Rnordman

Greg was a sales person that I will never forget.  He would often barrage prospects with a seemingly endless supply of sarcastic remarks.  Though his first quip would usually inspire a grin, as the attempts at humor continued, prospects would become annoyed and then attempt to disengage from the sale.  In the end, Greg’s ineffective use of humor cost him sales.

Unfortunately, Greg is not alone.  Many sales people struggle to use humor in ways that enhance their ability to sell.  There is no doubt that when used effectively, humor is a valuable sales tool.  However, there is also compelling evidence that when clumsily deployed, humor will hinder the sale from occurring.   

The good news is that there have been many social science studies that have analyzed how humor can be used to positively change behavior.  This research discloses how sales people can strategically use humor to improve sales effectiveness.  What’s more, the research also reveals how not to use humor within the sale.

Using Humor To Sell More

When sales people use humor effectively it will enable them to more easily accomplish the following three productive sales outcomes.

1.  Build Rapport

Humor boosts feelings of likeability, which naturally increases rapport.  There is a mountain of scientific research that has confirmed that people are far more likely to act on a request from someone they like, than a person they do not.

Likewise, prospects will rarely buy from sales people whom they dislike.  Likeability means that you enjoy being in a relationship with another person.  When prospects do not like being around a sales person, they will interpret the sales person and the sales person’s product or service in a negative light.

2.  Inspire Smiles

Humor induces smiles, which have been proven to make one more receptive to a persuasive appeal.  For example, scientists have conducted numerous studies exploring how smiling impacts the brain.  The research shows that when a person smiles it puts him or her in a more optimistic, energetic and productive emotional state.  These positive emotions linger, even after the act of smiling has ceased.

In addition, smiling alters the brain.  Science has proven that when facial muscles contort to produce a smile, blood flow increases to the brain.  This causes the brain’s temperature to decrease, which triggers feelings of pleasure.

3.  Improve Sales Results

Humor can help sales people raise their average sale price.  For instance, at the close prospects are often tense.  This tension can warp prospects’ perspectives and hinder the sale.  A well-timed humorous comment can reduce this tension and put prospects in a more positive mindset.

A great example of this is found in the research of social scientists O’Quin and Aronoff.  These researchers found if the seller stated the humorous quip, “I will throw in my pet frog” when disclosing price, the average sale price rose.

How Not To Use Humor

Though humor can amplify sales success, as stated earlier, it must be used strategically.  Research has shown that there are certain ways that sales people should avoid using humor.

1.  When Presenting Key Value Propositions

Research has confirmed that humor disrupts critical thinking and distracts one from the message of a persuasive argument.  This is why sales people should refrain from using humor when presenting key value propositions that prospects must contemplate and commit to.

2.  Use Self-Deprecating Humor Sparingly

Scientists have studied the effects of self-deprecating humor.  The studies confirm that when people use self-deprecating humor it increases likeability and social attractiveness.  However, there is also strong evidence that has identified that self-disparaging humor decreases the perception of competence. 

Sales people should only use self-deprecating humor if their prospects already believe they are an expert.  In this context, self-disparaging humor will cause a sales person to be perceived as genuine.  Until a sales person is perceived as an authority, using self-deprecating humor will be counterproductive, since it will erode trust.

3.  Refrain From Sarcasm and Potentially Offensive Humor

Humor should never reveal a sales person to be anything other than an expert who is enjoyable to be around.  Most sales people already know that they should act professionally, avoid sarcasm and any offensive humor.  Yet, others still need to be reminded. 

When sales people fail in this area it is usually because they evaluate humorous remarks through the criteria of if it is offensive to them.  Yet, such thinking is dangerously shallow.  Sales people must always think of the sale from their prospects’ viewpoints.  As a general rule, if humor could potentially offend or annoy prospects, sales people should abstain from using it.

Selling is relational.  The necessity of relational influence is the very reason why sales people are needed.  This is also why humor matters.  When used strategically, it will boost prospects’ receptiveness to the sales person and the sales person’s product or service.

The post Laugh Your Way to More Sales appeared first on Hoffeld Group.

WASHINGTON – A selection of issues at stake in the presidential election and their impact on Americans, in brief:

IRAN

Last year’s nuclear deal with Tehran has removed for now the threat of a U.S.-Iranian military confrontation. But the deal rests on shaky ground.

The accord curtailed Iran’s nuclear program, pulling it back from atomic weapons capability in exchange for the end of many economic sanctions.

But the next president could have his or her handsfull, dealing with Iran in general and the agreement in particular. Various restrictions on Iran start ending in about seven years.

For Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, it’s basically a question of continuity versus change.

As secretary of state, Clinton helped lay the groundwork for the pact. She supports it, while taking a generally tougher tone on Iran than President Barack Obama.

Trump hates the deal. But he contends that he can renegotiate its terms.

Both are prepared to use force to prevent Tehran from acquiring the bomb. If the deal collapses or expires without sufficient safeguards, that possibility is back in play.

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REFUGEES

With millions of Syrians displaced by a yearslong war and hundreds of thousands of people fleeing to Europe, countries around the world are being pressed to help resettle people seeking refuge.

The United States pledged to accept 10,000 such refugees by the end of the budget year in September and did so, a month early.

Republicans have balked at the idea of allowing people from Syria into the United States and Donald Trump has called for a halt on refugee resettlement for them. He says vetting of these refugees is inadequate.

Hillary Clinton has pledged to expand the Syrian refugee program and allow as many as 65,000 such refugees into the United States.

The fate of the program almost certainly hinges on the outcome of the November election.

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CHILD CARE/PAY EQUITY

In much of the U.S., families spend more on child care for two kids than on housing. And if you’re a woman, it’s likely you earn less than your male colleagues. That’s according to the latest research, which suggests that while the U.S. economy has improved, women and their families are still struggling to make the numbers work.

Clinton wants a 12-week government-paid family and medical leave program, guaranteeing workers two-thirds of their wages up to a certain amount. Trump proposes six weeks of leave for new mothers, with the government paying wages equivalent to unemployment benefits. Both candidates propose tax relief for child care costs. Trump’s plan provides for a new income tax deduction for child care expenses, other tax benefits and a new rebate or tax credit for low-income families. Clinton says no family should spend more than 10 per cent of its income on child care and has called for child-care subsidies and tax relief offered on a sliding scale.

Clinton also favours forcing businesses to disclose gender pay data to the government for analysis. Trump says only that working moms should be “fairly compensated.”

Women comprise about 57 per cent of the labour force and many of them have young children. If they aren’t getting paid enough to make ends meet, more families will seek out government aid programs or low-quality, unlicensed daycares for their children.

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EDUCATION

Education is a core issue not just for students and families, but for communities, the economy, and the nation as a global competitor.

The country has some 50 million K-12 students. Teaching them, preparing them for college and careers, costs taxpayers more than $580 billion a year, or about $11,670 per pupil per year. A better education usually translates into higher earnings.

And while high school graduations are up sharply and dropout rates down, the nation has a ways to go to match the educational outcomes elsewhere. American schoolchildren trail their counterparts in Japan, Korea, Germany, France and more.

For students seeking higher education, they face rising college costs and many are saddled with debt.

Hillary Clinton has proposed free tuition at in-state public colleges and universities for working families with incomes up to $125,000 — free for families, that is, not for taxpayers. Donald Trump has focused on school choice, recently proposing to spend $20 billion in his first year in office to expand programs that let low-income families send their children to the local public, private, charter or magnet school that they think is best.

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IMMIGRATION

The future of millions of people living in the U.S. illegally could well be shaped by the presidential election. The stakes are high, too, for those who employ them, help them fit into neighbourhoods, or want them gone.

Republican Donald Trump at first pledged to deport the estimated 11 million immigrants in the country illegally. Not only that, he’d build a wall all along the Mexican border. But his position has evolved. He’s sticking to his vow to build the wall and make Mexico pay. But he’s no longer proposing to deport people who have not committed crimes beyond their immigration offences. Still, he’s not proposing a way for people living in the country illegally to gain legal status.

Democrat Hillary Clinton, in contrast, would overhaul immigration laws to include a path to citizenship, not just legal status.

Illegal immigration has been at nearly 40-year lows for several years. It even appears that Mexican migration trends have reversed, with more Mexicans leaving the U.S. than arriving. Billions of dollars have been spent in recent years to build fencing, improve border technology and expand the Border Patrol.

Nonetheless the Mexican border remains a focal point for those who argue that the country is not secure.

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CLIMATE CHANGE

It’s as if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton live on two entirely different Earths: one warming, one not. Clinton says climate change threatens us all, while Trump repeatedly tweets that global warming is a hoax.

Measurements and scientists say Clinton’s Earth is much closer to the warming reality. And it is worsening.

The world is on pace for the hottest year on record, breaking marks set in 2015, 2014, and 2010. It is about 1.8 degrees warmer than a century ago.

But it’s more than temperatures. Scientists have connected man-made climate change to deadly heat waves, droughts and flood-inducing downpours.

Studies say climate change is raising sea levels, melting ice and killing coral. It’s making people sicker with asthma and allergies and may eventually shrink our bank accounts.

The American Association for the Advancement of Sciences says warming can be highly damaging to people and the planet and potentially irreversible.

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ROLE OF GOVERNMENT

It’s the Goldilocks conundrum of American politics: Is the government too big, too small or just right? Every four years, the presidential election offers a referendum on whether Washington should do more or less.

Donald Trump favours cutting regulation and has promised massive tax cuts, but his plans are expected to add trillions to the national debt. Unlike most conservatives, he supports eminent domain and has spoken positively about government-run health care. And don’t forget that massive border wall. Hillary Clinton has vowed new spending on education and infrastructure that could grow government, too. She strongly supports “Obamacare,” which most small government proponents see as overreach.

At its heart, the debate about government’s reach pits the desire to know your basic needs will be cared for against the desire to be left alone. For the last few decades, polls have found Americans generally feel frustrated by the federal government and think it’s wasteful. A smaller government sounds good to a lot of people until they’re asked what specific services or benefits they are willing to do without.

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DEBT

The federal government is borrowing about one out of seven dollars it spends and steadily piling up debt. Over the long term, that threatens the economy and people’s pocketbooks.

Most economists say rising debt risks crowding out investment and forcing interest rates up, among other problems. At the same time, rapidly growing spending on federal health care programs like Medicare and the drain on Social Security balances caused by the rising tide of baby boomers could squeeze out other spending, on roads, education, the armed forces and more.

It takes spending cuts, tax increases or both to dent the deficit. Lawmakers instead prefer higher spending and tax cuts.

Neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump has focused on the debt.

Trump has promised massive tax cuts that would drive up the debt and he’s shown little interest in curbing expensive benefit programs like Medicare.

Clinton, by contrast, is proposing tax increases on the wealthy. But she wouldn’t use the money to bring down the debt. Instead, she’d turn around and spend it on college tuition subsidies, infrastructure and health care.

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TRADE

In this angry election year, many American voters are skeptical about free trade — or hostile to it.

The backlash threatens a pillar of U.S. policy: The United States has long sought global trade.

Economists say imports cut prices for consumers and make the U.S. more efficient.

But unease has simmered, especially as American workers faced competition from low-wage Chinese labour. Last year, the U.S. ran a $334 billion trade deficit with China — $500 billion with the entire world.

The Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are both playing to public suspicions about trade deals. Hillary Clinton broke with President Barrack Obama by opposing an Asia-Pacific trade agreement that she had supported as secretary of state.

Donald Trump vows to tear up existing trade deals and to slap huge tariffs on Chinese imports.

But trade deals have far less impact on jobs than forces such as automation and wage differences between countries. Trump’s plans to impose tariffs could start a trade war and raise prices.

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SUPREME COURT

The ideological direction of the Supreme Court is going to tip one way or the other after the election. The outcome could sway decisions on issues that profoundly affect everyday Americans: immigration, gun control, climate change and more.

The court has been operating with eight justices since Antonin Scalia died in February. His successor appears unlikely to be confirmed until after the election, at the earliest. The court is split between four Democratic-appointed, liberal justices and four conservatives who were appointed by Republicans — although Justice Anthony Kennedy has sided with the liberals on abortion, same-sex marriage and affirmative action in the past two years.

The ninth justice will push the court left or right, depending on whether Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump becomes president. President Barack Obama has nominated Merrick Garland to take Scalia’s seat, but the Republican Senate has refused to consider Garland’s nomination, in an effort to prevent a liberal court majority.

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CHINA

Tensions have been rising over China’s assertive behaviour in the seas of Asia. The U.S. also accuses China of unfair trading practices and cyber theft of business secrets.

Donald Trump says that the sheer volume of trade gives the U.S. leverage over China. He accuses China of undervaluing its currency to make its exports artificially cheap and proposes tariffs as high as 45 per cent on Chinese imports if Beijing doesn’t change its behaviour. Such action could risk a trade war that would make many products in the U.S. more expensive.

Clinton says the U.S. needs to press the rising Asian power to play by international rules, whether on trade or territorial disputes.

While many of China’s neighbours are unnerved by its military build-up, the wider world needs the U.S. and China to get along, to tackle global problems. The U.S. and China are also economically inter-dependent, and punishment by one party could end up hurting the other.

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INCOME INEQUALITY

Income inequality has surged near levels last seen before the Great Depression. The average income for the top 1 per cent of households climbed 7.7 per cent last year to $1.36 million, according to tax data. That privileged sliver of the population saw pay climb at almost twice the rate of income growth for the other 99 per cent, whose pay averaged a humble $48,768.

Dogged on the issue during the primaries by Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton has highlighted inequality in multiple speeches. She hopes to redirect more money to the middle class and impoverished. Clinton would raise taxes on the wealthy, increase the federal minimum wage, boost infrastructure spending, provide universal pre-K and offer the prospect of tuition-free college.

Donald Trump offers a blunter message about a system “rigged” against average Americans. To bring back jobs, Trump has promised new trade deals with better terms, greater infrastructure spending than Clinton foresees and tax cuts that he says would propel stronger growth (though independent analysts say his budget plans would raise deficits).

