Studying sales pitch examples from the best of the best should be compulsory for anybody crafting their own pitch.

Why? Creating a winning sales pitch has never been more challenging. In a recent report, sales expert Marc Wayshak found that only 24.3% of 400 surveyed sales reps exceeded quotas last year.

61% consider selling harder than it was five years ago.

Prospects expect sales pitches to be highly personalized, too. But with the rise of automation tools, sales is more of a “numbers game” than ever, so personalizing a pitch can seem like an impossible task. And of course, every sales leader has a set of sales best practices they believe makes a sales pitch successful.

But best practices often conflict.

Let’s dive into some of the principles that make for an ultra-effective sales pitch, and explore examples that illustrate them perfectly.

Here are the tips and tactics behind these 7 winning sales pitch examples:

1. Reference past conversations
2. Start your elevator pitch with a question
3. Keep it short
4. Highlight benefits, not features
5. Anchor your pitch in data
6. Tell a story
7. Keep it conversational, not formal

What Is a Sales Pitch?

A sales pitch is a well-crafted, then packaged sales presentation. Typically, a salesperson gets less than two minutes to explain how their business will benefit the prospect. In some contexts, it is also known as an elevator pitch since, with tight time constraints, you are presented with an opportunity to persuade a prospect to engage in business with you.

The attention span of people in this tech-driven world is ever shrinking. As such, salespeople no longer have the luxury of an hour-long presentation geared towards selling a specific product or service. People no longer have enough time to listen to long sales pitches. Whenever you find yourself giving an hour-long sales pitch, you must restrategize.

A good sales pitch needs to convey the intended message concisely in a compelling manner. If the sales pitch is on point, you are on the right path to making profitable sales. The first few minutes of a business conversation determine the direction your interactions will take. Be sure to use this sales pitch as your attempt to convince the prospect about the superiority of the service you are offering.

If you are selling a product, a sales pitch is your chance to dispel a prospect’s belief about the product. This is when you reassure them of the benefits they will enjoy if they buy the product you are selling.

7 Sales Pitch Examples and Tips

Sales Pitch Example #1 – Reference Past Conversations

If you’ve spoken with your prospect before, don’t start a pitch by talking about yourself, your product, or your business. You’ve already built some rapport, so use it!

Refer back to the conversations you’ve had previously to show the prospect you remember them, and remind them that you understand their problem. It helps if your last conversation included solid discovery questions like these:

• What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?
• How are you addressing that problem today?
• How are you measuring your goals?

| Related: How to Really Run an Effective Sales Discovery Call

At DocSend, we always start our pitch with a review of the most important things we’ve already learned about the prospect and their pain points.

Here’s an example slide:

You can also use this technique if you’re pitching over the phone, email or LinkedIn.

Here’s an email pitch example that refers back to a previous conversation:

“Hi Sarah,

Thank you for taking some time to speak with me over coffee at Dreamforce on Tuesday. Loved your booth design!

When you mentioned that you sometimes feel like you’re sending your proposals into a black hole, it struck a chord with me. I had that problem at my previous company, too.

Now at DocSend, I help other media companies – like Mic, for example – solve that problem, by giving them insight into who engages with the document and when.

I think I can help you prioritize deals that show more engagement. Can we talk about it next week sometime?

Lisa”

Sales Pitch Example #2 – Start Your Elevator Pitch With a Question

When asked for an elevator pitch, or simply when asked what they do, most unpracticed reps will say something like this:

“I’m Greg and I work for ACME Corporation. We design, build, and distribute elaborate and dangerous devices to coyotes who want to eat roadrunners.”

Those facts may be true, but just stating facts does not make a good sales pitch! How would Greg’s prospect respond to that statement other than saying, “Oh, that’s interesting”?

A successful sales pitch begins a dialogue. Rather than starting with an opening line that’s all about you, try posing a question.

Check out this example from Chris Westfall, Author of The New Elevator Pitch: The Definitive Guide to Persuasive Communication in the Digital Age:

ARVE Error: src mismatch
url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuhaX2Zr6xU&feature=youtu.be&t=19
src in: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/QuhaX2Zr6xU?start=19&feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://www.saleshacker.com
src gen: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/QuhaX2Zr6xU?start=19Actual comparison
url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuhaX2Zr6xU&feature=youtu.be&t=19
src in: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/QuhaX2Zr6xU?start=19&enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.saleshacker.com
src gen: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/QuhaX2Zr6xU?start=19

Here are a few questions that a qualified prospect might say “yes” to:

• Have you ever noticed…
• You know how…
• I’ll never forget when…
• Doesn’t it seem like…

You can also reverse this. If your prospect knows you will try to sell them, they may have their guard up, and they’ll be wary of being pushed towards a “yes”. So instead of asking them to admit they have a problem, you could assumptively say they don’t have the problem.

For example, you could reverse Chris’ pitch from the video and say something like:

“You’re probably paying below 19% in taxes each year, right?”

If they are, they’re not a great prospect! If they aren’t, they’ll tell you all about it—and you can tell them how you’ve helped others like them.

Sales Pitch Example #3 – Keep it Short

You don’t need to tell your prospect everything you can do for them all in your first pitch. In fact, a perfect sales pitch should leave the prospect wanting more.

If you’ve done a good job identifying your prospect’s pain points, and you really understand how your product or service helps alleviate it, you should be able to pitch with one short sentence.

Check out this example from Shultz Photo School’s website:

“We help parents take better pics.”

Notice they don’t talk about lenses, lighting, angles, or composition. They don’t even mention how they help parents take better pictures! They’ve simply identified a specific audience—parents—and stated that they solve a problem they know that audience has.

It’s an extreme example, and a pitch this short might not work in every context, but it illustrates an important point: short pitches are simple. Simple pitches are easy to understand. And when your prospect understands you quickly, it’s easier to have a conversation with them.

Sales Pitch Example #4 – Highlight Benefits, Not Features

This is one you probably hear a lot, but how do you actually put it into action? Here’s one example, from G2Crowd:

ARVE Error: src mismatch
url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=20&v=sWsBPJZYrBw
src in: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/sWsBPJZYrBw?start=20&feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://www.saleshacker.com
src gen: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/sWsBPJZYrBw?start=20Actual comparison
url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=20&v=sWsBPJZYrBw
src in: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/sWsBPJZYrBw?start=20&enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.saleshacker.com
src gen: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/sWsBPJZYrBw?start=20

“G2Crowd is the user-voice platform for people to be able to say how they actually think about software, and not be told by the analysts, or people who don’t use it, or the reference from your best customers. You’re actually hearing directly from the user and engaging with people who actually use the product.”

I like this pitch because it’s short, but still makes it crystal clear why G2Crowd benefits users.

The rep could have pointed out that G2Crowd collects star-ratings, written, and video reviews, and can confirm whether reviewers are current users. He could have told us that G2Crowd categorizes the reviews in a way that makes it really easy to compare competing software products.

But even if he said all that, the benefit is still that we’re getting the information from real users! Focusing on the benefit helps make the information more relevant to the prospect or customer.

Sales Pitch Example #5 – Anchor Your Pitch in Data

Your prospects hear a lot of claims from your competitors. After a while, and especially if your prospect has made purchases that didn’t pay off, those claims start to sound dubious.

So use clear data from reputable sources as an anchor for your pitch. For example, here’s a slide from Tien Tzuo’s pitch of Zoura, a leading force behind the subscription economy.

Tzuo didn’t simply claim that the subscription economy is the future in his pitch—instead, he introduced concrete, reputable data points that allowed his audience to draw that conclusion for themselves.

Here’s another example. Which is more compelling?

“Optimizing sales content for desktop is a clear and worthwhile priority for today’s sales leaders.”

Or

“Nearly 85% of visits to sales collateral are on desktop, not mobile.”

When it comes to data, relevant specificity is king. (By the way, that stat is true, and is part of DocSend’s Sales Benchmarks Report!)

Boiling down exposition and concentrating on driving home quantitative evidence is a great way to showcase the prevalence and significance of the problem your product addresses. This is key in perking up the ears of your prospect and setting the scene for a memorable sales pitch.

Sales Pitch Example #6 – Tell a Story

If you have a little more time for your pitch, or if you’re preparing for a product demo, create a story that illustrates how your product benefits your customers.

Note: this isn’t the “About Us” slide some people still include in their pitch decks. Your prospect does not care about your founding story, or where your offices are located. Conversely, this story makes your prospect or customer the hero—their problem is the dragon they need to slay, you are their trusted advisor, and your product is the magic sword.

This example already got a lot of attention, but we have to highlight it because it’s become the prototype for storytelling in a pitch deck:

Andy Raskin, a storytelling pro, wrote up a quick analysis of what makes this an effective sales presentation. Here’s the TL;DR version:

1. It begins by stating a big change has taken place that affects the audience.
2. It names an enemy.
3. It teases the “promised land” – what the world will look like for the people who deal with the new change the right way.
4. It highlights a few features as ingredients in a sort of magic potion that can bring people to the promised land.
5. It brings the point home with some proof that the whole story is true.

Sales Pitch Example #7 – Keep it Conversational, Not Formal

Your elevator pitch should be practiced, but it shouldn’t be a monologue. Just because somebody has asked what you do doesn’t mean they want to hear every little detail.

So, start by giving them just a quick snippet of what you do that will pique their interest. If they verbally (or non-verbally) indicate that they’re interested, that’s your cue to continue.

Brian Walter calls this the WOW, HOW, NOW framework, and it goes like this:

1. WOW – Offer up some short, interesting statement that will make the other person think to themselves, “wow!”. This statement might even be slightly confusing, as long as it’s not just industry lingo.
2. HOW – If you’ve done the first part right, you got an eyebrow raise, a tilt of the head, or a “huh?” in response. Now’s your chance to clarify and expand just a little bit.
3. NOW – End by giving a specific example of how you do what you do.

Here’s an example:

Prospect: “So, what do you do?”

Me: “I help salespeople become the fly on the wall.”

Prospect: “Huh? What does that mean?”

Me: “I sell a platform that lets salespeople see how their prospects interact with their proposals after they send them out. Now, for example, I’m working with one customer to change how they prioritize deals based on how engaged prospects are with the proposals.”

Use Data to Ensure your Pitch is Effective

There are a number of subtle yet undeniable buying signals that can help you identify just how proactively interested your prospect is in your pitch.

For instance, if a prospect asks about pricing, next steps, delivery dates or service level, they’re showing indications that they’re considering moving forward. Other buying signals include statements like, “This would help us accomplish X” or “If/when we use your product, we’d/we’ll be much more Y”.

The drawback to relying on verbal buying signals like these is that they can sometimes be vague, or subjective. Luckily, there are some tools that make it easy to measure how effective your sales pitch is.

Gong.io or Chorus, for example, are conversational intelligence platforms that analyze sales calls to identify ways reps can pitch more effectively.

And I’m biased, but I also think DocSend is helpful. For example, I can see which of my prospects engage with which pages of a document I send them, and prioritize those topics in later conversations.

However you do it—even if you’re just tracking results of your pitches in a spreadsheet—keep track of the flops and wins! Every modern sales team should be using data to inform their pitch, not just going on gut instinct.

The post 7 Successful Sales Pitch Examples and Why They Work appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Located less than 10 miles from Evergage’s headquarters in Somerville, MA, Drift is a local media darling that’s taken the B2B world by storm. The company’s communications and engagement solutions help demand gen-focused businesses drive leads through what it refers to as “conversational marketing.” If you’re not familiar with Drift as a company, perhaps you’ve come across their seemingly ubiquitous message icon:

Despite Drift’s popularity, I can’t help but think that they would be better served if their customers would exercise a bit more restraint when it comes to when and how they engage their website visitors. Otherwise, Drift (and other chat solutions) could be heading the way of ForeSee.

ForeSee (now Verint ForeSee) is a voice of the customer (VoC) solution which you may have come across when you’ve been presented with a visitor satisfaction survey pop-up – often when you first land on a company’s website. Without knowing anything about a visitor (and often the visitor not knowing anything the company), ForeSee surveys purposely disrupt a visitor’s experience in the hope of encouraging them to share their feedback or opinions.

This obviously begs the question: how in the world can you provide feedback about your website experience before you’ve had a chance to actually spend time on that website? You can’t! Yet using an approach similar to ForeSee, it seems that many businesses using chat tools assume first-time visitors want to engage with them when they initially land on a website.

Evergage itself, as B2B solution provider, is focused on demand generation and account-based marketing, and online chat is one of our many marketing tactics (although we are not a Drift customer). However, we don’t interrupt new visitors you when they first land on our website.

Why? Well, we like to put ourselves in the shoes of those who visit our website, and we don’t want to distract them from first learning a bit about our solution and company. We monitor engagement to know when a chat session may be more appropriate, as we know customers are more apt to chat when they are on certain pages (e.g., pricing, features) and have engaged with the content for a certain amount of time. These are relatively basic indicators of interest that a company should be aware of. As part of our ABM strategy, we also take things a step further and personalize the chat greeting to the specific target account (by name and industry) and use the face of the actual person offering to chat:

Here are a few website chat guidelines I would recommend to companies when engaging visitors on their websites.

• Don’t show/initiate chat on your homepage, or at least not the second a person arrives on the site
• Only include chat on select pages of your site (e.g., pricing, contact, product pages)
• Wait until engagement thresholds are met before displaying the chat option (e.g., visitor watches a video, downloads a white paper, scrolls down the page, has viewed multiple pages, has spent a minimum amount of time on your site, etc.)
• If someone closes a chat box, don’t reopen it both on the current page or any other page during that visitor’s current session
• Personalize chat messages for high-value or target industry accounts
• Don’t show an open chat window by default

In Drift’s defense, it does provide a number of settings so business users can define when to show the chat icon on their websites. For example, the chat icon can appear based on a visitor’s firmographic data, whether she falls into a particular segment, and more. I just wish more companies would utilize these options.

Final Thoughts

The bottom line is that chat is a powerful tool for engaging visitors and Drift, in particular, is one of the top solutions available. Unfortunately, marketers are often too aggressive in using chat message pop-ups, which can start to feel like those annoying ForeSee surveys.

Remember to put yourself in your visitors’ shoes. Maybe aggressive chat is working for you. If so, that’s great. But don’t lose sight of your customer experience. If you visited your own website, when and where would you like to engage? Begin there and then err on the side of caution. It will serve the best interests of your company in the long run and ensure chat remains an effective means of engaging with your visitors.

The purpose of putting out my take on the “inbound vs. Outbound” question is to help you create a well-balanced campaign.

Sitting and making a couple hundred calls a day is not really what we consider sustainable for sales reps. Cold calling is also impossible for business owners to keep up with while running their business.

An effective outbound campaign is about leveraging technology to laser focus your target market and reach them in a personalized fashion with incredible messaging.

Doing this allows you to spend time on folks who actually show interest in what you offer.

We’ve seen it time and time again with LeadFuze clients.

It’s also about setting up and using inbound techniques to gather every targeted lead you possibly can. While we’re partial to outbound, we also heavily use inbound (which you’ll see later).

Thoughts on Outbound

There are so many who can benefit from an organized, automated outbound lead gen campaign. Here are the three groups we help most often.

• The Sales Rep: You make the world go round. Products and services find their rightful home due to your diligence and skill. Prospecting is the gasoline to your engine and we intend to help you fill up your tanks (or pipeline) better than ever.
• The Sales Leader: Your job is to enable. To train, motivate and meet team goals. Often times, you want to find better training materials and process-based guides. We hear you and hope you enjoy the next 7 chapters and use it for your team.
• The Business Owner: Owners are the first sales rep for their businesses. But you’re also running the business itself. An automated outbound campaign can help grow revenue without waiting on inbound to kick in or spending money on ads (not to mention saving you time).

Why Most People Fail at Outbound

Before we dive into the guide itself, it’s worth noting that most don’t do it. Or, they try for a while and give up.

Here’s why.

It’s a Mind Game (for You)

Some of the things you may be thinking about outbound could be;

• Is it spam? One of our most popular pieces of content is “What is Cold Email (and is it SPAM)?”
• Who Do I Email? Finding your target market, decision makers and their contact data are vital to success for outbound.
• What Do I Say? If you manage to find great leads to email, what is it that you actually send them to get them to respond?
• Do I Have the Time? Email templates, inputting contacts, writing follow-ups. There’s a lot that goes into the setup.
• Is It Worthwhile? The work that it takes needs to have a long-lasting payoff. Does it?

Chances are, you have a couple of these things in your mind. And for most, it means…

…You Don’t Give Outbound a Shot

Unfortunately, there are consequences to this decision. Think about your quota or your business and see if any of these apply to you.

1. You Live on Referrals: More referrals mean more deals, but less mean big problems. Getting referrals is inconsistent and relying solely on these makes it impossible to forecast sales.
2. Sub-Par Clients: Without a focused outbound campaign full of your ideal clients, you’re forced to take what you can get. Often times that means working with people who aren’t the best fit and may even stir up trouble.
3. Stagnant or Lost Income: You can never have consistent growth without a consistent sales process. Can you, at least somewhat, accurately forecast what you’re going to bring in next month? Next quarter?

By now, it should be obvious whether or not we’re speaking to you. If so, please keep reading.

