Rnordman

Understanding people and what makes them tick is what has made these two gentlemen so successful in two seemingly unrelated fields. Listening to Seth Godin and Robin Dreeke speak (or reading one of Godin’s 22 fantastic books), you’ll notice that they say a lot of the same things about what drives human behavior. And driving human behavior (the wallet-opening, solution-discovering kind) is what we, as salespeople, are all about doing.

If forced to distill everything Seth Godin and Robin Dreeke talk about, regardless whether it relates to FBI interrogations or selling stuff to people, you might say it’s this: The key to driving human behavior is all about making your primary subject feel like the center of the universe.

Mastering that ability, you also might say, is the key to unfathomable success in any career. Godin and Dreeke are living proof of that, which is why we’re absolutely fired up about having them both on stage at the Sales Machine conference in New York City this June 15th and 16th. Which, by the way, you should grab your tickets for ASAP because prices start going up on May 1st.

Seth Godin

In 2003, Seth Godin gave a Ted Talk titled How to Get Your Ideas to Spread, although watching it today (minus the slightly grainy footage and bad PowerPoint), you might think it was filmed in the past year or two. Godin’s speech was beyond prescient, it was clairvoyant.

“The thing that’s going to decide what gets talked about, what gets done, what gets changed, what gets purchased, what gets built, is: Is it remarkable?” says Godin.

In that talk, he discusses the importance of being remarkable in an age when mass marketing campaigns designed to sell average products to average people are quickly becoming extinct. Rather, Godin suggests we market to early adopters and innovators on the fringe.

“These are the people who are obsessed with something. When you talk to them, they’ll listen. And if you’re lucky, they’ll tell their friends on the rest of the curve and it’ll spread.”

Consumer behavior has changed

Consumers of all kinds no longer care (if they ever did) about you because, as Godin explains, they’ve got way more choices than they’ve ever had and significantly less time. Because of that mentality shift, billions of dollars of advertising spend every year from large corporations peddling average products is now failing to produce the same results it did for decades.

People in the majority at the middle of the curve are ignoring attempts to interrupt their purchasing behavior. In order to have a real impact, Godin advises to “find a group that really desperately cares about what it is you have to say, talk to them, and make it easy for them to tell their friends.”

“We’re living in a Century of Idea Diffusion. People who can spread ideas, regardless what those ideas are, win.” -Seth Godin

We’re living in a Century of Idea Diffusion. Ppl who can spread those ideas win @ThisIsSethsBlog
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Robin Dreeke

Building rapport with perfect strangers, and fast, is quite possibly the most effective tool a salesperson has in their sales arsenal. No matter how well you can explain and demo your product or service, or identify and leverage pain points, people with whom you have no rapport aren’t going to cooperate with you by making a purchase.

And since building rapport and gaining cooperation from individuals who might have information about criminal behavior is one of the primary functions of the FBI, Robin Dreeke, former head of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Program is most definitely an authority on the subject.

Not unlike a great salesman, Dreeke is skilled in the art of objection-handling, albeit in the slightly higher stakes world of crime and punishment.

Ego suspension

According to Dreeke, building rapport and trust is contingent upon you suspending your ego. “It’s about understanding what their goals and priorities are and aligning mine with theirs, then putting theirs ahead of mine.”

From a windowless interrogation room to a corporate boardroom, mastering the art of connecting with and winning the trust of at best skeptical and at worst hostile audiences is the key to driving human behavior in the direction you need it to go.

“You don’t have to be right. If you identify that someone needs to feel like they’re in charge and they’re right, why not?” -Robin Dreeke.

Simply put, Godin and Dreeke have something called People IQ, the massive benefits of which aren’t limited to any one field. To hear both of them share more of their insights and how it all applies to the art of Sales, join us at Sales Machine in New York City. You won’t regret it.

The post People IQ from Marketing to Law Enforcement appeared first on Sales Hacker.

More than 900 million people use Messenger, Facebook's chat product, every month.

To keep people coming back, the company has been juicing up Messenger's capabilities, turning it into a platform that extends beyond just chatting to things like getting news or hailing a ride. 

Here's everything you need to know to make Messenger as useful as possible:

SEE ALSO: How one Facebook employee’s health crisis led to a new internal slogan

First things first: if you want to boycott the main Facebook app but still use Messenger, it's possible to make an account using only your phone number. Just download the app or go to Messenger.com to sign up.

Facebook first introduced this capability last summer. 

Similarly, you can access Messenger on desktop without going to Facebook.com. If you're finding yourself too distracted by the social network's site but want to chat with your friends on your computer...

...check out Messenger.com. You get all the benefits of chat without any of the clutter.

Find the website here. 

Anthony Bourdain has spent roughly the past 15 years in the limelight as a television personality exploring the world, but before that he spent two decades in New York City kitchens, culminating with a stint as the executive chef of Brasserie Les Halles.

Business Insider recently spoke with Bourdain, and he told us that when he looks at the New York restaurant scene today, he's amazed.

"It's come so, so, so, so far in just my lifetime," he said. "So much of what we have now would have been unthinkable 20 years ago, 25 years ago when I was still in the business."

He embraces what a generation of young hipsters have created in Manhattan and the outer boroughs, a culture that has also manifested in other parts of the country.

"You've got tattooed young people all over the city and all over the country making their own sausages, curing their own meat, and rotting things in their cellars, and they're acutely aware of the seasons and are aping obscure subgenres of like Basque-specific restaurants," he said. "It is a wonderful thing."

When Bourdain looks at the New York food scene today, he sees a significant portion of customers who care about the chefs and cooks making their food, and this has in turn made these customers more adventurous.

Celebrity chef culture was in full swing in the '90s, but not in the same way it is now. The 1991 novel "American Psycho" and its 2000 film adaptation, for example, famously satirizes the high-end restaurant culture of the time by having characters obsessed with getting a reservation at the latest hot restaurant, simply because it was the popular thing to do.

What Bourdain is saying is that the same fervor for restaurants exists now, but for better reasons.

He explained that the "admittedly bizarre and frequently hilarious celebrity-chef phenomenon" has allowed chefs "to cook as well as they know how, because people are interested in their best game now. They're not showing up at their restaurant saying, 'I'd like the chicken.' They come in wanting to try Eric Ripert's food or Daniel Boulud's food and they don't go in there with a specific menu item in mind. I think that's a really important change in the landscape over the last 20 years."

Contributing to this change in tastes is the fact that the current batch of 18-35-year olds, millennials, are more interested in "experiences" like a meal at a fine restaurant than a big purchase like a luxury handbag, studies like one from Eventbrite have found. And New York City, with its endless supply of restaurants and young people with disposable income, is the perfect breeding ground for a new wave of foodies.

This generation has also grown up with fears of processed and genetically modified foods, stoked by books like "Fast Food Nation" and films like "Food, Inc.," which has enhanced the power of buzzwords like "artisanal," "locally sourced," and "non-GMO organic."

Bourdain finds this to be the main downside among hot places in New York. "You'll hear the name of the farm, the name of the farmer, what my cattle was fed," he said. "I don't need to know all that." But it's a small price to pay, he said.

"I'm glad that people are aware and think about these things, and I'm glad when waiters and servers know," Bourdain said. "And I'm glad that chefs are making the real effort to get the best quality ingredients and that the public is more and more likely to appreciate it and even understand it."

SEE ALSO: Anthony Bourdain discusses the new season of 'Parts Unknown,' his favorite restaurants, and how he went from outsider chef to the top of the food world

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: At Sam Adams, it’s OK to tell your boss ‘f--- you’

Pablo Picasso — Minotaur Kneeling over Sleeping Girl, 18 June 1933. (© Picasso Estate / SODRAC (2015) Photo © NGC)

Mention Picasso and the first image conjured up is a cubist jumble, or maybe something in the titular colours of his blue or rose periods. But a remarkable summer exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada shows how much the last century’s greatest artist could do with classical lines and basic black.

The Ottawa show puts on display for the first time in six decades the gallery’s rare full set of what is called the Vollard Suite—100 etchings and drypoint prints made by Pablo Picasso between 1930 and 1937 for the legendary Paris art dealer Ambroise Vollard. The gallery bought a full set in 1957, a brilliant purchase. (The British Museum managed to acquire its complete set in 2011, and made a splash in London with an exhibition the following year.)

The series doesn’t tell a story, exactly, but Picasso suggested it might be seen as a sort of diary. In the early prints, a bearded artist lounges in an idyllic studio—we seem to be in ancient Greece, apart from the cubist sculptures in some of the scenes—caressing his gorgeous, naked model. She has the face of Picasso’s lover from the time, Marie-Thérèse Walter.

As the years pass, though, the artist is replaced by (or changes into) a minotaur, and the erotic charge turns threatening. But then, toward the end of the series, any menace is replaced by poignancy, as the bull-headed monster is blinded and must be led through the streets by a little girl.

The exhibition, Picasso: Man and Beast. The Vollard Suite of Prints, is scheduled to run from April 29 to Sept. 5. Here’s my conversation with Sonia Del Re, the show’s curator, and the National Gallery’s associate curator of European, American, and Asian prints and drawings, about what makes the Vollard Suite so engrossing. (Scroll down for a gallery of selected Picasso prints she describes.)

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Picasso: Man and Beast. The Vollard Suite of Prints

Pablo Picasso

Two Sculptors, Two Models, and Sculpture, 20 March 1933

Etching on Montval laid paper

34.1 x 43.9 cm (plate: 19.5 x 26.7 cm)

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

© Picasso Estate / SODRAC (2015)

Photo © NGC

The post A different side of Picasso, artist and beast appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The customer service industry has been around since the beginning of time and is the cornerstone of every business. If doesn’t matter whether you serve the B2B or the B2C community, you need to pay close attention to your customers’ needs and demands. Failure to do so probably means that your business might not be around for long, if it hasn’t gone under already.

In today’s sales and marketing environments, engaging customers requires a higher level of commitment from all in the entire company. Gone are the days where marketers only cared (and were only responsible for) about branding and brand management and sales owned customer relationships separately. Today’s marketing environment demands that companies stop viewing customer engagement as a slew of discrete interactions and think about it from the customer’s point of view – as related and at times, cohesive interactions.

In order to truly engage customers, companies must step outside conventional channels and outside their comfort zone in order to maximize that engagement. Customers no longer distinguish marketing from the product itself or differentiate between the in-store experience and the overall experience. Stepping outside your comfort zone is a surefire way to learn new ways of doing things that will align with your customers’ changing demands. If your customers demand it, I highly recommend you listen to them!

How can companies big and small engage their customers more effectively? Here are three ways to achieve this:

Everyone is Accountable

Like I mentioned before, long gone are the days were marketers were strictly responsible for marketing and sales people for sales. The first step to engagement is everyone is accountable. There’s no “I” in team. Everyone needs to work cohesively as the ultimate goal is the same: customer satisfaction. More satisfied customers mean more business – which is something that benefits everyone.

Companies themselves need to become the engine of the customer-engagement vehicle. They will be responsible for establishing priorities and stimulating dialogue throughout the enterprise seeking to design, build, operate and renew cutting-edge customer-engagement approaches. Marketing is constantly being redefined, and while there’s no “magic bullet” to succeed in the era of engagement, this is the first step in the right direction.

Design a Strategy

Now that you’ve determined that everyone in the company is accountable, you must design a strategy to effectively engage your customers. The strategy will depend on your understanding of how people interact with a company throughout their decision-making process. That interaction could be with any aspect of the company: marketing, sales, PR, customer service, etc.

The customer experience will vary depending on the brand – no two brands are alike, nor should they treat their customers in the same way. For example, the hospitality industry aimed to enhance the customer experience for each part of the brand portfolio by demographics and affordability. Each part of the brand delivers a different customer experience, ranging from how guests are greeted by the staff to the type of toiletries offered in rooms. As a frequent business traveler myself, I know that my needs will be completely different from the leisure traveler staying with the family. I don’t care to know where the gaming room is, but I care about where the meeting room is. This type of mentality might seem obvious to many of you, but you’d be surprised how long it has taken certain industries to abandon the ‘one-size-fits-all’ mentality.

How is your industry adapting to engage their customers?

Build A Strategy

‘Build it and they will come’ became a memorable (yet often misquoted) phrase from “Field of Dreams,” but does it work the same in sales and marketing? It depends. If the design of your customer engagement strategy is solid, the implementation of that strategy should be just as solid, if not more.

Once your strategy is in place, you need to make sure that the organizational capabilities to deliver are in place – whether it’s adding staff, building a social media infrastructure, shifting and/or creating currently existing structures. Embarking upon this journey means that everyone in your company’s ecosystem needs to be a part of the strategy if it is to be successfully implemented.

An example I’d like to highlight are how luxury brands use a number of different methods to engage with their customers. They have built a number of channels in order to reach their customers where they live – on social media. Luxury brands have built blogs, digital magazines, and other relevant content in order to ‘socialize’ the brand. As customers demand more timely, relevant and compelling content, brands are taking their cues from them and implementing content-oriented strategies that are the brainchild of more than one team or department within the company.

Another big industry that has shifted gears to online has been the automotive industry. It has had to do so in order to better serve its customers, particularly millennials. The auto industry has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century by this highly influential (and powerful) demographic, as they prefer to do everything online, so why not purchase a car? That demographic accounts for about 10 percent of the 15 million new passenger vehicles sold each year, according to research firm, R.L. Polk. As a result, dealerships have had to re-train their staff, advertise competitive pricing online and provide content capable of answering potential customers’ questions ready to make a purchase.