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OPIOID EPIDEMIC

More than 28,000 Americans died from overdosing on opioids in 2014, a record high for the nation.

That’s 78 people per day, a number that doesn’t include the millions of family members, first responders and even taxpayers who feel the ripple of drug addiction in their daily lives.

A rise in prescription painkillers is partially to blame: The sale of these drugs has quadrupled since 1999, and so has the number of Americans dying from an addiction to them. When prescriptions run out, people find themselves turning to the cheaper alternative heroin and, increasingly, the even more deadly drug fentanyl.

Recovering addicts and their family members are increasingly speaking out, putting a face on drug addiction and lessening the stigma surrounding it. But dollars for prevention, treatment and recovery services are still hard to come by, leaving many people waiting weeks or months to find the treatment they’re seeking. Meantime, family members empty bank accounts in search of help, while law enforcement officers and emergency rooms serve as a first line of defence.

Donald Trump says the wall he wants to build along the southern border is essential to stopping the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, pledges to spend $10 billion to increase access to prevention, treatment and recovery services, among other things.

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NORTH KOREA

Pariah state North Korea could soon be capable of targeting America with nuclear weapons. What can the U.S. do to stop it?

Diplomacy and economic sanctions have not worked so far. North Korea’s isolation is deepening, but it has continued to conduct nuclear test explosions and make advances in its missile technology.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says the U.S. can put more pressure on China to rein in its North Korean ally. He says he is willing to meet the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un.

Democrat Hillary Clinton wants the world to intensify sanctions as the Obama administration did with Iran, a course that eventually opened the way for a deal to contain its nuclear program.

But it will be tough to force North Korea back to negotiations that aim at its disarmament in exchange for aid. Kim views atomic weapons as a security guarantee for his oppressive regime

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HEALTH CARE

About 9 in 10 Americans now have health insurance, more than at any time in history. But progress is incomplete, and the future far from certain. Rising costs could bedevil the next occupant of the White House.

Millions of people previously shut out have been covered by President Barack Obama’s health care law. No one can be denied coverage anymore because of a pre-existing condition. But “Obamacare” remains divisive, and premiums for next year are rising sharply in many communities.

Whether Americans would be better off trading for a GOP plan is another question. A recent study found that Donald Trump’s proposal would make 18 million people uninsured. GOP congressional leaders have a more comprehensive approach, but key details are still missing.

Overall health care spending is trending higher again, and prices for prescription drugs — new and old — are a major worry.

Medicare’s insolvency date has moved up by two years — to 2028.

Hillary Clinton would stay the course, adjusting as needed. Republicans are united on repealing Obama’s law, but it’s unclear how they would replace it.

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AMERICA AND THE WORLD

How the U.S. uses its influence as the world’s sole superpower is a central feature of presidential power.

It can mean taking the country to war — to protect the homeland or to defend an ally. Or it can mean using diplomacy to prevent war. It can affect U.S. jobs, too, as choices arise either to expand trade deals or to erect barriers to protect U.S. markets.

In the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, America’s role in the world is a point of sharp differences. Each says the U.S. must be the predominant power, but they would exercise leadership differently. Trump calls his approach “America first,” meaning alliances and coalitions would not pass muster unless they produced a net benefit to the U.S. Clinton sees international partnerships as essential tools for using U.S. influence and lessening the chances of war.

These divergent views could mean very different approaches to the military fight and ideological struggle against the Islamic State, the future of Afghanistan and Iraq, the contest with China for influence in Asia and the Pacific, and growing nervousness in Europe over Russian aggression.

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VOTING RIGHTS

Voting rights in America are in flux. Republican-controlled legislatures are tightening voter laws, placing limits on early voting and same-day registration, and imposing new requirements for IDs at polling places. In 2013, the Supreme Court invalidated a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That provision had required states with a history of racial discrimination to get federal preclearance to change election laws.

The issue has become highly partisan with the rapid growth of minority populations, which in recent presidential elections have tilted heavily Democratic.

The Obama Justice Department has challenged voter ID and other laws, saying they could restrict access for minorities and young people. Recent lower court rulings temporarily softened some of the toughest restrictions, but litigation remains knotted up with Supreme Court appeals likely. Bills in Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act are stalled.

Donald Trump opposes same-day voter registration, backing laws to ensure only citizens vote. Hillary Clinton wants Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act and seeks a national standard of at least 20 days of early in-person voting.

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Associated Press writers Bradley Klapper, Anne Flaherty, Jennifer C. Kerr, Alicia A. Caldwell, Seth Borenstein, Josh Lederman, Andrew Taylor, Kathleen Ronayne, and Paul Wiseman, Mark Sherman, Josh Boak, Matthew Pennington, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Robert Burns and Hope Yen in Washington contributed to this report.

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This story is part of AP’s “Why It Matters” series, which will examine three dozen issues at stake in the presidential election between now and Election Day. You can find them at: http://apne.ws/2bBG85a

EDITOR’S NOTE _ A look at issues at stake in the election and their impact on people

The post WHY IT MATTERS: Issues at stake in election appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

3D printing technology has been around since the 1980s; however, it gained immense popularity in the past decade. Since then, a number of 3D printed objects have been released, including 3D printed shoes, prosthetic body parts, vehicles and medical devices.

One key difference between 3D printing and traditional printing technique is that the former follows the principle of “additive manufacturing.”

That means, a 3D printer adds material layer by layer to create an object. On the other hand, conventional manufacturing techniques would typically require several processes such as cutting and drilling to manufacture the same object.

This makes 3D printing a cost- and time-effective technique that also helps reduce the amount of waste during manufacturing. In fact, 3D printing has derived its working principle from an age-old process that deposits binder material layer-by-layer on a powder bed with the help of an inkjet printer.

To manufacture a device with the help of a 3D printer, the user first must create a virtual design of the final product, a computer aided design (CAD) file, with the help of a 3D modelling software or 3D scanner. Once a 3D model of the object is prepared, it is sliced with the help of a tool into thousand smaller units of horizontal layers. These units are then fed into a 3D printer.

This article talks about the three main types of 3D printers and the features associated with each one of them – Ultimaker 2 Go, Lulzbot mini, Assembled Printrbot Plus. These three 3D printers are the best ones available in the market to fulfil all your printing needs. Read on to explore the features, compatibility and operational requirements associated with each one of them.

Ultimaker 2 Go

Small, convenient-to-use and highest quality 3D printer

Introduction

Ultimaker has already made a solid name for itself in the field of 3D printing. Its hardware and software are among the best available in the market today. In fact, Ultimaker’s print quality still remains unbeatable among all its rivals at the consumer level. Ultimaker continues to be the forerunner in the 3D printing market with its Ultimaker 2 series, which ultimately showed that 3D printing is a serious business.

The Ultimaker 2 Go version, is a little bit smaller than the Extended version, however, their printing quality and the use of technology remains the same. The smaller size of the Ultimaker 2 Go makes it convenient to use from a user’s perspective.

This printer is capable of unusually high resolutions and is compatible with Linux, OS X and Windows. However, there is no auto-calibration feature and sometimes it is difficult to remove the finished product from the print bed.

Typically, a resolution quality of 20 microns is enough to maintain a balance between the printing time and quality. This is because it takes more time to print an object if the resolution is higher.

Ultimaker 2 Go leaves little traces of the layers behind and the overall printing quality is good. However, it can cause curling at the base of the objects sometimes because of an absence of a heated print bed.

Specifications:

• Software used: Cura
• Minimum layer height: 20 microns
• Supported materials: ABS, PLA and Exotics
• Connectivity through: SD card
• Printing speed: 30-300 mm/s
• Build volume: 23 x 22.5 x 20.5 cm

Pros:

• Convenient to use
• High printing speed
• Great printing quality and supportive software

Cons:

• No heated print bed
• Price is quite high as compared to other printers
• Single extruder only

Consensus over the product:

While some users described this 3D printer as one of the best ones available in the market today, others find it difficult to work with the extruder. People often complain about the extruder, while others demand for a dual extruder option. Overall, the ease of use of the machine is the primary plus point that keeps its users happy. An added benefit is the presence of a very active Ultimaker community.

Lulzbot mini

Compact yet powerful and easy-to-use machine

Introduction

LulzBot Mini is a compact 3D printer which is best suited for those who are trying their hands on 3D printing for the first time. It is the entry level machine in the range of Lulzbot 3D printers. It has an amazing automatic print bed leveling feature that delivers high quality 3D printing results. However, the printer may produce irritating noise when it’s working and there are no onboard controls.

Lulzbot mini has a similar design as that of other high-range 3D printers in the series, however, the open-frame designs expose a lot of the hot parts of the printers and therefore prudence is required while dealing with this machine.

This 3D printer can be connected to a computer with the help of a USB cable and there are no SD card slots on it. There is a wipe pad at the back of the build plate of the printer, which can be used to wipe and clean the nozzle before initiating a new print.

3D printing with Lulzbot mini is quite simple and easy. The user needs to load orientation and slice the model before hitting the “print” button. As soon as the command is initiated, the extruder begins the preheating sequence and the temperature may reach as high as 300 degrees Celsius. After the cleaning procedure is done, the 3D printer initiates its self-leveling routine.

One of the best features of this printer is that it does not require any manual levelling of the print bed. It has an auto-bed leveling feature that enables the printer to set the bed before each print. This creates the perfect pre-conditions for a successful print, guaranteeing consistent printing results.

Specifications:

• Software used: CuraLulzBot® Edition
• Self Leveling and Nozzle Self Cleaning: Yes
• Supported materials: ABS, PLA, HIPS, PVA, wood filled filaments, Polyester (Tritan), PETT, bronze and copper filled filaments, Polycarbonate, Nylon, PETG, conductive PLA and ABS, UV luminescent filaments, PCTPE, PC-ABS.
• Heated platform: Yes
• Connectivity through: Requires USB connection to computer
• Printing speed: 275mm/sec (10.8in/sec) at 0.18 layer height
• Build volume: 152mm x 152mm x 158mm (6in x 6in x 6.2in)

Pros:

• High quality print
• Attractive design
• Easy-to-use software

Cons:

• Higher cost that competitors
• Irritating noise while printing
• No un-tethered printing

Consensus over the product:

The LulzBot Mini printer may have a higher cost than its rivals however its high pricing is justified by the quality of print that it delivers. In addition, the printer has great flexibility for the type of printing material used, which is an added advantage. Ease of use and handling makes it a perfect machine for beginner-level 3D printing purpose.

Assembled Printrbot Plus

Low tolerance, budget printer for home use

Introduction

Printbot Plus is an ideal 3D printer for home use even if you are on a tight budget. It has great resolution size range. In addition, it is capable of printing medium to large objects, making it good enough to print something from a gift to a professional prototype.

The Printbot Plus is an excellent choice when it comes to speed and accuracy. While the speed may depend on the size of the object supposed to be printed, Printbot Plus can reach a maximum printing limit of 60 mm per second when the settings are done. It produces high printing quality with 0.1 mm of print tolerance and a resolution of 0.1 mm per layer.

This 3D printer comes with one extruder installed. However, users can upgrade it to two heads if they want. It can be directly connected to the computer via a USB cable, thus making the printing process easier.

Specifications:

• Software used: Cura
• Vertical resolution: 100 microns
• Supported materials: ABS or PLA
• Heated platform: Available
• Connectivity through: USB or SD card
• Printing speed: 80-100 mm/min
• Build capacity: 20.3 x 20.3 x 20.3 cm

Pros:

• It can print small objects really well
• Easy and convenient to use
• Cost effective

Cons:

• May overheat on long prints
• Design may seem clumsy

Consensus over the product:

Printbot Plus can be effectively used to create high-performance 3D models and designs either using ABS or PLA. It can print high resolution designs with great accuracy at an average speed. In addition, it is one of the most affordable 3D printers available in the market today. However, there is no on-call customer support facility available and a few design features are missing.

To Sum Up

In this article, we explored the pros and cons associated with three 3D printers available in the market – Ultimaker 2 Go, Lulzbot mini, Assembled Printrbot Plus. While each printer has its own benefits associated with its use, Lulzbot mini seems the best option out of all. It may seem like a costly affair, but the decision to purchase Lulzbot mini is like making a future investment. It offers a great customer support, printing quality and speed, unlike the other two machines that lack heated print beds.

Abundant, chock full of energy and bound so tightly that the only way to release its energy is through combustion -- lignin has frustrated scientists for years. With the help of an unusual soil bacteria, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories believe they now know how to crack open lignin, a breakthrough that could transform the economics of biofuel production.

Consider the opening of Warren Buffett's 2012 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders.

From the second paragraph:

"A number of good things happened at Berkshire last year, but let's first get the bad news out of the way."

Buffett goes on to announce that "for the ninth time in 48 years, Berkshire's percentage increase in book value was less than the S&P's percentage gain." He highlights too his "inability to make a major acquisition."

This unabashed recounting of Berkshire Hathaway's setbacks isn't unique to the 2012 letter; in fact, Buffett frequently opens his letters this way.

According to psychologist Robert Cialdini, this strategy is brilliant. Cialdini is a professor emeritus of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University, the CEO and president of Influence at Work, and the author of the new book "Pre-Suasion," in which he highlights the invisible interpersonal forces behind our behavior.

In the book, he highlights Buffett's letter-writing strategy as a prime example of a "pre-suasive" tactic, or a way to influence people to behave a certain way in the moments before they make their decision. In this case, the decision might be whether to start or continue investing in Berkshire Hathaway.

On a recent episode of The James Altucher Show, Cialdini, who says he's a stockholder in Berkshire Hathaway, explained why Buffett's pre-suasive strategy works:

"It's disarming every time he says, 'You know, we made this mistake.' I believe the next thing he says to me — and that's where he puts the strength of the last year.

He's just readied me to listen to and process the next thing he's going to say more deeply because he's established himself as a trustworthy source."

Cialdini analyzed Buffett's shareholder letters and found that Buffett's been deploying this strategy more frequently in the last few years.

