Rnordman

It seems a long time ago that when someone mentioned that they had an account on LinkedIn, people’s response was ‘so you’re looking for another job then?’

LinkedIn has moved on from just being a recruitment website, but this repositioning has not been without its challenges. It has developed into a website which is still heavily used by recruiters (as it should be, it is a great platform for identifying talent), but also used by prospectors.

If you are a regular LinkedIn user, you will be familiar with receiving a LinkedIn invitation from a contact who seems to have an industry / interest in common, only to receive a pitch email within minutes of connecting. In a lot of cases, this makes LinkedIn more beneficial for the prospector than the (potential) customer. If regular users start to disengage with LinkedIn, the network will disappear. Not only that, but the pressure is already on with the rate of revenue growth slowing at the end of 2015 / start of 2016. So what have LinkedIn done to rectify this?

They have realised that they have a large number of accounts on the network, many of which on a daily basis are sharing content from all around the internet. So LinkedIn is acting as a powerful referrer. Also, while they have been encouraging users to upload their own content (through the write an article feature that was introduced a couple of years ago), visibility of that content is fairly low.

So, LinkedIn has introduced a feature to allow people to search through the huge amount of content that is published from within LinkedIn. Previously, using the search function to search for, say, ‘content marketing’ would firstly show you people who work in content marketing. However, you can now search ‘Posts’, so your search will show all posts about content marketing. A nice addition to the network I think.

So, will it work? Regular users of LinkedIn will still share their content on LinkedIn, particularly if they can see the benefits of posting to their connections and having their article indexed by search engines (all LinkedIn articles are public). Access to this content will need to outweigh any of the perceived disadvantages of spending time on LinkedIn, e.g. being sold to by an irrelevant product.

I fear it may be too late. If you are looking for an article on content marketing, where are you likely to start? Twitter already has thousands of communities which share content on all sorts of subjects from all over the internet. And of course there is also the small matter of Google which is the go-to resource for search (in the UK anyway).

If LinkedIn’s articles can rank well in Google’s search results (from a straw poll, this seems like an opportunity to improve), it can pick up traffic from this source, but I don’t think LinkedIn will develop into a go-to website for content. Which means that while LinkedIn has added a nice feature, I think it will take more to reposition such a large social network.

A key part of writing an email that gets a response from your busy coworkers is formatting. Here’s the format you should use to make it easier to get the information you need in the time you need it.

Read more...

(Photo Courtesy of Kenny Madden)

This cartoon was sent to me in response to a blog I wrote a couple of weeks ago. I just love the simplicity of it; not to mention that it absolutely captures what is wrong with marketing in many if not most companies today.

While marketing technology and marketing automation software are not totally to blame, they have made it easier to get more poor quality leads to sales faster than ever before. And, somehow, the cycle appears to be the following: CEO’s demand revenue; CMO’s crank up the lead generation machine; sales reps getting poor quality leads dumped on them; more leads are demanded at a lower cost per lead; the leads end up in a black hole sometimes called CRM.

At some point it has to stop, doesn’t it? You would think so, but there are few signs of it stopping in the real world today.

The current reality (according to CSO Insights):

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

One of the reasons that we are in the pickle we are in is because, in my opinion, CEO’s are not doing the best job they can leading their companies. Basic, building block decisions are ceded to those in organizations (such as marketing and sales) that cannot or will not work together to align. Dollars are squandered. Sales is mad. Revenue targets are missed.   

I am a big fan of Mike Weinberg and his book “New Sales. Simplified.” In that book Mike does a great job of providing exactly what CEO’s owe their sales (and marketing) teams:

1. Our reason for existence.
2. The direction the company is headed and why it is the correct course.
3. What we sell and why we sell it.
4. Which markets to pursue and where we are positioned in those markets.
5. The competitive landscape and how we stack up against competitive offers, and why we are better or different.
6. Why our pricing model is appropriate for the value we create in the markets we are pursuing and against the competition we are facing.

We had a client a number of years ago that blew through over $100,000,000 in venture capital because the marketing department was marketing $10,000 point solutions and the sales department only wanted to sell $1,000,000 enterprise solutions. It does not really matter who was right and who was wrong. The result was the company wasted a spectacular opportunity and was sold for pennies on the dollar in a fire sale to a competitor (that, by the way, sold $10,000 point solutions and at that time had a $10,000,000,000 market cap.)  The CEO was, apparently, powerless or paralyzed and presided over the death of a potentially great company. Don't let this happen to you.

Accountability starts and stops with the CEO. How can you make 2017 the beginning of the era of accountability for your company? Call me at 678-533-2722 if you want to explore your current situation and what can be done about it.

 Hyundai is launching a new website called “Click to Buy” in the UK, where customers can purchase its cars directly with fixed pricing and no haggling. The online model of car sales is one that Tesla employs widely for its own vehicles, owing in part to its inability to run its own physical dealerships in many places. The new Hyundai UK direct sales start January 6, 2017, and… Read More

Thanks to instantaneous communication tactics like social media, businesses are connecting with their customers at the push of a button. While this brings opportunity, it also means it’s easy to get distracted and lose sight of business goals.

For many time-poor small business owners, the challenge is that rather than taking a strategic approach most get caught in the daily grind of marketing execution.

5 signs it’s time to down tools and start thinking strategically.

1. You don’t know your who, what, why, when and where

   If you can’t determine what your business objective is, who your competitors are, why you are different and where your customers can be found and when they can benefit from your services.

1. You’re all about real time

While reactive marketing can be an effective tactic, it shouldn’t be your complete strategy. Being only reactive, will inevitably cost you time and money.

1. Your competition is doing it better

   First impressions count! Your customers look for a solution to their problems. The clearer your message and easier the buying journey is, the quicker and more effective your marketing efforts will be.

1. You lose sight of your budget

   A strategy guides all marketing tactics and is critical to your budget. If business growth is a priority, your proposed marketing activity must work to a dedicated budget.

1. You crave success

   How will you ever know your strategies are paying off if you have no marketing objectives? Your strategy should identify what ‘success’ looks like for your business.

And remember: K.I.S.S.

Your marketing strategy doesn’t have to be complicated.

If you put your marketing strategy in the too-hard basket, you will forever be a reactionary marketer.

Marketing strategies come in all shapes and sizes, with one commonality: the delivery of real business value and direction.

Is it time your business implemented a marketing strategy?

Let’s talk.

In today’s digitally focused world, many brands are embracing innovative ways to promote their products and services. Some companies have turned to influencer marketing as a means to enhance their brand awareness or increase their sales. Can successful influencer marketing campaigns be replicated?

Recently, Chinese tech giant, Huawei, embarked on an influencer marketing campaign. What can other brands learn from a successful campaign?

What is influencer marketing?

According to an article recently published on Scrawl, this form of marketing is “a new strategy that harnesses the power of individual people, or of certain types of individuals, rather than convey the message directly to a large audience. This approach relies on the awareness that people trust their peers more than advertising, so it’s more beneficial to spread your message to opinion leaders, who will then promote it to their followers. Understanding and utilizing influencer marketing can be used to help increase your business’s ROI.”

While influencer marketing isn’t a new form of product promotion, it’s definitely gaining interest in recent years.

Why is this form of marketing become a trend?

The impressive growth in recent times towards influencer marketing can best be attributed to three major shifts in the consumption of content.

1. Ad-blocking tech: It’s no secret that ad-blocking technology is on the rise. As Google and other SERP’s battle this issue, click-through rates are sinking. With that, display ads are also not reaching the audiences they intended to. A recent article on Rank Ranger sheds light on the topic and recent Google changes and its potential impact.
2. Social Ads: With ad-blocking tech on the rise, social ads are becoming a strong channel in driving traffic to content. Facebook and Twitter have been selling in-stream ads or promoted content for a while, now both Instagram and Snapchat are jumping on the ad bandwagon.
3. Price of Content Creation: the cost of creating quality content can be an expensive venture for a brand. By employing influencers, brands can bypass these expenses and release the responsibility to the creativity and interest in producing relevant, interesting content. With the release of the content to influencers, an added and equally important aspect of influencer marketing, is the ability to leverage their social audiences to benefit brand awareness and interest.

In short, these three aspects highlight an important trend that in a world where content production is in overdrive, it’s virtually impossible for brands to cut through the noise and stand out among the crowd in their industry. That’s why many brands are turning people into brand ambassadors, who have more influence and a personal perspective to help the company move the needle on consumer decisions. By shifting marketing efforts around individuals, brands are able to attract, retain and engage with customers in a much longer relationship.

The real differentiation is when a brand really invests in their influencers and values the relationship. Even though influencer marketing may sound simple, identifying the right influencers and creating the right kind of campaign for their target audience takes a lot of work.

Case Study

Chinese tech company, Huawei (pronounced hua-way), is a global leader in information and communications technology. In fact, Huawei is the world’s largest maker of internet switching equipment and ranked as the number 3 seller of smartphones after Samsung and Apple. Last year, the company reported sales revenue of $60 billion. In short, Huawei is a major player, yet somehow they don’t have the global brand awareness like their two competitors.

This less than positive report, forced Huawei to conduct research on the issue, which concluded that while people are aware of the brand, they may not be aware of the full suite of products and history of Huawei.

With this information, the company embarked on a campaign to shift the audience opinion via an influencer marketing program, or as they call it, a KOL (key opinion leader) program.

Huawei identified people who are neutral toward the brand. After identifying the right people, Huawei initiated outreach with these leaders, set up a webinar, and then invited them to one of the many global events, or for some invite them to their headquarters in Shenzhen, China.

In all cases, Huawei’s influencer marketing is solely done on an unpaid basis. Meaning that the brand does not pay the influencers directly, rather they introduce their products to the right people, allowing these individuals to create and interact freely with the brand.

Joy Tan, Director of Communications at Huawei, recently wrote that “KOLs are a force multiplier for all corporate communications, and companies that fail to harness that force are missing a great opportunity to help build a following and reinforce a brand. Getting started in influencer marketing is relatively easy: identify a pool of target KOLs, research their interests and degree of influence, and start making those connections. Not all of them will be receptive, but many will be; and you will have a new set of allies who can help set your brand apart from the competition.

Reaching Millions

In a recent study by Klear, they analyzed Huawei Connect as a test case for understanding the actual value of an influencer marketing.

The results of the social media outcome of this specific event are quite impressive.

• 258 Twitter mentions
• 42 Instagram mentions
• 51 Facebook mentions
• 16,900 total engagements: 7.2k on Twitter, 6.4 on Instagram, 3.6 on Facebook
• 116,000 views of Facebook Live posts
• True Reach: 4.6 million people
• Potential ROI: $128,900

(copied with permission by Klear)

What is true reach? It’s a proprietary technology that Klear created to analyze probability that each one of the followers will see a post according to his/her activity and engagement rate.

More importantly, is the dollar value that is attributed to the data and the exposure. Using the true reach, the dollar amount associated to bringing 11 people to a Huawei, far surpassed the cost of initiating a global marketing campaign in its classic form.

Lessons on Influencer Marketing

After looking at Huawei as a test case, here are a few tips on how to initiate and craft a solid influencer marketing campaign.

1. Mutual Benefit: Designing a solid influencer marketing campaign means that both sides are comfortable with the terms and conditions. Make sure that the program is a real win-win. Swag is not a motivator. Influencers within any industry are keen to partner but when the relationship enables both sides to succeed.
2. Research Each Influencer Before Engaging: Don’t just look at their following on social channels. There are many metrics that should be considered before engaging someone.
3. Transparency is Important: transparency can make or break any good influencer campaign. Trust is the cornerstone of the relationships these influencers have cultivated. Make sure to be honest.
4. Flexibility and Creative License: Any brand should allow the content creators and influencers to feel comfortable writing and sharing their opinion. A brand shouldn’t be strict in setting guidelines. Restricting them will only detract the final outcome of the campaign. Effective influencers don’t sacrifice authenticity.
5. Respect the Influencer: Any brand that wants to run a successful influencer marketing campaign, needs to genuinely respect the influencers. Being kind and respectful of their time, creativity and ability to comprehend content. They are real people, too. So treat them with kindness and they will work their magic.

As influencer marketing continues to become an integral component of any brands marketing efforts, an important component is to select the right ones. While this method of reaching new audiences is still developing, it will continue to change the landscape in the coming years. As social-media platforms rise and fall in prominence, the platforms may change but a solid influencer marketing campaign will outperform any platform and prove to provide true value to a brand.

 Within the past few months, NetSuite, Marketo, LinkedIn, FleetMatics and LogMeIn have each been acquired or merged for a combined value of more than $50 billion. At this rate, public SaaS companies may become an endangered species. Clearly, PE investors and larger technology companies sense opportunity and value. Read More

Where are companies at in their digital transformation efforts?

This was the question I set out to answer in, “The 2014 State of Digital Transformation” report.  After two years, it was time to check-in on the digital transformation landscape again to learn how companies are changing, what challenges they’re facing now and what opportunities they’ve uncovered.

Recently, I hosted a webcast on behalf of Altimeter and Prophet to share the findings from the latest “State of Digital Transformation” report. Over the span of one hour, we reviewed the latest facts and figures on the top drivers and challenges, who owns digital transformation and why, what it is and also what it isn’t, and also the best practices of companies undergoing digital transformation.

At the end of the presentation, the number of questions that flew in were too great to address in the live airing. My host for the day, Lindsay Malone, had the great idea to schedule a follow up Q&A to address the remaining questions. I wanted to also share the result here with you.

Who is typically leading digital transformation at organizations?

According to our survey, digital transformation is largely led by the CMO (34%). Not far behind, though, is a digitally savvy generation of CEOs who, at 27%, recognize that it’s time to lead their companies into the 21st century (see page 11). This is a number that we expect to grow in the coming years.

