Rnordman

My wife and my daughter are genealogy fanatics.

While I slavishly review fantasy football lineup options, they are on their own laptops using ancestry.com to see if our 13th century forebears (or foreBaers as the case may be) were more English than Irish.

They are so into it that my daughter’s side business is doing family tree research. (She’s pretty great at it, so if you want to know more about your history visit her site FindFamily.info for pricing and packages)

Recently, my wife logged on to ancestry.com to see that someone had attached some new details to her tree. A note for the uninitiated: the system works collaboratively, so your 9th cousin could be doing research and discover something that impacts your own lineage.

This new addition said that there may be some long ago Native American elements in the family history. This addition was of great interest, as its been a longstanding rumor in her family that there may have been a secret Sioux romance a long while back.

To get some clarification on who added this information to the collaborative family tree, and the underlying source of the discovery, my wife sent an evening email to the help desk.

The reply came the next morning. This is a quick turnaround, especially overnight, as companies take an average of 44 hours to reply to an email – a fact I discovered when I wrote my new book, Hug Your Haters.

How To Be Confusing and Unhelpful

This email creates far more questions than it answers, but also provides some opportunities for customer service lessons.

1. Speed Matters

Yes, the email reply came in 16 hours, but it didn’t provide any value to the customer. And if you are going to use an autoresponder to encourage customers to use other channels, why doesn’t that autoresponder email get delivered in five minutes? Why is it a 16-hour delay?

2. Let Customers Choose Channels

My wife selected email because she prefers email. If she preferred the phone, she would have used the phone. Businesses must support customers in the channels the customer prefer, not the channels the business prefers. I would argue that this is especially true in a circumstance like this where the customer is paying an annual subscription fee to use the platform.

Now, if she had contacted ancestry.com in a channel that is not typically used for customer support (Youtube comment, Instagram comment, Snapchat, sky writing) then it would make more sense for the business to redirect her to another support method.

I thought for a moment that perhaps these memberships specifically exclude email support (although it is more common for companies to exclude phone support). I checked her membership, and in fact no ancestry.com packages prohibit email support. Curious.

3. Never Shut the Door on a Channel

Evidently, ancestry.com prefers to interact with customers via phone. (more on that below) But even if that’s the case, companies should never prohibit customers from using a contact mechanism. Saying “Due to the volume of emails we’ve received, we will not be able to respond to replies we receive to this email” is both harsh and difficult to believe.

You don’t want people to email you, and you refuse to answer emails, yet so many people continue to do the thing you prohibit that it causes you to disallow it? The circular logic here is so acute that I cannot determine whether it is more confusing or more unhelpful.

4. Align Your Messaging With Reality

This is such an avoidable error. The email itself says “We value your membership and are committed to providing excellent customer service.” Yet, by its very EXISTENCE this email invalidates that claim.

Further, the email says they are unable to respond due to “high contact volumes” yet they were able to provide THIS email quickly. This creates doubt and dissonance among customers.

And, the “so many people email us that you can’t email us” bit falls into this category too.

5. Understand Customer Service Unit Costs

I simply cannot fathom why a business would demand that customers call them on the phone.

First, it is dramatically more expensive to provide support this way (something like 5-8 times more expensive on a per customer basis).

Second, the phone is often viewed as a hassle for customers and this perception is growing rapidly.

I give ancestry.com a lot of credit for having excellent support forums and message boards, and my research in Hug Your Haters found that customers actually prefer self-service whenever possible.

But to force customers to call? Remarkable.

I figured that the gambit must be to try to upsell customers to a more expensive membership tier when they were on the phone. So, my wife called in, and you won’t believe what happened.

Wham, Bam, Thank You Sam

She called the phone number listed in the email, and her call was answered within three minutes. This is exceptionally quick and indicates that while ancestry.com eschews email like Tiger Woods runs from brunettes, they have a strong telephone support program with plenty of personnel.

A very nice man named Sam spent quite a lot of time with her on the phone, talking through various scenarios understandable only to genealogy nerds. At the conclusion of the call (summary of answer: we don’t know) there was NO upsell whatsoever. Just a cheery “have a nice day.”

This is, by all accounts, excellent telephone service. Is ancestry.com so committed to delivering great support via phone that they refuse to water it down via email? I suppose that could be the answer to this conundrum? I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of a company taking that approach, however, except in a regulated industry like health care or financial services, where they don’t want written records floating around on email.

Befuddled, I turned to the extraordinary Hug Your Haters Facebook Group for their ideas of what could be afoot.

Possible Explanations

The “personal” explanation, from Mark Edwards:

“Somebody…most likely thinks that talking to a human is a more personal way of dealing with the problem.”

The “nefarious” explanation, from Vanessa Sain-Dieguez (one of the stars of my book, Youtility):

“They know people won’t call – thereby lowering complaint volume.”

The “conflicting incentives” explanation, from Dan Christ:

“Perhaps the agreement with their call center charges them a per call fee and a per email fee, so if an email exchange requires multiple responses, they pay for each response separately. In that case, a phone call is more economical than a multi-email conversation.”

What do you think? Have you ever seen anything like this, how would you feel if this happened to you, and what could be the explanation for this interaction, which manages to be both confusing and unhelpful?

Boom. Perfect demo. Your pitch is flawless. All things are going accordingly. You’re discussing pricing plans with a huge customer without running into any objections. Both parties have agreed upon the next steps. You’re on cloud nine and about to close a huge deal to look like a superstar in front of the whole organization.

You hang up the call, send over a proposal, and start high-fiving your colleagues. What could go wrong?

And then all of the sudden, days go by without any word from the prospect. You’re tracking the email you last sent and see that it’s been opened 20+ times…

It’s also the end of the month… Your manager is asking what’s going on with the deal and you keep repeating, “I got it, I got it!” But in your head, you’re absolutely freaking out, like when you throw a pokeball at that damn Pidgey but he keeps escaping. Agghhhhh.

“Where the hell is this prospect?” you ask yourself. Days turn into weeks. Weeks turn into months. Finally, you have no other choice but to mark it as Closed Lost in Salesforce and you’re absolutely confused on what the hell just happened.

On the other hand, how many sales managers are tired of seeing good deals get marked as Closed Lost due to the sales rep’s lack of following up (and “checking-in” doesn’t count either)? Sometimes even the best sales reps don’t fully find out the prospect’s reasons for moving on, or they end up telling you that the prospect “just stopped responding.”

As a sales manager, we’ve all been there. You receive a notification that a deal has been marked as lost… you click into the details of the Opportunity… and you see Closed Lost reason as ‘Went Dark’.

After digging a little further, you ask the rep for details and they say that the prospect just wouldn’t get back to you no matter how hard they tried. You’re thinking, the first meeting went REALLY well, what do you mean they just haven’t responded? You decide to click into the Salesforce Activity section to find one of these scenarios:

• Zero calls made to the prospect
• Zero voicemails left to the prospect
• A few emails here and there reaching back out to the prospect with one of these subject lines: “Following Up”, “Checking-In”, “Call me? Please?”

You look at the email that the rep sent out to find something that looks a little like this:

Subject: Checking in

“Hey NAME,

Just wanted to check-in. I know we discussed that the platform would be great for you and you’d be getting back to me shortly after talking with your finance team.

I’ve sent you a gazillion emails and haven’t heard back!

Call me!

Cheers,

Sales Rep”

If you’ve sent out emails with those subject lines ever, please check out the following post by John Barrows to find out more about how to cure the plague of just “checking in.” Here is another insightful article by HubSpot on how to follow-up appropriately by providing value.

I’ve been in both situations mentioned above (happens to all of us and you have to start somewhere) and wanted to share a story of a prospect that was finally won over after 4 long months of consistent follow-ups and multiple communication attempts.

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For DigitalOcean, this is a company that fits the Ideal Customer Profile and the first email I sent was on February 18th. After several conversations and 70+ email exchanges back and forth, patience, strategy, and teamwork prevailed. On June 29th, we finally moved this opportunity across the finish line to have them start using DigitalOcean’s services.

Below you’ll get more context on the prospect, play-by-plays from conversations, and key learnings on 1) how to manage multiple stakeholders 2) knowing when to walk away and 3) never following-up with “just checking in” and 4) how to provide value with each follow-up to elicit a response from the prospect.

Context 

Size: 150 Employees

Potential Revenue: $50,000 – $100,000 MRR (monthly, not annually)

Sales Cycle: 4 Months (not including initial time to move into proof of concept with their internal development team, migration time for production workloads, etc)

Stakeholder Count: 3-4 (CFO, COO, CEO, and Head of Infrastructure) – Infrastructure decisions impact the organization as a whole so decisions are never made by one stakeholder

Stakeholder Names and Role (Ranked by decision making power and fake character names for privacy reasons):

• Chief Operating Officer – Gregory
  • Oversees all financial and organizational-wide decisions
• Head of Infrastructure – Adam
  • Oversees all infrastructure decisions
• Chief Technology Officer – Arnold
  • Oversees all technology decisions (non-infrastructure related)
• Infrastructure Architect – Andy
  • Handles day-to-day infrastructure workloads, implementation, and maintenance

February 18th

I reached out to Arnold (the CTO) and he replied mentioning that he had heard really great things about DigitalOcean before copying Adam (their Head of Infrastructure). The CTO deferred me to the Head of Infrastructure and used the exact phrase “in charge of” and not something like “oversees” or “handles on a day-to-day.”

This immediately tells me that Adam (Head of Infrastructure) should be my main point of contact and Arnold (CTO) can be my champion because of his positive response with “DO has a very positive presence on platforms like HackerNews.”

February 25th

Adam (Head of Infrastructure) got back to me after a few days and scheduled a meeting about a week out. He then postponed it, only to ultimately reschedule it again a few weeks later. Adam told me that his COO (a new decision maker), will reach out to me in ~2 weeks. Great, sounds promising. 

But about a week and half goes by and I didn’t hear back. Rather than sit around and wait, I decided to be proactive by going on LinkedIn. I figured out who the COO was, and sent him the following message:

Boom. Meeting set.

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In #sales, you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate
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March 17th

We had an amazing demo with a prospect, established pain points, obtained a mutual understanding of value propositions by both parties, and confirmed next steps. Gregory (COO) asks for some feedback on questions and cost within 2 minutes of ending the call:

Sounds like this guy was trying to move fast so I returned the feedback the next morning…

to only find out that I wouldn’t end up hearing back until the end of the month, which happens to be the end of the quarter. We filled out a 3-page spreadsheet early before the prospect’s requested deadline to only receive back a short, one sentence that things were getting pushed back another week. Welcome to sales

 

April 7th

A week goes by and we heard nothing. At this point, I wasn’t surprised so I sent them two options: 1) Pick a time that they’re available from the following options or 2) Use my Calendly link for easy booking.

And, no response.

At this point, you have to start considering other options and you shouldn’t feel bad about it either. You’ve built a strong relationship; you’ve done a decent amount of work; and you’ve earned the right to attempt to reach out through a different channel.

LinkedIn? Call? Text? Skype? Well, there’s no LinkedIn photo and a barely filled out profile so let’s assume that he’s not very active. This company is located in another country so the time zones are completely off, so phone isn’t the best option either.

Text? Definitely don’t have his mobile yet, but I’ve seen some awesome software that lets you send texts directly from Salesforce and/or even schedule those text messages to be sent out at a specific time. TrulyWireless is a company that I recently demo’d which gives you the functionality to do that with a few other interesting ones, like logging calls from your cell phone automatically to your CRM.

And Skype? This is actually a good option for us since we’re selling to the developer market. No Skype in his signature though, so back to a good ol’ fashioned email.

 

April 18th

I reached out with something other than “just checking in” or “touching base.” I was sure to mention two things 1) a congratulations on recent news and 2) recent news on our own company. If you’re using LinkedIn Sales Navigator or something like Owler, you’ll be able to get automated news alerts on your tier 1 accounts to optimize your account based sales process. You won’t have to manually do research every time you want to reach back out to a prospect.

“We’ll come back to you next month,” said Gregory.

“Another delay?” I thought to myself, discouraged. It had been two months since we first got the company engaged and one month since the first demo. The responses hadn’t been very promising. It wouldn’t be unusual for some sales reps to get discouraged or mark the deal as Closed Lost.

 

May 4th

Rather than sending the prospect another article, I decided to go with the good ol’ saying: “never lose a deal alone.” Don’t be afraid to ask for help; bring in your sales manager or VP, or in this case, your CEO.

Immediately after I sent this out, the COO responded with the intention to continue the conversations where we had left off.

I approached this deal a bit more strategically since there had been roadblocks to getting him back on the phone. I needed my champion back on board. I sent the CTO a separate email asking him if he’d like to join the call along with the other Head of Infrastructure.

The COO and I clearly weren’t best friends at this point. I wanted to have more stakeholders in the room in order to control the outcome as best as possible. I ended up getting this from the CTO:

There it was, my golden ticket. All because I decided to reach out to the champion to get him back into the mix. I got confirmation that he’ll not only give us information on how to close this deal (which the COO did not want to share), but also give us the bonus of customer referrals.

The call goes great and it looks like we are off to a good start…

Coincidentally, the swag box that I had sent over the weekend showed up the same day. They were extremely stoked about that and the conversation, so I obviously moved the deal into Closing stage!

Of course, a week goes by with no response from anyone on their team. Then I get this email from the COO:

Disappointed, I continued to follow-up a few more times (while still providing value or having a reason to reach out). After no response over and over again, I felt discouraged and considered calling it quits. As one last shot, I decided to figure out what was going on again with my champion. I sent him a note after his vacation asking if he could get me the inside scoop on what was going on internally to give me insight into what I should do next.

Now I knew exactly why they went dark and with Arnold’s permission, I decided to send one more Hail Mary message to the Head of Infrastructure and the COO…

Moments later, they responded back…

saying that our latest offer worked for them and we’d start implementation next week. After 4 months of hard work, we finally got the ball moving forward.

In the wonderful game of sales, you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.

Key takeaways:

• Never lose a deal alone
• Understand each stakeholder and how to leverage them
• Don’t ever just “check in” or “touch base.” Provide value every time you reach out
• Think twice before you mark a deal ‘Closed Lost’
  

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Thanks for reading everyone. I hope you found a few golden nuggets in there. Please feel free to ping me directly if you have any questions or leave your comments below.

The post Gotta Catch ‘Em All: Closing Prospects that Go Dark appeared first on Sales Hacker.

For modern day businesses, automation of business processes is more a requirement than an option. However, while larger businesses usually don’t consider software costs unreasonable, middle and small businesses make such decisions very cautiously as the benefits from such investments are not always visible at the first sight.

It’s necessary to remember that continuous interaction with a customer is one of the key requirements of today’s businesses. Controlling the flow of incoming calls, online requests, emails, etc. is very important. It’s hard to practice the now popular customer-oriented approach without a united customer relation management system.

That’s why CRM systems are so necessary for every company that works with customers directly. And that is why the number of companies switching to the SaaS CRM model are quickly growing every year.

Let’s see why it’s necessary for small businesses to switch to a cloud CRM even now.

1. You Can Start Using It Right Away

Many business owners reckon installation and deployment of a CRM is a troublesome and difficult process. In reality, though, modern cloud CRMs cause no technical troubles and can come into use immediately.

You don’t need expensive equipment and top-grade servers or hire a full-time IT specialist to use a cloud CRM. There are no complications with CRM deployment and installing updates. All this is done remotely and with almost no efforts from your side.

You only need internet access to register and start using a cloud CRM.

2. You Can Access a Cloud CRM on Any Device

One of the obvious benefits of cloud CRM applications is their availability anywhere and anytime. Imagine you need to make an extremely important business call or send a corrected business offer to a client, or simply need to find an email address or phone number while you are out of your office.

