One day after the Canadian Civil Liberties Association published an incendiary open letter calling for a stop to the Sidewalk Labs development in downtown Toronto, the chief executive of the company behind the project said opposition was inevitable.

“Most people don’t like change, or at least they’re afraid of it in some way, and their natural tendency when they hear something new is to step back and say ‘no,’” Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff told the Financial Post in an interview Wednesday.

“You are naive if you don’t think that there’s going to be controversy when you’re trying to do something that’s hard, or never been done before.”

Sidewalk Labs, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, was selected to develop a smart city plan for a new neighbourhood on Toronto’s waterfront, but as public consultation has dragged on throughout 2018 and early 2019, critics have raised fears about data collection and corporate overreach by the tech giant.

• Sidewalk Labs and the question of tax increment financing: Here's how the proposal would work
• Sidewalk Labs says wider vision for Toronto waterfront – tax revenue, transit – still ‘concepts in progress’
• Sidewalk Labs unveils heated sidewalks and building ‘raincoats’ that will let patio season start early

On Tuesday, the CCLA threatened to go to court to block the project, arguing that until proper regulation is in place for smart cities, the project is premature and risks creating a “non-consensual, state-authorized mass capture of Canadians’ personal information.”

Doctoroff said he believes that claim is “without merit” and the idea that the project should be halted until governments can legislate clear rules for data collection is “a very silly response.”

“We all know that this issue with data — particularly data in public and semi-public spaces — is a big issue in society for which there are basically no rules. It’s the Wild West out there,” he said.

Doctoroff said that the Sidewalk Labs proposal of an independent civic data trust to regulate and hold all urban data inevitably means that government regulation will happen before the project gets off the ground.

“This place won’t get set up unless, whether it’s an independent data trust or something else is in place to actually do it, and ultimately it’s going to be government that has to do it. We’re not going to do it on our own,” he said.

Thus far, Sidewalk Labs has tried to put the emphasis on proposed urban innovations that might be included in the development, such as “raincoats” for buildings that would create usable outdoor public space regardless of the weather.

But now the project is moving toward a critical phase, with Sidewalk Labs expected to deliver a draft version of a Master and Innovation Development Plan (MIDP) that will lay out its detailed vision for the project.

Doctoroff says the draft MIDP will be published sometime this “spring” before soliciting public feedback, but criticism of the project is already mounting.

In addition to the CCLA letter, a group of activists have recently come together to launch the Block Sidewalk campaign. A report in the Toronto Star detailing secret Alphabet documents about the MIDP sparked a flurry of critical media coverage.

According to the report, Sidewalk Labs is looking for a share of property tax and development fees that the city collects in the development area, and the company also wants to be paid for “a share in the uptick in land value on the entire geography.”

Doctoroff confirmed that they’re asking for a share of the development fees and property taxes in the port lands, arguing that the company is only asking for a share of incremental revenue that the city would not otherwise receive without an “essential catalyst” spurring development.

He also confirmed that Sidewalk Labs is proposing to finance a light-rail transit extension into the development, though the company has no aspirations to actually operate the transit line — it would still be run by the TTC.

Doctoroff was vague on the broader topic of the Sidewalk Labs business plan, saying that it is still a work in progress. For example, on the Sidewalk Labs support for tall wood buildings, he said that once they prove that it can work, the company can make money “in some isolated cases from the technology we create” being used in other cases.

But when asked if that means patenting and licencing their technology, Doctoroff responded, “I don’t know about patenting or licencing, what the method will be, but if people look to this place and see that we’ve actually been successful in what we’re trying to do, presumably there might be business opportunities elsewhere.”

One area of the business model he was very clear about was to say that Sidewalk Labs does not intend to monetize data.

Despite the fact that Google is a sister company to Sidewalk Labs, he said there’s no linkage between the two companies’ revenue plans.

“From a business model perspective, it is completely 100 per cent separate,” Doctoroff said.

The average salesperson is losing up to 40% of their deals because they’re not following-up effectively.

After a sales meeting, do you ever experience a prospect ‘going dark’ on you? Everything felt like it should have gone great – the prospect seemed interested in the meeting, they asked the right questions, your sales pitch was stellar. And then you send 2-3 follow-ups…but no response. What went wrong?

Not knowing why a deal isn’t closing is really frustrating and the reason why your deal isn’t closing is fairly simple: you’re treating the follow-up process as a completely separate task!

If you treat following-up like a separate stage of the sales process instead of something you need to pave your way towards from the beginning of your relationship, your deals will get stuck in a “Qualified Awareness” stage. This is where your prospect is qualified to become a customer AND they are aware of what you do – but they don’t take action.

Sending effective follow-ups requires research, making a personal bond with your prospect, and providing real value every time you interact with them. But when you go the extra mile and follow these steps, you’ll send follow-ups that your prospect will actually engage with.

The Pre-Call

One misconception many salespeople have is that following-up stage officially starts after the sales pitch meeting. The truth is that the follow-up stage begins before you even start talking to your prospect.

The first step for a successful follow-up is to do research on your prospect before your sales pitch meeting. Doing a great job during your sales call increases the chances that your follow-up will translate to a close. Nothing turns a prospect off more than being unprepared.

I recommend having a ‘pre-call’ before your actual sales meeting with your champion to supplement your research. During this pre-call, ask:

• • • Who will be part of the sales meeting?
    • What are their roles?
    • Who’s the decision maker? (If your champion isn’t the decision maker, how can they influence the decision maker?)
    • Are there other stakeholders?
    • Do they have the budget for your product or service?
    • What are they hoping to achieve with your product or service?

Most companies have three or four core initiatives they’re working on at a given time. A key sales skill is to be able to map your product to one of those initiatives. Understanding what those initiatives are from an insider perspective is invaluable.

Next, look at their LinkedIn profiles to understand their experience and role, also look out for common interests that you can bring up during your meeting and follow-ups. You can even look them up on Google, Facebook or Instagram to find the key details that will help build personal rapport and build stronger relationships.

Armed with this research, not only will you have to tools to give a super-customized sales pitch but also to connect better with your prospect which enables you to send engaging follow-ups that will resonate them.

The Sales Pitch

During your sales pitch, you don’t just want to ask the right questions but also want to accomplish these three steps:

• • 1. Create Urgency
    2. Establish Concrete Next Steps
    3. Uncover How To Follow-up

Create Urgency

During your sales pitch, show your prospect what they have to lose by not taking action. Remember, people are “loss averse” and hate losing things twice as much as they like gaining the same thing. Show them how not taking action or sticking to the status quo will hurt them.

One great way to do this is to leverage case studies and testimonials. Show them an existing customer who had a similar problem, then show them how your product solved that problem. It’s important here to bring in real results and metrics here. Your prospect will be able to see their own experiences within your existing customers’ experiences and be able to concretely envision their future success with your product.

Establish Concrete Next Steps

You want to agree to next steps during your sales meeting. People like to do what they say they’ll do, especially if it’s a face-to-face meeting. Once they’ve agreed to next steps verbally, they’ll feel obligated to get back to you since they had already promised.

Establishing concrete next steps with your prospects also reaffirms your commitment to helping them solve their problem.

What does a concrete next step mean? This means establishing a clear timeline of when you’ll be able to provide them with more information about the next step (e.g. a pilot) and what you expect out of them (e.g. information on how to set up their pilot). This is effective because this creates a give-and-take relationship that’s more like a partnership between you and your prospect.

An example of establishing next steps might be:

“So, Ms. Prospect, in terms of next steps, I’ll get approval for a three-week trial for your team and import your accounts once you send me over the territory data. When do you think that you’re going to have access to that information?”

Uncover How To Follow-up (Based on Your Prospect’s Preferences)

This is actually one of my favorite tricks and it’s something simple that you can ask at the end of your sales meetings. It’ll save you from suffering through a lot of stress during the official follow-up stage.

That question is, “What’s the best way of keeping in touch?”

Most often, people will respond with “email” because they hate answering calls in this day and age of robocalls. In this case, you can respond with “I’m guessing you get 200 emails a day like I do. Is there something I can put in the subject line that will help my emails stand out?”

No matter how they respond to you, they’ve verbally committed to re-engaging with you. People instinctively want to keep their commitments.

Asking for permission to follow-up and asking for the best follow-up method based on your prospect’s preferences will get you way ahead in the sales cycle. You lower your chances of being an annoyance and also ensure that your chances are connecting will be successful.

Know When to Walk Away

Keep this in mind: 80% of deals require 5 follow-ups or more. Don’t give up after not seeing a response after a few follow-ups, especially if you can see that your prospect has engaged with your messages. The truth is, that extra call can make the difference between winning and losing a deal.

But, you also need to know when to walk away. You need to make sure that the prospect has no intention of buying in the short-term. You can ask them directly by sending them a break-up email.

In your break-up email, ask if your prospect is still open to implementing your solution to their team. The key to keep the relationship alive is to ask if now is not a good time, and if you should reconnect in the future.

Your prospect will respond honestly and with the right next step to take.

Walking away isn’t necessarily a bad thing either, it means that you can refocus your time and energy on other opportunities. You could be leaving a lot on the table by over-focusing on a deal that won’t move forward.

How do you typically prepare for your follow-ups? Let us know in the comments.

The post How to Effectively Follow-up After Sales Meetings appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Most marketers struggle to increase traffic to their websites, and there are a lot of ways to get from “point A to point B.” Paid ads and traditional marketing can seem like the best quick fix, but they rarely equate to an investment in long-term results. So if you are trying to figure out how to generate organic leads without a monster budget, I’ve got a few ideas that will help you get the job done.

What are organic leads?

Organic leads are prospects who find your company by searching for a product, service or question in a search engine, rather than directly visiting your URL or clicking on PPC ad. These leads and prospects often don’t know about your product or service before they do an online search.

Today, we use Google (and other search engines) as a way to answer all of our questions. Whether it’s the name of an actor, how to change a setting on my phone or how to solve complex business problems, I know that Dr. Google will have the answer. And, as marketers, we’re hoping that Dr. Google will prescribe information on our website as a treatment for the searcher. That’s why companies fight to reach the top of SERPs (search engine results pages) — we want their attention!

So how do you get to the top of these results? And furthermore, how do you get visitors to take action on your site?

Here are a few principles that will help you understand your audience, capture their attention and ultimately convert them to advocates of your company.

1. Do Keyword Research

Organic traffic relies on your ability to understand what search terms your customers and prospects are using to navigate the search engines. In other words, doing keyword research is essential so that your audience can find you online. To grasp organic traffic, you need to understand the relevant keywords for your business, along with the competition for these keywords across the internet. When you incorporate keywords in both your website and content you create, your site will become more easily searched.

A key factor to SEO success and increasing website traffic boils down to doing some homework to identify the highest volume of keyword searches and the lowest degree of difficulty. You can use tools like Google’s Keyword Planning Tool, Google Search Console, or SEM Rush to learn what your website is currently ranking for and to discover new opportunities.

Next, you can deploy a strategic content creation strategy to elevate your organic rankings. In other words, start with the low hanging fruit: where your website is ranking the highest matched with the greatest number of monthly searches. Also, seeking out new, relevant, high-volume keywords that you aren’t currently ranking for.

Don’t forget to spend some time digging through your site analytics to find out where organic visitors are regularly landing on your website (and fix any errors found on pages being indexed). Is it one of your main site pages or is it a blog post? Drilling down to this data is going to give to some really great insights about what Google values on your website.

If you find there is a big disconnect between what’s driving traffic and your business objectives, then your first focus should be adjusting your website content to align with your business and speaks to your personas.

2. Publish Regular, Consistent, Helpful Content

Now that you have a sense of what keywords you want to rank for, it’s important to deploy a consistent content marketing strategy. Both search engines and your readers value consistency. One of the more frequently asked questions I hear is, “how often should I be blogging?” My answer is always, “it depends!” Why? It all depends on how aggressive you want to be with the number of organic leads you generate. The more content (good content!) you create, the more leads you will generate.

A manufacturing client we have been working with, W.C. Branham, had poor organic ranking on opportune keywords when we started working with them three years ago. We began publishing one strategic blog post a week consistently, and over time, they began to rank organically for several of the keywords that mattered most to their business. This growth in organic traffic has led to a consistency of organic leads.

3. Understand Your Personas

Before you write one piece of content, or definitely before you re-design your new website, create your buyer personas so that you know whom your content is trying to reach. In essence, define the IDEAL customer. By creating quality content that resonates with your target audience, you will naturally impact your organic rankings. Keep in mind, keywords and search only get you so far. Writing keyword-driven content without helpful information is not an effective way of generating new online leads.

Some examples of questions you will want to be able to answer when creating your customer profile are:

• Characteristics (demographics, psychographics, behavior, etc.)
• Where do they “hang out” online and what kind of searches do they conduct?
• What are their biggest problems they are trying to solve, pain points, what solutions are they trying to capture?
• What are their buying behaviors? What are their information sources?

When you know WHO you are trying to reach, you can begin to know how to create content that will resonate with and help your prospects. Download our easy persona template to get you started.

4. Create Compelling Conversion Points

Now that you know how to attract new traffic to your website, it’s important that you have places to convert that traffic to leads. And that doesn’t just mean a contact form.

Think about an experience where you’ve gone in to a physical store to browse for something. If a customer service person approaches you, you’ll usually respond with “no thanks, I’m just browsing”. That’s how a lot of your website visitors feel when the only conversion point you have on your website is a contact form or request for a demo.

Now instead, imagine that you are reading a really helpful blog post that’s detailing how to create your marketing budget for next year. When you get to the bottom of the post, you see a button that prompts you to download a free budget template. A much better user experience, this offer solves your immediate problems and helps you get what you needed.

Also, spend some time drilling into the User Flow tool in Google Analytics. Look at what pages readers are choosing to go to next and what pages are causing them to leave your site. It might even help to map out a common user flow through your website to make sure you have a clear picture of where the readers are coming from, where they are going, and where they leave. Now, ask yourself: “Does this make sense? Could I make this process easier for visitors? Is there information they are trying to find or questions they are trying to answer? Where are the best opportunities for conversion?”

Remember, every searcher is going have different needs and be at a different place in their research process. It’s important that your website offers a variety of opportunities for people “opt in” to what your company has to offer.

5. Add Video to Your Website and Blog

Video has been an important element to SEO since 2007 when Google announced “universal search,” yet video is an underrated element of search marketing today. One study boldly states that websites that incorporate video are 53x more likely to rank on the first pages of Google search results. There are many algorithmic reasons why this is so, but here are a few:

• Google cares more about QUALITY content over keywords — because Google knows its users care about quality. Most videos are educational and informative content that succeeds in answering queries.
• Search results with video have a 41% greater CTR than searches without.
• Video makes visitors stay on your site longer, which means that your content is deemed more relevant and “authoritative.”
• Video builds more links. Having video rather than just text will triple the number of linking domains (one of the essential elements of SEO).

Need some video production inspiration? Here are some tips and tricks from our own seasoned TV producer to get you started.

6. Leverage Social Media

The more engaging content you create, the more places you can share it, the more visits you will drive to your website. Don’t underestimate the power of social media. When you take the time to create engaging content, don’t stop there… when you share it across social media channels, it increases the chance that those links are engaged and will bring interested readers back to your website. Think of each social media channel as its own search engine. As important as keywords are for blog posts, they are just as important in the social media channels. Don’t forget to optimize your social media posts with #hashtags to bring in more views, clicks, and retweets.

Remember that the purpose of search engines today is to deliver relevant, meaningful search results that answer the questions of your prospects and customers. Don’t waste time creating content that serves your company. Increasing your website traffic and organic leads will not happen overnight, but if you use these tactics, make data-driven decisions, and stay persistent, you can really impact results.

The motto of Vancouver-based biotechnology business STEMCELL Technologies is “scientists helping scientists.” And it’s an idea that founder and CEO Dr. Allen Eaves applies very literally. STEMCELL develops products and services to support academic research, particularly research related to stem cells. Because of this, Eaves tends to hire scientists then offer them business training rather than vice versa. “It’s much easier to teach scientists the principles of business than it is to teach someone neurobiology,” says Eaves. A large proportion of Eaves’s staff have a Ph.D. in a relevant scientific field—including 40% of his sales team.

Eaves made the leap himself from hematology and cancer research to entrepreneurship in 1993. “Having expertise is central to what we do,” he says. “But we have to come up with new ideas and new products, and then we have to market and sell them.” With that imperative in mind, Eaves offers his employees a kind of business boot camp in which, over a period of several months, staffers take courses in everything from project management to pricing to marketing and sales. It’s proven very popular. “Everyone understands that business runs the world, so people like getting that other perspective and feeling competitive in it,” he says.

But not too competitive: Eaves says the company’s vibe is less cutthroat, more collaborative—even when it comes to rivals. “We’re trying to give people the tools to do cancer and other research better, so we do a deep analysis of what our customers need and we try to give them those tools,” he says. “If we think a competitor’s product will help them, we’ll tell them.” A less confident entrepreneur might balk at the notion, but Eaves is not hurting for business. (The company pours 14 to 15% of its revenue into research and development—a disproportionately high amount, according to Eaves, and something he considers a key competitive advantage.)

Maintaining a highly collaborative environment where employees are amenable to learning new skills starts with hiring practices. STEMCELL looks for prospective employees with a proven track record in relevant scientific research, but also business acumen (that is, a willingness to learn the dollars-and-cents stuff) and social skills. Eaves has come to recognize markers: “I look at their resumé to see what else they’ve done. Were they part of a student biotech network? Did they play sports? We want to see anything that demonstrates social skills, which is very important,” says Eaves. “We’re not after prima donnas pushing for a Nobel Prize.”

As the sole owner of the company, Eaves has the freedom—unfettered by shareholders or other investors—to craft his company exactly as he likes. “I’m not really interested in making money,” he says. “I’m interested in making quality products.” Of course it’s easier to say that when his work is generating serious cash. “We’re growing at about 25% this year, and our sales are going to be about a billion dollars,” Eaves says. “My biggest problem now is hiring enough people.”

The post STEMCELL Technologies: Canada’s Best Managed Companies 2019 appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Whether you're purchasing bottled water from a convenience store or a designer handbag, the selling price of these items is often much higher than it cost to produce them. In many cases, this selling price is determined using a cost-plus pricing strategy — where the selling price is determined by adding a percentage to the production cost for a product.