How can I better understand how to measure/assess customers’ satisfaction along the customer journey?

When companies measure satisfaction they often use an array of existing metric systems (NPS to CSAT) or other homegrown KPIs to capture moments or transactions; but, these can’t gauge the overall customer experience.

If we consider CX to be the sum of all parts during a customer’s journey, then someone (a governing body) must be able to assess individual touchpoints and determine how those touchpoints add up collectively to whichever standard we are agreeing to measure. There are new types of metrics that can be introduced, but it starts with deciding what that benchmark standard should be. Shared experience value, happiness, and connectedness are metrics that matter and you’ll need a mechanism to capture how you measure on the standard for which you’re setting out to deliver. It’s a time for innovation on this front.

I find that many companies are still mired in old compensation models based on KPIs that don’t take digital efforts into account. Did you find that successful companies had changed compensation models as well?

There are a variety of interesting experiments in this regard, indeed, most operational elements are dated. This includes everything from process to measurement to reward and everything in between. Companies that are pushing innovation in this area are beginning to experiment with alternative management models which ask employees to work together toward different standards for innovating the processes they manage – this is changing review and reward mechanisms as a result.

For example, management is held accountable for bringing forward and implementing new ideas. Employees are responsible for discovering or considering new opportunities. This goes all the way up to the C-suite as a means of changing what a company values and how people work toward those desired outcomes.

Do you also experience that ‘innovation’ is ambiguous?

Most companies believe they are innovative simply because they are doing things they weren’t doing before or investing in new technology and bringing in new expertise to implement and manage it. But, my research shows that most companies are actually investing in iteration vs. innovation, and the differences between them are huge. I define iteration as doing the same things better. Innovation is doing new things that unlocks new value for your customers. Only one of those can lead to disruption, which is doing new things over time that make the old things obsolete.

What approach would you suggest for companies looking to create a digital customer experience strategy?

If you have a moment, please read a report on this subject I published earlier in 2016, “How Businesses are Taking the OPPOSITE Approach to Digital Transformation.” In this report, I provide eight  best practices that are guiding today’s successful organizations through their digital transformation efforts.

With over 3,000 solutions, the marketing technology landscape is a real nightmare. How do you navigate to find your way to the digital content management and distribution solutions?

Companies need to figure out their key objectives before trying to figure out the tools they need to support them. There are two resources I recommend checking out. My Altimeter colleague, Omar Akhtar published a report this year “Choosing the Tools for a Unified Content Strategy” which will help you navigate the intimidating landscape of content tools by creating clarity around your strategy, identifying gaps and requirements in your content operations, and providing a framework for rating tools that make the final cut.

Also, please read an article I wrote with LinkedIn, “Attention is a Currency.” In the article we reveal that only 20% of companies are aligning content to the customer journey. People don’t want to just see content; they want content that will take them to the next step. This report helps you to see content differently: 63% of consumers that they may deflect brands due to irrelevant content, 41% say they would consider ending the relationship with a brand because of irrelevant content, 22% said they already have.

Can you give an example of a company that has completed a digital transformation and provide an example of how it has tangibly improved its business?

The 2014 State of Digital Transformation report offers many examples of companies who have successfully executed digital transformation to drive business impact.

How is digital transformation realized in big companies (more than 5000 employees)?

The Six Stages of Digital Transformation report is a great resource for you to review for more information about this. This report shares the six phases that serve as a digital maturity blueprint to guide purposeful and advantageous digital transformation.

Have you seen any effective reverse mentoring programs designed to bridge the gap?

I’ve seen many interesting programs on this front, and have witnessed first-hand GE’s reverse mentoring program. There are many articles written about it – I suggest this would be a great place to start.

Please listen to the recording if you have a moment.

Also, if you have more questions about digital transformation, send your questions via Twitter to: Altimeter (@AltimeterGroup) or Lindsay Malone (@LZOMalone). If you’re interested in learning how Altimeter can help you with your digital transformation initiatives, reach out here.

Please read X, The Experience When Business Meets Design or visit my previous publications

Connect with Brian!

Twitter: @briansolis
Facebook: TheBrianSolis
LinkedIn: BrianSolis
Youtube: BrianSolisTV
Snapchat: BrianSolis

Invite him to speak at your next event or meeting. 

The post I Answer Your Questions About the State of Digital Transformation appeared first on Brian Solis.

This is a guest contribution from Sam Wright at techgirlblog.com. 

I’d had my technology lifestyle blog for little over a year when I began working with an influencer marketing platform, connecting brands and bloggers on sponsored collaborations.

Blogging in my region hadn’t become a true income source yet (that has changed in recent months and I like to think I had something to do with it) and a solid nine-to-fiver seemed the “safe” bet, especially as the platform would let me continue my blog.

One year on, I’ve had my job title change almost bi-monthly, I’ve stood in boardrooms and fought, almost to the point of tears, for bloggers, and I’ve also stood in boardrooms and been let down, almost to the point of tears, by bloggers.

The business of blogging is evolving at a rapid pace and I’ve been lucky enough to wear both “hats”, that of the creator and that of the brand on the other side, fearfully giving up creative control of their identity to a blogger.

Playing these dual roles has taught me four key lessons that I now apply to my blog and my job. These insights have allowed me to better monetise my own platforms but also given me the ability to ensure income for other creators. These are my learnings and whether blogger or brand, I’m hoping they can assist you as much as they have me!

Content. Content. Content.

It seems like such a cliche but the truth is everything links back to the content you produce.

Good content builds your audience and invites engagement, which then makes you attractive to brands – who then become interested in paying you to create good content in order to get exposure for their product or service.

Creating great content isn’t rocket science but there are a few additional things I’ve learnt over the years. The first is that good content is subjective. I’ve seen things produced by other creators and thought: “what the hell is that?” and yet it has gone on to do incredibly well with their audience. I’ve also seen really bad content that has little to no creative flair that gets published, getting no response from the targeted audience and yet the brand is over the moon because they liked it.

Sometimes it is hard, as a blogger, to remember that you don’t create content for brands but for your audience. It shouldn’t be hard, but it can be. I have a day job, so for my blog it is easy for me to say no to something that doesn’t sit with me, but I know that when your livelihood depends on the income your little space on the internet derives, it could be easy to think you could twist the content to work. You can’t. You shouldn’t. Don’t do it. All the money in the world won’t make up for the audience you’ll lose down the line.

As a creator myself I can say this with confidence: that audience means more to you than anything and if you’re true to your craft you’ll happily penny pinch to retain them. Long term it will mean less penny pinching because you’ll be far more respected than the blogger who chose to make the quick buck along the way.

Report on EVERYTHING

Vanity stats, the stuff you think no one cares about and then the extra statistics you don’t even understand – make sure they all go in your closing report.

My biggest learning from a blogger’s perspective after my first year at an influencer marketing platform has been that sometimes the blogger in me gets far too caught up in the creative.

The business of blogging has two parts: Blogging and Business. Business needs a return on investment. Lots of eyeballs on some gorgeous flat lays isn’t enough and, in time, we’re going to see even the best creators fall away if they don’t begin to show an accurate conversion. Your blog post or Instagram photo is simply one section of a giant funnel leading the consumer to the point of sale.

Bloggers, when approached to work with brands, need to ask what the goal is and what the measurement criteria is going to be. Don’t do the job if you don’t think you can deliver – and when delivery time comes be sure to over-deliver: track links, track audience demographics, track the keywords they searched to get to the post you wrote. Every little detail is like a tiny golden nugget for a brand attempting to not only target the right consumer but also lead them to a point where they purchase a product.

I’m about to be a little bit controversial now but if I take off my influencer marketing hat for a minute and put on my blogger hat: I know how annoying influencer marketing platforms can be.

I realise that they constantly hound you to sign up with no real promise of reward. I know you think they take the power out of your hands. I feel you. But the truth is, these platforms offer a service to the brand on the other side that bloggers have failed at: they know how to accurately report on a campaign.

Rather than fighting ten bloggers to get any sort of statistic other than “it got 20,000 views”, “there were 35 likes”, “my monthly uniques are…” it is far easier for a brand to pay a fee to a platform to pull the data they need to build their digital campaigns. The truth is we, as bloggers, are selling ourselves short and not delivering on the costs associated with running content on our blogs.

Report on ALL. THE. THINGS.

Blogging is about community – start collaborating

Sometimes during the hunt for money to put food on our table or the obsessive need with growing our platforms I think we forget why we started blogging in the first place. I think we forget that we wanted to have a space to share with like minded people who think like us or feel like us or could relate to us in some sort of way. We forget the conversations with our friends that revolved around theme design or the concept art behind our latest blog.

You’ll notice that most influencer marketing campaigns usually involve more than one blogger or creator. That’s because a few bloggers reach a far larger target market than just one. I’ve learnt to take the business thinking and apply it to my blogging. Working with other bloggers on projects (even ones that don’t make me money) allows me to reach a new audience who might potentially be interested in my blog. It also allows the other blogger to reach my audience. Most importantly though? It makes me happy.

Even if you want to make your blog a fully-fledged business, it should still make you happy. It takes so much of your energy to create, it’s important you enjoy it. I enjoy working with other creatives (usually far better than me at what they do) because I am able to learn so much from what they do and how they work. There’s a reason we flock to a site like ProBlogger and it is because the only people who really understand the passion that goes into maintaining a blog are other bloggers.

It comes down to relationships

In one year I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the biggest brands in the world. I’ve collaborated with some of the most well respected international media and advertising agencies both on my blog and at the influencer marketing platform I work at.

My boss is going to want me to tell you it is because of our amazing technology and the blogger in me wants to say it is because of the incredible, but small, audience I’ve built. There is no doubt that those things play a big role but I’m pretty sure there is one defining factor across that board that results in success: good relationships are built on a foundation of trust.

My blog readers trust me and because they trust me they come to me for advice or read my content for assistance. My “day job” clients trust me when I suggest our tech to better manage their influencer campaigns and report on them because I’ve been able to prove it delivers on what I say it does. My “blogging” clients trust me to look after a brand they’ve cherished, nurtured and built because they trust me (sometimes blindly). Those relationships aren’t made overnight. They’re like any other relationship and take time to nurture.

The first three things I learnt all link directly to the relationships you build: be it with other bloggers, your audience, with brands or even with the influencer marketing platform you might decide to sign up to.

In my time juggling hats I’ve realised the importance of people and of the connections we’re able to make. Ironically, the need to make those connections was the reason I started blogging in the first place.

Sam Wright is a lifestyle technology blogger at techgirlblog.com. She also heads up the software partners division at Webfluential – an influencer marketing technology company. 

The post 4 things I Learnt as a Blogger Working at an Influencer Marketing Platform appeared first on ProBlogger.

When was the last time you responded to a cold email? You probably can't remember -- for good reason. Most people simple delete outreach emails from reps they haven't met or mark them as spam. Even if some prospects do read the email, few bother to respond.

However, a well-crafted prospecting email is a powerful weapon in any salesperson's arsenal. I used seven principles to take a prospecting email from bad to great, and raised my response rate from 1% to 14% in the process.

In this blog post, I'll analyze the real emails I sent to prospects before and after my revisions, then explain the rules I used to upgrade my sales emails.

Email 1: The Before

How did this email perform?

• Sent: 100
• Opens: 11
• Response Received: 1

Where this email went wrong

I won't sugarcoat it -- these results were pathetic. A number of mistakes are made in this terrible prospecting email. Here are the most glaring errors:

• Structure: The email does not have an orderly flow, and jumps from one point to another.
• Subject Line: It's vague and lacks context. There is no incentive for the prospect to open or read the email.
• Opening Sentence: The message opens by introducing what my company does. Why would I want to read an email from a stranger taking about what his company does? People might have been willing to let this in 2005 when the average volume of email received was a fraction of what it is now, but few people would bother to read this today. Most people who opened this email probably didn't read beyond the first line.
• Inappropriately Placed Call-to-Action: The very first paragraph includes the line: "Look forward to hearing from you and connecting soon." This line has no business in the middle of an email.
• Salesperson-Centric Content: Lots of features are mentioned without specifying any benefits relevant to the recipient's company. The email says nothing about why that particular recipient should be interested in what I have to offer.
• Close: The end of the email is absolutely criminal. It includes no call-to-action whatsoever and is just a random closure.
• Length: Few prospects will bother to read an email this long.
• Attachment: Finally, the email contains an attachment, which triggers many companies' spam filters.

My miserable response rates prompted me to start learning about how to write better prospecting emails. Over a period of seven months, I overhauled my email prospecting strategy and started seeing response rates of 14%, a 1400% increase. While your response rate will depend on the nature of your product and your industry, such a marked transformation is quite possible if the right approach is followed.

Email 2: The After

Here’s another real email from the most recent prospecting campaign I ran.

How did this email perform?

• Sent: 100
• Open: 56
• Response Received: 14

What did this email get right?

• Structure: This email follows a logical flow, something completely absent in the first email.
• Subject Line: The subject line is effective because it refers to something my target audience is highly interested in.
• Opening Sentence: The email begins by talking about the recipient. I changed the first paragraph in each email, personalizing it to assure prospects that I'm not just a random stranger shooting in the dark, but someone who has taken the trouble to get to know a bit about them. Try to build a connection to break the ice and make prospects want to read the emails further.
• Buyer-Specific Content: The email highlights a very specific problem that's very important to my target audience and is consistent with the subject line. The body of the email informs my prospects what's in it for them and encourages them to read more. I emphasize how I can provide value by citing a specific use case relevant to their industry in simple, human language.
• Close: I use a definitive two-part call-to-action: I ask for a small commitment (a 10-minute call) and provide a preferred time.
• Length: This email is far shorter than the earlier one, which increases the likelihood that people will read it all the way through.

