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In the not-too-distant past, B2B sales professionals were considered unlikely to participate in teamwork or to engage in virtually any collaborative behavior. The inherent nature of the dog-eat-dog, quota-oriented job, the typical competitive persona drawn to it, and the highly leveraged compensation structure usually supporting it all add up to the classic 20th-century stereotype: Trusting no one, guarding one’s territory aggressively and never sticking one’s neck out to help a colleague who could be considered a competitor.

Quick Takeaways:

• Modern sellers are far more amenable to learning and sharing via peers
• Collaboration platforms, video solutions and gamification can be effectively deployed to support long-term learning goals
• Rich media solutions are well-suited to nano-learning and real-time, self-paced sales rep education

It’s little wonder that Glengarry Glen Ross and other caricatures of salespeople are so ingrained in popular and business culture. All the current talk about the buyer’s journey is informed by claims that consumers want to delay, at all costs, interacting with an actual, human salesperson.

Modern sellers, particularly those classified as millennials, are changing this work style dramatically. They’ve come of age in a time when gathering knowledge has moved away from “whatever the boss says” and toward a global network of peers and strangers whose content has democratized information access for anyone with a broadband connection and an interest in self-improvement. This trend doesn’t mean that younger, digital sellers are less competitive. They’re merely products of a foundational shift that empowered them to more effectively leverage best practices from their colleagues and industry peers to gain accolades and awards.

As enablement leaders, once we recognize that knowledge acquisition is no longer a purely downstream process within the sales organization, we gain the opportunity to leverage collaborative learning to yield win-win-win results for sellers, buyers, and our companies at the same time. In the spirit of “there’s an app for that,” here are some technology families you can use to enhance the benefits for all these stakeholders:

1) Enterprise social collaboration (ESC)

Many sales enablement organizations benchmarked by SiriusDecisions deploy either a standalone solution or one integrated with their sales force automation (SFA) platform to foster communications, ideation, teamwork, and community-building within their companies. Platforms such as Chatter, Jive, or Yammer allow institutions to flatten out bureaucracy, cut through red tape and politics and allow the sellers’ “hive” to stand up and adopt the best ideas and practices within any defined group of team members and near the most frequented watering holes.

Just as consumers have learned to place more trust in buyer reviews than in corporate marketing, millennial sellers are likely to weigh peer input as heavily as what they’ve learned from managers and in-house trainers. Collaboration initiatives can also be strongly legitimized by organizational leaders willing to let employees self-identify their peer groups (such as a new-hire class of sales reps) as long as it is maturely executed.

This resolves the inevitable onboarding questions of where to find information and understand policy, and builds a sense of community and healthy competition among quota-carriers. Still, many ESC initiatives fail to build sustained support, so garnering early executive sponsorship and tracking business-centric KPIs is crucial for long-term success. Encouraging collaboration around sales deals and opportunity management will pay more long-term dividends than happy hours or fantasy sports leagues.

2) Video learning and coaching

Another attribute associated with younger sellers is rooted in their deep experience with rich media offerings. Video is far more engaging to multiple senses and helps individuals (especially visual learners) absorb content more holistically -- and it serves as a hedge against attention issues.

Commonly used solutions such as Allego, Brainshark, and CommercialTribe are often deployed by sales enablement to record and refine everything from sales pitches to negotiation tactics and practice real-time, pre-meeting call scripting. After all, people buy from people, and video is well-suited to refining the human element of B2B selling. Don’t assume that all first-line sales managers will miraculously produce better results with video ­-- it extends good coaching but can’t fix the bad.

3) Gamification

While most sales leaders think about deploying game mechanics and contests to modify short-term behaviors around activities that immediately impact revenue -- such as selling a hot new product or rescuing a stalled pipeline -- there is equal value in using platforms such as Badgeville, Bunchball, or Hoopla to support sales rep or channel partner learning.

One of the most difficult sales enablement challenges -- how to continuously train reps once onboarding is over and they’re laser-focused on hitting quota in their assigned territories -- can be addressed by tapping into reps’ competitive nature. Gamification, which translates activities and results into points, badges, and leaderboards, leverages this instinct to drive behavioral outcomes.

For example, an organization entering a new industry vertical may prefer that sales enablement certify reps on the new sector rather than take quota-carriers out of the field for formal training. With an SFA-embedded competition -- points, recognition, or cash awarded to the first individuals (or teams) who complete asynchronous nano-learning on the new subject matter – sales enablement can leverage gamification for collaborative learning results. Take pains not to over-gamify reps lest they permanently back-burner your good intentions, and avoid over-rewarding only quantity-based activity vs. business-oriented results.

Today, there is more awareness of the value of growing and supporting employees throughout the course of their tenure. Most sales enablement leaders will overlap with human resources or corporate training when creating a companywide culture of continuous learning. Whether the solutions above are deployed as standalone tools or embedded in a larger-scale learning management system, leveraging the most common attributes of modern sellers to make learning a natural, enjoyable, social, and competitive is a highly effective best practice.

Editor's note: This post originally appeared on the SiriusDecisions blog and has been republished here with permission. 

SiriusDecisions empowers the world's leading marketing, product and sales leaders to make better decisions, execute with precision and accelerate growth. We enable B2B portfolio marketing teams to drive their organizations’ go-to-market success for an offering or a portfolio, whether it consists of products, solutions or services. Learn more about how we help sales enablement leaders.

Shyness, according to Psychology Today, is "the awkwardness or apprehension some people feel when approaching or being approached by other people."

Shy people often "desperately want to connect with others, but don't know how or can't tolerate the anxiety that comes with human interaction."

John Stoker, president of DialogueWORKS and author of "Overcoming Fake Talk," says that 40% or more of the population would classify as "shy."

That means there's a good chance you'll have to deal with shy people at the office, networking events, or client meetings – and it may behoove you to know how to approach them. 

We asked Stoker for his tips on making a shy person feel at ease, and getting them to open up quickly.

Here are the six steps he shared:

This is an update of an article written by Natalie Walters.

SEE ALSO: The 10 best jobs for introverts

1. Start with an introduction and an easy question

"Hi, I'm Jane Doe from _____. Who are you?"

While this may seem like a blunt introduction, Stoker says that you have to start with a simple, innocuous question like this to build a rapport.

"Asking questions is the easiest way to deepen or create a relationship with someone," he says.

2. Affirm the meeting

"If you make the first move by introducing yourself and taking an interest in the person, you will help to set them at ease, which will help you to establish a relationship with the person that could pay huge returns," he says.

But you'll want to go a step further and tell them how excited you are to be meeting them.

Try something like "I'm so glad we had a chance to meet today," "I'm so happy we're finally meeting!" or "It certainly is a pleasure to meet you today."

3. Use their name — often

"People love to hear their name," Stoker says.

So address them by it whenever possible.

It tells them that you really listened to their introduction and that you're engaged in the conversation.

Email marketing is tough enough.

I get that.

Yet here I am talking about MOBILE email marketing like you don't have your hands full enough with ‘regular' emails…

Here's the thing though.

When you focus on email marketing, you are taking a step back.

When you set your eyes on mobile friendly email marketing… you are definitely heading in the right direction – forward.

Why?

For starters, 80% of smartphone users check their phones within 15 minutes of waking up. (source: MediaBistro)

I bet you want to be one of those businesses greeting their (potential) customers in their inbox first thing in the morning, don't you?

Here's another cool stat: a whooping 68% of all emails are read on mobile devices! (source: Movable Ink – more mobile friendly email stats here)

You see where I am going with this?

Your emails HAVE TO be easily read across multiple mobile devices.

Otherwise, you might as well save the effort… and time… and take that time to learn about making your emails mobile friendly!

Let me show you how.

Don't miss any future videos; subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Mentioned in the video:

Infographic: 7 Simple Tips to Create Traffic-Driving Mobile Friendly Emails

Side Note: Why Video Posts?

Why indeed…

There's another topic I've been checking up on in the past couple of weeks: video marketing and its potential impact on website traffic.

WOW. The stats here are just as staggering.

According to a report from Cisco, by 2020, over 82% of all web traffic will come from video.

And this study by Vidyard shows that video drives better results. Period.

So much so that marketers who use video:

• receive 41% more web traffic from search than non-users;
• see 27% higher click-through rates;
• and grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users.

In other words, I feel like I no longer have a choice whether or not to deliver my content through video.

However… I am not a videographer.

I hate being in front of the camera.

I get lost for words.

Or start blabbering.

And editing videos?… Don't even get me started…

My new best video creating friend to the rescue: Content Samurai. Where have you been hiding all these years!…

Content Samurai is a completely web-based video system that allows you to create

• great full-length videos
• from scratch
• in minutes
• without any complicated editing software
• without a steep learning curve
• without having to pay someone thousands of dollars to do it for you.

How great of a video? The kind of video you just watched above. And this was my first one with Content Samurai.

There are many uses for Content Samurai, but the one I see getting the most mileage out of is converting your existing and future blog posts into videos to reach a new segment of your audience.

I am excited about the potential.

Moreover, I am on my way to turn that potential into reality.

What about you?

Can you relate to what I said above?

Then you should definitely check out Content Samurai for yourself.

And by the way… here's the coolest part of going through my Content Samurai affiliate link: should you choose to buy Content Samurai to claim your share of video traffic in your market, you can get a cool 53% off the advertised price.

Yep!

Check out Content Samurai and 53% discount is yours.

Off to convert more blog posts into videos,

The post 7 Simple Ways to Drive More Traffic with Mobile Friendly Emails [VIDEO] appeared first on TrafficGenerationCafe.com. Don't miss Ana's free Bite-Size Traffic Hacks email series - short actionable traffic tips to double your traffic in no time.

Thanks to substitutions, endless flavors and add-ons, and secret menus and combos, pretty much any drink at Starbucks is fully customizable.

The only downside to these bespoke beverages is that often they end up costing more. 

Luckily, we found a Quora thread in which Starbucks baristas and loyal customers share their tips and tricks on how to conquer the menu without breaking the bank.

From how to order a Captain Crunch frappucino to how to get freebies regularly, here are the best takeaways.

Max out on flavor

"Iced Teas are double-strength in pitcher and watered down for your final recipe. Ask for 'no water' for a much stronger (and, in my opinion, more effective) flavor," wrote Josh Whittington, a former Starbucks barista. 

Whittington also suggested, "Chai Lattes (hot) are made with hot water to even out the flavor. If you enjoy cinnamon/chai flavors, ask for a Chai Latte with no water. For even better flavor, ask for soy."

To get the most out of your coffee, Ibai Garcia says to order your beverage at kid's temperature. "By doing so they will serve you a drink at 135 degrees, which is way more pleasant to drink, and get the full flavor of the coffee," he said.

Self-described coffee fanatic Ryan Stenson says the best-tasting coffee at Starbucks is a short cappuccino. "It's the closest they come to making a regular double-shot cappuccino that you'd get at a top-tier (Blue Bottle, Stumptown, Four Barrell, etc.) coffee shop."

"Order Grande not Venti," wrote Jim Humphries. "If, like me, you're in it for the caffeine, don't bother with Venti, as both Grande and Venti contain 2 espresso shots." 

If you have a few minutes to spare, follow Stephen Carlson's advice and ask for a pour over. This way, you're guaranteed freshly-brewed coffee every time. 

Secret drinks worth trying 

Doppio Macchiatto — "Soy, extra foam, ristretto (two shots of espresso over a thick bed of soy foam, no liquid. Ristretto means the shots are pulled short, adding an extra complexity to the flavor)." - Josh Whittington

Dirty Oprah — "To impress someone or get a chuckle, order a "Dirty Oprah," which is basically a dirty (shot of espresso) Oprah chai. Ask for no water because they usually dilute it with water." - Ricky Yean 

How to save some cash

The Starbucks rewards program is meant to save you some money for frequent spending at the coffee shop. Longtime members like Tracy Chou know how to hack the system to save even more cash. "I use a registered Starbucks card so all my customizations (flavor shots, soy substitutions) are free," she wrote. 

"When making purchases, ask the cashier to ring up each purchase individually," advises Brandi Clevinger. Because each order gives you one star on your card, divvying up your order will fast-track you to your next free item. 

Low-calorie alternatives

"My favorite substitute for any of the fall/winter latte flavors (which are both expensive and high in calories): a grande skim misto with 1 to 2 pumps of the flavor of your choice (hazelnut and peppermint are my favorites)," said Lauren Lachs. 

According to Lachs, a regular peppermint mocha with nonfat milk comes to around 370 calories. By ordering her drink combo, you get the same flavor at 110 calories. 

For a low-carb and sugar-free option, Kelly Dassow suggests ordering an iced coffee with heavy cream. "They have it  in the back and they will get it for you if you ask."

Join the conversation about this story »

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When I stepped into the role of planning director inside Nike in the spring of 1986 marketing was a dirty word.

At that time a marketing department didn’t exist and Nike had never written an annual marketing plan. In its place Nike had product line managers, who would manage the product planning process and brief the sales organization twice a year at sales meetings on the new features, functions and benefits of the latest Nike footwear products.

In 1986 Nike was fifteen years old. It had grown to $860 million in annual sales. The apparel division was run the same way. It had departments for product design, production, product line management and sales but no marketing department and no annual marketing plans. The apparel division like the footwear division had not yet figured out how to introduce the annual planning discipline of marketing.

There were three main obstacles preventing Nike from adopting a brand planning process.

1. Paralysis by Analysis: There was a fear among Phil Knight (Nike’s Co-Founder and CEO) and top management that marketing planning as practiced in other fast moving consumer packaged goods brands (like P&G) would create paralysis by analysis. And this paralysis would kill the Nike brand because every quarter hundreds of new footwear products and thousands of new apparel SKU’s were introduced. To slow down the flow of new product creation to analyze in advance what people wanted was considered a very bad business, brand and cultural idea.

2. Go-To-Market Efficiency: Nike was at a stage in its planning evolution where the go-to-market focus was on getting the product designed, priced, packaged and sold in the most efficient way. It was product, production and sales oriented in its processes. Its go-to-market efficiency didn’t make time for pre-testing products or advertising.

3. Sales Orientation: Once the new product information and product samples were handed off to the sales organization then it was up to sales to figure out how to get it sold. They were the champions of growth and strategy. Up to that point in time 80% of Nike product sales were made on the futures program. Nike’s futures program was a footwear industry innovation. Retailers were presented with samples of forthcoming new products and if they placed a sales order at least 5 to 6 months in advance they received a 10% discount on price and a guaranteed delivery date. This program reduced inventory risk. As the footwear industry growth trend was a visible phenomenon, retailers knew if they didn’t commit to a futures order in advance that next seasons hot selling product might not be available for shipment as an at once order. This motivated the retailer to take the inventory risk instead of Nike.

The Journey To Marketing Leadership

So given Nike’s internal systems orientation and it’s fears of paralysis by analysis how did it turn the corner and become known as one of the worlds premier marketing organizations?

The transition began with a meeting I requested in the spring of 1986 with Mark Parker (Product Design Director) and Tom Clarke (Product Line Management Director). Note: today Mark Parker is CEO of Nike and Tom Clarke is former CEO, currently President of Nike Innovation). At that time I was a Financial Systems Analyst working for Nike’s Controller and was just completing a two year project to redesign Nike’s core financial systems, upgrading Nike’s chart of accounts, 52 different sets of books governing consolidated financial reporting and management reporting. In the course of working in finance I had the opportunity to interview every department manager at the company on their reporting needs. In those conversations we had to anticipate future reporting and management control issues globally as the organization grew.

