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Usually when “education” and “customer success” appear in the same sentence, it’s referring to the education of customers and ensuring that they’re up to speed on your products and services. Inviting them to webinars, sending them collateral and case studies, sending notes on your latest release are just a few ways CSMs typically help to educate customers. But building a customer success learning culture is more than that. It’s about learning from customers, and it begins at the top with the executive team.

Building a customer success learning culture implies that your company, no matter the department, places an importance on continually learning from customers and improving the way your company does business based on the two-way dialogue. What better way to learn this than from your customers – those that have already placed their trust with your company?

How can your company build customer success learning culture?

It starts with these 4 company focuses:

4 Focuses of a Customer Success Learning Culture

1. Customer Success Learning Begins at the Top

Like anything important that a company wants its employees to adopt, customer success learning must start at the top and be driven by the example of leaders across the company. Customer success learning is no different. It means that executives regularly spend time with customers, whether face-to-face with customers in their city, on the phone with customers and their respective CSM, while traveling to events or speaking engagements, or with CSMs or other customer success leaders at customer offices.

In a recent blog post, John Quelch, Harvard Business School Professors, says “Every corporate mission statement pays lip service to respecting customer needs, but actual customer expertise is typically a mile wide and an inch deep. That’s why every CEO should spend at least 10 percent of his or her time thinking about, talking to, and steering the organization to the customer.”

2. Customer Learning is a Two-Way Street Between Customers & Internal Leaders

We love this advice that Entrepreneur magazine gives in a recent article. One one of the best ways you can show your customers you care is by asking them for feedback, really listening to what they have to say, responding to their thoughts and suggestions, and adapting accordingly. Here’s how the article explains it:

Ask customers what’s on their minds regularly. That includes their satisfaction with their most recent sales or service experience and with your employees, as well as their general impressions of your business. Invite feedback at multiple contact points–via e-mail communications, online surveys, on your website, post sales interviews, contextual inquiries, and many other ways. Keeping a finger on your customers’ pulse is good for the heart–and bottom line–of your business.

Listen to what customers are saying about you in surveys, on Twitter or Yelp, or anywhere else they give feedback. Publish survey results and answers to customer questions in your e-mail newsletter. Create a sense of community around your business based on dialogue with your customers.

Respond to customers promptly when they contact your business, whether it’s a complaint or a compliment. Show them you’re listening and that you care. If there’s a problem, fix it so they can go away happy to return to your business.

Adapt your business based on customer feedback to better meet their needs. Communicate the changes you’re making based on what they’ve asked for (we’ll get into this a bit more later in the post).

3. Customer Success Learning is Meant to Be Shared

When valuable customer information is gathered, the worst thing that can happen is nothing at all. When the information is never shared, no growth can happen from it. A growing number of companies have developed effective customer learning programs that begin their customer feedback loops at the front line. The objective is to understand in detail what the customers value and what the entire company can do to deliver that value (whether the product, service, or something else entirely) better. Over time, companies compile the data into a baseline of the customer experience, which they draw upon to make process and refinements that are shared across the entire company.

Customer success learning feedback loops do more than just connect customers, the CSM, and a few decision makers in management. They keep the customer front and center across the entire organization by broadly sharing disseminating the information that matters.

4. Customer Success Learning Should Result in Action, Change or Improvement

If your company asks customers for their feedback but doesn’t act on the data or insights gathered, you are sending the message that it isn’t important – and that they have wasted their time. If that’s the case, they won’t waste any time taking their business elsewhere.

The Voice of the Customer is becoming increasingly important part of daily operations. And, customers appreciate someone asking for their thoughts, and taking the time to really hear what they are saying, but they don’t offer their opinion in vain. As Whitney Wood, managing partner at the Phelon Group said in an interview with Inc., “Every day, companies solicit feedback from customers, yet only a few translate that feedback into meaning. An even smaller fraction of companies actually take action or close the loop with the customer, to let them know their voice was heard.” Wood further explained that customer feedback has to result in change that customers can see, since change is the most powerful currency to reward vocal and consultative customers.

Just collecting the data and not doing anything with it is a waste of effort, time and resources – and can sew the seeds of customer dissatisfaction. It’s vitally important that customer success learning result in action, change, or improvement – whether big or small.

How Does Your Company Incorporate Customer Success Learning?

Does your company value customer learning? If so, what are some of the most valuable pieces of information you’ve gathered from your customers? Listening to customers is one thing, but adopting customer success learning as a culture is something entirely different, and unique. It starts at the top with executive support, and will cause your entire organization to embrace customer learnings as a result.

eBook: 5 Ways to Surprise & Delight Your Customers

To find the conversation-starters in your case studies, look for the emotions: Who is in trouble, and what is at stake?

What makes for an effective marketing story—the kind that is fun to tell, interesting to hear, and persuasive?

We are learning more and more about the importance of good storytelling. Many companies rely on published case studies as a primary means to create and share stories and carry their sales conversations. One client has nearly 500 case studies on its website, many of which run well over 2,000 words. That represents a lot of work from the marketing team and a treasure trove for anyone who talks with customers and is looking for compelling customer stories!

The problem with those case studies, as is the case of many companies, was that the sales teams weren’t using them.

Case studies, when used as part of customer conversations, can help prospects understand the value of your offerings and lessen the perceived risk of buying your stuff. They also demonstrate internally that the marketing team is working to craft tools that directly affect the sales effort. Most case studies I’ve seen are full of information, stay true to brand messaging guidelines, and are professionally produced (they look great!). The bad news is that case studies absorb resources, are typically committee creations, and can read with all the pizzazz of an unflavored rice cake.

Uncovering Compelling Customer Stories

The bones for engaging customer stories are in those case studies whose common sequence of (1) Situation, (2) Problem, (3) Approach, and (4) Results is on target. Yet the content is often dominated by references to the selling team and granular details of the products and services the customer bought. The conversational version of that same story should have prospective buyers on the edge of their seats—bringing the audience into the emotions of the situation and leading them to root for the protagonist.

Here’s an example. A company in the flash-storage business had developed a set of case studies that illustrated its advantage in speed. One story described a customer in rail-shipping logistics who needed faster batch-order processing in order to optimize shipments. After deploying the new solution, the intended increase in processing speed was indeed realized. The case study described the what, why, and how of that success with the equivalent of, “We installed the Batchinator 3000X and processing time was decreased, saving money and improving customer service.” Nothing wrong there, except that the story was not translating to compelling customer stories.

I asked the person who actually sold that deal to tell me more about how the customer came to believe his problem was lack of speed. In quite vivid language he described the general manager’s frustration. “He would arrive at the office early, and then his people would come in but they wouldn’t start doing anything. They’d be at the coffeemaker or the water cooler.” The data center responsible for overnight processing of the previous day’s data was often overwhelmed. Until the system could catch up and produce schedules, no one could begin their day’s work. “The GM was thinking his people were lazy or distracted. ‘They’re not showing up ready to work!’ he would say and then stomp around the office.” I could visualize that manager looking around and seeing 100 people wasting an hour most mornings. I could practically feel the knot in his shoulders, the churn in his stomach.

Now it’s easy to share the underlying emotion in this story—the frustration at the problem and the relief once a new solution was in place. The sales team learned how to share that story, not with the presenting problem—outsourced batch processing to an overloaded resource—but with a manager starting most work days with stress and frustration. Then they could show how the problem wasn’t the people; the problem was the system.

To find the conversation starters in your case studies, look for the pulse. Someone is trying to get somewhere and achieve a goal in the face of difficult obstacles. What’s the gap between the starting point and landing point? Which emotions (both positive and negative) are involved? What were the surprises along the path?

The published versions of case studies are still valuable. In my experience, they are best used as preparation for a conversation or as a follow-up (to provide detail) rather than as a substitute for the conversation and compelling customer stories.

Your customer stories won’t actually be shared around a camp fire…but could they be?

Every decision a prospective customer or client makes involves many subconscious and conscious emotions. The secret to success for any business is understanding the psychology behind these emotions. When it comes down to getting your prospective client or current client to pull out their credit card or checkbook, uncovering the following 5 psychological triggers will help.

1. Fear of Losing Out vs. Gain

Although it may seem hard to believe, it’s been proven that the majority of us are hard wired to have a significantly stronger reaction to loss than we do to gain. This psychological characteristic is referred to as “loss aversion”. To take advantage of this trait, design your marketing message to address what your prospect will be missing out on if they don’t buy something from you or enlist your services right now, rather than focusing on what they’d gain.

2. Time Savings

Most business owners are constantly looking for efficient ways to save time. Since this is most people, you need to come up with a meaningful offer that will speak to them for it to be a successful sales trigger. Help your prospects see how saving an additional hour or two a day can translate into more revenue, extra free time to relax, or more time to accomplish their goals.

3. Avoiding Analysis Paralysis

If you’ve been running a business, or in sales for any length of time, you probably already know that if you give people too many decisions to make, they’re likely to fall into “analysis paralysis.” Instead of throwing every service option, package, or product at your clients/prospects, consult with them and offer the most viable option. If you’re selling products, channel them in targeted directions. In other words, make it easier for them to make a buying decision. You can always introduce them to other products/services down the road.

4. Providing Social Proof

When a consumer hears that their peers believe in a product or service via reviews or testimonials (social proof), they’re much more likely to trust that it’s worth investing in, triggering a buying decision. Add testimonials to your landing pages and sprinkle them throughout your web presence. Encourage clients to give you the “good word” on your social media sites. If possible, include a photo of the individual that provided you with the testimonial. Providing “social proof” is a powerful psychological trigger to more sales because it has a positive influence on buying habits.

5. Social Media – Creating a Bond

For the most part, we’re all social creatures that enjoy forming new connections. In regards to social media, once a new connection has been made, we can’t help but want to continue that bond. That’s why we’re more prone to “say yes” to a request. Making a connection and nurturing an ongoing relationship is the key to success on social media, taken a step further with email marketing. By staying on the minds of our prospects and nurturing an ongoing relationship, they’re going to be more prone to buy in the future.

Source: Bazaarvoice

Practice the 5 psychological triggers to more sales and watch your sales grow. Ignore them, and you’ll be missing out on revenue generating opportunities.

Don’t forget to share if you enjoyed this post!

Have any ideas we missed? Leave a comment!

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ORIGINAL POST

Do you believe the saying “If it’s to be, it’s up to me?” Many people do. If you don’t, you might already be using leverage in your business to reduce or replace work with a better strategy for growing your business.

One of the challenges that Master Leveragist Scott Manning likes to give his clients is to take their plan for the next 12 months, cross out “months,” and replace it with “weeks.” Now, you’d be forgiven if you thought at first that he meant to get 12 months worth of work done in 12 weeks. But you’d be wrong about Scott’s intent.

What he wants his challenge to accomplish is to get his clients thinking deeply about leverage. Because leverage is the only way you can accomplish the same goals that would normally take you 12 months, in just 12 weeks.

So what if you were given this challenge?

How would you change the way you are marketing now in order to accomplish the same goals you have for 12 months of work in such a short amount of time?

Would you have to change the way you are doing content and social marketing?

Would you have to change the way you look at building your audience and customer base?

Actually, practically everything you do right now to market your business is on the chopping block for this exercise. And practically everything you’re doing right now can be reduced or replaced with leverage plays.

For instance, I bet you’re spending time and resources on content. Content for your site and your social profiles. It could be the main attention-getting factor for you if you are a blogger, but it certainly is a concern for most people looking for a steady stream of organic traffic.

If you’re wondering how you’re going to get 12 months of content and social engagement accomplished in 12 weeks, you’re not alone. Most people will look at their 12 month plan and see mountains of work that needs to be done to hit their biggest goals in the next year.

Leveragists see the problem in an entirely different way.

We know we cannot possibly write 12 months of blog posts in 12 weeks. Not good ones, anyway. And we know we cannot cram 12 months worth of social media engagement into 12 weeks either. Nor can we cram much of anything we had planned over the next year into 12 weeks and get the same results or better.

So we have to dump it. Yep, throw out the detailed content and social marketing plans and start from scratch. A clean slate!

So how can you get the same amount of traffic and attention, subscribers and customers, without man-handling your way there with 12 months hard labor? Simple. You have to give up on building your own audience first and go after existing audiences immediately.

Building your own audience is an admirable goal for any business owner. And you need your own big, healthy audience, eventually. But who says you have to build an audience to then turn around and sell to them? Why can’t you skip right to the “sell to them” part and get in front of audiences that are already hanging on the words of thought leaders and authorities in your market?

–Someone has a high traffic blog in your niche. Have you guest blogged on it yet?

–Someone has a podcast with tons of subscribers in your market. Have you been a guest on it yet?

In fact, there are so many ready-made audiences around you that once you start thinking like a Leveragist, you’ll see opportunity everywhere you look!

If you know how to give thought leaders what they want, they will give you the keys to their kingdom. They will put you front and center on their stage in front of their painstakingly cultivated crowd of followers and let you do your thing. And on that day, you will get a month, 3 months, maybe even 5 months of results that would have normally taken you 20 blog posts and a whole lot of social chatter to achieve.

How’s your 12 month plan looking now?

Even if the quicker version takes you 24 weeks, doesn’t it sound a whole lot better?

With leverage, the work you were planning over the next year gets replaced with thinking and creativity. You see, you already know you have something of value to offer potential customers in your niche. So you should already be offering that value on a podcast with 12,000 listeners… like next week!

The internet is leverage. Once you really understand what that means, you will never go back to virtually shaking each and every hand of each subscriber to signs up for your email list. That’s what people are doing now with content and social media marketing. They aren’t using the leverage the internet affords them. They are acting like they are at a networking event at their local Kiwanis Club.

And it’s not just some people. It’s practically every single business owner on the web that’s doing it this way! There’s always a place in your business where leverage can replace needless work and time-consuming effort.

Start looking for ways to speed up the time it takes to reach your next giant goal for your business. Do it as if your life depended on it. As if you don’t find a way to build a fire tonight, you’ll be a blue-lipped popsicle in the morning.

Opportunity for leverage is laying all around you right this moment. Think like a Leveragist and you’ll begin to see a whole new faster and easier path to your biggest goals.

Painful as they may seem, requests for proposals are a B2B fact of life. They help you establish successful partnerships in an age of tight budgets and fierce competition for service contracts. Ensure your company gets the most out of the RFP process. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Having the best ideas in the world won't help you if no one wants to listen.

Speaker and author Julian Treasure gave a popular TED Talk in 2014 that explained how anyone can speak effectively, whether in a conversation or in front of a crowd.

How well you influence others, he said, is as much about you do say as what you don't.

Here are the bad habits you need to avoid if you want people to listen to you, which Treasure calls the "seven deadly sins of speaking."

SEE ALSO: The 20 most popular TED Talks of all time

1. Gossiping

Speaking badly of somebody else seems to have a chain reaction, Treasure said.

If you engage in gossip, you can give yourself a bad reputation and inspire others to start gossiping about you.

2. Judging

If you fill your conversations with judgments of others, you're making the person you're speaking with self-conscious of being judged themselves, Treasure said.

They'll be afraid to open up to you and may shut down completely.

3. Being negative

Treasure said that his mother, in her latter years, became incredibly negative — she would even find the disappointment in arbitrary things like what day it happened to be. Treasure would force himself to stop listening as he spent time with her.

Choosing to be optimistic will simply make you more enjoyable to talk to, he said. Plus, it's better for your health.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Vasily Klyukin has been described as a "Russian-born Tony Stark." The self-made billionaire earned his riches in banking and real estate before dabbling in science fiction and architecture. In 2015, he purchased a ticket to become the first potential space tourist from Monaco, where he lives.

Now the modern-day renaissance man has published a collection of renderings of wacky skyscrapers around the world. They include a residential tower and hotels in the shape of a "sexy leg," a champagne bottle, and a cobra, which changes color much like a snake sheds its skin.

So far, none have been constructed or commissioned.

Tech Insider spoke with Klyukin on the inspiration behind his jaw-dropping buildings.

Vasily Klyukin doesn't design buildings. He designs landmarks.

"I know that 90% of my concepts are realistic, and 10% are realistic but expensive," Klyukin says. "There are no impossible concepts."

He was inspired to design skyscrapers after dreaming one up called the Monaco Comet. In 2014, he purchased a small building in the city-state with aspirations to convert it into the Monaco Comet, though no plants have been set in motion.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

A few months ago, we launched a spandy-new post editor, updates to the WordPress.com Reader, and a WordPress.com desktop app. They’re all designed to make publishing and managing your sites easier, from more effective auto-saving to quicker creation of image galleries.

Have you discovered everything the new and improved WordPress.com can do? Here are four of our favorite tricks.

Preview your site on any device, right from your editor

As more people access our blogs from phones and tablets, it’s increasingly important to make sure yours looks good no matter how large (or small!) the screen. You can buy a dozen devices to test how your site looks, bug your friends to check your blog on their phones — or preview your site on different screen sizes from right in the post or page editor.

When you click “Preview” in the editor, you’ll see a few icons across the top of the preview pane:

Click the three highlighted icons, and you’ll be able to see the post (or page) on three different screen sizes: computer screen, tablet, and smartphone. Be confident that your words and images appear just as you intend, no matter the device.