Presumably, Cialdini said, Buffett has "learned that it's an effective strategy for retaining and recruiting shareholders. It reassures customers — not only your existing customers — that you know the drawbacks, you know the failings, and you have undertaken an analysis that allows you to change those failings into pluses."

Interestingly, Cialdini told Altucher that the same technique — opening a conversation with your weaknesses or flaws — might also strengthen romantic relationships.

"It's disarming. It allows people to say, 'Oh, somebody's being really forthcoming with me, not trying to maintain some sort of superiority, so I'm going to give that back that same level of honesty.'

And when you have that I think you have a better relationship."

SEE ALSO: A psychologist who's spent decades studying the science of persuasion explains why it's so hard to resist a sales pitch

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I’ve spent years thinking and writing about one of the great mysteries of leadership and change: Why is it that the people and organizations with the most experience, knowledge, and resources in a particular field are often the last ones to see and seize opportunities for something dramatically new?

It’s the “paradox of expertise”: The more closely you’ve looked at an industry, the more successful you’ve been in a company or a profession, the harder it can be to see new patterns, prospects, and possibilities.  Which is why the best leaders are the most insatiable learners. And why all leaders, wherever they are in the organization, have to keep asking themselves, Am I learning as fast as the world is changing?

In the research for my book, Simply Brilliant, I spent time with lots of leaders with big ideas about the future. But none of them was as determined as Garry Ridge, CEO of the WD-40 Company, to keep learning as fast as the world is changing. Indeed, I’m not sure I’ve met a CEO who has made learning more central to the corporate culture than Ridge has, or has found more ways to develop a thirst for learning among his colleagues. How he is confronting the “paradox of expertise” offers lessons for long-established organizations in all sorts of fields.

Indeed, Ridge is so serious about the commitment to learning that he insists everyone at the company takes the “WD-40 Maniac Pledge,” a solemn vow to become, in his words, a “learning maniac”:

I am responsible for taking action, asking questions, getting answers, and making decisions. I won’t wait for someone to tell me. If I need to know, I’m responsible for asking. I have no right to be offended that I didn’t “get this sooner.” If I’m doing something others should know about, I’m responsible for telling them.

WD-40 is an unlikely setting for such a learning-obsessed culture. It is hardly a glamorous brand, but it is iconic in its own way. Almost anybody who works on cars, or does home repairs, or just wants to get rid of a squeak or some rust, has one of those bright blue-and-yellow cans in their garage or under their sink. In fact, when Garry Ridge took over, WD-40’s flagship offering was used in four of five American households and in virtually every mine, factory, and construction site in the country.

The new CEO quickly realized the product’s ubiquity was both a blessing and a curse. It was truly part of the fabric of American life, almost a cult brand. Yet the company was also a one-trick pony. It basically had the single product, which it sold mainly in its home country. As a publicly traded stock, it paid out almost 100 percent of its profits as dividends — because it didn’t know what else to do with the money. “WD-40 is a cult product,” an article in Barron’s proclaimed, but “it is hardly a cult stock.” The “very nature of WD-40’s past success doomed it to ultimate failure.”

Fast forward to today: WD-40 now sells its products in 176 countries, sales in Europe alone are bigger than the company’s total sales when Ridge took over, and it has launched a collection of new brands and products. The share price has nearly tripled since 2009, and it has become, for the first time ever, a billion-dollar enterprise in terms of market value. (Recently, WD-40 shares were approaching $120 apiece and its market value was nearing $1.7 billion, unheard-of territory for the company.)

There’s no question that Garry Ridge has made WD-40 Company more interesting than when he took over. But he did it by demanding that he and his colleagues became more interested in what was possible for the organization, its products, and the brand. Ridge overhauled the culture, redefined the work of its leaders, even embraced a whole new language, to put a premium on learning, experimenting, improvising — transforming a stale, insular business into something agile and open-minded.

“We had such huge growth opportunities,” he told me, “but people were afraid to step out of their roles. The fear of failure is the biggest fear in the world. We had to go from failure to freedom.”

That’s why the central ritual of life at the company is what Ridge calls the “learning moment” — a period of frustration, a burst of inspiration, a breakthrough of collaboration in which people stumble upon a problem, unearth an opportunity, or fail miserably at an initiative, and then communicate what they’ve learned without fear of reprisal. “Learning moments can be positive or negative, but they are never bad, so long as they are shared for the benefit of all,” he says. “I want people to be inquisitive, I want people to ask questions and take chances. My job is to create a company of learners. I like to ask my people and myself, When’s the last time you did something for the first time?”

To underscore his personal commitment to the culture he is creating, any time he replies to an email, Ridge affixes an electronic signature with the message “ancora imparo,” Italian for “I am still learning.” The phrase was a favorite of Michelangelo, according to the CEO, and the artist signed it into many of his works.

“One of my huge learning moments in life,” Ridge says, “was getting comfortable with those three magic words, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s great to hear people across the company, anywhere in the world, say, ‘I just had a learning moment’ and share it with other people. Or to hear one of our people say ‘Maniac Pledge’ — knowing they have permission to ask about something they need to know or learn. My dream is for this organization to be viewed as a leadership-and-learning laboratory for business.”

In the spirit of learning, I’ll ask you to consider the question that Garry Ridge asks his colleagues: When’s the last time you did something for the first time?

Author’s Note: You can download my in-depth case study on the “culture of learning” at WD-40 from my website. It’s free, but you do have to enter your email address to get the case study.

When was the last time you saw the word innovation? Ten minutes ago? The fact is, there are many different types of innovation but they’ve all been bucketed into one big category. In other words, many people struggle with what innovation means.

I believe that ideas fall on a scale that looks like this:

When we talk about innovation, we end up referring to all these different ideas as “innovation” which makes it pretty hard to have a clear definition of what “innovation” actually is. Here’s a quick, non-exhaustive list of terms I see associated with innovation:

Less Radical

• Kaizen
• Continuous Business Improvement
• Six Sigma
• Incremental
• Process
• Frugal Innovation
• Hacking or Hackathon

More Radical

• Design Thinking
• Blue Ocean
• Collaborations
• Open Innovation
• Crowdsourcing
• Disruptive Innovation

However, if you dissected all of these different types of innovations, you would still be left with 3 requirements that apply to all types of innovation.

Innovation must:

Let’s look at each of these individually:

NEW IDEAS

Innovation starts with a new idea. This could be a completely original idea, using an existing idea in a novel way or an incremental improvement to an existing idea. Ideas can fall anywhere on the scale for innovation to happen.

VALUE

Value can also come in different forms but ultimately, value is a positive result or impact. For a business, value may include things like increased revenue, decreased cost, increased market share, time-savings or increased engagement.

EXECUTION

Execution is the difference between an idea the would create value and an idea that does create value. Most companies miss this part of innovation. From our experience, it’s not generating ideas that is challenging but actually implementing the ideas to create value that defines innovation.

However you choose to define innovation, just having good ideas is not enough. Execution is the most important ingredient in innovation.

No one ever innovated by sitting on their brilliant idea and twiddling their thumbs.

I’ve arranged the definition into a Venn diagram (who doesn’t love a good Venn diagram?) to show you how the different components work together and overlap.

Now let’s take a look at some of the overlapping sections:

OPERATIONS

Everyday, employees perform tasks, follow routines and execute processes that create value for the organization. These processes are established, documented and well understood. In essence, operations are the regular processes in an organization that create value but are not the result of a new idea.

POTENTIAL

Have you ever had an idea that you knew would produce amazing results? That is what we call potential. Potential refers to a new idea that could provide value, if executed.

LEARNING

Learning occurs when new ideas are executed but do not create value. While there is value in learning itself, to qualify as innovation the newly gained knowledge from learning must be executed and more importantly, the value must be captured.

INNOVATION

Of course at the very center is innovation that uses all three components, new ideas, value and execution.

I was just talking to an outstanding Vice President of Sales. The solutions his company develops address very complex issues in “manufacturing.” (I’m using that as a surrogate for what he is really doing.) It’s a complex sale.

It’s an early stage company, they are starting to have great success and are closing some very large, intriguing deals. He needs to grow the sales team, hiring BDRs, Account Managers and others.

He asked, “How do I find the best sales people?”

I asked, “Well what are the characteristics of the best sales people you have on board now? What are you looking for in a sales person?”

He went on to describe what every sales manager describes, “I need strong prospectors, they need to be able to understand the sales/buying process, they need to to be able to handle objections, they need to present our value, they need to close…..”

He describe a huge number of selling skills and selling competencies the sales people should have.

I asked him to describe the customer engagement process. I asked, “Who are you targeting? What are the conversations you need to be having? How do you demonstrate your credibility and understanding of their problems, challenges, and opportunities? How do you position value in ways that are meaningful to them?”

We went through a discussion of the level of expertise in manufacturing, the need to really understand their manufacturing processes, metrics and drivers. We spoke about the typical challenges that face the manufacturing decision-makers and the conversations they had to have with those decision-makers.

I then asked him, “Who is the best person in your company at having those conversations?”

It turned out to be the CEO. As we looked at why the CEO was so successful, it was less about him being CEO, but more about his experience and background. The CEO had been a VP of Manufacturing at a large company. He had a long career in various jobs in manufacturing. He had deep experience in all the issues their customers faced. He didn’t consider himself a sales person, which is why he needed the VP of Sales.

The reason the CEO was so effective in selling was he came from an experience base that was similar to that of the customers. He didn’t know anything about selling. When he was having the first conversations with customers, he didn’t know he was qualifying them. As they brought up questions and concerns, he didn’t know he was handling objections, as they started asking how they could do similar things, he didn’t realize he was presenting a solution and closing.

To the CEO, he was having conversations with people of similar backgrounds talking about problems and solutions. The customers were eager to have discussions about how he could help.

As we talked about the issue, I thought, “Well maybe it’s because he’s the CEO?” I asked, “Beside the CEO, who else is very good at engaging the customer in these discussions?” We identified a manager in the organization. Like the CEO, he’d been in manufacturing all his career, at significantly lower levels. But he had seen the challenges, issues, frustrations manufacturing executives faced. He had felt their pain in his past jobs.

Like the CEO, he was effective because of his credibility in engaging the customers in conversations about their business. Again, he didn’t know he was prospecting, he didn’t know he was qualifying, he didn’t know he was handling objections. In fact the sales person shared a story of this manager at a customer meeting. The customer had brought up a concern, the manager responded, “That’s a bunch of BS, this is what the real issue is….” (I certainly didn’t learn that approach in my objection handling courses.).

The point was, the most effective sales people were people with manufacturing backgrounds who understood their customers, had “been there, done that,” and who could share ideas and solutions with credibility.

As we explored further, it wasn’t just the manufacturing background. There were other attributes and characteristics that contributed to their success. They were curious, they were passionate and enthusiastic about their solutions and solving problems, they were driven to engage the customer in talking about change and new ideas, they were persistent and didn’t give up, they were goal and accomplishment oriented, …….

The secret to their success wasn’t just their deep understanding of manufacturing, but it was a number of attitudes, behaviors, characteristics that are common to great sales people.

The VP of Sales came to the conclusion, perhaps the very best sales people are business (in this case manufacturing) people who had the capability and passion to sell.

Some of the most difficult aspects of selling are understanding enough about the business, the function, and the problems of our customers have. We can’t possibly script everything to the levels we need to engage the customer in deep conversations. We can’t possibly cover every possibility we might encounter with our prospects and customers. We want to engage the customer with credibility, knowledge, understanding, and empathy. We want to feel their pain, but show them a path to solving and eliminating it.

It’s very difficult to train these to people who don’t have the experience and knowledge, it takes a lot of time. It’s very difficult to develop the content and tools to help sales people who don’t have this experience and knowledge.

Perhaps our best source of sales people are business people who can sell.

Ironically, too few sales managers look at it this way. Selling skills are relatively easy to teach. People in other disciplines use similar skills. For example, project management, persuasion, questioning, listening, goal setting and meeting goals.

If a person has the right knowledge/experience, the right attitudes, behaviors, attributes, characteristics and willingness to sell; it’s relatively easy to teach them to sell.

Business people who want to and can learn to sell are often our best sources of talent.

There is a good reason not to discuss pricing until you’ve done enough discovery work to understand the investment that is necessary to produce the outcome your dream client needs. This is especially true in larger, complex deals where different levels of value can be created and different investments required.

Destructive Defensive Reveals

In many cases, refusing to share your pricing can make you look defensive, as if you are concealing something. Hiding your pricing is a sign that it is higher than your competitors, even though there is nothing inherently wrong with having a higher price than your peers.

That defensiveness gives your prospective client the feeling that you are uncomfortable with your pricing, and that it is so much higher that the act of simply saying your price out loud will cause your prospect to disengage and immediately withdraw from any further communication. When you are defensive, it looks as if you cannot justify the delta, and when you can’t, neither can your prospect.

This defensive revealing of your price can work against you when your price is higher.

Using Pricing to Differentiate

When your price is higher because you create greater value and need to capture more to deliver it, it often makes better sense to go on the offensive and immediately disclose your higher pricing—especially when you can easily justify a higher price.

By sharing the price very early in a conversation, you can also share the reason your price is higher than your competitors, how you invest the difference in your prices to create greater value, and why your clients believe this is the right decision to make.

You can also explain the concessions, trade-offs, and risks your prospective client is going to be forced to make by selecting an alternative with a lower price. These concessions, trade-offs, and risks are the higher cost your prospect will pay for accepting the lower price.

You may believe that a lower price makes it easier to win. This isn’t true. In more cases than not, it’s the value that is being created that matter more than pricing, unless you don’t believe and behave as if this is true.

The post Offensive or Defensive Pricing Reveals appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Businesses aren’t taking advantage of the digital revolution. In less than 30 seconds, they can access more data than was available for the first 4,000 years of human history. Unfortunately, they aren’t taking full advantage of it.

This isn’t because they don’t value business data. Not at all. A recent study from Gartner found that business intelligence was a top priority for CIOs heading into 2017.

However, they make a variety of business intelligence mistakes that can become very costly. Here are some of the worst mistakes you can make.

