Every afternoon, I take a 10-minute walk outside. This walk clears my head, boosts my energy, and helps me spend the last hours of my workday as productively as possible.

It turns out I’m not the only one who’s noticed the benefits of a daily walk. On the Top Sales Dog blog, Dave Clemens suggests salespeople walk around while they call prospects.

According to Clemens, this small change can make calling “less of a headache” for reps who dread it. In addition, walking has positive effects on your attitude and mood.

The Benefits of Taking a Walk While Calling

Even a brief walk benefits both your mind and body. According to a study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, just five minutes of daily outdoor exercise can improve mood and self-esteem. Similarly, research from Robert Thayer, a professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach, found a positive correlation between the number of steps people took and their happiness, energy, self-esteem, and health.

Walking also boosts your confidence. Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist and professor at Harvard Business School, conducted a study showing a person’s body language can change how they perceive themselves.

Cuddy asked participants in her study to hold high- and low-power poses. Their testosterone and cortisol levels -- hormones that influence confidence and stress -- were measured before and after.

After the high-power group held their pose for just two minutes, they experienced a 20% increase in testosterone and a 25% decrease in cortisol.

“Two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident, and comfortable, or really stress-reactive and feeling sort of shut down,” Cuddy explains.

Walking around forces you to maintain a high-power pose: You’re upright and in motion rather than slumped in your desk chair.

Ultimately, the psychological benefits of walking will translate to more successful calls. When you sound calm and self-assured, prospects instinctively perceive you as more trustworthy and competent.

The Logistics of Calling and Walking

This technique comes with a couple logistical considerations. First, it’s easier to walk and talk if you use a headset or earbuds with a microphone rather than hold the phone up to your ear.

Furthermore, if your manager requires you to record your calls for training purposes, use conference call software with a recording feature.

When you expect a call to take 10 or more minutes, make it at your desk. Longer calls usually require the ability to look up information and take notes, which is far easier when you’re stationary.

If the weather makes an outdoors walk unappealing, Clemens suggests using a big conference room or a long hallway.

There’s also the option of calling at your desk -- but standing instead of sitting. Many offices (like HubSpot) provide employees with height-adjustable desks. If you have one, take advantage during your next call.

Unable to walk or stand while making calls? You can reap many of the benefits simply by going for a walk at some point during the day. If your schedule is jam-packed, see if you can turn one of your meetings into a “walk and talk.” Your coworker will likely appreciate the opportunity to stretch their legs just as much as you will.

Your mood and mindset can determine the outcome of your calls. To increase your odds of a positive response, go for a quick walk.

It’s a new year. Whether or not you’re the resolutions type, we’re guessing you have some goals you’d like to achieve—and making them happen isn’t always easy. Time, energy, willpower—there are a million things that make it difficult. But with a little more structure and discipline, you can achieve your goals. The key to getting that structure? Habits.

Lately, we’ve been intrigued by the work of Gretchen Rubin, author of Better Than Before. Her excellent book teaches you how to form habits based on your personality type, a huge factor in making them stick. Whether you want to lose weight or build a website, the more you build related habits into your life, the more likely you are to succeed.

We’re total converts to Rubin’s methods, and we’ve found a few of her strategies particularly useful. Since we love them so much, we wanted to share 7 strategies to help you work more efficiently, build more structure, and live a happier life. Depending on your personality type, some may be more attractive to you than others. But they can all help in some way. Enjoy.

1) Monitoring

Before you try to change a behavior, monitor, measure, or track it. This will give you accurate data to measure your progress against.

Example: If you want to stop smoking, track not just how many cigarettes you smoke a week but the frequency and times of day.

2) Strategy of Convenience

Make it easier to do positive things and harder to do negative things.

Example: If want to avoid sweets, keep them out of your pantry sightline—or decide not to keep them in the house at all.

3) Pairing

Staple one activity to another so that you only allow yourself to do one thing when you do the other.

Example: If you want to exercise more, decide that you can only watch Netflix when you’re on the treadmill.

4) Accountability

Find someone to participate in or report your progress to—even better, assign a consequence for not following through.

Example: If you want to swear less, take a note from your mother and charge yourself for every slip-up.

5) Scheduling

Schedule events in your calendar to carve out dedicated time—no matter how minimal.

Example: If you want to volunteer more, designate the first Saturday of each month as your volunteer day.

6) Distraction

Research shows cravings diminish after 15 minutes. Redirect your focus via a menial task or mental exercise to bide your time.

Example: Instead of drinking a glass of wine, create a quick flower arrangement.

7) Clarity of Action

Break your goal down into specific, concrete actions. The more specific you are, the easier it is to track. (Call back to tip #1: Monitoring!)

Example: If you want to eat healthier, decide to bring a home-cooked meal to work 3 days a week.

We hope some of these strategies help you make progress in the areas you want, and we wish you luck on your journey. If you want more, check out Rubin’s book to learn about all 21 strategies. And if you ‘ve found any useful productivity hacks of your own, we’d love to hear about them.

Many prospects have expressed that unfocused B2B marketing communications are noxious―clogging the air, littering the landscape, and substituting quantity for quality and volume and weight for insight. Surely, if our message is everywhere, and if we speak loudly, our prospects will flock to our door. Sure―ask the people of Mexico City or Beijing, “How’s that breathing thing coming along?” Ask them about the view.

I think B2B marketing is doing way too much talking.

We’re Not Listening

A great deal of B2B marketing is rooted in what automation can do. It seems to be on the step just above enablement. The automation is so incredible and so efficient at getting out the message that it must be effective. It’s marketing success in a box, and it’s easy to focus on technology as the righteous road. If we use the technology well, we will succeed. I think this easily brushes aside the reality that it’s a lot messier and murkier out there.

Companies articulate and struggle to solve the problem at-hand through the fog of culture and an ever-changing array of requirements and contributors to the process. Their consideration journey is serpentine and idiosyncratic. B2B is, and always was, about people. We can’t really learn more about the people if we are talking.

Your Product or Service Is Completely Beside the Point

I may not have all the answers, but I know that many buy decisions are not based on attributes, the features and benefits of your product or service. Those appear to be table stakes. Preference and commitment are the drivers, and they are based on taking ownership of the problem and helping the prospect to solve it in their way. Borrow their glasses to see. Walk in their shoes to understand. Put their hat on your head. Listen to what they say and how they say it.

If B2B marketing is coming up short on its potential, and I believe it is, it’s because automation has us stuck in broadcast mode.

A Cool Breeze Blows Away the B2B Marketing Smog

Companies have learned some of the most amazing things when they begin the process of structured conversations and active listening.

• One company learned through prospect persona research that the words and phrases they were using were communicating the absolute wrong (and opposite) message.
• Executive decision makers told another company that the product wasn’t a fit as promoted, but it would fit in a different application (not anticipated, or even previously known).

Structured and active listening must become a process and not an event. It’s about not conducting research every fifth year―unless profits are high or money is tight. It’s about doing it every day.

Cleaning the Air

I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve seen enough to know that this is the righteous path. Consider this:

• The decision making process is getting longer and more complex, and more of it takes place prior to engagement. I think a contributing factor is that B2B marketing is not delivering sufficient value.
• Does the number 3,874 ring a bell? It’s ChiefMarTec’s tally of the number of marketing technology vendors, which feels like we’re tipping into hyperbole. Perhaps we should give each qualified prospect a seat and suggest they design the communication stream that fits them best. It’s a reasonable guess that we’ve got all the automation we need right now, and that improvement will only come with upgrading the garbage that goes in.
• In a research interview on behalf of a technology client, I asked a CEO the most important benefit he got from my client. He said, “my salesman.” I’m certain that you can’t achieve that without listening.

The absolute answer is a moving target. There is no silver bullet, no one size fits all.

The B2B marketplace is in a constant state of flux and moving forward requires agility. Success lurks in our commitment to listening and learning and adapting to our prospect. There are brave marketers out there who continue to test this agility and push the envelope. Let’s begin a dialog and share experiences.

The B2B process is personal, and B2B marketing success is about listening to those persons. We can’t lose sight.

As an early employee at Radius, I had the opportunity to wear multiple hats in marketing and sales (as you do in most startups). One of them, notably, was during my tenure in sales enablement. At this time I was tasked with developing & executing sales account strategy and managing the training of all go-to-market teams.

I found that the most successful SDRs, and sales development teams in general, exhibited one key ability: qualify businesses in or out quickly and act. It’s an approach seen only when reps are compensated on their ability to create pipeline. But even then, many reps struggle to source and identify truly qualified opportunities that their company is likely to close.

In today’s ABSD and account-focused world, this means qualifying a sales account based on how good of a fit they are. Reps have a tendency to make excuses for the prospects they spend time trying to convert and less time being highly exclusive with whom to sell to. This is where marketing and sales can partner to keep both teams hyper-focused and precise by knowing who they’re looking for. And, it’s where a well-defined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) comes into play.

Identifying Accounts that Don’t Make the Cut

An Ideal Customer Profile. or ICP, is a group of attributes that describe your best customer. Commonly built by sales and marketing leaders, your ICP helps you target the most valuable prospects based on their firmographic, environmental, and behavioral attributes.

We’re not talking about 3 or 4 criteria either – do not make the “we can sell to everyone” mistake. Your ICP could include 20 or more criteria. These are the best of the best prospects – your sweet spot, the bullseye. Not every sales account meets all the attributes, but your tier A sales account should match to around 80% of the criteria that make up your ICP.

The benefits of investing in a well-defined ICP includes faster sales cycles, higher conversion rates, and better customer metrics like the annual contract value and lifetime value.

In fact, it’s such a crucial process that at Radius we make it one of the first exercises in our go-to-market training. New hires are tasked with learning the Radius ICP and then defining it to their colleagues and manager. To further solidify their understanding, we also ask them to identify five accounts that would fit the ICP and explain why they would qualify for it.

Now, why is all of this so important for sales reps in today’s ABSD world?

1) Identify your best sales account using your ICP

If you’re committed to building an efficient sales enablement engine, you need to be able to commit to certain accounts that fit your ICP. By identifying the best accounts with the highest potential to convert into opportunities, you’re ensuring that your sales team can go after the right sales account and that your sales process is highly effective.

2) Use a strategic approach to developing the right accounts

With a great process in place to disqualify businesses that don’t fit your ICP, you can double-down on the target accounts that do make the cut.

Identifying the right sales account is just the first step in the process, you need to invest time into thoughtfully developing your target accounts so they have a higher likelihood of becoming opportunities for your business. Marketing and sales should think in terms of coordinated account-based plays that will raise brand awareness, kickstart engagement, and progress buyers into meaningful conversations.

Account-based plays look different than typical prospecting and marketing campaigns. Read 12 examples from TOPO of the highly personalized touches made possible when focusing on your ICP.

3) Adopt a top-down and bottom-up approach

Depending on which analyst firm you talk to, there are anywhere from 5 to 18 stakeholders in every modern buying cycle. Too often our sales and marketing efforts only target executive-level roles. Why? Because they sign the checks AND because reps have 500 other accounts they’re “actively pursuing”.

Even if the C-suite does commit to a meeting and later a proof-of-concept, it is incredibly impactful if the other stakeholder – who are often the actual users – have also been highly engaged with you and your brand.

Working thoughtfully, and comprehensively, on only your ideal prospects opens the door for you and marketing to go to the top, but be sure to also invest in the bottom early on.

4) Achieve marketing & sales alignment – finally

Cross-departmental alignment has long been organizational-nirvana. Agreement between you and your counterparts on who you both are going to actively invest time & resources into creates a joint mission toward revenue. And when marketing and sales are both contributing to the bottom line, many pressures subside.

Transparency and starting early is key. Everyone on your go-to-market teams should know the target accounts, who owns them, and what activities are live or planned to engage them. Also, every new hire should be given documentation and training about your ICP on their first day. Buyers equal revenue – the lifeblood of every growing company. Everyone should know the buyers and should be committed to converting them together.

Your ICP is the first step to long-term ABSD success

These are just some activities that a tightly-defined ICP can help you achieve, but ultimately, you need to start by truly understanding your customers and prospects.

The modernization of B2B organizations calls for a high-yield, revenue generating sales engine that is dialed into your best opportunities. Building lead lists and boosting the quantity of emails sent are outdated approaches. Sales development teams nowadays must know who to target, how to capture their attention, and where to engage them – criteria that all require a complete understanding of your target accounts.

Remember: You don’t have to go at it alone. Tools like predictive can help you build an ICP and better segment your target audiences. Learn about ICPs and more in How To Sharpen Targeting with Micro-Segmentation.

—

This post was written by John Hurley, Director of Demand Gen & Content at Radius. With 5+ years experience in building startups, John specializes in empowering growth at technology companies by coupling superior marketing intuition with a data-driven customer understanding.

Learn more about Account-based Sales Development by downloading your free copy of our latest ebook, “The Essential Guide To Account-Based Sales Development,” and get started with account-based sales development with confidence! 

The post Building Your Sales Account Roster–Who Should Make the Cut? appeared first on SalesLoft.

One thing we at Richardson are hearing from many of our customers in sales leadership roles is that they are, or are considering, expanding their inside sales channel strategy. They see the shift in buyer behavior, with more customers conducting research online before engaging salespeople. They also see that an increasing number of customers are willing to interact with sales organizations, and even willing to make buying decisions, over the telephone. As a result, they are moving beyond utilizing inside sales for just their small-size customers and simple sales and including mid-tier customers that might also be serviced well by inside selling teams.