Copy and paste for quick hyperlinks

Links are the lifeblood of the internet; they help us navigate within websites and discover new ones. There was already an easy way to create hyperlinked words (like this) with the “create link” button, but now you don’t need a button at all: just copy and paste.

Copy the URL you want to link to to your computer’s clipboard, then head into your post or page editor. Highlight the text you want to make clickable, and paste the URL directly over the highlighted text, as if you want to replace it. That’s it!

The highlighted text will be underlined and blue to let you know it’s a hyperlink. To change a link, move your cursor over the link and click the pencil icon; you’ll be able to edit the URL, and set the link to open in a new window. To remove the link, click the X. (And don’t worry: you can still use the link button if you’re more comfortable with that.)

Everyone loves a list

If you’re like me, you read a lot of blogs — and keeping them organized can sometimes be a challenge. Enter Reader lists, a way to group the blogs you follow. Only want to check out new posts from your favorite food blogs, or political analysts? Want to share all your favorite DIY sites with friends? Make lists!

Head to your Reader. In the left-hand column, click the down-arrow next to Lists and then click Add to open the list tools. Add a title and description; lists are public, so a description helps others understand what they’ll find. To add blogs to the list, paste in the URL of a blog you want to include and click Add (and this can be any site, not just WordPress.com blogs). Here’s a list we made with some of our favorite sketchers and illustrators:

(Love art or sketching? Follow the list!)

To share a list, copy its URL from your browser’s address bar. Paste it into a post, page ,or comment so your readers can follow along.

All your posts and pages, from any site

If you’ve got more than one blog on WordPress.com (or self-hosted sites that use the Jetpack plugin), you can manage posts and pages from across all of them from your WordPress.com dashboard.

Log in to WordPress.com and head up to My Sites in the upper left. Click on “Switch sites,” and then “All My Sites.” Once you do, you’ll be able to select Blog Posts or Pages to see every post and page you’ve created across all your sites:

Use the toggles at the top of the page to filter all your posts and pages — only look at drafts, see everything in your trash cans, or search for particular terms.

We use all four of these nifty features every day while working on Discover, The Daily Post, Longreads, and more.

Do you have a favorite dashboard trick?

Filed under: Better Blogging, Dashboard, New Features, WordPress.com

Over the past few years, laptops have become the de facto computer of choice for nearly everyone. Indeed, 194 million laptops were sold globally in 2015, whereas only 129 million desktops were sold in the same period, and the gap is expected to continue widening until at least 2020. But that doesn’t mean they are the right choice for everyone. Is it possible that there are 194 million misinformed people in the world?! Here we take a look at some reasons why you don’t actually need a laptop and why it might actually be a sub-optimal purchase for you. Why Do People...

Read the full article: 4 Reasons Why You Don’t Need a Laptop Anymore

The idea of establishing a strong organizational culture and assessing candidates for cultural fit have become hot topics these days—and for good reason.

Culture is a key factor in attracting and retaining top talent. Companies that have positive cultures and emphasize cultural fit in hiring also tend to attract more favorable publicity. REI, which broke the unwritten code of retailers by closing its doors on Black Friday, generated an overwhelmingly positive public response as a result of its bold move.

Compare that to the open letters from disgruntled Yelp employees that have gone viral recently. Whether or not these employee complaints were justified, they illustrate a hard truth: In the age of social media, sometimes all it takes is a strongly worded letter to raise questions about a company’s reputation (or at least its public perception).

However, it is possible for companies to focus too much on cultural fit to their detriment?

Here are three instances when a company’s desire for cultural fit can be taken too far.

1. When Cultural Fit Is a Shield For Discrimination

We’re hard-wired to be attracted to people who are more like us. A study by the Kellogg School of Management found job offers were strongly influenced by the interviewer’s perception of cultural fit. In this particular instance, the applicants’ socioeconomic backgrounds played a significant role in the hiring decisions of elite professional services firms.

While larger corporations tend to have more formal hiring practices to guard against discrimination, biases can creep in anywhere. A tech startup that simply defines itself as “fresh, innovative and disruptive” may inadvertently become biased against older employees who may have just as many skills and new ideas to offer.

Hiring managers can avoid this pitfall by more clearly defining their culture and translating it into specific, measurable behaviors.

2. When It Becomes More Important Than Competence

We’ve all encountered people who interview well and have the ability to establish rapport with just about anyone. (Think about your sales reps; much of their success hinges on their ability to sell themselves and your company to others without making it feel like a transaction.)

That’s why it’s important to remember that while charm and a strong connection can go a long way, it’s not enough to replace competence.

Using objective, data-driven assessments can help hiring managers focus on the most important job criteria and avoid making snap judgment.

3. When It Stifles Innovation

Cynthia Barton Rabe, author of The Innovation Killer, says “group think” is one of the two biggest barriers that stifle innovation within an organization.

While it’s important for teams to have a shared set of values and a collective mission, there are dangers in putting too much emphasis on conformity.

In such an environment, employees can be hesitant to speak up if they believe another approach or course of action will be more effective than what the consensus believes.

Instead, aim for a diverse blend of people who bring different perspectives, personalities and strengths to the table with the desire to use them for the greater good of the company.

Hiring for cultural fit is as much a science as it is an art form. While you may have a gut feeling about a certain candidate, keep your instincts in check by using objective, data-based processes and doing your due diligence.

If you find yourself walking the fine line between wanting to hire for cultural fit and not wanting to stifle innovation (or worse, face accusations of discrimination), join me for our upcoming webinar, “Hiring for Cultural Fit: How to Create A Happier, More Loyal Workforce.”

I’ll talk hiring managers through the art of assessing candidates for those intangible factors that often determine whether they’ll stay for the long haul or move on after six months.

Space is limited, so register now to secure your spot!

When people talk about what makes a great sales rep, they often use adjectives like "optimistic", "resilient," and "driven" to describe their personality.

But what role does intelligence play in selling success? Is recruiting a sales rep based on brains the smart thing to do?

Research examining the performance of sales reps has found some interesting results.

Sales Performance Correlates With Personality, Not Brains

Sales performance is the official job duties of the sales rep: Activities, metrics, and quotas. Research on nearly 46,000 salespeople examined the relationship between personality, intelligence, and sales performance.

The results found that brains account for 15% of sales performance and personality accounts for 85%.

A recent study provides us with some clues why: intelligence was correlated with sales volume but only for salespeople who are also high in people skills.

Citizenship Work Correlates With Brain, Not Personality

Citizenship work behaviors are ones that help the organization, such as volunteering for overtime, proactively suggesting new ideas, and offering to work with difficult colleagues.

These helpful behaviors are important because they've been shown to encourage creativity and adaptability in the workplace and improve employee morale.

Research has found that brains account for 53% of these helpful work behaviors and personality accounts for 47%.

Counterproductive Work Behavior Correlates With Personality, Not Brains

Counterproductive work behaviors are ones that harm the organization, such as theft, insults, or taking credit for someone else’s work.

These harmful behaviors matter because they've been shown to increase absenteeism and turnover, which represents thousands, even millions, of financial loss to a company per year.

Research has found that brains account for 9% of these harmful work behaviors and personality accounts for 91%.

Should You Hire Sales Reps With Brains or Personality?

Ideally, you want sales reps that have the brains and personality to succeed. But all things being equal, the research finds recruiting sales reps with the right personality traits for selling success will give you the edge.

Are you looking for salespeople that are the right fit for your sales role, team, and company culture? Use Ideal.com to automate candidate sourcing and duplicate your top sales performers. Sign up for a risk-free trial now.

A quest to create a state-of-the-art map of the Aedes aegypti mosquito’s genome involves scientists from assorted disciplines who rarely collaborate.

The Amazon Echo offers our first serious glimpse into the future of an intelligent home. It’s not perfect, but whether you’re you’re thinking of getting an Echo, hear people talking about “Alexa,” or not sure what the one you have is capable of, here are some of the best things you can do with it.

Read more...

TORONTO - Accounting giant KPMG says Canada has proven to be second most competitive market in a comparison test of 10 leading industrial countries.

CALGARY - The long-held vision of giant airships nearly the length of a Canadian football field delivering workers and supplies to the oilsands and the North's mining sector is a step closer to reality.

“As more marketers adopt ABM strategies, they’re finding that top-funnel marketing is the weak link in the chain, and that it too must be optimized with tech to generate full ROI from their ABM investments.”

In a TechCrunch article published last month, Ajay Agarwal provided a great overview of the state of marketing technology (MarTech). Comparing MarTech’s more tumultuous rise against the rather smooth ascent of sales technology (specifically Salesforce’s domination), he wrote:

“B2B will continue to be a strong market for martech startups with plenty of demand from CMOs; we expect to see several new $1 billion-plus companies emerge in categories like top-of-funnel marketing, account-based marketing and predictive analytics.” (Italics are my own)

With regard to predictive analytics and ABM, this isn’t too surprising; ABM is now a widely accepted B2B strategy for its efficiency and effectiveness. And predictive analytics – for those organizations with the means and database requirements – is probably the best way to inform ABM programs. Top-of-funnel (TOFU) marketing tech, however, hasn’t received nearly the same degree of attention.

This is mostly due to the fact that TOFU MarTech has, until recently, been nearly synonymous with advertising tech (AdTech) – a black box that most marketing orgs have traditionally handed off to their agencies to deal with (hence why AdTech’s pricing structure is often so different than that of MarTech). Yet, this is changing as companies recognize how much they’re investing in top-funnel activies: identifying and engaging target audiences, and creating prospective customers.

The rise of MarTech and its consumption of AdTech

Ten years ago, marketing technology capabilities and data availability were nothing near the levels of today – it was all more of a vision than reality. And marketers struggled with learning their newly adopted marketing automation systems, let alone trying to manage advertising tech and myriad paid lead gen sources.

But as MarTech solutions have proliferated over the past few years, marketers have had to take it upon themselves to ensure working integrations between systems and tools. And such DIY efforts spurred technological expertise among these practitioners.

This has given marketers a taste for control (and customization). And they’re now less willing to give up control of any aspect of the marketing process – even the top-funnel engagement and prospect acquisition tools that were once only the purview of search specialists, agencies and trading desks.

Consequently, TOFU technology is gradually being consumed within the greater MarTech landscape, and therefore it’s just now beginning to receive wider coverage as a necessary tool within the marketer’s stack.

Such recognition is sure to increase as the industry begins to see top-funnel technology’s ability to bring efficiency and transparency to paid lead acquisition efforts, thereby paying off on growing ABM and predictive investments.

The relationship between ABM, predictive and top-funnel marketing technology

We marketers love (and need) to categorize all our tech – the landscape has simply grown too big not to do so. Scott Brinker’s latest MarTech landscape supergraphic of more than 3,000 vendors illustrates the need well. And, in fact, many more TOFU tech providers have entered the landscape in 2016.

But when it comes to ABM, predictive and TOFU, we must remember: none of these ideas work well in a vacuum – they’re each highly dependent on one another.

ABM is a strategy (not an individual technology) – one that’s becoming increasingly sophisticated by the inclusion of a greater number of software and data providers that are developing capabilities to cater to such strategic needs. No one ABM tech can fulfill all ABM requirements.

A major subset of ABM strategy is predictive analytics, which leverages numerous sources of data – internal (e.g., CRM and marketing automation systems) as well as external (e.g., government databases and third-party data providers) – to inform ABM strategies. It tells marketers and sales teams where and how to focus their efforts.

This makes sense to most marketers by now. ABM is all about working smarter rather than harder. And predictive analytics tells us where the smart plays are. But it’s not enough to know where the smart plays are – marketers must be able to act on this information.

TOFU technology is the “play” button for ABM and predictive analytics

Once your ABM strategy is set (whether informed by predictive analytics or more manual processes), you still need to execute it; that is to say, you need to engage those identified accounts and high-quality personas and get them into your sales pipeline. This comes down to various B2B advertising and demand generation methods.

Traditional B2B advertising and demand gen, however, lacks the refinement needed to execute highly targeted ABM strategies. In fact, a recent survey from Wakefield Research showed that 96% of B2B marketers believe that B2B advertising reaches a large volume of people outside target audiences. And 71% believe that B2B ads frequently fail to meet expectations. This isn’t good.

There’s little point in investing in ABM programs or predictive software if you can’t properly engage the accounts and decision-makers that are likely to buy your product – i.e., the targets identified in your ABM strategies and predictive models. This is where top-of-funnel marketing technology comes in, by:

• Serving ads only to targeted account IP addresses;
• Tracking account activity on your website;
• Activating and automating demand gen processes to acquire contact info on decision-makers at such targeted accounts that are showing buying signals; and
• Verifying, normalizing and injecting that contact info into your lead nurturing and sales processes.

Account-based advertising and automated demand generation software hasn’t yet received as much attention as predictive analytics. Yet, as more marketers adopt ABM strategies, they’re finding that top-funnel marketing is the weak link in the chain, and that it too must be optimized with tech to generate full ROI from their ABM investments.

In today's 5 Minute Marketing Tip I'm going to show you a vital strategy to help you beat much bigger competitors – especially when it comes to winning large bids and landing corporate clients.
 


 
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Video Transcript

Hi, it's Ian here, I've got a really quick tip for you today, and it is about how you can win work against much bigger competitors especially if you're pitching for big projects or looking to win business with large corporate clients. I'll explain how after the break.

Hi, welcome back. So, back in 1838 in his massive book on military strategy on war, Carl von Clausewitz explained that victory in battle isn't just due to the overall number of soldiers or resources you have, it's due to your concentration of forces. In other words, you might have a smaller army, but if you use them well, if you concentrate those forces on specific points, you can win. Napoleon was really one of his models for that. For example, Napoleon managed to defeat the combined Sardinian and Austrian armies despite having almost half the resources they had. He did it by attacking the Sardinian army first and defeating them then recovering and then moving on to attack the Austrian army rather than trying to take them all at once. In other words, he concentrated his forces to where they where stronger and he was able to win and he kept going like that.

You can do the same in your marketing, really. You might feel overwhelmed, you might think, “Gosh, my competitor has 10 people working on bids against me or 20 or 50 or 100 or however big they are.” The thing to remember is, they are always dividing their forces. So, those 10 people who you might be facing as competitors are usually trying to win 20 or 30 clients. Now sure, if you also try and try and bid for those 20 or 30 projects with big clients, then, compared to their resources, you are going to have much less. You are going to just put in a very basic proposal and hope that somehow the client figures out that you are better than these other big competitor or maybe you are cheaper etcetera.

You shouldn't do that, instead what you should do is concentrate your forces. Instead of going for the 10 or 20, go for 1 or 2. Now, if you go to win 1 or 2 projects, 1 or 2 clients, then, you yourself will have more resources because you concentrated yourself, rather than the 2 or 3 junior consultants working 20% of their time and the 5% of the time of the partner having oversight on the bid that the bigger firms would inevitably put on it. That means you can do more research. You can better understand your target client. You can understand what the goals or objective are, you can position what it is you have to offer in terms of that much better than your competitors. You can spend more time with them, you can add more value in the meetings you have with that potential client, you can meet more decision makers in the client organization. All because you are concentrating your effort on winning 1 or 2 projects rather than spreading yourself thinly and trying to win 10 or 20 which you probably couldn't have managed resource wise anyway in terms of delivery.

The secret to beating your much larger competitors is to concentrate your effort and try and win a smaller number of projects. They obviously have to be big projects if you win them. Try and win a smaller number, but put much more effort into winning each individual one. That's worked wonders for me in the past, it's worked wonders for a number of my clients, it can work wonders for you, cheers.

The post How To Beat Much Bigger Competitors appeared first on Ian Brodie.

Joseph A. Michelli’s recent book, Driven to Delight, is centered on the customer-centric transformation and ongoing customer experience strategy at Mercedes-Benz USA. After reading the book, I had a few questions about some of the content and strategies Joseph covered.

And here’s what resulted from the exchange.

George Jacob: Joseph, what compelled you to write about the customer experience transformation at Mercedes-Benz USA?

Joseph Michelli: I facilitated a benchmarking session with the CEO of Mercedes-Benz USA. In that session, I invited leaders from other brands with whom I have worked and written about (e.g., Zappos and The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company) to join the Mercedes-Benz USA CEO. After that session, it became apparent to me the challenge facing the brand and the special leadership team poised to meet it.

I was fortunate to work with the company as it embarked on its multi-year journey to improve the experience customers were having in US dealerships, and I leveraged my vantage point to provide the content for the book.

At the onset of their transformation, Mercedes-Benz had the benefit of brand awareness. But not every company has the same clout. With that in mind, what are three takeaways for lesser-known brands trying to improve the customer experience?