As a result of that work I was surprised to find that Nike didn’t have a marketing department. I also learned it had never written a marketing plan and it didn’t have feedback systems to help gauge the effectiveness of its product line management, advertising, sports promotions and other elements it was using to increase its selling effectiveness. So in calling the meeting with Parker and Clarke my intention was to convince them that the company would benefit greatly if it added marketing planning, systems and research to how business was currently being done. My boss told me that an Ivy League MBA had tried to impose a more formal planning system on the company two years earlier and after nine months of trying had been ejected from the company like a virus. So it was with some trepidation that I approached Parker and Clarke to present my ideas on what had proven to be a very unpopular topic.

In that meeting I presented them with two pieces of paper. On each piece of paper I had drawn a map. On the first sheet I traced the process flow for bringing a new product to market and the major hand off points between departments. This map I called the status quo. On the second map I presented a process flow that included a simple marketing planning framework that could be owned by the product line managers. This map allowed me to present a few research tools to serve marketing planning. I also presented how the budgeting process could be altered to better serve product line management (the precursor to marketing management). By putting the two maps side-by-side Mark and Tom were quickly able to grasp how adding a few additional steps wouldn’t slow down the flow of new products but it would increase the strategic insight into how to make more effective business development decisions.

After this meeting Tom Clarke told me that he would discuss the idea with Phil Knight and get back to me. One week later I was offered a new job (without a title) working under Tom Clarke to quietly bring the ideas in that breakfast meeting to life. In agreeing to the plan I had presented, Tom told me that Phil had given him some additional advice. He told Tom: “Just don’t let Jerome build an empire. I don’t want to slow the flow of new products. I don’t want paralysis by analysis. I don’t want our designers, developers and product line managers to lose their gut instincts.”

So in the spring of 1986 I transitioned from the Financial Systems Analyst to Nike’s first Director of Marketing Planning. For any Nike historians out there this was six years before the Nike Campus was built. My transition was from a cubicle to an office that was glassed floor to ceiling on one side and looked like a large shoebox in the middle of the product design bullpen called the sandbox. My secret weapons were my education; Nike core systems knowledge and an Apple McIntosh (the first in the company). I wasn’t given a job title until about one year after the job move. I had a clear mandate but I was asked to make no grand announcements as to my formal role. This was because the intuitive nature of how the organization worked was so strong that to announce in advance that I was going to lay new systems, planning and research tools on the organization would have guaranteed cultural resistance and failure. So when people asked me what I did during my first year in this new planning position I would make something up like, Oh I’m the product intelligence officer. That was sufficiently ambiguous and mysterious enough to keep the naysayers lurking in the weeds confused and quiet.

A Brand Culture Is Born

So how was the idea of planning successfully seeded into a Nike culture that was hostile to how companies like P&G conducted marketing planning? Here’s how it was done.

I wasn’t just an analytical geek that knew how Nike core systems, data flows and decision points worked. I was also a runner. At this time in Nike’s history everyday at lunchtime a large contingent of management could be found in the locker room suiting up for their daily run. So I was able to get to know all the senior managers as runners and people as conversation would permit. Some of these guys were college track stars and keeping up with them was painful to say the least. Running is a sport where you gain an intimate knowledge of your abilities, limits, expanding radius, improving times and potential. There is an honesty that runners have in self-assessment. You can’t fake it in a race, either you have done the training, built up your base, endurance, speed or you haven’t. Running is a sport that breeds intellectual honesty.

I befriended the running product line manger at the time, Claire Hamill and told her I’d like to help her develop a template for what a marketing plan for the company would look like. I told her I’d do most of the initial work and that it wouldn’t impose a big burden on her time. So we developed the first marketing plan together for the footwear running product line.

The initial fifteen-page document outline looked something like this:

Market Situation Analysis:

• US Running Category Size and Growth Rate
• US Running Category Market Shares (Leading Brands)
• Nike Sales and Market Share Current Year & Projected Two Years Out
• Target Running Consumer Profiles & Segmentation (by product / pricing levels)
• Nike Running Product Line by Season Projected Two Years Out
• Competitive Analysis (Brands, Key Products – How Nike was ahead, equal or behind)
• Channels of Distribution Analysis (Strengths & Weaknesses)
• Advertising & Communications Analysis
• Sports Promotions & Events Analysis
• Issues Analysis: SWOT Analysis (Internal Org Strengths & Weaknesses vs. External Threats & Opportunities.

Marketing Goals:

• Financial Goals: Current Year plus Next Two Years (sales, units, margins)
• Brand Positioning Goals: What people believe now versus what we wanted people to believe about Nike’s running presence 2 – 5 years in the future.

Marketing Strategies:

• Product Line Plan (18 months to 2 years out)
• Products Linked to Consumer Segments, Learning & Needs in Sales Toolkit
• Advertising Plan (Identification of statement products, athletes, stories and campaign concepts)
• Promotions Plan (Athletes, Events, Camps, Clinics, etc.)
• Public Relations Plan (to augment advertising reach)
• Consumer Research Plan (To eliminate key marketing blind spots)
• Organization Plan (To develop new talent, skills, technical capabilities to succeed)

It was very difficult gathering all the information to write this first plan. But once a year the product line managers were expected to request a budget to help move sales in their category forward. And in order to develop a holistic vision of how all the marketing mix elements could be aligned and focused to achieve the greatest synergy there needed to be one person responsible for a category to pull together the organizational insight and learning. In the process of writing the first plan the running product line manager had to go out and interview the heads of other business functions to understand what they could and would support. In the process of conducting those interviews consensus was being built before the plan was written.

Also, I emphasized with the product line managers that marketing is not a department. It’s a process. It’s the process of organizing scarce organizational resources and focusing them on satisfying customer and consumer latent and tacit needs. After Claire and I had written that first plan some of the intangible benefits of marketing planning started to become apparent. Especially the power of focusing elements across the matrix organization on achieving campaign impacts, much like in the launch of a movie.

The first marketing plan was put in a ring binder. Pages could be taken out and updated as new information arrived. The second year effort to write the plan took a fraction of the time to produce. It didn’t create paralysis by analysis. Instead it created a narrative, form recognition and shorthand communications between business functions to focus company resources on creating greater marketplace brand synergies and impact.

Before any of these benefits were realized there was still the challenge in that first year of seeding the need for planning with all the other product line managers in the footwear division. So next I called on the basketball product line manager Ron Hill. I showed Ron what had been done for the running category and told him about the process that Claire and I had gone through to produce the running plan and asked him if he wanted to try something similar for basketball. Ron could have refused to participate and shown me the door and that would have been the end of it. But, Nike is a very competitive culture. Ron immediately grasped that he was competing for scarce organizational resources to grow the basketball category. He immediately saw that the running product line manager had a better story, a justified story for why she was asking for millions of dollars in marketing support money that she hadn’t asked for in the prior year. And it was justified by the size of the market, Nike’s market share and growth rate and all the other assets and resources that Claire had shown she was focusing on in the plan to achieve seasonal campaigns to grow sales. So Ron immediately came to the conclusion he needed a marketing plan for basketball too.

In this manner all of the other product line managers learned about the marketing plan template and soon, my phone was ringing. Can you help me write one too? By the second year all of the product line managers in the apparel division were also writing similar plans. By the third year I was asked to travel overseas to show country managers how to think about marketing planning.

Marketing Becomes The Hero

At the end of that first year of getting marketing plans written for all of the 12 footwear product lines several interesting things happened. First, management noticed something different in the sales meetings. The footwear product line managers were the lead trainers and cheerleaders to the sales organization. By virtue of the fact that they had gone through the effort to analyze, plan, imagine, strategize, organize and lead the thinking behind the marketing development effort, they were much more informed, inspired and fluid on stage in the sales meetings. Their arguments for Nike superiority became more clear, profound and considered. They developed perspective on where the brand was going that never existed before. The materials they presented to the sales agents as aids to selling became more effective. The storytelling about marketing direction strategically built upon Nike’s brand strengths, it remedied competitive product weaknesses, blunted competitive brand threats and provided far more detail in profiling new opportunities and how those efforts would be supported in the calendar year ahead.

Prior to the advent of this new planning process Nike was still a great organization. It had streaks of marketing genius. For instance in 1984 Nike signed Michael Jordan and the Air Jordan phenomenon was born. But, while Nike was rising in stature what the public couldn’t see is that the depth and breadth of all of its product lines were not being optimally managed. Product category management lacked synergy, coordination and focus. Functional heads across the matrix organization pursued their own sub-unit goals, unconcerned about external team impacts.

The key to seeding the marketing planning discipline inside a culture that was allergic to planning was to show them how it could be done without creating paralysis by analysis. The management needed assuring that we wouldn’t slow the flow of new product launches down and we wouldn’t reduce the need for product line managers to rely heavily on gut intuition and gut instincts to make most of their day-to-day decisions.

The annual marketing planning process that was developed avoided these obstacles. Ultimately the new planning approach succeeded because it created a framework for annually analyzing the business more rigorously to justify increased investments in developing the business and brand further. It also allowed the matrix organization to learn how to mesh to support campaign launch events. The results of these changes were profound. In the next ten years after the installation of annual marketing planning Nike grew over 800% in annual sales. The process of annual marketing planning was the key to organizational learning from successes and failures. And it’s fair to say that today, as Nike exceeds $30 billion in annual sales that marketing and marketing planning are no longer dirty words but rather a welcome way of life that has led to market dominance.

These and other insights into brand truth, purpose and deep campaigns is covered in greater detail in my new book, Soulful Branding – Unlock the Hidden Energy In Your Company and Brand. For more about Nike, here’s what I learned working on the Just Do It campaign.

The Blake Project can help you make the shift. Contact us.

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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Everyone knows that mentoring relationships are one important avenue for professional learning. Young people are taught to seek out senior executives in their organization, function, industry, or geographical location who can help them learn the ropes, share knowledge, teach new skills, broaden their network and, in some cases, fast track their careers. Less talked about, but just as important, are the benefits and learning that mentors can derive from mentees.

The best of these relationships are, in fact, a mutual exchange. In my work studying cross-cultural mentor-mentee dyads in Canada—local executives who’d been paired with immigrant job-seekers—I found much give-and-take between partners. Though they were supposed to be the “gurus” in these pairings, the mentors said they, too, derived personal growth and development in multiple domains.

The first was in their awareness of and appreciation for diversity. After hearing mentees describe their experiences trying to navigate a new labor market, the mentors in my study reported feeling greater respect for newcomers and the value of inclusion. As one participant told me, “My role was to explain what life in Canadian business is like, and how to adjust. But that’s kind of unfair. We’re not asking Canadian business to adjust to immigrants. So I had a newfound respect for Paul and people in his situation.” Another commented, “I just wanted to go up to my VP and say, “I found a gem here. This person is so creative and knowledgeable, I think we could really benefit from their expertise.” A third emphasized the value of the back-and-forth exchange: “Her sharing of articles, thoughts, and feelings [led us to] great dialogues and conversation.”

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The 2016 Summer Olympic Games are opening in Rio de Janeiro amid environmental and health concerns ranging from the Zika virus to polluted competition waters. Brazil, which hosted the World Cup in 2014, is suffering from a deep recession and a political crisis. While the International Olympic Committee touts host cities’ economic legacy, the immense operational challenge of running a mega event creates intense logistical, security, and financial pressures. For ideas on how to improve future Olympics, I spoke with Chris Dempsey, a founding member of the group that defeated Boston’s bid for the 2024 Summer Games. The former Bain & Company consultant argues that recurring cost overruns and mothballed venues highlight the need for the Olympics to change its business model.

HBR: In the late 1800s the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin was enthralled by the archaeological excavations at Olympia in Greece. He gets the idea to revive the spirit of those ancient competitions and bring them to the modern age. The first modern Olympics takes place in Greece in 1896. What was Coubertin’s business model?

Dempsey: His business model was really based on that of the World’s Fair, another 19th-century invention. The idea was, for a wide range of people to experience these events, you really did have to move them around different cities and different continents. If you have them in one place year after year, that requires potentially many weeks of travel by boat for most people. So Pierre de Coubertin said the Olympics should move around, just like the World’s Fair.

He started a movement and helped create what’s now a multibillion-dollar mega event and an incredible international brand. How responsible was the business model for that success?

You have to give Pierre de Coubertin credit for the boldness of his vision and for what he was able to achieve. But even in the very first Olympics you saw the same sorts of cost overruns and overbuilding that you see today. In 1896 Athens had major overruns. The king of Greece asked Pierre de Coubertin to hold them in Athens every four years. They’d already built the infrastructure. But Coubertin was committed to the rotation model. Eventually the Games became something that cities started to compete for. They really wanted the opportunity to show off to the rest of the world and demonstrate that they, too, could host such a large-scale international event.

The business model is, in many ways, a franchise model. The International Olympic Committee is a relatively small organization. What it does, effectively, is sell the rights to various parties: the rights to host, to broadcast, and to sponsor the Games. For that model to be successful, it needs to have demand in each of those areas. There’s continued strong demand on the sponsorship side and on the television side. You’re seeing questions from the host city side about whether it’s really worth it.

In 2014 you cofounded No Boston Olympics to fight Boston’s bid to host the 2024 Summer Games. Within a year, as public support kept eroding, supporters withdrew their bid. The United States Olympic Committee made Los Angeles the country’s candidate host city instead. What was your strongest argument in defeating the Boston bid?

The most important argument on our side was around the IOC’s requirement of a taxpayer guarantee. The IOC requires a signed contract that makes the host city and its taxpayers responsible for cost overruns. The incentives just are not aligned for the IOC to choose a fiscally, environmentally, and socially responsible plan when it’s not picking up the tab. I think Bostonians saw that the costs and the risks far outweighed the benefits.

You believe that the Olympic business model is outdated. How so?

When Coubertin launched the Games in 1896, he could not have conceived of a world with television, the internet, and intercontinental air travel. All of these things have shrunk our world and made it so much easier to experience the Olympics, in person or in your living room. In today’s world you’d never start the Olympics the way Coubertin did in 1896. We’ve clung to that 19th-century model while the world has passed it by. Sadly, the people who endure the costs of that decision aren’t the IOC — they’re the residents of the host city. That’s the reason we’re seeing so many issues with Rio. People there understand it’s an example of massive resources going to the wrong things.

You went to Harvard Business School. You’re a former consultant at Bain & Company. Put on your consultant hat. If the International Olympic Committee hired you to come up with a new business model for the Olympics, what would you tell them?

The IOC should find a permanent location or maybe a small number of semipermanent locations to host the Summer and Winter Games. Doing so would still allow the IOC to generate as much revenue as it does today, and at a far lower cost to the hosts. In fact, this change could strengthen the Olympic brand, and help forgo many of the negative stories we’ve heard in Rio and Beijing and Sochi.

The IOC would transform itself from a franchising business, going into business itself and taking responsibility for running the Games. This would be a bold leap for the IOC, one that ultimately would lead to a much better outcome not just for the IOC but also for its stakeholders.

A permanent location would still give you that same scale of the spectacle. All the athletes would be in one place for the opening and closing ceremonies. But we would lose the ability to shine the limelight on a different world city each time.

What the IOC does best and where it creates the most value is in creating really compelling content that people around the world want to consume. And I can’t think of a reason why you wouldn’t be able to do that at a permanent location. You’d be able to climb the experience curve by repeating these activities on a regular basis. That’s one of the key challenges with the Olympic model today: You’re asking a city to host the world’s biggest, most extravagant, most complicated event, but to do it only once.

