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Today marks the formal shipping date of Beyond the Sales Process: 12 Strategies for a Customer-Driven World. For those of you who are interested, here is some of the back story. ...

Marketers are always looking for ways to get the most bang for their marketing buck. Trade shows are one of the most efficient ways to spend your resources because they consolidate multiple marketing goals into one campaign. Where else can you reach a large audience, sell products, network within your industry and collect leads all in one place? Keep reading to learn about how trade shows can help your marketing ROI.

Client Feedback

Having the opportunity to meet face-to-face with your clients is one of the most rewarding parts of exhibiting at a trade show. It’s also one of the best ways to hear honest feedback from your customer base.

Before heading to your next trade show, make sure you create a survey to give out to current clients on the show floor. You can also create a list of questions for your booth staffers to ask during their conversations with customers to gain better insights into what your customers want.

Getting direct feedback on your products and services is invaluable. You can take the information gathered from your trade show and refine your products and sales approach, and hopefully increase future revenue.

Branding

Enhancing brand recognition is one of the most effective ways of increasing your marketing ROI. Trade shows allow you to position your brand as a key player in your industry or niche, so the investment in time and resources can pay off big in the future.

While exhibiting at a trade show, your brand is on display to buyers, members of the press and other industry colleagues in an environment where they can see your products in person, learn about your brand directly from your booth staffers and give firsthand accounts about your brand via social and traditional media outlets.

While planning for your trade show, make sure your booth and marketing collateral reflect your company’s brand image, create press kits tailored for the event and use your preferred social media channels to promote your show presence before, during and after the event.

Networking

Meeting face-to-face helps build trust between potential buyers and brands. It can be difficult to build trust over the phone or via email, and sending sales representatives out on field sales calls can be expensive. Trade shows present the perfect networking platform. Booth staffers can build relationships with multiple potential clients on the show floor, reducing the costs of individual visits.

While exhibiting at a trade show, you and your staff can meet with multiple vendors and compare and contrasts products and pricing. Before or after show floor hours, plan to meet with vendors who are also exhibiting at the show.

Trade shows always have a strong media presence, so make sure you plan to seek out and establish relationships with members of the press.

Prospecting

Trade shows are second to none when it comes to presenting your brand to new prospects. In fact, it is not uncommon for booth staffers to meet with hundreds of prospects a day while on the show floor. The prospects you meet on the show floor are typically high value; many are decision makers and purchasers looking to source new products and connect with vendors.

Expanding your network of prospects will help your sales staff by providing them with hot leads. Make sure your sales staff always quickly follows up with prospects after the event.

Conclusion

When calculating your overall marketing ROI, remember to track and attribute sales, leads and brand exposure to your trade show campaigns. By attributing positive return to your trade show marketing, you will not only prove to your managers the value of meeting face-to-face, you will also better understand how to budget for future trade show campaigns.

With billions of online searches done each and every day for products and services, your website is the catalyst to driving more sales for your business. But even though you may have a modern, updated site, chances are you are probably missing out on the one major factor that can turn your website into a sales machine: well placed and intentional calls to action. In fact the majority – 70% of small business B2B websites – lack a call to action according to Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends.

What does a Call to Action do?

A Call to Action (CTA) is a text hyperlink, button, or image on your website designed to encourage potential visitors to take an action. According to Kissmetrics, 96% of people are not ready to buy from you the first time they visit your website, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t able to capture prospects early in the buying process.

Placing clear CTAs throughout your site in exchange for valuable resources – like webinars, how to guides, checklists, and product offers – transforms your website from a digital brochure to a lead generation engine. CTAs also help your visitors to better understand what you expect them to do (learn more!) and what actions to take next (schedule a call!).

Without these call to action prompts on your website, your visitors will bounce without learning anything more about your business, and without leaving any follow-up information behind.

If you want to turn your website traffic into new leads for your business and generate more customers online, here are five CTA opportunities your website might be missing:

“Solve Your Problem”

Converting anonymous visitors to your website into actual leads you can follow-up with can be a real challenge for most businesses. By using “lead magnets” throughout your website, you’ll grow your pipeline of prospects.

A good lead magnet attracts your ideal customer by addressing a specific problem they might be struggling with. Here is a great example from the Hatchbuck homepage:

Offering helpful resources (like our free marketing planner) in exchange for a lead’s contact info and email address both gives your visitors tools they can use to be successful and grows your lead pipeline at the same time.

The marketing planner lead magnet on our homepage, for example, was crazy successful at growing our pipeline. In fact, we drove over 1200 new leads into our sales funnel in just 2 weeks.

If you aren’t sure what type of lead magnet to build for your website and need a little inspiration, here are 6 simple lead magnets to test on your site.

Bonus tip:

Keep your lead magnet form short a sweet. A name and email address might be all you need to start a conversation with a lead. Asking for too much information can actually deter leads from filling out your form. Instead, use your content as a way to segment your leads and their interests. For instance, we know that anyone who requested our marketing planner was looking at revamping their marketing efforts for 2016, while anyone who requested our marketing automation guide was ready to look at software.

“Learn More About Our Business”

Potential leads can land on your website in many different ways. They might do a google search and land on your homepage. Or they might click on a link they saw on social media and enter your website through your main blog.

Including “Read More”, “Learn More” or “View Page” buttons on your site will drive visitors more deeply into your site content, helping them down the path to becoming a customer.

Keep content on your homepage, your landing pages, and your main blog page short, easily scanned and well-organized. Cut out any unnecessary jibber jabber and keep it brief as a way to maximize the visitor experience.

Instead of going in depth into a product or article, for instance, include “Read More” or “Learn More” CTAs that take visitors to a related page on your site where you can really dive into the nitty gritty details. That way, visitors can quickly scan the page they land on and navigate to the content that is most important to them, optimizing their experience on your website. Here’s an example from Hootsuite:

“Like or Share”

Along with lead generation, your website can help to promote your brand and reach more of your ideal audience. A simple yet often overlooked call to action tip is using social sharing buttons:

Buffer uses social sharing buttons such as Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest to help build their social audience and expand their reach – and you can, too.

When a visitor to your site (including your customers) shares information with others via social media, they bring that third party cred factor to your brand. Their network is exposed to your business through a trusted peer, and your prospect pool becomes larger.

The trust brands build with their audience through social media isn’t just about brand awareness. A strong social presence is a major contributing factor to why consumers decide to purchase. So, if you aren’t encouraging social shares on your site, considered it a missed opportunity.

“Go Ahead. Check Out Our Product.”

Once you have a visitor checking out your site don’t forget the obvious – make it easy for them take the next step to engage with your product(s). Using a prominent product CTA button on your homepage and throughout your site gives your potential customers a clear way to find out how your product meets their specific needs.

A quick explainer video, or product page that lists benefits and features are great ways to give interested prospects an overview of how you can help them solve a problem.

For example, LeadDyno has a “Take a Tour” button on their site that sends visitors to a quick overview video of their software:

There are a number of ways to showcase your product depending on your industry and sales process. For some businesses a “Live Demo” leading to a consultative meeting with a sales rep may be the best fit. For some, a “Self Guided Tour” can give prospects all the information they need before they sign. As a best practice, have this button stand out by differentiating it from any other CTA buttons you use on your site. Keep the button color and button text consistent throughout your site, so when a visitor is ready to dive into your product, they instantly know where to click.

Bonus Tips:

When using a product call to action try to stick to what makes a powerful and clickable call to action:

• Keep this call to action above the fold.
• Think about common traffic areas on your site such as the top navigation on your homepage, pages that describe product features or benefits, and even blog articles with content relevant to your product offers.
• Maximize your conversions by keeping your button text simple and aligned with the offer on the other end once the user clicks through.

“Buy Me”

Once your prospects have had the chance to engage with your online resources and learn more about your product, don’t miss the opportunity to ask for the sale. This means using specific call to action buttons to to make it easy for your new customers to sign up for your products or services:

Box uses simple CTA buttons to get visitors in the buying process. Bold “Buy It” buttons capture those who are ready to do business now. A less highlighted “Try It” button for a 14 day trial captures those not quite ready to take the plunge. Lastly, for users with more complex needs, a “Contact Us” CTA creates a better experience for enterprise visitors.

When thinking about what calls to action will work best to close the sale, make sure you align the CTA with the needs of your visitors.Then, measure conversions with proper tracking to better understand what’s working and what’s not.

A compelling call to action is vital to helping your visitors navigate through the buying process. Putting these 5 top call to action tips to practice on your website positions you to capture missed opportunities, turning more visitors into leads and converting more online prospects into customers.

Are machines coming to take your job away? That has been a popular narrative since the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the last century, but there are still plenty of people working out there. Machines can automate repetitive tasks and prevent humans from having to do too much physical labor, but it takes humans to come up with the ideas to begin with. In short, automation isn’t going to take away all the jobs any time soon.

Automation has already gone a long way to simplifying things that were once complicated and involved a great deal of human interaction. You don’t need to call a cab and pay a human anymore when you want to go somewhere- just click your Uber app. You don’t need to call a hotel to make a reservation and then stand in line to check in anymore- you just click your AirBNB app. You don’t need to analyze massive amounts of data when you can use a program like Palantir.

When you apply automation to marketing, you can rely on machines to make your job easier. It still takes a human brain to input ideas, program the software, and make sense of the output, but machines can help do the heavy lifting. Machines will never replace the creativity of human brains, but they can help to make things easier to do on a larger scale. Take pay-per-click advertising, for example. Machines can do the work of going out and finding the leads, and then sorting the leads by which are the strongest, but it will ultimately take a human to convert those leads to sales.

Learn more about how automation can improve marketing from this infographic. When the machines come to help with automation, will you send them away out of fear or embrace them?

Infographic Courtesy of Global SEM Partners

A daily joural allows you to tap into the deepest reservoirs of life and gives you power over decision making.

Salesforce just bought another startup in the machine learning space, an area the cloud software maker has been doubling down on recently.

The startup is called MetaMind, a startup that specializes in artificial intelligence using natural language and image recognition technology. It's raised $8 million so far from Khosla Ventures and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

The announcement was made through a blog post on MetaMind's website. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Salesforce was not immediately available for comment.

Salesforce has been on a buying spree in the machine learning and data analysis space lately, scooping up startups like PredictionIO, MinHash, and Tempo AI. Just two years ago, it spent $390 million to buy RelateIQ, a software that helps automate data-input and gives sales recommendations.

The moves are part of Salesforce's effort to make smarter and more predictive software, as Benioff believes that's where the future of software is headed. At a recent conference, Benioff stressed that systems capable of analyzing data and recommending the right course of action will be where the next wave of opportunity comes from.

"This will be the huge shift going forward, which is that everybody wants systems that are smarter, everybody wants systems that are more predictive, everybody wants everything scored, everybody wants to understand what’s the next best offer, next best opportunity, how to make things a little bit more efficient," Benioff said.

Salesforce recently launched IoT Cloud, a software platform that collects and analyzes data to help companies make better decisions. Two years ago, it launched Wave, a data analytics platform.

SEE ALSO: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says there's a major shift happening in business software

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This mind-melting thought experiment of Einstein's reveals how to manipulate time

Yesterday, a coalition of journalists across the world launched the Panama Papers, a project to uncover the dirty secrets of the rich and powerful. An anonymous source provided reporters at the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung with a 2.6TB d...

Email personalization at scale is one of the toughest tasks in the sales development process. While email automation has been scorching the prospect earth, customization and hyper-personalization have been moving their way to the front seat.

But what good is a hyper-personalized email if no one opens it?

Finding the right level of personalization within an email body is one thing, but defining what aspects of email subject lines influence open and reply rates is a whole different beast.

We wanted to take the guesswork out of email subject lines, so we went to the lab here at SalesLoft for some authentic data around email tracking.