Failing to Set Business Goals

Scott Schlesinger, North American Senior Vice President and Head of Business Information Management, Capgemini, told CIO that businesses can’t simply collect data and use it when necessary.

“One of the biggest [mistakes in] pursuing an analytics initiative is jumping in too soon without clearly defining what it is the company wants to accomplish,” Schlesinger explained. “Companies will not be able to generate any real ROI if they don’t outline the business case first and determining why and where leveraging big data makes the most sense in their operations.”

Gathering raw data is pointless, since it’s so difficult to access in a format you can use. A smart business intelligence strategy relies on structured data that is categorized according to your business needs.

Your business needs must be clearly established before gathering data. These needs can include:

• Developing a better understanding of your customers
• Addressing competitor strategies
• Studying new markets that you hope to penetrate

Goals need to be clearly articulated, so data can be structured around them.

Failing to Identity Abnormal Activity

Human beings suffer from a number of decision-making heuristics. One of the biggest mistakes they make is searching for patterns that may not exist. Eddie Schwartz, chief information security officer for RSA, states that information officers need to be trained to identify unusual activity in their data.

“When we have those deviations, it’ll call attention to itself and say, ‘Listen! This is different than normal behavior,’ and those differences, when we combine them with things that we know, like indicators of compromise, like other types of potentially known bad behavior, or other things we know about our enterprise, it can yield fantastic results.”

A lot of factors come into play here. The analytics staff needs to be properly trained in analytics. They also need to trust that the data they are collecting is high quality and reliable. This means they need up-to-date software to design circuits that are used to process data efficiently.

Failing to Secure Data Properly

For most organizations, their data volume is growing steadily every day. They often look for the cheapest storage options to accommodate it. Unfortunately, the most affordable data storage options are often the least secure. This can lead to serious security breaches.

Steve Farr, senior manager for product marketing at TIBCO Software states that brands need to consider the legal and reputation risks of poor data governance. They need secure storage hosting and an internal security plan to keep it protected.

The security compliance program needs to be implemented consistently. Schwartz states that many organizations only use firewalls and other precautions after security breaches have already taken place, which obviously nullifies their value.

Keeping Department Managers in the Dark

Your organization can’t rely solely on your IT team to handle your business intelligence responsibilities. Managers from every department need to do their part.

Too many companies fail to communicate the importance of sharing data with their colleagues. They often view themselves as their own organization, since they often have limited contact with other departments.

This is one of the reasons organizations need to hold interdepartmental meetings on a regular basis. Every manager needs to learn the importance of data and incentivized to share it with their colleagues.

Becoming Distracted with Features

New BI analytics applications have powerful features, including search capabilities and charting tools. While these tools can be very valuable, they can also be very distracting.

Brands need to understand the actual purpose of these tools, rather than adapting them out of a sense of obligation. They must also understand the limitations of the most popular business analytics tools. They often lack the ability to integrate data, which means employees need to handle that task on their own.

Let’s face it, establishing a distinctive, differentiated position for our products and services is hard and getting harder in an increasingly crowded, over-communicated-to market. It’s probably accurate to say that it’s never been harder to stand out from the crowd.

Geoffrey Moore recognised the problem in “Crossing the Chasm” more than 20 years ago – a book that has been recognised as one of the few timeless classic texts on B2B marketing. Moore offered a simple framework for crafting a unique and relevant value proposition targeted at a well-defined audience.

But in today’s hyper-competitive world, I’ve found that it’s worth expanding Moore’s original framework just a bit to ensure that we’re capturing the raw insights we need to craft compelling communications and conversations…

Here’s the expanded framework. I’ve highlighted the additional elements. As you’ll see they are mostly concerned with ensuring that we really nail the problem:

For [TARGET SPONSOR ROLES] in [TARGET ORGANISATION TYPES]
who are trying to solve [PROBLEM]
but are struggling to [KEY CONSTRAINTS]
as evidenced by [SYMPTOMS]
resulting in [CONSEQUENCES]
[SOLUTION NAME] from [COMPANY NAME]
is a [CATEGORY NAME]
that [COMPELLING REASON TO BUY]
unlike [PRIMARY ALTERNATIVE OPTION]
[SOLUTION NAME] [PRIMARY DIFFERENTIATOR]

Bear in mind that this framework is NOT designed to be used verbatim in your external communications – but it can and must be used to shape and guide both your marketing communications and your sales conversations.

BREAKING DOWN THE COMPONENT PARTS

Every part of this framework has a critical contribution to make in defining your compelling value proposition. Let’s consider each of the component parts:

For [TARGET SPONSOR ROLES] in [TARGET ORGANISATION TYPES]

Generic value propositions that have no clearly defined target audience are inevitably imprecise. That’s why your value proposition must be designed to appeal to specific roles in specific types of organisation. These must represent the people most likely to recognise the problem your solution solves (and who are capable of leading the change process) in the organisations that represent your most valuable customers.

For example, your target sponsors might be “CIOs or IT Directors” in “Mid-size Enterprise Software Vendors”. If you have secondary targets, it’s worth capturing them as part of the process, but remember that compelling messages are best targeted at the sweet spot that lies at the centre of a defined market rather than at the edges.

Who are trying to solve [PROBLEM]

Without a clearly defined problem to solve, there can be no “solution”. But your prospects will always have more issues to address then they have money, time, inclination or budget to deal with. Interesting issues might drive consideration. Important issues might drive evaluation. But only critical issues are guaranteed to drive action.

That’s why it’s vital that your value proposition identifies a central critical issue that, assuming the prospect recognises the problem, is so important that they will inevitably have to take action, and for which your offering is a provably better solution than any other option they might be considering. You can think of this from the prospect’s perspective as an “Essential Job that Needs to be Done”.

But are struggling to [KEY CONSTRAINTS]

It’s one thing to have a critical problem. But you also need to understand what might have been preventing them from solving the problem already. This is where the idea of constraints comes in. Perhaps they have already tried to solve the problem with unsatisfactory results? What’s been holding them back? Of course, you need to focus on the constraints that your solution is best at removing or eliminating.

As evidenced by [SYMPTOMS]

Now you need to think about how you can identify the fact that your prospect is suffering from the identified problem. What are the symptoms that might be visible from outside (or which they might be prepared to admit to in a diagnostic conversation)? If you’re not clear about the symptoms, how are you going to be sure that the prospect is suffering from the problem you have chosen to target?

Resulting in [CONSEQUENCES]

The problems you have identified will have consequences. What are the current consequences of the problem? What is likely happen to the prospect in the future if they fail to address the issue? The combination of a clearly defined problem, constraints and consequences can help to identify the circumstances in which your prospect is inevitably going to have to take action.

[SOLUTION NAME] from [COMPANY NAME]

It’s obvious, but your solution needs to have a name…

Is a [CATEGORY NAME]

…but it also needs to fit into a solution category that your prospect can recognise. This is another critical element of your positioning. It’s almost always best to reference an existing category than to try and create a new and unfamiliar one.

That [COMPELLING REASON TO BUY]

This is where you capture the primary reason that your prospect needs to take action to address the identified problem. What are the primary benefits they will achieve from implementing a solution?

Unlike [PRIMARY ALTERNATIVE OPTION]

Positioning is about contrast. Here you need to identify the alternative option that your prospect is most likely to compare you against when considering how to solve the identified problem. This may not always be a direct competitor – for example, the prospect might consider solving the problem using in-house resources.

[SOLUTION NAME] [PRIMARY DIFFERENTIATOR]

This is where we complete the value proposition. You need to identify the primary thing that sets your solution apart from their primary alternative option.

CRAFTING YOUR UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION

It’s often best to start by bringing a group of sales people and marketers together, and asking them to come up with a draft value proposition using the above framework for one of your primary offerings. We recommend that you focus on a specific offering rather than to start by trying to come up with a value proposition for the organisation as a whole.

Try and get consensus around each of the above elements. Focus on the things that are most important. You’ll probably come up more than one option for the answer for some of the elements – you can capture these secondary elements as side notes or footnotes.

It’s worth validating your draft value proposition with a sample of your most valuable customers: do they recognise the problems, constraints and symptoms? Would they agree with your assessment of the benefits of the solution, the most credible alternative option, and your primary differentiator? This sort of customer feedback can be very helpful in both sanity checking and refining your value proposition.

Once you’re happy with the value proposition for the first offering you selected, you can repeat the process for other key offerings. You’ll probably find the exercise faster the second and subsequent times around, and you’ll probably recognise some repeating patterns.

Once you have a few of these offering-specific value propositions under your belt, you can then attempt to synthesise them together to create an umbrella value proposition for the company as a whole. Let me know how you get along.

Streamlining the entire work process and improving the workflow is not so difficult once you have the right resources, correct planning and proper set of tools. It is important to identify unproductive and redundant activities and manage them with ease. Here are top 5 tools that can help you automate and streamline your business processes:

1. SMART by GEP

Ever wondered how easier it would be to manage the purchases of your entire organization using one piece of software? SMART by GEP procurement software allows you to manage your entire source-to-pay process. Source-to-pay describes the set of processes that encompass the entire procurement and purchasing cycle. It starts with the identification of an opportunity for business-wide savings and ends with payment to the supplier. This all-in-one tool lets buyers manage supplier relationship, contracts, purchase orders and invoices, giving the enterprise easy access to contracted supplier catalogs. It automates, streamlines and accelerates the entire procurement to payment process and gives you full control of your purchasing requirements. Fully-automated purchase order processing helps the procurement team achieve more in less time. Overall, it drives savings, reduces cost and enhances collaboration with colleagues and suppliers.

2. PipeDrive

Every sales process includes a pipeline and this tool allows you to see and measure your sales pipeline’s strengths and weaknesses. It lets you identify the activities that are needed to close sales. The main motto behind PipeDrive is “activity-based selling”. Relevant features in this software include pipeline management, creating records, creating goals and activities, sales reporting and sales forecasting. It has support for mobile app and email integration and set of APIs that allows you to import and export data.

3. Slack

With the tagline “be less busy”, Slack aims to minimize communication and improve productivity. Communication is one of the vital aspects that powers your entire team’s performance. Inappropriate, untimely or inaccurate communication hampers team growth and reduces revenue. With Slack, it is possible for you to minimize the noise in communication and create a smooth flow of proper messaging reaching the correct team member in real time. Slack allows you to organize your team’s conversation in open channels for a transparent view. It also lets you create private channels for more confidential communication. You can also send direct messages or share files with your team members using easy drag and drop features.

4. Doodle

Where there is business, there are meetings! Doodle aims to solve the problem of meeting scheduling. You can create meeting fixtures on the go and arrange a meeting at a mutually agreed time. Scheduling a date will not be a problem if you regularly meet with multiple people. You only need to fill out a simple form with the title, location, and description of the event. The entered information is visible on the poll that lets participants know exactly what the event is.

5. Deputy

Managing your staff is not easy as you might think. Deputy is an awesome staff management software system that handles employee scheduling, time and attendance, task delegation, employee utilization and productivity and employee communication. Often business owners find themselves engaged in tasks that do not add to the overall productivity of the organization. This is why it is necessary to implement software such as Deputy that lets everyone focus more on results and less on time-consuming activities. You can create schedules with instant notifications sent to each employee, you can automate your timesheets, monitor time and attendance, streamline approvals from timesheets to payrolls, allow employees to connect to team communication via their mobile devices and also reward the top performers.

Are you currently using any other tools to automate your work process? Please share with us in the comments below.

Do you care what the other salespeople on your team think of you?

If not, you should.

Sales isn’t an individual, every-rep-for-themselves game. Although healthy competition can raise the bar for everyone, you shouldn’t make enemies of your teammates.

Doing so is literally bad for business. A top-performing sales team is twice as likely to have a collaborative culture than an average one, and four times more likely to report sharing top performers’ techniques with the rest of the team.

So if you’re pissing off your teammates, you’re not just hurting yourself: You’re bringing everyone down with you.

Read on to learn the seven behaviors that’ll earn you a terrible reputation.

1) You Don’t Take Meeting Times Seriously

Showing up late to meetings or to meetings won’t just vex your manager, it’ll also seriously annoy your team members.

It’s much harder for the other meeting attendees to focus when people are wandering in and out like it’s a coffee shop. Setting your own schedule also shows you think your time is more valuable than anyone else’s -- and the other reps won’t take kindly to that implication.

Of course, sometimes your calls with prospects will run long or otherwise conflict with internal meetings. When you can, leave a buffer between your meetings. If you can’t avoid scheduling them back-to-back, give your team members a heads up that you might be late, or send them a quick note via Slack or email when it looks like your previous conversation is going to end later than scheduled.

2) You Always Think the Glass Is Half Empty

A little pessimism in sales can actually be a good thing: It’ll motivate you to ask your prospects tough questions and plan for potential roadblocks.

But if you’re constantly bringing the doom and gloom, your team members will run in the other direction. It’s challenging to stay motivated when someone is always insulting the company, putting down the product, or criticizing the team’s strategy.

Plus, a single negative rep can sabotage an entire sales team meeting. Emotions are actually contagious -- so when one person goes on a rant, they infect the entire room with their mood.

3) You’re a Lone Wolf

Many sales reps are naturally competitive, so when you come up with a creative technique or effective strategy, you might want to keep it to yourself.

However, prioritizing yourself over the rest of the team never helps build strong relationships. Not only will your fellow reps like working with you far more if you freely share your ideas and insights, the entire company will see better results.

According to a CEB report, a sales team’s “network performance” (the positive effect teamwork has on average performance) determines 44% of company profitability.

“The value of all of that shared information increases dramatically as more and more reps opt in to learn and, in turn, share with one another,” CEB directors Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman explain.

4) You Never Accept Responsibility For Your Mistakes

When you strike out on a call or miss your quota, where do you assign responsibility? Some salespeople are eager to point the finger everywhere but themselves, blaming their territory, the quality of their leads, the product, and so on.

But if you’re constantly shifting the blame around, you’ll earn contempt rather than sympathy.

Your fellow reps don’t want to hear your excuses. After all, they have the same job as you -- and when they fall short, they own up to it.