This epic guide was made for you and can massively help your business or your quota.

Here’s what inside for you.

Let’s get started.

And Some Thoughts on Inbound

Stop making them fight and use them together to supercharge growth

LeadFuze has one primary goal when it comes to our clients — Provide the best lead data!

However, there is another (more internal goal) to double our site traffic.

We love inbound. Every week, we work with contributors and publish our own content that provides value and targets keywords.

And inbound has been amazing for us. Really.

In fact, we’d love to erase the “VS” and put in an “AND” to make it “Inbound and Outbound”.

Here’s why.

The data shows a conflicting story in the world of business.

According to HubSpot’s “State of Inbound 2018” report, most organizations are primarily using inbound marketing techniques.

From our experience, “primarily” means, it’s the only thing they’re doing. But look at what these same companies (who say they rely heavily on inbound) say about their struggles.

First, they want to close more deals and improve their sales funnels.

Secondly, they realize that prospecting is their weakness.

But what does the data mean?

Important: Data is meaningless unless you interpret it properly.

You can look at stats, facts and figures all the day long. But without understanding how they affect you, or in this case, give you an opportunity — it’s pointless.

So, how are these stats pertinent to inbound/outbound? Glad you asked.

Everyone wants to pit the two marketing strategies together, like a boxing match. That’s just not fair to either.

Of course, inbound can bring you massive amounts of free traffic that you can use to find the right candidates.

And outbound can be used to;

• Quickly build revenue
• Establish an initial customer base for your startup
• Start acquiring your dream clients
• Aggressively acquire customers in a new market
• And more

It’s Not a Fight.

Stop trying to make them box. Instead, figure out how you can use them both to tag team growth like never before.

But We Do Love Outbound More

We’ve established that inbound is awesome. That said, we are a tool for automating outbound prospecting and outreach.

Here’s why we love outbound more.

You Can Target Who You Want

Think back to one of your favorite deals. If you’re a sales rep or manager, it could be the client who was curious, genuine and a solid deal to close.

For a business owner, it could mean those same things as well as that client being super easy to work with (not to mention never causing you headaches).

It could be the big brands that order dozens, or hundreds, of accounts.

Whatever that perfect buyer means to you, whoever it is — you can target brands/contacts that look EXACTLY like them.

Now, imagine replicating that customer 10 times. 50 times. 100 times.

Inbound says you create what they want to hear, wait until they’re looking for it and they’ll come to you. Outbound says that you create something they want to see, reach out to them and see if they’re looking.

If they are, you get the deal. And if they’re not, you wait with your ideal buyer in your CRM.

I don’t mean to make inbound seem like “if you build it they will come”, but in terms of clients that are perfect for your business — it’s much better to actively seek than to wait and see.

It’s Scalable Using the Right Tech

Finding the right leads (that fit your ideal customer profile), crafting an offer, emailing them a great email, and scheduling follow-ups are all a part of a proper email outreach process.

Doing each of these things takes time. And even while doing it all manually takes less time than cold calling, it’s still hard to manage.

Automating this entire process is the reason LeadFuze (and our integration partners) exists.

Once your details are set (market, roles, company size, etc.), Fuzebot automatically finds leads that fit your firmographic profiles and sends your ideal leads to the tools you use most every day.

All you have to do is talk with prospects who wanted your offer and responded!

The Point is…

Once the setup is done and you’re satisfied with the open rates and responses your’e getting — you can ramp up your efforts and really see growth.

Have we convinced you that outbound is a viable option that can be used in conjunction with inbound and other marketing techniques?

If you were to ask somebody to describe you in one word, what would they say? How different would their word be from how you describe yourself? Your reputation is your equity. Often, it is the reason the customer responds to or ignores you.

The image that the customer has of us in his/her head is what they use to filter everything we say. It is our image that causes the customer to be confident or skeptical about the claims we make. Sometimes, it is even our reputation that determines if a sale will be made.

We may say, “oh that person has an inflated ego,” or “they have tons of blindspots.” In this, we quickly point out other’s faults without taking a moment to look at ourselves and notice that we have similar defects. Leadership begins internal, but it definitely has external impact so we must be mindful of our image.

Something that compounds this topic of image is how people look at us in different lights. Some may only see us in perfect “Pollyanna” type of environments. Others may only interact with us in difficult, stressful environments. This is why a customer may view us one way and a fellow employee views us in another. Our goal should be to have the same image/reputation in every situation, regardless of the circumstances. Yes, this is a tall task! I’ll admit that sometimes I fall short. Few people can claim consistency in every situation all of the time.

Right now, I want to challenge you to write down a list of words that you feel describe you. Put yourself in the shoes of those near you as you make your list. This exercise is your own 360-degree feedback tool. Be hard on yourself and at the same time aspirational. The purpose of doing this is not just to measure your past but help you in the future.

Your reputation is an asset and each day, your actions allow the asset to grow or shrink in value.

Copyright 2019, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

“Cold calling” is getting harder and harder to justify these days. Less people are picking up the phone, some executives don’t even have office lines anymore, the layers of gatekeepers are getting thicker and harder to navigate. It’s brutal out there. With all this, I still think cold calling has its place and can be effective IF done right.

First, let me be clear on my definition of what successful “cold calling” does and does not look like. I DO NOT think calling through a list of names with a generic elevator pitch can be effective. On the contrary, I think it can actually do more harm than good these days. I also don’t think making 50 dials sprinkled throughout the day to random people with varying messages can be effective either. However, being targeted with your message, staying focused with your calling and combining it with e-mail can be very effective.

The ideal approach to cold calling is to spend some time on your prospect’s website or Linkedin profile and find something specific to reference about them or their company and make a direct connection to the value your service can provide. However, most of the reps I work with are being asked to hit a certain volume of activity a day (30-60 dials) which doesn’t leave a ton of time for extensive research. I still think we should segment off about 1 hour a day to do the research and make those type of calls to our top tier target accounts but after that, we need to get the volume up there. Here’s a step by step process on how to be effective and relevant when doing volume cold calling:

Step 1: Segmentation

The best way to get the volume of calling up while still being targeted and relevant with your message starts with segmenting your target list. The more categories you can segment your target lists by (industry, title, existing technologies, competition, etc.) the more targeted you can be. I like segmenting by title and industry to start with.

Step 2: Develop your message

If you can get a good enough sized list by title (CEO) and industry (Tech) then you can start to figure out what those people care about and what their priorities are by doing a simple search on google for “CEO Tech Industry Priorities 2019.” After understanding their priorities you can come up with a message about your services that speaks to them. The easiest way to do this is by checking out any case studies you might have for companies in the industry you’re focusing on and see what kind of results you were able to drive for them.

Once you find a good case study with a solid result you can develop an attention-grabbing message that sounds something like this:

“We showed XYZ company in your industry how to drive (results) using our solution” or “we’re working with other (executive title) in your industry to help them address their (x) priority by….”

This message should be no longer than 15 seconds, focused on getting their attention and should solicit the response “how do you do that?”

Step 3: Develop your qualifying questions

In addition to having a specific message, we also need specific qualifying questions to ask. The good thing about staying focused on a specific group of people and knowing their priorities is that you can come up with very specific questions that show you know what you’re talking about when reaching out to these people and you can stay away from the generic BANT questions.

Among other things, you can simply ask questions like this:

“We’re working with other executives in your industry to address these three priorities: 1,2,3. How do these align with your priorities and what other ones are you specifically dealing with?”

Step 4: Prepare your supporting materials

Since we’ve already used the case studies to help develop our messaging to a targeted group we can use them to tell the story if/when we get the “how do you do that?” response after our attention-grabbing statement.

Step 5: Know what you’re asking for

The clearer and more specific you are with your call to action the better results you’ll get. Are you calling high and asking for a referral? If so, who are you asking to be referred to? A specific department? Title? Or, are you asking for time on the calendar of the person you’re calling? If so, how much time do you need? When do you want it? Be clean and specific.

Step 6: Deliver the message

When you deliver the message make sure you pay attention to the structure of your call and actually map it out before you start making your calls. How are you going to introduce yourself? What is the reason for your call? What are you asking for? What happens on a live call vs a voice mail? Write it down and practice a few times before you start.

Step 7: Block time

As I said earlier, I think that making 50 dials sprinkled throughout the day is a waste of time. You can’t gain any momentum or learn anything that way. However, if you block off an hour, prepare with the steps above, make sure you have your list ready and do nothing else but make calls during that hour you can accomplish a lot. The first few calls are going to be rough as you try to smooth out the delivery but then you’ll start to catch a groove and be far more effective as you go. By focusing your time and approach to a specific target you can also be far more efficient with your calling and will be able to make 20-25 dials in an hour with some good conversations mixed in. With prep and call time included this approach allows you to make 50 dials in about 3 hours, leaving the other 5+ hours to do whatever you want.

Step 8: Track and measure your results

Lastly, we need to make sure we track and measure our results. By taking a specific approach with a specific message to a target audience and segmenting an hour to do so we can figure out fairly quickly whether a message/approach is working or not. I usually keep a pad of paper and pen on my desk and count how many calls, referrals and meetings for each approach. I try each approach at least twice with an hour call blitz each time to get at least 50+ data points that I can use to compare to other approaches. If I can get anything around an 8% conversion ratio (meetings+referrals/calls) I put that message/approach on the list to use again. Anything below 8% I will try something else and keep split testing different approaches until I find one that works.

I know this seems like a lot of work but what’s the alternative? Pick up a list of names and start blasting through them with a generic elevator pitch praying to trip over an opportunity and hoping for a 1% conversion rate? Have fun with that.

Today I’m hosting my first ever workshop that’s open to the public in my hometown of Boston. Take a look at the agenda and let me know where we should host future workshops. Thank you to our event sponsors SalesLoft, LeadIQ, and Costello

 

The post IF You’re Going to Make Cold Calls, This is How to Do It appeared first on JBarrows.

Like a growing number of other commentators, I have come to believe that the traditional BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe) approach to sales opportunity qualification is fundamentally flawed and not fit for purpose when it comes to complex B2B sales.

The fact that over 40% of purchasing projects are ad-hoc rather than formally budgeted is, as I argued in a recent blog, yet another nail in the coffin of this outmoded and discredited methodology. But if not BANT, what can you use instead?

Any alternative approach has to take into account the fundamentally non-linear nature of B2B buying decisions, particularly when they relate to solving a new and unfamiliar problem (as opposed to repeat purchases of well-known commodities).

In such environments, opportunity qualification must be recognised and managed as a progressive rather than a one-off process - often starting with marketing, involving some form of tele-qualification and with responsibility passing to the sales person ultimately responsible for the opportunity.

In these complex, lengthy, multi-touch environments, it’s obviously important that everyone involved in the creation, qualification and management of sales opportunities shares a common perspective.

After evaluating hundreds of complex B2B sales environments, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are around a dozen consistent factors in the opportunity qualification process. Some are relatively obvious from the start of the engagement with a prospective customer - others only become clear after the customer’s buying decision journey has progressed.

For convenience, I’ll divide these 12 elements into initial and advanced qualification factors. Each of these factors needs to be regularly re-assessed throughout the lifecycle of the opportunity, particularly whenever the customer’s circumstances change.

After experimenting with a number of different approaches to evaluating each factor, I’ve concluded that a simple “traffic light” approach with three options (plus “unknown”) achieves the appropriate balance between simplicity, consistency and effectiveness:

• GREEN = a perfect fit against our qualification criteria
• AMBER = an acceptable fit against our qualification criteria
• RED = a risk factor or a negative fit against our qualification criteria
• GREY = unknown - we are currently unable to assess this factor

For each of the 12 factors, you need to establish a simple and consistent definition of what each of these levels of qualification means in practice in your environment. And I strongly recommend that when your sales people capture their current assessments in CRM that you require them to include a brief one-line commentary about how they arrived at their conclusion for each factor.

You also need to establish an atmosphere where it’s OK for your sales people to admit - rather than guessing - that they don’t have sufficient evidence to rate a factor as anything other than unknown (as long as the sales person then redoubles their efforts to get to the truth), and where it’s OK - and in fact highly desirable - to proactively qualify out a bad opportunity as early as possible in the cycle.

Let's start with the initial qualification factors:

INITIAL QUALIFICATION FACTORS

Business Issue

Has your customer acknowledged a clearly defined business issue that your organisation is really good at solving?

Organisation Fit

How closely is your prospective customer organisation aligned with your Ideal Customer Profile? If you haven’t established an Ideal Customer Profile, you need to!

Prime Contact

Is your prime contact the ultimate decision-maker, a powerful influencer or peripheral to the final decision? This is a critical consideration.

Reason to Act

Does your customer have a clear and compelling business justification to take action? This is typically far more important than having a vaguely defined “need”.

Availability of Funds

Is the customer ready, willing and able to fully fund the project? Note that the presence of a powerful budget shaper may be far more significant than the existence of a formally established budget

Solution Urgency

Is there a compelling reason why this project needs to happen now, rather than later (or at all)? Without urgency, even if they want you, they can probably wait.

The first three factors can often be established before a marketing-generated opportunity can be regarded as “sales ready”. All six factors should be established before you allocate significant resources to pursuing the opportunity.

Now let's turn to the remaining six advanced qualification factors:

ADVANCED QUALIFICATION FACTORS

The remaining factors typically require a significant level of involvement with the prospective customer before they can be accurately established.

Functional Requirements

What are the customer's functional requirements, and are they a good fit against our key capabilities? Hopefully you will have influenced them.

Decision Group

Have you identified and engaged all their key stakeholders, and what is your relationship with them? The decision group is usually larger than you might think!

Decision Criteria

What are their decision criteria, to what extent have you influenced them, and are they favourable to us?

Decision Process

Are you sure you have fully understood all the key steps in their decision process and timeframe?

Competitive Position

Are you sure you have identified all their other solution options, and do you know where you stand against them?

Relative Priority

How does this project rank against all the other projects competing for their attention/funding? This is frequently ignored but always important.

These remaining six advanced qualification criteria need to be assessed before any attempt is made to forecast the opportunity. And given the complexities of a typical lengthy B2B buying journey, and the fact that changes are nigh-on-inevitable, all twelve criteria need to be reassessed before an opportunity is promoted to the next stage of the pipeline or whenever the customer’s circumstances change.

BETTER THAN BANT

These 12 criteria, I hope you will agree, offer a far more complete and realistic assessment than BANT. And to anyone who think that 12 criteria are too many, I would simply ask you to consider whether any factor is unlikely to affect the outcome of an opportunity.

If it is genuinely irrelevant to your chances of winning the deal, you can safely leave it out of your qualification regime. But I’d encourage you think carefully before you hit the “delete” button. And, of course, there may be factors that are very specific to your typical sales situation that you will want to add.

CONSISTENT APPLICATION

Of course, what really matters is that your entire sales team consistently applies whatever qualification criteria you define, and that your sales managers are expected to evaluate the rigour with which their sales people are qualifying their opportunities.

If inconsistencies are common, you may need to refine exactly what you mean for each of the GREEN-AMBER-RED levels of each factor. And you may need to reaffirm that the purpose of qualification is not to make your sales people’s pipelines look good (for the moment, at least), but to help to ensure that they invest their precious selling time on opportunities that they have a realistic chance of winning.

And please don’t set arbitrary pipeline coverage targets that encourage sales people to cling on to opportunities that they should in all honesty have abandoned long ago.

A PROGRESSIVE APPROACH

So there you have it - my provably effective alternative to BANT. If you’re unconvinced, I suggest you try it. And don’t be surprised if your forecasts become a lot more accurate as a result. Drop me a line if you'd like to discuss how this methodology could be implemented in your organisation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales, a member of the Sales Enablement Society, a regular contributor to the International Journal of Sales Transformation and the Sales Experts Channel and the founder of Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the leading UK-based B2B value-selling experts.

Following a successful corporate career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and market leaders, Bob is now relishing his role as a pro-active advisor, coach and trainer to high-potential B2B-focused sales organisations, systematically enabling them to transform their sales effectiveness by adopting the proven principles of value-based selling.

The following is a guest post by Randy Frisch, CMO and Co-Founder at Uberflip.

The average prospect needs to touch five pieces of your content before they’re ready to purchase, yet only 20 percent of sales reps share content during sales conversations.

The culprit is the disconnect between the content team and the sales reps.

• In many organizations, the sales team often has no idea what the content team is working on or what assets are available for them to share with prospects. As a result, you’re left with one of two outcomes, neither of which is ideal:
• The sales reps go rogue and create their own content.
• They scrounge up old content from Google.

In this article, we’ll look at why these outcomes aren’t ideal and how you, as the content marketer, can empower your sales reps with content that helps them close deals.

Sales Reps Aren’t Content Creators

We’ve all seen sales teams go off and create their own content rather than using the assets marketing has provided. We all love sales reps, but they tend to be more casual with the content they create and don’t obsess over consistency the way marketers do.

To reiterate: this problem is not the fault of either party. It’s like the game of telephone we used to play as kids—something is getting lost in translation along the way. 

But instead of a funny, incoherent message we all laugh at, it’s not quite as humorous when sales reps spin off carefully thought-out messaging in the wrong direction.

Mixed messaging isn’t the only downside, mind you.