Cloud technologies allow you to access your CRM from anywhere, be it the office, cafe, train or your home. You can access cloud CRMs from different devices – your PC, notebook, tablet, or smartphone.

You or your colleagues can access the centralized database round-the-clock, and you can work on it even after office hours, which is often important for smaller companies.

Thanks to this 24/7 availability, cloud CRMs offer you flexibility and allow you to work whenever you want.

3. Modern CRM Applications Are Easy to Use

It’s hard to imagine anything simpler than using a cloud CRM. You only need to buy a software package for a fixed monthly payment and sign-in to your account from a preferred device. You don’t need to worry about anything else.

4. CRMs Are Available for All Kinds of Businesses

According to the Gartner research, the cloud CRM market grew by 12% from 2014 to 2015. There are acknowledged CRM market leaders, such as Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. New players also keep arriving in the market, offering more niche solutions and more attractive pricing models.

Usually, small companies cannot afford to invest large sums of money in software, and prefer small regular payments. Cloud CRMs completely satisfy this requirement.

Most cloud CRMs use the pay-as-you-go model, with minimal upfront investments and minimal commercial risks. Besides, there are no additional hidden costs, such as purchasing any additional equipment or licenses.

5. Cloud CRMs Are More Secure Than Your Desktop

When working with business data remotely, data security is often a major concern. According to research, data security is the main reason why companies hesitate in using cloud solutions.

This is why most cloud CRM companies invest heavily in data security. Their infrastructure is reliably designed to ensure continuity of service and safeguard data from hardware failure. To minimize the errors that originate on the user’s end, most service providers, including Salesforce, recommend using third party backup solutions, such as Skyvia or Spanning.

6. Cloud CRMs Are Maintained by Specialized Professionals

Even the slightest possibility of a system failure is a terrifying thought for small businesses who’re usually short on cash. For many of them, it can easily lead to a financial disaster.

Cloud CRMs completely eliminate such possibilities because all cloud subsystems are replicated. This means that each cloud system component, for example, a server, has a shadow replica running.

If the master server goes down, the system instantly switches to a shadow server so that you can continue your work without even noticing an error.

In general, cloud CRMs are available 99,99% of the time.

7. You Can Tailor a CRM According to Your Business

What’s better than a product designed specifically for your business? To start using a cloud CRM, small companies usually need only a small subset of its features, corresponding to their current business needs. However, as a company grows, it may need, more space for data or some advanced software modules.

Cloud CRMs can easily be scaled for new business needs. Most CRMs are built with a modular structure and you can enable these modules whenever you need. Of course, enabling new modules for your cloud CRM account is often not free.

8. Modern CRMs Support Third Party Integrations

Stand-alone software solutions have low success chances in the new digital world which requires flexibility and integration.

Many cloud CRMs provide built-in integration with external applications and software products. There is also a wide choice of 3rd party solutions for integration of cloud CRM data with other CRMs, accounting, marketing, and eCommerce tools, databases, and other sources.

For example, you can find the necessary solution for Salesforce integration on Salesforce Appexchange, starting from the Salesforce data loader, up to enterprise-class systems like Informatica cloud.

Wrapping Up

Cloud CRM applications provide just the right features, flexibility, and pricing that the booming small business industry needs. They take the burden of server maintenance completely off the shoulders of non-technical business owners and allow them to focus on their core business functions with complete peace of mind.

This is why some of the world’s biggest corporations, tech startups, and even home-based small businesses are turning towards cloud CRM applications for their business needs.

What’s the easiest way to lose control of the sales process? I’m sure you’ve noticed, many salespeople hold off on presenting their price to a prospective client until the final written proposal. They don’t bring up pricing in person or before …
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Expertise is built on a foundation of mistakes, trial and error, and downright failure. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re probably not trying new things, innovating, and growing.

But the crucial mark of any expert in an industry or profession is that they actively learn from their upsets. So instead of turning a blind eye to errors, give yourself the benefit of experience by tackling them head on.

Here’s a great place to start your hunt for common mistakes you can improve.

7 Sales Mistakes to Stop Making Today

1) Not giving meaning to the numbers in your pitch.

Numbers and statistics are great assets in a sales pitch, but there’s a caveat when using them that’s often ignored: Numbers must actually be meaningful. It’s easy to throw around some stats, but putting in the effort to figure out what they really mean is absolutely critical.

Take this (made-up) number, for example:

“89 out of 100 sales professionals say calling prospects is ineffective.”

That’s kind of interesting. But can you point to the real value of that number? How does it help the prospect understand more about you, your service, and -- most importantly -- how that service will benefit them? It merely poses a problem.

Now take this (also made up) set of numbers:

“89 out of 100 sales professionals say calling prospects is ineffective. Of those respondents, those who implemented an automated email system increased their sales conversion rate by 33%.”

Ding ding! The second half of this statement is what really matters here. It’s the answer to the problem that the first number poses. Scan through the stats you’ve been using and take a moment to brainstorm whether or not you can make them even more meaningful by taking them a step further.

2) Failing to ask how a prospect found you.

It’s a simple question, but one often forgotten or ignored: “Where did you hear about us?”

Yet asking that quick question has a multitude of benefits. Not only will Marketing be your love you for asking it, the answer could very well provide a sneak peek at your prospect’s behaviors.

Say, for example, they found you through a blog post. It might indicate that they’re seeking extra education before they’ll make their decision. If they found you by clicking through an ad directly to a pricing page, they may be closer to the close. These bits of information are essential, and act as great clues that can help you towards the ultimate close.

3) Making errors in your automated messages.

When’s the last time you checked your automated messages? It might be about time to take a look. Not only are stale messages ineffective, if you’re sending an automated message that looks spammy or contains errors, you’re losing street cred points on a regular basis.

For those interested in combing through emails to double check for errors, here’s a great list of common email writing mistakes to compare them against.

4) Being pushy when you think you’re being enthusiastic.

A “go-get-em” attitude is very different from an overly aggressive approach to a sale. People don’t like being pushed or cornered. And pressuring a prospect instead of educating them could very well result in them choosing a competitor.

The best thing that could happen when closing a deal is that you get a customer and an advocate. If you bully a prospect into a decision, you may get one but not the other. There’s a sweet spot of confidence and momentum, for sure, but hounding someone into submission leaves a bad taste.

5) Ignoring mobile sales.

How many times do you think you check your smartphone each day? A study by Deloitte found the average number to be around 46 times per day. Imagine if you could leverage that!

The thing is, you can. Making small changes to your sales process like optimizing your emails for a mobile screen or using eSignatures to close deals instantaneously from anywhere in the world will give you a huge advantage in the already competitive world of sales.

6) Slow turnaround time in your email responses.

Gone are the days when consumers have any patience for lag time in email responses. Unreasonable as it might sound, when people send an email asking a question, they generally carry the unspoken expectation that they’ll receive a (very) quick answer. And if a prospect reaches out to two different companies, the first to respond will always have the “first-to-serve” advantage.

If you can’t promise a tighter turnaround time, think about installing automated messages that set the expectation for a response. This would be akin to a support email, to at least let the prospect know that you’ll be in touch ASAP. If you can have it come from the sales rep who’ll actually be the one reaching out, all the better.

7) Failing to stand behind a higher price.

Some solutions are simply more expensive than others. But trying to explain that effectively to a client is difficult, to say the least. Instead of avoiding price comparisons, take the question head on and be prepared to explain the precise reasons for the higher price (ideally, it also aligns with a higher value).

Rather than trying to win the deal by throwing a competitor under the bus, be ready to clearly communicate the value of your product or service. Here’s a great example of a CEO who chose the more expensive option when comparing two services, based largely an effective communication from the company about the value behind their higher price.

Are you making any of these sales mistakes? Let us know in the comments below.

Salespeople need to be masters at creating buying moments for their customers. To get the deal, you gotta work on the deal.

Besides, customers buy when they’re ready to buy, not because you’re ready to sell.

Despite this, a lot of sales professionals still find themselves with no deals even when it seems they did everything right. A sales conversation seems to be going the right way but you end up with a non-sale or a frozen lead.

See: You could’ve ticked off all the steps on your ‘to-do’ list–but you might’ve also been checking those on your ‘don’t-do’s’.

We’re ripe into the second half of the year and it’s time to get in gear and minimize those no-deals.

Here are three mistakes you must watch out for at all costs to avoid no deals.

Going through the motions

First things first. Are you a bored salesperson?

Get to the office every day, make the same calls to the same people, get new prospects from the same sources. Use the same rules for handling objections and negotiations. Report to the manager. Rinse and repeat.

Is this you? Your results are OK. You make OK money. You go to work and go home feeling OK.

But chances are, when you’re not in the office, you complain about having to do the same damn thing day in and out.

There are salespeople who live in this reality day in and out. And these are the salespeople who eventually lose motivation and focus. They start going through the motions.

Your performance and results will suffer if you allow yourself to get bored. Bored salespeople don’t end up being successful.

If you’re one of these salespeople who have settled with the bare minimum, you will have to change now lest risk being ineffective and losing out to others who thrive in the world of sales.

Ok, repetition in itself is not bad. Our organizations have a sales process to follow. This has been polished and cemented and continuously improved day in and out.

How do you thrive in this “repetitive” sales field? Look at each sales conversation as an opportunity to be better at reading customers and closing.

Repetition in sales allows you to sharpen your skills every single day.

Just another day at work?

If you want to smash quotas and make a real career out of sales, you need to identify which of your daily tasks work 100% of the time and set them apart from those which only work 90% of the time and so on. Make the 100-percenters part of your everyday toolkit. For those that only work sometimes, keep them in your armory but continue to sharpen them. Have you noticed that prospects with a particular type of objection respond to a particular type of explanation? Note these down.

Even if being a salesperson means having to do a lot of things over and over again, each sales conversation is an opportunity to test out your weapons, validate your org’s sales process, and weed out the techniques that don’t work quite as well.

Sales pros who use this approach to constantly “train and retrain” themselves each day are those who succeed and hit their quotas out of the park.

Dropping prices as your weapon of choice

Deal droughts can make you take all sorts of not-so-smart decisions, one of which is going the easy route by dropping prices when times are tough.

Giving way price-wise not in any way an absolute mistake but many sales professionals fall into the trap of making it their crutch by having it as the first line of objection defense.

When you sell on price, you haven’t sold anything. What you’re doing is buying time with your customer’s business until a more valuable one comes along. When you sell on value, however, you own their business.

A key concept in value-based selling is assuming the role of a strategic partner rather than just a vendor. It works. A big chunk of our successes here at Tenfold is a result of our willingness to become part of our client’s problem-solving processes and seeking out ways to make their businesses more efficient. When you’re just another solution with the cheapest pricing, your customers think of you just the same–they chose you because you offered the cheapest solution, not really the best one.

There are several possible reasons why salespeople make the mistake of selling based on price.

It could be that they were taught to do so right from training. That’s a sales org problem that needs to be addressed. If you’re selling for a sales org that pushing price-based selling, you would notice the high employee turnover due to the burnout rate. Account management is in perennial infancy and the company’s business grows horizontally but not vertically.

Another could be because you don’t believe in the value of your own product or service. This could also be a training issue but it is your duty to embrace and understand your company’s competitive edge over other solutions so you can communicate them to your prospects.

Lazy salespeople relegate to price-based selling even when the thrust of the company is to provide value.

These salespeople are dangerous to sales organizations and should be weeded out if they remain unchanged.

Making decisions for your prospect

Why did you stop calling? Why did you not ask for their order?

Many salespeople fall into the trap of assumptions. Stop assuming that a prospect isn’t interested, that they’re too busy, or that it just isn’t the right time to be going after a certain deal. The reality of sales is you snack on rejection but the flipside of it is you lose everything you don’t go after. It hurts to get rejected but it’s working to detach negativity from rejection that will help you get deals.

Andrea Waltz, sought-after keynote speaker and co-author of Go For No!, has this to say for professionals who must face rejection in their work.

“Our attachment to the outcome, tend to make us less effective. For example, when it comes to selling, the ultimate place you can get to is where the words YES and NO contain the same emotional charge. And this means being more dispassionate when it comes to selling your product, service, opportunity, and even yourself.

There is no denying that there is some part of us that will always be happier when we hear ‘yes.’ After all, we’re human! We will never be able to be totally dispassionate about some outcomes. But the goal is clearly to reach a point where the difference between the elation of hearing ‘YES’ and the deflation of hearing NO is minimized… even if it can’t be eliminated entirely.”

Finish the rest of the year with a relentless attitude, go for the wins, accept that there will be NOs, and minimize no-deals. Follow up on every prospect.

Stop assuming the worst just to avoid rejection.

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Making these mistakes? Review your performance and start making a habit of arresting these mistakes as they happen.

It’s never too late to retrain yourself and get those deals.

I had a conversation with a prospect today about their demand generation challenges. As is often the case in these discussions, the topic of the sales team came up. My prospective customer, who is an executive on the marketing side of the organization, wanted to know how he could get sales to appropriately respond to the leads that would be generated from a perpetual demand generation program. “Sales has a particular way of selling” he told me, “but I want to make sure they are enabled the right way so that they will respond to the qualified leads we will be sending their way.”

*Image via curvedline.co

This comment is not all too uncommon from what I hear from many marketing department heads who are wanting to transform their approach to demand generation. They see the tactical approaches they are taking, but often times one of the biggest obstacles they foresee in moving forward is also having sales come along for the ride.

While this is a common issue, and one that marketers are wise to address, it is exactly this reason that organizations need to understand that demand generation is NOT just a marketing activity. Demand generation, when done right, is a discipline that both marketing AND sales must be a part of developing if it is going to be successful. And it is in this area where so many well-meaning marketing departments fall down.

How does a marketing team get the necessary engagement and collaboration from their sales team so they can be assured of success? Here are a few suggestions.

1. Ask Them-
It seems absurd and overly simple, but the number of marketing departments that do not include their sales departments in the development of a demand generation strategy is quite large. I hear a number of organizations state that once the program has been developed they “educate” sales on what is about to launch. What usually occurs afterward is that sales does not participate because they had no input into what’s being sent to their buyers.

In the 2015 B2B Enterprise Demand Generation Study conducted by ANNUITAS, less than half of marketing organizations said they included their sales departments in the development of buyer personas. With the buyer being the central focal point of demand generation, it seems quite unreasonable to not gather sales input given they are the ones speaking to their customers and prospects continually. They have a unique perspective.

Marketers should begin by asking sales for their input into gaining customer insights. Understanding who they sell to, what a typical buying process looks like, who is on the buying committee and what their buyers are typically looking for when proceeding through a purchase. As this insight is gleaned (along with customer interviews and secondary research into the market), sales should also be involved with the creation of the personas and journey mapping. By their involvement, the probability of them partaking in the program will increase exponentially.

2. Speak Their Language-
Few things will contribute to helping sales make quota then a fine tuned, perpetual demand generation program. PR Newswire took this approach and saw more than a 7% increase in conversions from marketing generated leads.

When speaking to sales, you have to speak this kind of language.

I once had a marketer who worked for me at a software company who would roll his eyes and say, “Sales is so coin operated.” They certainly are, as every sales person should be. But here is the catch, so should marketing! In order to gain the buy-in and needed collaboration with sales, marketing needs to be coin operated and convey to sales what their goals are in terms of driving pipeline and revenue. Once sales sees that marketing “gets it” they will be more apt to lend their time and efforts to a successful demand generation program.

3. Get Them There From the Beginning-
The foundation to any perpetual demand generation program is the ability to Engage, Nurture and Convert your buyers along their purchase path. Clearly the conversion (and even some of the nurture stage) will involve sales. To simply involve them “as needed” will not enable organizations to develop high value programs.

It is key to have sales there at the beginning of the ideation stage so they are a part of the core team. Anything less than this will only stymie the progress that one hopes to make in developing this kind of program.

