Rnordman

According to recent LinkedIn reports, B2B buyers seek insights and conversations with vendors on social media. In fact, 2 in 3 are open to connecting with a new vendor and 3 in 4 are ready to have a conversation with a new vendor on social media. So B2B buyers are willing to reveal themselves and engage with B2B sales and marketing leaders on LinkedIn.

But, the #1 reason that B2B buyers do not connect with a vendor on LinkedIn and in social media in general is because they don’t want to be bombarded with sales and marketing materials. They want a relationship based on real, up-front value. They want sales leaders to work harder to earn their trust and interest before they give you an opt-in, a phone call and a right to market or sell to them further.

As Mike Weir of LinkedIn mentioned in one of our podcasts, “You want buyers to feel: I like you, I like your opinions, I want to know more. This means you need to prove to your prospects that you are worth them opening themselves up to your sales messages.”

B2B Buyers Don’t Want to Waste Time with Sales Materials, Networking Calls or Demos…

Yes, you read that right. B2B buyers don’t want to waste time with marketing materials, sales messages, networking calls or demos, if they haven’t see any up-front value. As soon as a connection is made, most sales professionals thank the prospect for making or accepting the connections, provide some details about what they do and then go right into asking for a sales conversation.

With our invites to connect, we discuss the content that we can provide them and how it’s relevant to their business. Once they connect, we provide them with the article, podcast, white paper that we mention in the invite to connect (everything ungated!) and invite them to join our LinkedIn group for even more content. We then nurture those that take the additional action to join our LinkedIn community with more 1-to-1 messages that lead with content.

The Changes B2B Buyers Want Require a Targeted Account Management Approach to Prospecting, Nurturing and Social Selling on LinkedIn.

For one of our clients, a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider, we’re using a sales intelligence platform that provides us with data and insights into the companies that our client should be connecting with. The platform tells us what companies will be taking on a major IT project within the next 6 to 12 months and more importantly the specific type of project they will be performing.

This allows us to reach out to specific IT leaders who would be responsible for these specific projects – and show our client’s relevance to their specific needs. We are now able to target these IT leaders with content that is specific to the challenges and issues that they will be facing when tackling this new IT project. From there we provide case studies, webinars and other content that is all related to the prospect’s specific IT project – and move them forward to having a sales conversation and demo.

Notice the key word here – “specific”.

• “Specific” companies
• “Specific” IT leaders
• “Specific” projects
• “Specific” needs
• “Specific” issues and challenges
• “Specific” content

You see we’re taking the time to get to know our client’s prospects’ needs, interests and challenges. We are building a relationship focused on value. We’re finding out what their vision is and providing prospects with upfront content that maps out how to take their vision and turn it into value. As a result our client is having more sales conversations with companies like CSC, Expedia, PayPal, AstraZeneca, Intel and many others.

Studies Show That 74% of B2B Buyers Choose the Company That Was First to Earn Their Trust by Adding Real Value as They Are defining Their Buying Vision

Social selling is not a numbers game. It’s a relationships game. It’s how you build and leverage key relationships. This means that sales professionals need to stop focusing on their own agenda – on the hard sell, on gathering contact information. They need to place that focus on the needs or interests of the companies they want to work with. They have to stop throwing out newsfeeds – and spewing out general sales messages hoping that something sticks and actually provide content that shows how they truly understand the prospects needs.

Above all, they need to shift the conversation from themselves to their prospects. Make the conversation about them. Be the first solution provider to earn the prospects trust by adding real value as they are defining their buying vision. You can watch my webinar with LinkedIn’s tech industry expert for even more information on how to earn sales leads that actually convert to revenue here.

Learn the secrets of the most productive salespeople when you download our free e-book.

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In business, a company's bottom line — and most important measurement of success — has traditionally been its profit.

But following a zeitgeist shift that self-described "serial and social entrepreneur" Jason Haber calls "The Great Convergence," the bottom line is getting a face lift.

Historically, Haber explains in his book "The Business of Good: Social Entrepreneurship and the New Bottom Line," "capitalism has driven innovation and change on a monumental level. ... [But] its focus has been on profits."

So what happens, he asks, when the world's problems call for a solution that isn't entirely profit-driven and our governments are crippled by debt, unable to help?

The answer, it seems, is social enterprise. "Social entrepreneurs have a triple bottom line to consider: people, planet, and profit," Haber writes.

Haber points to companies like TOMS, Warby Parker, Global Poverty Project, and d.light as examples; companies that have identified a larger purpose or problem, and use traditional business tools to build a scalable solution that impacts the world at large.

"Social entrepreneurship is a model that is changing the world," he says. "It aims to fix the most entrenched problems facing mankind while building successful and profitable business for its owners ... It relies on technology and social media to thrive."

And Haber says this seismic shift in business is led by millennials, who currently comprise the largest segment of the US workforce. Millennials, who Haber refers to as Generation Now, have lived through the last three decades of turmoil and technological advancement. They've come out of this era possessing six distinguishing qualities —including a craving for collaboration and constant access to technology — that reveal why they're well-positioned to create companies that value both profit and purpose.

"Unlike previous generations, whose pursuits of money and excess are well documented, millennials have far different goals," Haber says. "It's no longer simply about making money now."

NOW READ: Millennials are rapidly changing today's business landscape — here are 6 reasons for it

AND: 12 entrepreneurs who are changing the world

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Barbara Corcoran shares her most profitable investment to date

“I wish I spent more time in meetings.” Ever heard that? Me neither. Not ever. And while it’s critical to communicate with our coworkers, meetings often seem like a lousy container for that communication. And adding more time to meetings definitely does not get us more results.

Meetings, as you most certainly know, are one of the biggest time-sucks in business life. Some estimates put time spent in unproductive meetings at over 31 hours per month.

 

If we all had nothing better to do, maybe all these meetings wouldn’t bother us so much. But we do have a lot to do. So much to do that it causes many of us to stay late, work weekends, and live tethered to our phones. Freeing up those 31 hours a month would make a very big difference to us.

Time lost in meetings has a massive opportunity cost. It takes away from work that might actually get results. Who knows – we might even be missing out on work we want to do, that would help our customers, advance our careers, and make our companies grow. That’s the work we’re supposed to be doing, right? What company’s mission statement talks about spending more time in meetings?

While I can’t promise to free up 30 hours of your time every month, what if you got back even three? Any one of the ideas below could do that. Hopefully just one will resonate with you and your team … and maybe you’ll be able to enjoy an early dinner with your family, or be able to finish up a project that lights you up.

1. Price it out.

According to Atlassian, every year U.S. businesses blow $37 billion in salary costs with unnecessary meetings. It’s almost the business version of the national debt clock.

Do your part to trim this waste. Use The Harvard Business Review’s Meeting Cost Calculator to find out how much each meeting costs your firm. You can even set it up as an app on your phone.

Two benefits here: First, having a dollar value tied to each meeting will almost certainly reduce the time spent in unproductive meetings at your company. Second, when you do decide to sit down, everyone in the room will have a focus: We need to get $184 worth of value out of these 45 minutes.

2. Consider open afternoons.

One of the biggest problems with meetings is how they break up your time. This creates short time blocks that make it hard to settle into work – especially deep, thoughtful work.

One way to diminish this effect is to have a company policy of “open afternoons” (or open mornings, if you prefer). It means all meetings get scheduled in one-half of the day – say mornings. That way, everybody gets a big open time block in the afternoons.

3. Skip the status report part of the meeting.

You know that part of the meeting when you go around the room and everybody explains what they’re working on and how it’s going? Cut that.

Move all the status information about everyone’s work to an information hub. That hub could be any one of the collaboration tools available (like Asana or Slack). It could be a status sheet on Google Drive. It could even be a bulletin board or a whiteboard. Positioning the white board near the water cooler or the coffee station often helps get more people to look at it.

Use that hub to let people know what you’re working on and how it’s going. Use it to find out what your peers are working on. And enforce its use: Anybody who doesn’t keep their hub updated gets demerits – like cleaning out the refrigerator.

If you just have to keep the “here’s what I’m doing this week” part of the meeting, time people. Everybody gets 2 minutes to explain what they’re working on. Any ensuing conversations can be had offline.

4. Stand.

Can sheer discomfort make us more productive? Seems so. Neal Taparia cut meeting times down by 25% at his company simply by making everyone stand. And Melissa Dahl reports that University of Missouri researchers trimmed 34% of meeting time by getting people to stand.

If sitting is indeed the new smoking, this is good for productivity and for our health. Wanna take it even further? Add a medicine ball. Taparia makes anyone who speaks at company “standups” (their word for meetings) hold a medicine ball while they talk.

5. Have “offline” conversations.

Don’t make your coworkers sit around while you and one or two other people hash something out. Have micro-meetings as necessary so you don’t slow down larger powwows.

There is a sister idea to this: Have more one-on-one talks with people. Don’t call them meetings. Just call them conversations. Sometimes the informality of a conversation just naturally makes things move faster.

6. Kick people out who don’t have to be there.

Sure, this will seem mean at first. One of the less aspirational stories about Steve Jobs was how he would unceremoniously kick people out of meetings. If you didn’t have to be in the meeting, you weren’t just given a pass. You were kicked out.

There are probably more sensitive ways to go about this, but the principle is sound. Don’t make someone sit in a meeting they don’t need to be in. Free them. Let them go do their work.

7. Use a timer.

There are cases where relaxed, open-ended meetings are appropriate. But they’re the exception, not the rule. So try to trim the regular, day-to-day meetings down. A timer can help. So can a commitment to 30-minute meetings. The condensed time makes everyone more efficient.

8. Always leave with action steps.

Productivity expert David Allen would have all of us install a “what’s the next action?” button on every meeting table. And it would probably help – too many meeting topics are raised, discussed, and then left hanging.

Don’t let this happen to you. Everyone in the meeting should be writing a concrete to do list, aka a “next action list.” They should be accountable to complete that list. At the next meeting (or even better – on their status/project hub!), they should report that they got those items done. If something didn’t get done, there needs to be a reason why. Don’t worry – “I simply couldn’t get to it” is a reason why. At least the first time.

9. Have an agenda.

This is one of the oldest productivity tips for meetings. And yet many of us still seem to benefit from the reminder.

Even a one-point agenda is fine. But, um… if there’s no driving purpose to the meeting… may I suggest skipping it?

10. Skip meetings for a week or a month.

This is a somewhat radical idea. It might even be dangerous. But if you feel lucky, consider going on a meeting fast. See what happens after a week, two weeks, even a month.

Some things will drop through the cracks, guaranteed. So have systems in place to put out the fires. But by the time your meeting fast ends, you’ll have a vivid picture of what meetings you really do need to have and what you need to cover in them. Let go of all the rest.

Bonus: Take your meetings online.

Virtual meetings don’t have to be just for distant contacts.

Conclusion

Meetings serve an essential function in business, but they need to be contained. Otherwise, they’ll compromise the primary reason we’re at work – to get stuff done. Here’s the summary of how to achieve that:

1. Know what your meetings cost – in money and opportunity costs
2. Schedule all meetings either in the mornings or afternoons to free up large blocks of time
3. Use a status hub or other work collaboration software to keep everyone apprised of what you’re doing
4. Try standing meetings, aka “standups”
5. Have more mini-meetings and offline conversations
6. Kick people out if they don’t have to be there
7. Use a timer
8. Keep asking “what’s the next action?” Then commit to doing it.
9. Have an agenda
10. Consider cutting all meetings for a week, just to see what happens

Back to you

Got any tips, tricks or gimmicks that have worked to trim your meetings down? Please – share them in the comments. Everybody wants to spend less time in meetings.

Now that you have some tips and tricks for making your meetings more effective, learn how Act-On can help increase the efficiency of your entire marketing team’s efforts. Take a video tour of Act-On to explore how Act-On empowers marketers to do the best work of their careers.

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of attending the 2016 Asia/Pacific Podcasting Conference, held here in Auckland. It was a fantastic two day event that showcased a number of talented speakers and presented some interesting ideas towards the future of podcasts.

We use some sort of variation of podcasting with a number of our clients, and the buzz remaining from the Asia/Pacific Podcasting Conference got me thinking:

Is there substantial value to be gained from adding a podcast to your marketing mix?

I would argue yes, absolutely. Let me explain why…

1 – It’s going to be huge!

Podcasting is currently experiencing massive amounts of growth around the world. There are over 1 billion subscriptions to over 250,000 podcasts right now. With technology constantly improving, it is becoming ever more popular among the digital savvy.

2 – But, it isn’t as common as blogging… yet.

Which is a good thing. As more people start podcasting, competition increases and therefore, so does the overall quality of podcasts. Can you afford to wait until your competitors are experts before you join the race? As an early adopter, you have free reign to influence this goldmine of a marketplace as you like! Being seen as original and a pioneer can do wonders for your brand’s credibility.

3 – It is incredibly easy to do!

Sure, you have to feel comfortable on a microphone and possibly a camera too, projecting yourself to what could be… millions of people! But you could record your podcast from your bed if you wanted, never having to see these people hanging on your every word, which should help alleviate some of those nerves!

