Our modern world is being devoured and shaped by the new Millennials that define every facet of our lives with their own terms and conditions. Yet, many of us marketers, old style and rigid to some extent, ignore this emerging goliath and still focus on business values and modern-looking websites.

The question is not what you can provide to your customers. Rather, the question is how excited can you get this generation, so that they will stand in line to buy your product? That is the power soft education, empowerment, and a core value based approach has on this Millennial generation. It is about building a relationship of trust and doing a dance with your customers in real-time. CMS platforms just become a product and a tool that enables this complex relationship, which is driven to the core by content, context, and marketing strategy.

In the past, brands have been the sum of its parts that have propelled companies to stardom, but with changing times, it has become a collection of micro-experiences that are delivered to your new age customers via value, promotions, content across every touch point, device and platform. It is no longer about how valuable your brand is; the new mantra is how your customer perceives it across touch points like smartphones and tablets.

The goal here is to create something so simple that it hides the complexity of technology from them and exposes the simplicity of the experience. How cool and vanguard your technology is has no worth to this new Millennial. If you can find a way to reach them, then they will find a way to put you at the forefront of stardom; in front of millions without a single dime of marketing expense.

It is this need to focus on customer value, their needs, their preferences and their behavioral buying journey that is defining new marketers’ business strategies. CMSs like Sitecore are just products. If you focus on the product then there are many to choose from, hence focus on this confluence of technology and unique customer journey to create a value proposition to be reckoned with. Create something that provides instant gratification and you will notice that the buying decision immediately shifts from being a rational one to one that is based on emotion.

The key component of this core customer journey lies in context and content marketing. This is where you design and retool yourself to meet your customer expectation at their own terms, where they need it, and when they need it across all channels. This is your eureka moment where you become part of the solution. Marketers need to figure out how we churn this big context and content soup to build trust with their customers, providing relevant and critical information at the right moment to create a performance multiplier. This is what brands like Uber and Starbucks have exemplified to their advantage: information at the customer’s fingertips and most importantly- simplicity.

Do cloud contracts need to change in light of potential economic uncertainty to become more flexible?

Navigating without a map – the new cloud market

Depending on which side of the fence we sit (cloud or non-cloud) – the changed tech landscape is here to stay, and as Microsoft Azure stretches out ahead of competitors, how do traditional resellers and private cloud providers continue to drive sales in this new world? Especially in a time of economic uncertainty, when we don’t yet know what tomorrow will hold in terms of financial market performance, or job cuts.

One of the issues with cloud is that, in most cases, the revenue per project no longer equals the revenue that would have occurred had hardware and infrastructure been purchased. Many vendors are struggling with this predicament, as quotas and sales targets always go up – and if people as a whole are buying less to do what they need – then where will those extra sales come from? You can’t outrun the market for ever – so despite the difficulties selling a service over hardware, there is the fundamental fact that the makeup of IT budgets has changed. Coupled with the potential for a few years of slower growth and the gap between sales and quota grows.

That’s not to say IT budgets in general are getting lower, but the market for compute is reducing – as servers get more powerful and more can be done ‘with less’ – and for even cheaper, if purchased from a multi-tenant cloud environment.

Moore’s law around processor technology is great for customers, but has become a headache for hardware sales reps trying to recoup their lost earnings. Many traditional resellers are now reselling public cloud services in a bid to plug the gap in traditional earnings, but perhaps they have to look at the wider IT landscape – and figure out what IT buyers are spending their money on today. Information Age predicts that by 2020, 44% of IT budgets will be driven towards Internet of Things technology so is this something that resellers and cloud service providers should be getting behind now, rather than waiting for a new wave of providers to disrupt their market? This is very much in the same vein as when cloud service providers came onto the scene and disrupted the traditional hardware reseller model, and resellers rushed to have a competing offering.

Of course, many hardware resellers are still around and doing very well today, but the market has changed and it has become much more competitive. These businesses are no longer competing on service quality or price alone; the tables have turned completely and they are having to sell against cloud services in Tier 1 datacentres that may be half the cost of their offering.

It can be tricky to sell an intangible service. An intangible product requiring long term investment, which might not show obvious advantages for an extended period of time, goes against the grain of many ROI calculations that vendors hand out for traditional hardware sales.

What is the return on investment for a new analytics solution? Perhaps the results are only going to be visible six months down the line when it is integrated into the marketing function. And if there was no analytics solution in place before then how do you demonstrate an ROI – compared to upgrading to the latest server that has a 4 month ROI compared to its predecessor.

Shifting perspective

Selling a service like the cloud requires a shift in perspective. Customers buying cloud services want to hear different things than customers purchasing on-premise hardware. Security may come to the fore, when previously, they were comfortable with handling the security requirements of their in-house datacentre infrastructure themselves. It was a known unknown.

When trying to motivate customers to move away from on-premise hardware to the cloud, it is the salesperson’s job to pick up on what the real issues are that are holding them back from making their decision.

The problem that prospects raise is often not the one that really matters to them, it is shadowing a real concern that they don’t want to voice. Or perhaps, they don’t even realise it is not the true reason.

Building up a list of the common concerns you come across from customers, aligned with how you can overcome these claims will enable you to address these issues early on in the sales cycle, so that they are handled and put to one side, sooner rather than later.

Change your message

Businesses, particularly small ones, may balk at longterm, committed payment plans when it comes to shifting from Capex to Opex, especially in turbulent and uncertain economic times. Cloud requires people to commit – unless you are using a ‘true’ elastic, public cloud – but even these come with strings attached that are difficult to extricate yourself from. Whereas cloud was once seen as a way of reducing cost, could the market move back to making capital expenditures on hardware in a bid to reduce ongoing, long-term costs and contracts?

The tip of the iceberg

Technology is a great tool for enabling businesses to grow and save money. What other product could you sell that could offer the same business enabling benefits as technology? We’ve discussed previously how you can structure a sales pitch, and the points discussed there still stand. The benefits you present need to be tied into the larger business perspective. How do the benefits provided by a feature link into the broader business goals? How will increased work efficiency brought about by the cloud allow a company to hit its long term targets? How does increased security allow a company to tackle upcoming challenges or threats? What are the long term outcomes of better integration between departments? All these questions and more need to be already answered by your sales team and presented to the prospective client.

But you do need to weigh up the risk that economic uncertainty is bringing to the table – is this a massive factor for the customer that is going to overshadow any decision they make? Do cloud contracts need to change in light of potential economic uncertainty to become more flexible?

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The U.K. voted to leave the EU last Thursday, which has driven volatility in markets across the globe, the resignation of the British prime minister, and a call for a Scottish Independence Referendum.

Although the specific next steps still haven't been outlined, the reactions to the results could have far-reaching implications on the payments industry.

• Cross-border payments could be impacted by the strong dollar: The British pound has tanked relative to the US dollar since the decision, and the euro has also dropped. As the dollar strengthens, US goods become more expensive and therefore less attractive to foreign buyers, limiting outbound commerce from non-US countries. Likewise, purchases made in foreign currencies become less valuable when translated in US dollar terms. A sustained drop in these currencies could suppress international volume for US-based payment companies with cross-border operations, like card networks and money transfer operators (MTOs). 
• But remittance companies could actually benefit from currency volatility: Remittance companies partly earn money based on the difference between the exchange rate applied to the sender and the exchange rate applied at payout. Remittance firms calculate an exchange based on the day's rate for a given currency, but they also add a mark-up of 1% to 3% on top of that rate to earn revenue. Volatile currencies could allow remittance players to grab additional margin to compensate for the volatility and risk, Samish Kumar, CEO of Transfast, told BI Intelligence. 
• Interchange rates could be altered in the UK: Interchange fees are determined by the card networks, but they're capped by the EU, which the UK is currently a part of. This means that the EU's fee caps apply to the UK, according to Richard Willis, partner at Alston & Bird's Financial Services & Products Group. However, if the UK officially splits from the EU in the future, it could gain control over its own interchange fee caps, which could affect the revenue various payment providers collect on transactions.

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If you are beginning to see some growth in sales and wonder where should you be spending your time to make sure that you keep on growing, there’s one metric we recommend that you start looking at today: Page Load Time.

Why? First, page load time is completely under your control, after all it depends only on the work you do on your own website.

Second (and most important), speed is something you need to be working on if you’re serious about user experience and sales because, as I’ll be showing in this article, consumers love fast websites.

What is Page Load Time?

Websites are usually built in a programming language called HTML, which basically performs two functions:

• Displays text
• Requests that your browser downloads the other components that make a website, such as styles (colors, fonts, margins, etc.), images, video, audio, Javascript (pieces of code that add interactivity to the page), etc.

The time it takes for a web browser to download all of that and load the page for you is the page load time.

If you’ve downloaded any files off the internet before, you know that smaller files download faster than larger ones. The same principle applies to websites. When you reduce the size of the files that form your site, your pages load faster.

Now, this sounds simple enough, but it requires some technical knowledge to do it. If you don’t have the available resources to work on it, we recommend that you hire someone to fix it for you. (We’ve added technical information about this at the end of the article.)

If you’re thinking that spending money to make files smaller isn’t worth it, I understand your skepticism. I didn’t believe it until I saw it for myself in an ecommerce company where I worked a few years ago.

The company’s site had a big issue with page load speed. But as our pages got faster, our conversion rates started soaring. Speed translated directly into revenue growth. We were now ranking on the first page of Google for terms that didn’t rank at all a month earlier. It was incredible.

But don’t take it from my anecdotal evidence. Check out the following data from more than 1,000 companies and case studies showing how increasing page load speed impacts sales and revenue.

The Business Impact of Page Load Time

Since 2010, page load time has been added as one of the ranking factors utilized by Google rankings. While some say it’s not a particularly strong ranking signal in itself, it’s a metric that has a domino effect on other important metrics, including sales and revenue.

A study by Amazon concluded that if their pages load just one second too long it could cost them $1.6 billion in sales each year. Google discovered that if their search results take just four tenths of a second longer they could lose 8 million searches per day, which ultimately leads to huge losses in ad revenue.

 

 

Some small and medium-sized businesses can also benefit from working on page load time to generate revenue. UGears, which produces self-assembled, high quality mechanical models, had a successful crowdfunding campaign, raising over $400,000, but they needed to build a long term, sustainable revenue source.

Running a free website audit tool, Plug in SEO, they identified specific issues they could improve, including page load time, on-page SEO and blog. Now, 25% of their revenue comes from organic sources, and that percentage is growing. UGears co-founder Dmitry comments: “We can clearly feel the increase in sales following the page load improvements.”

If you put yourself in the shoes of an average consumer, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. With higher competition and lower attention spans, every millisecond counts. An article by The New York Times titled “For Impatient Web Users, an Eye Blink Is Just Too Long to Wait” showed that users begin getting frustrated after waiting for just 400 milliseconds for web pages to load.

At Compass, we have access to a growing data set that tracks over $6 billion in annual ecommerce transactions. When we crunched the numbers to measure how load speed impacts the most important business metrics for hundreds of online stores, this is what we found:

Revenue increases by more than 16% if you improve average loading time from 3.5 to 0.5 seconds

On average, companies earn 2.3% more in revenue for every second their page load time improves. For instance, if you improve your average page load time from 7.5 to 3.5 seconds (which is not that hard to do), your revenue can grow by 10%.

For those companies operating faster websites, improving speed can be more difficult but also more rewarding. As you can see by the blue line in the graph below, if you your page load time goes from just 3.5 to 0.5 seconds, for example, revenue can grow by more than 15%.

Revenue improves with page speed improvements because visitors bounce less and convert more. In other words, when people come to a fast website they tend to browse around and shop more than they do in slow sites.

If your page takes 2 extra seconds to load, bounce rates go up 5%

Bounce Rate is a metric that evaluates how many people leave your site without performing any action, which strongly indicates that they’re not having a good experience.

Following the red line in the graph below, you can see that slow websites have considerably higher bounce rates than fast ones.

If your site is slow, people get impatient and “bounce” to shop elsewhere. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Since a bounce only counts only when a user allows a page to load fully and then leaves, slow websites are probably losing a lot more people than our numbers indicate.

Sales go down 12% for every second it takes for your page to load

Conversion rate is a metric that calculates how many of your website visitors convert into shoppers. Following the red line in the graph below, you can see that page load time has a direct impact on conversion rates.

The slower your website is, the worse your conversion rate and sales will be. You can see also that the curve is not linear. Again, the faster your website is, the more it has to gain by improving it further.

Bad conversion rates have a negative impact on the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, making it much more expensive for slower websites to acquire customers.

Merchants who sell cheaper products also seem to gain the most by optimizing their websites for page loading speed. As indicated by the blue line in the graph below, improving page load speed appears to have a stronger effect on ecommerce sites with an average order value that’s lower than $50.

What You Can Do to Increase Page Load Speed

As demonstrated, investing in someone that is technically savvy to fix your speed issues is a very worthy investment, translating in a better experience for your customers and higher revenue.

Auditing companies, such as Plug in SEO, can identify page loading issues and recommend experts who will help you fix it.

Whether you’re hiring someone or have someone in-house, these are the technical specifications they need to know to get started:

• Minimize the number of apps that add Javascript to your site.
• Remove the remains of old unused apps from your HTML and their associated CSS and Javascript.
• Keep an eye on image sizes, especially in areas like a homepage slideshow or hero section of your site, ensuring that they’re sufficiently compressed.
• Make sure all of the page components are hosted on fast web servers.
• Static components, such as Javascript, CSS and images, are those that load (are served) exactly the same to all of your visitors (as opposed to dynamic components). These can be hosted on a specialized, fast server network called a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
• Make sure that above-the-fold information loads as quickly as possible. Use lazy loading for everything else.
• Measure the range of real-world load times by sampling your visitors using tools like Google Analytics > Behavior > Site speed.

Check to see if your site currently loads faster than the global mean. (You can see this on your Compass dashboard or by using a website audit tool such as Plug In SEO.) If your load time is worse than the mean, then work on optimizing your Javascript, CSS and HTML files.

Optimizing Javascript, CSS and HTML can be technically challenging even if you’re handy with HTML coding. Make a backup first, optimize it and test to see if your site works as usual. Then re-measure how your page speed has improved.

If you’ve implemented all of the suggestions here and your page speed is still slow, you’ll need to do some deeper analysis or hire someone to determine where the bottlenecks are occurring.

Tools like YSlow and Google Page Speed Insights will help you with the analysis. However they require some technical knowledge of HTTP, HTML, Javascript and CSS.

Wondering if your pages are loading fast enough?

The post How to Improve Revenue by 16% With One Simple Tweak appeared first on Compass Blog.

A corporate website is the first place that potential customers go to learn about your company or your products. It can also be a powerful sales tool for your products or services. If your website is older, hard to scroll through and not generating leads, it’s probably time to update your website. A website redesign is no minor task. Depending on complexity and amount of existing pages, it can take up to a year to complete a traditional website redesign project. Given the significant cost, time and resource requirements for a traditional website redesign, many companies are opting for a more streamlined Growth Driven Design approach to their new website. The type of website redesign you choose depends on a number of factors.

Traditional Website Design Approach

Traditional website design is the classic way of approaching website design and does have many positives, but there are some difficulties that can occur with this approach.

• Time and Resources: Traditional website design requires significant time and resources. A website redesign scheduled for three months could take seven months to complete if the needs of the website (and client) change. For example, stakeholders will agree to mock-ups but then reverse course once the mock-ups are seen on a live interactive website. This leads to a second iteration of mock-ups and subsequent approvals that extends the timeline of the project.
• Strategy: A website redesign can be put at risk without a sound business strategy at its foundation. Many project sponsors can get caught up in the look and feel of the website and forget that their website will serve as a lead generation tool and virtual salesperson for them. Maintain focus on two or three main business drivers during your website redesign project. Ask yourself if a change request supports your goal of increasing leads 1.5x over the next year or whether the change will support the specific area of business you would like to grow in the next year. If a particular change doesn’t easily tie back to the business drivers of your new website, don’t do it.
• Changing Direction: New management can come in during the website redesign and change the direction of the project. Even with crystal clear planning and detailed project plans, unforeseen road blocks can extend a traditional website redesign and increase its budget.
• Launch and Done: A long website redesign can be exhausting and many times the project team is happy to be done once a website is launched. Unfortunately, launching a new website is just the beginning. The effectiveness of the new website must be assessed and results must be tracked. New content like blogs, case studies and infographics must be added consistently. Don’t make the mistake of believing you can launch a new website and not touch it for two years after the launch.

Growth Driven Design Approach

If you are leary of the pitfalls you might encounter in a traditional website redesign it might be useful to explore the accelerated methods of Growth Driven Design.

