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If customer journeys would not have been online but in middle earth and the metrics would all be converted into the rings of power, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV, used interchangeably) would have been the One Ring to Rule Them All.

What is Customer Lifetime Value?

Customer Lifetime Value’s definition is as literal as it gets. It is the sum of total value that a customer generates for you in their entire relationship with you.

Since the lifetime of each customer is quite sporadic in nature, it is either calculated on an average basis or by fixing a time period for it. For instance, pertaining to CLV analysis you would often hear the jargons such as CLV for people aged 18-22 or CLV for a 12-month period, so on and so forth. I will try to shed optimum light on each of them further in the post.

Why is Customer Lifetime Value important?

Every customer that you acquire for your business has a cost attached to it. It may be the cost of the PPC ad you ran, or the cost of promoted posts on social media channels or even the cost of creating interesting content for a direct lead. This is the cost of acquisition of a customer or the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

LTV helps you justify the CAC every channel demands. Let us illustrate the process through an example.

Consider a sample CAC table, having the channels common to almost all the online businesses.

A quick glance suggests that the customers acquired through the affiliate (referral) channel are the costliest, taking up much of your marketing budget. Should you discard the channel and focus on social media instead? When considered in solitude, the decision seems the rational one to make. However, adding the LTV chart into the equation, the customers whom you acquired through the Affiliate Channel, stay with you the longest and hence provide you with the highest revenue per user (RPU). The plot thickens!

How to calculate Customer Lifetime Value?

The obvious answer to this would be Total Profit / Total No. of Customers. Sadly, it’s not that obvious.

The above formula isn’t the right way to calculate LTV because of one primary reason; it ignores the customer history with you. The time each customer has spent with you and their individual buying habits would differ and so should the LTV of each customer.

LTV is calculated by applying 2 approaches in general:

1. Historical Computation of LTV
2. Predictive Computation of LTV

1. Historical Computation of LTV: This is an accurate way of calculating the Lifetime Value of a customer. The approach is dependable because you have a constant value to all the variable you need. The formula for calculating historical customer lifetime value is:

Historical LTV = ARPU per month x No. of months in their Lifetime

Where, ARPU is the Average Revenue Per User.
And, ARPU per month = Summation of all the Averages of Revenue per month per user.

Let’s illustrate the above method by a hypothetical customer lifetime value example. Consider that a business has 3 users and following is the record of purchases they have made in the past year:

As per the above table,

• Jon stayed for 8 months, Average Monthly Revenue for Jon =(220+120+200)/8= $67.5
• Bran stayed for 8 months, Average Monthly Revenue for Bran =(240+80+60)/8= $47.5
• Hodor stayed for 6 months, Average Monthly Revenue for Hodor =(140+140+140)/6= $70

Average Revenue Per User, Per Month = (67.5+47.5+70)/ 3 = $61.7

Find a meaningful timeline for your business, like a 12-month period and your LTV = 12 x $61.7 = $740

Now, time to talk about the elephant in the room – How does LTV help in deciding the budget allocation of different Customer Acquisition Channel and their CAC?

Hence, Cohort Analysis.

A cohort is a group of customers who share an attribute or set of attributes.

Cohort analysis takes the ARPU method of LTV calculation to the next level. When you create cohorts by the acquisition channels they came from, you can calculate LTVs (using the ARPU method) and plot it against the CACs and the table would give the picture you always dreamt of.

While the customers acquired through Referral channel result in higher revenue than Organic, the LTV/ CAC ratio is higher for customers acquired through the Organic channel. In simpler language, the customers acquired through Organic searches will give you higher revenue in their lifetime, than the customers acquired through any other channel. Hence, SEO should get the bigger piece of your Marketing Budget pie than Affiliate or any other channel of customer acquisition.

2. Predictive Computation of LTV
The historical computation of LTV is reliable and comparatively easier, but it leaves one major question unanswered. It talks about the past and at the best present, but the marketing activities that need to be undertaken can only take place in the future.

The historical computation also presents a skewed picture when some customers have been with the business for far too long or there have been some major product changes in the recent past.

Thus comes in the picture, the predictive computation of LTV. By using data modeling techniques such as Regression modeling, Moving Averages, Bayesian inference among others, experts are able to feed the historical data into an equation and predict the future customer lifetime value using predefined models.

Since the methods of computation and modelling are immensely technical in nature, simplifying it down to the scope of this blog post is akin to murdering it. In fact, for most of the cases, the historical computation serves the purpose as a starting point. But if you are a data geek like me, following Peter Fader and reading his paper on How to project customer retention is something you would love to spend your weekend on.

How to increase Customer Lifetime Value?

LTV of a customer depends on the relationship period, the number of purchases and average ticket size of each purchase. An increase in LTV is possible only when an increase in either one of these 3 take place or (in an ideal world) all three shoot up.

Businesses generally put focus on high-value customers and place effort into maximizing customer lifetime value for the rest. Eventually, the ball game turns to be about increasing value for customers.

Avinash Kaushik, one of the foremost authorities on Analytics, names the high LTV user as Mr. Right. To lure Mr. Right and likes to your business and more importantly retain them with your business, you have to take a few right steps in the right direction.

Let this post serve as the checklist of those steps to increase LTV for you:

1. Identify the right acquisition channel
2. Right visualization (Single Customer View)
3. Create the right segments
4. Right marketing to the right segments.
5. Sell them the right things

1. Identify the right acquisition channel
The graph showing CAC vs. LTV attributed per channel, paints you a clear picture of the ROI each acquisition channel bears for you. If you have been looking at low CACs vs. lead ratio to demarcate the marketing budget for your channels, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Going back to Pareto principle we talked about, if 20% of your customers account for 80% of the revenue you have, an incremental increase in that 20% can have an astronomic one in your revenues.

2. The (Right) Single Customer View
Single customer view is an aggregated, consistent and holistic representation of the data known by an organization about its customers.

A single customer view gives you the ability to track customers and their communications across every channel. It helps to break the marketing silos and understand the customer through all the touchpoints he/ she interacts with.

It is a dynamic snapshot of all the attributes and behaviours of a customer across channels and devices, as illustrated below:

3. Create the right segments
There are many attributes of a customer that defines his/ her buying behaviour. For different businesses, different attributes matter. For some it’s the demography, for some, it’s the frequency of purchase. To each, his own.

However, figuring out these attributes and analyzing the user groups having those attributes is pivotal. Segmentation appears as the savior in such cases.

Segmentation is the process of segregating your users (customers) into groups based on behavior, characteristics and/ or needs. Also, learn how to effectively segment your audience before beginning to segregate them.

4. Right marketing to the right segments
Segments are one of the best ways to visualize and understand your user behaviour. But its benefits do not stop there. You can further use these segments to craft marketing journeys to personalize every touch point with your business.

Personalized marketing and contextual remarketing prove to be the two most effective techniques of retaining your customers and in turn increasing their LTV.

5. Sell them the right things (Cross Sell and Up Sell)
Once you start understanding your users, it’s easy to understand their buying behaviour, preferences, and purchasing power. These 3 form the basis of all the up-selling and cross-selling across industries.
Not only this, you can easily automate all of it through product recommendation engines. It completes your puzzle of marketing automation that you were busy figuring out for so long. A pro-tip here is to use micro-segmentation in marketing automation for convincing results.

What Next?

Once you understand Customer Lifetime Value and start acting on it. The next in line would be a Retention Strategy. Guess what, I have a ready post for you – Customer Retention Strategy Growth Hacks.

Happy Marketing!

The post was originally published on WebEngage’s marketing blog.

Whether you are a small business, startup or enterprise, collaboration is essential for discussing goals and ideas, becoming more productive and making sure things get done. Expanding markets and global reach allows your company to look at your industry and markets differently. In order to make more informed decisions, you need to collaborate with experts, your staff and even foreign entities. Building credibility in new markets requires communication facilitated through the most efficient channels. Here are five of the best collaboration tools for businesses.

Do

This app only costs $10 per month, per user and gives you an all-in-one tool to help you hold more productive meetings. You can use the tool to keep notes, track progress, create agendas and follow up on to-dos in order to improve productivity. Your visual timeline gives you a better view of your meetings. You can run Do from either your desktop or mobile device. In addition, Do is searchable–this means you can find specified meeting items in order to ensure tasks are being covered. Moreover, it lets you track how much time and money is being spent on meetings to help improve efficiency.

Google Hangouts

When it comes to collaborating with people, Google Hangouts lets you send messages or make video calls on any device to several people. You can share photos and your location. On the other hand, you can use video calls to create face-to-face conversations with up to nine other people. If you wish to add more people, you can do so from a mobile device. Voice calls to the US and Canada are free. Not to mention, you can live-stream meetings and events. Google Hangouts is free. There are also paid subscriptions that give you the ability to connect to more people within a single session.

Toll free numbers

When it comes to improving client perception, it helps to have a toll free number. The reason is because customers can call you free of charge, and today, toll free numbers often come with forwarding and routing options that let you take calls anytime and from anywhere. A toll free number helps with privacy concerns as you don’t have to give out your personal number to prospects and clients, or contractors. This is one service that offers features to help your business enjoy better collaboration.You can even have your number forwarded to any mobile phone or landline.

Slack

If you want to have all of your communication in one place, then you need to download Slack. This app offers file sharing, real-time messaging, one-to-one and group conversations. In addition, you can share inline images and video with rich link summaries. What makes Slack even more useful is it integrates with Twitter, Asana, Dropbox and Zendesk. For five integrations and a 10k message searchable archive, you can use Slack for free. For additional features, paid plans start at $6.67 per user per month.

Fuze Meeting

Sometimes you just need flexibility when it comes to your meetings. With Fuze Meeting, you can get HD audio and video conferencing. You can also present animations, multimedia, documents and other forms of rich content. Any device can be used to access Fuze Meeting from a nearby hall to someone joining in from another country. Meetings can be scheduled through Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar. This tool is free for up to 25 participants and comes with unlimited VoIP, screen and content sharing, 1 GB of cloud storage and 12 HD video feeds. For additional users, Pro plans start at $8 per month.

In a global economy, collaboration is essential. The right tools gets you the right results. The best part is many of the best collaboration tools offer free plans for a smaller number of users, allowing you to test it out for your team before jumping into paid subscriptions. When it comes to expansion and international reach, you need flexible tools that allow you to send and receive messages, set up meetings and send documents at anytime and from any device.

If you’re aiming to become a successful sales manager, be sure and listen to this interview.

Gerhard Gschwandtner, founder and CEO of Selling Power Magazine and the popular Sales 2.0 Conferences, has probably worked with more sales leaders and managers than anyone in the world. After all, he’s been interviewing them and creating content and products for them for decades…. His magazine is read by over 300,000 sales leaders every month, and over 100,000 sales executives watch his daily video channel where, you guessed it, he interviews sales leaders. So who better to offer tips on how you can become a successful sales manager?

Gerhard knows what it takes to be a sales manager and to rise through the ranks. In this broadcast from the archives of CONNECT! Online Radio for Selling Professionals™, Gschwandtner joined show host Deb Calvert to discuss how front-line sellers can best prepare themselves for a move into management. If you’ve ever considered making the move or hope someday to do your boss’s job, be sure to tune in for this informative and inspiring interview with one of the sales industry’s most knowledgeable experts.

Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite!

Deb: “ When you talk to people, when you work with people who find themselves in that situation, what advice do you give them?”

Gerhard: “My advice to the company is to create a system wherein you allow people to aspire to be a sales manager. To experiment and try it out. Go and for the next three months work with another sales manager and become a co-manager. And get a feel whether you feel comfortable in that role. ”

Deb: “As a sales rep, what are the things I can be doing to demonstrate that I have the capabilities to manage and be successful when it’s time for me to make that transition?”

Gerhard: “One is the relationship. You want to prepare yourself and see how you can improve your capacity of collaborating and working with people to get better results. The second thing is strategy. The third is value. ”

There’s more to learn! Tune in for more of Gerhard Gschwandtner’s Advice on How to Become a Successful Sales Manager

Check out the full selection of archived interviews. We’ll help you cut out continuances, put an end to pending and stop stalling out in sales!  There’s no better way to maximize your windshield time than by listening to CONNECT! Online Radio for Sales Professionals™.

The post Want to Become a Successful Sales Manager? Tips from a Master appeared first on People First.

Businesses have way too many expenses and you cannot plan them all when starting to build the business model at the initial level.In fact, you have to spend way too much on planning and correspondingly setting up things in the targeted marketplace.

Nevertheless, there are many other expenses that you need to bear individually going forward.Here, in this article, we have come up with multiple tips to save money in business. In the below list, there are some tips that save you more money as compared to the other ones and you end up saving thousands in business:

PENNY-PINCHING ENDORSEMENTS

Businesses need advertisement to eventually become popular among its targeted audience while you need to save money in advertisement too. Try out the following practices:

1. Piggyback advertisement

Create advertisement materials like e-pamphlets, newsletters, and mailers to spread them all over the Internet. If you have a physical presence too, make the most of that. Tuck coupons and promotional pamphlets in the carry bags that you hand to the customers.

2. Share good bonds with your neighbors

Discuss with your neighbors about sharing the cost of marketing and promotions and follow a joint advertisement program. Consider promoting your business through sidewalk sales and ask them to share their mailing lists with you if possible. Meet their suppliers and discuss a minimal cost promotion.

3. Take help from your contacts

Ask the people in contact for referrals so that you can supply them your exclusive products and/or services. If possible, ask them to propose your products or services in business meets. Needless to say, the increasing marketing network is the only thing that provides you with business opportunities.

4. Create a database of your happy customers

Ask your customers to give feedback so that you get to know how you are doing and how much scope for improvement is there. If you customers share their stories and respective experiences with others, then they encourage them for using your products or services.

5. Get in TV commercials

Another major platform for you to advertise your business is the local cable TV channels. Generally, cable TV channels have reasonable advertisement charges in time slots. You might not get a good response initially, but you can certainly make an impression on your potential customers, which does count.

6. Voice your experience

Your presence in a particular business division does make you aware of various market fluctuations, which is beneficial for any business in the same or a like domain operated by you or anyone else. Share your experience with others and grab their attention towards your business.

GET ON THE INTERNET

The Internet is a global platform that enables businesses to grow exponentially, thereby serving a substantial share of consumers globally. Any business can secure its specific audience and serve it in the best way possible. Try out the practices listed below:

7. Online marketing

If you have a website, then you can promote your business easily by joining various newsgroups, social groups online that have your target audience. Advertise various categories of product/services you offer on your website through blog posts, Google ads, and on various social media platforms, viz. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

8. Trim down online selling cost

Creating your own business website, thereby incorporating professional nuts and bolts costs you a lot, whereas selling your products on a multi-vendor storefront is much convenient. Nevertheless, if you have a budget to create your own e-commerce website, then there are low-cost platforms available too. Try a WordPress-based website.