So, what is cost-plus pricing, and how do businesses use it?

What is cost-plus pricing?

Cost-plus pricing is also known as markup pricing. It's a pricing method where a fixed percentage is added on top of the cost it takes to produce one unit of a product (unit cost). The resulting number is the selling price of the product.

This pricing method looks solely at the unit cost and ignores the prices set by competitors. For this reason, it's not always the best fit for many businesses because it doesn't take external factors, like competitors, into account.

Retail companies like clothing, grocery, and department stores often use cost-plus pricing. In these cases, there is variation in the items being sold, and different markup percentages can be applied to each product.

If you sell software as a service (SaaS), this pricing method isn't the best fit because the value your products provide is often more significant than the costs to produce the products.

The cost-plus pricing method is a good fit for businesses that want to pursue a cost-leadership strategy. Cost-plus pricing can be used as part of the company's value proposition by sharing its pricing policy with consumers and saying something like, "We'll never charge more than X% for our products." This transparency helps build trust with potential customers and allows businesses to build a reputable brand.

Cost-Plus Pricing Formula

The cost-plus pricing formula is calculated by adding material, labor, and overhead costs and multiplying it by (1 + the markup amount). Overhead costs are costs you can't directly trace back to material or labor costs, and they're often operational costs involved with creating a product.

Markup

Markup is the percentage difference between the unit cost and the selling price of the product. You can calculate a product’s markup by subtracting the unit cost from the sales price and dividing the resulting number by unit cost. Then multiply the final result by 100 to get the markup percentage.

Cost-Plus Pricing Example

Let's say you started a retail clothing line, and you need to calculate the selling price for the jeans. Here are the costs to produce one pair of jeans:

• Material costs: $10
• Labor costs: $30
• Overhead costs: $15

The total cost adds up to $55.00. With a markup of 50%, the formula would look like this:

Selling Price = $55.00 (1 + 0.50)

Selling Price = $55.00 (1.50)

Selling Price = $82.50

This gives you a selling price of $82.50 for each pair of jeans.

Advantages and Disadvantages of a Cost-Plus Pricing Strategy

If you're considering using a cost-plus pricing strategy, you'll want to weigh the advantages and disadvantages. Here are a few of the key points to examine.

Advantages

1. It's simple to use.

Using a cost-plus pricing strategy doesn't require extensive research. Instead, you just need to analyze your production costs (e.g., labor, materials, and overhead) and determine a markup price.

2. The price can be justified.

The cost-plus pricing strategy makes it easy to communicate to consumers why price changes are made. For example, if a company needs to raise the selling price of its product due to rising production costs, the increase can be justified.

3. It provides a consistent rate of return.

When calculated correctly, the cost-plus pricing should result in all costs being covered. And you should expect a consistent rate of return due to the markup percentage.

Disadvantages

1. The price can be set too high.

Since this pricing strategy doesn't consider competitor prices, there's a risk that your selling price is too high. This could result in a loss of sales if consumers choose to do business with a lower-priced competitor.

2. There's no guarantee all costs will be covered.

Sales volume is projected before pricing the product, and sometimes this estimate is inaccurate. If sales are overestimated, and a low markup is used to price the product, fewer items are sold, and the costs to produce the product might not be covered. This often results in a financial hit for the company.

3. There isn't any incentive to operate efficiently.

If the business bases the selling price, they could potentially make the same percentage from a product even if production costs rise. This eliminates the incentive for the business to operate more efficiently and lower the costs to create their products. When businesses don't adapt their strategies to changing conditions, it's unlikely they'll be successful in the future.

With a cost-plus pricing strategy, you can simply mark up your product to determine its selling price. However, you'll want to look at the benefits and drawbacks of this markup method to determine if it's a good fit for your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Everybody wants leads – there’s no denying it. They drive your business forward. Without leads, who would marketers nurture until they’re ready to talk to sales? Who would sales turn in to customers?

Because of the importance of leads, marketing teams spend a lot of time creating new ideas to generate them. But sometimes it can be difficult to know what will work. Here are some ideas to increase your lead flow.

1. Consistently Blogging

By now, most marketers know consistent blogging is effective because it helps drive and convert traffic on your website. Writing one blog per month that your readers don’t relate to won’t encourage them to read or return. To be truly effective in creating leads, you must blog regularly every month, focusing on quality content with relevant CTAs.

If your bandwidth can’t keep up with native blogging, try reaching out to well-known names in your industry for guest blogs. You can also work with a professional copywriter who has experience in your industry. With a regular blog schedule – native or not – your blog’s views will increase. More views could result in more long-term leads.

2. Email Marketing

Like blogging, email remains a heavyweight in the world of marketing. Unfortunately, sending an email every few months won’t have much impact. An email campaign such as a weekly newsletter, or nurture campaign performs better. The elements of your email are important to consider, too. Write strong body content that steers your reader to take action. Make sure your CTA is ultra-clear. Your design, subject line, and pre-text can aid in this, too.

Sometimes you have to think beyond the design and copy to generate leads. According to digital expert Neil Patel, sending your emails to the correct audience through segmentation generates higher conversion rates. The more value you provide – from design, content, to segmentation – the better.

3. Social Media

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone without at least one social media account. That’s why you should consider using social media in your lead generation efforts.

Social media allows for more engaging and interactive methods. So, generating leads through it can be engaging and interactive as well. One method to collect leads across is to run a contest or sweepstakes. Your followers can enter by retweeting, sharing, liking, or following your brand. Their prize could be an extended trial of your product or branded merchandise. No matter the prize, you’ve gathered their information.

Hosting a live video or webinar on social media is another lead-generating idea. You can open the video to a wide audience then direct viewers to offers, gated content, or contests during the video. After, you can follow-up with anyone who engaged with your offers. Because they already expressed interest, this simple follow-up could to a warm lead for your sales team.

4. Pop-Ups

While some marketers don’t frequently use pop-ups, we’ve seen it work significantly well for one of our clients. Squadron, a modeling kit company, installed a pop-up asking users to sign up for their newsletter and almost 90% of those who saw it filled it out – generating over 9,000 leads. The form only required them to enter their email address, and featured a simple design.

If you’re going to use pop-ups, make the design appealing and easy to exit. The copy should be relevant to the page of the website they’re visiting. Try offering them something exclusive in the pop-up, like a catalog that Squadron offered, to engage them further. If the pop-up is relevant to their interests and not overwhelming, they’re an effective way to collect leads.

5. Gated Content

Putting your most valuable, premium content behind a gate is a powerful lead generation tool. Things such as eBooks, infographics, guides, or checklists are all examples of content that should require someone to fill out a form to download.

Gated content can help produce more quality leads than other lead generation methods. Why is it so effective? Generally, only truly interested people will provide their information for your content. If your content is powerful enough, those people will be more likely to continue engaging with your company.

6. Social and Google Ads

To extend your brand and content awareness – and collect more leads – try using paid aids. For example, Facebook conversion ads gather customer information in exchange for a piece of content.

Likewise, you can promote one of your company’s tweets that link to a landing page with gated content. Pay Per Click (PPC) ads increase your exposure to people already searching for keywords relevant to your business. And with Google Display Ads, you can place banner image ads on websites related to yours, or sites you know your audience visits. With good copy and visuals, people will likely convert to leads. Squadron used their best content (strong copy and designs) in a Facebook ad that generated 750 new contacts. Their Google ads resulted in 132,000 impressions that resulted in 80 conversions.

The pressure to generate new leads can be stressful. Now that you have some new ideas – or we’ve reminded you of what works – you can start creating new leads for your company. If you want additional help with your lead generation ideas, we can offer support at LyntonWeb.

When you were young, did you ever stay up all night “cramming” for a test? Did the adults in your life criticize you for this behavior, and explain to you that you would learn better if you studied a little at a time instead of all at once?

SAN RAMON, CALIFORNIA —  BlackBerry Ltd.’s purchase of Cylance Inc. for US$1.4 billion in November wasn’t exactly a blockbuster deal in the tech industry, where the big boys post billions of dollars in quarterly profits, and A-list IPOs are valued in the tens of billions.

Heck, the deal wasn’t even the biggest cybersecurity acquisition of 2018: Cisco Systems Inc. bought Duo Security Inc. for US$2.8 billion just a few months earlier.

But make no mistake, Cylance was a big deal for BlackBerry. For one thing, it was the biggest acquisition in the company’s history, and buying the Irvine, Calif.-based cybersecurity company made a strong statement about where BlackBerry is at today.

BlackBerry bought a cybersecurity company because these days, BlackBerry is a cybersecurity company.

And when the deal closed in February, BlackBerry paid cash.

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“We didn’t have to borrow a dime. We just sat down and wrote a cheque for $1.4 billion,” chief executive John Chen said during an extensive interview with the Financial Post from BlackBerry’s San Ramon, Calif., office, where Chen is based.

“The fact that we were able to write a cash cheque for $1.4 billion — that’s not a trivial amount of money — to buy a company, all cash, should tell everybody that the turnaround is definitely more than over.”

In some ways, the deal is the culmination of the business strategy put in place by Chen when he took over in 2013, a time when BlackBerry’s future was very much in doubt and the company was in desperate need of a “turnaround artist” at the helm — an artist who clearly feels like he’s succeeded to this point.

The all-cash deal is a point of pride for Chen. In public appearances since the deal was announced, he has said BlackBerry probably owed people $2 billion with no ability to pay it when he became CEO.

These days, they’ve got some walking-around money.

“Next year, especially together with Cylance, our software revenue will top over $1 billion,” Chen said. “There are not too many security companies at $1-billion revenue. We make money.”

That’s a big change from just a few years ago when, if you were being unkind, BlackBerry wasn’t much more than a basket of parts: old patents, brands and products left over from the company’s high-flying days after it invented the global smartphone market.

Today, BlackBerry executives would have you believe the company is drawing on years of secure communications expertise to position itself as a global cybersecurity leader in a burgeoning new market.

“We’re not a basket of parts,” said chief technology officer Charles Eagan. “We’re a bunch of ninjas that are preparing to fight the war that’s coming.”

Eagan said BlackBerry’s long history of working on secure mobile communications gives it an edge as it repositions itself as a cyberscurity company since security is embedded in the DNA of the company, which on March 7 celebrates its 35th anniversary.

Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin in 1984 founded BlackBerry, née Research In Motion Ltd., in office space above a bagel shop in Waterloo, Ont., and the anniversary caps off a busy six months that serve something as a corporate inflection point.

For 15 years after its founding, the company wandered in relative obscurity, dabbling in various technologies and experimenting with wireless data systems until the company hit a grand slam with the BlackBerry pager in 1999.

What followed was a classic rags-to-riches-to-rags tale, as Apple Inc., Google LLC and other global behemoths took over the smartphone market, forcing BlackBerry to call in a turnaround expert, John Chen.

Chen has drastically reduced the company’s size and changed its course. BlackBerry’s revenue now comes almost entirely from software, services and licencing intellectual property. In December, while releasing Q3 financial results, BlackBerry reported no revenue from the sale of handset devices for the first time this century.

There’s still a BlackBerry-branded device on the market — the BlackBerry Key2 — but the company licenses its brand to TCL Communication Technology Holdings Ltd., a Chinese manufacturing company.

Although BlackBerry does not make the device, Chen still uses it as his personal smartphone, but he’s publicly said he turns off the GPS because he doesn’t want to share his location information.

With that in mind, Chen’s personality perhaps better fits in with the careful suspiciousness of a stereotypical cybersecurity CEO than an enthusiastic, gadget-pushing smartphone manufacturer exec.

In practice, he and BlackBerry have already made the transition to software and services.

The Cylance acquisition, with its big price tag, was BlackBerry’s most eye-catching announcement recently, but it was just the cherry on top of a busy period for the company, which kicked off in September when BlackBerry first announced something called Spark.

Though details about Spark are still a little vague, it’s being billed as a secure communications platform for connected devices, that is, the Internet of Things (IoT).

“The strategy of this is to become the standard secure communication platform for IoT for all endpoints. That’s the dream that we have, and we’re applying everything in here,” Chen said, describing Spark at the BlackBerry Security Summit in New York in October. “In here is all the embedded technology that we know, all the secure technology that we know, and we’re taking it to the next level.”

Spark hasn’t been released yet, but Chen in October said it will probably be ready for the market “within the next 12 months or so.” In the meantime, the company has announced a trial project to integrate Spark with blockchain health-care technology involving sensitive records for children with rare diseases. Chen also announced the company is working with Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa smart speaker platform to do something with Spark.

“We’re very excited to be able to sit down and work with Amazon on how to bridge enterprise to consumer,” he said at the New York event.

Fast-forward to February and Chen was in Ottawa alongside Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to announce a $310.5-million project to expand the BlackBerry QNX operating system, with the federal government kicking in $40 million, based on a commitment that the company will create 800 new jobs.

QNX has been one of the bright lights for BlackBerry during its transition over the past few years. The QNX operating system, acquired by BlackBerry in 2010 as part of a failed strategy to reinvent the smartphone, has become a successful operating system for automotive infotainment systems.

More than 120 million cars on the road now use BlackBerry QNX software, and the project that Chen and Trudeau announced last month aims to expand the operating system so that it becomes a secure platform for future cars, with a wave of highly computerized, highly connected vehicles entering into the market — not to mention fully autonomous, computer-driven cars looming just over the horizon.

“It’s gotta be rock solid, and we’re the best in the world at it,” said John Wall, a senior vice-president at BlackBerry and head of the QNX division.

“Our play in it is to be that safe, secure, robust foundation, and the advantage that we have here is that we’re not competing with our customers. If I’m Mercedes, I want to develop features that look like Mercedes. I don’t care about the plumbing.”

But QNX is for more than just cars. It can be an embedded operating system for all sorts of things that have computers inside them, though they may not look like computers.

“It’s used everywhere. It’s used in washing machines. We have robotic vacuum machines that use QNX,” Wall said. “The lights in Ottawa — the traffic lights — are all QNX. When you do a Visa transaction, QNX is involved in that Visa transaction. The space station is using QNX.”

Wall said even the Russian military pervasively — and illegally — uses QNX in its equipment.

If QNX is the secure, solid operating system that will run on just about anything, and Spark is to be the secure communications system that will connect IoT devices, Cylance’s AI threat detection is what will make those secure systems smarter and more proactive in handling cyber attacks.

Cylance was one of the pioneers in building artificial intelligence threat detection systems, using machine learning to find patterns of malicious behaviour and block attacks before they happen.

“I’m building an engineering team, actually based out of Ottawa  … that will help port some of the Cylance technology over onto to our endpoint management solutions, our enterprise solution (Unified Endpoint Management), as well as on QNX to kind of provide the next generation of safety on the car,” Chen said.

The cars are part of Chen’s strategy, but it goes well beyond that.

In his presentation announcing Spark, Chen said BlackBerry expects 75 billion connected devices by 2025 — medical equipment, industrial systems, transport systems and consumer products of all kinds — and it wants to be the secure, trusted software provider holding all these devices together.

For example, BlackBerry last fall announced a smart cities security certificate product, signalling that the company is interested in IoT for urban data systems. The blockchain health-care project it’s working on signals it’s ready to dabble in the medical sector. It also has a product called Radar, an internet-connected device for tracking shipping containers, which gives BlackBerry a presence in the transportation sector.

In a way, BlackBerry now looks a little bit like it did in the early years of Research In Motion, when the company was wandering in search of a hit product while dabbling in all sorts of different wireless data technologies before finding success with the BlackBerry pager, with its email capabilities and iconic physical keyboard.

But Chen rejects the idea that they’re dabbling in search of a hit.

“We are going to make $1 billion in software that’s related to security, okay? If you call that wandering around, okay, I wander around with $1 billion,” he said, with a smile.

“I would say that we’re more waiting than wandering. We know that this hit in IoT communication is real. I mean, the needs are there. There’s no turning back.”

But if Chen makes it sound like an inevitability, Eric Goodness, an analyst at global research firm Gartner Inc. focusing on IoT, is a lot more skeptical about BlackBerry’s chances.

“I think it’s a strategy being pursued by hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of other companies,” he said. “It is a gold rush, no doubt about it.”

Moreover, Goodness said the IoT transformation is still very much in the early innings, and the marketplace is crowded with all sorts of different players trying different strategies to own a share of the market.

Some IoT device makers are writing their own software to create a closed ecosystem and won’t necessarily want what BlackBerry is offering. And some telcos and network providers are trying to assert their own dominance, too.

Goodness said BlackBerry indisputably has a gold-standard legacy for secure digital communications, but nearly every service provider claims its platform is ultra-secure, whether it actually is or not.

“From a market perspective, I just don’t see BlackBerry out there very aggressively positioning themselves as an IoT leader. I just don’t,” he said. “And in the IoT marketplace, visibility is everything.”

Goodness said he doesn’t hear major players in the industry talking about BlackBerry very often.

“We should be hearing Verizon and AT&T and Sprint and Vodafone and Telefonica and Telstra talking about BlackBerry as being part of their portfolio,” he said. “None of those companies talk about BlackBerry.”

For BlackBerry to succeed, Goodness said it will need to partner with consulting companies such as Accenture or Cognizant to bring them in on large IoT projects.

On the plus side, as Chen points out, BlackBerry is in the black. It has revenue coming in and money in the bank. The one thing it might continue to lose is consumer visibility.

Building the connective tissue behind the scenes, deep in the guts of connected cars and smart speakers might be lucrative, but it’s unlikely that Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey will be raving about BlackBerry software like they did about its devices.

Chen clearly still holds some nostalgia for the glory days, and fondly remembers wearing an original BlackBerry pager on his hip — a status symbol in its day — but said the BlackBerry name still holds enough cachet to help him get meetings.

“The power of the brand is that virtually anybody that I’d like to meet — in business and in politics — has been a customer,” he said.

But he admits the company’s future business strategy is not likely going to be seen as cool as it was in the past. Maybe one day people will take comfort in a logo on their car that says “BlackBerry Secured,” but Obama won’t be talking about it on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

“What you’re referring to is whether you’re a consumer company or an enterprise company. Coca-Cola is cool. But the people who provide the bottles to Coca-Cola, nobody cares — although they’re probably very successful,” Chen said.