When we kick off an ANNUITAS program with a client, we make it a requirement that sales be present. Granted, it is no small ask to pull sales out of the field, but at the same time there is no better reason for it, as a strategic, buyer-centric demand generation program can and will yield great benefit.

As marketing organizations continually seek to drive better results and enable sales, the best way to enable them is to have them join in and be a part of a collaborative team that is planning and executing a strategic demand generation program.

The next generation of the tiny house is the live-in shipping container.

Imagine stepping through the front door of a crate that once shepherded supplies across oceans and entering a pint-sized home that looks like something out a Pottery Barn catalog.

That's the vision of Montainer, a Missoula, Montana-based startup that wants to make it easier to become a homeowner. Their revamped shipping containers start at $55,000, and the company handles all the permits needed to make your dream home a reality.

Patrick Collins, CEO of Montainer, tells Tech Insider that the company currently installs the shipping containers as secondary dwelling units in homeowners' backyards, which means they share a property with a "real house." That's a much easier process than acquiring a bona fide tiny house.

To get started, a buyer must log onto Montainer's website and place a “no commitment” reservation deposit of $2,500. A member from the company's design team reaches out and works with the buyer to create a blueprint based on their needs and customizations.

Meanwhile, Montainer starts acquiring building permits from the city's development board. Collins says the fact that the shipping containers are sold as secondary dwelling units gives the builders some flexibility in the design.

"The tiny house movement is really about doing it yourself and being off-grid — trying to do things as cheaply as possible," Collins says. "Our customer ... they basically don't have to do anything."

Montainer gives the prospective buyer an estimated cost, and then they can decide whether or not to move forward. If they can't secure permits or funding, the deposit is returned.

All the shipping containers are built on the company's headquarters in Montana. They come in all shapes and sizes, and can even be stacked and adjoined to form larger configurations.

Collins says the first units have started to ship to early-bird buyers, and the company is now opening up sales to other homeowners. Eventually, once building codes from coast to coast catch up with the tiny house phenomenon, he hopes to make the shipping containers available to a wider audience.

"Ultimately, our mission is to make home-ownership attainable for anyone," Collins says.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Silicon Valley's most creative designer has the perfect solution for tiny apartments

When B2B organizations think about velocity, it is typically thought of as the time from the opportunity creation to opportunity closed (won or lost). It only includes the sales cycle. The idea is that a faster velocity (shorter sales cycle) means there is more momentum, which should translate to a higher win rate.

Sales velocity is important, but it’s not the only velocity metric that marketers should be tracking. In addition to helping marketers understand their impact on momentum, a more comprehensive measurement — total velocity — enables better forecasting and marketing optimization.

This post will explain the importance of considering the marketing cycle when analyzing velocity and discuss the impact it can have on the marketing team.

Three Measures of Velocity

Sales Velocity

We regularly monitor our velocity. Last month, when we took a look at our sales velocity for opportunities that closed during the month, we had a velocity just over 95 days. When filtering for just our closed-won opportunities, it was about 60 days.

But that’s just looking at opportunity creation to opportunity close. While we do some marketing post-opportunity creation, the large majority of our marketing takes place before the opportunity creation touch.

Sales Velocity + Lead Creation

So if you want to think about how marketing impacts velocity — and revenue-driven marketers should want to do that — you need to look into the marketing cycle. One way to do this is to track velocity from lead creation to opportunity close.

Why would you want to track how marketing impacts velocity? For one, if a faster velocity means higher win rates, you would want to see how your marketing is positively impacting win rates. And second, if you know how long it takes for an opportunity to close, it can help with forecasting. If you spend $X on marketing that engages prospects in January, how long will it take to start seeing returns? Assuming you have a somewhat consistent buyer journey, knowing this would be helpful.

So, we took a look at our velocity from lead creation to opportunity close. We found that we had a velocity of 245 days. Closed-won opportunities had a velocity of 331 days, a good amount longer. We’ll get to the implications of this later.

But even if you’re calculating velocity starting at LC, that’s still missing a significant portion of marketing: all the pre-lead stage marketing.

Total Velocity

When you spend $X in January to engage a new audience, you’re actually starting at the top-of-the-funnel. In other words, the $X you spent in January will influence the first touch (FT), not the lead creation touch (LC). Maybe the FT is in January, the LC is in February, the OC is in March, and the Opp Close is in April. That’s a four month marketing and sales cycle, not three months like if you had started counting at LC.

So we went back into the data and calculated our total velocity, from first touch to opportunity close and found that our total velocity was 311 days. Our total velocity (marketing and sales) is actually about two months longer than we had previously thought. When we only look at closed-won opportunities, our total velocity is 349 days, which is still over two weeks longer than LC-to-Close velocity.

Our traditional sales velocity (OC to Close) demonstrates the classic reason why organizations care about velocity: when opportunities became customers (closed-won), they closed about 35% faster compared to when they were lost.

However, now that we can see velocity that takes into account the marketing path, we see the opposite effect. Successful buyer journeys tend to have longer total marketing and sales cycles by about 12%.

While we would prefer to see that our closed-won opportunities had faster total velocity, there is still plenty of insight to be gleaned.

So what does this mean?

The slower total velocity is likely impacted by two factors:

1. Our product is powerful and nuanced, which requires a lot of education and often involves many stakeholders
2. We have calibrated our marketing and sales alignment to most effectively use our sales team’s resources

Our Product Requires A Lot Of Education

As for the first factor, our data shows that successful customer journeys involve a lot of marketing interaction — often several months from first touch to opportunity creation. Prospects are doing more research, reading more content, and interacting with us more ahead of the demo.

The result is that when they are ready to demo, they are well informed and well equipped to have positive interactions with our sales team, which results in a shorter sales cycle.

In 2014, Forrester famously claimed that buyers now complete about 90% of the customer journey on their own before ever reaching out to a salesperson. Our data reflects this concept. Seeing the data, our challenge now is to figure out ways to deliver the same amount of education, but ideally in less time. This will hopefully increase total velocity, while still ensuring that our sales team has good conversations and is able to close deals at the same fast rate.

Prioritize Sales Team Resources With Predictive Account Engagement Scoring

On a related note, the second factor that is likely influencing our total velocity is the use of predictive account engagement scores. These scores use an algorithm to take into account historical data in order to predict the likelihood of an account closing. This allows our sales team to focus on and prioritize accounts that are most engaged and most likely to close.

For accounts that have high engagement scores, this means faster closing rates, as reflected in the sales velocity data. But for accounts that may not be as likely to become customers, it means a longer sales cycle. This, too, is reflected in the data.

As for marketing, the predictive account engagement scores give us insight into what marketing interactions are adding value. If we launch campaigns targeted at accounts with low scores and the campaign is effective at increasing their scores, we’ll be able to increase total velocity. In order to make that judgment, we need to be measuring total velocity, not just sales velocity.

Going Forward

Now that we have addressed the likely explanations for our total velocity data, what are the implications moving forward? Most practically, it helps with forecasting. As we touched on earlier, if you know how long it takes for an account to go from first touch to close, you can forecast and budget accordingly. How long until you see returns on a marketing campaign that you launched this month? Total velocity tells you the answer.

Measuring total velocity also allows you to optimize for it. Are there certain channels that increase velocity faster than others? Do accounts that have engagements with Paid Social or Events close faster than accounts from Paid Search or Email? Again, a total velocity analysis will tell you this answer.

First touch to close velocity — total velocity — gives marketers the insight they need to impact and optimize customer momentum. As marketing strategies, like ABM, become increasingly focused on impacting and capitalizing on accounts with momentum, the ability to measure, analyze, and optimize for total velocity will continue to increase in value.

Sellers who have a strategic intent to meet buyer needs will ask questions to uncover those needs.

Sellers who plan to sell the same product with all the same specifications regardless of buyer needs shouldn’t waste time with questions designed to understand buyer needs. There is no point in asking questions to yield information that won’t be used.

By the same token, a seller who wants to understand and meet buyer needs shouldn’t abandon her intent at the first glimmer of a potential need. If the intent is truly to understand and meet buyer needs, there will be follow-up questions to probe the stated need(s) and to ascertain the scope and hierarchy of each need. When sellers leap ahead, as if a Pavlovian response kicks in to sell at the first sign of opportunity, the intent they started with is lost. Their credibility is lost, too, if the intent to understand needs was communicated to the buyer.

3 Steps to Understand and Meet Buyer Needs

Step #1 in questioning with strategic intent is to formulate a plan. A seller should know his or her objective(s) for each call. The plan will guide the questions and keep you focused on your desired outcome.

Step #2 in strategic questioning is for the seller to be aware of his or her own intent in the call. The intent is not the same as the plan. Two different sellers could have two different intentions – one may be a transaction-based seller with no expectation of repeat business while the other may be a relationship-based seller who relies almost exclusively on returning customers. Both, however, may have a plan in their next call to close the pending sale.

Both steps #1 and #2 ought to be completed before the sales meeting begins. Of course, plans may need to flex or change during a sales call. Even so, it’s best to go in with a clear direction in mind. This is more effective than pre-scripting the questions to be asked. If the plan and the intent are clear, the questions will be a natural outgrowth of them. Planning questions without having a road map or a compass is like setting out on a journey with only a few dollars in your pocket and no idea which direction to turn.

Step #3 for questioning with strategic intent is sharing the purpose of asking questions at the beginning of the sales call. This step alleviates seller apprehensions about asking questions and clues the buyer in to the purpose of the questions. One reason sellers get negative reactions to their questions is they jump right to a question without any set up or context. Caught unaware, buyers may be taken aback, puzzled or even defensive. These initial reactions make sellers reluctant to ask additional questions.

These buyer reactions are assuaged when the seller describes his or her intent for asking questions. The reason given to the buyer should be truthful and straightforward. Sellers should avoid over-promising. They should also avoid minimizing the process of asking questions. Don’t say “I just have a couple of questions. It will only take a minute.” Phrases like this diminish the value of asking questions. By setting a time limit, the seller is inadvertently instructing the buyer to keep it brief, too. That’s exactly the opposite of what the seller needs to communicate. Remember: the objective is not to race through the process. The objective is to truly understand buyer needs so you can meet buyer needs!

If you’d like to learn more about how to ask questions that are efficient and effective in pinpointing your buyers’ needs, be sure to read DISCOVER Questions® Get You Connected. It’s based on 20+ years of field research with both buyers and sellers.

Next Steps:

• To learn more about DISCOVER Questions® and how to get connected in meaningful ways with your buyers, order your copy of this bestseller from Amazon.com
• When you need sales or management coaching, customized sales training, or a dynamic speaker call us at 408-779-PFPS or book an appointment with Deb.
• Check out these resources for sales managers and front line sellers. New webinars, infographics, research, podcasts and more added every month!

The award-winning CONNECT2Sell Blog is for professional sellers who believe, as we do, that Every Sale Starts with a Connection.

Deb Calvert, “DISCOVER Questions® Get You Connected” author and Top 50 Sales Influencer, is President of People First Productivity Solutions, a UC Berkeley instructor, and a former Sales/Training Director of a Fortune 500 media company. She speaks and writes about the Stop Selling & Start Leading movement and offers sales training, coaching and consulting as well as leadership development programs. She is certified as an executive and sales coach by the ICF and is a Certified Master of The Leadership Challenge®. Deb has worked in every sector and in 14 countries to build leadership capacity, team effectiveness and sales productivity with a “people first” approach.

The post 3 Steps to Check Your Intent and Meet Buyer Needs appeared first on People First.

I was teaching B2B digital marketing in Buenos Aires this month, and found some of my students to be dismayed by one data point that came up again and again in the course: of all tactics in the B2B marketing toolkit, the most valued, the most used, and the most effective is face-to-face events. It’s not digital, except tangentially. But, year after year, events like conferences and trade shows consistently show up at the top of the list. Why is this the case, and what does that mean for us marketers?

Interestingly, my savvier students got it immediately. They intuitively understood the power of face to face in B2B marketing. “Business buying is done through relationships,” said one. Bingo.

It’s all about personal connections. Business buyers buy from people they know and trust. Business buying is based on people as much as it is on specifications and product requirements. Even when we are buying on behalf of our companies, we are social animals, and we want to look the seller in the eye before signing a big contract.

We need a conversation. Events are very efficient at conversations. Hundreds of qualified prospects have flown in, to talk with you, under one roof, in an intensely productive series of days.

Some people argue that business events are dead, or dying. Trade shows certainly suffered after 9/11, and the comeback has been slow. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, “Reports of my death are exaggerated.” This is still a $12.2 billion industry in the U.S. alone.

As an element of the B2B marketing toolkit, business events are actually thriving, even in a digital era. Let’s look at some numbers.

• Year after year, events and trade shows clock in as the single largest line item in B2B budgets. 20% on average, according to Forrester. I’ve seen companies that devote as much as 60% of their spend to face to face.
• Events are also at the top of the heap based on lead generation effectiveness. A 2015 study showed events way ahead of other media channels—online or offline—at 84%. Events ranked higher than even the company website, at 81%.
• Even in content marketing, where digital and social are the darlings, events are named the most effective content tactic in this year’s study from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. It was the same for the last two studies, too.

Three ways to improve your event marketing results

Okay, so you are convinced. But how do you get the most value from business events? I have three ideas for where some extra focus can drive vast improvements in the productivity of your event marketing spend.

1. Put the event to its best use—meaning a place to have efficient and productive interactions. Know why you are there. Select metrics consistent with your objectives, and put them in writing, so you can’t cheat. And don’t forget: If your objective is to have lots of conversations with prospects—which for most people it is—encourage your teammates to make appointments in advance. This extremely effective technique is often overlooked.
2. In face to face, your teammates are the medium at the event. And the message. So make sure your people are trained up on how to engage—and disengage. These are not sales conversations. But they can be learned. A bit of pre-event training can dramatically improve your productivity at the event.
3. Put the event in its larger context. Post-event is where the real revenue-driving activity happens. So make sure you focus on how you will capture contact information, and make a record of what happened during the conversation, and what your team should do to follow up. If you don’t have a solid lead management process in your company, don’t spend a penny on events.

In contrast to the pre-digital world, we’re now drowning in data, creating an increasing need for business intelligence to guide effective decision-making.

Success in today’s technology driven world directly correlates to the quantity and quality of information possessed… that of the client, the competitor and the market. Informed decision-making ultimately leads to greater access, opportunities and technological advancement. The difference between renewable success and ultimate failure is a fine line that most ambitious businesses are willing walk. Very often, the most important factor in determining success comes down to who engages in factual and informed decision-making and who follows hunches and suppositions. [source]

Why business intelligence?

In marketing, we used to emphasize doing market research — a periodic activity to better understand our customers/ clients and how to satisfy their changing needs. Marketing intelligence got short-changed in discussions (and in textbooks) mainly because we didn’t have many sources of information and those sources didn’t provide much in the way of insights.

Mostly, business intelligence in the marketing area consisted of forecasting and maybe a little pricing. We often just drew a trend line over our sales graph, and maybe one over our expenses and called it a forecast.

Everything is different in a digital world and the amount of data available for analysis increases exponentially with the addition of data from IoT devices that transmit data about everything from customer behavior to traffic patterns.

Using business intelligence as a marketing tool provides insights that put you well ahead of your competition.

IBM contends 4 Vs surround the problem of Big Data — which increases by 20% per year:

• Volume — currently the data equivalent of around 47 YEARS of HDTV programming exists
• Variety — about 80% of that data is unstructured (non-numeric) including images, video, and text. Analyzing this data is challenging, even with powerful data handling tools like Hadoop. It comes in a ton of formats from thousands of sources.
• Velocity — it’s coming hot and heavy, especially from IoT devices.
• Veracity — actually, I added this to IBM’s 3 Vs because you’re never quite sure if the data you’re getting is accurate, so cleaning data is an important first step to analysis.