Every minute a sales rep spends creating content is a minute they’re not selling. If they’re manipulating all these assets because they don’t understand what marketing has already created for them, they’re just wasting valuable minutes. This time should be spent positioning the marketing-approved content they’ve been provided.

The Google Trap

The other outcome that results when the content and sales teams aren’t on the same page is what I call the “Google Trap.” Over the years, I’ve watched sales reps at different companies – including those that I’ve overseen – go to a logical but very scary place when they’re looking for company-related content: Google.

Again, this seems logical. Google indexes content well. But they do it over time, not necessarily by what is most relevant in the moment and to a specific audience.

This approach might uncover an old PDF that used to be helpful, but it’s unlikely that PDF is aligned to your marketing campaign for this month, let alone this day.

It’s hard to personalize content when you’re working with dated materials. Many sales reps also have a tried-and-true template email that they send to every prospect they come across. Forget personas. Forget the six curated pieces of content. Forget anything that might earn trust with our prospects. Everyone gets the same assets, like it or not.

Again, the sales team doesn’t deserve the blame here. When you’re not sure where else to find your own branded content, why wouldn’t you turn to Google?

It’s our job as marketers to arm our sales reps with content that they can personalize on the fly to create content experiences. Let’s look at some ways we can do that.

Be the Solution

The first piece of this puzzle is communication. Make sure your sales reps understand all the content available to them, its purpose, and how they can access it. This sets sales reps up for success, allowing them to build personalized content experiences for their clients and manage the sales cycle better in the process.

To make it easy for sales reps to access the most recent and relevant content, not the old stuff that Google will show them. Look to create a content hub where all your best articles, videos, infographics, and other resources live. This can be a comprehensive solution, like a content experience platform (CEP), or something simple like a Google Sheet with links to content organized by persona or use case.

The next step is to help your sales team understand how content can be used to create experiences for prospects. For example, instead of sending out a templated email that is loaded with links to content most prospects won’t click through, embed content in the email that links back to a curated content experience. Consistent include relevant content in your follow up cadence to provide value at each touch.

A curated content experience impacts your prospect in two ways:

1. The resources you share demonstrate your understanding of their needs
2. The resources you provide will solidify their confidence in your company

To make sure sales reps are pulling the right content to create personalized experiences, you can utilize a content hub or create experiences for different personas using templates or snippets. This could mean creating templated web experiences to clone, or creating a collection of resources, calls-to-action, and messaging that are appropriate for each role.

If you go this route, a great way to empower your sales team is by giving them the flexibility to add resources that are relevant to a particular prospect. They’re the ones having the conversations with prospects, so they know better than anyone what kind of content will help them move the prospect through the funnel.

When customers perceive your content to be tailored to their needs, they’re 40 percent more likely to buy from you than a competitor who doesn’t personalize. That’s one reason to enable your sales team with the content they need to succeed.

Here’s another: 60 to 70 percent of all marketing content goes unused. That’s heartbreaking! When you let your sales team know what content is available to them, how much do you think that percentage decreases?

Each situation is unique, but I’m thinking it’s lower than 60 to 70 percent!

---

This piece was adapted from Randy’s book, F#ck Content Marketing: Focus on Content Experience to Drive Demand, Revenue & Relationships. For more advice on delivering personalized content experiences to help close deals, you can find the book on Amazon.

Randy Frisch has defined and led the content experience movement, prompting marketers to think beyond content creation and focus on the experience. This movement has fuelled an annual conference, Conex: The Content Experience, that brings together 750+ passionate marketers, and a North American-wide tour. Randy is the CMO and Co-Founder at Uberflip, a content experience platform that empowers marketers to create content experiences at every stage of the buyer journey. He is also a host of the Conex: The Content Experience Show podcast, a keynote speaker, and was named one of the Top 50 Fearless Marketers in the world by Marketo. As you can tell by the title of this book, he’s been known to swear sometimes.

To learn more about sales email personalization, download our eBook, Everything You Need to Know About Sales Email Personalization.

• Sling TV and DirecTV Now are taking opposite approaches to OTT growth.
• DirecTV Now increased its prices, which could cause it to lose half its subscribers this year, while Sling is ratcheting up promotions to attract new customers.
• The differences in approach reveal the fundamental differences between the two companies and the future of live digital TV.

After competing head to head for years, Sling TV and DirecTV Now, the two biggest digital live TV services by subscribers are taking opposite approaches to OTT growth.

DirecTV Now, with 1.6 million subscribers at the end of 2018, has turned away from chasing subscriber growth. It bumped up its prices and ended nearly all of its promotional offerings, eliminating what the company called "low value" customers. The change comes as AT&T seeks to stabilize its Entertainment group, which DirecTV belongs to, and could cause DirecTV to lose 800,000 in 2019, according to some Wall Street estimates.

Sling TV, the largest streaming service in the US with 2.42 million subscribers at the end of 2018, is tacking in the opposite direction. Already the cheapest vMVPD in the market with a $25-a-month option, Sling is now offering customers a $15-a-month deal for three months. Analysts predict AT&T's price increases will send many of its customers straight to Sling.

The divergent approaches point to the differences between Dish and DirecTV, their competitive advantages in the market, and the future of live digital TV.

Positioning in the market

In part, the divergence relates to the way the two companies have positioned themselves.

Sling is the cheapest of all of the vMVPDs in the market, which includes Hulu with Live TV and YouTube TV. It also lacks major programming like CBS and ABC. And for local broadcasters, Sling directs customers to buy digital antennas to get programming over the air for free. It has to come in at the low end on the price spectrum to even have people consider it, TVREV cofounder and lead analyst Alan Wolk told Business Insider.

And Dish, the the entire pay-TV industry, has been losing subscribers to cord cutting and wants to regain relevancy, which is why it's chasing subscribers, Amy Yong, an analyst at Macquarie told Business Insider. Dish is especially susceptible to cord cutting as a company without other products to offer. 

AT&T, on the other hand, wants to eventually migrate all of its satellite customers to DirecTV Now, Wolk said. AT&T bought DirecTV in 2015 not because it liked the satellite business, but because it valued DirecTV's 2o million-plus footprint, and saw the ability to get in front of the streaming trend as valuable. So AT&T needs to ensure the business model is profitable and isn't worrying about people who signed up for DirecTV Now at a discount.

The bundle is king

AT&T is also facing subscriber losses as it raises prices and drops A&E and Viacom. But AT&T has an advantage because it has other products it can bundle with DirecTV, such as wireless, HBO, and a new streaming service its WarnerMedia arm is developing. When 5G comes, AT&T will also be able to bundle mobile broadband and TV, Wolk said.

Read more: DirecTV employees fear its death as AT&T gets ready to build off its giant WarnerMedia deal

Sling doesn't have additional products or content to bundle. That leaves analysts wondering what’s next for a company whose core business, satellite, is in secular decline.

"We don't know what Dish wants to do," Dan Rayburn, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan, told Business Insider. "I haven’t seen any strategy from Dish on how they are thinking about the future of entertainment."

Sling is notoriously insular and it's hard to know what it's thinking, the analysts said. But its vast spectrum holdings, with which it could build a 5G network, could hint to how it may look to compete.

The future of digital live TV

Elsewhere, companies without a traditional MVPD service like Hulu, YouTube, and Sony's PlayStation Vue are nipping at the heels of Sling and DirecTV. The former three have about the same about of subscribers as the latter two, according to estimates. 

These virtual-only TV providers's service have an advantage because they offer simplified video experiences and good-looking interfaces, said Wolk.

But the whole industry has the same problem of staying afloat in a sector that's unprofitable due to slowing growth, though some players, like Google, can stomach losses more than others. In 2018, an analyst at Bernstein Research estimated that parent company Google lost about $60 million a year on YouTube TV. FuboTV CEO David Gandler predicted that some vMVPDs could shut down this year, Multichannel News reported.

Rayburn agrees and said all providers can do is make money with other products and services. Hulu, for one, says it's improving profitability because most of its live customers are actually watching video on demand content, which is where the ad revenue is. But he sees them getting out of the live digital TV business altogether, pointing to companies like Verizon, Cox, and Comcast which have stayed out of the fray.

SEE ALSO: AT&T's massive overhaul of DirecTV Now could cause it to lose half its subscribers, and YouTube and Hulu could be the big winners

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's why McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sales skyrocket in March

Have you been in an interview and asked your prospective employer which sales metrics they value most? That answer is probably, "Yes."

What if I asked you if you'd ever questioned your interviewer about their sales velocity? If you answered "Yes" again, you already know how important this calculation is to understand the growth mindset and overall health of a sales organization.

If you've never thought much about a company's sales velocity, take a moment to brush up on this important equation — and go beyond KPIs to impress your manager or future manager the next time you meet.

So, what is sales velocity?

The results of the sales velocity equation reflect the health of the business, the overall effectiveness of the sales team, and where the team can increase sales productivity to positively impact revenue goals.

HubSpot Director of Sales Dan Tyre says, "Every sales manager lives in fear their sales pipeline is a bunch of fluff. In today's instant gratification world, uncovering a sense of urgency and establishing sales velocity is important because it uncovers a slow-moving or, even worse, stagnant pipe."

Now that we know what sales velocity is and why it's important, how do we calculate it?

How to Calculate Sales Velocity

To accurately calculate an organization's sales velocity, start by separating small, mid-market, and enterprise pipelines. Your company likely has its own nuanced definition of what constitutes each of these segments and you should divide them accordingly.

Once you've divided your market segments, run a sales velocity equation for each one.

Sales Velocity = Number of Opportunities x Deal Value x Win Rate / Length of Sales Cycle

The Four Factors of Sales Velocity

The four variables that make up sales velocity are all metrics that your CRM should already be tracking, and they comprise of:

• Number of Opportunities
• Average Deal Value
• Win/Conversion Rate
• Length of Sales Cycle

Let's break down what each of these are and how to use them to pilot your organization's planning and goal setting.

1. Number of Opportunities - Your pipeline always contains a certain number of opportunities. Make sure they're qualified opportunities. If your pipeline is packed with bad leads and only a few that actually have a chance of closing, your bottom line will suffer.
2. Win/Conversion Rate - Your average win rate is tied to your attainment of quality leads. To identify your win rate, divide the number of sales won by the total number of sales opportunities.
3. Deal Value (average deal size) - Every deal requires both parties' most valuable resource: time. Make sure you're maximizing this resource for your prospect and yourself by introducing offers or add-ons to make your prospect's life better while increasing your average deal value and increasing your sales velocity.
4. Length of Sales Cycle (measured in months) - This is the only sales velocity factor you don't want to increase. Creating a more efficient sales process, redefining your sales playbook, and sometimes adding headcount to your sales team are all ways to shorten your average sales cycle and close more quality deals faster.

Creating Sales Velocity: Best Practices

1. Work toward increased sales effectiveness.

First, if the results of your sales velocity equation point to a need for increased sales effectiveness, work to increase your number of opportunities, average deal value, and/or win rate.

Generally speaking, you can suffer from the numbers above the line (the numerator of the formula) and still run a successful sales organization. When you have a problem with the length of your sales cycle (the denominator), however, your business may suffer.

Dan Tyre explains, "I worked with a portfolio company that had a big, fat pipeline going into the last quarter of the year. But we quickly saw that we were in trouble when none of the deals were progressing to the evaluation stage."

He continues, "Not taking careful account of how quickly something went from opportunity to opportunity to demo to price negotiation to contract really hurt us." Having a calculated sales velocity helps companies like this one plan for a longer sales cycle and analyze how to shorten it moving forward.

2. Lengthen the period you analyze sales velocity.

Second, the longer the length of time you analyze, the better. Measure the sales velocity of at least a quarter and as much as six months to one year. This extended sample period accounts for variables such as seasonality or an unusually long deal.

3. Keep your variables and definitions consistent.

Third, keep your variables and definitions consistent while calculating sales velocity. For example, when do you consider a lead to be a quality opportunity? Does it start when a lead fills out a specific form? Is it when they read a specific blog post on your site? Or is it not until they've scheduled their first phone call? Define these criteria early and keep them consistent when measuring sales velocity.

How to Increase Sales Velocity

Once you have the metrics to calculate sales velocity, you can then work on improving it. Thinking about the four factors above that you use to determine velocity, it stands to reason that improving velocity means improving those four metrics.

1. Increasing Sales Velocity by Increasing Your Number of Opportunities

To boost sales velocity, consider sourcing high-quality leads — even if that means attracting fewer total leads. Tyre says, "It's better to see opportunities show up and then terminate, rather than see the same tired pipeline week after week." For salespeople, bad leads are a fact of life, but moving on from them quickly benefits your sales velocity and your revenue.

You can source high-quality leads using many different strategies such as:

• LinkedIn Ads
• Pay-Per-Click Ads
• B2B Lead Generation Techniques

2. Increasing Sales Velocity by Improving Your Win/Conversion Rate

Improve your win rate by capturing and nurturing high-quality opportunities like referrals or prospects who've already demonstrated high intent to buy. To do so, you should:

• Remove prospects who have unavoidable roadblocks from the pipeline.
• Define clear next steps for high-quality prospects.
• Involve the decision-maker at the earliest convenience.

3. Increasing Sales Velocity by Increasing Average Deal Value

Never force a product or service on a buyer who doesn't need it — that's a recipe for losing prospects and churning new customers. Instead, uncover hidden pain points of theirs and offer more than what they expect like:

• Product or service add-ons for more ease of use
• After-sales services such as guides and product training

4. Increasing Sales Velocity by Shortening the Length of the Sales Cycle

The more efficient your team operates, the quicker sales can be closed. Shortening your sales cycle can be done in a multitude of ways, such as:

• Automating repetitive tasks.
• Setting agreed-upon goals for each sales call.
• Exploring prospect objections before responding to them.
• Being clear about pricing (very) early on.
• Making it ridiculously easy for prospects to sign contracts from any device.
• Focusing on your highest-performing channels.

Now that we’ve gone through some methods of increasing sales velocity, let’s discuss how discounts can affect it, too.

How Discounts Affect Sales Velocity

Discounts aren't always the answer to increasing revenue, but by offering your prospects incentives to close earlier, you can potentially decrease the length of your sales cycle — and positively affect your sales velocity.

Make sure your reps are well trained on how to use discounts to benefit deals instead of stunting your company's growth and serving as a crutch to struggling sales teams.

Track and Improve Your Sales Velocity

A healthy pipeline or bigger sales team isn't enough to keep an organization growing — in fact, it can have the opposite effect. Measure your sales velocity, know what the results mean, and have actionable steps in place to improve upon it quickly.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in May 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

In CSO Insight’s 4^th Annual Report: Sales Enablement Grows Up, sales enablement is defined as “a strategic, collaborative discipline designed to increase predictable sales results by providing consistent, scalable enablement services that allow customer-facing professionals and their managers to add value in every customer interaction.” Nuances aside, why should consulting firms care about sales enablement? Here’s why: sales enablement leads to more revenue on the table and deeper client relationships.

According to a recent study by Hinge Marketing “79% of consultants list attracting and developing clients as their biggest challenge.” Pursuit time is increasingly cannibalized by administrative duties, a buyer’s time is hard to come by, and expectations for differentiating and conveying unique value in these conversations are sky high. Enter: sales enablement.

In our recent webinar with Tamara Schenk of CSO Insights, “The Secret to Highly Effective Sales and Marketing”, we touched on three C’s to sales enablement success: 1) putting your client as the primary focus, 2) collaborating with clear accountability, and 3) content management. Here are the takeaways:

Putting Your Client as the Primary Focus

With client services being a #1 priority for all successful consulting firms, this “C” is a slam dunk. The pursuit and engagement process for firms is tedious and time consuming, which makes aligning your firm’s services to the client’s path imperative. Doing so improves client interactions, deepens visibility, and allows you to better understand the buyer’s journey. With this, you’ll have more comprehensive client personas and a better understanding of the relevant messaging and content that will resonate at the right time. The result: quicker pursuit cycles and more cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

Collaborating with Clear Accountability

Pursuit and engagement cycles today are flooded with duplicate content efforts from client to client. When creating deliverables, consultants can spend hours asking coworkers for materials to repurpose and collaborating on slides, creating multiple, scattered versions. Prioritizing cross-functional collaboration allows marketing to support basic needs such as content organization, and business development to spend more time working on deal strategy and sharing tribal knowledge. The result: increased credibility and differentiated services.

Content Management

Finally: content management. The content challenges aforementioned bog down the entire professional services industry. Finding and building content are the primary tasks keeping folks at top consulting firms from doing their jobs. Seismic helps solve this problem by 1) automating content creation at scale to quickly provide project deliverables, and 2) creating a centralized location to efficiently surface updates, messaging, and client-facing materials. The result: reduced time wasted creating deliverables and increased opportunities for billable hours leading to increased revenue.

Canada has a rich history of innovation, but in the next few decades, powerful technological forces will transform the global economy. Large multinational companies have jumped out to a headstart in the race to succeed, and Canada runs the risk of falling behind. At stake is nothing less than our prosperity and economic well-being. The Financial Post set out explore what is needed for businesses to flourish and grow. You can find all of our coverage here.

---

Startup support in Canada has come a long way.

