Consumers love swag. Whether it’s merchandise from their favorite sports team, movie or video game, the promotional products sector is a multi-billion dollar market. After all, most of us cherish the act of receiving and displaying promotional products based on the franchises we love. The idea behind using swag to advertise and promote your business is clearly a natural step for the industry. Perhaps even more importantly, it’s an idea that works.

The Creative Process

First, you’ll need to take care of the creative side of product and swag branding. Some choose to hire an external consultant or graphic designer for this process, as an innovative and imaginative product is bound to generate greater results. As such, this step shouldn’t be taken lightly by any means.

Despite their usefulness, a third-party designer isn’t absolutely necessary to the creative process. Indeed, many companies utilize inside resources, including administrative personnel, office workers or even general laborers who are willing to take on the additional responsibility of swag development. Potential candidates can be located through company newsletters, bulletin board posts or simply by asking individual staff members.

Finding Your Target Audience

You’ll also need to determine your target audience. Typically, the target audience of your swag will be the same clientele of your regular business. In some cases, especially with unique or specialized swag, you may need to expand your horizons.

Identifying promotional products that will be useful to your current base of clientele can be tricky, but it’s certainly not impossible. Those who work in office settings, for example, might appreciate a nice notebook or a smartphone charger.

On the other hand, clientele from the construction industry might benefit more from a branded tape measure, hammer or even a travel toolbox. As you can see, knowing your target audience is the key to a successful swag campaign.

Securing the Best Pricing

A simple Internet search reveals hundreds, if not thousands, of companies that supply bulk products for use as swag. Highly customizable, affordable and typically available with a quick turnaround time, it can be difficult to find the company that is right for you. However, there are some tricks you can use when perusing your options.

For starters, take advantage of the Internet to perform some initial research on any potential swag suppliers. If possible, try to seek out social media profiles and third-party review sites as opposed to a company’s official web presence.

Consult with some of your peers as well regarding their promotional swag. Finding out what they’re paying and whether or not they’re happy with the service can go a long way in making your final decision between one supplier or another.

Finally, pay attention to the amount of money you’re actually spending on promotional products. Avoid overspending, but keep in mind the fact you’ll typically receive a higher discount when purchasing items in great quantity. As such, make sure to look at all of the available purchase options before finalizing your order. Even customizable water bottles come in different sizes and styles to offer different price points. Consider your needs and what you’re willing to spend before selecting the product and shop around for the best options.

Distributing Your Swag

Generally speaking, industry events and trade shows provide one of the best opportunities for distributing your company’s swag. Because you’ll come in contact with a plethora of individuals, including potential clientele, such events are a boon for those who rely on promotional products to spread awareness of their company or brand.

If you have multiple swag products to represent your company, you might even consider distributing them within a gift bag. This is a great idea when it comes to recognizing the achievements of your employees or even as a holiday bonus at the end of the year.

Today’s social media sites can also be utilized to give away promotional swag to current and potential new customers. A number of strategies can be used to determine who receives the swag, including popular comments, structured contests and even those who are chosen at random. Since you’re both handing out promotional products and advertising the fact that you are doing so, your company will ultimately see even greater increases in exposure and customer interest.

Seasonal Swag

Swag can even be handed out during a specific season. Christmas and the New Year are obvious choices, though some would argue they lack creativity. Instead, try to coordinate your swag campaigns with some of the more unique and creative holidays.

Halloween, for example, is ripe with promotional opportunities. Customized candy, Halloween-specific coupons and even bags for trick-or-treating are all great ways to advertise your business while celebrating the holiday at the same time.

Earth Day is another holiday that provides ample opportunity for distributing your products. Traditionally held on April 22, it’s a time to celebrate earth, nature and the environment. As such, promotional products that are eco-friendly make the best choices. Reusable water bottles, lunchboxes, and solar-powered devices are all excellent ideas.

Making the Most of Your Swag Campaign

As you can see, there are plenty of tactics and strategies to utilize when creating, developing and distributing your custom-branded products. While the exact methods you choose to implement depends on a variety of factors, including your current customer base, your campaign goals and even your specific industry, there is plenty of room for creativity throughout the entire process.

Although closing is often thought of as the essence of sales, it’s actually only the last step in the process and one that, if you’ve done your job correctly, never comes as a surprise.

That’s because closing is the end result of a process that’s deeply embedded into every part of the sales process: Qualification.

The qualification process is where you discover whether a prospect is a good fit for your product, whether they’ll be successful with it, whether they’re able to pay for it, and when they can start.

But it’s not easy to be great at qualifying. You have to ask the right questions and understand how your prospect’s answers map against your ideal buyer profile, and getting good at that takes practice. Everybody has different strategies for qualifying, but the best salespeople have the following eight habits in common.

8 Sales Qualification Best Practices

1) They ask open-ended questions.

Only asking “yes” or “no” questions is a waste of time. For one thing, questions that can be answered in simply the affirmative or negative generally require making assumptions (see #7) because you’re asking your prospect to confirm or deny a premise you came up with.

For another, “yes” or “no” can only tell you so much. Without open-ended questions, you are determining the direction of the conversation -- and if your assumptions about where the discussion should go are incorrect, you could miss a huge piece of the puzzle crucial to the deal.

2) They incorporate their research into their questions.

If you’re doing research on your prospects and then regurgitating what you’ve found out during a discovery call -- “So, I see you’re based in Omaha …” -- you’re doing it wrong. Instead, use your research to guide your line of questioning. For example: “I see you have a support team of about 200. How are you currently handling the volume of customer requests and balancing workload across the members of your team?”

Research is only useful if you use it to bolster your questioning strategy. The best qualifiers excel at doing so.

3) They have a plan.

Every sales call differs in minutiae, but most will follow one of four trajectories:

1. The prospect is interested and a good fit.
2. The prospect is interested but is not a good fit.
3. The prospect isn’t interested and is not a good fit.
4. The prospect isn’t interested but is a good fit.

The best qualifiers know how to suss out which of these four categories prospects fall into. They have tried-and-true talk tracks they can deploy in each of these scenarios, and are ready to adjust their line of questioning dependent on what they discover in a call.

4) They don’t try to do too much.

Early on in a sales process when sales reps are having exploratory conversations with prospects is the wrong time to start full-on pitching and attempting to demo. There’s a time and place to talk features, pricing, and implementation, but the discovery stage of the sales process isn’t that time.

Instead, the best qualifiers focus on gathering information during the discovery process. They know that the more they learn during this part of the sales process, the more they’ll be able to target their approach later on, which will end up being more effective in the long run.

5) They listen more than they talk.

The best salespeople always listen more than they talk, but especially so during the discovery process, which is when they need to learn as much as possible. A trick one of my friends uses is to physically hit the mute button after he asks a question to remind himself to shut up and listen.

The main takeaway is this: The more your prospect talks, the more you’ll learn and the more complete your picture of their situation will be, enabling you to do tailor your sale as much as possible.

6) They gather as much context as possible.

When good qualifiers aren’t totally clear on what their prospect just said, they’ll ask for further clarification. When great qualifiers find themselves in this situation, they make sure they understand the whole picture. They ask why processes work the way they do, what was behind the decisions that led to the process, and dig deep until they understand the prospect’s world. Only then can they begin to make recommendations to their buyer.

7) They don’t make any assumptions.

This one goes hand in hand with #5 and #6. At the beginning of a discovery process, sales reps don’t know what they don’t know. Making assumptions at this point in the process is dangerous. You could easily lead your prospect down a path of questioning that misses or obscures something that’s crucial to the purchase decision. After all, they don’t know what you don’t know either, and they don’t know what information you need to make an informed recommendation, so you can’t count on them to surface those details.

8) They don’t force a fit.

Good qualifiers don’t blaze through discovery calls, but they also know not to drag on a call longer than necessary once it becomes apparent the prospect isn’t a good fit. A sales rep’s time is literally money, and the best qualifiers are looking for reasons to disqualify just as much as they’re trying to figure out whether a buyer is a good fit or not. Instead of trying to shoehorn a poor fit into buying a product that they won’t see results from, they cut their losses and move on to the next prospect.

What do you think the most successful qualifiers do? Let us know in the comments below.

‘Who’s on 1st’ is a comedy classic. But there’s nothing funny about the question ‘Who goes first?’ for business owners. Should you make the first move when it comes to sharing your proposed price? Or wait for the other guy to put a number out there?

Often, this dilemma devolves into either:

1. Everyone being frozen in fear of saying/not saying a number, or
2. A cycle of ‘you tell me yours’ ‘no I asked first’ ‘no really, I insist’…

Either way, it’s not helping move the deal, or your business forward. So here’s my take on who should go first.

You should share your price or proposal first.

Here’s why.

We’ve already addressed posting your prices on your website as a way to inform your potential clients, but once you’re in the consult call or meeting, the most dangerous question you can ask before you’d provided your proposal is “What’s your budget?”.

This question is dangerous because:

It’s a hopeful budget.
Your potential client will start off by saying a number far lower than what they could actually pay, to help them save money. Your potential vendor will start off with a number far higher, to try and maximize their profits. They’re going to be ambitious, so it may not be an accurate representation of where your deal could really end up.

The number will have little link to outcome.
Asking for a budget is just about money, and there’s a lot more that goes into the work you do. Diving into the benefits and outcomes they’re looking for, the scope or timeline of the project will all give you a better sense of what sweetness you can pull into your proposal.

Their budget is uninformed.
Not because they’re dumb, or because they haven’t done their homework, but because it hasn’t been linked to the quality of the work you provide, or the outcomes they’ll achieve. They aren’t the expert in what you do (that’s you!) so the budget they’ve come up with could be wildly inaccurate based on the value of your work.

This number is going to influence you.
Even if you started the consult call or conversation 100% confident in your established pricing structure and the value you’re bringing, you’ll be influenced by whatever number they say. So instead of giving the quote you were planning on…you lower it so that it doesn’t seem greedy, or over-the-top, or unrealistic (admit it, this has happened). In negotiation nerd speak, this is anchoring. They’ve anchored you to their budget, and now you’re being pulled in that direction.

So here’s what to do instead

Take time to explore their needs.
Having a potential client answer a few basic questions about their business via email before you’re on the phone with them gives you time to poke around/research/snoop on their business and start to formulate your expert plan. This way, you come to the table with at least a partial sense of what they’ll need.

Ask lots of questions.
Well, except for ‘what’s your budget?’ that is. Ask about their ideal outcomes, the challenges they’re facing, the parts of their business that they love the most (or the least). The responses will help you figure out where priorities will lie and how to shape your proposal accordingly. For example, if they’re frazzled and under a lot of time pressure, you’d frame your work in terms of how it will help them free up more time, be less stressed, and get more done with less panic.

Propose your best solution.
Finally, provide the potential client with your expert opinion on what solution will take them where they need to be. Identify the key actions you’ll take, how they’ll create impact, and state your price clearly. Get it right out there. The investment for your custom help is $XXXX. Voila. You’ve made the first proposal.

The key with presenting your proposed solution (and price point) to the client before asking what their budget is, is that it allows you to focus on creating the package of services or products that will work best for them and their desired outcomes, rather than trying to shave and squeeze and shove some services into the tiny budget they’ve given you.

But Devon, what do I do when they aren’t able to pay the full amount? How do I deal with them asking for a discount?

I’m glad you asked! The best part of being a business owner is that you can choose how you respond the requests for discounts or smaller budgets. I covered a few options you can explore in my Dealing With Discount Requests blog post.

A lot has changed the sales training process over the years.

While many of us had to endure those terrible VHS videos, complete with horrible soundtrack and ridiculous acting, today’s Millennials are pushing us to revamp our training to better mesh with their learning style.

Any time you are dealing with a generational gap in your team, you are bound to hit roadblocks in your training. Chances are, most of your new hires are Millennials, right?

Currently, there are more than 80 million millennials (those born between 1982 and 1993), so the chance that they will be joining your team is pretty solid.

In 2015, Baby Boomers in the workforce slid from the largest population, coming in second to millennials.

It’s time to tweak your training to better suit their learning needs. Not sure where to start? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

Provide a Comfortable Learning Environment

Millennials differ from their parents. They aren’t used to reading things off a blackboard, raising their hands to speak or sitting in uncomfortable classrooms.

This tech-savvy generation is largely motivated to learn through the use of online training seminars and other technology-based methods. In fact, on average millennials check their phones 43 times a day.

Leveraging the social nature of your trainees is a great way to get the right information in front of them. Because shareable information is typically no more than 5 minutes, most millennials have become accustomed to short bursts of information. With this in mind, keep your training sessions to short micro-bursts of information.

