Rnordman

Global beverage brand Coca-Cola recently announced its decision to replace CMO Marcos de Quinto, who was with the company for a little over three years, with two new roles: Chief Innovation Officer and Chief Growth Officer.

The CMO of today holds more responsibility than ever before, being key drivers of business strategy. With growing need to adopt digital technologies and deliver unique customer experiences, businesses are increasingly looking to their marketing departments, the ‘voice of the customer’, to drive business transformation.

The CMO is now “responsible for driving measurable, sequential growth in the current-state business and identifying and executing new opportunities to scale revenue via new channels, new markets, new products and new business models. They’re responsible for peering around corners and seeing ahead of the headlights, testing, learning, incubating the product, brand, and customer innovations for the future.” – Which5O

Coca-Cola’s decision is evidence of the company’s desire to innovate and to focus on growth, which is not a surprising move considering that soda consumption fell to a 30-year low last year. The beverage industry is having to adapt quickly to changing customer behavior.

The company’s focus on growth is evidence of a wider trend, impacted heavily by the startup marketing tactic of growth hacking.

Growth hacking as a movement stems from Sean Ellis, who coined the term “growth hacker” in a blog post in 2010 entitled “Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup”, defining this new brand of marketer as “a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.”

The term was popularized by Andrew Chen who wrote a blog post titled, “Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing”. He cited Airbnb’s integration of Craigslist as an example of the growth hacking principle. He wrote that growth hackers “are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of ‘How do I get customers for my product?’ and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph.”

From there, the buzzword grew into a trend.

Now the term has its own conference, a growing online community, and is impacting not only how startups market their products, but also threatening the traditional role of the CMO.

The biggest threat to the CMO right now is the future. As technology takes us one step closer to the ‘Digital Industrial Revolution’, the CMO role is not what it was a decade ago.

Who is the CMO of tomorrow?

A Business Leader

Due to the customer-focused nature of marketing, over recent years, the role of the CMO has been more focused on business strategy than ever before. Marketing as a function acts as the ‘voice of the customer’ within a business.

Historically, marketing has served sales. In this age of customer experience, the position of CMO on the board has become much more strategic, often absorbing the responsibility of overseeing both marketing and sales.

The CMO of the future will continue to be strategic, focusing on the long-term goal of increasing customer engagement, by improving customer service and offering unique customer experiences.

A CTO

With MarTech becoming increasingly important to marketing strategy, CMOs are increasingly looking to new digital technology to boost their efforts.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning technology is already having a huge impact on marketing trends and practices. With the uptake of messenger apps and ChatBots, this technology presents an incredible opportunity for the CMO in 2017. It’s 24/7, it creates personalized campaigns around the customer, it’s all-inclusive and it self-perpetuating.

Staying ahead of and understanding the impact of emerging technology will be a vital skill for the future CMO. Understanding how new technology contributes to the growth of a business, and using this knowledge to choose the right technology for the customer and the business will be vital to success for the CMO.

This focus on technology calls for the CMO to act more like or work closely with the Chief Technology Officer or Chief Information Officer.

A Face for the Customer

Traditionally, marketing has been a back-office function servicing sales. This has changed.

More and more we are seeing marketers step out from behind closed doors, interact directly with the customer, and in many instances, become the face of their brands.

The CMO of the future will be preoccupied with personalizing a brand’s interactions with the customer. This can only be effectively achieved with knowledge about the customer, which is best gathered from direct engagement with the customer themselves.

A Data Junkie

The CMO of the future will be driven by data. They’ll be fountains of knowledge, spouting useful facts and tidbits about the latest technology, the results of a recent marketing campaign, or changing consumer behavior.

The CMO needs to adopt data and fast. Instead of focusing on the tangible elements of marketing strategy like television commercials, advertising, branding, social media, or email, the CMO is learning to focus on the customer and data. These more intangible elements of marketing strategy will drive business strategy, as companies move closer to digital transformation.

A Growth Hacker

As startups continue to disrupt various industries, the CMO of the future will be agile. Adapting quickly to the latest buzzword or trend to maintain a competitive edge.

The CMO of the future will take growth strategies to heart and be masters in “the art and science of creating awareness, traction, adoption, and advocacy using unorthodox and surprising means. It’s quite literally a hack for traditional processes to accelerate business.” (Brian Solis)

Will CMOs be rebranded to Chief Growth Officers? Who can really be certain? What is certain is that the ‘voice of the customer’ in a business will be a key driver of strategy as digital transformation becomes an imperative.

As influencers have become an increasingly important part of marketing campaigns, many brands have noted escalating costs for influencer content and distribution. Gone are the days when gifting alone attracted mid-tier influencers, and those who once charged hundreds per post are now setting their rates much higher.

Fortunately, also gone are the days when marketers had to guess an influencer’s worth. Thanks to increasing transparency and better measurements for ROI, marketers can now determine just how much revenue, engagement and awareness an influencer has contributed to their brand, making it much easier to evaluate their value. By looking at the ROI, many brands are finding that despite increased rates, Influencer Marketing is still the most cost-effective strategy for reaching an audience in a way that inspires real action.

As you negotiate with influencers for your own campaigns, here are three important factors to consider:

The value of content

Influencer collaborations aren’t just an opportunity to reach your target audience; they’re also an opportunity to add compelling content to future campaigns, including your own social media efforts, newsletters and EDMs, where influencer content has proven particularly effective, boosting open rates, click-through rates and overall purchase rates. Studies also show that readers spend 7 times longer viewing influencer content than they do ad content.

When negotiating with influencers, mentally separate the value of content from the value of distribution. How do the influencer’s rates compare with the costs of producing professional imagery in-house? What image rights will you have? Thinking of content separately from publication will allow you to better assess the value of a collaboration.

Control of the message

Given their similarities, it can be easy to confuse Influencer Marketing with PR, but it’s important to remember how these strategies differ. An organic post, even if prompted by your PR agency, is not Influencer Marketing. You get free exposure and an objective endorsement, but what you lack is control.

With Influencer Marketing, you are engaging an influencer in business, not simply making content suggestions. You therefore have a voice in how your brand is portrayed, the calls-to-action used, and the messaging. Influencer Marketing works best, of course, when a genuine relationship exists between influencers and brands. But ultimately, if you expect guaranteed exposure and some control over an influencer’s content, this is marketing, not PR. An influencer’s rate should therefore reflect this control, and not just the exposure.

Influencer motivation

Another important factor to consider as you determine influencer compensation — particularly when choosing between gifting and payment — is the importance of timing and influencer motivation. Influencers who receive products or services ahead of publishing have less intrinsic motivation to fulfill specific obligations than those who know their payment relies on meeting requirements. So if you’re a retail brand planning for a specific shopping season or an event producer promoting an upcoming trade show, paying influencers upon completion of their work will better ensure the content is published when it has the greatest impact.

Bottom Line: Focus on your ROI

Ultimately, your marketing dollars are only well-spent if you see a return. Spending $4,000 for an Instagram post sounds expensive, but it makes good business sense if you earn a multiple of that in revenue. Likewise, gifting might seem cost-effective, but giving away product gets expensive very quickly if you aren’t reaching your marketing goals. Fortunately, the ROI for influencer marketing across all industries is strong — 11x higher, in fact, than that of digital display ads and 4x higher than brand-shared content.

As you assess Influencer Marketing ROI, it’s important to remember to include more factors than immediate sales. Influencer Marketing can boost brand awareness, strengthen loyalty, and even help you gain a stronger foothold in a new market. Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) ahead of your campaign will help you better determine whether your campaign is a success, and more easily establish the return on your Influencer Marketing investment.

Only by evaluating each of the above factors — from the value of professional imagery to the creative control over influencer content — can you assess the true value of an influencer collaboration. Influencer rates may have risen, but in terms of reaching KPIs, so has their value.

This article first appeared on the Shopping Links blog.

This is a preview of a research report from BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about BI Intelligence, click here.

Since Apple launched the iTunes Store and began selling songs for 99 cents each, media bigwigs have been advocating for an “iTunes for news” model to help ease digital media companies’ transition from print to digital.

But since then, publishers still have struggled to effectively mimic the success of iTunes, and convert it into revenue for content.

The closest model is micropayments, or low-value payments for online goods and services.

Micropayments, which allow users to pay per piece of content they purchase, are a relatively new problem for the online payments industry. That’s because in person, users are most inclined to use cash for payments below $10, and for online purchases of physical goods, shipping costs often disincentivize users from making low-value payments. For digital content, though, there’s no alternative to accepting low-value card payments, which mean that firms wanting to harness this model will have to seek out ways to make it work. 

Right now, micropayments aren’t effective. For consumers, they present psychological hurdles, because mobile and digital buying is already challenging and making frequent purchases could exacerbate these frictions. And for content producers, fees associate with digital payment eat away at the cost and limit or eliminate the profit potential for these types of goods, making them a challenge even if they were to catch on.

There are reasons for optimism — many publishers have bought into an app called Blendle, which aggregates content and makes payment more frictionless. And Blendle has seen modest gains since launch, which indicates that micropayments could gain traction under the correct circumstances. If a giant, like Apple, Google, Facebook, or another platform where customers both have existing news and payment relationships, were to take the challenge on, its value could begin to increase.

A new report from BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, outlines the micropayments problem and forecasts the future of micropayments for consumers and merchants. It also offers potential solutions for micropayments problems.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

• Digital micropayments are on the rise because they help solve a problem for online content providers. Micropayments have proven successful for digital music and app purchases. That's led publishers of digital content, like news or video, to look at them as an alternative way to monetize content, particularly in the wake of rising ad-blocker usage. 
• For merchants, micropayments are often too expensive to offer. Processing fees associated with card-based transactions are often high enough that they pare down or eliminate almost all potential for seller profit from micropayment transactions.
• A major tech giant could seize the opportunity to work with publishers to grow its own apps and payments offerings at the same time. Their wide reach and seamless payments infrastructure could get the necessary buy-in from merchants and consumers alike to make the model more successful across the board. 

In full, the report:

• Explains why micropayments are growing in popularity among content producers
• Evaluates why these types of payments pose a problem to both merchants and consumers
• Provides detail about potential solutions, both from payments providers and other third-party players in the space
• Assesses the conditions under which micropayments could take off, and determines whether or not they have a shot at success
• And much more

 Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:

1. Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. >> Learn More Now
2. Purchase & download the full report from our research store. >> Purchase & Download Now

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The biggest security mistakes people make when buying things online

Email is your best referral asset. It’s by far the most popular referral method because people are used to sharing via email. Dashing off an email message quickly to a friend about how much you love a product is much easier than starting a whole conversation over text.

Meet your customers where they’re most inclined to share by rolling out a killer email referral program. Emails help you encourage referrals over time, instead of letting customers forget about your rewards. They help you nudge newer customers to become advocates, and prompt your advocates to share with even more of their friends.

With the right tools and tactics, you can make sure your emails are maximizing their referral potential. We analyzed 6 email referral programs to highlight what to do and what not to—so you can make it as easy as possible for your customers to spread the word.

With the right tools and tactics, you can make sure your emails are maximizing their referral potential.

1. Planted

Planted is a recruiting service that connects non-technical people with jobs in the startup industry.

They offer a double-sided reward of $100 in Amazon Credit for anyone you refer who gets a job through the service. The email is clean, cute, and direct—nothing distracts you from the call-to-action (CTA).

This referral email is practically frictionless. They make the incentive clear, give you a unique referral link within the email, and they also have a big, eye-catching button where you can see who you’ve invited, who’s joined, and who’s been offered a job. Once you click the “Track My Referrals” button, they also offer you templates for email, Twitter, and Facebook sharing.

While the templates are customizable, the email template seems a little bit spammy, and might get flagged in someone’s inbox. It’s weird to use hashtags and @-mentions in an email to a friend.

What You Can Steal: It’s possible to make your email beautiful, simple, and effective all at once. The big “Track My Referrals” button is a clear call-to-action, that is much more eye-catching than hyperlinked text. But a button that stands out in one email, isn’t going to stand out in the next.

Use an email service with a drag-and-drop interface, so that you can try out different email designs that are appropriate for your brand but also direct focus to the call-to-action button. Try using an email design tool, like Campaign Monitor, to send out different iterations and then A/B test to find the CTA that’s most effective.

2. Career Foundry

CareerFoundry offers online courses that give people the skills they need to break into the tech industry.

They sent this email to contract employees who mentor and teach the courses—many of whom acquired their skills by taking a course themselves. By asking teachers, who understand on a personal level the value of the program, to refer their friends, they’re guaranteeing themselves both positive and targeted referrals.

Their program offers massive double-sided benefits, which incentivizes advocates to talk up CareerFoundry, and incentivizes their friends to listen.

But to take advantage of this service, you have to go through the extra step of signing up for their referral program. The referral program links take you to a dashboard which helps you manage your referrals (to see both who you’ve invited and who’s accepted the invitation), which is useful—but this process of signing up causes friction. Make your referral program barrier-free by giving them an easy-access personalized link instead.

What You Can Steal: Targeting the people that know first-hand the value of your program (in this case, its teachers) increases the likelihood that they’ll sing your praises. You can target people at specific times in their relationship with your company where they’re most likely to refer using an email service like Customer.io, which specializes in customer segmentation. For example, you could target referral requests towards frequent buyers who just made a purchase.

3. The Hustle

The Hustle is a daily newsletter that keeps you up-to-date with the latest tech and business developments.

They sent this email out to subscribers to encourage them to refer their friends. If subscribers reach certain referral benchmarks, they get Hustle merchandise, like stickers or a duffel bag.

The conversational and mysterious subject line (“Interested?”) helps increase open rates, and the goofy tone of the letter helps engage subscribers.

But the best part of this email is the visual representation of the rewards for referring. Not only do subscribers see what they get when they refer friends, but the physical rewards also lend themselves to social media sharing. Not only will referrers spread the word to get a pair of socks, but they’re likely to also post a photo of themselves on social media wearing the socks.

The one drawback of this email is that it doesn’t offer you a link or form to share with your friends. Referrers don’t get a template—instead they have to do the work of trying to convert subscribers, which is extra effort.

What You Can Steal: Swag (and its share-ability) powers your referral engine. People love getting swag, and they love posting photos of cute swag on social media. Use a swag service like CustomInk.com to create anything from t-shirts to mugs in minutes—without having to hire a graphic designer.

4. Capital One

Capital One’s referral program offers a $50 double-sided reward for each friend that applies for an account.

Because almost everyone has a bank account already, banks have notoriously high marketing costs to try to get potential customers to switch to their bank—and sizable rewards are a cost-effective way to incentivize them.

They include the “Unique Referral ID” right in the email, so there’s very little extra effort on the part of the referrer. But on the other hand, the system is very complicated for the person being referred. They have to type a random string of numbers and letters into a box on an application. They might lose the number or forget to type it in.

This complicated system discourages referrers from using your program. They don’t know if their friends will remember to take all the right steps to make sure they get their reward. While the step-by-step transparency is good, the system is a touch too complicated, which discourages potential advocates from speaking up.

What You Can Steal: The “Unique Referral ID” as a random string of numbers and letters helps prevent fraudulent referrals from going through. While we recommend using a variant of the referrer’s name as the “Referral ID” because it’s easier to remember, Extole also offers fraud protection, to make sure people don’t take advantage of your company’s generosity.

