Rnordman

What does dealing with price push back have to do with landing important sales?

Everything.

I’m sure you’re aware that your competitor may not be under the same expectation to protect gross profit margin you are.

No doubt, pressures to make sales on low-price are not a phenomenon likely to vanish anytime soon.

If you don’t know the fundamentals of switching customers from a price discussion to one about value and articulating a compelling value proposition, expect to lose sales to cheaper competitors.

To help you focus on simple steps to further strengthen your ability to handle price resistance effectively, here are four tips.

Tip #1: Don’t Brush It Aside

You can’t trivialize a price difference.

• Your customer feels definite pressure to get the best price possible.
• Your customer may be getting pressure for lower prices from their customers.
• Dismissing their concerns will only intensify the resistance.

Dealing with questions or concerns about price in a capable way is crucial. Don’t take it personally, either.

Price resistance is not a rejection of you, your company or your product. It may be a final negotiation tactic.

Perhaps, the buyer has decided to award you the sale? Only thing left is to see if there’s any more room to move your price down.

Tip #2: Give Customers Valid Business Reasons

Objections occur when you attempt to sell value without offering sufficient, valid reasons for your value.

• Focus on increasing your customer’s perceived value.
• Engage them with questions that uncover any misperceptions or false assumptions about your product or services.
• Clear up any misinformation with helpful evidence that proves value.
• Give valid reasons for how you provide the best value for their

About 70% of the job of winning sales is influencing customers
to view your value in the right light.

To convince a customer to embrace your offer over what they’re currently doing, the perceived value of your solution must exceed what they perceive they get currently.

There will be resistance if they have established loyalty or trust with another supplier.

Tip #3: Avoid Being Affected by Negativity

Prepare your mindset before the sales meeting with some reminders:

• Customers bring out your product’s downfalls or shortcomings because they resist making change to their status quo.
• Initially, customers will lump your company in with competitors, claiming they get the very same things you provide, but cheaper.
• Customers want the assurance they can trust you.
• It takes time to build trust.
• Lacking an urgency to make a decision is common in the early stages of relationship building.
• Buyers are trying to negotiate your price to its lowest level and placing skepticism on your value is tactically smart.
• It’s common for new customers to brand down your product when they don’t fully appreciate your company’s reputation.

Don’t let negativity get under your skin. Remain relaxed and composed.

Tip #4: Run the Numbers

Never assume the customer recognizes the obvious advantages of your solution. Always do the necessary work to justify your value in light of their business issues.

Running the numbers (or doing your homework) for an account increases the strength of your positioning. These steps can pay off in making more sales:

• Use discovery questions to identify your customer’s value drivers.
• Use your numbers to quantify the positive difference your product or services can have on their desired outcomes.
• Connect the dots from your numbers to the customer’s value drivers.
• Believe in your product one thousand percent. If there’s a mist of doubt in your mind about value, it will lead to a fog of doubt in your customer’s.

Running the numbers to quantify the difference your solution makes, is a chance to make a positive impression on buyers and set your value apart from competitors.

B2B companies are increasingly selling from remote locations over the phone. Perhaps a decade ago, most people would not have predicted this turn of events. After all, that’s when marketing leaders eagerly sought out the new promise of inbound marketing to produce leads and revenues.

For many years, we’ve seen arguments favoring inbound over outbound marketing. Marketers are now starting to realize, however, that they may have swung the balance too far in one direction. There’s no reason to choose between inbound and outbound tactics. Today’s effective marketing is “all-bound.” That’s because there’s synergy between inbound marketing and outreach in the form of emails, social selling and phone calls.

It’s not only the marketing departments that are reallocating their dollars to reach out directly to prospects and customers. The sales organization is also on board. Companies are hiring fewer field sales representatives. Instead, they’re investing in inside reps who nurture leads and close business using the phone, email and social outreach. In fact, according to an MIT Lead Management Study, there are 15 inside sales reps for each field rep.

The phone calls are not the scripted calls of yesteryear or like those that interrupt you at dinnertime at home. These inside sales people have conversations to help solve customer problems. They discuss technology, software and other complex B2B products. It’s not a numbers game. It’s a strategic process that often requires multiple touches to several members of a buying team prior to closing a sale.

The momentum is moving toward inside sales because:

• It Costs Less

  Bottom line improvements always guide business decisions. And it’s not surprising that inside sales costs less than outside sales. After all, cost reductions come from eliminating travel, increasing efficiency and the ability to hire inside reps at lower salaries than field reps. The net result, according to Josiane Feigon, author of Smart Sales Manager, is that the average B2B field sales call costs $215-$400 while and inside sales call typically runs between $25 and $75.

• Customers Don’t Want to See You

  The idea that customers might not want the in-person sales treatment goes against traditional thinking. However, a study of 12,500 buyers by SBI proved this to be true. They discovered that 75 percent of the time buyers prefer not to meet face to face. This reality has even led to many field salespeople spending a lot of their time on the phone rather than up close and personal with customers.

• Phone Calls Enable Instant Response

  Inbound leads are hottest at the moment you receive them. By responding to them within five minutes, you can increase your marketing qualified leads by 2000%. Even when a rep is sitting by a phone in front of a computer, achieving such a fast response rate is difficult. But to do so in person is physically impossible. Despite the challenge, inside sales people with the right processes and technology can attain almost instant response and the associated increase in qualified leads.

• Inside Sales Reps Have Easy Access to Technology

  Let’s talk a little more about technology, today’s central enabler. Whether it’s marketing automation, a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, or easy access to LinkedIn for researching leads, reps need these tools at their fingertips. With them, they can increase both efficiency and effectiveness. So inside sales people gain the technology edge.

  Plus, tools like web conferencing platforms that make it easy for them to share information with prospects help level the playing field with outside reps.

• Administration Fits Easily Into the Day

  Field sales reps are generally not the masters of paperwork. They often consider it as secondary to meeting with prospects and clients. However, sales people need to log call results, collaborate with internal staff, research contacts, create proposals and more. The reluctance to take care of such administrative duties is partially due to sales people’s preferences, but it’s also because tackling these to-dos on the road is not easy. On the other hand, inside sales people can handle them easily, which is good because they are a foundation for success.

Given the advantages of inside sales, if you’re building your sales organization, you might consider starting from the inside and working out. Build your inside sales team and see what they can achieve. Then, add field reps to handle technical issues onsite or group presentations to internal teams as necessary.

If you already have an entrenched field sales team, supplement their efforts with an inside sales force to see if it boosts results. You don’t have to build an inside sales team just to test it out. Because it offers tremendous benefits, outsourcing has become a popular option. Professional B2B telemarketing organizations:

• Hire experienced business development reps who can talk peer-to-peer with managers and executives
• Make sure reps stay focused on their calls by keeping them in quiet spaces, away from other departments
• Use tools to clean up databases and provide quality information to the reps who make the calls, enabling them to be as efficient as possible
• Craft robust call guides that enable sales people to have two-way conversations with prospects rather than talking at them from robotic scripts
• Scale up easily to your needs when you have requirements and back down when there is less activity, thus, optimizing your cost effectiveness
• Provide flexible hours, so you can match up your calling times with those when your prospects are able to converse
• Are cost-effective because they have incorporated economies of scale involved in infrastructure, management, processes, systems and reporting

So don’t stick with the outside sales model because you’re accustomed to it. Make sure you create a sales organization that meets your company’s need most efficiently and effectively. After all, you have to compete with other companies that are doing just that.

In 2015, Gartner famously predicted customer experience is the new battlefield for 21^st century business.

But many brands are still struggling when it comes to customer experience.

According to Forrester’s 2016 CX Index, only 18% of brands received a “good” or “excellent” score. And to worsen the picture, 23% of brands got a rating of “poor” or “very poor” from their customers.

Which clearly illustrates that there are plenty of opportunities — upwards of 82% — for savvy businesses to swoop in and enchant those less-than-happy customers with engaging experiences.

So now is the time to solidify the relationship with your customers in a meaningful way.

A New Era in CX

Modern customers are endlessly raising the bar on what they expect from brands — better, faster, and more connected experiences. And separating your brand from the crowd means routinely creating experiences your customers love.

But do you really know what your customers think about the experience your company and products provide?

Fortunately, recent advancements in artificial intelligence have put that insight within easy grasp of any business.

Giving you near real-time access to your customers’ thoughts and opinions. Forever changing the landscape of how brands create experiences — and what customers expect.

So let’s dive into what A.I.-powered sentiment analysis can do for you…

Opinion Mining at Scale

For this guide we’ll be using Google’s Cloud Natural Language API to perform sentiment analysis on written content.

Sentiment analysis — also called opinion mining — is a type of natural language processing that can automatically classify and categorize opinions about your brand and/or product.

For the purposes of this guide, we’ll be analyzing movie reviews. But you can apply this to any type of text:

• Product reviews
• Social media posts
• Support call transcriptions
• Email conversations
• Blog comments

Ready to go? There are only a few steps:

• What You’ll Need
• Step 1: Formulate a Request
• Step 2: Call the API
• Step 3: Break Down the Response

And the system is really easy to use.

What You’ll Need

Before we start sending content up to the Cloud Natural Language API, let’s get the initial requirements knocked out.

Download the source repository.

To start, let’s pull down the source files. (You’ll need a git client installed on your computer for this step.)

Move to the directory you want to use for this demo and run the following commands in a terminal…

# Download source repository
git clone https://github.com/10xNation/google-sentiment-analysis.git
cd google-sentiment-analysis

There are only a few files, so don’t blink. And keep this terminal open, you’ll need it for the rest of the guide.

Configure Python.

Next, you’ll need Python installed, plus the pip and virtualenv utilities.

And then we need to create an environment to run the scripts in (scripts are compatible with Python 2.7 and 3.4+), and you can do that by running the following commands in a terminal…

# Configure a virtual environment to work in
virtualenv env
# Activate virtual environment
source env/bin/activate

And finally, we need to install the needed dependencies by running the following command (also in a terminal)…

# Install required packages
pip install -r requirements.txt

Create a Google Cloud account.

Go to the Google Cloud home page.

If you don’t already have a Google Cloud account, go ahead and create one by clicking on the “Try it free” button and completing the registration process.

Install the Cloud SDK.

All of the steps in this guide go through command line, so you’ll need to install and initialize the Cloud SDK.

Step 1: Activate the Natural Language API

Go to your Cloud Natural Language API Dashboard.

Then click on the “Enable” button.

And that’s pretty much it for set up, you’re ready to start interacting with the API. So let’s jump into the fun stuff.

Step 2: Call the API

To analyze the sample content you downloaded in What You’ll Need, simply run the command below (in the terminal you configured above)…

# analyze the positive sample
python sentiment_analysis.py data/positive.txt

There are several files in the data folder — feel free to analyze each one to preview the different types of analyses.

Step 3: Break Down the Response

And here’s what the response looks…

Sentence 0 has a sentiment score of 0.2
Sentence 1 has a sentiment score of 0.8
Sentence 2 has a sentiment score of 0.9
Sentence 3 has a sentiment score of 0.1
Sentence 4 has a sentiment score of 0.5
Sentence 5 has a sentiment score of -0.1
Sentence 6 has a sentiment score of 0.6
Sentence 7 has a sentiment score of 0.3
Sentence 8 has a sentiment score of 0.5
Sentence 9 has a sentiment score of 0.9
Overall Sentiment: score of 0.5 with magnitude of 5.3

As you can see the API provides an analysis for each sentence in the content.

• Score — Ranging between -1.0 (negative) and 1.0 (positive), score corresponds to how far the text leans emotionally
• Magnitude — Indicates how much emotional content is present within the text; proportional to the length of the text

Here are some examples to illustrate the spectrum of responses:

And that’s it for this API. It’s super simple to use and extremely useful.

Take it to the Next Level

But this is just a start. The real power comes when you apply this type of analysis across all of the customer-produced content related to your product and/or brand.

How will you build on this script? Run it separately — or better yet — integrate it with your existing tools (CRM, social media automations, etc.).

And currently, you can analyze 5,000,000 text records per month for free — so start playing and have fun with it!

You can dig deeper into the Natural Language API in the Google Cloud developer documentation.

Enjoy!

You wanna become a better sales person? Are you looking for tools, insights, and content that can accelerate sales and get your team to the next level?  Good!  Because that’s exactly what A Sales Guy U was built for.

A Sales Guy you is the single best resource on the web for sales content.

A Sales Guy U content cuts to the chase and gets to what matters. You don’t get that with other content. It’s pure value. — Steve Richards, CRO Execvision

It was built and designed to make you a better sales person or better sales leader. A Sales Guy U is filled with tools to do your job better. It has videos packed with sales tips. It has ebooks, how-tos and more.

A Sales Guy U tackles many of the challenges sales organizations and salespeople face today.

Want to improve your coaching capabilities? We got an ebook for that. Looking to give a better demo, yup have one for that too. Do you want a tool that evaluates your sales team? We’ve one of the best tools out there for that.  How about an ebook on how to use Twitter, or a webinar with Mark Roberge on hiring, or an email scorecard tool, or hiring scorecard, or maybe you want to learn how to run a productive pipeline review.  A Sales Guy U has all of that and more.

A Sales Guy U is one of the very few sales resources that is No Fluff!  If you want innovative new tools, strategies, and processes to become a top sales rep… go there!”  – Jack Kosakowski  Global Head of Sales Execution, Creative Agency

The mission of A Sales Guy U is to help sales badasses get better. It’s that simple. We built A Sales Guy U as a one stop shop for sales people and sales managers improve their skills and expand their knowledge and it’s not just ebooks.  We have tools, webinars, videos and more, all free cover everything including:

eBooks:

• Coaching
• Delivering Demos
• Pipeline Management
• Yearly Sales Planning
• Content Marketing
• Social Selling
• Quarterly Business Reviews and more

Tools:

• Sales Assesment Tool
• Hiring Tools and Assessments
• Email Scoring Template
• Account Management Plan Template
• Coaching Cadence and more

Videos:

Too many to mention, cover every topic imaginable, from short and quick to full-length teaching sessions

Webinars:

• Hiring
• Pipeline Development
• Social Selling
• and more

Great sales content all in one place with a bad ass attitude. Sales has changed. If you want to win, you need to be better. A Sales Guy U. makes you better.  — Trish Bertuzzi, The Bridge Group

All of this is JUST A Sales Guy Content. We also have a section dedicated to content from around the web from the webs most impressive thought leaders.  It’s all there free for the smart salesperson’s consumption.

