The success of any sales team training ultimately comes down to sales leaders understanding two factors: what your team needs to know, and when they need to know it. Too much “what” and your sales team can rattle off facts and numbers for days, but won’t know how to execute on them. Too much “when” and teams will be in the right situations at the right time, without the knowledge on how to close the deal.

Addressing these two questions enables sales teams to discover learning subjects that can be applied in a productive way with real impact on revenue and overall business health. The “what” of sales team training may need to come first, but make no mistake that “when” is just as important. For now let’s start by discussing how the organization of a sales team can make learning that much more effective.

Roles, goals, and responsibilities. Oh my!

Occasionally figuring out the lay of the land in a sales team is just good business practice. Before implementing a training program, it’s best to take a step back and ask: who am I working with?

Of course you know all the people in your office (I hope!), the question is more about their positions. Defining the shape of your sales team is the basest level of building effective sales team learning. Let’s use the sales team here at Lessonly as an example. Our organization looks something like:

• One Chief Sales Officer
• Two Directors of Sales
• Nine Account Executives
• Fourteen Sales Development Representatives
• One Sales Intern

These titles are important for the fact that everyone on our sales team has different roles and responsibilities, but are all working toward the same goal. Our intern’s role in that goal might be a little different from my own as the CSO, but our mission is similar. The next piece of the team training puzzle is explicitly defining what teams need to do in their jobs. Bear with me for a moment and ask yourself this: what exactly do I need my employees to do in their roles on this sales team?

Listing out responsibilities like this starts to look like a rough outline of how the sales process works. Who does the prospecting? Who reaches out to outbound prospects? Who travels to see clients? Who coaches and trains the rest of the team? Be careful not to go too far down the rabbit hole with this, try and stick to the responsibilities that really define what that roles are on your team.

Here at Lessonly, we’ve found that effective training plans incorporate shot-calling in the form of goals. This gives our team something to aim for and exceed. For example, Kyle is an Inbound SDR on my team. His responsibilities are to answer direct inbound calls, handle live chat requests, and prospect customers who have found Lessonly on the web, among other things. If his goal was to source $40,000 in annual revenue every quarter while consistently setting 10 demos per week, we’ve got everything we need to make him better at his job. And when Kyle is better as inbound sales, the company benefits.

Learning’s investment shows quickly

With roles, goals, and responsibilities set, the areas for training start to present themselves. Picking on Kyle once more, he’s going to need to know a few things specific to the Inbound SDR role such as:

• How to use Intercom, Salesforce, and Lessonly
• How to assess customer pain points and needs
• How to demo our product
• How to be cordial on the phone and online

These types of statements are perfect fodder for sales training. Quick, digestible Lessons on subjects like these are exactly the type of learning that makes someone better at their job. Instead of putting a customer on hold to ask myself or another manager for clarification on pricing, Kyle can refer to a Lesson on the subject and quickly find his answer. With more memory recall like that, Kyle is going to remember that piece of information faster and provide future prospects with better service. Little improvements like these add up in the long run, building a team that embraces learning in the interest of doing their jobs better.

Getting a training plan like this into action sets the stage for improvement down the road. Once reps hit a goal, the question changes from “what worked?,” to “how can we do it better?” Think of it as graduating from Sales 101 to Sales 201. Learning begins to focus on more specialized and niche information that managers can use to really tip the scales in favor of your team. Instead of setting 10 demos per week, Kyle out-performed his goal and scheduled 15 because of a certain email script he was using. That’s when we take that script, figure out what made it work so well, and send it to the rest of our team in the form of a Lesson. Now we’ve taken Kyle’s success and translated it across the entire sales team. That’s the type of effect that sales learning can have for your team.

So take a few minutes and start sketching out the shape of your sales team. Some of the steps in the process might seem a little self-explanatory, but once you know exactly who you need to train and what they need to learn, you can figure out how to make them better.

The post The Two Questions that Drive Scalable Sales Team Growth appeared first on OpenView Labs.

At least once a week, two newsletters appear in my inbox that have nothing to do with marketing or copywriting: Further from Brian Clark and the RW rundown from Runner’s World. One is about living your best life, while the other is full of tips & advice for runners. They feed different sides of my body and mind that are also important to me and my business. If I’m not healthy in body and mind, then I can’t run my business and help my tech & sports clients with theirs!

Why am I talking about these seemingly unrelated newsletters to you, my tech content marketing audience? I’m talking about them because they are perfect examples of a key content marketing strategy. The strategy that increases your authority with your readers/audience by delivering value in your content. Let me say that again:

You increase authority with your audience when you deliver value in your content.

Further does this by sending me weekly messages filled with summaries of posts from around the personal development world on a single theme. This past week’s theme was “Experience less of yourself to achieve more”, while some of my favourites include “Find your next great idea” and “Develop an exercise habit with this simple 3-step strategy”. Not every theme resonates with me, but enough of them do that I look forward to the newsletter each week. I’ve learned how to declutter my home, how to be more present & mindful in everyday life, and even got some tips on how to incorporate more exercise into my schedule (something important for me as it helps keep my anxiety issues in check.)

The Runner’s World rundown is another good newsletter for me since I’m an intermediate runner and am always looking for more advice on how to improve. Where the rundown really succeeds is in letting me tailor the newsletter to topics I’m interested in, like training and nutrition. I’m not as big into the shoe reviews as I don’t run enough to need the latest and greatest information every couple of months (since you’re supposed to change your shoes every 500-800kms (or 300-500mi for my English system readers ) When I need a new pair, I know I can simply go to their website to read about the latest shoes then. As I run longer and more frequently, training is a bigger issue for me, so I need to know about the exercises I should be doing to strengthen the right muscles so that my runs are easy, efficient, and not too hard to recover from.

These two newsletters offer me great value in their content, so I keep subscribing. The same principle applies to tech content marketing too.

The tech explanation for delivering more value

Words, especially all that tech jargon we love, can be confusing and numbing to your audience, causing them to turn off and ignore your message. There’s just too much content coming at them today, and you can almost see their eyes glaze over as they see your content because of all that technobabble. It’s your task as content creator and publisher to capture their focus and deliver value.

Not only that, but it can also have a significant effect on your search engine results too. Search engines like Google place a higher priority on content that provides value, than on standard web page content. To better understand this, let’s look at this machine learning study from Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting. Enge wanted to see how well Google’s algorithms “learned” and then filtered search results.

Enge’s team replaced the text on blog category pages with content specifically crafted for the readers. That is, they replaced the generic “SEO text” they had on it (as most websites do on their category pages) with mini-guides specific to the categories on which the content resided. They saw a 68% increase in traffic to those pages and a drop of 11% to the control pages that were left as-is. Search engines are constantly improving their machine learning to better understand human language, so the more quality content you put on a web page or blog post, the better the chances are for the algorithms to pick it up and display it higher in the SERPs.

This is why I advise and encourage my clients to think outside of the box when it comes to their marketing message and the way they broadcast that message. You will always be rewarded with higher traffic, more engaged audiences, and increased brand awareness.

How to embed value in your tech content marketing and increase your authority

Now that you understand the tech mechanics of it, it’s time to get down to the two strategies you can use to embed value in your content marketing and increase your authority with your audience.

Step 1: Inspire your readers

For the most part, inspiring your readers is relatively easy, since you’re happy to talk about the magic of your tech products. But what about those nitty gritty product pages that simply have to give all the tech specs about your products?

By appealing to their curiosity and hunger for solutions to their business obstacles, your inspiration factor increases. It’s not just that your servers can store 2 PBs of data and handle 1.1 GB/sec of bandwidth transfer, but rather, that your customers will not need to buy another server for two years and that it can scale up to take the load of all the new employees you’ll be hiring this year.

The product pages and webinars promote your products and services, giving them the straight-up facts about your products. Consistent blog content and email newsletters inspire your readers with answers to their questions and solutions to their business problems they didn’t realize they had (or that your tech products would solve).

You become a source of inspiration to your readers because they see that you’re listening to them. You’re not just spitting out content or information at them, but you are listening to them and creating content that speaks directly to them.

The best way to demonstrate that you’re listening is by mirroring their problem/obstacle/concern in relevant content. For example, you could:

• Create a blog post series that explains how to solve a common industry problem.
• Highlight your next webinar that is hosting an industry thought leader talking about a relevant topic.
• Participate in a hashtag chat or series by posting relevant content on your social media channels, like a tweet chat on Twitter or a hashtag series on Instagram.

Step 2: Impart secondary value to your readers

This is where many content marketers fail, as they simply forget to take action here or let their efforts fade away. But if you’re able to continue delivering value to your readers in a secondary way, then you’ll increase your authority even more.

Your primary value is to solve the main business issue of your clients with your tech products. So you provide content that helps readers discover, learn, or promote your products in a way that leads to a buying decision.

Your secondary value happens when you move from a simple transactional relationship to the “go-to source for any question I might have about the industry or problems faced by others like me” type of relationship. Your readers see you as THE resource for information and so come back frequently for updates — plus they’ll recommend you to everyone they know when speaking about relevant topics with others.

Final thoughts on value and authority

Everyone can produce content, but not everyone can deliver value in that content. That’s why there are a ton of stagnant tech blogs and email newsletters that only go out once a quarter.

Yet the ones that have invested the time and marketing dollars into their content marketing programs are reaping some serious rewards. You see them pop up as examples in “best of” posts and articles and they’re cited in publications far outside of their industry domain. They understand the value of providing value to their readers and audience.

It’s time to show your market that you understand it too.

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Please leave a comment. If you got a knowledge boost from this article, I encourage you to share it with your crowd.

You’ve heard me say it before and you’ll hear me say it again: Sales is changing, fast, and nowhere is this more evident than in the decline of field sales.

Think about it: It wasn’t long ago that sales cycles began with a knock on the door, not a cold call. But with the rise of technology and the prioritization of efficiency, field salespeople are quickly being replaced by inside salespeople.

That’s not a bad thing, per se. But there are aspects of field sales that modern inside salespeople fail to properly appreciate, and that could help them be better inside salespeople.

Sure, a door-to-door field salesperson may not be as “efficient” or “productive” as inside sales reps making 300+ calls every day, but that doesn’t mean they’re obsolete. Far from it. A recent study has shown that face-to-face requests are 34 times more successful than email requests. In fact, some of the most powerful sales lessons I learned took place across a door frame, not a phone line.

If we don’t take steps to preserve those lessons, we’re going to lose them. And if we lose the lessons of field sales, we lose the heart of all sales: Relationships.

So before they’re gone for good, let’s take a look at the lessons of the past and talk about how to apply them to the future.

Want more tips to win at inside sales? Get started with our free Startup Sales Success course here. 

The disappearing art of field sales

When I say “field sales,” what comes to mind? I don’t know about you, but the first thing I think of is the stereotypical door-to-door vacuum sales guy.

You know the type: He knocks on your door, invites himself in, throws a bunch of crap on your carpet, and blows you away with the power of his vacuum (which is much better than yours, by the way).

Many of you are probably glad this era of sales is coming to an end. After all, there are a lot of negative connotations attached to it. At the very least, it’s highly inefficient by today’s standards:

• Today, you can sell to many people at once through phone calls, text messages, and emails. Back then, you could only pitch to one family at a time.
• Today, you can take your product to the entire world through advertising, webinars, and content creation. Back then, you were often limited to your zip code or, at best, your state.
• Today, you can analyze real-time sales data for you and your inside sales team at any time. Back then, you probably barely knew your own metrics, let alone the guy’s upstate.

And yes, those limitations were very real and often very frustrating. But beyond the negative stereotypes, something good came out of field sales, too: Humanity. Connection. The ability, the necessity, to build genuine relationships, one prospect at a time.  And if we’re not careful, we’re gonna lose that humanity in our endless pursuit of efficiency.

Let’s take a closer look at what this humanity looked like in a field sales environment.

1. Unparalleled context

There’s something immensely powerful about selling to someone in their own home: You get a rare glimpse into who this person is as a human being, not just as a prospect.

You see their photos on the wall, meet their family, and really experience the way they live. All of this provides an unparalleled level of context. It helps you understand this person on a deeper level and builds a very personal, very close relationship.

You lose these things over the phone. Sure, they can tell you about their family or what’s important to them, but that just isn’t the same as experiencing it firsthand.

2. Instant referrals

As you build relationships with field sales prospects, you also have the opportunity to build relationships with those closest to them. For example, maybe they’ve got friends or family over during your pitch, immediately introducing more potential customers.

If not, all you gotta do is walk next door and you’re selling to their neighbor: “Hey, I just set your neighbor up with an amazing new vacuum and I’d love to do the same for you. Do you mind if I come in for a few minutes?”

Or think about old-school enterprise sales, where you’d spend 3+ years golfing with the CEO of a Fortune 500 company before finally closing that $15M deal. In most cases, you weren’t just golfing with him; you were golfing with him and his buddies, immediately opening the door for new deals.

3. Undivided attention

I’m just going to lay this out plain and simple: Inside sales breeds distractions.

When you talk to someone in person, you’ve got their full attention. But when you talk to them over the phone? Not so much, especially if they’re sitting in front of their computer (and who isn’t?). Even if you do all the right things to hold a prospects’ attention on a sales call, they still have dozens of other things on their mind.

Even worse, inside salespeople are just as prone to distraction as their prospects. Between a bombardment of Slack messages and the 20+ tabs they’ve got open, undivided focus isn’t likely (unless you practice these tips).

But when you’re sitting in front of your prospect? In their home or office? You’ve got their full attention and they’ve got yours.

Humanizing inside sales techniques (before it’s too late)

In field sales, the gap between prospect and salesperson is minuscule. But as we utilize more sales technologies and adopt more inside sales processes, that gap grows wider.

Left on its own, this gap will eventually grow so wide that the emotional connection and commitment between prospect and salesperson will be lost. And once it’s lost, sales won’t be relational anymore; it’ll be transactional and when sales becomes purely transactional, you as a salesperson become fully replaceable.

All of that said, let me be clear: At Close.io, we love inside sales. It’s why we’ve built our own inside sales software. I’m not saying you need to give it up, but I am saying you can’t be so driven by the efficiency of inside sales that you lose the heart of field sales.

And here’s the good news: You don’t have to. Let’s take a look at five ways to preserve the spirit of field sales as we march into the future of inside sales.

1.  Separate sales cycles from life cycles

How long is your average sales cycle? Two, maybe three months? And what happens when that cycle ends and the deal closes? Does your prospect-turned-customer ever hear from you again?

In most cases, no, because modern salespeople often confuse sales cycles with life cycles. Don’t make that mistake.