What about those broadcast stakeholders in a time zone on the opposite side of the globe?

That is probably the trickiest issue. Television broadcasters want as many live events to occur in their primetime hours as possible. You would have winners and losers. As a whole, I don’t necessarily see the overall value from the broadcasting stakeholders declining.

What about your other alternative model? A small number of distributed locations would perhaps help with the broadcast media stakeholders. But you’d lose that spectacle of having all the athletes in the same place. It would distribute a lot of the operational and the financial burden, but it would also diffuse much of the scale.

You heard a lot about that in the Olympic debate in Boston, that there’s a certain magic to bringing all those athletes and visitors together into a five square-mile area. On the other hand, 99.9% of people who engage with the Olympics do so on a screen and are distributed throughout the world. They’re going to have a similar experience, whether all those athletes are in one place or not. I think you can find ways to make it work and still retain that magic without all of the costs and drawbacks of having them all in one location.

In 2014 the IOC passed a series of reforms called Olympic Agenda 2020. The stated goal is to make hosting the Olympics more practical and affordable for cities. Under this plan, the IOC would support the use of temporary and existing venues that would cost less. Can the existing business model work with some changes?

The IOC has made the claim before that it understands the issue and that it’s going to reform, but it hasn’t actually demonstrated a willingness to stick to those promises. As I think about the business model going forward, the most likely outcome is that the IOC will continue to do what it’s doing. And it will continue to hope that some number of cities every few years will take that risk because of the glittery promise of being on the world stage. Things will continue to chug along, with unfortunate outcomes for residents and taxpayers in those host cities. I would love to say that I see a change on the way, but there’s nothing that the IOC has done to date that gives me any confidence that it’s truly reformed.

Are you going to be watching the Rio Olympics?

I was 10 years old when the Dream Team played in Barcelona, so I’ve always been a fan of USA basketball. [The group] No Boston Olympics was not opposed to athletes or their tremendous achievements or Olympic ideals. Our issue always was with the organizers and the IOC’s flawed process. Thankfully, I’m able to separate those two ideas and enjoy the events.

Hot on the heels of being acquired by Microsoft, LinkedIn just unveiled an eye-catching new feature that users should see massive benefit from.

You knew LinkedIn was headed here sooner rather than later.

When Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, it catapulted LinkedIn onto the same playing field with Facebook and other social media giants in terms of its ability to build out (and scale) new features on the site.

“Imagine a world where we’re no longer looking up at Tech Titans such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook, and wondering what it would be like to operate at their extraordinary scale — because we’re one of them,” LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said at the time.

LinkedIn’s Big New Feature – Native Video

LinkedIn is making good on Weiner’s promise, with the news breaking that LinkedIn is busy rolling out native video on the platform.

Up to this point, LinkedIn has relied on third party providers such as YouTube in allowing users to share video on their news feeds or inside of blog posts.

That all changes with the advent of “native” video, a move that has seen massive success on Facebook and other networks in recent months.

As with almost every new feature release on LinkedIn, the first users to get access are powerful “LinkedIn Influencers” – high-profile professionals, celebrities and business leaders with the most visibility and largest followings on the network.

Welcome to “LinkedIn Record”

The new native video feature allows you to use a mobile app called “LinkedIn Record” to film and share yourself answering questions submitted by other LinkedIn users.

LinkedIn has a sampling of videos online already that you can watch, starting with co-founder Reid Hoffman asking – and answering – a question about what’s next with Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the workplace.

The videos will automatically play on your desktop news feed (similar to Facebook) and are also available to watch via LinkedIn’s popular mobile app.

In addition, the example videos shared by LinkedIn feature several influencers answering the same question (about AI in the workplace) and are strung together, one after another, auto-playing until you hit “pause” on one of them.

What Native Video Means For LinkedIn

As someone who cannot stress enough the value of utilizing video on your LinkedIn profile page and elsewhere, I’m delighted the network is catching up to Facebook and everyone else in terms of moving native video forward on the platform.

Even more, additional video-related surprises are likely coming soon if you listen carefully to the hints some LinkedIn employees have been dropping in recent weeks.

As they say in the broadcasting business … stay tuned!

Improving sales performance is a continuous effort for high-powered sales organizations. While there are a lot of levers that help move the revenue needle, there are some tried and tested methods that will have your reps selling more deals in shorter time.

Below are our no-fail tips for improving sales performance.

Align with the Buyer Journey

First and foremost; successful sales organizations align their sales process with how their buyers buy. The rise of the connected buyer means your sales organization needs to account for buyers who are more educated and researched than ever before. They’ve done their homework on your solution – and your competitors’ solutions as well. Make sure your sales process is buyer-centric and tightly aligned with their buying process, not the way you want to sell.

Uncover Needs in Your Sales Conversation

One of the most high-impact tips to improve sales performance is to listen better. The best questions won’t do a thing for you if you don’t listen to the answers. Remember, too, to ask probing questions to uncover not only the size of the problem, but also the breadth of it. Without your reps doing this consistently, you won’t be able to increase your average deal size – a key indicator of sales performance.

Differentiate Based on Buyer Need

Buyers will pay a premium for a solution that fits their needs. It’s critical that your sales organization has a clear understanding of how your solution is different and/or better than the competition. It’s also important your salespeople understand how to align solution differentiation with what’s important to the buyer. You may have a service that goes above and beyond a competitors’, but, if it’s not something that’s important to the particular buyer, it won’t matter.

Don’t forget to also effectively differentiate between “Do Nothing” and “Do it Internally.” Often times, those two options are your biggest competitor.

Enable Your Front-Line Managers

One of the most effective ways you can improve sales performance is to enable your front-line managers to foster success on their teams. Provide your front-line sales managers with a repeatable rhythm that supports consistency throughout your sales organization. Do your front-line managers have a cadence that helps them coach reps to success?

Remember, the amount of time your front-line managers waste just trying to keep up with the forecast is valuable time not helping their team sell. Ensure consistency and improve efficiency by giving them tools that make their jobs easier.

Develop a sales operating rhythm that provides a consistent language and process around:

• Territory Reviews
• Account Reviews
• Opportunity Reviews
• Forecast Reviews
• Active Sales Call Participation and Feedback

Remember, it doesn’t matter how many reviews you do with someone. If there’s no focus on executable action, there is no value within the sales team and there’s no improvement in sales performance. An operating rhythm helps you as a sales leader drive that action.

For the last few weeks, we’ve been exploring how you can use your website to move prospects into and through your sales funnel. In this week’s post, we’ll examine what needs to happen once someone has been in your sales funnel for a while and is continuing to show interest.

Having the right timing matters. You don’t get to this part of the funnel after the first couple interactions. If I see one consistent mistake, it’s that people shift into these sorts of strategies way too early. It’s like meeting someone in a bar and proposing the same night. Odds are you aren’t going to get too many yeses.

I totally get it from a business’ point of view and have often felt that frustration myself. You’ve shared your expertise. You’ve answered their questions. Surely they should be ready to buy by now. They obviously like what you do enough to keep coming back. So why aren’t they buying?

In my thirty years of being in business, I’ve rarely met a buyer who is as anxious to make the sale as the seller. Sure, there are those customers who come to us in crisis, and we scramble to put out their fire but they’re not the norm. So what do we do? We hang in there, and we keep being helpful and we work to stay top of mind until they’re ready to move forward.

The other factor to remember is that while we are the ones who build the sales funnel, it’s the prospect that moves through it and they control the pace and direction. So while one prospect may linger in the getting to know you (remember our know • like • trust = sales model) or growing to like you section for years, another may whip through both of those and be willing to trust you enough for a trial purchase in a matter of a couple visits.

For your website to truly be an effective sales funnel, you need to offer different levels of engagement, so the prospects can move themselves through at their own speed. As we talked about in the last couple posts, that means free content (text and video if possible) and content that you’ll give them for an email trade. But what kinds of things should you have available for those who are ready to consider a purchase?

Believe it or not – one that many companies miss is having contact information on the site. Don’t make me look for your phone number or email address. If you have the capacity, live chat is great. But make sure I can contact you and give me more than one method. If you have a brick and mortar presence, be sure you list your street addresses as well, with a link to one of the mapping sites.

You can also offer the ability to schedule a call, demo or take an assessment that will require you contact them (usually by email) with the results.

Remember that most buyers want to be pretty sure they’re going to buy before they speak to a salesperson or company representative. When they do reach out, they may have some final questions but they’re very close to making a buying decision. Which means you need to be ready to respond quickly once they do trigger that next level of readiness. Test your site and all your internal systems to verify that nothing is going to get in the way of you finally connecting with this potential buyer.

Today’s consumers want to be able to shop us on the web. How well that works for you is completely in your control. Is your site ready?

The post Sales Funnel – When are they going to buy? appeared first on Drew's Marketing Minute.

It’s hard to say “no” to prospects. After all, you’re trying to get them to say yes -- so rejecting their ask or giving them an answer they don’t want to hear can feel risky.

But unless you want to make promises you can’t keep, give buyers unrealistic expectations, or commit to unfavorable terms, be prepared to deny them once in a while.

If you encounter any of the six situations below, tell the prospect “no.”

1) They Ask for Customer References Too Early

Prospects ask to speak to your customers for a variety of reasons: They want an unbiased opinion of your product, they’re not sure whether to trust you, their company requires references, or they’re simply trying to brush you off.

Yet unless it’s toward the end of their sales process, offer an alternative. Not only do reference requests add indefinite delays, they’re usually unnecessary. If you’ve consistently built trust with the prospect, they shouldn’t need to verify with a third party.

It’s also unfair to ask your customers to spend valuable time talking to prospects if you don’t know whether those prospects are serious.

Not sure how to say “no” to these requests? Check out 12 different strategies.

2) They Ask For Unrealistic Results

It’s tempting to say yes when prospects ask for improbable -- but not impossible -- results. Sure, 99% of your customers boost customer satisfaction by 5 to 10%, but raising it by 30% is in the realm of possibility. The very, very distant realm.

However, giving the prospect a gentle reality check will serve you far better in the long run. You don’t want to start a relationship based on unrealistic expectations. When the prospect’s results fall short, they won’t blame themselves: They’ll blame you and/or your product.

In these situations, case studies and customer data are your best friends. If the prospect asks, “Could we increase customer satisfaction by 30%?”, give a data-backed answer like:

“Although that’s not impossible, our similar clients usually see an 8% raise. Given your industry and starting percentage, I’d say 7 to 11% is most likely.”

3) They’re Looking For a Feature You Don’t Have

When a prospect asks about a missing feature, some reps will tell them that feature is in the works. Then they cross their fingers the prospect won’t notice it never materializes.

Not only is this strategy unethical, but it’s also bad for business. If the buyer asks about, say, offline data backup, it’s probably because it's crucial to their operations -- and they’re not going to forget about it in a couple months.

Rather than making promises you can’t keep, figure out why the prospect wants that specific option. Once you’ve identified their needs, you can offer a potential workaround.

4) They Ask For a Discount Right Away

Prematurely handing out discounts can destroy your business. After all, once a buyer sees that you’ll bend under pressure, they’re likely to demand another concession … and another ... and another. You can avoid going down this rabbit hole by putting off price discussions until the prospect has bought into your product's value.

Plus, slashing your product’s price too early can lessen its perceived value. Imagine you’re choosing between cars: One that costs $30,000, and another that was originally $30,000 but has been marked down to $10,000. Which car seems safer and better built? Probably the first one.

For better or for worse, people equate value with price. You don’t want to cheapen the prospect's perception of your product before they fully appreciate it.

Nonetheless, refusing to give discounts without pissing prospects off or making them walk away is easier said than done. Here are 26 responses to refocus the conversation on value, not price, when your prospect pushes back. 

5) They Ask For a Trial Extension

Trial extension requests are rarely a good sign. If the prospect hasn’t had the chance to properly evaluate your product, you probably didn’t create enough urgency or get their full commitment before the trial began.

It’s also possible they’ve tried it and haven’t seen enough value -- in which case, they’re probably not your ideal buyers.

If it’s unlikely the prospect will end up buying, don’t extend their trial. There’s no point in extending the process and wasting everyone’s time.

However, if you think a deal might happen, figure out why they want an extension. Did all of their stakeholders test the product? Did they try out the core features?

Together, develop a clear definition of what "success" would look like. With clear goals and metrics, the prospect is much likelier to actually use and benefit from a longer trial.

6) They Make an Unreasonable Demand

If you’re mid-negotiation and the prospect demands a ridiculous concession or drastic discount, don’t be afraid to turn them down. Compromising is good, even necessary -- but taking a deal that’s unprofitable or clearly risky is not.

Furthermore, people often make extreme demands as a bargaining strategy. Let’s say the prospect wants to pay $10 a seat. They might begin by asking for $2 a seat, so that you’ll eagerly accept by the time they “settle for” a higher price.

Rather than giving a knee-jerk “No way!” to their demand, simply repeat it back to them. You’ll get a couple extra seconds to think. In addition, just hearing their request in your words might make them reconsider.

If they refuse to budge, on the other hand, it’s usually time to walk away. 

“No” is an incredibly powerful word to have at your disposal. And once you start seeing its effects, wielding it will definitely become easier.

Are there any situations in which you always say “no”? Let us know in the comments!

Let’s face it: the sales process can feel like a rabbit hole. When you’re staring at a computer screen, wondering whether or not to write “that” email, it’s easy to get lost in your imagination. Will your prospect think you’re too aggressive for following up too often or too soon? Or will he think you’re creepy when you mention what he’s reading on your blog — because, you know, your CRM gives you the ability to track that kind of thing?

In the world of sales, data is a double-edged sword. By tracking the wrong metrics, you might lead yourself to the wrong judgment call. And we’ve all been there: how many times have you looked at patterns that have actually been false signals? Maybe you’re feeling worked up because your prospect is taking too long to respond, only to realize later that she’s just slammed (and doesn’t have time to read your email). Or maybe, you’ve taken too long to follow up. Either way, missing the mark feels frustrating.

If you’re using data to guide your prospect follow-ups, you’re headed in the right direction. Now, you just need a set of power tips to make sure that you’re focused on the right next steps to take. Here are 3 simple ideas to guide you.

Proposal Views

This metric can help you gauge your prospects’ interest in what you have to offer. If they’re spending time reading your proposals, it means that your initial conversations have paid off. In addition to paying attention to views, try to figure out who’s reading and engaging with your document: multiple eyeballs are a strong sign that a potential deal is getting serious consideration. By knowing who’s viewing your sales enablement materials, you can more effectively guide your follow-ups. If nobody is viewing your proposal? No worries—offer to walk your client through your plan over the phone.

Power Tips:

• Instead of tracking raw numbers, look at proposal views over time. A flurry of eyeballs is a strong sign of potential interest.
• If you run into situations where your proposals remain unread, try to identify a pattern. This perspective will help you course-correct potential gaps in your communication.

Time Spent with Proposals

Some proposal views are worth more than others. For instance, if you notice that the CMO at your prospect’s organization spent an hour reading through your doc, it’s probably a good sign—in an age where people have finite attention spans, time is the ultimate asset (one caveat: a person may be spending time with your proposal because he is confused—or he may have walked away from the computer).

This metric will help you follow up smarter — and be less generic. For instance, if you see that someone is spending a lot of time looking at your pricing page, ask if he or she would like to discuss costs or budget. You can also streamline your docs by cutting out the sections that people regularly skip.

Power Tips:

• Integrate your software with your CRM to see if you can optimize your proposals by customer segment.
• Figure out where engagement is high, so you can build upon this knowledge in future follow-ups.