George, what a great point about the clout and resources of a Mercedes-Benz. The interesting things for me is that almost everything Mercedes-Benz did during the transformation can be done on a much smaller scale and that Mercedes-Benz achieved their victories in a budget-neutral way. Here are 3 quick hits for your audience:

1. Create the vision of success in customer transformation in words and pictures. Constantly refresh that message and engage your people in discussions about the purposefulness of improving the lives of those they serve.
2. Realize deep change comes slow and often means that your people will have to give up something in order for the gains to occur and sustain. Help your people off-load some of the existing work, which ultimately adds little value to customers.
3. Customer experience excellence is a two-fold endeavor. You must be operationally excellent to remove customer pain points and you must engage the hearts of your customers to drive emotional connections, loyalty, and referrals.

Luxury cars have a pre-purchase dynamic—historically driven by identity and product—that makes sales almost like recruitment. Has MBUSA’s shift from a product-centric to customer-centric experience changed that dynamic for them?

To use your phrase, Mercedes-Benz is still “recruiting.” In today’s marketplace, it’s important to connect products to lifestyle, and as you’ve noted, Mercedes-Benz has definitely connected people to a rich engineering tradition of innovation, safety, and a lifestyle of success.

That said, the shift toward customer centricity is assuring that the product is not let down by a lackluster dealership experience. Mercedes-Benz has a “craveable” product imbued with rich tradition and prestige… The dealership experience should bring the brand to life in every customer interaction, every time. No excuses!

You make a good point about MBUSA’s offering of a “craveable” product. How much of their sales process would you say is living up to the brand and the product potential buyers crave?

“Living up to” might have applied to how things were done a few years ago. But now the sales process mirrors what customers want. The consumer centricity of the brand and the changing customer have crafted today’s sales experience. The car is largely sold prior to a customer’s arrival. Thanks to the internet, consumers are savvy and just need a test drive and a quick purchase interaction that’s less than an hour long. The old days of bringing an offer to a “sales manager” in another room (who “will probably just not be able to make your offer work”) are long gone.

The mapping section of your book was interesting. MBUSA approached mapping by focusing on a customer’s evolving responses to “What car should I buy?” “How do I get the car I want?” “How do I get the most out of the car I acquired?” and “Will I buy a Mercedes-Benz again?” It’s clear Mercedes-Benz recognized how pre-sales and sales impacts the customer experience. Was this a big realization for them?

It truly was a mix of circular and linear elements. Most of the customer journey is linear. Awareness comes before purchase intent; purchase intent comes before purchase. But there are cycles. When you enter the latter phase of a lease, you are likely to be swept into the slipstream of a buying cycle. Your linear lease progress shifts into the buying cycle if “just in time” messaging is put before you.

You make an interesting point late in the book about focusing on the “lasting impact” of customer experience. Why do you think that is so important?

Customer experience is a journey, not a destination.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, purportedly said, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” Customers are like that river—they are constantly changing and evolving. If you seek time-limited success, you will become irrelevant. Swing for the fences and keep swinging.

What are the odds Mercedes-Benz has a free AMG lying around for a customer experience guy like me?

Well, since I’ve been hanging around, consulting with, and writing about them for a long time and my garage has not seen one appear yet… I would say you have a better chance winning the lottery and/or being struck by lightning.

If I said I really like my MINI, do you think that would help?

I’m sure they’d be happy to take your MINI in trade.

Image Credits:

Peekaboo by John Wright, CC BY 2.0

Kuskin paikalla by smerikal, CC BY-SA 2.0

Eliza riding in the car by Bradley Gordon, CC BY 2.0

When the Microsoft Surface first appeared, many critics panned it as a clumsy move into hardware — a device that was stuck in the middle, a half-step behind the hot market for tablets and only a half-step beyond the dying market for PCs. When the Surface then took off and gave new life to the Microsoft turnaround, it seemed to reinforce the upside-down logic of the company’s digital transformation. However, what few people realized was that Microsoft leveraged an old but often overlooked tool that has remarkable power to manage such transitions.

Over the centuries, firms have used hybrids to manage periods of difficult transition. In a recent article, we defined hybrids as combinations of competing elements or technical generations; for example, the Toyota Prius combines elements of internal combustion engines and electric cars. The advantage of hybrids is that they are a half-step that can help their developers manage long and difficult transitions, such as the one between generations of technology or the transition between careers. The challenge of hybrids is that they are only temporary half-steps, and so in retrospect they can look clumsy. Looking back at history, we can identify hybrids that bridged many of the major technology transitions: hybrid steam/sailing ships, hybrid electric/steam power plants, hybrid typewriter/PCs, hybrid hard/flash drives, hybrid cloud/enterprise computing, and yes, hybrid laptops/tablets in the form of the Microsoft Surface.

A transition of another sort is now emerging and, in turn, demands a hybrid of another sort. In the digital world, platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Nest are king. How can firms create new platforms, or even better, turn their existing products into platforms? As my coauthor, Feng Zhu, and I note in our new HBR article, making that leap from product to platform can be treacherous.

Insight Center

At the core of successful leaps, we have observed a new type of hybrid: the hybrid product/platform business models. Whereas product-based business models create value by selling differentiated products to market niches, platform-based business models create value by facilitating transactions across large, generic markets. Because product-based and platform-based models have many inherent tensions — niche versus mass market targets, asset versus transaction revenue model, differentiation versus network-based competitive advantage, etc. — prior work emphasizes that firms should choose to produce either products or platforms but not blend the two.

However, in our research, we discovered the opposite was true: Firms successfully making the leap from product to platform employed business models combining the two elements. In particular, firms used their product revenues to support the emergence of the platform, slowly letting go of the product mindset as they shifted to a platform mindset.

Some firms combine product and platform business models by using a product-based business model to complement the emergence of a platform business model. For example, Valve Software focused on making video games until it discovered that hackers were illegally modifying those games. Rather than cracking down on the hackers, it hired the hackers, who then developed a second game for Valve. But the growing body of hackers created a second problem — how to facilitate gamers who wanted to play against each other when they might each have a different version of the product.

In response, Valve built a platform called Steam to automatically update its games and make them compatible. Soon Valve realized it could use Steam to distribute any PC game, and having attracted a sizable user base for its own popular games, Valve built what is now the world’s most popular platform for distributing PC games. Valve didn’t quit making or selling its products, the games, but used them to complement the development of its platform, which employs a platform-based business model of taking a cut of revenue from every game sold.

Alternatively, some firms combine product and platform business models by using a product-based business model to subsidize the development of a platform business model. For example, Qihoo, one of China’s most successful internet firms, started out by making a security software product. However, realizing the real opportunity lay in platforms rather than products, Qihoo’s CEO made the then controversial decision to give the product away for free. After amassing a huge user base, Qihoo then leveraged its user base and reputation for security to launch a platform that allowed users to purchase safe software from third-party vendors, taking a cut on every sale. Qihoo didn’t give up on its product but simply used it to subsidize the momentum needed to create a valuable platform.

Adopting a hybrid business model does not mean that a firm will keep that business model forever. Sometimes, after successfully making the leap to platforms, firms may realize they need to abandon their old business model. But usually the greater challenge for leaders is letting go of the product mindset enough to embrace a hybrid business model and seeing that there may be more value in the platform than the product.

Even Steve Jobs struggled with this; he is reported to have been skeptical of Apple’s App Store, preferring to clamp down on the iPhone’s security and void warranties rather than embrace the efforts of hackers to “jailbreak” the iPhone so they could install their own software. Of course, today, Apple still employs a hybrid business model, selling products (iPhones) that complement its platform (App Store).

The last time you headed to a trade show, conference, or other event, did you come back with a stack of leads to follow-up with and a way to track ROI? Or did you come back wondering what you actually spent money on?

Trade shows, conferences, and other events can be valuable tools for lead generation. However, without a well-thought-out strategy, the time and money you invest will not result in quality leads. Here are a few last-minute marketing strategies you can employ to capture leads at your next tradeshow, conference or event:

Traditional Sign-Ups

Generating event-based leads can be pretty simple. As you network and make connections with new people, you can gather contact details like their name, their phone number, and their email address. Merely leaving a form within eyeshot is not enough, however. Leads are best captured after you’ve made a real connection with a person – a connection like having a great conversation, giving away a fun door prize, or offering to email a valuable ebook post-event.

Tablet-Based Sign-Ups

If you are setting up a booth at a conference or trade show geared at a younger, more tech-savvy audience, your brand will feel more relevant if you opt for tablet-based sign-ups. More importantly, tablet-based sign-ups are very efficient, taking away the need for later data entry work, and allowing you to automatically follow up with hot leads, making sure nothing slips through the cracks. This advanced take on the sign-up process can extend beyond mere email collection to include valuable customer feedback regarding your products and services, or the quality of your booth or presentation. Additionally, tablets can be used to provide your audience with interactive content, like videos, surveys and polls. Have event attendees provide their contact information in exchange for survey results, for instance, to create a fun and interactive experience and keep the conversation going well after the event.

Harnessing Social Media

Whether you opt for tablet-based sign-ups or standard paper-based forms, you can harness the energy and reach of an event by having a strong presence on social media in addition to your booth or table. Dedicate one person on your team to be in charge of the conversation on social. Follow influencers, connect with event attendees and monitor event hashtags to add your brand’s voice to the conversation. Sharing photos of the event on social can help your audience feel like they’re there, while encouraging people at your booth to share photos can help to amplify your brand on new networks that you didn’t have access to before. Social media can also drive attendees to your booth by helping you spread the word about a giveaway or free resource. Finally, a tradeshow or conference is a great way to get your brand in front of a highly-targeted audience of quality leads. Use the opportunity to offer a lead magnet on social to cast an even wider lead capture net.

Using Tradeshow Goals to Generate Leads

Immediately after signing up for a conference or tradeshow, it is essential to establish specific goals for that event. Are you hoping to change the community’s perception of your brand? Or is your goal to expand your reach within the professional community? Clear goals will ensure that you adequately prepare for the event and make the most of any opportunities that arise while you’re there. Additionally, goals can guide the details of your tradeshow exhibit, ensuring that it appeals to your target audience. Don’t be afraid to quantify your goals — set a realistic number of leads and customers that you can strive to capture during each event.

Join Expert Panels

You’ll find it far easier to generate leads if event attendees think of you as an industry authority and not just a source of free food or trinkets. One of the easiest ways to gain that authority is to join a panel held during the event. Other means of improving credibility in the lead-up to your event include highlighting business accomplishments in press releases or publishing white papers.

Nurture Tradeshow Leads

An event is just the beginning of your relationship with leads. Especially for B2B companies, it takes time to build trust and educate leads about the value you bring to the table. You could ask for the sale right away, but you’d likely be met with mostly “nos.” Instead, use marketing automation to put new, cold leads on a drip campaign post-event to warm them up, increasing conversions and overall ROI of the event.

Lead generation is a numbers game, but the quality of your leads can make a big difference between an event that ultimately generates new customers or a money pit that does little to elevate your brand. A combination of the strategies detailed above will help you connect with the right people and meet your tradeshow goals.

  If you sell the way you did 10 years ago, you don’t need a sales content strategy. There’s little strategy required to tell people about your company, products, features — just don’t forget those benefit statements! But if you’ve truly adopted a customer-centered sales philosophy you know you have new requirements. The new realities of selling to self-educating, digital era buyers has made having the right content an essential tool for sales professionals. The right content addresses every key buyer decision point throughout the customer engagement process. The importance and complexity of this requirement demands a strategy. Sales people need content to sell In B2B sales, especially a complex, considered or value sale, sales people still generate most of their sales “leads.” They develop virtually all sales opportunities. As it is for marketers, content is essential to capture prospect attention and generate interest. For sales people, tracking prospect content consumption indicates interest, intent and timing. Content is needed to get into more customer conversations. Digital era buyers want to conduct research to prepare for conversations with vendor reps. In supporting this desire, sales people “earn the right” to a conversation, often ahead of competitors. The right sales content can eradicate three costly and inefficient selling behaviors: The four-legged sales call (or more) where subject experts are required to deliver important but complex information “I’ll have to get back to you on that” — when the above aren’t present The BIG DEMO — often too early in the sales process, with effectiveness diluted […]

The post Why You Need a B2B Sales Content Strategy appeared first on Avitage.

As a sales professional, I hate it when I see other salespeople doing things that give the profession a bad name. Recently, I was on the receiving end of a sales strategy so bad I felt compelled to write a blog post about it to warn other sales reps -- don't do this!

The sales rep, PK (his name has been changed), works at an IT consulting and tech services company.

I work for a tech company in Business Development and have nothing to do with the services he is offering, nor am I the decision maker. Yet, PK visited my LinkedIn profile one day and decided to shoot a prospecting email to the address attached to my profile.

Things started out fine, but not great, with his first email on February 17:

Hello David,

I hope things are good with you.

Kxxxx Cxxxxxxxx Services Private Ltd. is a global IT consulting and technology services company with a niche in delivering quality solutions to customers across the globe. Serving for more than a decade and millions of man hours dedicated in delivering technology products and services.

Please let me know if we can engage in any of your current needs. We can provide you best and pocket friendly solutions.

Look forward your positive response.

Thanks,

PK

Because he didn't do his homework on me (even though I know he checked out my LinkedIn profile), I never responded.

Prospecting emails need a personal touch. PK could have tailored his approach to me by including information found on my LinkedIn profile. Gathering other intel on my job functions and responsibilities would have helped him qualify me, then approach me to try and get a referral to the decision maker in my firm.

What needs did I have that he could engage in? He didn't ask about my needs. He only told me about him and his firm. He didn't ask about my firm, what we do, why we do it, or anything else.

He didn't ask any open ended questions such as, "How do you handle ____?", "What happens when ___?", or "Can you tell me about a time when ____?" But at least his emails weren't offensive.

The next day, he sent a follow up email:

Dear David,

In my previous mail, I have shared some possible business opportunities between each other. I hope you get a chance to take a look.

Please let me know if there is any current Web or Mobile Development needs.

I would really appreciate if you can respond once.

PK

I'm not sure what "possible business opportunities between each other" he was talking about, as he never made an to help me. His initial email was all about him and pushing his services on me, and his second email was no different.

Needless to say, I did not respond once.

Eight days later, PK followed up again with a one-line message:

Anticipating your response once.

What, no "Hello, David"? No "How are you"? He thinks he can get a kiss without giving me some flowers?

Seeing as he hadn't given me any reason to, I did not respond. Once.

Seven days later, on March 4, old PK hits me with another email:

Awaiting your cordial comments.

Still no hello. But he softened up a bit. Thinking I may be cordial at this point despite the fact I haven't answered once because I'm not the right prospect for him. This was getting annoying.

Four days later, on March 8, my pal PK sent the email message which prompted this article:

I'm expecting an answer.

Excuse me? You're expecting an answer? We've gone from "Hello, kind sir, may I have your cordial comments" to "You'd better respond"?

I don't know about how PK was taught sales, but messages like that are guaranteed to be deleted. If any of my reps ever sent a message like that to a prospect they would be pulled off the floor and disciplined.

That is not how you gain a prospect's trust. That is not how you become someone's business partner. That is not how you get a prospect to sign a check with your name on it, drawn from an account of their hard-earned money.

Sales prospecting today is not old-school. You can't bully the client into submission. It is about partnerships, gaining trust and a building a network of raving fans who support your business because you solve problems for theirs.

Damnit, PK -- you piss me off.

He could have just said "Sorry for all the emails David, this will be my last communication. Please feel free to reach out should your needs change."

Instead, he ended on the worst note possible, leaving a bad impression of himself, his company, and his product. PK did it wrong. Very wrong.

And I still haven't answered -- nor will I.

Not once.

The marketing organization has been in a renaissance, moving from a model where every type of marketing is handled in a silo toward a more holistic model that’s structured around the customer lifecycle. It’s about time.

Traditionally, customers have come to us with marketing departments organized in every which way. In the long run, the model that’s proves itself time after time is a marketing department structured around the customer experience, one that makes sure that customers get consistent and progressive messaging from their first touch all the way through their entire journey—no matter where that journey takes them.

In other words, marketing organizations have to be nimble enough to allow for a panoply of customer experiences—sort of like those “make your own ending” storybooks where every choice reveals a new plotline, which is essentially what each buyer experiences with your brand. Making this a reality involves ensuring that you have the right strategy in place and dollars to back it up.

Point-to-Point Engagement? Or One Hub to Rule Them All?

The hub-and-spoke system used by many airlines today was one of the greatest innovations in the airline industry. However, when airlines like Southwest successfully implemented point-to-point systems at lower costs, it put pressure on hub-and-spoke airlines to adapt. A similar story is unfolding in how marketing organizations handle the rapid explosion of marketing channels.

If you’re in marketing, you know how overwhelming the sheer number of channel choices can be these days. The pressure to have an effective, dynamic presence on every single digital platform can be crippling to busy marketers who can barely keep up with just social media posts. And let’s not get started on the responsive, personalized website you need to have if you want to appeal to your audience.

According to Content Marketing Institute’s annual B2C Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America report, of the 12 tactics consumer marketers consider most effective, a healthy nine of them are digital marketing approaches: email newsletters, social media, mobile apps, videos, online presentations, microsites, website articles, webinars and webcasts, and blogs—with the rest being in-person events and creatives (photos/illustrations and infographics). And their B2B report echoes similar results, with the most effective digital marketing tactics being webinars/webcasts, email newsletters, blogs, videos, and online presentations. Their other tactics, aside from in-person events, involve different forms of content that can be hosted online: case studies, whitepapers, research reports, and infographic.