7 Winning Principles of Sales Prospecting Emails

Based on my experience, here are seven key elements you need to keep in mind to dramatically improve your prospecting email response rates.

1. Personalize

Mass emails no longer work -- period. If you want results, you must customize your emails with information demonstrating you know the recipient. Not only will the reader find it easier to relate to your email, but it will show you've done your homework and have spent time trying to understand the prospect's company.

2. Research

It's essential to research the industry and your personas before crafting your email so that you can provide value and appeal to their priorities from your first interaction. This is the foundation of writing personalized emails.

3. Visualize the Email's Structure

Before writing your email, draw a rough picture of the structure of your email. This structure form the basic template you use to create more personalized emails. Be clear about what the different sections of the email are, and what you are trying to convey in each section.

This exercise will give you immense clarity and give you a powerful foundation to personalize each email.

4. Use a Unique Subject Line

The objective of the subject line is to get people to open your email. One of the most common mistakes that salespeople make is to use the same subject line for every email. You should create 4-5 different subject lines depending on your personas and use them based on who you are sending emails to.

5. Get Straight to the Point

Prospects have short attention spans, so emails have to get to the point and be as brief as possible. If your email does not interest them in the first one or two seconds, you can forget about them reading past your first two lines, let alone getting a response. Focus on crafting an email that takes less than 30 seconds to read and quickly expresses how your company can uniquely solve a problem.

6. Include a Call-to-Action

I cannot emphasize the importance of a call-to-action enough. Including a clear ask has single-handedly gotten me so many responses leading to closed business that I always wonder why I didn't do it sooner. In my case, I asked for a reply confirming the meeting or call.

It’s a simple yet powerful tactic to get more responses. Of course, the underlying assumption is that your product solves an important problem of theirs, so make sure you don't go straight for a request without building value.

7. Focus on Benefits

One of the fundamental principles of selling is to talk about benefits and not features. Yet, most salespeople still talk about features far too early. There are two common reasons why we do this.

First, feature-descriptive emails are easier to write when you bulk email people. We don’t invest time to think about what the target customer wants and what is the exact problem they are trying to solve. However, if you want a respectable response rate, you will have to invest enough time to write emails with personalized benefits.

Second, we often fail to distinguish between a presentation and collateral. The purpose of a first-touch prospecting email is to make the reader interested to know more. It's not supposed to be a substitute for a website or a presentation (which won't even be effective until later in the sales process when you can customize it to your buyer's specific needs). Features come into the picture at a later stage in the buyer’s journey, but a prospecting email is the first touchpoint, where features are irrelevant.

Therefore, make sure you focus exclusively on benefits in your cold emails.

Writing powerful cold emails isn’t rocket science. If you are not getting a satisfactory response rate to your cold emails, start applying the above principles to your next set of emails. The more you experiment, the better your emails will become.

It takes just seconds. Visit any website and you will see statements such as, “We are experts in……”, or “Our products are the best because……” Both may be true, but as a potential buyer, I frankly don’t care. It’s a non-starter, a minimum expectation, that the organizations I choose to deal with are all going to be experts and leaders in their particular space. What I really want to know is how their products or services are going to help me!

Organizations, like individuals, enjoy talking about themselves. It is a trap that is all too easy to fall into. The prevailing logic is that organizations need to “sell” potential customers on their expertise, quality, points of difference. But, people don’t want to be sold. They want to be heard, they want to know that their needs are understood.

Simple changes can be made by any organization to signal its customers that they do in fact hear them and understand their needs and wants. It starts with the language that is used. Organizations need to resist the over-use of “Our” and “We”. Instead, whenever possible, those should be replaced with more empathic language.

Let me offer a simple example. Suppose that you are considering purchasing your first widget. A friend says, “Hey check out Wide World of Widgets.”, so you go to their website.

On their website, you find the following statement. “At World Wide Widgets, we make the very best widgets. Our proprietary state of the art process ensures that our widgets will deliver reliable results. We pride ourselves on outperforming our competitors. Click here to place an order.”

Simple, powerful and bold statements, but isn’t that what you’d expect? I doubt you’d be placing an order with a company that touts the mediocrity of their product. Yet, the more important question is, does this language actually help you to decide if you should even buy a widget?

Now, let’s try a more empathic approach. Let’s say the next website you visit is World Wide Widgets largest competitor, Widget World. On their landing page, you’re met with text that reads, “Widgets designed to make your life better. Each day you face many challenges. The right widget, tailored to your specific needs, can really make a difference. We’d like to help you determine which widget is best for you. Click here to tell us more about yourself.”

Obviously, for illustration purposes I’ve made the difference between the landing pages of World Wide Widgets and Widget World pretty dramatic. In reality, the application of this empathic approach is quite nuanced. There are times that an organization needs to explain differences in a product or service, to tout a benefit or make an offer. But, it needs to be done in a way that speaks to how it will solve a challenge or meet a need of its intended user.

It is a tough habit to break. We’ve been conditioned to market and sell goods and services by focusing on features and benefits. In the past, that worked. It doesn’t anymore. In my opinion, there is no perfect recipe. There are, however, some simple steps that can be taken. In any customer facing communication, look out for the over-use of first person plural pronouns. Whether the landing page of a website, a marketing brochure of even an email, they should all be dominated by second person pronouns. So, less “We” and “Us” and more “You”.

The other thing that can be done, is to write from behind the eyes of the intended user. In other words, if you are about to send an email to a customer, write as if it were an email you’d find of value and want to receive. It’s not about crafting the perfect message. Rather, it’s about proving that you understand its receiver.

Organizations go to great lengths to stand apart from their competition. They invest in innovation and marketing. They work to improve the customer experience and hire the best sales teams. But, the real opportunity to create a point of difference may simply be in the pronouns you use and the empathy you show.

This is our third expanded post from our article on top 10 learnings about the hyperlocal digital publisher market over the past year. Our first learning was that search is a differentiator on these hyperlocal sites. Our second learning was that you should make your side door look as good as your front door. Our third learning is the benefits (and drawbacks) of leveraging social media to increase your audience.

We can’t stress this enough – backlinks are a major SEO ranking factor and proof of credibility. Additionally, time on site is another huge ranking factor. Social media platforms want you linking to them as much as possible and want as much content as they can get so users stay on their sites for longer periods of time. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that every new feature they roll out focuses on getting people on their sites for longer periods of time.

Local publishers need to view themselves as a platform themselves. The difference is their platform doesn’t need to rank worldwide, it just needs to rank in their own community. That means you want the same things that Facebook, Yelp and other platforms want – lots of users on your site, viewing as much content as possible.

When you post an article on Facebook or Twitter, pay close attention to the bounce rate of those articles. Our analysis has shown us that bounce rates for articles posted on social media can be as high as 90%. Those are not good users for you – they are not adding any SEO value (in fact, they may be hurting your SEO score since Google will see lots of quick bounces off your site), they are not viewing any ads or any other content on your site.

Also, be careful who you link to. Every outbound link you put in an article is valuable. I’ve had publishers tell me that they want to add outbound links as a service to their readers – fair enough. But do you measure how many people are clicking on those outbound links? If few people are clicking, it’s not all that valuable, and you’re giving away “link juice” by offering that outbound link. Better to link internally to other pages on your own site!

We recently wrote about the benefits of Top 10 lists to your site and readers. Regardless of your journalistic opinions of Top 10 lists, they are known to get shared and linked to at a high rate. If you can generate high quality backlinks to your own site by generating content like this, why not? And there’s lots of valuable Top 10 lists out there.

Bottom line – don’t be seduced by the “quick wins” of social media – it’s more than likely the win is more for them than you.

While many large companies use automated résumé-screener software to cut down the initial pool of job applicants, loading your résumé with meaningless buzzwords is not the smartest way to get noticed.

"Nearly everyone is guilty of using buzzwords from time to time, but professionals are evaluated increasingly on their ability to communicate," says Paul McDonald, senior executive director for professional-placement firm Robert Half.

Some of the major problems with using buzzwords, according to Mary Lorenz, a corporate-communications manager at CareerBuilder, are that they have become so overused that they've lost all meaning, and they don't differentiate the job seeker from other candidates because they're so generic.

Other, less jargony words and terms should be avoided when they serve little purpose to the hiring manager. All these words do is waste their time and, as a result, you lose out on the few precious seconds a recruiter spends scanning your résumé.

Instead, Lorenz says job seekers should speak in terms of accomplishments and show rather than tell.

"Avoiding overused terms can help job seekers convey their message and stand out from the crowd," McDonald says.

Here's what you should avoid:

SEE ALSO: 34 things you should remove from your résumé immediately

DON'T MISS: 18 things you should accomplish before turning 30

1. 'Leadership'

According to LinkedIn, "leadership" was the top buzzword on its user's profiles. And if the word doesn't help you stand out on your LinkedIn profile, you can bet it won't make your résumé more eye-catching, either.

Rather than saying you have excellent leadership skills, you'd do better to highlight specific examples of when you demonstrated these skills and what kind of results you saw.

2. 'Exceptional communicator'

Tina Nicolai, who has read more than 40,000 résumés since founding her company Résumé Writers' Ink, previously told Business Insider that skills like being an "exceptional communicator" are "baseline expectations in today's market." Stating that you are really great at communication isn't, in fact, saying very much.

3. 'Best of breed'

When CareerBuilder surveyed more than 2,200 hiring managers, it found "best of breed" to be the most irritating term to be seen on a résumé.

The phrase offers little meaning and doesn't help differentiate candidates. "Employers want to know what makes the job seekers unique, and how they will add value to the specific organization for which they're applying," Lorenz says.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Marketing is becoming increasingly transparent, for content marketers. Technologies have progressed enough to allow you to map consumer journeys, to the most minute of details. You can now track a consumer right from when they arrive to your website to when they buy from you. You can see the impact of your content and how your audience received it. There is no shortage of metrics to measure to track your marketing progress.

Now that can see your consumers’ journeys, you can ask more pertinent questions about consumer behavior, so you can use it to create more effective content backed by smart marketing strategies. Every marketer can benefit from knowing why consumers say no instead of yes, and what drives them to do so. The following are some insights that can help shed some light.

1. Minimal requirements drive better conversions

A popular rule in digital is to keep everything under three clicks. Why? In 2015, it was reported that the average attention span of digital surfers fell to a shocking 8 seconds. That is all the time you really have to capture your consumers and reach them to their preferred destinations. Delays in the process, hang-ups, slow loading websites, too many fields to fill in and too many things to do before purchase can seriously hinder your conversions.

Imaginary Landscape, a website technology firm, conducted an A/B test for two contact forms on a website. The shorter version received as much as 160% more submissions. To optimize your website for conversions, you could build and test multiple forms for conversions using a form building app like SleekNote.

2. People love the news

It has been neurologically proved that the ‘new’ or ‘latest’ factor drives people to seek something out. The idea of something new, undiscovered and unfamiliar, prompts the release of dopamine in the human brain, which in-turn pushes people to chase it.

This is why people love newsy stuff. One way to leverage this fact, is by building your social media strategy around it. Be the first to discover news in your industry and share it, and be the first to track trends and tell your audience how to keep up with them. Doing so will increase your social media traffic and therefore improve your chances to convert. To source the latest content for social media, you could use a content curation software like DrumUp, or any app that intuitively collects the best content for you to share.

3. Labeled audiences are more likely to act

I’m not asking you to judge your audience to label them, what I’m asking you to do is far from it. People like being labeled, as long as the label is positive and makes them feel “included”. In fact, labels drive people to act.

Scientists from Stanford and Cambridge universities conducted a small experiment to see if labels affected people’s voting patterns. Two groups of people were chosen. One group was told that they were deemed to be “politically active” by scientists and therefore, more likely to vote. The other group was told nothing. The group that was complimented to be more politically active had a 15% higher voting turnout than the other group. Similarly, in the retail market, “Gold card” or “Silver card” holders re likely to have greater total purchases than regular customers. The takeaway is to give you audience the “special” status when you can, and make sure to give your loyal customers valuable benefits and rewards.

4. Information is most credible coming from “people I know” and “people like me”

According to Edleman’s trust barometer, friends and family rank as the top source for information in the digital world. If you thought that a reputable and austere presence is all it takes to vitalize your digital presence, you were wrong. This is the age of word of mouth marketing, and micro-influencers.

Social media puts you in a unique position to boost your business. You could create a powerful network of people to instantly drive up your visibility and influence on social media. Most businesses already have partners and loyal customers who would make great advocates, but employees are the people who could really make a difference to your marketing results. With the right employee advocacy guide and employee advocacy platform, you could revitalize your social media marketing efforts.

5. Admitting shortcomings is an important part of being reliable

It is better to admit your weaknesses than sweep them under the carpet, according to this study. A group of people were given two fictitious year end reports. One report focused on the companies strategic decisions, while the other focused on external factors like the economy and market. The participants found the first company favorable because admitting where you are lacking shows a certain pro-activeness. It shows that you have identified the problem, and are focusing on fixing it.

Sometimes, admitting shortcomings can be a great way to highlight your strengths. For instance, if you are not as popular as your competitors, you could advertise that your lines are shorter. Some time back, a convertible company advertised its latest model with a photograph of it nearly buried in snow. While that did highlight the drawback of owning a convertible, it also shows that it could let good weather in.

Admit your shortcomings in such a way that is also positions you favorably with your audience.

6. Telling your audience why matters

The xerox experiment brings out one of the most interesting insights about human behavior – the need for reason. People standing in queue to get photocopies were asked the following questions by someone (the researcher) standing behind them in line.

94% relented to the first version of the question, only 60% to the second, and a surprising 93% to the third. It seems that people simply need to know that is a reason to do something, and the actual reason or the accuracy of it doesn’t really matter.

Wherever possible, tell you audience “why”.