Making business intelligence work for marketing

Much of what you read on business intelligence focuses on configuring data and extracting it from databases using SQL, Hadoop, Python, R, Excel, or any one of a growing list of tools to handle big data. These tools troll through massive databases to quickly return data associations based on user queries. Let’s call this BI engineering, which is common in the field.

Very cool.

That way, if you want to know what other products a particular consumer bought or looked at since becoming a customer — bam, you’ve got it. This is the basis for user recommendations that create tremendous customer value when using Amazon or Netflix. Instead of searching thousands of items, you get great suggestions that both increase purchases that benefit companies while helping customers find things they’ll like.

Check out the demographics of people who bought XYZ using a BI tool and you quickly get information to help you market your product more effectively.

Also VERY cool.

Of course, there’s also a creepy side of business intelligence for consumers — that companies track your every move, every search, every click.

In today’s economy, information is power!!!!

Dashboards in business intelligence

Increasingly, firms use interactive dashboards providing trend analysis along with user customization options. Google Analytics is an example of one such dashboard for, while it provides detailed data correlations that commonly affect business decisions, it also provides options to customize queries.

Maybe an example will help.

I can use any of the standard Google Analytics views — they call them widgets — to answer questions like, how many visitors to my site came from Twitter? or How many people who bought a product came through AdWords? By tagging my content properly, I can even discover the ROI of each social network.

Goole Analytics allows me to put together a dashboard of my favorite widgets. I can even create different dashboards to answer different types of questions.

Here’s a performance dashboard I created for one of my clients:

I collected reports that I find help guide our decision-making all in one place.

We can see how successful we are in meeting goals, which content contributes to traffic, any performance issues, such as slow load time and difference across countries.

If I want to dig a little deeper, I can choose a second dimension, such as source, demographics, interests, etc to see how multiple factors determine performance.

I use multiple dashboards for different aspects of my client’s website.

I can even turn clients loose to set up their own dashboards or manipulate parameters on the existing ones to answer their own questions without having to reprogram. These can be done ad hoc or set up for inclusion in the dashboard moving forward.

Going beyond dashboards in BI

To gain true value from business intelligence, you need to move beyond simple correlation with your BI function and that requires someone who’s a subject matter expert, possibly paired with a BI engineer. Several experts say 70% of firms don’t have adequate data analytics capability to efficiently manage marketing. But, as challenging as it is to even get BI engineering right, stepping up to model building, which combines marketing concepts with data, is the stuff of only the top marketing firms.

You see, there are limitations and problems with using dashboards.

You can only view correlations between 2 variables

Correlation ISN’T causation. We call these spurious correlations when the variables correlated actually have no logic. The typical example of this is the correlation between the length of women’s skirts and the economy or the coincidence that led to an athlete doing things or wearing things for important competitions. Thus, shortening women’s skirts has NO effect on the economy.

Sometimes data is just plain wrong. For instance, if you’re trying to figure out who’s buying products in your store using loyalty card information to match characteristics of buyer with products, you get totally invalid data when I let a friend use my loyalty card or pick up items for the school bake sale.

Fixing these problems may prove impossible, but modeling helps provide more nuanced insights to guide decision-making.

What is modeling?

Modeling involves using established relationships among several variables or creating them based on theory. Econometrics is one way of building models based on financial information. Some marketers used these as building blocks for marketing models. This sometimes creates a problem when you assume that a particular financial variable is a good surrogate for a behavioral or cognitive variable. For instance, assuming purchase implies preference for a brand isn’t always true. It may be that the brand is cheaper or readily available and preference will change if either changes.

Marketers are getting better at building their own models based on sound marketing theory. The problem is, these models aren’t making their way into the decisions made by practitioners. That’s sad.

For instance, I developed a model to explain why patients don’t follow the directions of their physicians and another to explain why it’s so hard for people to make changes they know are in their best interest, like losing weight. Neither of these models are used in practice today.

Building models

Big data really helps in building new marketing models based on a company or industry.

Instead of looking at how a single variable affects an outcome variable of interest, a firm can now look at a number of variables to determine how (or if) each one impacts the outcome variable. But, don’t just throw all your variables into a soup, hoping something will emerge as life emerged from the primordial soup. You’ll end up with too many spurious correlations or overshadowing an important variable by another (when 2 variables are correlated all the relationship is assigned to the first, which may not be a controllable variable).

This is why model building is part art and part science. You can start by using stepwise regression to build a model, but go beyond that to consider whether this is the BEST model. Are there non-linear relationships that you didn’t model? Are some variables in the model nonsense? Do variables you think SHOULD be in the model get excluded?

Picking effective social media KPIs (key performance indicators) can be a daunting task.

Some social media managers choose to go super “vanity” and only measure follower growth (which isn’t that smart considering you can have hundreds of thousands of fans who still aren’t buying your stuff).

And some CEOs force their social teams to stick with direct return on investment (ROI) only — which for many brands, a direct dollar-for-dollar return is extremely tough to prove.

We’ve got some tips for a happy medium when it comes to choosing social media KPIs.

What’s A “KPI”, Anyway?

KPI is an acronym for the word, “key performance indicator.”

Businesses use KPIs to measure and evaluate factors that are critical to success. And no, in case you were wondering, not all KPIs are the same across businesses.

Even social media KPIs may vary depending on your social media goals and what outcomes you’re trying to produce.

Since we’re KPI-measuring beasts at B Squared, we’re going to share with you a few tips for ensuring you’re picking the best, most effective, social media KPIs.

Effective Social Media KPIs Are …

To start, you’ve got to make sure your team is on the same page. Again, what I deem important may seem trivial to you and vice versa.

The middle ground often includes direct or “hard” ROI key performance indicators, or quantitative goals, while also including qualitative metrics or “soft” measurements.

Case in point: If you want leads, that’s a direct KPI, but many brands use social media to gain awareness, and that’s a much softer metric.

So when you’re ready to start putting together your social media KPIs, get with the team and make sure you cover the four areas below.

Effective social media KPIs are …

1. Agreeable: Everyone on the team (and anyone you’re reporting to) should know why this KPI is important, and agree it’s essential for tracking progress.
2. Clear: Everyone on the team (and anyone you’re reporting to) should understand what the KPI means.
3. Relevant: The KPIs must have a positive impact or tie to a business goal.
4. Objective: Look at the minutia (like our “seesaw data“) as well as the big-picture metrics.

How To Choose YOUR Social Media KPIs

Now that your team is on the same page, how do you decide which social media KPIs will best serve you?

1) Start with company goals

For most of our clients, social media is used as an outlet for collecting leads. And leads, of course, can drive sales and direct ROI.

Sending traffic from your social sites to your website may also be a quantifiable goal.

Most c-level executives will expect some sort of conversion to happen on social, so be ready to create social media KPIs that can track those conversions.

2) Include brand goals

Brand goals are probably a little softer and include things like follower growth and reviews.

If you’re using Facebook for your business, their newest algorithm update means you should definitely have a KPI that keeps track of those.

3) Campaign goals

As you get more granular, you may want to set up social media KPIs that track your specific campaigns.

You can track things like:

• Campaign or brand mentions
• Custom hashtag use
• Sign-ups
• Check-ins

Tracking Your Social Media KPIs

Once you’ve determined which social media KPIs you want to track, you should create a spreadsheet that helps you measure them month-over-month, year-over-year.

Not only does this help you see where you’re falling short, it also helps you clearly show your team how your efforts are paying off.

Here’s an example of our Social Media Scorecard, which we use to track social media KPIs for clients:

Our Scorecard helps us track our goal (the number or outcome we expect for a particular month) and our actual (the actual number or outcome we garnered in a particular month).

As we pop the numbers into Excel, a formula automatically turns the cell red if we failed to meet our goal, and green if we meet or exceed our goal.

Percentages are also automatically calculated.

Of course, these vary from client to client, but you can see how easily we’re able to show success or failure by month, quarter, or year.

Clients LOVE that!

Want access to our already made, ready-to-use KPI scorecard? Get it by entering your information below!

How does your team choose effective social media KPIs? Which ones do you find most important to measure? We’ve love to hear from you — just pop a comment in down below.

Goals affect all aspects of life. Without them, very little is accomplished. Most people do not realize that anything you desire may be considered a goal. More importantly, sales thought creates fluid goal achievement.

Focused work has others exclaim you are the lucky one!

Mindset

It was recently suggested in a class that attendees test their thought patterns. Consider how you view difficult challenges and seemingly impossible accounts to be won over. Answer these two questions:

1. Do you tell yourself it’s impossible to win, and so it’s not worth the effort?
2. Do you prime yourself mentally each morning that you will earn the business?

In any serious endeavor, you have to become your own favorite coach. Preparation, practice, and words of encouragement delivered into the mirror will get you motivated to make your ambitious goal a reality. It is the habit of grooming yourself for the day that will make the difference. No one earns 100% of the sales they pursue, but the percentage will be far higher as a positive mindset is embraced.

By embracing the positive mindset, it’s almost automatic to be focused on what it is you wish to achieve. The next part is how to achieve it with setting goals. Dependent upon the complexity, a long-term project may need to be mapped out and a team put into place. Should the ideal goal be one you are able to handle by yourself, then work out milestones with a timeline in place.

Accountability

Given you have become your favorite coach, hold yourself accountable for what you promised you would do. The promises are those made both to yourself and your clients. Everything to be accomplished needs to begin with the end in mind:

• Ultimate achievement with target date for completion
• Goals and milestones to be completed
• Completion dates for each goal and milestone

Daily

At the end of each day review what you have completed. Before you turn off the lights, set a new plan for the next day with goals and milestones to be achieved. Hold yourself to task until they are done.

Account Management

In-between pursuing new accounts, it is essential that current clients be contacted as agreed upon. Make the check up conversational by asking the following:

• Is everything in good working order?
• Is there anything we can improve?
• Please update me with what’s new with your company.

Exchange updates and stories with one another. This frequently leads to new possibility. By pursuing new and current accounts in this manner, you build self-confidence along with a well-established personal brand. It will be very difficult for competitors to compete with you. All of this adds up to a very loyal clientele.

Sales Tips:

1. Build up self-confidence with positive self-talk
2. Take a public speaking course
3. Be attentive to goal setting and achievement
4. Focus on what needs to get done without distraction
5. Recognize what’s important to you and go after it
6. Leave negative self-talk behind
7. Become your own favorite coach
8. When things don’t work out, learn from the experience to move forward
9. Always keep an open dialogue with clientele
10. Ask questions to learn and listen for new opportunity

The availability of data in today’s world is breathtaking. We have tools to gather and parse sales metrics, deliver them in beautiful interfaces, and view them on desktop or mobile at a moment’s notice.

But such high volume isn’t without it’s drawbacks. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “measuring everything leads to measuring nothing,” you know exactly what I mean. Data is so readily available, you can quickly become lost in the quagmire of numbers relating to dials, opportunities, pipeline, and revenue.

That’s where knowing exactly what to measure for different roles comes into play.

Identifying the ideal analytics for your sales team is the topic of our latest eBook, The Essential Guide to Sales Analytics. Inside, you’ll find specific sales metrics and the value they bring to different roles within your sales organization.

Here’s what you need to know to apply beginner, intermediate, and advanced sales metrics to get started measuring success:

Now that you’ve had a chance to see some of the metrics, bring them home to measure your team’s performance. If you want to learn even more about sales analytics, download the full ebook here.

The post The Role Of Sales Metrics Across Your Organization {Infographic} appeared first on SalesLoft.

How are you directing people to your website?

Let me count the ways. Holler if you see one that doesn’t need its own distinct landing page:

• Google Search
• Google Adwords or Social Advertising Campaigns
• SEO Campaigns
• Link Referral

See one? Perhaps you’re thinking “Google Search”?

Here’s the problem. It was actually a trick question – there’s no reason to have any other pages on your website apart from landing pages.

This article will show you why each of those traffic sources should be answered by an optimized landing page and break down exactly why homepages are dead. I’ll also give a few tips for how to optimize website pages being linked to internally (about us, contact us, etc).

Let’s get rolling.

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Google Search

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Even Google search traffic should be sent to a landing page.

If someone types your company name into Google you have to ask yourself a couple questions:

• Who is this person?
• Why would they be typing my company name into Google?
• When they arrive on my “homepage,” what do I want them to do?

Now there’s two possibilities, really. They’re either someone who’s heard about your company and they want to learn more about you, or they’re an existing customer looking to login or go to a specific page of your website.

If they’re an existing customer you should optimize, very simply, for them to log in. Add a link at the top right of the landing page which reads “Already a customer? Login here.” or “Already a customer? Continue to our product pages.”

If they’re looking to learn something more about you, then that’s exactly the kind of person you send to a landing page.

Here’s an example of a landing page for someone arriving from a simple Google search to Influenster’s “homepage.”

By the way, here’s the html and javascript to add a scrolling button to your Wishpond landing page:

Button HTML (where #wpcSection is the section you want to send people to):

BUTTON TEXT

Javascript which makes the scroll occur:

$(function(){ $(“.scroll a”).click(function(event) { event.preventDefault(); //stops browser updating url var id = $(this).attr(“href”); var divPosition = $(id).offset().top; $(“html, body”).animate({scrollTop: divPosition}); }); });

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Google Adwords and Social Advertising Campaigns

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Your ad campaigns should be built around corresponding landing pages.

Sending ad traffic to your generic homepage means you’re leaving money on the table. It means you’re splitting the attention of your visitors any number of different ways.

Let’s put it another way…

My girlfriend loves yogurt. But, as anyone lucky enough to live in a first-world country knows, there are a lot of yogurt options. You have every fruit flavor under the sun, fat percentages more complicated than US economics and that’s before you start on the different brands.

Sometimes I take the cart around the entire shop before circling back to find her still standing there, wandering up and down the cold aisle picking things up and putting them back down.

There’s a psychological term for this. It’s called “information overwhelm”, and it occurs when you’re so stimulated your body just kind of shuts down. Like when you open a text book and your eyes immediately glaze over.

Too much content, not enough head.

A landing page cuts through information overwhelm. It delivers a single yoghurt possibility – the one you were looking for in the first place before WalMart threw 1000 options at you.

And that’s why you need one, especially for an ad campaign.

If someone types in “WordPress landing page plugin” into Google and your ad pops up but then simply sends people who click to your homepage, you’re left hoping they’ll find their way to the product page by themselves.

But chances are they won’t. One of a couple things will happen: 1). They’ll be frustrated by not finding exactly what they’re looking for and they’ll immediately bounce or 2). They’ll get distracted by your About Us, Careers page or blog, and then bounce.

So here’s the solution:

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SEO Campaigns

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Most businesses active with an inbound marketing strategy have a list of keywords they’re targeting. They’ve determined what their target audience is searching for and created SEO content optimized to appear when they do.

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Link Referral

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You don’t control all the links to your website. You can’t. You can try (and using UTM codes in your social posts, Q&A responses and guest contributions helps to see how people are getting to your pages), but you’ll fail.

People are going to cite your articles and ebooks. They’ll link to you from review websites and they’ll share your blog content without clicking your share icons.

So how can you be sure that, no matter what link people click to get to your website, that the page they arrive on is optimized for a specific conversion goal?

Optimize them all.

• Have a scrolling navigation bar at the top of every page of your website which features a contrasting CTA button for your primary conversion goal.
• On “features” or “products” pages with more than one section have multiple CTA buttons which drive visitors toward the same conversion goal.
• Re-format all your website copy to be easily read (bullet points, section icons, etc). Bold or encapsulate the information you want to be seen most.
• Include customer testimonials for (and specific to) every part of your service. Have a different testimonial for each product page as well as customer support, careers, etc.

Top Tip: When in doubt about where to send people, use your pricing page. This is the “end’ of your top-of-funnel, funnel. A/B Test your pricing page and optimize constantly to make sure it’s as good as it can be.