Entrepreneurship is increasingly explored by our educational systems; there are now policies and programs encouraging exports and global businesses — CanExport is one good example — and our incredible talent attracts attention from all over the world.

But the challenge of our funding ecosystem is a little more nuanced.

While there is certainly more capital available to startups in Canada than a decade ago, and top-tier global venture capitalists are keeping a keen eye on opportunities here, the existentially important “first money in” is still more difficult to come by compared to other innovation powerhouses.

• How foreign companies use Canada’s universities to steal away huge chunks of intellectual property
• Innovation means no one ever ‘graduates’: Learning happens year-round. Industry and schools must adjust
• Innovation Nation: Why has the government put a cap on innovation success?

As the director of Velocity, a startup incubator based at the University of Waterloo, I have seen this first-hand, mentoring over a hundred startups led by consistently ambitious, talented entrepreneurs — many of whom still struggle to find the capital they need to get off the ground.

In the last few years alone, our entrepreneurs have created everything from commercial cleaning robots to market-leading augmented reality glasses to artificial kidneys and AI-enabled hospital beds. These are businesses with the potential to boost regional and national economies while leading to breakthroughs across industries.

Still, it is perhaps no surprise that initial capital is difficult to secure. Investment at this stage requires a leap of faith. New enterprises are often made up of little more than an idea or a team — armed only with very early signs of a receptive market for what they have to offer. As a result, these companies often end up tapping other successful startup entrepreneurs.

But the history of Silicon Valley shows that a pool of these types of investors is decades in the making. And we can’t afford to wait that long. To continue scaling our innovation economy, what is needed is more than any one policy or a handful of entrepreneurs-turned-angel-investors — it’s new, more permanent forms of early-stage funding.

This March, Velocity will be launching a venture fund, for example, that allows investors to pool their capital and deploy it across multiple companies and industries. The value proposition is clear: Over the last 10 years, our startups would have provided double-digit annual returns; a quick look at the $1-billion valuation of the 90 companies who won our tri-annual pitch competitions is also strong evidence.

In the innovation ecosystem, there is a lot of healthy discussion on how best to support scaling companies. But we also need to scale the innovation ecosystem itself, which demands more access to early funding. At stake is not only the vibrancy of one company, investor, or region, but Canada’s capacity to build a globally-competitive economy and address some of world’s biggest challenges.

It would behoove all sectors, across the country, to find innovative ways to ensure that smart people — the kind of people who have ideas that spawn entirely new industries and categories — are supported at every step of the way.

In this age of disruption, we need to work together to ensure that the next titans are created in Canada.

Jay Shah is the director of Velocity, a startup incubator at the University of Waterloo.

Three accomplished sales leaders joined SalesLoft’s CMO, Sydney Sloan, on stage at this year’s Rainmaker conference. Jim Steele, President & CRO Yext; Mark Roberge, Lecturer at Harvard Business School; and Alyssa Merwin, VP Sales Solutions N.A., LinkedIn discussed their lessons learned, pitfalls to avoid, and strategies for inspiring breakthrough performance.

This post will recap the conversation to help you take your sales teams to the next level, and includes a few bonus questions we didn’t get to on stage.

Build exceptional sales teams

Leadership

What leadership principles do you live by? Where did they come from?

Steele: I learned the most during my time at Salesforce working for Mark Benioff. My time there taught me how to adapt and embrace a new way of working, to be agile and adjust the cultural make-up of the company.

We communicated with passion, rather than arrogance. It is a place where we focused on the customer journey and not just the transaction. Being a great listener and solving customer problems rather than simply pushing a product sounds basic, but it is so important.

Merwin: The foundation of my leadership principals are: vulnerability, fostering deep relationships, trust building, and fast feedback. Read Radical Candor for a great reference for creating better relationships at work.

Roberge: There are two areas that stand out the most. First is having a perspective on priorities between your needs, your team’s needs, and the company’s needs. My perspective is company, then team, and then me. It helps to align everyone on the common goals.

Second is servant leadership and understanding the personal goals of my people. I would meet with people a few months after they started to understand them and their personal goals on a deeper level. Take the time to understand what motivates people, what makes them tick. It’s important.

When you think about great sales leaders, either people you’ve worked for or those that have worked for you, what is the one word about them that inspires you?

Merwin: Tessa Delrio is a badass. She possesses an incredible combination of call-to-excellence and caring. This makes everyone want to be better, both for themselves and for her. When you have that combination, you can do more and be more.

Steele: Leaders who are genuinely curious. Learn, listen, and ask great questions in an authentic way. Mark Benioff was once a sales rep. Today, he still engages with customers in a way that shows that he cares about the business and wants to help solve their problems. He also cares deeply about his team.

Mark officiated our wedding and spent 3 hours walking through our vows. When my wife Amy nailed them, he gave her a big hug. When it was my turn, he challenged me – as he did for 13 years at Salesforce – to do better.

It’s during times of conflict that true character emerges. What do you recommend leaders do to prepare?

Merwin: This is why trust building and vulnerability are so critical. That foundation allows you to create a space where you can have those tough conversations, focus on why are you’re here, and how to find the way out.

Steele: My biggest disappointment at Salesforce was when we lost Morgan Stanley, a $30M/year customer in 2013. It was devastating. Two weeks later, we were on stage at kickoff with Tony Robbins. He drew out my heart and soul in reflecting on how and why we lost. Failure is not an absolute, it’s another step on the way to success. Be graceful in defeat and be confident that we can do better.

Roberge: This is a classic example of understanding the psychology of sales, whether it’s a difficult customer situation, two reps fighting over commission, or a misunderstanding between marketing and sales. First, actively listen. Show you understand and then explain the perspective. Next, move to build a solution, and show your team how it fits into the broader picture.

Building Exceptional Teams

SalesLoft’s Core Values inform every hiring decision we make. Do you have a magic formula for what the right team make up looks like, or how to determine the right balance of talent on your sales team?

Steele: You need to be aligned, have strong communication, and bring along your most trusted leaders. Look for people who have high self-awareness. The biggest failure in management is waiting too long to take action when someone does not fit.

Merwin: Understand the current dynamics of your team. Know your own strengths. Be honest about gaps in skills or experience, and find people who fill them. A true team is more than a collection of high performing individuals.

Roberge: Don’t try to cut and paste your previous role. You have to align the teams you lead to the buyer as well as the stage of the company and the economy. Understand these first, then align and build your team to serve a common purpose.

Also, look at diversity. Specifically, gender diversity. I’ve seen studies that indicate women in inside sales outperform their peers. You should do it because it’s right, but it will impact your bottom line as well. Make sure you create a comfortable place where everyone can thrive.

Think of all the teams you’ve built over your career. Which one was the biggest learning experience for you?

Steele: I started many years ago at IBM selling mainframes and quickly realized when I moved to Silicon Valley that I had to reinvent myself. I’ve learned a lot since then. Here are my top 5:

1. Be passionate and confident, but don’t be arrogant.
2. Don’t ever give away your power – you own that.
3. Don’t take your customers for granted. Embrace the long term customer relationship, not just the transaction.
4. Be excited and passionate when an opportunity presents itself.
5. If you get the opportunity to step on an elevator with a CEO, will you take advantage of it or stay quiet?

Merwin: I learned to start with a shared vision and common purpose. Some of the questions I ask are: Why are we motivated beyond our revenue target? What is our rallying cry, our reason for being? What is our role in achieving the goals?

Be clear about what you are collectively striving to achieve. Then empower and hold each other accountable.

Roberge: When Hubspot first went to Dublin, we sent a great performer to Europe to build out the office. We staffed it half with Boston employees and half Dublin. The goal was to replicate the Hubspot culture. We realized that part of our culture was Boston culture, not Hubspot culture.

You have to give room for regional offices to develop their own culture around the company’s overarching culture. Our end goal was to replicate the pieces that were core to our business. In the end, Hubspot Dublin had a pub that was our extended office hours location.

Defining Culture and Character

As the great Oprah Winfrey says, “failure is just life trying to move us in another direction,” and one of the best ways we can learn to embrace it is by talking about it more. What’s the greatest failure you ever had?

Merwin: I learned the hard way that what made me successful in my last company would not necessarily guarantee my success at LinkedIn. The 360 feedback I received after my first six months revealed that, while I had focused on having an immediate operational impact, I under-invested in building relationships and aligning with the culture.

That was the darkest day in my leadership career. It hit me hard. I decided there were four things I needed to differently.

1. I changed my space. I moved out of an office and sat with and among my team.
2. I started to walk the walk, literally. I slowed down my pace and shifted my entire tone.
3. I focused on my emotional resonance with the team and strived to build on strengths rather than ‘fix’ things.
4. I began bringing my whole self to work, allowing people to get to know me, professionally and personally.

It took time, but I was able to mend and build meaningful relationships. I evolved from a manager whose team would not go into battle for me, to a leader whose team is cohesive and high-performing.

Steele: When I joined a company whose culture was the antithesis of who I was, I learned the value of aligning in values. I felt that I could change the culture, which turned out to be a futile effort. If you don’t have a technology that works the way you sell, it is a recipe for failure.

Roberge: I’ve studied and taught on the subject of failure. I applied to Stanford, Harvard, Wharton. I didn’t get in. However, a year later I was accepted into MIT. I failed at my first startup. Now I teach at Harvard.

For me, I think about having a relationship with failure, which is a learning moment and part of the journey. In business, we talk about “failing forward” or we’re encouraged to “fail fast.” You have to also translate that to your personal life.

---

We hope you enjoyed the wisdom around leadership, building exceptional teams, and character-defining moments that has led these exceptional sales leaders to success.

Effective sales coaching is an ongoing and evolving process. For more on how to best leverage technology to scale coaching, check out our eBook dedicated to the topic.

Cold email templates are a great way to learn the basics of email copywriting as you build your campaigns. But wouldn’t it be even better to learn from proven cold email success stories that drove everything from website backlinks to booked meetings, and more?

To help get you started on the right path, I’ve rounded up six examples of the best cold emails marketers and salespeople have ever sent – as well as the factors that made them work. Read through the examples below, and then put their lessons to work to maximize the impact of your cold email campaigns.

1. The “Congrats On the New Role” Email That Got a Prospect to Ask for a Meeting

Contributor: Caroline Ostrander, Manager, Freemium Services at HubSpot

Scenario: I wanted to connect with a prospect who had just started in their role, reaching out immediately to offer congratulations and build rapport.

The result? The prospect ended up asking for a meeting.

Here’s the email I used:

Why It Works

This email has many factors that make it successful. It:

• Leverages a trigger event of the prospect getting a new job.
• Has an interesting and familiar-looking subject line to improve the open rate.
• References previous efforts trying to help the company and mentions co-worker’s names.
• Relates to the prospect by suggesting that taking a new role is stressful.
• Very lightly introduces my expertise.
• Does NOT ask for a time on the prospect’s calendar and instead asks an open-ended question designed to get a response.
• When the prospect replies, that’s a good time to suggest a meeting. To reduce the back-and-forth emails, I use HubSpot Meetings. This makes it easy for the prospect to schedule a call by picking a time from my schedule that works best for both of us.

2. The “Quote Request” Email That Created Expert Connections

Contributor: Ryan Robinson, Writer/Content Marketer at ryrob.com

Scenario: We wanted to use our blog over at Close as a way to provide upfront value before asking for anything in return from our prospect, for either a partnership or other hands-on collaboration.

The most effective email I’ve ever sent was built around this tactic. Our process is as follows:

1. Ask for a quote from the startup founder, exec or business influencer to include in an upcoming article they’d want to weigh in on.
2. Publish our blog post utilizing their quote and start promoting it heavily.
3. Reach back out to update and thank them for contributing to the post.
4. Highlight early success in that email (number of social shares, traffic, any features on publications).

We’ve prominently highlighted our partnership prospect in an article sent out to our blog audience and email list. This gives us a lot more credibility when we make our ask of a deeper collaboration, whether that’s a partnership, participation in a podcast or virtual summit, promotional ask or otherwise.

Why It Works

This cold emailing strategy works so well because we take the approach of providing value in our initial cold emails (rather than immediately asking the recipient to take an action that’s primarily for our own benefit).

3. The “Unorthodox Application” Email That Landed a Job

Contributor: Raul Galera, Partner Manager at Anafore (the company behind ReferralCandy and CandyBar)

Scenario: Back in August 2016, I had just turned 25. I saw that ReferralCandy was hiring for a “remote OK” sales position on AngelList. I was interested, but although I had worked at startups, I had no experience in SaaS or even in the e-commerce industry.

So at a first glance, I was probably not their ideal candidate. I knew that if I went through the traditional path of submitting my CV/Linkedin profile via AngelList, my application was probably going to get ignored.

Instead, I decided to write a personalized cold email to Dinesh Raju, ReferralCandy’s CEO, with a brief description of my experience, skills and – most importantly – what I could do for ReferralCandy. This email had a huge impact on my professional (and personal) life because it got me the job.

Why It Works

Each section of this email was carefully crafted to drive results. Here’s what I did in each:

• Subject line and first paragraph: Summary of the email – Leave aside for a moment the fact that I forgot to finish my sentence – your referral program software*. My first paragraph was just a summary of what the email was to going to be about. I introduced myself and mentioned the reason I was reaching out. Dinesh might have been impressed that I managed to find his email and how to reach out to him.

• Second paragraph: Make things clear – I got straight to the point and briefly mentioned: 1) the positions I was interested in, and 2) why I was a good fit for them. I don’t like to waste anyone’s time, so whenever I’m writing a cold sales email, I try to make sure that the person on the other side of the screen can see my intentions at a first glance. Again, this was potentially an audition for my real job.

• Third paragraph: Call to action – This is the most important part of any sales email. We all know the basics: include only one call to action, make sure it’s easy to understand and make sure your recipient knows exactly what they need to do if they want to move forward. In my case, I gave my recipient several ways to get in touch with me, but I could have also asked for their availability or suggested a few times for a potential call.

I finished my call to action with an invitation to “work together.” This is something I always recommend when drafting a cold email, especially if you’re looking for a job: give before you get, and show the recipient what you can do for them.

This is nothing new, and any cold email guide will tell you the same thing, but it’s very important to phrase it so you really stand out from the crowd. In this case, I needed to stand out from “other people looking for a job at ReferralCandy,” and the way I chose to do that was to “offer help” instead of just “asking for a job.”

• Fourth paragraph: Other relevant information – If the reader has made it this far in the email, I can assume they’re somewhat interested in what they’re reading. So I added a small section with more information. The sales outreach cold email equivalent of this would be a link to a relevant case study or blog post that talks about a specific problem that affects your prospect, and how you can fix it.

4. The Creative “Success Check-In” Email That Got Several Prospects to Book a Meeting

Contributor: Taylor Dumouchel, Marketing Strategist at Peak Sales Recruiting

Scenario: My colleague and Head of Sales Enablement, Andrea Nellestyn, wanted to collaborate on a creative project to capture the attention of her target account list.

The account list included hiring managers who were seeking to recruit top-level sales executives (our expertise) through traditional recruiting methods such as job ads. We know how difficult and time-consuming it can be to sift through hundreds of unqualified resumes captured through job ads, so we decided to hit on those pain points through a creative channel – a personalized video.

The result? Our response rate increase by 83% and we booked several meetings.

Here’s an example of one of the emails we used:

Why It Works

This email does a lot well. It:

• Has a hyper-personalized and timely subject line including first name and company to attract attention and increase open rates.
• References an existing job ad and common pain points the company may be experiencing in their recruiting efforts.
• Leverages the use of a personalized video thumbnail with the prospect’s name, indicating that this is a personalized video, not a cookie-cutter “explainer” video.
• Touches on how Peak can help sales leaders, specifically, attract top sales talent in their specific city.
• Asks lightly to discuss the current hiring strategy’s success. It doesn’t try to sell services immediately.
• Offers the option of booking a meeting directly in Andrea’s calendar.

5. The “Flattering Ask” Email That Helped Build Backlinks

Contributor: Mark Lindquist, Marketing Strategist at Mailshake

Scenario: I wanted to execute a link-building strategy to promote content for a client of mine, Pandadoc. The goal, as it is with any outreach we do to promote content, was to build relationships with the people we were connecting with.

We had over a 90% open rate and ~66% reply rate on this outreach. As far as I can tell, the success rate was due to a combination of having a clearly valuable offer, making it easy for the recipient to take advantage of it, and being concise and clear in our copy.

One of our goals for this client was to build relationships with other content creators in our space. There are a ton of sales blogs out there run by companies that aren’t competitors but target the same customers, so working with these companies on co-marketing initiatives made a lot of sense for the client at the time, given that we were a relatively undeveloped blog.

The outreach we did was based on the idea that the easiest way to connect with someone is to give them something of value and ask for nothing in return. The easiest, most scalable way we could do that was to offer a link to their site and a positive overview of them on our blog.