There are certainly cost benefits with this strategy, as well as the potential to reach more customers more quickly. In making this shift and adding greater demands for productivity from inside sellers, sales leaders need to consider and train for specific competencies. They need to think about how they develop an inside sales organization differently than field sales.

Obviously, many of the same selling skills are used in telesales as in the field. All sellers need to build rapport, ask great questions, listen actively, share insights, and articulate value. They need to position their solutions persuasively and close the deal. But when selling over the phone rather than face to face, sellers face higher barriers to engaging prospects and building credibility.

Among Richardson’s Six Critical Skills are establishing presence and relating. Not only are these skills more difficult to master over the phone, they become even more important. It is a lot harder for customers to warm up to somebody they can’t see or look in the eye. They don’t get the personal warmth that can come through when sitting across the table. Establishing this kind of connection over the phone is a tough challenge, and sellers need to be able to build rapport by projecting a sincere interest and warmth from the first “Hello.”

Presence is all about projecting confidence, conviction, and interest through body language and voice. Over the phone, body language is a moot point, unless the seller is making a video call; although, these rarely occur in first meetings. So, sellers must rely on their voice, their tone, and their conversational skills to show interest. They need to be concise, clear, and intentional in their words, even more so than when meeting in person because people can be less forgiving when they’re not face to face.

To relate to customers, inside sellers need to be skilled at using acknowledgement, rapport, and empathy to connect. They must be competent enough to ask really good questions and then to listen and pay close attention to the timing and cues for how fast the customer wants to proceed. Sellers have to recognize when customers get antsy and distracted, all without the benefit of visual cues. They must check more often to elicit feedback, and they have to be sensitive to the customer’s tone in order to understand the content and the emotional message.

In both inside sales and field sales, asking questions takes proficiency. Customers have little patience for a litany of questions that leaves them feeling interrogated. They have even less patience when being questioned over the phone. Inside sellers must take care to preface their questions to generate interest, setting the stage for why those questions need to be asked. The conversation should evolve to share information, insights, ideas, and other customer experiences. It is important to ask questions at a pace that leads to a good give and take with the customer. If this doesn’t happen, customers get bored and become distracted. It is much easier for them to multitask on the phone, turning to other tasks on their desk, because customers don’t feel as committed to giving sellers their full attention as when meeting face to face.

Inside selling can be an effective way to engage more customers in today’s changing selling environment. To be successful, the inside sales organization needs the skills and behaviors to overcome the lack of in-person connection that occurs with field sales.

Click here to contact us to learn more about how Richardson can help you develop an inside sales channel strategy. For immediate assistance you can reach us at info@richardson.com, or call 215-940-9255.

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The post Inside Sales Success: Competencies for an Expanding Channel Strategy appeared first on Richardson Sales Training and Enablement Blog.

We all know just how important email marketing is to eCommerce businesses. As an online store owner, you need to not only provide killer content, but you want shoppers and potential shoppers to engage with your emails… Because engagement equals traffic, and traffic, leads to sales.

To start your year off right, here are the top 4 things that could be killing your email marketing and tips on how to rectify them.

1: Your Subject Lines aren’t Up to Scratch

According to Hubspot 33% of respondents open emails based on the subject line alone. What this means for online store owners is that if your subject line is not on point, you’re killing your email marketing before you’ve even started.

There are a number of tips you can put into practice to improve your subject lines this year to breathe life back into your email marketing campaigns. Like we discussed in our Beat the Average With 10 Email Marketing Tips for eCommerce, try subjects that are clever and funny, ask questions, tease or create anxiety to improve your open rates with your subject lines.

Here are a few other ways to resolve the problem:

A/B Test to the Max

Test your subject lines before sending to your whole database to find the best subjects for your audiences that yield the best results. A lot of email platforms allow you to select two subject lines, test to a small portion of your list, and then will automatically send to the subject line that has the highest open rate.

Don’t Sound Spammy

Certain buzzwords in subject lines will give the impression that you’re spamming your user. According to MailChimp, words such as ‘Free’ or ‘Help’ or ‘Reminder’, should also be avoided as they are proven to negatively affect email open rates. Also, avoid using all caps, excess symbols and over punctuating.

Be Personal

According to Adestra, 22% of people are more likely to open an email that is personalized. If you’re not adding the recipient’s name in your subject line, try adding it and testing your open rate results.

If you’re looking for more subject inspiration, check out Digital Marketer’s 101 Best Email Subjects of 2016.

2: Your ‘From’ Settings are Too Generic

It’s not only your subject line that affects your open rate. Another leading factor is the name you select for your ‘From’ name. A generic name could be killing your open rates and your email marketing results. For instance, if the name for your support@website.example is just listed as ‘Support’, or ‘Marketing’ from your marketing mail address, the lack of that personal touch could make it more likely that your emails will be ignored.

Instead, use your store brand name like the below, or a personal name to make email less intrusive and spammy and therefore more likely to be opened. Plus, you will reduce the risk of important emails, from confirming subscriptions to transactional mails, being missed — like these leading merchants below:

3: You are Not Segmenting Your Database Enough

According to research MailChimp did, 14% of email marketers get a better open rate when segmenting their target audiences. When it comes to marketing, it’s not one size fits all and sending mass email blasts to your whole database could be destroying your open rates.

Segmenting your database lists based on location, amount previously spent and a number of other factors in 2017 will allow you to use subject lines, content and deals aimed at specific markets — all ultimately increasing your overall results. You can segment your market manually or through your email marketing platform, and can be done using the following parameters: Language, location, gender, age, buying behavior, etc.

Take this newsletter example from Airbnb that I found in my inbox this week, not only did they send me suggestions based on recent searches within prices ranges I have book in showing their segmentation superpowers, but the handy search bar and clear call-to-actions got me to click through.

Tracking this important information and segmenting accordingly to these parameters will allow you to send cross selling and up-selling emails based on previous purchases which will help convert more sales. Check out our full guide to email marketing platforms to find the best platform for your segmentation needs.

4: You Don’t have Automated Emails

Automated emails and transactional emails are more than just about streamlining your sales funnel. Automated emails can be triggered in certain cases, all contributing to your email marketing efforts to improve your marketing strategies.

According to Smart Insights, automated mails sent on triggers like mentioned above can yield 70% higher open rates. With these stats, can you afford not to add them to your email marketing plans? There are hosts of options in a variety of email platforms that allow you to manage automatic emails as part of the transaction process. Here are some examples you could automate in 2017 include:

• Trigger emails when users have abandoned their cart before purchasing
• Trigger emails after a potential customer has subscribed to your newsletters
• Trigger emails when a purchase has been made, which can include up-selling options.
• Trigger emails during the postal process

We dug into this a little deeper in our previous post, How too Make, Use, and Perfect Automated Email Marketing Workflows for eCommerce, where we looked at each time of workflow you should follow for automated emails directed at potential customers and previous shoppers as part of your complete marketing plan.

These include: the welcome flow, the abandoned cart workflow, the purchase workflow and the VIP customer flow. Additionally, don’t forget to keep your automated emails personalized like our merchant Fit Girls does with their confirmation mail here:

There you have it, the top 4 things you can do to help your email marketing perform at its peak in 2017. Don’t forget to add those pop-ups to grow your database and to stay tuned for more 2017 marketing tips and trends. If you have questions, feel free to comment below and I will get in touch!

Everyone is creating content these days. From SaaS companies to insurance companies to obscure widget manufacturers, B2B marketers have fully embraced content as an essential lead generation tool. In fact, a full 88 percent of marketers say their organization uses some form of content marketing, according to the Content Marketing Institute.

But with all of this content being created, how do you make sure it’s effective? It’s one thing to write an amazing 3-part guide and post it to your blog. It’s another thing altogether to use that guide to generate leads.

Here are some steps you can take to optimize your B2B content strategy to generate more leads.

1. Drive more (quality) traffic to your content

If the right audience is not seeing your content, that content is not doing its job. So the first step in creating a content strategy that is oriented towards lead gen is to increase the size of your audience.

To do this, you’ll first need a buyer persona. This is a description of your ideal customer, including demographics, psychographics, and pain points at work. Your content should be positioned to address their needs.

Next, you need to get the word out about your content. And this means using the right channels. Is your audience on Twitter? Are they active on LinkedIn Groups? Do they use Quora, Instagram, Facebook? Find your audience where they hang out online and share your content there.

2. Capture that traffic

Now that you have the right audience checking out your content, it’s time to capture their attention and increase their engagement with your business.

Often, content is described as “gated” content when a visitor must fill out a form in order to download it – and this is an extremely effective way for you to capture leads. Gated content means that you get an email address in exchange for an ebook or white paper that you share with your audience, which (as long as your content is high quality) is a win-win. These are quality leads that have expressed a direct interest in your content, so by gating your content, you will be able to develop a list of targeted, interested leads that your sales team can act on.

Other methods that B2B businesses use to capture inbound traffic include pop-ups that appear on various content landing pages asking for an email address or subscription, and content upgrades (an offer for related content embedded within a piece of content, which requires an email address to download).

3. The long-tail of B2B content marketing

While B2C marketing might have a relatively short sales pipeline, B2B is considerably longer. Landing a new customer can take months, in many cases. So why not use your content to nurture prospects that are partway through their decision-making process?

Content can be used to show new customers how your product or service helped similar businesses to their own (case studies), display your expertise and knowledge (white papers), or give them ideas for improving their business (ebooks). By continually providing leads with valuable content, your business will stay top-of-mind, and they will be more likely to turn to you when they are ready to make a purchase.

If you’re stuck for ideas on types of content to create to capture more leads, take a look at the basic and advanced content types that other B2B businesses are creating.

'EyeQue' is an optical device that can test your vision right at home. All you need is a smartphone.  Read more...

Why are you blogging? Does your business have an end goal in mind? More often than not, a business blog is designed to bring in leads for the sales team. Unfortunately, many blogs can be lacking what they need for proper lead generation. This guide is meant to give you the information you need for effective blog lead generation.

With these elements, you’ll be able to create a blog lead generation machine for your business. Act on them today to see how they’ll make a difference for you.

Always write content of value – for humans.

First and foremost, all your blog content should be directed toward and benefit your human audience. SEO should always be secondary. Your content should help people resolve an issue or learn something new. It should address one of their pain points and give them the instruction they need to move forward.

Alternatively, when you focus on SEO first, you take several unnecessary risks. You risk getting penalized by Google. You risk alienating your audience. You most certainly risk lowering your conversion rate. Instead of trying to force a higher ranking, focus on creating quality content, and your ideal ranking will come naturally.

Make your content relevant to the right audience.

You can create a fantastic, thorough article for your blog, but if it’s off-topic or irrelevant to your target audience, you won’t see them convert. In fact, all that hard work might be completely wasted. That’s why having reader personas is so essential.

You maintain your blog to reach a lead generation goal, not for vanity metrics. Getting visits and social shares can help you feel good, but it’s not enough and won’t directly contribute to your business goals. Create targeted, relevant content directed at those who would likely buy from you, and make that content helpful enough that your readers will convert.

Always have a relevant, strategically placed CTA.

When you write an article for your blog, it should always have a single call-to-action included somewhere within it. This CTA should include or lead to a form for interested readers to fill out. It should always relate well to the article content. Otherwise, your conversion rate will suffer. Your CTA should also offer something worthwhile. People need to feel like your offer is worth providing their contact information.

The CTA doesn’t have to be placed in the same location with every article. In fact, it’s best if you experiment with placement until you find your own sweet spot. Mix it up a few times till you see what works best, but only include your CTA once or twice within each article. If you include your CTA too many times on one page, you distract and overwhelm your readers. Be strategic with CTA placement, and your conversion rate will increase.

Offer an additional, gated resource to enhance your content.

As mentioned earlier, with every article you write, include a form-based call-to-action. This can be the standard subscribe form, or ideally, it’ll have a gated offer attached, such as a free download. With a gated offer, make sure it includes a fully optimized landing page with a form.

When you include an additional offer with your blog content, you filter your readers into who is just visiting and who is more serious about what you provide. Make sure your offer is highly valuable to the visitors you want to see convert. Your blog’s lead generation is highly dependant on whether you’re offering resources targeted toward the right people. Otherwise, the people filling out the form might have no intention of buying from your business.

Promote your content in the right places to reach the right people at the right time.

You have a blog article that follows lead generation best practices, but are you promoting it effectively? In order to see people converting on your blog content, you need to promote your content where they are and when they are paying attention. This can be in the form of an email, on social media, or through another means. The importance is on attracting the right people to your new article or resource.

Social media promotion is all about being on the right platform at the right time. If your target audience isn’t on LinkedIn, don’t waste resources there. If they’re only on Facebook in the evenings, make sure you’re scheduling your promotions for that time. Most importantly, you need to properly research your social media audience beforehand.

Make sure you have an adequate system for contact collection and follow up.

Your blog lead generation goals depend on your ability to properly collect, organize, and follow through with targets’ contact information. It can start as simple as gaining subscribers, but your most qualified leads will come from landing page forms. Either way, you need one central place for all that collected information.

You can start with just using a tool like MailChimp to gain subscribers, but your landing page requires a more in-depth tool. Using a tool like HubSpot’s free CRM can help you organize and follow up with contacts you gain, but its limitations might convince you to invest in a more advanced tool, such as Salesforce. The most important tool you need is one that can properly catalogue your contacts and monitor their interactions with your business. This will help you better understand them and follow up in a more personalized way.

Create a strategy that’s focused on one goal: qualified leads.

While it’s nice to see people coming to read your content or even share it with their network, your main focus should always be on getting qualified leads. Having a blog strategy that revolves around lead generation will help you create targeted content that brings results.

