one of the reasons jason lemkin and i teamed up to write “From Impossible To Inevitable” was so that founders at growing companies won’t make the same blunders we did. in this excerpt from the book, jason outlines the top 12 mistakes he made when building sales teams.
Read more on Jason’s 12 Top Mistakes Building Sales Teams…
The post Jason’s 12 Top Mistakes Building Sales Teams appeared first on Predictable Revenue.
one book that’s been a big topic in both in our predictable revenue hub as well as with students from my sales certification class, Predictable University is SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham; a book that argues the importance of asking the right questions in the sales conversation. if you haven’t had a chance to read it, check out the synopsis below in this guest post by Richard Young, Director of CRM Sales, EMEA for Bullhorn.
Read more on SPIN Selling: Why Questions Matter In Sales…
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A lot of people have a desire to avoid hiring salespeople. For some, it’s a question of:
“Do I even need salespeople at all? Slack and Atlassian don’t have any (yet). Can’t I just do a Basecamp model? Can’t I just have Customer Happiness Officers who make customers so happy that they keep referring new customers? And people just buy my stuff without me doing anything or having to sell it?”
Read more on 3 Reasons You Need Salespeople to Scale…
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The average person makes roughly 35,000 conscious decisions per day -- and the average rep probably makes even more. After all, sales roles require constant decision-making, from Which prospects do I call first? to Should I ask for this concession?
Ultimately, the better you are at making decisions, the better you’ll be at selling. Use these nine science-backed techniques to select the best choice possible.
Research proves what we’ve long suspected: "Hanger" -- or the irritation you feel when you’re hungry -- is a real thing.
Scientists from Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg found that ghrelin, a hormone that’s released when you're hungry, makes you more impulsive. The higher your ghrelin levels, the less rationally you tend to act.
Wait to make your hardest decisions when you're not hungry and your ghrelin levels are lower.
Making good choices is much tougher when you’re feeling emotional. Researchers from the University of Toronto Scarborough wanted to see if they could make people less emotional -- and consequently, improve their decision-making abilities -- by putting them in a dark room.
The experiment worked. When the study’s participants were under bright lights, both their positive and negative emotions were much more intense than when they were under dim lights.
If you don’t have your own office, reserve an empty conference room, then turn down the lights.
It’s much easier to give advice than to take it. When you’re the one grappling with an issue, being objective is nearly impossible.
But there’s a way to get around your biases: Simply pretend your challenge is actually happening to someone else. According to a study published in Psychological Science, looking at a situation from a third party’s point-of-view helps you think more impartially than placing yourself front and center.
People have trouble cutting their losses. If you’ve already invested time and energy into a prospect, it’s challenging to walk away -- even though you know they’re not a good fit for your product.
However, there's a simple, science-backed way to eliminate this “sunk-cost bias.” Spend 15 minutes focusing on your breathing. This meditative process focuses your brain on the present, so you’ll have less trouble throwing in the towel when something clearly isn’t working.
How many courses of action should you consider for each decision? Dr. Therese Houston, author of Teaching What You Don’t Know and decision-making expert, says the magic number is three.
“Once you start generating more alternatives, the quality of decisions goes way up,” she explains. “You’ve got more options on the table.”
Houston adds that “all too often, we only give ourselves one option, and we fool ourselves into thinking it’s actually two.”
For instance, “Should I offer the buyer a discount, or not?” sounds like two choices, but slashing the price is only one way to move the deal forward. Keep brainstorming until you’ve got two other ideas for coming to a compromise with your prospect. You could adjust payment terms instead, or throw in additional support at no cost.
As a rep, you know how difficult it is to get prospects to change their status quo. But you're also susceptible to this resistance to change -- and unsurprisingly, it hurts your ability to make good decisions.
Researchers from the University of Wuerzburg and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences recently discovered a bizarre solution: Watch the clock.
Seeing the clockwise movement subconsciously reminds you of the future, which makes you more open to change and new ideas.
So if there isn’t an analog clock nearby, consider buying one before your next important decision, or bookmark this site for a handy browser version.
Some people use data to guide their decisions. Others act on their instincts. The most successful decision-makers, however, consider themselves both “strongly analytical” and “strongly intuitive.” Depending on the situation at hand, they switch off between each style
Imagine you’re hiring a sales rep. First, you’d look at all the candidates from an analytical standpoint. That includes hard metrics like how many years of experience each has, how often they met or exceeded their quota, and so on. Then, ask yourself who feels like they’d be the best hire.
Once you combine your analytical and intuitive answers, you’ll be much closer to the right choice.
Your heartbeat may hold the secret to making decisions. Julia Mossbridge, a cognitive neuroscientist and the CEO and research director of Mossbridge Institute, LLC, says that “physiology -- including heart rhythms -- is linked to both unconscious and conscious processes.”
With that in mind, Mossbridge created Choice Compass. This app (available for both iOS and Android) uses your smartphone’s camera to analyze your pulse while you deliberate between choices. After one minute, it’ll tell you which one produced more rhythmic heart patterns -- which usually indicates a choice you'll be happier with.
You probably shouldn’t rely solely on Choice Compass, but it can make a good tie-breaker when you’re stuck between two choices.
Never make a big decision when you’re tired. A lack of sleep makes you overly optimistic, so your risk perception is completely skewed. Sleep deprivation also makes it much harder for you to take in and process new information.
Need proof of its danger? Sleep-deprived employees were responsible for both the Chernobyl disaster and the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.
If you’re feeling fatigued and the matter isn’t urgent, wait until the next morning to make up your mind. And if you can’t delay the decision that long, take a power nap. Studies show even a little shut-eye reduces impulsivity and improves your focus.
Adopt these techniques to boost both the quality and speed of your decision-making process. Agonizing over decisions will become a thing of the past.
According to The Radicati Group, in 2013, the majority of email traffic came from business email, which accounted for over 100 billion emails sent and received per day. By the end of 2017, it is expected that business email will account for over 132 billion emails sent and received per day.
Business email is big business. Regardless of the industry in which you operate, the people you want to connect with likely have overflowing inboxes. Furthermore, the majority of those emails probably pose little interest: they fail to engage or remain unopened completely.
Therefore, it’s crucial that your B2B email marketing campaigns stand out from the crowd, in order to increase open rates and click-through rates. But this doesn’t have to involve complex manoeuvres – there are a number of simple ways you can add a personal touch to your next email marketing campaign.
So simple, yet so effective. If you are emailing someone, it makes sense to use their first name. This approach creates trust and shows the recipient that your email contains interesting information that is relevant to them specifically, thereby making them more likely to engage.
In fact, the HubSpot 2014 Science of Email Marketing Report found that implementing first name personalization increases your click-through-rate from about 5.8 percent to about 7 percent. However, this is only the first step in effectively personalising your emails.
Returning to the results of the HubSpot report, it was shown that emails sent from two-word names have a 7 percent higher open rate than those sent from a one-word name. Therefore, it’s better to send your emails from an individual email address associated with your full name, rather than a generic one associated with a single brand name.
Addressing your recipients person-to-person is far more effective than company-to-person. It makes them feel more valued and if they have a question about your product or service, they will be more inclined to reach out if they know they are in communication with a tangible individual.
Whether your B2B database contains 100 or 100,000 contacts, there will be trends that emerge – and you can segment your database accordingly. These patterns will vary widely between organisations but you might, for example, identify a group of contacts that hold a specific role within a company; or who are at a particular point along the buyer’s journey.
What works for one group won’t work for another – for instance, you wouldn’t send a newly acquired lead detailed information about your pricing model. So you can create email campaigns for each of your segments, ensuring that people receive email content that is suited to their needs and interests.
There are numerous examples of B2C companies that adopt a matey, conversational tone in their emails. This is not always appropriate for B2B organisations, but we can learn from the premise. As Jayson DeMers writes for Forbes: “Impersonal content is boring. When your content reads like it was written by a robot, nobody wants to read it! Personal content is much more exciting.”
It’s easy to descend into corporate speak but don’t be afraid to give your business a “voice” in your email marketing campaigns. At the end of the day, we are all people and your potential customers want to know they are dealing with a business that actually cares.
Essentially, adding a personal touch to your B2B email marketing campaigns all comes down to being human. Addressing your audience person-to-person, segmenting your database and using your organisation’s unique voice are all highly effective – yet simple – ways to add a personal touch to your B2B emails.
You’ve done it – you’ve searched through the thousands of sales solutions on the market today and chosen what you believe to be the perfect platform for your business. You’ve pumped your team up about getting this new and improved solution in place, but just a week into the implementation process, you hit your first roadblock: what do they mean you have to pay extra for a sandbox environment!?
You’re definitely not the first to be blindsided by these types of hidden costs, and if legacy CRM vendors have their way, you certainly won’t be the last. For example, while Salesforce lists the price of its Sales Cloud Professional package as $75/user/month, according to a recent Forrester survey, 52% of Salesforce users highlight “high cost of ownership over time” as the thing they dislike most about the Sales Cloud. And when you dig into just some of the hidden costs within the Professional package, as was done by Data2CRM in this blog post, it’s easy to see why:
You don’t need to be a math whiz to figure out that the hidden costs of CRMs can eventually run you thousands of dollars per month. Instead of zeroing in on upfront fees like cost per user, companies should focus on total cost of ownership over time. To help avoid unpleasant surprises and get in front of your total cost of ownership, here are three key questions you should be asking when searching for the right sales platform for your business.
For many CRMs, implementation and support are not included in the buyer’s license fee. While at first glance this appears to lower upfront costs, in reality, companies are then left with two potentially expensive options: hire a third-party or find an internal resource.
When faced with these two choices, it’s important to consider these follow-up questions:
For a more exhaustive list of important questions to help you calculate the true costs of your CRM or sales solution, check out this blog by retired Forrester analyst William Band.
If these questions leave you feeling concerned, you may want to consider a third option: selecting a vendor that includes consultative, in-house implementation services and on-going support in its offering. This means that, in addition to overseeing the technical aspects of deploying your solution within an agreed upon timeframe, this team works with you to define a sales process and pipeline that sets you up for longterm success. 24/7 support to solve any urgent issues also ensures that your solution is always running and ready to generate revenue for your business.
Today’s market is flooded with point solutions that seek to solve small pieces of the sales performance puzzle, from email tracking to call dialing and reporting. Rather than adding these functionalities to their platforms and upfront costs, many CRM providers require (and charge for!) integrations with these point solutions.
The more tools your team must use on a daily basis, the more expensive it is for your business, and the less likely your team is to adopt them. In fact, 59% of sales reps believe they are required to use too many sales tools. As reps are forced to navigate between systems to get the job done, adoption suffers, and data capture decreases, restricting your business’ visibility into your sales process and performance.
Instead, look for a solution that provides calendar integrations, real-time notifications and other necessary tools in a single platform, for a single price. Not only does this type of all-in-one sales platform save you money in the long-run, but it also improves rep adoption rates. In turn, this generates a higher quantity and quality of sales data, which ultimately provides insights that can further lower TCO and increase ROI in the future.
All the hidden costs of CRMs may not seem like much of an issue for companies with sales teams of five or six – but what happens when they grow? What’s more, is it build to handle the volume of activity and data generated by a larger team? How much will it cost to integrate with any additional systems your business may acquire?
Selecting a sales platform with the architecture, API, support, pricing plan and other key features necessary to scale with your business is often overlooked by businesses anxious to get a solution in place. But companies with the foresight to do this, like cyber security and IT risk management firm Night Lion Security, reap the returns in the long run.