After all, the average human attention span is 8 seconds…

Interactive Training

In order to break up the humdrum nature of training, make it interactive. Showing a slide deck while standing in the front of a classroom just won’t work anymore.

You’re training a generation used to interacting with video games and computers. There’s no better way to keep your audience engaged than by having them get involved.

Take the time to revisit your role playing activities and make sure they are up-to-date and relevant. Millennials learn by “doing,” not just watching. Get them involved interactively from the very beginning and their training will improve in leaps and bounds.

Appeal to the competitive nature of the gamer generation by leveraging role-playing to discover your top trainees with a contest.

Most of your original role-playing topics will be just fine. If you are looking for additional scenarios, we recently published a post with 5 role play scenarios to use with your new hires.

Use Your Original Training Content…Just Repackage it!

Pardon the cliche but there really is no reason to reinvent the wheel. You have likely spent a good deal of time and energy tweaking your sales training program so don’t get rid of it completely, just keep the following points in mind:

• Condense your training sessions – make them shorter and add interactive elements (role-playing etc.)
• Consider using an interactive training software to digitize your training slides. You can email these to your trainees to be completed at home or at the office.
• Be sure to include the basics – identifying the needs of the customer, developing a solution for the customer and value presentation.

Create an Environment that Integrates Work AND Life

This point is HUGE.

Unlike the Baby Boomer generation, millennials have mastered the art of seeking a job that allows them to make a living but also doesn’t strip the “fun factor” out of their lives.

Check out these millennial stats from the Intelligence Group:

• 64% say it’s a priority for them to make the world a better place
• 72% would like to be their own boss. But if they do have to work for a boss, 79% of them would want that boss to serve more as a coach or mentor
• 88% prefer a collaborative work culture rather than a competitive one
• 74% want flexible work schedules
• 88% want “work-life integration,” which isn’t the same as work-life balance, since work and life now blend inextricably

As you can see, millennials value creativity, flexibility and collaboration. With this insight in mind, you will be better equipped to tailor your training program. Many sales teams have incorporated break rooms with video games and other stress relieving, interactive options.

Provide Understanding – “Because I said so” doesn’t fly anymore

The new generation is curious about the world and certainly won’t take “because I said so,” as a viable answer.

Explaining why things are done a certain way and providing context in your training will appeal to the curious nature of millennials. This has sprouted largely from the “just Google it,” nature of their daily lives. No longer do they sit around and wonder things, someone simply says “wait, I’m looking it up,” and the mystery is solved.

Offer Continuous Learning Opportunities

One of the top reasons that your millennial sales reps will ultimately quit is because they don’t feel challenged. Harness the ever-learning spirit of these reps and be sure you are constantly coaching and offering new opportunities to learn and grow within the company.

As part of your continued training, consider interactive and collaborative activities. Try choosing a different topic each week and inventing your sales team to a lunch and whiteboard strategy session. Not only will your millennial reps enjoy the chance to socialize, but they will love the challenge to think outside of the box and bounce their ideas off their peers.

Top Takeaways for Training Your Millennial Sales Team

• Keep training sessions short and interactive
• Simply revise your current training material – don’t throw it out completely
• Never underestimate the continued power of role-playing sales scenarios
• Gamify all you can for future contests and training
• Always explain the “why”
• Foster a work environment that combines work and lifestyle
• Offer continued opportunities for training

If you keep these points in mind, your millennial hires will mesh perfectly with the baby boomers and the opportunity to provide new, insightful and creative sales strategies will continue to flourish.

Tony Robbins grew up in a poor and unstable family. He was on his own at 17, living on a janitor's income.

After saving up for one of the late motivational speaker Jim Rohn's seminars, he approached Rohn for a job. Rohn became a mentor to Robbins, who eventually became a speaker. He initially struggled to find his own voice that would warrant the corporate clients and big crowds attracted by Rohn.

It was around this time that Rohn gave Robbins the career advice that he's since shared with millions of people over the last four decades, Robbins said in a recent Facebook Live Q&A at Business Insider's New York office.

"I was really frustrated, and I'd been working my guts out — 12-, 14-hour days — nothing was working, and I was pissed off and frustrated," Robbins said.

He was putting in long hours, but his career was going nowhere, and he thought that he was fated to continue his family's cycle of poverty. He said that he explained this to Rohn.

"And he said, 'Tony, you're so focused on expecting things to happen so fast ... Your worth in the marketplace is based on your ability to add more value than anyone else. If you can find a way to do more for others in your company, more for the employees, more for the clients, than anybody else, your gifts will make room for you. But in order to do that, you've got to build skills,'" he said.

These words didn't magically transform Robbins into a success, but they focused him on seeking out approaches that would help him build a brand that was different from Rohn's, built on actively intervening in clients' lives rather than just motivating them from a stage.

Robbins entered the mainstream when he was 26, with the success of his best-selling book "Unlimited Power," and went on to work with clients like champion tennis player Serena Williams, billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones, and even President Bill Clinton.

He shared this story in the Facebook Live Q&A after several viewers asked for advice on how to find a fulfilling job. He recommended they take Rohn's advice and see how they can make themselves invaluable in an industry that could use them, then learn the necessary skills they may be lacking to make this happen.

"Participate in your own rescue," he said. "Step up. Ask yourself, 'What industries are growing, what do I love, what do I enjoy? ... Go offer your services to be a mentee ... and you'll be able to move up."

You can watch the full Q&A below:

SEE ALSO: Tony Robbins has a simple rule he recommends all managers should follow

Join the conversation about this story »

Imagine not having to say no to a drink anymore because you have to drive home.

That would be great for liquor sales, which have been hit hard by drunk-driving laws in countries like China and Scotland, according to a research note by Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas and his team.

Drinking and driving should, of course, always be mutually exclusive, but the rise of car-sharing services and the development of driverless cars could shake things up.

Uber, for one, claimed that it has prevented about 1,800 drunk-driving crashes since its launch in California in July 2012, according to a blog post last January. But the evidence is mixed: A study by researchers at the University of Southern California and Oxford University found no effect from Uber on crash rates.

Regardless, the driverless-car and alcohol industries could benefit each other significantly.

Here is Morgan Stanley (emphasis added):

"Shared and autonomous vehicle technology help address the mutual exclusivity of drinking and driving in a way that can significantly enhance the growth rate of the alcohol market and on-trade sales at restaurants. The total addressable market (TAM) of the global alcohol market is ~$1.5tn today (1.14tn drinks x $1.33/drink). As our base case, we believe greater prevalence of shared mobility (i.e. ride-sharing) in the next 10 years can add 80 bps to the annual growth rate of the alcohol market (currently ~2.2%). This assumes that the joint population of drivers and those who drink consume 1 extra alcoholic beverage per week on average. In reality, this is highly dependent on the timing and telemetry of shared models. Would be drivers who reside in cities where shared mobility is well penetrated are likely to consume more than 1 additional drink per week, in our view. Beyond 2025, we believe autonomous technology can unlock an even greater TAM opportunity."

To make their case, the analysts calculated current global alcohol consumption and its monetary value, and compared that with estimated figures under the impact of car-sharing and driverless cars. They found that the booze market could get an extra $98 billion:

In the base case, where the analysts assume that would-be drivers who drink will have one more drink per week by 2025, the annual alcohol-consumption growth rate could increase by 0.8 percentage points relative to the baseline. In the bull case, the 10-year compounded annual growth rate for alcohol consumption could increase by 1.88 points.

Brands that sell premium beer and liquor will benefit the most from these incremental drinks, according to the note, citing examples such as Corona's parent company, Constellation Brands, British whiskey distiller Diageo, and Chinese state-owned company Kweichow Moutai.

We already saw how Americans are increasingly trading up to more expensive alcohol, a trend that Constellation CEO Rob Sands believes will continue.

SEE ALSO: Uber to invest $500 million in global mapping project: FT

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Rolls-Royce made a stunning driverless concept car

Marketers talk about brands as vehicles for growth. But does that mean they should just keep growing – or is there a point when they reach critical mass?

It may seem an heretical question in a time when public companies are under so much pressure to keep pulling bigger and bigger performance numbers out of the results hat. But re-reading Ron Ashkenas’ excellent HBR article Why Successful Companies Stop Growing, a number of the points he raises are directly applicable to the decision on when or whether your brand should stop pursuing further “gains”.

1. What Goal Are You Chasing?

It’s tempting to believe that growth is a race for an abstract goal called “first”, and therefore it’s fine to chase the same things as everyone else, as long as your brand gets there before them. The alternate temptation is to believe that growth is best achieved using a broad-brush approach, in which case your brand should pursue every opportunity it can without critically evaluating the merits or otherwise of each course of action. By contrast, say Cesare Mainardi and Paul Leinward, the areas you should be focusing on are those where you have distinctive capability advantages. So you should not be going after the same things as everyone else and you should not be tail-gating every “market opportunity” you see in the hope that it leads somewhere. Neither approach works. However, companies that successfully apply a distinctive capability strategy, they say, are three times as likely to report above-average growth and twice as likely to report above-average profitability.

In other words, just as differentiation is necessary for your brand, it’s also critical for your goal-setting. Setting distinctive targets and knowing why you have the capability to achieve them over others is vital. Growth is not so much a goal in itself. Rather, it is a sign that you are on task. Set goals for growth therefore on the basis of increasing your distinctive advantages. By doing this, you make best use of what you are inherently better at, and you almost certainly will generate barriers to entry that are higher and stronger for any others looking to enter and capitalize on your success.

2. What Are You Growing?

The abiding assumption for many of us is that growth is paired with performance. But for quite a number of ‘digital economy’ brands, growth is not aligned to returns at all. Instead these brands measure their success on potential; on their social media numbers or the market valuations that they or others have accorded them. When you measure growth by these criteria, the numbers are often heady but the realizable value of those numbers is far less certain. In 2015, for example, Airbnb accorded itself a valuation of $24 billion, but predicted actual revenue for that year of $900 million, up from $250 million two years before. That meant, that in valuation terms, Airbnb was more valuable than the whole Marriott hotel chain which has 4000 hotels and had made $13.8 billion in actual revenues the previous year.

To me, growth based on physical returns is a more substantial indicator of whether you have bankable distinctive capability. Others will disagree, arguing that while Airbnb continues to attract funding based on its growing valuation rates, then it can legitimately lay claim to being a growth company. Time will tell who is right about what constitutes growth.

3. At What Size Are You Most Profitable?

I’ve watched many companies continue to grow their top-lines and footprint even as their bottom-lines turn south. It happens when scale and profitability become an inverse equation – or when the pursuit of scale becomes the core focus at the expense of the brand’s core competitiveness.

Wise words on this from Investopedia: “Eventually every fast-growth industry becomes a slow-growth industry”. They cite the example of McDonald’s which for years shrugged off shrinking profits because it was unwilling to admit that it had saturated its market. Instead, corporate accelerated its restaurant openings and advertising spending, eroding profits as it did so and eating up large chunks of cash flow. “CEOs and managers have a duty to put the brakes on growth when it is unsustainable or incapable of creating value. That can be tough since CEOs normally want to build empires rather than maintain them.”

I’m a huge believer in identifying the point where the brand is at the right size to attract the best returns it can for the market conditions it is in and that it believes lie ahead. In some markets of course, that’s all about scale. In others, it’s about recognizing that the cost to take on the biggest players will be too high and take too long – in which case, the future may well lie in scaling back your ambitions to a focused part of the market where you are strong and where there are good margins for those that can cater to more specific needs.

4. What Market Are You Looking To Grow?

Obsolescence and convergence shift the profitability of markets from under the feet of brands every day. Chasing growth in the wrong place is the fastest way to dig your brand into a bigger and bigger hole. While market authority and leadership are reassuring statuses to have in what you perceive as your core area of strength, they mean nothing if the area itself is dwindling. Sometimes, brands comfort themselves that they are winning greater and greater market share when, in fact, they are simply becoming monarchs of nothing as the market itself plateaus and then starts to decline, and commoditizing forces push up the number of bargain hunters and decrease the real returns that your brands are achieving for you. Critical factors to watch here are organic growth, competitor activity, sector investment and of course net profit.

5. What Expectations Have You Set For Yourselves?

Percentages may look reasonable on paper, but according to Ron Ashkenas, it’s easy to overlook the law of large numbers: “the larger a company becomes, the more the entire engine has to work harder”. If your growth target percentages have not shifted in some time, you are, in effect, placing your brands under more and more stress as you grow. The risk is that your people will pursue top-line objectives at the expense of sustainable competitiveness or reputation in order to hit what they’ve been told are reasonable targets. The key to avoiding this is performance metrics that appraise gains through a range of lenses to ensure you are achieving quality growth, not superficial growth at the wider expense of your brand.