Once your customers are engaged with your brand, they will come…as long as you give them what they want. Give them what they want! It’s good business to keep your customers happy.

Download our free e-book to discover how to deliver better service and consistent customer engagement in eight easy steps.

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Kepes covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to aviation technology, enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

How concerned do consumers need to be about privacy today; how do you handle this issue in your own life?

Kepes: I am either incredibly naïve or very relaxed or a combination of the two. So long as someone doesn’t get my bank account or other intimate details, I don’t really care. The saying, “If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear,” is not quite that simple. But to some extent, it’s true. All of my Facebook photos are public. I feel kind of sorry for those people who want to look at my running pictures, but I’m really not concerned about it. I frequently receive ads on my social media pages for running products, and even though I don’t buy products from ads, I’d rather be pitched those type of products than others. This type of targeting is not bad, although it is annoying. As the consumer, you can choose to ignore these ads very easily.

There has been a rise in the use of ad blocking tech. What does that mean for digital marketers and the quest for personalization?

Kepes: Ad blockers are marginally effective and advertisers will find ways to work around them. Those tools are not really addressing privacy concerns but preventing really intrusive ads– those annoying pop-ups that block you from seeing content. Advertisers and media companies need to do a better job with this and realize that pop-ups really don’t work and come up with better ways to target their audiences.

How can marketers improve their efforts at personalization?

Kepes: I think that consumers are getting very tired of this coarse method of targeting. I am constantly being pitched trail running shoes, but I just bought a couple of pairs and I’m not going to be buying any more for a while. But I still get the ads on Facebook and Google. To be more effective, personalization needs to be more refined. An example of how you could do this is: I travel a lot, and when I arrive in a new city, I’d like to find a coffee shop quickly. Google perhaps knows I just got off my flight and then tells me here is a highly recommended coffee shop with free Wifi and a coupon as well. For me, that would be a great form of personalization. Google could actually do this today, but they haven’t, because there are too many concerns around the public backlash of tracking people and being creepy.

How should identity software be incorporated into personalization strategies?

Kepes: Broadly speaking, there’s probably an opportunity for a central, universal system of storing all consumer identity data, but in the post-Edward Snowden age, I can’t see that happening on a global scale. Storing all customer data in one place at a company level however is very useful. One problem though is on getting critical mass from the consumer perspective. People today want to have control around how a company can use their data. If the company makes it difficult or time-consuming to fill out a form on their website with preferences, individuals just going to say forget it. It’s not worth my time. So companies really need to demonstrate and offer to customers the value of them sharing their data. Ultimately, there’s got to be a strong benefit to the individual.

ON DEMAND WEBINAR:
Navigating the Customer Data Privacy Minefield

What’s the secret to great customer success? It starts with great customers – the ones that realize true value from your solution, provide invaluable product feedback and are the most vocal advocates. Customers don’t usually start out like this by definition. Customer success plays an integral role in making them “great” by employing a great customer success mindset with 4 predominant traits.

Mindset 1: Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence (EI) – sometimes referred to as (EQ) are those ever-important emotional and social abilities that make individuals really good at what they do. Individuals with high EI have a self-awareness that helps them understand and empathize with co-workers and customers. EI is key to a great customer success mindset because a CSM will remain focused on the outcomes, applying their emotions to tasks like problem-solving. The change-agent CSM explores possibilities, is open to new solutions and will always advocate for the customer.

Mindset 2: Clear and Thoughtful Communicator

A second common element you’ll find among effective customer success professionals is how they communicate internally across their organization and externally with customers. Their focus communicating is to always do so within the proper context:

1. What is the situation?
2. Who am I communicating to?
3. What is the appropriate tone – professional? Friendly? Funny?

Context and authenticity make CSMs good communicators. They are also great at listening, receiving feedback, interpretation, and translation. Each opportunity to communicate is viewed as an opportunity to learn.

Mindset 3: Effective Negotiator

We all negotiate on a daily basis whether on a personal and professional level. We negotiate with friends, family, and nearly every service provider we subscribe to. Ask anyone in your organization who they think the effective negotiators are and they’ll likely point to members of the sales team. Sales reps hold the ultimate responsibility to close the financial contract with the customer and that takes some serious negotiating skills.

But the financial contract with the customer is only one step in their journey and as part of a continuum for building strong relationships CSMs quickly develop effective negotiating skills with customers (renewal, upsell or cross-sell) and colleagues. Whereas the sales rep focuses on one audience, the prospect/customer, CSMs need to plan negotiation strategies for several audiences – product managers, developers, executives and customers – and their respective interests. They are masters at collectively identifying and articulating what people really want, creating learning conversations, designing options and presenting alternatives.

Mindset 4: Intellectually Curious

An intellectually curious person has a deep and persistent desire to know and will continually invest time and energy into learning more about people, places, things, and concepts. CSMs who have a genuine curiosity to gain a better understanding of what their customer’s business does, what problems their industry may be facing and their individual daily challenges will relate to customers on a whole different level. Digging deep into the details opens up opportunities to interact and engage more with customers. When CSMs become immersed in their customer’s environment that immersion drives them just a little harder to know more, practice more and seek out better ways to teach others.

It’s no accident that CSMs are great multi-taskers too. Could that be the result of applying the 4 traits in a supercharged execution mode and being proactive at managing their time – we think so.

Is there a mindset you think has been missed or overlooked?

Motivation is more than Vince Lombardi quotes and quirky posters on the wall. It’s one of the most important components of sustained sales success over time.

As a sales manager or director, you can only influence your team’s sales performance in two dimensions: Their skill set (what they can do) and their motivation (how repeatedly or passionately they do it).

Improving your team’s skill set is a largely objective process. By evaluating current performance metrics and comparing them to a successful end state, you can diagnose what areas need improvement and act accordingly.

But motivation is far harder. Not only are there are many external factors that affect motivation, every person requires different incentives and motivational tactics. In my decades as a sales leader, I’ve used the following strategies to successfully motivate my team and drive motivation through the roof. 

1. Build trust with the people on your team.

The foundation of motivation is trust. If your team doesn’t trust you and doesn’t believe you have their best interests at heart, it’ll be difficult for them to feel inspired and driven by their work. When salespeople are unmotivated, you won’t be able to re-inspire them unless you have an open and honest conversation about their challenges and goals -- something that simply won’t happen without trust. It’s a vicious -- or virtuous -- cycle.

Managers have to create trust and then maintain it by engaging with their team in a consistent, nurturing fashion. The best way to build trust is to be completely transparent. Simply discussing trust can be a great way of starting off on the right foot.

In my 30-year career, I’ve used one simple soundbite to kick off this conversation. It might seem like a squishy question, but it’s never failed to work. I simply say, “Julia, I want to make sure we are in a trusting relationship. How can we build trust between us?”

It’s pretty direct and it’s a great way to explain to the team that I am interested in working on a business relationship, rather than being their boss.

2. Ask your direct reports how they like to be managed.

I always tell new team members three important things:

1. Everybody’s personality is different.
2. I want to be an effective manager for your work style and personality.
3. I can modify my behavior to fit your needs. How do you want to be managed?

Just as different prospects will require different selling styles and effective salespeople understand how to adapt to those styles, effective managers understand that the best way to get results out of their team is to fit into their reports’ worlds, instead of forcing one method of communication or strategy on everyone else.

Here are some questions I ask my direct reports to help them figure out what their work style is like:

1. What is the pace of interaction that you prefer? Do you want to meet with me once a week, every other week, or multiple times a week?
2. How do you want me to give you feedback?
3. Do you prefer public or private praise and feedback?
4. What type of feedback do you prefer?
5. If I hear something amiss, do you want me to tell you, email you, wait until our one-on-one, or something else?
6. If something I do gets on your nerves, will you let me know?

3. Understand your direct reports’ personal and professional goals.

You can’t motivate someone unless you know what drives them. Understand what your direct reports each want to accomplish in their personal and professional lives. This will not only show you the type of person they are, but also give you insight into what things will motivate them the most.

Once you understand their goals, ask them the following questions:

1. Are you motivated right now?
2. What motivates you long term?
3. What can you do to motivate yourself?
4. How will I know if you are not motivated?
5. What do you want me to do if you don’t appear motivated?

Even if it seems obvious, you always need to ask. If they can’t tell you the answers to these questions, give them 48 hours to figure it out. Forcing your reps to be self-reflective makes it more likely they’ll give you thoughtful answers, which will be better for you both in the long run.

4. Make sure they’re covering the basics.

A salesperson’s motivation always suffers when they’re not taking care of themselves. Your team’s results are influenced by -- may even depend on -- consistent sleep, exercise, and a healthy diet.

Robert Yao, the founder and CEO of EpiFinder, so strongly believes in this idea he’s created a “Robert Yao Hierarchy of Needs.” Whenever someone on his team seems disengaged or demotivated, he shows them the pyramid and asks, “What do you need more of?”

If they point to “food,” he’ll buy them lunch. If they point to “sleep,” he’ll tell them to take a nap. If they point to “exercise,” he’ll say, “Go for a walk.”

While you don’t have to take things this far, stressing the importance of a balanced lifestyle will make a sustained difference on your salespeople’s motivation levels.

At HubSpot, we offer employees access to a gym, plenty of healthy food and snacks, and a nap room.

5. Set daily, weekly, and monthly goals.

Different salespeople are motivated in different ways. Some people are motivated by team-wide sales contests. Some are driven by quota achievement. Some are motivated by qualitative improvements. Some people are motivated by their impact on the organization. Some people are motivated by money.

Here’s how you should think about each type of goal and SPIF (sales performance incentive fund):

• Daily: This is a very short-term goal designed to break a rep out of their funk. The SPIF should be something fun but lightweight, since the rep isn’t doing that much to earn it.
• Weekly: This is a more tangible goal with defined business impact. Set metrics for improvement, then work with your reps on a plan to applying the necessary skills on a daily basis to achieve this goal. This should be a slightly more involved reward such as a round of golf that will influence meaningful results.
• Monthly: The largest of the three goals, monthly goals are accompanied by higher-value rewards based on extraordinary performance. I prefer not to give cash, because once you spend it, it’s gone. Instead, I’ve given physical SPIFs like speakers and TV sets. Every time your rep looks at that item, they’ll remember the process they went through to earn it.

6. Figure out where the issue lies.

There are two main aspects of motivation every sales manager must handle: Individual motivation, and group-wide motivation.

Before you do anything to boost motivation, ask yourself, “How many people seem like their spirits are flagging?”

If the answer is “just one or two,” you’re dealing with outliers. If that number is three or more, there’s a problem with the entire team.

7. Let people pick their own rewards.

Salespeople always do a great job choosing prizes -- after all, they have the most insight into what they want! Plus, this makes your job easier.

I use a three-step process to getting people to design their own sales contest.

First, I ask them if they need motivation. I’ll say, “How do you feel? Do you need a kick in the pants?”

They’ll either say yes -- in which case I’ll move to the next step -- or “No, we’re fine.” If it’s the latter, I’ll say, “It doesn’t sound like you’re motivated today, but if you can hit [activity or monetary goal] without an extra boost, that works for me.” The team will always respond, “No, no, Tyre, we need the motivation.”

Then I’ll ask, “Okay, what do you think the objective should be?”

After they’ve decided on a target, I’ll ask them to pick a timeframe.

Lastly, I’ll ask, “What reward do you want [within X budget]?”

This strategy is straightforward yet highly effective. My reps love it.

8. Give great rewards.

Sometimes, you may need to give your salespeople some inspiration. Here are my favorite personal SPIFs to suggest:

• Prospect for them
• Buy them (and maybe a few friends) lunch or dinner
• Cook them lunch or dinner
• Clean their house (or hire a company to clean it for them)
• Babysit their kids
• Walk their dog
• Wash their car
• Give them the full day off

Unlike a traditional cash prize, these rewards are motivating to the entire team. Everyone will be rooting for the individual rep -- because who doesn’t want to see their manager cooking their coworker dinner?

When you’re offering a team-wide SPIF, use these ideas:

• Take everyone out to the movies in the middle of the day
• Go bowling
• Attend a sports game
• Throw a pool party or BBQ
• Volunteer at a soup kitchen or local philanthropic organization (great for bonding)
• Play paintball or dodgeball
• Visit a go-cart facility

And when you want to truly rally your salespeople and show how committed you are, get a little wacky.

• Dress like a taco
• Shave your beard or head
• Grow your mustache
• Go in a dunk tank
• Sing at karaoke
• Perform a dance
• Pledge to give up coffee for a week
• Eat your least favorite food for lunch
• Wear a funny shirt to work

The goal: Do something playful and memorable.

Interestingly, sometimes the best SPIFs aren’t ones that seem to have any value at all to an outsider. I used to work with Don Bulens at Lotus, and we had a plastic doll we called the Tiny Little Baby Award. It got passed around to the best rep on a monthly basis and was displayed at the winner’s desk. People loved it -- the doll had no inherent value, but it was a way of recognizing people’s achievements, and reps cared more about the accomplishment of getting the baby than the baby itself.

