Rnordman

The biggest mistake sales leaders make when it comes to hiring? They simply hand over a job description to their recruiting team, and leave the search in their hands.

The problem doesn't lie in the job description or the recruiter’s ability to do the job -- it’s that sales leaders need to help their recruiters understand their dream hire by creating a candidate persona for every position. After all, you’re the expert.

In 2017, top sales representatives have a ton of career choices and a laundry list of emails and InMails sitting unread in their inboxes. This is why it's crucial to make sure the recruiter and the hiring manager have the same type of person in mind for the open role, and are aligned on the recruiting process -- from sourcing channels to interview scorecards. If you don't employ a candidate persona model and follow through, you could already be losing to the competition.

Before you extend even one job offer this year, grab some time with your recruiting team to rethink your hiring process.

How to Use Candidate Personas in Sales Hiring

What Is a Candidate Persona?

Let’s start by defining what we mean by "candidate persona."

A candidate persona is a research-backed representation of your ideal candidate. It should include details that bring your candidate to life like personality traits (curiosity, competition), past experience (college athlete, teacher), past companies or schooling, and motivations and goals. However, be mindful that you’re not asking for 20 of the same person -- generalize enough to make sure there’s room for a diverse set of candidates.

This will give your recruiting team a feel for how the ideal candidate thinks and interacts, and what makes them tick. With this persona in hand, they can write job descriptions and even create titles or career pages that appeal to your ideal candidate.

Using Recruitment Channels to Target the Right Candidate Personas

Funnels are a central part of recruiting, yet not many companies truly understand the conversion rate between candidate to employee, and even fewer have this information broken out by channel.

Source: Drafted

Let’s review the channels that exist today, as they have changed dramatically over the past decade.

• Passive outreach: Just like not every company (person) is capable of buying your product, not every sales rep has the experience to join your team. With this in mind, recruiters are sourcing passive candidates more and more. Talented people are often reluctant to speak with recruiters, so I recommend getting your executive team and investors involved in outreach. Although outreach typically has the lowest candidate-to-hire conversion rate, building relationships with these folks is important because when they are ready to make a move, they'll contact you first.
• Paid channels: Job boards and staffing agencies tend to generate the highest cost of acquisition, but they also have the lowest lifetime value.
• Inbound: A huge difference between marketing and recruiting is that inbound isn’t always better in recruiting. People who come to your website and apply for a job are more often than not unqualified. But every once in a while, a diamond in the rough will submit their resume.
• Referral: Referrals have the highest ROI of any hiring source. They also get hired faster and stay on your team longer. If you don't have a solid referral system in place, consider creating one.

Source: Drafted

Do you know which channels your best hires come from? If not, take time to synch up with Recruiting and match your best hires to the channels they were sourced from.

Standardize Interview Scorecards to Match Candidate Personas

According to SHRM, "The most effective [interview scorecards] prompt the interviewer to choose a rating -- ranging from poor to excellent -- based on the candidate's answers. These ratings are selected based upon pre-determined parameters that help dictate to the interviewer what constitutes an 'excellent' versus an 'okay' answer."

Source: Greenhouse

Interview scorecards are one very important way to define what makes a good fit for your sales team. Without having an interview scorecard, hiring managers often hire with their gut rather than the data.

Make sure you and your recruiters thoroughly discuss each interview and create and fill out a scorecard each time. Over time, this data can help you fine-tune your persona while maintaining a wide funnel of candidates.

The Post-Offer Relationship

There should be a company-sponsored lunch between the recruiter and their hire every six months or so. This is a great opportunity for the employee to give the person who recruited them direct feedback on the role and what they wished they had known before accepting the offer. The hiring manager should layer on the context about whether the person is a cultural fit and has been performing to expectations.

Recruiting is cyclical. Recruiters should always be observing top hires' qualities and then look for those in the new folks they are sourcing. Without a continued relationship, it is very difficult for recruiters to keep the pulse on the qualities they should be looking for.

Finding the right talent is the hardest, most important, and most time-consuming part about growing a business. People are the biggest line item on nearly every company’s balance sheet -- and the difference between a pillar company and a non-existent one is the ability to acquire, motivate, and retain great people.

Windows/Mac: Hemingway was originally a clever little web that highlighted common writing errors to help you edit. Then, it came to desktop. Now, it’s getting a free update that adds in a new distraction-free editing mode, PDF export, and more.

Read more...

I’m super excited to introduce you to one of the people who has helped me meet my own personal sales productivity over the years through the books she’s written. Her name is Jill Konrath and she’s truly an icon in the sales industry. With over 1/4 million LinkedIn followers, Jill Konrath was recently named one of the top 7 sales influencers of the 21st century. She’s an international speaker and a bestselling author. Her most recent book, More Sales Less Time: Surprisingly Simple Strategies for Today’s Crazy-Busy Sellers, was selected as one of 2016’s top sales books. Jill also wrote SNAP Selling, Agile Selling and Selling to Big Companies. I told you she was great. You won’t want to miss this conversation about how you can increase your sales productivity. It’s the theme of her new book and is changing the way I do sales – and I’m seeing improvements already.

The biggest reason you don’t meet your sales quota isn’t what you think.

Jill Konrath knows the pressure of meeting a sales quota and being productive in sales. She’s been a sales leader for years so she’s seen it all. Her most recent book, “More Sales Less Time” is a runaway hit because it resonates with the real life struggles sales reps are experiencing in the digital age. There’s more on our plates than ever before and Jill has nailed the reason behind falling sales stats: we are more distracted from our money-making tasks than ever. But Jill’s not one to point out the problem without giving solutions, she suggests tangible ways to solve the problem as well. You won’t want to miss the insights she shares in this conversation.

Face it: The always-on nature of the sales world is making you less productive.

It’s important for every sales professional to be on top of the latest technologies that can make our lives better and our jobs more efficient. But we’ve reached a point where it’s doubtful that both or either of those things is happening. Jill Konrath says that sales reps are more stressed than ever these days and that sales numbers are dropping significantly in spite of the technologies we have that are supposed to make our jobs easier. What’s the problem? We’re being less productive in sales because we’re more distracted than ever. Find out how to fix the problem, on this episode of #SellingWithSocial.

We sales people are addicted to our devices. It’s a fact. Here’s how to break free.

In studying to write her most recent book, “More Sales Less Time,” Jill Konrath discovered research that shows we get a little shot of a brain chemical called dopamine every time we hear the “ding” of our cell phone. It’s the same effect on the brain and body that a shot of drugs would provide. We are addicted people. And it’s impacting our success in sales productivity. We have to face it. Jill also discovered from her studies that there are only a handful of ways to address the issue effectively. If you want to know what they are Jill shares them freely in practical ways, on this episode.

This conversation with Jill Konrath is not about productivity, it’s about selling.

Jill Konrath’s new book appears to be about productivity tools and hacks that you can use to make more time in your day. But Jill insists that she didn’t write this book to become the next productivity guru. Her aim was to help sales professionals and sales leaders understand what’s happening to them, what’s causing their sales numbers to drop, and address it with effective solutions. She wants to help you get more sales because her passion is sales, not productivity. Let Jill help you do more effective selling by listening to this episode of #SellingWithSocial.

Outline of This Episode

• [1:38] My introduction of my guest on this show, Jill Konrath.
• [3:20] Who is Jill Konrath?
• [5:25] How Jill’s miserable life inspired her to write her most recent book.
• [13:00] The way the stress of the always-connected digital age impacts performance.
• [16:37] How a dopamine surge in our brains is affecting us as salespeople.
• [19:30] Finding a way to minimize the pull of the notifications.
• [25:55] How Jill’s new book can help you meet your sales quotas.
• [29:30] It’s not about productivity, it’s about selling.
• [31:20] 3 things to stop doing to get more time for sales.
• [37:46] Jill’s advice for those new to sales.
• [44:56] How you can connect with Jill.

Resources Mentioned

• www.jillkonrath.com/sales-resources
• Jill(at)JillKonrath.com
• BOOK: More Sales, Less Time
• BOOK: Snap Selling
• BOOK: Agile Selling
• BOOK: Selling To Big Companies
• RescueTime

A fine balance – sell what you love; love to sell

I’ll just say it – I love being in sales. Especially high-tech sales, and even more, in Silicon Valley, where there is so much history and innovation. Among salespeople in high-tech, you often hear the “big win” stories, where being at the right place at the right time can lead to millions in commissions, club trips to exotic locations, and company-wide recognition. However, just to qualify for being in a position where that can happen, you’d better be pretty darn good at what you do, love what you sell, and have the stomach to go the distance. And make no mistake – sales people at the upper echelons have amazing sales skills.

In that vein of continually improving upon your craft, there is so much good information on sales and how to improve your sales skills that it can be overwhelming. The trick is to have a mentor or coach, along with a commitment to continuous learning. In order to digest it all, you will need to chunk it down into manageable, bite-size pieces, and simply take it all in over time. Never stop learning, and practice, practice, practice! Sales is a never-ending process, and all the top sales professionals are continually learning and improving their craft.

This article is not about that.

Two key components of being successful in sales that don’t get a lot of attention are to find something that you will love selling, and a place to do so that’s a good fit. Without a great offering and culture fit, it’ll be tough to hang in there long enough to materialize those life-changing deals. There are so many emerging technologies, so many hot, trendy start-ups as well as big, established tech companies, that it’s tempting to think after a short period of time that the grass is greener somewhere else.

Ask any sales manager. They will tell you that it’s not uncommon to see sales reps with a long series of one- to two-year stints at a job before they hop to the next hot trend. Heck, I’ve done it myself! But to take your game to the next level, you have to think in terms of the long game. In all the interviews I do with sales executives and sales management on “The Sales Polish Podcast,” that’s a topic that comes up over and over again. Pull the rip cord on your job too soon and you stand to lose out on big money.

So this idea of long-term employment begs the question, “How does one choose the right company and culture fit in order to go the distance?” Well, just like qualifying a deal, it comes down to asking the right questions.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when considering making a move:

• What market or technology do I really love and get excited about?
• What are the hottest trends in high-tech, and which one am I most interested in?
• Try attending conferences like DreamForce, RSA, SXSW to talk to a lot of vendors and get a high level overview. There is also an abundance of articles on new or evolving solutions on tech publications like Techcrunch or Wired.
• Are the solutions I’m considering a “nice to have” or a “need to have”? Look for offerings that are a must for a business to run. With so many solutions competing for budget, you have to put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and have an understanding of what their top KPI’s are and how your solution would help your prospect.
• Who do I already know in the company I’m looking at and what can they tell me about the culture? LinkedIn is a great resource to find out if you know anyone who could give you the inside scoop.
• What is the feedback for those companies on Glassdoor or other social media sites?
• Who are the executives? What are their goals? Why did they choose the company? What are the challenges? What is the value of the solution? How is the company special?

A lot of this can be found on the company’s website, but if you have the opportunity to talk to the CEO or other leadership, those are some questions to ask them.

What are the rewards?

Its’s so important to love the technology because that helps to fuel the “why” behind all your activities. When the day has been frustrating, when you feel tired, when you feel discouraged, it’s the why you’re doing what you’re doing that compels you to keep pushing. If you truly believe that your solution will help your prospect, then it’s easier to dig a little deeper to continue to take massive action to help you reach your goals.

And let’s face it, you will be talking about it A LOT. If you really are fascinated and appreciate all that went into the solution you are selling, that will come across in all your interactions, demos, and communications. Think about the times you have talked to people who love their jobs and their companies – their energy is contagious. It’s fun to talk to them about what they do, you leave these people feeling inspired.

Now think about the alternative: How many times have you been bored to death during a demo? It’s known as “death by PowerPoint.” It inspires no one, but it’s so common, it’s sad. Is that how you really want to spend your precious time? Is that netting you the results you want? If not, it’s time to make a change.

I believe that how you feel about what you sell and the company you are selling for matters enough that if you don’t love it, you need to leave it for the right fit. To be successful in sales over the long haul, there needs to be a balance between loving what you sell and being really great at selling. By asking the right questions, along with being honest with yourself about what’s important to you, and finding the right fit, then you have an excellent chance of reaching your goals and being successful in your sales career.

The post Sell What you Love appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Part of your toolset as a sales manager is a library full of great books that can help you or your team with advice and ideas. But, I know that finding the right sales book can be tough and overwhelming! I recently searched “sales” in Amazon.com’s book category and came up with more than 1.3 million results. That’s right, 1.3 million! I don’t have the time to read all those books, and I don’t have time to waste on books that don’t deliver. And I know you don’t either.

So, I created a cheat sheet for you. Below are nine books I recommend for your sales team to read in 2017. All of these books are new and written by trusted authorities — most of whom I know. I think every sales leader should ask their team to read these nine helpful, accessible and useful books. Think about starting a book club with your team! It’s an easy, affordable way to engage your team and take their skills to the next level.

So, without further ado, here’s nine books to add to your Kindle or bookshelf this year.

---

1. More Sales, Less Time: Surprisingly Simple Strategies for Today’s Crazy-Busy Sellers

Author: Jill Konrath

If you’re an overwhelmed sales leader with too-few hours in a day, then “More Sales, Less Time” can help you. Discover how to reclaim a minimum of one hour per day by eliminating major time sucks and changing the way you tackle e-mail and social media. Learn to free up time to focus on activities that have the highest impact on your sales results, such as preparing, researching, strategizing, and connecting with customers. Understand how to optimize your sales processes to eliminate redundancies and wasted time. Finally, this book will help you transform your mindset to incorporate new, more productive habits effortlessly, leverage your best brainpower, and stay at the top of your sales game.

[Buy Now]

My Tweet Sized Two Cents:

---

#timemanagement skills for #salesleaders with no time to waste
Click To Tweet

---

---

2. The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need

Author: Anthony Iannarino

“The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need” reveals how all salespeople can attain huge sales success through strategies backed by extensive research and experience. In this book, author Anthony Iannarino turns his focus to a question that’s been debated for at least a century: Why are a small number of salespeople in any field hugely successful, while the rest get mediocre results at best? The answer is simple: it’s not about the market, the product, or the competition—it’s all about the seller. And consequently, any salesperson can sell more and better, all the time. This one helpful book explains what all successful salespeople, regardless of industry or organization, share—a mindset of powerful beliefs and a skillset of key actions.

