There are all sorts of things your company should be doing to help make a sale. Likewise, there are all sorts of things that your company shouldn’t be doing if you want to make a sale. One thing to watch out for is the type of phrases or vocabulary you’re using with your customers or leads. While it’s true that conversations differ from person to person, there are some things that should still never be said.

1. “Don’t worry”

Never in the history of humankind has an individual who felt worried, that was told not to worry, actually didn’t worry. Even if your personal life, this might be one of those phrases you want to avoid saying as often as possible. This is especially true if you don’t know the client that well. Saying this can make them feel belittled, which is definitely not how you want them to feel before trying to make a sale. Instead, try saying, “I understand your concerns and we will do our best to accommodate you.”

2. “As I told you before”

I know several people that would cringe if they heard a salesperson say this to a customer. If you were interested in a product and the company said this phrase, would it really be a company you want to buy something from, let alone interact with? Telling your customer, “As I told you before,” makes them feel as if they are incompetent. Replace this with something like, “You can stop me if I’ve already mentioned this.”

3. “Correct me if I’m wrong”

Silly salesperson! Your customer is not going to correct you if you’re wrong, because that would be impolite. But, maybe not as impolite as you saying it in the first place. Saying something like this implies a sense of arrogance. Why not say, “I could be mistaken, but…” This can really make a difference.

4. “I see…”

What do you see? Because I don’t see anything besides a salesperson who couldn’t be any less interested in what I have to say, or what my concerns are. This is really unsettling for a customer who wants to feel like the company he or she is ready to buy from, cares about his or her interests. Instead, try saying something like, “Wow, I can definitely understand where you’re coming from.” Of course, it depends on what you’re talking about, but something along those lines should be okay.

5. “I’m busy now”

We get it, you’re busy. But, there should always be enough time in the day to consult with your customers, even if there really isn’t. Luckily, the power of the internet means you can get back to customers when it’s convenient for you. However, many companies often say phrases in their emails, “Sorry it took so long to get back to you, I’ve been very busy.”

Right away, the customer thinks that he or she wasn’t your priority, and he or she might consider taking his or her business elsewhere. You can try saying something like, “Thank you for your patience, we will get back you as soon as possible.” If this is happening on a customer service call ,you can ask them if the customer has a number you can call them back at when you’re able to. This way, they don’t need to wait on hold.

6. “What’s your name again?”

It’s impossible to remember everyone’s name. But, the beauty of Mission Suite is that it will provide you with CRM and email marketing tools that would make it nearly impossible to forget. With so many customers and leads to keep an eye on, it’s not an easy task to keep track of everything. Instead of asking their name again, just make sure you collect that information when they sign up on your site.

Want to know if the language and phrases you’re using with you customers is effective? Request a demo with Mission Suite now!

Everyone understands that Sales and Marketing alignment (or smarketing) is a good thing. But the reality is that most organizations are a ways off from the VPs of Marketing and Sales being besties. I believe if organizations truly understand the value and have a clear path to get there, it will happen. Enter the 3 C’s of Smarketing: Communication, Coordination and Collaboration.

Communication: Start creating purposeful dialogue between Sales and Marketing

Marketing and Sales have to communicate to get their jobs done. But to start to create optimal efficiency, more detailed communication needs to happen. Organizations need to have clear definitions of what Sales is looking for in a lead so that Marketing can create campaigns accordingly, which is an awesome first step toward solid alignment. If you don’t yet have this, invite your counterpart to lunch and start the discussion. Bring data to review why some leads were followed up on and others weren’t. Look at new customers that went through the pipeline the fastest and keep an eye out for commonalities.

Once you have a common understanding, get it all down in writing so you have agreed upon definitions. Then make sure you can track to these stages and measure conversions from lead to sales accepted (or Sales Qualified Lead – SQL). Ideally, you’ll also have a stage in between for Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) so that Marketing can scrub out anything that clearly doesn’t meet the qualifications of what Sales wants before you send the leads over the wall.

Coordination: Continually optimize the outcome of Sales and Marketing efforts

Once you’ve got clear lead definitions, it’s time to create a feedback loop for continuous improvement. This means getting Sales and Marketing leadership together on a regular basis to review results and make changes in lead definitions or even campaign spend according to the feedback. Many organizations do this on a quarterly basis as “QBRs” or “Interlocks”.

No matter what fancy name you give to these meetings, make sure both departments understand the purpose and what they need to bring to the meeting. These meetings become worthless after 1-2 sessions if it is just Marketing showing data and asking for feedback from Sales. BOTH sides need to come with data and be prepared to explain what the data is saying.

Here’s how. Create some dashboard reports that both teams can access for the following data:

• Highest and lowest performing campaigns for the quarter in terms of SQLs, Opps and Closed Won (6 different reports)
• Highest and lowest performing inside sales reps (or telemarketers) for the quarter in terms of conversions to SQLs, Opps and Closed Won (6 different reports)

Both parties should analyze this data before the Coordination meeting and come prepared with feedback from their teams on why they think those were the results. Having the analysis and team input take place before the meeting (from both sides) will make these meetings more successful. As you mature in this process, you may be able to set goals for conversion rates and use that as a bar to analyze what campaigns over or under performed.

Collaboration: Get significant revenue growth by working toward the same goal

So now that you have great Communication and you are meeting regularly to obtain Coordination, what more could you possibly achieve? The answer is Collaboration. In this stage, the lines between Marketing and Sales start to intentionally get fuzzy. Marketing starts doing things that fall in the Sales realm and Sales starts getting involved in Marketing programs, otherwise known as smarketing. With smarketing, the offices of the VPs of Sales and Marketing are next door to each other and they might even report to a centralized executive like a Chief Revenue Officer responsible for both Marketing and Sales.

While this may sound like a scary alternative dimension, when you start smarketing, it’s totally awesome! This stage means the end to the blaming as Sales and Marketing are truly working together to achieve the mutual goal of growing the company. Marketing bonus plans are on revenue, not leads. There is mutual respect, because these groups are in tight alignment.

So how can a company achieve this nirvana? It’s actually a lot easier than you might think. At the heart of smarketing Collaboration is Sales and Marketing working together on a common program. This means designing the program together, promoting it together and tracking results together. This is the essence of smarketing.

The most effective program to achieve smarketing Collaborative alignment is a referral marketing program. While Sales already gets that referrals are their highest quality lead, most Sales folks don’t ask often enough or have a “give-get” to offer. With help from Marketing through a referral marketing program, Sales can not only get more referrals, but turn referrals into their most productive lead source. In fact, data from the referral marketing programs running on the Amplifinity referral platform shows an average conversion from lead to purchase of 35%.

This conversion rate is possible through referral software that enables collaboration between Sales and marketing by integrating into the Sales CRM to allow Marketing to create the brand message for the program and Sales to help execute on it. This enables Marketing to extend its lead generation team to Customers or Partners who can connect your message to target buyers in their networks.

Bottom line – This scalable personalized lead generation works so well because it is backed by both Marketing AND Sales.

If you’d like to learn more about achieving smarketing, I recommend this paper from Marketing Profs: How to Climb to Smarketing Success: A maturity model for sales and marketing alignment.

Download our free e-book, How to Close More Deals, Starting Today, and learn how to create the ultimate sales plan.

SaaS sales as we know it is evolving at a rapid pace, however the approach to hiring sales talent is not.  This gap in evolution is creating a scenario where many sales organizations are not fully optimizing their sales processes.  Because software sales is becoming increasingly systemized, sales leaders must rethink the profile of their ideal candidate and begin searching for candidates who will enhance the system.  

By changing the profile of an ideal candidate, and implementing a recruiting and hiring process that effectively identifies those candidates, sales organizations will better optimize their sales processes – and even create a competitive advantage.  

So, let’s take a look at what sales leaders can do to create a better target candidate, find talent that meets that profile more effectively, and of course eliminate those that do not.

Eliminate The Never Ending Search For Rock Stars  

The sales rock stars of the past, the ones who knew how to get deals closed and came waltzing into companies boasting a big rolodex of potential clients, are a dying breed.  Sure, they are still out there and many of them are doing quite well.  But these are not the salespeople of the future. Their unique mix of talents do not mesh with the new, ever evolving systemized approach to sales.  Is this case in every company?  No.  Should every attribute that has made this type of individual so successful be forgotten?  Not at all.   But the profile has changed and so should your desired candidate profile.

Seek Out a Better Candidate Profile

There are two key shifts in the SaaS sales landscape that are driving the need to source a different skill set:

1. The rise in highly informed, savvy prospects who are choosing to do business with organizations who are able to provide them with insight specific to their own business that they would have otherwise been unable to get on their own.

2. A data driven and more predictive approach to selling that relies on an “adherence to proven” processes.

So what does the new ideal profile look like?  

There are three key components of the next generation high performers that sales leaders must seek out.

1. Intelligence & Intellectual Curiosity:  Not that this wasn’t important before, but now it’s more important than ever.  The candidate should have the ability to; understand the business problems that a SaaS solution is solving, become an industry EXPERT, and posses enough knowledge and strategic insight to win over a prospect.  At the end of the day, your salespeople need to know more about your prospect’s business and the industry as a whole than the prospect does himself.

2. Highly Organized & Process Focused:  The lone wolf that succeeded by using their own intuition and “winging it” is an endangered species.  Access to data and sales enablement tools have allowed us to build processes that are effective and in a state of constant refinement.  That requires an individual who is methodical in following those processes and organized enough to manage those processes across numerous prospects.

3. Analytical:  The insight into our own processes, a prospect’s business, and their buying behavior, rewards those who mine that data.  Salespeople must be able to understand what that data means, and use that information to uncover new sales opportunities and drive self improvement.

Use Task Focused Evaluation For a Better Hiring Process

A hiring process that utilizes task focused evaluation will allow you to more objectively identify the right candidate to create a more scalable hiring process.  

By giving candidates tasks that require a certain level of intelligence, as well as the use of analytical and communication skills, we are able to develop a much better understanding of their abilities. Those tasks should all contain three components:

1. They require the candidate to do research on a topic that requires a level of thoroughness in order to gather the necessary information and/or data.

2. The information they are digesting is complex enough where the candidate must possess a strong quantitative ability in order to adequately understand the concepts and topic.

3. The information or data the candidate has gathered and interpreted must be presented.  This component calls on the candidate’s ability to effectively communicate information on a complex topic and demonstrate their ability to fully understand that topic, and “what it all means” from a bigger picture perspective.

Perhaps the most valuable component of task focused evaluation lies in the fact that it provides first hand insight into the work and detail a candidate is willing to put forth to complete a task.  If the candidate isn’t able or willing to exert a high level of effort to complete tasks during the evaluation process how willing would they be to do the same once hired?

Rely on Data Where Possible  

The most effective way to create a more objective and predictive hiring process is through the use of data.  It’s close to impossible to build a hiring process that relies solely on data, but finding as many opportunities as possible to gain insights from data is very important.  The utilization of a candidate scoring system and personality profile tests are a few simple approaches to using data in the sales hiring process that can be implemented in fairly easily.  

SaaS sales as we know it is changing faster than ever before.   The sales organizations that will remain relevant are the ones who will build great processes, harness the power of data, and provide their prospects with valuable insight.  But it’s the organizations that are able to identify and acquire this new breed of sales talent that will thrive.

The sales machine of the future has arrived.  Now it’s time to find the talent that can effectively operate it.

The post The Sales Talent Shift appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Are you struggling to find the right words to sell your product or idea?

Do you want to find better words that sell to maximize your conversions?

All writers know how important word choice is, and the power that a single word can have on readers. Choosing the power right word can be the difference between them taking action and remaining passive readers…

It can be the difference between writing content that’s memorable and content that’s easily forgotten.

Using power words is a simple way to increase your conversions, as they are strong, persuasive words that writers use to trigger specific responses in readers to persuade and influence them; however, trying to come up with the right ones can be difficult and time-consuming, as there is no one-size-fits-all, perfect power word.

That’s why we’ve done the hard work for you. Check out our list of 640+ power words that sell to maximise your conversions, which we’ve divided into different categories to make it easier for you to find what you need.

Just remember that using every power word you can think of regardless of the context and expecting results can be as ineffective as not using any.

Think about what action you want readers to take (e.g., to buy a product, subscribe, comment, sign a petition, etc.), and what emotions will help persuade them to take that action, then find the best words to trigger that emotion.

Most Persuasive Words in the English Language

You might already think these words are persuasive, but did you know that many consider them the most persuasive words in the English Language? Read this interesting post on Copyblogger for research behind why these five simple words are so persuasive.

• Because
• Free
• Instantly
• New
• You

Most Persuasive Words in Advertising

In 1963, David Ogilvy published a list of what he believed to be the 20 most persuasive words in advertising. Even though this list is over 50 years old, they are still powerful words that we should keep in mind.

• Amazing
• Announcing
• Bargain
• Challenge
• Compare
• Easy
• Hurry
• Improvement
• Introducing
• Magic
• Miracle
• Now
• Offer
• Quick
• Remarkable
• Revolutionary
• Sensational
• Startling
• Suddenly
• Wanted

Words for Popular Blog Post Headings

According to The Oribi Blog, the most popular blog post headings included these words.

• Big/Huge
• Critical
• Hacks (or a variation of this word)
• History
• Science
• Smart
• Surprising

Words to Increase Facebook Shares, Likes, and Comments

According to Neil Patel’s infographic The Surprising Words That Get Content Shared on Social Media, these words are the best ones to share on Facebook to get more shares, likes, and comments.

• Amuses
• Comment
• Deals
• Discounts
• Inspires
• Post
• Should
• Submit
• Take
• Tell use
• Warns
• When
• Where
• Would

Words to Increase Retweets

According to Neil Patel’s infographic, you should also use these words if you want to get more retweets.

• 10
• Blog
• Blog post
• Check out
• Follow
• Free
• Great
• Help
• How to
• Media
• New blog post
• Please
• Please retweet
• Post
• Retweet
• Social
• Social media
• Top
• Twitter
• You

Words to Call to Action

A great—and obvious—place to use these words is the start of call to actions. Combining these with words that trigger a feeling of urgency can be particularly effective in persuading readers to take action.

• Add
• Buy
• Call
• Claim
• Create
• Discover
• Download
• Get
• Join
• Launch
• Learn
• Promote
• Send
• Share
• Sign up
• Start
• Subscribe
• Trial
• Try

Words to Provoke Anger

As long as their anger isn’t directed at you, using words to provoke anger can be a great way to persuade readers. If you intend to make your readers angry about a problem before offering your solution, these are the kinds of words you should consider using.