Deliberate learning is at the core of 1%ers.  A Sales Guy U is here for those on the 1%er journey.

Bookmark it, save it, Paper.li it, I don’t care, but just don’t ignore A Sales Guy U.

The post The Best Sales Resource Center on The Web appeared first on A Sales Guy.

For those of us who have been on the product marketing and sales side of B2B for more than a few years, the account-based approach isn’t a new concept; it is a trusted one. Deals with long sales cycles, massive RFPs, and buying committees have often required taking an account-based approach to be successful, regardless of whether the company size was SMB or Enterprise. And to do this, we would bring our “A” game to the table. It was a large table, full of real people who each had definite opinions and biases on our product before we even arrived in the room. As a team, this was our one shot to outsell our competitors. It was glorious when we won, but the process was exhausting, and by no means sustainable.

The beauty of marketing technologies in today’s world is that we can heavily influence a buying committee prior to sales having those deal-sealing conversations. Marketing automation platforms have evolved quickly and can now easily facilitate personalized interactions with various stakeholders in an account while still applying Account-Based Marketing (ABM) techniques across the entire customer lifecycle. As marketing technologists, we’ve made amazing progress and experienced much success with automating many of the processes to facilitate ABM; however, it is not without its challenges.

Data, data, data. It all starts with data.

As many of us have learned, not all data is good data. 1:1 interaction with prospects can only be effective if the data you have at your disposal about that prospect is accurate and complete with the most recent, relevant information. Typos, incomplete records, and obsolete information permeates most marketing databases. A clean database will provide more opportunity to move from a traditional persona-based approach to an ABM approach. Learning how to leverage behavioral, contextual and firmographic data from across the internet to build and prioritize a list of high value target accounts is essential to success in the ABM world.

Integrations are key.

Integration is more than just sending data back and forth; it’s also about analyzing and taking action on data gleaned from a prospect’s activities and interests across multiple systems. The ability to identify unknown prospects and match them to digital activities collected through anonymous targeting across multiple systems for the proper decisioning of next steps is imperative to keeping messaging personal and relevant to your prospects. First generation integrations have provided a good vehicle for launching this methodology, but next level integrations are beginning to provide more seamless aggregation of the insights and information collected across MarTech vendors that may have been previously difficult to attain.

Personas are important, but limited.

Creating a persona for your buyers is very important when segmenting and messaging for general campaigns to grow MQLs, but it’s not without its limitations for ABM. Personas are not real people. They are a digital version of our perception of a particular group of people. We can assume a lot about our target prospects based on their likes and digital body language, but if we don’t actually know what drives their specific interest in our product, we are guessing. Even though these are very educated guesses, it’s not an exact science and will not be 100% on target every time. When looking to truly engage someone on the account’s buying committee in that 1:1 conversation, the approach needs to be more granular.

So what’s next?

As an industry, we are seeing significant advances in account insights being applied across the entire customer lifecycle. The layering in of artificial intelligence (AI) into the B2B customer experience is transforming how we collect, manage, and make decisions for crafting compelling 1:1 interaction with prospects in ABM. The partnership between marketing automation and ABM is rapidly becoming more efficient and precise, empowering both marketing and sales with more insight into their high value accounts faster than before. Marketers are driving strategic conversations earlier in the buying cycle and influencing opinions on the product before those committee presentations are given and final decisions are made. And it’s only getting better.

Learn more about how Oracle Marketing Cloud and Demandbase continue to partner on ABM at the Marketing Innovation Summit.

My younger brother, Jake Iannarino, is a professional comedian. He also practices Brazilian Ju Jujitsu. He is still a relative beginner in this martial art, but he is getting very comfortable on the mat, and he is starting to give much bigger, much stronger practitioners trouble. He is 5’8, and he tapped out an opponent that is 6’4 and 220 pounds.

How is this possible? He has practiced long enough to gain competence and confidence, even when he is on his back, and it looks like he in trouble. How has he gained both the confidence and competence? He has stayed on the mat long enough to start to see results, and he only practices with people who rank much higher than him.

You might believe that your larger competitor has an advantage of you because of their size and scale. This is not true. Your largest competitor has a top 20 percent of their sales force who sells the overwhelming majority of their product, and they have the 80 percent that make up the rest of their sales force. Some of these salespeople will know how to use their greater size to win deals, especially when their prospect equates size to mean they are a safe choice. But these larger companies worry about boutique firms with salespeople who know how to sell effectively, competitively displacing them with a high trust, high caring, high value approach.

You might believe that the additional resources your bigger competitor has will easily tilt the playing field in their direction. Most of the time, those greater resources don’t make a difference in regionally located opportunities, making them no advantage at all. A salesperson from a smaller company with the chops to sell more effectively can easily win over a larger, better resourced competitor. In fact, it happens all the time.

The confidence and competence to sell well is very much like a martial art. It’s the technique that allows a smaller, seemingly weaker competitor to beat what looks like an enormous, powerful opponent. But the larger competitor isn’t a threat when the salesperson lacks the confidence and competence that comes with having an excellent command of your art.

You, the salesperson, are the difference that makes the difference.

The post An Excellent Command of the Art of Sales appeared first on The Sales Blog.

The question isn't whether your prospect has objections -- it's whether you'll get to hear those objections and if you're capable of resolving them.

Every buyer has at least one major reason not to buy. This reason has been preventing them from pulling the trigger for the last few weeks, months, or even years. Successful salespeople quickly identify, surface, and handle these issues and concerns so they can win the business.

For more tips on handling objections, check out The GSD Sales Show -- tips for salespeople, by salespeople.

We spoke to 12 sales experts to discover how they're overcoming objections in 2017. To boost your objection-handling game, read on.

1. Anthony Iannarino: Change your mindset

Stop looking at objections the way you’ve been taught. Your prospective clients aren’t objecting -- they are trying to express a real concern. You don’t need to ‘overcome’ the objection. You need to look deeper, explore the real concern, and help your prospect resolve it so they can move forward.

2. Joanne Black: Crowd-source your responses

All objections can be anticipated. Common objections are:

• Your price is too high
• We need to meet the team we’ll be working with
• The solution we have now works just fine
• We have other priorities right now
• We need to discuss and get back to you

The sales team should get together and create responses to the common objections they hear. Then someone should role-play the buyer. Reps need to hear themselves responding and receiving feedback from prospects (even hypothetical ones).

The team should also discuss what to do if a buyer doesn’t verbalize an objection but it’s clear from her body language and/or tone of voice that she has one.

3. Bill Caskey: Dig into the buyer's reasoning

Money objections are usually indicative of a larger concern. And by “handling” a money objection, you may not be serving your prospect or yourself in the process.

These show the buyer believes spending this money will make their life economically better.

How can you overcome that belief in a sentence or two? You can’t.

With that in mind, the reaction to the money objection must delve into your prospect’s reasoning.

You must understand how the customer arrived at the conclusion that the cost is “too high” or “not in the budget.” By understanding, you will see if you’ve missed anything in the process, or clarify the set of beliefs that drove the customer to “too high.”

The worse thing you can do in reaction to a money objection is to arm-wrestle. It likely took them months to come to a certain belief about money, which you won’t be able to change in a clever 10-second reaction.

4. Colleen Stanley: Bring up objections before your prospect

Objections often send salespeople into fight-or-flight mode, and the result isn't pretty. Salespeople start overselling, defending and justifying, or discounting in an attempt to keep the prospect's interest. A salesperson’s inability to handle objections costs companies thousands of dollars each year.

So sales managers and CEOs, what can you do?

Teach your sales team to bring up the objections!

Sales and objections are predictable. Conduct a white boarding session with your sales team. Ask them to write down all the objections they hear from prospects and clients. Now, ask your team this powerful question: When would you like to know about these objections? Overwhelmingly, salespeople want to know sooner rather than later. Time to teach your sales team the powerful emotional intelligence skill of reality testing.

Salespeople often are reluctant to bring up the objection. They mistakenly think they will plant a seed of doubt in the prospect's mind. Well, the reality is your prospect already has thought of several reasons not to do business with you, many of which are based on false data or a previous experience with another vendor.

A salesperson that brings up the objections wins credibility and gets to facilitate a dialogue about false perceptions, objections based on previous experiences, or simply fear of change. If you want to win more business, bring up objections. It will set you apart and lead to an honest, productive conversation.

5. Tony Alessandra: Use active listening

Non-manipulative sales people use their listening skills and act as sounding boards for their prospects and clients. A lot can be learned by simply listening. Sometimes, it is appropriate to reflect back what has been said for reconsideration from a different angle. Your ability to clarify an issue will serve you and your client well.

Strategy #1: Convert to a Question

A statement is difficult to respond to. You can, however, convert the statement to a question and answer it. For example, to the statement, “I don’t think I could use that product,” you could respond, “What I hear you wondering is, ‘what benefits are there for me in this product?’” You can then proceed to answer the question, not rebut the statement.

Strategy #2: Reflect and Listen

Listen to your prospect’s voice inflections, observe her body language, and hear her words (to uncover) how she feels. You can then encourage further discussion by reflecting her emotions back to her. This is especially helpful if the prospect’s objection does not give you enough information. She might say, “The price is too high.” Seeing the emotion behind the words, you could say, “You feel frustrated about the price?” The prospect might say, “Sure, I feel frustrated. Have you tried to get a loan lately? How can I do business when money is so tight?” You will then save the day with, “That’s not an insurmountable problem. We have several credit plans you might find attractive.”

6. Mike Brooks: Isolate the objection

A recent client of mine was complaining that her inside sales team wasn't closing enough demos because their reps were getting the objection, "I need to talk to my partner first." She wondered aloud what they could do to overcome this common stall.

I listened to the team's recordings and found they were handling this objection incorrectly. They were buying into it by responding: "When should I get back with you?"

I taught my client the better approach: Isolate the objection by saying, "That's fine, and let me ask you. If your partner says, 'Do whatever you feel is best,' then based on what we've gone over, and what you understand about this, what would you tend to do?"

Any answer other than '"I'd do it" means the objection is a smokescreen -- and calling them back won't advance the sale. Instead, you must uncover the real objection.

7. Deb Calvert: Don't fear price objections

I'm not afraid of price "objections" and am actually happy when I hear them. Questions and comments about price are an indication of interest. After all, no one asks for a lower price or runs a price comparison unless they're interested.

Instead of reflexively responding, consider the buyer's desire for your product and the value of your product. Talk about price just as you would any other feature of the product. Defend your price by showcasing your value. Link the price to the value rather than discussing it in isolation.

Throughout the conversation, continually remind yourself that you're talking to a hot prospect who has expressed interest.

For example:

Buyer: That's not something we've budgeted for.

Seller (responding to buyer interest): The urgency you described suggests you'll be working outside your budget, rather than letting this problem get worse and worse until the new budget year.

Buyer: We'll have to do something.

Seller: Let's talk about the money you'll be saving once you solve this problem ...

8. John Barrows: Split-test your responses

As sales evolves and technology improves, I believe sales reps need to be more scientific than artistic to survive.

One of the ways to do this is to A/B test everything you do, specifically when it comes to objection handling.

Choose an objection you get regularly and develop two different approaches to handling it. (Here are some examples of different objection handling techniques to use.)

The next 10 times that objection comes up, use the first approach. The next 10 times, use the second approach. Track your results to see which approach yields a better response.

Once you’ve found an approach that works, pick another common objection and repeat the process.

9. Matt Heinz: Flip the script

My favorite objection-handling strategy is the walk-back. It’s a jiu jitsu move you can use when prospects ask a question or make an assertion that implies they’re shopping around, questioning your price, or sharing other feedback that might make the seller defensive. For example, let’s say a prospect tells you they are shopping around for solutions and aren’t yet sure if yours is best for them.

Many salespeople would get defensive at this point, try to justify their product’s superiority, and so on.

The walk-back, however, goes something like this:

“That’s a great idea, because our solution certainly isn’t for everybody. And I’m not sure I know enough yet about your business objectives and needs to even recommend our solution over others … ”

From there, you can talk about the attributes of companies that are a good fit for your solution or dig deeper with the prospect on their needs, objectives, goals to connect those directly with what your solution can do.

10. Bernadette McClelland: Eliminate objections early on

The term objection means 'the action of challenging or disagreeing with something.’ This can be a flippant comment in a conversation amongst friends or a formal protest during a court trial. In the sales field, it means the customer doesn't want to buy or go to the next logical step. In many cases, the customer throws excuses that the salesperson too quickly catches.

All three examples have differing levels of intensity and conjure up pictures of tension, winner and loser, and a sense of push.

If we do a couple of things differently early in the conversation, we eliminate virtually any need for a prospect to object to our next steps, our ideas, or even our partnership moving forward. In other words, we:

• Frame the reasons for the conversation with relevance
• Ask relevant questions with such depth and breadth we understand their business intimately enough to anticipate and proactively resolve their objection
• Split-test our solution with them to see where it might work and might not
• Remove any emotional attachment to getting the deal

Practice these strategies, and you won't hear objection sustained -- but objection overruled.

11. Tony Hughes: Gain credibility first

Difficulty in closing is almost always a symptom of not managing the sale properly.
Closing must be earned. Objections are usually evidence the seller has made mistakes by pushing to close before they’ve established trust and value and learned enough about the customer’s timing, priorities, and processes.

12. Barbara Giamanco: Don't make the buyer defensive

A common sales objection is that the product we buy from our current vendor “works just fine.”

What you don’t want to do is to pitch how your product is so much better, or challenge them in a way that makes them feel like you are questioning their decision making ability.

If that happens, the buyer will only dig in their heels and defend their buying decision. A better approach is to ask the buyer what they like about the current product and vendor.

They may mention a few things they like, but inevitably they will tell you all the problems that the product doesn’t solve or issues that it causes in the organization.

When that happens, you then have the opportunity to present a case for how you and your product can remedy those challenges.

For example, suppose the buyer says when they have an issue it can take days to get a response.