• Simplified Process: With Growth Driven Design, your new website focuses on a basic launch pad design that includes ‘core component’ pages – your home page, products page, about page, and a contact us page are typically the ‘must have’ pages for your website. Over time new pages are added based on user and A/B testing.
• Test and Test Again: The power of Growth Driven Design is in its flexibility. You can launch with a very minimal site and test a variety of elements like content, calls to action and images on each individual page. You can also test new pages that will be added after the initial launch pad site is completed.
• Always be Launching: With Growth Driven Design you never stop building your website. It’s a monthly activity that becomes a regular part of running your business. Much like the organizational monthly habits of financial invoicing and reporting you’ll be in the habit of launching new pages, tests, and content for your website.

Don’t Solve for Customers, Solve for Customer Problems

Regardless of the website redesign approach you choose, focus on core business drivers. What business problem do you solve? Do you limit legal liability by providing background checks and drug tests? Do you increase financial efficiency by providing expense report management software? Do you solve for fun and adventure by offering tandem skydiving ? Once your business focus is clear, deciding a traditional vs. Growth Driven Design will depend on factors like budget, resources available and the willingness (or not) to redesign your website every month.

Facebook advertising seems to be one of those things that every marketer is talking about it, but very few actually know how to drive real business results. There are far too many “experts” preaching their “get rich quick schemes” or touting that “Facebook marketing is free,” that it unfortunately gives even smart marketers new to earned, owned and paid media such as Facebook advertising a false sense of understanding what is truly required to achieve measurable success and results.

Our agency, Marketing Nutz works with brands big and small to help them drive a positive ROI with every dollar spent on digital, social media and marketing overall. We train and speak all over the world helping marketing, business and brand leaders try to not only understand organic and paid media, but optimize it for the highest business result possible. One of the top questions I always hear is… “does Facebook marketing actually work?” Then, the next question I hear is…”why doesn’t Facebook advertising work for me and my business… I have tried it numerous times and finally just gave up.”

Does this sound familiar?

• You get confused when you logon to Facebook ad manager
• You run away from the Facebook Power Editor because it gives you bad dreams
• You have wasted far too much money on Facebook advertising with little to zero return
• You don’t know where to start when it comes to paid media, earned media and everything in between
• You don’t know the difference between a Facebook boosted post or any other type of Facebook advertisement

If these thoughts feel a little too familiar, then you are in the right place. The truth is that Facebook advertising requires both art and science. You can’t just hop on Facebook, insert your credit card and out pops loads of leads, sales and ROI. I know some marketers may want you to believe such, but the truth is they likely just want your email address or your money.

This podcast is part of a new series titled “Welcome to the Pay to Play World, Are You Ready?”

Take a listen to the 208th episode of the Social Zoom Factor podcast to learn 5 things you MUST know before you spend one dime on Facebook advertising!

In this 20 minute podcast you will learn:

• 5 foundational and fundamental elements you must know before spending a dime on Facebook marketing
• How to get started right from day one as you start using or learn to optimize your Facebook marketing efforts and investment
• Why you must have the right mindset for success using Facebook advertising
• Different types of Facebook advertising options
• The importance of setting goals, objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success
• Tips to determine your Facebook offer
• The importance of an integrated digital and social platform for converting leads and achieving your goals
• Why your problem in achieving your results using Facebook advertising may not be Facebook but other issues with your digital platform and conversion funnels
• Why you must focus on your conversion funnels as a top priority before wasting time and money on Facebook advertising
• The importance of knowing your audience to target your audience and increase ROI of Facebook advertising

I recently asked a bunch of psychologists to tell me something mind-blowing — and one psychologist's answer seemed especially relevant in light of the upcoming US presidential elections.

Dan Ariely of Duke University said he was fascinated by a 2014 Israeli study in which researchers used a counterintuitive tactic to change people's political views.

Instead of going the usual route and explicitly telling people their beliefs were irrational, the researchers used a strategy called "paradoxical thinking," meaning they presented people with the extreme versions of their political perspectives.

The researchers were collaborating with The Fund for Reconciliation, Tolerance, and Peace, an American nongovernment organization that had asked them to develop a new approach to garner support for peace among Israelis.

Previous research had provided preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of paradoxical thinking. In one 1988 study, for example, women who supported traditional gender roles were asked questions like, "Why do you sympathize with the feelings of some men that women are better kept barefoot and pregnant?" Sure enough, those women ended up changing their beliefs about gender roles.

So for the current study, the researchers decided to apply a similar approach. Specifically, they aimed to change people's views on the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A few months before the 2013 Israeli elections, they recruited 161 Israeli Jewish participants, about 60% of whom were rightists, 21% of whom were centrists, and 19% were leftists. (Leftists are more sympathetic than the other two groups are to Palestinian concerns.) Researchers assigned each participant to either the paradoxical thinking intervention group or the control group.

Over the course of the next few months, those in the paradoxical thinking intervention group repeatedly came back to the lab to watch short video clips that portrayed the conflict as a positive experience that underlies Jewish identity. Participants in the control group watched short video clips about Israeli tourism.

A few months later, the participants once again filled out questionnaires about their politics. As it turns out, rightists in the paradoxical thinking intervention group had changed their views. Specifically, they saw the Palestinians as less responsible for the continuation of the conflict.

What's more, the rightists who'd seen those videos were more likely to report that they'd voted for more "pro-peace" political parties than were rightists who'd seen the tourism videos. Even one year later, the rightists who'd seen the pro-conflict videos reported a shift in their political attitudes.

Leftists who'd seen the pro-conflict videos, on the other hand, hadn't changed their views very much. And the participants who'd seen the tourism videos hadn't altered their views, either.

The researchers can't say for sure why watching the pro-conflict videos worked to change rightists' views. But they suspect that this approach doesn't threaten people, so it reduces the activation of defense mechanisms, and allows them to reconsider their positions. And responses from an earlier experiment in the study suggest that participants might have seen the messages as so extreme as to be absurd.

Of course, this study was conducted in Israel, so there's no way to know if the same findings might apply in the US. Moreover, this research was conducted in a lab, so it's unclear whether testing out this technique on your super-conservative uncle would work.

Future research might look at the best route for changing people's views in different cultures and social settings. Until then, it's helpful to know that the traditional path to changing someone's mind — telling them they're wrong — isn't always the most effective.

SEE ALSO: I asked 7 top psychologists to tell me what blows their mind — here are their answers

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NOW WATCH: Trump slams Hillary's 'I'm with her' slogan

 Next-gen edtech and virtual reality are both high-stakes platforms that have quite a bit of potential when it comes to defining our near-future. The marriage of the platforms may be far from ready for primetime, but there is a lot of flirtation happening in the space right now thanks to some major players. Today, Google for Education announced that it will be adding integration of… Read More

Artificial intelligence (AI) developed by a University of Cincinnati doctoral graduate was recently assessed by subject-matter expert and retired United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee - who holds extensive aerial combat experience as an instructor and Air Battle Manager with considerable fighter aircraft expertise - in a high-fidelity air combat simulator.

The artificial intelligence, dubbed ALPHA, was the victor in that simulated scenario, and according to Lee, is "the most aggressive, responsive, dynamic and credible AI I've seen to date."

The application is specifically designed for use with Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) in simulated air-combat missions for research purposes.

Retired United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee, in a flight simulator, takes part in simulated air combat versus artificial intelligence technology developed by a team comprised of industry, US Air Force and University of Cincinnati representatives. CREDIT Lisa Ventre, University of Cincinnati; Distribution A: Approved for public release; distribution unlimited. 88ABW Cleared 05/02/2016; 88ABW-2016-2270

Journal of Defense Management - Genetic Fuzzy based Artificial Intelligence for Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle Control in Simulated Air Combat Missions

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We all have that dusty bottle of cheap vodka taking up precious space in our apartment: a remnant of an ill-advised trip to the liquor store.

Since you can't drink it straight, and your usual orange juice mixer isn't enough to mask its horrendous burn, we've found some creative hacks to put your leftover vodka to good use — from making tasty desserts to creating your own vanilla extract.

Pie Crust

Vodka is the surprising ingredient that is essential for a foolproof pie crust. Unlike water, alcohol doesn't promote gluten formation when mixed with flour, helping the crust stay tender and flaky. 

Limoncello

Peel some lemon zest, add it to your vodka, and let it sit in direct sunlight for a few days. After straining out the peels, mix in sugar to taste. What you're left with is a much less cloying, citrusy liquor.

(Note: higher-proof grains work better because they will extract more lemon flavor, making your foul-tasting vodka taste smoother.)

Vodka Sauce

Stir a shot of vodka into a simmering pot of crushed plum tomatoes, heavy cream, and Italian herbs. Cook off the alcohol until the sauce thickens slightly, then add a fat pinch of Parmesan as the final touch. 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Whether you’re trying to calculate how many cups are in a quart, find the name of that actor from that one movie you watched last weekend or locate the closest Indian buffet (mmm), chances are you start your journey on Google. (Or maybe Bing, Yahoo or—gulp—AOL.) It’s nearly automatic now: You slide your phone out of your pocket, type in your keyword phrase and within nanoseconds you have all the info you need.

Somewhere along the way, though, businesses forgot their customers use the internet the same way as everyone else. Instead of building a keyword strategy around how human beings actually search the web, many companies designed their strategies for search engines alone.

Here are nine organic SEO keyword strategy hacks to help you satisfy both.

1. Keep Your Strategy Evergreen

I’m not saying you shouldn’t stay up-to-date on changing trends and buzzwords, but it’s important to do so in the right spaces—like your blog and your social media platforms. Nearly everywhere else, stay evergreen.

That is, don’t succumb to using of-the-moment jargon that could date your copy next year (or even next month). Spaces like your home page, service pages and other primary site pages that aren’t frequently updated should include timeless copy—or at least copy that won’t look outdated for at least a year.

2. Pick Your Battles

Ask any paid search pro, and they’ll tell you: Sometimes a keyword is so competitive, it’s best to let it go—lest you spend so much of your budget on one word, you miss opportunities to bring in prospects through other popular keywords. This is also true when it comes to organic search.

While you should certainly acknowledge popular keywords and use them when it makes sense, don’t focus so much on these phrases or you risk missing the boat on other conversion opportunities.

3. Do Keyword Research

Every keyword strategy begins with keyword research. There are a number of ways you can go about finding keywords, such as:

• Interviewing current customers and prospects, and looking for common words and phrases.
• Use Google’s related searches and autocomplete features to find relevant long-tail versions of keywords you feel are most relevant.
• Make a list of relevant topics and fill in each category with keywords for which you’d like to rank.

After you have your words, use a solution like the HubSpot Keyword Tool, Moz or the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to find additional common search words and phrases related to your product or service offerings.

4. Do More Keyword Research

Once you have a list of words, use your preferred keyword tool to determine:

• Search volume: The number of people who search this term (usually on a monthly basis).
• Traffic volume: The number of users who have reached your site using this keyword.
• Competition: The difficulty of ranking for this word, based on how many of your competitors are ranking for the same term.

This data will help you determine your highest-priority keywords. Strive to rank for words that are high in search volume with a moderate of competition. To learn more about budgeting and bidding for keywords through paid search, check out our fee guide, The 2016 Inbound Marketer’s Guide to Paid Media.

5. Don’t Obsess Over Keywords

You’ve followed tips three and four, and you now have a hefty list of competitive and relevant keywords you know your audience uses frequently. Great! Those keywords should now appear naturally throughout your site.

In other words, your use of keywords should never take away from the power and readability of your copy. Find ways to include these keywords, but don’t let your strategy send you into a keyword stuffing frenzy.

• Good: Data breaches happen daily. If you’re not investing in the right data security technology, you’re risking millions.
• Bad: Data security technology is necessary to keep your company safe from data breaches. Without data security technology, you could lose millions. Data security technology is an important investment. Buy data security technology today.

6. Don’t Take Shortcuts

There are times when it’s good to take shortcuts. For example, when you’re sitting in rush hour traffic on the freeway and you remember a secret back road home.

Then there are times when shortcuts are dangerous. For example, when you’re assembling IKEA furniture—or you’re writing optimized copy to attract customers to your website.

Hiding text, stuffing keywords and thin content (a site with little-to-no original content) not only are ineffective SEO strategies—they can get you in big trouble with search engines. As in, your site is pulled from SERPs (search engine results pages). No bueno.

7. Choose One Phrase Per Page

A great rule of thumb when it comes to keywords is to select one relevant, long-tail keyword, and focus on that phrase throughout an entire page. For example, let’s say the keyword is “hospital nurse burnout.” You would want to make sure this keyword phrase appears in each of following areas:

• Title (and title tag): 7 Ways to Spot Hospital Nurse Burnout
• URL: www.yourwebsitehere.com/blog/hospital-nurse-burnout
• Meta description: Hospital nurse burnout is a dangerous epidemic. Here are seven ways you can spot team members who are suffering from this condition.
• Image alt text.
• At least once within body copy.
• Anchor text in future content.

8. Never “Set and Forget”

Every few months, reassess your strategy. Review blog posts that receive high volumes of traffic, and consider how you can optimize these pieces to increase views and conversions. Look at low-performing posts to see what’s missing and how they can be improved. The same holds true for landing pages and any other pages that offer a conversion opportunity. The most powerful strategy is one that’s constantly tweaked and improved.

9. Always Remember: KISS

No, I don’t mean the obnoxious and slightly overrated rock band. I mean KISS (keep it simple, stupid). Not that you’re stupid. You’re brilliant! But the KISS concept is a reminder to avoid complexity whenever possible. There’s no need to make your keyword strategy, your SEO tactics or your copy some sort of multi-layered labyrinth.

At the end of the day, you’re a human speaking to other humans. Be cognizant of keywords, and remember to follow the above rules, but don’t go so far down the process rabbit hole that you’re losing the creative edge and unique voice your prospects have come to expect from your brand. Your keyword strategy will lead prospects to your site, but your captivating website experience will keep them there—and earn you the conversions.

It’s been quite a challenge to identify the top five ways people are being hacked at the moment because each industry has a different and very particular set of weaknesses that can be exploited to steal user credentials. Take for example the retail industry, where the majority of users are compromised via card skimming or POS intrusions. In contrast to healthcare, where those types of hacks are rarely seen.

The Verizon 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) came out earlier this year and the insights within it come from research gathered from 67 organizations across 82 countries, involving more than 100,000 security incidents and the analysis of 2,260 breaches. From this report, and other relevant articles, I have put together the top five ways users are getting hacked (in no particular order).

1. Password Reuse

We recently wrote about protecting users from password reuse attacks – that’s when hackers use exposed credentials from a breach (like the LinkedIn one), to attempt to hack into other services in the hope the user has re-used the same username/password combination in other places. In many cases, they have.

Make sure you have a unique and strong password for each login. It makes it harder for you to remember each one, so you should use a password manager. But the main objective is that it also makes it much harder for a hacker to get in.

2. Brute force attack

63% of confirmed data breaches involved leveraging weak, default or stolen passwords.

It takes less than a second to crack a simple password like ‘12345’ or ‘password’, so it’s no surprise that password hacking is one of the top ways people get hacked. Even Mark Zuckerberg recently proved he’s not above using a simple password like ‘dadada’ (and not just on one site, he reused it across a few).

When it comes to passwords here are two good resources: 5 tips to create strong passwords and this cool app to test your password strength.

3. Social Engineering techniques – phishing, spear phishing, vishing, whaling, and privilege misuse.

Almost a third (30%) of phishing messages were opened…And 12% of targets went on to open the malicious attachment or click the link.

Social engineering is a very common way for your users’ credentials to be compromised at the moment. You may receive an email from what seems to be a service provider you use or a colleague you trust, asking you to click a link and login to your account, or asking for private information. It seems totally legit, so you hand over your credentials and: Account Compromised!

4. Physical Theft – work, car, and home

39% of theft is from victims’ own work areas, and 34% from employees’ personal vehicles.

Not a high tech hack by any means but still ranking up there in the top five ways you can accidentally hand your login information over to the wrong people. Especially if you keep your passwords on a post-it note next to your PC.

5. Downloading malware – email attachments, websites serving up drive-by downloads, emails linking to pages with drive-by code installs

30,000 websites are infected with malware every single day – Forbes

If you download malware via an email attachment, a link in an email, or by visiting the wrong website, you could end up with Ransomware, a key logger, or malicious code installed on your device. Best way to avoid this situation is to check with the person who sent the email that the link or attachment is okay before you open/click it, and don’t download anything from a website you don’t trust. (Just don’t download anything.)