Unfortunately, a lot of traditional organizations are stuck in hub-and-spoke mode, with email marketing, social media marketing and mobile marketing arms simply tacked onto their traditional core marketing department—which is often most adept at legacy mass marketing that’s becoming ever less relevant. Some organizations with this old-school approach refuse to see the marketing experience through the modern customer’s eyes.

What Exactly Is Your Customer Looking For?

Customers don’t think of themselves as “email customers” or “Facebook customers” or “mobile customers.” They expect and deserve open access to the same information on any platform, a unified, omni-channel experience that unfolds organically wherever they are. If they see a post on Facebook about a great deal on a product, but didn’t have time to click “buy” before they walked out the door, they want to be able to go right to your website from their smartphone while they’re standing in line at the post office and get the same deal without having to go back and scroll through their Facebook timeline (in fact, this happened to me recently).

But when marketing organizations are siloed, the customer experience becomes disjointed. The social media department can’t always coordinate with the website department to ensure that your customer sees the same information on every channel. Customers are apt to receive duplicate or even conflicting messages, and once they’re stuck in the quagmire of your duplicate marketing messages, they quickly lose faith.

To give your entire team insight into the whole customer experience, you need a marketing organization devoted to that experience—and you need the tools to support it. Both your internal organization and your technology must allow you to read/listen and respond to customer behavior in the moment.

Why You Need to Spend Even More on Digital Marketing

Of course, to reorganize your marketing team, you need the budget. Less dollars are going into traditional offline marketing channels, and are instead going into digital marketing. And unless your company has been hiding under a rock for most of the last decade, you’ve probably already increased your digital marketing budget pretty substantially to accommodate the need for a website, social media presence, and email marketing campaigns (at the very least). In fact, Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey 2015-2016: Digital Marketing Comes of Age, published November 2015, reports that digital marketing budgets increased 10% from 2014 to 2015, and this amount will continue to increase this year, primarily going to social marketing, digital commerce, marketing analytics, customer experience, and advertising operations.

These days, digital marketing is marketing. In fact, 98% of marketers acknowledge that the online and offline channels are merging and a third of marketers already have their digital techniques fully incorporated into their marketing operations, according to Gartner. And here’s why:

1. Your customers are online, so that’s the natural place to talk to them. Pew Research Center reports that 84% of American adults use the internet, with adoption increasing over the years across all age groups, and a fifth of Americans go online almost constantly.
2. Digital marketing is faster than offline channels. In a world where buyers demand immediate, relevant information, it’s infinitely easier to fulfill those demands via digital channels because we can listen to the requests and automatically respond. Even the best direct mail piece still takes a few days to arrive.
3. Besides putting money where it counts, spending on digital marketing makes for better tracking of marketing ROI. Finally, marketers can justify where, how, and why they are spending their money.

The bottom line? Even companies that don’t think of themselves as “digital businesses” are taking their marketing efforts online. You have to meet your customers where they are. Digital is no longer a marketing niche—in fact, the phrase “digital marketing” will soon be considered redundant. We’ll all just say “marketing,” and that will be that.

If your organization hasn’t gone digital, you can lobby for change and be the marketing hero. Begin your campaign for change by defining what customer engagement means to you. Is it all about customer retention? Repeat purchases? Social advocacy? Perhaps it’s all, which for many it should be. Next, hone in on a set of customers you can identify as a prime engagement target and then engage them with that content, while measuring how their response is impacting your goal.

Just think—it will be dawn of a new day for your marketing organization.

What’s one of you most successful campaigns for driving business? How does an increase of $380K in business and 250% increase in engagement sound? Today, I’ll discuss a blueprint one of our clients used leveraging automated direct mail and gifting within their nurture paths.

 

What Gets Your Attention?

An email in your junk mail or a personalized coffee set delivered to your desk?

As we know, ALL businesses send email, even Ken the barber might send out a newsletter. Email is a relatively cheap medium, it’s easy, and no matter what anyone tells you, it still works. But email is clutter–I received 388 emails yesterday. Plus, many companies block email making it difficult to reach prospects behind the corporate wall.

How do you break through the noise? How do you reach your top accounts?

The Challenge: How to Create a Multi-Touch Experience

When the opportunity arose to help PFL with a project, my team jumped on it. PFL is one of the leaders in direct mail and it is integrated with Marketo, Salesforce and Eloqua to enable marketers to send physical mail and gifts directly from those systems.

But the challenge wasn’t to just send a list of folks from Marketo to PFL to drive a bulk mail–that’s a glorified list import like sending your holiday list a box of cookies all at once. Instead, the challenge was to drive systematic evergreen communications as part of an ongoing nurture conversation–and test the heck out it. So instead of a nurture campaign sending an email, it would send a tactile piece as part of the nurture journey when the time was right–very cool stuff.

But how would it perform?

The Project: Email and Mail are Better Together

PFL’s goal was to build trust and relationship, and to provide educational content to high target leads and accounts…and of course drive leads and accounts down the funnel.

A decision to move to automated direct mail is a big decision that requires a lot of education. The calls-to-action were low pressure (a Case Study) asking if a prospect wanted to learn more, rather than asking for a meeting or a demo.

Systematic Evergreen Communications

As part of the campaign, PFL decided to make the fifth touch the direct mail gift. If a prospect hit certain criteria and an address existed, the prospect would get the kit. Otherwise, the recipient would receive the email.

The special sauce was that campaign was built to be evergreen meaning that as new qualified leads entered the system, they would automatically drop into this content stream. This process had the double benefit of automating the sending of gift while also ensuring that the recipient received it at the right time during the nurture conversation.

As recipients received the gifts, PFL tracked all Case Study downloads and lifecycle successes that came from the campaign.

The Better Together Package

The physical package that PFL sent was fun–a notepad that had humorous examples of how physical mail and digital outreach are just better together.

Test, Test, Test

PFL started with four simultaneous test groups that included Marketo Real-time personalization (RTP) as well as retargeting campaigns using Facebook.

In the tests, we started RTP a bit late so the audience was too small to show any real impact. The plan is to try this method again in a future test.

On the retargeting, PFL leveraged Facebook to promote the Case Study download to the same people who received the gift. However, since PFL focuses on B2B, the match rates for Facebook emails were extremely low. LinkedIn would be the perfect retargeting medium but their pricing model is focused on high volume Enterprise customers (Translation: Super expensive for low-mid volume). Hopefully, LinkedIn will come downstream in the near future.

End Results – 258% Lift and Massive Boost in Revenue

The end result was one of the top producing campaigns I’ve ever worked on. We had 4 separate test groups to test offers and in the end, the combination of direct mail and email won big time. Using emails, in combination with automated direct mail and a few other tactics, PFL was able to deliver a cohesive experience across multiple channels to get the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

In the first three months the campaign:

• Generated a 258% lift in Engagement (People who downloaded content, became MQLs or better) vs people who didn’t receive direct mail.
• Ignited Sales bringing in $384K+ in revenue in the first three months.
• Delivered strong and rewarding 1,967% ROI (Based on investment vs revenue).
• Drove 71% more sales opportunities over the control group.
• Significantly streamlined marketing with a set-and-forget systematic evergreen approach as the direct mail sits within a nurture stream.

Other Automated Direct Mail Considerations

Before jumping on the automated direct mail bandwagon, here are a few things to consider.

Your Price Point. If you are selling $15 calculators or $99 software packages, physical gifting beyond a post card probably doesn’t make sense. If you are selling in a B2B environment where your Sales reps are trying to generate enterprise deals faster or close renewals easier, consider automated direct mail.

Getting Buy-in. Most digital marketers are used to spending budget on digital marketing as physical mail is old school. Asking for budget for direct mail is like asking for a CD for Christmas. So yes, you’ll have to make a case for it but the opportunity is large because so few companies are taking advantage of automated direct mail.

Costs. Direct mail is way more expensive than email. You’ll need to find a way to justify it within your organization but as this example shows, the ROI is there in the right situation. PFL spent about $20K to generate nearly $400K in revenue.

To give you an idea of base costs, PFL licensing starts about $10K for the software per year plus the cost of the items.

 

What is it? Does it matter? Do I already have one?

Marketing technology is exploding. Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape showed 947 companies in 43 categories in 2014 – which seemed overwhelming. Then in 2015 it jumped to 1,876 companies. And we’ve learnt that 2016 has seen it double again, to a massive 3,500 companies. So what does this mean for marketers? What does it mean for IT managers? And how can we plan to make the most of the new technologies without getting lost in a sea of data?

The aim of this post is to introduce the core components and purpose of a Marketing Technology Stack. Most of the current literature is aimed clearly at large organisations whose CIO’s, CMO’s and CTO’s are very busy dealing with mega integrations of multi-user software solutions. It’s fascinating to read, but not very applicable to the 60% or so of us who work for slightly smaller companies.

Why should I be thinking about a 'MarTech Stack'?!

Because you already have one! Without realising it, almost every business no matter how small will have some form of marketing technology stack. And it will naturally grow with your business. If you don’t plan now, you are likely to end up with a tangle of disparate systems all churning out data – none of which you can combine and measure.

Do you have a central database of customer information? Do you send marketing emails? Do you have a website? If yes – you have a three tier marketing technology stack. Add social platforms, analytics, a CMS, Display and Retargeting Ads, and a Marketing Automation platform and suddenly that is a LOT of data. In fact, the average company’s marketing tech stack now consists of 17+ tools (Radius). If you don’t consider how they interconnect at the start, you could end up with a lot of employees working in expensive and unconnected silos. And that is without considering other useful customer data you may have in accounting, events and sales software, amongst others.

OK, I have a stack... and I need to plan my stack...

We’ve established that a solid marketing technology stack will allow you to optimise your spend, time and effort. To achieve this you need a solid foundation to bring together and measure your various tools and components. Getting this base component right at the start, and ensuring it will integrate with your core elements, will allow you to measure each new tool you bring in, as you grow.

Once you have your base component, which will typically be a CRM solution but in some cases may be a Marketing Automation platform, you can choose the tools to integrate into your stack. These may include:

CRM

Linking marketing efforts to the remainder of the business, and especially sales and their pipelines – CRM should be your belt and braces in the technology stack. Integrate marketing and non-marketing technologies and you have your core system ready to go. Most CRM’s will offer enhanced reporting, instant dashboards and enough functionality for Sales, Marketing & Customer Services to work in one system together. It’s also a lot easier for management if all departments use a central system offering board level reports, fast!

Check: Does your provider offer integrations with your key business and marketing software? Better still, can they offer custom integrations? If yes, you know they can grow with you.

Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is essentially the ability to automate a number of processes. Typically it pulls together a bunch of previously stand-alone marketing solutions such as email marketing, lead management and lead scoring and provides them in one integrated package. Most marketing automation solutions are aimed at the lead generation and qualification stage of new business, and stop at the point you would pass a lead over to your sales team.

There is a very wide range of solutions available on the market for every speciality. Some contain website CMS, others specialise in content distribution. Each business will need a different solution which may be a big (and expensive) market leader, or may be a combination of smaller tools integrated together.

Check: Can your marketing automation and CRM platforms integrate? If not, you are missing the point of the technology stack, and you are setting up your marketing and sales teams for a lot of misaligned conversations over lead follow up!

CMS

A Content Management System allows you to create, publish, store, edit and collaborate on website content. Typically it is the back end of a company website. There are many options out there, from DIY WordPress websites, through to professional designed sites hosted on the big players such as Drupal, Joomla or Magento. Alternatively you may choose a custom CMS created by a website agency, or a CMS sitting within a Marketing Automation provider. I’ll assume all readers of this blog already have a CMS – as in today’s business world we all need a website!

Check: Carrying out lead generation or customer support through forms? It’s worth ensuring your CMS can integrate with your CRM/marketing automation solution.

Email

An oldie, but a goodie! Email marketing is going to be with us for a while yet so ignore all those blog posts exclaiming “Email is dead!” Automation in marketing is largely email based, used to distribute content and contact leads when they hit a desired score. Make sure you have an email marketing solution that meets your needs.

Check: Before spending on an email solution do check with your CRM and marketing automation providers. Both are very likely to offer email marketing solutions that are already fully integrated! Bonus! No new training or integration spend required.

Analytics & Tracking

Website analytics for B2B now comes in two forms, which I’ve nicknamed Analytics and Tracking. Analytics allows you to analyse (almost) all of your website visitors as a mass of unknown companies. You can identify where website traffic comes from, how it moves through your sites and carry out goal analysis on forms. It’s great to help you work out how well your website is converting visitors to leads and to identify which traffic sources are most valuable to you. Google Analytics is the most popular, and free!

Tracking is a newer technology. Like analytics it uses IP addresses to track, but unlike analytics it only shows you information on the IP addresses it can identify. Using tracking software allows you to work out which company the website visitor is from (expect to be able to identify 10-30% of all traffic), and target them accordingly. This may be a direct sales approach, but more often (and more successfully) it is a great way to score existing leads and measure their interest.

Check: It’s nice to integrate website analytics into your stack, but it isn’t essential. As website analytics is a mass of unknown website visitors you cannot tie it up with lead and customer data, so it isn’t the end of the world to work on this data outside of your technology stack. On the other hand, IP Tracking is only valuable when it is fully integrated with your lead and customer data.

Ad Technology

If you have ticked off the above as a fully integrated solution – congratulations you’ve got a solid tech stack! Ad Technology isn’t quite a clear. In a large enterprise you would want to manage this within your stack for control purposes, however in smaller organisations you will often have just one person managing your online PPC ads, display ads and retargeting. In this situation it is fine to manage these in their own platforms – as long as you are pulling the data in! If your central base can identify where your traffic is coming from, you are able to measure, compare traffic sources and plan accordingly.

Social

This will have differing levels of importance to different businesses. If you manage customer service via Twitter – you will need high-level integration, especially with your CRM alerting functionality. If you have a presence and carry out the odd post, it isn’t as important. However, almost all marketing technology will integrate with the main social platforms. At the minimum ensure you can search hashtags and mentions of your brand, and you can measure incoming website traffic from social.

SEO & Content

I’ve bundled together two gigantic topics here, as this blog isn’t going to go into the depths of SEO or content marketing. Both sit nicely in the ‘inbound’ marketing sphere, and both become more and more relevant the further your tech stack has evolved. Content makes up the lifeline of automated lead nurture email series, and the kind of content and frequency of it will largely depend on your industry and team size. SEO is essential for us all, and there are many blogs across the internet to get you started. It’s worth ensuring you have the basic tools in your CMS to manage these, and as your abilities grow you may find you want to integrate technology into your stack to manage both SEO and content.

Buyers Expect Accurate Self-Assessment. They want sellers who understand and acknowledge their own limitations, sellers who seek and accept help when needed. Your buyers will not trust you if you try to Fake It ’til You Make It in Sales. That’s a sure-fire recipe for failure.

In our continuing series on the 12 Dimensions of Trust, each of the 12 dimensions represents one of the 12 ways a seller can build or erode trust with buyers. Each associated action creates a connection or causes a disconnection. Knowing about all 12 Dimensions of Trust empowers a seller who wants strong connections founded in trust. Not knowing leads to buyer mistrust and seller confusion. Accurate self-assessment is the final dimension, the one that explains why you can’t Fake It ’til You Make It in Sales.

 “Seller seeks and accepts help when needed” is the only reasonable alternative to Fake It ’til You Make It in Sales. 

This dimension of trust goes hand-in-hand with “strives to learn” and the first dimension of trust, competence. A seller must be competent and also willing to acknowledge his or her own deficits. Over-estimating one’s own abilities results in sub-par performance, delays and missed opportunities. Asking questions to understand what is expected and what alternatives are acceptable will help sellers see more clearly what resources they will need in order to fully satisfy their buyers.

 

Next Steps:

• To learn more about DISCOVER Questions® and how to get connected in meaningful ways with your buyers, order your copy of this bestseller from Amazon.com
• For more tools, resources and content about connecting with your buyers and advancing the sale, visit our website. You’ll find lots of free webinars, infographics and podcasts.
• For individual sales coaching, group sales training, bulk book orders, or other services and products, call us today at 408-779-PFPS or e-mail deb.calvert@peoplefirstps.com

This blog post features an excerpt from the best-seller “DISCOVER Questions® Get You Connected.”  To learn more about how to connect with buyers and gain their trust, buy the full copy of this award-winning book from Amazon.com as a paperback or e-book. Author Deb Calvert is also available to speak at your next sales conference or to provide training for your sales team on how you can become the ONE seller that buyers actually WANT to talk to.

 

The post Why You Can’t Fake It ’til You Make It in Sales appeared first on People First.

Cold calling is a powerful tool to grow your business. Done correctly, cold calling will allow you to build rapport and trust, to display authority, and to increase the desire for your product or service.

Learn from a cold calling pro what the #1 cold calling mistake is, how you’re losing prospects at hello, how to recognize when your cold calling campaign is dead in the water, and more!

