Dyson, a company well know for producing upscale hair dryers has recently segued into the hair dryer market. The company’s new product, is one of the most expensive hair appliances on the market and managed to garner a significant amount of press in a short amount of time. Here are a few takeaways from their marketing strategy which can be utilized by any entrepreneur.

Build Off Your Reputation

It’s a lot easier to get consumers to buy if they know and trust your brand. Dyson’s reputation for producing high quality vacuum cleaners enabled them to sell a $399 hair dryer. A brand new company without any brand recognition would most likely not have been as successful with such a high priced item. Establishing a solid reputation may mean going the extra mile for the customer, providing a free return even if it’s not stated in your policy and answering support tickets within a set time frame.

Cheaper Isn’t Always Better

Pricing your product or services well below the average cost can make customers feel as if you’re product isn’t as good as your competitors even if it isn’t true. Studies show that consumers are more likely to find a product enjoyable and even superior just because it’s more expensive.

Dyson’s hair dryer is a lot more expensive than its counterparts priced at $399. Most luxury hair dryers from companies like T3 cost around $200. The higher price point gives consumers the impression that the more expensive product must be superior in terms of technology and features. Pricing your product high is going to turn off the bargain shoppers, but it will attract buyers with bigger budgets who are willing to pay more for a premium product.

Emphasize What Makes Your Product Unique

Dyson’s claim to fame is that it took $67 million dollars to produce its hair dryer and that it uses a microprocessor in order to adjust heat levels in order to prevent damage to your hair. In order for your product or service to stand out it needs to be unique and offer something your competitors don’t.

Do you offer support around the clock? Provide a money back guarantee? Do you have a patent for your product? Write down all the ways that make your product different from the rest and utilize it in your marketing materials.

Build Press Contacts In Advance

During it’s launch, Dyson obtained coverage from major news outlets like CNN, Gizmodo and TechCrunch. If you don’t have thousands of dollars availabe every month in order to retain a top PR company, you will need to create your own buzz and press.

Build your relationships with the press well before you launch your product. This can mean following journalists on social media accounts and commenting on their stories. Once your product launches and you start the outreach process, take a note from the big PR firms and use outreach software like Buzzstream in order to manage your campaigns. -mailing may not be enough since journalists get dozens of pitches daily. You may need to find out their contact information and follow up with a phone call.

Building solid reputation, differentiating your product and creating your own press will give your campaign the foundation it needs in order to sustain and thrive.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence "Fintech Briefing" subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.

The Canadian Mint and Goldmoney, a blockchain-based gold payments and savings platform operating in Canada and the UK, announced a collaboration that will give Goldmoney users access to the Mint's gold bullion vault, in addition to vaults from other participating institutions. 

Bullion is the most common form in which precious metals are traded, i.e. in bars or ingots. 

The two parties will also collaborate on campaigns to improve public awareness of and access to gold. Any user with internet access can use Goldmoney to buy, sell, and transfer allocated gold bullion via blockchain, and the service is available both for individuals and for businesses. Goldmoney has 13.4 million global users and $1.7 billion worth of AUM. 

Goldmoney users will be able to instantly buy any amount of Mint bullion using the platform's permissioned blockchain. Fees of 0.5% will apply for purchases, but bullion storage is free for up to 1,000 grams for Goldmoney users. Users will also be able to send gold title to anyone free of charge via text or email, redeem their gold balance to a prepaid Goldmoney Mastercard or bank account in fiat currency, or make vault-to-vault transfers between the Canadian Mint and seven other vaults worldwide using Goldmoney's platform or mobile app, available both for iOS and Android. 

Gold trading seems to be an area ripe for real-world blockchain use cases. This week, Euroclear and Paxos successfully tested a clearing and settlement platform for unallocated gold bullion. And although most focus has been on blockchain implementation within the banking sector, it is possible that the first successful industry-wide blockchain network might take root in the gold-trading industry.

Blockchain has the potential to make the gold-trading process, prone to high costs and human error, more cost-efficient and secure through automation and an ability to better keep track of bullion as it changes hands. In addition, alternative assets, including precious metals like gold, have been in high demand recently due to political uncertainty in the US and Europe. Together, these factors could mean high demand for blockchain solutions in the sector.

Blockchain technology, which is best known for powering Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is gaining steam among finance firms because of its potential to streamline processes and increase efficiency. The technology could cut costs by up to $20 billion annually by 2022, according to Santander.

That's because blockchain, which operates as a distributed ledger, has the ability to allow multiple parties to transfer and store sensitive information in a space that’s secure, permanent, anonymous, and easily accessible. That could simplify paper-heavy, expensive, or logistically complicated financial systems, like remittances and cross-border transfer, shareholder management and ownership exchange, and securities trading, to name a few. And outside of finance, governments and the music industry are investigating the technology’s potential to simplify record-keeping.

As a result, venture capital firms and financial institutions alike are pouring investment into finding, developing, and testing blockchain use cases. Over 50 major financial institutions are involved with collaborative blockchain startups, have begun researching the technology in-house, or have helped fund startups with products rooted in blockchain. 

Jaime Toplin, research associate for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on blockchain technology that explains how blockchain works, why it has the potential to provide a watershed moment for the financial industry, and the different ways it could be put into practice in the coming years.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Spending on capital markets applications of blockchain is expected to grow at a 52% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2019, according to Aite Group, to reach $400 million that year.
• Banks and major financial institutions are working both collaboratively and independently to develop blockchain tech. Over 50 major financial institutions are involved with collaborative blockchain startups, like R3 CEV or Chain. And many are investing in the technology on their own as well.
• Putting blockchain to use for real-world transactions is likely not that far off. If working groups' tests are successful, firms could be using it to transact real value as early as the end of this year and we could see widespread industry application within the next few years. 

In full, the report:

• Examines the funding increases that are pouring into blockchain
• Assesses why blockchain is becoming so popular and what factors are driving up increased research and development
• Explains in full how blockchain technology work and what assets make it valuable and vulnerable
• Identifies pain points in the financial industry and profiles how various firms are using blockchain to solve them
• Demonstrates the challenges to mainstream adoption and their potential solutions

To get your copy of this invaluable guide, choose one of these options:

1. Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORT

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of blockchain technology.

Join the conversation about this story »

What a year.

This year brought me an entirely new appreciation for books and podcasts. Without them, I’m not sure how else I would’ve escaped the distractions that 2016 will be remembered for. In a world full of noise and sound bites, these two mediums give us a deeper understanding of the subject matters they cover.

And we’re all the better for it.

In addition to my own recommendations, I recently asked the team which books and podcasts moved them this year. Here’s a look back at our favorite books and podcasts that made us focus, laugh, learn, and grow stronger in 2016.

Books

The Third Wave by Steve Case

Nick says:

Steve Case is one of the Internet’s pioneers. He co-founded AOL, which helped millions gain access to the Internet for the first time. He also led AOL through its merger with Time Warner, which is one of the largest mergers of all time. In his book, The Third Wave, Steve takes you through the journey of his story and paints a vision of what the next (third) wave of technology businesses will look like.

As someone who was first introduced to the Internet via an AOL CD, it was fascinating to hear the full context of how the Internet first hit the mainstream. I was just in middle school, so it’s always fun to hear stories of how a “tech startup” operated back in the late 90s.

The best part of the book is how Case argues his vision of how the next generation of technology companies will affect the “real world." While society still copes with the implications of our digital identities on Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat; there are companies being built that will transform medicine, transportation, education, energy, and food.

You know, the things that really matter in this world.                                                                                                  

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams

Rebecca says:

Scott Adams, the writer of the Dilbert comics, distills his principles on winning big in life with the perfect blend of light-hearted, comical, and cynical narration. You're in for a treat because the author's full-time job is making people laugh.

As someone with many years of corporate business experience and spectacular failures prior to becoming a hugely successful entrepreneur, Adams' observations on the business world are insightful yet highly relatable.

He also offers practical and actionable tips that are not just some repackaged content of another business/lifestyle best seller. I highly recommend this for all aspiring and current entrepreneurs.

 

 

Winning with Data by Tomasz Tunguz & Frank Bien

Nick says:

As a longtime subscriber and fan of Tomasz Tunguz’s blog about SaaS startups, I just had to pick this book up. His blog posts are specific, data-driven, and focused. So is this short read. At just under 150 pages, Tunguz and Bien have written a playbook for how to think and communicate about data within your startup.

With all of the analytics tools out there, teams are drowning in data. But what do you with it? How do you make sense of it? What should you care about? This book helps you figure things out in a practical way.

It’s one of those books that you’ll keep going back to your bookshelf to use as a reference in specific situations. You should be required to read this book before logging into any business intelligence or analytics tool.

 

Thinking Fast and Slow, by Dan Kahneman

Stefan says:

It’s a bit of a tough read, but it nicely exposes all kinds of biases we have. It teaches you a lot about not always trusting your gut.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

#AskGaryVee by Gary Vaynerchuk

Alberto says:

If you read this blog, then you’ve definitely heard of the legendary Gary Vaynerchuk. Steli interviewed him back in 2014, and his advice kicked us in the face.

Fresh off the success of his #AskGaryVee show on YouTube and interactions with fans on Instagram and Snapchat, the book is a catalog of the best advice he’s given on the show. Gary’s a true hustler with practical and real advice, and this book can act as the perfect situational reference guide as you go through your career.

 

 

 

 

Making Ideas Happen, by Scott Belsky

Liz says:

Scott is the founder of Behance, a company aimed at helping creative individuals be more productive. The value here is the six years of interviews Belsky had with successful creatives and what their day-to-day practices are.

This book almost reads as a sequel to the very helpful book Getting Things Done, by David Allen, and builds on those GTD concepts. Some of my favorite concepts here include prioritizing projects by energy levels—which projects will require extreme, high, medium, low or idle energy?

Breaking up projects by the level of energy you will need to complete them makes a lot of sense. It helps you organize your projects in a way so that you're setting yourself up to actually complete them. I also liked the section on killing ideas that lack potential, quickly and liberally, in order to avoid wasting time on them.

A line that resonated with me: "If meetings end without action steps, it's your responsibility to speak up and question the value of the meeting."

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Kevin says:

This book is a revelation. On the second page, my mind was blown when I learned Homo Sapiens (modern humans) didn't evolve from the likes of Homo Erectus or Neanderthals (as we learned in school).

No, we existed at the same time as six other species of humans. We weren't the only kinds of human beings around, but 70,000 years ago, we began to exterminate those other human species and they went extinct.

The rest of the book is similarly jarring.

 

 

                                                                                                                                                           

Pitch Perfect by Bill McGowan and Alisa Bowman

Liz says:

Bill McGowan is a long-time media coach whose clients include Eli Manning, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Welch, Thomas Keller, and Pat Benatar. He shares his tips on using the right tone to convey the right message at the right time.

We all have pivotal moments where our communication has to be focused and dead-on in order to achieve the results we want. Bill relates some of those pivotal moments in his own career where, by delivering his message in the right way and tone, he was able to turn a potentially career-ending situation into an opportunity.

His “7 Principles of Persuasion” are tried and true and memorable enough to learn quickly. I have to love anything called "The Pasta Sauce Principle." The concept being the more you boil down, the more dynamic your point will be. Add too much filler and you become bland and forgettable. His goal for the reader is to help you achieve the results you want, make your point in less time, overcome anxiety and stop apologizing.

One quote that resonated with me: "Don't care so much what other people think. Playing the role of the pleaser sets you too far back on your heels and distracts you from the task at hand."

PODCASTS

"Acquired", hosted by Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal

Nick says:

Ben and David do their research and serve up vivid details of the technology industry’s most interesting acquisitions and IPOs. They cover the full context of the transaction: the players involved, competition, product, and what ifs.

They even discuss if the transaction played out successfully and failed acquisitions (see the Snapchat episode). For anyone interested in how these transactions come about, here’s your (recent) history class.

Favorite episode: Episode 12: Snapchat (?!)                                                                                                                                                         

 

"Science Vs.", hosted by Wendy Zukerman

Kate says:

This is a recent acquisition of the Gimlet Media network (most known for the super-meta season 1 of Start-Up, which chronicled the launch of Gimlet itself). If you're the kind of person who wishes dinner table arguments had annotations, Science Vs. is the podcast for you. It has the plucky production value of a short radio show segment but goes in depth on the topics that always bring out strong opinions.

Wendy Zukerman breaks down the issue and consults scientists, researchers, and insiders each step of the way. No clear answers are guaranteed, though. Sometimes the facts are just as confused as we are.  

Favorite episode: Fracking                                                                 

"The Startup Chat", hosted by Steli Efti & Hiten Shah

Nick says:

Caution: As a member of the Close.io team, there’s an obvious bias here. 😇

For what it’s worth, there’s always someone in the company HipChat that references what they learned on a recent episode. The quick 20-minute, twice a week, conversations on business and life between Steli and Hiten are brilliant. It’s just simple and practical advice for starting and maintaining a business. It’s just a damn good podcast.

Favorite episode: 038: How To Say No

                                                                                                                               

"Seeking Wisdom", hosted by David Cancel & Dave Gerhardt 

Nick says:

David Cancel (CEO of Drift, former Chief Product Officer at HubSpot) is building quite the brand and product at Drift. He’s teamed up with Dave Gerhardt, Drift’s Director of Marketing, to bring great lessons on how to improve yourself and your team.

A lot of the content focuses on product marketing, but they also had an awesome episode about travel hacking that I loved. These guys are down to earth, and that’s how I like getting my advice.

Favorite episode: #46: Lunch with Mark Roberge (HubSpot)                                                                                                         

"Esquire Classic", hosted by David Brancaccio and Cindy Katz

Kate says:

So much new content is available every day, that it's easy to forget about the classics. Host David Brancaccio and narrator Cindy Katz sit down with the authors and journalists who've written some of the most popular pieces published in Esquire. Each episode reads through an article, with interview questions acting like real-time footnotes.

It's pretty much the most sophisticated storytime experience you could ask for. The podcast covers a wide range of topics, from coming of age to Michael Bay.

Favorite episode: The Second Coming of Steven Jobs

"The West Wing Weekly", hosted by Hrishi Hirway & Josh Malina

Nick says:

To me, The West Wing Weekly is a perfect representative for the podcast medium. Hrisihi Hirway and Josh Malina (Josh played Will Bailey on the show) do in-depth recaps of every episode of NBC’s The West Wing. As a big fan of the series (I’ve watched it three times), it’s the perfect “deep dive” into the crazy world of politics within the Executive Branch created by Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme.

Since Josh Malina was a cast member, they are able to provide unprecedented access to the show’s cast and background. It’s an entertaining must-listen for any West Wing fan.

Favorite episode: 2.01 - 2.02: “In The Shadow of Two Gunmen” (with Thomas Schlamme, Bradley Whitford, and Michael O’Neill)

Recommended reading:

The Hard Thing About Hard Things REMIX
One of our favorite books from the past two years is Ben Horowitz's book "The Hard Thing About Hard Things." Here are some of the best phrases and insights from the book, rearranged and modified to make a remix.

24 B2B cold calling tips for sales success in 2016
Not only have we shared our top books and podcasts of 2016, but we're also sharing our top B2B cold calling tips. Here's how fast-growing companies cold call to drive revenues in 2016.

10 time management tips to crush your Q4 in 2016
Finally, here are our top 10 time management tips to help salespeople produce real results and hit their quota in 2016.

The growth team here at Wishpond is always on the hunt for new lead generation tips and tricks. We love ourselves a great growth hack!

That’s why we’ve collected all of your most critical lead generations tricks into one web resource.

We want to share with you 60 lead generation marketing tips and tricks we rely on.

Enjoy!

---

1. Countdown Timers on Webinar Registration Pages

Countdown timers create a sense of urgency in your visitors, which gives them the impetus they need to convert. Often, conversion rate optimization (and lead generation) isn’t so much about giving your visitors a reason to convert, but rather giving your visitors a reason to convert now.

2. Co-Created Gated Content

No matter how specific your target market, there are probably 100 companies out there with the same one. And so long as they’re not direct competitors, creating a relationship with them is always a great idea.

And co-creating gated content is an even better one. When promoted, you get access (even for a second) to another business’ email list. If the gated content you’ve created is appealing and valuable, you’ll often get at least a few hundred downloads – or a few hundred new leads.

3. Peer Pressure

No one wants to be the first one in a club. You want to know that other people have trusted this organization and not been messed around. You want to know that other people have found value before investing anything (even if it’s just your email address).

4. Use Visual Directional Cues

We’re evolutionarily predisposed to follow the eye direction of those around us (it helped us identify threats a few million years ago). It works the same with arrows and lines. We naturally follow them to their origin or destination.

For marketers, directional cues (e.g. a big bright arrow) guide your users in a certain direction

5. “Get the Tools/Strategy I Used” Content Upgrade

Brian Dean of Backlinko, is the king of these. So much of his content is built around case studies of himself: “Here’s how I rank #1 for the keyword “SEO Strategies” followed by a massive, step-by-step guide with screenshots and links. Simply awesome content.

6. Checklist/Framework Content Upgrade

Content upgrades are an increasingly ubiquitous lead generation strategy, and for good reason. They’ve proven to convert individual blog visitors at least 1000% better than a non-specific ebook.

The article-specific checklist, framework or process is a leading strategy for content upgrades. It works by giving readers a broken-down version of the article which allows them to act on whatever complicated strategy it details.

7. PDF of the Blog Post Content Upgrade

The simplest and fastest content upgrade option, “Download a PDF of this article” is actually super valuable.

For those articles which are comprehensive, long-form or simply complicated as hell, give your readers an option to download. This enables them to refer back to your resource without having to bookmark it or have an internet connection.

Good lead generation marketing is about making your prospective lead’s lives easier.

8. An Audio Version Content Upgrade

This is actually something we’ve been meaning to try, but it doesn’t work with every article (some of them are too visually-oriented) but it’s a really cool idea. With the increasing popularity of podcasts, it’s entirely possible that your readers may want to download an audio version of your educational content to listen to on their commute.

9. ‘Bonus Strategies’ Content Upgrade

Offering “Bonus strategies not included in this article” is a great way to generate leads because it’s hyper-focused on the content. If you’re giving “13 Research-Backed Ways to Create Shareable Content” and holding back two as a gated bonus, you’re exclusively getting people genuinely interested in the content. If your article is good, they’ll believe the bonus strategies will be equally good and give them the whole picture.

10. ‘Worksheet to take action’ Content Upgrade

Oftentimes the worksheet is actually the content upgrade type which requires the most energy, but it’s also the one people love the most. In this lead generation strategy, you create an entirely separate piece of content related to a long-form or comprehensive guide.

11. Blueprint Content Upgrade

The “Blueprint” gives your readers a complete, actionable breakdown of the process behind your article’s recommended strategy. More than the checklist, it gives you the before and after and, in my ways, more closely resembles an ebook than any other content upgrade.

But remember, the primary difference between a content upgrade and an ebook is that you’re creating them (or at least it appears you’re creating them) to be specific to an individual article. The subjective value of your gated content drops drastically if it’s perceived to be a generic guide to the subject.

12. Entry Overlay for Article-Specific Gated Content

My favorite thing we’ve done recently (where we used to have a signup overlay) is determined which blog titles aren’t driving signups, and replaced the overlays on those articles with overlays promoting relevant gated content.

13. Product Demo/Webinar Exit Popup on Pricing Page

Wishpond A/B tested a VIP demo prompt exit popup on our Pricing Page (see below) and tracked the rate at which the visitors who saw it upgrades vs those who didn’t.

The pitch was simply, “Need help deciding if Wishpond is the right fit for you?” – no aggressive sales prompt, just “let’s have a chat and talk it out.” It improved Free Trial signups by 22% and upgrades by 57.6%.

14. Free Tool/Calculator

If you have a complicated piece of software, one of the coolest ways to generate leads is to give a small portion of it away (or use it to generate leads) in the form of a free tool.

There are many sites around the web which do this very successfully: CoSchedule’s headline grader, CrazyEgg’s site analysis, and BuzzSumo to name a few.

15. Influencer Giveaway

There’s no need for me to harp on about the value of influencer marketing. Running a giveaway with an influencer (I recommend a one-on-one consultation, copy of their book and free subscription to your tool or service) is a great way to increase your brand awareness (through their influence) and also generate leads.