9. Communicate, communicate, communicate.

As we previously established, trust is paramount to establishing a relationship with your team and getting their participation, buy-in, and motivation. In order to establish that trust, take a look at how you communicate with your team, both on an individual level and team-wide.

You can easily conduct a stand-up meeting in the morning to get your reps' blood pumping, using your energy and enthusiasm to bring up the temperature in the room and start the day off right. You can also conduct one-on-one meetings to really get to know each team member on an individual level and help coach them toward their goals.

It also helps to have mini check-ins during the day, whether that's with a short motivational email or an encouraging word when they're not busy.

Touch points like these serve as external validation that can be a big motivating factor.

Examples of a Motivational Email to Sales Team

If you the next step to improve the level of your sales leadership is more touch points with your team, consider sending them a motivational email from time to time. This is an especially good tactic for remote sales environments where you might not get that face-to-face interaction between calls or at the water cooler. The goal is to acknowledge the hard work they're doing and encourage them to keep their energy up.

Sometimes, the times that your team needs encouragement the most is when their numbers are down. Your reps will be looking to you to provide leadership, which includes an action plan and rallying energy. Here's how you can do this in an email:

Motivational Email When Numbers Are Down

Good morning, team!

As you know, we've been trending X% below goal since [Date]. This is due in large part because of [challenge or problem]. Given these challenges, I'm proud of how we've performed so far. For example, [Provide an example of a win].

As our leadership team looks into solutions for the factors outside of our control, we can do [action plan] in the meantime.

Ebbs and flows happen, and it's up to us to see ourselves through the dip. This week, we'll be revisiting some of the fundamentals by [action plan] to shake things up and get some results.

Looking forward to approaching this puzzle with fresh eyes.

Keep up the good work,

[Name]

At the same time, you might want to motivate your team to reach new highs even when sales are up. It's all to easy for reps to pull their foot off the gas when goals are being met and exceeded. However, it's actually good to help them lean into those headwinds. For example:

Motivational Email When Numbers Are Up

Congratulations, team!

I've just received word that we just hit [milestone], exceeding our targets by X%. Each one of you should feel proud for getting us to this stage. That's why I'm excited to announce [how the team is being rewarded for their performance].

In the meantime, let's continue to ride this wave. I encourage you all to stay focused and continue the great work you've been doing. We have momentum on our side, and we can take advantage of it to have a record-breaking quarter!

Keep up the good work,

[Name]

Ultimately, inspiring motivation is about finding the thing that makes your reps willing to go the extra mile. People who aren’t motivated won’t suddenly become top performers if you offer them $1,000 cash. Find the thing that makes your reps tick, and the ones who have the self-discipline and inner talent to work for a reward will shine.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in July 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Walking away is hard, especially when it comes to potential deals. After all, you've spent time, energy, and resources building a relationship — and giving up means you have nothing to show for it.

But in the long run, having a pulse on when to walk away and disqualify leads will help you refine your efforts and make you a much more efficient, effective salesperson. Every minute you spend on an impossible or low-value deal is one you could be spending on a viable, valuable one.

And even if you manage to convince a poor-fit prospect to buy, you're setting yourself up for an unhappy customer relationship and a potential hit to your reputation. To avoid the pitfalls of bad-fit prospects, look out for these seven signs you should give up on a deal.

7 Signs You Should Walk Away From a Prospect

1. They can’t answer these three questions.

Sales requires some detective skills. You need to uncover your prospect’s pain, figure out what they mean (versus what they say), and tailor your messaging to their priorities — but you can't do all the work.

According to Colleen Francis, author of “Nonstop Sales Boom,” sales reps should walk away from prospects who can’t answer these three questions:

• What does success look like with this project?
• Who else will be involved in this decision?
• When do you need to have this project done?

If the prospect says, "I don’t know" to any of those questions, they're either not serious or not a decision-maker. If it's the latter, you don't necessarily have to jump ship. Somewhere during the approval process, the real decision-maker will ask them those same questions. Without a satisfactory response, the deal won’t move forward.

Before you give up, try saying, “I’m worried that unless we can figure out what you’re hoping to accomplish — and by when — this might not be the best investment of your time. Should we table this conversation?”

2. They (really) don't have the budget.

Sales reps are used to hearing “We don’t have the budget,” and “I can’t afford that price.” But that shouldn’t be your cue to give up — many prospects use price as a convenient excuse to get off the phone.

That said, some companies actually won't be able to afford your product. You can hash out whether that's the case through a bit more discovery. Ask questions like:

• What’s your prospect’s company’s revenue?
• Is accessing cash a matter of proving the purchase’s value to higher-ups or hoping that a new round of funding comes in?
• If you changed billing terms or offered a slight discount, would that change things?
• Do you typically sell to companies of this size with this approximate revenue?

If your prospect’s answers are completely misaligned with what you’re able to provide, you’re probably out of this prospect’s price range. Rather than abandoning the deal with no warning, let your prospect down gently by saying, "Given what you’ve told me about your budget, I don’t believe our product is the right fit for you."

Score some sales karma by adding, "I’d recommend [Company A] or [Company B] — either should be able to meet your needs within the budget you’ve outlined."

Now you’ve created some goodwill, it’s a great time to request a referral. Say, "Do you know anyone who’s looking for a more robust solution?"

3. You're competing with three or more vendors.

Given your line of work, you probably enjoy a little competition. But as sales expert Jeff Hoffman explains, pursuing a sale when there are three or more other vendors in the mix isn’t usually worth it.

Not only do your chances of closing decrease with every direct competitor, Hoffman says, but the fact that you’re facing so many other vendors also suggests the deal’s still in early stages. You’ll likely be working with a lower-level employee, rather than the decision-maker.

And even if you turn down an RFP, that doesn’t mean the opportunity is lost.

"If your company was a serious contender, the manager will tell the researcher to go back to your company and ask again," Hoffman notes. "If you receive a second request, you will know the prospect is truly interested, and you aren’t wasting your time by getting involved."

4. They go dark.

Sometimes, your prospect will seem to fall off the face of the planet out of nowhere. They stop returning your calls, answering your emails, or responding to your LinkedIn messages. Eventually, you start digging into your bag of last resort re-engagement techniques — and still, zilch.

That's a good sign that you should probably stop trying. Sure, there's a chance they'll respond to that tenth email or eleventh voicemail — but let's be real, the odds are pretty slim. Plus, when you refuse to recognize prospects who aren't interested, you end up with a cluttered pipeline and inaccurate forecasts.

That said, never end a relationship by going dark yourself. Wrap it up professionally by sending a breakup email. Bryan Kreuzberger, founder of Breakthrough Email, says sending a “permission to close your file” email gives reps a chance to learn from the sale. (Check out the template he uses that gets a 76% response rate!)

5. You’re working with a coach — not a champion.

Your prospect is picking up the phone and putting your meetings on their calendar, so life is good, right? Not necessarily. Simply talking to you isn’t enough — the prospect needs to be able to move the deal forward.

If a prospect is unable to introduce you to other stakeholders, talk about their budget, share their decision criteria, or answer your questions about their needs, desires, and pain points, they're likely a coach — someone who can be valuable in providing context around his company’s internal politics and decision-making processes without the authority or influence to impact a deal.

When you run into this contact, you don’t need to abandon the account. You just need to find a champion — someone with access to the decision-maker who will sell your product internally.

You don’t want to burn bridges with your coach, so don’t insinuate that they’re not useful to you. Instead, keep things positive and ask that point of contact who (besides them) should be involved in the conversations. They’ll point you to the people who can actually ink a deal.

6. They don't see your value.

It's the salesperson's responsibility to educate the buyer on their solution's value. If your prospect is struggling to understand why they need your product and how it will help them achieve their goals, reframe your value proposition, show them customer case studies, send them testimonials from your happiest clients, and so on.

But if you've repeatedly attempted and failed to convince them of your offering's ROI, it's time to call it quits. Some buyers will never grasp the message — and you'll simply waste your breath if you keep trying.

While they might end up buying, you'll have a difficult (if not impossible) time negotiating a fair price. After all, they see your product as a commodity — not a necessity.

7. It’s flat-out not a good fit.

If your product won’t help the prospect, you’re obligated to walk away. At the end of the day, your mission shouldn’t be closing — it should be delivering the best solution to your customers.

Imagine you sell online reputation management services to restaurants. Because your product isn’t really cost-effective for smaller organizations, you target dining establishments with 20 or more locations. You get an inbound lead for a restaurant with only two locations; after following up, you realize this business will get minimal ROI from your services — if any.

Rather than pushing forward with the sale, you should say, "From what I’ve learned about your restaurant and goals, I don’t believe our product is the best solution. I recommend [alternate product #1] or [alternate product #2] instead, because [reasons A and B]."

This response boosts your reputation as credible and trustworthy — so when the prospect’s restaurant chain gets acquired by a much bigger one, you’ll be the first person they call. But even if this prospect never becomes a good fit, they'll likely pass your name along to anyone who is.

Removing a prospect from your pipeline never feels good — even when you know it’s the best thing to do. But there’s a major upside. When you walk away from the prospects who aren’t right for your business, you’ll be able to focus on the prospects who are.

Gartner Research predicts that the typical family home will contain as many as 500 networked devices by 2020. Similarly, Ericsson forecasts 50 billion connected “things” by the same date. Reaching these lofty projections over the next four years, however, will require a fundamental reorientation in the way that technologists and product designers work together to create successful “connected” personal devices and home appliance products. This evolution to “Internet of Things (IoT) 2.0” will be difficult for many companies to achieve — not for lack of technological expertise but because they’ll fail to recognize the value of design in connected product development.

Machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity — the forerunner of consumer-focused IoT — has been around for decades. Overwhelmingly, those IoT 1.0 applications pushed technology to address B2B market requirements.

Product design considerations in the IoT 1.0 world are not critical to persuading customers to adopt offerings. Enterprise IoT buyers seldom require great design, because most often the buyer is not the product’s end user. Fleet logistics companies, for example, monitor the condition and location of their vehicles. Their developers focus on meeting operational and environmental requirements, caring little about the physical appearance or user experience of a dashboard- or engine-compartment-mounted device that monitors vehicle data.

However, as the application of IoT expands to a broader range of commercial opportunities, enterprise B2B applications have become B2B2C. Fleet vehicle operators now directly engage with IoT devices that can measure their physical condition as well as their driving behavior. As B2C companies rush to exploit new IoT applications, pushing technology to potential end users no longer works. Increasingly, the pull of user experience will drive market demand, and product design will be critical to getting consumers to adopt offerings in this new IoT 2.0 world.

The fundamental principle in the IoT 2.0 era is that IoT is not the end product. The IoT is not an iPhone, a networking application, or a wearable device. Customers do not buy IoT. In fact, studies suggest that most consumers are unaware of what IoT is or does. IoT connectivity can enhance a product’s value, but it can never serve as the rationale for the customer purchase.

This misunderstanding of IoT’s role is contributing to a growing list of commercial failures by product manufacturers. Their excuses for missteps include security issues, complexities of managing product life cycles, and lack of interoperability. But most often the root cause is that IoT companies with traditional B2B business models and B2B2C distribution channels have been pushing IoT technology rather than addressing the pull of customer needs and tastes.

One notable example of this type of IoT failure involves the demise of Revolv, a home automation hub designed to communicate with any light switch, garage door opener, home alarm, heating or AC unit, and entertainment system. The product’s manufacturer, Nest, which is now owned by Google, recently informed Revolv customers that their devices would no longer function. So Revolv now serves as a classic example of an IoT product that was long on technology and features and short on addressing the needs of customers.

This kind of “tech push” occurs when both management and engineering discount the value of effective design for representing the emotional and physical connections to the end user. Product function is valued more highly than the expected or actual user experience.

When end users fail to engage with an IoT offering, technology is most often viewed as the problem and solution: “We need better security.” “We need to be interoperable with these other products.” “We need a smartphone app.” The “we,” however, seldom includes the end user’s perspective, and so market acceptance continues to suffer until management pulls the plug on the product.

Effective product design and innovation are the result of an integrated, thoughtful process that focuses on making things that simplify, delight, or enrich the lives of people. The IoT, because of its innate technological integration and new customer experiences, demands a significantly higher level of design and technology partnership.

Unfortunately, the perspective of many technologists (as well as business leaders) in the IoT is that product design as a professional discipline contributes very little to a product’s intrinsic value and market appeal. Changing this well-entrenched bias will not be easy. But developing mutual respect and creating an effective technology-design dynamic are essential if the connected device market intends to move beyond its current hype bubble over the next few years.

Here are five ways that technology and design can build successful partnerships to succeed in IoT 2.0.

Agree to a clear problem statement. Every new product development is based on addressing some problem or opportunity, but often those issues — obsolescence, margins, quality — don’t reflect the needs of the customer. Problem statements should assess value to the customer, covering fundamental questions including, “Why does this matter?” and “What will they pay?” This inquiry requires someone who is experienced in user-centered design and the design-thinking processes. If your team cannot define a problem that truly matters to your customer or their customers, then you don’t have a viable product.

Appoint a systems lead who understands design. Your development team likely has a lead systems person who understands the technology stack, but for an IoT offering, that individual must also possess an understanding of the user and their experience. If your systems lead does not appreciate how design delivers those insights, find a new lead.