• Arrogant
• Corrupt
• Cruel
• Destroy
• Devastating
• Discriminatory
• Disgusting
• Exploit
• Evil
• Force-fed
• Had enough
• Hate
• Heartbreaking
• Immoral
• Lies
• Never again
• Obnoxious
• Pointless
• Provoke
• Sick and tired
• Smug
• Suffer
• Struggle
• Underhanded
• Unethical
• Unfair
• Unjust

Words to Build Trust

Building trust between you and your readers is incredibly important, whether it’s trust that you only use reliable sources in your research, trust that you won’t send them spam if they subscribe, or trust that you’ll be honest about your products. Telling your readers to trust you will probably make them think the opposite, but using these words can help encourage them to trust you.

• According to
• Authentic
• Authoritative
• Cancel anytime
• Case Study
• Certified
• Expert
• Fully refundable
• Guaranteed
• No obligation
• Official
• Privacy
• Professional
• Proven
• Reliable
• Report
• Research
• Results
• Secure
• Studies
• Tested
• Verify

Words to Imply Logic

These words have a similar effect as the words that encourage trust. They can reassure the reader that you’re being logical, reasonable, and objective.

• Analyse
• As a result
• Because
• Consequently
• Example
• For this reason
• In order
• Logical
• Makes sense
• Organise
• Reasons
• Science
• Therefore
• Thus
• Why

Words to Encourage Community

If selling your product or idea requires you to create a sense of community and make readers feel that they would be joining like-minded people for a worthy reason, use these words that trigger feelings of belonging and a desire to be a part of something bigger.

• Be a part of
• Help us
• Join
• Let’s
• We can

Words to Spark Curiosity

Make the most of what few words you have in your headings by using one of these words to spark their curiosity. Intrigue them. Feed that urge that makes them feel they must click on your blog post to satisfy their curiosity.

• Astonishing
• Banned
• Bizarre
• Censored
• Confessions
• Confidential
• Controversial
• Cringeworthy
• Did you know
• Elusive
• Extraordinary
• Eye-opening
• Find out why
• Hidden
• Hilarious
• Imagine
• Life-changing
• Magic
• Mysterious
• Myth
• Remarkable
• Revealed
• Revolutionary
• Secret
• Shocking
• Sneak peek
• Strange
• Surprising
• You won’t believe

Words to Offer Exclusivity

Who doesn’t want to be invited into a secret club? Use these words to entice your readers with the promise of exclusivity.

• Be the first
• Before everyone else
• Behind the scenes
• Exclusive
• Insider
• Just for you
• Limited
• Members only
• Membership
• Rare
• Secret
• Sneak peek
• Special
• Unique

Words to Target Fear

Fear is such a strong emotion, and words such as these can be effective in grabbing the reader’s attention and persuading them to take action to avoid a fearful situation.

• Alarming
• Caution
• Crisis
• Danger
• Disaster
• Frightening
• Horrifying
• Mistake
• Nightmare
• Risky
• Shock
• Trouble
• Unexpected

Words to Target Greed

Combine these words with words that trigger a feeling of urgency to persuade people to buy your products. They can be particularly effective on those who wouldn’t usually spend but can’t resist these words.

• Bargain
• Bonus
• Cheap
• Discount
• Double
• Extra
• Free
• Giveaway
• Half price
• Marked down
• Massive
• Prize
• Profit
• Reduced
• Reward
• Sale
• Triple
• Unlimited

Words to Make it Personal

Use these words to make your content seem more personal, which helps to establish a connection with the reader by writing as if you are talking directly to the them.

• You
• Your
• I
• My
• We
• Our
• Us

Words to Imply Specificity

Readers like to know specifics, and these words will trigger that desire to know the exact “what”, “why”, and “how” of what you’re selling. For instance, if you want to convert your readers into subscribers, convince them that your writing tips will explain exactly how to improve their writing in specific examples or detailed steps.

• Because
• Certain
• Comprehensive
• Exactly
• Explain
• Define
• Definite
• Detailed
• How
• Identify
• In-depth
• Precise
• Specific
• This
• Why

Words to Imply Simplicity

People don’t want to read content that’s overly long and difficult to read, so use these words to persuade them into thinking that your content is easy to read and won’t take much time or effort.

• All it takes
• Basic
• Cheat sheet
• Easy
• Easy-as-pie
• Easy-to-read
• Effortless
• Formula
• Guide
• How-to
• In less than
• In no time
• Just
• No problem
• Nothing to it
• Simple
• Piece of cake
• Practical
• Quick
• Step-by-step
• Straight forward
• Template
• Tricks

Words to Imply Urgency

Use these words to persuade readers to take action immediately by implying scarcity, limited time, and loss aversion. Instead of making them want something, make them not want to lose something.

• Act now
• Clearance
• Deadline
• Don’t miss out
• Ends soon
• Expires
• Hurry
• Never again
• Now
• One day only
• Last chance
• Limited
• Running out
• While they last

Good luck with your word search!

Have any powerful words to add? Let us know in the comments below!

Did you know that meeting planners have one of the most stressful jobs in the nation as reported by Business News Daily. The meeting planner profession is listed fifth after military personnel, firefighter, airline pilot and police officer.

I believe it! I only have one or two trade shows per year. Yet it is the times before these shows that I get the most stressed. Below are some “hacks” or strategies that will help you not only beat your stress, but maybe channel that energy and eventually boost your productivity.

1. Do some breathing exercises every night before you to go to sleep
Research shows that keeping a bedtime routine facilitates good sleep. However, this is hard to do when you travel. Likely most of your routine is subject to change; your schedule is different, your room is different, your diet is different… you get the idea. While you can try to keep all of these as consistent as possible the one thing you can reliably control is having a routine about how you use your breath during bedtime. You’ve heard it before, in the face of stress and change you can always just BREATHE. One idea for breathing exercises from Prevention magazine is to exhale through your mouth, close your mouth and inhale through your nose, hold your breath for 7 seconds, exhale for 8 and repeat 3 times. This should settle you down and if you do it consistently at home and during travel it will help signal to your body that it is time to sleep.

2. Drink some herbal tea about an hour before you go to sleep
Bonus points for bringing your own tea when you travel. This way you will always have some on hand when all they offer in the plane or at the hotel is black tea. Just ask for some hot water and you are set! You can use the hotel coffee maker to make some or order it from room service if you were not able to stop at Starbucks. Herbal tea will help hydrate you after a busy day and you can get some that will actually help promote sleep like chamomile. My favorites are Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime and Yogi Bedtime (no they did not pay me to say that).

3. Take a walk outside if possible
Taking a walk in the morning will help you set your circadian rhythm in a new time zone. You don’t have to go very far, a walk around the block once or twice is enough. In the afternoon it will help you de-stress and re-energize before going back to work and it is much healthier than that can of soda or candy bar you may be craving. In the evening it will help you relax after a long day and keep you away from email. During the summer months I like to get my kids and walk to the park almost every day. Most of the time they don’t want to do it, but once I get them outside they run ahead of me and I get a little quiet time.

4. Do some yoga in your hotel room
You don’t need a mat if you happen to be traveling, you can just use your hotel towel. You can buy some of those funky sticky gloves and socks if you really want to avoid sliding around when you travel without a yoga mat. However, I usually don’t bother. I know people who are not familiar with yoga often think it entails contorting yourself into a pretzel and although you could do that as part of your practice it can just be doing some very simple moves for about 20 minutes. Medical Daily has a good article that shows some basic poses. Bonus points: Use your phone to play relaxing music or sounds, or use a meditation or yoga app on a regular basis.

5. Use a foam roller to rub against all those tight spots in your back
What? You forgot or don’t want to buy one? Go ahead and roll up a towel or use a tennis ball to use instead. You can also use the foam roller to do some ab work or probably more realistically prop up your legs while you are catching up on entertainment tonight in the hotel room.

6. Get a massage before and after your event
I know you think you don’t have the time or can’t afford it. However, consider that you can’t afford not to do it. Whether it is a professional massage at a spa, a nice backrub from your sweetie or just sitting on a massage chair at the airport, the health and stress-reducing benefits will pay off with a healthier and more efficient you. Mayo Clinic reports that massage benefits include “reducing stress, pain and muscle tension.” In fact they indicate that some studies found massage to be helpful for anxiety, digestive disorders, headaches, insomnia related to stress and more. Check, check, check.

7. Do some meditation. I know it sounds a bit intimidating and time-consuming, but…
You can meditate on your walk to the show floor instead of going over the list of everything that could go wrong. Concentrate on breathing in and breathing out evenly as you walk. You can meditate as you are waiting at the baggage claim rather than giving the person in front of you who will not let you get your bag another dirty look. Breathe in, breathe out. Swimming at the hotel pool for half an hour can be a wonderful opportunity to meditate. I have heard that going for a run can be meditative. I am too busy catching my breath on the rare occasion that I run to meditate, but I do have to confess that I feel better afterward.

8. Have some chocolate!
I know this could be dangerous, but work with me here. I don’t mean scarf down a whole bag of M&M’s. I mean buy a wonderful piece of Belgian or local chocolate from your favorite vendor and then make a special time to eat it, and enjoy it, slowly and mindfully. By this I mean, do not eat it while you are checking your email or texting your booth vendor. Instead, take the time to look at it, enjoy its aroma and then eat it. Slowly!

9. Have a beer with friends
I am really getting crazy now. Bear with me. There is ample research that social support can reduce stress. The national institute of health says “Numerous studies indicate social support is essential for maintaining physical and psychological health.” So, I guess technically you don’t have to have a beer to reap the benefits. Wine or even lemonade will do as long as you have a chance to talk to friends and connect. If you are traveling, you can take the opportunity to call your sister, best friend or shrink if things have gotten really out of hand.

10. Create something beautiful
Some people knit when they are stressed. I think that knitting can be a meditative activity. Part of the allure in making something beautiful is that it’s one of a kind. You can take those stressful times, when you feel total lack of control from planning for a trade show, and use that energy to take a break from planning and make something tangible. Art can take your mind off your problems like few things can – whether it is a watercolor, knitting a scarf or designing something unique to display in your home or office. The project can give you a much needed breather and a sense of accomplishment that can be a lifesaver when there appears to be nothing but delays beyond your control at work. Also, according to an article by Entrepreneur Magazine taking breaks can make you more productive!

As you strive to manage your work stress with these “hacks” consider this. According to a study by Shawn Anchor, the author of the Happiness Advantage, you can use stress to your advantage. He argues in an article published in the Harvard Business Review entitled Make Stress Work for You that individuals can be trained to rethink stress and use it to improve their productivity and health. A lot of the negative effects of stress are balanced by positive effects, like creating mental toughness, improving memory and speeding up recovery. By recognizing that stress is going to be part of our daily lives and that it is something we can manage and even take advantage of, we can take a deep breath and tackle our next event planning meeting with a smile.

If you are worried about your next trade show or event consider requesting an ROI calculator to help you prepare for it properly so you can take some time to relax and then measure your results.

This article was originally published on SkylineTradeShowTips.com

The post 3 Unexpected Ways Writers Deliver Value (So They Can Charge More) appeared first on Copyblogger.

Your sales reps play an important role in getting your brand and content in front of the right people — especially on social networks. But what if we told you that despite your best efforts, you may be missing a key group that can help amplify your messaging to an even larger network of people?

This is where internal empowerment programs come in. They can help you maximize the reach and impact of your content and support broader marketing initiatives, while also reaffirming your brand’s expertise, unique positioning and value propositions.

Your organization may have a “referral program” or an “internal advocacy group” designed to create a thriving and passionate community of employees. But internal empowerment programs have a more distinct impact on the marketing division, helping you:

• Drive adoption of new marketing, demand generation and sales practices
• Improve internal team communication, collaboration and goal-setting
• Amplify brand reach and reaffirm overall positioning
• Maximize content amplification and performance

Regardless of your focus, there are a few key steps and best practices you should apply to craft a killer empower program.

1. Set your goals.

This may seem like a big “well, duh” moment, but you’d be surprised how many organizations are not strategic in their employee empowerment and advocacy efforts. They spend big bucks rolling out new technology or large-scale transformation initiatives, only to have their investments fall flat. Before you get started building your program, you need to ask: What exactly are we trying to do here?

A good way to establish your goals is to first look at what’s ailing your organization. Is the rest of your team looped in on marketing’s big campaigns or branding projects? Are your teams living and breathing the same best practices you’re promoting to current and potential buyers? Are your employees actively promoting your brand’s content and thought leadership to help you achieve your goals? Once you identify what needs to be fixed, you can start to develop your strategy.

2. Identify your leaders.

Select one or two leaders within each department. These executives should serve as key influencers for your program by helping you promote the assets, tactics, best practices and thought leadership you’re trying to disseminate through your organization. Have ongoing meetings (either weekly or monthly) with them to better understand these different departments, their day-to-day struggles and what they need to succeed. Brainstorm ideas around what content, resources or training different departments will need to stay engaged and buy into specific practices or campaigns.

3. Cultivate a culture of collaboration.

Beyond your meetings with department leaders, you should communicate to all teams that you want to hear their thoughts, opinions and honest feedback. This could be around a big-picture brand initiative or a specific marketing campaign. For example, if you want to improve the success of a marketing campaign, you should always encourage the content marketing, product marketing, field marketing, social, PR and events teams to collaborate, share ideas and develop a final execution plan. When you do, you encourage your marketing organization to plan on a larger scale. Rather than designing a series of one-off assets, you’re extending a marketing message across all departments for a comprehensive, multi-touch initiative.

4. Create supporting assets and training materials.

To keep your team members engaged and excited about a new program or initiative, you should create a series of supporting assets. Embrace a variety of different formats to pique their interest and appeal to different learning styles. You also can adapt your content to your team’s workload and timelines. For example, developing detailed playbooks or educational programs can take a lot of time and, in turn, can be daunting for your team. Instead, start small by designing a series of cheat sheets, slide decks or holding open webcasts or digital roundtables. You can always scale up or build more content over time.

5. Make it easy to spread the word.

When a new asset is about to launch, spread the word via email, your company’s intranet or any other hub your organization uses to share information and resources. Share the final link, along with supporting social images and posts they can easily copy and paste into the network of their choice.

6. Practice what you preach.

Perhaps the most important of all best practices: You need to make sure you and other program leaders are applying the rules and methods you’re relaying to the rest of your team. If you want your team members to better collaborate on content ideas and execution, make sure you do the same. Or if you want your team to implement specific marketing best practices, you and your team should be the first ones on board. If you don’t, your fellow employees will quickly catch wind and simply ignore everything you say and every asset you share.

As your program progresses, you may acquire a lot of feedback and learn that specific changes or improvements need to be made. It’s important that you’re open to all types of feedback and willing to refine your program over time. That way, you’re constantly supporting your colleagues as their needs change.

Download our Real-Time, Buyer-Focused Content Marketing Handbook to learn more about employee empowerment and sales enablement programs.

Influencer compensation and how it is determined has been a hot-button issue lately. If you’re new to the industry, the different compensation rates can seem random. You’ll find very little consistency across follower ranges or content verticals. Each influencer wants a different rate. This can be overwhelming for brands trying to initiate and manage influencer campaigns. First things first, influencer marketing is not a media buy. If you’re trying to justify influencer marketing spend the same way you measure TV, radio or billboard buys, you’re going to come up short handed. Make sure that you’re ready for influencer marketing.