Link Click-Throughs

By including internal links throughout your proposal, you can make it easy for your prospects to ‘request more information’ without actually going through the hassle of reaching out to you and asking a question. These days, buyers’ research processes are self-directed. So give them the resources they need to figure out what they need, without numerous calls or follow-ups. When you monitor the links that they’re clicking, through simple tracking links in your Google Analytics, you’ll develop a clearer picture of what they’re seeking out. The end result? Better conversations.

Power Tips:

• In your sales process, conduct qualitative research around why your prospects are interested in certain links vs. others. Use this info to create even better proposals.
• Try testing placements and calls to action (CTAs) around your links to see if you can drive higher traffic volumes.

Final Thoughts

Remember that you’re dealing with a human being on the other side of the computer screen. If you see a clear pattern, there’s usually a story behind it. But the story might not always be what you expect. Be a skeptic. Play devil’s advocate. Challenge your data story with alternative explanations. Follow up, learn, repeat.

Think back to the last time you made a decision. Whether that was what shoes to wear this morning, or which vendor to go with for a 3-year contract, chances are there was some emotion involved.

And just like you, B2B buyers are buying out of emotion, make no mistake. They may tell you that it was “logic” that fueled that choice to partner with an emerging competitor, but don’t be fooled – they were swayed equally, if not more so, by their emotions.

There are various theories about which emotions affect our everyday decisions. David McClelland’s Human Motivation Theory, for instance, posits that we all have a need for achievement (accomplishing goals), affiliation (belonging to a group) and power (influencing others). By understanding which of the three factors your prospect is motivated by most, the theory goes, you can sell more effectively by speaking their language.

Other theories claim that there are six basic emotions that guide all decisions: greed, fear, altruism, envy, pride and shame. Understanding which of the six your prospect feels most strongly will help you couch your sales pitch in terms that resonate on their emotional level. For example, a newly hired exec at a Fortune 500 may be feeling a bit of fear that their position isn’t yet stable, and some pride at having recently been promoted.

Simply knowing that decisions are fueled by emotion isn’t enough, however. As you might have guessed, you have to know which emotions are being felt by your prospect in order to address them. And here’s where social media comes into play.

Social selling equips salespeople with the tools they need to identify their prospect’s emotions, either on an individual level or on a larger scale.

When it comes to the individual, you can dig into their public posts on networks like Twitter and Facebook, look at their past job history on LinkedIn, and comb through any previous correspondence or interaction they have had with your brand in the past. Using this information, you should be able to put together a solid picture of what is currently motivating your VIP prospect: Are they being driven by the need to fit in, or affiliation? Maybe they recently tweeted about a collaboration they would like to be part of, or their Facebook posts show an unwillingness to take large risks. Are they altruistic? Maybe they regularly retweet articles about eco-friendly government initiatives.

To scale this knowledge, you can use big data and grow your understanding of emotional positioning to your target market as a whole. Rather than zoom in on the tweets and actions of a single prospect, you look at what generally drives a larger group of prospects – what values do they share? This will show you what emotions they lean towards, which will in turn help you develop messaging to reach out to them.

Developing emotional connections with your prospects is one way to build long-term relationships with them, and in turn create more stable, consistent revenue streams. It’s also generally a good way to do business on the social web, as it shows that you are listening to your prospects concerns, needs and desires.

What if I told you there’s one thing that you can do right now as a sales leader that will help you achieve higher team quota attainment, more revenue growth, higher sales velocity, and increase in lead conversion rate?

It’s not a magic new magic sales methodology and it has nothing to do with a new tool or technology.

This one thing that can change the course of your business is Sales Enablement.

In his book To Sell is Human, Dan Pink explains that sales has changed more in the last 10 years than in the last 100. However, this is wrong, and the reality is that the buyer has changed (especially in a complex B2B environment). Sales is only now catching up thanks to sales enablement.

Research by Aberdeen reveals that sales enablement leads to 62% higher team quota attainment, 205% more revenue growth, 725% higher sales velocity, and 23% increase in lead conversion rate in organizations with structured sales enablement programs versus organizations without it. That’s how powerful it is.

It’s clear that sales enablement is a sales driver, not just a nice-to-have. Many high growth companies are deploying this function with incredible results, as they jump on the opportunity to supercharge the revenue-generating side of the business. However, other companies are laggards, and they suffer the consequences.

Where does your company stand?

The Rise of Sales Enablement

Sales Enablement is an evolution of sales ops and marketing but elevated to a more strategic, proactive and hands-on level. With more tools, more resources, and a more complex sales process, you need a person or department who owns this and can deliver it to sales reps.

There’s no single agreed upon definition of sales enablement, as it’s still maturing and evolving in function and scope, but I like the definitions from David Brock in his new groundbreaking book The Sales Manager’s Survival Guide: “It’s all about providing tools, systems, processes, training, coaching, and development that ‘enables’ sales to be more effective and efficient.”

Though the responsibilities of sales enablement is still being defined, we can begin to clarify its scope. The following four functions are critical for a successful sales enablement program:

• Content: Sales enablement must make sure that quality content is created and sales reps can find and utilize the right content at the right time.
• Training: Reps must be trained in not only sales skills, but product, marketing/industry and business skills as well.
• Tools and Technology: Once the strategy is established, you must guarantee adoption of the technology to execute against the process. This function also overlaps with training, as tools and technology add functionality and become more complex.
• Strategy and Execution: Sales enablement goes beyond winning deals and extends to hiring and onboarding, forecasting, budgeting, and performance reviews.

Most sales leaders and practitioners agree you need a full-time sales enablement function once your team hits a certain size. The size varies depending on the complexity of the sale and the maturity of the market, but the consensus is that you need to pull the trigger and form a department somewhere between 50 and 75 sales reps.

If you’re a smaller organization, you may not need a dedicated team full time, but it’s highly recommended that you get someone who’s responsible for this function. Sometimes responsibility falls under sales ops or sales management, yet other time I’ve seen the responsibility placed on marketing ops or product marketing.

The job of a salesperson is to show up on a call (or meeting) knowledgeable, skillful and with the right assets to help prospects buy. If there’s any indication that any of these elements are not there, you need to invest in sales enablement now. These gaps in efficiency and effectiveness are robbing your company of money.

Here’s the bottom line: You’re never too small to have a sales enablement program.

The Critical Components of a Successful Sales Enablement Program

When you ask about the importance of those critical components in sales that are under the enablement umbrella, there’s a Grand Canyon-sized gap between how important companies rate those activities and how they rate their current efforts.

Let’s dive into each of these aspects a little more.

Content: There’s evidence that the sales enablement function grew largely out of the need for sales reps to leverage and optimize the content that marketing was creating. The two problems that needed to be solved were quality/value and discovery/utility. There’s an overwhelming about of mediocre content on the web. By creating more valuable content, you’re helping reps stand out in the noise, establish expertise, and build trust with prospects faster.

When it comes to discovery/utility, among the many studies conducted, they all agree on one thing: less than 60% of the content being created for sales is not being used. This is in large part because either the content is not easily accessible and discoverable, or reps simply don’t know the most appropriate time to use which content. It’s sales enablement’s job to make sure the right content is being created and reps can find and use said content.

Ultimately, content’s job is to drive more deals. We already wrote about the four ways that sales enablement can help with content, but here’s a quick recap.

1. Reusable Templates for Proposals, Quotes, and Contracts: Creating templates the entire sales team not only saves hours of writing content from scratch, it also creates consistent messaging.
2. Beat Out the Competition with Battle Cards: A battle card is any type of content that educates and differentiates you from your competitors. This gives your sales team fuel to keep the deal moving forward.
3. Let Your Customers Become An Additional Salesforce: What your customers say about you can be 10 times more powerful than what you say about yourself. Get case studies that speak to every type of customer you have, whether it’s by industry, company size, or specific use case.
4. Optimize Content Utilization By Diversifying Your Channels: With all the different channels to promote content — from email and phone to social and direct channels — you must be everywhere your prospects are to stay top of mind. It takes a joint effort from sales and marketing to execute this.

Training: This goes much further than training for sales skills. It’s sales enablement’s job to ensure product knowledge with product training, assess marketing information for relevant industry training, and establish project management for critical thinking. Not to mention it’s their job to guarantee reinforcement as well. The fatal flaw that most organizations suffer from regarding training is it happens only once per year. What’s the good of investing time, money and energy in training if it’s not reinforced?

There’s a distinction that needs to be made between training and coaching. Coaching is about personal and professional development, and it deals with real situation and behaviors that are unique to each individual rep. Training develops the same skills and capabilities for everyone and should be standardized across your entire sales team. Coaching is done by managers. Training should leverage the sales enablement program.

David Brock, President of Partners In EXCELLENCE and author of The Sales Manager’s Survival Guide, emphasized that there are so many other things that are important to the success of your team beyond sales skills training. Your sales enablement program should also include the following

• Product training (monthly)
• Sales training (monthly)
• Tools/technology training (quarterly)
• Market and industry training (quarterly)
• Change management/project management (quarterly)
• Critical thinking and problem solving (quarterly)

Tools and Technology: This should be the last piece of the puzzle because tools are just a means to get a job done and execute a process. It never starts with the technology, as it just supplements a reps abilities and behaviors. Always start with process first, and technology will follow. Too many organizations get caught up letting the tail wag the dog.

Once the process is established, it’s also sales enablement’s job to guarantee adoption of the technology to execute against the process. This function also overlaps with training, as tools and technology add functionality and become more complex.

The key categories of technology that sales enablement will influence are CRM, marketing automation, sales intelligence and automation, communication solutions, CPQ (configure, price quote) and content/knowledge management.

Here are the major things to keep in mind when setting up your technology stack to make your sales team more effective and efficient:

• The technology is for your salespeople first and foremost, not you.
• Regularly use the tools yourself, and observe your sales team use them as well.
• Tools and technologies only supplements and often augments a reps abilities and behaviors, both good and bad.
• The amount and variety of tools in the tech stack can become counterproductive. Don’t go overboard.

Strategy and Execution: As you can tell, there are a lot of moving parts and sales enablement touches and influences. With the broader vision and company goals set by the c-suite, sales leadership is beginning to pull sales enablement in to help define the strategy and steps to increase efficiency and effectiveness from their reps. However, the breadth of influence sales enablement has gone beyond winning deals and extends to hiring and onboarding, forecasting, budgeting, and performance reviews.

Demand Metrics put together one of the best charts that help visualize and conceptualize sales enablement and the execution against the strategy in their Sales Enablement Best Practices Report (2014).

5 Steps to Setting Up Your Sales Enablement Program

Whether you’re a large team of 500+ sales reps or a small team of five, having a sales enablement program is critical for success. You can use these five steps to set up a program or tighten up your existing program.

1) Know your objectives. You must be very clear on the outcomes that you want. “Increasing revenue” or “generating more pipeline” isn’t good enough. The most important numbers to sales teams are pipeline, revenue, and customer lifetime value. However, Matt Heinz argues for a different metric for measuring sales enablement effectiveness: active selling time (expressed as a percent of a rep’s entire day). Another significant metric to measure is time to quota (expressed in months). Effective programs can shorten ramp time where new reps are matching quota attainment for the rest of your team months sooner.

When it comes to objectives and goal setting, I always advocate for SMART goals; goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. You must be scientific and methodical as possible so you can determine if your program is actually getting results.

2) Talk to the people closest to the problem. This starts with understanding the problem that you’re trying to solve, and what better way to accomplish that than talking with the people in the trenches day in and day out? Don’t forget to get an opinion from marketing, sales ops, account management, customer success and anyone who will be affected. Second order effects/benefit of talking to your reps is that their active participation in this process always results in better adoption and buy-in of practices established.

3) Know your buyer and their journey. Since we’ve already established that the ultimate goal is to deliver the best experience to a prospect or buyer, you must first know them inside and out. Beyond knowing their pain points and challenges, you must be able to recognize buying signals and trigger events that are related to that prospect’s problems.

I’ve addressed ideal client profiles and buyer personas many times before, which serves to reinforce its importance. It’s the cornerstone of other critical programs like outbound sales campaign management and account-based sales development strategy.

4) Maps the sales process to your buyer’s journey. When sales leaders are planning their strategy, it’s common for them to only focus on what’s best for their team and neglect the customer. The paradox is that what’s best for the sales team starts with that’s best for the customer. So rather than focusing on the sales process alone, it’s important to first look at the buyer’s journey and the experience a buyer has with you at every single state of the sales funnel. What’s their internal process for buying? Who needs to be involved? What information do they need? How do they get internal buy in? What are their attitudes and behaviors towards you and the field? Once you understand that, you can begin to understand how to empower your team and deliver a better experience to prospects

5) Validate, iterate, and improve. This is all about holding your sales enablement program accountable. A big reason why the sales space has taken off like a rocket in the last few years is that you’re able to measure performance and adjust. The most effective team’s test content, tactics and execution, but what makes them effective is rigorously measuring against your goals. You need a reporting structure to measure effectiveness, not to mention clear, objective standards and definitions for success.

No more fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants selling. No random acts of sales enablement allowed. It would be humorous yet tragic if the sales enablement function (who is tasked with making sales more effective and efficient) wasn’t effective and efficient itself. It would be humorous yet tragic if the sales enablement function (who is tasked with making sales more effective and efficient) wasn’t effective and efficient itself.

Conclusion

Adopting a sales enablement program will dramatically impact your sales team and how effective they are at closing deals.

Though the function and scope of sales enablement is still evolving and being defined, there is one thing that we can all agree on – sales enablement should be a mindset. Once everyone truly understands this, you can begin to impact the bottom line in a major way.

This is just an introductory overview of sales enablement that only scratches the surface. If you’re really serious about taking your sales game to the next level by making your team more effective and efficient, you’re in luck. We’ve teamed up with the experts at PandaDoc for a webinar that dives into “How to Use Sales Enablement to Increase Pipeline and Drive Revenue.”

Editor’s note: four or five years ago, it was trendy to talk about how attracting qualified leads was like wooing a potential date. (We talked a lot about not asking for a phone number before you’d been introduced.) In 2016, there’s more attention on the entire customer lifecycle, with emphasis on deepening your customer relationships for retention, loyalty, and advocacy. Amy Duchene revisits the original analogy with this in mind.

It’s wedding season. You may have received invitations to friend or family weddings. Me, too. And all of this has got me thinking: There’s a lot of similarity between business and marriage.

Hear me out.

A lot of brides (and grooms) focus on The Big Day. All the planning, all the coordination, all the logistics, all the time (and all that money) go into a one-time event that is seen as a singular achievement.

Sales people have a similar pattern: Nurturing the account, doing the demo, negotiating the terms, all lead up to a singular achievement: signing the deal. And in many offices, there’s a celebration (Act-On reps bang a gong).

But what each party may be forgetting is that The Big Day (or The Big Deal) does not end as soon as the “I Dos” are said and the covenant is signed. That’s actually just the beginning.

The Sales Cycle vs. Looking for a Mate

Think about your sales cycle. It probably looks a little something like this, depending on your muse:

• Scouting for and attracting new customers (prospecting, social media, referrals)
• Capturing your prospect’s information so you can tailor a personalized connection
• Nurturing those relationships
• Analyzing customer needs, coming up with a solution and sealing the deal
• Fulfillment (your service or product)
• Continued customer communication and relationship-building

Most of these factors focus on the pre-buying process, which is where salespeople spend most of their time.

Look the list over again – this time through a romantic lens. This looks an awful lot like love relationships, doesn’t it?