Work with designers who understand technology. IoT also requires a technology-aware approach to design. Product experience now includes upgrades, adapting to other products, personalization, and big data. Designers must work closely with technology teammates to understand what’s possible and what’s necessary in the design of the customer experience.

Follow a build-test-learn process. More than other technologies, IoT development benefits from the lean start-up process. The expectation of recurring revenue demands a recurring customer experience in a market with a continuous stream of new competitors. In this environment, churn is worse than a lack of sales, because it reduces revenue after customer acquisition costs are made. Designers can mitigate churn by building an experience that customers desire, observing their behavior, and sustaining the experience based on what they learn.

Simplify for success. Consumers demand simple solutions to everyday problems. Friction of any kind in the user experience, even for something as mundane as having to change batteries, will give users reason to stop using a product — which is death to an IoT offering. Technologist and designers must approach IoT development with a “less is more” mandate.

The IoT is driving the next wave of business transformation. The first wave of IoT change was fueled by technology and validated the potential of connectivity. The next wave will be led by companies who will achieve mass-market success by changing the way they develop IoT offerings, which in turn will change the way they do business.

This business evolution will require a new partnership between those who understand and advocate for the user and those who understand and integrate the technology. Together, they will create IoT 2.0.

The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems is a 512-page collection of puzzles from the Martin Gardner's beloved Scientific American column. The easier puzzles are at the front of each section, and become more difficult as you progress. Here's one of the easy ones:

In the United States at least eight coins are required to make the sum of 99 cents: a half-dollar, a quarter, two dimes, and four pennies. Imagine yourself the leader of a small, newly independent nation. You have the task of setting up a system of coinage based on the cent as the smallest unit. Your objective is to issue the smallest number of different coins that will enable any value from 1 to 100 cents (inclusive) to be made with no more than two coins.

For example, the objective is easily met with 18 coins of the following values:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90.

Can you do better? Every value must be obtainable either by one coin or as a sum of two coins. The two coins need not, of course, have different values.

Netflix might be the king of content in the streaming video world, but there's one gargantuan advantage Amazon has in the space: it doesn’t actually have to make money on its Netflix competitor, Prime Video.

Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky highlighted the value of video to Amazon during its earnings call on Thursday. He said that Amazon is going to “significantly increase [its] content spend” on its video offerings because the company is seeing better engagement and conversions from Prime members who use the video service.

In plain English: Prime Video helps Amazon make money in other ways.

Here’s a simple example. In a recent survey conducted by CutCableToday (independent of its website), Amazon Prime subscribers were found to be 10 times as likely to rent or buy movies from Amazon Instant Video than non-Prime members.

Let’s break that down. Amazon has two tiers of video. The first is Prime Video, which is a Netflix-like service attached to Prime (or available separately for $8.99 per month). The second is Amazon Instant Video, which is a “rent or buy” service like iTunes. And you can browse both at the same time.

One of the advantages for Amazon is that once people get in the habit of going to Prime to watch videos, which are free except for subscription fees, the company has a chance to sell them on renting or buying videos that aren’t available. Here’s the scenario: you search for “The Revenant,” and it’s not available on Prime, but there it is sitting on your screen, available to rent on Amazon for $5.99 with one click. You might just go for it.

In the survey, 40% of 380 Prime members polled said they rent or bought video from Amazon Video at least once per month, as opposed to just 4% of non-Prime members. That’s a big difference. And while that difference might be affected by factors other than exposure to Prime Video, Olsavsky’s comments suggest Amazon sees video as a driver of other purchases.

This isn’t good news for competitors like Netflix, whose core business is providing high-quality movies and shows for a per-month fee. Amazon could theoretically never make a single cent directly off of Prime Video, and still have the project be a resounding success. But a bigger threat to Netflix might be if other companies, like wireless carriers, follow Amazon's lead and start using subscription video primarily as a tool to make money off of other products.

SEE ALSO: The top games Apple thinks everyone should have on their iPhone

Join the conversation about this story »

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If it’s Friday, it must be my day to create some content. Marketers are busy planning, creating, optimizing, and analyzing, and for many of us, creating content is just one of many things on our to-do lists.

We’ve all seen the stats that reveal B2B marketers are spending more time, budget, energy, happy hours, hackathons, and puppy time on content. But to what end? It’s great to have that fabulous piece of content to attract readers (or more often than not, downloaders), but what happens next?

Those big download numbers you’ve been getting don’t count for much. And if you are being honest, you, your team, and your boss already know that. Most of those people are not ready to have a sales conversation. Many of them are not even interested in your products or solutions.

That’s where lead nurturing comes in.

The Truth About How Content Converts

68% of B2B marketers say that increasing conversion rate is their leading objective for lead nurturing, according to a December 2015 study by Ascend2. That means marketers want more people who download their content to become marketing qualified leads.

For some of those prospects, it is never going to happen. They may love your content, they may read it and even share it, but they just don’t fit your profile of ideal customer. You can segment them as “content advocates” and keep feeding them your content, but don’t expect them to ever convert.

But for many of these prospects, it’s just the timing that’s wrong. They could be the right person at the right company, but they are just not ready to have that dreaded conversation with an inside sales person. This is why so much of the buyer’s journey is now digital. Buyers continue to educate themselves with the content you are producing. (highlight to tweet)

There are many factors that make up a marketing qualified lead, both explicit (like company, job title, and the need to solve a problem) and implicit ones (visits to your website, blog, and downloadable content). If you have the right marketing automation tools in place to track all of this, you will know not only if they are the right person, but also that is it the right time.

How to Create Content That Educates

The same study from Ascend2 found that 69% of B2B marketers say that creating relevant content is the most effective tactic for lead nurturing. That makes sense, since lead nurturing is all about staying in contact with those who have reached out to you. The best way to do that is not to send them an email telling them how great your products are, or if their new best friend in sales can have just 15 minutes of their time. (If these kinds of tactics annoy you, you are not alone. I ignore those sales emails, too.)

Send them a series of relevant content based on what you know about them. That’s what this marketing technology allows you to do. Provide some value as you are building the relationship with this prospect. You know they are not ready for sales, but you do know they responded to your content. Send them more.

Here’s one final stat that is at odds with the one above: 59% of B2B marketers say that creating relevant content is their most challenging obstacle to successful lead nurturing. This is not just a challenge for lead nurturing, but for all your content needs. You need to change your attitude, allotted time, workload, or even your socks to put yourself in a content mode. This is not an optional process.

While it is easy to find companies struggling with content, there are plenty that are doing a good job. Emulate the content and tactics you respond to.

If you are reading this blog, it is because you understand content marketing is important, and you want to improve your results. The more you understand your prospects, the better your opportunity to resonate with them. This also allows you to experiment with different delivery mechanisms.

Here are few recent, personal examples. I tested the gated versus ungated ebook approach by releasing a full ebook for free on Slideshare with no registration required. It pointed to a gated asset. The two of them together were part of our most successful campaign of the year.

Now, I am creating a series of short content pieces specifically for a nurture campaign. These are meant to educate our readers about the ideas behind our products. They are not about our products. It is the type of content that prospects might seek out in their journey, but we know about their interests, and we can feed that. These content pieces will not appear on our blog. They won’t be shared on our social channels. They are for this specific nurture. It’s important, so I am finding the time to write them.

Create all the content you can, and push it out over every channel you’ve got, but focus on getting some of that content in front of people who have already told you that they are interested. You’ve got the technology—now it’s time to put it into action.

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You’re stranded on an island with 20 strangers. The group is holding a vote to decide who will be the leader. 

Everyone agrees the leader should be trustworthy, but unfortunately, profession is all you have to go on.

Whom do you vote for?

1. The doctor
2. The accountant
3. The professional musician
4. The sales rep

Got your order? Good.

I’m willing to bet you came up with the doctor, the accountant, the musician, and the sales rep -- in that order. That’s because according to a new survey from HubSpot Research, only a mere 3% of people consider salespeople to be trustworthy. Meanwhile, 49% trust doctors, 12% trust accountants, and 10% trust professional musicians.

On the bright side, being aware of this not-so-stellar reputation gives you an opportunity to fix it. Check out three credibility-boosting strategies to integrate into your sales approach.

1) Do your research.

Delivering a boilerplate pitch tells your prospect you’re more interested in making money than finding the best solution for their unique needs. Any trust the prospect had to begin with will vanish immediately -- and recovering it will be almost impossible.

So, make sure you’re reaching out to buyers you’ve researched and pre-qualified to some extent. Presenting a customized and personalized value proposition will show the person on the other end of the line (or email) that you’re serious about helping them, rather than just earning a commission check.

(Got a good fit buyer but not sure how to reach out? Get a refresher on the basics of warm calling.)

2) Use the right body language.

Sales reps are always thinking about improving their verbal communication, but don’t forget that mastering your non-verbal communication is crucial too. After all, body language has a huge impact on how the prospect perceives you.

Boost your credibility by leaning in, smiling and nodding, and maintaining good posture. Even if you’re talking to a prospect over the phone, purposeful body language will help you sound more assured and positive.

You should also watch out for physical gestures that might be turning prospects off. Maybe you drum your fingers on the table to get rid of nervous energy -- but to buyers, it looks like you’re impatient or annoyed. Or perhaps you cross your arms whenever you’re thinking -- but it comes across as defensiveness.

To get an objective opinion of your body language, ask your fellow reps and/or your manager if you can present to them. Ask them to keep an eye out for effective and ineffective gestures, facial expressions, and postures.

3) Be helpful.

Freely giving out information and advice is a great way to build trust. Establish credibility by posting handy tips in your prospects’ LinkedIn groups, sharing articles on social media, and blogging -- either on a personal site, or your company’s blog. If a prospect has seen any of your content before the first contact, he or she will automatically trust you more.

Not a writer? No problem. You don’t need to be the person who created the content to pass it along. Find content that’s relevant to your prospect from thought leaders in your space, and share away. Here’s a handy guide to what content you should send prospects and when.

When it comes to stranded-on-an-island elections, the doctor will probably always beat the sales rep. However, these three techniques will help you secure the trust you need to close deals -- and that’s better than running an island, anyway.

“Grab the 3 Follow-Up Email Templates that Got a 70% Response Rate – in Silicon Valley!”

“The EXACT Template that Pulled 308,074 Emails from Facebook!”

“The Sales Email that Won 16 New B2B Customers!”

You’ve seen these types of promises before. Verbatim email templates that worked like gangbusters for the author, now available to you – lowly sales creature! The templates come gift-wrapped in blog posts, PDFs, and eBooks.

It’s easy to dismiss these templates as hype, especially when they come from someone you’ve never heard of, on the fringes of the Internet. Not so easy when they come from legitimate, no – respected – companies selling quality products.

What gives? Could it really be that easy to steal an email template, plug it in, and wham… instant leads?

Well sure… it could… as could a lot of things in life. But it’s not likely. Here’s why…

Novelty is fleeting

Remember the “Hey” email? That was one of many subject lines Obama for America used (and reused) during the 2012 presidential election to pitch donors. As a stand-alone email, “Hey” was a roaring success. It had the highest open rate of all subject lines and pulled in millions of dollars, according to Obama’s email director.

Naturally, when Obama’s team shared these details post-election, email marketers got to work. Overnight, inboxes nationwide were flooded with “Hey” and “hey.” Personally, I’ve seen it used to pitch everything from charities to seminars to vitamins (seriously).

Let’s be frank. If you’re a marketer, you’re on a TON of lists: industry groups, trade papers, thought leaders, competitors, and probably a dozen more. You get what… 100, 200, even 300 emails a day? Maybe… maybe… you read half of them. More likely, a third, or a fourth.

Still, even with long hours, overwhelm, and email fatigue, you remember more than you think you do. Your brain is great at recognizing the patterns and word choices in common email subject lines

I’m not just talking about classic direct response grabbers (e.g., “Who else wants to save money?”). I’m talking about that email you glanced at last week, first thing in the morning, before having coffee. Yes, that subject line made an impression on you. When you see it a second time, your brain will remind you, even if it’s subconscious. When you see it a third, fourth, twelfth time (because 8,000 marketers read the same blog post) your brain gets acclimated to it.

Which means, when it shows up in your inbox for the 437th time, you literally stop seeing it. That’s right, your eyes blind themselves, as a favor to your brain, to prevent sensory overload.

“Guaranteed email templates” are a novelty item. And novelty items, by definition, have a short shelf life. Often a very short shelf life.

(Caveat: we are NOT talking here about your branding template, where you have an established look-and-feel, with your logo, header, footer, etc., all in place to ensure consistent branding. We are talking about the “verbatim” templates which promise you untold wealth and fame and sales if you just buy the thing and run it … verbatim, with no changes.)

Context is everything

A second problem with the verbatim approach to email templates is that it minimizes (or completely ignores) context. That’s an unforgivable mistake because context is, by far, the most important element of an email campaign.

What is context? Merriam-Webster defines it as:

” The interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs.”

So, to properly understand “The Sales Email that Won 16 New B2B Customers,” you would have to know at least…

• Who received the emails
• What emails (if any) preceded this one
• The features of the product or service offered
• The benefits of the product or service offered
• The price of the product or service offered
• The relationship between the sender and recipients

That’s not even mentioning all the other factors that can make or break an email campaign. Those are mundane but critical things like date sent, time of day, branding, and sender’s name.