“Well, for today, that’s where we need to be.”

Financial Post

• Email: jmcleod@nationalpost.com | Twitter: jamespmcleod

Canada has a rich history of innovation, but in the next few decades, powerful technological forces will transform the global economy. Large multinational companies have jumped out to a headstart in the race to succeed, and Canada runs the risk of falling behind. At stake is nothing less than our prosperity and economic well-being. The Financial Post set out explore what is needed for businesses to flourish and grow. You can find all of our coverage here.

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In every sector you can name, digital innovation, particularly the potential of artificial intelligence, is driving dramatic change.

A recent report from RBC estimates that 25 per cent of current Canadian jobs will be heavily impacted by technology — and yet, even in the midst of all this potential displacement, the Canadian economy will need to add 2.4 million new jobs over the next four years, all of them requiring a new combination of skills.

We cannot afford or excuse this double-jeopardy for Canadian prosperity: jobs without people and people without jobs.

• It’s not too late: Canada, not Sidewalk Labs, should be driving urban innovation
• Innovation Nation: Why has the government put a cap on innovation success?
• Innovation Nation: How to boost adoption of AI — ethically

In the innovation era, that means closer collaboration between our post-secondary institutions and industry than ever before. To stay on top of changing workforce requirements, universities and colleges need to be more aligned with industry needs. Industry, meanwhile, must also step up with support for future talent. No employer can expect new graduates to be job-ready on Day 1 without providing meaningful internship and co-op opportunities — and having meaningful discussions with their university and college partners about how these programs can help them meet future needs.

Employers also need to act on disruption before it happens. Firms know best which skills they’ll be hiring for, and which jobs are being displaced by automation. Colleges and universities can help companies retrain current employees, perhaps even on-site. Micro-credentials and continuous learning must be a part of the package of reforms needed to address the “future of work.”

Some of these changes might strain the traditional relationship between higher education and industry. Building a strong economy will require us to challenge existing structures. For industry to respond to the challenge of greater experiential learning opportunities like co-op programs they cannot be confined to a September-to-May schedule. Continuous learning, which is simply part of the package in the innovation era, happens year-round.

That’s a big change for higher education, but structural changes will be needed to ensure a competitive economy. Universities and colleges have been in this situation before. Ten years ago, there were precious few campus-based incubators to help students launch their own ventures. Today, nearly every university has one. It’s a recognition that undergraduate students, not just graduate students and faculty, can be innovators, and that entrepreneurial skills are essential to the innovation economy.

But the adaptation is far from complete. Topics such as intellectual property, the ethical use of data, and data privacy must be integral to every degree pathway. Universities and colleges need to make room for these and other digital-literacy topics in the curriculum. Everything new that is needed cannot all be additive. Tough choices may lie ahead.

Canada has many advantages in the innovation economy, including a strong talent-immigration strategy. The challenge now is to make sure the next wave of graduates is ready to step in and have Canada truly lead the innovation economy. It’s the collective responsibility of higher education, industry and governments to work together in support of their success.

There are always risks inherent in changing the way things have been done, but I have always found that betting on the next generation is the best bet society can make.

Sheldon Levy is the Special Advisor to the Minister of Small Business & Export Promotion. He served as Ontario’s deputy minister for advanced education and skills development (2015-17), President of Ryerson University (2005-15), and most recently the CEO of NEXT Canada (2017-2019).

Marketers can employ a number of techniques to drive people to take action — flashy design, catchy copy, celebrity endorsements, etc. But nothing is more effective than psychological triggers.

Psychological triggers are the common psychological motivators, cognitive biases, and behavior patterns that drive people to action. Completely outside of our conscious awareness, our brains evaluate new stimuli in our environments and determine our emotional and physical response in a near instant. It’s all governed by the amygdala, an almond-shaped cluster of nuclei in the frontal portion of the temporal lobe.

Our quick response mechanisms form a system called the adaptive unconscious. In his book, “Blink,” Malcolm Gladwell described it as “…a giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.”

95% of our purchase decision making takes place in our subconscious minds, so it’s critical that our marketing messages elicit a positive reaction. Even if the product or service we’re selling isn’t an “impulse” buy, there are dozens of customer touch points along the buyer’s journey that are directly influenced by these quick, emotional judgments. Whether you get someone to submit their email address or not, answer a sales call, or start a trial can all be influenced by skillful use of psychological triggers.

How to use 7 powerful psychological triggers in your marketing:

1. Faith in aesthetics

Humans are visual creatures. More than 50% of our brains are used to process visual information compared to just 8% for our sense of touch and 3% for our sense of hearing. We make immediate judgments based on how things appear. Improving visual appeal can increase perceived credibility, trust, and value. Conversely, unappealing designs, inconsistencies, or visual errors can quickly chip away trust and authority.

How to use it:

• Always be consistent with logos, screenshots, and product images. Ensure your image files are the correct format and optimal resolution for the application they are to be used in.
• Trust your designers. It’s tempting to do things yourself when you’re in a time crunch. But if you’ve got designers at your disposal, use them. Good designers will make sure the work is on brand, using the right fonts and colors, and shows off the product in the best light.
• Invest in usability and visual design. The way your website or app looks and feels is critical during the evaluation period. First impressions are everything, so put your best foot forward design-wise. Once a bad opinion is formed, it’s nearly impossible to shake, so dazzle them from the start.

2. Request justification

People have a natural tendency to comply with requests if they are given a reason. In a famous study conducted by Ellen Langer in the 1970s, researchers would cut in a line of people waiting to use a xerox copy machine. They gave all sorts of excuses for the intrusion, but the researchers found the highest rate of compliance when using the word “because” and then giving a reason. The reason didn’t even have to make sense. In one instance, the excuse they gave for cutting was “because I need to make copies.”

How to use it:

• Always provide value. Today’s consumers have more choice and power than ever before. The best way to build trust is to provide massive amounts of value before you ask for anything in return.
• Make it clear what the next steps are. Whether you’re asking for money, an email address, or participation in a survey, explain exactly what people should expect and what will happen next. This will put people at ease and make them more willing to engage.
• Show and tell. Offering a free ebook in exchange for an email address? Don’t just tell people, display an image of the cover. Even better, try an animated GIF flipping through the digital pages. This concept works even better at live events. If you’re doing a raffle or contest, putting the prizes on display for people to see and touch can make participation irresistible.

3. Social Proof and the Bandwagon Effect

Humans are social by nature; we use other people as models for how we should think and act. Especially in unfamiliar situations, we look to others to validate our decisions. This is called Social Proof.

Closely related to this is the Bandwagon Effect. Feeling included in a group is an incredibly strong motivator. It goes all the way back to our physical safety — there’s strength in numbers. Although if a small group is perceived to have more power, influence, or authority, belonging to it feels exclusive and desirable.

How to use it:

• Align your organization with trusted brands. Have notable customers with audiences of their own? Leverage their influence through logos on your homepage and in-depth case studies.
• Amplify your content. Great content can go viral and reach millions. But in order for that to happen, a certain threshold of comments, likes, and shares has to be reached. Get every member of your team and org to help amplify your content to build momentum and reach critical mass.
• Make it easy for your fans to promote you. Build sharing into your campaigns. Use custom hashtags include sharing tools, and direct people to tell others. Great marketing should mint people what the author of “Contagious,” Jonah Berger, calls “social currency.” People want to seem cool, smart, and in the know. Do something amazing, mint them social currency, and then make it easy for them to spend.

4. Serial positioning

People can most easily recall information from the beginning or end of a list. Things that are said first or are included at the beginning of a list or sequence benefit from the primacy effect. This information more often than not influences the rest of the list, so our brains store this in our long-term memory. Things said at the end of a list benefit from the recency effect and are stored in short-term memory.

How to use it:

• Place the most important details at the beginning and end. Whether its an email, press release, or article, include the information you want people to remember the most first or last. Even better, put it in both places.
• Include a review or summary. Make your podcasts, videos, and animations even more effective by including a short summary or review at the end. This will keep the most relevant details fresh in people’s short-term memories.

5. The Availability Cascade

The more often a piece of information is repeated, the more likely we are to believe it. One of the most famous examples of this is the word “halitosis.” Most of us know that word to be the scientific name for bad breath. But the Listerine company invented it to sell mouthwash. Created from the Latin word for breath, halitus, this new “disease” was the basis for Listerine’s decades-long campaign. Nearly 100 years later, the term is widely used and accepted —even by dentists!

How to use it:

• Be consistent with specific words and phrases. The most successful brands boil their value propositions down to catchy phrases and statements where every word counts. They use those lines in every place they talk about their products and with the strictest consistency.
• Repeat your key messages on social media often. People are more distracted than ever before. Most marketers overestimate how closely people pay attention to their content. This is especially true for social media. Social posts have a short shelf life — 18 minutes when it comes to Twitter. It’s not only acceptable but necessary to repeat your message multiple times a week or even daily depending on the network.

6. Curiosity

Curiosity is one of the most powerful of all human emotions. It’s amazing how far people will go to satisfy their curiosity once it’s been piqued. We’re constantly trying to make sense of our world, and we’ll go to great lengths in order to gather enough information to form a satisfying conclusion. In 2011, Patagonia took out a full-page ad in the New York Times during Black Friday week with the heading “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” The result? Sales went up 30%.

How to use it:

• Surprise and delight. Always strive to do the unexpected, and reward people for indulging in their curiosity. Even something small like a funny animation on your website or in your app can be enough of a prize to hold people’s attention.
• Balance is key. To come up with click-worthy social messages and blog titles, resist the urge to say too much or too little. Having partial knowledge drives people to fill in the information gaps. Too little information doesn’t drive enough interest while having too much makes seeking more unnecessary.

7. Labeling

Ironically, people love to feel unique, but they also love to be labeled. In fact, when people are given a label they believe to be positive, they’ll change their behavior to better reflect it. In one study on voting behavior, researchers found that people who were randomly labeled as “politically active” were 15% more likely to vote. There’s even data that shows that customer’s labeled as “Gold” or “Platinum” spend more money than those who aren’t.

How to use it:

• Identify your ideal customers’ traits and qualities. What kind of customers do you have? What kind of customers do you want? What are they like? Make a list of all of the traits and qualities your best customers have or you wish they had.
• Speak positively about your customers and clients. Describing your customers by their most positive qualities serves two purposes. 1. Your target audience will aspire to be like your customers, which will raise interest in your product or service. 2. Your existing customers will try to live up to your expectations. You’ll find that they’re more willing to try new features, give better feedback, and be more willing to participate in case studies and events.

Consistency is key

For these psychological triggers to be effective, it’s critical to be consistent in their application. But consistency requires visibility. Ensuring that everyone in your company is using the right logos, product descriptions, and images is easy when you’re a team of 6 people in one room. It gets a lot harder as your team scales to 600 and you start expanding into different buildings, countries, or even continents.

At this point, it’s vital to adopt a collaborative work management solution to bring increased visibility and accountability to the organization. All messaging, images, and instructions can be housed in this single source of truth so that everyone is always on the same page. Unlike emails and spreadsheets, these items can be updated automatically, eliminating needless back and forth and outdated files.

By consistently using these psychological triggers in your marketing campaigns, you’ll be able to connect with your audience on a deeper level, deliver a more compelling message, and drive people to action.

This article originally appeared on wrike.com.

Featured Photo: Jesse Orrico on Unsplash

Probably, ever since the first sale was made to a customer that involved a buying agent, procurement and sales professionals have viewed each other as adversaries.

Every time I talk to a sales person about procurement, eyes roll, a groan escapes their lips, and the nightmare begins, “All they are going to do is beat me up on price, they don’t understand, I’ve got to hit my numbers…. I don’t trust them…”

When I spoke to procurement folks, the story wasn’t very different, “My job is to cut costs and produce savings….. Sales people don’t understand this… I don’t trust them…”

It’s no wonder there has been this conflict between sales and procurement. Our goals are in conflict.

But, in recent years, there’s an amazing transformation going on in both sales and procurement. It turns out we are on parallel paths, but don’t know it, consequently we aren’t leveraging each other as effectively as possible.

The most forward thinking sales professionals realize that successful selling is really about helping the customer achieve their goals more effectively. We recognize we create value not just through how our solutions help the customer achieve their dreams and goals, but we help customers recognize they may be missing opportunities, inciting them to buy. We, also, recognize how difficult it is to buy–at least in complex B2B sales. We understand a large part of the value we create with the customer is in helping them navigate their buying journey/process.

There is a similar transformation occurring with procurement professionals. Where, historically, they have viewed their jobs as cost cutting, according to a 2018 Deloitte CPO Survey, only 20% of CPOs though cost reduction was important. Instead, 54% viewed supporting new product development as important, and 58% saw risk management as critical.

The survey states procurement should be seen as adding value within their organizations. Hmmm, sounds familiar…..

An EY study states, “By 2025, the leading procurement organizations will serve as a primary change for driving innovation ideas to/from a global supply base….” In doing this, we see huge shifts in behaviors and priorities in procurement organizations. Creating transparent supplier relationships, trust and collaborative partnerships. Working with internal stakeholders, creating customized value propositions, creating stakeholder experiences which “make it easy to do the right thing,” become critical drivers in procurement.

If you are getting a sense of deja-vu, this is what I and many others advocate about the future of sales and selling.

It seems leading procurement and sales practitioners are on parallel paths, yet don’t know it.

Imagine the possibilities if we start working together. What would happen if we start collaborating, being more helpful to our shared customers (internal stakeholders) and their ability to achieve their goals?

Sadly, progress is slow on both sides. Too many sales people focus only on their objectives and goals, pushing/pitching products to customers. Likewise, too many procurement professionals see their jobs as cost cutting.

But, this isn’t sustainable! I’ve been writing a lot about the concept of “turbulence.” The reality is all of us face tremendous disruption, changes, and turbulence. Global economies, shifting buyer preferences, market disroption, politics, changing societies, drive forcing functions impacting every organization.

Those that thrive are those that understand this turbulence, and are successful in helping their companies, their customers, and their suppliers successfully navigate that turbulence.

It seems sales and procurement have a lot of commonalities in how we can help our organizations and each other. We are on parallel paths, it only makes sense that we should be working much more closely.

Afterword: Much of this post was provoked by an outstanding article by Mike Blanchard, “The Future Of Procurement and Supply Chain.”

Focusing on value provided, you can implement a winning price increase, contrary to what may have been occurring historically.  Re-anchoring is the key to a winning pricing strategy – a focus area we will take on as part of developing

My friend Tom at Bottomline Technologies was running a sales team making thousands of phone calls a week.

Despite all their best efforts, his sales reps were only connecting with prospects 3% of the time. The other 97% of the time, they had no choice but to leave a voicemail.

In a typical week those voicemails could generate a grand total of one returned call each day. But when they did get callbacks, they celebrated! Those calls were their warmest, best leads.

So Tom asked himself a question. What if he could help his sales team leave effective voicemails that got more callbacks? What if he could make that 97% chunk of time and effort actually work for him?

I worked with Tom and his team, and after two focus days they spiked to 27 returned calls. That’s 13 more conversations per day than normal. Two converted that week. Boom!

It’s like peg-legged jeans and snail mail. Voicemails are new again in sales!

Here’s what we’re covering in this article:

1. Four Reasons Salespeople Absolutely Must Leave Great Voicemails
2. 11 Biggest Voicemail Mistakes
3. Seven Voicemail Scripts that Guarantee Callbacks
4. Six Steps to Execute the Perfect Sales Voicemail Plan

Four Reasons Salespeople Absolutely Must Leave Great Voicemails:

1. Because It’s Your Job

It blows my mind that 80% of sellers don’t leave a message when given the chance.

You are probably going to call the prospect five times before giving up anyway (actually the real average is a much sadder 2 times). So at least leave a message and log the touch. It’s minimal extra effort, especially when you’ve got an effective script.

On the bright side, if you do get a callback, it may be the warmest call you have all day. Bonus!

2. Because it Shows You Care

If you don’t leave a voicemail on your first call, you send the message that you aren’t important. If you don’t leave voicemails on any calls, you send the message that the prospect isn’t important.

We put a lot of effort into getting cold-calling right. But somehow, we sometimes only prepare for the times when we actually get a prospect on the phone! That’s not careful prospecting.

Leaving a handful of the right voicemail messages sends a much more positive message. It shows that you are important, your prospect is worth the time, and that you believe deep down a deal between the two of you will be a match made in heaven.

3. It’s Another Touch

We’ve all heard it takes at least 8 touches before a prospect will take a meeting. A great voicemail is a touch! Done right, they can also help with name recognition, urgency, and professionalism.

Hell, you might even add some helpful guilt to the eventual sales call. All of those are useful sales tools.

4. Voicemails Lead to Callbacks… eventually

Some research has shown that each time you leave a message, the chances of a callback go up about ten percent! Here’s how it works out:

• 1st voicemail = 11% callback rate
• 2nd voicemail = 22% callback rate
• 3rd voicemail = 33% callback rate

According to Zoominfo, the average callback rate after one call is just 4.8%. Still, you can be confident that more attempts will result in more successes!

11 Biggest Sales Voicemail Mistakes

There are plenty of ways to make mistakes during a sales conversation, but because voicemail is one-sided, the pitfalls are different. In all my experience running trainings, here are the eleven mistakes specific to voicemail I see most often.

1. Selling in a voicemail.

Trying to pitch your product or service in the voicemail is by far the most common mistake. It’s sort of understandable! After all, selling is our job and we mostly connect with voicemails during the day.

But if you actually try to sell in a voicemail you’ll be lucky to get 1% callbacks.

Here’s an example of what a voicemail script might look like when there’s a pitch in it:

“Hi Max. LB calling with Factor 8. I’m calling because we’re really excited to announce our brand new offering to the community. For years we’ve been working with inside sales teams of about 50 or more reps and now we’re so honored to open our doors to companies of all sizes and industries. Our new platform is called The Sales Bar and it all started. . .”

Feedback: Honey. We ALL quit listening to you around “our brand new offering”. You need to sell a meeting before you can sell. Get their interest with what they are interested in – not what you need to sell.

2. Talking for more than 20 seconds

This one’s simple. Sticking to a 10-second limit is even better.