[Buy Now]

My Tweet Sized Two Cents:

---

Successful #sales is about the #salesperson. Anyone can #sell more and better, all the time
Click To Tweet

---

---

3. Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, Text, and Cold Calling

Author: Jeb Blount

“Fanatical Prospecting” gives salespeople, sales leaders, entrepreneurs, and executives a practical, eye-opening guide that clearly explains the why and how behind the most significant activity in sales and business development—prospecting. The brutal fact is the number one reason for failure in sales is an empty pipe, and the cause of an empty pipeline is the failure to prospect consistently. By ignoring prospecting, many otherwise competent salespeople and sales organizations consistently underperform. Blount outlines his approach to prospecting that works for real people, in the real world, with real prospects. Learn how to keep the pipeline full of qualified opportunities and avoid debilitating sales slumps by leveraging a balanced prospecting methodology across multiple prospecting channels.

[Buy Now]

My Tweet Sized Two Cents:

---

Don't get caught with an empty #pipeline. Keep #prospecting to find #opportunities
Click To Tweet

---

---

4. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Author: Angela Duckworth

In this instant New York Times bestseller, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows anyone striving to succeed—be it parents, students, educators, athletes, or business people—that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent, but a special blend of passion and persistence she calls grit. “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” teaches readers:

• Why any effort you make ultimately counts twice toward your goal
• How grit can be learned, regardless of I.Q. or circumstances
• How lifelong interest is triggered
• How much of optimal practice is suffering, and how much is ecstasy
• Which is better for your child—a warm embrace or high standards
• The magic of the Hard Thing Rule

Winningly personal, insightful, and even life-changing, Grit is a book about what goes through your head when you fail, and how that—not talent or luck—makes all the difference.

[Buy Now]

My Tweet Sized Two Cents:

---

Find your #grit with and become a better #salesleader.
Click To Tweet

---

---

5. The Perfect Close: The Secret to Closing Sales – The Best Selling Practices & Techniques for Closing the Deal

Author: James M Muir

If you want to discover how to close sales using a practice that’s flexible, natural, and easy to learn and not pushy, then read this book. In “The Perfect Close” you will learn a closing method that is almost always successful. It’s zero pressure and involves only two questions. It’s a clear and straightforward approach that is flexible enough to use on every kind of sale at every given stage. It can be learned in less than an hour and mastered in a day. It is especially helpful for new and inexperienced salespeople and professionals who dislike the stigma of selling or find the sales process awkward or uncomfortable. If you are new to sales, make this the first book you read. It will teach you how to be effective immediately, as well as the rest of the steps in your sales process. If you are an experienced professional looking for ways to improve your performance, this book will help take your closing skills to a whole new level.

[Buy Now]

My Tweet Sized Two Cents:

---

A great guide for new #salespeople to learn #howto #close the #deal!
Click To Tweet

---

---

6. Hacking Sales: The Playbook for Building a High-Velocity Sales Machine

Author: Max Altschuler

“Hacking Sales” helps you transform your sales process using the next generation of tools, tactics, and strategies. Learn the most effective changes you can make, starting today, to evolve your sales and continually raise the bar. Walk through the entire sales process from start to finish, learning critical hacks every step of the way. Find and capture your lowest-hanging fruit at the top of the funnel, build massive lead lists using ICP and TAM, use multiple prospecting strategies, perfect your follow-ups, nurture leads, outsource when advantageous, and much more. Build, refine, and enhance your pipeline over time, close deals faster, and use the right tools for the job. This book is your roadmap to quick and efficient revenue growth.

[Buy Now]

My Tweet Sized Two Cents:

---

#sales tools, tactics and strategies for quick #revenue #growth.
Click To Tweet

---

---

7. High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

Author: Mark Hunter

As a salesperson, your pipeline is the key to your success. No matter what else changes, that remains the same. Top producers prospect—and they do it all the time. Sales expert Mark Hunter shatters costly prospecting myths, and eliminates confusion about what prospecting techniques work. Merging new strategies with proven practices, “High-Profit Prospecting” will help you find better leads and qualify them quickly, trade cold calling for informed calling and tailor your timing and message. You’ll learn to leave a great voicemail, craft compelling emails and use social media effectively. This book also teaches how to leverage referrals, get past gatekeepers, open new doors, steer clear of prospecting pitfalls, and connect with the C-Suite.

[Buy Now]

My Tweet Sized Two Cents:

---

Find #leads quickly and trade #coldcalling for informed calling.
Click To Tweet

---

---

8. Predictable Prospecting: How to Radically Increase Your B2B Sales Pipeline

Author: Marylou Tyler

If B2B sales drive your organization’s success, you need to be an expert prospector to target, qualify, and close business opportunities successfully. This game-changing guide provides the immediately implementable strategies you need to build a solid, sustainable pipeline whether you’re a sales or marketing executive, team leader, or sales representative. You’ll learn how to target and track ideal prospects, optimize contact acquisition, continually improve performance, and achieve your revenue goals quickly, efficiently, and predictably. The book includes easy-to-use charts and e-mail templates and features full online access to sample materials, worksheets, and blueprints to add to your prospecting tool kit.

[Buy Now]

My Tweet Sized Two Cents:

---

Drive #B2B #sales with expert #prospecting and #closing tips.
Click To Tweet

---

---

9. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Author: Cal Newport

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive 21st-century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep—instead, spending their days in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way. In “Deep Work”, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, “Deep Work” takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories and no-nonsense advice. It is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.

[Buy Now]

My Tweet Sized Two Cents:

---

#sales tools, tactics and strategies for quick #revenue #growth.
Click To Tweet

---

 

---

Each of these books offers a different set of tools and ideas that can help sales reps at every level. If your team reads one of these books, or all nine, they will walk away with a new perspective and ideas to help increase sales!

If you want guidance on how to take your sales team to the next level that can’t be found in a book, give me a call at 775-852-5020 or schedule an appointment with me.

The post Managers, Check Out These 9 Crazy Good Sales Books appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

After years of being in frontline sales, you finally have your own team, are responsible for a sizable portion of your company’s revenue generation and are confident you’re going to hit your quota. You’ve also learned a lot along the way – for example, no matter how approachable you try to be or how many team outings you host, there are some things that your sales reps just don’t tell you.

To be a good manager, you must learn how to listen to your sales reps, anticipate their needs and quickly recognize signs of unrest. Here are three important issues that tend to slip by sales leaders but can have serious impacts on their teams, and how to effectively address them.

They’re Not Using Your CRM

Although many sales leaders feel that they already know what a day in the life of an account executive looks like, you might be surprised to learn that your employees are using spreadsheets on the side, or saving deal notes in their email drafts folder, because they don’t find your CRM user-friendly or mobile-ready. In fact, 55% of reps feel that their CRM is more of a hindrance than a help.

The best way to tell if your reps are using your CRM is to do an analysis of the data that lives there. If your reps are half-heartedly entering minimal information just to appease management and get by, the data will let you know. And if you don’t like what you discover, it’s time to make a change.

It may be time to replace your outdated legacy CRM with an intuitive, next-generation sales platform built to drive rep adoption through ease of use. As sales veteran Mike Logan explains, “It’s all about providing your reps with a sales productivity tool that they love and makes their jobs easier. That way, the reps aren’t putting the data in to serve their managers; they’re doing it because it helps them run their business better. By solving for the rep first I get my data as a byproduct.”

They Think Forecasting Is a Waste of Time

Forecasting, or the process of predicting future sales revenue over a given period of time, is a crucial exercise that informs sales leaders and other executives how to most effectively and efficiently manage the business. When it comes to allocating resources, providing guidance to investors and other crucial tasks, companies often live and die by their sales forecasts.

However, in the words of famous sales guru and author Jason Jordan, “By the time you get to a frontline sales person, they really would rather not have to forecast at all. I’ve never heard a sales person say, ‘If I didn’t forecast I would never make my quota.’ No forecast has ever changed the actual forecast.” Rather than spending time crunching numbers and making (somewhat) educated guesses about the future, your reps would rather be taking the necessary actions to improve their conversion and close rates. Of course, the forecast still needs to be done.

To appease your reps and your boss, try using an automated sales forecasting tool that can help you more accurately predict sales performance and produce the results in a ready-to-use visual report. Jordan continues, “Depending on the size of the organization, every manager spends 5-20 hours a month forecasting or doing reporting that ultimately leads to forecasting. That’s hundreds of thousands of hours a month sales leadership is spending doing nothing but handing guesses upward into the organization. If they could take that time and spend it managing better downward, it would be much more productive.”

They Want to Be Coached

Let’s be real: being a good sales coach is hard. That’s probably why 73% of sales managers admit to spending less than 5% of their time coaching – because perhaps the only thing worse than not coaching at all is coaching poorly. While your reps may visibly rebel against 1:1s that take the form of performance evaluations or weekly play-by-plays, they crave real, genuine sales coaching that teaches them how to overcome challenges in their sales process and performance.

The problem is that reps are often unsure of the areas where they need improvement and when and how to ask for coaching. That’s why, as a manager, one of the most important coaching skills to learn is to teach your reps how to evaluate their own performance. All reps should have access to the data they need to independently track progress, make more strategic decisions and ask for specific advice.

Scientific sales leaders are choosing sales software that has the power to capture and process big data and provides real-time analytics plus robust permission controls. This way, reps are getting their hands on the reports they need when they need them and take a more active role in their own coaching. Examples of sales reports that a coach might provide his or her reps include call and email outcomes, time to first action, sales goals and more.

Listen & Learn

The relationship between sales rep and manager is a powerful one full of opportunity for spurring both personal and professional growth. As such, it’s important for managers to truly listen to reps and pay attention to what they might not be saying. For more insight into how your reps might be thinking and feeling about sales processes, tools and more, download our free white paper: 5 Reasons Why Your Reps Don’t Want to Use CRM (But Should!).

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV, also referred to as Lifetime Value, or LTV) has become a hot topic in the marketing world, and chances are that you’ve heard a lot of rumors about what it can and can’t do for your business. Unfortunately, there’s also a healthy supply of confusion, misunderstanding and outright misdirection out there about this powerful new approach to customer-focused insights. Getting a clear answer to your CLV questions can be a bewildering experience, and there are a lot of myths out there.

I’m here to bust them, one by one.

CLV Myth #1: “I already know what my company’s CLV is.”

One of the biggest misconceptions about CLV is that it’s simply a dollar-value representation of what an average customer will spend with you over their lifetime. Perhaps you used a method you encountered on a website, plugging your average order value and customer lifespan numbers into a simple formula. You might even be wondering what’s so hard about calculating CLV.

If you have a single, simple number for your CLV — $237.43, for instance — it’s time for some bad news. You’re doing it wrong. Worse, you’re missing out on the real power of CLV.

To see the true value of CLV in your marketing and planning, you need to be able to see the lifetime values of individual customers. You also need to be able to easily identify your most valuable segments, and pull high-CLV individuals into cohorts that can be researched and marketed to. You can’t do any of that with a simple CLV calculation.

CLV Myth #2: “CLV won’t benefit me because my business and customers are unique.”

While your customers are distinct individuals with specific needs, when viewed through the lens of CLV their behaviors seem shockingly similar to one another. CLV research shows that the overall behavior pattern for a cohort of customers tends to be strongly predictable across a huge range of business models. Regardless of what they’re buying — retail, digital media, travel/leisure, pharmaceuticals — similar kinds of customers tend to purchase in surprisingly predictable ways.

CLV allows you to see these patterns more clearly. This allows your company to build on these tried-and-true customer behaviors to make powerful, accurate projections with a relatively small amount of data. With the new perspective CLV provides, even the most obscure customer actions and trends can become visible.

CLV Myth #3: “CLV is too difficult to understand, deploy and integrate.”

In the early days of CLV measurement, this was true. Collecting all that data meant big development costs, and if you wanted to get meaningful marketing data back out, you needed a team of developers and analysts to slice-and-dice the numbers. Turning that messy, hard-to-follow soup of data into something a marketing team could make use of was a true challenge.

Those days are over, and there are now several good business intelligence tools on the market. The era of expensive, headache-inducing CLV number crunching is behind us. Today’s best CLV tools just need simple sales data — date, dollar value and customer ID — to deliver powerful, detailed insights. Your CLV data can even be integrated with your existing CRM, dramatically expanding your options for analysis and reporting.

CLV Myth #4: “CLV insights aren’t easily actionable.”

If you’re still new to CLV, the path for turning the wealth of data into measurable ROI results isn’t always obvious. Even if it’s easy to see the potential of CLV as a marketing tool, putting it to use can seem daunting, especially without a well-worn playbook to work from. It’s easy to imagine a marketer looking at a screen filled with CLV numbers and saying to themselves, “Great … now what do I do with all this?”

Let’s blow this myth out of the water. From the moment your CLV data has been crunched, you can do something that was once impossible: project the lifetime value of your entire customer base. This means you can accurately predict future sales volumes and trends on a scale of years, rather than just a quarter or two.

With the right CLV tools, you can also identify your most valuable customers. That means you now know where to spend your marketing dollars. If you’ve done a good job of tracking acquisition, it also means you know where to go to get more of those great customers. You can now build segments of your highest-margin opportunities and create high-ROI customer acquisition strategies. That’s a lot of actionable information!

CLV Myth #5: “CLV analysis is too expensive.”

Your marketing budget is tight. The last thing you need is another technology line item eating away at your already thin margin—not to mention the added cost of getting your messy, incomplete data in decent enough shape to be useful. There’s no way CLV could be cost-effective, right?

Wrong. Not only is setting up a CLV solution more affordable than you think, but it will help you quickly reduce your other marketing costs. After all, there’s nothing more expensive than wasting good money on bad customers.

Imagine cutting your marketing spend by only reaching out to your best customers, turning those anemic conversion rates into reliable, double-digit returns. And don’t let your messy data stress you out. The best CLV tools only require basic, easy-to-generate transaction logs to deliver exceptional results.

Don’t let these CLV myths prevent you from gaining the deep customer insights, unmatched revenue predictions, and profound ROI results your business needs. The more you know about your customers’ lifetime value, the more clearly you can identify your best customers — and see what it is about those customers that makes them valuable. That’s the true power of CLV.

To learn more about how to build a marketing strategy around CLV insights, download this free white paper: Download Now.

This post originally appeared on the Zodiac blog.

If you’re looking for ways to improve sales and profits in 2017 through marketing avenues, it’s important to always remember that top results aren’t all about increasing your budget and pumping out more and more strategies. Instead, you must find ways to ensure that your marketing campaigns are actually effective, and learn which tactics work best when targeting the specific businesses you’re trying to lure.

To improve your results, it is very important to take the time to regularly test your marketing campaigns and analyze the marketing metrics that matter (which include more than just the number of leads you receive from a campaign). Read on for some ways you can go about testing and measuring your marketing spend in 2017.

Split Test Your Content Marketing

While many people understand the role that split testing can have when it comes to advertising, web pages, and email conversion rates, many haven’t thought about using the strategy on their content marketing campaigns. However, a split test can actually be utilized on many different types of situations in which it is preferable to optimize performance, including in content marketing.

