Rnordman

Armed with an array of sensors, commercial drones are about to become a new source for digital information. We expect the drone market to surge to nearly $7 billion by 2020 globally, driven by regulatory clarification, continuously decreasing component costs, and – most important– ongoing innovation that connects drone capabilities to big-data analytics.

While 60% of drone usage currently relates to communications and media such as for film making and commercial photography, new higher-value applications are on their way, as drones have a significant advantage in terms of precision, convenience, and cost over more traditional solutions such as satellites and helicopters. Drone-mounted sensors can be used to capture an impressive array of data, paving the way for increased digitalization of industrial processes.

Leaders across a spectrum of industries are already availing themselves of drone-based data. In the oil industry, for example, what used to be weeks of inspection work now takes just days, thanks to drone-based thermal imaging and gas “sniffer” technology to inspect oil rigs and pipelines. Sky Futures, a third-party drone services company that specializes in such inspections, works with oil companies, such as BP, Shell, Statoil, and Conoco Philips, and has raised $9.5 million in investment capital in just the past year.

In transportation, American railroad BNSF is partnering with the Federal Aviation Administration to test drones for remote track and bridge inspection and air quality monitoring.  Network Rail in the United Kingdom is using drones as part of its ORBIS project to digitize the country’s rail network in 3D, to enable better planning of track maintenance and renewal. Airlines Easyjet and Lufthansa have adopted drones as a tool for aircraft inspections.

Other industries are being persuaded by the cost and safety benefits of drone-based data as well. Mining giant Rio Tinto is using drones to survey equipment and mining pits in Western Australia. Heavy machinery company Caterpillar is reportedly exploring the use of drones for fleet vehicle management in the field, while drones are the cornerstone of Komatsu’s “Smart Construction” service, which can fully automate bulldozers and excavators. And one of retail’s largest players, Walmart, is testing how drones could help improve warehouse inventory management.

Insight Center

The multiplying possibilities of drone-based data could inspire across-the-board alterations in data gathering strategies, particularly if such changes lead to cost savings, improved safety, and enhanced analytics. For example, savings are to be had in analysis of inventory stockpiles, thermal imaging of pipelines and rail lines, three-dimensional modeling of insurance claims, and non-destructive terahertz imaging for buildings. Soon, it might be worthwhile for many companies to check whether drone-based data could add value – either to optimize current operations or offer new avenues for growth.

If a company can identify potential benefits, it can then consider whether to consolidate drone program development across multiple business units or subsidiaries, so as to concentrate investment dollars and strengthen data analytics. In addition, organizations that decide to invest in drones may need to adjust their data architectures and processes – and improve their understanding of  local regulations. While some drone-based data may complement existing information, some will make other information-gathering methods obsolete. Given that drones have little track record as yet, determining the “best” method for data gathering will require strict analysis of benefits versus costs, such as through pilot programs, before undertaking expensive functional restructuring.

Businesses also will need to determine whether to run their own drones or outsource. Factors such as investment horizon, need for data security, and desired development speed will influence this choice. A company might opt for in-house drone operation and data analysis if it is concerned about proprietary issues or security, is willing to make a substantial up-front investment, and wants to take a “learn by doing” approach. As an example, French railway operator SNCF is using an internal drone program to enhance safety and maintenance through network surveillance.

Outsourcing may make more sense, on the other hand, where data can be shared (even possibly leading to industry-wide solutions), or if a company wants to get a drone-based data program off the ground quickly and with less investment. Commercially qualified drone services firms offering multi-sensor data have sprung up in a number of industries already, and partnering with such firms is proving to be a popular option where companies prefer to engage a specialist already versed in the complexities of the technology as well as applicable drone regulations. In some cases, these partnerships are leading to new business ventures: Lufthansa Aerial Services  inked a deal in January with drone maker DJI to develop specialized commercial UAV applications – starting with a pilot project for a wind turbine manufacturer.

Finally, whether they outsource or develop their drone teams in-house, organizations will need to develop internal capabilities for big-data analytics to make use of this new wealth of information. This will mean hiring the types of data scientists typically found at data-rich technology companies. Demand for such specialists is likely to heat up quickly as an increasing number of industries turn to drone-based data.

For many companies, drones are quickly becoming another component that must be considered in developing digitalization strategies. Backed by cloud services and big-data techniques, the unprecedented data gathering capabilities of drones have the potential to radically alter the competitive dynamics of the information landscape.

Should inside sales reps ask “Have I caught you at a good time?” or “Is now a good time?” when the contact first picks up the phone?

This was a recent question on a LinkedIn sales group. I was quite surprised at some of the answers / responses given by other sales reps / experts.

Here’s the correct answer if you want to be successful when cold calling:

The answer is “No, you shouldn’t ask if this is a good time (or any version of that) when the contact first picks up the phone.”

Why you shouldn’t ask this question when the prospect first picks up the phone…

Because you haven’t given the prospect a “reason” to give you their time of day yet!

What should be done for optimal results is to have an opening value statement that first piques the prospects interest and makes them want to know more, followed by…”And if I caught you at a good time, I’d like to ask you just a few quick questions to see if what I have in mind may be of some help to you, would that be OK?”

EXAMPLE:

“Hi (Prospects Name) this is Michael Pedone with SalesBuzz.com. Reason for my call, we recently helped (Competitor X’s) inside sales team overcome call reluctance and increased their talk time by more than an hour per day and if I caught you at a good time, I’d like to ask you a few questions to see if what we do would be of some help to you and your team as well, would that be OK?”

If the sales rep did the proper pre-call planning research and is calling on the right contact, and has the proper opening value statement, the above “closing” is all they will need to get their foot in the door and advance the sales call to the next level.

– Michael Pedone

The Leave campaign’s victory, with a margin of 3.8 percentage points, has likely ushered in a protracted phase of uncertainty for the UK, EU, and global economies. A systemic shock cutting across industries and borders, Brexit poses significant strategic challenges for business leaders as they navigate the fallout. Judging by our interactions with CEOs around the world to date, some of their burning questions are:

• What are the elements of uncertainty created by Brexit?
• How can leaders develop a specific view of the industry- and firm-level implications?
• What are the first-response imperatives for corporate leaders?
• What structural changes to the business environment are triggered by Brexit, and how do we adapt to them?

This is how we recommend CEOs approach these difficult questions:

Identify the sources of uncertainty

The uncertainties that come with Brexit can be ordered into four categories. While the overall directional impact is generally clear, it’s the magnitude, duration, and differential that are more critical to determine.

Political process. There are significant drivers of uncertainty domestically and abroad. At home, the UK faces dissolution pressures if Scotland seeks to salvage its EU membership, while the EU has every incentive to make Brexit a painful experience to deter other defectors, making the outcome of negotiations difficult to predict. These unknowns have the potential to influence the evolution of the financial, institutional, and real economies.

Financial economy. The directional impact on key prices was widely predicted — and strong corrections to the pound (-11% verses the dollar) and to equities (-13.6% FTSE250) were indeed recorded in the first two sessions after the vote. The Bank of England will likely lower policy rates, or even adopt negative interest rates. What drives uncertainty are the magnitude and duration of these corrections; as prices guide resource allocation, their volatility and uncertainty interferes with planning and investment decisions.

Trade regime. The reconstruction challenge for the UK’s trade regime is clear. The EU represents 47% of UK exports, facilitates an additional 13% through non-EU trade deals, and currently negotiates with countries worth an additional 21% of UK exports. While the UK would need only eight bilateral trade agreements to cover 80% of its current exports, there is a long tail of 18 additional countries worth more than $1 billion in UK exports and an additional 132 countries to cover all existing exports. Both internal and external factors drive uncertainty about the duration and outcome of the reconstruction challenge — for example, the UK’s ability to negotiate agreements, having outsourced this task to Brussels for 40 years, or trade partners’ willingness to engage with Britain in a constructively and timely manner.

Real economy. The transmission mechanism to the real economy is primarily via delayed or canceled investment decisions or the anticipatory redeployment of employment or production assets. Here, too, the directional impact has been analyzed credibly, with estimates ranging from 3%–9% of GDP loss. Here it is the speed, depth, and duration of these effects — on demand, consumption, and employment across industries — that drive uncertainty.

Determine the specific industry- and firm-level implications

Industries and individual companies vary widely in terms of the impact on the uncertainties outlined above, due to their differential dependence on UK and EU production, demand and trade, global trade, regulation, and integration into EU structures (e.g., R&D subsidies, EU norms and standards, etc.). Therefore each company needs to carry out (or take to the next level) its own specific impact analysis.

It is impossible to forecast precise impact with confidence, given that exit terms, timing, and knock-on implications are all uncertain. A scenario-based approach to planning, modeling, and preparing for multiple outcomes is therefore recommended. This can be done in four steps:

1. Attach a “value” to each source of uncertainty — strong vs. light currency depreciation, high vs. low future EU market access — along with your perception of likelihood (plausible, likely, unlikely) to build an “uncertainty map.”
2. From the map, combine various values to develop multiple scenarios. The scenarios should be made internally consistent by avoiding contradictions (e.g., by combining political uncertainty with lower volatility).
3. Consider the industry- and firm-level sensitivities to these scenarios. The key questions are about the impact on your firm’s business model, operating model, EU institutional arrangements and financial structures, and performance.
4. Use the scenarios and sensitivities that you’ve identified to test the resilience of your current plans, highlight risks, formulate response options, build capabilities, and reflect the results in strategies and initiatives and in risk management.

For example, a U.S. industrial conglomerate with a strong market presence in the UK and a spatially fragmented value chain may find its strategic sensitivity is highest to the UK’s potential failure to replicate the EU’s global trade access. Expecting growing protectionism, a plausible strategic response could be aggressively defragmenting its value chain and concentrating production in the UK (so as to counteract the rising cost of trade). In some cases companies will feel confident enough to bet on particular scenarios; in others they may wish to diversify measures to become scenario-agnostic or to create options and boost agility to be able to move decisively when matters become clearer.

Turn thoughts into action

In addition to initiating the strategic impact assessment outlined above, it is important that business leaders translate their insights into action. Immediate actions include:

• Inform employees and stakeholders of the industry- and company-specific facts (e.g., liquidity, stability of existing trading arrangements, and so on). Create confidence by showing that issues are being carefully considered, and define the process.
• Confirm that the impact will take time to play out. Emphasize that little is likely to change in the short term in legal and trading arrangements, although markets may be jittery until negotiation outcomes are clear.
• Continually update the industry and company assessment as events unfold. Run scenarios. Design contingency plans and reflect any insights in your strategies for growth, geographical footprint, global supply chain, and risk management.
• Don’t let a communication vacuum open up. Keep talking about progress against goals.

Adapt to the new post-Brexit business environment

Once a response to Brexit has been initiated, forward-looking business leaders will ask themselves, What’s the bigger picture? What structural changes does Brexit signal? How has the business environment changed and how must business practices be adapted for short-term survival and long-term advantage?

Brexit appears to be consistent with structural changes to the business environment that were already under way. While business has already become more sensitive to geopolitics, the politics of discontent and populism may prove to have an even bigger impact. Brexit highlights the plausibility of similar uncertainties unfolding in the U.S. and in other countries.

This calls for two conclusions as business leaders strive to make sense of the new environment. The first is a renewed emphasis on strategy under uncertainty, with a focus on flexibility, adaptiveness, and resilience. The second is that many businesses now need enhanced capabilities to effectively capture and translate the macroeconomic and political developments for industry- and firm-level implications. Conditions will likely be very different for different parts of any business, especially for large and global companies, making it even more imperative to select the right approach to strategy and execution for each segment.

Using their Deliverables

Intro: More than just a few good conversations and a slide deck

Consultants can get a bad reputation for good reason. Not everything we do is truly necessary or important, not every prediction we make comes true and not every binder or thumb drive we give you will get used again. Somewhere in between a mea culpa and passing the buck: most of the time something goes wrong on an engagement, it’s a lack of communication between the client and consultant.

As a startup, chances are you don’t have money to throw away playing the telephone game. In part one of this blog, I talked about working together and how to get the most out of an engagement.

This part will focus on the stuff that’s left over once we’ve left the room and how you can make it valuable and relevant immediately. Here are some tips for getting the most out of a consultant’s deliverables:

Have them fill out your deliverables, not theirs

The traditional view of a consulting firm’s work is a three ring binder, thick with unrecognizable charts and supersaturated with marginalia and footnotes. As its plastic covers and metal clasps collect thin coats of dust, the client moves on to another crisis and the consultants wonder why they worked so hard on a paperweight.

Ok, that’s a bit dystopian, but you get the point: our stuff isn’t always used. One way to get around this is to make sure the work a consultant does goes directly into documents you will use for critical business functions. If we’re doing marketing work, let us help you create value props that go straight to your sales team or agency. If we’re doing customer research, add our insights to your investor pitch deck. If we model your product’s success, put it in your financials.

As the client, you own the essence of our work – the insights, data and ideas. Without changing the fundamental meaning of what we’ve delivered, make sure we give you something you can take tomorrow and argue for more support, more funding, more customers. And if you don’t know what those documents look like, back up and have us help you with that.

Chop them up and recompile them as you need

This is a corollary of the “fill out your deliverables, not our deliverables” bit above.

What sort of deliverables are you likely to get from a consultant? Less wordy treatises on the market (that’s what these blogs are for!), more graphical representations of your market, your business model and your go to market strategy. Those pieces are quite useful for a variety of audiences, including investors, potential customers and strategic partners.

A wise presenter and data visualization / design expert named Edward Tuffte told me (and a huge room full of seminar attendees) to read documents like a raider. Take facts, approaches, relevant material and apply it. To hell with the rest.

If you need to put together a sales pitch for a customer, leverage the market research to find valuable competitive positioning. If you need to go into an investor meeting, use that same market research to provide an estimate of the total size of the opportunity, or the trends that authoritative research firms believe will be dominant to show how your solution benefits customers in the new environment.

Don’t feel constrained by the way in which the consultants have ultimately chosen to tell their story.

Learn to fish yourself

As a startup, you’re going to have to learn the mechanics of business, whether you want to or not. An entrepreneur can’t have a business if they don’t incorporate. They won’t have a business for very long if they don’t do their taxes (or work with someone who will make them structure their business on paper). They won’t have a business if they don’t protect their intellectual property, e.g., brand, patents, and trade secrets, through some formal process.

As a business, you won’t be successful in the long run if you aren’t attuned to your market, which is defined by customers, competitors and macroeconomics forces. Market research is an art, but it’s a very teachable art. If you hire outside consultants, insist they walk you through their approaches and how they piece together their recommendations. Then, extend the work they’ve done. Try out their competitive analysis approach on one more competitor. See where that competitor ends up on the landscape you’ve been provided with. (And if a firm doing competitive research doesn’t give you a landscape, fire them.)

One startup I worked with took our entire methodology from a small project a year ago and came back to me with the same charts and curves filled out for their next product. As a consultant, I wasn’t floored they’d done the work we could bill them for, I was ecstatic: we could now do the “next level” with this team because they understood where we were coming from and had given their limited resources a jump start.

Conclusion: Good things come in small packages

You don’t need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a consulting firm to get value from their work. While consulting firms may not be available for true boot-strappers (some firms work for equity, but you don’t really want to give away 10% of your business for a market study, do you?), structuring a tight, focused market or competitive research project can jumpstart your own business’s capabilities, direct you towards the right next investments and make you immediately credible with potential customers and investors.

And if you’re going to go to the trouble of taking on the world’s largest corporations and showing them how poorly they do it and how much better the world can be, it seems worthwhile to make sure your customers can share your vision and support you.

Good luck and get back to work! You don’t have time to read articles like this. Sheesh.

This article was originally published on lenati.com

It’s the end of the quarter, and you’re behind. The last thing you want to do is go for a quick fix, but you know you’ve got to hit your number.

This isn’t uncommon. According to research from Clearslide and CSO Insights, 58% of deals forecasted slip from the period that they are reported to be ready to close in.

That’s a big reason why, according to the Salesforce 2015 State of Sales Report, 75% of sales leaders currently use or plan to use sales activity management software. And sales teams are ready for it more than ever since the technologies that measure key sales activities have become standard in modern sales teams (think CRM, email tracking, dialer systems and screen-sharing, to name a few).

Here’s how sales activity management is changing the way we close our quarters in a very important way, as well as a few steps to get your team started with creating an activity based sales culture.

The Old-school Way to Close the Quarter

Step 1: List out all the deals. Go pull a list of all the deals in sight for the quarter.

Step 2: Conduct daily pipeline reviews. Run a daily pipeline and close plan review with the full sales team. This typically happens early in the morning and later in the evening – outside of selling time.

Step 3: Develop a promotional program. Create sales promotions such as giving reps extra discounting leverage, or free services to throw in with a signature by end of month.

Step 4: Wish you did it differently. At the end of the quarter, you’ll start pulling reports out of your CRM to figure out what happened. You’ll likely see data points that tell you things like prospecting or pipeline creation slowed a couple of months ago. You’ll wish you knew that earlier when you could have done something about it!

The Modern Way to Close the Quarter Strong

In short, the modern way to push for a strong close at the end of the quarter is to not do it at all.

Imagine if the gas gauge in your car only alerted you when you were about to hit empty. You’d start a mad rush to find a gas station, and odds are you’d run out of gas before you got there! Sound familiar?

When you don’t take steps on a daily and weekly basis to ensure you’re on pace for hitting your quarterly number, you leave yourself in a vulnerable place. You stop driving value in the sales process. You skip steps, and, as a result, don’t effectively communicate the value of your product to prospects day-in and day-out. You discount because you’re backed into a corner, which is money left on the table.

That’s why your sales organization should be engaged in Activity Based Selling, where winning a sale is the outcome of a cascading chain of sales activities that can be managed, motivated and course corrected in real time.

Modern sales leaders everywhere are embracing sales activity management, and you can, too, by starting with these very important steps.