When creating a content strategy, keep in mind this ultimate goal. For each section of your strategy, from content planning to creation to promotion and beyond, remember why you’re blogging in the first place. This will help you stay on point with your efforts for maximum blog lead generation results.

When you’ve hit a wall while working on a project, there’s no sense in banging your head against it. Here’s how Isaac Asimov, the prolific science fiction author and science writer, worked his way through creative blocks.

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DAVOS, SWITZERLAND — The world is going through a seismic shift in the make-up of its workforce and the boss of the world's largest staffing firm told Business Insider that the only way to stay employed is to constantly learn.

The World Economic Forum's benchmark "Global Risks" report for 2017 says the biggest risk to doing business globally is unemployment or underemployment due to the greater adoption of robots, automation, and artificial intelligence. 

However, Adecco CEO Alain Dehaze told BI that companies now need to look beyond displacement and how people need to look towards constantly re-educating themselves in new skills.

(This is one part of a larger interview. The second part is published here).

Lianna Brinded: Last year, technology was touted as being a boon for industry but also a threat to unskilled workers' jobs — this year WEF warns that job loss and underemployment is the biggest threat — what sectors and where do you see the most problems?

Alain Dehaze: Our view remains the same: technology, through automation and artificial intelligence, is one of the most disruptive sources of our age. It changes the way we work and the skills we need, but it also boosts productivity and creates new jobs.

History can help soothe some concerns, when we see that in 1900, 41% of the US workforce worked in farming. By 2000, that had sunk to just 2%, mostly as a result of the arrival of machines. While the developed world has shifted from agriculture to manufacturing and then to services, the number of jobs has always climbed.

One development we’re stressing in the 2017 Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI) report is that we should look beyond automation and replacement of lower skilled jobs.

Rapid development in areas like machine-to-machine communications and the Internet of Things, coupled with the proliferation of big data, means higher-skilled professions, such as lawyers, journalists and accountants, are changing too. Some of their tasks are being replaced. For lawyers we see the expansion of automated discovery services, which allow lawyers to spend less time sifting-and-searching and more time on value-added activities. This means being able to take more assignment thanks to higher productivity.

But of course this also means reskilling and changing the way they work. In the meantime new jobs develops, especially in healthcare and in the tech sector. Modis, The Adecco Group, forecasts a 12% rise in demand for tech workers by 2024 in the US, compared with projected growth of just 6.5% in all other industries, and the World Health Organization estimates a global health workforce shortage of 7.2 million professionals already today .

LB: What employment practices can help solve this problem — or is it mainly down to government?

AD: In the big picture, I do not agree that technology represents a "problem." Take the prior example regarding replacement of certain tasks in high-level professions: it represents an opportunity for those professionals to avoid mundane tasks that computers can do, and have more time for things where humans out-do machines – creative and strategic thinking.

However, as the way we work changes, the transition can be rocky. GTCI 2017 shows that countries that succeed in talent competitiveness – Switzerland, Singapore and the Nordic countries, for example - and have a ‘higher talent readiness for technology’, share key common traits. One is connectedness and collaboration among private and public partners.

Employers and governments must work together to design education and employment policies that provide the skills needed by a 21st century workforce.

It is urgent to shift from a traditional, authoritative, rote educational approach to a project-based and experiential approach. Specific hard skills are fundamental, but is even more important that students ‘learn how to learn’ and focus on crucial soft skills such as flexibility and the ability to adapt to change. Work-based learning opportunities, such as apprenticeships and internships, are key in this sense.

Given the rapid rate of change, the old paradigm of one-off education followed by a career will no longer work: life-long learning is a must, and it is up to governments and employers to invest in training and for employees to commit to constantly update their skill set.

LB: Where are you seeing the biggest skills gaps at the moment?

AD:In general, the most evident gaps are in the area of ICT, digital and computer sciences, as well as in the engineering and healthcare sectors. However, employers also struggle to find the people skills that are increasingly important to business success in the 21^stcentury – communication, creativity, collaboration and critical thinking, in particular. 

LB: One prominent economist I spoke to said companies have to invest to skill up their staff in order to tackle this problem of a skills gap — are you seeing any improvement in this?

AD: Absolutely — companies’ skills requirements are changing fast, which means they need to invest in skilling up their staff. Many also increasingly use agency staff and temporary workers/freelancers to plug gaps. While we must not over-generalise – there are major differences within countries, and between sectors and even companies within single sectors – some countries have more of a tradition of in-work training, like Switzerland, Singapore, Japan and the Nordics.

Join the conversation about this story »

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Despite the growing popularity of Agile marketing and the fervent evangelism of early adopters, most marketers remain at least a bit confused. Questions are to be expected. Why? Because, although the basic Agile modus operandi is fairly straightforward – release work rapidly, learn from its performance, and adjust accordingly – Agile teams need an internal system that supports a new way of doing marketing.

In other words, Agile marketing is simple and hard at the same time. It’s simple to understand in theory. It’s hard to shift to working this way.

#Agile marketing is simple to understand in theory, but hard to shift to working this way, says @andreafryrear.
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This duality can make it challenging to tackle the topic effectively, as my time leading workshops, breakout sessions, and webinars on the subject has taught me. The questions I get vary dramatically depending on where audience members find themselves on their Agile journey, and sadly, there’s never enough time to cover everything.

Fortunately, we aren’t constrained by time on a blog, so this article can get to all those burning, unanswered Agile-marketing questions. That’s a lot of ground to cover so to make it easier to navigate I’ve grouped the questions into categories.

• Agile-marketing basics
• Agile marketing for small teams
• Backlog setup
• Non-Agile teams in your Agile workflow
• Sprint setup: projects, recurring tasks, and estimating
• Addition of Agile skills

Agile-marketing basics

For those who have just encountered this topic, I’ll start with foundational concepts. I love it when people ask these sorts of questions because they help those of us who have been doing Agile for years refocus on the core ideals.

Q: Can I get a definition of Agile marketing? Is it a brand name or a new methodology/approach to marketing?

A: Agile marketing is not a brand name nor is it a new approach (if you use “new” to mean something no one has tried). At its core, Agile marketing helps teams focus their collective efforts on high-value projects, complete those projects cooperatively, measure their impact, and then continuously and incrementally improve the results.

One of the most appealing attributes of Agile for marketers is that it systematically creates boundaries around the work being done. An Agile team deliberately chooses what to work on, which means that it’s also explicitly choosing what not to work on. When the inevitable fire drill comes up, you can politely say “No,” or at least “Not right now,” citing the protection of your Agile system.

For overwhelmed and overworked marketers, Agile can offer a path back to sanity.

#Agile methods offer overwhelmed marketers a path to sanity, says @andreafryrear.
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While innovative marketers have applied pieces of this approach for years, often without realizing it, true implementation of Agile marketing adopts one or more Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban) and commits to improving performance continuously.

Q: Isn’t it Agile when we adopt a few pieces of the process at one time and continue to do so at a reasonable pace? It seems counterintuitive to adopt all things Agile at one time.

A: In the world of software development, where Agile originated, there has historically been an emphasis on wholesale departmental transformations when moving from traditional waterfall project management to some form of Agile. (A waterfall approach requires each stage of work – planning, for example – to be complete before work can flow to the next stage.)

Marketers have proven less receptive to this jump-into-the-deep-end style, preferring to pick and choose Agile pieces one at a time. As long as the team is truly committed to steadily bringing in more components of the chosen methodology and improving the process over time, there’s no reason this iterative approach can’t work as well as a massive one-time transformation.

Q: How much time does it take for a beginner to implement?

A: This question requires one of those infuriating “it-depends” answers (sorry about that). Assuming you’ve done your homework, a one- or two-person team could roll out a Kanban system in a day or two without much interruption in its flow.

A large department of a dozen or more people, however, would need to set aside a couple of days to undertake a team-wide switchover or to create a transition schedule for teams over weeks or months.

Basically, you could visualize your workflow on a whiteboard right now, but to get the full benefits of an Agile-marketing approach, you need time for understanding its core principles and adjusting your mindset.

Q: Can you explain the methodologies (Kanban, Scrum, Scrumban) a little more?

A: Scrum is probably the most well-known Agile methodology because it drove the transformation in software development and IT during the early days of the 21st century. Scrum teams run their work in segments called sprints lasting one to four weeks.

It includes a few prescribed roles – Scrum master, product owner, and developers – and multiple standardized meetings or ceremonies: daily standup, sprint planning, review, retrospective. (For brief definitions of these terms and others, see my Agile marketing glossary.)

Scrum emphasizes teamwork and limits the additional work forced onto a team once a sprint has begun.

Kanban is less structured, using work-in-progress (WIP) limits – team-selected upper limits on how many work items can be assigned to each state (such as “being written” or “being edited”). WIP limits prevent teams and individuals from overextending themselves and failing to deliver completed work.

The word Kanban means “billboard” or “signboard” in Japanese. Kanban teams typically track their work on a board that has columns. (You’ll find an example of a one-person Kanban board in the following section.) Each column heading indicates a WIP limit. After a given column reaches its WIP limit – its maximum number of items – no new items can move into that column until one is moved out.

Kanban doesn’t include prescribed roles or meetings; it requires teams to manage their own process in a more proactive and independent way than teams who opt for Scrum.

Scrumban, as you might have guessed, combines components from Scrum and Kanban. In my experience, this methodology works best for many marketing teams because it offers some protection from external interruptions without being too rigid. Scrumban applies the visualization and ongoing improvement from Kanban to the Scrum team system, filling in many gaps the other methodologies have when used independently. While Scrum is designed for teams of five to nine people, Kanban and Scrumban can work for teams of any size.

Agile marketing for small teams

Many people ask whether it’s possible to use Agile methods with a small team. Yes. It can be immensely useful to manage your work this way.

#Agile methods work even if you are part of a small team, says @andreafryrear.
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Q: How would Agile be useful for a single-person marketing department?

A: The easiest way to use an Agile approach as an individual is to create a simple Kanban board showing how work flows from conception to completion.

Example one-person Kanban board

Here the Backlog column is arranged with the highest-priority work at the top. As work moves up and begins, it moves into the Create column. When it’s ready for review, it moves to the right again, and so on until the item is done.

Solo practitioners will want to pay close attention to their backlog – the prioritized list of what you need to work on next – to make sure it’s always up to date. It’s also important to put strict WIP limits in place so you maintain focus on completing work rather than working on tons of things at once.

#Agile marketers focus on completing work rather than working on tons of things at once, says @andreafryrear.
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A WIP limit of one on each of these columns wouldn’t be unusual. Here we see WIP limits of two on Create and Review, and a WIP limit of one on Publish.

Q: How is Agile beneficial to a marketing team of a few people?

A: Agile helps any team, no matter the size, work on the right things at the right time. It visualizes what they’re doing so that others outside the team understand what’s going on (making them less likely to interrupt). It also helps create consensus among the team and its managers/stakeholders so that everyone is confident that tactics are supporting strategy.

#Agile helps any team, no matter the size, work on the right things at the right time, says @andrefryrear.
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Simple tools work best for smaller teams, so use a physical board whenever possible. If you’re not at the same location, lightweight software like Trello or LeanKit will get you up and running quickly.

A two-person team could use a board similar to the one-person board shown, with the cards having a unique color for each person to show who’s working on what and how that work is distributed.

Larger teams can stick with assigning each person a card color, or they may find it more useful to color-code the type of work they’re doing: green for content, orange for social media, etc. Experimentation is the only way to figure out what works best for your team.

Backlog setup

Agile teams always have a backlog (a prioritized to-do list). An Agile team should be able to pull the top item from a backlog and start working on it with confidence, knowing that it’s the next thing they should do.

The backlog is the engine of your Agile sports car; treat it with care. It needs regular maintenance to keep the team running on all cylinders. You need a backlog regardless of methodology so this section applies to any team using Agile marketing.

Q: Are backlogs made of multiple projects or are they tasks for a single project?

A: The backlog is primarily for projects and strategic objectives; the content will vary depending on the source.

When the team pulls an item from the backlog to start, that team is responsible for breaking it into individual tasks and deciding who’s responsible for completing each one and when.

Q: Is there a level of detail needed to put something into the backlog? If something is not defined sufficiently, does it belong in the backlog?

A: Almost anything can go into the backlog, including a blue-sky idea, a huge project description, or a suggestion from another department. But as the item moves closer to the top, and closer to being worked on by the team, it should get increasingly detailed. On a physical board, this might mean replacing your existing card with a new one that contains more information. A digital system might mean simply adding more, from links to checklists to more thorough specifications, to the current record.

Priority levels in the backlog:

A low-priority item at the bottom of the backlog might read, “Create a new series of blog posts to target emerging marketer persona.” It’s vague, giving the team a general idea of what kind of work might be coming up.

When that item moves closer to the top and becomes medium priority, a representative from the team might approach the person who submitted the project and ask for more information. This short fact-finding mission could clarify the project: “Write four 1,200-word articles next quarter showing how our product helps marketers.” This is useful information for the Agile team because it helps them size up the amount of work heading their way and provides estimated delivery dates.

By the time it reaches the top, the item needs to include enough information that the team could begin work without any further fact-finding: “Write four 1,200-word blog articles before June 30 on feature one, two, and three. Include call to action to attend our July 3 webinar.”

Q: Who can add items to the backlog?

A: This answer is going to be another “it depends” because it varies widely from team to team. Scrum teams often have strict rules about adding items to backlogs; many allow only product owners to add items to avoid confusion (and to prevent unsupervised stakeholders putting their pet projects into the queue).

But many marketing teams incorporate requests from multiple sources into their workflow, making strict rules unrealistic. In those cases, you can allow several people to put things into the backlog by submitting a form or sending a message to a designated email address.