Ok, you’re ready? Good, we thought you were.

Influencer marketing is not a media buy– it’s a creative process that is unique to each program. Much like other creative roles, there are a lot of variables that go into setting the price. Think of it like commissioning a painting from an artist. You’ve got to deal with each person individually. For the sake of simplicity, there are a few main factors that play into compensation: who you are, who the influencer is, and the content ask.

Who Are You?

When you come knocking on an influencer’s door, the first question they’ll want to know is “who’s asking?” Having lots of name recognition is usually helpful for a brand. Influencers want to build up a list of great brands they’ve collaborated with. This can help legitimize the influencer’s presence in the world of advertising. Your brand plays a big part in the determination of compensation, but it’s not always cut and dry.

A smaller influencer may want to work with a big brand and so will settle for a smaller compensation because of the value they derive from the partnership. Conversely, large brands can be a turn-off for influencers who are cautious about branded content in their feeds– big brands are recognizable and may come across as inauthentic so they may charge more per post. The ultimate factor is lifestyle match. If the influencer is a perfect lifestyle match for your brand, they will probably be excited about the partnership and willing to negotiate. Your job is to convey the brand values, goals of the campaign, and the reason that you think each influencer will be a good fit.

Who is the Influencer?

There are a few factors that you need to take into account when evaluating an influencer. Reach is the easiest and most apparent. However, you cannot reliably determine compensation (or value) based on reach alone. An influencer with 30,000 followers may charge more than an influencer with 1 million followers. In general, larger following will require higher compensation. Next, you should think about engagement, influencers whose photos spark lively conversations and may help reveal brand sentiment or other learnings for your products will be more expensive than influencers who simply post a photo and get little interaction. But remember, not all engagement is equal. The final factor you should take into account is quality. Will this influencer create a unique and appealing photo or video for your brand? Will they take time creating the content, dreaming up interesting ways to incorporate your products into their life? Some influencers even have to pay professional photographers to shoot their content, so that cost per photo may get passed on to you. Higher quality content will cost you more than a haphazard selfie with your bottle of juice, piece of candy or tube of lipstick.

What Content are You Asking For?

Your most important job is to be very clear about what content you are asking for. The more you have outlined up front, the more likely it is that influencers will want to participate and the content you get will be higher quality. The most ideal way to conduct an influencer campaign is to set up the expectations up front, give lots of resources and examples and let your influencers post freely. The more you dictate content, the more expensive it will be to have influencers agree to post. Additionally, dictated or heavily controlled content is more likely to be deleted from the influencer’s feed because it is not authentic to their style. Another consideration is timing. How many posts are you looking for? Some big names won’t do single branded posts in their feed– they only engage brands for longer term projects. Some influencers are just the opposite and will never post more than twice about a brand. The number of posts you’re soliciting from influencers will affect the price as will the timing. A post around Christmas is going to cost more than a post in the middle of January because there is tons of brand competition during the holidays.

The final pieces to think about with content ask and pricing are content rights and exclusivity. The main question you should ask yourself is “what am I going to do with the content created during this campaign?” Some campaigns are only looking for reach and engagement, the posts go live on influencer feeds and that’s the end of it. However, many brands are looking to repurpose influencer content for their own social media feeds and even paid advertising campaigns. If you plan to repurpose content from influencers, you’re usually going to have to pay more for that content and negotiate the content rights and usage up front. Influencers almost never transfer copyright for their work over to brands. However, most influencers are happy to make usage deals so that you can use the amazing content to promote your brand in other ways.

If you’re looking for exclusivity with an influencer, meaning that they agree not to post about your competitors within a designated time period, you’re gonna have to pay up. It is very reasonable to expect exclusivity within a photo (ie no other brands are promoted within the photo or caption promoting your brand) but any exclusivity beyond that can become expensive because you are paying for the potential loss of other brand deals that come up.

B2B marketing is all about finding out what’s most important to your target audience and seeing how your product or service can fill in the blanks. However, when it comes to marketing to millennials, many find themselves a bit lost.

What’s really important to Millennials? Are they a target audience for the B2B sector? How do you market to them?

In this post, we’ll answer those questions — and you’ll learn how to get into the mind of a Millennial.

First, let’s answer the question…

Who Are Millennials?

The demarcation years that categorize Millennials are a bit disputed. Some say that Millennials are those born between 1980-1996. But, generally speaking…

People born between 1982 and 2004 are typically considered to be of the Millennial Generation.

Now, a lot happened in those 22 years. If you were born in 1982, you likely remember a time when cell phones, email, and the internet were only a dream. Although, you probably were never a part of the workforce without them. On the other end of the spectrum, if you were born in 2004, you probably don’t remember the world before the iPhone, or instant messaging. It’s also very unlikely that you’re reading this post.

Clearly, when we talk about B2B marketing and Millennials, we’re really aiming our marketing artillery at those born closer to the early 1980s, those more likely to be B2B decision makers. And, studies show that they are entirely relevant in the B2B sector. In fact…

46% of Millennials are making purchasing decisions in the B2B sector.

So is it necessary to learn how to market to Millennials? You betcha!

The target Millennial audience is now in their early to mid-thirties. They are comfortable with technology, but they weren’t weaned on it. They may be able to see the pitfalls of a generation growing up with modern technology, but they also realize that they don’t want to forfeit their own current tech lifestyle.

Millennials in their early to mid-thirties are digital expats. They remember their homeland, filled with afternoons spent outside in the sunshine rather than inside messaging with friends and playing video games online. However, they’re quite content with their current habitat in the land of texting, emails, and Facebook.

What is Really Important to a Millennial?

Although the mere mention of the word “Millennial,” associated with the word “business” may conjure up images of offices filled with ping pong tables, bean bag chairs, boutique coffee shop runs, and afternoon naps, the truth is that they’re not all that different from anyone else.

What do Millennials value?

1. Transparency

No one likes a liar. And the internet makes it pretty easy to present a certain persona, even if it’s not real. However, that bubble bursts pretty quickly when companies don’t live up to expectations. Yelp, Google, TripAdvisor, even the Better Business Bureau, have accustomed Millennials to seeing honest reviews of the performance of any brand, product, or service.

It’s this kind of transparency that Millennials have come to expect from companies.

2. Authenticity

Although I’m not a fan of the current dressing down for work trend, I understand the sentiment behind it. Unlike the generation that entered the workforce in the 1980s — where making money and getting ahead were of prime importance — Millennials want their workspace and their living space to be cohesive. It’s all about doing something you love and not pretending to be someone you’re not.

Years ago, office hours were office hours. However, now that you can be reached night and day by phone, internet, and texting, personal time on weekends and evenings barely exist. So why not make it more comfortable? If work life can be enjoyable and blend seamlessly with the rest of life, why not make every effort to be comfortable and happy?

3. Responsiveness

Since Millennials haven’t experienced a workplace without instant communication, they expect nothing less than immediacy. That’s not to say that they are always demanding but they don’t understand slow response time.

To the Millennial generation, there’s little leeway given for failing to respond rapidly by social media, messaging, text, email… the list is so long, there’s just no excuse for not replying in a timely fashion.

4. Analytics

The Millennial generation is perhaps filled with more doubting Thomases than any other. This only makes sense since they’ve grown up in a world filled with competition.

Think about it. If you were born in the 1950s, how much competition was there for home phone service? Now, think about how many cell phone providers exist. I can think of at least a half a dozen top-tier ones right off the top of my head. And they’re all vying for your business.

Millennials are accustomed to this mentality. They really don’t know anything else. So they want proof, not just talk. Facts and figures speak louder than promises.

How to Adapt Your B2B Marketing to Millennials

Let’s start with a brief buyer persona. We’ll call our gal Millennial Marissa.

Millennial Marissa was born in 1984, so she’s currently 32 years old. Melissa would like to have kids, but there’s still plenty of time for that, so she and her husband are waiting. Marissa loves her profession. It’s not what she went to college for, but the pay is good, and after hefty student bills, she knows that she should be thrilled to have a job at all. Especially since she ended up back at her parent’s house for a couple of years after college.

Marissa has a few friends from college she keeps in touch with, but mostly she hangs out with people from work. Her workday starts early. Sure, she’s not at the office early, but as soon as the alarm goes off in the morning, she checks her phone to see who emailed her since she last checked it at 11 p.m., right before she fell asleep. She answers a few emails from partners overseas since their day is already well underway and they’re waiting for her input on a project.

While standing in line for her Starbucks breakfast, Marissa checks Facebook and replies to a few texts — some personal, some work-related. Then, the day at the office is filled with messaging, video conference calls, and keeping a constant eye on several calendars to coordinate schedules. She has a project that needs to be submitted online, but the platform she’s using seems to have a lot of hiccups so she has to table that while she tweets tech support for help.

I could go on about Marissa, but you likely get a feel for her day. It’s nonstop. So how do you market your product or service to her?

Let’s use our four Millennial values and see how you can apply them.

1. How to be Transparent

Nothing turns a Millennial off more than a company with a poorly-designed website that lacks a strong online presence. How can they know if your company is legit?

Make it easy for them to find out as much about your company as possible. Encourage reviews on sites like Glassdoor, Yelp, and Google. Make sure you’re engaged on social media so that your current customers can publicize their experience with you. Of course, this may open you up to criticism, but if your customer service is up to par, you should have little to worry about.

2. Be Authentic

I was going to write “How to be Authentic,” but if you need to be told how, we have an entirely new problem. You shouldn’t have to think about.

In a practical way, though, reaching out to Millennials is easy if you’re authentic on social media. Do you share pictures on Instagram that aren’t just industry-related? Why not share pics of staff pets? Or the view from your office? Or the offbeat collection of mugs that sits in the break room.

The point is, Millennials want to see your human side. They’re on the clock almost always, so you need to provide a little fun, too.

3. How to be Responsive

Slow response times can kill your reputation with Millennials. Are you doing everything you can to respond quickly? Do you offer a “let us call you” option so that they don’t have to wait on hold? Do you provide tech support through Twitter or chat? If you don’t, it’s time to start. Get rid of the “fill out this form and we’ll contact you sometime” mentality.

4. Provide Proof of Success

With so many automated systems at your fingertips, there’s no reason to not provide detailed analytics. Case studies are your best friend in this instance. A well-written case study reads much like a blog post, but it also provides facts and figures to back up your tale. Did you help a company boost sales very quickly? Great! How quickly and by how much? There’s so much content available that you need to remember that most people skim. So make those facts and figures stand out.

53% of Millennials believe analytics can help them make better decisions. ~IBM

So what do you think? Are you ready to market to Millennials? Hopefully, it doesn’t seem as daunting a task anymore.

However, one avenue we didn’t really unpack here is social media. This is a primary route to reaching most age groups, and yet many B2B companies are still at a loss for how to fully leverage it. If you find that to be true, or if you need a little help re-strategizing your existing social media execution, go ahead and download your free Social Media Prospecting Workbook.

Image Copyright 123RF Stock Photo

Verne Harnish is the President of Gazelles - the coaching organization that helps fast growth companies.  In addition to his best-selling books, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and his latest, Scaling Up, he writes the Weekly Insights, which I always read from top to bottom.  In his June 30 insights, Verne included a quote from Greg Brenneman, author of Right Away and All at Once - 5 Steps to Transform Your Business and Enrich Your Life.  Verne really liked Greg's emphasis on how to drive sales.  Greg says, "Empirical evidence shows that you get at least four times the market value for a dollar of profit that comes from revenue growth versus a dollar of profit that comes from cost reduction."  

Isn't that a great quote?  But it's more than a quote.  It's a blueprint!  Let's discuss some of the ways that you can achieve the desired revenue growth.

When we look at ways businesses embark on marketing campaigns, we can see that quantity is regarded as a good thing.

Lots of traffic – good. Viral posts are the Holy Grail: they generate thousands of page views every hour. Likes and shares: the more the merrier.

And from all of that traffic, and social interest, the business hopes for a high quantity of leads and conversions.

But when it comes to data, quantity in itself cannot drive profit and success. Simply having a lot of data does not help. In fact, it can muddy the waters and make decision-making more difficult, increasing cost and reducing efficiency.

So: quality and quantity are not mutually exclusive, but there is a relationship between them.

Maintaining a Virtual Address Book

As we become more digitally proficient, we all try to migrate data, rather than starting afresh.

Think about the last time you purchased a smartphone. Did you delete everything off your old device, and create all of your contacts from scratch? Or did you migrate data to the cloud, transferring it from the old device to a new one?

Naturally, hanging onto data is more convenient. And this has turned us into ‘data hoarders’. We hold on to data that is well past its use-by date.

When we retain data, we also import and export it. That import and export process can introduce errors. Contact names, numbers and other pieces of data can be subtly different between different devices. You might have noticed this yourself: some records don’t save after you switch devices, and you have to edit them to get them to work.

What About Big Data?

When you consider the huge appetite for Big Data in business, the smartphone analogy looks shaky. After all, Big Data is a good thing– isn’t it? Should we aim for quantity, first and foremost?

Big Data has been preened and cleaned. It has been standardized and processed so that businesses can understand it. There is a focus on quality and quantity. That’s why most Big Data comes from large companies that have already done the leg work.

In contrast, most of the raw data we all collect is not valuable until some kind of data quality process is put in place. This is why data scientists are so highly valued, they deliver clean data that is actionable. If we simply dumped the contents of a million spreadsheets into a text file, this would be Big, but it certainly wouldn’t be beautiful.

The Business Case for Quality

Achieving a high standard of data quality is arguably not cheap. Achieving a high volume is. We could simply sit on the database forever, allowing it to grow without restriction. That would certainly be the cheapest way forward.

But to look at the cost, we have to weigh up waste and value – not just pricing

• We can define waste as any activity that takes longer (or costs more) because of a low-quality data set. This might be physical waste, like returned mail and discarded paper. It might be waste that takes other forms: wasted storage media, wasted space, wasted time.
• In the same context, value is the importance assigned to a particular dataset; its place within the organization. How valuable is a CRM that’s stuffed with records that will not validate or save? If the sales team are working from 2-year-old contact details, how valuable is that information compared to a fresh lead?

Consider the fact that 60-70 percent of enterprise IT budgets are spent on infrastructure and operations. Consider how unhelpful it is when we continually heap unsorted, inaccurate, invalid and decayed data into a CRM that is already struggling.

When we look at the way data is handled, the ‘cheapest’ option is always the most wasteful, and results in the lowest value. Worse still, any bad data within a database will spread to all integrated systems, derailing attempts to integrate those systems to improve efficiency.

At every stage, data should inform a decision. If it cannot immediately do that, you have a data quality problem.

Embarrassment of Riches

In life, we generate more data now than we have over the course of human existence. We also cling on to more of that data, in a personal and professional capacity.