9. Chat with the audience

Join multiple newsgroups and chat with other participants on a daily basis. Share your business ideas and do take what others have shared. You never know a simple idea can brings you an increasingly large number of customers. If you can stay connected to such business or newsgroups, add your signature below the post. Avoid promotion through your posts, as you may get banned by the admin.

10. Be your own advertiser

Let people know who you are and what your business is about. Put your URL in your signature online, add your brand name, logo, and URL in your email signature, print company’s name and slogan on employees’ uniform, take the help of press release, and go social no matter what.

LOCATION IS THE KEY

Clients and employees prefer an organization that is in their close proximity not just for the sake of convenience of individuals but for the ease of business transactions frequently. Try out the following practices:

11. Be found

Businesses that are easily approachable and customers do not have to take much pain in getting in touch to buy the products and services have comparatively high chances of becoming popular among the audience. Let your customers find you easily and be available for them whenever necessary.

12. Don’t miss home

Establishing a permanent office at a physical location can cost you a huge sum of money (over $100,000), whereas a home-based office or operating from your own apartment does not require starting from the scratch. At home, you do have a phone, Internet connectivity, cupboard, and other furniture and you do not need to spend on all these items again.

WORKPLACE OVERHEADS

Offices do have multiple expenses that are necessary, though. However, you can cut down extra cost, whatsoever may be, by employing recycled equipment wherever applicable. Below are a few such practices that you may like to follow:

13. Recycled Xerox machine or printer

Various multi-national companies and other business owners who move periodically often sell printers or Xerox machines, as transportation is tedious for such things. If you require such equipment at your office because you need them frequently, then look for the recycled edition if available at an affordable cost.

14. Create forms yourself

Offices do need certain forms and they but those from third-party suppliers, and then create them on their own. In contrast, these forms can be downloaded online at no extra cost. Once downloaded, customize those forms as per your requirements at present or in the future.

15. Use freeware tools

You can find almost every software tool online either as the free trial edition or with a limited validity. Whichever software you need, you can try and search on Google if you don’t know which website to log on. In case any such software is not available in its latest version, you better download it from its manufacturer’s website.

16. Get pre-owned equipment

You can save thousands simply by purchasing pre-owned equipment, furniture, and other things you may need at your office. Just go online and search for used furniture or other things with an appropriate query on Google. Alternately, you can try and get the same at a nearby furniture store or a particular dealer.

INSURANCE AWARENESS

Organizations provide health insurance to their employees to make them feel safe in the workplace. If you are a startup, you may not be able to provide individual insurance cover to each of your employees. In such cases, each employee must have a health insurance plan for himself. However, it is not possible to ensure that each of your employees has one. In this case, you could understand the health insurance policies listed by various web aggregators and have multiple options to select from. The following are the practices that can be followed:

17. Group insurance

As a responsible employer, you can opt for a group insurance policy that covers all employees under one umbrella for certain benefits; subject to the policy issuing company. Buying a Corporate/Group Insurance Policy for your employees can be much cheaper than buying individual Health Covers. While, some employers provide comprehensive coverage, it is not necessarily important to do so; you can choose the type of coverage as per your affordability.

18. Extent of coverage

Life is full of uncertainties and anything unfortunate might come to an individual in the next moment. Thus, when at workplace, make sure that your employees are safe and covered against the medical hazards. Let them know the extent of coverage offered to them under the group insurance policy.This tip might not be of direct monitory benefit to you, but would definitely add value to your relationship with your employees and fringe benefit component of their salary.

19. Insurance claim history

When choosing an insurer for your employees, make sure you verify its solvency and claim settlement ratio.Also, do include the health cover in the list of key points to confirm. A medical insurance policy assures the hospitalization expenses to be borne by the insurance provider. Therefore, it is essential to know the capability of the insurer to settle the claims before investing with that particular insurer. An insurer with a strong claim history or a high claim settlement ratio is the best to invest with. Buying insurance from an untrustworthy insurer and facing claim rejection can lead to a total loss of investment/funds.

20. Opt for Deductible

Health insurance policies have a component called deductibles that reduce the premium payable by the insured. This basically happens because deductibles are that share of a claim that is to be borne by the insured himself. Meaning, if you raise your deductible, the insurer’s liability will decrease and consequently you would have to pay comparatively less premium. On the flip side, no or least deductible means the premium is going to be higher. Therefore, do talk to your insurer about the ways to reduce premiums.

EMPLOYMENT ECONOMICS

Organizations have certain expenses that cannot be minimized or overlooked. These expenses include employees’ salary, electricity and Internet bills, mobile bills and more.However, when it comes to saving money, you can follow the below practices:

21. Go for lease

Organizations try to own the place where they operate from, whereas it is recommended to lease the place instead.This reduces any extra overhead that may arise during the annual renovation, whitewash, and other activities that can cost over $10,000. In contrast, if they lease a building or a floor of that building, you just have to bear a share of the overall expense, which is quite to afford for any business firm.

22. Temporary hiring

It has seen that organizations prefer to hire employees based on projects, which is beneficial for them.Also, it is obvious for any startup to hire candidates on a temporary basis because the company will not want to pay to an employee when there is no work for him at all. This also saves money in the long run hiring of eligible candidates when a project is expected to run comparatively long.

23. Hire interns or trainees

When you have small projects and you cannot afford to pay a bigger sum to your experiences employees to work on those projects, consider hiring interns or trainees. Not only would this save your project cost but also give college students/ college graduates opportunity to work and learn in a professional environment.

24. Hire individual freelancers

Organizations, instead of hiring candidates or outsourcing services, prefer to hire individual freelancers, which reduces the project cost significantly. The same is recommended over an agency to minimize the per person cost of the project.

TAX APPROACHES

Organizations have to pay income tax just like individuals do. However, the taxable amount payable by an organization is way too much higher than that by an individual. The following practices are for organizations:

25. Defend your tax

New businesses may have a higher tax rate than those that have already been there. If this is about your business, you should take a stand for that. Verify how much others in your neighborhood are paying and negotiate. You can negotiate with community authorities that want your business to be there is the town and not move and get hired by someone else’s company.

26. Hire family members

If you run a company and your children are over 14 years of age and can pay tax for themselves, then you can hire them and save in taxes significantly. Since children’s income fall in the lower tax bracket, the tax liability is also less. Thus, you can transfer your income to your children’s bank accounts to save money in income tax.

27. Deduct your crucial expenses

Needless to say, you do get a tax rebate on mortgage interest and other business expenses.Besides, you are allowed to claim a tax deduction on the payment for multiple expenses incurred for home maintenance, including on the cost of cleaning your house or lawn. In case you have a doubt on tax deductions or any other related thing, you can consult your income tax advisor.

FINANCIAL ATTENTION

You need to focus on your financial goal and its corresponding tips to trim them down. The following are the practices:

28. Deport early

Banks give interest on early deposits, so make sure you deposit money as early as possible to earn interest.

29. Avoid credit card cash advance

If you own one or more credit cards, never go for cash advance since bank charge up to 2% as an upfront fee on the amount withdrawn.

30. Compare credit limits

In case you have multiple credit cards, you should make purchases with the card with lower interest rate, especially when you are going to leave unpaid balance at the month end.

Put the aforementioned tips to practice and save thousands in your business.

Mark Cuban, the "Shark Tank" star and billionaire owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, always has his hands in a wide variety of businesses.

Throughout his career, he's made over 120 investments, from large companies like Landmark Theatres to his Three Commas apparel line.

For all of the businesses he's been a part of, he's developed a set of "rules that have been almost infallible," he wrote in his 2013 book, "How to Win at the Sport of Business."

Below, Business Insider has summarized the three he's used "religiously."

SEE ALSO: Billionaire designer Tory Burch shares the best advice she ever got

1. Understand the difference between adding value and benefiting from a bull market

In the same way that some stock market investors think that they're geniuses when they keep picking stocks that go up, failing to acknowledge that all stocks are doing the same thing, Cuban says, entrepreneurs can fail to recognize that a good deal of their success is because of a fad or trend.

"There is nothing wrong with going along for the ride and making money at it, but it will catch up with you if you lie to yourself and give yourself credit for the ride," he wrote.

Cuban said that he saw this happen with professional sports leagues in the early 2000s. He explained that many team owners became enamored with rising revenues from television-rights deals, crediting it to their own "brilliance."

He said, however, that he and his Mavericks partners recognized that revenues were actually rising because of competition among cable and satellite providers. Cuban couldn't become complacent.

"It's a bigger challenge to recognize that the bull market may end and our programming needs to be of sufficient value to our customers and viewers for it to maintain or continue to increase in value," he wrote.

2. Win the battles you're in before moving on to new ones

Cuban wrote that he had a chance to take Landmark Theatres international, but that any time spent on developing a global presence was time not spent growing its national presence, and so he decided against it.

He wrote:

"You do not have unlimited time and/or attention. You may work 24 hours a day, but those 24 hours spent winning your core business will pay off far more. It might cost you some longer-term upside, but it will allow you to be the best business you can be."

3. Don't drown in opportunity

"If you are adding new things when your core businesses are struggling rather than facing the challenge, you are either running away or giving up," Cuban wrote. "Rarely is either good for a business."

Melissa Carbone, president of horror-attraction company Ten Thirty One Productions, told Business Insider in 2014 that after the $2 million deal she made with Cuban on "Shark Tank" went public, she was flooded with partnership and investment offers, some of which were quite attractive.

Cuban told her to take a step back and not let emotions make her impulsive. She said that she would continually hear Cuban's voice in her head reminding her, "Don't drown in opportunity."

Optimizing your team’s sales process is a job that’s never finished. With new growth targets always part of the equation as well as changes in buyer behavior, you need a process that allows you to effectively recognize and take advantage of needed improvements.

Below are four tips for evaluating the effectiveness of your sales process.

Focus on Your Buyer

Elite sales teams have a sales process that’s focused on one thing — the buyer. If your process isn’t aligned with how your buyers buy, it will never be effective. A common mistake is to assume that one process fits all. Your market likely has different segments of buyers that have different needs. Some have regimented buying processes, while others may be less refined. All have their own key decision criteria. Your sales process needs to adjust for these different buyers. If you take a one-process-fits-all approach, you aren’t accounting for the different buyer scenarios and your sales process may unintentionally weed out real opportunities.

Simplify and Support

The best sales processes are simple but effective, and supported throughout your entire enterprise. Every person involved in the company knows his or her role and timing within the full customer engagement process. Every department in your organization has some part to play in selling and delivering value for your customers. Your sales process must facilitate the efficient coordination of people, resources, and activities, from those departments when needed by your sellers. As with anything, if it’s too difficult to follow, then it will fall by the wayside and reps will resort to bad habits.

Incorporate Best Practices

It is a mistake to look at your top rep and simply tell others to sell like that person. However, replicating key behaviors of your top performers with the rest of your team can help you instill best practices throughout the organization.

Document the key activities that should happen during prospecting, presentations, handling concerns, scoping, negotiations, etc… Don’t hesitate to elicit feedback from the team and adjust the new process as necessary.

Let Managers Coach

The best selling process is managed by a great sales coach. Your organizational culture must therefore support a sales manager’s ability to evaluate, coach and communicate with the team. A well-defined sales process will provide the manager with many opportunities to collaborate and enhance any particular sales campaign. Leverage the process with guidelines for how to use it. Encourage sales managers to find ways to leverage the organization while helping their sales people be more competitive, qualify better and productively win the right sales campaigns.

If evaluating your sales process is a top priority for your team, download the ebook: Improving Your Sales Process to get started now!

Bottom line: Every manufacturer has the potential to integrate machine learning into their operations and become more competitive by gaining predictive insights into production.

Machine learning’s core technologies align well with the complex problems manufacturers face daily. From striving to keep supply chains operating efficiently to producing customized, built- to-order products on time, machine learning algorithms have the potential to bring greater predictive accuracy to every phase of production. Many of the algorithms being developed are iterative, designed to learn continually and seek optimized outcomes. These algorithms iterate in milliseconds, enabling manufacturers to seek optimized outcomes in minutes versus months.

The ten ways machine learning is revolutionizing manufacturing include the following:

• Increasing production capacity up to 20% while lowering material consumption rates by 4%. Smart manufacturing systems designed to capitalize on predictive data analytics and machine learning have the potential to improve yield rates at the machine, production cell, and plant levels. The following graphic from General Electric and cited in a National Institute of Standards (NIST) provides a summary of benefits that are being gained using predictive analytics and machine learning in manufacturing today.

Source: Focus Group: Big Data Analytics for Smart Manufacturing Systems

• Providing more relevant data so finance, operations, and supply chain teams can better manage factory and demand-side constraints. In many manufacturing companies, IT systems aren’t integrated, which makes it difficult for cross-functional teams to accomplish shared goals. Machine learning has the potential to bring an entirely new level of insight and intelligence into these teams, making their goals of optimizing production workflows, inventory, Work In Process (WIP), and value chain decisions possible.

Source: GE Global Research Stifel 2015 Industrials Conference

• Improving preventative maintenance and Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) performance with greater predictive accuracy to the component and part-level. Integrating machine learning databases, apps, and algorithms into cloud platforms are becoming pervasive, as evidenced by announcements from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. The following graphic illustrates how machine learning is integrated into the Azure platform. Microsoft is enabling Krones to attain their Industrie 4.0 objectives by automating aspects of their manufacturing operations on Microsoft Azure.

Source: Enabling Manufacturing Transformation in a Connected World John Shewchuk Technical Fellow DX, Microsoft

• Enabling condition monitoring processes that provide manufacturers with the scale to manage Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) at the plant level increasing OEE performance from 65% to 85%. An automotive OEM partnered with Tata Consultancy Services to improve their production processes that had seen Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) of the press line reach a low of 65 percent, with the breakdown time ranging from 17-20 percent. By integrating sensor data on 15 operating parameters (such as oil pressure, oil temperature, oil viscosity, oil leakage, and air pressure) collected from the equipment every 15 seconds for 12 months. The components of the solution are shown

Source: Using Big Data for Machine Learning Analytics in Manufacturing

• Machine learning is revolutionizing relationship intelligence and Salesforce is quickly emerging as the leader. The series of acquisitions Salesforce is making positions them to be the global leader in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). The following table from the Cowen and Company research note, Salesforce: Initiating At Outperform; Growth Engine Is Well Greased published June 23, 2016, summarizes Salesforce’s series of machine learning and AI acquisitions, followed by an analysis of new product releases and estimated revenue contributions. Salesforce’s recent acquisition of e-commerce provider Demandware for $2.8B is analyzed by Alex Konrad is his recent post, Salesforce Will Acquire Demandware For $2.8 Billion In Move Into Digital Commerce. Cowen & Company predicts Commerce Cloud will contribute $325M in revenue by FY18, with Demandware sales being a significant contributor.