Worried that you don’t have anything to talk about, or don’t know enough about a subject to be an ‘authority’ on it? Fear not! Some of the greatest podcasters out there started out not knowing what they were talking about, but they did it anyway because THEY wanted to learn. In the process, they helped educate their audience and became known as the authorities in their chosen topic!

4 – You need but a few resources to get started.

Actually, all you really need is; an idea, a passion for that idea, a webcam/microphone/laptop/smartphone, maybe a co-host or guest and you’re basically away! It couldn’t be simpler. With ever-improving technological advancements, it’s getting quicker and easier to publish your content online without the assistance of a film crew or recording studio.

This also makes it incredibly time-efficient to produce a decent show as well! If you know what you’ll be talking about and a rough idea how to use the equipment, you can put together a clean, engaging show in a few hours! Obviously, this is dependent on how much editing and fine tuning you may need. You can be sure though, with practice, that time will get shorter and shorter as you perfect your craft!

5 – People engage in it.

Who has time to read lengthy blog articles anymore? Well, still a lot of people. But the point is, a podcast, if done right, will entertain you in a way that words on a page cannot. We lose so much emotion and sentiment in text, but those elements are carefully preserved when you listen to two people passionately discussing a topic.

Podcasting also allows for direct contact with your community/audience. Who wouldn’t become a raving fan of your show if you were personally shouting out to them? The very nature of a podcast immediately makes the listener/viewer feel like a part of your conversation and therefore, more likely to engage with your brand.

Podcasts should also be fun!
Yes, it may be difficult to make something like tax accounting sound fun, but at least it gives you a stage and a spotlight to express your personality or your brand’s character. This alone may be enough to sway any potential customers from a competitor and into your corner.

6 – Podcasts feel genuine.

Podcasts are typically independent of any large branding agencies and thus are ‘uncorrupted’ by the guise of corporate advertising. That’s not to say they are all without their own agendas. However, people seem to respond better to marketing sales pitches when they are delivered through a conversation, instead of being forced upon us by advertising agencies. This creates a unique environment for you to promote and sell your product/services without feeling like an infomercial.

7 – Versatility.

Podcasts can be enjoyed in places where reading a blog cannot! Your commute to and from work, while you sweat out the kilometres on the treadmill at the gym, while you walk your dog, cook dinner, sit in the bath or simply drown out the distractions of your surroundings.

Are you ready to start podcasting yet?

As businesses look for new platforms to compete for and connect with their customers, podcasting is sure to experience a major growth spurt as marketers seek to capitalise in the near future. In an industry driven by building ‘community’ and offering tailored experiences for their customers, podcasting offers both one of the most engaging ways of connecting and creates the perfect platform to deliver incredibly high-value content.

Of course, these aren’t the only reasons to get into podcasting. Check out these interesting statistics: Big Time Podcasting Statistics and Demographics if you need further persuasion.

If you previously discounted the idea of adding a podcast to your marketing mix, perhaps now is the time to reconsider.

Want to close 20 consecutive quarters on plan? Any interest in a 63% win rate? Need another 1,000 registrants for your next webinar?

If you haven’t seen Moneyball, you should. Based on Michael Lewis’s book on the Oakland A’s incredible 2002 season, Moneyball is the kind of movie you can watch 15 times, but then still get excited for when it pops up on Netflix. The movie blends together fan favorite themes of competition, analytics, and the underdog-taking-on-the-system. Marketing and sales teams face challenges eerily similar to the Oakland A’s in 2002: never enough budget, lofty goals, and pressure to win.

The Winning Moneyball Formula

In Moneyball, Jonah Hill plays the biographical character Peter Brand, the A’s newest assistant GM and soft-spoken economics geek from Yale. In one of the great scenes of the movie, the Moneyball formula emerges as Brand begins to transform the way the A’s leadership approaches winning baseball games. After the A’s lost several of their best players to competitors with 3x the payroll, they had no other choice but to pivot and try something new. “People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.”

So how did the Oakland A’s put this concept into action? Their first step was to focus on recruiting and starting players with a high on-base percentage (OBP). Rather than trying to replace their best players’ batting averages, they instead focused on replacing their best players’ OBP. One example included signing a former catcher, Scott Hatteberg. This guy couldn’t really throw the ball anymore (post injury), but he could still catch it, and he had a great OBP. Hatteberg was their new first baseman.

By prioritizing OBP over BA, the Oakland A’s elevated one of the most unsexy metrics in baseball: the “walk.” Baseball dictionary for the uninitiated: getting walked is when a batter takes four pitches outside the strike zone, and then advances to first base without an “out.” To walk more = to get on base more = to score more runs = to win more.

As the Moneyball formula kicked in the Oakland A’s went on a tear, winning 20 consecutive games and finishing the season with 103 wins and 59 losses. The A’s earned the second best winning percentage in the American League (63%), and got there on a shoestring budget, spending just $260,000 per win vs. the Yankees’ $1,000,000 per win.

Moneyball Marketing

How do you apply the Moneyball formula drive more efficiency and revenue into your business? As an example, two basic metrics typically captured by marketing and sales include opportunities created and opportunities closed. When you divide these two metrics into one, you get an even better picture of your business known as “win rate.” Think of win rate in business as the equivalent to batting average in baseball.

If you open 10 opportunities and close 5 every month, that’s a great win rate; you’re batting .500. But if you open 10 opportunities and close 1 every month, that’s a bad win rate; you’re batting .100. But what is the OBP equivalent in the business world? Or better yet, what is the business equivalent to getting more walks in baseball?

Walking more in baseball translates to partnering more in business. Leveraging a partner for a warm intro and endorsement to a decision maker–that’s a walk. Asking a partner for help in an industry where they’re stronger than you–instant credibility, and less expensive. Investing in your partners and making their success and your success synonymous….now we’re getting it.

Marketing example: Our marketing team recently leveraged eight partners to help drive over 1,000 registrants to a Marketo-hosted webinar. If half of those registrants show up (500) and we close only 1%, that’s still five new customer wins with partners.

Sales example: Three of the largest deals we closed recently included highly influential strategic alliances. Our experienced sales team outsourced the implementation and consulting services revenue to a partner, while earning software revenue at 3x the average enterprise deal size. Each deal included a motivated partner working hard to make it happen. That’s Moneyball.

Follow these five Moneyball tips to win big with partners:

1. Give, then Get

The first principal of economics: People. Face. Trade-offs. As a company, every dollar you spend on project A is a dollar not spent on project B. This zero sum game demands that companies carefully balance partner interests against their own. If you can build incentives for your partners to help you (while sometimes sacrificing your own immediate self interest), in return, you may have the opportunity to build a “force multiplier.” A force multiplier is a factor that dramatically increases your scale and effectiveness as a company. Think of how many marketing and sales people you employ, and then add in the number of employees within your partner ecosystem. This incremental lift and multiplier can be a beautiful thing when you’re competing against companies 3x your size.

2. Focus & Specialization

Hiring people is expensive, and there’s a point of diminishing returns for every company. It’s simply impossible to hire for every needed specialty in every industry in every country. Instead of spending six figures on a full-time, subject matter expert, why not recruit a partner with established expertise and incentivize them to help you?

Marketo recently built a task force with an agency that has unique expertise in a specific industry. We didn’t have to go out and hire a team of experts. Instead, we focused in on this partner and made a conscious effort to include them early and often in the sales process. As a result, we’ve closed more deals in that industry in the last 12 months than in our entire history as a company.

3. All Hands on Deck

There are three key pillars to any productive partnership program:

1. Recruitment: Identifying and recruiting highly specialized partners
2. Enablement: Training and nurturing partners to unlock holistic value (1+1=3)
3. Commitment: Establishing and providing incentives for both partners and internal stakeholders to rally behind a “better together” strategy

The number one partner momentum killer is “channel conflict.” Channel conflict occurs when marketing and sales compete with their channel partners’ area of expertise. Competition is a good thing–it raises the bar on quality and drives price down–but it needs to be refereed with crisp rules of engagement. Compensation drives behavior, and the most effective lever in driving a partner-friendly ecosystem is to incentivize your stakeholders to play nice in the sandbox. This step is absolutely, positively, mission critical.

4. No “Barney” Meetings

Remember Barney? “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family…” Barney meetings with partners are not okay. These are particularly common among prospective partner discussions. As a rule of thumb, you can expect that at least 80% of these Barney meetings with partners will be a waste of time. To mitigate this, build a process that automates the discovery stage with partner prospects. At Marketo, we’ve built a partnership program with a number of prerequisites that help set the bar for a successful partnership. A thorough, automated certification program with thoughtful prerequisites can help filter out false positives.

5. Measure Success

How do you ensure partner contribution is widely recognized within your company? A clear gauge on partner progress with high visibility throughout the company is a fundamental need for any marketing and sales organization looking to build a force multiplier.

Start with a baseline and ensure your measurement system is widely adopted, simple, and always improving. At Marketo, we’ve tried a variety of partner success metrics (average deal size, customer retention, time to close, etc.), and we’re constantly tweaking and evaluating their true impact on our business. A world-class partner program should promote equal parts specialization, balanced investment, and bi-directional revenue contribution. Here’s a simple barometer to help you get started in measuring your top partners:Overall, what I love about Moneyball is similar to what I love about business: our challenges are analogous. We have to be resourceful, creative, and approach the game differently in order to win. So if you’re a marketing or sales professional, try leaning into your partner ecosystem and invest in a force multiplier to beat the competition. Play Moneyball!

If this was helpful and you’re interested in learning more about Marketo’s evolving partner-first culture, or how to build your own Moneyball playbook, join me for my session, Marketo Moneyball, Building a Partner-First Culture, at the 2016 Marketing Nation Summit.

3 Ways for the Account Executive to “Land and Expand”

By Mark Ruthfield, VP of Sales, Yesware

 

The price is set, the paperwork signed, the deal done and on the books. As the person who brought in the deal, you’re that much closer to hitting your yearly quota, and you may even have a nice commission check to look forward to. 

Your work is done, right? 

No. Typically it’s just the beginning. In fact, the best salespeople know that closing a deal actually opens a door. More than any cold call or seller profile, customers are ideal prospects. They’ve already bought into your company, and they’ll be the most receptive to further communication and exploring something new—especially if they’re satisfied with their initial purchase. 

Laying the groundwork to make the upsell is a tactic known as “land and expand.” Unfortunately, this process is smoother in theory than it is in practice, and salespeople often miss opportunities because they don’t revisit these deals. The remedy, though, is simple: prioritize communication and relationship building in the following ways.

 

 1.     Nurturing your customer advocate

You’ve spent weeks, even months, developing a rapport with your prospect’s team. Once they turn into a customer, they’re an invaluable resource to you—especially the person who really pushed you through, even if he or she isn’t the end decision-maker.  It’s paramount that you keep in touch with this person to make sure they’re a happy customer and to potentially expand a deal down the line. Reach out semi-regularly to maintain that trust that you first built. 

Developing a drip campaign is a great way to do this. Drip campaigns allow you to write outreach upfront and set your send cadence so you can move onto other things until your prospect receives and replies. For example, you can schedule emails to send a month or two down the line to check back in and see if they have any questions or need help with anything regarding your product or service. You can also use drip outreach to share industry news or send relevant content in such a way that your send rate is spaced out and lays the groundwork for back-and-forth, sustainable conversation.

 

 2.     Flagging future opportunities to upsell

Your biggest deals can come from existing customers. It just requires patience, foresight, and you fostering a true partnership. Say you’re in sales for a software provider, and you just closed a deal with a company where your contact is the ultimate decision-maker (score), and really believes your product can help her team (double score). The company has a smaller sized team to use your software right now, but they’re projected to have exponential growth fast, growing nationally in the quarter, and internationally in the next year. 

In a case like this, set a reminder to follow-up with your customer at that future date, or schedule an email to send on that date to your AM, looping back around. You can also use tools to monitor coverage and set up alerts so you’re notified when your customer’s company makes an announcement, instead of having to manually track it.

 

 3.     Asking your champions for referrals

Who’s the most likely to put in a good word for you? Your happiest customers—and they’re your easiest way to win over a new customer. According to Harvard Business Review, customers obtained through referrals are actually the most loyal and more valuable.

Once you pass off a closed customer to your account management team, use your team’s internal communication to your advantage. Regularly sync up with your account manager to keep tabs on the status of the customer relationship. When the account is at a place where they are all onboarded, comfortable with your product or service, and have nothing but good things to say, it’s go-time. Your team’s AM liaising with the customer can alert you that it’s the opportune time to reach back out. Then, you can nicely ask them if they know of a peer in their industry who would similarly value your solution.

 

The Bottom Line: Communication is Key

While not all deals that come through will follow this pattern, those that do are invaluable. Being able to identify and capitalize on the opportunity is an essential skill for any salesperson. These deals are low-hanging fruit that can pad a monthly, quarterly, or sometimes even yearly quota. All it takes is a little extra communication. 

 

Do you want more exposure for your business on LinkedIn? Are you using your LinkedIn company page to its full potential? LinkedIn company pages let you provide value to your audience while giving them the chance to engage with your business, effectively establishing your credibility as a trusted resource. In this article you’ll discover seven [...]

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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

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Marketing technology is transforming the world of media buying, with a growing number of firms testing more personalized “1:1” approaches that harness customer data to serve more relevant ads. According to September research, more than half of all media buyers were either already running, planning or testing such 1:1 marketing programs.