5) You Don’t Do a Good Job Qualifying

Lazy qualifiers are never popular.

If you’re an SDR, booking meetings without properly qualifying leads will force your salespeople to spend valuable time on poor fits, uneducated prospects, and tire-kickers. On the surface, it’ll look like you’re doing a great job -- but sending your reps bad meetings will cause you both to miss quota.

The takeaway? Do your due diligence. Ask the right questions, and walk away if necessary.

6) You’re Pursuing Their Leads

It’s not a shocker that contacting the same prospects as your fellow reps will piss them off. Stealing leads from your colleagues is literally taking money out of their pockets. And there’s no guarantee those deals will close -- even highly interested buyers will be aggravated by multiple calls from different salespeople at the same company, so you’ll sabotage both your team member’s chances and your own.

Being competitive is a good quality in a salesperson. But make sure you’re not taking things too far, as stepping on your team member’s toes will only hurt you.

7) You’re Not Using the CRM

Logging data probably isn’t the most exciting part of your job -- but do it poorly (or worse, not at all), and your office reputation will take a hit.

This is another mistake that SDRs should steer clear of making. If you’re booking meetings for an inside sales rep, their ability to take over the prospect relationship depends on the information you enter in the system.

If you don’t explain the prospect’s pain points, the rep will be forced to redo the discovery step -- annoying the buyer and slowing down the entire process. Or say you leave out the crucial fact that your lead doesn’t have budget authority. Your rep will waste valuable time before realizing they need to loop in the decision maker.

Did any of these seven behaviors ring a bell? If so, you’ll want to change your ways immediately. One toxic rep can poison an entire sales team -- make sure it’s not you.

With all the tools and technology we now have at-hand, it’s a great time to be a demand-generation marketer.

Demand-gen is the umbrella under which all other customer-attention and early funnel efforts find their footing. With strong demand-gen leadership, many other marketing specialties can thrive.

Reaching new markets, building buzz, promoting new offerings, and initiating and nurturing customer relationships are just a few of the activities that demand-gen marketing takes the lead on. Success in those areas trickles down to almost every other marketing sphere, from PPC to inbound marketing to conversion optimization.

To become a demand-gen success, however, you must master these 5 skills.

Demand Gen Skill to Master #1: Google Analytics

How do you know that your demand-gen efforts are producing fruit? You look at the data.

Google Analytics is the widely accepted standard in content measurement tools – and the first thing every demand-gen marketer should master.

Even if you eventually move to a different analytics tool like Omniture, an understanding of Google Analytics is an important foundation for understanding tracking and reporting.

Only 21% of marketers are using analytics to measure marketing ROI for marketing engagement. In other words, most marketers are doing their jobs with blinders on.

Smart demand-gen marketers know better. They let the numbers be their guide.

Not sure where to begin? Google Analytics Academy is a great place to learn the fundamentals.

Demand Gen Skill to Master #2: Excel

Excel isn’t just for numbers people and data nerds. This Microsoft Office tool helps you make smarter, data-driven decisions.

With Excel, you can combine data from multiple sources, get a bigger picture of your demand-gen results, and get insights that analytics software alone can’t provide. It takes all that data and helps you see patterns, trends, and connections you wouldn’t have otherwise spotted.

“If you can become fluent in Excel, it enables you as a marketer to be 100 times more powerful at using data to drive your decisions, because you can analyze data from multiple systems and do analysis not possible in your software tools.” — Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot

A great place to start is this HubSpot article with 10 Excel tricks for marketers.

Demand Gen Skill to Master #3: Designing a Marketing Experiment

Demand generation is equal parts art and science.

Optimizing content can dramatically increase the effectiveness of your demand-gen efforts. The only way to know what to optimize, however, is to test.

Marketing experiments give you the data and insights you need to make your content perform better, hit your lead generation goals, and create an optimum user experience.

Unfortunately, many marketers approach this with a “throwing spaghetti at the wall” methodology. Learning how to effectively design a marketing experiment will help you avoid wasting your time (and marketing budget).

Start with SnapApp’s Beginner’s Guide to Designing Marketing Experiments. That’ll get you on the road to success in no time.

Demand Gen Skill to Master #4: Ability to Assess New Technology Tools

Marketers have more technology at their disposal today than ever before. From CRMs to marketing automation systems to analytics software, you have a wide variety of powerful tools to choose from.

But as you know from being the excellent marketer you are, more choices can actually make it harder to decide what to use.

Smart marketers know how to do their homework and assess new technology tools. But they don’t stop at tool analysis. They also consider how the technology will align and integrate with the tools they already use and how it will impact their customers.

Scott Vaughan, CMO of Integrate, shared an effective assessment framework in his article on Chief Marketer. This is a great starting point for creating a process for assessing new technology tools and their potential impact on the business.

Still feeling overwhelmed by all the options? You’re not alone. This SnapApp post will help you get more clarity.

Image source: chiefmartech.com

Demand Gen Skill to Master #5: Creating a Clear Picture of the Buyer by Connecting Opportunity and Activity Data

Demand-gen marketers are experts at spotting opportunities. Really successful marketers, however, don’t forget the data.

Connecting opportunity and activity data can give you a clearer, more detailed picture of the buyer, and help you identify the best content type and placement. This of course leads to more robust buyer personas and a deeper understanding of the marketing landscape.

This clear picture also helps you weed out ineffective content, narrow in on the correct timing of offers, and eliminate unproductive locations from the marketing plan.

Where do you start? This Demand Gen Report article includes specific information on creating a structured approach.

Demand Gen Marketers Set the Bar

Demand-gen marketers create the systems that initiate the customer relationship and set all other marketing into motion. A successful demand generation program leads to more qualified sales opportunities.

Master the five skills in this post and you’ll get to the top of your demand-gen game faster and experience more lead-generation success.

A lead score helps you determine the sales-readiness of individual leads. This, in turn, allows your sales team to operate at peak efficiency, wasting less time on leads who still need to be nurtured and aren’t ready for the sales process.

But whether you’re new to lead scoring, or you just don’t have an established system yet, some common issues can get in the way of optimizing sales.

Here are some tips for fixing common lead scoring issues.

1. Determine What Your Ideal Lead Looks Like

Stu Heinecke, humor relations guy for Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA) says, “If you’re not able to explain who your ideal prospect is in a single sentence without fumbling for words, you need to get to work on a simple, but very specific definition. Identifying the right prospects then becomes much simpler, and your follow-up much more efficient.”

Many businesses don’t have a fully fleshed-out picture of what their ideal lead looks like, which explains why they’re not entirely sure how to score them.

It’s likely that you’ve already collected a great deal of information about your leads, from their job title and industry to annual revenue and the number of pages they’ve viewed on your website. You can leverage all of this information with your lead scoring. You can also choose not to use any of it if it’s irrelevant.

The best step you can take is to evaluate who your best customers are and what they have in common. This step alone can provide some valuable clues as to what your ideal lead looks like.

2. Score Both Demographic & Behavioral Attributes

How interested are you in a particular prospect? How interested are they in you? Do you have a way of differentiating between the two?

Just because you’re interested in a lead doesn’t mean they’re interested in you. The opposite can also be true. It’s important not to confuse the two when you’re looking to optimize lead scoring.

Demographic scores represent your interest in the prospect, while behavioral scores represent a prospect’s interest in you. Only using one lead score can make it difficult to segment your leads, which should be grouped by interest level as well as the potential value they represent. With demographic and behavioral scores in place, your sales team will have better data to act upon.

3. Create a Sufficient Number of Rules

If your lead scoring system is too simple, it could actually make your job of ranking leads more difficult. How many rules have you put in place?

If you only have three or four rules, then there’s a good chance you can’t differentiate the good leads from the bad. Your best leads could even be getting lost in the shuffle. Although simplicity is a good thing to practice, you should consider fleshing out your lead scoring if it only accounts for a small number of factors.

4. Determine What Makes Leads Sales-Ready

Do you know when to hand leads off to sales? Do you have a score threshold for when to reach out to leads?

If you know what has led to sales conversions in the past, you’ll be able to do a more effective job of handing over leads to the sales team at the right time. And don’t forget: A lead’s score changes over time.

Pamela Vaughan, principal marketing manager of HubSpot, advises us to “decide at which point a total score would validate sending a lead to your sales team for a conversation. It helps to look at past lead activity when determining this figure, so you know what has historically led to sales conversions.” She adds, “It’s important to remember that, because a lead’s activity can change from day to day, a lead’s individual score will also change over time.”

5. Include Current Customers In Your Lead Scoring System

It’s one thing to constantly go after new leads and customers. But often the most profitable leads are your existing customers—people who have already bought from you. Re-engaging at the right time to upsell or cross-sell is sales 101.

One of your existing customers might come to your website looking for something new—an add-on, an upgrade, an additional product or service. If you don’t already have a way of scoring customers that have bought from you before, put processes in place for your sales team so they don’t miss out on opportunities to sell. This also helps keeps costs down, since you don’t have to generate new leads through more costly methods.

6. Mitigate the Inflation of Lead Scores

Does your lead score system account for time? You might have a prospect whose lead score has increased because they made a call or they attended one of your webinars. And while it’s worth assigning points to leads that have engaged and shown interest, it’s also important to remember that these points can deteriorate in value with each passing day.

Avoid the over-inflation of a prospect’s lead score by accounting for time. If you don’t, your sales team will end up taking on leads whose value has diminished in value.

Getting Your Lead Scoring Issues Figured Out

Lead scoring enables you to create a well-organized, healthy lead flow by ranking leads based on their sales-readiness. When they are handed off to sales at the right time, their effectiveness will soar.

But first, you need a properly defined, well-orchestrated scoring system. Without this, you won’t see the kind of results you’re hoping for.

If you’ve encountered any of the above issues, take the time necessary to address them. Many companies don’t have a perfect process when they are first getting set up. Through testing and iteration, you can develop a system that’s right for you.

“This CRM is going to revolutionize our business!”
-Every CRM Buyer Ever

Your team was elated. Remember? You just signed off on your new CRM. Maybe there were even a few high fives, a few back slaps.

After months of researching vendors… brainstorming an exhaustive list of questions… narrowing down the list of vendors… more questions… gaining buy-in from an incredibly thorough IT department… at last, you e-signed the dotted line.

Whew! Full steam ahead!

And then you discovered: The rest of the team – and especially the sales team – wasn’t nearly as excited. No biggie. That’s what CRM training is for, right?

A few years later, you’re staring a stark reality in the face: That advanced, expensive sales engine we bought didn’t come with fuel. And if employees won’t enter complete, accurate, and up-to-date data into our CRM, or login to prepare for clients, this ginormous investment is useless.

But if you could somehow just flip a switch, you know, some sort of “CRM adoption” switch, then you could finally realize the following benefits.

Benefit #1: An actual ROI from your CRM
Which option do you think sales and business development teams prefer?

Option A: Spend roughly an hour per day manually looking up and logging contacts, creating accounts, creating opportunities, logging outreach, logging notes, entering action items, figuring out who to reach out to next, and basically anything other than actually meeting with customers!

Option B: Let AI intuitively feed you just the information you need at just the right time to connect to real rooms full of customers and prospects all while taking care of all of the logging and admin work for you in, you guessed it, your CRM.

By making it stupidly simple for employees to get amazing information to your CRM, you finally have the contextual data that fuels your powerful relationship intelligence engine. Now say it again (and this time it’s actually true), “This CRM is going to revolutionize our business!”

Benefit #2: A streamlined sales process
You hired your sales team to generate revenue, right? So why all the admin work? The average CRM user spends 5.5 hours per week adding contacts, updating contact information, capturing meeting notes, noting action items, assigning tasks, logging phone calls, inserting email interactions, praying that everyone else is doing their part to log the right data in the right fields, all of which costs companies an average of $13,200 per CRM user, per year.

What a waste.

Your CRM should serve sales and business development teams, not the other way around. And when you REALLY automate your CRM, it will serve the core function of sales, which brings us to our next benefit.

Benefit #3: A smarter sales team
If you’re in sales, you’ve been there. There’s a big client meeting on the immediate horizon and you’re scrambling. You need knowledge and you need it now.

So you’re tearing through email conversation threads, online notes, paper notes, checking with colleagues regarding recent interactions…

Is there anything I should know about in the CRM? Probably not, but better check anyway… I wish my colleagues who touch my accounts would enter data into that damn thing… I would. Just don’t have time…

Any big client news? What are they talking about? Can’t look ignorant… Oh, that’s right – they hired that new executive. What do we know about her? Does anyone here know her? Is the competition connected to her?!?

You know the feeling – it’s like you’re running yourself ragged just to appear competent.

Imagine letting the system prep you with everything you need to know:

• What’s going on with the client?
• Any new relationships I can leverage?
• Do we have board connections?
• Has anyone been touching my client?
• What if they didn’t log it all?
• What’s new with all our contacts?
• What is the status of the agenda items they care about?
• How has relationship been trending?
• Are we likely to close the opportunities when we think we will?

Getting all this information without the work enables a serene, successful meeting that leaves prospects impressed. No scrambling needed.

Benefit #4: An empowered marketing team
Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing teams see 38% higher sales win rates. It’s not hard to see why. With buyers now escorting themselves through most of the buying cycle before contacting a company, the pressure is squarely on marketing’s shoulders to identify ideal prospects, attract them with content, and nurture them until they’re ready to buy.

Any B2B marketing leader will tell you that “nurturing” is far easier said than done. Effective nurturing doesn’t just require quality content, but also contextual content that meets the reader where they are in the buyer’s journey.

“Overall, there is a significant correlation between the effectiveness of customer-facing content and the level of relationships that can be achieved with customers,” says Tamara Schenk of CSO Insights. “Content matters. Content in context matters even more. Content must become a sales force’s strategic imperative and a number one priority on every sales leader’s agenda. Highly effective customer-facing content that covers the entire customer’s journey is a must-have ingredient to remain successful in an ever-changing, buyer-driven world.”

Marketing automation systems need contextual data, and that contextual data comes from the CRM. A marketing team empowered by data can deliver the right content, to the right person, at the right time. A marketing team that lacks data can’t. It’s that simple.

