These are a few of my favorite things.

1. The ability to competitively displace a larger, better equipped sales force. There is just something about an underdog. The more lopsided and unlikely things appear from the outside, the more I admire their ability to punch above their weight class.
2. The ability to sell something at a higher price when all things are equal, or even less than equal. Most salespeople want to take price out of the equation as a way to make selling easy. There is nothing impressive or interesting there. What’s impressive is the ability to create greater value—and capture some of that value so you can execute.
3. A bias for prospecting. If you want to know what selling is, if you have to boil it down to one thing: opportunity creation. Opportunity creation is prospecting. Nothing happens until there is an opportunity, and it’s impressive to see a group of people who continually do so—even when they have a full pipeline.
4. The ability to create a preference that withstands all threats. You have to admire a sales force that can retain their clients. When the preference for the individual salesperson is so strong that their clients are all locked down tight, it’s something worth studying.
5. A culture of performance that is bottom up instead of top down. One of the most interesting thing to see is a culture that rejects people who would weaken it. When people expect everyone to play up a level, it’s a stronger culture greater than a leader can build on their own.
6. A competitiveness and combativeness that forms the foundation of their mindset and their desire to win. A sales force that loves a good fight is a sales force that will over time take on greater and greater challenges. The willingness to go out and throw punches is often by itself enough to produce results.
7. The ability to help others on their team succeed. Great salespeople are always happy to share what they do and how they do it with their peers. By helping others grow and succeed, the whole sales force gets better, and the team as a whole is more and more difficult to defeat.
8. A lack of excuses. It’s not your product, your price, or your irrational competitor. It’s not the President or your government. A sales force that makes no excuses is a sales force that doesn’t ever need to.
9. A lack of complaining. A sales force that doesn’t complain is rare. There are so many things about which one might complain, like territories, compensation, leadership. Complaining isn’t a performance enhancing behavior, and great sales teams no this.
10. A lack of fear. When things go pear-shaped—and inevitably, they always go pear-shaped—a fearless sales force steps up and does what is necessary. If it’s a shift in strategy, so be it. A shift into a new product, one that makes their existing pipeline moot, done.

The post Things I Admire In a Sales Force appeared first on The Sales Blog.

If you want your content to serve its purpose and drive marketing goals, you need to be proactive with your content promotion. Here are seven content promotion tactics you can use to get your website noticed.

1. Send an email broadcast

Your email list is (hopefully) composed of people who signed up because they’re interested in your brand and want to receive your latest updates. According to Campaign Monitor, you’re six times more likely to get a click from an email campaign than a tweet. That’s a great audience to promote your content to because they’re already engaged and much more likely to share.

You’re 6x more likely to get a click from an email campaign than a tweet via @campaignmonitor. #emailmarketing
Click To Tweet

Once a new piece of content is published, send a message to your list. Include a short teaser of the content to encourage them to click through, and be sure to include a call to action asking them to share it.

Five days after you send the first broadcast email, check your analytics to see who didn’t open it. Send the broadcast again — with a different subject line — to this group. You will be surprised at how many clicks you are missing by only sending the broadcast once! (Thanks to Adam Franklin from Bluewire Media for this trick.)

See who didn’t open your e-blast and resend w/ a different subject line, says @Franklin_Adam via @WillBluntAU.
Click To Tweet

If you create a lot of content, how often you use this strategy will depend on your audience. For example, if your subscribers signed up for a weekly newsletter (nothing more), then stick to that.

AdRoll sends a regular newsletter highlighting several recent posts from its blog. You could do something like that as well.

2. Engage with your community

Plenty of tools and platforms will help you join your industry’s conversation and give your content more reach at the same time. Here are some options:

Social media groups

Facebook and LinkedIn groups are great opportunities to dig deeper into a social platform and target your niche audience. Join groups that your content is relevant to, join the conversation, and suggest your content naturally. You can also join and contribute to specific boards on Pinterest.

.@Facebook & @LinkedIn groups are ways to engage with your niche audience, says @WillBluntAU.
Click To Tweet

Content promotion networks

You can also get more reach on social media with the help of content promotion networks, such as Viral Content Bee. This platform connects you with other people wanting to promote their content. Share their posts and you receive credits that you can then use to promote your own posts.

Quuu is a tool that automatically curates content for people to share. Sign up to promote your content and select the relevant categories. Then your posts can become a part of the curated content queue.

Online communities

There are plenty of other platforms where you can discuss topics related to your niche. Join Q&A sites like Quora or Yahoo Answers, and you can suggest your content as a resource to answer people’s questions. Just make sure you actually engage in discussions on the platform so it’s not all about promoting your content.

TIP: If you create content about marketing-related topics, Inbound.org and GrowthHackers are two content curation and promotion communities to take advantage of.

3. Pay to promote

Advertising your content is a fairly new concept that can work well, especially compared to traditional direct-marketing tactics. Pay per click or by number of impressions to help your content get more reach on a variety of platforms.

Facebook Ads

Facebook makes it possible to create targeted ads based on all kinds of criteria, including demographics, location, and specific interest categories. If you know your target audience well, you can take advantage of these features for your content promotion.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon offers a paid discovery feature with a pay-per-click model. Its users are mostly college-age millennials so if you have content relevant to this demographic, look into it.

If your content targets college-age millennials, look into promoting it with @StumbleUpon, says @WillBluntAU.
Click To Tweet

Reddit Ads

Reddit is another platform full of millennials, but not exclusively. Reddit Ads are an inexpensive option to get more reach for your content on the crowdsourced platform.

Outbrain

Outbrain is a promotion network that displays your content on relevant blogs and news sites. The “related content” section at the bottom of a lot of web pages is usually full of promoted content from Outbrain or one of its competitors.

4. Reach out on social media

Social platforms are crowded, so there’s no guarantee interested people will see and share your content. To improve your content’s visibility, target interested people directly.

Use a tool like BuzzSumo to find social media users who share content like yours. Just take a keyword from the content you want to promote and type it into its search bar.

You’ll see a list of popular content related to that keyword ordered by most overall shares. Find the most relevant content post and click on “View Sharers” — you’ll want to target this list with your content.

Targeting influencers with a lot of followers is important, but only if they’re likely to engage with your messaging. Make sure you select people with a high retweet and reply ratio (detailed in their BuzzSumo profile).

Connect on a social platform using an @ mention of your influencer to ask for opinions on your content or suggest that his or her audience might like it.

5. Connect with influencers outside of social

Social media isn’t the only place you should target influencers. Email is another option likely to capture more attention, especially if your influencer has a busy social profile. A cold email to a previously identified influencer can help you with a lot of things — building links, getting comments, or encouraging sharing. Consider this template:

An email to identified influencer may capture more attention than a social mention, says @WillBluntAU.
Click To Tweet

Hi (Name),

I was doing some research into influencers in the (Industry) space and came across your name. I’ve got a lot of respect for the brand you have built for yourself on Twitter.

The reason I’m reaching out is because our team recently put together a helpful resource about (topic), and I think your audience could get some great value from it.

I know you’re busy, but if you have two seconds I’d love you to share it around… Here’s a clickable link:(insert clickable link)

And here’s the original article: (insert article URL and name)

Thanks and have a great day.

Regards,

(Your name)

6. Ask to include your content

Getting your content to appear in roundups is a great way to get more reach and build backlinks at the same time. You can find relevant link roundups to target with the help of Google. Include your niche keyword and one of the following in your search:

• Roundup
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Best of
• Top 10
• Link love

Getting your content to appear in roundups is a great way to get more reach & build backlinks. @WillBluntAU
Click To Tweet

Once you’ve found some relevant roundups, reach out to the roundup curator to suggest your blog post be considered for the next entry.

One of my favorite roundups is from Ana Hoffman at Traffic Generation Café who is always open to share the love with a link if you do the same.

7. Write for others

Attract people from the web to important pages on your website (e.g., a squeeze page or sales page) by guest posting or blogging. Create amazing content and pitch it to other sites. If they let you, include links in the content and your author bio to key pages on your site.

There are tons of guest post opportunities, and finding them is easy. Most serious blogs will have a guest post submission page. Use Google to find them:

• (Niche keyword) + “guest post submission”
• (Niche keyword) + “write for us”
• (Niche keyword) + “contribution guidelines”

TIP: Install a plug-in like Alexa on your browser. When you visit a blog you want to pitch to, you can see important traffic stats with just one click.

Wrapping up

Content marketing can do a lot to bring traffic to your website and progress your business goals, but only if you take the right steps to promote your content.

Follow these tactics and monitor their impact on your site traffic:

• Broadcast to your email list (more than once).
• Evaluate content promotion networks.
• Explore options with paid media.
• Reach out on social media.
• Connect outside social media.
• Ask content curators to include your content.
• Increase your reach by guest blogging.

You might find that some tactics work better than others, so adjust your strategy and get the most out of your promotion to get your content noticed.

Which other content promotion tactics have you found to be most effective for your business?

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

Want to ensure you’re in the loop of CMI’s content promotion? Subscribe to the free daily or weekly digest newsletters.

Cover image by Viktor Hanacek, picumbo

The post 7 Promotion Tactics to Get Your Content Noticed appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Halfway through the month, I noticed my salesperson’s call-to-demo rate had dropped 10%.

During our next one-on-one, I asked her why.

“The decrease is intentional,” she responded. “I’ve become more selective about whom I’ll move to the demo stage. Not only can I focus my energy on the best-fit prospects, but I have more time in my day for other selling activities.”

This salesperson ended up selling more than she had in previous months. Since then, I’ve encouraged my team to give fewer demos.

Salespeople Have Become Demo-Happy

Imagine you’re three minutes into a connect call with a buyer when they request an overview of your product’s features.

Do you:

A) Launch into a product tour right then and there -- with the goal of closing by the end of the call

B) Think, “Awesome, they’re clearly primed to buy,” and schedule a demo immediately

C) Tell them you’d like to schedule a conversation about their needs and objectives first

If you answered A or B, you’re setting yourself up for failure. There are two likely outcomes when you shortcut the sales process and skip straight to a demo. First, you might win the deal -- but because you haven’t appropriately assessed whether your product is a good fit, your prospect may end up churning, returning it, and/or giving you negative reviews. Alternatively, you could lose the deal because you don’t know enough about their situation to position the product’s benefits in a relevant, engaging way.

Think of it this way: Every minute you spend giving a demo to a prospect who’s not an ideal customer is a minute you could be spending on activities that’ll actually help you meet your quota, such as prospecting, requesting referrals, cross- and upselling current customers, collecting testimonials, and more. There’s a huge opportunity cost to unnecessary demos.

In addition, to give a good demo you need to be mentally present -- you can’t go on autopilot. The more demos you give, the less energy you’ll have for other tasks. Giving fewer demos helps you be fully “on” the entire day.

Finally, being more selective about your demos helps you earn the buyer’s trust and respect. It will be clear that you don’t sell to anyone who will buy -- you only sell to customers who can benefit from your solution.

The bottom line? Just because the buyer asks for a demo or sales presentation doesn’t mean you should give one. Rushing to offer demos in an attempt to shrink your sales cycle is also ineffective, since you can’t give a convincing presentation without a thorough discovery. You’ll need to spend longer than normal answering objections and pushing past internal barriers -- assuming you even make it that far.

How to Respond to Premature Demo Requests

If your prospect asks for a demo too early in the sales conversation, here are some responses you can use to turn down their request without ticking them off:

• “I’d be happy to show you how [product] can help you achieve [prospect’s goal]. To make sure I only include the most relevant details, let’s set up a call to discuss your priorities. Are you free on [date and time]?”
• “Before we dive under the hood, I want to make sure [product] is the right fit for you. Are you available on [date and time] for a conversation about your needs?”
• “[Product] has several different use cases. I don’t want to waste your time on the ones that don’t apply to you, so let’s go over your needs first. How does that sound?”
• “I don’t feel comfortable taking [X minutes, hours] of your time on a [demo, presentation] until I know you’ll derive significant value from [product]. Let’s put a needs assessment call on the calendar first. Does [date and time] work for you?”

Sometimes the buyer agrees to a discovery call -- but keeps pushing for product information. In these scenarios, denying them might lead them to work with a different salesperson who’ll give them what they want immediately.

With that in mind, send them resources on your product’s main features or direct them toward a product webinar. You should also probe into the cause of their urgency: Are they operating on a deadline? Do they need to complete the purchase before a certain date?

Once you know why they’re in a rush, you’re better equipped to help them. For instance, if they need to make a decision by the end of the month, you might offer to rearrange some meetings so you can fit both a discovery call and demo in that time period.

Tracking Your Success

How do you know if your commitment to give fewer (and better) demos is working? There are four metrics you should track.

• Leading indicators: Your weekly, monthly, and/or quarterly demo rate will go down, while your discovery call rate for the same period should go up.
• Lagging indicators: Both your close rate and customer retention rate should increase.

It may seem counterintuitive, but giving fewer demos will make you more successful. Implement this change today, and watch your win rate climb.

Image Credit: Shutterstock.com

When it comes to connecting with potential customers, there are few things more valuable than trust. Trust is an essential factor in every business relationship.

Imagine you’re headed to a jewelry store to purchase a Rolex watch. Maybe you can’t really afford one, but just imagine: On your way to the store, you see a man on the street. He sidles up to you, rolls up his sleeve and shows you his arm, strapped with watches up to his elbow.

“Hey man, want to buy a Rolex?” he mutters.

Unless you’re temporarily insane, you won’t bite. Why? Because you don’t trust the guy. There is no way those Rolexes are real.

This may seem like an odd example, but many digital marketers today are the equivalent of the watch salesman. They connect with a potential prospect through social media or email and immediately begin pushing their products, without taking any time to develop a relationship of trust.

This is a mistake of critical proportions. Today, more than ever, it’s essential for digital marketers to create trust with potential clients. Only after trust has been built can services or products be sold. And one of the best ways to establish trust between you and potential customers is to create amazing content they can’t find anywhere else. Here’s how to do that.

Why you must build trust

In the bygone days of advertising, companies built trust by calling on the “experts.” Tobacco companies would boast of the fact that 9 out of 10 doctors recommended their smokes. Check out the Lucky Strike ad below, for instance. This sounds crazy now, but it was a legitimate advertising strategy that actually worked.

Image Credit: Lucky Strike

No longer. More and more research is showing that trying to push products on customers doesn’t work the way it used to. A recent survey by Hubspot showed that only 3 percent of people surveyed said they considered marketers and salespeople trustworthy. The implication was that marketers are actually at a disadvantage when it comes to selling and must invest extra effort in creating trust with potential customers.

Millennials in particular can be even more challenging to reach. As marketing strategist Matthew Tyson wrote: “Millennials don’t trust advertisements. Only about 1 percent of millennials claim that a compelling ad influences them. The rest are almost naturally skeptical of advertising. They think it’s all spin, so they don’t bother paying attention.”

In short, it’s not enough to just get your product out there. It’s not enough to simply get eyeballs on what you’re selling. Trust, not exposure, is the currency of today. Of course, this raises one critical question: how do you build trust?

Four steps for building content that creates trust

Once you’ve recognized the importance of building trust, you need a specific plan for creating content that creates trust. Here are four steps to help you create amazing content that generates a huge amount of trust.

1. Define your target audience.

Before you create any content, you need to determine whom you’re writing to. Every audience uses specific terms and phrases. Entrepreneurs often speak about growth and ideas. Salespeople are concerned with new leads and increasing their conversion rates. Millennials want to be “on fleek.”