7. Some audience members are more likely to buy than others

Across all industries, potential buyers can be grouped based on their willingness to make a purchase. Most people fall under three major groups – spend thrifts (15%), un-conflicted (61%) and tightwads (24%). It is a good idea to approach different audience groups by how much effort of yours is necessary for them to convert. The tightwads are, predictably, the hardest to convert. Focusing on them is important because they make-up about a third of your audience.

To convert your audience, it is important to build credibility and improve the superficial value of your product/services on the web. For instance, instead of saying subscribe for 500 a year, you could say subscribe for 41.66/month. It is easier for people to see value when your rates don’t take away their focus.

There is no time like now to build a marketing plan that accounts for consumer behavior, because there are ways for you to measure it. Consider the tactics highlighted on this article while creating your social media and content marketing strategies and you will see positive results.

Staffing for Trade Shows and Events has changed. Before “Big Data” and the proliferation of electronic marketing it was sales people who reigned supreme at the show. Their personality and ability to connect with people were key tools for getting more people into the booth. Crowd gatherers were big too as it was all about getting people who you did not know to come into the booth and learn all about your company. While salespeople can still be great staffers and people skills are always great, the landscape of trade shows has changed and with that the type of skills needed to staff the booth.

WHAT THEY NEED TO KNOW:

• Why are you there? Are you looking to gain new clients or nurture existing ones? Are you planning to educate people on an existing product or launch a new one? What are your goals for the show and how do they fit into your overall marketing and company goal? It is also helpful to give staffers specific goals they have control over. An example may be to ensure they find out from the client if they are aware of the new product, if they think it will meet the need, and what steps the company should take to get that client’s business. It may also be helpful to them to know approximately how many leads they are expected to take throughout the show and each day of the show.
• It’s not just about leads, it’s about relationships. There are other ways your company can get someone’s name or email address. However, this is the time to start a real relationship with a qualified prospect by listening and making them feel welcome.
• Technology should help not hinder. If the client is there and wants you to talk or listen, don’t force a video or demo on them just because you think it is cool.
• Less about you and more about them. This includes pitching your products. Find out about their needs, their interests, and their experience with your company or their current vendor.
• Fully control the customer experience. From the trash in the booth to the time you take to ask how their day is going. The trade show is a unique opportunity to truly control their whole environment. Take advantage of it. They need to create an experience that goes beyond the booth.
• How to capture information. Capturing information from clients via quotes, photos or videos is part of the value of the show. This information can later be re-purposed as marketing content that will extend the value of the event not only from a marketing standpoint but also potentially to benefit your product/service improvement and customer service initiatives.
• Any products or services that you are featuring at the show. If they need training they should get it well before the show. As products become more complex, hands-on time is even more valuable. Staff will be expected to know more than just the basics.
• How to demo. Staffers should be comfortable doing a live demo of your products or service (as relevant) or, at the very least, access a video of one. If they can’t do this well the effectiveness of your live event will suffer and you will miss opportunities to build credibility with new and existing clients.

WHO THEY SHOULD BE:

• Good listeners. Attendees are not looking for someone to spew out everything already on your website or marketing materials. They can get that by doing a Google search. They need someone to truly listen to their questions, needs, and tailor the message to them. In fact, the attendee may have already searched your company and will come to your booth staffers with more knowledgeable questions. The buyer is a lot more informed than they once were, prepare for questions deeper than the surface of your company or products.

In contrast to your technical booth staffers, it is important to have a good balance of personalities to engage with your attendees. A Skyline booth staff veteran has this key take away from her experience.

“Yes, it was important to have very knowledgeable people in the booth but I would always balance those people with the “Engagers”. For me, it almost mattered more that people in the booth were people. They were engaging and outgoing and, frankly, fun (without being pushy).” – AA

No one enjoys a pushy booth staffer!

TECH SAVVY. No, they don’t need to know how to code, but… between lead gathering apps, monitors and possibly digital signage, there are plenty of opportunities for both leveraging technologies for the benefit of attendees and for tech glitches. You need someone who will not be afraid to troubleshoot as needed, will be comfortable learning and using apps as needed and can easily use technology to ensure the exhibit is functioning and exhibitors get an optimum experience. Something as simple as googling an answer or pulling up a key video on YouTube should be a natural thing for your staffers. Their time and your time with them are precious.

• No one knows every single answer to every question they get. However, there are some people who take ownership of the question and ensure they can find the answer and then follow up with the client as soon as possible. Your staffers should be able to access answers with the client at the show if at all possible, during the show and send the response via email or phone or immediately after the show (within days at the latest).
• Customer centric. If they are not the type of person who will go the extra mile to help a client they are not the right person to staff the booth – emotional intelligence is key. You get seconds or minutes to make a good impression in person with a current or potential client. Many other companies are there competing for that time. Your staffers need to be eager to make the most of every client experience. One way to bring this home is to talk about the potential lifetime value of each prospective client that walks into your booth.
• Change has always been inevitable at any live event and trade shows are no exception. This is not new, but it has become even more prevalent and expected. Technology is a big help but will increase the uncertainty of whether or not things will work as planned. Your staff needs to be able to adjust course as needed and do it with a smile.

One of Skyline’s veteran booth staffers had this to say about the increased use of technology on the trade show floor:

“What I appreciate about where technology is now is it allows the booth staffer to come alongside the attendee and join their self-guided experience. This is achieved through the use of touch screens and apps for iPad. It creates a feel of teamwork and co-discovery. As a staffer, I became less of a presenter and more of a companion.” – RM

Working as a team, instead of creating an “us versus them” mentality makes the attendee feel welcomed. This is an example of technology enhancing the face to face experience, rather than detracting from it.

WHAT THEY SHOULD WEAR:

• Ensure they are easily identifiable. You don’t want attendees wondering who is staffing the booth and who is a client, as time is precious.
• Ensure that they are comfortable yet professional unless it fits well with your theme and branding. Comfortable shoes are a must. Their feet will hurt regardless, but they will hurt more if they are wearing the wrong shoes, which is likely to make them tired and irritated. No one wants to interact with someone who appears to be in pain. Besides, dress codes are much more relaxed in most industries nowadays and good quality shoes can look stylish.
• Brand and theme appropriate. Gone are the days that the uniform at trade shows was branded cheap looking polo shirts. You can be brand-appropriate without necessarily wearing a uniform. This is more the case if you have a larger exhibit but try to think of alternate ways you can make your staffers easy to identify without making them look like they are ready for their hourly shift at a local burger joint. You can have branded name tags, accessories, all wear the same color shirts (not necessarily the same style). You want your staffers to feel comfortable. For example, if a lady has to wear a standard men’s shirt that reaches down to her knees, she is not going to feel her best.

WHAT THEY SHOULD HAVE:

• Smartphone, tablet or touchscreen. Make sure staffers have easy electronic access to key product/service information so if they are asked a question they don’t know the answer to they can easily check it on the spot and get back to the client.
• Show and venue information. They should have this well before the show so they can make their travel arrangements and clear their calendars well before the show.
• Backup hard copies. Paper product/service cheat sheets well before the show so they can review them on the plane and at the hotel before the show. Also, lead card backups are always a good idea in case your Wi-Fi sputters or you lose access to your lead gathering application.

BONUS POINTS

• If you have a staffer that can also be a presenter of relevant industry data, your company will gain added credibility and real face time with potential clients. Those clients are then more likely to come back to visit your company’s booth.
• If staffers are active on social media they will be able to help promote your presence before, during and after the show and they are more likely to be recognized as someone potential clients are already familiar with and trust.

These are a few of the things you should keep in mind as you prepare to choose and prepare your staff for your next show. We would love to hear your tips. Please comment here or feel free to email me at sofiatroutman@skyline.com. Special thanks to Randy Mauricio, New Product Development Project Manager, and Amy Armstrong, Account Executive, Skyline Philadelphia for sharing their veteran booth staffing tips.

This post originally appeared on Skyline Trade Show Tips.

Chris O’Connor, IBM’s General Manager for Internet of Things Offerings, has been involved with connected devices for almost 25 years. As a result, he has a unique view on the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), what it means for the future, and what we can learn from previous generations of technology. 

Chris is also an Advisory Board Member of IoT Community, the organization producing IoT Slam , so we sat down with him as he prepared for the event to hear what he plans to talk about.

ReadWrite: So as the General Manager for IoT, what does this mean for IBM?

Chris O’Conn0r: So for us at IBM it’s been a journey of experimenting with the IoT data, all these connected assets, And the early work that we did around Smart Planet. It proved that it was controlled, but the ability to do it in mass wasn’t quite there yet, and now we move to where we are today which is sensors are cheap,  connectivity is easy given Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, low power long range capabilities, and cellular capabilities in abundance. As well as now the cloud is an accepted way to work both in both a public, private, and local fashion.  And analytics are ruling the day in terms of being able to provide value and information, and thinking engines are now emerging as a way to understand the patterns and the variances of how well this data actually comes together.  So you think about all this technology as the perfect storm and now these capabilities are becoming very affordable and can make the internet of things and its wealth of data actually processable by the average enterprise, company or corporation. 

RW: And that process is really important because the first way of IoT was sort of everyone running around the hooking sensors and then putting data streams onto everything they could find and it’s great I got these huge pile of data – okay, now what?  And now you got to figure out how to take all that data and actually turn to insight and actable business information. 

CO:  That’s correct.  We think our clients need to think beyond the connection of the device. Fundamentally we see three types of the business that our clients strive for. The first is around operations and maintenance and product life cycle. This is driven by devices and I know whether it’s healthy, whether it’s well, whether it’s on, whether it’s off, whether it’s broken, whether it’s fixed. And I can more efficiently maintain that device to make something better for my enterprise if I know this.  So many of the clients we work with can pay for the experimentation of an IoT system just by savings they get being able to change that equation. 

The second pattern that we see is people talking to their clients. So many companies actually don’t really connect directly with their clients. They make devices, they put them into distribution channels, distribution channels, and then a retailer sells it. The manufacturer is not working with the client, it’s the retailer that actually talks to the client about the plus and minus of that particular product being sold.  So with a connected device, the customer hooks it up and the manufacturer now has a direct connection for the first time and that’s a huge advantage.

And then there’s a third area,  just fundamentally watching all this information about how your products are being used. So, for example, you can change your warranty, so instead of saying a warranty is 36,000 miles for three years, you can have a warranty that says, if you drive your car into these cities and these geographies your warranty as this long. Or if you drive your car in these cities and these geographies, or if the car is exposed to salt and snow, you’d really re-invent your business and the service that you sell at the same time.

RW: Do warranties even exist in five years? I mean if you’re building predictive models then you can sell products not as assets, but one with use case scenarios. If I’m selling tires and I had this information of where you live and whether there’s salt on the road and whether it’s at altitude, maybe I sell this product as a service and the idea of a warranty goes away. 

CO:  I think that’s right.  And the real benefit here is your predictive models get to account for all kinds of different variabilities and you get to also take the learnings from those predictive models to instantly tell other devices about it at the same time.

And so it’s an individual process of learning, if you think of a car driving down the road with a certain set of conditions and then flips it can instantly tell all other cars about that flip and they can also account all other cars what to watch out, those cars now can watch, learn and take action instantly based off the knowledge of that first car.

RW: And I love that because I think that’s where cognitive computing takes off when you start seeing the data pools overlap on each other and learning from each other and that’s when cognitive computing just kind of explodes. 

CO:  Well, if you think about why we bought The Weather Company, it’s to be able to have that additional processing. And in the environment are other devices and then the context of weather plays into the variability of what should take place, so having learning points we think are the key aspect of IBM’s start with IoT.

RW: Of course, with everything has been going on recently with all this data and all these sensors, over the last couple of weeks all of a sudden security is right back in the public eye.

CO:  If you think about security with IoT, we’ve solved this problem before. We solved this problem several times at the data center, we solved it when we went to client-server, we solved this problem when we started introducing cloud technologies inside the data center. But what you have going on right now is you have an end point. Some do simple things like a sports watch that simply transfers your heart rate, some do incredibly complex things like a car driving down the road or an airplane up the sky, and they require incredibly complex types of interaction. 

RW: But the thing about that is you’re saying we’ve solved this before, but we now have people entering this market who don’t have a data legacy, so the problem with IoT is people connecting devices who don’t have that background and don’t realize the implications.

CO:  That’s right. So if you’re going to be connecting your device you need to do a little business security pattern work even if it is something that seems non-threatening. You have to think that if you are putting together this system and you’re getting ready to sell something that you buy from suppliers, you need to sit down and map it out. Am I going one-way, am I going the two-way with my data, am I storing anything, do I take any personal information, where does that go? You actually need to kind of write the things down each step of the way.  And we will learn as an industry and that’s part of the growth, unfortunately, but it’s part of the growth. 

RW: So based then on people learning, what do you going to be talking about on IoT Slam?

CO:  So IoT Slam, it’s a great time because it’s such a wonderfully diverse set of people from individuals to educational institutions to systems integrators to device manufacturers.  We’re going to talk about some of the trends and directions we think are relevant around the IoT and we’re going to talk about some of the technologies that relate to business use cases around security, around usage of things like blockchain,  around usage of the IoT platform and what is that do for you if you use one. Why do you want to use one versus putting one together, maybe, yourself and so we’ll talk a little about trends and directions and some best practices we see and generally use it as a way to seed the discussion for what we hope is  really good forum and opportunity to get people to talk as individuals and groups around the internet of things.

Hear Chris O’Connor discuss the three major ways he’s seeing enterprises take advantage of IoT at IoT Grand Slam [http://tav.so/QdsuZ]. Enter code “RWW” for 20% off.

The post How IoT is making IBM’s Smart Planet smarter appeared first on ReadWrite.

Business-to-customer relationships parallel person-to-person relationships in the most basic way: everyone wants to be shown a little love.