Benefit #5: Keep your customers
Legendary aviator Edgar Mitchell famously said, “If we don’t take care of our customers, someone else will.” Given competitor’s’ ability to swoop in with insight-fueled solutions, Mitchell’s quote has never been truer. Customer retention is the bloodline of any business, especially when you consider that it costs 7x more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one.

Today’s customers expect more, and disjointed experiences don’t fly. Each team member, from business development, to support, to marketing, to the CEO needs the ability to pick up each customer conversation where it left off. How can you reasonably expect to deliver superior customer service when 88% of CRM users admit to entering incomplete contact information?

You already know all this, which is why you bought your CRM. Now it’s just about simplifying and automating everything already.

The good news is you don’t need to switch your CRM – you just need to automate everything, making it so simple and advantageous that employees don’t think twice about using it. In fact, they may not even know it! We can show you how with a personalized demo.

Sales enablement is a hot topic for discussion in both sales and marketing departments these days. In fact, I ran a Google search recently on “what is sales enablement” that returned over 1,760,000 results; so a lot of people are writing and talking about it.

Just for kicks, I ran a search on “Pokemon Go” – and you guessed it: 33,900,000 results on that one. I also found a story about two guys who fell off a 75-foot cliff in San Diego while playing the game. Luckily for them, they survived with moderate injuries.

Download our free Sales Enablement Roadmap to learn how to make your sales team more effective.

In much the same way, many business owners are in danger of “falling off the cliff” attempting to get sales enablement right for their companies. And the injuries can be a lot more serious if it isn’t done right, you’ll experience lead flow declines, diminishing revenues and cash flow constraints.

How Do You Get It Right?

Let’s start with what sales enablement is courtesy of a really good definition from Scott Santucci of Forrester:

“Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system.”

This definition is loaded with great meaning, but I’d like to focus on the words “selling system” and how the lack of such a system is preventing companies from achieving sustainable gains from their sale teams’ efforts.

In much the same way, many business owners are in danger of “falling off the cliff” attempting to get sales enablement right for their companies. In simple terms, a selling system consists of three things:

1. A specific, documented process that outlines how the sales team manages the interaction of the buyer’s journey, from beginning to end;
2. Content that helps the buyer through each stage of the buying process; and
3. Technology including, at a minimum, both a marketing automation and a CRM platform.

Let’s review each in detail.

Documented Sales Process

If you haven’t clearly defined and documented your sales process, this is the time to do it. But where do you start? If you’re currently closing deals, you already have some kind of process in place to support guiding an unqualified lead to becoming a satisfied client.

Select a recently closed sale that’s representative of the bulk of your transactions and work backwards from the close.

I’ll use an example outline from one of our transactions:

1. Get signed goals contract from client
2. Signed agreement submitted by new client via QuoteRoller, our chosen proposal platform
3. Updated agreement based on final discussion/negotiation with prospective client loaded into QuoteRoller
4. Submit proposed agreement to client via QuoteRoller
5. Discovery call three (if additional data is needed beyond first two discovery calls)
6. Discovery call two
7. Discovery call one
8. Client submits Inbound Marketing Assessment
9. Run competitors report on prospect’s top three competitors
10. Personalized follow up email triggered by lead score passing 60 points or from a specific form conversion
11. Lead moves from Marketing Qualified Lead to Sales Qualified Lead classification

Each of our discovery calls leads us further into the identification and diagnoses of the problems and challenges that the prospect faces. At the end of the discovery process, we’ve gathered enough information to allow us to build a proposal that addresses the pain points and is also tailored to that prospect’s business objectives.

In this scenario, we have – if you count all of the interactions – 11 touch points from the beginning to the end of our process. While we have some sales that require fewer touches and some that require many more, this is indicative of a typical transaction. The timeline on our transactions can range from eight weeks on the short side to a year on the long side, with the average being about four months.

The four most important things to consider when developing your process are:

1. Aligning it with how your prospects are buying today;
2. Keeping it as streamlined as possible;
3. Ensuring that every sales team member uses it as designed; and
4. Having the mindset that you’ll always be refining it for improvement.

Content

Once you’ve documented your sales process, it makes it so much easier to look at what the buyer’s information requirements are throughout their journey and it will help you tailor the content for each stage.

For example, our first discovery call focuses on the information we obtain from the Inbound Marketing Assessment (IMA). The IMA has 59 questions that, once answered, give us a good grasp on where the prospect is in terms of “marketing health.” The content we use to engage the prospect at this point is driven by the high priority pain points uncovered by the IMA.

How do you get sales enablement right the first time for your company?

Instead of generic content addressing higher-level problems, we can get very specific with content addressing those high priority problems. Along the way, there will be stalls – the points at which the prospect may slow down, postpone or even disengage from the process. These stall points are where you need to have the right content to reengage prospects and propel them through the succeeding stages of the buying process.

Technology

Technology is critical to the strategic execution of the marketing plan, the collection of prospect behaviors to provide sales intelligence and the performance reporting that provides feedback on the plan’s effectiveness.

For the marketing team, the creation, distribution and measurement of content is best managed by an automation tool. For the sales team, support provided by a CRM tool allows them to manage the simultaneous pursuit of a variety of prospects while supplying critical business intelligence to help direct their sales activities in the most productive way.

In many of the assessments we do for prospective clients, we find deficiencies in the sales process. (Most of the time, it’s a lack of agreement on what the process is and/or lack of documentation – usually both.) The important point here is that the problems created by the lack of a documented sales process are magnified by the lack of technology required to support the process.

We recommend starting with formalizing the sales process through documentation and then finding a CRM platform that is simple enough to use so the sales team really takes advantage of it.

Thirteen years ago LinkedIn launched Groups, an online space for lively discussion and ideas. So what could possibly go wrong?

Well like every other free online forum on the web it quickly filled with people more interested in prospecting for clients than actively contributing to the conversation. As a result things became very spammy and the “real” discussions waned.

Seeing the need for reform, LinkedIn retooled Groups and instituted a set of rules, guidelines, policies and features designed to make it far less of a spam factory.

So how can you use LinkedIn groups for sales without annoying the very people you want to connect with?

The first rule is don’t be the “real estate agent” who only goes to parties so he can get his card in everyone’s pocket.

People can sniff this out a mile away. And they can see you don’t care about anything other than making money off those in attendance. Even the host is left wondering how you even got in.

So the trick is to be tactful about your approach.

Here’s one way…

On the Groups page, type into the search bar a topic that your prospects might be talking about.

So I type in the keyword ‘training’ and a message pops saying, “Hey, here are some discussions within the Sales Management Executives Group that include the word ‘training’.”

Seeing some useful groups in the search results, I would then post some useful content in the conversations there to further the discussions. The idea is that people would notice my statements, comment on them and ideally want to reach out to connect with me to discuss further.

The other way is a little more proactive. Look at the various comments on the subject and explore who is doing the liking and commenting. Then take a look at the commentor’s profiles and if appropriate, reach out to them about their comment in the group and set a conversation in play.

Both approaches require a fair bit of tact and finesse to ensure that those you reach out to aren’t made to feel like they’re a mark. That means, coming with your A-game with good content to add to conversations and a willingness to invest in the discussions.

There are two reasons for doing this. One, is to ensure that Groups are seen by users as a good place for discussion. The other is to ensure that you, and by affiliation, your company are seen as high-information contributors in the groups.

Because if you’re spotted as someone merely on the prowl for prospects, you’ll be as clearly identifiable as a tin of spam.

People like to be catered to, but not pandered to. Doubly so when they're at the receiving end of a marketing campaign. And especially so if they're Millennials. So here's advice from a Millennial on how to actually reach young customers. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

There are different kinds of companies when it comes to marketing strategies – those that want to be the first to try something new and those that are content letting others work out the bugs before they step in to a tried and true strategy.

The benefit to being first is you stand out from the crowd and you usually get the best pricing because there is no competition.

The benefit of not being first is you know something works before you try it. There is less risk of getting it wrong, making a mistake, or upsetting your potential customers.

But there is a risk to waiting. And it’s one that not many people will tell you.

Marketing strategies – whether they are new advertising mediums, new ways of following up, messaging, etc. – have a lifecycle. At first, they are brand new and only a few companies are using them. They go through growing pains trying to find their place in the world, getting consumers used to this new concept. Then the good ones start to work really well for the companies that figured out how to make it work. Then other companies come in and drive up the price as consumer acceptance becomes greater.

And finally, every other company comes in, the market becomes oversaturated, the consumer learns to ignore it, the price goes up and performance goes down.

The risk for being late to a new marketing strategy = when everyone starts doing the same thing, the relative effectiveness of that activity goes down.

Let’s use Facebook advertising as an example. At first, very few companies were doing it. There may have been some hiccups, but because they got in early, the prices they paid were much lower and they had more time to optimize their campaigns than other companies who joined up later. As time went on, it got more expensive to advertise on Facebook due to increase competition. Eventually, every company in your market will be advertising on Facebook. And it may still work, but it won’t give you any competitive advantage anymore. You will simply be doing the same thing as everyone else.

All leaders know to be proactive when times are challenging. They don’t always know exactly what to do, but they know they need to do something.

I am surprised at how few leaders work to capitalize when things are going well. When market conditions are favorable and business is booming, this is not the time to just sit back and enjoy the spoils. Great leaders know that they need to be even more strategic and proactive during boom times as responses to “sunny day” temptations can make the difference between being good, great or even awesome.

A great leader making the right choices regarding the following seven temptations can move mountains and create wealth for all, leaving behind those who have to start the hard work again when the bust inevitably happens.

1. Temptation: Save praise for later.

When things are busy and bonuses are high, the positive morale makes praise and compliments seem superfluous. Plus, people are busy, and as the saying goes, “good news waits till noon.” But noon often becomes never.

What great leaders do instead: Now is the time to make sure that people feel appreciated for the growth and hard work. Make a point of offering small bits of specific, positive feedback on a regular basis. Put systems in place that help the team members celebrate their accomplishments — beyond the extra cash in their check.

2. Temptation: Give in to “good enough.”

When things are going well, it’s hard to see the little errors and systemic breakdowns that occur. Often the lost deals and customer dissatisfaction are hidden by increasing top-line revenue and margins. Robust times are when it’s easiest to coast and let your people do the same.

What great leaders do instead: Heavy volume means you can put the systems to the test with minimal risk. Dedicate time and resources to stretching and testing limits so you can increase capacity and efficiency. There is no better time to look for new opportunities and ways to improve. Use this boom to encourage team members to think of the future and big possibilities. Then empower them with committed resources to go as far as you can safely go.

3. Temptation: Become invisible.

Good times are often busy times, and you may be wrapped up with travel, meetings and communication. You may disappear for weeks at a time. You know what you’re up to, but your staff doesn’t

What great leaders do instead: It’s good to delegate and focus on growth, but the team still needs direction and confidence in the leadership. The more quickly they surpass goals, the more they need guidance toward the next summit. Make a point of being visible and active in goal discussions. Come out of your office and talk to your people. Schedule lunches or happy hours so they can get creative talk time outside of day-to-day issues.

4. Temptation: Over-rely on star players.

Big producers add a lot to the company, but it is a mistake to underplay the rest of the team. Diversification is key to longevity in down markets.

What great leaders do instead: Make a conscious effort to monitor, motivate and cultivate each team member. Repetition of consistent business is a great way to help that “B” player get closer to becoming an “A” sales star. Use the abundant market to build skills and deepen your bench. That way you will have redundancies in place and people ready to step up if your starting players become unavailable.

5. Temptation: Decide you are indispensable.

There is nothing wrong with knowing the value you bring to a company. If things are going well, it is natural to feel a sense of pride and ownership. Just be very careful to avoid thinking or behaving as though the place couldn’t carry on without you. Remember what they say about cemeteries being full of indispensable people.

What great leaders do instead: Stay mindful of the ways you personally can continue to improve, which will keep you learning and keep you humble. Empower your team to grow and aspire to bigger positions that will expand the company exponentially. If they are aspiring to take on your position, you are doing something right.

6. Temptation: Stop asking “What If?” just because you can.

Daydreaming, asking questions, cultivating curiosity — these are the activities that fuel creativity and innovation. When you’re riding high on what’s already working, sometimes you forget to explore new territory just because it is there.

What great leaders do instead: Make opportunities for creative thinking at work and in the personal lives of your team. Create challenging exercises to keep team members on their toes. Schedule regular retreat time away from the craziness of daily operations to address new opportunities and resources only available when abundance is high.

7. Temptation: Give up experimenting.

It seems counter-intuitive to think that success can cause paralysis. But when things are great, you want them to stay great, and if you are not careful, that can lead to a paralyzing fear that they may not. It is easy to become too afraid to try anything new. Unfortunately, what works during the boom may kill you when the bust comes.

What great leaders do instead: Apportion time, resources, and funds to create a laboratory where safe failure can occur regularly. Challenge the team to take calculated risks on a regular basis, so you can learn, grow and capitalize.

This article first published on YPO’s website.

1. Write a tweet.
2. Leave some room at the end.
3. Then keep typing hashtags until you reach 140 characters.

You will probably get more impressions, but the bigger question is: are those impressions worth anything… or are you just attracting spam accounts? Furthermore, are you turning off your legitimate follower-base by using a slew of spammy-looking hashtags?

Since hashtags just celebrated their ninth birthday (check out the first-ever use of a Twitter hashtag here), a lot has changed. What went from being a valuable organizing tool in communication swung across the pendulum to spam and is now finding a balance somewhere in the middle.

Search Engine Journal’s Experiment
In an age where major entertainment marketing campaigns are abandoning Twitter, it’s time to seriously reconsider strategy. A recent infographic from Search Engine Journal, “Why Twitter Hashtags Are Worthless,” puts the contemporary use of hashtags under a critical eye. (We’ve reposted the full infographic below.)