“It was really difficult to find a solution that could grow with our business while still providing a smooth, straightforward user experience,” says Night Lion CEO Vinny Troia. But since selecting a provider based on its customization, ease of use and reporting capabilities, Night Lion can focus on growing its business. In fact, the company is expected to more than double in size this year.
Taking the time to investigate the total cost of ownership associated with a sales solution upfront is truly invaluable in the long-run. While these three questions are a great starting point for identifying any hidden costs associated with your vendor of choice, they’re just the tip of the iceberg. For more questions to help you uncover the hidden costs of CRMs, download our white paper: 7 Questions to Ask When Evaluating Sales Software.
It is important that you have a roadmap to guide you through all of the things that move you from target to close, especially the commitments you need. Your sales process, however, by itself is not enough to help guide you to winning new deals. It is necessary, but not sufficient. This is where being strategic in generating possibilities is invaluable.
Methodologies are important, too. Methodologies are different from your sales process. For example, SPIN Selling is a methodology, not a process, as it doesn’t speak to the stages of the sales process. It’s a methodology for asking questions, and for my money, creating a compelling case for change. The Challenger Sale is also a methodology, and a very useful one today. Methodologies are also necessary, but not sufficient.
I would argue that you also need a philosophy of sales. You need a set of beliefs about what is good, and true, and beautiful. You need a set of beliefs that guide how you sell. A lot of what I write here is my personal philosophy of sales and selling, like all things being equal, relationships win, and fast is slow, and if you create value you are entitled to capture a portion thereof.
Another idea that lies outside a process or a methodology that I would classify as a philosophy is the idea that selling requires the identification and selection from a number of possibilities.
Let’s say you are calling on your dream client. You have a great relationship with the main, decision-making stakeholder. You have also met his boss, and she has agreed to support your initiative. Things have progressed nicely, and according to your sales process, you are right where you want to be. You are certain that you are the preferred choice, and you are very close to winning a deal.
And then, like turning off a light, your main contact tells you that they have decided not to move forward with no further explanation. And then he goes dark.
Your process provides no guidance. Your methodologies don’t touch scenarios like the one described above. In spite of a lack of guidance, you still have to act. This means you need to generate and select from a range of choices.
Maybe you have more ideas.
There are still more ideas available to you.
Maybe you need to pursue two of these ideas simultaneously, or maybe you need to generate more ideas.
One of the best ways to make good decisions is to first identify the choices available to you. If you only have one course of action, then the only decision you have to make is whether to take that action or not.
Possibilities provide you with more potential opportunities to succeed, and they often provide you with additional choices should one approach fail.
Possibilities make the impossible possible.
The post The Strategic Power of Generating Possibilities appeared first on The Sales Blog.
My ongoing series of blog posts on “Compensation During the Interview Process” continues here by focusing on the common compensation components and when to bring them up during your interview process. If you haven’t been reading from the start, the other posts are Talking Compensation During the Interview Process and How Much Does This Job Pay?
I know it’s basic, but in my experience compensation is one of the main reason company’s mess up the hiring process. The blog posts mentioned above provide tips to candidates going through the hiring process and will save you time so that when you get to the negotiation stage there won’t be any major surprises. Below are the five most common compensation components and when they should be brought up in the process.
Base Salary: As a candidate, you should have a conversation about the range no later than the second conversation, ideally the first.
Bonus or Incentive: This should also be no later than second round but ideally the first and should include these questions from the candidate:
Is it a percentage of annual salary? If no, how is it based?
How is it determined?
What is the history of bonus payout for this level role in the company?
The goal of these questions is to determine if the bonus is real cash you will recognize or is it a “nice to have if we have a good year.” Unfortunately, in my experience, both scenarios most certainly exist. The conversation on how you will be measured and what objectives you must attain to receive this compensation element should take place late in the interview process with the person responsible for allocating the bonus.
Long Term Incentive (LTI): This would include, but not be limited to: equity, stock options, pensions, or shares. It is important to know what you currently have that is of actual cash value, what will vest or mature and when. In the interview process, this question is appropriate to ask when you are nearing the final stages, especially if you have any amount of compensation that you would be walking away from. The hiring company doesn’t want to extend you an offer and then hear from you that you have a $100 thousand cash delta that needs to be addressed.
Just as the company owes it to you to share what the cash compensation is early in the process, you owe it to the company to provide them with this information so they aren’t surprised. And it could keep you from having an offer rescinded.
Vacation: This is also something that should be discussed when nearing final stages. The company should share their policy and you should share your current vacation allotment. This isn’t the time to negotiate, but it is time to share the information. The time to negotiate this is during the offer stage.
Perks: For example: parking, gym memberships, cell phone allotment, car allowance, and home office allowance are all items to negotiate at time of offer.
These components are all part of the most common components package. Depending on the candidate and company, they hold a different weight from one opportunity to the next. In my next blog post, I’ll outline some ways to offset any “gaps” when negotiating your offer.
In Part I of our series on increasing sales productivity with microlearning, we reviewed the difference between training and learning. In Part II, I’d like to make some recommendations on how to improve sales learning which will result in increased sales productivity. First off, let’s review the definitions of training and learning specifically:
You can train a sales rep how to enter an opportunity into the CRM system, but salespeople need to learn how to have value-added conversations with a prospective customer. Salespeople don’t get overly excited about being trained, but they get very excited about learning something new – especially when that “learning” directly impacts their income as in the case of winning sales.
The best way to accelerate the “learning curve experience” is to create a system for sharing new information with reps using microlearnings – short, focused pieces of content designed to facilitate learning at the time that the referenced knowledge and information is needed.
In the table below, which column, training classes or microlearnings, do you think will have the greatest impact on helping your salespeople close more business?
The training classes listed above are all necessary competencies for the salesperson to perform their job, but the microlearnings highlight the knowledge that’s required to conduct value-added conversations. And value-added conversations lead to winning business.
What’s more, microlearnings are timely. Salespeople can always get help with pricing configurations when they get back to the office – but they better know about their #1 competitor’s new product announcement when they’re directly asked about it in a client meeting.
Companies are beginning to recognize the need to evolve their sales training programs and are rethinking how learning & development affects their overall productivity levels. There’s a reason they don’t call it the training curve; training will not affect productivity as much as learning.
Creating an effective microlearning system is as easy as A-B-C
According to CSO Insights, B2B salespeople spend up to 35% of their time searching for or creating content to advance their sales. A lot of this time is spent looking for the learnings that will allow them to add value to their conversations and win. Harness the knowledge your team is finding every day on their own, and turn it into an effective and efficient system of sharing microlearnings with the sales team to increase productivity.
Our approach to creating an effective microlearning system is simple, which is why we call it the A-B-C Microlearning Package. For this example, I’ll use the first topic on the list of microlearnings in the table listed above, “Insights on our top competitor’s new product.”
A – Capture the “main/raw” content. In this instance, it’s probably a press release or marketing campaign announcement from your competitor about their new product. It could be in the form of a blog, a video posted on YouTube, a PDF or even a PowerPoint posted on Slideshare.
B – Have a subject-matter-expert (SME) speak to the “raw content” to provide the essential meaning or takeaways for the salespeople. This should ideally be a few paragraphs of text highlighting your messaging/positioning against the new product and its shortcomings (“their new offering still isn’t as good as ours because it’s missing X, Y and Z”).
C – Ask the sales rep a question or two. Asking a few questions causes the sales reps to think about what was just shared, what it means, and how to use this new information. Having the reps answer a few questions about the content has two benefits: critically thinking about the content helps the reps internalize the information, and the aggregated answers provide sales management with insights on both when the information is being received and how well .
The best way to deliver these microlearnings is to broadcast them to all the reps on the communication channels that work best for your company. That could be email, an SMS text, your CRM system, a sales enablement system, etc. The microlearnings should be tagged and centrally managed in such a way that salespeople can access them anytime in the future when the need occurs.
It’s as easy as A-B-C:
A = Capture
B = SME Take-aways
C = Questions
Parts B & C are easy…. Every company has the SME’s to provide commentary and select the right questions to ascertain whether they’ve “got-it.” The most significant part of implementing microlearning is Part A, ensuring you’re capturing valuable “raw content” to share with the sales team. Once you start sharing the learnings that accelerate their earnings they’ll want more.
With millennials approaching 50% of the workforce, in Part III of this blog I’ll discuss the importance of creating an optimized learning culture for your sales team to support this “self-directed” learning generation.
In my time as an entrepreneur, I’ve really grown to appreciate the value of stamina. In some ways, I think it’s the character trait that gives all others value. You may have skills, for example—but without stamina, you’re not able to use them as effectively. You may have work ethic, too—but without stamina, work ethic only carries you so far. Being able to weather tough days and to keep pushing forward, though, through good times and through bad—well, that’s invaluable. Stamina will make everything you do easier, and it will give you strength and resolve in moments of crisis.
But here’s the really great thing about stamina: It’s essentially a lifestyle choice. You may not have stamina, but there is always something you can do about that. You cannot simply choose to give yourself more money, but you can claim more stamina for yourself.
There are several ways to do it, too. I’m a strong proponent of exercise, and make it a priority to get active every day—even if it’s just doing something basic and low-intensity, like walking my dog. The act of getting physical gives energy and it creates resilience. Physicality helps you to be more effective creatively, strategically, and intellectually.
And there are other ways you can build that physical endurance, too. You can choose to sleep a full eight hours each night. You can choose to eat a healthy diet. You can choose to do things that fulfill you, even beyond your professional life. All of these things are life-giving. All of them provide endurance—a key competitive advantage. And all of them are yours for the taking; it’s just a matter of making good choices.
One thing that doesn’t always create stamina? Working. Ask any high-performance athlete: They may work out intensely for a couple of hours each day, but they would never do it for 12 hours at a time. They know that constant work would be counterproductive. It would cause burnout, not growth.
My practical advice? Start layering good, endurance-building habits into your day. Start small, if you like: Go for a walk at lunchtime today. Invest in little lifestyle changes that create endurance, and see how much you benefit from it in the long run.
Marketers tend to focus on the top and bottom of the funnel.
We closely monitor advertising response rates. And we’re constantly tweaking our sales pages and closing scripts—trying to increase conversions.
Those efforts are important, but a strong middle of the funnel can also do wonders to improve the overall profitability of your sales funnel.
The goal in the middle of the funnel is to cultivate prospects who are aware of you and your product or service, but who aren’t quite ready to make a purchase with you.
Normally the tools we use in the middle of the funnel are some form of “content marketing.”
Blog posts, social media channels, webinars—these are all regular tools used by marketers in the middle of the funnel.
Each is designed to increase your audience’s trust in your ability to help them solve their problems.
Here are five of the most common problems that lead to poor performance in this stage of the sales funnel:
The middle of the funnel is where people are deciding whether you are someone they should trust and listen to.
Brian Carroll, author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, claims that nurturing programs don’t impact sales conversion rates until a minimum of five touches.
A “touch” does not have to be a one-on-one interaction. A 5-email autoresponder can have the same effect.
But many marketers don’t create enough touch points to build the trust needed to help prospects feel comfortable enough to make a purchase.
If you’re aggressively building an email list, but you don’t have an autoresponder or a regular publishing schedule in place, you’re letting prospects fall out of your funnel.
Have you ever received an email from a marketer and you have no idea who this person is?
Sometimes it’s spam. But just as often, it’s a marketer who let his or her list go dormant.