If you take that route, make sure you have a marketing owner (a role that should be functionally similar to that of a product owner) that keeps a close eye on incoming backlog items so the size of your to-do list (backlog) stays reasonable and the items on it remain actionable.

The backlog reflects important upcoming work for the marketing team; it shouldn’t be a junk drawer for random ideas. While many teams don’t place limits on the size of their backlog, you may find it necessary to impose a WIP limit here too if backlog items tend to languish unattended.

Non-Agile teams in your Agile workflow

Few marketing teams are an island, which means that Agile marketing teams typically have no choice but to develop effective ways of interfacing with non-Agile teams.

Fortunately, this problem can be solved with time and dedication, and it may even spread Agile ideals further in your organization.

Q: Most marketing teams depend on other departments to get their work done. What if other departments don’t use Agile?

A: There’s no fundamental reason that this relationship won’t work. Software developers, after all, often were the only Agile teams in their organizations. If marketing is an Agile pioneer, I recommend going overboard on visualization: Create a huge board in a high-traffic area or send regular status updates via email along with a link to your publicly accessible virtual board.

Make sure everybody can clearly see what you’re doing so they get insight into how their contributions affect it. This subtle peer pressure can nudge other departments to get you what you need at a reasonable pace.

Work flows best when the team pulls in only projects or tasks that they can complete autonomously from start to finish. “Finish” doesn’t have to be the project’s final release point, but it should mean the end of marketing’s responsibility.

Q: What if bottlenecks exist outside of your team, such as subject-matter experts for content, legal review, etc.?

A: Keep in mind that you need to map your real workflow, not the one you wish you had.

The most common issue is that non-Agile teams aren’t as consistent in their delivery dates, which can delay a marketing team’s ability to release projects on schedule. You can deal with this by building padding into your own cadence (for example, the design team usually takes two weeks to turn work around so we need to deliver things two weeks before we need them back), or by cross-training your team members in skills for which you normally rely on other teams.

You don’t have to become a team of design experts, but if you routinely sit around waiting for images to support your content, you can create a minimum-viable-product (MVP) version of your graphics and replace with the final versions later. This increases the amount of work you can release independently.

Sprint setup: projects, recurring tasks, and estimating

Now we’re getting into the specifics, the nuts and bolts questions that tend to come from teams practicing some form of Agile.

Often these questions are specific to a particular team. I’ve selected a few that apply to more than just the person who asked them. I avoid recommending specific tools because appropriate choices vary with the team’s size, needs, budget, etc.

Q: How does Agile work for high-volume, super-quick turnaround project planning?

A: Agile works particularly well in any environment of change or uncertainty, so it would almost certainly help manage workflow in this situation. Depending on how short “super quick” is, a more lightweight approach like Kanban might help keep things nimble by reducing meetings and planning overhead.

#Agile works well in any environment of change or uncertainty to help manage workflow, says @andreafryrear.
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Q: You mentioned a lot of marketing teams use a one-week sprint, which makes sense. But if the rest of your company is on a two-week sprint? Should you align with that?

A: No, you don’t have to automatically run the same sprint length in every department. There can be benefits to doing so, but if your marketing campaign needs to be completed before a new product or feature goes out, there’s no reason for the product and marketing teams to have an identical cadence.

Try varying sprint lengths to see if one gets you better results than another.

Q: How do I mix Agile projects with day-to-day issues and problems that my team needs to manage?

A: The solution to this one is hard data. Monitor and measure the average number of “issues and problems” your team has to deal with per sprint, and then leave enough of your sprint empty to allow for unplanned work.

If you get lucky and nothing comes up during a given sprint, team members can always pull additional work from the backlog.

Q: If a team works on multiple projects, is a sprint usually project-specific or is it phases of multiple projects worked on in the same period?

A: Sprints aren’t strictly structured around projects (although they might be). Their primary objective is to direct the team’s energy toward the next batch of most important work. Ideally, you have something that you could release at the end of a sprint, even if it’s not a fully completed project. In some cases, you’ll end up pulling some pieces of a larger project into one sprint while leaving others to be handled later. Agile software developers aren’t typically fans of this practice, but it’s common on Agile marketing teams whose efforts span multiple sprints (and even different teams).

If you’re working on an e-book, for example, you might have a completed chapter at the end of a sprint. You could put it out as a blog post, measure the audience response, and make adjustments based on their feedback. Or you might finish all written copy before passing it to a separate team for visual design. You could even split up research, writing, and promotion so each phase happens across multiple sprints.

There is no rule for what belongs in your sprint. Include the largest amount of top-priority work that your team is confident it can complete within the sprint.

Knowledge of Agile skills

Many marketers are looking for ways to learn more about Agile. Some Agile skills, like a willingness to hypothesize and test, require little more to develop than personal dedication. Others, like an understanding of Scrum ceremonies, may be most efficiently learned in a formal class setting.

Q: Is it worth getting Scrum master certified?

A: If you’re leading an Agile marketing team, then yes. If you’re not leading, then probably not. The same goes for product owner training.

What are your Agile questions?

If this list didn’t cover your most pressing Agile inquiries, shout out in the comments and I’ll be more than happy to give you an answer. You can also check out this video from my Content Marketing World 2016 session with Jeff Julian, Your First Agile Marketing Effort.

Andrea would love to see you at her Agile Content Strategy workshop at the Intelligent Content Conference – you’ll see more sticky notes than you’ve ever seen in one room. Register today for the March 28-30 event.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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).

The post Confused About Agile Marketing? Your Questions Answered [With Video] appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Email personalization is a way to authentically connect with your subscribers by sending targeted and relevant content that matters most to them. If subscribers don’t feel like they matter to your brand, then most likely, your brand won’t matter to them.

Personalized emails not only trump traditional “email blasts” – they also increase open rates by 26% and generate a 760% increase in email revenue.

Email marketers are starting to see the true value in email personalization and how it relates to ROI. We recently surveyed marketers about what their top goals and biggest challenges were for their email marketing strategies – 38% said improving email personalization was their number one goal, and 36% of marketers listed email personalization as their biggest challenge.

We took the survey a step further and asked what they felt the most effective email personalization tactics were for email marketing purposes.

In this post, we’ll discuss 7 important email personalization tactics and how you can engage your subscribers in a meaningful way.

1. Email list segmentation

According to our survey, the best way to improve email personalization is through using email list segmentation. While many marketers feel that email personalization can be challenging, having the right marketing tools in place will allow you to automate email campaigns in a segmented and personalized way.

Creating different segmented lists enable you to develop dynamic content for each target audience you want to reach. Different contacts need different things depending on a number of factors.

Collecting relevant data about your subscribers is the first step to segmenting relevant email lists and obtaining quality contacts. One of the best ways to do this is through your signup forms when someone wants to receive newsletters or learn more about your company.

Asking your subscribers about their geographical location, gender, age, profession, interests, etc. is important when creating segmented email lists. You can even use data about a subscriber’s stage in the buyer’s journey and what their past email activity has been.

For example, if you are a health insurance company and you are implementing a new policy that will mostly benefit singles on the East Coast who are between the ages of 26 – 36, you can use marketing automation to build out a list of your contacts who fall within that criteria, and create an email that tells them about this offer in an engaging and personalized way.

2. Individualized email messaging

Once you have segmented email lists in place, you can start thinking about how you can make your emails more personalized. If you individualize each message, you show your subscribers that you are paying attention to who they are and what they care about the most.

According to Aleks Peterson, Editor of TechnolgyAdvice, “If you call [your prospects] by name, speak to their pain points, objectives, challenges, hesitations, and role responsibilities at the right time and place, you will see a return.”

Individualized email messaging goes way beyond including someone’s first name in a subject line – you need to create engaging content that relates to their needs. This can include sending out personalized images and videos, including names or recent purchases within your email content, sending out product focused content that only relates to certain email lists, and getting creative with your storytelling content.

We created a similar guide that covers the best ways to personalize your email campaigns through individualized messaging that you can read here.

3. Behavior-triggered emails

Sending out emails based on a subscriber’s behavior ensures that you will remain relevant with where they are in their customer journey. Having marketing automation in place is crucial to sending out behavior-triggered emails to the right subscriber at the right time.

One of the most common behavior-triggered emails is the “Welcome Email.” These emails act as a warm and timely greeting that tell your subscriber what to do next. They are super important because they catch a subscriber right when they sign up.

You can also send reminder emails that are based off of a certain time period. These emails prompt a subscriber to do something like renew a subscription or purchase something that has been sitting in their shopping cart. You can also send birthday and VIP offers as well as emails that only focus on re-engaging customers who have fallen off the map.

4. Responsive email design

Email design is important when tracking reader engagement – if a subscriber doesn’t like the appearance of your emails, they will most likely click out as quickly as they clicked through.

Having responsive email design on desktop and mobile platforms is also important when it comes to formatting, relevance, and interaction. Paying attention to font size, layouts, buttons, email length and fluidity are important factors to take into account when designing your emails.

Content marketing expert and author, Marcia Riefer Johnston, takes this idea even further and says that adaptive design is also important to email personalization. Johnston explains, “Adaptive content goes beyond responsive design, the content itself changes according to the device, the context the person.” She gives the example that adaptive content will say “click” on a laptop, “tap” on a tablet and “say select” from a car’s GPS system.

Responsive design has become simple using the right email marketing tools.

5. Social media integration

Social media marketing and email marketing shouldn’t be looked at as separate marketing avenues. Having a holistic view on social media and email marketing will make your personalization less challenging and more engaging.

You can include social buttons and social media campaigns that are relevant to your different email lists within your email campaigns. This can drive more traffic to your social channels as well as to your website.

You can also upload your subscriber lists from email to your social channels. This allows you to connect with your subscribers in a personal way on multiple platforms. You can even target social ads to active email subscribers in order to spend your ad budget in a more targeted way.

6. Individualized landing pages

A personalized call to action used through a relevant landing page within an email is a powerful way to drive traffic to your site. These landing pages should directly relate to the content of your email as well as to the interests of this specific segmented list.

If you can grab a reader through engaging content and imagery, personalized landing pages help subscribers to take the next step in order learn more about what you are promoting. When integrating personalized landing pages within an email, you should match its message and look to the overall theme.

7. Self-managed preference center

Self-managed preference centers allow your subscribers to enter or change any personal information that they want to provide you with. These preferences can vary from the custom fields you include on your sign up forms and can be adjusted at any time.

They can also use these preference centers in order to change how you currently interact with them. Subscribers can choose to only receive emails on certain topics, change the frequency of their emails or unsubscribe from all lists.

These show you which subscribers are most interested and what their main interests are. You can use this information in order to update your segmented lists or create new ones. All of the information that lies within this center should be taken into account when sending out personalized emails.

By using these centers in a way that directly informs your personalized messaging, you will increase subscriber satisfaction. It even helps your customers to self-segment and show you what they need most from your email content.

Wrap up

Email personalization lies at the heart of every successful email campaign. Your customers want to feel listened to and valued. While email personalization can seem challenging for some marketers, using the right email marketing and automation tools can alleviate your pain points and make the email personalization process much easier.

Employee voice is crucial for high performance and innovation, yet leaders continue to silence and disengage their employees unknowingly.

Bubbles form around management that reinforce beliefs that their communication is sufficient, yet modern research suggests otherwise.

“One of the mistakes we make in business is that we sit around the table nodding in agreement.”

Dr. Angela Pratt, HR Director, Kellog’s Frozen Foods and North America Marketing

In this post, we’re going to cover some of the most common misconceptions among both managers and employees, and identify some best practices you can implement right away to encourage more frequent, rich, and honest communication in your team.

Management Beliefs:

1. Employees have no problem voicing their opinions

Although great strides have been made in encouraging open communication, studies show employees continue to keep silent:

• 85 percent of employees recently failed to speak up
• 90 percent of nurses hold back from speaking up to physicians even when the patient’s safety is at risk
• 93 percent of organizations are at risk of an accident due to employee silence.

It’s easy to miss employee silence if you are simultaneously seeing instances of employee voice. In a survey of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, 42 percent of those who spoke up at least once in the past year also decided not to speak up on other occasions.

Even for those who spoke up at least six times, 32 percent withheld on other occasions. Employees self-censor based on fluctuating relative power and openness of others.

2. It’s not a problem if employees don’t always speak up

In a survey of 1,025 managers and employees, everyone provided at least one example of silence costing the company an average of $7,500. They found the average person wasted seven days for every issue they kept silent:

• 78 percent complained to coworkers
• 66 percent had to do extra or unnecessary work
• 53 percent ruminated about the problem
• 50 percent felt angry

Beyond budgets and deadlines, silence can lead to corruption, low morale, and accidents.

3. The business doesn’t really benefit from voice

Employees work hands-on with products, processes, customers, business partners, and/or competitors. Such valuable exposure gives employees early and deep insights into opportunities and threats.

Besides profitable ideas, more voice fosters more divergent thinking for better decisions. Procedural justice also means more satisfied and committed employees deliver more discretionary effort.

Furthermore, B-lab and the Global Reporting Initiative recognize employee participation in decision-making as a corporate social responsibility. Companies impact communities through the members who work for them. Both skills and stress can spillover into the community.

4. People only need to vent – nothing else has to change

Photography retailer Black’s set up a web page and email to encourage feedback to the CEO. A former assistant store manager recalls writing detailed suggestions on business practices:

“I never received a reply, which only solidified my suspicion that the entire system was nothing but lip service. The irony of the matter is when Black’s went out of business a couple of years later, the CEO cited some of the same concerns I had written about as reasons behind the company’s failure.”