5. Amazon Prime Student

Amazon Prime likely has between 50 and 70 million members worldwide, but they still incentivize more to join with a referral program.

This email, which includes daily Kindle deals for Prime Student, includes the referral program at the bottom and offers $10 for every student you refer who joins.

The best part of this referral tactic is that it juxtaposes the monetary offer with personalized products that the receiver wants to buy. The student who receives this email will want to refer a friend because doing so helps them pay for the products they see—personalized products the Amazon team has already determined they might need.

But $10 isn’t a high incentive—especially coming from Amazon, a marketplace giant. It’s also added at the bottom of the email and is easy to miss. A larger button, instead of just hyperlinked text, could help draw the reader’s eye.

What You Can Steal: Don’t just tell your referrers about the possible rewards—show them. If you’re an e-commerce platform, showing referrers personalized products that they actually want gives them an extra push to tell their friends. Business intelligence tool Clearbit (which you can integrate with your email marketing through Segment) helps you gather information about your individual customers for even deeper personalization, which you can use to drive referrals.

6. Dropbox

Cloud storage system Dropbox has about 500 million users, and it’s growing by roughly 100 million each year.

They send this email when a referral has been successful, to let people know about the rewards they’re receiving. Even if customers are receiving value from your referral program, they might not realize it. When people recognize the benefit they’re getting from your referral program, they’re more likely to refer again.

[source]

Their email rewards customers for past referrals and encourages them to refer again, which creates a viral loop. Implementing this referral program increased signups by 60%, and 35% of their daily signups come from the referral program.

They also have an in-app dashboard form where you can connect your contacts. You don’t need to manually copy and paste your friends’ emails, like a lot of referral programs require—you import them directly from Gmail. This decreases friction and lets users invite as many people as possible without doing a lot of manual data entry.

What You Can Steal: Give your users access to all of their contacts at once by using Google’s Identity Platform, which integrates their Google account with their account at your company. That way, they can invite all their contacts to your service in one fell swoop, instead of having to manually copy and paste email address after email address.

Plug the Leaks in Your Referral Marketing Funnel

The best referral emails are ones people want to engage with. Not only do you need to provide the incentive for them to refer, but you also need to make it as easy as possible for them to participate. Adding extra steps, like forcing them to sign up for a program or even making them read a paragraph can detract from the number of people who refer your company.

Optimizing your emails based on these tips will plug the leaks in your referral marketing funnel. When you make it as easy as possible for your advocates to spread the word and their friends to sign up, everyone who wants to become your customer will.

It’s no secret that savvy businesses are engaging their customers by creating personalized experiences tailored to their interests and needs. And email makes it easier than ever to do so.

Personalized emails also happen to be pretty darn effective at driving sales. According to the Direct Marketing Association, segmented and targeted emails generate 50 percent of all revenue.

But there’s a fine line between sending content that’s relevant and content that’s just plain creepy.

To help you personalize emails that delight consumers without scaring them away, here are four ideas to try with your next send.

1. Embrace consumer data

So you have all of that big data… now what?

Well, there may be a big opportunity to get creative with how you present it.

If you can find a story in your data, share it with your audience. After all, people love to hear stories and learn more about themselves. By delivering this information via email, it shows your customers that you’re collecting data to customize a unique experience tailored to their needs.

And as you do, you also gain an opportunity to build deeper connections with your individual customers – just as you would with any relationship.

Late last year, the music streaming platform Spotify led the charge with storytelling through customer data. They not only placed billboards featuring the biggest listening trends of 2016, they also sent personalized emails to customers with details of their music behaviors throughout the year:

As you brainstorm ways to tell your subscribers’ stories through email, be sure to include opportunities for them to further engage with your brand.

Whether you include a discount code to thank them for being loyal customers or a simple link to explore new products, your email should include a clear call-to-action to continue the interaction.

2. Send reminders of forgotten items

Cart abandonment emails is a popular phrase among the email community, and for a good reason: they serve as a reminder to customers to purchase items in which they’ve expressed interest, and they work; according to our friends at MailCharts, 33 percent of opened cart abandonment emails drive sales.

As a result, your goal should be to remind customers about the items they were browsing and encourage them to make a purchase.

To influence subscribers to open these emails, includes phrases that emphasize urgency and curiosity in your subject line. Examples like “Don’t forget!” or “Forget something?” work well because they’re short and elicit interest that could motivate subscribers to read the email.

Another way to optimize cart abandonment emails is to provide an exclusive offer, such as a discount code or bonus item. Here’s a great example from Brooklinen, which promoted free shipping with an online order:

By offering an incentive and emphasizing urgency (“before your items are sold out”), it encourages on-the-fence buyers to convert. They even included a “Recommended Products” section at the bottom to deliver even more personalized content to subscribers based on their individual tastes.

3. Celebrate the little things

Who doesn’t love a party, amiright?!

If you collect subscriber information like birthdays or the date of their first purchase, try sending emails to celebrate them.

When you do, don’t forget to include a present to go along with it, such as a freebie. In Sephora’s email below, they celebrate customer birthdays with a free item that can be redeemed with a purchase – which is a subtle way to promote additional business and get them psyched. A nice win-win!

To make this email all about the subscriber, Sephora address me by my first name. Doing so adds a personal touch to the email content in a way that feels like a 1:1 conversation.

4. Send items they’re interested in

Whether you track consumer behavior on your websites or directly ask about their interests on your sign up form, use this information to send emails with content that aligns with what they like.

The NFL Shop, for example, asks new subscribers about their favorite professional teams. Once a consumer shares this information, they get personalized emails with images and content specific to what they selected:

So instead of sending generalized emails with a variety of sports teams (which could include a person’s arch nemesis team), NFL Shop is able to cater to the individual, passionate fan.

Although tailoring content to your subscribers is a quick way to boost engagement and sales, continue providing opportunities for them to explore other products. They may want to purchase items for a friend or family member and will need to know you’re the source to go to!

Get crafty with your emails

When it comes to connecting with customers through personalized emails, the possibilities are endless. Whether you choose to send a detailed email with a variety of customer information or go with a standard cart-abandonment email, your customers will be thrilled to hear from you.

Your company’s life depends on successful marketing and customer management. If you are hitting all your targets consistently, then you are doing it all correctly. However, it takes a lot of time and effort for managers to handle both in a day and not miss something.

This is especially true if you are using two different platforms for your CRM and marketing. You have to mentally coordinate both functions, so they successfully dovetail with each other. This is tedious and not efficient. In fact, it’s a great recipe for burn-out.

Put Marketing And CRM At Your Fingertips

The solution is to integrate both marketing and CRM together, on one platform. TieiT allows you to manage your customers, sales staff, and automate much of your marketing from one dashboard.

TieiT is a single platform, multi-tasking management system enabling you to manage the smallest details of your marketing, while also allowing you to step back and get the ‘big picture.’

From one dashboard you can:

• Manage customer accounts, including collecting payments
• Manage web leads and add them to your CRM
• Create e-mail marketing campaigns with automation
• Send quotes, payment reminders, and custom invoices
• Establish multiple payment solutions
• Tailor marketing campaigns with a landing page builder
• Manage your social media posting schedule
• Track sales and sales staff
• Integrate with other CRM apps
• Track lead behavior

This is only a small sample of how TieiT simplifies your day and frees up time for other projects, or maybe, to go home early.

So, how are you going to increase your sales? TieiT ensures your marketing campaigns begin on time, targeted to the right customers, offering something for their stated interest. You won’t be in the dark about pending deals, know the sales people to reward and who to help, and customers are more connected.

Integrating your CRM software with marketing automation promotes efficiency across the board through live-updating cross-divisional synchronization. It prevents unnecessary manual duplication of information that can quickly turn obsolete due to delayed record-keeping. And because it saves your marketing and sales team’s time, money, and effort, they will be free to focus more effectively on their common goal: making sales.

For me, the word “homework” conjures up college memories of late nights, vending machine meals and stress. Maybe this is why most of us aren’t very eager to do our homework when we finally get to the “real world” of business. But, as much as I hated homework, I know that it ultimately helped prepare me to get an “A” on the test. Similarly, in the world of business, doing your homework leads to more growth and profit.

Perhaps the most common area that I see businesses (of all sizes) neglect, is conducting customer research. According to a recent CMO survey, only 41% of CMO’s include marketing research in their budget. And “failure to understand customer needs and wants” is cited as the #1 reason for product failures. Why are organizations failing at this? Many believe they already have the answers.

Customer research can be difficult, expensive, painful and confusing. So instead of tackling it head first, organizations skip it altogether and rush to get to market with their ideas, untested business models, useless products and irrelevant content. The result? 72% of all new products fail to meet revenue goals. And $958 million is wasted on ineffective marketing every year.

There have been millions of articles written on the importance of knowing your customers. But let’s say you disregard all of that and decide to go to market with your new marketing campaign anyway.

4 risks of neglecting customer research:

1. You will create something that nobody wants

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your marketing and advertising campaign is – if you create a product that nobody wants, or that solves a problem nobody has, you will not sell it. Just look at the top 10 product failures in the U.S. by some of the most well-known brands around (Google, McDonald’s, Microsoft). Their tunnel vision caused them to spend billions of dollars to promote something that ultimately missed the mark.

And while many of these organizations conducted customer research prior to launching their products, there is an art form to asking the right questions so that you get the “real” answer instead of validating your current biases. A topic which I will cover in a future blog post.

2. You will sound like everyone else

How many companies claim to be “the best solution” or “end-to-end” and “world-class”? Using the exact same phrases as your competitors only confuses your customer, forces them to tune you out and further commoditizes your product.

As hilariously pointed out by Bob Hoffman, The Ad Contrarian, if you aren’t going to do the upfront work of discovering what your customers care about and how your brand is differentiated, you might as well use the universal creative brief. Because, ultimately, your communications will sound just like every other company.

3. You will focus on communicating the wrong things

When organizations are too internally focused, the product or marketing organization convinces themselves that they know exactly what the customer cares about. But YOU are not your customer.

Take this research from McKinsey, which illustrates this point. When asked what themes B2B companies considered most important for their brand to communicate – many cited product sustainability, social responsibility and global reach as the top. Whereas customers considered open and honest dialogue as the most important (which no organization in the sample emphasized), followed by specialist expertise and responsibility across the supply chain.

It just goes to show that what you value internally may not be aligned with what your customers want to hear.

4. You won’t get results

No matter how good your execution is, if your marketing content fails to connect with your prospective buyers, you’ve wasted your time and resources. This often confuses organizations, as they pour hours into the backend execution (writing emails, posting on social media, sponsoring events), but don’t see an increase in sales. Ultimately, marketing communications are measured by how well they help potential buyers move along their journey and relationship with your organization.

Although doing your homework isn’t the most exciting exercise, it definitely prepares you and your business for future success.

“It’s not the will to win, but the will to prepare to win that makes the difference.” – Bear Bryant

It wasn’t long ago that many small-business marketers were deploying email marketing, but viewed marketing automation (MA) as a tool for mid-size and enterprise organizations only.

Even though top-performers are five times as likely to use MA than other organizations, the thinking was: This technology is just too expensive for the little guys. It requires too many dedicated people to be a cost-effective solution for a business with less than 250 employees. After all, smaller companies don’t have the resources to dedicate the staff necessary to implement and manage MA, nor can they feasibly cover the steep licensing fees.

That used to be the thinking. But it’s definitely not anymore.

Some of today’s marketing automation technology is well within the reach of many small- and medium-sized businesses, affordable pricing plans, no IT resources, and incredibly powerful core capabilities.

It’s clear to us that the modern marketing automation platform can be a great option for more companies of all sizes. Still, it’s not the solution for every single one. If you’re considering transitioning from using a stand-alone email marketing solution to a more powerful marketing automation platform, it’s important you understand the advantages and disadvantages of making this step.

For most small business marketers, email marketing serves as the core component of their outbound marketing strategy. Yet, while email continues to be a powerful tool for these companies, a range of other technologies have established themselves in the marketing arsenal, such as web analytics, landing page hosting, paid search, CRM, and social media. Although the majority of smaller marketing programs use at least a few of these tactics, these functions generally are not integrated.

Unfortunately, fragmented technologies create a number of challenges for small business marketers that can have detrimental impacts on the business. Among them are:

• disparate data;
• constrained resource bandwidth;
• reduced support for multiple interfaces;
• overlapping functionality;
• copious licensing fees; and
• lack of consistency in customer experience quality.

The result is usually an inability to analyze and optimize the customer experience across multiple channels. In short, disparate data equals lost opportunities.

Unified Data

Email marketing tools are primarily designed to be good at one thing: email. But of course, most customers don’t interact with companies using email alone. Multi-channel engagement is a core differentiator for marketing automation. MA provides native functionality from multiple back-office marketing systems, resulting in one system, one interface, and one source of marketing data … in short, unity.

Although email can be viewed as something of a multi-channel tool itself ‒ it can integrate links to a website, mobile views, or social media within a message, and it can provide personalized engagement through dynamic data fields, list segmentation, and multivariate testing ‒ it has many limitations. For example, tracking and measuring performance after an email has been sent is next to impossible without an integrated multi-channel system in place.

Most companies, no matter their size, need one system that manages and tracks behavior across multiple channels ‒ a system that encompasses all the benefits of email, but with linkages to track and aggregate ongoing cross-channel customer engagement. That’s where marketing automation comes in.

Sales and Marketing Harmony

Email marketing is, as the name suggests, largely a tool for marketers. Customer relationship management (CRM) is largely a tool for sales. The disparity of the tools and accompanying business processes has traditionally divided marketing and sales functions in many, if not most organizations. Because marketing automation tracks marketing engagement across multiple channels and it aggregates prospect and customer behavior in a centralized database, it enables the sales organization with a powerful source of information. This helps bridge the divide between marketing and sales.

Taken a step farther, with MA, prospect engagement can even be monitored and assigned numeric scores (known as lead scoring), allowing marketing to track and automatically notify sales (inside their CRM) of highly qualified prospects. For small companies this means that overtaxed sales staff can dramatically reduce the amount of time spent qualifying opportunities as they enter the pipeline; sales can focus instead on closing short-term revenue and driving increased profitability.

Marketing automation combines all the benefits of an email marketing solution along with integrated capabilities that would otherwise need to be cobbled together using various standalone technologies. By combining most functionalities in a unified platform, MA serves the needs of both the marketing and sales departments and ultimately has a greater impact on the business as a whole. In smaller organizations, it’s even more crucial that marketing and sales work together to bond both the buying and sales cycle and maximize revenue for the organization. MA becomes the glue that links the different components

related to marketing and sales engagement. It also drives accountability by providing visibility into pipeline performance and business outcomes.

Take a look at this infographic to learn more about the capabilities of email service providers vs. marketing automation.

Points to Consider

If your company is considering moving to a marketing automation system, think carefully about your needs, your proficiencies, and your resources before taking the plunge. Here are some essential factors you should weigh before making your decision.

• Email usage. If your organization is heavily using email marketing capabilities to segment lists, personalize campaigns, and improve performance through A/B testing, then you are quickly reaching a diminishing return on investment. It might make sense at that point to migrate to an integrated tool that makes it possible to optimize customer engagement across channels and allow marketing to take charge of qualifying new leads before they get passed to sales.