16. Video Cliffhanger (Wistia Turnstile)

YouTube is great, don’t get me wrong. But it ain’t got nothing on the lead generation capabilities of Wistia. Sure, YouTube allows you to add little, annoying overlays which direct people to another video. But does it allow you to stop the video at any point and email gate the rest?

Didn’t think so.

My recommendation for this would be to create a 5-part video course and leave the first one free and awesome. Gate the rest.

Wistia allows you to customize your gate message as well as how much information you ask for. All leads are exportable as a CSV or automatically exported through one of Wistia’s email marketing integrations.

17. Gated Questionnaire Results

The questionnaire itself isn’t gated of course, but the results are. And once you’ve invested time into answering 5-10 questions on “What kind of content marketer are you?” you damn well want to know the answer.

Another great benefit of this lead generation strategy is that, if you play your cards right, the answers to your questionnaire can be stored as lead information – allowing you to segment and inform your lead nurturing strategy.

18. Add an Inline Blog CTA for a Demo

Let me give you some context with this one, because a “Book a Demo!” CTA in the middle of your article won’t fly, and your readers will hate you. Inline CTA’s have been shown to convert far better than anything else because they provide context.

19. High-Contrast CTAs

This is conversion rate optimization 101, but we see it ignored so frequently that we have to mention it nonetheless.

The goal of your landing page needs to be clear to the visitor the moment they arrive. If you haven’t made it obvious, what can you expect from them except a bounce?

20. Two-Step Lead-Generation Funnels

Once someone’s clicked on your lead generation form or CTA, they’re committed. Not completely, of course, but more than 50%. So a two-step lead gen funnel just makes sense.

Entice your landing page or website visitors with a simple form or button and then, once they click, show them the rest of the funnel or form.

21. Source, Referral or Traffic-Specific Popup Offers

Many marketing automation platforms can track the behavior and activity of your site visitors, whether they’re leads, customers or visiting for the first time.

That means you can cater specifically to types of traffic – delivering them lead generation offers based on who they are, even before they become leads.

22. Utilize the Punishment vs Reward Ratio

Several years ago, researchers sent Ph.D students a reminder about an upcoming economics conference. Half of the emails sent offered a discount for early registration while the other half phrased it as a penalty fee for late registration.

93% of students registered early when they heard about the penalty fee while only 67% did so when presented with a discount.

Tests like these have been repeated time and again, showing that people respond far more strongly to loss than they do to gain.

To use this within your lead generation strategy, consider a countdown timer or “Lose Access to this Giveaway at Midnight on Saturday.”

23. Use Images to help people visualize the results (relationship, happiness, money, etc.)

We’re all visual learners. Sure, some people need it more than others. But ultimately, we understand concepts far more quickly when we see them than when they’re described to us.

For instance, if I describe to you a line that is curved such that its ends coalesce and every point on said line is equidistant from the center, I would be describing a circle. However, if I simply show you an image of a circle, you understand what I am referring to far more quickly.

24. Use Bullet Point Lists

Whenever you’re writing landing page or popup (any lead generation tool, really) and have a benefit you want to communicate, do so in bullet-point form.

When Unionen (a Swedish company) A/B tested a bullet-point list of “reasons to become a member” against a control paragraph, they found that the list had a 5.3% conversion rate, a 15.9% improvement over the control.

25. Use Colored Icons in your Bullet-Points

You want to grab the attention of your landing page or website visitors, and a simple bullet-point won’t do it.

Whenever you’re listing out the benefits of downloading your ebook or registering for a free trial, make those benefits stand out and appeal visually with colored or icon bullets (Try FontAwesome icons, they’re free).

26. Add Testimonials

Testimonials are the new word-of-mouth. It’s equivalent to having someone stand in front of your (clearly biased) brand and say, “You can trust them. I’ve worked with them before and gotten excellent results.”

Testimonials feature real people relatable to your website traffic, which increases the chance of that traffic relating to your brand as well as trusting what’s said.

Testimonials can showcase specific value points, metrics and KPI’s in real-world and concrete terms. Something it can be difficult to do in a benefit list or headline.

27. Use the AIDA framework

You’re probably more familiar with AIDA as a framework for best practice in advertising. It’s been around forever and is But it’s easy adaptable for lead generation marketing as well.

Joanna Weibe, marketing thought-leader and copywriting guru, defines AIDA for lead generation like this:

Attention – Jar the reader out of their boring ol’ lives

Interest – Engage their mind with unusual, counter-intuitive or fresh info

Desire – Engage their heart so they want what you’re offering

Action – Ask them to take the next step

28. Inverted Pyramid Method

Vero, the successful email marketing platform, recommends their users consider the “Inverted Pyramid Method” for creating emails:

Basically, the inverted pyramid method recommends you create messaging which grabs the attention of your visitors (in lead gen that’d be the headline), builds excitement (urgency, a countdown timer, a customer testimonial or a value/benefit list) and closes with a call-to-action.

29. Publishing Industry Report

Industry reports are original content (or at least originally collated content). This means that you’ll be the citation everyone uses for that statistic or quote. And that, in the world where we’re all constantly searching for the most recent statistic to use in our content, is a valuable place to be.

And every time your industry report is cited, your website goes up that little bit in the search rankings and anyone who clicks on the link might just become a lead.

30. Academy #1: Create educational, TOFU courses

Setting up an academy is far simpler than you might think. There are many platforms out there (Wishpond uses and recommends local Vancouver startup Thinkific) that make it easy. And, when you consider your academy as simply an extension of your blog, it’s not all that intimidating. We simply created slidedecks of our educational, Top-of-Funnel content and uploaded them as a PDF.

31. Academy #2: Create lead-nurturing courses

An academy is also an excellent lead-nurturing tool. Let your new leads know about your courses and give them free access (as they’ve already provided you with their lead information). Alternatively, ask for more valuable lead information in exchange for accessing the whole academy.

32. Academy #3: Create onboarding and platform-educational courses

Once your leads have been generated and nurtured into users, your academy is still incredibly useful for onboarding and educating them about the platform.

33. Slideshare #1

Slideshare is an awesome platform for both driving new traffic and generating leads. With an audience of 70 million active users, it’s an opportunity waiting to be grabbed.

My first strategy for Slideshare lead generation is, plain and simply, Slideshare’s Lead Generation Tool. Slideshare charges $8.50 (USD) for each lead generated using the lead form embedded in your presentations.

For some of you, that might sound steep, but what if your lead gen form reads “Interested in learning more about Wishpond’s lead generation software and how we can help your business do more with your traffic? Register for a VIP demo!”

And, given that you can set that embedded lead form to appear at any point within your slideshare as well as upon download and when people click “Learn More,” a successful slide deck might yield a few good leads.

34. Slideshare #2

Another lead generation strategy within Slideshare is a simple CTA at the end of your slidedeck. If your presentation has been valuable and the content awesome, recommend a related ebook or newsletter subscription and then link to the landing page within your website.

35. Slideshare #3

Give 50-75% of your content away on Slideshare. Retain the rest in gated format on your blog.

36. Facebook Lead-Gen Ad #1

Facebook released its lead generation tool last June, and they’re super successful.

And it makes sense why. Facebook users don’t like being sent off-platform (just like blog readers prefer to be kept within your blog to convert on gated content). They’re comfortable where they are, and they know their surroundings. Sending them to your website just results in them being uncomfortable and, immediately, aware they’re going to be aggressively sold to.

37. Facebook Lead-Gen Ad #2

My second recommendation for Facebook Lead Generation Ads would be to exclusively run them on mobile and continue to run desktop ad views to your ad’s landing page. Facebook’s lead form is far easier to convert-upon than a landing page, and it’s possible you’ll have higher conversion rates from mobile visitors than you would otherwise.

38. Facebook Lead-Gen Ad #3

A cool way to use Facebook Lead Generation ads would be to run them towards a lookalike audience made up of people similar to those who converted on a single piece of gated content, or on several pieces on the same subject.

A lookalike audience is made from a custom audience, which can be created by importing a CSV of your business’ current leads and then cross-referencing them with Facebook users who are similar demographically, in terms of interests or in terms of behavior.

39. Twitter Lead-Gen Cards #1

Twitter’s Lead-Gen Cards are something to experiment with. Twitter may not be what it once was but there is still room for some gains.

40. Twitter Lead-Gen Cards #2

Twitter, unlike Facebook, actually allows you to target users based on the content of their Tweets (though I’m sure Facebook has thought about this). It’s a cool feature, as it allows you to reach users within minutes of their tweet with content relevant to what they’re thinking about.

41. Twitter Lead-Gen Cards #3

Targeting the Followers of a single Twitter user (or Followers of your Followers) gives you specific access to highly-targeted people as well as adds social proof to your advertisement.

42. Give Popup Viewers a Negative Option

A negative option CTA within your lead generation popups makes viewers choose to disengage, whereas before simply not acting was an action. Now, they have to actively choose to not accept.

In the words of Joann Weibe, “I have to choose to opt-out, meaning that if I decide not to take the freebie offered, I have to choose (or say yes to) a negative consequence.”

43. Personalize Lead Gen Pages Based on Visitor Activity

The more specifically you can target your lead generation strategy, the more success you’ll have with it.

A great example of this is to use merge tags in coordination with a visitor’s traffic source.

For instance, have a single landing page for all guest contributions. So when someone clicks the link in your author bio they’re sent to a blog-specific landing page which, using merge tags, the headline might say “Hi there [Social Media Examiner] reader! Thanks for visiting Wishpond. We create lead generating and marketing automation software. Have a look around!”

44. Slide-in Popups

An overlay popup (both full-screen and smaller) is an interruption. That’s the strength of them: asking visitors to make a choice about converting, subscribing or becoming a lead (because, as we know, the easiest decision to make is no decision at all).

But you don’t necessarily want to get in the way of your awesome blog articles (which is why I’m such a fan of click popups), and, for newsletter subscription particularly, a side-bar slide-in popup works wonders for lead generation.

45. Go Specific with your Lead Magnets

It’s never a bad idea to create more lead magnets (unless your Social Media Examiner, who defy normal best practice with a single industry report per year).

And the more specific you can go with your offer – based on what a visitor is viewing – the better. A pre-filled Excel spreadsheet for example, could be offered in an article referencing PPC optimization.

46. Use Exclusivity

Just as no one wants to be the first to join (Lead Generation Strategy #3), no one wants to be left out either.

Creating an element of exclusivity (primarily within your webinars or conferences) is a crucial element of psychological optimization. Exclusivity is the subjective belief that something which has been limited has more value that something offered free of limitation. You want your landing page visitors to feel (legitimately) that if they don’t convert now, they might miss the chance.

It’s a similar thing to urgency – trying to get your visitors to understand that they need to convert now or never.

47. Use Graphics to Represent Digital Content

Words are ephemeral. They’re difficult to grasp onto and value must be imagined.

Products are concrete – the feel of a T-Shirt or the roar of a new car’s engine.

It’s no wonder, then, that “67% of consumers consider clear, detailed images to carry more weight than product information or customer ratings.”

A mockup book cover for your ebook is something that a reader can visually grasp.

48. Progress Bar in Popups

The endowed progress effect is a psychological element of conversion optimization whereby “people feel they have made some progress towards a goal then they will become more committed towards continued effort towards achieving the goal.”

In other words, it’s that feeling of having invested in something and wanting to see it through.

49. Use Click Popups Instead of Landing Pages for Content Upgrades

Click popups can be engaged with and converted upon without the need for a new tab or window, and that seriously drops the amount of friction – which increases conversion rates.

We’ve been doing click popups with our content upgrades (and some relevant ebooks) for the past 9 months or so, and we’ve seen double the conversion rates for those click popups than we do for those same content upgrades offered within landing pages.

50. Make your Value Proposition Address a Pain Point

Follow the PAS copywriting formula. Start by addressing a problem the reader has. Agitate that problem; dig deeper into the problem. Be the hero and show how you can solve that exact problem.

51. Curiosity Gap

In 2009, a behavioral study, showed that “subjects spent more scarce resources (either limited tokens or waiting time) to find out answers when they were more curious.”

This is common sense, of course, but when people identify a “gap” between what they know and what they don’t, they’re likely to take action to fill that gap. The study went on to show that when they do fill that gap, pleasure receptors in the brain are triggered.

Consider this for an upcoming webinar or ebook landing page. If your offer intrigues people (perhaps with “never-before-seen” data or insight) you’ll increase the chance of those people committing to find out what information is (fill the gap).

52. State the Dollar Value

Our culture works in dollars and cents. We want to know what things are worth, otherwise we’ll guess (and usually guess low).

If your lead magnet has a dollar value (like a course or academy which previously cost to register) make it central to your value proposition. After all, what is a value proposition except an explanation of the value of an offer?

53. Make your Click Popups Explicit

Just because your popup CTA makes it clear what people are going to get when they click (a click popup) doesn’t mean you should just have a blank form appear.

Best practice for click popups is to repeat exactly what the CTA button or link said – consistency is key in lead generation.

54. 5 Why’s Method

The “5 Whys” method is a strategy to determine the pain point of your target market in order to better address it with your lead generation offer, or at least its title.

It has you, as the content creator or communication head, asking yourself five whys, starting with the surface level (in the same way an eight-year-old might pester you from the back seat of the car).

55. Have Multiples of the Same CTA

That might be a bit confusing. I’m not telling you to have multiple CTAs (that would defy the whole point of a landing page as having a single focus point).

Instead, what I’m telling you is to give your landing page or website visitors multiple options to convert at any time that they’re sold. Your CTA should not just be at the top or the bottom. It should be, in the words of Neil Patel “after each persuasive technique [to increase] the likelihood of a conversion at other points throughout the page.”

56. Speak with Authority

You are an expert in your field, even if you don’t feel like it. If you’re content or lead magnet is at all educational, you’re an expert.

So don’t dance around it. If you’re putting up a guide to Facebook marketing, make it the Most Comprehensive Guide Ever Created on Facebook Advertising.

57. Write for your Audience

There’s no point in creating content that’s not appealing to your business’ target market. But that’s simply common-sense.

So here’s something a little less common-sense: Writing for your audience is as much about how you write as it is about what you write.

For instance, you might be a marketing agency targeting gyms. In your lead nurturing emails, you might write about how you can get them more leads. Except that gyms don’t call them leads. They call them contacts. And they don’t call them sales at the end of the funnel. They call them members.

58. People Will See Through Fake Urgency Tactics

My recommendation is to keep your countdown timers real. If you have an upcoming webinar on Wednesday, have the countdown timer countdown to Wednesday. Promotion? Run it with a countdown until it closes. Webinar? Most GTW accounts genuinely do have a limit on how many people you’re able to host. Make that your stated limit.

59. Price Decoy

Our choices are informed by their context. A good apple looks better next to a rotten one. An alright boyfriend looks heaven-sent after one who refused to leave the couch.

It’s the same for your lead generation offers.

60. White Space

Modern website design is all about clarity – clean lines, white space and well-contrasted text.

And those things aren’t just about the artistry of web design. It’s not just because they look good. It’s also because it’s optimized.

White space (which doesn’t have to be white, by the way) focuses attention on everything that isn’t. It focuses attention on color, on text and, particularly, on contrast.

—

For 1,000 lead generation tips, tricks, ideas, and examples visit Learnleadgeneration.com.

I’ve written many articles extolling the virtues of high impact presenting and public speaking and in some I’ve even gone on record as promoting it as the most important skill in business today.

Its significance is only paralleled by its difficulty.

In a world where there are so many demands placed on our attention, where we are awash with information it’s becoming increasingly difficult to both get an audience’s attention in a presentation and keep it.

The good news is that when you know what to do and how to do it things become a great deal easier for both you and your audience. What’s even better is that the lessons are right in front of us and most of us are experiencing them every day in the form of social media.

1. Facebook first

Let’s face it, that’s exactly what many people would rather be doing whilst they are listening to a presentation. After all, so many business presentations can be quite tedious to listen to. Have you ever felt that urge to check out what’s happening on your Facebook page or on your emails as soon as the presenter turns her back to you to read her slides?

Many of the reasons that Facebook is so powerfully addictive are the very same lessons to be learned for presenting.

– We are curious

We want to know what’s going on and to be certain that we aren’t missing out on anything. As presenter’s we have to craft and deliver a presentation which will make our audience instantly curious about what’s coming next. We have moments to do that and so we have to open our presentation with a bang.

Forget the niceties and formalities and make yourself stand out from the crowd.

Ask thought provoking question

Share a shocking fact or statistic

Tell them a short, relevant and powerful story

Make them smile

Once you have aroused their curiosity say something that will leave them in no doubt that everything you have to say from now on will be of great benefit or value to them.

If it isn’t then why are you presenting anyway?

Make them a promise you can comfortably keep.

– We want to connect

Seriously, that’s why we are all here and it’s the one thing that we crave more than anything else; to feel a sense of connection.

Help your audience to connect with you by letting them into your world, be prepared to be a little vulnerable and show them who you really are.

Ditch the corporate spokesperson and have a conversation instead.

– We are bored

It sounds terrible I know but I believe that the reason so many of us tune into Facebook so frequently throughout the day is because we are bored; even at work.

If you are presenting and your audience feel the slightest hint that they are likely to soon be bored the games over. Make certain that everything you plan to say, show and do is personal to them, interesting and of value.

Ask yourself why you would stay tuned in if you were them.

2. Think like a tweet

I’ve often said that I believe that far too many professionals present their ideas to others as though they are comedians.

That doesn’t mean that I think that they are funny.

A comedian gets paid to tell a story and save the punchline for the end.

Many business presenters tell their story saving their key message (their punchline) for the very end.

It works with a joke but it’s painful in a presentation.

If you can’t clearly, concisely and richly deliver your message in the form of a tweet then I don’t believe you have a powerful one to share.

Craft your message with absolute clarity in less than 140 characters and make certain you give it to your audience right at the start.

3. Get them LinkedIn

Everyone now and then a proud father will post a picture of their son’s first Karate lesson. You may even stumble across the odd holiday sunset in Bali but for the most part its business. LinkedIn’s main purpose is to help people to network professionally and most professionals have learned that the best way to do that is to share rich content.

As I’m writing this article I switched over to LinkedIn for a moment and the first 3 articles on my timeline are:

How can you tell if someone is going to be a good team fit?

Scrap your work from home policy

A rough guide to leading organisational change

In other words once you’ve found your ‘tweet’ aka your message stay completely focused on it.

Networking isn’t a skill to be reserved exclusively for connecting with people you don’t yet know; it offers a huge opportunity for us to connect even deeper with those we do already know.

To craft your presentation ask yourself 3 very important questions.

What’s so important in this presentation that my audience should give me their undivided attention for 20 minutes?

As a result of listening, what tangible difference will it make to their personal or professional lives?

How do I want my audience to feel?

4. Take Pinterest

Pinterest has become enormously successful as a virtual pin board through the use of images. For some considerable time now much research has suggested that most of us are visual learners.

In other words we like to see things in pictures.

With over 100 million monthly active users, Pinterest has more than demonstrated that human beings like images.

Next time you’re presenting do yourself and your audience a favour and use relevant, colourful and compelling images to help animate your words.

5. Google+ or just plus

My reference to Google plus centres around two aspects:

Firstly, the idea of crafting and delivering a presentation which is so compelling that you naturally create your own circles. In other words, where the content is so rich and well delivered that your audience will want to go out of their way to share it.

My second point is to focus on the word plus.

In essence that revolves around creating a presentation that dares to be different, that stands out from the crowd and most of all makes a difference.

Who would have that that we could learn so much about high impact presenting from the arguably impersonal world of social media.

Each of these social media sites has built enormously successful empires without even using the spoken word; imagine the power of these principles with the spoken word.

I really hope you enjoyed this post. If you did, please feel free to share it through your preferred social media channels below and subscribe to our mailing list so you won’t miss any future posts.Image: Courtesy of Flickr.com

:::The new economy of conversation: How brands can make and maintain meaningful connections and create a lifetime value with customers in ways that’ll set your brand apart in a crowded marketplace, tell an authentic story, foster maximized marketplace engagement and breed brand loyalty:::

“Blah…Blah…Blah…” This is what most consumers hear when exposed to marketing messages no matter the medium through which it’s delivered. Today’s consumer demands more than catchy slogans and slick ad campaigns. But, in what’s evolved into an overwhelmingly egregious disconnect, most companies struggle to communicate even the most essential messages that will differentiate their brand in today’s crowded, confusing and expectation-laden marketplace.