When you think about the lifecycle of your relationship with a prospect, think in decades, not weeks or months. Sure, you may close this one deal in the next two months, but the relationship shouldn’t end when the deal closes.

After all, this person may move up in the company. Their needs may expand. Maybe they’ll meet someone who needs your product. Or maybe they’ll even launch a new business altogether. Don’t you want to be there when that happens?

Then, stop treating relationships like sales cycles. Every relationship has a potential lifetime of value if you treat it that way.

Note: This is especially true for prospects who don’t immediately become customers. If all you see is a three-month sales cycle, you’ll give up after your first rejection. But if you think about working with them over the next 10-20 years, you’ll follow up relentlessly until you get the deal.

2. Infuse personality into your communication

By nature, inside sales has a degree of disconnect and distance. In most cases, you’re closing deals without ever having met your prospects in person. It’s hard to relate to a disembodied voice over the phone, so find ways to give your prospects something more “human” to connect with.

Your social media profile pictures are a great place to start. That picture of you in a nice suit against a green screen background might impress executives, but it probably isn’t going to score you any points with prospects.

Try something more personal and relatable, something that creates a picture of who you are as a person, not just a professional. For example, make your profile picture of:

• You and your family
• You doing something you love
• You in your favorite team’s jersey

Got your social media accounts optimized? Great! Now infuse some personality into that bland email signature.

3. Produce engaging personal content

For the more creative among you, content production is a great way to form a genuine connection with your audience. When you share what you know, believe in, and care about, you allow prospects and customers to get to know you as a person, not just a salesperson.

The most obvious way to do this is through blog posts, but that’s certainly not the only way. For example, you could run a podcast, produce videos, engage on social media, or curate high-quality content.

Predictable Revenue’s Aaron Ross (@motoceo) masters this practice with his sales and revenue-focused newsletter. Since I’m already pretty familiar with those topics, I’d probably have unsubscribed long ago if not for one thing: A large portion of every newsletter is dedicated to his personal life.

Whether it’s an update about his travels in China, an inside look at the challenges of adoption, or a story about an adventure with his daughter, there’s always something that makes me feel connected to him as a human being.

So ask yourself: What’s important to you? What are you passionate about? What makes you "you"?

Find your passions and wear them on your sleeve. Your prospects will relate to them a lot quicker than a sales pitch.

4. Mix up your communication channels

Whenever possible, ditch phone calls and emails in favor of video calls, even if the setting isn't ideal or the lighting isn’t perfect. Just being able to see the person you’re talking to provides a lot more context and connection than a standard phone call.

That said, video calls aren’t always realistic. In those instances, experiment with the channels you use to communicate with your prospect. Don’t just focus on phone calls or emails; switch it up and throw in a few curveballs. For example, social media pings and text messages can be a great way to break through the noise and get their attention.

Be creative. Experiment. Take risks. Find the communication channel that works best for your prospect and leverage that. For example, if you’re one of the few sending them text messages (and they don’t mind the texts), you’ve got a direct line to their full attention.

5. Demand attention when you need it (because you won’t have it for long)

In field sales, it wasn’t unrealistic to expect your prospect’s full attention. But in inside sales? It’s not gonna happen. Attention is a scarce commodity, and it only becomes rarer the greater the distance between yourself and your prospect.

Instead of trying to fight the inevitable, accept the reality of the situation and work around it. After all, you don’t need their full attention for the entire pitch, only the most important parts. So identify what those parts are and, when they come up, ask for your prospect’s attention. For example:

• “What I’m about to say is the most important thing you’ll hear from me today.”
• “If you forget everything else I say, remember this one thing.”
• “This next part’s important and I think you’re gonna want to hear it.”

Once you’ve asked for their attention, build up the anticipation by silently counting backward from three, then drop whatever bomb you’ve prepared. This ensures that if they were distracted by email, Facebook, Slack, or any number of other channels (and they probably were), you’ve got their full attention—at least for the moment.

Be a salesperson, not a salesperson

All of this said, I’m not saying you need to start every sales conversation with 30 minutes of excruciating small talk. Trust me, I hate wasting time as much as your prospect would. Be respectful of the other person’s time. What I’m saying is this: Focus on the “person” half of “salesperson.”

As we step into the future of sales, it’s important we don’t forget the lessons that brought us here. The only way to thrive in the new sales environment is to keep reinventing and reinvesting the relational side of sales.

So be real. Be you. Be relatable. That’s what made vacuum salespeople successful 50 years ago, it’s what makes SaaS salespeople successful today, and it’s what will make the next breed of salespeople successful 50 years from now.

 

 

Want more sales advice? Join our free Startup Sales Success email course. Every week, you'll get an email showing you how to improve your sales process.

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Leaders and their teams often pride themselves on their ability to deal with an onslaught of decisions. But the reality is they often end up making rapid-fire calls on issues big and small and wasting their time. They and their organizations would be better served by an approach that treats decisions as a deliberately structured workstream.

Consider the experience of one of the world’s largest footwear manufacturers, whose leaders engaged in an exercise that others can use to revamp the way they make decisions. In its fast-changing industry, big challenges loomed on many fronts. Computer-driven, automated manufacturing that could make reshoring of factories feasible threatened to redraw the supply-chain map. Advanced materials and new construction methods were bringing far greater complexity to manufacturing processes. Product innovations (such as sensors in athletic shoes to detect incipient injury) could add additional layers of complexity. And like all organizations, the manufacturer also faced a steady stream of more mundane challenges: how to comply with product specifications from customers, improve yields at underperforming sites, or refurbish corporate headquarters.

All such issues require decisions — and in some cases, a series of decisions — that differ in magnitude, urgency, and complexity. But in the culture of firefighting that had developed at the company, decisions were treated in isolation or in response to day-to-day developments in the business. Moreover, managers and teams were unsure who owned what decisions, constantly kicking them upstairs and putting more demands on the senior team. As a result, the team found itself handling everything from big-picture questions like how much to invest in the “factory of the future” to far-less-momentous issues like equipment purchases to improve the throughput of a single production line.

Recognizing that ensuring high-quality decisions would require a disciplined process, the executive team embarked on an exercise designed to create a repeatable process for prioritizing decisions and determine the right methodology for each. It consists of these four steps:

1. Compile a list.

Create a list of the decisions likely to arise in coming months, without regard for their significance — everything from major capital investments to promotions to when to hold the next all-hands meeting. Although most large organizations may have defined processes for this, rapidly-changing situations, short-term crises, and urgent needs from customers can overwhelm the team’s agenda. Often they also fail to consider the behavioral aspects of team dynamics — for example, how various members exert their power to get their issues on the agenda. Dynamics between teams can come into play as well: For example, how does a senior regional team interact with the global team?

For the footwear manufacturer, the exercise turned out to be less straightforward than it initially appeared. Using a time horizon of 12 months, members of the senior team offered lists that differed widely. Disagreement emerged about which decisions fell within the specified time frame. Many members listed numerous issues that they expected to bubble up from within their functions. And it soon became clear that little agreement existed about who owned which decisions in the company.

But once the team had compiled the list and become aware of all the decisions members felt needed to be addressed, they could remove duplications and combine similar decisions into more coordinated, larger decisions. For instance, the list included a decision about embarking on a process-innovation strategy and one about bringing the production process closer to the customer. The process-innovation question was then rolled up into a larger decision about a broader customer-centric strategy.

2. Understand their characteristics.

Ultimately, some 26 decisions emerged from the first step. The team then characterized them according to four criteria — magnitude, organizational complexity, analytical complexity, and subject-matter challenge — and used a point system to assign each decision a score.

For magnitude, the metrics included size of capital investment or operational expenditure and time to expected benefits; the greater the investment or longer the time-to-benefit, the higher the point score. Measures of organizational complexity included number of stakeholder groups involved, their degree of alignment, degree of power, and the degree of effort required to achieve alignment, with point scores escalating accordingly. Measures of analytical complexity included quality of relevant data, degree of uncertainty, number of alternatives, and degree of clarity in measures of value, again with escalating point scores. Measures of content challenge included the team’s degree of familiarity with the business or technical issues involved; the less familiarity, the higher the score.

3. Sort them into three categories. 

Based on the scores that resulted, the team could assign each of the 26 decisions to one of three categories, each of which requires a distinct decision-making process:

Strategic. These highest-scoring decisions, entailing a great deal of both organizational and analytical complexity, are usually the relatively small number of decisions that will determine the long-term direction of the company. For the footwear manufacturer, these strategic decisions included where and how to deploy automation and the location of factories for proximity to customers. Such decisions require addressing complex organizational challenges such as multiple, often-conflicting stakeholders with differing values, experiences, or cultural needs. Further, these decisions also have considerable analytical complexity such as large, often-incomplete data with considerable ranges of uncertainty.

Strategic decisions usually require the most time and attention of senior teams as well as a rigorous, comprehensive, and uniform decision-making process. Such a process frames the question accurately, generates multiple alternatives (including hybrids of two or more alternatives), generates a wide range of information from experts inside and outside the organization, identifies values and trade-offs, uses sound reasoning (not “gut feel”) that takes uncertainty and risk into account, and concludes with a commitment to action.

Significant. These decisions score in the middle range, require a sound business case, and together can add up to considerable investment. Typical significant decisions include such issues as sourcing, new products, and make-or-buy IT investments. The decision-making process may not require an in-depth application of each step in the strategic-decision-making process. Rather the process should be tailored, depending on the nature of each significant decision.

For significant decisions that are organizationally complex but involve little analytical complexity, the process should focus on the best means for bringing people along and getting buy-in. For the footwear manufacturer, choosing an approach to ERP implementation represented such a decision.

Significant decisions characterized by a high degree of analytical complexity but low organizational complexity require leading-edge data capture and cleansing, as well as the right value-focused analytics. For the manufacturer, that included decisions about energy and water solutions as part of the company’s drive for sustainability.

Quick. These decisions score low on both organizational and analytical complexity and may be addressed by defining procedures that describe the approach needed or that have well defined rules, regulations, checklists, and the like. How to deal with a production process that is drifting out of spec falls into this category. These quick decisions can often be delegated to lower levels in the organization, freeing time for the senior team to focus on strategic and significant decisions.

All upper-tier teams face all three categories of decisions. The kind of decision doesn’t necessarily correlate with where in the organization it should be addressed but with the appropriate way to solve it.

4. Understand the timing.

Once the decisions were defined and categorized, the footwear manufacturer’s senior team could see clearly when each needed to be addressed. By defining time horizons of three, six, and nine months, the team could defer decisions that were not immediately needed and address them at the appropriate point. For example, the team determined that key promotions, which would take into account the change-management abilities of candidates, needed to be addressed ahead of ERP implementation strategy.

***

When teams consider and score the decisions they face in terms of organizational and analytical complexity, the majority of decisions usually turn out to be classified as significant. Further, with a mechanism in place for characterizing decisions in terms of organizational and analytical complexity in the future, the team can treat decisions as a workflow, which they can periodically review and update. And by defining the most efficient and effective process for dealing with them, the team can free more time for attention to strategic, high-impact decisions. The appropriate delegation of decisions can free even more time. In the case of the footwear manufacturer, the CEO could assure team members that a whole cluster of decisions could be comfortably taken at the departmental level instead of requiring the approval of the entire senior team or him.

Understanding where to focus and when is one of the most important things a senior team can do. As the leadership team of the footwear manufacturer learned, creating and managing a decision agenda is one of the fastest and most efficient ways to do it.

Each year major business media outlets rank CEOs based on their performance. The few who win awards and earn the highest ranking become superstar CEOs — they gain visibility and higher social recognition, and they may even earn higher compensation. Award-winning CEOs also tend to capitalize on their fame by assuming more board seats and writing books.

But for every happy award-winning CEO, there are many more CEOs who did not win. We wanted to know how these rankings affect CEOs who don’t get the top spot. If awards can influence the behaviors of CEOs who win, could they also influence the behaviors of their competitors who don’t?

We conducted a study to investigate this question. Looking at CEO awards granted by Business Week, Financial World Gold/Silver Awards, Forbes, Chief Executive, and Harvard Business Review, we identified over 200 superstar CEOs of S&P 1500 firms in the U.S. from 1996-2010. We considered a CEO to be a “superstar” if he or she won an award or was included in a ranking of top CEOs. We then identified their competitors among S&P 1500 firms – these are CEOs of firms that are similar in size and have similar product offerings as the superstar’s firm. The average number of competitor firms for each superstar CEO firm was 24, and there were 1,450 competitor CEOs in our sample.

We hypothesized that competitor CEOs’ firms would undertake more and/or larger acquisitions in the four years after a peer had won a CEO award (i.e., post-award period), compared to the four years before (i.e., pre-award period). We believed that when CEO gained high social recognition and visibility from an award, it would motivate their competitors to look for ways to enhance their own social recognition and visibility in the short term. Since acquisitions are heavily covered by mass media, undertaking more or larger acquisitions can bring social recognition and visibility to CEOs.

Acquisitions also enable a firm to grow much faster than it would organically. Corporate growth can enhance top executives’ social status, and larger firms tend to pay their CEOs more than smaller firms. So acquisitions can help competitor CEOs bolster their social recognition and visibility, as well as their compensation.

We found that competitor CEOs’ firms conducted 22% more acquisitions in the post-award period than in the pre-award period. This suggests that if a competitor CEO firm made five acquisitions in the pre-award period, such a firm would undertake six acquisitions in the post-award period. Moreover, we found that if a firm spent $100 million on acquisitions in the pre-award period, it would increase its acquisition spend to $256 million in the post-award period.

We also investigated how different CEOs responded to missing out on awards. We created a model to estimate each CEO’s chance of winning an award, based upon firm characteristics (such as firm size, accounting performance, stock performance, advertising intensity), CEO characteristics (such as gender, age, and tenure), and the number of acquisitions conducted in the prior two years. Not surprisingly, we found that “runner up” CEOs – or those who would seem more likely to win but didn’t – were associated with the biggest increases in the number and value of acquisitions conducted in the post-award period. This suggests that “runner up” competitor CEOs may feel worse about losing out on an award than other competitor CEOs.

If competitor CEOs use acquisitions to make up for their loss, as our data suggests, then what can we expect for the quality of those acquisitions? We found that acquisitions conducted by CEOs after losing awards had a more detrimental effect on firm accounting performance than those conducted in the pre-award period. Specifically, acquisitions conducted by competitor CEO firms in the post-award period negatively influenced return on assets more than those conducted by the same firms in the pre-award period. In addition, acquisitions conducted in the post-award period were received more negatively by stock market. This suggests that these acquisitions were rushed through without sufficient due diligence.