• Revolutionizing product and service quality with machine learning algorithms that determine which factors most and least impact quality company-wide. Manufacturers often are challenged with making product and service quality to the workflow level a core part of their companies. Often quality is isolated. Machine learning is revolutionizing product and service quality by determining which internal processes, workflows, and factors contribute most and least to quality objectives being met. Using machine learning manufacturers will be able to attain much greater manufacturing intelligence by predicting how their quality and sourcing decisions contribute to greater Six Sigma performance within the Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control (DMAIC) framework.

• Increasing production yields by the optimizing of team, machine, supplier and customer requirements are already happening with machine learning. Machine learning is making a difference on the shop floor daily in aerospace & defense, discrete, industrial and high-tech manufacturers today. Manufacturers are turning to more complex, customized products to use more of their production capacity, and machine learning help to optimize the best possible selection of machines, trained staffs, and suppliers.

• The vision of Manufacturing-as-a-Service will become a reality thanks to machine learning enabling subscription models for production services. Manufacturers whose production processes are designed to support rapid, highly customized production runs are well positioning to launch new businesses that provide a subscription rate for services and scale globally. Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), electronics providers and retailers whose manufacturing costs have skyrocketed will have the potential to subscribe to a manufacturing service and invest more in branding, marketing, and selling.

• Machine learning is ideally suited for optimizing supply chains and creating greater economies of scale. For many complex manufacturers, over 70% of their products are sourced from suppliers that are making trade-offs of which buyer they will fulfill orders for first. Using machine learning, buyers and suppliers could collaborate more effectively and reduce stock-outs, improve forecast accuracy and met or beat more customer delivery dates.

• Knowing the right price to charge a given customer at the right time to get the most margin and closed sale will be commonplace with machine learning. Machine learning is extending what enterprise-level price optimization apps provide today. One of the most significant differences is going to be just how optimizing pricing along with suggested strategies to close deals accelerate sales cycles.

Sources:

Lee, J. H., & Ha, S. H. (2009). Recognizing yield patterns through hybrid applications of machine learning techniques. Information Sciences, 179(6), 844-850.

Mackenzie, A. (2015). The production of prediction: What does machine learning want?. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(4-5), 429-445.

Pham, D. T., & Afify, A. A. (2005, July). Applications of machine learning in manufacturing. In Intelligent Production Machines and Systems, 1st I* PROMS Virtual International Conference (pp. 225-230).

Priore, P., de la Fuente, D., Puente, J., & Parreño, J. (2006). A comparison of machine-learning algorithms for dynamic scheduling of flexible manufacturing systems. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 19(3), 247-255.

Effective sales management must include the ability to harness each individual salesperson’s best traits and leverage those to build and maintain a strong customer base. If they fight amongst themselves, productivity and team cohesiveness suffer.

Various issues can cause conflict between salespeople. Simple competitiveness, perceived favoritism and a bigger office are a few of the many prompts for tension or argument. None of these, however, match dealing with the minefield of selling in the same geographical territory.

Before management throws up their hands and splits the territories geographically for the sake of eliminating an account tug-of-war, consider these ways sales can share the same territory without stepping on each other’s toes.

Keep in mind each of these strategies requires a thorough examination of each salesperson’s key strengths and abilities, as well as a deep understanding of the company and the product or service being sold.

1. Split it up by vertical

For the companies that have customers operating in different industries, this is a viable option. Perhaps one of your sales reps is strong with manufacturing clients, while another one excels at working with healthcare customers. Sharing a geographical territory in this manner still offers the advantage of drawing clear boundaries, which assists in keeping the chances of sales run ins and conflicts low.

Way to make it work: When a company targets buyers in a variety of verticals, especially within a small geographic region, splitting customers by industry category is a productive way to dole out the opportunities.

2. Divide it by size

According to Marketing Tech Blog, more than half of salespeople perform at under a 40% close rate. Some of this could be due to different salespeople performing better with various accounts. For example, one person could thrive with mom and pop shops, but struggle with large, corporate companies with multiple decision makers and long buying cycles. Another salesperson may not feel challenged with smaller accounts, but be energized by the “moving and shaking” of professional demonstrations and in-depth selling that goes into enterprise sales.

For these scenarios, splitting up territories by prospect size offers the perfect solution. One or more salesperson would handle the small and medium accounts, while others woo the large, enterprise accounts.

Way to make it work: Set up different sales quotas and expectations, depending on the type of salesperson. The salesperson targeting small accounts may need to open a large number of accounts, while the enterprise salesperson’s goals may be a smaller number of accounts, but a much larger dollar amount over the course of a year.

3. Segment by sales cycle task

Predictable Revenue estimates that sales reps who function in shared territories spend 20-30% of their time holding ownership over inactive leads and accounts. Reduce this time waster by using a task-based system.

A hunter-gatherer approach is a strong way of accomplishing this, which calls for the salespeople to work in teams. One of them hunts down new prospects, begins the conversation, and the other one handles the product demo and closes the sale. With each of them playing to their strengths, the sales cycle shortens, the closing ratio increases and the instances of conflicts are minimized.

Way to make it work: Analyzing the strengths in each team member, and assigning the tasks correctly are key for this to work. Strong, two-way communication is required, both with management and between the salespeople.

4. Divvy it up by lead type

It is becoming more common for leads to be mined from inbound marketing. Lead generation type is a powerful way to divvy up the potential clients. Perhaps one sales rep receives the inbound leads, while another works on trade show leads, and a third uses cold calling, networking and social selling. Again, it is all about playing to each sales rep’s individual strengths.

Way to make it work: This solution is successful for businesses that enjoy many leads from different sources.

These territory sharing concepts each have their unique benefits and offer specific types of rewards. Not all of them work with every industry or every size business. Whichever approach you choose, make sure it fits within the overall strategic sales focus of your company. Also, it is imperative to foster a team-oriented environment among your salespeople to maximize performance as well as job satisfaction.

Get salespeople to buy-in with the particular arrangement you choose and you will have a sandbox full of productive, high-performing reps who are excited to prospect, engage leads and close sales.

Live chat. A technology that’s been around for years.

Fully understood by a small proportion of marketers. Sadly, correctly optimized by even less.

You can’t just stick live chat on a website and expect magic to happen. Some people just add it as another support channel, managed by their usual support team…but that’s not the way to do things.

Live chat is a whole other medium. It has its own set of rules and best practices. It needs a dedicated strategy to make it succeed.

This is important for customer service and even more important for sales and lead generation (areas where live chat can produce brilliant results that many digital marketers aren’t even aware of).

I want to help you achieve brilliant results by using and optimising live chat correctly though. This post is part of a series by The Chat Shop and LiveChat on increasing online sales and using live chat as a sales enablement tool.

First off the bat from our team. How to target the right website visitors in order to help them convert.

Why you need to engage visitors

You spend a lot of time and money getting potential customers to your website to view your products. I’m guessing you’ve optimised for SEO, manage a few social channels and operate some PPC advertising.

I bet in all of those channels you’re battling against at least a handful of competitors in order to get a good quantity of quality traffic. And then, once you have won some traffic for your site, these potential customers have a tendency of jumping around your site and between you are your competitors’ websites.

This is the case for every industry. It’s so easy for consumers to research online that they’ll court a bunch of options during their decision journey. And they bounce around the funnel rather than gradually moving down in the pleasant fashion you’d love them to.

Damn you internet, you really are a blessing and a curse.

Consumers do the majority of their research and make most of their decisions before they would even think of reaching you for any advice or help in converting.

And the trouble is, even if they do start leaning towards you, they have plenty of backup options if they face a barrier to conversion.

Even if they want to buy, but can’t, there’s a strong possibility of them going to one of those competitors rather than having to reach out for help. Particularly true if they have to go way out of their way (such as changing communication channel – e.g. from your website to their email).

But with live chat you can interact with potential customers before they reach that point.

‘That point’ is the thick black line in my poorly drawn funnel. The red is live chat engaging with people way before they’ve made their final decisions.

You can find those that are interested but aren’t ready or able to convert. You can reach out before the conversion decision ultimatum.

Help them before they hit those barriers – the “I’m not sure this is the right product”, “let me first see if I can find it elsewhere” or “it won’t let me click ‘buy’, I’m leaving” barriers.

You can do all of this with proactive live chat. A preventative support technique that allows you to programme your software to invite visitors to chat based on their behaviour. Rather than waiting and hoping that they’ll come to you for help.

Target the right people

Now on to how it’s done. First off you don’t want to be interacting with absolutely everyone.

Some people are ready to take the final steps on their own (congrats, that’s when your buyer funnel has done its job properly) and some just aren’t interested in taking the next steps.

You want to be interacting with people that are actually interested in what you offer, that just need a little help taking the next steps. You want to make select interactions with people above that communication barrier line. Live chat is great…but you can’t completely flip a customer’s wants and needs. Don’t try and convert everyone.

Deciding who to interact with depends on who would be considered an interested shopper on your website.

If you’re selling a complicated product or service, a prospect might have to view a number of information pages before you could even dream of them making a decision. Consider setting up a proactive for people that have viewed 3+ information pages.

More of an impulse product? Well you’ll definitely have to focus on something a little further down the funnel. Someone that has added a product to basket is definitely interested.

Are you generating leads for a B2B product? Well there’s a much longer decision process here and someone that’s going to buy may have to visit a couple of times before they can be considered an interested buyer. Create some proactives that are targeted at returning visitors that have visited a few important pages.

Sorry, no hard and fast rule on this I’m afraid. As with all applications of live chat, if you want to do live chat for sales you’ll need to optimise over time.

Interact at the right time

Nobody likes being interrupted when they’re in the shopping zone.

You know what I mean.

When you’re flying around the store, looking for the perfect products and throwing them into your basket…nothing can stop you.

But then someone does stop you!

A ‘helpful’ store assistant pops out of the woodwork and says “Can I help you with anything?” Ok, sure, they really are trying to be helpful (I think) but it’s just at the wrong time. A time when you clearly don’t need any kind of help (except a higher limit on your credit card maybe).

When you’re using live chat for sales you could interrupt potential customers in the same way – if you don’t interact at the right time. So be aware, don’t just engage the right people but engage those that look like they actually need help.

Not just every poor soul because you’re too eager to get everyone to buy more stuff. That doesn’t work.

When’s the right time? When someone you’ve identified as an interested consumer signals that they may need help in making the next step.

You’ll need to stack instructions in your live chat code to satisfy both criteria.

Again, this requires some studying of your website analytics data and optimisation over time. But we can offer some excellent starting points for when to interact.

Start by looking at the average time on page for some of your checkout pages. Even better, filter your traffic based on people that do convert and people that don’t convert. If an interested visitor is on your checkout page longer than the average time a converting individual spends there, they might need some help. Send a chat invite based on this time on page metric.

You can use a similar technique for product pages which provide a lot of detailed information. If the visitor has a lot to read before they can make a buying decision, it can be a good idea to make sure they have everything they need. But not too early remember…that’s why you should engage around the average time on page.

Finally, an interested visitor that has been flicking between 2 similar product pages may be finding it hard to choose. Interact with them to provide some advice, rather than them giving up and going to a competitor because they think they’ll have clearer information.

And these invites to chat don’t want to be generic messages such as “Can I help?”, they should be tailored based on the criteria you’ve used to set them up. Website visitors are much more likely to talk then.

You need the right messages, at the right times, to the right people.

Optimising your targeting

Unfortunately there isn’t a magic ‘Optimise’ button that sorts all of this for you. Come on LiveChat developers, get it sorted…what are you playing at?

Actually that’d put some of The Chat Shop’s consulting team out of a job. Second thoughts LiveChat developers, take your time on that magical invention.

Optimising isn’t a 5 minute job and there aren’t any black and white guidelines for doing it perfectly. To get more sales, by targeting the right people, will take time. Most live chat softwares provide plenty of data for you to analyse and learn from however…we’ll run you through a few things we use with LiveChat but you should be able to imitate these steps in whatever software you are using.

First up is the Greetings conversion report in the back end of LiveChat, under (you guessed it) the Reports header. Here you can dig into which of your proactive greetings are working and which aren’t. Conversion in this scenario means how many people are chatting when you invite them to do so with a proactive greeting.

(Here’s an example of the conversion rate on a greeting for one of our smaller customers).

Notice a proactive that is getting a very low engagement rate? Perhaps you’re firing it too early or the messaging isn’t as personalised as some of your other greetings. You’re not giving those interested visitors a reason to chat and get help in converting.

You of course also want to see which proactives are actually helping customers and making them go “Yes, now I can click buy!” to your chat agents.

To do this you’ll need to be tagging your chats when they are ‘Sales’ chats, ‘Lead’ chats ‘Service’ chats and anything else you want to track. Then go to the CSV export in LiveChat’s Reports tab.

Download the CSV and filter each proactive greeting, one at a time. You’ll be able to see which proactives are creating the right kind of conversations. You don’t just want people to chat, you also want to know that your strategy is able to produce sales.

If it isn’t producing sales or just specific proactives aren’t, more adjustments are needed.

You’ll also need to keep a close eye on your website analytics data as you keep live chat optimised over time.

Visitor behaviour never remains in a status quo, so don’t go thinking that proactives based on time on page will keep interacting at the perfect time. The perfect time can change.

Conclusion

Live chat can produce some magical effects. It can dramatically increase sales on your website (along with improving lead generation and customer service, of course) but it does take a little work.

Like every digital marketing channel, live chat needs to be optimised over time.

To make more sales, you need to provide a quality service. To do that you need to do more than sit back and hope potential customers get in touch when they aren’t sure.

You have to be proactive in your approach. Analyse the data, target the right website visitors and optimise over time.

Look at how you can help more customers. Provide what they need to convert.

This post was originally published on The Chat Shop blog.

Today’s marketing strategy is predominantly digital. Tools like multivariate testing and out-of-the box analytics have empowered marketers to make data-driven decisions and quickly adapt to changing market and customer dynamics. Still, 35% of the average B2B marketing budget is allocated to events, which are inherently offline and, thus, hard to digitize. Fortunately, there are now tools available that allow marketers to apply the same principles to event success that are commonplace for digital channels.