How to Requalify Existing Prospects and Clients

By Mike Brooks, www.MrInsideSales.com

One area many sales reps struggle in is how to requalify existing accounts, or prospects they haven’t spoken with in a while.  Let’s first establish the need to do this, and we’ll address exactly how to do it. 

First let’s acknowledge that all things change.  In fact, someone once said that the only thing that doesn’t change is change itself.  It’s constant.  And that means that just because a prospect or client was in charge of a certain function last month or 6 months ago, it doesn’t mean they are in charge of it today. 

In addition to their duties changing, their areas of responsibilities change also.  Someone who was responsible for handling lead flow may now also be in charge of ordering those leads.  Or someone who was responsible for one area of the business (and ordering) may have given that responsibility to someone else.  

The bottom line is that it’s important to do more than just, “Oh hi, just calling to see if you need anything?”  Today, it’s important that you requalify the person you’re speaking with and try to find as many opportunities as possible to sell your product or service. 

One of the biggest problems sales reps have is knowing how to transition into requalifying.  The resistance I get from sales reps is, “But I spoke with him three months ago!  I already know what he does.” 

“Yes,” I answer. “But how many times have you found that things have changed since then?”

If you’re honest, the answer is it changes all the time.

So what you need to begin the requalifying process is a good transition sentence, a soft approach, so you can begin requalifying and get the updated information that often makes the difference between a successful call and one that results in nothing at all.

Here are some examples of transition sentences.  Remember to adapt them to fit your personality, your product and service:

 

Transition sentence one: 

“________, since it has been a few months since we’ve spoken, let me just make sure my information is correct.  Besides yourself, who else handles…” 

[This is an assumptive way to find other decision makers in the company…]

 

 Transition sentence two:

“___________, let me get up to date on things with you.  I know that last time we spoke you said you handled (X); what else are you responsible for these days?”

 

Transition sentence three:

“Because things change all the time, let me just ask you a couple of quick questions to make sure I’m up on things on your end.  For example, what other products are you handing these days?”

 

Transition sentence four:

“___________ I’m updating the information on all my accounts this month – do you mind if I just verify a few things?

Great!  What is your current extension?

How about your direct phone number?  Cell?  Email?

And are you still the only contact for all the printing needs there?

What other things are you handling?

How about other departments – who would I want to speak with…

How about your need for (X) – where have you been sourcing that these days?

What would you need to see from us to begin placing an order for that also?

[I’m sure you can think of more…]

 

Transition sentence five:

“_________, I know the last time we spoke you told me you handled (X), is that still correct? 

Great.  What else are you in charge of?

How are you handling your (XYZ)?

What other departments are handling the (ABC’s)?

And what other products are you in charge of?

And remind me again of the decision process there?

How about timeline? 

And besides yourself, who else would weigh in on this?

And so on…

 

As you can see, just because you think you know something about someone, you can still learn more.  Think about it: When was the last time you were able to thoroughly qualify someone on the very first call?  It probably took a few, didn’t it?

When you use these kinds of requalifying questions, you’ll be in a much better position to completely qualify an opportunity.  And that can only lead to more business.

 

If you found this article helpful, then you'll love Mike's Completely Updated and Revised eBook, “The Complete Book of Phone Scripts.” Now over 130 pages of powerful and effective scripts to help you easily get past the gatekeeper, set appointments, overcome objections and close more money!

Visit: http://mrinsidesales.com/completescripts.htm and find out why Jeffrey Gitomer, Brian Tracy, Tom Hopkins and many others recommend Mike’s ebook of Phone Scripts!

Do you have an underperforming inside sales team?  Talk to Mike to see how he can help you and your team reach your revenue goals.  To learn more about Mike, visit his website: http://www.MrInsideSales.com

 

LeadGrab is a tool launched today that is blowing up the results of sales and marketing professionals almost immediately. Social Selling experts are driving new leads and interactions at an incredible rate while they do every day anyway.

I have been using this tool behind the scenes for over a month now, and I have been massively impressed. Top quality, SaaS based tool with a clean, modern and easy to use interface that will make you smile as soon as you see it in action.

So to help you see it live, I am doing something that I have never done before –

2 Webinars in 24 Hours

These are brief-focused live demonstrations of LeadGrab in action. You will see for yourself why this has launched like a rocket since it’s release earlier Tuesday.

Pick which one works best for you and register quickly. I am using GoToWebinar for these and am limited to 1,000 attendees maximum in each session.

Wednesday, April 20th at 8:00 pm Eastern/5:00 pm Pacific

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Thursday, April 21st at 10:00 am Eastern / 3:00 pm United Kingdom

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These sessions will be 30 minutes in length and will answer your questions and give you an opportunity to buy LeadGrab at the special launch price with lifetime license.

I hope to see you on one of these two sessions. They will be fun, focused and informative.

If you would rather buy it and try it out with the 30 Day Money-Back Guarantee, then click here.

Original article: Generate Sales Leads Like Never Before

©2016 Fill the Funnel. All Rights Reserved.

The post Generate Sales Leads Like Never Before appeared first on Fill the Funnel.

A B2B content strategy is the key to your lead generation system. Content is made to attract, acquire, engage a clearly defined customer audience – and then drive profitable customer action.

In order to build a successful content strategy your team needs to develop a larger, more cohesive story for your organization to share. It will need clearly defined targets, goals, and a long-term horizon.

The following guide will be an asset to seasoned marketing strategists and beginners alike. Once we’ve discussed how to define targets and clear goals, we’ll look at how leading SaaS companies are using some of the most effective content strategy techniques. This is a guide for building a plan that is both reflective of your company goals and engaging for prospective buyers.

Define Your Targets

Audience personas: First, get very detailed about the specific audiences that will see your content. A quality buyer persona will define your ideal user down to their interests, location, habits, and behaviors that relate to your product. Outline what their needs and pain points are.

What might their engagement cycle might look like? Creating a map of content to deliver throughout the buyer journey is also going to be helpful in later stages. With a full understanding of your customer you can begin to tailor a message and a content marketing strategy to them.

Most companies will need more than one persona, but start with the most important. From this you can start to see what type of content to create, how it will be consumed, and the best way to deliver it to the audience.

“What would your content look like if your customer signed your paycheck?”

– Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, Marketing Profs

(Source)

Brand Story: Here, define what brand ideas and messages you want to communicate through your content. How will these messages differ from the competition? What will be the tone of your messaging? It’s important to think about how the landscape will evolve after the content is shared with your audience as well.

Channel Plan: Lay out which platforms you’ll use to tell your story. As well, define the criteria, processes and objectives within each. How will you best connect them so they result in a well-rounded brand conversation?

What are your Goals?

A content marketing strategy serves a variety of purposes. How you use it will depend upon the action you want your audience to take:

• Prospecting: Generating leads for sales and marketing teams
• Marketing: Generating interest in your products or services
• Thought Leadership: Developing name recognition to influence your industry
• PR: Developing and repairing public perception about your brand or offerings
• Sales: Helping your sales team close more deals, more quickly
• Community: Developing friends and supporters who get the most of your offerings

The fundamental thing to remember here is that you’re looking to see a profitable shift in your audience’s behavior. This means calls to action.

A comprehensive marketing strategy engages it’s audience with a variety of material to bring them into the engagement cycle. But with every level of content should be a defined conversion goal, something like this:

(Source)

This phase also requires you thinking beyond a conversion, to the next step. It requires a methodical examination of each stage of engagement and proper planning.

When you’ve mapped out your sales funnel, you can optimize and personalize content in the middle of the buyer journey to lead them to a purchase. Think in terms of small steps, and the triggers that will bring your audience in the next part of their journey.

When you set out to map your content strategy goals, figuring out what actions you want your audience to take is key.

When creating these goals, be sure that each is appropriate to the stage of the buyer journey you’re targeting. For example, top of funnel goals could be opening an email or visiting a website. Middle funnel actions to encourage could be downloading a report, signing up for a free trial, or a webinar.

Centralize Your Marketing

To get conversions, you’ll need to first start a conversation and a great place to host that conversation is your company blog.

It’s also a great place to generate leads. Here, you can acquire a high number of unique page views and centralize your marketing strategy with your audience.

On the blog, less ambitious calls to action (such as subscribing to your blog or following you through social networks) can help with the overall effectiveness of your strategy.

By diversifying your appeal between email subscribers, social platforms, and content on your website, you allow for a more diverse and powerful strategy overall. A well-executed blog will spark curiosity, keep readers interested, and encourage them to come back for more.

Brian Clark, Founder and CEO of Copyblogger relates:

“Don’t focus on having a great blog. Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers.”

This means focusing on quality content that begins the sales cycle, but doesn’t come off as ‘salesy’. Positioning your content as media part of a digital magazine, instead of marketing, will make it unique.

(Source)

This is the Adobe Digital Marketing blog. As a resource for an audience in-line with their Marketing Cloud, this does a great job of hosting the reader experience with quality content delivered in a fresh and appealing ‘top-of-funnel’ way.

With a content hub appearing as neutral, readers are invited to become email subscribers and enjoy other forms of content in a pressure-free way.

2 Fantastic Channels for the Modern B2B Marketing Strategy

The channels in your marketing strategy will be directly informed by your brand and your audience. Whether you use podcasts, ebooks, newsletters, guides, or more – the Content Marketing Institute found that B2B marketers, on average, work on 13 different content channels and target four separate audiences within a strategy.

Specific tactics will vary by industry and company. But a couple of content strategies satisfies a wide set of valuable purposes for B2B marketers. Companies seeking to turn over the greatest number of MQLs position themselves as thought leaders, and establish themselves within a community – here are two examples of great content marketing strategy.

Webinar Registration

As a content marketing tool, webinars are outstanding. CMI reports that 60% of marketers are using webinars. This is likely due to the fact that webinars attract highly qualified leads in the middle or late stages of the sales funnel. A webinar is great way to share your message with viewers and invite their trust with some ‘time-on-page’ learning more about your company.

(Source)

In this Adobe webinar, the audience gets a great seat to an exciting conference while being continuously reminded of Adobe’s brand offerings.

For a great example of how to invite your views into a webinar, here’s how New Relic positions thiers:

(Source)

The copy clearly defines how to register, what the benefits will be, and that space is scarce. New Relic also plants a CTA for a free account. This page shows exactly how to engage leads, wherever they might be in the funnel.

Case Study and White Paper Downloads

Long-form and substantial content is a great for generating sales. Promoting case studies and white papers which speak to your audience and their industry will boost MQLs and show you as a trustworthy authority.

(Source)

Adobe thinks outside the box with their audio white paper series, hosted on Soundcloud. By approaching concept from another angle, the company can heighten its appeal as an industry leader and innovator and also promote content in novel way.

Google 360 provides another great way to lay out a whitepaper offer. Presented as a ‘featured resource’ for those engaging with analytics, this page is clean and helpful to all. White papers and case studies like this are great incentives for signing up for your email list.

(Source)

Key Takeaways

In an industry swimming with content, a B2B company with a well thought out strategy will have an advantage. By first understanding target buyers, marketers can then develop a brand message to match their audience. From this, a map of conversions within the specific buying journey can be created. Only when these core concepts have been finalized should the marketer begin to select their content for engagement within the larger strategy. The examples of white papers and webinars show how leading SaaS companies have used blogs as a pivot point for their great content marketing strategies.

On any given day, the sales and product team play by different rules. Little attention is really paid to the separation of the two. It seems only natural.

There go the tech people. New features, roadmaps, and so on.

On the other side of the room, perhaps even on a different floor, there sit the smooth talkers.

Despite their inherent differences and business functions, these two teams have one major thing in common: they both live and die by numbers,  whether it’s leads versus lag or dollars versus downloads.

Sales, meet product. Product, meet sales. Before we look at how these two teams can work together, let’s look at how they function independent of each other.

The sales team: Beyond closing deals

Results, results, results. More so than any other team, the sales team is results-oriented.

Unlike other teams, if certain goals aren’t met, it has a direct impact on their bank accounts and livelihoods. That means they are more dependent on a good product than the product team itself.

Modern sales teams have moved away from closing more deals to closing the right deals. The commercial conversation in 2016 is honest and helpful. That’s why the sales team needs to know exactly what’s going on in product. Sales need to be aligned with the product lifecycle to set accurate expectations for their prospects.

The product team: More than features

The product team is always in the hot seat. They sit in the intersection (and sometimes crossfire) of tech, marketing and business.

The best product managers have a comprehensive understanding of each of these areas and allow for open communication between them all. Ultimately, their job is to apply the appropriate filters and separate vanity from value, delivering a stronger and more sustainable product.

The product team has all the data they need. And sure, this data is indicative of which features are being used. But it comes with restrictions and limitations and doesn’t always paint the full picture.

Yes, analytics will show if and when a certain feature is being used. What analytics data doesn’t show is the intention behind using it or the expectations of that feature. Some users might even be using a feature for completely different reason than it was initially built for.

Worst case scenario, this might guide product development down the wrong path and waste resources, time and money. Best case scenario, a better product will be built.

How listening to user feedback led to a unicorn

Take Instagram, for example. What eventually turned into the world’s most popular photo-sharing app started out as something completely different. In its early days, the founders built a check-in service called Burbn.