Our findings have three important practical implications. First, as shareholders and board directors assess whether an acquisition is a good or bad move, they need to investigate the CEO’s motivation behind it. In particular, they need to pay attention to the timing of when a CEO is proposing an acquisition deal. For example, our study would suggest that if it is not long after the CEO’s peer won a prestigious award, the proposal may be driven by the CEO’s personal desire and could have adverse consequences for the firm.

Second, our findings highlight the potentially negative effect of CEO awards. CEO awards can be used to reward those who have done a great job, and can incentivize non-winner CEOs to work harder and deliver better financial performance. Yet, personal desire for achieving high social recognition and visibility may also motivate the non-winners to undertake strategic actions, such as acquisitions, that can harm shareholder value. Further, there are a lot more non-winners than winners, and the potential negative effects of such awards may outweigh their value.

Third, our research highlights the importance of paying attention to CEOs’ emotions after something substantial happens to their peers. This study indicates that CEOs may become envious if their peers achieve greater social recognition and visibility. Such envious feelings may drive CEOs to engage in intensive acquisitions or other strategic moves that may benefit their own interest but may harm shareholder value. Our findings suggest that board directors may need to play a role in preventing CEOs’ emotions from influencing major firm strategic decisions.

It is important to point out that we did not directly measure the psychological process behind how CEOs reacted to not winning an award. Yet, our findings consistently indicated that they strive for higher visibility in the business community through intensive acquisitions.

Think about when you go into a dentist for the first time or a lawyer’s office. You probably don’t feel comfortable. What about when you go to a party and don’t know anyone? It’s human nature to feel more comfortable with the familiar.

A customer in your store or on your website is a lot like taking someone into your home. First, you have to make them comfortable, introduce them to the surroundings, and handle their fears. Unless this person has previous experience with you or your company, they won’t be in their comfort zone. People are “guarded” when they meet new people or are placed in new situations and environments.

And when a person is guarded it’s difficult to get on common ground. You have to assure your customer, address their fears and beliefs, and put them at ease. Remember that you are not in the product business; you are in the people business. A “guarded” customer to me indicates a good thing -- not a bad thing -- because the more guarded customer shows they are likely a buyer.

Before I talk about building common ground, I’d like to discuss what comes before it: Your greeting. The first step to making people comfortable is the greeting. It sounds simple, but go out today and keep track of how many people say hello to you when you walk into their business. It’s a game changer if you do it right.

Customers will often say something like, “I’m not buying anything today,” or “I’m just looking,” when greeted by you. Don’t take it personally. Be positive when you hear these things. Acknowledge them and move on. Continue to show interest regardless of what you hear. You have to learn to handle these complaints, which are born out of the buyer’s beliefs and complicated by their fears -- do not handle them like objections.

Buyers have certain pre-built convictions about salespeople that have nothing to do with you. Often, a customer’s thinking goes, “I can’t trust him,” or, “He won’t tell me the truth,” but if you are telling the truth and they don’t believe you, it’s about the receiver not the giver. However, even though you’re not responsible for their beliefs, you need to have control over the process and solve this problem of distrust.

On top of these beliefs is fear. The customer is thinking, “If I show interest she will pressure me to buy,” so they are protecting themselves. They are thinking, “it will take too long,” and that they don’t want to be stuck for two hours there in the store or on the phone. They think, “I will feel obligated,” if they spend two hours with you looking at a product that they will have to do something with you. Until you handle these fears you won’t be able to handle your customers.

Understand that buyers fear making a decision -- often more so than spending the money itself. Buyers fear getting ripped off, making a bad decision, and feeling like a fool later. Your buyers fear financial insecurity. Your buyers fear pressure, and they don’t want to be pressured. Buyers fear it will take too long. Buyers fear they will be obligated to reciprocate. Buyers fear they can’t say no. 

The only way to put people at ease is to know what is going on with them. Your responsibility on a first call or meeting is to make people comfortable, introduce them, and handle their fears.

Here are four simple steps to keep in mind as you greet each new customer:

1. Put your buyer at ease by introducing them to their surroundings.
2. Understand what’s behind complaints such as, “I’m not buying today.”
3. Acknowledge their fears.
4. Create responses to each complaint.

Now you’re ready to find common ground and start building trust. The dictionary defines common ground as “the basis of mutual interests or agreement.” The key word is “agreement.” You can’t get on common ground if you disagree with people. Forget this idea that opposites attract. In selling, opposites never attract. It’s vital to gaining trust and control that you take the time to get on common ground.

However, you must not waste the customer’s time. Most salespeople go out of their way hunting for common ground. “Where do you live?”, “Where do you work?”, “Nice kids you got there” -- these are not reasons people came to your shop or agreed to take a call with you. People don’t come in to talk about their kids or where they live, not to mention that these conversation starters are not authentic on your part. And you must always be authentic and genuine.

Think about what you have in common with everyone. Remember those fears we talked about earlier? You can probably relate to those.

Here are five areas of common ground that every salesperson and buyer can agree on:

1. Information: They want it, you have it.
2. Getting in and out: You want that too.
3. Making a good decision: You also want to be sure they don’t make a bad decision.
4. Not being pressured: You don’t want to pressure them either.
5. Don’t want to waste time: You don’t want to waste yours either.

Start your conversation with one of these points of common ground, and you’ll forge trust instantaneously.

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Editor's note: This post originally appeared on grantcardonetv.com and is republished here with permission.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

I recall reading Skip Miller’s “ProActive Sales Management”, where he states: “If you, as a sales manager, do not know if you are going to make the year after the first quarter, the battle is over. Now you better be lucky.” I should think we can include front line sales people. Given the “advancements” in sales technology since the above statement was made, there is no reason why sales people should not be in a position to know how their year will turn out and what they have to do to make sure it turns out above quota. But based on numerous sources, many do not have a clue where they are at the end of Q1, and are destine to continue to travel the rest of the year in the same clueless bliss.

Well, whether you’re a manager or a rep, Q1 ends this Friday, where are you going to be come Monday?

Reps need to have much greater control of things in their pipelines than they do over events in their brackets, where they have no direct control. There are two key things reps need to do to avoid March Sadness, have a clear positive view of the path forward, and exceed quota.

 

Your Quota Is Not A Plan

Part of the challenge is that many do not take the time to plan, either in a big picture way at the start of the year, quarter, and each month. Sure everyone has a strategy, but your architects aren’t gonna build your building, you need construction guys to do that, with their tactical plan and skill to translate the architect’s output to a viable structure.

Too many sales people see their quota as a plan, it is not, it is a destination, and should be leverage as such. It is still up to you to plan your step by step success and execution that leads to it. Despite the talk of ABM, many reps do not extend that work into a territory execution plan or account plan. Activity based on KPI’s is not execution of a plan, sure things get done, sometimes even according to “plan”. Given that the prospect/client is yours, the quota is yours, should not the execution plan and actions taken also be yours? If you answered yes, then why are so many sellers achieving less? Sure a paint by numbers painting is a picture, but it is hardly art. Hitting KPI’s set by someone else, is not selling.

Who is the Villanova in your Pipeline/Base?

I had a number of conversations with reps last week looking at the end of Q! and forward. One common factor is the lack of a viable pipeline. I know people don’t like to bring numbers in to sales, seems to confuse the issue with facts, but it is not hard to look at people’s pipelines to see that much of their sorrows can be addressed with a bit of prospecting. But there is no shortage of excuses as to why they can’t or won’t prospect at sufficient levels to drive quota. If you have a close ratio of 4:1, it is not hard to know what you should have in your pipeline, and if you’re short, you gotta prospect.

Instead many tell me that they can make up the gap from existing clients, or they have a big opportunity they are working on, “a sure thing”.

You know what they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, just substitute brackets with pipelines, and then take a look at yours:

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The post March Sadness appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

LinkedIn has created more than their fair share of confusion lately. Between their updated and, at the moment, unstable, redesign of LinkedIn.com, changing Premium Membership features and Sales Navigator people are just confused and less sure than ever of what they should use, purchase or ditch.

LinkedIn doesn’t make it easy either. We deal with this every day; clients who say they want to call to get an issue fixed are often surprised by the fact there is no number to call. (For help with issues, see last week’s post on How to Submit a LinkedIn Help Ticket).

In addition to the recent confusion, lots of people don’t like the new design; some things have moved, and others are just gone. Well, that’s usually the point of a redesign, and most people don’t like change. Probably more than 90% of the people I hear this from are non-paying members. For those who are Basic Members (free), you receive a tremendous value for nothing. And, this platform belongs to LinkedIn. You borrow their network. More than an equal exchange of value, I think.

If you are a Premium Member, I get your frustration. Relearning and retooling your process is annoying. It’s also LinkedIn’s way of saying, “If you want to use our network for certain things (i.e. selling or recruiter), no problem; pay for the access and convenience of receiving information in one place, in multiple ways.”

It’s time to reconsider how you want to use LinkedIn, if at all. It’s a value-in value-out proposition. You might get lucky without adding much value, but that’s never a long-term strategy.

So, let’s take a look at what I would do if I were you.

For the CEO/C-Suite/President/Business Owner

LinkedIn.com:

1. Build a client or talent-focused profile that highlights you, your company.
2. Prune your network and then add people you know or want to know.
3. Determine if you will use LinkedIn regularly. If so, upgrade to Premium.
4. Make sure you know how your marketing and sales teams use LinkedIn to begin, nurture and engage with prospects and clients. Ask them to show you their LinkedIn strategy/plan and find out how they are doing. You can’t appreciate, measure or improve on what you don’t understand.
5. Become knowledgeable on what is possible to do on LinkedIn.com:

Sales: researching people and companies, joining Groups where you might meet new prospects and see clients participating, finding alumni who might also be prospects, finding other influencers within your clients’ networks, etc.

Recruiting: Proactively searching and finding potential talent is far more effective than posting a job and waiting for people to apply. Yes, it’s more time-consuming, but it’s far more targeted and strategic.

6. Determine if salespeople should move to Sales Navigator. Would it be helpful to save people as leads, connect beyond 2nd level connections and save companies as accounts so that you can follow their professional activity and know what’s important to them and their companies? Most likely. The only time too much information is not helpful is when you don’t know how to sort and make sense of it. Sales Navigator helps make sense of information.

Salespeople and Marketers: Finders and Minders (I’ve decided I prefer this to “Hunters & Farmers”)

LinkedIn.com:

1. Build a client-focused profile that highlights you and your company. Show your value and how you are different quickly.
2. Prune your network and then add people you know or want to know. Connect with your current clients and prospects.
3. Determine if you will use LinkedIn regularly. If so, consider an upgrade to Sales Navigator, skip Premium.
4. Work with your marketing and sales team come up with a LinkedIn strategy. Learn what others on your team are doing on LinkedIn and ask how they are doing.

Find salespeople who are increasing their funnel, nurturing client/customer relationships and are engaging through LinkedIn in a variety of meaningful ways.

Dismiss those that aren’t getting results, that’s too easy. Find others who are and learn from them.

Ask marketing to share their content plan with you.

If you are one salesperson trying to buck an old system (cold calling only) sit down and figure this out. If what you do and how you do it is good, and you bring value, you can make LinkedIn work for you. Your LinkedIn activity will make a difference in your sales activity.

Record where leads and conversations originate. Capture the lead source as LinkedIn, so you know it’s working. If LinkedIn’s network is not helping you, you need to examine why not. It’s a network of more than 500 million people who are there for pretty much the same reason you are.

If it’s not working, what can you do differently? Start with your approach and messaging. Are you adding value first or trying to sell something before anyone cares about you or how you can help them? Be honest.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator:

1. Save all your clients/customers as Leads and their companies as Accounts. You can then follow them from your Sales Navigator Home Page. You will find this Home Page is far quieter than your LinkedIn.com Home Page.

2. Review the lead recommendations that Sales Navigator offers. Add the appropriate lead recommendations as Leads to the saved Accounts, and now you are beginning to create a picture of influencers, champions, decision makers and new opportunities within a current client/customer or prospect.

3. Follow your clients’/customers’/prospects’ activity and how you are connected to them. Reach out and connect with a personalized invitation request.

4. Reach beyond your network to 3rd level connections. At some point, you may tap out of 2nd level connections and want to reach further out. Maybe you have a new territory or area of focus. Your network should constantly be expanding.

5. You create sales preferences when you launch Sales Navigator, and once Sales Navigator knows your preferences and sees who you are saving as Leads and Accounts, they provide you with similar people and companies. Seriously? That’s pretty helpful.

6. If you use Gmail, it now interfaces with Sales Navigator. Or, if you have the Professional or Enterprise level of Salesforce.com, you can connect Salesforce.com with Sales Navigator.

Before you give up on LinkedIn.com or Sales Navigator, work at it for three months, pay attention and add value consistently. And in doing so, you will increase your professional value.

Without an effective sales hiring process, you’re going to churn through rep after rep.

Given enough time, you’ll hire a dud. We’ve learned the hard way. In our last round of hires, we actually had to fire someone on their first day.

Like a big pain in the neck that never should have walked into your office in the first place, dud. Shining resume, experience galore, and they’re terrible.

That’s the bad news.

The not-so-bad news is that these situations can be brought to a minimum, but only if you add some barriers. Putting things in the way that will stop bad candidates from slipping through and steps that will shoot red flags up along the way.

In sales, it’s all the more important.

Sales development reps (SDRs) on the team (typically) enjoy certain amounts of self-management. Only time and results are indicators that a new person isn’t working out.

Unfortunately, good performance and showing up can be accomplished by someone who is unethical—making the interview process so vital for a healthy sales team.

“Never hire someone who knows less than you do about what he’s hired to do.” – Malcolm Forbes

Our post today will pull back the curtain and detail our 7-step interview process for hiring SDRs.

Sales Hiring Process Step One: Application “Easter Egg”

Disney/Pixar is the king when it comes to putting hidden references into things, otherwise called “Easter Eggs”.

They’ve foretold pretty much every upcoming movie with small, almost unnoticeable glimpses in previous films.

How does this relate to hiring? Good question.

Don’t just have prospects fill out an application. Start the interview process from the onset by weeding out anyone who doesn’t pay attention to the details.

Do this by putting in a secret “easter egg” into the form or page for potential hires.

For instance, if you are having interested parties email you, have them write a specific subject line in their email. How about an example:

“To apply email me @ __________. Be sure to put “I eat spam sandwiches” in the subject or I will not reply.”

There will be many emails that have no reference to spam—guaranteed.