Single touch-points occur all the time- for example, asking for a cup of sugar from your neighbor. However, it takes multiple touch-points to develop a true relationship so before you call your neighbor a trusted friend, you might help him dig his car out of the snow, your children may play in each other’s yards, he might come to your barbecue, and so forth.

Business-to-customer relationships are similar. Focusing all of your customer relationship energy on the sale may result in short-term gains, but if you neglect other stages of your customer lifecycle (customer support, service, renewal, etc.), you’ve lost out on a huge opportunity to make a life-long customer.

The Importance of the Customer Lifecycle

Forrester recommends that organizations ditch the traditional marketing funnel and replace it with a process that builds an ongoing relationship with the customer: the customer life cycle.

As customer experience guru Annette Franz emphasizes, the moment of sale is not the stopping point when it comes to your customers:

“Discounts might be working well to bring customers in the door, but do they stay after they’re in? Can you keep those that you acquire? Are you creating a precedence that is not sustainable?”

In other words, are you simply focused on getting a sale rather than building a long-term relationship? If so, then you are making a big mistake.

In it for the Long Haul

The truth of the matter is that customers aren’t looking for you to provide a stunning customer experience. They just want to know that you are a dependable, honest company that is willing to communicate regularly with them. They want sales, marketing and service to be transparent and easy. Customer care needs to be reliable across all stages.

If a company is only looking at the sales side of things, they’re giving off the message that they aren’t practicing “customer love.” Instead, they only seem to be interested in their customers for an immediate sale without providing much long-term value in return. And really, if a company isn’t dedicated to helping their customer out, why should the customer be loyal to them?

After your first sale interaction with the customer, your relationship has only begun. Now you must ensure that you live up to everything you promised.

The Right Tools for Each Situation

Targeting and acquiring customers is a starting point, but you must then continue to provide a positive experience when onboarding, supporting, growing and retaining your customers. The way you treat your customers after the sale influences the relationship for the rest of the customer lifecycle.

Ensuring your customers’ needs are met at each stage may require utilizing a number of tools at different times. Moreover, while at some point customers may be able to self-serve, there will also be times when you will need to connect directly with your customers.

Be sure you provide an easy means to move from self-serve to humanized assistance, across channels, so you can meet your customers where they want to be.

Show Your Customers Love

If you show your customers love, they will show you love in return. And if you build long-term relationships based on true customer love, you will make your customers happy and enable your business to grow.

Want to know why Trish Bertuzzi is such a sales powerhouse? Because she knows what it takes for anyone to make it in the industry. Her first piece of advice: Learn your sales craft.

No matter who you are — male, female, sales rep, mechanic — you have to invest in your future by learning as much as you can about your craft before the industry chews you up and spits you out. In sales development, things like owning your training and mastering the technology are just a few steps to take in learning your sales craft.

Watch the video below to hear the advice from Trish herself at this past year’s Rainmaker conference. And stay tuned for more exciting news headed into Rainmaker 2017, which will be filled with more motivational nuggets in the new year!

Video Transcript:

My advice wouldn’t be any different for a woman starting in sales. It would be for anyone starting in sales. And it’s that learn your craft.

Don’t expect your company to provide you with every little thing you need to know and do. It’s a craft. You have to work at your craft, like an actor or a doctor or a mechanic. I mean, really invest, because your future, you own it, you need to invest in it.

My technology when I started was a pad and paper, a pen, and a phone, right? So now there’s technology that does so much for a Sales Development Rep. So many of the mundane tasks are automated. And I think when you combine that with the intelligence that the technology provides, we know so much about our buyers now.

We really can become their trusted advisors and have really valuable conversations with them, because that technology is delivering that intelligence to us, and I think that’s why sales development has become even more powerful than ever before. It kills me, because people will invest a fortune in hiring people but then not set them up for success.

I mean, these tools will make your team more successful. You don’t have to buy everything on the planet, but figure out what part of your process needs assistance, and then go find the right tool for you.

—

For a more comprehensive look into SalesLoft’s internal SDR process, download our free playbook and optimize your sales development activities to start crushing your goals today.

The post Learn Your Sales Craft with Trish Bertuzzi {Video} appeared first on SalesLoft.

Think about the last thing you bought for pleasure. Maybe it was ice cream, tickets to a show, or a new shirt.

You didn’t make this purchase to solve a problem in your life -- it simply made you feel good.

Because human beings are more emotional than logical, we buy things for pleasure rather than pain fairly often.

But many salespeople solely sell using the second emotion. They look for their prospects’ problems, figure out if their solution can solve those problems, and show their prospects the impacts of changing versus doing nothing.

This approach can work well. Yet it falls flat if your prospect doesn’t believe her business challenges are significant or worth prioritizing. In addition, if your competition is using the same strategy, all of your pitches will sound similar.

Invoking optimism to close a deal can be a highly effective alternative to a sale focused on pain -- follow this three-step strategy to craft your messaging around opportunities rather than challenges.

1) Identify Your Prospect’s Mindset

Buyers who spend their days putting out fires respond to pain-based selling. They don’t want to think about the next five years -- they’re too busy making it through the next five months. And if your product can make those five months easier, you’ll get your buyer’s attention.

However, if your prospect is focused on the long term, she’s probably curious to know how your product can enhance her business and drive its strategy. This type of buyer is ideal for opportunity selling.

How can you tell which type you’re dealing with? Ask your prospect about her day-to-day. If she’s jumping from crisis to crisis, she’s likely the first type. But if she’s planning projects or making decisions that’ll be relevant far into the future, she’s probably the second.

You can also ask, “Where would you like your [team, role, product, department, company] to be in four years?” or “What’s your long-term vision?”

If she can’t answer, she’s not a good candidate for opportunity selling.

2) Factor in Their Status

The further up the ladder you go, the more effective opportunity selling tends to be. Executives are usually passionate about their company and excited for its future, which means they’re primed for positive messaging.

Suppose you’re selling to a mid-level IT professional. He might be worried about his department’s ability to classify, manage, and protect the organization’s vast amounts of data. To show him the value of your product, you should speak to this challenge.

But if you’re working with the CIO, she’s likely focused on finding new technologies that’ll keep the company ahead of the curve. You don’t need to prove anything’s broken: Instead, speak about the opportunity to become the most advanced business in this space.

3) Pinpoint Your Prospect’s Vision

Your work isn’t done once you’ve determined the buyer will respond well to a hope-based approach. Every prospect has different aims for the future, so try to figure out what this specific one is envisioning.

Here are some helpful questions:

• “What’s your vision for [business area]?”
• “If you could see three years into the future, what would you love to see?”
• “What are your reach goals for [the team, X campaign, Y project, the organization, the department, your career]?”

Seeing which sound bites generate an enthusiastic response is also useful. For example, you could say, “Many of our customers who originally bought our software to run virtual team meetings now use it to conduct customer surveys as well.”

If your prospect says, “Huh, I could see our team doing that,” you’d want to explore that topic further. If they don’t seem interested, on the other hand, you should move to another use case.

Stand out from your competition and inspire your prospects to action. With this simple strategy, you don’t need to identify challenges -- you can sell on opportunities.

I caught up with Adele Revella, CEO of Buyer Persona Institute, and author of Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight Into Your Customer’s Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business. Adele’s unique perspective derives from decades of experience as a sales and marketing executive, trainer, researcher, and entrepreneur. In this podcast, we talked about buyer personas- they’re built, so now what?

 

Adele Revella: Most people think that a buyer persona describes the person that they want to market to, and this is part of the correct answer. A buyer persona is essentially an example that allows you to understand the buyers that you want to market to or sell to so that you can be more effective at influencing their decisions. The most important part of the buyer persona is understanding how, when, and why that person, that buyer makes the decision to leave the status quo, whether they’re using a current product or buying one for the first time, and actually make the decision that now’s the time to go do an evaluation and buy something new.

David Reimherr: This is really what separates you, and why your book was named one of the top five business books by Fortune magazine because you’ve taken it to the next level. Let’s assume we have the buyer personas built. You’ve gone through the process of creating them – now what are the next steps to best use the information that you’ve gathered?

AR: This is perfect, because most people say, ‘Hey, we’ve got our buyer personas done, and we’re going to make posters and put them on the internet and share them at meetings,’ and that’s not the next best step. Actually, what we’ve discovered is that while it’s okay to distribute your personas, most people in your organization aren’t really going to change their behavior, aren’t going to do anything differently as a result of just sharing who your buyer is and what you’ve learned about how they make buying decisions. So what you want to do next – and there’s a number of places to go – but we think the most important next step is to develop new ways to approach your buyer in terms of your content strategy, and your messaging, based on everything you’ve learned about the attitudes and perceptions your buyers have about this decision.

DR: So, what would you suggest, if you’re a company and you have that done, should there be a big meeting where you review everything? How many people should be involved? Who should be involved? I want to give people direction on hard next steps they can they can apply in real life.

AR: What we recommend is that you find four to six experts in your company who understand exactly what you can and can’t do, and maybe at least one person who knows the competitive landscape pretty well. So four to six people in a room, and your buyer persona, if you’ve done it the way we talked about in our last podcast, is going to take you through five different categories of insight into what affects the buyer’s decision to choose you. So it’s going to tell you maybe four or five triggers that cause buyers to say, ‘Hey, we want to invest now.’

And it’s going to have four or five insights, maybe more, around the benefits that buyers care about, and it’s going to have several insights around the objections buyers have, and the obstacles they face, and it’s going to have many insights, maybe six, or seven, or eight, around all the attributes of your company and your product and your service that buyers evaluate. Now you might have a list of thirty things that you now know from your research that affect your buyer’s decision, and they’re basically the questions buyers are asking when they’re on your website, or they’re engaging with your sales people, or they’re having any kind of marketing interaction. They’re saying, ‘Can this company address my priorities? Is it going to give me the outcome I expect? How can they help me overcome these obstacles I have to succeed and are they qualified to deliver the capabilities, and functions, and features, and services I need?

And since we know every single one of those, and we’ve got verbatim quotes about every single one of those thirty or forty things that factor into the buyer’s decision, we can now sit in a room with our internal subject matter experts, and we can work through each of those thirty or forty things one at a time, and write a statement of capability that would just wow the socks off of that buyer, that would directly and specifically answer that buyer’s concerns about whether or not you’re going to be able to deliver what they need, or whether or not you’re going to deliver the benefit or outcome they care about.

DR: If you’re able to do that, everything you do will have a higher success rate. Every ad, every message, if you start getting a few extra percentages in your favor across all the different areas it adds up. Now, where do companies sometimes fall just short of hitting the mark with this messaging? I think you gave an example in your book of discovering that buyers were reluctant to invest in solutions that might become obsolete in a few years, and then the messaging that you gave, incorrect messaging, or messaging that might not quite cut it was, ‘We have the flexibility to design a solution that meets your needs now and in the future.’ That’s a bit of a platitude.

But can you give some insight on this?

AR: Yes, and it really does go back to the research phase, because if you did the interviews correctly with your buyers, that summary headline, like ‘We’re concerned about whether you’re going to be able to address our needs in the future’, is accompanied by in-depth quotes from buyers where they talked about what they thought their needs might be in the future, and specifically what they needed to hear from a company in order to believe that they could actually achieve that. And so when you’re in this workshop – we take about eight hours to do this workshop with clients – we want you to sit there and read every one of those verbatim quotes that relates to that key finding around the future proof aspect, and say ‘What is the buyer really concerned about here?’ and ‘Let’s get much more specific about how we’re going do this.’ Don’t just say, ‘Oh yeah, we can do that.’ My favorite one is ease of use. I go to websites and everybody says their products are easy to use, so it’s almost laughable to think that the buyer would go to your site and see those words and go, ‘Oh, sweet. This is the answer to my dreams. This company’s product is easy to use.’

• It’s how are we going to provide proof about our future?
• How are we going to provide evidence?

And when we do the interviews and we get buyers to talk about that in depth, they’ll give us clues, and now again we’re sitting in this meeting with our subject matter experts, and we’re looking at those clues, and we’re saying ‘We as a company, how can we answer this problem?’

DR: I believe you said ‘Effective messaging emerges at the intersection of what your buyers want to hear, and what you want to say,’ and it’s not one or the other. So I think if you are kind of out there trying to put it together, and still need some examples, just draw two circles and start what intersects of what you want to say, and all the information you gathered, what it looks like buyers want to hear, and start there. Would you say that would be a very good place to kind of help people who are still trying to get past the platitude of ‘How can I do that?’ I feel like that really directs people in a good direction.

AR: Yes, or make a list. I do it with a Venn diagram, and I think you saw that in the book where there are two overlapping circles, but the practical step is, now you’ve got a list of your persona, of everything your buyer wants to hear, and you know everything you want to say, so start matching those things up. Sit down and build a table, and say ‘Okay, here’s something that the buyer wants to hear,’ and we go over and we look at what we have to say, and we say ‘Ah, there’s a good match here,’ and then you start to look at what you want to say and you said ‘Wait a minute, the way we answered that, does that really differentiate us? The way we said that?’ Because being able to say that ‘we’re easy to use’ or ‘sure, our product’s future-proof,’ anybody could say that. So now what you’re doing is, you’re kind of starting to inspect all your statements, and saying ‘How can we talk about our ability to be easy to use, or future proof, in a way that it would be hard for our competitors to answer that question for the buyer?’

Because your buyer’s asking these questions of every company that they’re considering, so you want to not only answer their questions, but you want to answer them in a way that’s unique. And sometimes it’s not so much that you do it differently, it’s the fact that you were willing to get past the platitudes – your word, David – and really get into the details of how you do that. Sometimes it’s just the mere fact that your marketing got smarter, and you didn’t just say, ‘Hey, we’re easy to use,’ you actually started proving it to people, and talking about what you do to make it easy to use, or having videos around how it’s easy to use, or talking about the level of R&D commitment you have to future proof a solution – something that your competitors aren’t doing that will help you stand out from the massive morass of companies that are all competing for the same business, and all using the same jargon to answer your buyer’s question.

