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In my previous post, I talked about the top 10 interview questions to use in your sales hiring process.

In this post, we’re going to look at three homework assignments you can give to potential sales hires to help you determine if they’re a good fit for your business.

You can only get so much information out of questions. Putting potential sales hires in practical situations to see how they act—and not what they say—is when you’ll learn the most about their talents and truly discover what they’re capable of.

Here are three simple yet powerful and practical tests that you can give your potential sales hires to uncover whether they’ll be a good addition to your sales team.

Let’s take a look.

1. Ask them to sell you something

When people show up to interviews, they’re dressed perfectly. They smile perfectly. Every strand of hair is perfectly in place. They walk and talk like a salesperson.

By the first look, you’re probably impressed and you might think, “If I feel like this, then our prospects and customers will be impressed, too.”

Often, this could not be further from the truth.

I’ve seen a lot of people who’ve sailed through the interview process. They’ve nailed every single question. Charmed the entire room. Said all the right things. But the moment you put them in a realistic sales situation? Complete meltdown.

That’s why asking them to pitch you something will help you find out if they’re more than just talk.

What should they pitch you?

• The previous product they were selling. See how they act selling something they’re experienced in and have extensive knowledge about.

• Your product. They might not have a full understanding of your product, but you want to see how they navigate the conversation when they don’t know everything about what they’re selling.

Ask them to sell you something in a way that fits your sales process. This could be an in-person sales conversation or a mock call. You can do this one-on-one or raise the stakes and do it in front of the entire team.

Here at Close.io, we do mock calls right in the middle of the office, in front of the entire team. It adds to the existing pressure and you’ll see how they handle the heat and the feeling of being judged.

This is a test to see what they’re made of, right on the sales floor. Do they like the challenge and rise to the occasion? Or do they crash and burn?

Create a realistic sales scenario

You don’t want to make it as difficult as possible, you just want to make it as realistic as possible. That means creating a scenario that fits your sales process and the way your sales team works and see how they do.

Things to take into consideration:

• What’s their energy like?
• What’s their body language like?
• How do they talk?
• How do they structure the conversation?
• What kind of questions do they ask?

At the end, give them one thing you want them to improve or change. Then do the whole thing again. Be the same person and say almost the same things. All you want to see is if they took your feedback and made those changes. You want to know if this person is coachable.

You can start off easy and increase the level of difficulty throughout the conversation to get a sense of how experienced this person is and how they deal under pressure. Be really tough just to see what their natural reaction is. Will they have a nervous breakdown or pass with flying colors?

At the end of the exercise, will they ask you for feedback? Did they see this as a learning experience or are they not happy with you? You can tell a lot about a person based on their energy and you’ll get a good sense of their character once the exercise is over.

2. Write a cold email to a potential prospect

Even if cold emails are not a part of your sales process, it’s a great exercise for potential sales hires.

Explain who your ideal customer is, explain your product, then tell your candidate they’ve got 30 minutes to do the following:

• Research a company that fits the ideal customer profile
• Find a person within that company to contact
• Write an email to that person
• Provide an analysis of why they chose that company, that person and why the wrote the email the way they did
• Send the email to you as if you were the prospect

This is a great exercise to uncover a few things:

• Do they understand who your customer is?
• Do they understand your market?
• Are they strategic in the way they communicate?
• Are they able to analyze themselves?

This simple exercise will tell you a lot about what type of person they are, what kind of experience they have and what their ability and talent for this job is.

Even if you don’t do cold emails, your salespeople will have to communicate with your prospects and customers in a written format. If they’re really good at it, it will be a huge plus.

3. Call your competitors

Tell your potential sales hire to do a little bit of research to find out who you’re competing with. Alternatively, give them a list of your top five competitors.

Tell them to look at their products, sign up for a trial, request a demo and get on a phone call with them.

Tell them to ask as many questions as possible to learn as much as possible about the product. What features do they offer? Who buys from them? Why does their pricing look the way it does? Then ask them to come back with a summary of what they learned.

This is an exercise that’ll familiarize them with the competition, but it will also help you see how good they are at asking questions. How good are they at being a prospect?

If you don’t know how to be a prospect, you don’t know how to be a good salesperson.

Here’s an example.

If one of the competitors says “We’re really exciting about releasing a new feature in three months”, your potential sales hire should ask:

• Why are you building this feature?
• Did your customers ask for it?
• Why are you launching it in three months?
• Why didn’t you build this earlier?
• What’s the purpose of this feature?
• Which pricing plan will this be on?
• What’s the UX/UI like?

The information they bring back to you has to go beyond, “They’re doing X.” You need to make sure you know why. Did they ask these questions or do they not know?

If they’re not in the habit of asking follow-up questions and going as far as they possibly can in their quest for information, they’re not going to be great at sales.

When they present you with all this data, ask them: “How do you think we relate to all these companies?”

Because if they talk to a prospect and that prospect asks, “How do you compare to company X?” They need to be able to present this information to them in a way that puts you ahead of the competition. You want to see how they think about the entire market.

These are three exercises that’ll help you uncover a ton of information about potential sales hires.

There are other things you can do that are less explicit, but still action-based tests that’ll help you evaluate your sales candidates.

Here are a few things:

• Give them feedback throughout the day and see if they change and adjust based on your advice. Are they capable of learning and are they capable of learning fast?

• How much are they driving the interview process versus relying on you to drive it? Will they ask for next steps? Will they ask for feedback? Will they ask questions or just say thank you and be on their way? This is a great way to see if someone will proactively ask for the next step instead of waiting for you to tell them. If they’re not going for the close for their own job, it’s unlikely they will close deals for your business. The follow-up is the most important thing in sales. If they don’t have the follow-up hustle, then things don’t look good.

Try these three simple exercises during your sales hiring process and let me know how it goes.

I’d love to hear what type of home assignments you use or challenges you’ve been presented with during interviews that have been successful. Go share them in the comments.

Recommended reading:

Top 10 interview questions in sales hiring
Struggling to figure out what you should you ask during a sales interview to find the perfect hire? These are the top 10 questions you should be asking.

My startup hiring interview hack: Why? Why? Why?
A simple strategy to x-ray through the bullshit answers applicants give you and get real insights into what makes them tick.

Hiring for startups: How to recruit the un-recruitable!
How do you find high-performers? And how to make them want to join your team? Here's some unconventional startup recruiting and hiring advice ...

We tend to like doing business with companies that put us, the customer, first. There is nothing better than going to restaurants, stores, and shops where you can tell they put us, the customer first. It usually leaves us with an awesome experience we tell our friends about.

Just like the example above, in the software industry we prefer to do business with companies that take care of our needs. They put us first by helping us solve pervasive problems with simple—yet powerful solutions.

Raymond Albert Kroc was an American entrepreneur best known for expanding McDonald’s from a local chain to the world’s most profitable restaurant franchise operation, according to biography.com. Kroc, included in Time Magazine’s ‘100 Most Important People of the 20th Century’, said this about putting customers first:

“If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.” – Ray Kroc.

When the Customer is True North, Every Department is Aligned

At ClientSuccess, we believe that when customers are first in your organization, everything else falls into its proper place. When the customer is true north, the product is built around what customers need in order to be successful; marketing is concerned about sharing the success of customers and attracting the right kinds of new business; finance strives to create a seamless invoice and payment process; and sales ensures the process is efficient and in the best interest of the customer. When all departments across the organization work together to ensure the customer is true north, then customer success is truly the goal of the entire organization.

Ensure the Customer is First in Every Situation

How can your organization achieve this? How can every department ensure that the customer is true north and that every consideration, question, or opportunity has the customer in mind, first and foremost?

We’ve compiled 6 questions to ask internally of your executive team to ensure that every department – from marketing to sales to administration – has their compass set on customer success.

6 Internal Questions to Adjust Your Compass to True North

1. What Do Customers Actually Want From Our Organization?

While this question may seem obvious, it’s the most important question to consider when making sure your compass is set towards customer success. What do your customers actually want from your organization? What do they need from you in order to be successful? What are their goals, and how will your product or service help them reach their goals and KPIs? An all-too-often problem that organizations face is that they are trying to be all things to all customers, rather than focusing in on the core areas of their business.

2. How Can We Deliver Better on Promises?

Is your organization guilty of over promising and under delivering? There’s nothing that can break a bond of trust faster than committing to something – whether it be a product update, a marketing event, or even a pricing structure change – then not following through. If your organization has made commitments in the past that haven’t been delivered upon either in a timely manner or haven’t been delivered on at all, then your customer compass needs some adjusting. Organizations that strive to ensure their customers are true north focus on under promising and over delivering and surprising and delighting their customers.

3. Can We Make Information More Accessible to Customers?

When your customers are looking for information about a product, service, or even a how-to guide, is it easily accessible to them? Do they know where to locate the information? One of the most common frustrations of customers, regardless of industry, is easily locating information that they need. Creating a content repository can be time consuming and expensive, but it’s worth evaluating your current processes to be sure that customers can find the information they need when they need it. There’s nothing more aggravating for customers than having to save every Wiki, blog, email newsletter, and email – all with various links to documents.

It’s important to understand that your customers are using countless other products and services, all of which they need to understand fully and keep up on. Ensure your organization stands out by keeping all of your content across product, services, marketing, sales, and finance organized and easily accessible.

4. How Are We Listening to & Acting on Customer Feedback?

Customer Success Managers (CSMs) and other team members across your organization are interacting with customers on a daily basis. CSMs build meaningful relationships with customers by engaging with them, asking questions, and working with them to solve problems and deliver meaningful solutions. When customers give feedback on processes, products, services, or even team members, how do you ensure your organization acts on that valuable information? Do you have a process in place to ensure every piece of feedback is listened to and evaluated to determine if an action should be taken?

When customers provide feedback, they want to ensure that they are listened to and understood and that their voice is considered – even if not everything is implemented.

5. Are We Training Our Internal Team to Exceed Expectations?

Does your internal team have the tools they need and the empowerment to make decisions on behalf of customers? Are your team members constantly having to go up the chain of command to solve even the simplest issue for customers? Customers expect that your CSM team and others they interact with directly have the tools they need to resolve issues and solve problems immediately. If your CSM team hasn’t been given the information or the empowerment to be successful, then how will your customers be successful? Investing internally to ensure your CSM team and others that are customer facing are highly qualified is never a waste of resources. The more you invest in tools, training, and resources internally, the more you invest in your customer’s’ ultimate success with your organization.

6. Do We Reward Our Customers and Show Appreciation?

Just like anyone, your customers enjoy feeling appreciated. As an executive, it’s important to encourage your customer facing team members to write hand-written thank you notes or to send a small gift after a positive exchange with a customer. Did a customer give a great piece of feedback regarding your product? Did a customer go out of his or her way to speak at a recent event? Did a customer stay up all night trying to fix a problem they were encountering? All of these scenarios are appropriate for a kind word or a thoughtful gesture, such as a gift. Showing appreciation to customers – even during a difficult situation – will show them that you care ultimately about their success not only as an organization, but their success as individuals.

How Does Your Organization Ensure Your Customers Are True North?

Has your organization evaluated which way your compass is facing? It’s easy to get off track and point the compass towards product, marketing, sales, or revenue. While all of those things are important, the customer is the most important of all. Without a successful and thriving customer base, none of the other aspects matter to the business. Begin asking your executive team some of the questions above to determine if your compass is pointed towards your customers. If it is, that’s awesome – keep growing and improving! If it’s not, begin prioritizing where you need to make adjustments to get back on track.

When it comes to content marketing, there are a couple of different strategic directions you can pursue. You can choose to publish a bunch of general content and attract a large volume of low-returning traffic, or you can publish very specific content and appeal to a lower volume of higher-returning traffic. Have you considered the latter?

What is Niche Content?

In the midst of writing and publishing content, it’s easy to feel like your efforts are falling on deaf ears. However, the data clearly shows that content plays a direct role in the purchase decisions of customers.

Unfortunately, many marketers are pursuing strategies where they try to please everyone. As you can guess, this rarely goes well. In order to generate healthy returns from your content, it’s much more important that you identify a niche and address the needs and pain points of this audience.

But what does niche content look like? Well, what better way to understand it than by looking at an example? Here are two: ThisGiftsForMen.com and Killerspin.com. The first is a website dedicated to gift giving ideas for men, while the second is a website all about table tennis and ping-pong. There’s no mistaking what either of these websites do. While they only appeal to a sub-segment of the population, they do a fantastic job of penetrating their audiences.

Six Reasons to Invest in Niche Content

Today’s generation loves personalization and craves tailor-made experiences. By developing niche content, you can appeal to millennial consumers and reach them in new ways. Specifically, you’ll enjoy the following benefits:

1. More Qualified Leads

When you’re targeting a very specific group of customers, it stands to reason that you’re going to attract more qualified leads to your website. In the end, this lowers bounce rates, enhances conversion rates, and increases the value of your website. There isn’t much more that needs to be said about this – it’s a pretty straightforward concept.

2. More Advertising Dollars

When your site attracts qualified leads, you’re subsequently able to generate more advertising dollars. After all, advertisers like to invest their money into sites that are able to provide isolated and engaged audiences.

Not only do niche audiences allow you to seek out contextual PPC advertisements, but you’ll also find opportunities for referring leads to other websites and making money from affiliate marketing.

3. SEO Prominence

“One of the fundamental principles behind how search engines work is that they establish the relevance of content to serve users the best possible results for their specific queries,” SEO specialist Tim Hand explains. “Since keyword relevance of a domain’s content boosts rankings for related searches, it makes sense for businesses to write content related to their field.”

Essentially, what Hand is saying is that niche content – specifically local content – is much more effective in gaining search engine prowess than simply producing fragmented content that fails to put a dent in any individual topic or niche.

4. Authoritative Reputation

Have you ever wondered how individuals and businesses become thought leaders in certain industries? Well, in most cases they target a very specific niche in the industry and write authoritative and unique content. Find a niche that doesn’t currently have a clear thought leader, and make it your own.

5. Stronger Word of Mouth Marketing

Word of mouth marketing is one of the most valuable things a company can ever grow. With word of mouth marketing, you’re able to sit back and watch others enhance your brand’s reputation. There are many different ways to encourage word of mouth marketing, but high quality niche content is one of the top options in a marketplace that’s driven by sharing content on social media.

6. Less Wasted Time

One of the biggest downsides of appealing to a wide readership is that you never know who you’re speaking to. As a result, you have to provide a lot of contextual information when introducing new topics or covering technical concepts. This is a waste of time for you and may be a waste of time for some of your readers.

With niche content, you don’t have to worry about including superfluous explanations and detailed context. You can safely assume that your audience understands certain cues and get straight to your point.

Niche Content Equals Better Content

There are times when general content works well. Plenty of large websites pursue generalized strategies and enjoy high returns. However, for the large majority of brands and websites, niche content is the only way to stand out in a saturated marketplace that prioritizes personalization.

Be very careful when choosing your niche. Ideally, your niche will be closely related to your most profitable target demographic. Find things that appeal to these customers and build a foundation around these concepts and topics. It may take some time to build up your audience, but you’ll experience much better long-term results by honing in on a niche.

3 Tips for Your Next Account Based Selling Campaign

We all need more customers and if you’re a small business or startup, you know better than anyone it is essential to succeed. So why does prospecting seem to be so tough? Without the big bucks for marketing, we rely on cold calls and cold emails to generate interest. It’s a numbers game, or so we’re told…but after all the time and energy spent,  the few responses you get don’t cut it.  That is why sales experts are recommending Account Based Sales Development, they are worrying less about the volume and more about the quality.