Asking for input and then ignoring it is worse than never asking in the first place. 25 percent of employees withhold suggestions because they think it would be a waste of time.

The President of PixeLINK Corporation, a Canadian manufacturer of industrial cameras, asserts:

“the employee/employer contract should always work two ways – employee gives 100 percent to the organization and employer gives 100 percent to the employee.”

Employees need resources like pay, role clarity, and employee voice to meet the demands of their work.

Employee Beliefs

1. There’s no point to making suggestions because they won’t do anything about it

A nurse remembers the first time he made a suggestion. He noticed first aid kits had expired and so he emailed his supervisor and the nursing manager.

When he didn’t get a response, he spoke with his supervisor but she dismissed his concern. He says, “it jaded me significantly.”

“If you’re not going to take this kind of stuff seriously, why would I report anything in the future?”

He sees peers receive the same disregard from management: “pretending to listen and saying they want to hear ideas and then implementing nothing.”

An IT rep at a large company believes senior leadership is well-intentioned, but may not have time to process feedback.

“I feel that the ‘big-picture’ types of folks are either unable or unwilling to work on finer points. From my personal experience, they haven’t referred any of these suggestions to their subordinates who may be able to look into the matter.”

2. I will be punished if I speak up

People remember when coworkers label someone a “trouble-maker.” They pay attention if it seems like supervisors retaliate to dissenting views.

One study showed that employees who spoke up were less likely to receive a raise or promotion. For the nurse’s peers, “they have seen other people fired that they consider agitators or independent-minded people in the organization.”

On the other hand, research suggests suffering in silence is comparable to the distress of whistleblowing. It can teach helplessness; diminish self-efficacy and motivation; and, grow cynicism and alienation.

Bottled up emotions can also resurface in unproductive ways.

3. My input is too small to say anything

After management cut off and shut down his suggestion, the IT rep questioned if he knew enough to speak up.

“Since that occasion, I’ve made sure that my opinions or suggestions are well-researched and filtered through colleagues and my supervisor before being brought forward.”

His cautious approach has since kept him silent on occasions his opinions were warranted.

Employees usually withhold suggestions because they believe they are trivial. In fact, improvements of any size contribute to making the organization more competitive.

Speaking up about smaller issues also prepares people to speak about larger issues. PixeLINK’s President explains effort and perseverance build the confidence to speak.

Even if you strike out, you’ll be up to bat again. If you never step up to the plate, though, you will never hit a home run. Showing commitment also earns respect, which increases the weight of a person’s voice.

Best Practices

1. A bias toward action

Virginia Mason Medical Center used to file away and forget safety concerns. They now train managers and executives to offer support and resources. The Center shares raised concerns to show they value them for better safety outcomes. Plus, they integrated related systems to check in real-time if reports lead to improvements. The number of raised concerns went from 10 in 2004 to 840 in January 2014.

2. Emotional intelligence

When employees feel negative emotions, it leaks into the way they express suggestions. Fear comes across as lack of confidence or competence. Anger comes across as aggressive and threatening. Organizations can teach emotion regulation techniques:

• Re-framing obstacles as challenges
• Channeling anger into passion
• Planning appropriate timing and setting
• Partnering with better communicators

3. Conflict management

All levels of an organization should learn how to have difficult conversations. This involves building rapport and speaking candidly without provoking resistance. The key is respecting people and their perspectives.

4. Dialogue

Leaders model the behaviors for ongoing, active two-way conversations:

• Reduce formality and power cues
• Acknowledge you can make mistakes and want to improve
• Bring up controversial topics and encourage disagreement
• Align how you listen and how you act with purpose
• Make asking for input routine in day-to-day operations

5. Venue

There is no need to reinvent the standard census surveys, sample surveys, and focus groups. Instead, amplify their impact with quicker, less top-down, and more social tools:

• Mini-polls deliver real-time visualizations of responses
• Collaboration platforms share information informally and bring unknown issues to light
• Wearable devices produce data like location and vital signs to analyze productivity and safety

Technology also helps to understand and apply data:

• Intranet analytics interpret usage and employee-published content
• Cognitive analytics provide insights and even predictions based on survey and workforce data

6. Recognize

PixeLINK’s President reflects,

“Employees react positively to acknowledgement of their successes and gain confidence once management shows confidence in them. The more confident the individual, the more open one is to suggestions for improvement. My rule of thumb was always three positives before I suggest an area in which they can improve. That ratio has changed to 5:1 to reflect changing times.”

Recognize often and recognize publicly:

• Show empathy for the other perspective, validating their concerns
• Commend people for asking tough questions, raising difficult issues, and suggesting new ideas
• Reward employees for the input and feedback that contribute to successes

In conclusion

Employees are silent when they see nothing to gain and/or they see something to lose.

Employers seeking high performance need to prove employee voice is worthwhile and safe. Senior leaders, direct supervisors, and colleagues are all essential to building that trust.

You can build an environment of rich communication in your team, but in order to achieve the benefits of that environment, you need to be aware of the different perspectives each participant brings to the table, and the common misconceptions they may already hold.

Are you ready to take the next step in building an extraordinary organizational culture? Check out our latest guide:

The following is an overview of founder-led selling and provides a design pattern to help early stage startup founders and their teams think through the earliest stages of their go-to-market strategies. This deck is the distillation of my experience from founding and then running sales at TalentBin, writing Founding Sales, running the Modern Sales community, and advising a couple dozen early stage B2B startups on their GTM strategies over the last three years.

Through this deck you’ll learn that at each stage of GTM, there are a set of things that should be focused on (and others that should specifically not be focused on). You’ll see that not focusing on the things that need to be done at a certain stage in order to get to the next, or prematurely focusing on the things called for at later stages, can seriously damage the enterprise value creation.

After years of experience helping countless teams through this process, I have seen too many early stage companies fly themselves into the ground because they’ve failed to master their GTM approach. They continue to fail simply because they don’t have access to good information. With this deck, I am hoping to change that.

Share this information with your early stage B2B founders, sales leaders and others in the industry and keep them from flying into the ground. They’ll thank you.

The post Founder-led Selling: A Design Pattern for Iterative Startup GTM Development & Execution appeared first on OpenView Labs.

In my last blog, I explained why account-based marketing is important in outbound prospecting and how it should be used for account profiling and prioritization. In this blog, I’d like to take it to the next level and touch on the importance of adding outbound prospecting into your sales development structure and processes.

At Marketo, my team is responsible for our most important enterprise accounts (which we define as organizations with 750 employees and more). We’re tasked with uncovering quality opportunities for our sales team and are 100% focused on outbound prospecting into these accounts. We do everything with that in mind.

Each day, the sales development team will focus their outbound efforts on targeting and profiling new accounts. Within each account, we target anywhere from 3-5 different personas and decision-makers. This includes account profiling, email personalization, and maintaining follow-up tasks. A busy day indeed, but at the end of it all, we are driving significant pipeline contribution to the bottom line. In 2016, we added a 65% year-over-year growth in pipeline. Ultimately, we are making inroads with our top prospects using our outbound prospecting process.

Below, I’ll share the tools we use as well as some best practices and “out-of-the-box” tactics for outbounding. Let’s dive in:

Tools of the Trade

Each SDR’s bag of tricks should include the right amount of prospecting and automation tools to help them do their day-to-day job and target the right individuals from the top target accounts. At Marketo, we use some of the best and most efficient technologies in the market:

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A CRM system is the main database for all your information about accounts, contacts, and opportunities.We start our outbound prospecting with our CRM as it allows us to research any existing/previous/lost opportunities as well as the contacts associated with the account. Paired with an account-based marketing tool, you can prioritize your accounts with the highest account score that have the propensity to purchase.

Marketing Automation Platform: To track each account’s activities and see the different channels and campaigns that they’ve engaged with. We use our own marketing automation platform and Marketo Sales Insight application. We leverage everything we learn about a prospect to personalize our outbound emails and phone calls. Because we have an ABM tool that is native to our platform, we can glean insights on our target account activities across all touchpoints, enabling us to have more relevant, effective conversations.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator: One fundamental of both sales and marketing is to be where your prospects and customers are. With the rise and adoption of social media platforms, we would not be able to prospect into our top target accounts without using a social platform that is geared towards sales. In our case, we use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to personalize our outreach.

For those not familiar with Sales Navigator, it allows sales professionals to tap into the power of LinkedIn for social selling, with features like lead recommendations, CRM integration, lead builder, and prospect/customer updates. At Marketo, we use the tool to look for mutual connections, promotions, funding, and most importantly, school alumni affiliations. We also use it to send a more direct email with InMail and keep track of news and updates from our target accounts and key contacts. Let’s face it, everyone is always updating their online resume (i.e. LinkedIn), so you can feel confident that most of this information is correct and will be valuable for your outreach.

Sales Intelligence Tool: We also utilize a technology that provides intelligence and analytics on business leaders who make buying decisions. This data includes contact information, organizational charts, spending initiatives, budgets, current products and services used, and much more. A tool like this is extremely valuable in understanding reporting structures and also current projects and initiatives. It also provides a direct link to our CRM tool to eliminate the need for manual data entry and streamline our account profiling.

Sales Communication Platform: This is a big piece in ultimately executing our email sends and automatically tracking all activity associated with our outbound process. In this platform, we utilize, customize, and personalize our email templates along with specific and targeted working cadences to ensure each prospect is receiving the right amount of information in a timely fashion. Of course, this tool is also integrated with our CRM and marketing automation systems to provide real-time activity and task tracking.

Tips for Outbound Prospecting

There are definitely right and wrong ways to prospect. Here are some best practices and out-of-the-box tactics that have worked well for us:

• Set a cadence for reaching out and following up. It’s paramount to make sure you have the right amount of activity in the right amount of time without pestering your prospect. Regardless of what you may have heard about cold calling, it still remains the best way to actually connect and speak with a human being. Not making dials is not doing your job. There are days and times that work best for cold calling, and you should ask your SDR team to schedule calls during those particular windows. At Marketo, we deploy a full 25-day outbound cadence that includes a series of pointed and personalized emails along with calls, voicemails, and social connections.
• On LinkedIn, quote anything on a prospect’s profile that directly ties into what you do. It’s hard for a prospect to not respond when you directly quote them. For example, if you come across a prospect’s job description on LinkedIn that says “My task is making the digital customer experience as personal, innovative and seamless as possible”, then you could reach out, quote him, and add to it with a comment like “We couldn’t agree more. Have you seen our webinar, Talk to Me, Not at Me: Testing for a Better Customer Experience?”
• Look for relevant and recent news about a prospect/company on their activity feed. Employees often post news about their organization, so it’s easy to find one to comment on and build somewhat of a warm connection.
• Do research on their company website. Scour their pages to understand what they do and how you can help. You can also look at specific job openings on their website that are relevant and may contain your product name or product use in the descriptions. This will easily tell you whether they’re utilizing or evaluating your products or service.

Ultimately, outbound prospecting is about making sure that your outreach is professional and that you are providing value to the prospect immediately. Try not talking too much about your own product and how great you are. That is an immediate turn-off and will not earn a response. To solicit a better response that will lead to more quality sales opportunities for your sales team, use timely, valued-based outreach to connect with your prospect on a personal and social level.

Let’s get aligned on these acronyms first:

• SDR – Sales Development Representative (sometimes called Business Development Reps, or Account Development Reps), junior employees who qualify accounts against a number of criteria.
• MQA – marketing qualified account, a target account that has reached a level of engagement to indicate possible sales readiness
• IBP – ideal buyer profile, the right people for an SDR/ADR to approach within your target accounts (including Marketing Qualified Accounts)

The first time any organization starts down the Account Based Everything path, they follow a process to success. It starts with account selection – the list of target accounts / existing customers that are most likely to deliver revenue.

Then, it’s critical to identify the right people to approach within those target accounts. And I don’t just mean an individual. In complex B2B sales cycles, deals happen by committee. The buyer is rarely one, isolated individual. Purchasing decisions at large companies can involve as many as 17 decision makers!

Account Based Marketing and Account Based Sales Development is not about casting a wide net – it’s about pinpointing sales and marketing activity with a spear. Remember, you’re not waiting for the members of a buying team and its key influencers to swim into your net. You need to identify them in advance so you can design strategies to reach them.

6 roles within every buying team

The first step is to identify the kinds of people you’ll want to reach. These are your Ideal Buyer Profiles (IBPs). This activity is most often led by marketing, and will include not just job titles (which vary widely from company to company) but also job function, discipline, seniority and priorities.

Consider:

1. Initiator: the person who starts the decision-making process.
2. Decider: who makes the actual purchase decision.
3. Buyer: who selects the suppliers and manages the buying process.
4. Influencer: who contributes to the specifications and evaluation.
5. User: who actually uses the product or service.
6. Gatekeeper: who controls the ow of information in and out of the company.

After identifying the key buyer personas, marketing needs to build out profiles for each one: your IBPs. These are detailed portraits of the people in each role, including things like:

• Demographics – age, seniority, salary range…
• Psychographics – attitudes, beliefs and biases…
• Job dynamics – day-in-the-life insights, pain points…
• Key challenges – goals, strategies, pain points…
• Background – career route, past roles, skills…

For instance, it’s not enough to know that you’re targeting the CMO in your target accounts. You ideally need to know that you’re reaching out
to ‘brand-conscious CMOs obsessed with customer experience but without deep experience in digital’ as well as what kinds of messages and content they respond to.

Why does this matter?

Having the Ideal Buyer Profile helps SDRs in two important ways:

1. They guide contact building – leading the reps to the most important people in the target accounts
2. They help reps understand the person they’re prospecting – to know what drives them, what makes them tick, what language will resonate, etc.