So there you have it! Hopefully you’re following best practices, and none of the above is news to you. But share this with your colleagues, friends, and family, who may need a friendly reminder. And tell us your own experiences with online safety in the comments below!

This week is the one year anniversary of SDR TV’s most popular video series, Sales Tips! We’re celebrating with recap playlists like how to craft personalized sales emails and the best ways to supercharge sales calls. And to close out the playlist celebration before tomorrow’s can’t-miss blooper reel, we’ve compiled a playlist featuring none other than the fearless AE leader, closer extraordinaire, and (M) VP of Sales Tips — DG!

To build up the sales development community and serve the needs of revenue generating teams around the world, an organization’s VP of Sales must be a fearless leader. Derek Grant joined our ranks last May as SalesLoft’s VP of Sales and is a proving to be a power player in the Atlanta SaaS startup scene.

If you want to grow within your sales organization, you need to be consuming the constant stream of sales content every day. And how you consume content will highly impact your success as a sales leader. So first up, DG is here to talk you through his favorite sales books that have shaped the leader he is today.

Up next on the playlist, DG tackles two questions you should be asking your prospect early on in the sale:

1. Will you be my champion? The champion’s job is to take what you as the rep sell to them, and turn around and sell it to the decisionmaker. They fight for the budget. They scrap against other vendor options. They are your number one ally in the sale, and it’s crucial to know that the person you’re selling to is willing to do that for you.

2. Are you okay telling me no? The time may come where your champion needs to tell you no — and you need to know up front that they are going to be comfortable doing so. No sugar coating, no ghosting — just honesty. If you establish that level of trust and openness up front, the process is going to be more conducive to a mutual solution.

Then, Derek’s final piece of advice addresses a common closing objection — incentives. It’s normal during the negotiation phase of a close that a buyer ask for a discount. Account Executives need to be prepared with ways to give those closing incentives in a way that allows them to keep the balance in the transaction.

Is the buyer asking for a discount on the smallest pricing package? Offer them a discount if they go up a few seats. Leverage incentives in a way that will both show your negotiation skills, but still hold both parties accountable to their ends of the bargain.

Whether you’re on the frontline or the closing end of the sales process, it’s always helpful to show up to the party prepared for any and all buyer objections. Derek Grant is one of our favorite cameos on SDR TV for his VP of Sales tips for combating objections on both ends of the sales spectrum, and how to control the sale from start to finish.

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Want a more comprehensive look at our Sales Operations Process? Start today! Download our free eBook and optimize your sales operations efforts to start crushing your sales development goals today.

The post VP of Sales Tips: The Best of the Best from Derek Grant appeared first on SalesLoft.

Is your company a lean company? Should it be?

The concept of lean management came up a few times in the last week or two; that kind of coincidence always inspire me to write about the topic at hand.

So I set out to learn a bit more about it. I knew, conceptually, what it was, but digging deeper makes me think that every customer-centric organization ought to be lean. Nay, every organization should be lean so they can be customer-centric.

Whichever way you look at it, it seems to be a solid concept for any organization.

So, what is lean management, also simply referred to as lean?

According to Lean Enterprise Institute, lean management is: a series of practices that develops people to understand and own their problems, and aligns resources to achieve the purpose of the organization. Lean management engages everyone in designing processes to continuously solve problems, improve performance, and achieve purpose while consuming the fewest possible resources.

In short, I’d say it’s a concept rooted in continuous improvement. Or, as I like to call it, a journey. It’s not a one and done. It’s not about the destination because the destination changes. Customers evolve. Needs evolve. Businesses evolve. Products evolve. The journey to be the best, to design a great experience, and to deliver value to your customers is a long, ongoing one.

Back to defining lean.

TechTarget defines it as seeking: to eliminate any waste of time, effort or money by identifying each step in a business process and then revising or cutting out steps that do not create value. The philosophy has its roots in manufacturing.

Guiding principles for lean management include:

• Defining value from the standpoint of the end customer.
• Identifying each step in a business process and eliminating those steps that do not create value.
• Making the value-creating steps occur in tight sequence.
• Repeating the first three steps on a continuous basis until all waste has been eliminated.

Defining and delivering value for customers is a key area of focus for customer experience professionals. You might have thought that price was a huge driving factor for why customers buy. Price is secondary to value; if you’ve delivered value, price is less of an issue. Customers will pay if companies deliver on their promises, fill a need, and do it with minimal effort on the customer’s part.

But don’t take my word for it. Value is defined by your customers, by each individual customer. It doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. This is why you listen to customers. This is why you need to understand your customers. This is why you map their journeys, identify key moments of truth, measure where you don’t deliver value or where you fall down, and employ continuous improvement processes to reduce pain and effort, iterating until you’ve got it right. Of course, once you’ve got it right, the target moves and you continue to iterate. Regardless, it’s all about when the customer says the company has delivered value, not when the company thinks it has.

Of course, integral to this are your employees and an organizational transformation, a shift in the culture and in the way of thinking and doing.

There’s a lot of good stuff under the hood of lean management, so I’ll be taking a look at many of its components over the next several months.

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. -W. Edwards Deming

Image courtesy of SydesJokes

Your face-to-face sales are invaluable, but paying attention to a few basic copywriting tips can take your marketing to the next level. Great copywriting helps you sell when you’re away from the office. It automates your marketing.

It can also serve to help your sales by creating valuable resources for your customers to refer to before they buy. Great copywriting becomes a means for adding value to your audience’s life. These B2B copywriting tips can also help if you’re selling to other businesses.

Follow These Copywriting Tips to Grow Your Business

1. Understand Your Audience – If you want to write copy that sells more product, it stands to reason that you’ll need to understand the people who are buying it. What problem are you solving for your customer? The better you understand your audience, the more likely you can position yourself as the solution to their problem.
2. Find Your Unique Selling Proposition – What do you do differently than your competition? What unique angle do you bring to the business. In a competitive environment, the customer is going to want to know why they should hire you, and for good reason. Your unique selling proposition serves as your competitive advantage. It always helps to know this and exploit it.
3. Perfect Your Headline – After investing hours into a specific piece of content, it is easy to make your headline an afterthought. But think about this – your headline is the single biggest factor in whether someone will read what you just wrote. This makes it extremely important. So use it to draw people in, and generate interest in the rest of your message.
4. Keep Your Copy Clean – While you may not always care about the rules of grammar and spelling, your audience might. Repeated writing errors can erode trust in your copy, and cost you customers. It can pay to have an extra set of eyes review your material. Do you need to hire a copyeditor?
5. Inject Your Personality – Think about the last few purchases you’ve made online. If you are selecting a new product or service, it really helps to like the person or business. When we inject our personality into our writing, it helps the reader identify with you. Learn how to write how you talk. Good copywriting can be informal, but professional. Go ahead an mention hobbies, passions and interests on your about page, or your social media. You never know when your next customer might use it for an ice breaker.
6. Know Your Objective – Every piece of marketing writing should have a theme, or a point. Every sentence should work toward making your central argument. This gives your writing a direct and focused feel.
7. Understand Digital Marketing – Knowing how to tailor your message for a specific platform can be extremely helpful. A firm understanding of the latest marketing trends can give you an idea of where your customers might be online, and how to best reach them.
8. Invoke Emotion – Regurgitating facts onto the page with no apparent strategy is not going to help you sell more. Your copywriting needs to invoke emotion. This is how you get the person at the other end of the computer to pull out their wallet and buy your product. They’re interested in your industry and that’s why they’re reading. A good story that makes them happy, sad, excited, afraid or surprised can persuade. People buy based on emotion. This is one of the most important copywriting tips for any business to follow.
9. Keep Tweaking – Your website content, brochures and other evergreen content (long shelf life) doesn’t ever have to be a finished product. If you are not seeing the results you are looking for, tweak it. Change a sentence or two, and leave it up for a few weeks. Test it to see what does better. Then move on to the next piece.
10. Write to Convert – Work hard on your calls to action. Your audience won’t know what action you want them to take, unless you tell them. You can do everything right from the headline down to the bottom of your piece, but if you aren’t communicating that next step, chances are a good portion of your audience is dropping off.
11. Follow Trends – What is happening in your industry right now? What do your customers need to know about? A good copywriter can bring this industry news to light in an engaging manner, that positions you as an expert. They also know the best ways to position the content through blogging, social media and other emerging trends.

Make sure that you are investing the time and effort into creating better marketing materials by following these copywriting tips. Producing content that resonates with your audience will help your business take off.

If improving your copywriting skills has been difficult, you can always hire it out to a marketing writer or copy editor.

Do you feel lost when you try to think of ways to generate leads for your business?

In the wake of Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, which, as you’re aware, dealt a disastrous blow to many websites, the search engine giant has not been coy about its desire to see more fresh, relevant, and original content on websites.

You know the drill. “Content is king” has been the mantra on many marketers’ minds for more than a few years. In my experience, content marketing has proven to be very effective when done right.

But you probably already know all that. What you most likely really want to learn is how to better use content marketing for lead generation. What types of content yields results, and which don’t? More importantly, how do you use specific types of content to capture leads?

Here are some of the best methods that I’ve tried, tested, and observed to produce outstanding results.

1. Produce an e-book

According to an industry forecast by PricewaterhouseCoopers, total revenue from e-book sales are expected to hit nearly $8.7 billion in 2018, an increase of over 3,000% since 2008. What’s more, the United States is expected to reach 112 million e-book readers by 2020.

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Total revenue from e-book sales are expected to hit $8.7B in 2018 & 112M readers by 2020 via @PwC_LLP
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All of that represents a huge market just waiting to be tapped, which is why creating and releasing an e-book is a strategy that has proven to be highly effective at capturing leads.

Obviously, you don’t need to charge for your e-book. As a free resource, it provides value up front, increasing the likelihood of introducing leads into your funnel. I like e-books because they let me do three important things cleanly and efficiently:

• Educate potential leads
• Let me show what I know
• Capture leads in the sales funnel

Let me walk through each of those points.

Educate potential leads

A well-written e-book should offer something of real value to readers who can walk away with specific answers to questions that urged them to read the material.

The e-book usually is the first contact point between you and the reader, so it’s absolutely critical that you deliver the information you promised in your landing page or email, otherwise you’ll end up killing your reputation and any relationship you might have had with your audience.

Show what you know

Do you want to show people what you know about a certain subject or industry? Then write it down in an e-book. Unlike blog posts — even long ones — an e-book really lets you discuss a subject in an in-depth manner. The deeper you go into a topic, the more information readers will get from you. This, in turn, will increase your e-book’s value.

People will see you and your e-book as rich sources of information, and will expect to get more valuable information from you in the future.

Capture leads in the sales funnel

Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of making an e-book is that it allows you to collect your readers’ email addresses, effectively putting them in your sales funnel. The success of this phase, however, ultimately depends on your landing page, which is where you let readers know what information is in your e-book, why it’s worth their time, and why it’s fair to ask for their email address in exchange.

When creating a landing page for your e-book, I like to refer to a summary of the basic elements of a great landing page, similar to the example by Wishpond.

The image above shows a screenshot of HubSpot’s landing page for its e-book, Learning SEO. It includes the seven main elements:

• Headline
• Subheading
• Description
• Features
• E-book picture
• Lead form
• Call to action

You can also use Unbounce’s e-book landing page template to save time.

2. Host a webinar

I’ve been blown away by the sheer power of webinars to produce an avalanche of warm, targeted customers. Like e-books, the success of a webinar will depend on whether it offers anything of real value to people.

Only when a webinar is considered to offer value will people happily give you their contact details and information. Of course, in exchange, you have to provide real hands-on training, examples of real-life applications, and real expertise — all while they sit in the comfort of their homes or offices.

If you’re looking to host a webinar to generate leads, I strongly recommend asking qualifying questions on the webinar sign-up page to see what your participants want from the activity. You can ask questions to gauge their interest in your products or services, or questions about where they are in the sales cycle.

As for hosting the webinar itself, I recommend including these elements.

Topic

Your topic has to be relevant to your audience and presented in such a way that it sparks interest. In other words, you want to sell it to your audience, whose first instinct will be to think, “What’s in it for me?” Where should you start? Think of an inviting title, provide assets relevant to the subject, and keep your presentation streamlined and on-topic.

My webinars generally walk people through a specific set of topics. I tell my audience the topic, but I don’t give away the farm. I want them to attend to learn all the secrets.

You also can set aside a few minutes of webinar time solely for a Q&A session, giving your attendees an opportunity to participate and you an idea of what information they’re looking for.

Speaker

The speaker is perhaps the most important component of a webinar. Anything less than a stellar presenter will cause your attendees to multitask or take a break from the session.

As such, it’s important to work with someone who’s an expert in your topic, someone who has charisma and the ability to command people’s attention through a computer screen.

Recording

Recording the webinar lets you evaluate what went right during the presentation and what didn’t. More importantly, recording the webinar allows you to provide a video copy to your attendees or to provide a content offer to registrants who were unable to join the webinar. You can even post it on your website at a later date.

Survey

You should consider getting feedback from your attendees. Ask what they liked about the topic, presentation, and speaker, and whether they have any suggestions for future webinars. Use this feedback for your future content marketing efforts.

3. Host real-life events

Industry events play a key role in any content marketing strategy. I like to think of them as a way to bridge the gap between the online world and the offline one. They let you interact and learn about potential leads in a way that’s just not possible — at least in my experience — through email blasts and social media comments.

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Industry events bridge the gap between the online world and offline one says @neilpatel #contentmarketing
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It may seem odd to introduce real-life events in an article about content marketing, but hear me out. Content is what drives the event’s success, and contributes to its ongoing role in your marketing funnel. Here’s how to use content to prepare for, improve, and follow up on your live event.

Before

• Talk to your event’s speakers and notable guests through chat/SMS or video, uploading this content on your website and social media pages to generate interest. You should also encourage guests and speakers to share their interview for additional visibility. 

• Create an event hashtag when promoting your event. Not only will this help spur the event to go viral, it also allows you to measure mentions and the spread of your content.

During

• Live blog or tweet the event (don’t forget to use your hashtag) and encourage attendees to do the same. You can perhaps offer prizes to lucky participants who upload event pictures on Facebook or Instagram — make sure you repost their posts as well.

After

• Upload photos and videos of the event on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, or some other photo and video-sharing site.

• Consolidate all content related to the event — articles, photos, videos, and other postings mentioning your event. You can then share your curated content on your official blog, Tumblr, or Storify.

• Review your event, not just for your sake but for your audience as well. Compare the results of the event with your goals. Were they met? Did the event have any shortcomings? Upload your thoughts to a blog, a vlog, or podcast.

Great events are an incredibly effective lead-generation tool, doubling as an opportunity to build your brand and image.

4. Create white papers and guides

Yes, I know: White papers are about as old-school as they come, but they’re still around for a good reason — they work.

I agree with Roanne Neuwirth who wrote, “White papers still matter.” You don’t have to call them “white papers,” which smacks of old-school corporate boredom. You can call them whatever you want. The point is this: White paperish (I made that word up) content will generate leads.

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White papers still matter and will generate leads says @RoanneNeuwirth #contentmarketing
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What should your white paper have for it to be effective at generating leads? Let’s not complicate this. Here is a simple and straightforward four-point process. Credit to Nick Cavalancia for distilling it in such a simple way:

• Title – Catch the reader’s attention right away, all while conveying the paper’s subject matter.

• Content – Expound on the title, zeroing in on a particular aspect of the customer’s purchase journey (something you’ll have to decide on). Whatever the case, the content has to be helpful even if the reader won’t buy your product or service.

• Promotional plan – Distribute copies of the white paper to your sales team and run through its content. Include the white paper in your social media outreach campaign, email marketing campaign, or external advertising efforts.

• Lead strategy – Instead of following up with a “buy now” call to action, you can respond to the lead in the most benign manner possible: offering more information. Perhaps send an email asking if the reader wants to download another white paper, sign up for the next webinar, or join a future event.

5. Write consumer case studies

Case studies can tell stories — good stories. It can be a success story of a product or service, or a solution (or solutions) to a particular problem encountered by customers, complete with the steps to fix the issue.

Although many marketers have an aversion to case studies because they’re often boring and uninspiring, they are invaluable in turning plain readers into buying customers. Research indicates that case studies are the third-most effective B2B content marketing tactic.

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Case studies are the 3rd-most effective B2B #contentmarketing tactic via @cmicontent #research
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Image source

I don’t know about you, but I’m seeing serious leads.

You can refer to this guide on how to write a case study, which can be broken down into the following:

• Abstract or summary – Begin your case study with a summary of the problem and a preview of the solution or steps taken to solve it.