The most difficult transition into Account Based Sales Development is justifying taking the time and energy to research your prospects in order to tailor your message. It can feel like you are wasting precious time and missing out on getting in another dial. In B2B sales, the clock doesn’t stop and when the pressure is on it’s easy to revert to cutting corners and using automation tools to just get it done.

The key is playing sales as a value game; not a numbers game. Keep in mind the most important reason we call and email strangers all day: we know that we can help by solving a very real problem. That all begins with an email or a conversation that doesn’t get brushed off, but engages your prospect enough to see what’s in it for them. It’s not rocket science, the only way an Account Based Sales approach delivers results is when you have laser focus, go the extra mile and add VALUE. Here is a start:

1.

Never send an email without personalizing 100% first

The concept and benefits of personalization is a no-brainer; it’s the execution that trips us up. The shift from quantity to quality can be overwhelming at first; we get caught up in the details and get stuck on what to say. Don’t overthink it and remember your prospects are people, not robots.

• Re-craft  your email templates in a way that forces you to tailor each message. Take away the option to get lazy and hit “Send All”. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be, nail down the pain points that will hit home with your prospect based on their title, function industry or other easily identifiable traits.
• Dig into your prospect’s LinkedIn page or Twitter – Don’t be creepy! But if you both run marathons, cleverly tie that into your subject line
• Be aware of content your prospects share and start a conversation.  Read an article they shared – let them know you liked it

To paraphrase #GaryVee,“It’s all about depth, not width”. An Account Based Sales approach will be impossible if you don’t specialize. Have specific accounts already in place in verticals where you can become an expert.

2.

Focus on building relationships: Add value, don’t sell

Being an altruistic sales rep may be in your best interest. Mark Williams reiterated this on the Andy Paul’s Accelerate podcast with a version of the saying “Salespeople are too busy selling to help their prospects”. It’s easy to get wrapped up in your quota, your dials and your pipeline that we forget: It’s NOT about us. It’s about solving a real problem for our customer. If we shift the focus back to the customer and how you can help them, everything else will fall into line.

Salespeople often have the audacity to ask something of the busy executive they are cold calling, most likely asking them to take time (like they have any). We have no credibility or rapport with the prospect, yet time and time again we are confused or disappointed when the response is a big fat ‘NO’.

Shift your focus from selling to adding value:

• Share a relevant article.
• Leverage your network and connect your prospect with a lead.
• Be active on LinkedIn and Twitter – you are the expert in the space you sell into and your insights are more valuable than you realize.

Once you are able to add value, something magical happens. Your prospect trusts you. Now you’ve earned the right to ask them for their time if they haven’t already come to you.

3.

Think outside the box

If you want to get noticed amidst all the noise, you can’t be like everyone else. Stand out from the pack and ditch the cheesy “did you get eaten” emails. Be genuine and think outside the box. A handwritten note introducing yourself or after a good conversation has a lot more impact than a generic email. Don’t forget about good ol’ fashion Fed Ex…living in an age where everything has become so instantaneous, sending some creative or interactive collateral will capture your prospect’s attention and next time you call – they’ll remember you and want to take your call. Headed to a conference? Take advantage of the face time with prospects that will be attending and invite them to dinner, sports or entertainment event.

Most importantly, don’t panic if you don’t have the most dials that day. Have patience! Keep focused on adding value and building relationships with your prospects… and watch your response rate and success rate skyrocket.

The post 3 Tips for Your Next Account Based Selling Campaign appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

It’s time for salespeople to stop wasting their prospects time.  It’s time sales people stop sending out emails and leaving messages asking for just 15 minutes of a prospects time and offering nothing in return.

This Spazz Out was easy, as I had just received one of those irritating email asking for my time.

Stop wasting your prospects time. If you can’t offer something of value for 15 minutes of your prospects time, don’t ask.

Not All Influencers Will Help Your Business Succeed

Having the right connections online in your industry builds both trust and credibility for your business.

Would you like your brand to be recommended by influential leaders in your niche?

In order for your audience to be compelled to spread the word about your company they want to know whether your business is “the real deal.” When an individual or brand recommends your content and products or services this could be like gold to your conversion rates.

Where do you begin the process of making meaningful connections?

This all starts with target market research of who the biggest industry players are and the audience they are reaching.

A well-planned marketing strategy along with data tracking will help you find the best influencers to interact with and promote online.

Social media has made connecting with top industry players easier as long as meaningful communication is in place. Your initial approach should always be about them and can open the doors to sending an email or LinkedIn InMail or inviting them to events such as Twitter chats, webinars, live streaming events, and social media groups and communities.

In a study of influencer marketing by Augure, 73 percent of those surveyed reported that they began their relationship building over a period of two or more years.

Finding the right connections for your niche can be a challenge — the study revealed several factors that marketers used to hone in on the right people:

As your business evaluates the relevancy of an influencer’s community you will discover how they can impact your target market. Ask yourself several questions:

• How many fans and followers do they have on their blog and on social media?
• Do you have something of value to offer their business?
• Will they be interested down the road in promoting what your brand has to offer?

Depending on your industry you may find that it is better to make a connection on one channel versus another. For example, a blogger who writes about home, family, food or finances may find more success when engaging on Pinterest. A B2B or real estate agent, however; may have a better response on LinkedIn.

The marketers in the study by Augure revealed that email marketing was the most effective way of reaching influencers:

In every platform it’s important to communicate in a meaningful and authentic way — this can be done by:

• Blog commenting – Get involved in a select number of high profile blogs in your industry and leave feedback that shows you are truly interested in what they are writing about. As you comment and share their articles on social media in a balanced way they, in turn, will respond with a possible interest in your business.

Here’s a good example from blogger and entrepreneur, Donna Merrill, who left some valuable feedback on a recent blog post by author and marketing expert, Peg Fitzpatrick:

• Long-form content – Readers respond to articles with detailed information that can be backed up with statistics, examples, and action steps. Your business can create a mix of content and include an infographic, case study, or video that influencers will want to share. It’s fresh, authentic and well-researched content that generates the most interest.

• Recognize leaders in your industry – One of the best ways to draw attention to your brand is to create a blog post that shows who is successful in your niche. This should be done after your business has established a sizable amount of readers who will be willing to share your content on social media like this example post from Influencer Relationship Management software platform, Onalytica:

• Reach out to your connections – Use email and comments to communicate with your network — this could be helpful feedback on an article, industry news, a special event they may want to attend, etc. When writing an article that mentions an individual or brand be sure to make this known to them either by direct correspondence or a shout out on social media.

• Showcase a professional in your industry – Podcasts are still going strong — these are very effective in building an audience around influencers and attracting other leaders to your business. These can be webinars, live stream events, Facebook Live videos, etc. Author and entrepreneur, Bryan Kramer, engages his audience each week with different leaders in the world of business and marketing:

Decide now the best types of influencers your business should make a connection with whether this might be another blogger, a high-level marketer, a B2B expert, etc. Celebrities measure on the low scale of who is important — it’s more effective to discover who is an ace in your own industry.

Forging authentic relationships takes time, patience, and some financial investment into marketing platforms, blogging tools, and measurement software. Find out what would be of interest and value to those you want to add to your inner circle rather than offering a sales pitch. As your business supports and promotes influencers in your niche you can build a strong network for the long term and build a reputable brand persona with your audience.

I don’t know about you, but when I step back from it all, it feels like we’re living in one of the most disruptive and dynamic periods in human history. Nothing stays the same because nothing ever has—or ever will.

Arriving in London on the heels of the Brexit vote, I had a front row seat to what will likely turn out to be one of the most catalytic events in the European Union’s short history. After listening to the disappointment, frustration and utter shock that filled the conversations following the decision, I had a quick flashback to the early nineties that inspired me to consider what was new from a trend and behavioral perspective. What follows is an exploration of an evolution—a look at the past and it’s bearing on the present. We’ll start with a bit of food for thought.

Something changed with food here in the UK twenty years ago that captured the country’s imagination. Now obviously you didn’t have to be an astrophysicist to predict the eventual trends that would follow, but the change in the British food scene was a radical transformation. I remember being fascinated by the differences between UK grocery stores, like Waitrose and Tesco, and their dull American cousins so much so that I wrote a white paper detailing the quiet rise of organic foods and farm-based products in Britain and its grocery store’s progressive approach to private label.

Britain’s relationship with food (and their reputation for it) changed for the better—as the rise of new celebrity chefs, like Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, helped turn food into entertainment and helped solve the mystery of preparing real, delicious food, making it simple and sexy in the process.

Over the past twenty years, America’s relationship with food has experienced a dramatic shift, as we’ve seen the successful growth of farm-to-plate produce, micro-breweries, better-for-you restaurants and emergent good-for-you packaged food brands. The entire food ecosystem is undergoing a radical transformation.

Bulldog Drummond has been deeply involved with a wide variety of food and beverage brands over the past 20 years. We’ve seen innovation accelerate in all facets of the industry driven by category disruptors, like Plum Organics, Clif Bar and Annie’s, who have forced established global brands, like Campbell’s, Kellogg’s and Nestlé, to rethink their approach to business.

What has happened in food is a reminder that entire industries undergo radical disruption—in part due to the pursuit of better and in part due to complete reinvention. Nothing stays the same because nothing ever has. Look at what Uber has done to the taxi industry or what Airbnb is doing to hospitality and you’ll see how established systems can be totally disrupted.

So no matter what industry segment you operate in, if you’re not thinking about how to evolve and disrupt your own business model to be more compelling and relevant (before someone else does), you might find yourself fighting for your very survival.

Let’s take a quick look at a couple of obvious segments that need to undergo radical disruption.

Wake up retail—digital ate your lunch and it’s coming for your dinner too
Westfield Shopping Centers used to represent predictable, unspectacular malls home to large retail boxes that offered very little to engage and connect with the local communities they were a part of. Their leadership realized the world of retail was rapidly changing and consumers needed compelling new reasons to visit their malls. Working closely with their team, we developed a dynamic positioning and design process that helped re-image each of their malls as a customized, compelling, relevant community-specific destination. As each mall was scheduled for redevelopment, an individual positioning brief was created to guide the design and experience development, helping ensure that the design was informed by the mall’s connection and relevance to its immediate community.

Department stores need radical intervention and reinvention. And no one knew that better for his time than the famous retail entrepreneur Harry Selfridge. Selfridge understood what it meant to be a must-visit destination, evolving and pushing the boundaries of store design to meet the untapped desire of the consumer. While the years have passed, not much has changed. Despite the explosive growth of online retail, most department stores today remain uninteresting, unrewarding and unfulfilling experiences. In the past, Nordstrom was always an exemplar for retail leadership—earning the highest reputation for service—but like its competitors, it faces relevance, value and experience challenges and needs to re-imagine its place and relationship with consumers. After working closely with Stitchfix, it’s clear that elegant and digital solutions solve the time, selection, curation, simplicity and instant-gratification challenges traditional retailers, like Nordstrom, haven’t yet been able to address.

While helping to design the digital strategy for emergent luxury retailer PIRCH, we became intimately familiar with how their business model is purpose driven and service lead, with the consumer at the center of every experience. They’re absolute masters in experience and relationship design—combining education, service, elegance and value to deliver on their promise. They are a must-study for any retailer or brand looking to re-invent their model.

Buying a car is a miserable waste of time
Buying a car is likely the second most expensive purchase you will ever make in your life, and yet it often feels like a visit to the proctologist. Much like the mall and the department store, the entire car buying experience needs an overhaul. Why waste time driving to a dealership, test driving a car, haggling over sticker price and filling out reams of paperwork? And, it’s not an isolated event—it’s basically the same unsatisfying experience regardless of the brand. Tesla broke the model and redesigned the buying experience while CarMax engineered some of the pain points out of the traditional car dealer experience by designing a connected consumer-centric journey that combines the power of digital and that of physical to offer greater efficiency, selection and value to the consumer. They’ve both gone part of the way, but it’s time to shake up the entire consumer experience and relationship with car buying and do it in a meaningful and tangible way before the likes of some “Amazon for cars” turns this category upside down and inside out. Maybe there will be a dealer-less experience when driver-less cars become mainstream? Until then we’re in the driver’s seat.

Heads up, nature is going to be the radical disruptor
When coming back to the UK, I’m always on the lookout for what’s new and different to see what ideas might hop the pond (and vice versa). I know it’s far from a new subject, but climate change seems to be rising to the surface of pubic perception in the UK—as it should. And, while it didn’t quite receive front page treatment when it came out a couple of weeks back, a report from the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) paints a disturbing picture of the impact they expect to see based on the rise in temperature. They warn of more widespread flooding and new diseases among the consequences— consequences that require our urgent attention. In the report, it claims that the UK is poorly prepared for the inevitable effects global warming will have in the coming decades. These effects include deadly annual heatwaves, water shortages and difficulty producing food along with other unforeseen outcomes. Nature is the ultimate disruptor. There needs to be an urgency within us to address (and anticipate) the potential impact of global warming, as it threatens to disrupt so many parts of our daily life. If not, then we might find ourselves fighting for our very survival. The time for disruption and changing consumer behavior is now. Time isn’t on our side.

Uncommon questions to fuel disruptive thinking:

There is absolutely no doubt that innovation should be a key driving principle in every business and that regardless of the department we operate in, we should be encouraged to think about how we can disrupt, iterate and innovate. It’s a mindset that has to be fostered from leadership. One of the basic catalysts for fueling innovation is curiosity and the power of questions. Here are a number of them that can help start that conversation:

1. What’s the problem we need to solve for?
2. What does the consumer need/want/feel that they don’t know they do?
3. What does it look like if we turn the model upside down and inside out?
4. How can we add more tangible value for the consumer?
5. How can we save people time in each step of the process?
6. What happens if we engineer out all of the frustrations?
7. What happens if we replace analog with digital?
8. Where can we enhance service?
9. Where can we create memorable and meaningful experiences?
10. How can we educate and inspire to connect and fuel community?

At Thursday lunchtime, the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee will announce decisions made at its second meeting since the UK voted to leave the European Union, with a cut in interest rates by 25 basis points almost guaranteed to be the outcome, if market expectations are to believed.

Up until today, rates have stood unchanged at 0.5% since 2009, a record 88 months of inaction from the central bank.

Last month, despite being widely expected to cut rates, the governor Mark Carney and his fellow MPC members left policy unchanged, with only one member of the committee, Gertjan Vlieghe, voting for a cut.

One of the most-watched impacts of any potential action — whether in the form of a cut or a possible extension of quantitative easing — will be how the pound reacts to the news. Sterling took off last month when the BoE's last policy decision was announced, jumping 2% in short order.

The pound crashed after Britons voted to leave the EU, losing more than 12% of its value in a couple of trading sessions, and dropping down to the lowest level since 1985.

It has since rallied a little, thanks largely to the increased political stability brought about by the appointment of former home secretary Theresa May as prime minister in mid-July. However, sterling still remains roughly 10% lower than it was at the close on the day Britain went to the polls.

At around 8:00 a.m. BST (3:00 a.m. ET) on Thursday morning, sterling was fairly muted, lower by just 0.25% against the dollar at $1.3293. When the Bank of England announces what it is doing to monetary policy, it is likely to move substantially, with a downward move the most likely outcome.