Your audience won’t trust you if you don’t speak their language. If you don’t know your target audience, you need to take the necessary time to define it. If you don’t know how to speak to your target audience, partner with someone who does.

2. Define your niche.

After defining your target audience, you want to specify your niche. Your niche allows you to focus your expertise and time on one specific subject. If you’re passionate about starting a blog, you can carve out that subject as your niche and become known as the expert in that niche.

Additionally, writing valuable content for niche websites is an incredibly productive way to establish your authority. If you’re into tech and electronics, writing on Engadget is a great fit, but if you want to write a detailed post about user-centered design, you might be better off writing on Specky Boy. Find your audience by thinking through where, online, your audience hangs out.

3. Find the content that’s already performing well.

Once you define your niche, you can discover what existing content is already performing well for this audience. Tools like BuzzSumo allow you to see which content is getting the most social shares on a particular site.

So, for example, let’s say your target audience is content marketers. You know content marketers like the website ContentMarketingInstitute.com. When you use BuzzSumo to see the most shared pieces in the last year at CMI, here’s what you get:

Image Credit: BuzzSumo

From this quick search, you can see that content marketers care very much about knowing content marketing industry trends. If you create a lengthy and detailed post about the future of content marketing, you will build significant trust with readers, generate social shares and develop deeper relationships with potential customers.

4. Add massive value through your content.

As mentioned, content that is short and fluffy adds little value to readers and likely lacks the ability to build trust. If you really want to create trust-building content, you need to add massive value to your readers.

If you you do the hard work of adding large amounts of value to your readers, you’ll be dramatically rewarded.

Conclusion

Creating content that creates trust isn’t easy. It takes time, research and a commitment to creating something that truly matters. But it’s worth it, both in terms of the trust you build with potential customers and the results for your bottom line online and offline.

It doesn’t work to simply create content and hope someone stumbles upon it. You need to create content that is going to build deep trust with your customers. Once you establish yourself as a trustworthy source, you can then think about selling to them.

This article was originally published on Entrepreneur.

LinkedIn’s recent overhaul includes some quick (and effective) ways to reduce all the noise in your home feed. Here’s how it works.

With 9 billion daily content impressions, LinkedIn’s member newsfeed is filled with both massive opportunity and noise.

I want to spend the rest of this post showing you how to cut through the clutter, make your own LinkedIn newsfeed more useful and (most important) how to stand out from the crowd and get noticed by others.

Tip 1: Curate Your LinkedIn Experience

The social networks you enjoy the most are those you can open and immediately find something of interest.

The same goes for LinkedIn, and it’s important that you give the platform some direction and insight on what it is you want to see on your personal feed.

LinkedIn shared some tips in a recent blog on how to do this.

“[Your newsfeed] is personalized for you based on your profile and relationships in order to surface topics you care about from people who matter in your professional world,” LinkedIn noted in its post.

Cleaning up your newsfeed will help you stay on top of relevant news, companies, and thought leaders in your industry, which is vital to staying competitive and winning new business on the platform.

LinkedIn’s recent redesign has made it easier to mute and unfollow posts and conversations you’re not interested in, while also telling the platform what news outlets, influencers and topics you want to hear more from.

Tip 2: Hide Content, People and Ads that Don’t Matter to You

On both the LinkedIn mobile app and its desktop design, you can click the “…” (known as the control icon) to the right of any post in your newsfeed to pull up some curation options.

Those three little dots will allow you to hide posts from your feed, follow or unfollow individuals or companies, and also hide sponsored content and ads as well.

By making some slight modifications to curate your feed, it will signal LinkedIn to show you the most relevant information, saving your time and making the resource far more valuable.

Tip 3: Use the Mobile Version’s “Improve my Feed’ feature

On the LinkedIn mobile app, you have an additional option to help you enhance your newsfeed.

Under that same “…” control icon, you’ll see an option that says “Improve my feed.” These preference settings make it easier clean up your feed by following and unfollowing different connections, as well as “Follow Fresh Perspectives,” where LinkedIn will suggest top voices in your industry and will update your feed with relevant information.

“This feature is coming soon to desktop, but any updates you make on mobile will be reflected in your feed, no matter where you access it.,” LinkedIn shared in its recent blog post.

Bonus Tip: How To Get Your Content Noticed on LinkedIn!

On LinkedIn, the content you create (and share) is the currency you need to “buy” the time, interest and attention of prospective clients on the site.

By creating useful, pitch-free content that helps a target, niche audience you want to serve solve one of their professional problems, you immediately place yourself in a position to win new business.

Now, when it comes to getting that content of yours noticed inside the LinkedIn newsfeed, it all starts with eye-catching text and imagery.

I’ve shared elsewhere how to write awesome LinkedIn headlines, including proven formulas for copy-and-paste headline templates and more.

It goes without saying that “text only” updates are going to fall flat on LinkedIn, so make sure you always include an eye-catching photo, or else link to something online that enables LinkedIn to add in a preview image and text.

Finally, the best way to get seen repeatedly on LinkedIn is to use video.

Streaming video, in particular, creates an irresistible, eye-catching item that will stop the scroll through any newsfeed.

Whether it’s about improving your own experience, getting noticed more or both, there’s no reason to wait when it comes to improving your LinkedIn newsfeed.

Once you do, you’ll immediately get way more value (and sales leads) as a result!

As the sales profession moves faster every day, a lot of competitors emerge. Sales teams need to step up their game if they want to stay for the long run. With the rapidly rising growth of technology, trends and tools swarm the market aiming to lend companies and sales organizations a hand in boosting sales growth.

Without a doubt, there is an unbearable pressure wearing down on most sales organizations these days, as the fluctuating economy and shrinking margins make it harder and harder to reach sales quota and drive revenue.

So, how do sales organizations boost sales growth? How do sales teams increase their productivity and enhance their performance? Let’s find out.

It’s all about the people behind the sales teams. From the sales managers down to sales representatives, success in sales growth all comes down to them. Sales representatives – the front-liners and first responders who carry the future profits of the company on their backs – are taking on bigger territories, facing higher quotas, and making more customer contacts than ever. Sales performance management is the key. Our goal is to find effective tools to help them be more productive and create ways for them to be more organized and accelerate their output.

What is Sales Performance Management?

Sales performance management is the practice of monitoring and guiding personnel to improve their ability to sell products or services. A key objective of the sales performance management process is to educate and motivate salespeople to set attainable goals and satisfy customers.

In our modern times, the process of pursuing a lead and closing a sale has transformed completely due to technological advances. Whereas sales representatives in the past relied heavily on costly travel and face-to-face meetings with potential customers to conduct what is known as outside sales, today’s Internet – coupled with a host of advanced web tools–has fueled the contemporary practice of inside sales, or the process of conducting sales remotely. With tools such as CRM, web conferencing, predictive analytics, and social media platforms, sales representatives are able to pursue leads with greater efficiency and consistency – these are the key elements of sales acceleration. Sales acceleration is further fueled even more by a critical technology used in the contact center: a sales dialer.

There are different types of sales dialers, namely: progressive dialing, predictive dialing, preview dialing, and manual dialing. The first three are automatic dialing modes, which sets them apart from manual dialing.

Let’s briefly discuss their differences in order to highlight their advantages, and learn how they can help improve sales performance.

Manual Dialing

Agents manually dial a customer’s phone number, they spend a considerable amount of time reviewing paper records or computer terminal screens, selecting the person to be called, finding the phone number, dialing the number, updating the records after each call and if the customer doesn’t answer, the agent has to remember this and call the customer later. With manual dialing, agents spend more time attempting to find a prospect and waiting until the call is connected than talking.

Progressive Dialing

Progressive dialing minimizes wasted time between calls by automatically dialing a number from a call list as soon as an agent becomes available. The progressive dialer runs through the calling lists provided by the company. It waits until an agent is free to take a phone call, and then progresses to dial the next number on behalf of the agent.

Predictive Dialing

A predictive dialer calls multiple numbers at one time. As soon as a customer answers, an agent is connected to them. Based on the average time it takes the agent to wrap up a call, the dialer “predicts” when the agent will be available again and begins calling multiple numbers.

Preview Dialing

A preview dialer allows each contact record to be automatically delivered to agents based on your outbound campaign settings, such as list priority and ratios. This feature enables agents to review contact details prior to placing a call, ensuring they are fully prepared before engaging the customer. The system automatically dials based on your campaign settings, and agents can optionally skip records that should not be dialed.

How Do Sales Dialers Boost Sales Performance?

1. They increase sales productivity. Agents do not need to constantly refer to phone number lists and manually dial numbers to reach customers, and they experience less disused time as the dialer determines the best times to call and predicts when a current call will be finished while already dialing the next number. By circumventing disconnected or unavailable phone lines as well as machines, agents are always connected quickly to the right customer who are most likely to answer and entertain calls at just the precise times.
2. They efficiently manage leads. Sales dialers that integrate software for lead management can organize lead and sales information, customer history, and contact data while providing this info to agents. The software also determines peak call times automatically and further filters out any “do not call” numbers, fax lines, or answering machines to ensure direct access to the right customers at the best times. When calls are placed, the solution usually uses local phone number – a rational way to prompt potential customers to answer. Studies have shown that over half of all consumers hang up when they see an unknown phone number on their caller ID, which is not a big surprise. These dialers automate and capture all call activity directly into the CRM for stronger lead management, providing valuable real-time metrics and KPIs (key performance index) that may boost sales and further improve marketing strategies.
3. Help increase sales and reduces cost. They significantly reduce contact center operational costs as fewer outbound calls need to be placed manually, and fewer agents are needed to handle such calls. The combination of effective agents and well-built leads can triple productive output and sales. The right customers who are most approachable to purchase are automatically contacted, the dead time for agents is eliminated, and call abandonment rates drop significantly. This means that a predictive dialer can deliver swift ROI with a substantial profit. In addition, predictive dialers with CRM integration also cut expenses for companies as they do not require additional expensive telecom hardware or integration.
4. Improves customer satisfaction. Dialers contact customers at times that are most convenient for them and at a lower call rate, such calls are generally less invasive and more welcome. Customers will not feel bothered knowing that the business cares about respecting their time, and the products and services proposed are likely to suit the customer’s needs or preferences. As the likelihood of actual purchase increases, brands may enjoy greater customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty while contact center agents and managers also experience greater satisfaction and confidence resulting from contacting strong leads who appreciate their calls.

In the end, improving sales productivity is all about looking for efficiency at each step of the process. Tools that help increase sales performance also help the company as a whole. Using the right sales technology applications keeps your reps focused on selling, not data entry. Producing your own content and automating its delivery allows you to inform your prospects, without your reps wasting time trying to find and adapt outside content that fits. Collaboration between sales and marketing improves the efficiency of two increasingly related jobs. Want to see your reps waste less time on the tedious aspects of sales? Give them the right tools, and make it a team effort. This way, everyone is happy and successful.

According to a recent study by Russell Reynolds Associates, CMOs think differently than their C-suite colleagues. Senior marketing executives tend to be more “imaginative,” “unconventional” and “willing to test limits” than CFOs, CEOs, CROs and CIOs.

These traits make CMOs great leaders for transformation and growth initiatives, but may also explain some of the relationship challenges they face when working with their peers. As CMOs continue to gain influence within their organizations, it’s vital to establish alignment amongst the C-Suite on the objectives and corporate vision so the entire organization is moving in unison towards one common goal.

1. Plan and budget strategically to predict revenue performance.

When your CMO sits at the boardroom table, they need to answer tough questions about marketing investments and returns, ROI and impact on revenue. Prepare for these questions by aligning your plan to corporate objectives, allocating actuals to campaigns and measuring the ROI and revenue impact of your marketing initiatives.

Marketing Performance Management technology enables this level of visibility, giving your CMO and your marketing team real-time insights into your marketing performance. Doing so could save valuable time searching for investment data, allowing your team to spend more time planning, optimizing and measuring your marketing performance to drive more revenue.

2. Deliver insight to the CFO into investment plans and forecasts.

We’re used to discussing the often turbulent relationship between Marketing and Sales, but there’s another key department Marketing needs to build a better relationship with–Finance. Marketing’s alliance with Finance and the CFO is just as important as its relationship with Sales.

The CMO’s critical role in the organization means the CFO must see Marketing as a strategic lever rather than a cost center. According to Allocadia’s 2017 Marketing Performance Management Maturity Study, only 14% of marketers see Finance as a strategic trusted advisor and 28% said they have no relationship with Finance or speak to them only when they must.

Source: Allocadia

To build trust with the CFO, begin by aligning your actuals to campaigns and objectives so Finance has a breadcrumb trail to follow marketing spend and the impact of those investments. Next, get on the same page about what success looks like and how Marketing Performance will be judged. Finally, loop Finance into the budgeting and planning process.

Finance values predictability over all else. If they have an understanding of how much and where Marketing is spending, they’ll be more comfortable. By managing your spend according to plan, optimizing your investments and evaluating your results through the same lens, you will inspire confidence from Finance that you’re running the business of marketing.

3. Allow visibility and ensure alignment.

Your CEO’s top priority is providing returns to their shareholders. To do that, they need to acutely understand their industry, set corporate-wide objectives, bring a compelling product to the market and ultimately drive revenue. Marketing can help by:

• Showing the CEO that marketing is driving towards the same end goal by speaking the same language (money).

• Aligning your plan to corporate-wide objectives, providing visibility into Marketing’s investments and demonstrating how Marketing is driving revenue.

• Being transparent about what’s working and what’s not, then adapting when necessary to maximize Marketing’s impact on the top line.

4. Own the conversation about how Marketing is driving revenue.

For the modern marketer, it’s important to demonstrate to the C-suite, in particular the Chief Revenue Officer and Head of Sales, how Marketing is helping to drive revenue. Moving past a conversation that hinges solely on leads and MQLs elevates Marketing’s position in the organization as a revenue source rather than a cost center.

First, provide visibility into your plan and revenue forecast, then make sure to track your progress for revenue generated and/or influenced to date. Accountability and proactive actions will position Marketing as a leader in driving revenue.

Susan Vanin, Director, Global Marketing Operations at Juniper Networks says her marketing team is keenly attuned to its contribution to the business. What helps this team are technologies like Allocadia that enable them to make data-driven decisions to maximize their impact.

5. Connect your systems in the cloud.

Among your CIO’s top concerns is how your organization’s customer and financial data sources, such as CRM and ERP, integrate while maintaining security and privacy protection. As your marketing team grows and your output increases, marketing will have a greater need for an official system of record to help you run the department efficiently and securely.

Allocadia’s research also found that 57% of companies who expected 25% revenue growth or higher ensure consistent technology integrations. Only 13% of companies expecting flat or negative growth report the same. By integrating technologies, such as an MPM software for marketing investments, CRM tool for customer and prospect information, and ERP for business process management, you can connect the dots and develop a complete picture of your marketing spend (both investment and return).

A word of caution however, make sure the vendors you work with have the proper security certifications and partner with the CIO to integrate the essential components of your organization’s technologies and data sources.

When your CMO sits at the boardroom table, they need to answer tough questions from leadership about marketing performance. Winning leadership’s buy-in and sponsorship hinges on being able to speak in their language about the things that matter the most to them. Whether that’s revenue, corporate objectives, data integration, budgeting processes or insight into marketing data, effective communication is key to building confidence and winning their support.

Are your blog posts reaching as many people as you would like? Building up a large number of blog readers and subscribers can be difficult and it’s a major problem for many blog owners, even those who publish regular content on their blogs. The good news is that there are many different ways to rectify this issue. No matter if you are looking to rank in the search results and send highly targeted and free organic traffic to your site, or if you are looking to invest a little time and money in the world of social media, there is

The post How to Reach a Wider Audience with Every Blog Post You Publish appeared first on Blogging Tips.