Here’s what Search Engine Journal’s research found in evaluating 137,052 Tweets over a seven-day period:

• 9% of Twitter accounts were “Questionable” (meaning they had a high follower/following count and odd liking/sharing habits)
• 5% of Twitter accounts were “Real” (meaning they had organic following, sharing and liking habits)
• 6% of Twitter accounts were “ZeroSpam” (retweet farms)

ZeroSpam Twitter Accounts…

• Tend to be less than 8 months old
• Follow 0 people and have fewer than 10 followers
• Tweet and Like 5k+ times in less than six months
• Average 6,691 likes and 17,025 shares/retweets
• Total 19.22M false likes and 48.9M shares in less than a year

Accounts identified as “Questionable” follow 4.2x more accounts than are following them. Generally, they use business-related hashtags, most often these:

• #advertising
• #business
• #contentmarketing
• #design
• #digitalmarketing
• #emailmarketing
• #entrepreneur
• #growthhacking
• #inboundmarketing
• #influencermarketing
• #marketing
• #mobilemarketing
• #onlinemarketing
• #pr
• #sales
• #seo
• #socialmedia
• #startup

How Does It Affect Me?
Well, if you use these hashtags for business, then Twitter spam, which brings bad or incomplete data into your analytics, could end up misdirecting your social strategy. Spam of this nature is a growing problem on Twitter; the company reports:

• 5% of the 300M+ monthly users are spam
• 15M monthly spam users spam tweet and like 1,000x/month
• 95B false notifications are generated per month

So, Should You Use Twitter Hashtags?
Hashtags in and of themselves are not bad. However, we have noticed with many of our BuzzPlant clients that conversational Twitter behavior generates much higher rates of impression, engagement and overall value than “broadcast” Tweets.

Do you use hashtags on Twitter? If so, how? If not, why not? Tell us in the comments below.

Paying for content from a professional marketing company can seem crazy.

Why not just have an intern whip up some content for you?

I’ll tell you why (and you may not like the answer, but it’s the truth).

Because your intern sucks.

Your intern isn’t a trained writer.

Your intern doesn’t know a damn thing about writing content that persuades, informs, or directs customers.

Maybe your intern knows a little HTML and CSS, maybe they know how to put together a sentence or paragraph — heck, maybe they even know some marketing principles!

They took marketing 201 after all.

But that’s insufficient. Having an intern, or your cousin, or your friend’s brother’s wife who published a children’s book in the ‘90s, write the marketing content for your website…

Or your brochure…

Or even your business cards…

Is crazy.

Here’s why.

Paying for Content From a Professional Is an Investment — Paying for Content From an Amateur Is Setting Money on Fire

(Oh, and FYI, it’s equally crazy to write your own content, but I’ll get into that bit a little later.)

Having an intern or a secretary or an employee who isn’t a professional writer create your content is crazy.

Here’s why.

Your website has a variety of functions:

• To display your product or service
• To let people know you exist
• To help people find you and contact you
• To bring in leads

It may also have these functions:

• To sell a product or service directly
• To support existing customers
• To take payments

So ask yourself this — are you willing to lose leads because prospects don’t know what to do once they land on your website?

Or because your content sounds like a college essay?

Do you want people to be confused when they go on your website to make a payment?

Do you want them to have difficulty understanding your product? Or difficulty researching you and your company?

Do you want them to get lost as they search diligently for a way to purchase your service?

Do you want to lose money? Or prospects? Or time?

If you’re not paying for content, or you’re “paying for content” by paying an intern or some random person or employee to write for you, you’re paying a higher price.

You’re paying in lost leads.

You’re paying in lost sales.

You’re paying in unhappy customers.

You’re paying with the integrity of your business and the image of your brand.

You may be thinking, “Ok, fine! I’ll just write it myself!”

Gear it down big shifter.

Even if You Can Write Your Content Yourself, You Shouldn’t

The main reason? Confirmation bias.

Also the blind spot bias.

Or any of the dozens and dozens of biases affecting our ability to see the truth about ourselves and our endeavours.

(Enjoy that list, you can get lost in it for days.)

The point is this — you’re in too deep.

You run the show, you know your business inside and out, you know the minor details that make you the expert you are.

This is bad (at least, it’s bad for writing content).

You’ll make assumptions about what your customers know, assumptions that are completely unconscious, assumptions that are wrong.

You’ll write at a level that’s too high, or too low, for your customers. You’ll miss things that an outside observer will see in an instant.

You’ll even miss simple things — doubled words, typos, missing punctuation.

These are things an outside writer, paired with a good proofreader, will catch in an instant.

There’s Actually a More Important Reason You Shouldn’t Write Your Own Content

If you write it, you won’t be able to evaluate it properly.

If you’re paying for content from a professional, you can read over what they’ve written and notice mistakes or issues immediately.

It will be much simpler to get your content where you need it to be.

If you write it yourself, you’re just going to have a harder time finding issues.

Oh, and it will probably take you a lot longer to write it than you think it will.

Paying for content lets you avoid these issues.

Your Website or Print Content Is an Investment in Your Business — Don’t Skimp

You get what you pay for — that’s the ugly truth about marketing.

If you don’t pay someone who’s trained to write marketing content, you’re making your marketing less effective.

You’re paying for mediocrity.

Which is crazy.

Because you’re anything but mediocre.

Your brand is anything but mediocre.

Why wouldn’t you want the best for both?

Great marketing content can increase your sales.

It can generate more leads.

It can reduce customer complaints and customer service calls.

It can make your job a heck of a lot easier.

Your website, or your brochure, or your pay-per-click ad, or your Facebook page, can become useful tools in your effort to bring customers into the fold.

If they’re written right.

That’s the real value of paying for content — it’s like bringing on a new salesperson and customer service agent all wrapped into one.

You’re investing in the future profitability of your business.

You’re ensuring that your website supports your brand, helps your customers, and does what you need it to do.

Pay a Professional so You Can Get Back to Being a Professional

You’re a professional.

You have work to do.

You don’t have time to clean up messes (which is what you’ll have to do if you pay an intern or family friend to write your marketing content).

Paying for content is the best way to ensure you can focus on your business (and not marketing).

Get it taken care of now, so you don’t have to worry about it in the future.

Click here to contact us about your project.

Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead.”

Getting your point across in as few words as possible takes time and effort. But it’ll pay off: According to an analysis of more than 40 million emails, the most effective were between 50 and 125 words.

Wondering how you can cut your messages down to this length? Here are the most common ways you may be wasting space.

1) Being Too Wordy

Make your sentences as short as possible. If your prospect struggles to get your point, they’ll probably stop reading.

Keep an eye out for these wordy phrases:

• “First and foremost”: Replace with “first.”
• “At this point in time”: Replace with “currently.”
• “For the purpose of”: Replace with “to.”
• “In the near future”: Replace with “soon.”
• “Whether or not”: Replace with “whether.”
• “With the exception of”: Replace with “except.”
• “Make an effort”: Replace with “try.”
• “Consensus of opinion”: Replace with “consensus.”
• “In view of the fact that”: Replace with “because.”

2) Introducing Yourself

Never begin an email by stating your name, title, and company. Not only is this exactly the kind of run-of-the-mill opening an old-school salesperson would use -- which’ll immediately put your recipient on guard -- it’s also a waste of valuable space. Prospects can find this information in your email signature and the “From” field.

(Need to update your email signature? Use HubSpot’s free email signature generator.)

3) Repeating Your Subject Line

Your subject line should act as the prologue of your email. It sets the stage, piquing your prospect’s interest so they open and read your message. Recycling your subject line in the first sentence of your email isn’t just lazy -- it’s ineffective.

Before:

After:

4) Inserting Full URLs

Providing helpful blog posts, web pages, or resources lets you add value and position yourself as a trusted consultant. But you’ll lose valuable real estate if you just copy and paste the entire URL -- not to mention that full links make your emails look messy.

It might sound obvious, but you should always use hyperlinks.

Before:

Check out this blog post on going from door-to-door selling to the C-suite: http://blog.hubspot.com/sales/aol-svp-slideshare?_ga=1.54227437.455576106.1468247616#sm.001gax27mwqzfg510vh1c8izdcqc2

After:

Check out this blog post on going from door-to-door selling to the C-suite.

5) Explaining Your Purpose

Telling your prospect why you’re emailing by writing, “I’m just emailing to … ” or “I just wanted to check in after … ”, is a waste of time. They already know you’re emailing them. Your point will be more effective if you simply get to it.

Before:

“I’m following up on our consultation. Have you thought about sourcing your supplies through a single OEM?”

After:

“Have you thought about sourcing your supplies through a single OEM?”

6) Including Too Many Ideas

You might have a thought-provoking question, four eye-opening statistics, and three compelling benefits to share with your prospect. But stick to one or two per email.

The goal is to connect with your prospect, not sell them. If they’re confronted with a ton of information, they’ll be overwhelmed rather than intrigued.

As an added benefit, keeping a few factoids up your sleeve will come in handy if the buyer doesn’t respond to your first few emails. Giving each message a different focus keeps them from feeling repetitive.

7) Using the Passive Voice

Tighten up your sentences by changing them from passive to active voice. You can identify the passive voice by adding “by zombies” to the sentence’s verb. If the new sentence makes sense, it’s written in passive voice.

Take this sentence: “Improvements were suggested … by zombies.”

To rewrite a sentence in the active voice, determine who’s performing the main action, then use them as the sentence’s subject.

For example, the rewritten sentence might be, “Our team suggested improvements,” or “The client suggested improvements.”

Once you rewrite it in active voice, adding “by zombies” doesn’t work:

“The client suggested improvements … by zombies.”

Getting rid of the passive voice won’t just make your emails shorter: It’ll also make you sound more confident.

8) Including Generic Statements

If you want to grab your prospect’s attention, you can’t waste any time on unrelated statements or questions. Immediately diving into your main purpose might feel rude, but it actually shows thoughtfulness for the buyer’s busy workday.

Wondering what’s considered superfluous? Here are some common offenders:

• “I hope you’re having a nice [day, week, month].”
• “Hope you’re doing well.”
• “I trust you’re doing well.”
• “Happy [day of the week].”
• “How has your summer been?”

Notice the common theme? Each of these lines could apply to anyone. If your opening sentence isn’t personalized to the individual buyer, delete it.

Trimming down your emails makes them easier to read -- and therefore, easier to respond to. If you want your prospects to take action, write less.

The key in building a successful product is about building the right thing for the right target audience.

If you think it’s all about the product you are selling, you’re missing the point. It’s about creating the product your users need and want.

Listen to your users, but really listen. That way, you’ll be able to fine-tune your product into something they will want to use and be willing to pay for. You need to get inside the mind of your customers.

Any good customer success manager will tell you that the real secret lies in the acceptance that it is all about them. It’s about making them feel like you truly get them. Like you’re really there just for them.

But how can you uncover your users’ needs? How can you put yourself in their shoes in order to truly understand them?

Four tactics that will help you get into your user’s mindset.

Pro tip before we go in:
If you really want to strengthen the relationships between your users and your product, don’t just read these tips, bookmark and go on with your life – act now!

1. Create a Buyer Persona, find their Online Habitat and do some spy work.

One of the best ways to stand out while providing quality beyond what anyone else is doing in your field is by truly understanding your target market.

Dig in and learn more about who they are and what they’re trying to achieve by using your product.

After your Buyer Persona is all set, write a list of groups, forums, subreddits, wherever you think your audience spends their spare time. Spend some time in these groups – see what they care about, what their needs are, even interact if you feel comfortable enough to do so. Learn what they’re thinking by seeing them interact with others.

2. Watch User Session Recording to understand their experience.

The hardest lesson I learned as I watched my first user session recording, was that I didn’t know my users as well as I thought I did.

I was sure I had planned everything out to the smallest detail, that our design and flow was magnificent and that they would intuitively know what to do.

And then I started watching our user session recording.

Wherever I thought they would scroll, they hit “next” and when I thought they would hit “next” they were searching for more information.

These are not mistakes done by a newbie. Anyone creating a new product or launching a new feature will most likely make a few mistakes while making predictions. It is almost impossible to predict exactly the way the user is going to behave.

Therefore, analyze user behavior along with analytics and try using tools like User Session Recordings, which allow you to segment your users by actions, session characteristics, and demographics, to see exactly how they behave on your site and where they’re having trouble.

Seeing what the real experience feels like for your customers, as a Customer Success Manager, will allow you to help them further than expected and improve their experience with empathy (we will get into that later).

3. Align your goals with their goals.

As a customer success manager, your only goal is to make sure your customers are getting what they want to get out of your product and that they are happy and delighted by the experience.

You should aspire to create value for your customers by helping them get what they need.

By aligning your goals with theirs, you can improve customer communications and you can make sure you’re focusing on the right things.

Even if your product is still crude or has some technical growing pains, understanding your customer’s goals and showing them that you’re working with them towards these goals, will get them to love the entire experience of using your product.

People want to belong to something they feel they can relate to. If they feel you really understand them and their needs, it is more likely that we will have customer retention.

4. Be empathetic.

It might surprise you to hear empathy in terms of customer success or product development but it is a core value in the course of making smart choices.

It implies considering people’s feelings, along with other factors, in the progress of building common ground.

As you modify your product based on data and analytics, you must also take into consideration their emotional reactions. Not only will you be meeting customers’ needs, but you will also overcome their expectations.
You can show your empathy in several ways:

1. Run surveys to collect feedback in order to sense the viewpoints of every user.
2. Make sure your response time and customer interaction are flawless – stop worrying about your own problems and listen to THEM.
3. Spend A LOT of time on the previous 3 tips – every minute you spend learning about your users is an opportunity to raise constructive feedback.

Being empathetic can go a long way:

1. Common misunderstandings regarding cross-cultural dialogue and ethnic differences can be avoided.
2. Being more empathetic means your customers will see you care and they will love you and your product even more. You will develop and retain good customers.
3. The key to being empathetic is once you understand what they feel and their state of mind. This is when you will actually be able to anticipate the answers or solutions you can provide in order for them to be happy.

Empathy is what makes you an amazing customer success manager, because you truly get what goes on inside your user’s psyche and understand what their real problems are.
Now to you

Getting inside the mind of your users is mostly about being able to see the world through their eyes.