On the other hand, if your organization sees no need to customize or optimize email campaigns, then it will be unlikely be able to leverage the features of the MA tool and see a significant return on investment. In that case it’s probably better to stick with the email solution.

• Content creation. Content is the fuel that powers a marketing automation tool. Targeted content needs to map to all stages of the customer buying cycle to start generating a return on investment. It’s also necessary to develop new content over time to use in nurture marketing campaigns and to maximize the value of marketing automation. If continually creating new content is too costly and resource-intensive for your small business, deploying MA is probably not the right decision for your company.

• Staffing requirements. Companies that implement an automation platform should expect to have at least one person trained on how to configure the tool for lead scoring, email marketing, landing pages, and campaign execution. The person will also need to interact with both sales and marketing, and will likely need analytical skills to hold both departments accountable for performance. Because MA works best in a collaborative, not siloed, environment, it’s important that sales is engaged early and often and clearly understands lead scoring rules to make sure that alerts and routing are worthy of their time and efforts. Make sure you have sufficient personnel to cover these tasks before investing in MA.

For further guidance on deciding whether you’re organization is ready to move from an email marketing system to a marketing animation platform, take our interactive quiz.

Direct mail brochures offer a host of marketing benefits that extend well beyond your client’s mailbox. As the most effective way to deliver specific and detailed information – while still creating a visual impact – a powerfully designed brochure can:

• educate your prospects,

promote your company’s reputation

• generate new leads, and
• close sales

Because it delivers more detail than the cheaper, briefer postcard mailer, the brochure makes a great direct mail alternative when it’s time to dig deeper for a positive customer response.

It’s not too far off the mark to say that the sky is the limit when it comes to designing a fully customizable business brochure. Investing in quality graphics is the key to creating material that’s both professional looking, and attention-grabbing. Just like your direct mail postcard, your brochure must pack a captivating punch by including all the right design elements: catchy headlines, tight, focused copy, and an irresistible call-to-action.

But the payback offered by a well-designed brochure doesn’t end with direct mail. These colorful marketing materials are the ideal vehicle for catching the eye of potential clients – whether at a special event, or right inside your office.

Here are five outstanding benefits of direct mail brochures, that also double as some of the best reasons for making these materials a part of your print marketing campaign.

1. A Resource for Details

The biggest benefit of a print brochure is that it lets your business engage more fully in the selling process. You can delve into the particulars of what your company has to offer because you’ve got the space, the design, and the ideal format to:

• explain your product or service in detail,
• overcome anticipated objections, and
• literally ask for the sale

But to maximize success, don’t be tempted to use all that extra brochure space to ramble on in multiple directions: instead, pick a single, predominant marketing message. In other words, the information you provide should be thorough, but still concise. It can be a great idea for example, to focus on what sets your business apart from the competition.

2. A Personal Handout

Trade shows, workshops, and the opening of a new office or restaurant are all great opportunities to place your marketing brochure directly into the hands of potential customers. But while public events are a great way to connect with new clients, they can also be chaotic affairs. Ideally, your brochure will offer just the right balance of information and impact to entice prospects to take it, keep it, and digest it later – once the dust of event day excitement has settled.

While it may sound like an obvious point, be sure to provide business contact details that are:

• clear and complete, and
• that feature prominently in your marketing materials

In most cases, the best place for this information will be the back of your company brochure. It’s also not uncommon these days to include a smartphone-readable QR code alongside your contact information, so that today’s technology-savvy consumer can find out more about your products and services as quickly, and conveniently, as possible.

3. A Media Kit Accessory

While not every company makes use of a media kit, this package of promotional materials can be a highly effective way to introduce a new business, or announce a new product or service. Print brochures feature prominently in most media or press kits, since they’re particularly valuable for:

• describing specific product or service features
• showcasing client testimonials, reviews, or company awards and achievements
• visually highlighting the unique qualities of your business

Because they’re designed to grab the attention of media channels that may be able to spread the word about your business for free, media kits can play a cost-effective role in furthering brand awareness.

4. An Office Display

A visually appealing brochure can continue to work hard for your business, even when it’s just sitting on a table or display rack. To function as a bona fide lead magnet, your brochure must boast an arresting cover that simply begs to be picked up and read.

For best results, pay careful attention to front cover features like:

• appealing color mixes,
• arresting images that pique viewer curiosity, and
• bold, large fonts that are easy to read

The main point to keep in mind is that “less” is “more” when it comes to your brochure cover. Think in terms of setting the stage for the informational content to follow, and steer clear of tired clichés. You don’t need a lot of text for your brochure to stand out, but you do need a graphic design that’s clean, simple, and one-of-a-kind.

5. A Partner for Postcards

Direct mail brochures and postcards work together like a well-oiled marketing machine. Because brochures are distinctly detail-heavy, they offer the perfect support mechanism for your short and sweet, eye-catching postcards. To maximize the effectiveness of both, consider using brochures as a follow-up to your direct mail postcard campaign.

A targeted brochure can help to fill in informational gaps – and answer any questions your postcard may have raised – while it also keeps your business top-of-mind with direct mail recipients. Just remember that a brochure is not a book: streamlining the information you present, so that it substantiates and complements your postcard mailer, will deliver the biggest bang for your mark.

Spring cleaning isn’t just for your home or office space. It is a good opportunity to check in on the health and productivity of your company’s sales. While your business’ sales rely on a number of components including your sales team personnel, employee wellbeing and engagement, market conditions, and a countless number of other factors; there are several areas within your organization you can explore to conduct a sales audit.

1. Start with your sales team. Your employees are the face of your company, particularly when it comes to making sales. The first step in ensuring your sales employees are reliable is to make sure your hiring process is finding and onboarding the appropriate staff. Be thorough with performing background checks, calling references, and seeking appropriate prior work experience. Continue your sales audit by reviewing your training of new sales employees. And finally, ensure your new and current workforce is happy, engaged, and productive by investigating the environment of your office. It is almost always in an employer’s best interest to maintain a positive work environment so staff can perform at their peak.

2. Review your sales procedures. Compare your sales process ideas to your company’s actual operations. Make sure you are appropriately setting short- and long-term sales goals, correctly tracking sales stages, and that discounts and other incentives are cost-effective. You want to avoid setting unattainable objectives or losing track of spending and profits. If your sales procedures are perfect on paper but falling short somewhere in practice, you will have to figure out where the missing link is and resolve the issue. Explore your organization’s customer service procedures as well. Your customer support team—the employees who follow up with clients after a sale is made—is just as critical to closing deals and turning leads into customers as your sales team. Examine their activities including customer contact, communication wait times, follow-ups, product or service shipping/delivery speed, handling of equipment, etc. You can gather this information by sending surveys or questionnaires to current and previous customers or performing follow-up calls.

3. Keep track of market conditions. Last but not least, market conditions will always affect the waxing and waning of your company’s sales. While this isn’t a factor you or your business can directly affect, it is important to keep track of and analyze as it will always directly affect your sales performance. Investigate your competition, develop a target audience or customer by detailing your ideal client’s age, marital status, location, education level, salary, buying motivation, etc. This can ensure your sales team will be able to better tailor their sales approach to the type of customer you want to attract. And always keep in mind that markets will rise and fall, but if you are in a low swing for too long, it might be time to revisit your sales strategy.

Checking in on and keeping track of sales even when your business is healthy is important as it offers the opportunity to know exactly what is working well and why. You can also use the opportunity to interact with your sales staff and gather their thoughts during a team luncheon. Spring is a great time to clean your home, vacuum your car, and even revisit aging office policies; but it is also a perfect chance to audit your company’s sales.

In order of preference and effectiveness, face-to-face is the very best way to sell, followed by video face to video face, followed by the telephone. Email doesn’t appear on this list because it isn’t a method you should use to do any actual selling.

Yet, some people write massive missives in hopes of convincing their prospective to buy, or at least to take the next step. They send proof providers to show their dream clients that they are a good company, full of good people, with a really good product. Those emails don’t get read, nor do they evoke a response. They also send proposals with pricing, anticipating the return email with a signed contract and an order. Instead, they get a prospective client who avoids their calls and their email.

Selling is not about the exchange of information, even though information is surely exchanged. Selling is about conversations. Face-to-face meetings are always conversations. This is also true of face to face video meetings over Skype, Zoom, or Google Hangouts. The telephone is still an excellent tool for conversing with a prospective client about change, even if inferior to the prior two choices.

Poor, small email is no match for other more powerful mediums when it comes to sales. Email doesn’t allow for a conversation. The communication medium is asynchronous, meaning one person can speak, and they have to wait for a period of time to receive a reply. Letters were a wonderful form of communication when there were not better methods available, but no one needs a digital pen pal.

What you want most of all in sales is a conversation. You want to listen to and speak with your prospective client and the people on their teams. You want to be able to riff on ideas, get to know each other, and work on problems together. In all cases, you want the best medium for the outcome you are trying to achieve.

If you want a real sales conversation, you aren’t going to do much worse than email. Move yourself up to a medium that better serves your outcomes. That medium is, in all likelihood, the phone.

The post You Want a Conversation appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Good morning! Here's what you need to know in markets on Friday.

The United States launched a salvo of 59 cruise missiles on Shayrat airfield and nearby military infrastructure controlled by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in response to a chemical attack that killed at least 80 people in the northwestern part of the country on Monday. US President Donald Trump, initially resistant to the idea of becoming involved in Syria, said it was in the vital national security interest of the US to prevent the use of chemical weapons.

US stock futures and 10-year treasury yields have fell sharply in reaction to the news that the United States launched over 50 Tomahawk missiles from warships stationed in the Mediterranean targeting a Syrian airfield. The yield on 10-year government bonds fell below 2.3%, leaving it sitting at the lowest level since November last year.

Two men are facing charges for alleged insider trading ahead of Intel's $15 billion Mobileye acquisition. The SEC on Thursday said it won a court order freezing assets of Lawrence Cluff and Roger Shaoul, both of Richmond, after they generated more than $925,000 of gains on Mobileye shares and call options purchased in the month-and-a-half before the March 13 merger was announced.

The stream of U.S. energy companies going public at the start of 2017 has dried up on concerns over the future direction of oil prices. Texas-based FTS International and Select Energy Services are among six U.S. energy companies that filed for listings in the first quarter but delayed, even after receiving the green light from local regulators, Thomson Reuters data showed.

Cloud security and identity management software developer Okta has priced its upcoming IPO. The firm will aim to sell11.0 million shares priced at $17.00 per share, raising $187 million in an IPO for a market value of $1.5 billion

Larry Fink, the chief executive at BlackRock , which with $5.1 trillion is the world's largest investor, thinks US stocks are overvalued. "We don't have the tax reform that we're expecting," Fink told CNBC. "If we don't see a true deregulation, I think the markets would have some setbacks there."

Twitter shares slid following a report that cofounder and board member Evan Williams plans to sell up to 30% of his shares. "After a year and a half of no selling, I have filed a new 10b5–1 plan to liquidate a minority of my TWTR over the next year," Williams wrote in a blog post on Medium after Business Insider inquired about the sale.

Initial jobless claims in the USA, which count the number of people who applied for unemployment insurance for the first time in the past week, fell by 25,000 to 234,000. The four-week moving average was 250,000, a decrease of 4,500 from the previous week's revised number.

The Czech central bank lifted its koruna cap on Thursday, after which the currency oscillated wildly before gaining ground. "The Bank has said little so far, other than that interest rates have been left unchanged and that it stands ready to intervene in the FX market if needed to prevent excessive currency moves," William Jackson, senior emerging markets economist at Capital Economics, wrote.

Music streaming service Spotify is planning to go public this year, but a new report from The Wall Street Journal says the company isn't planning a traditional IPO. Instead, The Wall Street Journal reports that Spotify is planning a direct listing in September which wouldn't involve raising any new money. A normal IPO involves a company issuing shares of stock. But The Wall Street Journal reports that Spotify will instead simply register its shares on a public market.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: These are the watches worn by the smartest and most powerful men in the world

In today’s modern digital age, businesses thrive on the latest technology and innovation to break barriers and propel them towards success in the competitive marketplace. It’s hard to imagine a time when business was conducted without the aid of technology, back when things needed to be manually filed. Now, technology rules the roost. With a plethora of technological aids available it is used for practically everything and anything in business. However, sometimes it’s hard to know which ones will be effective to implement. If improving overall productivity is your ambition, there are a few simple ways technology can help.

Workforce Activity Tracking

Technology and computer software allow us all to be experts at multitasking. Employees can have multiple tabs open on their web browsers at once, switching from one task to another in a matter of seconds. Suddenly what was once hours’ worth of work is condensed into a manageable frame of time. You’d think productivity would skyrocket. Alas, sadly not. Why, do you ask? Procrastination. A few minutes here and there checking social media or watching a YouTube video can mount up to a significant chunk of time throughout the day. Some may say if they are meeting their deadlines, what’s the harm? As an employer, you want to trust in your employees’ time management skills. However, it is necessary to give them the tools needed to use their time effectively and to succeed in their career.

Luckily, there are a number of applications that businesses can implement to track employee activity to determine how they’re really spending time at work. Tracking within a company’s intranet software can determine which web pages are being visited frequently throughout the day and how employees are spending their time during office hours. Employee monitoring software can track nearly a hundred percent of an employee’s activity, including Internet usage, computer screen recording, phone usage, and keystroke logging. For those employees who spend more time on the road then they do behind a computer, there are GPS apps to track an employee’s vehicle usage. For example, a business and employee can analyze the time spent commuting and where the stops, if any, were made. When implemented correctly, these apps are designed to help employees get back on track and sway away from their procrastinating habits. Not only does it encourage productivity among employees but it has numerous advantages for the company. Employee monitoring allows for greater transparency, fewer errors to spiral out of control and greater delegation as you can assign work to employees based on their key strengths.

Although employee monitoring can be discouraged due to its intrusive nature, the main intention for monitoring is not to invade privacy or be used as a way to punish employees. Instead, it’s used to figure out where time is being wasted and where time management can be improved. Short-term evaluations with these applications are shown to improve employee performance – not to mention the overall productivity of the company!

Real Time Connection and Collaboration Between Employees

Gone are the days of writing a letter, or sending a carrier pigeon from person to person, waiting hours or days for a response. With a push of a button, we can send an email to not only one but hundreds of individuals. It’s no secret that fast, two-way internal communication has become a vital aspect of every company’s success. Providing employees with intranet software systems allow co-workers to easily collaborate by encouraging discussions on forums related to a particular project, while also keeping information in one organized place.

Work is no longer confined to within the four walls of an office, as mobile technology allows the employee to stay connected. As long as you have access to a smartphone, tablet or a computer an employee can conduct work wherever they find themselves. Whether on the road at a business convention or while on vacation following up one last email before they hit the golf course, employees have the freedom to take information with them everywhere they go, promoting the ever so desirable, flexible work schedule.

Furthermore, allowing employees to occasionally work from home can have vast benefits to the company’s productivity and an employee’s motivation. Giving employees the freedom to choose where they work can boost morale and engagement, which means you’re less likely to face that most scary of phrases – high turnover. Although working from home or places other than the office isn’t always as effective as office work, sometimes it’s unavoidable. For example; a parent might need to stay home with a sick child, or an employee could get sick themselves – after all, we all tire and get ill periodically. Now an employee can stay in the comfort of the home, restoring their body, while also meeting deadlines at work – and preventing others from catching the same illness!