• Scouting for new customers (prospecting, leads, referrals) – i.e. finding someone (or several) to date
• Capturing your prospect’s information – e.g., getting their information (phone number, etc.) so you can connect
• Nurturing those relationships – courting, wooing, going out for meals, hanging out, texting … whatever you do, this is all about getting to know the person and beginning to make it personal
• Analyzing the need and coming up with a solution – Maybe he or she often eats dinner alone, and wants some company to try a new Thai restaurant. If you like that type of food, you might be a match – at least for that night. Maybe he or she needs a date for a distant cousin’s wedding, or wants to learn to kayak, or wants to go to Seattle for the weekend. Maybe you can fill those shoes, too.Eventually, if you are lucky, this moves beyond being someone to hang out with on a Saturday night, to being THE ONE you want to spend your time with – and they feel the same. When you formally agree on this, you’re sealing the deal.
• Fulfillment – In sales speak, this is the delivery of the product or service that you sold. In relationships, you’re fulfilling the promise to commit. And you are there. That’s fulfillment.

The truth is, we can learn a lot from our personal relationships and apply those findings to business. After all, sales is a people business … and it’s all about the quality of those relationships.

First Come Loves, Then Comes Marriage…

So, let’s say you have a heart match – or, in the sales world, a prospect you want to sign because you believe it will be good for both parties. Now it’s time to make it official. You start to plan the wedding or you set the contracting machinery in motion. At the culmination, a contract is presented and signatures sought. If all goes well, both parties sign, and a relationship has taken a permanent step.

Is that it, though? What happens on the next Monday morning?

In business, like in marriage, the obvious answer is, of course that’s not the final step. There are many, many more steps – and days – to come. A key (and too often overlooked) part of the sales cycle comes after you’ve put a ring on it. I’m referring to the focus needed on the long-term relationship – the marriage, as it were. If you don’t nurture that relationship, it could fail.

In It for the Long Haul – What is Customer Lifetime Value?

Marriage partners will go through a lot together: fun trips, buying cars, having children, moving to a new town, pesky in-laws, illnesses and accidents, triumphs and losses. Business relationships often have a similar path. Your customer goes through changes: they flourish with your product, and then the business falters, and then it recovers. Or they get purchased by a larger company. Or they bring out a new product line, or expand to sell in another country. You go through changes: You might launch a new feature that does not work for your biggest customer in California. The economic environment changes: a government regulation that affects half your customers is revised and you and your customers both have to adapt. In both marriage and in business, it helps to be flexible.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Now we get to the place where our analogy falters. We can’t quantify most of the benefits we get from a marriage. But you can quantify the value your customers bring to your company year over year.

“Customer lifetime value” is a quantifiable metric to help you assess how much value your company can realize over the entire duration of your relationship with your customer. This number, in turn, helps you understand how much you can spend to acquire and maintain a customer, and still make a profit.

Think about how much a customer spends, and how frequently. Not just what you’ll earn with the initial sale, or even this year – but a projection of the grand total. We’re talking repeat and add-on business here.

If you sign up a customer today, you’re guaranteed that initial purchase value. That might be fabulous, but by itself, that’s a short-term measure. Why settle for that?

Here’s the kicker: if you retain and resell that customer for the next year, two years, even 20, years, you’ll see revenue year over year. Usually at greater net profit each year. Add up that total profit and you’ve got predictive CLV, and a great, meaningful goal to shoot for.

The Cost to Get a New Customer vs. Keeping an Existing One

Let’s get granular for a moment.

When dating, you’ve first got to find your mate, decide you want them, woo them with excellent dates – get to know them – and predispose them to care about you (perhaps through the content of your conversations) before you pop the question. Dating can get expensive. (All those dinners, all those concert tickets. That new hot tub. Your sharp new clothes.) And that’s before you even get to the wedding.

Start to mention the “W” word to vendors around town and you’ll soon find that dresses, cakes, photos, food and party favors cost a whole lot more than you ever anticipated. The average cost of a wedding in 2015, according to The Knot, was over $32,000. Not cheap. So between courtship and marriage, you’ve made a sizeable investment.

Now think about your business. One of the key components of a sales cycle is the cost to get the new customer in the first place. You need to find and attract prospects. Then you court them. If you’ve got a long sales cycle, that probably means lead nurturing and a whole lot of content marketing. All this comes before you get to the negotiation stage and then sign them up.

So, how much does it cost you to acquire a new customer? Consider your promotion and marketing efforts. Prorate your advertising costs, pencil out your teams’ time. Figure out how you account for events and tradeshows. Count up all the expenditures during the courting and sales process (flights, dinners, meetings, demos and presentations, phone calls, movies, tickets to the ball game, etc.). Talk to your finance team to make sure you’re on the same page with them.

This stuff adds up, and quickly, when you scale it across your sales quotas for the month.

This is just one reason why retaining existing customers is so much more profitable than acquiring new ones, making the case all the stronger for paying attention to CLV. A few interesting statistics from SailThru:

• Existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products, and spend 31% more than new customers
• Increasing customer retention by 5% increases profits 25-95%
• It can cost a brand up to 5x as much to get new customers vs. keeping old ones

After the Big Deal, Now What? Nurture Relationships for Pay-Off

So you’ve forked over the cash to throw the Party of a Lifetime and get married, have a partnership celebration, or sign a new customer. Once the party is over and the cake and bubbly consumed, now what?

You move into the next phase – the marriage.

Many of the strategies you use to keep the marriage healthy are the same ones you use to keep the business relationships rolling. You need to nurture them, build satisfaction, and keep them coming back. You need to listen.

Think about it this way: if you don’t spend the time or effort to nurture the relationship – it all goes badly, right? Or, at minimum, you drift apart. Whatever your tried-and-true method to keep your existing customers happy, just do it, and they’re likely to stick around. It may cost you money and time to retain a customer, but it’s less than starting from scratch, and the rewards are much greater.

It also helps prevent what tech investors call ‘sloppy growth,” which is what happens when you over-emphasize converting leads and under-emphasize assessing how much value the customer brings to the business long term. “In other words,” writes Act-On’s Kevin Bobowski on IDG Connect, “quantity over quality.” Smart growth is what you get when you attract and convert – and retain – the high value customers.

When It’s OK to Let Your Eye Wander

One last bit of consideration – and that is knowing when you are in a bad or stagnating relationship. (I’m talking about customers only. I don’t want to be on the hook for giving you bad marriage advice!)

Maybe the relationship has cooled off. Your customer got bought by another company, and the new relationship isn’t so good. Or your customer’s had a lot of turnover, and the new team you’re working with wants a different product or service. It may be time to dump them – or to let them dump you.

In the meantime, you’re still working every day on your lead and demand generation, so you’ve got a steady stream of new customers incoming. Have the Big Day of signing them up, and then move into marriage mode, where the real value lies. After all, lifetime value applies to each and every customer in your proverbial Rolodex. They all need love.

Here’s a Honey-Do List, for Spouses or Marketers:

• Calculate customer metrics for your own business. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
  • How much does it cost to find a new customer and get them into your funnel? Include marketing, promotion, advertising, events, sales expenditures, etc.
  • How much revenue does a new customer bring in each year?
  • What is the average duration a customer is with your company (or, how long you’d like them to be)?
  • How much does it cost to keep your customer? Consider company events, training, surveys, marketing communications, and so on.
  • Can you upsell your customer? What might it cost to do that?
• Revisit your pricing strategy. If you have a subscription business model, do you sign them up for little to no money up front, knowing they’ll pay repeatedly once they’re in? Do they pay a high premium to join – so they give you a lot of money up front – but then their annual subscription or renewal fee is low? What would happen if you changed your model?
• What’s your retention rate? Is your customer list growing at a higher percentage rate than your churn rate? What does it cost you to lose a customer? What would your net profit look like if you could cut your churn rate?

It’s not all science and hard numbers, of course.

Think about those intangibles – the “feel good” things you can do for your customers, like:

• Treat your customers with kindness and courtesy – be nice
• Don’t cut customers off when they are expressing concerns. You can learn a lot from negative feedback
• Ask for their feedback, and then listen. What direction would they like to see your product develop?
• Close the loop promptly when they have a concern
• Promote them. Retweet their Twitter posts, comment on their Facebook posts
• Remember them. Check in with periodic calls, meetings, or “just because” cards
• Fork over for the occasional random upgrades (such as honoring their tenure with upgrade to the next level of your business, or VIP status at an event)
• Evolve with them as time passes. Learn how their business is changing – and, if it makes sense, make adaptations to your own model along the way

A Lifetime Together

The endgame of any successful partnership – business or spousal – is to make that partnership so happy that you want to stick by each other’s side to the end.

I wish you a lifetime of happiness!

Go beyond just sales and marketing alignment and include customer success to build a winning Team Trifecta that will allow your company, to make the most of the opportunity that is — literally — sitting right under your noses. In this eBook, Beyond Sales & Marketing Alignment, we’ll show you how to build your own successful Team Trifecta and imagine what is possible with an approach that yields comprehensive results across every stage of the customer lifecycle. You’ll learn how to deliver dramatic improvements from small investments that generate big returns – such as customer retention.

It’s a great time to be in B2B sales; you have access to an ever-expanding pool of potential customers, there are more sophisticated tools for reaching prospects too, and you have the ability to engage clients in new and unique ways thanks to social media, search engines and other digital strategies. Without a doubt, these are boons to B2B organizations, but they also necessitate better strategic prospecting. When almost everyone is a potential lead, you have to get better at identifying who is a good match for your product and devising interesting ways to separate yourself from the pack in their crowded field of vision.

Prospecting is an important part of overall lead generation, and recent survey results indicate that 70% of B2B organizations listed improving lead generation as their first priority in 2015. By employing creative prospecting methods in order to more reliably reach the right customers, you can significantly improve the quality of your leads and have meaningful sales conversations with people who need your product.

Gather and analyze all the data you can get your hands on

Data isn’t just for the marketing department; sales reps can use thorough data analysis to paint a detailed portrait of their likely prospects. By intensely studying to whom, when, why, and how you sell your product, you can identify key patterns that will help jumpstart your strategic prospecting efforts.

If your organization promotes content on Facebook (and it definitely should), you can use the power of the social media giant’s vast bank of demographic data on its users to your distinct advantage. Also, don’t forget that you likely have access to a very valuable database right in your own company, thanks to your CRM platform.

Explore different techniques for social prospecting

Nearly three-quarters of reps who employ social selling techniques get better results than their peers. Unfortunately, many sales professionals are happy to look no further than LinkedIn for their prospecting efforts on social media. While LinkedIn can still be a great resource for sharing information, identifying connections, and joining value-added organizations, there are many other ways to creatively use the reach of social platforms to aid in your search for prospects.

Twitter is a great resource for sharing content, because as high-quality posts generate likes and retweets they are exposed to additional networks of like-minded followers. Sales reps can and should publish content that will help establish themselves as a thought leader.

Also, you can use Facebook Live Video and Snapchat Stories to create engaging video content for your audience. Give potential buyers an inside look at your company and product, and personalize the experience so that they feel like they are part of your team.

Use effectual reasoning in conversations with prospects

Many entrepreneurs use effectual reasoning techniques in the early stages of building their business, but this process can have a dramatic impact on how you talk to your sales prospects as well. Essentially, the technique involves using a logical series of questions and answers in order to solve a problem, without having any preconceived notion of potential solutions before the process begins.

Start your conversations with a cold prospect by asking them questions about their business in an attempt to understand more about what they go through. It’s absolutely essential that you avoid having an agenda, otherwise, you may sacrifice your authenticity and be seen as deceptive. If your questions and their answers lead you to a place where it makes logical sense for you to introduce your product as a solution to their problem, that’s great! You’ll know definitively that they are a good fit because they’ve told you why in detail. If the process doesn’t naturally lead you in that direction, thank them for their time and appreciate the experience as a learning opportunity.

Don’t look at prospecting as an isolated event

Prospecting isn’t a one-and-done event for a specific customer. It’s a series of different methods of outreach that form together into a larger campaign. It’s sound strategy to begin the process by coming up with a plan that accounts for different outcomes at each stage of the campaign. This way, you’ll always know what action to take in order to reach your overall goal. Don’t assume that every interaction has to go your way or else you’ve failed; focus on winning the war.

“It’s Dave, not Jake.” You know that uncomfortable moment when you realize you called someone by the wrong name? We all do it, but when it happens in business, it decreases the chances of a lead ever becoming anything more. If your goal is to connect with your audience and build a relationship, you’ll have to nail so much more than a person’s name…though that’s a good place to start. This is where data comes in.

Incomplete and incorrect data accounts for many, if not most, of the problems marketers have automating campaigns. Information is one of the critical interdependencies required in the demand generation process, and because data is the fuel that helps us make critical decisions, bad data equals bad decisions.

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of databases, and 100% of them contained some level of incomplete and incorrect data. In each instance, though, we were able to identify the problems and make significant improvements to the database. How? Let’s look at three things you can do to improve your data quality starting today.

1. Identify your requirements.
   Where have we heard that before? Right, everywhere! Without an objective, there’s no way to know whether or not your data is right, wrong or incomplete. Make a list in the form of questions you need to pose to your database. This list should include questions like:

• What is the contact’s vertical market?
• Where is the contact located?
• Is the contact a current customer?
• How many employees work for the contact’s company?

These questions help form a foundation for what information needs to be accurately recorded in a contact’s record in order to segment and market to your database effectively.

1. Determine the decision(s) you will make based on this information.
   In this step, you should define how you need to record field-level information, often referred to as field standardization, based on your business’s unique needs. As you review each of the questions defined in step 1, think about what decision(s) this information will drive. For example, the data that answers the question “Where is the contact located?” could be used in a number of ways, such as:

• What sales territory is the person in for lead routing?
• Does this person fit into a location-based marketing program we’re running?
• Does his/her geography impact which products or services we would sell to them?
• What email compliance laws impact this individual, based on the requirements in various countries?
• Should our marketing messages be localized for him/her to consider cultural implications?

The answers to these queries can range from very simple to extremely complex, depending on how the decisions intersect. However, as you work through the answers to these questions, the requirements for your data, including your needs for formatting and standardization, will become clearer.

1. Find the gaps.
   Now that you know what decisions you need to make based on your data, you can begin to identify the holes. Data gaps always manifest themselves in one of two ways: incomplete data or incorrect data.

Incomplete data is just what it sounds like. You have critical data missing from a contact’s record, which negatively impacts your ability to market to them. For example, if your company is running a location-based marketing program targeting major metropolitan areas and you are missing a contact’s location data (city, state, postal code, etc.), you won’t be able to accurately target that individual.

Incorrect data is the case of having fields complete on a contact’s record, but the data is suspect or just plain wrong. There could be several reasons for this—people submitting faulty information, either mistakenly or intentionally, is one example—but I think the biggest factor is data decay, since databases degrade at about 22.5% per year. Contacts move, change jobs, retire and update email addresses or phone numbers all of the time, so you need to keep your data fresh to ensure accurate segmentation for marketing campaigns and to help your sales team follow up on hot leads.

Data governance and regular hygiene are the answer here. Whether it is in the form of data plugins that constantly update your database or in the form of quarterly refresh imports, your data needs a regular cleansing so it doesn’t start smelling like last week’s garbage.

Data is the missing link most often overlooked when building a demand generation strategy. To jumpstart your marketing efforts, design or redesign, your database must very specifically answer the critical questions you outlined above and work on filling in any gaps you see. Your campaign results and your sales team will thank you.