Smart businesses know when data is helping the cause. They also need to recognize when they’re simply hoarding data, with no clear plan.

We need to look again at the idea of data being good for business, and dive deeper into the nature of the data we hold. If we’re going to spend thousands of pounds implementing CRM systems, we need to nourish those systems with actionable and accurate data.

Quality and quantity are not mutually exclusive. You can have a very large, reasonably accurate CRM. But you cannot reach this point without investment in quality, and not without the realization that increasing quantity does not increase the likelihood of success.

Norwegian Air has been named the best low-cost airline in Europe for the fourth consecutive year by the leading consumer-aviation website Skytrax.

The airline also took home the prize for best long-haul low-cost airline in the world.

Norwegian was presented with the awards at a ceremony on Tuesday at the 2016 Farnborough Airshow.

"We believe that not only should air travel be affordable to all but also that low cost can still mean high quality," Norwegian CEO Bjørn Kjos said in a statement.

"These awards give us huge momentum as we continue our ambitious expansion plans in Europe, the US, and beyond."

Norwegian is certainly making its presence felt.

The expansion of the company's Norwegian Air International subsidiary into the US has ruffled feathers. It's a potentially industry-changing move that US airlines and unions have vigorously opposed.

The US airlines are objecting on the grounds that NAI could exploit foreign labor laws, but in truth they should be worried about the kind of international network the carrier is attempting to create.

In April the US Department of Transportation tentatively approved the Irish — yes, Irish — airline's application to fly into the US.

You may be wondering why an airline called "Norwegian" would be based in Ireland. That's the root of the issue.

NAI is one of several subsidiaries operating under the Norwegian banner. Unlike the rest of the company, including Norwegian Air Shuttle, NAI is based in Dublin instead of in Norway.

This, critics say, allows NAI to take advantage of Ireland's employment laws, which are significantly less stringent than Norway's. As a result, they say, NAI could hire lower-cost pilots and crew members from Asia to fly transatlantic routes. (The company says its current service to the US is operated by NAS with Europe-based crews.)

AFL-CIO Transportation president Edward Wytkind referred to the DOT's decision as one to "green-light this low-road air carrier whose operating plan will destroy fair competition and extinguish middle-class airline jobs here and in Europe."

But NAI says none of its Asia-based crews will operate flights into and out of the US. Further, the pay differential between the airline's Asia- and Europe-based pilots is roughly 1%, Norwegian Air spokesman Anders Lindstrom told Business Insider.

And all this complaining about NAI is happening even though it is tiny, with a fleet of just 10 Boeing 787 Dreamliners. The major US airlines and their European alliance partners have more than 1,000 wide-body long-haul jets at their disposal and are responsible for more than 80% of the traffic across the Atlantic.

Here's why Norwegian is scary

Here's the real problem for US airlines: Norwegian is going to expand rapidly and in a way that eats at the foundation of the hub-based system that major US airlines depend on for survival.

How? By offering direct flights to smaller cities in the US from underserved cities in Northern Europe.

In practice, this means passengers in Hartford, Connecticut, or Providence, Rhode Island, no longer have to fly to Boston or New York for an international trip. Instead, for a far lower cost than a US carrier, they might fly NAI to Oslo, Norway; Stockholm; or Hamburg, Germany. Later this year, Norwegian is launching service to Paris from New York, Los Angeles, and Fort Lauderdale.

This kind of setup not only undercuts US airlines' international business; it could also threaten their domestic operation.

But there's more

With its base in European Union-member Ireland, NAI will also be able to use its hubs in Europe as transit points for passengers traveling into and out of Asia and Europe to the US. As a result, NAI will be able to tap into the lucrative US-to-South Asia market over which US, European, and Middle Eastern airlines have fought for the past decade.

The presence of Norwegian and its low-cost model could provide competitive pressure on legacy carriers for value-minded travelers the same way Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar have for premium-cabin clients.

In fact, NAI could be the airline to disrupt the transatlantic long-haul business the same way other low-cost carriers have transformed the European airline industry. In Norwegian's home market, it has forced its local rival SAS to revamp the way the 70-year-old airline does business.

"We have made significant transformative changes to stay competitive and to survive," SAS CEO Rickard Gustafson told Business Insider in March. "We have cut overhead costs, adjusted pensions and union contracts."

NAI's weapon in all this will be narrow-body jets like the Boeing 737 Max 8 and the Airbus A320neo. The company has orders for as many as 350 of these aircraft in place.

While transatlantic service has traditionally been operated using large wide-body jumbo jets, the narrow-body jets are cheaper to buy and cheaper to operate. The first of the 737 Max aircraft are expected to enter service in 2017, while Norwegian is expected to see its first A320neos later this year.

Norwegian won't be able to reach the US legacy carriers' bread-and-butter customer: the high-end business traveler. Major US airlines depend these high-value clients, who fly often and pay full-business or first-class prices, to generate the revenue they need to stay afloat.

Norwegian's low-cost premium cabin on its Dreamliners may attract some of these customers, but it is unlikely to sway high-end corporate clients.

But based on how Norwegian has shaken up the airline industry in its homeland, US carriers should be wary of the disruptive power of this airline.

One final detail: According to Norwegian's CEO, the target price of admission for one of his airline's flight across the Atlantic is $69.

SEE ALSO: RANKED: The 20 best airlines in the world

Join the conversation about this story »

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When I first started my sales career as an overly aggressive outside salesman, we were taught to knock down doors for business, hunt out prospects, go in for the kill, and one-call close them. (Follow-ups were for losers who couldn't close on the first date.)

In all my time on the job, I had never heard the word 'upsell.’ Not in any of my trainings at two of the most aggressive B2B long-distance phone service reselling companies, and not in my early years as a broker. Instead, here’s how it went: Hunt them, sell them, and forget about them.

Holy shiitake, Batman. I left a lot of commission on the table.

There’s no better way to increase your monthly sales than to prospect your existing customers. You know, the ones you closed because you took the time to see what their needs were and the solution you could provide? The ones you’ve kept in touch with over time to make sure they were still shiny happy people?

If you've done it right, your clients will buy from you again. If you’ve treated them well and offered them solution-based recommendations, they will be open to new services or offerings because they will trust you. And if you know your customer, make an effort to keep up with them, and demonstrate your appreciation of their business, you’ll uncover new pain. You’ll either know whether a new solution you can offer would be helpful, or whether you should direct your customer to the company that can solve this pain.

If this is how you approach sales, you’ll become a partner in your clients’ businesses instead of coming off like a sales jockey trying to score an extra few bucks off your client so you can pay for the next round of drinks at happy hour. And because you’ll be trusted, you’ll actually make more money than if you simply pursued the next sale without regard for your customers’ needs.

All this is to say that upsells are not to be taken lightly.

The following scenarios are the three situations where upsells are generally appropriate:

1. You uncover a customer’s new need because you’ve kept in contact with them, watch for news about them, and monitor their progress. You then offer them your solution.
2. Your company releases a new product or service. Because you’ve taken the time to understand your client’s business, you know your new offering is a good fit for one of their needs you haven’t been previously solving.
3. A client considers you a trusted advisor, and calls you with a question. When you ask them why they ran into this problem, they tell you about a challenge they’re facing, so you recommend another product your company offers to make sure they don't have that challenge in the future.

When you are a solutions-based sales provider and a professional who knows his customer, you can dig into the treasure trove that is your hard-won client base to offer new potential solutions to people who have trusted you before. Because you’ve previously acted professionally, your customers are 99% more likely to pick up the phone when you call than 99% of the new prospects you’re trying to reach for the first time.

What do you do when your firm has a new offering? Do you go out cold and see who will buy? Or do you go to your client base first?

When I was a rookie salesman, I never would have thought of upselling, because nobody ever taught me anything different. It was “eat what you kill” that day and that day only. Tomorrow was another hunting day. “Follow-up” and “upsell” were not part of my sales lexicon.

Old-school sales teaches reps to close and move on.

But modern salespeople know that the close is just the beginning. You must deliver, follow-up, serve, and upsell (when appropriate!).

If I ever took the time to look at the additional offerings I may have been able to help my old clients implement and save some money, I would have sold them more services and made more money myself. But I didn’t understand the potential of upsells, and I only went hunting for new business -- I only cared about the money going into my pocket.

Now I know that as long as I help clients save money and add value to their business, the money will take care of itself.

So who can you upsell today?

There are three types of identities we all have as human beings. Identities of origin we are given at birth: gender, race, or religion among others. Later, we form identities of growth, those in which we seek to satisfy our emotional needs, based on our likes and dislikes. Finally, as we become more independent, we often look to make a contribution to society through our identities of aspiration.

These three sources of identity shape the communities we join and create. Communities of aspiration are especially powerful. When people who share the same ambitious goals come together, they can move mountains. While communities of origin and growth currently attract the most attention from HR leaders, we think communities of aspiration deserve more attention.

Any company that wants to improve collaboration, break down so-called siloes, or live into its diversity goals will be well-served by pursuing a deeper understanding of each. Each requires a different approach.

Communities of origin are our connection with the past; they link us to our forebears, who provided us with our first map of understanding the world. Whether we personally identify with them or not, other people will often categorize us according to them.

Whether it’s based on race, gender, religion, or country, some communities of origin experience obstacles to inclusion. Since the 1980s, some organizations have tried to eliminate these obstacles in their workplaces. One of the most common efforts has been to create affinity groups within the company for people sharing a specific identity (a “Women’s Leadership Network” for example) so that participants can mentor each other and discuss ways to overcome the shared challenges they face. For example, IBM has created its business resource groups (BRG), employee-driven units based not only on race or gender but also on issues like cross-generational differences. By 2015 the total number of such groups in IBM was at least 244 around the world. Such communities are particularly useful in recruitment, hiring, talent development, or in defining employee retention policies.

Most multinational companies now have similar BRG schemes that help achieve specific key performance indicators on how diversity of origin manifests itself in the organization.

Communities of growth offer connections to the present; they are made up of people we feel an affinity with based on our current likes and dislikes. Communities of growth may be official or semi-official – such as the company softball or soccer team – or self-organizing and informal, such as a group of employees who regularly meet up for yoga and coffee. communities often provide us with a feeling of security. They also give us maps of the world different to those of our identities of origin, which is why they change as we change, while at the same time always representing our present.

Many companies have attempted to develop friendship-based communities among employees, typically organizing activities such as weekends out, departmental Christmas parties, and so on, in a bid to create emotional ties between workers and the company. But because emotional communities are held together as much by the likes as by the dislikes of members, they can be unpredictable and difficult to manage. As a result, these emotional communities can sometimes work to the benefit of organizations, but they can just as often end up having the opposite effect, particularly when people share a dislike for certain policies, boss, or for what they consider to be an unfair situation.

Emotional groups, which represent communities of growth, are difficult to value in terms of their contribution to the organization, given their unpredictability, and it can be risky for management to try to engineer them.

We suggest that HR leaders make minimum interventions in trying to influence communities of growth. Emotional communities will emerge in organizations, whether management likes it or not, and will have a life of their own.

Communities of aspiration look toward the future. If communities of origin and growth are bonded by perceptions of sameness, communities of aspiration are held together by the differences between their members.

Corporate communities of aspiration (CCAs) are (often temporarily) bound together by a common business or intellectual challenge. They benefit from the differences between members to co-create or co-execute specific tasks, and when the task is complete, they dissolve.

They have the added benefit of helping to foster ties between employees in different communities of origin and growth – ties that otherwise might not occur. Research we conducted with our colleague Patricia Gabaldon showed that although in the organizations we studied (which were Spanish and Moroccan firms) employees often affiliated according to communities of origin or growth. At one company, this was linguistic, with English-speaking, French-speaking, and Arabic-speaking employees occupying different levels in the organization and rarely intermingling; while at another, it was geographic, with employees from the Basque Country being overly represented among top management positions. Education was another factor, with one company reporting that its engineers bonded closely, creating a closed community that was very difficult for outsiders to penetrate, as was religion, with a Moroccan company noting the limited interaction between women who wore the veil and those who do not. The problem was not so much belonging to a minority, but just being part of a specific group, whether considered a minority or not, and not being able to exit that group to move among others within the organization.

The results of this research suggested that integration among employees in organizations would be improved if further horizontal mobility among affiliation groups was promoted. Communities of aspiration offer a way to do this, making different groups more permeable and accessible.

Making a Corporate Community of Aspiration Work

For a CCA to work, five elements need to be present:

A common project: The main pre-requisite for a CCA to work is a common project, initiative, or the search for a solution to an existing problem within the company. This can be top down, (the company set up a particular challenge or new product) or bottom up (the company allows employees to develop their own creative ideas, and then choose the most convenient ones)

Voluntary: Most CCAs are open to voluntary membership, whether appealing to individuals for specific skills or to the company. People typically aren’t assigned to them, but join them because they’re excited about putting their ideas to work.

Short term: A CCA does not represent a new position or a new career: it is a temporary place in which the individual can channel their ideas or abilities, and once the project is finished CCAs are dissolved. If a new product or unit is required as result of the exercise, then a new team will be put in place on a more permanent basis.

Interlinked: Members of CCAs can belong simultaneously to many others. This creates multiple links among them as part of a super-community structure that allows individual participation within a comfortable small group while at the same time providing exposure to a multiplicity of different groups.

Collaborative: CCAs are not solo pet projects, but require employees to work together. People join in to co-create or co-execute a solution for an existing problem or to co-develop a new initiative or a new product.

Communities of aspiration can be used to come up with new ideas and solutions, as well as execute them.

For example, Valve Corporation, a videogame developer, has defined a unique corporate structure with no bosses or managers at all. Each member of the firm is invited to define her/his contribution to the company according to their choices and preferences. A highly talented developer specialized in graphics animation could choose to work on a game by assuming a “group contributor role,” becoming part of the group (CCA) developing that game. (On the other hand, after finishing this “group contribution”, the same person could choose to work in a more individualistic fashion on the next task.) This “free to choose” approach is mirrored in the firm’s office design. Valve Corporation offices incorporate wheeled desks to foster mobility and allow the fast configuration and re-configuration of groups as well as individual work.

Other companies select specific initiatives as laboratories to test some of the components of CCAs. For example, Everis, an NTT Data Company, launched the “ 1W4US” (One Week for Us) initiative in 2014 to foster collective talent. The company issued innovation challenges related to its strategic plan. Out of all the published ideas, the best five were selected through a combination of participants’ votes and managers’ opinions. Groups of four then formed around the selected ideas to prepare pitch presentations to a jury of the company’s clients. Then the teams spent a week developing an execution plan for each idea. Finally, those plans were presented to a group of investors who weighed in on the value of each idea so that a decision could be made about whether and how to proceed.