Customer Retention Management

The relationship a business has with its customer is vital. However, managing these connections can be difficult. Generating a sale after the first initial contact with a customer can be a long and tedious process. Even more difficult is maintaining the relationship throughout the sale process, including after the sale has taken place. Thankfully, technology has once again come to our rescue. The latest developments allow businesses to document and track a customer, with access to in-depth information relating to purchases and the communication shared with the customer all at the touch of a button! Through careful examination and evaluation of these records, a business can figure out which communication methods are effective for an individual customer based on their demographics, the type of service or product they need, and the stage of the decision-making process they are currently in.

Through the management of customer relationships, businesses can make the most of leads and get even more by evaluating what drew them to the brand, or, perhaps more importantly, why some of them weren’t swayed. Was it due to the pricing of the product or service, or was it that the competitors’ offering was more attractive? It could have been that the communication method used was either ineffective or not frequent enough to encourage brand recall at the fundamental stage of the decision-making process.

New technological innovations are occurring every day improving and shaping the way business is conducted. Finding the right innovations that can be effectively implemented in your business can be a case of trial and error. At the end of the day, it’s about finding a balance between productivity, communication, and technology that works best for the employees, as well as the business to achieve a favorable outcome.

If you are interested in discovering the benefits a cloud-based employee intranet can offer your business, get in touch today with MyHub for a free demo with an intranet design expert.

Based on my experience over the past almost 30-years it seems that everyone has been burned by outsourced lead generation. Often multiple times. And, at lot of times executives will say “I tried it and it didn’t work.” Many will acknowledge that the failure(s) were partially their fault. Candidly, when this kind of partnership doesn’t work it is the client’s fault in many situations, but not always. 

The main reason for these failures is that there is a LOT of mediocrity in the lead generation industry, which is why some say outbound is supposedly “dead.” It isn’t dead. It has just been ruined by snake oil lead generation firms (for those of you younger than I am, and that would be most of you, snake oil is defined as: a substance with no real medicinal value sold as a remedy for all diseases). These firms, like those traveling sales folks who hawked one-size-fixes-all elixirs to those who wanted to believe, make great claims—that inevitably fail to pan out.

As such, outbound has been replaced by email marketing and marketing automation programs that SPAM CANNON emails to the masses such as the following (I received this one yesterday):

I run business development for XYZ, Inc. - we give growing companies an unfair advantage to beat revenue goals. We quickly become a major outbound sales channel for our clients so I thought we’d have much to discuss.

Here’s the problem: most fast growing companies hire as many sales people as possible to solve for scale, missing a more efficient strategy—where we come in.

We’re not a lead gen or appointment setting firm, but rather a revenue focused extension (not a replacement) of your sales team. We work at scale delivering strong ROI by handling the grunt work of prospecting, qualifying, networking, and outreach. We then loop in your closers when the lead is hot, keeping their focus on directly generating revenue.

Any interest in a short chat? 

Beyond the fact that this is too long, and not well written, it was sent to PointClear, my B2B lead generation services company, that does what they purport to do. I get at least one like this every day.

The sender is taking a scattershot approach, blasting this un-personalized message to large quantities of so-called prospects, qualified or not. There is no strategy in their market approach. They’re just hoping one in a million will raise their hand.

If this is how they do their own lead gen, how do you think they’ll handle yours?

Here are five things to consider if you want to avoid being the victim of poorly executed outbound programs that over-promise and under-deliver:

1. If a service provider is willing to take your list, script and money – run the other way. That’s an approach that will fail. They will take your money – oh yes they will. And you will have been burned. Why?

• There’s no such thing as a good list. We work with you to create an accurate, current targeted database.
• Most providers overly rely on a canned (script) approach to an outbound call because that’s what an inexperienced associate needs. We use call flows—and hire professionals who know how to use them.

2. If you have a 3-month plus sales cycle, don’t sign up for a “100 hour” program. You can’t do anything in 100 hours. When the pipeline is weak, desperation and fear take over. Sales/marketing execs are desperate to do something, but afraid to risk the budget. So, they settle for a cheap solution—which is how mediocre firms survive. It seems that there is always enough money to do something a second time – but never enough money to do it right the first time.

3. Your list/database is 60% of the reason why programs succeed (the other 40% is the message and media). The bad news is that lists suck. We spend a lot of time on list analysis, gap analysis and list enhancement on the front end of a program. Most companies in our industry don’t. It’s not unusual for marketing executives to spend $10 or more on a “lumpy” or “dimensional” mailer and then argue over $.25 per name on the list. They often aren’t willing to invest in the list, even though it’s the most important thing. (See this blog for more about lists and testing PRIOR to using the list for marketing.)

4. As a senior executive making the decision to execute an outsourced outbound lead generation program, stay involved. I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve been pushed down to a junior level person, putting the program at risk. The reasons for this outcome differ. In some cases, the junior level person has their own ideas about how to run the program. The provider, in these cases, is forced to go to war with their day-to-day contact or do what they say and hope for the best. Neither option ever works out. In other cases, the junior level person is afraid to ask for help within their own organization, increasing cycle time for fixes and slowing down progress. Senior execs: don’t totally delegate the program, and make sure EVERYONE knows that there’s an open-door policy if issues arise.

5. Don’t spend a dime on marketing or sales unless there is a shared definition of a lead (shared by marketing and sales). Then you must establish what I call a “Judicial Branch” to mediate leads that are refused by sales because they don’t meet the lead definition or leads that are ignored by sales (for what SiriusDecisions calls non-intuitive reasons such as “I called twice and they did not call me back so they must not have been a real lead”). Otherwise, you’ll be spending (well, wasting) your budget on leads that, instead of generating revenue, are stuck in a black hole.

I don’t want you to be burned by an outsourced b2b lead generation company. I am interested in showing you the difference between a snake-oil firm, and one that gets the job done.

I am happy to talk if you would like to talk about your specific situation and concerns. Just reach out to dan.mcdade@pointclear.com.

Is your marketing automation set up to upsell as well as focus on ROI?

Everything your business does should focus on surpassing your revenue goal. Are you really doing enough to reach that point?

Smart digital marketing doesn’t just sell products; it convinces customers to add to their purchases through accessories or higher quality (and incidentally, higher priced) items. This is a tactic known in e-commerce as the upsell.

Upsells are highly useful for attaining business goals. They help with revenue, obviously but they can accomplish a much more worthy task than that: namely, securing the loyal customer.

When you sell a customer a core product, he or she usually makes the purchase based on factors other than your brand. Maybe the purchase occurred because the item had the best price, or you offered free shipping. That single purchase doesn’t create a loyal customer by itself.

Arranging an upsell, on the other hand, raises the odds that you’ve secured a loyal customer. The shopper sees your company as one that offers continued additional value to an already great product. That’s the reason popular service sites are loaded with upsells.

A Cautionary Tale

Securing the upsell is worthwhile, but you’ll face some hurdles along the way. Assuring a shopper that your additional product fulfills some kind of need that was previously unmet isn’t easy, and doesn’t necessarily turn out as you plan.

One of the biggest hurdles you’ll face is the potential for negative churn, a term used to refer to the number of people who cancel memberships or don’t return for repeat purchases. If your upsells are too loud and obnoxious, this can drive up your churn rate.

This isn’t a new concept. Pushing customers too hard, too quickly, has always resulted in negative relations between businesses and consumers. Given the right balance of subtle posting and problem solving, however, there’s no need to be concerned about the way your upsells might affect customers.

Now that you’re aware of the risks of upselling, take a look at some of the ways companies land the upsell on their pages. These are some of the tried and true strategies.

Make It Solve a Problem (Even If the Client Didn’t Know There Was One)

The ability to solve a problem is the lifeblood of any upsell. Customers won’t buy a product unless they really need it or believe they will. Helping customers to perceive the value of a product lies primarily in the wording you use to promote it.

Here’s an example. Consider a boating site that offers core products for serious boaters, but includes a series of upsells, such as cookware.

If a visitor is thinking about core boating equipment, cookware might not make the list, but an informative blog post can shift people’s attention to potential add-ons, as in this example upsell blog post. If your customer doesn’t readily see the need for the additional product, make it clear.

Set Clear Goals

In any good sales strategy, you’ll find a list of clearly defined goals linked to business objectives. Upselling is just a different level of sale. Setting clear goals gives you something to measure along the way; it reveals the impact of your upsells, revenue stages, sales velocity, and other key metrics. You can use the data you collect to improve your sales strategies in the future.

Develop Trusting Relationships with Customers

Of course, you want customers to believe they need the extra product you’re offering, but that comes more readily after you’ve built a certain amount of trust. You earned a little trust already when the customer made the initial purchase, but you can increase that by making sure he or she won’t end up feeling cheated.

Upselling is built around providing products that aren’t core to the plan -- that is, the customer’s immediate need -- but that doesn’t mean you can’t appeal to the “want” side of the equation. It’s all about striking a balance with a soft sell that doesn’t push but offers a great deal on something useful.

You can increase the trust you’ve built with customers through such things as incentive programs, special pricing, and exclusive offers.

Look for Ways to Automate the Upselling Process

A lot of energy and time can go into the upselling process. Fortunately, automation can be harnessed to do much of the grunt work.

There are many forms of automation tools, but you’ll primarily go to your current marketing tactics. Through targeted emails and opt-in widgets, you can target your existing customers with special offers and deals.

When a customer makes a purchase, for example, it can be followed immediately by a confirmation email and a soft guidance toward further upsells. Automation is a promising tool for the present and future of the upsell.

Thanks to Larry Alton for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. Larry is an independent business consultant specializing in social media trends, business, and entrepreneurship. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

With millennial employees now ascendant in workplaces across the land, managers are grappling with how to hire, retain and engage them. Canadian Business Senior Millennial Correspondent Anna Fitzpatrick answers our burning questions about how to approach this exotic species of office fauna.

MORE ON MILLENNIALS AND WORKPLACE CULTURE:

• Millennials really aren’t different from previous generations of workers
• Millennials aren’t coddled—they just reject abuse as a management tactic
• Make the most of your millennial workers
• Uptalk and vocal fry are, like, totes profesh now, so get over it?
• Millennials can make great salespeople—if you forget the phone
• Moonlighting at other jobs makes your employees more creative and productive
• Millennials’ job plight is more complex than simple unemployment
• Millennials are forcing Canadian firms to up their mobile game
• Surprise: Millennials hate online job applications
• Why you should be forcing workplace colleagues to socialize more
• Why millennials shun sales careers, and what to do about it
• Why developing friendships at work is so important

The post 10 burning questions about millennials in the workplace, answered appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

With time short and budgets tight, it’s becoming a rare occasion when sales teams actually come together, meeting face to face. The result is often a lack of interaction among team members.

At Richardson, we understand the barriers keeping teams apart, but we also know relationships add value in forming strong sales teams. We believe the answer to bridging this gap lies in technology. Over the past year, we’ve been prototyping and refining a new approach to blended learning that incorporates strong social elements to bring the benefits of social interaction in learning to geographically dispersed teams. This new approach to training works within the realities of today’s sales environment. It is one that doesn’t take sellers out of the field for too long. One flexible enough to work as a standalone online solution or combined with minimal classroom time. One that forges connections between sellers.

Social Learning Tools

Leaderboards allow sellers to see their own progress and compare it against the progress of their teammates. Elements like games, quizzes, answering questions, unlocking achievement badges all promote social interactions. Friendly gameplay appeals to sellers’ natural competitive instincts while reinforcing learning and skill development.

With discussion threads, sellers can talk with others on their team and even have private conversations with managers. They can share comments and questions, and reply to those others have posted. They can discuss best practices, how they’re using the learned skills, where they face challenges with customers – these discussions create a stronger community within the team.

Some lessons require learners to pause and reflect on what they’ve just learned and how it will apply in future client situations. The act of thinking, writing, and reflecting helps sellers improve knowledge retention and application. Sharing their views in discussion threads allows team members to collaborate on ideas without having to come together physically. These threads also help managers to interact with learners and to coach based on their responses.

Research tells us learning through social media works because learning is a fundamentally social activity. At Richardson, we have made social learning an integral part of how we train today’s learner. We have created a blended-learning experience for the digital age – and the answer to keeping sales teams trained and connected while minimizing time away from the field.

Richardson Accelerate^TM

We live in an accelerated world, the ways in which we work, learn, and even socialize are constantly in flux; where consistent growth is difficult — and consistent performance is rare. While selling organizations have adapted by becoming nimbler, they’ve experienced a gap between their developmental needs and the learning solutions available to them. Richardson Accelerate^TM is here to close that gap. For more information contact us at 215-940-9255 or info@richardson.com . You can also click here or on the image to download an informational brochure.

The post Social Learning in the Digital Age appeared first on Richardson Sales Training & Enablement Blog.

Author: Guy Atzmon

Marketing–the process or technique, not the profession–is a verb for good reason. It represents an ongoing dialogue between brands and their audience. While these conversations change depending on who’s participating in them, they’re constantly evolving and creating a foundational relationship between the two parties.

To create, build, and grow these necessary and meaningful relationships, brands are segmenting their audiences and personalizing their content and campaigns. However, many often settle for a bare-minimum approach, adding a prospect’s first name to sales emails or segmenting customers based on sweeping demographic markers.

In today’s increasingly personalized world, this approach is obvious at best. At worst, it doesn’t lend to a meaningful interaction with a prospect or customer. It can also mislead brands into thinking they are achieving personalization when they’ve only bucketed buyers into a broad segment like “millennials” or “empty nesters.” Such an approach falls short of truly representing individuals, their interests, pain points, and actions.

Communicating with your buyers shouldn’t feel like checking a box or completing a form. Below are three best practices for a holistic, personalized marketing strategy, aimed at building meaningful relationships with buyers at every turn:

1. Find the Right Balance of Overt and Subtle Personalization

Greeting people by their first names in emails is a step toward personalizing marketing efforts, but it’s also the most basic and can be offensive if executed incorrectly–we’ve all received enthusiastic letters or emails from brands that got our names hilariously wrong.

Instead, try balancing overt and subtle personalization strategies. An example of an overt approach is offering special discounts and deals based on unique factors like a subscriber’s birthday or loyalty status. Subtle examples include content that reflects the buyer’s intent rather than identity, or offering educational content based on a customer’s purchase history.

Take a look at this short video by T. Rowe Price that educates account holders about contributing more to their college savings plan and pay attention to the overt and subtle personalization. It greets the account holder by her name and highlights her account contributions to date and expected college tuitions. The subtle personalization varies depending on the account holder’s stage within the customer lifecycle. Customer data is not simply regurgitated back to the account holder in a robotic way. Rather, the value of the message lies in the meaning and intent expressed to the account holder.

Overt personalization works best when the message serves a specific purpose–educating a prospect about a product or service, explaining an offer, or showing your appreciation for specific actions. On the other hand, subtle personalization makes people feel like you genuinely care about them and their interests. Subtle elements often come from personalized content used for specific segments and by presenting the next-best action (which is not synonymous with the next-best offer) driven by their past behaviors. Showing prospects and customers that you see them as more than line items on a spreadsheet can help establish an emotional, lasting connection.