3 Ways to Implement Sales Activity Management

1. Determine your key performance indicators.

Interview top-performing salespeople to ask what behaviors and activities they focus on daily that they believe lead to sales. Top performers don’t always know exactly what they are doing, or why it’s unique, so you’ll need to probe deeply here. Ask questions like: What do you think you do that is unique in comparison to your peers who aren’t performing as well as you? What do you think you should do more often, but you just never seem to have the time? Also spend time with a couple middle performers and sales managers to ask similar questions.

After you’ve narrowed down your list of key activities and goals, confirm they are aligned to be tracked properly within your CRM system and that the team knows how to log it all properly.

2. Implement intrinsic transparency.

Once you have your activity goals defined for your different selling roles, build out personalized scorecards for each salesperson and sales manager so everyone can stay aligned and focused. Since you’ve developed these via team interviews, it will help your team be more aligned because they were part of helping create the metrics and goals. You’ll want to roll these out via training sessions with smaller groups and then the entire sales organization. The scorecards can be managed either through Salesforce reports, or by using an activity management system that integrates with your CRM system.

3. Measure and motivate.

With your scorecards in place, you’re now ready to start training your sales managers on how to be truly modern, metrics-oriented coaches instead of just walking around asking people what’s going to close this month. That still has it’s place, but is only a small portion of the real value a true front-line sales manager can bring to the table. Now they can manage their team against a common set of operating metrics, they’ll know who people can learn from, when their team is at capacity and what exactly folks need help with. And they can know this all in real time.

Don’t get me wrong, the “end of quarter push” still has it’s place and is oftentimes a necessary reality. Within a sales organization that has a strong culture, it can be a rush of excitement to pull the team together. But modern sales leaders change the end-of-quarter push from a panic to hit the number, into an opportunity to rally the team to see how much they can beat their number. And the best way to get there is by managing their sales team daily around the activities and behaviors that truly matter and lead to closing more business.

Get more from every lead that enters your pipeline. Find out how when you download our free e-book.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) projects that over 1.8 million students will graduate with a bachelor’s degree in 2015. Despite this, and despite the fact that youth unemployment rates were at 11.9% as of February 2015 (more than twice the average national unemployment rate), businesses are still having trouble filling positions. Why is this? With so many potential candidates and available job openings, why are we still seeing such a discrepancy? The answer may be that many of today’s graduates are lacking interpersonal communication skills.

In a survey conducted by Workforce Solutions Group, it was revealed that more than 60% of employers say that applicants are not demonstrating sufficient communication and interpersonal skills to be considered for jobs. Apparently, while universities are able to nurture the necessary critical thinking and problem solving skills of the next generation of employees, they neglect teaching soft skills that employees use to interact with bosses, clients, and each other.

But just how important are soft skills? That’s a difficult question to answer, mostly because it’s next to impossible to find an aspect of business that does not depend upon interpersonal communication in some way. Even a solitary app designer who works from home and never sees another human face will still have to reach out to others in some way for his or her product to be made available to the public. Every interaction, business or otherwise, depends on a person’s ability to communicate ideas and concepts to another person. Employers recognize this fact, with 77% of employers saying that soft skills are just as important as hard skills. However, it actually goes even further than that. Interpersonal communication skills aren’t just as important as other skills, they’re actually the most important skills prospective employees can learn. They stand to become even more vital in the years and decades to come: A study performed by Pew Research Center asked a national sample of adults to select from among ten options the single skill which is most important for children to learn in order to succeed in the world, and 90% of respondents selected ‘communication’ as their answer.

To put it simply, interpersonal communication skills are more important than intelligence in the business world. Here’s why:

1. Customer service is more important than ever

Customer service has always played a part in business, but now more than ever before, organizations are realizing that the satisfaction of their customers is tied directly to the success or failure of the company. Where once customers’ purchase choices were limited to what businesses were located within easy travel distance of their homes, the modern market provides nearly limitless potential choices from around the world—all connected and accessible at any time. For businesses to really stand out from competition, they need to offer more than just convenience and low prices. Employees with the necessary communication skills to easily interact with customers in a friendly and non-threatening way provide potential clients with something they may not be able to get elsewhere, increasing loyalty and customer retention. Given that, on average, loyal customers are worth up to 10 times the cost of their first purchase, this results in significant increases in revenue for an organization. Customer experience today isn’t limited only to the individual, but a shared experience via various social media channels (positive or negative). 67% of customers have used a company’s social media site for servicing, which means a significant amount of customers are turning to social media to address service-related issues. Those with the interpersonal skills to help these customers are actually helping to create brand ambassadors, because customers who feel engaged by businesses through social media spend on average 20–40% more with that business, and are three times more likely to recommend that business to others.

2. Individuals are more willing to work with people they like

In theory, the organization with the best products or the lowest prices should always be the one to succeed. In practice, however, this just isn’t always the case. When faced with decisions, most people will unconsciously lean in the direction of the choice that they feel better about, regardless of what facts and logic may dictate. This is especially true in today’s market, where many options offer similar solutions, making a number-driven decision especially difficult. While most businesses recognize that emotion and feeling play a part in the decision-making process, few realize just how large of a part that is; 98% of top salespeople identify relationships as the most important factor in generating new business. The ability to effectively understand, communicate and influence are underrated skills in the workplace. Even for those who do not work directly with clients, interpersonal communication skills are still vitally important. These skills help facilitate productive co-worker relationships, and can have a large impact on the overall success or failure of a business. For example, the stress caused by having to work underneath a manager who lacks interpersonal skills is believed to cost American companies an estimated $360 billion every year.

3. Hard skills are increasingly being performed by machines

There is little doubt as to the value of soft skills in business, but it may still seem like a stretch to say that interpersonal communications skills are more important than intelligence. Consider automation, however: As technology continues to progress, it’s becoming painfully obvious that more jobs than just those centered around production lines are in jeopardy of being made obsolete. When at one time automated systems could only perform simple tasks, now they’re able to handle a magnitude of responsibilities, including accounting, marketing, sales, and more. But one area where automation is unlikely to overtake humanity is in being personable. Those who’ve mastered people skills will always have an edge over automation. In fact, certain forecasters predict that the job market of the near future will consist of only two types of people: those who know how to design and operate automated systems, and those with creative and social skills whose job it will be to deal directly with customers. In essence, soft skills may soon be some of the only marketable skills that new hires can bring to the table.

As the costs associated with college tuition continue to climb, many students are graduating in their chosen field, only to find that the hard skills they’ve spent years studying don’t allow them the standard of living they’ve been anticipating. Instead, those who are attempting to enter the workforce should focus on developing their communications skills, and should be looking for ways to demonstrate those skills to potential employers. After all, most employers recognize a certain amount of on-the-job training is necessary when bringing a new hire into the company. What cannot be so easily taught are things such as etiquette, adaptability, teamwork, internal communication, and conflict resolution. And, when it comes to business, these are often the most important skills of all.

As you hire the employees who will potentially become the backbone of your business in the years and decades to come, ask yourself where your focus lies. Are you considering candidates based solely upon the hard skills they include in their résumés, or are you looking for something more? If soft skills are not a prerequisite for your new hires, you may find yourself operating a business filled with an exceptionally skilled—yet completely ineffective—workforce.

Want more tips for creating and maintaining a dynamic office culture? Download the free Salesforce e-book.

“Always be closing” is one of the iconic lines uttered by Alec Baldwin in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” one of the most iconic sales films of all times. Sales professionals have seen a massive shift in their industry – gone are the door-do-door salesmen and here are the people who need to remain on the cutting edge of what customers need in order to provide the best product or service possible.

With the industry shifts comes a change in strategy and those who don’t (or won’t) adapt will be left behind – like Jack Lemmon’s character in “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Failure to adapt will hands down make you the dinosaur in the room.

What other things can Hollywood teach salespeople about their industry? Plenty. Here are a few lessons movies can teach us about selling:

Steamrolling your obstacles – The Pursuit of Happyness

In this widely popular film, Will Smith plays unemployed Chris Gardner, who finds himself and his 5-year old son homeless after a series of bad breaks. He lands an unpaid internship at a brokerage firm and works tirelessly to change his circumstances. Throughout the movie, the character faces a number of constant setbacks, but he decides to steamroll his obstacles as they come, rather than wallow in how unfair life can be.

Sales professionals are adept at rolling with the punches and dealing with unpredictable moments – whether with customers or industry changes. But that doesn’t mean they can (or will) steamroll every obstacle they face. If at first you don’t succeed, try again seems to be one of the most repeated mantras. In my book, Think Big, Act Bigger, I talk about steamrolling obstacles that will come at you – and they will. We’ve all overcome obstacles to get to where we are but what takes us to the next level is putting those obstacles front and center, or addressing the elephant in the room. Ignorance is not bliss. Face the obstacles, overcome them and persevere – just like Chris Gardner did.

Adapt, Change or Die – Death of a Salesman

We’re all familiar with Willy Loman – a down on his luck salesman who grows bitter and resentful about the world around him. Loman’s inability to change proves to be his undoing. He never listened and never changed.

In any part of life, you must adapt, change or die. If you refuse to change, you will lose your business, your customers and even a few friends. The sales industry has changed; the customer service industry has changed. With social media opening new avenues to reach customers and get new leads, staying in the past isn’t an option. You have to adapt in order to respond to change otherwise, you’re won’t have a business to call your own. Basically, don’t be like Willy!

“It ain’t about how hard you hit…” – Rocky

If anyone knows how to get up after being knocked down it’s Rocky Balboa. In the 2008 film, Rocky tries to impart a lesson to his son – life will knock you down and throw punches. It’s not about how hard life hits you, but how you take the hits, get up and move forward.

It’s the same in sales – and in business. How many times have you tried to sell something to a customer and have been shut down right on the spot? It hurts, but as a sales professional, you have to work around that. You’ll even face hostile customers from time to time and often feel like the stakes keep getting higher and higher. If you’re to be a successful sales person, you must learn how to bob and weave the constant challenges being hurled at you and move forward. You must constantly be learning and adjusting your approach as the end goal will remain the same: close more deals, improve customer satisfaction and meet the allotted quotas.

“Helen, we’re both in sales. Let me tell you why I SUCK as a salesman.” – Tommy Boy

In this classic scene from the 1995 film, Chris Farley’s character “Tommy” convinces their waitress to serve them chicken wings. Seems innocuous enough, but their policy is ‘no wings after hours.’ By talking to the waitress in a language she understands, Tommy manages to have her bring out some chicken wings and earns praise from David Spade’s “Richard” for his ability to read people, get inside their heads and tell them what they want (and/or need) to hear.

In today’s sales environment in order to succeed you must dig a little deeper into your customers’ wants and needs. You need to get inside their heads and resort to using methods like big data and predictive analytics to better help target and upsell customers at the moment of purchase. Analytics can also help sales pros look at all the different variables that can help generate the desired engagement from customers – newsletters, clicks on a promotion or any other type of engagement. Use every possible tool at your disposal to find out what your customers wants and get that deal done!

“Coffee is for closers” – Glengarry Glen Ross

The ‘granddaddy’ of all sales films delivers one of the most classic, yet unconventional and at times inappropriate, sales speeches of all time by Alec Baldwin. The film deals with the constant pressure of “always be closing” and the salesmens’ complaints about potential customers and leads they’ve been getting from the sales company.

While the film hints at salespeople having to lose their souls and doing anything to ‘always be closing,’ real life isn’t as dire. While the goal is to close deals, the tactics are a bit more…humane. The movie does show a concept that any sales professional can learn from – AIDA, which stands for Attention, Interest, Decision and Action. If you’re to be successful, you must capture your prospects’ attention, keep their interest, convince them they desire what you’re offering and lead your prospect to take action – whether it’s buying, sharing, following or trying something.

There are plenty of other movies that would get a notable mention – Any Given Sunday, Boiler Room, Jerry Maguire, Wall Street and Trading Places, to name a few. Whatever your motivation is, the goal remains the same: close the deal. How you close the deal is entirely up to you, but if you want to achieve a modicum of success in the ever-changing sales industry, you must stay on top of the latest trends and tools in order to reach your customers. The time invested in doing the legwork will pay off in the end when you’ve closed on a bunch of sales leads and surpass your quota.

What is your favorite sales film?

Learn five key ways you can get the most value out of Sales Cloud — making your sales organization much more effective. Download the free e-book.

The sales proposals that you present to prospects have the power to make or break a deal. The problem is that most sales proposals suck harder than a Hoover that’s fresh off the showroom floor.

Here’s why your sales proposals suck and how to fix them:

1. Your Proposal Is So Ugly, Its Own Shadow Ran Away From It

Why is it that marketers and salespeople put so much effort into the entire process of attracting and pitching a prospect, only to drop the ball five yards shy of the end zone?

Your proposal needs a cover page and professional formatting. The ‘look and feel’ of your sales proposal may sound like window dressing, but your sales proposal is the last impression that you’ll make on a prospect before they make a purchasing decision. Your cover page will set the tone for the proposal and the deal itself. Invest time into a sharp, on-brand cover page with the prospect’s name and company as well as the name of the rep who is presenting the proposal. Also, make sure that the fonts and style are uniform throughout the proposal. Nothing says “chintzy” like mismatched type styles.

2. Your Proposal Is So Generic, Its Own Mother Wouldn’t Recognize It

There’s an art to the preparation of a sales proposal. To master this art form requires the preparer to personalize and customize the sales proposal template.

First, you’ll want to personalize the proposal to reflect the discussions you’ve had with the prospect. This is your chance to demonstrate that you actively listened to the prospect during discovery calls by proposing products or solutions that align directly with the prospect’s needs. The key to doing so is in how you describe your proposed offerings. Explain the value of the proposed offerings as to how it relates to the prospect’s unique needs and you’ll help the prospect better connect with the proposed offerings.

Secondly, you’ll want to customize the proposal so that it’s as specific to the company you’re presenting it to as possible. For example, use terminology that’s germane to the prospect’s business.

3. Your Proposal Is So Analog, It Might As Well Be A Stone Tablet

The proposal itself is only one facet of the sales proposal stage. The other angle you must consider is how to manage the process of delivery and closing. If you’re using a standard-issue analog sales proposal of yesteryear, you won’t have visibility into whether the prospect has received, opened, revisited or accepted your proposal until you actually (hopefully) receive a signed agreement. By using a document automation solution with analytics, you can monitor the prospect’s engagement with your delivered proposal so that you’ll have insight into the optimal time to follow up and keep the process moving.

Additionally, your ‘stone tablet’ PDF is a pain in the neck for the prospect to wrangle with. He has to download your attachment, squint at it on his mobile phone, forward it to his boss who has to do the same thing, wait for his boss to approve it, then he needs to get to his computer to sign the darn thing, reattach it to an email and send it back to you. That’s a ton of friction to add on to the tail end of your sales process, especially when you’re flying blind and don’t know where in that process your prospect may have stalled out.

4. Your Proposal Is So Bloated, Its Idea Of Dieting Is Deleting Cookies From The Browser Cache

The proposal is your final fourth quarter field goal attempt to win the game and close the deal.

To this end, it’s a good idea to preface a sales proposal with supplemental content that reiterates the highlights of your brand and your solution/products. Supplemental content can help reinforce your company’s positioning in the case that your proposal has to go head to head with other proposals. Including content like a brief corporate overview, client testimonial quotes and logos is appropriate and in doing so, you can set a positive tone for the presentation of your proposal.

However, it’s best to err on the side of being conservative with extra content. Presenting a fifteen-page whopper of a proposal is tone deaf. In doing so, you’re telling the prospect that you don’t respect their time — a very dangerous message to send. Don’t overcompensate for a lack of confidence in the effectiveness of your sales pitch by adding bloat to your proposal.

In summary, if your proposal is ugly, generic, dated or too lengthy then there’s no way around it… your proposal just sucks.

Content Marketing ROI Starts With A Content Marketing Strategy

Nearly 90% of B2B marketers say that content marketing is now one of their highest priorities. But only 1 out of 3 companies has a documented content marketing strategy. Would you fly by the seat of your pants for any other marketing channel?

Of course not.

Over the long run, content marketing has been shown to deliver the highest quality leads at the lowest cost of any digital channel. Without a documented plan, though, it’s impossible to effectively measure the ROI of your efforts. That’s why today’s B2B marketers need a strong content marketing strategy in place. Not only to align their teams and build a business case for investment, but also to connect the dots to lead generation and revenue.

1. BUYER PERSONAS

With B2B content marketing, you need to understand your buyers at a different level than you normally would for other transactional marketing channels, like your website or your PPC advertising. To get real ROI from content marketing, you need to be an invaluable resource for your buyers, which means you need to answer every question before they’ve thought of it.

The best way to map out your buyers, who they are, where they’re coming from, and what they care about, you’ll need to create Buyer Personas.

Buyer Personas are depictions of your best customer segments, with sample data of their demographics, psychographics, and digital habits. How old is your typical buyer? What motivates them? How do they make purchasing decisions? Where do they go to conduct research? Which peers do they lean on for advice?

Once you’ve created 3-6 Buyer Personas per product/service or industry that you serve, you can map your Buyer Journey.

2. BUYER JOURNEY

The Buyer Journey is a new concept, and it’s one of the most misunderstood in marketing today. The “funnel” doesn’t apply as a B2B marketing concept in today’s digital world. The path to purchase is no longer a straight line, entire teams now make buying decisions, and buyers can digitally “jump” back and forth between the 6 key buying stages.

What questions are your buyers asking at each stage? Which online social communities do they go to for answers? What content formats do they prefer at each stage? These questions help to map out your online Buyer Journey.

The first stage of the Buyer Journey is Awareness – that is, the buyer becomes aware that they have a challenge to solve, not that they become aware of your solution (yet). Once they conduct some preliminary research, they’ll begin to consider various solutions to their challenge. This is the high-learning phase of the Buyer Journey.

Once the buyer passes through the Consideration stage and decides that there are a few solutions out there that fit her needs, the third stage is Comparison. Which solutions have which features, what are the pricing models, and how is the post-purchase support?

Once the buying team has decided on the preferred solution(s), the Evaluation stage follows. This is where she has the opportunity to gauge how well this solution actually works, either through case studies, demos, trials, or a pilot.