The first step in uncovering the best subject lines was defining what deems an email template the “best” overall. So SalesLoft Support Engineer Andy Perez went deep diving into the stats, and decided to pull out which email templates were getting the strongest open rates. It was by these standards that we deemed email templates receiving the most views and replies as “best,” since they were the ones garnering the most positive activity.

But what gave those specific templates such successful open rates? Andy dug a little deeper, and noticed that many of these high-performing email subject lines had a few things in common:

1. A dynamic tag
2. A question
3. Three words or less

Of the templates with a view rate greater than or equal to 50%, we came across each of these characteristics among the top performers.

For example, the subject line “{{company}}, Highest Cash Values” had a 61% open rate, “Third time’s the charm?” coming in with a 50% open rate and a 25% of replies, and “Get press for {{company}}” with a staggering 71% open rate.

The common thread between these characteristics all come back to our most devoted theme: hyper–personalization.

When you’re selling to salespeople in this SaaS industry, it’s easy to reach for automation in daily sales emails. But email subject lines that are long, wordy, and unpersonalized are likely going to bypass the inbox and go straight to trash.

By using the same touches of customization that you would in the email’s body, your chances of resonating with the receiver are infinitely higher. The personalization of dynamic tags, combined with the brevity of short, direct questions, show your prospects that you not only care about their individual account, but that you respect their time and attention.

While there’s certainly no hard and fast rule behind getting a human being to open an email, these specific aspects of email subject lines have proven data behind their success. But, when it comes to hyper-personalization, testing is key. Dive deeper into your sales development team’s email tracking history, uncover the successes (and even the failures) within your data, and then use that data when injecting finding your place on the personalization-automation continuum.

A personalized sales process is a sincere sales process, so why not take the time to find out what works best for your email subject lines?

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Want more advice about email personalization? Download our eBook on the 7 Secret Sauce Ingredients To A Sales Email Tool:

The post 3 Things That Your Email Subject Lines Need appeared first on SalesLoft.

Millennials are about to be the largest segment of employees in the workforce. Their potential to make an impact on your small business is hard to ignore.

But what we also cannot ignore is the talent that lies within mid-career professionals. As we know, competition for great employees is fierce and for your small business to win the battle, there are a few things to consider about these types of potential applicants.

Here are some great ideas, gathered from business owners worldwide on the differences between the two sets of employees:

“They [mid-career professionals] started working during the technological era, but don’t rely on it. Most mid-career professionals started their careers at the cusp of massive technological advancement. They understand how the technology works and they use it efficiently. Microsoft Word, Excel, CRMs and ERPs? No problem! However, they don’t RELY on technology like the millennial generation. They know how to call a cab and not wait for an Uber. They also know that a picture with Kim Kardashian is ultimately useless,” explained Sebastien Dupéré, President and CEO of Dupray.

“The most obvious difficulty when hiring entry-level workers is a lack of skills and familiarity with the workplace. Younger folks might take time to adjust to working full-time in an office environment, especially if this their first job post-college. On the other hand, I would expect mid-career workers to have a set of knowledge and skills a new worker probably lacks. And if someone has been in the workforce 5-10 years but doesn’t have skills that make them stand out compared to new workers, that probably isn’t someone you want to hire,” said Marc Prosser, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Fit Small Business.

Owner and founder of Power Digital Marketing Grayson Lafrenz shared thoughts on both ends of the spectrum:

“Here are some benefits to hiring mid-career professionals: They usually come with a strong skill set and require less training and more seamless integration into workflows and teams. They have already worked at several companies so they don’t have that ‘grass is always greener’ mentality and can really appreciate the great benefits and culture that your company has. They are usually more polished and professional so from a management perspective they are typically lower maintenance and require less time to support.

For millennials, in my experience they are very knowledge hungry and if you can help them grow their skill sets, they will thrive in that environment. They generally come to you with no bad habits (or necessarily good habits) so you have the opportunity to really coach them up and help make them great. Depending on your industry, they bring you some great forward-thinking and are not afraid to challenge the status quo and try to evolve strategy. Also the acquisition price to hire these individuals is usually lower because they don’t have the experience, overhead and commitments of a mid-career person. You can think of it as a rookie baseball player who is still on their rookie contract vs. picking up a pricing veteran in free agency.”

To round things out, Bill Fish, founder and president of ReputationManagement.com makes a great point that, well… age shouldn’t matter.

“Mid-career people have been around the block so to speak and can be more focused on executing ideas. To pigeon hole your business into one demographic, whether it is millennials or dare I say ‘old’ people in their later 30s, it’s not in the best interest of your business. The goal should be to get the most out of the skill set of everyone at your business regardless of the year they were born,” he said.

While it is true that you shouldn’t hire based solely on number of years in the workforce, this insight provides some items for you to consider when weighing your candidate options.

You can read the original post by clicking here.

The sinking dollar has forced lots of firms to adjust their pricing upward. We asked for some expert advice on how to persuade your customers to pay more:

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You have to tell a story…

“You don’t change prices without a story. That is arguably the dumbest thing you can ever do. The challenge is when the story is highly complex. Mobile communications is a perfect example. Everybody screams that three-year contracts are too long, but because it’s a three-year contract, the cost of the phone can be spread out. You have to plan a campaign around these notions. Instead of an increase coming out of the blue, it seems like a natural consequence of a series of events that have led to the company to say, ‘There’s nothing more we can do.’”

Kenneth Wong, associate professor of marketing, Smith School of Business, Kingston, Ont.

…except when you don’t

“There are no hard and fast rules around this, and part of being a good marketer is understanding when the rules apply and when they don’t. This rule that you should always provide an explanation—well, that could be a bad business strategy. Say I’m running Esso right now, and I need to raise my price by 5¢ because the cost of crude oil went up. If I spend a million dollars explaining that to the public, I’ve just wasted a million dollars of my shareholders’ money. People are conditioned to expect some price increases, just like we’re conditioned to expect gas prices to go up or down with the price of crude oil. Spending money to tell people something they already know is a bad business decision.”

David Soberman, professor of marketing, Rotman School of Management, Toronto

Big clients need special treatment

“If it’s a large customer, you need to tell them face to face and be prepared for a long fight. Have your salesperson go in there to make the announcement. If the discussion escalates to another level and the client pulls in a leader to the conversation, you need to be prepared to escalate on your side as well. Don’t leave the salesperson hanging there. Bring in someone on a similar level, such as your VP or general manager, to support that salesperson. These kinds of discussions can go on for months. One of my clients spent a year negotiating with one of the largest companies in the world. But they were persistent and resolved to get that price increase, and eventually my client wore them down.”

Ralph Zuponcic, president, Price Point Partners, Hudson, Ohio

Don’t be so apologetic

“Clients I coach fall down by simply going in and feeling guilty and apologetic about the price increase. Then they feel like they’re backpedaling when they’re having the conversation. If you’re business-to-business, every one of your clients has built their company by running a smart commercial entity, and they don’t give away products for free. If you have a fact-based conversation to explain the rationale for a price increase, they will get it. You want to absolutely ignore the impulse to throw things in and soften the blow. Even if there is a price increase, I want to be absolutely sure my clients are getting far more value than they’re paying for with my solution. This can be an opportunity to review the value you’re providing.”

Mark Cox, managing partner, In the Funnel, Toronto

Acknowledge the outrage

“If I’m a consumer and I say, ‘I’m morally offended that you did this,’ and you respond by listing a product’s features and benefits, I’m going to be like, ‘You’re not hearing me.’ You have to respond to moral outrage with emotion. You can say you have not done a good job of communicating what you’ve been investing in. Then you can go on to how you’re improving customer service or whatever it is. But first, you admit, ‘Our bad.’”

Kelly Peters, CEO and co-founder, BEworks, Toronto

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MORE ABOUT ADVICE & MANAGEMENT:

• How to hire a temporary manager to fix a problem you can’t
• How to rename your company
• What to do when your company’s growth stalls
• How to recruit a great team of advisors
• How established companies can think like startups again
• How to make employee profit-sharing work for your company
• The right way to get media coverage for your company
• Four ways to hire your next employee without ever looking at a resumé

The post How to raise your prices without driving away your clients appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

I’m one of those people who hates being sold to. I’ll never engage with cold calls, stop to speak with promotional street teams or fundraisers (known in the UK as “chuggers” – blending the words “charity” and “muggers”), or subscribe to in-store loyalty programs when prompted at a checkout. In short, I’m your sales team’s worst nightmare.

It’s not that I don’t buy things, support charities or have loyalty toward specific brands – of course I do. But if you want me to become your customer, you’d better not send aggressive, ill-informed, clumsy salespeople my way – they’ll do more to turn me off your product or service than to get me excited about the prospect of making a purchase.

Build Trust

The first step to winning me as customer is to build my trust by demonstrating that your brand/product/service can add value to my life. The best way to do this is via testimonials, endorsements, independent reviews and educational resources.

I’m far more likely be swayed to make a purchase if a product has been recommended by someone I consider to be a peer.

You might say that the best way to make me a customer is to do a good job for someone else first.

Share the Good News

Once you’ve created those testimonials, endorsements, independent reviews and educational resources, you’ll need to share them as widely as possible via your website, blog, email and social media (encouraging your employees, business partners and customers to do the same).

Instead of approaching me directly with a “cold” sales call, let me believe I have discovered you. This makes me feel smart and more open to your (gentle) approach.

Don’t be shy when sharing content. The more proactive your approach, the more “discoverable” you become. Make sure your name can be seen everywhere.

Add Value and Capture Data

Once you’ve been discovered, you need to add value to your proposition by educating your prospects. Downloadable eBooks, white papers, brochures and online events like webinars are great ways of doing this and enable you to capture valuable marketing data, including names, telephone numbers and email addresses.

Nurture

Once you’ve captured my interest, it’s time to start nurturing our relationship. You do this with more engaging and useful content.

Marketing automation technology, which helps you deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, can help you become a smarter marketer in this respect.

The more useful the content, the more engaged I become, and the more likely I am to make the first move and contact you – giving you permission to deploy the sales team.

The Warm Call

If you have taken the time to attract my attention and nurture my interest and I still haven’t engaged in business with you, there may yet be an opportunity to develop our relationship.

A “warm call” is the complete opposite of a cold call. It is targeted, informed and, if handled correctly, welcomed.

Perhaps it could be an invitation to an event or product demonstration. Perhaps you might want to discuss my specific business needs, helping you to shape your product/service road map. Perhaps you just want to make me a really great offer.

Because I’ve engaged with you previously, because you have done your research and because I feel like I know (and trust) you, I’ll take your call, and I might actually enjoy being sold to.

How do you take the sting out of sales? Share your comments below:

This abridged post first appeared on the iContact Email Marketing Blog.

Photo: Craig Sunter

How do you get people to open your emails? While there isn’t a definitive science to the mastery of high open rates, we do know some surefire ways to increase your email open rates. With the help of some email marketing experts, I’ve put together a short list of 5 simple ways to increase your email open rates.

Test Subject Lines

Subject lines can make or break an email. This aspect is key in grabbing attention and making a good impression. To determine what works with your subscribers, you need to run tests. Test your subject lines on small portions of your list before sending it to your master list.

Stacey Herbert from Brazen Profit Lab runs split tests in this fashion:

“With clients, we tend to split test subjects on 5k segments. First we’ll test two subject lines. Next, we’ll send the winning subject to everyone who didn’t open the losing subject. We’ll then send the winning subject line to the master list or appropriate segments.”

Simple tests like this are great ways to increase your open rate, and you can run them even if you have a smaller list.

Try Different Send Times

Like most things in life, everything is in the timing, and emails are no different. This might seem like a no brainer but sending your emails at the right time to your audience can sometimes make all the difference.