Take a look at the results from a 2016 survey of content marketing trends run by Content Marketing Institute, and you’ll find that although a whopping 88 percent of B2B businesses use content marketing in their organization, only a tiny 6 percent of them actually find it very effective. These statistics show that there is a definite need for improvement in this area.

Split testing can be helpful here because it enables you to gather current and accurate data about the content you produce, by comparing multiple variants of a post or other format against each other. These comparisons will then enable you to find out which variant performs best.

While the simplest option is an A/B test, where only two versions of content are pitted against one another, you can add a number of other variants to the mix if you like, kicking it into gear to multivariate testing. (Note though that this more involved testing typically requires a lot more website traffic if you want to properly gather valuable data).

You might want to manually conduct the testing yourself, but it’s also worthwhile to consider some of the split-testing platforms that are available today, as they can save you a lot of time. As you test the content you create, look for areas where you can enjoy a good-sized uplift in your marketing results. This will ensure that you’re seeing proper results from the testing, rather than simple, natural variance that can occur from user behavior.

Keep in mind that the larger the size of the visitors/readers, the smaller the uplift needs to be; and that you should conduct the testing over a reasonable period of time so you can accrue plenty of data and be sure that your results aren’t just occurring by chance.

Test the Pricing of Your Goods or Services

If you want to amplify your marketing results it is also beneficial to test the pricing of your goods or services. Many businesses tend to assume that they really know what the best price for their offerings should be, and fail to do any sort of testing of various price points to see how this affects results. This is a mistake though, as consumers can be changeable and incredibly unpredictable.

The best way to get top results from marketing outlets such as online and offline advertising, direct mail, e-newsletters, presentations, events and the like (anywhere you are promoting an offering and its price), is to test to see if the price is right. Conducting these tests will let you find out which price point generates the most inquiries, sales, or other responses, and then allow you to adjust your price and your future marketing to suit accordingly.

To use this tactic, think about splitting up your target market in various marketing platforms. Then, test out multiple price points and analyze the results before choosing a final cost to put in place for your goods that will be promoted to the entire market.

Use Social Media to Test Campaigns

Another great way to test out your marketing campaigns early on, and have them be as effective as possible, is to make use of social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like. For example, Twitter, with its limited character space, is the perfect place to test out email subject lines for your newsletters. After all, a predominant factor in the click-through-rate on a mail out is the headline used — it must being interesting and engaging enough that people decide to open the email in good numbers.

You can use the social media site to do some testing by creating a few different headlines, then assigning a unique, short URL to each Tweet so that you can manage the individual click-through rates. If you find that a particular subject line resonates well with your social media audience, this should be a good indication that your campaign will enjoy a similar response.

Homework: Retest and Re-evaluate

It’s not enough to test all of these things once. Due to the rapid changes of the digital world, you must constantly test your marketing campaigns to see what’s still working and what is no longer effective. Regularly testing will help keep your company fresh and make sure your marketing efforts continue to thrive instead of stagnating.

James Reynolds is the founder of Veravo, which consists of three search engine marketing agencies: SEO Sherpa, SEO Partner, and Click Jam. He is also the host of the Traffic Jam Podcast. James is fanatical about all things search, social, and content on the web, from his blog, to Twitter and LinkedIn. He is a contributor to several leading publications, including Entrepreneur Magazine, and mentors startup companies in his free time. Today, we are going to be talking about link building done right.

Dr: This topic comes at the right time for me to start talking with somebody like you to clarify some things. I’m excited to dig into all of this, and from looking into everything that you’ve accomplished, and currently do, I think you’re the right person to talk to.

JR: Let’s hope so. Let’s do it.

Dr: Before we get into examples of how to accomplish getting links built, can you just generally talk about the importance of links? Some people say they’re on board, and you have other people kind of downplay them, but we all know they’re important at the end of the day, so can you kind of dig into that a little bit?

JR: Absolutely. I think the importance is played down a little bit, but let’s not make any mistake. Links are the primary ranking factor that Google use to understand the authority and the relevance of a web page in relation to any particular topic. In effect, what Google is doing with links and how they monitor them is considering links as votes, so any third-party website linking to your own is seen by Google as a vote in their eyes, and generally speaking, the more links that you have to your web page, the higher that page will rank in Google. Now, whilst Google doesn’t actually publish this anywhere, they have mentioned it a few times sort of in passing, and then there have been a whole bunch of studies as well that have really correlated the number of links to a particular website with its ranking in the search results, and I think most recently a few of those have been a really great study by Stone Temple Consulting, and there really is pretty much a direct correlation between the number of links to a web page, and its ranking within Google.

Dr: Thanks for clearing that up, because I know there’s a lot of other ranking factors-

• How many pages people visit
• How long
• The dwell time
• How long they stay on the site

I think Google is downplaying them to kind of get rid of some of the ill-advised practices that were going on. That’s just kind of my guess; you’ve always got to try to read between the lines of why and what Google is doing. That kind of leads to my next question about some confusion about the importance of links. It is the deal with a black hat and a white hat way of accomplishing getting links, not to mention all the Google updates that are happening, seemingly every day. I know that’s a bit of an overstatement, but often they are. So, can you please talk about what used to be done that should not be practiced any longer?

JR: Literally, anything that is automated, self built, or paid for, should generally be avoided. And this all comes out of the industry that was born out of Google’s reliance on links to measure a site and a page’s authority. Of course, marketers got very smart to the fact that this was what Google was measuring as their primary ranking factor, and they found ways to build links en masse, perhaps in a fashion that Google didn’t intend the analysis of a link to be in the first place. They generally wanted to measure, if someone places an editorial link from their site to a third-party site, they are essentially endorsing that piece of content that they’re linking to, and that should be seen as a ranking factor. But of course, then, with all these people then trying to trick the system, building links that weren’t genuinely placed, using automation, using tools, etc., Google over time got pretty smart to those tactics, and really nowadays anything like that doesn’t work. You have to be able to acquire links in a genuine fashion, and that’s really going to come down to having great content that people want to link to, and then finding a way to market that content to get it in front of the eyes of those people that generally do link out to relevant content.

I think if you want to cover some of the things that really should be avoided, one would be blog networks – that was a real hot link building tactic in years gone by, and in those days when you could use blog networks, it was literally a case of creating a bit of content, uploading it to a blog network automation system, that system would then kind of spin the content into multiple formats, and it would be blasted out to thousands of sites all with links pointing back to your own domain. Obviously, Google knows that links built in that fashion are not genuine, so they really cut down on that. Other things, like mass form submissions, and definitely anything that involves any payment for links you should absolutely avoid, because all of those things are against Google’s Terms and Conditions.

Dr: I see that offer all the time, the form submission one, and six, seven years ago I might have bitten. So, those are the kinds of things that we need to tell people to stay away from. If you have a company that comes to you and mentions blasting out to thousands of forms, or blog networks, or even the companies that come and say, ‘We can improve your SEO by building your links,’ without mentioning anything about a content plan or anything, those are the key indicators for kind of a lay person that’s not super technical, that we can have them raise some eyebrows and say, ‘No, this is not the way to go.’ Is that what I’m hearing?

JR: Absolutely. And you’ve got to genuinely earn your place at the top of the SERPs (search engine results page) now. You can’t trick your way, or fool your way up the rankings if you don’t genuinely deserve to be placed there. So, you do have to take a step back a little bit, and focus on content, focus on user experience, create something that genuinely deserves to be placed number one in the SERPs for a particular keyword search that matches the content if you want to appear there. Once you’ve got that in place, then embark on link building, because that’s what will move the needle up the search results.

Dr: Awesome. What should be considered here to make sure everything is setup correctly on your website before you go into your link building efforts?

JR: I think the first thing would be all the technical stuff. You certainly want to make sure that Google can actually crawl your website before you embark on link building. If they can’t crawl the site, analyze the content, and detect all of those signals, then of course link building is not going to make a difference. So, looking over the technical components, making sure there’s no crawl errors, making sure the site is actually indexed, you should certainly do all of those things in advance. Then moving on from that would be covering off the user experience. This is something that Google is super interested in. They want to make sure, of course, that if they send any traffic off to a website, that the user is going to meet a really good experience when they arrive at that site, and some of the primary things that to look at now would of course be the user experience on mobile devices, mobiles, tablets. You know the virtual device, so much of internet usage is moving that way, search habits are certainly moving that way. You want to make sure that your site is working across all devices that people would access it on, and then from there, you want to make sure that you’ve actually got genuinely good, relevant content, that’s going to give a quality answer to the queries that you actually want to rank for.

Dr: I believe you can go to just the Google Webmaster Tools, and that will help with making sure your sitemap and everything is setup correctly. Is there anywhere else you can point people to, to make sure everything you mentioned is setup correctly?

JR: There are external third party tools that are great for site analysis. Some of our favorites are

• Moz, which is a very user-friendly interface, and ideal for someone who’s not that technical. It will point off all the areas there.
• Onpage- A current favorite, if you’re a bit more of an avid SEO, is a tool called onpage.org. It’s really fantastic. It’s a bit more for the advanced user, but that will point out all of the technical issues, and then just generally for site experience, I would certainly encourage people to put their website through the Google mobile-friendly test to see if it passes Google’s mobile guidelines, and also, to do a speed test.
• Google’s Page Speed Test– Not something we mentioned just then, but actually how quickly your site loads is a very important factor that relates to user experience, and you’ll see how Google grades your site, and also offer you some fixes that you can pass on to your developer for improving site speed.

Dr: Awesome. Moving on to the value of links, I believe all links are not the same. So, can you explain how search engines assign value to links?

JR: Essentially, they use a variety of factors, both to determine how valuable a link is in terms of the authority it should pass, and also the strength of signal that it passes in relation to a particular page ranking for a certain keyword.

1. So, the first thing that they would look at is the authority of the website linking to your web page, and Google will evaluate the overall authority of a site, and it’ll also evaluate the overall authority of the page linking to your website, and that’s influenced in turn by the amount of links and quality of links that that website has linking to its own site, and its own page. Now, if we use as a simple example a link from let’s say the Wall Street Journal, or bb.co.uk, very established, well-known websites, they would pass a lot more authority than a link from Mama Jones’s cookery blog, for instance. They’re much more established, trustworthy sites, that in turn can pass more of that trust, more that authority to your site when they link through to you.
2. The second one is the actual relevancy of the link. So, if you have a cookery website, if you are being linked to from other cookery websites, that is going to have more value to you than if you get links from an automotive website, because it’s on topic, and it’s relevant.

Dr: That’s a great point. Logically, everybody could know nothing about this, but they could understand that if they get linked to from nytimes.com, that’s a great deal, right? But, the second thing you mentioned is something that I don’t think most people understand, and that’s relevancy. As we get going here, it sounds like a good strategy is if you are going towards link building, and you’re just getting going, and it’s to get the attention of these awesome, huge sites, go with relevancy.

JR: And if we think really about what Google is trying to determine, they want to understand the authority of a particular website within a particular industry, and if that website is being mentioned and linked to consecutively, many, many times over by other established, trustworthy websites within that space, then it sends a very strong signal to Google that, ‘Hey, this website too is an authority, they’re trustworthy, they are endorsed by other people within that industry,’ so it will send very strong signals to them. So yes, super important. There are a few other things that might affect the value of links. One is just kind of a technical thing, this idea or concept called ‘no follow’ and ‘do follow’ links, and that’s basically controlled by the linking website, and the linking website effectively can choose to pass authority and endorse the page they’re linking to, or they can choose not to endorse, and pass no authority to the page that they link to.

Also, the placement of the link on the site – again, links within editorial content are going to pass more value than let’s say a link hidden away in the footer or sidebar of a website. If it’s in with the content, Google is going to value that a bit more, and another factor they look at is actually what the text in the link says. This is known as an anchor text, and what that text says will also give greater or lesser degrees of strength in terms of the signal that’s passed.

Dr: Let’s talk about getting outside links. I know there’s probably a few best practices, probably a handful of your favorite ways of going about it. So, I’d like for you to really dig in here and just talk about some of the best ways to accomplish getting some links.

JR: There are a ton of options. I think probably the best place to start would be a link building strategy that’s often referred to as ‘link reclamation‘, and that’s literally finding opportunities where third party websites are already mentioning your brand, or referring to your content, but haven’t linked to your website, and then going out and contacting them, and then asking them to add a link back to your web property. And that’s a super easy win, there’s a bunch of tools that will allow you to identify those places, and then it’s just a matter of using some good old fashioned email outreach to contact those website owners, and then get them to actually link through to your site.

Dr: What are those tools?

JR: Probably the best ones would be Moz – we mentioned them already. They’ve actually got a tool that’s built for this, so it will go out and look for mentions of your brand name that haven’t included a link, and then they’ll give you a list of those. Ahrefs is another good tool for this. They have a nice alert system where you can put in your brand name, or other keywords that you want to get notified about, and any time a piece of content is posted, they will let you know, and you can go then and check whether any links have been placed. The third one is Mention, it’s a tool that I quite like. It monitors social shares as well as links, and will again notify you any time that someone mentions your brand.

JR: The next ones would fall in a kind of a loose topic that I would refer to as self-managed link building. These types of links perhaps don’t pass as much value as genuine editorial links that appear without you having to actually go out and find them, but they are more easily built. So, in terms of how self-managed link building is done, that’s essentially where you typically create the link, or were involved in creating it. One classic example of this would be guest blogging. If you can identify really good, high authority websites in your market that would accept guest post contributions, you can then produce a piece of content for that site, and you will typically have the payoff of either being able to link through to your own property, maybe once or so within the content based on editorial guidelines, or at least you’ll get a link from your author bio that might appear below the post itself.

You have almost entire control over the links that are placed, and where they’re placed, you can even control the anchor text that’s being used in those posts.

Dr: Let’s dig into this more. Blogger outreach is something I believe has the most opportunity for people. I would love to talk about some best practices, some best tools to use, and how to find them.

JR: So, I guess some ideas on guest blogging, especially if you’re starting out with it, would be to start at a level if you like, of a site that you can relatively easily access. Sure, the biggest opportunities might be on forbes.com, but it’s unlikely that if you’re new to this, and you’ve not done a lot of writing in the past, that you would get your content accepted there. So, it’s good to get a bit of a ramp up on this. If you’re a local business, it would be great to start with even more localized websites. Perhaps there are industry specific sites, or locally specific websites that accept guest contributions, and you can reach out to those by contacting the editor, and get your content in front of them. Now, it might sound a bit daunting, but it’s actually easier than you might think, because typically most editors or content producers are lacking most in content, and they’re really looking out for good stuff to post to their website. So, if you can come in and be the industry expert on whatever it is that you do really well, and provide great content on that specialized topic, and it’s relevant to the website, then you will find that as long as your content’s pretty good, there is a strong chance that content will get accepted.