DR: You kind of touched on something we were going to dig into in a little bit, but yeah just to kind of reiterate, I can imagine a ton of situations where there are other great companies who can offer what you can, just as you can offer what they can. Very rarely you’re going to have some unique and patented idea where the world’s just your oyster. There are other people who do what you do, and that’s okay. But what you’re saying is, we’ve got to try to figure it out and do it in the shorter messaging, but what you’re saying is a good way for people that can try to stand out.

Regarding capabilities, what you can offer as a company through a product, or solution, or service – if you find a highly rated buyer expectation, which means buyer expectations are basically what buyers expect, what solutions they expect to be provided to them if they invest in your solution, correct?

AR: Right. What are the attributes that matter to your buyers? They really want it in purple, and you don’t have in purple, you only have it in blue and pink, what are we going to do, right?

DR: Exactly. So if you find a highly rated buyer expectation that your company or solution can’t deliver on, and you don’t have any way to address those particular needs to that exact expectation, but it’s super highly rated, do you go ahead and just leave that completely out of your messaging?

AR: If it’s something you genuinely can’t deliver, it sometimes – and without working with a specific example it’s tough – but if there’s a workaround – does affect product strategy, we’ve got to, ‘Hey, listen, we’re seeing that buyers really need such and such, it’s affecting our sales cycle,’ then maybe this becomes a priority for your development of your product and service.

DR: Let’s say you can kind of do it. Not that you can’t completely do it, but you’re so-so at it, and other people are great at it.

AR: Then I want you to talk about it.

• If it’s a very highly rated attribute, and remember we’re talking mostly about marketing here, so if it’s very highly rated and you don’t have the best solution here,
• I want you to include it in your marketing messaging, and then
• I want you to help your sales organization get prepared when they get in front of the fire, and now they’ve got to deal with the detail around that.
• Prepare your sales organizations that this is going to come up, buyers are going to ask about this, here’s the objection you’re going to face and work with your sales people to come up with how they’re going to explain the value of that workaround.

If this is super highly rated by one segment of the market, one type of buyer, then we’d be looking to see if there’s a different persona out there that wouldn’t rank that attribute as highly. And sometimes – and this is more sophisticated application of buyer persona work -sometimes what we’ve said to the client is, ‘Look, there’s parts of the market that are really going to care a lot about A, and you really kind of aren’t that very good at A, but let’s go find a part of the market where B, C, and D, where you do shine, are more important. Then let’s help your sales people target the deals that they’re going to win, because you do have to worry a little bit, and that’s why this is kind of a complicated topic, is you have to worry that if marketing’s getting sales people in front of buyers that that kind of idea isn’t good enough, then you’re just wasting the sales people’s time, and that’s the worst thing you can do.

DR: So if it’s super important to the buyer, and your company wants those types of buyers, get better. At the end of the day, you’ve got to get better. In the company, sales and marketing only can do so much, and that’s what always gets lost in sales and marketing conferences- the big assumption is that all the companies are great at doing what you’re saying you can do. But that’s obviously not the case.

AR: Nobody is great at everything, so it is hard. That’s really the value of this, and you talked about those overlapping circles, with ‘here’s what your buyers want to hear,’ and ‘here’s what we have to say.’ In part of my keynote, I show that there are different overlapping circles with what buyers want to hear. Not all buyers want to hear the same thing, and so it’s partially finding that group of buyers where you have the best possible overlap. And so one application of our work is to start to do segmentation and to start to help clients anticipate which parts of the market are going to have the best overlap with what they have to say. That’s sometimes a very vital part of this because the thing is when companies are trying to grow – if you’re talking about small companies and five percent of everything – when small companies are trying to grow, they tend to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to go market to everybody. That’s our growth strategy, because heck, we don’t want to turn any business away.’

But the reality is – and this is hard for a lot of companies to take on – is that there’s probably parts of the market that you are better serving than others, and the persona work can help you to figure that out, can help you to see different overlapping circles where different buyers want to hear different things, here’s our capabilities.

DR: What do you suggest companies do when you have a feature solution or service that you provide that is super amazing, super unique, super helpful, and it’s just the best thing in the world, but it doesn’t necessarily resonate high with what a buyer wants? Although you know they really do need this, but through your research, you’re not really finding that to be high on the list of what’s going to resonate with them. Should it be completely left out of the marketing messages? Where should you go when that happens?

AR: This is more common than the first question you asked. And boy, this is really hard medicine to take. Nobody wants to hear that their baby isn’t beautiful in the eye of the beholder. And so here’s what we do – we say look, first of all, we want to take all the findings we do have and recalibrate our thinking about it. So we’ve got this great capability about the way we bundle all these things together, or we do this package solution, and buyers just don’t see that yet, and we actually do a little bit of testing in our interviews around those value props so that not only do we understand what the buyer cares about when they have made a previous decision, but we introduce this new capability that our clients care about, and we get the buyers’ reactions. So now we have really good evidence that this isn’t resonating with a buyer, and what we do is say, ‘Look, we’ve got to find a way to connect this greatness that you guys believe in over here, to something that does matter to your buyer.’

We’ve got to find a way to repackage the value of this great piece into something that has a hook, and to something that does matter to buyers. We’re marketers, right? We’re going to find a way to present that value in a different way, and it’s about getting inside that. So if we have the most flexible solution, and our buyers don’t really care about flexibility, it’s not high on their list, we’re going to find something they do care about, where flexibility would actually address that issue, and we’re going to go present it that way.

DR: So, when you’re limited in the amount of space, and what you can say in a marketing message, you’re definitely going to need to lead with what buyers care about. Then it’s going to be more of the salesperson’s job to kind of bridge the gap to all these additional things that you have, but you definitely need to lead with what buyers currently are caring about today.

AR: Exactly.

DR: To close with a couple of questions, now that we have all these areas in defining messaging, let’s just go ahead and give some examples of all the different places that people can use these. Not specific examples, but different areas, SEM, pay per click ads, content marketing, retargeting – what else can we sell? Because now that you have the messaging, let’s hear all the different areas that you can utilize that messaging.

AR: Well part of the reason why I say start with messaging is because fundamentally, your message is embedded in every single marketing activity you do. It’s almost like I’d have a hard time coming up with anything that this didn’t affect because it’s always about the message. And I see so many marketing blogs and so forth talking about all these things, the buyer’s journey, they need a white paper, they need this, they need that, and I’m going ‘Yeah, but that’s just the embodiment of the message, and frankly buyers, while they would like to see different formats, and videos and all that, and they do have preferences, and we learned that in the buyer’s journey, the most important thing is not about the format of the content, but the content of the content, the words and the content.’ Once you get this message right, there isn’t any place that you shouldn’t be using this message. Every single place you do, including all the way into your sales training and sales playbook.

DR: So obviously you’re above the fold and home page, right?

AR: Absolutely.

DR: It’s very static for many companies who aren’t involved in an ongoing content approach where you’re constantly updating your website or media companies who do that. Many sites I’ve seen are a set it and forget it thing. Nothing ever happens to it. So don’t forget, once you go through this exercise, you might need to do a revamp of your website. At the very least, you might need to do a revamp of the words you’re using on your website, even if you don’t do a big redesign. Use it anywhere and everywhere. Just be consistent once you’ve zeroed in on your strategy of the messaging.

What if a company is not great at copywriting? Where can they turn?

AR: Well, personally, I’m don’t think I’m a great copywriter either, so I go out and hire somebody to do it, and that’s the best case. But you know what, I do want to emphasize this answer – if you get the right kind of message, the creative aspect of writing the copy isn’t as critical. I think a lot of people have tried to use copywriting instead of saying something important. We’re going to go out there and try to be the most creative because we’re saying the same thing as everybody else, so we’re going to make it more. And I think we get this from consumer marketing, we get it from watching TV ads and consumer marketing where somebody does something really clever, and we remember it because it was clever, but the sheer facts are that if you give your buyers useful answers to their questions, it doesn’t have to be clever. It just has to be simple and concise.

And the whole process of going through what we talked about at the beginning of this podcast of looking at what your buyers want to hear using their words, being ruthless about striking the jargon – so get rid of all the adjectives, all of them, all of the fancy words, and just give them the information, and then copywriting isn’t as important. Like I said, I still use a copywriter, I think copywriters are amazing, I care about that a lot, but it isn’t as critical. If you’re on a tight budget, and you don’t have a copywriter, and this isn’t your best skill, join the club, and just make it simple and clear.

DR: And you’re not deemphasizing copyright, and you’re just emphasizing the meat and potatoes of it, the actual subject.

AR: Exactly.

DR: You mentioned a great resource if people wanted to get better at copywriting. Whose book was it again?

AR: Everyone Writes by Ann Handley.

DR: Thank you so much, Adele. How can people continue to learn from you?

AR: We’re at buyerpersona.com, or you can find us on Facebook, facebook.com/buyerpersona, or Twitter @buyerpersona.

ADELE REVELLA

Adele Revella is CEO of Buyer Persona Institute and author of Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into Your Customer’s Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business (Wiley 2015), recently named a Top 5 Business Book by Fortune Magazine. Adele’s unique perspective derives from decades of experience as a sales and marketing executive, trainer, researcher and entrepreneur.

To View The Original Blog Post, Please Click Here.

People tend to be precise with small numbers and imprecise with larger ones.

Young kids love to explain that they are not 4 years old but rather 4 and a half – with an emphasis on the half. But hardly anyone says they are 54 and a half. They might not even admit they are 54 but say mid-50’s instead.

This isn’t just people being coy about their true age. As numbers get larger, we get less and less comfortable with them, and we are more likely to use round numbers as placeholders. When I say that 80,000 people work at my employer, I’m not really giving a precise estimate. If we hire 100 more people, I am highly unlikely to change my response to 80,100. For similar reasons, McDonald’s campaign stopped counting at 100 billion burgers sold and now just says “billions and billions.”

Manoj Thomas, a consumer psychologist at Cornell University, has studied the “feelings of uncertainty evoked by large precise numbers.” He calls this the precision effect. In an experiment, participants in two groups evaluated the same houses with prices that were either non-round ($395,425) or round ($395,000). On average, subjects judged the non-round prices as a better value than the round ones, even though the actual price was higher. Professor Thomas concludes “when we see a big number that is precise we instinctively assume it is less than it is.”

The implications of this phenomenon for marketing are rampant. We’ve long known that people are more likely to buy if the price is set to $3.99 than to $4.00. The psychological difference of the leading digit increasing from 3 to 4 is powerful. But Thomas’ research suggests that we can see the reverse effect with large numbers. You shouldn’t list your house for $500,000; instead you should list it for $501,387.

The next time you’re buying or selling something expensive, remember that buyers will pay more when sellers use a precise asking price than when they use a round one.

This blog was originally posted on Manage by Walking Around on November 20, 2016.

Whether you are a new store owner looking to implement your email marketing strategy or an existing store owner looking to revamp and streamline your email marketing before Christmas, this one is for you.

Email marketing is the cornerstone of success for online stores. As many of our Coupon Pop users know, building and email list is vitally important in ensuring they retain all that hard earned traffic.

According to research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association using 2015 email data from their clients, the ROI on email is a whopping 3,800% and 72% of people would rather receive promotional content via email than through social media. Add that to the fact that email has become content marketing’s best friend, there is just no way an eCommerce site can survive without it.

Here are some of the most important email types for online stores:

Product Recommendations: These are marketing emails offering customers product recommendations, based on what other customers have purchased.

Abandoned Cart Recovery: These are automatic emails which are targeted to online shoppers who left the checkout process before finalizing the sale.

Targeted Newsletters: Weekly targeted emails informing users of business news, upcoming promotions and new stock arrivals based on relevant information retrieved from previous orders, total spend and other important data.

Personalized Coupon Codes: Personalized coupon code emails are one-time generated emails that include unique coupon codes that can be sent at random to a select group of customers.

Transactional Emails: These are automated emails which are sent to a store’s customers to confirm a purchase, to give feedback on an order and to thank them for their business.

Email marketing platforms, or software, provides stores with the necessary tools to run all of the above email marketing campaigns and offer a way for small to large businesses to make the most of their databases to increase sales and drive traffic.

But with so many platforms out there, which one should we be using?! Every platform has its pro’s and con’s and choosing between them will be determined by your email marketing and database needs, as well as your budget and comfortability – i.e which platforms are more comfortable, or user-friendly, for you personally, making it easier for you to use.

To that end, I have compiled a list of all the current email marketing platforms that you have to choose from.

ActiveCampaign Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $49 per month per 1000 contacts.

If you are looking for some out-of-the-box email creativity and CRM tools, then ActiveCampaign could be for you. This platform offers far more than just newsletter functionality, it includes a full CRM and marketing automation and an email newsletter tool. What makes their CRM integration unique, is their full-featured email editor that can be used when emailing around CRM issues. However, if you are not looking for a CRM tool, and only want email marketing tools, then this platform could come off a little pricey.

AWeber Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $19 per month per 500 contacts and $29 for up to 2000 contacts.

AWeber is a powerful email marketing tool that puts a lot of emphasis on design. This platform enables store owners to create professional-looking emails, quickly and easily, with their 700+ templates. The database segmentation is very impressive, allowing you to target specific shoppers based on how much they have spent and which links they have previously clicked on.

Benchmark Email Marketing Platform

Price: Their free package allows stores to send 14K emails to 2,000 contacts and the pro version starts at $9 per month for 600 contacts.

Benchmark Email is simple, cost effective, easy to use and gets the job done. Their goal is to make email marketing easier for online store owners with their easy layout picker, mobile and desktop ready responsive designs, and interface language variety. Plus, its internal storage allows users to keep image and video files within the platform for future use.