Helpfully, analysts at ING have compiled a chart to illustrate where it thinks the pound will go in a variety of scenarios. ING's base case for the MPC meeting is that Carney and his associates will cut rates by 25 basis points, as well as announcing between £50-75 billion of QE. In this scenario, ING sees sterling tumbling by as much as 3%, which at current prices, would take the pound below $1.29 for the first time since early July.

The best outcome for sterling investors, and British holidaymakers would be for the Bank to once again take no action, which ING believes would boost sterling by around 2.5%. Take a look at ING's various sterling scenarios below:

While ING's predictions are a useful indicator of what might happen to sterling in the aftermath of the rates decision, it should be noted that prior to the BoE's last monetary policy announcement, HSBC predicted a 1.5% fall in the pound after a "no change" decision from the Bank. In reality, as mentioned above, sterling gained 2%.

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Would the offer of a FREE! tattoo make you more inclined to go under the needle? Well, if you have been toying with the idea of getting a tattoo; the offer is coming from a well-respected and clean provider; and you’re just the slightest bit drunk, then quite possibly, yes. (Kind of gives new meaning to the idea of locating customers’ pain points, huh?) That’s the power of FREE!

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you probably aren’t offering free tattoos on your website. But that doesn’t mean the psychological power of free works fundamentally differently for your products and services.

What is it about FREE! that’s so irresistible?

We are constantly bombarded by offers for free stuff:

“Get a free session with a personal trainer when you sign up for a gym membership.”

“Free body butter with $80 massage purchase.”

“BOGO shoe sale for back to school.”

According to behavioral economist Dan Ariely, deep-rooted psychological principles explain why marketers and entrepreneurs are smart to use the allure of free offers to attract more shoppers. Bottom line: FREE! works.

While most transactions have an upside and a downside, when something is free, we forget about the downside. FREE! gives us an emotional charge and we transfer that feeling to the item being offered, making it seem more valuable than it really is. The power of free is also tied to our primitive fear of loss. Because there’s no visible loss, the free offer makes us feel safe.

In Predictably Irrational, Ariely focuses on how the emotional pull of getting something for nothing, which he calls the zero price effect, can lead us to make bad (i.e., irrational) decisions. For business owners, the relevant concern is about how to keep your value, while offering something for free.

Using FREE! as a marketing tool for your website

When thinking about how to harness the power of free for your own products and services, it’s important to keep in mind that a free offer is a marketing tool. As with all marketing tools, the key to making giveaways successful is to carefully consider your goals ahead of time.

So think about what you want to accomplish: Are you hoping to attract new sales leads? Do you want to build a social media following? Is your goal to entice past customers to return for an upgraded product or service? Are you looking to introduce a product with new features that might nudge formerly reluctant customers past their tipping points?

Once you know your goals, you can strategically choose the right type of free offer to drive traffic from your target audience and influence them to purchase something.

Here are some tips to help you develop the best strategy for your free offer:

1. Choose an offer that connects with your ideal client

Most people buy things that they have a personal connection with. This is because a personal connection is an indication of value. The best way to connect with your ideal client is to consider what problems they might have and how you can solve them. For example, back before the days of Amazon Prime, many of Amazon’s ideal customers were hesitant to purchase books online because they didn’t want to pay extra for shipping. Amazon recognized the problem and included a free shipping offer for orders over $30. Someone purchasing a book for $16.95 might pay an additional $3.95 for shipping, for instance. But if the consumer bought another book, for a total of $31.90, then their shipping would be FREE! Some probably didn’t really want the second book, but FREE! shipping was just too tempting to pass up. Sales went up like crazy.

2. Choose an offer that demonstrates your value

One big goal of a free offer is to give people a taste of how fabulous your business is, so they walk away thinking “I need to work with this company.” At Spring Insight, we focus on website and online marketing strategy. Our main offering is a 20-minute FREE! website assessment, which users can sign-up for online. During the session, I get on the phone with you while I review your website and tell you what specific changes to design and functionality would help you run your business more effectively. But beyond giving advice about structural changes, I talk strategy. Sure, you could take my ideas straight to your web developer, but chances are you will be so impressed with my expertise, that you will see way more that’s valuable than simply website reorganization tricks.

3. Choose an offer that doesn’t seem too gimmicky

Never forget that your customers are smart. Then treat them that way. We have all found ourselves inadvertently in the middle of a hard-selling sales pitch at one time or another. The reason such sales pitches are so annoying is that they make us feel like someone is trying to trick us into buying something we don’t need or can’t afford. The most notorious example of this is the FREE! vacation in exchange for listening to a presentation from a recent college grad with a business degree trying to convince you to buy a time-share. How does that ever work?

But doesn’t FREE! devalue my product or service?

Nope. Not in my experience.

The key here is to focus on giving away ideas, not products. How do you earn permission to speak to a group of people who will engage with your message, buy what you sell, and share your ideas? You build a reputation for being a generous, creative person who loves to share her brilliance with the world.

My free website assessments raise my visibility. This is also a big reason I write blog posts like this one and why you should be blogging regularly too. It’s a great way to get in front of people who are otherwise ignoring you.

Sure, you will get some freeloaders and cheapskates. But if you are strategic, your free offer will also be a siren sound for your ideal clients—the ones who will become not just one-time buyers, but loyal customers who return because their first impression of you was all about generosity. I don’t worry about giving away my value because I’ve got plenty more great ideas to share once that proposal is accepted.

While your customers probably aren’t in the market for that FREE! tattoo, if you can tap into the free offers that will get them flocking to your website and telling all their friends about your company, you will see positive results.

In a time where every company needs to be data-informed, you can actually predict your customers’ likelihood to send a referral and even raise it higher with a customer feedback tool you’re probably already using: Net Promoter Score (NPS).

NPS captures how customers feel about your product and why with two simple questions:

Image source

It almost seems too simple to be useful, but the data doesn’t lie: companies with a higher NPS grow faster than their competition thanks to evangelical customers willing to put their reputation on the line and spread the word about their products.

This isn’t just true at the macro level. Successful companies are already using NPS to sniff out the customers most likely to refer friends. Here’s how they’re doing it, and how you can go a step further and use NPS data to make your referral program more effective.

How Airbnb Uses NPS to Predict Referral

Airbnb is famous for using data to improve and saw NPS as a huge opportunity. The company had its data team analyze the correlations between NPS’ likelihood to recommend (LTR) score and future actions like rebooking or referring a friend for the more than 600,000 users.

The data team started by separating users into seven cohorts: those who didn’t leave a review, those who left a review but skipped the NPS question, those who have an LTR between 0 and 6, and then, one each for the remaining LTR scores of 7-10.

[Image: source]

First, the team measured those cohorts’ probability to book another trip on Airbnb within a year of their first trip. They found that the probability rose almost linearly with LTR. Users with an LTR of 10 were about 13% more likely to rebook within a year than detractors.

[Image: source]

The trend was similar but not quite as pronounced when it came to correlation between LTR and probability of sending a referral through the Airbnb app. Users with an LTR of 10 were 4% more likely than detractors to refer.

You might think 4% doesn’t sound like much. But in Airbnb’s dataset of 600,000 customers, that 4% amounts to 24,000 advocates. Not to mention, the experiment only measures users who referred through Airbnb’s in-app referral program. It doesn’t account for users who may have just mentioned to their friends that they should give Airbnb a try.

While Airbnb doesn’t tell us how in this case study, we can be sure that its team used this data to improve the customer experience and drive more referrals. If you dig into the data, you can do the same thing with your product. Here’s how.

How to use NPS to Generate More Referrals

Here are three simple ways to use your NPS data to improve your referral program:

1. Close the loop with respondents

Customers who respond to your NPS survey—even ones who give you a bad rating—have taken the time to help your company improve. Following up afterward is your way of repaying them and showing them that you’re committed to improving their experience.

Here’s how to follow up with NPS respondents depending on their LTR:

• Promoters (LTR is 9-10). The commitment principle tells us that once someone says they’ll do something, they feel compelled to deliver on their words with action. Tap into that. You can use a service like Customer.io to automatically send an email to any promoter after they respond, thanking them for their time and inviting them to refer.
• Passives (7-8). Typically, passives appreciate the value your product delivers but had an issue actually getting it. Topical example: If someone loves Pokemon Go but has trouble playing because the app crashes, their LTR would be a 7 or 8. But solving it would push them into promoter territory. If you’re using Qualaroo to collect NPS data, you can integrate with Slack to notify your customer success team as NPS responses come in. That way, they can delight respondents by solving these fixable issues quickly.
• Detractors (0-6). Most detractors’ complaints relate to the value your product, app or service provides. For instance, they often want new features or functionality. Push detractor responses to your product management team so that they can look for patterns and identify product changes that will drastically improve the customer experience moving forward. That’ll lead to more referrals down the line.

People will only refer your brand if they love it and feel confident their friends will too. Your NPS survey uncovers that exact information with its question on likelihood to recommend. By talking to customers who respond, you can either give them the slight nudge they need to refer or solve the problems that stop them from becoming advocates.

2. Double Down on Whatever Increases NPS

This isn’t about reading through the reasons customers give for their NPS score. You need to dig into the data, quantify as much of the customer experience as you can, and identify the parts that most strongly correlate with a higher rating.

Uber has one of the highest NPS scores of any company around, so we’ll use them as an example. There are so many small differences between every Uber ride: car cleanliness, trip length, the driver’s skill, etc.

But let’s say that after analyzing NPS data, Uber finds something most wouldn’t even think to look for: customers who have taken at least three rides in the more upscale UberBLACK option give a much higher LTR. Uber could act on that by offering more discounts on UberBLACK to customers who’ve yet to use the service.

That might sound like an overly simple message: “Improve your product and people will like it more.” But it’s about finding the right improvements. By finding the specific elements of each transaction that correlate most strongly with a higher NPS and working backwards from there, you can make the changes that will get your customers excited to spread the word about your product.

3. Know when to tweak the referral program

Tracking NPS can also let you know when the problem is with your referral program itself, rather than with your product.

[Image: source]

Take a look at the distribution of LTR scores from Airbnb’s NPS analysis. The vast majority of respondents were promoters. More than half pegged their LTR at a perfect ten.

Now, imagine if Airbnb still had these incredible scores, yet almost no one was referring. It would be incredibly frustrating to have all these customers telling you they’re willing to refer new customers but never actually doing so. But that’s the reality for many companies: In some industries, as few as 10% of promoters ever refer new business to the company.

If the NPS data is telling you that customers love your product, yet none of them are becoming advocates, the real problem must lie with your referral program – assuming you have one. Consider a few ideas to grease the wheels and get people referring:

• Make referral easier to find. No one will refer if they don’t know they have the chance. Try putting a link to your referral program front and center on your site’s homepage or navigation bar.
• Design referral to be seamless. Sharing a referral shouldn’t take more than a few clicks. Any instances of friction are a chance for advocates to say, “Forget it,” and give up, so make referring as easy as possible.
• Try a new reward structure. Maybe your rewards aren’t enticing enough. At Extole, we’ve found that an equal reward for both advocates and new customers drives the most referrals, but that might not be true for your product. Try out different rewards to keep your referral program going strong.

If the data is telling you that customers love your brand or product but the referrals aren’t coming in, you need to experiment with your referral program to figure out what tweaks will get more people sharing.

Use the Data you Already Have

You don’t need some groundbreaking new data source to understand what motivates your customers to refer. You just need to use what you already have in creative ways.

NPS is one of the simplest, most widely used customer feedback tools around. But it uncovers your most passionate customers and lets you quantify what separates them from everyone else. That tells you who to target for referral now, and what you need to do with your product to get more advocates down the road.

If you think of social media as the sole province of vacation selfies and muffin recipes, the idea of using it for genuine professional development may seem absurd. But there are plenty of ways you can use social media to build professional skills, knowledge, and relationships, without getting overwhelmed.

To get real learning value out of social media, ask yourself these three questions:

What do I want to learn?

Want to learn more about your industry? Follow smart industry leaders on LinkedIn and Twitter to see what they’re reading and what they’re thinking about. From that you can learn key industry hashtags on Twitter to discover great new resources. Seek out the best blogs and podcasts in your field by reading or listening further when you find an interesting story that a colleague has shared online. Think about the specific subfield or topic you want to learn about next, and focus your reading in that specific area so that you develop expertise instead of just learning a tiny bit about a lot of subjects.

You and Your Team Series

Learning

Recently, I had the good fortune of conducting a joint interview with Don Schuerman, chief technology officer and vice president of product marketing at Pegasystems on the topic of customer experience.

Don brought an intriguing perspective to the table from more than 20 years on the technology side, working directly with companies to operationalize digital initiatives.

You can listen to the interview here, but I also wanted to share some highlights from the conversation:

The market is changing, whether we like it or not: Customer expectations are sky-rocketing, and brands are being forced to compete on the basis of the experiences they enable. Ignoring these rapidly increasing expectations might not immediately damage customer relationships, but over time, customers will disengage and move on. Cumulatively, this could cause crippling long-term effects on a business.

Consistent and compelling experiences never happen by accident: Optimizing customer experience requires a very conscious and focused effort from organizational leadership. The technology and channels adopted by customers are changing quickly and that requires a reciprocal effort on the part of the brand.

Large organizations face large roadblocks: The larger and more widely distributed a brand is, the more fragmented their message can become. Unfortunately, customers can get lost in the shuffle. As a business grows and becomes less agile, they face unique challenges in staying connected with their client base.

Success is very possible with the right mindset: There are many businesses, both large and small, that are seeing tremendous gains by refocusing on the customer, such as jumps in loyalty levels, retention, repeat purchases, and long-term value. But there is no silver bullet; it’s an evolutionary process that must attack problems “customer first.”

Please take a moment to listen to the full interview here (audio).

Connect with Brian!

Twitter: @briansolis
Facebook: TheBrianSolis
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Experience is everything…read my new book, X!

The post Building a Brand Through Experience Design appeared first on Brian Solis.

Editor’s note: David Meerman Scott’s book, The New Rules of Sales and Service, was recently republished in a newly revised paperback edition. In it, Scott discusses the changes happening in the sales and services industry and how professionals and stay in tune with buyers. Here are Scott’s four biggest takeaways from the book.

1) Buyers are in charge.

We’re fed up with unwanted phone calls interrupting us at home and at work. We hate wading through hundreds of unsolicited emails. We’ve had it with intrusive social media messages. We’re tired of poor service from companies that don’t treat us with respect or that send us into a phone mail maze that wastes minutes of our time and never connects us with a living person.

At the same time, all of us -- you, me, and all our existing and potential customers -- turn to the web to solve problems.

Today buyers are in charge. The idea of mystery in the sales process is over. We research someone online before agreeing to a first date -- is he a creep? We fire up LinkedIn an hour before an initial business meeting -- does she have anyone I know in her network? We watch an on-demand movie trailer before deciding which film to see that night at the theater. We check out restaurant reviews and browse menus before booking a reservation.

There’s a huge disconnect that I address in The New Rules of Sales and Service. 

2) Instant communication has transformed sales and services.

In the days before real-time online communication …

• It was very difficult for buyers to find independent information about the products and services that interested them.
• There was no easy way for unhappy customers to voice disapproval of a company in public.
• Both buyers and existing customers couldn’t communicate instantly with the companies they did business with or patronized.
• Customers had little say in the products and services they wanted to buy.