You might respond, “We assign a dedicated account manager to your team who will respond within X number of hours when alerted to a problem.”

Be sure that you don’t promise something that your company cannot deliver. Focus on how you can solve their problems, which will open the door to closing the deal.

By Clayton Carroll, {grow} Community Member

We’ve seen it before.

Someone disagrees with an influencer and the social media piranhas have a feeding frenzy. They quickly rip apart the dissenter. The piranhas hurl jeers and “insights” all designed to devour an opinion and shame that person from showing their face in public again.

Faced with this possible outcome, why would anyone disagree?

Sometimes there seems to be a lack of critical thinking on the internet. However, I think that’s just a small part of it.

If someone thinks an influencer is wrong, there are several reasons why they might not voice their opinion:

1. Influencers are the new celebrities (Mark Schaefer and Tom Webster, aka Schwebster, in their niche are now akin to Branjelina). There’s probably a bit of a positive halo around these folks.
2. Those who voice disagreement fear alienation by an influencer and their fans.
3. It is very time consuming (and a lot harder) to thoughtfully disagree than to clap, clap, clap, when everyone else is cheering.

How Did This Happen?

The internet and social media enables almost anyone to become famous in their niche.

Think of the screaming line of tweens that came down with Bieber fever.  I feel the same way about Gary Vaynerchuk and Mark Schaefer (well, almost).

Gary and Mark have delivered so much value, I almost feel indebted to them. Also, they are almost always right and have impressive accomplishments (how they became influencers).

These influencers (Mark and Gary) are celebrities to people such as myself.

We Emotionally Connect with Influencers

When an influencer or anyone has helped you tremendously, you form an emotional connection.

The tweens that caught Bieber fever also went crazy for the Twilight movies.  Like a Justin Bieber concert, these tweens on went nuts for Team Edward because they wanted him to end up with Bella (was anyone on Team Jacob?).

I want to become a better marketer so I metaphorically scream and cheer at Mark and Gary’s every word.

Disagree with my celebrities and I might turn into carnivorous fish.

Chewed Up and Spit Out

I’m sure most of us have seen people decimated by the social media piranhas and read horror stories.  Someone saying the wrong thing at the wrong time can end their career.

The stakes are high on social media and the internet because everything goes into public record. Targeted troll attacks can be devastating if someone really wants to put time and energy into coming after you.  So why give them a reason to do it?

Role Model, Icon, Celebrity = Influencer

Whatever you want to call them, an influencer is a good person to know.  They are even better for helping your business or personal brand (influencer marketing as Mark talks about).

If they like or know you well enough, they may even promote you for free.  Get known well enough to the influencer’s tribe and their fans might become your fans.

Why risk a potentially good relationship by disagreeing with them?

I’m Just Here to Cheer

Whenever I disagree with anyone online strongly enough to put it in writing, I always try to think through every possible objection or outcome.  Get it right or risk being dropped in the middle of the Amazon. I also find it very difficult to articulate a proper response in 140 characters or less.

Critical thinking in this case takes a lot of effort with little return.  It’s easier to nod, smile, engage in Groupthink and move along with your day.

Is There a Solution?

There’s not really a perfect solution but it helps if we act like normal humans.

More specifically, any partial solution requires both the influencer and we as their audience:

Influencers:

• Be very clear it is ok to disagree with you and welcome any constructive criticism.
• Encourage a difference of opinion, which helps everyone get better.
• Make it clear to all of us that you do not tolerate social media piranhas.

My Fellow Audience Members:

• Always be respectful and constructive when disagreeing with the influencer or another person.
• Encourage the idea of different opinions even if the opinion is wrong.
• Accept no matter what we say or how right we are, someone will always disagree.

Influencers Are Sometimes Wrong

No one bats a thousand.

It can be hard to imagine your influencer being wrong.  They accomplished all these great things and what have you done?

The best way of looking at it may be as Gary Vaynerchuk says, “You’re only as good as your last at bat”.  Seeing an influencer that way does not diminish their accomplishments but keeps them honest.

Other Thoughts

Mark does a great job of encouraging great dialogue on his blog and social media.  I’ve always felt his community is a reflection of him, which is professional and very sharp.  Gary also does a great job of engaging his audience when folks constructively disagree with him.

So the problem may not really be with the influencers. The piranha mindset comes from the community and I’m not sure how that can be corrected on a large scale. It might just be a problem we have to accept as our to-do lists grow every day. What do you think?

Clayton Carroll is in sales and marketing at the software company ERP 101, which provides software for your very small business.  He also finds and shares digital marketing success stories every week on Medium and the ERP 101 blog.  Find Clayton on Instagram but also make sure to add him on Snapchat!

The post When Social Media Piranhas Strike appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

        

Comments

• Very great insight Stan and I love the Tolkien reference. I ... by Claytonjay101
• Thanks Clayton, this is especially true when, through ... by Steve_Dodd
• No I do agree. I had a little heartache with the fandom writing ... by Mark W. Schaefer
• No not at all! In fact, I loved your comment. I'm Dutch but ... by Claytonjay101
• That's OK Clayton – I did not mean to cause you any ... by Kitty Kilian
• Plus 4 more...

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When Colonel Peter Newell headed up the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force (REF) he used lean methods on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to provide immediate technology solutions to urgent problems.

Today, his company BMNT does for government and commercial customers what the Rapid Equipping Force did for the U.S. Army.

Pete and I created the Hacking for Defense class (with Joe Felter and Tom Byers.) One of the problems our students run into is that there are always multiple beneficiaries and stakeholders associated with a problem, often with conflicting value propositions and missions.  So how do you figure out whose needs to satisfy?

Here’s Pete’s view of how you do it.

Unlike businesses, government organizations don’t sell products, and they don’t earn revenue. Instead, they have missions to accomplish and very hard problems to solve.  They use a variant of the Business Model Canvas –  the Mission Model Canvas – to map their hypotheses, and they get of the building to do beneficiary discovery. (A beneficiary can be a soldier, program manager, commanding general, government contractor, stakeholder, customer, etc.)  And just like in a commercial business they are trying to determine whether the value proposition solves the problem and helps the beneficiary accomplish their mission.

Discovery for both business and government is similar in that the only way to do it is to turn assumptions into facts by generating hypotheses, developing Minimum Viable Products and getting out of the building to test those MVP’s in the trenches where the customers and beneficiaries work. Early in the discovery process, teams are faced with a cacophony of personalities and organizations. Often, they struggle with understanding which person or group represents a beneficiary, supporter, advocate or potential key partner. It’s only through repetitive hypothesis testing that they begin to sort them all out.

It’s in the trenches however, where things become different.

Multiple Beneficiaries, Multiple Conflicts
Unlike their commercial counterparts, government problem solvers are often faced with multiple beneficiaries associated with a problem, often with conflicting value propositions. As these differences become apparent, teams must make decisions about the value proposition trade-offs between conflicting beneficiaries – sometimes even pivoting completely in favor of one beneficiary to the detriment of another.

During last year’s Hacking for Defense class at Stanford Team Aqualink experienced the conflicting beneficiaries’ problem.  The result was a significant pivot of both beneficiary and value proposition.

Aqualink started with a problem given to them from the chief medical officer of the Navy SEALS – they had no way to understand chronic long-term health issues divers face. Divers work 60 to 200 feet underwater for 2-4 hours, but Navy doctors currently have no way to monitor divers’ core temperature, maximum dive pressure, blood pressure, pulse and the rebreather (air consumption), or the dive computer (dive profile) data.

Having all this new data would give a diver early warning of hypothermia or the bends. More importantly the data would allow the medical director to individually assess the short and long-term health of each diver. And medical researchers would have access to detailed physiological data. The medical director tasked the team with building a wearable sensor system and developing apps that would allow divers to monitor their own physiological conditions while underwater and to download it for later analysis.

In the first week of the class this team got out of the building, suited up in full Navy diving gear and did customer discovery by spending an hour in the life of the beneficiary.

But as the students on the Aqualink team spoke to the SEAL team divers, (another one of their beneficiaries), they experienced an existential crisis. Most of the divers were “ambivalent” (read hostile) about the introduction of a vitals monitoring platform, (“If you gave to us at 0900, it would end up on the bottom of the ocean by 0905.”) Having worked so hard to get into the SEALS, no diver wanted doctors telling them they could no longer dive.

After further questioning, the team discovered the reason the divers were spending so much time underwater – they often did not know where they were. To find out, they had to get a GPS fix. This meant their minisub (called the SEAL Delivery Vehicle) had to rise to within 6 feet of the ocean surface so the GPS antenna could broach the surface. And to do so they had to surface slowly to avoid giving the divers the bends.

The divers told our student team, “Screw the health sensors. Build us a GPS sensor that can be deployed from 100 feet underwater.”

Now the team had a dilemma. They would have to decide which beneficiary to focus on – the SEAL Team medical director, who was the sponsor of their problem, or the operators of the delivery vehicle and divers within SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team One, along with their immediate chains of command in SDVT-1 and Naval Special Warfare Group 3.

When they went back to the medical director with their findings, he was surprised as they were.  “Never knew that’s why they spent all that time down there.  Heck, yes, fix their problem first.”

Understanding the Problem Context and Problem Ecosystem
As Aqualink shows, getting out of the building – interviewing the beneficiaries, drawing their workflows and mapping a day-in -their-life – will give you a more complete picture of the context in which a proposed problem exists. Talking to multiple beneficiaries will lead to better understanding of the entire ecosystem of the problem. Often this will show that the problem you have been given is merely a symptom of a larger problem, or is the result of a different problem.

The solution is to:

1. Cross check the results of your discovery between different beneficiaries. Often, you’ll find that they seldom have a complete understanding of one another’s workflows and pain points but instead are championing the solution to a mere symptom of a different problem.
2. Share what you learned in discovery among the different beneficiaries. This will arm you with the tools needed to get them (or their leadership) to agree on the right problem that needs to be solved first. In many cases this will lead to your first pivot!

The goal is to sort out who has a value proposition that must be addressed first.

The power of beneficiaries helping one another
While discovery with multiple beneficiaries can be confusing and exhausting, there is immense power when all the beneficiaries work together. Therefore, the goal of customer discovery is not just to understand the pains and gains of individual beneficiaries, but to find a shared purpose between all of them.

Once they understand they share the same goal, they can solve pain points or create gains for each other using the resources they already control. A “shared” sense of purpose is a very powerful step in the pathway towards a deployable solution.

When the Department of Energy asked BMNT to build a training program for getting veterans into advanced manufacturing jobs, we saw the power of a shared purpose between multiple beneficiaries first hand.

The problem we were asked to solve is that of the 10,000 veterans who leave military service every month, many remain unemployed or underemployed, yet at the same time the number of unfilled advanced manufacturing jobs in the U.S. is expected to climb to over a million by 2020. From a business perspective, obtaining technically qualified talent is among the top constraints to growth in the US.

Seems like it would be a match made in heaven, right?  Not so fast…

While we initially thought the beneficiaries of the effort were the veterans, we quickly discovered there were other beneficiaries in advanced manufacturing. We found these additional beneficiaries had different pains and gains which in turn required different value propositions to solve their problems.

Our customer discovery taught us that there were three additional beneficiaries:

• Universities needed to grow their enrollments. Our discovery showed us universities were willing to create programming for Advanced Manufacturing, but first needed to see a business case for how it would increase their enrollment to make it a worthwhile effort.
• Industry needed to attract and hire qualified employees. We learned that technically qualified employees within industry were in such demand that the number one way to get qualified employees was to pilfer them from others.
• Government Agencies needed to help their communities build skilled labor pools to attract new industries.

And we learned that our initial beneficiary, veterans leaving service, didn’t need internships or low-paying jobs, but needed jobs that paid enough to support their families.

We found each of these beneficiaries had a shared purpose. And each of them had a value proposition that would create a gain or relieve a pain point for another beneficiary. These were big ideas.

We found that as these overlapping value propositions emerged, we used the results to get the beneficiaries to come together in a workshop designed to jointly create a shared minimum viable product that they could then use to test within their own organizations.

Bringing the groups together in a workshop also served to align value propositions between beneficiaries by demonstrating that there was a way to create a single program that served all their needs. And we created an environment that allowed each beneficiary to discover that the other beneficiaries were partners they could work with in the future.

What was the impact of bringing the beneficiaries together in a workshop and creating this beneficiary ecosystem for advanced manufacturing?

Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) created a veterans’ jobs program. They teamed with a local college to create internships that allowed veterans to work during the summer.  In turn, the local college created additional advanced manufacturing classes to meet LLNL’s technical needs and the regional workforce investment board provided funding.

In Fort Riley, the Army base in Kansas, the military teamed with Kansas State University to create an advanced manufacturing program. Kansas State created a series of advanced manufacturing classes. Soldiers leaving the service can take these courses at a nearby campus beginning up to six months before they leave service.

An unexpected consequence is that today there are soldiers from Fort Riley using advanced manufacturing processes to create parts for vehicles and equipment at the Army base.

Lessons learned

• Government problem solvers will often be faced with multiple beneficiaries with different value propositions. Share what you learn from different beneficiaries with each other to sort out which has a value proposition that must be addressed first.
• The benefit of having multiple beneficiaries is that their strengths can be used to help one another create gains and relieve pains for one another. Creating a shared sense of empowerment from working together smooths the pathway towards scaling the right solution.

Are you looking for ways to reach out with C-level executives and boost B2B sales? Well, an optimized B2B marketing plan can indeed help businesses to overcome certain pain points when dealing with clients.

But that can only be achieved if you will work with a professional marketer in the industry. So how do you do that? Check out the following tips for a successful strategy in reaching marketing success this 2017.

New Ideas for a Winning B2B Marketing Strategy

CEOs need to understand the importance of an ultimate business to business marketing plan to guarantee great results. Although it’s really hard to catch the attention of customers today as they are always busy, there are effective tips to help you get positive feedback or at least make them notice your brand.

Don’t worry because here are some of the best techniques to make them recognize the value of what you offer.

#1: Use multi-channel marketing approach.

With an effective multi-channel contact plan, you can connect to a wider clientele base easily. One important channel is LinkedIn. You can email them a killer offer to make them accept your call and make sure to follow up your call with another message via email. Learn more about Multi-Channel Marketing Approach!

