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As a former FBI kidnapping negotiator, Chris Voss knows how to navigate extremely tense situations, work with unpredictable personalities, and successfully broach difficult topics. As he explains in his book, “Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It,” these skills often allowed him to successfully trade money for lives.

With these stakes, it might seem surprising Voss wasn’t worried by hearing “no” in negotiations. But he argues “no” is one of the most powerful words you can elicit from your negotiation partner.

Why “Yes” Is Dangerous

If you’ve ever received a series of “yeses” from your prospect, only to have the deal fall apart at the final moment, you’ve seen first-hand why “yes” can be dangerous.

Voss explains there are three types of “yes” responses: Confirmations, counterfeits, and commitments.

A confirmation “yes” is an automatic response to a close-ended question. For example, if you ask your prospect, “Do you want to cut down on the hours you spend doing administrative work?”, he’ll likely say “yes” without thinking.

Don’t get too excited by a confirmation “yes.” According to Voss, “It’s mostly just simple affirmation with no promise of action.”

Counterfeit “yeses” are less benign. Your negotiation partner means “no,” yet believes saying “yes” offers the path of least resistance or an opportunity to gain an advantage.

Perhaps you ask the buyer, “Does that sound fair?” Even though he thinks the price is too high, he says “yes” to avoid haggling right now. You’ve gotten a positive response -- but the deal will end up stalling.

A commitment “yes” is authentic. It leads to action and is “the ‘yes’ at the table that ends with a signature on the contract,” Voss writes.

If you chase commitments from the outset of the negotiation, you’ll usually end up getting confirmations and counterfeits versions instead.

Starting with the “no” will generate far better results.

What ‘No’ Means (It’s Not What You Think)

What does “no” truly signify? It rarely means, “After a careful, thorough analysis of the situation, I’ve decided the rational response is negative.”

“‘No’ is often a decision, frequently temporary, to maintain the status quo,” Voss writes. “Change is scary, and ‘No’ provides protection from that scariness.”

“No” might translate to:

• “I need feedback from someone else.”
• “I’m not ready yet.”
• “I’m not sure it’s in my price range.”
• “I want something different.”
• “I need more information.”

“Nos” are reversible, not permanent. They’re an excellent way to jumpstart the negotiation -- once your partner feels comfortable, he’s far more willing to engage in the conversation and share his reservations.

How to Get a “No”

Jim Camp, author of "Start With No," advises negotiators to begin by giving their partners “the right to veto.”

There are several ways to do this. Voss suggests making a statement you know is false. If the buyer cares about avoiding hazards at all costs, you could say, “It seems like you’re not interested in the version with the most safety functions.”

They’re compelled to respond, “No, I am,” which makes them comfortable correcting you.

Alternatively, ask your prospect what they’re not looking for. You might say, “Tell me about the features you don’t want,” or “Which terms would you reject?”

You’ll uncover potential issues, show them you’re on their side, and put them at ease.

Finally, you can solicit “nos” by flipping your “yes-oriented” questions. Rather than asking, “Is it a good idea if we did X?”, ask, “Is it a terrible idea if we did X?”

Here are four more prompts:

• “Would it be awful if … ”
• “Could you ever imagine doing … ”
• “Is it ridiculous to suggest … ”
• “Do you find the thought of Y completely ludicrous?”

Use extreme language -- like “awful,” “ridiculous,” and “terrible” -- to show your prospect saying “no” would be reasonable and even anticipated.

These strategies also reveal which negotiations will ultimately go nowhere. If the buyer refuses to say “no,” they're unsure of their priorities, confused, or manipulative. Productive negotiations require honesty on both sides, so walk away from prospects who aren’t transparent.

Test Your “Yeses”

Once you’ve successfully elicited a “no” from your prospect, you may be tempted to accept every “yes” as legitimate. After all, you’ve shown it’s okay to reject your request or say you’re wrong.

But sometimes you need to reinforce this idea. If the buyer says “yes” but sounds skeptical or unsure -- or your instincts tell you he’s holding back -- test his response to make sure it’s true.

To do so, comment on his reluctance, then go silent and wait for his response.

Here’s some sample dialogue:

Salesperson: "I know one of your priorities was insuring the product during transit. Our customers usually cover this cost, but we’re happy to do so in this case. In exchange, are you open to establishing a 5% interest rate per month for any deferred payments?"

Prospect: "Yes, I think we can agree to that. I’ll have to check with my team though."

Salesperson: "You seem a little hesitant."

Prospect: "To be honest, 5% sounds excessively high."

Other ways to phrase your comment include:

• “You said ‘yes,’ but I sense you have some reservations.”
• “You sound unsure.”
• “That’s how I sound when my [five-year-old offers me one of her culinary creations, friend invites me to his performance art show, in-laws ask if I read the book they gave me last year].” (A humorous, self-deprecating reply can work wonders.)

“No” doesn’t have to be the final word in a conversation. On the contrary, it’s an incredibly powerful way to establish trust and transparency. Next time you’re negotiating, don’t avoid “nos” -- seek them out.

These are head-spinning times for those of us who think about the best ways to lead and the most effective ways to compete. What defines acceptable personal behavior (let alone behavior worth emulating) among public officials? Why would executives at so many iconic organizations — Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, FIFA — tolerate behavior so egregious that it threatens the very future of their organizations? How should innovators with a fierce sense of ambition handle the criticisms and objections that inevitably come their way and make sure that confidence does not turn into bombast?

In a world hungry for great leadership, these are just a few of the questions that too many leaders seem incapable of answering. I don’t pretend to have easy answers myself. But I do know that the best leaders I’ve studied — executives and entrepreneurs who have created enduring economic value based on sound human values — recognize and embrace the “obligation to dissent.” Put simply, you can’t be an effective leader in business, politics, or society unless you encourage those around you to speak their minds, to bring attention to hypocrisy and misbehavior, and to be as direct and strong-willed in their evaluations of you as you are in your strategies and plans for them.

I first encountered the term last year, in an intriguing interview with a CEO named Victor Ho, cofounder of a customer loyalty company that has raised more than $100 million in venture funding. Ho talked about his childhood, his college years, and the experiences that shaped his entrepreneurial instincts. He also talked about his stint at McKinsey & Company, the blue-chip consulting firm, and one subversive takeaway. “The strongest lesson I learned at McKinsey that I now share with every new hire is what they call the ‘obligation to dissent,’” he told the New York Times. “It means that the youngest, most junior person in any given meeting is the most capable to disagree with the most senior person in the room.”

What a powerful image. What a contrast to what usually happens in the corridors of power. The obligation to dissent is in fact a hallmark of McKinsey culture, established and enshrined decades ago by Marvin Bower, the legendary head of the world’s most celebrated consulting firm. A biography of Bower describes the first encounter between the larger-than-life leader and Fred Gluck, a former managing director of the firm. Gluck bumped into Bower, who asked how things were going with his maiden assignment at the firm. Gluck answered honestly and told Bower he thought the partners were approaching the engagement all wrong.

The next morning, Gluck found a note asking him to report to Bower’s office. He assumed he would be fired. Instead, he found Bower on the phone with the project leader, discussing Gluck’s critique and agreeing that the newcomer was right. They scrapped the approach, refused to charge the client for the work, and started over. “This obligation to dissent, this was Marvin’s principle,” one senior consultant told the biographer. “It came directly from him….And very few people have the guts to dissent.”

Another McKinsey alum, Robin Richards, chair and CEO of the CareerArc Group, makes it clear how he wants his colleagues to behave. “Don’t have a meeting with your boss where you agree with him on everything he says,” Richards explained. “If you have an obligation to dissent, then we get the best minds and we get the best outcomes. People like living in that environment. They feel valuable. People become fearless.”

Truth be told, very few people have the guts to dissent, very few people become fearless, because very few leaders emphasize and celebrate their obligation to do so. Edgar Schein, professor emeritus at MIT Sloan School of Management and an expert on leadership and culture, has spent decades studying the attributes that define great executives. One of the attributes he highlights time and again is humility — the sort that invites dissent. Sadly, that kind of humility is all too rare.

Schein once asked a group of students what it means to be promoted to the rank of manager. “They said without hesitation, ‘It means I can now tell others what to do.’” That’s precisely the know-it-all style of leadership that has led to so much crisis and disappointment. “Deep down, many of us believe that if you are not winning, you are losing,” Schein warns. The “tacit assumption” among executives “is that life is fundamentally and always a competition.” But humility and ambition, he argues, need not be at odds. Instead, humility in the service of ambition is the most effective and sustainable mindset for leaders who aspire to do big things in a world filled with huge unknowns.

So here’s to humility. Here’s to dissent. And here’s to a more fruitful style of leadership than we’ve seen of late.

Yesterday, I heard the world’s 2nd worst sales pitch: “Can help me out and buy this?”

Of course I didn’t want to “help him out” – there was nothing in it for me!

(The world’s worst sales pitch is, “Want to buy this? I’m trying to get rid of it.”)

Saying “can you help me out” is just about guaranteed to fail. People buy because here’s something in it for THEM. That’s why the old list of “features and benefits” has BENEFITS listed – benefits for the buyer, not for the seller.

Now for the really bad news: YOU have been doing just this – saying “can you help me out and buy this,” without even knowing it!

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: What you say isn’t as important as how you say it.

And guess what – when you cold call, you’re saying all the wrong things, no matter what the words happen to be!

Studies Show that 93% of All Communication is Non-Verbal

At least half of communication is non-verbal. Estimates run from 55% to 93%. That means the words you say only account for half of the real message you’re communicating to prospects. Your other, non-verbal communication consists of obvious things like your body language and voice tone, but there’s another biggie that most people don’t consider: The context in which you deliver your message.

Regardless of the words you use in a cold call, the fact that you’re cold calling in the first place sub-communicates the idea of, “I really need to make a sale,” which is roughly equivalent to, “Want to help me out and buy this?”

In other words, when you make a cold call, what you’re really communicating is that you’re there to TAKE something from them.

The successful salesperson doesn’t TAKE anything. The successful salesperson GIVES VALUE FIRST, before even thinking about trying to “get” anything from the prospect. And in the real world, if you give value first, there is no “taking” at all. The prospect willingly buys from you because they see that there’s something in it for them.

Let me say that again: The ONLY reason people buy is because there’s something in it for them. That’s where the acronym “WIIFM” came from – it stands for “What’s in It For Me?”.

Cold calling removes the WIIFM from the equation and sends a message that you’re there for YOUR benefit, not theirs. They won’t see value, they won’t trust you, and they won’t buy.

No one will ever buy to help you out. They’ll only buy because they see a gain in buying from you. So always strive to give value first. And remember that no matter how much value you can offer a prospect, if your approach is via a typical cold call, the context of your delivery will kill your chances every time.

So stop cold calling, start giving value first, and watch the sales start rolling in!

Learn how you can stop cold calling forever and become a sales rock star by downloading a 37-page PDF preview of the Never Cold Call Again System.

Think about this question for a second: Why does your website exist?

If you said to generate leads, make more sales, or build an audience, you’re in the right place.

Each of those answers is a goal for a successful website, and meeting those goals starts with one thing: collecting names and emails. In this post, I’ll show you the highest converting strategy I’ve found for building a quality email list – the Content Upgrade.

What is a Content Upgrade?

A content upgrade is bonus content directly related to an article on your website. Instead of using the same ebook or email magnet at the end of every post, a content upgrade is created specifically for that piece of content.

The key is relevancy. The more relevant the bonus content is to your post, the higher your opt-in rate will be. Think about it. If you were interested in email marketing and reading a post about it on my blog, would you be more likely to give your email in exchange for an ebook about social media or an ebook about email marketing?

The email marketing ebook (duh!) Why? Because it’s directly related to the blog post and the natural next step to learning more about the topic you’re interested in, email marketing.

Do Content Upgrades Work?

I first learned about content upgrades from Bryan Harris, the owner of Videofruit, and I couldn’t contain my nerdy marketing excitement. I immediately dropped everything and proceeded to make my own content upgrade to see how it worked. The results didn’t disappoint.

Here are a few screenshots of content upgrades I have hosted in LeadPages:

Not bad, right? After seeing the proof for myself, I started using them with clients and got similar results. Now, I’m sharing them with you!

Below are 11 different types of content upgrades you can use to increase your opt-in rate and build your email list FAST. I’ve added an example with each one and the type of post each content upgrade works best with. Let’s dig in!

1. Checklists

Checklists are one of the simplest email magnets to create but also have the highest value. Why? Because they are easily consumable and can deliver high value quickly.

You can create a checklist version of a long post or use a checklist to summarize the steps someone should take after reading your article. For example, your article answers WHY you should do something and your checklist shows HOW to do it. This makes a checklist of perfect content upgrade because it’s the next logical step for people interested in your content.