All of this used to be true because communications wasn’t instant. There was no way to easily research products or companies or to complain about poor service.

None of this needs to be true in your business any longer. The world has changed, and your business needs to adapt. 

3) Even in a world where everyone investing in inbound is creating content, serving it up at the right time makes it stand out.

While many people are indeed creating content, there isn’t that much that is great because most content is written about products. That egotistical approach doesn’t work well.

The basic idea is to understand buyers needs first, then create content especially for them. When delivered at the right time and in the right context content makes the sale.

4) Social media will only be effective if you build it into your daily routine and take it seriously.

To make the new rules of sales and service part of your world, you must change your mindset. You need to understand your buyers, rather than just talking about your products and services. You’ll need to be aware of what’s going on in the real-time news and on social networks. You’ll need to create content and publish it on the web, and sometimes you’ll need to do it urgently to be successful. On social networks, two-way communication is required, not just the typical broadcast approach that most people are used to. These habits and techniques do not come naturally to entrepreneurs, salespeople, or customer service representatives steeped in more traditional ways.

But making a change is tough. I’ve spoken to many people about this.

I’ve found that finding the time to participate in social media is much like exercise; you need to make it an important part of your life. If it is important to you, you don’t even think about it anymore. It just is.

You have a choice. You can choose to exercise regularly in order to stay fit. The most effective way is when exercise becomes part of your routine. Some people like fitness clubs. Others enjoy running outdoors or dancing or kickboxing. But in all cases, success comes from making it an important part of your daily life.

And you also have a choice when it comes to how you communicate. You can interrupt people with product messages. Or you can create the content that people want to consume and are eager to share.

There are no shortage of sales experts telling you how to be better. (Trust me, I just listened to way too many of them as I compiled this list of sales training YouTube channels.)

Each week, they’re saying you just need to do X or Y or X and Y, and if you do so you’ll be crushing your quota and killing your customers with kindness without compromising one for the other. They’ll tell you you can have your cake and eat it too with a cherry and whipped cream on top.

It’s all total horsesh*t, at least for you. None of it applies to you.

Why?

Because you’re uncoachable.

You won’t get better. You can’t get better. Maybe you don’t need to get better because you’re already perfectly good at what you do. You learned enough in your first few months of selling to carry you through your career. Maybe it took you a few years (slow learner). Either way, you don’t need to improve, right? You’re already the best you can be.

Carole Mahoney, head of sales coaching firm Unbound Growth, recently published the ebook “Is Sales Coaching Right for You?” In it, she shares how she detects whether someone is coachable, whether they are capable of improving their results, whether they’ll accept they don’t know everything and subject themselves to critique and uncomfortable coaching suggestions, and whether she can actually help them. If none of the above is true, Mahoney tells them to bug off -- she has no time for people who aren’t coachable.

As a salesperson who benefited tremendously from coaching early in my career from Carole Mahoney’s business partner, Rick Roberge, and as a sales leader who has had as much failure as success when it comes to coaching my team members, I was eager to read her findings and interview her for additional perspective. (See, I’m still coachable!)

Mahoney rejects more coaching applicants than she accepts. Her sales process (like most sales processes are, if they’re any good) is built around mutual qualification, not begging for attention and orders. Often, she detects that she can’t help a prospective coaching client faster than they figure it out for themselves. She looks for these eight red flags during her sales process as signs that she should kick them to the curb.

Below are those eight reasons you’re destined to struggle along at 90% for the rest of your sales career as you contend with dead-end sales jobs and performance plans.

No? That’s not you? If you’re still reading, there’s some hope for you yet. Don’t get carried away, though. I said “some.” Call me what you will, just don’t say I didn’t give you a chance ...

1) You Don’t Have Time to Improve

Do you ever say to yourself, “I just need more time on the phones and I’ll be fine”?

Mahoney told me that most salespeople who considered -- but didn’t hire her -- as a sales coach think they just need more time for selling.

“When they work just a bit harder, they get by,” Mahoney said. “Since they’re doing okay most of the time by just working a bit harder, they’re not ready to admit that the way they are selling might also be a problem. They are also unwilling to admit that changing the way they sell might be the only way to be effective with the time they have.”

Uh oh. Maybe you’re up sh*t creek without a paddle. Nobody can create more time. But not everyone can improve either ...

2) You’re Happy With the Status Quo

“If salespeople have goals that are nice to have and won’t change their world, there’s little incentive for them to improve,” Mahoney said.

The status quo might be over-, consistent or under-performance for your “man-made” quota. (Man-made quotas are quotas that are given to you. Winners set their own goals.)

If you don’t have big, important, personal goals that fuel your fire, why change what you’re doing?

All's not lost on these souls, though.

“Some salespeople just need a nudge before they’ll think bigger about what they really want in life.” adds Mahoney.

3) You Don’t Follow Through on Other People’s Advice

Like Melania Trump and First Lady Michelle Obama before her said, “Your word is your bond and you do what you say.”

Not you, though. You don’t follow through.

During Mahoney’s sales process, she usually assigns homework to her prospects and gets commitment from them to do it before her next call. Sometimes, she challenges them to do something different than they’re doing now and suggests their next call focus on how her advice helped. What she’s doing may look like free coaching, but what she’s really doing is testing whether prospects can be coached at all.

Unfortunately, she often finds that prospective clients don’t follow through.

“If doing what you said you would do is optional, and deadlines are more like guidelines, then how can a coach help you?” she asked me rhetorically during our interview.

4) You’re Never Wrong

You don’t need coaching. You just need validation.

You know you’re right. You’re looking for someone to have your back, be on your side, and assure you that it’ll eventually work out for you when the stars recognize your brilliance and finally align for you.

“I should have gotten the job. I deserved it more than him.” “I did everything right. That deal should have closed.”

These are common excuses Mahoney hears from help-immune B players.

“These salespeople will spend their time complaining about things that are outside of their control,” Mahoney added.

One example Mahoney gave me was a prospective client who was banging their head against the wall trying to make their cold calling and cold emailing work. “It wasn’t working at all, but he was not open to anything different and just wanted us to help him tweak what he was doing,” Mahoney said. She declined to coach him.

Coachable salespeople ask, “What could I be doing differently to hit my goals despite my current plan not working?”, or, “How can I prevent my deals from going south?”, or, “What would you do if you were me?”

5) You’re Smart Enough to Figure It Out on Your Own

Being highly educated is a positive for most jobs. But in sales, if you’re obsessed with people recognizing how smart you are, you’ll probably struggle. It’s great to be book-smart, but if you think your special “fast learner” skills trump anyone else’s years of been-there, done-that experience, you’re not going to be coachable.

“Your ego can get in the way of a coach being able to help you,” said Mahoney. “We turned down several potential clients because they were too self-absorbed. They were way too proud of what they knew instead of being interested in learning what they don’t know. They certainly weren’t willing to consider that their current knowledge might be their impediment.”

I guess that means that the more wonderful you believe you are, the less coachable you become. (Don’t worry. I’m screwed too.)

6) Your Situation Is Too Unique

Not only are you a special snowflake, your situation is a one-of-a-kind too. You’re so unique there’s no possible way someone who doesn’t know your industry, your company, your products, and your buyer could help you. Or so you think.

Mahoney added, “Some salespeople think their role is too specialized to get help from a coach who isn’t intimately aware of all of the nuances of it.”

She suggested that this uncoachable trait is easy to detect when salespeople start questioning what applies to them vs. other sales roles or industries.

“There are legitimate differences between different companies, but most sales principles can be applied across different industries, buyers or services,” Mahoney said. “These salespeople would rather figure it out on their own because no one else could possibly understand.”

7) You Expect Someone Else to Invest in You Before You’ll Invest in Yourself

If there’s any type of professional that should understand the value of investing upfront for a payback down the road, it’s you. It’s what you ask buyers to do when you attempt to close.

Ironically, many salespeople wait for their companies to invest in them. But most sales organizations take a “survival of the fittest” approach to sales performance management. You might be put through a world-class training program in your first few months before you’re sent to sink or swim, or maybe there’s not even that in place. You might be blessed with a great sales manager, but chances are they don’t really have time to take you from zero to 60, let alone the experience and skills to do so. Bottom line, your company can and will only do so much for you.

So, why do salespeople balk at hiring an independent sales coach and investing in themselves? Mahoney answered this question with one word: Money.

Salespeople don’t invest because they don’t want to risk their own money on their own development. They may have a negative buy-cycle or money weaknesses that prevent them from making smart investments in themselves.

But, before crossing these people off her list, Mahoney asks these people a battery of questions, including, “Why do you believe your company should pay for training? Is investing in your future worth the short-term sacrifices that may be required? If you don’t believe in the investment, why would you expect someone else to? Is the investment not worth the risk?”

If they are stalling, she’ll ask, “How much money is a lot to you? How did you make your last buying decision? Is the way you buy not only not keeping you from hiring a coach, but also standing in your way when you encounter a buyer who doesn't believe in investing in your solution?”

But say the wrong thing, like “I need to check with my boss,” or “My spouse and I need to really weigh this against other things we’re considering buying,” and Mahoney might make the decision for you. To her, if salespeople aren’t willing to invest in themselves, it’s a huge red flag around their commitment to being successful in sales, in general.

Don’t hesitate. When I hired my sales coach, I was in debt and I paid him more than I had booked in the preceding few months. It was a big risk. It worked out, of course. It was the best investment I’ve ever made in my career.

8) You Can’t Handle a Coach

If you’re asking yourself, “Why is Pete being such a sarcastic a**hole” or “How does Carole ever get any clients?”, then I’ve accomplished my goal.

I’m not being sarcastic in an attempt to be funny, nor am I playing devil’s advocate to be devilish. I’m not being dramatic just to get pageviews. The reason I wrote this post in this tone is because effective sales coaching requires you to subject yourself to some tough love from your coach and if you can’t handle it in a blog post, how will you handle it when it’s one-on-one and personal? The language in this post is in your face, just like a good coach will be when you’re not doing it right.

Still reading? If so, and you’re considering coaching, here’s a checklist you can use to determine whether they can even coach the pathetic out of you:

• You are open to feedback and will dedicate the time to receive it.
• You have an incentive to change.
• You will follow through on advice you receive.
• You don’t care as much about being right as you do about being successful. You take responsibility for losses, and share credit for the wins.
• You accept there are things you don’t even know that you don’t know.
• You understand you can learn from others and that some people are much wiser and more experienced than you.
• You have a personally meaningful goal worth investing in.
• You have a “whatever it takes” attitude.

Still think I’m being too harsh on you? You might remember the scene where Frankie (Clint Eastwood) in Million Dollar Baby finally agrees to train Hillary Swank’s Maggie.

Frankie says, “If I take you on, you don’t say anything. You don’t question me. You don’t ask why, you don’t say anything except maybe ‘Yes, Frankie.’”

Why was he so hard on her?

“Winners are simply willing to do what losers won’t,” Mahoney said. “I want to coach champions, so I have to find the ones who will do what it takes, even when it’s uncomfortable.”

Maybe that’s not for you? Why did you read this far, then?

Psst -- want to see Carole Mahoney speak live? She'll be at #INBOUND16 -- check out the sales track here.

If you’ve been following along with the Sales Enablement Shift podcast so far, you’re largely familiar with our mission to bring some clarity to the increasingly confusing sales enablement industry. One major challenge when it comes to clarifying and elevating the role of sales enablement is finding a universally accepted definition of sales enablement. Without a clear definition of sales enablement as a role, function and process, it’s incredibly difficult—if not impossible—to successfully plan and measure the program itself.

In our newest episode of the Shift podcast, Seismic’s VP of Marketing, Daniel Rodriguez, sits down with Thierry van Herwijnen to nail down a definition of sales enablement that reflects today’s industry standards and, most importantly, the needs of enablement practitioners and organizations as a whole. In addition to giving this definition, Thierry broached other significant topics surrounding sales enablement, and even addressed some common misconceptions typically accepted by the enablement industry. Below you’ll find five sales enablement myths debunked during Episode 3 of the Shift podcast, but be sure to tune in to hear what Thierry has to say about content governance, getting executive buy-in for a sales enablement initiative, and the greatest challenges still facing enablement practitioners today.

1. Myth: sales enablement is easy to define.

   Despite its growing importance in the market, sales enablement is evolving every day, and with this constant evolution comes constant redefinition. But from his own experience, coupled with insights from Tamara Schenk and CSO Insights, Thierry gives his definition of sales enablement:

   “A strategic, cross-functional discipline that is designed to increase sales and enhance productivity through an integrated selling system that equips salespeople and managers with the right tools and resources to engage buyers at the right time with the right content.”

   Thierry is also quick to point out that sales enablement—in theory and practice—is going to mean something slightly different to different organizations and individuals. However, his definition is a great starting point for organizations currently building their sales enablement foundation and practitioners working to elevate their role in organizations.

2. Myth: sales enablement is synonymous with training.

   While sales training can be viewed as a component of sales enablement, the scope of sales enablement reaches much further than initial training and onboarding. There is a current misconception in the world of enablement that it is just training rebranded. But enablement includes much more than just training, such as content, hiring and coaching, opportunity management, and “delivering the right content and tools to both managers and salespeople,” as Thierry explains.

3. Myth: Sales enablement should function separately from the rest of the organization.

   As sales enablement continues to evolve, there isn’t a definitive place where sales enablement must report within the organization, so long as it’s working closely with sales, marketing, and operations. “When [an organization is] starting out with the enablement function, it should align it to an executive sponsor…who can give sales enablement a platform to have an elevated conversation about its role and scope within the organization,” Thierry advises. So while it doesn’t matter where enablement lives organizationally, it’s imperative that it’s closely aligned with sales, marketing and operations to break down the silos between these teams.

4. Myth: Salespeople shouldn’t create their own content.

   “Salespeople will always create their own content—the most powerful thing salespeople can do is create and tailor content specific to the customer,” Thierry explained when asked what his opinion is of salespeople creating content. “It’s all about finding the right balance. Marketing or sales enablement can provide salespeople with 80-90% of their content, and then allow them to customize and tailor the last 10%.” What’s most important, Thierry says, is paying attention to what reps are creating and using most frequently; if you have hundreds of reps creating the same deck for all of their client-facing interactions, something is off-balance.

5. Myth: Sales enablement practitioners don’t have a seat at the executive table.

   Thierry predicts that, similar to the not-so-distant progression of the accounting role to CFO, enablement roles will continue to elevate to executive leadership positions as the technology evolves and the demand grows. “In five years, we’ll probably have [a role] like the Chief Value Officer, who oversees a lot of functions [like sales, marketing and operations] and brings them all together in one lens that focuses on the customer.” Sales enablement practitioners are not the VPs of Broken Things, but rather are the strategic overseers who have the power to connect sales, marketing and operations to better serve sales and drive revenue.

Many thanks to Thierry for his valuable insights and fun conversation. You can listen to his own sales enablement podcast, the Sales Enablement Lab, on his website. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Shift podcast on Soundcloud, iTunes, and Stitcher!

Content marketers have a big challenge: continuously filling their content pipeline with fresh, insightful, and relevant information. Your target audience expects it and turns to trusted sources when they need to search for answers and seek insights. Whether or not that’s your brand depends on the quality of your content.

Moreover, brand managers and product marketers depend on continuing information streams. After all, content marketing is the principal method for connecting with buyers to reinforce brand messages and build awareness in the digital age. But more than that, content marketing helps you build relationships.