This voicemail sample recording is what it sounds like when you do just the opposite. (Yes, this is a real recording of a seller calling an old client I used to work with.)

Woof! Way too long.

3. Not using names.

Not only should you use the recipient’s first name, make sure you say your own name twice, slowly.

Along with many other words and phrases that effective sales professionals use, light use of your prospect’s name correlates with better outcomes. It seems obvious, but I’ve heard voicemails without names in them! Don’t forget.

4. Discounting the urgency.

I have literally left a message before saying, “nothing urgent. Call me back whenever.”

Yup. Still waiting on that call.

If you leave a message that essentially says “you can do this whenever”, it means you won’t make the prospect’s to-do list. After all, they’ve got a lot of more urgent things going on!

Your goal should be to authentically generate enough urgency that the prospect feels like they can’t wait to call back. The key here is authenticity. Don’t overstate the urgency, or make it sound like a life-or-death scenario.

5. Leaving random information (rambling)

Usually, a rambling voicemail is a result of not having a plan going into the dial. If you don’t stick to a few very short points, the prospect will regret listening to the message.

Here’s another real example of a voicemail we recorded, where the rep doesn’t seem to have a point:

Pretty bad, right? Why not keep it to one point? Even if the prospect isn’t interested in the offer, you’ll at least avoid annoying them if your message is to-the-point.

6. Only leaving one voicemail.

We all know this, we’ve all read it, but some people continue to only give it two attempts before giving up.

You need to make several attempts for this to work. Try 7-10 messages before calling it quits on a prospect. Bonus points if you can connect your voicemail messages so they tell a coherent story and pique the prospect’s interest even more!

7. Speeding through your phone number.

Just because you have it memorized, doesn’t mean it’s easy to memorize! If your prospect is really interested, they’re listening closely. Don’t make them listen twice to get the number written down. Say it twice, nice and slow.

A high-speed voicemail can also make it sound like you’re part of a “smile and dial” call center. The impression you want to leave them with is that you called them. Not that you called them while you were calling hundreds of others (even if that’s true).

8. Not being conscious of the tone of voice.

If you’re making a lot of dials it can be easy to fall into monotone mode, which makes you sound bored. If you start to feel a slump, take a break! Stand up. Do some squats. Feel alive and happy, then get back to dialing.

Pretend it’s your cool Aunt who sends you money on the other end of the line. Smile while you record it!

9. Sounding desperate.

This one is related to the “selling over voicemail” mistake. I sometimes hear reps go so far as to assume their prospect has no interest, and try to make up for it with big offers, or overblown claims.

They end up sounding completely desperate, just because they were too assumptive to begin with!

Take this example of a bad script:

“Max! LB here with Factor 8, Sales Training Designed by Sales Leaders. We are going to have a consultant in your area next week and I’d love to get the chance to come in and show you what we’re all about. We’re running a special right now and…”

Feedback: This is basically an ad, right? Remember, the whole concept of sales conversations is to get folks interested. There’s no opportunity to have a real conversation in a voicemail, so don’t assume your counterpart has any specific thoughts. Instant delete.

1o. Making it all about you.

I’m sorry, but no one cares. Especially in a voicemail. Tell us all about you and your goals and you’re guaranteeing no call back.

Here’s another example of a poor voicemail script, where the focus is on the caller:

“Hey Max! LB here with Factor 8. We’re the Nation’s leading sales training company for phone sellers working with companies like Allergan, Microsoft, Infor and more. . .”

Feedback: this screams sales call and no one likes to be sold – especially when they can opt out guilt free with the delete key.

11. Forgetting the goal of the voicemail.

Voicemails are like resumes. The resume gets you the interview. The interview is where you sell yourself. If you put everything in the resume then it’s 10 pages long and no one wants to interview you. Right? Voicemails should intrigue. Entice.

Ugly voicemails are ugly because they have forgotten the goal of the message:

• Get them to call you back
• Drop a positive brand impression so they’re at least thinking about calling you back next time you call

What did I miss? Tell me in the comments.

Seven Voicemail Scripts That Guarantee Callbacks

Voicemail Script #1: The Lever

A lever is a bit of information that shows you know what you’re talking about and convinces them this isn’t a cold call. The best levers are people that work at the company you’re calling into, but a shared history or any relevant info about the prospect or their company can work too.

Basically, you’re trying to NOT sound like a cold sales call here.

Sample Script:

“Hi Max. Lauren with Factor 8. I’ve been working with you and the team at Outreach for the past 3 years and need to chat with you briefly. Please reach me at [phone number]. Again, Lauren with Factor 8 at [phone number]. Thanks!”

Here’s another example of a lever script, where the lever isn’t a person, but a prior conversation:

“Hi David. This is Cindy from [company]. We spoke on [date] regarding a quote for [product/service]. I wanted to see if you got the pricing from us, and I was hoping we could help you with your purchase. So if you could reach me at [phone number]. Again, it’s Cindy at [company] – [phone number].”

Voicemail Script #2: The Mystery

A mysterious voicemail leaves the listener wondering what the call is about and plays to our fear of loss and FOMO. What if something’s wrong w/ my account? What if this is a business lead? What if I’m the only jerk who didn’t call back?
Sample Script:

“Hi Max. It’s Lauren at [phone number]. Again, I’m at [phone number].”

These are effective, but also think about how many of those nice, short voicemails you could leave in an hour!

Voicemail Script #3: The Value

Only your mom will call you back for something you want. Everyone else wants to know what it’s worth their time. At Factor 8 we like the term, SWIIFT ℠ So, What’s In It for Them?

Adding value in a voicemail message could be about an offer to save them time or money, make something easier for them, or answer a question that’s been nagging them forever.

The value script can run the risk of being pitchy, so I like to save it mostly for existing accounts and relationships.

Sample script:

“Hey Shelley, this is Evan Fleming calling from [phone number]. I thought of you because I’m working with an active footwear brand that’s seen about a 20% increase in reorders, and I think that I could help your brand do the same, but I’m not exactly sure. So if you could give me a call back at [phone number]. Again, this is Evan. Thanks!”

Execution is also important for the value script, so here’s a sample recording you can listen to:

Feedback: OK, I could tell it was a sales call, but it didn’t billboard the entire offer or try to pitch. The aim was clearly to show the listener that Evan had provided value to others like them, and could potentially do the same for them. The prospects problems, Evan’s solutions, and nothing about Evan’s company in there at all!

Voicemail Script #4: The Urgency

When we ratchet up the urgency by adding a timeline (and even a little mystery), we astronomically increase our odds of someone dialing us immediately after getting the message.

Here’s an example of a voicemail script that creates a sense of urgency:

“Hello Bob. Lauren calling with Factor 8. I’m trying like crazy to reach you by end of day. Please call me at [phone number]. Again, Lauren trying to get you before the expiration. Call me back quickly please at [phone number].”

You can be a little creative here and invent some urgency. But the urgency you invent has to become real at some point. Don’t tell a prospect their account is expiring if it isn’t. That’s super annoying.

Voicemail Script #5: The Urgency + Mystery Combo

Once you’ve gotten the basics of those last four scripts, you can combine examples to get even more creative. For example, this script combines a sense of mystery with urgency.

“Bob? Lauren with Factor 8. We need to talk today about your account. Please return my call at your earliest convenience at [phone number]. That’s [phone number]. Talk soon.”?

Keep going! And keep track of which script you use and which are most likely to get prospects to call you back.

Here’s another example script you can test that combines mystery and urgency (my favorite combination):

“Sharon, it’s Lauren at Factor 8. I just saw a report that I need to talk to you about right away. You can return my call at [phone number]? Again, it’s Lauren at [phone number].”

Plan ahead here! You need to know what report you’re talking about to make the conversation a good one when they call back to ask about it.

Six Steps to Execute the Perfect Sales Voicemail Plan

Let’s give these puppies a whirl! Here are a few steps and tips to make your process data-driven, and scalable:

1. Pick the voicemail strategy most fitting for your list and offer, and write an awesome message using your own words, values, etc. for each type of message. Then name it something snappy like, “VM1” or “VM Value”.

2. Rinse and repeat for three different and standard messages. Try at least two techniques. Just because you may not love the mystery script doesn’t mean it won’t work with your prospects.

3. All day today pick one voicemail type and leave that message every time you don’t connect. Really, every time. Log the message in your CRM noting your snazzy name above so you can keep track of your callback rate, and test a different strategy next time.

Note: Find a way for your messages to not only be true, but to relate to each other so you can eventually leave multiple types of messages for each contact. Obviously if your urgency message number one mentions an imminent expiration, it would be awkward for you to then call back offering some value. Get me?

4. Prep your callback statement. Your phone will ring. Yes, you will be shocked. So when someone calls you back saying they got a message you needed to speak to them right away, be prepared for how to jump in to the conversation.

Even better, prep a starter that can work for any message! It could be as simple as you being really excited to talk to them about your potential fit, noticing some happenings about their company, or wanting to talk before XYZ event.

5. Try this for four straight days and note which strategy worked best for you (and email me with how many callbacks you got!)

6. Create multiple versions of your favorite and most successful strategy and never skip voicemail again!

Unlocking Warm Calls with Great Voicemail

Voicemail isn’t rocket science. But it does take the right approach and some diligence to make a huge difference in the amount of sales conversations you have. Just think of how much fatter your pipeline could be if all the voicemails you left resulted in 10% callbacks… or 30%!

The key is consistency and practice. If you want to make voicemail an effective part of your sales process, you need to train on the tips and tricks in this article. Set up regular workshops, share successful examples frequently, and keep a record of which reps get the most callbacks. That way, you can give them some recognition for their work.

By simply avoiding the big mistakes, nailing execution, and testing a variety of voicemail strategies, you’ll be doing better than 80% of your competitors!

The post The Complete Guide to Effective Sales Voicemail (Plus Scripts and Example Recordings) appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Canada has a rich history of innovation, but in the next few decades, powerful technological forces will transform the global economy. Large multinational companies have jumped out to a headstart in the race to succeed, and Canada runs the risk of falling behind. At stake is nothing less than our prosperity and economic well-being. The Financial Post set out explore what is needed for businesses to flourish and grow. You can find all of our coverage here.

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Long before the debate over pipeline construction, the oil price differential, production curtailment and government-purchased rail cars dominated headlines, a pair of Toronto entrepreneurs were busy travelling from wellsite to wellsite in frigid northern Alberta, testing technology that has the potential to transform the conversation.

Ian Burgess and Nouman Ahmad had developed a system to help energy companies receive a fairer price for their product — a possible solution to the price differential problem that has plagued both conventional and unconventional oil and gas producers.

“On our very first hardware field test, I hit a whiteout storm driving north from Edmonton,” recalled Burgess with a laugh, “and my van full of equipment started to skid. I remember thinking ‘this could turn out to be a very expensive first trip.'” Fortunately, he was able to stay on the road.

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At that stage, Validere Technologies, as the two named their fledgling company, had just graduated from Silicon Valley’s prestigious Y Combinator seed accelerator, in the summer of 2016.

Through Y Combinator, the company received critical early stage capital from Clint Chao and Ammar Hanafi, partners at Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capital firm Moment Ventures. “We invest in industry verticals outside the immediate sphere of Silicon Valley,” Hanafi said.

“When Nouman and Ian first presented to us, it was clear they were thinking big picture on how to effectively introduce leading edge AI powered IoT tech to the age-old world of oil and gas,” Chao added.

As crude oil moves from wellhead to refinery, custody transfer takes place an average of eleven times. Each time this happens, it mixes with different crude oil streams from different storage facilities as it moves progressively from smaller feeder pipelines to larger arterial trunklines, to eventually arriving at a refinery thousands of kilometres from where it was drilled.

Inevitably, the commodity’s composition changes.

Whenever there’s a compositional change, there is a good chance it’s no longer representative of what was sold — all crude oil is not created equal. “Of course, there are third party labs that do sporadic tests, but they aren’t done in the field or in real-time,” Burgess said.

Validere’s technology works in two stages. Validere 360 is a testing product, sold on a software as a service model. Alpha takes that data and uses artificial intelligence to suggest what to do with the oil once the information is known. “Whereas 360 is all about producing useful crude oil quality data through internet connected testing devices in the field, Alpha is about how to use that information over time, in the most optimal way, using our proprietary predictive AI engine,” Burgess said.

Once a pipeline company has a greater degree of confidence in the quality of the crude entering their system, it can then for example, redirect a sour (referring to crude oil’s hydrogen sulphide content) stream of oil into a more appropriate storage facility. “Our technology creates trust because if ever there is a custody transfer dispute, we can print out an audit form showing much more accurately how, at various points along the supply chain, the composition of the oil changed,” Ahmad said.

So how do a pair of energy-industry neophytes end up coming up with a possible solution to one of the Canadian oil industry’s most nettlesome problems?

After the 2013 disaster in Lac Mégantic, when an unattended freight train carrying crude oil from North Dakota rolled down a hill and derailed, causing a massive explosion that killed nearly 50 people, Burgess was awarded a research contract by the U.S. Department of Transportation to help it better understand what went wrong.

It was then that Burgess, who by age 24 had already graduated from Harvard with a PhD in Applied Physics, was first exposed to crude oil quality testing. It was also where the first of many iterations for Validere’s underlying technology was born. “After a while I started to realize there was a big problem in the oil and gas industry,” Burgess said.

A key finding in his research was the crude oil’s vapour pressure in the rail car tanks was off-spec — essentially the oil in the tanks shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

Shortly after completing his work in 2014, Burgess met Ahmad, who had just recently exited a successful fintech startup focused on life insurance. A coffee here, a conversation there, and soon they agreed there was an opportunity in crude oil quality testing. “At the start we worked together without any formal agreements,” Ahmad said. “It was a time for us to explore whether we were capable of working together.”

They then entered a pitch competition at Harvard to work out their business plan, and yearning to return home, they then looked north to Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) — a seed-stage program for “massively scalable, science-based companies.” CDL is unique in that it employs a mentoring process, with the goal of maximizing equity-value creation.

Here they met Canadian tech investor T. Chen Fong. “From pretty well the moment we met Chen, he has been an invaluable adviser to us, and was one of our first significant investors,” said Ahmad, a former investment banker who immigrated as a child with his family to Canada.

They also met senior M&A lawyer turned Parkland Fuel Corporation executive Pierre Magnan. “CDL is great at bridging the gap between industry and academia,” said Magnan, who runs Parkland’s considerable Caribbean holdings from Grand Cayman. “And the Validere story is as much about gritty hard work as it is innovative tech.” Magnan sits on Validere’s board and was also an early investor.

Flash forward to October 2018 when Validere announced a $7-million round of financing led by Houston-based energy private equity firm Sallyport Investments, the family office for renowned U.S. energy executive Doug Foshee.

“In the six years we’ve been in business, close to 2,000 deals have come across my desk,” Managing Director Kyle Bethancourt, who came to Sallyport from the Blackstone Group, said. “In that time, we’ve only invested in thirteen deals. Validere being one of them.”

Ahmad and Burgess’s focus for the past several years has been to iterate Validere’s underlying technology, listen to the needs of their customers, and prime for scalability. “Now we’re at the stage where we can focus on growth rather than survival and build out the business,” Ahmad said.

Validere has successfully completed six platform deployments with large Canadian oil and gas clients, and now has more than 20 employees, with offices in Toronto, Calgary and Houston. The Toronto office is staffed with the company’s tech talent — a reflection of Toronto’s status as a global hub for artificial intelligence. The Calgary and Houston offices are staffed by Validere’s energy experts.

The market Validere is going after is global. “In Canada alone, every producer, midstreamer, and refiner wants to know the quality of the crude oil they’re buying and selling,” Fong said. A senior crude oil trader working for a Calgary-based midstream company agrees. “We blend our crude oil all the time and so we need to know what the composition is. To have that information in real-time would be tremendous.”

The same can be said for the United States’ energy industry — and that’s before considering the value of Validere’s technology to other hydrocarbons like natural gas and natural gas liquids. There are 18 frequently measured properties of crude oil — vapour pressure, colour, density, and so on. These properties, or variables, dictate the quality of oil being tested and its value.

“It is hugely important that the variability of crude oil stream characteristics is as well understood as possible,” said Tony Mate, a twenty-five-year veteran of Canada’s energy business with experience spanning finance, accounting, communications, and trading.

Mate currently works as CFO of Outlier Resources, a Calgary based private natural gas producer. “It can be a challenge to have the best possible data when extracted in extreme conditions, and any automation like this would certainly be worth a look.”

Success hasn’t come with challenges however, many of which are still on the horizon. “The sophistication and disruptive nature of their technology requires patiently educating their market,” said Fong. “That is their greatest challenge to scaling up, since they really don’t have any direct competitors.”

Not to say there aren’t competitors, however when Validere does compete for a client’s business, it’s typically over a feature here and there. “Never do we fully compete over our full suite of technology, and the insights we’re capable of producing,” Ahmad said.

But educating the market takes time, especially since Validere’s technology involves mission critical business decisions. “We’re certainly not operating in the consumer tech space where adoption tends to occur much faster,” Burgess said. “The more we demonstrate how our technology can save as much as $15 per barrel in lost revenue, in the field, in real time, adoption should occur in any business climate.”

But for the duo, one of the most satisfying aspects of their journey has been to help make the life of field operators that much easier.

“After my first trip into the field, I came away with a profound appreciation for how difficult many field operators’ jobs are,” said Burgess. “We exist to help those guys, and anyone along the crude oil supply chain, make smarter business decisions based on the quality of crude they are trading.”

Financial Post

Trends in marketing, like those in fashion and design, are circular. Ten years ago, marketing automation’s promise to turn the craft of business-to-business marketing into a hard science was precisely the message executives had longed to hear. Seemingly overnight, quant marketing was hot, brand marketing was not.

John Bigay, CMO of iZotope, an audio tech company for music professionals, described being perceived as a brand marketer during the rise of marketing automation as “walking into brain surgery with crystals and sage bundles.” The primacy of data forced organizations to question their (faulty) assumptions about marketing being largely immeasurable, but marketers overcorrected. Predictability and efficiency came at the expense of a more durable, albeit less measurable, differentiation: brand.

David Cancel, Founder and CEO of conversational marketing startup Drift, explained: “Competitors can copy your product, they can copy your content, they can even copy your pricing, but they can’t copy your brand.” But how does a marketer go about building a brand … purposefully?