While it’s true that some of the companies promoting guaranteed email templates mention a few contextual details, they never go far enough. Why not? I suspect it’s because those niggling details would undercut the whole click-bait premise of using their email templates for guaranteed success.

The fact is, no two companies are exactly alike. Even direct competitors, who fight over prospects like Spy vs. Spy, vary enough in price, selection, return policy, etc., as to require different emails.

Obviously, email recipients are different too. An appropriate email for one group of prospects might be downright offensive to another. Add to that the rapid changes in job titles, roles, and responsibilities in today’s marketplace and you’re doing a lot of work to try to shoehorn a stranger’s template into your campaign.

Any good email copywriter knows that context – list and offer – trumps the words in a template. Hurts me to say that, as a copywriter myself, but it’s the truth.

Do this instead

Verbatim email templates aren’t totally useless. They’re great for inspiration. They’re also make excellent case studies. MarketingSherpa, for example, does regular deep dives into email campaigns, providing context and important qualifications. One template, in isolation, would not offer anything useful to their readers. One template, in context and over time, is a different story.

So, you while can certainly learn from email templates, they’re not nearly as valuable as learning formulas for creating your own.

What are formulas?

Formulas are outlines that copywriters use to ensure their message stays on track. They save time for the writer and provide the reader, viewer, or listener with a coherent message.

Some of the most common copywriter formulas are:

AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action

PAS – Problem, Agitate, Solve

4Us – Useful, Urgent, Unique, Ultra-Specific

4Ps – Picture, Promise, Proof, Push

When you understand these formulas at a gut level, you’ll never look at “guaranteed,” email templates the same way. You’ll decipher the code you once thought was magical and mysterious, and see it for what it is: a simple progression of thought, based on human psychology.

You’ll begin to see formulas everywhere, especially in your inbox. You’ll be surprised (and amused) by how you still fall for formulas – even when you know where they’re headed.

These formulas have deep roots; they go all the way back to whenever people first began selling, trading, bartering, and haggling.

Does automation mean set n’ forget?

Of course, a third problem with guaranteed templates is that they imply that automation solves conversion problems. By putting their emails on autopilot, it’s suggested, money will just roll in. But that’s simplistic, and it’s not how savvy marketers view automation.

With analytics tools as sophisticated as they are, marketers are constantly testing even the strongest email campaigns, looking for ways to improve. When you understand formulas, you’ll be able to refresh a sagging campaign or create a whole new one rather than wait around for the next blog post flogging a “can’t miss!” template.

Really, until you thoroughly understand email formulas, verbatim templates are a silly distraction. And who’s got time for that?

Whether you’re using a template or a formula for your emails, your subject lines can be one of the most important elements of your email program. After all, an awesome email is worthless if it’s never seen. That’s why it’s so important to know how to create amazingly effective subject lines that will get your email opened. Download Act-On’s eBook, “12 Tips for Amazingly Effect Subject Lines” to learn tips for creating subject lines that are sure to attract attention.

If you haven’t added social media to your sales process you are at a distinct disadvantage. Think back to 20 years ago, and imagine if someone told you that every company you worked for was going to issue everyone an email address and give them a computer. You would have laughed! Years before that you would have done the same. Now, you can’t even imagine these 2 items not being issued to each and every member of your sales team. Why? Because these are the optimal way to reach and communicate with your buyers.

Well I have some interesting news. Buyers are now digitally connected and are using social media one way or another. Some are using it to research, some are using it for fun, some are using it to stay in tough with their children, and some of them are using it for their own reasons. But regardless, they’re there.

Almost every executive I know uses LinkedIn in one way or another. Many of them are on Twitter, and if they are not, then many of the folks in the decision process are.

Prospect Identification

Networks like Twitter and LinkedIn allow me to identify key decision makers (or members of the committee) within a given company. Finding competitive sales reps and seeing who they might be connected to at target companies can be done with some slyness on LinkedIn but can be done extremely easily and stealthily on Twitter.

Buying Signals

Advanced searches across key social networks help sales reps identify buying signals or trigger events that give clues around when someone might be seeking information or leaving hints that they are considering a solution to a specific problem. If done correctly, searches designed to capture purchase intent or key titles can give you an entirely new channel of qualified and timely leads.

Trust and Value Building

Anytime your company creates content that is a applicable to your buyer persona or you come across insightful research that they would appreciate you cannot send them an email or call them. BUT, you can provide insight or content designed to advance the sales process and get it in front of them by using social. These micro touches and micro engagements are key to advancing things between calls and emails as well as to stay top of mind. Whether you focus on insight selling or challenger model, nothing works like social content sharing.

Increased Email and Cold Call Success

Whether your reach out method of choice is email, phone or both, there is no better strategy to increase response rates than social selling. Whether your prospects are active or not, the fact that they have a social profile built will provide you with key information about how to connect. Do they follow the Green Bay Packers on Twitter? Have they shared golfing photos on Instagram? Is there a YouTube video of them giving a presentation at a conference? These types of items if integrated into your phone and email reach outs can increase your success rates as much as 60%. Consider using them in your email subject line or to build immediate rapport on a cold call.

BONUS

Since Google Search has decided to give extremely heavy weight to quality inbound links and social signals – sharing lots of content consistently which links back to your company blog/website will give your company much better placement in Google Search. It’s a well-known fact that a lot of the buying process is done through self-research and “Googling” things, an inadvertent advantage of social selling is higher search placement for prospects that are searching about related solutions in the research phase. It also ensures that your competitors stay off the first page of search. This is the macro benefit of having a social selling culture.

Wouldn’t it be great if your prospects sent you an email, or gave you a call, when they were ready to make a purchase? Or, failing that, filled out a form on your website requesting pricing information the minute they felt a need for your product?

Some prospects might do this… but chances are, the majority won’t. The buyer’s journey is increasingly complex, with consumers using all the digital tools available to research a purchase before they make one.

With the rise of big data comes a deeper understanding of this journey, and more emphasis on understanding where exactly a prospect is within it at any given time. However, unless prospects are tweeting directly to your brand about wanting to make a purchase, their true intent can be difficult to uncover.

Here are 3 ways that your prospects are signalling their intent to purchase right now, that you probably are unaware of:

1. They are engaging with content – but not your content

Before a buyer is fully committed to making a purchase, they did their homework, especially in the B2B space. They downloaded a few ebooks, read a white paper and browsed some blog post archives.
If they are engaging with this type of content, they are in the early stages of intent signaling. However, many brands miss out on these juicy prospects because the content they are engaging with comes from the competition. Using tools like LeadSift, businesses can now identify these consumers based on the content they consume, no matter the source.

2. They are trying to solve an immediate problem

Consumers have grown accustom to finding immediate answers to their problems. Not sure how to measure something? Google it. Can’t figure out the best method of bookkeeping? Ask your network on Twitter.
Google has dubbed these “How do I…” moments micro-moments, and they’re happening on search and social. If your brand can leverage data immediately, tapping into these intent cues as they happen, you will capture in-market consumers ready to make a purchase.

3. They are using multiple devices to do their research

Too many brands overlook the fact that the buyer’s journey is a complex phenomenon that often takes a customer from desktop to tablet to phone and back again.
When exploring a need, consumers may start by doing some casual Google searches at work. Then, they might log into LinkedIn from their tablet while commuting home and read a related white paper shared by a colleague. A few days later, they sign up for a webinar from their phone. Each of these actions tells the story of a consumer moving closer towards a purchase, and the business that can fit the data together to tell the full story will be the one to ultimately satisfy that consumer’s needs.

Intent signals are valuable pieces of data that can help increase leads and generate more sales. If your business is not listening for them across a variety of platforms, devices and behaviors, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.

Market segmentation has traditionally been based on demographic factors such as company size, sector and location. But these simple characteristics are hopelessly inadequate predictors of which specific organisations you should focus your marketing and sales energies on.

That’s because in any complex B2B sales environment, there will be a set of specific unique-to-you structural, behavioural and situational characteristics that are much more reliable indicators of the long-term potential of any given organisation, and of your chances of doing business with them either now or in the future.

I’m not suggesting that you should ignore demographics - but I’m urging you not to stop there when it comes to targeting your marketing efforts or assessing the attractiveness of your potential sales opportunities.

STRUCTURAL AND BEHAVIOURAL FACTORS

Common structural or behavioural characteristics often include whether the organisation behaves as an early adopter or a laggard when it comes to new ideas and technologies, whether they are a market leader or a follower, how they are funded, how they are organised (for example, centralised or decentralised), their market share ambitions, and whether their expansion strategy is through acquisition or organic growth as well which systems the organisation has already implemented.

As an example, in the early days of SaaS many of my clients learned to check whether their prospect had already implemented cloud-based systems elsewhere in their organisation, since this single data point had a huge impact on the length and complexity of the sales process and their chances of winning. Many innovative software vendors have also (through painful experience) come to recognise how important it is to test whether the prospect has a track record of buying “best-of-breed” solutions or whether they typically end up buying from established brands like SAP, IBM or Oracle.

Many of these structural and behavioural factors are usually fairly persistent - they tend not to change significantly over time, unless it is in response to a significant change in the organisation’s environment or circumstances. They are particularly useful in determining whether any organisation is likely to be a good long-term prospect.

SITUATIONAL FACTORS

But it’s the situational factors that typically indicate whether any organisation might prove to be a promising target in the here-and-now. Situational factors reflect short-term recent changes to the target organisation’s internal or external circumstances. The most common example is a recent change in management - a factor that often opens the door to change.

Other internal situational triggers can include changes in organisational focus, priorities or strategy, recent funding events or a recent acquisition, or a recent setback in the achievement of key performance indicators. External situational triggers can include recent changes in legislation or regulation, significant macro-economic changes, or a dramatic shift in the competitive landscape.

These situational triggers act as powerful catalysts for change: they disturb the status quo, and open the prospect’s eyes to the potential need for urgent change in response to the identified problem or opportunity. They drive the evaluation of new systems and new approaches, and often result in the willingness to spend money on a suitable solution.

DOING YOUR OWN RESEARCH

Of course, it’s harder to build up the relevant structural, behavioural and situational profiles than it is to buy an off-the-shelf list of “prospects” of a certain size, sector and location. But the effort invested in doing the research always has a significant payback in terms of better targeted marketing campaigns, and more effective opportunity qualification.

And that, of course, leads to finding and winning more of the right sort of prospects, shorter sales cycles, larger deal values and higher win rates.

If you haven’t already completed the exercise, here’s what I advise: start by profiling your most valuable current customers. Look for the common structural and behavioural characteristics - and ask them what situational triggers caused them to start searching for a solution. You’ll inevitably discover a number of significant patterns that could transform your marketing and sales focus.

You might find this guide helpful.

By the way, this article was first published in (and is republished here with the permission of) the excellent "International Journal of Sales Transformation". You can download a pdf copy of the original article here.

There’s a lot to know about content marketing. You’ve got the content creation part, the social media part, the SEO. The audience growth, the influencers… Sometimes it seems like it just goes on and on.

That’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good because it means there’s always more to learn. There are always new techniques to master, new technologies to try out. It keeps things interesting, and keeps your skill sets sharp and growing.

The bad part? Well, if you’re the type who’d like to just learn something once and then keep doing it the same way forever … that’s not going to work very well.

To give you a broad view of the content marketing best practices now in being used in the industry, we thought we’d package them up like ABCs. Odds are good you’re already doing most of these. But maybe there’s one or two you could add to your quiver. Keep reading to find out. ;)

Audience

You know how real estate is about “location, location, location?” Content marketing is about audience, audience, audience. That’s because the whole point of content marketing is to attract and engage an audience. It’s “owned media”, as the agency folks would say.

Audience is also a factor in persona marketing – the technique of breaking up your customers into different profiles, and then creating content and a sales funnel that’s tailored to each group.

Blog

The anchor of many content marketing programs. Use your blog as a content engine by reformatting what you publish there into ebooks, infographics, SlideShares and more. Also make sure you’ve got your blog set up for maximum lead generation. Blogs are particularly effective for that.

Call to Action

And its sister best practice – conversion optimization. Every piece of content you publish should have a call to action. Even if the call to action is just to like, comment or share. Using the call to action to lead people to another piece of content works well, too.

Data

As in data-driven marketing. Smart marketers are data-savvy. They know when to trust their data and when to question its limits. They are genius at shifting it for maximum actionable insights. They obsess about data quality. Their data wisdom gets applied to every aspect of their content marketing, from strategy to choosing a blog post title.

Engagement

It’s the thing we’re all focused on. Unfortunately, engagement rates appear to be in decline. To stay ahead of that trend, apply what you can from these best practices.

Facebook

Say what you will of the social Goliath. It’s the master of sharing. Recent research showed Facebook drives more referral traffic than even Google for the top 400 digital publishers.

Google

Oh, mighty one. We humbly publish for your favor. Bing is not enough.

Seriously, though. Google’s a pretty big deal for content marketers. Sure, the Google+ thing isn’t going so well. But many of us live and die by our search engine rankings. We also love our free Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts. And then there’s YouTube, owned by Google. And then there’s Google Drive, which some companies use instead of Microsoft Office.

What’s next from “Big G?” Who knows, but I’m rooting for a search function for my house. (Editor’s note: YES!!)

Headlines

They matter. A lot. The right headlines can double, triple and even quadruple your content’s reach. The wrong one can kill it.