Crisp and clear IBPs are an essential element to any ABSD strategy.

IBP is not a shortcut past insights

Although your Ideal Buyer Profiles can tell you a lot about what messages will resonate with a given buyer, they don’t completely replace your research on actual contacts. The best Account Based Sales teams know how to discover insights and deliver value for target accounts.

A crafted message to a persona in a specific industry is a powerful thing on its own – but relationship-building should also reflect the things they learn about each individual contact (a recent blog post they wrote; a speech they gave, etc.), especially for Tier 1 accounts. As you go lower down your account tiers, the base profile plays a bigger role in shaping interactions.

Download our free guide on this topic, The Clear and Complete Guide to Account Based Sales Development to learn more.

Who develops IBPs for your SDRs? How’s it going?

While some might disagree, I firmly believe that email marketing is still an important and effective facet of digital marketing. It can be a great way to build relationships with customers, provide readers with useful information, and gain visitors to your site.

However, it does take time and effort. You have to work at growing your subscriber list and really focus on delivering useful content. But, if you do so correctly, you can really increase your sales.

Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your email marketing efforts.

1. Choose a Provider

I wish I were kidding, but I’ve honestly had clients ask if they can send out giant email blasts through their Gmail account. Your personal email is not the place to be sending out newsletters or other email marketing efforts. You need to get a provider who specializes in email marketing.

Luckily, there are several out there that will be able to meet all your needs. Look at MailChimp or Constant Contact – these are two of the most popular email marketing providers and are very easy to use.

2. Build Your Audience

One of the best ways to leverage your email marketing is simply just to send out your message to as many people as possible. That makes sense, right? The more people you send it to, the more eyes it gets in front of, the more people you have to sell your goods or services to, the more money you make.

However, building your email marketing list isn’t always the easiest task. You really have to have a strategy in place to get them to sign up for your newsletter. You can’t just sit around and hope they will sign up. Instead, you have to meet them where they are and make your email marketing sound so irresistible that they can’t help but add their name.

So, how do you do this? Here are a few tips:

• Social Media – Social media and email marketing go hand in hand. You probably have followers on your social media pages that don’t know you have a newsletter. Share it on social media and get them to sign up. Also, add a sign-up button on your sites so that new visitors will know how to opt in.
• Pop Ups – You can add pop-up windows on your blog or site. Make sure you aren’t just spamming your readers, though, and that you show them your newsletter will provide real value for them.
• Events – This might seem like an outdated practice, but you would be surprised how many people you can connect with when you collect email addresses at events. This probably shouldn’t be your number one strategy when building your audience, but it is something to keep in mind.
• During Checkout – If you are an eCommerce business, consider collecting emails during your checkout process. The potential customer has already expressed interest in your company, so they should be more willing to sign up for your email marketing.
• Webinars – Hosting a webinar can be a great way to reach out to new people. By promoting your webinar, or even partnering with another company, you can get in front of more people who will be inclined to join your list.

3. Create a Premium Design

We are a very visual society. We want things to look nice and clean but still be fun and modern. While your content is extremely important in your email marketing, you cannot overlook the design aspect of it.

If your newsletter is cluttered, people are going to be turned away and never even read your content. You don’t want them to click on that delete button before you can reach them with your copywriting; therefore, you have to catch their attention with your design.

Want some inspiration? Here are some really great email marketing designs to help get your creative juices flowing for your own designs.

4. Write Incomparable Content

People don’t want cluttered inboxes full of random newsletters and emails that don’t help them or interest them. If that’s what they are getting, chances are they are going to opt out of those emails as quickly as possible. Therefore, it is paramount that your content provides beneficial information to your readers. How do you do this? Let’s start at the beginning.

• The subject line is often overlooked, but it’s extremely important. Your subject line is your make or break point. This is your first chance to grab your reader’s attention, so it needs to be as compelling as possible while also staying under 35 characters.

• Next, you want to establish the purpose of the email you are sending. Every single correspondence that you send out should have a clear goal. Whatever that goal might be, it needs to be crystal clear to the reader. By making your CTA concise and to the point, the better chance you have to propel the subscriber down your sales funnel.

• As for the content of your email, make sure that you use short sentences and bullet points. People are busy – they don’t want to read paragraph after paragraph. They slim their emails and see if there is something worth stopping for. Therefore, make your sentences shorter and more concise. Don’t over think it – write like you were talking to someone in your office.

• One last tip – make sure that you add a social share button somewhere in your email. You want to promote your readers into sharing your content with their audiences. This increases the number of people who will see what you are sharing. Make sure this is a share button, not follow. While you do want your readers to follow you on social media, this is where you get them to share your content with more people.

5. Use Company Email

This can be overlooked at times. It might not seem like a huge aspect of your overall email marketing strategy, but it’s been proven that using a company branded email address is more effective.

When people think the email is coming from a real person at your company, the more likely they are to open the email. We trust what we consider a personalized sender over just a generic one from the provider. This is a simple trick but can greatly help your email open rate.

6. Test Your Times

Another aspect that is often overlooked is the time that you send your emails. People read their emails at different times. One of the worst things you can do is to just send out emails and expect people to read them. Instead, you need to really work to see when your readers are actually opening and reading your emails. The email addresses on your list are real people, and they are busy people. Work with their schedule.

You can start by sending your email to one part of your email list in the morning, and then have it go out to the rest in the afternoon. Then go into your analytics and see which time had the best metrics. You can then expand upon this. If the morning worked better, test out different times in the morning segment – send it out to one part at 8 a.m., then 9 a.m. and 10 a.m., and so on. This should tell you when your readers are actively in their inbox and more likely to open your emails.

7. Segment Your Audience

Segmenting your audience can be extremely effective and can help you to really understand who your buyers are. Not all of the people who sign up for your emails are the same. Some might have signed up to find out what type of events you are having, or to get updates on your blog. Some might just be there for a type of coupon.

The problem is most of your subscribers probably aren’t there for all three reasons. Therefore, by segmenting your audience, you can figure out what type of email they want and focus on sending them only those emails.

You can segment your audience by demographics, like their age, where they live, their gender, etc. You can also segment on behavioral data, like what they buy, how often they buy, when they open your emails, which emails they open, etc. By putting them into different categories, you start to understand their interests and can better promote your content to them.

Email marketing is still a big component of digital marketing – one that shouldn’t be tossed aside. When done correctly, it can be an effective way to build customer loyalty, increase website traffic, and drive sales.

When you attend a trade show, you expect to run into wholesale distributors, retail buyers, members of the press, and other industry influencers—and you will. But, you’ll also run into these types of people who seem to turn up at every show:

Freebie Addicts

As discouraging as it is, some people who you encounter at a trade show will pretend to be interested in your products or services, but the truth is they are only at the event to collect as many freebies as possible. To avoid giving away expensive freebies to this type of person, keep all of your cheaper items in the front of your booth, and hide your nicer freebies in the back.

The Friend Requester

Chances are you will also run into The Friend Requester, which is a person you have a brief conversation with, and then find they have sent you an invitation to connect on LinkedIn moments later. Don’t be turned off by this approach. Even if you didn’t think they were genuinely interested in your products during the conversation, you never know how connecting with them through social media will benefit you in the future. Keep in touch with this type of person, but don’t spend a lot of energy selling to them after the event unless they showed a true interest when you met them in person.

The Time Waster

If the trade show has seminars or conferences going on at the same time you’re exhibiting, you may run into a few Time Wasters while you stand at your booth. These people attend trade shows only to listen to the seminars, but they end up having downtime between sessions that they spend browsing the booths with no intention of buying anything or engaging in conversation.

All About the Numbers

Some distributors and retail buyers are incredibly focused on numbers, so they will visit your booth and ask you dozens of questions about price points and current sales. It may be frustrating—or even intimidating—to be around this type of person, but be patient and answer all of their questions. These people are not asking questions to annoy you—in fact, they are probably very serious customers who are simply trying to learn all the facts before making a decision.

The Ideal Customer

Of course, almost every trade show exhibitor will run into an ideal customer or two. These attendees will enter your booth and immediately make it clear they have a desire to purchase your product and want to learn more about what you have to offer. The Ideal Customer will ask for your promotional materials, review your numbers, and schedule a time for you to follow up with him or her after the event. It’s essential you pay a lot of attention to these attendees and follow up promptly after the event so you don’t lose his interest.

Have you ever run into any of these people at a trade show? Share your stories in the comments below!

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

No, I am not questioning the message behind Nike’s well known slogan or mantra, nothing to do with Nike at all.

I am talking to and about sales people who regularly fail to follow through on expectations they set for people they work with, but most importantly, prospects and customers.

We have all familiar with old sales adage: “Under Promise – Over Deliver”, well it seems many sales people feel that only applies to some things, some actions, but not all. While most get how to leverage this from a product perspective, they seem to feel they have immunity when it comes to actions they have committed to. While existing clients may be a bit more tolerant of tardiness, (although they should not have to be), prospects who have never dealt with you, have nothing else to parse a decision around than your ability or willingness to actually follow through, in the way you said you would.

Buyers long ago have realized that even products claiming to be bleeding edge and “revolutionary”, are at best evolutionary in nature, or last year’s model with a fresh coat of paint. This leaves the interaction with the rep and the selling organization as one the determinant and differentiator in a decision. While it is always an advantage to be able to deliver insight that prospects can action and achieve more than they set out to achieve, or take any action they otherwise would not have. But absent that, and believe me in a world of feature, buzzword and price selling, it is very absent, the only thing left is how we sell, and core to that is how we deliver on even the smallest commitment we make.

While I understand that there are more demands than ever on sales people’s time, there are (or so we are told) just as many new tools allowing sales professionals to maximize their time. This really is a situation where you are in control, both in the commitments you make, and the ones you chose not to follow through on. The fact that many, pundits and buyers, recognize that you are having to pack 16 hours into a ten-hour day, does not equal having permission not to do something, especially things we committed to with prospects/buyers. Things includes the “smaller” things, but in a world “same”, it will those little things that will swing decisions.

There are some simple things we can do. Starting with prioritizing, and not just in creating a list, but in how we set expectations for prospects. If something indeed is “small” in your estimation, then the expectations you set around it should also be small. You can tell a prospect you will have an answer for them much further out than you would for delivering something impacting an impending buy decision.

Couple this with other useful practices. One is the old Urgency/Importance matrix, allowing you to prioritize activates, and make sure they are done. Add to this the practice chunking, where you set allocate specific time to the practice of setting out “chunks” of time for specific tasks. Where many limit their success is not extending these to their calendar. If it has to be done, it needs to be scheduled! If you don’t have the time, and you know it going in, don’t promise, or know who you will delegate it to. While I appreciate the power of intent, it does not replace do, or make up for something you don’t do that you led the prospect to believe you would.

While it is natural to focus on the on the visible, the things that you get done, but buyers are more likely to remember the things we don’t do.

Want to maximize your sales time, grab your copy of “Sales Happen In Time”, and make time work for you!

The post Just Do It? appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

It all started with an Email – The Email Era

Email was invented in 1972 and launched us into a communication revolution.

For the next 6 years email would be pure. People would only send messages to those they knew personally. These were the days when getting email was a treat! “You’ve got mail” was the most exciting sound your computer made.

Sadly, those days are long gone and now we all receive a constant barrage of email which offer little to no value.

It took 6 years from the invention of email to see the invention of SPAM. Peopled figured out that email could be used to send unsolicited and unwanted messages.

Over the last 39 years we’ve only gotten better at finding ways into customers inboxes in hope they buy from us. Sure, it’s now possible to “personalize” emails, trigger emails based on customer actions, and let people unsubscribe from emails,

However, many of us are still just dressing up the same unwanted emails.

“The times they are a changin”

Marketing:

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

Due to the ease and low cost of sending email, we sent emails flying as fast as we could. Many of these emails adding little to no “value” to the customer.

We became focused on sending almost random offers to consumers that worked some small percentage of the time. These kinds of tactics overloaded the customer’s inbox.

They ultimately turned the inbox into a disaster where users couldn’t tell the good from the bad. Spam filters do a good job of filtering this for us, but we still get an enormous amount of unwanted mail.

Bring in the Robots – The Marketing Automation Era

At the same time that the effectiveness of blindly blasting billions of emails around the web was decreasing, consumer protection laws around email marketing were increasing.

This made it both harder and less effective to legally continue with old email marketing practices. A new approach to email marketing was needed.

The approach changed. Instead of blasting out unsolicited emails, we started creating valuable content in order to draw people in. The strategy was called Content Marketing and Marketing Automation was the tool of choice to deliver the content and capture leads.

Starting in 1992, marketing automation helped enhance sales relationships by allowing marketers to build-out complex email workflows. These workflows were triggered based on a user’s past actions on the company’s marketing website.

This was an extraordinary achievement back in 1992 and is a technology that is still being adopted by many industries today.

Marketing Automation helped us capitalize on the constant stream of resources produced by content marketing. It allowed us to collect more email addresses and other valuable customer info.

It helped us create targeted email campaigns and better understand how they positively or negatively impacted revenue.

It isn’t a stretch to say that Marketing Automation made it possible for a new generation of marketers to make their mark on the business world.

However, the type of Marketing Automation that worked in 1992 has been so widely adopted by companies that customer inboxes are once again overwhelmed.

This is why we see abysmal email performance benchmarks like 2.5% click rates and 21% open rates across industries.

So far, I’ve been talking about email but the truth is that over the last 36 years the number of ways to communicate with customers has grown exponentially.

Further, the actual products that companies offer are being delivered in more ways than ever before. They’re delivered by web, mobile and tablet while still often being available by traditional methods such as phone and physical stores.