The Comparison and Evaluation stages are the high-emotion phase of the Buyer Journey, so the pressure is on to make a genuine connection. If the evaluation goes well, it’s on to the Decision stage, where the buying team’s final approval is earned. If it doesn’t, we’re back to the Comparison stage.

For most firms, once a buyer hits the Evaluation Stage, they have landed at the top of a typical Sales Funnel, and it’s on the Sales Development Rep or Account Exec to close the business. Once the prospect becomes a customer, the buyer transitions into the 6th stage of the Buyer Journey, Loyalty, and the ball is back in Marketing’s court to generate advocacy.

With your Buyer Journey mapped out, it’s time to define your Goals & Mission.

3. GOALS & MISSION

What do you hope that content marketing will help your team achieve?

High-level goals for content marketing could be demand generation, building brand awareness, improving brand perception, lead generation, sales enablement, or customer retention. Document your goals, and assign measurable objectives.

Once you have your content marketing Goals, it’s time to define your content marketing Mission. Why are you the best resource for your buyers? What is it about your thought leadership and commercial insights that will make your firm unique?

The easiest way to define your Mission is to ask yourself why your solutions are important for your buyers, and then look inward to find your differentiator.

If my firm provides BPO solutions, and my audience the Chief Operating Officer, what is it about my company’s perspective that puts our firm on a different playing field than the competition? It might be our history, our list of clients, our subject matter experts, our culture, or something else entirely.

Find the thing that makes your story unique, apply that perspective to helping your target audience answer their questions at each stage of the Buyer Journey, and you have your Mission.

Now you’re ready to document your Brand Voice.

4. BRAND VOICE

Just as repetition is key to advertising success, consistency in brand voice is crucial for content marketing success. Your team is going to be producing a lot of marketing content, and you may also rely on content marketing agencies. Unless your Brand Voice is documented, your content marketing assets will be inconsistent, watering down your message and reducing the impact of your campaigns.

When it comes to Brand Voice, it’s not just about having a brand archetype or deciding whether your brand is Personable & Friendly vs Corporate & Professional.

You also need to define a brand lexicon; what are the specific words that will accelerate each stage of the Buyer Journey?

You need a brand emotions; what emotions are you trying to trigger at each stage?

You need brand imagery; does your content feature illustrations, icons, or a specific photography aesthetic?

Having your Brand Voice documented ensures that anyone on your team can jump in and create content, and that every asset will be consistent, maximizing impact.

NEXT STEPS

Take the time, energy, and resources to craft a strong content marketing strategy. You wouldn’t go into battle without a gameplan, and you shouldn’t launch a new marketing channel without a strategy.

And if these four steps seem daunting, fear not! Our team is more experienced than anyone in the world at helping B2B firms create the right content marketing strategy.

Which aspects of your content marketing strategy are you struggling with?

The Pipeline Guest Post – Gerald Vanderpuye

Just Touching Base!

In baseball, a player who is touching base is not in danger of being put out. In sales, we must continue to touch-base or follow-up as it’s also known to stay in the game of sales.  When your rep loses a real opportunity, it’s because of a poor follow up. You sales rep couldn’t touch base either in the right manner or failed to follow-up enough.  

Time kills deals!

Professional sales people know time kills deals and deals get stuck in the infamous black hole where nothing happens for days weeks and months. This is the moment when it is more important than ever to touch base.

The Follow-up challenge!

Although sales managers would argue some sales reps are simply lazy and refuse to follow up, the problem for the majority of salespeoplesales people is more about effectively following up rather than the will to follow up.

An effective follow-up strategy gets a sales deal out of the black hole and back on into the light (the sales process).  We use the term black hole because sales have no idea what’s going on with the buyer and the deal, all they know is the deal is slowly getting out of their control and getting harder and harder to touch base.

This lack of information about the buyer leaves salespeople following up blindly which ends with disengaged Buyers who get spammed and annoyed.  We delved deep into thousands of deals and got an insight into what was happening on the Buyer side.

Know when to Follow up!

Opportunity win rate  for our customer is between 8%-40% for all new sales. At least 60% of buyers were never going to buy and ultimately waste the reps time.  We then measured how much time buyers spent on reading the sales and marketing content shared and discovered hundreds of Buyers often show initial engagement, then drop off, however, come back at a later stage. Without these insights, sales reps were often touching base at times totally out of sync with the when the buyers are most interested.  Imagine a Buyer that is disengaged during the month of February yet receives seven follow-up emails from the sales rep.  The sale is lost in the CRM. However, there is no follow up when the buyer come’s back to the shared marketing content months down the line when the interest is real and sale is back on.

Give your Buyer a reason to act now!

There is another 25% of Buyers that are genuinely interested in the problem you are solving! They simply do not have a compelling reason to act now.  In this scenario, the touching base is mostly about being consistent with the relevant content that either generates a compelling reason for the buyer to act.  

Helping your buyer sell Internally

Finally,  prospects who are struggling to sell your product internally. There are other stakeholders they need to bring into the picture, and they need the right messaging and content to capture these stakeholders interest.  Can you help your champion get their interest with your content and follow ups?   

Professional sales enablement organisations understand that an excellent follow-up strategy is a must for success as 80% of closed deals require five follow-ups before close. Although this Data for why sales reps need to follow up is evident still 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up.   BuyerDeck provides sales reps real data about where the buyer is in the buying cycle (Not the sales process ) and suggests the perfect content/message to follow up effectively.

If you are interested in helping your sales teams better follow up with technology that is fully integrated into your CRM here is an opportunity.  We are now giving away 5000 free licences to broaden our feedback pool. Visit our giveaway site to see if you qualify.*

About Gerald Vanderpuye

As a proud co-founder at BuyerDeck, I have three passions: I love sales, technology and creating happy customers. I have been in sales, marketing and delivering remarkable customer experiences the last 10 years. My last position was at Rackspace where I was responsible for  developing sales strategy and driving business growth through existing customers and new Logo acquisitions in key markets. I was leading and managing a diverse team to deliver on new growth targets for both Enterprise and SMB’s. I am now leading the team at BuyerDeck to bootstrap the distribution of our B2B SAAS product beyond the initial traction of 12K buyers and sellers.

* I do not receive payment of any sort from BuyerDeck, just looking to help them give away 5000 licences. Tibor Shanto

The post Why sales reps are always “Just touching-base”! appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

In today’s data-driven marketing world, wouldn’t it seem crazy to spend the most money on the most poorly measured marketing channel? Strange as it is, it’s still happening. Events continue to dominate marketing budgets, while event success and ROI are measured poorly or not at all. The problem isn’t with events, but the metrics we use to determine event success.

Here are three of the biggest problems with event metrics and how to fix them:

1. Lack of data

While events are the biggest spend in B2B marketing budgets, they are notorious for having the worst data. A lack of event data means a lack of event metrics. Without proper measurement, events can end up being a big waste of time and money.

The easy and over-simplified answer to the lack of data is that events are “offline.” That answer often gives events a pass for messy and incomplete data in many different areas. The lack of data leaves anecdotal evidence and gut feelings as the primary way to determine your event’s success or failure.

So what’s the solution? Stop giving events a pass for being offline and start being diligent about measuring everything from engagement to follow-up to how events actually impact sales. Develop a process for tracking everything you can. No, you don’t need to go as far as tracking attendee movements with RFID, but there’s a lot of other things you can track with the right processes and technology.

There are many event-related questions you (and your ops team) should be able to answer with data: How many attendees were from target accounts? How did your event affect opportunities associated with accounts that attended? How many attendees spoke with someone from your sales team? Who spoke with who? What did they discuss?

Arming your on-site team with the right processes and technology to track offline engagements goes a long way to help you get the data you need.

2. Setting the wrong event goals

What is the ultimate goal of your event strategy? For 76% of marketers, that primary goal is still lead generation (Regalix). Sadly for those marketers, research shows that while lead gen may still top the list of reasons for investing in events, companies would be more successful if they focused on accelerating sales pipeline.

A recent Forrester study shows that marketers too often rely on events to find buyers but not to educate or persuade them and thus “B2B marketers clearly aren’t treating event investments strategically; much of their money and effort here could be better spent”.

Marketers need to shift how they measure events to focus on pipeline acceleration that leads to revenue. Counting new “leads” is not enough to truly see how your events are impacting the business.

Looking at the number of new leads alone is an ineffective way to measure event success. Moving away from a lead generation focus to a pipeline focus and then measuring your event’s impact on revenue will help you optimize your strategy for maximum ROI.

Lead gen can still be part of your marketing strategy, but using events to generate leads is far less effective than other tactics. Events are the most impactful when they focus on engaging top accounts to move them along in the sales process.

3. Calculating ROI the wrong way

Event ROI has long been one of those elusive, difficult to calculate marketing metrics. Almost 20% of marketers today don’t know their event ROI according to a Demand Metric study. Of those that do reportedly know their event ROI, they are often looking at the wrong metrics. Looking back to setting the wrong goals, most companies still focus on lead generation and brand awareness as their primary event metrics.

One major reason that event ROI is still measured by leads and awareness is because there it seems too difficult to get to a comprehensive understanding of event ROI in terms of revenue. That goes back to the problem with lack of data.

To compensate for not having the right data and systems necessary to calculate event ROI, many have tried to create ROI formulas that end up being overly complicated. Marketers continue to send money on events because they know that events positively influence pipeline, but that influence isn’t being properly measured.

To adopt a revenue event marketing strategy and maximize return, marketers need to start measuring things like event potential and event influence in addition to event ROI. To learn how to change your upgrade your event metrics, download our new guide: Event ROI Handbook.

The world of online marketing gets more crowded every day. With the vast majority of marketing taking place online for every type of business, the average person is being marketed to via email, ads, direct messages, branded content so much that it all starts to become noise. For B2B marketers, the deluge of online marketing messages bombarding the average person on a daily basis reduces the impact of even our best marketing campaigns. One of the biggest advantages of hosting a live event is the ability to cut through this online noise to reach your target accounts.

Marketers are starting to realize the importance of in-person events as much more than just a way to generate leads and boost brand awareness. Sanjay Dholakia, CMO at Marketo, was recently asked what he thinks is driving this rise in the relevance of marketing events today. “There’s so much information online today that you can’t blast your way through it anymore,” he said. “In this crazy digital, mobile, social world, we now have infinite channels, so there’s much more noise. It’s hard to get the signal through.” It’s clear that events are an effective way to “get the signal through” and reach your target audience.

Here are 4 ways that live events can help B2B marketers cut through the online marketing noise:

1. Events get your message across without distraction.

We’re all suffering from content overload. That makes it difficult to get your message heard by your prospects. Marketo’s CMO believes, “The formula is great content plus great energy plus emotional impact to connect with your audience…the only way to get at them is to have targeted, relevant content.”

Your online content like whitepapers, blogs, webinars, and infographics may be excellent, but the endless amount of digital distractions can prevent your audience from fully absorbing or ever hearing your message. When was the last time you read all the way through a company’s whitepaper without checking your email, Twitter, Slack, etc?

Events are different. Your attendees made the effort to register and show up, so they are already far more engaged than the average online lead. That means you have a huge opportunity to deliver content that aligns with your message to an audience that is actually paying attention. Sure, your attendees may still be checking Twitter during your event, but that’s okay. That means they are more likely to be tweeting about your event and the information you are presenting!

2. Events build relationships and community.

In-person events provide more than the opportunity for you to present your content to an engaged audience. They allow you to bring like-minded people together to learn and connect in a way that isn’t possible online.

For companies with a thriving online community, events provide the chance to bring those community members face-to-face to strengthen those relationships. If your company doesn’t have a big online community, events like user groups, customer events, and roadshows are a great way to start building one.

In his conversation on events, Marketo’s CMO Sanjay Dholakia said, “It’s no longer about lower cost, the best product, or the biggest brand. The basis now is: Who’s got the relationships? That’s where the physical engagement is really important and powerful.”

Chris Cavanaugh, CMO of Freeman (an event production company) says that “Live experiences are gaining a bigger share of the pie because they draw on the basic needs of us as humans to connect and socialize.”

3. Events accelerate the sales process.

A well-executed event combines website visits, email, content, sales meeting into a shorter timeframe. All of these event touchpoints help move top of funnel leads down the funnel more quickly than your standard path of online engagement.

Ask any salesperson and they will agree, meeting face-to-face helps close deals. For existing sales opportunities, an event can be the catalyst to close the deal. Events are ideal for moving opportunities forward that stuck in any stage for your sales cycle. Events also give your prospects the chance to connect with your customers for candid references.

To succeed, marketing requires your audience to take action and engage. That action can’t be forced and the constant stream of digital content at our fingertips gives us the ability to think, “I’ll get to that later.” The truth is that we rarely get back to it. Even if your prospects really want to get back to that relevant and insightful eBook you emailed them, most of them won’t.

Events can’t be saved for later. By their nature, they require action within a certain time frame without resorting to age-old marketing tactics like “limited time offer!”. Register now before the event fills up. Register now because the event is next week. Events require action for a legitimate reason. If you don’t take action, you will miss the event.

4. Events amplify the rest of your marketing.

Events have the power to break through the noise of the online world. Beyond that, they make your own online marketing more powerful. Using events as a strategic point in the buying cycle makes your online messaging stick. When your event’s content integrates with a larger digital marketing campaign it makes that content more memorable.

Freeman’s CMO, Chris Cavanaugh believes that marketers shouldn’t think of events in isolation. Instead, events should be viewed as “flash points” that help companies amplify the messaging that is engaging the same audience on other channels. The biggest challenge for marketers planning events is integrating the online and offline messaging to create a holistic marketing mix where all of the brand components help cross-sell and upsell each other.

The goal should be to take a holistic approach to the entire marketing mix where all of the tactics and channels help each other. This goes beyond just marketing. There are multiple other internal teams that should be involved with your event strategy. While events are the perfect capstone to an integrated marketing campaign, what happens before and after that event is just as critical to your success.

“So how are you talking to them the rest of the year?” Cavanaugh says. “How are you talking with them online, and then how can we use that dialogue with your audience at events? So it’s thinking about it programmatically, more holistically. Think about events as one more marketing tool.”

Social Selling is an engagement game. To be effective, you need to think like Nir Eyal, author of “Hooked.” Apps like Tinder, Snapchat and Instagram all have ‘The Hook Experience’ in common. The Hook Experience refers to the model of manufacturing desire with four repeating steps: Investment > Trigger > Action > Reward.

Now imagine, if you can apply this method to social-selling. From my own personal experience as a social seller, here are 3 effective habits to engage prospects in a chaos of social noise.

Habit #1: Investing in self-gratification

You’re probably already building your personal brand through online self-gratification. We already look our best on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Tinder, et. al. Make sure that you’re consistent across your social media outlets. If your social profiles have inconsistencies, you’ll get a range of audiences and they’ll get confused about who you are.

Personally, I audit and update my LinkedIn and Twitter profile twice a month with my value proposition. In order to stay relevant — and valuable — I write about a topic that hooks the type of prospect I want to engage with. This year, I’m focused on sales enablement and social selling (thus, writing this blog).

Does your profile clearly state who you are looking to connect with and why they should engage?

Habit #2: Looking for triggers with intentional consumption

Social listening is intentional consumption. Millennials have short attention spans. To be effective, we must be prospect-obsessed. I’m not advocating for stalker-level obsession but you should act as a digital servant. According to Nir Eyal, we respond to associations, memories, and certain emotions which dictate what we do next.

To apply his theory to social-selling, I simply go on Twitter and target a prospect by searching for a specific #hashtag related to my specialty (like #salesenablement).

Then I look for associations. These can be pain-points I can solve or emotions I can evoke. Be creative when you look for triggers.

In the example above, Kevin Thomas Tully, CEO & Founder of ScealCom inadvertently gave me a safe passage to connect because he states he’s “always willing to talk about sales enablement and optimizing the sales process.” A perfect fit!

I carefully listened to online conversations and visited his LinkedIn profile to familiarize myself with his recent activity. I made sure to learn about his presence in the social-selling community, and to read the articles he’s most passionate about (what he shared with his own followers). I carefully vetted the services he provides via his company’s website and obsessed on how to offer better current sales enablement packages.

To win Kevin’s trust, another tool I use to tune in for internal triggers is an extension called Crystal Knows.

Habit #3: Instant Gratification in Action

Social Selling is all about engaging and influencing now, not later. To be a digital servant, I act on timely content and I provide value by re-tweeting to increase exposure. Re-tweeting is the most efficient method. But to hook a prospect, we must provide value by performing a variety of actionable rewards that give the prospect what they want throughout the entire buying process.

The biggest challenge, however, is authenticity because retweeting can only go so far. True magic happens when you take the online engagement offline.

To me, being authentic means being vulnerable. For example, making grammar mistakes in direct messages is a sign of non-automated banter (aka you’re a real human). Mistakes are merely opportunities to solve problems, and they open the door to further conversation. In school, have you ever pretended to know less than you did to get the attention of someone you had a crush on? Well, some things never change.

Now back to my conversation with Kevin Thomas Tully…

As an outbound, social-selling activity setting, this appointment took me 5 minutes to schedule. Compare that to cold-calling 60 leads in 6 hours to set 1 appointment, which is why I believe social selling passes the effectiveness test. I’m also happy to announce that Kevin Thomas Tully is now a full-fledged sales enablement service partner of PandaDoc!

Social Selling is a trendy term that’s thrown around often these days. I’ve seen too many companies and pundits broadcast without genuinely engaging with advocates (their fans and/or followers). Broadcasting is not social-selling, folks.

As a rule of thumb, apply Nir Eyal’s hook and let me know how that changes your game.

Ready to enable your B2B clients to convert Twitter & Linkedin vanity metrics into signed proposal with PandaDoc? Become a PandaDoc Partner or email zen@pandadoc.com to learn more!

In 1944, the CIA's precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), distributed a secret pamphlet that was intended as a guidebook to citizens living in Axis nations who were sympathetic to the Allies.

The "Simple Sabotage Field Manual," declassified in 2008 and available on the CIA's website, provided instructions for how everyday people could help the Allies weaken their Axis-run country by reducing production in factories, offices, and transportation lines.