It’s important to also note that there is no one time fits all. You need to consider your audience and determine when they are most likely going to open a message from you. Here are a few guidelines to determine the optimal time to send emails:

• Who is your audience? Are you marketing to other businesses? Maybe weekday mornings are best to reach business owners. Running a DIY blog? Fridays and saturdays could be your best bet to creating excitement for projects.
• Where are your subscribers located? Segment lists based on geo-location. No point in sending an email to an individual in Australia at 3AM.
• What kind of email is it? Look for behavioral patterns and see if there’s anything you can take advantage of. If click through rates are higher in the afternoon, you may consider actionable emails after lunch time.
• Use the data you have. Email marketing produces a lot of useful data which you can use to improve send times. Do some digging, you’ll be surprised what you find!
• Test, Test, Test! Your audience is unique which means you need to find what works with your subscribers. Write down some hypotheses based on the guide lines above and then run some split tests!

Address Deliverability

Deliverability is the percentage of sent emails that actually end up in the contact’s inbox. Common reasons why your emails may not be delivered are unsubscribes, soft bounces, hard bounces, and invalid email addresses. You also have to keep an eye out for spam folders. The general idea here is that the more emails you can get delivered into someone’s inbox, the greater chance you have of getting them opened.

Daniel Kohn of Smartmail.io gave me some insight on how he deals with deliverability:

There are many different elements to addressing deliverability but on the most basic level, the first step would be to look at your list, understand which email clients (Gmail, Yahoo etc.) the majority of your list are on and start to better understand which words to avoid using in your subject lines to avoid spam and promotional filters.

For example the words“free” and “coupon” are big no no’s across the board. Making some simple changes to your subject lines could make all the difference.

Clarity over Creativity

In a typical email inbox, people only have three pieces of info to consider when deciding whether or not to open an email: the from name, subject line, and pre-header text. Very little information to display the value of opening to the subscriber. At a time when people have shrinking attention spans and itchy delete fingers, it’s crucial that you get it right.

Cynthia Price, the VP of Marketing at Emma, provides some insight on how to win in the inbox territory game:

When it comes to these three fields, simpler is better. Or to put it another way, prioritize clarity over creativity. People are bombarded with emails, are quickly scanning their inboxes and want to avoid risk (aka spam), so be totally clear about where the email is coming from and the content it contains. It’s the best (and quickest) way to get more people opening your emails.

This doesn’t mean you can’t be creative with your email subjects and preview text. Just make sure that it’s simple and captures the purpose of your email. At the end of the day, email marketing is about effective getting your message across and keeping it simple is the best way to achieve this!

Use Email Series and Lifecycle Campaigns

Consistency is key in establishing relationships and trust with your readers. It’s also a great way to condition subscribers to receiving and opening your emails. This is why email series are such an effective tactic.

At the very least, you should have a welcome email series. This could be an onboarding series for your software, a showcase of your top tier content, or quick looks at your top products. Then, you can feed contacts into other lifecycle campaigns. Need some inspiration? Check out these 20 lifecycle email campaigns.

Joy Bird engages their subscribers with this content email to help shoppers measure their living space for furniture. This process is an important process of buying furniture. This lifecycle email is encouraging subscribers to start the process required to purchase furniture which sends prospects further down the sales funnel.

Keep your Email List Fresh

In order for your emails to get opened, they need to be sent to active contacts. Your email list will have turnover over time and this is just something you have to deal with. People will change emails and unsubscribe so it’s important to maintain an active mailing list.

Remove unsubscribed email addresses and email addresses that have caused your emails to bounce several times. This allows you to get accurate data on your email campaigns plus, it’s nice to clean house sometimes. If you want to run a reactivation or resubscribe campaign, create a segment for inactive subscribers.

The simplest way you can keep a fresh email list is to continue to capture emails. New subscribers are much more engaged and it’s always good to get fresh eyes on your newsletter. Here are 7 tips for creating effective email sign up forms that will consistently build your email list.

Get to It!

These 5 tips will help you improve email marketing ROI. By increasing email open rates, your marketing message will get more exposure and you’ll open up more opportunities for click throughs and sales. What other ways do you increase email open rates? Share your tips in the comments section below!

There are just under three months until Britons vote for whether the UK should stay or leave the European Union and businesses across the nation are navigating through uncertain territory.

Basically, we don't know if Britain is going to leave the 28-nation bloc or not after the vote on June 23 and this is causing some strain over how companies conduct their businesses.

Deloitte has just published its 35th quarterly survey of 120 Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and Group Finance Directors of major companies in the UK, and it shows that a significant number of firms are under-prepared for a potential Brexit.

On top of that, the survey showed that 83% of CFOs think, "the level of uncertainty facing their business is above normal, high, or very high." This is up from 64% in the last quarter and is at the highest level since Q4 2012.

The 2016 Q1 survey took place between March 8 and March 21.

While 120 CFOs doesn't sound like a big sample size, it's actually pretty significant. The survey includes 20 FTSE 100 CFOs and 55 FTSE 250 company chiefs. Overall, the combined market value of the 84 UK-listed companies surveyed is £360 billion, or approximately 17% of the UK-quoted equity market.

So, actually, the survey offers a pretty decent insight into what some of Britain's biggest companies are doing and thinking.

Here are some of the other key stats taken from the report:

• 89% say EU membership has helped UK export performance.
• 86% say EU membership has attracted foreign direct investment.
• 71% say EU membership has contributed to the success of UK financial services.
• 68% say EU membership has boosted the UK’s influence and connections with the rest of the world.
• On a scale of 0 to 100 (where 100 is the greatest risk) CFOs gave the EU referendum a risk rating of 54.
• 75% of CFOs say now is a bad time to take risk onto their balance sheets, up from 63% in Q4 and the highest level since Q4 2012.
• Just 18% say they plan to increase hiring within their companies, down from 40% in Q4 and the lowest level since Q4 2012.
• 40% of CFOs say cost reduction is a strong priority.
• 13% say asset disposals are a priority — the highest level since Q1 2013.
• 77% of CFOs say now is a bad time for UK corporates to issue equity

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The real estate trick billionaires use to sell their penthouses faster and for more money

The main benefit of an interstellar mission is to carry out in-situ measurements within a target star system. To allow for extended in-situ measurements, the spacecraft needs to be decelerated. One of the currently most promising technologies for deceleration is the magnetic sail which uses the deflection of interstellar matter via a magnetic field to decelerate the spacecraft. However, while the magnetic sail is very efficient at high velocities, its performance decreases with lower speeds. This leads to deceleration durations of several decades depending on the spacecraft mass. Within the context of Project Dragonfly, initiated by the Initiative of Interstellar Studies (i4is), this paper proposes a novel concept for decelerating a spacecraft on an interstellar mission by combining a magnetic sail with an electric sail. Combining the sails compensates for each technologys shortcomings: A magnetic sail is more effective at higher velocities than the electric sail and vice versa. It is demonstrated that using both sails sequentially outperforms using only the magnetic or electric sail for various mission scenarios and velocity ranges, at a constant total spacecraft mass. For example, for decelerating from 5% c, to interplanetary velocities, a spacecraft with both sails needs about 29 years, whereas the electric sail alone would take 35 years and the magnetic sail about 40 years with a total spacecraft mass of 8250 kg. Furthermore, it is assessed how the combined deceleration system affects the optimal overall mission architecture for different spacecraft masses and cruising speeds. Future work would investigate how operating both systems in parallel instead of sequentially would affect its performance. Moreover, uncertainties in the density of interstellar matter and sail properties need to be explored.

The Msail (Magnetic Sail) consists of a superconducting coil and support tethers which connect it to the spacecraft and transfer the forces onto the main structure. The current through the coil produces a magnetic field. When the spacecraft has a non-zero velocity, the stationary ions of the interstellar medium are moving towards the sail in its own reference frame. The interaction of ions with the magnetosphere of the coil leads to a momentum exchange and a force on the sail, along the direction of the incoming charged particles.

According to Zubrin, the current densities of superconductors can reach up to jmax = 2 · 10^10A/m2 and this is the value used in the analysis. For the material of the sail, the density of common superconductors like copper oxide (CuO) and YBCO was used, with ρMsail = 6000 kg/m3.

The main disadvantage of the magnetic sail is also evident when taking the force formula into account. At lower speeds, the force keeps getting reduced asymptotically, and hence the effect of the Msail at these velocities becomes negligible. This has as consequence that reaching orbital speeds (10-100 km/s) requires long deceleration duration.


In the present work, the power system for the Esail was modeled with a specific power supply of 50 W/kg. Although the details of the power system were not part of this analysis, photovoltaic cells could be used, utilizing the laser beam power in combination with radioisotope thermoelectric generators and batteries. Another option is the use of electromagnetic tethers as an energy source, by means of electromagnetic induction.

It becomes clear that the Esail has a disadvantage when dealing with high speeds, because of the very high voltage and consequently system mass needed. For that reason, an additional system would be necessary for the initial deceleration from the high cruising speeds until the point where an optimally designed Esail can take over.

Missions to neighboring star systems require high cruising speeds in order to reduce the total trip duration. There have been proposals based on fusion propulsion that aim to keep the total mission duration underneath 100 years, which means that an average speed bigger than 0.0435 c is necessary in the case of Alpha Centauri. The present analysis focuses on missions with the objective of performing scientific measurements in the target system, hence requiring orbital insertion around a star or a planet. In this context, the combination of Msail and Esail seems to be an elegant solution.

Starting the deceleration phase of the mission with the use of a magnetic sail is beneficial, due to the high forces produced in the large velocity range. As the velocity decreases, the force drops also and the Msail starts being ineffective. At this moment (which has to be optimally chosen as described later), the Msail can be switched off and detached from the spacecraft and the Esail can start operating. The electric sail must be designed to perform optimally in this velocity region and can decrease the velocity of the spacecraft further, until the required value for orbital insertion is achieved.






Electric space Sail

Magnetic Space Sail

Arxiv - Combining Magnetic and Electric Sails for Interstellar Deceleration

Read more »

As a sales leader, it’s important to reflect on the wins and the losses. It’s fun to rehash victory stories and overcoming resistance to win a new customer logo. And while it can sometimes be discouraging to rehash a loss – especially if it’s fresh and still hurts – there’s a lot that can be learned from understanding why the deal went south. This is why running a regular win/loss can truly be a “win-win” for your sales team.

The benefits of these win/loss reviews are more powerful than they may appear. For customer wins, you understand the value the customer saw, the red flags you overcame, the relationships you built, and so on. And for losses, you can take a deeper look at objections and where they went wrong, relationships that perhaps weren’t strong enough, competitor’s value, and etc. And because you’ll run them in cooperation with your sales team, it’s the ultimate way to build buy-in on executing new sales strategies so you can put more deals up in the win column.

But the true value of win/loss reviews and deep analysis isn’t only understanding the sales process and what went right or wrong. There’s also value in that you’ll better understand the buying process and putting yourself in your customer’s shoes to grasp all of their interactions with your company and team. This “buyer centric” approach of evaluating the buying process from a recent set of wins and losses via a workshop discussion can prove to be incredibly valuable.

The Buyer Centric Win/Loss Approach

Preparing for the Meeting

Here’s a detailed look at the process that your team can essentially copy and paste into your own buyer centric win/loss analysis:

• Schedule a 90-min meeting with a group of your sales team to perform a “win / loss analysis”.
• Ask each salesperson to come to the meeting with 3 recent wins, and 3 recent losses.
• At the start of the meeting, explain the purpose, which is to help everyone understand why we win and why we lose so everyone can get better together (together is the key word – this shouldn’t feel like a threatening meeting).
• Stress that although we all love talking about our wins, it’s important to talk about losses so we can learn what happened and come up with ways to win more in the future. It’s important for your team to know this is a safe environment to objectively discuss the losses – not a meeting to criticize. It’s key that you let the salesperson who worked the deal do most of the talking on the losses – it should NOT be the sales leader explaining what they did wrong.