In my article on using LinkedIn’s advanced search features, I created a checklist to use those when building your personal brand.

Here’s another example of a great checklist email magnet from my friend Will Hoekenga who runs Copygrad. The same thing happens when you click the link, it leads you to an opt-in form to get his free checklist:

2. Ebooks

Ebooks are by far the most common type of email magnet. However, you’ll often see a website use one ebook at the bottom of every post, on the sidebar, and in a pop-up.

Remember the key is relevancy, so if that ebook is on how to use Facebook, but your post is about LinkedIn, chances are your opt-in rate is going to be nil. And you’ll confuse people in the meantime.

Ebooks can be created from a compilation of previously written posts that have a logical order, or you can create a completely new ebook. Here’s an example of an ebook I wrote from scratch to go with my email marketing content.

3. Screencasts & Step-by-Step Tutorials

Video tutorials, or screencasts, are especially helpful for walking people through complex processes, like learning a piece of software. Screencasts are like looking over someone’s shoulder at their computer screen when a step-by-step written tutorial isn’t enough.

Screencasts are easy to create with a tool like Jing or Snagit, and they only require the time it takes you to do the actual task (unlike writing a checklist or ebook.) To create a screencast, simply go through the process step-by-step, talking through it like you are training someone.

Want to see an example? Check out the custom content upgrade I created for this post. I’ve added below. It’s a step-by-step tutorial that walks you through everything you need to create a content upgrade, with screenshots at each step. This ISN’T a screenshot so click the link and download the QuickStart guide!

4. Free Guide

The free guide is the Swiss Army knife of content upgrades. They can contain almost anything on any topic.

Guides work well when used in specific categories of blog content. For example, if you’re AWeber, you have blog categories like:

• Growing your email list
• Email optimization
• Writing email copy, etc..

You could create a guide for each one and use it as a content upgrade for posts that fall into that category. Check out the ‘Growing Your Business with Email Marketing’ content upgrade AWeber uses here:

5. Templates

Templates convert really well because they make it easy to get started on a strategy you’ve laid out in your blog post. Use templates with posts where you can provide an example of executing your strategy.

You can create templates from anything from call scripts to email templates to Keynote slides, like Pat Flynn did below:

6. Formula Spreadsheet

If you’re creating any type of post dealing with numbers, measurements, or calculations, the formula spreadsheet is the perfect content upgrade. They can be created in Excel or Google Sheets and allow readers to have the formula ready so they can make quick calculations. For example, a blog post talking about calculating a mortgage can include a mortgage calculator spreadsheet content upgrade.

Want a free and easy way to create a formula spreadsheets? Check out this list of pre-made templates on Google Drive. You can easily find a template someone already created and customize it to fit your content upgrade. You can see the different types of templates in the screenshot below:

7. List of Best Tools/Resources

If you’re writing a “how to” post or an introduction to a topic, a list of tools to help is a great addition. Providing a list of resources to help readers achieve what you’re writing about also saves them the time of researching it themselves.

Here’s a great example from LeadPages, the awesome software I use to create my content upgrades. They talk about creating eye-catching email opt-ins and then offer a list of icons readers can download for their own opt-ins:

8: Transcript or PDF Version of the Post

If you have a particularly long post, say 2,000+ words, creating a PDF version people can download and read later adds a lot of value. Similarly, if you have a really good podcast or video post you can create a helpful formatted transcript of the content.

Neil Patel is famous for writing super long, in-depth posts daily. He also includes a variety of content upgrades – one of them being a PDF version of the article. Check out his opt-in form below for a PDF version of his 2,200-word post:

9. Behind the Scenes Look

If you’re showing your readers something new, chances are they are going to want to know how you did it. The behind-the-scenes content upgrade is a great way to give readers an inside look at how something is really done. It works great for tutorial posts and case studies.

In your content upgrade, you can provide tools, resources, and strategies that you (or someone else) used to achieve the goal you’ve laid out for your readers. Check out this post by Bryan Harris about a two-step sales funnel. After explaining the funnel, he provides a behind-the-scenes look on how he implements it.

10. Downloadable Worksheet Guide

If your content is action-heavy, a worksheet guide is the perfect way to entice readers to get started. Worksheets can be anything from a list of resources to a quiz, to an advanced, in-depth guide.

In the example below, Jobmob uses a worksheet resource with all their best content and tips to improve your resume.

11. Cheatsheets

Cheatsheets are one of my favorite content upgrades because they’re nothing but actionable strategies. These downloadable email magnets can be used for almost any post and often convert at over 30% for me.

Cheatsheets are great for posts that answer the question WHY? Once you have introduced the topic, explained the benefits of it, and shared case studies of other people doing it, the first thing readers want to do is try it themselves. A cheatsheet gives quick, actionable tips for getting started.

For example, in my most popular cheatsheet, the Business Blogging Toolkit, I include three things: blog post ideas, a publishing checklist, and a blog post promotion checklist. One of the places this content upgrade has worked best is in my article, 11-Step Method for Writing Powerful Blog Posts.

The original content only talks about what to do when writing a post, NOT how to brainstorm content topics beforehand or what to do after you publish. The blogging toolkit fills in those gaps and provides an actionable list readers can follow.

Your turn. What content upgrades work best for your content?

This post was originally published on the Fluxe Digital Marketing blog.

At Base, we consider ourselves pioneers of a ground-breaking new category that takes data analysis to the next level: the Science of Sales. At the core of this category is our belief that sales can and should be accurately measured, scaled and refined in the same way that industries like marketing and support have been for years.

As the technology and methodology to make this happen continues to evolve, we expect a new role to emerge within the sales organization to support this initiative. Enter the Sales Scientist.

What Is a Sales Scientist?

One way to think about the role of a Sales Scientist is as a cross between a Data Scientist and Sales Operations. In addition to having the interdisciplinary knowledge around statistics, machine learning and more required for Data Scientists, Sales Scientists must also have an intimate understanding of sales processes and best practices.

The combination of these attributes enables Sales Scientists like myself to provide sales teams with actionable recommendations that lead to immediate improvements in their sales results. As a Sales Scientist at Base, I’m responsible for learning about our clients’ sales pipelines and examining their data using our big data analysis technology. My team and I then hold Sales Acceleration Labs (SALs) with our clients to share our findings and recommendations.

While my day-to-day activities encompass a host of proprietary formulas, technologies and strategies, there are some tricks of the trade that I can share. Let’s dive into the number one metric that I rely on on a daily basis, the Sales Formula, and then examine the results of one of our SALs.

The Sales Formula

The Sales Formula describes a lead’s journey through a company’s sales pipeline. It provides a consistent and reliable way to measure and evaluate a sales strategy over time across the key conversion points needed to turn a lead into a closed deal. While the formula should be adapted to suit each client’s unique sales pipeline and process, the baseline formula and the definitions for its variables are as follows:

By measuring leads or deals with different dimensions like lead source, company industry, etc. using the Sales Formula, you can isolate the significance of specific factors on your sales performance. This reveals the steps you can take to improve at each stage of the sales pipeline.

For example, you may discover that deals from paid search convert at a high percentage at the beginning of your pipeline, but fall out in the Opportunities Worked stage. In contrast, deals originating from partners convert at a lower percentage early in the pipe, but close at a higher rate.

While additional analysis is required to determine why this is occurring (BDRs over-qualifying leads, lead sources underperforming, AEs struggling to close, etc.), the outcome will result in actionable steps to overcome this challenge.

Let’s take a look at how this type of analysis played out in a real Base customer scenario.

IAWS Sales Acceleration Lab

Iowa Wind & Solar (IAWS) is a turn-key solar installer that offers planning, financing and installations for solar energy solutions in both the commercial and private sectors. As the company grew, Vice President David Birchmier began his search for a way to help his team measure its sales process and uncover actionable insights.

With an organized sales process in place and more than 695,000 data points captured using Base’s All-in-One Sales Platform, IAWS turned to Base’s new scientific sales solution, Apollo, and its team of Sales Scientists. After customizing the Sales Formula to fit IAWS’s pipeline, my team and I went to work analyzing IAWS’s various lead sources and how different reps handled deals from these channels.

This process resulted in a series of insights that enabled David to conduct more strategic lead distribution and better coach his reps as to where to focus their efforts. “Base has been able to tell us which lead sources and competitors we should be going after, and the right reps to take on these deals,” says David.

Become a Sales Scientist

This is just one example of how Sales Science can help businesses uncover actionable insights about their sales. What do you think your company’s Sales Formula looks like? What dimensions mean the most to your business? If you’re interested in discovering the answers to these questions, I recommend you enroll in our Science of Sales eCourse. Happy selling!

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It’s 2017. If your company runs on what I will call “Salesforce Time,” with a January 31st year end, you have another month to go – good luck! If it’s a new fiscal year at your company and you’re a rep, you’re waiting to see which accounts fall in and out of your territory, and are likely ready to fight for key accounts. As a manager kicking off a new year, you’re probably knee deep in spreadsheets carving up territories. If you’re really on your game and reps already have their territories and are off to the races, congratulations! This is a tough feat to pull off.

No matter what, once territories are determined, there’s no time to lose. Benjamin Franklin said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” I love plans: making them, tracking against them, executing on them, changing them, and reflecting on them. But, they can be a lot of work, so it’s worth outlining why we do territory planning.

Why do we do territory planning?

1. Revenue is a lagging indicator, activity is a leading indicator. It can take weeks or months to see the deals you generate make it into the forecast. Sometimes it can seem like nothing is happening. By creating a strategy for hitting quota, including concrete plans for developing relationships and pipeline from a variety of channels, you’ll be able to measure your efforts and see what is effective and ineffective for generating pipeline and closing deals.
2. Leverage your resources. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, so ask for marketing, sales development, product, partners and sales leadership support early and often. Determine where you can connect the dots so that you aren’t wasting time making cold calls. Make the company work for you & make your asks specific: outline accounts, contacts and messages you want delivered.
3. Be held & hold others accountable. Demonstrate to sales leadership and yourself that you have a plan to be successful and show progress against that plan. Make sure you and others are doing what everyone committed to. If you are promised pipeline support, but aren’t getting what you expected, revisit the plan with your manager. Ultimately, as a rep, you are on the hook to deliver on your number and determining expectations early on will make it easier to adjust as things change.

An effective plan will mean increased pipeline, sales effectiveness and deal size by finding & using the information. It will allow you to identify white-space to target new cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Ok, so what’s in a territory plan? If you’ve ever worked at a large or bureaucratic company, you are probably picturing long documents, spreadsheets, green sheets, gold sheets, blue sheets or database fields to fill out. If you’re new to territory planning or your company isn’t providing a formal template, don’t worry, you can build your own and share it internally to demonstrate your leadership and commitment. Either way, it doesn’t have to be complicated. Great territory plans have six parts:

A territory summary.

This is tricky if you have a set of named accounts, but if you are covering a vertical or a region:

• Outline where your prospects are: the major urban areas you’re covering, publications that your prospects read, tradeshows, events and networking groups that are important, etc.
• Determine who your prospects are: number of accounts, key industries or sub-verticals, key trends or insights into your buyers
• List key customers in the territory
• Summarize what the market landscape is like in your territory: key partners, competitors, and analysts or thought leaders

Reflection of past performance.

Dig into the data so you don’t make the same mistakes that were made the previous year and capitalize on things that were successful. Overall, you want to answer the question: how did the territory do last year? By summarizing what you know about the territory including:

• What was the breakdown between upsell/cross-sell and net new customers?
• For existing customers, what white-space exists for you to sell other products?
• What was the average deal size? Product and service mix?
• What types of companies are most likely to buy in your territory?
• Which deals didn’t get done? What are those customers doing now? Could there be a deal to pursue here this year?

Goal Setting

Good goals are SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound:

• Start with pipeline. Conventional wisdom when I started selling is that you needed 3x your quota in pipeline to end up at your number. When I dig into the numbers at a lot of startups, that coverage ratio is often much higher. Also, it’s not just about initial pipeline, you also need to learn about how much coverage you need at each stage.
• Determine your pipeline gap. How much are you missing? Depending on your sales cycle length, you might tackle this 1 or 2 quarters at a time, or you might plan out the whole year.
• Breakdown where you expect the pipeline to come from: marketing, sales development, partners, and self-generated.
• Add additional goals that will make this quarter or year a success like key new logos you want to add, closing one or more deals over $X, developing specific partnerships in your territory or getting promoted.

Account Tiering & Top Account Plans.

Now, let’s further breakdown how you will achieve your pipeline generation goals, beginning with your own pipeline generation efforts. Ideally, your company or your analysis of past territory performance will tell you which types of accounts in your territory are most likely to be a good fit. If not, identifying a few industries, the size of company and likelihood that they are making changes will help you prioritize your accounts.