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Optimization Strategies for Pages You Might not Think to Optimize

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Then there are those pages you might not think matter that much. They’re not directly part of your sales funnel, so why would you have to optimize them for conversion?

That question is ridiculous. Why would you NOT optimize them for conversion? What do you lose by doing so? Think about what you could potentially gain.

We’re talking about your…

• About Us Page
• Careers Page
• Partners Page
• Affiliate Page
• Contact Us Page
• Etc

You still want something from people when they visit those pages. You want them to contact your support team to solve an issue they’re having, discuss getting set up, or talk about your pricing [;ams. You want them to apply for a job opening, become an affiliate or create a mutually-beneficial partnership.

These are conversion goals, people. Let’s optimize accordingly.

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Wrapping it Up

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Hopefully this article has changed how you think about your website. Everything can be optimized for conversion.

The stats are pretty solid on this: the more landing pages your business has, the more leads you generate, the more traffic you have and the better ROI you get from online marketing.

In fact, Dell (a company which has over 1,000 landing pages) saw a 300% increase in conversions when testing against unoptimized website pages.

If you need a hand getting set up with adding landing pages to your website or optimizing the pages you have, don’t hesitate to reach out in the comment section!

The upsell might be the most underrated play in sales. A ton of lip service is paid on sales publications and in sales trainings to hunting for new customers -- prospecting, connecting, and qualifying people who have never worked with your company before.

But it’s hard to hunt effectively. Given your company’s lack of history with your prospects, there’s simply no guarantee that prospects will want to speak with you, much less buy your product. Even painstaking research can’t always reveal that what seems like a good fit on paper just won’t cut it in the real world.

Proactively sourcing new business is always going to be part of your job as a sales rep, like it or not -- especially when you’re new, you won’t have much choice. But once you’ve built up a customer base, you can start farming -- that is, mining your existing customers for opportunities to upsell or cross-sell.

But you can’t just reach out to every single customer six months after they’ve purchased to see if they want another ride on the merry-go-round. Spotting these opportunities requires the same finesse you use to reach out to new leads. Luckily, the five situations below can reliably be used to identify good opportunities for upselling.

1) They’re seeing success with your product.

The best time to ask for another commitment from your prospect is when things are already going well. This situation is particularly helpful when the customer wasn’t ready to commit to a more sophisticated package.

Once they start seeing consistent success with your product, a customer will be more open to restarting a conversation about a more sophisticated package. After all, they’ve started to realize a return on their investment and have seen for themselves that your product works. Think of this initial success as your foot in the door you can leverage to get a bigger deal.

2) Their company is positioned for a strategic shift.

Any time a customer’s company is gearing up for a big change in strategy -- whether it’s introducing a new product line, pivoting on an existing offering, or simply shifting gears -- you should be there.

If you already have a healthy relationship, it’s only natural that a customer will want to go to the next level with a vendor they already know and trust, provided you can sell them something that’ll help in this new endeavor.

3) They’re focused on new priorities.

Most companies don’t face one challenge at a time. They usually have multiple competing projects at any given time that someone needs to prioritize. Which means that once your product is in place and solving an existing challenge, your customer will have time to tackle other items on their list.

Make sure that during your initial discovery you’re doing a thorough qualification. Although your focus should be on the specific product your prospect is interested in, suss out your prospect’s other projects so you have broader context. Then, check in on progress in a few months and see if you can help out with any of the other priorities your customer needs to solve.

4) They’re referring new business to you.

If your customer is proactively sending you new prospects and leads, it’s a sign they’re extremely happy with your product. After all, nobody is going to take time out of their schedule or risk their reputation to send a referral on behalf of a company they’re about to end a relationship with.

In these cases, reach out to your prospect to thank them for the referral, then use this as an opportunity to ask them how things are going.

5) They’re growing.

Whether they’re expanding their offices, adding new departments, or simply hiring at a faster clip than they used to, your ears should perk up when you hear about company growth. This means that something’s working (hopefully, something related to your product), and that more cash is now available for your customer to spend.

Growth also indicates that the company is investing in their future and will likely have new needs as they scale. Get in at the ground floor and you’ll be able to feed off the relationship for years to come.

How do you tell when your customers are ready to be upsold? Let us know in the comments below.

From Amazon to Spotify and Facebook, website personalization feels just natural for B2C websites. Pause for a second, though, and think how it could work for B2B companies too, with their inevitably longer sales cycles and importance of personal, empathic communication that exposes a vendor’s problem-solving skills.

Since you can’t attend personally to each and every lead, you want to rely on a specialized technology to get more insights into your audience’s behavioral patterns and tailor your messages accordingly via your website – the cornerstone of your online image. For this, you should first understand who your customers are and then channel your expertise through dynamic content that will hit the targets.

We are not speaking general visitors here but the ones who already got into your sales pipeline: leads, opportunities, customers. Guess what system was specifically designed to manage relationships with them? That’s right, the mighty B2B CRM is here again to build the bridge between your customer base and sales force, this time through no other medium than your website. Below is our take on some exciting opportunities arising from website CRM integration, from better lead management to higher engagement of your B2B clientele.

1. Uninterrupted, faster management of leads

A website request is normally registered in a CRM system only once the lead is qualified. But ask yourself a few questions: how much time lapses before they get into your CRM system? how many critical data gets lost on its way? and how many more leads could be qualified if you registered their web requests immediately?

A CRM integrated with the website will instantly register a visitor who has sent a request via an online form as a lead. From this moment on, every interaction will be recorded, without missing neither communication nor personal details crucial for conversion. By automating the registration of every new website request into your CRM, you will improve the time required to respond and follow up on requests with no information lost in the swirl of emails. To back up this process with immediate feedback to registered leads, you may want to introduce email marketing tools to send out automatic but personalized emails using the CRM data.

2. Better awareness of their browsing behavior

Gathering such data is crucial for a better understanding of your customers. Sometimes it can truly open your eyes and help you tailor your offering and communication according to your website visitors’ immediate interests (see point 3).

To track the behavioral patterns of your audience, website CRM integration works to connect your every lead’s identifiers both from your website and CRM. There are two ways to do this, so let’s take a look at them in action.

• website first

The goal for this method is to assign a unique CRM ID to every website lead. Once they fill in an online request form, be it for a quote or to download a whitepaper, they will be automatically registered in the CRM with all the details they provided (name, company, position, address, phone, etc.).

• CRM first

That’s a bit tricky but not impossible. To identify your leads, opportunities or customers as your website visitors, it’s necessary first to make them click a designated link with a unique customer identifier in the URL query (something like mycompany.com/?id=3746453). Using a neat marketing excuse, you can just send such a link in a personal email. Once clicked, your Content Management System (CMS) will relate the website visitor ID with the one from the CRM so that you can follow their browsing behavior right from the next time they stop by your website.

3. Higher engagement through personalized content

As cited by Hubspot, targeted content brings 20% more in sales opportunities. The same source confirms that 42% of personalized calls-to-action convert better than non-personalized ones. So why not use website CRM integration to this benefit?

This approach may seem to be the most technologically complex and effort-consuming, but in the end of the day it does help to reap visible improvements in conversion rates. This is where you can rely on your website as complementary to your sales/customer service team to the extent where their participation is minimized.

Once your identification mechanisms are tuned (see point 2), you can go on and enable data-driven personalization based on the data already contained in the CRM system. There are multiple focuses to it, but you can opt for the so called ascribed website personalization that triggers content recommendations for further read (“you may also be interested in…”). Possible content options include:

• geo-targeted materials (“Offices in your city/country/region…”)
• industry-focused collateral (case studies by industries, analytic white papers, e-books, etc.)
• request-based offerings (complementary services, available upgrades, etc.)
• personalized special offers and discounts

In this regard, your CRM will serve as a persona builder for those who registered as a lead and beyond (qualified lead, opportunity, customer). As content personalization can spread across channels, including your email marketing, it can become part of your nurturing strategy for returning visitors who have been already registered as leads, opportunities or customers.

Afterword

In our CRM consulting practice, we advocate pushing the limits of both the technology and its perception by end users. Going for a seamless integration of their website and CRM system, B2B companies can discover new ways of engaging their audience, nurture it through personalized content and effectively manage relationships with them across communication channels.

This article originally appeared on ScienceSoft Blog and has been republished with permission.

Anything that’s worth having takes time. It takes dedication, investment, visualization, and growth.

You may be thinking… what does this have to do with productivity!?

EVERYTHING.

I’ll get to more on this in a moment. Bare with me.

Basically, think of your mind as a super powerful pattern recognition machine.

The human mind is constantly trying to make new associations, and find patterns in our behavior and the environment. Our minds will stop at nothing to be active. That sounds cool and all, but active doesn’t mean “positive.” Our minds will be active regardless of what activity we do or think about.

Most of the time, that activity translates to negative mental thought. It’s not that we hate life or anything, it’s just that the human brain is hardwired first to think in a negative way. In fact, our brains are meant to have us see sticky situations regularly, and feel fear frequently to keep us from harm.

The human brain is a little archaic and hasn’t completely evolved to have us thinking about unicorns and rainbows all the time… yet. Yes, this is a challenge, but keep with me folks cause the solution is rather simple.

It all comes down to how you choose to perceive the world. Simply, ask yourself the question “Do I live in a friendly or hostile Universe?” –Einstein

If you think you live in a hostile place, you’ll experience the world beating you up, time and again. If you think you life in a friendly place, you’ll experience more circumstances of people willing to help you.

Here’s a great quote to contemplate:

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” –Dr. Wayne Dyer

Now, back to our simple hacks that will make you crazy productive.

When your mind is positive and actively engaged, you’ll naturally create a crazy productive state! Solutions come easy, creativity flows. Kiss those writing blocks good-bye and any other issue you have. Being crazy productivity doesn’t just come to people. It’s created through habit. I’m going to give you the 3 hacks that will create a naturally productive state.

Let’s jump right in.

#1 Only Think About Positive Things for a Week

I’m taking this straight from Tony Robbins. This isn’t just some energy bull-s%&#. This is a real working exercise to retrain your habitual mental patterns (that hinder productivity).

First, think for a moment about a time that you were really unproductive. The day sucked, dragged on, there were so many problems and you successfully got NOTHING done or accomplished. We all have these days occasionally (or frequently depending on who you are).

Now think for a moment—what were you thinking about that day, and how did it make you feel? Negative days stem from cranky moods and negative thoughts. It always starts in your mind first.

The day is never “out to get you.” It’s really just about the perspective you have. Now, don’t beat yourself up either. This happens to everyone. At some point, (hopefully now!) you realize that you can’t control what happens to you externally, but you can control how you feel about it.

Unproductive days stem from unproductive thinking.

With this theory then, it would make sense that if you want to b

e ultimately crazy productive, that you would have to master being in a positive mindset.

Take the challenge. Start now. Only think positive thoughts for the next week. I’m not going to lie to you, it’s going to be tough. Be patient with yourself.

Every time you think a negative thought, catch yourself, negate it, and replace it with a positive thought. For example, we all know that an object in motion stays in motion.

One negative thought leads to the next and so-on. Stop the thoughts at the source. When the first negative thought shows up, acknowledge it and then say in your head or out loud “cancel, cancel, cancel.”

Psychologically, this actually neutralizes the negative thought and feeling in your brain. Then, say a positive thought, or something you’re grateful for. When you state a positive affirmation your mind starts thinking more positive thoughts.

Think of your mind like a freight train. Your thoughts build (both positive and negative). Make sure you’re on the right tracks.

Action Steps:

+ Set a start and end date for this challenge

+ Keep a journal, and write what happened for you throughout the day, what tripped you up and what you did well. You’ll start to see patterns.

+ Find a source of positive energy. Maybe it’s watching comedy, or motivational videos.

#2 Spend 60 Minutes Every Day Proactively Consuming Positive Content

Productivity usually stems from a positive mindset. You’ll be crazy productive when you feel great, you’re on track to your goals and desires and you feel fulfilled. Now, sometimes we feel this way, but sometimes we don’t.

Have you just felt like you were crushing it one day and the next you’re failing at everything and just can’t get a grip? It’s not your fault. It’s happened to everyone. And to be honest, you probably weren’t taught how to be constantly productive.

Like everyone else, you were thrown into school and the workforce and told to be productive, but no one ever showed you how. Honestly, most people actually ARE productive when they feel great! It’s just the pesky days that we’re not feeling our best that sabotage our coveted productivity.

The solution? Create a strategy to occupy your mind so it’s thinking about expansive concepts, rather than coming up with problems for you to think about all day.

I promise you, if you don’t proactively plant content in your mind, you’ll find a way to be productive. It just may not be the way that you want!

For example, if you don’t do anything, your brain will come up with problems: everything going on wrong around you, things that will make you anxious, and you’ll complain and gossip.

That’s not going to help you!

Here’s the solution: spend 60 minutes every day listening to positive content to fill yourself up.

Simply, it gives your mind something expansive to think about when you’re idle—and that’s great! Otherwise, when your mind is idle it’s usually coming up with problems.

Personally, I listen to 2-6 hours of intellectually stimulating, spiritual or motivational content every day to keep myself in a great state, and thinking positively.

You are what you think.

Therefore you are what you consume (books, media, tv, etc.). With that in mind, plant content around you that you actually want to consume.

If you want to be an incredibly successful producer, business person, or media guru listen to like: Arianna Huffington, Oprah, Gary Vaynerchuck or Sheryl Sandburg. Listen to the audios of their books, or watch videos of them speaking on YouTube for an hour every day.

If you want to feel motivated, and in control of your life—listen to motivational videos on YouTube.

If you want to feel connected, fulfilled and whole, listen to more spiritual content such as from Eckhart Tolle, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Anthony Robbins, Mike Dooley and more.

Align the content that you’re going to consume with your goals. It’s simple.

Personally, I do a mix of audio books and YouTube videos. If you’re looking for inspiration, I have a short playlist mix here, and another comprehensive one here. Try this out for a week and see how you feel. Document your journey and see if your productivity increases.

Action Steps:

+Create a YouTube Playlist with 6 or more videos that inspire you

+Download 2-6 audio books that will inspire you (probably not fiction, and usually written by the role models and influencers you admire)

+Block out 60 minutes of time every day (either in one block in the morning, or 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at lunch or at the end of the day) to listen to your content

+Do this for at least one week (7 days)—No skipping days!

+Document your journey through journaling

#3 Practice Cultivating an Attitude of Gratitude at least 10 Minutes Every Day

Seriously, gratitude will increase your personal productivity—significantly! When you feel grateful, it switches your emotional state into a happier, loving one. This is the place that solutions come.

Trying to figure out complex problems is much easier from a state of gratitude. Everything just flows.

Traditionally, when we view “problems” we’re thinking about how much they suck. It’s really hard from that place to think of an actual, viable solution. However, when you’re feeling terrific, grateful and happy the flow turns on, and the solutions come straight into your noggin.

Gratitude literally shifts your mindset into feeling love.

When you pour love into your work, you’ll naturally get more done, and of higher quality. Is that almost the definition of being productive!?

When you wake up (or before you go to bed) consider all the things, people and events in your life for which you could be grateful. Write them in a list, and take a few minutes to FEEL THE GRATITUDE.

It’s that feeling that brings you to tears because you feel so damn lucky. Yep that’s it. Make sure you’re feelin’ it!

Action Steps:

+ Set a reminder every morning and evening for 5 minutes or so to be grateful

+ Keep a gratitude journal where you write down everything that you’re grateful for

Like this post and you’re still looking to crank up your productivity? Here’s a worksheet you can download for free on goal setting.

Do you have other mindset activities that make you crazy productive!? Let us know in the comments!

Booking a hotel for business travel poses a quandary for many of us. We want to stay in as nice a place as possible, but also want to do right by our company (or client) by being fiscally responsible. While these goals seem at odds, with a little savvy both can be achieved.