If you have an online application, put some small, but noticeable requests (noticeable to those who pay attention). How about, “Instead of your High School, put your favorite movie of all time in its place.”

Note: Obviously, don’t take away necessary information to find out their favorite movie. And don’t make it too good of a hidden requirement. You don’t want qualified people to not figure out your complex riddle.

Doing this one thing will work wonders in weed eating. If they don’t pay attention now, it’s likely they won’t start when they get the job.

Reading into every detail that leads communicate is vital to the nurturing/qualification process.

Sales Hiring Process Step Two: Phone Screening

If a prospect replies (with the egg) and they seem like a good candidate, don’t schedule a sit-down just yet.

Even if you’re desperate for someone to fill the sales role for your rapidly growing business, jumping the gun can cause a lot more problems than ensuring a quality hire. Get them on the phone for a 10-20-minute screening call.

In sales, they’ll be on the phone a lot.

Our interview process is built to gauge interviewees in every aspect of their day-to-day responsibilities. This can take time, but it’s time well spent.

One great question that is also a great tell comes from RecruitLoop (here’s their favorite seven phone questions).

Ask candidates: Can you remember applying for this position?

Genius!

Job seekers apply for jobs, and good on them for it.

However, if a person applies for ten positions they may not remember your weird Easter egg. Unless, they take some time to get prepped for the phone call.

If they do their prep work before their interviews, they won’t be “on the market” for long.

SDRs have to have their stuff together before they talk with leads. If they already do this by prepping for phone interviews, they are likely worthy of a full interview.

Sales Hiring Process Step Three: Face to Face Interview

If they’ve made it through your first two mini rounds, it’s worth your time to meet them in person.

While it’s important to understand that you will be trying to find specific information by asking questions, there is something WAY more important.

So, questions are important. In fact, they’re more important than you may think.

Interviewing is not just about their answers—especially in sales.

• How does the person conduct themselves? Calm, nervous, pretentious?
• What style of language do they use? Poor English, common/normal, super smarty-pants?
• How succinct and clear are their answers? Talk your ear off, wordy, concise?

In order to find these things out, you have to ask questions that are virtually impossible to be answered by a simple “Yes” or “No”.

Here are a few sales specific questions to give you an idea:

• How do you personally approach handling objections on a sales call?
• At what point is a lead no longer worth pursuing? (This one can give you great information while telling you how your interviewee handles themselves.)
• What is your least favorite part about sales?

If the person you ask gives you a simple one sentence answer to these, they may not be worth pursuing further.

Sales Hiring Process Step Four: Assessment Test

Now it’s time for qualified candidates to move further down the gauntlet.

Depending on the type you use, the test may tell you how good a person fared (1-2 is not a good fit, 3-4 is decent, a 5 is great).

There are companies that help you with this, or you can come up with your own.

Doing this will help you get answers that you may not have been able to get in the interview. Most of these tests present similar questions in different forms to dig into how your candidate really thinks.

It’s also the easiest step for you. However, you will have to make a judgement call.

If a person lands a 2 out of 5, but has passed with flying colors until this point—you’ll have to decide.

This potential dilemma may warrant a policy. For instance, if a person scores less than X; they don’t move on. If they score Y, it’s up to the manager.

Keep in mind that this test isn’t just semantics. Your SDRs and BDRs will need smarts to prospect and handle sales tools (lead gen software, CRMs, etc.)

Sales Hiring Process Step Five: Written Test

Yep. You read that right.

We take our interviewees back to their school days and make them answer a couple of questions in written form.

The reason is really simple. SDRs send tons of emails.

In order to succeed in today’s sales environment, you have to know how to communicate well via the written word. Your candidates may fly through the process and woo you and anyone else with their charm.

But put them in front of a question and a computer to type their answer on and all that charisma turns into spelling errors and poor grammar.

Or, it just doesn’t make sense—there are really many ways this can go wrong.

Which speaks to the importance. It’s nothing crazy, just a couple of questions that require them to write a coherent answer.

Here are our written test questions.

1. What is something you learned in school that will help you in this role? Why?
2. What is something you learned in school that was a waste of time? Why?

Note: Ask them these together and you’ll see their written voice and how they view learning.

The next step is where things get crazy…

Sales Hiring Process Step Six: Coaching Test

How can you tell if someone is coachable?

An interview process, no matter how long, isn’t really sufficient to see how someone handles criticism and direction.

How do we get past this issue? Easy.

1. Take their answers to the written test.
2. Sit them down with the print out in front of us.
3. Break out the red ink pen and critique their answers.

Brutal, we know. It doesn’t stop there, either.

We are intentionally hard on their answers to the point of trying to rub them the wrong way a bit.

While it’s not as bad as hazing; it’s constructed to make the candidate feel uncomfortable and see how they react.

Chances are, they won’t have to deal with this level of intensity (from us) once they show up for work. But it does let us know how they hold up under pressure, which is an incredibly valuable asset in a career where you are told ‘no’ so often.

It also shows you how they take correction—an aspect that can make or break a good team.

Sales Hiring Process Step Seven: Reference Check

You finish step six, and you’re even surprised that someone can make it through. That said, it’s not quite time to have them fill out the I-9.

Call their references.

Seriously, there are times that even we think that this isn’t a necessary step.

Whether it’s the one boss that loved them, or their grandma pretending to be the head of sales at a software company—whoever’s on the app is a lock.

Not necessarily.

There are too many times that a candidate makes it all the way here, but their reference makes us uncomfortable. The most important part about this step are the questions you ask. There is one that can’t be left unanswered:

Answer honestly, would you hire [name of interviewee] again?

We’ve heard some answers, but for the sake of privacy and respect we’ll leave it unsaid.

Just take our word for it and ask the question to all of the references you can.

It’s Your Turn

We’ve shown you a sales hiring process we use to build our sales team.

Let’s make this even more beneficial.

Add your favorite interview question, step in your process, or helpful indicators of both good and bad candidates.

As far as marketing and sales tactics are concerned, video is a juggernaut. The stats and case studies continue to stream in and it’s hard to deny the positive impact video can have on your sales efforts. According to a report published by Forrester, including video in an email leads to a whopping 200–300% increase in click-through rate. Yeah… we were sold.

It’s a huge reason why we partnered with industry leading video platform, Vidyard to make it easier than ever for SalesLoft customers to record personalized video for their prospects. The integration is now live to all users and you can learn more about it here.

Fortunately for our sales team, they’ve had early access to the integration for a little over a month now. They’ve been experimenting with different uses, styles, timing, and a dozen other variables to try and dial in our sales video strategy and figure out what works.

Using video in the sales process is still in it’s infancy and there are no experts to turn to for definitive best practices, so we wanted to share some of what we’ve learned as a team here so you can hit the ground running in your own sales video efforts. We’ve broken our learnings into two sections: style and substance.

Style

Style is all about the way your video looks, and there’s plenty of opportunity to do it wrong.

Lighting

As you’re thinking about your video, you should aim for a shot that is well lit from the front, without glaring lighting from any angle. Natural light is best. Be careful that you’re not backlit too strongly or your face will be shadowed and hard to make out. It helps to have a lamp or window in front of you.

Special tip: If you have an external monitor, turn up the brightness and select a mostly white screen to display.

Framing

To frame your shot correctly, aim for a shot with the computer just above eye level with your body centered (vertically and horizontally) within the screen. Don’t position the camera too far beneath you. That’s nobody’s best angle. Also be aware of your proximity to the camera. You don’t want to get too close.

Thumbnail

Many people don’t consider how the video will look once it’s inserted into an email or webpage. You want to make you’re making a good first impression with your thumbnail. Select your thumbnail specifically for more clicks. A smile + a prospect’s name held up on a whiteboard is great, like so:

Don’t leave a default thumbnail or a black screen or select a generic or mid-motion thumbnail.

Substance

Substance is all about what you put into your video. This is what will make or break your videos success.

Length

We found the most effective videos were under 30 seconds long. These were the videos with the highest engagement rates. So introduce yourself and get straight to the point.

Content

The best videos aren’t made to be in-depth explanations or rambling pitches. They’re designed for your prospects to see who they’re communicating with and understand why they should respond to your email or take a next step. Keep it short, sweet, and concise with a clear call to action.

Cadences

Once you’ve mastered how to record a video and what to include, you need to think strategically about how these videos fit into your sales cadences. When is the best time to use a video? We’ve found videos to be great tools for re-engaging cold leads and for following up with specific information for your warm leads. Every sales process is different so take some time to experiment.

There you have it. One month’s worth of knowledge on how you could and should be using video in your sales efforts.

–

Check out our product news blog for even more information on our recent Vidyard integration and how you can get started with video today.

The post 7 Takeaways from Using Video in Our Sales Process for a Month appeared first on SalesLoft.

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

Digital disruption is rocking the payments industry. But merchants, consumers, and the companies that help move money between them are all feeling its effects differently.

For banks, card networks, and processors, the digital revolution is bringing new opportunities — and new challenges. With new ways to pay emerging, incumbent firms can take advantage of solid brand recognition and large customer bases to woo new customers and keep those they already have.

And for consumers, the digital revolution is providing more choice and making their lives easier. Digital wallets are simplifying purchases, allowing users to pay online with only a username and password and in-store with just a swipe of their thumb. 

In a new report, BI Intelligence explores the digital payments ecosystem today, its growth drivers, and where the industry is headed. It begins by tracing the path of an in-store card payment from processing to settlement across the key stakeholders. That process is central to understanding payments, and has changed slowly in the face of disruption. The report also forecasts growth and defines drivers for key digital payment types through 2021. Finally, it highlights five trends that are changing payments, looking at how disparate factors, such as surprise elections and fraud surges, are sparking change across the ecosystem.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Digital growth is accelerating the pace at which payments are becoming faster, cheaper, and more convenient. That benefits both nimble startups and legacy providers that invest in innovation.
• Mobile payments are continuing to take off. On mobile devices, e-commerce, P2P payments, remittances, and in-store payments are each expected to rise as customer engagement shifts from more established channels.
• Power is shifting to companies that control the customer experience. As the selling power of physical storefronts shifts to digital devices, the companies that control the apps and platforms that occupy users’ attentions are increasingly encroaching on payment providers’ territory. 
• Alternative technologies are moving from the idea stage to reality. Widespread investments in blockchain technology last year are beginning to result in services hitting the market, promising to further squeeze margins for payments providers. 

In full, the report:

• Traces the path of an in-store card payment from processing to settlement across the key stakeholders.  
• Forecasts growth and defines drivers for key digital payment types through 2021.
• Highlights five trends that are changing payments, looking at how disparate factors, such as surprise elections and fraud surges, are sparking change across the ecosystem.

 

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This week’s Conversation That Matters features Greg Power of Weber Shandwick, a public relations expert who says the days of just the facts are over.

“Audiences need to connect to the person sharing the information and simply stating the facts isn’t good enough in a post truth world.” Power says. “Stories connect us, they resonate, and storytelling is an important part of our evolutionary DNA.

“It’s how we’ve always organized the world and how we need to organize the world to participate in it.”

Power believes great storytelling includes “people, it involves conflict, it has human drama and it has a solution.”

Power said this was the magic of Steve Jobs. “He understood how to use drama. During the launch of the iPhone, he created conflict by stating smartphones are not so smart and then positions the keyboard on the smartphones as the enemy because of the screen space it robs from you, the user.

“He goes on to state screen space is your freedom. He turned it into a drama and let me tell you why. Let me tell you who the villain is and now let me show you is the hero and the hero was the iPhone.”

Conversations That Matter is a partner program with the Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. Join veteran Broadcaster Stuart McNish each week for these important and engaging Conversations shaping our future.

Please become a subscriber and support the production of the program at www.conversationsthatmatter.tv

Investopedia defines Fintech as a portmanteau or a bag of financial technology that describes an emerging financial services sector in the 21^st century. With the expansion of technological innovation and smartphone adoption the financial industry is undergoing a transformation.

Before looking ahead to what Fintech will bring let’s first look at the emergence of it. Three factors come to mind:

• Cutting-edge ICT technologies
• Change in consumer preference on transaction methods
• Demand for alternative after the 2008 financial crisis

Fintech in short was the byproduct of events. In addition, the focus of this industry theoretically is about putting the customer first. In 2017, Fintech is expected to be the next and big growth sector. Not only will you see plenty of start-ups with new initiatives in sub-domains of credit, lending and payments, per Fintech Finance.

The above report alludes to a gradual disappearance of credit and debit cards. Their replacement will be through mobile wallet companies. You have probably heard of Google Wallet, Apple’s Passbook, Lemon Wallet, etc. They are the next frontier for making payments and consumer adoption is increasing because of the convenience factor and eliminating hassles.

The second important trend in Fintech is security. This is paramount to have since most of the sensitive financial information gets stored on a cloud server. This in turn becomes vital target for hackers. So, having a mobile security solution will be essential to protect financial transactions via these devices.

Instant gratification has been fueled by excess technology and prevalent for this generation. This means expectations are high and time is short for today´s consumers. Designing financial services that are long, arduous and bureaucratic will see customers going to a competitor that can offer quicker results.

The other driving force of change for the industry is artificial intelligence (AI). It will impact on the financial management processing and enhance banking performance. It will allow users to access more transparent and intuitive interfaces.

Disruption of the sector and industry shifts

In this era change and disruption have remained a constant. A Fintech Industry Report from 2016 by SparkLabs highlighted these following layers of disruption:

• Banking tech
• Payments
• Cyber currency
• Business finance
• Consumer finance
• Alternative cores

For example, banking tech will see analytics, data management and customer relationship management (CRM) get a makeover. In regards to payments increase usage and adoption of mobile wallet POS.

Currency as we know it may see its next evolution. Blockchain, digital wallets, cryptocurrency exchange are the few to mention and looks like they could decentralize the traditional model of finance. Bitcoin is prime example of where the exchange of money or transactions will gravitate soon.

Business finance will also see areas of peer-to-peer (P2P) business lending practices change. More flexible credit lines for business becoming less of a hassle with paperwork, and the revolutionary power of crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is a very popular financing channel that is participatory and financial institutions benefit from using it.

Alternative cores is a change from the traditional providers of health insurance, car insurance, property insurance and banks. This presents a formidable threat to current banking institutions and trust for this financial industry is low at the present time.

Investment trends in Fintech and DevOps

Believe it or not the investments are growing in this sector rapidly. Below is a screenshot from a Sparklabs analysis on the state of affairs and amounts:

In 2014, funding from VC-backed companies attained $6.7 billion. A year later that number was $13.8 billion, which increased by 106 percent. Furthermore, in 2015 the number of $50 million fintech deals surpassed 60.