• Tiering: If you cover 100+ accounts, break your territory into A, B, C and possibly D tiers. These can include current customers with potential for upsell or net new prospects. If you cover just a few accounts, you’ll create account plans for all of your accounts.
• Top Account Plans: For your A accounts, at least the top 5, create a more detailed account plan, for lower tier accounts, give your sales development rep a crack at creating a plan and coach them on the output. The plans should include:
  • Org chart that shows which divisions you are in, who you have relationships with & how strong they are, which relationships you need to develop, who your network has connections with and what executives you want to connect.
  • Current state: Existing strategies that align to your message? Stated initiatives we can capitalize on? Key partners they work with? What competitive solutions do they invest in? Why have/haven’t we been able to sell into them before?
  • Strategy, messages & solutions: What is your strategy for getting into the account/divisions? What messages will you be delivering? Products or solutions you will position?
  • Activity/events plan: What events will you invite the account to? Can you do an internal roadshow? A happy hour? Meet them at a tradeshow? Are you going to be calling your rolodex to make connections and get referred in? Map our your activity cadence with the account.

Plan pipeline generation for other channels

When you broke down the pipeline you needed, you assigned specific amounts to channels like sales development, partners, and marketing. Create a plan for how you will work with each group to generate pipeline and revenue.

• Are there particular accounts in your patch that you want them to target? Which contacts should they go after and what messages should they deliver?
• What events are happening in your territory that you can all work to drive attendance to? What events can you plan with partners, marketing or with a specific client?
• How often will you meet with each counterpart to review progress?
  • Will you agree on specific activity metrics with your sales development rep and partners?
  • Based on past conversion rates, do you know you need to hit a particular number of events or attendees to drive pipeline?

Calendar & Metrics

Map out your quarter. How many calls and events is it going to take to get to your pipeline goals at each stage. Are you going to meet your activity goals? Do you have events planned that you can invite accounts to in addition to your top tier?

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Great. I’ve made my plan. How do I know it is working? Most reps build their plan at the beginning of the year and never look at it again. Don’t be that guy/girl! Schedule time each month or quarter to review your plan and your progress. Create a dashboard for pipeline and make sure that pipeline generation is on the agenda for 1:1s with your manager and in team meetings. Don’t wait till the end of the quarter to panic, by then it is too late.

The post Jumpstarting your Territory in the New Year appeared first on Sales Hacker.

When "Tools of Titans" author and podcaster Tim Ferriss was asked on a book tour pit stop what he would print on a billboard if given the chance, the self-help guru did not hesitate.

"You are the average of the five people you most associate with," Ferriss answered.

During a talk at the San Francisco headquarters of e-book and audiobook subscription service, Scribd, Ferriss shared a piece of advice that was given to him as a teenager. It riffs on a now famous tip from motivational speaker — and early Tony Robbins mentor — Jim Rohn.

The rule suggests that the five people you spend the most time with shape who you are. It borrows from the law of averages, which is the theory that "the result of any given situation will be the average of all outcomes." We might interact with many people, but the few who are closest to us have the greatest impact on our way of thinking and our decisions.

"I was given that advice probably when I was 15 or 16, which has impacted a lot of my decisions since," Ferriss said. "And each year, I think it is more and more important."

In an interview with Business Insider last fall, Ferriss rattled off the names of a few people he cycles into his inner circle. Matt Wullenweg, a lead developer of WordPress, and serial entrepreneur Kevin Rose made the short list. As did Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of "Wired" magazine, who Ferriss also called the "true world's most interesting man."

"Then there are people like Maria Popova, who I've gotten to know," Ferris told Business Insider. "Her ability to consume high quality information and distill it, and then put out beautiful prose gives me something to aspire to."

He topped off his current five with the godfather of self-help and author of "Unlimited Power," Tony Robbins. "The more I get to know him, the more impressed I am," Ferriss said.

On stage at the Scribd office, Ferriss explained that the list is ever-changing, depending on what areas in his life he wants to work on: physical, emotional, psychological, or financial.

"If I feel like I need more work in the physical realm, then I'll modify the group to reflect that," Ferris said. "It's not always the same five."

You can learn more of Ferriss' life hacks in his new book, "Tools of Titans."

SEE ALSO: This tech icon fasts for 16 hours a day — and just launched an app to help others do the same

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Tim Ferriss’s top self-improvement tip stresses the importance of who you surround yourself with

President-elect Donald Trump only had one high-profile supporter in Silicon Valley during the 2016 presidential campaign: Peter Thiel, a PayPal cofounder, Facebook director, and legendary venture investor.

And yet, Thiel is notoriously private, keeping much of his true rationale for supporting Trump to himself, even as he faced steep criticism from his colleagues in the technology community for his role in the election, and more recently, as part of Trump's transition team.

Now, in a must-read new interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Thiel speaks candidly and clearly about how he views the world, nine days out from Trump's inauguration. The entire interview is well worth your time, as a look inside the mind of Trump's biggest advocate in Silicon Valley, but here are the 7 most revealing sentences:

• On reconciling being gay with the perception that Trump's administration will pursue an anti-LGBT agenda: “You know, maybe I should be worried but I’m not that worried about it,” Thiel tells the Times. “I don’t know. People know too many gay people. There are just all these ways I think stuff has just shifted. For speaking at the Republican convention, I got attacked way more by liberal gay people than by conservative Christian people.
  
• On the concerns that Trump might provoke a war with his Twitter account: “A Twitter war is not a real war."
• On the infamously vulgar Billy Bush tape: “On the one hand, the tape was clearly offensive and inappropriate. At the same time, I worry there’s a part of Silicon Valley that is hyper-politically correct about sex. One of my friends has a theory that the rest of the country tolerates Silicon Valley because people there just don’t have that much sex. They’re not having that much fun.”
  
• On whether Russia is behind the hacks on the Democratic National Committee: “There’s a strong circumstantial case that Russia did this thing. On the other hand, I was totally convinced that there were W.M.D.s in Iraq in 2002, 2003.”
• On Twitter's role in the election: “I think the crazy thing is, at a place like Twitter, they were all working for Trump this whole year even though they thought they were working for Sanders.”
  
• On Hillary Clinton's weakness: "“If you’re too optimistic, it sounds like you’re out of touch,” Thiel tells Dowd. “The Republicans needed a far more pessimistic candidate. Somehow, what was unusual about Trump is, he was very pessimistic but it still had an energizing aspect to it.”
• On whether or not he'll regret his role in Trump's election: “I always have very low expectations, so I’m rarely disappointed,” he says.

Read the full New York Times interview here>>

SEE ALSO: The hidden symbolism in how tech leaders were seated in their meeting with Trump

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Airplane designers have a brilliant idea for the middle seat

One of the biggest challenges of any industry is explaining complex ideas in a way outsiders can understand. Whether a startup is trying to lure investors with a business plan or a department is trying to train other teams on their processes, specialized concepts can get complex and frustrate both the teacher and learner. To prevent this, more people are adding visual aids and graphics to their complex thoughts to break apart their instructions and make them more memorable. Check out these five ways to include them in your next presentation or article.

Images Break Up Text to Aid Comprehension

Image via CopyPress

When audiences are trying to understand complex subjects, it helps to give their brains a break. Long paragraphs of text can lose people, and readers can start skimming and miss important information. To prevent this, add visuals that emphasize the issue or allow readers to take a break.

Think about this next time you’re reading an in-depth article. Your brain relaxes when you look at an image, allowing you to process what you just read. If the image correlates directly with the text, it creates an emotional connection with the data, helping you remember. For example, an image of a homeless teen elicits sadness in an otherwise detailed article about poverty statistics.

Charts and Graphs Help Visual Learners

Everyone learns differently. Some people are visual learners while others prefer to hear or do something to facilitate learning. Some people prefer to read detailed instructions while others enjoy visuals. By utilizing graphics in your instructions, you reduce the risk of miscommunication by tapping into two learning styles.

You don’t have to stop with static graphics. Using videos or interactive media to emphasize your point or educate your audience is an excellent way to increase your results. For instance, introductory or explainer videos can be useful for innovative companies that want audiences to quickly and easily understand the brand’s value proposition.

Graphics Provide Context to Data

Image via Flickr by dougbelshaw

There are some data points that readers can’t comprehend, like large sums of money or distance. In this case, people often use interesting infographics that add perspective and give audiences something to compare them to. One of the most popular visuals is the number of water bottles used each year wrapped around the world. While our brains can’t comprehend the magnitude of billions of water bottles, we can understand how important it is that they can line up around the world several times.

Not only does this provide context, it also adds interest and creates a unique comparison—which also helps with memory.

Images Build Brand Identity

Logos are not the only graphic that companies can use to build their brand. With a growing emphasize on visual content for social platforms, it’s never been more important to have a strong marketing strategy using visual content. Establish an image style for your brand and make sure you are consistent across all communication channels. By pairing your brand with all images that you share, you’ll be able to communicate your message and grow your brand identity.

Images Stay in Your Long-Term Memory

While text stays in your short-term memory—and is more likely to be forgotten after a few hours—images stay in your long-term memory. If you can pair your complex ideas with images, you should be able to remember the concept long after you would if you had just read about it. Furthermore, images travel to the brain faster, so you can understand the message and then move on to learn something else.

This is why professors lecture with slide projectors and images that emphasize their point. They’re able to cover all of the information they need to during the class, and the slides help students remember.

Visuals are a great way to break down complex thoughts to teach them to others and can be applied to almost any idea to make it more understandable.

Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Chinese Internet search giant Baidu and co-inventor of the Google Brain, believes there are other, more immediate risks concerning AI that aren’t getting enough attention. “I think that the conversation is distracting governments and society from the real ethical issues facing AI,” Ng tells TIME. “And we shouldn’t whitewash these issues by talking about things that could be hundreds of years away.”

Highlights
* Andrew Ng (Baidu AI) thinks AI will have big impact on jobs
* Ng thinks 2017 will be year of the conversational computer
* Economist Hanson and other studies from McKinsey suggest the impact on jobs could be a lot less
* Attempts are made to compare the impact of AI to prior innovations (electricity, internet, combustion engine)
* If AI were going to displace 47% of jobs by 2035 then it needs to impact about ten times more than all driving jobs
* there should be a study and building stream of really huge successes and huge companies
* it seems like it would need to be ten times more than the dot.com boom

The Google Brain is the search giant’s research arm working on machine learning, natural language understanding, and other technologies that power many of Google’s products. Ng now oversees Baidu’s growing Silicon Valley AI research lab.

Between smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and the proliferation of chatbots on platforms like Facebook Messenger, tech companies are increasingly working to make computers better able to hold natural conversations with users. “I think 2017 will be the year of the conversational computer,” Ng said. “We’re seeing very strong data that this is coming.”

Ng believes that the key to unlocking a voice-controlled computing future is creating a software platform that will run across devices, similar to how Android powers lots of different gadgets today. “It won’t be one hardware device, it will be multiple hardware devices in multiple form factors.” Baidu has its own voice-friendly software called DuerOS which can answer questions and connect with third-party services in China.

Ng believes there are three areas that we should be worried about today: AI’s impact on human workers, information sharing among AI researchers, and honesty in AI software.

“Job displacement is so huge I’m tempted to not talk about anything other than that,” said Ng. “But I believe in honesty in AI.”

Ng shared an example: If a ride-sharing startup or food takeout service is using artificial intelligence to make predictions about delivery and arrival times, that AI tool should provide the most accurate estimate possible.

Openness is also critical, Ng believes. Artificial intelligence researchers often publish findings in academic papers to foster growth in the field. But hiding technical details in such reports “goes against the spirit of openness,” according to Ng. “If you want to publish data, you should do it to share knowledge,” he said. “You don’t have to share everything, but if you don’t want to share something there are different ways to talk other than [through] the academic publishing system.”

But the long-term impacts of AI will reach far beyond just the technology industry. IBM’s Watson platform is already changing the way doctors diagnose disease, for instance.

“We’re making this analogy that AI is the new electricity,” Ng said. “Electricity transformed industries: agriculture, transportation, communication, manufacturing. I think we are now in that phase where AI technology has advanced to the point where we see a clear path for it to transform multiple industries.” Specifically, Ng sees AI being particularly influential in entertainment, retail, and logistics.

Economist Robin Hanson considers the potential of Deep learning and the last Artificial Intellience to have an overwhelming impact on the world economy. He considers the 2013 prediction that about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk .. to computerisation .. perhaps over the next decade or two.

If AI could induce a change that big then they would be creating a value that is a substantial fraction of the world economy, and so consume a similar fraction of world income. It would in a short time become vastly larger than it is today. We should see an awe-inspiring rate of success within that activity. The application of these new methods should be enabling huge new revenue streams, across a very wide range of possible application areas. Stock values would spike far more than we have seen.

In 2011, McKinsey estimated that the Internet accounted for 21 percent of the GDP growth in mature economies over the past 5 years (2005-2010).