In one pivotal meeting, Kevin Systrom and his team decided to switch their focus from check-ins to photo sharing. Having paid close attention to user feedback, they threw out one year’s worth of work and put all their efforts into the part of the product the users were committed to—photos. Eight weeks later, Instagram was born.

How much is paying attention to user feedback worth? In Instagram’s case, 1 billion dollars.

Working together: Go from confrontation to collaboration

Understanding what should be built and when is the core responsibility of the product team. However, answering the question, “Who is this product being built for?” is a company-wide responsibility that each member of the company can contribute to.  

This is where sales come in. On a daily basis, salespeople receive countless rejections from prospects. They sit at the forefront of feedback.

With qualitative data from live chats, product demos, calls and in-person meetings, sales can provide product with an important perspective. Product might have raw data, but sales have raw feedback straight from prospects.

Sales: Always question, never overpromise

The conversation you have with prospects should be a healthy balance between what the product looks like today and what the vision is for the future.

Taking the visionary aspect too far will put unnecessary pressure on the product team, and it might also reflect poorly on the sales team as those promised features might not be implemented after all.

What should you do instead?

Ask questions. Figure out the real need behind the feature request and whether it's a dealbreaker or can be solved with a workaround.

Product: Break the bubble, get out of your comfort zone

It’s convenient for product teams to stay in their comfort zones. It might be fear of failure, but it might just be lack of insight.

With sales directly sharing customer feedback with the product team, you can make sure that you keep moving, always striving to serve your market better, faster. Sales teams bring customer-generated ideas, product teams validate those ideas.

Think market, not customer

A salesperson might have the same conversation with a dozen prospects within the span of a week. They’re all asking for the same feature and without this feature, the deal is off the table. Anyone can understand the rep's frustration, especially if they’re hearing the same objection over and over again.

This is when a lot of salespeople run over to product and say, “We need this feature—NOW.” Helpful? Not at all.

When salespeople request certain product features, the product manager should explain, “No, we’re not going to build this feature, and I’m gonna tell you why.” Saying “no” is part of building a well-defined product.

If there’s friction between product and sales teams, there’s a very simple solution to get them both on the same page. Forget about features, funnels and follow-ups.

Instead, step back and look at the big picture: the overall business objectives. At the end of the day, that is what everyone should be working toward, regardless of opinions, beliefs and team shirt.

Your office could be a gold mine full of insight

Look around you. No matter what kind of product you’re building, chances are “real users” are in the same office.

In the early days of Close.io, we were sitting right next to our target audience: our own salespeople. At an early stage startup, it’s easy to start working on the wrong problems. At Close.io, we had the opportunity to code our product while our core users were actually using it.  

Our sales team used Close.io to manage the entire sales process from start to finish. This meant we could identify pain points and tackle issues very fast through our own in-house feedback loop.

Having access to our core users on a daily basis provided us with incredible insights. It helped us simplify workflows and evaluate the product much faster than if we hadn’t shared the same space.

As our very own Phil Freo pointed out, “Startups often build software based on limited understanding of problems, or in the best cases based on their own past experiences, but they still remain disconnected from real users during most of the development process.”

Harness the feedback, stay connected to your users.

The feedback funnel: All it takes is one email

Most people sigh when they hear the word “process.” The word has a bad reputation and is often associated with bottlenecks, frustrations and delays.

However, a process doesn’t have to mean spreadsheets, database entries and multiple sign-offs. A process can simply be a conversation. Replace “process” with “communication” and instantly, we’re on friendlier terms.

Here’s what you can do:

• Start the conversation: How do the teams normally function? How do they normally communicate? What does each team’s routines look like? Figure out how to integrate sales-to-product feedback into the existing team culture in a way that doesn't disrupt current workflow. In plain English: Get to know each other.
• Establish rules: You’ve opened the lines of communication.  Now it’s time to make sure those lines stay uncluttered. Setting boundaries will allow for more effective communication. A good first rule is establishing and sticking to common terminology that everyone should use to make sure everyone is communicating clearly.
• Keep it simple, but consistent: Whether it’s a weekly or monthly email, daily huddle or meeting—make sure it happens. No excuses.
• Trial and error: Depending on the size of the teams and the existing structure, it will take some time to figure out the new dynamic. Be flexible. Be patient.

It’s all about involving the right people, in the right way, at the right time. And guess what? If nothing else, one email is all it takes.

Sales and product, better together

Every team within a company has a unique function. Despite this, they’re all dependent on each other. Collaboratively, they can work toward long-term business goals and achieve better results. This is old news.

How they can do this is the tricky bit. While each company has its own setup, there are a few ground rules which will pave the way toward success. Let’s recap:

• Establish a process that works for both teams
• Set clear boundaries
• Stay mindful—you both have the same end game
• Keep educating each other as product and strategies change and evolve

Remember, what works right now is not going to work forever. As the product goes through its lifecycle, the relationship between the sales and product teams needs to develop and evolve with the business.

There’s always more to learn, and new and better ways of working together will emerge. As long as both teams support each other, and understand and respect each other’s purpose, you will achieve better results and better numbers, together.

Recommended reading:

MVP your team to excellence
Don’t think of MVP as just a product development methodology. MVP is also a way to create a more effective & collaborative startup team—here's how.

Conflict resolution 101 for startups
How to resolve conflicts between people in high pressure, high growth startups. This is your step by step guide to conflict resolution!

Coworkers as your first customers: Your office as the ultimate development environment
Startups often don’t talk to real users during the dev process. However, if you build your product as users test it, you'll build a great product.

Here in 2016, great content alone is simply not enough. The combination of an authentic, relatable voice and conversations with your audience are possibly the most powerful currency in our quest to connect with each other in a meaningful way. As viewers, we are bombarded with a smorgasbord of content, and if we are greeted with an annoying pop-up ad that covers the screen or information hidden behind a paywall, we simply look elsewhere.

To secure the attention of the busy digital reader, publishers must engage and build a rapport with their audience. Despite the obvious methods of how to create a successful strategy around this modern requirement, it seems that businesses are ready to try a different approach by investigating the use of “Conversational Bots” to take their personalized services to the next level.

The is already here, and automated news stories can be sent to potential readers in a message from an AI personal assistant based on your interests and preferences. Elsewhere a British programmer has created a robot lawyer that has successfully saved its clients more than in parking tickets.

Whatever your opinion, it seems that humans will need to get used to the idea of interacting with intelligent computers. With Google, Apple, Amazon, and recently Facebook all investing heavily into digital assistants, it’s clear to see that paper newspapers will continue to decline and static e-newspapers will become less desirable as your new AI friend will distribute and generate news items to your smartphone or tablet each morning that are increasingly tailored to your personal needs.

It seems that many of us are suffering with mobile app fatigue, with of users deleting an app within three days of it being downloaded. Even the ones we do keep get lost on the crowded home screen and are typically only opened twice on your device. I suspect most of you reading this use only around five apps on a regular basis because you have learned that quantity is not better than a quality mobile app that delivers personalized value.

The problem is that our thirst for instant gratification means we no longer have the patience to scroll through several pages to get the information we need, and many of us are starting to feel more comfortable using our voice to ask an e-assistant to get the results we want.

We are social creatures who enjoy connecting with each other. Messaging apps are by far the most used on our smartphones for this very reason. Meanwhile, apps such as Slack are also leading a new revolution with their everything-under-one-roof ethos that sets users free from the old world with multiple apps and windows always open.

The next stage of this evolution is already happening as we see messaging apps developers begin to open up their APIs. That opens the door to the use of bots to go mainstream as developers go beyond only building static mobile apps to concentrate on making e-assistants conversational bots and that will drive another paradigm shift.

It’s time to prepare for the arrival of messaging chat bots that could even manage our travel, documents, sales leads and our entire lives if developed properly. There are already a few warning signs that suggest that businesses or publishers that do not integrate the use of conversational interfaces will soon witness an increasing drop in traffic if their content is not available on these digital platforms.

Ultimately, these chat bots are relatively easy to create and programmed to provide actions or give automated responses based on the interaction between users after a variety of questions or comments in a conversation.

The most interesting aspect of this emerging technology is how we are starting to add fewer new apps to our phones and tablets. Bombarding users with an array of choices and multiple options to manage even the most mundane aspects of our lives is increasingly becoming a chore.

Less is more, and we no longer need five pages of apps on our smartphones or tablets. The quest to simplify our lives is well underway, and it seems that adding targeted chat bots to our five favorite apps could be the silver bullet to deliver the greater productivity and efficiency we have been searching for.

How to Effectively Use LinkedIn InMail to Attract More Sales

If you are like most business owners you’ve probably skipped over several InMail messages on LinkedIn at the start of your day in order to get to the most important matters. In fact, you may have come across a sales pitch like this one:

The offer may be valid, but the approach will most likely not get a large response, especially when sent out to a group of contacts on LinkedIn. One of the biggest factors in gaining more sales on this growing social network is trusted relationships, especially through LinkedIn groups.

According to a LinkedIn report, companies that engage with their prospects increase their sales by 50 percent. A professional profile that also includes contact information and social links will also add to your credibility and increase your chances of getting a response.

If your network is active and involved on social media, and especially on LinkedIn, then you can start the process of communicating with them in a meaningful way. Find out what groups and lists they are most engaged in and start there. By sharing their content and leaving valuable comments you are showing an interest in what they have to offer in addition to their product or service needs.

Through consistent communication with your connections you don’t need to invest in the premium InMail options, but rather generate interest through meaningful conversations, shares, retweets, and active participation in groups.

Once you have established a relationship with your network you can begin crafting your LinkedIn InMails. Here are some helpful tips on how to be most successful and attract more leads and sales:

Start a conversation

Instead of a run-of-the-mill sales approach your prospects want to know that you are interested in them, and this all begins with your subject line, which is the first thing they will notice. Examples include, “A Mutual Group (name of group) Connection,” “Great Point on Your Article (name of article),” “Referral From (name of trusted source),” and “I Thought You Might Be Interested In (something of value without a sales pitch).” When you share helpful insights, articles, and other information you are opening the door to communication and increasing their level of interest like this example from Nataly Kelly, VP of Marketing at Hubspot:

Present an attractive CTA

Once you’ve captured your prospect’s attention it’s important to include the next steps to take. This is a good place to invite them to a meeting, find out more about their needs and business, ect. The point is to move both of you closer toward your goals in a helpful way.

Choose your contacts carefully

Not only should you be sending out LinkedIn InMails sparingly, but you should also send them out individually to those who are active on LinkedIn. Check also for the number of connections that they have, the quality of their network, which groups they are involved in, how relevant they are to your business, and whether their profile is professional with up-to-date information.

Evaluate your profile

Take a look at your current information to fix any errors, add new information and relevant work or articles, etc. Your headshot should be professional and not outdated with the most current information at the beginning of your profile. LinkedIn gives you the option of a public view, which can be helpful in making your improvements. Here’s a great example from one of my clients, Robert DeLaurentis, owner of Flying Thru Life:

An InMail message that is simple, and to the point without too much text works best for busy prospects. Always keep in mind that your outreach must first be established by how much of a relationship you have build with each contact. A helpful approach that shows an interest goes a long way, which should always include thanking them for taking the time to read your message.

A well-planned approach is a great way to use LinkedIn InMail to better connect with your current network and increase your sales. The more relevant the message to both of you the better chances your business will receive a positive response.

Joshua Brustein / Bloomberg:
How the Amazon Echo started as part of a secret AR project and ended up as a surprise hit  —  The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo  —  The talking speaker started as part of a secret augmented-reality project and ended up as a surprise hit. … Telling Jeff Bezos he's wrong is always a frightening proposition.

There are many rules to business. There are many things you’re told you “need to be doing” if you want to be successful.

But despite all the complexity about getting business right, there are really only two rules — two philosophies really — that dictate success.

It doesn’t matter what you’re selling.

It doesn’t matter what you’re planning to do. It doesn’t matter where you’re at or the industry you are in.

Massive success is rooted in these two rules.

1. Be incredibly easy to do business with.

Ubiquity is the new exclusivity. Helpfulness is the best strategy for driving awareness.

In today’s app-driven sales economy it’s easy to force prospective customers into a funnel where they have to fill out a form, download a white paper, or make a dozen frantic visits to your website before your technology scores them high enough for you to want to care to get to know them.

No wonder you’re not successful driving new revenue. You’re not flexible enough to meet people where they are.

No one wants to feel like an idiot to have to do business with you. More importantly — no one wants to have to do work to give you their money.

They want you there to help them and support them and give them guidance. And when you’re not easy to do business with it just adds to the frustration and chaos they already feel.

So abandon the strategies where you hide your contact information on your website. Make it incredibly easy for people to cancel your service or product if they’re not happy. Ditch all the complex contracts.

Be everywhere your prospective clients will be looking. Be there with a smile and a helpful hand instead of a gimmicky sales pitch and awkward marketing process.

2. Be so good they come back for more.

Obsess about ways to provide surprise and delight to your customers.

Think about all the frustrating things in your industry that you could remedy, even in small ways.

Deliver service with a smile, even when you’re stressed out and anxious. Put a plan in place to follow up on the promises you make.