With technology making it easier than ever for consumers to block and otherwise avoid advertising and marketing messages as they go about their online and offline lives, companies ubiquitously scramble for solutions—ultimately turning to content marketing to help them make and maintain meaningful connections with the marketplace…to the tune of an estimated $50B spent by U.S. businesses for 2015. However, like many marketing innovations that are incubated to solve problems, content marketing could quickly lose its impact.

According to Kevin Lund, CEO of T3 Custom—a lauded content marketing firm that helps brands “speak human” to maximize content marketing ROI, “Those who are wildly successful at content marketing understand the strategy is not just starting a blog and creating social media accounts. It’s a disciplined approach to communicating with a target audience—one offering ample opportunity to tell a simple, human story that will educate, inform, entertain and, most importantly, compel customers in a way that fully captures mind–and market–share through messaging that truly resonates.”

“Companies must completely re-imagine their approach to connecting with customers by simply communicating with them instead of talking at them,” Lund urges. “Specifically, speak human. This is not just in a given ‘handshake moment,’ but rather it is a continual friendly engagement with a consumer, or the marketplace at large, that is built primarily by trust and performance.”

Below are three of Lund’s strategies that can help you make and maintain meaningful connections and create a lifetime value with customers in ways that’ll set your brand apart in a crowded marketplace, tell an authentic story, foster maximized marketplace engagement and breed brand loyalty.

1. Recalibrate low-level communications. We have long struggled with linear, low-level or one-way communication. It is a completely timeless human phenomenon that is at the core of every conflict or stalemate, from the ones we experience at home, work and in our communities. We focus on transmitting information, but lose sight of the critical need for feedback, response or an actual “human” exchange of emotions or ideas. However, for decades this was our only way of receiving communication from advertisers and many consumers “stomached” it because there was no alternative.

Today’s social networking tools can effectively and surreptitiously disguise “reach” with “results,” often only perpetuating linear, low-level communication. For example, you’re on Twitter and Facebook and you’re tweeting and posting five times a day, and perhaps growing a fan and follower base on each like clockwork, with your “strategic” ad buy. But your zealous, disciplined approach doesn’t mean you’re doing it effectively. Who, exactly, are all those followers, friends and fans? And are you really “speaking human,” creating content or telling an authentic story? It might be that you are simply tweeting and posting just to check it off your task list, and that your followers are re-tweeting or “liking” you for the exact same reason. If that’s the case, then they’re not really followers or actual “friends” at all.

“Speaking human” involves more than just opening a communication channel for that channel’s sake, or doing social media just because someone at some seminar told you that you should. Your “handshake moment” is where people actually discover the essence of who you are as a brand for the first time. If that’s the case, what are they going to find? Will they be greeted by a sales pitch? A slogan? A press or media kit? Or are they going to find a real person—someone they might want to reach out to and greets them with a warm hello? If you’re not asking these questions, let alone answering them satisfactorily, chances are your content is simply traditional advertising disguised as substance wearing a new outfit.

2. Master conversational media. Conversational media insists that we don’t just sell ourselves, but rather, share ourselves. And further, it informs the listener who we are, rather than what we are. We must learn the signals that tell us when to drop the jargon, cut the B.S. and simply talk, authentically and truthfully, to those we hope might buy our product or service. Yes, we sell things, and so we must provide essential information about policies, performance and the like, but good content marketing is about providing information and education. Brands shouldn’t have to sell themselves.

An effective mix of messages includes telling people what you do, how you do it, and even why you do it. Then, you draw them in to your embrace with a story that is compelling and authentic. Then, leave them alone to make the choice. Why not influence the decision making process with endearing, enlightening and empowering messages? Speaking Human is about engaging with someone for a mutual benefit: you need this information and I must deliver it in a way that you understand while you need to ask me questions in a way that makes sense. We’re having a conversation. We’re speaking human. When the conversation takes place on social channels, participate in the exchange in such a way as to achieve the coveted “handshake moment.” How do you get there? What do you say to influence them to engage with your brand, your business? It’s all about cutting through the jargon, the clutter that clogs the communication pipeline. It’s not about selling your soul. It’s about them.

3. Give them something to talk about. In this new economy of conversation, marketers must master the art of facilitating the relationship between the business and its consumer. For example, the company wants to run a campaign to advertise a specific product offering. The consumer is looking to meet a need or discover an innovation. Content marketers bridge the gap. They create the information the business needs to share and provide the information customers want to receive. The job of today’s content marketer is to work both in the world of traditional media as well as conversational media.

The goal is not bullying, but inviting. Not grabbing attention, but earning and holding attention. Naturally you want audiences to take action. But, it’s the rare brand that understands how the content and story must interact to add real value versus merely seeking to sell a product or service.

Storytelling is an essential human activity and must be the cornerstone of any meaningful content strategy. If story is the nest, content becomes the baby starlings that grow strong and fly off carrying compelling messages. A story can instantly communicate your history, values and beliefs, and gives people something to talk about. Unless you have a real story, loyalty is unlikely.

“The Conversation Age finds brands in the midst of an evolutionary process,” Lund continues. “Social media and the overarching digital landscape has afforded them the ability to engage in a transactional dialogue, often giving them the bigger platform and louder voice. This new power forced modern companies to become completely transparent in their brand storytelling. Thus, the Conversation Age requires modern businesses to educate, inform, even entertain their customers, all while telling a story.”

Today, learning how to use conversational techniques in commerce to touch the heart of the customer must be a top priority for modern marketers in any field. No longer is it effective to merely “shout” at consumers through the one-way megaphone of traditional advertising such as TV and radio spots, and billboard and print ads. Nor, frankly, will consumers stand for it! Instead, sophisticated, modern consumers are demanding transparent, honest and authentic dialogue.

Source:

https://contently.com/strategist/2015/02/04/study-how-much-of-your-content-marketing-is-effective/

President-elect Trump's election victory shocked the world, as he defied the odds (and the polls) to come out on top.

A lot has been written about how and why this happened, with some putting the shock election result down to Russian hackers or CIA Director James Comey.

One factor that hasn't been discussed a great deal is the housing market. But, according to Markus Schomer, chief economist of PineBridge Investments, the prolonged effects of the financial crisis exacerbated economic issues, which in turns impacted the election result. 

"The reason Trump won was because of a part of the country where some of the benefits of the Obama economy haven’t been felt sufficiently," Schomer said in an interview with Markets Insider. "We have seen a lot of the manufacturing jobs leaving and no new jobs being created."

There’s an inequality between the jobs that have been lost in the old manufacturing hubs - places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan - and the new jobs created in places like California.

This inequality was then exacerbated by a lingering problem in the housing market. 

"Before the great financial market crisis, housing was always a very liquid asset," said Schomer. "If you lose your job in Ohio, you sell your house and move to California, because that’s where all the jobs are. Because of the housing crisis, so many people have been so underwater with their mortgage that they couldn’t do that."

Schomer said: 

"For the past six years, that typical mobility that we had in the US, where people would go where the jobs are, has been lost. At the same time, the jobs being created aren’t the kind of jobs that everyone can do. The people who lose their jobs in one industry can no longer just transfer it easily to another industry. There’s a cyclical element here, which is the housing story, and a structural element, that the skill sets are not easily transferable anymore."

Geographic mobility within the US has decreased over the past several decades. According to a report by Liberty Street Economics published in October, the percentage of the working-age population (those between 25 and 59) that moved to a different state in a given year stood at 1.5% in 2010, down from 3% in the 1980s. 

"The idea of moving across state borders for a job has been woven into the fabric of the American Dream," the report said. "However, the image of the United States as a mobile nation has changed substantially over recent decades."

Those in middle America are also much more likely to believe that their homes haven't increased in value. 

This chart by the Federal Reserve shows that US homeowners clustered on the coast are the ones that disproportionately feel that the value of their homes have increased. Middle America, where a lot of the jobs have been lost and for whom labor mobility is the most important, are more disullusioned about what their homes are worth.

 

There was no policy to address these cyclical and structural rifts under the Obama presidency, according to Schomer.

"That’s the one thing that was missing in the last administration," said Schomer, "there was no policy to address the job shortfall in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Maybe it should be the state government that does that, but the federal government never developed a strategy."

SEE ALSO: The chief economist of an $82 billion asset manager talks Trump, China, and his outlook for 2017

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Watch Yellen explain why the Federal Reserve decides to raise rates

Augmented reality is becoming a larger and larger part of the brand landscape now. Before we get too deep down the augmented reality (AR) rabbit hole, let’s do a quick vocabulary lesson, because they’re somewhat-similar terms that often get confused.

First, let’s distinguish between AR and virtual reality, or VR. AR is the blending of virtual reality with real life; developers create images and applications that blend in with the world around the user.

The best known example of augmented reality at work in 2016 was Pokemon Go, which broke almost all Apple download records and created a rush for more brands to interact with AR.

Turns out users love seeing a Pikachu in their landscape.

Virtual reality, by contrast, is the creation of a virtual world that users can interact with. By definition, it’s going to be different than augmented reality and not contain many elements from the world we see every day. Virtual reality is a little farther off in terms of driving business and brand behavior, but Oculus Rift (a well-known VR platform) being purchased by Facebook was a step in that direction.

The final component is artificial intelligence, or AI. This refers to machines who learn from experience and repetition. Presently, you’re seeing this mostly with chatbots — but in the future, AI will shape much of how business is done.

Chatbots (like this one by Sephora) are well integrated into popular messenging app Kik.

Back to augmented reality. While the market is small now, it could grow to $90 billion by 2020. Brands are rushing into the space, in part because of the huge success of Pokemon Go, and in part because it’s a next logical step in our continued digital evolution.

Here’s how brands are working with augmented reality right now:

In your iPhone camera. Apple is working on this with teams from several startups it recently acquired. This would allow, for example, a view of a city street to be overlaid with directions, price points for nearby restaurants, coupons, or–wait for it–some type of animated creature to make you giggle.

On your face. At the same time Apple is working on integrating augmented reality into their phone cameras, they’re supposedly also working on “smart glasses.” This isn’t necessarily a surprise, as the biggest tech companies out there are working on the same. Facebook has one in the pipeline, and SnapChat’s Spectacles are already out. (In a nice hipster throwback move, Snapchat made Spectacles available in vending machines.)

Style and AR, all in a pair of SnapChat Spectacles.

The smart glasses concept for brands will be the next tier of “making sure you’re on Google Maps” from 5-10 years ago. Now you’ll want users to be able to engage with you through augmented reality. That could be information about your store/product, coupons, offers, or random fun characters you sprinkle near your brick and mortar to encourage people to come in.

At your favorite game/match. Think about live sports for a second. The advent of HDTV has driven down incentives for people to drive to a stadium, park, and buy food/drink because the views are so stellar at home. (This is mostly true for football, but applies to other sports as well.) But what if augmented reality comes to stadiums, and fans can overlay the field with characters, images, and real-time stats? It might be coming soon to Gillette Stadium, home of the Patriots. It was possible at Gillette because of a Wi-Fi upgrade, which would be a necessary condition at other venues.

Sports is a specific type of branding, but this idea can be extrapolated out to any number of other concepts. Trade shows could be made more informative and entertaining. Lifestyle brands could offer real-time makeup tutorials. B2B sales people could walk prospects through a demo (and pricing) more effectively. Research in the last few years has shown that customer experience is more valuable than traditional branding now, and augmented reality is a great chance for brands to increase CX.

At your office. This is more an internal (focused on employees) idea rather than an external (focused on customers) one, but it’s nonetheless valuable. Microsoft’s augmented reality offering, HoloLens, has partnered with an elevator company to help train 24,000 technicians. They can see problems ahead of arriving at a client site, and less experienced techs can be guided by more-veteran ones. The techs can also pull up tons of information about the elevators in question via HoloLens.

From $0 to $90 billion is a giant market jump, and augmented reality is here to stay for a while. Understanding how it could help you deliver on your brand promise is crucial to the next 5-10 years of business.

Excited about AR? Ask yourself:

How could AR make some piece of my user’s journey easier/better? Users might not be asking for it yet, but if you see an opportunity to incorporate AR into an existing part of your user’s experience, start looking into it. (Same goes for an internal app!) You could see better user engagement, or push them further through a conversion funnel.

Do you have the resources to do it well? So you’ve done your research, and you know there’s real value in AR for your organization. Can you invest the resources to make it easy to use, and consistently work well? It’s exciting to try something new, but if the experience is clunky or gimmicky, you won’t get the user engagement or business value you’re looking for.

What other applications of augmented reality have you seen and liked?

If you are trying to figure out how to get your sales team to improve conversion rates, consider strategies that enable reps to focus more on closing deals.

In many cases, low conversion rates result from salespeople being bogged down by lead generation processes.

The following is a look at several strategies you can employ to support your reps and help them close deals more efficiently.

Systematise Best Practices

Don’t overlook the brain drain that occurs when reps have to dedicate mental energy to identifying and implementing best lead generation practices.

Reps often end up navigating cold calls, emails and other methods without a clear plan, organisational system or emphasis on efficiency.

Evaluate the methods that consistently produce the best results for your business. Build ideal customer profiles or buyer personas, which allow you to target the right people every time.

Coach your reps on using the most efficient prospecting methods. Save them the brain drain by defining best practices, and automating much of the lead generation process.

Offer Better Data

Time is often wasted in lead generation because reps don’t have access to high-quality profile data on prospects.

Incomplete or inaccurate prospect profiles cause reps to have to conduct more research prior to making calls.

It is important that your marketing function collaborates with sales reps to build thorough prospect profiles from the beginning.

More profile data allows for more effective, and therefore efficient, prospecting contacts. Less time and energy spent getting appointments preserves more time and energy for preparing strong, customised sales presentations.

It gives your reps additional ammunition for effective need discovery, which is imperative to closing deals.

Reps need to investigate the distinct needs and pain points of each customer to articulate value in a way that matters.

Outsource Lead Generation Activities

Typical sales reps don’t like lead generation activities.

Even those who have talent in these areas get worn down from the process of attracting prospects, impeding their ability to focus on sales presentation and conversion strategies.

Outsourcing lead generation activities is one of the simplest, but most impactful things you can do to free your reps up to focus on closing.

You also benefit from hiring an expert provider that has expertise in helping clients target and land appointments with ideal customer types.

Thus, you get the best of both worlds — a happier and more focused sales team, and more expert lead generation.

Wrap Up

In general, you have two basic options for reducing the lead generation stress on your team and helping them close more deals.

You can define best practices for efficient activities, or outsource appointment setting requirements to an expert firm.

Regardless, your reps will convert much more efficiently when they have time and energy to focus on need discovery and value articulation.

Author: Patrick Groover

Many organizations employ a wide variety of tactics when it comes to their marketing strategies. Thankfully, a modern marketing automation platform provides enough flexibility to achieve the same outcomes in many different ways.

That being said, while it is possible to take many paths to achieve your objectives, some configurations present a healthier approach than others.

What Does a Healthy Strategy Look Like?

Like most things in life, quality comes in many sizes, shapes, and formats. One team’s definition of healthy may look drastically different than another team’s as initiatives often are unique to a specific organization. Therefore, to define healthy, it is important to look at the principles or leading indicators that highlight whether the sales ends are justified by the marketing means.

As a general rule-of-thumb, healthy strategies leverage balanced communications to deliver results and maximize the use of everyone’s time, both the audience’s and brand’s. A healthy program is customer-appreciated–timely, value-adding, and relevant. Equally important, healthy initiatives are internally supported–efficient, repeatable, and sustainable.

Program health can be measured based on both qualitative and quantitative metrics. For example, a good quantitative metric to track is the amount of time being spent on each campaign or marketing activity compared to the overall ROI. Qualitative metrics include things like employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.

In this blog, I’ll explain three ways that you can get the most of your marketing automation platform for a healthy, sustainable strategy and how you can measure them:

1. Campaigns Should Always Add Value

Your relationships with potential and existing customers are like muscles—properly exercised, they can lead to strong and powerful revenue outcomes. In the same way, overusing and straining them can lead to opt-outs and irritated customers.

As you’re assessing your campaigns, the first question you should ask is “Does this communication provide value to my audience?”

Many times, it can be tempting to overcommunicate when you’re leveraging a marketing automation platform due to the scale at which you can run programs. To overcome this temptation, it’s important to target specific outcomes and objectives within each program. Instead of aiming to send out a weekly or monthly message, define your relationship or education objectives–this is often supported by writing out a value-adding statement while planning your communications.

For example:

• This program is designed to educate our audience on ___________ and can be confirmed when the contact __________.
• This nurturing program will track our audience as they move from _________ to _________ and will track the number of times they __________.

Applying this to real-world scenarios for a subscription management company:

• This program is designed to educate our audience on all of our available subscriptions and can be confirmed when the contact clicks on links to an increasing number of subscription summary pages.
• This nurturing program will track our audience as they move from casual readers to event participants and will track the number of times they attend annual events.

By targeting specific outcomes and objectives, you’ll be able to clarify the value that you’ll deliver through automated communications. In the scenarios above, the subscription management company wants to educate their audience on available subscriptions and raise awareness about the information within various publications. The value-adding objective is to present relevant content to their audience and highlight information that the contact may not have otherwise known was available through these publications.

Adding value at each touch point is a great way to ultimately deliver on your goals for driving conversions and revenue. By linking together value-adding communication objectives, you can develop an overall nurturing path for each contact. In the example above, the subscription summary page could include a call-to-action to sign-up for the listed publication.

Ideas for measurement: Track unsubscribes, click-through activity, and program successes.  The goal is to gauge whether your audience is interacting with your content or potentially avoiding communication. Qualitative customer surveys and internal discussions on content relevance can uncover areas for improvement.

2. Automation Should Reduce Complexity

Do your nurture streams or campaign workflows look like a bunch of spaghetti? Do they feel overly complex in their logic? If so, it may be time to take a look at the events, constraints, and logic being used to automate your communications.

With a marketing automation platform, you can leverage information in a number of ways. By listening for behaviors, rather than programming if/then statements for every interaction, you can simplify the process for placing the most relevant information in front of each audience segment based on their interests. This also increases the likelihood that your audience will see content that resonates the most with them.

One example of this is a welcome series for new customers. Rather than stringing together multiple send-wait-send emails and evaluation steps, you can set up a communication series that are based on whether customers exhibit a new or desired behavior. Not only is this a healthier approach, it’s also a great way to avoid overwhelming them and ensuring that your most important messages are consistently connecting with the right audiences.

Here are a few ways you can evaluate this aspect of your marketing automation:

• Use the simplicity principle. If it takes more than a few configurations to get to your outcome, then there may be an easier setting that accomplishes the same goal
• Ask your team to note any workflow logic that feels overly complex and host team brainstorming sessions to see if everyone agrees on the approach
• Schedule a periodic review with your platform’s implementation experts to select automation programs
• Encourage your team to read and share articles from your marketing automation community

Of course, if you are running up against a wall when it comes to the available triggers, filters, and logic within your current marketing automation platform, it may be time to consider more sophisticated systems. There is a big difference in design logic from platform-to-platform, and the right logic will make it far easier to implement campaigns based on the objectives and responses you hope to achieve.

Ideas for measurement: The average time spent building out nurturing workflows is a great metric to start with. Qualitative monitoring might include a discussion of daily workload, system ease-of-use, and best practices for automating customer interactions.

3. Automation Should Reduce Repetition

A final concept for getting the most of your marketing strategy is scalability. Many marketers have come to terms with the daily grind of developing programs, and as such, they may not realize that many repetitive activities can be consolidated. The right marketing automation platform will reduce the number of times that any type of program or content needs to be produced from scratch.

Common examples of repetitive activities:

• Building the same audience list or segment
• Loading the same content over and over again
• Recreating the same email just to adjust content for an audience sub-segment
• Attaching audiences to campaign flows
• Setting up campaign flows from scratch just to add a few tweaks for a new audience

Features like dynamic content and the ability to clone whole campaigns (with all associated assets) can free up the much-needed time to support your strategic initiatives. Efficiencies designing, implementing, and executing campaigns will allow you to focus more on monitoring results and optimizing.

Another common area where repetitive activities are abound is reporting. If you’re spending hours and hours compiling data to deliver status updates, your marketing automation platform may have untapped, out-of-the-box settings that can visualize results without a heavy amount of manual intervention. Creating an inventory of your marketing reports and a process for delivering updates may result in greater efficiencies.