It’s not about magic, it’s about listening closely and tuning into their experience.

The more you are able to see what they see, the easier it gets.

Many organizations start the year with plans to implement new sales methodologies. Unfortunately, many of these plans will fail to boost sales productivity, and many will simply fade away as the year progresses.

If you want your new methodology to stick, don’t treat implementation as the final step. What you do after implementation is every bit as important as what you do before and during.

Here are the five ways to ensure that your company is among those that succeed.

1. Structured Practice

Simply understanding the new methodology does not necessarily translate to actual day-to-day use. Old habits die hard, and busy salespeople often won’t slow down long enough to change their operating rhythm. To overcome this inertia, organize formal role-playing opportunities to practice and reinforce the new methods. Institute official debriefs and feedback from practice calls and meetings. The more often your team practices—and receives feedback on—the new habits, the more effectively they’ll incorporate them into their daily activities.

2. Best Practices Collaboration

Highly effective sales teams have something in common that merely adequate teams rarely possess: a high level of sharing among salespeople. When individual performers hoard information and best practices, it may benefit them individually in the short term, but it does nothing for the whole team.

In order for a new methodology to take root in your company, discourage hoarding and encourage collaboration. Sharing successes and best practices among the team will accelerate adoption and performance among the whole team. Start by instituting a sharing portal to make it easy for reps to learn from one another. Most sales people enjoy “bragging” about their successes, and an internal sales portal will encourage them to share what they’re doing to achieve that success. Reward collaboration and build shared success.

3. Proof Points

The best sales methodology in the world will fall flat if it doesn’t connect with what customers genuinely want. Similarly, your buyers want proof that you can do what you say you can do. Effective proof points speak to the priorities and the perspective of your customer, demonstrating the value and differentiation your prospects are looking to achieve.

Help your reps demonstrate the value of your solutions. Develop a consistent process for your sales team to gather proof as soon as possible after a successful engagement. Then leverage the skills and resources of your marketing team to turn that information into compelling, easy to consume proof points.

4. Follow-up Training

Even the best training in the world will fall flat if it only happens once and there’s no plan to reinforce it afterwards. The human brain is not wired to absorb and execute on information that is delivered all at once and only once. Provide your team with benchmarks for success, and schedule refresh sessions throughout the year to reinforce new practices and measure performance against the new methodology.

5. Social Technology

Social media tools are no longer only for socializing. The most successful sales team leaders use multiple social media approaches to reinforce sales training, encourage collaboration, and communicate important information to their teams. [If you’ve had Command of the Message training, be sure to download this list of social media posts to help you reinforce CoM with your team]

LinkedIn groups are an effective gathering place to share information, provide key reminders to team members, offer motivation around key initiatives, and share success stories from top performers. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn feeds are a good place to cut through the email clutter and reach your teams with reminders, reinforcement tips, and success stories.

Reaching out to your team on social media allows you to reinforce the language, habits, and collaboration expectations of the new methodology. Integrate social with the tools they’re already using—sales enablement platforms, CRMs, etc.—to achieve highest engagement.Put these five steps in place, and watch your sales methodology take root inside the organization.

For more tips on picking the right transformation partner, download our Sales Transformation Decision Guide.

As sales moves rapidly to the Account-Based model, all across the industry, Sales Development Reps are attacking accounts from a multitude of different angles. As opposed to prospecting a lead, reps are touching each lead at least seven times in the hopes of converting it to a qualified opportunity before moving on to the next.

We’ve already discussed how Outbound SDRs select and tier their accounts, but for inbound reps, like me, this strategy is slightly more challenging. In the case of inbound Account Based Sales Development, I have to wait for the accounts to come to me.

Here’s how the rest of the SalesLoft Inbound Team and I have discovered how to execute the iABSD approach:

Leads come into my inbox every day. Because of this, we’ve built a set process on how to handle each one of those leads using a tiered approach, where each tier is handled a little bit differently.

So, the first step here is to discover into which tier the lead falls. To tell most of this story, we use predictive data, which helps us determine whether the lead account fits our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Accounts we believe to be a perfect fit are labeled as Tier 1; those that are good fits, but not necessarily “perfect” are labeled as Tier 2; and finally, our accounts that are still in the testing stage are labeled as Tier 3.

Leads coming in from Tier 3 accounts are put on automated cadences to continue testing, but leads coming from those accounts that are identified as Tier 1 or Tier 2 are handled with a bit more care. The key here is that the tier of the account is just the first piece of the puzzle.

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DOWNLOAD OUR ABSD EBOOK TODAY

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The next piece is the lead itself. What’s their role and how do they fit into the decision making process? Are they a decision maker or an individual contributor?  The former is put on a 12-touch cadence, designed specifically to convert the prospect into a qualified opportunity. The latter, however, is added to a discovery cadence, built to learn more about the systems and processes of the account before moving towards a conversion.

But whether or not the lead is a decision maker or not, it’s important to then prospect further into the account, finding new ways to attack it from multiple angles. For this process, our team has a 3 different buyer personas, and anyone in an account that falls into one of those personas is prospected and added to the proper cadence.

Each inbound lead has a different story, and that story is a powerful piece of information for an inbound Account Based Sales Development Rep. You can make assumptions based on the piece of content that brought the into your inbox. It is invaluable insight into the challenges the organization might be facing, and in some situations, the content can give you credibility with a prospect.

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

The post Navigating Inbound Account Based Sales Development appeared first on SalesLoft.

If you had the opportunity to survey a wide range of top sales organizations and the top performers that support their winning sales teams, you’d find some steady trends. Top organizations are organized, disciplined, and results oriented. They approach business in a structured fashion and develop and support processes that help employees maintain high standards. Top employees, in turn, excel at what they do, and thrive in an environment that recognizes their talents while holding them accountable for success.

Two recent surveys provide deep insight into the characteristics of top performing sales organizations. Steve W. Martin provides an overview of his recent study on high-performing sales organizations in the Harvard Business Review, and two colleagues at CSO Insights, Jim Dickie and Barry Trailer, review their research findings in a white paper titled The Anatomy of a World-Class Sales Organization 2015. Each paper has interesting and original insights, but there is common ground:

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Leading sales organizations have a sound structure, strong processes, and strict accountability…
Click To Tweet

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Top companies maintain a strong structure

Martin’s study was a 42-part survey with 786 sales professional from various levels of achievement within their organizations and from various industries. He found that 50% of study participants from high-performing sales organizations, those where annual revenues increased significantly year-over-year, responded they had sales processes that were closely monitored, strictly enforced or automated, compared to just 28% from underperforming sales organizations.

Dickie and Trailer’s research focused on data pulled from 1,000 participating companies. The study, like Martin’s, found that structure was critical to building and maintaining a world-class sales organization. Once top talent is identified and hired, the author, like us, stresses the importance of providing sales reps with training and the right sales tools in order to help these top performers optimize their efficiency.

Both studies also recognized – in slightly different ways – how important it is for departments outside of sales to participate in helping the sales team achieve success, particularly when it comes to adapting to market fluctuations, or helping to train managers on how to better adapt to changing times. Here are a few ways HR and the sales department can work more closely.

Process-driven organizations achieve more market share

Optimizing sales processes by maintaining a structured approach for engaging and working with clients helps companies outsell their competitors, note Dickie and Trailer. The CSO research took a deep dive into process, showing four levels of the sales process. Level 1 is a random process, Level 2 is an informal process that’s loosely defined but not monitored. Level 3 is a formal process that is reviewed and measured, and Level 4 is a dynamic process that goes through cycles of feedback and modification. As companies moved up through the levels of process, Dickie and Trailer found, their performance improved.

Matching sales process with the various types of relationships salespeople have with clients, (approved vendor, preferred supplier, solutions consultant, strategic contributor, and trusted partner) the CSO research team created a matrix that shows how process drives achievement in sales:

 

Source: The Anatomy of a World-Class Sales Organization – 2015, CSO Insights.

When a process is in place, is followed by everyone, and leadership is able to adjust the processes as needed to account for market fluctuations or other factors inside or outside of the organization, salespeople can focus on selling. Why? Because the sales team understands what’s expected of them, work more efficiently and accomplish more. Similarly, Martin’s study found that 48 percent of the participants from underperforming sales organizations indicated they had non-existent or informal structured sales processes compared to only 29% from high performing sales organizations.

Accountability leads to higher performance

Martin found that high-performing sales organizations hold their team members to a higher level of accountability. “High-performing sales organizations are not afraid to aggressively raise year-over-year annual quotas,” notes Martin, adding that 75 percent of high-performing sales organizations raised 2014 annual quotas more than 10 percent over the previous year.

High expectations and quotas should also reflect in high rewards. Dickie and Trailer note that successful salespeople at top performing firms should have compensation programs that are more enhanced, and Martin, like us, advocates a strong bonus and commission structure.

Accountability is arguably the most powerful tool for getting reps to perform and Martin notes that

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high-performing sales organizations are typically quicker to terminate underperforming salespeople
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– 18 percent of high-performing sales organizations indicated that salespeople will be terminated for poor performance after one quarter. This contrasted dramatically with average companies – only 2% reported they would terminate underperforming employees after one quarter.

Overall, these researchers found new ways to verify assumptions that many sales leaders may have been making all along. “The results from this study,” notes Martin, “quantify that the best sales organizations have strong leaders who exercise control, monitor team performance, and establish internal processes that all team members must abide by.”

Staying at the top requires a mix of talent, structure, process, and people that’s very difficult to balance correctly. The researchers suggest companies work hard to make the most of the tools available to them – including a wide range of sales pipeline and CRM software which can greatly support and enhance performance and growth. “It is not easy. It is not fast. It is not cheap,” write Dickie and Trainer, noting with a bit of a warning that, “It is not optional.”

The post Common Denominators of Top Sales Organizations appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

Product returns are a costly problem for retailers. It has been estimated that U.S. customers return a hefty $264 billion worth of products annually—almost 9% of total sales. In online retailing, return rates are an even bigger problem. A 2013 Wall Street Journal article indicated that as much as a third of internet purchases are returned, and studies have found that handling these returns can cost between $6 and $18 per item.

In online retailing, most products are returned because customers aren’t satisfied with what they get—but this isn’t necessarily due to product defects. Because customers can’t physically evaluate and test products before purchasing them, it’s harder for them to set the right expectations, and easier to be disappointed by a product. This is why retailers provide information—product descriptions, pictures, and videos—to help customers make more informed purchase decisions.

This is also why online customer reviews have become such an important source of product information. These are typically characterized by the average star rating (“valence”), the number of reviews (“volume”), and the variance in star ratings (“variance”). Since online reviews affect people’s likelihood to buy something, we wanted to test whether reviews also influence their likelihood to return it.

We analyzed more than two years of sales data from a major European online retailer to measure the effect of reviews on purchase and return decisions. Our dataset spanned a total of almost 9 million page views and 631,063 purchase transactions for 2,164 different products in electronics and furniture. We measured the average rating of a product at the moment of purchase and compared that to its longer-term average rating later in time. This let us determine whether users saw reviews that were overly positive or negative. (For example, say 4.5 was the average rating of all 10 reviews so far, at the time of purchase. We compared this with all 40 reviews that the product had at the end of the its cycle, which had an average rating of 4.2.) Then we measured the number of returns for each product that came in during the allotted time period. We also controlled for higher-quality products (which may have had more favorable reviews, been more likely to be purchased, and been less likely to be returned).

We find that online customer reviews available at the time of purchase do affect customers’ likelihood to buy a product. If reviews are overly positive, this leads to a substantially higher purchase probability: a one-point increase in review valence results in an increased purchase probability of approximately 10% (9.14% for electronics; 14.60% for furniture).

However, because these overly positive reviews inflate customer expectations about the product (that’s why they buy it), customers can experience greater disappointment upon receiving the item if it doesn’t live up to its rave reviews. This then leads more people to send the product back. We found that the effect of overly positive review valence on return rates is similar: the return probability increases by approximately 10% (11.16% for electronics; 10.34% for furniture) with a one-point increase in review valence. This results in lower profits for retailers, due to higher total return costs that offset the gain in sales. Thus, overly positive review valence can backfire by raising customer expectations too much.

We further found that the effect of review valence on returning is contingent on several factors: First, the effect is weaker for customers with a lot of experience buying in specific product categories at the retailer. (Experienced customers rely less on reviews when forming expectations about a product, and hence a smaller effect is found.) Second, the effect is also weaker for more expensive products. (For more expensive products, customers spend more time deciding whether to keep their purchase, and so they rely less on the expectations they formed at the moment they bought it.) The other review characteristics (volume of reviews and variance of ratings) also affect purchase decisions, with more reviews resulting in a higher purchase probability, but a higher variance in ratings lowering the purchase probability but do not affect return probability.

It’s still commonly assumed that online customer reviews can boost retailers’ performance. So retailers often encourage customers to write positive reviews about their products to increase the valence and volume of the reviews. But managers should understand that sales is only one side of the coin—it does not take into account the effect of reviews on customers’ return behavior. To truly increase retailer performance, online reviews have to offer an accurate reflection of product quality, making sure to not inflate consumer expectations. It requires a balance: if the ratings are too low, retailers will not sell enough; if the ratings are too high, retailers will get too many returns.

Retailers should provide and ask for more detailed and accurate information that will set realistic expectations. Aside from reviews and descriptions, they can also include more high-quality pictures and videos of products, as well as tools (e.g., a size configurator), to help customers better assess whether a product fits their needs and expectations. Companies can also motivate more customers to contribute product reviews by, for example, reminding and incentivizing them to give feedback after they receive their item. However, incentives should be designed in such a way that customers write thorough reviews that adequately represent their actual product experience.

Positive reviews are not good or bad per se. What matters is that they reflect the true quality of the product to boost sales and minimize returns. This is crucial, since consumers heavily consider online reviews, along with other cues for quality, like price and brand, when deciding what to buy. As more and more customers go online to buy products and search for information, online customer reviews will only become more important. Retailers have to start paying careful attention to balanced reviews.