You probably signed up for the list months ago, there was no autoresponder in place, and the marketer hasn’t sent anything to subscribers since you signed up.
To stay top-of-mind with your audience, try to send or post something at least every week or so.
If you go too long, they’ll forget who you are and why they signed up in the first place.
Here’s a perfect example of what not to do in the middle of the funnel:
This email doesn’t contain a single piece value for me.
I don’t care that they have a new website. I care about my life and my problems.
Instead of doing this, focus on helping people solve problems. If you can help people solve problems with your free content, they’ll be much more likely to purchase products and services from you when they have bigger problems they need to solve.
People move through the middle of your sales funnel at their own pace.
You never know what piece of content will convince people to move into the “actively considering a purchase” stage.
But this I do know: too many marketers forget to include a call to action in their content.
You don’t have to be pushy. At the end of your cultivation materials, just include an invitation to take the next step.”
You could say: “If you’d like to learn more, we should talk. Here’s how to get in touch.”
It’s easy to set up an autoresponder or a content plan, then just put your head down and execute.
Whatever you’re doing to cultivate prospects in the middle of the funnel, don’t forget to test different variations over time.
The math of sales funnels means a small improvement in one area can have a large impact on the overall results of your efforts.
Remember that people in the middle of the funnel are interested, but not quite sure about you yet.
If your middle-of-the-funnel efforts aren’t working well, people might hang out in this area of indecision for months—or even years.
Your job is to get them to move forward. Stay focused on that and you’ll do just fine.
You can learn more about the Top of the Funnel here.
Digital is not only a means to optimize a company’s existing operations. It also gives both attackers and incumbents the power to disrupt value chains, enter new sectors, and create innovative business models. Established companies face threats from new competitors like Amazon Business, which offers millions of products, from automotive components, industrial lifts, and ramps to lab products, protective gear, and electrical equipment.
To get ahead of threats like this, industrial companies can use digital to transform and extend their own business models before change is imposed on them by attackers reshaping their industry. Some incumbents are joining digital platforms and B2B marketplaces to aggregate demand and sell direct to end users. BASF, for example, was the first chemicals company to sell products online through Alibaba. Other businesses, such as the 3-D printing start-up Sculpteo, are selling services rather than products. Still others are offering their manufacturing capacity as a service to third parties.
Content Marketing continues to drive marketing strategy for many companies and yet, most companies don’t document that strategy. The result? Marketing departments are challenged to create a variety of compelling content on a consistent basis.
Smart, creative and results-focused advice on content marketing that actually works is in high demand and I’m happy to say that over the past few years we’ve published just under 500 content marketing articles on topics ranging from strategy to measuring ROI. To bring you a balanced view of content marketing, we’ve made sure to publish our own point of view and thought leadership as well as interviews with brand content marketing practitioners and executives.
There’s a lot of insight in those interviews and below is a list of the 10 of the most popular, featuring conversations with brands that include: MarketingProfs, Visa, Facebook, Content Marketing Institute, LinkedIn, 3M, Bank of America, Xerox, and Dun & Bradstreet. Enjoy!
1. Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs
Interview: “Writing is thinking. And for us as marketers, good writing is good marketing”
In business and in life, writing is an essential part of communications – no matter how digital, virtual and science fiction we get in our communications. That’s why Ann’s most recent book, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content, is so timely. From Twitter to White Papers to books in print, Ann has smart, actionable advice for us all.
Takeaway: “The best content marketing isn’t about what you do or what you sell – it’s about how what that thing does for others. That’s a subtle shift, but an important one, and a hard one for companies to truly embrace.”
Read the full Ann Handley interview here.
You can find Ann on LinkedIn and on Twitter at: @marketingprofs
2. Stephanie Losee, Head of Content at Visa
Interview: “Brands now have the freedom to speak to their audiences directly.”
In this interview Stephanie discusses the most important changes in content marketing, a content report card for brands, predictions, career advice, and insight into more cross-functional content marketing success. Oh, and she also has thoughts on what will be the ruin of Snapchat.
Takeaway: “Think about what kind of content are external audiences expecting when they visit your owned channels, both content and social? What would benefit them? Ask for data about visitors and use it to inform your first few moves. Use existing staffers and resources and get to an always-on strategy that puts customers’ needs first as fast as you can.”
Read the full Stephanie Losee interview here.
You can find Stephanie on LinkedIn and on Twitter at: @slosee
3. Jonathon Colman, Product UX + Content Strategy Lead at Facebook
Interview: “Quality isn’t a definition; it’s a conversation.”
An insatiable learner (Masters in Information Science), wicked smart, focused on results, kind and thoughtful, Jonathan is definitely someone you can learn a lot from. In this interview he shares his journey from REI SEO to Content Strategist at Facebook, offering really useful tips, tools and resources along the way.
Takeaway: “Content experiences aren’t a zero-sum game, they’re not binary, and they’re not a competition between silos within an organization. When you look at the organizations who are growing sustainably year after year, most of the time you’ll see quality content and content services are a strong part of their strategy.”
Read the full Jonathon Colman interview here.
You can find Jonathon on LinkedIn and on Twitter at: @jcolman
4. Joe Pulizzi, Founder of Content Marketing Institute
Interview: “Build an audience first and define products and services second.”
In this interview, Joe talks about how he found his passion for content marketing, the value and impact of goal setting, and the 6 step Content Inc model.
Takeaway: “I love content marketing because you can increase the bottom line while, at the same time, help your customers live better lives or get better jobs. Content marketing is the only kind of marketing that provides ongoing value, whether you purchase the product or not. Isn’t that what all marketers want to do?”
Read the full Joe Pulizzi interview here.
You can find Joe on LinkedIn and on Twitter at: @joepulizzi
5. Jason Miller, Group Manager, Global Content and Social Media Marketing at LinkedIn
Interview: “You need a plan, and you need to find what works, then scale.”
This interview focuses on Jason’s current work, about LinkedIn and his insights into making social media and content marketing hits. He also shares examples of great B2B social media and content marketing, tools, resources and even a few predictions.
Takeaway: “As a content marketer you really need to ask yourself: ‘Do you want to stand out or do you want to truly connect with your customers and prospects?’ The answer is a balance of the two.”
Read the full Jason Miller interview here.
You can find Jason on LinkedIn and on Twitter at: @JasonMillerCA
6. Carlos Abler, Leader – Content Marketing and Strategy :: Global eTransformation at 3M
Interview: “Content culture transformation is an essential pillar of digital transformation.”
This in-depth interview with Carlos covers content marketing in general, content strategy, and how to develop a content marketing culture across a large enterprise.
Takeaway: “Content strategy is a broad concept of organizational practices for effectively managing content lifecycle; content marketing is a specific application of content to add value to an organization’s relationship with people. Content strategy enables content marketing and content marketing defines the requirements that content strategy must serve to enable it.”
Read the full Carlos Abler interview here.
You can find Carlos on LinkedIn and on Twitter at: @Carlos_Abler
7. John von Brachel, SVP, Content Marketing Executive at Bank of America
Interview: “Good content marketers need to have both left-brain and right-brain skills.”
For this post, John talked about his editorial background, how he stays current, motivating executive participation with content and a preview of his keynote and breakout session presentations at Content Marketing World.
Takeaway: “Have a compelling and consistent story to tell, one that allows you to build better relationships with your audiences. Sequence these stories to your audiences in ways that keep them connected to you and your brand over longer periods of time.”
Read the full John von Brachel interview here.
You can find John on LinkedIn and on Twitter at: @vonbrachel
8. Jeannine Rossignol, Vice President, Marketing at Xerox
Interview: “Content is an integral component of every aspect of marketing.”
This conversation with Jeannine focused on content marketing strategy, top challenges facing content marketers, and content marketing lessons to be learned from Charlotte’s Web.
Takeaway: “A clear strategy should include who you target, what their buyer’s journey looks like, and most importantly, what are the questions they need to answer to move from one stage in the journey to the next. Every piece of content should go back to that strategy.”
Read the full Jeannine Rossignol interview here.
You can find Jeannine on LinkedIn and on Twitter at: @j9rossignol
9. Rishi Dave, CMO at Dun & Bradstreet
Interview: “There may not be a need for more content, but there is a need for higher quality content that delivers new insights.”
Here, Rishi talks about building an inbound approach to marketing with content and the role content plays in an overall demand generation strategy.
Takeaway: “Don’t simply jump into tactics around analytics, technology, and content operations. Make sure you have something unique to say and that the organization understands what that messaging is. Until you have that, and a culture that supports it, great execution of inbound will not break through the noise.”
Read the full Rishi Dave interview here.
You can find Rishi on LinkedIn and on Twitter at: @RishiPDave
10. Michael Brenner, CEO at Marketing Insider Group
Interview: “The real question behind content ROI is, ‘why should I change what I am doing today?‘”
A first class guy and a pleasure to work with as an influencer, our discussion with Michael touches on some of the key questions marketers are trying to tackle, from developing a strategy to growing an audience to the importance of measuring content marketing performance. Michael also shares a business lesson from one of his favorite childhood stories.
Takeaway: “Content Marketing ROI is no harder than ROI for the rest of marketing. Start with a benchmark, calculate the cost of your content, place a value on the results and from there, ROI is pretty easy.”
Read the full Michael Brenner interview here.
You can find Michael on LinkedIn and on Twitter at: @BrennerMichael
There’s a lot of smarts in these content marketing interviews and I hope they have inspired you in ways that will motivate content that is better for your customers and more effective for your marketing.
The Content Marketing World conference is coming up fast and on September 8th, I will be presenting solo and participating on a panel that you might be interested in. Here are the details:
Thursday, Sept. 8 – 12:05 – 12:50pm
Optimize the ROI of Your Content Agency Investment
Solo Lunch & Learn Session (Room 1)
Thursday, Sept. 8 – 2:50 – 3:35pm
How B2B Executives Need to Strategize in the World of Content
Panel with Jennifer Harmel, Michael Brenner, Carla Johnson and Kira Modrus (Room 3)
You will also be able to see most of the content marketing smarties interviewed above at Content Marketing World. Ann, Stephanie and John are all giving keynotes and of course, Joe Pulizzi is the man behind it all.
My business partner and our agency president, Susan Misukanis (L) and our agency director of marketing, Ashley Zeckman (R) will be attending Content Marketing World as well.
If you can’t make the conference or even if you are, don’t miss a thing by watching @toprank, @smisukanis and @azeckman for tweets during the conference and Online Marketing Blog for daily liveblogging of presentations. We hope to see you in Cleveland!
Disclosure: We are currently providing services to LinkedIn and MarketingProfs.
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The post 10 Must-Read Content Marketing Interviews with Major Brand Marketers appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.
We tend to associate the government with words like bureaucracy rather than lean innovation. But smart people within government agencies are working to change the culture and embrace new ways of doing things. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) is a great example.
The NGA, an organization within the U.S. Department of Defense, delivers geospatial intelligence (satellite imagery video, and other sensor data) to policymakers, warfighters, intelligence professionals and first responders.
A team from their Enterprise Innovation Office has joined us at NYU as observers at our 5-day Lean LaunchPad class, while another team is in Silicon Valley with the Hacking for Defense team learning how to turn their hard problems into partnerships with commercial companies that lead to deployed solutions.
The Innovation Insurgency
Over the last year the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) has become part of the “Innovation Insurgency” inside the U.S. Department of Defense by adopting Lean Methodology inside their agency.