Another thing I would look at, which would be especially relevant for local businesses, would be directory submissions. I’m talking about localized business directories, not the sort of mass directories, the low quality, spammy directories that might get you in trouble for link building. Now, these types of links are probably not going to pass a huge amount of value, but they increase the strength or the reliability of the information that surrounds your business.

Dr: Any other ideas for link building outreach?

JR: I’ll touch briefly on content-driven link building. There’s a bunch of different types of content that you can produce, whether it be really good quality, in-depth, feature rich blog content, or infographic content, video content, whatever it is- if you are in the position to go out and create the very best content in your market, that’s when you’d get the best value. This is like the high yield link building strategies, but they are the high effort ones as well, because you have to put a lot of time into creating really good content, researching it first, and then putting that content out in front of influencers who would then want to maybe feature it on their site, or at least link out to in future posts that they produce.

Dr: Circling back to Google, we’ve got to go where Google goes, right? And where Google has gone, and continues to go, and will continue to go, is rewarding people who are doing it the right way. Sometimes we look at these big platforms, and automatically think that they’re just all in it for the money, and of course they’re in it for the money, anybody who runs a business, part of the reason is in it for the money, but what Google really wants, where they make their hay is a good user experience, and if they didn’t do that, then the Yahoos and the Bings, if they were providing it, would take over.

I only can imagine that they’re going to have completely cracked down on any sort of ill-advised practices. It takes time to kind of get rid of all of it, but I think it’s the current and the future, so it might be hard, but it’s the way to go if you’re going to want to get in line with where Google is moving. Do you see the future going that way with the search engines, and Google in particular?

JR: Absolutely. The engines are getting more and more intelligent, and day by day, week by week, they’re able to identify true signals versus fake signals. So, it really is looping back to what we said at the start.

Dr: Yes, and unless you’re a huge company with a ton of followers, it’s not a ‘build it and they will come’ kind of thing. You’ve got to have your outreach. You’ve got to have your content distribution plan in place.

Dr: What about bad links? Is there such a thing as links that actually hurt you?

JR: Unfortunately, yes. If you do anything like what we described at the start, paying for links, using automation, doing any of these practices that are against Google’s Terms and conditions, you could find yourself in trouble. So, of course it goes without saying that you shouldn’t engage in those practices yourself, but also, there is the possibility that if someone really dislikes you, that they could try and get your site in trouble by implementing a negative SEO strategy. That would include building bad links to your site, as opposed to trying to build good links to their own. And it does happen from time to time – thankfully there’s not too many shady people out there – but I’d certainly advise whether it’s inadvertently that you’ve acquired some dodgy links yourself, or if someone else has built them to your site, you should be in the practice of just keeping an eye on the types of sites that do link to you.

Dr: How can somebody quickly notice which of these are bad links, and get rid of them?

JR: You have to just identify all of the links that are pointing to your site, and use some good sort of general thought to identify the bad ones, and those would be basically any links with the criteria we just described there. You know, mass forum links, low quality places like in forum comments, or in the footer of websites, or sidebars. Probably the best tools to do that would be a couple of those that we mentioned already, Moz has a good backlink analysis tool called Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs is fantastic for identifying all of the linking sites, and also Majestic SEO is very good. In fact, Majestic SEO is quite nice, because it will also categorize the topic of website that is linking to you.

Dr: What about realistic expectations? Somebody’s getting into this, they do it for a month, and think nothing is happening. What kind of a timeframe can somebody expect if they’re starting from scratch, and they’re looking to have this strategy take effect?

JR: This is the classic SEO question, especially if you’re in the agency: “Well, how long is it going to be before I rank number one?” I mean it’s a super tough one to answer, because there are many, many factors at play. I would say if you’ve got a brand-new site, or a very young site, it’s likely that these types of efforts are going to take a little bit longer. Google certainly places more trust in sites that have been online, and established for a longer period of time, and have just gained some natural authority. So, if you’ve got an already established website, and then you implement effective link building, then you’ll probably garner results much more quickly. If your site’s newer, then it’s probably going to take more time. What I would say though specifically around link building, is that there’s been some really good studies on this. The average length of time it takes from when a link is placed, to when ranking changes typically take effect as a result of that link being placed, can be anything between seven to ten weeks on average.

Dr: I didn’t realize that!

JR: It can actually be rather long period. Now, it’s not always the case, because like anything in SEO, no one signal can be viewed in isolation. There’s lots of other factors that then play on an individual signal, but typically it’s going to take that amount of time.

Dr: Well James, I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom, and all of this great information, the tools, the strategy, and everything we’ve talked about. Do you have any parting thoughts before we move on to how people can continue to learn from you?

JR: Go out and do some keyword research, and identify the opportunities that you can get those quicker wins with. It’s all about finding the opportunities that are going to get you the best return for time invested, and that is going to be a gauge of how competitive those keywords are that you’re trying to rank for, how much traffic you can expect to acquire once you do start ranking, and also based on the level of authority your site has now, versus the strength of sites that are ranking. You’ll also get a gauge of how quickly it will be until you can start to appear. Don’t try and reinvent the wheel. Go after the topics that your market is really interested in, and then use proven formulas that have worked in the past, and just try and improve on those so that you can garner stronger results.

Dr: That’s a great point. You can have original thoughts on a topic that’s not original. I’m glad you touched on that. You are obviously someone that people need to continue to learn from, James. There is a lot to this, and I think it’s a deep, deep topic. How can people continue to learn from you?

JR: The primary place I post content to is our main SEO agency site, which is seosherpa.com. We produce some pretty in-depth content over there. For a general kind of look at everything that we do, we have a new site that will easily navigate people to those places- veravo.com. As a business, we do SEO services for other agencies wholesale. We do SEO direct to end customers, and we also do AdWords management. So, if people need some help on any of those topics, veravo.com would be the place to go.

When you ask your dream client for a meeting, you are playing a game. The game works like this: If you trade enough value for that meeting, your dream client says, “yes,” and you win. If what you say isn’t perceived as valuable enough to command your dream client’s time and attention, you lose.

Failure is feedback. It informs your plan, and it provides you the opportunity to evolve your approach and try again.

When you try to gain an agreement as to the process you and your dream client will engage in as you explore change, another game is being played. If you do an excellent job describing the process and how your dream client benefits from that process, you win. You lose when you cede control of the process to your prospective client, and you likely decrease the odds of winning.

Losing control of the process means that you won’t serve your dream client well enough through the process to ensure a win, and it will educate you by teaching you what doesn’t work.

Pricing conversations are another game you play. The game is won when you can justify your delta, the difference between your price and what your dream client is already paying, or your price and your competitor’s price. The game is lost when you can’t help your the contacts within the company you are calling on justify spending more to obtain the better outcomes you are trying to sell them.

You will lose the game, and it will be your fault. You will also lose the game even when you do everything right.

You will sometimes win the game when you play it poorly and deserve to lose. From time-to-time, you will lose the game when you deserve to win. In sales, no one goes undefeated.

You can always improve, and you should always be working on getting better. That said, you always get to play the game, but the fact that you are playing does not entitle you to win. When you lose, take responsibility for the loss, make your adjustments, and play the game again.

The post You Get to Play. You Don’t Get to Automatically Win. appeared first on The Sales Blog.

The biggest mistake sales leaders make when it comes to hiring? They simply hand over a job description to their recruiting team, and leave the search in their hands.

The problem doesn't lie in the job description or the recruiter’s ability to do the job -- it’s that sales leaders need to help their recruiters understand their dream hire by creating a candidate persona for every position. After all, you’re the expert.

In 2017, top sales representatives have a ton of career choices and a laundry list of emails and InMails sitting unread in their inboxes. This is why it's crucial to make sure the recruiter and the hiring manager have the same type of person in mind for the open role, and are aligned on the recruiting process -- from sourcing channels to interview scorecards. If you don't employ a candidate persona model and follow through, you could already be losing to the competition.

Before you extend even one job offer this year, grab some time with your recruiting team to rethink your hiring process.

How to Use Candidate Personas in Sales Hiring

What Is a Candidate Persona?

Let’s start by defining what we mean by "candidate persona."

A candidate persona is a research-backed representation of your ideal candidate. It should include details that bring your candidate to life like personality traits (curiosity, competition), past experience (college athlete, teacher), past companies or schooling, and motivations and goals. However, be mindful that you’re not asking for 20 of the same person -- generalize enough to make sure there’s room for a diverse set of candidates.

This will give your recruiting team a feel for how the ideal candidate thinks and interacts, and what makes them tick. With this persona in hand, they can write job descriptions and even create titles or career pages that appeal to your ideal candidate.

Using Recruitment Channels to Target the Right Candidate Personas

Funnels are a central part of recruiting, yet not many companies truly understand the conversion rate between candidate to employee, and even fewer have this information broken out by channel.

Source: Drafted

Let’s review the channels that exist today, as they have changed dramatically over the past decade.

• Passive outreach: Just like not every company (person) is capable of buying your product, not every sales rep has the experience to join your team. With this in mind, recruiters are sourcing passive candidates more and more. Talented people are often reluctant to speak with recruiters, so I recommend getting your executive team and investors involved in outreach. Although outreach typically has the lowest candidate-to-hire conversion rate, building relationships with these folks is important because when they are ready to make a move, they'll contact you first.
• Paid channels: Job boards and staffing agencies tend to generate the highest cost of acquisition, but they also have the lowest lifetime value.
• Inbound: A huge difference between marketing and recruiting is that inbound isn’t always better in recruiting. People who come to your website and apply for a job are more often than not unqualified. But every once in a while, a diamond in the rough will submit their resume.
• Referral: Referrals have the highest ROI of any hiring source. They also get hired faster and stay on your team longer. If you don't have a solid referral system in place, consider creating one.

Source: Drafted

Do you know which channels your best hires come from? If not, take time to synch up with Recruiting and match your best hires to the channels they were sourced from.

Standardize Interview Scorecards to Match Candidate Personas

According to SHRM, "The most effective [interview scorecards] prompt the interviewer to choose a rating -- ranging from poor to excellent -- based on the candidate's answers. These ratings are selected based upon pre-determined parameters that help dictate to the interviewer what constitutes an 'excellent' versus an 'okay' answer."

Source: Greenhouse

Interview scorecards are one very important way to define what makes a good fit for your sales team. Without having an interview scorecard, hiring managers often hire with their gut rather than the data.

Make sure you and your recruiters thoroughly discuss each interview and create and fill out a scorecard each time. Over time, this data can help you fine-tune your persona while maintaining a wide funnel of candidates.

The Post-Offer Relationship

There should be a company-sponsored lunch between the recruiter and their hire every six months or so. This is a great opportunity for the employee to give the person who recruited them direct feedback on the role and what they wished they had known before accepting the offer. The hiring manager should layer on the context about whether the person is a cultural fit and has been performing to expectations.

Recruiting is cyclical. Recruiters should always be observing top hires' qualities and then look for those in the new folks they are sourcing. Without a continued relationship, it is very difficult for recruiters to keep the pulse on the qualities they should be looking for.

Finding the right talent is the hardest, most important, and most time-consuming part about growing a business. People are the biggest line item on nearly every company’s balance sheet -- and the difference between a pillar company and a non-existent one is the ability to acquire, motivate, and retain great people.

It may seem outrageous to those in the customer service business, but the answer is most definitely “no.” Nowhere in the call center industry is this more evident than in insurance claims support scenarios. The need for insurance of some description is one of those morbidly certain things in life like death and taxes. Unfortunately, insurance is arguably more complex than the other two put together, which makes customer support in the insurance contact center quite the challenge (that’s putting it lightly.) But whether it’s an insurance customer or a retail customer who didn’t read the return policy or a consumer with a complicated warranty situation for a high-value purchase like a vehicle, sometimes the customer is just wrong and it takes a particularly skilled and well-trained call center agent to create a positive experience from that foundation.

As a long-time customer support partner for one of the largest travel insurance providers in the world, we have deep experience supporting the customer who incorrectly believes he’s covered when he’s not. The familiar mantra of “the customer’s always right” heard in many other customer-centric sectors simply does not translate well to insurance. In fact, with lengthy and complex policies in play – the customer is often “wrong” about the details of their coverage. So how do we engage and support these customers without turning them off?

Why the Customer Gets It Wrong

Let’s look at this idea of the customer being wrong from the insurance perspective: even basic travel insurance policies come with some 18 pages of small print explaining the terms and conditions of the policy. (Much like the world of warranties.) If you’ve read every word of every policy you’ve ever bought, you deserve a medal. It’s a rare soul who can stomach all the legal and industry language that fills every inch of those pages.

Add the fact that every individual policy is different from the next, and the reality is that very few people take the time to fully comprehend exactly what they’re getting when they sign on. The basics, sure – most people have a good handle on the broad terms of coverage. But when something unusual or complex happens, the ultimate impact of this lack of understanding lands directly on the claims department. Claims that have been denied represent one of the most complex area of insurance customer service, where agents must explain to customers why a claim has been rejected when the customer believes their claim is valid.

Here’s a good example: An irate customer recently called us to dispute a claim rejection. More than a year earlier, our customer had purchased travel insurance for an expensive trip to Hawaii with his wife. However, life happened between the time of booking and the planned date of departure, and the couple were now going through a divorce. Our customer understandably cancelled the trip. It was this customer’s belief that his investment in the vacation would be covered by his trip cancellation insurance. But the policy he’d purchased to cover the trip did not include divorce as an eligible reason for reimbursement. He believed his reason was valid; it was our job to help our customer understand his policy and accept the reality that he was not covered. That is an especially challenging scenario for any agent – anyone with a heart can understand how upsetting this situation was for the customer and yet, the customer was wrong about his coverage. Success came from guiding the policy owner through to the relevant terms of his policy, clearly illuminating those terms in a way the customer could understand, and not becoming emotionally involved.

How to Tell a Customer They’re Wrong

We’re all familiar with angry customers. When people believe that their travel plans, cars, health, and more are insured against any number of adversities, only to find out they’re not, that’s a recipe for disappointment, disbelief, and pure anger. And so they pick up the phone and call us.

Helping a customer understand that they’re wrong essentially requires a non-emotional response that taps into assisting and enlightening instead of sympathizing. Agents need to stay far away from phrases such as, “I completely agree with you,” “I feel your pain,” and “I’m sorry to hear this.” These are sympathetic phrases that could mistakenly lead the customer to believe they are, in fact, in the right.