Aside from the growing trend in this sector, software development and information technology operations (DevOps) DevOps is also hitting the financial services industry. DevOps refers to a set of practices that emphasize the collaboration and communication of both software developers and information technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery, and infrastructure, conforming to Wikipedia.

As mentioned before traditional models and legacy systems in Fintech are obsolete. DevOps on the other hand, improves the collaboration between traditional development and operations of functions. In this new process you will find the tendency towards agile software development and automate testing along with deployment.

What DevOps also offers the benefits like efficient pipeline from developer desktop to production, increased efficiencies (cost savings) and earlier delivery of value (innovation).

Naturally, there is a tendency for business leaders of such enterprises to make the migration. However, outsourcing these efforts might make more sense if you are looking for new opportunities of growth. Seeking a DevOps Consulting firm is a valuable option. Another is to research a business directory for few players. Examine the differences in the services offered and costs associated with it.

Takeaways and Conclusions

The growth of the industry will continue and skyrocket. The number of startups, new technologies, payment options and birth of alternative financial services is disrupting the business.

Fintech investment has grown by 27 percent globally since 2008; the year when the housing market crashed. This growth rate even exceeds Silicon Valley that has a growth rate of 13 percent, per RainFin.

It is important financial business and industries take notice of this trend. Because the rate of growth and adoption can have an immediate impact on revenues, and profits. But overall Fintech brings with it alternatives that consumers are demanding for.

Is your B2B business a commodity business, or a true value added product/service business?

I can’t count the number of owners, CEO’s, and presidents that tell me their B2B business is unique, and they don’t have any competition.

If you believe this about your business, I am very interested to talk to you about how and why you believe it is unique.

In this day and age, with the proliferation of businesses, both large, small and one-person bands, there really is no unique business, at least not for long.

You may offer something a little different than your competitors, but to them you are still a commodity.

And I have one way I can tell if your company is just a commodity company.

If you post your pricing on your website, your B2B business is definitely a commodity. And the only way you can compete is to keep lowering your prices, or, offering more and more for the same price.

Why? Because there is always another business that is much larger than yours, and very similar to yours, and they can offer a lower price to help rid their market (read – your market) of their competitors. (IE: your company).

So, how do you really distinguish your business?

There is really only one real distinct way to differentiate your B2B business; and that is with your people. Your people are definitely unique.

And because your sales people, and marketers, and client service people are the first people a potential client usually meets from your company, you must have each of these individuals trained and coached on how to converse with your potential clients.

I have interviewed thousands of B2B buyers over my business career, of over 40 years, and to a person, they say that the most important differentiator between companies is the people, especially the sales people and marketers.

Everything else being equal, your people are the sole reason most companies buy from your company, vs another company.

And this is especially true in B2B.

Your real uniqueness comes from your people.

And all of these B2B buyers stated that it is the way B2B sales people conduct themselves with them that they will choose your company.

Now, if you sell a commodity type product, say something below $10K per year, then price may be a larger factor than your people.

But even if your product and/or service does sell for a lower price, your people will be the reason that your clients stay with you. And that is because your people always stay in touch with your clients, the right way.

So then, how do you ensure that your people are the right people for getting good clients, and keeping them happy after they become clients?

And how do you make sure your people are using the right strategies and tactics to keep in touch the right way?

All of your client-facing people must be trained and coached properly, to ensure they understand how to initially deal with your potential clients, and then how to ensure your company keeps them as clients.

If you are having any trouble, either getting new clients, and/or retaining clients, then we should talk.

If you do not meet with your clients on a regular basis, at least monthly, we should definitely talk.

Let’s discuss what you need to do to ensure your client-facing people are trained and coached properly, on how to grow your business the right way.

Please contact me through my email, in my signature below, and let’s set up a time to discuss the right way forward for your company growth. I guarantee your results.

Artificial intelligence goes by many names—machine learning, augmented intelligence, neural networks and more.

In fact, over a dozen terms are used to describe how machines are being used by organizations of all types to emulate human thinking, reasoning and decision-making.

Artificial intelligence is simply machines emulating human thinking, reasoning, decision-making.   Far from being the stuff of science fiction, AI is here now and creating exciting new opportunities for forward-thinking enterprises in every industry.   

If you want the real story about how AI may affect your organization—and your career—we have good news.   

In one simple step, you can acquire the critical information you need to not only understand artificial intelligence as never before, and also see how you can use  artificial intelligence to your benefit .   

It’s a shortcut that can revolutionize your business, leapfrog your competitors and grow your company’s bottom line: The eMarketer Artificial Intelligence Bundle.

The acknowledged leader in the field of digital economy research, eMarketer, is for the first time making two of their most important reports on artificial intelligence available to non-members like you.

With one simple step, you can acquire the most comprehensive, wide-ranging and valuable research on AI in business.

Only The eMarketer Artificial Intelligence Bundle gives you an in-depth look at how AI is being used today and where it’s headed tomorrow.    

Simply put, all the key players in your organization need to understand the promise of AI or risk being left behind by the competition:      

• Marketers and advertisers can exponentially increase the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and ad buys through AI’s ability to find higher-qualified prospects and deliver the right messages to them at the right time.
• Customer service managers can use new call center algorithms and chatbots to satisfy customers more quickly and more efficiently.
• Media and content providers can use AI to not only provide a better website experience through smart recommender systems and search technologies, they can create automated content that sounds like it was written by a human.
• IT managers, of course, will need to know how to evaluate, budget for and maintain AI systems that may be completely unlike anything they’ve experienced before.    

Whether you’re already employing AI techniques or just getting off the ground, this is the kind of analysis you need to make the most of your AI initiatives.    

A One-Of-A-Kind Resource

Just a few minutes with this special research collection will reveal why it is superior to any similar product:

• Breadth and depth of research: The reports in The eMarketer Artificial Intelligence Bundle have scores of insights, revelations and facts.  Because their researchers specialize in gathering research from as many sources as possible—academic institutions, government data, industry associations, online media platforms, audience measurement firms, and other media researchers and consultants—you get the most important big-picture insights with the granular detail you need to use it to its fullest potential.    
• Specific companies and technologies: Each report not only looks at the broader trends within AI, they name the specific companies and products that are on the leading edge of applying AI to thorny business problems.  
• Expert analysis: The report authors have decades of experience in researching and analyzing all aspects of the digital world, from advertising, marketing and social media to technology, apps and demographics. They know how to separate the noise from the valuable insights and never bog you down in trivia or ignore the obvious.    
• Informed forecasts: The authors don’t just report what’s working today. They conduct scores of interviews with executives, advertisers, media buyers and marketers to not just confirm the raw data, but also forecast where growth opportunities are in the years to come.

Not Available Anywhere Else

Typically, these exclusive reports are only available to a select number of eMarketer subscribers. But for the first time, eMarketer is making The eMarketer Artificial Intelligence Bundle available for purchase, and this is the only way you can get it!

But that's not all! Order today and you'll save more than 50% off the price you’d pay if each report in the bundle were sold separately. Click here to purchase the bundle.

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Hack-a-thons started as a way to bring technology enthusiasts, coders and digital geeks together and have them solve a problem with their collective braintrust. Fast forward to today and the hack-a-thon process is being applied to all areas of business. In fact, the business that Schneider Associates built its brand on — Public Relations — has been hacked. No longer are we solely focused on getting our clients in the media (though, we still do that).

The spectrum of our client work is as vast as the ideas that come out of hack-a-thons: lead generation, sales marketing support, website development, social influencer campaigns, operation optimization, editorial production and more. The list of what we are hired to do continues to grow, which dictates how we hire talent, train our staff and think about the challenges clients bring to our doorstep.

Point is, as an integrated marketing and communications agency, Schneider Associates is constantly hacking. Whether flipping traditional media models on their head, eliminating the reliance on print materials in enrollment marketing campaigns or even building relationships with media influencers through social media, clients hire us because we’re thinking months ahead.

So, when Schneider Associates was invited to be a mentor for Northeastern University’s Nurse Innovation & Entrepreneurship Program, we jumped at the chance.

At this hack-a-thon, you won’t find Beats headphones, energy drinks or ripped jeans. Rather, you’ll find stethoscopes, scrubs and a passion for helping people stay healthy.

The website reads, “The hardest part of starting up is knowing where to start.” This is exactly what we at Schneider Associates face with client challenges. In fact, one size does not fit all. So if a client approaches us about looking to “drive brand awareness,” we will ask the question, “why?”

Is competition eating into your marketshare? Are you launching a new product that needs visibility? Is your sales team having a hard time closing deals? Are your enrollment leads not of the quality that you expected? Are you dealing with social detractors that are influencing a decline in sales?

Our job is to ask probing questions. Our job is to explore as many solutions to our client’s business challenges as possible. Our job is to hack PR and disrupt traditional thinking.

Have a challenge you need hacked? Get in touch with us. We’re ready.

The post Hacking PR and Pushing the Limits of Disruption appeared first on Schneider Associates.

It can be really time consuming, when you want to track how your business is performing across multiple departments or product lines, or other variables, when you don’t have that information at hand. You have to find it, maybe pull out a comparison of last year’s figures, and then wade through it all. That’s why I like a dashboard.

Just like the indicators on your car’s dashboard, they’re all in one place and you know at a glance, with a number or an image, how things are going.

My preference is a summary dashboard for the company – covering sales, margin, profit, new business, client margins and contributions for the top clients, expenses and how they are tracking against budget, and other summary measures. Then you can drill down by department into sales, operations, customer service, marketing and production (whatever is relevant to your business).

1. First, work out what you can measure

Activities – frequency – eg: tweets, blog posts, direct email campaigns, proposals, new business development meetings, number of leads via website
Outcomes – conversions, sales, new clients
Variance/Change – eg: actual vs budget; budget vs forecast; this year vs last year

You must have a system that captures the data you want to measure, because you don’t want to be measuring too much manually as you grow. It is time consuming, and has the potential for error.

1. Identify what is important to measure

What sort of focus & measures would best indicate performance (good or otherwise) in your business?

• Sales revenue
• Margin
• Number of new clients acquired
• Value per client
• Revenue per person in your business
• Profit per person
• Number of subscribers per month
• Average value of subscribers/clients
• Number of product sales
• Average value of product sales
• Revenue per distribution channel/affiliate/reseller/sales person
• Financial ratios – eg: percent of direct costs/overheads to sales

1. Feed results into dashboard

If you can’t do it yourself, have someone create a macro spreadsheet to automatically pull the necessary data into your dashboard. If this isn’t possible, have someone do it manually for you.

You may see your company’s results represented in the dashboard once a month, or if you have a smaller business, your bookkeeper may be able to give you key sales and financial information in a dashboard monthly. This would include comparisons to previous years and actual vs budget.

Other results, such as those related to your marketing, may be something you can track in a separate spreadsheet. For example, if you get measurement statistics from your email marketing system, you could record the key numbers each month and track those.

1. Analyse results

You need to know what you want more of next year, what needs addressing and what you want to change. Make sure you do an analysis of how you performed in all these areas:

• Sales revenue
• Margin
• Profitability
• Sales by Product/service lines
• Marketing performance and ROI – leads, conversion, subscribers
• Customer service if you have a customer service department to address and close support problems, for example
• Operations /Production – how efficient are you in generating output
• Actual against budget & the goals you set 12 months or 6 months ago

When you’ve done this, you’ll have a clear focus on what your priorities need to be for the following month and/or year.

1. Track and action

It’s all well and good to track these measures but the whole purpose of them is to let you know as soon as possible when you need to course-correct.

By measuring monthly you will see patterns that are good and patterns that flag potential problems. Better to course correct and address any performance issues mid-month than at the end of the year when it may be too late.

Managing by dashboard, once set up, makes managing, tracking, analyzing and auctioning much easier than if you had to wade through all sorts of separate pieces of information, reports and spreadsheets to compare the information you need.

Marketing Debt happens when startup marketing departments are underfunded and understaffed.

Just like Technical Debt, marketing debt means that a lot of shortcuts were taken that will eventually undermine the health of the organization. In the case of marketing debt, there will come a time when sales start to flounder because Marketing hasn’t had the time or ability to create a scalable, repeatable lead gen model via multiple, holistic channels.

This results in Sales not getting what they need to get their job done.

There are a lot of reasons why you should care about marketing debt.

Remember The Startup Curve?

Marketing debt accumulates through the Trough of Sorrow all the way through the Wiggles of False Hope. Marketing debt is part of the reason why these crashes and wiggles happen, and lowering your debt is one of your biggest obstacles to get over into the Promise Land.

Most companies start to focus on alleviating their marketing debt after they have raised their A Round. Until then the focus and budget has been on sales, because without sales they wouldn’t have reached their A Round, but without solving marketing debt, the company will not reach its B Round.

Now that you’ve determined that you have marketing debt, or you haven’t, which in that case there are plenty other articles you could be reading right now, how do you start to lower your marketing debt?

The Marketing Audit

What are you doing now and what do you need to be doing? Determining this has a lot to do with your sale amount and your funnel. It makes no sense for a product that is $10 a month to have SDRs, Inside Sales, and AEs. For the purposes of this post, we’re going to focus on companies that sell to mid-size companies up to enterprise and have an average sale over $50k.

How Strong is Your Brand?

“Strong brands have been shown to be effective strategies for achieving sustainable profits and returns. Furthermore, strong brands also demonstrably enhance shareholder wealth via higher firm stock [prices].” GfK MIR

People see you before they can read your message or hear what you have to say. Are you claiming to be the BMW of XYZ for the enterprise but you look like a Yugo?

Branding is critical for companies that sell to enterprise. Having a strong, consistent, well-designed brand makes leads easier to get and deals easier to close because people trust that you if you care enough to pay attention to your brand, you’ll take care of theirs as well. Also, in today’s world of hyper-commoditization in SaaS, design is one thing that isn’t easy to copy. In addition, people have the automatic assumption that we are what we look like thanks to the

Also, in today’s world of hyper-commoditization in SaaS, design is one thing that isn’t easy to copy. In addition, people have the automatic assumption that we are what we look like thanks to the Consistency Principle Heuristic. That applies to companies as well. Poor design makes you look untrustworthy. We all judge books by their cover, at least in the beginning. Why add friction?

Poor design makes you look untrustworthy. We all judge books by their cover, at least in the beginning. Why add friction?

We all judge books by their cover, at least in the beginning. Why add friction?