The editors at the viral powerhouse Upworthy would have us all write 25 headlines for every piece of content. Why? ‘Cause somewhere in all those words will be a killa headline. It just takes some work to find it.

Tool for the job: CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer, which will rate your headline on multiple fronts, including SEO length, emotional zing, and how it measures up to their database of headlines and their sharing stats.

Images

They’re not just pretty pictures. Having at least one image on every page helps with SEO. And as many of you know, adding images to social media posts is pretty much essential. Social posts with images can get up to two times more engagement.

If you’re not a graphic designer, don’t sweat this. Tools like Canva can help a lot. And there’s dozens of places online to find free images.

Joe Pulizzi

The founder of The Content Marketing Institute and probably one of the top ten most influential people in the industry. So it would go without saying that it’s worth reading everything he writes. Find it on his Content Marketing Institute blog and on his Twitter feed.

KPIs

As in Key Performance Indictors – another term for “metrics.” This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of results. Trouble is, KPIs can get complicated. There’s lots of them, for starters. And they come in several flavors:

• Lead generation metrics
• Content consumption metrics
• Sharing metrics
• Sales metrics
• Retention metrics

Here’re the KPIs content marketers are most likely to track:

Lead generation

It’s the bread and butter of B2B content marketers. Most everything they publish is at least in part a lead generation effort.

Usually that lead generation happens through content downloads (aka “gated content”) and landing pages.

Mobile

There’s more Internet traffic on mobile devices than on desktops now. This has a lot of implications:

• Your website and all other content formats must be mobile-friendly, if not completely responsive.
• Mobile users are especially allergic to slow sites. So speed matters more all the time. Witness the new Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It’s already influencing your search rankings.
• App marketing is rising rapidly.
• Video does particularly well on mobile.

Newsletters

You know the old adage: “The money’s in the list.” Even if you’re not in retail, the money’s probably in the list. Newsletters – and other email marketing messages, like welcome emails, surveys, lead nurturing and more – are extremely affordable and a fab way to stay in touch with your audience.

And guess what: Emails are still the preferred channel of communication for marketing messages.

How MarketingSherpa survey respondents answered the question, “In which of the following ways, if any, would you prefer companies to communicate with you? Please select all that apply.”

Optimization

As in search engine optimization. If you want results from your content marketing work, you’ll need the help of the search engines to get there. But don’t worry – SEO is not rocket science. You can learn the rudiments of it in an afternoon. Then leverage tools like Yoast SEO (for WordPress users) to get the basics done.

Promotion

When you hit “publish”, the work has just begun. 2 million blog posts are published every day – getting your post (or any other content format) some exposure requires a bit of finesse.

Promotion (also called “amplification”) includes working with influencers, sharing on social media, announcing the content to your email subscribers, and even… gasp… advertising.

Yes – consider advertising your content.

Quizzes

These interactive content formats are fab for lead generation, engagement rates and as a clever way to repackage content from other formats. Try one!

Repurposing

Aka “reformatting.” This is a must-use content marketing practice, especially if you’re struggling to keep up with content production. Everything you publish should be repurposed into another content format.

That can mean taking something text-based and making it into something visual. Or it can be grouping text-based content like blog posts into ebooks – or even full-length books. Think post-Thanksgiving turkey here. How many delicious leftovers can you make out of your content?

This is also a great opportunity for a competitive edge. Because 51% of content marketers don’t ever repurpose their content. Geez, guys…

Strategy

The way to avoid “random acts of content.” Strategy should be an iterative process, in that you’re always reviewing how your strategy is working and you’re always checking the data to see how it could be improved.

Test

Test headlines and calls to action. Test email subject lines and landing pages. Test ebook covers, best times to post on social media, and even which social media platforms to be on. Test it all!

User experience

This applies to everything from how you handle customer service to how easy it is to sign up for your emails. It’s also about how easy it is to navigate your site, and how you craft your messaging through the sales funnel.

This is the age of the customer, after all. Their needs (and how consistently you meet them across channels and stages) should shape every aspect of your marketing and your company.

Video

It’s big and getting bigger. Remember: The second-largest search engine isn’t Bing. It’s YouTube.

If the idea of getting in front of a camera terrifies you, or if you’ve got no idea how to develop a video marketing strategy, check out our post, Why Your B2B Marketing Needs More Video [And How to Add It]. Or depending on your product, perhaps your customers could be tempted to create a video or two. LINK TO USER-GENERATED CONTENT BLOG POST

Webinars

Webinars came in very high on the list of effective content marketing tactics in the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs 2016 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – North America report.

While they take a bit of work and promotion, webinars are an excellent way to build your email list, position your company as a thought leader, and give your audience and in-depth view of important topics. If doing one on your own seems too hard, consider partnering with another company for a co-webinar. Or hook up with an influencer. The extra payoff there is the influencer is usually very willing to promote this webinar to his or her audience.

Another powerful W best practice: White papers. They even beat out videos and blogs in the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs’ report.

X

As in the X factor. The mysterious secret sauce that causes a piece of content to “go viral.” Despite a lot of studies and a lot of tools and a lot of really bright people trying to crack the code, it’s still a mystery why some things spread like wildfire and why other things – apparently similar things – flop.

You

One of the most powerful words you can use in your content. You is a magic word – it’s a spell to build intimacy and trust with your readers. It does particularly well in headlines.

Z end

OK, I cheated there. But some of the best content marketing bends the rules a bit. It’s OK to play and take a few risks. Otherwise we risk being boring, and that’s terrible for business.

Over to you

Can you think of any content marketing best practices I missed? Come on, there’s gotta be a few. Give them a shout out in the comments.

Content marketing is on the rise, and companies that invest in content creation generate 67% more leads than their competitors. Download Act-On’s free workbook, “4 Steps to Develop a Content Plan,” and we’ll show you how to serve up content that attracts prospective buyers and creates brand affinity. The workbook will help you develop buyer personas, map out your buyer’s decision-making journey, and serve them content that will help them at each stage of the journey.

Every company these days seems to be either contemplating or pursuing digital transformation. Most cite the need to keep up with disruptive and well-established competitors. But perhaps this focus is too narrow. We believe the greatest challenge to companies today is not keeping up with their competitors, but with their own customers.

One reason is that individuals are transforming to digital faster than organizations. Think for a moment about people as tiny enterprises. They’ve redesigned their core processes in the area of procurement (online shopping), talent acquisition (marketplaces), collaboration (social networking), market research (peer reviews), finance (mobile payments) and travel (room and ride sharing). Have you reinvented your core processes to the same degree?

Customers’ expectations are also more liquid and no longer based on industry boundaries. Customers – whether consumers or business buyers – don’t compare your customer service to that of your competitors, but to the best customer service they receive from anywhere. The same is true for their expectations of your web site, mobile app, loyalty program, branding, and even social responsibility.

So how can you keep up with your customers? You have to start thinking like them.

Customers don’t think in or; they think in and. You have to transcend trade-offs.

The adage used to be that you could pick any two combinations of “cheap, good, or fast.” But today’s customer doesn’t want to make tradeoffs. They want it cheap, good, and fast. As leaders, we are accustomed to thinking of business being about making tough decisions between competing objectives. But we need to think more like our customers. Instead of focusing on how to make tradeoffs, we need to focus on how to transcend them.

Some of the tradeoffs that are most suited to digital transcendence are:

• Big and small: Combine the speed, agility and creativity of being small with the scope, scale and influence associated with being big.
• Complex and simple: Manage the systems and processes to run a global business while creating simple and elegant experiences for customers.
• Global and personal: Achieve universal consistency and reach around the world while delivering relevant, tailored interactions to every customer.

Customers want to be empowered, not controlled. You have to act with empathy.

Business used to be about getting customers to do what you wanted them to do. But customers don’t accept this any more. They don’t like to be told what to do. They want relationships based on reciprocity, transparency and authenticity. If you want to keep up with your customer, you can’t be focused on getting them to do what you want, but instead on helping them do what they want.

This evolution from control to empowerment means a change in the basic building blocks of customer engagement.

• Funnels used to be linear processes that moved customers from one stage to the next. There was no going back until a sale was either won or lost. Now these funnels have become Escherian journeys, fluid, customer-led and multi-dimensional. It’s not about capturing and converting towards a transaction, but connecting and collaborating around a shared purpose.
• Channels used to be pipes connecting you with your customer, carrying carefully crafted messages to passive audiences. Now they are experiences connecting customers to their own desires, and communities connecting customers to each other. It’s not about promoting the features and benefits of your product, but building empathy and understanding of each customer’s intent – and helping them achieve it – as part of an ongoing relationship.

Customers don’t think in straight lines. You need to be non-linear.

To keep up with your customer, you have to let go of linear thinking. Customers today expect you to be where they are, deliver what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. If they’re browsing your website on their laptop, they will expect that when they next come to your site from their mobile device or tablet, or talk to a sales person in your store, branch or call center, you will pick up right where they left off. Business has become like that old game of Twister. You have to be flexible if you are going to win.

This requires rethinking and redesigning core disciplines:

• Strategy has to go beyond analyzing markets, making plans, and forecasting the future. Strategy also has to build capabilities, transform culture and architect for constant change.
• Campaigns have to be more than one-way communications for one-time responses. They need to initiate and expedite personalized journeys as part of ongoing conversations.
• Personalization needs to go deeper than looking simply at what someone buys. It needs to be based on the subconscious motivations of why someone buys, revealed through real-time analysis of a wide variety of data sources.
• Social can’t be treated merely as a channel for distributing messages. Done right, it’s a context for building genuine relationships that demonstrate how much they really matter.
• Loyalty needs to be more than accumulating points for rewards. To be genuine and enduring, loyalty needs to be reciprocal. If you want their loyalty, you have to be loyal in return.
• Operations need to go beyond the efficiency of the company to the efficiency of the customer. How can you optimize to help customers get more for their time and effort, not just their money?

It’s a significant shift in mindset and practice to reorient from keeping up with competitors to keeping up with customers.

We suggest getting started by assessing where you are.

• How does your transformation compare to your customers? In what areas are they moving faster or slower than you are?
• Who is setting your customers’ expectations? It’s probably coming from outside your industry.
• What kind of relationship do you want to have with your customer? Are you trying to get them to do what you want? Or figuring out how to help them do what they want?

Next, look at where to focus your attention.

• Which tradeoffs do you need to transcend? We mentioned a few above. Others include speed and scale, consistent and nimble, high-tech and high-touch.
• Where is linear thinking getting in the way? Review the disciplines outlined above and see which ones will have the most impact on your customer experience.

Creating sustainable advantage is more elusive than ever. The new game is designing customer-driven journeys across touch points to help them achieve their intent, and to create more multidimensional relationships. To win this game, stop thinking about just keeping up with your competitors, and start thinking about keeping up with your customers.

Challenging the Sales Status Quo

We all know the sales funnel. We are familiar with its design, function, and purpose. But what if somebody came along and told you that your funnel had been upside down this whole time? And that starting with a narrow field of prospects and expanding as you went was actually better than whittling down from a large pool to a handful of qualified leads and customers? It seems crazy, right?

Sangram Vajre has found that turning the sales cycle literally on its head is the best approach to closing deals and building a foundation of advocates. The new revenue model has become all about customer experience. His revolutionary approach has spurred a movement within martech and given rise to a series of festivals, conferences, and virtual summits that are drawing in hundreds of marketing specialists from around the world and challenging the status quo on a daily basis.

In This Episode

• How the most popular approach to sales is leading to a decrease in customers
• Why challenging the status quo means embracing the competition
• How losing prospects leads to gaining advocates
• Why building a community means proactively adding value to you customer’s day

Quotes From This Episode

“At the end of the day, these customers are online and talking about stuff. As a marketing team, we have access to all of this information.” —@sangramvajre

“We need to be more of an experience engine because customer experience is customer success.” —@sangramvajre (highlight to tweet)

“We learned that we can turn our prospects who are not our customers into our advocates.” —@sangramvajre

“Turning prospects into advocates is the most important job marketers need to be doing.” —@sangramvajre (highlight to tweet)

“People underestimate the power of personal touch.” —@sangramvajre

Resources

• Sangram Vajre on Twitter: @sangramvajre
• #FlipMyFunnel on Facebook, Twitter, and Slack
• Creating the First Ever MarTech “Customer Experience” Stack
• Terminus
• Vidyard
• Jill Rowley

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Unsurprisingly, the innovative young Sangram wanted to be a pilot, soaring high in the sky and looking down at the world from a completely different perspective than everybody else. With the launch of FlipMyFunnel, he seems to have created this experience on his own through martech!

       

Editor’s Note: This post first appeared on OpenView’s new Medium publication, Expand Upon. Be sure to follow us on Medium here. 

tl;dr — pure freemium has a low ceiling in B2B, but high-touch sales is expensive; combining the two motions to efficiently sell to free users could be your team’s next breakthrough.

The case for a new SaaS playbook

Playbooks for SaaS demand generation, predictable revenue and customer success are becoming widely known and implemented. Companies that have mastered these fundamentals of inside-sales-driven SaaS distribution find themselves in search of step-function improvements to unit economics.

Ultra high growth organizations constantly seek ways to expand reach and awareness, and to turn that demand into happy customers that refer friends and coworkers.