Selecting angel investors is a minefield: Play the game right and you’ll win. One wrong step and it’ll blow up in your face. But the dream of riches and Techcrunch-fame distracts many founders from the truth until it’s too late.

While the right investors will increase your startup’s success rates, the wrong ones will put your business on the wrong trajectory, waste your time, and even cause you to miss opportunities to raise more money. Here are the three least discussed mistakes founders make when selecting angel investors, strategies you can use to avoid them, and the two traits that will make you insanely appealing to the right angel investors.

Get your free fundraising guide and raise money on your own terms. 

Mistake #1: Picking investors who are infatuated with your idea

In the early days of your startup, you’re in love with your idea. You envision it disrupting industries and changing the world. It’s your newborn and you want everyone to love it. So when you do find angel investors who love your idea, you’re ecstatic! They understand and love your idea as much as you do, enough to give you cold, hard cash.

And that’s the worst thing possible. Because if you have to kill your idea and your angel investors don’t agree, they will make your life difficult.

You might have to kill your original idea and pivot for a range of reasons: you're solving a problem no one cares about, your business can't scale, you've burnt out, etc. 

However, when angels are too emotionally invested in the original idea, they won’t allow you to do what's necessary. They’ll argue with you, and threaten to withhold money and support. They'd rather you limp along with a half-dead idea than cut your losses and move on.

How to avoid this mistake: Look for investors who love your team

Ask yourself: Are they investing because they believe in my idea (which may change)? Or are they investing because they believe in my team and me?

The best angel investors believe in teams more than ideas. In a way, they're like gamblers. They’re betting it's your team’s combination of skills and passion that will lead to success, not your idea. A strong team with a good idea will go further than a weak team with a great idea.

As a result, while good angel investors will like your idea and believe it has a chance to succeed, they're not attached to it. If your startup pivots, they’re able to embrace change.

Mistake #2: Wasting time on the wrong types of investors

There are many types of investors but here are two types you should avoid: “friend” investors and “wannabe” angel investors.

“Friend” investors

Investors have their own reasons for helping startups. Some want to make money, others like giving back. But some angel investors take it further than that: They want to be friends with you. They want to hang out with you, have drinks and dinners, and meet weekly. They'll have you jumping through hoops only to sign a tiny check months later.

For the same amount of time you spent with a friend investor, you could’ve pitched somebody capable of writing a six-figure check. Friend investors not only cost you opportunities but are a time sink: once, because you spent weeks raising so little and twice, because you’ll need to raise more money in the future. Every minute you spend fundraisingis a minute you’re not investing in your business.

Wannabe angel investor

The second type of angel investor you need to avoid? The wannabe angel investor. They want to be an angel for the exact same reason Shark Tank, a show where entrepreneurs pitch investors their ideas, is wildly successful:

“People love the vicarious thrill of being able to sit in judgment of someone else asking you for something. [...] It is even more compelling when it’s you they’re begging from. The biggest thrill in angel investing is that people flatter you and beg you for your resources, and this makes you feel powerful and respected. [emphasis added]” — Tucker Max, serial entrepreneur, ex-angel investor

No one is immune from the desire to feel powerful and respected. The difference, though, between a real and wannabe angel investor is that the former invests; the latter fantasizes about investing (and wastes your time).

How to avoid this mistake: Vet your angel investors

What distinguishes an angel investor from a wealthy person who wants to invest? Experience.

A real angel investor has ran, built, or helped startups in the past. More than their money, it’s their experience that makes them an invaluable advisor.

A wealthy person with cash to spare, on the other hand, lacks this experience. Their sole source of knowledge is breathless writeups on “sexy” startups and when they invest, they quickly become a liability. They don’t know how to make business decisions or remove themselves from day-to-day operations. If things don't go well, they panic, creating extra stress and mayhem.

The key to avoiding this nightmare? Be selective. Before you accept a single dollar from an investor, find out:

• When was the last time they made an investment?
• Do they have experience in the industry you’re in?
• How many investments have they made?
• How many failures have they had?
• Why are they investing?

Always vet your angel investor on their track record, not just their check book.

Mistake #3: Treating angel investors like miracle workers

Angel investors are people, not miracle workers. Yet, that’s exactly how many founders view them. The list of miracles founders expect from angel investors, includes, but isn’t limited to:

• Giving them a ton of money and helping them raise more money
• Connecting them to the press
• Getting them boatloads of customers

No one benefits from these hyped up expectations. Founders put too much faith into angels and come to blindly rely on their advice. This only encourages angels, who aren’t immune to power trips, to treat the businesses they invest in like they own them.

How to avoid this mistake: Take ownership of your success

Success isn’t a gift others give you; it’s what you and your team earn through your own efforts.  You chose your team for their intelligence, passion, and ability to get shit done, right? Then, you already have the necessary ingredients for success. Don’t believe anything otherwise.

Taking ownership of your success goes hand in hand with maintaining reasonable expectation for angel investors. Founders overestimate what angel investors can do in the short-term but underestimate what they can do in the long-term.

Angels can’t make you rich but they can provide valuable introductions to future investors, business partners, or employees. They can’t solve all of your problems but can give you advice on how they solved similar issues. Once you understand what angels can and can’t do, you’re on the way to having a healthy relationship with your investors.

The 2 traits angel investors love to see in founders

Investing is a two-way street. You’re vetting angels but they’re also vetting you. So far, the emphasis has been on how you can avoid choosing the wrong investors but what do the best investors look for in founders? It all boils down to two things: self-awareness and the ability to execute.

Be self-aware

Silicon Valley worships over-the-top entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs. What worked for Steve, however, won’t necessarily work for you. If you want to impress an angel, you need to be self-aware: secure and confident yet aware of your weaknesses.

Being self-aware makes you more coachable. While investor don’t expect you to have all of the answers, they want to see that you’re open to advice yet critical. Because at the end of the day, it’s up to you to make the hard choices. You can’t do that if you’re not able to consider new evidence and evaluate it.

Be able to execute

Not only do investors want to know who you are, but they want to know what you can do.

Part of being able to execute is understanding your business, or knowing which stages your business needs to reach to achieve its goals. Vision isn’t a substitute for a plan yet too many would-be founders act as though it is. Once you understand your business, the rest boils down to your ability to execute. Anyone can come up with a great idea but not everyone can to turn it into reality.

Sidestepping the minefield

As everyone competes to be the next Google or invest in the next Google, angel investing will continue to grow. Yet, mo’ money, mo’ problems.

Sometimes the dangers of angel investing are obvious: wannabe and friend investors. Other times, they come from mismanaged expectations, whether it’s angels who are too invested in an idea or founders who are too invested in what angels can do for them. That’s why vetting angel investors and having reasonable expectations is crucial. Clear communication cuts down on conflict and confusion.

If you want to stand out, sell investors the entire package—what your idea is and who you and your team are. Ideas may be continually dreamt up, changed, and scrapped but teams who are self-aware and able to execute are much harder to find. That’s why great angels invest in people, not just ideas.

Want to make fundraising an eaiser, more effective process? We've put together a fundraising guide to help you walk into every investor meeting with confidence and raise money on your own terms.

Recommended resources:

Podcast: What you don't know about angel investors
This post was inspired by a conversation Hiten Shah and Steli Efti had on their podcast, The Startup Chat. Listen to it here!

The 7 deadly fundraising sins that could kill your startup
Don’t make these seven fundraising mistakes and if you avoid them, you’re going to save yourself so much pain, so much time and so much struggle.

Fundraising hacks for founders [free online crash course]
Want to learn how to approach investors and get funding for your startup? Even if you've got no name, no connections and no magic traction? Start here.

When you have a great lead, your sales proposal is the best tool at your disposal for landing new business. But how do you craft a document that hits the right tone and will be authentically convincing to your client?

First, it's important to convey your value to prospects. You should also avoid hiding great ideas or deliverables behind fluffy wording, vague guarantees, or worse, distracting typos.

Each proposal must be unique to your client. However, there are proven best practices that can be applied to any bid. The infographic below, from Instructional Solutions, has 19 tips that will improve your next proposal, grow your business, and avoid closing mistakes.

Want to skip straight to the infographic? Click here.

Sales Proposal Writing Tips

1. Know your audience

Develop a deep understanding of your potential client, what they need, what they want, and their bid preferences. This is key to writing a proposal that will feel tailored, thoughtful, and necessary.

2. Master the tone

Keep your audience in mind as you write your document and you'll find the right tone. Whether formal, casual, or something in between -- as long as it matches the needs and motivations of your prospect, it will serve you well.

3. Craft a catchy title

Wonder where the sale starts? It's here. The title should serve as a summary of your appealing offer, not just a document header.

4. Use evocative language

Use active verbs, remove unnecessary words, and choose language that's familiar to your prospect and will make your proposal more engaging to them -- and persuasive.

5. Cut the jargon

Acronyms, technical slang, and other jargon will turn your reader off faster than a sleazy pitch. Don't confuse your reader by trying to sound smart, that's bad for sales and bad for you.

6. Distill in the executive summary

Your prospect is busy. They don't have time to read pages and pages of how great you and your product/service are. Create a concise but comprehensive executive summary and you'll make their decision a lot easier.

7. Postpone the "About us" section

If they want to know more about the history of your company, they can Google you. Don't waste this precious time to talk about your past successes. Instead, speak to how you can offer them value.

8. Avoid generalizations

Let your prospects know exactly how your offer will help them and improve their business. Keep the vague metaphors, hyperbole, and watered-down language out of your proposal, and stick with specific, actionable case studies and relevant examples of how you can help.

9. Nail the opportunity statement

Use your proposal to show how well you understand your prospect's problems -- and how efficiently you can help them. Remember to keep it centered on the prospect. It's easy to go overboard on your features and benefits. Just make sure you can tie it all back to their needs and pain points.

10. Identify the deliverables

Every offer should have enticing deliverables. Personalize each one and clearly connect your offering and your prospect's needs.

11. Clarify the timeline

Be clear. Be realistic. And be firm. Use these three tenants when setting a timeline for your prospect.

12. State the scope

Don't overpromise just to close their business. This is the easiest way to increase new client churn rates. Be clear about what you're offering -- and what you aren't. Setting a clear scope ensures you lay a solid relationship with your prospect and earn their trust.

13. Breakdown the budget

The budget is likely what your prospect will flip to first. Break down your total costs and clarify the value of each.

14. Employ whitespace

Don't fear the whitespace. Use it to your advantage to highlight and emphasize your points and guide the reader where their focus should be. Lists, paragraph spacing, and formatting are all great tools at your disposal.

15. Get great design

You can have the best content in the world, but if your presentation isn't up to par, you won't capture your prospect's attention. Put time and money into your proposal and make sure the design is pleasing to the eye.

16. Try templates

While it's easy to say clean, professional design is important -- it's also easy for this part of the process to take up too much time. To guard against this, have a designer develop a template that can be customized and client-targeted.

17. Review, review, review

Once you've completed your proposal, wait 24 hours and then review it again. Have colleagues review it as well to ensure you haven't missed any glaring errors that can sabotage your success.

18. Double-check submission details

You don't want to do all that work and then overlook a prospect proposal preference, like font choice. Verify the submission process and style it to match your prospect's guidelines perfectly.

19. Follow up

Once your proposal is complete and delivered, check in with your client. If they have revisions or additional questions they need clarified, make sure you're able to incorporate them.

Set yourself up for success by creating a sales proposal that can go the distance. These tips are your first step to getting there.

It’s important for you to understand that “millennials”, “gen Xers” and “baby boomers” aren’t real. They just don’t exist. At least, they don’t exist in the way that they are depicted by major news outlets like CNN and Time Magazine. A generation is, after all, just a group of people. It used to be that generations were defined by their response to historical events.

So, what’s the secret to marketing to generations that are typically grouped by stereotypes? The secret is, of course, treating each generation as individuals. Treat them as if they were individual people with their own skill sets and viewpoints. That’s exactly what they are, after all. Today we’ll be looking at the three generations and show you how to reach them using social marketing.

Millennials

The US alone has 75 million of these people, which is an awful lot to try and target. The New York Times tells us that around two-thirds of millennials would rather make $40,000 per year doing a job they loved over earning $100,000 per year doing something they didn’t like.

How can you apply this to social marketing? Millennials aren’t looking for more “fun and excitement” than any other generation when searching online. What they want to find is some meaning to it all.

This is the reason that social marketing and search engine optimization made the recent shift away from marketing like a robot and moving towards authenticity. Millennials are able to smell this fake content from miles away. They find fake things hollow and meaningless.

You need to show millennials your authenticity by creating a personality around it, or by giving your brand a narrator. A great example of this is Greg Shuey of Stryde. He regularly hosts Facebook Live broadcasts where he and his team show customers what they are working on. Authenticity is created when you post through social media like your brand is a person, rather than a faceless corporate construct.

Generation X

Did you know that 45^th President of the United States Barrack Obama is a member of Generation X? What was the one thing that truly characterized his presidency from when he started campaigning to when he left office? His pragmatic hope of course.

Generation X was characterized as the “rebel generation” in the early 90s. These are the kids who grew up under Reagan and played grunge rock in order to drown out the world around them. At least, this is the stereotypical view of this generation. The reality of generation X is that it’s pretty easy to characterize them; generation Xers are the hopeful strategists of the generations, and most of them can spend up to 10 hours a week consuming content online. As such, there’s plenty of potential for social marketing with them.

Show generation X the value and practical uses of your product, but be genuine and authentic about it. Bestselling author Andrea Butje of Aromahead Institute came up with an ideal solution for authentically offering valuable and practical information about products. She did this by offering certification courses, allowing students to use the education they have in essential oils to create an aromatherapy career. Gen Xers are more likely to bite if you offer them something of value that could ultimately change their lives.

Baby Boomers

Many people consider baby boomers to be adults that don’t understand modern technology, but this isn’t a fair representation of the generation. This might come as a bit of a surprise, but the latest research from Pew Research Center confirms that, as of 2016, 64% of adults between 50 and 64 were on at least one social media site.

Baby boomers are the most ignored area of society in terms of social marketing. You should never forget that around half of all consumer expenditures come from baby boomers. This generation is also spending around $3.2 trillion annually. It’s a market you can’t afford to be missing out on.

Before you go all crazy and spamming baby boomers with social marketing, though, there is one thing you need to keep in mind. They don’t see social media as a marketplace, more so as a place that they can connect with their long lost friends.

Baby boomers also tend to be very loyal customers. That’s the whole purpose of the “Like” button on your Facebook page. The way to succeeding with social marketing for baby boomers is to get them to interact with the Facebook page and make them feel like loyal customers who can be engaged.

So, how is this done? By giving them great deals for interacting with your page. Give them the chance to try things for free. If you are in their local area, then promise that you’ll have a friendly chat with them if they stop by the store. They place a heavy value on face-to-face interaction, preferring it over digital communications.

The true issue that many social marketing campaigns have when campaigning to generations is to focus on stereotypes and not reality. This just makes you look like you’re trying too hard – such as when Sonic tweeted “bae” to their followers. If you want to win then you need to be treated followers like people, no matter their generation. They are people after all, and not a generation.

The post How to Reach Millenials, Boomers and Gen X with Social Marketing (Stereotype-Free) appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

        

Comments

• Well said, Henry. Thanks for your feedback and candor. Much ... by Bill Carmody
• I like the honesty hear Bill. I've read lots of articles that ... by Henry Foster

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The concept of the mobile app as a marketing tool is no longer new. There are written and unwritten rules, and there is also statistical data to see how consumers perceive this role of a mobile app.