BombBomb Email Marketing App

Price: Starting at $39 per month for up to 2500 contacts.

BombBomb offers a unique email marketing perspective for those online stores winning at video content. Their platform is centered around video content, allowing users to shoot videos or upload videos through their app which can then be added into a video email newsletter. This is particularly interesting for you clothing-niche merchants out there looking for creative ways to show off new lines and stock or for those that want to send out personal messages to their customers and give their emails a personal touch.

Campaign Monitor Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $9 per month for up to 500 contacts.

If you are looking for an email platform that is easy-to-use for a fast-growing business, then Campaign Monitor may be worth a closer look. From newsletter signups, to repeat buyers, they offer a host of pre-built and customizable segment options for online shop users. Their powerful segmentation is designed to get you sending highly relevant emails to ensure maximum results.

Campayn Email Marketing Platform

Price: Free for the first 20K emails for up to 2000 contacts and then starting at $10 per month for unlimited emails to up to 1000 contacts.

Campayn’s contact manager is what really makes this budget-friendly platform stand out. It enables users to import contacts from a variety of apps and displays them in an address book format, linked to their social media profiles. A handy little function for those store owners who want to send personal, individual emails to their most loyal customers. And of course, their user-friendly editor and templates make sending email campaigns easy.

Constant Contact Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $20 per month for unlimited emails to up to 500 contacts.

This is a great email marketing platform for sending events and promotions. Traditionally used by brick-and-mortar stores, Constant Contact’s ability to gather new contacts and create promotions all from one app, makes it online-store ready, and is ideal for those eCommerce sites that host a lot of online events and promotions.

Drip Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $41 per month for unlimited emails to up to 2000 contacts and a free two month trial.

Drip takes automated Transactional emails to the next level by creating the perfect platform for store owners to pre-define emails that should be automatically sent. Its easy to use visual campaign builder allows users to plan email campaigns in a way that is simple and clear and makes for a super cross and upselling tool. And the best part? A free starter-package that lets you send emails to up to 100 contacts to test it out for yourself.

EmailDirect Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $19 per month for up to 1000 contacts.

If you are looking for an email marketing platform that goes a step further in contact filtering, then EmailDirect could be the platform for you. This platform allows you to store as much information as you want about each contact in your database and then gives you a host of segmentation options to allow you to send targeted emails to targeted lists. EmailDirect is a popular choice for eCommerce stores because of its ability to tie into the API’s of online stores, and tracking which customers have bought what and when. Not to mention their 24-hour customer support. But this segmentation, unfortunately, doesn’t come free.

EmailOctopus Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $0 per month for up to 1000 contacts.

Although EmailOctopus offers only the basics, they are definitely worth a mention as they are one of the most price competitive platforms out there. Additionally, it allows users to send emails through Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES), making it one of the most cost effective ways to broadcast campaigns to an entire database without segmentation. This makes it a good platform for brand new, smaller online stores.

Emma Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $89 per month for up to 10,000 contacts.

The key features that make Emma a good eCommerce email platform choice are its user-friendly drag-and-drop tools, built-in mobile-ready templates, its A/B/C subject line testing and its autoresponders — like the above review catcher. Best suited for those medium to large online businesses that want a world-class platform with two-way synchronization of segmentation tools, analytics and customer data.

FreshMail Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $0 per month for up to 500 contacts.

Ideal for those stores that are looking to take a more visual approach to their emails, FreshMail takes newsletter design to the next level by allowing you to create beautiful and effective newsletters without any coding skills. Packed with all the important features including auto responders, text messaging, SMS, MMA, transactional emails and A/B Testing, its full-sized images, beautiful Google Fonts-powered text, and detailed layouts go far beyond your standard email.

GetResponse Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $15 per month for up to 1000 contacts.

GetResponse is a popular platform among growing online stores. Allowing store owners to import images from Facebook, iStock and Flicker means you are able to directly sell your products through your newsletters. Another handy feature worth mentioning is its drop-and-drag calendar for easy scheduling of newsletters and promotions.

iContact Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $14 per month for up to 500 contacts.

iContact is much more than an email marketing platform. Their integrated social media tools allow users to draft and schedule Twitter and Facebook posts in conjunction with email promotions, right from their platform. Additionally, if you are already working with a number of email platforms, iContact offers easy, automatic uploading of contact lists from other apps. Ideal for those looking for both email and social platforms in one.

Infusionsoft Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $199 per month for up to 2,500 contacts, plus marketing automation and full CRM.

If you are a growing eCommerce store, looking for top-notch platform that handles email, CRM, eCommerce and sales automation, then Infusionsoft is a leading choice. I won’t lie, Infusionsoft is not cheap, but when you look at the type of platform and automation you are getting — a CRM system that keeps a record of all of your interactions with customers, an automation platform that automatically keeps in touch with those customers based on their behavior, and all the bells and whistles an email marketing platform has to offer — you start to see why it’s on the high-end side.

Klaviyo Email Marketing Platform

Price: Free for the first 250 contacts and then starts at $25 per month for up to 500 contacts.

Truly designed with the online store in mind and with unprecedented Shopify integration, Klaviyo is very popular among eCommerce owners. Its powerful segmentation functions are top-notch and allow you to run email campaigns to those customers who viewed a specific store product. One of their biggest selling points for me, is their abandoned cart recovery email options and the ability to integrate your Shopify customers with Facebook Custom Audiences.

Mad Mimi Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $0 per month for up to 2,500 contacts up to 12,500 emails.

Mad Mimi is my personal favorite because it keeps it simple and real. Ideal for your weekly emails, Mad Mimi is for the budget-conscious store owners who want a simple, user-friendly platform with features that they can switch on and off as they need them. The quick stats view, drip email options, social media integration and more, made it a great value for money platform.

MailChimp Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $0 per month for up to 2,000 contacts up to 12k emails.

No email marketing platform list would be complete without one of the global email marketing platform leaders, MailChimp. From its impressive template selection, its segmentation, cart abandonment and product recommendation email options, its ability to connect email lists to purchase data and eCommerce store integration, MailChimp is a power email tool. Not to mention, it offers one of the best free plans out there, ideal for those stores just starting out.

Mailigen Email Marketing Platform

Pricing: Starting at $10 per month for up to 500 contacts.

Mailigen is one of the few email marketing platforms that allow you to combine email and mobile marketing to target your customers to the device they are most likely to check. Ideal for those stores marketing locally, Mailigen will let you gather contacts from your SMS campaigns and integrate them with your email marketing lists. Additionally, they boast behavior-based automation systems designed to retain a human touch.

MailUp Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $34 per month for up to 248,000 emails to unlimited recipients.

MailUp is a cost effective platform better suited for those online stores with big databases who need to bulk send a lot of emails. Their pricing is a little different in that the faster you want the emails sent, the pricier it will be. Of course they have everything you need from a platform — database, nice unsubscribing and eCommerce store integration. So if you have millions of emails to send through the month and you are not in a hurry, this option can end up costing you a lot less than other platforms.

Rare.io Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $0 per month for up to 99 contacts.

Specializing in online store email marketing, Rare.io is a popular choice among Shopify, Bigcommerce and Spree users. Its segmentation options include being able to target new users based on coupon usage by previous customers and the location of these potential shoppers. But it’s the standout features that impress so many eCommerce clients: personalized product recommendation emails and custom coupon code for promotional emails.

Remarkety Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $100 per month for up to 3,000 contacts up to 30k emails.

Another eCommerce superstar is Remarkety, which include everything an online store owner would need: Targeted newsletters, abandoned cart recovery, automated follow-up emails, product recommendation and personalized coupon email templates. Designed to integrate with leading platforms (such as Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Shopify, PrestaShop, VirtueMart and OpenCart) in a matter of seconds, it is user friendly and easy to implement. Ideal for medium to large online stores.

Sendicate Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $0 per month for up to 500 contacts for up to 1000 emails.

Specifically designed for those merchants who prefer a simple visual editor without any clutter. Sendicate platform is complete with all the basics, plus, you are able to easily edit and change the email sections you want and segment using search filters. If you are a new store owner with a smaller budget, their free option is a great place to get your email marketing started.

SendinBlue Email Marketing Platform

Pricing: Starting at $0 per month for up to 9000 emails and unlimited contacts.

Integrating with WordPress, PrestaShop and Magenta, SendinBlue works seamlessly with these platforms to handle your drip campaigns, transactional emails and your weekly newsletters. It allows users to either import their own email templates or HTML settings, giving you much more control on the design-front. Additionally, their automatic SMS sales follow-up function will help with repeat business. Altogether a very cost efficient option for small to medium stores.

SendGrid Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $9.95 per month for up to 2,000 contacts and 40,000 emails.

It’s SendGrid is simple, flexible pricing options that stand out. It allows users to choose a price based on their exact needs, making it very cost efficient. With its platform integration and delivery promise, this is a great place to launch your email marketing if you are unsure of the volume you will be using.

Sendloop Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $0 per month for up to 2000 contacts.

Sendloop is another budget-friendly platform for small to medium online stores. Some handy functions are its migration assistant that allows you to import contacts from a number of email services, and the Sendloop code, allowing you to see the pages your customers visit and plan your marketing strategy around their site behavior.

Soundest Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $0 per month for up to 500 contacts.

Soundest is designed with the online store owner in mind. Very popular on Shopify, it integrates well with leading eCommerce platforms. The feature that makes this platform stand out is its campaign booster — a feature that will automatically segment and re-send to contacts who haven’t opened the email, making sure that your customers never miss another limited-time offer again.

Tinyletter Email Marketing Platform

Price: Free.

Tinyletter is MailChimp’s answer to simple, free newsletters, specifically for those smaller online stores with less than 5000 contacts. Minus all the bells and whistles – no integration, no templates, and very few features – Tinyletter is designed to make it quick and easy to send mass newsletters. An additional bonus is that if you do decide to upgrade to Mailchimp later on, it’s very easy to migrate to Mailchimp from Tinyletter.

VerticalResponse Email Marketing Platform

Price: Starting at $0 per month for up to 300 contacts.

If you’re looking for deep integration with Salesforce, then VerticalResponse is for you. Ideal for merchants looking for professional features and advanced marketing campaign options, the plus version will help you seamlessly get out your email marketing in no time. They do have a free option, which means you can test out their platform before committing to a monthly amount.

There you have it, all your leading email platforms. No matter what platform you choose, you are well on your way to converting sales.

Have questions? Comment below!

As a sales manager, director or VP, you may occasionally struggle to determine what is stopping your salespeople from meeting your standards.

You want your sales team to succeed, but you might be wondering:

“Is my team reaching their full potential?” 

“What is stopping them from being more productive or closing more sales?”

With that in mind, let us talk about 6 common pain points for your salespeople, and along the way, we will also discuss tactics and sales training ideas you can use to help them overcome those pain points.

 

Biggest Pain Points for Your Salespeople

1. Spending too much time in meetings

While the occasional meeting is understandable and often necessary, bogging your sales team down with too many meetings can be detrimental to their performance.

Think about it like this: Any time your salespeople spend in a meeting is time they could instead be spending selling your company’s products/services to customers.

So when a salesperson is forced to attend a large number of unnecessary meetings, he or she may become frustrated and suffer from lackluster sales results.

To help your salespeople in this area, make sure you only schedule meetings when necessary. Ask yourself whether or not the meeting topic could be better handled as an email. If it could, then you can cancel the meeting, send a quick email and let your salespeople keep doing what they do best: sell.

Also, when you do need to hold meetings, make sure you have a clear schedule/agenda for them and stick to it. Your salespeople should have a good idea of what will be discussed in each meeting and how long the meeting will last so they can plan accordingly.

 

2. Dealing with too much administrative work

Administrative work is another thing that will keep your salespeople from doing what they do best. That includes tasks like:

• Processing and tracking orders
• Updating the CRM
• Creating sales reports
• Creating presentations
• Making the necessary preparations before talking to customers
• Handling various paperwork

One study showed that salespeople only spent one-third of their work time actually selling. Twenty percent of their time is spent on CRM/administrative work/reporting.

This is a major problem.

It is easy to understand how a lack of time with customers can lead to less-than-impressive sales results.

One solution is to have your salespeople hand over administrative tasks to an administrative assistant. Even if you have to hire a new employee for this role, it could be worth the improved sales you may see as a result.

Another option is to streamline the admin work process. For example, you can ask your salespeople which administrative tasks take up the most time and then create a solution or implement software to help them save time with those specific tasks.

Regardless of what action you choose to take, it is a good idea to open up a conversation with your salespeople on what tasks hold them back from selling more. You might end up discovering it is an easy problem for you to resolve, which results in your salespeople spending more time talking to customers.

 

3. Handling customer service and/or technical support inquiries

This is another major time-waster for salespeople, and it often happens when they feel they should take ownership of every issue their customer faces. While it is good for salespeople to look out for the best interests of the customer, they must also be willing to delegate when appropriate.

Check in with your salespeople, and make sure they have confidence in the customer service/technical support employees at your company.

Remind them of the process for directing a customer to customer service or support, and see that they implement that process on a regular basis. They should not be spending a great deal of time handling requests that are better suited for another department.

 

4. Chaotic processes

If your salespeople are struggling with basic tasks, like entering and processing orders, they will struggle to work productively. That is why it is crucial for you to regularly analyze the processes and systems in your sales department to see where you can make improvements.

Figure out if there are certain processes or programs that confuse or slow down your salespeople. If you find that there are, look for simplified solutions. You may even want to bring in a sales logistics expert to make the processes in your sales department more streamlined, thus allowing your salespeople to work more productively.

5. Lack of sufficient training/information

Often, struggling salespeople lack training in one of two areas:

1. Sales
2. Product/service information

When a salesperson does not receive adequate sales training, his sales results will suffer.