Reviewing the Wins

Go around the table with each rep one-by-one. First each rep should cover their 3 recent wins. Ask them these questions:

• Where did this lead come from?
• Why did they buy? What was going on in the business to motivate them to make an investment? Note: Coach people away from why they bought from YOU, and towards what business problem the client was trying to solve and realized they needed to address.
• Who was involved in the decision that we spoke with? Who was involved in the decision that we didn’t speak with?
• Walk us through the steps the customer went through from your initial call to close. What decisions and key steps occurred internally? For this one, be prepared to probe and ask clarifying questions. Reps will tend to give some generic answers, but you want to really dig in and ask 2 to 3 clarifying questions. So when someone says “they saw our demo and liked it”, ask follow up questions such as: What stood out to them? How did they explain it to people internally to get buy-in?
• The above steps will give you a sense of what the customer was going through along their buying process.

Reviewing the Losses

Now switch to losses and ask:

• Where did this lead come from?
• What did they end up deciding – did they go with a competitor, or was it a no-decision?
• Reflecting back, was there a point in the process that signaled to you the deal was going south?
• Did you get any signals that you wish you would have listed to or trusted your gut so you could have gotten out earlier?
• Looking back, what could we have done differently that may have turned this into a win?

Adopting a Buyer Centric Win/Loss Analysis

Did you notice a trend in the questions above? The questions don’t revolve around the faults or successes of the sales team. Instead, the idea here is to understand what the customer was going through in their buying process as well as helping reps learn from each other about the wins and the losses. This process should help you define your sales stages in a way that aligns with that process, and also includes steps to help minimize the losses.

For example, let’s say that you learned from the deals that you won there was always a VP involved in the discussion somewhere. And let’s say in the deals that you lost there was a common theme that there wasn’t a clear ROI discussion. You can use these to add steps in your sales process such as “ROI Discussion Completed” or “VP Agreement”. These are very different than the old school sales steps like, Qualified Opp or Proposal Sent, and are more specific and helpful for the sales team to remember the steps they need to take to win more business.

The value that can result from buyer centric win/loss analysis discussions can be incredibly eye opening, and can help your sales team know where to focus (and know what to avoid)! So often, sales team members feel like they’re reacting to circumstances that seem out of their control. But by drawing parallels and understanding past trends and how they relate to future deals can save your team significant time, help them focus on what matters most, and avoid wasting time on areas that have failed multiple times over in the past.

The post How to Win More Sales by Running a Proper a Win / Loss Analysis appeared first on OpenView Labs.

In my new book Negotiating the Impossible, I offer numerous principles and tactics for negotiating effectively when things get ugly — especially when you don’t have sufficient “money or muscle” to use as leverage. This could be a deadlocked deal, an escalating conflict, or any situation where there is mistrust, antagonism, or a seeming unwillingness to engage in good faith.

Many of the lessons are just as useful for knocking down the more common barriers people face in negotiation.  Here are three common “hardball” tactics that the other side might use — and some advice on how to respond.

Tactic #1: “We will never…”

What You Do: My response to any ultimatum — regardless of the type of negotiation or how the ultimatum was delivered — is usually quite simple: I completely ignore it. I don’t ask people to repeat or clarify ultimatums. Why? Many ultimatums are not true deal-breakers. Sometimes people are just emotional, or trying to assert control, or using strong language in an attempt to gain advantage. In such these cases, it will be easier for them to back down later if you have not engaged with or legitimized the ultimatum.  How so? There may come a day — a week from now, a month from now, or years from now — when the other side realizes that what they said they could never do, they must do, or is actually in their best interest to do. When that day comes, the last thing I need is for them to remember me having heard them say they will never do so — because then they will not be able to say “yes” without losing face.  Too often, people will escalate matters, and even sacrifice their own best interests, if that’s the only way for them to save face.  If ignoring an ultimatum is not possible, you want to reframe their statement as a non-ultimatum before continuing.  For example, if they say “I will never do this,” I might respond as follows: “I can understand, given where we are today, this would be very difficult for you to do…”  This way, I’ve given them two ways out.  This would be “very difficult”, not impossible, and their reluctance is “given where we are today,” not forever.

Tactic #2: “Just one more thing…”

What You Do: It can be really frustrating when people keep adding new conditions when you think a deal has been struck. When it happens, it’s important to distinguish between two (of multiple) possibilities. They might think you are too committed to making the deal and are trying to take advantage of this. Or, their additional demands are truly important to them and they need you to agree. You have multiple options, but here is something that I do often: I explain that if something is truly important to them, I want to understand why and work with them to accommodate their legitimate concerns. But I am not willing to negotiate an individual issue in isolation — especially at this late stage in the negotiation. If they need adjustments, we will also have to discuss what kinds of concessions they are willing to make in exchange. If this is really important to them, they should be willing to show flexibility on other issues of value to me.

Tactic #3: “Great! Now let me double-check with my boss…”

What You Do: One piece of advice I give often is to negotiate process before substance.  For example: you’ve been negotiating for months, and just when you think the deal is done, they tell you that they need another six months, or that others need to sign off on it, or that they are now going to shop around your offer.  Many of these problems stem from a failure of not having negotiated process before substance. In other words, before getting too deep into deal terms, you want to get more information about (and try to shape) the process — i.e. how you will get from where you are today to the finish line.  This includes discussing questions such as: How long does it take an organization like yours to do a deal like this? Who are all the people who need to be on board? What might speed up or slow down the process?  What will we discuss in the meeting next week, and when will we cover the other concerns we have?  When you negotiate process before substance, you make it less likely that you make substance mistakes later on.

Today marks the formal shipping date of Beyond the Sales Process: 12 Strategies for a Customer-Driven World.

For those of you who are interested, here is some of the back story. (Here is Steve Andersen’s take.)

As a sales industry watcher, former analyst, trainer, and consultant, if there’s a sales book out there, I’ve probably read it. I’ve been mentioned in quite a few of them, and I’ve provided testimonials for a number of others. I’ve already authored two highly successful sales books myself—why would I write another? It’s hard work. Very hard work.

For starters, it’s unlikely that I would have considered writing another book, if it hadn’t been for Steve Andersen. When he proposed that we co-author a book together, it was an offer I simply couldn’t refuse.

I met Steve years ago at a software company as I was making a transition from my role as VP of Sales to VP of Operations. Steve was brought in to replace me, and it only took about a week for me to realize that he was someone very special indeed. In fact, I had never met anyone nearly as competent; his experience, knowledge, and drive gave him effectiveness around selling and sales management that was, in my experience, unrivaled.

We worked side-by-side for the next few years. He and his team sold a lot of software. I serviced those customers and kept them happy. We spend a fair amount of time together with customers and on our own, driving to visit clients, attending meetings, and even attending jazz concerts, an interest we both shared.

Fast forward. Steve left the company. Then I did. But we stayed in touch. When he started Performance Methods, Inc., he asked me to come aboard. I was involved in my own consulting practice at the time, so I had to pass on what would have been a terrific opportunity.

In 2005, I started ES Research Group (which has sometimes been referred to as “the Gartner of sales training”). PMI was the first firm that ESR analyzed and reported on. At that point, since Steve’s company was the first we evaluated, a comparison to others was difficult, but my team and I quickly discovered how very effective and successful PMI is at what they do.

As an impartial observer, ESR could never favor any one of the sales training providers that we evaluated during those years. It was important that we remain unbiased, and just as importantly, that we were perceived as such. But, after conducting multiple assessments of sales training providers and their outcomes, there were clearly some key differences. PMI stood out as a leader in many of the areas we looked at, including the quality and experience of their people, client satisfaction, their approach to customization, the depth and value of their intellectual property, and the commercial terms around engagements with their clients. I chose not to heap what might seem to be undue praise on Steve’s company while I was running ESR, but I wanted to. In some ways I regret this, but Steve respected my commitment to neutrality.

When I closed ESR in 2014, the first person I heard from was Steve Andersen. “I’ve always wanted to write a book,” he told me. “And the only person I can imagine writing it with is you.” I hadn’t been looking to take on an intensive new project, but knowing Steve—his indisputable success, his brilliant mind, and his deep understanding of the relationships among companies and their customers—I had to admit that our admiration was mutual. I agreed to put my author’s cap back on and plunge in.

In March of 2014, with the assistance of our talented development editor Jennifer Bohanan, we started writing.

From the get-go, we determined that our book would be different from anything else available on the market, or it wouldn’t be worth the time and effort we would have to expend in writing it. If you want to understand how much of a departure Beyond the Sales Process is from the repackaged same-old, same-old gathering dust on most salespeople’s bookshelves, you’ll want to give it a thorough read. In the meantime, I can provide some key considerations about what sets this book apart:

• Typical sales books focus only on “the sale,” that fleeting time when a customer is actively engaged in buying something in particular. Beyond the Sales Process is about how companies (especially their customer-facing resources) relate to their customers before and after, as well as during the sale.
• Most sales books focus only on the “what,” claiming that if you just do what the author did, you too will be wildly successful. In Beyond the Sales Process, Steve and I explain how to do what needs to be done. And we provide evidence from real people who validate that the how’s we put forth really work. (This is especially important for some Millennials, who won’t settle for what if you can’t back it up with how.)
• Unlike other books, our guest of honor is the customer, not the reader, and we provide a rare and laser-sharp focus on your relationship with them. We understand that, without the right customer-driven approach, your sale to that customer might be limited to just one.
• Steve and I believe that selling isn’t done to the customer. Our approach doesn’t rely on generating or filling out forms, controlling people that you claim to respect, assuming that your customer is somehow damaged, or bright-shiny objects (such as technology).
• We don’t claim to offer a silver bullet. We don’t believe in or resort to tips, tricks, and shortcuts.
• Our book is not about name-dropping or cashing in on others’ research. It is instead a direct result of the knowledge Steve and I have each gained through live engagements with hundreds of companies, from start-ups to the Global 100, over the course of many years—especially the last eight.
• In Beyond the Sales Process, in the form of in-depth case studies, executives from real companies share their stories about how they work with their actual customers. When a company submits to—and encourages their most important customers to participate in—exhaustive interviews that result in a multiple-page case study about what really works from the CEO level on down, readers gain something truly meaningful.
• Steve and I wrote the book we wanted to write, that we believe needed to be written. Our publisher initially pushed back on the case studies and the 20-plus illustrative graphics and models we planned to include, but they eventually relented, and even came over to our side of the issue. Why? Because the case studies are real-life applications of the Engage/Win/Grow approach and its effectiveness. The models reveal how the approach works. The additions we insisted on were no superfluous window dressing. From beginning to end, Beyond the Sales Process is clear, concise, and compelling.
• A broader audience can find out how top performers in some of the world’s most successful companies do what they do. From start-ups to SMEs to the Fortune 500, sellers at all levels can learn and execute proven strategies that will catapult them to a new level of accomplishment as they engage, win, and grow with their customers.
• It’s a book about leadership and coaching. Everyone on the customer-facing team, especially sales managers, contend daily with too much information. (Steve calls it the “tyranny of the urgent.”) So he and I decided we’d provide coaching to our readers, whether they’re sales people, account managers, or sales leaders. We manage that through…
• …Diagnostics! How can you, as a rep (or manager), be sure you’re where you want to be in your relationship or opportunity? Each of the twelve strategies wraps up with six sets of probing, insightful questions that will evoke the actionable awareness you need to do the right thing the FIRST time.
• You’ll not only read about what Steve and I have learned, but also gain the collective wisdom of dozens of people in the market, including customers, consultants, analysts, and most importantly, the customer’s customer.
• Steve says, “If our reader can peel off just several of these strategies and get better at them, they’ll be more successful with their customer.” (We thought that was fine until a reader sent me an email suggesting just the opposite: “I tried, but I can’t skip any of it—too much value in each strategy.”)
• Another reader writes, “Everything is fully explained. Nowhere is it assumed that I’m supposed to know all of the concepts, terms, and abbreviations, nor have the authors concluded that their readers are beneath understanding what’s being presented.”
• Yet another reader says: “Beyond the Sales Process provides salespeople with actionable ideas. There is definitely something to be learned by everyone.”