"Some of the instructions seem outdated; others remain surprisingly relevant," reads the current introduction on the CIA's site. "Together they are a reminder of how easily productivity and order can be undermined."

Business Insider has gone through the manual and collected the main advice on how to run your organization into the ground, from the C-suite to the factory floor. What's most amusing is that despite the dry language and specificity of the context, the productivity-crushing activities recommended are all-too-common behaviors in contemporary organizations everywhere.

See if any of those listed below — quoted but abridged — remind you of your boss, colleagues, or even yourself. And if they do, you should probably make some adjustments or find a new job.

You can read the full manual at the CIA's website »

SEE ALSO: 8 podcasts that will make you smarter about business

How to be the worst possible leader

• Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

• Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.

• When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.

• Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

• Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.

• Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

• Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable"and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

How to be a bad employee

• Work slowly.

• Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can.

• Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.

• Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.

How to be a terrible manager

• In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers.

• Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw.

• To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.

• Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.

• Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.

Albert Einstein may or may not have made the famous statement about the definition of insanity being “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” But wherever that saying originated, there’s plenty of truth in it, and it’s used by countless individuals and organizations as a way of saying, “If we want things to turn out differently, then we have to do things differently,” which certainly applies for marketers.

The concept of product differentiation is not new. Naturally, brands want to make their products and services more attractive to a particular market. Products (including service products) may stand out from competitors based on single or multiple characteristics, and when buyers perceive that difference, marketing magic can happen. Developing uniqueness in the eyes of customers and maintaining that sense of “specialness,” however, requires continually fine-tuning marketing and sales practices.

Continuing to Make Products and Services Stand Out Over Time

There are practically unlimited ways that brands can make themselves stand out in the market. It could be by touting ethical buying and manufacturing techniques, making a complex product easier to understand, or perhaps becoming thought leaders in their industry. However it’s accomplished, it’s not a once-and-done thing. It requires listening to targeted consumers, understanding a coherent “brand” for products or services, continuing to gauge how the brand is perceived, and adjusting as necessary.

Stagnation Is Deadly to Your Marketing Content

Some of your evergreen marketing content will continue to resonate and be relevant for a long time. But you can’t expect to market just like you used to and keep getting great results, even for a highly successful marketing campaign. Not only must you regularly refresh marketing content, your sales team needs powerful tools that help them put the right information in front of the person with whom they’re having a sales conversation. And depending on industry, the “right” information may change at a glacial pace (if you sell, say, zippers), or it may evolve quite rapidly (if, for example, you sell software).

Marketing Strategies That Stay Fresh

Marketing strategies by necessity must change and evolve with the market, and that requires keeping a finger on the pulse of your industry and market. The strategy that produced results a year ago simply may not speak to the market as well today. Five areas on which you can focus to help ensure your marketing strategies remain relevant are:

• Technology (Is it now faster, or more powerful?)
• Price and/or quality (Is it within reach of a larger market?)
• Product (Why is it more relevant today than yesterday?)
• Customer service (What is your brand doing to ensure it’s superior?)
• User experience (How will a new customer feel differently after trying your product?)

All of these are made better by compelling enterprise content that’s instantly available to sales professionals in the moment. Not only must your team have sufficient, fresh, compelling content, they must be able to reach the right piece of content for the prospect without delay. Fortunately, technological solutions exist with these capabilities.

Don’t Follow Trends. Create Them.

Marketing differentiation doesn’t work as well when brands play follow the leader, or feel like they have to jump on every industry trend. In fact, it’s most effective when you’re the brand that sets the trends rather than one of the many that follows them. It’s not easy, but with the right combination of exceptional team members, and solutions that put the power of compelling enterprise content into their hands, your brand’s marketing strategy can flourish and evolve so that your team can reap the rewards.

Being able to personalize enterprise content on the spot is immensely powerful in helping you build customer relationships. As you learn more about each customer and are able to meet his or her needs with the right, compelling content, you accelerate the buying process, build loyalty as a trusted advisor, and do so without wasting your own or your customer’s time. Make sure you have the tools you need to lead your customers to the exact solution that meets their needs, and offer them sufficient relevant content to answer their questions, and your marketing strategy is poised for success.

Image credit: Einstein by Brad Montgomery | Creative Commons

Our English teachers told us to avoid the word “very” because it’s weak and vague. They were right, and many times, we use “very” as a modifier for a word that could easily be replaced with a stronger, more accurate word. This infographic tells you what to use instead.

Read more...

It is poor form to exert more effort extracting a discount from your company than you spend convincing your prospective client to make the investment necessary to produce the results they need. The energy you put into negotiating for a concession from your company should not come close to the vigor with which you negotiate with your prospect.

Your sales manager or you company’s leadership team might want the revenue badly enough to allow you to make a concession, but the fact that they are more easily sold than your prospect is doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do what is right for all parties. You need the courage to “go there” and defend the investment you are asking your dream client to make before you look within your company for money.

Just because it’s easier to negotiate with your own company than it is to negotiate with your prospect doesn’t mean that it’s a wise decision.

When you take money out of your side of the deal, you are really allowing your dream client to take their own money out of the investment they are making in the results you are being hired to produce. A smaller investment means less money is available for all of the things that you need to do to deliver. You are making these investments on your client’s behalf. When you focus your sales efforts on discounting on behalf of your prospective client, you are also making it more difficult for your company to generate results. When you need to spend more money to deliver, when there are problems or challenges that you need to resolve, the money you need isn’t there.

You may occasionally have to discount the original pricing that you quoted your prospect, even though the first time they ask is simply a responsible contact doing their job and inquiring about a lower price. You will also have to negotiate with your dream client from time to time, especially in larger, more complex deals. Those negotiations mean you trade a lower price for something of equal or greater value to you and your company.

If you spent the same effort selling your dream client as you spend selling your management team, you’d have already won their business.

The post Why You Absolutely Must Negotiate With Your Client First appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Negotiation is a hot topic. A Google search for the term unearths a stunning 131 million results. Thousands of books have been written on the topic, with countless more online articles, guides, and blog posts available for your perusal.

That’s because negotiating is scary. The stakes are always high when you’re trying to get something you want, and business negotiation is especially pitched because it involves professional repercussions.

But negotiating doesn’t have to be stressful or hard. The best negotiators stick to a tried-and-true set of best practices that ensure they achieve an ideal outcome more often than they don’t. Incorporate these eight habits into your selling routine and you can close more deals, too.

1) They don’t view negotiation as a battle.

Negotiation is often treated as a zero-sum game. We talk about winning or losing, of beating our opponents. But negotiation isn’t a sports game with a win-lose outcome -- the best negotiators know that there’s a way to achieve what both parties want. The salespeople who excel at negotiation approach each discussion as a way to achieve a mutually beneficial end goal -- for the rep, it’s a closed deal; for the prospect, it’s the change or value the product will bring.

This shift in mindset is hugely important. Approaching each negotiation as a battle gets you in a combative mentality that’ll put you at odds with your prospect, which will trickle down into every interaction you have. Keep things as positive as possible to keep the conversations productive.

2) They can tell the difference between an objection and a request for information.

Not being able to do this can be disastrous. If you’re ignoring true blockers and forging on like they’re no big deal, or your reaction to a request for information is to get defensive, things can go south very quickly. You’ll lose your credibility and risk angering prospects unnecessarily.

The best negotiators understand when prospects object to something because they haven’t fully bought in (a request for information) or because it really could halt the sales process (a blocker), then respond accordingly.

3) They have already anticipated their prospects’ objections.

Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” instructed generals to know their enemies. And while prospects aren’t enemies (see #1!), you are still at a severe disadvantage if you don’t know the ins and outs of their business situations.

Before you enter a negotiation, take a look at your proposed offer and ask yourself: What will my prospect go for? Where will they push back? Where are the areas of potential confusion or concern?

By anticipating these objections, you’re better equipping yourself to address your prospects’ concerns, and you’ll appear more impressive as well by somehow knowing what your prospect cares about before they tell you.

4) They make sure there’s no purchasing surprises.

The worst thing you can do in a negotiation (short of something horrendously rude) is to arrive unprepared. Part of this is preparing for objections, but keeping a negotiation devoid of any process-related surprises is key as well to make sure you’re starting on the same page.

Does your prospect plan to have their legal team present to redline a contract (and what’s your company policy on allowing them to do so)? Do they need you to submit a formal proposal for review?

The best negotiators know the ins and outs of their prospects’ purchasing mechanics so that when they get to the table to negotiate, it’s actually the right time to do so.

5) They already know their prospects’ end goals.

This is just part of good selling, but it bears repeating. The best way to ensure a good outcome for both you and your prospect is … surprise … to know what they want. It’s the only way you can gauge whether what you’re presenting is relevant and shape your message to speak to what your prospect really cares about.

It also gives you leverage. I don’t mean leverage in the sense that you force your prospect’s hand in any way. But knowing what they need and what they want allows you to reprioritize what you emphasize during negotiation and anticipate what your prospect will walk away from or stick to.

6) They don’t use underhanded closing tricks.

There’s a lot of terrible closing advice out there. But the idea that prospects need to be hard closed or tricked into buying is outdated at best and dangerous at worst. Always be upfront and honest throughout negotiations and closing processes, and don’t resort to sneaky tactics to close a deal -- if it’s truly a good fit, you shouldn’t have to.

7) They know how to read between the lines.

Whether you’re negotiating in person or over the phone, you need to understand what’s not being said as well as what’s being said. Whether it’s a suspicious change in voice tone or a shift in their prospect’s body language, the best negotiators are always looking for changes in behavior that could indicate the conversation is going well or poorly.

8) They know when to walk away.

There don’t have to be losers in every negotiation, but you certainly can lose. If you regularly accept terms that are bad for your business -- a deep discount or payment terms that allow a prospect to end a deal at any time -- you’re building an unstable book of business that may never pay dividends for your company. Skilled negotiators understand where their bottom line lies, and if the terms cross it, they know it’s better to walk away than keep fighting for scraps.

What negotiation habits work for you? Let us know in the comments below.

We’ve covered the basics of information products.

Now let’s get specific.

Have you ever sat in front of your computer staring at a blinking cursor wondering where to begin?

I’ve been there.

Deciding to make an info product is a great first step. But how do you actually create the content that goes into your product?

What you need is structure. A skeleton you can use to build your information product.

RATTLE: The Super-Simple Formula for Teaching Anything to Anyone

What I’m about to show you is the exact formula I use to create epic educational content in any niche.

I call it RATTLE.

It stands for Resonate, Accept, Turn, Twist, List, and Ending.

RATTLE can be used with any educational content—regardless of the subject or how that content is delivered.

It can be used to create content of any length. I use it to create a few paragraphs for a social media posts. I also use it to create content for 3-hour long video training courses.

Here’s how it works:

1. Resonate

Start your info product by selling your audience on the value of what they’re about to learn.

Do this by stating something that resonates with an emotion you know the people in your audience already feel.

For example, if you are creating an info product for golfers, don’t start with an in-depth look at the proper grip.

Start by talking about the pain of slicing your drive deep into the trees on every hole you play.

How many golf balls will you lose? How many hours will you spend hunting for a ball after yet another errant shots?

You don’t have to create a need in the mind of your prospect.

You just need to put your finger directly on a pain they already feel and know well.

2. Accept

You’ve agitated their pain. Now tell them that it’s okay that they struggle with this issue.

Help them accept their current situation without blaming themselves. Let them know you understand where they’re coming from. That you’ve been there. That you know the way out.

The idea here is to build a bridge between them and you. You want to say, “I’ve been where you are; I’ve solved the problem that seems unsolvable to you right now.”

At worst, you want to say, “I’ve found a person who struggled the same way you do today. And they made it through. Let me tell you their story.”

3. Turn

The turn is just what it sounds like. It’s the moment when you turn the conversation away from their experience and toward your unique knowledge.

The turn is usually just one or two sentences. Here a simple phrase you can use as an example to help you make the turn successfully:

• Because of [ the pain we just discussed], we’ve come up with a simple method we use to solve [pain].

4. Twist

For the twist, you tease your solution.

This is the moment you reveal the specific info product you’ve created to solve the audience’s pain.

If possible, give your twist a name. This can be the name of your product, or it can be a “technique” you teach within your product.

5. List

If you’ve done the first four steps, your audience will be primed and ready to hear how you can help them solve their problem.

They’ll be engaged. They’ll know why this training is important and they’ll be inspired to take action.

The list is your how-to content.

The list will usually make up 80-90% of your info product, sometimes more.

In your list, use numbers. For example, you could use phrases such as “There are six steps to the RATTLE formula.”

Break the larger group into smaller groups and write each one in succession. Explain how each one works, and how it fits together in the bigger picture of the full formula.

Each item in the numbered list can also have sub-lists if needed. In that way, it can be as simple or as complicated as you need.

Ending

Your ending should be your “payoff” section. Remind the audience of why they took the time to read or hear your course—and of the results they can expect if they take action.

Tell your readers, “If you take the actions in this training course, you could see [these] results in [this] amount of time.”

RATTLE Makes Creating Titles Easy

Numbers in product titles work because they make it easy for the reader’s brain to grasp how much mental commitment is required to learn this content.

Using RATTLE gives you a built-in list. You can split or combine these steps to create more “numbers” for your lists.

When you write the subject line, just use the numbered list in your content to frame the title.

How RATTLE Works With Different Formats

I mentioned earlier that RATTLE can be used with any format. But to be more specific, here’s are a few examples for you to use RATTLE in real life:

1. Books, eBooks, and Guides

For written content such as books, eBooks, and Guides, the RATTLE method gives you a simple formula you can use to write the content for your publication.

“Resonate, Accept, Turn, and Twist” happen in your introduction. “List” happens immediately after, followed by “Ending.”

This approach means you can write different sections of your info product at different times. If you get stuck on the “resonate” section, skip ahead to the next section and write it.

It’s a lot easier to write a few dozen 200-word sections than it is to sit down and write a 30-page PDF training all in one shot.

2. Video training

To create a video training using RATTLE, use the different RATTLE stages as the different parts of your training slides.

The Resonate, Accept, Turn, and Twist sections go in the introduction. The numbered list becomes a series of slides you can use as you teach the material.

And the ending becomes the conclusion to the training.

3. Audio trainings

For audio training, the process is the same as creating video content.

Use Resonate, Accept, Turn, and Twist in your introduction. Then go into your list and teach listeners the details of how to solve their problem. When you’re done, finish with the ending.

4. In-person seminars

In-person training content works just like video trainings. The great thing about live events is the Q&A opportunity at the end.

If you hear the same questions over and over again, simply add another item to your numbered list in your training to cover it.

Tools to Create Your Content Outline

Here are a few tools I use myself or that I know work for other people:

1. Mindmaps

I use mind maps to outline all my info products ahead of time. I use Freeplane to mind map the different sections of my content. FreeMind is another good choice. Both are free for Windows.

I literally start by creating branches with R, A, T, T, L, & E on them to make sure I get all the sections.

When I start writing, I use Hemingway for my first drafts. Then I keep the mind map open and simply fill in sections based on the mind map outline.

For longer projects, Scrivener is a fantastic way to keep everything organized.

2. Outlines

Some of you prefer more traditional outlines to mind maps. If that’s you, try Workflowy, which is slick, cloud-based, and has a free-forever starter package.

Evernote is also a good tool you can use to create simple text-based outlines.

3. Whiteboards

In my home office, I have a wall that’s painted in special whiteboard paint—allowing me to write on the wall as if it’s a whiteboard—even though it’s just paint on the wall.

Personally, I use whiteboards when I need to think with my pen. I’ll draw circles and lines and just kind of dump everything up on the board. Then draw a bunch of arrows to connect things together.

Usually when I’m done I’ll have a much clearer idea of how I want the content to flow. From there I’ll write out a more formal outline in either my mind map or in an outline.

4. Pen and Paper

For you traditionalists, nothing beats a good Moleskin notebook and a pen. Personally I like lined notebooks, but you can get them with blank pages or a grid-style.

I’m partial to the Fisher Space Pen, which writes amazingly well. It also fits in my pocket easily, and I don’t have to worry about it exploding on my shirt.

Conclusion

RATTLE has served me extremely well over the years.

What I love most about the framework is that I can use it over and over again with the same audience—yet they never feel like they’re being given a stock “formula.”

The content is unique for every piece. It’s just the structure of the content I’m using over and over again.

For this reason, if you use this method to create your info products, no one will ever know that you’re using a framework—unless you tell them specifically.

For example, have you caught on yet that I created this article using the RATTLE framework?

For your homework, I want you go back through this article and write down the outline I used.

Where’s the Resonate section? Where’s the List?

If you look closely, you’ll find them.

Have you ever thought your content initiatives needed more pizzazz? How about just ‘more’?

Many organizations have an insatiable appetite for content because the ability to offer interesting, relevant, and useful content is one of the only ways left to truly break through and engage your audience in an environment that’s considered ‘noisy’ on a good day and downright frenetic on an average one. But ‘more’ content creation can be a challenge in the face of scarce resources. One question I hear often is “How do you create content at scale?”

Of course, this question resonates most with smaller organizations; however, even larger organizations run their content marketing with lean teams (including us). So no matter your size, let’s take a look at some steps you can implement today to create valuable content more efficiently and effectively:

1. Create An Editorial Process

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like I’ve heard Joe Pulizzi say “You don’t have a content strategy until you write it down” in some form or another at least 10 times. But you know what? He’s right. There is something to writing down your intentions, creating a plan, and sharing it that makes you much more likely to actually follow through. So let’s walk through how to map out your editorial process (and write it down!):

Who’s writing for you?

Start by understanding who will contribute content—whether that means writing for your blog, recording videos, or writing ebooks. In some cases, your content may come from your content team, freelancers, your PR agency, internal writers, partners, customers, or guest contributors.

Who’s editing for you?