While large enterprises and national economies have reaped major benefits from this technological revolution, individual consumers and small, upstart entrepreneurs have been some of the greatest beneficiaries from the Internet’s empowering influence. If Internet were a sector, it would have a greater weight in GDP than agriculture or utilities.

And yet we are still in the early stages of the transformations the Internet will unleash and the opportunities it will foster. Many more technological innovations and enabling capabilities such as payments platforms are likely to emerge, while the ability to connect many more people and things and engage them more deeply will continue to expand exponentially.

In 2015, HBR looked at the internets economic impact


The technologies of the past had massive new job creation effects that swamped displacement effects. The Internet on the other hand has massive displacement effects that are overwhelming the job creation effects. In the past, new technological achievements created new industries that not only absorbed the displaced workers but generated opportunities for many more. The result was a vibrant middle class.

Consider the integrated circuit, which first appeared on the market in 1961. At that time, the worldwide electronics market was $29 billion. Today it is on the order of $1.5 trillion. The integrated circuit made existing products better. For example, vacuum tube mainframe computers were replaced by computers based on integrated circuits. The new machines were less expensive, far faster, more reliable, substantially smaller, and much more energy efficient. As a result the mainframe computer business expanded rapidly. IBM’s revenue increased from less than $2 billion in 1960 to over $26 billion in 1980. The integrated circuit also spawned new industries and applications that never existed before — cellular communications, PCs, tablets, and the Internet of Things.

The story of the internal combustion engine is even more dramatic. Not only did it create the automotive industry, but Henry Ford shocked the industrial world when he doubled the pay of assembly line workers to $5 a day. Ford reasoned that a higher-paid workforce would be able to buy more cars and thus would grow his business. Others followed suit. Ford’s action helped to create the middle class.

The Internet has made shopping more efficient and created more competition that has driven down consumer prices. But it has had little or no effect on per capita sales. Monthly retail sales adjusted for both inflation and population growth are below where they were prior to the 2008 recession — $165 versus $168 billion — and have increased by less than 10% in the last 15 years or about 0.6% per year. Meanwhile, employment in the retail and wholesale trade has dropped from about 21.2 million in 2000 to 19.9 million in 2010.

The reason Google, Facebook, and Twitter can pay them such large salaries is that the Internet companies are so efficient they can generate high revenues with few employees.

In 2013, Google had around 50,000 employees and generated revenues of around $55 billion in sales, or about $1.0 million per employee. The numbers are similar for Facebook. Amazon was running at a $74 billion revenue rate and had around 110,000 employees, or a little over $670,000 in sales per employee.

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As an Administrator and one of the founding team members of the Business Support Center for Entrepreneurship and Small Business at Delaware Valley University, I can attest to the value of such a program and the experience has provided an extraordinary amount of value to each of the members as well as myself as an entrepreneur.

What is a Business Incubator or Support Center?

A business incubator can be described as an organization that is established to nurture new or young startups in its early months or years and a business support center can serve the same purpose and is often aimed at aiding existing businesses. Let’s consider some ways in which business incubators and support centers are able to aid businesses and help them to grow.

Resources

Many business incubators and support centers offer a variety of amenities including work space, meeting rooms and offices, internet, printing facilities, technical support, exclusive partnership services, opportunities for funding, networking events, seminars and more!

Similar to a program that the Central Bucks Chamber of Commerce has implemented, many business incubators or support centers offer entrepreneurial assistance programs where experts consult with resident members on areas of interest or concerns in their business (ex. Business planning, marketing, management, legal). Oftentimes these consultations are included in the general membership dues. Memberships to business incubators and support centers are designed with startups and small businesses in mind so most modern day facilities are affordable.

Connections

Even though most entrepreneurs constantly work with people through their businesses, entrepreneurship can be lonely and many entrepreneurs are misunderstood by the people around them. Working with a business incubator or support center will allow an entrepreneur to work with a diverse set of similarly-minded entrepreneurs. This will help to decrease their isolation and increase their confidence when speaking with other people about their business as well as create meaningful connections. As these meaningful connections are produced, they will come with a layer of accountability as each member will look to work alongside each other to build their businesses.

In addition, since some business incubators or support centers are managed by Universities or Colleges, they provide a talent pool of young professionals eager to gain relevant work experience through job shadows, internships or positions. This is ideal for young companies looking to scale and expand their team with young talent.

Productivity

Every entrepreneur is concerned about productivity and efficiency. Business Incubators are organized in a way in which entrepreneurs can maximize their valuable time so that it can be spent on their building their business. The collaborative nature of many incubators with shared workspaces have helped many entrepreneurs by providing opportunities for them to work closely with other businesses and benefit from their creativity. Shared workspaces will continue to rise as the freelance economy continues to grow. In fact, the number of coworking spaces in 2016 has seen a growth of 700% since 2005 according to the NAIOP Research Foundation.

Since many entrepreneurs work on their businesses at their home, they lose a sense of work/life balance. Working at home can also be distracting as it can become easy to start working on unrelated tasks. Working at an incubator provides an entrepreneur with a work-oriented atmosphere.

Time & Money

Regarding the return on investment with an incubator program, it is quite clear that leveraging their resources, connections and member benefits are cost-effective. In comparison to renting a physical office, members benefit from not having to spend the time seeking out individual suppliers for utilities, office supplies and maintenance. As previously mentioned, membership rates for incubators are generally ideally priced for entrepreneurs on a budget.

In conclusion, with the changing landscape of the work world, it would be wise to consider commercializing your idea by leveraging the support and resources provided by a business incubator or support center.

To view the original article, click here.

Author: Chandar Pattabhiram

Marketers are the first to feel the pressure of emerging technology. It comes from all sides; from competitors, as new tools come to market, are adopted, and become essential for effective strategies; and from customers, as individuals and businesses show preferences for new channels and methods of communication.

As the number of channels grows, the potential touchpoints through which marketers can engage customers and understand their behaviors is rapidly expanding. Formally, we refer to it as “proliferation,” but I think of it as a blizzard.

Yes, a blizzard of data that marketers need to sift through to determine what matters and what doesn’t. The ones that matter I think of as the “beacons in the blizzard.”

To learn more about how marketers and their customers are approaching emerging technology and this subsequent blizzard, Marketo surveyed members of the Marketing Nation and non-Marketo users from around the world on their priorities for 2017. We broke down the data by region. Thankfully, everyone is excited about the potential for new touchpoints, but marketers in the United States shared different priorities from their counterparts in Australia, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Typically, American marketers adopt new technology categories faster than their global counterparts. However, while U.S. teams are more focused on figuring out the “why’s” behind customer behavior, European marketers in particular are usually ahead of the curve in adopting “cool” technology. This may account for some of the disparities that we see below.

Among the findings:

• 57% of all respondents in the U.S. believe predictive analytics will be the primary technology they leverage in order to best engage with their customers, compared to only 11% of international marketers.
• 50% of U.S. marketers believe their customers will be utilizing machine learning next year, while only a quarter of international marketers believe their customers will be using machine learning.
• As marketers continue to prove demonstrable value and ROI, they cite reporting and analytics as a critical need, with 37% of everyone surveyed listing it as a top priority; interestingly, however, U.S. marketers feel more strongly about this need than their international counterparts (42% vs. 34%).
• 31% of international marketers believe IoT would be the primary channel for interacting with customers in 2017, while only 16% of U.S. marketers believe the same.
• 37% of all marketers feel better reporting and analytics to make sense of all the data is the key to successfully maintaining customer relationships, while 33% say they require a platform to keep up with the speed and volume of interactions.
• American marketers are more pessimistic about the impact of new touchpoints on their engagement with customers, with only 48% saying they are excited compared to 62% of marketers around the world.
• More than a quarter (26%) of U.S. respondents feel they don’t have a handle on existing touch points, juxtaposed with only 14% of international marketers reporting the same concern.

So yes, it is a blizzard, but it’s one that’s full of opportunity, not only to weather the storm but to find and capitalize on those beacons. And don’t let the disparities between U.S. and international marketers concern you, even if your team spans multiple continents. The channels of communication and technology means may vary, but it is important to keep yourself laser-focused on the ultimate goal: winning the battle for the hearts and minds of your customers.

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7 Things That Illustrate What Marketers Think About the Future of Technology was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post 7 Things That Illustrate What Marketers Think About the Future of Technology appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Lasting businesses are built on customer retention. But today, consumers are more connected, distracted, and informed than ever before. So the margin for error for crafting long-term customer relationships is razor-thin. Want evidence? Consider these stats from new research:

• 65% of consumers expect companies to interact with them in real time.
• 7 in 10 consumers say technology has made it easier than ever for them to take their business elsewhere.
• Only 15% of companies have advanced analytics, processes, and tools to engage in a digital economy.

On the other hand, a 5% increase in customer retention can impact profits by 25-95%. Maintaining customer loyalty isn’t a cake walk. But it’s necessary if you want to create a long-term customer fan base who buys from you repeatedly, tells their friends and colleagues about you, and saves you tons of money and effort in customer acquisition.

Creating that kind of deep customer loyalty requires practice and skill, so we talked to the customer loyalty expert for details on how it’s done. On this week’s episode of the Marketing Cloudcast  —  the marketing podcast from Salesforce  —  Joel and I interview Noah Fleming, President at Fleming Consulting and author of the new book The Customer Loyalty Loop: The Science Behind Creating Great Experiences and Lasting Impressions. We asked Noah to share his proven, science-backed strategies for dramatic customer loyalty increases.

If you’re not yet a subscriber, check out the Marketing Cloudcast on iTunes, Google Play Music, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Take a listen here:

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are four tips straight from Noah to start increasing customer loyalty now and maintain it for the long haul.

1. Make customer loyalty core to your marketing strategy.

Noah says too many marketing departments are focused on the latest and greatest customer acquisition strategies instead of truly building customer loyalty efforts into their programs. Customer loyalty shouldn’t just be a goal for the service team. Marketers need to get involved, too. He advises, “It’s about really understanding how you keep a customer and how you maximize the value of that customer.”

“We’re finally realizing that the customer experience does not start once you have a customer. In fact, the customer is experiencing long before they decide to do business with you and long after they do business with you,” he explains.

Noah says that’s the whole gist of the customer loyalty loop, the concept on which this new book is based. “Every time the customer is engaged — whether it’s through an advertisement, marketing, or a tweet — the customer is having an experience, and there’s an impact happening in the customer’s mind.”

2. Start thinking like a movie director and plan for the ending.

“Typically people remember the beginning of an experience and the ending of an experience,” Noah shares. “When a customer sees your branding and marketing, they’re already creating a movie in their head about what the experience is to come. We call this anticipated memories.”

However, when the experience doesn’t live up to a customer’s expectations, an anticipation gap occurs. This is common when overzealous sales and marketing teams are solely focused on getting new customers in the door.

Noah says companies need to ask, “How does the experience end, and how will that influence whether the customer will be willing to do business with us again?”

3. Check in with customers about their experience and use their stories.

You may have heard that it’s five times less expensive to keep an existing customer than to get a new one. However, as Noah points out, “This is bad advice because they never tell us how to make that existing customer five times more valuable.”

Customer value comes in many different forms — the most obvious being direct revenue to your company, but word of mouth, referrals, and customer success stories are also highly valuable. Noah says, “Referrals and testimonials carry great value. Getting a case study from a customer carries great value.”

So don’t focus on how you can grow your customer base to a massive, and possibly unsustainable, size. Focus instead on reaching out to your customers and genuinely asking how their customer experience is shaping up. For those who are thrilled with their investment in your products and services, maybe it’s time to use their experience as part of a word-of-mouth marketing effort, or simply ask if they’d review you on TripAdvisor, Yelp, G2Crowd, or wherever your audience reads reviews online.

4. Use the four stages of the Customer Loyalty Loop.

According to Noah, marketers need to think creatively about customer loyalty in terms of these four stages:

• Imagination before persuasion
• Conversion not coercion
• Experience choreography
• Happily ever after

When it comes to the early parts of the customer relationship, if you’re dependent on the laws of persuasion, you might get the first sale but not the second or third. Noah suggests, “There are other laws of persuasion that we need to pay attention to. That’s removing resistance and reducing friction in the buying process.”

Once you have the customer, it all comes down to “delivering those remarkable moments and impactful memories that stick and make them want to come back again.” The easiest way to accomplish this? “Deliver on your expectations. Just be good throughout the entire experience. That’s incredibly impactful,” he says.

In the final stage, Noah urges companies to ask, “What is the most appropriate thing to be asking for at this stage? Most of the time it’s not a sale. You need to work on building that relationship so you can take that customer to happily ever after.”

In this podcast episode, Noah Fleming (@noahfleming) shared much more insight on customer loyalty tactics that you can use throughout 2017 to grow customer evangelists. Get the complete scoop on the Customer Loyalty Loop in this episode of the Marketing Cloudcast.