First and foremost, the mobile app is your constant presence close to your potential customers. People take their mobile phones everywhere, even when they go out for lunch. And the role of smartphones is evolving: for individuals into entertainment and media centers, for professionals in portable computers for work in transit or from a remote location.

Thus, through their dedicated apps, companies can now reach potential customers through a device which they are already using for business, shopping, and communication with their favorite brands.

So, what can you do to integrate your mobile app into your marketing strategy?

1. Push Notifications – Send Them at the Right Moment

A study conducted by Leanplum – a mobile marketing automation platform – on 671 million push notifications sent in 2015 revealed a worrying trend: over 63% of companies send their messages at the wrong time.

The number one problem identified in the study was, surprisingly, not taking time zones into account. The second: not sending the notifications in the time interval when users are most likely to interact with them.

It is easy to avoid these mistakes and make the most of push notifications – which are proven to be more effective than emails or browser notifications. Use the analytics data you have available and discover the time frames when your target audience engages with your app. In this way, you can deliver your push notifications at the right moment to maximize their potential of being opened and read.

2. Make Your App Discoverable

Your mobile app is a valuable digital property, just like your website. Since you are working hard to promote your website and make it visible through SEO, social media and AdWords, why would you not include your app in these efforts?

For that matter, did you know that 25% of users discover apps through searches? This means that, without proper promotion, you may be losing 1 in 4 potential new users. A proper mobile app promotion strategy includes:

• Pre-launch campaign on social media through special landing pages, and even by inviting your existing email subscribers to test the beta version and give feedback;
• Launching date: live social media events, polls, inviting your followers to share videos of using the app and post their impression;
• App stores optimization: search for relevant keywords to include in your app description, as well as for a short and memorable app name;
• Post-launch campaign: continue to promote your app through your website and social media channels (Facebook offers a customizable call to action button which can land users on the app download page).

3. Use App Updates to Promote Your Business

When you release major app updates, you can use this opportunity to tell your customers about special discounts coming up, new product releases or new sections of your app which were included to better serve them.

Large app updates should always revolve around adding new functionalities, either in response to your users’ feedback or as a way of increasing the value of your app. Just like the launch of the app, major updates should be promoted through an integrated email-website-social media campaign. You can also attract new users to the app by offering discount coupons for new installs of the updated app.

4. Integrate Your App in Other Marketing Efforts

Since the smartphone has become the number one device for browsing the internet, it has never been easier to integrate your mobile app into your online marketing strategy. For instance, you should always include links to the app stores in your email newsletter headers and even in the email signatures of all your employees.

The mobile app can also be used to send reminders for sales campaigns, online contests, events you are hosting, and also as a simple tool for confirming participation in these contests or events.

5. Track and Make Use Of Mobile Traffic Analytics

There is a lot to be learned from the data concerning how and when your customers interact with your app. It helps your organization understand how they prefer to communicate with you, to do their shopping. In addition, when using in pair with website analytics, app data can help you identify stagnant customers, as well as new customers with the potential of becoming loyal brand ambassadors.

The information you collect from your mobile app will determine how to shape your marketing and remarketing strategies, by targeting the right users at the right moment and on the right device. In this way, you will maximize your customers’ lifetime value, fine tuning the calculations of your customer acquisition cost and segment your clients in a more efficient manner.

——————————————

Your mobile app can be more valuable to your business than you could have imagined. By combining the right promotion and app development strategies, it can complement your website in terms of lead generation and conversion.

The digital advertiser typically has a one-word goal: growth. These 10 best practices illustrate how to coordinate Facebook and Google campaigns to deliver superior results.

Planning

Coordinate your story across channels.

Develop a narrative that includes consistent messaging across channels. For example, if you’re running a direct response initiative to drive e-commerce sales, make sure the call to action in your Google text ads mirrors messaging in your Facebook prospecting ads. Think about how you’d react if you saw these messages in both channels in sequence and if the action you’re being asked to take is clear.

Align objectives and formats across channels.

Include formats across both channels that reinforce your objectives. For example, if you’re a direct response retail advertiser looking to promote a store-only offer, include Google’s Local Inventory Ads and Facebook’s Store Visits objective into your media plan.

Allocate budget between new vs. existing customers.

Use Google’s Customer Match and Facebook’s Custom Audiences to differentiate messaging between customers and prospects. Exclude customers in all of your prospect-oriented campaigns with monthly refreshes. (We’ll discuss using naming conventions to roll up performance in the Measurement section.)

Run a test.

Skeptical about the impact of incremental spend in either channel? Run a test and let the data tell the story. This can be helpful when working across siloed organizations.

Execution

Use search intent data to optimize campaigns on both Google and Facebook.

Users are telling Google exactly what they’re looking for. Use this information to tailor the ads they see on Facebook by creating audiences based on their search query. Here are some examples of how search intent can influence your Facebook ads:

• A user searches for a brand term. Change the messaging in the Facebook campaign to leverage their brand affinity.
• You could convert non-branded queries related to your offering into highly relevant ads across the Facebook universe. For example, if people are searching for hotels in San Francisco around a specific amenity such as ocean views, walking distance to downtown, or outdoor pool, highlight the amenity in your Facebook ad copy.
• Leverage lookalike audiences aligned with type search queries to enable targeted prospecting on Facebook.

Use social engagement data on Facebook to inform your paid search strategies.

• Use Facebook’s Audience Insights tool to perform analysis of your customer base to generate insights like age, gender, likes, purchase behavior, and interests. Then, use these insights to craft your copywriting strategy.
• Use top-of-funnel strategies on Facebook—like driving awareness with a video ad with specific keywords referenced—to increase paid search volume and conversions.
• Create audience segments on Google based on engagement insights on Facebook for more precise bidding/targeting. For example, if women converted at a significantly higher rate than men on a Facebook campaign for a particular product, then you could add female demographic targeting to your Google ad groups and bid higher in these groups.

Design the account structure for feed-based ad delivery.

Align the account structures of your Facebook Dynamic Ads and Google Shopping campaigns. For example, break out top products to allow for greater control and visibility.

Cross-sell across channels.

Someone just converted on search? Increase their lifetime value by cross-selling them complementary products on Facebook.

Measurement

Use a standardized naming convention.

If your paid search and social teams implement standardized campaign naming, it’s easy to roll up across channels.

When creating a standardized naming convention, include attributes like target prospect or customer, test details, placement, or references to a specific initiative. Your campaign name should match your UTM structure in your URLs to coordinate with your analytics tool.

Align on a multi-touch attribution model.

Many search and social teams still operate on a last-click conversion, which doesn’t take into account all of the interactions that took place prior to purchase. Teams should align on an attribution model that takes into account each touch point to conversion with a common conversion window.

All too often, companies define their markets in vague terms that fail to really connect sellers with motivated buyers. The problem with hurried target market definitions, weak buyer personas and a “show me the money” attitude is that this has not kept pace with how buyer behaviour has evolved.

The internet has changed pretty much most things in our life today. And it has also played a role in turning the buyer-seller relationship completely upside down. Today, the information that buyers need to make a purchase decision is just a click away. The power in the buying and selling process has shifted from the seller to the buyer.

But not all businesses have kept pace with this change in power, they still think that it is “buyer beware” – that as the seller you are driving the conversation with the objective of a quick sale.

The sales environment as a whole is witnessing a significant shift from the traditional method of B2B prospecting (outbound) to one that is more buyer-friendly (inbound).

As buyers – before we make a purchase decision, 60% of us rely on Word Of Mouth – friends – social media, 49% on customer references and recommendations, 47% on analyst reports, and 44% on media articles (source HubSpot Inbound Sales Report 2016).

There is a big challenge to shift this sales mindset from a “me focus” to a “buyer-centric” one. In today’s market, the buyer has already progressed considerably along the customer journey by the time they want to interact with the seller – they now control the conversation before, during and after sales – so welcome to “seller beware”.

A Seller’s “Point Of View”

Whereas some businesses may still be in the habit of viewing their prospects as numbers in the sales funnel, the newly empowered buyer can see through this, especially in today’s transparent digital economy. Companies should be looking at how they can transform their sales process to match the way people buy. By shifting your focus and impressing upon buyers the desire to offer advice first and foremost it can help open up the opportunity for constructive dialogue.

Typically B2B buyers do not have available all the details they may need to make a complex purchase, especially something that falls outside their own area of expertise. So there will always be a need to have direct sales contact especially for purchases that are long and complicated such as technology.

Many buyers have already entered the Awareness (just getting to know things) stage of the buying journey (see below) before they actually engage directly with sales. But if you cannot add any value to a sales conversation over and above what the buyer can source from self-research on the Internet, then you will have problems.

Educate, Don’t Sell.

“Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t. Seth Godin

Helping is the new selling. The most successful salespeople are the ones who aren’t viewed as salespeople, but who are subject matter experts and add value through advice and sharing knowledge.

As a seller it is common to worry about rejection, nobody likes to hear a “no or … let me think about it…”. But pushing a prospect prematurely along a sales process will typically end in a missed opportunity, as the buyer may not be ready or just not a good fit.

Instead of focusing on your own needs to close a sale, focus instead on the buyer’s desire to get a problem solved. So talk about the problem. Start conversations around the buyer’s “pain”. Lead with a message targeted to the buyer’s context, what are their challenges, what options do they have, what are the consequences if they fail?

Defining your buyer personas is essential to personalising the sales process for today’s empowered buyer (see below example from HubSpot).

When You Are Selling, Don’t Forget What It’s Like To Buy.

Work hard at trying to fathom through questions, research and listening what buyer’s perspective is. Just because the tables are turned and you are selling now – don’t forget your own experiences of making a purchase.

If you cast your mind back to the last time you had a positive buying experience yourself, I’m sure it was because you felt the sales person really understood you, and put your needs first – rather than their own. Whether you were buying a pair of shoes, smartphone or a house, what makes a great sales experience stand out is the feeling that you really were the “centre of attention”.

If you have ever found yourself in a sales meeting and realised that you’re the one doing all the talking this is a bad sign because you are pitching rather than listening. Don’t be thinking about how you can get the prospect to buy from you. Instead think about the ways in which you can help.

It can be tempting even before the relationship is even started to ask about budget, level of urgency or the decision making authority. If you have done adequate research you will know if the prospect fits the right profile and who the relevant stakeholders and influencers are. So instead try to understand from your contact the typical obstacles or considerations taken into account in their buying process. At an early stage it is more effective to ask questions of your prospect to learn what their challenges are and where they would need help.

Always start with questions that try to develop an understanding of where the business is at, it’s challenges and goals at a strategic level.

A positive rapport will open up more sales opportunities when you think like a buyer. This is less about small talk but more about demonstrating an understanding of your buyer’s situation and providing insights and knowledge to assist the buyer.

A Buyer’s “Point Of View”

I have to admit when I visit my local bike shop I am always interested in the latest bit of technical kit on display. So I hover, circle and then start to read. Without fail the store assistant will ask: “Can I help you?” Despite me clearly needing help, 9 times out of 10 my answer is “No, I’m just looking.”

It is a pretty common response from a buyer. And to a great extent it is because of a question of trust. Will the assistant really have my best interests at heart or are they looking for a quick sale? I know that on many other occasions in different shops I have had that negative experience, particularly where you are buying something that is not in your field of expertise. All I am looking for as a buyer is a solution to a problem.

Typically if I am going to buy something, I set a budget, do my research and know exactly what I “thought” I wanted – up until this point I am in control. Now being sold to means someone is trying influence that outcome. And as a buyer from past bad experiences there is a feeling of doubt, especially when the conversation starts to discuss products that I did not consider, but now I am beginning to feel like I am being sold to, the pressure is being applied and I am not sure whether this is the best advice.

But times now have changed and because of the 24/7 digital world we live in, I do now have a choice and an option to share my opinion and experiences. I can search for information, actual unbiased results and not feel like I am being taken advantage of.

I can already build up a level of trust on a vendor through my self-research, tapping into existing users and asking colleagues. This can help a lot in finding what sets apart one company from another.

With the Internet and the social media revolution there has been pressure applied to sellers to become more aligned with the buyer. Today buyers do not rely solely on messages from salespeople or corporate sources to learn about products and services. This information is readily available online.

With so many touch points now in the sales process the sales cycle is becoming longer and more complicated. So it is important to find a salesperson who can facilitate a solution with their knowledge to get you through your own buying challenges:

• Budgets are tighter
• Fear of making a bad decision
• Buyers have more options
• More stakeholders involved so an increased level of complexity
• Reaching a consensus is a challenge
• Customers want to interact differently

Take Away

If you are looking for inspiration on how to open a conversation, use our checklist below to get you over the first hurdle and starting to engage.

Engaging conversation – checklist.

• Ask permission – it’s ok to show respect by asking permission to ask questions first.
• Start broad, and then get specific – open-ended questions are a good way to gather information and keep everybody at ease.
• Direct the conversation around your responses and on your research.
• Keep questions simple and non-threatening.
• Focus on the desired benefits or solutions.
• Maintain a consultative open attitude, and wait for responses before you carry on talking.
• Don’t be in a hurry to get to your next appointment.

Image source: www.freepik.com

To be successful in driving engagement from business buyers, it’s not enough that marketing content simply be relevant to the individual reader. To be information of value, that same content needs to be useful, and at a very fundamental level it needs to tell the reader something he or she doesn’t already know.

Sounds obvious, right? And yet if I were to choose the one thing that dooms more B2B email creative to mediocrity and worse, it would be just that: telling people stuff they already know.

In 90 percent of all cases, this dreadful habit occurs in the service of what at our firm we call the “set-up paragraph” – that very first paragraph of email copy in which the writer attempts to make a case for why the recipient should care about everything else he/she is about to read.

Set-up paragraphs can be a necessary evil if the information on offer is purporting to describe a solution to a problem the reader may not know he has, or an opportunity he may not know exists. And even then, they should be as short as possible. Most of the time, however, set-up paragraphs simply bog down the email in a recitation of facts (e.g. “As a busy IT leader you know …”) that does nothing but try the reader’s patience.

For a particularly egregious example, see the email below from Azalead, a software platform for Account-Based Marketing (ABM). Starting with the headline: “Your buyer has changed more than any time in history (sic),” almost 70 percent of the entire email is given up to making a business case for why I should care about ABM.

Now, if you need to convince any B2B marketer at this point that ABM is a trend worth noting, he or she is probably beyond help anyway. But even if I were to be somehow completely ignorant of this thing called ABM, that entire first paragraph is nothing more than a lecture. No offer, no value proposition, no call to action, nothing that tells me what the writer wants me to do, and why, and how.

The one and only call to action is at the very end of the email, and by then, assuming I’ve read that far, I know absolutely nothing about the actual offer (a mysterious “free guide”) aside from the 3 very anemic bullet points that attempt to describe the value of the information in such lackluster terms as “What exactly is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)”. There’s no benefit language, nothing that describes in a specific, concrete or compelling way how this free guide will benefit me or my business.

Key takeaways: Don’t tell me stuff I already know. Don’t lecture me on a business trend or challenge or problem that you think I should care about. Get to the point. Tell me WHAT the offer is, WHY I want it, and HOW to get it. And then deliver specific, compelling examples of what I’ll learn when I do respond.

Of course there’s also a further irony to Azalead’s message, namely that their pitch begins with “Your buyers now expect hyper-personalized content tailored for companies just like theirs.” Everything, in other words, that this email is not.