A third example is PwC iMarket, an innovation initiative launched in 2013. Once at year Employees can submit ideas to an internal platform. Managers can then “buy” those ideas or choose to participate in developing them further. Each project lasts for 60 days, and then the management team performs an evaluation both of the project as well as the team that developed it.

Whether as a temporary initiative or a permanent way of organizing a company, CCAs are helping companies like these leverage employees’ diverse strenths and motivations.

Organizations cannot oblige their employees to have coffee with this or that group, but they can create structures in which employees can temporarily move out of their comfort zones to join temporary communities of aspiration that strengthen cross-organizational ties and help the company achieve its strategic goals.

Quality sales questions create value. Here’s how it works.

To meet buyer demands, sellers must start and end every sales encounter with value.

Sellers do this by differentiating themselves, building trust and demonstrating to buyers how much they care. Each of these objectives has been linked to asking sales questions.

When interviewed after meeting with sellers who asked quality sales questions, buyers reported favorable impressions of the seller. What’s more, sellers who ask quality sales questions advance the sale faster and close more sales.

Quality Sales Questions Simultaneously Produce these Results:

• Asking questions enables sellers to understand what buyers value.
• Asking questions reveals the hierarchy of buyer preferences.
• Asking questions builds rapport and trust.
• Asking questions improves trustworthiness and serves a specific purpose in all 12 Dimensions of Trust.
• Asking questions creates value for buyers challenged to think in new ways.
• Asking questions stimulates dialogue and signals the seller is genuinely interested in what matters to the buyer.
• Asking questions and gathering information about what matters to the buyer prepares the seller to position product benefits in a way that will be relevant and compelling.
• Asking questions keeps the seller and buyer processes aligned.
• Asking questions will help the seller to avoid making dangerous assumptions about the buyer’s awareness, interest and desire.
• Asking questions creates new value and differentiates the seller who asks them from all other competing sellers.

The importance of asking quality sales questions can’t be over-stated. If you haven’t already read the definitive book about sales questions, be sure to grab a copy today. 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 Sales Questions: 10 Reasons You Need to Ask More of Them appeared first on People First.

Today it seems like everyone is rushing to join the digital membership economy. Two of the most popular tactics are online communities and subscriptions.

For example, you can now subscribe to razor blades, underwear, groceries, clothes, toiletries, even dog toys. Or you can join a premium community for advice, guidance, and connections with like-minded people on topics ranging from healthcare to entrepreneurship to art lessons.

Lots of companies would love to implement a subscription model, especially one with a sticky online community component. This allows firms to build long-term, profitable relationships with customers – seemingly the perfect solution to the era of digital disruption.

But for every LinkedIn or Amazon that’s pulling it off, there are dozens who have failed. What separates the leaders from the stragglers?

Leaders…

Make sure they have a market/service fit before investing in on-boarding customers. Start at the bottom of the funnel. Before investing a nickel in developing your message or turning on the loudspeaker, you need to be sure that once target buyers try your offering, they will love it and will want to continue paying you forever. Until you are confident in that fit, focus your investment on designing the right offering.

Identify the right metrics. In the transactional economy, the most important measures are new customer acquisition and sales. In the digital membership economy, the metrics best apt to indicate success are more likely to be around member churn and engagement. In other words, how long they stay is more critical than how many walk through the front door.

Invest in building a culture of membership. Subscription is a pricing structure. Membership is a mindset. Successful membership businesses focus on the long-term relationship. This has implications across the organization.

• For sales, the moment of transaction is the start, not the finish line.
• For finance, short-term revenue gains do not justify poor treatment of members.
• For product development, the offering needs to evolve constantly to meet members’ needs – changes only every year or two won’t cut it.

Love their members more than their products. When I joined Netflix, it was for three-DVDs-out-at-a-time. Today, streaming is a more efficient way for me to access professionally created video content, and Netflix provides me with streaming. And they are using what they’ve learned about my behavior and preferences to actually create much of the content that I watch. I didn’t join Netflix because I wanted DVDs. I joined Netflix for access to great content in an efficient way. Netflix isn’t in the DVD business, although for some period of time they will continue to offer DVD subscriptions.

I don’t join a gym for a specific class or workout machine. I expect my gym to provide me with a range of equipment, classes and learning opportunities to optimize my fitness. This means that they need to swap in better offerings as they emerge. No one piece of equipment or delivery platform is as important as the overarching goal of your members. It’s the members’ mission that should be your guiding star, not your products, whether you offer DVDs or workouts.

You have to be willing to sunset the old and bring in the new to honor your side of the bargain.

Stragglers…

Create a membership model just because they want recurring revenue. Organizations sometimes move to membership purely to generate more revenue. They aren’t thinking about the value-add for members. Kate Hudson has a lovely line of yogawear available through subscription, which is great, but some people thought they were buying a single outfit and were surprised to find themselves being auto-charged. Not everyone needs a new outfit every month. In building a formal long-term relationship, trust is critical.

Insight Center

Let the members determine the direction of the business. While you do need to put your members at the center of everything you do, you can’t let them (or their online discussions) drive your strategic direction. Often, today’s members are less likely to be willing to transition to the new. As a result, they might send you in a direction that doesn’t appeal to incoming members.

Let’s say you run an online community. By default, the longtime members are comfortable with your web interface. And switching costs might be high. So it might seem like you don’t need to invest in new platforms. But new members, who are in evaluation mode, might be more likely to want a mobile app option, and may not join without it. Inertia can keep members from canceling, but don’t fall into the trap of confusing it with love.

Inertia isn’t love, and feedback isn’t strategy.

Some members’ input may be more valuable than other’s depending on their vintage (i.e. the future over the past) but preferences are their domain and strategy is yours. Listen most to the members who are most representative of your future, but remember to spend some time studying the market and prospects as well in order to get a full picture.

Give it away, hoping to make it up in volume. I love freemium, the idea of combining a premium paid membership with a free membership that provides value forever. But freemium needs to work in service to a larger business strategy. Freemium works best in three scenarios:

• As a means of trial. Many people who have a free subscription to Dropbox get all of the online storage they need. But for others, as they make Dropbox part of their daily routine, they find they need more storage and greater functionality. As a result, they upgrade to the premium service.
• To create a networked effect. Each new member that joins LinkedIn for free creates additional value for the recruiters, salespeople and jobseekers paying for LinkedIn subscriptions. And if no one used the free version of LinkedIn, there’d be little reason for those people to pay at all.
• To serve as a marketing channel. Some people never pay for a SurveyMonkey subscription, because they only need small surveys sent to a few people, with limited analytics. But when those people send out their surveys, they are advertising for SurveyMonkey to everyone who receives the survey. If one of those survey recipients subscribes to the premium offering, the sender (who’s a free member) becomes a marketing channel for attracting and converting new members.

If you aren’t using your free subscription for one of these purposes, there is no reason to offer your membership for free. And note that it is very hard to charge for something that used to be free, as What’sApp, Napster, and many other companies have learned the hard way.

As long as your success depends on connecting with buyers who have choices, you can differentiate your business by joining the digital membership economy. But success depends on more than just changing your pricing structure. By changing each piece of your business model to focus on maintaining a long-term relationship rather than on quick acquisition of new customers, you can enjoy higher profitability, more predictable cash flow and customers who are your ambassadors.

Is there real value in social selling activity for sellers, or is it all talk?

Social selling engagement comes when your activity adds to an already working engagement process with prospects and customers. Social media channels broaden and vary our interaction with customers. But social media are tools, and success or failure depends on how well they are used. Adding social tools into a broken engagement process with prospects and clients is a recipe for continued disaster.

The value that sellers bring to their use of social media channels is the human element.

The Buyer’s Timeframe is What Matters

Sellers can develop long term relationships with clients on social media. But that doesn’t mean it will be easier to “bring in the deal” when the time comes – such as end of the quarter.

Understanding the whole buyer’s journey, and how social media fits, is key to being able to synch your pipeline with you buyer’s timeline.

Do Your Homework First

Before you engage, research your buyer. Look for press releases, changes in management, expansion and growth, or downsizing. Any of these may signal a business issue that you may be able to address or solve. Look at what you find to add value to your interaction with your prospect when you engage with them on social media. Added value is what your prospect is looking for in interactions with you.

Determine the Prospect’s Favorite Way to Communicate, and Use It

How often do you visit a vendor’s website, and come face-to-face with a slew of social media buttons, but no phone number? I recently had the experience of looking in vain on a website for a way to talk with a company representative about some questions. Not even a Google search produced a phone number. This was so frustrating, I decided to go elsewhere. Unless you are sure that you really know your target buyer’s communication channels, I suggest you offer all reasonable channels of communication.

Give Prospects What They Need to Make a Decision

Buyers look for different information at different stages of their journey. As they advance, they may want pricing information, a proposal, demonstrations, implementation plan, customer references, and so forth. The buyer may also want to learn if your company is a thought leader by looking at its publications and public appearances: e-books, best practice guides, infographics, white papers, trade shows, conferences, and user groups.

Is your content client focused, and responsive to their journey? Give the potential buyer what they need in order to choose you. Help prospects help themselves to this information as you see the need arise through your interactions.

What happens when you take the time to invest in your social selling activity? If you’re giving consideration to prospects to help them make decisions they feel good about, you have the basis for a mutually beneficial, strong buyer-seller relationship. Results matter. You can have all the activity in the world, but if you are not delivering results and meeting your goals, then you need to revisit your activity.

To help you identify how to build a strong buyer-seller relationship, with a role for social selling, see our free guide, Social Selling: The Human Element.

This article is just a sample of the full content — get instant access to this free ebook in our Resources section.

A few weeks ago while working from home, I heard a knock on my front door. I thought it was the postman, as he typically drops our mail off at that specific hour in the morning.

Much to my surprise, a man wearing what looked like a company-branded polo shirt introduced himself saying that he was visiting our neighborhood as a ‘hawker.’ Before he showed me any of his wares, he said he’d like to show me his ID card and tell me a bit about himself.

He pulled out his ID, which was hanging around his neck, said his name was Ben, and explained that earlier on in his life he had been involved in ‘silly activities,’ hung around in bad company and eventually got into trouble. He further explained that, upon his release from prison, he got this job as a door-to-door salesman in order to have some work experience under his belt and eventually get a real job.

He said that he was part of a not-for-profit helping ex-convicts get back on their feet and that he would take home 50% of any sales he makes.

His narrative spoke directly to my emotions and I was sold before he actually pitched any products to me. He had a bag full of household cleaning products we probably already had. I hastily selected a duster and carpet cleaner, asked for the price and paid $10 for them. He was really appreciative and I felt I had made an impact in his life and would hopefully contribute to keeping him away from trouble.

On reflection, he captured the attention of my emotions first, before pitching his products. Although his story reflected his reality, this was ingeniously-executed neuro-marketing.

Imagine if he left out his backstory and just said, “Good morning mate! I’m Ben and I have these household cleaning products to sell to you today all under $10!” My response would most likely have been, “Thanks but, no thanks!”

Decisions are Emotional, Not Rational

In 1994, a neuroscience professor by the name of Antonio Damasio published a book titled, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain; where he went through a series of case studies that demonstrated the importance of emotions to rational thinking and normal social behavior.

His groundbreaking discovery shifted the focus of modern neuroscience and the advertising industry from the rational and cognitive aspects of brain function to the emotional.

Damasio studied people with damaged brains incapable of processing emotions. He found that their lack of emotions hindered their ability to make decisions. They could rationalize and describe their decisions in rational and logical terms but found it difficult making simple decisions because they lacked any sense of how they felt about the options presented to them.

Damasio actually wrote:

“I never wished to set emotion against reason, but rather to see emotion as at least assisting reason…nor did I ever oppose emotion to cognition since I view emotion as delivering cognitive information.”

What Neuroscience Tells us About Emotions and Logic

Our brains have two main parts: the limbic system (or core) and the neocortex (outer brain).

The core is divided into what neuroscientists refer to as our ‘reptilian brain’ and our ‘mammalian brain.’

The reptilian brain is responsible for survival reflexes such as hunger, breathing and other bodily functions. While the mammalian brain handles emotions or feelings.

The limbic system views the environment in black and white; it generally processes information and makes decisions somewhat automatically and quickly as compared to the neocortex –– which is the huge gray bit that you probably imagine when you think about a brain. The neocortex is the part of our brain that makes us intelligent, processes language, logic, decisions and control of emotions.

In evolutionary terms, the neocortex is a much more recent in development, and it is actually bigger in humans than in other animals.

For example, if you suddenly hear a loud bang, your limbic system (or core) will instinctively crave for safety and will tell you to be afraid. Your neocortex will, however, analyze and rationalize the context of the situation and make the final call as to whether it is harmless ‘thunder,’ if it was raining, or if we should run away as a result of an explosion.

Source: OECD

In day-to-day life, whenever you are confronted with an external emotional stimulus such as love, anger or fear, it is typically routed through the neocortex first (for rationalizing and analysis) before being sent to the amygdala –– a part of the limbic system responsible for providing appropriate emotional responses.

This is how things should work in theory, but because the neocortex is a newer and less mature area of the brain in evolutionary terms, it is less efficient than the limbic system (the core).

This means that emotional stimuli sometimes ‘short circuits’ or bypasses the neocortex (any logical analysis) and, as a result, emotional responses are automatically triggered. This is a typical occurrence in all brains, but occurs more frequently in some people than others.

To put this in context, this explains sudden bursts of road rage and phobias of spiders, where the brain is unable to process rational thought.

An arachnophobe, for example, is unable to process that a spider is harmless, not poisonous and that humans are more than 1,000x bigger. Therefore, it logically poses no threat and there is no need to be afraid of it.

How to Speak Directly to Emotions: The Limbic System

When an individual is emotionally attached to a point of view, using only logic as means of persuading the individual to change his or her opinion is not very effective. His or her emotionally grounded views will trigger defensive behavior because their emotions will see this as an ‘attack’ that warrants short-circuiting the route via the cortex. The person’s response would be an emotional response with no rational analysis from the cortex.

What Marketers Need to Know: Motivation Emotions v. Critical Emotions

First, you need to accept that you cannot prevent the market and your customers from having negative or positive emotional reactions. With this acceptance, you will need to understand the motivational emotions and critical emotions that might trigger outright rejection of your offer or product.

Motivation emotions that drive buying behavior tend to be driven by the following five core emotions:

1. Fear
2. Guilt
3. Pride
4. Greed
5. Love

According to Dan S. Kennedy in his book No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent, each of these motivation emotions translate into more specific emotions for the affluent marketing segment looking to buy more luxurious products.

Take, for example, the emotional drivers for wanting to buy a high-end car such as a Ferrari. They could translate to the following:

• insecurity within new social status
• reward for workload or societal status
• fear of being found to be fakers
• desperate desire not to commit a faux pas
• wanting to be “today, not passé”
• feeding their emotional emptiness
• what’s the point of being rich? Buy it!