If you’ve read the excerpt, you’ll know that we spend substantial time discussing what your customer is doing when they aren’t buying from you. Being successful in sales means having a successful customer, so we never advocate for hit-and-run selling. Sure, you can do it and win a deal—once. But if you’re competing against someone who is engaging, winning, and growing with their customers, you’re going to come up short every time.

So, after spending two years focused on writing, I’m pleased to promote Beyond the Sales Process, as well as the Engage/Win/Grow approach. And I’m delighted that I had the opportunity to write about this important topic with my friend, colleague, and someone who is truly the smartest guy in nearly every room I’ve ever been in. Read it; you’ll understand just what I’m talking about.

And after you’ve finished, we want to hear from you, so send us your thoughts, insights, and feedback.

I could be the only person in the United States who still listens to cold calls.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Lots of managers and directors who are in charge of hiring salespeople listen to cold calls to try and identify good talent -- at least the first 15 seconds of the cold call.

But I might be the only buyer in America who still picks up cold calls. I’m like a chef who visits great restaurants to see if there are any innovations he’s missing. Whether it’s morbid curiosity or sheer entertainment, I feel compelled to listen to my voicemails and occasionally (maybe four times a year), I pick up my phone randomly and connect.

From what I’ve seen over the last few years, there’s a huge variation in voicemail quality. The typical cold caller is a fast-talking script reader in a noisy environment. They’re dialing quickly in the hopes of finding anyone with a pulse so they can jam in a free offer or quick question to get my attention.

I can tell that these cold callers are in a hurry because they don’t really care who they’re talking to. They sometimes mispronounce my name, rarely ask how I’m doing, and it doesn’t really sound like they breathe -- they just try to cram in as many words as possible.

I usually say “Hello?”, then listen for something (anything) of value before saying thank you and hanging up. Sometimes I have to interrupt their stream of consciousness just to say that.

But once in a very long while (maybe once a year), I’ll get a good warm call. Despite being interruption calls, these warm calls are bolstered by the fact that the rep clearly did their homework. They sound relaxed, conversational, and are respectful of my time. They know who I am, reference something I’ve published recently, or an event I’ve spoken at.

These people get a full 90 seconds to make their case. Usually it’s because I’m telling them to interview at HubSpot, because just a little bit of effort is a significant enough departure from the norm that I want to let the caller know that I can tell the difference.

Warm calling is what I practice and preach. It’s about being human, doing your research, adding value in the first 15 seconds, and having fun -- I think of it as delivering a playful puppy to my prospects’ ears.

At HubSpot, we teach warm calling best practices to new reps or SDRs. We teach them how to make prospects smile, how to get over the fear of calling someone they’ve never met, how to keep prospects engaged, and how to keep the conversation flowing. We do a lot of role playing and we rate them on every aspect of the call until they score an average of eight out of 10 or higher.

All these things help. After all, understanding the theory behind how to do something and then putting it into practice is essential to learning.

But it’s just as important to understand what not to do. I literally keep a USB drive with recordings of the worst cold calls I’ve gotten that range from the bad to the skin-crawlingly obnoxious.

Listening to one terrible cold call can often be more instructive than ten good warm calls. Once you hear them, you know exactly what you never want to sound like. Here’s how I use cold calls as a coaching opportunity.

How to Use Bad Cold Calls For Sales Coaching

The first thing to set up is a prospecting call rubric. That way you can break down a prospecting call into each of its components and do a thorough assessment of its strengths and weaknesses. Here’s what I assess (each category is scored out of 10)

1. Prep: How much does the rep know about me? How specific is their research -- do they just say, “I saw your website,” or do they say, “I read your blog post on corporate governance that you published last week”?
2. Opening: Is it human? Does it get me to smile, laugh, or engage?
3. Content: Is the rep adding immediate value? Are they giving specific tips that help me or just providing generic advice that’s not really helpful?
4. Pace: Is the rep able to provide value without rushing so I can understand what they are saying?
5. Length: Voicemails shouldn’t exceed 30 seconds -- any longer, and prospects will get bored, confused or just hang up.
6. Phone number: You’d be surprised how many reps blather through their phone number unintelligibly. Can you understand what the person is saying?
7. Follow-up: Did the rep send a follow-up email to the effect of “As per my voicemail … “? This lets me know a rep is interested in getting a response, helps me easily respond, and differentiates her from other people vying for my attention.

We tee up five to 10 calls to go through in an hour, ask everyone to score the call using the above rubric and then we discuss weaknesses, strong points, and whether we’d call back. After listening to a few traditional (usually horrible) cold calls and getting familiar with the scorecard, I have reps score each other’s voicemails.

Reps that are newer to sales may not be good at warm prospecting yet. You’ll see in your reps’ body language which ones recognize mistakes they make themselves, and by putting up examples of good and bad prospecting calls you’ll help them distinguish between what they should do and what they shouldn’t.

The main thing new reps gather from this exercise is confidence. They’ll have a scorecard with points they know they have to hit in their next voicemail or prospecting call, and walking them through actual recordings gives them real points of comparison. In this way, you can turn awful cold calls into a productive learning tool.

A few months ago, the CEO of a pet supply company came to me with a problem. When people typed in the brand, Google auto-corrected the query to the name of a popular TV show. The brand was lost in the vastness of the Internet, and the CEO—let’s call him Mike—was worried that no one would be able to find his company via search.

Since I had experience optimizing websites for search, Mike asked me to help him build stronger SEO. And within weeks, I was able to get Mike’s website to appear as the first result on a Google search for the company name.

To start, I focused on the usual tried and true SEO tactics like shortening URLs, fixing meta-tags, and checking on the speed of the website. But the key factor for Mike’s company—which some marketers miss—was social media. It turns out that social and SEO have a hazy yet important relationship.

A quick history

In a video from 2014, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web Spam Team who is currently on hiatus, definitively said that there’s a relationship between search and social. Although Facebook and Twitter posts are treated like web pages, Google doesn’t index every social media post. Yes, even Google has its limits.

A few years ago, Google made a deal with Twitter that allows Google to see every tweet in real time without needing to index all of them for search. According to a study by Stone Temple Consulting, Google indexes less than four percent of all tweets. And even though Google’s bots crawl social pages, Cutts explained that the search engine doesn’t factor Facebook likes or Twitter followers into search rankings.

In a recent article for Entrepreneur, writer Larry Alton posited that a strong social media presence does correlate with SEO rankings but admitted that no one really knows how it happens. Google is secretive about its decisions, and there are so many factors affecting search rankings that it’s hard to pinpoint the impact of social.

For this reason, brands pour significant resources into social media, but they usually see the investment as a means for ads and consumer engagement rather than SEO. Recently, however, experts have figured out some loose connections between the two.

How social legitimizes brands

Mike’s site wasn’t showing up in Google results, because search engines didn’t know his brand existed. He had no social media profiles that proved the brand was legitimate.

The first thing I told Mike was that we should create some social profiles and regularly share valuable content. Coupled with a more search-friendly website and a Google My Business listing, these profiles would help search engines understand that Mike’s brand was more than just a TV show typo.

When it comes to branded SEO (which focuses on a branded term, like a company name, as opposed to keywords), social media is extremely important since profiles appear at the top of a search engine results page (SERP).

If you Google my name, for instance, my LinkedIn profile appears at the top of the SERP, followed by my website and my embedded Twitter stream.

If you don’t keep these profiles active , however, you could miss out on substantial SEO benefits. According to a study from Chitika, an online advertising network, the top position in Google SERPs gets 33 percent of all search traffic.

Social networks as search engines

If you’re looking for the perfect restaurant for a first date, you’ll probably search Google at some point, but you may also check Yelp, peruse TripAdvisor, and scout Facebook posts. Google is dominant, but search is a lot more holistic than we like to think, and plenty of people now use social media as search engines.

Last summer, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his social network was already fielding 1.5 billion searches every day. As of September 2015, Twitter handled 2.1 billion searcher per day.

Search giants are slowly starting to take advantage of this trend. In 2014, Yelp partnered with Yahoo so reviews would pop up after a search query. Google has knowledge graphs that appear on the right side of the first results page when people look up certain people or places, and Google restaurant reviews show up in these graphs. There’s potential here for more embeds from other social networks in the future.

Point is, the content you share on social networks can still impact your SEO and brand recognition through search, albeit indirectly for now.

Usually, if a brand is on top of their search marketing strategy, they also believe in the virtues of social media. If you’re working to cover both, you’re probably on top of the unusual relationship.

In Mike’s case, social profiles gave his company a chance to compete on Google. Within weeks of posting to social feeds, Google was no longer confusing pet products with a TV show. The digital misunderstanding had turned into a lesson on the importance of SEO.

OTTAWA – A senator who has crusaded against tax evasion has released recent correspondence from the revenue minister revealing the government’s plan to determine how much money Canada loses to tax dodgers.

Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier says in a Jan. 20 letter to Sen. Percy Downe that her department will try to estimate the value of Canada’s so-called “tax gap,” the difference between what is owed in taxes and what is actually collected.

The Charlottetown senator was responding to the leak of 11.5 million records from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, the authenticity of which the firm has confirmed. The firm denies any wrongdoing and says most of the individuals named in the leaked documents were not its direct clients, but accounts set up by intermediaries.

Lebouthillier’s letter says Canada will work with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which uses the tax gap measure to help develop policies that target tax evaders.

But Downe said he won’t cheer until the Canada Revenue Agency actually releases data to the parliamentary budget officer so he can begin measuring the gap.

“Until that’s done, I’ll hold my compliments,” Downe said in an interview. “The letter indicates they’re going to take a look at it, which is more positive.”

Downe said he that’s why he plans to table a bill in the Senate next week that would require the government to measure the tax gap.

Lebouthillier’s letter says she is working towards gauging that gap.

“I have instructed my officials to commence work on a plan aimed at enhancing public understanding of non-compliance with Canada’s tax laws and to identify the financial resources that would be required to move forward on the plan,” the minister writes.

“As a first step, the CRA will undertake a comprehensive study of tax gap estimation.”

Lebouthillier’s spokeswoman Chloe Luciani-Girouard had no comment on the letter Downe released, but said she was not disputing its contents.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists worked with hundreds of journalists, including some from the CBC and the Toronto Star, to analyze the leaked documents

The records reportedly show major banks helped clients create companies in offshore havens like Panama.

The two Canadian media outlets reported that the Royal Bank of Canada and its subsidiaries set up about 370 of these types of corporations.

The Royal Bank said Monday it operates within the law and has policies to prevent tax evasion after reports said it used the Panamanian law firm whose leaked documents are said to reveal the use of offshore tax havens.

“RBC works within the legal and regulatory framework of every country in which we operate,” the Royal Bank said in a statement. “Tax evasion is illegal and we have established controls, policies and procedures in place to detect it and prevent it occurring through RBC.”

The bank said there are legitimate reasons to set up a holding company, but if it believes a client intends to commit a criminal offence by evading taxes, it would report that and not serve the client.

The leaked documents reportedly show the offshore dealings of more than 100 politicians and public figures from multiple countries, including Iceland, Ukraine, Pakistan and Russia.

Luciani-Girouard said in an interview that the Canada Revenue Agency already had much of the Canadian-related information contained in the Panama Papers investigation. She said Lebouthillier has asked her officials to examine the leaked data “in order to cross-reference this information with data already being obtained through the agency’s existing mechanisms.”