As with any investment, the path to optimization starts with measurement. To that end, there’s been a shift in how businesses think about event success. This shift is driven predominantly by the realization that face-to-face interaction accelerates sales opportunities.

Measuring Pipeline and Revenue From Events

Fast-tracking event interactions to closed-won opportunities calls for a new mindset. It means that we need to shift how we measure events to focus on pipeline acceleration and revenue generation. Simply counting new “leads” is not going to give you an real indication of how your events are impacting the business.

There are five different metrics you should be looking at when evaluating event success in terms of pipeline and revenue:

• Revenue potential – the potential reach of your event based on the opportunity value of all event registrants
• Revenue in the room – the opportunity value of all attendees that have checked into your event
• Influenced opportunities – the value of all opportunities that were influenced by your event
• Sourced opportunities – the value of all opportunities that were created by your event
• Event ROI – the amount of return on your event investment relative to the cost

Tracking these metrics will give you a much better idea of how your marketing events are impacting sales.

Measurement is only half the battle

Knowing what to measure to track your event’s influence on revenue is hugely important because it gives you a baseline from which to optimize. When you first start tracking these revenue-focused metrics, you may not be happy with the results. So what can you do to improve your event results?

The biggest lever to optimize event outcomes is better sales engagement and follow-up. To do that you need a process for sales engagement at events. Beyond targeting the right audience for your event, these are truly the only real measures we have available to optimize event outcomes.

• Engagement Mapping – pre-event plan to give your sales team assignments on who they’re responsible for engaging with at each event
• On-site Engagement – making sure that all attendees engage with the right members of your team and that those interactions get tracked and conversation notes get recorded
• Follow-up – because event interactions are tracked and synced with your CRM and Marketing Automation, it’s easy for sales to follow-up quickly with a relevant message.

How to measure and optimize your events

Knowing what you should measure and what your sales team needs to do is great, but how can you put this strategy into action? In the past, all of this work would have been manual. Measurement of revenue-focused event KPIs would require your ops team spend hours in Salesforce and Excel. Sales engagement at events was planned and tracked via sales reps’ memory and handwritten notes.

At Attend, we recognized these major event marketing challenges and developed a solution. To solve for proper event measurement, we created our Revenue Attribution Dashboard, which calculates all five of the core revenue-focused metrics for you. To help you optimize your event results via sales engagement, Attend Playbook allows you to map and track engagement, which enables effective sales follow-up.

Want to see how our Revenue Attribution Dashboard and sales Playbook work? See a full overview here: Measure & Optimize Event ROI.

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Checking your email on vacation can be just as tempting as checking your text messages at work.

In fact, 44% of working adults say they check work email every day while on vacation, according to the American Psychological Association. About one in 10 check email hourly.

The temptation is understandable. Who wants to click through hundreds or thousands of emails after returning from a time of rest and relaxation? Some say this post-vacation email deluge even makes them dread going on vacation in the first place.

However, research shows that stress levels tend to increase when you have access to your inbox, and that in order to return to work refreshed and rejuvenated, you need to unplug completely during vacation.

Here are five email hacks that can hopefully help you do that:

Natalie Walters contributed to a previous version of this article.

SEE ALSO: The majority of Americans are making this huge mistake that can hold them back at work

DON'T MISS: Here's the truth about whether it's OK to be unreachable during your vacation from work

Set your auto-responder to expire a couple of days after you get back from vacation

"The most important hack is to setting the expectation that you will be back later," Dmitri Leonov, VP of growth for Sanebox, previously told Business Insider. This buys you a couple of extra days to play catch-up at work before responding to emails, and gives you the peace of mind while you're away that your return to work won't be totally overwhelming.

Plus, when you come back to work on Monday but your out-of-office email doesn't expire until Wednesday, people are really impressed when you get back to them first thing Wednesday morning, Leonov says.

Install a filter to separate important or urgent emails from unimportant, non-urgent ones

Everyone should have a filter that sorts emails into "important" and "unimportant" folders, Leonov says. These filters, like Google priority or his own tool, Sanebox, allow you to quickly scan through your unimportant emails and delete them all at once when you return to work.

"Having an active filter is going to save you a disproportionate amount of time when you're back," Leonov says.

Filter out recurring emails

Daily updates from your go-to news sites or weekly notifications about meetings are helpful — if you're in office.

While you're out of the office, though, make sure to filter out these recurring updates, notifications, and newsletters so you don't waste time deleting them during or after vacation when they are obsolete.

Working on the road is not easy.

Spotty Wi-Fi, noisy cafes, and constantly changing time zones are all par for the course. 

But these stumbling blocks haven't stopped Jodi Ettenberg, a former corporate lawyer who left the legal profession to travel in 2008, from working while roaming from continent to continent. 

Ettenberg sustains her travel through multiple income streams, including sales from her online store, freelance writing, social-media consulting, and, more recently, speaking engagements at summits and conferences around the world.

Business Insider recently spoke with Ettenberg, who shared the tools that keep her productive and functioning on the road.

SEE ALSO: I spent a year preparing to quit my job to try my side gig full-time — here are the 2 biggest steps I took

DON'T MISS: I run my own company – here are my favorite tools to manage my business, money, and life

Project management 

Ettenberg uses Trello to manage both her personal and work to-dos. 

Trello is a web board where you can pin "cards" with different categories. Under each category, you can create to-do lists, deadlines, discussion notes, and more. The format is similar to sticky notes, and you can share each individual card with anyone you want to.

She writes on her blog, Legal Nomads, that she has both personal and work boards on Trello. She shares her work boards with team members who are part of that particular project and manages her workflow using the Getting Things Done (GTD) system by David Allen.

Note-taking and curating 

Ettenberg is a big fan of Pocket, which she says she uses "for everything." 

Pocket allows you to save articles or videos that you want to read or watch later, even if you don't have an internet connection. You can tag articles to categorize them and to help you search for them later.

For example, Ettenberg has tags for each country that she plans to visit.

Laptop stand

Ettenberg uses the Roost laptop stand to bring her screen to eye level.

Ettenberg, in a Facebook post, explained that the Roost stand has helped diminish the back pain she often experiences when she types.

Some time ago I paid around $50,000 for a used German car. My search got down to a BMW 3 series sedan and a Volkswagen station wagon.

After driving both and some deliberation on the merits of the two vehicles I went with the VW.  A couple of male friends asked me why I went with the VW and my unedited response was that the particular BMW didn’t deliver much value for money. They burst out laughing that I mentioned “value for money” and a German car purchase in the same sentence.

Which got me thinking.

We often confuse “value” and “value for money” with “valuable”. And before we can consider the third we need to consider the first two.

For simplicity’s sake I suggest the following:

Value is shorthand for “what is the market willing to pay”.

Value-for-money is shorthand for “what the market receives in exchange for what it pays”.

Valuable is shorthand for “the market’s willingness to pay a premium”.

In my car quandary, both cars were the same value ie around $50k. The BMW was a valuable car because at $50k you didn’t get very much. Other than a standard vehicle, well made, and with a BMW badge. There was a lot of intrinsic value locked up in the brand, brand reputation, history etc. The VW was value for money because I got a lot more car for the same money as the BMW — it was bigger, had more options, leather seats, was newer and had lower mileage.

So what then is value? How do we value the concept of value. More importantly how does the consumer value a good or service and what are the implications for brands.

Marketers frequently get tripped up by these concepts and misunderstand how to price and how to use pricing to add to the value of a brand. Or how to index your brands against other brands or the consumers’ value index. Furthermore how to use premium pricing to increase the “valuable-ness” of a brand.

Putting it simply; everything has a price. The market price of a pair of branded sneakers might be $100. If a particular brand is losing favor with trend-setters then the value (or perceived value) of those sneakers will be around $100, maybe less. If a brand is extremely sought after then the value (or perceived value) is higher than $100.

If the brand manager via the retailer doesn’t price the brand accordingly then they are going to at some point experience either a glut or shortage of those sneakers.

How can we then measure value, and then price accordingly? One economic definition of what value is, I find, quite helpful.

Value = (Tangible Performance + Intangible Performance) / Price. Using this formula you can use your consumer measures to calibrate the objective, tangible factor and the subjective, intangible factors to calculate scores in your category and then apply prices accordingly.

In the case of a luxury good, the intangible factors are extremely important and mostly outweigh the tangible. A $3000 handbag does the same job as a $30 handbag. But it does it with a lot more style. And delivers considerably more status and emotional payoff to the owner than the $30 handbag would.

The purchaser of a Huawei phone is less driven by the intangible factors than an iPhone purchaser and is willing to sacrifice intangible benefits in order to achieve tangible benefits at a much lower price.

The V=(TP +IP) / $ approach is particularly helpful when comparing similar brands.

Viagra and Cialis do (or so I’m told) a similar job. But they have quite different brand personas and perform in different ways functionally. Let’s assume for the moment that a supply of either costs $100. And let’s assume that the tangible benefits are similar at 4 out of 5. Let’s also assume that Viagra delivers 5 out of 5 on intangible benefits (branding, emotion, social etc) and Cialis 4 out of 5.

Using the simple calculation Viagra would deliver total performance of 9 and Cialis 8. At a score of 9 Viagra is more valuable. At $100 it’s also better value for money. But if Cialis were to drop their price to $80 they would now represent better value for money, albeit at a lower value.

In the light of recent occurrences the VW brand has been substantially devalued and BMW and other European automotive brands have benefited from this. Some because their products are more valuable and some because they deliver better value for money either through tangible of intangible performance factors.

When it comes to value what is your brand delivering?

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Rob Bree

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The Brand Challenge

A lot of people are looking for “brand strategy”. Why? One reason is because brand power and influence are much more difficult to obtain in this era of empowered consumerism. Empowerment comes from increased access to information and through a shift in trust from experts to peers. This shift isn’t simply a change in the way buying decisions are made. Peer-to-peer sharing is a broad and deep cultural shift. Collaboration impacts how learning is done in the classroom, how teams work in business and also how consumers relate to brands.

Another reason is that expectations of a brand have widened dramatically over the years from a logo and slogan that encapsulate the essence of a product to the full consumer experience (awareness to acquisition to use to advocacy – or not). We’ve moved from Chock full o’ Nuts to Starbucks; from descriptions to experiences. What do you think of when you think about Disney? The movies? The characters? The theme parks? The cruises? Disney is all these things under one brand identity. The aspiration for a brand is a profitable, growing business, not a label.

Seasoned, experienced business people are looking for brand strategy because the forces of fragmentation and expansion create a challenging environment for any brand to reach customers and to deliver value. We urge our clients to rethink how they are approaching brand strategy in order to master the demanding environment. At Strategos, our point of view about brand strategy reflects current reality and challenges. We define brand strategy more broadly than segmentation and communication. We believe that brand strategy is a component of business strategy and the entire business model must be addressed to build a compelling brand story.

Brand vs Business Model

At Strategos, we see the marketing mix as a critical part within a more complete business model.

The business model elements are:

• Who is the customer? Unmet needs, markets and segments, customers or consumers

• What do we provide? Products & services, emotional & functional benefits, experience provided

• How do we provide it? Marketing, channels, supply chain, operations, partnerships & alliances

• Where do we make money? Sources of revenue, value levers, cost drivers, pricing tactics

• Why is it different? Right to win, core competencies, competitive landscape, differentiation

The customer and the benefits delivered are at the core of all brand work. Strategos’ more comprehensive approach is especially helpful in today’s environment. For example, the supply chain, operations and partnerships can critically impact brand perception in this age of transparency and sustainability. Communicating the brand essence is not enough. The brand identity must be authentic and robust reaching into your supply chain, production and channels.

Other things we’ve learned:

• Brand strategy is most useful at the category level, not the product level – stepping back to evaluate the entire category can spark growth. Disney’s business and brand began with animation but expanded to family entertainment.

• Brand identity can be an input to business strategy or an output – an existing strong brand asset such as Apple can be an input; an output example would be Uber as a brand that emerged from a radical new business model.

• Brand communications (media campaigns) are best considered as a thread on your strategic migration map instead of a dimension of competition – growth is the aspiration for all brands and can be achieved through multiple approaches, including, but not limited to communications. Mini Cooper has a rich history of creative media campaigns but the campaigns are a means to an end, not the end itself – they communicate the essence of a fun, quirky, customizeable car. We routinely ask clients to identify “what’s the thing?” – the essence of their brand’s competitiveness. If what you find when you ask yourself this question that you’re attempting to make your communication plan the “thing” rather than focusing on the value delivery equation in your business model, you’re missing something important.

• Brand positioning is more robustly described through brand attributes on what we call an industry map, showing all brands’ bases of differentiation, than by a demand landscape based on usage occasions and buyer personas – an industry map is more comprehensive since it includes other critical stakeholders, partners and competitors, and focuses on how we will be different and play to win, not just on where dollars are being spent today. Well-meaning efforts to keep the customer as the focus of branding have led to overreliance on segmentation, which in turn is often over-simplified into static market maps. The result? Conversations such as “Gee, look at all of the money being spent by striving moms on breakfast! We need a mom-breakfast line for our energy drink business now!” Segmentation of existing market behaviors is a tool. It won’t give you all the answers to building a profitable business.

Turning your brand into a business asset

So what brand has done it right? One clear example is Crayola. Crayola took a strategic approach and has transformed their business from coloring sticks to creative play. Strategos worked with Crayola on the original strategy project that expanded their brand and their business.

You can start rethinking your brand too. Try stretching what you consider your category to see if there are natural areas of growth. List brand perceptions from stakeholders in addition to customers to see if the benefits you deliver are consistent. Compare the brand promises of your suppliers and partners to yours in order to check for consistency. Look at what your competitors are doing and derive their strategy from their actions.

If you do this well, some obvious opportunities should emerge. Get started on any quick wins that become evident from this assessment, and use the initial successes to fuel the appetite in your organization to do what it takes to turn your brand from label to business asset.

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Approximately 65% of enterprises utilize IoT solutions for business purposes, according to a recent survey conducted by 451 Research and cited by Beta News.

Among the businesses surveyed that are using IoT solutions:

• 66% used IoT technologies for risk reduction. For instance, oil companies are starting to use drones to inspect oil rigs, which can be a dangerous task for humans to perform.
• 63% used IoT solutions to optimize operations. For example, manufacturers can use sensors to gather data about machines on their assembly line to predict when they might fail, and fix them prior to experiencing any downtime.
• 33% used the IoT to develop new or enhance existing products, such as car companies that are putting cellular data connections into their cars to gather data about them and provide Wi-Fi hotspots for passengers.
• 21% leveraged IoT solutions to enhance customer targeting. A good example of this would be a retailer that uses in-store beacons to target customers with real-time offers sent to their smartphone based on their location in the store.