The Blake Project Can Help: Accelerate Brand Growth Through Powerful Emotional Connections

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

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Put a Little Heart Into Your Data

Are you obsessed with data and statistics? Do you know what your brand’s unique value proposition is? Do you know how to craft memories into your brand story? Do you remember to stay human in your marketing?

Greg Chapman is a champion of the consumer with a penchant for focusing on, “customer-centric, consumer-centric marketing strategies, and the overarching customer experience.” He’s a wizard on parlaying that into dynamite ROI and customer retention.

As the co-founder and CMO of The Pocket Suite, he is dedicated to bringing practical insights, strategies, and solutions to businesses for customer-centric growth and retail marketing.

Greg uncovers the ways to ask the right questions of your customers in order to really understand them and determine your brand’s differentiated value, what it means to weave memories into your brand story, why science is only half of the equation for great marketing, and why it’s essential to remember that behind all the data are people.

He eloquently describes it best when he says, “As marketers, we step back and we look. And it’s really about trying to find the things that are going to touch your feelings, and then connect it up with what my brand has to offer, with respect to those feelings.”

In This Episode

• Why starting with knowing your customer inside and out is key
• How to create a sentence that describes your brand’s differentiated value proposition
• Why science and data are helpful, but they are not everything
• How to find the points in your customer’s journey where they will give you permission to charge more money
• Why creating positive experience and memories are a powerful tool for enhancing ROI
• How to follow up and ensure your brand is delivering on all of its promises

Quotes From This Episode

“I have just always approached things as kind of half science and half art.” —@Gregory_Chapman (highlight to tweet)

“Brand relationship is really a collection of stories and a collection of memories on how that brand has that relationship with a customer.” —@Gregory_Chapman

“But the thing is you market to people, you don’t market to data.” —@Gregory_Chapman (highlight to tweet)

“In today’s marketplace, you’ve got to bring those two together. I think just being business-driven, analytics-driven, lifetime-value-calculation-driven, I think that’s an extremely important thing. Don’t get me wrong, but I think it’s only half. I think the other part is, there’s memories, there’s stories, there’s attitudes, there’s behaviors, there’s relationships, and I’m sorry, that’s just not all 100% science.” —@Gregory_Chapman

“As opposed to saying, “the customer.” That’s a very impersonal thing. When you can relate [data] to personas derived from ethnographic research, then I think you’re really in touch with your customer.” —@Gregory_Chapman

“But the key to my sentence is, it start with knowing the customers. That’s the issue that I think trips people up.” —@Gregory_Chapman

“Find the points in the journey map where the customer gives you permission to charge more money. And you know what? They’re out there. They are out there.” —@Gregory_Chapman

Resources

• Greg Chapman
• Greg Chapman on Twitter, @Gregory_Chapman
• The Pocket Suite
• Quorum International
• SkyMall
• The Sharper Image
• Bret Giles
• Provide Commerce
• “The Hero’s Journey,” by Joseph Campbell
• “Your DIY Guide to Crafting and Telling Compelling Brand Stories that Sell,” by Park Howell
• BusinessofStory.com
• Park@BusinessOfStory.com

When you work in sales or as a wholesale distributor, every interaction with a prospect is important. So, when you send an email filled with overused phrases, you’re not making the best impression on a potential client. To avoid losing a client over your poor communication skills, avoid these phrases in your sales emails:

“We guarantee the lowest price.”

One thing you can guarantee is that every salesperson in the universe includes this sentence in their sales emails. Salespeople should try to get clients to think of the value instead of the price, so don’t make your pitch centered around the price you can offer.

“We can help you increase revenue and reduce costs.”

Similar to the low price guarantee, this promise is made by every salesperson in the business. In fact, your client could have a dozen other emails in his or her email inbox that say the same thing. Don’t fall into this trap of approaching clients with the same pitch as everyone else you are competing against. Make your email stand out by showing how your product will benefit the client in detail, instead of skipping to the outcome of increased revenue and reduced costs.

“Click here for more information.”

When you direct the client to a link for more information, it shows laziness and disrespect. You may feel you are being helpful by providing a link that can answer all of their questions, but a client will feel you are too lazy to type up the information and present it to them in the email they are already reading. You should position yourself as the only source of information the client needs, so don’t send them somewhere else to find what they need.

“Just checking in.”

To salespeople, this phrase is a great way to start a conversation when you haven’t heard back from a client in quite some time. However, to clients, this signals that you are stressing out about meeting some sort of sales quota and need to follow up with everyone who you forgot about over the last few weeks. If you want to reach out to a client who you haven’t heard from in awhile, try to present new information to them. Did your company recently release a case study showing how effective your services are? Use this as a reason to reach out instead of “just checking in.”

“If you have questions, don’t hesitate to contact me…”

You are a salesperson, so your job is to get in touch with clients. You don’t need to reiterate to the client that you are available to them if they have questions. Instead, end the email with your signature, which should include all of the contact information the client needs to reach you. If you need a sentence to end with, try “please let me know if you have questions” instead.

Are you guilty of using any of these phrases in your sales emails? Are there any annoying phrases that aren’t included in the list above? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Prospects invest a great deal of time researching the right solution. For some, it’s easier because they’ve got a hot tip on a must-have service – and if that’s your service then you’ve been working really hard at customer success! Throughout the evaluation process, a number of solutions (likely your competitors) are being considered, a few individuals from different departments are weighing in (the average decision group consists of 5.4 people) and the prospect is really kicking the tires on your trial.

So why should they become your customer? You really do have a great service to offer them and it solves their pain, but someone else is convincing them that they do as well. So why should they become your customer – you need to tell them the 3 things every prospect wants to hear:

We focus on outcomes We remove any friction you may be experiencing with our service – we don’t anticipate you’ll have any but in case you do…. We will be there during every one of your decisive moments. This is the bar we set for our prospects and we continue providing the same level of guidance and attention to our customers.

By knowing when and how to act, organizations can provide proactive, satisfying experiences that are fundamental to converting trials and cultivating customer loyalty.

We provide more than just support You are on a journey with our service – starting at the trial stage. As your organization changes – new team members, changing mandates, evolving strategies – our service will continue to meet your needs because it is paramount we ensure your success.

By understanding how customers use your service, you can provide guidance on features and functionality. You can identify opportunities for maximizing their lifetime value. And your product and development teams can use these insights to continue evolving your service based on what businesses and users actually require.

We are trusted advisors You won’t just hear from us when there is a problem or when you become an actual customer – we aren’t in the break/fix mentality of the 19^th century. With a thorough understanding of your business and your requirements, from our initial interaction, we work towards building a trusted relationship. You can expect to hear from us regularly, even if it’s to say “hello”.

By anticipating the behavior of customers and by having comprehensive competitive profiles of each customer at hand, you can engage with the right customer with the right information at the right time. With a rigorous proactive process in place, you can stop firefighting and spend more time truly engaging with customers – a critical step in becoming a trusted advisor.

In order to establish, position and communicate your customer advantage with confidence, your organization will need to be equipped with the right tool that provides relevant business and customer data, the know-how to enable you to perform growth management and customer success, and the right insights for better decision-making.

Is your business in a position to stand up and tell prospects what they really want to hear?

Are you inadvertently neutralizing your value proposition?  Rick Farrell, President of Tangent Knowledge Systems, describes how to communicate your value proposition to buyers without taking away its impact. His interview with show host Deb Calvert brings some misconceptions to light and helps sellers to re-frame the way they present this crucial piece of information.

Too many sales organizations excel at a game that’s no longer being played. They’ve perfected their ability to consistently hit the target, but it’s an outdated target… the wrong target because the target has changed. Farrell explains how the internet has essentially marginalized and neutralized their traditional value proposition.

Farrell covers how to differentiate yourself, create brand equity, and truly understand if your customer has a motivating reason to buy.

Excerpt from the Interview. Just a Sample of Rick Farrell’s Advice on How to NOT Neutralize Your Value Proposition:

Rick: “If anyone here is taking notes, I want you to write this down. ‘We are very unique just like everyone else; we are all selling the exact same differences.’ So being different from a product perspective or solution perspective is not pragmatic, it is not realistic because everyone — quote-unquote — claims they’re different. So that is the major reason that commoditization continues to happen and more so at an accelerated rate…

“So it’s not like the market has change that much. It’s just that the recession… and with their choices and other access to information…  customers are no longer tolerant like they used to be. But sales organizations continue to sell as if they have lots of information, lots of enthusiasm, lots of senseless follow-up. And it just doesn’t work like it used to. The obvious reason is the internet. The internet has marginalized that traditional value proposition of salespeople bringing information to the table.  So the goal of salespeople is to use their information as a tool of inquiry. You use all your expertise — not as a tool to influence, but as a tool to gather more information — because, ultimately from the customers’ perspective, the only real thing that you offer differently is not different content or different explanations of your product or service. The real thing that you offer that is consistent and sustainable is “context.”

This is just the start! Listen to the rest of this powerful interview with Rick Farrell on how to avoid neutralizing your value proposition. There’s no better way to maximize your windshield time than by listening to CONNECT! Online Radio for Sales Professionals. We’re here to help you cut out continuances, put an end to pending and stop stalling out in sales.

The post Don’t Neutralize Your Value Proposition! appeared first on People First.

Leanne Hoagland-Smith wrote an outstanding post, The Ultimate Sales Goal Is Connecting With Customer Value Drivers, Not Creating Value!

In the post, Leanne hits head on what too many salespeople miss about value. We tend to think of value and value proposition in our terms. Instead, it’s the customer that defines value!

For us to be effective in engaging the customer it’s critical to understand their value drivers, positioning our value in the context of what’s important to them.

As a result, when we look at most complex B2B buying decisions, multiple people are involved. It’s incumbent on us to understand what each values and engaging them in discussions about those drivers and how we impact them.

It’s also important to recognize value is situational and time dependent. Stated differently, our customer value drivers change over time and with the situation. Assuming that certain personas, let’s imagine CFO’s, have the same value drivers is dangerous. While their functions are similar, the specific situation, their individual views, what they are trying to achieve is different. And the same person will change over time, based on needs and what they face. To make it more complicated, these value drivers may change within the same buying/selling opportunity. As customers learn more through their buying process, their value drivers will change.

Leanne’s article is critical to understand as the foundation for any discussion of value we have with customers.

Having said this, I disagree with the assertion that “it’s a fallacy to think salespeople can create value.” (I really respect Leanne, so I hope I’m not simply playing word games, I don’t believe I am).

There are a number of cases where I think salespeople have the responsibility and obligation to create value for their customers.

Leanne’s article focuses on customers that recognize the need to change and have embarked on a change initiative. For customers already on a mission to solve a problem or address an opportunity, it’s critical to understand and engage on the basis of their value drivers.

But there are far more customers who don’t realize they should/must change, there are opportunities they are missing, there are areas where they can improve. It’s our responsibility to help educate customers, help them identify ways to grow, improve, even bring sanity to their lives, or grow their businesses. This is value we create for the customer.

Helping our customers think differently about their businesses, to disrupt their status quo is critical to their success. Look at the evolution of computers/technology from card based mainframes, to minicomputers, to PC’s to tablets/smartphones, to wearable devices to whatever the future holds. If sales people weren’t disrupting the status quo, getting people to think about information/computing differently, our customers would miss opportunities. Helping our customer consider new business models—leveraging agile practices, imagining new possibilities in IoT and how they engage their own customers are ways that salespeople create value.

In complex decisions, the majority of customer efforts fail. Data shows as many as 60% of buying initiatives end in no decision made. This means the customer still has a problem or opportunity, but they have failed to solve it. Research shows this failure has little to do with the selection of a solution, but more on the ability of the customer buying team to align their priorities and objectives to make a decision. Salespeople play a critical role in helping customers with this process–helping them to organize themselves, align the varying agendas and priorities, helping them make a decision, hopefully for the sales person. This is value creation.

In these days of customer research and self-education, customers will inherently focus on the things they “value.” But what if they are missing important considerations? After all, they unless they are buying in this category every day, they may not know what they don’t know. Consequently, they may be doing something very wrong, or be missing opportunities. Salespeople educating customers on these issues, challenging them to think differently, challenging their assumptions, having them consider different points of view or alternatives is value creation.

If salespeople are doing what they should be doing, focusing on helping customers identify and address problems and opportunities, rather than pushing products, they should be expert helping customers recognize the need for change, mobilize change, develop and implement plans/programs to achieve their goals. Since we focus on our sweet spots, the problems we are the best in the world at solving and those who have those problems–we have deep expertise and greater knowledge than the customer. Teaching, educating, helping our customers recognize new opportunities, mobilize, and execute is value creation.