Good content marketing establishes trust with your audience by offering them informative and entertaining content without asking for much in return. Psychologically, we’re all much more willing to engage and buy from someone we like and respect than someone we don’t.

The Power of Curated Collections

However, few content marketers have the wherewithal to develop all the content their organization needs on their own. According to Curata’s research study conducted on over 500 marketers, leading content marketers are developing 65% of the assets in their program, curating 25%, and syndicating the remaining 10%.

With content curation, marketers can find, organize, annotate, and share the most relevant and highest quality digital content on a specific topic, produced by third parties yet relevant for their target audience. Not to mention, your buyers consume content from multiple sources for different points-of-view, so content curation provides them with unique perspectives. Unearthing great content from a variety of sources—even your competitors on occasion—can also be a highly effective way to build your credibility and trust as an unbiased thought leader.

Moreover, with content curation, marketers can overcome some of the top content marketing challenges, as reported by the Content Marketing Institute. Here’s how content curation can help you overcome the top five content marketing challenges:

1. Producing Engaging Content

Curating relevant collections adds additional assets to your content mix such as videos, podcasts, cheatsheets, worksheets, and infographics. These can help enhance engagement with your target audience, particularly when it’s deployed on different channels. For example, we’ve seen that infographics work well on Facebook, where they are a great prompt for comments. It’s also extremely easy for people to share, retweet, and otherwise promote your curated content on social channels, which they are more likely to do if you curate something entertaining or insightful and easy to digest.

2. Producing Content Consistently

Content curation helps fill up your editorial calendar without the same investment needed to create original content. It’s usually a lot faster and easier to find and annotate content than it is to research and write it—particularly if you use content curation software, which automatically crawls the internet for relevant content and brings it to you. To produce content on a consistent basis, consider curating content at least once a week. Even if you send a weekly rather than daily newsletter, it’s good practice to curate on a regular basis to break up your workload and ensure that your site is refreshed with new content.

3. Producing a Variety of Content

Curated content expands the mix by collecting and organizing content from diverse sources and in multiple formats. It allows you to offer a wider variety of perspectives than only tapping in-house resources. Even industry giants benefit from adding content curation to their marketing mix. It helps establish them as industry insiders and thought leaders, complements their social media marketing, and also attracts influencers who may contribute to the site.

4. Being Budget and/or Resource Constrained

Content curation is not as time or expertise intensive as developing original content, so fewer resources need to be allocated to enjoy its benefits. A data center company based in Iceland, Verne Global, used content curation software to create their content hub Green Data Center News. This site enabled their small team to save over $100,000 in expenses for outbound marketing staff and website development, connect with prospects on a daily basis, and easily get global press coverage.

5. Filling Gaps in the Knowledge and Skills of Your Internal Team

Content curation augments your existing expertise by referencing external sources, reducing the need for investing in new content development. For instance, perhaps you’ve hired a journalist for your team who is an excellent writer and editor, but not (yet) a subject matter expert for your industry. Once they read the top publications and blogs in your industry, a smart journalist will know enough to recognize and curate great articles by others with more expertise—saving you the expense of hiring a subject matter expert.

Curating content can increase the consistency of a production schedule, requires fewer resources than developing original content, makes it easier to offer more engaging content, expands the expertise pool available, and opens up the variety of content—and perspectives—available for publishing. It’s one of the most effective tools available for dealing with many of today’s content marketing challenges.

Have you started curating content for your organization? Share your tips and tricks below.

Our third annual survey of 2016’s Most Innovative B2B Tech Brands found B2B consumers’ view of innovative tech brands currently focused on innovative companies able to increase marketing, business, and sales efficiency. That’s good news since the seven most expensive words in business are, “We have always done it that way!”

More and more B2B consumers are seeking innovative technological solutions to business and marketing issues, and in a more complex marketplace they’re looking for innovation from brands that are able to not only provide products and services, but that are seen to better meet customer expectations when it comes to technology. Those are the brands that become preferred providers, no matter how one chooses to classify them.

Top-20 Most Innovative B2B Tech Brands

This year 900 B2B consumers were asked – on an unaided basis ­– to name the companies and brands that they felt were leaders when it came to technological innovation, with the following top-20 results. Numbers in parentheses indicate movement up or down the list from last year. Bolded names indicate new B2B consumer mentions for 2016.

1. Alphabet (+1)
2. Apple (-1)
3. Amazon (+1)
4. IBM (-1)
5. Siemens (+4)
6. Facebook (–)
7. GE (+5)
8. Cisco (-1)
9. LinkedIn (+2)
10. Salesforce.com (new)
11. Intel (-3)
12. Samsung (-7)
13. Square (+3)
14. Slack (+3)
15. SAP (-5)
16. HubSpot (new)
17. Mindbody (new)
18. Equinix (new)
19. Tesla (-1)
20. Kickstarter (–)

The B2B consumer’s expectations for constant innovation, and the expansion of technological innovation making business more efficient accounts for the addition of the four new brands on this year’s list with each new brand providing B2B with the opportunity to grow and become more profitable. Those four new brands include:

• Salesforce.com (#10): A customer relationship management cloud computing company.
• HubSpot(#16): An inbound marketing and sales platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers.
• Mindbody(#17): A software leader for class- and appointment-based businesses.
• Equinix (#18): A company that provides carrier-neutral data centers and Internet exchanges to enable interconnection.

GE and Siemens showed the biggest movement up the list and Samsung was the brand that moved downmost. Four brands that weren’t mentioned by enough B2B consumers to make this year’s top-20 list included Dell, HP, Uber, and YouTube.

It’s clear that B2B consumer attitudes toward innovation have not only shifted dramatically. B2B consumers have come to see innovation and change as an opportunity to partner with innovative companies and create real synergy.

It was billionaire, Aristotle Onassis who recommended, “The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows,” which is a great definition for innovation. One thing is clear, seven other words companies should remember when it comes to B2B innovation are: “It’s not business as usual any more!”

Find out more about what makes customer loyalty happen and how Brand Keys metrics is able to predict future consumer behavior: brandkeys.com. Visit our YouTube channel to learn more about Brand Keys methodology, applications and case studies.

Being target motivated is one quality of a great sales manager, so what do you do when you notice your team is continually missing sales targets?

PANIC!
(Just kidding…well, kinda)

What you really need to do is take the time to re-evaluate your sales process, your coaching techniques and even the motivation levels of your team.

Did you know that according to a Bridge Group report, an average of 50% of sales reps are not making quota?

There are many reasons that may have nothing to do with your management style, but upon careful examination, I would be willing to bet you’ll notice areas that are in need of a little extra TLC.

1.Your Goals Aren’t Firm

Like anything else in life, if your goals aren’t fully formed they will be impossible to attain.

Setting loose sales goals is like making a New Year’s resolution to lose weight. Without developing the specifics (how much, how will you do it etc.) you probably aren’t going to be setting yourself up for success.

Utilize the following acronym from FileBoard for setting attainable goals – SMART.

Specific
Measurable
Actionable
Realistic
Time-related

By utilizing this on a management level, you can set more realistic goals and your reps should also be utilizing SMART for their very own goal setting to hit those targets.

If you are missing your quarterly targets, for example, break your goal down into weeks of months.

This creates a more palatable goal that your team can monitor closely. It also allows you as the manager to notice things are slipping off the tracks before your quarterly goal is completely derailed.

You will also be better able to identify the cause of the sales slip up much easier when you are only looking at the stats for the week (or month).

2. You’re Raising Targets Too Quickly

Believe it or not, not at sales reps are looking to hit the goals you set for them. This probably leaves you scratching your head a bit, I mean…why would anyone NOT aim to hit their target?

The answer is actually pretty simple. You are raising sales targets too often.

Think about it from the reps point of view.

“If I hit the sales goal $X, this means I will be working overtime to hit the next goal.”

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t change your goals based on your sales, but what you shouldn’t do is jack them up really high when you hit the target.

Why?

Your salespeople are going to become discouraged. What good is celebrating the achievement of a goal when you now have the worry you aren’t even going to come close to achieving the next?

From Forbes:

“Employees avoid exceeding targets if they know it will inflate future expectations. Too often, work targets are routine adjustments based simply on historical performance. Once employees recognize the predictable pattern, they may deliberately limit their efforts in a bid to temper future goals. This is known as the “ratchet effect” and it gets in the way of optimal firm performance.”

3. You’re Not Coaching

For those with long term management experience, it can be hard to take a step back and fully examine the shortcomings of your sales team. In fact, you might be a part of the problem and no one wants to face that troubling thought.

Sure, you are holding meetings and encouraging every chance that you can, but are you actually coaching?

Being a mentor and someone that your team not only respects (but doesn’t fear) is key to being in a great position to coach your sales team to greatness.

The Sales Executive Council found that sales reps who received 3 or more hours of coaching per month had 17% higher goal attainment than reps who received less than 2.

That’s a big difference!

From the Salesforce blog:

“A recent study by Zenger/Folkman showed that first line managers feel, to a greater extent than their executive counterparts, that it’s their responsibility to give orders and directives versus work collaboratively with their team members. Unfortunately, when leaders give orders they succeed in conditioning their people to wait for those orders, resulting in a decline in initiative and overall engagement — crappy.”

You are more than a captain of the ship, you need to get in their and help show your crew mates how to set and direct their sails. (see what I did there? sails/sales…moving on…)

One-on-ones are the best opportunity to coach your reps individually. Set up your meeting and stick to a plan. A sports coach wouldn’t show up without a playbook and plan of action, neither should you.

Sitting down and asking what your rep wants to talk about is a giant waste of time. As the coach, you lead the discussion. This doesn’t mean that you can’t ask questions beforehand. Touch base with the rep to find out where they feel they could improve.

For example, if you know that follow-up is where this particular employee is slipping up in the sales funnel, make that the subject of the one-on-one.

Ask questions and really listen to the answers, you will learn more about the issues at hand and how you can work to correct them.

Lastly, review data with your employees and see where things may have gotten off track.

4. Your Lead Generation is Poor

How strong are your leads?

As you can see, valuable time and effort are wasted on leads that are never going to convert into sales.

Do you have a clear definition of what a “good lead” is?

Surprisingly, this is one of the leading reasons poor leads are acquired…you and your team don’t know exactly what they are looking for and chase whatever comes their way.

Top reasons you are chasing bad leads:

• Your content isn’t aimed at your ideal leads
• You aren’t qualifying your leads
• You’re placing your content in front of the wrong audience

5. Your Sales and Marketing Teams are Disconnected

When your sales and marketing departments aren’t aligning their efforts, your sales are without a doubt going to suffer.

Sales and marketing are a bit like cats and dogs.

A recent study actually found that 87 percent of the terms sales and marketing use to describe each other are negative.

Consider this, your clients are connected through so many platforms these days that if your marketing and sales team aren’t reaching out with similar goals in mind and similar branding, things aren’t going to run smoothly.

That’s a fact.

So how can you improve this?

If you don’t already, start having meetings with both teams. Allow them to talk about issues (maybe marketing is passing down too many unqualified leads) and come up with solutions.

When your two teams begin to interact, they will no longer be a faceless person to place blame on, they will be actual valuable players that can listen to and take advice.

6. Your Team is Suffering From Disengagement

Disengagement isn’t only an issue that crosses different departments, it happens all too often within the team.

Getting your reps engaged again would be easy if you could just motivate with money…but when salespeople aren’t satisfied, money often may cover the wound for a moment, but utlimately with disengaged salespeople on your team, you will be missing your target again and again.

7. Follow-Up is Falling Short

Want to know how poor follow-up is impacting your sales?

Take a look at these statistics regarding follow up from Kaleidico.

• 2% of sales are made on the first contact
• 3% of sales are made on the second contact
• 5% of sales are made on the third contact
• 10% of sales are made on the fourth contact
• 80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact

Tips for improving follow-up from Entrepreneur –

1. Put your leads into one of three categories – ready to buy leads (hot), almost ready (warm) and leads that aren’t likely to be ready ever (cold). This is often referred to as “cherry picking leads.” Of course your sales team will want to focus on the low hanging fruit, but make sure that they are also working on turning those warm leads into hot ones.
2. Perfect your timing – Follow-up success or failure is largely due, in part, to timing. Be sure your team is touching base with warm and even some cold leads, often. Implement your own hard and fast system for follow-up times and make sure your entire team is on board.
3. Make sure your salespeople are educating – Following up with leads isn’t worthwhile if you are simply checking in. Make sure your reps are actively educating leads with each and every interaction.

8. Your Metric Tracking Isn’t up to Par

If you aren’t tracking the success of your campaigns or the number of connections made each day, how are you going to identify where you need to improve when you keep missing your sales target?

Take a look at your current metrics and tracking system and notice where you can be more efficient.

9. You Have a Weak Spot in Your Sales Funnel

If you are missing targets, chance are there is a weak spot in your sales funnel.

As mentioned above, perhaps it’s your follow-up or maybe your leads are poor, but diving in deep to see exactly where you are losing potential customers is key to getting a successful rehabilitation plan in place.

Once again, the importance of metrics reveals itself!

Here are 5 metrics from Hubspot that will help you pinpoint your sales funnel issues.

1. Traffic Sourcing & Engagement Stats from Content
2. Call-to-Action Effectiveness
3. Landing Pages Submission Rates
4. Email Click Rates
5. Measuring Email Marketing Automation Performance

10. Your Sales Cycle Has Lengthened

If you are noticing a sudden drop off in sales target achievement, take a look at your sales cycle. Has is recently become longer?

The longer it takes to get from prospecting to purchasing, the easier it is for customers to fall through the cracks.

Even if your sales cycle hasn’t changed, tightening it up a bit may help increase your conversions and get you one step closer to hitting your sales target.

So how can you shorten in?

Check out these 4 tips from Pardot:

1. Objective lead qualification – this allows you to separate hot, warm and cold leads.
2. Lead nurturing – by nurturing your leads. salespeople can more accurately gauge what it is that the leads want and how they want the information delivered.
3. Detailed prospect tracking – By tracking where your leads are in the funnel, there’s no real mystery.
4. Speed up your follow-up – Don’t let warm and hot leads turn cold by keeping them hanging in the sales funnel for too long. When you increase follow-up time, you are effectively shortening up the cycle.

With all this in mind, delve deeper into the effectiveness of your own management style and the sales process itself and soon you will identify the reasons you are missing your sales targets. Once these issues are identified, you are ready to make changes, move forward and once again begin meeting your goals.

If there’s anyone you want to approach to sell your products and services it’s the person with the power to say yes. The person who directs strategy and knows what is in play and how to pull the purse strings. That, of course, is the CXO.

Many companies are trying to develop a CXO engagement strategy, but few are successful. Why is this the case?

We have consulted with hundreds of companies on CXO engagement and have observed that there are five critical success factors that come into play when it comes to CXO selling. They are:

1. The support and engagement of your own executive team. CXO selling can be difficult because it requires your sales and marketing organizations to change the way they do things. Change is hard and people don’t like it, which means they are probably not going to do it if they don’t have to. This is why commitment, support, and engagement from the very top of the organization are critical. Company leaders must consistently communicate the importance of CXO engagement and hold sales and marketing accountable for executing—not just providing lip service—to their vision. Secondly, your executive team needs to support the effort by walking their talk and making themselves readily available to meet with customer peers. Salesforce has been successful because its top CXOs have made customer meetings a top priority. As Salesforce COO Keith Block said in a recent earnings call, “In the last three weeks, I’ve had more conversations with CEOs around transformation than in my entire career over 30 years.”