You never know – he could be missing a key part of the sales process and might only require a bit of sales training to improve his results drastically.

For example, a salesperson may be struggling to sell because he does not know the correct process for closing a sale. In this instance, you could offer sales training just on how to close a sale that would help improve his sales results.

Salespeople who do not understand the product/service they are selling will find it difficult to sell. Your salespeople should understand the features and benefits of whatever they are selling so, they can communicate those features and benefits to customers confidently.

To help them accomplish this, use your best sales training techniques to make sure every new hire receives training on the products/services they are selling. Also, create a centralized location where they can quickly reference any additional information they might need while talking to customers.

That way, they can easily fill in any knowledge gaps and feel confident enough in their product/service knowledge to close the sale.

6. Lack of qualified leads

If your salespeople cannot obtain qualified leads, they will have a hard time selling. A qualified lead is much more likely to make a purchase than a cold lead.

So, ask yourself whether or not the lead generation tactics at your business are conducive to generating qualified leads. You may want to meet with the marketing team to make sure they are on the same page as the sales department as far as qualifying leads.

 

Final thoughts

Remember, not every pain point here will necessarily apply to your sales team specifically. As a sales manager, you must always be willing to pinpoint the problems your salespeople are facing.

Talk to your team and find out what is causing them to struggle. Only then will you be able to come up with specific solutions that will help your sales team’s performance.

The post 6 Common Pain Points for Your Salespeople and How to Solve Them appeared first on SalesDrive, LLC.

Content marketing isn’t just a buzzword coined by digital marketers.

It’s a sophisticated way of building rapport with your target audience, strengthening your brand image, driving more traffic to your site, and increasing your sales numbers.

The leading companies, organizations, and entrepreneurs in most industries have embraced content marketing.

Content marketing is particularly important for independent consultants and service providers since it gives them direct access to their target audience and a level playing field with the bigger and more established brands.

In simple words, you’re not doing your business any favors by not having a content marketing strategy in place.

If you’re not sure where to start, here are a few pointers to help you get off the mark.

1. Identify the Needs of Your Local Audience

The secret to successful content marketing is a narrow focus and correct identification of your audience’s problems.

For example, if you’re a healthcare consultant, you have a huge industry with a wide range of audiences, problems, and needs.

For a successful content marketing strategy, you need to narrow down your focus to a very specific audience, with closely aligned needs that can be addressed in your content. This will also allow you to establish yourself as a niche expert

To get a better idea about the needs of your audience, use Google Trends or discussion platforms like Quora or other industry specific forums and Facebook Groups where people share their problems and seek advice.

You can also use tools like AnswerThePublic which gives you dozens of content ideas related to the questions your audience is asking.

Source: AnswerThePublic

A quick look at these questions and phrases would give you tons of ideas about your audience and its needs.

This is priceless information that you can use to tailor your message according to your ideal buyer.

2. Create Actionable and Problem Solving Content

Nothing wins you customers and brand advocates like highly actionable content. If your content can help readers understand their problems better and guide them in making measurable progress, you’ll be the first person they’ll contact when they need relevant services.

Actionable and problem-solving content even works in unconventional industries

The formula for creating such posts is simple.

• Choose one very specific problem, for example, “how can people injured in accidents proceed with lawsuit and compensation claims”
• Break down the solution into easily understandable steps.
• Address each step in detail with demonstrations, real-life examples and data evidence from reliable sources.

Try to create comprehensive and evergreen content that can be considered as the go-to resource on your topic. Make it so detailed and valuable that your target audience doesn’t need to look anywhere wlese for answers. This massive roundup post is a brilliant example.

Source: Secrets to Remote Work Success

Doing so takes time and effort, but it results in more readers social shares, traffic and brand recognition.

3. Engage Users With Emotional Copywriting

Many service consultants, especially in the healthcare and legal industries, deal with sensitive problems.

Which is why the tone of your website’s copy and its selection of words can have a huge impact on your website visitors.

Even the slightest of insensitivity towards your clients can result in bad marketing and lost patients.

The right words, on the other hand, can immediately connect you with your audience and persuade them to take action.

Source: Kissmetrics

To hook readers and evoke emotions, use storytelling and real life case studies. Show empathy towards your clients, understand their pain and give them hope.

To make it easier for you, here’s a list of almost 400 high emotion words that can be used to make your content more persuasive.

4. Evoke Curiosity to Build Your List and Generate Leads

Email list building and lead generation is the backbone of any content marketing strategy.

If your blog and website traffic isn’t converting into subscribers, you’ll find it even harder to convert them into paying customers.

This is precisely why you need to use lead magnets on your blog to generate curiosity in your visitors and persuade them to join your email list.

A lead magnet is an ethical bribe, a free resource, like an eBook or a video course, which you can give away in return for the email address of your visitors.

Here’s a good example from a marketing blog

Source: SmartBlogger

Consultants and service industry marketers can also use a variety of lead magnets ranging from checklists and PDF eBooks, to quizzes, and even free templates. For example, this documentation services and consultancy firm uses a declaration of conformity template as a lead magnet for its email list.

You can find many other creative examples of lead magnets in this post.

Once a visitor converts into a subscriber, you need to keep him engaged with regular emails, helpful advice, and relevant service offers.

5. Leverage Social Proof To Build Credibility

There are hundreds of thousands of blogs and websites on the web that offer advice in different industries.

But many of them are owned by niche marketers, not industry professionals.

To stand out from in this crowded space, you need to use different trust factors to build credibility.

Studies show that video testimonials from past customers and association with established professional bodies build trust faster than most other methods.

You can also display customer testimonials from public forums and review sites to strengthen your brand image.

Wrapping Up

Content marketing is all about winning the trust of your target audience and converting them into loyal customers by regularly creating highly actionable content that solves their problems. Healthcare professionals can use this marketing methodology to their advantage and reach their target audience in a much more effective manner.

Why You Must Address Problems Before You Can Offer Solutions written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

You make a product, hone your pitch and then get busy prescribing the benefits of your tools to anyone who’ll listen.

That’s the way it works. You know what people need, and you tailor your solutions to meet what they need. You even give your unique methodology a fancy name and construct branded processes to deliver results.

Then one day you conclude that sales aren’t what you had hoped. That sometimes when you recommend work your proposals go nowhere.

Fear not, I’m about to give you a dose of reality. Get what I’m about to share, and you’ll start writing, selling, and proposing in an entirely new way.

Hold on, though, as I’m about to shatter your world view – but I’ll do it as gently as possible.

Here it is.

Very few people want what you sell.

That’s not a knock on you or your business or your solutions. I’m sure all are amazing.

What people buy

But what you must realize is that there are only a few things people actually want, and unless you sell food or sex you’ll have to figure this one out.

People don’t want what you sell – they want what they believe they will get, achieve, relieve, dodge, or acquire based on buying what you sell.

So, your job as a marketer is to understand the problems people are trying to solve and match your solutions to those very specific problems.

What are your best customers saying to themselves when they get up in the morning?

I sell marketing consulting services, and I guarantee you that very few people who eventually engage our services wake and utter, “you know what I wish I had, some marketing consulting.”

But they might say something like, “why don’t my customers refer me to their friends?” or “why do I keep losing projects to Acme Consulting?”

Creating trigger phrases

In the past, I’ve referred to these kinds of statements as trigger phrases.

Your customers don’t know how to solve their problems, but they usually know what their problems are. If you can get really good at demonstrating that what you sell is the answer to their problem they really won’t care what you call it, they’ll just buy it to make the pain go away.
If the pain is big enough, you may have to put out the fire before they will even consider the comprehensive solution you know they truly need.

Take some time and break down every solution you sell, every benefit you attribute to what you do, and map it back to a handful of “trigger phrases.”

These phrases can be questions or statements or even anecdotes, but they must come from the point of view of the customer.

In my book The Referral Engine, I advise creating a one-page tool that you can share with your referral sources. The idea is to create a cheat sheet of trigger phrases that signal that the person saying them needs your service.

So, for example, if you sell accounting services to small businesses a trigger statement might be, “I can never get a handle on my receivables.”

That’s a real problem that your accounting solution can cure.

Problem-solving as strategy

Frankly, creating a list of trigger statements should be very high on your strategic list.

People aren’t searching for your solutions, but they search every single day for ways to address problems they see and feel.

Marketers that build their content, web design and SEO practices around problem solving will intersect their ideal client’s buying journey at a much earlier point – the point at which you can do the kind of trust building that makes your solution the obvious choice.

Google the phrase – “problems we solve” and you’ll see that some marketers are building web pages with this very idea at the center of their content strategy.

So the next time you see a marketing consultant selling a “reputation management” solution, know that no one wants that – what they want is to make the one-star review go away. I’m a marketing consultant, so I sell the “we can make the one-star review go away service.”

Make sense?

For illustration purposes, I’ll outline my entire problems vs. solutions map. If you’re a marketing consultant, then this will make total sense to you, and you should probably look into becoming a member of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network.

If you own or market for any other type of business you’ll have to do the work to create this map for your business based on brainstorming with your staff, the questions you find in forums, and through some planned, quality one on one time with your existing customers.

I’ve formatted these as questions, but you can see how they could just as easily be formatted as statements.

I’ve broken what we do into the logical chunks of the Duct Tape Marketing System.

Vision

Vision problems

• Have you lost or never found the passion for your business?
• Do you feel like you’re drifting without any real plan?
• Do you feel a lack of clarity and control in your marketing efforts?

Vision solutions

• Do you have a good sense of why you do what you do?
• Do you have a vision for your business one year from today?
• Do you have a revenue goal for one year from today?

Strategy

Strategy problems

• Do you feel like you’re trying to sell to anyone and everyone?
• Do you feel like your business is a commodity?
• Is price always and issue with your clients?
• Do you seem to be attracting the wrong types of clients?
• Are you struggling to stand out from your competitors?

Strategy solutions

• Do you have clients or customers currently?
• Do you know who makes an ideal client for your business?
• Do you have a unique message that answers “why you?”
• Do you know the greatest problems your clients face?
• Do you have graphic elements (logo) that appeal to your ideal client?
• Do you have a complete view of your competitive landscape?

Local Online Presence

Local presence problems

• Do you feel like you’re getting left behind in the ever-changing online world?
• Do you feel like your website isn’t performing as you had hoped?
• Do you wonder why your competitors show up for local searches and your business does not?
• Are you weary of the constant pitches from SEO companies?
• Do you find the need to produce content and participate in every social network exhausting?

Online presence solutions

• Have you ever had a different business name, address or phone number then you have today?
• Do you have a Google My Business Page?
• Do you have a marketing based website?
• Do you publish articles/blog posts regularly?
• Are you using and SEO plugin (WordPress)
• Are you familiar with “schema” location mark-up?
• Do you have a plan to acquire reviews from customers?
• Do you have a way to capture leads/emails on your website?
• Do you have profiles on major social networks?

Content

Content problems

• Do you wonder why anyone would want to read blog posts about your business?
• Do you feel like your website homepage is cluttered and confusing?
• Do you feel stressed out by the idea that you are being asked to produce more content with less time?
• Do you feel like you have no idea what to write about?
• Does is seem like no one else in your industry is blogging?

Content solutions

• Do you know the most important keyword search phrases used by your ideal client to find businesses like yours?
• Does your website home page promote a clear and simple message about why people should hire/buy from you?
• Do you have local content such as blog posts about events, client stories in neighborhoods where you work, etc.?
• Do you have a blog or other way to consistently publish new content?
• Do you have any written customer success stories?
• Do you create any video content?
• Do you publish an email newsletter?

Offline presence

Offline problems

• Do you sometimes feel like a dinosaur because you like real books and brochures and in person meetings?
• Do you sense that some of your marketing tactics are outdated in today’s online world?

Offline solutions

• Do you have a suite of printed or downloadable education materials?
• Do you have an automated way for people to make appointments with you?

Lead generation

Lead generation problems

• Do you feel like you’re simply guessing at how to generate leads?
• Do you wonder what it would take to consistently generate the right leads?
• Do you sometimes feel your wasting money on ineffective lead generation tactics
• Do you feel like you’re flying in the dark when it comes to choosing the right lead generation tactics?
• Do you find the technical aspects of online advertising a bit intimidating?

Lead generation solutions

• Do you know the best place or way to generate leads for your business?
• Do you have a way to attract ideal client leads who want to know more?
• Do you have a way to follow up with leads?

Lead conversion

Lead conversion problems

• Do you hate the thought of selling?
• Do you find it difficult to get in front of the right prospects?
• Do you spend way too much time chasing meetings, proposals, and deals?
• Do you sometimes drop the ball when it comes to getting a new client started?
• Do you get frustrated that sometimes clients leave as fast as you can generate new ones

Lead conversion solutions

• Do you have a consistent way to respond to leads?
• Do you have a set way to present what you do to prospects?
• Do you have a way to nurture leads before they convert?
• Do you need a proposal process for your type of business?
• Do you have a process to orient new customers?
• Do you have a process to reactivate dormant customers?

Tracking

Tracking problems

• Do you ever wonder what’s working and what’s not?
• Do you struggle with confidently know where to invest your limited marketing budget?
• Do you sometimes feel like you are simply responding to the marketing idea of the week rather than working a plan?
• Do you find it very difficult to measure the return on your marketing and time investment in your business?

Tracking solutions

Website analytics

• Do you have Google Analytics installed on your website
• Do you have Google Search Console integrated with your site
• Do you have any Google Analytics Goals created to track website conversions?
• Do you use call tracking tools on your website?

Key performance indicators

• Do you know the key indicators of success in your business?
• Do you set and track revenue and customer goals?
• Do you track leads generated?
• Do you track leads converted?
• Do you know the cost to acquire a new customer?

Okay, your turn. Demonstrate that you understand the problems and you’ll get the opportunity to pitch your solutions.