Value creation is not limited to bringing something into existence (though I believe that is a huge element of value creation—new business processes, new technologies, new methods). Value creation is also about bringing things into awareness for the customer.

We limit ourselves and how we serve our customers by not doing everything possible to help customer recognize and realize value.

Finally, recognizing when customers don’t value those contributions, leaving them alone, and going somewhere else is a form of value creation (or responding to their value drivers).

We have to be well grounded in the basic elements of understanding what customers value and engaging them on their own terms with what’s important to them. But we are not fulfilling our obligations to help customers succeed organizationally and individually if we aren’t constantly seeking to create value.

Cold call email is still one of the most effective ways to present yourself to a targeted audience.

If you’re anything like me, the idea of cold calling gives you the cold sweats. Luckily, technology has stepped in to save us all. By deploying cold call email ahead of your cold phone calls, you can make them insanely more effective. Here’s how to do it.

Everyone is familiar with the benefits of a nicely written cold call email. If you are reading this article, chances are that you have already sent a dozen of these outreach messages, or you are about to do so. Either way, the main point behind every cold call email is to bring in new leads. So, are your cold call emails effective enough to attract your audience?

The Ease of Cold Call Email

Email is just easier to begin with. Aside from removing the fear factor, it is generally easier to locate the email address of the person you want to talk to than it is their phone number. Phones are sacred to many (myself included) and even if you find the number, you might get sent straight to voicemail anyways.

Present yourself properly and offer a valuable conversation

Being the good email writer you are, you may still not be satisfied with the number of leads you get in return. In order to achieve your business goals, your cold emails should invite your prospect into a conversation they WANT to have with you.

You must find common ground with your prospect. A topic you can talk about (and ideally share valuable information), that your prospect will gain from.

One more benefit of using cold emails before cold calling is that it is much easier to scale. You can spend time following up with those who express an interest rather than wasting your time calling dozens of uninterested, unqualified prospects. You can pinpoint those people who are most likely to turn into customers and concentrate on them.

Your Only Cold Call Email Goal: Pique their Curiosity

You should always strive to offer value to your prospects, but sometimes it’s best to lead with a cold email that simply piques their curiosity. Get them to respond and start a genuine conversation around a topic they are interested in talking about. Then you have an opportunity to build a relationship and the value of your product or service.

To be successful using this tactic, it’s important that your cold email sends the right message. Keep it short and sweet, no more than 3-5 sentences, and remember, ending on an open-ended question is more likely to get you responses.

By doing this, you give your target audience a good reason to respond positively, instead of treating your email cold call as spam. People are more likely to respond positively when you don’t immediately ask them to take some type of major action.

One of the essential things to consider when writing an effective cold call email is to avoid overselling. Since spammers try to sell many different things through cold emails, appearing even a little “salesy” is something you should avoid at all costs. It is always better to try to present yourself and your offer softly, without sounding too emotional or hopeless.

Warming Up Your Prospect

The goal of your first cold call email is not to get the sale. It’s to get a positive response. This opens up the floor for further communication with your prospect. That is a very good thing.

Think about it. You basically barged into your prospect’s inbox completely uninvited, but your offer or service was compelling enough that they took time out of their day to respond to you, a total stranger. You should never expect them to buy immediately, but you should be ready to answer some of these questions:

• What is your offer? You should have alluded to it in your first email, but now you can spell it out clearly.

• Who are you working with? Social proof is important, and even having just one recognizable name can be incredibly helpful. Offer to work for free or extremely discounted rates to get some testimonials. Pro tip: Always say no to people who ask you to work for free. If you offer, that’s different, but anyone who finds and contacts you looking for a handout is expecting the moon but paying for peanuts. For more about this, check out this post from Untamed Writing.

• Why should I trust you? This can be a difficult question to answer. Extoll your strengths and use more social proof if possible. Talk about how current customers feel about your service and your high work standards. This is the perfect place to talk about your money-back guarantee or refund policy if you have one.

Answer any questions your prospect has and make it clear that you are willing to walk them through everything. Best practice is to try to respond to prospect emails within a day, but preferably within the hour. Doing so increases the likelihood that your prospect is still at their computer and can continue the dialogue in real time.

Once you have developed an email relationship with the prospect, don’t be afraid to ask for the call. Simply end one of your emails with something like, “I’d love to discuss how I can help you grow your business with a quick 15-minute phone call. Are you available some time next week?”

Make The Call

Don’t make scheduling more difficult than it needs to be. Use a tool like Calendly, send the link to your prospect, and let them choose the times that work best for them.

By getting permission before you call, you have eliminated one of the toughest barriers in cold calling: the gatekeepers. Now when you call, if you reach a secretary or receptionist, you have the ability to say that your prospect is expecting you. What’s more, if you reach a digital gatekeeper, like voicemail, you’ll most likely get a call back.

Bringing in new leads with email cold calls – the easy way

Bringing in new leads is not only about making profits, it is about communicating with potential customers and other professionals in your industry, too. When you connect with other people that are experts in your professional field, you can easily follow the tactics and strategies of your competition. Moreover, such connections can help you properly adjust to the always-changing market.

At LeadFuze, we believe in effective communication. More importantly, we believe that you deserve only the best. Therefore, we offer you our professional assistance in developing fruitful business relationships with your clients and bringing in new leads.

But, how do you create an effective cold call email? Check out these cold call sales email templates.

After you create your cold call emails, we help you to begin generating data about the leads that fit your target audience. You can target leads based on industry, job title, geographic location, and more. Our software locates them and finds their email address by name, along with additional useful information such as phone and social profiles.

Then you can set these cold call emails to be sent separately to each lead!

Conclusion

Cold calling is scary, I know. By using cold email first, you can scale up your business without wasting time on uninterested parties. Be personable and try to develop a relationship with your prospect. When you do this, you can eliminate cold calling all together, because the only calls you’ll be making will be warm ones to prospects who already know and have begun to trust you.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Let’s talk about website traffic. The Holy Grail of digital marketing. Everyone wants it and once they have it, they want more of it. When you open up your GA it’s the first thing that you look at. When you talk to a new agency it’s the first thing that you tell them you don’t have enough of. We have become almost obsessed with traffic. But…is your business improving? Are you getting more sales? Are you getting more leads?

Traffic Is Important, But It’s Not The Goal

To get real results from your digital marketing you have to start with the real goal. Traffic is important, no doubt. Without it, you have absolutely zero chance of attaining your goals. But, you have it and not attain your goals. Traffic comes in two flavors; high-quality traffic and low-quality traffic. High-quality traffic is full of people that fit the profile of your customers and they are in the right stage of the buying cycle, based on the page that they are engaged with, on your site.

Low-quality traffic if full of people that 1) are not the profile of the customers that you do business with, or 2) they aren’t in the stage of the buy cycle that is relevant to the page that they landed on.

Want More High-Quality Traffic?

Makes sense, but getting it takes some analysis of the traffic that you’re currently getting. First, this may seem counter-intuitive, it’s important to try to figure out why you’re getting that low-quality traffic. Granted, you’ll never get rid of all low-quality traffic, but you sure can reduce the amount that you’re getting.

The first step is to determine if there are commonalities among the people within the low-quality traffic group. Are they all coming from your Facebook page? Or, maybe you’re getting low-quality traffic from social channels, in general. Or, maybe it wasn’t the person that was low-quality but where they landed on your site.

Or, maybe it wasn’t the person that was low-quality but where they landed on your site. Maybe, they landed on a page that talked about a product or service that you offer, that wasn’t what they were looking for. Or maybe their experience with the page that they landed on was really bad, so they just left.

All of these things have to be considered as you start to tweak the type of traffic that your site is getting.

Focus On The Goal

Traffic is just a means to the end. Ultimately, the goal is more sales, more leads, more members, etc. All of your online efforts have to improve your business, or it’s a waste of time, money, and effort. The first step to any digital marketing strategy or website design/development is to get more business. To do that you have to have conversions. But, don’t just focus on the final conversion of a sale or a quote request, or a contact us request. Yes, these are indeed the ultimate conversions, however, there are a lot of conversions that happen earlier in the buying cycle.

At the top of the sales funnel, prospective customers may visit your site simply to learn about your company or your services. As they move down through your sales funnel, they may download some type of information that you have on your site, like a case study or a white paper. These are all conversions as the customer goes through their decision-making process.

It’s important to make sure that you have the right kind of information on your site for all of the types of conversions that your prospective customers will go through. Because if you don’t provide it, you will have spent a lot of money to generate low-quality traffic.

More Information

We’ve been working with clients for a very long time on how to generate a better quality of traffic to their site. In fact, we’ve even written a white paper on the topic and you can get your copy of this white paper for FREE!

Download your copy!

As an industry influencer, you can get much more impact from your marketing campaigns.

You will be seen as an expert, and when you publish content, people will sit up and take notice. They will click on the articles you share, and they will be more likely to share them with their own audiences. You’ll get more exposure for your brand, and you’ll get more leads and conversions.

To understand the impact that industry influencers make, just look at what happens every time Search Marketing Land or Moz shares new content. It gets heavy user engagement and it gets shared widely. Wouldn’t you love the same thing to happen with your content or other aspects of your marketing?

Here are top 5 tips to become an industry influencer yourself:

1. Create Quality Content

To be an industry influencer, you need to establish yourself as an authority, and one of the best ways to do that is to create in-depth, knowledgeable content.

Explore a topic in depth when you write. Don’t just skim the surface. That means writing about multiple angles of a topic, backing up your information with examples and statistics, and providing actionable information. All of that usually means writing longer pieces of content, but not always.

If you don’t want to create longer, exhaustive pieces of content, you can still write in-depth about a topic by writing multiple articles around the topic. Your blog itself can be the exhaustive resource that your audience needs.

2. Offer Unique Perspectives

Industry influencers don’t just regurgitate information — they create information. That means offering unique perspectives and opinions.

For example, when writing about content marketing, Derek Halpern of Social Triggers challenged the “content is king” status quo and wrote about how “design is king.” He argued that before your users ever read a word of what you write, they decide if they want to stay on your site based on the way it looks and how it’s designed.

Of course, Halpern’s article was cited and shared widely, and many people have referenced it in their own articles or written rebuttal pieces. What new insights can you bring to your niche? What opinions or suggestions can you share that your competitors haven’t already?

3. Nurture Relationships

Power comes from the connections you have. Powerful people don’t often become powerful on their own. They become powerful based on the partnerships they forge and the people they know.

To gain industry influence, you need to nurture relationships in your own niche, as well. You can easily do this by writing guest blogs regularly for a site, by encouraging guest content on your own site, or even by creating special products with partners, such as ebooks or online courses.

To start creating those relationships, you need to start doing things like sharing other people’s content, starting conversations on social media, or sharing items of interest with the brand.

4. Build Your Social Media Following

These days, you can’t get anywhere without a large social media following. Most people can’t even get a writing gig or marketing job if they can’t show that they already have a fan base. The number of followers on your social media is an indication of your influence. The more followers you have, the more people you can reach with your content and ideas.

Building your followers takes time and consistency, and there are dozens of things you can do to attract them. Primarily, you will need to share quality content on a consistent basis. However, other tactics include engaging with users on other profiles and pages, hosting contests, running PPC campaigns, creating scarcity and so on.

5. Go Offline

Industry influence isn’t limited to the online sphere. If you want to be a true influencer, you’ll need to go offline, as well.

One of the best ways to gain influence through offline activities is to be a speaker at an industry event, such as a conference or seminar. Treat your presentation the same way you would the online content you create — make sure that it is authoritative, in-depth and offers unique perspectives.

You can also build influential industry relationships by networking at these events. Even if you are not a presenter, you can meet and greet the other attendees and start laying the foundation for what can become influential relationships.

Finally, you can publish content in local newspapers and magazines, or you can publish items in print for your customers, such as pamphlets, small books and brochures.

By building your influence through online and offline activities, you can get more attention for all your activities in the future. When you have something to say, people will pay attention and you will get the results you want. That will help you get a bigger ROI on your marketing and start meeting your sales goals.

Like most other sales processes, ours begins with an initial connect call, which is primarily about establishing a relationship with a lead.

The sooner you make this call the better, because that’s when the lead is in the middle of asking questions and trying to figure out what to do to solve a problem.

Your goal should be to ask your own questions and provide simple answers to the lead while collecting information on the company’s budget, authority, need, and time (BANT), as well as its goals, plans, and challenges (GPC).