The key is to remember that hotels – as well as most companies – offer what I call “backdoor” discounts. These reductions are put in place to serve price sensitive customers while avoiding giving discounts to consumers who don’t care much about prices. To minimize cannibalization, companies create “hurdles.” Customers who jump over these hurdles are identifying themselves as price sensitive and worthy of discounts. In the hotel industry, two popular hurdles are selling packages and employing uncertainty.

Package pricing. It’s commonly believed within the hotel industry that business travelers will pay more than leisure vacationers. (Usually, this is true.) To create discounts for leisure travelers, many hotels provide significant price breaks  (25% – 50%) if their property is booked as part of a vacation package (air-hotel or air-hotel-car rental). Packages are offered at online travel agencies, including Orbitz and Expedia, as well as by airlines.

Discounting via packages is popular because business travelers don’t tend to purchase them. This is because reservations are non-refundable, corporate travel agents aren’t pushing packages (they don’t earn lucrative commissions on them), and packages are marketed to vacationers. These hurdles weed out business travelers and as a result, packages primarily appeal to price-sensitive leisure customers. Since packages are presented as one price, hotels avoid harming their brands by offering obvious discounts on nightly rates.

A variety of hotels – even the most exclusive ones – provide substantial discounts through packages. For instance, Orbitz offers a seven-night air/hotel package at the Ritz Carlton Central Park, which is 36% cheaper than booking separately.

Uncertainty discounting. Creating uncertainty in exchange for a price break is often used to identify price-sensitive customers. In the hotel industry, travelers who are willing to purchase without knowing exactly which hotel they’ll stay at – the hurdle – are rewarded with discounts by middlemen like Priceline and Hotwire. For instance, Priceline’s “Name Your Own Price” service pledges to save customers up to 60%. Customers input specifics on Priceline’s web site (or app) including dates of stay, quality level (1 – 5 stars), desired area of the city to stay (which is specific – there are 30 bid zones in the New York City area, for instance), and a nightly rate bid. If a bid is accepted, the credit card is charged (non-refundable) and only then is the actual hotel name revealed. If a bid isn’t accepted, there’s a 24-hour waiting period to rebid on the same itinerary.

Both Hotwire (which also pledges up to 60% off) and Priceline (through its “Express” service) offer a less onerous option that doesn’t require the guess-work of making bids. These services list a hotel’s quality level (1 – 5 stars), general location, attributes (gym, business center, TripAdvisor rating, etc.), and nightly rate. The critical missing information is the hotel name. Only after customers make a non-refundable credit card purchase is the exact hotel revealed.

The benefit for hotels of participating in these services is the ability to discretely discount. Capacity-challenged hotels don’t have to blemish their brands by publicly offering rock-bottom discounts. Instead, a hotel’s name is privately revealed after a customer pays in full. Just as importantly, the uncertainty (exact hotel and potentially, price to bid) reduces cannibalization. Many of us, myself included, prefer to know which hotel we are booking before making a non-refundable commitment. In contrast, price-sensitive customers are more apt to stay at any hotel, as long it meets basic requirements such as quality level, in return for a discount.

There are opportunities to gain insights that make using Priceline and Hotwire more palatable. Two bulletin board web sites, BetterBidding and BiddingForTravel, provide information to reduce the uncertainty. Posters report particulars including winning prices and hotels they receive. This data helps bidders to deduce, with a high degree of accuracy, which hotel they’ll receive as well as how much to bid.

In 2016, the following nightly rate “wins” have been reported: four-star Maui (Hyatt, $188); five-star Boston (Liberty Hotel, $200); three-and-a-half-star Washington DC area (Key Bridge Marriott, $46); five-star Las Vegas (Cosmopolitan, $117); four-and-a-half-star Chicago (Intercontinental, $119); five-star New York City (Palace Hotel, $155); five-star San Francisco (Fairmont, $171); and five-star Paris (Hotel de Vigny, $166).

Since I typically know which hotel I’ll get by using these bulletin board sites, I routinely use Priceline and Hotwire for business travel. As a result, over the years I’ve saved clients tens of thousands of dollars in hotel expenses while also personally benefiting by staying at top-notch hotels.

Buying packages as well as using Priceline and Hotwire can add a little pizzazz to – and help save money on – your next business trip. And with the end of the summer upon us, keep in mind these tips can be used to book a “one last hurrah” leisure trip too.

Have you ever been to visit a new client or office and had no clue where to go once you made it to the building? A few months ago, I had a day-long training session that I needed to attend. My GPS did a great job getting me to the right complex, but I was on my own once I parked.

The big logo on the front of the building assured me I was in the right place, but where was I supposed to go once I passed through the entrance?

My hopes of getting some guidance at the front desk were quickly dashed as I realized there was no one there. I could either take the door on the right, which seemed to be card-access only, or the door on the left. It was a moment of red-pill/blue-bill, and I was stuck in my indecision and ignorance.

I share this story because you should think of your website as your digital office space.

It’s stuffed with content that works for you all day long as an army of full-time employees. But is your homepage, the grand foyer of your website, set up to help inform and guide those who show up there? Reflect on your current homepage as we walk through some of the key elements that you can utilize to give new and returning visitors the experience they deserve. Anyone coming to your homepage is there with a purpose, so plan on addressing their needs by taking advantage of these small tips.

1. Navigation Menu (with Logo)

While homepage will be informational and help guide visitors to where they want to go, you must always have a clear menu that they can rely on when they are ready to view your other pages.

Newer visitors may need a good look at your homepage before they move further along, but others will know where they want to go, or know what they are looking for. Develop clear navigation that allows visitors to find what they need, when they need it.

Your logo also has a home up there by the menu. Having your logo at the top of your homepage establishes your brand and company name in the mind of the visitor, and it may also reveal your core focus, if the logo has a slogan added onto it.

In addition to adding brand value to the page, your logo is a helpful link straight back to your homepage. Internet users have come to expect and rely on the ability to click a site’s logo and be taken immediately to the homepage. Live up to the expectations and demands of good user experience.

2. Business Overview

Make it crystal clear, right on your homepage, what your company is all about.

I know I’m not alone when I say that I hate to spend five minutes or more scrolling through a company’s homepage, only to realize I don’t have the slightest clue what they actually do. Write copy that actually means something to the audience you are trying to reach, and show how you are here to help them. It’s up to you where you ultimately place this info and how you share it, but it needs to be there.

3. Ways to Self-Identify

Your navigation menu provides visitors with pathways to all of your online content, but you also need a few simplified ways for your audience to work their way through the buyer’s journey.

Often, this will manifest as a list of your key services. It could also be questions that your personas are asking, allowing them to relate to a specific problem and learn more about the solution you provide. On our homepage, for example, we ask a few key questions to address the goals of our different personas. “Tired of spending money on marketing that doesn’t work?” addresses our personas’ concern with ROI.

Here are the 6 essential elements your website homepage must have.

Give your visitors the chance to give a name to their problems and to take action to resolve them. By self-identifying with your services, visitors will know they are in the right place, eager to learn more about how you can help them.

4. Calls-to-Action and Content Offers

Businesses with an online presence understand that a website is an employee that works to promote your company 24/7. But if you don’t have any conversion offers readily available, it’s a wasted opportunity.

Establish clear goals for your homepage, and allow those goals to determine the content offers you present to visitors. This will keep you from going overboard with calls-to-action, and to carefully consider the top two or three actions you want visitors on your homepage to take, allowing the rest of the page to frame those goals.

Don’t ask anything of your visitors that they aren’t willing to give. Good user experience and good inbound marketing require meeting the prospect at the moment they are ready to take action, and no sooner. And when all is said and done, test and refine those CTAs and offers, always working to provide new and returning visitors with the content they want.

5. Validation

You’ve done great work, so don’t be shy about it.

Prospects want to know about the results you’ve gotten for your clients and your processes for achieving project goals. Having this information available will help them to see whether the projects you’ve done in the past are capable of addressing their own needs in the future.

Testimonials are a simple way to provide more personalized – and less salesy – proof of your company’s experience. It’s the customer’s word, assuring the prospect that they’ll get nothing but the very best work from your business.

If your company has won awards through your work with clients, wear those badges proudly. As with the testimonials, if you have an abundance of awards, display the ones that clearly show your expertise and will really mean the most to your visitors.

And while case studies can be used as content offers, some of my favorite case studies are online, ungated and beautifully laid out with great visuals and data. IMPACT’s website is a great example of providing testimonials alongside full-fledged case studies for visitors who want to dive deeper.

Developing case studies can seem like an overwhelming task, but it is more than worth the effort. Not only can your sales team pass them over to prospective clients with ease, great case studies can sit on your website and generate leads all day long. They’re your data-backed seals of approval from happy customers.

6. Footer

I’m sure your company’s website already has a footer, but it’s important to note some of the key elements that make a footer helpful to your visitors.

Navigation Links

There’s a reason you tend to see links for “careers” pages in footers.

Footers are a great space for all of the important links that returning or context-specific visitors need. These are the links that you might not want dominating your menu navigation or homepage, but you still need them to exist and be available to those who are looking.

Returning visitors will know they can rely on these quick links to get them where they need to go.

Social Links and/or Feed

Every business should know where their audience is, and should work to engage them on the social channels they use the most. Providing links to your own social accounts gives visitors an easy route over to your social pages.

If you’re active on one platform the most, you can also include a live feed of any updates your business posts. This can work well for companies that manage their Twitter accounts closely, or that use Instagram to provide frequent photo updates.

Contact Info or Form

Even if you provide this info elsewhere, it’s smart to have your contact information readily available to anyone in need of it. If not contact info, give them a small form to fill out or another means of contacting your team directly. Let them know you’ll get back to them in a timely manner.

Blog Posts or Subscribe

Lastly, you could also prioritize your blog in the footer of your website. If you aren’t promoting it elsewhere on the page, your footer can be a great place to either show a feed of new posts, or to have a CTA prompting visitors to visit the actual blog or subscribe.

Bonus: What should NOT be on your homepage?

I can’t reasonably talk about all the elements you need to beef up your homepage, without also mentioning two things that don’t deserve to be there.

Don’t Use Content Out of Context

You don’t want to overwhelm new visitors with CTAs and content offers that they aren’t ready for. Make sure your content appropriately addresses the stage of the buyer’s journey that they’re in.

A common way to address this issue is to do a combo offer. A bottom-of-the-funnel “Sign Up Today” is placed beside a more top-of-the-funnel “Learn More” or “Start a Free 30-Day Trial” CTA. Visitors who aren’t ready to commit are still able to take a small step forward, while those who know they want your solution can go right ahead and sign up for your service.

Don’t Use Sliders

Please. The data is in, and homepage sliders simply don’t live up to the task.

If you think sliders are a good idea because you have so many great offers to promote to your visitors, put yourself in their shoes and take a look at this slider example.

Go ahead, I’ll be here when you get back.

Done? Okay.

It’s painful to sit there and wait for all the slides to load, right? I gave up and started clicking the arrow buttons just to get through it all, and even when I wanted to read one of the facts it would scroll faster than I could read!

Homepage image sliders are lazy marketing. If you truly have too many great offers to choose from, that’s wonderful! Take one of the homepage goals you set to determine which of those offers is the most important, and craft it into one, singular hero image that will catch everyone’s eye.

Your homepage is the front door of your website, and you want to be sure you make a good first impression to new visitors – and a consistent experience to those returning. By limiting yourself and not going overboard with unnecessary content, you’ll see that you can get to your point much faster and give your visitors exactly what they are looking for.

The power of digital platforms to profitably disrupt industries continues to impress. Platform leaders like Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber and Google redefine user experience and expectations. Their ongoing success pushes incumbents to alternately revisit core business assumptions and seek regulatory relief.

What really makes them work? True platform innovators aren’t just market matchmakers using data-driven algorithms to drive better buyer-seller matches; they invest in new value creation. In platform markets, cultivating user capability becomes as strategically important as reducing transaction costs. Successful platforms empower their users.

Where traditional business models sell products and/or services, matchmaking models sell reduced transaction costs. The platform investment model, however, creates multi-sided surplus — more value to sell.

Insight Center

As a seller, who would you rather be? Choice One means going it alone to build product and find buyers. Choice Two enters markets with low friction to access many buyers and suppliers. Choice Three, however, offers Choice Two’s lower coefficients of friction but also facilitates co-investment which both makes your product better and gives you data-driven insights from innovative use and innovative users.

As a buyer, who would you rather be? Choice One requires going it alone to identify relevant offers and judge the sellers’ claims of quality. Choice Two presorts and helps prioritize your choices and cuts your logistics costs. Choice Three has all Choice Two’s benefits but educates you on new alternatives and protects you from deals gone bad.

In classic microeconomic terms, where firms previously focused on how best to manage transaction costs, platforms require top management to creatively cultivate transaction surplus. How should leaderships invest to make their users – not just their platforms – measurably better?

For example, Airbnb data scientist and economist Peter Coles recently described how the sharing economy company was testing a new pricing tool designed to make people more comfortable and confident they were getting fair value from their listed property. Coles, speaking at Boston University’s recent Platform Strategy Research Symposium, emphasized that helping participants become better entrepreneurs was essential to the platform’s overall success. Giving its hosts customized information, insight and advice about pricing their property, Coles observed, would lead to better outcomes for Airbnb’s ecosystems. Improving user capabilities would measurably improve Airbnb efficiencies.

Similarly, Facebook’s Blueprint courseware initiative launched in 2015 champions new user capability. Originally intended to support advertising agencies, Facebook created a training and education platform to teach advertisers how to use Facebook’s myriad advertising, marketing and experimentation tools more effectively. With over 50 e-learning modules in subjects from Instagram to A/B experimentation, Blueprint’s appeal quickly went beyond agencies to smaller businesses and entrepreneurs.

Though still early, “we’re extremely happy with adoption rates,” said one Facebook executive (in conversation with one of us). More importantly, Blueprint users say their training delivers results that are worth the time and effort. Needless to say, they can share success stories on Facebook.

Alibaba founder and CEO Jack Ma goes further, asserting his firm is in the business of solving social problems. Before the company’s $155 billion IPO in 2014 — the largest initial public offering in history — he observed, “we want to help small businesses grow by solving their problems.” The goal is not simply to match buyers and sellers but rather to “expand the boundaries of business.” Alibaba does this by providing sellers with tools and analytics from other transactions to inform sellers’ decisions. It also uses these transactions to make literal investments in small to medium enterprises on terms more favorable than those from a bank.

This same socially shared educational/advisory capability can be seen in SAP’s carefully built developer community. On launch of their ERP ecosystem, independent software vendors (ISVs) and SAP partners had no reason to help one another. SAP could help match them to buyers but bidding against one another for new contracts they often viewed each other as competitors.

After SAP opened a platform to develop, share, and track expertise everything changed. Volunteers answered each other’s questions both to demonstrate their own expertise and to foster a greater sense of community. Improving access to and expertise of partners was so effective that research out of Georgia Tech showed ISVs who joined the platform significantly increased sales and had a much greater likelihood of an IPO. This study highlighted the essential co-creation of value.

Recognizing the value of investing in partners can solve a social problem of the so-called and so-so named “sharing economy.” When private contractors lose the benefits of insurance and education that they had with full time jobs, their willingness to conduct transactions falls. People whose homes are trashed by unruly guests won’t list them; people whose riders run off without paying won’t drive them.

Yet these “e-lance economy” worst cases highlight how strategic social investment wins. Uber, which originally pushed insurance costs onto their drivers, has dramatically increased coverage options. The company also invests in drivers by helping them buy new cars. Airbnb had originally declined to indemnify hosts but now offers $1M in coverage. Upwork, which provides a freelance labor market offers its partners the chance to participate in free online courses. Investing in one’s partners is the difference between matching an adolescent to a job at McDonald’s versus training that can match a teenager to a job at McDonnell Douglas. The former facilitates a transaction; the latter is a value-added human capital investment.