The article was effectively a listicle on ‘top sales blogs’. The outreach email looked like this:

Why It Works

There are several elements that make this email especially successful:

• Personalization – I used Mailshake to do the outreach, which allows you to upload a .csv with text replacement fields, and replace elements of your email with personalization. In the email, anything surrounded by {{brackets}} was replaced with copy specific to the person or the blog. This extends to the subject line, too. I tell them exactly what I’ll be talking about in the email, and use their blog name to catch their eye.
• Straight to the point – On the first line, I say exactly what I’m doing and why I’m reaching out, along with a bit of flattery. On the second line, I tell them exactly what I want from them. This also makes the email easy to skim. There’s lots of white space, and not a ton of words.
• Low-friction ask – All I ask from them is a 2-3 sentence description of their blog (which many of them probably already have as boilerplate info), and a link to their best article.
• Obvious value – Beyond the flattery/coverage of being included on a top blogs list, this is the easiest backlink these blogs will ever get. That’s the idea of asking for a link to their best blog post as well – they can give me an article they’re trying to promote, so they even get an extra piece of value.

6. The “Hyper-Targeted Outreach” Email That Helped Land New Clients

Contributor: Laura Lopuch, Writer, writing for Copyhackers

Scenario: As a new freelance writer, Laura sent 328 cold emails to potential customers, resulting in a 56% open rate and a positive reply rate of 9%. As a result, she was able to grow her business by 1,400% in four months.

The following is an example of the cold emails she sent, along with the response received from one of her prospects:

Why It Works

In her Copyhacker article, Laura explains how important research was to her process. Specifically, she researched:

• The person she was emailing (aka her reader).
• Their job position.
• How long they’ve been in that position.
• Recent news/accomplishments about that person (aka flattery).
• Recent news about their company (aka flattery).
• Any new projects their company is working on releasing or has just released.
• Info about them that’s directly related to her offer.

With this information, Laura was able to make her messages relevant to her recipients. Not only could she personalize her messages to the correct purpose, but she also took what she assumed her recipients’ business goals were into consideration to create a more impactful email. Her advice: “Do the heavy-lifting and put your message into context for your reader. Forget all the detail, and frame the conversation to focus it.”

Writing Your Own Cold Email

Use these templates as inspiration. Don’t copy them outright – not just because plagiarism is wrong, but because the specific combinations of factors that made these messages work for their senders probably don’t apply to you.

Instead, look at the different points noted above in the “Why It Works” sections. Apply the lessons found there to your own cold email messages – no matter what industry you’re in or what your CTA is.

Got another cold email template you love? Leave me a note below sharing it:

The post The 6 Best Cold Emails Ever Sent – And Why They Worked appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Last week, a friend sent me a Facebook DM: “Should we still be using press releases?”

Simple question, but one that’s full of history and heated debated on both sides of the coin.

But, in 2019, I think it’s a question worth seriously considering. Do you really still need to be using press releases as part of your PR/comms strategy?

Of course, you’ll find the vendors that benefit from press release use are still backing it in 2019. Take this Cision study for example.

On the other hand, Silicon Valley start-up folks have had a rough relationship with the media and the press release for years–take a spin through this old post to get a better sense.

What’s always been missing in this debate is a relatively objective third-party who can take an impartial look at what’s happening, how things have shifted and give an informed opinion on this topic.

OK, fine I’ll share my opinion!

Press releases were designed, at least initially, as a way to get news out to a mass amount of media outlets with minimal effort. This is why wire services exist, right? “We need to get our press release out on the wire!” is a phrase you used to hear many years ago.

The idea, of course, is that the media will use the release in a few different ways:

• Key message “pull-through” — this is a fancy way of saying the journalist will use your key messages from your release in his/her story
• Direct quotes — you hope the journalist pulls straight quotes from your release
• Client mentions — of course we want this, right?
• Lifting big chunks of the release — in some ways, this is best case scenario, they almost run the release word-for-word!

Now, press releases can, and do, continue to do all these things. In spots, they work quite well (getting corporate announcements out to a large group of reporters, for example). But, today’s communicator also has many more options at his/her fingertips in 2019–options that simply weren’t available 15-20 years ago.

Predominantly, I’m talking about corporate blogs and social channels here. In many cases, media will follow these blogs and accounts for information in real-time. You could make an argument that Twitter is the modern wire service in many ways!

Also: If you think about the goals I talked about above, wouldn’t you have a better chance of success with the first one, and maybe even #2 and #3, if you had a personalized pitch with a reporter you actually had regular contact? I would certainly think so.

On the other side, today’s reporter is more stretched than ever before. They don’t have as much time for research as they once did. So, a well-written press release in their inbox can go a long ways toward securing coverage–especially when it comes to goal #4 above.

All that said, I’ve been leaning away from the traditional press release for a number of years. My big reasons?

1: Banking on quality vs. quantity.

I’d rather take a few hits with some key publications vs. 25 hits with publications I (and the client) have barely heard of before. It’s quality over quantity. I can’t think of too many clients that wouldn’t want just 1-2 hits in key pubs they really want to get into vs. 10 hits in pubs in that “other” or “nice to have” bucket.

2: The SEO angle is dead.

As if it were really ever alive! Years ago, many would argue there was true SEO value in getting a high volume of stories placed in the media with links back to your site. This was almost 100% an SEO strategy by PRs. But, I never saw it that way. It felt like people were gaming the system. It didn’t feel effective. And, I really never heard too many stories about it working all that well. Certainly, in 2019, this is not an effective approach, or justification to use a news release.

3: In it for the long run.

I much prefer an approach similar to what my friend and podcast partner, Kevin Hunt, has done at General Mills. They run media-ready stories on their blog first–then pitch. Or, better yet, over the years, they’ve conditioned certain media to look for them! Many media will reach out to them for a story based on what they saw on the corporate blog! That probably doesn’t work for most companies, as GM is a Fortune 500 company with a big following. But, the concept still works across many different industries and niches–it’s more about the long play than the short-term reward. And, that’s what I’m interested in when it comes to developing media relationships and generating value for clients.

Just my two cents in the “press release is dead” conversation. What about you–got an opinion on this always hot topic?

Construction industry executive Jeff Hansen-Carlson gestures toward his data chart on a big screen that depicts various industries and their adoption of new technologies, or lack thereof.

“We’re right there, above hunter-gatherers,” he jokes, referring to the construction industry’s line, near the bottom of the page.

“Smart cities are coming, whether we like it or not,” said Hansen-Carlson, the director of business development at EllisDon construction, which worked on local marquee projects such as Parq Vancouver and Surrey Memorial Hospital’s Critical Care Tower. He was speaking on a panel on the digital evolution of cities hosted on March 12 by the Urban Development Institute in Vancouver.

The arrival of the fifth-generation mobile internet network (5G) in Canada, new stress points from our increasingly urbanized populations and the onset of new technologies such as driverless vehicles will intensify the need, but also our ability, to evolve toward smarter buildings and more intelligent cities, the panelists said.

5G will provide faster data download and upload speeds, wider coverage and better connections. “It’s really going to disrupt our industry”, Hansen-Carlson said.

Economists estimate the global economic impact of 5G could reach $12 trillion by 2025, he said. It will also be central to the development of smart buildings and cities in which everything will have a sensor and will be connected to the internet, while producing data that can be harnessed and used.

“Everybody wants that data,” he said.

“By 2020, we’ll have more than 30 billion devices connected to the internet,” said panelist Brett Emmerton, an industry solutions executive with Microsoft. “That (number) will pale in comparison to our near future.”

Meanwhile, more people than ever are moving to cities.

“For the first time in history more than 50 per cent of the world’s population live in urban areas,” Emmerton said. “Cities take up only three per cent of the surface area of the earth, yet they’re responsible for 80 per cent of GDP, 80 per cent of the energy consumption and 75 per cent of carbon emissions.”

He said nearly 70 per cent of humans, or about six billion people, will live in cities by 2050.

“The data generated in those cities have enormous value, but only if we can work with it to provide new insights and solve some of those challenges,” he said.

Increased traffic congestion, decaying infrastructure, energy management and cyber security are already major issues in our cities, he said.

Microsoft already spends a billion dollars each year on cyber security research and development alone, he said.

Smarter buildings, driven by new analytics technology, machine learning and artificial intelligence will help us to understand better our households, buildings and cities.

The construction industry needs to be a part of that, Hansen-Carlson said. “We realize we haven’t really been contributing to the technology very much over the past decade, but times are changing.”

EllisDon now retrofits older buildings and builds new ones that are integrated and intelligent.

“Every system is talking to each other,” he said. “That data is gathered and we can do something with that data. We don’t just let it dissipate.”

He said their buildings can be equipped with data sensors and full fibre networks so that heating and cooling systems, lighting, security, elevators and all of the building’s other systems can be optimized, managed and mined for data.

“That means that everything the building is doing, you see,” he said. “You have control over it and you are informed by data play-by-play.”

A major example of how buildings need to adapt is found in their parking areas, said fellow panelist David Thom, the president of architecture and engineering firm IBI Group.

Soon, driverless vehicles and a more mature ride-hailing industry will be a central part of our transportation network. That means fewer people will own cars that require parking spaces at our condos and offices.

“There is a whole different way of looking at just a simple thing like parking, which is a very big part of a building,” Thom said. “How do you design that to make it adaptable?”

He said he is working on a building in San Francisco that is being revamped after the initial approval process to reconfigure the parking component. The designers are going back and taking out large zones of parking and batching parking area together into two mobility hubs, he said.

“We’re estimating that approximately that 30 per cent of the building will still be used by cars,” he said, but rather than personal parking spaces, the areas will be used for autonomous vehicle resting space, charging stations and receiving zones for items and passenger delivery.

The onset of driverless vehicles alone is already transforming how buildings are being designed and built, he said. But that’s only the beginning.

evan@evanduggan.com

twitter.com/EvanBDuggan

I have tremendous empathy for sales people and what they face as they struggle to make their numbers. It seems the mantra is always “do more.” The solution to anemic pipelines is “do more prospecting” (that seems to be the magic solution to every sales problem).

Alternatively, it’s “do more emails,” do more cold calls,” “do more customer meetings,” or “do more research,” or “do more with your accounts,” or any other things that focus on volume.

We have an obsession with volume, specifically volume of activities. If the volume of activities we currently conduct aren’t producing what we need, then the answer is to double or triple or quadruple down on those activities.

As we struggle to keep up with ever increasing demands for volumes, inevitably we start taking short cuts. After all, we are already busy, so doing more means we have to figure out a way to get more done in a shorter period of time.

Managers and sales enablement people try to help this out, perhaps providing tools and processes that enable us to do more in a certain period of time. But, inevitably, we reach a point where we have to do even more.

So we take shortcuts. We start prospecting outside our ICP, we relax our qualification criteria, we prepare less for meetings, we conduct less discovery–moving into pitching, we rush to close.

Unfortunately, our numbers tumble. We are producing the same or less.

But we know the answer to that problem—do more! More prospecting, more qualifying, more deals, more meetings, more proposals, more closes, more, more, more.

But then we run into another problem. We run out of time for doing more. We haven’t, yet, figured out how to create more hours in the day. We only have 8760 hours in a year. Doing more breaks down when we look at the time it takes to do more.

“More” has been the mantra for years. But it doesn’t seem to be working, so why do we keep with the insanity of continually doing more.

What if we conducted a thought experiment, “How can I achieve my goals by actually doing less?”

We probably would start by looking at the deals we win and lose. We’d try to understand what generate each outcome. What is it about the customers and the problems the customers, the problems they face, their buying process, and so forth? What do we do that causes us to win, or that causes us to lose?

We would try to understand what creates success, consistently executing those things in each deal we qualify and how we engage the customer.

These actions would help us increase our win rates, they could help us increase our average transaction size, they might help us decrease our sales cycle.

We might think, “If I can increase my win rate by 50%, the number of qualified deals I have to have in my pipeline is reduced by 33%.” This then ripples through to our prospecting, since we have to have fewer qualified deals in our pipelines, we don’t have to prospect as much to find those qualified deals.

This then causes us to think about how we increase our win rate. Do we do a better job of disqualification, focusing only on the right opportunities? Do we change how we engage our customer in their buying process, becoming much more effective? What else can we do to increase our win rate for those qualified deals in our pipeline?

We might choose to look at average transaction value. “What if we could increase our average transaction value by 25%? This would mean we have to win fewer deals, which means we could qualify and compete for fewer deals, which means we don’t have to prospect as much.

We then start thinking about how we do this. Do we change our qualification criteria, do we change how we engage the customer in defining their problems, do we change how we articulate value……..?

Alternatively, we might look at our prospecting. Let’s imagine, for example, only 10% of our prospecting calls identify a qualified opportunity. Rather than doubling down on prospecting calls to fill our pipeline, what if we studied that 10% trying to figure out: How do we find more like them, how do we spend less time on the other 90%? What did we do with those 10% that created the outcome we wanted, how do we do that with every prospect call?

Doing more of anything or doing more of everything seems to be the knee jerk reaction of too many managers and too many “experts.” But doing more is mindless. Doing more doesn’t force us to do better. Doing more ultimately breaks down.

We would do ourselves and our customers a huge service if we stopped thinking about doing more, instead started thinking about doing less. Doing less forces us to think about being better, being more focused, being more purposeful, creating value in every interaction, and valuing our time.

In reality, if we figure out how to achieve our goals by doing less, we accomplish so much more.

(But there is more to this–stay tuned for part 2)

Canada has a rich history of innovation, but in the next few decades, powerful technological forces will transform the global economy. Large multinational companies have jumped out to a headstart in the race to succeed, and Canada runs the risk of falling behind. At stake is nothing less than our prosperity and economic well-being. The Financial Post set out explore what is needed for businesses to flourish and grow. You can find all of our coverage here.

---

Financing a technology startup in Canada is like an art form, according to Mark Usher, chairman of the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association.

Entrepreneurs often start out with nothing but an idea and a blank canvas to paint it on. In a company’s earliest stages, they add a base layer of funding by pitching wealthy strangers on the basis of that idea alone, hoping to secure a lifeline.

The picture begins to take shape when they have to convince venture capitalists that their business will amount to more than just a mom-and-pop shop, with the future expansion of their company on the line.

• Canada's cybersecurity firms keep turning to the U.S. for funding, leaving us without a homegrown leader
• Innovation Nation: Canadian startups need new angel investors — maybe you
• How foreign companies use Canada’s universities to steal away huge chunks of intellectual property
• Innovation Nation: Why has the government put a cap on innovation success?

The details are then flushed out and completed when they’re able to obtain a $20-million cheque — something so rare in Canada that management teams generally have to acquaint themselves with U.S.-based private equity funds.

They have to do this, of course, while continuing to secure sales and running their business on a day-to-day basis.

Usually taking place between the first five to seven years of a company’s lifespan, although it can often stretch well-beyond 10, the funding process occurs in three crucial stages. Failing at any one of them could mean scaling back operations, including any global aspirations. Success can result in the formation of a new powerhouse in the private sector and launch a company toward an IPO.

 

To understand each stage of the financing process for tech companies, the Financial Post spoke with Usher, eSentire Inc. president and chief operating office J. Paul Haynes, and Business Development Bank of Canada senior vice-president Karl Reckziegel.

The pre-seed and seed stages

Before beginning the search for angel investors and venture-capital funds, Reckziegel said entrepreneurs typically begin financing their company by asking friends and family for funds they can use toward developing a working prototype.

The goal is to generally raise about $250,000, and some company founders have been known to also mortgage their homes to get there.

With a working prototype in hand, a founder will look to begin the seed stage of financing, where Reckziegel suggests they’ll aim to raise $1.5 million in an attempt to develop a customer base.

This stage is where angel investors — wealthy individuals, often retired entrepreneurs, looking to back startups — come in. These so-called angels usually only invest between $50,000 and $250,000, Usher said, so companies might end up tracking down up to 15 of them to meet their targets.

Some angels are organized in groups and hold monthly pitch meetings. Haynes remembers pitching eSentire to 20 angels sitting in an auditorium.

“You’re getting random questions in the end and you don’t know where they’re coming from and the wrong question and answer can turn the other 19 off your deal,” he said. “I probably have some of that scar tissue myself.”

The other option at this stage involves targeting a venture-capital firm. In the past two years, venture-capital firms and other institutional investors provided an average of $1.6 million in 216 tech deals during the seed stage,  according to data obtained from CVCA InfoBase.

Both angels and venture-capital firms have representatives sit on a board of directors and assist them in running the company going forward.

It took six months before Haynes was finally able to raise US$1 million from Toronto-based Intrepid Equity Investments. He said he chose a firm over a group of angels because each decision his company took going forward would only require one signature — that of the lead Intrepid investor — instead of 15.

The early funding stage

This stage, where companies are often vying for their first institutional cheque, can be the most crucial.

“It’s the real test, because once you’ve got those guys in, you’ve got a lot of momentum and value add and connections that open up your world,” Haynes said.

Here, startups are looking for between $5 million to $10 million in Series A and B investment rounds, according to Reckziegel, and they’ll use the money to prove their product will work on a wider scale, launch new products and fill out their management teams.

“You’re going to move from the idea to a real business,” Reckziegel said. Individual investors are harder to find at this stage and so most startups will look to venture-capital firms.

The process works in the same way that a job application would. Instead of a cover letter, Haynes attached a one-page “teaser” that hinted at what was to come in a 30-page business plan. Should the business plan intrigue a venture capital investor, they’ll begin their exhaustive research.

References help because they’ll want to speak with other people who’ve worked with the CEO or founder before. In Haynes’ case, he remembers an investor calling 15 customers he listed in his business plan — and asking to speak to another 15.