To be successful, a salesperson needs both passion and perseverance.

A rep who’s enthusiastic but unwilling to put in the necessary effort and do less glamorous work will ultimately fizzle out. A rep who works hard but doesn’t have passion, on the other hand, will never be able to demonstrate the value of her product convincingly to buyers.

Psychologist and recipient of a MacArthur Genius grant Angela Duckworth defines this fusion of passion and perseverance as "grit." According to her research, grit turns out to be a great predictor of success across a number of disciplines, including sales.

Sales managers can’t “teach” grit like you’d teach prospecting techniques or the most effective way to make a sales presentation. To encourage gritty behavior, use these four strategies.

1) Model Grit

It’s the simplest principle in Duckworth’s book, ("Grit, Power of Passion and Perseverance"): People imitate their leader’s behavior. With that in mind, take every opportunity you can to model grit.

For example, next time there’s a deal in the pipeline your rep or team can’t afford to lose, set up a meeting to map out every action that needs to occur to close the deal -- and then coach them to execute on that plan.

Go in with an attitude of “Let’s take control, get creative, and do what’s necessary to win this account.” Maybe you decide to ask your CEO to make a call at the executive level, or find a creative way to hand-deliver the proposal in a way that demonstrates your willingness to partner with the client.

Your salespeople will take your “take charge attitude” and apply it to their other deals.

If you lose a significant opportunity, modeling grit means using that loss as a learning opportunity. Don’t show frustration or quickly move on. Instead, schedule another meeting to analyze the deal, understand the gaps in your response, and commit to not repeat the mistakes in the future.

2) Give Your Reps a Vision

Salespeople are grittier when they believe they’re doing meaningful work. It’s difficult for them to feel highly invested in their work if all they hear from their manager are impersonal goals such as, “We need to expand our reach in X vertical,” or “Our VP of Sales wants us to sell 20% more of that product line.”

After all, it's hard for reps to buy in to these objectives. If a rep looks at the dashboard and sees she’s far from hitting her target, she needs something to motivate and inspire her.

With that in mind, provide your reps with a vision. This vision should be unique to your team. In other words, don’t just borrow your organization’s mission statement.

That might be, “Our team will build an industry-wide reputation for our expertise and thought leadership,” or “We’ll earn a record number of referrals by giving our prospects a fantastic buying experience.”

3) Hone in on Gritty Processes

You can coach grit to a certain extent by figuring out which behaviors are gritty and making sure your reps are practicing those.

For instance, I believe that “gritty prospecting” involves having the discipline to make prospecting calls, even when there are other priorities. It means sending timely email follow-ups and thank you notes, and so forth, based on your specific sales process.

Observe your salespeople. Are they setting enough time aside to prospect? Are they booking enough initial appointments even when their pipeline appears full? If not, help them build that self-discipline.

Another example to consider is call planning. A gritty rep will make sufficient time to conduct research before a call and really consider the prospect’s business challenges and priorities instead of just pulling up their website for 30 seconds. When you see a salesperson who isn’t doing his homework, help him understand why he should and what the desired behavior looks like. In time, once he sees the success of this strategy, he’ll begin to internalize it.

If a rep isn’t taking your feedback and trying to improve, they may not be the best fit for your team. You can’t instill grit in someone who’s not willing to change.

4) Call Out Examples of Grit

Recognize grit when you see it on the sales floor or in the field. Not only will you make the rep you’re recognizing feel good, but you’ll also give the team a template for gritty performance.

The stories of “so-and-so drove across the state to deliver the demo in-person to customer Y” become internal folklore. Senior salespeople share them with newer reps, implicitly encouraging them to go above and beyond. The original salesperson becomes a hero, which makes her incredibly likely to repeat similar behavior going forward.

How you should share these examples depends on your internal culture and practices. Consider giving an award to the grittiest salesperson of the month, celebrating a significant win and the salesperson responsible via a mass email or chat message, or implementing a peer recognition program so reps can nominate each other for being gritty. Another way to acknowledge gritty behavior is to take five minutes during a team-wide meeting to say, “I want to recognize so-and-so for doing X … ”

Stopping a team of gritty salespeople is nearly impossible. They’re hard-working and engaged -- but most importantly, they push each other to become better.

If you managed to land your first 100 customers, congratulations! You’ve already made it further than the majority of startups ever will.

The road to 100 was brutal, but it’s just the beginning. Now, everything’s about to change. What got you here won’t get you there. To make it to 1,000, you’re going to need a new set of skills, strategies, and processes.

It won’t be easy, but it is possible. To prepare your business for 10x growth, you’re going to need to master your metrics, ramp up your sales, and optimize your marketing. Ready? Let’s start at the top.

Master Your Metrics and Segment Your Data

In their early stages, most startups don’t care about data. Those that do care learn pretty quickly that when they only have 25 customers, metrics aren’t very useful.

Even in the range of 100 to 1,000 customers, you often won’t have enough data to reach statistical significance. It won’t be perfect data, but it’s the best data you have, and that’s much better than just guessing.

Brute force may have gotten you to 100, but it won’t get you to 1,000. As soon as you hit triple-digit customers, all growth should be centered around data.

The Five Most Important Startup KPIs

Just like salespeople have a set of core metrics they need to track, so does your startup. Here are the five KPIs you need to focus on to sustainably grow your startup from 100 to 1,000 customers.

1. Churn

Most startups assume churn only tracks the customers who cancel their subscription, but there are multiple types of churn, all of which need to be measured.

2. Lifetime Value

The lifetime value metric measures how much revenue you get on average from a customer from the moment they start paying you, to the moment they stop paying you. Like any SaaS metric, there are many ways to calculate LTV, and you can read more here.

3. Acquisition Cost

How much do you spend to acquire new customers? Keep in mind that even “free” exposure, like content marketing, has a price tag. Find a way to calculate the cost of the time you invest.

4. Monthly Recurring Revenue

For an accurate look at your MRR, calculate the following: Profits from upgrades, profits from new buyers, losses from downgrades, and losses from cancellations.

5. Revenue Per Customer

This is a little different from lifetime value. This metric measures the revenue an average customer will create over different periods of time, including daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually.

There are hundreds of KPIs you could track and, as your business grows, probably should track. But those five will create a strong foundation to grow your startup from 100 to 1,000 customers.

How to Segment Your Data

To truly unleash the power of your data, you need to segment it into customer groups. For example, if you have a user base in the US and Canada, you’d want to measure the metrics above separately for each location.

Here are the seven most common ways to segment your customer data.

1. Location

The geographical location of a customer. This could be as broad as “country” or as specific as “city”.

2. Industry

The market a customer operates in. For example: Healthcare, marketing, or legal.

3. Size

The overall size of a customer, measured in revenue, customers, or employees.

4. Channel

How a customer found your product. For example: Facebook ads, word of mouth, cold outreach, or content marketing.

5. Frequency of Usage

On average, how often is your product used? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Not at all?

6. Behavioral

What specific problem do your average customers use your product to solve? And which features do they utilize the most? Which do they ignore? What features generate the most support tickets? What features are most requested?

7. Cohorts

Cohorts are customers with specific shared experiences. For example, businesses with 1–15 employees that were founded in the last three years.

Again, those seven segments are just a start. When categorizing your customer base, separate them into as many categories as is relevant for your startup.

Why Segmentation Matters

Correctly segmenting your data will deliver more actionable insights than just looking at your overall data. Here’s an example of what it might show you:

• Your Canadian customers have a higher lifetime value and lower churn rate.
• They focus primarily on the analytics features in your product.
• You acquired the majority of them through blog posts.

With that information, you’d know the most profitable way to grow your startup would likely be to target the Canadian market with high-quality blog posts highlighting your product’s analytics capabilities.

Product recommendation: If you use a billing system like Stripe or BrainTree, check out ProfitWell. ProfitWell is a powerful, free data tracking and analytics tool which automates much of the process described above.

Ramp Up Your Sales Efforts

Most early-stage startups don’t have a dedicated salesperson. Instead, sales outreach is usually handled by the founder(s). Once you hit the 100-customer mark, it’s probably time to hire your startup’s first salesperson.

When it comes to building your first sales team, there are two things you should know.

1. Hire Talent, Not Experience

Your first sales hire shouldn’t be a senior executive; they shouldn’t even be an experienced salesperson. Instead, your first hire should be someone with talent and potential, not an impressive resume.

You want junior reps with less than two years of experience who have the following traits:

• An entrepreneurial spirit
• A balance of competitiveness and compassion
• A high tolerance for rejection
• A desire to learn and be coached

For startup sales, talent trumps experience. Find candidates with potential, give them the opportunity and tools to succeed, and they’ll go far.

2. Stay Involved in the Sales Process

Because you’re hiring junior reps, they’ll need guidance and supervision. That means whoever has been handling sales needs to stay involved in sales. The difference is, instead of being a salesperson, they’re going to be a sales manager.

The first few months should be spent ensuring you can train your team to replicate your results. Once that’s been established, you can take a slightly more hands-off approach, but you should still check in every day.

Can’t wait to get out of sales? It may be awhile. You can consider hiring your first VP of Sales once you’ve hit the 1,000-customer mark but, until then, stay involved.

Take Your Marketing to the Next Level

It’s not yet time to make your next marketing hire. Instead, it’s time to build systems and processes. Whoever has been responsible for the marketing so far has probably been doing it the Nike way: they “just did it”.

Develop step-by-step processes that other people can eventually take over, run with and improve upon.

That established, you’ve got two options to scale your marketing: Keep doing what you’ve been doing or start exploring new channels. Let’s take a closer look at each.

Approach #1: Do More of What You’ve Already Been Doing

List all the marketing channels you’ve used to get your current customers, then break down those channels to really understand how they work.

For example, let’s say blogging has yielded good results for you. To better understand this channel, you’d want to:

• Calculate the cost/time it takes to create a post.
• Break down each step of the process.
• Measure how many viewers your average post attracts.
• Measure how many of those viewers eventually become customers.

Then use that data to estimate your customer acquisition costs (CAC). Once you understand your CAC, you can make informed decisions on how to best optimize your existing channels. For example, should you spend more time on blog posts? Less time? Should you outsource it altogether? The data will tell.

In marketing, whatever got you to 100 can get you to 1,000, but you need to understand those channels from top to bottom.

Approach #2: Start Experimenting with New Channels

Want to expand into new channels? Still don’t hire a new marketing specialist for this role. Marketing generalists are hard to find, and you don’t know enough about your market to hire a specialist.

Instead, run a few small in-house experiments and measure the response. If a channel looks promising but you don’t know how best to use it, seek guidance from colleagues, mentors, and online courses like those available through Digital Marketer.

With the resources available today, it shouldn’t take long for anyone with a basic understanding of marketing to master a new channel.

But keep in mind…

Regardless of the approach, you’re still entering uncharted territory. You might think, “We’re just doing what we’ve always done,” but that isn’t entirely true. You might be in the same channel, but it’s going to require a totally different mindset and methodology. A lot of people who are great at “doing it” aren’t great at building a system around it, and you should approach this as a new skill set.

Focus on THIS to 10X Your Customer Base

If you’ve gotten to 100 customers, you’re in a good place. You’re further than most startups ever get and have a reasonable chance of building something of lasting value. But as your business grows, so will the demands on your time:

• You’ll want to do way too many things.
• Your customers will want you to do way too many things.
• Your network will want you to do way too many things.

There’s going to be an overwhelming amount of stuff on your plate, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed and discouraged when you can’t stay on top of it all.

You’ll have to start saying no to yourself and others in order to stay focused on what really matters: Your customers. The bigger you grow, the louder the noise. Learn to tune it out.

“If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.” — Jeff Bezos

As a founder, it’s your responsibility to prioritize your customers. Start today by reaching out to them; all of them. Find out:

• Why they’re using your product.
• What they like and dislike about it.
• What they want next.

You got your first 100 customers, but it’s those 100 customers that are going to help you get the next 900.

And remember: You’ve already accomplished something great. You’re on your way to something spectacular. Take it one day at a time and don’t get pulled in too many directions. Stay the course and you’ll get there.

Want more actionable advice on getting B2B customers? Check out the The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your B2B Startup from 0 to 1,000+ Customers here.

The post 5 Metrics B2B Startups Need to Focus on to Scale from 100 to 1,000 Customers appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Just hiring a “salesperson” won’t work. You need to fully understand what a Sales Development Representative is and what their responsibilities should be.

You need to have a sales strategy that draws potential buyers in, and another strategy that goes out and finds clients from scratch. To do this, there are two primary roles that should be a part of the sales team.

These roles are the Sales Development Representative (SDR) and the Business Development Representative (BDR).

This post aims to give you a detailed look at the Sales Development Representative role.

Loose terms and poorly defined roles and sales terms will, at best, cost you money. Over the long haul, an unclear sales process will give the competition an opportunity to surpass you in their ability to woo leads effectively; potentially causing significant harm to the health of your company.

A Sales Development Representative is often used interchangeably with another sales role called a Business Development Representative (BDR).

While this is common, it’s not accurate—yet another thing we hope to clarify with our sales definition post series.

By the end of our time here you should have:

• A detailed definition of an Sales Development Representative
• A comprehensive view of the role
• A good idea of characteristics quality SDRs share

What is a Sales Development Representative (SDR)?

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

You’ve probably seen a “How It’s Made”, right?

A product is being made in bulk, mainly through some type of automation, but there are always real people checking the quality of what’s moving by on the conveyor belt.

Someone has to be there to make sure things are running right, pick out the defectives, and push the quality stuff to the next stage of the process.

This is a decent illustration for an SDR. Basically, they work the line.

By focusing more on lead qualification, they play a crucial (and often missing) role in the sales and marketing of an organization.

A lot of the process can be automated (like most of the products on How It’s Made)—but sales is about having a conversation with the right people.

SDRs often times start that conversation with leads by reaching out and taking them through the early stages of the pipeline, either getting them ready to talk with a closer or finding out they’re a suspect with no intention of buying at all.

SDRs are usually compensated and rated based on the number of sales qualified appointments (SQAs) they garner for the company.

That compensation isn’t typically going to be as high as a BDR, due to the different nature of the role. (Handling inbound sales requests is much easier than generating your own.)

Now that we have a basic look at the term, let’s deep dive into the role and the benefits that an SDR can have in a healthy sales machine.

What Do Sales Development Representatives Do (Exactly)?

While the example we used of a conveyor belt may have given you an idea of the responsibilities entrusted to an SDR, it’s quite a bit more than that.

Sure, anyone who works on a conveyor belt has to be skilled to notice defects of product whizzing by quickly.

But they don’t have to worry about the products avoiding contact, constructing barriers to keep them from being spotted, and (hopefully) will never have a manufactured good telling them that it doesn’t want to be sold.

SDRs face these problems and more in an effort to figure out whether or not a given or found lead is a fit for the things they are selling.

There are three primary channels any SDR worth their salt will use to stay on top of the minds of the leads they’re working on.

Let’s go over each.

Social Media

Using networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and (to a lesser extent) Facebook are vital in the B2B climate today— especially when it comes to the tech and software space.

Sales Development Representative’s use this tool as a means to convey knowledge, set themselves up as experts in the solution offered, and to show themselves to be relative experts in the field or industry of your leads.

For instance, if you sell inventory software for small chain restaurants, a good SDR will share valuable resources (both that belong to your company and elsewhere) to that end.

Examples of content would be:

• A white paper on reducing shrink in individual restaurants
• Industry news of big chains
• Conference highlights from events in the industry
• Resources of big names that restaurant owners may follow
• Upcoming webinars (of your company) that are of interest

The key is to provide extreme value, not regurgitate lame information.