In July the NGA hosted the inaugural 2016 Intelligence Community Innovation Conference with attendees from across the Department of Defense and public sector. At the conference Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. Paul Selva said, “Implementing innovation [in the government and large organizations] is like a turning battleship, you may have an upset crew with cooks having to clean up spilled food and sailors falling out of beds but that ship can turn with effort. The end result is often that change can happen but it is going to come at the cost of disruption and difficulty.”
The good news for the country is that the leadership of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has decided to turn the ship now.
To connect to innovation centers outside the agency, their research group has set up “NGA Outpost Valley” (NOV), an innovation outpost in Silicon Valley. The NOV is building an ecosystem of innovative companies around NGA’s hard problems to rapidly deploy solutions to solve them.
To promote innovation inside the NGA, they’ve staffed an Enterprise Innovation Office (EIO) to coach, educate and advise the entire agency, from core leadership to the operational edges, with methods and concepts of validated learning through rapid experimentation and customer development.
The NGA has adopted Lean Innovation methods to make this happen. The process starts by collecting agency-wide ideas and/or customer problems, collecting a group insight, and sorts which problems are important enough to pursue. The innovation process uses the Value Proposition canvas, customer development and the Mission Model Canvas to validate hypotheses and deliver minimum viable products. This process allows the agency to rapidly deliver projects at speed.
To help start this innovation program the NGA’s Enterprise Innovation Office has had their innovation teams go through the already established Innovation-Corps classes at the National Security Agency (NSA), and they’re about to stand up their own Innovation-Corps curriculum inside the NGA. (The Innovation-Corps (I-Corps for short) Program is the Lean Innovation class I developed at Stanford and teach there and at Berkeley, Columbia and NYU. It was first adopted by the National Science Foundation and is now offered at 54 universities, and starting last year taught in all research agencies and the DOD.)
This past week a team from the NGA’s Enterprise Innovation Office observed the 5-day Lean LaunchPad class I’m teaching at NYU. Their goal is to integrate these techniques into their own Lean innovation processes. From their comments and critiques of the students, they’re more then ready to teach it themselves.
At the same time the NGA Outpost Valley team was in Silicon Valley going through a Hacking for Defense workshop (we call a “sprint.”) Their goal was to translate one of their problems into a language that commercial companies in the valley could understand and solve, then to figure out how to get the product built and deployed. Like other parts of the Department of Defense (the Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Agency (JIDA) and the Defense Innovation unit Experimental (DIUX),) NGA’s Outpost Valley team is using a Hacking for Defense sprint to build a scalable process for recruiting industry and other partners to get solutions to real problems deployed at speed.
Putting lean principles into NGA’s acquisition practices
As part of the Department of Defense, the NGA acquires technology and information systems through the traditional DOD’s acquisition system – which has been described as the antitheses of rapid customer discovery and agile practices. The current acquisition system seldom validates whether a promised capability actually works until after the government is locked into a multiyear contract, and fixing those problems later often means cost overruns, late delivery, and under performance. And as any startup will tell you, the traditional government acquisition processes create disincentives for startups to participate in the DOD Market. Few startups know where and how to find opportunities to sell to the DOD, they seldom have the resources or expertise to navigate DOD bureaucratic procurement requirements, and the 12 plus months it takes the government to enter into a contract makes it cost prohibitive for startups.
A year ago Sue Gordon, the deputy director of the NGA, sent out an agency-wide memo that said in part, “…we must build speed and flexibility (agility) into our acquisition processes to respond to those evolutions. It is our job to acquire the technologies, data and services that NGA and the NSG need to execute our mission in the most effective, efficient and timely manner possible …”
In addition to NGA’s internal Lean Innovation process and innovation outpost in Silicon Valley, they are starting to use open innovation and crowdsourcing to attract commercial developers to tackle geospatial intelligence problems.
This week the NGA posted its first major open Challenge – The NGA Disparate Data Challenge– on Challenge.gov, the U.S. government’s open innovation and crowdsourcing competition. Government agencies like the NGA can use the site to post challenges and award prizes to citizens who find the best solutions. Putting a challenge on a crowdsourcing platform is a groundbreaking activity for the agency and opens the possibility for a number of benefits.
The NGA Disparate Data Challenge has two stages.
NGA’s challenge is its first attempt to attract startups that otherwise would not do business with the agency. It’s likely that the prize amounts ($10-$25K) may be off by at least one order of magnitude to get a startup to take their eye off the commercial market. Curating a crowd and persuading them to work together because the work meets their value proposition is hard work that takes incubation not just prizes. However, this is a learning opportunity and a great beginning for the Department of Defense.
Challenges in Embracing Innovation in Government Agencies
Innovation in large organizations are fraught with challenges including; building an innovation pipeline without screwing up current product development, educating senior leadership and (at times intransigent) middle management about the difference between innovation and execution, encouraging hands-on customer development, establishing links between department and functional silos that don’t talk to each other (and often competing for resources), turning innovative prototypes and minimum viable products into deliverable products to customers, etc.
Government agencies have all these challenges and more. Government agencies have more stringent policies and procedures, federally regulated oversight and compliance rules, and line-item budgets for access to funding. In secure locations, IT security can hinder the simplest process while a lack of access to a physical collaboration space and access to data, all set up additional barriers to innovation.
The NGA has embraced promising moves to bring lean methods to the way they innovate internally and acquire technology. But what we’ve seen in other agencies in the Department of Defense is that unless the innovation process is run by, coached and scaled by innovators who have been in the DOD and understand these rules (and have the clearances), using off-the-shelf commercial lean innovation techniques in government agencies is likely to create demos for senior management but few fully deployed products. (The National Security Agency has pioneered getting this process right with the I-Corps@NSA.)
Lessons Learned
- Lean Innovation teams are starting up at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA)
- NGA has an Innovation Outpost in Silicon Valley working on it’s first hacking for Defense Sprint
- NGA is experimenting with open innovation with its first problem on Challenge.gov
- The goal of Lean in government agencies should mean deployment not demos
- In order to successfully deliver products with speed and urgency, this requires coaches and instructors who have been the customer: warfighters, analysts, operators, etc.
- It will take innovation built from the inside as well as acquisition from the outside to make it happen
Your buyers have needs, and you can meet those needs with your solution. So what is causing those annoying continuances and stalls? Why can’t we get this closed already?
Maybe — just maybe — there are some needs you haven’t fully considered. Maybe it’s time to take a step back and reconsider how you’re interacting with the procurement department, purchasing agents, third-party agencies, influencers and gatekeepers involved in the buy. Jill Harrington, president of SalesSHIFT, is here to help.
In this rebroadcast from the CONNECT Radio archives, Harrington offers uncommon sense for sales teams seeking bigger, better, faster sales. She will help you accelerate sales by working with (not against!) the professional negotiators and buyers that are being consulted by the end user you’re serving. Her expertise in improving corporate performance is driven by her core belief that:
“Too many salespeople, even entire sales organizations, work way too hard doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Your team may be stuck in a rut doing what they’ve always done, doing what your competitors do, or simply doing too much of what doesn’t work. The net result… You’re making it way too hard for your clients and potential clients to choose you!”
Deb: “What are some of the common reasons you observe? So many sellers do a fine job interacting with traditional customers and direct decision makers, but then they struggle with the other folks who are influencing the decision.”
Jill: “Right. They (those influencers) have great relationships to some of our customers. These guys seems to really, I don’t know, get in our way sometimes… and I think that’s the issue. Now, I’m not speaking for all sales professionals, and if some of you are on the line and may be doing a great job, please do not be offended! But, I think the number one reason why most salespeople struggle with this group of customers is because they don’t truly understand them. And, very often we stereotype them or make assumptions about their roles.”
Listen to the full interview for tips and techniques that will improve your interactions with your most challenging customers. There’s no better way to maximize your windshield time than by tuning in to CONNECT! Online Radio for Sales Professionals®, your resource to cut out continuances, put an end to pending and stop stalling out in sales.
The post Challenging Customers: Working With Them, Not Against Them appeared first on People First.
By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
If you read this blog regularly (and why wouldn’t you), you know that I put a lot of emphasis on understanding and selling to a prospect’s Objectives, a much better area of focus than pains or needs. One of the positive elements of Objectives is that they are generally long term, and they continuously evolve. This provides with a number of opportunities to succeed, but it needs to executed right and in the right sequence.
Many sales people I speak to are always in a hurry, looking to short cut things. You can’t blame them, every time they go “Home”, they are asked, what did you close? As old as time, the tribe sends out their hunters, and they expect that hunter to come home with a kill, not “progress”, a “next step”, or any intangible gains. This drives a certain behavior that limits focus on the buyers’ long term, in favour of the seller’s immediate focus of quota.
I recently had a rep tell me that they would rather focus on the prospect’s priorities than their objectives, his reason being that priorities “paid off quicker than anything long term like objectives.” Well maybe.
Sure you are more likely to have short term gains with helping people with priorities, what they see as their immediate burning issue. But what I have seen is that priorities, or series of priorities are part of an overall plan, an overarching Objective, eventually success will be measured in not how well you accomplished any given priority on route to the Objective, but how well the Objective was achieved, and did that in turn drive the impacts and results the business was looking for.
Many sales people will opt to service the priorities because working on the whole Objective may take work and time. After all, the company may not realize their Objectives for some time, but may buy the first piece now. The challenge with that is that servicing their immediate purchases without aligning it with Objectives will often leave vendors exposed to the next flash or discounter who comes along. But if you can focus and sell to Objectives, it does not preclude you from servicing some of the steps along the way.
In addition, there is the question of influencing and shaping their Objectives and means of achieving. It is the familiar posture in sales, one where you would prefer to be a “trusted advisor” rather than a “supplier” or “vendor”. Keep your focus on what they are trying to achieve and why, not what they need to buy. There may well be alternative means of achieving their Objectives, ones you can introduce by virtue of being a Subject Matter Expert, picking off smaller projects along the way will not give you that. As well, if you are not aligned to their Objectives, any vendor who delivers a priority can come along and displace you. It is also OK to not win every small project along the way, as long as you are the one they look to for validation of the work, and further direction. The best sales people will win both priorities and Objectives by focusing more on the latter than the former.
The post Priorities vs. Objectives appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..
There’s no point in spending a single dime on a lead generation campaign unless you have a system in place to turn those leads into sales.
It’s a waste of ad budget, landing page builder subscription, not to mention the time you spend setting it up and optimizing the conversion rate.
It’s like throwing money down a well.
This article will give your SaaS company a step by step guide to lead nurturing.
The lead nurturing process in this guide has proven to yield the best ROI, be the simplest to replicate and convert the greatest number of leads into sales.
Before we can start effectively nurturing your leads into sales there are a few details we need to know about them.
Remember, effective lead nurturing is about three things:
If we can’t segment we can’t personalize, and if we can’t personalize then our strategy loses between 50% and 100% efficacy – as in we’ll convert about half as many leads as we can if we segment effectively.
You’ll see why it’s essential in a few steps, but at this stage know that it’s important and isn’t going to drop your visitor conversion rates too much.
You might see a drop if you’re collecting a lot of leads from content upgrades, as they’re a relatively low-value lead magnet. But if you’re focused on webinars, ebooks, whitepapers, infographics etc, you shouldn’t see more than a 5% decrease – and that’s more than worth it for the boost we see in sales conversions down the line.
Any good landing page builder will allow you to send a bit of hidden information through with your lead’s conversion. Usually, this is done with a hidden field.
Imagine a hidden field like a stowaway on an old wooden ship. Nobody knows it’s there but it crosses the ocean just as effectively. Except this time, once it gets where it’s going it delivers vital information to your marketing team.