A typical connect call lasts about 20 minutes and must result in acquiring this information before you can move to the next step. However, as the name implies, it’s also important to establish a connection as well as to challenge the lead’s thinking so that the lead exits the call feeling as if he or she spoke with an expert.

Here are some scripts of how that often plays out for Hüify’s sales staff when they are calling on prospects that range from new leads to past customers. You can use these as jumping-off points for your own connect calls.

4 Templates for Common Connect Call Scenarios

1) Inbound lead requesting a consultation or demo

Hi Norman, this is Josh with Hüify. (PAUSE. They will usually be surprised and comment about how fast it was that you called them.) Haha, well I saw that you had some questions and I was in between meetings, so I thought I could help answer them. (PAUSE. Let them start talking).

2) Inbound leads (general)

Hey, Norman! (PAUSE) It’s Josh (PAUSE) from Hüify. (PAUSE. Listen for recognition of your company name here.) Did I catch you at a bad time? I was calling because I saw you downloaded ________ and I wanted to see if it was helpful. Is your company planning to ________? I spent a little time on your website before calling you. Do you mind if I give you a ________ tip?

3) Target account

Hey, Norman! (PAUSE) It’s Josh (PAUSE) from Hüify (PAUSE). I saw the blog article that you wrote about ________. I really enjoyed it. (Continue conversation about this commonality.) Can I give you one small suggestion? At the bottom of the article, there isn’t a clear next step. Have you thought about what the next logical step would be for the reader if they wanted to follow up with you to ask more questions about this topic?

4) Existing or former client

Hi, Norman, how are things going with you? It’s been a few months since we ________, and I wanted to see how ________ has been performing. Now that we have the foundation set up, it might make sense to have a discussion about how ________. Do you want to schedule some time to discuss? I can point out some suggestions for ________. When’s a good time to chat? I’m available during ________ next week.

Next Steps: Make a Decision

Listen carefully to the prospect’s responses, paying close attention to their tone and subtext so that you come to understand their current state of mind. This is an early turning point in the process, and depending on how the conversation unfolds, you’ll need to make a decision about what strategy to pursue moving forward.

• Use gentle questioning to gather information about their business.
• Based on their answers, share a tip to build trust
• Share a positioning statement
• Based on fit, decide if you should move forward, and 
book the exploratory call


If the prospect seems to be more reserved:

• Leverage an inbound tip to build trust
• Use a positioning statement to create value
• Listen to determine if your statement and tips are 
resonating and moving the prospect into a more open frame of mind. 
If the prospect is in a closed frame of mind, send him or her some free resources (a good blog article or ebook) and politely exit the call.

How to Close the Call

Every call should move the sales process forward, so if there’s a fit, ask for more time. Here’s a script you can try:

“My next suggestion would be to schedule what we call an exploratory call. I can offer some additional tips on [something the lead values] and share what we have seen working for others who are trying to ... [reference goals or pains mentioned during the call]. I’m also interested in hearing more about [goals x, y and z] that you mentioned earlier. Perhaps we can talk a little more about whether there might be a t between our companies.”

Wrap It Up

Say something like: “Great, how does [day] at [time] sound?”

Once the call is booked, don’t hang up just yet. The moments immediately after booking an exploratory meeting can be a great time to have further conversation and gather additional information. Here is one way to introduce that conversation: “So that I’m a little more prepared for our call next week, would you mind if I asked you a question or two?”

Regardless of what you learn afterward, it’s important to wrap up the connect call by scheduling another call and assigning the prospect some homework to complete before moving forward. It doesn’t necessarily matter what the homework is, as the goal is to set the stage for the exploratory call by requiring that the lead buy in before it ever begins.

Once you have established that buy-in, it’s time to look for deeper insight into both the company as a whole and the individual interests of the people likely to be involved in future calls.

Editor's note: This post was excerpted from A Closing Culture and has been republished here with permission.

What’s the Measure of Your B2B Marketing Success Today?

Are market share, revenue growth and lead counts the way you measure your B2B marketing success?

If you answered yes, you’ve probably lived through this cycle:

• When your company / product line’s numbers were good–you were a rock star!
• When revenues were flat or declining, and sales couldn’t close deals–you were in the dog house!

The downside of market-based signals or high level metrics is that they’re only distantly related to your day-to-day work. It puts marketing at the mercy of opinion rather than impact.

Yes – it’s even true of lead counts. Think about it. To generate leads, you need a marketing tech stack, a good Web site, product marketing messaging and content, marketing programs, and well-defined market segments to target. So which marketing team specifically is accountable when results come in?

Uh oh….I don’t suppose your board will care if your content was great, but your Web site hasn’t been updated in 6 years. If you’ve missed lead goals or revenue numbers, get ready to scramble to identify what you’ll do differently.

From Hopeful to Hardcore B2B Metrics

Good marketers quickly escape this trap, but it’s ridiculously hard. Wing-and-a-prayer metrics rob everyone of the ability to have better impact.

In the age of the customer, we can no longer afford to guess at what works. Customers educate themselves through normal channels–including friends, colleagues, co-workers and conferences–as well as through digital watering holes.

According to Regalix, 52% of B2B marketers say both digital and offline marketing add up to impact. The take-away? Business as usual is dead and gone. It’s time for new ways to measure impact.

What Does a Good B2B Dashboard Look Like?

So where should you start? What’s pragmatic a pragmatic approach to new B2B metric? Here are 4 guidelines and key secrets (learned the hard way) for B2B marketing dashboards that work:

1. Focus on 5-10 of the right dashboard charts.

Goodness lies somewhere in between slogging through a data haystack and juggling 50+ charts.

Working without good data will hurt your business. It’ll manifest itself as overly optimistic forecasts, followed by missed pipeline and revenue targets.

On the other hand, all but a nerdy few can effectively manage data coming from 50+ charts. If you’re only speaking the language of data to your stakeholders, you’ll kill the creativity that makes you a great marketer. Data is meant to inform, not to stifle marketing innovation.

The secret is to have 5 to 10 of the right charts. You need enough data to see marketing results, pipeline flow, and revenue trends. And your charts must focus on the outcomes that make or break your business–including what drives the results and trend lines that you’re seeing.

2. Track flow and quality.

Get insights into funnel flow. Learn how Web traffic, landing pages, events, and email marketing drive leads from casual interest into closed revenue. If your demand creation pipeline is sluggish at any point, figure out why and do it fast.

And, focus on lead quality. A higher volume of leads doesn’t matter if you’re attracting the wrong buyers. Monitor how well you’re reaching the right accounts–the ones that quickly convert to revenue and infrequently churn.

Just watch out for the volume trap. The volume trap is a risk when you turn off the firehose of leads to focus on the best leads without educating your stakeholders. Manage this transparently or you’ll waste cycles explaining why quality is better than quantity.

The secret is to have a clear time frame for when the quality ramp kicks in. Only then, should you reset your traffic and lead volume goals. Design this and track progress to the crossover point with your stakeholders. For sales, this will help them adjust how they deploy their sales development teams. So, collaboration is the key.

3. Know how marketing programs contribute to results.

Traffic volumes, leads, lead conversion rates, pipeline and revenue–these are the basics of Marketing’s new vocabulary.

And also, we need insights into which marketing investments lift our numbers. Trying to drive more leads? Which programs–social marketing, events, webinars or email marketing campaigns–work the best? What content marketing topics drive engagement and conversion? Which elements of your website convert, lower your bounce rate, or attract linkbacks?

The secret is in having program-specific insights. Marketers need to see which programs contribute to lead and pipeline forecasts. We need to know if tactics activate our existing prospects or attract new ones.

It’s the equivalent to a sales rep knowing which accounts add up to their sales forecast for the quarter. Without this marketing insight, it’s like owning a sales quota without any idea of how to achieve it.

4. Measure content marketing topics and assets.

Content marketing moved from hype to a new norm in the past year. Ann Gynn, editor of the CMI blog, says content marketing is a “catch phrase no more.”

Yet it’s still a newer area of marketing, so many aren’t sure what to track. Laura Ramos of Forrester’s B2B Marketing unit says, “when 87% of B2B marketers say they struggle to develop compelling content, no amount of messing around with the mix will create a significant improvement in results.”

The secret is to make sure you measure both content collections and assets. Focus on content themes that drive traffic, leads and engagement. Know how your content collections drive leads across pipeline stages.

And also, learn how specific assets are performing. What’s the most popular piece? What’s the best content type and at what stage in the buying journey? Was there a sequence of assets that drove the best buyer engagement? Your odds of success increase when you know the answers to these questions.

If content is king, content impact is queen.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a big deal. It seems as though it’s being mentioned on every webinar, at every marketing conference, and in all major marketing strategy discussions. But despite all of the hype surrounding account-based marketing, only 43% of people polled have a clear definition of what ABM is!

Account-based marketing, at its most basic, makes an account (rather than an individual lead) the focus of marketing and sales efforts. ABM relies on data analysis to pinpoint the correct accounts to target; leverages research to find the correct cadre of contacts inside an account; and uses targeted, personalized, timed communications to engage those contacts.

While the buzz is great, and we personally think that ABM is a fantastic strategy for scalable growth, there seems to be an overabundance of information about ABM floating around. So much information, in fact, that marketers aren’t able to fully digest the principles and benefits of an account-based marketing strategy. To help cut through the ABM noise, we’ve compiled a list of 10 of the most important things to know about account-based marketing:

1. ABM Helps to Loop in All Decision Makers

On average, every purchase now requires 5.4 people to formally sign off on. This means that involving all parties from the very beginning is crucial. Every time an additional person is added to the decision making team, your sales cycle lengthens. (Imagine everyone is ready to sign, and then a VP joins the buying team and you have to begin at the beginning with that person.) When you target an account, rather than an individual, you’re able to close deals more quickly by addressing all decision makers from the beginning of the buyer’s journey.

2. ABM = Increased ROI

It’s no secret that marketers are seeing incredible return from account-based marketing. In fact, 80% of marketers who measure ROI say that ABM initiatives outperform other marketing investment. And what’s more, 60% of those who have used ABM for at least a year report a revenue increase of at least 10%,and 19% report a revenue impact of 30% or greater.

At the end of the day, marketers not only want to see organizational growth, but they want to be able to demonstrate real value from their efforts. ABM not only helps companies generate more revenue, it ties marketing directly to closed deals and revenue. In fact, companies using ABM generate 200% more revenue for their marketing efforts.

3. ABM = Increased Contract Value

Getting customers in the door is great, but it’s not the be-all, end-all. A customer who signs a one-year, $10,000 contract, and cost $1,000 to acquire gives you a $9,000 gross return. But spending $1,000 for a customer who signs an $8,000/year, 5-year contract will yield much higher returns.

ABM has proven to significantly increase deal sizes by focusing on customers who are most likely to be successful with your product or service, which in turn means they’re more likely to remain your customer. In fact, contract value for ABM-targeted accounts increases an average of 40% for mid-market accounts and 35% for enterprise. Those numbers can easily result in immense growth for your organization, without spending more money on acquisition.

4. ABM is Gaining Steam, Quickly

ABM is much more than just a buzzword, it’s being implemented by some of the largest and fastest growing organizations in the world. Over 52% of companies say they currently have ABM pilot programs in place, and 83% of ABM testers have plans to increase their usage over the next year.

5. ABM is Not Just For Enterprise Anymore

In the past, account-based marketing was a tedious, time consuming, manual process. It was really a solution only for organizations that had abundant resources and the stability to test new marketing strategies. Today, the basic process remains much the same, but technology has changed the labor equation, making ABM practical for any company that already uses marketing technology well. If you’re regularly using marketing automation and a CRM, you already have the tools and technology you need to get started with an ABM strategy. While large companies are currently the heaviest users of ABM, small companies are the most aggressive testers.

6. ABM = Increased Engagement

A whopping 83% of those using ABM report that increased engagement with target accounts is the top reported benefit – and that’s a big deal.

While lead generation is imperative to a business, the next step in getting your leads to convert into paying customers is encouraging leads to engage with your brand. Solid lead engagement requires knowledge about your buyer, an understanding of their needs and wants, and a marketing strategy that plays to that knowledge. The personalization aspect of an ABM strategy allows you to speak directly to your prospects with a tailored message, increasing the likelihood of a positive response.

7. ABM = Strengthened Retention + Expansion

Customer retention is another incredibly important metric for success. We’ve all heard the saying, “it’s much easier to retain an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one” – and it’s true. According to Invesp, acquiring a new customer is five times as expensive as retaining an existing customer.