This means enterprise deals have a stronger emotional component than most other sales. Someone’s job could be on the line if they choose the wrong option or the implementation doesn’t go smoothly. No one wants to be the one with their head on the line. That’s why, according to

No one wants to be the one with their head on the line. That’s why, according to CEB’s research on the Consensus Sale, there are now an average 5.4 decision makers that need to sign-off on every enterprise deal. In addition,

In addition, Circle Research has found that only 39% of B2B companies actually have a strong brand – which means your company has an opportunity to win over your competition by creating a strong brand.

Of course, “brand” is far more than just a logo and a consistent look and feel.

According to Circle Research, “A strong brand – we call it an Alpha Brand – has seven key features:

1. It is prominent, understood and inspires affinity
2. It is based around a single clear anchoring idea
3. It is perceived to provide a better solution
4. It appeals to the emotional as well as the rational
5. It recognizes ‘one size fits all’ doesn’t work
6. It is built to have multi-dimensional appeal to all stakeholders
7. It is true to its word”

Positioning

“To find a unique position, you must ignore conventional logic. Conventional logic says you find your concept inside yourself or inside the product.

Not true. What you must do is look inside the prospect’s mind.” Positioning, by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Get your team together and ask them (and yourself) the following questions:

1. Who are we as an organization?
2. Why do we exist?
3. What do we do?
4. Who do we serve?
5. What would success of [Company] look like to you?
6. What’s the good news?
7. What’s the “not so good” news?
8. What do we need to keep in mind?
9. What are our goals?
10. What is our offer?

Most importantly – be honest with yourselves and with everyone else in the room. These aren’t easy questions, but you won’t be able to create a strong position without answering them fully and honestly.

Keep in mind, you don’t own your brand reputation. Your customer does. All you can do is manage it. Does your organization on the inside reflect who you claim to be to the world?

If you’ve never worked on positioning before, and even if you have, Simon Sinek gives an amazing explanation on the power of positioning in his TED talk “Start With Why.”

Messaging

How clear is your message? Can someone understand what your company does from first glance at your website? Can you explain what you do in a 1-minute elevator pitch? What about 30 seconds?

How do you explain what you do and why you do it? What tone does your messaging have? Humanistic? Funny? Technical?

“…to introduce a new product category [you] must carry in a new ladder. This, too, is difficult, especially if the new category is not positioned against the old one. The mind has no room for what’s new and different unless it’s related to the old.

… it’s often better to tell the prospect what the product is not, rather than what it is.” – Positioning, by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Does your message reflect how you look? How you act? Are you keeping the promise of your words?

Mailchimp takes this so seriously their Voice and Tone guide is public for anyone to review.

Buffer is known for its transparency in all decisions. This is reflected in their message, their blog posts, and their actions. Buffer doesn’t just say they believe in something, they follow through with it – and they are rewarded in turn with brand loyalty from those who think like them. Their brand is strong.

The Funnel Audit

If your average sale is above $50k a year then in all likely you have, or will have, SDRs, Inside Sales, AEs, and Customer Success:

• Sales Development Reps – Builds the lists and does the initial outreach
• Inside Sales – BANT qualifies
• AEs – Closes deals and manages accounts
• Customer Success – Helps with onboarding and overall success of your customer using your product, and can help upsell

Let’s look at some of the ways to fill the lead gen funnel:

Outbound	Events	Advertising	Inbound	Earned Media	Referral
e.g. Building lists, cold email workflows, cold calling, ABM	e.g. Conferences, trade shows, CABs, PACs, hosted evenings – your own or going to others	e.g. SEM, Facebook, industry publications, ads in newsletters, print, billboards, paid article placement	e.g. SEO, blogging, guest blogging, Twitter BOTs to landing pages, giving away Case Studies, White Papers, and datasheets, webinars, etc.	e.g. Press write ups, reviews, industry pundit and analyst outreach	e.g. Partner programs and incentives for customers (plus all of the materials listed in Inbound)

Let’s look at these in terms of the Stages of the Funnel (see above):

Building Awareness

Think about how we buy. We don’t purchase something the very second we hear about it the first time. We need to hear about it several times, dozens, even hundreds – before we reach a minimum trust rate where we will even consider purchasing it.

That also holds true for B2B sales, because while we might be selling to businesses, those businesses are filled with humans.

So how do we build awareness?

This is where PR is your best friend.

I’ve heard plenty of companies say that they don’t see any ROI from PR. There’s a reason for that. People see your name in an article and they don’t necessarily go directly to your site and buy. What they do subconsciously is have a mental checkmark by your name that says, “Social proof – this place is good enough to be mentioned in publication XYZ.”

And then they look for other cues to show that your company is worthy of their attention.

That’s the strength of PR, getting in front of a lot of eyes and growing your mindshare to your target market by going after the right publications. After you have shown up in enough articles, ads, friends posts, events, etc they are ready for your outreach.

Outbound marketing helps bring them to your website.

I don’t recommend buying lists, but I’m all for researching and building them. There are several companies that you can use for business intelligence if you have the budget, and if you don’t there’s always LinkedIn and Email Hunter. Targeted lists do better than wide lists in terms of results.

Targeted also means targeted content, which has a higher response rate as it is aimed at the reader and is more likely to build engagement.

If you’re going after top tier enterprises, then Account Based Marketing (ABM) is the way to go. Also outbound, ABM requires a collaboration of marketing and sales at a level these two departments typically don’t do. Marketing controls the message and delivers the materials, and Sales controls the delivery.

Each team gets to focus on what they do best and together they land the large deals. There are companies out there that help do ABM at scale – Demandbase (ABM for ads) and Folloze (ABM for enterprises that do complex enterprise sales using direct outreach) are two of the leaders in this realm.

Consideration Stage

Your website, blog, and available materials such as webinars, white papers, case studies and datasheets all come in to play here. Consideration means that the prospect knows that they have a problem, and they are considering companies that solve their problem. It does not mean that they are considering your company at this stage. SEO is critical here.

Your message being on point is crucial as well. If you can’t be found in a search, or if your message doesn’t resonate within the first 8 seconds on your website – you do not exist.

How do you do what you do better than your competitors? Positioning comes into play here. Brand matters. Transparency of information and thought leadership help as well.

Who are your Partners? Partner marketing brings with it a level of trust that many other types of outreach do not. Your prospect is already spending money, or considering spending money, with your Partner.

Bringing you on with them can lower your own sales cycle time and get you from the consideration stage to the decision stage.

Prospects Decision Making

You’re now on the shortlist – how are you maintaining interest while arming your evangelist inside of the organization?

Do you have a repository of helpful content that enables them to educate others so they can bring your business in? At this point, it’s all about what you can do for the prospecting account.

You are the enabler, but the real salesperson is inside the company you’re selling to.

Action

You’ve gotten the account.

You might think this is the end, but it’s actually the beginning. If you’re a SaaS company you need to keep that account, and most likely you’re looking to upsell. How you onboard, the first actual experiences your customer has with your service and team, these actions need to be spot on.

Mistakes can happen (and they will, trust me) but your team need to find them, own up to them, and fix them. You Customer Success team is the most important part of this process – giving them everything they need to be successful is how you will win.

Making sure that your brand holds up to the promise you make is how category leaders are made.

Final Thoughts

Lowering your marketing debt and building your brand isn’t simple, but it’s the differentiator that all unicorns and other strong companies have in common.

In the beginning, spending your time and money on sales makes sense – but there comes a time in your growth where that isn’t enough, when your marketing debt is too high. That’s when it’s time to take a step back and reevaluate your marketing channels to build a scalable, repeatable lead generation model.

That starts with making sure your positioning is on point, and then builds out to message, design, channels, methods of engagement, and materials.

You don’t become a category leader without going through this process.

Have any ideas, comments or questions on this topic?

A B.C. Supreme Court ruling will send shock waves through the arm of the Canadian real-estate market that is powered by foreign capital, say immigration lawyers.

The ruling targets a weakness in Canadian laws that often leads foreign owners of real estate in cites such as Metro Vancouver and Toronto to claim they are “residents of Canada for tax purposes” when they are not.

The landmark B.C. decision requires notary public Tony Liu to pay his client more than $600,000 because Liu failed to adequately determine whether the Vancouver house his client was buying for $5.5 million had been owned by a tax resident of Canada.

As a result, the Canada Revenue Agency did not get paid, at the time of the sale, the 25 per cent capital gains tax it charges non-resident sellers of Canadian property on any profit they make on the sale.

So the CRA later demanded the buyer pay the $600,000 in tax. The buyer, in turn, sued Liu, arguing Liu failed to discover the seller was not a tax resident of Canada.

The CRA considers people who don’t live in the country at least six months a year and don’t pay income taxes here to be foreign property investors and speculators and thus subject to capital gains taxes.

Related

• Douglas Todd: Time to the end honour system in B.C. property purchases
• Thousands of Metro mansion owners avoiding taxes
• Douglas Todd: How much does the real estate industry influence B.C. politicians?

Three Canadian immigration lawyers said the CRA tax-residency rule is often not enforced, even in over-heated housing markets in Vancouver and Toronto that are in part fuelled by offshore money.

The complex ruling published this month by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Kenneth Affleck strikes to the heart of a gaping hole in Canadian tax, immigration and property-transfer law, say the immigration lawyers.

The B.C. decision is a stark warning to real estate agents, notaries and lawyers who fail to ensure that sellers of properties are truly tax residents of Canada, said David Lesperance, a tax and immigration lawyer based in Toronto.

“This truly is a game changer,” said Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland.

“It’s a precedent. Real estate agents can now get a knock on the door from the taxman, asking for the (capital gains) taxes that should have been collected by Ottawa, because the agent failed to make adequate inquiries.”

Sam Hyman, a Vancouver immigration lawyer, said the judge’s decision alerts purchasers to “the dire consequences” of making offers on properties sold by people who may be trying to avoid capital gains tax by falsely declaring they are tax residents of Canada.

Many buyers and their agents, Hyman said, are not being diligent in making sure the seller is a physical or tax resident of Canada, while others are being “cavalier” or “engaging in wilful blindness” about it.

The immigration lawyers urged the B.C. government to end the “honour system” that leaves it largely up to sellers to state on real-estate-industry forms whether or not they are residents of Canada for tax purposes.  

They said the honour-system loophole could be fixed through Ottawa and Victoria agreeing to the sharing of information among the CRA, the federal Immigration Department and the arm of the B.C. government responsible for property sales.

The B.C. Liberals, Kurland said, have stubbornly refused to solve the costly problem by reforming the government’s property-transfer forms to require sellers to answer whether they are “a tax resident of Canada.”

The B.C. government, which last summer brought in a 15 per cent tax on foreign buyers to cool Metro Vancouver’s globalized real estate market, recently began to ask property sellers and buyers to answer, “What is your citizenship?”

But citizenship is “as irrelevant as eye colour,” Kurland said.

The issue that really matters to most Canadians and the CRA, he said, is tax residency, whether a home buyer or seller pays their fair share of taxes in this country.

All three lawyers say Canada is forgoing hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue by not enforcing the country’s tax-residency rules, which are designed in theory to give long-term residents an advantage over foreign nationals.

The lawyers said they hope the federal government – which this week pledged to “target high-risk international tax and abusive tax-avoidance cases” – will make it a priority for CRA to audit mansion owners who pay little or no income taxes.

It would be relatively easy for the CRA, Lesperance said, to conduct “lifestyle audits” on wealthy trans-national “astronauts,” also known as “ghosts,” who pay little or no income tax in Canada while financing family members to spend lavishly on expensive homes and cars in the country.

In some cases, Kurland said, dubious immigration professionals are advising clients they can “eat their cake and have it too.”

Some property owners, for instance, are claiming to real estate officials that they are Canadian residents, so they can avoid capital gains taxes while selling houses (and to ensure they qualify for permanent resident status).

But some of the same people, at the same time, are claiming to the CRA that they are not residents under our tax law, so they don’t have to declare their global income and property holdings, and pay income taxes on them in Canada.

dtodd@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/douglastodd

Blog: www.vancouversun.com/douglastodd

MORE RELATED: Canada’s public guardians have failed Vancouver residents

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A lead is a lottery ticket. You don’t know whether you win anything until you scratch the card. Why wouldn’t you check to see if you have won anything? Why not take a look and see what you’ve got—if anything.

Some sales folks make the mistake of deciding that because many of their leads don’t turn out to be real opportunities, none of their leads will turn out to be opportunities. First, because something is true about some leads says nothing about other leads. Second, most of the time many of the leads are decent; the problem is the salesperson doesn’t know how to create value for the lead in the early stage of the buying process, preferring instead “ready-to-buy leads.”

Other salespeople believe they don’t have time to follow up on leads. They make a single call, and then they give up and go away. For these reps, if it takes more than a call or two to reach someone, they move on to receptive prospects, regardless of whether they are any better than the leads with whom they are having trouble contacting.

The right thing to do with a lead is to call them. You are not guaranteed that the lead is worth your time. You are not guaranteed that it will turn into an opportunity, nor are you certain to convert that opportunity. You are not promised that anyone will get back to you, let alone engage with you in the process of exploring change.

Just like you aren’t guaranteed that a lottery ticket is a winner, a lead comes with no guarantees. You just have to play it to see what happens. If you want to do your very best work, targets are still greater than leads, but there is no reason not to scratch a lottery ticket, even if that isn’t your plan to succeed. Why would you throw the lead away when you lose nothing by playing the game?

Make the call.

The post A Lead Is a Lottery Ticket appeared first on The Sales Blog.

 There’s really not much difference between political canvassing and the door-to-door sales pitch. Startup Polis is leveraging its campaign experience to help large companies woo customers with that personal touch that can mean so much. The American consumer has come a long way since the days of Willie Lohman and the door-to-door sales pitch, but despite all of the online and retail… Read More

Facebook’s ubiquity makes it dangerous in so many ways. Aside from the threat of picking up malware, the ever-present risk of someone hacking your account — plus privacy issues from Facebook itself — mean you must be vigilant when using the service. Thankfully, it only takes a few moments to make sure you’re not at risk for Facebook issues. Here are six easy ways to avoid becoming a victim on Facebook. 1. Browse With an Alternate Mobile App Facebook’s mobile apps came under fire a few years ago when it started forcing users to use the dedicated Messenger instead of...

Read the full article: Secure Your Facebook With These 6 Simple Tricks

"I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy." 

—Iris Murdoch

Currently, most of the attention on autonomous vehicles is focused on the technology that lets cars drive themselves. However, in the near future, the industry will need to broaden its focus to include what is arguably just as important: the passenger. At Intel, we've been working on technology platforms that will allow cars to actually drive themselves for some time. More recently, our UX team has turned to designing, prototyping, and testing a number of experiences for how passengers will operate autonomous vehicles, how passengers will feel safe and confident during a trip, and how these automated systems will communicate clearly, so passengers will understand what an autonomous vehicle is doing, and why.