#2: Offer something valuable to build connection.

Many B2B businesses believe that their products or services have clear value to potential clients but sometimes, not receiving a positive feedback means that the value isn’t clearly presented. In order to ensure that they see the value of your offer, it’s important to give freebies such as SEO services to create rapport. In return, customers will see how determine you are in offering them something they need. Remember, sales are all about establishing relationships.

#3: Get referrals.

If you want to grow your network, you need to meet your friends’ friends. It’s more likely that they know what kind of people you need in your business. In fact, the guiding principle in sales referrals is that the people you like exactly know the people you would be interested to know of.

They have to be: 1. someone who did business with your company before 2. Or anyone who have dealt business with people in your LinkedIn contacts.

#4: Leave optimized voicemails.

Most of the time, salespeople don’t know how to leave compelling voicemails. Did you know that too long voice messages are dull? If you create unprofessional sounding voicemails, tendency is that potential clients won’t give you a shot. The best thing to do is make it at least 30-second long, sounds more than interesting, sparks curiosity, and ends with easy-to-remember contact information like your phone number or email.

#5: Provide Targeted B2B Content

Also, one important thing to highlight in your B2B marketing strategies is that B2B content shouldn’t always be about white papers, long-form presentations, or lengthy content format. What matters is the value it offers the clients.

With 95% of customers choosing shorter content formats, you really need to provide direct-to-the-point information if you want to capture buyer’s attention in a span of 30 seconds.

Utilize all the possible marketing channels to reach your B2B prospects and allot more attention to platforms that gives you more revenue than expenses.

This post originally appeared at The Savvy Marketer.

What is it with customers always asking for more?

Sure, you might make a point of offering various end-of-quarter, end-of-year incentives to induce them to buy, but everyone does that and even that has its limits. At some point, you must start to wonder when your customer is simply going to acknowledge the value of your partnership and stop chipping away at your margins.

You also might wonder how it got to the point where you’re fighting tooth and nail for every basis point of margin.

But here’s something to consider: What if shrinking margins aren’t just about your customer demanding more? What if they’re also about you conditioning your customer to ask for more? Making matters worse, maybe you’re not even aware of how you create the possibility for value to leak out throughout your sales cycle.

Most sales cycles are long and complex—and getting more complex by the day. You now have to manage lots of buyers and influencers, each with their own set of goals and agendas, which don’t always align within a given stakeholder group. Because individual stakeholders have unique, and sometimes divergent priorities, they tend to ask for stuff that suits their specific interest.

The natural reaction for salespeople is to oblige them and say “yes”—all the more so when the relationship is delicate or developing. Salespeople want to come across as cooperative; they want to be seen as exceedingly helpful. So the answer is almost always “yes” when a prospect makes a simple request for, say, an additional meeting, a pilot, another proposal response, or…you get the picture.

Another challenge you might confront as salespeople: The “promised” close by the end of the quarter, so long as you tack on one small added feature. Naturally, your customer can’t pay any more for it. But you’re told that if want to close the deal by the end of the quarter, you need to “help your buyer out, give them a small win”. After lots of internal conversations, you and your manager agree to move forward.

And then the “promise” gets broken. Not only does your deal not close, the buyer has gone on vacation and you’re left in the lurch. Now you’re getting pressure from your manager because you missed your commit (which means she missed hers too). Now your deal has lost momentum and is on the verge of fizzling out altogether into another “no decision.”

What’s happening here?

More than likely, experiences like this are symptomatic of a condition you are just as culpable for as your customers are. If you give your prospect everything he asks for, without exchanging something of equal value, they start to think of you as “free.” And make no mistake: there’s an unlimited demand for free. 

You may not think of what you’re giving away as free, but if you’re giving things of value away without recouping anything, that’s exactly what they are. I’m amazed at how many times I’ve heard a salesperson say to a prospect, “Oh, don’t worry, that’s free.”

This is a prescription for margin erosion, and if you don’t push back against it with some unconventional and counter-intuitive skills, you are complicit in that profit-killing process. Once you condition your customers to expect to exchange no value for all the added benefits and services and knowledge you bring to the table, you have groomed them to continue asking for more freebies, again and again.

So why not ask for more? Why not identify opportunities for exchanging value instead of giving it away? Why not send the right signals when managing your concession strategy?

That value creation process—what we call executing pivotal agreements—is one of the subjects I’ll take on in my upcoming webinar, Monday, April 10 at 10 am PST.

I hope you’re able to join me. Register for the webinar here.

The post There’s an Unlimited Demand for Free appeared first on Corporate Visions.

Top sales talent is continuing to become more and more rare. In fact, a recent study found that the greatest salespeople – those who exceed quota year over year – make up a mere 20% of the total sales workforce. So, what gives this small talent pool their competitive edge? Here are 5 sales skills

Read More

The post Do Your Salespeople Have These 5 Essential Sales Skills to be Successful? [Video] appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

Our prospective customers will always have many more potential issues than they can possibly afford to address in the short term. There will always be a bunch of problems that they would like to - or feel they need to - solve.

But one of the reasons why losing to “do nothing” (rather than to a competitor) is now the most common outcome of even apparently well-qualified sales opportunities is that if organisations don’t feel they have to take action right now to deal with an issue, they will probably postpone or defer the purchase.

This is particularly galling for sales people (and their colleagues) who have often invested months of effort and received a string of positive signals from the prospective customer. They may have even been selected. They may have agreed terms.

But despite their herculean efforts, despite the good intentions of their champions within the customer, they still often end up failing to close the deal and win the sale - and it’s scant compensation to think that at least you haven’t lost to a competitor…

At least not to a conventional competitor - because it’s high time that we acknowledged that our most challenging competitor often isn’t an alternative solution from another vendor - our most powerful adversary is often the status quo.

That’s why it’s so important to recognise that our customer’s problems, issues and challenges fit into a hierarchy of irritating, important and critical problems:

Irritating Problems

At the bottom of the problem pyramid lie a large number of irritating issues. These problems, whilst annoying, are unlikely to expose the business to any significant risks. They may cause the prospect to investigate solutions but they are unlikely to cause them to invest significant resources to deal with them - unless, of course, these initially irritating problems start to have a bigger impact.

Important Problems

In the middle of the problem pyramid lies a smaller but often still-numerous set of important issues. These problems often have some measurable impact on the organisation, and the business would benefit from solving them.

They are likely to cause the prospect to seriously evaluate potential solutions, but if resources are tight and they have higher priorities organisations can often find ways to live with them via compromises and workarounds - at least in the short term.

The exceptions are important issues that are associated with a high priority strategic business initiative, in which case it can often be easier to find resources to address “merely” important problems.

Critical Problems

At the top of the problem pyramid are a relatively small number of critical business problems that - once recognised - will inevitably drive the prospect to take action. They simply cannot afford to accept the costs and risks of sticking with the status quo.

These are the problems we should be targeting in our outbound marketing campaigns and pipeline building programmes. But we shouldn’t expect new prospects to always be willing to acknowledge these problems until we have built a relationship of trust.

This requires genuine thought leadership, and the ability to develop what initially may appear to be merely irritating or important problems into something the customer will come to recognise as critical once they have fully understood all the implications.

Targeting the right problems

It should go without saying, but the problems we choose to target should not only have the potential to be recognised as being critical, but that they should also be chosen because we can offer a solution that is at least as effective (and preferably more so) than any other option they might choose to consider - otherwise we’ll end up drawing the prospect’s attention to problems that another vendor will end up solving for them.

Establishing the nature of the problem

Once we’ve persuaded our prospect to acknowledge a problem, we need to assess just where it currently sits on the irritating-important-critical scale. Here are some questions that can help:

• How did you first become aware of the problem?
• What are the consequences for the business?
• Who else is affected (and might have a vested interest in finding a solution)?
• How have you tried to address the problem before (and with what results)?
• What would happen if you were to fail to solve the problem now?
• How does this problem relate to any current corporate initiatives?
• How does this problem rank against all your other current priorities?
• How would any solution be funded?
• What sort of business case would be required?

Elevating the irritating or important to critical

Sometimes, apparently irritating or important problems - once the consequences are fully recognised - can be elevated into critical, “must-fix” problems. This can often be achieved by exploring the unrecognised or under-estimated implications.

This is why not taking the prospect’s description of the problem at face value is so important. If we can successfully draw the customer’s attention to consequences they may not yet have recognised (and if we do this better than any of the other vendors they may be talking to) we both strengthen the case for change and our ability to influence our prospect’s vision of a solution.

Here’s why this is so vital: according to Forrester, the vendor that does the most to shape the prospect’s vision of a solution wins nearly three-quarters of all contested opportunities. To which I'd add our own experience: the vendor that turns what appears to be an irritating or important problem into a critical one is most likely to be considered as a trusted advisor by the prospect - with all that implies for our chances of winning.

So: have you identified your ideal customers' most common irritating, important and critical problems? And what are you doing to target them?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales and the Founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, home of the Value Selling System®. Following a successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and mature corporates, Bob now works with a growing client base of tech-based growth-phase businesses, equipping and enabling them to systematically create and capture mutually meaningful value in every customer interaction.

It seems like for the past several years, we marketers have been hearing something akin to Paul Revere’s famous alert to the colonial militia: “The Millennials are coming! The Millennials are coming!”

Well, it looks like they have arrived. Millennials are generally the children of Baby Boomers and were born between the mid-1980s and late 1990s. They now represent 24 percent of the total U.S. population—a larger percentage than Baby Boomers—and spend about $200 billion every year.

Millennials represent a significant buying force and, to stay relevant, brands must account for this generation’s needs, purchase preferences, and increasing spending power. In fact, one-quarter of the Millennial population has an income greater than $75K a year. Building brand momentum with Millennials requires an understanding of the key trends and what matters to this generation.

1. Brand story and mission matters to Millennials.

Millennials look for a few key value propositions: authenticity, originality, and value. For example, they are 38 percent more likely to buy natural and organic products and 40 percent more likely to shop local, even if it costs more. Your brand story must convey why your brand is unique, special, and worth their attention—all in six seconds.

2. Top brands among Millennials are relatively new to the market.

While top choices for Boomers and Generation X include more established brands with a history of consistently delivering on their brand promise, the top choices for Millennials include newer brands with a strong value proposition. According to the 28th annual Harris Poll EquiTrend® study released by Nielsen, newer brands such as Kind bars and Naked juices have been able to build momentum with Millennials successfully.

3. Multicultural is now mainstream.

More than 40 percent of the Millennial population is considered multicultural, defined as having African-American, Asian-American, or Hispanic heritage. This group takes extra steps to maintain a connection with their culture, meaning that brands must tell a story that connects to the values of multicultural Millennials. Among the context to connect with this group, sports, photography, fashion, and food industries have been the most successful.

4. Millennials are tech-savvy and trusting.

Compared to all other generations, they are most trusting of almost every type of advertising—digital and traditional—and technology is an integral part of their shopping experience.

5. Personalized coupons convert.

Retailers can entice Millennials with digital deals and coupons that are customized based on location, previous purchases, or holiday. Although they make less shopping trips than Baby Boomers, Millennials spend more per trip—$54 versus $45.

The Millennial generation and the rise of digital, omnichannel marketing have shattered the standard, more predictable path to purchase. Connecting with younger consumers requires an innovative approach to the overall customer experience and, more importantly, telling your brand story in a way that makes them the hero. A compelling brand story engages and delights consumers; it makes them want to learn more, want to participate, and want to advocate on a brand’s behalf. Learn how to architect a 6-second story that drives business growth – download our latest ebook, Transformational Marketing: Moving to the TopRight.

Have you ever wondered why you didn’t get a response to a sales email or how to avoid saying things that could blow major deals?

Award-winning author and former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator, Chris Voss, has a rare talent for negotiations. He has worked on cases such as the “Blind Sheikh Case,” the TWA Flight 800 catastrophe, and many other hostage negotiations. During Chris’s 24 year tenure in the Bureau, he was trained in the art of negotiation by not only the FBI but Scotland Yard and Harvard Law School. This was the inspiration for his book, “Never Split the Difference.” (I really recommend reading it if you haven’t yet, it is one of the best business books I have read in the last 5 years.)

Chris has been testing and perfecting his negotiation techniques for years, and currently teaches business negotiation at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. He has also lectured at Harvard, the Kellogg School of Management, and many other international institutions.

So even if you’re not negotiating with war criminals and drug lords, you can still use his negotiation tips in your work and everyday life in order to win more deals.

At the end of 2016 I began to plan my 2017 reading list. Several of my friends, both of which are CEOs at fast-growing tech companies told me that Chris’ book was one of their favorite reads of the year. I downloaded the book on my Kindle, and started reading it on my way back to the Bay Area from Kuala Lumpur, and in the first few pages, I was hooked. As a writer, I’m very skeptical and critical of other people’s writing. I have a hard time “reading things for fun” because I’m always thinking about what the writer’s intention was, and what their angle is. But when I was reading Never Split the Difference, I just got sucked in: it was gripping and entertaining, but every page was packed full of actionable advice and useful examples.

By the time I landed in San Francisco I decided there was only one thing to do: cold email Chris Voss and ask him to do a webinar interview. The following recording is from our recent webinar.

In this recorded webinar, you’ll learn:

• Why salespeople should actually be afraid of YES
• What many of the “classic negotiation tactics” you hear about are missing
• Simple tips to become a better negotiator
• How to use tested negotiation tactics to quickly develop rapport and trust with even the most skeptical buyers
• Strategies for proactively confronting and overcoming even the toughest objections
• And more

Watch it for yourself now:

The post Sales Lessons From the FBI’s Former Lead Hostage Negotiator, Chris Voss appeared first on Salesfolk.

Learning to network well is a useful skill for any job.

Put simply, it opens doors, allowing you to share information and make connections with people that could help you get ahead in your career.

It also provides an opportunity to get to know people you wouldn't necessarily meet in your day-to-day life.

As useful as networking is, it can also be pretty intimidating. It takes courage to walk up to complete strangers and start talking to them, so it's no surprise that many people don't get the most out of their networking opportunities.

Psychologist Dr Ronald Riggio, a professor of leadership and organisational psychology at Claremont McKenna College, California, says effective networking is critical for career success.