Marketing Automation has helped improve the number of customers we get from the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel. We are now facing a new set of challenges:

• Marketing Automation is based solely on how customers interact with marketing, not how they interact with the whole company including product, sales and support.
• Marketing Automation only focuses on the sending of messages and creation of content to maximize opens, clicks and conversions.
• Marketing Automation does not look to provide a better paying customer experience, it effectively abandons the customer after they have made their first purchase.

Automate or Die – The Growth Automation Era

The view of our customers continues to get more complicated in a post marketing automation world.

We need to engage with customers throughout a fractured user experience across multiple devices; we need to track diverse revenue streams from the same customer; we need to understand how they influence other buyers.

At the same time businesses of all types are starting to think in terms of lifetime value.

Lifetime Value:

The total amount of revenue earned by a company from a customer over their entire lifetime as a customer.

In simple terms, lifetime value is all about maximizing revenue from each customer. While this may be a simple task in the physical world, in the digital world the technical complexity has made it all but impossible.

Only the world’s most innovative technical companies can intelligently target customers with relevant marketing campaigns as they navigate through a modern digital experience.

Growing customer lifetime value is not a simple challenge of measuring user engagement, creating a list of customers likely to cancel and sending a friendly digest email once a month.

Growth Marketing requires tactical campaigns that deliver 1:1 experiences to millions of customers. It requires the coordination with all departments, their related systems and how the customer is using our product, service or store.

One of the key motivations for this new way of thinking is the adoption of modern business models such as subscriptions or the sharing economy.

These business models require customers to buy again and again to work. What was once traditionally a marketing or sales-only concern, today has to be a concern of every department.

Everyone in the company, not just marketing, has to find ways to Grow customer lifetime value. This can be as simple as making sure that a customer has a good support experience.

Or as complex as targeting users based on past purchase behaviour, usage patterns and social influence.

Growth:
To increase gradually in size, amount, etc.; become greater or larger; expand:

Companies have to look beyond basic email or in-app messaging automation to enhance the customer relationship and increase revenue per customer.

The current tools available lack the ability to target users based on their Lifetime Value and the ability to make them an offer to increase it.

Noticing a gap in functionality, many enterprises built-out their own behavioral and personalized marketing platforms. Most notably, Dropbox’s referral marketing engine and Amazon’s behavioral marketing platform.

Think about the campaign personalization you can have by knowing the financial relationship, customer health score and usage habits of your customers.

Given a simple to use admin interface and a fully open API, every department in your company can use this data to grow lifetime value. This is the future of our Growth Automation journey.

As enterprises like Amazon, Uber and Airbnb have been exploring these campaigns they’ve had to command substantial technical resources to build Growth Automation tools.

While building these tools, they’ve discovered the complexity of the problem and the platform sophistication needed to solve it. To this point, often the simplest sounding campaigns like ‘coupons’ have become large scale internal projects.

Technical teams require large amounts of financial resources to operate growth marketing campaigns. However, it’s often the problems hidden under the surface that negatively impact companies the most.

Developers building internal marketing tools are distracted from developing value directly in-line with the company’s main offering.

The cost and time required to maintain these systems is often overlooked in original budgeting and ultimately leads to a stale, underperforming project.

We need a platform that allows us to easily create campaigns that automatically engage customers and increase lifetime value.

This platform needs to reduce our dependency on technical teams, make it possible to report regularly to our executives and work with our existing platforms throughout Sales, Billing and Customer Success.

It must be able to automatically grow revenue from a customer’s first purchase, drive referrals from happy customers and even extend the length of their time as a customer.

Expand your customer footprint

At SaaSquatch, we’ve dedicated ourselves to Growth Automation.

We’re making it possible for companies to run campaigns that grow customer lifetime value without dedicated development teams.

We’re putting the customer experience first, not letting it be an afterthought. We’re making customer data accessible instead of locking it away. We’re bringing intelligence and automation to growing revenue.

Join us on our journey to build the world’s leading Growth Automation Suite and never stop growing your customer footprint.

If you want your reps targeting the right high-level decision makers, you need to enable them with a keen understanding of the value of your solution and what makes it different from competitors.

Effective targeting starts with building customer value.

We can’t effectively target unless we are (1) effectively building customer value through our sales conversations and (2) aligning the solution we provide with the high-level business outcomes that are important to people in the account.

In order to do that, there are three things your salespeople need to be able to uncover and articulate:

1 They need to understand the customer’s needs and requirements.

2. Once that need is identified and quantified, your sales teams need to be able to articulate how your solution will help solve those specific problems.

3. And finally, by solving that customer’s problem, you are creating value. Customer value is created by applying what you do for a living to solving their problems. Your salespeople need to be able to quantify and articulate the business impact of that value.

You can’t target the right people without first identifying and quantifying each person’s specific needs. You must be able to serve those needs by articulating and differentiating your offerings.

The best conversations are the ones that lead the client to naturally understand the value of the business case. Here are some key essential questions you should be able to effectively articulate as a sales leader:

1. How am I enabling my sellers to effectively target the high-level business opportunities within an account?

2. How am I enabling my salespeople to improve their intelligence, relationships and reputation within accounts?

3. How am I enabling my sellers to identify competitors and differentiate against them?

4. How do we enable our sales process so that we can systematically, strategically saturate accounts?

If you can’t answer these key questions, your reps will not be able to successfully target the right people within an account. To improve how you effectively target the right buyers, you have to enable your sales organization with the ability to have the right conversations and attach to the biggest problem.

A salesperson can target up or down within an organization, as long as that conversation is relevant to what the person in that role cares about. Enable your sales reps to be audible-ready to have conversations at any level. Being audible-ready means that your salespeople are ready, at any time, to have a conversation that is based on value and attached to business issues that have the largest business impact.

The most effective marketing strategies are those in which planners have a thorough understanding of how buyer psychology impacts decisions.

To optimise sales leads through content marketing and user experience, get in the minds of your customers and consider how they engage with your content.

The following is a look at several specific techniques to help you understand your buyers to improve your sales leads.

Establish Authority and Credibility

Due to something that is known as the “Halo Effect”, consumers tend to associate positive feelings toward a brand with all facets of the business.

Therefore, especially during initial connections with prospects, focus on establishing desirable attributes like authority and credibility.

We all realise that the first stage of the buyer journey is awareness.

During this phase, prospects are most interested in getting necessary information about possible methods to resolve a problem.

So offering thorough, in-depth and well-supported content, and a quality user experience, you can establish your company as a credible resource.

That credibility is valuable as your prospect moves through the buyer journey.

Supply the Desired Information

People have a natural desire to seek out information when faced with problems or uncertainty.

This desire inspires a standard approach to a content marketing strategy that involves researching to understand the typical problems your market faces.

The next step is to attract prospects by stoking their curiosities.

Often, people don’t realise there is a void or gap until nudged by suggestion.

As you strategize how to attract sales leads, consider opportunities to demonstrate problems your solution addresses to prospects that may not yet realise a need exists.

Graphics showing a decline in performance of business equipment, followed by stats on how your solution resolves the issue, are a good example.

Leverage Visual Influence

Amplify the impact of quality copy through visual appeals.

Not only do effective colour schemes and imagery give content aesthetic appeal, but they can also influence a buyer’s thinking through a psychological process known as priming.

Because people naturally associate certain products with colours based on their experiences with using them or seeing them in the past.

Integrating particular colour schemes into your design can affect the subconscious way your target market interprets the message.

Awareness of colour psychology allows you to strengthen the impression of informative copy.

Play on Social Trust

UGC experts Bazaarvoice consistently report that the majority of buyers trust user-generated content more than brand content.

Albeit that they concentrate in the B2C space, it is still highly relevant messaging. Because as I reported previously in this post, more and more millennials are moving into the decision-making process.

Millennials are especially likely to believe messages from peers, with 84 percent indicating UGC influences their purchasing decisions.

And the message from this psychological data on buyer influence is clear; people want to know what others in a similar position think about your brand.

Therefore, your job is to generate UGC through social media, and through powerful testimonials and case studies that you can share on your website and in your content.

The Science of Persuasion

In his books (and the video below), Dr Robert Cialdini, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing, Arizona State University has a worldwide reputation as an expert in the fields of persuasion, compliance, and negotiation.

His video is aimed at people like you & I in general, and not specifically at a B2B level. However, in the first of his six steps of the science of persuasion, he talks about reciprocity and how people feel obliged to give back to others when they have received something for free.

He uses an example based on tipping in restaurants, but this also works in a B2B capacity. Because we’re all human after all.

Just think of companies such as Moz and Rand Fishkin, WordStream’s Larry Kim, KISSMetrics and marketing expert Neil Patel.

These companies shared their in-depth knowledge and freely offered it to the rest of us. They taught us how to be better at what we do. They invited us to become part of their communities.

All of these pieces are firmly interwoven into Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and demonstrates how these organisations integrated buyer psychology into their content marketing strategies.

If you’ve not seen this video before, I highly recommend you watch it.

Wrap Up

Leveraging buyer psychology in your content strategy to generate sales leads is simply a matter of coming alongside the people you want to reach.

But don’t fight the flow; position your message to align with what people naturally want to know.

Define your processes and connect with sales leads through an impactful content strategy.

Having worked with hundreds of business development professionals, I’ve noticed that those who generate the lion’s share of revenues share certain habits and traits. The top sales people:

• Are Not Too Extraverted or Introverted
  Contrary to popular opinion, the extroverted, talkative business development rep does not always rise to the top. Instead, according to a study published in Psychological Science, it’s the ambiverts— those who cluster in the middle of the introvert to extrovert spectrum — who close the most sales. They are comfortable enough with other people to engage with them but do not feel the need to dominate conversations. Because they are curious about others, they naturally ask questions and listen to the answers.

• Are Judicious with Their Time
  While it’s evident in sales that the more you do, the more you achieve, being busy does not equate to being efficient. Reps must use their time to do the right things. Here’s what the best salespeople do to make sure they use their time wisely.

  They start to qualify their leads immediately by asking the right questions—those that help determine whether they can help their prospects and they have the authority and budget to make a purchase. Because it helps them to map out the sales process and to customize the solution they offer, superstar reps are particularly interested in the prospect’s needs and decision-making process.

  Also, they use technology wherever possible to save time and increase their effectiveness. This includes CRM, email, and social platforms such as LinkedIn, which enable them to reach out and engage with potential buyers.

  CSO Insights reports that only 33% of inside sales rep’s time is spent actively selling. Perhaps that’s not surprising when you consider the number of tasks competing for their attention. They range from admin work to sales emails and phone calls. The revenue generators understand the importance of prioritizing their to-do lists. While sales people can tackle prioritization manually, technology can help here too. A study determined that sales reps using prioritization technology averaged 88% more talk time and improved sales conversion rates by 178%.

• Conquer with Empathy

  According to research by David Mayer and Herbert Greenberg, while sales people need to have an ego that drives them forward to win the deal and the acclaim that goes with it, they also must be empathetic. That means they need to have the ability to understand the prospect’s problems and what they want to achieve. At the same time, they keep their goal in mind: to close sales. With this synergistic approach, they can negotiate more win-win sales.

• Keep an Eye on the Future
  We tend to think of salespeople as being focused on the sale they are going to close today. Many of them do just that. But those that excel look to the future. They know the power of the sales pipeline. It starts with making new connections and building relationships, continues with nurturing them, and one day, those that are qualified and treated right during the buying cycle will turn into sales.
• Understand the Value of Persistence

  According to studies, 44 % of salespeople follow up once on a lead. Then they give up. That’s despite evidence that shows 80% of sales occur after five follow-ups. Whether following ups by phone or email, persistence pays off. The best business development reps stay in touch with leads that are not ready to buy yet knowing that someday some of them will become customers.

If you want to maximize your revenues, look for business development reps who are ambiverts, use their time well, balance their need to achieve with empathy for customers, don’t sacrifice tomorrow in a scramble for today’s sale, and persist until they get the job done.

When you think of your B2B content marketing strategy, your focus is probably on content creation, not ROI. But more and more content marketers are in a crunch to produce measurable results to allay their executives’ financial concerns.

But showing ROI in content marketing isn’t always easy. Why do we say that? There are two distinct challenges that occur when determining ROI.

One challenge of a content marketing strategy is that it takes time to see results. It’s not like a marketing campaign where you pool your resources for a few months, see a quick uptake in sales and lead generation, and then it’s over. Content marketing is much more like a marathon — you may even fall behind in the beginning, but the secret is not to give up. This investment of time and resources over the long run will pay off.

The second challenge is that the nature of content marketing makes it inherently difficult to quantify. How do you connect the number of times people read your blog with the number of sales you made in a month? How do you measure your brand’s reputation?

And, ultimately, how do you convince your executives — such as your CMO or CFO — that this is a worthy investment?

And do you know yourself what return your achieving? Without that information, how do you improve your strategy? Being able to get an ROI for your content marketing is essential. Let’s look at some ways that you can do just that.

A Measurable Formula for the ROI of Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy

1. Quantify Your Investment

That’s right — let’s look at the “I” in ROI. How much do you spend on your content marketing? Whether you hire out for content or PR services, or pay certain employees or contractors to work on your content creation, determine the amount you’re spending. Got the number?

2. Find Your Conversion Value

How many on-site conversions do you get? Establish a value for each conversion — this can range from simple to complicated depending on your company, so take the time to calculate it.

If your company offers products, you might determine the average price a customer would spend on a product. Of course, the more complex your products or services, this formula might vary.