Join the thousands of smart marketers who already subscribe on iTunes, Google Play Music, and Stitcher.

New to podcast subscriptions in iTunes? Search for “Marketing Cloudcast” in the iTunes Store and hit Subscribe, as shown below.

Tweet @youngheike with marketing questions or topics you’d like to see covered next on the Marketing Cloudcast.

For its first couple of years in operation, LinkedIn struggled to measure up to the performance of other social networking sites, especially Facebook and Twitter, to be a source of traffic generation for users. That has changed over the past few years, however.

It’s become possible to leverage significant LinkedIn traffic and convert it into blog traffic if you know what you’re doing. Here’s how.

Five Tips for Maximizing LinkedIn Traffic

LinkedIn has managed to attain steady and substantial growth over the past few years, which has empowered it to become one of the more influential social media platforms around. This is especially true for brands in the B2B industries, where LinkedIn truly thrives.

In any case, whether you’re a small firm or large organization, any of the following tips should enable you to maximize your LinkedIn traffic.

Complete Your Profile

It starts with your LinkedIn profile. If you don’t have a strong one, then your brand will appear weak or disengaged. So before you do anything else, complete your profile and take advantage of this valuable real estate. Start by making sure your profile name precisely matches your company name. You don’t want any discrepancies here, or you’ll confuse your potential customers and make your profile more difficult to locate. Other elements you want to make sure are present include a rich description, a high-resolution image, and relevant details about your employees and career opportunities.

Share Content

Your profile alone isn’t going to be enough to attract customers and generate buzz. If you want to give people reasons to check out your profile, never mind follow your account, you’ll need to add value. The quickest and easiest way to do that is by sharing relevant content. For an example of what good sharing tactics look like, check out Park West Gallery’s page. Driving traffic back to your website or blog is the goal, so share some of your content from these destinations. LinkedIn will display the title, a description, and a thumbnail image. Also, note that you needn’t share only your own content. In fact, it’s in your interest to do more. Follow the 70-20-10 Rule and balance what you share.

 

How to Get Massive Traffic from LinkedIn Groups

 

Publish on LinkedIn

In addition to sharing posts from other sites, LinkedIn has its own publishing platform that lets you create and publish new content straight to the site. You’ll be able to generate new links and drive traffic to your page … which ultimately enhances your brand’s image).

Here’s an example of what an article published on LinkedIn looks like.

Join Groups

There are thousands of groups on LinkedIn. The vast majority of LinkedIn users belong to at least one of them. The wonderful thing about these groups is that they make LinkedIn seem smaller. Instead of being one among millions of users, by joining a group you can become one of a few dozen or hundred. This will enable your brand to forge meaningful connections with potential partners and customers.

Grow Your Network

Remember that LinkedIn is a networking platform. Although you’ll likely connect with a few clients and customers, the goal is to grow your brand and forge promising business connections with other leaders, business owners, and experts within and outside of your field.

Don’t get so caught up in the details that you miss the big picture. As a rule of thumb, make it a point to respond to every message you receive. The more engaged and responsive you are, the more you’ll get out of LinkedIn.

Make LinkedIn an Asset

You would be smart to make LinkedIn a traffic asset for your company now rather than later. Even if you don’t currently spend a lot of time on the networking platform, if you build a strong foundation right now, it should provide you with opportunities to grow in the future.

As 2016 comes to a close, it is already time to start thinking about and preparing for a new year, new business goals, and new sales targets. Despite the hustle and bustle of the season, now is when you should reflect on the year past, refocus, and prepare for the busy year ahead. And while resolutions are typically made with regards to personal and lifestyle goals, they are just as applicable in the workplace to motivate and encourage performance throughout the upcoming quarters.

Consider these seven new year’s resolutions to set yourself up for sales success in 2017!

I Resolve to … Leverage the Sales Stack

Using the right technology in your sales process can sometimes make or break a deal. A sales enablement tool, for example, helps reps to be more productive, efficient, and effective by using predictive analytics and data science to recommend proven, winning content that adds value to the sales conversation and advances prospects.

Even though you are probably not in the position to personally build the sales stack, individual sales reps are often chosen to beta test and offer their opinions about new sales tech. After all, the organization will not be able to see ROI unless reps incorporate the tooling into their workflow. Change can be hard, but your sales stack was chosen to streamline your sales process, to help you stay organized, and to drive productivity. Work with your sales coach to ensure that new sales technology fits seamlessly into your existing processes and be sure to provide any relevant feedback.

I Resolve to … Collaborate with Peers

Collaboration gives sales reps the opportunity to learn from the successes and failures of their peers and leverage the best practices of others. Everybody in the company has something to say and undoubtedly has some value to contribute. By working with each other instead of against each other, the organization as a whole can benefit from smarter, more effective sales processes.

I Resolve to … Close the Gap

Marketing and sales alignment has plagued B2B organizations for years. To this day, it remains one of the top challenges companies face, but alignment is more important now than ever before as prospects increasingly demand content. Unfortunately, this failure to align costs B2B companies lost opportunities, deals, and revenue. Not to mention the fact that many of you are still wasting 30% of your day on average looking for or creating your own content, despite marketing’s resource investment in developing content that drives prospects through the sales funnel.

Make the effort to communicate more effectively with your marketing counterparts in order to satisfy the needs of buyers. With a ‘shareconomy’ of knowledge, sales and marketing share content, goals, and feedback. For example, you talk to prospects and customers on a daily basis; with awareness of their pain points, challenges, and needs, marketing can create relevant, effective content.

I Resolve to … Adopt a Customers-First Attitude

Customer experience has long been a priority for B2B companies, but it hasn’t been a focus for B2B organizations until more recently. A customer-centric mindset represents a shift from focusing on the sales reps’ needs to focusing on the customers’ needs, fundamentally changing the game for reps who rely on one-size-fits-all pitches to sell.

To execute a customer-centric strategy, reps must proactively build trusting customer relationships with the goal of solving the buyer’s problem. First, identify the prospect’s pain point or challenge and then be sure to add value to every engagement. Depending on their stage in the purchase process, this value could be in the form of content such as research reports, product information and data sheets, case studies, or even ROI calculators.

I Resolve to … Get More Social

A recent Hubspot report identified social selling as a top sales priority for 2017. So if you aren’t already, expect to get much more social in the new year. Your buyers are already researching solutions and engaging with providers on social media, making it that much more critical that you are present and part of the conversation.

Social selling is key in staying top-of-mind with prospects, and social media can be used in every stage of the sales process, from networking and prospecting to customer service. With easy-to-access insights about prospects such as demographics, top challenges, topics they’re interested in, what’s happening at their company, and what’s going on in their industry, sales reps can engage more intelligently with buyers and effectively drive meaningful conversations.

I Resolve to … Be More Productive

The start of a new year is the perfect time to re-evaluate your sales processes and look for areas to improve. Are your prior productivity efforts still effective? Are there areas where you could make changes in the workflow? Is there tooling that could automate more mundane or repetitive tasks so that you can dedicate more time back to core selling?

All of your productivity measures should relate directly to your personal sales goals, as well as organizational goals. As such, every decision that you make should add value to your day and contribute to hitting those key objectives.

I Resolve to … Use Data in Decision-Making

Data has become a powerful tool for the modern sales rep, and one that you can’t afford to ignore. Data-driven sales strategies have been proven to decrease costs, increase productivity, optimize effectiveness, and boost revenue. Make a point to identify appropriate and relevant KPIs, to collect and analyze this information regularly, and to use the resulting insights to effectively guide your sales strategies. Consider different ways to leverage that information that will support organizational goals and guide your sales process.

Regularly reflect on how this data can be used to your advantage. For example, which factors advance deals throughout the sales cycle? What works and what doesn’t, why or why not? What talking points are most effective? What content generates the highest ROI?

These resolutions are just the tip of the iceberg. What resolutions do you think will help you see greater sales success in 2017?

Stories like Indiana Jones, The Goonies and Sherlock Holmes have all taught us a very important (and sometimes frustrating) life lesson: If you want to find the artifact/treasure/bad guy, you have to crack the code!

Even with all of the information available to us as marketers today, there is still so much mystery surrounding the “perfect” combination for content marketing success. Additionally, thousands of variables and quickly evolving customer habits add complexity to content planning and execution.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret. I can help you crack the code to building influence with content marketing! How? There are three essential steps to building influence with content and this post contains a “map” of each element. While the exact code might be slightly different from one company to the next, these steps can help you identify the key elements you need to deploy a successful and impactful content program.

Identify Audience Needs

The sheer number of options available today have enabled consumers to become much more selective about which brands they interact with online. There is another cause and effect to this influx of options: consumers are overwhelmed.

To truly capture and keep the attention of current or potential customers, brands must identify who their customers are, what they care about and who influences them. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to attract and engage different members of your audience. Preferences will vary on everything from content types to topics and goals.

Who Are Your Best Customers?

To better reach these different audience members, focus on identifying key traits of your current ideal customers. Once you’ve uncovered that information, you can develop customer profiles or personas which can serve as a guide for your content strategy.

3 Ways to Uncover What Customers Care About

Access to your customers will vary greatly based on your industry and offerings. Three simple ways to uncover customer needs include:

1. Asking Customers Directly: surveys, social polls, customer calls
2. Review Analytics: content types, key phrases
3. Keyword Research: uncover top questions customers are asking online

Circle of Influence

The last piece to identifying audience needs is developing an understanding of who influences them. For example, if your target profile is a Director of Marketing, you will want to research the different types of people that influence their decisions. Below is an example of how this might look:

Including influencers in your content provides a great opportunity to maximize exposure and build credibility. The information that you uncover about who influences your audience can be used to determine which influencers will have the most impact on your audience.

Develop Content Based on Identified Needs

Once you’ve developed customer profiles, you can begin planning the details of your content creation. For each profile, it’s important to create content that meets the needs of every stage in the buying cycle. By following an attract, engage, convert model, you can ensure that you have content for that customer at every stage.

When building a model to optimize across the sales cycle be sure to include:

• The channel that the content will publish on.
• What keywords/phrases will be incorporated into the content.
• Which devices the content should be optimized for.
• Content topics that map to the different stages.

Test Different Content Types

Different segments of your audience will have specific preferences on the types of content that they want to engage with. Even with little resources and budget, it’s important to test different content types to appeal to your audience.

TopRank Marketing has published a list of 30 different content marketing tactics that includes definitions, pros/cons as well as some great examples from other brands to get you started.

Create A Content Brief

Every larger piece of content (eBooks, white papers, research reports) should include a project brief. A detailed brief will serve as a guide for the project and help ensure that your team stays aligned with the objective of the content.

Your brief should include things like:

• Identifying who the content is for.
• Detailing the problem that this content solves for the reader.
• A clear directive of what the reader should do next.
• Goals and details of how success will be measured.

Maximize Content Impact

At the end of the day, we need to be intensely focused on developing, publishing and promoting content that has a maximum impact on our audience and on our marketing goals. The difference between good and great content can be summarized by a few different characteristics.

Incorporate Storytelling Into Content

Stories help create a connection between the content and the reader. While it may take some extra effort, adding a storytelling element to your content has many benefits including:

• Creating a shared experience.
• Helping readers develop an emotional connection to the message.
• Differentiating you from your competitors.
• Assigning meaning to the content.

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Additionally, a great story is very sharable which can help increase the exposure of your content. Sometimes the simple addition of a widely recognized metaphor can be just the extra boost that your content needs to make it more interesting and enticing for your audience.

Content Should Be Visual

Compelling visuals alongside great storytelling makes for a killer content combination! Because of the amount of information available, consumers eyes can quickly begin to glaze over when they’re faced with a wall of endless content.

Be sure to include creative visuals that compliment different types of content. Below is an example of a blog post that included “horror stories” from top content experts. Based on the experiences that they shared, our team was able to develop a series of horror movie “posters” to compliment the content.

Content Amplification

Every piece of content should have an amplification plan to maximize impact. Some best practices for content amplification include:

• Develop compelling visuals to encourage social share.
• Create unique messaging for each social platform.
• Encourage employees to amplify your content.
• If you worked with influencers, develop messages for them to share.

Take These Steps to Build Influence with Content

Truly cracking the code takes time, testing and iterations of your approach. However, you can use the three steps above to build a solid foundation that will speak to the needs of your audience, solve their pain points and maximize content efforts.

If you’re interested in learning more about how TopRank Marketing can help you build influence with your audience through content marketing, contact us today for a consultation!

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The B2B sales experience is disappointing to 81% of executive buyers. Only 19% of executives rate their time spent with sellers as “high value,” according to research from Forrester. That’s alarming.