2. Use Design and Creative to Tailor Outreach

Personalization should affect all marketing messages—and all aspects of them. Give equal consideration to how your brand is sending every message and what’s being expressed. Are you relying solely on text or using interactive content? Why did you choose a certain image, animation style, or on-screen text? And ultimately, are you telling a story that the recipient will relate to and find valuable long after they’ve consumed it?

For example, Atlantis Paradise Island Resort sends personalized videos to its customers throughout the booking process. In the videos, the resort highlights the different activities and amenities that every guest can enjoy, making it simple to book plans and create a customized itinerary before stepping off the plane. If a guest is traveling with children, those recommendations will include images and videos of kid-friendly events. If a couple is seeking a romantic getaway, they’ll receive an overview of spa treatments and activities that provide the retreat they’re looking for. In every case, the resort shows its commitment to guest preferences and needs.

3. Strengthen Customer Relationships with Every Interaction

There’s a big difference between a personalized marketing action and a complete strategy. To make a real difference and resonate with your prospects and customers, every interaction should inform and support their buyer’s journey. To pull that off, it’s critical to collect customer data at every interaction and build on future interactions with each new layer of data.

For example, you wouldn’t engage in the same conversation repeatedly with a colleague. Instead, you process each new piece of context about him, his life, family, hobbies, interests and more, and use that information to modify and inform your next conversation. Likewise, in your relationships with prospects and customers, personalization fails when its sole focus is to drive the next conversion or transaction. Rather, each touchpoint should aim to guide your prospect or customer along their journey and help them achieve their goals.

Create a holistic customer profile by overlaying different data such as buyer persona, browsing history, stage in the customer lifecycle, and preferred devices. This snapshot should look like a Venn diagram—an intersection of an individual’s characteristics—that each drive different decisions about what should be sent to them and how. For example, a customer’s tenure can affect how you greet them, a mobile operating system can dictate device imagery, and interests can drive the content shown.

Using all of the data available about a person and adopting a holistic personalized marketing strategy, you can avoid making prospects and customers feel like they’ve been lumped into a generic category. Instead, aim to inspire and inform with every exchange. Additionally, finding and applying the right balance of subtle and overt personalization enhances the customer experience. By continually delivering positive experiences, you’ll drive better relationships with them that result in short-term conversions and long-term loyalty.

What brands are leading the way in personalization? I’d love to hear in the comments below.

3 Ways to Make Personalized Marketing a Practice, Not a Goal was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post 3 Ways to Make Personalized Marketing a Practice, Not a Goal appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

The goal of any B2B content strategy is to create content that B2B buyers desire — you want to be their #1 source of industry information. So how can you update your strategy to fit the needs of the modern buyer?

A recent survey conducted by Demand Gen Report and Uberflip reveals fascinating developments in the B2B buying process. Are you interested in learning more about your buyers? What makes them tick? What content formats do they want? What are their priorities?

We have taken the highlights of this report, and crafted a post that delivers the lowdown on how to effectively reach B2B buyers, and keep them coming back.

7 Trends That Will Boost Your B2B Content Strategy

1. Case Studies Are B2B Buyers’ #1 Content Choice

Case studies resonate strongest with buyers — 78% of buyers said they accessed this format in their research. Buyers want to see first-hand accounts of what others have done to succeed. Case studies let buyers benchmark their progress against industry peers.

Encourage clients to participate in your own case study by offering incentives, such as a discount, for participation. Include information about challenges your clients faced, how your company overcame those challenges, as well as any facts or statistics that support these claims. Then you can leverage small amounts of this information on your website and social media to attract new B2B buyers. Video testimonials also offer a unique opportunity for prospective buyers to hear about your company — after all, it’s the closest thing to an in-person recommendation that you can get.

2. Third Party Approval Grows in Power

For a while now, we’ve seen a growing trend towards brand distrust, and even contempt for traditional marketing. Buyers are more likely to rely on outside recommendations to make purchase decisions. In fact, 87% of buyers said that they give more credence to industry influencer content. In the same vein, the study also showed that buyers leaned heavily toward peer reviews, third party publications, and user-generated feedback.

An integral part of your content strategy should be to nurture and leverage influencer relationships. Seek out those in your industry who have earned the trust of a large audience, and see if they’ll work with you on an upcoming campaign.

It can also help to involve your current customers in your B2B PR efforts. Ask for short video submissions or photos of how your customers use your products. Make it into a contest to encourage participation. Then share their submissions on your website and social media.

Influencers are the ones holding everyone’s attention. They are the ones people actually spend time watching.–AJ Agrawal

3. Shorter Content Reigns Supreme

It comes as no surprise that buyers rely on content to make their purchase decisions. What does surprise many is that shorter content is emerging as a preference.

Not even B2B buyers are immune to the modern time crunch we all face. 46% of buyers strongly agreed that they are overwhelmed by the amount of content available. The same amount noted that they gravitate toward shorter content formats.

Note, however, that short content doesn’t mean you should create “fluff” content — this should be content that gets right to the meat of the matter, and answers questions quickly. But this content shouldn’t merely be written — B2B buyers prefer interactive and visual content, as well as audio/video content.

Longer form content still holds a valuable place in your content creation — it helps grow your credibility, establish industry expertise, and ranks well in search engines. But you should also focus your efforts on creating short-form content that gets to the heart of an issue, and satisfies buyers who search for their information on the go.

4. Make Content Easy to Access

Want to make buyers happier? Cut down on the number of hoops they have to leap through to get your content. 71% of buyers said that they want content that is easier to access. When asked what recommendations they would make to marketers, 58% of buyers advised that related content should be bundled into special packages for download. Another suggestion included a shift to fewer forms, or content that could be accessed with a single click.

This doesn’t mean you have to eliminate gated content altogether, but it does mean you have to increase the value of your gated content. What kind of content do B2B buyers find valuable? An overwhelming majority — 99% — of study participants expressed a desire for content with insights from industry thought leaders and analysts. A collection of such data might be a helpful way to offer value in exchange for buyer information.

Another point to keep in mind is that B2B buyers are doing more and more research on the go — away from the office. In fact, 52% of participants said that they prefer content that is fully optimized for a smooth, mobile experience. All of your B2B buyers should be able to easily access your content for research on their smartphone or tablet.

5. LinkedIn Remains The Top Dog of B2B Social

Social media remains one of the top means of research for buyers — and LinkedIn is a clear preference for buyers in the B2B sector. 84% of respondents said that they occasionally or frequently share B2B content on LinkedIn. Twitter and Facebook ranked considerably lower, at 64% and 37%, respectively.

How can you effectively use this platform to reach B2B buyers in your industry? Here are a few tried and true ways that you can implement:

• Share educational content that will lead back to your website.
• Become a part of and engage in groups where you can add meaningfully to the conversation.
• Use LinkedIn’s publishing platform to create and share your own thought leadership quality material.

6. Buyers Prefer Prescriptive and Predictive Content

For the third time in a row, buyers in this study ranked prescriptive content as their top content preference — cited by 97% of respondents. What is prescriptive content? It is content that lays out a formulaic-style solution to a specific problem. Create content with insightful and step-by-step solutions for remedying common industry problems, such as…

7 Steps to Make Your Business Website More Secure

5 Tips to Create a Better Customer Experience

Predictive content came in 2nd place, chosen by 87% of respondents. This is content that makes a statement about the future, with titles such as “The Future of…” This calls for a bolder approach to content creation. Don’t be afraid to make statements about the future of your industry. Be among the first to report on emerging industry trends and don’t shy away from predicting how these will change the industry.

The following is an example of predictive content from my own blog:

Click here to read this predictive blog post for yourself.

Finding popular and relevant topics takes some detective work, but is well worth the effort. –Kim Garst

7. Buyers Hesitate to Give Personal Information

Interestingly, the study showed a growing hesitation to provide personal information in exchange for content. When it came to gated content, 95% of buyers said they would share basic information, such as their name, company, and email address, but only 33% were willing to give up their phone number. This may call for a revamp of how you gate your content, and the information you request.

It is also imperative to take into consideration the kind of content that a company offers. Buyers were found to be more forthcoming with personal information when offered certain kinds of content over others. For instance, buyers were more willing to share their information in exchange for white papers, ebooks, and webinars, and less likely to share it for podcasts, videos, and infographics.

Key Points to Remember…

• Case studies are the #1 form of content preferred by B2B buyers, who want to benchmark themselves against their peers.
• Make content short and to the point.
• Buyers want content that is easily accessible, and optimized for mobile.
• Buyers prefer content that shows them how to solve a particular problem, or gives insight into the future of the industry.

A successful B2B content strategy evolves as new data emerges. These 7 new trends will help you to effectively reach your B2B buyers and give them what they want. Don’t delay in implementing them in your strategy.

Content marketing is one of the best ways to tell your brand story. But many marketers are confused about what that actually means. Here, we break down what a brand story is, why you need to share it, and how to communicate it through every piece of content you create.

What Is Your Brand Story?

Despite the word “story,” a brand story is not a linear narrative. It isn’t even confined to the written word. It is an amalgam of your brand’s existence; it’s your essence. Your brand story is:

• Who you are: How your company came to exist, as well as your vision, mission, values, and culture.
• What you do: The product or service you provide.
• Who you do it for: The people you want to help.
• Why you do it: Your larger goal; not just what product/service you provide but how that benefits your customer (e.g., your app helps book vacations so that your customer can truly relax).
• How you do it: Visibility into your product, production, or process.
• Where you are headed: How you are evolving and working to create the best product/service for your customers.

In some ways, it can be hard to quantify a brand story because it is not one single thing, wrapped up in your website’s About page. To your audience, your brand story is both tangible and intangible, formed by the sum total of their interactions with your brand.

It’s in everything they see, read, hear, touch, experience (sometimes even taste) when they encounter your brand. It’s your website UX, the way you banter with them on Twitter, the way your customer service reps answer the phone. Your brand story is a powerful entity that functions as a conduit between you and your audience.

Why Brand Story Is So Important

Consumers have become increasingly resistant to interruption marketing, the paradigm in which brands interrupt consumers to sell, sell, sell. Consumers don’t want to be treated as a faceless dollar bill, and they don’t want to feel preyed upon by corporate interests. But the traditional dynamic, which is inherently a one-way conversation, has made them feel this way.

Unsurprisingly, the 2014 Edelman Brandshare survey found that the majority of consumers are suspicious of brands’ intentions.

Consumers are not inherently opposed to brand communication, but they don’t want interruption. They crave engagement marketing, a dynamic in which the brand-consumer relationship is built on trust, mutual respect, and common interests. They want to connect and interact with brands, to be acknowledged as unique individuals.

Unfortunately, although there are more ways for brands to communicate with consumers than ever, consumers largely think that brands are dropping the ball. According to Edelman, the majority feel there is an imbalance in their relationships with brands.

To build a better dynamic with consumers, brands need to actively cultivate relationships. This is why sharing your brand story is so vital. It’s a friendly introduction, a way to build a relationship beyond a blanket media buy.

Your brand story tells your audience who you are, why you want to help them, and why they would enjoy working with you, helping you make an authentic, genuine connection at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Letting them behind the curtain also helps you demonstrate both confidence and vulnerability, which makes audiences more eager to trust you and accept your expertise.

Now here’s the part that many marketers hate to acknowledge: You don’t have total control over your brand story. Your story is part what you communicate and part how your consumer perceives what you communicate.

While that may be frustrating, it’s important to take control of the part of the story you can communicate it. With no brand story, your customers can write their own narrative—or worse, disregard you entirely.

Communicating Your Brand Story through Content

So, how do you share your brand story? Content is one of the best tools at your disposal. Every piece of content you create supports your story, from the simplest tweet to a full-on white paper.

It’s a steady IV drip, a way to deliver your story to multiple audiences, on multiple platforms, in many formats. Storytelling content can include:

• Articles
• Case Studies
• Data visualizations
• E-books
• Explainer videos
• Infographics
• Interactive infographics
• Microcontent
• Motion Graphics
• White papers
• Video

These communication tools are also versatile and flexible. Your story isn’t static; it changes as your company grows and expands, as you bring on new team members and break into new markets. While your website may not change much, a new initiative can spawn an article, infographic, and social content to send your story far and wide.

6 Ways to Tell Your Brand Story

Many brands get so excited about content marketing that they push any and every idea out the door, eager to feed the content beast. This instinct is well-intentioned but destructive. The only thing worse than no content is content that is disjointed, off-brand, or inconsistent.

To ensure you’re telling the right story and setting your content up for success, follow these 6 tips.

1) Choose the Right Subject

Consumers want to work with brands that “get” them, that are invested in helping them solve a problem, do something better, or enhance their life in some way.

Unfortunately, too many brands are focused on what they want to create, not what their audience needs. To help you come up with the right ideas, create audience personas, which detail exactly who your audience segments are, their pain points and struggles, and how you can help address them.

You can use those personas to vet all your ideas, ensuring you are giving your audience truly valuable content that demonstrates that your brand is a useful resource or helpful friend.

Example: LinkedIn Marketing Solutions is all about mobilizing marketers to grow their audience, create more effective content, and, ultimately, achieve their goals. To help their audience get better results from their marketing, we helped them create a useful e-book packed with tips, stats, and deep dives into the world of native advertising.

2) Present it in the Right Format

The most important goal for every piece of content is to communicate your brand story as efficiently and effectively as possible. Therefore, choosing the right format is vital. You might get caught up in trying to produce the flashiest, trendiest types of content, but this is a disservice to your audience.

Whether content is meant to inform, delight, or entertain, show your audience you value their time and attention by presenting it in the right package.

Example: Warby Parker is known for their tremendously creative annual reports, packed full of personality. Each year, it’s an engaging interactive report with hidden surprises, such as the opportunity for readers to create their own personal annual reports.

3) Use Your Brand Voice

It is way too easy to default to boring marketing speak.

Your brand personality and culture are what makes your brand unique. This should be reflected in your brand story through a strong (and human!) brand voice.

Don’t know what your brand voice is? It sounds like your company conversations, Google chats, water-cooler jokes. It’s influenced by who you are and who you strive to be.

Pro tip: Once you complete a piece of content, give it a second pass for word choice and tone. These are the easiest ways to color up your content and make sure you’re speaking to your audience appropriately.

4) Design with your Visual Language

Your visual language is the aesthetic experience of your brand. Everything from your logo to color palettes can affect how your content is interpreted. Whether it’s a brand video, infographic, or interactive, a consistent, on-brand visual language creates a cohesive experience.

If you don’t already, your brand should have a formal style guide. (This allows any designer to preserve brand style and integrity.) Make sure it includes specifications for:

• Logo
• Color palette
• Typography
• Iconography
• Design system (such as hierarchy)
• Photography/graphics

5) Make it Shareable

You don’t want to be the only one telling your brand story. Encourage your audience to share your story by making it easy to do so. Working social buttons, proper dimensions, SEO optimization, hashtags—consider anything you can do to foster engagement.

6) Maximize exposure

It takes a lot of work to create a great piece of content, so you should try to reach as many people as possible. Your owned channels are a great starting point, but it always helps to elevate your visibility through publishing partnerships, syndication, or cobranded work. The larger the reach, the more people will hear your brand story.