Since 2015, the department has been monitoring all money transfers exceeding $10,000, including from Panama, she said.

“They’re currently assessing the high-risk taxpayers and auditing them randomly,” Luciani-Girouard said.

“It’s a global issue and it’s ever-so complicated. That’s why CRA is quite satisfied they now have the means to attack this head-on with what was given in the last budget.”

Last month’s federal budget provided $440 million to the CRA over five years “to combat tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance, including offshore,” she said.

Luciani-Girouard said if the department uncovers any evidence of illegal transfers, it will be referred to the Public Prosecution Services of Canada.

Pierre-Luc Dusseault, the NDP national revenue critic, urged the government to move quickly with its promises to fight tax evasion.

“If the government doesn’t take action, the wealthy and powerful will continue to benefit from our malleable tax laws,” he said in a statement.

The post Ottawa to study gap in uncollected taxes in light of Panama Papers appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Would you like your sales team to sell more and cost less?

We thought so.

In that case, I’ve got one word for you: S P E C I A L I Z E.

By having field sales reps focus exclusively on face-to-face selling and by expanding and upgrading your inside sales and client support teams, you’ll create a team of specialists who will sell more.

This team approach can be far more efficient and effective than the traditional sales structure.

In this post, I’ll describe the new sales structure and show how it can increase revenue while reducing sales costs.

The Old Model Isn’t Working

The traditional sales structure is primarily, if not exclusively, dependent on highly compensated field sales reps. These reps are responsible for every phase of the sales cycle from generating leads to managing client relationships.

This model no longer works. There are two reasons:

• The buying process has changed.
• The model is extremely inefficient and expensive.

To sell more, let’s first look at the buying process. Buyers no longer need sales reps to learn about a company’s products and services. That information is readily available on the internet.

As a result, buyers want to meet face-to-face with sales reps much later in the buying process, if ever. Inside sales reps can now play a role previously filled by the field sales team much more efficiently.

Then there is the field rep system. At many companies, the field sales reps look like the figure on the right: juggling multiple tasks. They generate leads, cultivate prospects, handle face-to-face meetings, negotiate deals, and manage the overall relationship with the client once the deal closes.

This system is inefficient. Studies suggest that field sales reps spend only 40% of their time actually selling.

The system is also very expensive. Field sales reps are often among a company’s most highly compensated employees.

New Sales Roles Designed to Sell More

Justin Roff-Marsh and other sales experts advocate a different sales structure, one far less dependent on expensive and inefficient field sales reps. In the new structure:

• Field Sales Reps now focus exclusively on face-to-face meetings and closing larger deals. They no longer have an end-to-end relationship with the prospect and client.
• Inside Sales takes on an expanded role: supporting field sales by developing leads and cultivating prospects plus selling to larger accounts and managing relationships with existing accounts.
• Sales/Client Support Specialists handle routine customer service but also support the field sales team by preparing presentations and proposals and ensuring that the field sales team has the necessary sales tools.

The grid below shows how the new model might work in a company with a 10-person sales organization. The field sales team would shrink and the inside sales team would expand dramatically.

Each team’s responsibilities are highlighted in the chart. Note how the field sales reps’ responsibilities have been reduced. Their former responsibilities are noted with a “x.” Their current responsibilities are highlighted with red blocks.

Below are two grids with revenue and sales costs under the Old Model and the New Sell More Model.

OLD MODEL

NEW MODEL

Old Model

• Field Sales
  • Compensation – $200,000 + $50,000 in T&E.
  • Revenue Responsibility – 95%+.

New Model

• Field Sales
  • Selling time increases from by 75%, from 2 days a week to 3.5 days a week.
  • Revenue per rep increases 50% in revenue per rep to $3 million from $2 million.
  • Revenue Responsibility – 75% of company revenue.
• Inside Sales
  • Headcount increases to four from one.
  • Upgraded skills and increased selling focus result in 50% increase in revenue per rep.
  • Revenue Responsibility – 25% of overall (up from < 5%).
• Overall Revenue – Increases by $1.5 million or 14%.
• Sales Costs
  • Sales costs drop by $95,000 to 13% of sales from 16%.
  • Field Sales drop by $575,000 – lower headcount and lower per rep. compensation – $150,000 + $75,000 in T & E.
  • Inside Sales – $400,000 increase in cost due to increase in headcount and 50% increase in per rep compensation.

Getting Started with the New Sell More Model

Don’t expect to accomplish this sell more transition overnight. You’ll need to expand your inside sales team and shrink your field sales team. The entire process could take one to two years.

The first step would be to beef up your inside sales team. That alone could take a year.

Restructuring the field sales team will be tricky. You need to reduce the size of the team and individual compensation.

As you strengthen the inside sales team, consider letting the lowest performing field sales reps go. Alternatively, if a
field rep leaves, you could decide not to replace him or her.

Expect your overall sales costs to go up for at least a year and maybe even two years. You’ll need to carry the field sales reps at their current compensation for a while. And you may need to pay severance.

However, once the transition is complete, you should have a sales team that produces more and costs less.

What is a conversion funnel and has the engagement engine replaced it? According Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, the answer is YES!

Now, I really like the engagement engine as a replacement for AIDA (a communication model that’s been around for over 100 years). And, we’ll talk about why in a few minutes. But, let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water. Early in the history of marketing, the AIDA communication model formed the basis of the conversion funnel — notice the resemblance to this image:

The conversion funnel

This model is still valid and I’ve written a lot about how to maximize movement down the conversion funnel in terms of optimizing conversion.

The underlying notion of the conversion funnel is that actions and communication prompt prospects to move from one stage to another ending in conversion.

Now, there’s lots wrong with the original conception of the conversion funnel. First, it isn’t a linear pathway. Instead, prospects jump out of the funnel only to jump back in at an earlier point or a later one rather than moving smoothly down the funnel. Some prospects get stuck in the funnel and exit without every coming back or converting.

Another problem with the funnel is that conversion is only another piece of the process. For most businesses, getting existing customers to repurchase, purchase additional items, and remain loyal customers is an important part of conversion. Too many businesses forget this. But, it’s 5X easier (and cheaper) to keep an existing customer happy than it is to replace them with a new customer. A company should spend at least as much effort on existing customers.

Finally, a fundamental shift occurred along the conversion funnel. It used to be that brands drove movement down the funnel, now the forces driving movement come from outside of brand communication, while brand communications might still be the catalyst for everything else. Enter the engagement engine.

Image courtesy of Spiegel Medill at Northwestern

The engagement engine is a powerful tool driving consumers (whether B2B or B2C) down the conversion funnel, hence it doesn’t replace the funnel, but augments it. Consumers still go through the 4 stages, but it’s the engine that moves them through them, rather than brand communications.

Now, I don’t blame Northwestern or the J-school. They’re both great institutions with stellar reputations. But, they’re not marketers and they don’t have a strong understanding of consumer behavior or marketing strategy.

So, let’s delve into this further.

How the engagement engine drives consumers down the conversion funnel

Like I said, it used to be brand communications — advertising, PR, sales people — that moved consumers down the conversion funnel. Now, everyone is in the act.

Today, we find that between 70% and 90% of the purchase decision happened before the consumer ever saw a salesperson or bought product on your website. Even business customers make decisions before buying and they like the option to buy online without seeing a salesperson. IBM proved this when their terminals were commoditized and they sold more that $1 billion of them through IBM Direct. Once a business customer owned some terminals or even mini computers, they didn’t need a salesperson to reorder. It was faster to just do it online or by phone.

What does this change mean for brands?

They can’t just produce brand messages to drive sales. They have to provide the information necessary to make decisions. In many cases, all the customer wants/ needs is pricing information.

Amazon is a great example. They provide extensive information about products prior to purchase and their recommendation engine is incredible. By crowdsourcing information from users, they provide the best, most accurate information to drive sales.

How to drive the engagement engine

Brands don’t control messaging using the engagement engine framework — which I think is pretty accurate. That means brands don’t have control anymore, but are simply another voice in the mix. And, not even the loudest or most persuasive voice. Trained by decades of brands lies and misinformation, consumers now take everything a brand says as suspicious. Brands must work to de-commodify their messages. In other words, brands need to get influencers to spread the good word of their brand rather than advertising their brands.

In the days before computers, word of mouth spread a brand’s reputation (good or bad — although bad spreads faster and farther). But, there were limits to the value of word of mouth since consumer voices were muted. Enter social media. Now, consumer voices are LOUD and can even drown out brand voices. And, consumers believe other consumers; even when they’re wrong or unethical. Recently, Amazon sued 1000’s of brands for posting fake reviews on its site and consumers face lawsuits for paid or false negative reviews on Yelp.

So, what’s a brand to do?

1. monitor online conversations and join those conversations naturally, as part of the community
2. understand your target market and what’s most important to them
3. prompt conversations by posting interesting content, especially images and infographics
4. be a good corporate citizen and share your involvement
5. build and engage online communities by recognizing and celebrating consumer voices sharing your brand messages
6. analyze engagement and use insights to enhance engagement efforts
7. employ SEO to make it easy for potential buyers to find your content
8. craft websites that provide excellent user experiences; making it easy to learn about products and make purchases online
9. understand the mobile platform and provide user experiences optimized for that platform
10. share content from others to position yourself as a thought leader in your product lines and to encourage others to share your content
11. learn how to harness a community of influencers to promote sharing
12. create social customer service teams to address questions, problems, and concerns voiced through social networks 24/7 — create performance metrics to ensure prompt responses and escalate problems
13. identify roadblocks interfering with purchase intentions and remove them
14. build subscriber lists to keep interested users up-to-date and offer special promotions to encourage purchase

Fundamentally, the engagement engine turns marketing from push communications to listening, responding, and understanding. It makes communications more customer-centric rather than brand-centric.

Customers are people too. Just like salespeople, they usually care about doing their job and being successful. They love to buy, but generally do not like to be sold. This is most apparent in the negotiation between buyers and sellers. Over the years I have seen some great interactions and some that just flat out kill the relationship and inevitably kill the deals.

Here are 9 things that you should never do:

1. Forget to understand the buyer’s perspective.

It’s not enough to know what you want from a negotiation. You have to know what your customer wants. You must understand and respect the buyer’s perspective. Respect his role in the negotiation. By showing him that you are reliable and trustworthy, by not adopting manipulative or underhand tactics, usually you will find a reciprocity that rewards fairness with fairness. You’re also then entitled to let him know if you think you are being treated unreasonably. Unfair treatment breeds exploitation and the ultimate collapse of the relationship – whether you get the deal or not.

2. Think that Negotiation Starts at the End of the Sales Cycle

The attitudes of a customer at the negotiation table are a result of the selling actions taken throughout the sales cycle. If you’re subservient or passive in your early engagement with a prospective customer, it is likely that the customer will control the negotiation, as you try to finalize a deal. Negotiation starts early and, in truth, never finishes. Your interaction with the prospective customer colors his negotiating style, and your final bargaining, prior to conclusion of a contract, is just the end of the beginning of your relationship.

3. Confuse the position they take with what they actually care about 


A position is a particular stance taken by one party in a negotiation. It typically outlines their preferred result. Interests, on the other hand, are what they really care about and if you don’t understand those you will likely fail. Interests define the problem. They are based on intangible motivations such as need, desires or concerns, which underlie the preferred solution. It is important that you distinguish between interests and positions. Great negotiators are clear on their ultimate interests, and those of the other side.

4. Talk too much. Listening too little.

The cheapest concession in a negotiation is to let the other party know you are listening. Pay close attention to what has been said, repeat it, and use the knowledge to explore his interests, and deflect him from his position.