Most firms tend to have their own areas of expertise and their own investment cycles, so companies have to cater their investment applications with these factors in mind, Haynes said.

Data show that institutional investors made 259 deals with Canadian tech companies for an average of $9.4 million over the past two years.

The late funding stage

The late funding stage is the easiest, Reckziegel said, because after spending years building a customer base and showing consistent growth, there is much less risk associated with companies looking to raise funds in a Series C or D round.

“By the time you’re at Series C, some of those risks have fallen away,” Reckziegel said. “The technology risk is usually proven and market risk is lower because you’ve already proven in your Series A and B that you can get market traction.”

Here, companies are finally looking to take the massive step toward becoming a scale-up instead of a startup. They’re attempting to become large global players, Reckziegel said, and will do so by attempting to raise about $25 million.

Because companies are now looking for larger investments, private equity funds and larger institutional investors such as pension plan investment boards can play a role.

As far as venture-capital firms go, Usher said there are only two in Canada that can provide this kind of capital: OMERS Ventures and Georgian Partners Inc., which in August closed the largest independent venture-capital fund at US$550 million.

Multiple U.S. firms, by comparison, annually work with multi-billion-dollar funds.

“There aren’t as many growth equity later stage funds in Canada as there are in the U.S., so you find U.S. investors investing in these companies disproportionately for sure,” Usher said. “There’s only so many investors who can write that kind of cheque.”

Even when Canadian tech companies expand their search outside Canada, data shows the average late-stage deal they secured over the past two years was $7.8 million, when they were hoping for roughly triple that amount.

Raising significant amounts in the late-stage period in Canada is not impossible, but the companies that have managed to do so are an extreme exception to the norm. In the past two years, the top five late-stage deals in Canadian tech ranged from $90 million to $207 million. Of the five, Lightspeed POS Inc. was able to exclusively raise $207 million from Canadian investors.

For those that can’t do the same, there’s no issue in taking funds from U.S. investors, Usher said.

“Yes they’re investing from the U.S., but the jobs are in Canada, the CEOs are in Canada, that’s a net positive for Canada,” he said. “The alternative is not pretty.”

Email: vferreira@nationalpost.com | Twitter: VicF77

Regardless of their relentless efforts, brands across industries suffer from churn problems in today’s competitive world. As shown in the image below, one of the major reasons why customers leave the company turns out to be poor customer service.

What is wrong with customer service today?

According to research by SQM Group, 86% of customers expect their issue to be resolved on the first call, which isn’t happening. Each time a customer has to call back because their prior issue was not resolved, customer satisfaction drops, on average, 15%.

The never-ending IVR menus, ridiculously long response times, and multiple transfers are some of the typical events adding to customer effort. However, when customers are complaining about customer service, it may not necessarily mean poor agent performance alone. It is the overall experience the customers have had till that point which has disappointed them so much that they decided to cancel.

Companies underline their retention efforts only at the end-of-term:

The biggest mistake companies repeatedly do is, underline their retention efforts towards the end of a customer’s journey. But what companies fail to understand is that customers don’t decide to cancel overnight. Churn happens due to a series of poor customer care interactions, multiple substandard experiences, and counter offers from the competition; which together drive the customer to lose interest in the company.

Today most of the retention measures are reactive in nature as the visibility to churn root causes are limited. What companies see and perceive as churn reasons are just the tip of the iceberg and the real reasons for cancellations stay hidden, as companies, most of the time, don’t have the necessary capabilities to understand the root causes of customer dissatisfaction.

By the time companies intervene, it’s too late. What follows is a high cost and high effort marketing campaign involving costly offerings and discounts, however, they don’t mean much to a frustrated customer, who has already decided to cancel.

Problem Solution Fit – Proactive Lifecycle Risk Prevention:

Customers do inform companies about their wants, needs, and wishes during their interactions across various touchpoints with the company. Also, these needs and wishes would vary from customer to customer depending on their current customer lifecycle stage.

Companies must start using call center data like agent notes to understand their customers’ wants, needs, and wishes. Companies must also start using the call center channel as an effective way to proactively reach out to their customers to solve their issues and mitigate churn effectively.

Companies must constantly be on the lookout for customers showing various signs of cancellation such as mentioning their competitors, inquiring about contracts, calling repeatedly for the same issue, etc. before they actually decide to cancel. Today’s AI wave is empowering companies to identify those customers who are showing these churn symptoms in the early stages of the lifecycle. Companies have the options to proactively intervene through their customer service channels and prevent churn at the right moment by delighting the customer with excellent service before an irritation or series of annoyances becomes a full-scale churn problem.

Addressing the churn signals early and smartly depending on customer journey stage will consequently improve the overall customer lifetime value, ensuring a smooth and profitable business.

Business Benefits of Proactive Lifecycle Risk Prevention:

Addressing risk proactively is cost-effective:
According to Gartner, a commitment to customer experience results in up to 25% more customer retention and revenue than sales or marketing initiatives. If companies start addressing churn risk proactively, by intervening early in the customer lifecycle, they can mitigate the risk by providing personalized offerings. As they already know about their customer and these offers will be not only cost effective but also will improve customer satisfaction, which will further create opportunities for upselling and cross-selling in the future. Alternatively, dealing with a new prospect is as difficult as shooting in the dark with no guarantee of a positive outcome.

Earns customer loyalty:
According to The Institute of Customer Service, a 10% increase in customer satisfaction score results in a 12% increase in trust from customers. If service teams start reaching out to your customers proactively to sort out their issues before the customer starts complaining, customer satisfaction is bound to reach new heights, resulting in your customer’s loyalty for an extended period.

Easier upsell/cross-sell opportunities:
The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60% – 70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5%-20% according to Marketing Metrics. So, following a proactive approach results in positive customer experiences which means satisfied and happy customers. Happy customers will eventually increase sales and earn profits for businesses.

Reduces support costs:
Making it a priority to identify and fix issues causing poor customer experience helps improve your customers’ overall satisfaction rate with your company. It will also mean fewer repeat calls, shorter call times, and quicker problem resolution, all contributing to a lowering of customer care costs.

By investing in an AI-powered search to enhance your agent-assisted support, knowledge management, and customer experience efforts, your company can experience significant savings on support operations costs.

Takeaway:

A proactive approach to the churn problem can result in a 5% to 8% boost to retention rates in recurring revenue business from Telecom, Home Security, Insurance, etc. For that, finding the actual root causes for customer dissatisfaction and churn must always be a companies’ top priority. By not restricting churn understanding and prevention to some event, and instead looking at the entire customer lifecycle will always give the most accurate picture. Using call centers, the most prominent touchpoint, as the medium to understand customers, as well as an effective retention service delivery channel, will go a long way in mitigating churn risk and ensuring long-term business success.

Originally published here.

A study shows it comes down to pricing.

“It’s called ‘business-to-business’, not ‘business-to-lead,’” is one of my favorite lines from Engagio’s very own Clear and Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing. It rings true for any B2B organization that practices Account Based Marketing — especially at the beginning of the journey when shifting from lead-centric to account-centric campaigns. And yet, without individual leads, there really is no account.

While ABM acknowledges that there are many people involved in today’s B2B buying decisions, access to those individual contacts is critical. Without reaching a large number of contacts within an account, and gathering intelligence about each contacts’ role, it’s impossible to view the account as a whole. Seeing how those individual leads fit together – who the users, influencers and buyers are, and how these people are related – is the key to effectively engaging the account, versus engaging the lead.

But first things first: you need to find the contacts and learn all about them.

And I have an EASY way to do it.

Where To Find High-Quality, Account-Specific Contacts

The best place to look for new – and qualified – contacts is within your best-fit accounts; those that match your ideal customer profile. Seems like common sense, but many organizations struggle with how to actually go about the process. Short of asking existing leads for an introduction or purchasing contacts from list vendors, how do you gain traction when trying to expand within an account?

Simple. Look to your email inbox.

The account-specific leads you’re already engaging with through email marketing are the freshest and most accurate source for discovering new contacts. All you have to do is start paying attention to the replies that come back from your email campaigns.

I’m not just talking about human replies. I’m even talking about those “nuisance” auto-responses like Out-Of-Office and Left-The-Company/No-Longer-with-Company that clog your inbox and tend to get ignored or deleted. These highly underrated gems are the key to quickly adding contacts to your target accounts. In addition to containing new contacts, reply emails are also loaded with intelligence that allows you to enrich and cleanse existing records. That means more targeted, personalized messaging reaching the right people, at the right time.

Let’s take a look at some specific examples of reply emails, and what type of data can be mined from them.

Out-Of-Office (OOO)

Here’s a pretty standard OOO reply. Your lead tells you they’re out of the office, when they’re returning, and who to contact for important matters in their absence.

Validate Email Addresses

The first piece of information you learn from any OOO is that the email address is still valid. Your contact is still active and at the same account. Given the high number of people that change jobs every year, this is an instant win.

Add New Contacts

Now let’s look at the items in blue. Your original lead, Mark, just gave you two new contacts: Stephanie and Bruce, and their titles and email addresses. This information delivers immediate insight into how these new contacts fit within the account.

The next step is to reach out to the new contacts. I always recommend practicing permission-based marketing when adding new contacts to your database. While Mark specifically recommends contacting Stephanie and Bruce during his absence, it’s a good idea to get the new contacts to opt-in to receiving communication from you. Not only for compliance purposes but simply because it’s the professional and considerate thing to do. Reach out with a one-to-one email, introduce yourself, make your intentions clear, and ask them to opt-in.

Enrich Existing Contacts

Finally, let’s look at the items in green. If you previously only had Mark’s name and email address – say, as a result of an inbound campaign – you now have his title and cell phone number. Multi-channel outreach is critical in ABM, so having Mark’s cell phone number is pure gold. Short of asking Mark in an email for his cell, there really is no other easy way to find this information. Additionally, you now have Mark’s title and can more accurately map his role to the account. If you had Mark on a general email nurturing list before, you can switch him to a list more relevant to managers. Both pieces of intelligence can be used to enrich your existing record.

And here’s the thing. If your competitor is also trying to sell to Mark, you just got a huge competitive advantage by discovering his cell number and title. You know more about Mark now and can quickly pivot to make your messaging more relevant to him.

Left-The-Company (LTC)

Here’s an example of a pretty typical LTC reply. Often when an employee leaves, the company will put an auto-response in place to alert senders of the change and effective date. If the role has already been filled, the LTC may also contain a replacement contact.

Add New Contacts

Looking at the information in orange first, we see that the organization has given us a replacement contact: Jenni Miller, her title, email and phone number. Just as before, reach out to Jenni and get her to opt-in to be added to your database.

Cleanse Existing Records

The items in blue and green tell us that our existing lead, Pamela, is no longer with the company. Remove her from your database so that you’re not sending to a bad address. A healthy database helps maintain your sender reputation, ultimately improving your email deliverability and increasing connect rates.

While both of these actions may sound like nothing more than database maintenance on the surface, staying on top of the movement within accounts is critical in an ABM strategy. And this type of insight can only be discovered in a timely manner when you’re mining emails replies. Otherwise, you’re not learning about these changes until you receive a hard bounce (more on that below!).

Bonus! Leverage Trigger Events

A Left-The-Company is an important sales trigger event, and I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the huge opportunity that it represents. If you’re mining reply emails and discover a LTC before you receive a hard bounce, you gain a significant timing advantage – as much as 6-9 months – over competitors. Whether Pamela was your contact for renewals, or she was blocking you from reaching decision makers, getting in front of her replacement is critical. Often, new people at an organization want to prove themselves. They may want to shake things up. Whether it’s changing vendors or bringing an innovative solution to the table, being the first in with new and replacement contacts can help solidify your position and win the deal.

Another, bonus: If you had a good rapport with your original lead, Pamela, follow her to her new company. If it matches your ICP and Pamela has buying power or influence, stay in contact with her in hopes of doing business together again in the future. People buy from people they know and like, so keep your “Rolodex” updated as your contacts move onward and upward.

By The Numbers

It’s clear that email replies contain some pretty incredible intelligence that ABM practitioners can use to expand into target accounts and learn more about existing contacts. But does email mining net enough data to make it worth the effort?

Absolutely! Here’s what I’ve discovered after years of analyzing the data from companies mining emails:

• 1% – 2% is the average reply rate (higher during the summer and holidays). Ex: if you send 10,000 emails per month, you will receive around 150 replies.
• 87% of replies are Out-Of-Office for typical marketing campaigns
• 55-65% of replies contain new or replacement contacts
• 20% net new contacts added annually
• 72% of existing records enriched and cleansed annually

Bottom line: for B2Bs, mining emails is unequivocally one of the quickest and easiest ways to add new contacts to target accounts, update and cleanse existing records, and ultimately support ABM success.

Everything—no matter how innocuous or dated—had its use. It was a mantra he lived by. Born in 1946 to an Irish immigrant father and an American mother of French-Canadian descent, his parents’ coming of age was marked by the Great Depression plus decades of war. Unsurprisingly, this meant that his parents, Pat and Stella, were more than practical when it came to purchases and investments. They were intentional. They were frugal. It was “waste not, want not.” And they never threw anything away—a way of life that he held on to long into adulthood. But one day, Pat and Stella’s hoarding and his resulting belief that everything was useful, changed my life. After one of his routine check-ins with Pat and Stella, Dad arrived home with what looked like a small, hardcover suitcase. It was a shiny steel blue. He swung the case onto the kitchen table and called me over. He unlatched the cover and pushed it back to reveal the contents. My eyes widened. He smiled. We hugged. And I ran my fingers over the black keys of the old typewriter as I pondered which story I would write first … This is a piece of my story. And everyone has a story to tell; a glimpse to provide—including your B2B brand.

The Intersection of Storytelling & B2B Content Marketing

Storytelling is civilization’s oldest form of communication, helping us teach, entertain, preserve our histories and cultures, and instill our values. We’re programmed for stories. Our brains light up when we hear and see stories unfolding. This hunger for narrative combined with our desire and ability to guide our own quest for answers, storytelling has naturally become a fundamental staple of B2B content marketing. As Ursula Ringham, Global Head of Influencer Marketing for SAP, says: “In marketing, story is everything.” But the challenge for many B2B marketers is to weave a story web that is everything to their customers and prospects. It needs to provide that meaningful glimpse. It needs to be familiar. It needs to be authentic. And it needs to resonate. “Every content creator should consider themselves a storyteller,” Nick Nelson, Senior Content Strategist at TopRank Marketing, declares in his piece on building trust through storytelling. “When we write, we are invariably sharing a story: about our solution, about our customers, about the pains we can help solve.” He adds: “Tying multiple pieces of information together in a coherent, chronological, and—above all—relatable way makes the message far more affecting. The content suddenly becomes experiential instead of merely educational.” [bctt tweet="In #marketing, story is everything. @ursularingham #B2BContenMarketing #Storytelling" username="toprank"] The bottom line? It’s no longer enough to inform buyers. Instead, you must provide story-driven content that connects on both intellectual and emotional levels. Read: Creating Content Connections: 10 Lessons in Resonance from Content Marketing Pros

How to Create B2B Content Connections Through Storytelling

Whether you’re building a large-scale brand narrative or pulling at story threads, here are a few things to keep in mind as you commit to storytelling in your B2B content marketing initiatives.

#1 - Commit to storytelling by doubling-down on what’s already familiar.

Contently co-founder and recognized journalist Shane Snow is widely known in marketing circles for his knack for storytelling and his dedication to helping other marketers harness their storytelling skillset. A couple of years ago, I had the privilege of seeing Shane speak on this very topic at MarketingProfs B2B Forum. At that time, he laid out a three-step framework for telling better stories and it resonated with me.

1. Create timely, seasonal, and evergreen content that tells a story at every stage of the funnel.
2. Connect your audience with your stories by determining the right distribution channels and content types—based on your audience’s preferences and your objectives.
3. Optimize and refine your stories to ensure your creating content that undoubtedly connects.

The concepts outlined in his framework should feel really familiar—they’re meant to, from my perspective. (Familiarity is a hallmark of good storytelling.) The switch is defining how you show and tell stories your buyers will care about, rather than simply creating more content. For a more in-depth look, check out Shane’s storytelling course that outlines the science of great stories, the elements of effective storytelling, and much more.

#2 - Introduce your audience to new characters.

Content is absolutely everywhere. And trust in marketing—among consumers and your C-suite—is low. As a result, buyers are looking to those they know or those they think they know for insights, answers, and recommendations. And this means there’s never been a bigger opportunity to partner with other “storytellers” to add new dynamics to your content. “In order to tell a compelling story, you have to be immersed,” Ursula Ringham states. “Bring empathy and understanding, bring purpose, and bring insight—the latter of which influencers can certainly help with. When you co-create content with influencers, you not only provide influential experts with a medium to share valuable insights, but you can also provide your audience with a mix of perspectives—significantly upping your storytelling capabilities and credibility. “Partnering with an influencer allows you to highlight your brand’s own existing narrative in a new way, so that you can reinforce the proof points you really want your customers to know,” Whitney Magnuson, Global Head of Social Media and Influencer Programs for IBM, told us not long ago. [bctt tweet="Partnering with an #influencer allows you to highlight your brand’s own existing narrative in a new way, so that you can reinforce the proof points you really want your customers to know. @whitneymagnuson @IBMSystems" username="toprank"]

#3 - Steer clear of fantasy or fiction.