There is a lot of knowledge trapped inside your four walls. Much of what you need to know is already known. All you need to do is ask the people inside your four walls to share that information with you.

What Clients Want

Your sales force has knowledge about your customers. They know what they want. They spend their time speaking with your clients or prospective clients about the areas where they are struggling and what they believe will help them. If you want to know what your clients want, you can ask your sales force to share that information with you. They spend a lot of their time sitting face to face with your clients or dream clients.

What Your Competitors Do

Your sales force also knows what your competitors are doing to win business and how they are positioning themselves in the market. Those clients and prospects with whom they are spending their time share information, like how they say they are different, how their solution is better, and what their pricing model looks like compared to yours. If you want market intelligence, a big part of it is already inside your four walls.

How to Serve Clients Better

When it comes to knowing what clients want, there may be only one group that knows more than the sales force. That group is your operations team. In a lot of businesses, the operations team spends more time with clients, either in person or on the telephone. None of what they know is speculative. Your operations team knows what problems your clients have implementing and executing your solution. If you want to know how you can improve the value you create for your clients, that knowledge already exists inside your four walls.

You hire people to do a job. As they are doing that job, they are learning. Their knowledge is growing. If you have inspired them, engaging their hearts as well as their minds, all you have to do unleash a massive amount of actionable insights is ask the people who already have them to share them with you.

The post The Leadership Playbook: The Knowledge Inside Your Four Walls appeared first on The Sales Blog.

In comparing effective appointment setting to online dating platforms, it is easy to draw some parallels with regard to the precise matching of the right people.

I often write about business being built on successful relationships. If you will permit me to use a recent testimonial we received from a satisfied client:

“The quality of the appointments they arranged for us was high and enabled us to have the right C-level conversations that have led to new opportunities.”

To me, this message illustrates that successful appointment setting isn’t just about getting you in front of people; it is about getting you in front of the right people.

There are a number of ways you can ensure you are connecting with the right people.

Goal: Starting the Conversation

The objective of effective appointment setting and online dating platforms are much the same; to get you a conversation with the right person.

In sales, you target individuals that you believe fit the characteristics of your typical buyers for a solution. In online dating, you look to connect with people that have qualities that make for a good potential partner.

In both scenarios, the first step leads to a conversation.

Appointment setting doesn’t always produce immediate sales, and online dating rarely jumps from initial match to marriage overnight. However, when performed effectively, both types of matching result in opportunities that offer a high potential for success.

Prospects with Similar Needs

Appointment setting and online dating also both involve efforts to connect with people that have a mutual interest in the relationship.

In selling, the prospects you target for meetings typically have a need or problem that you believe your company can satisfy. In online dating, other members of the service you use have a similar need or desire to find a potential partner or to start a relationship.

I appreciate it sounds a tad unusual, however, the more you think about your counterpart in these situations, the easier it is to prepare the right questions and right messages. With selling, in particular, asking involving questions helps you uncover the deep needs and pain points of buyers.

Over time, you become familiar with common dilemmas, which enhances your success in landing meetings and converting sales.

Data is a Key Driver

I doubt that people who use online dating services even consider the advanced data and analytics used to connect them with optimal matches. Dating services only last when they have relative success in connecting people with relationships that consistently become fruitful. Consistent misfires are frustrating.

In marketing and selling, analytics are used to identify the characteristics and behaviours that form your ideal customers for specific solutions.

Analytics are constantly used to fine-tune your buyer personas such that the efficiency of successful matches, and therefore your sales performance, grows.

Accurate matching in B2B selling and online dating isn’t just about finding the “right” matches; it is about eliminating wasted time spent with the wrong ones.

Conclusion

The types of relationships you seek in B2B selling are very different from those pursued via online dating services. However, the parallels identified help you understand that effective appointment setting techniques often apply in both arenas.

Internal Results doesn’t offer you personal dating services, but we do offer expertise and experience in targeted appointment setting. Plus, we only charge you when meetings result.

I speak to technology companies coming out of the major hubs on a daily basis. When asked if they plan to target the federal government, they often tell me they are proactively avoiding it (if they don’t actually laugh at my suggesting it in the first place). Sometimes, I hear that their mentors or investors have told them to avoid the market like the plague.

Why would someone tell them to avoid a $400 billion market?

Unfortunately, the federal government has a reputation for painfully long sales cycles and/or being hopelessly complicated. This reputation isn’t entirely undeserved – selling to the government really is a more difficult and complex process than normal commercial sales.

However, there are great rewards for those who make it through to the other side. Simply put, the federal government is a big spender, to the tune of $79 billion for Information Technology alone. The market is immense. The contracts are bigger and longer. For some startup boutique companies, a ‘small pilot’ in the government could be larger than its biggest commercial customer. And barring a royal screw-up, once you’re in, you’re in.

It’s not a totally selfish endeavor, either. The government needs the innovation that the private sector creates. Without new, fresh ideas and technologies, government IT becomes stagnant, less efficient, and operating at far less than full potential. Everyone who pays taxes to the United States government has a vested interest in helping it use those tax dollars to highest effectiveness – something that can’t happen when government workers are stuck using old technology.

So, should you sell to the government? I’m here to tell you that it’s worth it. However, you must be ready, committed, and know who to call for help. Here are six indicators that your organization is ready to tackle the government market:

1. You have conviction and belief in your product.

You don’t sell to the government to “see what happens.” You know deep down it can work and have a positive impact. That level of belief and conviction can serve as a great foundation and motivator for the times when the nuances of the government just aren’t making sense.

2. Your exit strategy isn’t next year. (You’re in it for the long game)

If you’re trying to make it big and exit within a year, selling to the government might not be the best option for you. The scale of government is much bigger than what many small companies are used to. And while Dcode42 and others can greatly reduce the sales cycle, the full potential of the market will take a year or so before you are in the real money…with a few exceptions, of course. Going government means focusing on the longer-term and the larger payoffs that come with it. Keep your eyes on the prize.

3. You have a reference-able customer(s) that will sing your praise.

For now, past performance is a critical piece for government sales. A happy customer from a highly regulated industry, willing to give you a sterling reference will go a long way towards getting you in the door. Keep in mind, government officials are effectively investing in technology on behalf of the taxpayer and are naturally inclined towards avoiding risk. Anything you can provide to reassure them you are not risky will increase your chances of winning.

4. You have the resources, time and a little bit of runway to get your government arm off the ground.

Companies in an ideal position to enter the government market often have someone they can dedicate full-time to learning the government language and making their government arm successful. While it’s not impossible to get by with someone only working on government half-time or less, it will take longer to get up and running than with a full-time dedicated role.

5. You have a well thought-out delivery structure.

Like in most industries, people in government talk. Satisfied customers will tell their colleagues – and so will unsatisfied ones. A seamless delivery and smooth contract execution is incredibly valuable, as past performance leads to more contracts. We recommend a bit more care and attention and preferably a dedicated customer service representative for each government customer. Try to avoid making them call the main customer service line. Don’t just hand over the license keys and walk away.

6. You are open to working with partners – even ‘frenemies’

Partnering is critical in the government market, and the right partners can mean the difference between a win or a loss. Often, this means working with ‘frenemy’ companies – sometimes you compete, sometimes you partner. Companies ready for success understand this and are open to working within this model.

Today, companies that are ready to sell to the government have more resources available to them than ever. The government landscape is changing as government-owned accelerators emerge and tech-savvy government entities like 18F and the US Digital Service have launched.

Programs like ours, Dcode42, exist to open up access to resources and make it as simple as possible to get over the moat and into the castle, so to speak. If you are an emerging tech firm, we highly encourage you to consider this market and reach out to the resources that can help.

The taxpayers are relying on us.

The post Six Indicators You’re Ready to Sell Your Technology to Government appeared first on OpenView Labs.

According to Pipedrive, sales management is the process of developing a sales force, coordinating sales operations, and implementing sales techniques that allow a business to consistently hit, and even surpass, its sales targets.

Sales management can make or break your company. After all, without revenue, your company cannot survive. This blog offers 9 practical tips that will make you awesome at sales management. After reading this blog, you will know how to lead your sales team to (and beyond!) the sales targets.

1. Prioritize goals

Every day, you face unlimited opportunities while you have limited resources at your disposal to address those opportunities. Without clear goals, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Without priorities, you can find yourself overlooking big opportunities while chasing small ones.

Having goals and priorities allows you to decide what work is most important and what the best order is to tackle that work.

2. Establish a path to reach goals

According to Mark Christie, sales management is essentially about planning: how do you make the most of your opportunities and resources while minimizing distractions and threats? A sales manager must create a clear and achievable plan to reach the company’s established goals. What does your team need to succeed, and how do you get it?

In order to adapt to circumstances, plans and goals must be flexible. Nevertheless, they should still be a steady means of guidance. That means that goals should be changed only after much thought and deliberation, and that plans to reach those goals typically require more frequent adjustment.

Cóbhan Phillipson claims that equipping your team with software that increases its efficiency and effectiveness is now vital. Value-adding content has become essential to the sales call. Case studies and data-driven reports can quickly demonstrate a company’s value to a prospect. Make sure to include this in the path to your goals as well.

3. Earn trust and win commitment

Christie says that many sales managers forget that they are part of the team. It is not only important that your salespeople trust each other; they should also trust you as their leader. Christie therefore urges you to avoid turning work into a zero-sum game, where one person’s success must come at another’s expense. Salespeople do their best work when they know they are valued and when everyone benefits from helping others succeed.

4. Help your sales team achieve its potential

Find ways to help your sales team succeed. This requires training, coaching and arranging responsibilities to play to individual strengths as you make adjustments for weaknesses. Aim to make salespeople better at their jobs over time and fit their positions to their talents.

Recognize different styles of sales management, communication and learning styles. Not everybody is like you. That means you have to help your salespeople do their best in whatever style is natural to them.

Phillipson mentions that you should leverage emerging technologies too. According to him, the best sales managers are constantly looking to get the most out of themselves and their team. New and emerging technologies can quickly add ROI and value to your sales force.

5. Accepts responsibility

I like it when Christie says that praise should always flow down and that responsibility should always flow up. It is easy for sales managers to abuse their power to cover their mistakes, but as Christie says, this is never a good idea. Give credit to those who work for you, do not hog the limelight, and praise in public while you criticize in private.

When giving praise or criticism, always focus on the work rather than the salesperson. Feedback should never be a matter of whether someone is good or bad. Instead, you should focus on specific achievements or particular problems, and offer constructive suggestions for improvement.

In addition, Phillipson says that some sales managers focus on the negative too much; do not fall into this trap. Morale will suffer. Praise and thank your sales team and the individual members every now and then. Celebrate success stories and make sure everybody hears about them.

Phillipson also says that if you want your sales team to accept your constructive criticism, you should be willing to accept feedback from them. You should occasionally even request feedback; that way, you create an open and honest working culture.

6. Delegate work, but not responsibility

Christie points out that, as a sales manager, you are not only accountable for your team’s work, but also for providing all the tools you can give the team members to ensure their success.

This means that you have to train them when they lack the skills or experience that you have, and that you have to explain objectives and issues, so your team is prepared to address them. Be clear about your requirements, standards, objectives and timeline. They should be stated at the beginning of the project and they should change as little as is practical given the circumstances.

7. See opportunities in problems and lessons in mistakes

Life is never perfect; it is just a matter of time until something goes wrong. You should therefore be prepared at all times.

Make certain your team feels safe to bring you bad news quickly. The sooner you are aware of trouble, the better your chances are to minimize its damage.

Sometimes, problems arise because you or your team have made mistakes. Mistakes should be acknowledged and serve as learning experiences. Consider what you and your team can gain from the experience, even as you address the current problem.

This does not mean you cannot hold salespeople accountable, but since everyone makes mistakes, even a large but isolated error says nothing about a salesperson’s long-term value.

8. Identify sales roadblocks

Take the time to identify roadblocks in your company’s sales processes. As Phillipson says, it is important to take time to figure out the most pressing issues and to plan accordingly. It helps to incorporate sales-management software that provides detailed analytics of where deals are breaking down.

Phillipson also urges you to assess how your salespeople are spending their time. After all, time is the most precious resource of all.

9. Keep ill-fitting clients out

Millie Liu understands that it may be tempting to expand your customer outreach to clients outside of your “sweet spot” to hit your numbers, but this is not a good idea. Bringing in complicated or ill-fitting customers will cost your company resources as well as countless hours of implementation and configuration time. Instead, focus on high-quality leads that can turn into valuable customers.

Social Selling

Social selling is now a crucial way for successful sales teams to communicate with their prospects. Social selling is when salespeople use social media to interact directly with their prospects. If you want to learn more about social selling for your sales team, I have a reading tip for you.

The blog ‘The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Social Selling’ demonstrates that social selling increases sales, presents 6 steps to get started with social selling, gives 3 steps to leverage the power of social selling, and it lists the 5 worst social-selling mistakes you can make.

Hillary Clinton campaigning in Pittsburgh, PA, in July 2016. (Justin Sullivan/Getty)

Historically, U.S. Presidential elections come with so many unexpected twists, turns and surprises. The November 8, 2016 “Clinton vs. Trump” contest is no different—although Donald Trump is in a weight class of his own.

What will happen over the next few months leading up to the election will have far-reaching effects, not just for American public policy but for global leaders, business executives and foreign policy throughout the world. The same is true for Canada and our allies.

Donald Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric exposes deep rifts in the global economy

I was at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Philadelphia last week, and it was very clear from my conversations with former DNC chairs, U.S. politicians, Bernie Sanders supporters, business executives, and even celebrities and athletes: a Clinton presidency will be viewed as positive for Canada-U.S. bilateral relations and a major step in the right direction for trade with Canada.

Many Canadian small- and medium-sized manufacturers and exporters consider the U.S. the gateway to free trade, since $2.4 billion worth of goods and services cross the border every day. Canada-U.S. trade in goods and services reached $880 billion in 2015 and Canadian exports to the U.S. were about $450 billion representing more than 72% of all Canadian exports.

A Trump administration would jeopardize Canadian manufacturers’ and exporters’ access to the U.S. market, potentially reducing revenue and forcing some companies to consider exporting to other markets and relocating their American operations elsewhere. His mixed signals and irrational statements on global trade threaten important agreements like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

As for bilateral trade with the U.S., Canadian companies would struggle to pivot towards new international markets outside the U.S. where they continue to face the same fundamental challenges—lack of capital to expand into global markets, a fear of the unknown, lack of contacts and local insights, and finally a lack of coordination, duplication and overlap of trade and investment services. What should be a cause for concern is that Canada’s trade deficit with countries other than the U.S. widened from $4.6 billion to a record $6.0 billion.

On TPP, the U.S. and Canada are two of four countries that haven’t submitted the agreement for ratification, along with Brunei and Chile. Secretary Clinton may try to re-negotiate environmental and labour issues in the treaty, but let’s not typify a knee jerk reaction since she has publicly committed to find common ground and purpose to boost the US economy and promote free trade with like-minded partners.

Paul Wells’ column in the Toronto Star on July 30th about why Canada should prepare for the unthinkable is right on the money. Respectfully, to make Canada competitive, we have to go one step further beyond reactionary statements and speeches.

Nine ways to improve Canada’s international trade strategy

When it comes to international trade, we need to press forward as a nation to bring the government and industry together to reboot a coordinated Canadian strategy focused on international trade and investment.

We need to ensure Canadian companies can stay one step ahead of their global competitors, rather than always playing catch-up. The new reality is Canadian companies need to expand and invest in markets beyond the United States and Mexico to stay competitive.