We expect more companies will move to utilize the IoT to cut costs in the near future. BI Intelligence projects that businesses will be the top adopter of IoT solutions since it will help lower operating costs, increase productivity, and allow for expansion into new markets.

We project that enterprise investment in IoT technologies will skyrocket from $215 billion in 2015 to $832 billion in 2020, and expect that businesses will continue to find new use cases for IoT technologies over the next few years.

To receive stories like this one directly to your inbox every morning, sign up for the IoT Briefing newsletter. Click here to learn more about how you can gain risk-free access today.

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A new study suggests that there might be a pretty simple way to increase your performance levels: positive self-talk.

The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, looked at how different psychological techniques affected someone's success while playing an online gaming system. 

The study’s participants were 44,742 volunteers, 16-92 years old, that were recruited to the project via the BBC Lab UK website.

The participants were instructed to use one of three possible psychological skill interventions, or ways to mentally approach a task.

The first psychological skill intervention was to use imagery, in other words the participants were told to picture themselves being successful in a given situation. Another was self-talk, where the participants were told to tell themselves that they were capable of performing at a high level. The third psychological skill intervention method was to "if-then plan," where the participants were told to plan how to achieve an outcome.

They were all then tested on four different aspects of performance, including process, outcome, arousal-control (how they controlled their emotions), and instruction (how they got through the process). 

The research team found the greatest improvements in achievement occurred when participants used the self-talk method and told themselves: “I can beat my best score score next time.” The next top strategy was when participants told themselves that they could "react quicker this time.”

Imagery-outcome (imagining yourself doing better than last time) and imagery-process (imagining yourself reacting faster than last time) were the next best options. The team found that if-then planning didn’t make a significant difference in achievement.

So next time something seems a little too difficult to overcome, give yourself a pep-talk and have faith you can accomplish the task. 

MORE: Bill Gates thinks that the US drug pricing strategy is 'better than most'

UP NEXT: Here's how your Fourth of July fireworks work

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NOW WATCH: People with these personality traits have more and better sex

Every month, you see a new “email is dead” blog post, or a new “email-killer.” And every month, product updates, newsletters, and discount coupons continue to flood my inbox.

I mean, social media was supposed to replace email, but Facebook still emails me when someone comments on my photo.

Unlike social media or other communication channels where you broadcast content, email allows you to craft unique content for specific groups.

That’s why it’s remained one of the most important parts of most brands’ marketing strategy.

Which is also kind of the problem. Every brand sends emails. How do you stay out of spam folders, get opened, and read?

Restructuring email marketing at Mention

We started restructuring our email marketing strategy a few months ago. We realized that although potential customers are interested in marketing, they aren’t all interested in the same kinds.

They’re motivated by different goals and do different things. Social media marketers want to start conversations, while growth marketers want to generate leads. They’re looking for different resources.

Most importantly, they all have varying degrees of knowledge about monitoring and our brand.

That’s when we started to look into segmentation, and our open rates have since averaged 40-50%.

Want to know how we did it? Let’s take a step back and start with the basics.

What is email segmentation?

Everybody loves personal attention.

Imagine you walked into a restaurant, and they already know that you’re vegetarian, lactose-intolerant, and can’t stand the smell of baked beans. Instead of offering you a massive menu, they propose customized choices catered to your dietary preferences.

That would be impossible in reality, unless the chef served only five customers (or was your mom).

But in email marketing, personalizing a customer’s experience is easier.

And that’s what segmentation is about. Personalizing your emailing based on information about your contacts.

Segmentation helps you:

• Plan your content strategy and creation
• Define the topics and tone of your emails

There are endless ways to segment your email list. The most basic method is by demographic information: age, gender, language, job titles, etc. More advanced options include interests or behavior. And it can be as complex or as simple as you want.

Why it’s necessary

I typically receive at least 50 emails per day. I open and read less than 10. If I receive too many irrelevant emails from a brand, I unsubscribe.

As your customers are flooded with more and more email, you cannot afford to send irrelevant emails. Untargeted emails not only waste time and money, they also hurt your brand.

Segmenting your email list helps you send the right content to the right customers. Companies that segment email lists see a 19% increase in open rates. This personalization leads to more conversions, more purchases, and happier customers.

How Mention does email segmentation

We have 500k subscribers, but we lose contacts when we send untargeted email blasts.

So we segment our contacts the same way we segment our content creation: by persona and lifecycle stage.

Segmentation by persona

Buyer personas help us understand our customers – their demographics, interests, and motivations.

You can create them by learning more about your current customers. Try sending out surveys, conducting interviews, or meeting them in person.

We obviously learn about our customers by monitoring their online conversations as well. Often that’s where you find the most honest answers.

You can monitor your industry, your brand, and your competitors with a tool like Mention.

Setting up targeted alerts will help you see:

• Real-time customer insights
• Customer demographics
• What your customers are interested in

You’ll discover who your customers are, along with their likes and dislikes, interests, and challenges.

After the content marketing team at Mention gathered enough information about our market, we sat down with sales to match their ideal client profiles with our buyer personas. Each lead in our database is assigned at least one persona, and receives tailored content .

Segmentation by lifecycle stage

Persona segmentation helps us learn subscribers’ interests in certain topics, but not their interest in buying.

To determine their interest level, we assign each lead to a lifecycle stage, which is where they are in the buying process.

We use three lifecycle stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. The more a lead interacts with content, the further she moves through the marketing funnel.

We customize our email copy and subject lines since the conversation we’d have with a new subscriber is very different from one we’d have with an engaged, warm prospect.

For example, an awareness-stage contact might receive a general social media strategy checklist, but a decision-stage prospect would get content that promotes and sells Mention.

Just like in the regular sales process – you can’t pitch too soon.

Real-life examples of email segmentation

Like we said earlier, segmentation helped us reach average open rates of 40-50%. These are the actual emails that made it happen, along with the info we used to segment, create, and optimize the campaign.

Email 1

Subject line: Crush social media with these killer tools
Offer: ebook
Persona: social media marketers
Lifecycle stage: consideration
Open rate: 55.3%
Click rate: 22.22%
Copy:

Since this email is targeted, both the subject line and body are very specific.

However, as these leads are just starting to learn about monitoring, we didn’t mention anything about our brand or our product. They’ve engaged with our brand a little, but we probably haven’t established much trust yet. That’s why we chose to focus on bringing value rather than selling ourselves.

Email 2

Subject line: Why social media marketers rely on Mention
Offer: success stories
Persona: social media marketers
Lifecycle stage: decision
Open rate: 59%
Click rate: 14.1%
Copy:

This second email is a lot more “promotional.” We didn’t even try to hide it. How did we get away with that?

First, this email was sent to social media marketers who have opted into our social media marketing content. The email is highly targeted with tailored content. They’ve expressed interest in the topic, so they won’t be surprised or put off when they receive it.

Second, we only send these decision stage emails to leads who’ve actively interacted with a lot of our content, showing clear interest in our brand.

By the time they receive a success story, they’ve probably already downloaded four ebooks, three checklists, and attended a webinar. In other words, they’re “ready” to be sold to.

In limiting these sales attempts, our subscribers are more willing to open most of our emails, knowing we don’t try to squeeze them dry all the time.

Improve your email open rates by keeping salesy emails to a minimum.

Applying segmentation to your email marketing

Segmentation has helped us learn more about our customers and help them better in return. It’s had a dramatic impact on our email marketing. To get started sending more relevant emails to your own list, here’s how to get started:

1. Know your customers. Gather data through forms, surveys, interviews, or monitoring. The more you know about your customers, the better you can segment them.
2. Create personas. Customer personas are key to your list segmentation. They help you define which segments need which message.
3. Create customized content. Write and design content that’s targeted towards each persona.
4. Use an email tool to segment emails. We use HubSpot, but there are plenty others offering easy-to-use segmenting services, like MailChimp, GetResponse, and Customer.io.
5. Measure and A/B test. Track open and click-through rates to see how customers interact with your emails. Test and optimize to keep improving your results.

Setting up in the beginning takes some time. But once you see the results it brings, I promise you’ll be hooked!

Email isn’t dead. Far from it.

Email is alive and kicking, but certainly evolving. But poorly targeted email marketing wastes time, hurts deliverability, and can hurt your brand rep.

There’s no way around it. Learn about your customers, and as HubSpot says, “market unto others as you would have them market unto you.”

Want more help with your email marketing? Get our free ebook:

Customer testimonials are one of the best ways to improve your sales and marketing efforts. Whether you include them in your marketing materials, place them on your website or use them as email content you can reap three major rewards:

• Improving trust – People, especially young people, do not trust advertising. Testimonials have a huge impact on consumer trust because they are not written by you. They are generated by existing, happy customers. Prospects do not have to worry about the spin you are using because it is in a completely different voice.
• Overcoming objections – Powerful testimonials can convince even the most difficult prospects that your company has something to offer. If they are harboring objections in their mind, testimonials can overcome them without your sales team doing the heavy lifting.
• Lowering costs – Testimonials are generated by customers and do not cost anything to add to your newsletter or website. Because they are so cost-effective, they will have an immediate impact on your ROI.

Unfortunately, many companies are ill-equipped to gather and distribute testimonials effectively. Here are five important tips on how you can earn and promote powerful customer testimonials:

1. Ask the right customers

The best testimonial is from somebody that your audience finds relatable. It is important for prospects to see that your company has helped clients similar to them. Therefore, you need to ask customers that are closely in-line with your target audience. The more targeted your campaign is, the more finely you need to screen your testimonials.

You will also need to make sure your audience knows exactly how relatable they are. If you are targeting small tech companies, make sure the testimonial includes that information. If you are targeting men specifically, make sure to include the customer’s gender in their testimonial.

2. Feature positive reviews throughout your marketing materials

If you have a website that you use to drive business, including testimonials everywhere you can is a must. Put your most flattering ones right on your homepage, even if it is just a simple quote or two. Wherever you have any sales copy, make sure to include at least one relevant testimonial. You will also want to create a page dedicated to customer reviews and feedback. Make it easy for prospects to find one relevant to them by allowing them to sort testimonials by criteria such as product, feature, benefit, or type of customer.

3. Have clients share before-and-after scenarios

It is not enough to prove that your company can provide value to your prospects, you need to prove that you can provide more value than the competition. Encourage your customers to share exactly what solutions they have implemented prior to yours, or if there were any others they tried and did not see the same results with. This sets you apart from the rest of your competition and proves that you are a prospect’s best option.

4. Leverage social media

Make sure to ask for and distribute testimonials on your social media pages as well. This can include Facebook reviews, LinkedIn recommendations or glowing messages on Twitter.

This can help to build trust among potential customers who enjoy knowing that their peers are already fans of your product or service. Before you begin promoting anyone’s testimonial as sales collateral, remember to ask for explicit permission to use it first.

5. Create a checklist or template

Testimonials are only effective if they are believable. If a prospect suspects that a testimonial was fabricated it could hurt your credibility. That is why, in 2013, Yelp purged almost a quarter of all its user-submitted reviews which seemed fraudulent.

In order to ensure that your testimonials are believable and high-quality, certain things must be included. A useful way is to create a template or checklist and ask customers to include the following in their testimonial:

• Specifics – They must describe exactly which features were especially beneficial, and exactly what impact they had. Request statistics or percentages too.
• Relevance – A testimonial will be more influential to potential customers if it describes issues and features that are relevant to your target audience. Do not be afraid to ask your customers to expand on a particularly important issue.
• Key identifying information – In order to be believable, prospects must understand that these testimonials are coming from other people. Require that testimonials not be anonymous. At a minimum, you should include first and last initials, plus their title and company. With your customer’s permission, provide their headshot too.

In the end, the best way to receive great testimonials is by simply asking. If you are able to approach every happy customer with a simple testimonial request, you will quickly have more than enough to boost sales and improve your marketing materials.

We know, we know… events cost money and securing management buy-in to host them can be difficult to attain, but there’s a reason events are often the top expense in the marketing budget. They can help create and move opportunities through your pipeline faster, enforce a positive workplace culture and image, and keep your customers engaged and excited to be working with you. Whether you’re just getting started or are continuing to fine-tune your event strategy, here are the 5 event categories you should consider incorporating in your annual marketing plan:

1. The Launch Event

Launching a new product or service? Have you recently upgraded or enhanced an existing one? A launch event can be an effective way to make a splash with your user base and a great reason to engage prospects in your pipeline.

If you’re on a tight budget, consider hosting a group of customers and prospects in your office. You can deliver a brief presentation and overview of the launch for all guests and then break out into a demo space for folks to have a more hands on experience.

Make sure you have plenty of product folks in the room to be able to answer questions. And while the product is the main attraction, you still want to make it fun. Offer snacks and beverages, tie it to a theme, play some music (low volume) in the background during demo / networking time, and your guests will appreciate the extra step and not feel like you’re just trying to sell them one more thing.

Don’t have a big enough office space, and have some budget to spare? Book a private room at a restaurant or a lounge space in a hotel — this can be a nice perk for your guests and depending on the venue, it may be what gets them to show up. Alternatively, the launch event can be grouped in with your company’s user conference if you host one, which can serve as your product launch platform. This is a great way to make a splash on a broader scale with a built-in audience.

Timing: 1-2 per year

2. The Field Marketing Event

A field event allows your sales team to engage directly with prospects, move your pipeline forward, and ultimately result in a faster sales cycle. We can’t stress enough how impactful these events can be if done right. This means setting the right tone with your outreach and event agenda, and also understanding your buyer personas and pipeline in order to get the right audience in the room.

These events can be as small or as big as you’d like them to be. Bigger events and roadshows do require planning in advance so trying to pull one together 3-4 weeks ahead of the anticipated date is a huge undertaking and not the best use of your time. By better understanding and evaluating your pipeline and personas, as well as company and sales goals, you’ll be able to come up with a list of target cities to host your events well in advance.

If you’re just starting out, plan to host a few per quarter in regions with the biggest opportunity. By creating an attractive agenda, you may get folks to fly, drive, or take the train from nearby cities. For example, say you have a ton of opportunity in New England — hosting a free, half-day event in Boston with several speakers (they don’t just have to be from your company) followed by a fun evening networking event or outing, may see higher turnout than a one-hour lunch meeting. It’s just a big enough commitment that it’s worth the trip – a lunch or happy hour isn’t going to get you that.

And remember, just because these events are primarily for closing, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invite customers. Customers can be your best advocates, providing valuable insight to prospects, and they can also grow with your business as you launch or evolve your product.