With trust in marketing low, authenticity and transparency are increasingly critical. As my colleague Nick Nelson so eloquently said: “Storytelling backfires when it strikes people as false or disingenuous. Share real anecdotes and back them with third-party evidence or quotes. Telling hard truths, even if it means acknowledging a shortcoming in your business, can be tremendously beneficial in the long run. Even more than being true to the facts, you must be true to yourself, and your brand.” Boom. [bctt tweet="Storytelling backfires when it strikes people as false or disingenuous. Even more than being true to the facts, you must be true to yourself, and your brand. @NickNelson #B2BContentMarketing #Storytelling" username="toprank"] Read: Be Honest Like Abe: How Content Marketers Can Build Trust Through Storytelling

It’s Storytime

The nostalgic tale I opened with is more than a fond memory. It’s a glimpse into who I am, where I came from, and how I got here. It’s my truth. It’s my context. It’s a piece of my story. Every brand has the opportunity to find, show, and tell their own stories. Stories about who they are, what they stand for, and how they solve problems. Stories that bring truth and add context. Stories that resonate and inspire. So, dust off your brand’s old hand-me-down typewriter and get to work. It’s storytime. Senior Director of Digital Strategy Ashley Zeckman and Content Strategist Annie Leuman are on the ground at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego from March 20-22, 2019. And as always, you can count on us to deliver you first-hand learnings and stories from the conference floor. Follow @azeckman, @annieleuman, and @toprank on Twitter to get live updates.

The post Once Upon a Time: Storytelling in Today’s B2B Content Marketing Landscape appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way since its inception – with major breakthroughs taking place as we speak. It has often been brushed off as unrealistic, too futuristic or too expensive for someone other than the likes of Amazon or Netflix to implement, but this is no longer the case. In this article, we take a look at four examples of the kind of artificial intelligence for marketing that companies like yours are using to get ahead of the game.

1. Personalised content/product recommendations

Be relevant, be timely and don’t pester me with irrelevant deals – that’s what your typical customer now demands. According to the latest Salesforce report, 62% of B2B buyers expect to receive personalised recommendations at different stages of their journey. In the B2C segment, shoppers are even more spoiled and expect an Amazon-ish kind of experience from every brand. Segment’s 2017 study noted that only 22% of customers were fully satisfied with the level of personalisation they received.

Machine learning – the power behind most content recommendation systems, including those of Spotify, Netflix and Amazon – can appear out of reach for marketers due to price and technology constraints. However, developing custom algorithms isn’t the only way to go. Plug and play solutions are now plentiful on the market and are a quick and efficient way to use artificial intelligence in marketing. Some examples are:

• Content AI by Marketo – which uses predictive analytics and machine learning to display the most relevant content on your website as “recommended” for users.
• CaliberMind – analyses all your customer data, creates ideal buyer personas, and suggests how to communicate with your audiences in a profitable way.
• Visely – an AI-powered product recommendation engine for Shopify stores.

Wondering how quantifiable the impact of AI on personalisation is? After analysing 3.5 billion marketing interactions, Blueshift concluded that AI-powered personalisation:

• Creates a 3.1X-7.2X lift in customer engagement.
• Has 2X higher impact on engagement for mobile pics compared to email.
• Over time, AI engines can deliver an additional 50% lift over the initial results.

2. Conversational AI – chatbots

Chatbots are the driving force of automation in customer support, but sadly they are underemployed in the marketing space. After all, marketing is all about cultivating great relationships and leading meaningful conversations. Chatbots can now cope perfectly with that task, helping you engage with prospects through multiple channels at different stages of their journey.

For instance, Nordstrom allows shoppers to engage with a bot whenever they are looking for a gift. After asking a series of leading questions, the on-site assistant suggests the most appropriate goods to buy.

Nordstrom chatbot

The Hipmunk Messenger chatbot takes the user’s location to determine where they are travelling from and then pitches appropriate deals. Their clever assistant can also curate travel advice and manage hotel bookings for the upcoming trip. The travel industry in general already leads the way when it comes to chatbots.

Hipmunk chatbot

Other industries are catching up as well. In fact, between 2018 and 2024 the global chatbot market is expected to witness a 31% growth and reach $1.34 billion. This should come as no surprise, considering the shrinking costs of developing a chatbot. According to CMS Wire, the average cost of an SME Messenger chatbot developed for marketing purposes is $3,000-$5,000. But, remember, beyond giving your bot the AI wits, you should also account for the content development costs.

3. Predictive analytics and insights

Better use of data for audience segmentation and targeting is a top priority for 55% of marketers in 2019. If you want to follow suit, you need to move away from just using descriptive analytics (Google Analytics) and embrace predictive tools.

Predictive and lately prescriptive analytics can help you beat the data chaos and pinpoint the most profitable marketing channels and actions. Machine learning algorithms are already at your service to help you:

• Anticipate and react to changing consumer behaviours.
• Score leads in your CRM and suggest the best move to meet your sales numbers.
• Optimise your PPC budgets to increase sales without spiking your ad spending.
• Identify and acquire “lookalike” prospects, closely matching your ideal buyer personas.
• Discover and pursue missed keyword and content marketing opportunities.

The best part? Predictive analytics is now a commodity technology, within reach for both SMEs and larger enterprises. In fact, smaller companies often have a competitive advantage when it comes to predictive analytics adoption – they need less time and technological effort to prepare their data for analysis.

4. Social listening and sentiment analysis

Knowing what people say about your company (or your competitors) online is essential for creating an effective social media marketing strategy. But detangling insights from that hot mess of conversations happening simultaneously is a better job for AI than a human agent.

Data science is already being actively applied to social media marketing for micro-segmentation and targeting, social media listening and influencer marketing campaign management. AI-powered social listening stretches marketers’ abilities even further, allowing them to:

• Identify and quantify consumer purchase intent on social media.
• Understand how shoppers feel about your product vs your competitor’s product.
• Learn what’s driving the conversations in your industry and how the content of those conversations changes over time.
• Notice and respond to questions about your products/services in real-time.
• Identify and engage with buyers seeking product recommendations/advice on social media.

What’s even better – AI tools can help you avoid the faux pas of including an avid surfer raving about a “great tide the other day” as opposed to a fan of “Tide, the detergent”.

To wrap up – Yes, you should definitely start to use more artificial intelligence in marketing as it can majorly increase the accuracy and effectiveness of your efforts. No, ‘smart’ tools are no longer exorbitantly pricey or useful only for selected industries. Jumping on the AI innovation train has become easier than ever, so if you’ve not done so already then it’s time to hop aboard.

Search for world’s largest eCommerce store on Google, you will find that most of them are the multi-vendor marketplaces. The huge success of online multi-vendor marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart, Ebay, etc. has encouraged aspiring entrepreneurs to start a multi-vendor online store. However, starting a multi-vendor marketplace is not a walk in the park. You need to build a fully functional online store where the number of vendors can operate under a roof without any hassles.

So today, I have decided to compare the top ecommerce platforms that help you build a multivendor online store like Amazon & FlipKart without any technical knowledge.

Based on my research for top multi-vendor marketplace platforms, I found these 4 multi-vendor ecommerce platforms for comparison:

• Cs-Cart
• Yokart
• X-Cart
• Apattha

These are the popular names in the multivendor industry, before I started; let me give you a brief introduction about each platform:

CS-Cart is a very popular name in the multivendor industry. You can start a self-hosted multivendor marketplace with CS Cart easily.

YoKart is a dedicated multivendor marketplace platform that has gained a lot of popularly in short period of time. You can start both hosted and self-hosted marketplaces with YoKart.

X-Cart is a popular open source platform. With X-Cart you can start a single or multivendor ecommerce store easily.

Apptha is basically an extension by which you can start a multivendor marketplace swiftly with your word-press, Magento, or Joomla online store.

Let’s Start the Comparison

Features:

I have compared features that must have in a multi-vendor marketplace. In Addition to, I compared features of each platform that is available in their base package.

• Features Available in YoKart $1299 Package
• Features Available in CS-Cart $1450 Package
• Features Available in Apptha with extensions
• Features Available in X cart $1495 package

Pricing:

CS Cart:

• $1450- A Self Hosted Solution
• $3500- A Self Hosted Solution with more features
• Enterprise Package – Pricing is not mentioned on the website

Yokart:

• $250 – a hosted solution
• $999 – a Self-Hosted solution
• $1299 – a Self-Hosted solution with new features like product catalog, multilingual, & multi-currency.
• $2999 – A Self-hosted solution with Partial Custom Design option
• $5999 – A Self-hosted solution with Fully Custom Design & Pre Launch Marketing option.

Yokart provides free installation on all the packages.

Appatha:

• $799 – A marketplace solution

X-Cart:

• $1495 – A Self Hosted Solution
• $5995 – For enterprises with more features

Technical Support:

In the starting period of any startup, good technical support is very necessary. So, you need to hire an ecommerce company that has an active customer support team and additionally won’t charge you for support.

• YoKart provides 1 year free technical support. The technical support mediums are phone calls, email, Skype, & WhatsApp chat.
• Cs Cart provides free customer support for 90 days. After that, you’ll have to pay for technical support.
• X-Cart provides 1 year free technical support but that is in $5995 package. If you’ll buy any other package, you have to pay for technical support.
• Apptha provides 3 months free support. After that, you’ll have to pay for technical support.

Mobile Apps:

Nowadays many people like to buy products through mobile apps because mobile apps offer a more user-centric experience.

• Cs-Cart offers mobile apps for customer shopping but not for vendors and admin. Regarding the mobile apps price, it is $90 for one month without source code. In package of $3500 (Multivendor Plus) customer shopping mobile apps (Without source code) are included.
• Yokart offers mobile apps for customer and sellers. Regarding the price, it is $499 (one time price) for each app without source code. For with source code mobile apps, you have to contact YoKart team.
• X-Cart also offers mobile apps for customer shopping but not for sellers and buyers. The mobile apps price information is not written on their website.
• There is no information about Apptha mobile apps on their website.

Customizability and Scalability:

At the point of starting a new venture, it’s nearly impossible for anyone to predict when her business will outgrow the expectations. When in future, the orders will increase, and when you may want to expand your business to new regions. Such questions get answered only when you reach (or are close to) the expansion stage.

• Cs-Cart has the developers in many countries, so customization is easy in CS-Cart.

• YoKart is a fully customizable eCommerce platform. However, finding YoKart developers on the web is not easy. You have to contact YoKart team for any customization work.
• X-Cart is also a customizable platform and you can consult with X-Cart team for customization work.
• You can customize your marketplace built with Apptha. However, customization cost could be on the higher side.

Free Demo:

• Cs-Cart offers 15 days free use of its multivendor marketplace. You have to contact CS Cart team for that.
• YoKart doesn’t offer a free trial period but you can check the live demos easily (without contacting YoKart team) to get through the system.
• For free demo in X-Cart, you have to contact their team.
• There is no free demo option with Apptha.

Conclusion:

Depending on your requirements and budget, you can choose the best platform from the above solutions to start a multi-vendor online store like Amazon, Etsy, Flipkart. If you want me to compare any other multi-vendor eCommerce platform with the above solutions, please let me know in the comment section.

I still have not recovered my voice from last week’s Unleash Conference put on by Outreach. The gorgeous venue – an amazing resort in San Diego – was second only to the caliber of attendees and conversations that I was able to have.

1200 people, 50 speakers, 3 days, ~500 different engaging discussions… So was it worth sounding like Gollum for four days after? Absolutely.

“This is like if my LinkedIn feed came to life for 3 days, all while the sun is shining!”

That’s something I overheard as I walked around the expo hall packed with over 30 of the fastest growing technology companies in the world (ie. LinkedIn, Gong, Intercom, Chorus, Drift, etc).

There were hundreds of incredible highlights from the conference I want to share with you. But how could I choose between an opening keynote announcing some extremely exciting news for the world of sales tech (can you say Outreach Galaxy?), content from Jacco vanderKooij & Robb Jeppsen, early-morning workouts with David Gerhardt, a 90s dance party, and a final keynote from the Iceman, Wim Hoff himself?

Nope. Can’t choose.

So instead of specific event highlights, I want to share with you some common themes I heard about the state of sales tech after having (literally) hundreds of different conversations with the industry leaders in the sales technology space.

Here’s what I learned.

1. Salespeople Are Now Thinking Like Scientists

A lot has changed since I got into the world of sales/marketing technology almost 5 years ago. If I asked a BDR or an AE what was on their mind back then you would probably hear something like “I’m not getting enough leads from Marketing” or “I have this cool new subject line that’s somehow performing way better than all the others”.

Last week was a little different. I heard things at Unleash like:

“I’ve been using AI to help uncover new leads on my own from people’s out of office replies.”

And:

“Our team has been A/B testing a statistically significant sample of subject lines and now we not only know which is the best, but we can tell you why…”

Now with the technology to back them up, the best salespeople are putting data first and thinking like scientists. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Sales Development leaders of the future will be called “Sales Scientists” – you heard it here first.

2. Communities (not Companies) Are in The Driver’s Seat Now

Sales Technology companies are no longer the only ones driving the sales tech conversation forward. There was strong representation from some amazing sales communities like MSP, #GirlsClub, Bravado, NAWSP, AA-ISP, and The Revenue Collective. I’m confident that each one of these communities will have a big hand to play in molding best practices and defining the Sales Tech landscape of the future.

Why is this a good thing for sales?

Plain and simple, it will keep every vendor in the space honest. They can no longer hide behind fancy marketing language because these third-party communities have ideas and opinions of their own. And buyers in every industry continue to demand even more transparency and expert-led conversations.

We’ve seen review sites (like G2Crowd) explode over the last few years, and I think these communities are going to be the next iteration of that trend.

3. Flying cars are here, and you need to get ready

The gap between early adopters of sales technology and those that still haven’t fully dove in is widening fast. I’m already starting to see organizations get left behind. Sales organizations that are embracing the idea that “how you sell” is as important as “what you sell” are beginning to dominate their competition.

For example, a few organizations I spoke with are still finding contact information manually, just beginning to set up automated email sequences, and aren’t yet paying attention to intent data.

Meanwhile, companies like Dogpatch Advisors are helping their clients fully automate the actions of their best sellers. They’re using a mixture of sales engagement platform and lines of code that crawl the web and embed screenshots into a sequence of fully automated email campaigns. Sellers are only notified when a prospect shows some intent to purchase.

The former is just getting their Learner’s Permit while the latter is zooming around the sky in flying cars.

My advice for those nowhere near the latter? You can’t skip ahead and go straight to flying cars but you can start by laying the foundations tomorrow so you don’t fall further behind.

RELATED: How to Structure Your Sales Organization for Maximum Efficiency

4. The Market Will Demand Strong Eco-systems

There is no doubt that the sales technology landscape is crowded. Large organizations might work with 6-9 different sales technology vendors all serving different functions of their sales process. For years, it has been difficult to bring data from all these systems together and make sense of it all.

But that’s changing. Customers of sales tech will soon expect their sales tools play just as nicely together as their marketing tools do.

At Unleash, I saw many vendors using the number of integrations they have as a differentiator. And of course, Outreach unveiled its new Galaxy, doubling down on an eco-system not just for other technologies but for community and enablement partners as well.

Strong eco-systems will ensure that data silos no longer exist in the sales org, and the focal point of the eco-system will be the Sales Engagement platform.

Why? Because it’s the system of action – the link between buyer and seller.

Think back to about 2014. If you asked somebody what was in their technology stack then, you would hear “and obviously, we have a CRM” somewhere in their response. That’s because right around 2014 (and probably before then) CRM became table-stakes.

After all the conversations I had with sales leaders at Unleash, I’m confident that we have hit that same sentiment with the Sales Engagement platform. Granted, it was a Sales Engagement conference so perhaps my findings are slightly skewed. But next time you ask someone what’s in their tech stack, I would not be surprised if you hear “…and obviously, we have a sales engagement platform” in the answer.

5. The Enterprise is Jumping on Board

I was pleasantly surprised by the size and scale of the organizations that attended Unleash. For a while, some sales technologies seemed like they were relegated to live in the SMB, Mid Market and Commercial space, but it appears that’s no longer the case. With companies maturing across the board and an overall increase in security and scalability, the Enterprise is taking notice.

As the Enterprise adopts new sales tech, we’ll see which companies are built on strong operational and cultural foundations and which aren’t. Automation in the hands of a great salesperson makes them better, but automation in the hands of a lazy salesperson makes them worse. The same is true for sales organizations, and new tools will draw attention to both fundamental strengths and weaknesses alike.

What’s Next?

Despite feeling like I was walking through the future of sales and sales tech at Unleash, it also struck me how quickly these recent changes have become normal for early adopters.

Those who were quick to begin using new AI tools, intent data, clever integrations, and focusing on the selling process to maximize efficiency are already on to the next best action.

So there’s much more progress to be made, and this isn’t the ultimate pinnacle of sales. But we are on our way there.