While an agent does need the ability to put themselves in the customer’s shoes (i.e. having empathy), the primary focus should be on educating the customer about their policy. Doing this successfully begins with building the right agent profile. Ensuring that the people you’ve hired have the right natural attributes to stay measured and calm, to not take anger personally, to communicate clearly and effectively is essential.

How to Train Contact Center Agents to Say No

With the right people in place, the focus moves to training. When your agents are supporting complex issues like insurance claims or warranty validation claims, they have to be the ultimate experts. Thorough training on the nuances of both products and processes is essential. Role play (including live call role play) and effective testing for applied knowledge are essential elements of training for these scenarios. (Our training is based on the philosophy that no one should be able to get 100% on a test and 0% on a call. In other words, an agent’s most challenging call should be easier than the tests they faced in training.)

We audit our training programs twice a year (and our own training has been audited and found to be exceeding industry standards by JD Power.) The focus of the training program audit is to ensure that the training plan is balanced: no one is going to experience death by PowerPoint; agents are challenged with hands-on work that simulates the production floor; testing happens at regular intervals and includes cumulative assessments; and role play is never overlooked. In our world, role play takes two forms: side-by-side role play in the classroom and live call role play with “mystery callers” dialing in to the training environment. In the latter scenario, you can simulate the stress and discomfort of an agent’s first few calls before they actually take a customer’s call. We ensure that live call role plays involve personnel that the agents don’t know calling in on our role play phone line. If an agent knows it’s his trainer on the phone, the stress level goes way down. If he has no idea who is on the phone, the pressure increases.

The investment you make in upfront training is an investment in long-term customer loyalty. Armed with deep knowledge – and the confidence that comes with competence – your agents can then interpret the customer’s policy at a human level. This means that dialogue with the customer begins with guiding the customer through their policy and addressing the customer’s concern using relatable context and language. It’s the agent’s goal to make it clear exactly what the policy entails and which section reflects the decision that was made. Doing this in a way that creates a positive experience for the customer is a delicate dance. Too much empathy and the customer still feels “wronged” – too little and the customer doesn’t feel valued. It’s about the agent creating trust and acting as an informed consultant and advisor rather than an advocate for “making it right.” And that’s counterintuitive to most call center jobs.

A large chunk of an agent’s onboarding time should be dedicated to Policy Interpretation training. They need to build a thorough understanding of the industry terminology and policy language and what it all means in layman’s terms.

The second key part to agent training is in how to deliver a positive customer experience even though the customer isn’t getting what they want. Essential to this process is understanding the customer journey map and uncovering a customer’s motivations behind making the call. Some customers are all too ready to start a shouting match, and it’s the agent’s job to prevent the call from getting too heated. This is where empathy, not sympathy, is once again key. Oftentimes, the customer just wants to know they’re being heard.

Finally, it’s valuable to provide agents with continual coaching in professionalism. The agent must be trained not take someone’s inflammatory comments personally or offensively. And it’s not about avoiding confrontation, either; it’s about taking a firm stand while simultaneously letting the customer know the agent is genuinely listening to their concerns.

Wrapping It Up

At the end of the day, you don’t want to lose a customer because of a bad experience with the contact center. It requires a skilled, diplomatic, confident individual to educate the customer on complex policy and warranty issues while also ensuring they feel heard and valued.

Of the 398 marketing startup acquisitions in 2016 only 22% were made by the six major advertising groups, who had to fight it out with consulting companies, IT firms, and publishers.

Global consulting firm R3 releases a yearly ranking of mergers and acquisitions in marketing. The total deal value rose to $14 billion, 150% more than in 2015. Consulting firms made considerable moves into advertising agencies’ turf last year with acquisitions of small creative agencies. 

IBM, for example, bought a number of boutique digital and creative shops totaling $240 million. Deloitte acquired the award-winning creative agency Heat. Accenture spent $40 million more on marketing startups in 2016 than the previous year with its acquisition of London-based agency Karmarama becoming a key part of its push into marketing. 

Tech companies also continued their push into marketing. Fourth on R3’s list of marketing acquirers was Salesforce with its $700 million acquisition of the marketing platform Krux. Google acquired the YouTube influencer marketing agency Famebit.

In a shift from the previous year, publishers emerged as new players in the marketing space as they looked to extend their revenue streams. The New York Times, the FT, Time Inc. and Vice all acquired branded content or influencer marketing companies in 2016.

Leading the ranking is Dentsu with over $1.9 billion in dealflow, pushed up largely due to its acquisition of Merkle, estimated at $1.5 billion. WPP wasn't far behind, with 36 acquisitions and $1.1 in deal value.

Absent from the ranking were tech companies like Adobe which acquired video advertising platform TubeMogul or Oracle and SAP, which have their own marketing and e-commerce solutions. In 2017 R3 predicts tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google and Salesforce to be more active.

“They have the cash, and they are continuing to take leadership roles on content creation,” said Greg Paull, Principal and co-founder at R3.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell on Snapchat becoming the 'third force' to Google and Facebook

In today’s incredibly noisy startup world, storytelling is the key to your business getting heard. Not just a means of getting noticed, storytelling provides a way for you to put a stake in the ground and get customers, investors and stakeholders to truly buy into your vision.

Effective storytelling establishes value and creates loyalty — two main drivers of growth — and often times determines which side of the 90%-10% failure to success rate your startup will land on. Here are six keys to effective startup storytelling:

1. Create a character

Each of us is distinguishable from the other six billion people on earth. Think of any brand (i.e. Dove) as a person – imagine what characteristics they’d have if you met them in real life. Would you want to talk with them? What would you talk about? How would you represent yourself in their presence? These are the same questions prospective customers ask when choosing a company to do business with. You’re startup’s unique characteristics should be consistently pulled through your story.

2. Have a higher purpose

A good brand has a higher purpose than the desire to sell goods or services to make a profit. That purpose is the human value of what your products and services provide. For example, if you’re a startup in the FinTech space, your purpose is not to profit from fees on investments, but to empower your customers to lead more fulfilling lives. Convey that higher purpose whenever and wherever you tell your story.

3. Be empathetic

Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with their heart, seeing with their eyes. Chances are you did this when you created your product and service. And if not, you may want to go back to the drawing board. When you tell your startup story — in the media, on your website, or in marketing material — illustrate the real problems that you are solving for people.

4. Use micro-storytelling

While Fortune 500 companies can create complex storytelling campaigns across any media channel they choose, most smaller business and startups simply can’t afford to reach customers and prospects in the same way. But similar to how marketers have found ways to marry traditional marketing practices with data analysis and experimentation to find inexpensive growth hacks, things like naming can serve as an efficient and evocative form of micro-storytelling that pays dividends many times over.

Even some of the biggest startups out there use micro-storytelling in their taglines: Square (“Sell on the go.”), Venmo (“Make and share payments.”), and Evernote (“Remember everything.”)

5. Ditch the jargon

Filling your story with technical terms, acronyms and business speak is one of the best ways to lose your audience. Take a page out of Apple’s communication playbook according to Cameron Craig, who ran PR programs for the company for over ten years:

“If you ran any Apple press release through a readability level test it would most likely score a level easily understood by an average 4th grade student or lower. Any hint of jargon, cliché, or techno mumbo-jumbo would be removed in the editing process. If a “mere mortal” couldn’t understand our language, then we had failed. And failure was not an option. Steve Jobs read and personally approved every press release.”

For more essential insights and examples on brand storytelling and writing, have a look here.

6. Be visual

Although a cliché, “A picture is worth a thousand words” is as true as ever today. We are visual creatures. When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, they retain 65% of the information three days later. Wherever possible add visuals (video, infographics, pictures) to your story to enhance the impact and increase retention.

Next time you want to sell your business to someone, whether they’re a potential customer or an investor, remember that you aren’t selling a product or service, but rather the story behind it. If you can do that, you’ll have a much better chance of standing out from the crowd and ensuring your success.

The core purpose of sales is to challenge buyers’ assumptions and make them imagine what the world would look like if those assumptions were overturned. Make them think about what they would get out of buying your solution. That’s why you need to use your abilities to ask questions that activate buyers’ needs. Here’s how.

It's a metric that merits more attention. What do your customers and prospects think about their interactions with you and your company? Is the buyer experience one they'd recommend and eagerly repeat?

Unfortunately, in chasing metrics that are focused on sales activities and results, we're neglecting to measure what matters most. Long term success depends on how buyers feel about working with you. To build for the future, you need to lay a strong foundation with buyers.

Today I did a BrightTALK presentation for the Sales Xpert Channel.

I talked about what I call “Gap Selling” or “Selling to the Gap”

Selling to the Gap is based on the concept that when people buy, there is a “gap” between where they are today and where they want to go, and it’s this gap that drives the value and probability of closing the deal.

Selling to the gap is a simple process that adds tons of value to salespeople looking to increase their close rates, accelerate the sale and maintain greater control over the sales process.

Based on the idea that all sales evolve around changing from a current state (where the prospect is today) to a future state (where the prospect wants to go), gap selling helps sales people get to the intrinsic motivations, and the desired outcomes, of their buyers.

You can listen to it here.

Let me know what you think.

Do you sell to the gap?

 

The post A New Framework to Drive More Sales appeared first on A Sales Guy.

Effective B2B marketing requires an audience-centric approach from all angles. The better you understand your target audience, the more relevant and valuable your content and messaging will be. Creating buyer personas helps you visually picture your buyers and understand them on a deeper level.

Buyer personas defined

While the term “buyer personas” is fairly common vernacular in modern marketing, the definition is sometimes misunderstood. Tony Zambito’s definition is especially helpful in understanding that a buyer persona is much more than a demographic profile of your target audience, but rather an in-depth look into the buying behaviors and selection triggers of the people that hire your firm:

Buyer personas are research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, where they buy, when they decide to buy and why they make buying decisions.

Personas put a human face to your buyers

Buyer personas help B2B marketers understand the human side of their target audience, realizing that buying decisions involve a myriad of factors and involve both rational and emotional influences. Personas essentially help you see prospects and clients as real people—rather than faceless segments of your target audience. They help gain insight into the way your audience thinks and behaves and their wants and needs. By leveraging buyer personas, your marketing messaging, content and sales and marketing efforts can be approached with an understanding of the buyer’s context and perspective.

Buyer personas are built on research, not guesswork

In order to truly see things from the buyer’s context and perspective, personas can’t be developed based solely on the views and opinions of the sales and marketing teams. Instead, they are based on real data obtained from independent industry research, surveys, and most importantly a substantial compilation of one-on-one qualitative interviews. While your business development staff may know a lot about your buyers, the insights that personas highlight can only be obtained through conversations with actual buyers.

For the interviews, it’s best for them to be conducted by a third party to ensure objectivity and precision. You should include a diverse mix, such as long-term and new clients, lapsed or former clients, and prospects that you’ve not been able to do business with. You’ll want to make sure you have a sample of several interviews for each “bucket” of buyer types that are also diverse in your coverage of specific markets and/or service lines. The point is, you want personas to be accurate representations of your buyers and not skewed based on the unique views and perspectives of any one interviewee.

Start by identifying their goals and objectives

A great place to start with getting inside the mind of your buyers is to uncover their goals and objectives as it relates to their job, organization and relationship with firms like yours. These goals ultimately drive their buying behavior, so it’s essential to uncover things such as:

• Key job responsibilities
• Areas of focus, key initiatives, long-term strategies
• How their job performance is measured
• Job-related goals
• Personal goals
• Project/purchase-related goals
• Outcomes or results expected from project/engagement (both tangible and emotional)

Identify challenges and issues

Now that you understand their personal and professional goals, it’s important to also understand what challenges and issues your buyers face in the position. This includes:

• Key challenges faced (related to
 your services/expertise)
• Key issues that your firm can solve
• Needs that may/may not be identified and/or funded
• What barriers exist to working with your firm

Identify buying behavior and selection triggers

The end goal of buyer personas is to gain insight into buying behaviors, so significant attention is given to understanding their role in the buying process and how they make selection decisions. Knowing the ins and outs of the decision making process in your buyer’s world is imperative to reaching them. This includes:

• Changes/events that trigger a need/search for your services
• Role in the selection process (technical buyer, project manager, procurement officer, influencer, end-user, etc.)
• Key factors in shortlisting and/or selecting a firm/solution
• How they differentiate winning firms from similarly qualified competitors
• Why they do or do not buy
• How they use websites and other content in selection process
• Typical buying process, activities and “journey” timeline

Identify their questions and interests

When it comes to content, it’s important that it speaks to the questions an audience asks and their interests as it relates to your expertise. You have to think about content through the buyer’s lens, which means it needs to align with what your audience wants to read and hear. This includes:

• Most common questions they ask at each stage of the buyer’s journey
• Questions they aren’t asking but should ask
• Educational topics of interest
• Industry-related subject-matter interests
• Gaps in buying information
• How your content could be helpful/useful

Identify their information sources

Once you have identified the kind of information your buyers are interested in, it’s also helpful to understand where they go to get that information and what their preference for consuming that information is. This includes:

• Trusted resources for news, information and insights
• Industry websites, blogs, publications frequented
• Conferences and trade shows attended
• Formats and media used most and preferred

Leverage personas to personalize your content and messaging

Making sure that your messaging and content is relevant to the people you want to reach is critical to the success of your content marketing and business development efforts. By having buyer personas to reference, it helps you understand the roles and responsibilities of your buyers to make content more personalized.

B2B purchasing decisions are typically made with a lot of consideration beforehand—especially for larger purchases. So it’s important for companies to understand how and why a buyer made the decision either to choose your firm, choose a competitor or stay with the status quo. Buyer personas help to model this decision-making process so that your company can better know how to persuade them.

Taking the first steps

Buyer personas are not created overnight. While building buyer personas involves a lot of research and dedicated time, they are critical to understanding your target audience and creating content that is relevant and valuable. Understanding your audience will help your company make better strategic marketing decisions and ultimately drive better results in business development.

Advertising your business online is an important way to drive leads and boost sales. But what happens to consumers once they click on your ad?

Making sure that you have updated, refreshed landing pages for all your ad campaigns is an important way to make sure you’re getting the most from your marketing investment.

Try these tips to update your landing pages this year.

1. Make Them Mobile-Friendly!

Whether you’re using landing pages to convert search ad visitors or prospects you target from Facebook ads, it’s important to make sure your landing pages are mobile friendly. Today, 50-60% of all Google search is from mobile devices, and mobile is also a primary way consumers use Facebook on a daily basis. It’s important to make sure that no matter what type of device consumers get to your landing page from, they have a great experience because this can boost conversions and help you get more ROI from your advertising spend. So, if your landing pages aren’t mobile-friendly yet, resolve to get that changed first thing!

2. Update the Look & Feel for a Clean Focus on One Call to Action

The ultimate goal for your advertising landing pages should be clear and easy to understand to the visitor.