Dragon Slayer

I’ve spent the better part of my career helping software companies sell to businesses, and I’ve observed that the strongest brands tend to fall into one of two categories: dragon slayers or patron saints.

Dragon slayers are companies that identify a broadly unpopular practice, and then build their brand on the promise of a better way. Sales and marketing tech provider HubSpot, for example, introduced the concept of “inbound marketing” as the antidote to email spam and interruptive advertisements. Before them, CRM giant Salesforce catalyzed the “cloud software” movement as a way to expose the shortcomings of on-premise enterprise software.

Patron Saint

The alternative approach to brand building is the patron saint model. Patron saint brands elevate the stature of their buyer’s role in the organization. Take Gainsight, arguably the best-known provider of customer success software. Certainly companies invested resources in helping their customers become better users of their products before Gainsight rose to prominence. Yet it was Gainsight, through its content and events, that helped earn the customer success leader a seat at the executive table.

The company’s CMO, Anthony Kennada, said the patron saint metaphor “resonates deeply” with him, explaining that Gainsight’s marketing investments – including a customer success job board – act as sort of a “career companion” for the professionals it serves. The company also tracks on LinkedIn the number of professionals with a customer success title, which serves as a proxy for how effectively they’re lobbying for the role.

Given that dragon slayers and patron saints think about brand very differently – the former being a disruptor, the latter an advocate – it may come as a surprise that they employ similar tactics. Both have enjoyed success with content, events and community-building, for example. Where they diverge is in how those techniques are employed, and how the output is measured.

Dragon slayer brands often draft off a counter-trend they set in motion – HubSpot didn’t say the company was the answer to interruptive outbound marketing, rather it said the inbound marketing movement was. Marketing’s success is thus pinned to the popularity of the movement it promotes. The more energy driving the movement, the more likely it is to propel their brand forward. This is why these brands tend to take a “go big” approach to their marketing.

Every year, Salesforce boasts attendance in the hundreds of thousands for its annual Dreamforce event. Meanwhile, HubSpot’s INBOUND conference enjoys well over 20,000 guests. While these organizations want their buyer to attend their events, they don’t cut the messaging so fine that those surrounding their buyer don’t also see a reason to attend. The movement trumps the product.

On the other hand, patron saint brands like InsightSquared, my previous employer, think about events more in terms of audience composition than absolute totals. InsightSquared’s annual Ramp event, for example, may be one of the larger conferences for revenue operations professionals, but the audience still totals just over 400 guests. However, well over half of the attendees are the exact persona that the company champions. Like other patron saint brands, the right attendee matters much more than the highest number of attendees. Even Gainsight’s annual Pulse conference, the world’s largest gathering of customer success professionals, attracts just over 5,000 attendees at its flagship North American event.

Some companies are working around this more-vs.-better binary by hosting “birds of a feather” events in which multiple companies, each of which sells a non-competitive solution to the same buyer, band together to host a meta patron saint event. Together LeanData and DataFox, two startups that serve the broader operations function, jumpstarted an event dubbed Ops-Stars that convenes multiple companies each of which targets a sales-, marketing- or business-operations buyer.

The opposing forces of size and relevance also play out in content. To maximize audience size, dragon slayer Drift, which is vitalizing the “conversational marketing” movement, doesn’t put a web form in front of any of its content. It also produces content on a wide variety of topics – much of it only marginally related to their core marketing buyer. They don’t aim to target their buyer so much as surround her.

Conversely, Pendo, a startup founded by product managers to champion product managers, takes a tweezer to content and community where Drift takes a backhoe. The hub of Pendo’s content strategy is ProductCraft.com, a separate brand that converges product managers to publish content, share best practices, engage in debates and host events. It’s not entirely a “walled garden” – anyone can view the articles contained in the community – but if you aren’t a product manager, really why would you? The subject matter itself (“Who should own product documentation?”) is purposefully limited in appeal, as are the community-supported debates, which have topped 50 in the site’s first year.

How do you choose?

If you are responsible for creating or enhancing your company’s brand, asking yourself the fundamental question: “Do we exist to disrupt a practice or champion a role?” is an effective first step. While the answer may not alter the mix of marketing tactics you deploy, it may change how you conceive them and what criteria you use to evaluate their success. It may also restore brand to its rightful place at the top of your organization’s priority list. And that alone is progress.

The post Branding: Are You a Dragon Slayer or Patron Saint? appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Canada has a rich history of innovation, but in the next few decades, powerful technological forces will transform the global economy. Large multinational companies have jumped out to a headstart in the race to succeed, and Canada runs the risk of falling behind. At stake is nothing less than our prosperity and economic well-being. The Financial Post set out explore what is needed for businesses to flourish and grow. You can find all of our coverage here.

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OTTAWA — In November 2017, the head of Google LLC’s parent company praised Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for Canada’s advances in artificial intelligence, saying he was “enormously thankful to Canadians” for its contributions to AI research and, by extension, its contributions to Google’s bottom line.

Alphabet Inc. chairman Eric Schmidt, who was speaking to Trudeau at a Google event in Toronto, explained how the company had built much of its cutting-edge software, which it later sold through various finished products, in Canadian office spaces.

“We now use it throughout our entire business and it’s a major driver of our corporate success,” he said. “So we owe you.”

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The comments probably gratified many in the room, but for some it was a reminder that Canada, for all its advances in research and development, routinely gives away huge chunks of its intellectual property rights to foreign multinationals — often through the very academic institutions that it pays to develop innovative new technologies and concepts.

Companies such as Google and Apple Inc. increasingly rely on Canadian workers, who come cheaper than those in Silicon Valley, and universities to bolster their corporate know-how, then sell the finished products through U.S. headquarters.

This reliance is a well-known struggle that homegrown companies have to deal with, but some observers say the lax rules around Canada’s university R&D programs have limited the potential economic outputs of those efforts, which have fallen well short of political ambitions.

Federal and provincial bodies funnel approximately $12 billion into research and development efforts every year, according to a 2017 report by the University of Toronto, consisting of a mix of government grants, tax credits, loans and other measures.

But some of those funding efforts may increasingly end up creating IP for foreign companies. In 2016, 58 per cent of the patents granted to Canadian inventors were assigned to companies located in other countries, up from 45 per cent in 2005.

The report found a “glaring gap between invention and ownership” when studying Canada’s ability to generate returns on the patents it develops, ranking it 12^th out of 17 nations on this measure.

“It’s pennies on the dollar for the amount of money you put in,” said Jim Hinton, fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

In Ottawa, federal ministers tend to use every available breath to promote job growth through “innovative” programs, often through consortiums involving university research centres. But Hinton and others say the results of such programs in terms of economic output are so weak that government officials need to reconsider how they are sold to the public.

“We have to say this is a philanthropic thing, we can’t be saying it’s generating money,” Hinton said. “The universities have oversold what they’re able to deliver on.”

The reasons for the shortcoming, if viewed that way, are complicated. Part of the problem, observers say, is that university professors are afforded an immense amount of discretion on which companies they partner with for research, and there is minimal oversight about who they partner with and how. The approach to intellectual property, and who ultimately keeps it, also differs from one university to the next.

Hamid Arabzadeh, founder and chief executive of Ranovus Inc., an Ottawa company that develops efficient infrastructure for data storage systems, said multinational companies have largely crowded out much of the available university research grants. The company in its early stages, he said, had to fight hard just to find somewhat obscure professors that it could work with.

“Pretty much everything that is above the ground level has already been picked up,” he said. “So what we have to do is go find things that are below ground and that have talent.”

That crowding out, at least in the telecom space, Arabzadeh said, is largely a result of Nortel Networks Corp. going bust in 2009, which left a dearth of Canadian firms to lead research and development.

Nortel was instead replaced by major international companies such as Ericsson, Huawei Technologies Co. and Cisco Systems Inc., which have deep pockets and are able to focus their efforts on the most sought-after professors.

“Huawei may have 10 people in Ottawa, and their only job is for each of them to work with five professors, get their IP, send it to China, assess it, shortlist it, get it productized, all with thousands and thousands of people behind them,” Arabzadeh said. “My job is to build a business here that is sustainable, so I cannot assign 10 of my guys to go and work with these professors.”

Ranovus has secured a number of public innovation grants to develop technologies, including $20 million from Ottawa’s Strategic Innovation Fund.

But the ability of Huawei and others to work with select professors also gives them a direct funnel to up-and-coming talent, allowing them to hire the students of the professors they work with, Arabzadeh said.

Canada has a broad suite of government research programs, including the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF), and Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), to name just a few.

Graeme Moffat, senior fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, said the NSERC research program has some of the lightest restrictions pertaining to how partnerships are formed and that many other programs are similarly open.

For example, some programs might force a foreign company to establish an office in Canada, but don’t put explicit boundaries around who gets to keep the IP.

“There’s money flowing everywhere, without necessarily an overarching strategy to it, other than spend money on innovation,” Moffat said.

NSERC recently laid out a new framework for its research partnership program, and said the “open model of the program enables the research community the flexibility to construct projects that will yield strong outcomes and benefits for all parties.”

Moffat said Canadian universities need to strike more of a “middle ground” with multinationals in their research partnerships in order to retain more IP in Canada. At the very least, he said, there should be provisions in place to ensure more high-skilled workers remain in Canadian tech hubs.

“If highly qualified people who are working on these grants are staying in Canada, then the net benefit to Canada is probably there, because the best IP walks on two legs,” he said. “However, there’s nothing really constraining the movement of intellectual property.”

Despite all the public money going into such research programs, Canada has little hard information on how much economic output the country receives from them.

“It’s been mostly just box checking,” Moffat said.

That Canada loses IP through its university programs is not a new challenge, but observers say the problem could deepen as the government appears increasingly willing to spend on innovation, either directly or indirectly.

Ottawa’s 2018 budget boosted funding for academic institutions by $3.2 billion over the next five years, an increase of 25 per cent. It has also raised direct spending levels.

It was a point Schmidt made in his 2017 conversation with Trudeau, just two years into the Liberal mandate.

“You’ve done a lot, and you’ve done it very quickly,” he said.

Trudeau, perhaps unaware that local firms are broadly unsatisfied with Google’s prominence in Canadian R&D, doubled down on Ottawa’s efforts to secure more foreign research funding, joking that Schmidt was “on record” with his promise to spend more in Canada.

“We’ll make sure that works out,” Trudeau said.

• Email: jsnyder@postmedia.com | Twitter: jesse_snyder

Here are some truths we need to grapple with in today’s economy:

• Consumers trust word of mouth recommendations from family and friends more than advertising
• Consumers trust recommendations from perfect strangers more than advertising
• Anyone can create a position of authority and attract a community if they demonstrate expertise, credibility and consistently produce content to keep that audience engaged

All of those truths have led to the popularity and effectiveness of influencer marketing. If you aren’t familiar with the term, influencer marketing is a new twist on an old tactic. Remember celebrity endorsements? When someone you liked, an actor or athlete, endorsed a product or service, you thought more favorably about it. Expand that definition of “celebrity” to anyone who has created subject matter celebrity or notoriety and has a defined audience that trusts their endorsements.

This could be a teenager who reviews technology for other teens on YouTube, it could be a person who reviews convention hotels, or it could be a mom with a popular blog aimed at other moms. These people have some things in common that will help you identify them as a genuine influencer:

• They regularly produce content on a specific topic
• They give away a lot of information for free
• Typically, they will have a core channel (YouTube, podcast, blog, etc.) but also have a very active social presence
• They have attracted a group of people who are all interested in their niche topic and consume their content regularly (through subscription, attending live events, etc.)
• They rarely stray from their core topic or subject matter expertise
• They write for other publications, channels, or media outlets

No matter what their specific subject matter expertise is, all of these people have the ability to influence the behavior and/or opinions of their audience because they’ve earned their trust.

One of the biggest shifts in this tactic is the emergence of micro-influencers. Back when we only had three to four channels (TV, radio, print, outdoor) all of the influencers were bigger names and had a broad base of appeal. In 1960, you might have seen a magazine ad featuring Claudette Colbert telling you why she chose to smoke Chesterfield cigarettes or Humphrey Bogart reminding you to buy a box of Whitman’s chocolates. Today, we’d call these kinds of celebrity endorsements macro influencers.

Interestingly, they are not the focus when it comes to influencer marketing now. In a world where niching and targeting are greatly valued, the power seems to be in the micro-influencer. Consider Mischa Pollack who has 74,000+ subscribers on his Drunk Tech Review channel on YouTube where he leads a roundtable discussion (with alcohol being liberally consumed) and testing of gadgets, technology and toys (anything from Bluetooth speakers to jet packs) or Alexandra Lerner who uses Instagram to talk about yoga and wellness, while collaborating with brands who want to reach her audience.

Micro-influencers could have as few as 500 followers/subscribers but most have between 10,000 -500,000. You name a topic and there is someone out there who has built a following around that subject. One of the challenges of influencer marketing is that it’s a bit like the wild, wild west. In some cases, the influencer will have a media kit, pricing, and contracts. In other cases, you will have to work with the influencer to define the rules and deliverables of the campaign because they haven’t formalized their process yet.

This can be a very effective tactic, but it can also go south in a hurry. Next time, we’ll explore some best practices for working with influencers to make sure you get a great ROI from your efforts.

 

The post Who is an influencer? appeared first on McLellan Marketing Group.

By Mark Schaefer

For about eight years, I worked in high-level enterprise sales jobs for a Fortune 100 company. It was an extremely complex job with so many moving parts and evolving relationships that at times it was hard to catch my breath! My single customer represented $1.5 billion in annual sales and it was one of the most demanding jobs I’ve ever held.

In the middle of my sales career, our company named a new CEO, Paul O’Neill, a brilliant man who would later serve as the U.S. Treasury Secretary.

Paul was a no-nonsense finance type. He did not understand the sales function and at one point in a meeting asked, “If our products are the best in the business and our customers want them, why do we need a sales team? Why don’t we simply take orders and maintain a small service team to respond to problems?”

I shuddered.

A company without sales people??? Was this guy CRAZY? Did he know how hard I was working?

But … I could also sort of see his point, at least in theory. If marketing was continually creating and refining products customers need, pricing them fairly, and promoting them well, why DID you need sales?

While this sales-free scenario seemed unlikely back then, technology has made it more possible. In a world where we can usually assume we’ll receive quality goods, reliable delivery dates, and self-serve customer assistance, do we still need sales people?

Marketing our way out of sales

My grad school teacher and mentor Peter Drucker famously said:

“The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.”

Indeed, the better your marketing, the fewer salepeople you should need.

The marketing profession is about creating demand and acquiring customers. If we do that extraordinarily well — and the routine administration of the account is increasingly handled by AI-driven auto-servants — are we entering a world where sales professionals are obsolete?

Here’s a news story from The Wall Street Journal that suggests the answer is “yes:”

“In an extraordinary step aimed at cutting costs, Tesla is going to begin shutting physical stores and move to selling vehicles only over the internet as it starts taking orders for the $35,000 version of its Model 3 compact car.”

“It’s 2019—people just want to buy things online,” Elon Musk told reporters in announcing the change.

Only a fraction of car sales in the U.S. happen online. As Tesla tries to reach a new category of mainstream buyers and increase sales of its Model 3, it will be testing whether these consumers are willing to make one of life’s largest purchases without a test drive and local store to guide them through it.

A car company with no sales people. Wow. Tesla offers a glimpse of what it takes to have a sales-free world:

• It has established a brand so powerful, clear, superior, and relevant that the demand always outstrips a need to “sell.”
• Rich, interactive web-based content about every feature of the car provides a dazzling library of information that far exceeds the knowledge of any human sales representative.
• Online resources allow you to customize your car, secure financing, and schedule a precise delivery of your finished vehicle. The new ordering process reportedly takes one minute.

Perhaps Paul O’Neill’s vision of a sales-free world is finally coming to life.

If your marketing is working well in this self-service world, why do you need sales?

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

The post Is it time to eliminate the sales function? appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

We spend a lot of time discussing how to select your target audience as part of creating an inbound marketing plan. Hopefully you know who your target audience is for your small business. But have you taken the time to further divide that target audience into smaller market segments?

It is important to understand the makeup of your target audience in order to select the right marketing activities and messages. Sending the same message through the same channel may not be as effective as sending more targeted messages through the appropriate channels for each segment.

Why? Because your target audience is made up of people or businesses with different characteristics based on many factors. Dividing your target market into further slices with common interests enables you to speak to them in terms that will get their attention and help them decide to do business with you.

What is Market Segmentation?

Market segmentation is dividing your customers into smaller groups based on various characteristics and needs. There are many ways to divide your target audience so learn as much about your customers as you possibly can.

You create these segments to make it easier for you to be more focused when communicating with your target. People in the same group are more likely to respond similarly to your communications.

And by doing this exercise, you will be able to easily classify your best customers and find more like them.

Why Segment?

You segment a market when different groups perceive a different value for your product or service. This helps you develop your marketing activities and messages so that you are not perceived as being all things to all people.

Analyzing your target market and dividing it into individual segments can:

• Provide insight into which segments you can more successfully service based on your current resources and skills
• Alert you to a market segment that is losing money or one you are not capable of servicing effectively
• Help you understand what you need to do to expand your business to include a particular segment.

This analysis may also help you determine that there is one particular segment that you want to exclusively work with even though there are others that you could effectively service. In other words, this segment contains your ideal client. Finding this segment of ideal clients is priceless.

Benefits of market segmentation

Breaking your target audience into groups based on their specific needs helps you better understand your customers, increasing effectiveness of your marketing.

Market segmentation allows you to:

• Focus on the right market for your business. Don’t try to market your products and services to those in your target who don’t want or need them.
• Save you time and money. Rather than using one generic strategy for all customers, you can be more precise in how you communicate to individual prospects. This helps you spend your marketing dollars more wisely.
• Clarify how your products and services apply to these different segments of the market. You will be able to better communicate the benefits to that particular segment.
• Potentially find a segment that is willing to pay a premium for your products and services. Identifying a segment that has more discretionary spending may allow you to raise prices for your products and services.

Selecting Market Segments

To segment a market, there are various attributes that you can use to paint the picture of your ideal client. For consumer markets, market segmentation has four distinct categories.