A simple productivity platform or to-do app can help you stay scheduled and focused on delivering on your best intentions.

There is nothing particularly genius about doing what you say. But it makes all the difference in the world to your customer.

And it has a massive impact on your growth. Your customers want to believe in you. They want to give you a second chance when you screw up.

All you have to do is be willing to try. Apologize when you get it wrong. And keep trying to get it right.

These are the rules that make business awesome.

1. Be impossibly easy to do business with.
2. Be so awesome that they ask for more.

No amount of sales automation or witty marketing satire can trump the impact you create when you execute these two rules.

Being awesome isn’t an accident. Changing the world doesn’t happen by chance.

It takes focusing on the details. It requires you playing the game by a different set of rules.

These are those rules.

The post The Only Two Rules You Need To Be Successful In Business. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt: Author of EDGY Conversations.

Copyright by Waldschmidt Partners Intl... Not sure that all that legal stuff really matters. If you want to share this material, do so. Just don't charge for it and don't tell people you wrote it. Both of those are uncool.

Other than that, all rights are reserved to you to change your life. If you are ready to be amazing, now is the time to get started. Onward...

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Visa says its improving its smart chip-embedded cards, which have been the source of grumbling from businesses and customers forced to wait for transactions to go through.

The company said Tuesday that Quick Chip for EMV will let customers dip and remove cards, usually in two seconds or less, without waiting for purchases to be finalized.

Though the wait can be just seconds, in today’s economy of swipes and scans, the cards have been a nuisance for high traffic retailers, for example, a coffee shop during the morning rush.

The cards are more secure than those with magnetic strips because the chip assigns a unique code to each transaction. That means that if a crook acquired that code, it couldn’t be used to make another purchase. Chip cards are much harder, if not impossible, to duplicate. That makes them more secure than magnetic cards, which are easily copied.

Roughly half of all global credit card fraud occurs in the U.S. even though the country makes up only about a quarter of all credit card transactions, according to a report by Barclays last year.

Visa Inc. said that more than 265 million of its credit and debit chip cards have been issued to date.

The post Visa: new technology for chip cards to speed checkout times appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

If you’re not on the Google Chrome extension bandwagon yet, you will be once you start using some (or all) of these tools.

The Chrome Web Store is perfect for people who love new tools, toys, and productivity hacks. To help you get started, I've gathered a few of my favorite Google Chrome extensions for salespeople below.

Google Chrome Extensions for Task Management

1) Add To Wunderlist

This extension allows you to easily save anything from the web as a to-do on your Wunderlist -- you can even save relevant text. It also syncs new items across your devices, which is especially helpful if you're browsing and would like to follow up on something later. Instead of looking into it right then, add it to your Wunderlist. You'll stay focused and on-task.

Price: Free with Wunderlist (Wunderlist: Free for Basic, $4.99/mo. or $49/yr. for Pro/Business)

2) Wunderlist New Tab

Another beautiful tool for the Wunderlist enthusiast, Wunderlist New Tab displays all of your current to-dos every time you open a new tab. You can also quickly and easily add new to-dos or mark off items you’ve completed.

Price: Free with Wunderlist (Wunderlist: Free for Basic, $4.99/mo. or $49/yr. for Pro/Business)

3) Todoist

If you are a Todoist user, this extension allows you to see your list and add to-dos quickly from your toolbar. The extension has the full capabilities of the desktop app, so you can assign tasks to a project, add links, and so on.

Price: Free with Todoist (Todoist: Free for Basic, $28.99/yr. for Premium)

4) Prioritab

For people who don’t want to use a more involved to-do list but still want to stay on top of their priorities, Prioritab may be perfect. This simple interface opens with each new tab and gives you a breakdown of your priorities for the day, week, and month, as well as how far into each of those time periods you are.

Price: Free

5) Taco

Taco displays your to-dos from over 40 apps all in one place, and this extension makes them easily accessible every time you open a new tab. Popular supported tools include Asana, Evernote, Trello, Basecamp, Todoist, Slack, and more.

Price: Free

6) HubSpot Sales

HubSpot Sales is downright the most useful extension for B2B sales professionals. It provides in-depth details about businesses and individuals on the web or whom you’ve exchanged emails with. You'll see their title, company, contact information, social profiles, and even recent social posts.

And it makes scheduling meetings a breeze. Simply share a link that allows both you and your prospect to select convenient times and eliminate all that back and forth. 

HubSpot Sales also includes email tracking, which tells you which prospects opened your emails, where they were located, and whether or not they clicked on any links in your message. You can also create custom email templates to reduce the time you spend responding to emails, send pre-scheduled prospecting sequences, and track prospect interaction with content.

Price: Free for Basic, $50/mo. per user for HubSpot Sales Professional

Google Chrome Extensions for Collaboration

7) Zoom

The HubSpot team is obsessed with Zoom. It’s hard to find a reliable video conferencing tool, let alone one that’s simple and intuitive. But Zoom is that unicorn.

With this extension, you can instantly start a meeting or schedule a future one. The meeting URL and relevant details are sent with the invitation, so your recipient can easily join.

Zoom lets you share your screen, give remote control to someone else (so, for example, your sales engineer can take over your computer to answer a tricky tech question), record the meeting (useful for reviewing how it went), and more.

Price: Free unlimited meetings for two participants and 40 minutes for multiple participants; $14.99/mo. per host for unlimited minutes and meetings

8) Point

Point allows you to quickly and easily share websites or articles with co-workers, friends, or prospects, then discuss that content in a chat format while you both view the article in real time. Point is also helpful when sharing content via email.

Price: Free

9) Basecamp Notifier

Stay up-to-date with activity from Basecamp projects with the Basecamp Notifier, which alerts you of activity on projects or tasks that you are following. If your team uses Basecamp this extension is a must, and is the easiest way to avoid missing important notifications. (This extension does not yet support Basecamp 3.)

Price: Free with Basecamp (Basecamp: $99/mo. for businesses, free for teachers and students)

10) Add to Trello

This extension provides one-click access to all of your Trello Boards, and allows you to create new cards on Trello while you’re browsing.

Price: Free with Trello (Trello: Free for Basic, $9.99/mo. per user for Business Class, $20.83/mo. per user for Enterprise)

11) cloudHQ Sync

This extension is great for sales reps with files and folders scattered all across the cloud. Sync allows you to pull all your cloud-based files into Google Drive, so you can search and access all of your files in one place. cloudHQ syncs with Evernote, OneNote, Box, OneDrive, Gmail, SharePoint, Basecamp, Dropbox, and more.

Price: Free

Google Chrome Extensions for Productivity

12) Black Menu for Google

If your organization runs on Google Apps, this extension is a must-have. Black Menu allows you to access any Google App from an easy-to-use dropdown menu with one click from your toolbar. You can customize which ones you see and even access little-known Google tools and shortcuts.

Price: Free

13) Pushbullet

Bring together all of your devices and spend less time looking back and forth between your computer and cell phone with this extension. The most helpful feature is the SMS sync, which allows you to send, receive, and respond to text messages on your desktop. You can also easily send files and links between devices and see alerts from all your devices in one place. I love this extension because it allows me to work with headphones on and not check my phone constantly. I can respond to calls and messages without grabbing my phone or getting off task.

Price: Free

14) Strict Workflow

The Pomodoro productivity technique calls on you to work in 25-minute blocks -- known as “Pomodoros” -- with five-minute breaks, and Strict Workflow is an extension that makes doing so simple. You can time Pomodoros while blocking websites like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube during your “focus” time.

Price: Free

15) Forest

You’re not the only one who struggles to avoid Facebook, Reddit, ESPN (pick your poison) while you’re working. Forest is one of the best Chrome extensions I’ve found for actually staying on task.

Whenever you want to be heads down, plant a tree. It grows while you work -- but if you open any sites on your “Blacklist,” the tree will die.

Forest shows your planting history, which is a cool way to visualize your work sessions and feel a sense of accomplishment.

Price: Free, $2 for accompanying phone app

16) Skim.it

Knowing your prospect’s latest company announcements and strategic moves helps you build rapport, gain their trust, and differentiate yourself from the (less-educated) competition.

The Skim.it extension makes it easier than ever to stay on top of news. It uses machine learning to extract the key points from text-heavy content, so you can read press releases, articles, blog posts, and more in half the time.

Price: Free

17) Noisli

Improve your focus and block out distractions by putting on a pair of headphones and allowing Noisli to create a relaxed environment for increased productivity. You can customize a mix of different sounds or use a premade formula to drown out even the most persistent loud talker in the next cubicle or an entire coffee shop buzzing around you. Noisli works beyond the office as well -- use its premade “Relax” mix to get a better night’s sleep.

Price: Free

18) Google Calendar

Managing a busy schedule isn’t easy, but this extension makes it a little easier. It allows you to see upcoming events with the mere click of a button. You can also add events right from your browser.

Price: Free

Google Chrome Extensions for Productivity

19) Evernote Web Clipper

Say goodbye to a cluttered bookmarks bar and hello to organized and easily searchable notes for all your saved websites, articles, and quotes. Evernote Web Clipper allows you to clip and save articles straight to your Evernote, clip specific sections of webpages, add annotations, and control which notebook clippings are saved to.

Price: Free

20) Google Keep

If you’re a Google maniac (and aren’t we all), Google Keep is a great option for saving random content you want to come back to. Just right-click on an image, URL, or highlighted text, then choose “Add to Google Keep.”

You can add notes or labels for easy categorization. Everything you save syncs across your platforms — from your web browser to your phone to your tablet. Plus, Keep is available offline, so your content is always accessible.

Price: Free

21) Vidyard GoVideo

This tool lets you start recording yourself, your screen (or both) with a simple click. Introduce yourself to prospects, give sneak previews of your product, dive into detail for a single feature, and more. Once you’ve finished your video, share it via email or social media. You can also upload videos from the Gmail compose window.

You’ll get notified when someone watches your video, letting you follow up while you’re top of mind.

Videos are capped at 60 minutes -- and you can record as many as you’d like.

Price: Free 

22) Loom

Loom lets you quickly capture and narrate videos for prospects. It takes one click to record and one click to finish, meaning the process is nearly effortless. In addition, your video is accessible by a public URL. Simply copy and paste that URL into an email, and your recipient can watch (and rewatch) the clip at any time.

I recommend using Loom to create product and/or walkthroughs and make your sales presentations more visual.

Price: Free

23) Grammarly

Everyone you email will assume you have perfect grammar if you use the Grammarly extension. The tool corrects your spelling and grammar whenever you make a mistake.

Price: Free

24) Lumio

This is a tool for those of us who regularly use research and information from many sources. Instead of the normal list of links on a note somewhere, Lumio allows you to select specific quotes or videos and organize and rearrange them as cards that automatically save all the source information. Salespeople can use Lumio to aggregate third-party reviews, case studies, and related information to send to prospects.

Price: Free

25) Find My Tab

Do you always have 10-plus tabs open? You need this extension, which shows you an easy-to-read list of your current tabs. Never waste precious seconds flipping through web pages again.

Price: Free

Google Chrome Extensions for Social Media

26) Pablo

Create beautiful images with text overlays for social posts quickly and easily with Pablo. Simply highlight the text you wish to share and click the Pablo extension. In just a few clicks you will have a beautiful graphic optimized for the channel of your choice.

Price: Free

27) Crystal Knows

Crystal allows you to import contacts from Google or social media and run personality reports immediately. They run your contacts against the DISC assessment which uses four primary personality types to determine behavior. Is your new prospect dominant, influential, steady, or calculating? Find out and then get tips on how to communicate with them moving forward.

Price: Free (Enterprise begins at $5/mo. per user)

28) Rapportive

Want to send a truly personalized email to each prospect? Rapportive pulls up a contact's LinkedIn profile in a Gmail sidebar as you're composing an email. Comment on the weather in your prospect's city or refer to a mutual connection. Rapportive also pulls in links to any social media accounts or websites your prospect has linked to their LinkedIn account, so you can quickly and easily grab pertinent information to drop in your email.

Price: Free (Premium version available only with LinkedIn Sales Navigator)

Google Chrome Extensions for Fun

29) Giphy

Sometimes the only way to spice up a sales email is to express how you feel with the perfect animated GIF. You can search whatever you need to say in GIF form, then drag and drop into your email compose window.

Price: Free (Value: Priceless!)

30) Lumosity Break

Lumosity subscribers can take productive breaks throughout the day. The extension pulls a new game each time you open a new browser tab, so you can keep yourself sharp throughout the day while doing something that doesn’t quite feel like work.

Price: Free with Lumosity (Lumosity: Free for Basic individual plan, $11.95/mo. for individual plan, $5/mo. for a full-year commitment for individual plan, $3.75/mo. for a two-year commitment for individual plan, $299.95/lifetime for individual plan, $8.33/mo. for a full-year commitment for a family plan)

31) Instapaper

This extension is a simple tool to save articles for reading offline later. It's useful for stockpiling reading material before long flights or travel.

Price: Free

32) Earth View from Google Earth

Sales is a high-stress job. Taking every opportunity to center yourself makes you more effective -- not to mention, less likely to burn out. That’s where Google Earth’s Earth View extension comes into play.

Every time you open a new tab, you’ll see a beautiful new satellite image. Nature is scientifically proven to reduce stress, so this will boost your mental health throughout the day.