You know that saying, “Everyone needs an editor?”—well, it’s true. Creating content is just the start; you need some checks and balances in place to ensure it’s error-free and on brand. So, who are the editors in your organization? Often, these responsibilities lie within your content team. If you’re on a small team, you may spread the responsibility across a couple of team members who are not only close readers and grammar whizzes, but also understand your brand voice, products, and promise, and can ensure that it shines through your content. A good way to make sure your content (regardless of the writer) is consistently in line with your brand voice and tone is to write out (yes I know, ‘document another process’) your brand guidelines and share them with your writers and editors.

How often will you publish?

From a blog perspective where your goals may include driving inbound, SEO, and subscribers, it’s critical that you publish consistently and set expectations. Based on how much content you have coming in from your various writers and how quickly your editors can review that content, you should be able to get a sense of how often you can publish. What’s the best practice? It really depends on your audience and your industry. In my opinion, it’s best to define your publishing cadence based on what you can actually maintain. If that’s only one blog per week, that’s still good—you have to start somewhere, and you can offer a weekly digest to your subscribed audience to make sure that your new content is highlighted for them.

For longer form assets or more resource-intensive assets, like an ebook, infographic, or whitepaper, it’s important that you set a calendar and cadence that fits both your resources to create the content and your organization’s needs. At Marketo, we go through a content request process every quarter, which we use to populate an editorial calendar that balances the assets requested with the content team resources and maps to our company goals.

Who’s approving your content?

Once your piece has been edited, is it ready to go? Define the approval process that you need to actually publish content—from a blog to an ebook. A couple of things to think about: Do you have different levels of review based on the type of asset? (For example, at Marketo we have more internal reviewers and editors for a Definitive Guide than a blog.) Do you have a design review process in addition to copyediting process? It’s important to define these different elements, as they will affect your content creation process.

2. I’ll Have My Content Strategy Supersized, Please

Obviously, you can’t wave a wand and wish three more content team members into existence (really, I’ve tried!), but after you define your editorial process, you should have an intimate idea of how things work in your organization. Now, you need to think about how you can use your process as a foundation for creating and fostering more content. Here are two easy ways to do that:

Repurpose

Repurposing is wonderful when it’s done with intention (meaning don’t just slice and dice content for the sake of repurposing). Take a look at the content that you have and how it has or hasn’t resonated with its target audience, and see if you can distribute it in different ways to capture some more of the success or turn a ‘blah’ asset into a success by offering it in a more consumable format.

Not sure where to start? Do you have three kick-a#$ blogs on the same topic that performed really well? You can combine them into a larger asset. Do you have a larger asset that you can break apart into 10+ visuals and micro-copy? A workbook that you can turn the content into a BuzzFeed-style quiz? The options are endless.

Branch Out

Now that you understand how you’ll churn out content for your organization, you’ll be able to easily identify new opportunities. If your strategy revolves around content that your content team creates, consider branching out by collaborating with internal and external contributors. For example, if you’re looking for more content for your blog, create guidelines, offer blog swaps with your peers at other companies and your partners, and get the word out about your program.

Consider these strategies for developing more content:

• Internal: Reward internal employees for their contributions to content
• Partner: Do you have a group of partners or collaborative products/services? Do a blog swap or invite them to blog for you, or team up for a joint ebook.
• External: Publicly invite people to submit their content. Offer clear guidelines that lay out your requirements and approval process to set expectations upfront.
• Freelancers: Have great ideas but can’t implement them with your current resources? There are tons of awesome freelance writers available on LinkedIn or through a variety of other platforms.
• Curation: See amazing content that you wish you could have? Often, you can! Curated content gives your audience value and the creator credit.

3. Get Buy-In

This is a pretty critical piece of anything you want to be successful. So, you’ve written your plan down—you know your writers, your editors, your reviewers, and how often you want to/can publish, now go identify who in your organization cares deeply about content and who it impacts, and share this plan with them to get their feedback and buy-in. You may find that you need to adjust your plan a bit, but that feedback will make your plan better and your initiatives more beneficial across the organization.

Looking for more tips to get started? Join me for a webinar that will take a deep-dive into this topic on July 7th. Do you have any tips to add? I’d love to hear them in the comments below.

Maciej Cegłowski (previously) keynoted the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics conference with a characteristically brilliant speech about the "moral economy of tech" -- that is, the way that treating social problems like software problems allows techies to absolve themselves of the moral consequences of their actions and the harms that result.

Software development involves "working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings" to find the "clever twist" that gives us the "feeling of competence, control and delight." That feeling leads us to believe that we can solve social problems in the same way, a feeling that's exacerbated by the programmer's urge to "seek maximal and global solutions" that "fix the general problem for everybody, and for all time."

But a quick glance around the ground-zero of technological solutions for social problems -- the Bay Area -- shows "a residential theme park for tech workers, surrounded by areas of poverty and misery that have seen no benefit and ample harm from our presence." what's more, the programmer's excuse that we can't be held responsible for the way our tools are used absolves of us any responsibility for this situation, while inviting us to double down on the tactics that created it.

The crowning achievement of this insanity is surveillance capitalism, which rewards those who "try flashy things that ... capture the speculators' imagination" and their money, in order to collect more and more data from the general population, though the "actual value of the data collected is not clear." Thus tech is locked in an arms race with humans, who "develop an immune response to new forms of tracking and manipulation," prompting tech to find ever-more insidious ways of collecting from us.

Far from being a harmless folly or an irrational economic bubble, surveillance capitalism is creating the conditions for some genuinely terrifying outcomes, as states draw on the massive troves of data to control their populations -- thus containing the social instability that comes from otherwise unsustainable levels of wealth inequality and immiseration.

I've often heard people on the government side -- cops, spooks, bureaucrats, politicians -- say that NSA surveillance doesn't scare them as much as Google and Facebook surveillance. But the NSA is only able to spy on us cost effectively because of surveillance capitalism: the data-collection activities of the private sector are the intake feed for the state. It's naive to expect that the state will place effective curbs on corporate surveillance at the same time as it is relying on that data as the front-line of its border patrols, criminal justice system and other core functions.

Any data we collect will probably leak. Any data we retain will definitely leak. The private data breaches we've experienced to date -- and the mass-scale criminal attacks on their subjects -- were the tremors, not the quake.

One of the candidates running for President this year has promised to deport eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, as well as block Muslims from entering the country altogether. Try to imagine this policy enacted using the tools of modern technology. The FBI would subpoena Facebook for information on every user born abroad. Email and phone conversations would be monitored to check for the use of Arabic or Spanish, and sentiment analysis applied to see if the participants sounded "nervous". Social networks, phone metadata, and cell phone tracking would lead police to nests of hiding immigrants.

We could do a really good job deporting people if we put our minds to it.

Or consider the other candidate running for President, the one we consider the sane alternative, who has been a longtime promoter of a system of extrajudicial murder that uses blanket surveillance of cell phone traffic, email, and social media to create lists of people to be tracked and killed with autonomous aircraft. The system presumably includes points of human control (we don't know because it's secret), but there's no reason in principle it could not be automated. Get into the wrong person's car in Yemen, and you lose your life.

That this toolchain for eliminating enemies of the state is only allowed to operate in poor, remote places is a comfort to those of us who live elsewhere, but you can imagine scenarios where a mass panic would broaden its scope.

Or imagine what the British surveillance state, already the worst in Europe, is going to look like in two years, when it's no longer bound by the protections of European law, and economic crisis has driven the country further into xenophobia.

Or take an example from my home country, Poland. Abortion has been illegal in Poland for some time, but the governing party wants to tighten restrictions on abortion by investigating every miscarriage as a potential crime. Women will basically be murder suspects if they lose their baby. Imagine government agents combing your Twitter account, fitness tracker logs, credit card receipts and private communications for signs of potential pregnancy, with the results reported to the police to proactively protect your unborn baby.

The Moral Economy of Tech [Maciej Cegłowski/Idlewords]

(via Four Short Links)

(Image: Bansky one nation under cctv, Oogiboig, CC-BY-SA)

As a modern salesperson, it’s easy to fantasize about how that latest whizbang social selling or sales intelligence tool can help you connect with more buyers more easily. (I know I do.) But even with all the new technology available today, nothing replaces the telephone for having a constructive conversation with a prospect.

That doesn’t mean every single buyer you call will be ready or willing to talk with you -- far from it. Whether you’re calling a good fit prospect you proactively sourced, following up on an inbound lead who didn’t exactly ask for a phone call, or dialing your newest Twitter follower, you have to be ready to break through resistance when you hear a “Hello?” at the other end of the line.

While many social selling gurus might lead you to believe that phone prospecting is dead, the telephone still remains the best prospecting tool out there -- when done right, that is. And doing it right requires preparation and practice.

One of the companies I advise recently asked me to help them create a script for that initial unscheduled phone call. Being a bit rusty myself, I turned to one of my favorite sales experts, Marc Wayshak, author of Game Plan Selling. Wayshak responded with a few videos to help me out.

Here is Wayshak’s five-step process for breaking through your prospect’s resistance in the very beginning of that initial call.

1) Make sure you’re calling early or late.

The key to connecting with a prospect is to catch them when they’re not busy with someone else or when gatekeepers aren’t screening for them, according to Wayshak That’s unlikely to be during the day, so, Wayshak specifically suggests making calls before or after the typical 9-to-5 workday. “Try your prospects before 8:30 in the morning or after 5:30 in the evening,” he recommends.

2) Drop the fake enthusiasm.

Ever get a call from a sales rep who sounds like a game show host inviting you up to a stage? Does it immediately turn you off? I know it puts a bad taste in my mouth. When I hear a salesperson who has the enthusiasm dial cranked up to 11 on the other end of the line, they get quickly hung up on.

Think about it. Does your best friend, closest co-worker, or top customer ever greet you like that? Nope -- and they’re people who have a pre-existing relationship with you.

Wayshak advises salespeople to be real: "Avoid sounding overly excited, and pleasantly surprise your prospects by doing the exact opposite of what they expect from a salesperson on the phone.”

That means taking your voice tone down a few octaves, and speaking in sentences -- not exclamations.

3) Sound like a normal person making a call.

When your prospect picks up, open with a tone and a line that breaks from the traditional approach most salespeople take. And since most reps go way over-the-top, this means speaking like a normal person will set you apart.

“Instead of greeting the prospect with false enthusiasm, say: ‘Hi, Brian. George calling. Did I catch you in the middle of something?’” Wayshak suggests.

This calm, friend-like approach is completely different from the overly salesy language that prospects are accustomed to hearing (and hanging up on).

4) Have a contingency plan.

If your prospect is busy when you call and wants to get off the phone as soon as possible (read: most buyers), have a plan in place to address that resistance. For example, if a prospect tries to get off the phone right away, don’t freak out -- simply ask for permission to pose a quick question.

Wayshak recommends saying something along the lines of, “Would it be alright if I just took 30 seconds to tell you why I called -- and if it doesn’t make sense, you can feel free to hang up? Does that sound okay?”

5) Focus on challenges.

Just like so many bad email prospecting messages I get, most salespeople start their calls and voicemails by talking about how great their products and services are. Instead, “switch it up by describing common challenges that your clients face -- and find out if your prospect is dealing with those same challenges,” Wayshak says.

As a bonus, this final step will help you initiate a challenge-focused conversation so that you and your prospect can decide whether it makes sense to schedule a call to talk about how you can really help them.

For more advice on creating and delivering a value proposition focused on your buyers’ challenges, read these prospecting tips from top expert on the subject, Jill Konrath.

Practice Makes Perfect When it Comes to Prospecting

While it’s a pipe dream to think that you’ll never get hung up on again, don’t be one of those reps who is either too afraid to pick up the phone or overly reliant on social and email for their prospecting efforts. And most importantly, don’t spend too much time looking for that holy grail sales prospecting tool that makes it all unnecessary. It doesn’t exist (and we’ll tell you if it ever gets created, we promise).

Instead, follow and practice these guidelines to reduce the number of times you get a premature “no” or hear an unexpected dial tone. If you put in the work refining your approach and customizing them for your own selling situation, they will work for you.

For a bit of extra inspiration, here’s a five-minute video of a live sales call where Wayshak demonstrates how to have a conversation following this framework.

For more strategies like this, check out Wayshak’s free ebook: “25 Tips to Dramatically Increase Your Sales This Year.”

It’s the perfect storm.

Technology and economic forces have put customers in control of their interactions with businesses like never before. The economy has never been more digitally and globally connected. Some will go so far to say that marketing has changed more in the last two years than in the last fifty! And yet, marketers are not confident in their digital ability. Only 48% of digital marketers feel highly proficient in digital marketing. According to a Forrester Research 2015 study, only 5% of organizations feel that they have mastered digital or agile marketing to a point of differentiation from their competitors.

In a recent blog post, published by HubSpot, 17 different traditional advertising agencies weighed in on what they perceived some of the biggest threats facing this dynamic marketing landscape to be. What surprised me is that while agencies acknowledge the digital evolution, many are still burying their heads in the sand, hanging on to their ever shrinking retainers, without adapting to the need for dramatic change.

In 1961, when John F. Kennedy was ideating his strategy to compete in the Vietnam War, he recognized that the usual military practices the military had relied on through the years would no longer be enough to compete against guerrilla warfare. He needed to innovate and adapt. A one-size-fits-all approach to warfare was outdated, which resulted in the formation of the military branch, the Navy SEALs. Although the Navy SEALs did not change the outcome of that particular war, the branch has proven time and time again to be invaluable to the military as a whole.

Much like the changing tide of military combat in the 60’s, we have similar needs as marketers today. We need to be agile, responsive, and adaptive. The internet was not intended to be a new platform for outdated advertising practices like flashing billboards on web pages, interruptive pop-ups and TV commercials repurposed as 30-second pre-rolls. Rather, the web is a dynamic playground of opportunities to build a one-to-one relationship with your target audience, earning their attention and fostering ideas worth sharing with like-minded advocates.While it’s clear nobody has all the answers as to what marketing and advertising best practices will be in the future, we know that now, more than ever, we need to give consumers information that is authentic, accurate, and accessible, and we want our tactics to be measurable. This is where the inbound marketing “Navy SEALs” team comes in. Consider hiring an inbound marketing “SEALs” team to get the job done!

1. Speed

   — or put into marketing-speak, real-time. “Traditional agencies are built to uncover insights (takes time), develop campaign ideas (takes time), plan and buy media (takes time), and produce the creative (more time)” was a challenge pointed out by Will Burns, of Ideasicle from the aforementioned HubSpot post. Inbound marketing agencies leverage insights and data to adapt strategy in real-time. The inbound approach frequently relies on establishing a quarterly, rather than annual marketing plan, allowing for companies to be agile and adaptive to their business changes and challenges.

2. Agility

   — If we agree that the last few years have drastically changed how consumers are accessing information, then the need for brands to adapt how information is accessed by their customers has to be aligned. One of the fundamentals of the inbound marketing methodology relies on your content “getting found.” Inbound agencies not only have had to immerse themselves with all the social media platforms, (as they come and go with relevancy), but need to adapt to all the search algorithm changes dictated by search engines. A best practice this quarter may be outdated next!

3. Left Brain, Right Brain

   — Traditional marketing practices have relied more on creativity through the years than measurement. After all, it’s virtually impossible to measure the effectiveness of a billboard or a brochure! The Navy SEALs of marketing (inbound marketers!) understand how to tap into both sides of their brains by creating marketing campaigns that not only look great but are tied to analytics. When deploying inbound marketing, there isn’t one email, blog post, downloadable piece of content, or video created that doesn’t have a measurable component. This measurement allows you to adapt your near term strategies immediately to drive results faster. Like the SEALs, every inbound marketing strategy isn’t going to be done exactly right, but accurate measurement ensures that you avoid catastrophic results.

4. Put Others First

   — If you have any friends who have been in the military, chances are they are on your speed dial as one of your first responders to lend an unconditional helping hand. One of the many attributes which sets a “SEAL” apart is to constantly be asking yourself how you can add value to your team. To be a Marketing “SEAL” requires the same passion for helping. You need to ask yourself “how can I bring value to my customers.” The successful companies today no longer approach sales and marketing by the historic “ABC’s,” always be closing, rather the mantra of the new digital economy has to be “ABH,” or always be helping. Your goal as an inbound marketer should be to make your customers and prospects more informed buyers by creating awesome content.

5. Never Get Comfortable

   — Any effective SEAL recognizes that you are constantly training. When SEALs aren’t in combat, they are in training. Because being great at inbound marketing requires a myriad of skills (analytical, creative, writing, social media savvy, technical, etc.), you have got to stay curious and have a plan for personal development. When deploying inbound marketing best practices, you can never assume that you have it all figured out. Every campaign brings new learnings; a chance to deploy a better tactic the next time given real-time insights. Like the SEALs, you need to be moving and doing at all times, and staying abreast of all best practices.

Of course, I recognize that the worlds of marketing and the military are miles apart in terms of significance and outcomes. Whether you are in the military or not, by having a strategy, being helpful, adopting a certain sense of agility, and being quick and nimble will ensure you not only accomplish the big wins but triumph over a lot of small victories along the way.

Most people will agree that one of the many jobs of a marketing agency is to monitor, manage and improve its clients’ online reputation. At Bonafide, it’s a big part of what we do.

Often it feels like an uphill battle, especially if your client has neglected their online reputation for a long time. But establishing and maintaining a solid reputation is more important now than ever before.

Buyers are searching and vetting companies way before they want to connect with a sales rep. Using a combination of social media, customer review sites and independent blogs, your customers learn a ton about how you do business and form an opinion before they even speak with you. And if you’re not managing your reputation across these and other channels, your voice will only play a small role in the sales process.

Our challenge is to set our clients up for success by making their reputation an important part of this buyer-driven process.

Through our work, we’ve uncovered six key elements to boosting our clients’ reputations and earning trust from prospects.

Let’s dig in.

Position Your Client As a Thought Leader

If you’re going into surgery, would you be more comfortable with Joe from County Medical or the surgeon who pioneered your procedure?

Thought leadership is about positioning your client to be the industry expert.

People want to do business with companies they trust and respect. If you’re an authority in your space, you’ll have a big advantage in the vetting process.

Needless to say, you want to position your client as a thought leader — but how?