For instance, we’ve published 34 ebooks. If I’m going to create an email drip campaign to nurture leads into a sale there’s no way I’m going to do it 34 times. (Remember, automation is key to our efficient lead nurturing strategy here…)
Instead, I’ll group my ebooks into a few segments: lead generation, social media marketing, growth hacking and contests and promotions.
If someone downloads my complete guide to marketing automation I need to tell my marketing automation platform that this lead should be placed into the growth hacking segment and to sent relevant content. If someone downloads my complete guide to Instagram, they need to be segmented into the social media marketing list and sent relevant social media content.
So you have their email address, name, business name and (with the hidden field) their interests as well.
That sounds like the recipe for an email drip campaign to me…
Here’s the schedule:
In total, that’s 6 pieces of educational content which needs to be relevant to the lead. That, my friends, is why we segment into relevant groups.
As a rule, your highest open rates are going to be between 8am and noon (cheers Mailchimp).
And most email marketing platforms can make that happen for you, even with your drip emails:
But the difficulty is, unless you’re exclusively generating leads from a specific local area (which is rare for lead-generating SaaS companies) your prospective customers are likely to be all over the globe.
That’s why I recommend you schedule drip emails to be sent within the same hour as the initial download. For instance, if someone downloaded an ebook at 2pm in their timezone, so long as you deliver an email 72 hours later, you know they’re likely to be active again.
That said, I do tend to add or subtract a few minutes here and there to make the scheduled nature of the emails a bit less obvious.
So there’s two options for optimizing your sales emails: automatic and semi-manual.
I’ll go over both.
Automatic Sales Emails:
With an automatic sales email, we’re relying on just the lead information we generated initially. That means you’re delivering an email that looks something like this (bracketed phrases are merge tags):
Hey [First Name],
James Scherer here. I hope this email finds you well!
I wanted to reach out because I’ve been talking to some marketers here in Vancouver and they were expressing their frustration at finding new strategies for lead generation.
Is this a difficulty at [Business Name[?
If so, I’d love to get you on a call to break down a few of the things we’re doing here at Wishpond, specifically our new popup and overlay tool, which has already driven thousands of new leads from our own inbound efforts.
Let me know a time that works for you and I’ll be in touch!
Semi-Manual Sales Emails:
I recommend the semi-manual strategy only for right when you’re getting started with SaaS lead generation. It’s important to get a complete idea of who your leads are before diving into complete automation.
You need to do this in order to inform what drop-down items you provide in your lead gen forms down the line. Doing a bit of digging into the leads you’re generating is an incredibly valuable use of your time. It gives you insight into what proportion of your SaaS leads are from which industry, who they are, which element of your product they’re interested in, etc.
So here’s what we need to do:
**Asking for business industry in the first place will save a lot of time, but is impossible to get right if you’re not 100% sure of what industries to target._
Top Tip: If you’re a bit more code-savvy, you can ask for business website instead of business name initially and create a crawler to search for that site’s SEO description. It’ll need some clearing up but you can get a pretty accurate list that way as well.
The semi-manual strategy means you’re delivering an email that looks something like this:
Hey [First Name],
James Scherer here. I hope this email finds you well!
I wanted to reach out because I’ve been talking to some other [business industry] marketers here in Vancouver and they were expressing their frustration at finding new strategies for lead generation.
Is this a difficulty at [Business Name[?
If so, I’d love to get you on a call to break down a few of the things our other [business industry] users, specifically our new popup and overlay tool, which has already driven thousands of new leads for businesses like yours.
Let me know a time that works for you and I’ll be in touch!
Once you’ve done this for a week or two, take the industries you’ve seen most frequently and add them to your initial lead generation forms. Including industry will improve your sales email success rates, but might decrease your landing page conversion rates. Test it for yourselves!
If you haven’t integrated your VIP demo pages with a sales platform or CRM quite yet don’t worry. Just create a landing page prompting a VIP demo and create a simple automated workflow to notify your sales team when someone’s converted:
Set the conditions which will trigger the internal email:
Then set the actions to be triggered (the internal email to sales):
Use merge tags in the internal email (name, email address, date selected for demo, etc) so your sales team gets all the information they need, automatically.
Hopefully this five-step guide has given you a better idea of how your SaaS startup can better turn leads into sales.
If you have any questions about generate, nurturing or closing your SaaS leads, don’t hesitate to ask them in the comment section below!
Technology is changing the way people today purchase and form brand loyalties. Today’s consumers expect brands to reach out to them in a way that offers value and keeps interest. Gone are the days of interruptive advertising making a real or lasting positive impact.
It’s important to understand that consumers are not moved by repetitive or interruptive marketing like they once were. In today’s oversaturated market, it’s hard for a brand to make a real impact among consumers. TV commercials, billboards, cold calling and other traditional forms of marketing are only pounding more branding on an audience that has been hardened from years of similar ad techniques.
Image via Flickr by Free for Commercial Use
With technology changes, brands are able to make a bigger impact in ways that are more cost effective but time consuming. The new marketing techniques have realized that a customer-centric approach is not only possible, but much more likely to yield lasting results. This has resulted in both inbound marketing and–more recently–next best action marketing methods that help businesses find and nurture new leads.
Next best action (NBA) marketing is focused on gathering information about consumers in order to make the business model better fit the need of the target audience. With this marketing system, professionals gather, sort and implement data from their customers across their entire company. The name itself (next best marketing) is pointing to the underlying method of using new data to continually identify the next best step in the sales process for every prospect.
Examples of next best marketing at work can be seen in many industries. Most service professionals, for example, are trained in a form of next best marketing. A waitress is likely to talk to a patron about personal taste preferences before suggesting an item on the menu and a good waitress will also likely suggest add-on items, like drinks or appetizers, to further boost sales. While this obviously leads towards direct revenue for the business, there is also a personalized services aspect that is looking out for the desires of the consumer and cultivating a good consumer-business relationship. A patron that leaves a restaurant satisfied by a delicious meal is far more likely to return.
In similar ways, hair dressers, hotel staff and retail makeup consultants all work with their prospects to sell as many relevant products or services as possible. Even in nonprofit industries, organizations often use NBA practices to request appropriate donation rates and garner useful volunteer services for their cause.
Not only do next best action marketing strategies help companies better approach their qualified leads with a tailored pitch, but those same strategies can also help businesses determine the likelihood of future purchases and the cost-to-benefit ratio for each acquisition. This means that businesses can better assess how they are spending their money to bring in new consumer groups and which leads they should pursue further for future transactions. The more a business is able to segment leads, the better that business will be able to reach each individual prospect, lead or acquisition.
While NBA and inbound marketing can go hand-in-hand in a business strategy, they are not the same thing. Inbound marketing focuses on putting out content designed to draw prospects in and cultivate them towards acquisition. Next best action marketing is a direct conversation with the prospect to find out where the next best step lies in moving them towards cultivation. While inbound includes a stagnant library of information in the form of a corporate blog, white papers or email archives, NBA uses opt-in calls, meetings or emails to form a give-and-take conversation to direct the process.
On one hand (inbound marketing), consumers are left to find the information for themselves, which works well for drawing in new leads and informing them about the company. Harvard Business Review found that inbound marketing and advertising can often add to the overwhelming chaos and push their prospects away with the misinformed idea that more content will hold the attention of a lead. Rather than understand the valuable nature of a strong inbound approach, brands have taken the easy road of churning out content in the hopes of creating a sticky web for their prospects.
On the other hand (next best action marketing), consumers are directed with a concierge-style marketing effort that helps direct them towards what is best for their ever-changing needs. This is only an effective approach when dealing with a lead that is qualified and interested.
You might be able to see, then, how these methods can work well in tangent. Next best action marketing does not work well if the leads are not qualified, since the sales team wastes a lot of time on trying to cultivate uninterested prospects. On the other hand, inbound marketing can fall short if prospects do not have the personal drive to push for more information and find answers for themselves.
A combined strategy might include inbound marketing efforts to bring in new leads and help them convert to opt-in contacts. Then, the company or organization can use those willing and interested contacts to approach with a Next best action marketing strategy for moving them further down the sales funnel. Finally, a combination of segmented emails, supportive inbound marketing and continued NBA conversations can turn customers or clients into loyal brand advocates. A brand advocate is not only more likely to purchase again in the future (reducing the cost spent on new leads), but is also more likely to pass along positive recommendations to friends and family.
According to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, Return on Behavior magazine:
Though more outside of the brand’s control, working to establish loyal customers is more likely to result in customers that speak in a positive light on behalf of the brand. These brand advocates are formed when they believe in the value of a brand and want to tell their friends, family and workplace peers about their experience. According to ACI Scholarly Blog:
(Source: Lithium)
By working to establish a valuable company that centers on the needs of the customer, a company or organization is able to create a loyal customer base to publically spread word of this value. Brands will see their initial investment in obtaining and cultivating leads multiplied when those leads continue to make future purchases and influence others to do the same.
When fully combined, these marketing strategies (inbound, NBA and WOMM) can create the kind of experience that offers the most customer-centric approach available and allows a brand to reach its full potential audience. This combined strategy helps brands and organization successfully set themselves apart from the other options in their industry and create a brand that does not get lost in the shuffle.
Networking is one of the most important aspects of running a company. Without it, clients would not be aware of your services and your business would cease to continue improving. You may think the only ways of networking are the traditional meet-ups, such as:
These events all have one thing in common: they allow you to surround yourself with people in your industry. But what about other ways of surrounding yourself with industry professionals? Or even better: surrounding yourself with potential clients? There are many ways to meet new people and convert them into clients.
Networking is the epitome of marketing yourself and your company.
No prospect is a one-channel individual. That is, they are not only using email, or Twitter, or LinkedIn, or the phone… chances are, they use all of those, and more, in their day-to-day lives.
Prospects are multi-dimensional in their choice of channel and platform, jumping from a phone call to check their email to write a tweet. And, to make matters more complicated, each prospect has a different way of using each platform. Some might use Twitter to develop their personal brand, while others use it to stay current with industry news, and still others use it as a way to network and develop new connections.
With all of this complexity, it is important for your sales team to combine the most popular methods of communication when reaching out to prospects.
Consider these two scenarios, both targeting a marketing exec at a B2B company:
Scenario A: You send a cold email to them, asking if they would like to try a free demo of your new big data software. Three days later, you send a follow-up email – the first email wasn’t opened, so you’re hoping this second one makes it through. A week goes by with no response, and after one last (unopened) follow-up, you deem the lead cold and move on.
Scenario B: You send a cold email to them, asking if they would like to try a free demo. Then, you immediately find their username on Twitter and use your personal account to retweet their latest industry-related tweet. You also respond to their question about big data interpretation. The next day, you look them up on LinkedIn and see that you have a shared connection. You request an introduction, and a few hours later, they’ve accepted your request to connect. Instead of sending another email reminding them of the demo, you send a quick, informal note on LinkedIn that they respond to an hour later – you’ve succeeded in setting up a demo for sometime later that week.
The second scenario is far and aware the more successful scenario, because the sales rep used multiple channels to reach out to their prospect.
Your prospects will be much more likely to care about your sales pitch if they feel a personal connection to you – and you and achieve this through a multi-channel strategy.
Before meeting a prospect face-to-face for a big pitch, tweet to them a few time. After hanging up the phone with another prospect who was very receptive to your product, immediately send a LinkedIn request.