Much of this work has led us to spend quite a bit of time inside vehicles—incorporating new technologies and new interactions to understand what should be optimized on our platforms—and in this process, we've started thinking about the ways in which the physical interiors of autonomous vehicles may need to change. So I'd like to share a few initial thoughts as we begin to form hypotheses about what will be important in these new physical interiors.

One aspect of car ownership we often take for granted is the relationship between driver and passenger. With the exception of picking up a hitchhiker, a driver knows his or her passengers—family members, friends, co-workers, acquaintances—and because of this, there's a familiarity that lets people share such a small space. And even with taxis and ride hailing services, a front seat/back seat separation exists between driver and passengers, where passengers who share a ride almost always know each other. However, with ride hailing services introducing reduced-rate "pool" options, strangers are now riding in the backs of cars together. And with driverless "mobility-on-demand" services likely to be one of the first ways autonomous vehicles enter the market, we will likely see an increase in the number of passengers who don't know each other, sharing rides regularly in vehicles without a driver.

Of course, most people have experience sharing rides with strangers. Buses, subways, airplanes, and trains are just some of the ways we travel together. But although we're often shoulder-to-shoulder, the relatively large interiors, and larger number of people traveling together, make it easy for us to assume a certain degree of anonymity. It's easier for us to keep to ourselves in the midst of the crowd. But with autonomous vehicles, the interiors are much smaller and hold far fewer people. It's the closeness of the space—the intimacy— that will be a significant challenge for designers. These interior environments will need to address a number of competing needs. How will they accommodate groups of strangers, and also groups who know each other? How will they provide space for being social and for keeping to oneself? How will they create experiences that promote sharing while also safeguarding individual privacy? And all of these situations will undoubtedly be heightened with no human driver to help set context or mediate interactions.

So, the intimate nature of autonomous vehicles will most likely lead to a significant rethinking of vehicle interiors, prompting car companies to innovate in a variety of ways. But when it comes to designing how people will share these close spaces with each other, we've identified three general challenges that seem particularly important for designers to tackle first:

· Being together & being apart. 

From one ride to the next, we see an ever-shifting need to be social or private. Some people will want to sit side-by-side, others across from each other, still others will want to sit in a small circle to share or socialize—all while other passengers may want their own more private, personal spaces. All of this means that seating will have to become much more changeable, flexible, and adaptable. How might seats be combined or separated? Can they be brought out or stowed away, to create more or less space? In what ways could seats be reconfigured into individual or shared seating?

· New ways to create privacy. 

In such intimate spaces, the pressure to have some sort of social interaction with other passengers, even a brief hello, may be substantial. In some contexts, passengers will want to engage, but in others they may want to keep to themselves. Currently, people use headphones or stay heads-down in a book to signal that they are "unavailable" for conversation, but physical aspects of the interior might also be designed to help create discrete spaces. How might partitioning be incorporated into the environment? Could lighting be used to signal a need for privacy? What interior layouts will let passengers use their mobile devices without someone looking over their shoulder?

· The ebb and flow of our devices. 

If one of the main value propositions for autonomous vehicles is to free up driving time for other activities, then passengers will likely use their mobile devices for chatting, texting, watching content, or being productive. This means that vehicle interiors must account for the various needs we have with our mobile devices. What physical areas (device "cup holders"?) will enable us to charge, view, and use our devices hands-free? How will the space accommodate the bags, cases, power cords, stands, headphones, and other peripherals we bring with our devices? And how will the space make it easy for us to remember our devices, so we don't leave them behind at the end of a trip?

Again, these three challenges look at the interiors of autonomous vehicles as shared environments, much like taxis or ride-hailing vehicles, where passengers may or may not know each other. Many in the industry believe that autonomous vehicles will first hit the market as fleets of "robot-taxis". This is likely because the value propositions of autonomous vehicles seem familiar and well-aligned with the current "anytime, anywhere" promise of ride-hailing services. For personally-owned autonomous vehicles, other interior design needs will arise, and many aspects of the above challenges may not apply at all.

It will be interesting to see all of the ways these interiors will come to be, as the industry marches on and autonomous vehicles become a reality. In a few short years, we might take a ride, if we're confident they are safe and trustworthy. And we might continue riding in them, if the interiors are designed with our needs, comfort, and privacy in mind.

-------------

Further Reading: IDEO's take on passenger experience and shared transportation environments. 

The venture capital industry is beginning to take a good, hard look at a new financial instrument coming out of the bitcoin community — Initial Coin Offerings, or ICOs. Also known as “token sales,” this new fundraising phenomenon is being fueled by a convergence of blockchain technology, new wealth, clever entrepreneurs, and crypto-investors who are backing blockchain-fueled ideas. ICOs present both benefits and disadvantages, as well as threats and opportunities, to the traditional venture capital business model.

Here’s how an ICO typically works: A new cryptocurrency is created on a protocol such as Counterparty, Ethereum, or Openledger, and a value is arbitrarily determined by the startup team behind the ICO based on what they think the network is worth at its current stage. Then, via price dynamics determined by market supply and demand, the value is settled on by the network of participants, rather than by a central authority or government.

Insight Center

Venture capitalists, who generally have been standoffish to the ICO phenomenon, are now becoming more interested in it for a number of reasons. One is profits — cryptocurrency investors made some massive returns in 2016, with cryptocurrencies from Blockchain startups Monero and NEM both seeing 2,000% increases in value. For example, the cryptocurrency used for the Ethereum network, called Ether, saw its value double in just a few days in March 2017. Yes, in three days, people who invested in Ether doubled their investment. Those investors can opt to cash out to a fiat-backed currency, or wait for the cryptocurrency to continue to rise (or fall). Volatility is a two-way street. While the price of Ether has been rising, Bitcoin has dropped 20% to $1,000 dollars from a record $1,290 on March 3, 2017.

The second reason VCs are becoming more interested in ICOs is because of the liquidity of cryptocurrencies. Rather than tying up vast amounts of funds in a unicorn startup and waiting for the long play — an IPO or an acquisition — investors can see gains more quickly, and can pull profits out more easily, via ICOs. They simply need to convert their cryptocurrency profits into Bitcoin or Ether on any of the cryptocurrency exchanges that carry it, and then it’s easily converted to fiat currency via online services such as Coinsbank or Coinbase.

What traditional investors don’t like about any of this is the regulatory uncertainty; the high valuations and over-capitalization; the lack of control over financials, strategy, and operations; and the lack of business use-cases. And like any industry, the ICO arena has had its fair share of outright scams, pump and dumps, and blatant Ponzi schemes. However, much of the criminal activity is now being mitigated by self-organized, crowdsourced due diligence in the community, as well as by external parties such as Smith and Crown, a research group focused on cryptofinance, and ICO Rating, a ratings agency that issues independent analytical research on blockchain-based companies.

At least one VC firm is moving into cryptocurrencies. Blockchain Capital is set to raise its third fund via a digital token offering in the first-ever liquidity-enhanced venture capital fund (where people can invest without locking their money up for years on end) via a digital token called BCAP.

ICOs are the Wild West of financing — they sit in a grey zone where the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and many other regulatory bodies are still investigating them. The main problem is, though, that most ICO’s don’t actually offer equity in start-up ventures; instead, they only offer discounts on cryptocurrencies before they hit the exchanges. Therefore, they don’t fit into the current definition of a security, and are technically outside of traditional legal frameworks. Secondly, they are global instruments — not national ones — and they are funded using bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies that are not controlled by any central authority or bank. Anyone can invest, and they can even do so pseudo-anonymously (it’s not impossible to find out who people are, but it’s not easy, either). Currently, there’s no Anti-Money Laundering (AML) law or Know Your Customer (KYC) framework, though some companies are working on that. One example is Tokenmarket, a marketplace for tokens, digital assets and blockchain-based investing, that has teamed up with the Stock Market of Gibraltar to offer KYC- and AML-compliant ICOs.

Detractors of these new funding schemes scream for structure and protection, point out the scams, demand more control, and say that without equity, investors don’t have enough skin in the game. Meanwhile, proponents retort that there’s a real need for freedom to invest outside the accredited system, which sees the wealthy getting wealthier. They argue that the door needs to close on the domination of Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley and other VCs and investors in the tech industry who have been making massive returns on the backs of entrepreneurs for far too long.

How Blockchain Works

For blockchain startups, ICOs are a win-win — they allow startups to raise funds without having equity stakeholders breathing down their necks on spending, prioritizing financial returns over the general good of the product or service itself.  And there are many in the blockchain community who feel that ICOs are a long-awaited solution for non-profit foundations that want to build open-source software to raise capital. Non-profits usually hold about 10-20% of the total cryptocurrency they issue; as Ethereum did in their ICO in 2014,  with 20% going to the development fund and the remaining going to the Ethereum Foundation. This is so they have a vested interest in building more value, as well as having reserves for growth in the future. (As of March 2017, the market capitalization of the ether token was more than $4 billion.)

The market cap for bitcoin is now close to $20 billion, and half of that is allegedly owned by less than one thousand people, who are called “bitcoin whales.” Many of them are in China, but there are also hedge funds and bitcoin investment funds who hold massive amounts of bitcoin. Most made their money early on by buying or mining bitcoin when it was still under $10 (in the early days of 2011-2013). It’s now worth approximately $1,120 per bitcoin. These “bitcoin whales” are currently the ones who make or break many of the ICOs. Some of the enormous profits they have made in bitcoin are being channeled back into innovation, as many of them seek to diversify holdings, as well as support the ecosystem in general.

More than $270 million has been raised in ICOs since 2013, according to Smith and Crown (not including the $150 million raised in The DAO scandal, which was returned to investors). Since 2013, there’s been about $2 billion invested in blockchain and bitcoin startups from the VC community. ICOs are becoming more and more popular for startups seeking to get out of self-funding, bootstrapping starvation mode and avoid being locked in by venture capitalists, watching their own equity drown in a sea of financing rounds. ICOs are dominating the overall crowdfunding charts in terms of funds raised, with half of the top 20 raises coming from the crypto-community.

In a recent conversation, MIT scientist and author John Clippinger described the vast potential of this new movement to me as such:

One way of thinking about a crypto-asset is as a security in a startup, which begins with a $10 million valuation and becomes a $10 billion dollar entity. Instead of stock splits, the founding crypto-asset gets denominated in smaller and smaller units; in this case 1,000 to one. Here, everyone in the network is an equity holder who has an incentive to increase the value of the network. All of this depends upon how well the initial crypto-asset and its governance contract are designed and protected. In this instance, good governance, e.g. oversight, yields predictability, security, and effectiveness, which in turn creates value for all token holders.

Just as venture capitalists are taking a hard look at this new phenomenon, so should we all. It’s not just about the money that can be made; it’s also about funding blockchain projects and, in the near future, other startups and even networks, as Clippinger noted. We now have a way to easily fund open source software, housed under foundations rather than corporations, that can truly drive faster innovation. Right now, blockchain technology is at the stage where the internet was in 1992, and it’s opening up a wealth of new possibilities that have the promise to add value to numerous industries, including finance, health, education, music, art, government, and more.

The idea of creating compelling B2B website content may sound overwhelming at first, but it doesn’t have to be. Here at Bop Design, I’ve crafted the website content strategy for a number of B2B clients and I’ve learned what works, what doesn’t, and what to do to ensure we consistently launch websites with winning content that generates new business.

The seven tips below provide a solid road map for you to craft B2B website content that sells.

1. Start with your site map

Before you write a single line of copy, draft your site map: a hierarchical list of all the pages on your website and how they relate to one another.

We created the site map below for MediKeeper, a company that develops healthcare portals. Naturally, it starts with the home page at the top. The next line down features the top-level pages – the pages that will appear on your main navigation. Below the top-level pages are the sub-pages. (In some cases, there will be sub-pages to the sub-pages, depending on how large your site is.)

The site map provides a jumping off point that organizes the pages on your site in a clear-cut manner and helps you plan your B2B content strategy. Keep in mind that the site map is meant to represent just the pages on your site. It’s not a comprehensive catalog of every copy point you want to make. In essence, think of the pages on your site as content categories that will make sense to your prospective clients. You can then drill down and make notes on which copy points to make on each page.

2. Create your overarching brand message

While you may be tempted to dive right in and start writing page copy, it’s important to have a content strategy at the outset. What is the main message you want to convey about your brand? All too often we come across clients who aren’t clear about what makes their brand unique. Determine what sets you apart from your competitors and craft a story around your brand that positions you as the company best suited to serve your clients’ needs.

In the example of our client MediKeeper, we created the overarching brand message, “Workforce health just got easier.” They are communicating to clients that their wellness portals provide a simple solution to the complex job of managing workforce health – something many HR managers struggle with.

Your overarching brand message should guide you when crafting the remainder of your B2B website content. Ask yourself, “Does the copy I’m writing convey the overarching brand message?” The answer should be yes.

3. Get to the point

While you may be skilled at writing beautiful prose or clever headlines, if it doesn’t immediately get to the point of a) what you do and b) how it can help potential customers, it’s not worth much in a B2B marketing context. Business folks are busy and they simply don’t have time to poke around your site just to figure out what it is you do.

You’ve got about 10-20 seconds to engage your website visitors once visitors land on your site, and that means letting them know they’re in the right place. If they’re searching for payroll software, don’t make them work to figure out that’s what you provide. Make sure this information appears front and center to get them to dig deeper to find out if you’re the right payroll software provider for them.

However, when we say “get to the point,” we’re not just talking about the home page. Use this principle on all of your website pages. The internet is bursting at the seams with more and more content daily – and as content volume grows, attention spans shrink. That’s why we’ve seen a trend of “simplify or perish” when it comes to content. Avoid long blocks of copy and make your point succinctly, yet effectively.

4. Speak like a human

Yes, you’re representing a B2B business, but don’t make the mistake of forgetting that your buyer is actually a living, breathing human being with thoughts and emotions. In this age of social media, even the most traditional, corporate sites are adopting more conversational tones in their website content. Why? It’s simply more engaging.

So, stop referring to yourselves in the third person, ditch the dull corporate speak and start talking to your audience like people. While you may not want to sound too laid back (leave the emojis and “LOLs” for texting friends and family), a skilled copywriter will understand the difference between conversational and cutesy.

5. Solve your client’s pain points

All too often, we come across B2B websites that go on and on about how awesome they are. That’s nice, but your website visitor is thinking, “But how are you going to solve MY problem?”