That’s why smart platforms invest in capabilities and that makes “users creating value for other users” fast, simple and easy. That’s the essence of network effects.

In other words, when platforms think about investing in sustainable growth, investing in greater capacity and greater efficiency doesn’t go far enough: platform management should strategically invest in the capabilities, competence and creativity of its users.

The platform investment model suggests a framework of next steps for organizations that want to go beyond better matchmaking:

See and segment users as assets. Who are your “Pareto Users,” that is, the 20% of users who generate 80% of the revenues or post most of the complaint, compliments and suggestions? Which users could become 10%, 50% or 100% more valuable with better information, advice or apps? Which users can your platform make more valuable both to you and them over the next 12 to 18 months? In platform environments, user value should go beyond the volume of transactions to measure the value users create for each other.

Target users for online education and training. Borrow best practices from Facebook, SAP and Airbnb. What courseware, templates and training modules would measurably improve user abilities to leverage their desires and your platform? Is there a platform – or user – “Salman Khan” who can tutor your platform participants to get more value from you? This isn’t about sales or marketing; this is about quickly boosting the human capital and capabilities of the people who make your platform work. Could you create three 90-second sessions that could literally transform a typical user into a potential power user of your platform?

Identify risk the platform can absorb better than the individual. Risk-pooling is the idea behind mutual funds and mutual insurance. The platform can and should take on risks that individuals can ill-afford. Payment platforms, for example, are in a far better position to identify and mitigate fraud than individual users. The obvious result is that people protected from fraud are far more likely to use their credit cards resulting in a win for consumers, merchants, and the platform alike. More transactions occur on platforms where partners are protected.

Think APIs and SDKs. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Software Development Kits (SDKs) are the secret sauce for digital platform innovation and enhancement. For example, early in its online presence Netflix opened public APIs from which users created links to New York Times movie reviews and ways to discover niche content. An API can give your best users the chance to better customize and personalize your platform to their needs. APIs and SDKs give users the permission and the power to create value for themselves.

Identify buyer needs for which the platform can cultivate new supply. Upwork hosts job boards of the top categories of listings that have gone unanswered. By investing in online training tools, the platform can increase the skill level and supply base of the freelancers able to perform these jobs. Any user search on a platform that fails to find a target represents an opportunity to invest in a supply partner.

A platform investment model is fundamentally different from the efficiency model that drives most platforms today. Sure, your strategy can be to attract as many buyers and sellers as there are people on the planet, but a sustainable model can only come from making all those users and partners more valuable. That’s platform leadership.

Every company wants to make it big and have companies like IBM, GE and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in their list of clients. Approaching major brands/corporations can be quite daunting. It’s not easy to get the attention of these giants, but the entrepreneurial mind does not take no for an answer. When you are on the outside looking in, you need a little creativity if you want to get the attention of larger companies.

Here are six strategies you can use to fine-tune your methods of approaching that big brand.

1. Breakdown Larger Companies into Smaller Components

Don’t focus on the overall company, target a smaller division or department. For example, if you want to approach a behemoth such as GE, narrow down on the procurement department of Industrial Power Generation division of GE Oil & Gas.

2. Solve an Overlooked or Smaller Problem

This is basically a foot-in-the-door approach to sales. Larger corporations already have the basics covered. Make your initial contact by focusing on a smaller issue your prospect has overlooked.

3. Earn that Coveted Spot on the Executive’s Calendar

Corporate decision makers don’t have much time; you need to do a lot of research into the background of the company before you make that initial contact. Learn as much as you can about the company, the industry and the marketplace. Look up what issues they faced, their challenges, objectives and goals. Get a handle on how their processes and methodologies work.

4. Talk the talk

Speak the language of the business you are targeting. Do not provide generalized descriptions of your products/services. Focus on the results companies care about such as accelerating time to revenue, increase sales to new segments, reduction in supply costs, etc.

5. Plan Your Campaign

Decide which aspects of your value propositions you want to emphasize to your contacts. Typically, you will need to try several times before you get a response to your calls/emails. Plan out what information you will include from the start and keep it consistent. All content should be business-focused.

6. Take Advantage of Trigger Events

Smart sellers keep track of what is happening in the target company by monitoring the media. Any major external or internal events can present an open opportunity for sales. Internal trigger events include mergers, venture capital funding, sell-offs, spin-offs and change in leadership. External triggers such as economic issues, government legislation, competitive moves, or industry trends also present ample opportunities for a successful approach.

Putting Your Best Foot Forward

When initiating contact, you will need to pay attention to what you want to say. Narrow down which points you will be focusing on, and make sure all of them are positive. Here are a few things you will want to highlight during introductions:

• Any tough goals which you have achieved (Focus on numbers and client satisfaction)
• How do you measure outcomes and which ones are you most proud of?
• The business results you are proudest of (Focus on ROI)
• The segment of clients you have worked most closely with
• The kind of projects you excel at (focus on what your can do better than your competitors)

Remember, breaking into large companies requires a lot of planning, research and persistence. The decision makers at large corporations demand that you only approach them if you are extremely well prepared, so play it safe and over-prepare. Make a strong business case, offer valuable insights, ideas and information. Show them how you can help their company improve business, reduce costs or increase revenue.

Use these tactics to break through the corporate barrier. A little creativity coupled with a lot of hard work goes a long way. You can easily turn your dreams of having an impressive client roster if you put in the time and effort it takes. Like the adage goes, chance only favors the prepared mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can watch the full Q&A below:

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

Join the conversation about this story »

In an explainer video, the message inside is what makes up the core, and the viewer responding to the call to action (CTA) is the goal.

This is why explainer videos were created in the first place: to provide value, to inspire, and to result in specific behavior that will eventually benefit the company.

Some of these “specific behaviors” include: signing up for trial offers, opting in for email newsletters, or simply starting to use your brand.

The CTA is the one element responsible for triggering these actions, making it one of the vital components of an effective explainer video, along with a condensed message and stunning visuals. Even so, a lot of explainer videos overlook the importance of calls to action.

Today, we’re going to look at the most common mistakes that happen in an explainer video’s calls to action.

Mistake 1: Too Many Calls to Action

The call to action is the trigger for any actions you want viewers to take after watching an explainer video–but like everything else, too many CTAs is unhealthy.

By too many, we are not necessarily referring to the quantity but the emphasis. A call to action needs to be subtle, yet clear enough to provoke an action.

Say you’re an SaaS that sells a WordPress widget. Your CTA doesn’t need to be “Buy our WordPress widget now!” Obviously, you can say that if you want, but that wouldn’t be the best option.

Your approach depends on how much the widget costs and viewers’ familiarity with it. Suggesting an immediate purchase for a brand-new product exposes you to the great risk of losing a potential buyer by lowering their first impression from watching the explainer.

“So, how aggressive should my CTA be?”

Unfortunately, there’s no exact measure for that. Consider it carefully based on the information you have about your target audience. But, all things being equal, less tends to be more. Just by getting the viewer to take that action–no matter how small–creates a positive psychological connection with that viewer.

Ultimately, the best practice is to think about your call to action to drive viewers further down the conversion funnel. It’s very common for people to think an explainer video is a portal that teleports viewers from “What the hell is this product?” to “I want to buy this product right now!”

Spoiler alert: It’s not.

An explainer video is a map that directs people toward your product. The same is true for the call to action; it’s an engine to jump-start viewers and, under additional parameters you have in place, send them along on that buyer journey.

Mistake 2: Too Abruptly Done

Even if your product has a very appealing value, when and how it’s deployed can be important. Another common mistake in an explainer video’s CTA is it’s being “rushed down” or “thrown in” at the end.

It catches viewers by surprise, which could be a good plot twist in an entertainment video, but NOT in an explainer video.

Not only is it confusing for viewers, but the shock element is also very jarring that it might diminish the explainer’s good impression and reduce the likelihood of viewers taking actions.

This analogy isn’t perfect, but imagine a call to action as a finale to a Lord of the Rings movie. It comes naturally and is expected, but it doesn’t knock off the entire experience viewers have had from the beginning of the franchise.

Mistake 3: Lack of Screen Time

Nine times out of 10, the most logically acceptable call to action is to ask viewers to visit a website (the tenth is asking them to try a free demo). Either one can get viewers to move down the funnel.

It’s a good thing.

What is NOT a good thing is the fact that most explainer videos have an extremely short on-screen time for the URL they want viewers to visit. This isn’t a good practice, especially for companies with longer website address. If the very first step down a sales funnel is not taken, no sales will be happening.

Mistake 4: Cheesy Sales Line

The main idea of an explainer video and its call to action is obviously to make sales. However, it is not supposed to feel that way for the viewer. The good ones don’t.

But they also do not cover the fact that they offer a quality good or service.

A call to action is not about tricking viewers into taking action by covering up what a company has to offer (which will of course come with a price). Instead, it is about how the product/service offered can solve a problem that viewers have.

Besides, most viewers are smart, and they are fully aware that you are trying to sell something, so be smart about anything that you’re trying to throw to them.

What you need to do is to make them feel that the reason they’d take such action is because it will help them, and because they are the ones who want to do it, not because YOU want them to.

This has as much to do with the voice-over reading (related to the tones of the sentences) as it does with the visuals and the copy itself.

Make sure that the voice-over and visual representation of your idea can encourage viewers to take the actions you desire.

Mistake 5: Tone-Deaf Call to Action

Often, a call to action (or an explainer video script in general) seems perfect when it’s written on a piece of paper. It reads logically in your mind and fits with your brand’s overall objectives.

But, as we know, just because a script is good doesn’t mean it will be as good in execution.

Anticipating that gap between expectation and reality can be a tough task, especially with an explainer video where you have to deal with a written script, voiceover, visuals and other variables.

The best way to see if everything aligns is to see it with the eyes and hear it with the ears of your target audience. Technically, anyone will be able to access your video once it’s released, but the focus should be your target audience and thus it has to be enjoyable for them.

To avoid having a tone-deaf call to action, constantly think about the target audience and use them as the compass for your explainer video.

If the tone isn’t as enjoyable for them as you had hoped, either work on the wordplay and make the CTA more enjoyable and natural, or give another voice-over a shot.

That’s it for the most common call-to-action mistakes in an explainer video. There’s no such thing as the perfect explainer video, but you can get as close as possible by avoiding these mistakes when you make your explainer video.

What do you think? Have you ever seen a perfect explainer video? Tell us in the comments.

Guest post by David Rogers (@david_rogers), faculty at Columbia Business School and author of The Digital Transformation Playbook: Rethink Your Business for the Digital Age. This excerpt is from Chapter 3, on how businesses need to transform their strategy for competition. Download a full chapter at www.DigitalTransformationPlaybook.com

In 2007, two recent graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, were struggling to pay the rent on their apartment in San Francisco. When they heard that the city’s hotels were fully booked during an upcoming design conference, they had an entrepreneurial idea: Why not rent out a bit of their space? They bought three airbeds (inflatable mattresses), put up a website, and, within six days, found three guest lodgers. Each one paid $80 a night. “As we were waving these people goodbye, Joe and I looked at each other and thought, there’s got to be a bigger idea here,” Chesky said. By the following year, they had teamed up with another friend, computer science graduate Nathan Blecharczyk, and started a business that they later named Airbnb.

By 2015, Airbnb had served 25 million travelers, providing them with lodging in over 190 countries around the world. But it doesn’t look like a typical global corporation in the business of providing lodging and hospitality. Instead of building hotels and hiring employees to serve customers, the three founders built a platform that brings together two distinct types of people: hosts with homes to rent (whether a spare room or their whole home while they are away) and travelers who are looking for someplace to stay. The company has minimal assets. In fact, it doesn’t own a single rental property. Yet it can offer travelers their choice of more than 1 million listings, ranging from a sofa or tiny guest room up to an actual castle (more than 600 are available to rent). The company takes a cut of the rental fee on each transaction.

Airbnb has only a few hundred employees but manages to book 40 million guest-nights per year because its platform is built to be as simple and self-service as possible for both homeowners and travelers. Its staff focuses on building a Web interface and mobile apps that make it as easy and frictionless as possible for a host to offer lodging or for a traveler to find a place to stay.

Much of Airbnb’s success comes down to building trust between the two parties. (Who wants to have their apartment trashed by out-of-town guests when they are on vacation? Who wants to show up at a dump that doesn’t match what you booked online?) Building trust begins with mutual ratings and reviews for both hosts and travelers but goes far beyond that. The company waits to release rental payments to the host until after the renter has checked in and verified they are happy with the property; it likewise holds onto the renter’s deposit until after they have left and the host has verified their home is in good shape. As further assurance, it provides each host with $1 million in insurance for damages. It has also added verification of both parties through detailed user profiles, ID verification, and links to social networks like Facebook. Travelers looking for options in a destination city can search by neighborhood, can read the company’s curated recommendations on where to stay, and can even use Facebook to find “friends of friends” who are renting out spaces. Its founders were even able to mix trust building and marketing: by hiring photographers to take pictures of lodgings for any host who requested it (for free), they offered better visuals for the host while guaranteeing visitors that the company had verified the location they were renting. This innovation alone rapidly increased growth in bookings.

Airbnb has grown at a phenomenal rate, with more rooms for rent than Hilton, InterContinental, or Marriott and nearly $4 billion in gross bookings in 2014. During that year’s World Cup games, out of 600,000 attendees who came to Brazil from around the world, 25 percent stayed at an Airbnb rental. Today, the company operates in over 190 countries. “Every country other than North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Cuba,” Chesky cheerfully told television host Stephen Colbert in an interview. That list has since been updated: when the United States reestablished ties with Cuba, Airbnb was one of the first American companies to announce it had launched a presence there.

Rise of the Platforms

Airbnb is just of one of many new digitally powered businesses that act as platforms—bringing together two or more parties to create and exchange value through the business rather than trying to create all the value themselves.

Marketplaces like eBay, Etsy, or Alibaba’s Taobao bring together buyers and sellers of goods of all kinds in direct sales or auctions. Matchmaking services like Uber or Didi Chuxing provide taxi services not by purchasing vehicles and hiring drivers but by providing a platform to connect drivers in their own cars with people nearby needing a car service. Media companies from YouTube to Forbes.com operate by bringing together independent content creators, content consumers, and advertisers—each of whom is seeking out the other. Mobile operating systems like Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and Xiaomi’s MIUI compete by attracting the best software developers to create apps, which, in turn, draw consumers to buy their smartphones. Airbnb is just of one of many new digitally powered businesses that act as platforms—bringing together two or more parties to create and exchange value through the business rather than trying to create all the value themselves.

Platforms represent a fundamental shift in how businesses relate to each other—from linear to more networked business models. Platform businesses can often be very light in assets but generate large revenues. Instead of building features and seeking to get customers to use their own products, they build ecosystems by getting customers to interact with each other. Rather than simply paying for services received, customers both provide value and receive value. As a result, the value of a platform grows as more people use it.

Scaling Fast

Platform businesses can grow extremely quickly. Their low operating costs, combined with a scalable cloud computing architecture, make this possible. A line chart of Airbnb’s user growth looks like a hockey stick, with listings shooting up 1,000 percent in three years. The ability of platforms to increase revenue with relatively slow employee growth is likely another factor.

Airbnb reached $4 billion in gross bookings with only 600 employees. Since the rise of the Internet, the list of the fastest-growing new companies around the world is dominated by those using platform business models. In fact, my research has found that eight of the ten most valuable global companies founded since 1994 are platform companies (see diagram).

Excerpted from The Digital Transformation Playbook (Columbia Business School Publishing). Copyright © 2016 David L. Rogers. Download a full chapter at www.DigitalTransformationPlaybook.com

The post Build Platforms, Not Just Products appeared first on Brian Solis.