Canada needs a strategy that can mitigate political, social and economic risks like the U.S. elections and Brexit, which will ultimately impact us since we are a trading nation. It is also time to start thinking about real incentives and financial instruments that can help Canadian exporters perform better internationally despite all of the uncertainties in the world today.

A successful strategy requires clear priorities, based on understanding the strengths we need to preserve and capitalize on, and the weaknesses that threaten our prosperity. Strategy addresses what to do, but also what not to do. It is far from clear that we are taking the right steps to improve investment attraction and global exports.

When it comes to international trade, Canadian industry must lead with strong government support. Smart leaders benchmark successful organizations and countries. It happens in other countries, such as Denmark and South Korea, where both public and private sectors come together to chart a long-term plan.

We have a historic opportunity to develop and implement a new export promotion and investment strategy that will support Canadian trade interests at home and abroad – in a coherent way, and to our best advantage.

Omar Allam is a former diplomat, global entrepreneur, and CEO & Founder of the Allam Advisory Group, a global business, strategy and commercial diplomacy consulting firm that helps clients with international strategy, market entry support, export development and investment attraction worldwide.

These three investing legends are warning of another crash

MORE ABOUT FREE TRADE & THE U.S. 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION:

• Donald Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric exposes deep rifts in the global economy
• Why are Canadians turning their backs on free trade?
• Trump fears have been a marketing goldmine for these Canadian companies
• Nine ways to improve Canada’s international trade strategy
• How Justin Trudeau can put Canada back on Washington’s radar
• Five stocks that could help protect against Brexit aftershocks
• How to position your portfolio for the rest of 2016
• Five ways global trade will change for Canada in 2016

The post A new U.S. president requires rethinking Canada’s export policies appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

According to Aberdeen Research, coached teams achieve 15% higher lead conversion rates and 14% shorter sales cycles than teams that are not coached (Aberdeen, 2014) … but we don’t really need research to justify coaching — it’s intuitive to anyone in sales. With almost universal acknowledgement and such obvious benefits, one would think that sales coaching would be a science by now. Unfortunately for our sellers, it is not. The typical sales organization struggles mightily to build a consistent and effective sales coaching program. When coaching fails, we tend to throw frontline sales managers under the bus, but in our experience, the problem is broader and so is the solution. There are three typical reasons for failed sales coaching programs:

1. Lack of visibility at the top
2. Lack of practical processes and tools in the middle
3. Lack of accountability on the frontlines.

The key to building a successful coaching program is to address all three levels simultaneously.

Signs of a Poor Sales Coaching Program

The tell-tale sign of a poor coaching program is a sales leader who has no idea when, where, or even if coaching is taking place in his/her organization. Visibility is essential to execution, not only because it fosters accountability, but because execution needs direction, and direction is only possible when leaders have insight into the behaviors of their teams. Ultimately, good coaching programs require sales leaders who not only understand the KPIs they are trying to move, but also have visibility into the behaviors that move them.

When performance falters, frontline sales managers make the easiest targets — after all, it’s their responsibility to develop their teams and ensure that sellers deliver on revenue expectations. When it comes to coaching, however, most sales managers are set up to fail because we typically give them neither the know-how nor the tools to succeed. Frontline managers probably have the toughest jobs in the company; we expect them to carry quota, pitch deals, and manage accounts. Then we pile on forecasting, compensation, territory management, and endless reporting. It’s no wonder coaching falls by the wayside. Since we can’t create more hours in a day, we need to help our sales managers make the most of the time they have by giving them practical tools and techniques for coaching.

Even with perfect information for leaders and practical methods for managers, there is no guarantee that sellers will respond. To actually change selling behaviors, coaching programs need to engage and challenge sellers in ways that require commitment and encourage participation. Sellers need to be crystal clear on what behaviors need to change and what good selling behaviors look like. Most importantly, however, they need to see and believe that coaching is about development and not about criticism. This means coaching needs to be objective and feedback needs to provide clear, actionable direction.

How to Develop an Effective Sales Coaching Process

It is just not possible to develop skills and change sales behaviors without engaging all levels of the sales organization. To make that happen, we need transparency into where coaching takes place, how behaviors are changing across the organization, and to what extent business outcomes are being impacted. We need to rescue our sales managers by arming them with practical coaching methods that remove subjectivity and inspire sellers to improve.

(1) Use Technology to Make Your Sales Performance and Sales Coaching Process Visible at all Levels of the Organization

Any sales performance management solution that needs to provide visibility and measurement across an extended organization is likely to involve technology; sales coaching is no exception. Coaching is an endless process with a very specific cadence of activities and outcomes, and because it touches every seller and every manager, we need a practical way to organize ourselves and keep track of it all. There are several good technology solutions on the market that can get the job done (see Richardson’s Coaching Cloud). The key is to find technology that places behavior change at the center and works outward from there. Our inputs need to include the specific behaviors we are trying to change and how those behaviors look when done well. Defining is not enough — we need ways to baseline and measure behaviors so that we can quantify the impact of coaching and correlate behavior change to changes in our KPIs. Technology gives us the mechanisms to bridge activities to outcomes so that sales leaders and managers know where coaching is taking place, whose behaviors are changing (and whose are not), and how behavior changes metrics are correlating to activity, pipeline, and revenue KPIs.

(2) Establish Practical and Continuous Coaching Methods

As we mentioned earlier, coaching never stops. It’s a continuous process that involves field observation, structured feedback, and commitment to change from sellers. It’s essential that these processes reflect the practical reality in which our sales managers live. Efficient observation practices target very specific behaviors and remove subjectivity. Nothing kills motivation or time faster than a disputable observation. For this reason, we should avoid using scales when assessing behaviors and stick to binary outcomes — either the behavior was demonstrated or it was not. Discrete observations make the process much more practical for coaches, allowing them to focus on execution and not taxing them with proficiency levels and forcing them to justify their score. It is equally important that the feedback process is efficient and, once again, technology can help. Analytics through a coaching platform can provide direction back to managers, detailing which behaviors are improving and which behaviors require more of their attention. They also help managers separate systemic problems from individual deficiencies. For instance, if every seller on the team is struggling to position our solutions, we may need to look at our product training to understand why the team is having trouble aligning benefits with needs. Sharing individual measures with sellers during feedback is another best practice activity. Sellers value credible data over opinion during feedback, and they are much more receptive to coaching if we can show them, very specifically, what they are doing well and where they need to focus.

(3) Capture and Track Commitments

In the end, a seller’s behavior will change because he/she is personally committed to improvement. Just as our coaching practices should reflect our commitment to our sellers through fair and constructive feedback, our methodology should also support our expectations of our sellers. During every coaching interaction, we should expect our sellers to make a commitment to change for the coming weeks. Those commitments should be documented in the coaching platform and should be compared against our observations to ensure that progress is being made. When behavior measures do not support improvement, we should be quick to refocus sellers’ attention on their commitments and increase our observation cadence. Sellers need to understand that a commitment to change is not a statement, it’s an action they need to rehearse before every sales interaction.

The bad news is that coaching is difficult and needs a comprehensive approach. The good news is that it’s worth the effort. The key is to take time on the front end to put the pieces in place at all levels of the sales organization. Technology is essential because it helps managers track the many activities required for effective coaching, and it provides the analytics needed for visibility and focus. When we combine good coaching methodology with a strong organizational commitment to change, sales improvement will follow.

Learn more about how Richardson’s new Coaching Cloud Technology can help you improve your sales coaching practices and team performance! Download your complementary brochure here, or contact us at info@richardson.com for more information!

The post Making Sales Coaching Visible, Practical, and Accountable appeared first on Richardson Sales Training and Enablement Blog.

We all know that we need to invest in our marketing and branding efforts to help our companies grow! That’s a given.

What we often don’t know is whether or not our expenditures are actually the right ones.

Even with modern tools that allow us to track and manage our marketing, advertising, and branding efforts more effectively than we used to, whether or not we are able to really count on our branding and marketing efforts to deliver for us is still a question that a lot of us can’t answer correctly.

While we may never actually have a true and real answer to whether or not our marketing money is being used to its optimal level, what we do know is that we are likely wasting a lot of our money and effort due to a few key mistakes.

To help put your marketing money to better use, flip the script on these common errors:

1. Not being consistent:

One thing is certain. Be it PR efforts, advertising, or anything else, you should be consistent with your efforts to make sure that you are doing a good job of achieving your ROI.

As someone that has worked in direct advertising, I know that you should see some sort of feedback immediately from any direct response advertising you do. The same can’t be said for all forms of marketing.

Instead, to make sure that you maintain consistency in your marketing efforts. You need to begin by asking yourself what the intended outcomes are.

So if you are doing a PR effort that is to get you in a number of media outlets and you get into a number of media outlets, you know you were successful.

If you ran a direct response campaign and go no responses, you know that something wasn’t working.

But if you are running a brand building campaign, but expect immediate results…that might not be the best idea.

Which if you don’t get the results you were hoping for, could lead to wanting to do something different or not doing anything at all.

All of which destroy consistency.

So make sure you are clear on what you are trying to achieve and build that into your plans so that you are consistent and can measure accordingly.

2. Don’t lead with discounts:

How many of us have seen a friend start their business built on the idea that they are going to give everything away and convert everyone into paying later?

This is sort of the original sin of a lot of our newspapers in the digital age, they gave everything away from the start because they didn’t understand monetization and now are having a difficult time making money because everyone has been getting news for free for so long.

Sad!

This plays out all over the place.

Look at sports, where the sales team wants you to buy a full or partial season package under the guise that you are going to be getting a better deal than other fans that buy on a per game basis. But as soon as attendance starts flagging, they turn around and destroy that promise with a discount.

Don’t do that.

Both are bad ideas.

You have to be very careful if you try to use discounts and in most cases, I would say don’t do that at all.

Why?

Because discounts destroy your brand.

On average, it takes 7 years to regain your brand positioning in your buyers’ minds once you start discounting.

So be careful with the discounts and it should never be a lead strategy…never.

Because if you are leading with discounts, you are already losing.

3. Not making your marketing a priority:

I could have led with this one.

But one of the big issues with a lot of marketing spend is that the money is thrown at marketing because you feel like you have to, but you don’t really put the time and energy into making it a priority so that you can get the maximum value from your marketing efforts.

This usually plays out with things like no clue what you hope to achieve, no idea about what market you are attacking, and no idea of what the marketing mix should look like for a specific buyer profile.

The key to anything that surrounds your marketing is that you need to begin by understanding why you need to do and whether or not you are committed to making a significant investment in making it work right for you.

After that you are going to want to ask yourself 3 questions:

1. What is the value we are trying to create?
2. Who will buy this?
3. How do we reach them?

Once you have those answers, you need to commit to action.

If not, get out and don’t start. Because I can guarantee you that you are going to waste your time and money on marketing that won’t be effective.

Whether you love it, hate it, or have claimed a gym with your 1600 CP-level Vaporeon (in which case, I’ve got a Snorlax with your name on it), you can’t escape Pokemon Go.

For the uninitiated: Pokemon Go is an augmented reality game that uses the GPS in your mobile device to populate your world with Pokemon. You’ll find new varieties of Pokemon depending on where you go and your level in the game. You level up by collecting Pokemon and staging battles against other Pokemon.

Here’s where marketers need to pay attention: many local businesses are Pokestops, meaning that players will flock to them to collect items that help them advance in the game. Even if your business isn’t a Pokestop, there’s a good chance you’ve got a handful of Pokemon hanging out in your store. (Just loitering there without buying anything. The nerve.)

Thanks to sheer luck, some businesses are home to rare Pokemon. That means I’ll gladly walk three blocks out of my way to visit a bodega with sub-par sandwiches if I hear whispers of a Mewtwo lurking there.

Contextual email marketing + Pokemon Go

There are a host of local marketing opportunities that businesses are already taking advantage of – among them branded Pokestops and soon-to-be-released branded content (T-Mobile branded Pokeballs, anyone?)

But there is another huge and virtually untapped way to market your business with Pokemon Go: email marketing. Not just any email marketing; contextual email marketing that leverages the geolocation aspects of the game.

Here are three ways that businesses with brick-and-mortar locations can drive more foot traffic by combining the forces of contextual marketing and Pokemon Go.

Entice people to visit your store with location targeting

Location personalization has long been used by savvy email marketers to help customers find store locations nearest to them. But Pokemon Go presents a new way to use geo-targeted emails. Instead of just showing people nearby stores, you can show them all Pokemon Go points of interest that are near your store locations.

For example, if there’s a Pokemon Go gym around the corner, point it out on a live map. If your store is a Pokestop, even better. You can direct customers to all the Pokestops near your store, plus areas where specific Pokemon have been spotted.

Bonus tip: If your store is not already a Pokestop, you can put in a request for it to become one here.

Feature Pokemon content in a live social feed

Encourage customers to snap photos of pokemon in and around your store. Then, feature those photos in a live social feed in your emails. A live social feed pulls in your social content in real-time, so it automatically refreshes every time you open the email.

If you connect your live social feed to your Instagram account, for example, it’ll display all of your Instagram photos. You can do the same with Twitter by pulling specific hashtags into your live social feed. Live social feeds are a clever way to keep your email content fresh and drive engagement at the same time.

Bonus tip: Give your social followers a heads up that you’ll be featuring their photos in your social feed. Tell them to sign up for your email list so they can see their photos featured in your emails. Boom – instant boost to your subscriber list!

Pair Pokemon with limited-time offers

Want to clear your inventory or drive foot traffic to a special event? Use pokemon as an incentive for people to visit your store at a certain day and time. In your email, let your subscribers know which pokemon they’re likely to catch while they’re there. Sweeten the deal with an email-exclusive coupon that can only be used in stores.

Be sure to include how long the sale or event lasts. If really want people to act fast, you can include a countdown timer in your email to let people know how much time they have left to act.

Bonus tip: In Pokemon Go, you can use an item called Lure to attract other players to your store. Basically, a Lure “lures” local pokemon to any Pokestop for 30 minutes. That means Pokemon Go players will be more likely to swing by your store if they have a better chance of catching a Jigglypuff.

Throw a lure on your store, then send an email letting people know about it. They’ll only have 30 minutes to act, so it’s a great way to drive last-minute foot traffic.

Pokemon and leads: gotta catch ‘em all

All joking aside, Pokemon Go has the potential to drive serious revenue for your brick and mortar business. Contextual email marketing lets you tailor your email content to your customers’ unique needs, behavior, preferences, and now, pokemon. If you’re new to contextual marketing, now is the time to give it a try.

Blogging sounds ideal. In a fantasy world, you grab a cup of coffee, draft a perfect post, and hit publish. In reality, you’re fixing headline typos, battling images, filtering comments, and losing your mind over broken social buttons. Running a successful blog is a never-ending game of chess, but occasionally you can cheat. With some helpful tools, blog resources, and hacks, you can manage every part of your mini-empire—without so much frustration. From editorial calendars and headline helpers to grammar checks and SEO optimization, here are 66 blogging tools to help you run the blog of your dreams.

Editorial Calendars/Organization

1) Basecamp: Basecamp gives you a private and secure space to talk about and organize projects with team members. You can track, discuss, and act on various tasks, discussions, deadlines, and files all in one dashboard. Communication is simple and intuitive with options such as message/discussion boards, real-time chat, and automatic check-ins to ensure that tasks get done effectively.

2) CoSchedule: This is the perfect editorial management tool if you’re focused on social media and content marketing. It seamlessly integrates a large library of external content marketing tools, such as Google Docs, WordPress, Google Analytics, and a long list of social media platforms. You have access to marketing workflow tools, a marketing calendar, and a social media content calendar to keep track of what’s getting posted, when, and across which sites.