He spoke to Business Insider about how to make the most of networking events, highlighting the things people do which make networking a less valuable experience. Here are four common mistakes people make, and how you can rectify them.

1. Not actually listening.

A big mistake people make, Riggio says, is not taking the time to listen to the people they meet. Often you may find colleagues are waiting for their chance to speak, rather than really listening, so try not to be one of those people.

Instead of focusing on what you want to say, ask questions and show you're interested in getting to know the people you meet. You'll probably find it's a much more rewarding experience, and they might remember you better if you take a real interest.

2. Seeing it as a 'chore.'

Riggio says people sometimes see networking events as an unavoidable "chore" rather than a good opportunity. Seeing it as a necessary evil means you're probably setting yourself up to fail.

To get over this idea, Riggio says you should try and use networking to find out interesting things about others. Don't think about the event as full of colleagues who you'll have nothing in common with. Instead, see it as an opportunity to learn interesting things about new people.

In a blog post on Psychology Today, psychologist Dr Ben Dattner said only networking when you "have to" means you're more likely to feel anxious and stress yourself out. Rather than focusing what you need to get out of the event, try to think of what you can offer others from the experience.

3. Too much self-promotion.

Don't dominate the conversation, and don't make it all about your own achievements, Riggio warns. Rather than setting off on a rant about everything you've achieved, simply introduce yourself and tell your new contact something interesting about yourself that can be a conversation starter.

For example, you could say: "I’m a real estate agent and you might be surprised about some of the things that buyers are looking for in a house."

Dattner says a common mistake is keeping the people you meet updated about your accomplishments, when a better thing to do is to actually keep track of theirs. People are generally more interested in starting up a conversation with someone who takes a genuine interest in them.

Most salespeople begin relationships with their prospects with little to zero credibility. There are ways to build up your trustworthiness in advance, like blogging, getting an introduction, crafting a personalized email, working for a well-respected company, and so on.

But HubSpot’s research shows most prospects still don't trust you when you reach out.

To win their respect and attention, don’t act like an amateur rep -- even if you are. Buyers are busy: They’re not going to waste their time on a salesperson who seems relatively clueless.

Avoid exposing yourself as a rookie by steering clear of these eight phrases.

1) “Why did you decide to take this meeting?”

An experienced salesperson will steer clear of this question. Not only is it overused, but the answer is obvious: Whether the rep proactively reached out or contacted an inbound lead, her prospect found her value proposition compelling.

So why do amateur reps ask this question? They’re actually trying to figure out which issue their prospect is experiencing that’s relevant to their product. In other words, they’re being lazy and asking buyers to do their discovery work for them.

HubSpot sales director Dan Tyre suggests instead:

• “What’s your biggest obstacle to [prospect’s team, department, or company] growth?”
• “What does your boss obsess about?”
• “What takes up the most time in your day?”
• “What are the executives on your team trying to accomplish?”

These questions allow you to surface opportunities for helping the buyer they might not even know about.

2) “Real deal”

If your product works, you don’t need to make big claims. Telling the buyer your solution is “the real deal,” “one of a kind,” or “the only product of its type” will make them skeptical, not intrigued.

Rely on customer case studies and data to make your point instead. For example, you might say, “76% of our customers see their weekend sales double in three months or less.” Statistics like these are far more convincing.

3) “The reality is … ”

Rookie reps use this line to kick off a frank, tell-it-like-is discussion with their prospects. The problem? It can sound offensive -- as though they don’t trust buyers to identify “reality” on their own.

If your prospect feels like you’re questioning their intelligence, they’ll usually stop listening. You’ll have to work hard to reengage them.

Instead of “the reality is … ”, try these alternatives:

• “Some people are surprised that .... ”
• “Contrary to popular belief … ”
• “I didn’t expect this, but … ”

These phrases let you introduce an unexpected fact without insulting your prospect.

4) “Honestly”

Phrases like “truthfully,” “to be honest,” and “I’ll be candid with you” imply that up until this point, you’ve been misleading or manipulating your prospect.

Even if he doesn’t question what you’ve already told him, he’ll probably perceive you as another stereotypical, fast-talking rep.

Instead of telling the buyer you’ll be honest, just be honest. It’s as simple as that.

5) “Can you tell me a little bit about [prospect’s business]?”

You’ll rarely hear a veteran rep use this question. He’s well-aware how quickly his prospect will lose interest if she thinks he hasn’t done any research.

Instead, a well-trained salesperson will open with a specific fact about the buyer’s industry, organization, role, situation, or likely challenge before asking his question.

Here are a few examples:

• If you offer relocation assistance: “I see you just opened a new office in Oklahoma. How is the employee relocation process going?”
• If you sell to ecommerce sites: “You have a wide selection of products. How do you typically source them?”
• If your prospect works in a three-person department: “Your team is fairly small relative to your company. What’s the workload like?”

6) “Who’s the decision maker?”

Nothing says “I’m new to selling” like this question. If you’re talking to a junior employee, you’ll make them feel unimportant and small -- which means they’re far less likely to help you win over the ultimate authority.

Even if you are talking to a higher-up, they might not think of themselves as the “decision maker.” B2B purchase decisions involve 6.8 stakeholders on average. Each one has influence.

A better question would be: “Have you bought a similar product before?" If they say yes, ask them to describe the buying process.

Your prospect’s answer will help you pinpoint the people with the greatest sway over the purchase.

7) “I promise … ”

As senior salespeople know all too well, it’s a bad idea to give promises in sales. There are too many external factors and variables -- your solution might work flawlessly, but the prospect might use it ineffectively, their market might shift, a new competitor might change the landscape, and so on.

Avoid sounding like the new kid on the block by using conditional statements instead. You might say, “If you follow [X best practices], you’ll likely see [Y results] in [Z amount of time]” or “Our customers see [A impact] in [B time] when they implement [C approach].”

8) “You don’t know me, but … ”

Inexperienced reps often feel nervous about reaching out to new prospects, so they use this opener. However, it only makes them look insecure.

Even worse, most buyers won’t keep reading. You’re a stranger -- why would they care what you have to say?

If you share a connection or common interest, begin your email or call with that instead. For instance, “I’m also a major fan of competitive gaming. Have you seen 'The King of Kong'?”

Once you’ve eliminated these dead giveaways of inexperience, buyers will be more likely to see you an authority. Earning their respect is a major step toward earning their business.

Email marketing is an inexpensive and effective way to get in touch with prospects if you take the proper steps in crafting them. The information you relay in your email and the way you share it has a direct impact on how well your email will perform with recipients. You don’t have to be a professional writer to get attention or to create a successful email campaign, but you should be concise and include compelling information. Most prospective buyers are bombarded with emails from a variety of businesses, on a daily basis. Incorporating the right details allow you to break through the clutter and helps ensure that you make a connection. 

Let’s assume you’re a sales manager in a highly competitive B2B market with a team of eight major account reps. You have just received an email from your VP of Sales outlining an aggressive growth strategy for the next 6 months.

You’ve decided the best approach is to ask your sales reps to grow the business in their existing accounts. You have called a meeting with the sales reps to share best practices for generating new business from existing accounts.

Six ideas that you could pass along are:

• Look at the current situation through the lens of your last sale. From time to time when you are engaged with a customer look back and think about the situation that preceded your sale. What was the impetus for the opportunity? What did you observe? What situations were present? Who did what just preceding the opportunity?

New opportunities are a response to something. Was the last opportunity consistent with what you understand to be the customer’s plan, or did it appear to be a reaction? What things were in motion before the opportunity occurred? With these insights, sales reps can look for new opportunities.

• Assess organizational changes for clues. Another set of signals that an opportunity may be in the offering is changes in the organization. Whether a company is preparing to implement a planned strategy, merging with another group or responding to a problem, very often personnel are tasked before the opportunity is visible to the outside world. Teams of required skills are assembled and units are disbanded or reduced.

Look at new and expanded organizations and what kinds of skills, and in what quantity, are being added. If you have been working with the organization it is important to leverage the sales team’s knowledge of the customer. They can provide insight to what specific changes may mean and not mean. This can help you determine what kinds of opportunities may be coming down the road.

• Observe what is happening in overall ongoing expense management and related capital budgeting. Implementing new ideas and acquiring new capabilities cost money. Even when they are budgeted they have to be funded. Is the customer experiencing any changes in spending patterns you can identify? Are expenses being restricted or expanded?

Large opportunities are rarely standalone and companion efforts may have very different schedules and critical paths. Look for opportunities that may signal other opportunities.

• Remember it’s a network. In major accounts, many players are involved in the decision. A few are key decision makers; others are influencers. Still others are gatekeepers who can’t say yes, but can say no. You have to know who is playing which role, the relationship between the players, and what they think about you and your competition. An average sales performer has a general understanding. A top sales performer has a comprehensive understanding.

• Don’t forget to tell your story. In case you spot an opportunity be able to subtly, but clearly reinforce just what it is you do that is of value to customers. Customers don’t spend much or any time pondering what you do. They worry about what they need and when they do only the organizations that are top of mind, come to mind.

More often than you wish, customers will even forget all of what your company does. If that happens, you simply won’t be considered. Too often, if you don’t share the range of things you do well periodically, a customer might say, “Oh, I wish I had known you can do X, because you did such a great job on Y and, had we known, we would have used you.” Always have an up-to-date value proposition about your core capabilities and a new story about how those capabilities have been used by others.

• Bring in fresh thinking. Think about leveraging literature, speeches, research, stories you’ve heard that relate to the customer’s agenda or you know are of particular interest to the individual. Even if they don’t produce a lead today it builds relationships and often creates leads in the future.

Most companies would be better off if they spent more time thinking and acting strategically about how to grow their business in existing accounts.

If you’re not deliberate and intentional, your sales team will never reach the level of growth most organizations want.

New tactics, better scripts, and even great leads will only delay the inevitable decline of businesses that don’t have a cutting edge process to sell their goods.

Seriously, do you think that we should be using the same medical procedures of time past?

Nope.

And you shouldn’t be trying to sell using tactics from earlier eras either.

Today, we’re going to explore one of the many nuances that your B2B team may want to notice, include, and define—the difference between BDRs and SDRs.

To be clear, that’s Business Development Representatives (BDRs) and Sales Development Representatives (SDRs). Believe it or not, there is enough of a difference to warrant both this post and a separate role in many organizations.

We hope to not only explain why each is unique, but also explain the value of the two roles when working together to create more appointments for your closers.

Let’s get started with the definitions.

Sales Development Representative (SDR): A type of inside sales rep who focuses more on inbound lead qualification, moving leads into and through the sales funnel, qualifying prospects, and setting up sales qualified appointments.

Business Development Representative (BDR): A type of inside sales rep who focuses on generating qualified prospects using cold email, cold calling, social selling, and networking.

As you can see, there are both similar and different aspects to these roles. Let’s take a deeper look at them.

We’ll use the three major categories that define the responsibilities of both roles in order to explain.

They are:

• Research: The things that BDRs and SDRs need to find out in order to qualify leads.
• Engage: The things they do to reach out, nurture, and speak with leads.
• Qualify: The things done to separate suspects from prospects before sending them to close.

SDRs Research

This role will likely have some form of knowledge of the lead going into their research.

SDRs are primarily for inbound leads. Most of the data has come in from an outside source and not hunted down by your reps. Typical examples of this include:

• Marketing and Advertising (i.e. LinkedIn, Youtube ads, Webinars, etc.)
• Inbound and SEO (i.e. Content marketing and Organic Search Traffic)
• Leads Generated by BDRs (Some leads may not be ready to close, but aren’t suspect either. In this case, they may go to your SDRs for additional nurturing)
• Referrals

Just because there is little information available from the onset doesn’t mean that there isn’t research involved.You have to do a little digging to find the other pieces and (possibly) strike it rich.

You have to do a little digging to find the other pieces and (possibly) strike it rich.

Example: A company has begun the search for a new solution for the pain your product solves. The decision maker sanctions a person or two to help do research. One of those researchers comes across your site and signs up to your email list to request your lead magnet.

While it is a potential lead, reps really don’t have much.

Maybe the company name, the name and title of someone, but other than that—SDRs have to dig.

Pro Tip: According to one study, the faster you try to contact inbound leads (from the moment they initiate) the better your chances of actually getting a hold of someone are. You’re 3000 times less likely to do so if you wait more than five hours.

Your reps will have to figure out who was researching and who is responsible for the decision before they ever start nurturing the lead, score them, and qualify them.

Tools SDRs Use: Social media, email, phone, lead generation software.

BDRs Research

While researching and filling in data for SDRs isn’t always easy—BDRs never have it easy.

Instead of finding parts of a treasure map, these reps are trying to dig into the mountain and find the gold themselves. The only research that many may be provided with is an industry in which to concentrate their efforts.

Other than that—zilch. Nada.

Often times, the BDRs are given training on how to qualify without the necessary instruction on how to find leads in the first place.

The challenge of this sales role is also the potential freedom.

Leads can literally come from anywhere. A good BDR will tackle every day with excitement to fill their pipeline with new and fresh contacts just waiting for the solution they may not know about or even want to talk about—yet.

Pro Tip: Every business magazine has a top list of 100, 500, 1000, or even 5000 companies ranked by growth or overall revenue. Those companies are in various industries and will always have competitors who are itchy for a spot on the list. Both the companies on said list and their competition are a great way to prospect for B2B leads.

Tools BDRs Use: Networking, Google, lead software, social media, email, phone.

SDRs Engage

The way to engage inbound leads can range wildly. For instance, if you can contact a new lead within the first few minutes, then you may have a qualified appointment super quick.

However, the buying cycle of most industries is going to be a longer stretch where people move toward the appointment through the stages of awareness, research, etc.

SDRs are responsible to aid the funnel to nurture leads and pay close attention to the behaviors of contacts.

Some of those behaviors will help reps identify between prospects and suspects; meaning the ones who may buy and those who likely will not.

Others help indicate where leads are in the cycle and when they may be ready for a qualifying call before heading to the close.

Almost always, these leads are inbound and in some sort of a funnel with automated content.

SDRs work with this funnel, using a CRM and lead scoring, in order to accomplish their goal—set appointments.