• Real people – Genuine interviews are what really make great case studies stand out. A case study needs to tell a story, and that narrative is most effective when it’s told from the customer’s perspective.

• Photos and videos – Multimedia assets make case studies more engaging, appealing to both oral and visual learners. Charts are especially useful, providing additional background to your case study’s points and making comparisons between products or experiences more effective.

• Solution – When talking about the solution, keep your broader audience in mind and walk the reader through the steps you took to fix the problem in a clear manner.

Conclusion

As you may have guessed, there are many ways to use content to generate leads. However, it’s also important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to content marketing and lead generation. Depending on the nature and industry of your business, one method may be more effective than the other.

In addition, you should consider how you’re going to measure your content marketing strategies. A 2015 report by Ascend2 found that conversion rates are the most commonly used metric for measuring content marketing performance, followed by lead quality, and website traffic.

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Conversion rates: Most commonly used metric for measuring #contentmarketing performance via @Ascend2research
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Source

Simply put, before you set out on any lead-generation campaign using content marketing, you need to determine what benchmarks to use to measure its success.

In any case, what matters most is that your content drives action and movement. Without it, your content isn’t doing any marketing on your behalf, defeating the purpose of the entire endeavor.

What content marketing methods have you found to yield the most benefits?

Want to learn more about how content marketing can help build sales leads? Make plans to attend Content Marketing World 2016 Sept. 6-9 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today and use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Top 5 Lead-Generating Ideas for Your Content Marketing appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

For many marketers, the performance of a successful piece of content largely hinges on the introductory call to action (CTA) that it is promoted with. The conversion rate of that simple button, link, or image strongly impacts the value of that resource for both marketing and sales teams.

That’s kind of scary, right? So much time, effort, research, and resources put into good content can fall by the wayside if nobody looks at the material or provides follow-up information during the discovery experience.

Often content creators and demand gen marketers can overlook the importance of a strong CTA and then wonder why a piece’s performance isn’t hitting expectations. Though you may think, “What can be done? How else can I say ‘Download Now’ or ‘Request a Demo’,” there are several tactics and language approaches to increase conversion rates and intrigue your audience.

In this post, we’ll cover how to challenge, reward, and stand out with CTAs to better convert your content.

Challenge

Offering your customers and prospects an enticing CTA that presents a challenge or a learning opportunity can be a powerful way to affect click rates. Creating more active, interactive content that tests or contests with users has shown powerful results. Of course, the content on the other side of the CTA has to deliver on the offer.

A recent blog post from Impact Branding & Design titled “This is the Most Interesting Content in the World (And Here’s Why)” highlighted a new Dos Equis campaign that used interactive content to engage their audience.

Having officially retired their Most Interesting Man spokesperson, Dos Equis turned the attention to their audience, asking them to show how interesting they are – well, actually tasking them to “prove it.”

The CTA used is “See Where You Rank” with a content title “Think You’re Interesting? Prove It.”

The content gives unique results based on a user’s actions and ample opportunities to share and challenge their friends in the same manner – for them to “prove” themselves and see where they rank.

Other CTAs that would have a similar “challenging” approach could be:

• Test Your Knowledge
• Accept the Challenge
• How much do you know?

Ideally, these CTAs would all lead to a dynamic piece of content that offers user participation, but that doesn’t necessarily need to be the case. These same CTAs could be used for infographics or ebooks that provide information that users think they have a strong handle on. Suggesting otherwise allows their interest to be piqued.

Reward

Similar to proposing challenges to your audience, offering a reward can be equally effective. Creating strong content is always about delivering value.

Often this value is the information – the contents – of the material (ebook, blog post, white paper), but increasingly users want more dynamic results from their content experiences.

This is where using more active content like assessments or calculators can boost engagement performance. Using CTAs that speak to an individual more, and offer unique results for their attention, is a strong way to gain clicks and completions.

These CTAs might look like:

• Learn My Results
• Discover Your Persona
• Where Do You Stand?
• Calculate!

A bonus to this type of CTA is that it can be used to introduce the content in the promotion, but also towards the end of the experience to only lead gate the results, and not the entire piece. Form fills are less dismissive once the experience is already in progress and committed to.

ServiceNow, a service management company, went with an assessment-focused CTA when covering ITSM (Information Technology Service Management).

The “find out where you stand” is a compelling line that offers an evaluation of your understanding and process. The fact that unique results are achieved for each user adds to the strength of the assessment format here, but CTAs like this can be positioned for a variety of content – as long as value is being delivered to the user.

Stand out

Obviously, all CTAs should stand out as much as possible without going full Vegas-style with blinking neon. Strong design guides users’ eyes to the part of the content where action is needed. However, even if your CTA button, text, or image is very present, the wording that is often used can cause it to be ignored or de-prioritized.

A great example of using a simple language change to give a CTA more pop is on the SnapApp main website.

Using Optimizely to conduct a performance A/B test, we were able to increase conversion rate by 11x on our demo request button for specific pages, going from 2.07% to 22.7%.

What was the test? We switched from the typical “Request A Demo” language on the button to “Let’s Go.”

 

By just adding a little flavor to more typical requests links and buttons, you inject more intrigue and more attention – even if it’s just a half a second’s worth more.

A bonus for reading this far into the post, here’s a little library of potential CTAs to experiment on future campaigns:

• Let’s Do This
• Show it to me!
• Ready for Action
• Solve My Problems
• Make This Mine!
• Intrigued?
• Give Me The Goods
• Let Me Own This
• Show Me The Way
• Impart Your Wisdom
• Drop The knowledge

Providing Value for Your Audience

At the end of the day, a CTA is just a little vehicle to providing value for your audience. They want content that will speak to their interests and provide guidance and information. What marketers want is an engaged and active user base that they can learn from and qualify so their sales team can reach out with the best possible follow up.

Certainly, getting higher conversion rates and completions from your ebooks with strong CTAs would boost your lead engagement. But to really learn from that engagement is where using interactive content comes in.

By having unique form fields and variables that users participate with during an assessment, a quiz, or a calculator not only provides them with custom results, but delivers that informed data back to your marketing and sales teams to use for advancing the buyer’s journey.

Personalization is key to engagement and conversion in today’s big data-driven marketing environment. Messages tailored to a user’s real-time behavior, interests, and personal preferences will resonate with consumers and business buyers alike, and they improve customer experiences and response rates. Brands offering personalization will outperform those that don’t by more than 15 percent by 2018, according to Gartner. (highlight to tweet)

Live chat apps are growing in popularity and can be used to facilitate deeper, personalized engagement with customers, and yet marketers seem slow to adopt this fast-growing channel. Why aren’t more marketers putting mobile-first messaging to work to reach and engage their audiences through chat?

Marketing is not just about insight, but the ability to use that insight to create change within teams and throughout organizations. “I think we’re at a point where the challenge isn’t perfecting the technology or unifying our data. The real challenge now is human,” said Stefan Tornquist, VP of research at Econsultancy.

The chat messaging opportunity is only growing, and marketers could be using these real-time tools themselves to communicate with their own colleagues across siloed company divisions at every stage of their customer’s buying cycle—from inventory levels on the factory floor and customer support on the phone to the shipping department.

Chat Personalizes the Retail Experience

Retail customer experience is an obvious use case for this technology. Thanks to companies like Amazon, today’s customers expect personalization at nearly every touchpoint. They want a retailer to know their interests: what size, color, or style they typically buy, or what they looked at last time they were in the store.

Many businesses are leveraging data to deliver this type of experience to their customers across their marketing campaigns, but chat can help take personalization one step further by allowing agents to connect directly with customers in real time while they’re actually in the purchase process. According to the Wall Street Journal, large retailers such as Zulily and Everlane (and even airline KLM) plan to use Facebook Messenger this year to deliver enhanced customer service, while large, omni-channel retailers like Walmart and Nordstrom are already onboard.

How Chat Technology Benefits Businesses

The benefits for customers and businesses alike are potentially substantial, particularly when customer service representatives have access to CRM data.

Real-Time Communication Between Consumers and Customer-Facing Teams

Prospects get the responses they need quickly, while customer service and sales teams can take advantage of chat interfaces to address multiple conversations easily. This speed and ease is a clear advantage over email; being overwhelmed by inbox messages doesn’t happen with chat. Because chat apps are multi-user, agents can see when someone else has addressed a customer question, which not only eliminates clutter, but also eliminates duplication of efforts.

Ease of Use and Ease of Access

While many adults in the Western Hemisphere aren’t familiar with chat beyond texting or Facebook Messenger, it’s really simple to use and accessible from both mobile and desktop devices. From a business perspective, the same advantages apply. As more customers shop with mobile devices, mobile-based customer service and sales options will become increasingly important.

Companies That Use Chat Close More Sales and Sell More Product

A recent study showed that companies using online chat services boasted a 19 percent increase in order value. Even more compelling, 88 percent of shoppers in the study would have abandoned their carts without a “click to call” or “click to chat” option for support.

How Chat Technology Aids Internal Operations

While the use cases for live chat with consumers are clear, there are also internal uses for chat that can help improve the customer experience and make it even more personal.

Ask an Expert

For higher-ticket sales items, such as cars or major appliances, customer service can bring more seasoned sales team members into the chat to engage in consultative discussions. These team members can even share brochures, spec sheets, or comparison charts within the chat application. Whiteflash.com, an online diamond retailer, has trained three gemologists available to join live chats. The company has seen its average order value increase by 67 percent since introducing chat.

Quickly Assess Inventory

In the event that an item is out of stock, customer service representatives can use chat to reach other teams within the organization—even in remote warehouses—to determine when inventory will be replenished. They can even arrange for shipping to the store or the customer directly.

Fine-Tune Your Funnel

Because chat enables marketing professionals to engage customers during the sales process, it provides new insights into how customers shop. This can help improve marketing, better align the marketing and sales teams, and prepare customer service representatives to engage customers and guide them through conversion.

Marketers should be viewing chat as an exciting new tool to differentiate their brand and delight customers. Its ability to keep customers engaged while increasing sales should not be overlooked for internal or client-facing uses.

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Webster’s Dictionary defines Efficiency as…

Oh wait, this isn’t a graduation speech. It’s a wake up call. Something the sales industry is in dire need of.

See, in the past few years, sales organizations, have started to heed what those of us in inside sales have been saying for over a decade:

THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY!

The revelation has come in the wake of a constant bombardment of the latest and greatest sales tools—tools that promise Better, Faster, and Cheaper: The Efficiency Trifecta. There are 1,000+ SaaS platforms designed to drive efficiency in the inside sales world and here is what it costs at the low end. It is not hard to imagine that by 2018 we will be spending $1,000/ month per rep, just to make them do things faster.  While 2016 is certainly the Year of The Sales Stack, remember, faster does not equal better.

Whether it’s data, dialer, emails, CRMs, leaderboards, or barometers that identify the best time of day to call someone based on optimal air pressure, we buy it. We buy it all, because it makes us”faster” at our jobs. We can smile, dial, and email more than ever before. We can build processes so specific that an SDR no longer has to think; they just show up and see what’s on their “To Do List” and do it.

We call all of this “efficiency,” and we’ve become so fucking efficient it’s a wonder we need to even show up for work at all.

Now, efficiency does matter. It matters a whole lot, actually. But we’ve gone so far down the path of efficiency that we’ve forgotten what it means to be effective.

The average sales stack per SDR or Inside Sales Rep now costs $564/month, or $6,800/year. And that’s just to achieve the first scheduled meeting. That should scare you, but if it doesn’t, this might: A sales stack for a team of 10 inside sales reps costs around $68,000/year on the LOW END! 

If this makes you angry, then good. You should be, but not at the people behind these tools. It’s easy to blame them, but it’s not their fault. They didn’t lie to us, we lied to ourselves.

They sold this stuff to us because we wanted to be sold to, and these bright, shiny new tools blinded us to the bigger picture. We knew the tools mattered, but we overestimated their power. The little voice in the back of our head was saying, “Okay, this is cool. If we get more meetings, we’ll send more deals into the pipeline, and eventually, more revenue will come in. Plus, if we close at least two meetings, that will pay for the cost of the tool!”

What that voice should have been saying was, “This is cool. We’re going get more meetings, and increase the volume of deals going into the pipeline. Now what do we need to do to make sure the reps are having amazing conversations with the prospect to ensure pipeline velocity also increases?”

Or, in plainer terms: “These reps better not fuck up these deals!”

Unfortunately, the opposite happened. The reps did not have amazing conversations, and deal after deal fell through fell into “Maybe-Land”. This approach created what we like to call the “Plunger Effect,” where the pipeline gets so full of shit, people don’t know what to do. In fact people are scared to even Roto-Rooter the pipeline because it will expose the naked truth. The truth that we have not supported our sales team to improve their discovery skills which would let you keep a cleaner and more accurate pipeline.

Here’s some anecdotal proof for you.  Go to any of your reps. Check any deal where the expected closed date has pushed through 2 standard sales cycles and ask them “Why is that?” Keep asking that same question 3 times in a row. Don’t deviate, no matter what they say just follow up with “And why is that?”  You will most likely discover they missed qualified timeline and access to authority in over 75% of the cases. Yes, some will be legit, but we all know deep, deep down inside. You know the place we don’t like to talk about, the place where even VPs of Sales get scared when the CEO says, “so what’s the forecast look like?”  We know that deep in the pit of our stomach there is just too much garbage in the pipeline.

Again, nobody lied to us. It’s not the vendor’s fault and most importantly it’s not always the reps fault. It’s the fault of sales leadership team. In their neverending quest for Better, Faster, Cheaper, as well as a desire to make “data driven” decisions, Management and Executive Management overlooked effectiveness, the most important part of the sales process. In fact, they overlooked the sales conversation itself.

Okay, now it’s time to take out a dictionary.

 

Efficiency is the ability to accomplish something with the least waste of time and effort.

Effectiveness is what is adequate to accomplish a purpose, or producing the intended or expected result.

 

What word does each definition have in common? ACCOMPLISH!

Yes, we have improved our efficiency enough to have accomplished an important step in the sales process: securing the meeting. The problem is that in most cases, companies don’t actually make money from securing meetings.

Companies make money from producing the intended or expected results OF THAT MEETING!

So would you rather have more meetings, or more effective meetings?

Even if you are at an early stage and want more meetings, if those meetings are garbage then all you are doing is accelerating the suck factor. So, how do we become more effective?

The answer is actually quite simple: Training and coaching. Nothing more, and nothing less. However, training and coaching is not only overlooked, it’s often not even understood. It’s easier for an executive to buy a saas tool to help send more emails or make more phone calls. They virtually see and feel these tools.

Because most executives and sales leaders have never actually had sales training they have no frame of reference for what it looks, feels, smells and tastes like. The good founders often think “it’s not that hard I’ve never had training and I close stuff all the time!”  The problem Mr/s. CEO is that you don’t realize that your title and vision provide ridiculous leverage that cannot be cloned, EVER.

Combine that with the fact that sales training doesn’t connect to the CRM and spit out a colorful and fancy report to “prove ROI” then they feel justified in denying the need and only see it as an expense.

Many CEOs and VPs of Sales believe that sales is a skill that never goes away, and many non-business-oriented founders and C-Level executives believe that when a sales rep fails, it’s because they are not good at their job.

So, when you add all of this up together what do you get?  Training and coaching is viewed as a burden, a cost that cannot easily be measured through ROI, therefore unpredictable and an uncomfortable spend.

Now in some cases, that’s true, but in many cases, a sales rep fails because management is not good at their job. And part of their job is to understand what training and coaching can offer, and dole it out accordingly.

Training is the prep work.

For example, if you were planning to run a marathon, a trainer would help you focus on targeting the right muscle groups. They would help you build your calves, thighs, core, and hamstrings, and advise you on your diet.

In sales, a trainer conducts role playing scenarios, teaches specific sales philosophies and methodologies, and uses stories of wins and losses to illustrate important points.

Coaching encompasses the elements that occur on the practice field or during game time.

While the trainer is good at strength conditioning, your coach is going to talk to you about body, balance, feet placement, stride, endurance, shoes, socks, and clothing. Your coach is going to advise you on your “game-day” activities.

In sales, a coach sits with reps during live phone calls and provides guidance, conducts post-mortem to establish what went well and what to focus on in the future, and runs role playing scenarios.

So back to effectiveness. The success of any organization which relies on salespeople comes down to one simple thing: More effective conversations, and more effective conversations are only achieved through sales training and sales coaching. So before you buy the latest and greatest widget which tells you the temperature of the chair your prospect is sitting in, you may want to consider instituting some simple sales training and coaching, which would teach your rep to ask better questions about said chair, or if they’d prefer to stand. Because it’s not the temperature of the chair that matters, it’s how that temperature is affecting the prospect’s decision making.