You should be using all of the tools available to you when moving leads through your pipeline. And that doesn’t mean just sifting through data to better inform you about their likes, dislikes and needs. It means actively reaching out to them on multiple channels, creating a variety of touch points and ensuring that you and your product are top-of-mind next time they have to make a purchase.
Account based strategies work because they incorporate everything B2B marketing and sales teams do to target, close, and grow the best possible accounts. Account based strategies are not only personalized, they leverage basic human emotions and group dynamics for more effective selling.
Account-based marketing has boomed in the last two years, in large part because technology now automates the process of decision maker identification. With an account-based approach, every buyer can feel that the sales process is customized specifically for them.
B2B sales reps should be willing to walk a mile in their customers’ shoes. Successful account based strategies are grounded with emotion. Empathy is key to building out your buyer personas and understanding your audience’s motivations and pain points.
Engage.io’s John Miller has a great distillation on why Account Based Marketing works. “First and foremost: Reach the right people with a targeted strategy. That’s ABM. Rather than waiting around for the right people from the right companies to come swimming to your net, ABM allows you to reach out to the right people with a targeted strategy.”
Add in the fact that B2B purchases always close faster with organizational buy-in, and you have quite a compelling case for account based marketing and sales.
Well-orchestrated account based strategies share a few fundamental characteristics. To quote Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures, “An Account Based Strategy is built on the idea of creating many advocates within a company in order to close a sale. Sales and marketing teams use ABS to concentrate their efforts on a discrete list of target accounts.”
Account Based Strategies are not a departure from what many would recognize as “regular” or “traditional” marketing and sales. Rather, Account Based Strategies are a combination of familiar principles applied and concentrated toward a B2B audience.
One of the hallmarks of a solid SDR program is that lead generation (and the cost of securing those leads) is predictable from month to month and quarter to quarter.
If your lead projection numbers fall consistently off target (either positively or negatively), it’s time to pinpoint why. Even if your efforts generate significantly more leads than expected for a given time period, it can be concerning. While it’s usually good to have more leads (in most cases—see a caveat to this rule later in the list), you want to ensure you understand what is driving the increase in leads. Fine-tuning the measurement of your outbound marketing campaigns so that you understand what the levers are for each tactic and what effect it has on the outcome is key to accurately projecting lead volume. And a more accurate projection of lead volume not only demonstrates the value of marketing to the rest of the business, but it also shows that you are in firm command of what works, why, and what the business can expect as a result.
An account based marketing strategy is similar to what is traditionally called enterprise sales. The primary difference is that an account based strategy can be used to target a company of any size. Instead of messaging only to decision makers within a company, sales and marketing work together to simultaneously target multiple decision makers, with different roles and responsibilities. The concept involves leveraging dynamics of group psychology to close an account.
Rather than waiting for a decision maker to make a move, inbound companies using an account based strategy aim to speed up their sales cycle by targeting additional influencers directly.
By the time the decision maker at the company requests a demo, there will be a panel of people at the company who are knowledgeable about what you offer. When they go into their next meeting, your company’s name is on the tip of everyone’s tongue.
Today’s sales teams are challenged with sending tens of thousands of emails while maintaining a high standard of customization in each message. The more specific, accurate merge fields available, the greater the capacity for personalization. The more personalized an email, the greater the likelihood of a positive response. Even with a proven process, personalization at scale is hard, however, and not everyone knows how to do this effectively, so it’s important to hire and train well across your sales and marketing teams.
In order for these principles to be effective, Account Based Strategies must be applied all the way through the marketing and sales process. The gap between sales and marketing is an age-old chasm. Now more than ever, the Sales Development Representative (SDR) plays a key role in bridging the gap between sales and marketing.
Lars Nilsson, VP of Global Inside Sales at Cloudera who coined the term Account Based Sales Development states: “I called it ABSD because it is very much the SDR whom has the focus and control of both the technology and the multi-step processes that have to come together in order to execute a flawless outbound campaign. The SDR is in essence the quarterback for ABSD and can allow for scale across your target accounts.”
The largest and easiest cost to overlook for any SDR program always comes down to one thing: time.
And what is the most important activity that reps spend their time doing? Generating leads! With the recent role specification and birth of the SDR, sales teams have gone from buying leads to bringing the task in-house. Provide your SDRs with all the training and technology to succeed, and the true cost of even a small team of 6 reps can cost upward of $30K per month. That covers salary, coaching and training, technology, and everything else for a fully operational sales team. That’s a lot of money to protect someone’s time.
So, what do we do to protect the reps’ time? We invest in tools and technologies that will help automate pieces of their job, making them better, fast and stronger.
Any new customer is a good customer, right?
Not necessarily. As your business grows, a sign of maturity is making the shift from simply growing your customer base to focusing on acquiring the right kind of customers.
A key question SDRs must ask themselves around targeting alignment is, “What customers will best support our company’s retention and long-term growth goals?” Thinking strategically about the type of customer you want to make contact with and move through your lead funnel allows you to tailor account based strategies to meet that customer wherever he or she lives online. Another way to identify whether your account based strategy suffers from target misalignment is to look at post-sales relationships from an internal perspective.
For example, if your customer success team is constantly irritated with your sales teams for selling the “wrong” kinds of clients, then it’s on the marketing department’s shoulders to reassess targeting approaches to ensure your efforts are driving the right types of opportunities.
Once this is in place, the next step is to map out exactly what this hand off looks like.
We’ll talk more about how to build the right sales stack and what works best for your company later in this eBook. To download your free copy, visit accountbasedebook.com.
According to marketing automation leader Marketo, “Lead scoring is a shared sales and marketing methodology for ranking leads in order to determine their sales-readiness.” Yes, lead scoring helps companies prioritize leads based on their stages in the buying cycle. But when done correctly, lead scoring can also help businesses actively seek out prospects that are likely to bring the most value based on their similarities with previously won deals.
To do this, companies can score leads based on a number of criteria, including industry, company size, content downloads, website visits and much, much more. This is all fine and good, but where many opportunities are lost is when companies take a one-dimensional approach to examining the value of a lead.
Lead scoring is not a straight shot from lead capture to revenue; rather, it should be treated as a matrix where a lead is carefully plotted on a plain of desired outcomes and ranked accordingly. Here are three important but less obvious factors you may have missed when developing your lead scoring strategy.
Lead Yield is just one example of a Yield Measure, or a set of new sales metrics that can help you understand how much value you get in return for your investments at each stage of the sales pipeline. The formula for lead yield is as follows:
Sales Revenue / # of Leads Generated
Lead yield is an important metric to consider when establishing your lead scoring strategy because rather than simply pointing out the leads that have generated the most revenue for your business, it helps you understand them on a volume scale.
For example, imagine that one of your largest deals in company history came from the technology space. But of 1,000 leads from that industry, it was the only one that closed. In contrast, deals from the publishing space only generate 50% of the revenue of this technology deal on average. However, of 1,000 leads generated from the publishing space, 100 closed. Clearly, giving leads from the tech industry a higher lead score than those from the publishing space based on a desired revenue number would be a mistake.
The image below illustrates another scenario in which lead yield can uncover the most valuable prospects for your business:
Understanding this gives you deeper insight into the qualities you should be looking for when it comes to prospecting – i.e. contact title, company size, industry, other technologies in use, etc. Furthermore, it also gives you an opportunity to dig in and understand why your business may be failing to close more high-grossing leads.
Customer acquisition costs, or CAC, can be calculated using this simple equation:
Total Sales & Marketing Expenses / # of New Customers
By segmenting your customer base according to lead source, industry or other key lead scoring criteria and using this formula, you will quickly be able to see which types of customers cost your business the most money to acquire, and those that cost the least. When you compare these traits to those of your customers with the highest lead yield, you should be able to pinpoint key lead characteristics that will generate low cost, high value wins for your business, and score them accordingly.
Did You Know? Organizations that use lead scoring experience a 77% lift in lead generation ROI over organizations that do not use lead scoring.
While this metric is easy to calculate, factoring it into your lead scoring strategy can have a big impact and result in major rewards. One important thing to remember is, when considering sales cycle length in lead scoring, it’s all about optimizing for your current goal, be it low-risk quick wins or high dollar slow movers.
Start by simply adding up the amount of time previously won leads took to progress through each stage of your sales pipeline. Then, calculate the lead yield and CAC of leads within each of these time frames and start scoring. If you’re lucky, you may even discover a sweet spot: high dollar quick wins!
This sophisticated approach to lead scoring is highly effective yet also very complex. This is why new scientific sales solutions with the power to dynamically analyze millions of data points at once are emerging to help companies uncover the qualities and activities driving the most revenue.
If you scroll through LinkedIn or even perform a quick Google search on building sales teams, you will come across articles with titles like, “Sales Strategies to Build your Team,” or “KPIs of the Best Sales Organizations.” There is A LOT of content out there, and while some of it is compelling, most of it is fluff. It seems much of what you find is positioned from a very high level and it feels theoretical rather than real and actionable.
I’m a lover of data. I like looking at it, I like thinking about the story it tells and hey, I even like sharing it. Above all else, however, is my passion for developing winning sales teams. Frankly, data helps me do my job better. With all of this talk about metric driven teams, what metrics should you choose to look at? I won’t claim to know the answer for all industries, but I would like to spend some time in this blog post sharing some of the sales activity reports that we keep an eye on in our inside sales team at Base.
Like many other software companies, we employ Business Development Representatives (BDRs), Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) and Account Executives (AEs). Our BDR team is responsible for qualifying marketing-generated incoming leads, ensuring they are a good fit for our tool before introducing the prospect to an AE. Our SDR team uses an account based selling approach to prospect into businesses in particular verticals where we know we can bring great value. Finally, our AEs run the remainder of the sales cycle, and bring the deal to a win or lose decision. Surprise, I like wins better.
The reason I provide some context into the roles is because the activity of the reps naturally varies by group. For the sake of this blog post, we will be reviewing our BDR team activity report. If we look at June’s data, the BDR who was the highest over quota also demonstrated the most overall activity (calls, emails, completed tasks) in Base. This same individual is pacing to repeat his top performance in July and frankly, he has simply outworked his peers. See below.
Humble brag here, but that is a one click report that lives right in the Base platform. We can filter by team, date ranges, type of activity etc. Pretty useful, right? Not surprisingly, we have learned that this “hustle” shows a similar correlation to great quota attainment in our team of Account Executives.
Our AEs are blessed with quite a few warm leads every month that the BDR and SDR teams pass along. That said, the reps that are consistently outperforming are picking up the phone to do some of their own prospecting as well as sending more emails, asking for referrals, etc. Now, this isn’t a huge surprise to most sales professionals reading this post. However, I would like to point out a few things to consider when it comes to sales activity reports:
1) Many sales organizations don’t have a way to track this type of data. In fact, when asked to grade their relationships with their sales data, 83% of sales leaders gave themselves a B- or lower.
2) Organizations that do track this data access it from a manager level as opposed to an individual contributor level. The feedback from our sales people on having visibility has been overwhelmingly positive. I frequently overhear reps making comments like, “I’ll catch Pat in one more call.” I love the competitive nature of sales people.
3) You can’t coach what you don’t know. We frequently talk to teams exploring Base as a solution who aren’t able to quantify rep activity. Sure, they can see who is reaching quota or outperforming the rest of the team, but without KPIs like number of calls or the outcome of those calls, how can they coach those falling behind? Use data as a way to understand what your best performers are doing.
Now, it is naïve to think that pure activity is the driving factor for success in sales. We look a layer deeper when understanding what our team is achieving. Beyond pure quantification of output, we can realize what is happening in each call and email with our prospects.