Ideas for measurement: Excellent quantitative measure include the number of hours spent building reports and reconfiguring or rebuilding previously developed workflows and content. Tying this information to a general survey that evaluates perspectives on the amount of repetitive work is a good way to track qualitative satisfaction with the current systems, processes, and tasks.

A Great Time to Reflect

The new year is right around the corner, and many of us are planning out what it will look like for our organizations. One of the best things we can do is to pause and reflect on the items that are working and those that can be streamlined. A great way to rally your team to success in the new year is to ask them to participate in the evaluation process and help determine if there are any areas within your marketing strategy that could be streamlined going forward. Of course, it may time to consider a more advanced marketing automation platform if your current solution does not support these capabilities.

What other tips do you have for a healthier marketing strategy? As always, please feel free to share your comments below.

 

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A 3-Point Health Check for Your Marketing Strategy was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post A 3-Point Health Check for Your Marketing Strategy appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about the mobile apps business is that it absolutely must revolve around empathy. If the project managers fail to understand and share the feelings of their audience, it will be damn hard to create a compelling, awesome app that everyone will enjoy using.

But empathy itself is a tricky thing, especially when you’re trying to tap into a large audience. It requires a thorough understanding of today’s users, as well as how users of tomorrow will behave. With things moving as fast as they do in the digital world, it might seem close to impossible.

What we do know about the mobile audience in general is that they’re a tough bunch. They are hard to reach, even harder to retain, and merciless in their desire for an almost flawless user experience.

Understanding your mobile audience, their needs, wants, moods, behavior patterns and expectations can seem like a superpower at times. You’d basically need to read their minds.

But product managers are essentially caught between a rock and a hard place – they *need* to know these things, otherwise their apps could be set up for failure.

Here’s a real-life example of this common challenge for you (we’ll explain later how we got this data). Trinity Mirror, one of the largest and leading UK publishers, created a new app for one of its news sites. As with most new apps, their app crashed now and then, and crashes are known to be the biggest app audience killers. Logically, they absolutely had to get rid of the crashes. So, they were faced with a choice: either sniffing through endless streams of data and trying to recreate whatever users did to initiate the crash, or somehow read their users’ minds, understand their behavior patterns and app usage, in order to be able to quickly reproduce crashes. They were actually able to choose the latter, (no we’re not pulling your leg) which helped them eliminate the issues swiftly.

Imperfections of (traditional) analytics tools

Let’s take a closer look into the two options Explore Trinity has had, to understand exactly why “reading users minds” worked better for them.

Say Trinity Mirror used traditional analytics tools to monitor their new app’s behavior in the wild. What would they be able to find? That their app crashes often, and that it probably crashes more often on a specific platform. They could also see that the time spent with the app drops, but it would be pure speculation to link those two things together. The point is – they could get a lot of valuable, useful information, but they’d lack an answer to a simple, but tremendously important question – why?

Why did the app crash? And why did it crash on a specific version, more than on others? It could take countless hours to reproduce that exact scenario which led to the crash, and even then, there are no guarantees that fixing that particular instance will make a significant impact in the long run. Again, we can go back to the start. Understanding is the key, and traditional analytics tools can offer plenty, but not understanding. These tools provide a lot of value, but they don’t provide a full, accurate picture. For that, after all, you’d need a superpower.

Solutions for tomorrow

Combining a traditional analytics tool with a means of understanding the ‘why’ will enable you to form a complete picture of the app’s state and your users’ minds, allowing empathy to take the stage. That way, future iterations of your apps can provide exactly what your users want, essentially helping the app grow. What we’re talking about here is user session recordings. Being second best to mindreading, they allow you to see the exact sequence of events which led to things like app crashes or app abandonment. If certain app’s elements (for example, the shopping cart) get abandoned, through user session recordings it’s easy to determine if it’s because of a bug, a crash or if certain features (for example, payment methods) are missing.

Now let’s go back to our Trinity Mirror example. When they noticed a high percentage of crashes in their new app, instead of combing through endless streams of reports, they used a qualitative analytics platform entitled Appsee. Appsee’s user session recordings and could instantly identify the exact sequence of actions that led to a crash. And because Appsee automatically detects all unique screens, gestures and user interactions in an app, Trinity Mirror didn’t have to do the unnecessary work of pre-defining in-app events in advance.

But perhaps the best part of this fresh approach to analytics is that it’s proactive – sort of like finishing someone else’s sentence. Instead of waiting for users to start complaining and or worse- uninstalling the app, they could identify and react on an issue before it got out of hand.

By having access to user session recordings, you can see if certain buttons, or key features of your app are going unnoticed or confusing your users. You can see what users are gravitating towards, and which parts spark their interest the most. By analyzing screens users flock to, as well as those they avoid, you can start understanding behavior patterns. All of this will help you identify your app’s most frustrating UI elements, consequently leading to – you guessed it – empathy.

Once realizing which parts of the app are most popular, you can expand on those features, essentially growing your app creating a compelling, satisfying and well-rounded user experience. You can get first-hand feedback on newly installed features without having to ask for complicated and expensive face-to-face interviews. At the end of the day, these tools will allow you to understand your users. Bear in mind – understanding and empathy are great tools for growth hacking your app. They will help you identify your app’s pain points fast, and will make sure your changes always hit home.

Painting the complete picture

In-person interviews, as well as other forms of user research, are still essential, if you are looking to get a complete, well-rounded story on your users. However, they have been, and will continue to be lacking, for as long as you don’t keep empathy and understanding in mind.

Session recordings truly are a critical, extremely insightful instrument and allow you to maintain those factors. Together with traditional analytics tools, and classic methods of understanding users (such as in-person interviews), they will allow you to focus on the most important thing of all – being empathetic.

Within the world of sales and marketing over the last two to three years, account-based thinking has risen to prominence as a top-of-mind initiative. Analyst firm TOPO recently reported that 80% of all client inquiries are related to account-based topics. Advisory firm SiriusDecisions called Account-Based Marketing a “must have,” in 2015, revealing that nearly all (92%) companies surveyed recognize the value in ABM. Even the online search activity around “account based marketing” has grown almost 10X since 2013.

Revenue-minded B2B leaders have always sought out tactics that will land more of the big deals, the ones that include long, complex sales cycles. But account-based thinking is not a shiny object that should be ignored until the next trend comes along. As B2B marketers and sales team face increased pressure to deliver results to their organizations, the account-based mindset has finally begun to earn the recognition it deserves as a surefire way of driving growth, as it has for years. Why? Because it’s perfectly suited for B2B.

Account-based sales and marketing is not new; it’s just been ignored by MarTech.

Advisory firm ITSMA first started discussing the concept of ABM 12 years ago. However, in the last decade, B2B demand generation has almost completely re-invented itself. Just look at the collision of disciplines such as marketing automation, inbound, content marketing, analytics, email, search, social media, and more. These tactics have armed marketers and sales teams with data-driven tools to create more efficiencies and produce more revenue.

The problem is that these technologies are optimized for single-buyer deals; ideal for high velocity, low-value purchases. They are built around the ‘lead,’ an individual buyer who progresses along your funnel until they are ready to buy. Their limitations have ushered in a new wave of technology available to accelerate and scale account-based activity.

B2B requires Account-Based Everything.

The nature of B2B buying and selling demands a different process, as it always has. In many cases, the buyer is never a single person. He or she is almost always part of a buying team. The bigger the deal, the more people, departments, and disciplines get involved. Up to 17 people influence the typical enterprise purchase (up from 10 people in 2011) according to IDG. Each of these people has a different motivation, a different pain point, and is rewarded differently.

It’s due time to realize that we’re really selling to an account – not just a lead. To support selling into a large account effectively, it’s critical that your team understands how each individual fits into the larger account and has a sense of the relationships, influences, and connections that bind them together. Your marketing team needs to understand the context of the account relationship to decide how to interact with any new person that comes into the system. Your customer success team needs to systematically expand the depth and breadth of relationships across client accounts to cross-sell and retain happy customers.

This is not only Account Based Marketing, nor is it just Account Based Sales Development. This is Account Based Everything. And it’s a critical prerogative for modern B2B organizations.

Now, more than ever, is the right time for account-based thinking.

The Corporate Executive Board has discussed several external factors behind the growing number of stakeholders within organizations; a company’s aversion to risk requires buyers to build consensus to move ahead with any purchase; the complexity of technology means the involvement of IT, operations, and procurement in purchases; globalization brings regional players into the mix; regulatory requirements warrant legal and compliance oversight; and finally, flat, networked organizations prioritize cross-silo collaboration. These factors all mean that in today’s world, more than ever before, it’s critical to build relationships across accounts, rather than focus on one individual “lead.”

Beyond these external factors, there are internal economics that are driving urgency behind the buzz around account-based strategies. For many organizations who sell into the enterprise market, big deals are worth 10-20 times more than the average deal size. Account-based activity is more efficient, leading to bigger wins, increasing the quality of opportunities while accelerating deals. It aligns sales and marketing, enables sales excellence, and delivers a consistently relevant experience to customers. These are powerful reasons why companies are designing sales and marketing strategies specifically for these types of deals.

What’s more, relying on tactics such as inbound only serves to limit growth potential. As powerful as inbound can be, most programs take 6-9 months to start seeing results, and a full 12-24 months to start seeing significant value. Most companies simply don’t have the luxury of waiting for the lead-centric inbound model to ramp up, or expand when facing content saturation. Account-based strategies and outbound activity are a faster route to revenue, and can help break through the noise in crowded markets.

The future of B2B is account-based.

Our own efforts to help companies adopt account-based thinking are being met with enormous positive traction. Beyond our own validation of this concept, reports from the front lines of account-based programs have been astonishingly positive. These programs have been shown to yield the highest conversion rates, and the greatest revenue growth of all the programs run by pioneers who have proved this model.

According to the ITSMA, “account based marketing delivers the highest Return on Investment of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic. Period.”

In an interview for Martech Advisor, Megan Heuer of SiriusDecisions predicts the future of account-based thinking. She describes it as “the future of B2B – insight-led, technology-enabled and just plain the smart way to focus on growth and customer relationships.”

From where we sit, we couldn’t agree more.

Are you making every sales conversation count? Tune in to this archived episode of CONNECT! Online Radio for Professional Sellers^® to increase sales, improve profitability and retain more customers. Special guest Nancy Bleeke, founder of Sales Pro Insider and author of Conversations that Sell, talks with host and on-air sales coach Deb Calvert to show you how you can make your each sales conversation work better for you.

Bleeke’s extensive sales background and work on personality styles and communication gives her a unique perspective. She is the developer of Tribal Types™ and will  let listeners know how they can quickly identify buyer styles. That alone improves the impact of a sales conversation!

Knowing your buyer’s style and adapting the way you communicate will make the sales conversation more meaningful and more collaborative. Your buyers will respond with increased interest, and you’ll be able to make more sales as a result.

Excerpts about improving the sales conversation from Deb and Nancy:

Deb: “In years past, it seems like there has been a heavy emphasis on how to close the sale. Yet there has been a shift. The books that have recently been bestsellers in the sales space seem to be giving more attention not on how to close the sale but on how to open the dialogue and genuinely connect with the buyer. What are your thoughts about that trend?”

Nancy: “I think it’s very necessary and being a person that focuses on communication and conversation, I always struggle with the fact that things were focused on the outcome of the sales conversation. If we can’t engage that buyer first, we can’t have a conversation to close in the long run… A productive conversation can accomplish so much more, usually more efficiently. And so I think we can close sales effectively and make a stronger connection in the future referrals when we actually connect with the buyer to get what they need, and give them what they need, and just truly have that conversation.”

Deb: “What are those adaptations? Can you give us some examples of what it is the seller’s doing?”

Nancy: “What the seller might be doing is narrowing down their questions to just three or four for somebody who can shorten their time but make them high impact and purposeful. ”

There’s a lot more where that came from! Tune in for more insights about the sales conversation from Nancy Bleeke

This is just the start! The wisdom keeps coming, so listen in with Nancy Bleeke to get detailed information on Tribal Types™ and buyer styles in sales conversations. There’s no better way to maximize your windshield time than by listening to CONNECT! Online Radio for Sales Professionals^®. We’ll help you cut out continuances, put an end to pending and stop stalling out in sales.

The post What Could You Do to Improve the Impact of Your Sales Conversation? appeared first on People First.

Great customer experience. It’s obvious when it happens and quite frustrating when it doesn’t. Websites like Zappos, Hilton and United Airlines are investing significant time, energy and money to ensure that you are not just satisfied …they want you so thrilled that you tell others about the experience. To accomplish this, they have given us better online tools that allow us to search, transact, track and even get support without picking up the phone.

So why is it that this same passion for automating the customer experience is not happening in B2B? I have a few thoughts. It could be a fear of losing that personal touch. Or maybe it’s the feeling that their products are “just too complex”. In the end, it often comes down to the guy on the left. He represents the old way of doing things. I’m sure this guy works at your office. He might even be the owner or CEO of your company. Regardless… the primary reason you have not changed is “because we’ve always done it that way”.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the major differences between a B2C order and a B2B order. I realize that there are some exceptions but, in most cases, you will find that B2B customers are still calling a rep, still using paper and still calling customer service when there is a problem. The chart below outlines a few more…

The good news is that most B2B companies are aware of this issue and are starting the conversations to enact change. A few of them are hiring the talent to make a change immediately and will likely become industry pacesetters. The majority are stuck in a committee trying to plan their “strategy” or next steps.

B2B companies need to realize that the next generation of buyers does not want a phone call. It’s no longer about your great products. Great digital experiences will determine your success or failure with the customer.

If you are one of the leaders driving change now, I would propose 5 keys to help you transform the B2B experience for your customers:

1. Personalize your B2B – Ensure that the websites are built for each user type you sell to
2. Simplify your Search – Intuitive search which also recommends products to each user type
3. Make it Easy to Purchase – Quick order and ability to reorder asap for new and current customers
4. Constant Communication – Order updates, new products, promotions and educational content
5. 24/7 Service – Live chat, FAQ and the option for a live voice if needed

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

Given today is Boxing Day here in Canada, and that I am off enjoying the holiday (the bargains), I thought it was a good day to reprise a piece from 2010 about thinking out of the box. Enjoy!

There is a lot of talk in sales and in marketing about ‘thinking out of the box'; this is big with me because I am sure that when they put me in a box I’ll be dead, and that’s not good. But all too many in sales people are stuck in their boxes, they may say they think out of the box, even when they are too afraid to come out of the box. It’s so warm and cozy, easy to explain, not like outside the box.

Now being in sales, and having the ego to go with it, you’re probably sitting there thinking “phew, can’t be talking about me, I always think out of the box, hey even that sales tech said so last week before I bought her lunch.”

Well let’s test things and find out, shall we?

Answer the following question: What’s one and one?

Waiting

Waiting

Waiting

Write your answer here: _____

One more, what’s three and three?

Waiting

Waiting

Waiting

Write your answer here: _____

So, what did you put down, 2 for the first one, and 6 for the second?

You’re so in the box!

The first one is obviously eleven; and the second is thirty-three.

Absolutely it is a right answer, look, just step out of your box a minute, yes you can keep one hand on it for security if you need to.
Look here man, 1 and 1, or 11, it’s eleven. Again, 3 and 3, 33, thirty-three, right?

Of course it is, if you said two, you choose to only partially listen to what I was asking. Thought you heard one plus one, right? This was amplified by the echo chamber that is your box, and bam, an answer that misses the opportunity presented. How many times do you faced this same risk with customers, thinking you understood what they were saying only to blow it?

In sales, you must float on or ride your experience, not be weighed down by it; like a surfer on a big wave, you can use it to be propelled forward, or be crumbled by its power. You need to interpret and react according to the specific situation, be creative in responding, not predictable with your comebacks.

You need to use and leverage language and imagination in moving sales forward. But if you insist one and one is two not 11, then you need to relax and open the lid a bit more, a lot more. By leveraging language and imagination you will not only challenge yourself to creatively resolve challenges, but also encourage your buyers to step up and step beyond their limits, especially in how they limit their view of their challenge, and things that limit their perception of “a” solution.

It is one thing to say you think or act out of the box, another to execute. Many talk beyond their box and then be as conventional as ever in their execution. Selling is about change, step out of your box if you expect the buyers to abandon theirs.

Become one of the thousands of sales professionals receiving my latest updates on sales execution, tools, tips and more.

Join Now!

The post Getting Out Of Your Sales Box appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

Revenue Marketing Journey: Milepost 1

Revenue Marketing is the combined set of strategies, processes, people, technologies, content and results measurement across marketing and sales that does four things:

1. drops sales-ready leads into the top of the funnel
2. accelerates sales opportunities through the funnel
3. measures marketing based on contribution to pipeline and revenue, and ultimately
4. transforms marketing from a cost center to a revenue center

In a series of monthly posts, I will chronicle the major tasks fundamental to transforming your marketing organization to one that influences revenue in a predictable, scalable way.

The increasing importance of customer experience requires us to transform marketing.

Jerry Gregoire, chief information officer at Dell said: “The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.” Is the customer experience at your firm sufficient to motivate a marketing transformation? Consider these examples of customer experience driving change:

• Vinyl shifted to CDs, then to iPods and now to Spotify, Pandora and Songza. The product is the same, music, but the customer experience is much different and driving the change.
• Blockbuster and Hollywood Video are replaced by Netflix, iTunes, HBO Now, and Amazon Prime. Same product, different customer experience.
• Are you hailing a yellow cab, or scheduling an Uber or Lyft? I’ll wager you have tried the latter two and had a different experience.
• Have your tried using an Amazon Dash button at home to order laundry detergent?
• Have you pre-ordered and prepaid for your Starbucks beverage so you can breeze in, skip the line and be sipping in seconds?
• And how about those iPads at every table in some airport restaurants replacing the wait staff? The food is the same (sadly), but the customer experience is certainly different.

The internet has changed the way people buy and how they want to engage with us. The buyer’s journey has changed and if we adapt marketing faster than our competitors we can gain market share. But responding to pressures from prospects isn’t the only impetus to transform marketing.

Sales wants effective marketing engagement with their funnel.

There are various conflicting statistics about how much of the buying journey is over before the buyer wants to engage with sales, most of them suggesting in excess of 50%. One thing is for sure, buyers are increasingly engaging with us through marketing’s digital channels when they are in the awareness, research, consideration and evaluation buying stages. These channels, include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google and your website. Sales knows that they can benefit from knowing exactly how and when a prospect engaged. What content did they view? What ad did they respond to? Furthermore, if a prospect is not ready for sales engagement the reps want to be able to advise marketing how to nurture that individual. Perhaps they want marketing to engage with several large strategic accounts and help the sales reps penetrate deeper and broader (Account Based Marketing). Not a new concept, but we now have technologies and marketing channels that make these activities much more measurable and more cost effective.

Marketing teams want to know their efforts make a difference.

Marketers know that the buyer behavior is shifting. They know there are new channels and new marketing technologies to help them. Marketers want to transform from lead generation and demand generation to a modern marketing approach to engaging prospects and customers. They know that more CEOs are insisting that marketing demonstrate a strong ROI. Most marketing management I meet understand that the old marketing structures with their silos will not work in a world where prospects interact through several channels for a single business transaction.

First steps on the journey

The destination is a revenue marketing organization that delivers repeatable, predictable, scalable results that generate a significant impact on the pipeline and revenue. Key milestones along the way include:

• Choosing the channels with which to engage prospects and customers
• Deploying a revenue marketing architecture that will scale
• Adopting the best processes, especially around lead management and program development
• Choosing and enforcing the right KPIs
• Overhauling the content factory and becoming customer centric, not product centric.
• Organizing for success

In the next post, we will discuss organizing for success in revenue marketing and designing a marketing center of excellence. For more insights, download TPG’s new white paper: Introduction to the Revenue Marketing Center of Excellence.

As posted previously in Target Marketing Magazine on September 26, 2016

When my wife and I bought our current home, we knew it wouldn’t be our last. But I was still surprised when she proposed we sell our house and move on to something better.

She broached the subject by sharing her thoughts on our future and how our housing situation didn’t quite mesh with our ambitions. She raised interesting points, but I wasn’t ready to move. I was only at the “top of the funnel,” and I didn’t realize I had a problem that needed a solution.

My wife knows I’m somewhat particular and not inclined to jump without exploring every option, so she pivoted her approach. She showed me a lot in a neighborhood I like where we could potentially build the home of our dreams. By prioritizing my preferences, she led me to imagine living in a home designed for our needs. When we realized the process was going to be more involved than we thought, this newfound dream quickly unraveled.