We’ll close with one simple thought: Suppose the power goes out. Is your team capable of making good sales calls with only a cell phone and a list of names and titles?  If not, you need to start focusing on effectiveness.

 

The post Efficiency vs. Effectiveness appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Most brands and companies today have some sort of social media presence. Even in industrial and technical sectors, Twitter and Facebook have proved themselves to be lively venues for engagement, sharing and conversation. But here’s a new development. The San Antonio based data company Stirista now can turn your social media followers—a portion of them, at least—into an instant marketing database, ready for communications through any channel you like. To me, this sounds like the next big thing in the rapid progression of social media marketing.

The way this works is pretty straightforward, albeit a bit geeky. In a process known as “reverse append,” the social media handles are matched to a vast database of consumers and business people (Stirista’s contains over 120 million names), many of whose records include social media handles. If there’s a hit, the entire record—name, address, phone, email, and demographics—is connected to that social media account. According to Ajay Gupta, CEO, the best results can be produced for the “big three” networks, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The match rate averages around 10 percent.

So, with this technique, marketers who have built up sizable social media followings can enrich the relationship. Here are some of the applications that come to mind:

• Deepen those relationships by communicating through other media channels.
• Identify customer service problems. Searching on telltale hashtags like #tmobilesucks or #sprintrules, and contact the follower directly to resolve the issue.
• Market research. Do a demographic analysis of your fan base to gain insights into their nature and needs.
• Conduct competitive research. GoToMeeting might see who’s following WebExpress, for example. Or Hillary could look at Bernie followers.

Best of all, the reverse append process is inexpensive, and fast.

I learned about the capability a few months ago, when Stirista’s CEO Ajay Gupta brought me in for some consulting help. To launch the service, Stirista came up with a pretty nifty PR idea: they reverse appended consumer data onto the millions of Twitter followers of @realDonaldTrump and @HillaryClinton. They then matched those names against another Stirista product—a voter file—and analyzed the nature and political behavior of the followers of the two presumptive presidential candidates.

The results contained some fascinating facts, which we wrote up in a report, and hired a PR professional with political experience to pitch to journalists. (Does it surprise you that a third of Trump followers turn out to be registered Democrats?)

On the launch day, we were pleased to see a flurry of press attention from outlets like Politico and the Wall Street Journal. As B2B PR strategies go, this was a hit.

But to marketers, the big news is this new technique, which takes the value of your social media asset to a new level. Just think of the possibilities if you can instantly add a complete record of 10 percent of your social media followers to your marketing database. Wow.

When I think about product demonstration, I link it to the 1950s salesmen going from door to door. Luckily, marketing has changed quite a bit and you can now reach millions of people with one message.

With video, you can do the same product demonstrations as in the 1950s, but without the endless traveling and doors in your face. Still, product demonstration videos need to be professional and of high quality; otherwise, people will click away immediately and throw the online door in your face. That is not as painful, but it does not help your sales.

To harness the power of product demonstration videos, you do not need to make a massive investment. You just need to adopt the right principles, as simple – but professional – videos often have the same power as professional commercials.

This blog will show that product demonstration videos enable better conversion opportunities, list 5 reasons why videos should be an important part of your marketing mix, and reveal how you can simply create product demonstration videos in 6 steps.

Conversion opportunities with product demonstration videos

Matt Aunger of Buffer has collected 6 stats that urge you to use video as a marketing tool.

1. Video generates 3x as many monthly visitors to a website as other content.
2. Visitors spend 88% more time on a website that includes video.
3. Organic traffic from search engines increases by 157% with video.
4. Consumers are 46% more likely to seek information about a product or service after seeing it in an online video.
5. Consumers are 85% more likely to buy after watching a product video.
6. Consumers have 57% more confidence in their online purchase with video.

If you do not have a product demonstration video on your website targeting the right audience yet, you should post a high-quality video soon.

5 reasons why video should be an important part of your marketing mix

1. Video drives traffic and findability

Video offers an alternate route for driving traffic to your website and product pages. Video is great for SEO, as Google owns YouTube and will give your video content the same authority as written content, provided that it is optimized properly.

In addition, YouTube is the second largest search engine. By uploading video content to YouTube, you can use this pool of traffic to your advantage. Just remember to include calls to action and links. Finally, video stands out on social media. Incorporating it into your social strategy will help you attract new customers.

2. Video introduces you to a new audience

Some people prefer watching video, while some people prefer reading articles. By incorporating video into your marketing mix, you can reach potential customers that are drawn to this particular type of content.

3. Video helps showcase complicated features

For products that are more complicated to explain, a video can show how those products work. In a product demonstration video, you can showcase the more complicated or hidden features, which allows your audience to feel confident about buying that particular product.

4. Video humanizes your brand

By showcasing yourself and your personality in your videos, you humanize your brand. Megan O’Neill of Animoto says that when you create a behind-the-scenes video showing how your product is created, you not only offer valuable content that gives potential customers more insight into your product, but you also give them more insight into who you are. Sharing a part of yourself through video will let potential buyers get to know you, so you will stand out from the competition.

5. Video is easily shareable

Video is great for sharing. That means more people to see your awesome product and company!

How to create a high-quality product demonstration video in 6 steps

1. Research the purpose and audience of your demonstration video

Start at the beginning. With every marketing tool, you need to ask yourself what the purpose is and to what audience it is targeted. Product demonstration videos are no different.

• Where in the marketing funnel is this video going to exist?
• Which role are we targeting?
• How SHORT should the video be?
• How technical should the video be?

If you want your product demonstration videos to be effective, they should have a clear purpose, a quicker pace than live demonstrations, and show only what is necessary.

David Halk of Vidyard gives some examples. If the purpose of the video is to educate c-level decision makers, you might want to keep the video to a two/three-minute highlight reel correlating features to value propositions.

If the purpose is to educate your key target users to help qualify them for a more meaningful conversation, then you might want a five/seven-minute video that goes a little deeper in terms of functionality and usability.

In any case, you will want to err on the short side. Live demos are often twenty to forty minutes long. It is better to send your potential customers four highly targeted five-minute videos than a twenty-minute video that casts a wide yet ineffective net.

2. Plan modularizing the demonstration video for personalization

As you now know the purpose and target audience, you will want to see where this video can be personalized for your different verticals and target markets.

As Halk explains, more often than not, your technology or services will be utilized across different industries. And ideally, when you conduct live demonstrations you are “speaking the lingo,” so that your prospects know that you truly know them.

Before you begin writing your script, carefully plan to include some simple edits that will allow you to make multiple versions of the same video. It will then seem crafted specifically for a single industry. Communicate key value propositions related to that industry, edit the voiceover track to include industry terms or use elements that target a key target market.

3. Write a script

When it comes to your script, focus on your customers’ biggest pain points, how you plan to solve those problems and what is going to make them sign up for a trial. Abdullahi Muhammed of Tech.co says that one of the most common mistakes companies make with product demonstration videos is making the whole story about them. An “all about us” video press release will not score you high engagement rates, nor will it result into more sales or virality.

He therefore proposes the following ideal script:

• Quick intro about your product
• Introduce the problem
• Address the problem with your solution
• Include a call-to-action
• Wrap it up with your trust signals (press coverage, well-known clients, awards etc.)

Halk also thinks you need a script: “When a video is recorded, there is a higher expectation from the viewer that the delivery be without fault. A script will ensure that. Writing a script is a little up-front investment that is actually going to save you time in the long run. If you can, record one of your better live demos, listen to it while taking notes, and break down your demonstration into a shot list and associated talk tracks. Then, practice the script aloud to remove clunky sentences and unnecessary words.”

4. Focus on the opening

You have around 8-12 seconds to win your viewer’s attention. If you manage to keep them hooked up for 12 seconds, 80% of viewers will continue watching till the 70-second mark.

Muhammed urges you to squeeze the max out of this time by creating a solid opener and an enticing cover image, which states the exact problem your product will solve for the customer.

5. Record audio and screen separately

Recorded demonstrations lack the interactivity of a live delivery. For that reason, Halk says, you will want the audio for your demonstration to have some energy, to be clearly articulated, and to dance without missing a beat.

He therefore recommends you to start with the audio first. Tune your microphone settings and pull your script up on your monitor. Practice test recording a few sentences so you have an idea of your tone and pace. Then, begin and do not stop recording until you are done. If you stumble, just pause, return to the last sentence, and continue speaking without stopping the recording.

Then, the screen capture. Pull out your shot list, and take spaced out captures of the listed features and actions. Just make sure you take into the consideration the length of the associated talk track while recording. Otherwise, you may end up with not enough video for your audio track.

Muhammed gives the tip of hiring a voice-over artist for affordable prices on Voices or Fiverr. To get the best results, he suggests asking the VO artists to record alternative lines that may be used in the future. The last thing you want to do is start from scratch when you need to make an edit. It is always better to have to cut voices than find new ones.

6. Invest in a good microphone and music

See if you can find some money to buy a good microphone and some background music.

Good sound on a demonstration video is often an overlooked feature, as Halk says, but bad sound can make your demonstration video unwatchable. Investing in a mic will help improve the completion rate of the video, and therefore make your customer better educated.

Add some music to the background of your video, but make sure it is not too loud so that it drowns out the narration. Music can lighten the mood to the video, add some humor, and make the watching experience more enjoyable.

Adding music also has a very functional effect. If you have edited your audio narration down from one recorded track, you may inevitably have some awkward clicks, pops, or volume mistakes throughout the recording. Music will gladly cover them up.

Rock your video marketing

Have you been inspired by my blog to start working on you video marketing? I have a reading tip for you. My blog ‘62 Easy, Valuable Tips to Rock Your Video Content’ starts by offering a way to create a video content strategy.

After that, you will read 40 video content ideas, so you can get started with the content generation. This is followed by 5 ways to increase video views on YouTube. However, people make mistakes, so this blog also offers you 7 common pitfalls marketers make developing video content, so you know what to watch out for. Finally, 4 final video content hacks are listed that will make it easier for your video content to be successful.

Companies that continually increase sales invest time and effort to gain a better understanding of their buyers. Learning about your customers isn’t just a one-time event or short-term process. Employ strategies as you first get to know a prospect, but then continue to enhance your relationships by gathering more information after the sale.

The following are three tips to help you better understand your buyers.

Have a Value-Based Business Conversation

As a starting point, adopt a customer-centric attitude. For businesses that want to better understand their buyers, it’s a great first step. This attitude drives efforts by sales representatives to have value-based conversations with prospects.

During early stages of the selling process, reps can learn about the values and deep needs of buyers with emphasis on listening. Ask questions that invite buyers to share their frustrations, potential consequences of problems and level of urgency. Listening helps reps become familiar with the points of differentiation in their solutions and project a value proposition which showcases benefits more than price.

Execute Great Need Discovery

The value-based conversation hinges on the most important component of the sales process – great discovery. You can’t sell a solution if you don’t uncover the problem it’s solving. During need discovery, you build rapport and trust by asking a lot of in-depth questions that show a genuine desire to understand all facets of a buyer’s need.

Specific types of discovery questions enable you to gather information that’s useful in differentiating your solutions. Begin with open questions intended to draw out the processes, activities and people adversely affected by the central business problem. For instance, guide the customer into pointing out problems or concerns with current providers or products with open-ended trap setting questions.

The Sales Process Never Ends

To develop profitable long-term relationships that increase sales, you need to dedicate time to understanding buyer experiences after the sale. Follow-up conversations give you insight into the positive and negative experience factors that contribute to, or detract from satisfaction. Remember, it’s easier to sell to an existing customer than it is to build a relationship from scratch. Engaging in social media can help you stay top of mind with your buyer, in addition to the more traditional processes of Quarterly Business Reviews and standard monthly reviews.

With roughly 930 million members, LinkedIn is undoubtedly one of the most popular, trusted social channels sales professionals have at their disposal — making it one of the (if not the) best platforms for social selling.

But its popularity also makes it a crowded platform to stand out — and sales reps risk sounding overly promotional if they don't compose their messages appropriately.

To understand the elements of an effective social selling conversation starter, I spoke with four sales experts. Let's dive into what they had to say.

How to Start a Conversation on LinkedIn

Before we dive into more specific expert-backed advice, let's go over a few general best practices when starting a conversation with anyone on LinkedIn.

If you‘re aiming to start a one-on-one conversation, you’ll want to start by connecting with the person and including a brief message explaining why you want to connect.

When reaching out to someone:

• Don't ask for a favor
• Don't send a generic “Hi, how are you” greeting
• Do explain how you know them or why you want to connect
• Do show personalized interest in their LinkedIn activity

For instance, rather than connecting with someone and saying, “Hey there, I thought it would be good to connect”, try saying something like: “Hey there. I found your recent post on social selling very interesting — It would be great to be in your network to continue sharing content.”

Alternatively, perhaps you send something like this: “Hey [Name]. It looks like we both attended Elon University. Would love to connect, and if there's anyone in my network I can introduce you to, please let me know.”

Additionally, if you‘re hoping to engage with a prospect, it’s likely best to post on your own LinkedIn to attract interested viewers, or comment on a prospect's post before directly messaging them. Forming a meaningful connection with the prospect ahead of cold-pitching them is going to be the most effective strategy.

Expert's Best Social Selling Conversation Starter Tips

1. Leverage video posts.

Alex Wedderburn, a Strategic Account Director & Higher Education Lead at Hootsuite, told me he believes video posts are incredibly effective when starting a conversation on LinkedIn.

As he puts it, "I use LinkedIn to publish video posts to highlight the amazing things I experience while working at Hootsuite from both an individual and company-wide perspective.

"Let's face it — text is the medium and format for everything. It‘s on our phones, our emails, and our presentations. We digest text constantly across multiple digital devices and screens all day long, so when a video comes up, it stands out, it’s different, it's fun and authentic."

Wedderburn says, “Video can offer that genuine, unpolished, true version of yourself that people can relate to — and that often opens conversations on LinkedIn.”

There are a few best practices when using video to sell to prospects, including:

• Be concise
• Don't be too scripted
• Do your research

As an example, take a look at Wedderburn's recent LinkedIn video in which he highlights three things happening at Hootsuite in a quick one-minute rundown:

However, using video can add a personal touch and help you connect more quickly with the prospect on LinkedIn. Plus, it will help you stand out.

Wedderburn adds, “Video provides an opportunity to just be a human—to connect with people in new ways and champion the power of human connection and build something that's real with your audience.”

2. Use hashtags.

Lately's Co-Founder & CEO Kate Bradley Chernis told me her best conversation starter garnered 278 comments — and it was a single sentence containing 73 characters, plus three hashtags (all of them made up spur-of-the-moment) and a 24-second video attached.

Chernis told me, "Why did it work? For one, short always works; everybody's algorithms are set to boost 80 characters or less. Secondly, hashtags that contextualize your message versus try to pile on a trend or work as indexers (the opposite of what any marketer will tell you) crush it every time. For example, my highest performing hashtag is #peeingmypants, which I used when Gary Vee tweeted about Lately.ai!"

Here's the post for reference:

"Certainly, this particular post was of the moment — COVID had basically just happened, which meant everyone was all by themselves; hence, there‘s crowd-sourced sympathy at work here. In addition, there’s enough mystery about what I wrote to most people not utterly immersed in Venture Startup Land that they were curious to ask questions or Google it (why is $1 million ARR remarkable?)."

Chernis adds, "I also commented on the comments, asked my team to comment on the comments and the more play the post got, the more we continued to comment. Fuel the fire once you've started it!

In short: Selling on LinkedIn doesn't have to look like, well, selling. It can look like excitement, joy, passion, or humor as it relates to your brand — which will attract and engage viewers and, ideally, result in new leads and prospects.

3. Inspire and educate with your outreach.

Sprout Social‘s VP of Revenue Operations and Strategy, Dan Summers, reminded me that most buyers are 70% of the way through their buyer’s journey before they engage with sales. So how do you capture the attention of a buyer who isn't already interested?

He told me, "Buyers are busy and focused on accomplishing their own objectives. To capture their attention, it is imperative to inspire and educate them with your outreach. There are many ways to approach this, but I've seen a few that have been incredibly effective."

Here are a few tips Summers shared with me when it comes to starting a conversation on LinkedIn:

• Lead with information the buyer might not have about their industry, competitors, or their brand — start with value, and tailor your approach to their unique needs
• Share thought leadership on your social channels, which enables you to demonstrate your expertise, increase credibility with buyers, and show you're on top of your industry
• Share your personal experiences with their brand if you use their own products or services, which conveys authenticity — if you don‘t have personal experiences to share, consider sharing customers’ experiences on social or review platforms that tie to the value your solution provides

“The key theme to focus on is personalization,” Summers says, “Tailoring your message to your buyer's persona and leading with content that is designed to inspire and educate them will improve your chances of starting a meaningful conversation.”