LinkedIn’s head of B2B Marketing shares what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to selling your products and services on the platform.

David Karel, LinkedIn’s Head of B2B Marketing, recently shared some intriguing (and important) tips on the best ways to sell your products and services on the platform.

In the process, he highlighted 3 key themes on what it takes to truly be successful in taking advantage of the massive, B2B marketing-related opportunities on LinkedIn.

Theme 1 – LinkedIn is Unlike Any Other Platform

“If you think about what LinkedIn has become, it’s the first time in history of media that you can engage with the world’s professionals in a single place,” Karel said on a recent podcast interview. “And the opportunity is not just that professionals are gathering in such huge numbers on the platform, but that they are engaging with a unique purpose. They are coming to LinkedIn with a very different mindset then when they are going to other destinations online.”

This is key – because of its “professional” theme and tone, LinkedIn users are not logging in looking for funny cat photos or restaurant recommendations.

Instead, they’re visiting the platform to look for a job, find an employee, get online training, network with others, consume industry-specific content or even buy and sell products and services.

That means you have an immediate – and valuable – opportunity to build and develop 1-on-1, personal relationships with buyers who are already in “business mode” from the get-go.

Theme 2 – How You Engage is Everything

Karel is quick to say that spamming strangers with sales offers or requests for phone time is the worst possible approach you can take on LinkedIn.

Instead, he says, you must understand and apply the fundamentals of content-, context- and relationship-based marketing.

“The key is you can reach [prospects] in this professional context,” he says. “You can engage in meaningful way, and that’s by sharing valuable content.”

That includes understanding the key pain points your ideal customers have, and then “solving” those problems by creating and sharing content that both demonstrates your expertise and credibility while also bringing immediate value to anyone consuming it.

“People on LinkedIn want to connect with opportunities and education,” Karel says. “They want to engage with high-quality content on the platform. That means you have an opportunity to create, share and attract people with your content.”

To that extent, Karel shares a surprising statistic – there’s about 15 times more expert content and advice shared inside the LinkedIn news feed than job-related posts or openings. Meaning LinkedIn has come a long way from only being useful for job searches or employee recruiting needs.

Theme 3 – SlideShare Can Be Your Secret Weapon

Karel notes that one of the most underutilized B2B marketing tools online right now is SlideShare – the visually-themed network which LinkedIn purchased and integrated into its platform back in 2012.

“SlideShare presents a huge opportunity,” he says. “You can reach large scale audiences, and visuals are so powerful when it comes to messaging and sharing your content online.”

With 70 million users worldwide, SlideShare allows you to share slide decks, videos, infographics and other visually-themed content for free. It also has paid plans that enable you to gather demographic data about viewers and embed opt-in forms directly inside your presentations.

Best of all, SlideShare integrates seamlessly with LinkedIn and shows up well on Google organic searches as well, giving your SlideShare-based content even more reach and shelf life.

According to the site, “when you upload to SlideShare, you reach an audience that’s interested in your content – over 80% of SlideShare’s 70 million visitors come through targeted search. This can help you build your reputation with the right audience and cultivate more professional opportunities.”

Final Thoughts

When it comes to selling your products or services on LinkedIn, Karel says the keys are to be helpful (not promotional), to bring value by creating and sharing unique and engaging content and to use LinkedIn’s powerful member database to find and engage with the right prospects and potential buyers.

If you’ve studied the LinkedIn platform for any amount of time, those themes should resonate, because they’ve been proven to work time and again.

So get after it!

The post 3 Smart Moves that Supercharge Sales Funnels with Content appeared first on Copyblogger.

Quick quiz for social media marketers:

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been asked, “So, you get paid to go on Facebook?”

Probably quite a few of us, right? People get social media. But it seems many are still bewildered by social media marketing.

So how can you explain the value of what you do, to those who matter most to you?

To be sure, social media marketing is an incredibly new (and ever-changing) industry, unlike finance, engineering, sales, law, medicine, and more established fields. Plus most people use social media for fun, so social media’s place in business can seem suspicious.

Nevertheless, there’s a way to get your value across and explain social media marketing to stakeholders, bosses, friends, and family in a way that they’ll get. Keep reading for some tips on how to have these important conversations, and we’d love to hear any tips or stories you have to share in the comments!

What people think I do vs. What I actually do

Sometimes, when talking to different people about social media jobs, it can feel a little like the “What People Think I Do/What I Really Do” meme:

These general guidelines can help.

3 Guidelines for Talking to Anyone About Social Media

1. Be patient with those who might not know as much about social media as you do
2. Remember your audience and customize your message accordingly
3. Use stories to engage the other person and help them relate to you

1. Be patient

You’re constantly using, discussing, experimenting with, or reading about social media.

Others aren’t.

It can require some patience to remember there are plenty of people out there who don’t know Twitter recently changed its 140-character rules (and even if they did know, might not be too interested). So, if you try to explain social media marketing to someone and they’re not getting it, don’t get frustrated. Be patient with the other person, and be grateful — it’s actually pretty awesome you get to be an (unofficial) ambassador of social media.

2. Remember your audience

It’s tempting to come up with one “silver bullet” explanation and use it with every person who says, “So, tell me what you do.” But you’ll be more successful if you account for each person’s background and reasons for asking.

For example, a stranger at a party is probably making conversation, while your mentor probably wants to know how social media marketing can help her department.

3. When in doubt, use stories

As Leo has previously explained, our brains light up whenever we hear a story. Why? They’re engaging! In addition, they make complex ideas feel simple and easy to grasp.

whenever we hear a story, we want to relate it to one of our existing experiences. That’s why metaphors work so well with us. Whilst we are busy searching for a similar experience in our brains, we activate a part called insula, which helps us relate to that same experience of pain, joy, disgust or else.

This graphic from the New York Times illustrates it well:

If, during the course of explaining your social media marketing job, you notice the other person’s eyes glazing over, stop and say, “Let me explain with a story.” Then, share a situation that exemplifies the value of your job:

• That time you helped a customer resolve an issue
• The day you generated a ton of leads for the sales team
• The campaign that brought in 100 new attendees for a company event

—

Now that we’ve got the basics down, check out how to discuss social media with these 8 types of people in your life.

8 Ways to Explain Social Media Marketing to Bosses, Clients, Family, and More

1. How to Explain to Your CEO

Give your CEO numbers that tie into goals

If you ask your CEO, “Is it important for the company to be on social media?” they’re almost guaranteed to say yes. After all, 96% of businesses invest in social media marketing—so somewhere down the line, your budget got their approval.

But that doesn’t mean your CEO is totally sold on or even completely understands the concept. You can help them see the value of social media marketing by drawing clear connections between the organization’s high-level goals and your own responsibilities and results.

Let’s say one of your company’s biggest priorities right now is generating better leads. You could tell your CEO, “After looking at the data, my team realized our most qualified prospects were coming from LinkedIn. So, we started focusing our energy on LinkedIn and dialed it back on Twitter and Facebook—and now, the number of MQLs we’re shooting over to sales has gone up by 30%.”

(Here’s a guide to KPIs, if it helps.)

Brand Connections’ useful guide to goals KPIs might come in handy, too.

Of course, you’ll want to adjust your approach depending on how fluent your CEO is in social media. Some executives will be crystal-clear on, say, the differences between Meerkat, Periscope, and Snapchat, while others might say, “Meer-what?”

If your CEO is closer to the second, make sure that you provide simple, quick explanations for every new concept you introduce. To give you an idea, you might say, “We’ve been getting 20% more event attendees ever since we started filming ‘behind-the-scenes’ videos with Periscope, a tool for live broadcasting.”

• Periscope might equal “behind-the-scenes videos”
• Facebook Live might equal “streaming video feeds”
• Snapchat might equal “in-the-moment entertainment”

Bonus: Here’re some tips on how to convince your CEO about social media’s value, using data!

2. Your CTO

Help your CTO evangelize on social media for your company

Social media marketers can be a huge help to their CTOs.

As digital and content strategist Zane Razane explains,

The CTO serves as the public face of technology for a company, so my job is to support their social platform engagement with the audience both online and offline—conferences, events, etc.

When you’re explaining your function to the CTO, Razane recommends saying something like:

Together, we’ll come up with a strategy for your online presence that aligns with the company’s brand, vision, and values. With that locked down, we can create content for social media, our blog, third-party blogs, and more. By establishing you as credible and trustworthy—not to mention a valuable source of information— we’ll support the business goals and online reputation of the company.

3. Your Coworker

Explain what you do in context with what they do

New coworkers will always ask, “Oh, what team are you on?” However, even when you’re talking to people who have known you for years, it’s helpful to have a job description you can whip out during meetings and random conversations.

The key? Customize your explanation to the person’s own role.

To give you an idea, let’s say you’re talking to someone on their first day.

You: Welcome to the coolest company ever! What team are you joining?

Them: Thank you! I’m a support engineer. What do you do?

You: Oh, awesome. I run our blog—so actually, I spend a lot of time with the support team, since your interactions tell me so much about how our users think and what type of content they’ll like.

Now, here’s how that interaction might play out if they were, say, in HR.

Them: I’m a PeopleOps associate. What about you?

You: Nice! I’m a social media coordinator, so I figure out what to post to our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts. In fact, our customers love seeing candid pictures from our internal events—hackathons, company celebrations, speaker lunches, etc.—so I’m sure we’ll get a chance to work together as you plan out the lineup.

Describing how your role fits into the other person’s role makes it easier for for them to relate to (and later remember). Plus, it’s a nice way to lay the groundwork for future collaboration.

Teams like Typeform make it a bit smoother to see where new hires fit within the structure of the organization. Their Trello-based org chart helps you see who works where and on what — making the social media marketer’s explaining a bit easier.

4. A Potential Contact (Who’s Not in Marketing)

Ask them about their favorite brands — and use that info to frame your answer

It’s always challenging to explain your job when you’re networking: You want to be interesting and memorable, yet accurate. And when the person you’re talking to is from a different industry, it’s even more challenging — now you also have to describe your role in a way they’ll appreciate.

The best solution I’ve found? Ask about their favorite brand, then use that brand as your example.

Here’s how that might play out:

Them: I manage HR for Capstone. What do you do?

You: Oh, cool! I’ve heard great things about you guys. And I work in social media marketing—actually, it might be easier with an example. What’s a company you like?

Them: Hmm. I love Shake Shack.

You: Ahh, me too. Well, if I worked for Shake Shack, I’d be the one posting those drool-worthy pictures to Instagram, writing food-themed posts for our blog, working with Marketing to make sure our latest restaurant openings will be covered on social… And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

5. A Potential Contact (Who Is in Marketing)

Solicit their advice on a social media marketing challenge

Let’s face it, answering the “what do you do” question is much easier when it’s coming from a fellow marketer. You can just say, “I’m a community manager,” or “I manage our digital media efforts,” without giving any follow-up details or definitions.

However, while there’s nothing wrong with simply providing your job title, you’ll be missing an awesome opportunity. Surface-level answers are huge road-blocks in the conversation when you’re talking to someone new—the more in-depth or specific you go, the more you and the other person will have to discuss.

With that in mind, consider asking for advice on a challenge you’re currently facing.

You: I’m a social media coordinator for Owl Insights. Actually—I’d love to get your expertise on an issue we’re currently struggling with.

Them: Oh, sure!

You: So, I’m in charge of our Instagram page, and I’m really struggling to come up content ideas that our audience will be interested in. I’ve been posting “behind-the-scenes” pictures, but they’re not driving much engagement.

Them: Well, I love how Granular—who’s also B2B—has started a UCG campaign…

Not only will your reply spark a strong (and potentially productive!) conversation, you’ll make the other person feel great by asking for their help.

Worried that your coworkers wouldn’t want you sharing so much info? You can still use this technique: just describe a problem you encountered in the past, then ask how they would’ve handled it.

You: I’m a social media coordinator for Owl Insights. Actually—I’d love to get your expertise on an issue we recently dealt with. I’m not sure our approach was the best one.

Them: Sure.

You: So, I’m in charge of our Instagram page, and…

And hypothetical situations are always an option as well. Here’s some inspiration from a list of what social media managers are working on today.

6. A Hiring Manager

Share your specific social media results. Mention data plus strategy.

In order to get a job, you need to convince the hiring manager of one major thing: You will make their organization more successful. Everything else — from your previous experience and education to your skill-set and certifications — only matters because it indicates whether or not you can do a good job in this role.

So when you’re talking to an interviewer, focus on your results.

And get specific.

For instance, “I grew our Medium followers by 200% in three months,” is only meaningful if you add, “… by bringing in some of the most well-known writers in our space to guest-post, publishing one high-quality piece per week rather than three average ones, and incorporating custom graphics.”

Sharing more details is even better. To give you an idea, you could add:

“I decided to reduce how often we posted per week after running a short experiment. I compared our engagement for a week with three medium-researched, 700-word posts to a week with one highly-researched, 3,000-word post. We gained twice as many followers the second week and got four times as many comments and likes—in part because the longer piece was recommended by several key influencers.”

This level of detail shows you’re analytical and thoughtful. It also tells the interviewer that you didn’t get those results through luck.

7. Your Friends

Figure out the last time they interacted with a social media manager (whether they knew it or not)

Although they might not realize it, your friends probably interact with social media marketers on an hourly basis. You can demonstrate the value of your work by finding some of those interactions.

For example, you could ask a friend to show you the last 10 photos he liked on Instagram. There’s a strong chance at least one will belong to a business or brand.

Once you spot one, explain, “This company’s social media team posted this picture to increase engagement with users just like you. They know seeing this picture makes you more loyal and engaged.”

Next, connect the dots by saying, “I use a similar approach at my job. My company posts [X type of content] on [platform 1] to build relationship with [these types of customers]. We also post [Y type of content] on [platform 2] to build relationships with [different/related types of customers].

Nate Hill, a web and social media strategist for the University of Michigan’s career center, advises ending with:

I look for new ways to get people to interact, consume, or share the content we’re putting out for them.

8. Strangers

Have a story ready

From random people in the grocery store to friendly strangers on the street, you never know when you’ll meet a total stranger who will ask what you do. In these cases, you don’t have the background knowledge necessary to tailor your explanation. That’s why it’s extremely handy to have a universally relatable example up your sleeve.

Florina Gobel, who handles social media strategy for the non-profit New Organ, uses this one:

“I’m like a chef. I cook up stories. I want people to like my food, talk about my food, and get their friends to come over and recommend it to their friends. So I plan the menus carefully: what story will be served, how, and when. I design strategic menus of stories. Bite-sized appetizer stories, individual courses, dessert, etc to be served at the right times, the right places. I analyze customers’ response to inform future menu decisions. And I also respond directly to both positive and negative feedback. A job well done means building a thriving, loyal community driven to take actions that support the restaurant’s business goals and growth.”

9. Your Grandparents

Make your role feel relatable

The number of older people on social media has tripled since 2010, with roughly one in three people over 65 using at least one platform.

That’s good news when you’re trying to explain your job in social media to your grandparents. But even if they’re familiar with the ins and outs of Facebook, you might still need to outline how your activity (on all the channels) contributes to your company’s success.

Start by providing an illustration of marketing they’ll be familiar with.

For instance, you might say:

“You know how you’ll be flipping through a magazine, and you’ll see an ad for a new car model? And then maybe you turn on the TV, and you see an ad for that car again. Next thing you know, you’re listening to the radio, and you hear a broadcast for that same car. If you’re going to buy a new car in the near future, that brand—if not that exact model—will be on your mind.”

Now link your example to social media, like so:

“You’ve probably noticed how much time people spend online. Well, I put information about my company and our products online, where potential customers can find it. I also try to keep them satisfied after they’re….”

Over to you

Do you have any awesome ways of describing your job to the people in your life?

I’d love to hear your stories of what worked—and what hasn’t worked—in the comments!