Research shows that 84% of companies believe that ABM provides significant benefits for retaining and expanding current client relationships. New customer acquisition is expensive, and if not done right, can lead to high churn rates (“sloppy growth”). Instead, investing in keeping your customers will deliver a steady stream of reliable revenue.

8. ABM Improves Consistency

On average, a B2B customer will use 6 interaction channels (e.g. ads, email, phone, etc.), and 65% are frustrated by the inconsistency of the experience. ABM can help by providing a consistent experience across all channels of communication to each person in a targeted account. As Jake Sorfoman of Gartner notes in this blog post, In Customer Experience, Consistency is the New Delight: “Consistency is often compromised when good intentions work at cross purposes.” Account-based marketing helps you keep everyone’s purposes lined up and moving forward.

9. ABM Helps with Departmental Alignment

Most organizations struggle with sales and marketing alignment. However, according to one study, organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions experience 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates. In a recent survey, 91% of those with an ABM program in place said that they were “tightly” or “somewhat or moderately” aligned with sales. This is no coincidence. Account-based marketing helps organizations improve communications between departments by focusing on common goals, values, and metrics, such as defining the ideal customer profile.

A successful account-based marketing strategy delivers high-quality leads to sales by targeting accounts have already been prequalified and deemed to be a good fit. ABM focuses on quality, rather than quantity, allowing sales to spend less time qualifying leads and more time selling – to companies who are likelier to buy, and likelier to become excellent customers.

10. Marketing Automation is A Key Tool for ABM

Along with capturing data and putting it to work, automation lets you create a process and then set it to repeat at scale, without additional labor. The top benefits that marketers see from combining marketing automation with an account-based marketing strategy are:

• Effectively linking buyer behaviors and data across contacts for a unified account view
• Automatically scoring accounts and triggering campaigns and workflows inside and outside of the inbox
• Precisely targeting all decision makers within an account and delivering a unified experience across the organization

With the right strategy and the right technology to carry it out, ABM will support you in all aspects as you balance your strategy among brand awareness, demand generation, and customer retention and expansion. To learn more about account-based marketing, download your free eBook here.

Lead generation is a huge part of a well rounded B2B marketing strategy. But in today’s marketing oversaturated world, your buyers respond by safeguarding their information. Prospects won’t give you their email addresses unless they trust that your company will give them valuable information—not spam.

Videos can help you build trust with your audience by introducing them to the people behind your brand and giving them a glimpse of the value behind the gate. Done right, it can be an important and valuable lead generation tool, building trust with your audience and expanding your marketing strategy.

Here are four steps to set up your videos for lead generation:

1. Prepare Your Equipment

The reality is that most marketers don’t have the budget or resources to create high quality video with fancy video equipment and production software. However, you can create low-budget, low-effort videos that still make a big impact.

By using some iPhone recording best practices, you can create a professional business video. Use a tripod, face some natural light, use a good mic, and you’re well on your way. You can also use your Macbook to film your video or shoot it directly from your laptop. And once you’re ready to step it up, you can put together an excellent lighting kit for about $100, right in your office or conference room.

2. Identify Your Use Case

Before you start rolling the cameras, you need to understand what the purpose of your video should be. Your videos can be culture-related, product-focused, or even promotional.

Here’s a breakdown of three different use cases:

Event Introductions

For your first go, you can start with an event introduction video. Lead generation and events (virtual or physical) go hand in hand. Whether you’re hosting a webinar, tradeshow, or roadshow—there’s a lead form involved. But before your prospects give you their email address and register for the event, there’s a level of trust involved. This is the perfect place to insert a video and start seeing higher conversion rates.

A great event introduction video will explain the purpose of your event, so your viewers can understand the value and trust the people behind the process. Here’s an example of a webinar introduction video we made recently:

Thought leadership videos can be anything from how-to guides, quick fun facts and tidbits, to in-depth talks about a specific topic, such as Whiteboard Fridays from Moz. These videos help build brand affinity and trust with your audience, showing them that you’re invested in their success.

The best thought leadership videos are the ones that answer your audience’s questions. Think about what your audience struggles with and what problems they want to solve. You can make how-to videos that answer those questions, animated videos that highlight facts and statistics, and videos that go in-depth to explain tricky topics. Try adding one of these videos to a blog post to get your point across in a more human and relatable way—it’ll also increase your time on site!

Product Videos

Product videos are a great way to get your prospects excited about your products or services. In fact, 64% of businesses who use video believe that it has led directly to increased sales, according to Wyzowl. This is especially true when you consider that you can assign prospects to a product-specific list based on the videos they watch (more on that below.)

Product videos come in many shapes and sizes. Here are a few do’s and don’ts for your product video:

• Do create an animated video for products that are otherwise hard to explain. For example, Slack’s product video is mostly a screengrab video that shows off their interface—making it easy to get the point across.

• Do make your product video inviting! Your video should not only explain your product, but also engage your audience—whether that’s through animation or live action.

• Don’t try to explain every single feature. Keep your video short and sweet.

• Don’t leave viewers hanging—have a clear call-to-action. Do you want them to sign up for a demo? Contact your sales team? Let them know where to go from there!

3. Add a Lead Generation Form

Using videos for lead generation is easy. With certain video hosting platforms, you can add a form directly in your video, which we call a turnstile. Aside from gathering their information, turnstiles help you initially qualify your leads, since the people who fill it out are the ones who take the time to learn what the video was about and decide they were interested—making it more likely that they’re the right audience.

You can ask your viewers to sign up before viewing your content by adding a turnstile to the beginning of your video. Or, to create a more trusting relationship, add the form towards the end so that your prospects can decide whether the content is valuable to them before they give up their information. In fact, our research shows that that adding a lead generation form 20-30% of the way through your video or 60-70% through your video will garner the most conversions. You can even plan your video script around your lead generation form so that it doesn’t come as a surprise for your viewers.

4. Connect it to Your Marketing Automation Platform

Wyzowl reports that 77% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a video, but to truly prove the ROI of your videos, you need to be able to connect the right data together.

By integrating your video hosting platform with a complete marketing automation platform, you can connect your video’s engagement data directly with your central marketing system. This allows you to factor in the videos your prospects watched into your lead scoring, create smart lists based on viewing data, and send out emails with integrated video links. You can also see exactly which videos converted your prospects into leads to better optimize your marketing campaigns and provide sales with information on what certain prospects are interested in.

The tips I outlined above are just the start. Once you get your video strategy up and rolling, you can start exploring other strategies to maximize the value of each and every video asset. Pretty soon, you’ll be seeing the dollars rolling in along with those views.

Have questions about using video for lead generation? Leave them in the comments below!

If you think of kettlebells as just funny shaped dumbbells, you’re missing out on one of their biggest strengths. Kettlebells are perfect for full-body movements like swings and squats that can give you a serious workout with just a single heavy weight.

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You probably don’t think of running as a dangerous exercise, but it’s an intense activity and injuries are common, especially for beginners who push themselves too hard. This graphic from Strength Running shows how you can prevent running injuries.

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Known to many as the world’s most prominent sporting competition, The Olympic Games, which originated in ancient Greece as many as 3,000 years ago, will officially kick off this Friday. This year’s Games are being held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a location choice that has stirred up some controversy already. But, with such a large global event like this, no matter the location, comes an opportunity for PR agencies to integrate their clients’ names into the conversation before, during and after the Games.

One of the biggest media advantages surrounding the Olympics is that it goes way beyond just sports. Media channels like fashion, lifestyle, marketing, music and even technology are all fair game when it comes to who will be covering the different aspects of the Games. The Olympics are broadcast to a global audience and, with this year’s games expected to receive over 3.6 billion global viewers, the international PR and media opportunities are countless.

#HelloFromHome

Hershey’s is one of the proud sponsors of the 2016 Olympic Games. In order to promote their support of the event, they developed a campaign called “Hellos from Home,” which was all about “sending love” to the US gymnasts that were travelling to Rio. They also named 19-year-old U.S. Gymnast, Simone Biles, as their spokesperson for the campaign. Hershey’s (along with their savvy PR agency) pinpointed a media hook that would resonate with viewers leading up to the event, and utilized a rising star in the Olympic Games, leading to a wildly successful PR campaign that has provided other PR pros with a perfect example of how to integrate clients’ names into the conversation before the event.

Why Won’t My Tweet Go Through?!

Last summer it was reported that none of Brazil’s Big Four operators were able to maintain a 4G connection more than 50 percent of the time, proving they had much work to do before the network could handle the influx of Olympic data traffic. And, with mobile data traffic at this year’s Olympics expected to be 50 percent higher than at the 2012 Games, we are bound to see more news come out during the event surrounding slow-moving networks for end users.

As any marketing and PR professional knows, news hijacking can be an essential piece to getting your clients’ name out into the media. For example, for a technology company that focuses on improving network capabilities, their tech PR agency can latch onto the news of Rio experiencing network outages. From there, tech media can use the insights from your client when reporting on how these network outages could’ve been prevented. Identifying relevant news stories that relate to your client’s expertise during a major event, like the Olympics, ensures that your PR strategy will win you a gold medal.

Go for Gold

Don’t forget, just because the event is over doesn’t mean the conversation should stop. There will be plenty of talk about the winners, the losers, the advertisements and sponsorships, the drama surrounding the host country and so on.

A contributed content strategy is a perfect way to finish strong after an Olympic year. Let’s say you are a digital marketing agency looking to discuss social media strategy around the Olympics. You could offer up a byline to the media that lays out the top social media posts in Rio – the media loves a recap because they are easily digestible for readers. Not only does it get your client’s name out there, but it also establishes specific spokespeople at the company as thought leaders.

Finally, keep in mind that large-scale events like the Olympics aren’t a one-time thing. By harnessing the power of media and technology, PR pros can generate a cohesive mega event strategy that ensures journalists and, more importantly, global audiences will keep your client at top of mind for the next big event.

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BlackBerry will begin offering its Hub+ suite of apps for download on the Google Play store via a subscription service ($0.99 a month), the company announced.

The BlackBerry Hub+ suite, one of the most popular features of BlackBerry 10, is a suite of apps that centralize all of a user’s communications in a single interface along with other productivity tasks such as contacts, calendar, passwords, and notes. The announcement is just the latest in a string of efforts by BlackBerry to remain relevant in the mobile market.

BlackBerry is hoping the release of Hub+ to Android devices will encourage ex-BlackBerry loyalists to download the free trial and ultimately subscribe for the full suite. Hub+ is already available on all devices running BB 10, however, its two newest devices, the PRIV and the soon to be released DTEK50, are the last smartphones the company plans to release this year as it struggles to get consumers to purchase the devices.

But with only 15% of Android devices running Marshmallow, there most likely will be fairly low penetration, reports Fortune. BlackBerry is hoping to make the suite available to users on the Android Lollipop, which accounts for 35% of all Android phones currently in use.

BlackBerry’s decision to offer Hub+ comes as the company attempts to increase its software and services segments amid its crashing hardware sales. Subscription-based apps offer publishers a more consistent, recurring fee, rather than relying on sporadic in-app purchases.

It’s likely that more publishers will begin adopting this model as app stores, like Google Play, seek to bolster their app revenue businesses. Both Google Play and the App Store recently announced plans to give publishers that used subscription models a greater cut of in-app revenue — from 70% to 85%.

Cutting through the noise of an overcrowded app market is critical for any app developer looking to build a viable user base. There are now well over 3 million apps available across the world’s five largest app stores. Delivering the right product to the right audience at the right time in this environment is imperative to the success of any app.

The challenge of marketing an app effectively has made app-install ads — an ad unit that directs users to download a mobile app — an essential tool for developers seeking to stand out in the Google Play and Apple app stores. This is why it's not surprising that more marketers are using paid channels to drive downloads than ever before. In fact, over 80% of respondents in a survey of the top 100 grossing mobile app developers noted they plan on increasing their spend on app-install ads in 2015.

BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on mobile app-install ads that looks at the revenues from app-install ads and how they're expected to grow over the next five years. It also looks at the performance of app-install ads and how these metrics are expected to change over time.