Price: Free

Editor's note: Alexandra Holmes contributed to a previous version of this article.

The ability to recruit, coach, and develop effective sales teams; have a relentless pursuit of key strategic goals; and posses a long track record of high integrity transactions with peers, customers, and partners are all traits employers look for in their next (or first) VP Sales. But in order to attract and hire a great VP Sales and outpace competitors who vie for the same stellar candidates, employers need to understand the job traits that a VP Sales values most when evaluating prospective employers.

Why? Great VPs of Sales – those who consistently lead their teams to achieve aggressive growth targets – are happily employed and understand that they are the most highly coveted salespeople on the market, so they won’t consider making a move to a new employer unless the perfect opportunity comes their way.

So, what job traits do great VP Sales value the most when considering a new career opportunity?

In no particular order, here are the 10 job traits every VP sales considers when evaluating a career opportunity from a prospective employer:

1. An offering they believe in

If an executive decides to join a new company, it’s because they believe in what the company is selling. World-class employers understand this, and, when sales recruiting, clearly detail to candidates how their offering fills a need in the market, has an excellent market reputation, and will continue to solve complex business problems today and into the future.

2. A compensation plan that is at or above market

The number one thing all salespeople consider when evaluating an employment opportunity is compensation. A typical VP Sales compensation package will be comprised of a six-figure base salary plus additional incentives, such as equity, stock options, and bonus plans.

• Base Pay – A VP Sales expects to have the highest base salary on the sales team because of the functions they perform. Base salaries for the position, regardless of company size, industry, or location, start at $100k, with an average base salary of $124,193.
• Commission – A VP Sales expects commissions and bonuses to equal about 30% of their total compensation package.
• Equity and Stock Options – If the company is private, a VP Sales will expect equity, especially if the company is a startup and does not have the capital to offer a base salary that is at or above market.

No VP of Sales is going to consider a job that doesn’t have a lot of financial potential, whether that comes through a traditional commission structure or substantial equity.

“A VP of Sales wants to make money and wants to make a lot of money on their stock. They want to make coin. Anyone that’s good is not going to join your company at $5,000 or $20,000 MRR a month, it’s just not going to happen.” – Jason Lempkin – CEO Echosign.

3. Colleagues who share their vision

If a VP doesn’t respect (or like) their colleagues, or if their colleagues don’t respect their strategic vision or management approach, it’s going to be difficult for them to be effective. When a VP is assessing a new opportunity, they want to know who they’ll be working with on a day-to-day basis. They want colleagues who will execute their vision, as well as a leadership team that supports their strategic philosophy.

4. A company that understands its corporate objectives

Every company needs a corporate strategy to succeed in today’s marketplace. A good corporate strategy determines where resources are allocated, how the competition stacks up, what markets to compete in, and what advantages the company has in order to meet their growth targets.

When a VP considers a new role, he or she wants to see that the leadership has outlined clear goals and needs for the business, and that they’re committed to helping the VP execute their sales strategy.

Whether the company is an early-stage startup that requires the VP to create a sales process, or is an established business that needs a VP revamp existing processes, the VP Sales wants to join a company that understands their corporate strengths, weaknesses, and growth objectives.

5. Opportunities for growth and change

Great salespeople will only join a company that offers growth, change, and the ability to rise within the organization. In fact, one in three employees leave their jobs because of a lack of career growth.

When a VP of Sales assesses a new opportunity, they want to know if the company is private and going public, or if there is an opportunity to move into a C-level position. They assess the role beyond the moment, looking to the future to see how they’ll be able to grow within the organization. Specifically, they will want to know if there is the opportunity to become the VP over a larger territory, or move into an Executive VP, Global VP, or President role.

6. Ability and autonomy to solve challenges and provide real value

When assessing a new position, a VP wants more than just a large paycheck and a great product. They want to know that their future employer will give them the autonomy necessary to make significant changes and solve critical problems that will drive selling costs down and revenue up.

At the VP level, autonomy is extremely important. VPs want to have complete P&L control over their region and staff. If they feel the leadership team will micromanage and try to direct their every move, they will pass on the position, regardless of the compensation or room for growth offered.

“A Sales VP won’t be content if they’re not able to provide value to an organization. The best VPs want to be confronted with challenges they’re excited to solve.” – Brent Thomson, CSO, Peak Sales Recruiting.

7. A proven leadership team

When a VP Sales is assessing a prospective employer, they want to know everything about its corporate leadership team including:

• Who is on the existing management team
• The structure of the management team
• The background of the management team
• How much autonomy the management team intends to provide the candidate

Sales VPs also want to know that they will have the ability to learn from other proven executives who possess unique business experiences and who value their perspective on how to achieve aggressive growth targets.  

8. Organization stage

When a VP is considering joining a company, they want to know what stage the business is in.

Is the organization in the compete stage, where there is a deep need to build and grow a new sales team, or is the organization in the maintain stage, when there is an established sales force, but a need to continue to grow revenue without adding headcount?  

Why does organization stage matter to a VP? Running a medium-sized $50 million sales department requires a much different skill set than leading a large billion-dollar sales organization.

When a VP Sales is assessing a new opportunity, they want to understand the challenge they’ll be faced with and if their experiences and skills sets will help them be successful. Will they need to come in and build out a sales team, or overhaul an existing process? The best VPs enjoy a challenge, are intrigued by the possibilities, and will join a company if they feel they can make a difference.

9. An ethical approach to selling

There are some sales teams that will do virtually anything to make a sale, and there are others who work to make ethical choices about selling.

Unethical sales practices damage sales numbers, and repels salespeople from joining the team. These unethical practices include executives and reps making promises about product developments that cannot be fulfilled, misrepresenting products or promotions to close deals, and not being transparent about price changes.

When a VP sales is scouting a new opportunity, they look carefully at the company’s sales philosophy and ask the following questions:

• Are the target numbers realistic?
• Are the sales methods ethical?
• Are the sales practices and approaches something I’m comfortable with?

10. Being set-up for success

If an organization doesn’t offer the best tools, infrastructure, and budget to its sales team, it won’t be very attractive to an established VP Sales. In order for VPs to be successful, they need the organization behind them, and want the right tools and processes to make their sales goals a reality.

For a list of the top sales management tools, read our Sales Management Tools Study results.

Job Traits for VP Sales

Proven VPs are highly sought-after by employers. In order for them to accept a new role, they must feel that the new opportunity provides the challenges, products, leadership and compensation that they need to be successful.

Looking for more advice on how to find, attract, and assess sales leaders?

Join the @Peak Executive Email Series and get proven sales recruiting insights delivered straight to your inbox:

The post What Every Great VP Sales Wants in a Job appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

When your sales team loses focus, there’s often a breakdown in tools, processes or content. Often the culprits are cumbersome administrative processes and a lack of internal alignment around message and sales execution. Bottom line, you need your reps spending as much time as possible selling.

Here are several action steps you can take to ensure your team is focused on the high-value activities that move the needle.

Ensure a Clear Sales Process

The best thing you can do to help your sales team refocus is to ensure they have a simple, predictable and repeatable sales process to work with. When reps don’t have clarity on what to do and when in the sales process, they’re bound to work less efficiently as they maneuver through creating their own qualification and sales stages. Your managers are also wasting time trying to figure out how to best help reps move deals forward or sometimes more importantly, qualify them out.

Streamline Planning and Forecasting Activities

Accurate forecasting and sales planning increase the odds of your team hitting their quotas. A structured, streamlined and consistent approach for forecasting simplifies this important planning activity for reps. Less time trying to decipher uncertain processes means more time spent working to achieve them. The ability for a manager to look at a dashboard that tells him/her everything they need to know about pipeline and current opportunities is invaluable. Ensure your reps and managers have access to consumable information that is easy to understand and utilize in planning and executing sales.

Structure Coaching and Feedback Processes

Similarly, front-line managers are able to dedicate more time to coaching reps toward quota attainment with a streamlined operating rhythm. A concise, predictable approach to coaching reps to success ensures that reps spend more time selling and managers spend more time focused on helping reps close deals.

Conclusion

Giving your team a greater sense of control with a manageable selling process is the key to helping them refocus. Streamline processes for both reps and managers, structure coaching and feedback systems for consistency, and monitor activity throughout the pipeline.

The most frequent question I get asked by small business owners is how to simplify inbound marketing when faced with limited resources. Inbound marketing seems so overwhelming with all the effort that needs to go into creating great content, sharing it on social media and optimizing that content for search engines.

But the value of inbound marketing for small businesses can outweigh the challenges and should be included as part of your marketing activities.

Inbound Marketing – the What and Why

Inbound marketing is the process of attracting your ideal client with quality content to create brand awareness and attract new business.Your content, whether it is in the form of a blog, ebook, webinar, presentation, audio or video, needs to:

• Be optimized to be found in search engines
• Be shared through social media and email marketing activities
• Educate your ideal client on how you can help them satisfy a need or solve a problem.

Inbound marketing offers many benefits:

• Build your expert reputation
• Generate inbound links for greater search engine visibility
• Develop relationships with prospects and customers
• Strengthen search engine optimization efforts
• Increase brand awareness
• Generate qualified leads at a lower cost per lead

And although inbound marketing can be a rather large undertaking, you can focus your efforts to simplify inbound marketing and make it work for your business.

Inbound Marketing – the How

The following 6 steps can help you simplify inbound marketing and get the results you are looking for. Understand what you want to do with inbound marketing and why you want to do it, and take it one step at a time.

Identify your goal

What do you want to accomplish with inbound marketing?

• Create more brand visibility by ranking higher in the search engines?
• Generate more leads?
• Convert more leads into customers?

Goals need to be measurable but achieving your goals are not totally in your control. So if you want to generate 100 new quality leads a month, then you need to identify what it will take to help you achieve that number. Goals may take several different activities to achieve.

Optimize your web presence

Before you begin any inbound marketing activity, you must have a quality well optimized web presence so that your marketing activities are effective. Your web presence is made up of your:

• Website (which must support mobile devices)
• Social media profiles
• Business directory listings

You should be in control of them all and they should consistently project your brand. Don’t take short cuts in this important area as first impressions count. If you haven’t developed your powerful web presence, do that before you launch marketing campaigns.

Create your lead magnet

First time visitors probably won’t buy from you because they are still researching a solution and not entirely sure what you offer is what they need. Plus giving you something of value – their contact information – isn’t going to happen for free.

But in order to grow a quality email list, you need time to build trust, instill confidence in your expertise and build a relationship.

Enter the lead magnet.

A lead magnet is a free incentive to get people to give you their contact information. Your lead magnet needs to be something that your target audience values that ties into the products or services you provide.

The right magnet for your business depends on what your customer values. They don’t have to be lengthy, complex or time-intensive to create. They do, however, need to be useful.

Lead magnets come in many forms: checklists, templates, tools, infographics, presentations, guides, coupons, free estimates, webinar replays, quizzes, or surveys.

Determine what your audience would value and create the lead magnet that will help you grow your email list. You may want several lead magnets to use at different times to attract an audience at a varying points in the purchase process.

Build and nurture your email list

Now that you have your lead magnet attracting your target audience to subscribe to your list, nurture your list by sending valuable content that helps them learn more about your expertise. Nurturing is letting your subscribers get to know you and your brand through communication that offers value, not a sales pitch.Send them your blog posts, a personalized newsletter, a tutorial, an infographic or other useful content and supports the reason they subscribed to your list in the first place.

Segment your list to deliver information that is relevant to the subscriber. Segmenting your list helps you get better open and click rates. If you only collect email addresses, you have fewer options but you can still segment based on signup date or subscriber activity. If you do have more information available, you can choose other ways to segment.

One segment you absolutely should have is your customers! This is the “delight” phase of inbound marketing. Those who already do business with you should be one of your prime focus areas. Communicate with your customers and offer them special deals. Provide awesome customer service and quick responses to their questions so they can only brag about how wonderful you are. Happy and satisfied customers who understand the value you offer will not hesitate to refer new customers to you.

Identify your top social media channels

No small business needs to be active on all social media channels. Your choice of social media platforms will be different whether your business is B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer). You need to find your audience on a particular social media platform or you probably shouldn’t be there. Be smart about where you spend your time so that you don’t spread yourself too thin.

With the many ways to engage with your audience on social media, you do need a strategy. Each platform has its “rules of engagement”. Organic reach has deteriorated and pay to play is now mandatory. Other options for engaging with your audience now include private groups, live streaming and content syndication.

The three major players, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, all offer small businesses a distribution channel for your content. If you are a visual business, Pinterest and Instagram are also a good choice. And don’t forget YouTube for posting and optimizing your videos.

In all cases, you need to understand when you should post and when you should pay for visibility. Choose the most appropriate social media platform, create an ad to drive people to claim your lead magnet and get the lead generation engine running. Just make sure you are sending visitors to a high quality landing page that doesn’t chase the visitor away.

Create an editorial calendar

A robust editorial calendar is how you simplify inbound marketing. Lay out your content with their calls to action and distribution strategy in a calendar. Even if you only plan one piece of content per month, plan on how you will share it and if you can rework the content into other types of media.