Pro Tip: Don’t rely on automation to seek out inbound leads that meet many of your “ideal client” factors. Actively fill in the lead data and search out the appointment, not only looking for lead scoring.

BDRs Engage

This role is aggressive. The leads they drummed up are now their targets for cold outreach.

There may be valuable content used to generate a response, but there is little to no automation in the BDRs pipeline.

Email and phone are the primary tools that get contacts to respond. Social media can help in many ways, but when it comes to getting appointments, it doesn’t get the job done.

Getting responses doesn’t (typically) happen without multiple attempts at contact through both email and phone.

In order to maximize leads, good BDRs will use an aggressive and organized schedule.

Obviously, this isn’t the only way to do it. Your schedule may take more time and should be tweaked over time to land the highest number of qualifications and appointments.

Pro Tip: Don’t automate your content, but do keep a structured pipeline. Understand when you sent your first email and track your sequence like a hawk.

SDRs and BDRs Qualify

The end game of both of these sales roles is to set qualified appointments for your closers.

Undeniably, the best way to do this is to get leads on the phone.

One definable difference is the use of lead scoring (in the case of SDRs). While this process lets you know when a lead is really interested, it shouldn’t be a final indicator that the contact is ready to be pitched.

If so, there would be no reason for SDRs.

Instead, SDRs should have one foot in the marketing funnel and one in the sales process.

Once a lead reaches the preset score, they should be labeled sales accepted leads (SALs) and called to qualify them for the pitch.

Now for BDRs, there is no marketing funnel, but a pipeline similar to the one in our last point (see above).

Once a lead is on the phone with either an SDR or BDR, both are trying to make sure the contact is a prospect. Inbound leads came to you, but the outbound leads were tracked down—this should obviously change up your communication a bit.

Questions may differ, but not by much.

Do You Have Both of These Roles?

Given the different nature of these sales roles, it hopefully makes you realize the usefulness of both.

SDRs can provide more SQAs from your content funnel and BDRs can bring in more SQAs that have never heard about your brand.

Both, when done correctly, can lead to the type of growth that scales startups and breaks plateaus of established organizations.

Predictive analytics and consultative selling among the most important trends for B2B sales strategy in 2017

As a marketer, you’re more than familiar with the importance of closing the gap between marketing and sales. It’s been proven over and over that the more these teams talk, the better the results.

Yet according to Aberdeen group, salespeople still spend an average of 440 hours a year searching for the right content to use. Furthermore, 65% of marketing content isn’t used by sales at all!

When looking at the most popular sales trends for 2017, three are crucial when bridging this gap. These trends are most likely to inform your sales enablement content over the next year and beyond

In this article, we’re going to analyse each trend to see not only how they will contribute to your sales enablement efforts, but your marketing strategy as a whole.

1. Subject Matter Experts will Play Salesperson & Marketer

The majority of B2B buyers would rather do business with someone they perceive as an expert on a particular matter over a salesperson.

Subject matter experts (SME) will have an important role in the sales process in 2017 and beyond. These executives provide enough value that a prospect would be willing to pay to meet with them. In a sense, this is a new form of consultative selling that takes a more advisory role.

The graphic below from 4imprint presents a good argument for having SMEs present in your organization:

Historically, sales leaders would lead SMEs within their organizations. They were guided through the sales process and called upon when needed. However, some organizations are beginning to empower their SMEs to manage the sales process themselves, providing them with teams and systems as support.

As this shift takes place, marketing must also get involved. Like sales should support the SME with the right people, marketing must assist with the right content.

Give your SMEs access to a library of content that you have already created. This is the easiest and fastest route to getting them involved and assisting them through the sales process. Sit down with your SME and interview them. Ask questions like:

• What are the most common questions asked by prospects?
• What content doesn’t exist that you’d like to see?
• What can we create to make educating your audience easier?

Having these insights not only helps in assisting the SME, but can also inform your own content efforts across every stage of the funnel. Dig deep on each answer to gain valuable insight. Topics that prospects are hungry for provide promising content opportunities.

Recruit your SME to act as a thought leader for your organization. Guest blogging is one effective method of expanding into a wider audience. Provide value for other audiences in order to attract them to you.

Get your SME in front of a camera and create practical and insightful video content. This turns your in-house thought leader into a source of content that can cater to several audiences throughout the entire sales cycle. If you’ve been considering YouTube as a marketing channel but haven’t been sure where to start, then this could act as a cost-effective experiment.

When presenting these ideas, make sure you show what’s in it for them. Convince your SMEs that these opportunities will not only serve their own interests, but will benefit the wider organization.

2. Data-Driven Sales will Inform Marketing

Marketing has known the value of data for a long time. And it looks like sales are finally catching up.

Thanks to sales analytics systems, teams can finally understand how they’re closing deals and measure impact on revenue. Insight on who their buyers are and what the ideal customer looks like allows sales to focus on prospects that matter.

This includes behavioral data as well, yielding insight on how they act and when they buy. Not only does this help sales efficiency, but is a treasure trove of insight for marketing.

By taking this data, marketing can focus on revenue goals as well as their own lead generation targets. The benefits of this insight include:

• Predicting behaviors: by gathering data on past purchase and user behavior, marketing can predict future engagement and sales events. Sales can use this to focus on selling the right products to the right leads, while marketing can take this insight and refine their message-to-market match.
• Sales emails: sales teams can now collect data on the calls-to-action and subject lines that lead to responses. Marketing must take this insight and apply it to their own marketing, uncovering certain triggers that generate a conversion or response further down the funnel.
• Touchpoint attribution: we can now connect the entire journey from the very beginning all the way to the end. This is useful for long sales cycles. Many marketing teams often “hand over” leads to sales, refocusing attention on more lead gen. Instead, marketers can inform sales messaging and vice versa.

Having access to this data will help you create more of the right content, both for sales enablement and other marketing efforts. There is an opportunity to make content more effective and meaningful at all stages of the funnel.

3. Embracing a Multimedia Content Library

Sales enablement content typically comes in the form of blog posts or ebooks. But the way we consume content is changing, and sales enablement must follow suit.

Videos, infographics and interactive content will have important roles in the overall content marketing strategy. So how can you apply this to sales enablement?

The subject matter expert can be a great source of sales enablement, essentially “scaling” their function. Animated explainer videos, recorded demos and webinars can are also key when empowering sales to educate and nurture their prospects.

Infographics make assimilating information easier for prospects. This visual format simplifies complex topics, which is useful when engaging with busy senior executives. Test how infographics affect the sales process with tools such as Venngage and Canva. Infographics are easy to create with their WYSIWYG editors, meaning you can test on a small scale before considering hiring a designer.

Interactive content is also having its time in the limelight. With tools such as Ceros, you can make static eBooks, infographics and websites engaging and visually appealing.

Finally, consider interviewing other thought leaders. This will help add authority, allowing a third party expert to chime in on complex matters.

Turn these interviews into more video content and podcasts to cater to different viewing styles. If someone would rather listen to an interview “on-the-move” they have the option to do so.

Sales may face several industry-shaking changes this year. For marketers, these three trends are going to affect you the most. Getting in on these approaches early means you can serve leads and prospects faster than your competition, assisting sales to turn more leads into customers.

Timo Rein is the co-founder and president of Pipedrive, a provider of sales CRM software that gives sales teams control over their selling processes. He has 15-plus years experience as a salesman, sales manager and software entrepreneur. Before co-founding Pipedrive, Rein helped build a leading sales and management training house in the Baltics. Prior to that, he was among the top one percent door-to-door salesmen with Southwestern Company.

Digital marketing is one of the most popular ways for businesses to try to increase sales. In fact, spending on digital marketing is projected to increase by anywhere from 12-15 percent.

What’s surprising about this number is that according to recent research, many businesses have a hard time measuring the results of their digital marketing campaigns. A third of marketers don’t know which digital marketing efforts have the best revenue impact, and some businesses don’t even track metrics that give this information.

To make sure you are spending your digital marketing budget in a way that will help you increase sales, here are the top digital marketing KPIs you should be tracking, and information on how they help inform your strategy.

1. Email marketing KPIs

It probably won’t surprise you that email marketing is among the best marketing techniques to increase sales. In fact, 60% of marketers say that email marketing is producing an ROI for their organization, and 32% of marketers say that email marketing will produce an ROI for their organization. Other reports even indicate that email marketing can yield $44 for every $1 spent.

While marketers believe email marketing is the best e-commerce tool, it’s important to remember that not every email will be as equally as effective in generating sales. The process of getting emails to convert includes a mix of creativity, strategy, and, of course, data analytics.

To help you make sure your email marketing strategy is converting into sales, here are the top email marketing metrics you should be measuring.

Click-through rate (CTR)

Click-through rate is the measure of how many people clicked on a hyperlink, CTA or image within a particular email.

Click-through rate is important because it helps you measure how well your emails are performing, which calls to action are encouraging activity, and if your click-through rates are changing (for good or bad) based on your email marketing strategies.

Conversion rates

Conversion is the percentage of subscribers who complete a goal action. Conversions tell how many of the subscribers that clicked-through followed through on your desired outcome. This could include making a purchase, subscribing to an email list, downloading a report, sending a referral your way, registering for an online class, and more.

Return on investment (ROI)

Not only is it a good idea to measure conversions, but it’s also important to measure your overall ROI. Overall ROI will tell you how much you made in total sales minus the money you invested in the campaign.

Overall ROI will give you an idea of how well your campaigns are contributing to the overall profits of your company.

Unique open rate

If you are looking to understand just how effective your subject lines are, unique open rate is the perfect KPI to monitor.

Unique open rate determines the amount of distinct opens of your email. Unique open rate will only count one open no matter how many times a subscriber reopens the same email. Total opens, on the other hand, counts the total number of times any and every subscriber has opened your email.

Measuring unique open rate is the better way to determine how appealing your topics and promotions are while monitoring total open rates will give you an idea of how appealing your actual content is.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate will tell you how many of your emails are not being successfully delivered. There are two different types of bounce rates to measure, hard bounces and soft bounces.

Soft bounces are when an email isn’t delivered because of a temporary error like a recipient’s mailbox is full, a server problem or your email message is too large. Soft bounces are minor problems and most email service providers will automatically try to redeliver an email that registers as a soft bounce.

A hard bounce, on the other hand, is when an email isn’t delivered because of a permanent error. This could include something like the recipient’s email address doesn’t exist, the domain name isn’t real, or the server has blocked delivery.

Remember that for one in five companies, email marketing yields an ROI of more than 70:1. However, the only way of knowing how well your email marketing campaigns are performing is to measure the KPIs listed above.

2. Social media marketing KPIs

Another vital part of your digital marketing strategy to increase sales should be social media marketing.

If it’s not, it should be. After all, 90% of young adults (ages 18-29) use social media. Something that is particularly interesting, especially for B2B companies out there, is 84% of VPs and CEOs report that social media influences purchasing decisions.

However, making sure your social media marketing strategy is converting to sales for your audience isn’t as simple as just posting content on your profiles. To really determine what content is leading to conversions, you’ll want to keep track of and test the following metrics.

Impressions

Impressions will tell you the number of time your social media content is displayed across a particular social media network. For example, in Twitter, “Tweet impressions” will show you how many times your tweet has been displayed across Twitter.

Impressions don’t directly tell you how many, and who is converting, but it does tell you that people are engaging with and sharing your content. The more engagement you have on your content, the higher the impressions you should see.

Click-through with bounce rate

Clicks tell you the number of people that click on your content, which will give you an idea of how much interest your content is generating. However, if you really want to know how many people are responding to your social media content, a better metric is click-through with bounce rate.

Click-through measured with bounce rate will tell you the amount of people that clicked your link (click-through) and bounce rate will tell you the percentage of people that clicked that also left your linked page immediately. When you measure these two social media metrics together, you get a better idea of how much interest you are actually generating.

Social shares

Social shares tell you not just the amount of traffic that is coming to your website, but the amount of traffic that is driven to your website by particular social media channels.

When tracking social shares, you can use analytics programs to segment and test which campaigns and social media platforms are driving more traffic to your website. This is the perfect way to determine how well your social media campaigns are positively reaching your target audience.

When tracking social media metrics to increase sales, there are several other important metrics including shares, likes, referrals, conversion rates, and more.

3. Digital ad KPIs

If you are looking to really boost your e-commerce sales, then it’s important not to leave digital advertising out of the equation.

Online advertising is one of the most profitable ways to increase sales. In fact, according to recent studies, when non-viewed ads are filtered out, brand lift improves by 31%.

While digital advertising is a great way to increase brand awareness and boost sales, just like with email marketing and social media marketing, there is a science to it. The best way to make sure your ads are resonating with your target audience and really hitting the mark is to keep your eye on e-commerce related digital advertising metrics and adjust your strategy based on what the numbers are telling you.

Here are the top digital advertising metrics to keep your eye on when looking to increase your sales.

Cost-per-click (CPC)

Cost-per-click (CPC) is the most dominant model of payment for online advertisements. CPC refers to the actual amount you pay for a click to your website (click-through). The amount you pay for a keyword will depend on your industry and the competition.

Measuring CPC is important in regards to your e-commerce strategy because it will give you an idea of how much your digital advertising campaign is going to cost to run and ultimately give you an idea of the financial success of your advertising efforts.
Cost-Per-Thousand (CPM)

Another common model for payment for online advertising is CPM, or cost per thousand times your ad is displayed (impressions). Rather than bidding on a specific keyword, you simply pay a specific amount of money each time your advertisement is seen a thousand times.

Just like with CPC, CPM will tell you how much value your ad is producing in terms of how much it costs. If you find that your overall ROI is high and your CPM is low, then you know that your advertising campaign is producing value at a relatively low cost.

Lead to close ratio

When looking at your digital marketing efforts in terms of how it directly affects your sales, you’ll want to measure your lead to close ratio as well.

To gather this information, you’ll want to divide the total number of leads you acquired from your digital marketing campaign and divide it by how many of those acquired leads resulted in a sale.

This will give you an idea if you are underspending or overspending on display advertising, and help you form a better strategy for moving forward.

4. Website KPIs

Finally, since the majority of your e-commerce sales will actually take place on your website, it’s important to keep track website KPIs that will help you increase your sales.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate will show you what percentage of visitors leave (or bounce out of) your website before leaving.