Other more granular motivational emotions for mass market products still grounded in the five core emotions above are:

• Competition: “Our neighbors have that grill, so we need to get it or something better.”
• A sense of belonging: “I’ll join my friends and get that Apple watch.”
• Trendsetting: “My favorite celebrities own a hoover board, I need to get one!”
• Instant gratification: “I’m feeling down, something new will make me feel better!”
• Leadership: “I’ll be the first person in the office to get that phone.”
• Time: “This subscription saves me time of having to go shopping.”

Your ammunition as a marketer is the understanding of the specific motivational emotions that will entice your target customers to buy your products and their critical emotions that will deter them from buying your products.

You will need to develop accurate customer personas and then craft an emotionally driven narrative that speaks to both their motivational and critical emotions and achieves your objective to sell.

How do you do this?

Language is key

Aim to use the following in your copywriting and video scripts:

• Metaphors
• Storytelling that amplifies human feelings
• Painting visual images
• Endorsements and social proof
• Empathy that aligns with the point of view of customers

The end objective of the design, the color selection and messaging on your packaging and in your entire marketing communications is to become a likable brand which will result in a positive memory recall of your website or brand name by your audience.

Here are ways of changing rational words to emotional ones in your narrative:

Source: Cox Blue

The Role of Emotions and Logic in Consumer Behavior

When presented with a range of choices at the point of making a purchase decision, the average consumer seems to think that his or her purchase decision is guided by rational analysis.

The reality, however, is that emotions play a predominant role in a majority of purchase outcomes. Emotions tap into previous and related experiences that seem to attribute subjective values to each option under consideration.These subjective values translate to preferences that lead to our final decision.

Source: WPP & Millward Brown Knowledge Bank

Emotions play a central role in consumer behavior; our buying decisions seem to be driven by emotions and then justified with logic.

Key Emotional Drivers that Influence Buying Decisions

Source: WPP

Research into the most effective of advertisements reveals that consumers are most influenced by emotional ads in comparison to rational ads focused on features.

Advertising and marketing copy that generates a strong emotional response has two benefits.

• First, it helps personify a brand and actually shape brand perception
• Second, the effect of personifying a brand helps generate engagement and memorability

Your marketing copy could also take the route of a hero narrative; where negative emotions such as sadness, fear or guilt are initially generated to help create drama, which ultimately result in a positive emotional takeout.

As a product developer, retail or e-commerce marketer looking to influence the buying decisions of potential customers through emotions, you really need to focus your core marketing strategy on optimizing the following three areas in your packaging, visual imagery, brand narrative and marketing copy used to describe your brand or sell products.

1. Likability: Creating a genuinely likable brand
2. Key emotional triggers: Utilizing the most relevant emotional drivers (negative and positive) in your messaging
3. Reinforcing positive brand memories, and ultimately earning industry mindshare

I will break down each of the above in the rest of this article.

1. Likeability

Likeability is a key driver of advertising’s effectiveness. Likability is the one core metric your marketing messaging should strive to optimize. Here’s why.

Research conducted by America’s Advertising Research Foundation concluded that consumers driven by the emotion of ‘likeability’ were most likely to respond to a brand’s ad by eventually buying the product.

Likeability outperformed 34 other commercial “pre-testing” methodologies as a predictive metric for sales from advertising.

Source: 5MetaCom

Another study in 2005 by Hermie, Lanckriet, Lansloot and Peeters, titled “Stop/Watch: Everything you need to know about the impact of magazine ads,” found that up to 80% of an ad’s memorability is tied to its likeability.

In the book Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why, written by Max Sutherland and Alice Sylvester, their research was able to bridge a positive link between likeability and persuasion.

It is little wonder Facebook’s first social reaction was the ‘like’ button.

Other studies have gone on to show that positive emotions toward a brand have far greater influence on consumer loyalty than trust and other brand attributes.

Improving Likeability with the COMMAP Model

In the advertising world, Erik du Plessis, in his book The Advertised Mind, devised a model for creating more likable ads called COMMAP – COMmunication-style MAP, that breaks the likeability of an ad down to six elements.

1. Entertainment: If the ad entertains, it will be liked — although entertainment is not restricted to just the use of humor.
2. Empathy: People like ads they can relate to — ads that show the kind of goods they may possess, experiences they might have or lifestyles they may aspire to.
3. Relevant news: More than just new information, relevant news is new information that is meaningful (or presented as such) to the audience. Problem-solution type advertising falls into this category.
4. Familiarity: If an ad has been over-saturated in the market, or is run-of-the-mill, it can have the opposite effect of entertainment — and damage likeability.
5. Confusion: This is the most common mistake creatives make in designing advertising. A confusing ad can’t deliver relevant news, entertain or create empathy.
6. Alienation: Irritating the audience is a sure way to alienate consumers. While advertising that is confusing can be ignored, advertising that is annoying can actually damage a brand.

It is important to note that the first three, relevant information combined with empathy and entertainment, are things that we should strive for.

Familiarity, confusion, and alienation are three things that we should reduce.

Emotional-Oriented Marketing for Likeability

Examples of emotional-oriented marketing optimized for likability include the following.

Share a Coke Campaign

The Share a Coke campaign printed the most popular names in each geographical marketing region in which Coca-Cola operated on bottles of the product. The campaign combined the elements of entertainment (seeing my name on a bottle of Coke), empathy (my name is as personal as it gets) and relevant news (this was a novel marketing campaign not attempted at this scale by other brands).

Herschel Supply Co Well-Traveled Campaign

The Well Travelled photo blog and the #WellTravelled Instagram hashtag utilized by Herschel Supply Co have personified the brand as a wandering world traveler.

This campaign also combines the elements of entertainment (seeing interesting travel destinations), empathy (these destinations appeal to Herschel Supply Co’s target customers) and relevant news (the content is relevant and meaningful to their audience).

McDonald’s Happy Meal Toys

McDonald’s used to use toys in their Happy Meal commercials to lure children to come to their restaurants. It combined the elements of entertainment (by including interesting kids toys), empathy (knowing that toys make kids happy and if kids are happy, their parents are also equally happy) and relevant news (most toys were in season and related to a recent, popular kid’s movie release).

Ways of Evoking Likeability and Positive Emotions

Your marketing copy and even product design (if you sell products), should aim to incorporate the following in a bid to maximize likeability and positive emotions:

• Storytelling
• Painting visual images
• Advertising
• Endorsements
• Metaphors and Similes
• Humor

The goal is to not have buyers to think too hard before pushing ‘Buy.’ Perks such as free shipping and free returns should also be incorporated into your e-commerce strategy in order to sweeten the conversion deal.

2: Key emotional triggers

For retail and e-commerce marketers, your marketing and product messaging should utilize emotional triggers that connect to your customers’ buying decisions.

Here are 10 key emotional drivers of buying behavior:

• Fear (negative)
• Guilt (negative)
• Trust (positive)
• Value (positive)
• Belonging (positive)
• Competition (negative)
• Instant gratification (positive)
• Leadership (positive)
• Trendsetting (positive)
• Time (positive)

Narratives that initially generate negative emotions need to ultimately result in a positive emotional takeout.

3: Building and Reinforcing Positive Brand Memories

A growing body of academic research is proving that the majority of customer purchases are at least partially memory-based.

In the context of marketing your e-commerce brand or product, it is paramount to create and reinforce positive brand memories and associations that directly allow customers to recall your brand and buy your product when they are in a position to make a purchase or shop in your store. The stronger your brand and product memories are over your competition, the more sales you’ll see.

The following four steps approach, as devised by Percolate, will optimize your marketing for memory and mindshare:

1. Understand the mechanics of consumer memory: What makes a brand distinct and memorable?
2. Perform a ‘memory audit’ of your brand: What elements and associations are memory strengths? What are weaknesses? What’s the competitive landscape, and how is your current market share (and share of voice) influencing memory rank?
3. Strengthen your brand anchors: What are the key brand elements and associations that provide a foundation for scalable, consistent campaigns to build brand memory?
4. Develop a communications system: How do you organize an operating architecture to develop and deploy messages that reinforce the brand?

The following seven questions, also devised by Percolate, should be asked to assess your brand memory-building strategy:

Top-level global questions:

1. Big Story: Does your brand have a single global story, mission or theme that is consistent across all communications?
2. Identity System (tone of voice): Does your brand have a distinct verbal and visual system that is represented and repeated across all communications?

Tactical execution questions:

1. Consistency: Do campaigns and each of their communication elements reinforce the same brand system?
2. Clarity: Can your customers associate your communications with your brand?
3. Impact: What retrieval cues are these campaign communications delivering, and are they being delivered through the most emotionally engaging form(s) of media available?
4. Reach: Where and in how many different places will your brand’s target audience be exposed to these communications?
5. Frequency: How often will the target audience be exposed to these communications?

Your communications and advertising campaigns should all converge to effective capture not only positive attention but also build memory.

Conclusion

I will conclude by saying that a brand is nothing more than a mental representation of a product in the consumer’s mind.

Emotions are the primary reason consumers prefer a brand name or shop with a retailer over another. After all, many products we purchase are available as generic brands with the same ingredients and at cheaper prices. Emotional connections rationalize our decisions to pay more for a brand name product over another somewhat identical product.

If the representation consists only of the features and attribute, no emotional connection establishes a link to influence consumer preference and action.

The richer the emotional content of a brand’s mental representation –– as exemplified by the words used to describe the brand, its personality characteristics in packaging/visual imagery and the brand ‘narrative’ –– the more likely a consumer will buy the product.

Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

People have an amazing ability to convince themselves of almost anything. This is great when they are facing a challenge and they reach inside and not only conceive a means of addressing the challenge, but taking extraordinary action and successfully hitting it head on and overcoming it. Of course the opposite is also true and more common, when people see a challenge, a big challenge in their eyes; so big and seemingly overwhelming, that when they look inside, all they find is the rational for giving up and a list of “why nots”.

Stop Talking To Yourself

Ask any good sales manager or sincere buyer, and they can share numerous examples of sales people who have talked themselves out of a sale. By this I don’t mean the more common example of a sales person who doesn’t shut up long enough to allow the buyer to place the order. This is more about specific instances where the sales person, faced with some difficult options, convinces themselves of “the inevitable negative outcome”, and as a result stops trying to do anything to change the situation in their favour, and settle for the deal being lost.

Let Your Process Do The Talking

To avoid this, and be able to overcome more hurdles you face in selling, you need to turn to something many sales people find boring, and fail to see as a strategic advantage, their sales process. This assumes they or their company has a defined and viable sales process that continues to evolve with the market and buyers. If the have one of those, the other factor is the rep’s propensity to follow it to succeed. Many pretend, or cherry pick, “I like this, I’ll do it; skip that, don’t like it”. If the process is in fact a good one, you need follow it as it is, not your interpretation based on likes, dislikes. If you don’t follow the parts you don’t like, you will not only lose sales, but more importantly, not improve in ways that help you leverage the process and win sales.

Objectivity Rules

One of the best things about having a process is that it takes a lot of the subjectivity out of execution. Rather than your execution reflecting your mood on any given day, the process allows you to perform the right activities, for the right reason, and the right tools at critical stages of the sale. Even in difficult sales or scenario, taking the emotion out of it, and focusing on specific activities, allows you to execute, examine results, adjust and execute again. The same time and energy that went into the emotional side of things, is now applied to specific actions and impacts.

This is why a key component of a viable and evolving process is metrics. The process drives the activity, the measurement allows you to evaluate and set out the next set of actions, measure again, and repeat. Sure you will lose deals, but you will have tried, and understand why you lost after the fact, not because you talked yourself out of things in advance.

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The post Don’t Talk Yourself Out Of It appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

The producer price index (PPI) for final demand rose by 0.5% in June, according to the Labor Department.

Economists had forecast an increase by 0.3% month-on-month, according to Bloomberg. 

The jump in prices was led by the index for final demand services, notably those related to securities brokerage and dealing, which increased 7.7%. Prices rose across several other categories, from eye glasses to car fuels.

The index for final demand goods jumped 0.8%, the most since May 2015, led by a 9.9% jump in the gas-price index. 

Core PPI, which excludes volatile food and energy costs, rose 0.4% month-on-month (0.1% expected.) 

Compared to the same time a year ago, PPI for final demand rose 0.3% (0% expected), and 1.3% (1% forecast.) 

Producer prices are used as a forward-looking indicator of consumer-price inflation. The idea is that if wholesale prices are rising, retailers would likely pass these costs on to regular buyers.

More to come ...

SEE ALSO: Delta just highlighted one of the biggest issues that we'll hear all earnings season

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Competing against an incumbent provider is one of the more challenging sales situations that we encounter.  The existing account holder likely has a stronger relationship with the client, first-hand knowledge of the client’s business, and enjoys the benefit of being a known entity.  Remarkably, even with mediocre performance, an incumbent can be difficult to unseat, and a lot of the reason why is attributed to psychology.  There are a few neuroscience concepts that give us some insights as to why customers hold on so tightly and how a challenger might loosen the grip.

Loss Aversion

Loss aversion is the simple idea that the fear of losing something is much stronger than the joy of gaining something — in fact, it is about twice as strong, according to research.  In a competitive sales environment, that means that the value proposition of a challenger needs to be significantly stronger than that of the incumbent if the challenger hopes to win the business.  Loss aversion is how even relatively weak providers maintain accounts.  So why is our fear of loss so strong?

It is human nature to overvalue what we already own; this is called the endowment effect.  It is evident when people are reluctant to part with something they own for its cash equivalent, or if the amount that people are willing to pay for something is lower than what people are willing to accept when selling it (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1991).  The endowment effect is particularly strong when the good or service has experiential, emotional, or symbolic significance.  Buyers become attached through experience, even if that experience is less than ideal.  The effect is strengthened when an emotional connection is made — for instance, when an existing sales person has forged a personal relationship with the buyer.  The endowment effect explains why relationships matter and why current providers maintain momentum simply by showing up.

Another important principle at play when trying to unseat an incumbent is the idea of the sunk cost fallacy.  Individuals commit the sunk cost fallacy when they continue a behavior or endeavor as a result of previously invested resources, including time, money, or effort (Arkes & Blumer, 1985).  For example, individuals sometimes order too much food and then over-eat “just to get their money’s worth.”  Similarly, a person may have a $20 ticket to a concert and then drive for hours through a blizzard just because s/he feels that s/he has to attend due to having made the initial investment.  If the costs outweigh the benefits, the extra costs incurred (inconvenience, time, or even money) are held in a different mental account than the ones associated with the ticket transaction (Thaler, 1999).  As clients make investments of time, money, and effort, sunk costs increase, and because of the fallacy, they may not rationally weigh the cost-benefit of the incumbent’s performance.

So, with the endowment effect and sunk cost fallacy working to create loss aversion, what can a challenger do to counter the impact and take away the business?  Here are three approaches that will help.