If you want them to call you, put your phone number in a clear and easy to find place on the page. If you want a form filled out, place it prominently and clearly on the page (and make sure it works seamlessly on mobile too – see above!)

Clean, simple landing pages that pack a punch with a powerful but minimal message and a clear, easy-to-use call to action can help you get more out of your advertising, boosting your overall bottom line.

3. Make Them Relevant & Enticing for Each Offer Type

If you have more than one focus in your advertising efforts, like if you are running ads for different products, locations, or services, it’s a great idea to have more than one landing page to send visitors to. In fact, research shows that businesses with more landing pages tend to get more leads. That’s because having more than one landing page allows you to tailor your message to be more relevant to the ad people were interested in the first place.

So, if you’re running Facebook ads about an offer or promotion, make sure you send visitors to a landing page that’s about that specific offer rather than a generic page on your website. If you’re targeting different search ad groups around different products, have a specific landing page for each product to make it quick and easy for the visitor to convert by contacting you about whatever you originally advertised to them.

A little strategic investment in strong, unique landing pages can really help you get more out of your advertising.

4. Add a Testimonial or Quote for Quick Validation

Reviews are an important part of the buying journey for consumers so you can leverage this trend on your landing pages by adding a customer quote or testimonial after your call to action to help entice visitors to contact you. A short, impactful quote along with a customer photo (if you can get one!) might make all the difference to someone who clicked on your ad and was curious about your business.

Are your landing pages ready to help you take your marketing to the next level? Read more about updating your landing pages here.

Digital marketing has come a long way, and with its rise, we’ve seen more companies using different digital marketing techniques in a bid to gain an edge over the competition. Today we look at one of these methods. Email personalization is a way to use targeted words and data to show customers that you are human and you care about the reader as a person.

Most companies have a load of data about their prospects and customers. From surveys to webforms, there are limitless ways to gain more data about each customer. But how important is that data if you cannot use it?! That data is particularly important in email marketing. It tells you what to market, to whom, and how to do it.

Email personalization improves click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10% (Aberdeen). So how do you integrate email personalization in your next email? Here are eight ways.

 

Refer to them by name

Nothing captures our attention faster than seeing our names in text or print.

You should use customer names in email subjects, making your emails grab the recipient’s attention instantly thus prompting them to open. In addition, you can use their names in greetings or in the body of the email. Copyblogger says we become more engaged and even more trusting of a message in which our name appears.

A study by the Stanford Graduate School of Business revealed that adding the name of the recipient to the subject line increases the probability of the recipient opening it by 20%, translating into a 31% boost in sales leads and a 17% reduction in unsubscribe rates.

However, using a person’s name too much may appear salesy and/ or creepy. There is a thin line between personal and creepy.

Stick to first names, they are friendlier than using more two or more words. If you don’t have their first name, then you should reconfigure your data-gathering sources to include a full name collection step.

Be a person yourself

Doesn’t it feel good when people know you are a company and not just another individual? There’s a feeling of pride that comes up when you send an email from a business you own or have power within. It’s tempting to send emails with a marketing or sales handle attached to your domain name (e.g. sales@mycompany.com).

It’s easy, and people can anticipate the content of your email. But people don’t connect with company names, they connect with people. 68% of Americans say they base their decision to open an email on the ‘From’ name.

Readers want to share their pains with people they can refer to by name. Which is why Hubspot and other companies started using people’s names as email senders. Below is an example of their email personalization.

They’ve used Niti as a front person for their marketing department.

Now every time I reply, I don’t have to wonder who or what reads and replies my emails, I already ‘know’ it’s Niti Shah. That’s human connection at its most basic level.

That is what your recipients want, to talk to human beings.

Check your recipient’s gender

Don’t think it matters? The top reasons for U.S. email users to unsubscribe from a business or nonprofit email subscription are too many emails (69%) and content that is no longer relevant (56%). (Chadwick Martin Bailey).

However, you’d be surprised at how many companies still send mass emails to all of their users without considering their gender. When you are selling products that are gender specific, you need to ensure that you know the gender of the recipient of your next email before you hit send.

This is especially true for cloth and shoe retailers or any other businesses whose content is gender sensitive. See below how Jaeger takes its visitors’ genders seriously.

You’ll receive little interest from men when sending a marketing message of bras and tops to them. Just as you’ll get very little response from women when sending advertisements for vests and other masculine clothing.

Which is why segmenting your email lists is important for you so that you may cater to each gender individually.

Not sure what your customer’s gender is? You should have asked them that when they were signing up.

Set up behaviour-triggered emails

These are emails that are automatically sent due to a customer’s action or lack thereof. Behaviour triggered emails show that you care enough to follow their progress through the sales funnel. Setting up behaviour-triggered emails shouldn’t be an uphill task. Just establish important milestones in the use of your product and each time a customer hits a milestone, send them an email.

For example, if you sell email hosting, why not set up automated emails for each time your customers add 1000 more emails. It shows you care. Here is MailChimp sending a behaviour-triggered email.

(Tom Tunguz)

Use compliments and praise to your advantage

In B2B interactions, successful companies don’t just go on the data that the customer gives them or on the behavioural data from usage of their products. They do the extra leg work and look into their customer’s personal lives. Being able to compliment your customers for achievements that are totally unrelated to your product could be the extra push they needed to become loyal promoters of your brand.

So how do you do this?

Start by checking out their company’s news pages for any recent news that could be worth a mention. Next, check for any media mentions then check them up them on social media. Those three channels will give you enough information for you to figure out what to compliment them on.

Choose something meaningful, like the change of a CEO, and avoid extremely personal events. There is a fine line between appearing friendly, which is what you’re trying to do, and sounding like a stalker. If you compliment them a few times every week for a month, that’s outright stalking them.

Don’t overdo it.

Who doesn’t like a surprise?

Every May, I am sure I will receive at least three happy birthday wishes. One from my internet service provider and the rest from my two banks.

They don’t just do it on my birthday, they send me Merry Christmas and Happy New Year messages every December.

What am I trying to get at?

These companies have figured out how to show they care by taking my DOB and major holidays to reach out to me. You could do the same with your customers. Surprise them these coming months with a birthday wish, or choose an important day in their country’s calendar and wish them a happy celebration.

To make them feel special, why not add a discount like the one shown below?

(Business 2 Community)

Reinforce text with imagery

Of the 5 senses, visual data is processed fastest and better than all other forms of data. But video far outperforms text. Just like in your website copy and your blog posts, email readers hate receiving a block of text in their emails.

Images and videos don’t just draw a reader’s attention, they also leave an impression. They are memorable and depending on what you choose, your readers may remember the messages in your emails for more than just a few minutes.

The next time you are sending an email, check to see whether it deserves a photo. Judge by the amount of text in the body and if it’s too much, add a photo.

Timing is everything

MailChimp suggests that the best time to send an email is around 2 pm. But should you send your global email at that time?

The answer is no.

Take this example. You have three customers, Tom, Dick and Harry. Tom lives in California, Dick in London and Harry in Beijing.

When Tom is having lunch at 2 pm, Dick is headed to bed at 10 pm, while Harry is summarizing his dreams at 6 am. So, should you hit send for all of them at the same time?

Tom will likely see your email before evening, but the other two won’t. Harry has to go to work while Dick has to sleep. Both will probably see your emails more than 6 hours after you send them. If they receive too much email, then your emails drop further in their inbox, reducing the probability that they will be opened.

Be smart. Figure out what time works best for your customers by region, then configure your email software to send the emails at appropriate times for different groups of customers.

It will improve open rates, engagement and this will definitely lead to an improvement on ROI.

And there you have it, 8 ways to improve your email open rates and engagement.

Best Practices for Email Personalization

 

42% of surveyed marketers claim they personalize using anonymous data (eConsultancy). Where do you get all the data you need for truly personalized emails?

• Social media – It goes without question that social media is the new public notice board. Check your customer’s Facebook page, LinkedIn page and twitter account for any news that may be relevant in your email.
• Signup forms – In the most basic form, a signup form should be able to take their name and email address. But, you can go a step further and add one or two more fields, or just do it is a second step after confirming their emails.

Take a cue from this photo, that’s us collecting information.

• Company news pages – Company news pages have a load of data that you can use for email personalization. That’s where you learn about company size and company events like seminars.
• Other data collection tools like surveys – They’re very effective; why not set one up today? It could help you learn their pain points.
• Syndicate data from all your marketing avenues – That’s easy when using a CRM, but if you don’t use one, no worries, doing it manually still works for smaller companies.

And now the fun part, the best practices.

Just because these methods have been found to be effective doesn’t mean that you should use them all at once. You should,

• Choose 4 and stick to them. It saves you from being so friendly that they don’t take you seriously. Did I also forget sounding creepy?
• Don’t overdo on any point. If you send them a card for every national holiday you are missing the point: surprise.
• A/B testing. What works on e-commerce sites doesn’t exactly work the same for SaaS companies. Results vary from company to company and in different industries. Find out what works best for you and focus on optimizing it.
• Use smart segmentation. Email list segmentation goes hand in hand with success at email marketing. Start by segmenting your list by gender (if it’s important), or by their preferences while they signed up. It will save you a lot of unsubscribers and unhappy customers.

There you have it. A definitive guide to email personalization. Don’t just sit on it. Read your next email right now and see whether you can make it a little more personal without sounding creepy.

Email personalization delivers 6x higher transaction rates (Experian) Start personalizing your emails today and you are on your way to experiencing an increase in sales and revenue.

Have any of these tips worked out for you? I would like to hear your stories in the comments.

Road trips are a great way to get to know someone. They reveal compatibilities, interests, and perspectives on everything from the best route to worthwhile stops. These rites of passage are similar to shared expeditions of buyers and sellers. Both require clear understanding of the ultimate destination, open communication, and eagerness to engage.

Still, buyers and sellers are different. On one side there are needs to fulfill and benefits to derive; on the other, revenue goals and customer satisfaction. What is a journey for buyers is a process for sellers. Successful sales and marketing teams manage both paths to mutual advantage while accelerating the results they care about most.

From then to now

We hear many stories about how the buyer’s journey is changing. How it’s becoming more fluid and dynamic, and how buyers have more control than ever before. All true. What’s not true but remains broadly perceived is that the journey is now a random walk. That buyers are less likely to follow a well-worn trail and more apt to advance from one stage to another with little predictability. High-performing sellers know better. Today we’ll share how they remain proactive – and how sales enablement helps establish strong links between the sales process and the buyer’s journey.

Before describing how to make journey-process alignment possible in your organization, let’s quickly reset.

Like the basic stages of the buyer’s journey, marketing fundamentals remain unaltered. Decision-making processes, in particular for complex purchases, conform to the same pattern they’ve followed for decades.

Whether you’re buying a new car, a ski jacket that’s a little outside your price range, or enterprise software, the journey is consistent.

While some stages may occasionally be skimmed (perhaps you’re aware of the existence of ski jackets) and circularity is possible (for example, upon reaching the negotiation phase you discover a new solution and decide to restart your process), the buyer’s journey of the future will remain clearly recognizable. What will change is how sales teams evolve to make the most of it.

When the classic sales process is set against the buyer’s journey, it’s easy to spot the alignment shortages many of today’s sales teams are facing.

The key question for sales and marketing teams is therefore: How do I adapt my sales process to the buyer’s journey?

For sales managers seeking to increase rep effectiveness and drive consistency in how they leverage sales content for maximum gain, sales process revisions offer huge upside. The biggest reason is that they demand businesses more deeply consider the needs of their target audience. Rather than centering their sales process on a scripted sequence of product (or service)-first messages, aligned businesses focus first on guiding buyers through their journey. They map their process to buyers’ needs while preserving the flexibility to challenge, support, and consult buyers at every stage. By investing the upfront time necessary to executing on this strategy, aligned businesses position themselves for vastly improved sales effectiveness.

Illustrated below is an example of an aligned sales process set against the buyer’s journey. As you can see, it’s a process that’s more dynamic, flexible, and customer-centric.

Five steps to better connecting your sales process to the buyer’s journey

Step 1: Reframe stage definitions and goals

Draw a table with your buyer’s journey across the top, then skip down three rows and add your sales process. In the second row, note what the buyer is trying to accomplish in each sales stage. In the third row, jot what you are trying to accomplish in each sales stage. Now you have a high-level map of your sales process and your audience’s journey. Do they align? If so, great; if not, read on.

For many sales teams, reframing stage definitions and goals can quickly remedy misalignment. As an example, it’s common for a sales process to include a “qualify” stage where sellers assess whether or not buyers are likely to purchase within a reasonable timeframe. In this case, “qualify” represents a sales perspective. Meanwhile, the parallel objective from the buyer’s point of view is “committing to change.”

Reframing stages and goals helps sellers reconcile buyer preferences with their own intuition and leads to more impactful conversations. With this in mind, we recommend keeping the following questions in your back pocket:

• Can your buyers articulate the need they are trying to solve?
• Can you help buyers refine the scope of their problem?
• Is your buyer’s problem something that your company can help solve and is solving that problem part of your sales process?
• Is your buyer committed to making a change? Can you help evaluate the pros and cons of making that change?
• Can you help buyers identify, include, and convince others in your target company that they share this need?

Answers to these questions will help you better establish the content and engagement strategy critical to delivering what your buyers demand. Our recommendation: look for a sales enablement platform that accommodates not only the content capabilities you expect, but also the customer engagement and analytics that will support your sales process from start to finish.

Step 2: Identify Value Points

Once your process steps are aligned, pinpoint how you can provide value to buyers in each stage. Think beyond product capabilities and instead focus on solution evaluation and ensuring multiple perspectives within your buyer’s organization are addressed. The key is to pivot the question from “What do I need to get from the buyer?” to “How can I help the buyer get what they need?” Better sales performance begins with this simple shift.

Step 3: Identify Tools, Content & Resources

Help buyers marshal the resources required to deliver on their goals. One way is to explore the following categories and become a go-to resource for buyers.

• Product and solution education – What product specs, solution guides, industry specific collateral or industry expert advice do your buyers need? Where in the buyer’s journey will this be most helpful?
• Committing to change – What analyst reports, case studies, or ROI calculators will showcase the need for a change of direction?
• Solution selection – How can you use evaluation checklists, comparison charts, 3rd party advice, and product trials to help buyers choose among multiple products? Does your sales process meet this need at the most opportune stage of the buyer’s journey?
• Selection validation –Mitigate your buyers’ concerns by referencing proof-of-value trials, customer references, and industry experts.

Once you’re clear on the above, make certain your reps are able to find, share, customize, and analyze the content that satisfies these important buyer needs.