For example, if you are giving a presentation or webinar, record it. Post snippets of the video on YouTube, embed them into a blog post and summarize the presentation. Send out a replay of the webinar as a lead magnet to get more subscribers. Transcribe the Q&A and turn the answers into another blog post.

Most businesses have a lot of content available to them, they just don’t realize it. Work with someone who can help you see the value of the information you have and how it can be turned into content for your inbound marketing strategy.

Eliminate the overwhelm

The best advice I can give to those wanting to implement inbound marketing for their business is to focus on a few activities that help you achieve your goals, outsource when necessary and not get distracted with all the possibilities. Being able to focus your marketing is important to those of us who need to deliver client projects while continuing to market our businesses.

How do you simplify inbound marketing for your business with limited resources?

Regulators are cracking down on misleading influencer marketing campaigns. Here’s how to keep your collaborations above board.

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Influencer marketing has emerged in the last year as a leading strategy for businesses of all sizes and industries — overtaking paid search, e-mail marketing, and even organic search to become the industry’s fastest growing channel for acquisition, according to a recent report.

With this growth has come a need for brands to clearly understand — and implement — relevant advertising laws. Although every country has its own set of rules, the common thread is simple transparency. A litmus test used by the USA’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) suggests that viewers should be able to recognize at a glance that a post is sponsored.

Here are 4 easy ways to make sure your posts are legal no matter where you are in the world:

1. Ask influencers to tag posts with #ad or #client. It’s a simple step that fits any medium, including space-restricted platforms like Twitter.
2. Require disclose in every post. It’s not enough to announce a brand-blogger relationship at the beginning of a campaign. Make sure you specify to bloggers that they must mark every post. For bloggers, a simple declaration on an about page is not sufficient.
3. Add clear language to blog posts. Ask bloggers to include specific language letting their readers know that a post is sponsored.
4. Request that bloggers use the “nofollow” code. If you ask a blogger to include a link in a sponsored post, it’s a good idea to specify that the link uses “nofollow” code to avoid unethical link building.

With any influencer marketing campaign, remember that while disclosure is largely in bloggers’ hands to implement, the responsibility ultimately rests with brands.

Prominent retailer Lord & Taylor offers a high-profile example of the consequences that brands can face for failing to disclose. The brand settled an FTC complaint earlier this year that the brand deceived customers when it failed to require disclosure in an influencer marketing campaign for its new Design Lab collection.

According to the FTC complaint, Lord & Taylor gifted 50 influencers a Paisley Asymmetrical Design Lab dress and paid each between $1,000 and $4,000 to post a picture of themselves in the dress on social media. Bloggers were contractually obligated to mention @lordandtaylor and the #DesignLab hashtag in their posts. Lord & Taylor even pre-approved each post, but none were required to disclose that the post was sponsored — a failure that the FTC says deceived consumers.

As part of its settlement with the FTC, Lord & Taylor is now required to ensure that its influencers clearly disclose when they have been compensated in exchange for their endorsements. (Notably, all brands should do this.) The company must now also allow the FTC to monitor its influencer marketing campaigns. (Something all brands should want to avoid.)

The complaint has put a spotlight on the need for transparency in a marketing realm that until recently has been very lightly regulated. With so many brands and influencers failing to disclose their relationships, an industry-wide feeling has persisted that the behavior must be OK. This thinking is damaging on many levels.

Having worked with hundreds of brands and influencers on all types of collaborations, I cannot place a higher value on trust between bloggers and consumers. Consumer trust is the very reason that influencer marketing works. If viewers have to question whether an influencer’s opinion is ‘paid’ or genuine, the value of a campaign becomes immediately diminished.

To protect yourself, your influencers, and your consumers, always require disclosure when you launch an influencer marketing campaign.

Since World War II, the U.S. has been an innovation superpower. In virtually every advanced field, whether it’s information technology, biotechnology, agriculture, or renewable energy, America holds a leading position. Other nations may challenge in one field or another, but no one can match its depth and breadth.

To account for its success, many point to America’s entrepreneurial culture, its tolerance for failure and its unique ecosystem of venture funding. Those factors do play important roles, but the most important thing driving America’s success has been its unparalleled scientific leadership.

While private companies employ some excellent scientists, most of America’s scientific research is publicly funded. Take a look at any significant innovation, such as an iPhone, and you’ll find that most, if not all, of the technology came from some government program. Google got its start from a federal grant. This is no accident, but the result of the national strategy that Vannevar Bush outlined in his 1945 report to President Truman, “Science, The Endless Frontier” that led to government agencies such as The National Science Foundation (NSF), The National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

It has been this architecture that has driven America’s technological leadership, funding everything from the first computers, the internet, GPS, laser scanners at stores and most blockbuster drugs. Return on this investment is high, estimated to be anywhere from 20% to 40%. So for companies looking to create revolutionary products, identifying and accessing cutting edge, exploratory research is a key competitive advantage.

As Bush wrote in 1945: “New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science.”

Yet that poses a problem for managers. If, as Bush argued, “there must be a stream of new scientific knowledge to turn the wheels of private and public enterprise,” how can a private company find out about that new knowledge, and turn publicly published research into a competitive advantage?

Monitor and participate

One way that firms identify and access crucial research in the public domain is to simply monitor what’s going on in the academic world. Federally funded research is published openly, so monitoring scientific journals, sending internal researchers to conferences and working closely with the offices of technology transfer at government agencies and research centers is invaluable.

In the pharmaceutical industry, the monitoring process can be incredibly elaborate. Perry Nisen, CEO at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, points out that his former employer, GlaxoSmithKline, has thousands of people working in R&D and assign experts to specific areas of interest, which some spend their entire careers focusing on.

Most companies don’t have those kinds of resources though and take a more ad hoc approach. Eric Haller, EVP and Global Head at Experian Data Labs emphasizes creating a culture of discovery. “We pay for our data scientists to go to the conferences of their choice, encourage them to publish white papers and we have weekly seminars so that they can share what they’ve learned,” he says, but doesn’t assign formal areas of focus.

The key, emphasizes Jeff Welser, a VP and Lab Director at IBM’s Almaden Research Center is to be seen as an active participant and not just a spectator. “Being immersed is incredibly critical,” he stresses. “You need to have people active at conferences, writing papers and helping the field advance. You have to put value in to get value out.”

Partner

One way that some firms get the inside track is to partner directly with academia so that they don’t have to wait for results to be published in journals (which can take years). Daniel Hook, MD, of Digital Science, explains that these are structured differently than government grants and that while corporate partnerships are often more flexible, researchers are also asked to do more.

“Generally more is asked of researchers in a private partnership, such as consulting with internal researchers,” he says. “There are also often milestones put in place that determine whether funding continues.” Additionally, companies sponsoring research usually insist on first right of refusal for any commercialization of the research and require approval prior to publication.

Giulio F. Draetta, the Director for MD Anderson’s Institute for Applied Cancer Science believes that aligned incentives are crucial to making these partnerships work. He advises first to “put in place a system that recognizes contribution based on having achieved an agreed-upon task,” such as identifying a particular molecule or receptor in cancer studies.

Yet partnering with academia can also be done at a much smaller scale. Digital Science’s Hook points to Elsevier, which offers small prizes, usually just a few thousand dollars, for scientific achievement. IBM’s Welser advises smaller firms to “look to cultivate relationships with a couple of professors. I would also think seriously about geography and build up relationships with universities in your area that you can drop in on and interact with.”

Bridge the cultural divide

One pitfall for firms looking to mine research in the academic world is the cultural divide between academic scientists who are doing exploratory work (called “basic science,” although it’s far from introductory!) and those who are focusing on research of a more applied nature. Often, scientists themselves are don’t agree on which approach is more fruitful.

For example, Sanford Burnham’s Nisen told me, “I try to find people, physician scientists especially, who understand unmet clinical needs and can verbalize the pharmacological effect that we can work back from. From there, we can go searching through the science to find useful solutions to the problem.”

Yet MD Anderson’s Draetta takes the opposite view. He says, “I still think that the greatest discovery comes from exploratory research in which there is not a specific target. Starting with a specific disease in mind is more high percentage, but the real breakthroughs come from basic discoveries,” and points to the recent advances in immunotherapy as a prime example.

Lynda Chin, of the University of Texas explains, “Basic science is a long-term proposition. You need to be single-minded and stick with it until your hypothesis is disproved. Applied science, however, requires execution by a cross-disciplinary team and you need to constantly make decisions about time and resources, taking into account not only probability of success, but also opportunity cost.”

The bottom line, she adds, is that “this means you have to work hard to integrate two different cultures and it is a challenge to do that effectively. We need to build a culture of understanding between the two disciplines.”

We need to move faster

Throughout history, integrating science and industry has proved to be an unwieldy process. Michael Faraday discovered the principles of the dynamo and the electric motor by the 1830’s. Yet the first electrical plant, Edison’s Pearl Street Station, wasn’t built until 50 years later, in 1882. Still, economist Paul David points out that the real impact didn’t come until the 1920’s. Ignaz Semmelweis argued for hand-washing in obstetric wars back in the 1840s, before being ostracized by the medical community. Today, doctors still have trouble remembering to wash their hands. Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but wasn’t commercially available until 1945.*

And lest you think that that long delays from scientific breakthrough to product are a thing of the past, consider the case of the Macintosh. Apple launched its revolutionary computer to great fanfare in 1984, but all of the basic functionality was on display as early as 1968, at Douglas Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos. Xerox had a working version as early as 1973.

True, we do have far more capabilities to catalog and search information today. Resources like Google, PubMed and ArXiv make it much easier to locate published scientific work. Other tools, such as Figshare, UberResearch and Symplectic provide further resources to identify promising research. Yet we have a long way to go to bridge the divide between industry and science.

It’s worth the effort. As IBM’s Welser explains, “The thing that’s nice about that kind of setup is that you get to pool your resources with government, academia and other industry players, which is a good thing at the pre-competitive stage.” Of course, once the collective breakthroughs become exciting new products, IBM and competitors like Intel and Microsoft fight like dogs.

And that, probably more than anything else, encapsulates how firms need to pursue exploratory research. Commerce is a necessarily competitive endeavor. Discovery, on the other hand, is a collective one. The two, however, aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. In fact, if you want to compete at the highest level, you have to treat collaboration as a competitive advantage.

*An earlier version of this article listed the date penicillin was commercially available as 1943; it wasn’t actually commercially available until 1945.

We get it. You’ve been around the block a few times. You’re hot stuff. You’re the MVP of your sales team. But you can still do better.

Master salesperson and one of the biggest advocates for continual learning in sales Zig Ziglar once said, “Life is a classroom -- only those who are willing to be lifelong learners will move to the head of the class.”

In the spirit of lifelong training and forging ahead on your path to taking over the sales world (or whatever your goals are), we’ve compiled a list of some of the best-kept secrets of master sellers. And to complete the list, we collected some of the biggest “don’ts” in sales, to help you correct bad habits or keep from forming them in the first place.

8 Secrets of Master Salespeople

1) Listen and consult instead of selling.

People know when they're being sold to, and they don’t always like it. Fight your instincts and keep from turning prospects off by learning to consult, instead of sell them.

Do this by asking a lot of questions and getting to know the prospect’s business. Listen, learn, and then advise. When a prospect feels like you care and knows you’re knowledgeable about your industry, they’ll want to work with you.

2) Be disciplined with activity goals.

Track the number of cold calls you make, how many prospects you contact every day, and other daily activities to measure your success. Having goals in place will keep you motivated and also help you track your progress as you hone your sales pitch and process. 

3) Take your time when qualifying buyers.

High-quality prospects become long-term customers and a source of strong referrals -- two things a stellar salesperson simply can’t live without.

Don’t skip over the research process with prospects to make sure they’re a good fit. Also make sure you understand what the decision maker cares about as you move through the sales process. It’s not worth chasing a sale that will never come to fruition because you can’t get the head honcho interested in what you’re saying. 

4) Keep up on your competitors.

You should live and breathe your industry. Understanding your competitive landscape helps you impress prospects and fine-tune your sales process according to the latest trends.

Keep in mind that knowing your competitors is about more than memorizing a list of product feature. You should understand how your product and customer experience are different from other offerings, so you’re prepared to answer any question a prospect throws at you.

5) Seek out critical feedback.

It’s not always easy to hear critical feedback, but sales pros know how to take that information and use it to strengthen business relationships.

Directly address complaints from clients and demonstrate how you’ll improve, and then do it. Additionally, train yourself to accept criticism gracefully instead of getting defensive. Keep in mind that the customer is always right, even if he’s wrong. Learn to use that fire in your belly as fuel to improve, not implode.

Also, don’t just wait for feedback. Proactively ask for areas of improvement and critical insights when your offer is rejected so you know where to improve next time.

6) Act on facts, not feelings.

A prospect’s decision to buy or not might be influenced by their feelings, but you should train yourself to react to facts, not emotions. Maintain an emotional distance from clients to avoid conflict or feelings of rejection. When it comes down to it, it’s not personal -- it’s just business.

Maintain this attitude in your pipeline management as well. Don’t chase after unqualified prospects because you really like a brand or want to prove a point. Spend your time on prospects that make sense for your company.

7) Get eight hours of sleep a night.