Demographics

Demographic segments are based on age, gender, education, income, occupation, marital status, ethnic or religious background.

Homeowners that are first time buyers in the 25 to 35 age segment may have different needs than those of homeowners in the 60+ age range.

For example, if you offer handyman services, senior homeowners may have more of a need for your services than the younger buyer but may have more price sensitivity.

The younger homeowner may try to do the work themselves, but if they have family and work obligations, they may be more likely to want a regular handyman service to take care of regular maintenance.

Although the services you offer may be exactly the same, your message, price and packaging may differ depending on the segment you are communicating with.

Behavioral

Behavioral segmentation targets users based on behavior and decision-making patterns such as purchasing decisions, consumption, loyalty and lifestyle. By understanding purchasing behaviors of your target audience, you will be able to time your marketing to hit when they are most likely to purchase.

Homeowners that only call their landscaping company in the spring for cleanup and mulch are considered a light user. Those that have your company come every week to mow the lawn are more frequent buyers.

You can decide market to your light users to turn them into medium or heavy buyers. Or you can also spend more on your frequent, loyal buyers, providing more services for them to choose from. Your strategy will be based on whether you want more customers or more loyal customers.

Psychographics

Psychographic segmentation uses personality, interests, values, spending patterns, buying behavior, brand consciousness, lifestyle (conservative, trendy, economical), activities and interests (fitness, shopping, sports, etc.), attitudes and beliefs (health conscious, environmentalist, security conscious, etc.)

Homeowners that are environmentally conscious or have children and pets may want a cleaning service that uses organic products to clean rather than those with chemicals or bleach. If you are marketing to those homeowners, you need to be really clear that you use all natural or green products in your cleaning.

Geographic

As the name implies, geographic segments are used to target the needs of a particular audience living in a specific area. Again if you target homeowners, those living in an urban area may have different needs than one who is living in a rural location or near the water.

By researching the needs of these homeowners, you may find that your message needs to be changed in order to appeal to these three segments.

What if you service businesses not consumers?

For business markets, segmentation is still important and consumer segments can apply to businesses. Remember you are selling to people.

Other variables to consider include industry, business size, number of employees, location, private or public, revenue, independently owned, franchise or chain.

Businesses are less likely to purchase something they don’t need. By segmenting your business buyers based on needs, you can more easily figure out which businesses would need your products or services.

As a small business, it likely you will target other smaller businesses because you may not have the resources to service a large company.

So although it may be a bit more complicated, it’s still possible for a small business to segment their market.

Is the segment worth it?

Once you have selected a segment or segments to target, you then need to determine if the segment is worth going after.

• Is the segment large enough?
• How difficult will it be to reach this segment with your marketing activities?
• Does this segment have the need and the money to satisfy the need?
• Is the segment viable – i.e. is this segment growing? A stable or declining segment would need to be evaluated based on the number of competitors already servicing that segment.
• Does your business have the necessary skills, knowledge and expertise to service the segment?
• Does the segment align with the values of the company?

How to Segment

Some business owners have difficulty getting started with segmentation. Start by looking at your current client base and see if there is a pattern. Sometimes businesses just naturally attract a particular type of client. Take a look at those clients you just love to work with. What characteristics do they all have in common that you could turn into a segment?

Let’s take a look at another example:

A massage therapist would start by picking their target market based on geographic location since it is more likely that their client base will come from within a 10 mile radius of your office. After a relaxing massage, most people don’t really want to drive more than 20 minutes to get home.

However, within that target market, you could segment even more in order to offer specific services based on physical need.

• When would athletes more likely get a regular massage?
• Would corporate executives benefit from a massage as a way of relieving the stress of the job?
• What would attract stay-at-home moms more often?
• Is there a type of massage that is beneficial to seniors?

Understanding what motivates these segments into booking an appointment for a massage enables you to develop marketing programs that speak directly to these people. This does not mean you would exclude the general person who calls to book a massage.

But you may find that marketing your business exclusively to seniors to relieve arthritis pain or athletes who need to be in top condition for their events maybe more financially successful. The key is to explain why your service caters to their needs, especially if they make it a regular part of your health and wellness activities.

Summary

Successful marketing usually occurs when you speak precisely to your target audience. Market segmentation helps you achieve that precision.

Once you go through the exercise, you may choose to market to only one segment within your target market at any one time or you may choose to reach multiple segments simultaneously. In either case, you now can develop

• Marketing messages that speak to your target segments
• Activities that are geared towards these segments, and
• Clarity around your business that attracts clients like a magnet

So rather than use the “spray and pray” method of marketing, take some time to segment your market. Effective market segmentation will result in more of your target audience turning into a customer.

The idea of a “sales process” has been around since long before I was offered my first sales role. The concept has been heavily promoted by the mainstream sales methodology vendors and adopted with varying degrees of effectiveness by many sales organisations.

But I’m not sure it was ever an appropriate metaphor and with the emergence of an increasingly well-informed customer community the idea that a complex B2B sale can be distilled down to a step-by-step sales process seems increasingly at odds with reality.

This is particularly the case for unfamiliar, strategic purchases where the customer may have no recent past experience of the various considerations involved. As Gartner recently pointed out, the customer decision journey for these sorts of purchases is inherently non-linear and sometimes verging on the chaotic...

At any point in their decision journey, the customer can choose to move forward, move backwards, stay where they are, go around in circles, put the journey on hold or abandon it all together. And the chances of delay or abandonment increase exponentially with the number of stakeholders in the decision-making group.

These challenges combine to mean that the most common outcome of these sorts of complex evaluations is the conclusion that they might as well decide to “do nothing”. As a consequence - in many sales situations - our most powerful competitor is not another similar vendor, but the status quo.

So, whilst the idea of a “process” with a predictable outcome might be applicable to regular, familiar purchases, we can’t really apply the term to the typical complex buying decision. We can’t assume or imply that our customer is going to follow an entirely predictable path or that apparently similar opportunities will evolve in similar ways.

Nor can we or should we assume that our best chance of success lies in following a standard series of sales steps. Now, I’m not suggesting that we encourage our sales people to go freelance and make it up as they go along. There are a series of sales activities (the most important being discovery and qualification) that are of universal relevance.

It’s just that we need to apply them in the context of our specific customer’s decision journey, rather than our own generic linear sales process. And that means we need to accurately diagnose what sort of journey our customer is embarked on, and what phase of the journey they happen to be in right now.

For example, we need to know:

• Whether or not our customer has recent experience of buying similar solutions (or solving similar problems)
• Whether or not our customer has a clearly defined vision of their desired solution (and the extent to which we have influenced this)
• Whether or not our customer has a well-defined decision-making process, where they are at the moment, and what they intend to do next
• Whether or not they are open-minded about who to do business with or have a preferred option already in mind
• Who will be involved in the decision process, what influence they have, and whether the decision group is well-aligned

We also need to identify what phase they had reached in their decision process when we first became aware of the project and got involved in the exercise.

These insights – every bit as much as problem-solution fit - can help us to judge whether they are likely to buy, whether we are likely to win and whether the effort is likely to be worth it.

And whilst the actual buying journey itself is often non-linear, the phases through which a successful buying decision evolves (sometimes more than once!) are somewhat consistent – but their next step could be in any direction:

• At the start, they are broadly satisfied with the status quo
• Then something happens to disturb their equilibrium
• Then they start to explore the situation and their options
• Then they seek to define their decision criteria
• Then they aim to select their preferred option
• Then they seek to verify their decision and negotiate the best deal
• Finally, they seek final confirmation and approval to proceed with the project

It’s important to accurately diagnose the current phase of our customer’s decision journey, and to be very aware of the point at which we entered their journey. The later we get involved, our scope for influencing their thinking is progressively and significantly reduced unless we can persuade them to retrace their steps.

But if we engage early and discover that they are inexperienced or suggestible buyers, we have the potential to influence not only their decision criteria but also to help them to navigate the complexities of reaching an internal consensus amongst the key stakeholders.

Armed with a buyer-centric perspective, we can give our sales people flexible frameworks – a combination of flexible sales tools and buying enablers - that serve to influence and support each customer’s specific buying journey. That’s got to be way more effective than a one-size-fits-all sales centric approach, hasn’t it?

This article was originally published in the March 2019 edition of Top Sales Magazine.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales, a member of the Sales Enablement Society, a regular contributor to the International Journal of Sales Transformation and the Sales Experts Channel and the founder of Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the leading UK-based B2B value-selling experts.

Following a successful corporate career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and market leaders, Bob is now relishing his role as a pro-active advisor, coach and trainer to high-potential B2B-focused sales organisations, systematically enabling them to transform their sales effectiveness by adopting the proven principles of value-based selling.

This is a truly amazing period of history for sales professionals. The information tools that help us to identify, connect with, and sustain ongoing relationships with buyers are more powerful than ever, and they allow us to do things few could have imagined just a few years ago. But there's a challenge we all face: We mustn't let the extraordinary technology we now have blind us to the importance of having a clear sales process.

Read Time: 8 Minutes

This is a story about Jonathan Ward's obsessive approach to industrial design.

If you're an industrial designer, you'll recognize some parts of his process, and perhaps be envious of the parts you don't. If you're not an industrial designer, this story will show you how an experience or series of thoughts can be translated, through hard work and over time, into an extraordinary physical product.

PRELUDE

It's the 1920s, and an audacious American businessman named E.L. Cord wants to make the best cars in the world. And he wants to make them in America.

This is an absurd idea; everyone knows the best automobiles come from Europe and have names like Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Benz, Hispano-Suiza. Cord's car doesn't even have a hyphen. It's going to be called the Duesenberg. That's the name of the Indianapolis-based carmaking firm run by brothers Fred and Augie Duesenberg, a pair of brilliant engineers who happen to be crap businessmen. Cord buys their failing firm, then tasks them with fulfilling his best-car-in-the-world mandate, backed with his money.

The resultant vehicle is unveiled at the 1928 New York Car Show (without a body; at the time it was typical to purchase a car of this class without one, so that you could have it added by the bespoke coachmaker of your choice). Once the public finally sees complete Model Js, the car is revealed to be a socks-knocker.

1928 Duesenberg Model J

"There wasn't a single part of this twenty-foot-long vehicle," Jalopnik would later write, "that didn't look like it was sculpted by Michelangelo." Fast, beautiful, elegant, stylish, expensive, the Duesenberg Model J puts Europe on blast. We can almost guarantee that at least one European auto designer had a cigarette fall out of his mouth when he saw the newspaper photos.

1928 Duesenberg Model J

"They were truly such a significant automobile when they were new," Duesenberg historian Randy Ema told The Robb Report. "Nothing else was comparable as far as power, speed and road ability." America had their non-hyphenate supercar.

1928 Duesenberg Model J America also had the Great Depression. In the years following the car's launch, Cord's empire--he owned some 150 companies, besides Duesenberg--took a hit, and never bounced back. By 1937, both Cord and Duesenberg were kaput.

Left behind as a legacy:

1) The American phrase "it's a doozy," meaning extraordinary, splendid, stylish, outstanding.

1935 Duesenberg Model SJ

2) Several hundred surviving cars, including units of the Model SJ (above), a supercharged version of the Model J. A handful of these cars, preserved and restored, would appear decades later at a certain classic auto show in Pebble Beach.

____________

It's the 1990s, and design aficionado Jonathan Ward is prowling the grounds at the Concours d'Elegance for their Dawn Patrol. The cars roll onto the grounds at dawn. As the sun comes over the horizon, Canon and Nikon lenses rise to cover attendees' eyeballs. At this point in time, the Dawn Patrol is still a relatively uncrowded event where those willing to brave the hour can gawk and photograph the cars absent a mob.

There are shutterbugs standing back and shooting long; they want the poster shot of the entire car. Not Ward, who is right up on the metal. "I was never one to do wide shots of a complete vehicle," he says. "I'm on the cloisonné, I'm on the bumblebee hinge, the typeface, the dashboard."

Ward, drawn to details, is compulsively amassing them in a photo archive, which we'll get to in a minute. Of all the cars--or car details, more accurately--that he shoots that morning, one of them lodges in his brain. It's on a Duesenberg SJ that he comes across, and the dashboard features what will come to be one of his "all time favorite gauges ever:"

"It had what was called the drum style gauge and it's just a magical design."

To explain, a typical American gauge of that era featured an indicator needle that rotated around a dial:

Typical dial gauge

The Duesenberg featured a different design found on Rolls-Royces of the era. The indicator was a static line bisecting a rectangular window and did not move. Instead, the numbers moved. Digits were printed around the sides of a short, drum-like cylinder--hence the name--and this drum rotated in place behind the window, revealing the relevant number.

Drum-style gauge in a Duesenberg dashboard

Did it provide any performance advantage? No.

Was it cool? Yes.

Was it easier to manufacture, or more reliable, than a regular dial? No: "I've since learned," Ward says, "apparently they were horribly unreliable and usually removed and refit with the more conventional-style gauge."

I ask him why on Earth, then, would Duesenberg incorporate such a thing?

"To show that they had that capability," Ward explains. "They wanted to create the Rolls-Royce of America." The Duesenberg gauge's design intent was pure, but it exceeded the engineering capabilities of the era.

The gauge stuck in Ward's head, where it had plenty of company. At the time Ward was cooking up a plan to start TLC, a company that would grow into America's leading service center for the classic Toyota Land Cruiser. A decade after that he'd start Icon 4x4, the audacious design-build firm that established his name in the world of rugged-but-elegant custom automobiles. Running both of those companies would take a lot of mental energy. But not enough to make him forget the gauge.

FORMATIVE EXPERIENCES

"The first things I remember sketching as a kid were watches and cars."

As a child Ward was fascinated by the little machines his father and grandfather wore on their wrists, and he wanted to see more of them. "I'd go digging around in my dad's and my grandfather's attics, pulling out old watches they'd had in high school, and finding broken ones they'd left in junk drawers. They had a lot of great Deco stuff, watches from the '30s and '40s."

Ward pored over the faces, the little letters and numbers, the movements, studying the transitions between surfaces. Even at that early age, "I really appreciated the minute details and the design consideration that went into them," he recounts.

By the time an adult Ward attended the Pebble Beach event where he encountered the Duesenberg SJ, he'd amassed his own collection of watches. I ask him which he was wearing at the time, and he can't remember. "It might've been an Omega Moon Watch Speedmaster, a World War I trench watch, a 1937 Packard Salesman Award watch that was pocketwatch modified," he says, thinking. "I probably had 40 watches at the time."

To be in love with watches as a child, and to then get to purchase many coveted watches as an adult, sounds like it would be very satisfying. But Ward suffers from what we'll call the Designer's Curse.

DISSATISFACTION

Cars and watches intersect not only in the Passion part of Ward's brain, but also in the world of branded retail. Ward, a stickler for detail, finds that latter intersection often sloppily executed. "So many of the modern car-brand/watch-brand collaboratives are so shallow," Ward says. He objects to the practice of merely taking "the leather from the interior, and a badge or a similar typeface and slapping it on there. Come on, man--the potential is so much deeper than that. It's not just the leather, but the hardware on the car, the radiator cap, the hinges, there's so many things that represent the DNA of that vehicle. And as a consumer I've always yearned to see that integrated well."

This dissatisfaction extends beyond watches that are car-inspired. When Ward finds a lack of design in areas where heavy attention should be paid, it drives him nuts. "Even a Ressence--which is one of my favorite modern watch brands--there's zero consistency on typeface. For example, look at the numeral one on the back, look at the numeral one on this outer wheel, look at the numeral one on that inner wheel--they have nothing to do with each other.

"That kills me. Or take a Rolex: The typeface, the font on the date has nothing to do with anything else. You'll find six-, even seven-digit watches where that level of consideration in the design was never achieved. No one ever thought it through or cared."

The Designer's Curse is a two-part hex. The first part is that your senses are constantly scanning the world around you for errors in physical design. The second part is having to accept, via experience with manufacturing, that sometimes those errors have to be lived with. "You know and I know, [those flaws exist because] the watchmakers are dealing with an established network of suppliers who already have that widget with a generic type face already on the shelf."

Ward can't escape the first part of the curse. But it's his life mission to beat the second. "To get your design as perfect as you'd like it, you have to push back with that supplier, you have to wait longer, you have to pay more."

INSPIRATION

Given his background and skillset, it seems obvious that Ward would eventually put his money where his wrist is. "As a watch collector and lifelong watch geek, I've always looked at different ones and thought, 'I would make a killer watch.'"

Where should the inspiration come from? Do you start from scratch? Take one of your favorite watches and merely correct its flaws? For Ward the answer emerged from his car show photo archive. "About seven years ago I finally decided I really need to sort that image collection, which had gotten absurd--15,000 images or so.

"I broke it into categories for badges, grills, hinges, gauges, et cetera. And every time I'd see another exceptional vintage car, the design continuity of the gauges and how they relate to the rest of the vehicle, especially on early stuff, was always fascinating to me."

Thus we arrive at the drum gauges on the SJ Duesenberg. Rolls-Royce had them, Cadillac as well--why was it Duesenberg's that attracted Ward? "The presence of the Duesey drew me in," he says. "The aspirations of the brand and the design details of the SJ were magnetic."

While a drum gauge is a mechanically unlikely feature for a watch, Ward was smitten with that display method, which only reveals the currently relevant number. This has precedent in the watch world: "Jumping hour" watches reveal the hour in one window, a single digit at a time, with minutes shown in another. "I started to obsess," Ward says, "on that concept of a jump-hour based on the Duesenberg."

A design had begun brewing.

OBSESSION

To work out their ideas, some designers sketch. Others manipulate modeling materials. To some extent, the physical act of translating an idea in your brain into physical lines of graphite on paper, or armature wire on a workbench, provides a measure of relief.

Ward's sketchbook of choice is between his ears, so he can't leave it in the studio nor limit its hours of operation. "With any design idea I have, there's a period in time where it's like my version of a sheep jumping fences," he says. "I'll have a 3D model crafted in my odd brain and as I'm falling asleep, I'm altering chamfers or scaling or adding details, building out the model."

For Ward, this process is enough--until it's not. "It advances to an obsessive, out-of-my-control compulsion. There's some next level where it starts to be--not incapacitating, but to a point where I'm going to lose my remaining sanity if I can't get this out of my head. I need to see it done. I need to see it made."