In search of step-function improvements we look to the nature of the acquisition funnel itself to find blockages; what steps and flows for buying and adopting the product can we fundamentally rethink?
A typical SaaS product sold through inside sales centers on the notion of the Marketing Qualified Lead or MQL. The MQL lives as a CRM record, a conversation that started through outreach from a sales rep (SDR, most likely) or converted on a landing page. Along the way in order to become marketing qualified the individual met various criteria, including but not limited to demographic characteristics as well as a behavioral profile that suggested the person could be a good fit for the product. Here the dance begins, often including a trial, demo(s), and even consultative sessions with sales. Following these meetings the buyer negotiates a contract, purchases the product, receives full access to the product, often begins product training, potentially a data migration and/or other technical setup … and at some point becomes a happy user of the product.

The “Revenue API”

Traditional inside sales-driven distribution starts with the fit and sale, with customer success becoming the focus post-sale.

What if we could sell to folks who were already getting value?
The breakthrough moment for us on the HubSpot Sales products was when we started thinking of our (amazing) sales team as a “Revenue API” for the product; wherever we could develop a product that would sell itself … we did that, and where the product team needed help converting users to customers we generated leads rotating them to sales.

Enter the Product Qualified Lead, or PQL. If we flip the traditional model 180 degrees and start instead with product adoption, we find ourselves selling the product to folks who understand the offering and are potentially already happy with it, before they even pay.

To many this may sound like freemium. I would argue that freemium fell short in B2B and from its ashes rose the PQL. While “pure” freemium businesses (which I would define as having zero touches during the sales process) may work well in the consumer product world, B2B products hit a growth ceiling that often can only be broken through by using a higher-touch sales model.

The graph above tells the story behind the shift from pure freemium in B2B toward the PQL model. Touchless sales loses its effectiveness as deal size increases.

Best of both worlds

Mixing the velocity of freemium with the higher pricepoints of inside sales can be magical.

To understand the product qualified lead, it helps to see the various flavors of a PQL and how they fall neatly across a spectrum.

On the far right of this spectrum are touchless self-service purchases — we consider these PQLs because in some models it makes sense to encourage a (usually small) starting purchase and then for the sales team to call into those new customers to ensure success and account expansion. Since they are purchases they have a conversion rate of 100%.

As we move back through the spectrum we see that there are leads who have hit some capacity limit, for example they might have used all the calling minutes allowed on the free plan. The conversion rate of these leads will vary but in some cases it can surpass 50%. This outstanding conversion rate makes sense considering these are users who have already onboarded and adopted the paid product in its free version; there is little to explain or demo here for the rep, so they can focus on closing business and positioning the customer for longer-term success. The challenge here is getting free users this far down the engagement path.

This type of PQL carries some caveats and details that are worth exploring. Even if users have deeply engaged with a subset of features, even exceeding a capacity limit, the sales conversation still adds value beyond the original point of adoption. For example there may be features that the user cannot access for free and for those sales still needs to attach the solution to need and to qualify properly. Additionally it is common for users to use one feature very deeply and know they need to upgrade, but fail to fully attach that particular feature to lasting value. In these cases, it is important to run a good needs-based discovery and recommend how the larger offering can be a long-term solution.

Another click back brings us to “hand raisers”, ie. users that generally have a preference for someone to help them connect the dots. This type of PQL looks a lot like an MQL from a systems perspective since it is typically generated from a form submission. The difference is that instead of filling the form out in exchange for gaining access to gated content the user is instead requesting to learn more about a feature they have stumbled across in the context of using the product. This approach works well in two situations: a) when there is no path for a valuable free version (cost-prohibitive or impossible from a compliance perspective) and b) when the feature requires positioning and/or explanation. Hand-raisers can convert at 2x-4x the conversion rate of traditional MQLs.

Finally we have free users, who in certain circumstances can be thought of as PQLs, perhaps when they meet certain behavioral or demographic criteria. Constant Contact famously tripled their trial conversion by calling free users, and that same pattern can yield great results. The word of caution here is to be targeted about who you call, and to keep in mind the challenge of calling someone who is not expecting a call. One trick here is to do some personal email nurturing for those free users with whom your team would like to connect. A particularly powerful pro tip from PQL sales guru Michael Pici: Have all email come from the assigned sales rep have the call-to-action be for the rep to offer setup help and product guidance. The conversion rate for free users will vary wildly based on your model, but typically will be in the low single-digit percents.

Getting started with PQLs

It may seem daunting to overhaul your sales motion, whether it is working for you or not! One easy way to start to dabble with product-led demand generation is to have landing pages that describe feature functionality, and to link to those pages from your product’s free trial. You likely have the infrastructure in place to rotate a form submission to your sales team, so this is a lightweight starting option. From there you’ll need the collaboration of your product and sales team to drive more free-product engagement and move that “PQL point” further into the adoption cycle.

Good luck out there and if you try some of these ideas we’d love to hear your thoughts and results!

Thanks to Michael Pici and Brian Halligan for the brainstorm that produced the PQL spectrum.

The post Why Product Qualified Leads are the Answer to a Failing Freemium Model appeared first on OpenView Labs.

How to Stress Less About Referrals written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

photo credit: Pixabay

You already know the value of a referral in building retention, value and loyalty to your brand. And those referrals help you grow your customer base at a much lower cost than waiting for customers to discover you.

The numbers make the case: Cold calls result in a 3% or less appointment success rate, where having a referral boosts your success to 40% or more. Think of the time and shoe leather you save by working mainly from referrals.

But what’s the best way to get them?

There are two ways: word-of-mouth referrals or marketing automation – having a program in place that can reach out to your customers automatically. Word-of-mouth is highly valuable but can take more time, commitment and effort. Marketing automation can be expensive, but it’s more practical and takes some stress off your sales team. The good news is the two methods are strong co-workers.

How marketing automation fuels word-of-mouth referrals

The tried-and-true value of word-of-mouth referrals is undeniable: In 2014, a Small Business Trends survey showed that 85% of small businesses say their customers learned about them through someone they know. And about 62% of small businesses consider word of mouth the most effective marketing strategy, says a report by InfusionSoft.

And technology has changed the way it works: Social media is the new word-of-mouth marketing. It’s today’s virtual water cooler. Ambassador shares the example of the recent Netflix series Making a Murderer, which at one point drove 8.46 million Twitter impressions and 412 unique tweets per hour, ultimately making it one of the most popular series that the online streaming service has offered to date.

People are interested and influenced by what other people are talking about, with 46% of people turning to social media when planning to make a purchase. That’s where marketing automation comes in.

It can help build the buzz, joining technology with the old-fashioned power of word-of-mouth referrals. And marketers and businesses are catching on: EmailMonday says about 11 times more B2B organizations are using marketing automation than they did in 2011. About 69% use marketing automation for customer acquisition and 50% for customer retention.

The value of marketing automation is undeniable, too. Capterra says 91% of those using marketing automation see the platform as “very important” to their marketing success, and businesses that use the tool see a 451% boost in qualified leads.

Ways to put marketing automation to work

So how does it work? Essentially, marketing automation is software that enhances your marketing plan by making it more target-rich and effective across various channels, such as email. It can generate leads by gleaning data about your prospects’ activities and interests, helping you direct the right content into the right channels, R2Integrated says. That gets people talking about you, and keeps them connected with more meaningful content.

Socedo, which helps clients find leads through analyzing social media data, uses a number of marketing automation tools itself to analyze and improve its own content, optimize success on click-throughs, and improve email communications and social media reach.

Marketing automation software also can determine who your top advocates are. That helps you to stop wasting time with people who aren’t interested in your product or service and instead stay focused on potential buyers and clients. A general email blast to your entire contact list won’t be as effective as targeting the users who you know have an interest.

Additionally, software tools like those offered by Ambassador allow you to build a campaign with custom rewards to encourage referrals – a top way to get your message shared. Among the highly connected millennial generation, 95% say they’d like an incentive, such as discounts or cash rewards, to share a product through email or social media channels.

Don’t forget the follow-up

You also should have a strong plan for following up with prospects. ActiveCampaign says to start with a sort of mission statement – a description of the kind of experience you want your contact to have. Then consider what result specifically you’d like the follow-up to provide, such as greater sales or increased referrals. These and other goals will help direct your automated follow-up plan.

Also, as R2Integrated notes, it’s important to remember that marketing automation shouldn’t run on autopilot. Authentic personal experience (not just “personalized” experience) and engagement will always be the core of making strong connections with your customers, so it requires some creative thinking and strategizing.

The good news is now you have many more tools to make that happen.

Aseem Badshah, Founder & CEO of Socedo. Socedo helps sales and marketing professionals leverage social media to discover leads and build relationships more effectively.

When writing copy for a landing page, especially for a B2B site, do you write in plain language that everyone can understand or do you use technical jargon?

Most common wisdom has said that jargon doesn’t work in copy, but that’s a blanket statement that may not always be true.

There are certain times when jargon is totally appropriate. There are also times (many of them) where jargon is straight up cringy.

What is Jargon and Why Don’t People Like It?

Jargon is defined as, “special words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand.”

Then again, the second definition listed is, “a form of language regarded as barbarous, debased, or hybrid.”

The first one seems particularly helpful for communicating with technical groups. The second one seems like a big, fat mistake for copywriters.

Jargon, Cliches, and Buzzwords

As for the second definition, it’s mostly been a qualitative attack on jargon – and it’s been going on for a long time. George Carlin, the iconic comedian, constantly railed against what he called “soft language.”

If you’ve got the time, watch his poetic “Modern Man” routine:

Comedians like Carlin rail against the softening of language, the vague generalities that (mostly) marketers thrust into public discourse. Today, many people poke fun at startup jargon, business jargon, and even conversion optimization jargon.

Basically, jargon is like the cheesy stock photo of the copywriting world. Most of the time, people don’t like jargon because it is bland, vague, and doesn’t mean much…

Instead, it’s nice when a company tells you exactly what they do in plain language (create studio-quality videos in your browser)…

But what’s the actual argument against jargon in terms of copywriting and online sales? Any research done on this?

Though there haven’t been many A/B tests or case studies specifically on jargon, one area of academic research that has been studied well is cognitive fluency, in which jargon plays a role.

Cognitive Fluency and Jargon

You’ve heard it before: clarity trumps persuasion.

If you came upon the following value proposition, how likely is it that you’d understand it right away?

“Revenue-focused marketing automation & sales effectiveness solutions unleash collaboration throughout the revenue cycle”

What does it mean? Can you now explain what they do and how is it useful to you? Not really, right?

Or take two examples of email service providers….which one is easier to understand? This:

Or this:

Probably the second one. The first one is cluttered with buzzwords (‘truly dynamic,’ ‘maximize the performance,’ etc).

That’s not to say the first example isn’t effective – it could be very effective, I don’t know their numbers. That’s just to say that the second example, MailChimp, has much greater cognitive fluency.

Cognitive fluency is defined as the “subjective experience of the ease or difficulty of completing a mental task.” Or to put it more simply, it’s the heuristic that Easy = True. In real life, this idea has been backed by some surprising research findings:

• If the name of your company is easy to pronounce, shares are likely to perform better after your IPO.
• If you write in a clean, clear font, people are more likely to believe you’re stating a fact.
• In North America, if your name is John, people will be more trusting of you than if your name were Zesiro.

The Boston Globe wrote a great piece on cognitive fluency a few years ago. One of their points:

“When presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process – even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities.”

They concluded that, “it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard.”

Furthermore, realize these two quick facts:

• The average American reads at a 7th or 8th grade level.
• Only 15% of the population has full literacy (a university undergraduate reading level).

So, if you’re writing copy that a 12-year-old would find difficult to read, your writing is too complex for the average American.

How do you make things easy to process? A large part of that has to do with your audience’s familiarity with the terms you’re using…

Fluency and Familiarity

Familiarity, specifically in terms of conversion optimization, has a major impact on our decision-making process, whether we realize it or not. For example, think about the mere-exposure effect – this tells us, among other things, that the more often you see someone, the more likely you are to develop a romantic attraction to them.

It also tells us that we tend to develop a preference for things just because we’re familiar with them. That includes words, and that includes industry jargon (That’s why jargon isn’t always a bad thing…).

Familiarity makes things easier to process. Here’s what the Boston Globe had to say about the connection between cognitive fluency and familiarity:

“Cognitive fluency signals familiarity – some psychologists argue that the eerie experience of déjà vu is simply when we’re fooled by the unexpected ease of taking in a piece of sensory information, and interpret that as a memory of having been there or seen it before.”

Digital Certainty, an optimization tool that runs on some complicated math, explains perfectly simply what it does in familiar language (gives you better results faster):

‘Familiar’ doesn’t mean avoiding industry terminology all-together. In fact, by talking about ‘multivariate testing‘ or ‘Voice of Customer,’ you call to prospects that are the right audience for your product. Usabilla does it well, too:

You’re Still Writing For People

Even in B2B copy, you’re still addressing human beings.

As Peep wrote a while ago, “You write for people, it’s people who read your site. A marketing director or a purchasing manager is a person too. Don’t write for companies, write for people.”

Peep Laja:

“Clarity is something that I see marketers constantly struggling with. The best way to re-phrase all of the marketing speak on your site is to imagine you’re explaining your product to your close friend. If there’s a sentence worded in a way that you wouldn’t use in a conversation with a friend, re-word it.”