2. Sales training. To support a CXO selling effort, salespeople have to make the shift from talking about products to talking about customer business initiatives and challenges. They have to change their mindset from quick, short-term product sales to playing the long game with strategic customers. This means positioning your company as a strategic business partner (which takes time) and leveraging trusted relationships to close more substantial, long-term deals. In short, you need your sales people to acquire business acumen and learn to speak the language of the CXO customer. This helps them get them in the door—a daunting task in-and-of-itself—and equips them to have real business conversations about things that matter to CXOs—even becoming their professional sounding board and a source of new ideas. This takes training and support.

3. Sales and marketing alignment. Marketing absolutely needs to be on board to support sales in their CXO selling efforts. CXO selling typically requires new messaging, collateral and programs—such as events—appropriate for a CXO audience. There also needs to be a heightened synergy between marketing and sales teams. That includes regular meetings to discuss what’s working and what isn’t, where customers are coming from and what sources are delivering the best leads, and what the sales team needs from marketing to be successful. In many companies sales and marketing don’t cooperate as well as they should, so this is another case where the executive leadership (e.g. Chief Sales Officer and Chief Marketing Officer) needs to be in lock step, mandating collaboration between the two groups, and holding them accountable.

4. Research and insight. CXO selling requires two basic kinds of insight: who to sell to and what they want to talk about. Don’t take it for granted that your sales organization knows who the decision makers are at their key accounts. We’ve learned over the years that most companies, for example, don’t even have a clean list of the CIOs for their most important target accounts. This is further complicated by the emergence of new titles such as Chief Digital Officer or Chief Innovation Officer, meaning there’s a whole new crop of CXOs to whom you should be selling. So target identification and building lists of the right CXOs to target is job number one. Secondly, you’ll need to know what these executives care about—their current business initiative, key challenges, etc. That requires strategic and frequent research because these can change on a dime with a new merger or acquisition, a change of leadership, or new development in their business environment. Has the company announced a sweeping cost-cutting initiative? Are they consolidating vendors? Do they have a blank check for cybersecurity? Each are examples of real initiatives at real companies we cover. How helpful would it be to know these things going into a meeting? And how dangerous would it be to go in not knowing?

5. Measurement and accountability. You have internal CXO support; you have training; your sales and marketing teams are cooperating; and you have given your teams the tools for research and insight. Now you need to develop a methodology to measure how well your CXO engagement strategy is succeeding and hold your teams accountable. That, of course, includes a compensation plan. But it has to reflect the inevitably longer sales cycle required for developing CXO relationships over months or even years to achieve much bigger deals. Because salespeople may be more inclined to stay in their comfort zones selling products to the same familiar customers and getting immediate results, you have to be creative in how you hold them accountable and incentivize them to take a longer term approach. One of our customers tracked—over the course of seven years—the difference in revenue from companies that were targeted for a CXO engagement program versus similar profile companies that were not. The result was—on average—a 30% lift in revenue from the accounts that were prioritized for CXO engagement. This helped the team justify sustaining its CXO engagement program during the last big recession when other programs were getting cut.

CXO selling can be complex and difficult to scale, but with the right tools, strategy and executive support—as Salesforce has proven–you can lay the groundwork for bigger, better, and more deals—and create closer, more strategic relationships with your most important customers.

Lead generation is a key part of your company’s marketing and sales efforts in order to grow revenue. Whether your company sells in a B2B market or handles complex sales in the B2C markets, effective lead generation is critical to your marketing and revenue growth. But many companies struggle with producing enough leads to help increase their sales.

Here are 25 reasons why your lead generation efforts may be failing, categorized under 4 main principles:

You May be Lacking an Effective Lead Generation Strategy

Ascend2Research revealed that the #1 reason why lead generation efforts fail is due to a lack on an effective strategy. Signs of an ineffective marketing strategy include:

1. Your lead generation process is not mapped out from top to bottom with a full understanding of your ideal buyer persona’s “buyers journey.”
2. Your buyer persona (or qualified lead) has not been accurately defined and developed. To understand your ideal buyer you need to have identified the aspects of their buyers’ journey, which includes information that relates to their:
   1. Priority initiatives
   2. Success factors
   3. Perceived barriers
   4. Decision criteria
   5. Evaluation journey
3. The focus is on “quantity” of leads instead of “quality” of leads, wasting precious sales and marketing resources chasing down bad leads.
4. Realistic expectations were not accurately set upfront based upon a proven marketing process and key understandings of your Key Performance Indicators (KPI).
5. Purchased or rented email lists were used in your marketing campaign. These lists only serve to upset people and are not good for your branding or your company. Think about your own emails this past week. How many emails did you receive that you think were spam? Enough said.
6. There are content gaps in what you are providing your ideal buyer persona at each stage of their evaluation journey or decision-making process. That may be because the content hasn’t been created or you are not sure what types of content should be published and where each content type fits into the different stages of the lead generation process.
7. Content that your ideal buyer is seeking is not being developed and published on a consistent basis.
8. You may be creating content that is too self-promotional, meaning it’s all about you, your company, your products and your services instead of publishing content around your ideal buyers’ challenges, pain points and opportunities. You need to be educational and helpful first before the buyer will allow you to move in for the close.

You Are Not Generating Enough Inbound Traffic

If you do not have enough market reach and are not attracting enough of your ideal buyers at the point where they are interested in what you have to offer, then your lead generation efforts will suffer. Not generating enough traffic may be because:

9. You are not being found in search engines for the most relevant keyphrases related to your company, your buyers and the information they seek.
10. You may not be reaching your target buyers at the point in time when their needs or interests are greatest.
11. There is no real social media marketing strategy. You might have a Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter account (most people do at this point), but there is no real strategy to make effective use of your social media. Social media is the #2 tool your buyers use to research and educate themselves on the products and services they seek to buy. In fact, when making a purchase, 75% of B2B buyers use social media as part of their decision-making process, according to International Data Corporation.
12. There is a lack of key content publishing efforts such as eBooks, white papers, case studies, guides or check lists that buyers read during their buyers’ journey and evaluation process.
13. You don’t have a subscriber base and have not created a system to gain a subscriber base in order to send them relevant newsletters, announcements, and valuable content offers.

You Are Not Converting Enough of Your Inbound Traffic to Leads

The Inbound Marketing methodology, along with a robust Marketing Automation Platform, is key to converting website traffic to leads. Here are some reasons why you may not be converting your traffic to leads:

14. Your content does not focus on your buyer persona’s pain points and challenges, or the opportunities they seek. And you may lack compelling incentives or relevant content offers to encourage your prospects to convert to a lead.
15. The content that you have is not aligned with your buyer persona’s evaluation journey. Non-branded educational offers, such as buyer guides and eBooks, tend to do well when a buyer is at the Top of the Funnel in their buyer’s journey. Case studies, white papers and webinars tend to do well in the Middle of the Funnel. Product comparison guides, consultation offers, free assessments, and free trials do well at the Bottom of the Funnel.
16. Your website pages, landing pages, and emails lack Calls-to-Action [CTAs] to encourage your visitors to act.
17. Your CTAs send your visitors to unappealing or seemingly unrelated landing pages that do not sell the value of your offer.
18. You allow visitors to download content offers without having them complete a form to capture basic information. Your content offer should be free, however it should cost your visitors a little information about themselves so you can continue to market to them.
19. Your forms do not feed a marketing and sales contact database that enables you to track everything your visitors, prospects and leads do.
20. You do not promote compelling content offers to your visitors based upon your buyer personas.
21. Even though you are writing good content geared towards your buyer personas, you may not be putting your best foot forward due to silly grammatical mistakes that undermine your credibility.
22. Your conversion process may not be optimized for mobile users. Google has stated that 50% of all their searches are from a mobile device, and according to Webbiquity, 50% of B2B buyers are using smartphones for business purchases. So you must optimize everything for mobile.

Your Sales Team is Not Closing Deals or Opportunities

This may be primarily due to a lack of an integrated Inbound Marketing and Sales approach within your company. (You can no longer effectively grow by simply throwing leads over the infamous marketing and sales wall.) So your marketing and sales team may not have an integrated marketing and sales approach because:

23. Your marketing team is not effectively qualifying leads for your sales team through a lead nurturing process. Not all leads are qualified or sales-ready. Expertise in lead nurturing results in a 50% increase in sales-ready leads with a 33% decrease in costs. (Forrester Research via HubSpot)
24. You are not testing and tracking which blog articles, CTAs, landing pages, content offers, email subject lines, and social media posts are generating the best leads. That may be because you are lacking a marketing automation system that optimizes your lead generation efforts.
25. Your sales team is operating blind by not having key tools, such as a CRM, that allows them to track everything a prospect or lead has done when interacting with your company’s digital assets (website pages, landing pages, content offers, social media, emails, etc.). Key marketing and sales tools such as a marketing automation program and CRM help provide actionable intelligence for both your marketing and sales team.

So What are the Keys to the Success of Your Lead Generation Efforts?

Here is what you need to do:

• Create an effective strategy to reach your lead generation goals and objectives
• Set a marketing budget and align it with your revenue goals.
• Develop an effective content marketing experience that targets and delivers key information to your ideal buyer personas at each stage of their evaluation journey.
• Ensure that you have adequate marketing skills and resources internally and/or partner with a certified marketing agency.
• Align and integrate your marketing and sales strategy, methodology and processes.
• Implement adequate digital marketing and sales capabilities, tools, analytics and reporting.
• Track and measure your return on investment (ROI).

Not sure where to start?

Start by discovering the 8 Critical Ingredients of a Digital Marketing Plan that will help generate more leads for you.

A When, Where and How Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization For Startups

Sure, you came up with an outstanding idea for a product, but don’t pat yourself on the back just yet.

This is only the first of the 5 phases of a startup lifecycle. And while it’s important that you get it right, what and how you chose to do next can make or break your business.

To state the obvious, growing a business takes time, dedication and not least some fundamental know-how. It’s the latter we’re going to address in this article.

Knowing when to optimize conversion rates is almost as important as knowing how to do it.

When Should You Start Optimizing?

Rush in and you’ll just be burning money and wasting time with nothing to show for it.

Do it too late and you’ll miss out on a lot of opportunities and will be left with an awful lot of things to patch and fix.

According to Morgan Brown, the perfect moment to start optimizing is in the second stage – when you already have an MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

.

While there is no doubt you should put conversion optimization into your strategy as user growth starts to scale out, it’s crucial to remember that what works for a company that has hundreds of thousands of visits per month, won’t work for a startup that barely has 2000.

With this in mind, let’s explore the most effective and accessible ways startups can boost their conversion rates.

1. Don’t waste time on A/B testing if you don’t have traffic

During the past few years, A/B testing became the most popular Conversion Rate Optimization method among marketers and even though all the hype it received is obviously not for nothing, I have to say that it has been proved many times to be unfit and inefficient for startups.

This happens due to the fact that startups often don’t have enough resources to run split tests.

For one, the procedure can be rather costly, and then there’s also a painful lack of time and traffic.

It’s not a secret that you need a large enough sample size in order to conduct an A/B test, but why is that?

Both variations should be seen by a sufficient number of users, which varies from case to case, before you can attribute your experiment’s success or lack of it, that is, to your hypothesis rather than sheer coincidence.

This is when a sample size calculator might come in handy. Luckily, there are a few tools out there meant to make your life easier: Calculator.net, Survey System, Get Data Driven.

Keep in mind that it’s best to aim for a statistical relevance of minimum 95%.

So the question you should be asking is:

“How long does it take for one of the variations to outperform the other by 20% ?”

For a startup, it can take months for a single A/B test to reach statistical relevance and get validated, so now is not the time and place to experiment with button sizes and colors.

What you can do instead is go for the big impact changes, like testing two completely different landing pages.

While it can seem like a bold move, it will save lots of time you’d otherwise spend waiting to see which button converts better.

The good news is, A/B testing is not the only way to optimize your funnel.

2. Set up your web analytics tools right

“If you can not measure it, you can not improve it” – Sir William Thomson (First Baron Kelvin)

Setting your Google Account properly and tracking your data is crucial if you want to know where your sales come from and which marketing channels bring the best return of investment.

But these are not the only benefits you should be after.

Other dimensions you should be watching closely are your exit and bounce rates and on which of your website’s pages they peak. This will allow you to identify your pain points and focus on them while optimizing.

Watch out for these bad guys!

At this point, it’s worth mentioning a few of the most common mistakes people and companies make when setting up a Google Analytics account:

• Not filtering out internal visits

For more accuracy, you should make sure to create a filtered view out of which you exclude your company’s IP address. Just think how many times a day you check your company’s website, and then imagine what impact several people doing that regularly can have on your monthly report.

• Forgetting to set up goals

Depending on your type of business, your website can have different goals.

Take, for example, a blog. Its conversions would mainly be time spent on page, engagement or maybe signing up for a newsletter.

Things are not the same for an E-commerce website, where the main conversions are purchases or completing a form.

Setting up these goals can give you a much clearer, much needed overview over how your visitors engage with your website and how they progress down the sales funnel.

• Failing to segment your users

Segmenting your users can give you priceless information about their behavior, demographics and geographical info, things that will come in handy when building your buyer persona.

• Not making the best use of the UTMs

UTMs (Urchin Tracking Module) codes are tiny bits of text you can add at the end your links in order to individually track your campaigns.

Each one of them contains information, such as Source, Medium, Content (optional) and Campaign that it communicates to Google Analytics (or other analytics tools).

This way, you are able to see which ads, campaigns, content and marketing channels bring you the best bang for your buck.

3. Collect qualitative data from the website’s visitors

There are two main types of data you can collect and make use of:

1. Data obtained through quantitative research

• focuses on numbers and quantifiable insights
• transforms those numbers into usable statistics
• it’s thoroughly accurate
• it’s rigorously structured
• you can mostly get you hands on it through online polls and peeking into web analytics and heat-maps.

Even though it sounds like an enticing basis for website optimization, it has one major drawback: it needs a larger sample of population, a thing that we already established you don’t have yet.

2. Data obtained through qualitative research

• is what you should go for
• It’s harder to interpret
• focuses on who your users are and what they expect from your product
• It’s indispensable to conversion rate optimization
• helps you build buyer personas
• helps you adjust your unique value proposition and copy to address your visitors using their own vernacular

Qualitative Research Methods

But how can you actually conduct qualitative research? Below, I listed the most popular and efficient methods.

Online surveys

When it comes to qualitative data, surveys are your best tool in the shed. Used right they can tell you (almost) everything you need to know about who your customers are.

Like with everything in marketing, you should decide what your goals are and craft your question in a way that brings you closer to meeting them.

You can trigger surveys on load, on exit or on scroll and while it’s generally better to keep them short and sweet, there are special cases when this won’t work.

A buyer persona survey is a good example for that.

In order to have a complete grasp on all the aspects surrounding your users, from age and sex to income and lifestyle, you need to address between 10 and 15 questions.

So how do you keep your respondents engaged? The best way is to offer small rewards, like an ebook, a voucher or a discount.