Step 4: Test and Validate

Changes to sales processes can be sensitive and justify the adage “measure twice, cut once.” We recommend identifying a few high-performing sales reps who are consultative, customer-first thinkers already. The biggest reason is that they’ll likely have immediate, market-validated feedback and recommendations on whether or not revisions to your sales process will correspond with the buyer’s journey. (Note: Many of these reps are also likely to be active participants in your sales enablement strategy.)

You should also test the effectiveness of your new process by running a pilot program. Train a subset of your sales team on the advantages of linking your sales process to the buyer’s journey, and how to translate guidance into action steps. If your sales cycle is long or complex, it may be difficult to confirm the benefits of your new process with a statistically relevant sample. However, salespeople will quickly acquire a gut feeling on whether or not it’s working and – until additional data can be gathered – should be trusted for near-term insights.

Step 5: Codify, Train and Commit

Moving a sales organization to a new way of thinking is hard. By investing in training, you’ll help reps more deeply understand your new process and the reason it will make a positive difference for them.

In addition (and if you haven’t already), be sure to digitize your playbook. By delivering your playbook in accessible, easy-to-consume, modularized chapters, you’ll give reps the head start they need. This is one of the best ways we’ve seen to codify a sales process and move organizations forward fast.

Go Forth

Modern sales enablement platforms help reps connect their sales process to the buyer’s journey. When this happens, reps maintain control of the customer dialogue. They use the power of sales content and training to ensure the right message is delivered at the right time to the right audience. In short, they avert chaos by leveraging technology and insights to steer engagement in a productive direction.

The better you’re able to align perspectives on the buyer’s journey and sales process, and use them to fine-tune your sales content strategy, the more effective your reps will be. Luckily, the art and science required to get there is more straightforward than many teams realize. And with the right sales enablement platform, the benefits are more accessible than ever.

How the lead management process is handled influences how sales are made — or even if they are made.

An established process should not only increase the company’s bottom line but also produce the most appropriate solutions for a customer’s needs.

Without effective lead management processes and practices in place, a company’s ability to increase opportunities for both customers and sales is limited.

A sales team can’t simply sit back and wait for prospects to come to them. Their efforts need to focus on generating leads, qualifying leads, and nurturing them.

If leads are handled incorrectly and without an understanding of how the management process works, neither side will get what they want. The lead will most likely seek solutions elsewhere. The sales team will suffer from a lack of leads and low conversion rates.

That said, here are six costly lead management mistakes that can be easily avoided.

Not having a lead handling process in place

What happens when a lead comes in? What happens after the initial contact?

A lack of clarity in the lead management process gives rise to confusion and loses a potential customer in the shuffle.

What happens to a lead after initial contact and who handles the lead at different points in the process needs to be established and well-defined. Otherwise, no one will know when to funnel the contact to the proper person or department, and the lead will lose interest and seek solutions elsewhere.

Not prioritizing leads

The sales process can be long, but failing to prioritize leads can make it even longer and unfruitful.

Although the scenario is not common, some leads know exactly what they need and are ready to buy immediately.

More commonly, a lead requires more information on a product before deciding it’s the right solution.

A keen understanding of a lead’s needs and where they are in the sales process helps a business determine the most strategic way to deal with them. A lead needing more information should probably be funneled to marketing while more decisive ones can go to sales. Actively trying to sell when a lead is not ready is an inefficient use of time and resources.

Waiting too long to follow up on a lead

The chances of making contact with a lead and making the sale increase the sooner someone follows up.

A Harvard Business Review study has revealed that responding to leads within an hour generates seven times more conversions. The study audited 2,241 U.S. firms and found that leads lose interest when there is too much time between initial contact and follow up.

Within five minutes of a prospect’s contact is the ideal time to make direct contact and have an impact. A computer telephony interaction–like a CTI integrating MS Dynamics and Avaya–allows a sales team to react to lead interest immediately by using a computer to track inquiries and make return calls in seconds.

Giving up too soon

According to Business Insider, a potential customer needs some form of contact at least seven times within a period of 18 months to make an impact.

Through time, a business can convert someone with just an interest into a lead and eventually a sale. It starts with advertising, then the marketing and sales process.

It would be great to close the sale on the first contact, but this scenario doesn’t often happen because many leads are not ready to buy immediately.

Does this mean forget about them? If they are qualified, they will mostly buy at some point. The customer needs to build trust with the business. By nurturing the leads through marketing and periodic contact, the trust will grow over time.

Not creating engaging content

Ours is the Internet Age. Many leads will reach a business via the internet.

Whether a potential customer heard of the business through word of mouth or a web search, they will perform some internet research to learn more about the company and their products.

Quality content — both online and offline — is needed to obtain and nurture leads. This content may consist of web pages, blog posts, ebooks, marketing material, and whitepapers, which speak to the problems potential customers may have. Good content is the difference between engaging a prospect and having them look elsewhere.

Not updating lead databases

Any information obtained on a lead will help in discerning their level of interest and make it easier to sell to them. With the utilization of CRM integration like an MS Dynamics – Avaya CTI integration in the lead management process, it is easy to track if, when, and how many times leads have been contacted. Knowing this vital information gives insight into the best way to address the lead’s needs. Developing a profile of the prospect includes content they have been exposed to or what part of the website prompted the lead to show interest in the company. Whether the lead is funneled to another person or department, the efforts to engage are better targeted.

Final thoughts

Leads are crucial to a business’s sales cycle. An efficient handle on lead management brings effective conversion of a prospect to first a lead and then to a customer. Avoiding the mistakes mentioned above will allow a sales team to acquire more qualified leads and create more effective sales opportunities. The result? The business will thrive.

Influencer marketing is defined as focusing market activities around key individuals that have influence over potential buyers rather than targeting the market as a whole.

The increased use of brand influencers is among the most impactful trends in content marketing.

Influencer marketing isn’t new. It has been fashionable with B2C companies for some time now.

However, B2B organizations are recognizing the value that an external, influential person can have as part of their content marketing strategy.

Especially when used in the context of their video marketing strategy – think Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Periscope, Facebook.

Also, at least 309 million people are using ad blockers on their devices, according to PageFair. So marketers need to find alternatives to reaching potential customers.

The following is a look at several primary benefits of using influencers to achieve demand generation.

Better Trust and Credibility

Using a vocal influencer is like having someone besides you brag about your abilities or accomplishments.

Because when you author messages in company content, the audience realizes it is your job to speak positively on your firm’s behalf.

By partnering with someone external to your business that is trusted by the target market, confidence and credibility factors are usually higher.

When people believe the genuineness of a message, they pay more attention and are more likely to respond.

Broader Content and Greater Reach

You gain access to potential prospects with influencers that you wouldn’t reach as quickly through other demand generation efforts.

This point is particularly the case if the person you go to has a strong following on a blog or social media channels in the industry in which you operate.

A recent Tomoson study on influencer marketing revealed that 37 percent believed blogs were the best influential marketing platform.

Facebook was second at 25 percent, followed by several other social channels including YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.

The types of content and formats used by the influencer may vary from your standard approaches as well.

A fresh take on content can attract attention from more people, and perhaps get individuals who have become desensitized to your message to pay attention.

You might even get some new creative ideas to use in your internally-generated content.

More Sales Leads

The most tangible benefit of influencer marketing, when useful, is a higher volume of sales leads.

When people trust the influencer and pay attention to the message, the odds of them responding positively towards their brand are greater.

Businesses are making $6.50 for each $1 spent on influencer marketing, with the top 13% earning $20 or more – Tomoson

According to influencer marketing agency, Billion Dollar Boy, Danio wanted to create a fun and disruptive campaign to persuade men to think of Danio yoghurt as their preferred afternoon snack.

Comedic YouTube personality Anto Sharp devised six videos letting out his renowned #HungerCry at 4pm snack time while enlisting his audience to create and share videos of the same.

Audience members shared 400 “Hunger Cry” videos and his videos resulted in 5 million views.

His Facebook videos resulted in 3.3 million views.

The return on investment for Sharp’s videos resulted in 97p per 1,000 Facebook views compared to an average of £35 per 1,000 Facebook views for paid media.

The effect was that Danio reported a 12% average increase in Danio yoghurt sales as a direct result of the campaign.

Higher Quality Demand Generation

More important than a high volume of sales leads is high-quality sales leads.

In the Tomoson study:

• 51 percent of marketers believed they captured better quality prospects with influencer marketing
• 38 percent indicated the same quality of people were won over with influencer marketing
• 11 percent thought demand generation was worse

Ideally, the influencer stokes the interest and enthusiasm of a prospect, priming him before interaction with your business.

Higher-opportunity leads improve the potential for sales cycle efficiency and conversions by your team.

Influencer Marketing Expectations

Another influencer marketing solutions provider Linqia reported that nearly half of marketers in the US plan to ramp up their budget for influencer-focused campaigns.

The driving force of influencer campaigns is content.

Especially relevant is that more than two-thirds of marketing and communications professionals (69%) cited content promotion as a tactic for which they engaged with influencers.

Interestingly, according to eMarketer, nearly six in 10 (59%) said the same about content creation.

And 75% found that identifying the right influencers was the biggest challenge with an influencer marketing program.

Also, respondents struggled to get influencers’ attention and to measure efforts.

Wrap Up

Depending upon your market, influencers provide several key benefits in a thorough content marketing strategy.

So increase your reach and authenticity by leveraging an outside voice, while also driving a higher volume of high-quality leads to your business.

Influencer marketing is still very new to B2B companies in the technology space.

From the evidence to date, one of the key challenges for marketers is finding the best way to measure success.

The term ‘inside sales’ was first applied to remote sales in the late 1980s, when it was set up as the direct opposite of ‘outside sales’ – that is, the face-to-face field sales approach. For a long time, inside sales was seen as an outlier, a young upstart, and was relegated to the side lines of the sales department.

But this is no longer the case. Insides sales is growing 300% faster than outside sales, and what’s more, the lines between inside and outside are increasingly blurred. Indeed, according to research, modern outside sales reps typically spend 50% of their day selling remotely.

So what exactly are the benefits of inside sales, and how can these best be incorporated into an existing outside sales team? Here, we’ll highlight some of the advantages of employing a more joined up approach to sales, and give you some tips on how to make it happen.

The Benefits of Inside Sales

Cost savings

Inside sales has significantly lower operational costs than outside sales, as it dispenses with the expensive outlays associated with travel in the field – for example, according to the Harvard Business Review, it costs 40-90% less to bring in new customers using inside rather than outside sales teams. As such, sales departments looking to cut costs and use their budgets more effectively often introduce an inside sales component to their operation.

Buyer preferences

Today’s buyers are growing more comfortable making purchases remotely. Many wouldn’t dream of investing in a product or service without first researching it online, and would prefer a quick phone call to a formal face-to-face meeting. As a result, it’s good business sense to have inside sales reps ready to engage with customers on their terms, rather than only connecting with them later on in the buying journey.

Better technologies

With the advances in digital technologies such as videoconferencing, webinars and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, inside sales reps are increasingly able to build the same sense of customer intimacy and rapport that has long been exclusively associated with traditional sales – but at a fraction of the cost.

Work/life balance

Outside sales will often require a lot of travel, long hours and time spent away from home, which can make it unappealing to sales reps used to modern practices. On the contrary, inside sales is the ideal way to attract talented sales reps who love selling but still want to achieve a work/life balance.

How to Bring the Benefits of Inside Sales to your Outside Sales Team

Recruit with flexibility in mind

Inside sales and outside sales have traditionally required different competencies and skillsets, with inside sales reps utilizing the latest technologies to generate quality leads and outside sales reps using their strong interpersonal skills to close the deal. Increasingly, however, sales reps of all stripes are being required to become proficient in all of the above.

For example, inside sales reps are using interactive multimedia technologies to demonstrate products to customers, while outside sales reps are spending less time in the field and more time warming up prospects remotely. As such, it is essential that organizations recruit individuals with a wide range of skills and, perhaps even more importantly, an open, collaborative and flexible attitude.

Provide skills training to fill the gaps

As new technologies emerge and buying behaviors evolve, the roles of sales reps, both inside and out, is changing. To help your sales reps master the array of administrative, prospecting and closing skills required of them, it is essential to invest in appropriate training and continuous professional development. This is especially true if you want your outside sales reps to develop the skills traditionally required by inside sales reps or vice versa, as many of the most experienced sales professionals will have developed with expertise in silos.

Put clear processes in place

When a sales department contains a mixture of inside and outside sales teams, it is common for conflicts to arise – from clashes over commissions to disagreements over lead quality. To avoid turf wars between the teams, it is best to set out well-defined roles and responsibilities beforehand, and also encourage close collaborative relationships between sales reps from both sides of the divide. In this way, you can develop a sales team who view each other’s roles as complementary rather than competitive, and who can learn from one another.

Achieve the right balance

While the crucial role inside sales plays in many modern businesses is undeniable, this by no means sounds the death knell for outside sales. Outside sales reps still have important contributions to make, and it is essential that they are not displaced in the name of ease or cost savings. Rather, it’s the responsibility of the organization to ensure that all of its sales tasks are being achieved as efficiently and effectively as possible, and that the right balance is achieved between inside and outside sales.

Want to learn more about the benefits of inside sales? Then check out NewVoiceMedia’s online guide, The Ultimate Guide to Inside Sales, to find out the everything you need to know about the ins and outs of growing a winning inside sales team.

When we talk about different types of marketing strategies for small and large companies, the list goes on and on. Most companies find it easiest to base their strategy off of one or two of these strategies or ideas. For example, if the holidays are around, the company many choose to base their strategy solely off of this time of year, using promotions and a spin on email marketing. Others may choose to try location-based marketing or just a simple digital marketing strategy. It seems like each year, new types of marketing strategies take hold.

This year, it’s looking like account-based marketing could be the new “thing.” Though account-based marketing has been around for a while, it’s starting to get recognized more and more.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Or, should we say, “marketing account-based what is?”

It may sound like Yoda talking. Account-based marketing is when a company directs their marketing strategy based off of prospect or customer accounts. Essentially, this means you work backwards. You take a look at what kind of customer accounts you want to buy from your company. After you’ve gathered a list and set these ultimate goals, you communicate with those accounts and see if you can pull them in.

It’s New and It’s Debatable

Account-based marketing is far more difficult than, say, social media marketing. Sometimes it may work and other times it may flop. However, unlike other types of marketing, account-based marketing is super risky because it’s not so certain what the results will be. You could put in a lot of hard work and perhaps see nothing come of it. At least with Facebook marketing, you’ll likely see the results of your work quickly.

These days, account-based marketing is really only meant for big enterprise companies who have the financial means to take that risk. They can afford to set the bar very high for themselves. They take themselves seriously. That being said, once (or if) we start to see positive statistics with this kind of marketing, there’s no reason we can’t see it being used with smaller companies in the future.