The low value perception is the reason buyers to shun sellers. The expectation that the B2B sales experience will be unpleasant, time-wasting and disrespectful causes buyers to start the buying process without involving a seller.

Unfortunately, buyers who proceed without sellers often misunderstand product features, service and brand differentiation, and value. That’s why they commoditize similar offerings and focus primarily on price when they finally do take a meeting with a seller.

It’s why so few sales advance or even get opened. It’s why buyers want sellers to change their behaviors. Buyer want sellers to behave more like leaders and less like sellers.

In last week’s CONNECT2Sell Blog post, we presented the research with B2B buyers that explains why it’s so important to Stop Selling & Start Leading® if you want to advance the sale. This continuation of that post explains how to do this so the B2B sales experience leads your buyer from open to close.

Enhance the B2B Sales Experience by Managing the Experience

Every touch point with a buyer impacts the overall customer experience. The total experience should be seamless and consistent. When sellers engage, what a customer saw online should match what a seller describes, for example.

Typically, the seller is held accountable for the customer experience. However, sellers often don’t understand the inner workings of the other departments that interact with buyers. Billing, shipping, service, QA, marketing. tech support, service lines and even production can influence the overall customer experience. If a seller is not managing the interactions and/or does not have the business acumen to understand and explain what’s happening, buyers may feel let down.

To enhance the B2B sales experience and customer experience:

• Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes. Walk through the entire buying and fulfillment process so you know what your buyer will experience.
• Spend time in the departments that interact with your customers. Learn what they need from you in order to deliver on time and as expected
• Take charge (or hand the account off to someone who will). Manage the account and the experience before, during and after the close.
• DWYSYWD. Do What You Say You Will Do. Keep your promises. This is one of buyers’ chief complaints in our research study with 530 B2B buyers.
• Anticipate your buyers’ needs. Be proactive in troubleshooting and preventing issues from arising. Respond quickly when they do.

Enhance the B2B Sales Experience by Involving the Buyer

This is a surprising find. Of all the behaviors we asked buyers about, the ones most preferred related to buyer enablement. That’s not something we talk often about in sales. Maybe it should be.

Instead, we spend far too much time on sales enablement. A lot of money is spent on equipping sellers to do things for buyers and to know things about buyers.

The problem is that sales enablement leaves buyers out in the cold. They don’t feel involved and, therefore, they are not engaged. Even if it makes the purchase easier, buyers may resist sales activities and technologies that sideline them.

To enable your buyers, involve them in these ways:

• Ask dialogic instead of purely diagnostic questions. Your needs assessment can be used for more than qualifying the buyer. Purposeful questions can create value out of thin air, stimulate thinking about new solutions, build trust between buyer and seller, and get the buyer excited about new possibilities. Not sure how to ask questions that do all that? Be sure to read DISCOVER Questions Get You Connected, the bestseller based on buyer research.
• Co-create insights with buyer. Don’t do all that research and insight-formulating on your own. No matter how impressive that may be, it’s your insight and not the buyer’s. When buyers participate in generating insights, they become emotionally invested. When you facilitate self-discovery about what matters most, you get buy-in at the deepest levels.
• Dignify the buyer’s own ideas and decisions. Collaborate to build from and expand on those decisions and ideas.

Enhance the B2B Sales Experience by Creating Value through Leadership

Leaders inspire, enable, encourage, challenge and model. These behaviors are the essence of The Five Practices of Exemplary Leaders®, an evidence-based framework for leadership from Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner.

Sellers aren’t typically seen as demonstrating these behaviors. Instead of inspiring, they’re pitching. Instead of challenging, they’re transacting. Instead of leading, they’re selling.

Buyers don’t see value in time spent with sellers. They do see value in time spent with sales professionals who demonstrate leadership behaviors more frequently.

To create value and show up as a leader with your buyers, make deliberate choices to do what leaders do:

• Model the Way. Leaders clarify their values and set the example by aligning actions with values.
• Inspire a Shared Vision. Leaders envision the future by imagining exciting and ennobling possibilities. They enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations.
• Challenge the Process. Leaders search for opportunities by seizing the initiative and by looking outward for innovative ways to improve. They experiment and take risks, learning from experience.
• Enable Others to Act.Leaders foster collaboration by building trust and facilitating relationships. They strengthen others by increasing self-determination and developing competence.
• Encourage the Heart. Leaders recognize contributions by showing appreciation for individual excellence, and they celebrate victories by creating a spirit of community.

These choices earn high marks from buyers. They differentiate sellers in ways that advance the sale faster. They create value and deliver a B2B sales experience that is positive for buyers.

Next Steps to Improve the B2B Sales Experience and to Join the Stop Selling & Start Leading® Movement:

• Participate in our seller-side research. Tell us your Personal Best story and be entered into a prize drawing. We might feature your story in future publications.
• Learn more about our research with buyers and the Stop Selling & Start Leading® movement.
• Book a call to discuss how our speaking, coaching, training and consulting services will improve your sales productivity and effectiveness.

The award-winning CONNECT2Sell Blog is for professional sellers who believe, as we do, that Every Sale Starts with a Connection. Our 2017 emphasis will be on reporting buyer-side research and how sellers can connect with buyers and sell more effectively by adopting the behaviors of leaders. The Stop Selling & Start Leading® movement is all about the future state of sales and your success as a Sales Professional.

Deb Calvert, “DISCOVER Questions® Get You Connected” author and Top 50 Sales Influencer, is President of People First Productivity Solutions, a UC Berkeley instructor, and a former Sales/Training Director of a Fortune 500 media company. She speaks and writes about the Stop Selling & Start Leading® movement and offers sales training, coaching and consulting as well as leadership development programs. She is certified as an executive and sales coach by the ICF and is a Certified Master of The Leadership Challenge®. Deb has worked in every sector and in 14 countries to build leadership capacity, team effectiveness and sales productivity with a “people first” approach.

The post How to Advance the Sale and Enhance the B2B Sales Experience appeared first on People First.

Here’s the first step needed to create a client-attracting, lead-generating LinkedIn profile.

There are still so many misconceptions on how LinkedIn can be used, especially when it comes to winning new business for yourself on the platform.

Case in point: Did you realize that LinkedIn is actually one of the most powerful, B2B-themed search engines on the planet?

With nearly 500 million professionals in 200 countries, and with 2 new members joining every second, you have a whole lot of potential clients and customers under the same digital roof.

Because LinkedIn is a searchable database, similar to Google, users can type in keywords and phrases to find certain types of professionals to connect with or services they want provided.

Along with using LinkedIn to find your ideal prospects and clients, you can also get “found” on the world’s largest social media platform for professionals.

And it all starts with a single sentence.

Your LinkedIn Profile Headline = Sales Gold

To begin, consider the small section of your LinkedIn profile which appears right below your name at the top of your LinkedIn profile page.

This is your professional headline, and it follows you everywhere you go on the platform.

When it comes to selling on LinkedIn, getting your professional headline right is key to not only getting “found” on the platform, but also to enticing potential clients and customers to want to learn more about you.

The Big Mistake Most LinkedIn Profiles Make

If you’re like most people on LinkedIn, you likely set your profile up as a virtual résumé, and thus your professional headline only features your job title.

The problem with a LinkedIn profile headline and Summary section that is essentially a third-person rendering of your job duties, your role at your company, awards you’ve won, etc., is that nobody cares.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but nobody really cares about what you want.

Rather, people care about what they want, and are only going to be interested in your if you can show others how you’ll help them reach their goals or solve their problems.

As a result, you need to make your LinkedIn profile what I call “client-facing.” It needs to be all about the audiences you serve, the goals they attain when they partner with you, and the products or services you provide to them these audiences achieve their goals and desired outcomes.

When it comes to your LinkedIn profile’s professional headline, you need to be both client-facing and SEO conscious.

Consider the keywords and phrases that your clients would use to search for you on Google. How do you want to be discovered? What would people type in?

Would they type in “Business Coach?” or “Revenue Consultant?” Would they type in “Keynote Speaker” or “Minneapolis Pest Control Services?”

They would not type in something like, “CEO, Company X” or “Marketing Director”, which is what far too many LinkedIn headlines read like right now.

1 Simple Sentence That Will Win You New Business on LinkedIn

LinkedIn gives you 120 characters (or around 18-20 words) for your professional headline, and it’s the perfect opportunity to add in your ideal keywords and phrases. This, in turn, will help your profile have a better chance of getting “found” when users are searching LinkedIn for someone who provides your specific products or services.

In addition, your LinkedIn headline should answer these three questions:

1. What would others call me? (Business Coach, Finance Consultant, etc.)

2. What service or product do I provide? (Business Coaching, Financial Consulting, etc.)

3. What audiences do I serve? (Entrepreneurs, Small Business Owners, etc.)

So a sample LinkedIn headline for a Business Coach could be as follows:

“Business Coach | Business Coaching Services | Serving Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs”

You’ve included common keyword phrases (Business Coach, Business Coaching) people might type in when searching LinkedIn, and you’ve identified some niche audiences (Entrepreneurs, Small Business Owners) that you serve.

See how this works?

The key is making it clear, simple and fast for people to decipher who you are, who you serve and what you provide.

This approach starts with your LinkedIn professional headline, and should flow through the rest of your profile, with your Summary area, testimonials and so on.

Getting your professional headline right will lay the foundation for a killer LinkedIn profile and move you toward generating more warm, inbound leads on the platform as a result!

In 2016 CSO Insights reported that:

• Fewer than 60% of B2B sales reps are hitting quota
• Just 42% of marketing qualified leads are accepted and worked by sales
• The #1 sales execution challenge is the lack of qualified leads

Sound familiar? It should because the situation has not changed much in the past several years.

Following are the top five resolutions I recommend that you take to improve results in 2017.

1. Start with the End in Mind – Lead to Revenue Calculator

We developed our comprehensive Lead to Revenue Calculator to factor in metrics frequently ignored by other planning tools. Our calculator is designed to help you adjust the numbers to fit your company; so multiply, add zeros, adjust percentages or make whatever other changes you feel will shed light on your lead generation situation.

The assumptions embedded in the example above are industry benchmarks. For example, the industry estimates that inbound marketing efforts will produce about 35% of desired revenue each year – the balance has to come from existing business or proactive outbound marketing. Some of the other assumptions are estimates based on SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall metrics. While many industries estimate that sales reps source 60% of their own business, the reality is that each company should provide much more support. Hence the 35% used in this example.

To run your own numbers, click here.

2. Establish a Universal Lead Definition

A friend of mine said: “even a man lost in the woods knows where he wants to go.” I believe that every marketer and sales executive wants to do a great job, but they approach lead definition in silos. As a result, they all stay lost in the woods. That is why so few marketing qualified leads become sales accepted leads. Then, marketing resorts to a cost per lead strategy that exacerbates the problem. Is someone who downloaded a white paper – costing your marketing department $25 – 50 a lead? Is someone who scores above a certain threshold in marketing automation a lead? Is someone who completed a form on your website a lead? Maybe, but probably not.

Unfortunately, establishing a universal lead definition (ULD) is not going to come from some Kumbaya moment around the campfire attended by marketing and sales. In order to establish a ULD that is understood by and agreed to by the entire company there will have to wide participation by executive management including operations, finance, marketing, sales and other executives. How important is this? Critically important.

Look at your own company. How does a lead progress in your organization? Are leads thrown over the fence from marketing to sales and lost in a black hole?

Some guidance: a ULD is not BANT, ANUM or one of the other formulas used today. These formulas do a great job of disqualifying opportunities that could actually be great prospects if they are worked right. The high scoring “leads” that are sent to the field are often column fodder exercises where you are competing against a competitor who, because they started earlier and were more agile, won the business before you had the chance to compete for it. While there are millions of words written about this subject, a ULD is going to come down to: firmographics, decision-makers and influencers, pain or need (no matter what anyone tells you), a compelling event and the process for an evaluation. The best leads are going to be those where a sales rep gets involved early in the process – not when the prospect is 57 – 70% of the way through the buying process as some inbound pundits would have you believe. Doubt my word, read this from Julie Schwartz at ITSMA.

3. Establish a Judicial Branch – a universal lead definition is not just a good idea, it’s the law!

Once a ULD has been agreed upon, it needs to be enforced. The judicial branch inspects exceptions. An example – the lead is proactively rejected by sales: The judicial branch determines if the action was appropriate (the lead did or did not fit the ULD); or if the lead was rejected for what SiriusDecisions calls “non-intuitive reasons” (I called three times and they did not call me back so it was not a lead). Another example – no feedback from sales: Most leads end up in a black hole sometimes called CRM. A timeframe SLA must exist between marketing and sales on a lead being rejected or accepted by sales.

The Judicial Branch won’t work if the judges include only members of marketing and/or sales. Operations, finance and others in executive management need to be involved because they with find it additive and enjoy the control this process makes available. And, as tedious as this will be for the first month or two, it will pay huge dividends in the long-run.