Among the things you should look for are:

• Friction (what stopped or made the buying process more difficult)
• What drives their purchase (what problems your product solves for them)
• What influenced their decision to chose your product (always good to keep an eye on the competition and their answer could give you a complete different vision on your Unique Value Proposition

Some examples of questions you should make sure to ask:

• What made you chose us?
• What would you improve at our website if you had the chance?
• Did you consider buying from any competitors before?
• What stopped you from purchasing?
• What would determine you to finish your purchase?

User testing

This is the closest thing to the real deal you can get. Though it’s highly effective and it saves you lots of precious time, this one, can prove to be a little bit over your budget.

Even so, done right, it can have a significant impact on your conversion rate and it’s likely to shed some light over your users’ behavior.

The whole process consists of crafting a list of specific, but not too detailed tasks and observing someone interacting with your website for the first time, as they comment along.

Hopefully not your users…

There are two type of user testing:

• Over the shoulder user testing – real-time sessions
• Remote user testing- observing the user remotely via audio and screen capture technology

Here’s a couple of tools you can work with for this purpose:

• Userzoom
• User Testing

Live chat transcripts

If you don’t have live support on your E-commerce website, stop whatever you’re doing and make sure you implement it now!

While most strategies in marketing have promoters and detractors, the benefits of live chat support leave little to debate.

Additionally to topping all other customer service communication media, a mere glance over statistics shows an increase of 38% in purchases and a decrease of 30% in cart abandonment rates.

Pretty swell, right?

The trick is to know how to get the most out of it, once it served its initial purpose. Getting the transcripts, going over them and identifying patterns will provide some precious info on the most encountered:

• sources of confusion and friction

• information that might be lacking from your website

• frequent feature requests

You can even use the information from these transcripts to create FAQs or compelling content for your blog.

So, get your hands on this secret gold mine and start digging for cues! What you’ll find might surprise you.

4. Collect leads using interactive overlays & surveys

As the Lean Marketing Framework (AARRR) shows, your work doesn’t stop after the users made a purchase.

Stop for a moment and imagine you meet a great girl or a charming guy and you walk over to say “hi”. They engage in conversation and seem very keen on getting to know more about you, so when you suggest going for a date, they accept straight away.

Now imagine having an amazing dinner by candle light, enjoying your date’s company and not taking their number at the end. Besides it being rude, you also miss out on a lot more fun dates in the future.

Much like in the date analogy above, it’s great you managed to convert your users, but if you want to get the most out of this newly sprung relationship, the ball is in your court.

Acquiring customers is the expensive part. It is much cheaper to spend your efforts on retaining them.

After the initial purchase, it’s up to you to measure their satisfaction through a Net Promoter Score, phone call and prepare the ground for the next purchase.

So how do you get leads?

One of the best ways to do that is by implementing a pop-up (also know as overlay) or widget lead collector on your website.

This is an example of a lead collector survey on the Marketizator website.

But in the age of information, users know their data’s worth and aren’t exactly looking forward to giving it away.

That’s where 3 very important principles come into play:

• Honesty

Be honest and straightforward about what your visitors might get if they leave their email address e.g : news about the latest updates, exclusive promotional offers, tutorials.

• Generosity

Offer discounts or vouchers in exchange for their personal details.

• Shared knowledge

Not only do books and PDFs help you position yourself on the market as an authority in your domain, but they can also represent a powerful incentive for your users. Ask them for their name and email address and send them your “How To” guide, white papers or “Tips and Tricks.”

Here’s another example of how Marketizator collect leads on the blog:

This is a lead collector overlay that pops out when visitors want to exit the page.

What you should take away from this

There’s much more to CRO than A/B tests.

As a startup you should get creative and use the the little time and budget you have wisely, to ensure that when growth starts you will be able to scale.

Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

We are all familiar with a gag reflex, a hypersensitive response to a stimulus, if you ever want a live demo, just offer me some fish.  The hypersensitivity is generally a conditioned response, usually a result of previous experiences. The experience element is key for both prospects and sellers when it comes to Direct prospecting vs. Passive prospecting.

Pundits will tell you the number one reason salespeople don’t like prospecting, especially telephone prospecting is rejection, wrong!  In actuality, it is the fear of rejection, a fear that looms so large that it often prevents salespeople from picking up the phone and actually experiencing the possibilities that exist beyond the initial rejection, the bounties of Direct prospecting.  This why they would rather spend time and energy looking for the “safer” harbour of Passive Indirect prospecting. There is no less rejection, they just don’t have to deal with it directly, and can pretend that it didn’t happen.

Learn how to handle the 5 most common prospecting objections

Rejection is not fatal, witness all the sales professionals who survive rejection daily, yet live healthy, happy and more prosperous lives than the average and passive sales person.  It first needs to be put in context, and dealt with.  The good news is that how you deal with rejection can be altered with training.  Most people look at sword swallowers with freakish fascination.  Most people gag when a sharp foreign object hits the back of their throat.  Sword swallowers train to manage and control the very muscles that causes the majority to gag.   They are not freaks, but committed to understanding and practicing what it takes to get things done.   The average person will use the gag reflex to rationalize their lack of willingness to try something new or different.  For the sword swallower it’s just another day in the office.

But that gag or Rejection reflex is not limited to just the sellers in the equation.  Based on the call, the prospects often experience a gag reflex of their own.  Remember that the reflex is an involuntary reaction to previous experiences, in my case fish, in the case of the prospects, it is all the crappy prospecting calls they have received prior to the current one.

One way to avoid the “Reflex” on both side is for sellers to take a different approach to how they prospect.  Most sellers and passive prospecting approaches, say social selling, use a tired and worn out approach, one based on “pain points”, “Solutions” or “needs”, leading to very similar talk tracks.  After a few hundred(s) of these calls, it only takes a few choice words from the seller to trigger the gagging and hacking that leads to rejection, and usually in very predictable ways.   80% of the time 80% of prospects will have one of five most common reflexes, the five most common objections.  This means that a pro who not only takes the time to craft a better talk track based on future looking objectives, and then also spends time preparing to Take Away the most common objections, will engage with more prospects, more often, leading to greater success, and way fewer “Reflex” incidents.

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The post The Rejection Reflex appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

Now that buyer personas are a widely accepted marketing practice, it’s time to course-correct. For far too many companies, buyer personas have become an attractive, air-filled object of desire that have little effect on the quality of marketing efforts.

Four years after my original version of this post, many marketers remain confused about what buyer personas are and how to build them. This confusion can turn an important credo into a useless chore.

Let’s clarify the most common mistakes that still plague those who develop buyer personas.

1. You describe the buyer, not the buyer’s decision

The biggest mistake marketers make is to profile their buyers instead of their buyers’ decisions. After all, buying is the behavior marketers want to influence, so the first priority for personas is to understand the attitudes, decision criteria, and actions that cause buyers to perceive that one option is better than another.

We often make the mistake of gathering buyer information that is either irrelevant or obvious. If your marketing team is debating whether your persona is a man or a woman, or if you are bogged down finding just the right stock image of your persona, then you’re focusing on the wrong things. Unless you’re a B2C marketer for products sold in retail environments, the buyer’s gender, marital status, and hobbies are rarely relevant.

Too many personas include irrelevant or obvious info, says @buyerpersona. #cmworld
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Imagine a biographer telling us that Amelia Earhart and Ernest Shackleton belong to an “adventurer persona.” Although that’s true, there’s nothing in this description that allows us to fully understand them, get inside the choices they make, or anticipate how they’ll respond when they face a new challenge.

If your personas simply profile people, you end up with too many personas and not enough actionable information. Your content needs to influence people to change their minds, take action, and prioritize the problem you solve. To achieve this kind of influence, we need to understand what our personas think about the alternatives available to them — and what ultimately causes them to buy.

How to fix this: Even if you include other data in your buyer personas, I recommend five insights that reveal everything you need to know to influence your persona’s buying decision. They are the 5 Rings of Buying Insight^TM in your buyer personas:

• Priority initiatives – What causes certain buyers to invest in solutions like yours, and what is different about buyers who are satisfied with the status quo?

• Success factors – What operational or personal results do your buyers expect to achieve by purchasing this solution?

• Perceived barriers – What concerns cause your buyers to believe that your solution or company is not their best option?

• Buyer’s journey – Who and what impacts your buyers as they evaluate their options and make a selection?

• Decision criteria – Which aspects of competing products, services, solutions, or companies do your buyers perceive as most critical, and what do your buyers expect for each?

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Content Connections 2016

This FREE, virtual conference brings together leading keynote speakers and cutting-edge brand giants — such as Joe Pulizzi, Robert Rose, Ann Handley, Scott Brinker, Andrew Davis, Jeff Bullas, and more — to present the hottest topics in content marketing.  Register Today!

2. You still make stuff up about buyers

The most common mistake which I wrote about in 2012 is still the most prevalent. Marketers typically gather information about their buyers by talking to sales reps, meeting with product experts, or conducting online research.

A buyer persona needs to be based on what you learn in interviews with buyers. The key point here is the need to talk to buyers. If your buyer personas are based on generic or internal ideas about your buyers, your content won’t be any better than it was before you had personas.

It shouldn’t be surprising that your internal sources don’t have the information marketers need. Buyers are reluctant to reveal too much to your sales people for fear that the information will be used to manipulate them. Your product experts may interact with current customers, plus a select few of your largest prospects, but this is not representative of the larger market your content must address. What’s more, mining online data for information leads to buyer personas that are little more than job descriptions.

If your goal is to produce better content than everyone else, you need insights that are not obvious to your competitors or anyone inside your company. These persona insights are so valuable that you would never post them on your website. Your buyer personas will tell you, with scary accuracy, exactly what you need to do to deliver content that persuades buyers to choose you.

How to fix this: The only way to gather clear, unexpected insights about how your buyers make decisions is to have in-depth conversations with them. Spend a few hours a month interviewing recent buyers, including both those who chose you and those who did not. Ask buyers to walk you through their decision, starting with the moment they decided to solve this problem. Each conversation should take around 30 minutes. The time it will save you in planning, writing, and revising content for each buyer persona will be immeasurable. There’s some skill involved in these interviews, so do your homework first.

3. You develop too many buyer personas

Do you remember the nursery rhyme about the old woman who lived in a shoe? She had so many children she didn’t know what to do. Marketers often make a similar mistake when creating personas, segmenting themselves into paralysis.

This happens when marketers layer buyer personas onto their existing market segments, frequently defined by demographics such as industry, geographic region, or company size. Many think they should create a new buyer persona for each of the relevant job titles in each of these segments.

Not so. Doing so equates to an unmanageable number of personas.

I am often asked how many buyer personas are required. This is the wrong question. Instead, you want to know how many ways you need to market your solution to persuade buyers that your approach is suited to their needs. Buyer personas must make it easy to know when a different version of your story will result in more business for the company.

How many personas do you need? That’s the wrong question, says @buyerpersona. #cmworld
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How to fix this: To determine the right number of buyer personas, look critically at your business strategy and answer two questions:

• Will you generate more revenue if you build separate strategies?
• Do you have the resources to execute?

When you capture the 5 Rings of Buying Insight about your buyers, you see that differences in job title, company size, and industry often have no relationship to what affects your buyers’ decisions. You need separate buyer personas only in cases where those five insights differ significantly.

For example, you may find that buyers of your RFID technology in both the hospitality and consumer products industries have nearly identical priority initiatives (a mandate to be more competitive) and identical challenges (a need for incremental implementation). If you have a strong story to communicate on these two points, it makes no sense to have separate hospitality and consumer-products personas. In this case, addressing a single buyer persona may be the best way to ensure effective messaging and content marketing.

Conclusion

To make your buyers’ needs the focus of your marketing strategies and tactics, avoid the three biggest mistakes marketers make with personas.

1. Don’t describe the buyer; describe the buyer’s decision.
2. Stop making stuff up about buyers; talk to them.
3. Don’t develop too many buyer personas; look for commonalities across your market segments.

Do these three things, and you will become so attuned to your buyers’ perspectives that you consistently impress them, confidently delivering content that answers their questions and persuades them to choose you.

Want to learn more about buyer personas? Attend Adele Revella’s session, Developing Personas (She Had So Many Personas, She Didn’t Know What to Do), at Content Marketing World 2016. Use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post The 3 Biggest Mistakes Marketers Make With Buyer Personas (2016 edition) appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

While “Marketing and Sales Alignment” has been both a challenge and a worthy goal for some years now, the topic has seemed to crescendo recently as the pressures for performance and accountability on both teams increase.

We recently did a roadshow with InsideView and other industry leaders on this topic, titled “Drive: Fuel Your Revenue Obsession.” The thought leader presentations and InsideView’s research, Crack the Code on Sales and Marketing Alignment, showed that while the issue still exists, solving it has never been more important.

Where we stand today

Today, the internet and competitive pressures have increased demands on both functions, as we’re theoretically able to process so much more than ever before: more communications, more leads, more deals. In reality, the role of a sales rep is much more difficult than ever before because the power is all in the hands of the buyer and expectations are exponentially higher. Marketing is feeling the heat, too. “Big data,” the ability to measure marketing’s performance, and the mandate that marketing needs to prove its contribution to pipeline and revenue is forcing a look farther down the sales cycle.

Thanks again to the internet, nearly 70% of the sales cycle happens before sales is even in contact with the buyer [1]. This means marketing and sales must work together to educate and guide the buyer down the path to a closed deal, which makes the demands on sales—once the buyer does engage—significantly higher. Sales must be both educated and consultative. And, to be those things, they need the support, training, and content to effectively compete in an environment where the buyer has all the power.

And yet, sales and marketing teams still struggle to align

It’s easy to fall victim to “how we’ve always done it,” when it comes to cross-team collaboration. I’m begging you—don’t be a victim. Companies where sales and marketing have joined forces are gaining an incredible competitive advantage, and it’s easier to align than ever before.

The benefits of alignment are incredible

• According to SiriusDecisions, cross-functional alignment among sales, marketing, and product organizations can help companies achieve up to 19 percent faster revenue growth and 15 percent higher profitability.
• IDC reports that B2B companies’ inability to align sales and marketing teams around the right processes and technologies has cost them upwards of 10% or more in revenue per year—or $100 million for a billion-dollar company.
• Aberdeen Group found that 60% of best-in-class organizations have a formal competency to ensure that marketing has extensive visibility into the sales team’s utilization of content. Not surprisingly, organizations with this visibility see an 85% sales quota attainment, more than three times more than the worst performers.
• And a recent Highspot survey of 400 sales, marketing, and sales enablement professionals uncovered that 50% of organizations with a focused alignment effort in the form of sales enablement saw an increase in sales conversion rates of 10% or more, while 23% increased conversion rates more than 20%.

But there are still challenges

Times of change—even when it’s for the better—don’t come without challenges, and there are still hurdles to full alignment in these areas.

• Many existing challenges directly relate to a long tradition of “religious wars” between sales and marketing. It’s easy for me to say “get over it,” but that’s exactly what teams need to do—get over it, and get on with working towards a common goal, together.
• If you’re not objectively measuring the disconnect (lead quality, content quality and effectiveness, and intelligence on account or prospects), this ongoing argument becomes finger pointing. With a closed-loop process and objective data, teams can focus on root causes and work to fix them.
• The main areas of friction—and therefore biggest areas to align—include leads, content, and prospect and customer intelligence (i.e., data).

What to do about it

The best way to align your sales and marketing teams is to take baby steps. Walk before you run, gain some traction, and then run with it!