Persistently, she sought another option that would get me excited about moving while offering a more affordable price and better lot logistics. Several alternatives and story evolutions later, we found a new opportunity. This one allowed us to build on a lot with a view, which she knew was near the top of my wish list. Her story again evolved to highlight how this solution addressed our needs.

This time, however, her story included a different narrative for another stakeholder: my mother-in-law. External validation when making such a big purchase is always nice — particularly in the business world — and my wife shifted her story to account for her mother’s different and more conservative perspective. She told the same story with a different narrative, and my mother-in-law began to come around to the idea.

We began the process of purchasing the lot, and we even found a buyer for our home. Everything was lining up — until my wife’s outlook changed. She’d grown increasingly uncomfortable with the risk and effort involved in a custom build. I acquiesced, and we canceled the sale of our home. We were staying put.

Our story was complete. Or so I thought.

Marketing Through Storytelling

Nurturing a lead shouldn’t be a disjointed series of assets delivered sequentially. It should reflect a progression of narrative, focused on the customer and across channels to create a connected experience. The journey might begin via inbound, and it might bounce back and forth between web, email, and paid channels several times over a long duration. Consistency throughout this progression is vital. If we can do this well, we can generate 50 percent more sales at a 33 percent lower cost — for starters.

Nurturing leads through storytelling can fuel astronomical growth. Swedish demolition equipment manufacturer BROKK Inc. reported 200 percent growth after beginning a campaign dedicated to telling the company’s tale.

Josh Hill of Marketing Rockstar Guides likens the process of nurturing leads to a serialized novel: “At a tactical level, each email, each landing page, each paper is a chapter in the story,” Hill wrote. “Rather than give it all away, each content piece that is shared uses plot elements and storytelling components to keep leads engaged. Calls to action are about continuing the story to find out what happened.”

To help your story resonate with your target audience, don’t thumb through conventional marketing textbooks. Take a page from storytelling experts such as Joseph Campbell and his Hero’s Journey to provide a framework for your narrative.

Getting to Business in Your Story

Another method used by master storytellers like “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone is ABT — and, but, therefore — to propel their story forward and keep audiences engaged. In fact, scientist-turned-storyteller Randy Olson suggests Donald Trump’s presidential election win was largely driven by Trump’s innate storytelling nature and use of the ABT structure: “America was once great. America is no longer great. I will make America great again.”

Regardless of your opinion of the election result, Trump’s success offers a lesson: We can use these techniques to craft customer-creating business narratives.

Ardath Albee, author of “Digital Relevance,” suggests the hero of our story is the buyer rather than our product. Our hero might struggle with various problems, which function as the villain. Ultimately, our hero achieves her goal by using our product to solve those problems.

To extend this all a bit further, we can nurture leads by creating serialized, content-driven experiences. Below is an adaptation of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey created by the fine folks at Camp Creative to illustrate how we can use storytelling to nurture leads and create customers:

1. Ordinary World: The hero begins in an unremarkable world of normalcy, although “some kind of polarity in the hero’s life is pulling in different directions and causing stress.”

This is the status quo. Our customer might not even know she has a problem that needs to be solved. Our story starts here as we begin to shape our customer’s perspective. It’s our job to help her realize she might have a problem.

2. Call to Adventure: Our hero receives a call to head off into the unknown.

Once our customer understands there is a problem — something that’s causing stress or is standing in the way of improving her situation — we need to show her solutions. This doesn’t mean we should solely offer our product as the solution, but we should introduce her to the landscape that awaits.

3. Refusal of the Call: Frequently, the hero is reluctant to answer the call. This could be due to fear, insecurity, or other reasons.

Change is hard, and it often comes with great risk. Home in on anything that might keep your hero from accepting the challenge of solving her problem now that she knows what it is. Address these concerns, and our reluctant hero will be ready for the next step in the journey: meeting the mentor (hint: that’s you!).

4. Meet the Mentor: The hero meets a supernatural or spiritual guide.

This is where you — not your product or service — become the trusted advisor to our hero. Think of yourself as the fairy godmother to your customer’s Cinderella. You’ll share knowledge, insight, and wisdom to help our hero overcome her challenge.

5. Cross the Threshold: This is the point where the hero crosses from his/her ordinary world into the unknown, taking a leap of faith.

At this stage, you must show how your product specifically solves the hero’s problem. Provide a demo, a walkthrough, a webinar, or another meaningful interaction where you can illustrate exactly how you’re going to help our hero overcome her problem and initiate change.

6. Tests, Allies, Enemies: The hero must endure a series of tests or challenges to begin her transformation.

In medium- and high-consideration purchases, you’ll likely encounter several other stakeholders for whom you’ll need to pivot your narrative. Arm the hero with the tools she needs to win these stakeholders over by addressing their concerns head-on.

7. Central Ordeal: The hero encounters a major obstacle or hurdle. Think of this as the trilling climax of our tale.

Our job at this point in the story is to help our customer overcome objections and restore her confidence to move forward with our product or service. It might be an issue that was raised early in the process and never addressed, or it could be a completely new concern. Either way, we must help her clear this final hurdle.

8. Return With the Elixir: The hero returns home and applies her newfound knowledge or power — your product — to great acclaim.

The narrative need not end here. Storytelling can be just as effective as part of the customer experience. It can help you onboard customers, deliver success, and eventually brand subscribers and advocates.

Bringing Things Home

Remember the cliff-hanger to my house-hunting story from earlier? When we last left our heroes, all hope seemed to be lost. Thankfully, it wasn’t the end of our tale.

After we canceled the sale of our home and called everything off, my wife inevitably solved our home-buying woes. She found us a home that combined the affordability of a production home in a setting and style befitting a custom one. She again made the case for why this was the right choice for our family and showed how this particular house checked the numerous boxes of what I was seeking.

As the situation evolved, her story adapted to address the context of each new situation, taking into consideration all of the data gathered as part of our lengthy buying journey. She got me. Hook, line, and sinker. How? She put my concerns, pain points, and desires at the center of her story.

In a couple of months, we’ll move into our new home. I’m confident we’ll live happily ever after. Or at least until she wants to move again.

The 4-Step Process to Influence Google Through a Relevant Message and Increase Organic Traffic and Conversions.

Are you ready to discover the ultimate Google hack and break the code to understand Google and what they are looking for in order to drive more qualified traffic to your website?

If you’re ready to learn, in Google’s words, how to create content that is relevant and compelling, link and share-worthy, and earns you lots of traffic and conversions, you’ll love this infographic.

I have broken down for you the process of how to create relevant content that will earn traffic from Google, even if they change their algorithm.

Why?

Because these steps are not dependent upon algorithms.

Below the infographic, get my insights on each point in more detail as well as a list of other resources from highly reputable websites.

An Understanding of Google’s Mission Clarifies How to Create Content That Drives Traffic

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” (see source at: https://www.google.com/about/company/)

When creating your content, the emphasis of the content should be on “accessible and useful” information.

Combine that with the following information from consumers and the point becomes clear:

1. Consumers only reveal 20% of what’s on their minds. That means we have to discover the other 80% in order to be relevant to them. (IBM Study & Infographic)
2. 47% of businesses say they have a strong capability of providing a relevant message…
3. Yet, only 21% of consumers said businesses are relevant to their problems, needs, wants or desires. (IBM Study & Infographic)
4. 50% of website visitors leave a website within seconds due to a lack of a message (2015 B2B Web Usability Report)

If you evaluate consumer sentiment with Google’s mission statement, in makes sense that the two are in alignment and that our websites and content should be as well.

Here is the reality for SEO:

Google values websites that are relevant, specific, and audience focused over websites that put the emphasis on themselves or their products or services.

What is the ultimate Google hack?

Create a central message that is focused on the user, the user experience and how it relates to their experience and feelings.

In other words, make the content about them, not about you.

Keep reading if you want to learn how to propel your content, gain authority, and build relevant traffic to your website.

Google values websites that are relevant, specific, and audience focused http://ctt.ec/38S92+ #SEO @donpurdum

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Google Hack #1 – Create Your Unique and Relevant Message That Focuses on Value

Your message is not about you. I know, I said it again.

But the hardest temptation to fight is a mass marketing mindset that focuses on features and benefits.

What is the focus of a feature and benefit?

It’s either the business or the product or service.

Your message is not about features or benefits. It’s about a relevant solution that emphasizes the audience.

Value is something slightly different and I have yet to find anyone out there really defining value.

I define value as

Solve one problem, meet one need, or fulfill one desire, for one person, in one piece of marketing content (or presentation, speech, or sales pitch).

For our purpose, the emphasis of your content should be on the needs of the website visitor, not on the need to sell in order to grow your business.

Putting the emphasis on you over your audience is rarely “useful” information.

The following five points is the process I reverse engineer a business’s thoughts and organize them in order to arrive at a relevant, inspiring and powerful message:

1. What problems are you passionate about solving?
2. What tangible values do your customers experience and how do they feel about those experiences?
3. What “specific” problems do you solve for each tangible value?
4. Who are you “specifically” solving each problem for?
5. Discover the business you are “really” in…

Resources:

How To Find Your Target Audience And Create The Best Content That Connects (coschedule.com)

12 tips for content marketing from an SEO perspective (searchenginewatch.com)

20 What’s to Find Your Why (roryvaden.com)

How to Get Clear on Your Marketing Message …to Attract More Clients and Make More Money (clientattraction.com)

Google Hack #2 – Align Your Message with Google’s E.A.T. Principles

Once you have your core message, every piece of content you create moving forward is a function of delivering that message.

Now, it’s time to put that message into your website and create specific content.

However, you want to ensure that you’re meeting Google’s quality control needs.

Google’s E.A.T. is important for two reasons:

1. It determines your site’s value.
2. Quality raters reference it.

Google says their search quality guidelines are based on:

• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

The more your content reflects these guidelines, the greater the opportunity Google gives your content to rank well.

Expertise

“Expertise” can be better defined as asking; “What is your message?”

Your message is, or should, always be in alignment with your expertise or niche. As a result, your content should always be specific and relevant, and valuable to your professional expertise.

In order to achieve this guideline, we recommend that you create content that:

Solves one problem, meets one need or fulfills one desire, for one person, in one piece of content

This requires extreme clarity about your business, your audience(s), and the results that they get from your product or service.

The number one reason content marketing isn’t working for many businesses is because most businesses don’t have enough clarity and therefore it leads to a lack of message.

For example, one real estate company we recently consulted with created content about their community and some happenings. However, they didn’t tie the content back into a real estate topic that informed their expertise. Simply mentioning how something positively affects property values, higher closing percentages, or interest in living in the neighborhood in the article would pull their expertise back into the overall content and made it relevant to their expertise.

Authoritativeness

Authoritativeness builds on “expertise”.

When content is highly relevant, it attracts engages influencers who are able, willing, and ready to share it via high-quality links and/or social shares.

But in order to get those relevant, valuable links you have to know:

• Who the relevant influencers are on your topic
• What topics they like to create content around that is relevant to your topic
• And, how to create relevant content for them that incentives their link sharing willingness.

When you create your content be sure to appropriately quote and link to their relevant content, and be sure to let them know.

Here is the point and relevance about Google in the area of “authoritativeness”:

1. Google believes in your authority because you quote and link to influencers content that is relevant and authoritative to your content. You are demonstrating that you value research, accuracy (trustworthiness), and others contribution to your own. However, while important it’s just a minor point in the overall equation of your SEO.
2. Google really believes in your authority when an influencer loves your relevant message and content, and includes a link back to your site from theirs. That’s where the real magic happens.

Holistically, you want an authoritative impression upon Google that your content is valued by those are willing to endorse your content and have are already authoritative in their own right.

Trustworthiness

The final issue of Google E.A.T. is to discern the trustworthiness of your content and website. How well do you protect your visitor information if they provide it? Does your site use SSL in that case?

Is your content accurate and does it reflect a high-quality standard that is unique and relevant or is it bland and repeated content from around the web that doesn’t demonstrate any expertise?

Or, is it obvious you are taking someone else’s content, plagiarizing it and using it as your own without referencing where you got it?

Ethical behavior is a big part of the trustworthiness equation.

Resources:

Google’s General Guidelines Doc (See Section 3.2)

EAT and YMYL: New Google Search Guidelines Acronyms of Quality Content (SEMrush.com)

Meeting Google’s Quality Guidelines: Will Google EAT Your Content? (ProBlogger.net)

You Are What You E-A-T: Trustworthiness According to Google (spinweb.com)

Google Hack #3 – Create Accurate, Emotional, and Action Oriented Headlines

Without relevant headlines that have an emotional appeal, your audience won’t feel a reason to click through.

I relate to the economics of a purchase… every time you open your wallet to spend money, it’s an emotional decision.

It’s the same with a click… all clicks are emotionally based.

In 2012, Forbes published an article by Susannah Breslin titled “3 Emotions That Make People Click”.

Susannah said there are three primary emotions that make people click:

1. Arousal
2. Fear
3. Curiosity

These three powerful emotions can significantly boost your click throughs. However, your content better deliver if you use any of these emotional triggers.

If the headline does not appeal to your audience both logically and emotionally, there is no incentive for them to click through and read the article.

Spend at least half of your time thinking through the headline of your article.

Use some tools like Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer. It’s not perfect nor always right. However, it is a great reference tool and it’s free to use.

Your headline goal is two-fold:

1. Help Google understand what your article is about and its relevance to your expertise.
2. Give your audience a solid reason to click and engage your content.

Resources:

Discover Your Emotional Triggers (outsmartyourbrain.com)

You’ll Be Outraged at How Easy It Was to Get You to Click on This Headline (wired.com)

How to Create a Great Title That Both Google and Your Audience Loves

Many businesses and marketers struggle to create great titles that appeal both logically and emotionally, and have the right keywords and combinations for Google.

Here is a quick process that may help you:

Step 1 – From your message, decide on your broad topic

Once decided, head to a resource like SEMrush.com and see if the topic is trending well.

For example, let’s say you decided upon the general topic “Let’s say your topic is “Starting a Business”.

Notice how many searches there are for this topic. It’s 736 million searches.

So what does SEMrush have to say?

It’s definitely a viable topic. It has high volume and results.

However, we definitely want to get more specific and drill down in order to find that sweet spot for the right target audience.

Step 2 – Look at the various other phrases being used. There are some tips here to clue us in.

Step 3 – What are some of our influencers writing about around this topic?

In some cases, a simple Google search will do. If you have a favorite influencer, head over to the site. Many have a search feature that will allow you to discover if they are writing on they topic.

Here is what some were writing:

• The All-in-One Content Marketing Playbook for Startups (copyhackers.com)
• How 4 Startups Successfully Launched Their Business Through Content Marketing (NeilPatel.com)
• How 4 Startups Successfully Launched Their Business Through Content Marketing (Startupgrind.com)

In this case, many writing about “content marketing for startups”.

That’s getting more specific and SEMrush validates it as a great medium target keyword with a high pay-per-click performance. That means the topic is in demand.

Step 4 – Narrow your topic even more

Now that we know we have a great topic that both Google and influencers love, how do we drill down some more to a great title?

That’s where some creativity comes in and an understanding of how to create a logic and emotional headline that earns validation from Google and clicks by the audience.

Here is another useful tool to help you from CoSchedule.

In this case, we chose the following headline:

Content Marketing Success for Startups in 90 Days or Less

It’s logical, actionable and emotional… the emotion is a time aspect.

Who wants to wait six months for results?

Google Hack #4 – Create Your Content from the Title That Attracts, Converts, and is Relevant and Emotional

Now that your title is done it’s time to create your content.

Content should be valuable by solving one problem, meeting one need, or fulfilling one desire in one piece of content.

The key is to create content that applies to Google E.A.T. principle by keeping it in line with your expertise.

If you create content outside of your profession, industry or genre, you risk losing your expertise perspective and being de-emphasized with Google as a result.

This is why all content must be directly tied to the “Business You are ‘Really’ In”. By doing so, you ensure that you don’t stray from your core message.

Finally, promote, promote, and promote some more.

Include influencers by quoting and linking. Be sure to email or tag them on social media so that they know your content exists.

Most importantly, invite them to share it if they find it valuable to their audience on their blog and social media.

Don’t stop researching, as you come across other valuable and relevant articles on other websites you can revise your content and add them to it.

Resources:

6 Ways To Create Relevant Content For Your Ideal Audience (twelveskip.com)

Awesome! 16 Powerful SEO Copywriting Secrets (That Work Fast) (Backlinko.com)

4 Things World Class Content Marketers Do Every Time They Create Content (JeffBullas.com)

Content Creation (Moz’s Beginners Guide to Content Marketing)

Content Promotion (Moz’s Beginners Guide to Content Marketing)

Conclusion

As you can see, it’s vital that you align your business holistically with a relevant and clear message that is audience focused.

By doing so, you make it easier to create relevant content and stay within Google’s E.A.T. best practices guidelines.

If you want to learn more, you can get immediate access to the “5 Step Formula to Attract Your Audience, Increase Sales and Position Your Business for Success” on-demand, FREE webinar.

Learn my unique, systematized process that will help you discover what your customers are thinking and how to speak their language. Get immediate access to it today by clicking the image below.

No one wants to clash with her co-workers, but conflict inevitably has a way of happening. This is particularly true in the middle of the sales funnel, where marketing teams overlap and intersect with sales teams.

Much of this tension stems from disparate goals. Marketers tend to play the numbers game, working diligently to drum up as many leads as possible. Salespeople are more focused on generating revenue, spending time to foster relationships with leads they believe they can close. While marketers like to cast the widest net possible, salespeople don’t always like everything that’s caught.

Several studies reveal the grim reality of this discord: Most companies suffer from poor collaboration between sales and marketing. Productivity woes related to these alignment issues cost businesses about $1 trillion per year. If creating a harmonious workforce isn’t enough motivation, business owners who care about their companies’ bottom lines would be smart to soothe any strife between the departments.

Hashing It Out

As with most conflicts, any tension between marketing and sales teams can be resolved with good communication. To help foster that dialogue and ensure everyone feels like part of the same team, here are four questions to have the departments pose to each other:

• What questions and objections have you heard from prospects recently?
  When marketing asks sales this question, they learn more about customer needs. Marketers want to create content capable of persuading customers who might buy products or services from their company, so this insight can be tremendously useful.
• How can we support you with content?
  Marketing departments should think of themselves as sales with a budget. They should support their sales counterparts with appropriate content, email messaging, templates, and anything else that might improve the customer experience and reduce the time and energy the sales team spends on nonselling activities.
• What are the conversion rates and sales velocity for leads from new sources?

Marketing specializes in finding new ways to get the word out, but that doesn’t mean every opportunity delivers the same results. If your sales team says leads from recent webinars are harder to move through the pipeline than other prospects, marketing should nurture those leads longer before they’re ready for sales conversations.

• Do we still agree on our definition of a marketing-qualified lead?

It’s imperative to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding the definition of marketing-qualified leads. In the same way businesses naturally evolve, this definition should be flexible to accommodate change.

Bridging the Gap

Once you’ve established an open dialogue between the two departments, it’s important to prioritize their alignment. Make sure the C-suite sees the importance of this collaboration. Set up regular meetings between sales and marketing leaders, and encourage both departments to talk through conflicts as they arise.

Above all else, develop habits that will help sales and marketing exchange knowledge. Whether it’s creating an internal email to detail every newly won customer or having members of your marketing team sit near sales and listen to calls, the key is making sure marketing understands what’s driving people to purchase the company’s product.

Our team has found some success by encouraging a half-open door policy between marketing at sales, enabling the sales team to walk into our marketing area and directly communicate with us about problems with leads. Marketing isn’t obligated to do anything about a specific lead, but those conversations help ensure our process is working as intended.

Sales and marketing are two crucial components of every company, though some conflict can seep into their working relationship over time. Effective and open communication can help alleviate this strife, ensuring both teams are pulling in the same direction.

How well do your marketing and sales teams work together? What is the biggest source of conflict between these departments at your organization?

Do you ever wonder what makes your top performers so successful?

I can tell you from experience: It’s not some magic closing technique, or even special relationships.

Top-performing reps close more business because they have the discipline to do the right activities day in and day out that result in closing more deals. They know to not spend too much time crafting the perfect sales pitch or taking ownership of support requests.

But top performers do these things intuitively, and unfortunately most of your sales team doesn’t do this naturally.