Furthermore, the report examines the top app-install ad products and pricing models offered by the leading advertising platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Google, as well as newer app-install formats from Instagram and Snapchat. Looking to the future, the report examines how companies are shifting their app-install ad spend to new formats, as well as the new tools they're using to improve optimization and ad effectiveness.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Mobile app-install ads — ad units that direct users to download a mobile app — are an essential tool for developers, and they account for a major share of mobile ad spend. We estimate 25% of total US mobile ad revenue was generated by app-install ads in 2015.
• A combination of new developers entering the space and rising ad budgets will drive increased spending in years to come. US app-install ad revenue will grow to over $7 billion by year-end 2020, according to BI Intelligence estimates.
• Mobile app install advertisers have traditionally invested heavily in display and interstitial ads, but are moving to mobile video and native install formats. 86% of developers currently use in-feed video app-install ads, and video ads are seen as the most effective app-install format.
• As formats like video rise in popularity, older formats are losing their appeal for install campaigns. Static nonnative ads are widely used but are not seen as effective. Free app networks and offer walls have also fallen out of favor.
• Ad platforms are now developing innovative new install formats to earn even more revenue from these lucrative ad units. New approaches, including deep linking and app streaming, are more contextualized and interactive than older ad formats.

In full, the report:

• Forecasts app-install ad spending in the US through 2020.
• Explores which app-install ad formats developers believe are most effective.
• Discusses what the most popular platforms and ad networks are doing to attract ad spending.
• Investigates new tools for marketing apps, including deep linking and app streaming.

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

1. Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
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The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the fast-moving world of mobile app-install ads.

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Automating the marketing process is an important component of any business. By creating a system that can capture leads, nurture them and convert them into customers all by itself, businesses can spend more time growing their business. Unfortunately though, marketing automation does not come cheap. Industry leaders like HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot have a starting price of at least $100/month. Also, with many of the advanced features only available at higher priced plans, most of these tools are simply not meant for SMBs.

What Small and Medium businesses need is a no-frills tool that can do away with all the fluff and can accomplish the most essential automation elements at low cost. In this article, we will take a look at five of the best such tools that target small businesses.

Hubbion

Small and local businesses typically deal with customers over both email and text messages. Hubbion is a great tool for SMBs who need to automate their various channels of marketing over SMS, email, voice, fax and posts. Users have the ability to specify certain triggers to add new subscribers to the list and may also schedule autoresponders to reach out to their list. Besides the features and the the ability to reach customers over multiple platforms, another reason for small business owners to prefer Hubbion is the pricing structure. This is a pay-as-you-go service that charges businesses based on the volume of messages sent. What this means is that businesses can get started on their outreach for as little as a dollar or two without having to pay a monthly subscription.

Leadsius

Leadsius is a marketing automation tool for email marketers. Like Hubbion, Leadsius too comes with behavior based triggers and workflow rules that enable an automated system of user engagement across the business website, landing pages, social media and email marketing. The good thing about Leadsius is that it comes with a free plan that has a contact list limit of 2500. However, the features here are limited and this plan does not allow advanced workflow rules and dynamic smart lists.

Spokal

Spokal is an inbound marketing automation plan that comes with features like event based segmentation, email nurturing, A/B testing and social media calendar. The tool is not free by itself and costs a monthly fee of $49/month. This makes it vastly cheaper than the popular marketing automation tools in the market. Do note however that Spokal is not a complete tool by itself and you may need integration with MailChimp or ActiveCampaign to see your emails through.

JumpLead

JumpLead is a wonderful marketing automation tool for website nurturing. It comes with features that lets businesses to trigger targeted marketing activities based on the page visited or the web form completed. These subscribers may then be nurtured and converted into customers via email marketing. JumpLead is free to small businesses that have monthly visitors of less than 200 and need to send less than 100 emails in a month. If you have a website with a larger traffic, you may have to pick one of their paid plans starting at $49 per month.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON THE HUBBION BLOG

(Princessdlaf/Getty Images)

Oooph. That’s about the best way to sum up the state of Canada’s economy after a barrage of awful economic reports in recent weeks.

First up was fresh evidence that Canada’s manufacturing sector is struggling, despite all the support it’s received from cheap oil, the low loonie and a strengthening U.S. economy. Factory sales fell in May by 1 per cent, the third monthly drop this year.

After that, we learned Canada suffered the steepest monthly decline in GDP since 2009, as the full impact of the Fort McMurray wildfires caused the economy to shrink by 0.6 per cent in May. As Statistics Canada noted at the time, the majority of the downturn was due to the fires, but not all of it. In fact, in three of the first five months of 2016 that we have data for, Canadian real GDP declined on a monthly basis, even when the beleaguered oil sands are taken out of the picture.

Then on Friday we got a double whammy of awful news on the jobs and exports fronts. First, the wallop from Statistics Canada’s labour force survey—the country lost 31,000 in July, a far, far cry from the 10,000 new jobs that were expected to be created. Ontario in particular was hit hard, losing more than 36,000 positions.

Perhaps one of the most troubling aspects of the jobs report, though, was that hourly wage growth has hit a wall, climbing just 1.8 per cent over last year, compared to an annual gain of 3.25 per cent in February. When combined together the drop in employment, slumping wage gains and stagnant growth in hours worked paint a picture of a labour market in distress.

Friday also brought yet more dismal news about trade. Canada’s trade deficit—the gap between the value of the goods it buys from the rest of the world and what it sells—widened to its largest in history. The trade shortfall hit a record $3.6 billion in June—in fact, of Canada’s 10 largest monthly trade deficits of all time, five have occurred this year alone. Worst of all, non-energy exports suffered a fifth straight monthly decline, and fell 3.5 per cent from the year before, the biggest year-over-year decline since 2012.

That’s a lot of scary news for the economy to digest in a short period of time. The worry is this will create a feedback loop, where bad news begets more bad news. As it is, this has already been the weakest recovery for business investment in decades, with the private sector on track for its lowest share of capital construction expenditures in a quarter century. So it’s hard to see businesses opening up their wallets to invest, which is what’s sorely needed in order to reduce the economy’s over-reliance on consumer spending and real estate.

This is also likely to make the job of Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz a lot more difficult. The recovery in non-energy exports, driven by the weaker loonie and a strengthening U.S. economy, was an important part of his explanation for how Canada would finally move beyond the effects of low oil prices. At the very least, that recovery seems to be on hold, though perhaps continued improvements south of the border—a report on Friday showed the U.S. economy created 255,000 jobs, exceeding expectations of 180,000 new jobs—will boost Canada’s non-resource economy in the coming months. If that doesn’t happen, Poloz may feel he has to cut interest rates again, at the risk of further inflating housing bubbles in Toronto and Vancouver.

Before Poloz does that, though, he will want to see if the fiscal stimulus measures revealed in the Trudeau government’s first budget work as promised. Ottawa plans to run a $29-billion deficit in fiscal 2016-17 as it rolls out its stimulus measures, including spending on infrastructure and enhanced child benefits. Last month the first payments under the new Canada Child Benefit went out to households, with some economists predicting it will add 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points to GDP this year due to higher consumer spending. All told, the government forecasted that its budget measures would add 0.5 percentage points to GDP.

Which raises the question: At what point do the dismal jobs numbers, weak exports and slumping GDP become a political problem for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau?

The Conservatives are certainly trying to pin the blame for the stumbling economy on Liberal policies. “Canadians have no reason to trust the Liberal Government when it comes to Canada’s economy,” Lisa Raitt, the party’s finance critic, said in a statement on Friday. “The Liberal Government claimed that if it borrowed tens of billions of dollars, it could grow the economy and create jobs. In reality, the Liberals have failed to deliver results for middle-class families and the Canadian taxpayer will be left to pay the bill.”

In reality, the Trudeau government is only nine months into its first mandate, and less than five months have passed since the Liberals brought down their 2016 budget. For now, at least, the polls suggest Canadians are willing to accept the government’s position that it inherited a slow economy made worse by shocks like the Fort McMurray fires.

Yet a key plank in the Liberals’ election campaign was that Trudeau would bring a more activist government to Ottawa capable of engineering stronger growth through deficit spending—all in contrast to his predecessors low-tax, laissez-faire approach. (Never mind that there’s really little that any government can do in the short term to influence the economy.)

Whatever the polls say now, there’s a limit to how long Canadians will support the Trudeau government if its big deficits and bold promises don’t at least appear to deliver good news soon.

The post Don’t look now, Canada’s economy is getting ugly appeared first on Macleans.ca.

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Chip-enabled credit cards are supposed to be more secure than magnetic stripe cards, because the chip’s ability to create dynamic, single-use data is nearly impossible for fraudsters to counterfeit.

But at the Black Hat computer security conference, researchers from payments technology firm NCR announced that they’ve uncovered a way that can be bypassed, according to CNN.

Chip cards still include a magnetic stripe so they can be used at merchants that have not yet upgraded to EMV-enabled terminals. But when a user attempts to pay via swipe at a chip-enabled terminal, they are generally instructed to “dip” the card into the chip reader.

NCR believes that there’s a way that hackers will be able to rewrite the magnetic stripe coding on a card to make it appear “chipless” when swiped, therefore allowing them to continue to replicate and counterfeit essentially fake chip cards, according to CNN.

The flaw could keep retailers hesitant to upgrade to EMV-enabled terminals. Merchants could potentially prevent this type of counterfeit fraud by enabling point-to-point encryption (P2PE) on their terminals, a feature that most manufacturers include, but require merchants to manually enable.

That means that if merchants aren’t aware of the need for encryption, they might believe that the expenses associated with upgrading to EMV — new terminals cost up to $600 each, plus other costs associated with activation — isn’t worthwhile, and will continue using their old terminal. And that could exacerbate an ongoing problem, because 41% of smaller merchants have not upgraded to EMV terminals — and 20% of that group, which would be most likely to be unaware of the need for encryption, don’t plan to do so.

Fraud cost U.S. retailers approximately $32 billion in 2014, up from $23 billion just one year earlier. To solve the card fraud problem across in-store, online, and mobile payments, payment companies and merchants are implementing new payment protocols that could finally help mitigate fraud.

John Heggestuen, senior research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on payment security that looks at how the dynamics of fraud are shifting across in-store and online channels and explains the top new types of security that are gaining traction across each of these channels, including on Apple Pay.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

• EMV cards are being rolled out with an embedded microchip for added security. The microchip carries out real-time risk assessments on a person's card purchase activity based on the card user's profile. The chip also generates dynamic cryptograms when the card is inserted into a payment terminal. Because these cryptograms change with every purchase, it makes it difficult for fraudsters to make counterfeit cards that can be used for in-store transactions.
• To bolster security throughout the payments chain encryption of payments data is being widely implemented. Encryption degrades valuable data by using an algorithm to translate card numbers into new values. This makes it difficult for fraudsters to harvest the payments data for use in future transactions.
• Point-to-point encryption is the most tightly defined form of payments encryption. In this scheme, sensitive payment data is encrypted from the point of capture at the payments terminal all the way through to the gateway or acquirer. This makes it much more difficult for fraudsters to harvest usable data from transactions in stores and online.
• Tokenization increases the security of transactions made online and in stores. Tokenization schemes assign a random value to payment data, making it effectively impossible for hackers to access the sensitive data from the token itself. Tokens are often "multiuse," meaning merchants don't have to force consumers to re-enter their payment details. Apple Pay uses an emerging form of tokenization.
• 3D Secure is an imperfect answer to user authentication online. One difficulty in fighting online fraud is that it is hard to tell whether the person using card data is actually the cardholder. 3D Secure adds a level of user authentication by requiring the customer to enter a passcode or biometric data in addition to payment data to complete a transaction online. Merchants who implement 3D Secure risk higher shopping-cart abandonment.

In full, the report:

• Assesses the fraud cost to US retailers and how that fraud is expected to shift in coming years
• Provides 5 high-level explanations of the top payment security protocols
• Includes 7 infographics illustrating what the transaction flow looks like when each type of security is implemented.
• Analyzes the strengths and weakness of each payment security protocol and the reasons why particular protocols are being put in place at different types of merchants.

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

1. Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
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The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of payments security.

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The core idea behind this book is that marketers need to embrace and take responsibility for the entire sales funnel, not just the top half. It’s the new B2B imperative that marketers take full responsibility for the revenue impact of their efforts, that they work closely with their sales counterparts to make them more efficient and help them convert more opportunities into closed deals.

The book covers a wide range of “full funnel marketing” areas, including technology, sales enablement, productivity best practices and more. It’s both comprehensive in scope and easy to flip to the content you need for an immediate situation in your business.

What pushback have marketers had to the idea of working the entire funnel?

We’ve seen pushback from marketing, from sales, even from executive teams initially who either don’t understand the concept or aren’t seeing the full potential of what marketing can help achieve in the organization.

Marketers specifically, in many companies, have been so used to working the top of the funnel – focusing on Web visits and campaigns and leads – that it can be hard to see sales enablement, for example, as something in their purview. But increasingly, we see marketers grasping the idea that they are managing a profit center, that their role and stature in the organization can grow leaps and bounds when they put themselves closer to sales and revenue.

Talk more about that, how has the perception of marketers changed with a Full Funnel Marketing approach?