Bonus Resource: CoSchedule wrote a monster blog post called 30 Social Media Engagement Tactics to Boost Shares and Conversions. It’s incredible.

The awesome thing about this type of outreach and lead nurturing is the automation factor. Using a tool like Buffer or MeetEdgar, you can literally build a library of posts and circulate them regularly.

Bonus Tip: Be sure reps include a bit about themselves, too. Don’t get uber personal, but showing off personality will tell leads that reps have a story and they’ll likely relate better when SDRs are reaching out on an individual basis.

Another way SDRs use social media is to dig up information that could help qualify leads.

Through the use of tools and social profiles, reps can find contact information and scope out to see several things about individuals who are part of a target brand.

Social media, LinkedIn mostly, is great for reaching out and introducing yourself. Finding leads through research, or using a software product, will usually lead you to a prospect’s profile.

Adding them to your network and starting the conversation is a popular and effective method of introduction.

But that’s a post all to itself.

Email Outreach

Sending cold and warm-ish emails is a primary function of the SDR role.

Email and phone communication should work hand-in-hand to qualify a lead. Your reps should be well-versed in sending emails that get responses.

Writing emails for both outreach and the funnel sequence will be a regular part of the job description and should be a skill that is learned and constantly improved upon.

The responses to emails help find decision makers, educate potential buyers, and warm up prospects.

Here are a few pointers to keep in mind for your Sales Development Representatives.

• It’s Not Copywriting

The headline should be punchy and enticing, but the body of the email should read like, well, an email. If your reps start sending long-form sales copy via the electronic mail, it’s probably spam—even if it’s good.

Focus your reps, not on sounding personal, but being personal. If you’re reaching out to 50-100 leads a day, it’s possible to be more intimate with each lead.

Larger mass emails may be more difficult, but more personalization typically leads to a greater response rate.

• Remember the Influencers

Don’t just target the decision maker. Talking with the direct and indirect influencers help good SDRs work their way into meetings and discussions among buying teams more often.

If more than one person has regular communication with an SDR, they are likely to become a prime prospect.

• Get the Details Right

With reps writing both personal emails and filling up the pipeline with sequence content, there is a lot that can go wrong.

People who are customers could keep getting sales emails, resources could be sent twice, etc. Detail-oriented reps should use a CRM like a skilled craftsman.

Phone Outreach

The phone is often the most telling part of an SDR’s job.

The primary responsibility for this sales role is to qualify leads. That job entails finding and filling in data of target accounts, nurturing inbound leads, and identifying both suspects and prospects.

Doing this as quickly as possible for each lead is crucial to the conversions of your company.

One of the quickest ways to qualify a lead is to have a genuine conversation with decision makers about their current solution and needs.

If you can get the right someone on the phone and ask the right questions, you’ll quickly be able to send them to close or bid them adieu. This is why sales development reps are tracked and compensated by the sales qualified appointments (SQAs) they are able to set up.

Note: If you have a detailed marketing funnel and lead scoring system, SDRs should be a liaison between the marketing and closers. The step in-between departments is often called a Sales Accepted Lead (SAL). SDRs should be able to identify the readiness of SALs extremely quickly and ship them to an SQA (now say this sentence ten time fast).

Bonus Resource: For an idea of what an ideal day looks like for a Sales Development Representative, take a look at this post from SalesHacker. It’s a pretty good reference point.

Summary

Companies, like SalesForce, have used this role to explode growth.

Adding this step in the sales process ensures that good leads get to the pitch and bad leads get removed from the pipeline. It’s also the best way to turn lukewarm leads hot.

In order to get the full effect, it’s important to understand the role and the right people for the job.

After reading this post, could your organization use SDRs to increase revenue?

The media landscape has dramatically changed over the last several years. Cultural shifts and the proliferation of digital, social and mobile channels have made a permanent impact, making the need for a fully integrated B2B communications strategy absolutely essential.

As we’ve previously discussed, effective B2B marketing in today’s ecosystem requires a strategic and integrated approach. Strategy should come before tactics, content before channels, online and offline efforts should reinforce one another and everything marketing does should be aligned with sales. Nowhere is this need for integration more necessary than in a firm’s communication strategy—and the execution.

The new media landscape is no longer just paid and earned

Historically B2B firms had to rely on paid media and earned media as their primary means to get their message across to their target audience. Paid media is obviously attention that you pay to receive, including traditional advertising, direct mail as well as online advertising, search engine marketing and paid social media amplification. Public relations and earned media have always been a communications plan staple with the goal of receiving attention from the press in the form of articles, mentions, features and interviews.

Brands become publishers with owned media

But with the explosion of content marketing over the last several years, there has been an incredible opportunity for firm’s to create owned media: the content (such as your website, social media profiles, blog, email marketing, etc.) that your firm produces and owns. So B2B firms are capitalizing on the idea of “brands becoming publishers” because they control the message and they publish the content. And this emphasis has marked a seismic shift in marketing communications, because marketers are no longer dependent (or at least significantly less dependent) on advertising and public relations to get their audience’s attention.

Everyone’s a journalist with shared media

Shared media is similar to earned media however instead of earning the attention of the press, you’re earning the attention of your audience. Social media has created a generation of audience-journalists, which means that your firm’s content—whether owned, paid or earned—can be shared by your audience with their networks and thus compounding the reach
 exponentially.

Owned and shared media provide an opportunity for smaller firms

Historically, smaller and mid-sized firms were at a significant communications disadvantage to large firms whose budgets for advertising, public relations and tradeshows were unmatchable. With owned media, it’s not about outspending your competitors; it’s more about outsmarting them by creating remarkable content that’s relevant to your audience. In this new media landscape, smaller and mid-size firms can have just as much marketing power (and sometimes more) than their peers with deeper pockets.

Your content can generate media coverage

Another amazing thing about publishing content is that owned media also leads to earned media. While still important, the traditional press release and media pitch in many cases has been supplanted by something known as Google and Twitter. Many journalists and reporters use search engines and social media to do their research, look for story ideas and seek out subject matter experts. Which means that your thought leadership content can and will garner media coverage for your firm. Additionally, both paid and earned media can also lead people to find and engage with your content—further amplifying the reach.

Communication efforts need to be integrated and synchronized

Even with the addition of owned and shared to the media mix, many firms make the mistake of continuing to operate their paid (advertising) and earned (PR) media efforts in a silo. In today’s marketing ecosystem, all marketing and communications tactics and activities—including public relations, advertising, content marketing, email marketing and the like—should be operating from the same overarching communications strategy. Each component should be supporting the other and conveying the same consistent message from channel to channel.

Content marketing is a strategy, not a tactic

It’s important to realize that content marketing done right, is not merely another tactic to add to the mix, but rather a philosophy that should permeate every facet of your marketing and communications plan. If your firm is committed to content marketing, your integrated communications plan around owned, earned, paid and shared media should be ultimately support the objectives, goals and target audience of your content marketing strategy.

Leverage a combination of owned, earned, paid and shared media

Even though owned media may be the dominant centerpiece of today’s B2B marketing mix, it’s best to leverage the strengths of all media options in order to most effectively reach and engage your target audience. Remember that owned leads to earned and shared, and paid and earned lead to greater visibility of both your firm and your content. In other words, don’t put all your communications eggs in one basket. Diversify your mix and let each component reinforce and compound the effectiveness and reach of the other.

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Due to the ever-shifting media landscape, it’s even more critical to communicate—whether online, offline or in the media—from one holistic and integrated strategy. Consistency in both your objective and message will ensure the best possible outcome of your communications efforts.

Try reverse engineering your sales to better nurture your leads

Do you remember your first sale? The thrill of having someone effectively say, “What you have is valuable and I want to pay you for it!” It’s exciting and never gets old, right?

So much of what we strive for in business hinges on finding ways to make our products and services as attractive as possible to prospective customers. One of the best ways to do that is to create a lead nurturing strategy that clearly demonstrates the value of your wares while expertly guiding the customer along the path to purchase. But how does one achieve such a feat?

I recommend starting at the end—with the end purchase from an existing customer—and reverse engineering how you achieved the sale from there.

Think about your best customers: What connection did you establish that led to their purchase from you? Without knowing the details of your business, I bet trust was a big part of the equation. They needed to believe your product or service could meet their needs and deliver something of value.

As such, your lead nurturing strategy will need to build trust with your audience. As a small business owner, you’ll need to demonstrate that you can solve problems that are important to them.

How do you uncover what problems your prospects have (or think they have)?

By listening to them, or course! Yes, it’s simple, and yet, so many businesses struggle to hear their audience. Nurturing leads is about finding ways to listen and encourage conversation. You can listen to your customers in all kinds of ways. For instance:

In person—When you’re talking to prospects or customers, listen more than you speak. Don’t assume you know what they need. Ask thoughtful questions that will help you discover whether or not you can help them—or how you can tailor your product or service to meet their specific needs. Take notes and write down exactly what they say, using their words.

On social media—Start conversations with your followers online. Post questions or create polls on juicy topics that are interesting to them. When someone comments on a post of yours, ask them a follow-up question. Find out more. Be curious and genuine in your interactions to better understand their experience. Copy and paste those answers and exchanges into your small business CRM or contact management database.

In writing­—Create avenues for leads to respond, including short surveys (tools like Survey Monkey, Google Forms, and Typeform can help you do that) and email campaigns. Ask them to “hit reply” and let you know what’s true for them. Attach a personalized video message inviting them to share what’s challenging them right now. And gather all that feedback just as they communicate it so nothing gets changed in translation and anyone on your team can access this valuable customer insight.

Now that you’ve listened, how do you turn those notes into a lead nurturing strategy?

Look for patterns. Closely examine how people describe things and the exact words they use. Those are the words and phrases your audience can hear and trigger their interest. Those are the topics that will have them click open an email, watch a video, or stop scrolling long enough to read a post. Those are the challenges and issues that are relevant and meaningful to them.

Take steps to address those topics, demonstrating your expertise in your field and your ability to solve the unique challenges your customers are facing.

What’s the best way for you to communicate what you want them to know?

This stage is where you can begin to leverage the latest technologies and trends to cultivate an ongoing conversation with your audience. Consider which method you might use to best answer their questions as well as which method the customer is most receptive toward. It might be a video, downloadable checklist, how-to guide, blog, email series or social media post.

Once you identify which methods will be most effective, seek out the small business tools you’ll need to execute your lead nurturing strategy. It’s important that you have a way to organize your customers, their preferences, and the contact details necessary for you to deliver your message. There are great software options on the market designed specifically for small business lead nurturing that help centralize that data and make it easy for everyone on your team to access this vital information.

Executing your lead nurturing strategy can become a tedious and time-intensive process if you let it. The good news is that with automation of email and social media posts, you can streamline much of that work. Anything you create for your lead nurturing campaign can be re-purposed.

Your leads are likely coming from multiple channels, especially online. Therefore, use what you create to bring new prospects into the conversation by demonstrating your expertise across all your marketing efforts. What’s interesting and engaging to one ideal customer may also resonate with others.

So, start with your best customers, who represent the kind of leads you’d like to attract. Look for the connections and interactions that needed to occur for those sales to happen and reverse engineer a game plan from there for your lead nurturing strategy. Then, think about the best way to communicate your value proposition to the client. One thing’s for sure—there are plenty of people out there with problems they’d love to have you solve!

If you are a solopreneur, you wear many hats. You may hire some freelancers to do some work for you, but you still do much of the work yourself. Wearing those many hats all day every day may be exciting but also exhausting. How can you do it all while staying sane and productive, and how can you be successful wearing the many hats of a solopreneur?

In this blog, I first explain the subtle difference between a solopreneur and an entrepreneur. Then, I will specify the solopreneur’s most valuable asset. Subsequently, it is time to discuss productivity. Once you understand all those things, it is time to raise the bar and become successful as a solopreneur.

4 differences between solopreneurs and entrepreneurs

As John Rampton says, the differences between solopreneurs and entrepreneurs can be subtle, especially since some entrepreneurs work alone until they can build their businesses enough to make a team. However, there are distinct differences between those who choose solopreneurship over entrepreneurship without plans to change and those who choose entrepreneurship.

1. Solopreneurs do not wait for a buyout

An entrepreneur works hard to build one’s business but one is not quite as attached to the concept as a solopreneur. Many, but not all, entrepreneurs build their businesses with at least a small hope that a much larger company comes along and offers millions for it once it grows. At that point, one could easily move on to the next great venture.

Of course, many entrepreneurs have turned down buyout offers to continue pursuing a passion, so this is not a defining difference. However, a large divide between the two may come when an entrepreneur can run a variety of businesses over the course of one’s career, while a solopreneur tends to work at one thing consistently.

2. Entrepreneurs put a face to a company

While a solopreneur tends to spend hours working hard to build one’s business, an entrepreneur frequently prefers to be out making connections and getting the word out about one’s business. An entrepreneur may be perfectly happy doing that and that alone, leaving one’s team behind to do the work.

Solopreneurs can be great networkers as well. One major difference is that an entrepreneur may be more comfortable spending all day at a variety of networking opportunities and client meetings, while a solopreneur is content simply doing the work.

3. Entrepreneurs are managers

When someone is an entrepreneur at heart, even as a solopreneur, one is waiting for the day when one can build a team. One may even begin working with freelance workers and virtual assistants to delegate the work. One is comfortable leading a team of people toward a defined goal.

Solopreneurs, on the other hand, are usually in no rush to hire an employee to manage. Even if the day comes when they must outsource work or bring in a team member, a solopreneur may find oneself pitching in and doing the vast majority of the work oneself. One may even have a hard time letting go of tasks since one simply wants to jump in and work hard to grow one’s business.

4. Solopreneurs are workers

While entrepreneurs can work harder than anyone they know, a solopreneur is a worker by one’s very nature. If a task needs to be done, one’s first thought is to roll up the sleeves and start working.

Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, have no trouble delegating, even if they have to delay that process until they have enough money to bring additional workers on. They realize the sooner they can delegate tasks like billing, web development and database management, the sooner they can focus on building and growing their businesses.

The solopreneur’s most valuable asset is time

There is only one thing you do not have in unlimited supply, Karen Talavera says, and that is time. We are all limited to twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. That means you will be forced to make choices in life about how you use that time. Do you put it into the pursuit of wealth, adventure, position, family, your relationship or social change, and if so, how much? Life is full of trade-offs, and how we use our time usually indicates where our priorities lie, Talavera claims.

Indeed, we can change our minds as we go along if we want and some of us do. Nevertheless, if you are a solopreneur, how you use your time makes the difference between success and failure. It makes the difference between whether you eat or not, whether you are scraping by or prospering, whether you are paying the rent or racking up debt, whether you are investing in yourself so getting new business is easier or whether you are constantly pounding the pavement.

As a solopreneur, you must value your time as if it were gold. Talavera promises that if you are willing to accept that fact, not only do you have a fighting chance of staying sane on the challenging journey of solopreneurship, you also have a solid shot at sticking around.

How to boost personal productivity as a solopreneur

Sarita Harbour says that one of the solopreneur’s biggest obstacles to success is dealing with distractions that threaten your personal productivity. As said, time is your most valuable asset. Being more productive means getting more done in less time.

Harbour, Talavera, and Dennis Williams have some tips for boosting productivity that I would like to share with you.

1. Know your “why”

In general, it is easier to work for someone else than to go into business for yourself. So, what is your motivation for taking the harder road? It does not matter what it is; what does matter is that you know your “why.” When the going gets tough, that driving reason that motivated you to do this in the first place will be the burning ember that keeps your fire alive.