Example: We partnered with INC to create an animated infographic showcasing 3 exciting infographic trends for infographics. This gave INC a great piece of visual content and allowed us to showcase our expertise and design skills to a larger audience.

Always Strive to Tell Better Stories

As your brand story evolves, you will have more opportunities to connect with your audience—if you stay up-to-date on how to tell the best stories.

Going forward, continue to educate yourself, refine your brand story, and experiment with different ways to communicate your brand story. Remember: No one can tell it better than you.

Editor’s note: You may have missed this article when CMI published it a couple years ago. We’re sharing it now because we know how pressed for time you are and how much a documented strategy can help.

As CMI research shows, marketers with a documented content marketing strategy are more effective than those who lack a written strategy. Yet, only 40% of B2C and 37% of B2B marketers have written down a plan.

If you lack a written strategy, a one-page plan is a great place to begin. If you have a detailed strategy but struggle to gain traction, boiling it down to one page will make it easier. A one-page strategy can help you:

• Crystalize your content marketing strategy
• Gain stronger buy-in more quickly from executives or clients
• Keep content producers strategically aligned

A one-page #contentmarketing strategy can help you gain traction, says @riverwordguy.
Click To Tweet

Get started

To create a content marketing strategy in one page, first focus on what the organization needs to accomplish in the next year.

How to find this information depends on your company. You can engage C-level executives, read the company’s internal and external documents (including the overall marketing plan), or use another research avenue to identify:

• Company’s growth strategy
• Revenue growth targets (as a percent or dollar figure over last year)
• Profit targets (as a percent or monetary amount per share over last year)
• How growth will be achieved (e.g., new product launch, add-on sales to existing customers, new markets, acquisition, new customers, increase in market share)
• Other factors or criteria important to the organization’s growth

Considering how crucial these inputs are to marketing, it’s surprising that marketing managers are often unaware of the precise business objectives.

These business-level elements will appear in your plan as:

1. Objectives: What qualitative results must the company accomplish over the next year?

2. Goals: How will progress toward objectives be measured quantitatively?

Next, work with mid-level marketing, sales, and product leaders to sketch a content marketing plan. How will content marketing help the company achieve its goals? You may find some ideas that content marketing can support, and others that it can’t. What content marketing can support will appear in your plan as:

3. Strategies: What will the content marketing function deliver qualitatively during the next year? (e.g., introduce a new product, increase awareness, dramatize your solution’s differentiation, create a better customer experience, offer social proof)

4. Metrics: How will marketing measure the achievement of content marketing strategies? (e.g., increase awareness by a certain percent, deliver specified number of marketing-qualified leads to sales, contribute a certain dollar amount to the sales pipeline from qualified leads, produce a certain amount of revenue)

Don’t shy away from revenue goals. It’s bracing to have quantified goals to meet, but quotas bring a clear finish line and value to all content marketing activities. Measure the sales pipeline, customers won, and revenue generated. These are the metrics executives really care about.

Take it to the executives

Now that you have completed the first four parts of the plan, present the draft to the executives and middle managers. Walk through the plan step by step and discuss it immediately, face to face. Be open to questions and input. Be succinct. Be wise – narrow the scope of discussion to avoid misunderstandings or setbacks. The results of their input will help you sharpen the plan, but you still must keep it to one page.

Use input from executives & middle managers to sharpen your #contentmarketing plan, says @riverwordguy.
Click To Tweet

Through these exchanges, you’ll learn that that executives care most about the financial numbers. As one CEO put it, “When you come into my office, I see either a penny of expense or a penny of profit on your forehead.” They want to know:

• Content marketing costs
• Revenue planned to be generated and by what date
• Profit produced based on company or product margins
• Targeted return ROI for content marketing

Work toward a straightforward understanding with your executives – a simple and scalable marketing model. For instance, I reached this understanding with a CFO: For every $3 in revenue generated by marketing, the company would spend an additional dollar on marketing. The more revenue generated by marketing, the more budget it would have to spend.

Align content creators

I pin the agreed-upon one-page plan above my computer screen and encourage my team to do the same. Use the plan as a litmus test for ideas. Let it simplify decisions about which content goes forward.

As you well know, all your agencies, freelancers, reporters, writers, digital, and social experts need to work from the same content marketing strategy. When it’s only one page, they’re far likelier to use it day to day than they would a multi-page document or, heaven forbid, a dusty 3-inch binder.

A 1 page #contentmarketing strategy will be used more than a multi-page document or dusty binder. @riverwordguy
Click To Tweet

In addition to one-page strategies, content creators also need:

• One-page message map
• Buyer personas
• Understanding of the buyers’ journey
• Editorial calendar

Template example

This content marketing strategy template fits on one side of standard printer paper. If you absolutely need more space, use legal-sized paper or even an 11- by 17-inch piece. The important thing is to keep it to a single page that can be easily shared to maximize its impact and usefulness with executives and content creators.

Content Marketing One-Page Plan

Objectives:

1. Increase revenue from product X over the next 12 months
2. Position this disruptive new product as a viable alternative to (competitor’s product)

Goals:

1. Increase revenue by X% to X% in 2017
2. Build buyer awareness to XX%

Strategy:

1. Become the best source of information on (customer problem or product category)
2. Deliver useful information and thought-provoking insights
3. Educate buyers on:

• How to address key technology and business challenges
• How to generate revenue, reduce expenses, and improve user experiences

Metrics:

1. Increase website traffic +XX% year over year
2. Convert XX% of website users (You may track soft conversions and/or hard conversions.)
3. Add to the sales pipeline XXXX marketing-qualified leads per year, including $YY million in potential deals
4. Generate revenue of $X million

Who we serve: Capsule version of buyer personas

What’s in it for buyers? Ideas to further buyers’ careers and their companies’ success

Topics: List topics where the company seeks to position its helpful content.

Serving sizes & frequencies

Time (to get message across) Words             Media

7 seconds                                23                    Headline, tweet, sound bite, cartoon (daily)

2 minutes                               400                  Web page, blog, news release, video, infographic (2X/week)

5 minutes                               1,000               Magazine article, contributed articles, long video (monthly)

20+ minutes                          4,000+           White paper, application note, e-book, speech, webinar (quarterly)

Calls to action

Soft: Watch a video; read blog, magazine article, or white paper

Hard: Enter demand funnel – read a gated white paper, sign up for a webinar, qualify at a trade show or event

Conclusion

Adapt the template to suit your needs. Include the most relevant elements. Cover what you need to gain executive support and align content creators. But always keep in mind that it must fit on a single page or its purpose will be diminished.

Want more expert advice on how to make your content marketing strategy more effective? Subscribe to CMI’s free daily newsletter or weekly digest with an exclusive letter from founder Joe Pulizzi.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Simplify Your Content Marketing Strategy with a One-Page Plan appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

My coaching client Daniel asked me, “Bill, are you a Hunter or a Farmer? Do you constantly prospect for new business, or do you focus on the clients you currently have?”

I replied, “I’m more of a Trapper. I like to apply the principles of value-centered marketing, so people see me as a resource and come to me for further assistance.” However, even though I take on this persona, it’s still essential to understand how different salespeople like to work. This post will explain the difference between the hunter and farmer sales persona and how they take on sales activity.

Below we’ll go more in-depth into each sales persona and its main characteristics.

The Hunter Sales Persona

As the name suggests, the hunter salesperson goes out and hunts for new opportunities, prospects, and accounts. They’re independent and enjoy moving from one deal to the next as they’re motivated to continue finding and drawing in new leads.

Hunters are good at quickly building rapport with prospects but not necessarily cultivating long-term salesperson and client relationships. They go to many networking events, join other organizations, use LinkedIn and social media platforms to reach out to leads, make lots of calls, and ask for referrals regularly.

A hunter will thrive in a role where they can be independent. People with this persona will do well as account executives, field representatives, or business development managers.

The Farmer Sales Persona

The farmer salesperson is most comfortable fertilizing and watering existing relationships. They work to foster relationships and build long-lasting rapport with their existing accounts before anything else.

Their clients know that they’re there for them should any issues arise, and the farmer is eager to assist when they do. Their client-first mindset greatly influences and increases customer retention and loyalty. They also drive revenue with existing clients, sometimes through encouraging upgrades to higher software tiers as a business scales.

Sales roles that farmer personas thrive in are account managers, customer service representatives, or client success managers.

While hunters and farmers are on either end of the spectrum, the trapper persona falls somewhere in the middle.

The Trapper Sales Persona

The trapper salesperson has a critical understanding of their business’ target audience and buyer personas, and they meet prospects where they already are in their buyer’s journey.

A trapper may use inbound marketing to create a fine-tuned way to communicate the value of what they’re selling to their prospects in the channels they’re already present, like social selling to B2B professionals on LinkedIn.

An effective trapper is also adept at generating various forms of social proof, such as testimonials and case studies, to present to clients as a means of inspiring them to do business with them. Trappers are also closing-focused in their roles.

Hunter vs. Farmer vs. Trapper

While all three personas are client-focused, it’s important to understand the distinction between them. The infographic below is a rundown of the difference between the three personas.

Can You Change Sales Personas?

I’ve been in the world of sales, marketing, and business development for over 30 years.

It is rare to find someone who is truly well-developed in more than one of these personas. For example, my predominant persona is the trapper. I enjoy determining my market, finding prospects, and crafting the right message to pull them in. As I’ve honed these skills, the less hunting I need to do — although I still need to bring the sale to fruition when I bring someone into my world. I’m a good trapper, decent farmer, and okay hunter.

As you have probably already guessed, every industry, business model, and personal style will ultimately dictate the right blend of these three personas. Great marketing will bring people into your world, but you still have to close the deal, so to speak. Sometimes they come into your world through marketing, but you have to keep tracking them until the time is right and they truly see your value.

If you’re a front-line salesperson, focus on cultivating the strengths of your sales persona rather than becoming a different one or imitating their approach. If you’re a sales leader or business owner, hire the personas that complement yours and work together to build a fast-growing, profitable company.

Editor's Note: This blog post was originally posted in April 2017, but was updated in April 2021 for comprehensiveness.

Sourcing talent in this day and age can almost make you go cross-eyed. Staffing firms need to have their sights everywhere because “Division I” technical talent is available for only an instant. Where that next superstar candidate will emerge is anyone’s guess. Since sales and recruiting teams have to be economical with their time, sourcing efforts need to focus on known commodities whenever possible.

Think about it. At least 80% of sales take five follow-ups to close. Being that tenacious takes time. Though making new connections widens sales funnels, part of the reason sales and recruiting teams build relationships is to have a reliable well of talent when needed. Some of these techniques are things staffing firms may be doing every six months. But it’s the successful sales and recruiting teams that use these techniques to generate new staffing leads (both candidates and new accounts) on a regular basis. It’s a rookie mistake to let what’s already on your plate grow cold. Here’s the old school way to leverage existing relationships and spend more time closing tough placements.

1.) Maximize Those Personal Relationships

By their nature, established relationships are easier to leverage. Trust already exists because people understand you and your character. Sales reps and recruiters building books of business and candidate contacts ease introductions through long-standing relationships. Over time, their toolkit will include additional tactics for getting warm leads, but even then referrals from your personal relationships create a fast and stable foundation.

Years ago, I played in a volleyball league as a way of staying active, both physically and professionally. Through the league, I met three executive level technology professionals, one of which was a VP of IT at Discover Financial. We had played together, gotten to know each other’s character, and built a rapport. When I reached out to him and said, “I want a shot. What can I do to prove to you that my level of service and our firm’s ability are going to be at a high level?” he was already receptive.

He made the introductions with the caveat that closing the deal was up to me. He simply gave his people an understanding that he knew me and my character. Beyond that, the sale and delivery were in my hands. Great sales reps are people who do what they say and say what they do. That took some of the risk off the table for him. From the start, I let him know that I’m willing to work hard for the business and the introduction he made didn’t need to put his credibility on the line in the process.

Make saying yes to the referral as easy as possible. The process should feel hands-off. Your personal contact makes an introduction and you handle everything else. The less intrusive your request, the more likely you’ll be able to use that contact in the future. With the gatekeepers and procedures you’re able to bypass, you’ll want to keep on coming back.

2.) Be Willing to Connect with Old Contractors

In sales and recruiting, one eye needs to be fixed on the next sale or placement. It’s like playing Risk. Anyone not planning several moves ahead has nowhere to go without serious setbacks. Recruiters are always looking for new candidates to fill positions. Sales reps are looking to open new doors with new accounts. However, the more economical way to generate new staffing leads is to use previous contractors in one of two ways.

Think about it. Why can’t John Doe, who you placed in a role a year ago, help your transition into another account? All of the groundwork is completed. Your reputation is respected. They know your process first-hand. This makes them a walking, talking success story highlighting your capabilities. Even a brief word confirming your dedication goes a long way to generate new staffing leads. The process flashes from introduction to qualification with less heavy lifting.

On the other side, previous contractors are a renewable resource themselves. They’re a known commodity and you can present them to new prospects with great results. I can say “I’ve worked with John Doe in the past and this guy is the shit. I personally know he’s an outstanding consultant. Based on my research, I know he’s the type of resource you’ve looked for in the past and I’ll stake my reputation on him.” That to me is a door opener. That’s not just saying we carry Java Developers. That’s a person calling with conviction.

Using contractors to break into new accounts and find new candidates requires upfront work. There needs to be a living and breathing relationship between you and anyone you present. That’s why maintaining past relationships is so crucial. At least 10% to 15% of a sales rep’s or recruiter’s week should be dedicated to reaching out to people they’ve worked with in the past. Might seem like a lot, but top sales performers are meeting people face-to-face 8 hours a day anyway. And the results to generate new staffing leads are much more fruitful.

Let’s look at an example. High producers turn over a fair percentage of contractors every year. If you have 30 people billing on January 1^st, then 10 to 15 might have completed their contracts by December 31^st. Recruiters performing at that level or higher over three or four years have 40 to 60 people (minus the bad placements or ones with bad chemistry) available to give referrals or take contracts. Take one of those people per week out to coffee or lunch, asking them genuine questions about their career, and you will generate new staffing leads, whether it’s new clients or new candidates, on a fairly regular basis. You just need to ask the right detailed questions (it’s one of the six characteristics of a great recruiter):

• Where are you working?
• Who needs people?
• What can I help you with?

People who have a good relationship with you and trust you are going to be forthcoming about leads and instances when they would be willing to move on. All without the frustration built into establishing new connections.

3.) Use Your Recruiters for Insight

Recruiters interview countless people. In my own experience, there were 10% or 15% of people who I didn’t use, but who are deep down great candidates. Maybe the rate didn’t work or the location was too far away or the company was not the right fit for this given person. Regardless, I knew I wanted to keep tabs on Jane Doe because somewhere along the way this person might be the perfect fit for a different account or role. All of the vetting has been done in advance so the hiring timeline speeds up.

On the sales rep side, it is important to leverage certain top performing recruiters and bridge the gap between the sales and recruiting department. During my own experience, I was trying to handle 15 to 20 sales reqs on an ongoing basis. Depending on how the recruiting team is structured, I know that certain recruiters will understand the type of character I want in candidates I present inside my accounts or maybe they understand certain requirements better than their peers. I’ll sit down with the people who get my style, how I work, and how I sell to ask them where their recent candidates are coming from and going.