Believe it or not, this is one of the most important secrets to becoming a superstar salesperson. Successful people know how important sleep is. Arianna Huffington, Google chairman Eric Schmidt, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos have all publicly spoken out about the importance of being well rested.

Sales is a high-energy job, and relying on caffeine is ineffective and unhealthy. In order to fight off brain fog, afternoon crashes, and a negative attitude, make six to eight hours of quality sleep a night one of your top priorities.

8) Have a backup plan when you pitch.

Always have two asks ready at the end of every pitch: A primary closing strategy and a fall back position, also known as a BATNA -- your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. Rarely is a sale an easy slam dunk, even when you think the stars have aligned for you and your prospect.

Don’t be caught off-guard by not fully understanding your best case and best alternative. 

Sales Mistakes to Unlearn 

When you’ve been in sales for a while, bad habits can easily become part of your daily routine. Sometimes lifelong learning involves a little unlearning.

Whether you need to cut these practices from your repertoire or stop them in their tracks before they become habits, it’s essential you know what mistakes to avoid. 

1) Don’t let the client take over calls.

Although you don’t want to monopolize the conversation, you do want to be in charge of where it goes. As you start to understand your own sales process, break down call agendas into talking points with time allotments so you know when it’s time to move on to the next item of business.

2) Don’t ignore the emotional connection.

Facts aren’t all you need to close the deal. Focus on building an emotional connection by finding ways to relate to the client in a genuine way.

3) Don’t let your ideas be forgettable.

Become a storyteller, not a salesman. Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick, found that after a presentation, 63 percent of attendees remember stories, but only 5 percent remember statistics.

Tell a story with humor and vivid imagery to get your ideas to stick in the prospect’s mind.

4) Don’t misuse technology.

Technology shouldn’t be a crutch (like a wordy PowerPoint), but should support you while existing in the background.

Instead of relying on technology as a prop, use it as a tool to better serve your prospects. For example, Fileboard has a unique tool that helps you track a prospects engagement while you host digital presentations. If a participant clicks away from your content, you’ll know, so you can alter your pitch to re-engage the prospect. 

5) Don’t try to trap prospects with hard-sell hypotheticals.

Hard-selling prospects is the quickest way to destroy trust. Don’t ask leading questions or propose, “If X, would you buy now?” scenarios. Stay in the realm of reality to keep from turning off potential clients.

6) Don’t be a beggar.

Examine a prospect thoroughly before pitching your services, like a doctor would, instead of begging for the opportunity to show them what you can do. 

7) Don’t feel the need to fill silence.

Silence is a powerful tool when used correctly. Pause during presentations to give clients the chance to process information and take your time responding to “nos.” Clients may follow up with the solution you need to present to them.

8) Don’t talk around what you want.

When you nurture a prospect, it’s easy to feel like you’re walking on eggshells, but you can’t court them forever. When it’s time to close the deal, set a concrete objective and use clear language with the client, even if that results in a “no.”

9) Don’t close through a third party.

You need to close the person you’re talking to, not a person on behalf of someone else. Get a definitive answer from a decision maker, not a middleman.

10) Don’t be selfish at the expense of customer experience.

First and foremost, you should address your prospect's needs. If they would have to be shoehorned into successfully using your product and a competitor is simply a better fit, recommend them to build trust with that customer for the future.

11) Don’t blame others for your mistakes.

Clients can forgive an individual they have a relationship with better than a stranger or an entity. Maintain trust by not using your company as a scapegoat or blaming the process for mistakes. You’ll also build credibility if you hold yourself accountable and don’t push responsibility off to someone else. 

Turn these negative situations into positive ones by working with the client to solve the issue so it doesn’t happen again.

All of these tips and tricks aside, the best way to become a master salesperson is to dedicate to lifelong learning and loving the sales industry. Having a passion for what you do is one of the biggest secrets any master can share.

Editor's note: This post originally appeared on the Fileboard blog and is republished here with permission.

Struggling to boost stagnant sales?

Customers in your sales funnel not converting?

Thinking about running a site-wide sale?

Hold it right there cowboy.

There’s no need for that yet. The fact that your sales are slowing down could be due to a variety of things. It could be an issue with your…

• Website navigation
• User experience
• Pricing strategy
• Communication
• SEO
• Product/Service quality

“But Jordan, those are all huge long-term investments!” you say.

What if I told you that there are 3 strategies — quicker strategies — that you can use to boost your sales. Offering discounts can be a great temporary fix but using these 3 quick strategies can easily boost stagnant sales now and also a year from now.

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Employ a popup for opt-ins

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If you’re not using a popup on your website already, you’re missing out on valuable leads that can convert into sales. By simply employing a popup the amount of email opt-ins you receive can oftentimes double.

You may not like popups but the fact is — they work. The benefit of using popups — entry, exit, click, timed, or scroll popups — is that they command attention from your visitors.

A simple way to use a popup is with a benefit-driven offer. You’ve probably seen this thousands of times: “enter your email in exchange for [life-changing free product].”

I bet your email inbox is filled up with email newsletters as we speak.

Popups can be powerful but it is important to manage how intrusive your popup is. Popus that are difficult to close or are unrelenting can do more harm than good. Be sure to split test every element to see what works best for your visitors.

You can test so many different things on a popup:

• The number of form fields
• The choice of form fields
• What colours you’re using
• What you’re using to trigger the popup (entry, exit, click, scroll, timed)
• What lead magnet you’re offering
• What call to action you’re using

Once you’ve gathered more email opt-ins, they should be added to the appropriate email lists to be alerted about relevant…

• New sales
• New products
• Awesome content
• Promotions
• Partnerships

Remember that email is still the number one converting tool for digital marketing. Building a large email list that has already shown interest in your product/service is a surefire way to boost stagnant sales.

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Facebook remarketing

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Once a visitor leaves your website, your interaction with them doesn’t have to end there. A Facebook remarketing strategy can be an easy way to continue the conversation and make the sale.

What is Facebook remarketing?

If a visitor is browsing your e-commerce store, for example, and leaves with a shopping cart full of items. You can have ads for those abandoned items “remarketed” to them on Facebook.

Kissmetrics studied the rates of shopping cart abandonment and saw that 49% of individuals visit a website 2-4 times before they buy. 70% of shopping carts are abandoned while 56% of companies online use remarketing to gain customers.

Simply create your ads with the Facebook Ad Tool and insert the tracking pixel they give you onto your website. This way Facebook will know when they leave your website without converting and remarket your ads to them on their Facebook newsfeed.

Here’s an Amazon ad that was following me around Facebook for a pair of bluetooth headphones I was shopping for:

After showing an interest for this exact pair of headphones on Amazon I left the site and was quickly remarketed the product. Efficient right?

Facebook remarketing can do a number of things like:

• Generate leads
• Increase sales
• Drive traffic to your website
• Develop brand awareness
• Re-engage lost shopping carts
• Upsell to existing customers

If you’re looking to boost stagnant sales then the main issue you’d address is shopping cart abandonment. This is for people who were right on the edge of purchasing from your website and left without buying.

To remarket to someone who abandoned their shopping cart you could…

• Use an ad with a fantastic image of your product
• Present a new promotion that wasn’t available initially
• Present a similar but different product suited for their needs

The idea of remarketing is to stay present in the mind of your customer until they are ready to take out their wallet and buy.

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Test your call to action

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Testing your call to action on all of your landing pages, emails, and content can be a quick and easy process to boost stagnant sales. You can split test several things about your call to action to see what really makes your visitors convert.

Begin by deciding what about your call to action you’d like to test.

• Location on the page — Is your call to action below or above the page fold? Can your visitors see the call to action? How many call to action buttons are on the page?
• Communication — Does the communication of the call to action incite action? Is your language strong enough to make a visitor want to claim your offer?
• Colour — Is the colour strong enough to stand out on the page? Or does it blend into the page?
• Size — Is the button large enough to see? Can it be seen clearly on mobile?

Take some time to test your pricing page as well. Since your call to action is to buy, your pricing strategy should be optimized to make sales as efficiently as possible.

Some areas of your pricing page that you can test are

• New pricing tiers
• A helpful frequently asked questions (FAQ) page
• A tiny popup with helpful explanations for features
• A “featured” product, plan, or service that stands out from the rest
• Limited time pricing/offers

Split test your changes on your audience and see what is more likely to lead to a conversion. If your call to action has not been clear or effective enough, by split testing elements, you will see a sharp increase in conversions.

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Wrapping it Up

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Now that you’re locked and loaded with these three high-impact strategies to boost stagnant sales it’s time to take action. Before you go ahead and begin a sitewide sale, it would be smart to try using a popup, remarket on Facebook, or test your call to actions first.

Have you had success with any of these strategies? Do you have any you can add? Leave a comment below.

A typical salesperson starts his day with a database full of unqualified prospects—a database that was populated by buying advertising, attending trade shows, purchasing prospects lists, or other networking activities. So, who do you call first? How do you know where to start? Here’s a proven way to help your salespeople find the prospects that are most ready to buy.

Finding a Needle in The Sales Prospecting Haystack

For each prospect, the database may hold a name, physical address, phone number and an email address. That’s it. There’s likely zero information that can actually help a salesperson decide whether to contact Prospect A or Prospect B today.

This grey area is where behavioral email segmentation can be really useful. Instead of just starting at the top of your database, picking up the phone and hoping for the best, this process allows self-educating buyers to systematically tell you how interested they are in your company and which products they’re most likely to buy! It’s like being able to read your prospect’s mind.

Step One: Creating Buying Signals

For illustration purposes, let’s say you have a database of 2,000 prospects. In order to segment those 2,000 prospect database into hot, warm, and cold leads, you need to understand how interested each person is in your products, right? By devising a well-planned series of emails, you can create a system that lets your prospects unknowingly send you their buying signals and segment themselves for you. This way, you can qualify all 2,000 prospects at once.

As you begin this process, it’s important to have the right frame of mind. Most salespeople think about email in a very transactional sense. You email a prospect or customer, and the measure of success is a sale. But in behavioral email, you have to throw away that thinking.

This approach isn’t transactional—it’s a high-efficiency qualification process.

The return on investment (ROI) isn’t revenue, but knowledge. You don’t care whether your prospect buys right now. You don’t expect them to buy. You just want them to start clicking around and consuming information, because each and every time they do that, they’re sending you a behavioral cue that you can then put into a profile where you segment them behaviorally.

Step Two: Picking Your Tool

To launch your campaign, you’ll want to use an inexpensive email marketing tool such as Constant Contact, MailChimp or Emma. Each of these services enable you to send out a mass email to your database with links that are trackable down to the individual email address level. This way, you’ll be able to view each of your contacts’ individual email open/click activity.

If your company has access to higher end email marketing tools, that’s even better and will likely make the process easier. The point here is, don’t think you have to break the technology bank in order to perform this kind of segmentation.

Step Three: Defining Your BEL

Behavioral Email Logic (BEL): The most important and most difficult step of this process is designing what’s called your Behavioral Email Logic (BEL). To create your BEL, you first need to define the core message content of each email you plan to send. Then you’ll hypothesize what a prospect’s behavior (choosing to delete an email, open it, or open it and click through to your website) might be telling you. For your first campaign, this might feel like a guessing game. But I promise it will get easier.

You’ll use your hypotheses to create a sequence of emails automated to send based on the prospect’s delete/open/click pattern. For instance, maybe you’ll decide that any time a prospect deletes two emails in a row, the prospect is terminated. That person would receive no further emails under this campaign. Likewise, if the prospect opens two emails in a row and click through to your website from both emails, that person receives a specific third email message. Prospects who open two emails in a row without a click receive an entirely different third message. And so forth through all the possible delete/open/click patterns.

The goal of the BEL is simple: By sequencing the messages in a predefined pattern, you can attempt to interpret what the delete/open/click behaviors communicate. At the most basic analytical level, this delete/open/click behavior conveys interest. On a higher level, overlaying this activity with the content that produced the deletions/opens/ clicks provides additional data points for segmentation.

Step 4: Launch, Monitor & Report

Completing a campaign takes about six to eight weeks because you have to give prospects time to act on the emails. I’ve found that prospects either act on an email almost immediately or save it and come back to it within three to five days. So I recommend sending each wave of emails 7 to 10 days apart, giving respondents plenty of time to indicate their level of interest through their actions.

By the end of your campaign, you’ll easily notice some very eye-opening results. Out of 2,000 prospects, you might find 300 warm prospects who have opened emails, clicked on emails, and read a few items on your website. And out of those, you might have jumping out at you just a handful of truly hot prospects. These are people who not only opened emails, but also clicked on more than one email and/or read multiple items on your company’s website. Maybe these prospects even completed a lead-generation form on the website.

Obviously you’ll want to call your few hot prospects first and then work your way through the warm list. Don’t even bother calling anyone on the cold list until you’ve completely worked your way through the warm list. But more than just who to call, the data you’ve cultivated can tell you a lot about each prospect’s particular pain points. Which emails did the prospect open? What kind of content did they click on? This data, along with a quick google search and glancing through the prospect’s social network profiles, will help you craft a really focused and relevant personal outreach.

And there you have it, the beauty of behavioral email. It not only helps focus your efforts on your hottest leads, but more importantly, it tells you exactly what you need to say or sell to each one. You’re on your way to closing more sales and creating a happier, more effective sales team.