Start here:

• Produce 10X content like eBooks, blog posts, white papers, case studies, and the like for both your clients’ website and other authoritative sites.
• Curate and share relevant, helpful information like industry news, blog articles, research and data on social media platforms and within online industry groups.
• Contribute expert-level content to trusted industry publications and leverage their authority and audience.
• Connect and collaborate with existing thought leaders with large followings in the same or closely related niche.
• Comment and engage with popular, relevant threads your prospects are reading on sites like LinkedIn and Quora.
• Speak at industry conferences, then add your presentation slide deck to sites like SlideShare.
• Consistently contribute to niche LinkedIn groups, specialized online communities, and targeted industry blogs.

Here’s an example of how Southern California Reproductive Center, a fertility clinic in Los Angeles, uses thought leadership to earn their clients’ trust:

Include Trust Symbols to Dispel Doubts

When prospects land on a new website, they often arrive with skepticism and a suite of objections. Trust symbols put them at ease and add credibility to your client’s reputation. 85% of consumers think trust symbols are meaningful, and 50% have used them as the deciding factor in making a purchase.

Trustworthy websites usually have:

Graphical logos/badges

Some of the most well-known are Norton Secured and BBB accreditations.

Recognitions or awards

Third-party recognition transfers trust and reputation to your client.

Years in business

Longevity alone can be a powerful indication of trust.

Trust by association

If the big brands trust your client, other prospects will too.

Industry associations

If your client is a member of any industry associations, feature them prominently.

Media/Press

“As seen in” sections build credibility by showcasing media recognition.

Testimonials

Great stories from existing customers inspire trust in new ones.

Earn Positive Reviews to Boost Social Proof

Building positive reviews is key to boosting your clients’ reputation:

92% of people read online reviews of local businesses.

69% of people remember reading positive reviews about customer service, and 88% of those people said such reviews affected their purchasing decision.

Earning positive reviews can be difficult — customers are more inclined to share their negative experiences. And because reviews are a numbers game, if your client has two reviews and one is bad, the negative review will stick out like a sore thumb. But if you build 200 positive reviews with a handful of negative ones, the storyline becomes much different. You’d be hard-pressed to find a business that hasn’t had a run in with a customer that just couldn’t be pleased – and consumers know that.

How to Encourage Positive Reviews

People with a less-than-stellar experience are about 50% more inclined to leave a review – so proactivity is a must when it comes to earning positive reviews.

Strike while the iron is hot – when you have a customer’s attention, you need to make it as frictionless as possible for them to share their positive experience — otherwise they’ll lose interest.

Our favorite tool to facilitate reviews for our clients is Grade.us. Why we like it:

• It takes the reviewer directly to the review site – complete with instructions.
• It diverts negative reviews by redirecting them to a private feedback form instead of a review site.
• We get an instant notification when a new review is left on a property we’re monitoring.
• It’s dead simple to set up (interns can do it).
• It sits on our clients’ domain.
• The list goes on – and they keep adding features we’re excited to implement.

A word of caution when soliciting reviews – be careful about incentivizing positive reviews with contests, prizes, etc. because it’s against the terms of some review sites.

Respond to Reviews to Build Credibility

Bad reviews are almost inevitable and most prospective consumers understand that. And just like earning good reviews – the way you handle bad ones is critical. People want to see how you treat your customers when things don’t go as well as they could have.

Some tips for handling bad reviews:

• Respond quickly.
• Acknowledge their issue and that they were not satisfied with your product or service.
• Thank them for bringing it to your attention.
• Commit to resolving the situation.
• Provide the contact information of a senior employee and ask the reviewer to get in touch for a resolution.
• Explain what you’ll do to ensure it won’t happen again.

If someone on your team is guilty of poor service, it’s important to acknowledge it. If you feel you’re in the right though, accepting blame can be a tough pill to swallow – and rightly so. But it’s important never to respond defensively — or worse – attack the customer. Acknowledging that they were not satisfied is not admitting fault.

Constructive responses to bad reviews make the best of a negative situation. A Cornell study of TripAdvisor hotels found revenue increases when managers responded to negative reviews in a positive manner.

For a real world example, see how Earnhardt Honda responds:

• He apologizes and acknowledges the specific complaint.
• He offers to hear them out and make it right.
• He provides his phone number and email address to make contacting him easy.

One last word of caution here – if you’re in the medical or healthcare space be very careful how you respond to reviews as your comments could land you in violation of HIPAA laws.

Monitor Social Media and Respond

Customers are talking about your client’s brand on social media with or without you. If you aren’t monitoring and participating in these conversations, then you’re missing an opportunity to be a part of these customer-winning and (losing) conversations.

Just like quick and constructive responses to bad reviews can turn negative situations into positive ones, catching and responding to brand mentions is a big opportunity.

Look at how UPS turns a disgruntled customer into a positive interaction:

UPS is doing a few things right. They’ve separated their Twitter handle into a main account and one for support. They take a sincere interest in the customer. They write like humans. And they make it easy for the customer to contact them.

It can be difficult to manually monitor social media for a sizeable brand, so you’ll need some tools. Our favorites are Hubspot and Hootsuite. Some other good ones are Mention, Social Mention, and BrandMentions.

Get Involved in Local Communities

Doing good in local communities will also do good for your clients’ reputation. It can help reframe them from faceless, profit-driven corporations to organizations that care about the communities in which they do business. A significant 80% of customers would buy from an unknown brand if they knew it had strong social or environmental commitments.

While doing good is a reward in itself, helping local communities won’t help your clients’ reputation if prospects don’t know about it. You need to get the word out.

Here’s how:

Website

Add a section that details positive community outreach or social commitments. For example, Toms has a section on their site that explains their program that provides children with shoes.

Social Media

Take pictures, share them on social channels, and include hashtags and mentions that will loop in the right people, organizations, and news outlets.

Local Media

Work with media to get mentioned. This isn’t just for local businesses — large organizations can benefit from local media mentions by expanding campaigns across multiple regions.

Final Thoughts

Consumers are no longer relying on you to tell them how great you are. They’re getting their information from other places, and they’re much more in control of the process than they used to be.

Building a stand-out reputation for your clients isn’t complicated — it just takes a lot of work and proactivity.

Rest-assured though, the payoff is huge – a stellar reputation can win business, command higher prices and keep customers coming back for years.

Executive dashboards are quickly becoming absolutely essential tools for executives to keep their fingers on the pulse and performance of their company. The right dashboards pull data from throughout the enterprise making reports and metrics available at a glance and at a moment’s notice. Better still, this all happens through one intuitive portal.

Well-designed dashboards offer many significant advantages to the executive. First they provide broad visibility to all aspects of the business for more control. They allow management to measure performance of everything from simple production statistics to complex ROI calculations. They save countless hours otherwise spent logging into systems, running reports and then scanning those reports for meaningful insights to help set focus and strategy. Great dashboards also allow execs to compare performance against budgets or plans, in order to leverage what is working and minimizing the weak links.

In spite of their power and complexity, top-notch dashboards are fairly quick to set up and intuitive to use. Truly, the greatest challenge that executives have with dashboards comes when it’s time to select the key performance indicators to pull from their vast expanse of data.

But choosing KPIs is not rocket science. The simplicity and coherence offered by well-designed dashboards allow the executive to monitor the very issues and key concerns that are most impactful to the profitability and performance of the business and its departments.

Take a look at some of the KPIs we recommend for Finance, Marketing and Sales:

FINANCE KPIs:

• Working Capital
• Operating Cash Flow
• Return on Equity
• Current Ratio
• Net Profit Margin
• Expensing Reporting Errors
• Budget vs. Actuals Variance
• Accounts Receivable Collections
• Debt to Equity Ratio
• Inventory Turnover

MARKETING KPIs:

• Sales Revenue
• Customer Acquisition Costs
• Lifetime value per customer
• Inbound Marketing ROI
• Traffic-to-Lead Ratio
• Lead-to-Customer Ratio
• Landing Page Conversions
• Organic Traffic
• Social Media Traffic
• Mobile, Traffic, Leads and Conversion Rates

SALES KPIs:

• New Contacts Rate
• Client Acquisition Rates
• Sales Volume Per Location
• Pricing Against Competitors
• Existing Client Engagement
• Employee Satisfaction

Getting Started

The ideal executive dashboard can easily and automatically connect data from throughout the organization. It should be accessible on commonly-used desktops and devices and available online to those who have the permissions to access it. Up-to-date, real time returns are optimal so that execs can act on actual and current returns, and avoid being behind the curve as they strive to stay ahead of the competition.

To minimize costly data errors and inaccuracies, dashboard software should have the ability to cleanse, merge, and combine data from across the enterprise into a homogeneous data warehouse. If the software has features to add calculated columns, or filter, group, and pivot data, so much the better. The more the data is congruent, the more valuable its reports and insights.

Finally, decision-makers don’t want to have to spend hours coding or designing dashboards. So an executive-level dashboard requires an intuitive interface with simple and easy methods to select KPIs, enter formulas, use templates, and design a dashboard that delivers.

Executive dashboards display the metrics that support executives in monitoring and managing the most critical performance metrics of the organization. In one place, at a glance, and at any time, they can review progress and respond to events with greater accuracy, timeliness and effect.

ClicData dashboards gather data from throughout your company into a standardized data warehouse so you can access key metrics and actionable insights any time you want. Discover the intuitive design and sophisticated power of ClicData.

ABM. Social Selling. Predictive Analytics. Sales Enablement. Which one is most effective at boosting sales performance? Hard to compare, exactly, as the best practice is to do them all. But a recent survey found that those companies focused on sales enablement, on average, saw a 10% improvement on pipeline conversion rates.

A new Highspot/Heinz Marketing survey of nearly 400 B2B respondents titled “The Sales Enablement Practitioner Survey” shows a heightened investment in sales enablement teams, initiatives, and technology directly—and in many cases dramatically—increases sales conversion rates for B2B companies.

According to the survey, more than 50% of companies that have committed to sales enablement efforts have experienced improved sales conversion rates of greater than 10%. A full 23% of companies have seen conversion rates increase by 20% or more, and 11% have increased their conversion rate by greater than 30%. That’s a 30% increase in revenue from existing pipeline!

Here are a few other interesting tidbits I pulled out of the survey, which you can read in full here (Sales Enablement Practitioner Survey 2016).

• 79% of organizations with sales teams larger than 10 reps are doing some form of structured sales enablement activities
• A majority (53%) have teams dedicated to sales enablement
• 67% of organizations with 100 sales reps or more report dedicated sales enablement teams, but only 44% of those in the mid-market (11-99 sales reps) have dedicated teams

Clearly, sales enablement is a hot, upwardly trending business process. Executive leadership recognizes the positive impact: 66% of respondents to our survey said budgets are increasing. Thirty-six percent said this increase is at least 11% year-over-year from 2015 to 2016. And, budgets for sales technology are increasing as well. Fifty-five percent of organizations increased their budgets for sales technology from 2015, with 37% reporting an increase of 11% or more.

Where are sales enablement teams spending their time?

We see it time and again—once you put structure around sales enablement, the results start rolling in, and both sales and marketing get more invested in optimizing efforts—which leads to even better results. Survey respondents told us firsthand what they do to make the most of their sales enablement initiatives. If you want to have an immediate impact on sales conversions, these areas are a great place to start.

• Seventy-six percent said it’s critical to reduce the amount of time your sales team spends on non-selling activities. This seems like a no-brainer: Reduce non-selling activities so your sales team can sell more. However, many sales reps spend way too much time away from core selling activities. Our study found that on average reps were spending between 2-5 hours per week searching for content, 2-5 hours creating content and roughly 4-7 hours in their CRM system. Modern sales enablement practices can eliminate or reduce much of this.
• Seventy-six percent agreed that reps must have easy access to content. We mention this a lot, and it’s a staggering fact: 65% of marketing-produced content is wasted because sales simply can’t find it. Making it easy for your sales reps to find the right content quickly is foundational. Providing marketing with a way to measure what content is working and how to improve content quality is revolutionary.
• Sharing best practices is also imperative, as cited by 65% of survey respondents. Sales is a dynamic environment with product and message changing regularly and buyers’ needs varying across industry, size, and buying cycle. Good sales reps are constantly asking their peers what’s working well in order to improve their performance. Having a platform in place that enables data-driven analysis of what content, pitches, and processes are most effective in various situations lifts the performance of the entire team. Only Highspot has Content Genomics™, proprietary technology that tracks how content evolves across an organization, surfacing insights into content quality and performance.
• Sixty-four percent said training must be improved. The idea that you can train an entire sales force—regardless of size—on new products, new methodology, new features, and even new sales techniques once a quarter is dead. It’s been proven wrong so many times, and yet so many organizations are hanging onto this idea as “the way it’s done.” Successful sales organizations integrate training into their sales enablement workflow so that reps can be trained “just in time” when the content is most likely to stay fresh for a client conversation.
• The right technology is critical, according to 61% of respondents. Sales enablement technology has come a long way since first generation solutions. Modern technology is empowering sales enablement teams to use data to measure and improve performance. By vetting, deploying, and implementing the right sales enablement technology, you can solve challenges one through four.

I hope you found value in these insights from your counterparts in organizations large and small. If you’re still looking into sales enablement, our Definitive Guide to Sales Enablement will step you through the process of selecting, designing, deploying, and optimizing a solution that meets your organization’s unique needs. And if you’re ready to see how Highspot can help you turn your existing pipeline into more revenue, just contact us for a custom demo.

Get the product right, and it will sell itself — or your customers will help you sell it.

Tech product marketing has evolved through several dramatic phases in the past few decades. But the most recent transformation may be the most dramatic shift yet, bringing us into an era where some companies can do without a sales team at all.

Atlassian, a maker of tools that help software developers collaborate with each other, grew from nothing to $100 million in revenue without ever hiring a salesperson.

How? With a product that essentially sold itself.

This is the 4th stage in the evolution of tech sales. Let’s take a look at how we got here.

The Evolution of Tech Marketing

Field sales: The first marketing strategy that the tech industry pursued was an approach drawn from other industries: The field sales model. Oracle mastered this in the 1980s and 1990s, with an enormous, aggressive, highly competent field sales force that spent most of its time on the road, calling on customers, wining and dining them until there was enough trust and mutual understanding to close six- and seven-figure contracts.

Inside sales: The next stage was a more telephone-based, inside-sales model. In this approach, pioneered by Oracle and others in the late 1990s and embraced by Salesforce.com in its earliest days, salespeople spend less time on the road. The focus shifts to the inside sales force, calling lists of cold and warm prospects and closing many sales on the phone. Here, sales becomes more of a numbers game: You need a big enough list of prospects to deliver the sales you need, based on the rate at which you can close those prospects.

Marketing: As sales organizations began to understand the virtues of large numbers of prospects, the industry evolved into a third, more marketing-driven stage. HubSpot (content marketing), ExactTarget (broad marketing mix) Constant Contact (broad marketing mix including radio spots), and Barracuda Networks (creative marketing including the use of airport billboards) exemplify this approach. This stage elevated marketing from sales support to a more strategic role, where it is responsible for generating content and marketing programs to fill the sales funnel and while branding the software companies.

Product-driven marketing: In fourth-stage sales, the product begins to sell itself. In this stage, the product itself is the go-to-market strategy for your company. Atlassian is probably the most successful example of this, but there are many others including OpenView portfolio investments Expensify, Datadog, FieldLens and Lesson.ly to name a few. Beyond our portfolio, to a certain extent Solarwinds falls under this category, based on word-of-mouth referrals and its ability to be easily downloaded and installed. Even LinkedIn benefits from the “self-marketing product” strategy, especially now that it has achieved critical mass: The more people who use LinkedIn as their de facto resumes, the more it draws in hiring managers and HR staff who grow to depend on LinkedIn as a recruiting tool.

Dramatic Simplification

As marketing and sales have evolved, companies moved from a high-bandwidth, high-cost, high-effectiveness approach to sequentially lower bandwidth, lower cost, lower effectiveness approaches. But the old ways of selling have never disappeared: They’ve simply become equally valid options on an increasingly broad spectrum of possibilities.

Individual companies can and should tailor their sales and marketing strategies based on where they fall on this spectrum.

If you have a complex product and multiple/high level buyers, it generally requires field sales to educate the buyers and help them move down their buying journey over multiple meetings. Field sales efforts require an enormous expenditure of effort (and T&E budgets) by experienced, expensive sales executives. After identifying a handful of likely target customers, salespeople spend months wining and dining them, learning their needs, and customizing an offer to meet those needs. But the payoff can be high: A relatively high proportion of the prospects should be converted into extremely valuable customers, often with six- or seven-figure contracts.

If you have a more intuitive and simple product, you may be able to move all the way to the other end of the spectrum of go-to-market strategies by creating a product-driven strategy.

A product-driven strategy requires a product team that makes the product so intuitive and easy to use that the users intuitively understand it without extensive training. The better products get to the “aha moment” extremely quickly, may have free trials or freemium pricing models to help lower the bar to adoption, and may have built in functionality that better engages users more deeply over time, brings users back, and encourages users to get other users to adopt them.

As you move along the spectrum from field sales to product, the number of prospects generally increases, while the percentage of those prospects who convert into paying customers generally declines. In other words, the funnel needs to bring in more potential customers in order to be sure of producing a few conversions at the other end. But the cost and complexity of the sales effort gets incrementally lower with each stage.

What you need to do as you move along this path is to be able to dramatically simplify everything down to its essence, so you don’t need the bandwidth (of time or money) to educate the buyers and make the sale.

The buying process is one of being convinced that the value of using the product, net of what you’re going to pay, is positive. The sales team does this by communicating value. If the product itself can communicate its own positive value, then that equation works with very little additional sales effort needed. Your product sells itself, just as water flows downhill.

If you need more communications, marketing can help. If you need even more, then the telephone can provide that. If you need even more still, you have to rely on in-person salespeople. The key is to design a product that needs less!

How to Find the Right Mix

Finding the right mix of high-touch, high-bandwidth sales, lower-bandwidth sales and marketing and self-marketing products can be tricky. And moving from the high-touch to the self-marketing side of things is also a challenge — but it’s one that can pay off with dramatically more efficient sales and revenue generation.