For example, someone may click through to your website through an interesting social media post, but upon reaching your website, they click away before further exploring your website.

The goal is to keep your bounce rate as low as possible, and if your bounce rates are high, it might indicate that your website needs adjusting to keep people there in order to lead to more sales.
Things that affect bounce rate could be slow load times, poor design, too many pop-ups, alternate advertising, cluttered content, and more.

Time on site & pages per visit

Time on site measures how much time someone spent on your website and pages per visit measures how many pages a particular user visited during a stay on your site. These metrics are important to measure because they tell you how involved or interested a user is when they come to your website.

If you notice that your average time on site and pages per visit are low, then it may mean you need to include more compelling content, make it easier to lead visitors to purchase or find ways to make sure you are attracting the right audience.

Cart abandonment

Cart abandonment tells you how many people added a product or service to their shopping cart but clicked away before actually buying the product.

This metric is especially important because it tells you that people are interested in your products, but for whatever reason, they clicked out before making the final decision.
When you know who is abandoning a cart, you can employ marketing tactics to help push them towards actually purchasing. For example, if you see that someone has abandoned their cart, you can automatically send them an email to remind them to make a purchase.
Additionally, you’ll want to check your e-commerce software to make sure there aren’t any technical issues preventing customers from easily making a purchase.

Wrap up

Digital marketing is definitely among the most popular and effective ways to increase sales, but only if you are paying attention to the science of it. When looking to increase your sales, make sure you are tracking the digital marketing KPIs above, and then using the information to make smarter marketing decisions. If you do, you’ll find you’re able to more effectively use your marketing budget to increase sales.

At this point, I think we all have experimented with email marketing, and some of us swear and live by it. Email marketing is an asset to any business employing this as part of their overall marketing strategy. In fact, let’s start this off with a not so little statistic.

“Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter” – McKinsey

Um, hello? 40x is not a small number. I am certainly NOT discrediting Facebook or Twitter because we actually generate quite a few leads from those platforms, but I do want to emphasize that for most businesses, email is a significant lead generation tool.

However, when we bring marketing automation into the mix, here’s a few stats we found:

56% of companies currently use an email marketing provider and are 75% or more likely to be purchasers of marketing automation software over the next year. – VentureBeat

Over 75% of email revenue is generated by triggered campaigns, rather than one-size-fits-all campaigns. Automated email campaigns account for 21% of email marketing revenue. – DMA

These statistics indicate that companies are actively looking for ways to improve their marketing efforts and overall customer experiences.

Unlike traditional email, marketing automation allows you to employ what marketers like to call lifecycle marketing. This means that the right content is sent to the right person at the right time during their buying process. Messages are personalized and only deliver the most appropriate information for that stage in the sales process. It also allows you to send customized offers and other content based on their particular demographics and behaviors.

Marketing automation also allows you to efficiently and effectively bring other channels into the mix such as social media, online live chat, events, and more, while streamlining and improving your sales and marketing processes. Not to mention, it gives you great visibility into how all of your channels and efforts are converting your leads into clients and inspiring engagement.

To put simply, marketing automation maximizes your performance while minimizing your effort. Sounds great, right? So, how does one successfully transition from email to marketing automation?
First, you have to ask yourself the following questions:

• Am I getting a ton of spam complaints or unsubscribes? If yes, you need marketing automation.
• Are your open/read rates really low? If yes, you need marketing automation.
• Is engagement overall really low? If yes, you need marketing automation.
• Are you having trouble converting leads and pleasing customers? If yes, you need marketing automation.
• Do you not have enough information about your leads and customers? If yes, you need CRM and marketing automation.
• Do you understand the kind of content that resonates with your leads and customers? If no, you need marketing automation.
• Are you spending too much time on manual efforts that could be automated? If yes, I think you know the answer…

Another key reason to implement marketing automation? It significantly improves collaboration on your team resulting in happier employees and ultimately a better customer experience.
Now, let’s talk about the transition.

1. Plan. This will be the first stage of your transition. You have to create some sort of roadmap and strategy. What are your overall goals with marketing automation? Write down exactly what you want to accomplish. This can be both for the customer experience and your internal business process.
2. Think data. Understand who your customers are, what they want, and where they are in your funnel. Marketing automation gives you all sorts of information you can use to personalize their experience. A CRM and integrated marketing automation platform will not only collect and manage this data, but also use this data for your benefit.
3. Start small. Once you have outlined your goals, determine which has the highest priority and start there. You never want to jump in with marketing automation full throttle, especially if this is your first rodeo.

My recommendations:

Contact Form
Add automation to the contact form on your website. If you are collecting leads or inquiries through your site, you can automate the follow up emails they receive. Send them an automatic Thank You email or trigger an email from your sales team.

eBook Download
If gated content is part of your strategy (I recommend it), then you can easily automate the process once they have requested to access your content. For example, once they confirm they want to receive your emails, automate all of the emails that they receive post download, and, if you want to go a step further, customize the emails and paths they take once they open or click on your emails.

Transactional
eCommerce is another great place to automate your process. After the purchase is made, automate the thank you and follow-ups. You can also easily send them personalized offers by tracking what they purchased and when.

Making the switch from email to marketing automation might seem like a big step, and it is. But, it is a critical step that will take your business to the next level, not to mention free up your time and ultimately save you money.

Don’t let marketing automation intimidate you, though. Strategize, start small, and collaborate.

How to adapt to the shift to mobile commerce

For a long time, the rise of mobile marketing has been the darling of tech predictions. Since Mary Meeker, an analyst at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, said in 2008 that "Mobile [will] overtake fixed Internet access by 2014", the world has been waiting for that prediction to hold true. It did, at least by some sources, precisely that same year she said it would.

According to a study by Comcast, in 2014 mobile usage represented 60% of the total time spent online, while desktop-based consumption made up the remaining 40%.

Since the majority of your website visitors come from mobile devices, you need to adapt your digital marketing strategy to take advantage of the power of mobile marketing.

In this article, I will show you 3 reasons why you need to do so and how to adapt to these changes.

Reason #1: Mobile commerce is growing at a fast rate

Mobile commerce isn't just a fancy and futuristic concept anymore, it's a huge opportunity for e-commerce stores that can help boost their growth.

According to Digi-Capital, a research firm, mobile commerce will hit US$700 billion in revenue in 2017, a more than 300% growth over the past four years, when it was worth US$230 billion. Further research made in 2016 by Coupofy says that global mobile commerce now makes up 34% of all e-commerce transactions around the world, and it’s predicted to grow 31% in 2017. That surpasses the growth levels of the e-commerce industry, which is predicted to grow only 15%.

What's more interesting is that Asia represents almost half of the mobile commerce market. Countries like China, UAE, and Turkey have the highest number of mobile shoppers, with 68%, 57% and 53%, respectively, of their total population. Also, the emerging markets with the highest growth rates are India, Taiwan, and Malaysia. On the other hand, the first-world countries with the highest growth rates are Japan, the United Kingdom, and South Korea which have grown 50%, 45%, and 44%, respectively.

Given all this wonderful and promising data, how can you optimize your store for mobile commerce?

There are three main ways, two of which I will explain below, in order of convenience. Creating a mobile version of the site is also an option, but we don't recommend this since it can be worse for SEO than responsive design. 

Responsive design

The easiest way to get started with mobile commerce is to optimize your store by using what's called "responsive design". If you have never heard of responsive design before, it's a design standard aimed at adapting websites to be viewed on any screen of any size. Whether you are using a 27-inches screen, or a 5 inches smartphone, you are able to browse on a site without any problems.

There are many benefits to responsive design, some of which are directly tied with e-commerce, some of which include:

• Ensuring brand visibility;
• Driving organic traffic;
• Increasing customer loyalty, and;
• Boosting engagement.

Here’s a sampling of facts from a Google study entitled What Users Want Most From Mobile Sites Today that shows a few more benefits of responsive websites:

• 74% of people say they are likely to return to a company’s site in the future if it is a mobile-friendly site.
• 48% feel frustrated and annoyed if a company doesn’t have a mobile-friendly site.
• 52% are less likely to engage with a company that has no mobile website.

Fortunately, every e-commerce platform, including Shopify and BigCommerce, already offer themes with responsive design. You will only have to install these themes, and your store will be ready for mobile commerce.

If, on the other hand, your store uses a custom-made CMS with no responsive design, you will have to have your design team adapt your theme for responsiveness.

Mobile app

You have the option of creating an app for your store, just like most big e-commerce stores do, including Zara, Forever21, and even Amazon.

This approach is similar to tcreating a mobile version of the siet, in the sense that you are creating two different entities with all that entails. The biggest difference, however, is in the process of creating the app.

App development is a whole different game to web development. It's a more expensive, complex, and time-consuming process, which only big companies, like the ones mentioned before, can stomach.

Not only that, there's a study by RetailMeNot that shows how different people behave when faced between an e-commerce app and a website store. This is what they found:

• People are much more likely to visit your website for almost any online shopping activity, except for redeeming gift cards and loyalty program points.
• When checking store hours or locations, 66% will visit your website as compared to 45% using your app.
• To check reviews, 50% visit your website and 31% use your app.
• If they want to use their gift card or loyalty points, however, 19% will use their app, while only 12% visit your site.

For those reasons, I'd suggest you stay away from this option and focus on the first one, which brings the biggest bang for the buck.

Reason #2: Social commerce is getting easier and more convenient than ever

One of the reasons behind the strong rise in mobile commerce has been tied with the speed in which the difference social media channels have adapted to the changes in the industry. A few years ago, it was hard to imagine that you could make a sale right from your Instagram feed.

Today, however, it’s easier than ever to shop on social channels. Let me show you how the biggest social media channels have optimized their sites for e-commerce.

Facebook

According to Shopify, Facebook dominates as a source of social traffic and sales. Nearly two-thirds of all social media visits to Shopify stores, which is one of the biggest e-commerce platforms in the world, come from Facebook. Plus, an average of 85% of all e-commerce orders from social media come from Facebook. Facebook has the highest conversion rate for all social media e-commerce traffic at 1.85%.

In order to start selling on Facebook, you have a few different options. The most commonly used is to create a Facebook ads campaign and direct it to your store. Even though that's the most common way to drive traffic to a store, and a very effective way to do so, as Shopify as shown, it's not the same as being able to shop within Facebook.

Fortunately, Facebook has changed things in the past few months and rolled three exciting new options: the shop tab, Buy buttons and Messenger buy buttons.

The shop tab allows for e-commerce stores to add a tab in which they can display their products and sell them straight from their Facebook page. This handy guide by Social Media Examiner will show you how you can install on your own Facebook page.

The buy buttons are a whole different game since they incentivize purchases from the feed itself, which is a much more convenient for mobile users. They still haven't made this option public yet, but it's quite promising for any e-commerce store owner who wants to boost their mobile sales.

Finally, the Messenger buy buttons allow companies to send them automatic personal messages that suggest them different products. Imagine if a customer visited your store, added a product to their cart and left. By creating a retargeting campaign and using custom audiences, you could contact these people and remind them of the product they left.

Now, people can have Messenger automatically plug in the credit card and address information attached to their Messenger profiles when buying something from a Messenger bot without any need to leave Facebook’s app.

This is another great step from the Palo Alto giant that will make mobile commerce much more convenient.

Instagram

Instagram has recently launched ads with “Shop Now” buttons. They have tested their program by partnering with 20 US-based retail brands including Kate Spade, JackThreads, and Warby Parker. Since this program is still in beta, they haven't published their results. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the results are incredible once they make this program public.

Even though this option isn't available for all companies yet, there's one company that allows you to optimize your Instagram feed for shopping.

Yotpo, an Israeli-based startup that focuses on user-generated content, allows you to transform your Instagram account into a shoppable feed. Instead of just adding a link to your homepage and hoping for the best, Yotpo allows you to integrate your different products with your Instagram account. When you mention one of your products in your feed, you can make people shop directly from there without having to go to your website and find the product.

Pinterest

A few months ago, Pinterest revealed their “Buyable Pins”. As their name suggest, they allow companies to add a "Buy" button to any pin. Since Pinterest is a visual-driven social media channel, this represents a major opportunity for companies.

For now, Buyable Pins are available for specific merchants in a beta program. You need to get on the list to be able to use them. Also, you need to use BigCommerce, Magento, IBM Commerce, Shopify and Demandware's e-commerce platform to be selected. Still, Buyable Pins represent a major breakthrough in the e-commerce world.

Reason #3: Mobile Internet usage is dominating desktop

As you have seen in the beginning of this article, the study made by KPCB which predicted the year that mobile would surpass desktop usage was corroborated by the study made by Comcast.

The Comcast study shown before shown mobile usage surpassed desktop in 2014. This isn't the only study that studies this matter, however. According to another study made by StatCounter in November 2016, this is something that just happened last year.

As you can see in the image above, in a seven-year period from October 2009 to October 2016, worldwide mobile and tablet Internet usage went from 0% to 51.3%, surpassing desktop usage by a small margin.

Nonetheless, there are a lot of differences between countries. This same study found that in the UK and US, for example, mobile hasn't surpassed desktop usage yet, while in others, like India and China, it has by a big margin.

This change in content consumption isn't the only important change that has happened. In late 2015, in a study that analyzed $7.8 billion dollars of annualized ad spend, Marin Software found mobile has overtaken desktop for the first time, with more than 50% of budgets spent on mobile ads.

KPCB, the famous venture capital firm that made the great prediction in 2008, made in 2015 another study in which they analyzed how people accessed Internet. Not only they found mobile has surpassed desktop, as they have predicted before, they also found people spend 5.6 hours a day on the Internet. What's surprising from that finding is that from the total time, 2.8 hours were spent on a mobile device. This is a significant increase from 2010 when an average of just 0.4 hours a day was spent on the Internet via mobile device or smartphone.

In order to adapt to these incredible changes, you should follow the advice shown before about responsive design, mobile website and apps. This will help your website be ready to take advantage of the fast-paced changes in Internet usage.

Conclusion

Mobile marketing is growing like it has never before. That growth is creating new unparalleled opportunities that any kind of business can take advantage of.