2. Prioritize your activities by economic value

You need to know which actions are high value, low value or fall somewhere in between. Make a list of what you do in a typical day and week, then scrutinize it to learn what generates revenue. Which actions are required to sustain the business and which ones to grow it?

Too often, solopreneurs get mired in the weeds of administrative busy work that could and should be outsourced if not deprioritized – like accounting, website maintenance, social media promotion, “meeting for a coffee” etc. Just because you like it does not mean you should do it, and vice versa.

Uncomfortable prospecting and following up on leads? Too bad, it is a high-value activity, so if you do not want to do it yourself, outsource it. Do not like speaking or attending events to gain visibility and clients? You might want to rethink that one too.

Again, life is full of trade-offs. Invest your precious time in what grows the business so you can become prosperous enough to outsource what you do not like. Otherwise, you will waste time on low-value activities on your way to the poor house.

3. Schedule your day to minimize distractions

As a solopreneur, you are the go-to person for all business communications, but there are times when you need to be focused on the task at hand without distractions, especially when you are working on tasks critical to growing your business. Maximize your productivity by scheduling the tasks that require your undivided attention during times when distractions are less likely. This may mean you get most of your difficult, hands-on work done early in the morning or late at night. Working odd hours may help you because you are free of certain distractions.

4. Block off time for specific goals

Be ruthless with your time. Get smart about it and bundle similar activities together. Mentally, it is much easier to stay in flow than constantly switch tasks. Block time on your calendar every day or week for high-value activities. When you are the only one working on building your business, it is critical to keep your sales and marketing activity levels on track. If you are not consistently keeping up with your email, reaching out to potential customers or following up with warm sales leads, you will not get more business.

There is plenty that can get in the way. Fires can pop up throughout the day that can prevent you from getting these tasks done and they really put a hamper on your personal productivity. If you start scheduling the important things in a daily planner and stick to it, nothing else can take that time from you. Block off a time each day and dedicate it to sales and marketing.

5. Know when to use money to buy time and when to use time to save money

This one is easy: what do you have more of? If it is money, use it to buy yourself time by outsourcing low-value activities, things you do not do well even if you like them, or things you do not like. Have more time? Use it to get done what you cannot afford to pay for and can do reasonably well.

6. Create leverage via technology, partnerships or both

Form alliances and partnerships that bring you into new opportunities or in front of new audiences. Maybe you have a silent subcontracting agreement that fills in the peaks and valleys between clients and projects. Maybe you can position yourself as the “intel inside” organizations complimentary to what you do.

7. Embrace apps and systems for efficiency

Today’s technology gives small business owners many inexpensive or free apps and software systems to maximize personal productivity. Use an app to track your appointments, tasks, events, and to-do list. Sync it across your devices for maximum efficiency.

8. Invest in visibility and leverage the crap out of it

In the Internet era, there is absolutely no excuse not to and it is easier than ever before. To generate leads, prospects need to know you exist. Develop a blog or content publishing schedule that drives traffic to your website; then syndicate and distribute that content far and wide. Use your business social media accounts to spread your message and listen for problems you can solve. Go to networking events, conferences, and join groups that give you face time in front of actual prospects, not just other solopreneurs.

9. Strive for a balance between working “in” your business versus “on” your business

Most savvy solopreneurs eventually realize that job number one is not to deliver goods and services to clients (working “in” your business), but to sustain and grow the company (working “on” your business).

10. Pay attention to your attention

Pay close attention to when you feel most energetic and alert, and try to schedule your critical activities for those times. You probably still have work to do at times when you feel easily distracted, but try to stick to tasks that do not require maximum focus at these times of the day.

11. Embrace the haters

Contrary to popular belief, the most successful solopreneurs are open to criticism and feedback, utilizing contrarian ideas to fuel progress and help innovate their businesses. Use employee and customer complaints or found faults to make your business stronger. Even though all feedback is not actionable, gathering this information from other points of view can help you make better business decisions, whether that means implementing a new product or developing new internal processes.

Thinking about starting as a solopreneur?

Starting as a solopreneur may be a scary thing at first. After all, how do you create work for yourself? Well, it takes time and dedication. If you are thinking about becoming a solopreneur, you can use all the help.

In my blog Tips for Success for the Solopreneur, I explain the difference between solopreneur, entrepreneur, freelancer and self-employed. Then, I give you six tricks to get clients to take you seriously, twenty-three tips for succeeding as a solopreneur, and six solopreneur branding mistakes to avoid.

Your team is constantly receiving new leads, and as you know, no two of them are exactly the same.

Some are probably inbound and come mostly from your marketing team, while others are outbound and sourced by reps themselves. Some may be from B2B companies and others from B2C. Some are extremely tough closes, yet for others it seems like the stars align and they close exactly as planned for more than anticipated.

But when these leads are just a name in a list of hundreds or even thousands of other businesses, it’s hard to know what you’re going to get. Because of this, reps will often just start at the top of a list and work their way down. Or, they might cherry-pick leads that are similar to those that have been easy closes in the past.

Either way, good leads can slip through the cracks, while bad leads can waste your team’s time. In fact, it’s been proven that reps ignore 50% of marketing leads on average. So how do you know what makes one lead better than another? And how do you help your team prioritize and focus on the leads that will drive the most value for your business?

Say Hello to Lead Yield

Lead Yield is just one example of a Yield Measure – measures that are used to understand how much value you get in return for your investments at each stage of the sales pipeline. With lead yield, companies can:

Strategically invest in growth: Understanding lead yield is a method for directly quantifying the ROI for marketing channels, and supports arguments for growing/cutting programs.
Forecast more accurately: By knowing average deal sizes based on dimensions such as industry and marketing channel, forecasts can be supported by historical data rather than a one-size-fits-all model.
Effectively prioritize efforts: Knowing which types of leads drive the most value for your business enables you to strategically score and prioritize both inbound and outbound leads.

The equation for lead yield is as follows: Sales Revenue / # of Leads Generated. You can see an example of this equation worked out below.

In this scenario, the yield for all leads, or “aggregate lead yield,” is $101.77. This means that, with conversion rates and lead quality held constant, we can forecast $101.77 of revenue for every lead in our pipeline.

Super helpful, right? But we’re just getting started. The real value of lead yield becomes apparent when we begin to segment leads and calculate their yield by dimension.

Lead Yield by Dimension

Think of all the potential factors that can touch and impact each of your deals at any point during their journey through the funnel, from reps, to pricing, to lead source. These are dimensions.

Rather than viewing your sales funnel in aggregate, viewing it by relevant dimensions helps uncover underlying trends, patterns or variables that indicate levers teams can pull to scientifically impact sales.

To understand what sets one lead apart from another and identify the types of leads generating the most value for your business, we want to choose dimensions that are relevant to the actual lead profile. Some examples of these kinds of dimensions include:
– Lead source
– Contact title
– Company size
– Company industry
– Number of decision makers
– Solutions already in use

You can see a breakdown of lead yield by the dimension of industry below:

As you can see, these results tell us that Media is the industry with the highest lead yield, followed closely by eCommerce and Travel/Hospitality.

First of all, this warrants a discussion with the marketing team, whose budget would clearly be better invested in channels that produce leads from these verticals than others.

Secondly, this discovery also offers guidance for which leads reps should be prioritizing in their outreach. When given a list of leads, focusing on the ones that have similar qualities to those with the highest lead yield will ultimately generate the most value for your business. The same goes when sourcing. This information can also be used to create or improve lead scoring.

Finally, you may notice something else interesting about the results of this particular lead yield analysis. While eCommerce leads have the second highest yield out of all industries, they represent a very small percentage of wins.

Of course, there could be a number of reasons for this discovery. Maybe my reps aren’t pursuing these leads with the same tenacity as others. Or perhaps they’re not as knowledgeable about this industry and as adept at closing leads from this vertical.

It will definitely take some additional dimensions and analysis to get an answer. However, one of the best parts about dimensions is that they can be combined to generate increasingly granular insights.

For example, we could take these industry buckets and further segment them by company size to see whether different industries perform better for my SMB, mid-market and enterprise teams. We could then further segment these results by the dimension of sales rep to see if particular reps are more skilled at closing deals from certain industries than others.

Be a Steward of Data

It’s important to remember that before we even begin to think about segmenting leads and deals by this information, it’s critical to ensure that we have clean and complete sales data. Here are a few tips to make sure that we are generating the quality of sales data needed to receive accurate and impactful insights:

Avoid free-text fields: Instead, use drop-down and multi-select fields wherever possible to avoid typos and missing information.
Keep data standardized: Clean data makes reporting easy. Watch out for the same dimension listed multiple ways, like “NY” vs “New York” vs “NYC.”
Monitor data completion: Missing fields often hold the keys to success. Constantly review field completion rates and ensure data is filled in.

Simple Yet Powerful

Despite being easy to calculate, lead yield is one of the most powerful calculations in the Science of Sales. To learn more about lead yield and other key equations shaping the field of sales science, download the free eBook: Understanding the New Metrics of Sales.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

I am sure this not unique to Ontario, every November, grade nine students get the day out of school, and are encouraged to join a parent or relative at their place of work. It is an opportunity for the students to get out of their cocoon of academia, and experience a dose of reality. Among the many benefits of the program, and there many, given the career realities kids will face, is the ability to spend ‘a day in the life’ of a working person; highs, lows, warts and all, not just what’s on the recruitment posters.

I was reminded of this while I was reading a piece in the Harvard Business Review, titled: “The New Sales Imperative” by Nicholas Toman, Brent Adamson and Cristina Gomez, the CEB team behind the Challenger Sales and Challenger Customer. It reinforced the need for sales people, and their respective organizations to have a much better understanding of how others “work”, in this case buyers.

Just like grade niners, many sales people have a distorted or unrefined view of what happens at buyers’ place of work, what they face on a daily basis, what they do, how they do it, and often why they do it to begin with. Without that understanding it is often difficult for kids to appreciate what their parents go through, and in the case of sales, makes it hard for sales people to help their clients, and by extension their own companies.

Right from the start – as soon as we enter the buyers’ world, we are confronted by a reality that very much counters one of the most widely help myths in B2B selling today:

Most B2B sellers think their customers are in the driver’s seat—empowered, armed to the teeth with information, and so clear about their needs that they don’t bother to engage with suppliers until late in the process, when their purchase decision is all but complete.

Customers don’t see it that way. They may be better informed than ever, but CEB research shows that they’re deeply uncertain and stressed… Customers are increasingly overwhelmed and often more paralyzed than empowered.

Most B2B sales people, and their extended teams, have for years have presumed the opposite, (encouraged by the pundits), building much of their sales approach on that erroneous assumption. This has inadvertently added complexity to the buying cycle and process. Not that buyers needed help in that, given the numerous internal interests involved in any given purchase, CEB research showing there are up to 6.8 stakeholders involved from the buyer organization these days. Labouring under this misconception has led to B2B sellers/organizations to miss a great opportunity to bring real value to buyers.

The real value sellers can add for buyers by reduce complexity of their buying process and experience. To do that they need to first understand that the many of the struggles buyers face, are often more internal than market related, and certainly not product/vendor related, which is where most sellers focus. While there are a number of ways to do this, sellers should focus on two on their Day at Work With Buyers:

• Simplifying by eliminating unnecessary choice
• Illuminating the buyer’s journey

More is not better – it’s just more

One assumption many sellers have is that choices are good, certainly in the selection process and in the actual buy. As the authors describe, choice is one of the factors adding to the stress and difficulty. During the buy cycle, alternative choices will lead to some in the buying group, feeling that the alternative may have greater appeal. This has the effect of not only slowing down the buying process, thereby extending the buy cycle (that means a longer sales cycle grade niners), with 2/3 of customers saying the cycle took much longer than expected or planned. Multiple interests, multiplied by multiple choices, often leads to “lowest common denominator purchasing”.

This lingers in to the post purchase phase, CEB cites research showing that “second-guessing occurs in more than 40% of completed B2B purchases”. Yet despite this, sellers continue to believe that it is there roll to provide (drown) their buyers with more information about their choice or options.

Illuminating the Journey

Many sellers do not recognize how far down the journey the question of product or vendor are really a factor. Long before that, buyers, all 6.8 of them, need to agree that there is something or what, is worth addressing; if so, then are there particular ways to address. Only after that do thoughts turn to selecting a solution and vendor. Yet too many sellers/organizations think it is all about them and their product, leading them to ignore key parts of the buyers’ journey; sellers think of the entire journey is what the CEB calls “customer purchase-from-us journey”; a view that does nothing to address the first two, and from the buyer’s perspective, most important steps.

Prescription

On a high level the answer is to simplify the buying process for buyers, in ways they could learn as a result of their “day at work with a buyer”. Specifically, “a proactive, prescriptive approach”, based around how buyers who buy, buy successfully, actually do buy. Yes, again counterintuitive to many of the mainstream approaches of being “responsive”, where rather than simplifying the process for the buyer, sellers contribute to the complexity of the decision by being “responsive”.

The piece highlights some key ways to achieve this, rather than rehashing, here are some highlights. Starting with some revealing data points:

• 86% of sales professionals agree that “helping the customer consider all possible options and alternatives is important.”
• 79% agree with the statement “I remain very flexible to customer needs and opinions throughout a sale, even when I don’t necessarily agree with their direction.”

The reality is decidedly a different picture:

Sellers can achieve this by applying what they learned from their interactions with previous “successful” buyers, and sharing that experience with potential buyers. The good news is that sellers interact with buyers on an ongoing basis. This allows them to have a front-line view of the buying process. Many sales people and organizations will conduct “deal reviews”, but most will bring the usual bias to the review, and end up looking at why they did or did not make the sale, but overlook the opportunity to learn how the buyer(s) made the buying decision, including steps that precede the product/vendor stage. If they did focus more of the review on specifics buyers faced in their entire journey, they can then share that with future buyers, thereby simplifying the process. But a continued focus on why the sales was won, lost, or came to a draw, will not do anything to help buyers avoid or anticipate specific things they will face in the buying process, long before there is even discussion of a product/vendor.

Helping buyers understand and eliminate hurdles and potential roadblocks they have seen others face in the past is an opportunity for proactive sellers. This will include helping buyers map their journey in a way different than the “buy from me journey” mentioned above. Stepping away from your product, and focusing on the helping buyers deal with realities they will face in selecting any supplier, not necessarily just you. Keeping in mind that the buying organization is likely to have 6.8, not always – and at times conflicting ideas of what they are looking to solve, what the solutions may be, both having to be resolved before any talk of specific vendors. Not making it about us is hard for many, limiting choice and avoiding being purely responsive is even harder.

Understanding and articulating the things that have caused complexities for prospects is key, helping clients avoid these across the three stages described is best achieved by focus and specifics sellers have experienced, leads to much greater success in less time than being responsive and facilitating endless choices, in the hope the buyer will find a solution they like. Buyers don’t often find it on their own, leading to the high number of “no decision” results, or a smaller safe decision that does not address the issues at hand, but take twice as long to arrive at.

The pay off:

Understanding why and how buyers bought, critical steps taken, and challenges faced and how those buyers dealt with them; then sharing that with prospects, are key to a seller’s ability to help customers map the complete journey, not just the parts where they are selecting products/vendors. More people (think they) know what to buy, their struggle is “how to buy”. A savvy seller, supported by their entire organization, can help their buyers craft a better buying journey. Helping buyers understand and prepare for specific obstacles they will face, and how to get past them. The alternative is to ignore the buyers’ reality, add to the complexity, and drive more “no-decision” outcomes to cycles.