Emphasize the loss associated with the status quo. We are typically very good at articulating the value that our clients receive by selecting our products and services.  However, we may not be as effective at describing the losses that clients will face with a no decision, i.e., staying with their existing provider.  Often, long-term providers become complacent with service and upgrades as they try to increase margins across the account lifecycle.  Meanwhile, technology and product features are evolving in the market.  Think about what opportunity costs (unrealized benefits) the client is accepting by staying put and be sure to include them in your pitch.

Help buyers associate costs fairly. The sunk cost fallacy occurs because buyers don’t fairly allocate the ongoing costs of their previous decisions against the benefits they are receiving.  We need to help them understand the total cost of ownership and the inconveniences created by their past decisions (including the opportunity costs described in #1).  Otherwise, we are being unfairly penalized as the challenger.

Seek out decision makers and influencers who are not vested in the current solution. It’s rare to find a decision made by a single individual these days, particularly in B2B sales.  Selection-by-committee has many disadvantages for sellers; however, it does create some opportunities, particularly for non-incumbents.  When planning an opportunity, rank decision makers and influencers according to how vested they are in the current solution, and actively make your case to those with little to lose.  Perhaps the best way to fight loss aversion is to avoid it.  Look for a new VPs or Directors, and cultivate them as a client coaches to help make your case for change.

Neuroscience tells us that there is a lot going on in the head of a buyer, and some of it is not particularly rational.  We need to be aware of the natural bias that exists to resist change and learn to help buyers see past the status quo and recognize the opportunities associated with change.

The post The Neuroscience of Sales: Unseating an Incumbent appeared first on Richardson Sales Training and Enablement Blog.

The best SUVs combine sportiness and utility into one vehicle; a versatile and practical choice for motorists who want the qualities of a car and a truck rolled into one. More than ever before, SUVs and crossovers of all kinds offer luxury comforts and rugged performance, ideal for people of all ages and families of all sizes.

However, no SUV would be complete without some cost-saving fuel efficiency for trips both long and short. Finding one that sips gas (rather than guzzling it) doesn’t have to be difficult. The experts at AxleGeeks, a transportation research site powered by Graphiq, took a look at the base models of each gas-powered 2016 SUV and ranked them according to the best combined city and highway miles per gallon. When ties occur, SUVs are ordered by price.

Take a look at the top 10 most fuel-efficient SUVs that strike a perfect chord between practicality and gas economy.

#10. 2016 Mitsubishi Outlander ES

Combined Gas Mileage: 28
City Gas Mileage: 25
Highway Gas Mileage: 31
Price: $22,995

Buyers seeking a larger, yet affordable, SUV with good gas mileage can check out the midsize Mitsubishi Outlander. A sub-$23,000 vehicle with up to 28 mpg in combined gas mileage. Other fuel efficient numbers, like 25 mpg city and 31 mpg highway, make the Outlander a money-saving choice.

#9. 2016 Buick Encore

Combined Gas Mileage: 29
City Gas Mileage: 25
Highway Gas Mileage: 33
Price: $24,065

Buick, known more for larger, luxurious cars, took a turn into crossover territory with the Encore. With that change came a sporty, economical vehicle that saves money on gas without sacrificing its premium image. The Encore performs at a combined gas mileage of 29 mpg, an average between its city mileage of 25 mpg and highway economy of 33 mpg. At just over $24,000, it’s an affordable entry into the SUV luxury segment in price point and fuel savings.

#8. 2016 Honda CR-V LX

Combined Gas Mileage: 29
City Gas Mileage: 26
Highway Gas Mileage: 33
Price: $23,745

The compact crossover earns 29 mpg combined – 3.5 more per gallon on average than immediate rivals in the segment. The CR-V, built on a Honda Civic platform, maximizes its gas usage no matter where your runabouts take you.

#7. 2016 Nissan Rogue S

Combined Gas Mileage: 29
City Gas Mileage: 26
Highway Gas Mileage: 33
Price: $23,290

Nissan’s Rogue S goes against the grain in its fuel efficiency numbers. Most impressive is a 29 mile-per-gallon economy that’s 6 mpg more on average than others in the larger compact crossover segment. The Nissan Rogue, like Mazda and Honda models, is one fuel efficient purchase motorists can make if they’re seeking economy and money savings.

#6. 2016 FIAT 500X Pop

Combined Gas Mileage: 29
City Gas Mileage: 25
Highway Gas Mileage: 34
Price: $20,000

The Fiat 500x was engineered to navigate twisty European roads. So, naturally its fuel efficiency numbers must be on par for a crossover SUV of its kind. The Pop trim level will cost buyers an even $20,000, and owners can expect a combined gas mileage of 29 mpg. Even when the 500x isn’t traversing winding paths, it ekes out an impressive 34 mpg on straightaway highway treks.

#5. 2016 Honda HR-V LX

Combined Gas Mileage: 29
City Gas Mileage: 25
Highway Gas Mileage: 34
Price: $19,215

Fuel efficiency and Honda vehicles go hand in hand, and the HR-V is no exception. Buyers pressed between choosing the HR-V and other crossovers in the immediate class will find the Honda has a slight advantage in fuel efficiency.

#4. 2016 Mercedes-Benz GLA-Class GLA250

Combined Gas Mileage: 30
City Gas Mileage: 25
Highway Gas Mileage: 35
Price: $32,500

Taking the compact SUV to the luxury level, Mercedes-Benz’s GLA-Class of crossovers manages a robust 30 combined miles per gallon, four more on average than vehicles in its immediate class. In the city and on the highway, the GLA250 base model attains 25 and 35 mpg, respectively – numbers not usually found in vehicles that take premium fuel.

#3. 2016 Mazda CX-5 Sport

Combined Gas Mileage: 30
City Gas Mileage: 26
Highway Gas Mileage: 35
Price: $21,795

The bigger brother of the CX-3, Mazda’s CX-5 compact crossover manages to surpass most others in its class in fuel economy. This model arrives at an affordable price point with the efficiency expected from the Japanese marque.

#2. 2016 Chevrolet Trax LS

Combined Gas Mileage: 30
City Gas Mileage: 26
Highway Gas Mileage: 34
Price: $20,300

The LS trim level of Chevy’s Trax keeps things fuel efficient on the way to the pump and out on the road. The Trax’s 30 combined miles per gallon is a major gas savings factor for an SUV costing just over $20,000 MSRP. Built for long road trips, Trax owners can expect 34 highway mpg for maximum fuel economy.

#1. 2016 Mazda CX-3 Sport

Combined Gas Mileage: 32
City Gas Mileage: 29
Highway Gas Mileage: 35
Price: $19,960

Mazda’s subcompact crossover, revealed to the public in 2014, gives most other SUVs on the market a run for their gas money. A 2.0-liter inline four-cylinder engine sends power through an automatic transmission, achieving an impressive 32 mpg combined. The impressive highway mileage makes the Mazda CX-3 Sport one of the most fuel efficient SUVs in years.

Learn More About These SUVs

“96% of social media managers measure number of fans and followers, 89% measure traffic, 84% measure mentions, 55% track share of voice, and 51% track sentiment.” – Awareness, Inc.

Truth be told, being a social media manager is a lot more complicated than it sounds. With the company’s brand image on the line, it is a tremendous responsibility that involves an extensive list of tasks ranging from handling feedback to analytics.

To ensure you do your job right, take a look at this infographic with 30 of the best strategies for social media and branding experts:

1. Optimize Your Pages and Profiles

As the social media manager, you need to make sure that your social media pages put your brand in the best light. A significant step for this is to make sure the pages link to one another and include a link to your website. Also, make sure your pages are geared for discoverability by targeting relevant keywords and hashtags.

2. Create Branded Pages

Make sure your branding remains consistent through all channels. You can do this by using branded images and color schemes. Just make sure that the style is apt for the <href=”#sm.00000gjlh1d9v4ejdvengix6ge730″>particular social network.

3. Determine User Interests

As a social media manager, it is your job to provide relevant and engaging social media content to establish authority. Also, consider the social network itself to identify the primary <href=”#74cea2436232″>interests of its user base.

4. Learn from Leaders

The examples of great social media exploits are all around us. The best thing is, using their standards as guidelines are entirely free of charge. Learn their <href=”#74cea2436232″>approaches in essential social media tasks and see how they fit your brand’s strategy.

5. Post Frequently

Posting frequently is an excellent way to establish your social media presence and promote your brand’s authority. However, you need to learn the best frequency for each social media network. This number varies for each website, so be sure to do your research.

6. Use Hashtags

Social media users love hashtags, and they can use them to look for brands they’d be interested in. Hashtags can also link your brand with trending topics in the social space. These are the reasons why you need to target relevant hashtags in your social media updates.

7. Feature Great Images

Relevant images are highly shareable in social media. It helps convey information faster and induces more potent emotions in the audience. On the other hand, plain text content can easily bore the social community.

8. Share Photos of Yourself and Your Team

Strong social communication exists between two people. This is why you need to humanize your brand and make it more relatable to your audience. You can do this by exposing the faces behind the organization and give them glimpses of your office in action.

9. Build One-to-One Relationships

In addition to your audience, social media networks can also connect you with influencers, bloggers, and other potential business partners. This includes key people in your industry that can help you grow and build your brand’s credibility.

10. Use a Conversational Tone

Your tone when conversing thru social media must be friendly and welcoming. Do not intimidate your audience with business jargon and talk as if you’re just a regular friend.

11. Offer Concise Morsels of Advice

The online audience wants actionable information fast. This is why you should always cut to the chase and deliver practical tips and advice. Keep it simple and get straight to the point.

12. Don’t Overdo the Self-Promotion

In digital marketing, it’s all about your audience. Although it’s acceptable to promote your brand every once in a while, you should make sure your social pages remain consumer-centred.

13. Keep It Real

The social community gravitates toward authentic stories they can relate with. This is why you need to drop the pretense and get real. Use real stories about your brand to appeal to your audience’s human side.

14. Ask Questions

Asking questions in social media is a great way to boost engagement and collect useful insights. This can be done for multiple purposes such as asking for feedback, doing a survey, or holding a trivia contest, which leads to the next point.

15. Run Contests and Giveaways

Social media websites like Facebook and Pinterest now offers the necessary tools for holding virtual contests. This is a great way to expose your brand and promote healthier relationships with your audience.

16. Create Collages

The social community appreciates the creative use of images in telling stories. This is why collages are extremely effective in getting social engagement. You can capitalize this using the right image editing tools.

17. Perfect Your Timing

To make the most out of your posts, be sure to publish them <href=”#sm.00000gjlh1d9v4ejdvengix6ge730″>when your audience is most active. This depends on the social media network.

18. Interact in Real-Time

Using a social network’s built-in chat feature to engage the audience in real time. You can look for followers who are providing feedback via comments and then ask them to send you a personal message. You may also host a chat to initiate panel discussion for a more productive communication.

19. Follow-Up with New Connections

A popular strategy on social networks is to follow your audience to encourage a follow-back. However, you should also follow people back to show your appreciation. This is a great way to grow your influence in that particular channel.

20. Monitor and respond

It’s a good strategy to monitor for any mentions of your brand you can capitalize on. This can help you obtain feedback, respond to people who seek you, and find new potential followers. You can do this using social media monitoring tools.

21. Offer Special Deals to Your Followers

To invite more followers, you need to increase the value of becoming a follower by offering exclusive deals and promos. Not only will this make your followers happy, but it will also provide your business with a quick boost in conversions.

22. Dial-Up Social Media at Events

You can use your social media page to promote an upcoming or ongoing event. This can stimulate attendance and increase the exposure of your brand. It will also help you gain UGC (User-Generated Content) by asking your audience to post photos of the event.

23. Toss Up a Popup that Asks for Followers

A great way to build social media followers is to utilize popups. You can use this with services or free plugins for WordPress.

24. Ration Yourself

To improve the discoverability of your page, be sure you are involved with a branching network of related pages. In addition to visibility, this can also expose you to partnership opportunities with similar brands.

25. Learn from Your Analytics

An analytics tool like Google Analytics can provide you with actionable insights. There are also other tools that will help you gain social intelligence, which will assist you with future optimizations based on the preferences of your audience.

26. Work as a Team

Social media management isn’t ideal for a one-man team. You also need to get others involved in handling the growing demands of social media management. It will also allow you to streamline your social strategy with other departments.

27. Be Patient

A successful social media channel cannot be achieved overnight. This is why patience, along with empathy and creativity are some of the qualities of an excellent social media manager.

28. Keep Up with the Changes

The landscape of digital marketing is ever-changing, including social media. If you want to remain competitive, you need to be adaptive and keen in <href=”#fdjpxsl0zg5lqgbe.97″>implementing new strategies.

29. Have Fun

Lighten up – it’s social media, after all. It is a place where people connect, share stories, and keep the online culture alive. If you want, you can use <href=”#sm.00000gjlh1d9v4ejdvengix6ge730″>light-hearted posts to maintain the “fun factor” in your social pages.

30. Bring in a Strategist

A seasoned social media strategist will help eliminate the guesswork and pinpoint what your brand needs to do social-wise. Bringing one in will help propel your social marketing strategies forward and gain the competitive edge in your niche.

Conclusion

Mastering social media management is a huge challenge for any digital marketer. However, even the biggest challenges can be overcome if you take one small step at a time. If you manage to implement the thirty strategies highlighted above, then you would’ve gained more than enough experience to master social media.

Synergy. Collaboration. Interlock. Alignment.

These buzzwords are everywhere in the B2B industry these days, and for good reason. Organizations that have mastered alignment, especially between sales and marketing, experience benefits like higher win rates, better customer retention, and increased revenue growth, to name a few.

Aligning marketing goals to the organization’s sales strategy has never been more imperative, and fortunately for B2B CMOs, it’s now easier than ever. Video and messaging tools improve communication between teams, regardless of location; big data and cloud technology foster collaboration and increase visibility into organizational activities, content, and reporting; and marketing organizations now have access to data that matters to business goals. The barrier is all but shattered between sales and marketing, yet marketers are still finding themselves in the dark when it comes to attribution and quantifying marketing goals. Below are three ways CMOs can align marketing goals to the sales strategy in order to better support Sales, close more deals in less time, and measure Marketing’s contribution to revenue.

1. Understand Sales’ needs
   

   Sales should be perceived as Marketing’s internal customer; if salespeople don’t have the resources and support they need to sell efficiently and effectively, Marketing cannot consider its goals met. CMOs and other marketing executives should meet regularly with SVPs of Sales to discuss sales goals, identify gaps in content offerings (for both internal and client-facing use), and ensure that content is resonating with buyers. For enterprise organizations where regular conversations like this are difficult, content analytics are helpful to monitor various reps’ and teams’ daily or weekly usage of sales materials. But qualitative feedback from Sales coupled with content analytics give CMOs a valuable and holistic view of Sales’ needs and whether Marketing is addressing those needs. It also helps address whether the lead scoring and content used to attract buyers matches Sales’ target accounts and buyers.