Transcript

All right. So we are officially recording right now. I’m going to start sharing my screen. Very good. I’m going to welcome all of you again. All right. Sorry for complaining or whining. All right. So welcome everybody to this special webinar today, “Cold Calling Mastery”. You are my people, the kind of people that have joined this webinar early on a Wednesday morning to learn more about cold calling and how to master the art of cold calling.

My name is Steli Efti. I’m going to tell you guys a little bit about my background, even though I think many of you might know a thing or two about me. But just right—setting the context:

Why do I care about cold calling? Why do I think it’s effective? And what’s my experience in it? And then I’m going to share the basics, as well as best practices, to really elevate your game.

Throughout the webinar, please feel free to ask questions and make comments in the chat and whenever I cannot respond to either immediately, at the end we’re going to have a nice Q&A session. I’m going to go through all of the questions there. So whenever you have a question, get it out of your system, put it in chat. It’s going to make this a lot smooth of an operation.

The truth about cold calling

All right. So first of all, let me say that I’m not dogmatic about cold calling. I don’t think cold calling is the best thing in the universe. I don’t think every company has to do cold calling. A lot of people ask me, “Steli, why do you love cold calling so much?” Like motherfuckers, it’s not like I love it. It’s that sometimes, it’s a powerful tool to grow your business and when it is the right tool to grow your business, I use it. And because I have to use it a lot, I’ve gotten pretty good at it. That’s pretty much it.

I have a business right now actually at Close.io and I’ll get to this in a second, we do zero cold calling. It’s all inbound leads. We are doing lots of sales calls where we call all our incoming leads for our content marketing. We don’t do any cold calling. But for Elastic Sales—I’ll tell you guys a little bit that in a second—we did hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of cold calls.

So, it’s not about good or bad. It’s about practical. When it works, it works. And if it works for your business, you want to make use of it and make it work for your business.

Pivoting from an outsourced sales startup to a sales CRM startup

All right. Having said and having that out of the way, let me give you a little bit of relevant context. So I’m originally Greek, grew up in Germany. I used to say I have the best that Europe has to offer. I’m not sure about that anymore. But I’ve been a serial entrepreneur my entire life and my entrepreneurial superpower has always been the hustle in sales in one way or another.

Eight years ago, I sold everything I had. I bought a one-way ticket. I came to Silicon Valley to start my first technology company. That company turned out to be a catastrophe. It didn’t work out. It was a soul-crushing failure and defeat. But five years into that defeat, I started another business and that business is what we are running today.

And originally, we started that business with the concept of running an outsourced sales team on demand for venture-backed startups. It was called ElasticSales. It was in the heart of Silicon Valley and we did sales for about 200 venture-backed startups, helping them scale their sales operations.

And the vast majority of what we were doing was SaaS sales and it was all outbound. So as I said, we did hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of cold calls during the time that we were running ElasticSales.

Kevin Monk, yes, you are supposed to be able to hear something. I think that it’s indicated through chat that other people can’t hear me. So guys, just do me a favor. If somebody can just maybe give Kevin a little bit of tech support in the chat, maybe he doesn’t have the speakers on or something else is going on. If you guys can hear me, I’m pretty sure that the audio problem is probably on his side, unfortunately. And let him know that we’re recording this webinar so if it can’t be resolved, he still is going to be able to watch it later.

All right. So ElasticSales, we were doing sales for other companies, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of cold calls and we learned a shit ton during that experience. As part of running ElasticSales, we built a little tool called Close.io. The core emphasis of building our own sales technology during Elastic time was to have sales software that doesn’t suck and to build a sales software that would truly empower salespeople to crush it out there. And our real focus was inside sales.

And from day one, the very first thing we did with Close.io was integrating voice over IP. So we wanted to have a CRM system or sales software system that allowed us to call leads right from the app and to receive calls right through the app, because we thought it’s stupid and inefficient to have sales reps using a separate phone application to make calls and then having to use the CRM to report what they just did. So we built a beautifully integrated system where today Close.io is probably the most powerful CRM out there if you are doing cold calls.

You can do one-click calls right out of the system. You can do, you know—we have customers that do 400, 500 cold calls per rep per day in Close.io. You can record all your calls in the system. You can pre-record voicemails and drop them. You can do call transferring. There are a million features and functionalities in Close.io that makes it a really powerful tool. So if you are into cold calling, you might want to check it out.

All right. We know a shit ton about cold calls. We’ve done millions of them ourselves. We care deeply about it. And today, I’m going to teach you everything I know about it. All right. So let’s get started.

How the phone transformed sales

So first, let me take just one moment to highlight why the phone is such a beautiful device and why it is such a powerful device in order to grow your business. So first of all, think about it. The phone was probably one of the most transformative sales technologies ever invented. Probably the only one that’s one the same level is email. But what the phone did is prior to the phone, salespeople were always local and local only. It was the time where as a salesperson, you would have to go in your regional area and go knocking on doors, door to door to door, selling one person or one business at a time.

The phone changed all that. The phone made it possible for you, as one single human being, to transform the confines of your location and be able to reach anyone and everyone around the world. And that made a massive boost in sales productivity. both in reach and time because there are two things.

Number one is transforming your physical location and being able to talk to people that are not in your immediate environment. But the second thing was also time, because the biggest waste of sales productivity prior to the phone was actually the distance between one prospect and the other.

So, all the time that was wasted driving to a business or walking to a business, pitching them, and then having to go to the next business. That was all a complete waste of time. Today, you can pick up the phone, call a business, hang up, and be on the next call with the next business within seconds.

The next thing is that, and this is something very powerful to be reminded of as a startup, is that there is something powerful in this human connection and social connection. And no matter how beautiful websites are, and social applications, and email, and all kinds of other tools that we’re using today—and I want you to use all of them—there’s nothing that trumps a human-to human-interaction to build rapport, trust to display authority and to increase desire. Really, humans like to interact with other humans. Humans like to be influenced by humans. And humans build the strongest relationships one-on-one with another human being.

If you do cold calling, you probably do that most of the time in the B2B sector and you probably are not in transactional sales, but in transformative sales instead. So transactional sales is where you go to your fucking bakery and you go, “Hey, I want to have a pretzel.” It is like a dollar and they just—the person takes the money and gives you the goods. Sales at the end of the day is nothing else than a transactional value. You give the money. They give you the goods or services.

The cold call, and using the phone to do sales, typically involves transformative sales. That means you’re going out there in the world. You’re reaching somebody that didn’t think about you, didn’t have you as a top priority and you start a human connection. You make them aware that you exist. You learn about them to figure out what they need and what their desires are and then you transform their day and their life, in many cases, by making the sale if it is the right fit and if you can truly help them solve a problem or create real value.

And the last, but not the least, is a last kind of foundational thing about the phone and why it’s a beautiful device is that it’s a great equalizer. I’m not a great fan of The Wolf of Wall Street. I love the book. The book is entertaining as fuck. I don’t think—that’s not my type of sales, going out there and being like a fucking scam artist and whatever you want to call it, like a super uber-aggressive bull room type of an energy, of a person. It’s not me.

But the one beautiful line in that movie, if you’ve watched The Wolf of Wall Street, was when he explains to these morons, these idiots, the phone is the great equalizer. And it’s true. The phone strips away a lot of the superficial shit, and all that is left is your voice and the content of what you’re delivering. And that’s all the other person has to create an image and an imagery of like  who you are and to be influenced or create a relationship around you.

So, I mean back in the day, that guy was able to take a bunch of like 17, 18 19-year-old uneducated idiots and train them in selling top CEOs in the US on buying millions worth of penny stocks. So they would call CEOs, cold call CEOs, and get them to buy stocks:

From a broker they’ve never heard of? From a brokerage firm they’ve never heard of In a stock of a company they’ve never heard of In a Penny stock which is something they have never invested in and not just do that with like a few hundred dollars or a thousand bucks, [but] millions of dollars.

So, the phone truly is the great equalizer. It can make an 18-year-old kid that’s uneducated stay in the same level ground as a top CEO that’s a millionaire and have the kid influence the CEO. Just keep that in mind. It’s a beautiful device.

The basics of cold calls

All right. Let’s talk about the basics of cold calls, and the basics of cold calling if you decode it and you break it down in its single elements is very simple steps. The very first step and the most important step, is you need to be able to reach people. I know this sounds simple folks, but that’s why it’s so important. This is the number one mistake most people make when they do cold calls.

Most businesses, cold calling campaigns are dead in the water at that very first step. They’re not reaching enough people. They haven’t thought about how to reach enough people and they don’t even consider that as a part of the things they are tracking. We’ll talk about that a lot more later. I will run through these really quickly and then we’re going to go through them one by one and really go deep.

The very first thing you need to do if a tree falls in a fucking forest and nobody is around, it’s the same principle. If a cold call is made and nobody picked up, what was the fucking point? There was no cold call made, right? All you did is you waste the time. And that’s probably one of the reasons, not the only reason, but one of the reasons why people and many companies hate doing cold calls because today, most of the cold calls you make, you’ll be listening dial tones, voicemails, and you’ll talk to gatekeepers or secretaries, people that are not the decision-maker. So you’ll waste a significant amount of your time.

There are lot of tricks on how to increase your reach rate and we’ll talk about that but there’s also a baseline that you need to understand which means, if you call 100 people and you don’t reach at least 10, you’re dead in the water. You’re fucked. You need to improve the quality of the phone numbers that you have, the leads that you have, the time that you call, or something else. We’ll talk about that in a second. So reaching people is fucking crucial and you are underestimating it and I urge you not to anymore.

The next thing you need to do, once you reached somebody and they pick up the phone and it’s the right person and you have their ear now, you have their attention, what you need to do is you need to sound good. Again, something people completely dismiss, don’t pay attention to, “Sound good? I don’t know. I’m just going to focus on like pitching them on my shit.” Fuck you!

All I have on the phone in order to determine who you are and if I want to be influenced by you, if I want to listen to you, is your voice, is the way you sound, is the way you deliver the words and the content, not the content itself. We’ll talk about that a lot more.

So first, you reach people, basics people. Then you need to sound good. And again, a little bit of a chat. Richard is asking a question. Folks, let me know if anybody is experiencing any issues. If not, please jump in and support the little community in chat and help out Richard. Before I move forward, I just want to make sure that all of you guys are taken care of.

All right. So first, you reach people. Second, you need to sound good. And then you need to ask questions. And I saw that there’s a question about what comes first, the cold call or the cold email? We’ll talk about that a little bit but it’s an excellent question so I want to comment on it really quickly.

Oh Kelly, if you’re in a webinar with me, you’ll have to live with F bombs and foul language. It’s just the way I express myself so you’ll have to deal with that or find another place to get more clean information. It’s just the passion that I have. It’s just the way that I communicate. If I want to be authentic, there’s going to be a little bit of that in there. Get used to it.

What comes first, the cold email or the cold call?

All right. So what comes first, the cold email or the cold call? It depends. There is not a singular answer to this, “All businesses should do cold emails first or all businesses should do cold calls first.” It depends on who you’re trying to reach. It depends on who’s your target audience. And ultimately, I would always test both and see just what works. Be practical and be pragmatic. Whatever works, try it out. Don’t be dogmatic. Be pragmatic about this.

I know that typically when you want to call professionals, if you’re selling to professionals like doctors, lawyers, accountants, coaches, teachers, whatever it is, you can probably get a really high success rate —or restaurants owners, you might get a really good success rate with just cold calling the person directly rather than cold emailing.

If you’re selling to high executives and large Fortune 500 companies, cold calls will probably not get you anywhere. So you might have to master the art of cold emailing. It depends on your market.

The next question. You guys are great with the questions. So have I seen Jordan Belfort’s sales scripts? Yes, I’ve seen his sales scripts, his sales training. There are a few gold nuggets here and there. It’s entertaining. But I’m not a huge fan of all his stuff, to be honest.

All right. So I’m going to keep going with the webinar. I’m going to be answering the questions. You guys keep putting the questions in and at the end when we do the Q&A, I’ll scroll back and I’ll make sure to answer every single one of them.

How to qualify leads

All right. So, going back to the basics. We need to reach people. We need to sound good. We need to ask questions. This is something that’s so crucial that everybody is messing up. People think that cold calling and sales pitching on the phone is all about you talking. It’s not. You’re calling someone not to just sell them on your shit but you’re calling someone to learn about them and figure out if they are qualified, if they’re a good fit and if you can truly help them. What I call selfless and selfish qualification.

First, you figure out. You get the answer to the question, can I help them? And then you get the answer to the question, can they help me? And only if the answer to both of these questions is yes, then you are trying to sell. So you need to master the art. If you want to be good at sales, you need to master the art of asking questions. She who asked the question is leading the conversation and getting all the information. You need to get the information before you try to sell anything.

Managing objections and making the close

So you reach people. You sound good. You ask questions. And you manage objections. So people are going to have some objections for you and typically, these objections are going to be recurring, so they’re going to be the same kind of top 5, top 10 objections and you need to learn how master them, how to manage them and how to be proactive about them. Then you go for the close. And the close does not necessarily mean they buy your software or your product or the services, whatever it is that you’re trying to sell.

The close can be any conversation that you’re setting, any call-to-action, anything that you want them to take as an action after your call. Maybe it’s signing up for a free trial. Maybe it’s scheduling a demo. Maybe it’s, you know, coming to an event or whatever the hell it is. But make sure that you are clear on what you want them to do and make sure you go for that close at the end of the conversation.

Should you do a round of calls just to get the right number?

All right. So there’s another question here that’s excellent. So when you’re selling B2B, doing a round of calls just to get the right number, is that a good idea? Kevin. So Kevin is asking that.

Kevin, again, you rarely hear me say, “Yes, this is a good idea. This is a bad idea.” It depends. Is it working? And if it’s working, I would step back and I would say, “Well, if we do a hundred calls to get the right number, how many times do we convert in getting the right number?” Again, if it’s like 20% or 30% of the time out of 100 calls, you get 20 to 30 good numbers and those calls into the good numbers result into a really high reach rate, so if you call these 20 or 30 people, you reach half of them, it might be worth it depending on what your customer lifetime value is.

But if you’re calling a hundred people and you get one number and when you call that number, you never reached anyone, it’s not fucking working. So you might as well do something else or try a different way to get the right number.

I’m just getting the signal that my battery is low. Let me quickly actually plug my laptop just to make sure that this webinar is not going to die immediately. All right. So this is what happens when you’re doing it live. You have to work. And so, I’m just grabbing the mic, leaning down and grabbing charger and we’re good to go. All right. So let me make sure that we’re going to be powered throughout the entire webinar.

All right. So yes, it depends. Try it out. See what the metrics look like. It might make sense. It might not make sense. It might make more sense to do a better job on the lead generation part or sending cold emails first to get to the right decision-maker. There’s an excellent book called Predictable Revenue that talks about kind of a cold email to get to the cold call approach. It’s an excellent book. Make sure to check it out.

Accents and cold calling

All right. The next question that’s excellent, Richard, is does voice accent play a role in cold call? Again, can you guys guess what I’m going to say? It depends. It depends. It depends on two things. Who is your target customer? Who are you selling to and what’s their response to somebody that has an accent and is clearly a foreigner? And it depends on what kind of an accent you have. I know this sucks but it’s reality.

There are certain accents for certain eras and cultures that are perceived as sexy and sophisticated or at least OK and there are certain accents that people will equate with not such good things, like “Oh, you are probably an outsourced person. You’re probably somewhere in a very cheap area in the world calling”, that they’ll think some bad things about you.

So, is having an accent for cold calls bad or good? It depends on the market you call. If you call into a very traditional and conservative audience, it might be bad. If you’re calling to startups, it typically doesn’t fucking matter. And then, again, what kind of an accent do you have? Can people not understand you or do you just have like a nice little charming French accent? I mean no matter how you stand with the French, you like them or not, in most cultures, a French accent is perceived to be sexy. Don’t ask me why but it is the way it is. So if you have a slight French accent, it might be sexy. If you have a heavy French accent, I might not understand what you’re saying and that’s always a problem.

So, it depends. You should just base—if it’s working or not, if having an accent is a good thing or bad thing. Just based on the results, does this person—if you hear the person getting, or if you yourself hear a lot of people going “Uhm, what did you just say? Can you repeat this? I can’t understand.” If you get the sense that they don’t understand you or if you get the sense that they are hypercritical at you, then you might have a problem. So you just might be cognizant of it.

The "gatekeeper" isn't your enemy

So how do you get past the gatekeeper when making a cold call? You guys have such great questions. I don’t even have to go with my slides. All right. So let’s go to that question, Donna. It’s an excellent one. How do you get past the gatekeeper when you’re doing a cold call?

Well first, honestly, I don’t really like the term gatekeeper. It just dehumanizes a person. And also, they’re not like in front of a fucking gate, keeping it. It’s not like that. They are a human being and they have a job and one part of that job is usually to protect the time of their boss. So protect the time of the decision-maker, making sure that that decision-maker is deploying their time in meaningful and useful ways.