You see B2B companies constantly writing in this twisted, convoluted way, perhaps based on the belief that because they’re selling to a business they can’t sound human. It doesn’t help that all of their competitors are writing the same way.

It’s such a common occurrence that NN/g listed 5 ‘cringeworthy’ words/phrases you should stop using immediately:

• Utilizes
• Enables (allows you to …)
• Very (really, extremely, quite)
• We understand that… (In today’s fast-paced world…)
• End user

These aren’t the only perpetrators of course. Any word that is vague when it could be specific, is complex when it could be straightforward, is bland when it could be colorful, isn’t a word you want to use. Jakob Nielsen from NN/g put it really well:

Jakob Nielsen:

“Even for specialized audiences it’s still best to write as simple as possible. Even highly educated people don’t want to struggle to read your site. You do not impress anybody by spouting highfalutin words or complex sentence structures that require careful parsing. People don’t pay close attention to web content.

In particular, users take around 10 seconds to decide whether a web page is worth their time at all. So if you can’t communicate your key point quickly, you won’t get any message across, because the user will have left the building.”

For example, if you take a look at Product Hunt’s “tools for developers” category page, you’d expect to get lost in a sea of technical jargon that you don’t understand (if you’re not technical that is). Which is fine, because they’re targeting developers. It’s a specialized audience that deserves specialized copy.

But some of the companies do a great job at using technical terms but in such a simple way that it would be easily communicable to someone not as technical. They’re using specialty language, but still writing as simply as possible…

Image Source

The point is, even with technical audiences, you still want to make sure your readers are doing as little thinking as possible. As Falconer Web Marketing wrote:

“Even when writing to specialists in my MBA program, I found that avoiding jargon whenever possible helped my essays stand out from my classmates’ jargon-riddled papers, and earned me higher grades.

My professors can understand MBA jargon perfectly well, except that it takes extra effort even for them. Jargon is difficult to understand even to someone who knows it.”

As alluded, there are times when jargon works, too…

When Jargon Works

Joel Klettke lists two situations in which you should use jargon:

• It signals that you belong, and understand your audience, and…
• It acts as an IMMEDIATE filter, getting rid of any leads you don’t want (because they simply don’t get it)

I’ll add another reason, too, suggested by Bob Bly – to create a perception of better value:

1. Perception of Higher Value

One reason to use jargon, to create a perception of higher value, is a valid use (though I suspect this is largely the use case people like George Carlin railed against). Here’s how Bly explained it:

Bob Bly:

“For example, Mont Blanc doesn’t call their product a “pen” in their catalog. They sell “writing instruments.” Reason: people will pay $150 for a writing instrument. But they can buy a perfectly functional pen at CVS for a dollar.

In a similar vein, almost no one sells used cars any more. Today a used car is called a “certified pre-owned vehicle.” Vehicle sounds more impressive than car. Pre-owned removes the stigma of used. And who certified your pre-owned BMW or Lexus? BMW and Lexus, of course.

Direct marketers know that the words you use do matter. Consultant Gary Hennerberg says that when Collin Street Bakery changed the name of its main product from “fruitcake” to “Native Texas Pecan Cake,” mail order sales increased 60 percent.”

Claude C. Hopkins gave a good example of this in his seminal book, Scientific Advertising. He talked about beer advertisers that all called their beers “pure.” But after millions has been spent to no avail on this vague word, Hopkins decided to actually write about the specific reasons Schlitz was pure.

Image Source

Some of the copy he wrote included:

• “All beer is cooled in plate glass room in filtered air.”
• “Then the beer is filtered.”
• “Then it is sterilized after being bottled and sealed.”

As he said, “All the claims were such as any brewer might have made. They were mere essentials in ordinary brewing.”

But his example shows that it’s not only euphemisms that can work to raise perceived value, but sometimes providing specific descriptions can perform the same feat.

2. Specialty Language for a Specialty Audience

When should you use technical language? When your audience is technical.

Stoplight.io, selling software to nerds so they use nerd terminology (those looking for API modeling tools aren’t intimidated by ‘specification code’) :

As Joel Klettke put it:

Joel Klettke:

“Imagine you’re sitting down for lunch with a table of avid hockey fans who are chattering away about the game last night. Problem: you’ve never watched a hockey game in your life. The conversation starts coming toward you, and you panic.

“Hey ___________, did y’see how Chara rang Gaudreau off the dasher in the third? Total goon play from a massive pylon – and the zebras completely missed it! I think he’s lookin’ at 5 – 10 games, what do you think?”

Now, if you respond to this question with,

“I say, he is rather an impish brute, and the thunderous body collision surely caused cranial damage!”

You are OUT.”

To communicate with specialized groups, it’s helpful to use the language they are familiar with. Therefore, depending how you define it, sometimes jargon is exactly what you need to convert those speciality audiences. Jakob Nielsen from NN/g summed it up really well:

Jakob Nielsen:

“Jargon has a bad reputation in communications circles: in fact, a thesaurus suggests “waffle”, “gobbledygook”, “guff”, and “mumbo jumbo” as possible substitutes. But that’s because jargon obscures the message for readers outside a field. For professionals, enthusiasts, hobbyists, or others who specialize in a field, using that field’s jargon improves communication. Furthermore, using appropriate language defines you as a fellow insider.

Specialized language is not only more concise but also clearer, as long as the reader is a specialist who understands the terminology. If you’re writing for beginners or trainees, it’s certainly best to define any specialized terms you’re using.”

If you’ve ever played a sport fairly seriously, you know all about this specialized language. Sailing in particular has quite the terminology…

Image Source

3. Filtering Leads

This is related to speaking to a specialized audience, but I want to make the point that using jargon can save you time and money. How? Avoiding people that aren’t right for your offer in the first place.

For example, Peep’s coaching program assumes a certain level of knowledge by adding some industry lingo. Things like ‘value propositions’ and ‘information architecture’ wouldn’t mean a thing to the layperson. Which is great! Because then you’re not even wasting data/time on leads who certainly won’t fork out money for the workshop. You’re qualifying your audience via an in-group vernacular.

Though here’s where the definition of jargon gets murky, as this, to me, seems more like ‘terminology.’ Either way, speaking the language your audience does is never a bad thing – it’s the name of the (copywriting) game.

Just Know Your Customer

It all comes down to knowing your customer and using – stealing even – the language that they use. Top copywriters, like Joseph Sugarman, all acknowledge the context in which they write their copy and how it affects their word choice:

Joseph Sugarman:

“The point I wish to make is simply this: a good copywriter can write to fit any market. His or her ads can sound very upscale for one client and then very downscale for the next. Simply by understanding and applying the principles, one can rise to any copywriting challenge – through understanding the jargon of the customer and using the appropriate words that will resonate with that customer.”

How do you get to know your customers? There are many ways to learn about your customers, and many ways to collect Voice of Customer data to use for copywriting. One easy way: have a conversation with them. As far as jargon research goes, Joel Klettke advises:

• If they don’t use the words you use, don’t use those words.
• If their face scrunches up with confusion at any point, don’t explain things that way again.
• If they have to ask you to explain yourself, avoid explaining it the way you already have when trying to sell

Conclusion

Unnecessary jargon, when used to convolute, mask, persuade, or talk down, is bad. Jargon as a whole, however, isn’t always a negative. Here are a few occasions when using technical jargon is acceptable and effective:

• Perception of Higher Value
• Speciality language for a specialty audience (if you’re selling to developers, use words they use)
• Filtering out leads you don’t want (“we’re not for you if…”)

Worry about jargon mostly, as Joel Klettke said, “When it’s yours, not your audience’s.”

Feature image source

It seems like everyone is obsessed with growing email lists these days.

And for a good reason: email is still the most effective marketing channel in terms of return on investment.

You probably want to grow your list, too (if you’re smart). But how do you do that in a world that staged a war for email addresses? A world where every website looks like a battlefield with popups, slide-in forms, welcome mats, and other opt-in weapons.

I’ve been struggling with this problem, too, until by trial and error I developed and adopted 5 authentic ways to collect email addresses without annoying my readers. In fact, they wanted to give me their email address when I asked for it.

Today I’m going to show you 4 of my strategies.

You can steal them to build your email list without annoying tools like popups, and watch your email list grow every day.

There is a special fat bonus at the end, so be sure to read all the way through.

Let’s jump right in. Count down with me.

How to collect emails without annoying people

Strategy #4: Give more than you ask for

No wonder people are annoyed when a popup jumps right at them. They’ve seen hundreds of those, and people know they all ask for their email address.

Most people who are trying to sell on the Internet, just ask, ask, ask.

That created a new online psychology, where people expect to be bombarded with sales pitches and opt-in forms, and they develop the so-called banner blindness.

That’s a sad truth for online consumers, but also an opportunity for you.

If you give instead of asking, and always over-deliver by providing astonishing amount of value before making an ask, you’ll break that psychology. People will actually pause for a second to think “wow, this person is actually helpful” and they’ll pay attention.

On practice, this means offering a ton of resources for free. It means producing truly valuable, in-depth content, giving it for free, and only then asking people if they want to subscribe.

If people already got incredible value from you, they will want to sign up so they don’t miss your future material.

For example…

There is a handful of people who put out such great stuff that you wonder why it’s free.

Tim Ferriss is one of them. His blog posts, his podcast episodes, everything he puts out there is so.freaking.good that of course I’ll sign up for his email list! I actually look forward to his 5-bullet Friday newsletter every week. (I’ll also buy almost anything he produces, because I know it’ll be awesome, but that’s a topic for a another blog post).

Here is another example. Sarah Peterson at Unsettle.org routinely publishes comprehensive, all-you-need-to-know blog posts that spell out strategies she could charge for. Just this one blog post is enough to make me want to fill out the little opt-in form at the end:

If you follow this strategy and truly put your best stuff out there for free, you can even do popups without annoying (almost) anyone, because you gave more than you’re asking for. But I digress.

Strategy #3: Create content upgrades for everything you write

Content upgrades not only have the highest conversion rates compared to other opt-in solutions (see my results below), but they are also the most thoughtful and the least annoying way to grow your email list.

Content upgrade is “packaged” information that is highly relevant to the blog post topic.

Because it’s relevant to the post and because people who see it are already invested in the topic (they are reading your article, after all), the chance they are going to want the upgrade is high.

And you can make that chance even higher by creating content upgrades that are irresistible (like the one at the end of this article).

For example…

I add content upgrades to my posts with a clear and bright call to action, like that:

As another example, Bryan Harris at Videofruit featured content upgrade right at the top of one of his post, to catch readers’ attention right from the start:

He then featured it again at the end of the article, as readers who made it all the way through are even more likely to want it.

By offering a highly relevant and valuable free gift with your post you’re giving readers an option to subscribe in a tempting (& non-annoying) way.

When you think of content upgrades, you probably image checklists and workbooks. Those are good ideas, but if you want to stand out and create something really tempting, record a short video tutorial that’s relevant to your blog post. I can show you exactly how to do that in one of the bonuses at the end of this post.

Strategy #2: Be more creative with your lead magnets

I probably don’t need to tell you that you need to create lead magnets for your opt-in forms. This links back to strategy #1: if you’re asking someone for their email address, you better give them something great in return.

Lead magnet is an opt-in freebie, like a content upgrade, only it is not tied to any specific blog post. It should be relevant to your overall domain expertise and serve as incentive for signing up.

Wait. When I said “opt-in freebie”, did you think “ebook”?

Please, do not create an ebook.

There is enough supply of them on the Internet to last a decade!

Instead, catch people’s attention by offering something unusual. Create a freebie that provides information in bite-size format; it will have a higher perceived value than an ebook that people know (by now) they will never read.

For example…

Super Human Breakfast offers a 5-day challenge that includes a recipe, shopping lists, video support and prizes. How more convincing is that that a “healthy eating ebook” would be?

As another example, Kimra Luna’s primary lead magnet is a mini course about webinars:

To give you more inspiration for creative opt-in freebies, I’ve included a list of 10 ideas for engaging non-ebook lead magnets in the bonus gift at the end of this article.

Strategy #1: Give your subscribers a reason to forward

Your email subscribers are your biggest fans. You know they are, or why would have they subscribed?

Fact #1: Because subscribers like you, they’re more likely to share your stuff; you just need to give them a good reason for doing so.

Fact #2: A personal email has a very high chance of converting because people will typically only email friends and colleagues who they know will be interested.

Conclusion: it would be cool if your subscribers forwarded your email (with a call to action) to their contacts.

But who does that? Who forwards emails these days?

People who are incentivized.

Note: this tactic is most suitable for welcome and product launch emails; it is not a good fit for every-day use or weekly newsletters.

Think of this as email content upgrade.

Can you create a sexy (not something one can easily find on the Internet), substantive material that’s on-topic for your domain expertise? Offer it in your welcome email (or product launch email) as a bonus for those who forward the email to friends or colleagues.

For example…

Here is the email I got from Programming for Marketers when I signed up for their free email course:

With this technic, you’re offering subscribers an extra bonus for a quick and easy action. Unlike many other opt-in tactics that disrupt user experience, this one adds to it.

Justin and Nat teach the technical part of executing this tactic in their free course Programming for Marketers.

Want to get a 5th strategy + 3 bonuses?

I’ve covered four of my email list-building strategies here, but there is another one that I couldn’t include because it’s as long as this post. It includes 7 different ways you can use various social media channels to grow your email list.