COMPULSION, PART 1

Relief came in the form of a guy from a CAD company. "So as I had this mythical model growing in my head, we had developed a new friendship with the team at Autodesk," Ward says. They offered to send a tutor down. Through Icon, Ward already had a staff of CAD-whiz engineers who could race circles around him; but he "wanted to be able to at least comprehensively illustrate my intentions with a design before I introduce it to my engineers," so took the company up on it.

The tutor arrived, expecting they'd tackle automotive projects. Instead Ward saw an opportunity to cure his insomnia. "I sat down with this tutor once a week for eight months, and all of the work was based around the watch," he says.

CONSTRAINTS

A CAD file, once you pop it open, is a representation of a limitless space. But within that space, one designs objects that are defined by limits and constraints. "It's an interesting kind of struggle," Ward says. "Take one of my favorite designers, Raymond Loewy. I've noticed that if he was doing something for himself, meaning no constraints, it failed. If he was entertaining the manufacturing or budgetary restrictions or other factors imposed by the client, and working with a client's design director, with all of those constraints, his work was phenomenal. We need boundaries and borders to help us focus in on the core elements that need to be addressed.

"One of the neatest opportunities to me about watch design is all the constraints," says Ward. "The legibility, the math, the symmetry, the geometry of it, the size of the movements, and on and on. Those are exciting to me--they give you so many cool opportunities to take something further."

I ask Ward for an example; he's got three chambered. "You can go all the way down to the transition of a crystal to a case. When you study almost any watch, there's no flow to that. But the manufacturing capabilities of today, you can mandate one radius for the top surface of a crystal and a different radius for the lower inside surface of that crystal.

"You can do a special coating, or say 'I like that coating on this side, but I'd have better refraction if we did a double anti-reflective coating on the inside.

"Then there's branding, which often involves another typeface fuck up. The brand typeface in relation to all the other places that words and letters are used, there's often no consistency. And some watches have beautiful, super sanitary, clean design and then they just drop the big-ass logo on it--it's like "Oh, come on."

COMPULSION, PART 2

As smart as CAD programs are, they can't tell you when a design is "finished." For most designers, your boss or client dictates that. For Ward, after eight months of CAD, "shit started getting serious. We printed a bunch of prototypes. I kept tweaking them, then realized: 'This is good to go. I can actually make it.'"

Hoping to create the watch as a bad-ass one-off for himself, Ward attended the Baselworld Watch and Jewellery Show in Switzerland. "I talked to Svend Andersen and a couple makers, showing them parts of my design that would dovetail with their movements, breaking out ISO's to get some loose quotes. The prices were out of my league, so it was not going to happen."

On his way out of the show, something fell out of the sky and landed on Ward's head. That something was the peculiar arithmetic of industrial design, where you can't afford to make one of something, but you can afford to make fifty. With the development costs spread across multiple hypothetical buyers, what was impossible now merely becomes a pain in the ass.

"I got to thinking: I'm fascinated with industrial design. I'd like, long-term, to see Icon get into other aspects of ID. The brand came from both my love for automotive design, and my idea of how things could be engineered that I wasn't seeing done out there. So it seemed like an opportunity to take the same organic approach and do the watch.

"I came back, talked to my wife--who's Icon's COO--about it. And then we just went for it."

MANUFACTURING

Modeling a complex object in CAD can feel like running a marathon; then you get into manufacturing, which feels like climbing a mountain. "Once I had those CAD files done, I thought it was gonna be easy, like 'Let's go.' And then it took another year and a half, almost two years to get it through and ready for production," Ward recounts. "But most of it being my own fault.

"To me, the original purity of vision of the design intent must be established first. Then you have to go through the maze of addressing all those constraints and rules, which in the case of this project, I understood seven out of ten going in. The other three were 'Oh shit' moments that popped up on the road to creating it with our engineering partner in Switzerland. Those are the challenges where you think you've got it all lined up, then you find out 'The shank needs to be here, and for it to be here where you've put it, affects this other thing,' et cetera."

Another issue was the geography of the manufacturing. "I'm all into reviving the industrial American tradition," says Ward, "and I wanted to make the watch in the U.S., with all of the details just the way I wanted them done. But I found there's hardly any supplier network in the U.S. The way the crystal needed to be made, had to be in Switzerland. The way I wanted the dial made, it had to be in Switzerland.

"The complication that is required for the mechanical movement to do what I wanted to do, did not exist in the U.S. I would've had massive time and development cost to develop it. But that movement exists in Switzerland; in fact it's the exact movement used in watches that are double to quadruple the price point of the Duesey. It's proven, it's off the shelf, the engineering's already paid for."

I ask Ward what other off-the-shelf components exist in the watch. "The movement is off-the-shelf--that's it. The buckle, the tang, the crown, the case, the crystal, even the band--as a leather craft hobbyist, I designed the prototype band and sent it to Italy as the sample. I drove them crazy spec'ing out the exact finish, cut lines, creasing, skiving, every little thing, which was unbelievably rewarding. And stupid, for a run of 50 watches."

"Price-point-wise for me," Ward says, "the development costs were absurd."

____________________________

Up Next: Ward goes over the design details of the finished watch (and gets nuts with the package design). Stay tuned.

There seems to be a very disturbing trend happening among many B2B marketing organizations. The idea of working towards a more customer centric approach has become a popular concept among marketing teams, yet the development of the key foundation documents necessary to assist in making this happen seem to be missing or get bypassed. Too often, marketing teams are not putting in the critical work of developing their buyer personas and customer journey (also known as buying journey), two vital documents that are imperative to moving down the path to stronger customer centric marketing initiatives.

Buyer Personas

Only 55% of B2B marketers use personas as part of their overall content marketing strategy. CMI/MarketingProfs, 2018

Yet, 65% of companies who exceed lead and revenue goals have updated their personas within the past 6 months. Boardview

To be customer centric, means to really know your customer. Not just their basic demographic information such as title, age range, salary, geography, but the details that make your customer into an actual 3D persona. It’s a pretty basic premise. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, how can you truly expect them to engage?

Buyer personas provide the details that drive customer centricity. When the content you produce delivers insights into the actual person you’re targeting, that is when you have truly put your customer first. You then increase the potential for not only achieving higher engagement, but having your persona see you and your brand as a trusted thought leader.

A few benefits that buyer personas provide:

• Content development: Stop developing content that you ‘think’ your audience wants and develop content you know they need. When you take the time to dissect your key personas, content ideas come more easily and are much more aligned to what can actually help your buyer.
• Messaging: Moving away from product-centric messaging to customer centric messaging is a goal for many B2B organizations. Breaking down your buyer personas will help you get there. When you better understand the person who is buying your products and services, you can write for and to them more successfully.
• Sales alignment: Your sales team is vital to the development of personas. Marketing needs to work alongside sales to build out these key buyers and influencers. Other than your actual customers, sales is the most important partner marketing has in building out these documents.
• Communication Cadence: How does your persona like to receive communication and how often? Developing personas requires your team to learn various details of your target audience, which in turn will improve how, when and how often you communicate with them.
• Possible Partnerships: Where does your key buyer hang out or get their information about your industry? When you learn how your personas are influenced, you gain insight into possible partnerships to grow your database and increase leads.

Customer Journey

By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human. Gartner

Building out the stages for your customer’s buying journey is critical to understanding what your persona(s) need to know as they venture from becoming aware of your solution to eventual loyal customer advocates. When you know what it takes to move your prospect from one stage to the next, everything you develop in marketing is done so with more confidence and opportunity for personalization. You can anticipate what your buyer needs before they need it, putting you top of mind as not only a brand, but as the ‘go-to’ resource in your industry.

A few benefits that a customer journey provides:

• Content development: The key to effective content development is asking great questions about what your audience needs at every stage of their buying journey. These questions can then be turned into solutions through your content and distributed via the proper channels to your target audience. The goal is to get the right content in front of the right audience at the right time. A mapped out customer journey is critical to making that happen.
• Sales alignment: Again, your sales team is your most important internal partner when developing the customer journey. The buying journey is not a sales journey, but working alongside sales to build out this customer centric approach will ensure you are asking the right questions at each stage. Marketing also needs to know how and when sales is involved with the prospect to customer relationship, so that there is a compliment happening between marketing initiatives and sales goals.
• Campaign development: Developing a program of campaigns has a higher chance of success when you know how your customer actually buys from you. Need new leads into the database? Building out an awareness campaign works better when you know how your audience becomes aware of your products/services. Looking to drive more MQL’s further down the pipeline? The work you do with sales to understand how your products/services are considered for purchase will ensure a more successful outcome with your campaigns.
• Interdepartmental communication: Your customer interacts with your company via various departments, directly and indirectly. To ensure you can better anticipate what your audience needs, marketing has to break down the internal barriers and talk to other departments about how the customer engages. Sales is the most obvious, but departments such as product development and customer service will also provide key insights into the customer’s journey from awareness all the way to becoming a loyal advocate.

To be customer centric means to get personal. Yes, developing these documents requires your marketing team to take a step back and do the necessary work. But by placing the proper importance on building out these foundational pieces, your marketing initiatives will improve, your leads will become more qualified and your revenue will increase.

Humble. Helpful. Empathetic. Active listener. Customer-oriented. Flexible. Solutions-focused. Knowledgeable. Authentic.

When you hear these characteristics, who do you think of?

I think of a star salesperson.

You might disagree, and that's okay. Representations of salespeople in popular culture (and frankly, the personality profile we've been taught to associate with a "typical" salesperson) haven't always fit this mold.

It's time for a mental reset. The best salespeople have always been subject matter experts, put the customer first, and led with their authentic selves. But today, buyers put less trust in us than they ever have, market competition is fiercer than ever, and these traits no longer separate the best salespeople from merely good ones. These are the skills your sales team needs to survive.

If you want to develop a more effective salesperson, start with how your organization coaches and trains them.

The Problem With Mini-Me's: Coaching Lessons From an Atypical Career

A unique tension exists in the transition from individual salesperson to sales manager that can lead to ineffective coaching. I often work with new sales managers who think, "If these tactics and scripts worked for me, they'll work for my team." In effect, the manager aims to create a team of mini-me's who will sell and act the way they do.

63% of reps have difficulty changing their methods once they find a system that works for them.

Sometimes, this works. But if this is your management philosophy, I'd bet your team is performing below their full potential.

I experienced this tension myself 10 years ago, when I first started working at HubSpot.

I didn't always want to go into sales. I enrolled at Harvard Business School after spending a few years in finance. On my third day, one of my professors said something that lit a fire: Most Harvard MBAs don't know how to sell. They might build a brilliant product, but they're clueless about how to promote it and demonstrate value to potential buyers.

That generalization included me. On top of not having sales experience, I'm also your typical introvert. I thought if I wanted to be successful in my career, I needed to change my personality to get closer to the extroverted ideal: outspoken and powerful. Part of that transformation meant learning how to sell.

I interviewed for an account executive position at HubSpot and bombed it. HubSpot told me it was a "no."

I emailed the VP of Sales and told him that I disagreed with his decision not to hire me. I even offered to work for commission only for three months to prove I could learn to sell well.

Later, I learned that the way I'd handled this objection demonstrated sales potential. Even though I didn't act or sound like the typical HubSpot salesperson in 2009, the management team thought I was smart, coachable, and could add value. Most importantly, they knew I was committed to learning. I was in. (And don't worry -- I was hired at full OTE.)

My excitement didn't last long. On Day 1, I was rejected more than I'd been in my entire life. I sounded terrified on the phone.

My first manager, a classic extrovert who'd spent decades in sales, tried giving me specific lines and soundbites to use on calls. He soon realized I wasn't seeing results by mimicking him, so he pivoted. He set me up with successful salespeople who were more like me than him, so I could shadow and observe them.

Eventually, I found a style all my own that used my strengths: empathy, listening, and problem-solving. All I had to do to be successful was guide prospects through how to improve their marketing efforts. I wove solution selling into my process starting with the first connect call.

It was a rough start, but within three years I'd been promoted to a sales manager. Today, I'm the vice president of our Global Agency Partner Program. What I assumed would be a six-month gig turned into a 10-year career.

My journey in sales was anything but typical, but I learned three crucial lessons along the way:

1. There's no such thing as a typical salesperson anymore.

A few decades ago, salespeople were gatekeepers of information. Prospects had to speak with you to learn about a product or service because there were no mechanisms for independent research. The options buyers considered were limited to whoever reached out first, broke down objections the fastest, and got them to sign on the dotted line. Personal relationships could make or break a deal.

Today, this couldn't be further from the truth. Buyers research their own problems and potential solutions independently. Products are more replicable than ever, and buyers typically have dozens, if not hundreds, of vendor options. Relationships and trust are as important as ever, but they're not built on shallow rapport. Buyers are looking for business advisors they can trust to craft unique solutions for their unique circumstances.

Salespeople aren't gatekeepers anymore — the sales process can largely happen without us and we need to add unique value along the way to ensure our prospects choose us, not our competitors.

The profile of a "good salesperson" has evolved. Changes in buying behavior have shifted the center of gravity in the sales process from personality to trust-building, opening the door for historically atypical personas (like me) to have amazing sales careers.

This doesn't mean people who do look like the historical sales persona can't be successful in 2019 — but they need to build new muscles and layer a customer-first mentality on top of their existing skill set. Nor does this mean we should start only hiring introverts or business school graduates.

However, it is time to acknowledge that the idea of a "typical salesperson" is dead.

2. The best sales coaching is individualized.

Sales managers who try to create teams of mini-me's will be successful … to a certain extent. Some guidance is better than none, and playbooks are a crucial part of any effective sales process. But it's not enough.

"Sales managers are like professional sports coaches," says Andrew Quinn, HubSpot's VP of Sales Enablement and Productivity. "They may not have been the best players or even played professional sports, yet they excel at coaching professional athletes. The best sales managers might not have been the best reps, but they know how to coach their team to get results."

Truly effective management is about individualized attention, helping someone find their voice, and teaching them how to think about the business problems your company addresses.

There is no effective one-size-fits-all coaching model that accomplishes these goals — I'm living proof of that.

It's worth pointing out that this mini-me mindset has likely contributed to the negative perception consumers have of salespeople. Only 5% of prospects consider salespeople to be trustworthy, and many buyers find it difficult to form a personal connection with reps. Why? I'd bet it's because a lot of us are trying to act like someone we're not, and buyers see right through it.

Source: HubSpot Research

We need to take a cue from our buyers. Every sales process looks different — buyers vary in sophistication, where they are in the sales lifecycle, the goals they're trying to achieve, and problems they're trying to overcome. With so many variables at play, it's difficult to be effective through rote memorization and following sales scripts. Instead, managers should tailor their advice to the selling motions a salesperson is struggling with, in a way that leans into the salesperson's strengths.

3. When building trust, authenticity matters far more than extroversion.

The best salespeople lead with their authentic selves. When I started out in sales, I got fairly basic advice for building rapport — identify commonalities, mirror a prospect's tone and language, and create familiarity through small talk.

If this is genuinely how you connect with people, these tactics can be effective. But if they don't come naturally to you, it will be obvious. Today's buyers are savvy, and the moment they feel you're presenting yourself inauthentically, they'll start doubting the rest of your advice. More importantly, they'll be less willing to disclose their problems, pain points, and goals to a partner they don't find genuine.

How to Develop a Coaching Strategy

At a high level, there are two ways for managers to teach their teams: training by example and by inquiry.

Training by example is the classic coaching technique. Managers show reps successful recordings, scripts, and techniques for them to apply to their work. It's effective so long as the manager provides examples that are authentic to the rep's selling style.

Training by inquiry is more personal. Managers recognize that reps are able to independently solve a problem, so instead of concrete examples, they provide guidance based on the rep's selling style.

Content-wise, sales organization should invest in three types of training: Systems and operations, process, and solution.

1. Systems and Operations

Systems and operations training is typically covered in new hire training and onboarding. Is the salesperson set up on their CRM? Do they have access to the right lead views and reporting dashboards? Do they understand how the different parts of your sales stack work together and what function each tool serves? Do they understand what type of context each tool provides, how to access it, and how to leverage it on calls?

This type of training builds the minimum standard of competence salespeople need to do their jobs. Think of operations training as everything that needs to happen before a new hire can go to their desk, open their laptop, and understand how to navigate through their day.

2. Process

Salespeople need two types of process training: a qualification process to determine who's worth moving through the sales process and an array of sales methodologies to apply to calls in real time.

Qualification

Qualification training teaches salespeople how to prospect and qualify good-fit buyers. Who are your most successful customers, and what do they have in common? What problems are they typically trying to solve? Just as important — what red flags should salespeople be on the lookout for? Who is your anti-persona?

This process is unique to each business and typically can't be replicated from company to company. Root this training in real data and results, keeping an eye on churn, retention, and customer success. Work with your customer support and service teams to understand where customers stumble and succeed and how to control for this in the buying process.

Sales Methodologies

Sales methodologies are frameworks that enable salespeople to build skills and improve their effectiveness at different parts of the sales process. They're product-agnostic and applicable to a wide range of sales scenarios. Typically, they're branded and sold as training packages, books, and so on.

You're likely already familiar with many well-known and widely-used methodologies, including SPIN, Challenger, and Sandler — you can read more about the most common sales methodologies here.

3. Solution

Just as good-fit training teaches salespeople how to identify good-fit buyers, solution training focuses on how to handle different types of buyer problems they'll face on calls. Solution training has two parts: Product training and solution training.

Product training gets your team up to speed on what they're actually selling. Salespeople should be soup-to-nuts experts in their company's products and services — this is the bare minimum.

Solution training takes this product knowledge a step further. What common problems do your buyers face? How do you work with your buyer to craft a strategy to achieve their goals? Solution training can be as specific as providing your team with battle cards for competitive deals or as broad as teaching business acumen and active listening skills so salespeople have the tools they need to have effective conversations.

Coaching Mechanisms

Finally, a word on how this training gets delivered.

Just as training is not a one-size-fits-all process, the medium you choose for training will deeply affect the outcome. Use a blend of one-to-one, one-to-many, and peer-to-peer coaching depending on what the scenario requires.