As many others have recommended, the best way to start is first by creating a product that people are willing to pay for. Once you have something that sells — by whatever means it takes — then you can start to “de-labor” the sales and marketing process.

It is possible to start by building a product that requires virtually no sales effort at all from the start, but it’s trickier. Although Atlassian pulled this off, few other companies have successfully taken this route. The reason is that you get a lot of information from high-touch, high-bandwidth sales. Your customers will tell you what’s working and what’s not, and your field salespeople (even if those are the founders) will learn a lot by talking to them.

Also, those first sales will tell you a lot about the sales process. You’ll be in a position to ask, ‘Where’s the labor?’ And then you can start working on simplifying it.

And there are a few general approaches you can take to try and remove the sales labor from your product.

One is simply make your product so awesome that people can’t help but talk about it. You do that either by making it better by far than other similar products in the market, or by making it free (or incredibly inexpensive) in a market where similar products cost a lot.

Second, if your product isn’t innately incredibly awesome, you need to start polishing it. Focus on ease of use, making it possible for people to get started using it with very little friction at all. Data can help here. For instance: Imagine an email product that analyzes data from the emails you send, then recommends automated response emails that match your most common responses. You could then just approve and send these automatic response without having read the inbound email. That would be amazing, and we’d all be talking about it!

Finally, the third approach is to build in “naturally viral” components to your product. This is not always possible, but when it is, it works wonders. The very act of using a viral product like this helps promote it — the way Hotmail worked in the 1990s, or Instagram in the 2000s.

It won’t be easy, but if you can remove effort from your sales process and get your products closer to the ideal of selling themselves, you’ll add an incredible amount of efficiency to your business — and the rewards will be great.

The post Your Product Is Your Go-to-Market Strategy. Here’s Why. appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Dear brands, we love you but you have been making a mess of our Facebook newsfeeds with your constant, inappropriate selling, content and updates.

Please stop!

Ever logged into Facebook to be social and interact, only to see a brand trying to sell to you right there? I cringe at the sight of misplaced advertising and selling.

A whopping 66% of brands do not have a Facebook strategy, and brands that do have a Facebook strategy do not have it documented – hence, there’s nothing to implement. Nobody goes to the grocery store without a grocery list, so don’t jump on the Facebook train without a strategy!

Here’s a whole list of Facebook marketing mistakes and sins almost every brand is committing;

1. Posting less content and inconsistently

By posting on Facebook inconsistently and inappropriately you tell your audience, “Dear customer, we are busy doing more important things, therefore, we have no time to be human and keep you updated about us”.

Organic page reach on Facebook is declining. Now more than ever, engagement should be a priority.

Solution: Create an editorial calendar for Facebook, and focus on inspiring your audience. A perfect example of a brand succeeding at this would be SaaS Company Post Planner. Their Facebook updates are consistent and their content is great. Hence, engagement is off the roof.

2. Always begging for engagement or likes

Most brands publish content that screams, “We need likes!” or they ask users to like the post and bleh bleh bleh in Dracula’s voice (like-bait post).

Well, the bitter truth is Facebook will actually bury such a post. Don’t post visuals or updates asking fans to like or comment, as this tells the world how desperate your brand is and your lack of a social media strategy.

Facebook users like myself visit to share photos, watch funny ferret or cat videos, and catch up on the latest happenings in my circle; what do you think I would do seeing a brand asking for likes? I either skip the content or come pour out my heart in your comments (you don’t want the latter).

Solution: Provide a lot of helpful content regularly, and put up “real questions” that spark engagement.

3. Not paying to play

Truth be told, brands can’t market or fully reach individual Facebook audiences without paying. So to get more eyes on your content, you must be willing to pay Facebook.

You don’t publish and pray and expect it to rain likes and comments; with great content you should get a healthy organic reach but want a larger reach? Pay to play.

Solution: Facebook admitted it several times that organic page reach is decreasing. However, using the “boost post” feature would instantly get more eyes and engagement on your brand and content.

4. Ignoring the fact that the world is mobile

Facebook statistics as at March 2016 have shown that there are over 1.65 billion monthly active Facebook users, and a whopping 1.51 billion of these are mobile users or visitors.

These numbers are too huge to ignore. Brands should optimize their Facebook pages for mobile users; having cropped out visuals or missing page components damages the user experience.

Take, for example, the visuals below: the visual on Coca-Cola’s cover was optimized for desktops only, making mobile visitors to the page believe Coca-Cola has some spiritual agenda.

Now take a look at the mobile version of the same cover

Choosing what now Coca-Cola? Have they gone spiritual?

5. Publishing the wrong type of content

You don’t plant a potato and harvest marshmallows. The same applies to content and engagement on Facebook; using irrelevant hashtags or twisting up trends can be a bad blow for business.

For example, the visual below:

Having made up Star Wars day isn’t enough, brands have to make it even more contrived and use an absurd hashtag.

Want to grow a following on Facebook or increase engagement? Posting inappropriate comments and pictures, using click bait, being all about traffic and sales would not work!

Damn, you are so greedy and we can see it! However, Facebook is cracking down on click-bait posts and will continually drown them in the newsfeed; be original and creative.

Solution: Publishing behind-the-scenes pictures of employees, pictures of products, videos or pictures of a typical day at the company or events, holidays and birthdays will increase brand perception, engagement, and page likes.

Brands should not rely on Facebook marketing to make sales. The truth is everyone hates being sold.

6. Not engaging customers in comments

Another deadly sin brands make includes not engaging fans in comments. Being social involves you interacting with fans, asking questions and responding.

Brands should be involved in the conversation in their Facebook comments, responding to feedback, lending a helping hand or increasing engagement creatively.

Solution: Engage fans in your comments, address feedback and spread the brand image.

7. Trying to sell every time

Too much of selling beats the purpose of being social. Brands should abstain from selling and focus more on user experience, building a community and providing value. That way, users remain loyal and increase their spending potential to your brand through the law of reciprocity.

Solution: Facebook is rolling out the shop store for Facebook pages, simply add your products into your shop and users can buy once they visit your page.

8. Ignoring or deleting negative feedback or comments

Handling trolls and negative feedback requires a dedicated Facebook team, patience and creativity. Brands are expected to respond to trolls and negative comments in a respectful and playful tone to keep the community mood light and friendly or it might result in disastrous PR for that brand.

Solution: Tara Hornor wrote an epic post with tips on handling Trolls and negative comments.

9. Ignoring advanced Facebook advertising

Advertising on Facebook does not end with clicking “Boost Post”. For instance, you could create a lookalike audience based on subscribers already on your mailing list, who are on Facebook, and send targeted ads to them.

The true potential of Facebook advertising cannot be quantified; brands should take specific steps in creating ads that offer great incentives while achieving business goals.

Solution: Use Facebook’s Power Editor to create ads to gain leads and advertise new products, but don’t spam your users’ newsfeed.

10. Refusing to evolve like Facebook’s algorithm

Facebook changes its algorithm randomly; the latest changes in the Facebook algorithm include bringing content to users based on previous interaction.

Brands are expected to keep up with the latest updates to ensure a consistent user experience in regards to content, cover photos, and ads.

Solution: Brands should bookmark (literally) the Facebook for pages web page to stay updated with the latest algorithm updates and implement to increase engagement and brand perception.

Sum up

Facebook marketing requires creativity, A/B testing, and constantly staying ahead of the latest changes from Facebook. For a brand to successfully reach, inspire and engage its audience, the above solutions are required.

What other sins do you see brands commit on Facebook? I would like to know in the comments section.

As email marketers, we face problems that closely resemble hurdles seen in the dating world. (Editor’s note: or the parenting world.) Sometimes, no matter how determined we are and no matter how many times we try to get some kind of response from an email recipient, it just doesn’t happen.

Sometimes we get consistently denied and ignored by our recipients. The worst part is we have much more visibility into our recipient’s actions or inactions, in this case, compared to the dating world (or it might be the better part; the ambiguity around dating can be one of the most difficult things). The hardest decision to make as an email marketer is when to stop trying and give up on these particular recipients. Too many email marketers never do; they continue this fruitless endeavor indefinitely, harming their email sending reputation in the process.

These recipients I’m referring to are (appropriately) referred to as unengaged email recipients.

Perseverance is a virtue, and “Never give up!” is a battle cry. But as tempting as it may be to keep trying, to continue sending to these particular recipients, it may end up hurting your overall deliverability and effectiveness in reaching out to the people who are more likely to welcome your email to their inboxes.

The email metrics that indicate they’re just not that into you

Many marketers in the email environment have a general knowledge and overview of deliverability and engagement, but most of them may not be able to identify all the metrics that affect deliverability.

• The first, and most obvious, metric to point out is opens and clicks. These metrics are fairly simple and straightforward. The more opens and clicks you receive from your recipients the higher your engagement
• The second, and still somewhat obvious, metric is spam complaints, in which recipients identify and mark your email as spam. This particular metric can surely and effectively bring down your engagement and overall deliverability

The one thing you may not notice (but your recipients probably will) is the inbox placement of your emails. As an example:

A prospect signs up for a weekly or monthly newsletter from you, and since you pack it with great content, they look forward to getting it. But you’re starting to get blocked by some ISPs, and that newsletter doesn’t arrive in their inbox. (They may find it in their spam folder if they look there.) They may think you’ve forgotten them, or they may think you’ve gone out of business.

Other examples would be webinar signup confirmations, and so on. Recipients that have opted in, or signed up for emails, may notice that they aren’t getting them. But you, the sender, will NOT know.

The point is: the lower your engagement metrics are with your overall recipients, the likelier it is that your emails will have trouble reaching the inboxes of those recipients who do want your email.

ISP as Big Brother

This makes sense when you look at it more closely: A recipient sees an email in his inbox that he is unfamiliar with, or that he knows he doesn’t want, and he marks it as spam. This action tells the email client to notify the user’s ISPs (Internet Service Provider). Think of an ISP as an overprotective older brother in this scenario. This notification from the email client tells the ISP that this email is definitely unwanted email (remember the definition of spam: it’s not necessarily junk mail; it’s any email the user no longer wants to receive, and it could be mail that was originally wanted and asked for). Therefore, any future emails you send to this user will get marked as spam. The more of these complaints you receive, the more often ISPs will tend to step in and proactively mark your emails as spam placing all of your emails to that particular domain in the spam/junk folder. Imagine getting blacklisted from Gmail.

Let’s get back to unengaged recipients. This is something that most of you will overlook when considering engagement metrics that affect your deliverability. I understand. If they are not identifying and marking your emails as spam, or taking any other negative action, then how can they possibly hurt your deliverability?

Well, remember the overprotective older brother – the recipient’s ISP – I mentioned earlier? Those ISPs notice all the fruitless attempts you’ve made sending to those long-term unengaged recipients (they notice everything). They have algorithms in place that will score your sender reputation and engagement. If your engagement rate is low enough (combined with the other metrics I talked about) it will essentially hurt your inbox placement across the board at that domain, making it more difficult for you to reach even your active, engaged audience.

This means that all the recipients you have engaged with on that domain – and new recipients you’re trying to establish a relationship with – will effectively not receive your emails.

The more you keep sending to unengaged recipients the more you’ll see your emails begin landing up in the spam folder. Right next to emails advertising those dating websites. You see the irony.

Still unengaged? It’s past time to take a hint

When is it time to give up on those unresponsive names? The answer to this question can vary quite a bit from organization to organization. There is no direct science to it but you want to focus on the size of your list, and the cadence and volume in which you send.

If you send daily, with a large volume, then you may want to think about cutting back on your sends to unengaged recipients much sooner than a sender who sends only once a month. Also be mindful of the ratio of engaged and unengaged recipients you have on your list. If you have a high ratio of engaged vs. unengaged recipients, then it is less likely ISPs will bring down your sending and engagement reputation. The question you may have is “What’s the benchmark ratio?” There’s no one answer to that; it depends on a host of factors. Track your own ratio, create your own benchmarks, and protect your engagement rate by removing unengaged recipients off your list.

Biting the bullet

It sounds simple, “remove unengaged recipients from your mailing lists,” and it’s easy to think about, but it’s hard to do.

Nobody likes to see their list shrink, and if you don’t have a healthy flow of new leads coming in, it seems like a very negative thing to do (and your boss, and the sales team, may not like seeing the number of leads go down). But you really do have only two viable choices:

• Remove those no-action-names completely from your mailing lists
• Do a re-engagement campaign. And if you pick this option and they still don’t engage, then just do it – take them off your list

The main point to take away here is to pay attention to your unengaged recipients. They only look harmless; ISPs are weighing engagement more heavily, and so you risk your deliverability by allowing those addresses to stick around. Think hard about how much risk you can take, and whether there’s any reward past keeping your list at a certain size, no matter how meaningless those unengaged names are. Email gets kudos for being inexpensive, and the fact that these numbers don’t appear to be costing you much (in direct costs) is misleading. They can and, sooner or later, will hurt your bottom line.

So you wash them out of your lists – what are you really losing? Someone who wasn’t interested in you anyway, so it’s not a loss at all, but a net gain in favor of your email reputation and deliverability. Now it’s time to get creative with your lead generation efforts and replace those cold fish with engaged leads who will be interested to hear from you.

The art of successful email marketing depends first and last upon proactive deliverability management. Download Act-On’s eBook, Best Practices in Email Deliverability to learn tips and tricks that will help you manage the critical factors that affect the deliverability of your email messages.

Ready to grow your business? Here are some high-level ideas to get you started NOW.

Owning a business is like running a fantasy football team, you always look forward to Mondays.

Once you taste a little success, you want growth. And when you’re chasing after that growth, you often fall in love with the journey. They say the chase is the fun part anyways, right?

Reading business websites like Forbes is not enough to take your business to the next level. You need to take action.

If you plan on achieving some hockey stick growth in the near future, then you’re in the right place. I’ve spent the last decade building and selling businesses, but I’m not here to talk about myself. I’m here to help you grow your business as much as possible…

Business growth only happens in three different ways:

1. Getting more customers. The more people that buy, the more money you make.
2. Raising your prices. You’ll make more money off of each transaction.
3. Improving your conversions. Increasing the frequency that your average customer buys from you and getting each customer to buy more often.

This post will cover all three. And even if you aren’t as far along with your business, this post will give you the ingredients to scale quickly and efficiently whenever you are ready.

Are you ready to scale your business? Let’s dive in.

1. Repair Your Sales Funnel

The first and arguably the most important factor when it comes to scaling your business is your sales funnel. If you haven’t thought long and hard about your sales funnel, then yesterday is the perfect time to start.

Also referred to as a customer acquisition funnel, your sales funnel is the ideal process that takes customers from being a prospect to being a paying customer. It’s what takes you from seeing a random ad on Facebook to reading a blog post to receiving a free Ebook and then to finally making a purchase.

Think of your sales funnel like a real funnel (I know this is hard because I’ve never owned a funnel, but let’s pretend). The more leaks your funnel has, the more customers spill out along the way. The stronger your funnel, the less spills you have, and the more money you earn.

If you haven’t examined your funnel, chances are there are MANY leaks that you don’t know about. Most funnels work something like this:

Traffic → Free Content (lead magnet) → Helpful Free Content → Email Follow Up → Sale

To be honest, all of my businesses used to look like that as well. Then we realized we were leaving a ton of money on the table.

Here are some mistakes that we’ve made over the last few years that I see a lot of other businesses making as well.

Too many steps in the funnel: You can only ask people for something so many times until they say no. If you have many steps in your funnel and looks something like the following, then you’re losing sales:

Paid traffic → FB page → free content → email opt-in → $10 product → $25 product → Webinar → $100 product → $700 product

Each step is going to yield a dropout rate. The more steps, the more people will drop out. It’s as simple as that. The more steps, offers and products in the funnel, the more people are going to say “no” and once they’re gone, it’s difficult to get them back. It’s better to have a tighter funnel that consists of 2-4 steps and to retarget people who have dropped out.

While too many steps can be a bad thing you also need to make sure you are careful of having…

Not enough steps: Have you ever walked into a random store for the first time and bought a product you had never heard of for $3,000? I’m not sure about you, but I’ve never done that.

The internet works the same way. If your product is $1,000 or more, do you expect your customer to make a purchase after reading two blog posts? I hope not.

You need to have a tripwire, or a low dollar product that gives people the option to make a low-risk choice and test your company out. Once they buy from you, if they like what they’ve bought, they’ll be more likely to use that credit card again and buy your more expensive products.

We’ve played around with our tripwires, pricing things at as low as $7 and as high as $97. It really depends on your product and how familiar people are with your brand, but I definitely recommend testing this out for yourself.

Too many funnels: At one point, Drop Ship Lifestyle had four different funnels with four different lead magnets and four different tripwires. In practice, this sounded great, but we quickly realized that it was extremely confusing to people that were opting in.

Sometimes people would want to buy cheaper products that weren’t offered in the original funnel that they opted in to. Other times, people were confused by the different courses and it was unclear which courses were free and which ones were paid.

The more funnels you have, the more products you need, the more email autoresponders you need, the more segmenting you need to do within your CRM software (more on that in a minute). Basically, it means that your headache potential is high.

It’s better to have one strong funnel that works than four funnels that are subpar. It also takes time to figure out how well a funnel is performing. It can take an extremely long time, especially with…

Not enough leads: Trivia time: What do you call a broken escalator?

(If you’ve watched Mitch Hedberg, you’ll know the answer…)

Answer: Stairs!

Okay, I’m sorry if you didn’t laugh….

Try to think of your funnel as an escalator, taking your leads from nothing all the way to the top floor (that’s where you make the sale). If it breaks, it becomes stairs, and nobody will move, and they’ll leave entirely and look for the elevator (which is your competitor!). If you want proof that your escalator is working efficiently, you need to get a lot of people on board.

In order to know if your funnel is working, you need to send a lot of traffic through it. Without testing it, you’ll never know, and it’s difficult to tell whether or not a funnel is converting without enough data.

“What’s enough data?” This depends on your price point (which should reflect your budget), but we aim for at least 1,000 new leads to send through a funnel (for a product that’s around $1,000) before we analyze it and see if it’s working or not.