Your business needs to start adapting for mobile commerce, at least if your goal is to sell products or services online. Most importantly, it needs to adapt for mobile visits and usage. This isn't an option anymore, people will expect your website to be ready.

If you adapt to the changes mentioned in this article, your business will be poised to grow in 2017.

Will your business make the changes necessary to grow?

 Ivan Kreimer is a freelance content writer that helps SaaS business increase their traffic, leads, and sales. Previously, he worked as an online marketing consultant helping both small and large companies drive more traffic and revenue. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook

As a Sales Manager, you want things to run smoothly for your sales team.

Unfortunately, there are several barriers that may get in the way of your salespeople’s success.

But as with many challenges, there are ways around (or even through) them if you have a plan of attack.

With that in mind, here are three sales barriers you may encounter and how you can lead your team past these obstacles.

3 Common Barriers to Your Sales Team’s Success

1.   The Fear of Being Rejected

One of the most common barriers for salespeople (and many other people) is the fear of rejection.

Cold calling strangers and trying to get them to purchase from your company can be intimidating for your salespeople.

Why does fear of rejection occur?

It happens to salespeople for several reasons, but often times, it is a result of tying their career success to self-worth.

The idea of being rejected by a potential customer not only has financial implications; there is a deep-seated fear that they are failing at their job.

Luckily, there are ways to mitigate, or even work through, the fear of being rejected.

Here is how you can help your salespeople break through this barrier:

Help them change their perception. During a slump, a fearful sales rep might think prospects are not interested without any realistic reasons.

The best way to help them through this is to encourage them to stop making assumptions.

Remind your team that cold calling involves talking and selling to someone you have never met, so you cannot assume that they will reject you.

Focus on activity metrics. Although some people thrive under pressure, having to close a deal “or else” can create a sense of fear sometimes.

Instead of focusing on how many sales your reps make (something they cannot control), shift the focus to what they can control—the amount of phone calls they make.

When you give the control back to your sales team, there is less pressure on them, and they can overcome their fear of rejection.

Explain how your products/services can help your customers. Without a doubt, it is easier to sell something that you feel good about and that you feel knowledgeable about. If possible, use hands-on experiences with the products/services your salespeople will be selling so that they can really explain things well to the potential customers.

Show your reps how your products or services can help others, thus giving them:

• A boost in morale
• A deeper understanding of your products/services
• One less reason to fear rejection from a potential customer

2. Poor Communication

With 92% of all customer interactions occurring over the phone, communication is critical when it comes to sales.

But when sales reps read from a script or try to influence a customer with buzzwords and jargon, communication often becomes a sales barrier.

Why is that?

Because when your sales rep is talking at a customer and pitching them your product or service, they are not listening—and listening is the key to connecting with someone.

Listening helps your sales reps understand a customer’s:

• Pain points
• Concerns
• Needs/Wants
• Preferences in communication (their language)

Understanding these factors will make the sales process more of a dialogue instead of a one-way conversation.

Improving your reps’ communication skills can also help them show the value of your products/services to your customers, which can help them close sales more effectively.

3. Lack of content and/or social media marketing

A common issue with many companies is when marketing and sales teams do not coordinate their efforts.

A lack of content or social media marketing creates a sales barrier that will hinder your team’s ability to sell, as well as the general growth of your company.

Why is content marketing so critical to the success of your sales team?

Because research shows that companies with a solid content marketing strategy (such as creating informative blog posts) have a huge advantage over companies that do not.

Why is social media so important for your sales team?

Social media may seem trivial in the world of sales, but roughly 90 percent of marketers say that social media marketing has increased exposure for their business.

Not only that, but among internet users (on a daily basis):

• 79% use Facebook
• 32% use Instagram
• 31% use Pinterest
• 29% use LinkedIn
• 24% use Twitter

That means you are missing out on countless potential leads if you are not working with a solid social media marketing strategy.

Both content and social media marketing allow your sales reps to:

• Find new leads
• Build relationships with prospects via digital channels
• Understand a prospect’s needs and wants more clearly

So how can you help your sales team overcome this common sales barrier?

Work with your marketing team to create content that educates the buyer. When your content is interactive and helps the customer learn, it can:

• Break the ice for your sales team
• Build trust
• Separate your company from competitors
• Give your sales reps the opportunity to answer questions directly from your customers

Overall, trying to align the efforts of your marketing and sales team may be challenging, but the benefits outweigh those difficulties.

Sales teams that work with marketing improve their ability to close deals by 67%!

Not only that, but roughly 90% of companies with sales and marketing teams that work together see measurable increases in their lead conversion.

Final Thoughts

CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, said, “You can focus on things that are barriers or you can focus on scaling the wall or redefining the problem.”

As a sales leader, overcoming sales obstacles with your team requires you to address each barrier and lead your team past them.

Communication is the common thread with many of these sales barriers, so a great place to start with your team is making sure they can openly communicate their concerns to you.

From there you can scale the walls of each problem, or even break through them, together as a team.

Can you think of any other common sales barriers your sales team faces? Feel free to share in the comments section below.

The post How to Help Your Team Break Through Their Top 3 Sales Barriers appeared first on SalesDrive, LLC.

After implementing inbound marketing, you probably noticed an increase in the leads collecting in your database. But your sales team is demanding more qualified leads.

So how do you generate more warm, qualified leads? These four steps will help ensure a successful strategy for creating more sales qualified leads with your inbound marketing efforts—and satisfy your ever-hungry sales team.

Discuss What a “Sales Qualified Lead” Means

Marketing and sales must see eye to eye on what qualifies a lead as ready to be contacted by the sales team, otherwise no one will achieve their goals. For example, the sales team will not be able to close leads who are either unqualified or not far enough down the sales funnel, and leads will be turned off by the salesperson’s misplaced efforts.

Marketing and sales need to agree on what a qualified lead is to achieve synergy. This step alone can make a significant difference. Once you’re on the same page, the right leads can be handed off at the right time.

To make your hand-off process as efficient and effective as possible, consider using an automated process. Learn how to set up a CRM (customer relationship management system) with this free guide.

Develop Your Lead Flow Strategy

Now that you’ve discussed what a sales qualified lead looks like, it’s time to put it down on paper. Create a document that clearly defines your different lifecycle stages, when and how they are handed off to sales, when and how these leads should be followed up with, and any other labeling conventions for leads that you’ll be using in your CRM.

Share this document with all company departments and be sure to make this a living document—changing with your marketing and sales department as your database and company grows.

While the document should be shared with the entire company and suggestions for tweaks and improvements should come from many angles, make one person the document gatekeeper to keep it in order and make any needed updates to the CRM. This document will help you identify, and more importantly avoid, any bottlenecked, mislabeled or lost leads.

Set Up a Simple Lead Scoring System

According to HubSpot, 79 percent of B2B marketers have not established lead scoring. No wonder generating qualified leads for sales is proving difficult for so many marketing teams.

By applying a simple scoring system to your leads, your sales team will be alerted when a lead meets specific criteria. If marketing and sales have agreed on a predetermined value, they’re more likely to be notified when a lead is in fact “qualified.”

Here’s an overview of how to set up your lead scoring system:

1. Determine point values for the key factors you’ve chosen. Whether it’s job title, industry, annual revenue or number of pages viewed on your website, you need to decide on point values for each of these factors. To keep it simple, consider a point scale of 0 to 100, where 0 means less qualified, and 100 means more qualified.
2. Score your leads. Now it’s time to rate all your leads, which is usually done by assigning positive and negative attributes to each contact. Positive attributes might include actions like conversions or webpages visited. Negative attributes could be your contact opting not to receive email updates from you.
3. Set a score threshold for when a lead is sales-ready. Your sales team can be notified when a lead has met enough of your criteria to be sales-ready. This could be a point value of 85, for instance. Work with sales to come up with a point value and transfer method that makes sense to them, whether it’s an email, a notification within your CRM or another indicator.

Above all, this lead scoring system will help your sales team prioritize leads.

Beyond lead scoring, companies should also establish a lead nurturing program so sales can turn prospects over to marketing when they still aren’t ready to buy.

Focus on Lead Nurturing

Earlier, we discussed positive and negative attributes for your leads. Lead nurturing is the process whereby you can increase interest with your prospects using targeted content. Their score goes up with content they open, click or engage with. It goes down when they either do nothing or opt out of emails.

Nurturing is just like it sounds—think of it as a process. For instance, we’ll say one of your leads opted in to receive emails from you. But when they signed up for a webinar, they didn’t show. Maybe they didn’t think it would be the best use of their time after all, but maybe they just forgot. At this point, you could send them a free report or guide to gauge interest.

In this way, you can continue to deliver expected, relevant content on subjects the lead is interested in learning about, increase their score and bring them to the point of being warm and qualified.

A lead who’s just become aware of their problem (awareness stage) may not be ready to buy. This is not uncommon. Many do not buy until they feel they’ve adequately researched their challenge and possible solutions. Leads in this category may be interested in comparisons between your product and your competitor’s product. Or they may just want to learn more about the issue first.

Lead nurturing is key to generating quality leads for sales.

The Power of a Sales Qualified Lead

While it may take more effort and time to garner and develop sales qualified leads, they are more likely to turn into customers and remain loyal to your brand. And the lifetime value of a qualified customer is worth the energy, don’t you agree?

Let’s face it: writing content is hard work and takes a lot of time. That’s true for beginner and veteran marketers alike. So anything you can do to increase your output would really help.

What if I told you that you could triple the amount of content you publish, with only a fraction of extra work?

Content time and effort

Think about how you might write a blog post or other fairly meaty piece for publication. What takes all the time and effort?

1. You have to think of a topic and compare that topic to the interests (personas) in your target market to make sure there’s a match.
2. You need to choose and research a keyword or phrase that will be the focus of your article. This will help your content get found in searches by your target audience.
3. You’ve got to write a catchy title that uses your keyword. This takes a lot of brainstorming, variations, creative writing and thought.
4. With a winning title in hand, you need to create an outline of your piece.
5. Research comes next. You need to find facts and stories that help you build credibility and make your article come alive.
6. Then you write. And write. And rewrite until you have something that’s thorough, interesting, true and compelling.
7. At this point you look for graphics that will illustrate your work.
8. Finally, you publish using WordPress or another platform.

Although your own content writing process might vary a bit, there’s no questioning the amount of time and effort it takes to get from a blank page to a published piece.

The secret shortcut to more content

If you’re a sole proprietor, entrepreneur, small business owner or freelancer you probably don’t have a large bench of writers to help you increase your output.

You’re it. So you need a shortcut.

But sorry, the secret isn’t to skip any of the steps above when you create original content; they’re all important.

The secret is to skip steps when you multiply your original article in both form and placement.

Steps one through seven are where the hard work lies. Thinking. Research. Writing.

So if you could create additional content by skipping steps one through seven, and only do step eight (publishing) you’d have something, right?

Here are three ways to do that.

Content plan #1: Reformat and republish

Once your post is written it’s fairly easy to republish it in another form.

One easy way to do this in the B2B world is to publish your post as a LinkedIn Pulse article. You might want to tweak the headline a bit, add a short bio and include a link back to the original article.

You could also reformat the written post into a slideshow and share it on LinkedIn’s SlideShare channel. To do this, summarize the main points as bullets and use your slide application’s graphics tools to tell the same story visually.

A slideshow can also be useful when you present your message in person or on a webinar.

Add motion, sound and images

With a bit more effort you could convert your content into a video or audio script and record yourself with your smart phone. Voila: instant video, YouTube upload or podcast.

If you’re graphically gifted (or know someone who is) you can even create an info-graphic highlighting the core concepts in your article.

The payoff

Do all of these, and one post morphs into five or more additional pieces of content!

Content plan #2: Syndicate and share

Once you’ve written a few posts to establish your credibility, try to syndicate your work on channels other than your own website.

The Web is full of magazines, newsletters, round-ups, communities and other outlets that are hungry for content, too. Their model is often to publish or republish the work of many authors – and you could become one of those authors.

For example, after a few months of writing my own blog I applied to become a contributor at Business2Community – and was accepted. This is my first B2C syndicated article.

Syndicate existing articles

Most syndicated sites will accept articles you’ve already published so you don’t need to write original posts for them unless you want to.

Look for syndication sites in targeted searches, Google alerts, and content shared by others on your social channels. Research your chosen topic and you’re bound to find a number of relevant multi-author sites.

The payoff

Start syndicating on just two sites other than your own, and you’ve tripled your content output!

Content plan #3: Derive and drive

This last multiplier is best used with very large pieces of content such as e-books, online learning courses and the like.

A large project like an e-book can easily take 100 hours or more to build, and may require a financial payout as well for additional research, graphics and design.

That’s a lot of investment. But e-books and their close relatives are at the top of the food chain in content marketing. Their value and depth make them very effective as lead-generators and even revenue sources, so they can be worth the investment.

To get a return on that investment, smart marketers often plan coordinated campaigns centered on each large piece of content they create.

Derivative content: Growing the tree

I call these “derive and drive” campaigns because they derive pieces of content from a main publication and use those derivatives to drive an audience back toward the main publication itself.

Imagine this process as a tree. The main publication is at the root of the tree. Each chapter or section of that publication could be re-purposed as a blog post – the branches. And each of the main points in each blog post could be repurposed as a Tweet or social share – the leaves.

(Some content marketing pundits use a pyramid or pillar image for this same concept. But I like the connected, organic nature of a tree to show this process better.)

Driving back to the root

The smallest derivatives – the many social shares or “leaves” – point readers back to the blog post from which they were derived. The larger derivatives – the blog posts or “branches” – point readers back to the main publication. The main publication – the root – is hopefully valuable enough to generate a lead or a sale.

The payoff

This content plan multiplies your output many-fold. But it does more than that. It also gives you a publishing map that can help you fill weeks or even months of your calendar. And it creates a coordinated campaign that leverages the value of your highest-cost content at every point.

Do you want a deeper dive?

• Which of these three content plans intrigues you most?
• Which do you think you could use to kick-start your own marketing efforts?
• Are there specific tactics (SlideShare, video production, content trees?) that you’d like to learn more about?
• Are there other techniques you’ve tried?

Share your ideas and interests in the comments below.

Thank you!

This article was originally published here.