Projects come and go. Let’s say we recently lost candidates to certain accounts. That’s a means to identify and break into new accounts. If we’re losing candidates to specific companies sucking up talent, you know a demand exists that you can potentially go after.

Using Inbound Marketing to Generate New Staffing Leads

The above three tactics are known to most companies, but take time and effort on your end to put them into a formal process. It’s important to reinforce the importance of this specific strategy and incorporate it into your tactics to ensure the sales and recruiting team doesn’t fall into a comfort zone. Yet there are additional ways to draw in new clients and candidates without revamping what your team is doing.

Strong inbound marketing strategies are standard for every business. The question isn’t if you need to pursue inbound marketing, but how you can make it work most effectively for you. We can deliver the results you need.

If you ask SDRs about the difficulties they face during day to day prospecting, you would hear many recurrent challenges: rejection, market saturation, list exhaustion, bad data…It can go on and on.

I’m not going to sit here and help SDRs make excuses. There are steps you can take to make your team’s situation more palatable. Encourage SDRs to speak openly, and collaborate to broaden strategies and get people on the phone. Switch up your outreach methods and find that personalization sweet spot. Using positivity techniques will make your reps more chipper, more resilient, and more productive.

All things considered, the life of an SDR is still tough  –  it’s easy to burn out and let these challenges impact performance. Hearing “we’re all set, we use COMPETITOR X” over and over again is draining. A lack of quality contacts, or relying on data that leads you astray can force an SDR to spend hours doing research instead of outreach. Some of these difficulties are totally out of your control as an SDR, and it’s a grind to get through all of that to hear one “yes.”

What is in your control, and one of the biggest factors of SDR success, is data. Good data at the top of the funnel leads to more conversations and higher quality leads at the bottom of the funnel.

The question however, is how do we get that data? What kind of leads are we supposed to fill the top of the funnel with to get our desired results, and promote SDR productivity?

Hold onto your hats – I’m here to talk to you about the Pre-Qualified Lead.

Pre-Qualified Leads are a bit of a step up from your traditional MQL, but the two fall in the same category. Instead of pumping out content and getting hand-raisers, sourcing a Pre-Qualified Lead is a more active process.

Traditionally, an MQL self-selects by downloading content, attending an event, visiting your website, etc…the point is that they take an action, and that action is what gets them into the top of your funnel. From there, the SDRs sift through all inbound leads and start to qualify them for the sales team. They move into your ISQL stage, then SAL, SQL and eventually get handed over to the closing reps.

With Pre-Qualified Leads, the process is a bit different. Instead of leads self-selecting themselves, you’re selecting them based on a set of predetermined criteria.

Creating and maintaining an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and custom qualification criteria enables you to filter through your database and pick out leads that are “pre-qualified,” in the sense that they’d be an ideal fit for your technology or service. Utilizing services like predictive modeling and combing through historical data will clarify which accounts are more likely to close, and consequently which accounts your SDR team should be focusing on. It’s the old adage of fishing with a spear instead of casting a wide net – you might catch less fish, but they’re the fish you want to eat.

All of this means that leads will enter the sales funnel with further qualification, which is traditionally an extra step your SDRs have to accomplish. Pre-Qualified Leads eliminate the grind of daily research and (often times) heavy account mapping, giving your team more time to qualify and pass opportunities to your closing reps.

The question now turns to how? The value is apparent, but getting those pre-qualified leads into your sales funnel becomes the challenge. Here are a few ways to generate Pre-Qualified Leads with little to no serious investment:

• Incentivized Surveys: One of the easiest ways to generate Pre-Qualified Leads for your SDRs, incentivized surveys are a shotgun approach to finding your ideal accounts. Think of it as casting a wide net versus spear fishing (I know, we just talked about how that’s not what you want). By sending out surveys that contain prioritized qualification questions, you can sift through the responses to find the answers you’re looking for, and in the process identify the accounts you want to target. Incenting the survey will increase the response rate, and it doesn’t take a large monetary investment on your end.

• Predictive Modeling: You have a ton of historical data that’s laying dormant in your CRM – it’s time to use it! By analyzing win / loss reports, ROI, recurring revenue, and a bevy of other metrics, predictive modeling tools can tell you what accounts are more likely to close and drive high profits. Accounts that already exist in your database could be “diamonds in the rough,” and re-focusing your SDR team on those prospects is equivalent to generating leads from an outside source. This also helps further develop your ICP to know what accounts to look for in the future.

• Buy them!: It might be a bit of a cop-out, but plenty of companies out there sell Pre-Qualified leads (or the programs / tools to generate them for you) at reasonable prices. Working with these companies will help you further establish the qualification questions you need answered, develop (or improve) an ICP, and set-up a constant delivery of leads to your SDR team. It might be a little more costly, but the benefits start to outweigh those pretty quickly.

Giving your SDRs a list of Pre-Qualified leads will not only boost their morale, but their conversion rates as well. Create a well-oiled sales development machine and treat your reps to a pre-qualified list.

The post Pre-Qualified Leads: A Staple of Successful Sales Processes appeared first on OpenView Labs.

For years manufacturing firms grew simply by producing good quality, differentiated products. As a result, the sales function was fairly straightforward albeit passive: salespeople called on their clients on a regular basis and maintained solid relationships with them. If a quote was reasonable and served up with a coffee and a donut, the sale was almost guaranteed.

Over time the manufacturing sector became more competitive, and in order to generate awareness, marketing departments developed advertising and branding strategies to communicate a differentiated position. This helped the sales process but didn’t always serve up qualified leads.

Today, it’s not just the manufacturing sector that’s changed, the buyer has changed too. According to Jill Rowley, a digital transformation expert and former sales leader at Oracle, the modern buyer has changed more in the past 15 years than past 100, and more in the past five years than the past 50. Buyers are more educated and more aware than ever before, they’re connected to vast networks of contacts and regularly access information and data before making a purchase decision. A big part of the buying journey involves doing research before a purchase is made and many buyers use social media sites to gather information. In fact, social media now drives more traffic to many websites than search engines.

Relying on the traditional, passive approach to relationship building means manufacturers and their sales reps are in a race to the bottom. Salespeople who aren’t engaging with their buyers in the channels they frequent – especially social media – are losing opportunities. They can’t make a sale if they’re not in the room. And they can’t engage if they’re not sharing valuable insights and information.

The New FOMO is YAMO – You Are Missing Out

Social selling – intelligent interaction with prospects and clients in social channels – is the key to building strong, profitable relationships with today’s buyer. If you’re a salesperson in manufacturing and think your buyers are not using social media, you’re wrong. Today, buyers look for subject matter expertise. Consider that 49% of buyers have researched sales professionals by looking up their profiles on LinkedIn and 72% of buyers use social media to research before making a purchase (1). If your buyers are looking to understand your subject matter expertise and point of view on your product in a channel you’re not currently using, you are missing out. You are missing out on opportunities to build relationships, differentiate in a competitive market and reach your quota.

So, how do you start to build a meaningful relationship on social media with a buyer? By using valuable content to start a conversation. By sharing content that resonates with your buying audience you are providing information they are seeking while also positioning yourself as a person of influence within the industry. Finding quality content does not have to be a challenge. There are tools and software available to help you get the right content in front of the right people at the right time.

One of these tools is Grapevine6. Using artificial intelligence, Grapevine6 serves up content from 15,000 global publishers and specifically tailors it to the needs of each individual user. Grapevine6 enables salespeople to strengthen their personal brand and become thought leaders in their sector. The app drives business conversations with prospects and clients, while more efficiently and effectively moving opportunities through your pipeline.

Your buyers are on social media and they are actively seeking information and solutions to make their lives better. So again, we ask the question, are you out there, too?

(1) LinkedIn Global Survey of 1500 B2B Decision Makers and Influencers, May 2014

A leader in the health industry recalled an incident from 40 years ago that still haunted him. In the early stages of his career he decided he had to speak up about malpractice he had witnessed. He remembered the experience very clearly: “I was hauled before the District Medical Officer… there’s me at 21 and him fifty-odd: ‘Young man, if you think you have any future in this career, you’ll desist from this [questioning] immediately.’ So I did desist.”

To avoid situations like this, most people will consciously or unconsciously weigh up relative power differences before deciding to speak up. And it’s always tempting to think that when you have more power — maybe even just a little more – it will be easier to call out wrongdoing. But over the last two years, as we interviewed over 60 business leaders, what we found is that this feeling never goes away. There is always someone or something more powerful than you are — when we spoke with company CEOs, they’d express concern about their boards, and when we spoke with board chairmen, they’d admit to being afraid of the media. No matter how senior the person we interviewed, there was always a lingering doubt about the risks and consequences of speaking up.

In our study, recently published, we sought to understand the complexities surrounding the decision to speak up or not at work — from a small idea about how to change customer service conversations, to a more serious issue of professional wrongdoing. In a previous article we explored how leaders may inadvertently silence others through being blind to their relative power. Now, we share what we’ve learned about those who do speak up. Our research suggests that speaking truth to power requires attention to these five intimately related questions:

1. How much do you believe in your own opinion? Speaking up requires you to believe you have a contribution to make and to feel strongly enough about it to speak up. So how much do you care? How would you feel if you didn’t speak up?

When we spoke to one whistle-blower who had inadvertently discovered that their CEO had been defrauding the company, he described the devastating consequences of speaking up: not only did he lose his job, but his family came apart as well. Asked whether he would blow the whistle again, had he known the consequences, he replied quickly: “Absolutely not!” Then, wracked with distress, he said: “But how could I not have?” Even with the consequences so brutally apparent, this executive felt so strongly that speaking up was the morally right choice that he could not have lived with himself had he stayed silent.

This is an atypical story that stands out because of its drama — in many cases, the morally right course of action is murkier, and the consequences of speaking up are not so devastating. Which leads us to the second question:

2. Do you have a realistic grasp of the consequences of speaking up? By balancing how much we believe in what we have to say with what might happen if we say it, we can decide whether we have the energy and resilience required to do so. People often have an exaggerated fear of the consequences of speaking up, and so we tend to prefer the short-term security of staying silent. How can we best ensure we are being realistic with our fears? Start by considering how those who have previously spoken up have actually been treated. Then don’t forget to reflect on the counter-argument: what are the long-term consequences to you and others of staying silent? And think carefully about who is likely to be affected if you do speak out. This brings us onto the third key question:

3. How will what you have to say affect the political games being played in the organization? The Chief Operating Officer of one of the world’s biggest banks described the environment that fostered the culture that enabled the Libor and related scandals: “It all begins with the organization’s biggest lie.” This lie?  “Budgets.” The COO said that as soon as budget conversations were initiated, the political games began. Those new to the organization often fell afoul of the unwritten rules of the game. The organizational culture became so Byzantine with intrigue, and silence so obviously the safest choice, that larger and larger lies were allowed to grow unchecked.

This applies in all organizations. There is always politics in organizations, even in those that say they don’t have any, and there are always written and unwritten rules — with the unwritten ones being those that will usually trip you up.

4. What are the social rules that govern how you speak up and how you are listened to? Human beings label one another all the time, often unconsciously. So we meet someone and label them as: woman or old or American or rich. And then of course we consider their formal organizational label: CEO, sales rep, shelf-stacker, consultant. All these labels convey status, which differs according to context. A consultant in one organization may be expected to speak up and challenge the status quo — that is why they have been brought in — but in another, they might be expected to provide evidence to support the CEO’s stated strategy.

An activist investor in America, responsible for funds worth billions, described how she was often the only woman in the boardroom when she met with the executive teams of the companies she invested in.  And she was nearly always the only person aged under 50. Well aware that in these settings the labels “woman” and “young” conveyed lower status, she explained how she sought to build alliances before board meetings by speaking with her co-investors in advance, one-on-one, to secure their support.

Labels matter. If you want to speak up you would be wise to consider what labels are applied to you and the consequences of the labels you are applying to those you are speaking up to. This leads to the final question:

5. What is the most skillful way of speaking up in order to be heard? The Deputy Chairman of a global media organization explained to us that he quickly learned not to challenge the Chairman in a group situation. However, when traveling with the Chairman he knew that when they sat down together in the hotel lobby with a glass of wine, he could say anything he liked — and he would be heard.

Knowing what to say, how, when, and to whom is how you mitigate the consequences of speaking out and amplify the likelihood of being heard. Rehearsing can help, as can actively reflecting on your previous experience of speaking up — what worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn that you should apply in this situation?

The reality is that organizations are soaked in power and power politics. Speaking up is always a political act.

In choosing to speak up or not, a less powerful person has to be acutely aware of their own drivers and behavioral triggers, sensitive to their standing in the formal and informal social hierarchy, and also to the specifics of their organizational culture. There is no one-size-fits-all approach people can adopt. But there is no doubt that organizations of all stripes, and in all sectors, would perform better if more voices were raised, and heard.

The promise of predictive analytics applications for B2B sales and marketing is to generate revenue by expanding existing markets and penetrating new markets.

These predictive analytics applications are Software as a Service (SaaS)-based applications used in the sales funnel for both prospects and existing customers.

Traditional CRM lead management, Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Sales Intelligence (SI) offer some functionality to help Bb2B marketers and salespeople make better decisions. Today however, artificial intelligence (AI), data science and machine learning are now raising the bar.

Market Highlights

• Gartner estimates that the market for SaaS-based predictive analytics applications is approximately $100M – $150M.
• Solution offerings span many use cases — from segmentation to account selection, demand generation and upsell and cross-sell.
• Subscription contracts are typically two years or less and vendor churn at the end of contracts remains high due to unrealized expectations and the ease of switching.
• While there is differentiation in solution offerings, most vendors use similar messaging and positioning which creates confusion for buyers.

Popular Use Cases for Predictive Analytics

Total Addressable Market (TAM) Identification — B2B companies want to know how big of an opportunity exists before entering a market or making staffing and investment decisions.

Segmentation — Predictive models can be used to create segments of accounts based on signals (fit or intent) rather than simply on traditional firmographics.

Account Selection — Sales and marketing teams can identify the best accounts to select for outbound calling or for specific, integrated demand generation programs.

Integrated Demand Generation — Marketers, SDRs and ISRs can instantly expand the companies and contacts that they prospect versus buying lists.

Lead Scoring — Traditional lead scoring is typically based on two dimensions (demographic/ activity or firmographic and engagement). Predictive lead scoring incorporates buyer, company and market signals that are correlated with propensity to buy, in additional to traditional scoring.

Forecasting — Predictive forecasting models attempts to automate the forecasting and pipeline management processes by using data science models to score opportunities and roll them up at various levels.

Opportunity Scoring — Opportunity scoring helps sales management understand the true likelihood of close (and the close date) instead of going off what the rep has entered by leveraging historical data.

Upsell / Cross-sell – Upsell and Cross-sell models provide not only the accounts to target, but also the solutions to offer by analyzing internal data.