2. Track leads after the handoff to Sales

   Marketing’s work is not done once qualified leads are handed over to salespeople, so while tracking the number of qualified leads passed to sales is valuable, it’s even more important to monitor lead behavior post-sales handoff. CMOs should help their teams gain visibility into how a lead interacts with sales throughout the entire buying process. This gives marketers a better understanding of both buyers’ and sellers’ needs, but more importantly, a better idea of where a lead drops out of the buying process. This focuses the content creation and distribution process so less deals are lost at different stages of the sales cycle. Tracking leads throughout the entire buying process also allows Marketing to measure its influence on won deals at various stages.

3. Get involved in activity-based enablement
   

   In a perfect world, salespeople would spend every second of the workday with buyers and existing customers. But menial tasks and manual reporting responsibilities often get in the way, leaving reps frustrated and stressed about hitting quota. Marketing can align with the Sales strategy by getting involved with the sales organization’s activity-based enablement initiatives. This includes understanding the time reps spend looking for and creating client-facing materials, and minimizing that time by making it as easy as possible for reps to locate, use, personalize and share content. Reps should be able to employ contextual search when speaking with different clients, as well as have content served up to them based on the selling interaction at hand. CMOs can help this process by organizing content in a way that makes sense to sales, such as segmenting by role, industry, stage in sales cycle, and more, and working with SVPs of Sales to ensure that content is delivered in a simple, straightforward way to Sales.

Committing to alignment, especially at enterprise organizations, is no easy feat. Alignment isn’t a checklist item that can be achieved in a quarter, nor can it be implemented through a series of training sessions. Alignment is a mindset, and must be at the forefront of B2B CMO’s minds during goal setting, strategy planning, metrics reporting and everywhere in between. Taking the three steps above will prove Marketing’s dedication to aligning to the sales strategy, and effectively quantifying marketing’s contribution to revenue will ensure marketing executives a seat at the C-suite table.

Sometimes we use words to make things appear differently than they are. We describe things so that something negative appears less so, so it is more palatable. But calling something other than what is truly is, does not make it into something different.

There is no such thing as a “no decision.” There is a “yes,” or there is a “no.”

There is No No Decision

When a client suggests that they are not making a decision, that they are postponing the decision, or they are going to continue doing what they are doing now, that is a “no.” The client has in fact made a decision, and the decision is to not buy from you now.

Categorizing a “no” as a “no decision” may make you feel better. It may make you feel as if your prospective client didn’t say “no,” and they may, in fact, have left the door open to explore changing again sometime in the future.

Categorizing the “no” as a “no decision” may improve the metrics you capture in your customer relationship management software. It might improve your win ratio dramatically. But, it won’t change the number of wins.

If you categorized a prospective client as an opportunity, and that opportunity ended in a “no decision,” that is a loss. You have gone through the process, and you did not convert the prospect to a client. You did not win.

The Competitor Who Beat You

Just because you did not lose to a competitor doesn’t mean you didn’t lose. You just lost to one of your toughest, unnamed competitors.

You invested the time. You invested the energy. You may have invested your company’s resources in pursuing that opportunity. It is no different than any other opportunity that you pursued, and it doesn’t need a label that makes it something different than a loss. It should be categorized as “Lost-Status Quo.“

Change isn’t easy. Compelling people and companies to change is not only difficult, it’s complicated by the fact that so many decisions are made by consensus. If you total up all of your lost opportunities at the end of the year, many of them will have been lost to a competitor who is not named in your customer relationship management software. That competitor is Lost-Status Quo.

In “no decision” is the same as a “no.” And in “no” is a loss.

The post A No Decision Is a No appeared first on The Sales Blog.

By Mark W. Schaefer

When I was just starting out in business, I spent a good part of my career in enterprise sales. I learned a lesson there that stuck with me throughout my whole career and I want to share it with you today.

One of my customers bought 100 percent of their raw material from the company I was working for, Alcoa. We went through a period when we were a terrible supplier. We had quality issues, production issues, and pricing issues that made us difficult to work with.

And yet, this company stuck with us. They would not move their orders to any other company. I was frankly perplexed.

One day, I had lunch with the company president and asked him why he stuck with Alcoa even when we were hurting their ability to produce their product.

“My father had a vision when he started this company,” my friend said, “and Alcoa supported him when others didn’t. They helped us with product design. Their metallurgists made us special materials to get us off the ground. When we ran into financial difficulty they were flexible with us and even gave us a loan for equipment we needed at one point.

“When my father was on his death bed, here were his final words to me: “Always stay with Alcoa. They brought us to the dance.’ ”

Now THAT is customer loyalty.

The lesson I learned from this is that your best customers aren’t customers. They’re partners. They’re family. And you should treat them that way.

It is a great joy to me that my long-time customers become my friends. When that happens, you can’t just view things in dollars and cents any more.

I am now in a situation where one of my long-time customers is going through some growth pains that necessitates a pivot. In the short-term it is going to create some financial hardships for me but I’m going to hang in there and support them because that’s what family does.

Will it pay off in the end? I don’t know. That’s not how a friend thinks about things.

I always look at a customer relationship and think “what would we do if we were one company? I have found that kind of thinking leads to the best results for everyone in the long-term.

I’m beginning to think this kind of thinking is growing out of date. But it’s worked for me this long. I can’t change it now. It’s a philosophy that … well … I guess you could say it brought me to the dance.

Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

Illustration courtesy Flickr CC and Varmazis

The post When to treat a customer like family appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

        

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Wouldn't it be nice if your prospecting emails got a 100% response rate? If they were so intriguing, compelling, and valuable that prospects couldn't wait to book a meeting with you?

Unfortunately, the only thing most sales emails compel buyers to do is hit the "delete" button. And this prompts reps to treat sales like a pure numbers game -- the more emails sent, the better the chance of getting a reply from someone.

But this strategy creates a vicious cycle. The more uncustomized, spammy sales emails sent to buyers' inboxes, the more willing prospects are to hit "delete" without even reading.

Instead of treating leads like names on a list and giving them reason to mistrust salespeople, let's break the cycle. Let's start treating our buyers like people, and commit to sending the ultra-personalized, one-off emails they deserve.  

To write sales emails that forge real relationships and drive responses, ask yourself the five questions laid out in the following SlideShare from Henneke at Enchanting Marketing. Once you pledge to stop the mass email barrage, seductive sales copy becomes a whole lot easier to produce.

A few weeks ago I had the privilege and opportunity to deliver the closing keynote for the B2B Summit in London.  The event, hosted by B2B Marketing, was a one-day event that delivered multiple sessions focused on best practices on everything from content, measurement, demand generation and Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategies.

Since the event, I have been fortunate to have several conversations with a few of the attendees either by phone or email and I keep thinking about what it means to be buyer-centric. One conversation, which is still ongoing, has been with one of the few sales reps who attended the event. Side note: If you want to help your sales people adapt to the new world of a very sophisticated buyer, send them to marketing events. 

During my speech, I poked a little fun at the numerous emails I receive on a daily basis that present some kind of technology or service that I must have in order to make my business even better. Then, they ask if I have time for a 30-minute demo. I spoke about how this type of approach, which is rather disruptive, is ineffective and is in no way aligned to a buyer purchase path. While every once in awhile this may lead to finding that elusive needle in a haystack, it is simply not an effective way to try and engage prospects. To be clear, sending a cold email or worse yet, connecting on LinkedIn for the sole purpose of sending a pitch, are both disruptive, and ineffective.

In response to this segment of the speech, one of the attendees (who is in sales) emailed me and asked,“What would your suggestion be on how we fill top of the funnel (tofu) if we do not suggest a demo? I have very slim/non-existent marketing. I am smart about targeting and messaging but the reality is I think the prospect does need to see it. Doesn’t a demo sound more interesting than a case study or conversation?”

Clearly in this situation, this rep is on their own trying to source their own leads, not all too uncommon in many organizations. However, during our dialogue, I responded with the following, “The issue with the offer of a demo is that the sales person has just told the buyer that they have no idea of where I am in my buying process or even recognized that I may not be in a buying process at all. You are right that the prospect will need to see a demo . . . eventually, but not at the first interaction. I do believe a conversation is what you should be aiming for initially. This is not a conversation to sell, but a conversation to help them, to educate them.”

“This does require being an expert in your field and not just an expert on your product or company. You need to be able to speak to industry trends, the impacts of market shaping events and be able to articulate the struggles companies are having today and provide inside and education on how they should be solved without talking about the services or technology that your company provides. Buyers want to and often time need to be educated as they know they have an issue, but often times need help thinking through how they should approach solving it.  If you can be the person (in a sales roles with little marketing support) or your company can be the vendor that helps provide that, you will convert more deals to wins in the long run.”   

And this is exactly what organizations need to embrace, the understanding that disruption is no longer a valid approach. The understanding today is that the buyers buying process trumps the sales process. Understand that often times the buyers need help understanding their issues on a deeper level and content should address these issues and help educate. The understanding is that sales is no longer the focal point of deals, but it is the buyer(s) who chart their course and we, as an organization – marketing and sales – must develop a strategy that aligns to this process.

In DemandGen Report’s latest B2B Buyers Report, when asked the Top 4 Reasons buyers selected the winning vendor the second most important reason given was, “They demonstrated a stronger knowledge of the solution area and the business landscape.”

Disrupting buyers with offers of demonstrations, gimmicks, or a quick checking in to schedule a time for a call is not at all buyer-centric. Educating, providing insights, being helpful to buyers as they seek to address their pain points and challenges is what buyers want. Organizations that want to succeed will make this change starting now, understanding that unless they do, the buyer will be lost to them.

Author: Carlos Hidalgo @cahidalgo CEO/ Principal, ANNUITAS

*Image via katloterzo.com

The post No I Do Not Want To See Your Demo appeared first on ANNUITAS.

You’ve heard the stats. You’ve read the articles.

Today, the majority of the buyer’s journey is self-directed and happens before you even know who they are. This reality has made marketing teams accountable for engaging buyers sooner and getting them to that first “hello” faster.

At Netskope, we knew we needed to strategically guide the conversation from the very first touch to the last–and to do it, we invested in creating relevant, buyer-centric content for every stage of the journey. It’s how we scaled our content efforts for the best experience at every touchpoint, leading to more business impact and less content waste. As a result, we saw a 5x increase in website visits, 10x increase in qualified leads in our database, and 10x the social reach.

But getting there was a journey in itself with a lot of learnings along the way. Here are five tips to successfully map your content to the buyer’s journey:

1. Brut Force Only Gets You So Far

For any organization, large or small, it’s easy to fall into the trap of producing a high volume of content to fuel prolific campaigns. Unfortunately, this endeavor involves churning out as much content as possible, often with a lack of regard to efficiency or effectiveness.

To become a content juggernaut, you have to build a repeatable, scalable process for content creation–and spreadsheets won’t cut it. For us, this is where technology, specifically marketing automation and marketing content software, became essential. By integrating the two, we were able to build a truly effective and efficient marketing operation. Marketing content software helps you plan content, meet deadlines, and coordinate teams to create and deliver buyer-centric content across the funnel, and marketing automation enables you to distribute that content to the right people and measure the impact on your target audience, not to mention track how they progress through the buyer’s journey.

2. It’s Okay to Repurpose Content

Repurposing content in different areas throughout the buyer’s journey was key to our success. Don’t get stuck thinking that a report can only be used in one stage of the buyer’s journey—there are multiple ways to use a single asset. For example, my team initially leveraged a Gartner report as a didactic piece to drive awareness and support lead generation. However, when our sales team began using the asset to drive engagement later in the sales cycle, we realized we were missing an opportunity. The report lists our company as a representative vendor and so we used it to set buying criteria during the evaluation stage as well. We started to encourage customer-facing teams to re-use this asset to support multiple stages of the buying cycle. For potential customers who weren’t familiar with our product, we were able to use it to garner interest in the general topic and challenges. Then, as they started engaging with us, we used it to introduce our solution. For buyers further along in the purchasing journey, we used it to establish authority and differentiate ourselves from our competitors. This strategic repurposing helped us get the most out of a single asset.

Keep in mind that reusing content doesn’t mean hitting people over the head with the same piece of content, providing an infographic to generate awareness only to repeat it in an additional nurture email to the same lead. But, it does allow you to take successful content and frame it in a new way strategically. For example, you can easily take a ebook or flipbook and create an infographic on the topic or share digestible, interesting quotes from it on social media.

3. Don’t Let Great be the Enemy of Good

When it comes to planning, creating, delivering, and analyzing content, remember: everything doesn’t need to be perfect. You need to move fast, and some content can not only survive, but thrive in a less-than-perfect state.

Our Movie Line Monday series, for example, is filled with fun, short videos running less than five minutes each. We film each video in just one take, with no do-overs and no extensive editing time. These quick videos deliver content in a way that is digestible, genuine, and, most importantly, scalable. When it comes to content planning, we create workflows to align with the amount of time a given asset requires, factoring in additional time for assets that require near-perfection and less time for others that thrive on quick turnarounds like our short videos.

4. Listen!

If you’re not talking to your customers, prospects, and cross-functional teams, such as customer support or sales, you’re missing the boat. It’s essential to incorporate feedback as you create new assets and iterate on existing content. You need to get out there and listen to what people are thinking.

Markets change over time. When we started at Netskope, it was a very evangelical sale—not many people knew about our product as a category, so much of our content was focused on awareness and education. But today, analysts, press, and, of course, competitors are talking about cloud security. Because people understand the category, we had to reframe our content in a way that recognizes that people are familiar with the term and then take a deeper dive.

To deliver a positive experience at each stage of the buyer’s journey, you need to stay on the pulse of your buyer—taking into consideration what they see, what they respond to, and what they find interesting. For example, through talking with sales and customers, we discovered that IT teams and CISOs were inundated with fear-mongering tactics regarding topics like data breaches and job security. If we went in line with that topic, we’d just be a part of the never-ending noise. Our solution? Keep reading…

5. Establish a Brand Voice

To stand out from our competitors, we knew our content needed to be different. Accordingly, we focused on content that was fun and authentic, balancing a lightheartedness with the serious importance of security. We believe in injecting humor and personality—and focusing on topics that make people think. This has been a way for us to reach our customers and keep them engaged long after we’ve closed the sale. While this strategy may not be the best for your target audience, the key is to understand the tone of voice for your brand and be consistent about it. Look at your company’s values, which can often be found in your mission statement, and see what tone to incorporate into your content that aligns with it.

Taking a buyer-centric approach and getting out of spreadsheets, you too can increase the quantity and quality of your content throughout the buyer’s journey. When you create a scalable process for delivering the right content at the right time, you can focus on topics and tactics that drive revenue and increase retention. Not to mention, you can boost morale, knowing your content is making a significant impact on the success of your company—and on the success of your buyers.

What other advice do you have for mapping content to the buyer’s journey? Shared your tried-and-true tips below!