As the article concludes, those selling organizations that can produce tools, guidelines and other things that simplify the buyer’s journey, will not only sell more, but have more loyal clients, leading to more cross and up sells. All things they could learn by spending a day (or few) with their buyers at work.

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The post Buyers: Take Your Rep To Work Day appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

Operating a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) business can be very rewarding as it’s a great way to deploy software that has many benefits. It can also be challenging. But, if one industry understands the importance of how technology can aid your business, it’s the software industry. So what role can customer support software play in the success of a SaaS company? Here are a few ways this software can help keep your business prosperous and facilitate growth…

It can help reduce customer churn – If customers are not onboarded properly, churn can be a real issue for SaaS companies. Customer support software is great for keeping track of key information (including all customer interactions) that can lead to dissatisfied customers. For example, software can be utilized to make sure issues are responded to in a certain timeframe so customers don’t feel ignored. It can also display how satisfied a company or even a particular contact is though technology that measures “distress” via average ticket response times, total number of tickets, and other metrics.

It can tell you how to improve your product – As a SaaS company, you likely have a product roadmap and vision for how your software will evolve in future versions. But does than plan match what your customers are looking for? Customer support software helps in not only resolving issues faster but it can be a central repository for all customers that you can learn from. Information such as common ticket types and ticket volume related to specific software areas is important to keep an eye on to make sure the needs of your customers are being met. It’s also really easy to include a “feature request” ticket type to gather intel on what new features are most requested. After all, happy customers equal a successful business.

Increase your top of funnel leads – Not only can customer support software tell you how to improve your product, but it can also help in driving new top of funnel leads. How? For example, you can look within the support software at new customers to see what their common questions are, then have your sales people address these questions more clearly with prospects in the future. Sales is all about making sure someone feels comfortable with their software choice, and a resource of information to quell the future concerns of prospective customers is a great asset to have. Likewise if you offer a trial (as many SaaS companies do) you can track issues by trial accounts to understand where and how to improve the trial experience.

Teach support staff to identify needs that can be upsold – In a SaaS company, every employee is involved in sales in some form. No, your support staff shouldn’t be selling to your customers directly. Instead, since they’re the people who are talking to your customers on a daily basis, train them when they should and should not to loop in a sales person. If a customer is looking to accomplish something that requires a higher tier software package, enable your support team to say more than just “that’s not available at your price point”. Instead, have them follow up with “I’m going to loop in Jen from our team to tell your more on how we can meet your needs” and tag them in easily via support software. Sales people love this type of introduction and it will be much more successful on both fronts.

Understand what customers are worth (or not) – Especially in SaaS, not all customers are created equal and there can be reasons why sometimes customer relationships simply do not work. A $5,000 per month customer may reach out to support more than one who spends $50,000 a month and this means higher maintenance costs for the lower value customer. It’s important to look at ticket volumes by customer via SaaS support software and then take it to another level – see how happy they are with your company – and determine if the relationship is a good fit for both of you. We’re instinctually trained to never want to lose a customer but sometimes they can do more harm than good to a business and its bottom line.

In conclusion, customer support software has a major role in successful SaaS companies. It helps with not only customer retention but also increasing sales with current and new customers. The software can also be used to help employees communicate more efficiently and to evaluate the success of every customer relationship. It’s no surprise more SaaS companies are deploying customer support software solutions, sometimes for the first time, because of the many ways it can benefit a company both short and long term.

Periodically, today’s content marketer needs to take a step back and see the forest (or whatever is your preferred “big picture” cliché). These pauses are an excellent time to evaluate whether your offered content matches your targeted audience’s persona(s) and where they are in their buying journeys.

Do you have too much Top of Funnel (TOFU) content and not enough Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) content that is oriented to decision makers?

In this episode of the Rethink Podcast, we meet with Karrie Sundbom, senior manager for content marketing at Act-On. She tells us a bit about her role and responsibilities at Act-On, as well as shares a few tips on mapping your content to the buyer’s journey.

Karrie bundles her tips under Educate, Create, and Activate.

Educate

Everyone is talking about the buyer’s journey. But what is it? Essentially, the buyer’s or customer’s journey are the steps a potential customer takes toward purchasing your product or services. This journey can have many shapes, entry points, turns (including U-turns), and exit points. Generally, we define the journey’s phases as awareness, consideration, and decision.

Content marketers want to make sure they’re offering the right content throughout the buying journey. The goal is to create content that will answer the buyer’s question at that particular stage, and then point them in the right direction, further along on their journey, and, eventually, generate leads and sales.

According to Sundbom, one of the first steps marketers should take is to study their buyer persona(s), and then educate themselves on both the content they already have and the content they may still need.

“You really need to pay attention to who the buyer is. What are their pain points? What are their day-to-day challenges?” Sundbom said. “Who in that company is the decision maker? Who in that company is the budget holder?

“You really need to do your homework. You need to know where these people live. Where are they getting their information? Where are they getting their content? Who do they trust? And you need to start planning around that.”

As for collecting this information, you can hire the project out to an agency, survey folks that have (or had) those job titles within your organization, or reach out to the people you know or who may have a connection with via LinkedIn. You can ask them a range of questions, or just one or two.

Here are questions you might want to ask:

• What keeps you up at night?
• How is your job measured?
• How do you stay up to date with trends?
• What publications do you read?
• What does a typical day look like?
• What knowledge/skills are required for your job?
• What tools do you currently use?
• Biggest challenges in your job?
• What does it mean to be successful in your role?
• What type of content engages you?
• What are some objections/worries you have when purchasing (your product or service)?
• What is at risk if you make the wrong purchase decision?
• What purchase did you make that you most regret? Why?

The second step is educating yourself on what you already have in your library and what holes you may have to fill. Look at all your blog posts, white papers, infographics, videos, eBooks, and so forth, and begin organizing it by buying stage.

You can do this on a white board, in a PowerPoint slide, or in a spreadsheet. In your content audit, tag the material by type, persona, theme, place in the journey (TOFU, MOFU, or BOFU), and so forth. You will also want to identify content that is evergreen, as well as content that you will be able to leverage into other formats, by, for example, turning that webinar into a video, podcast, infographic, comparison datasheet, or blog post.

Once you have a clear idea of who your buyer is, and what content you may have that addresses their needs, it is time to begin creating content to fill the holes you have (and, yes, you’ll more than likely have some holes).

Create

Your previous research and content audit will help you identify content holes, as well as help you potentially see the need to tweak, add, or remove the personas to whom you are selling, Sundbom said.

You will also identify secondary personas you may need to create content for, such as CFOs, IT directors, and so forth. This content can be used by your primary personas to educate others within their organizations.

As you have built out your map and identified what you need to create, Sundbom recommended prioritizing the creation of new content on filling the biggest holes and being in sync with your company’s goals.

Likewise, you’ll want an honest appraisal of the time some pieces of content will take to produce. Say your audit finds that you need more customer testimonial case studies. Realistically, it could take several months to identify successful customers who are also willing to participate.

As Stephen Covey, author of the famous book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, once said, “Begin with the end in mind.” Identify the content you need, case studies, demo videos, billboards along a highway, and the like, and then work backward on what’s needed to get those created.

Additionally, Sundbom also advised being selective about what content should be given away for free and what should be gated so that you can “capture those leads and begin nurturing those relationships.”

Activate

Sundbom’s final quick tip? Activate, activate, activate!

Go back to your earlier persona research where you identified buyers’ preferred channels; that is where you want to share your content.

This sounds overly simplistic, but too often I’ve seen marketers get drunk on the latest channel trend and spend crazy amounts of cash to share their content on it. Yet, their buyers never see that content because they don’t use that channel.

There are deployment options for all budgets. You can use third-party syndication, share on social media, or share with your own networks.

You should measure and test your content’s success via free tools, such as Google Analytics, or do A/B testing using a marketing automation platform like Act-On.

What success looks like will depend on your business goals and your industry. In addition to determining the bottom line goals (leads, sales), you will also want to find out what days and times of the week your audience consumes your content. Determine whether they prefer a content-type format (white paper or video) or channel-type format (email or Snapchat).

Want to learn more tips for Content Marketing? Check out this great post, “Content Marketing on a Shoestring Budget.”

And, if you haven’t yet defined your buyer personas, take a look at our eBook/workbook, “4 Steps to Creating a Content Marketing Plan Right Person, Right Message, Right Time,” to help you complete this crucial step.

Effective teams don’t just happen — you design them. And two of the most important elements of that design are a.) the degree to which team members are interdependent — where they need to rely on each other to accomplish the team task, and b.) how you’ll actually coordinate that interdependence.

This issue arose when I presented a leadership team with survey results showing that its team members had very different beliefs about how much they needed to actively coordinate their work to achieve the team’s goals. Several members believed they were like a gymnastics team: they could achieve team goals by simply combining each member’s independent work, much like a gymnastics team rolls up the scores of individuals’ events to achieve its team score. Others — especially the leader — believed the team should function more like a hockey team: they could achieve their goals only through complex and often spontaneous coordination. I pointed out that until the team reached agreement on this fundamental disconnect, they would continue to have a difficult time achieving their goals.

You can tell when a team doesn’t have a good fit between interdependence and coordination. If there is insufficient coordination, team members have difficulty getting information from each other, completing tasks, and making decisions. If there is more coordination than required, team members will spend unnecessary time and effort on tasks, which slows the team down.

You and Your Team Series

Collaboration

Chart of the Day: It's never good to compare yourself to others - except when it comes to Email Marketing.

Benchmarking your email marketing is extremely important. It is pivotal to know if you are outperforming your sector or if you need to adjust your tactics.

If you work in B2B then the key stat you need to pay attention to is the fact that B2B retail has an open rate of 24.24% and the click rate is 4.75%. Whereas B2C - Other is slightly lower with an open rate of 22.64% and click rate of 4.04%.

Email benchmarking is discussed in greater detail in our post, Email Statistics - 2017 update.

• Source: Email marketing benchmark reports 2017
• Sample Size: 1.5 billion emails over 2016
• Recommended Resource: Email Marketing Guide

In account based selling, your success depends a lot on the steps you take to select targets prospects, research them, and match the right resources to reach out and follow up.

In How to Sell More with Account Based Selling Part 1, we looked at the first 5 steps to as a planning phase. These steps optimize your time and resources:

1. Having a plan
2. Setting realistic goals and expectations
3. Managing research time
4. Defining the target accounts
5. Setting your ideal customer profile.

Now you’re ready to go! Here are 5 tips to help you get the best results when you put your Account Based selling strategy into action.

6. Get Everyone Involved

Get the right departments and players involved to make the effort a success. First on the list is sales. They need to define the accounts that should be the focus of the account based selling initiative. They know which departments and contact titles they want to connect with. Sales will also work along with marketing to nail down the value proposition, messaging and buyer persona challenges and solutions.

You need another layer of effort to research and collect contact titles, emails, and phone numbers. It’s important that a separate individual do this additional research, regardless of who is going to execute the account based selling initiative. The person may have a background in sales, marketing, or other function, but it is critical to get accurate data and to perform this time consuming task before this initiative begins.

Then, once you have collected accurate data on accounts, messaging, contact information, you need a CRM to manage the data, and resources to perform the initiative. It used to be that IT needed to be involved to import the necessary data, templates, and other assets into the CRM. But now it has become rather easy to import this data — the researcher or someone in sales or marketing may be able to import the information.

There are two additional departments that you may want to involve. One is the customer service department and the second is the professional services department. The customer service department is in constant contact with customers. They bring thoughts, insights and input on the challenges customers are having, which can be invaluable to messaging. Include them. I would also involve professional services. In enterprise accounts sales, professional services are in contact with customers and can also provide input to the account based selling initiative.

7. Decide What Happens After You Nurture the Accounts

Everyone is all gung-ho. You have determined a reasonable number of accounts to implement in a multichannel strategic account based selling initiative. Once the cadence is complete and you end up with a fair amount of opportunities, what happens to the accounts in which you never had a conversation with the designated contacts? What about discussions that did not uncover a present opportunity, or revealed that your prospect is using a competitor? You must nurture those accounts. You won’t necessarily nurture them all in the same fashion, but you must have a strategy to nurture those accounts, as well as bring new accounts into the mix.

Not all nurturing is the same. Prospects using a competitor’s solution will need different follow-up than a prospect using a manual solution. Lead nurture may be different still for accounts you have had no contact with during the account based marketing initiative. Nurture with care, and target your message appropriately.

8. Understand Pain, Resolution, Urgency, and Implementation

If you cannot uncover and resolve your customer’s or prospect’s pain, you will be hard pressed to convert account opportunities into revenue and sales.

The pain or challenges a prospect or customer faces, plus their urgency and plan to overcome them and relieve the pain is the eye of the tiger. These determine if a sale progresses or falters and the speed at which it does so. Let’s take an example. The sale was progressing nicely but then it stalled. Phone calls, emails and texts went unanswered. You rushed and hurried to deliver the proposal you believed to be the answer to their prayers, yet the field representative has no idea what the prospect’s or customer’s thoughts are on it. The field representative is under stress to meet a number. It’s three weeks into the month, and they are dumfounded that they have not received a response from a contact who was hot and heavy to move forward.

The field representative needs this deal to close. Every possible scenario runs through their mind, but it’s all hearsay since the prospect or customer has gone silent and the representative has no idea why. In most cases, the one way to resolve this scenario is to go back to the pain the prospect or client was experiencing, the internal resolution that you have mapped out with their team and the urgency that was driving the sale. Review as well their mindful plan to roll out the initiative successfully.

The SDR is most often the first person to have a conversation with the prospect or client.

It is imperative that the SDR discuss the prospect’s or client’s pain or challenge. Equally important is to discuss the urgent reason to overcome this challenge and how they are going to have their initiative succeed.

Understanding this type of conversation with the right level prospect or customer is key to uncovering an account opportunity. If an SDR or sales is not having this discussion with this prospect or customer, three things happen: (1) appointments cancel, 2) deals stall and 3) revenue suffers.

9. Task People With the Right Skill Level

If you’ve spent the time to plan this strategic account based selling initiative, make sure you have the best resource executing it. Many times a resource performing other functions may be assigned to execute the strategic account based selling initiative on top of their existing responsibilities.

In other cases, an inbound SDR or team is expected to successfully execute the strategic account based selling initiative. Do these actions look familiar? Stop. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it does outline a few pitfalls that are important to avoid if you are going to succeed with account based selling or selling in general.

First and foremost, the person executing the initiative should be consistently committed and dedicated to the initiative. If they have other responsibilities, it becomes unclear how to prioritize their time. Usually, they end up performing whichever task pays the most.

Second, one needs innate enthusiasm, excitement, stamina, curiosity and motivation, not only to do the job but to achieve success.

Third, one must have keen problem solving ability to engage prospects and customers in discussions and uncover a problem. Strong relationship building skills are also required. SDRs must build strong relationships with the prospect or customer. Those carrying out your initiative also must build and maintain strong working relationships with the account owners they support, such as the field representatives they may be working with on their accounts.

10. Be Creative Test, and Refine

Putting together an account based selling initiative takes time, resources and planning. Account based selling in not a new concept nor is it new to many companies, but it has its hurdles and challenges.

Be creative in this multi channel exercise. Try a different cadence and see the results you get. Try a new form of media in addition to social, calls and email and see the results you get. Try a varied message and see what happens.

If what you are doing is working, keep it. If not experiment. Be adventurous until you get the results you are looking for. Most importantly, test refine and have fun until your pipeline is bursting with qualified opportunities.