1. Identify key stakeholders and influencers, then get them committed to working on the issues that are unique to your organization.
2. Agree on common goals: For example, what are we really trying to fix (this month, this quarter, this year).
3. Be accountable for common Performance metrics/MBOs.
4. Communicate—across teams, up and down:
   • What you are doing
   • Why it’s important
   • What exactly is expected of everyone
   • …and don’t forget to LISTEN!
5. Fix the content problem.
6. Focus on quality leads over quantity.
7. Work together to improve intelligence/data on customers.
8. Measure, measure, measure, improve, repeat.

Yeah, I just yadda, yadda, yadda’d over the best part. To hear a longer discussion on it, view our roadshow presentation here.

Help is available

Before marketing automation, sales enablement, and sales intelligence tools, it was really difficult to have an informed discussion about what was or what wasn’t working between sales and marketing.

However, in the last five years or so, sales enablement solutions like Highspot have reached a point of closed-loop analysis that enables go-to-market teams to systematically improve. Sales can easily tell marketing what works (and what doesn’t) because it has the data to back up its claims. Marketing can in turn just as easily tell what sales uses most and optimize existing content based on actual usage figures and customer uptake stats.

Don’t be fooled, though.

Not all sales enablement solutions are created equal. It takes what we call “modern” sales enablement solutions to create the necessary closed loop processes that drive greater sales effectiveness and provide marketing (and everyone else involved) the analytical insight required to optimize for future success.

Want to learn what to look for in a sales enablement solution to drive greater sales and marketing alignment? Read our Definitive Guide to Sales Enablement.

[1] The B2B Sales Force Digital Reboot, Forrester, Oct 19, 2015

Here we are at the start of another quarter (and another fiscal year if you’re like us), when a marketer’s mind is preoccupied with two questions: How did I do? and, How can I do better next time?

They sound a little paranoid, but we’re not talking about a tryout for a spot on The Voice here — we’re talking about the very root of what makes a marketer a marketer, which (spoiler alert, sort of) essentially comes down to impact on the organization.

Truth is, we as marketers ask those questions every day, not just at quarter end. That’s because we strive to make the most out of every campaign, every activity, and every dollar at our disposal, and we take only hard data as evidence of our success.

Introducing the Impact Modeller

You know we’re heavily biased toward ROMI here at Allocadia. Our platform helps you lay out your grand plans, attain complete visibility into what you’re spending and why, and demonstrate how you’ve contributed to your company’s top line. It also includes a tool to ensure that your overall plan would drive enough top-of-funnel leads to hit your revenue target. And with our June 19 platform release, we’ve made that tool even more powerful.

Formerly known as Revenue Performance Planner, the new and improved Impact Modeller is the missing link between your plan details and your company’s objectives. It’s a mathematical modeling tool that estimates how each planned campaign and tactic will contribute to your top line. It works off some key assumptions on sales funnel conversion rates and deal size, and can be adjusted for different activity types and periods. In a nutshell, it’s like the American Express card for your marketing plan — you won’t want to leave home without it (props to Ogilvy & Mather for that 80’s marketing gem).

But in all seriousness, how would your job change if you could see in advance how each of your planned activities contribute to your goals? Imagine being able to identify the gaps before they occur, and being able to move budget around before spend was committed. Imagine being able to truly optimize your investments around the best-performing activities, freeing up valuable resources to test new ideas and new technology. Imagine simply being able to walk into the CMO’s office and confidently demonstrate how your plan is on target to meet your goals, month by month, quarter by quarter.

Here’s How it Works

Here’s how the Impact Modeller works.

Step 1: Set up your sales funnel stages with the language your company uses every day. Impact Modeller supports up to 10 stages.

Step 2: Assign conversion rates between stages. Assign unique conversion rates for different types of activities – because they don’t all convert the same way.

Step 3: Assign a default deal size, or set the deal size by activity.

Step 4: For each line item you create in Allocadia (a line items equates to a campaign or tactic), set a top-of-funnel lead goal. You can do this by month, by quarter, or by year. If you have multiple activities within a category, as an alternate approach you can assign the goal to the category.

Step 5: Check the Impact Modeller to see how much revenue you’re estimated to bring in (you can view this by activity, by category, and by time period).

Step 6: Adjust your top-of-funnel goals and/or your range of activities until Impact Modeller aligns with your overall revenue goal. Then go!

Impact Modeller comes standard with every Allocadia license. To see how it works or for more information, email us today.

Killer Apps That Will Help You Take Your Office Wherever You Are written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

photo credit Jan Vašek StockSnap

Smartphones and its technologies are becoming undeniable assets to businesses today. It is time to grasp the value of Mobile power and the value of mobile apps. Working on the go, or while you are holidaying is getting better these days. The stress of competitors, the need to take decisions instantly, the anxiety to close a deal anytime, the transaction that can happen anytime, the always required necessity to monitor your team for improved productivity, the finance that needs to be adjusted and many more pressures like these have been constantly pushing you to chase your office even on the go.

What helps you to put your office in your pocket? Just take advantage of some of the best apps that can help you to keep in touch with your office and track all details, monitor, manage, do business, make payments and so on while on the move. You can happily holiday and still run your office/business without any break. Few apps can give you unlimited opportunities. Make use of these apps and solve all your skill gaps even on the move.

#Cloud Business Management App

Netsuite – One single app to keep you connected with your finance, commerce, and customers.

Available for both iPhone and Android users, this is one solution for all business size, industry and role. It is a unified business management suite, covering ERP/Financials, CRM, and ecommerce. It is a single app that connects financials, customers, and commerce. Where ever you are, you can access to all business information of your organization and take actions as you go. It is simple yet easy to use.

# Operations Management App

NimbleCRM – Customer relationship management while on the go

It is easy to get trapped in any of your work activity trap if you fail to have a management strategy. You need to have visibility and complete connectivity if you wish to serve your customers better. No worries. You have an app for that. Nimble is one of the top rated social sales & marketing customer relationship management apps available today. With Nimble, you can have your team customer engagement including contacts, calendars, emails, social interactions etc., all at your fingertips. NimbleCRM now can be integrated with MailChimp, an app for email marketing. Through this facility, Nimble CRM sales team can easily get a glimpse of what their customers, leads, prospects or suspects are clicking on or opening in target marketing emails sent by the Marketing team in MailChimp. With just MailChimp app too, you can quickly look at how your campaigns and lists work even while you are away from your office.

# For Social Media Marketing

Buffer-Social media Scheduler

Time is one thing that cannot be recovered once it is gone. So be productive even when you are away from your office. Social media is one big sucker these days. Managing them wisely for your branding, promotion helps you save your time. No worries, there are a number of apps for that. One such high rated one is Buffer. You can promote your business and engage your communities easily with Buffer even if you are away from your office. Launched in 2010, Buffer is a fantastic scheduler for all your social posting. It works well with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. It frees you from the hassle of scheduling every single post separately. Available for both Apple and Android users, the app allows your team to work together, connect to more profiles, schedule posts in advance, and even analyze data generated by your followers. This app helps you to connect and optimize social media marketing easily and conveniently.

# For Ecommerce Analytics

Abondo- At a glance of ecommerce statistics

If you are running an ecommerce business, then this app can be the right choice for you. Information is a key to be successful in any ecommerce business and converting information into insight is wise. “You can’t just open a website and expect people to flood in. If you really want to succeed you need to create traffic,” said Joel Anderson, CEO of Walmart in one of his statements. Abondo is one app that gives you ecommerce statistics at one glance.

# For Google Analytics

Dashboard

Achievers make informed decisions – and informed decisions make achievers. Visualizing and analyzing real-time data is critical for any business today to make decisions. With the right metrics, you can turn data into information and capture your revenue. There are apps that can help in pulling real-time data from multiple sources. Dashboard is one such app. It has a top rating in the app store. Fast, quick and real-time google analytics conversions and metrics – wherever you are. It helps you to monitor your business performance and success on the go, set targets for your KPIs, track target values for main metrics, add custom conversions and access to over 90 plus reports.

# For File Sharing

Google Drive

Google Drive is one place where your files are safe and allows you to access and share files, photos, documents, designs, videos, recordings etc anywhere and at any time. Your storage and access depend upon the cloud storage plan that you choose. Your storage can be expanded to Drive, Gmail and Google photos. The app works with Google. You can save any attachment to drive and access and share them anytime, scan documents and save it as PDFs in Drive. Go ahead and make a presentation while you fly too.

Evernote

Dump all your notes in one place. You can still be organized. This app lets you make a note or capture them and access anywhere on all your devices. Your notes can be just a scribbled note, a formatted text, a photograph, webpage, voice memo and so on. Drop all of them into Evernote and access or share them as you want them.

# For Invoice / Accounting

FreshBooks

No more excuses like “my dog ate your invoice,” “our boss in on a holiday,” “your invoice is unethical,” “I am not well to come and collect the invoice,” and so on….
Developed specifically for small business owners, FreshBooks app makes your accounting simple, intuitive and online. It is cloud based and lets you send invoices easily, track time and capture expenses effortlessly. Reporting and accounting have never been so easy. With FreshBooks, there is no stress on expenses and invoicing and even a non-accounting person can handle this app well and get their job accomplished. Easy to use, get paid fast, raise invoice quickly and share them, get organized and save time. The best part is you can do all these anywhere and completely away from your office too…

Zoho Invoice

Zoho Invoice is yet another top rated invoicing app that helps you to send invoices, accept payments, send reminders, and even accept card payment online. All – quickly and easily on the go. Automate and save time.

# For Instant Recruiting

Workable

Recruitment is the only department where multiplication and division mean the same… What makes your recruitment process effortless? There are few apps for that. Workable is a recruitment app that will help drive efficiency in hiring the right candidate. Used widely, this app allows you to post openings instantly, track applicants, compare candidate and collaborate, mass mail, integrate with Gmail, import reports / database, hire on the go. Simple and yet a functional app that makes recruitment totally hassle free.

# For Customer Support

Freshdesk

This is one tool that will help you support your customers wherever you are. Moreover, it lets you integrate with your CRM or order management system thereby letting you provide contextual support anytime and anywhere. Handling customers, managing their refunds, returns, queries are easy with this app.

# Workflow Management – Project management

Asana

Gone are the days where you say “I am not the only one to be blamed!”It is no more herding cats. Good control reveals problem early – a strategy for project management. Asana is a project management and collaboration app that lets you manage your team, share information, organize schedules and track the progress – all from one single app. You can also leave feedback, upload attachments and comment on each progress too. Easy to use, Asana is an app that keeps you updated with the progress of all tasks that you assign your team member.

# For Video Conferencing

ClickMeeting

This is one popular app that lets you have your online meeting anytime and anywhere. ClickMeeting is one of the top-rated mobile apps that let you schedule a meeting, host and even be present in a meeting online via any Apple, Blackberry or Android devices. Moreover, you can even share your screen, manage presentations, record your meeting and highlight certain parts of the presentation. With some of the best collaborative tools, the app can be the best tool to conduct a meeting while you are away from your office.

# For Finance Management

Yodlee

Keeping track of expenses, money flow, banking transactions etc can be challenging. But with the right apps, you can efficiently control your business finance even while you are away from your office. Yodlee is an app that works well with online and mobile banking portals allowing you to manage your finance on the move. It lets you to easily manage your cash flow, visualize future transactions and also plan for upcoming expenses well ahead.
Last in the sequence but no last in the importance…….

# Zero Distraction Apps

QualityTime

All work and no play make Jake a dull boy…Working during your holidays or away from your office can be excellent with all the apps that i discussed here. But, in case you reach a brim and feel like having your personal time, no worries, you have an app for that too. Serious. QulaityTime is one amazing app that locks your smartphone for a stipulated time set by you and restricts you to have an access to your own phone. Just select the time and hit the start button. Time to relax….

Meenakshi Krishnan is a Content Consultant at OpenXcell, a pioneering Mobile App Development Company in India and USA. Technology inspires her and this has helped her to write contents on varied topics ranging from telecom, apps and healthcare communications and so on. She is currently working on global mobile app technologies reporting on diverse subjects. Prior to this, she was working for a technology marketing company based in Norwalk as a content contributor.

If only it were that simple. As with most things in marketing these days, there’s much more to it than that. Yet so many marketers today refer to “nurturing” as something that happens only when a prospect doesn’t attain a certain score after one or two marketing touches instead of part of a broader Lead Management Framework℠. And that “nurture program” is merely a notion of emailing that prospect whatever one-off communications are sent to everyone else in the database – whenever everyone else receives them.

I would argue that instead, nurturing should be an ongoing two-way conversation used in order to build and maintain a relationship with your buyers. It’s not merely a score, but a way to do all of the following:

1. Establish yourself as a thought-leader who understands your buyers’ struggles, wants and needs-
Think of nurturing as a strategically orchestrated dialog that begins with building trust. We’d all love for 100% of our audience to receive a single email from us and immediately score as a hot lead, ready to be passed to sales.

However, the reality is that buyers today are savvy and skeptical. They require multiple touches, but not the kind of product-focused touches most marketers build today. Buyers don’t want to hear how wonderful our product is. After all, isn’t everyone’s? We must build Engage stage content that appeals to their needs and establishes our brand as a thought leader, building trust over time.

2. Gather data about your buyer….one step at a time-
We’ve all heard the saying, “Don’t propose marriage on a first date” by asking your prospects ten questions in your first communication or touch. Nurturing is the perfect opportunity to date your prospects and gather data gradually…before proposing marriage.

Build a progressive profiling strategy that captures the least threatening data you need first (i.e. name and email) and save the scary / heavy commitment questions like purchase time frame for later. Not only will nurturing allow you to capture the data you need for scoring, it will also allow you to tailor your content based on the answers and/or your buyers’ behavior in a well thought-out manner.

3. Keep your company/solution/product top-of-mind-
Nurturing isn’t just about prospects. Don’t close a deal and then forget about your new customers you’ve worked so hard to gain. Continue to nurture your customers, not because you’re necessarily aiming for a certain lead score this time around, but because you want to keep your brand top-of-mind. Odds are these customers will be in the market for additional solutions or products that your company offers in the near future.

Of course the flavor of communications as well as the frequency should be different for customers versus prospects. A monthly newsletter works well in this scenario.

4. Prevent non sales-ready leads from growing cold-
Building what we call a “turnback” nurture program will prevent leads from falling into a black hole. A turnback strategy accounts for all the possible reasons a previously qualified lead turns out to be unqualified. It might be simply because they’re just not ready to buy. Maybe the prospect erroneously answered the progressive profiling questions. Or maybe he/she just doesn’t ever pick up the phone when a sales rep calls.

Think about all the reasons a sales rep wouldn’t want to waste their time following up on these leads and build your turnback program to do the follow-up. This can prevent the leads from becoming a total loss and often, drives real results in pipeline growth. Make sure the sales organization is clear on how to place leads into the proper turnback program once developed and establish criteria for what constitutes re-qualification. The results will be new sales-ready leads with minimum sales involvement.

When done correctly, nurturing will help Engage, Convert and retain buyers. Nurturing isn’t a score, and it’s not easy to develop an effective strategy without it. However,well-designed lead nurturing helps build a perpetual stream of sales-ready leads, increasing pipeline and driving revenue growth.

*This post first ran June 5, 2014 on ANNUITAS.com

Author: Jennifer Harmel @JenniferHarmel2 Vice President, Strategy, ANNUITAS

The post Why Lead Nurturing Isn’t A Score appeared first on ANNUITAS.