The post The Top 5 Things Unleash Taught Me About the State of Sales Tech in 2019 appeared first on Sales Hacker.

At the beginning of March, we announced the winners of the 2nd annual Sales Hacker Top 50 Awards, presented by Bravado.

But because we received more than five thousand nominations, it seemed a little unfair to only share amazing stories about 50 of them. After all, there are thousands of other salespeople about whom we heard incredible things!

So this week, we’re sharing some of the runners-up: the folks who didn’t get a billion nominations, but who clearly crushed it in 2018.

We searched through all of the reasons for nominations we received and picked out the stories about people in sales who do the hard work of elevating the sales profession. Each of these people gives without expectation of any returned favors – to their colleagues, their employees, and to the sales community in general.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry… you’ll message them on LinkedIn to ask them for advice.

Honorable Mentions from The 2019 Sales Hacker Top 50 Awards

Anita Absey – Chief Revenue Officer at Voxy

“Anita came on as the first CRO of Voxy in 2018 and has since scaled the inside sales team both in the US and in their international offices. She is a fantastic representation of what it means to be a sales leader– not just a sales manager– as echoed by the members of her team and others in the C-suite at Voxy.

She rapidly scaled sales at Voxy, while also playing mentor to numerous female sellers both within and outside of Voxy’s walls. She has also led international expansion for the company while achieving new goals for them.”

Tom Alaimo – Sales Manager at TechTarget

“Tom is an extremely positive, motivated and professional sales person. Apart from his work commitments, he also launched his Millennial Momentum podcast, blog and vlog that provides educational content benefiting everyone in a sales role.

I admire his hustle and positive attitude.”

Katie Betsworth – Account Development Manager, Lead at VintageView

“Katie is that person who always goes above and beyond her job duties to boost everyone in the team.

In 2018, she helped mentor four new Sales Reps while the company was searching for a new Sales Director. She is the glue that holds the department together and is constantly crushing goals and expectations.”

Taylor Booker – Sales at LoftSmart

“Initially, Taylor was like any other ‘inside-SDR’ doing cold calls and emails to set meetings.

About 6 months into 2018 he took the initiative to speak to leadership and recommended that he go on the road and be in the market to get meetings/sales via an ‘outside’ approach. He completely knocked it out of the park and has been our top performing SDR going on 8 months now.

He is our in-house thought-leader and our go-to person for anything related to our prospects and sales methodology. He is a truly invaluable resource for all closed/won accounts.”

Emily Ciavolino – Director of Sales at Bonusly

“The Bonusly sales team grew from 2 to 5 teammates this year, and Emily brought on amazing new hires. Emily is a great motivator and knows the right balance of constructive and positive feedback.

In start ups, sales is a very important department that everyone in the organization relies upon for a job.

This year, because of Emily’s leadership we have closed more deals, moved into the enterprise space and become a major competitor in the employee recognition space.

Emily is always finding great ways to support and enable her people to do their best whether it in by bring on new tools or hopping on calls to support her people. I cannot speak highly enough about Emily as a leader and as a motivator.”

Kayley DiCicco – National Corporate Accounts Manager at Novel Coworking

“Kayley is an extraordinary salesperson – one of the best I’ve ever had the good fortune to work with. She is a tremendous resource for our company and has first been single-handedly responsible for our company’s Chicago sales and absorption.

She more recently graduated to a national enterprise-client focused role all credits to her smart work. She is hungry, diligent, never gives up, and gets wins over and over again.”

Josh Etress – VP of Client Experience at Wildsparq

“Josh has such a gift for pursuing a relationship while he is pursuing the sale. He works really hard, sets aggressive goals, chooses optimism over a scarcity mindset.

My office is right beside Josh’s so I often overhear him connecting with potential customers. I have heard him offer encouragement and guidance that is outside of the scope of his role as a salesman.

Josh also leads a team in our organization with enthusiasm and vigor. He wants the best for each of the people he leads and works to encourage and challenge them to pursue excellence and relationships in their roles.

I also overhear Josh offer resources from his personal library to the people he engages with. I am reading a book now that he recommended and loaned to me because he thought I might enjoy reading more about creating culture on our team.

He relentlessly pursues excellence and cares so well for people as he goes.

Josh continually chooses the team over himself and is deserving of the honor of this award because he never draws attention to himself or his accomplishments. He is humble and kind and wants to see others succeed. That is something to celebrate!”

Will Frattini – Director of New Business Sales at Zoominfo

“The best way to describe Will is “Tom Brady but sales”.

It is inspiring to work for Will as he leads by example. He began ZoomInfo as an Account Executive where he quickly became the #1 performing representative and has climbed the ladder to Team Lead, Manager, Senior Manager, and now Director.

Will is not afraid of change, and is constantly A/B-testing strategies and challenges the status quo. He makes decisions quickly based on data, and his actions lead to results.

Will has complete faith in his team and he doesn’t micromanage, but somehow has the ability to know exactly where all prospects are in the funnel and offer great timely advice when you wouldn’t expect him to be there. Above all, he makes sure we all embrace that family is first.

Under Team Frattini no one loses alone, and we all win together.

His sales acumen and keen hearing ability to decipher “what the client is actually saying” far surpasses anyone I have worked with. This has ultimately enabled his and his team’s clients to gracefully navigate the journey of purchasing data for their sales/marketing teams. Will makes everyone around him a stronger sales professional.

Will is who he presents to the world and we need more managers like him in sales!”

Shannon Johnston – Chief Consultant at SBMO Consulting

“Shannon helped me win 2018 in a big way.

She took me (a brand new sales rep) under her wings and gave me the tools & tips to succeed and sell the right way. She always stressed the importance of setting expectations correctly and making sure customers needs were met. With her guidance, I then grew to the number one rep for the company by early 2018.

In September I confessed to her I needed a bigger pond to swim in with my new-found skills and she encouraged me to keep growing even though I would no longer be working under her. So, I made the move – with lots of coaching from Shannon – to a Fortune 500 company.

Shannon continues to mentor me and help me grow my skill set in a variety of ways by sharing podcasts, books, sales info that she finds interesting and actionable. She is my constant source of encouragement. She always believed in me even when I’m not totally sure of myself.

It is not just the people working under her, she is keen on helping other companies and the society at large win as well. Shannon helps local women community through her own Lean In events. She offers them advice to grow their companies through sales and marketing. She’s not about fast sales. She actually cares about the customer and the reps. She cares about selling the right way and winning customers for life.”

Samantha Juett – Enterprise Brand Partnerships at Shutterstock

“Sam goes above and beyond in her role as a sales development representative. She consistently achieves her target, qualifies high-value leads into genuine business opportunities, and takes a leadership role in spearheading multiple new projects to improve how Shutterstock connects with qualified prospects.

Sam is a thriving SDR star with a promising future ahead in her field.”

Trent Mosley – Senior Account Executive at MINDBODY Inc

“Trent made the difficult shift from being the top performing rep in an inbound model to being the top performing rep in an outbound model. He did this seamlessly, without complaint, and with every single customer loving his approach and style.

The term “too good to be true” could be stated about Trent and his work ethic, delivery of results, and attitude. Anyone would be so lucky to have him!”

Bob Shoecraft – Director & Client Revenue Strategist at Seamless.AI

“Bob has set a standard for closing that’s been unmatched at our company, not because he closes the most meetings but because of the company culture he’s built around the sales team.

Bob goes out of his way to announce and thank each individual person that helps set up a meeting for him. When he closes deals he makes sure to not only share his victory but hand over the majority of the credit to the SDR who set him up for an alley-oop. He’s a guy who brings joy to the Seamless team while also driving home results day after day.”

Thomas Stevens – Sales Development Manager at Netwrix

“Thomas began his TechSales career at Netwrix as an SDR right after he graduated college in 2017.

After just over a year in the role, he has raised the bar by setting new SDR sales records while also becoming a mentor within his team. Once a trainee himself, he is now training new SDR’s on cold-calling & outreach best practices so they can compete to break the records sete by him.

Thomas proves the classic case that with an open mind to learning, a positive & transparent attitude to selling, and with a self-starter mentality, you can thrive as both an SDR and a Sales Leader. In a truer sense of words, the student has become the teacher.”

Sean Sugrue – Sales Development at LeaseQuery

“Through hard work, creativity, and authenticity, Sean led the team to their goals in 2018. Sean did not come from a typical SDR hiring profile. He actually spent the previous 10+ years in the service industry.

The tenacity and emotional intelligence he possessed elevated him to the top of a scaling team of 20+ SDR’s who had much more experience in these types of roles. It was hugely impressive. He continues to strive for improvement every day and is clearly one of the top SDRs in the country.”

Parker Trahan – SDR Team Lead at Teamable Software

“When Parker started at Teamable in July, he was the only SDR. With a little coaching, he ramped up as an SDR within a week and set up 40 demos with prospects by August.

He sounds amazing on the phone, never gives up and always stays positive. He’s super creative and a true team player with leadership skills – a golden combo in the field.

In a short period of time, he helped the VP of Sales to hire 7 AEs. Parker is a team lead now and carrying forward his experience he successfully onboards and coaches all newly hired SDRs.”

Sound Like Somebody You Know?

Tell us who deserves some recognition for their great work in Sales in the comments below!

Or, share your story on LinkedIn or Twitter using the hashtag #SalesHackerTop50.

The post The 15 Most Inspiring Sales Stories We Heard This Year appeared first on Sales Hacker.

You probably don’t know your customer as well as you think you do. As a result, your business is at risk. Below are 10 questions you need to answer to know your customers, so you can better reach each of them.

1. What are my customer’s business objectives for this year?

2. What is my customer’s personal objective for this year?

3. Who are the other people I need to get to know?

4. What are the competitive threats my customer is dealing with?

5. What are the big issues or risks my customer is dealing with?

6. What would happen if my customer lost their biggest customer?

7. Where is my customer’s growth going to come from?

8. How is my customer’s business perceived in their area and their industry?

9. How important is what I sell to their overall business?

10. How important am I to my customer?

Take a moment to answer each of these questions for every one of your major customers.  Similarly, these questions work well when analyzing a prospect to determine how you can best help them, too. As you work through them, I’m sure you’ll find gaps. That means you have work to do. The sooner you can answer each question, the sooner you will become even more valuable to your customer.

Being seen only as a vendor is a bad place to be; however, if you can’t answer any of these questions, you are nothing but a vendor.

It’s going to require a lot of digging to find the answers to all ten of these questions, and the customer must be included in the process. By asking these questions, you are showing the customer that you’re not a vendor but somebody that really wants to work with them. Certainly, your competitors are not asking these questions.

Copyright 2019, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

Your business has a lot of functions it has to account for. For everything from SEO to making sure that your leads turn into customers, many of these activities can be simplified by taking advantage of business software.

But with so many options on the market it can be difficult to determine which software options are best for you.

This list will give you the top recommendations for all the software on the market today.

User IQ

A big part of your business is preventing customer churn. User IQ is a piece of software that promotes customer growth. This customer onboarding software takes customers through the funnel from adoption to advocacy.

Through targeted engagement, you’ll be able to keep customers and prevent them from moving to your competitors.

There are a variety of different pricing levels, depending on the features you want and the size of your business.

Profisee

These days data is everything in business. Whether it’s using data or protecting data, you must have a master data management strategy in your business.

The problem is making this happen. Profisee is a master data management software offering that helps you to build a solid foundation of data across your company.

You’ll be able to maximize the data you have and increase the value of that data.

Izenda

Business intelligence and analytics are not something of the future but the present. The fact is that Izenda is one of the most robust platforms on the market in this sector.

They offer a flexible, scalable solution that produces real reports that will direct you towards better marketing, better customer engagement, and ultimately better ROI.

Proposable

The sales process can be complex and difficult. When you’re dealing with hundreds of prospects at the same time, keeping track of the sales process can quickly become a losing battle.

Proposable is all about helping you to track your sales documents and match each prospect with the stage in the sales process.

This software comes with a variety of templates to help you craft the perfect proposal. You can even perform split testing with these templates to see which one resonates the most with your target audience.

It also comes with a 14-day free trial.

Guaranteed Removals

Your online reputation is critical. The fact is that customers are more likely to search for online reviews about a business rather than take your word for your talent and expertise.

And this is a good thing for genuine businesses. The problem is that it’s so easy to destroy a company’s reputation by publishing negative content about them online.

Guaranteed Removals ensures that you can get negative content buried or removed, so it can no longer destroy your online reputation and cost you, customers.

And you only pay after the content has been removed.

Pronexis

You often hear a lot of talk regarding lead generation. What you don’t hear as much about is lead handling. Once you’ve snagged a prospect you need to make sure that they’re converted into a paying customer.

Pronexis is a lead handling platform that can help you keep the leads you generate. Through using professional, American agents with expertise in lead handling, you can increase your strike rate.

They use innovative technology to help you organize your leads and manufacture content that appeals to your target market.

It’s an all-in-one solution you can take advantage of.

Pipe Drive

Pipe Drive is an Estonian software option that promises the most streamlined CRM platform in the world. It’s one of the top contenders because all emails, calls, and communications are tracked and plugged into a streamlined sales view.

The advantage of this is that it ensures your team is always on the same page. They always possess the latest information and are aware of the current sales progress of each prospect.

What makes it different is that this is a real CRM pipeline. It’s never been easier to know what has to be done at each stage in the sales process.

There’s also a separate marketplace, where additional add-ons can be purchased.

Last Word – What’s the Best Way to Take Advantage of These Software Offerings?

You should always make sure that you can take advantage of a refund guarantee or free trial first. Focus on integrating software into your business slowly. Don’t try to pick up everything and demand that your team understands everything immediately.

Furthermore, you need to make sure that they meet the immediate goals of your business. Choosing a piece of advanced software that isn’t suitable for your business is only going to lead to lost capital.

Do your research into each piece of software and choose the option that’s most relevant to where your business is.

Which piece of software do you most like the sound of?

By Brenna Lofquist, Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing

Account Based Marketing (ABM) has been a hot topic in the B2B Marketing world within the past year or so. Companies are transitioning from casting a wide net to bring in as many leads as possible to targeting specific, key accounts that fit a predefined criteria.

A little more background on ABM

For those that might not be as familiar

The predefined criteria usually represent a company’s Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), a holistic representation of the types of companies that best fit their product offerings or services. This goes back to the important distinction of ABM – the focus is on targeting companies, not individuals.

Messaging and content are tailored to align with the company’s unique interests and needs which is a different approach from traditional inbound marketing where the focus is on targeting buyer personas at the individual level.

The disconnect

Essentially with ABM you are asking sales to work with fewer leads and going against the traditional notion that a full sales funnel drives success – I can’t imagine that would make them very happy. It’s no secret that sales and marketing tend to butt heads – while they are working toward the same goals they often operate in silos. Without sales buy-in though, your ABM program will fall flat and then what are you left with?

SiriusDecisions found that only 36% of companies deploying ABM consider sales and marketing tightly aligned, leading to an ineffective ABM design and execution. Let’s be honest, no one likes it when someone comes in and tells them to change their process, but for this to work, something must be done to build the trust between sales and marketing so they can work in unison towards the same objectives.

Getting Sales and Marketing on the same page

There are a few things a company can do to help better align sales and marketing when it comes to ABM.

Reinforcement of the goals and objectives is key. Sales must know that Marketing is on the same page when it comes to the goals they are trying to reach through ABM efforts. Both teams are trying to provide valuable, meaningful interactions with target accounts to ultimately drive sales and more revenue. The quicker both teams realize they are working toward the same goal and it’s not one team over the over, the sooner they can execute a successful ABM program.

Define the roles and responsibilities of each team. This should create a clear idea of who is responsible for what, especially when something falls through the cracks. It also provides a platform for holding one another accountable.

Here are two examples you can use. The first one is a simple table that outlines the major areas and responsibilities – you can also include teams such as support, operations, and IT so you have the full picture.

The second example provides more detail within each area of responsibilities. This example was taken from the ABM Workbook we developed with Integrate. Look here if you are interested in other aspects of ABM.

Once filled out, this should be discussed with both teams to walk through the responsibilities and what’s expected of each team.

Schedule regular meetings with sales and marketing teams. This should allow for continuous, seamless alignment. The facetime will also continue to build trust between the two teams and hopefully strengthen the relationship. Talk through what’s working and what’s not for each and identify ways to improve, this collaborative effort will also to help strengthen the relationship.

I can’t stress enough how important it is that sales and marketing work together when it comes to ABM. If you think you can get by without sales onboard, think again. Check out some statistics that RollWorks put together, if you still don’t believe it.

One stat they found was that 66% of companies have reported that the key benefit of ABM is an increase in pipeline opportunities thanks to closer work between sales and marketing.

Here’s one for the sales teams out there. ABM helps reduce up to 50% of sales time wasted on unproductive prospecting, which historically caused sales to ignore 50% of marketing leads.

By no means am I saying that one team is the issue or the blocker when it comes to ABM, I am just trying to explain the importance of the two teams working together. If successful alignment occurs, it will not only be beneficial for both teams but the company as a whole – everyone will be happy.

What have you done to ensure alignment between sales and marketing for ABM efforts? Was it successful? Let us know!

The post The Ideal Sales and Marketing Relationship for ABM Success appeared first on Heinz Marketing.