I’ve heard more than one sales VP or c-level executive describe marketing as the “arts and crafts” department – the group that does creative and business cards and trade show booths but is acting as a cost center. Unfortunately, many marketers have earned this distinction (even if it’s a bit unfair) by focusing their reporting on clicks, opens and activities instead of outcomes.

Marketers who embrace the full funnel opportunity are also embracing more risk and responsibility. And when they report on the revenue impact of their efforts, it’s hard not to take them more seriously. These marketing leads are seen increasingly as core to the growth of the organization, as key drivers of accelerating sales and profitability. They’re making decisions and triaging focus areas based on what drives business value, not marketing milestones.

So how do Full Funnel Marketers measure their work? What’s on their scorecards?

It’s fine to still measure the impact of marketing activities and campaigns, but Full Funnnel Marketers know that this is merely a means unto the ends that counts. You can’t buy a beer with a marketing-qualified lead.

Modern marketers see closed deals, marketing contribution to pipeline and marketing-influenced revenue as key measures of their impact and success. These are more difficult to measure, but ultimately are the right focus and benchmark for marketing’s value to the organization.

Is there any value in sales leaders reading this book as well?

Absolutely. This is a blueprint for how sales & marketing organizations can work together, but also gives sales leaders an idea for how to more proactively partner with marketing counterparts who embrace the Full Funnel model.

How can our readers get a copy of the book? It’s available for free on our Web site, just click here!

The sales culture in tech has changed dramatically over the past few years.

With the rise of sales-related software and changing customer demand, salespeople no longer just rely on personal relationships and three-martini lunches to sell their products.

Instead, the new sales culture requires more technology input, role specialization, and teamwork to maximize the chances of selling, according to DocSend, a sales document analytics software maker.

To illustrate this change, DocSend has recently put together an infographic based on data from LinkedIn, Salesforce, CEB, and McKinsey, explaining why this change is happening and how you could improve your sales culture as well.

Take a look:

SEE ALSO: These superstar execs made more than $5 million selling business software last year

DocSend says the old sales model is outdated and inefficient. Sales data is dispersed, salespeople work individually, and the overall sales process is disorganized.

That's a big problem in today's sales environment where buyers have higher demands. Purchasing decisions are made by consensus and everyone wants higher, measurable returns. A lot of customers now ask for customization, and third party consultants often get involved as well, further complicating the sales process.

To deal with this change, DocSend points out 3 things you should do immediately to sell more. First, use sales-related software across the entire sales process. Make CRM software like Salesforce your database tracker, and use predictive analytic software like Insidesales.com to make smarter decisions. Social selling tools like LinkedIn or e-signature software like DocuSign are also must-haves.

While marketing copy should be useful and informative, it can still be used as an effective tool to sell more. Providing value to your customers is always a solid strategy for strengthening your business.

Make sure your marketing is focused on helping you achieve your business goals. Here are some strategies to help.

How to Sell More With Your Marketing Content

Follow Your Marketing Strategy –Have you considered the best ways to reach your ideal customer base? Developing and following a marketing plan can help you stay focused on the future, setting and exceeding your marketing and sales goals for the future. Plan out the number of blogs you intend to write, and where you intend to publish them.

Plan out the other channels you are looking to use to spread the word about your business. In an insanely distractive world, it’s a good idea to remain intentional and keep the bigger picture in mind as you are tempted to tinker with the newest blogs, websites and social media outlets. Keep track of where you receive the most traffic, and the most leads, and do more of that.

Reuse Your Blog Posts – Your blog posts don’t have to enter a world of darkness after they have made the social media promotions round exactly one time. Bring paper copies of the ones that answer frequent customer questions as you speak to people in person. With sites like Create Space, it is more feasible to compile them in book form than ever before. You can also schedule older (but successful) posts on your social media channels to keep providing value.

You can concentrate ahead of time on writing “evergreen” content. This is simply content that always remains useful, and contains no time element. For example, I have the date feature on my blog turned off. I do this because I don’t want someone to simply look at the date and think that any writing advice or marketing advice might not be useful because it’s more than a few weeks old.

Perfect Your Headlines – Your headline is the single biggest determining factor on whether someone who comes across your content will read it or not. So read up on the tips for creating a compelling headline. Learn how to perfect your word choice and make an enticing promise in the fewest words possible. Study the websites that are the best at enticing people to click. Your headline is what generates interest. Without that, all your other efforts are lost.

Post in the Right Places – Just because everyone under the sun is on Facebook, doesn’t mean that’s where they will automatically turn for a specialized B2B product. It might be the right site for you to market your business. It might not. Try different social media sites, and experiment with what drives the most traffic to your website.

What are the best general information websites within your industry? Look for ways to write guest posts for them. Read and provide thoughtful comments on their other published materials. Thoughtfully participate in the industry conversations that are taking place in other websites around you. It does wonders for your visibility.

Focus on Your Customer – A lot of the marketing copy out there really isn’t focused on the customer at all. It is another repackaging of the sales message, and therefore falls flat. Think about it…would you hop on the computer to read or view hours worth of hard-sell advertising copy? Doubtful. The TV commercials and newspaper advertising of the past dealt with an already captive audience. Consumers find your online marketing content on their own accord. If you want to sell more, you have to persuade them to read your content.

Speak in Benefits – One of the best ways to speak the same language as your customer, is to convey the benefits of your product or service. A V8 engine on a car is a feature. Driving 0-60 faster than any other car you’ve ever owned is a benefit. Readers want know how your industry, products or services can benefit them.

Write Something You Would Read – Step out of your own shoes for a minute. Really think about what your reader might be looking for. What are some of the common questions potential customers in your industry might have? What is some of the information everyone should know about your industry? The better your content meets reader needs, the stronger the connection you’ll have.

You can use the Google Keyword Planner to find out what people are searching for. You can think back to the common questions potential customers ask in person, for a larger built in audience. You can also ask your readers and customers what kind of content they are looking for.

Teach Instead of Selling – Your blogs and other “soft” marketing materials are not the place to offer a hard sell. Your reader has a problem. If that problem is not addressed (with you positioned as the solution), they’ll likely lose interest. Giving your readers a strong catalog of useful information positions you as the expert. When your readers determine they no longer want to take on a project themselves, who do you think they’ll reach out to? The teacher.

Keep Current – There is no shortage of information about your industry online. Your readers are faced with a barrage of choices, sometimes to the point that making a decision is overwhelming. Keeping current on the latest technologies, trends or products only helps your efforts as industry expert. It keeps you positioned as the knowledgeable option.

Push Your Customers for Reviews or Testimonials – Social proof is a significant factor in online selling. You can talk until you’re blue in the face about how great your business is. The second a customer is willing to do the talking, you will sell more, because people are more apt to listen.

Who are the recent happy customers? Who are the people who made your day with kind words? Ask them to write you a LinkedIn recommendation, or a testimonial for your website. If you sell a product, ask for a review.

Conclusion

People don’t want to be sold to, and that is even more true online. But if you can relate to people on a human level, they will start to trust you, and you can build relationships. Some additional steps you can take to help you sell more include:

• Perfect your calls to action, and learn how to make an ask.
• Tell better stories.
• Hire a marketing writer to help you with your content.

The best advice I can give would be to select one (or more) of the above listed strategies, and begin the work on improving your content. You can leverage your marketing content to sell more, by providing the right value – even without the hard sell.

Word of mouth can do wonders for your business. We’ve heard it all before – happy customers are what generates referrals. After all, what’s stronger social proof than someone raving about the company that helped solve all their problems?

But is word of mouth enough to generate the right leads and create sales?

There are many advantages to word of mouth marketing. People place more trust in recommendations from people they know as opposed to a random company. In addition, word of mouth is free and needs no upkeep on your end. You don’t have to strategize or do anything different than normal as long as what you are normally doing is helping to create positive word of mouth referrals.

Sounds great, right?

However, there’s also a weakness associated with relying solely on word of mouth that you need to consider before you give up on creating additional marketing strategies.

Word of mouth is hard to control – which means you can’t promote particular items, sales, or even target a type of customer. You can hope your customers pass on positive information about your company, but there’s not much you can do about it without setting up a system to help your customers share their experience. (And if you’re doing all that work, are you really saving yourself any time or money?)

So if you are still relying solely on word of mouth to generate leads and sales for your business, you could be giving your business the short end of the stick without even realizing it. With the amount of time that needs to be invested to generate one lead, you simply can’t be sure that word of mouth is going to consistently find people in the right stage of the buyer’s journey.

Don’t worry – we’re not saying word of mouth is a bad thing. But since it’s hard to control, it may be time to consider adding another tactic or two to your sales strategies and plans.

Why Inbound Marketing Can Increase Your Lead Generation – And Sales

How do you address the marketing gaps that word of mouth is not filling? Two words: inbound marketing.

Simply put, inbound marketing is about drawing in the right type of clients by providing them with the right information and resources they need to solve their problem. (Don’t worry – you’re still the one helping them with their problem.)

It also allows you to create a lead generation strategy that builds a relationship with potential clients – instead of simply hoping they call.

So, don’t fret! With inbound marketing, you can balance out the short-comings of word of mouth to create a strategy that works best for your company’s sales and lead generation.

Here are just a few of the ways that inbound marketing can help your sales and lead generation processes.

Start Speaking to The Right Audience

While it’s wonderful that your clients are talking about you, you can’t exactly control who they speak to. If they’re coming across your perfect buyer persona on a regular basis, then it’s probably a great thing. But what if they’re not?

As we mentioned above, inbound marketing is about attracting the right buyers. It’s also focused on speaking to an audience that has a problem you can solve.

With word of mouth, who knows if the people hearing about you actually have a need for you? Inbound marketing connects you to potential clients who are actively looking for a solution to their problems.

Nurture Relationships with Leads

People rarely make a purchase the first time they hear about you – especially not in today’s day and age. Instead, they research and read reviews to really decide which company is the most trustworthy to invest in.

In fact, 80% of sales will happen after at least five touch points.

It’s hard to create touch points with leads who are only touching base with your clients – and not you. How do you build a relationship without actually interacting with someone?

It’s easier than it sounds. Imagine your perfect client shows up on your blog from a search engine. At the bottom of the post, there’s a call-to-action leading them to download a quick checklist on the same topic. They sign up to receive it and now they’re subscribed to your newsletter and are part of an automated email workflow. Next, they receive a set of emails that talk more about the same topic they’re interested in. These emails direct them to other blog posts, opt-ins, and finally a bottom of the funnel offer such as a free trial or demo where you can show that your company is the one that can solve their problem.

On top of the email workflow, other things to nurture the relationship and keep your company in the front of their mind occur, such as regularly receiving your newsletter in their inbox. It won’t be long before they see you as a trusted expert in the field – and someone who can help them solve their problems.

Announce Your Promotions

You spend a lot of time thinking up the perfect promotion – one that will connect with your buyer personas, while making them feel like they can’t pass up the opportunity to do business with you. But promotions only work if people know about them.

Is it likely that your clients will tell people about each and every promotion you do?

Unfortunately, no – and to rely on this sales method would require you to make sure your clients are constantly informed about all your promotions, even the ones that may not apply to them.

Target Peak Times – And Slow Seasons

Does your business ebb and flow? Most businesses aren’t hitting consistent numbers from month to month. If you’re relying solely on word of mouth, your slow season may continue to crawl.

But what would your sales growth look like if you could emerge from that slow season?

On the other hand, you’ll also want to prepare for peak seasons so that customers are fully aware of your offerings and any seasonal promotions. During the time of the year when consumers are spending the most, you want to reach as many people as possible, all in a short timeframe. You’ll want to reach beyond your (and your client’s) network.

Good news travels fast – but does it travel fast enough to make your sales promotion a success?

If Not Word of Mouth, What Lead Generation Tactics Should You Choose?

Instead of considering just word of mouth, think instead about how a referral system that leads prospective clients into a relationship with you can transform your sales numbers. If you believe all you need is word of mouth, you’ll be amazed at how adding another strategy can help grow your company.

Even if you want to stick to the premise of word of mouth, try today’s updated inbound version of it: social media. On social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, when one person shares their review, there’s a possibility it will be seen by thousands of people. And if someone recommends you to their followers, you can step in to form a relationship with them immediately without waiting for them to decide whether to come to you or not. Social media encompasses all of the pros of word of mouth marketing with the extra benefits of an inbound strategy.

Go ahead – give inbound marketing a try. The best part? With inbound marketing, you have data to measure. You can determine what methods are working, which aren’t, and alter them to create optimum results for each part of your lead generation strategy.

Try doing that with word of mouth.