5. Squeeze every last drop of blood from a deal

It is unwise to pay too much, but it is also unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much you lose a little money; that is all. When you pay too little; you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing you bought it to do. Smart buyers don’t necessarily want to squeeze every little last drop of blood out of the deal. They understand the value of reciprocity and that fairness begets fairness. They know that you will be more inclined to support them after the sale, if the deal is a true win-win – though they may not want you to know that.

6. Negotiate On Your Own

Sometimes when you get to the end of the sales cycle your customer’s Procurement team handles the final step. Remember these people have a job to do. Your buyer, or sponsor, needs to be at your side of the table, explaining the value that you have convinced him you will deliver. Otherwise you are on your own and you have nowhere to turn. Having a negotiation partner reduces the stress for all parties and makes it less personal.

7. Use Price as a Compelling Event

Discounts offered in exchange for accelerated contract signature rarely work in B2B sales. You are signaling to the customer that you are prepared to reduce your price and can do so while still maintaining profitably. Then when the ‘sign-before’ date passes, it is difficult to increase your price again without damaging your credibility and the relationship.

8. Agree to a Price before you Establish Value

Any price that you present is too high if the buyer does not perceive adequate value. Before you begin to negotiate price, make sure that price is the only issue left to discuss and that buyer can explain to you the value they expect to receive. Price is easiest for the buyer to negotiate. For you, the sales person, you can only bring your price down – never up. If you discuss price earlier in the process than you should, then any price concessions you give become the starting point for the next round of negotiation – if you actually become the selected supplier, which will only happen if the buyer understands the value that you deliver.

9. Try to Close the Deal Too Early (or Too Late)

Timing is important when closing a deal. Poor negotiators rush to the end-line or delay unnecessarily, afraid of failure. Both approaches produce bad results. Closing before the buyer is ready is pushy, and damages the relationship. Delaying allows time for other competitors to enter the fray or new projects to take precedence. Great negotiators understand the how, when and where. They bring everything they need to the negotiation table in order to cement the deal, and they can isolate and agree a complete list of outstanding points of conflict, and resolve them one at a time. Help the buyer by providing him with a list of everything needed to close the negotiation. When you have addressed each of the points on the ‘list to be agreed’, ask for the order, close the deal and document the agreement.

Your personal brand is your image. The right image can get you that job, attract people to your business, and win over connections that you would have never stood a chance with otherwise. Boosting your personal brand on LinkedIn should be a priority whether you are the manager of a large firm or launching your first startup.

Boosting your personal brand requires time and effort. You have to commit to using LinkedIn if you are going to make your mark on 400 million users. These simple tips will show you how to use LinkedIn.

Tip #1 – LinkedIn is Not X Social Network

It’s easy to treat all social media networks the same. And that’s because most of them are the same. What you post on Instagram may be transferred to Pinterest. What you post on Facebook can be shortened to go on Twitter. You don’t have to put much thought into what you post.

LinkedIn is different. The best thing you can do for your personal brand is to publish unique content on LinkedIn. It’s worthwhile to link it to your other social media networks, but this isn’t the same as simply copying your Facebook update for LinkedIn.

Tip #2 – Fill Out Your Profile

This is the simplest tip of them all, and yet people fail to do it time and time again. It’s a time-consuming process to completely fill out your LinkedIn profile, and yet if you put the effort in it can make such a difference.

Many people will view your profile before they consider formally connecting with you. Make your profile public and allow people to find out about you first. This will encourage people to find out about who you are as a brand.

Tip #3 – A Professional Tone

It’s good to innovate and to think outside the box. But that doesn’t mean you should go against what everyone else is doing. LinkedIn is different to every other social media network because it’s the one network that adopts a professional manner. Whenever you are filling out your profile or writing to someone, make sure you adopt at least a semi-formal tone.

Avoid any slang or shortened words. This is the easiest way to not generate business leads on LinkedIn.

Tip #4 – Can the Default Messages

LinkedIn has a default message for everything. Whether you’re connecting with someone or just asking to be invited to join a group, you will notice default text populating your window. It’s tempting to save time by sending this, but this is really a huge mistake.

Anyone who has used LinkedIn for a certain length of time is well aware of what the default text says. If you send it, you are sending the message that you don’t really care about that person. They are not worth a personalized message. You are not serious about forming a relationship with them.

Cancel these default messages and write something personal. It can be a rewritten version of the default message, if you like, but the point is you have done something different. You have gone out of your way to respect that person.

Tip #5 – Participate in Group Chats

The easiest way to spread your reputation as an authority in your field is to participate in group chats. Give people the benefit of your wisdom by answering questions and posting opinions on current topics.

This is where LinkedIn can become time-consuming because it can take many hours out of your working week to get this done. But it’s what most people don’t do, so that fact alone is going to make you stand out from the crowd. Choose only relevant group chats. For an added bonus, you should target the groups that your prospects are members of. To build authority is a great way to create connections.

Tip #6 – Take the Relationship Away from LinkedIn

Building your personal brand is one thing, but it doesn’t mean anything unless you can make that personal brand work for you. Whenever you connect with a lead on LinkedIn, offer a face-to-face meeting or the chance to exchange email addresses. Get the relationship away from LinkedIn so you can advance the relationship early.

This is a statement of intent and this statement could make all the difference with your ability to turn that lead into a customer or something more.

Tip #7 – Recommendations

Finally, wherever you can, have people recommend you for certain skills. Repay the favor and this will help you to craft a profile filled with skills that other members can vouch for. These are essentially brand testimonials.

Dynamic selling is about aligning your selling plan to the customer’s buying process. Every customer (or group of customers when you’re selling into a business) has a different decision-making and purchasing process, which is why the selling process should be flexible enough to meet their individual needs. It requires developing relationships and making the effort to understand how your customer makes decisions, what needs to happen, and when it needs to happen.

There’s no set, one-size-fits-all process you apply each time. But the great advantage is that tasks like diagnosing issues, efficiently scaling your team, and forecasting your own future needs become easier and more accurate. There’s no set, one-size-fits-all process, so here are 7 tips for success through a dynamic approach to sales.

1. Understand How Buyers Find Suppliers in Today’s World

The sun is setting on the order-takers of the world. Today’s buyer looks for an expert who offers valuable information and important insights about typical challenges or business problems. The primary way they do this? By searching online—so it’s important that you’re online, but that’s just the first step.

Buyers select the provider that educates with practical information, insights, ideas, and new perspectives. Be that provider by making your information fresh, original, and readily available and you’ll set the dynamic selling process in motion.

2. Never Mind What You Want—It’s All About the Customer

Focusing on the needs and wants of the customer requires scaling one-on-one marketing efforts so that each sales team member can offer tailored content for each buyer encounter. This requires thinking about what’s in it for the customer and what the customer gains because of your product or service. Your broad, generic content might work when someone first hears about your company, but when it’s time for the salesperson to step in, it’s no longer gonna fly.

Dynamic sales also requires measuring what works. Whether it’s through collecting data related to content, processes, or customer satisfaction, solid data analytics helps your team practice dynamic selling.

Discover the 7 Sales Content Metrics You Need to Track

3. Let Your Sales Process Mirror Prospects’ Decision-Making Process

Dynamic selling mirrors prospects’ buying practices. Over time, team members become more adept at knowing what they need to know, accomplish, and share at each stage of the buying journey in order to answer customer needs appropriately. Salespeople and marketers alike, however, know that customer needs aren’t static, which can be as volatile as markets and rapidly evolving technologies. With that in mind, today’s salespeople need to be flexible and their approach requires listening to customers, paying attention, and developing the capacity to detect trends in the buying process so they’re not caught off guard.

4. Adopt Tools for Mobility and Collaboration

Being connected and capable of collaborating is essential. When you can use technology to allow customers to understand your processes––involving sales, marketing, operations, and service––you demonstrate that you’re working for them at every step. Today you can’t afford to tell a prospect to wait until you get back to the office so you can email them information. Mobile technology allows you to carry every last bit of information with you, and with sales enablement, you can show prospects tailored solutions on the spot.

5. Redefine What “Closing” Means

The phrase “always be closing” doesn’t mean what it did a generation ago. While, yes, you should always be moving forward, you shouldn’t always be focusing solely on getting that signature on a contract. Closing can be thought of in stages. For example, you successfully “close” your introduction to a prospect. Later you “close” a meeting with them successfully. This attitude forces you to pay attention at every step, so you can stay more closely in step with your buyers.

6. Master Follow-Through

Did you know that nearly half of sales professionals give up after a single follow-up? Or that the average sales representative only makes two attempts to reach a prospect? How do you think that works out for those salespeople? The fact is, completing sales requires a great follow-through game along with outstanding responsiveness when a prospect has a question. Following up new leads quickly increases your chances of putting the rest of the dynamic selling process to work, and follow-through at every step heightens your likelihood of success.

7. Develop a Dynamic “Playbook” for Each Potential Deal

In today’s selling environment, creating a fixed sales “playbook” to use with every potential customer won’t get results—at least not the ones you want. Fortunately, technology makes it easy enough to create a dynamic playbook for each prospective deal. When you have the mobility and tools on hand to present the right sales content and to record results at each step of the sales process, you can tailor information to the customer’s buying cycle and decision-making process. If you’re just starting on the path to the dynamic selling, that could mean cutting down a slide deck to the ones most relevant to your prospect. If your company is more advanced, it’s using interactive content like calculators, guided selling and live analytics you can share with the customer.

Dynamic selling isn’t without challenges, but information, technology, insights, and experience allow today’s sales team member to quickly put together the right data to deliver insights to customers on demand. Ultimately, dynamic selling better meets the needs of customers and sales professionals, as well as content-creating marketers, by cutting out wasted effort and focusing attention on real customer needs and how best to address them.

Click through to Carson Conant’s SlideShare below for a step-by-step guide on making dynamic selling a reality at your company.

 

 

“Digitally empowered buyers,” who are they and what exactly do they want? If your sales team doesn’t know the answers to this, then you have big problems. ‘Digitally,’ and ‘empowered’ aren’t just buzz words of the time they are common terms. If you are not thinking of your clients as ‘digitally empowered’ then you’re living in the past!

These digitally empowered consumers want, nay expect, salespeople to have the skills and knowledge to deliver value and solve complex issues – not just pitch their product/service. In fact, a recent report from Forrester Research, ‘Overhaul Sales Training to Win and Retain More Customers,’ found that organisations are underestimating this difficult feat.

Forrester cites the following as the primary reasons:

• The changed buying environment that is demanding new sales competencies
• Adapting salespeople’s mindsets is a massive scale challenge
• Current training methods are inadequate and yet not changed

These are the realities of selling in this new market, and the terrifying thing is that not enough people are discussing and acknowledging them. The report goes on to discuss the problems and, in particular, two key barriers that sales professionals face in tackling this challenge. The first one being:

One-size-fits-all training does NOT equate to success for all.

A huge mistake that companies keep making, that only wastes time and money. Sales teams are made up of unique individuals with differing combinations of knowledge, skill, education, life and business experiences. You cannot expect to train them all with the same training methods; they are not sheep that need to be herded.

If you want to address your sales person the right way you need to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses through assessments first. This valuable information will help guide training sessions and focus the trainer on what exactly needs to be addressed. Furthermore, clients are unique, and if you are willing to accept this and adapt to their needs, then you must put the same care into meeting the needs of your unique sales people.

The second barrier found was; long gaps in sales training leads to sales unpreparedness.

How often are you training? If there are long gaps between your sessions then how can you expect your sales team to be up-to-date with the latest product’s messaging, competitor’s information, and executive communication? If your sales team is behind on the knowledge, they will fall behind on closed deals. Forrester refers to a great quote by John D. Brandford:

An enlightened view of the world of education and without a doubt a correct one.

Today’s ‘digitally empowered buyers’ won’t wait; they will go elsewhere. Stay ahead of the times and know exactly what your potential clients’ want, when, where and how. The more time spent training your team on this; the less time spent daydreaming about better result.