As we scale our team, I have been spending a fair bit of time considering email and call outcomes, and yes, this is another one click report in Base. Below you will see data from our BDR team and the email outcomes report for July.
Like many development teams, our group uses a specific outreach cadence, which is a combination of calls and emails. While we have guidelines to the language they use in their email outreach, we let reps customize and make the content their own. Not surprising is that certain reps had better email responses than others.
We tracked the response rates for some time as a sort of “A-B” test of what content and type of messaging was having the most traction with our prospects. Another nifty component of having a team working together out of Base is that individual contributors can share their email communication with the rest of the team. This visibility means that reps who had lower response rates can read and then commandeer language from reps who had better response rates to improve their templates. Sharing is caring, after all.
Obviously, these metrics are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to measuring and analyzing the performance of a sales team. In my next blog, I’ll be writing about stage duration analysis in a pipeline funnel – yep, the length of time Account Executives keep deals in various deal stages. Sounds sexy, I know, but I promise that you will be blown away by what we learned (and more importantly how many more deals we were able to win). While you patiently wait, check out our white paper, Understanding the New Metrics of Sales.
We love any tool which helps marketers do their jobs better, which is why we created an infographic breaking down 150 of the best marketing tools into 30 different categories. But we aren't the only ones. Some of the folks at SimilarWeb also looked at how to help marketers decide on what marketing tools to use, and came up with a clever new service which they've dubbed 'SimilarTech'. We chatted to Daniel Buchuk, SimilarTech's head of brand and strategy about their new feature, what inspired it and how it works.
Scott Brinker's market landscape graph is testament to the extraordinary evolution of this industry, featuring featured 350 companies in 2012 and over 3,500 companies in 2016. I can't think of many other industries showing tenfold growth in the past 4 years! This is fantastic for marketing professional as it brings unprecedented choice to optimize and manage all marketing output, campaigns and operations. However, choice also comes with challenges such choosing the right tools and platforms for your business - continuously assessing their relevancy and fit while staying alert for innovation.
It is certainly one of the main reasons. It is very hard for marketers today to assess the
value of many of these platforms, especially when they're contacted by early-stage businesses with aggressive sales team that often over-promise and under-deliver. SimilarTech is a free tool for people to see instantly who's using these platforms and asses relevancy. Many of our users also find it really helpful for competitive analysis since they can look up any web-based platform used on their competitors' sites.
SimilarTech is designed to help both sides of the equation: marketers and technology-
owners. Marketers are able to gain insights to make informed decisions with solid understanding of market trends and adoption of specific technologies while the companies developing web-based technologies can find, qualify and connect with new companies based on their technology stack, location, web traffic and more.
Editor's note: You can see images of the tool in action below:
We use state-of-the art crawling technology to scan every website for the technologies they use. Our crawlers are scaled massively to reach large portions of the internet on a daily basis to deliver always up to date and relevant data. 99.99% of active sites on the Web are detected and indexed in our database for real market share data with over 100 million web pages analyzed daily and over 1 billion data points collected every single day. Our challenge to process all this knowledge and turn it into relevant insights for marketers that need market insights and sales professionals that need to find and qualify new opportunities.
We initially positioned SimilarTech as a tool for marketing and sales professionals to get market insights on technology usage and to generate and prospect leads based on companies their technology stack and online performance. Initially, we didn't consider marketing agencies as one of our potential customers, but we found that there's a huge demand all over the world for digital marketing agencies to use our insights to target publishers in specific territories, business verticals and using a defined set of advertising platforms.
You’ve probably heard that content marketing is the wave of the future.
But do you know why?
While it’s true that content marketing is massively effective for nearly every company and industry on the globe, many marketers don’t understand why.
Let’s shine a light on this puzzling (yet fascinating) state of affairs, with 10 statistics that will prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that content marketing is today’s marketing.
Paid advertisements were all the rage in online marketing. Today, however, consumers are increasingly savvy about opting out of the advertising they would rather not see. In August 2015, approximately 200 million people worldwide had installed ad-blocking software.
While it is great news for consumers, it’s terrible news for marketers who rely heavily on paid advertisements to spread their brand’s message.
Luckily, there’s a way to continue marketing efforts without being blocked by the people you’re trying to reach. The secret is content.
In addition to being impervious to ad-blocking software, good content is something consumers want to interact with, which makes it more effective and welcome on a foundational level.
While high-quality content is difficult to pin down, it’s well worth it in the end. According to Neil Patel, people who succeed at becoming leaders in the world of content marketing — people who craft compelling, valuable content that gets to the heart of their readers — experience drastically more site growth than their competitors.
#Contentmarketing leaders experience 7.8X more site traffic than non-leaders says @kapost.
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Take Search Engine Journal, for example. The content on this site is always high quality and, as a result, it earns over 1 million unique visitors each and every month. This is no accident: People want valuable, informative material and Search Engine Journal knows how to create it.
According to a 2015 IBM Digital Experience Survey, 56% of marketers believe that personalized content promotes higher engagement rates. Because personalized content helps consumers remember a brand, it also encourages them to engage more personally with the company in question, thus introducing a positive feedback loop that benefits both the customer and the company.
56% of marketers believe that personalized #content promotes higher engagement rates says @IBM.
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While skim-able content is highly valued, consumers are actually reading the articles marketers post. According to a NewsCred Insights post, marketers who produce high-quality, relevant content enjoy audiences who spend significant time on their sites. Over time, this engagement helps produce higher levels of brand recognition, which boosts sales and encourages ongoing engagement.
The median time people spend on #contentmarketing articles is 37 seconds says @newscred.
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While many inexperienced marketers assume that content marketing is expensive, the fact is that it’s often cheaper than traditional marketing methods. Because content marketing is effective, easy to begin, and popular with consumers, it can drastically reduce the money marketers spend on advertising their brands. What’s more, it manages to do all of this while being more effective than traditional marketing.
#Contentmarketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing & generates 3x as many leads says @demandmetric
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Most B2B marketers use content marketing as a foundational piece of their marketing strategy. In addition to making it easier to communicate with consumers, content marketing also produces more sustainable value and makes it easier for brands and customers to connect with one another.
When content marketing adopters and non-adopters are compared, the adopters have conversion rates that are nearly six times higher than their competitors. While content marketing requires an investment of time, money, and skill, it drives much higher conversion rates than its traditional marketing counterparts.
#Contentmarketing drives higher conversion rates than traditional marketing says @JuliaEMcCoy.
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When you analyze the impact of different content distribution channels side by side, it becomes clear that email offers the largest overall reach: For every $1 spent, email gives back a whopping $38 in ROI, and offers the broadest reach (CampaignMonitor). Because email is personalized, targeted, and delivered directly to a customer’s inbox, it’s a wonderful (and inexpensive) way for marketers to gain an in to their customers.
More is more, right? When it comes to content marketing, that may be true.
While it’s not uncommon to use various marketing tactics in any segment of business, B2B marketers are notorious for using dozens of content strategies. The reason for this is that while content marketing is effective, it’s much more effective when distribution channels are varied and diverse.
With this in mind, marketers will benefit from creating various content formats and using several different marketing platforms to push them through to consumers.
Content marketing has become such a profitable marketing method that major companies around the globe are hiring people to manage the content creation and distribution process.
Adding this role helps the company ensure that it is allocating resources correctly and communicating with its customers in the most targeted and effective way possible. It also ensures that marketers are using content formats, various distribution platforms, and new technologies as effectively as possible.
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While many marketers are unsure about why content marketing is so popular these days, these 10 statistics prove that it is indeed the marketing of the future.
Less expensive, efficient, compelling, and highly customizable, content marketing caters to virtually all businesses and all industries.
From blog posts to infographics and everything in between, creating unique, consistent, and truly useful content is the No. 1 way to connect with your audience on the most effective level.
Let us help you strengthen your case for content marketing. You can still register to attend Content Marketing World Sept. 6-8 in Cleveland where you’ll have more than 200 speakers ready to help your content marketing efforts. Use code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Why is Content Marketing Today’s Marketing? 10 Stats That Prove It appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
Modern-day psychology -- and life experience -- tells us that pain is the best motivator for action. That’s why prospects are much more likely to buy if your product or service will solve a deep frustration of theirs. Asking the right questions is key to uncovering the pain that will motivate your prospect to buy.
Unfortunately, most salespeople don’t know the right questions to ask to close the deal. In sales, you can do everything else right, but if you’re not closing sales, you’re going to go broke -- fast. It’s no surprise that the most successful salespeople ask the same questions, over and over again, to discover their prospects’ biggest pain-points -- and close more sales as a result.
Check out this special report to learn more about the best questions to ask during a sale. And commit to asking these five powerful closing questions the next time you’re trying to close a deal.
Your goal with this question is to find the organization’s “migraine.” Don’t get distracted by little headaches. Headaches, though frustrating, aren’t a big deal -- but your prospects will do anything to relieve a migraine. Ask this question to get directly to the key issues and frustrations that your prospect is facing. Once you know, you’ll be able to communicate how you can help solve that problem.
Check out this video to learn more about discovering your prospect’s deepest frustration:
In other words, what is that migraine costing your prospect’s organization in lost revenues, savings, or profits? By asking for a specific number, you’ll get your prospect to articulate the value of solving that problem.
Getting your prospects to acknowledge what a challenge is costing them creates massive value and leads them to think about how important your solution really is.
This question helps you understand how that cost personally affects your prospect. You might feel uncomfortable asking this question, but salespeople who hold their prospects’ feet to the fire get a higher level of commitment to solving the problem than those who are too afraid to ask a personal question.
The video below gives even more detail about closing questions like this:
There are few things more frustrating to a salesperson than getting to the end of a sales process only to hear, “We’re going to put this off until next year.” The hard truth of the matter is that salespeople who hear that answer have only themselves to blame.
Never present your solution until you’re confident that your prospect is fully bought in to solving the problem right now. Challenge your prospect by asking -- in a way that’s genuine but not aggressive -- if solving that challenge is a key priority before you try to close the sale.
Ask this question as you get ready to move toward closing a sale. After you’ve gone through the entire discovery process, test the waters to see if the prospect is thinking about moving forward with your solution. This question makes clients feel like they’re in control -- but also gives you really important feedback about their actual desire to work with you.
Next time you go through a sales presentation with a customer, focus on uncovering their deepest frustration. You absolutely must ask these five closing questions to close more sales, and you really can crush your sales goals. Which of these five questions did you find most useful? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Businesses today have access to heaps of sales data that offer the ability to measure a lot more than revenue. A set of new sales metrics is emerging that enables sales leaders to not only gain a deeper understanding of their sales performance, but to also identify the specific steps that can be taken to impact growth.
These metrics can be broken into 5 key categories:
Capacity metrics work to help you understand the workload of your team and the maximum revenue that can be generated given your number of reps. If you’re unsure whether your team is reaching its full potential, or are worried that reps might be overwhelmed, these metrics will allow you to better measure and maximize their productivity.
Is your team falling short of its forecast? Not sure how your spend is stacking up against your sales? These metrics help you understand the monetary cost and value associated with your customers so that you can plan and predict future performance in a way that will maximize your profits.
Process measures are used to understand how leads and opportunities flow through your sales pipeline. Breaking conversion rates down stage-by-stage allows you to pinpoint bottlenecks and inefficiencies at various points within your sales process, revealing actionable insights around how to increase revenue.