4. Ask a question, try something new, or share a cold-calling war story.

Jed Mahrle, Mailshake's Head of Outbound Sales, provides three strategies for sales reps hoping to use LinkedIn for social selling.

To start a conversation on LinkedIn, Mahrle advises, "First, ask a question. The sales community on LinkedIn loves to share their opinions. If there's something you genuinely want the answer to, ask."

Consider, for instance, how Mahrle once ended one of his posts with a question to his audience:

“Second,” He adds, "Try something new for a week and share the results. Gather new ideas from people like Josh Braun, Founder of Josh Braun Sales Training, or Jason Bay, Chief Prospecting Officer at Blissful Prospecting, as well as podcasts like 30 Minutes to President's Club. Document the results. Then share what you learned."

Finally, he adds, you could share a cold-calling war story.

“Everyone in sales has an interesting cold call. Share the transcript of a recent one (good or bad) and see if there's a lesson to be learned from it.”

Finally, let's dive into 15 social selling post ideas to engage your prospects.

15 Social Selling Post Ideas to Get Buyers Talking

Use Questions to Start Conversations

Posing a thoughtful question is a great way to engage your prospect. And a question is especially useful if the person shared someone else's post (rather than writing it on their own), since it gives them an opportunity to demonstrate their own expertise.

1. “Fantastic insights, [name]. What advice would you give for someone in [X situation]?”
2. “I love what you said about [specific point] -- so true, even though most people think [different opinion]. Which experiences led you to that conclusion?”
3. “[Name], this was a great read. Have you seen the latest news on [topic]? What's your take?”
4. “I've never considered [idea] from that angle. Do you think it still holds true [under X circumstances]?”
5. “I've read a couple other posts on this topic, but yours was the most [convincing, thought-provoking, well-researched, well-argued] by far. What do you believe [topic] will look like in five years?”

Use Comments to Forge Relationships

Giving the prospect some praise will make them feel good — which, in turn, will make them like you more. But of course, this strategy only works if you‘re being genuine, so don’t compliment something you don't truly appreciate.

1. “Well-said, [name]. I especially liked your point on [topic] -- in my experience … ”
2. “Yes! This article should be required reading for people in [role, industry, position]. Just forwarded it to a couple friends.”
3. “Spot-on analysis of [subject]. Your explanation of [X], in particular, was fascinating. I'd be eager to read a follow-up post on [X] alone.”
4. “Thanks for pointing out why we shouldn't do [X]. I'm definitely guilty of doing that in the past -- to stop, I adopted [strategy].”
5. “Haven't read anything this accurate in a while, [name], awesome job. To add to this, I've found [related idea].”

Use Shares to Boost Egos

Everyone wants more views, so sharing your prospect's post (or share) will almost certainly score you some points.

1. “Looking for advice on [subject]? @prospect, expert in X, has your back: [link].”
2. “Are you up-to-date on [topic]? Check out @prospect's comprehensive article: [link].”
3. “@prospect's latest post on [topic] is definitely worth your time. [Link]”
4. “Impressed with the solid insights in this post on [topic] from @prospect. [Link]”
5. “[Short quote from post] - @prospect. [Link]”

If you add your own sample questions, comments, or posts below, we'll give you some ideas on how to make them even better.

Ultimately, conversation starters aren't easy — but the more personalized, authentic, and human you can make them, the more likely you are to see meaningful responses in return.

LinkedIn is extremely popular for professional networking. However, it remains to be relatively under-utilized as a marketing platform, and more so when compared to popular counterparts such as Twitter and Facebook. Nonetheless, it holds immense potential for businesses in terms of lead generation, audience building and audience engagement.

Here’s how you can leverage LinkedIn to grow your business network and improve your bottom-line.

1. Create a company page

Your company page acts as your brand identity on LinkedIn. Although you do not have to restrict all your LinkedIn outreach activities to your company page alone, it acts as a dedicated space to publish and share company information officially. Its the most authentic source that people would trust, whether they are looking to join your team, or are simply curious about what you do.

2. Connect with potential customers

“I reached out to “Connect” with business owners throughout Southern California (I started by reaching out to business owners who are also USC alumni, like me). I’ve discovered that about 1/3 will connect with me,” says Ed Brancheau CEO at goozleology.com.

Connecting with your target audience is a good first step to take post creation of your LinkedIn account, after all it is them you are attempting to reach, and holding out your hand first is a nice way to begin.

2. Update your pages

Whether you have a single company page or multiple pages dedicated to each of your products, using them to improve your presence on the network will require some effort. If you’re running a small or medium enterprise you’d be better off with a single company page. Multiple pages means more effort and more management, which could drain your resources. Irrespective of how many pages you set up, the ground rule is that all of them must be complete with company description, profile photo and cover photo. You should also share industry-relevant and business-specific content from time to time to keep these pages alive.

3. Get a custom URL

LinkedIn has a great Custom URL feature for individual profiles as well as company pages. Getting a custom URL will make promoting your LinkedIn pages on your website and other online properties much simpler. A custom URL is easier to remember and recall. It also improves search traffic, ensuring that anyone who may be looking for your business online finds it quickly and easily. Your custom URL is a unique branding opportunity too.

4. Build a targeted network

Of all the social networks, LinkedIn perhaps allows for the most precise targeting. Whether you’re simply looking to add people to your network, or scouring the platform for potential buyers, you should look for those who meet specific criteria. Age, gender, location, profession are few of them based on which you can filter your target audience. The quality of your network has a direct bearing on the quality of engagement you’ll see within your network, so its advisable to refrain from adding people randomly just to see a bigger number of followers.

5. Stay in touch with prospects

DMs on Twitter aren’t thought of very highly. But LinkedIn is a completely different ball game. In fact people appreciate DMs on LinkedIn as long as you aren’t spamming their inbox with blatant sales pitches. Mentioning prospects in relevant status updates, sending personalized seasons greetings, sharing free access to gated content, inviting people to participate in your events are a few ways in which you can stay in touch with your followers.

6. Get your employees involved

While you can treat your company page as your primary account, you should also encourage employee advocacy. Your company page may have several thousands of followers, but leveraging employee profiles will give you the advantage of establishing a more human connect with your target audience. If you’ve set up a team of employees to represent your business on LinkedIn you should ensure that all their accounts are complete and up to date. Remember to have all of them add your company’s website on their profiles – it’s a great way to get link-backs. Also encourage them to share company content with their connections.

7. Join relevant groups

Identify groups that are relevant to your industry or business and join them proactively. Some of these groups may be closed groups and others may be public groups. While public groups are less of hassle in the sense that you don’t have to follow up on your membership status, some closed groups are actually more niche. You don’t have to pick one over the other, but when joining closed groups make sure it’s worth the time you’re going to be spending on gaining access to the group. You can join as many as 50 groups on LinkedIn, and if you’re going to be using the full limit, you really want to make each of them count.

8. Create your own group

Once you join other groups, create one of your own. Apart from inviting people in your network to join your group, you can also go through all the members in the other groups you’ve joined and invite them as well. LinkedIn makes it extremely simple to filter group members by job title or any other keyword that may be relevant to your search. You can also access a list of Admins on a separate tab within Groups. When you’re a member of a group you can contact people who work in similar or related industries even if they aren’t a connection. You can do this using LinkedIn’s InMail feature.

9. Participate in discussions

Participating in group discussions is a great way to establish thought leadership and share your expertise with a targeted group of listeners. Since all groups are created for specific niches, members are more likely to be tuned into the conversation. As a result, your comments in a group discussion are likely to draw more attention when compared to posting a general update on your profile. You can also use these groups as a channel to push out your own content and also urge some dialogue around it.

10. Publish content on the native platform

In early 2014 LinkedIn rolled out long-form publishing to a select group of people. Within the next year the feature was made available to all major English speaking countries. In essence, the move gave 230 million LinkedIn users the ability to publish and share long form content. Publishing content natively lets you reach out to even your 2^nd and 3^rd degree connections, which by default improves the exposure your brand receives. If you publish great content you also stand the chance of getting featured on Pulse! DrumUp can help you generate some great ideas for creating powerful social media content.

11. Don’t just sell

Social media users are becoming less tolerant of outright sales pitches on these platforms. While it’s still okay to reach out to a qualified lead, trying to sell to somebody who may not even be interested in your product or service is plain annoying. You should really take the time to be genuinely interested in the things that are happening within your network and participate in these conversation with the intent of adding value to your followers.

12. Set targets for outreach activities

Like all other marketing activities your LinkedIn outreach efforts should have targets too. This will give your LinkedIn marketing campaign a sense of direction and drive your team towards achieving measurable goals. While these goals should be realistic, they need to be well-defined as well. For instance, you could say you’re going to add 10 people to your network every week; or that your going to participate in three relevant conversations. Like all social media platforms, there’s always a flurry of activity on LinkedIn and it’s easy to get distracted by everything that’s happening around you. Setting goals will help you stay focused and achieve better results.

Have more tips for LinkedIn marketers? Do share them in the comments below.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Cold calls, emails, presentations, client meetings—every salesperson knows how to do them.

Salespeople learn to do these in practice, during company trainings, and sales conferences. The rules and mechanics are almost universal, and the difference you hear is usually just a matter of semantics.

If the sales trade is an open book anyone can read, then why do salespeople get different results?

Why do some sales front liners close deals faster than other agents?

Why do some people hit their quota, while some trail behind their targets?

We can barely hear you say, “because they’ve got the charm, the looks, the technique. Because they’re cut out for this job.”

If you think the same, then this list is the cure to your self-pity and doubt.

Winning the sales game is not a birthright or a God-given talent. Selling is a skill, and some people are better at it because they’ve worked at it.

It’s what salespeople do besides selling that makes a difference in sales productivity. These are the habits, the fixed behavior and the established routine of a salesperson throughout the whole sale process. Most of us take these habits for granted, but in truth, they lay the foundations of our work ethic and business strategy.

Before acquiring habits that drive sales performance, salespeople have to think of a sale in a new light. A sale is not an isolated event that happens on its own. It is actually the culmination of a series of actions.

Everything that you do during the sale process be it having coffee in the morning with your boss to checking your email after every break or spending 10 minutes talking with someone from marketing—all of these form a routine that determines your sales performance at the end of the day.

The sale process is a challenging journey, and every salesperson develops his or her own routine along the way. Not all of our habits inspire good results. If you’ve been falling below the chart for some time, then there is definitely something you have to change your routine. Butch Bellah, author of the book, The 10 Essential Habits of Sales Superstars, believes that our daily routine heavily impacts the end game, and that “if you change your habits, you change your results.”

Salespersons reach optimum performance by imbibing a set of habits that boosts productivity and outcomes.

Here’s a list of 40 habits that can make a sales front liner a superstar in the biz.

Goal Setting

Sets goals and monitors them

A Harvard study revealed that people who stick to their goals and continuously monitor their progress perform 30% better than others. Authors of the study attribute the outstanding performance to the higher motivation people feel when they have goals to meet. People get more fired up, and end up achieving more.

Different salespersons need different goals. Some buckle under the pressure of ambitious goals, while others thrive on the challenge. The type of goal to set also depends on the strength and weakness of sales agents.

Whatever the goals may be, the most important part is monitoring whether you make your goals or not. You don’t need a sales manager to call you out when you miss on something. Treat your sales goals as a covenant with yourself and you’ll find it harder to break them.

Makes public announcements about future achievements

If goals are not enough pressure for you, then try public anticipation.

This is the technique Aaron Ross, author of the bestselling book Predictable Revenue, uses to achieve top performance at his own pace and time. Tired of following the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound) model in goal setting, he began working on a new approach to work. He calls this Showing Your ASS, from Announcing Specific outcome by a Specific Date.

Ross’s funny acronym makes sense, especially if you are the type of salesperson who finds it hard to get the ball rolling and misses on the small outcomes you need to get the big result you want.

He says, “The best part about showing your ASS is that it’s also totally within your control and you can’t hide from it because you’ve announced it.”

Sales 101

Studies the product extensively

A good salesperson is expected to know the product inside out. A top sales agent goes beyond this, and devotes extra time to study the product extensively—examining flaws, comparing it with competing products, and believing in the capacity of the product to provide solutions to real-life problems.

According to Insight Squared, the top 1% of sales reps has deep product knowledge. What’s more, several studies have already shown that people who have clear intent to buy are drawn towards sales agents who show extensive knowledge of the product. The training app provider Wranx shares, “Retail sales associates with strong brand expertise sell 87 percent more than peers without.” The huge number is more than enough proof that knowledge sells.

Asks questions before making a proposal

Customers these days are empowered buyers.

They know their rights, they have information at their fingertips, and they have networks that help them confirm whether a provider is okay or not. To get on their good side, you need to communicate that you are here to help—without telling them so.

The most effective way to let them know you are after their best interests is by asking questions. Training and Development specialist Brian Tracy says effective listening is key to a successful sales practice. Effective listening involves:

• Asking the right questions
• Never interrupting the client while he/she is speaking
• Responding appropriately
• Clarifying his/her answers before giving a reply

Knows selling is helping

A successful salesman does not ask his client “What can you buy from me?” Instead, he asks himself “How can I help this client?” and works towards that achieving that goal.

Square 2 Marketing CEO Mike Lieberman says the time of hard-selling agents is already done. He adds, “It’s time to fire your salespeople and then hire Sales Guides with a new mission — to help your prospects make a strong, educated, and safe purchase decision. People only buy when they feel safe. Salespeople need to help prospects feel safe by counseling them through their buyer journey. “

Tries to imbibe the customers’ thoughts and feelings

When your prospect is giving you a hard time, the best response is to put yourself in his/her position and try to predict what he/she would like to hear. This requires you to know your client’s needs inside and out, and pay attention to the small details.

Highlights value over product and price

With the internet around, it has become increasingly hard to tell your client the best features of your product. Chances are, this information is already out online and your customer has read it even before you made your call.

Move away from talking about your product and instead focus on the benefits that the product can bring to your client. Use other conversation pieces, such as success stories of other clients or the practical value of your product for your client’s needs.

Upholds integrity and honesty in every sale

Customers are tired of smooth-talking salespeople.

They don’t want to hear the best things about your product or your company. They only want you to be honest and to tell the truth. And believe us when we tell you, they will know if you’re too good to be true.

Alen Mayer, President of the International Association of NLP Sales Professionals, warns salespeople against trying to seduce introverts with sweet talk.

“When introverts find out that the salesperson doesn’t know what he or she is talking about, they shut down the conversation. To win an introvert’s respect, you need to prove your credibility using third-party endorsements, certifications, and awards your product or company won. Introverts don’t usually get swept away by a sales pitch, but they can be influenced by objective reviews or media coverage.”

Keeps promises

Salespeople are always guilty of promising clients something.

Promise to give you a discount. Promise to give you a free trial. Promise to increase your ROI.

Promises, promises, promises. It’s the oldest and cheapest trick in the sales book, and customers know much about them as you do.

Promises are great devices of persuasion, but they can be your downfall too. When you make promises you can’t keep, such as double ROI in three months, you are sure to get an earful from your unsatisfied customer.

Use promises to your advantage by sticking an old business truism: underpromise and overdeliver. Melinda Emerson writes for Nextiva, “By promising one thing (5-day delivery, for example) and beating expectations (2-day delivery) you’ll surprise and delight your customers. And that will keep them coming back.”

Strategies

Puts personal and professional information where clients can easily find them (online presence)

Being visible online is a must for salespeople. Rick Roberge, co-founder of Unbound Growth, has sound advice for salespeople in this digital age.

“As soon as a salesperson identifies himself, their prospect probably Googles them and their company and finds them on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social platforms. Salespeople should make their best stuff easy to find and make sure that what the prospect finds aligns with the conversation.”

A habit to develop: check your social media profiles every week and upload new content such as a blog or article to keep your accounts updated.

Joins LinkedIn groups

Everyone in the sales business has to be on LinkedIn, or else risk missing out on updates and opportunities in the business. To maximize your presence on LinkedIn, start joining LinkedIn groups and raise your chances of closing more deals.

Vorsight Co-Founder Steve Richard says you are “70% more likely to get an appointment with someone on an unexpected sales call if you cite a common LinkedIn group than if you don’t.”

LinkedIn groups are amazing venues to meet new professionals and exchange ideas with them. When you join these groups, allot time in a week to check on the group’s activity and give your fair share of views to let other group members know you better.