Originally posted on LinkedIn

Your latest sales strategy isn’t working. Your team is losing steam, close rates are down, and your lead pipeline is almost empty. You spend all night putting together a revamped strategy to turn performance around—but when you announce your 10-point plan to the team, you’re met with blank stares and apathy. They’re not biting.

How do you get them on board? How do you get them to trust your new decision, and believe that you’re right this time around?

As a sales manager, the first thing you need to do is take a step back and fix your attitude. Even if you know exactly what needs to change, it’ll never happen if you expect your team to switch direction on a dime, take your word for it, and commit 100% to a new strategy just because you tell them to. Instead of looking at numbers on a spreadsheet, and how you can get them higher, look to your team.

If you work at a startup, your reality and your environment are constantly in flux—and not every strategy can work out every time. Getting your sales team to embrace change from the ground-up is the only way you can survive, and it has to start with you.

1. Be transparent about the “why” and “how”

When current FlipBoard CEO Mike McCue was running his first startup, he faced a decision that would put most teams at each other’s throats: license his software to AT&T for a boatload of cash, or face them as a competitor.

He knew there was only one right call. But instead of just giving the order, he got the team in a room and started an open conversation around the decision. He started with first principles: “immutable facts, which, once known, can be built upon to enable further discoveries.” Within 45 minutes, they agreed to turn AT&T down—which is what he wanted from the start.

McCue could have handed his decision down from on high. By starting with the problem and the facts, he got the team thinking about solutions instead of objections. Even people who still disagreed with the final call had to respect that it was reasonable under his assumptions.

As a sales manager, this is one of the most powerful tactics of persuasion in your arsenal. Writers call this “show vs. tell.” Sell your team on a strategy change by showing them the problem, and lead them through the facts so they’re able to reach the decision you made by themselves.

You and your sales team need to reach what Hiten Shah calls problem alignment, where everyone understands three things:

• The problem: the key result that isn’t being met. This is a measurable fact, not an opinion.
• The root of the problem: why the current system isn’t working.
• The solution: the change you plan to implement, and why you think it will solve the problem.

It’s all about giving your team context. If you lay out the rationale behind the change, they'll understand the potential upside rather than look for reasons to disagree.

Documentation means authority

“The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.” — Warren Buffet

However, it’s not enough just to reach problem alignment—you need to follow through, and transparently document the new strategy as you implement it.

It’s human nature to fall back in old, bad habits. As Harvard Business professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter points out, change in the workplace often creates feelings of powerlessness, uncertainty, and self-doubt. Even when your team agrees that the old way of doing things is failing, they’ll lapse back into it without clear direction.

Share clear, written documentation outlining what’s going wrong and how your strategy will fix it. Make everything about a new strategy 100% clear, in one central place, and available for everyone to access. When you give a one-off speech, it becomes “tribal knowledge” and is forgotten within minutes.

When you write something down, it becomes an actual strategy and a process that can be scaled. Instead of being buried as “something our boss said one time,” the new strategy becomes an explicit credo that everyone can easily follow and look back at in times of uncertainty.

2. Get down in the trenches and lead by example

In 208 BC, Chinese general Xiang Yu faced nearly impossible odds, leading 50,000 men against an army of 400,000. So he did something drastic: he burned his army's ships—their only means of retreat—so that their only option was to win the battle. Xiang was telling his men, “No one gets to go home. Including me.”

Xiang was doing more than just making sure no one could run away. He was putting himself and his soldiers on even footing. He wasn’t just giving them an impossible task and throwing them to the wolves—he was diving in with them.

Anyone can just tell their team to do something hard and then disappear. But you need to burn the ships, lead by example, and show your team you’re fighting with them. Show them that you’re 100% committed to the new strategy and not asking them to do anything you’re not willing to do yourself.

Get your hands dirty

Here’s what leading by example looks like in the context of a new strategy:

• Imagine you’ve determined that tripling the number of times reps follow up with new leads from two to six will increase sales.
• It’ll be a tough pill to swallow. You know that the strategy is an improvement measure. But your team will be thinking, “Does he really think this will work? It’s easy to just dump extra work on us when he’s not the one on the front lines.”
• The solution: You need to get in front of the team and do your six follow-ups in front of them. That shifts their interpretation of the new strategy to “Wow, he wouldn’t be wasting his time on this if he didn’t really believe in it.”

That’s why when David Greenberger onboards new sales reps, he sets their quota at a third of what he can do. If a rep comes to him and says, “It’s not possible to close 60 leads in 60 days,” he can respond with, “I know it’s possible. I closed 180 in that span.” By showing reps that he's basing expectations and strategy on what he does himself, he gets his reps clocking up to 300 calls a day.

3. Measure and iterate relentlessly

Jeff Bezos’ #1 measurement of intelligence isn’t IQ. It’s willingness to change one’s mind. The smartest people aren’t the ones who come charging in with a plan, guns blazing—they’re the one’s who have a plan, but are willing to adapt it to the facts. They constantly look for new takes on “problems they think they’ve solved.”

Your new strategy can’t be something you cooked up in a day and said, “Yup, this is perfect.” That’s the same mentality that makes your sales team resistant to change in the first place. No strategy is ever perfect, because circumstances are always changing.

Practice what you preach and obsessively measure and test the success of the new strategy with your whole team. Admit when you’re wrong, and take ownership for your own mistakes. Go to the team for new suggestions, and implement them. You’ll build more efficiency, learn better, and improve faster. More importantly, your team will feel actually invested in the new strategy.

As a sales team manager, you don’t want your sales team to accept change—you need them to seek it out proactively.

Rally the team around metrics

Keep performance at the forefront of your team’s mind. Put up a scoreboard of the metrics measuring both the strategy’s results and the team’s output. That keeps both parties accountable—them for putting in the work, and you for guiding the strategy's success. Then, have weekly meetings where you update everyone on the team's progress, and ask for feedback.

That acts as a huge motivator in two ways:

• When your team is crushing its goals, you tap into the science of small wins. Each little bit of progress will make your team want to keep improving. As the numbers improve, it both validates their hard work and motivates them to get even better.
• Even falling short is an opportunity to reinforce commitment to the new strategy. Your sales reps are out there, working on the ground—go to them for ideas on what’s working and what isn’t. By opening the floor, you give them a sense of ownership over the strategy.

Constant testing and iterating is what allows startups to adapt—but without purpose, it’s often demoralizing for team members. Let the numbers speak for the success or failure of your strategy, and inform your next move.

Adapt or die

At a startup, you have to jump quickly on chances to improve—new market opportunities, big product improvements, new sales strategies—but that can only happen if your team is willing to pivot and try new things.

More often than not, you’re at the mercy of factors out of your control, so focus on what you can control. By fostering a mindset in your sales team that actively embraces and seeks out change, you transform the unpredictable into opportunity. In the long-run, it’ll create far more upside for you and your business than any single new strategy.

Recommended read:

Trial by fire: The new manager’s guide to building a sales team
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Sales team seasonality: How to maximize downtime
Even in sales, business slows down—but you don't have to. Maximize downtime by doing these three things and when sales picks up again, you'll crush it.

The #1 avoidable mistake 99% of sales managers make
It's a small mistake but too many sales managers are making this mistake—and it's HURTING their sales reps' performances. Fortunately, it's easy to fix.

Ah, yes. We’ve come a long way since the early days of remote collaboration via our computers. You remember. Corded phone smashed against your cheek, struggling to keep it in place with a shrugged shoulder while attempting to type and move a mouse at the same time. The good ole days.

Okay some of us still do that.

These days though, we’re able to share screens and apps with someone one floor up or on the other side of the globe as if they were sitting right next to us at our very own desk. It’s difficult to overstate the impact of this still relatively nascent technology that we all suddenly take for granted, but we can sure try.

Seeing is believing

Sales really isn’t much more than the ability to get your buyer to envision what you’re already able to see. It’s why we spend so much time on product demos and understanding the pains of our prospects.

Today, the ability to do that has been helped at the same time it’s been hindered. While there are so many great new and affordable technologies that enable us to tell our stories, track key metrics, and engage in ways never before possible, we’re also farther apart than we’ve ever been.

Sales of almost any kind has become borderless and nearly all sales organizations at least endeavor to someday have an international presence if they don’t already have one. That means the in-house demo or the conference room catch-up are not always possible when they need to happen. This is where screen sharing can and is having such a profound impact on businesses today.

1. Saving Time and Money On Travel

There’s no substitute for being able to give your prospects a full demo of your product or service. While being there live and in person is ideal and enables your team to pick up on non-verbal cues, energy, etc., it’s just not always possible or efficient. More and more teams are turning to screen sharing applications that allow them to effectively be “in the room” holding a prospects’ hand and walking them through a proper demonstration.

We’ve found that product demos delivered via screen sharing are often more conducive to vibrant and candid dialogue than an in-person demonstration. Without the pressure of having a sales team in the office with schedules to keep and planes to catch, prospects are more apt to really immerse themselves in the demonstration. They ask more questions, reveal more pain points, and ultimately increase the likelihood of getting a deal done.

Pro tip: Never demo past the close. The last thing you want to do is bore your prospect or distract them with a feature they won’t need and don’t care about.

2. Allow SDRs to Handle Initial Overviews

Your SDR already has them on the phone and (hopefully) interested. Now what? Next-gen screen sharing products are as simple as shooting a link to your prospect in order to share screens and engage. The small ask of clicking a link to share a screen with your prospect is virtually rejection-proof and allows your SDRs to go the extra mile in qualifying and educating prospects. This method also allows SDRs to have a little more skin in the game and gives them invaluable experience to prepare them for career advancement.

3. All the Decision-Makers in One Room

This isn’t a guarantee. But anyone with a little outside sales experience knows how frustrating it can be to show up to an in-person meeting only to find out the key decision-maker won’t be there. Even if you’re fortunate enough to meet on a day when all the decision-makers are actually in the office, there’s always a chance something will come up that for some reason takes precedence over your presentation.

With screen sharing technology, your odds of getting everyone in the room increase dramatically because all it requires is for someone to jump on their phone or laptop wherever they may be at a moment’s notice. And in this era of having multiple decision-makers at multiple levels in the business, this becomes a huge advantage for sales teams.

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With screen sharing tech, your odds of getting everyone in the room increase dramatically
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4. The Advantage of Spontaneity

Even the best sales presenters among us follow some sort of script. We do our best to make sure it comes off as fresh and customized to our audience, but presenting always has a tendency to feel a little rote and overly practiced.

Screen sharing has a way of eliminating pretense and adding a little spontaneous flare to a presentation as you’re coaxing your audience to follow along with you on the screen, describing every step you’re taking them through and fielding questions. In a more traditional or structured presentation format, your audience members can easily become lost and many won’t have the nerve to interrupt your train of thought with a hand raise or interjection.

5. Engaging Left and Right Brain Simultaneously

One of the reasons inside sales is growing so fast is because technology like screen sharing has enabled them to be more powerful than ever before without necessarily having to travel great distances. But screen sharing works in part because of the different ways we’re all wired and the unique ability of screen sharing to connect with different types of learners.

Before, an inside sales rep could only realistically engage one side of his prospect’s brain at a time. She could build the personal relationship and trustworthiness factors of the sales process on the phone or with friendly and engaging emails. On the other hand, she could send a prospect an explainer video or some graphs and numbers to back up her company’s claims. Screen sharing now allows her to do both at the same time.

As you can hopefully see, screen sharing has become an integral part of the modern sales organization. If you haven’t already done so, think about implementing screen sharing technology into your sales strategy. Let me know of any creative ways your team has used it in the comments section.

The post 5 Ways Screensharing Has Become an Indispensable Sales Tool appeared first on Sales Hacker.