So, the number one thing that you need to do to get past the gatekeeper is not wanting to get passed them, but actually wanting to stay with them for a moment. Just ask yourself:

What are the goals that this person has? What are their incentives? What’s their day like? How many calls do they get in a day?

And just display some empathy and display some care when you call them. Just spend a moment with them. Maybe you change your cold calling script to first sell the gatekeeper [on] why it’s a good idea to connect you with the decision-maker. How about that? How about making a sales pitch that sells that person on why it’s a good idea for their career and their boss for them to let you through.

And how about building a little bit of rapport and being maybe a little charming, spending a little time with them going, “Hey, how was your day? How many calls do you get?” And if you get a sense that they are super busy, just being very dry and going, “Listen. I know that you are super busy. You have a million things on your plate and you get tons of these calls, here’s the thing. I have to offer X, Y, and Z. Here is why I think it’s going to be relevant for you. Here is what I need. I know that you typically don’t do this but let’s talk about it. Help me out here. What would it take for you to let me through and let me talk to person X, Y, and Z.” Just display some empathy and put yourself in their shoes and sell them on why they should let you through. Don’t just try to get  [or] trick them into letting you through.

So, Adam, you have a really good point. So typically, I actually just let all the questions keep piling up and then we just do the question at the end. Today, I’m free styling it a little bit more. Also, I’m having a bit of a go-to training, a challenge that I haven’t told you guys about which is that I can’t scroll in the chat right now. So, that created the anxiety and the initial response for me to just go and respond to the questions immediately.

All right. So let’s rock and roll and keep on with the webinar. So the basics, you reach people, you sound good, you ask question, you manage their objections, and you go for the close. Let’s dive into another foundational fundamental thing before we go into each and every one of them and I’ll share some more tactics with you.

The 3 questions you need to ask yourself before picking up the phone

There are three simple questions that I want you guys to ask before making any cold calling. You need to understand that cold calling is a full contact sport. Cold calling is a performance art. You need to think of yourself as, like, the Beyoncé or the Michael Jordan of sales and you need to show up every day and every call is another shot you throw. And you’re going to miss a ton of shots.

And the question is, can you just fundamentally and from a mindset perspective, keep your energy level up, keep your mindset sharp and keep your focus and your clarity level really high? So to me, it’s really important to have clarity before you go into any cold call. And a powerful way to create clarity is to ask yourself some basic questions.

Before you start doing cold calls, ask yourself, why am I doing cold calls to begin with? Like why am I calling these people?

And you go with the lean production and lean startup philosophy of asking the five whys and you could go, Why am I doing cold calls today? Well, because I want to get customers. Why do I want to get customers? Because I want my business to succeed. Why do I want my business to succeed? Because I want to get a million dollars. Why do I want to get a million dollars? Because I want to help my mother and my family out and I want to have financial stability for my wife and my little baby.

Now, that’s a fucking good reason to do cold calls.

Do you see what I’m saying? And not to say that everybody needs to have like a wife or a husband, children, and things like that. Your why, your motivations, your motives for taking action are going to be different. But the important thing is that you understand why am I doing this? Because it is going to be painful. It’s going to be hard work and you’re going to need all the motivation, all the internal resourcefulness you can get when you get started.

So make sure that yourself, as well as all your sales people, that you take a moment before you jump into action and you create a level of clarity and understanding, why am I doing this? What are my higher motivational reasons? And if you have those, you’re going to be able to get a lot more resourcefulness from it and a lot more energy when you snap into action.

Know your objective

Next question you want to ask yourself is what do I want to accomplish in this very next call? So it might be that you say, “I want to reach the decision-maker and then what? Well, I want to help them. I want them to know that our product exists. So, is that the number one thing that I want to accomplish? Not really. I want them to know they exist and I also want them to experience it so they can make a decision if they want to—if it can help their business.”

All right. So that is the core goal of the cold call, how am I going to accomplish it? What’s our game plan to get to that desired result? And then you snap into the cold call and you take a little bit of time to ask some fundamental questions, create clarity and focus, create some motivation and inspiration in yourself and then you go and snap into action. Don’t just walk into the office and start cold calling while you’re still half asleep, thinking about like the last argument you had with a friend of yours. You need to have all the energy, all the focus, all the clarity you need before you do cold calls.

How to reach prospects and the ideal reach rate

Let’s go through the five steps that we talked about earlier. Let’s start what the fundamental step of reaching people. So there’s one step that’s not even on the slide which is you have to spend a lot of time on the lead generation part to get really high quality leads, high quality phone numbers, make sure that your reach rates are really high.

You need to take into consideration what time zones you are calling. What is the ideal time to reach that customer persona that I’m trying to sell to? Is it better for us to call them really early in the morning? Is it better to call them right after lunch? Is it better to call them really in the afternoon or in the evening? Depending on who you are calling, you are selling, the timezone and the day and time that’s most optimal to reach them is going to be different.

Sometimes, companies have discovered that it’s really effective to call, cold call their customers on Sunday mornings because that’s typically where those executives are going to be in the office and nobody else is there. Sometimes, they discover that it’s really great to call them really late in the afternoon, 8:00, 9:00, 10:00 PM. Everybody else is gone. When the phone rings, that executive will pick up.

I don’t know what the ideal time is. If you cold call coaches, you might want to be aware of like the time they are coaching the team, or teachers when they have classes. Like you just need to be aware of time zones and ideal times, kind of “What’s the life of this person, what will be a good time for that person to pick up the phone when there is a ring, and then to give me a few minutes of their time?”

We discussed this early, that in some cases, the ideal strategy and tactic is to go right to the cold call and in some cases depending on who you are selling to, you want to send a cold email asking for an introduction to the right person first. So I’ll give you the rundown. There’s a book called Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross. Go and get it and read it if you haven’t yet. Aaron is a really good friend of mine.  

And the philosophy that I’ll share—the core nugget I can share with you right now, the core philosophy is that when you sell to high level executives or when you sell to the enterprise a lot of times, larger companies, it’s very hard to make cold calling work. So instead of cold calling thousands and thousands of people to reach a few, a handful of people, what he developed was this process where he would send cold emails, but not to the person that he wanted to sell to, but like one or two executive levels higher. So he would send an email really high up the ladder and then ask that person for a referral down.

So the email would typically have a subject line that’s like, “Quick question” or “The right person to talk to” or something along those lines. And when you open that email, he would say something along the lines of, “Hey John, here is what we do in a sentence. Here is why I think it might be relevant for you guys. Can you do me the favor and point me to the right person in the organization? Who is right person for me to have a quick conversation about this?”

And a lot of times, he found success 20, 30, 40% of the times. If you write that email in the right way, you’ll get a response. And he found that high-level executives will actually be pretty open to going, “Oh, you want to do some—you have this marketing technology? Yeah, our marketing person is this guy.” And then send an introduction for that email to the right person.

And then you will get the—if you get an introduction from a high-level person down in the org, you will get the call. It doesn’t mean that the person wants to talk to you. Again, it doesn’t mean that the person is sold on you just because the CEO introduced you, but they will take the call and it might be a pretty powerful tool for you, especially if you sell to the large organizations.

All right. There’s a lot of like detailed nuance in terms of reach rates. Once you get to a point where you have a larger team, like 5 or 10 people, and you really know what you’re doing, you could do a shit ton of work on the cold calling side of things with using predictive—power dialers and predictive dialers.

So I don’t want you to worry about that too much, but once you’re like a ten people and your reach rates are at 15%, 20% when you do cold calling, if you want to squeeze another 5 or 10% productivity out of what you’re doing, maybe even 15%, you might want to look into power dialers or predictive dialers. Predictive dialers are technologies, pretty standard. What it does is it’s dialing multiple numbers at once and then it drops all the numbers that are going to voicemail and it just connects the sales rep when a connection happens.

And so let’s say there are five sales reps, the software will call 10 or 20 or 30 numbers at the same time, drop a number of calls and just give you the connection when a human being picks up. So in essence, the workflow looks like this. You, as a salesperson, go “Yes, let’s get started.” And you have somebody go, “Hello?” And you start doing your sales pitch. You have your cold call. And the moment you hang up, the next person goes, “Hello?” And it’s really beautiful and magical. It just cuts out a lot of the waste. But you need to have a ton of people to make this work and it’s like second-level optimization.

When you want to look at your reach rate, just as a rule of thumb, you’re looking for 10 to 15% on cold calling on reach rate to make cold calling works. If you’re below 15% on reach rate when you do cold calls, you have to get back to the drawing board and do something else.

When you have like 20%, 25%, 30%, you’re killing it. There’s almost nobody that does cold calls that reaches 50% or 60% of the people. But if you are, amazing! But if you’re below 10% when you’re doing cold calls, you’re fucked. You’re dead in the water. There’s nothing that you can do to make your cold calling campaign works. So you need to fix that first.

Why you already lost the prospect at hello

A lot of time, a cold call is lost at the low-level. It’s really like very first few—the very first sentence you say is where you have lost the call. You just messed it up. You don’t realize it. You might be on the phone for another 5 to 10 minutes, but you already lost at the hello.

And here is why. Here is how most cold calls sound like at the beginning. Somebody picks up the phone and they go, “Hey, this is John.” And you go [in a really rushed voice], “Hey, John. This is Pop. I’m calling from Close.io. What we offer is sales software for inside sales teams. Is this a good time to talk?”

The problem is that you spoke way too fucking fast, way too nervously. And here’s what was going on in my mind. As you were talking, like I’m picking up the phone, you need to realize that the first thing that people think when they pick up the phone and there’s a voice they don’t recognize is they’re asking themselves, “Who is this? What is this about? And is this a sales call?”

So while you’re blabbering on, you’re like “da, da, da, da”, the person is like, “Wait. Who is this? What is this about?” And you keep talking. People are not paying attention. They are not listening, so they cannot compute what you’re telling them. So all they’ll know is, “Oh God! There’s a person that speaks really fast. I don’t know what the fact they are trying to sell me. This is probably a sales call. I want to get off this call.”

This is where most cold calls are lost. So you want to train for that. You want to make sure that when you cold call somebody, you speak slowly, with high energy though. You don’t call me as if you’re like depressed. I don’t want to talk to a depressed person. You call me and you go, “Hey, this is Steli. John, the reason why I’m calling you today in a simple sentence is—what we do in a sentence is—we offer sales teams a powerful set of inside sales tools. Is this a bad time to have a quick chat?”

Now again, this doesn’t mean that he wants to talk to me. But I spoke slowly with high energy. I gave the different sections of my introduction space so they can breathe. I say, “Hey, my name is Steli Efti.” Give it a little bit of pause so they can go, “Oh, I don’t know this person.” “You don’t know me but the reason I am calling is because what we do in a sentence is X, Y, and Z.” Now, the person is, “Oh, they’re doing X, Y, Z. I don’t want this.” And then I go, “Is this a bad time or does this, in general, sound interesting to you?”

I space it out. So I allow the person to give me a little bit of attention. I use up that attention. I’m going to give them another space, a breathing ground to give me another little bit of attention and step-by-step, we’re building rapport and we’re actually able to make this work.

But if the first sentence that you speak is too fast, too nervous, and I don’t hear what you are saying, all I can say is no. And I don’t know like literally at the end of the cold call, the end of the first two or three sentences, I still don’t know what the hell you are doing. I can’t recite anything you said.

So make sure to make your hello strong. Come out swinging.

Speak clearly. Speak loudly with energy. Speak slowly and give your different sections of your introductory cold calls space so the person can catch up with you.

Very important.

Sounding good. The way you sound would create an image, an impression. We as human beings, the way our brain works is that we need to create an image. We are very visual, even if we don’t realize that. We need to create an image to be able to compute what’s going on. So if you realize that while you’re talking to people, they will have to create an image of who you are in order to be able to determine how they feel about you.

If you sound like you’re super low energy, if you sound like you’re nervous, they’re going to imagine somebody nervous, somebody junior, somebody that’s depressed, and that will influence the way they feel about this call and you and wanting to talk to you.

If you sound like you’re an authority, if you sound like you have energy, you’re smart, you’re enthusiastic, you know what you’re talking about, if you sound like you’re smiling and enjoying yourself, it’s going to create a different image. It’s going to create a different impression on who you are. And that image is going to make a dramatic difference in the influence.

It sucks. And I know that people don’t like that especially rational people. But tonality is really 70% and what you’re saying is really just 30%. You don’t realize, if you sound amazing, if you have an amazing energy on the phone, it’s going to make a much bigger difference than if you say amazing things.

If I call you right now, if somebody cold calls you right now, somebody you don’t know, the first that they tell you is, “Hey, congratulation Kevin. You won a million dollars!” What do you think? Do you think, “Oh amazing! I won a million dollars?” Do you drop the phone and go high-five to everybody at the office? No! You think this is a scam and you hang up.

Well, the content of what they said, wasn’t that amazing? What is a better content than “You won a million-freaking-dollars”? Nothing. The problem is that the content is not the problem. The problem is I don’t trust you. The problem is that I don’t believe you. The problem is that you sounded like you’re lying. That’s the problem.

So you need to make sure that you train yourself and your team to sound smart, enthusiastic, and like an authority. How do you do that? You want to have—you want to speak clearly. You want to speak loudly. You want to smile.

Smiling is an old sales hack. Put a little—buy a little mirror and put it right next to you when you do sales calls. Use a Sharpie to put a smiley and remind yourself to smile. If you smile, it comes through in the energy and the way you talk. And you want to speak with enthusiasm because if you’re not enthusiastic about talking to me, why should I care about talking to you?

How to stay motivated

To do that, to have great energy, great tonality and sound great, you need to be able to control your state. So, find out what helps you to control your own state. For some people, it’s music and listening to a certain kind of music. For other people, it’s listening to watching a motivational speaker video. For some people, it’s looking at a picture of their family, of their last vacation, or the car they want to buy. Whatever it is that motivates you, whatever it is that puts you in the right state, you need to utilize that every single day when you’re doing cold calls.

If you go to salesmotivation.close.io, you can subscribe and get a daily morning video from me, a 1-minute video that shares a motivational quote and an action item to help you crush your day. Thousands of people on that list and they enjoy [it]. Whatever it is that helps you be motivated and control your state, use that every day to make sure that you sound good and you’re in a great state when you do these cold calls. It really, really fundamentally will make a massive difference.

Why selling is easy

So, now that we reached people, we sound good, we need to ask question. We need to qualify people. And really, we need to learn as salespeople to listen more than we speak, to ask the right questions. And to go about selling and the approach of saying, “Well first, let me figure out. Can I truly help them? Are we the right company to serve this business or this customer? And if we can help them, can they help us?”

And only when the answer to these questions is yes, then I’m going to try to sell. But the beauty is if you know enough about your prospects, selling is easy. If you know and care deeply about them, selling is easy.

And also, if you paid attention and you truly cared and you asked the right question, when you tell them that they are the right fit, when you tell them you think you can help them, they will believe you.

Think about it. Did you ever have somebody on the phone that was like asking you questions but you could tell that they’re just running through a list of questions. They don’t even fucking care what the answer is. They just want to get to the next question.

Whatever the hell you are saying, they just, “Yeah, yeah, oh great!”

They ask you, “Hey, let me ask you John. How many people do you guys have at your business?”

“Oh, we’re about eight people.”

“Oh, great! And then let me ask you, are you using other software right?”

“Yeah, we’re using this.”

“Oh, great, great. And then can you ask—John, can I ask you last question? What’s your budget right now for this?”

“Well, it’s about…”

“All right. Great. Great. I think that we’re the perfect software for you.”

What the fuck, right? Do you believe that person? No! That person didn’t pay attention. He said just great, great to everything you said. But what about that person that actually listens? That goes, “Oh, so you’re 8 to 10 people. Interesting. Tell me. Are you guys understaffed? Are you happy with it? How many people were you last year? How many people are you going to be a year from now? Interesting. Listen John, the reason why I asked about the size is because honestly, if you are like thousands of employees, we would not be able to help you. Most of our customers are about 5 to 15 people. So you are hitting that sweet spot. That’s great to hear. All right. So let me ask you the next question, John. What software do you guys use right now and why? How did you get to that software?”

If you pay attention, if you listen, if you take the time, if a person gets the feeling that you truly care, at the end of the conversation when you go, “You know what John? I think we’re a perfect fit. I think that we can truly help you.” How likely is it that they’re going to believe you? A lot more. So learn to ask questions and truly care about the answers, please. Pay attention to really qualify people before you’re trying to sell them anything and see if there are some red flags or some things that will point out that it’s not going to be a good thing.

And then try to figure out on the cold call:

Is this the decision-maker? Who is the decision-maker? What’s the budget? What’s the timing? What’s the competition? Who is this? What is this company all about?

Try to learn more than you teach. It needs to be given a go and there needs to be balanced. You can’t just ask a million questions and not tell them anything. But you want to make sure that you learn more than you try to teach because at this point, you don’t know what to sell and teach them if you don’t know who they are.