Timing: 2-4 per quarter

3. The Customer Event

Getting the customer to sign on the dotted line is a huge achievement, but maintaining their loyalty and excitement to be using your product is a whole other challenge in and of itself. Keeping your customers happy goes beyond getting them to use your product, it means providing them with opportunities to learn, improve, network, and even have some fun. Outside of webinars and online trainings, in-person user events can take form as conferences, roadshows, or more informal gatherings such as happy hours and dinners.

You can take it a step further by creating a Customer Advisory Board (CAB). This can be a group of representatives from a mix of your customers. They can be a blend of your top users, as well as those who want to use your product more, but not until a few bugs have been fixed or features added. Their feedback is crucial to your product management team and a way for marketing and sales to keep tabs on the pulse of the customer’s happiness. Don’t forget to treat your CAB like the VIPs that they are, incorporating surprise tokens and exclusive perks can go a long way!

Timing: 2-4 per year

4. The Employee Event

Your largest investment is likely to be the people that make your company function: your employees! Showing them some love and appreciation helps your team feel motivated and excited to be working for your company. Everyone needs a break now and then and these events let your team get together, bond, and ultimately work better together. What’s better than that?!

These events can range from small, informal gatherings to larger, more organized ones. And while they are typically organized by HR/People Operations, marketing/event teams often get pulled in to assist and help make them as seamless as possible. Good culture isn’t built overnight after all and it really does take a village. Here are a few examples of what you can do for your employees:

• Team building: This can be as simple as a dinner out, breakfast with your team at a nearby cafe, cutting out a little early to attend a happy hour, or playing a game or doing an activity together at the local park. It doesn’t have to be outside the office, but getting out does help people relax and not feel like they’re still on the clock.

• Annual bash: This can be a broader team outing or it can be an event for the entire company, like a holiday or New Years party, or even an anniversary / company birthday celebration.

• Recruiting event: Throwing an after work event for current employees and potential employees is a great way to attract qualified candidates. Recruiting events shouldn’t just include, well, recruiters. They should include people who love working for the company, from different departments that can help evaluate potential candidates. This event should be in addition to employee-only gatherings, but it’s one that shows your employees that you care what they think and respect their judgment in helping grow the company. It could even be an exclusive perk or incentive for your team to attend.

• Other suggestions: A sales & marketing kickoff, an engineering & product offsite, a finance all-hands, a month end sales celebration… you get the idea!

Timing: 1-3 per quarter

5. The Investor / Board Event

Whether you’re an early stage, a venture-backed startup, or a post-IPO company, show your backers and board some love by hosting an event to thank them for their continued investment and insight. These don’t have to be big or expensive events (#CFOapproved). They can coincide with your quarterly earnings and board meetings, which are typically scheduled well in advance and are already on the calendar. We’ve hosted a cocktail reception with heavy hors d’oeuvres for 20 people, brought in a private chef, and had some small personalized touches for each attendee for under $1,500.

Timing: 1-4 per year

And whatever you do, make sure to check these 3 tasks off your list post-event:

• Follow up with your attendees.

Thank them, share some content, give them a call-to-action that is meaningful and adds value to their day-to-day… but only pick one CTA! Don’t you just hate it when you receive an email that asks you to do 5 different things and includes 7 links?! I usually delete them to be honest (sorry? Not sorry…). One to two asks is manageable, but figuring out your ultimate goal will allow you to go with the most important ask.

• Document and promote your events.

Add an events page to your website to list upcoming events, and be sure to showcase fun photos, speakers, and agenda topics on social and your blog. You can even share some video clips from sessions, condensed presentations, or handy “spark notes” of what was covered. Why do this? For one, this is free press, and good for your inbound marketing efforts. And two, it shows your target audience that you throw awesome events they should be attending…hopefully next time they won’t miss it!

• Measure! Measure! Measure!

As I mentioned at the very beginning, measuring results and ROI on your events helps your cause. It’s not just an administrative task to check off at the end of your event. It makes it easier for management to approve budget and see the value your events are providing. It also allows you to fine-tune your strategy by evaluating what went well and what didn’t.

What events are you currently hosting on a regular basis? What has worked well and what hasn’t? Let us know in the comments! Need some help getting these events set up or working them into your plan? Events By Maple can help!

Many organizations struggle with the decision to hire a consulting firm to provide strategic guidance. Traditionally, strategic direction has been the domain of chief officers and vice presidents, and tactical consulting might be the area that is outsourced. So, why hire a strategic consulting firm? There are seven simple reasons.

1. Cost savings
The investment in a strategy consultant is an important decision and by doing so, you will save time and money versus doing it yourself. You do not have to recruit and hire highly skilled resources. Instead, they are on demand and can scale the solution to meet your budget. In addition, by engaging strategy consultants, you will add time back to day-to-day operations, rather than adding new projects that typically require reprioritizing your team’s job responsibilities.

2. Objectivity
Strategy consultants will contribute dynamic new approaches to your solutions by:

• Offering an outside perspective. Staff members can sometimes be wrapped up with emotion or company politics.
• Providing a fresh set of eyes. Sometimes you are just too close to the issues to see a solution.
• Delivering an understanding of how other clients have approached similar problems. This enables you to reorganize common attributes of effective solutions, applying lessons learned in applicable situations.
• Bringing unbiased, creative solutions to the table. Sometimes, these solutions have been considered by parts of the organization, but a strategy consultant brings a credibility that can push a good idea across the finish line.
• Being invested in the outcome, not in the past problems. They have a clear view of their own role in your company, how to set the right goals and milestones for progress and the specific results that will equate to a successful outcome on your project.

3. Deep expertise
With most strategy consultants having many years of experience in their fields, they bring added value in already having insights and experience in initiatives that are new and frightening to many others. They understand risks and mitigation practices and are able to bring stability and consistency during chaotic times. They bring specialized, market-leading skill sets as well as knowledge of market-leading technology. These skill sets are often not found in-house, and an experienced consultant can build your solution and train your existing staff. Consultants provide consistent, replicable results by using process-oriented and method-driven delivery practices. In fact, they are often the authors of the most successful and productive delivery methods.

4. Agility and speed
Consultants can engage immediately because their skills are already built. There is no ramp-up for training, documentation, process creation, method authoring, planning or staffing plans. They are focused on the project with no distractions; they know what they are there to do, and are not caught up in the minutia of day to day operations. Most strategy consultants follow agile business processes, which means they are able to navigate complexity with speed and clarity. Agile thinking eliminates unneeded processes and artificial boundaries to fuel a culture of collaboration, helping to focus on what matters most to clients.

5. Defined and proven methods and processes
Strategy consultants demonstrate competence and justify the cost of their services by achieving certifications such as Marketing Automation certification and PMI certification. They demonstrate to their clients that they use established methods and processes that have been refined and honed over the course of hundreds of engagements.

6. Key partnerships
Strategy consulting firms partner with all market-leading software and services providers, often partner with more than one. Further, resellers, partners, and channel partners have dedicated resources within tech companies making problem resolution faster and easier.

7. Market leadership and leading edge
Strategy consultants have the ability to choose market leaders to provide solutions for situations, environments and needs that are unique to each client. Most are not only aware of industry trends, but are often the ones setting them.

If your organization is struggling with a stagnant issue, if forward momentum has been disrupted by a lack of internal resources or disagreement and discord internally, if you don’t have time to train up your own staff and create your own intellectual capital, or if you don’t have the ability to forge deep relationships with industry-leading tech companies, then a strategy consulting firm should be a serious consideration.

He started out like you and me, one man with an idea. He was a Ford Mustang enthusiast, and when it came time to shop for parts, there was only one thing Steve Voudouris could say about the shopping experience: it needs fixing.

So he fixed it.

Today, he runs a small business empire.

The road from “small” to “empire” is a remarkable story in itself. At age 17, instead of attending to his studies, he was attending to sales of his PC Tachometer, along with his brother and his best friend. It was a gimmick, a joke. But sales took off. That was Xoxide, his first company, now with close to 100 employees.

Two years later, he founded AmericanMuscle, to better serve Mustang enthusiasts. By 2009, he sold his share of Xoxide to focus on his passion: aftermarket automotive. In 2012, he added ExtremeTerrain to his empire of 300 employees.

So what’s he got that you don’t got?

First, he has unfettered determination. That was clear at 17, when not even the teacher’s lecture could distract him from his business venture.

You have to want it. No, I mean you have to really, really, really want it. Most people want things, then they switch on the TV. That’s not wanting. That’s just dreaming. Wanting is when you keep pushing for something and don’t stop trying.

Steve Voudouris doesn’t get sidetracked by everything that comes along. He pursues his goals with unfettered determination. That alone is not enough to guarantee success. But a lack of determination almost always guarantees failure.

Second, he finds ways to make things work. He is not afraid to keep an open mind and evaluate opportunities. The fact is that the market is constantly changing. Your business landscape is constantly changing. Are you paying good enough attention to switch gears, either to leverage a great opportunity or to abandon a fading one?

At the same time, he is constantly experimenting. If one way might yield better results, he’ll find it. One irritant that was holding up sales was that people didn’t like buying styling and body panel parts for their Mustangs. Painting and installing them is a time-consuming and costly affair. So Steve rolled out pre-painted parts, ready to install. He cut out the body shop and made it easy to change the look of the car.

And sales took off.

“Believe in your own abilities. That’s what drives success,” he says. “It’s usually not the first thing you try that gets you there. The important part is that you keep trying different angles until you find a way that works for you and your business.”

Third, he has built an ambitious company culture. Unlike some companies, he does not hire employees on the basis of how low a salary they’ll work for. He seeks the most ambitious, entrepreneurial employees. He seeks people who can be inspired, so that he can fill them with enthusiasm for the company’s mission.

These are the people who will find new ways to make things happen for the company, whatever their role might be. It was an executive assistant who lead the entire layout and design of the new state-of-the-art call center. The result is a brand new facility that makes coming to work fun and enjoyable for call center employees.

You might be amazing. Your idea might be amazing. Your business model might be pure genius. But what about your employees?

Fourth, he focuses on delivering unique value to the customer. After all, that’s why he founded AmericanMuscle in the first place. He offered free shipping right from the start. Not such a novel idea, you might think. But at the time, that move rocked the car enthusiast world.

Unlike most eCommerce type businesses, Steve did not just dump a vendor’s product line on the site. He had his team (who are all enthusiasts themselves) hand-pick only the parts they would want on their vehicles. No redundancy. No poor-performing parts that would lead to dissatisfied customers.

For some reason, the quality of images and video in the enthusiast niche just weren’t what Steve expected. So he changed it. He understood that customers want to see exactly what they’re getting and judge the quality before buying.

He raised the bar in the niche.

Fifth, he leverages technology. These days, that’s almost all anybody does. Steve kept his eyes on any tech advances in the auto parts industry. If it was happening, he wanted it to be happening at AmericanMuscle.

Steve also kept his eye very closely on technology advances in other niches. If it wasn’t yet happening in the car enthusiast niche, it would start at AmericanMuscle.

“My strategy from the start was always to be the early adopter who puts new, working ideas or technologies into motion” he says. “If parts could be delivered faster by opening a fully automated distribution center, AmericanMuscle is going to be getting into the automation business to pursue that idea and gain that competitive advantage.”

Steve has not done anything that you and I can’t do. It all starts with the drive – that unrelenting ambition to remain focused and determined. Add in good strategy, a good team, a laser-sharp commitment to the customer experience and a technological advantage. You, too, could preside over a small business empire.

We know the age-old process: the marketing team delivers a bunch of leads to sales team and pats themselves on the back for hitting their leads goals. The sales team follows up, but only closes a small percentage of the leads they received. Marketing says Sales dropped the ball, while Sales blames Marketing for delivering unqualified leads.

However, with the knowledge and technologies available to marketers today, it shouldn’t be this way. Through research, targeting, and communication, the marketing team can align with the sales team to deliver high quality leads that improve Sales’ close rates and increase the bottom line for the organization.

Below, are five strategies to help marketers delight their sales team with high-quality leads.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

The first step to providing better leads is alignment with the sales team. The marketing and sales teams have to work together to define funnel stages like MQL, SQL, opportunity, and so on. That way, as leads become qualified, based on how they’re labled, everyone in the organization knows what funnel stage they are in and what engagements they’d had to earn those labels.

At this point, Marketing knows not to pass leads on until they’ve engaged enough with the brand to be qualified for a discussion with Sales. And since both teams agreed on these terms, Sales should be happy to follow up with the qualified leads they receive.

Create a Lead Grading System

The easiest way to organize leads is to give them a score based on how qualified they are. You can name them however you want, but make sure it’s clearly defined so all teams understand the meaning. At Bizible, we go with a simple A, B, C, D or F. Again, alignment is necessary here to make sure everyone agrees and understands what each letter grade means.

The score does not correspond to how deep the prospect is in the funnel, but rather how closely they mimic your target customer. For example, if your ideal customer is a marketer who uses marketing automation and a CRM, a lead who comes in and matches each of those could be an A grade.

Above all else, a lead scoring system helps determine which leads should be prioritized over others. Sales can begin outreach with the A grades, then B and C grades. The D and F grades can be monitored, but until they become an A, B or C, it’s probably a waste of effort and spend to be actively trying to engage with them.

The grading system is also a great way to manage email lists and how content is distributed within that channel. For example, if you’re running a webinar about marketing automation, you probably don’t want to send an email about it to the D or F grades who aren’t using MA. Sure, they might sign up for the webinar, but that signup could trigger outreach from the sales team and it’s not worth their time to reach out to prospects who won’t buy your product. If you segment the email list by grade, you ensure the right leads get the right content.

Build Account-Based Marketing Lists

By now you’ve probably heard of account-based marketing and its many benefits, one of which is lead quality. Instead of putting content out into the world and waiting for a flood of leads to engage, ABM is the process of targeting the account you want (which include those A, B, C leads we discussed earlier) and creating content and outreach efforts specifically to engage them. Meaning that all engagement will be from qualified leads and none of the sales team’s efforts will be wasted following up with leads who will never convert.

Marketing and Sales should meet and build the target account list together. Which types of companies are your ideal customer? Answer this by asking questions like, how many employees do these companies have? What is their annual revenue? What industry are they in?

The team can answer these questions as generally or specifically as they want, depending on how large you want the list to be (i.e. are they using marketing automation vs. are they using Marketo).

Account-based marketing insures that Marketing is only delivering qualified leads that Sales has the potential to close.

Additionally, since ABM focuses on accounts, it’s important to track which personas within an account have interactions with your brand before a purchase is made. If you recognize that CMOs, CEOs and Directors of Demand Gen are usually involved in the buying process, but your sales team has only interacted with the Director of Demand Gen and the CMO, you know it’s time to target the CEO. This could be the final effort needed to close that big account your company has had its eyes on for months.