Caution: Never ever use a LinkedIn group just to spam and promote your product. You will end up with more haters than prospects if you just use a LinkedIn group for self-promotion.

Asks for new prospects and referrals (even from people who say no)

Beat the pain of rejection by getting prospects out of a dead call. Get referrals even from people who’ve already rejected your offer, to make your time on the phone with them count. The next best thing to closing a deal is getting a new prospect.

Maps prospects and conquers one territory after another

Top salespeople know that randomness never gets you anywhere near the quota. The best approach to sales calls or email blasts is a systematic one, where the plan is clear and the goals achievable.

A geographical approach works best, says Jeb Blount, CEO of SalesGravy.com. He says, “The best salespeople map or grid their territory by day. They then plan their appointments and calls each day, within the grid, thus reducing wasted drive time. The key is leveraging the CRM to run call lists by geography based attributes.”

Sales agents that do this are more productive and turn in more numbers at the end of the day. Start this habit and literally cover more ground every day.

Starts small

The organic way of marketing is still the best way to promote a service or product. When you have satisfied clients that speak out for you, your reputation grows and your market base expands. You can achieve this when you choose to go small, conquering one territory after another before launching a large-scale sales effort.

Ryan Denehy of Groupon reminds sales agents to seek the multiplier effect that a constrained market provides. In 64 Things I Wish I Knew, he writes:

“When you have a product with seemingly broad appeal you’ll be tempted to sell nationwide, or to move into multiple verticals. This works if you’re a well-resourced company but in general it’s best to identify the smallest market where you can have success and knock that shit down. “

Tracks competitors

Let’s face it, the sales game can get pretty tight, especially for SaaS ventures and other tech products. Some people say that doing your damnest best will get you ahead, but sometimes, sheer passion just ain’t enough.

Knowing how your competitors are doing is basic for top performing salespeople. Jamie Shanks of Partner at Sales for Life advises sales teams to build a central repository of deals made by your competitors to know which prospects are out. This repository is part of what Shanks calls competitive intelligence in social selling.

Competitive Intelligence helps you focus efforts on the best leads you have, instead of engaging people who are already on the way to signing up with other people. To do this right, you need to log in your LinkedIn account more regularly and monitor what your connections are up to.

On the Job

Asks high-value questions

Salespeople in full control of the conversation can do what many are afraid to do: ask the hard and high-value questions.

These smart questions range from queries on the state of business, to the solutions the owners have resorted to. You have to show clients that “you have done your homework,” says Arturo Riera, Marketing Consultant for Academy of Art University. Asking straight questions also reduces the time spent on each call.

Prefers LinkedIn messages to emails

Another technique to catch the attention of your client is to send your message through LinkedIn. Emailed messages tend to get lost in the pile of emails a business receives every day. LinkedIn messages are more personal and tend to get noticed more quickly as fewer people use LinkedIn messaging.

Customizes messages

Admit it or not, canned messages make life easier for salespeople. Before making calls or sending emails, check your template and customize messages, adding bits or personal touches to make your mail sound more authentic and inviting.

Rehearses lines like a committed actor

The best salespeople know the value of a single voicemail. It’s not a simple call. It’s a performance.

To get the perfect voicemail, you need to compose your message beforehand and practice before recording it. This is what Michael Pedone, founder of Salesbuzz, advises salespeople to do so they can avoid panicking once they hear the beep.

Even better, salespeople can tailor their calls with “perfect customizable voicemail messages with technology, like the PowerDialer from InsideSales.com.”

Uses dual monitors

Larry Reeves, COO at American Association of Inside Sales Professionals, believes that one simple habit can bring an additional $100 worth of productivity. His advice: Use dual monitors.

Dual monitors solve various problems for workers, like split screen, switching windows, and errors with clicking. Programmers and writers use two monitors to work on one monitor and simultaneously view the results on the other screen. For salespeople, two monitors mean you can Google your prospect while writing them an email.

Keeps a huge “Rolodex” and uses it

A directory of clients is the most useful folder you will have throughout your sales career. Allot time to organize this data and keep this directory somewhere close to your workstation, so you can look it up during calls or important meetings.

Jeff Sheehan, author of Hired!Paths to Employment in the Social Media Era, says this loose collection of business cards is integral to networking and marketing. He adds:

“Although it may be a bit time consuming to ‘load’ this data into a spreadsheet or CRM system once you receive a business card or other contact from someone, the time that you’ll save trying to find this information later will be incredible if it is readily accessible.”

Spends more quality time with customers

When you are not busy making phone calls, meeting clients or talking with leads, then you are not doing the job you should do. Salespeople should spend more time customers to cultivate a deep and lasting relationship with them. But, mere quantity is not enough. As the competition gets tougher, salespeople should give more than just time to their clients—you have to give them your undivided attention.

VoloMetrix CEO Ryan Fuller studied top sales performers and found out that those at the top spend up to 33% more time with customers each week. These same top performers interacted with 40% fewer accounts over a three-month period. These findings suggest that to close more deals, sales front liners must first prioritize their leads, and engage them longer than other sales agents would.

Tells great stories with drama and emotion

Storytelling is an important skill in the sales business. Advertisements, from print, commercials and other types of media, capitalize on the power of a narrative to move a person. Salespeople use the same technique, and even attend workshops on seminars to improve on this skill.

Many experts offer tips on storytelling. Daniel Ambrose, Managing Partner of Media Consulting Firm, says “When it comes to storytelling, the opening should be dramatic and personal. The beginning of the sales conversation should focus on dramatizing the needs of the readers.” Ambrose thinks this is key to getting the customer more invested in the story and the outcome, which will eventually lead to making a sale.

Case studies or the stories of other clients, on the other hand, remain the best route for salespeople, according to Todd Hockenberry, owner of Top Line Results. He writes, “Case studies are also a versatile form of content. You can always get customer quotes as testimonials from any case study you create. These are great to add to your website, add to your email signature, and drop in other marketing materials.”

Reads and researches on customers before making a call

New sales technology gives sales agents access to customer data. Knowing these sets of information about a customer, you can better prepare for your call and compose the right kind of message for your prospect.

We often hear of customer data for marketing, but sales agents need to be apprised of what customers want as well. You can check out their LinkedIn profiles, twitter and facebook accounts, to get ideas on how to best engage your prospect.

Asks for feedback during the sales cycle

Top salespeople know they haven’t perfected the sales process. They always strive to improve, and are not afraid to ask for the opinion of others—may it be good or bad.

During sales calls, in meetings, or in correspondences with clients, take the time and effort to ask them for their honest assessment of the sales process. The feedback completes the sales cycle and strengthens the trust between you and the client. Whatever the client says, take it to heart and ponder on how you can use that comment to improve your next client’s experience.

Hates making customers wait

Selling is a bit like flirting. You need proper timing to seal the deal with your prospects. The worst thing you can do is make them wait, which makes them feel unwanted and neglected. Do that to your clients and you may get this heartless response—“I’ve moved on to another provider.”

Senior Director of Brand Innovations at Hipcricket Guy Borgford writes on a column for luxury daily, “As consumers seek the quickest path to information and entertainment, their loyalties lie not with the product, but with the provider. The key is to get them what they need when they need it.”

Presents something new to prospects on follow-ups

Following up on clients is standard procedure, and is crucial to clinching a deal. Add value to your follow-up by presenting your clients with something new—something you didn’t give them the first time you met.

This added value can be new information, a case study, deeper insight into their company’s needs, expert advice, among others. Prepare for these follow-ups and other calls by creating a desk hint sheet. This sheet can give you story cues and list down ideas you can try with clients. This tool is extremely helpful for people who have a hard time sparking conversations with clients.

Remembers special occasions

Clients are not buyers—they are people you have relationships with! Make them feel special and cared for by greeting them on special occasions, especially dates that mark your business partnership. Send them cards on the day they double their revenue, or the day that marks a phenomenal profit growth.

Persists despite rejection

This is not just a habit that you have to cultivate—it’s an attitude about work. A study from Dartnell Corp said that 90% of salespersons give up after four tries without getting results. Don’t be part of the 90% and persist. Remember this: the tough clients to crack can become your most loyal customers. All it takes to make that happen is patience and perseverance.

Time Management

Steers clear of the paperwork (and focuses on selling more)

Everyone hates paperwork, but these are necessary for company operations and so people have to put up with it. The problem is, for the sales department, taking on paperwork takes away precious time that could have been devoted to doing revenue-generating tasks—like making a call or meeting a client.

Wendy Weiss, President of ColdCallingResults.com, puts non-revenue generating activities like paperwork at the bottom of a salesperson’s priority list. She recommends delegating those tasks to other people, or doing them during off hours. Her high-priority items:

“Meetings or conversations with existing customers to potentially sell additional products or services would be high on the list. Prospecting is a high priority item although it’s further down the list than meeting with a prospect who is about to say, “yes.”

Does a weekly review every weekend

Start Monday on a high by doing your homework on the weekend. Follow Solutions Staffing Chief Sales Officer Anthony Iannarino’s example and gain more focus and attention. His routine involves “spending time on Sunday doing a weekly review and putting the most important tasks and outcomes on your calendar.”

Keeps a running task list

Lists are popular ways to digest information. However complex something is, when it gets to a list, it somehow becomes simpler and easier to understand. That’s why many of the blogs you read (including this one) frequently use the list form.

Smooth Sale CEO Elinor Stutz relies on a running task list to keep herself organized and focused.

“How this works is, at the end of the work week (when everything is fresh in your mind), list bigger projects that need to be completed the following week. And, at the end of each working day, list the projects that need to be completed the following day. Even though interruptions pop up, you are on top of what truly needs to be accomplished.”

Lists have also helped Stutz track her accomplishments more efficiently. If you adopt the same habit, you would have more control over your tasks and your time.

Focuses on one task at a time

We know how much salespeople love to flatter themselves by saying they can “multi-task.” They can juggle calls, emails, meetings, the list can go on and on.

Before we go any further, please remember this: multi-tasking is a myth.

Sales accelerator Jill Konrath busts the myth of multi-tasking. She says, “With multitasking affecting your intellectual capacity, it also drags tasks out when you are trying to save time. Research shows that anytime you are learning something new, multitasking can slow you down 20-40%. That is a huge hit to productivity!”

Gets adequate sleep and stays positive

Salespeople need to be enthusiastic and positive to elicit affirmative responses. Clients don’t want to talk to a grumpy salesperson, who can’t focus because of lack of sleep. When a client hears a happy, positive tone over the phone, he/she feels better and is more likely to entertain your proposal.

We know that selling is a stressful business, but aim for a complete rest to start your day and your calls in the right mood. Sleep for eight hours and eat a healthy breakfast before leaving home. Psyche yourself to sound positive and engaging before picking up the phone to make a sales call.

Growth and Improvement

Expands his/her sales network

Top performing sales agents tend to have more friends and acquaintances in the business. They have a network that is 30 to 40% larger than average, according to a VoloMetrix study.

A wide customer database directly contributes to better sales, but how do more frequent and deeper interactions with fellow sellers increase a salesperson’s performance?

Ryan Fuller of VoloMetrix explains: “It makes sense that people who find ways to build more relationships get exposed to more ideas from across the business, are able to access expertise quickly when needed, and have more context about what’s happening. All of these things help them to be successful.”

Regularly checks and updates his/her LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn is the first place clients go to when searching a salesperson or a company. Keep your LinkedIn profile up to date, listing all your achievements, seminars attended, and posting new content you may have written or produced.

Shares tips and best practices with the entire company

Some people say that the best people in the business keep the secrets of their trade. For us, it’s the opposite. The best salespeople share what they know, and help the sales practice develop further.

Propagate good sales practices in the company by sharing tips and lessons you’ve learned with at least one of your peers every day. Sharing of ideas and experience helps create a culture of excellence, something that everyone will benefit from.

Coordinates with the marketing department

The smart salespeople know they can’t do their work alone. Connecting with the marketing people is a step forward for any sales effort. As Leo Dirr says, “With increasingly self-educated buyers, the roles of sales and marketing are becoming harder to define and distinguish. The most successful teams marry the two functions as closely as possible.”

The perfect harmony between sales and marketing can result in great things for the company. Machine giant IBM tested this theory, and came up with a new function they called Channel Enablement. What did IBM get? Shorter sales cycles, reduced market-entry costs, and lower sales costs. Overall, a successful experiment.

Read sales blogs and books

The process of learning never ends, and for top salespeople, they take this lesson to heart. The best salespeople read sales blogs and books to improve their skills, reading classics to visionary books authored by the experts in the business.

Saleshacker recommends 23 books that all salespeople should read, including Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale and Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Get started on a reading habit today, and increase your knowledge about the biz. If you find it hard to finish books, start reading one chapter a day, or one blog post daily, until the habit sets in.

Ends each day by checking on his/her performance metrics

A top salesperson is growth-oriented, and seeks to develop his skills and knowledge to their highest potential. There’s no better way to know how you fared in a day than by visiting your metrics and reviewing whether you met your targets.

Before going home, ask yourself:

• How many calls did I make?
• How many calls was I supposed to make?
• How many people said yes?
• How many people said no?
• How much time did I put to selling?
• How much time was wasted?

Many offices are now installed with productivity software to help you better monitor your performance. Use these numbers as inspiration to move ahead, and get better every day.

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Developing healthy and successful sales habits need time.

A University College London study reported that it takes 66 days on average for a person to get accustomed to a new habit. The study observed 96 people, and in that set, 18 days was the shortest time recorded before somebody learned a new habit.

The time to master a new habit depends on your resolve to change and improve your sales routine. Start adopting new sales habits today, and reap the benefits in the near future!

To be honest I am disillusioned.

Social media offered a promise that was so compelling I was hooked. The potential and the promise became apparent. You could create, publish and get worldwide attention for free.

And ten years later…..over 2 billion people are now obsessed.

The social networks and new media channels allowed the freedom and power to get your content and message out without paying for it.

The promise….free attention and content distribution.

Viral traffic was attracted by YouTube. Blowing things up, blending strange objects and cat videos went off. We were mesmerized.

But things aren’t the same anymore.

The landscape is changing fast. The new gatekeepers are Facebook and Google. They have the data about your customers and to reach those prospects you now need to pay them. They are the new media moguls.

The social network gatekeepers. And they are slowly closing the gate.

The open web is closing

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all want to keep you within their eco-systems. Much of the viewing of videos and even articles are now happening within the platforms.

Ev Williams (Twitter’s founder) is concerned.

In a recent interview on the Atlantic “Primarily what we’ve seen is that the social networks have gotten really, really big, and they drive more and more of our attention.” They are threatening the open web. “That could be bad,” says Williams.

The reality is that Facebook and other social networks are becoming the default portals. Even Google is now serving up the answers on its results page and you don’t need to click through to the website or blog to get the result.

This stat also makes you sit up and notice.

“85 cents of every new dollar in online advertising went to Google or Facebook in early 2016“, according to a Morgan Stanley analyst quoted by The New York Times. So both the free attention and the paid traffic are being dominated by what is emerging as almost a duopoly.

So what do you do?

You have to get creative.

It’s what great marketers have always done. The term has been coined. Growth hacking

Growth hacking is the art and science of growing a business and startup without spending big bucks on paid digital or traditional media advertising. It’s all about efficient marketing tactics that deliver growth without advertising.

Let’s face it. What startup or small business has access to a huge marketing budget? Almost no one!

Big brands, banks and the big end of town can pay for brand awareness. But the small guys need to get leads. That’s your email list.

But before we go there we need to explore the new traffic paradigms.

The new traffic paradigm

Websites, bloggers and start-ups had 3 main ways to get traffic to their digital platforms before the social web.

1. Rank on Google with what was often “Black hat” SEO tactics. Google’s got that covered now.
2. Build an email list. That is still vital despite the predictions of the death of email.
3. Pay Google for advertising. They used be a lot cheaper and effective a decade ago.

So, things have evolved.

Pay for traffic

We now can pay Google and Facebook. They are the big paid channels.

Earn it

We now can earn attention on social (getting harder) or build authority on Google (takes time)

Partner

Collaborate with influencers, bloggers and websites that already have traffic. But you need to have something of value to exchange.

Own the resulting attention

This is done by building an email list when they show up after you have been working on 1-3. These are your leads.

So how do keep getting attention without paying for it despite the big networks wanting to own it all. How do get traffic that is sticky?

As the fight for attention online becomes tougher you will need to look at creating sticky content and traffic.

Grow traffic that sticks

There are some core strategies that you need to consider to be effective on a web that screams louder every day. But it doesn’t mean you have to yell as well. It’s about working smarter and evolving.

These include.