4. Improve Lead Nurturing

Nurturing is essential for successful inbound and outbound lead generation. In fact, I propose that nurturing is the most underutilized marketing activity at a marketer’s disposal. Additional contact using multiple touches and multiple media—including phone, voicemail and email—across multiple cycles is well worth the time and expense (which is nominal):

• Standard B2B lead-generation programs produce an average 3 – 7% lead rate.
• Advanced lead-generation programs (which include nurturing) produce a lead rate three times higher (see table below).

Before we get into the details, note that there are three groups of prospects that require nurturing:

1. Marketing Pipeline. These are prospects with a specific planned next step to be taken within a reasonable timeframe.
2. True Nurture Opportunities. These are fully qualified prospects who are not immediately interested.
3. No Response. These are contacts past the point of diminishing return on a given touch cycle.

5. Make 2017 The Beginning of the Era of Accountability

Accountability is not about punishment or blame. It’s about helping others reach their goals through purposeful, sustainable action. It’s about end-to-end success. It’s 2017, and the new era of accountability is here.

Specifically, marketing must:

Be accountable for lead quality, be open to taking leads back and nurturing them until they are “sales-ready” and measure their impact in terms of revenue driven by their activity

Sales must:

Be accountable for effective lead follow-up, work each and every lead to win/loss or return to marketing for nurturing, and forecast realistically and accurately

In short, Accountability = Account-Based Marketing.

Account-Based Marketing, where sales and marketing strategically target high-value accounts, has accountability built in. The two organizations work together to approach decision-makers in a highly personalized, coordinated way, to move the account successfully through the pipeline. They use the right tactics, at the right time, with the right channels, to create the personal interactions that move the revenue-generation meter.

That’s a wrap. Happy marketing and selling in 2017!

History has shown us that we should learn from the past. In sales, history has told us that selling is an art. That it requires a certain type of personality to be successful. That, as long as you have the right talent in place, the revenue will follow. However, this happens because we have not learned from the past.

If we are to truly learn from our sales history, we must reflect on our data and use the insights we uncover to go beyond art and scientifically improve performance. And while CRM has historically been thought of as a mere database or system of record, when used correctly, it can tell us more about our sales history than we ever imagined. As the planning begins for 2017 sales strategies, consider these steps to use your history to improve your future.

Super Users and Weak Links

Super users and high performing reps know your process, leverage their sales tools for optimum productivity, and have an abundance of sales knowledge. But, imagine if you were able to determine that your super users have a niche. A sweet spot. A key focus area where they exceed. And, if you could exploit that key focus area, imagine the potential for revenue and that already stellar performer.

Also, consider your low performers. Without realizing it, so many are left without guidance or are considered ineffective because they are provided the same leads or deals without reflection on their sales data. Imagine if you were able to determine that a rep is under performing, but that within one key demographic or focus area they are actually highly effective. Allocating leads and deals relative to competency is something that your CRM should show you, and that so many leaders overlook.

The Scientific Method of Sales

Despite the misconception of sales as an art, the scientific method is in motion each time a problem is identified and a strategy is put in place, evaluated and optimized – though it goes unnoticed as a science. Imagine how much more organized and successful this process could be if sales leaders purposefully harnessed the scientific method to systematically measure and improve performance.

With the right tools and tactics in place, this can be done, and can shape our future by telling us so much about our past successes and failures. First, determine your goal, whether it be to increase revenue, improve efficiency or decrease risk of loss. Next, decide the data points that your team must capture to effectively monitor and measure the success of your endeavors. As your hypotheses are tracked and measured within your CRM, you will have a running record of activities and outcomes that you can refer back to to better inform future decision making.

For a more detailed breakdown of how to do this, check out this blog post.

CRM as a Coaching Tool

Too often, the CRM is not a key player in one-on-one reviews or team meetings with managers and reps. Instead, teams often use this time to provide play-by-plays of their weeks and to try to get to the bottom of what they think may be happening. Managers are left reviewing reps’ “techniques” and critiquing their sales “art form.”

But if your CRM is being used correctly, all your reps’ activity will be reflected in your conversion rates. It will be captured in pipeline development reports, stage duration analysis and so many others. Leveraging your CRM during 1:1s will provide a clear and unbiased snapshot of what has been happening, and provides data-driven insight into performance improvement.

Moreover, if these reports and metrics are important to a manager, they will become important to reps. If sales teams can learn to use reporting to their benefit during 1:1s, there is no reason a rep should not be able to run their own one-on-one and easily explain their progress or lack thereof.

Will This Help Me Sell More?

In 2017, let’s recognize that CRM is not just a technology or database, but rather a means of success and a philosophy. Let’s also acknowledge that sales is not solely an art, but a combination of art and science. The best sales organizations iterate, identify metrics and measure success quantitatively. Take a look at years past, and see the impact your CRM will have on the future. And for more tips on how you can make this happen, download our free eBook, From Art to Science: 5 Steps to Predictable Sales Growth.

B2B Telecom is a tough but rewarding industry to sell into—it may be hard to build and motivate a team, know how to get them leads, and keep them confident on the phone and happy at work. At Invenio, setting up and motivating competent B2B Telecom Sales teams is our specialty—but if you’re not ready to hand things over to us, read on to check out our four tips for success in B2B Telecom sales!

Data-Driven Decision Making

Always base the decisions you make about your sales strategy on real data, not guesswork. Just because someone has a high title, doesn’t always mean their ideas or opinions are better—keep things simple and rely on reporting. If you suspect certain things, pull the data, survey the clients, and get solid support. You can then make decisions with confidence and may even learn a few new things about your clients and your B2B Telecom Sales Strategy that will surprise you!

Educate Prospects and Drive Leads

Lean on the Marketing Department to educate and drive your sales leads. Any good marketing department should have all the tools and skills needed to have an educational website well-suited for SEO and lead-generation, and these should be funneled straight to the sales team whenever they are ready for a demo, or to buy. Even if the marketing department is small, there are so many tools and

Be a Compelling Caller

It’s important that your callers are as effective as possible—people don’t have much time and you only have one shot once you’ve got them on the line! Stop asking see-through questions like “When is your contract up for renewal?”. Come up with a strong reason for the call—notes in your CRM are critical for this—and make sure it’s about the business you’re calling, not your own needs. Call with confidence in yourself and genuine belief that you have a solution for calling them—it will shine through on the call, and the best way to come across in this manner is to be prepared, so do your research!

Create some Positive Energy

It’s important to create a positive environment filled with positive energy in your sales environment. Companies can do this by creating an environment of celebration over successes, frequent learning, training and open sharing, etc. Leaders must reward positive behavior and sales, get their team excited over promotions and contests, and more. This excitement will translate into positivity and excitement in your team’s phone calls.

There you have it–with a little persistence, enthusiasm and some help from the experts, you can have amazing success in B2B telecom sales.

If you have a blog (and I hope by now you do), there’s a good chance that the majority of your content is being written by your marketing team. Have you considered asking your sales team to join the content team? Including your sales department can be one of the biggest untapped gems for your company to help with content support. Why? In most organizations, it’s your sales team that is closest to understanding your customers’ needs. They know first hand why your customers choose to do business with you, why they don’t, the competitive landscape, what problems your company can solve, etc. Leveraging this credible source of information can be a key marketing differentiator for your company. Including sales in your content marketing team can help you create more content and better quality content. Here are some considerations for getting Sales on board and helping them understand how they can help impact change.

How to Include your Sales Team to Help Create Better Content

Educate your sales team: Does your sales team know for what purpose your blogs exists? Does your sales team even know that you have a blog? Chances are there is a sales meeting coming around the corner and I encourage you to incorporate content marketing in your meeting agenda. The more your team can understand the “why” behind this essential marketing tactic, the greater buy-in you will get.

Enable your sales team: Encourage your sales team to be co-creators in helping come up with blog topics. If there is a centralized location for capturing recent questions they have encountered in the field, or a wish list of content ideas that would be helpful in enabling the sales process to close, having a “living document” on your Google Drive for these ideas will create a library of content possibilities.

Incentivize your sales team: What sales team doesn’t love a good competition? You can have some fun with this and create a healthy rivalry that not only rewards the individuals who contribute the most ideas, but because all things digital can be measured, you can tie incentives for the topics that perform the best. It won’t take long for other contributors to get in on the action!

Empower your sales team: Chances are you have some writers or “actors” on your sales team! Encourage your team to write their own articles or solicit volunteers for your next video blog shoot. If your sales reps are willing to be regular contributors, you can assign them a day of the week or month and you can even assign them a “beat” like a television news or magazine assignment editor. Give them a chance to be recognized and shine.

Socialize your sales team: In order for your content to get in the hands of the right audience, it’s important to share your blogs on the social media channels of your target audience. Encourage your sales team to either post your company articles on their own social media sites or centralize your publishing process using social media tools like the publishing tool in HubSpot.

Why Your Sales Team Should Care About Content Marketing

• Drives More of the Right Leads: The more high-quality content you publish on your website that is engaging, smart, and educational, the more visitors you will drive to your website. This increase in traffic from prospects that don’t already know you by name (organic traffic), will drive an incremental number of qualified sales leads.

• Inbound leads close faster than outbound leads: Like most sales organizations, there’s a fair share of cold calling that is still happening today. Depending on your product or service, this sales cycle for “cold leads” can be significant, which can lead to a thin and unpredictable pipeline of opportunities. Inbound leads (those prospects that find YOU) close faster and cost less to acquire than outbound leads because the prospect has done their research and has an identified need — and is further along on the buyer’s journey.

• Content as a Sales Tool: If your sales team has access to an arsenal of strategically written content to use as part of their sales process, it will help close more deals. They can use blogs as a conversation starter in a cold call, share an article as a timely and relevant follow-up to a meeting, and as a way to connect with a prospect on social media. Content is a powerful tool in the sales tool chest.

Inbound marketing success is a team effort, and it requires strong alignment between Sales and Marketing. The organizations getting the most out of their marketing budgets (and getting more of it) tend to be partnered tightly with Sales. According to the 2016 State of Inbound Report published by HubSpot, organizations who had a formal agreement between Sales and Marketing were more likely to see higher ROI on marketing dollars in 2015, receive a budget increase, and expand their sales teams. Sales and Marketing alignment could be the key difference in 2017 and take your digital marketing results from good to great!

A sales team is a valuable resource for creating a marketing plan. Information collected from sales data can help a B2B company build a solid buyer persona that can be used to add value to relevant services.

If you lead a B2B company, you might not realize that your past sales are actually the best resources for putting together a future marketing plan. In fact, your sales team might be the most underutilized research resource you have at your disposal. Who else spends more time interacting directly with customers and prospects than your sales reps? This means that each member of your sales team is like a walking, talking information-gathering machine. Taking time to pick the brains of your sales team members could help you to gain key insights that will inspire better decisions and a crisper marketing plan.

Collaboration Between Sales And Marketing Is The Key!

Every B2B startup leader needs to understand that collaboration between sales and marketing is pivotal for creating a total picture of who clients are and what they need. You’re only actually reaching a small percentage of your full potential for pleasing clients and pulling in new leads if you’ve been keeping your sales team and marketing team in separate compartments. Start taking advantage of your Sales Team and involve them as much as possible to create a better Buyer Persona.

There are two main ways you can start utilizing your sales team more effectively. Your company should be doing the following:

• Begin having regular meetings with your sales staff regarding client feedback and customer behaviors
• Create a reporting platform where members of your sales team can share critical data regarding client feedback and customer behaviors

Creating A Buyer Persona

What are you supposed to do with the information that you gather from your sales team? All of the data can be compiled and processed to create very targeted profiles of the people you do business with. Each profile that’s created can be put into your buyer persona. What exactly is a buyer persona? A buyer persona is a generalized template that represents your customers. Here’s how you should work your personas into your overall plan for success:

• About 80 percent of your marketing initiatives should go into developing products and services based around what your brand’s primary persona needs
• Develop a secondary persona that you can focus the remainder of your marketing efforts on

Many startup companies actually brush off the idea of creating buyer personas because they don’t realize the big impact having a targeted customer profile to sell to can have. The reality is that your company can save large sums of money by not wasting marketing dollars on segments of the population that aren’t relevant to the niche you operate in. Having a targeted marketing plan that caters to a specific buyer persona can help you focus your dollars on people who are likely to respond and engage.

The Input You Need

There’s nothing better than getting information right from the front lines. What pieces of information do you need to create a comprehensive buyer persona? There’s a list of key facts that you can use to make questionnaires that members of your sales team can fill out. Be sure to have your sales team answer with as much detail as possible. Some key questions to include on any questionnaire are:

• Who are you selling to?
• What are the characteristics of buyers?
• What is the preferred mode of communication among buyers?
• What are the pain points of buyers?
• What led buyers to your brand in the first place?
• What types of companies do buyers work for?