Use Advanced Targeting on LinkedIn

Due to its background as a job-seeking site and its subsequent growth as a social network, LinkedIn provides an array of valuable business information on its users. Because of this, it is a wonderful B2B marketing platform.

Now that you have lead grades and ABM lists, you can use LinkedIn’s targeting features to direct content and sponsored updates to individuals who fit your buyer profile. For example, we recently did a marketing operations educational series that spanned multiple weeks and was followed by a webinar. To narrow the field of marketers who would see the content, we used LInkedIn’s targeting parameters to only pay to show that content to individuals who had marketing operations as a skill or job function on their profile.

Not only did this help drive more qualified engagement, it saved us money on ads by only showing to individuals in our target market. Meaning when someone clicked the ad, they were more likely to download our content and/or attend the webinar, than if we had just blasted content out to all marketers on LinkedIn.

That’s just one of many examples. LinkedIn allows targeting based on location, job title, company size, skills and so on, making it possible for the marketing team to get creative and drive more qualified leads over to the sales team.

Optimize the Process with Attribution

Now that you’re aligned with Sales, doing some form of account-based marketing, grading leads and using LinkedIn targeting capabilities, how do you know if your efforts are working? This is where marketing attribution comes in.

Marketing attribution takes all of your online and offline marketing efforts and ties them to revenue. That way, instead of basing “what’s working?” on clicks or leads, it can now be based on what is driving actual business value. The sales team speaks in terms of revenue, now it’s time for the marketing team to as well.

Did that event you sponsored last month lead to any closed deals? Did the revenue from those customers outweigh the cost of attendance? Are Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter ads driving clicks that turn into customers? Did that ABM direct mailer help speed up deal velocity or close an account?

When these questions are answered with attribution, you know which efforts are driving the best leads for Sales to close. You can reallocate budget to the efforts that are driving customers and cut spending in the areas that aren’t.

When was the last time you took a retail marketing cue from a car manufacturer? I can hear you thinking, “uhhh… never?” Well, maybe now is the time.

As I’m sure you know, Tesla is killing it, taking the luxury car market by storm. And they’re doing it primarily by leveraging a strategy long thought to be un-leveragable: word of mouth. Tesla has done it by taking a deliberate, systematic approach to referrals. They’ve tapped into how people buy today, and retailers are paying attention. Think about what you buy and how you shop. I bet it might go something like this:

You were admiring your co-workers new bag last week, and she emailed you the site where she bought it, and tells you how happy she’s been with her purchase. Turns out, it’s from a new brand you’ve never heard of. So, you browse their site and make a purchase. A few days later, your bag arrives, and you’re thrilled. You swing it over your shoulder, check yourself out in the mirror, and go meet your friend for coffee. She might admire your new bag, too, and you may share your excitement with her. “I’m just loving this new bag. This brand just has incredible stuff, you should really check it out”.

And now, for most of the world, the sharing doesn’t stop there. We’re also texting our five closest contacts in our cell phones, emailing ten colleagues at work, and sharing a post with our 800 Facebook friends; “I’m loving this new bag. This brand has incredible stuff, you should check it out”. And when enough of our friends find that piece of information valuable, experience it for themselves, and share the great news within their own networks? Well, then, the word of mouth phenomenon has begun.

Humans have always had their sharing voice, but now that voice is more amplified than ever. And for marketers, this has presented an opportunity to reach more high value customers at scale. The learning curve on how to best scale and control word of mouth has been elusive for even the world’s best marketers. In fact, 64% of marketing executives indicated that they believe word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing. However, only 6% say they have mastered it. The technology that has made the customer’s voice so powerful (email, social, messaging, and SMS text), is the same technology that has made it so difficult for marketers to create and control.

But more brands are figuring it out. A few years ago, the list of marketers who had mastered word of mouth may have only consisted of the Apple’s, Uber’s, and AirBnb’s of the world. Now that list includes the world’s top retailers, led by Amazon, and including Gillette, Rebecca Minkoff, Indochino, and American Giant. And they’re all doing it in the same way: with referrals.

Back to the car manufacturer. Like almost every retailer, with Amazon being a notable exception, Tesla’s ideal customer is very specific. It’s the same consumer targeted by luxury retailers. It’s a consumer not motivated by price. It’s someone that wants to own the highest quality premium brands. Tesla’s competitive advantage in reaching their ideal target is their existing customers. They created a movement with word of mouth (and little bit of Elon Musk) at the center. Their word-of-mouth success was no behind-the-scenes accident.

From fashion brands to footwear, from sporting goods to essentials, retailers of all kinds are creating their referral programs, too. And their customers are responding. It’s not about discounts, it’s about letting your customers personally share your brand with their friends and family. It’s about identity. It’s about community. And it’s about creating a scalable and optimizable acquisition channel.

Referral marketing has placed the reigns of word of mouth solely in the hands of the marketer, providing a clear path to driving revenue.

Have you been reading about Brexit this week?

The economic effects of the decision for the UK to leave the European Union will be immense, and some effects have already started to show, but what does it all mean for e-commerce?

As political and economic experts are just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s to come following this major political decision, there is one element certain to have an effect in many ways: exchange rates.

We asked several e-commerce experts in the UK to chime in and comment on the changes they predict in the near future, for both online retailers and ecommerce technology.

We found five major areas that all e-commerce companies in the UK and doing business with the UK should look at:

1. A new relationship between the British pound and international shoppers

This week the UK currency fell to its lowest value against the dollar since the mid 1980s. Nearing an equal level to the Euro, this opens up the doors for international buyers to step in and quickly take advantage of a “discount” so-to-speak.

These changes will have a clear effect on British shoppers, who may tighten their wallets. However, companies selling outside of the UK can take advantage if they act quickly, focusing their advertising efforts on international buyers. Al Mackin of Manchester-based Nudgr.io supports this theory, saying, “This may be short term but it opens up quick marketing opportunities in other countries. There’s no guarantees that the exchange rates will remain the same over the long term, but if you’re nimble then you can capitalise on this opportunity to increase sales outside the UK.”

Companies outside the UK might find some opportunities, too. We know of one company that was quick to jump on a new chance for good marketing, offering Brits a respite from the political chaos, with a humorous twist at Transylvaniabeyond.com.

Transylvaniabeyond.com offers Brits a place to move in a time of Brexit-induced chaos.

2. A change in marketing to capture penny-pinchers

UK companies will have to market themselves in a slightly different way as consumers hesitate and keep a closer eye on what’s coming out of their wallets. Competitive pricing is something that consumers will be looking for, and advertising discounts and special offers is a great way to help shoppers breathe a bit easier.

Attila Kecsmar, CEO of Antavo, a UK-based company serving online retailers with operations in Hungary, says “For most tech companies serving ecommerce businesses, it will be more difficult as these retailers will want to cut costs.”

“On the other hand it may prove beneficial for our technology, as we provide reward programs for online retailers, which can be used to capture the attention of penny-pinching customers. Also, companies will put more focus on customer retention, and such loyalty programs are perfect for that.”

3. A smaller budget for big-ticket items

As the aftermath of the decision unfolds, there is no way to know precisely what will happen. At the moment, people are up in arms, speculating about what will happen, how the decision will be made and if and when Article 50 will be triggered.

Justin Rees, Founder of Talking Customers has the following insight regarding consumer confidence: “On the consumer side, people will put off spending large sums of money in times of uncertainty. So if Brexit makes people anxious about the security of their jobs or perhaps how prices might fluctuate over time then they tend to put off buying big ticket items. For ecommerce businesses that target these areas they could see a fall in sales while the uncertainty remains.”

4. A change in mobile shopping habits

Several contributors have already alluded to decreased spending and increased interest in finding a good deal, but wherever there is change, there is also opportunity.

Grace Caffyn at Digiday made a very interesting point about mobile commerce, saying that more price-sensitive consumers will lead to m-commerce seeing an increase in search traffic. She also stated that this increase is a great opportunity for m-comm companies to get more conversions on mobile.

Companies should consider spending more money on their mobile ad budget and make sure they’re providing top-notch customer service. Now, more than ever, good deals and great marketing can make up for a lowered interest in spending money.

Some brands, like innocent, used the referendum to have a little bit of marketing fun. Interacting positively with customers and building loyalty are key in times like these.

5. A hike in expenses in cross-border sales and supply chain

Markus Linder, CEO of SmartAssistant, expects “the slowdown of economy will have negative impact on online retail demand in the UK and a weaker pound will lead to an increase in cost for UK retailers which they need to pay for e-commerce technologies in the future.”

If your products are produced outside of the UK, there will likely be tough times ahead when it comes to working with your overseas suppliers, in terms of costs. Rita Usanga, Digital Media Specialist at Britano UK, tells us about the other side of the coin, describing how international manufacturers will also be affected. “We are a nation of importers, not producers, and with the value of the pound dropping to a 31 year low, products will become more expensive for UK consumers to buy. This will inevitably result in reduced spending as pockets and purses come under pressure which will in turn negatively impact eCommerce sites and worldwide manufacturers who do significant business with the UK.”

And finally there is shipping. Paul Rogers, Founder of Replatforming.com, says “merchants are likely to be impacted by higher shipping costs” as a result of the changes, “making them less likely to buy.”

UK companies should take a look at the currencies they are paying for their infrastructure with. Al Mackin makes a great point about hosting, saying that a lot of ecommerce sites pay for infrastructure and marketing services in US dollars. He says, “If you’re hosting with Amazon Web Services, and a lot of e-commerce sites do, then that’s going to lead to an increase in your monthly hosting costs if you don’t have up-front payments.” However, many companies can pay for these services in Pounds, in which case, it’s smooth sailing.

Al also offered a bit of advice, saying that companies can keep watch over the exchange rates and look for opportunities to buy up-front, to compensate for price increases caused by exchange rate woes.

British Corner Shop shared the news of the referendum decision on their page and reassured their target audience, British expats worldwide, that business would continue as usual.

Watching the effects of Brexit for the months to come

Overall, many of the ecommerce experts we asked expressed their concerns related to the currency changes that the referendum and potential exit have brought. Having said that, it’s still too early to determine the true extent of these changes.

One of our contacts John W. Hayes, Marketing Strategist at iContact, put it quite well when he said that business will have to keep an eye on the issues for the long-term: “It’s too early to comprehend how Brexit will impact UK ecommerce…The two years it will take disentwine the UK from the European system, following the triggering of Article 50, is a long time in politics and an even longer time in ecommerce.”

SaaS has become all the rage of businesses these days. Of course it’s attractive when we see the number of SaaS unicorns or when we read of the high growth rates of SaaS companies (though a 100% growth rate of a young $1M SaaS company is very different than the 5% growth rate of a $1B company.) But there’s a lot of sex and sizzle behind these business models, with everyone wanting to jump on board–giving rise to Everything as a Service.

Inevitably, there’s a lot of confusion as companies try and many fail to emulate what they see in these SaaS companies. I think it’s because of a lack of understanding of the business and sales models–and how they fit our target customers with how they want to buy.

Without going deeply into these, I wanted to try to provide some clarity about the models, where they fit, and whether we can/should exploit them.

While I’ll refer to SaaS, the basic selling models exist in all sorts of industries and markets–not just software.

SaaS as an implementation model: This is probably more relevant to software companies, but this really has to do with how the product/service is delivered. SaaS companies talk about the cloud, that means they host, maintain, and deliver the service, rather than having your own IT department do this. It’s not a new model, though wrapped in cool technology, it seems new. Basically it’s a variety of outsourcing and we’ve had these models for decades, if not longer. Many companies no longer manufacture or service their own products, having companies do this for them. Virtually every part of a company can be outsourced (even sales–think of channel partners and other forms of outsourcing). It’s critical to maintain service/quality levels/reliability levels in those relationships. As sales people, our customers will be concerned about our ability to manage those.

SaaS as a payment model: This is where a lot of excitement occurs. Imagine changing from a one time purchase to a recurring revenue model that can go on for many years. Sales people and customers like it because it lowers the cost (perhaps not the risk) of entry. If we are looking at “renting” something the cost is significantly lower than buying it outright. A lot of SaaS companies, at least in the early days, said “try it for a while, if you don’t like it, you can always cancel.” As we look at current models, with SaaS contracts going up to 3 years, the financial decision may be different. But, of course, this is not new. As consumers, with many “big ticket” items, we’ve always had the alternatives of rent/lease/purchase. Even in B2B we’ve had a variety of rental/lease/purchase/off balance sheet financing models. Customers and sales people (with strong financial acumen) have used these for decades to overcome cashflow, capital budget and other challenges.

The combination of the SaaS implementation and payment models have created “new” B2B customers. This is where much of the excitement and new opportunity around SaaS as a sales model. It is very exciting and an opportunity that every organization should explore. Traditionally, B2B sales had been about getting the entire organization to commit to a single solution. We’re familiar with that–the complex decisionmaking process, longer sales cycles, and so forth.

With the SaaS implementation and payment models, we have a new B2B buyer, the individual or small department. Rather than getting the entire organization to commit to a solution, we only have to reach and convince individuals and small departments. Rather than getting everyone aligned in the corporation, getting them committed to a multimillion investment (perhaps paid in small amounts over years), we could reach out to individuals, getting them to make a commitment to pay perhaps $25-125 per month. And if we could reach a lot of individuals, very quickly, we could quickly scale revenue.

This converted a very long complex sales cycle into much shorter, more predictable sales cycles. In this, the sale is to an individual, the buying/sales process focuses on the individual, is much shorter and not complex. This gave rise to the SaaS selling model — high volume, high velocity, and because we are dealing with large numbers of small things, much more predictable. Most of the models and lessons for this sales model come straight out of consumer packaged goods and retail sales methods. Strong marketing, strong product awareness/visibility, the ability for the customer to self educate, great merchandising/point of sale, creating a great buying experience, making it very easy for the customer to buy are all tenets of great retailing. Leveraging the web as the virtual storefront and going after individual or small department buyers is very powerful.

In retailing (at least years ago), you could grow very rapidly by adding more retail outlets. Every retailer had it’s own models of how many stores of what format could be supported by a population/demographic (I’ve spent some time with McDonalds and Starbucks looking at these models and they are quite rich, very predictable). Likewise, in the SaaS sales models, we can predict growth very easily, knowing how much and when a new sales person is likely to produce revenue.

I think every B2B sales organization should reassess their sales strategies, asking themselves the questions, “Is our customer the enterprise or can it be individuals/departments within the enterprise?”