Old-school sales leaders coached on frameworks of emotion and gut instinct. Modern sales leaders use activity-based selling to identify the best practices of their top performers and coach their team around objective data.

I’m not saying you should micromanage your reps on how they should sell. You must empower them with the right skills and techniques to be successful at selling. Here are three simple steps to do just that for your coaching strategy in the coming year.

3 Steps To Update Your Inside Sales Coaching Strategy

1. Uncover key selling activities.

These are the fundamental activities that move opportunities from lead to close. Sales is a cascading chain of controllable activities that lead to a defined outcome, but you have to make sure that reps perform enough of the right activities to be successful.

In the Complete Sales KPI Guide, we used our research of 1,500 sales metrics used at over 100 sales teams to uncover the best metrics for driving revenue. Every sales team’s process is unique, so the metrics that drive it must be, as well.

Define the structure of your sales organization. Map out each role and develop a hypothesis for the top 3-4 activities that are critical to that role. Here’s what our research says are good key performance indicators to start with:

Inside Sales:

1. Conversations / Talk Time
2. Discovery Calls
3. Proposals / Pipe in Contract
4. Wins

Sales Development:

1. Calls
2. Conversations
3. Meetings Scheduled
4. Sales Accepted Opportunities

Customer Success:

1. Conversations
2. Opportunities Created
3. Milestones Completed
4. Wins

What selling activities do you see your top performers doing that you wish the rest of your team would do more of? That’s a good place to start. Then interview sales managers and reps to get their feedback on what their key selling activities are. Even if you don’t agree with their suggestions, including them in the process generates buy-in.

2. Track activity metrics.

At first, this sounds like micromanagement. But as Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana explain in “Cracking the Sales Management Code,” measuring sales activities is a key ingredient to better sales management.

“We would contend that collecting activity-level metrics is not old school whatsoever – we think it is new school,” They write in the book. “And we would argue that tracking salespeople’s activities won’t lead to micromanagement – it will lead to proactive management.”

After you reverse engineer your sales process to calculate activity metrics, you’ll need a way to track them. You can measure activity metrics manually by using a sales scorecard template. But a sales activity management system will automatically track metrics, provide guided selling on what activity reps should focus on, and alert them when pacing to goal falls behind.

The important part is to make the metrics visible. A lot of companies fail when sales teams don’t manage their day around key activity metrics. If the reps aren’t seeing them all the time, then it won’t affect their decision on how they spend their time.

“I think it feels very insurmountable when you’re a seller to look at the big number for the month or quarter or year, but this breaks it down into those bite-size pieces that are more manageable,” Paycor director of high velocity sales Janet Jansen told us.

Paycor’s reps love the fact that they can see where they are pacing against their goals and what they need to do to catch up. With sales activity management, Paycor cut onboarding time in half and increased overall seller activity by 50 percent.

3. Coach around objective data.

Activity data creates coaching opportunities, whether it’s helping the sales rep who’s “always busy” but doesn’t seem to close deals find focus, or training someone on how to properly log information in Salesforce, their CRM system.

When activity pacing falls behind for a rep, dive into the data and see what they’re not performing enough of. A sales rep who isn’t having the right number of discovery meetings may not be finding enough qualified leads. Coach them accordingly, provide next steps and follow up a week or two later.

If pacing slows for the entire team, you can quickly rally them around key initiatives with a contest or spiff. (Check out our list of inexpensive sales incentive ideas here).

Plus, tracking activities in real time allows you to course-correct performance before it’s too late. That’s the benefit of having forward-looking (or leading) KPIs

Just ask Jackson National SVP of national sales development Doug Mantelli. He recently told a panel at Dreamforce that his team used sales activity management to turn 35 lagging indicators into 3-4 key operating metrics and increase activity levels by 30 percent with less reps than the year prior.

Doug knows that coaching the middle performers in your organization has massive ROI.

“Regardless of the tools we give them, regardless of what products we give them, our top performers are our top performers. Our bottom performers tend to be our bottom performers, although not for long if you have a disciplined sales culture, right? But it’s the middle performers that … if you can get that group to move — the movable middle — you can make massive overall improvements in your activity,” Doug said.

When planning the current year for your sales organization, use these three steps to create a truly impactful sales coaching strategy. Your reps will thank you. Your bottom line will, too.

It’s no secret that email is still the #1 most effective marketing channel around. Unlike other channels like PPC or social media marketing email has one significant difference: it’s permission based.

Permission meaning people willingly agree to accept your communication. Where ads and promotional campaigns do their best to shove pretty pictures and off-the-cuff headlines in our faces, emails sent to our inboxes are warranted. People that give you their email are granting you permission to market to them.

That’s half the work of marketing done right there!

If you want to improve the effectiveness of your email marketing apply these 60 email marketing strategies, tips, and examples.

***

1. One Call-to-action maximum

For the highest conversion rate possible it’s best to have only one call-to-action in your email. Period.

Having more than one CTA creates too much choice and confusion. As the number of choices increases the recipient may fail to make a decision. The conversion goal should be clear and the recipient should only have the choice of claiming your offer or not.

It may be tempting to stuff your emails with as many CTAs as you can but that may backfire. If you desperately need to have more than one CTA make the most important one the priority.

Philips Sonicare ran a multivariate test to find out which of their newly designed emails would convert the best. Surprisingly they found that the plainly designed emails with a single CTA converted far better than the other well designed variations.

Don’t muddle your CTA or overcrowd it with other CTAs, images, and text. The more decisions you ask your users to make the greater chance they won’t make one at all.

2. Design for Thumbs

Half of all emails are now opened on mobile devices. Remember this and design for smaller screens. Things like buttons should be made large enough to be clicked on small screens. Add lots of white space so that information can be read easily and CTAs can be seen/clicked. You don’t get much real estate on small devices so make use of all the space and most importantly, use a responsive layout.

3. Create Urgency by Setting a Deadline

Don’t use a manufactured or fake deadline, create a sense of urgency by explaining your offer and the need for it to be claimed immediately. Smart marketers do not rely on fake deadlines and ruin the trust they’ve built with their audience. Instead create a deadline for your offer and stick to it. Your audience will know then that your offers and real and jump at the opportunity to claim it.

4. Emails with just one image have highest click-through rates

ConstantContact analyzed over 2.1 million customer emails and found that emails with only 1 image had the highest click-through-rate.

Now that over half of all emails are opened on mobile devices, shorter more concise emails perform better. Based on this information it’s safe to say that recipients favour emails they can read at their desktop or on the train on their way home.

5. Use templated emails for pull content and personal ones for push content

Templated emails are ones that are built using a prebuilt template. Email newsletters for example, are written and styled with some sort of email software. They look like a physical newsletter and are obviously not hand created each time they’re sent out.

Email newsletter are what are considered pull content, meant to ‘pull’ traffic to your website. Email newsletters are sent to a large audience so it helps to use a prebuilt template to help you efficiently ‘nurture’ your leads.

Push content on the other hand should be made personally to ‘push’ a recipient towards some sort of goal, like signing up for a free trial or downloading a case study. These emails are sent less frequently and are meant to build a relationship between a seller and buyer. Use personal emails to increase the authenticity of your offer and make it clear that it’s being sent by a human and not a faceless robot.

Email Copywriting Tips

6. Most Mobile Devices only allow for 33-38 character long subject lines

Christa Sutherland of MailerMailer says that, “According to MailerMailer’s 2015 Email Marketing Metrics Report, messages with medium-length subject lines yielded the highest open rates. More specifically, those with subject lines of 28 to 39 characters resulted in the highest average open rate of 12.6%. In comparison, messages with the shortest subject lines (4 to 15 characters) produced an average open rate of 12.1%.”

About 50% of all emails are opened on mobile devices, mobile devices that have physically grown in size throughout the years. This means more screen real estate and more room for characters in email subject lines.

Remember that your email subject line is more important than the content of the email. Why would the content matter if the email isn’t even opened?

Rather than concentrating on the length of your subject, think about the emotions it invokes instead. Is it exciting? Curious? Urgent? Test subject lines with your audience and do what respond best to.

7. Avoid Email Spam Trigger Words

To the chagrin of many marketers, webmail services like Google’s Gmail have become increasingly better at filtering out promotional and spam emails. These spam filters work by filtering out specific trigger words that are highly associated with spam emails.

To save your emails from being filtered directly to the trash it’s best to avoid using ‘spammy’ trigger words in your subject lines. Well known spam phrases like “Earn $”, “Work from home”, “Miracle” or “Meet singles” get sent directly to the spam folder.

8. Give a 1-2 Subject Line Punch by Leveraging Pre-Header Text

Preheader text is the text that comes up after the subject line in the email. By default yours might show something like:

• Having problems viewing this email? View online
• To ensure delivery to your inbox, add us to your contacts
• Can’t see this? View in browser

That is a missed opportunity for some text that supports the subject line.

The red box in the example below shows where the pre-header text is placed in Gmail.

Take advantage of pre-header text by adding in some important info to support your subject line like:

• Free Shipping All Week!
• Check out our mobile site
• Buy one get one free

Preheader text, along with the subject line, is the first thing recipients see so it helps to add more information to get them to open the email. It gives the recipient a little preview as to the content of the email so make sure it is extra persuasive.

9. Don’t automate your greeting. Try warm wishes, best regards, or greetings from sunny England. Mixing up your greetings makes you less robotic, and more personal.

Instead of using a generic greeting like ‘Hi’ or ‘Hey there’ try mixing things up with something a bit more natural. The key here is to make your emails appear more personal and less automated.

10. Use the power of the P.S.

According to CopyBlogger, a P.S. at the end of your emails ranks as one of the things recipients will always remember. A reader will always read the P.S. because it sticks out as an odd element that is separate from the content.

A P.S. is the last element on the page thus easier to remember so use it to reinforce one of your offers.

Alex from Groove uses a P.S. in his emails to get recipients to share his most recent article with a handy pre-populated tweet.

11. Numerals are the best thing to use in your subject line to stop skimmers and have them focus on you

Instead of writing ‘twenty three’ write ’23’ to catch the attention of those who only skim through content. Numerals stick out amongst text, especially long and large blocks of text according to Nielsen Norman Group research.

12. Double Newsletter Open Rates with a Reminder Email

Have a promotion running or an event coming up?

A reminder email is one of those email best practices that can make your recipients act. Using automation you can schedule an email to be sent out a week or two before your offer expires. It’s a gentle reminder that time is expiring and that they need to act soon to claim your offer or to save their spot.

13. Speak to the Lizard Brain

The Lizard Brain might sound like a weird type of artisanal beer but we are all said to have one as a direct result of human evolution. It’s where our ‘fight or flight’ response is born out of. The Lizard Brain or Reptilian Brain as it’s also known as, is where much of our instinct and raw emotion comes from.

Accordingly there are 6 ways to speak to the Lizard Brain:

• Self-centered-ness – The Lizard Brain wants to hear about itself.
• Contrast – The Lizard Brain understands things quickly in black and white, right or wrong.
• Tangibility – The Lizard Brain is impatient and gets to the point fast.
• Beginning and End – The middle doesn’t matter only what’s at the beginning and end.
• Visual stimuli – Bright and shiny objects grab and hold attention most.
• Emotion – Appeal to the emotive responses of the Lizard Brain for the biggest reaction.

14. Write your marketing emails like you write emails to your friends

In general, people hate being marketed to. How many people have you heard say ‘I love those ads on that play before YouTube videos’ or ‘I love how that store follows me around with those display ads’? None I bet.

Our advice? Don’t write your emails like a marketer, approach your writing like you’re speaking to a close friend. Keep the communication casual and friendly and treat them like an actual person.

15. Personal Examples and Offers

Personalized or targeted emails drive 18 times more revenue than generic broadcasted emails. The more the content of the email matches the intent or interest of the recipient the more likely they will convert on your desired goal.

For example, an auto dealer would more likely use your marketing service if you sent them a case study of another successful auto dealer as opposed to sending them a case study on a fitness centre.

You can accomplish this with a little bit of segmentation. When you’re collecting leads through a form, make sure to add one personalization feature such as industry or position title. This way you’ll be able to send targeted content to each of your segments ie. content for auto makers or content for social media managers.

Top Performing Keywords for types of Subject Lines

16. Top Performing Keywords for Benefit-focused Subject Lines

• Best
• Cheapest
• Easiest
• Fastest
• Prettiest
• Quickest

17. Top Performing Keywords for Clickbait Subject Lines

• Get rid of
• Secret of
• Shocking
• What you need to know
• Won’t believe

18. News

• Announcing
• Discover
• Find
• Introducing
• Learn
• New
• Read
• See

19. How-to

• How to…[do something really cool]

20. Discount

• 2 for 1
• Clearance
• Discount
• Half off
• Offer
• Sale
• Save

21. Command

• Add
• Aim
• Buy
• Call
• Click
• Download
• Get
• Open
• Put
• Register
• Try

22. Personal

• He
• I
• It
• Me
• Mine
• Our
• You

23. Reason Why

• Here’s how
• Steps
• Ways
• Why

24. Price

• %
• $
• Free

25. Urgency

• Expire
• Expiring
• Extended
• Hurry
• Last chance
• Limited time
• Now
• Running out
• Still time

26. Consistent layout for every email

If you have the same layout for every email, it makes it easy for people to read every single one, because their eyes will be trained on what to look for. Using a brand new layout and colour scheme each time will force your readers to learn your new format each time which makes for a poor user experience, not to mention a lower conversion rate.

27. Include the name of your company in the From Name of your email

If your email is being sent from your name or another person’s name without any company branding it could be ignored by the recipient.

When I subscribed to the Kissmetrics newsletter I received emails from Tomasz Borys. Having no idea who that was I promptly deleted it. It wasn’t until I accidentally opened one I knew it was from Kissmetrics.

Include some sort of branding in your email so that the recipients know who the emails are coming from.

28. The 9-word reengagement email

One person got 750 responses after emailing 1,200 people on a stagnant list (a 62.5% response rate!)

Here’s how to do it:

Subject line: {first name}

Body: Are you still looking at getting [insert your service/product]?

Here are a few examples:

• “Are you still looking at getting your kitchen renovated?”
• “Are you still looking at building a new website?”
• “Are you still looking at buying a new car?”
• “Are you still looking at growing your blog traffic?”

Here is an example of how the whole email should look:

From: Website Business

To: bob@company.com

Subject: Bob

Body:

Are you still looking at building your website?

– Jordan

=========

That’s it! But why does this work so well?

This email generates curiosity and a certain level of personalization. The casual nature makes it seem like it’s coming from a real person thus will garner a real response.

29. Clarity Trumps Creativity in Subject Lines

By focusing on clarity over creativity in their email subject lines, MarketingSherpa saw 541% more open rates.

The more ambiguous or unclear the subject line is the less likely a recipient will open it. Make the most of your email subject line by explaining with clarity what the email is about, DON’T reveal everything or else it won’t be opened at all. Clarity is paramount.

30. Use CoSchedule’s Headline/Subject Line Analyzer

Subject lines can be a tricky thing to get right to maximize your open rate.

Make your life a little easier with CoSchedule’s headline analyzer. It will analyze all the words in the subject line and score it based on the types of words used and the character count. The better you can a balance elements like power or emotive words the better score you’ll get. The best way to do this is to come up with 5-10 subject lines and test each with CoSchedule’s headline analyzer.

31. Use Grammarly to check your grammar and spelling (it’s free!)

Grammar and spelling mistakes are terrible mistakes to have, especially if you’re trying to come off as a professional business. It’s a sign of poor quality control at the most basic level.

Mistakes in emails can be difficult to catch and may go unnoticed without a keen eye. No one’s perfect but we can all strive to be better. Grammarly is a tool that checks the spelling and grammar of everything you write across the web. Grammarly will catch pesky grammar mistakes that a typical word processor like Microsoft Word won’t. It’ll recommend grammar changes and help you become a better writer, especially in emails.

32. Specificity Rules

Strive to be as specific as possible in your email subject lines. Ambiguous subject lines create confusion for the recipient. Ambiguity creates friction and poses questions. Ideally we want the decision to open the email to be fast and emotional. The recipient should transition quickly from ‘What’s this?’ to ‘I want it!’.

As VerticalResponse writes, “The more specific your emails are, the more likely your readers are to click on them. ‘Big Sale!’ is too vague and open-ended to mean much. Instead, try something like, ‘Save 40% on our most popular model today only!’ It gets right to the point, creates urgency, entices the reader, and invites curiosity: Which model is the most popular one, why is it so popular, how awesome is it that it’s 40% off, and what time am I going to get one?”

33. Exclusivity This is not for everyone, maybe not even for you.

Exclusivity constantly ranks as a high incentive for action. Excluding or even the thought of exclusion is enough to made people question themselves and act out of emotion. The exclusive golf/country club on the west side or the exclusive mastermind business group, are all things that are longed after by outsiders. “You won’t let me into the VIP area?!… I’ll show you.”

Infuse a bit of exclusivity in your email subject lines for a little more punch. Make your offer exclusive or the act of claiming a rare deal or product.

Example: Conversion Rate Experts – Read this only if your sales exceed one million

34. Mix up your sentence structure to make your email copy more readable

Having too much text is a problem that goes unnoticed by most email marketers. Long sentences and large paragraphs make the content hard to consume. Remember that most email is opened on mobile devices so try to make your words short and succinct. Brevity is a virtue when it comes to email.

35. Use active voice.

A good way to check for active voice is to measure your use of helping verbs or “to be” verbs like was, will, is, are, am, etc. Instead of, “Our product will help you…” try “Our product helps you…” Simple tweaks make a big difference.

36. Lose all the jargon.

Every brand has their own acronyms and industry terms that make sense—to them. When you write for humans, you have to keep in mind that just because it makes sense to you, doesn’t mean it will to everyone else. Jargon isn’t just bad, it’s overused and meaningless for your subscribers. How many things out there are “disruptive,” “the Uber for X,” or “#1?” Don’t be that guy.

37. Do A CRABS Check

No not that crabs, the other one. CRABS is a little checklist created by Dave Chaffey author of Total Email Marketing. Before you shoot off your email check for CRABS.

CRABS stands for:

• Chunking – One idea per paragraph, 1 or 2 sentences max for easy reading.
• Relevance – Stick to the meat, only write about what matters and remove all the fluff.
• Accuracy – Don’t overpromise and underdeliver on your offer. State what you’re offering exactly to avoid any confusion.
• Brevity – Get to the point. Stop beating around the bush. Hit all the points you need to, no more no less.
• Scannability – Check if the most important words and phrases are going to be seen by those who quickly scan. You should be able to pick up on the highlights of your email quickly.

38. Don’t use a person’s name more than once per email

A bit of personalisation is fine, but if you overdo it it’s just a little bit creepy. Instead try something a bit different. If you serve a local audience try using their city name in the subject line. Personalization is important just keep it to a limit.

39. The ‘You Are not alone’ Subject Line

Let your reader’s know that someone is on their side. You’re that someone who understands their problems, fears, and pains. What keeps them up at night? What makes them feel happy, sad, alone, afraid, disgusted? Target those pain points to get your reader to open the email then make sure the contents provide the solution.

1. Example: The Problem With the 5 Most Asked Interview Questions
2. Example: Your Last Chance for the Adventure of a Lifetime

40. The Last Call Formula:

1. Last call: [Name Of Product] closes in [#] hours
2. Example: Last call: SEO That Works closes in 3 hours

41. The Don’t Buy This Formula:

1. Don’t buy [Product Name] until you read this
2. Example: Don’t buy Welcome Mat until you read this

42. The Social Proof Subject Line

1. Examples: Find Out Who Else is Using [Your Great Product]
2. Learn How the 100 Top Businessmen Benefited from [Your Service]
3. Successful Online Entrepreneurs in [Client’s Location] Use This Strategy to Increase Productivity

43. The Invitation

1. You’re Invited: Come See [Your Company’s] Great New Gallery

44. The What If Email Formula:

1. What if [Negative Result]
2. Example: What if Youtube shutdown

45. The Never Met/Seen Email Formula:

1. The Most [Hated/Loved] [Person] You’ve Never Met/Seen
2. Example: The most loved salonist you’ve never met

46. The Normally Email

1. Formula: Normally We [Do Something]. You Get It [New Way]
2. Example: Normally we charge $500 for this advice. You get it free.