3) Divvy HQ: The dashboard gives you a snapshot of what’s due, what’s done, and what the rest of your team is working on. Like Google or Outlook, you have access to unlimited calendar shares, but Divvy allows you to customize each individual calendar to suit your content strategy. You can set up calendars based on individual departments, markets, teams, or even clients.

4) Edit Flow: Edit Flow provides a WP editorial calendar that gives you the option of having multi-user support, which you can also synchronize with iCal or Google Calendar to keep track of all your projects. Some features include custom comment fields and the ability to create groups of users, making communication easier between team members.

5) Editorial Calendar: This plugin for WordPress lets you see all your upcoming posts and when they’ll be posted. It’s a simple tool if you mostly just need to manage posts, edit post titles, publish posts.

6) Flow: Flow allows you to effortlessly organize teams, delegate tasks, and prioritize your to-do list to make sure that nothing gets overlooked. It’s easy to see who needs to do what, when it will be completed, and what comes after. Communication is to-the-point, meaning it will take less time to discuss the work and give you more time to do it.

7) GatherContent: Unlike other content management tools on this list, GatherContent allows you to carry out a project to its entirety on the platform, much like WordPress. It has a minimalistic design that is uncluttered and easy to use and stores everything on a cloud, making your work accessible from any computer, no matter what stage you’re in.

8) Kapost: This is a great tool if you produce large volumes of content or have numerous team members. Kapost tracks the workflow of content marketing, starting from strategy and execution all the way through distribution.

9) LooseStitch: This is a great tool for companies that outsource content production. It allows you to create concepts and outlines that can be shared with selected users for collaboration. You can share drafts and final versions of your content and store it in a well-cataloged library.

10) Marketing.AI: This gives you access to standard calendar features, such as tracking production schedules and task status. You can also keep track of all the stages of content assets and keep track of all content published over time. It’s great for monitoring the impact of all your content marketing efforts.

11) SocialCast: This tool allows you to create posts, assign tasks, collaborate, and track the progress of all your content. It’s easier to talk to team members about content, e-books, and other marketing materials.

12) Trello: While not a proper editorial calendar, Trello can help you keep track of blog-related projects with your team. It uses visual organization techniques to help organize and collaborate across teams smoothly and quickly. The design is easy to use and makes brainstorming and collaborating effortless.

Design/Images

13) Animate It!: This plugin lets you add cool CSS3 animations to your content.

14) EWWW Image Optimizer: The EWWW Image Optimizer automatically optimizes your images as you upload them onto WordPress and reduces the file size in bulk for images that have already been uploaded.

15) Fotor: Fotor is a fantastic online photo editor that allows you to edit images using filters, frames, text, and more. It’s quick and easy to use and offers many tools to create custom images and collages.

16) Gimp: Gimp provides you with tools to customize and enhance your images. The program is easy-to-use and comes with multiple tutorials to help you learn various techniques to create awesome images.

17) File Renamer: This plugin changes the names of your media files directly from the WordPress backend and updates all the links associated with each images.

18) Pexels: Pexels is a great resource for free stock photos that you can use for various projects. The site contains a huge library of images and videos sorted into multiple categories.

19) SEO Friendly Images: This helpful plugin automatically updates all your images with the proper titles and ALT tags so you don’t have to worry about it.

20) Skitch: Skitch lets you draw attention to what’s important through the use of annotations and markups in an easy-to-use app. You can use it on your phone, tablet, or desktop.

21) Visage: Column Five sister company Visage created this easy-to-use design tool that lets you create visual content for your site. There are a number of readymade templates at your disposal and you can create your own. Sharing with your team is simple and straightforward, letting you complete projects quickly and seamlessly.

22) WP Smush: This plugin optimizes your images so the page loads faster. Smush strips images of unnecessary information, reducing the file size without sacrificing image quality. The best part is that it performs this operation automatically when you upload a media file—and it can optimize your existing images in bulk.

Ideation/Writing

23) BuzzSumo: BuzzSumo analyzes your audience’s interests so you’ll have a better idea of what they’re attracted to. It looks at your competitor’s sites to see what keywords and content performs best, so you can build upon them and create better resources.

24) Cliche Finder: Unlike other proofreading tools, this one is designed to specifically filter through your text to determine which phrases have a weaker impact.

25) CoSchedule Headline Analyzer: CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer is the perfect tool for headline optimization, especially if you’re using the CoSchedule calendar plugin. The analyzer will give you tips on how to get the perfect headline, analyzing your word balance, type, and sentiment to let you know what you can do to make your headline better.

26) E.ggTimer: Keep yourself on task with this awesome tool, which lets you create deadlines and countdowns for projects.

27) Emotional Marketing Value Analyzer: This analyzer from the Advanced Marketing Institute returns a score based on the total number of Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) words in relation to the overall number of words that are present in your headline. From there, it determines what type of emotional impact your headline has: intellectual, empathetic, or spiritual.

28) Feedly: This tool helps you keep tabs of your industry content. You can take all those blogs and sites and keep them in one place, organized by subject or folder, so you can easily peruse next time you need blog inspiration.

29) Google Trends: Google Trends is the perfect tool to help you determine if your content idea is currently trending.

30) Grammarly: This browser extension proofreads your text, checking for 250 types of grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors, as well as any form of plagiarism.

31) Hemingway: The Hemingway app is perfect for determining if your text is too dense, too complex, or unreadable. After analyzing your content, it gives you hints on how to improve your text by highlighting words or sections that may need replacing.

32) Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator: This allows you to input three keywords on a topic and generates several ideas for a blog post.

33) Keyword Planner: This free tool is perfect for researching keywords to determine how difficult it is to rank for a particular search term.

34) Keyword Tool: This tool is linked with Google’s autosuggest feature to generate a list of possible optimal keywords for not only the Google search engine but also Bing and the Apple App Store.

35) KingSumo Headlines: This lets you A/B test headlines, showing different options to each visitor and selecting the best-performing headline over time as readers post and share your content with others.

36) ShareThrough: ShareThrough’s headline analyzer uses over 300 unique variables to help you create engaging headlines that will deliver stronger impressions to your audience.

37) Scoop.It!: This tool is good for queueing up content for your blog. It allows you to search for great content that you can put your spin on and lets you publish it at a later date on various social sites.

38) WordPress Distraction Free Writing: If you just want to focus on content (not all the distractions of the WP interface), enable this mode to keep yourself on task.

Conversion Tools

39) GetSiteControl: This all-in-one widget lets you do it all. You can create surveys, email and contact forms, popups, and live chat windows.

40) HubSpot: HubSpot helps you attract visitors and convert leads with tools that help you optimize your posts for search engines and social media using inbound marketing. It allows you to create email forms and perfect landing pages to increase your traffic and keep your readers engaged.

41) MailChimp: MailChimp helps you manage campaigns, including email and popup forms. There are a variety of ready-to-use templates to choose from or you can create your own using HTML.

42) OptimizePress: This tool lets you set up easy landing pages for sales, e-books, or whatever you need.

43) Postmatic: Postmatic is an email-based commenting plugin that allows users to subscribe to a post in order to receive notifications, which they can then comment on through email.

44) SumoMe: This plugin gives you a ton of tools to increase conversions and optimize your site, including popups, social sharing, heatmaps, CTAs, and more.

Site Optimization

45) Akismet: Akismet is an anti-spam plugin that performs real-time data analysis of millions of sites to block spam automatically.

46) Crowd Control: This plugin was created by Postmatic and is perfect for comment moderating. Instead of manually filtering through comments on your site, Crowd Control gives readers the ability to report comments that they believe are violating your site’s commenting policy.

47) Broken Link Checker: This scans all your posts, pages, images, comments, redirects, and more to ensure that there are no broken links. You can edit directed links straight from the plugin’s page, so you don’t have to manually edit each piece of content.

48) Epoch: This is a commenting/chat experience that uses fully native comments while being compatible with page caching, CDNs, mobile, other comment plugins, and SEO best practices.

49) IntenseDebate Comments: IntenseDebate allows readers to create profiles and build reputations through a comment-voting system. This grants readers the ability to develop a community, which increases social interactions on your site.

50) Jetpack: This plugin gives you visitor stats, security services, speeds up images, and helps you get more traffic.

51) Redirection: This helpful plugin automatically sets up redirects for posts that have had a URL change. It also provides statistics about how often the redirects are being accessed and where the original links are.

52) Easy External Links: This plugin is an SEO-friendly external link handler for WordPress. Some features include domain handling and external image hosting support that standardizes the format of external links to create steady on-site SEO.

53) Open in New Window: This handy plugin makes sure external links open in a new window, leaving your page open to ensure consistent on-page SEO ratings.

54) wpDiscuz: With wpDiscuz readers are able to comment on your content, vote comments up or down, and load previous comments in a thread. The plugin also provides support for popular anti-spam plugins available for WordPress.

SEO

55) All in One SEO Pack: This plugin optimizes your site for search engines by automatically optimizing titles, overwriting default meta details, and generating the optimal meta keywords for various search engines

56) Google Analytics: This plugin seamlessly connects Google Analytics with WordPress to create a dashboard directly to the backend to help you track downloads, search results, and 404 errors.

57) Moz: Moz checks your competitor’s sites to see where they get their links from, what their top pages are, as well as their domain and page authority.

58) Rankie: This WordPress plugin tracks your rankings on Google while keeping a close eye on keywords to help improve your overall search engine exposure.

59) Premium SEO Pack: This tool optimizes your site for search engines. The minification tool provided makes your site render quickly so users have a more enjoyable experience. The plugin also improves internal link building, optimizes images, handles 301 redirects, and optimizes your site for social media.

60) SEMrush: This tool analyzes your competitors’ sites to determine where their traffic comes from, which keywords they rank for, and who links to their site.

61) SEO by Squirrly: This plugin is helpful for the non-SEO experts. It helps you create content that is human and search-bot friendly, which helps your site rank better in search results and keep users engaged.

62) SEOPressor: SEOPressor offers a lot of impressive features to help optimize your blog posts, such as a built-in keyword research tool to find the perfect keywords related to your content. The built-in SEO analyzer provides a score and the plugin also optimizes images, manages internal linking, and optimizes your blog post for social media.

63) Ultimate SEO Video Plugin: This is a must-have plugin for any video blogger. The plugin automatically generates schema.org video object markup and automatically fetches SEO details from its video hosting service. The sitemap that it generates helps Google and other search engines index pages easily, which helps your video rank higher.

64) Yoast SEO: This free plugin has a large list of features that optimize your website, including XML site-mapping and on-page analysis. The comprehensive optimization setting panel allows you to manage each element of the plugin easily to help you understand how well your post is being optimized.

Social Sharing

65) AddThis: AddThis is a great tool to use when trying to publish content on various social sites. It supports over 300 social media services and provides you with a variety of icon designs and sizes and analytical support to update you on what people are sharing across platforms.

66) Better Click to Tweet: This Twitter-specific WordPress plugin makes it easier for visitors to tweet memorable lines and snippets from your content, meaning your content will be shared more frequently across Twitter.

67) Buffer: Buffer makes it easy for readers to quickly share your content on social media while they are reading a blog post.

68) ContentDJ: This helps you track and plan original content, optimize your posts for social media, and source new content for curation all from the dashboard. It also tracks in-depth metrics like how far your content reaches, how many retweets your content has had, and how many times your content has been clicked on.

69) Monarch: Monarch tracks and display share counts with a built-in statistics tool and also provides an easy-to-use interface that allows you to display social sharing widgets, popover, and fly boxes across your site for popular social networks.

70) ShareThis: ShareThis supports 120 different social channels, allowing your visitors to spread content across multiple platforms, including email, quickly and easily.

71) Simple Share Buttons Adder: This simple plugin is a no-frills tool that allows you to add basic social buttons, customizing what text and images are shared.

72) Social Metrics Tracker: This tracker collects data across various social sites to tell you which posts are most popular based on the number of shares.

73) Warfare: This tool helps you increase shares through social buttons, tweetable quote boxes within your content, Pinterest-specific images, etc.

74) WP Facebook Open Graph Protocol: This fantastic social optimization tool makes sure your posts and pages are displayed properly on Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn.

75) WP Social: This free plugin works seamlessly with other WordPress plugins such as Yoast SEO and All in One SEO to increase your social media traffic. It automatically implements Rich Snippet Tagging to all your content in order to optimize your social media content.

Think we missed any? Let us know what blog resources you love.

Data is a marketer’s new best friend. Data tells a story. Yet the picture for B2B marketing isn’t black and white. We can see some trends straight up, but other marketing insights must be inferred or are only ad hoc, opinion-based beliefs.

What are B2B marketers looking to measure? Here’s the core list of goals we need to measure courtesy of the Regalix Research Report on the State of B2B Marketing 2016:

Even when we have good insights, knowing what to do about them is new territory. So, it’s time to invent new ways to help our teams know what to do with the data we give them.

Since startups are look for ideas from customers and prospects, I decided to offer some free advice in the hopes that we get better tools soon.

Here are 4 areas of B2B marketing analytics that are ripe for invention:

1. Measure marketing as a team sport.

Tracking traffic, pipeline, and revenue are a norm. It’s time that we also get smarter at how we assess marketing enablement of and collaboration with sales, corporate marketing, field marketing, and other stakeholders.

Start up pioneers have the opportunity to invent a smarter way to correlate the impact of marketing resources to sales productivity, market penetration, and brand awareness. We need better tools to measure how marketing investments directly and indirectly help other teams hit their goals.

2. Gauge true content impact.

As marketers, we’re in our infancy in understanding the impact of content. Most efforts at content measurement are anecdotal or ad hoc. Alone, an asset is an island unto itself. It doesn’t advance a dynamic dialogue with a prospect.

Want proof? The Content Marketing Institute reports that 57% of B2B Content Marketers cited measuring content effectiveness as a problem.

Over the coming years, we need to get better at measuring what content themes drive engagement, leads and pipeline. We need to track the flow of digital content conversations, and where these conversations trail off.

I’m not talking about tracking views of your assets or e-books simply to score leads. That’s only half of the story. Actually, it’s just the beginning of the story.

What’s important is the thread of the prospect’s or customer’s interest. That requires us to match digital content engagement plus social selling interactions plus conversation topics with our sales teams. In truly advanced B2B marketing companies, conversations with service teams would add transformative insights to the post-sale experience.

Hard to do? Today…yes. In the future, this is how we get smarter.

3. Forecast program impact to pipeline.

What programs drive more leads and pipeline? Do webinars get new leads or engage the base? By what average number and percent? If we can benchmark how programs perform, we can start to forecast contribution to net new and install base pipeline targets.

Sales organizations can do this well using advanced Sales Force Automation tools. It’s time for B2B marketers to get attention to the similar needs we have. It’ll make lead quality and lead flow more reliable and business demand more predictable.

4. Make it safe to embrace data.

B2B marketers manually drive a lot of integrated marketing today. But how do we know it’s working? How do we collectively add value to the demand creation process?

Today, marketing automation tools help with prospect databases, lead tracking, and pipeline flow. That’s very helpful. However, little else in marketing seems to be measurable. And that’s a major opportunity for hungry startups.

And, even if we had the right tools to see the impact of integrated marketing work, we’d need marketing ROI bootcamps. We need to train marketers in how to effectively read and use demand gen, product marketing, event, and other data to plan better programs.

We can’t truly embrace data without helping marketers grow along with the data revolution.