• Engagement
• Content
• Tools
• Partnerships

Let’s take a closer look.

Engagement

In a world where mass media is impersonal and the web is virtual the challenge is making your engagement authentic and sticky. This is becoming key to standing out from the crowd in a see of blandness.

Making it personal is what engagement is all about. This could include behind the scenes insights on Snapchat that can turn visitors into raving and engaged fans.

But the challenge is doing engagement at scale.

A face to face meeting is the best level of engagement. But it doesn’t scale well. The social web provides the technology and networks to have a highly engaging conversations with no limits and provides a big lever.

Here are some engagement tactics are not something that scales traffic fast but it is where the traffic is stickiest. It builds that credibility and trust like no other traffic source.

#1. Start a podcast.

Podcasts reveal the voice and personality of bloggers and brands. Podcast popularity is rising with 57 million Americans now listening to them on a regular basis according to Forbes.

The game here is changing fast with Apple iTunes virtual monopoly and market share being challenged by Androids “Play”. Pandora is getting into the game with “Serial” as well as Spotify throwing its hat into the podcast ring.

This will be good for everyone.

But Podcasting isn’t without its challenges and will need to evolve to achieve greater penetration

They can be hard to discover on iTunes. Also, they don’t surface and are listened to easily via Google search. I agree with Jay Baer comments that it has to evolve to being an “on-demand radio“.

Once the standards and platforms evolve to being more open, searchable and easy to use we will see the real explosion of podcasts.

But despite that it’s a highly engaging and personable way to communicate and build that all important attention.

#2. Get on Snapchat.

Not much polishing is done here. Snapchat is raw and real. And the law of scarcity can be used to drive traffic to your blog, landing pages and online portals. A 10 second video and a 24 hour story are driving engagement on Snapchat through the roof.

Who is doing this well?

• Gary Vaynerchuk is a big evangelist and is getting huge engagement with his SnapChat tactics. His handle is garyvee.
• Kaelin Tuell is a fitness fanatic who is also smashing it on Snapchat. Russell Brunson did a video interview where she revealed her secret sauce for growing a Snapchat audience. Her handle is tuell_time

I will be using Snapchat more over the next few weeks as we trial the engagement and tactics. So watch out for this Snapchat face!

By the way, if you are on Snapchat just take a photo with your smartphone of the image below and we will connect on Snapchat!

#3. Use video sales letters.

Online video is a personal and visual conversation that can be one too many. It scales well.

This type of tactic can convert attention that educates into traffic that converts. Learn the art and science of creating videos that educate first and sell second.

#4. Run webinars.

Webinars is personal training that can be watched by thousands at a time.

Education is the focus and collaborating with other bloggers and influencers can explode both your email list and your traffic.

#5. Livestream.

Livestreaming has come into its own as the technologies have matured. The parallel development of several technologies such as smartphones, video streaming tech and also faster mobile networks has made this possible.

Periscope and Meerkat are two emerging livestreaming platforms. They are personal and very engaging.

Now, just because I listed 5 types of mediums to drive engagement and then traffic doesn’t mean that you do all 5. Start with one like a regular webinar or maybe a podcast.

Content

Content needs these to elements to really move across the web.

#6. Headlines.

Steve Rayson and the team at BuzzSumo have done some research and have revealed the 5 key elements for writing a viral headline. It is based upon research done with millions of headlines.

Here is an example of a headline using this formula.

#7. Visuals.

Stock images are almost past their use by date on social. The rise and use of “real” images is something that Facebook is encouraging for marketers to include in their social advertising strategy.

This is one of the reasons they chose to Shuttlerock for an innovation award for creating authentic visual content that will scale and can be uploaded to be used in Facebook ads.

Authentic and relevance is key if you are posting visual ads into a Facebook timeline .

Tools

Marketing now needs tech tools. Love it or hate it the reality is that technology is now a key component of marketing. These are 2 tools that I use to convert traffic that sticks.

#8. SumoMe

Pop-ups are avoided by many because they see them as annoying. Television ads are sort of the mass media version of a pop up. But 50 years later we are still watching television with ads that sometimes seem to run for ever.

A pop-up done well is a bit sticky and also adds value in exchange for an email address. I have been using SumoMe’s “Welcome mat” for the last few months and the results have been astounding.

We have grown our email list by nearly 30,000 just with the Welcome mat!

#9. Leadpages

Traffic is good but converting into leads and then sales needs great landing pages.

We have been using Leadpages for well over a year now and it is one of the fastest and cheapest ways to build landing pages for webinars, sales funnels and for selling products.

It has transformed our business.

This is the Leadpages landing page we created and where we send visitors from Twitter. These are sent every 4-5 hours into the Twitter stream.

This is how the visual tweet looks.

This tactic and the landing page is alone adding 400+ new subscribers a month.

Below is the landing page.

Partnerships

Trying to find the right partners to collaborate with is becoming a big part of a digital marketer’s tool kit.

You can find them the hard way or you can be smart and use some cool tools to identify influencers and bloggers. These are also great for finding content that is trending or viral.

These tactics are now a key part of hijacking engaged traffic.

#10. Newswhip

Want to see what top stories are trending and which influencers and writers are the sources of that? Then Spike NewsWhip is essential for any PR professional, journalist and content creator..

#11. BuzzSumo

Want to know what content and who the top influencers are in your industry or niche? Then BuzzSumo is a great tool for identifying bloggers, influencers, companies, journalists that are creating content that is resonating around the web.

It also helps you find the top performing content with its content research feature. You can then use this to use as inspiration for creating content that maybe can go viral.

What about you?

So what are you doing to attract the eyeballs and ears that you need to succeed in a digital world? How do you break through the clutter, get attention and get traffic that sticks?

What’s working for you?

Look forward to hearing your stories and comments below.

Free Webinar

Join us for a webinar on June 28 at 6pm EST time to discover the key tips and tactics to grow your email list fast.

 

Today’s digital space is being increasingly muddied by the daily barrage of new, and often poorly planned content. In fact, the amount of content that gets created online every 30 hours equivocates to the amount of content from the caveman era to 2008. That’s when the social media explosion happened and people began creating and sharing their own content en masse. Fast forward to today and we have and endless spattering of content we have to cut through to be effective.

This brings us to the concept of “likeability” – how much is a particular post or piece of content “likeable”? For B2B Salespeople, the content they share needs to be liked and valued by their prospects. The like-ability of the content can increase by crafting posts using best practices for each social network (length, language, media, etc). Good content, context and… good timing! This means not only knowing when the prospect exhibits the need for specific content – and the ability to deliver that content to the prospect at the optimal time for action via the right medium.

Salespeople are publishing content to drive thought leadership but the ultimate goal is to get expressions of interest and engage prospects into the sales process. With the amount of content we know that’s jamming the feeds how can we stand out and turn social content into dollars?

Likeability = Targeted Content + Situational Context + Timing

We agreed that the goal is to cut through the crap and build our pipeline. That means we only care about the attention of a very small subset of people – those that match out buyer persona. This requires having content that is optimized for social media and that is adding value specifically to your buyer persona. Content that is role based, industry based and funnel stage based is a great way to organize content you intend to share – and share it the right way. This may be by DM, or dangled in front of them in public areas like hashtags you know they are active in. Monitoring their online activities also give you windows of context to leverage – for example – when the prospect asks a question thats applicable, or shares an article that opens the door for you to share the right content.

“Likeability” of content for B2B Salespeople depends on:

• Role/Industry/Funnel Stage Focused Content
• Monitor & Search For Prospect Signals
• Deliver @ Best Time & Best Channel

Welcome to Shark Week! This week, people from all over the world are tuning into content programming dedicated to—yep, you guessed it—sharks. This follows the well-timed release of The Shallows, a movie about a lone surfer’s survival attempts against a shark attack.

With the fascination surrounding these mysterious creatures of the sea, I’d like to draw some parallels from the underwater ecosystem to our very own marketing ecosystem. After all, as marketers, it’s in our genes to keep abreast of and ride the wave of (pun intended) trending topics.

So, how are marketers like the giants of the ocean—sharks and whales? The similarity lies in our “feeding” habits. Sharks find a specific target and then spend time hunting it down, similar to account-based marketing (ABM), in which an organization identifies a number of target accounts and dedicates sales and marketing resources to penetrate and close them. On the other hand, whales, specifically baleen whales, swim with their mouths open, taking in large amounts of water that contain tiny creatures. This is evocative of the traditional demand generation approach, with broad-reaching techniques that focus on generating and engaging a large number of qualified leads based on their attributes to move them further down the funnel and eventually close them.

Ultimately, whether you’re most like a shark or whale will depend on your objectives and nature of your business. In fact, both species are critical to the ecosystem, just like most B2B organizations need an optimal mix of both broad-reaching and targeted strategies to achieve their different goals.

Let’s take a look at three differences between sharks and whales, and how they can help guide your marketing strategy:

1. Inbound vs. Outbound

Whales eat by swimming with their mouths open toward their prey. Both food and water enter their mouths, and they squeeze out the water out through their baleen. Similarly, with a broad-based marketing approach, marketers use different campaigns to generate leads, including a variety of inbound tactics such as paid advertising, SEO, and webinars, which are then filtered by scoring systems based on desirable attributes determined by audience personas.

On the other hand, when a shark is hungry, it uses its different senses to hunt down its prey, rather than waiting for the prey to flow through its mouth. Just like sharks, marketers employing an account-based marketing approach use different signals to identify their targets and directly market to them. These might be the “big fish” accounts—accounts that are likely to results in large deals, or accounts that fit specific parameters like company size, industry, technologies used, etc. In ABM, since the focus is on a specific set of accounts, marketing efforts are outbound and personalized, tailoring specific content to those targets. Some examples include direct mail, database emails, and calling campaigns. In ABM, there is a smaller need for filtering since that has been done during the account selection phase, although leads are still scored based on their decision-making ability and other factors.

2. Different Success Metrics

At the end of the day, both sharks and whales need to eat to survive, just like the end goal for both ABM and broad-based marketing is to generate revenue. However, while whales need to consume large numbers of fish, squid, and other tiny creatures like plankton to survive, sharks are more attracted to fewer, larger creatures.

The interim goals and success metrics for marketers can be different as well, based on the approach they use. Marketers who use a broad-based marketing approach may measure lead quantity and quality, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), sales qualified leads (SQLs), and opportunities created. Whereas, ABM marketers may prioritize meetings, average selling prices (ASPs), win rate, velocity, and account penetration metrics. This is because the broad-based marketing funnel is different from the ABM funnel, which is flipped—the stages in the former revolving around awareness, interest, consideration, and purchase and the latter comprising of identify, expand, engage, and advocate.

3. Different Tools

While most sharks are equipped with rows and rows of sharp teeth and jaws that can unhinge to extend their reach while attacking, some breeds of whales don’t even have teeth. What they do have, however, are baleen plates that act as a filter to squeeze out water and other unwanted materials.

Comparably, to survive in today’s competitive landscape, you need the right technology platforms and tools to automate, score, personalize, measure, and optimize your campaigns. However, there are specific tools that you need to implement and carry out ABM effectively. ABM solutions, whether from a specific vendor or within a complete marketing automation platform, like Marketo’s, enable both marketing and sales teams to get a 360-degree account-level view and aggregate the engagement and actions of leads within a specific account. Broad-based marketing tools, which may be one in the same with the right solution, generally have a lead-level view, enabling marketers to assess and score leads based on multiple demographic and behavioral data.

There are plenty of fish in the sea, but the key to reeling them in lies in your marketing strategy. Whether you choose to be a shark or whale or a hybrid of both depends on your goals. At the end of the day, one thing is for certain—your customer is the king of the sea. And while this does not apply to the unsuspecting and ill-fated prey of sharks and whales, prioritizing customer experience above all else is an essential practice to be successful.

What other similarities do you see between marketers and sharks or whales? Share your observations in the comments below!

Sales force automation is a technological solution that transforms the way your sales reps use information. Appropriate SFA software streamlines your sales processes by adjusting the sales pipeline. As traditional sales force automation (SFA) applications are being used by the majority of sales organizations, the benefits of such software are clear. For example, investing in SFA increases deal closure by 30% while the implementation of SFA reduces sales cycles by 18%. In order to stay ahead of the curve and outsmart your competition, savvy sales professionals need to constantly enhance their approaches, strategies and operations. Adding intelligence to your SFA helps you beat your competition and meet the sales quotas faster.

As the heart of your company, your sales team needs the tools to increase their productivity and drive your company’s success. Usually, sales force automation provides companies with a great range of functionalities: from opportunity management to document flow automation. However, if you want to revitalize your sales process and increase revenue, traditional SFA will not be enough – you need to add intelligence to your sales force automation. With this kind of insight, you can detect missing steps in the sales process and advise the best next action to move prospects to the next stage of the pipeline. For example, during the order processing stage, the system suggests products to up-sell or cross-sell based on the history of communication with the customer, profile information, purchasing behavior and so forth. An integrated strategy for business intelligence and SFA is needed to produce significant improvements in forecast accuracy that leads to higher profits. Advanced analytics enables your sales managers to see the bigger picture of the sales process and plan their sales efforts accordingly and can help sales reps meet their quotas faster and more efficiently.

In addition, your sales team will undoubtedly appreciate the benefits of intelligent sales force automation by implementing dynamic sales processes, which allow for better flexibility and less unpredictability.

"When we let data drive our marketing, we all too often optimize for things that are easy to measure, not necessarily what matters most." — Ezra Fishman

Too many startups focus on the numbers, rather than the people behind the numbers.

Forget about automated reports and real-time dashboards for a moment. Because there are so many crucial elements to the success of your startup which can’t be quantified.

Let’s talk about why you shouldn’t be too focused on the numbers and how to find a balance between quantity and quality that will set you up for success.

Meaningless numbers

Every user interaction that happens on our websites and apps can be tracked, quantified and analyzed. As a result, many startup founders have an unhealthy fascination with data, metrics and analytics.

They think all these numbers contain the answers to the mystery of business success.

They don’t.

So you have your churn rates memorized, your cold calling metrics on display for the sales team, and a daily email with your trial conversion rates?

Great.

Now ask yourself: Are you actually doing anything with that data? Does it actually mean anything to you?

Without context, numbers are useless. If your data isn’t translating into action, your metrics are a waste of time.

Lack of context

Reports, real-time dashboards and one-on-one observations all serve the purpose of gathering data. But there’s one vital difference: When you talk to your customers in person, your data has context, and context completely changes the story your data tells.

Make customer visits and customer calls a priority in your startup, whether you have 10 customers or 10,000—make sure you talk to users during all stages of product development.

A first-time user will have a very different experience to someone that’s been using your product for a year. But in order to develop a product that generates true value, you need insight from both.

Lessons from Pinterest: People before metrics

Back in the early days of Pinterest, way before their $5 billion dollar evaluation and before anyone knew what “pinning” was, founder Ben Silbermann spent his days in coffee shops, turning strangers into beta testers.

Silbermann would approach people and ask if they’d be interested in trying out his social website. Then he’d carefully watch how they interacted with Pinterest and take note of their activity, body language, and facial expressions.

If they seemed particularly frustrated or entertained, Silbermann would ask questions about their experience to better understand what was going on. At the end of each session, he’d have a wealth of data he never would have gotten from a dashboard or a spreadsheet.

There’s more to UX than just clicks and conversion rates. If you really want to understand how customers are using your product, you need to sit down with them while they use it.

Finding the balance

Knowing your data and knowing your customers are not the same thing. Your data needs context, and you can’t get context without human interaction.

But before you start talking to your customers, make sure you’re tracking the right metrics. Your metrics should:

• Correlate to your overall business goals, e.g. increase MRR by 15%.
• Have goals attached to them, e.g. add 200 new customers per month.
• Have an action assigned to each metric, e.g. bring in more qualified leads.

Once your metrics have been set, it’s time to start talking to your customers to put those numbers into context.

Because when you do, you’ll discover how you can move your leads through the funnel and start moving your numbers up.

Now go get'em!

Recommended reading:

SaaS sales: Why you need to call every trial signup user within 5 minutes!
Calling trial signup users can be demoralizing but there's an easy yet powerful way to massively improve the success of your phone outreach. Learn how calling within 5 minutes produces incredible reach and conversion rates.

Why startups need to visit their customers
Is visiting customers valuable for startups and SaaS companies? Yes, it's crucial and this is how you and your business will benefit from doing it right.

Why you need to call your churning customers (and how to do it right)
Your churning customers can your greatest teachers. They were once willing to pay for your product or service but something pushed them to cancel their contract. Here's how you can learn from them in order to build a bigger, better SaaS business.