Curious how to calculate the value of a lead in your pipeline? What about understanding how that lead compares to a lead from another source? Yield measures are used to understand how much value you get in return for your investments at each stage of the sales pipeline.
The Sales Formula provides a consistent and reliable way to measure and evaluate your sales strategy over time across key conversion points needed to turn a lead into a closed deal.
Lead yield is just one example of a yield measure, and can be calculated using the following simple formula:
Sales Revenue / # of Leads Generated
Understanding your lead yield enables you to more accurately score and prioritize leads from your various marketing channels and sources based on those that ultimately generate the most value for your business. It also gives you deeper insight into the qualities you should be looking for when it comes to prospecting – i.e. contact title, company size, industry, other technologies in use, etc.
For a full breakdown of the new sales metrics in each of these categories, check out our newest white paper, Understanding the New Metrics of Sales.
At any stage of your career, it’s important to think about the future. Many jobs don’t offer a clear role progression, but in sales, you know exactly what job titles are in front of you. If you’re a sales manager at an early-stage startup eyeing your next move up, your goal is probably to become Head of Sales, Vice President of Sales, or Chief Revenue Officer. However, it’s often hard to get to that level due to the training and development that’s needed to do the job well.
It’s difficult being thrown into the fire of management while developing a brand at an early-stage startup. To make sure you’re developing the right skills, below are some of the key responsibilities a VP of Sales is tasked with – and how you can train yourself to succeed at that level.
Right now, part of your job is to manage individual sales reps. But in order to be a good VP of Sales, you’ll need the ability to manage your managers. It’s a requirement and skill that only comes with the right experience and training.
You can improve on this by building your own team leads. Pretend they’re your Sales Managers and you’re the VP – if you treat your reps as Sales Managers, they’ll treat you like you’re the VP of Sales, which can lead to promotion sooner rather than later.
In my opinion, one of the most important traits of a VP of Sales is their ability to understand their company both financially and analytically. It’s important you know which KPIs are most important to measure. You’ll need to explain these metrics to executives, and
the more you can use numbers to tie performance to revenue, the more appealing you are to your company.
In order to be a successful VP of Sales, you need to have vision for where the sales team is today and where they will be in 3, 6, 9 months, etc. This could be one of the biggest differences between a Sales Manager and a VP. Sales Managers drive the day-to-day performance of each rep, but a VP of Sales strategically thinks about the company’s long-term performance and goals.
As a Sales Manager, you should try to come up with a 90-360 day plan and sync with the executives in your company. Don’t hesitate on trying different exercises with your team and initiate conversations about sales strategies with the VP of Sales. It will impress your manager and show that you have the drive to become an employee in higher management.
As a Sales Manager, you’re a user of Marketing, but a VP of Sales needs to be working together on how the marketing funnel feeds the sales engine. Make sure you’re giving the marketing team everything they need in order to generate your leads into successful sales. To create an understanding relationship and consistent feedback between the sales and marketing teams, you should allocate some part of your day/week and get to know what marketing does.
Grabbing a coffee with the Head of Marketing or a Marketing Analyst is a great way to get a better understanding of how marketing and sales go together. Find out what their biggest pain points are and what their priorities are. Once a relationship is established, it will become much easier to start thinking about how marketing and sales connect.
Sales Managers are typically managing one branch of a team – SDRs, AEs, Sales Ops, Sales Engineers, Sales Recruiters, etc. As a VP of Sales, you need to understand how to build the team across the board. What kind of AEs should you hire? What kind of post sales should you hire?
To get a better sense of all the positions, when an opportunity presents itself in your career to rotate your position, do so. When you rotate through different teams, you’ll gain a lot more experience managing different types of roles. Get to know the entire sales organization if possible and volunteer yourself to sit in on hiring meetings and to be an interviewer for new roles. Not only will this prove your dedication, but it will educate you on what is needed in each position for the company.
When you’re a Sales Manager you’re managing reps and reporting to the VP of Sales, but as VP you are likely reporting to the executive team and getting pulled into board meetings. Communication, a high level of adaptability, and keeping executives and Sales Managers in the loop is extremely important at the VP level. You must give them enough communication so that they feel confident in your ability to continuously deliver results.
Figure out how to lead and motivate a team of people. In many cases, you might have to be the messenger delivering tough messages to the organization. Even if you’re close with your current VP, create some distance and adapt your communication style so it mirrors an executive level relationship. You need to learn to show empathy but also remain assertive when speaking with investors, sales reps, managers, the board and even the CEO. A VP of Sales needs to know how to speak to different people, all with different personalities.
Though you’ll encounter many new challenges as a VP of Sales, these are a few of the key responsibilities I’ve seen Sales Managers struggle with when transitioning. By preparing yourself and giving yourself the extra training needed for the VP level, you’ll gain a better understanding of your sales organization and have a better chance for future promotions.
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Jordan Wan is the Founder/CEO of CloserIQ, the sales recruiting platform connecting top sales talent to tech companies. Previously, he was the Head of Analytics at PayPerks, Sales Manager at ZocDoc and Trading Strategist at Bridgewater Associates.
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After weeks (if not months) of prospecting and preparation, you’ve landed the call. The big call.
The one with the C-level exec, the department head, and maybe a few of their reports too.
How can you best control the call so that your meticulous sales process isn’t derailed?
Here are our team’s top tips to get you from “Nice to meet you” to “Sign here” in one call.
“Set an agenda! Make sure everyone is on the same page with goals and expectations and status going into the call. Especially with multiple stakeholders – they often have vastly different wants and expectations. So make sure you’re accommodating everyone on the call in the first place – otherwise, it might not get off the ground at all.”
It’s true, it’s unwise to go into any sales call blindly, but especially one with many stakeholders and opinions. Does everyone need to be on the call? Will they all have to speak up or will some simply listen in? Who is the ultimate decision maker? Be clear and straightforward with your contacts from the get-go about each individual’s role and the goals for the call. If you can, address people by name or ask participants to state their name before speaking to maintain order.
“Have a list of questions you’d like to ask ahead of time. Ask probing, open-ended questions that will facilitate a dialogue with the buyers, who will often end up telling you exactly what they want and need, and the issues they are having. Then, you can direct the conversation from that point on, addressing their key needs.”
Focus on information that will help you serve them better. What problems can you solve? What day-to-day pain points can you alleviate? The more customer-oriented you can be, the better. No one wants to hear a one-sided sales commercial. Truly listen to their needs and adjust the conversation based on what they say and how you can help. Be careful not to interrupt or talk over folks. Without body language cues, a little more patience will go a long way to a smooth conversation over conference call.
“Know the answers and do your homework. While there’s no way to know every single answer, the less you have to tell a buyer “that’s a good question, I’ll get back to you,” the better able you will be to control the direction the call goes.”
That being said, if you don’t know the answer – don’t make one up. Simply promise to find out the correct information and pass it on to them quickly after the call. The more transparent you are up front, the more likely the buyer will sense your trustworthiness and may be more likely to buy. Take detailed notes too – empty promises are a deal-killer.
“Ask what next steps are at the end of the call. Calls usually end with buyers letting you know that they are ready to buy or the more common “we’ll talk it over and will get in touch.” Get an idea of timelines, when they plan on making a decision, and if they need any additional information to help with the process.”
Don’t let the call end without an action plan in place. Can you follow up in a few days? Do they need you to schedule another pitch with someone else on their team? Is there a certain element that’s holding up their decision that you can help manage? Does someone on the team have a specific concern? Figure out how you can get them across the finish line in a timely manner while you still have their attention on the conference call.
“Give the buyers new ideas and perspectives. Have you had clients from the same industry or with the same problem that needed solving? Show how other customers have been successful with your product and why.”
Maybe they think they don’t need your service. Or can’t picture why a certain feature could help them save time. Make sure you explain any out-of-the-box ideas, unique use cases, or special promotions you can offer in order to sweeten the deal and make it easier for them to sign on.
If you come prepared, you’ll be able to deftly manage any concerns as they arise. And when you run an organized, successful conference call, your prospects will be signing on that dotted line in no time.
Investing in building a new tech stack does not always save you time or money.
But there’s a modern sales strategy that does: activity-based selling. This methodology tells us that sales is a cascading chain of controllable behaviors that lead to a defined outcome. Every sales rep has a defined set of actions that lead to their desired results.
Before your field sales rep closes her enterprise deal, she uncovers a business opportunity, identifies key players in the buying process, provides a value proposition, hosts demo and discovery sessions, negotiates a contract and then finally closes the deal.
Your sales development rep identifies leads, calls them, qualifies them and sets up appointments with sales reps.
It’s critical to guide those activities that lead to sales. Sales activity management automates your activity-based selling strategy and conserves two of your most valuable assets: time and money. Here’s how.
In an ideal world, we’d get maximum productivity when we hire the right people and provide them the right tools. But sales is complex, and sometimes reps need guidance on where to spend their time.
Managing teams around a common set of activity metrics increases revenue. When reps know which activities to spend their time on and how much of each activity they need to succeed, they spend less time guessing what to do next.
Sales activity management provides reps with a recipe for success, increasing the number of times they close a deal and decreasing the amount of potential revenue loss.
Don’t you wish you could avoid that awful feeling in the pit of your stomach when you look at your sales report at the end of the month?
Sales activity management allows you to monitor performance daily, signaling when you fall behind pace. Your reps have individual activity goals, and you have composite data that shows how your team is doing. When reps haven’t made enough phone calls to hit quota, you can use competition or incentives to rally them around that key metric.
Onboarding and coaching are two of your most important responsibilities. Research from DePaul University revealed that sales organizations struggle with sales rep turnover and that the average cost per turnover is $97,690. Almost $100,000 for one person!
With sales activity management, you onboard salespeople against a common set of metrics. Reps get ramped up thoroughly because they know where they’re expected to be performance-wise.
Sales activity management also provides objective data to guide your weekly one-on-ones and coaching sessions. When the metrics tell you where individual salespeople fall behind, you know exactly where they need help.
The best part is that you’re not just saving money, but getting more of it. But you can’t do any of this without a robust activity-based selling strategy.
In his book Cracking the Sales Management Code, Jason Jordan explains that “Sales activities drive sales objectives, which in turn drive business results.” For example, if you increase call plan usage, you increase the number of new accounts, which should, in turn, lead to greater market penetration.
Once you know the business results your team has to deliver (usually handed down to you by executive management) you can begin to work your way up from activities to affect those business results. Let’s look at how you can get started with activity-based selling.
Define your sales organization’s structure and develop your own hypothesis of the right activity metrics for sales reps. Interview reps, managers and executives to see what they think are the right metrics. Taking their feedback into account, determine what metrics best create your sales process and then ensure you are able to track them in your outbound sales platform and CRM.
When you’ve determined your metrics, review them with sales managers and reps for buy-in. Explain how you came up with them and why it helps manage the sales process. Develop personalized scorecards for team members to track their metrics. Display performance metrics publicly and review them daily to review progress toward goals.
Inspire team collaboration via accessible stack rankings, and use contests or incentives to rally the team when needed to lift a metric or for a special initiative. Ensure managers monitor metrics daily to course correct when falling behind and celebrate success. Run consistent one-on-ones and coaching sessions using objective metric data as your guide. Assess sales team data monthly or quarterly to identify any goal misalignment, and adjust as needed.
These three steps will get you started with activity based selling. Once you have them in place, you’ll be able to accelerate your activity-based selling strategy by making your key selling behaviors happen more often. Then you’ll have a modern, activity-driven sales organization.