47. The Problem Email

1. Formula: The Problem With [Insert Problem]
2. Example: The problem with pricing too low

48. The Big Mistake Email

1. Formula: My Big [Topic] Mistake
2. Example: My big self defense mistake

49. The Lessons Email

1. Formula: [Topic] Lessons From A [Weird Source]
2. Example: Programming lessons from a real life ninja

50. Quote a B.U.D.A.

1. EXAMPLE: “New York Times: New software KILLS banking”
2. A B.U.D.A. is a Big Undeniable Dominant Authority. The New York Times, Amazon, Google, the FDA, the President of the United States etc. When they make quotes that prove your points, it’s great to use them as subject lines.

51. The dotted cliff-hanger

1. One way to use curiosity is to create a cliffhanger. The cliff hanger is a method that leaves you with the burning question: “What will happen next?”. We see it in any good soap opera (if you believe such a thing exists) or television series. One form of cliff-hanger is easily recognized, the three dotted end. This is the email subject line that ends with …
2. Examples: Secret Escapes Team – On the second day of Christmas…
3. Banana Republic – Shoes don’t make the man, but…
4. HMV – Mr. Grey Will See You Now… (50 shades of Grey promotion)
5. Ann Taylor – Between Sandals And Boots, There’s This…

52. The ‘How Can I Help You’ Welcome Email

When welcoming a new email subscriber take the opportunity to put the ball in their court. Ask them what they’re looking to get out of your new relationship and how you can best help get them there.

Here’s a fantastic example of a helpful welcome email from Drift:

53. Have only one CTA for the best conversion rate

In One Email, One CTA on the 500 Startups blog, Susan Su writes the following:

“One of the principles I talk about most when I talk about email marketing for growth is “one email, one CTA.”

It’s a simple rule:

Each email campaign should only have 1 tight, focused call-to-action.

• Have only one button so that the choices are simple, click through or don’t click through.
• It’s possible to use more than one instance of your call-to-action for example, ‘Get the resource’ and ‘Learn more’.
• It’s possible to place the same link in more than one place like your button, inline link, and in your header image.

54. Make Subscribers Feel Like They’re Getting Access to Something Exclusive

It’s no secret that people like to be made to feel special. Use this to your advantage by creating something special with your email list. It’ll encourage much stronger community building amongst your network.

Apple does this perfectly with each of its product releases. Instead of waiting in the cold outside an Apple store for the latest iPhone, email subscribers can pre-order one and skip the line. Apple uses a touch of exclusivity with their pre-orders to make their subscribers feel special.

55. Make Your Emails Feel like a continuous conversation

Treating email like a continuous conversation makes it feel more personal, like a real conversation.

For example, say in your email ‘in my last email I told you how we did this, in this email I’ll show you how we built on that. In the next email I’ll show you how it affected our business and what we changed in another part of our business because of it’.

56. “People Like You” Effect

Personalization is a powerful tool that makes people feel like you’re speaking directly to them.

Emails like this from Airbnb, ‘What people like you do to [achieve goal]’ are personalized by location. Speak directly to your audiences and relate to them using the ‘People like you’ effect to add that extra inclusiveness.

57. Leverage the Zeigarnik Effect

The Zeigarnik Effect refers to that feeling that someone gets when something is left unfinished. Waiters are better able to remember things about tables that have unpaid bills than ones that have already paid. Akin to cliff hanger moments in your favourite TV shows.

Evernote labels their onboarding emails in a series of 5. If a recipient opens the first email they’re more likely to continue the series, moving onto the second.

Technical Email Tips

58. Use Countdown GIFs to increase urgency for webinar/event invitation emails

If urgency is something you’re trying to communicate in your email a countdown timer might help. For a special promotion, contest, or offer a countdown timer will get your audience to act quickly.

Litmus breaks down the process of adding a GIF countdown timer to your email in this short tutorial.

59. Use CTA URL parameters to pre-fill form fields to decrease work for people and increase conversion rates on the landing page

By using a prefilled formfield option you can reduce the amount of work your recipients have to do on a landing page form.

URL parameters can automatically insert recipient information into a form once they click your email’s CTA. Fields like name, email, business name can all be automatically filled into an event registration landing page form if a recipient clicks on your email CTA.

60. Use auto-submit URLs in CTA buttons to auto-register people for webinars direct from the email

Having auto-submit URLs in your CTA buttons can auto-register people for events like webinars, without them having to fill out a form.

If you already have all of their lead information it saves them from having to re-enter it for registration. Simply by clicking ‘register’ they’ll automatically be saved a seat.

***

Download your own pdf copy of this list and see all 350 email drip campaign strategies, ideas, and examples at www.emaildripcampaigns.com

Are your sales and marketing teams dropping the ball on lead management? For every lead that isn’t followed up with properly, potential revenue is stripped from the bottom line.

Here’s a look at how to improve lead flow from marketing to sales and why this process is so important to your customer acquisition.

What is lead flow?

You already know there’s a process by which leads move through the sales funnel. They’ve usually had several interactions with your company by the time they hand over their contact information to become a proper lead, and there are usually several more interactions after that before they become a customer (if they actually get that far).

Lead flow describes how well they move through that process. When you have a clear lead flow structure, there’s always a clear next step for dealing with each new lead and they’re all ushered along the funnel in a timely manner. Many organizations lack a clear lead flow structure, which means leads with potential get lost in the shuffle, ultimately costing the business revenue.

The Problems Caused by Poor Lead Flow

If your marketing department is getting loads of new leads and sending them over to sales all at once, your sales team is stuck with more work than they can handle. Making matters worse, if they don’t have a clear idea of which leads are most likely to pay off, they could end up focusing on less valuable leads while letting the promising ones go cold.

How quickly leads are contacted plays a significant role in how likely they are to move to the next step in the sales process. Research has found that buyers are 50 percent more likely to go with the first business that responds to them, and 21 percent are more likely to enter the sales process if they’re contacted within the first 5 minutes than if it takes 30.

A strong lead flow process is an easy way to differentiate yourself and improve results.

The good news here (for you, anyway) is that many businesses are failing when it comes to lead flow. The average response time to a lead is currently 61 hours for those that bother to respond, while 47 percent of companies’ leads get lost somewhere along the way and never receive a response.

If your company can get an efficient lead flow process established to ensure your sales team makes contact quickly every time a promising lead comes in, you’ll be doing better than the vast majority of your competitors.

Steps to Improve Lead Flow

If reading to this point has made you realize your organization needs to improve on lead flow, you can take a few key steps to get there.

Create a lead scoring system.

First things first: You must acknowledge that not all leads are created equal. As a marketer, it’s tempting to want to revel in the quantity of leads you’re bringing in—big numbers make your team look more successful. When you zoom out to look at the bigger picture of what helps the company earn more sales and profit, though, the quality of those leads matters more than the quantity.

You have to do the work of determining which leads are most valuable before you hand them over to sales. Start by talking to sales about what a strong lead looks like. What do the leads they feel are most valuable have in common?

Use that information to grade your leads based on criteria that fall into two main categories:

• How close they are to your ideal customer
• How ready they are to move to the next step in the process

Some leads that aren’t at all like your target personas can be discarded altogether, while others simply need more lead nurturing before you hand them over to sales.

Develop a clearly defined lead flow process.

Every marketing and every sales employee should be on the same page here and know the exact steps to take. Your lead scoring will do the work of showing you what stage each lead is in. Develop clear guidelines defining who’s in charge of leads at each stage in the process and what steps they should take.

Make use of your CRM to properly label and score your leads so everybody on both teams can quickly see where a lead currently is in the process. When there’s a change and it’s time for someone new to take over, the CRM should alert them immediately so they can move fast.

Pay attention to what works.

Your lead scoring system and lead flow process shouldn’t be set in stone. Over time, both marketing and sales will gain more insights into what makes a lead valuable and what changes to the process can improve results.

Revisit your processes every quarter to make improvements based on what you’ve learned—and make sure both teams are involved when you do, so you always stay on the same page.

Don’t be one of the businesses that reaches out to valuable leads too late or lets them fall off the radar completely. With these three steps and the additional information in our Sales Enablement and CRM guide, you can move toward consistently better results.

Moving from traditional sales to inbound sales is a big shift for any organization. If you’re a marketing leader, it’s important to get out in front of this shift and set proper expectations for everyone involved. The best way to do this is to set up a straight forward service level agreement between your sales and marketing teams. Here’s how to do that.

Establish a Baseline

Understand how your sales team currently generates leads. Does a big chunk of leads and sales come from a once a year conference? Does each salesperson have their own territory that they are responsible for selling into? Are leads distributed round robin to the sales team? Ultimately, you’ll want to establish how many leads are currently received on a monthly basis and from what method.

As you move to online lead capture and nurturing, you’ll want to establish what percent of total monthly leads your sales team can expect from online efforts. If your company typically gets 100 leads a month now and you are just starting to capture leads online, consider targeting 10% of that lead total to come from online sources. Yes 10 leads (on top of the regular 100) seems like a small number, but it’s a start. If you receive any leads from your current website, factor those in too. You may have visitors landing on your website specifically to find a phone number for a sales rep, which, by the way, is a good reason to have a website only phone number. That way you can track website leads that decided to call in rather than fill out a form.

Define a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

To be clear, I’m focusing this discussion specifically on online leads. You may already have a qualification process for more traditional leads. A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead that has taken a specific set of actions on your website that indicate purchase intent. An MQL may have downloaded 2 pieces of advanced content, visited your site within the past month and subscribed to your blog. You can choose to send MQLs over to sales or you could nurture them furture with emails. That’s a discussion you can have with your sales counterparts.

Define a Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) Lead

A bottom of the funnel (BOFU) lead is a lead that is seeking a consultation or conversation with someone in your organization. For LyntonWeb, we define a BOFU lead as someone who completes and submits information on our Speak to an Expert page. If a lead converts on that page, we have a series of internal events that are triggered to assure we reach out and schedule a call as quickly as possible. BOFU leads are typically handed over to sales right away.

Understand Close Rates for BOFU Leads

Again, I’m talking online leads here. Let’s say 4 of your 10 online leads are BOFU and your sales team is able to close 50% of those leads at an average project size of $20K. That’s $40K in additional monthly revenue you can attribute your online efforts. You’ll have to talk regularly to your sales team about the quality of the leads you’re generating. They will have good insight on the sort of content leads will respond to and how to nurture them further down the funnel.

Ultimately, setting up any sort of service level agreement between marketing and sales, regardless or how formal or informal, is a collaborative venture. Remember the ultimate goal of growth for the company not for a specific department. Don’t forget that if your sales team is used to cold calling and mining leads the old fashioned way, they’ll need some education around online lead capture. Be patient and remember the goal.

Have you ever read through a blog post or gotten to the end of a website page and just left a site because no one “told” you what to do next? You were left hanging in space, free to leave at anytime.

Leaving your visitors (prospects) hanging is the first simple way to NOT generate more leads, or be very helpful to those you’re trying to do business with. One essential element of any solid inbound marketing strategy includes visually-focused content that easily guides a visitor from the beginning of their buyer’s journey (prospect) all the way to becoming a brand loyalist (evangelist). These important invitations to the next level are the job of a good “Call-to-Action” (commonly called a CTA). Think of them as road signs, leading the way to the desired destination.

Why is it important to have a CTA in every step of the sales funnel? Even if it simply directs you to a free educational download or a premium catalog of resources, your focus should be on your messaging.

Here are some questions we receive when developing CTA’s for our clients:

• “I need a CTA for an email I’m about to send that directs my leads or current customers to a secondary form on my website. Is this possible?”
• “I’m having issues tracking the conversion rate of my new eBook offering from our landing page analytics. What am I doing wrong?”
• “Do we need a catalog of CTA’s for each stage of the inbound sales funnel?”

But first, where are the most important places to include a CTA? As noted, a CTA is, quite literally, a Call-to-Action, guiding your reader to take a desired next step. It’s usually in the form of a button or in-line text link that is strategically placed on a website page, or in a certain section of a blog post, email or other content.

A CTA acts as a link between exploratory content that your prospect is interested in and premium content offers that can only be accessed by providing personal information. Think of a time where you read the summary of a blog post. If you were interested in finding out what the article examines, you simply choose the “Read More” button at the bottom. Even if they don’t turn into leads now (by clicking the “Read More” button and submitting the form), they’re more likely to come back if they see your website as a destination for insightful and actionable information.

Here are a few ideas about why your CTAs may not be getting the responses you hoped for.

1. Your CTAs aren’t targeting your buyer personas

In the hope that you have developed buyer personas for your business, tailored messaging delivered at precise moments during the buyer’s journey through clickable CTAs will resonate with your leads and their immediate or long-term needs. The more you know about your visitors, the more segmented your content will be in the future. If you take the time to understand how your customers buy, your marketing efforts become seamless.

Your CTA messaging should have a direct impact on someone’s willingness to click and move further down the buyer’s journey. Maybe you have a new whitepaper or infographic you’d like to share with your blog subscribers. Here’s your chance to delight your brand evangelists. Because your buyer personas have key identifiers attached to each step of the journey, instead of using the usual “Learn More,” “See All,” “Try a Demo,” or “Download Now,” CTAs you can get a little more creative with your messaging such as “Download Immediately,” “I want to know more” or even “Save my Site.” It would be a big mistake to send content to prospects with impromptu CTA messaging that was developed for evangelists.

If the content that comes ahead of your CTA is not informative or is rather bland, even the world’s best CTA is going to have low conversions, leaving you with that gut-wrenching feeling of failure. By the time a visitor clicks your CTA, they should have a general sense of who you are, how you can help address their specific needs and what information they need to begin the sales process. The CTA needs to reinforce that they’re about to take a step towards achieving a solution to their problem. Here are two examples:

2. You sound too salesy

Your goal as an inbound marketer should be to provide educational information about your industry, not just flat-out selling your products and services. You do not want to overwhelm your leads or customers with forceful selling. Your CTA should be inviting and succinct and should address problems that your targeted buyer persona’s express along their buyer’s journey.

CTAs are not the place to begin a dialogue with your leads or prospects. It is however, the place for prospects to begin the buyer journey. Remember, we develop our CTAs based on buyer persona research. The research you conducted should give a clear indication of how your prospects communicate and take action in their daily lives. If it doesn’t, you need to start over and re-evaluate the information you have.

3. You’re not creating a sense of urgency

Ushering your leads naturally should be your top priority. Internet researchers can be very indecisive while browsing for solutions. That’s bad news, because the longer a buyer sits and analyzes, the more openings arise for your competitors to steal your leads. Your content needs to entice and nurture the lead to act immediately.

The internet is one big library of anything you might want to know or buy. As a result, it becomes more difficult to decide if you’re finding the best solution to your problem. Be the clear answer to their challenge, and make them want to choose you.

Amazon does a great job in converting leads into die-hard customers and eventually brand evangelists. We’ve all purchased products through Amazon, and they already know that we’re not interested in receiving information or deals on products we never buy. Instead they send detailed newsletters of items purchased in the past, with clear CTA’s attached to each. Rather than using the generic “Buy Now” CTA, they go the extra mile in making the message actionable. Phrases such as “View our product line” or “Add to Wishlist,” and the powerful “1-Click Ordering” CTA can be seen all over their site and email campaigns. Because Amazon has nailed down their target audience and how they shop, their focus has shifted from carrying influential brands to the messaging that will resonate with the lead and convert them to customers.

These same principles can be applied in the B2B world. Our clients want to know their customers will receive the right information at the right time, in each step of the buyer’s journey. This is accomplished by using effective CTA messaging that is developed for your buyer personas. Look at it this way: using general messaging might bring in a lot of prospects or leads. But it would be very concerning to find out more than 90% of those prospects/leads had a minimal impact on your sales. The right compelling messages help to eliminate that concern.

If you’re interested in learning more about Call-to-Actions and upping your inbound marketing game, download our guide to creating Performance Content and learn to Crush the competition through inbound marketing.

In today’s digital world, marketers know that creating quality content is key to informing, engaging and inspiring action, as well as building authority and rapport with their audiences. And oftentimes that means creating original pieces and assets that tap into their audience’s interests, address pain points and answer burning questions.

But let’s face it: marketers are busy—and creating quality, original pieces that get results and position your brand as having the best answer is incredibly time intensive.

However, there is one tactic that can come to the rescue: content curation.

What is content curation?

Simply put, content curation is all about finding, gathering and sharing the best and most relevant content the web has to offer on a specific topic that your audience cares about.

Why content curation?

First off, you’re likely already doing it in some capacity. According to Curata, more than 83% of marketers curate and share content from third party sources with their customers or prospects.

Secondly, content curation can add value, quality and credibility to your content marketing efforts and your brand. Curata also reports that over 50% of marketers say content curation has increased their brand visibility, thought leadership, SEO, web traffic and buyer engagement, and 41% of marketers say the number of quality or sales-ready leads increased, too.

Finally, as previously mentioned, content creation allows you to create quality, compelling content in less time. As TopRank Marketing’s CEO Lee Odden wrote in his book Optimize:

“Pure creation is demanding. Pure automation doesn’t engage. Curating content can provide the best of both.”

Whether you’re thinking about adding content curation to your tactical mix or looking for ideas to boost the quality of your curation efforts, below we offer some best practices, tips, tool suggestions and some examples of how brands are doing it.

Content Curation Best Practices, Tips & Tools

#1 – Identify sources you can go back to over and over again.

Remember that content curation is all about finding and sharing the best of the best content that’s out there, so take time to find and document credible, quality sources that you can consistently pull from. This will not only ensure you’re sharing the best stuff, but it’ll also increase your efficiency.

Wondering where to look? Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Google News, Google Search or Google+
• Social media and social sharing sites (Pinterest can be especially useful!)
• Industry news publications and blogs
• Industry specific newsletters you receive via email
• Niche topic blogs that are relevant to your business and audience
• Press release distribution sites such as PRWeb or PRNewswire
• News aggregators
• Competitors (This will allow you to see how they’re doing content curation.)

As another tip, consider conducting your own poll or survey to collect insights that can be rolled into other pieces of content.

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“Content curation is all about finding and sharing the best of the best content.”
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#2 – Be relevant.

Stay focused on just a handful of different topics and themes that are relevant to your audience. This will ensure that your curated content resonates and show that your brand or company has is knowledgeable and dialed in on those subjects.

As for the type of content you should be looking out for, here are some to consider:

• Blogs, news articles, white papers, case studies, press releases or eBooks
• Any content written by influential industry thought leaders
• Statistics, data, surveys, studies, reports or other research
• Links shared on social media
• Videos, infographics or other visual content
• Slideshare presentations

#3 – Give credit where it’s due.

You know that time, resources and a little love went into creating all the pieces you’ve curated. So whether you’re sharing on social media or working the content into a blog post, make sure you’re giving the original writer and/or publication credit for their hard work.

#4 – Commit to consistency.

If you want your content curation efforts to be successful and effective, consistency is key. In addition, this tactic needs to be integrated into your overall content marketing strategy.

The frequency and curated mix that’s right for your brand will depend on your industry, overall marketing strategy and goals, but 2-4 curated social media posts a day and a monthly blog roundup could be a good starting point.

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“If you want your content curation efforts to be successful and effective, consistency is key.”
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#5 – Give your “people” some special attention.

Your customers, prospects and partners are likely creating some great content. Highlight that content to show them you’re in touch with their business and help you serve up relevant content to your audience.

#6 – Share on multiple channels.

While curated content may not be your work, you should still share and promote it like your own to get more reach, engagement and awareness. Remember that variety is the spice of life. Below are some places to publish and share include:

• Your company blog
• eBooks
• Email newsletters
• Social media channels
• Contributed articles or blogs to industry sites
• Niche microsites or hubs dedicated to a specific topic or news category

#7 – Utilize curation and distribution tools.

There are a number of helpful content curation and distribution tools out there. Use them to streamline your processes so you can consistently share find and share. Below are some free and paid options to consider:

• Feedly (free and paid programs)
• List.ly (free and paid programs)
• Storify (free and paid programs)
• Scoop.It (free and paid programs)
• Buzzsumo (free and paid programs)
• Buffer (free and paid programs)
• Curata (paid)

Examples of Content Curation in Action

News Roundups

LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

Each week, the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions publishes a “Top Trending Content” blog post focused on what’s happening and what’s being talked about in the marketing world.

Below is a shot of one of their latest posts.

BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed is a champion of curated content, utilizing a variety of sources to compile silly, interesting, newsworthy and timely posts each day. While the example below isn’t exactly hard hitting news or focused on helpful tips, it definitely employs a number of content curation best practices such as utilizing social sharing platforms, crediting sources and focusing on a specific topic their readers will enjoy.

Innovatech Labs

Big brands and companies aren’t the only ones who can find interesting and relevant content to curate for their unique audiences. There’s also opportunity for smaller and niche businesses to do it, too.

Innovatech Labs is a materials testing lab that uses several analytical testing techniques, which are useful to many manufacturers who want to ensure product quality and cleanliness. Each month, Innovatech Labs publishes an Analytical Testing News Roundup featuring interesting articles that showcase how those techniques are being used in the real world.

Social Sharing

TopRank Marketing

TopRank Marketing’s social news feeds feature a hearty mix of commentary, photos, links to original content and, of course, curated content links. Here’s a peek at our recent Twitter posts, highlighting great content from some of our favorite sources.

Hubs and Resources

HubSpot

HubSpot’s “The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics” is a great example of content curation at its finest. This resource features the latest marketing statistics and is organized by tactic. In addition, it’s continually updated as new data is released.

CMO.com by Adobe

CMO.com by Adobe provides a great mix of curated and original content. In fact, their tagline says it all: “Digital marketing insights, expertise and inspiration – for and by marketing leaders.” The big way they’re featuring curated content is through their “Marketing News Feed,” which pulls in posts from authoritative and credible sources such as Social Media Today, MarketingProfs, Marketing Insider Group and even TopRank Marketing Blog.

Do you curate content? How often are you doing it and where do you find inspiration for it? Tell us in the comments section below.

Disclosure: LinkedIn and Innovatech Labs are TopRank Marketing clients.

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As a small business owner, do you dream of success? Of course you do. That’s why we do what we do. We all want some measure of success. For most of us, success means achieving the lifestyle of our dreams.

A Common Mistake Among Small Business Owners

As business owners, our businesses help us achieve our dreams. That’s why, when our businesses are in their infancy, it’s so natural to pour ourselves into the minutiae of operations and sales and marketing and human resources and everything else in order to keep the baby alive and well. “It’s our sole responsibility to keep this ship afloat!” we cry.

We try to do it all. Superpreneur-style.

Obviously, it doesn’t take a genius to know that trying to do everything on your own is a seriously flawed practice…unless your goal is to burn out in the most spectacular way.

Always Be Innovating

In the U.S., existing small businesses comprise 99% of all employer firms, employ nearly half of the workforce, and account for more than 60% of the private sector’s net new jobs.

The most successful entrepreneurs work smarter not harder in order to use their limited time more wisely. In other words, successful small business owners are innovators.

“These are the kind of leaders who give their companies a clear competitive edge. They do so by acting innovative themselves and expecting others to do the same. That’s what we discovered in the eight-year research project behind our book… Put simply, innovation is driven by choice, not chance, at the most innovative companies in the world.”

Clayton Christensen and Hal Gregersen, co-authors of The Innovator’s DNA

Correct Your Mistakes While You Can

You’re not alone in your struggles to achieve small business entrepreneurial success. You’re also not alone in wanting to make your business stand out from competitors in order to achieve that success.

Earlier this year, Babson College published a research report entitled The State of Small Business in America 2016, which highlights the main challenges and current opportunities that America’s small business owners encounter.

The report collected insights from over 1,800 small businesses across the U.S., representing every industry sector with a median age of 12 years in business, a minimum of 4 employees, and at least $150,000 in revenues.

The most unexpected findings in the report revealed the depth and breadth of innovation that small business owners are currently responsible for producing.

3 Ways to Make Your Business Stand Out From the Competition

If you want to pursue opportunities that will get you closer to your dream lifestyle, innovation in the 3 areas below will take you there so long as you are committed.

1. Build Meaningful Relationships

You’ve heard this a gagillion times before, but likely still don’t have a clue about exactly how to build business relationships let alone make them meaningful. So let’s take a look at how to build your business network and maintain relationships that mean something to clients.

1. Solve Problems: When you think of yourself as a problem solver, you will always try to find something of value to offer. Problem solvers routinely survey their existing customers and keep a close eye on their industry to identify pain points. Why? Because whether you’re speaking at a conference, posting to social media, building out the content on your website, brainstorming a blog post, having lunch with a current client, or speaking with a potential client on the phone, you can better understand how to build brand evangelists, attract customers, and convert leads with a unique value proposition based on real problem-solution insights. Every successful business has a unique value proposition. It’s a guiding light for all interactions and outreach that can be intermingled into every piece of content and messaging that your business puts out. Make sure you know yours!
2. Back to Basics: You are only as strong as your weakest customer service channel. Tim Calkins, clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, said “getting things done in an an accurate manner, on a timely basis, and at a reasonable price” is fundamental to customer service. I would add “fulfillment” to Calkins list, meaning that if your customers don’t experience your product or service as advertised, there will be backlash. So make sure to meet these most basic expectations first. Every touchpoint that current and potential customers have with you and your business will make-or-break you, especially in a social media world. Everything rides on customer service, so try to pick up every call, find solutions before a problem arises, and be transparent. And always remember that great customer service will help you turn current customers into brand evangelists that will generate referral business for you.
3. Be Selfless: When you offer expert knowledge and suggestions, you build credibility for yourself and your business. Want to get really crazy about being selfless? Give potential clients options to consider that are NOT your business. For instance, at Prialto we actually give prospective customers suggestions for other virtual assistant services even when it means not taking their business because our services truly aren’t the best resource for them. People appreciate this like you wouldn’t believe, and typically come back to us after trying other solutions in the industry.

2. Understand Processes

We live in a very fast-paced world, which doesn’t leave much time to inspect all facets of your business. But don’t stress. Just looking at a few will help you get where you need to be to beat your competition.

1. Workflows: Look at your industry on a weekly – if not daily – basis in order to identify ways that your business can reimagine systems that will create an x-factor (see definition below). This reimagining is called business process reengineering, which refers to a focus on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organization. Look for holes in the offerings of your competitors. Is everyone in your industry failing to address a particular pain point? Grab that problem by the horns, find a solution (make your products and/or services better, find better pricing models, or simply offer more value for their dollar), and use that solution to illustrate how your customers are getting value from you versus the rest of your industry. Key takeaway: Value drives sales.
2. Next Level Sh#t: Consider defining your x-factor, which is a variable in a given situation that could have the most significant impact on the outcome. To put it in practical terms, an x-factor will separate you from your competition if it adds value to your business and it’s something you do or have that nobody else does or can do. It’s a matter of playing to your strengths, so take some time to decide what your core strengths are and how they distinctly set you apart from your competition. Again, value drives sales.
3. Organizational Differentiation: is yet another form of advantage. Maximizing the power of a brand, or using the specific advantages that an organization possesses can be instrumental to a company’s success. Location advantages, name recognition and customer loyalty can all provide additional ways for a company differentiate itself from the competition.

3. Engage in Research and Development

To create meaningful impact, business owners must stay nimble. Goldman Sachs conducted a study of nearly 10,000 small businesses that showed over one-third are engaged in research and development for a new product or service. About two-thirds of the businesses in the study are improving the quality of an existing product or service.

1. Innovate then Iterate: “An innovation will get traction only if it helps people get something that they’re already doing in their lives done better.” Clayton M. Christensen business best-seller, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. He has come up with a series of tests to help entrepreneurs judge whether their ideas are likely to succeed in the marketplace. “I think it’s very important for innovators to understand what we’ve learned about established companies’ motivation to target obvious profitable markets — and about their inability to find emerging ones. The evidence is just overwhelming.” So study your competitors to figure out what they do that you could do better, and discover what they don’t offer that you could offer. Position yourself as a true competitor to reap the rewards of disruption.
2. Interview Your Clients: Interviewing clients gives you the most effective, insightful bang for your buck. Beyond asking them open-ended questions related to your products and/or services, ask them more specific questions that get to the heart of why they chose to work with you, and why they stay. Additionally, ask them what would help them refer others to your business.
3. Utilize Data: Unless you’ve been spending most of your time under a rock, you understand that content marketing is the end-all-be-all of your online presence. Among its many graces, content helps you rank in search engines and builds your clout. But in order to be effective, content must utilize data (analytics). Which means that in order to utilize data, you must actually track it first. Once tracked, study certain key metrics according to your business needs and objectives. Using analytics (data) in combination with your UVP-rich content is crucial and cannot be overstated. Putting these all together makes for incredible SEO opportunities, to say the least.

Correct Your Mistakes While You Can

For many business professionals, these aren’t life-altering revelations to make your business stand out from competitors. Rather, the secret sauce here is that you must put each of these aspects of growth hacking – essentially – into action in order to beat your business competition. Spend time doing the above three things well, and you’ll stand out from the competition.

For fun, check out these examples of corporate competition through differentiation. And if you want to dive into your x-factor and what makes you great, check out 8 Force Multipliers for Entrepreneurs via Anthony Iannarino.

Admit it, innovating is cool. Is it the new black? You decide…

We’d love to hear your comments below.

As your B2B business enters a sustained growth phase, it presents you with incredible opportunities to use your resources to reach an expanded pool of customers. You’re in a better position to deliver your value proposition to buyers and decision makers who were previously outside of your circle of influence, and your sales efforts during this phase can lead you to exponential growth that can change the course of your entire organization.

Increasingly, businesses are investing more resources into social sales programs to engage their prospects in innovative ways. Attempting to scale a social selling strategy results in a delicate situation, seeing as how you need to increase efficiency in order to expand your reach, but you don’t want to lose the intimacy of the platform that makes social media so effective. By using the advanced tools provided to you and giving your reps what they need to confidently approach prospects via social media, you can ramp up your social selling program to meet the needs of your expanding customer base.

Adopt a scalable model that sets your sales reps up for success

If you want to see real success when attempting to scale your social selling program, then it all starts with training. Do not rely on sales reps attempting to make social connections “whenever they have time” or “after they have finished their real sales calls.” During your sales training procedures, firmly layout why social selling is such an important part of your strategy, and set clear goals for your salespeople in terms of their efforts (since nearly two-thirds of salespeople incorporating social selling techniques outperformed their peers, it shouldn’t be hard to convince them). This way, no matter how big your sales team grows your social sales connections will follow at an appropriate pace.

Employ automation measures strategically

Automation has created vast new possibilities for B2B marketers and sales managers, but it’s important to remember that just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. In their haste to imbue their social selling efforts with a quick shot of growth, many business leaders make the mistake of employing wholesale automation in order to reach the most people in the fastest way possible. Automation must always be used in service of connecting your audience with value-added information. If your prospects become accustomed to a barrage of posts from your accounts that offer little incentive to click, they’ll be far more likely to lose faith in your company’s expertise and unfollow.

The more specific your search queries are, the better quality leads they’ll produce

Scaling up your social sales is all about the quality of your leads. It seems counterintuitive, since you would think that more leads would be better when you’re trying to grow your business. In reality, revenue growth allows you to sell to an entirely new segment of customers, so it becomes more important than ever that you spend your time and money selling to the right ones. Platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter have developed new search tools that give sales professionals unprecedented ability to identify quality leads more efficiently.

Use the power of your growing network for referrals

As your customer base, and therefore your network increases its scope, your opportunities for referrals will be greater than ever. Use the power of your network’s connections to gain exposure to an even larger group of prospects. Ask your satisfied customers and followers if they would be willing to tag interested parties on social platforms who could benefit from your product. Most of them will be happy to do so, and you’ll gain the advantage of a built-in, warm lead.

Leverage a thought leadership position

LinkedIn isn’t only the most popular platform for B2B content marketers, but it plays an important role in the majority of buyers’ decisions as well. While it was once seen primarily as a haven for job seekers and networkers, the social site has emerged as a hub of knowledge sharing where everyone from sales reps to CEOs can establish their credentials as experts and thought leaders in a chosen subject. As your social selling program grows, most prospects will want to quickly check to see if your company has specific insights that can help make their job easier, and publishing high-quality content on LinkedIn is a proven strategy for demonstrating this expertise.

"Thanks for the advice. Since implementing it, we have doubled our close rate." — James Kennedy, Founder, Rubberstamp.io

Every day, readers of our blog send us emails like these. They implemented our advice, saw results and share their wins with us.

This year, we published 139 sales posts. With every post we publish, we always aim to provide a ton of value to the millions of people who read our sales advice.

That's why we’ve picked the 7 best posts we’ve published in 2016. If you want to kill it in 2017, read these. Whether you’re a sales rep or a sales manager, there’s something for everyone in here.

1. How to respond to "I don't have time"

If a prospect truly believed your solution could double their productivity or increase revenue by 30%, would they rush you off the phone with “I don’t have time”? No! They would make time.

When a prospect says “I don’t have time”, they actually mean “This isn’t worth my time.” [Tweet this!] It’s your job to demonstrate the value of your solution and why it’s worth their time.

This objection could appear on the first cold call—or later in the sales process. Here’s exactly what to say to convince prospects to make time during any stage in the deal. Read more.

2. Are your salespeople closing bad deals? Here's how to fix it!

Not every closed deal is a good deal. [Tweet this!] While your salespeople might get richer by closing any prospect with a pulse, selling to the wrong customer will kill your business.

In SaaS, you can’t close a deal once and call it a day. You must constantly provide value for customers to justify paying you each month—and that starts with selecting the right customers. Bad customers are costly: they require more support, increase your churn rate, and will badmouth your brand.   

Get your salespeople closing the right deals by:

• Drilling in how their choices affect the company’s metrics.
• Leading by example by turning away bad deals.
• Rewarding the right behavior.  

Setting your sales team back on the right track starts with these three steps. Read more.

3. 3 models of effective sales team organization

Effective sales teams are made, not born. [Tweet this!] Part of that means deciding how to organize your sales team.

Should your sales team work as islands, each salesperson left to sell by themselves? In an assembly line, with salespeople specializing in a specific stage of the sales cycle? Or as a pod, a small group responsible for the entire journey of specific customers?

Each model has its strengths and weaknesses. However, the right model is one that will drive maximum results and create the best cultural fit for your organization. Explore which model is right for your business. Read more.       

4. 3 unusual ways to make your sales emails stand out

“Delete.”

That’s the fate of most sales emails. Busy prospects don’t want to read another boring email. [Tweet this!] They want to read emails that are relevant and valuable.   

Optimizing the subject line and body of your emails is a good start but isn’t enough. Stand out from the crowd and increase your response rate with these three unusual tactics. Read more.

5. 10 objection handling techniques every B2B salesperson should know

If you aren’t prepared to handle objections, you’ll lose the deal to someone who is. [Tweet this!]

However, preparing to handle objections doesn’t have to be a shot in the dark. Prospects tend to have the same objections. That’s why we have listed the top 10 most common objections and how to handle them.

If you’ve ever been thrown a curveball by “Your product/service is too expensive” or “You’ve got a great product, but we’re going to go with [the industry standard]”, this list is for you. Read more.

6. How to onboard a sales team in 4 weeks

Most companies spend months onboarding new sales reps. It’s expensive and time-consuming for the company, frustrating and boring for the new reps.

Sales is like swimming—in order to learn, you have to get in the water. [Tweet this!] Instead of training salespeople for months, train them in 4 weeks. They’ll go from making cold calls and receiving direct feedback on their first day, to being able to manage themselves.

They’ll learn what they need, as they need it, instead of being overwhelmed by useless info.

For an even more in-depth approach to training reps, the free 4-week sales onboarding schedule is included to show you what to do, hour by hour. You can even customize the schedule and share it with your reps. Read more.

7. 8 CRM-ready sales email templates

To create a well-oiled sales machine, every single part of the machine must work. [Tweet this!]

One common detail sales managers overlook is making their email strategy scalable. Instead, every salesperson is left to their own devices, losing deals over email and not knowing why. The solution? Email templates.

Email templates allow your sales team to start on the same foot. By consistently reviewing the results and tweaking your templates, you can experiment your way to better emails.   

Get started with these eight sales emails covering every stage of the sales process. They can be copied and pasted straight into your CRM. Read more.

Crush it in 2017

Whether you want to send better emails, manage objections better, or organize and onboard a sales team better, these seven posts have you covered.

Which of these posts was most valuable to you? Help spread the word and share this post with your sales team. [Tweet this!]

Also, tell us in the comment section what your most important sales goal for 2017.  Then, make it happen!

Recommended reading:

24 B2B cold calling tips for sales success in 2016
Enjoyed the seven sales tips above? Here are 24 tips for B2B cold calling designed to help you have a great year. Learn how fast-growing companies cold call to drive revenues.

10 time management tips to crush your Q4 in 2016
Instead of focusing on the activities that produce real results, salespeople waste too much time on busy work. Let's break that bad habit with these 10 time management tips.

5 cold email templates that will generate warm leads for your sales team!
5 cold email templates for salespeople. Get templates for the cold calling 2.0 approach as well as direct sales approach templates.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence IoT Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.

At a recent investor conference, Intel EVP of Sales, Manufacturing, and Operations Stacy Smith shed light on the company’s new sales strategy for the IoT, The Motley Fool reports.

Smith, who was recently moved into the position from her old job as Chief Financial Officer, emphasized that the company will shift its focus to crafting a sales force and strategy that's more aligned by vertical markets, supplying the hardware and software needed to fully supply those various markets.

To accomplish these goals, the company will look to create a sales force with specific skills in a space to target markets within the IoT most effectively.

While Intel has done well in the IoT so far, this new strategy could help it continue to improve and grow as the IoT matures. Intel has seen steady growth in its IoT group, but the unit is still not one of the larger business segments for the chip designer. But the IoT is so broad — ranging from drones to development boards to autonomous vehicles — for which Intel recently carved out a business segment, that Intel, as well as competing chip designers, may find a number of opportunities to continue their businesses and diversify their revenue streams.

The IoT Revolution is picking up speed and when it does, it will change how we live, work, travel, entertain, and more. From connected homes and connected cars to smart buildings and transportation, every aspect of our lives will be affected by the increasing ability of consumers, businesses, and governments to connect to and control everything around them.

Imagine “smart mirrors” that allow you to digitally try on clothes. Assembly line sensors that can detect even the smallest decrease in efficiency and determine when crucial equipment needs to be repaired or replaced. GPS-guided agricultural equipment that can plant, fertilize, and harvest crops. Fitness trackers that allow users to transmit data to their doctors.

It’s not science fiction. This “next Industrial Revolution” is happening as we speak. It’s so big that it could mean new revenue streams for your company and new opportunities for you. The only question is: Are you fully up to speed on the IoT?

After months of researching and reporting this exploding trend, BI Intelligence, Business Insider’s premium research service, has put together an essential report on the IoT that explains the exciting present and the fascinating future of the Internet of Things.  It covers how the IoT is being implemented today, where the new sources of opportunity will be tomorrow and how 16 separate sectors of the economy will be transformed over the next 20 years.

The report gives a thorough outlook on the future of the Internet of Things, including the following big picture insights:

• IoT devices connected to the Internet will more than triple by 2020, from 10 billion to 34 billion. IoT devices will account for 24 billion, while traditional computing devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, etc.) will comprise 10 billion.

• Nearly $6 trillion will be spent on IoT solutions over the next five years.

• Businesses will be the top adopter of IoT solutions because they will use IoT to 1) lower operating costs; 2) increase productivity; and 3) expand to new markets or develop new product offerings.

• Governments will be the second-largest adopters, while consumers will be the group least transformed by the IoT.


And when you dig deep into the report, you’ll get the whole story in a clear, no-nonsense presentation:

• The complex infrastructure of the Internet of Things distilled into a single ecosystem

• The most comprehensive breakdown of the benefits and drawbacks of mesh (e.g. ZigBee, Z-Wave, etc.), cellular (e.g. 3G/4G, Sigfox, etc.), and internet (e.g. Wi-Fi, Ethernet, etc.) networks

• The important role analytics systems, including edge analytics, cloud analytics, will play in making the most of IoT investments

• The sizable security challenges presented by the IoT and how they can be overcome

• The four powerful forces driving IoT innovation, plus the four difficult market barriers to IoT adoption

• Complete analysis of the likely future investment in the critical IoT infrastructure:   connectivity, security, data storage, system integration, device hardware, and application development

• In-depth analysis of how the IoT ecosystem will change and disrupt 16 different industries


To get your copy of this invaluable guide to the IoT universe, choose one of these options:

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The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the fast-moving world of the IoT.

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