Making A Plan To Use Personas

Your sales team obviously has some great insights into what your clients need and want. Here’s how to get the information you need from the people within your team who have it:

• Make at least one internal resource accountable for owning and updating personas
• Allocate a specific budget to persona research and maintenance
• Make your buyer personas fully accessible across all lines of business
• Make your buyer personas part of long-term planning goals, campaign development and new launches
• Make persona training part of orientation for new hires

Answering The Call Using Data

Data is a beautiful tool when it comes to pinpointing who your customers are and what they want. You can use the data you’ve accumulated to create buyer personas to identify the goals, desires and challenges your clients have. Being able to identify the goals of clients will put you in a position to develop and offer tools to help them achieve those goals. Knowing about the challenges your clients face is equally as essential. Being able to fix issues or provide solutions to problems can help to raise the profile of your brand and create long-lasting relationships.

Keep Updating Data

A buyer persona is something that needs to be constantly improved and updated. It’s important to have your marketing people collaborate with your sales people even after personas have been created. You would ideally like to see marketers participating in direct observations with your sales reps. This means they will visit client sites to gain a better understanding about how your company is meeting the needs of clients.

Companies Know The Importance Of A Buyer Persona

Many iconic companies have been able to grow and remain relevant because they act according to the buyer personas they’ve identified. Here are some notable examples:

• Seventeen is written and designed to appeal to a single reader prototype that has been revamped many times since 1950
• MySpace came back from obscurity by operating based on the needs of musicians and musical acts
• Zipcar built a brand based solely around the millennial urban dweller
• JetBlue earned substantial market share by only courting low-budget travelers

The bottom line is that data is truly the best way to get to the heart of your customers. What marketers of today are realizing is that your own sales team is the best source for getting your hands on meaningful data. Have you been leaving your sales team underutilized as a valuable source of marketing power? Yes? Start making a plan to craft a buyer persona using in-house data at the head of your agenda and feel the difference.

5 Ways to Monetize Your Content in the Age of Facebook and Google Dominance written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Smart marketers know they need to build a presence on the information giants, Facebook and Google, to remain relevant in today’s digital age. Facebook and Google currently dominate online advertising, search, and traffic. The problem many businesses face is that the two companies constantly change their algorithms making it difficult for businesses to be found. Lack of online visibility makes it even harder for businesses to monetize their content.

It’s time to focus on change, context, and website traffic to remain relevant online and generate revenue from your content. If you’re not willing to do that, then you’re leaving money on the ground for your competition to pick up.

Ways to monetize content

Here are four ways to monetize your content in the age of Facebook and Google dominance.

1. Native Advertising.

Google and Facebook account for more than 49% of digital advertising dollars spent by businesses. This continued growth is partially contributed to being household names. Native advertising drives leads back to your blog, website, or landing page through paid advertising efforts.

Facebook recently announced a change to their newsfeed algorithm with plans show more family and friends updates and less business content. This change forces businesses to spend more on advertising if they want their content viewed by users.

Make native advertising work for your business by promoting valuable content instead of your Facebook page or website. Native ads work best when:

• They tell your brand’s story.
• They deliver content the user can relate to.
• They don’t focus on selling your products or services.

Native advertising is predicted to be a $21 billion industry by 2018, making it too big to ignore. They are gaining traction from mobile users with click through rates being 137% higher on mobile devices than desktop.

Native advertising is the best way to get your content seen by a large audience, drive traffic to your website, and increase sales. They work because they are less invasive than traditional advertising and users are genuinely interested in the message you are sharing.

2. Content Upgrades

Content upgrades are special bonus content pieces or mini-lead magnets placed in your existing content. Businesses create eBooks, free reports, subscription membership sites, and online workshops based on the content they already wrote about on their blog or website.

Don’t just place content upgrades on every page of your website or blog. Use your Google Analytics account to pinpoint which pages are the highest performing. Add content upgrades to the pages that are already performing well. This bonus content is a more in-depth look at a topic the website visitor is already interested in making them more likely to hand over their e-mail address.

Leads responding to free content upgrades are a better quality because not every website visitor will find the upgrades. Those that do are invested in finding more information, highly engaged in the information you are providing, and are more likely to start a customer relationship with you.

Your number of paying leads will increase drastically when your membership website or online workshops offer value your visitors can’t find for free somewhere else. Partner with influencers to make these offers more appealing.

3. Instant Articles.

Google and Facebook launched instant articles solutions to publishers in the past year. Facebook Instant articles were opened to the public in April 2016. Google Accelerated Mobile Pages were released in January of 2016. Both offer Internet users, especially mobile users, a better user experience. They load instantly unlike articles published on your unique URL.

Facebook’s research shows 70% of users are less likely to abandon an instant article – which means more individuals are actually reading your content, seeing your offer, and taking action. More importantly, 70% of mobile users take action within an hour of completing their online search.

At this point, it doesn’t seem like businesses have anything to lose by publishing content via instant article solutions. They experience a decrease in abandonment rates, increase in audience reach, and increase in engagement rates. However, businesses have been slow to make the move, making this a valuable resource.

Take action now before your competitors. You’ll be known for your instant load times, easy access, and positive experience. Why now? You never know when Facebook and Google will give ‘extra credit’ to those already using the features and move you up in your search results.

4. Video

If you browse the Internet at any given time, you are likely to see videos in your news feeds and search results. Google and Facebook like video and they both give businesses using video more power in their algorithm by showing them first.

In addition, Facebook is investing a lot in securing live video as an important trend in 2017. They recently paid $50 million to companies and celebrities willing to publish content using Facebook Live.

Videos help generate revenue when they:

• Offer unique and valuable information to users.
• Use the right metadata.
• Are shareable.
• Are interactive.

Businesses using video today in their online marketing strategies see higher engagement, increased lead conversions, and a better quality of leads. Individuals want you to make it easy for them to understand your message and they want to feel like they know you on a personal level. Video makes it possible to accomplish both at one time.

Use videos to demo products, share your mission, highlight customer testimonials, and interview team members. Viewers will gain an instant connection to your brand and will want to start a relationship with you.

5. Don’t want to join them? Beat them.

Of course, if you are not too keen on joining the cartel-like hegemony of Facebook and Google, you can always opt to build your own content powerhouse. The web offers a number of solutions that help you control the means of creating content, from inception to distribution. Try a solution like Kajabi which allows you to create a website, sell your digital products, and grow your customers – through one platform. With the platform, you can set up your own course and sell your knowledge to a wide audience. There are of course a number of tools that allow you to create and distribute content, and more often than not, your best bet for distribution is – rather surprisingly – Facebook and Google.

Final thoughts

There is no predicting Facebook or Google’s next step. The secret to keeping up with both is to create a well-rounded and unwavering online marketing strategy. Stay updated on their rules to make sure you are easily found online. Being found is the first step to monetizing your online content. Businesses not willing to play by their rules become a tiny speck in business history.

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About the Author

Itai Elizur is the COO at Inbound Junction, a content marketing agency specializing in helping startups and business increase their online visibility. Prior to joining the Inbound Junction team, Itai worked as a Creative Manager at Wix.com, and as the Director of Marketing at Infolinks, the 3rd largest website network in the world. Itai specializes in helping business develop and optimize large-scale user acquisition strategies through content, brand messaging and marketing automation.

 

Like this month’s theme? We are sharing even more about how small businesses can grow with SEO over at www.SEOforGrowth.com.

On April 23, 2012, Adobe Inc. launched a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscription version of its key product line, Creative Suite, causing its net income to plummet by almost 35% percent the following year. Yet by April 2016 Adobe’s stock price had nearly tripled from its value four years earlier. Adobe’s radical transformation from a product-based business model to a service-based one raised eyebrows in the industry, with many software vendors now wondering how radically they should approach the SaaS model.

Due to the fast growth of the SaaS market and the high valuations of SaaS startups, a move toward SaaS seems very compelling for traditional software vendors. For example, in 2014 IDC estimated that more than one-quarter of enterprise applications would be offered with the SaaS model by 2018, up from one-sixth in 2013. But the move to SaaS comes with considerable challenges: Firms will need to change their structure, sales culture, and incentives, and convince existing as well as new customers of the new offering’s value.

To understand how traditional software vendors can move to the SaaS model while managing the transformation’s challenges, we studied how the stock market reacted to publicly listed firms announcing they wanted to introduce a new SaaS offering from 2001 until the end of 2015. We distinguished (1) whether firms were introducing a completely new product or a product already existed and (2) whether the new product would be SaaS-only or a standard product “fallback” would exist. (Disclosure: One of us works at Amazon Web Services, a provider for many SaaS businesses.)

While a SaaS announcement on average neither decreases nor increases company value, we find big differences depending on the specifics of what’s announced. Investors preferred new SaaS products over product conversions and valued having a product fallback option. These choices may change the intra-day stock valuation by as much as 3.5% and 2.2%, respectively. In addition, we found that partnering with an external cloud service provider to deliver SaaS (instead of building and managing the cloud infrastructure on your own) leads to a further 2.9% increase in stock price on the announcement day.

Based on these results, we suggest decision makers follow three steps in order to manage the challenges of transforming towards a SaaS model:

• Do not give up on the on-premise option yet.
• Make sure existing products, processes, and culture do not prohibit the SaaS model from blossoming.
• Collaborate and partner with cloud platform providers.

On the first point, of course, running two business models in parallel implies duplication of resources and can lead to the growth of the SaaS model being hindered. Software development, operations, and support have to be provided for both offerings, and because they differ from one another considerably, economies of scale cannot be reached in the way possible with just one business model. For example, Adobe’s finance team estimated that the cost of running both models side by side would cost them twice as much as simply offering one of the models. At the same time, sales personnel who are used to making large license-plus-maintenance deals are not likely to do well or be motivated to sell smaller monthly or yearly subscription packages.

About the Research

Despite these challenges, our study found that investors increase their valuations of the software vendor’s stock by an average of 2.2% if the vendor makes clear in its announcement that the SaaS offering is provided in parallel to a perpetual licensing model. Even more surprising, this does not appear to apply only to existing products with an installed base of customers in place. Launching a new software product with both SaaS and perpetual licensing models is seen even more favorably by investors than launching the new product only with the SaaS model. There seems to be variety in customers’ requirements, meaning that software vendors would not be able to tap into the whole market without a perpetual license offering.

Consequently, software vendors should not look at Adobe’s example and draw a conclusion that the model of selling perpetual licenses to software is dead. Rather, they should consider finding a way to facilitate both business models — at least for a transition period. Two prime examples of software vendors that have patiently run two business models in parallel while transforming to the SaaS model are Autodesk and Splunk. Autodesk, a longtime market leader in computer aided design and engineering software, added a perpetual licensing option to all of its subscription offerings over a 15-year transition period before going all in with the SaaS model in 2016. Splunk, a leader in business intelligence founded in 2003, is still holding onto the perpetual licensing model, even for new product lines it has launched. The fact that Adobe, Autodesk, and Splunk have all been successful with dual approaches (both in terms of share price performance and growth of SaaS sales) shows that each vendor needs to understand its customers’ needs and gradually help them move to the SaaS model.

On the second point, software vendors should still make sure they embrace the SaaS model and give it the attention it needs to flourish. It’s easy for existing organizational structures and cultures to inhibit the growth of the new business model, which arguably has been a reason many major software vendors have been unable to establish leading SaaS offerings organically. Accordingly, our study found that the existence of a previous version of the product prior to the introduction of the SaaS offering reduces company value by an average of 3.5% compared to new product launches with the SaaS model. Thus software vendors should look to approach the SaaS business model by creating new product lines rather than converting their existing product portfolios, when possible. Dynatrace, a leader in application performance management software, has shown the importance of developing SaaS products from scratch, in isolation of existing product lines. It established an independent entity, Ruxit, in 2014 to develop a line of SaaS products in complete separation from Dynatrace’s established product lines and organization. The new business was given time and space to grow in isolation before being integrated into the Dynatrace portfolio two years later, in July 2016.

Finally, a big reason for the emergence of the SaaS model lies in the economies of scale and flexibility provided by dividing computing into independent components. Software vendors should see this as a great opportunity rather than a risk and should not try to build all the components themselves. For example, consider Zynga’s decision, announced in 2011, to build its own datacenters. Only four years later, in 2015, Zynga backtracked on the decision and started hosting its games on Amazon Web Services again. Our study found that announcements that implied the SaaS offering would be built in cooperation with cloud infrastructure and platform providers increased company valuations by an average of 2.9% as compared to other announcements, which underlines the importance of this finding.

In conclusion, decision makers at software firms can feel confident that launching new SaaS offerings will not be perceived negatively by their investors — but rather the opposite — provided that they follow the three steps we’ve outlined above.