How to Implement Account-Based Marketing

So, you’re willing to give this marketing strategy a try. But, how to implement it? Having to communicate to your prospects about their interest in your company sounds like a lousy sales pitch already. But, to get you started, after you make your target account list, consider, what’s in it for them? This is where you’ll have to use personalized marketing strategies to reel them in. And, you’ll have to pay attention to each step of the process so you can be ready to “execute” at any given time.

Measurement is Key

With any type of marketing, constant measuring is key. But, it’s never been as important when it comes to account-based marketing. Unlike other marketing strategies, you need to be constantly measuring progress as you go along because your attempts can lead to different customer behavior. Each prospect you pull in or fail to pull in will be a learning experience to make adjustments with in the future.

It’s Not for Everyone

Account-based marketing is definitely a sensitive type of marketing. It’s not for everyone, though we can’t really discourage you from giving it a try! Account-based marketing is a great way to set goals for your business, where the rewards are really unlike that of any other kind of marketing.

Do you have any thoughts about account-based marketing? Tell us in the comments below!

If you are reading this I assume you have set up a LinkedIn profile, or are thinking about it, thereby joining the leading social network for professionals, with over 450 million users.

If all you have done is set up a profile, filled out the various sections, connected with people you know, and left it alone, then I can promise that your profile won’t be working for you. It is unlikely to help you find new clients, partners or opportunities. Engagement is essential. But in order for you to engage properly you ought to be confident your profile says everything you want it to say.

There are many ways you can do this, and the following is just a few of the basics you need to consider when creating your profile. Please remember that your profile isn’t static. When you change roles, take on new responsibilities, learn new skills, or gain new qualifications, you should update your profile. In fact, you should be improving it all the time.

1) Make sure your profile has all the bare essentials in it – see my blog The bare essentials required for a successful profile on LinkedIn.
2) Remember that recommendations help you stand out from your competitors and make you appear as a more credible person to approach. Therefore, get the recommendations rolling in, but make sure you get “real” recommendations.
3) Keep front of mind; keep it dynamic
4) Engage in groups as this is a good way to raise your profile, meet people and generally be connected to a big pool of prospects.
5) Talk to people and share updates on what you are up to.

Taking these simple steps can make all the difference. But you need to be planned, disciplined and committed to keeping your profile – your presence on LinkedIn – updated, relevant and attractive to those people you most want to meet.

Profiles alone don’t make LinkedIn work, you need to engage, demonstrate relevance and network professionally to get the full value for yourself from LinkedIn.

In today’s world, sales reps are expected to engage with content marketing more and more; creating their own content, developing their own voice in addition to increasingly using social media as a way to publish their content and own perspectives.

Change is constant in our society. So, it is to be expected that content marketing will experience that change too; it’s evolving and it will continue to evolve in the future. So, as we have just started a new year, these are the key themes that we think will characterise content marketing in 2017:

Email comeback

With the rise of the use of social media in B2B marketing over the past few years, the use of email has seemed to be in decline (or so we thought). Some organisations had started to think that the only way to engage with their audience was through social media. Some even made the mistake of relegating email to the backstage. However, a recent study (2) showed that for the organisations that had continued to use email alongside other methods as a way to distribute content to their audience, email was rated as the most successful metric for measuring content marketing.

In 2017, we expect organisations will start paying more attention to their email content, and therefore, to their e-newsletters. Organisations will likely be making more of an effort to create outstanding content in their email marketing; tailored to their customers and providing their audience with really insightful and relevant content.

Sales reps should bear this in mind and although they already use email constantly to communicate with customers and prospects, they should pay more attention to the information they provide and the format of the content itself. Personalising it to be able to satisfy each customer, will not only get the attention of whoever you are emailing, but will have a higher probability of transforming that attention into real interest, and as a consequence, a new client. This sounds obvious, however we now have a culture of copy and paste and writing generic content that we need to move away from.

Print is back on

Content publication has become increasingly digital; however, many people are actually crying out for more printed content. For example, we all like to browse the IKEA website and see what products we can add to our home to make it cosier. But, printed catalogues are still often mailed to different homes and we all like the feeling of being able to flick through the pages, making notes on something we liked and feeling the weight of the catalogue in our hands.

Sales reps can use this as a point of differentiation by going the extra mile when contacting their clients; mailing to them (where possible) printed collateral, maybe in the form of ebooks or visual whitepapers. Being able to have a call with a prospect while they can flick through the pages of your printed content enhances the experience and gives them something physical to consume offline.

We think that traditional print will become more popular in 2017, as organisations find new and interesting ways to engage with clients.

Adapting to mobile

Most of us own a mobile and take it with us everywhere we go. We use our mobiles for everything: to read the news, access our email and watch films.

Many websites are still not optimised for mobile – but we need to think about how our content will look on different devices.

Organisations should be looking at how they can develop mobile-ready content marketing campaigns with content developed specifically to be consumed on a small screen.

Videos in bulk

By 2020, video will represent 82% of all consumer internet traffic. This is something to consider, even if you think your buyers aren’t consuming much video data. As we mentioned in a recent article (3), “you have to be where your buyers are. And you have to be there now, even if the buyers are only going to get there in a year or two”.

Telling stories via video is a dynamic and often clearer way of getting your content out there. In fact, using mini videos can be very useful when clarifying an idea or concept, explaining a particular topic or even summarising the purpose of an organisation even in just a few seconds. Customers want to buy into a story, and enhanced mobile phone video capabilities make it easy for every sales rep to get on board the vlogging revolution. For more information on B2B Vlogging read the article in full here.

Sales reps can take advantage of this new trend and use it to build a quick profile of themselves so that potential customers can get to know them easily, as well as building a story around the journey from how they became sales reps to why they decided to sell a particular product.

The true power of LinkedIn

If you ask people what they use LinkedIn for, a high number will probably say they use it for networking such as connecting with new clients, colleagues and possible contacts that can help you with your business career.

Well, the truth is that LinkedIn’s power is often underestimated by sales reps. LinkedIn can be so much more than just a networking tool. In fact, some B2B reps have already realised this and are starting to use it to its full potential by publishing blogs and regular updates. Individuals are further developing their own profile, explaining their ideas and thoughts and talking about how they perceive particular trends, or what their thoughts are about a particular issue, business or situation.

By publishing their own content, sales reps position themselves as thought leaders and continuously build their profile. This allows them to be perceived as more strategic, instead of just being yet another sales rep. Their audience can empathise with them and be compelled to want to know more, ultimately leading to mutually beneficial relationships that can end in a business deal or a sale.

All this leads us to one word: personalisation. No matter the form of your content marketing (email, print, etc.), everything you write needs to be more personalised. But, personalisation needs to happen both ways: not only personalised to your customer but to the individual, so the person writing the content is giving their own voice within a business too; empowering them so that they can build their own profile; sharing their own perspectives, whilst tailoring their storytelling to their audiences.

For more information download the Ultimate Content Marketing guide.

References:

• http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2016/12/content-marketing-trends-watch/
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansutter/2016/12/02/8-trends-that-will-shape-content-marketing-in-2017/#6b333df72970
• http://www.business2community.com/video-marketing/business-trying-b2b-vlogging-01704706#d81bKHFryGkqlfPV.97

Now that we’re a few weeks into the New Year, the reality that it's time to commit to the goals you've set for yourself is probably settling in right about now. If email marketing is on your to-do list for 2017 (and I hope it is!), you’ll want to start with setting measurable and attainable goals. After all, when you have clear objectives and targets to aim for, it can make it easier for you to stay motivated and execute a game plan that helps you get the list growth, engagement rates and business results you’re looking for. To help you get started, here are four email marketing campaign goals you can work towards this year.

1. Grow your subscriber list

As an email marketer, your subscribers are your most valuable asset. That means in order to run a successful email marketing campaign, you need to build and maintain a list of people who regularly open, read and engage with your messages. Your subscribers are people who voluntarily sign up to receive email updates from your business. Some could be long-time customers, while others might be first-time visitors on your website or blog who want to learn more about your company or get answers to a problem they face.  Even if you have a healthy list of contacts, gaining subscribers is critical to maintaining an engaged audience – after all, the average email marketing list decreases by around 22.5 percent every year. [bctt tweet="Even if you have a healthy email list, gaining new subscribers is critical for an engaged audience."] If you’re hoping to grow your email list this new year, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind. Make it easy for people to subscribe to your emails. Where does your audience interact with your company the most – on your blog, website, social networks, etc.? Adding a sign up form on the platforms where your company is the most visible is a great way to start collecting new contacts. Also consider how you can optimize the positioning of your form on these pages. Placing your sign up form at the top of your homepage or using a pop up or slide-in form, for example, can increase visibility of your form and encourage more people to subscribe to your list. Provide a valuable reason for subscribing to your list in your sign up form. Most people are protective about their personal information and require a compelling reason for giving you their email address. That means it’s crucial that your audience understands the value of your emails from the get-go. Explain what your audience will receive in your emails and how frequently they’ll get them. You might even want to add some positive feedback you've received from current subscribers, if you have the space. This way, you can connect with the right people and set a foundation based on trust when you send them relevant emails. Setting expectations on your form also helps prevent any unpleasant surprises, which could motivate your subscribers to mark your emails as spam if you send them something they didn’t expect. Check out this sign up form below, which visitors will find on DigitalMarketer’s homepage: By using a delayed overlay opt-in form and large text, there’s no doubt viewers will understand the purpose of the form and the value they could potentially get for subscribing. Plus, it makes it easier for people to either sign up or close the form if they’re not interested.

2. Increase your open rates

Open rates are a key measurement for determining the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign. Even though they vary across industries, open rates show how many people were compelled by your subject line to open your message and hopefully read your email content. It can also shed light on your deliverability and list health – average to high open rates mean that a good percentage of your subscribers are receiving your emails and seeing them in their inboxes. The more people open your emails, the more opportunities you’ll have to turn them into loyal customers or advocates of your brand. To improve your open rates, you need to stand out in overcrowded inboxes. [bctt tweet="The more people open your emails, the more chances you’ll have to turn them into loyal customers."] Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when planning your next email send. Spend extra time writing your subject line. The subject line of your email can make or break its overall performance, especially when you consider that the average business user receives up to 121 emails per day (!). To get your subject line to stand out, keep it short and concise. Also, opt for direct, actionable language. Crafting a compelling, persuasive subject line will help capture reader’s attention and entice them to open your email. In some cases, you can try different tactics like creating a sense of urgency in your subject lines to motivate subscribers to read more. Including phrases like “limited-time only”, “Hurry” and “Last chance” are all effective ways to create a sense of urgency. You can also reference specific details around how much time is left on an offer (like specifying the number of days, hours or minutes).  While there are a number of ways you can add a little urgency to your subject lines, here are a couple of examples of what it looks like: You can also use elements like personalization and emojis to help make your emails pop, like the following subject lines: Use confirmed opt-in. To build an email marketing audience that looks forward to your messages, get permission from contacts before adding them to your list and promise them something valuable. After they subscribe, follow through on that promise with each message you send to build an engaged audience who looks forward to your emails. Using confirmed opt-in also allows you to filter out potential subscribers who signed up to your list by accident or aren’t really that interested in your emails. But more importantly, it gives people an opportunity to validate that they definitely want to receive your emails. Remember, the more people you have on your list who actually want to hear from you, the better your open and click-through rates will be.

3. Improve email click-throughs

If you already know that a lot of people are receiving and opening your messages, you might find that not as many are clicking your call-to-action. Click-through rates measure the number of subscribers who click on the links in your message and are one of the most effective ways to quantify audience engagement with your emails. Improving your click-through rate can help build relationships with website visitors, subscribers, and longtime customers, creating an opportunity to bring in more business. If improving your click-through rates is on your to-do list this year, stick to these email essentials:  Always send relevant, valuable information.  Any time your subscribers read an email, they will always ask themselves, “What’s in it for me?” Keep this in mind whenever you prepare an email to send to your audience. If you can clearly identify what subscribers will get out of the email (whether it’s education, an exclusive offer, etc.), then it passes the test. Another way to improve engagement is by segmenting them into like-minded groups and sending relevant, targeted messages tailored to their specific needs and interests. If your emails are crafted for a broader audience, consider segmenting your subscribers and sending them targeted content to help capture their attention. Doing so can help increase engagement and improve your relationship with them. Include a clear call-to-action.  Every email you send to subscribers should include a single call-to-action (CTA) that stands out and visually pops — whether it’s downloading an ebook, reading a blog post or scheduling a free consultation. Each CTA should offer something valuable to subscribers and stand out from the rest of your email. Experiment with its placement, wording and design to determine what kind of CTA creates a higher click-through rate.   In this email below from Candace Payne (aka Chewbacca Mom!), she makes it extremely easy for new subscribers to download the incentive offered on her sign up form: With only one CTA that's offered right at the top of the email, it's easy to take action as soon as the email is opened.

4. Retain customers and turn them into brand advocates

One of the benefits of email marketing is that it engages old and new customers long after the sale is made. Customer retention is crucial to the success of any business, and emails have the unique ability to build relationships with past customers, prompting them to purchase from you again in the future. To boost engagement among your existing customers, here are some tactics to consider: Send exclusive content and targeted offers. While it’s important to nurture leads before a purchase, it’s critical to maintain relationships with them after now that they’ve become customers. This can help establish a relationship that is based on trust, appreciation and authenticity. One of the best ways to do this is to offer exclusive sales and discounts, courses, ebooks and other content based on their interests. Segmenting customers in this way can help you send targeted content to people who want it most. Not only does this encourage customers to make another purchase, but it also demonstrates your vested interest in their relationship with your business. Consider sending emails based on past email engagement (if they clicked a link for a specific product, they may be interested in more content related to that topic), interests or geographical location. Feature user-generated content and customer testimonials. Highlighting customers by sharing feedback or social posts about their experiences with your brand can go a long way in showing them you value their support. [bctt tweet="Featuring customer feedback about their experiences with your brand shows them you value their support."] This also incentivizes other customers to follow suit and share their own experiences, in the hopes of getting recognition from your business. Want a fun way to encourage customer feedback? Turning it into a social contest and offer a prize to a randomly selected individual!

Take your email marketing campaign to the next level

Setting email marketing goals for the year can help grow your email list, increase subscriber engagement and grow your business. And by making these commitments, it makes it easier to identify what tactics you need to try or continue using throughout the year in order to crush your goals. For more on how to improve your strategy, check out our newest resource, The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing. There you’ll find more detailed information on list building, what to write in your emails, how to improve email performance and more!

The post 4 Goals for Your Email Marketing Campaign appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.