One-to-one coaching typically occurs between managers and their direct reports, and it falls into two buckets: pipeline reviews and individualized coaching. One-to-many coaching is best for baseline training (such as a quarterly update on product features) or for exercises like call reviews where a team comes together to provide feedback and advice for one salesperson. Finally, peer-to-peer coaching is an invaluable, often informal, channel for salespeople to get help from other people on the ground.

Source: HubSpot Research

How HubSpot Trains Better

At HubSpot, coaching begins with determining incoming reps' knowledge, skill gaps, and creating growth plans.

Quinn sorts new sales reps' raw skills into three buckets: knowledge, skill, and will.

"Every individual has a mix of those three things, and that's going to shape the way I engage with them based on where those levels are from empty to full," says Quinn.

Our customers feel the same way.

Pamela Firestone, Head of Sales at Skift, says, "The purpose of coaching is to develop sales talent to meet their goals, but also develop them into independent thinkers who can continue to grow and take on more responsibility."

Internally, we invest in a wide array of sales training that fall into the three buckets above. This training is part mandatory, part informal, and partially driven by the individual salesperson (versus mandated by HubSpot). We believe in allowing people to learn in the way that works best for them, so we also use many different mechanisms to deliver this coaching.

1. Operations

All sales hires go through two weeks of standard onboarding that all new HubSpotters attend. Then, we provide an additional two to four weeks of sales-specific sessions depending on role and segment. These trainings cover how to navigate the HubSpot CRM, access leads, create templates and sequences, and more. Periodically, as we update our sales stack, we'll run new team-wide trainings, but for the most part, operations training is covered during onboarding.

2. Process

Process training is done continually at HubSpot and certain portions are used as criteria for promotion as hires progress from business development reps to quota-carrying salespeople.

In new hire training, we require all sales hires to play the role of their buyer and use the HubSpot product to create and grow a business's online presence. This work is presented formally and graded via scorecard. Sales hires are also given extensive training on HubSpot's qualification framework, personas, and so on.

To be promoted from BDR to salesperson, candidates go through multiple one-to-one certifications with a hiring manager. They must demonstrate mastery of their day-to-day process, provide recorded connect calls for review, and role play a mock discovery call. To standardize the process, we use scorecards to evaluate each of these conversations.

3. Solution

Solution training is a combination of formal and informal training.

During the first two weeks of new hire training, salespeople learn to use HubSpot. Then, new sales hires are required to pass methodology and product-specific certifications on HubSpot Academy. Our sales enablement and training teams regularly produce team-wide certifications or trainings as we add to the HubSpot product.

Informally, managers deepen training on specific selling motions, like crafting effective emails, active listening, and negotiation. Some of our segments run this training at a formal cadence, while others use team meetings or call reviews to do so.

Creating a Collaborative Culture

Culture is one of those vague concepts that has concrete implications for how well your sales team operates.

Creating an open culture where knowledge sharing is the norm is one of the best investments you can make in creating a virtuous cycle of continuous learning.

One way we do this is providing mentors for anyone new to their role, even if they're not new to HubSpot. Typically top performers, sales mentors join a new rep's calls and act as a safety net to help answer specific questions. Mentors step back over time as mentees become more independent, but this is an effective way to build peer relationships and encourage knowledge sharing.

Source: HubSpot Research

We also employ "ding notes": emails that are sent to the entire sales team for every deal that gets closed. The email includes information on the buyer and the process of closing the deal. Not only is this a great way to celebrate wins — the dozens of replies you get after "dinging" your first deal are a treasured HubSpot rite of passage — it's also a source of invaluable information the entire team can learn from.

Michael Swope, Chief Business Officer at HomeSmart, also encourages his reps to openly share their success. "Our reps have weekly phone calls where they share best practices, tools, and successes they've had over the last week," says Swope.

Managers who fail to treat reps like individuals and nurture their unique talents create teams that are unlikely to perform. Guiding reps to sell authentically will lead them to listen more, build better relationships, and focus on the customer's needs.

While coaching, you may discover that there's a gap between who your sales team is and who your prospects are. Next week, we'll be talking about bridging this divide through hiring in sales.

We tend to think of the Laws Of Physics as fundamental truths about how things behave.* For example, F=M x V (Force is equal to Mass times Velocity). We always calculate force using this formula, it is universal. These Laws represent fundamental behaviors of objects and very predictable properties.

Somehow, we seem to treat many of the numbers we use in sales and marketing as “fundamental and unchangeable truths.” We accept them, we accept the mathematical relationship, and all our behaviors are driven by those relationships.

We have all sorts of metrics we look at: Pipeline coverage, win rates, average transaction value, sales cycle, prospect to qualify ratios–treating each as fixed, developing our numbers and strategies based on the math.

The SaaS world has developed their on special version of these fundamental productivity numbers, creating a litany of acronyms: CLV, CAC, ARPU, MRR, ARR, ACV, Churn and on and on. We even create ratios of ratios attributing great value to those.

And we have all sorts of marketing metrics including, Visits, click through rates, response rates, download rates, dials, connects, meetings, MQLs, SQLs, SALs, ABCDEFGs…..

As managers, we track all sorts of things, including, % of People at Quota, MTD/QTD, YTD Quota Attainment, CPOD, Voluntary/Involuntary Attrition, Ramp to Productivity, as well as all the previous numbers.

I don’t want to diminish the importance of many of these metrics, they are important in tracking performance and helping us identify problem/opportunity areas.

But the problem is that we accept these numbers, particularly the ratios, as given and unchangeable. They become, perhaps, the “Unchangeable Laws of Selling/Marketing.”

As a result, the usual answer to driving growth or higher levels of performance, is simply doing more. If we want to grow sales, if we want to grow marketing leads, the answer is to do more–because, after all, the ratios are fixed, unchangeable–laws of selling and marketing.

Managing to the numbers this way, works until it doesn’t, but takes no talent or insight. All you need to do is open the calculator on your phone, or pull of your shoes and socks, counting on your fingers and toes.

Yet this is how most managers and sales people manage to the numbers!

Imagine if we started challenging these laws of sales and marketing. What if we increased our average transaction value? What if we reduce our sales cycle? What if we increase our win rate? What if we increased the relevance of our marketing outreach? What if we reduced voluntary and involuntary attrition?

Thinking about these basic numbers and relationships, figuring out how to tilt them in our favor drives tremendously different views of what is possible, and how to better hit our goals.

As we do this, we then think, “How do we make this happen?” This forces us to look at the fundamentals of what drive performance, and how do we do the things that help us most effectively improve performance.

Our jobs as managers is not to accept the numbers and ratios as “given,” hoping to achieve our goals by driving volumes. We are responsible for understanding what drives these results and what might we do to change them, tilting things in our favor.

The Laws of Sales/Marketing are not fixed, they aren’t laws at all, just arithmetic calculations.

What are you doing to drive performance? What are you doing to understand what is driving the results you and your people produce? How are you tilting the numbers in your favor?

Afterword: Some will recognize this post as a variant of the effectiveness/efficiency discussion. Too often, we focus on efficiency, where we need to first focus on effectiveness.

*The physicists or similarly minded people will correctly claim the laws of physics aren’t absolutely absolute…please grant me some literary license.

Do you want to increase your effectiveness when it comes to prospecting? Are you concerned that you don’t have enough leads or are not closing enough sales? Are you just trying to figure out what to do? You probably are saying “yes” to at least one of these questions. These are real world issues that deserve real world solutions. Let me unpack each one for you.

Not having enough leads isn’t strictly about the number of leads you have. Rather, it is about where you got the leads and what you’re doing with them. Before you think about how to generate leads, first ask yourself who you’re trying to sell to. If you don’t establish a clear profile of who will most benefit from what you’re selling, you will just wander. This will happen because you’ll start to think everything is a lead. The key is not the number of leads you have but the quality of them and how you handle each one. Watch a short video on this topic from my keynote at the Zoominfo Conference:

Focus your efforts on those leads with similar traits as your best customers. The next key is making enough contacts and this is where most people fall short. Let’s say you make two or three calls or send a few emails, but you don’t get any response so you give up. The reason you need more leads is because you’re giving up too soon.

The lead that looks like a perfect fit is someone you can’t let go of because you know that you can help them. You’re certain that you could make a difference in their business and/or personal life if they would just give you a chance. If you truly believe that, you have an obligation to continue reaching out to them. This might mean you reach out over a dozen times! There is nothing wrong with that, as long as you are offering them new, valuable insights each and every time. Keep at it! If you give up, you’ll only be doing them a disservice.

When you focus on the right lead, you’ll be able to create more value for them and before long, they will see it too. All of this will result in closing more sales and even without having to discount. The reason so many discounts are given to close a sale is because the salesperson began with a bad prospect. Remember that not all prospects are created equal. You don’t have time to deal with those that don’t match your profile of a perfect customer.

If you’re reading this and you’re still confused, your mental state is probably still not zeroed in on helping others see and achieve what they didn’t think was possible. Keep in mind that helping people is our primary goal as salespeople.

To help you get in the zone, take 20 minutes and write down all of the outcomes and benefits you have helped your customers achieve. As you build that list, you’ll begin to see that what you do is making a difference. You will also notice how certain outcomes match up with certain customers. Look for patterns and indicators that you can begin to use to help you prospect. As you do this exercise, you’ll start to believe in yourself and your ability to help those around you.

Prospecting is just the beginning for you to help others. What else could be more satisfying?

Copyright 2019, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

It’s common for departments to have a full team for sales operations, cross-functioning with a traditional team of sales reps.

So, what do Sales Operations entail?

Sales operations in a B2B environment include quality lead management, strategic territory planning, contract and proposal management, forecasting, reporting, CRM management, and more. The definition of sales operations continues to evolve and expand to alleviate growing sales processes. Sales ops relieve sales reps of tactical responsibilities allowing them to focus on relationship building and closing deals.

Skills of a Winning Sales Operation

We’ve put together 6 commonly-seen skills of sales operations functioning at their best.

1 Formal Vision Building

It is every sales operations team’s responsibility to develop an overarching vision for the department. They say hindsight is 20/20, but what if your sales operation team honed their ability to plan to meet their future goals? Before you can deploy strategies and enlist new technology you need to know where you are headed first.

• Look at the existing data
• Think in quarters, years, and decades
• Make sure you have the resources to scale your short-term vision

Departments waste significant time and money annually backtracking and pivoting strategies. While it is good to remain flexible and adaptive, it is equally important to create a solid sales vision that considers everything from hiring to forecasting to CRM practices. High-level strategizing is a skill that is crucial to sales optimization.

2 Establishing Tech Infrastructure

You might have the most talented sales team, but you could still be out-paced by competitors with superior technology. In just the past two years alone the industry has seen an influx in available applications and tools to help support sales operations. Improved data analytics and more intelligent CRMs can be incredibly advantageous but also keep in mind that too many complicated interfaces can potentially bog down the team.

Technology strategies should focus on:

• Integrating apps and tools
• Customizing to meet team needs
• Automating superfluous tasks
• Improving analytics and reporting

The sales stack should be substantial enough to upgrade all pipeline processes, but sleek enough that the benefits far outweigh the learning curve.

3 Training & Hiring

Sales operations teams need to be experts in hiring and training, helping to absorb the administrative responsibility the often lengthy process involves. Sales ops are the in-house product gurus that know what it takes to close deals with specific personas. They have intimate knowledge of the statistics associated with the current team and should make informed hiring decisions based on this information.

• Create established best practices
• Formalize onboarding thru initial training
• Support new sales reps

This might be the most overlooked sales ops function despite how crucial putting the right personnel in place is to have a thriving sales team. Sales operations should establish best practices for onboarding, training, and retaining the best sales talent.

4 Lead Generation

Lead generation skills start with a value proposition, which is a formal explanation as to why your product meets the buyers’ needs and details the delivery process. Having a solid value proposition is just the start to quality lead generation. Creating quality inbound marketing materials and collecting data throughout the lead generation process to refine your leads are both important aspects. Not all leads are created equal, quality over quantity improves sales reps chances at closing deals.

• Maintain accurate data for informed decision-making
• Curate quality content and branding to bolster lead generation
• Underpin your strategy with a strong value proposition (see #1)

Having a strong sales ops strategy to generate hot leads or enlisting the help of third-party lead generation professionals are two ways to make sure your department does not go without this vital skill.

5 Customer Happiness

Sales ops not only has to help the sales reps generate leads, but they should also support relationship management for those leads that have turned into sales. Customer service skills aren’t just for the customer service department. Nearly every part of the sales process involves the customer and therefore requires high-level customer etiquette. This begins with knowing the customer base and target personas. The sales ops team are already the data experts and should use this to their advantage to take a quantitative, yet personal approach to support sales reps and improve sales outcomes with strong customer service skills.

Some tips for sales ops professionals:

• Provide useful statistics to help close deals
• Know the client base
• Take ownership of customer happiness

6 Collaboration

One of the best skills for your sales ops team to have is the ability to collaborate, specifically with the marketing department. Marketing departments build the brand and attract leads organically through design and quality inbound materials. They can also help circulate campaigns and collect data relevant to their advertising efforts. Marketers, like sales reps, are communicating directly with consumers to generate leads.

Here is how to join forces for better sales outcomes:

• Share metrics and data across departments
• Discuss what is working and what isn’t on a qualitative level
• Talk about clear strategic priorities

While marketing and sales might seem different at a glance, the two teams are working towards a common goal. Just using different processes, tools, and data. To reach optimal operational effectiveness, the departments must collaborate as they towards increasing overall revenue.

In its essence, sales operations is a team of sales support all-stars that keeps the company on track to meet goals in the short and long-term. To deploy sales ops effectively, it is essential to build sustainable strategies, find the right tools, hire qualified sales reps, retain customers, and collaborate your way toward success. Sales ops are entirely people-driven. And function from in-house personnel down through the client base.

Your user adoption metrics create a silent, unending conversation between your enterprise and your customer. They are invaluable in helping you understand the results your customers are getting from your product. And in today’s customer-centered economy, there’s nothing more important than generating real value for your customer.

Adoption is about more than just usage; it’s about helping your customer get the most out of your services. It follows then, that your adoption metrics should reflect this deeper goal and generate insight into customer engagement.

The adoption phase is the first time your customers start seeing the value of your product and getting returns in the form of improved ROI. As such, the user adoption metrics that matter should address issues such as whether your product or service is helping your customer complete their work more efficiently.

Three Keys to Successful Adoption

Your customer will spend most of their journey in the adoption phase. It’s the point when the promises of the sale and the lessons from the onboarding process are leveraged into everyday value. This phase leads you into the renewal and upsell process.

Here’s the breakdown:

Onboarding	Adoption	Renewal/Upsell
30 days	305 days	90 days

The adoption phase is your opportunity to nurture your customer relationship and establish a recurring revenue cycle driven by a commitment to customer growth. That’s why it’s sometimes referred to as the growth stage. As a manager, your focus in the adoption phase should be on using the customer success platform to monitor three key questions:

1. Is the customer using the product?
2. Is the customer getting value from the product?
3. Is the customer enjoying a positive and trusted relationship with your company?

Let’s look at each in turn.

Is the Customer Using the Product?

Once the customer enters the adoption phase, you want them to start seeing value as soon as possible. And to achieve value, they must be incorporating your product or service into their everyday working lives.

Regularly monitoring customer uptake is the easiest way to tell if your customer understands and is happy with your product.

Metrics that Matter

The most immediate way to track your customer’s product usage is through license utilization. It’s a simple measurement of the difference between the number of active daily users in an account and the total number of licenses purchased. You can move beyond this at-a-glance count by creating an engagement score based on more detailed information. This broader metric offers greater insight into the health of an account by also measuring the time spent online in an application, individual user frequency over a defined timeframe, and the number of features accessed. Distilling this data into a numeric value helps your customer success team rapidly identify active and at-risk accounts.

Is the Customer Getting Value from the Product?

Customers achieve value when they maximize the features and functionalities of your offering within their unique environment. Knowing, for instance, that your customer is regularly accessing only three of four key features produces a behavior-based opportunity to foster direct engagement and a more rewarding customer experience.

Metrics that Matter

An engagement score for the breadth of customer engagement provides a broad insight into your customer’s use of your product. You can track overall usage as well as time spent using specific product functions both across and within accounts. You can use this metric to effectively monitor the uptake of both existing and new functionalities in response to direct campaign engagement. For example, you could directly monitor the movement of engagement rates following a new launch campaign or different renewal messaging.

A customer-centered company should always be able to read and proactively respond to a customer’s behaviors across their journey.

Is the Customer Enjoying a Positive and Trusted Relationship with Your Company?

A key component of driving lifetime customer value is building and maintaining a trusted relationship. Using the data insights from a customer success platform and adopting a customer-centered approach across your business should enable you to maintain an active dialogue with your customer which, in turn, generates more customer information to shape future engagement.

Ultimately, the best way to build trust with a customer is to deliver valued ROI. You can keep that priority at the forefront by consistently engaging customers with goal setting and achievement, reminding them of their progress, and employing targeted campaigns.

Metrics that Matter

It can be difficult to quantify levels of trust in a useful way. You can, however, measure the frequency and content of customer responses to quarterly business reviews (QBR) and campaigns and chart the success rates of support cases. You can also use a centralized customer success platform to monitor every communication and interaction that occurs between your customer and a team member. It’s helpful to monitor fluctuations in this correspondence over time to check for seasonal increases and decreases in customer engagement and to plot an overall measure of activity.

By combining this qualitative assessment with metrics that measure the depth and breadth of customer product usage, you can build an overall customer health score. This metric can include detailed business rules and algorithms to reduce all your customer engagement into a highly visible and readily actionable status. The user adoption metrics that matter most are, after all, the ones that guide your future customer engagement.

Defining the User Adoption Metrics that Matter

User adoption metrics should keep you constantly informed of your customer’s behavior and product engagement. These metrics should center on how frequently and effectively your customer uses your product and the overall health of your relationship. Maintaining this information in a centralized customer success platform lets you quickly visualize a customer’s current engagement and personalize your interventions.

Gathering such important information will guide you toward creating a customer-centered approach that leads customers to see and feel the value of your product or service. After all, the adoption process is a chance to demonstrate your commitment to the customer by building your strategy around their needs.