If you’re only getting a few dozen leads per day, you’re not able to make strong observations on what’s working and what’s not. It also slows down your entire business if it takes a full month to realize that the funnel isn’t breaking even.

The solution? Use paid traffic (we prefer FB ads but there are plenty of ways) to get more leads so you can test your funnels within days instead of weeks.

Another big mistake many businesses make is that they…

Don’t ask for the sale: I see a lot of businesses shy away from asking for more. They’ll have a great lead magnet with a great opt-in offer, but once I opt-in, they stop asking. If they don’t ask me to check out their products or visit their latest blog post, I won’t, and then the interaction stops there.

Instead, you want each step in your funnel to always include an upsell. If they buy an inexpensive product, offer them an upsell on a more expensive product on your thank you page.

Here’s one of our thank you pages. Right after they bought a $47 product, they are given the option to buy a $97 product.

If they read a blog post or watch a video, ask them to sign up for your lead magnet. If they give their email address, ask them to buy your product.

If someone stumbles on your website for the first time, you want to give them the opportunity to slide down your funnel as far as they’re willing to go. If you don’t offer them an upsell after each step, then they’re not going to make it as far. It’s that simple.

On another note, I see a lot of companies that don’t go after the sale hard enough. I’m not saying you need to be extremely aggressive, but if you aren’t pushy and never get rejected, then someone else will get the sale and not you.

At a business conference I attended last year, I learned that there’s a positive correlation between how much a business makes and how long their email autoresponder is. One business claimed their email autoresponder lasted for over a year! It makes sense that they are a multi-million dollar company, because when you stop sending emails, your chances of making the sale drops to 0%.

But don’t get too busy trying to make the sale, as some point, you’ll need to take a step back in order to…

Review your funnels. Automated funnels are great, right? Once you set up everything, you can just plug and play and then never have to think about it again, right? WRONG.

If you’re not reviewing your funnels, you won’t know which ones are performing well and which ones are actually making you money. Assuming you are paying for traffic, you need to review your analytics and make sure that your funnels are profitable.

For example, back when our company had four funnels, when we looked at the numbers, we realized that one of the funnels simply was not converting.

Meanwhile, one of our funnels was converting FAR better than the rest, so we shut down the weakest funnel completely and started sending more traffic to the lead magnet that had the highest conversion rate.

This opt-in page had a 40% conversion rate, which is pretty good.

This one had a 1% conversion rate. We no longer send traffic to this page. :-)

If you have more than one funnel (and you should), then make sure to mark your calendars and schedule time to review them and make sure they’re all running profitably and efficiently. You will probably find that you’ll need to cut and increase spending according to performance

Alright, now that we’ve got our funnels behind us, time to move on to the most overlooked aspect in funnels today…

2. Live Webinars

As you can see, live webinars have been a very profitable tool.

If you haven’t hopped on the webinar train yet, then you’re doing yourself a disservice. It took us two years to start doing them regularly, but now that we’ve found a system that works, we’re not slowing down anytime soon.

Webinars work well for many reasons. They’re personable, focused, engaging, scalable, and fun. I still think it’s so cool that I can hop on a call from Vietnam and talk to people in all corners of the world all at once. Oh, and it’s FREE (for attendees).

Anyone who signs up is clearly interested in the topic, so none of your leads are completely cold. We make sure that our webinars are filled with more information than any of our lead magnets, and by doing the presentation in real time, it gives us a lot of credibility and trust. Sure, sometimes people don’t show up or you experience technical difficulties, but we’ve found ways around these issues through sending follow up emails, replays, and an email with the subject line “For those of you who hate webinars…” to address this.

I’m not talking about the same webinar strategy that you’ll read in books about recording one, replaying it, and letting it act as an automated sales funnel. Ours are different. We do them live, and we do more than one. I already wrote more about funnels than I originally intended, so in order to keep this post from being 5,000+ words, I’ll save the webinar details for a future post.

3. Private Facebook Group

Having a Facebook group where people can connect and chat is valuable. I’m not sold on pushing your leads to Facebook (it’s distracting as we all know!), but the important part here is that you have somewhere to push your leads to.

Sure, perhaps they can comment on your blog post, but how often does that turn into a conversation weeks down the line? How often will your question get answered by someone else? If you have a huge blog with a loyal fan base, then sure. But if not, it’s better to direct people to one casual group that you control.

Public accountability works well and FB groups are a great way to do that. We also have current customers answering questions by saying, “Buy the full course,” which is incredible.

Our Facebook group is getting more active by the day, and people are starting to help each other out as well as promote our most expensive products for us! It’s a great way to maintain a community without much maintenance.

Plus, since it’s on Facebook, nobody expects it to be extremely formal, so you can treat it however you like. If people ask questions, you’re able to provide value publicly, which not only helps others with the same questions but helps you gain trust. Everyone spends hours on Facebook everyday mine as well give them the chance to be productive.

Obviously, there are better ways out there to communicate than Facebook, which takes us to our next point…

4. Don’t Just Build An Email List, Engage

This should be obvious, but if you’re not building your email list, you better get going. If you’re not sure why then you should probably revisit this blog when you are further along in your business.

The bad news is that you should have already started building our email list, the good news? If you’ve built a business without one, then your potential for growth is enormous.

If you’ve just started to collect email addresses, it’s time to double down on your lead magnet and get more. Having an email list is incredibly valuable. As of March 2016, my biggest email list is 84,914. We’re currently getting a few hundred leads a day, so this number is only growing.

It took over three years (and a lot of money on paid traffic) to get it to that number, so don’t be discouraged if you’re just starting out.

Once you get an email address, it’s a waste of time and money if you don’t engage. You need to be sending frequent emails to your list, and your emails need to be engaging and valuable. If you send email blasts every other day selling your products without providing value, then people will stop opening your emails.

In your emails, make sure you’re solving a problem or at the very least entertaining people.

Here are a few of the types of emails we send out to our list:

Indoctrination Sequence: Once people opt-in, we send them through an indoctrination (or welcome) series. In these four emails, we ask them several captivating questions helping people open up. This gives us AMAZING data (the more we know about our customer’s problems, the easier it is to solve them) and also makes it clear that we want to build a relationship. It’s WIN-WIN.

Lead Magnet Autoresponder: These emails provide people with the FREE lead magnet they signed up for, but also adds a little spice to it. We provide advice on how to use our products better, try to answer their questions, and hit on the challenges that we know they are going through at this given time. These continue the relationship and keep us fresh in their minds.

Webinar Sequence: Webinars are like icebergs. The majority of the work goes unseen, and when done right, they help you make A TON OF MONEY (Titanic, anyone?).

For every 60-minute webinar, we send 2-3 emails promoting the webinar, two more reminder emails to those who signed up, and then 5-10 follow-up emails to those who attended and 5-10 for people who missed the webinar. It’s a lot of emails (luckily I have someone on board who helps me write them), but it’s definitely worth it.

Newsletter: Once people join our community and buy our product, we continue to provide value to them by sending them monthly newsletters. This varies depending on your business model, but it’s not a bad idea to continue the relationship after people have bought your product. If your business has a recurring billing model, then you need to be sending newsletters/updates.

Our newsletters’ sole purpose is to help our current customers even more. We want to remind them they made the right decision (buying our course) and motivate them. The ROI on this isn’t immediate, but our customers love hearing from us.

Broadcasts: This is usually for people who haven’t bought. You would expect these broadcasts to be filled sales pitches, right? That’s the OPPOSITE of what we do. Broadcast emails are for big announcements and FREE content. We send out blog posts (like this one), podcast interviews, videos, and other helpful content that is completely free.

(In future posts, we’ll be going into more detail on how to craft great emails, when to send them, and more.)

You might be thinking, “Wow, this is a lot to keep track of. How do I organize this?”

5. A is for Apple, C is for CRM

For those of you who forgot, CRM stands for customer relationship management. Why is CRM important? Because if you want to scale your business, you need to care about your customers. That means tracking who bought what and studying the metrics.

Since we’ve upgraded our CRM software and have paid more attention to it, we’ve been able to pinpoint which funnels perform well (see #1), which emails have the highest open rate, and which steps people are dropping out on. It enables us to maintain an overview of how everything takes place, which helps us stay organized and keep tabs on every lead and customer that comes our way.

We used to use Ontraport and now we use InfusionSoft. Both have worked well for the most part. Having either will help you segment your email list so you can track who you’re talking to and tag them appropriately. One of our goals in the upcoming year is to start optimizing our CRM tracking, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, if all of this sounds overwhelming, no need to worry, it’s time to…

6. Delegate Like It’s Your Job (it is)

A lot of business owners suffer from what I call “superman syndrome”. They think they can do everything themselves. They write their emails, run their ads, do podcast interviews, and more. They’ve thought about hiring help, but they’re either too cheap or too scared that if they delegate it, it won’t get done properly.

These fears as a business owner are rational, but they are still holding you back from scaling. If you want to grow your business, you need to work on your business, not just in it. Even though you think you’re the best at writing your sales copy or running your Facebook campaigns, it’s not the best way to spend your time. Plus, there are experts out there that can do it better than you. Sorry, superman.

Hiring can be a scary thing, so it’s important to be careful when bringing on new team members. While hiring someone to replace you right now may seem like a step backward, in the long run, it’ll definitely be a forward LEAP if you do it right.

Hire people that will do their job better than you can do it. For example, our tech guy knows way more about landing pages and analytics than I do. Our paid traffic girl knows WAY more about Facebook ads than I do, and our content writer is far more creative than I am (he wrote that line but I let him keep it in because it’s true!)

Instead of writing the content myself, running the ads, and then checking the data, I leave it to my team, allowing myself to focus on growing the company while they maintain it.

Some people feel like they need to touch every single aspect of the business in order to be confident that it’s running well. Here’s a good rule: if you can hire somebody who can your job 90% as well as you can, then do it.

You’re not going to find someone who can do it as good as you right now. But if you hire them now and it is their full-time job to get better at that skill, sooner or later they’ll be able to do that task better than you.

7. Pay For Traffic The Right Way

In order to get paid traffic right the first time (which is what you want because it means not wasting tons of money), you’ve got to mull over the following core questions:

The first question you should ask yourself is, “Who is my target audience?”

If you’re selling arch-support heels for old ladies with calluses, you’re probably not going to want to target Male’s age 18-24.

Brainstorm and figure out who actually WANTS or NEEDS your products. Then, write it all down. You need to make your very own avatar. No, not the blue kind from Pandora, a customer avatar of your ideal customer.

What’s his/her age? What do they do in their free time? How much money do they make? What is their job? You should even give him/her a name. This is your ideal customer, and this is who you should target.

The next question you should ask yourself is, “Where does my target audience hang out?”

Are they Facebookers, Redditors, Tweeters, Youtubers? Just about every social online hangout space has the ability to advertise.

Or maybe they are some serious old school folks that aren’t on social media? If that’s the case, they probably browse news outlet websites or check what disease they just obtained with WebMD, so you can still target these folks with platforms such as Google Ads.

Or, perhaps your ideal audience is stuck in the early 2000’s with their Yahoo! Browser… well, guess what? You can advertise with the Yahoo! Ad Platform called Yahoo Gemini!

You definitely need to be thinking about where your audience actually IS on the internet, and then digging further to see how you can speak to them in the places they ALREADY visit. (Don’t worry we will cover more on each Ad Platform, and how to use each, in the future)

The third and final question we’ll cover here is, “How do I speak to my target audience?”

When you are asking your target audience for their email address in exchange for a free download or another lead generator, you need to be able to adequately speak to this person in his/her language.

You need to be able to persuade them to give you their email address through text alone. This isn’t always easy.

There a few ways in which we prefer to do this.

• Tell your audience what they are going to get/gain out of giving you their email address.

• Use emotions, tell your audience how this lead generator will inspire them, or make them better at their life or job, etc.

• Ask yourself, “How will this download make your target audience’s life easier? Or how it make their life more efficient?” Then spell it out in words that they use.

• Finally, show your target audience proof. What have others accomplished by using this Lead Generator? What have others said about your program or business?

Ask yourself these three core questions before you jump on to any Ad Platform, and if you answer each one truthfully and tailored to your business, you should see a high ROI.

On top of paid traffic, it’s also a good idea to…

8. Content Market Like a Queen

One area you should definitely be delegating is content marketing. Why? Because it’s extremely time-consuming. Sure, every now and then you can write a new email or blog post, but if you are going to produce content on a regular basis (which you should), you should bring someone on board or hire an agency to help out.

“What kind of content should I make?”

If your content is not helping the reader, it’s not going to help your business. Your content needs to be valuable and easy to follow.

As far as what platform to use, here are some options with some pros and cons, but remember, engagement is what matters most:

Blog: Blogging is not dead. Not even close. If it were, do you think we’d be publishing this post right now? Blogging is great because it’s easy to set up and get going, but writing is hard and takes time to put out an in-depth post. That’s why we have a content creator on board.

It took Jeremy several hours to write and edit this post, while it took me less than twenty minutes to read through it and add my two cents. We’ll be going over our exact blogging process and how we get the most out each article down the line.

Social Media: I’ll admit, we don’t do a very good job at this. But that’s okay, because I’m proud to say that we are not spread too thin. We don’t use Twitter, SnapChat, or Instagram. We have a Facebook page, but we don’t have a posting schedule, we just wing it. Social media is a great way to engage with your customers and to do so FAST.

One issue with this is people’s’ attention span keeps getting less and less. The problem here is that you can’t half-ass social media. If you’re on Twitter, people are going to expect you to respond within minutes rather than days. We plan to experiment with this in the future as we grow.

YouTube: This is another area that we haven’t focused on recently, but I’ve seen a lot of companies have success with it. We are able to get leads for extremely cheap by advertising on other YouTube channels and sending them back to our channel. Then, once they watched one of our videos, they are able to opt-in to our lead magnet (shown below).

We don’t put out new YouTube videos anymore, but having a backlog of videos definitely gives us credibility. The great thing about content is the more you have, the easier it becomes to backlink and cross promote. We link to YouTube videos in your blog posts all the time, letting people consume as much context as possible until they are ready to buy.

The blog has been our main focus since late 2015, but that may change if I decide to start a video blog. Those are becoming more and more popular, but I’m not sure if I want to be on camera that much. Plus, vlogs require a lot of work, and the main reason I haven’t started one yet is because in order to grow a business, you need to…

9. Focus. Focus. Focus (Your Products)

Don’t fall into this trap. The main reason Drop Ship Lifestyle continues to grow and succeed is because the main product has not changed over the years. Sure, we’ve updated the courses, improved the videos, and added information, but the coaching program we sell today is the same 7-module video course that it was in 2013 when we launched.

Similar to your funnel, if you complicate your business by adding too many products, it can lead to a lot of confusion. Adding products and levels can sound appealing, but it can do more harm if it’s not done correctly.

Over the years, we’ve been able to raise our prices because we’ve improved our course and made it better by trimming a ton of fat and making it easy to consume. We didn’t try to add on an upsell of products that were semi-related. We’ve grown because we’ve made sure our product is the best ecommerce course on drop shipping out there and then we focused a ton of energy marketing it.

Notice we didn’t just raise the price randomly, we increased the price while adding more value and improving the product. If you want to charge more, you’ve got to bring more value to the table. The best way to do this is to provide additional products or services that helps people get their desired result faster. Que the segway…

10. Go Premium or Go Home

If you’re familiar with the 80/20 principle, then you can assume that 20% of your customers will generate 80% of your sales. It sounds impossible, but it’s pretty accurate. Especially when you offer a premium product.

As we mentioned earlier, when you offer premium, you need to add value along with the price tag. Here are some examples on how to make your product premium:

• Offer done-for-you services (For example, DSL builds you a website if you go premium)

• Offer 1-on-1 coaching/training

• VIP treatment (people love to think they are “special”)

• Adding additional products (guides, conference tickets, etc.)

• Expedite (if you offer a service, deliver the results faster)

• Warranties

• And more…

People with a lot of money are used to paying for convenience. So, if you offer a high priced product as it is, chances are there are few customers out there that would pay double, triple, or even quadruple that. It’s up to you to figure out how to provide more value.

11. Build a Public Profile (because people care)

In the age of the internet, it’s never been easier to establish a relationship with your customers. It baffles me how so many business owners still hide behind their laptops and never make an attempt at getting personal.

Since you’re the leader of your company, other people want to know you. The same way we want to know Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. It’s not always easy to be the figurehead, but you just have to do it.

I still don’t like getting in front of the camera, but I do it because I know people like it and I know it works. I’m sorry if you are shy and don’t like the attention. It’s your business so it’s your problem.

I laugh at all of the business websites I come across where you cannot find even the basic information on the founder/leader of the business. If your approach is to stay behind the scenes, hire a CEO who can fill your shoes or rest well at night knowing you are selling yourself short.

Get in front of the camera and record some videos every once in awhile, sign your name in the emails, and don’t be afraid to be personal. People like buying from people more than businesses. Remember that.

If you can remind your customers that behind every product and every pitch there are real people, they’ll be more likely buy. Share your experiences and tell your story. People appreciate authenticity.

12. Think Big. Then Bigger

This seems cliché, but the main reason your business isn’t growing could easily be your mindset. Are you comfortable where you currently are, making a few hundred thousand per year?

It’s easy to slip and plateau if you’re not surrounded by the right type of people and the right team members. If that’s you, make sure you set some ambitious goals and surround yourself with people who are going to hold you accountable or help you achieve them.

You’d be surprised how many people don’t actually aim high because they assume there is too much competition. It’s actually the opposite. There’s less competition the further up you go, because most people don’t want to fight to get there. If you’re going to dream, you mine as well dream big

Become a High-Performance Marketer

Alright, I know this wasn’t exactly a short post, so if you made it until the end I hope you got a lot of value out of this. We’re going to be publishing two posts each month, so please subscribe if you haven’t yet. We’re also going to be opening up a community soon, so stay tuned for that.

We’ll be sharing our launch formulas, our detailed approach to paid traffic, our webinar secrets, and more, so make sure you enter your email and check back soon!

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