3. Calculate How Many People Convert to Customers From Your Content

Then figure out how many of these purchases are made as a result of your content. For example, the people directed from organic search results are a result of your SEO-optimized content; people who click from your content on social media have also been motivated by your content strategy.

Use Google Analytics or another analytics package to determine where your traffic is coming from; that should give you an idea of how many customers and prospects you have as a result of your content strategy.

Once this is all computed, you will know how many people converedt to customers as a result of your content creation. Multiply this number by your average sales (step 2), and you have an approximate value for what your content earned.

4. Other Factors On Your ROI

The amount of people directed to your site isn’t the only number that contributes to your ROI. Consider other things that add to your overall return.

• Brand Awareness – The more they see your content, the more people become aware of your brand, and come to trust it. Even if they don’t click at that moment, you’re becoming more visible and credible for when they are ready to buy.
• Customer Loyalty – The more helpful information you can provide your customers through your content, the more loyal and satisfied they will be.
• The Future – Always look ahead. Unlike a regular marketing campaign that just goes into the company archives, your content is evergreen. People will keep returning to it, so the pay-off over time can be quite large.

When leads and sales are your goals for content marketing, you stand a much better shot of calculating ROI as you can attach a dollar value to leads and sales. –Sujan Patel

Now’s the fun part. Let’s dive into some innovative PR ideas that will pump up your ROI, and get you real results.

6 Ways to Beef Up Those ROI Numbers

Concentrate on What Works — Forget What Doesn’t

Einstein is credited with saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” Let’s apply this to your content strategy. What content have you been investing in that isn’t working for your strategy?

Look at what programs you invested in that brought you little or no results. Perhaps you spend money to appear in search results, when you could work on ranking with SEO. Also, discover which content is not reaching your target audience. Once you’ve weeded out programs that aren’t contributing to your ROI, move those dollars to areas that will more effectively support your strategy.

The same goes for social networks. Eliminate social networks that aren’t working for your strategy, and focus on networks where your audience is, and where you get the most engagement.

2. Tap Into the Fear of Missing Out

We all have it — that fear that we’ll miss out on a great opportunity. Why not motivate your executives with fear of being left behind their peers — or worse, their competitors.

For example, if you ignore the opportunity to enhance your content with SEO, you could miss out on that coveted first place on the search results page. If you don’t produce educational content for your audience, they will likely turn to your competitors to answer their questions, and gain their trust.

3. Determine Your Audience

Use an analytics tool such as Google Keyword Planner to see how many people search for your industry’s key terms on Google. That’s your audience. This is not people that search for your brand — those already know you. Narrow it down to people who are sniffing around for information in your industry. They are the audience you want to attract.

Then use your website’s analytics to learn how many people visit your site from unbranded searches. Once you have this, subtract it from the total number of people searching industry terms — there you have your potential audience. This presents a golden opportunity to gear your content towards people searching for these terms. The more people you can reach this way, the more it will boost your ROI.

If you write more about the trends in your industry, you will not only be seen as an authority, you will attract more unbranded search traffic. –Michael Brenner

4. Target Your Audience with Niche Keywords

Focus on ranking for low competition and low volume keywords that are specific to your industry. You’ll rank faster — meaning less investment — and you’ll attract a more targeted audience. It may result in fewer people, but those people are more serious about buying. In turn, you’ll get a faster ROI.

5. Use Gated Content

Your blog is an educational resource for people who are still “looking around.” Gated content that goes deeper than your blog, can help you see who is ready for the next step. Once they’ve given you their information, they’ve become a lead — and a valuable part of your ROI.

6. Maximize Every Piece of Content

Get the most out of the work you put into your content. Promote it across your social media channels and in your newsletter. Choose your truly outstanding content to syndicate to other high-authority publications.

Once it’s been around the block, you can always go back and reimagine it into something even better. In short, get every last drop of return you can from it.

A Few Points to Remember…

• Despite the challenges, you can put a value on the investment in a B2B content marketing strategy.
• Analyze your strategy, and eliminate what doesn’t work.
• Show your executives what they would lose without a content strategy.
• Create content with niche keywords to interest readers who are more likely become customers.

So there you have it. While crunching numbers and proving your content’s worth isn’t exactly fun, it is possible and beneficial. You’ll learn how you can improve on your B2B content marketing strategy with new and innovative PR ideas on how to reach your marketing goals. What are you doing to improve the ROI of your content marketing? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

All signs are pointing to chatbots when it comes to what the future of customer engagement will look like. Is it too soon to start thinking about integrating bot technology into how your B2B tech company operates? Well! Surely Chatbot is still in its toddler phase but soon it’s going to graduate from an ever-changing kid to a complete grown-up dependent technology.

It might seem strange to think that bots can actually help to improve the way you run your B2B tech company. However, the reality is that chatbots can vastly improve the experiences of your customers. This game-changing technology is something that most top-tier tech brands have already started utilizing to offer quick and meaningful responses to clients. The big question is whether chatbots are the friends or foes of sales professionals. Many sales professionals feel intimated by chatbots because they view them as offering watered-down versions of real human interaction. In addition, many companies shy away from automation as it pertains to customer interaction out of fear of creating a generic experience. It’s important for startup leaders to embrace bots as a type of technology that can level the playing field.

What Does A Chatbot Do?

The great thing about chatbots is that they can cover a variety of tasks. Some tasks that chatbots can be assigned include:

• Executing reminders for calendars and meeting schedules
• Computing stats on an ongoing basis
• Taking care of the first level of customer service
• Creating summaries
• Providing support for instant purchases

Misconceptions About Chatbots

The big misconception that most people have about chatbots is that they are entirely robotic and rigid in the ways they communicate with users. The reality is that chatbots are designed to provide useful information in a personal way. You can choose to implement bot technology using these two ways:

• Voice
• Text

The big benefit offered by chatbots is that they are awake even when your staff is asleep. Chatbots are always there to provide basic information or verify that inquiries and questions have been received after business hours. This is particularly important in the world of tech startups because most new companies don’t have large teams. They are able to serve as placeholders until human staff members can provide responses that are more complete. Providing instant acknowledgement and feedback is a way to protect against the likelihood of a lead going to a competitor instead.

Combining Your Strengths Using Chatbots

What is really fascinating about today’s chatbot technology is that companies can customize the way they utilize them. Your strategy can include any of the following configurations for customer experience:

• Exclusive contact with chatbots
• Contact with chatbots until conversation is elevated using human support
• Contact with chatbots only for automated situations
• Contact with chatbots following human interaction

How Are Tech Companies Using Chatbots?

“Bots are the new apps,” Satya Nadella of Microsoft recently declared. There are many ways tech companies can utilize chatbots. They can be used to collect data, observe patterns or provide one-on-one support any time of the day or night.

Facebook is one of the tech giants out there today that is fully embracing chatbot technology. The company has unveiled a tool that allows companies to build their own bots for Facebook’s messaging app. These bots can interact with customers in automated ways.

The best example of a chatbot that has been successfully integrated into user experiences is Apple’s Siri. Amazon’s Echo and Microsoft’s Cortana also demonstrate the ways a chatbot can become a central part of the experience of using a product or service. “These devices will help people not feel strange or awkward about saying things to technology or saying things to computers,” Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot recently said regarding the impact of the bots featured in popular technology products.

Some examples of companies that have successfully implemented chatbot technology to create better communication and shorter wait times are:

• H&M uses chatbots to assist with shopping by remembering style preferences
• Domino’s uses chatbots to allow customers to speak or type orders into mobile devices
• Sephora offers chatbots that serve as personal stylists
• RBS uses chatbot technology that makes it easy to make account changes
• Mattel has started adding built-in talk features on some toys

Can Bots Play A Role In B2B Lead Generation?

Most startup leaders aren’t concerned about paying for pricey technology simply for the sake of jumping on a trend. They want to know that the technology they’re investing in will pay off. Those in the world of B2B sales tend to assess the value of everything based on whether or not it will create lead generation. Where do chatbots stand when it comes to creating leads and making it easy to follow up with those leads? Here’s what chatbots do for B2B companies:

• Streamline operations
• Improve customer service
• Simplify specialized tasks

Chatbots Can Be Personal

It can be hard to envision a world where bots will do the heavy lifting when it comes to engaging in sales discussions with prospects. The simple reason for this is that anyone who has ever dealt with sales understands what a delicate and interpersonal thing the process of closing a deal is. Customers value a personal touch when they’re throwing money at a product or service. In addition, skilled sales professionals are valuable precisely because they possess the rare talent of being able to earn trust and create persuasion. It’s reasonable to say that it would be impossible to completely replicate this magic touch in a robot for the time being. What a chatbot can do is act as a supplementary tool that actually allows your sales team to be more efficient. Bots bring value to the table by helping firms to access data and develop faster processes. As a result, sales professionals can spend more time engaging directly with leads instead of dealing with the behind-the-scenes work of acquiring, organizing and analyzing data.

Chatbots Are Here To Stay And Rule

The public has gotten used to seeing chatbots take pivotal roles in the products rolled out by giants like Amazon and Google in recent years. 2017 is likely to be the year that customers begin to see more chatbots used by smaller companies. What should you know before you research possible chatbot solutions that can be integrated into your company? It’s important to have metrics in place to measure how the use of chatbots affects the following:

• Lead conversion
• Customer retention
• Customer wait times
• Customer satisfaction

Chatbots offer the biggest advantages in the world of B2B leads when they are used as supplements. A good rule to follow when introducing chatbots is to use them only to bridge the gap between customers and your sales team. A chatbot should never be the endpoint for communication if you’re attempting to build relationships.

How do you feel about the future full of Chatbots adding interesting angles to the customer engagement and being an integral part of the Sales? What are your thoughts on it?

Cold calling is a sign of laziness.

There, I said it. And I mean it.

But what do I mean?

It goes way back to when I read one of Robert Kiyosaki’s books about starting your own business. He said, “Having a job is a sign of laziness.” Of course, it must be taken in context: If you aspire to be a successful business owner or entrepreneur, he’s telling you to get off your butt, leave the safety and security of your job, and get started already.

In other words, it was about getting out of the employee context and into the business owner context.

Likewise, salespeople are all within their own contexts.

Many have no desire to improve. I’ve met people who had cushy “sales” jobs in huge corporations that were totally disorganized, and were still employed and receiving a large salary despite having had zero sales for a year or longer – in one case, I met someone who hadn’t sold anything in over two years (!) and still had a job.

Others generally wish to improve, but as you and I both know, wishing doesn’t accomplish much. These people will talk the talk but not walk the walk when it comes to working to improve their sales.

The third category are salespeople who are making a conscious effort to continually learn and improve. They run the gamut from brand-new salespeople who have no idea where to begin – but who have a burning desire to succeed and will make the effort to do so – all the way up to the very elite top sales pros who earn six figures every year, seemingly with ease.

It’s safe to assume that you’re in this third category – after all, you wouldn’t bother to read this if you weren’t.

And since you fall into this category, you have not only a desire to succeed, but a responsibility to yourself to do whatever is necessary to make that happen. Part of that is staying on the cutting edge, learning new sales and lead-generation techniques as they become available, and constantly moving forward to do the best sales job you can.

In that context, cold calling is a sign of laziness.

Cold calling is the easy answer to the eternal question, “How can I get leads?” It doesn’t require any brainpower or real thinking to make cold calls. You go door-to-door, or pick up the phone and give your pitch.

It reminds me of a summer job I had one year during high school, working for the local parks department doing hard labor like cutting down trees and hauling away the remnants, landscaping work in parks, and so on.

Physically, it was brutal, but as a thinking person, I found it to be the easiest job I’d ever had. I’d come home physically exhausted but had to do zero thinking all day long and had no work-related thoughts when I went home at night. For me, that was easy.

“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.” -Henry Ford

Salespeople who choose to cold call, instead of using their brains to think and to do the work of finding better methods of attracting leads and sales, are only cheating themselves. Sure, it might *seem* easy to get up and go to work every day and start making those calls, but is it? How easy is a paycheck that falls short each month? How easy is it to make call after call and deal with the endless rejection and failure of cold calling?

Not easy at all, is it?

The answer is to start thinking for yourself, and stop listening to the endless chants of “cold call more” that you’ll hear from sales managers and inexperienced & unqualified sales trainers. Cold calling really is a sign of laziness – *IF* you’re a thinking person who aspires to something above mediocrity in sales!

Chart of the day: Website lead response management research

If you're involved in a business where you collect leads from your website you will know the importance of timing - 'timing is everything'. For example, for a financial services or travel company who offer brochures for download, phone follow-up is still often an effective technique if the profile of the lead fits. Of course, within B2B marketing, this approach is even more common when offering whitepapers to help prospects learn about a product or solution.

Today's chart-of-the-day isn't as recent as most we feature, instead it's a classic study designed to identify what day of week, time of day and time from creation to call back a web-generated lead for optimal contact and qualification rates.

The full report summary gives details on contact times (similar to best mail contact days Wednesday and Thursday are far more effective than other days and surprisingly, 4 to 5PM is best for calling) which we don't look at here. Instead, this pair of charts cover the probability of contacting someone depending on the length of time from when the lead is generated online. The charts show the importance of calling leads as soon as possible, both to gain contact AND to help qualify leads.

The takeaway is to test this within your own sector if you haven't done this analysis recently, since it's likely behaviours have changed since this time and many companies are now encouraging call-back as an alternative. Do let us know if you're aware of any more recent study.

• Source: Lead response management study (2009)
• Methodology:  3 years of data across six companies that generate and respond to web leads, from over fifteen thousand leads and over one hundred thousand call attempts. Unfortunately, company types weren't defined, but the report implies financial services for consumers for mortgages and health insurance.