It’s in this question, we start to look at the fundamental issues of our sales deployment strategies–both SaaS and other companies need to address this in developing their sales deployment models. The answer may be both! But then this requires different approaches to the market.

For example, traditional B2B sellers may find the ability to restructure their offerings, focusing them on helping individuals or small department rather than the enterprise. The buying/sales process shifts from being a long complex cycle involving many people across the organization to a short/predictable cycle to lots of individuals.

Likewise, we are seeing traditional SaaS companies restructure their approaches moving from the individual/small department to the enterprise. Here they face the reverse challenge in moving from thousands of highly predictable transactions with individuals to smaller numbers of opportunities with groups making a complex enterprise wide decision.

Now here’s where we start seeing some problems with the sales deployment strategies many organizations are trying to put in place.

First, they confuse the implementation and payment approach with the sales model. Just because you have an offering that is cloud based and paid for monthly, doesn’t mean you should have a SaaS-high volume/high velocity sales model.

The most fundamental question we have to look at in our sales strategies is “What problem(s) are we helping our customers solve?” If they are enterprise wide problems, the only sales strategy is the complex sales strategy. For example, each individual in the organization cannot have their own financial reporting system. The company has to have a single financial reporting system, consequently many people in the organization, who are impacted by financial reporting systems, will have to be involved in making that decision. Likewise a manufacturing process control system, a building/facility, are all enterprise wide problems. In the case where we are not solving the problem that an individual or small department faces, but rather a problem that impacts multiple people/functions in the organization and for which there must be a single solution–the high volume/velocity sales model doesn’t fit. The customer must make a decision to solve a very complex problem.

Recently, I’ve been involved with a number of “SaaS” companies (or organizations trying to implement a “SaaS” sales model that are failing. The problem is, the customer problems they are solving are enterprise wide problems, not problems of individuals or small departments. So their efforts to drive a high volume/velocity model, much of their marketing/content/web strategy is oriented to the wrong “problem/customer.”

Second, sometimes changing the way we and the customer view the problem can change our sales model or approach. For example, many of the traditional SaaS companies leveraging high volume/velocity approaches reach their limits in effectiveness/efficiency. For example, if the maximum productivity of a sales person is $1M (they can’t handle any more calls/demos/volume), it’s pretty easy to see that we need 5 sales people for $5M, 10 for $10M, and so forth (that’s why it’s called predictable). At some point however, we have to consider, “can we achieve the same revenue with fewer people, by driving an enterprise approach?” For example, could one person manage enough complex deals to produce $2.5 M, so to produce $5M, I need 2 sales people and to produce $10M I need 4. Even if each of those sales people were twice as expensive, the cost of selling is still significantly lower.

Of course we can’t do this if our customers view the “problem they are solving” as something left to each individual in the organization. But if the problem the customer can solve can be defined as an “enterprise” decision, it may be much more effective and efficient to organize our selling approach to be an enterprise approach, rather than a high volume/velocity approach.

Why is all this important to sales executives?

First, our approach to the market has to be based on the problems we help our customers solve and how the customer views those problems. Are they problems of the enterprise, are they problems for individuals within the enterprise?

Second, sometimes the definition of the “problem” and who has the problem changes. It can move from problems individuals have to those of the enterprise or a much larger group. Then we have to change our sales model.

Third, the skills, programs, systems, tools, people, training, metrics are different for each approach. We have to make sure we are recruiting the right people/managers and putting the right things in place to maximize their performance.

Fourth, no sales model is forever. Sometimes what served us well in the past, needs to change because our customers and how they buy are changing.

Fifth, sometimes multiple models have to coexist within an organization, yet each must focus on their sweet spot. Note, I’ve completely ignored channels, partners, ecommerce and other models. Evaluating which of these and which combination we might use requires careful evaluation.

Common to all of these is clear definition of “Who are our customers? What problems do they have, how do they want to solve their problems? How do they want to buy? How do we organize ourselves to most effectively and efficiently solve their problems and grow our own business?”

What is world-class? In sports, it is easy to define. World champions and Olympic medalists are world-class. But what is world-class in sales? Revenue performance? Maybe, but how do you get there? What are the behaviors that drive world-class sales performance?

At CSO Insights, we are passionate about all things sales performance. We research sales performance from different perspectives, including behavioral and metric perspectives. We investigate, for instance, the roles of sales process and sales management, the growing impact of strategic sales force enablement, and the roles of technology and compensation.

Our CSO Insights 2016 Sales Best Practices Study has just been released. “Drawing Back the Bow” is this year’s cover story. It creates an umbrella theme for the 12 behaviors that have the greatest impact on sales performance.

For the thirteenth year, this study identifies those behaviors that have the biggest impact on sales performance, measured by well known key performance indicators such as quota attainment, qualified opportunities, new account acquisition, YOY existing customer growth or average account billing. Top performers in these areas do a few things differently. They focus on what matters. They focus on the top behaviors that have the greatest impact on sales performance, collectively and consistently. And that makes a huge difference.

The world-class segment is only 7.7% of the overall study population of more than 1,700 respondents, 1,200 of whom work in complex sales. But they achieved 21% better sales performance.

A sales performance difference this large cannot be ignored by any sales leader. Now, what are these top behaviors that drive sales performance, and what does it take to become excellent at those behaviors, to become a world-class performer?

From the top 12 behaviors we have three behaviors that were also top behaviors last year:

Sales and marketing are aligned in what our customers want and need (World-Class 94%, All Respondents 39%)

The key differentiator to successful sales and marketing alignment is this: being aligned to “what our customers want and need.” And that means beginning with the customer’s journey as the main design point when addressing this challenge. Here are four steps to improve sales and marketing alignment in a “customer-core” way:

• Shared vision of success: A shared vision describes how the organization creates value for the customers and how success will be measured. Following the customer’s journey makes it easier to create this vision, and revenue contribution has to be one of the measures of success for both sales and marketing.
• Shared strategy to create value in every interaction: A shared strategy for creating and delivering customer value is necessary―from first contact and all the way through the buying decision and the customers using the products, services, and solutions successfully.
• Shared marketing, sales, and service processes: Based on this shared vision and strategy, sales and marketing have to agree on a shared sales and marketing process, ideally powered by integrated engagement and selling methodologies. It is essential that these efforts continue after the buying decision has been made.
• Shared technology: Integrated processes require integrated technology from the website to marketing automation to sales enablement to the CRM system. Integration is mandatory to leverage the potential of successful sales and marketing alignment.

Our organization is highly effective in allocating the right resources to pursue large deals (World-class 94%, all respondents 40%)

Allocating the right resources to the right opportunities is a challenge for most organizations because resources are like budgets—there is never enough to go around. In many organizations, it’s still the loudest voice that gets the biggest share. But the right resources should only be placed on the most valuable deals to increase the probability of winning those deals. For example, sales managers evaluating deals should consider the strategic value for the customer and the value for the sales organization. It is exactly this deal evaluation process that is often missing in many sales management approaches. When decisions about investments and resource allocation have to be made, the process of making those decisions should be tied to the sales process and the decision gates the customer must go through.

When coaching sales professionals on leads and opportunities, sales managers should always investigate where the customer is along their customer’s journey. As soon as a deal comes close to the customer’s “change the status quo” decision, the sales manager and salesperson should also evaluate this deal against others. Ideally, this step takes place in a funnel coaching session, as it’s about evaluating this deal in the context of other opportunities being worked by the salesperson or the sales team.

We know why our top performers are successful (World-class 94%, all respondents 44%)

Look at the performance rankings of any sales team, and it becomes evident that not all salespeople are created equal. There are often key performers who regularly appear on the top of the chart. Just how valuable are these individuals?

Firms that excel at knowing who their top performers tend to focus on assessing three things. First, they determine the skills and competencies that sales professionals apply in their daily workflow. Doing so, they not only assess what top salespeople are doing, but also how they do it. And that’s a key finding for any sales force enablement approach, especially for onboarding and coaching. Second, they assess talent, the “behavioral DNA.” Third they assess the cultural fit because not every A-player is an A-player in every culture.

The key benefits of this approach are to understand what makes your top performers successful (we all know who they are!). Then, sales force enablement has to ensure that best practices can be shared and that the hiring process is consistently adjusted based on the latest assessment findings. Furthermore, enablement leaders have to ensure that their onboarding process is tailored accordingly.

Click here, download your copy and check out the other top behaviors!

This article was initially published @ Top Sales Magazine, July 2016

The post What World-Class Performers Do Differently: The CSO Insights 2016 Sales Best Practices Study appeared first on Sales Enablement Perspectives.

I was talking with Johnathan Allen, from Salesloft, the other day and asking him how he thought small businesses could use Account Based Selling. We had a great conversation so I asked him to write a blog post for us.

Account-Based Sales Development is a growing buzzword, but it’s actually not a new concept. Account Based Selling has re-emerged, because of the innovative technological advancements in predicative software. Here’s a quick definition:

Account-Based Sales Development (ABSD):

“Is a strategic prospecting process that involves selling to targeted and highly valued accounts rather than focusing your prospecting efforts at the contact level.”

So, you’re probably thinking, “Ok, but what does that mean for my small business? And how is it going to make me more money?”

Navigating enterprise sales can be difficult for small businesses. The sales cycle is painstakingly long and on average five people have to formally sign off on each B2B purchase. The cost to acquire a large customer is high. It’s getting tougher to gain buyer consensus and build the needed relationships to close the deal. That’s where Account-Based Sales Development comes in. B2B companies can use the account-based selling model to prospect a specific number of pre-qualified accounts, while simultaneously using multiple channels to reach all of the decision makers.

Here are the main benefits of using Account-Based Sales Development in your small business:

1. More targeted, therefore you get a higher close rate
2. More strategic, and doesn’t rely on high volume
3. Builds your brand, because you sell in a more customer-centric way

B2B selling can be complex at the enterprise level. As small business you may not have the resources. You may have a small sales team and you most likely do a lot of the selling yourself. If you’re looking to improve your performance with enterprise accounts, account-based sales development will help you identify and acquire the right customers to grow your business. Here is a three step process to increasing your sales through enterprise customers.

Step One: Create a Specialized Role for Sales Development

Let’s use the example of a small sales team that currently has one manager and three sales reps. Currently, there’s one manager that helps big deals close, and the three reps are responsible for everything from generating the lead to closing the deal. The first thing to do is break up the team members into specific roles matched with their strengths:

• Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) – these reps are the engine that feeds your sales team with leads and works at the front end of the sales cycle. These are the prospectors and your future Account Executives. For more information on sales development, here’s a Salesforce.com blog post that covers the topic. The most junior sales reps should start as Sales Development Representatives, and work their way up to Account Executives as they become successful.
• Account Executive (AE) – these are your closers and relationship managers once the deal is closed. The most successful sales and experienced sales rep will become the team’s AE.
• Sales Leader (SL) – responsible for performance, motivation, attaining team goals, coaching, sales rep career development, pipeline forecasting and everything else.

Specialization is a core underlying principle of successful sales development. It keeps teams focused on their role and fosters improvement and development of skills. SDRs, for instance, should never close deals. They should prospect all the time. The reverse would be true for AEs, whose goal is to accept the right leads, generate opportunities and close business. Sales leaders now can focus on what they should: strategy, team development, and exceeding quota.

Step Two: Review Your Data Process

It might not seem obvious at first, but startups and small businesses are often sitting on mountains of data. Leads may have been acquired from various trade shows, events or databases. If you’ve ever purchased a list of emails, for instance, chances are you have a whole mess of bad lead data.

The first step to understanding what drives business growth is sorting and straightening out your data. It may seem like a difficult task at first, but it’s worth it. Clean data will boost your team’s productivity and shorten your sales cycle. Sorting through and cleaning bad data will also make the next step much, much easier.

Step Three: Identifying Ideal Client Profile and Target Accounts

Now that your data is truly clean, you can build your ideal client profile. Analyze and identify the characteristics of the accounts that you’ve won and lost. Through analyzing this data you should be able to pinpoint the specific characteristics of your ideal client. Armed with an accurate ideal client profile, based on data rather than assumptions, you can apply that profile to the top target companies you want to do business with.

For our sales team of three, we’ll take the top 100 companies we want to target, and provide 50 to each SDR. These SDRs will each own that account, they should research and find the right people to prospect aggressively, until they can pass qualified leads to the AEs. Instilling this sense of ownership in sales development helps that rep focus on researching and understanding that target account’s pain better in order to come up with a truly compelling value proposition.

Moving to account-based sales development is all about increasing the quality of interactions and leads that are passed to the sales team. It’s true, you might see a dip in raw leads generated, but you’ll have higher quality leads. Your team is more able to identify the best opportunities.

Taking the road to account-based sales development is a worthwhile journey for any small business looking to maximize their team’s performance with limited resources.

The post 3 Step Account-Based Sales Development for Small Business appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

Resources to Help Improve Your Website Productivity

Today I have some tools to help your business improve your website functionality and reach. Here’s four links with tips and tricks.

Maintaining a successful website that encourages growth can be a challenge, especially for companies or entrepreneurs with little or no staff. By incorporating the right resources you can greatly improve your efficiency. There are several ways to be more productive without a high budget. Do you need more time to build your business and less on website management? Take advantage of these resources, and let me know how these work for you!

1) Flexible and mobile-ready platform – Onspring

Manage and analyze your website from one dashboard. Onspring is a smart way to perform a website audit and reduce the risk of security breaches, which will help you increase your bottom line. This integrated software includes visual reports, collaboration tools, online surveys for your readers, and much more. Your business will be able to keep up the pace as your website grows without the risk of falling behind or being held back by a security breach.

2) Generate more leads from content – Insighter

Do you need to attract more readers who can be converted into sales? Insighter provides an easy way to share content with personalized call-to-action functionality. Encourage engagement with a professional presentation while driving traffic to your website at the same time. This free tool will help you establish your brand identity as well as spreading the word on your blog posts for increased sales.

3) User feedback on demand – Userthink

Generate more conversions from your landing pages. Userthink provides a simple way to reach your customers the moment they arrive at your sales page. Get focused feedback from users all over the United States while attracting new visitors. The tool includes a variety of landing pages such as a home page, order pages, squeeze pages, coming soon pages, and more. Setup is done online without the need to download expensive software.

4) Power up your email list – Kickofflabs

If you have a contest, newsletter or other promotional email then you will love this marketing tool. Kickofflabs will not only help you collect more leads from your website, but will also enable you to create great opt-in forms. Set up automatic and customized email replies while encouraging your subscribers to spread the word about your brand. The service is free to get started for 30 days and includes professional options to suit your business budget needs.

Hopefully you will find these website productivity tools for business useful to your brand building and sales. Are there any that you would like to add as well?