The best way to manage objections

The next thing you need to do is you need to learn to manage objections. This is simplest thing to prepare and something that everybody is missing out on. Like there’s going to be top five—there’s going to be a top whatever it is, 10, 20 questions people have when you do cold calls. There’s going to be a bunch of objection that they have. “I don’t have time. We don’t care about this. We already have software. This is too expensive for us.“ Whatever it is, take a moment to write an FAQ and objection management document. You write down the top 10, top 20, whatever it is questions that people ask or objections that people have when you do cold calls. And then write down a succinct answer in one or two sentences. That’s it.

And then you don’t have to—you want to learn these answers but it doesn’t have to be word by word. You don’t have to be a robot and be, like, reading off a script. But you want to be able to respond to an objection in a clear and concise format. You don’t want to compute your answer in real time every single time because it’s going to make you ramble. It’s going to make you go, “Ahh, yeah, it’s a good question. But you know…” and by that time, they’ve hung up already on you.

You’re going to be able to go when they say, “I don’t have time”, go, “Good! I only want to talk to people that are busy. And more of my customers didn’t have time. Most of my customers that I have right now told me the exact same thing as you. Listen, I don’t want to waste your time. I need another two minutes. We already talked for a minute. Let’s spend another two minutes together to make this worthwhile and make sure that we’re making the right decision either way. Yes or no? Let me ask you. What are you guys doing right now for software?”

That’s it. Like a lot of times when you manage an objection, the way that you respond is more important, again, than what you’re saying. I was proving this to people. We were doing cold calls back in the day. This is ten years ago. We had a cold calling trip and we would call professionals and it was like a product that would help them save $5,000 in five years. And the cold call, just to prove my team that it didn’t fucking matter what you said. It mattered a lot more how you delivered it, I would actually call people and go, “We can help you save $5 in 5,000 years. The next thing that we need to know, John, is ….”

I would tell people we would save them $5 in 5,000 years and they stayed on the line with me and they answered all my questions. They laughed and they cried. And I closed them. And my team was like amazed by that. It’s not that I’m that amazing. It’s that if you know that the way you deliver something is more important that you what you deliver, even if it sucks.

And I’m not saying call people and tell them bullshit but realize that how you sound is more important than what you say. When somebody brings up an objection, it means that they are afraid of making a mistake and it’s a trade of confidence. What you need to do is—they are lacking the confidence in what you’re saying, they are afraid, they are hesitant. So they’re not that confident and you need to make them confident. You need trade your confidence for their confidence. So how you respond is much more important than what you say. Trust me. You need to be really good at that.

And having an objection management document, thinking about what other things people tell us again and again and again on the phone and what’s a good way to respond to that, is a very powerful way to prepare to be able to answer something in two or three sentences without rambling and still sounding confident.

If somebody has an objection all the time, make sure to address the elephant in the room. It’s the simplest thing in the world. If you know that everybody you’re cold calling gets a million cold calls a day, don’t just try to ignore that fact. How about embracing that fact? How about calling those people and going, “Listen John, let me guess. This is cold call number 500 today. It must suck to do your job. You’re interrupted all day long with people that are cold calling you. I know it. And let me tell you why I still called you. I know that you don’t want to talk to me. I know it sucks that you’re getting so many calls and I still decided it’s a good idea to cold call you. Let me tell you why.”

Do you think they are curious at this point? Do you think that they’re going to want to go, “Well, I’ll give this guy another 20 seconds because now I’m curious to hear why.” Why? Because I seem like I know who they are. I seem like I’m not an idiot. I seem like I know they don’t want to talk to me. I’m aware of that fact and I called because I have a pretty strong reason to do it, despite knowing that. That’s a pretty powerful way to start a conversation.

Whatever it is, if they you know that all of them already have a solution in place, don’t avoid that fact. Don’t try to pitch them on your solution, then like ten minutes into the conversation they go, “Well, but we already bought this other solution from a competitor of yours.” And you go, “Oh my God! Another prospect that already has ….” Like, don’t be stupid. If you know anyone you’re cold calling already thinks they have this problem solved, then make it part of your pitch.

Address the elephant in the room.

Go, “Hey, I know that you probably already bought a piece of software. What’s your solution?”

“Well yeah, we bought already blah.”

“Cool! Most of my customers said the exact same thing at this exact same time. Here is why I still call you. Because what you might not be aware of and I want to just give you the fact is that…”

Whatever it is, address the elephant in the room.

"Send me more information" hack

Here’s a little hack that I want to share with you guys, which is the “send me more information” hack. A lot of times on cold calls, if you get past the hello and if you are empowered to ask some questions, if you spend a little bit of time with them on the phone, if they at some point decide that they realized they don’t want to be influenced by you, they want to keep their guard up again, they’ll ask you for more information. They go, “Can you send me more information in email?”

This most of the time doesn’t mean they want more information. This most of the time means “I want to get off the phone”. Here is a hack on how to utilize it and empower this. When somebody tells me, “Hey, can you send me more information on this?” I always say, “Yes. Yes, absolutely. What’s your email address?”

Here is what happens next. They put down their guard. They relax a little bit. They go, “All right, good. This call will not go on forever. This guy just took the—he will send me more information. Cool.” So the person starts giving me their email.

Hey, even if I have their email, I’ll ask for their email, “Oh cool! What’s your email?”

“Well, my email is Steli@Close.io.”

“Can you spell that for me?”

“Yes.” They gave me their email address.

And then I go, “Just to make sure that I send you the right information…” and now, I keep asking them the question that I would have asked them if they didn’t ask me for more information. It’s as simple as that.

Six out of ten times, the conversation will keep going on if you ask good questions. You have good energy. And they will talk for you for another 10, 20, 30 minutes and you’ll have the entire cold call with them just by making that little trick by utilizing, Jiu-Jitsu-ing their ass, by utilizing their energy and getting their guard down a little bit, getting them to relax really and go, “Can you send me more information?”

“Sure. What’s your email? How do you spell it? Let me ask, just to send you the right information, how many people are you right now at the company? What kind of software do you use? What’s your budget?” And you keep going on.

Six out of ten times, they just keep giving you information. Some of them will give you a little bit more information and go, “No, really, can you please send me the info?” You go, “Yes, sorry. I wouldn’t do my job if I didn’t ask for a few more questions just to make sure that you’re going to read the email.” And some people will block you off from the get-go when you go, “Oh yes, sure. Just to make sure that I send you the right information, how many people are you guys?” And the person might respond, “No! I told you give me more information. I don’t want to answer any more of your questions.”

For that person, you have to push back. All you go is you go, “Listen, I totally understand that. But I don’t want to waste your fucking time. If I send you an email that’s generic right now, what are the chances you’re going to read it? You’re not going to read it. I’m just going to pollute your email. I’m going to waste 5 minutes writing you an email that you are going to waste deleting or archiving, then I’m going to have to follow up with you with another email that you’re going to delete or archive. Then, I’m going to call you again. We’re going to have another 3-minute conversation. Let’s just stop wasting each other’s time. If I send you something, I want it to be valuable and I want it to be worthy of you to read it. That’s why I have these questions.”

Once in awhile, even in a cold call, when somebody pushes, you need to push back. You want to be friendly. Don’t be an asshole. But you want to be strong.

Virtual closing technique

All right. So there is a virtual closing technique and I have written about this. I’m going to send all of you guys the link to this blog post. There is a video of me talking about this in detail but I’m going to run through this really quickly because we had so many amazing questions at the beginning that I want to get through the material here.

The virtual closing technique is very simple. Once you’ve qualified somebody and you’re sure that they’re the right fit, you ask them, “What would it take for you to become a customer of ours?” It’s the most powerful question ever. “Hey, now that we know that this is a great fit, what would it take for you to become a customer of ours? What would it take for you to become a customer?”

And then, what you do is whatever they answer you, you go through follow-up questions until you arrive at a virtual time in the future where they buy.

If they go, “Well, I have to talk to my colleagues ….”

“Cool. What happens next?”

“Well next, we would have another call with you.”

“Great. Let’s say that call goes well, what happens typically next?”

“Well next, we would have you go through our advisory board?”

“Interesting. Tell me more about that. And then, when I go through your advisory board, are we in business?”

“No, no, no. You have to go through our legal, and then procurement.”

“Cool! Are we in business now?”

“Yes.”

Now, what you’ve done is you create a virtual roadmap of what will it take to sell them and that gives you all the information you need to build your pipeline, the deal size, the time to close, the confidence, the stakeholders that are going to be involved. It’s magical. Make sure to use the virtual closing technique once you’ve realized that they are a great fit.

Why you should use a sales script

All right. A word or two about sales scripts, use them even if you don’t like it. Just use them. It’s just good design thinking. What you want to do is, you don’t want to have sales scripts where everybody is a robot and just recites the script, word by word. But what you want to do is, you want to be conscious and have thought through the entire conversation, the journey the customer takes in that cold call with you from not knowing who you are to knowing who you are but being reserved and not trusting you, giving you a little bit of trust to now thinking they want to take the next step.

You want to design those different stages. You want to write it down. And you need to want—you need to think about your sales script as a piece [or] product that will have multiple versions. There’s no perfect sales script. So every sales script we have has a version. You always start with version one and you always make it simple. Version one, you give yourself 30 minutes to write. I don’t care what you sell, just write one version.

No matter how bad it is, it’s going to be the worst cold calling script you’ve ever written. Just get it out of your system. Write version one in 30 minutes and then what you do is every week, you revise that script. You look at the script after you’ve done hundreds of cold calls and you go, “What’s bad about this script? What doesn’t work? Oh, I’ve tried this new thing once and it was really good.”

You keep working on the script, making it better and better and better. It’s going to empower you to be really good and really professional. It’s going to empower you to train and onboard new people and skill. It’s going to empower you, even on bad days, to do a good job.

Some days, you’re going to just be flying. You’re going to be Michael Jordan in his best game. You’re just going to be better than the sales script, and that’s fine. Just rock it. But some days, you’re going to feel like shit and you’re not going to be in good mode. In those days, you’re not going to be shit on the phone. You’re still going to be professional because you have a sales script to work with.

I’m going to run you very quickly through this. And here’s the cold calling script that we used when we started Elastic Sales. We had the idea for Elastic Sales, outsource sales development on demand for startups on a Tuesday. On a Wednesday, I started cold calling B2B startups with a fake name, no website, no logo, no reference, no trust, no nothing. And we said, “We’re going to do cold calls for two weeks to see if the idea is worth building, if the idea that we had for this company is worthwhile. We’re going to just cold call our customers and let the customers or prospects educate us.

So here is what I was doing. On the very first day, this is the script. And just to give you an idea, our goal was in 14 days to get one customer as a validation that there is something there, and we got seven, seven customers in 14 days from cold—like from an idea on Tuesday, two weeks later, having seven customers cold calling them with a fake name, no website, no logo, no nothing. I would call up people and I would say, “Hey, my name is Steve. I’m calling startups in the area to find out if they might be a good fit for a beta program that we’re running. What we do in a sentence is we provide companies with a sales team on demand. Does that, in general, sound interesting to you?”

That was a powerful beginning. The first sentence was powerful because it would say, “Hey, my name is Steve Eli. I’m calling some startups in the area.” This is suggesting that I’m local as well. People like to buy from other people that are close in proximity. “I’m calling some startups in the area to find out if they might be a good fit for a beta program that we’re running.”

Here is what I’m answering: who am I and why am I calling you? And I’m using some startup lingo. I’m calling to find out if you’re a good fit for our beta program. I’m not saying, “I’m calling to sell you something.” I’m calling you to find out if you’re a good fit for our beta program. If you’re a startup and we only call startups, you know what a beta program is, you had one yourself. So at this point you go, “All right. So this is another startup in the area. They’re doing a beta program.” Yeah, but what is it about?

So now, I answer that. I go, “What we do in a sentence…” and this is important because I highlight by saying, “What we do in a sentence is ….” I’m telling you, “Dude, relax. This is only going to take a sentence.” I don’t want to start saying, “What we do is we blah, blah, blah” because the person think, “Oh my God! How long is this going to take? Is this going to be a cold call that takes forever?”

I don’t want to address that and go, “What we do in a sentence…” I say, “What I suggest is relax. This is only going to take a sentence. We provide companies with a sales team on demand.” Just one sentence. Don’t explain everything you do. And I will ask, “Does it in general sound interesting to you?”

At this point, it didn’t matter what they said. When said, “No.” I went, “Oh, interesting. Tell me more about your current sales process. When they said, “Maybe it’s interesting for me.” I would go, “Oh, great. What’s your current sales process like?” And when they said, “Yes, it’s absolutely interesting for me” I would say, “Great! What’s your current sales process like?”

It didn’t matter what they said at that point. Not that I didn’t care at all. But I didn’t care at this point because I knew they and I don’t know enough to make that judgment call just right now. But I knew I needed them to get it out of their system, so if they thought, “No, this is not for me” I didn’t want them to think it while I ask questions. I wanted to be able to get it out of their system, verbalize it, and tell me, “No, no, no. I don’t think this is for me.” And I go, “Oh, interesting. What’s your current sales process like?” “Well, we don’t do cold—”, whatever it is they say.

And then, I ask my qualifying question. I went through a bunch of questions and then, I went for the close. I test close. I basically tell them, “Listen. We’re doing a beta program. It starts in four weeks. Does that timeline work for you? It can be heavily discounted. It’s just going to cost you a thousand dollars a day. Is that in your budget? And then, we’re only going to be able to give you one salesperson. Will that work? OK. Let’s talk about the decision-making process in your company. Who needs to be involved? What other next steps that we would have to take to make this happen?” So, I would run through a potential [close], like what will it take to make this happen, to see if they are for real.

All right. So a quick question in the audience. How would you phrase an opening line if you do actually have a product or service? We sell videos and not a beta program. I mean you might do the exact same thing. You might just go and say, “Hey, my name is Steve. I’m calling…(whoever you are calling). I’m calling local restaurants—I’m calling restaurants in Palo Alto right now to figure out if they might be a good fit for a service that we are doing. What we do in a sentence is we offer restaurants a video service that does X, Y, Z. Does that in general sound interesting to you?” That might work. You might want to do something completely different depending on who you are selling to.

The cold calling benchmarks that matter

All right. So a few words on benchmarks and then, we’re going to be wrapping up. So, here are the core benchmarks that you care about when you’re doing cold calling.

You care about the number of dials you make: how many people did we dial today? You care about how many people you reached, as we said. You care about how many people that you reach were fully qualified And you care about how many qualified [people] we converted.

Closed here can mean any conversion, right? It could be we closed them to jump on a demo. We closed them to download a whitepaper. We closed them to do a trial, whatever it is.

You want to track the top of the funnel all the way down the funnel. How many dials did we make? How many people did we reach? How many people were qualified prospects? How many people we closed?

If you track these numbers, if your results are not good, you will always know why. You will know, are we not dialing enough? You will know, well, we are dialing a shit ton. We’re dialing 5,000 people a day but we’re only reaching 2. That’s our problem. It’s not the closing that’s our problem. It’s that we are not reaching anyone.

How do we fix that? If we are reaching a good amount, as we said, 15% at the minimum, but out of the people that we reached, only 10% are qualified, then we know that our leads are shit. Because if I spent all this time reaching people, the people that I reached, I should be able to qualify at a really high rate.

I would venture to say, you want to have a qualified rate that’s 25 to 50%. Out of the people that talked to you, you want to qualify a really high percentage. That means that you have a really good quality of leads. And you want to keep working on that to make the qualify rate as high as possible.

If I cold call you and if I have you on the phone and we talk, isn’t it a waste if you could have never bought and you were an absolute wrong business for me to call to begin with? That makes no sense. So make sure that you have a high qualify rate. And then out of the people that are qualified, I want to have a really fucking high closing rate.

So if you are qualified and you talk to me, I want to close half of them, if not more. I don’t want to have somebody that spent 5 to 10 minutes with me, they are fully qualified. We had a real conversation and then I only get 10% of them to take the action I want them. Then, my pitch sucks. So depending on what the numbers are, you know what sucks and what the problem is in your business and you focus on fixing that. But the highest leverage will always have—the highest point of the funnel will always have the highest impact in the end results.

You want to track the minutes on the phone. And the beauty is that Close.io tracks all of this automatically without you having to do anything. How many minutes am I really on the phone? And this is more of, like, making sure that you really have calling time. You’re not just dialing tons of people, but you actually are on the phone with people.

Just to give you guys some guidance, if you’re doing outbound cold calling, you definitely want to be at least in the hundred if you do really high quality. In some businesses, many businesses, they’re doing 200 to 400 dials a day. I know that’s a lot.  But if you’re doing like 40, 50 cold calls, you’re dead in the water. You’re not throwing enough balls to make greatness happen in this game. You need to throw a lot of balls.

So depending on the quality of your dials and the number of reaches that you have, that number will go down. If every single person you call, you reach and you have really long conversations, of course, you can’t have 400 really long conversations in a day. But if you reach only 10%, you better dial 150, 200 at a minimum.

Just to give you guys some guidance on what it takes to make cold calling really work. As I mentioned already, Close.io was built around making millions of cold calls. Our phone integration is pretty powerful. If you haven’t checked it out yet, do it. If you have and you are a customer, let me know. I’ll give you some goodies. And if you have and you didn’t like it or you have some feedback, Steli@Close.io. Please let me know. Please start a communication channel. Anything I can learn from you guys, I highly appreciate.