The first step is to determine the role of your buyer. A mid-level marketing manager will have different pain points than a CEO. Chances are a lower-level administrator will do the initial research of identifying possible vendors, and then make recommendations to the executive team. You want to make sure you are covering the pain points of all of your buyer personas.

Let potential clients know that you understand their pain points by stating what they are. Then be explicit at explaining how your product or services can help eliminate them.

6. Make CTAs clear and concise

Now that you’ve written amazing copy on how you can solve your client’s problems – and convinced them that you’re a great fit, make it easy for them to contact you. Provide clearly visible calls-to-action (CTAs) throughout your site and on your navigation that prompt them to get in touch.

Perhaps offer a free consultation, product demo, or just an opportunity for them to reach out with questions. Again, make it easy. Provide a short form they can fill out right then and there – with “short” being the operative word. Make it simple for them and they’ll be more likely to complete the desired action: contacting you about your offering.

7. Work with a skilled B2B website designer

While they say content is king, you can think of design as queen. Think about a standard text document. You could write the most compelling, persuasive content ever, but it’s not going to do much for you if you present it in that format.

The right designer – one who is experienced in working with B2B websites –knows how to make your copy pop and motivate potential buyers. They know how to break up content for maximum readability and understand which copy needs to stand out most.

Avoid designers who design simply for the sake of design. A stunning design alone won’t do the job. You need a designer who understands that B2B marketing has a purpose – and that purpose is to sell.

Marketing and sales have traditionally had a bit of a contentious relationship in many companies. With miscommunication, vastly different goals and objectives, and sometimes an inability to see the other’s point of view – these two teams who need to work together often find themselves at odds. And out of that contentious relationship, a new role was born: sales enablement.

Sales Enablement is a strategic, ongoing process to equip the sales team with the tools, resources and skills to make them more efficient, and ultimately improve sales execution and drive revenue. As the head of sales enablement at Act-On, I tried to do this in three unique ways:

1. Sales training (onboarding, continual training, sales methodology training)
2. Communications (sales newsletters)
3. Tools and resources (prospecting tools and company tools to tee up appropriate content)

Successful sales enablement involves a lot more than automated pricing guides and managerial oversight of the sales funnel. B2B companies are making huge investments in sales enablement tools, but too many begin with little understanding of the people, processes, and enterprise-wide insights they must bring together in order to make sales enablement a success.

“Research shows that 70 to 80 percent of the time, under-performance is due to environmental rather than individual factors, yet most of the time sales enablement solutions focus on improving the individual,” says Robert Koehler of TOPO Inc. (Koehler was employed at LinkedIn at the time of this interview).

Crucial to the success of your organization is ensuring that both marketers and sales understand the perspective of their prospects and customers. “Sellers tend to think in terms of features and benefits, but buyers think in terms of capabilities — the unique set of problems they can solve by purchasing your product,” says Candyce Edelen, CEO of PropelGrowth.

Clearly, it pays to take some time to understand the best ways to go about implementing effective sales enablement methods. Truly successful sales enablement looks at the bigger picture and earns the right to make both a strategic and tactical contribution. Here are seven best practices to help you succeed with your sales enablement efforts.

1. Hire the right people.

Theories about how to hire the right sales personnel are as old as the profession of selling itself. But modern sales enablement strategies and disciplines require professionals who are more flexible and teamwork-oriented than in decades past. Your company’s goal should be to hire salespeople who are able and prepared to help their customers dream and achieve.

2. Observe, evaluate, and understand your sales reps.

Successfully introducing new sales enablement technology and processes means looking beyond individual bottom-line production and taking on the attitude and role of a sales performance consultant. Approaching the sales enablement process with an open mind and inclusive attitude will help avoid common pitfalls, such as focusing too much on process automation, or forcing the entire sales staff to follow overly rigid scripts.

3. Provide continual product, competition, and buyer training.

If you have a physical location, maximize your calls to action at the point of sale or interaction with customers. Even if people are just window shopping, you can reach them with CTAs to engage with you via an email program that offers benefits and value. That could be discounts, sales alerts, new product releases, contests, and so on.

4. Use your own crowd to crowdsource sales enablement tools.

Nothing can doom a sales enablement strategy faster than the perception that it’s something marketing is imposing on sales. Instead, the development and refinement of sales enablement should be a collaborative and open process.

5. Align content and tools to the buying cycle.

The longer buying cycle and the highly informed buyer are facts of life which aren’t going anywhere. Using marketing tools to help your reps be more effective communicators is vital to winning business under these conditions.

6. Be vigilant over time to ward off fragmentation and drift.

As organizations grow, expand, seek new audiences, merge, and spin off, disconnections and inconsistencies crop up. Products have different names in different regions. Pricing tables seem arbitrary because the CFOs who tried to reconcile them left after the merger was complete. Territories are drawn along gerrymandered lines. The sales enablement process can help you discover and weed out many of these anomalies and vestigial artifacts to eliminate confusion and prevent the team from communicating at cross purposes.

7. Integrate sales enablement across the business.

Effective sales enablement not only brings the sales department’s reps, managers and leadership to the same table, but includes voices and input from the entire organization. This should, at a minimum, include the entire marketing and customer success departments. Remember that these three teams are the face of your company – delivering a consistent experience across the entire customer lifecycle is crucial to creating long-lasting, happy customers.

The thing that I can’t stress enough is that all of these best practices are tied together by one thing to have successful sales enablement – consistency. Everything on the sales enablement side should be consistent, from trainings to newsletters, to tools and resources.

In the end, sales enablement is first and foremost about attitude. It’s a team approach to sales that gives everyone in the organization a support role in aligning resources to make the right sale to the right customer. Marketing plays a key role, ensuring that the right information, tools, and subject matter experts can be delivered in a way that is relevant to each unique selling situation.

Do you have any advice for those seeking to ramp up their sales enablement abilities? Share it here!

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Amazon has reportedly agreed to purchase Souq.com, a Dubai-based e-commerce company, according to Reuters.

Although the acquisition price has not been confirmed, TechCrunch reports that Amazon will pay $650 million for Souq, which was previously valued at $1 billion after raising $275 million in funding last February. Amazon was in talks to acquire Souq last December, but a deal never closed.

Extending its reach in overseas markets has been a focus of the e-commerce giant for several years now. While Amazon hasn’t been successful as an e-commerce business in China, it's been developing a logistics business in the country. In fact, it recently expanded its freight-forwarding and logistics services to include air cargo services in addition to sea shipping — a move that could help it attract more merchants to its marketplace in China. Amazon also debuted its Prime subscription service in Mexico, aiming to grab market share by extending its efficient shipping and video streaming services in the country. Moreover, the e-commerce giant pledged to invest $5 billion in its Indian operations over the next few years.

This acquisition marks a departure from Amazon’s typical strategy to grow organically in a new market, but could allow for the e-commerce giant to rapidly expand in the Middle East. Souq is currently the market leader in the region, and receives more than 45 million site visits per month. As a result, Amazon wouldn't have to build a network of merchants and buyers, and it would gain brand recognition from Souq's popularity. Amazon would also be able to forgo the regulatory approvals needed to operate in the countries Souq sells in — United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait — facilitating cross-border sales.

The region’s e-commerce market is in infancy stages, but Amazon could face considerable competition from soon-to-launch Noon.com. Noon is backed by retail tycoon Mohamed Alabbar, and plans to launch with 20 million products. In China, Amazon struggled to gain market share from a well-established Alibaba, so it's likely looking to get a head start on Noon through the Souq acquisition.

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Whether you’re a veteran writer or just getting started, your success depends on your ability to maintain the highest quality in your content. This means creating content that follows today’s top best practices.

Without a focus on the most important elements of content creation, you run the risk of wasting your time and resources. You’ll simply be disappointed.

Let’s get started with these 10 content creation best practices. By the end, you’ll be better prepared to create content that’ll stand out from the rest to bring you subscribers and leads.

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1) Have a clear purpose

Your content creation depends on what you want to get out of it and how you’ll accomplish it. That’s why it’s so important to know your content purpose. The best way to approach this is to have a content strategy. Without one, you’ll be disorganized, and it will show in your content in one way or another.

You don’t want to create content just for the sake of having it. You always want to have a reason for why you’re creating it. A strategy with a description of your creation purpose is necessary to keep track of why and how you’re creating content.

Takeaways

DON’T create content for the sake of having content.

ALWAYS have a reason or purpose for why you’re creating it.

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2) Know your audience

Creating personas for your content marketing efforts is essential to successful reach and conversion. You want your content to attract and retain the right audience. The best way to do this is to have a clear understanding of who this target audience is, their pain points, and how you can help resolve them.

In a past article, I dived deep into persona development, but these are a few of the highlights:

• A reader persona is a fictional representation of who your ideal readers are in relation to your content goals. If your goal is conversions, your ideal readers would be likely to convert. Personas are not based on complete assumptions but rather are formed from research-backed data.
• Personas give your content direction, which helps you stay focused on the right path toward your end goal.

You can find step-by-step instructions on collecting the right data and putting it all together by continuing on to the original article.

Takeaways

DON’T create anything without establishing a clear understanding of your readers via personas.

DO your research: What do they want? What are their pain points you can resolve?

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3) Be business relevant

You might think you need to be hip and trendy to reach people and get attention. You’re missing the most important part about content: you need to reach the right people at the right time in the right way.

Yes, you’ll want to create content about topics you know your target audience is watching. Current trends are a great way to get their attention. However, steer clear of controversy and focus on trends and topics that can relate back to your business.

Some trends you can and should use can be found on social media. These topics are sometimes generic enough to avoid controversy while also giving your brand a human voice. You can use these trends to inspire people, but make sure you’re focusing solely on that. This is not the time for self-promotion.

Takeaways

DON’T create content that doesn’t match with your business goals. It might be trendy, but if it isn’t relevant, it won’t reach the right people.

ALWAYS create content that is business or industry relevant, and as a potential secondary addition, incorporate trending topics with it.

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4) Provide value

Content creation is about offering valuable information and advice to help your readers solve a need or pain point. It’s not the time for a sales pitch or promotional broadcast. Your blog, for example, is not a press release platform. They are separate entities.

Your focus when writing and developing your content should always start with how you’ll help your readers. It’s not about SEO until you’re sure your content holds value to your readers. When you know you’re offering true value, that’s when you can carefully incorporate other items, such as SEO elements and calls-to-action.

Takeaways

DON’T create content without having a primary focus on providing value.

ALWAYS focus first on creating quality content for your audience.

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5) Optimize your title

Whether it’s a blog post, an eBook, or a social media update, your title is how you’ll get people’s attention. It’s how you’ll get them to take the next step. For example, a social media update with an optimized title will get people to click-through to your destination.

Use CoSchedule’s headline analyzer for your blog posts to see how effective it is or isn’t according to best practices. You’ll see whether it uses strong words, has a good length, offers positive, neutral, or negative sentiment, and much more. It helps to get an outside point of view on your title to truly understand how it works or doesn’t outside of your own biases.

Takeaways

DON’T use titles that you find appealing or effective without researching it first.

DO make sure you’re getting input from tools or other people before finalizing a title.

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6) Find a balance between text, images and video

Whether it’s a blog post or social media update, you should always be offering content variety. A blog post cannot be just block text and neither should your social media updates. Incorporate relevant images to enhance your blog posts and express a major point from your text. When creating a social media update to promote that blog post, add the featured image to your update to improve engagement.

If you want to take it one step further, start creating videos on your blog and social media. Video is taking over where text once reigned. Text is no longer the preferred format. It’s video, so you should be seriously considering a video strategy for your content creation efforts.

Takeaways

DON’T publish block text. Headings and subheadings help, but they’re not enough. At minimum, offer a featured image. Video would be even better.

DO consider creating a video creation strategy to add to your existing content strategy. It shouldn’t replace it – just enhance it.

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7) Always have a call-to-action (CTA)

A blog post needs a call-to-action. An eBook needs a call-to-action. Social media updates should have CTAs. Do you notice a trend?

Calls-to-action are one of the most important elements of any content you create. It’s how you get your audience to convert and take that next step closer to a sale. Your content goal should be lead generation just as much as (if not more than) thought leadership. Of course, your content itself should be value-based, but it wouldn’t have a business purpose if you didn’t include a CTA.

Takeaways

DON’T publish content without including an attractive, convincing call-to-action.

DO add one CTA per content piece to get your audience to convert into leads.

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8) Check for SEO

After you created your blog content, and after you’ve included value to the reader, you now need to get it found in search results. SEO is critical to have your content found by the right people, so it’s important you use a tool like Yoast to check that your content is truly optimized.

With Yoast, you get a two-in-one service. If you’re hosting your site in WordPress, use this plugin to check your content for both SEO and readability. The plugin will teach you how to create content that appeals to search engines while also maintaining reader value.

Takeaways

DON’T make SEO your #1 priority when creating a blog post. Keyword stuffing is a huge no-no.

DO focus your content creation on both SEO and reader value by investing in a tool or following best practices.

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9) Proofread for any errors

When you’re creating written content, you’re bound to make errors in grammar, accuracy, or structure. This is why proofreading is so important. Check your content to see if there are any spelling errors. Are your facts and data accurate? Do your links work? Is the article formatting all in the right place?

If you don’t proofread, you’re almost guaranteed to publish an error-filled piece of content. The best way to prevent this is to both proofread it yourself and also have someone else take a good look at it. These are some other proofreading tips that can guide your content creation efforts.

Takeaways

DON’T publish content that hasn’t been reviewed for grammar, spelling, accuracy, etc first.

DO thoroughly proofread your content yourself and have at least one other person help you out.

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10) Have a social sharing strategy

When your content is hosted on your website, you need to get people to come visit it. Social media promotion is one way that this can happen. Use hashtags you know your target audience is watching. You can now use hashtags on LinkedIn, so that’s one more platform where you can take advantage of that feature. Without hashtags, add keywords to your updates to be found by other social media users.

Make sure you’re adding update copy that draws people’s attention without being deceiving. Tell your social media audience what they’d get out of clicking through instead of creating clickbait. You want people to stick around after they click through, but clickbait will just increase your bounce rate.

Takeaways

DON’T use clickbait to get more people to click through. It’ll increase your bounce rate and damage your future click-through rate.

DO explain the value in what you have to offer behind the link. Express the benefits to them.

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Your content is how you’ll bring a return on investment on your marketing efforts. It’s important that you create content that attracts, retains, and converts a qualified audience. These 10 content creation best practices are here to help you achieve that.

What are you doing to create results-oriented content? Would you add anything to this list? Share your input in a comment!