Outcomes Expected

B2B sales and marketing organizations are turning to predictive analytics to increase their bottom line and competitive advantage. Some of the most outcomes expected include:

• Improve win rates, deal velocity and increased deal size
• Increase revenue in existing markets
• Increase share of wallet with existing accounts
• Generate revenue in new markets
• Increase conversion rates throughout the sales and marketing funnel
• Increase marketing’s contribution to the sales pipeline
• Increase ROI on marketing spend
• Optimize the allocation of sales and marketing resources
• Cut down lead volume and increase revenue and productivity
• Increase SDR call utilization rates
• Decrease expenses by eliminating unproductive leads

In summary, predictive analytics applications can provide an “unfair” advantage to B2B sales and marketing teams. Specifically, adopting SaaS-based predictive analytics applications can help a B2B marketing team by improving segmentation, account selection, demand generation and lead scoring to increase conversion rates and contributions to pipeline and revenue. In addition, adoption of SaaS-based predictive analytics applications can help a B2B sales team improve forecasting, pipeline management and upselling/cross-selling to increase win rates, deal velocity and average sales price.

<< DOWNLOAD The ABM Template Instantly >>

Overcoming objections in sales is critical for you to have success in sales.

You’ve heard the word “no” more times than just about anyone in the world (besides people who’ve been in the field longer than you).

But what most people don’t realize is that “no” doesn’t always mean they will not or cannot buy from your company.

While they may seem like they’re not interested, there is an art to overcoming objections in sales.

In the first world, we are bombarded with offers, sales pitches, and ads each and every day. It’s for these reasons that the public (in general) has built up a shield.

This protection takes several forms:

• Just looking/checking things out (aka “kicking the tires”).
• I’m not sure what we’d use it for.
• No, thank you.
• Or just a cold “Not Interested”.

Getting past these initial guards is the difference between reps that meet their quotas and those that don’t.

Seriously. Let’s say you have about five meaningful calls a day four days a week. 20 calls to either close accounts or set appoints (depending on whether or not you’re a closer or an SDR).

If you only get 10% on average, is that enough to satisfy the goal sheet?

Probably not. That’s why you’re here, right?

Well, let’s take a look at the process of getting around the shields.

Common Sales Objections

While this isn’t a post about overcoming specific reasons most B2B buyers will use, we do think it’s important to give you a feel of these excuses that you’ll hear if you’re in sales long enough.

Keep these in mind when we’re tackling the basic approach for overcoming objections in sales.

• It’s Too Much Money: Pricing is all over the map, especially in tech/software. Usually, the bigger the pain solved—the bigger the price tag. If you can explain how well your solution alleviates their biggest problem, price is not longer an issue.
• We’re Happy with Our Current Provider/Solution: Very few products get to invent a totally new market (kinda like Slack). If you’re going to sell, you have to make leads want to switch and that means understanding your competitors’ products as well as your own.
• The Product is Too Complicated: B2B software is often notoriously complex. They used to call Infusionsoft—confusionsoft. Understanding how your company onboards new accounts will be a critical selling point in this case.
• Yeah, Just Send Me an Email: A classic hand-off line to get off of the phone. We like cold email outreach here and actually love sending emails that get even the most time-stingy leads to respond with open minds.
• I’ve Never Heard About You: Startups, am I right? Getting your voice heard isn’t about viral videos or Facebook ads. It’s about sales reps getting people to respond, building rapport quickly, and getting leads to understand the product.

Again, there are larger lists that clearly explain how to get past many objections. These are just some of the most common.

“The best know how to focus on value, not cost.“— Ramit Sethi

On to the Artform

It really is an art.

Like dancing with a partner that doesn’t want to move (at first). In fact, it’s like they’re asleep and as they slowly wake up to the music, you have to convince them to rumba while teaching them the moves. All before finishing together in perfect sync.

If someone could actually do that—you’d be impressed, right?

Sales people have to do something similar for a living. If you do cold outreach, you’re waking them up to your brand upon contact and, at first, they probably won’t like being disturbed.

But the dance has begun.

Either they’re going to walk off the floor OR you convince them to start taking rumba lessons.

Step One: Learn About Leads (Before Outreach)

In B2B, there are too many occasions when reps know too little about the brand they are trying to reach.

When the decision maker (or direct influencer) is on the line, only basic information is sitting in front of them barely gone over right before the call—that is no way to try and sell a product.

One of the easiest ways to cut down on the number and type of objections that you hear is to know as much about a lead as you can before contacting.

You can do this with a list of leads bought from a third party, but the best way to understand a lead is by crafting a list yourself (aka prospecting).

Doing this can help you know revenue, number of employees, industry specifics, and other things that will help you during the conversations you’ll have.

Example: If you know all the brands on your list are in the $3-10 million range and almost have to employ a solution like yours, then you know you won’t hear “we can’t afford it” or “we don’t understand your product”.

You’ll be able to hit the ground running and try to differentiate yourself from their current tool.

Step Two: Listen to Their Concerns

The problem with a lot of pre-determined comebacks to objections is the robot syndrome that can occur on the phone.

When you stop listening to understand and start listening to respond, you’re not trying to attract a partner for a business anymore—you’re engaged in sales jiu-jitsu.

Both of you will roll around for a while until the other taps out. Oh, and no one buys anything.

When you aren’t being genuine, it’s very noticeable. So, just hear what they have to say.

Even if you know exactly how HubSpot told you to answer back; give it a minute. You may actually see a different angle and another approach altogether.

If nothing else, it may shock the contact that you actually had a conversation with them instead of trying to get to the next call.

Step Three: Repeat the “Problem”

After you’ve reached a sufficient understanding of the problem, it’s time to show how good of a listener you really are.

If you can portray the problem with enough clarity, the lead will be more likely to feel like you understand their industry (often a common cause for objection). If you’ve done step one well enough, you should be ready to go.

Step Four: Tackle the Sales Objection Itself

Now it’s time to start removing, or jumping that barrier.

It took this long to actually reference the “objection” itself because of the need to get all of the facts before you engage with the problem that is keeping you from setting the appointment.

Every step is overcoming objections in sales. But once you’ve avoided all you can avoid, listened closely, and expressed your understanding—you have to jump that fence.

Here are some pointers:

• Practice Responses: During your research, mark down which objections you are possibly going to encounter. Spend some time going through your responses and make them specific to the industry that you’ll be targeting. Make sure you don’t sound rehearsed, but know your stuff.
• Know Your Solution: They likely have a solution already, but don’t understand how yours can make their work life better. Ensure that you carefully weave what you’re selling into the response of the objection itself. The point of the call is to move leads closer to buying (or to buy), not win an argument.
• Ask to Respond: Before you begin, let them know that you intend to respond. Be bold and ask them if they’d be interested in buying if you could remove their fears and satisfy that objection. Then, go in for the final move. Tackle that objection.
• Ensure Understanding: After you show them the reason that their objection doesn’t disqualify them from being a customer, you’ll have to see if they feel the same way. Ask them if they understand in common, natural language.

Step Five: Try to Move On

After you’ve attacked the objection and the lead understands, it’s time to move things along.

Ask for the sale. If it works—Congrats! You did it.

If the customer says no, there are a few potential reasons:

• They have other objections and they should come out in the conversation.
• The lead is really a suspect and shouldn’t have been qualified.
• You didn’t handle the objection properly.

If they have another objection, start over at step two and keep things moving.

If they may be a suspect, it might be best to let them go.

If you didn’t handle the objection well enough, you’ll probably lose this one. So, immediately after the call, write down everything you can remember about the conversation.

It’ll come in handy for future study.

Rare Note: Maybe your solution isn’t right for the lead. It’s rare, but sometimes an objection could be legitimate. Don’t use this as an excuse, but there are times when you’d rather lose the sale rather than have an unhappy customer.

What’s Your Best/Worst Sales Objection Story?

How about telling your best sales objection hurdle jump in the comments?

What about the worst?

Which sales objection really grinds your gears and which ones do you find the easiest to get around?

Want to get people to respond to your cold email outreach? Grab this guide which gives you 10 cold email tips you need to be using!

Earlier this year, I talked to a CMO at a B2B tech company whose sales counterpart was lobbying strongly for the company to adopt Account-Based Marketing (ABM) as part of their demand generation strategy. The reason? Though the marketing team was doing a great job generating raw inquiries at the top of the funnel, the sales reps weren’t receiving the number of “sales ready” leads they needed to hit their pipeline targets.

And therein lies, as any B2B marketer who’s been paying attention for the last year will tell you, the predominant argument for why B2B companies should convert to an ABM strategy: traditional demand generation is broken. The lead funnel is obsolete. Inbound marketing doesn’t work, or at best is grossly inefficient.

But I’d like to offer a different interpretation. Maybe demand generation isn’t broken. Maybe companies are just really bad at it.

Think about it: most companies have no problem generating leads at the top of the funnel. Heck, you can pick up the phone and buy hundreds of leads on a Cost Per Lead basis. Where the system breaks down most often is mid-funnel. Where most B2B companies generally have a much tougher time is converting those top-of-funnel leads to MQLs, SQLs and revenue. Studies show that few companies use technology like marketing automation to its full potential. In more unvarnished terms, their lead nurturing programs are woefully inadequate.

Now, that’s not to say that ABM isn’t a fit for the company I described earlier, or that ABM can’t increase marketing ROI even for those companies who do a first-rate job with lead nurturing. Far from it. But my suspicion, based on the marketers we talk to every day, and the visibility afforded into the way they generate and nurture leads, is that one factor in ABM’s popularity is that many, many companies are failing miserably – or at the very least, are grossly ineffective – at nurturing leads to maturity.

If your sales reps aren’t getting enough qualified leads, I’d wager that one or more of the following five reasons is to blame. When our firm works with B2B companies to improve their nurture programs, these are some of the most common issues we uncover:

1. Relying too heavily on BDRs to respond to new leads.

We’ve worked with companies where as much as 80 percent of all new leads never make it to the next stage of qualification. The reason? Responsibility for responding to and qualifying those leads lies solely with a BDR team. If the BDRs can’t reach the prospects, the lead goes no further. The solution? Integrating automated email follow-up to all new leads as part of an Initial Lead Qualification program that runs concurrent with, and complementary to, BDR outreach.

2. No segmentation.

A one-size-fits-all nurture strategy, without any attempt to personalize or segment copy or content based on persona, industry, or other key differentiators, means that any email communication will be ignored by a significant percentage of your nurture database. In B2B email, relevancy is absolutely crucial. Even simple segmentation: making minor copy changes to emails to accommodate just two different personas, can have a dramatic impact on campaign performance and conversion metrics.

3. No mid-stage nurture.

I’ve written elsewhere that companies should abandon the notion that you can somehow know enough to deliver precisely the right information at the right time, at every step of the buyer journey. But to ignore the buyer journey altogether is to pretend that more qualified leads don’t have different information needs. A simple mid-stage nurture program, one that identifies those prospects showing signs of active interest and markets to them accordingly, can help surface sales-qualified leads far before when the prospect might otherwise trigger (or request) sales follow-up.

4. Don’t give up too soon.

Many companies run nurture campaigns of a finite length, the notion being I suppose that new leads should be nurtured for a fixed period of time until they convert to qualified status, and if that doesn’t happen, said leads should be abandoned, and more new leads should be generated at the top of the funnel. That is a colossal waste of marketing investment. If you’re paying $50-100 or more per MQL, i.e. for leads that meet your target criteria and have shown any interest whatsoever, that lead should be nurtured INDEFINITELY. Why would you quit after 6 months?

5. Mix up your offer strategy.

If your nurture program consists of primarily early stage offers (white papers on trends and best practices and the like), you’ll struggle to identify and engage with prospects who may be ready to take the next step and actively evaluate your product. Conversely, if your nurture emails are simply a constant drumbeat to download trial software or take a demo, you’ll miss the opportunity to educate, and build credibility with, those prospects who aren’t quite yet ready to look at product. The ideal nurture program is a mix of early and late stage offers that appeals to a mix of prospects.

For more ideas on how to improve your nurture program, download our free white paper: “Top 10 Tips for Lead Nurturing Success.”

Contrary to what you might expect, sales emails should not be all about you and your company.

Instead, you should put your prospective customers front-and-center when you plan a new campaign: What do they care about? What are their problems, and how can you solve them? How can you add value to their business?

While many people believe that a great sales email should be all about pushing an incredible offer or bragging about their product or service, cold emailing another business professional actually requires great subtlety and thoughtfulness.

You have to understand that business customers don’t care about your product or solution. They buy because they have problems they are trying to solve, and so the best way to sell is by trying to appeal to customers’ pain points and desires.

So, instead of talking about what makes your product great, focus on what’s relevant to your prospects.

Here are five crimes and misdemeanors of narcissism that you need to remove from your sales emails:

1. You lead with an introduction about you and your company.

The goal of every sentence you write, especially your first one, is to make prospects want to read the next sentence. If you’re sending a cold email, they’ve probably never heard of you and they’re not going to care what you have to say. Since people can and will use the internet to find out who you are and what your company is about, don’t waste valuable time and space by talking about yourself. Instead, start your email by addressing your prospect’s needs.

Bad example: “I’m writing with information about our innovative sales enablement platform.”

Good example: “What’s the biggest reason new {!Company} leads go cold?”

2. You suck at personalizing your emails.

Have you ever noticed how natural persuaders drop your name into the conversation at just the right times? On the other hand, those who overdo it by constantly and randomly adding these ‘personal’ touches with your first name or company name come across as sketchy and untrustworthy. Using merge data from your contact list to personalize a message is a powerful technique that you can work into most of your cold emails. But you should let the message guide you, adding these touches only where it feels natural and persuasive.

Bad example: “We’re reaching out to every dentist like {!Company} in the {!City} area with a special offer on our appointment management platform. {!First}, are you the right person to speak to about this?”

Good example: “I know that managing appointment calendars is probably a constant struggle for your office, {!First}. Many of our {!City} dentist clients had already tried 3+ different paid solutions before they discovered our platform.”

3. You don’t ask questions.

A well-placed question can encourage prospective customers to think about an existing pain point. If you frame it just right, you’ll also be priming prospects for a solution only you can offer. It’s a good idea to end your email with a question, too. Questions are more engaging than simple statements and more likely to prompt your prospect to take action.

Bad example: “Our team has over 60 years of combined experience, and we only hire IRS Enrolled Agents.”

Good example: “Are {!Company}’s taxes being prepared by IRS Enrolled Agents, or just regular CPAs?”

4. You include long feature lists.

If you’re tempted to provide a long list of features in your sales email, don’t do it. Bullet points and numbered lists scream that you’re sending a mass email because they’re impersonal and look like mass marketing emails; not to mention, they’re boring. Instead, take one feature and explain how it addresses the pain point or value addressed at the beginning of the email.

Bad example: “You can count on industry-best deliverability, anti-spam protection, dedicated IP addresses, full API-based expandability, and 99.9% uptime.”

Good example: “Industry-best deliverability means you’ll never have to worry whether your emails are actually hitting the Inbox.”

5. You’re using jargon and filler words.

It’s hard to keep readers engaged when your emails are bloated with jargon. Clichés are a sign of lazy writing, and they dilute your marketing message. Too much jargon also makes it hard for prospects to relate to you and understand what you’re talking about. Instead, keep your language simple and strike a conversational tone.

Bad example: “We can accelerate your business’s social media growth across three key metrics.”

Good example: “We’ll get you more fans, followers, and likes on every channel.“