The fastest way to master cold calling

The last slide of the presentation. If you want to become a master in cold calling, you want to start recording yourself. You want to—self-study is the fastest way to mastery. It’is the one thing people hate to do. They hate to record themselves. And then even if they record themselves even more so, they hate to listen to themselves. That’s why it’s so powerful.

No seminar, no webinar, no book, nothing will teach you as much about cold calling than listening to your own calls. Close.io offers that. You can make cold calls, record these cold calls, and you can listen to them. What was my energy like? How did I respond to this?

You can self-study. Every day, pick a good and a bad call and dissect it. What was good? What was about it? Every week, take your best and worst call and send it to somebody you respect, somebody in your team and go ask them for feedback.

The next day go, “All right. Yesterday on my worst call, I made this mistake. I’m not going to make—today, I’m going to focus on improving on that one particular thing.” Keep listening to yourself, recording yourself. And you know what? You can record your voice which is great. But even a level above you who you are really beast on some black belt shit, put up a camera and record yourself on the cold calls visually as well.

Look at you while you talk, your body language, your hand movements, your eyes, your face. Look at how your body reacts. Learn from that shit. It’s going to tell you everything you need to know and everything you need to work on. Self-study, there’s no shortcuts in greatness. If you want to be great at cold calls, you have to put in the work. And one great way to become amazing is to start recording yourself, watching yourself, studying yourself while you’re doing what you’re doing.

Free Startup Sales Course

All right. If you’re not on the 30-day Startup Sales Course, make sure to get on it, Close.io/free-sales-course. It’s a 30-day course where you get a bunch of emails with some amazing content from me. If you haven’t gotten the book, I’m saying here 50% discount code, awesome sauce to get the Ultimate Startup Guide to Outbound Sales. There are a lot of cold calling techniques in there. You know what? Fuck it. If you send me an email, Steli@Close.io, you’ll get the book for free. Just send me an email, you will get the book for free.

Q&A

And that’s about it. I’m going to spend—for anyone that wants, I’m going to give you an extra 10 minutes. I know we run a little late today. I’m going to be answering some of your questions. For people that have to run, don’t worry. The entire session is recorded so I’m going to send you the recording. You are going to be able to listen to any and every question that you have.

Zee was saying, “Hack it with a mirror in front of yourself.” Yes. Have a mirror in front of yourself. Put a camera up. Record as much as possible. If you’re really into self-study, it’s going to feel little weird but again, if you’re in it for greatness, if you really want to improve the fastest and most powerful way possible, study yourself. And mirror is a powerful feedback device. Absolutely.

All right. John has a question. Steli, do you have any tips on how to manage the handover from an outbound prospector, who is making the cold call, to a sales rep who will actually go on site to meet with a customer and close the deal?

It’s an excellent question, John. Yeah. I mean what you need to really—what you need to do is if you have like prospectors that are calling to set an appointment, you want to make sure that not just they qualify that prospect very well but they sell the hell out of that appointment. They sell the hell of the sales rep that’s going to show up. Sell me on that person. Sell me on why, you know what? I think this is an amazing—there are studies about this. I don’t—I can’t recite them but I’m guaranteeing you, there are tons of tons of studies that I looked at, amazing results. Sell the salesperson.

“Hey, now that we figured out that this is a good fit, I want to set up an appointment to have John Jacobs show up and do an in-person presentation with you.  And let me tell you, I have the privilege—we have hundreds of sales reps, John Jacobs is our number one account manager, has been for the past three years. He’s the most senior person we have here. He is magic. His customers—like his desk is constantly full of gifts because his customers love him. Now, John is fully booked out for the next three months. But just this morning, there was an opening. So it’s your lucky day. I can give you that one opening. But I need a promise from you that you’re going to make that appointment good. I don’t want to give that—if you’re not that certain, I can give you another really good rep but if you want John…”

And this is even overdoing it because I’m freestyling it, but you want to sell the appointment, why is this appointment could be really valuable, why is John really amazing so that people know why they should care. And then you want to make sure that you send them a calendar invite. You want to make sure that if you schedule things in weeks in advance that you check in multiple times. You call them again a week before to resell them on the appointment. If you set appointments, two or three days is really short. Still, send a calendar invite. Send them a text or call them and reconfirm. Make sure that they are top of mind and resold them on why the sales rep should show up. And really, sell the sales rep as this great expert that they are so that the person appreciates them.

Great question on how to sell the appointment, on how to make the handover work.

Yeah. So Zee has a good comment as a response that there are apps out there.

Yes. OK. So the question is like what kind of tool to record yourself? So, Close.io is recording yourself as well as others. You know what? I mean just be practical. This is my number one tip. If you use a Windows or a Mac, there’s a recording device. Just record yourself. You want to record yourself and others. You could use VoIP tools typically. They are good to be able to record. If you do a quick Google search, I’m sure that you’re going to find other things.

But if you don’t have the other side, you can just record yourself, the way you respond to things, your energy levels, you remember what they said most of the time. It’s good enough to get started. Be really out. Be practical. Just start recording yourself today! That’s going to make the biggest difference. Even if for the next two weeks all you do is consistently just using your phone, your smartphone to record yourself and it’s really shitty quality and it’s only yourself and it doesn’t record what the other person says, if you do that every day for the next two weeks and you listen to these calls and you analyze yourself, you’re going to improve. So don’t spend too much on the tools or the setup, “Oh, I’m going to research what is the best tool.” And then another week has passed, then you forgot about it and you never did it. Just be practical about this stuff.

So Kevin asked if people can share an inbound phone number on Close.io. Yes, you can have ring groups. You can do conference ring and you can share numbers on Close.io. Just shoot us an email at Support@Close.io and we’ll tell you all about it.

All right. Adam has the next question. “I read a blog of yours where you suggested refusing to send someone more information if they asked because it wasted everyone’s time. Do you suggest that to ask question and get more information before doing, sending the info? What’s the best approach?”

It depends. I mean if you remember, what I said if somebody says, “Hey, can you send some information?” really early in the conversation, I don’t know what to sell them on so I’m going to go, “Oh sure. Just give me your email address. Cool. Now, just to send you the right info, how many people work there? And how do you guys do this?” I’ll just continue with the conversation.

If the person gives me a push and he goes, “No! I’m not going to answer any questions. Just send me the email.” I will never say yes to that. I will never just send a bullshit email. I will go, “No! I can’t send you email because it’s going to waste yours and my time.” Like that’s when I do that.

If I’ve asked already all my questions and I had a really good conversation, then at the end they say, “Hey, can you just summarize all these and send it to me?” I will go, “Yes, but how can we make sure that it’s not going to be a waste of email? What’s the really next step?” “Well, just send the info. I’ll think about the next step.” I’ll say, “No. I know that you have good intentions. I don’t want to send you an email that you’re going to forget about. It’s going to get lost in the inbox then I’ll have to send you multiple follow-up emails then I’ll have to call you again and we’ll be at the exact same place seven days from now. Let’s think this through together.”

So I’ll push back at the right moment. But it depends. If I just told you, “Hey Adam, my name is Steli. I’m calling from Close.io. And what we do is we offer powerful inbound sales software. Does that sound, in general, interesting?” And you go, “Yeah, I don’t know. Send me an email with more info.” I’m not going to push back because at this point, I have zero credibility. I have nothing to push back on. I’m just going to go, “Oh sure! No problem. What’s the best email to send you that email to, Adam?”

But then, what I’m doing is I’m going to continue my call and ask you all the questions I wanted to ask you anyways. I hope that that answered that question. It’s an excellent follow-up question, Adam.

All right. Alexander asked, “How can I help my employees who overcome a fear of cold calls?” So, that’s an excellent question. There’s a blog post that I have about how to overcome the fear of rejection. I can get you that blog post. I’ll send you that blog post later on, Alexander. But if you go to Google and you search fear of rejection Blog.Close.io, you’ll find that as well.

So, here are a number of things that you can do. Number one is you have to go first. Somebody needs to demonstrate to these people why they should not be afraid. Somebody needs to show them what fearlessness looks like. And somebody and more importantly, it needs to demonstrate them how to respond once you got a kick in the face. When you have a good cold call, that’s always easy but when you’re on a cold call and somebody shouts at you and hangs up, now you can demonstrate to a voice how to deal with it. You go, “Wow!” It’s always sucks for a split second when somebody hangs up. It’s part of the business.

The most important thing to do next is pick up the fucking phone and call the next one with more enthusiasm and more energy. You pick up the phone and you call and you take it like a woman or a man and you display how to deal with that rejection and it’s going to teach them that it’s not that bad.

The other thing that you need to do is once we had severe case of somebody that was really afraid of—like somebody that was fearless in every other area in their life and really bad on the cold calls. So what I did was I forced them to fail. This is an advance hack so you need to have your shit together if you want to coach somebody to do this. But what I made this person do is I told them, “The next ten cold calls, I want you to stutter. So they had to cold call and go, “My name is Steve from…” It’s stutter until the other person hang up, and that’s so painful.

And then they had to make another ten calls where they talk so fast that the person couldn’t hear it. And have them hung up. And that feels so awkward, so weird. And then after they did 20 horrible calls and he had them feel it every single one of them. I went. “Go get them now and do an awesome job.” And they just magically—now that they failed 20 times and they failed in the most horrible way, they were fearless. And the next call, they crushed it.

So sometimes you have to face those fears to be able to overcome them and you have to push your people to really suck at it and to then see how great it feels when you can do a good job at it and to realize that it doesn’t fucking matter. It doesn’t really matter.

Kevin, this is going to be the last question that I’m going to answer live in the webinar. If you have more questions because I have to run to a meeting, if you have more questions, just shoot me an email, Steli@Close.io. I’ll answer any and every question I get. I promise it to you. I’m on your side and try to make you guys crush it.

All right. So Kevin asked, using a CRM and probably Close.io—do we still need our CRM as we use it? So the question is, does it make sense to use in some cases Close.io and probably another CRM. It might. Send me an email. Let me know a little bit more and I’ll put in touch with an awesome guy here on the team.

We have some customers that use [another] CRM and use Close.io for all their outbound campaigns. Most of our customers choose Close.io as their singular CRM. But we have all kinds of use cases. So it depends on what you do, if it’s a good fit or not. Send us an email. Describe your case and we’ll honestly tell you if we think it’s a good idea or not.

All right guys. Thank you so much for the amazing questions. This was kickass awesome. I want you go out there and crush today. And I’m looking forward to the next webinar and I’m looking forward to the next webinar. I am looking forward to getting those emails from you in my inbox. Guys, have an amazing day. Take care.

Recommended reading:

24 B2B cold calling tips for sales success in 2016
People say cold calling is dead because they work the phones like it's 1995. Here's how fast-growing companies cold call to drive revenues in 2016.

The fastest way to become a cold calling pro
Want to turbocharge your sales and prospecting skills for the phone? There's a two-fold approach that will beat any other method ... and it's free!

Cold calling conversion funnel metrics and benchmarks
Here's how to create an effective cold calling sales funnel, how to optimize it, and the cold calling sales benchmarks you should be meeting.

After more than a decade at Salesforce, I’ve seen the number of distractions at work grow along with the pressure to continually pack your pipeline with viable leads and new business. I’ve also been lucky to work for and manage many salespeople over the years, and have figured out that sales success isn’t always about experience or your education level. In fact, some of Salesforce’s best sales reps had never sold software before working here.

What all successful, productive reps have in common is the capacity to learn.

Amid the growing pings, email notifications and workplace pressures, I’ve developed guidelines for a standard set of skills and recommended reading to help salespeople cut through the noise and stay productive.

1. There’s no MBA in selling.

You don’t need to go to business school to learn how to sell. Find a mentor that motivates and inspires you to strive for excellence. Also read books, articles and listen to podcasts on selling.

An oldie but goodie is The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson of CEB. They really dig into the behaviors and attitudes that will help you achieve high performance. I also listen to Tony Robbins, who has books, videos and presentations that are the holy grail of workforce coaching.

Additionally, I follow Salesforce’s Chief Digital Evangelist Vala Afshar on social media.

2. Focus on the relationships, not the number.

Your relationship with customers is what will drive your productivity and success, and eventually lead to selling more.

3. Study your customers, not just any news.

Every morning I scan the New York Times for business and global news. When I was a sales rep, I’d read the local news for where my territory was and industry articles for the top industries in my territory too.

This made me sell smarter and reduced the need for me to cram in research about a customer before meeting them… because I already had this knowledge baked in.

4. Block time for you.

If you don’t keep space on your calendar for work, someone else will take it up with meetings.

Keep undisturbed time during your day for cold calling, company research or customer proposals.

5. Focus on the end goal.

If everything is important then nothing is important. Eliminate demands that don’t help you drive revenue and don’t get distracted by requests that aren’t related to your customer’s success or the problem you’re trying to solve.

Until you have finished your necessary daily tasks (created a proposal, called certain customers) don’t let yourself get pulled into too many directions.

6. Track your data.

With customer relationship management (CRM) tools, you really get what you put into it. Get notes out of your notebook/excel and into your CRM so that you have easily searchable info on customers and clearly know your next steps and deal history.

Use your mobile phone to access this CRM data.

7. Analyze your data.

Know what contracts are renewing, what deals need attention, where you have been successful. The best employees can back up their work with data that proves their success.

Always have this data at your fingertips.

8. Treat yourself.

This is a no-brainer but too many people forget to do the basic things to keep you healthy and happy. Put your family first, get sleep, exercise and eat well.

Treating yourself every once in awhile is necessary to give you the boost you need to stay productive.

9. Tweet yourself.

Use social media to find pipeline and follow social posts by your customers to learn more about their business. Try texting as a means of communication with customers who are hard to reach.

10. Win as a team.

You may be an expert, but you can’t close a deal or succeed in any area of business without leaning on someone else.

For example, a prospect of mine had a number of technical questions that I wasn’t able to answer, so I reached out to a sales engineer to oversee the issue and ensure the customer’s needs were met.

In another instance, a prospect asked to speak to customers who had had similar implementations, so I reached out to a colleague who had relationships with the right customer and would be willing to speak to my prospect.

Our sales team felt so confident in our collective strength that it didn’t matter what we shared, and in the end we needed each other as resources to win.

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When I initially became an SDR manager 1.5+ years ago (feels like eons, though), I was fortunate enough to have the guidance and time of many senior people within our organization such as our CEO and head(s) of Business Operations.

After speaking with dozens of SDRs, SDR Managers/Directors, and Heads of Sales, I’ve realized that my own experience was the exception to what could unfortunately be viewed as an all-too-common rule. The rule being that many fast-growing organizations promote reps into front-line managerial positions and give them little advice or none at all.

While I may not be able to help you become an all-star Sales/SDR Manager in one post, I can in a series of them.

Below are a few pieces of advice that exponentially accelerated my own learning and allowed our team to not only achieve goals, but surpass them. I’m confident many of them will also help you:

1. Establish your team culture.

Regardless if there is only one Sales/SDR team within your Sales org or multiple (like we have at Grovo), your team needs an identity. This is important for a few reasons:

*NOTE: the identity of your team must also align with the culture and identity of the overall company).

Motivation

People are naturally motivated when they feel they’re a part of something larger than themselves. This is true at any growing company, but is magnified when there’s an entity that’s larger than an individual rep yet smaller than the overall company and comprised of people doing the same thing as them e.g. a team of SDRs, team of AEs, team of CSMs, etc.

Training

In the early days of an organization, training isn’t that good, but it’s also not very hard to deliver. You only have a few reps on a team and most likely only a few people in the overall company. 

As any team scales, having smaller teams (or pods) allows those on that team to learn from one another in addition to the manager who may be busy with multiple ramping reps, recruiting, or something else that requires her attention.

Instead of having reps distract multiple people on the sales floor, have a dedicated team to lean on. It will increase the efficiency of the whole org and allow reps who have been around a bit longer to step up and work on their own professional development.

Style

No two teams are alike (typically) and this stems from a manager’s particular management style. At Grovo, we have multiple SDR/Sales teams and they range from being very punctual and regimented to being a bit looser and cavalier on the phone. One isn’t better than the other, though (numbers confirm this, of course). 

The “style” of your team is where its specific identity shines and is what they become known for. You’re doing your team a disservice if they can’t look at themselves and say they’re a part of the “(insert name)” team whose flavor is “(insert a few adjectives e.g. playful, stone-cold serious, etc).”

The key here is to achieve balance in a rep embracing and cherishing their individual team’s style while not looking down on another. After all, the entire Sales org/company is one team.

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You do your team a disservice if they can’t say they’re a part of X team w/ Y style
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2. Create pipe discipline.

Pipe discipline is required for each and every single role within any Sales organization. SDRs have various types of leads, AEs have opportunities in different stages to manage, and AMs/CSMs have living, breathing (but hopefully not churning) clients to care for and grow.

If you’re a new manager and don’t have guidelines around how big pipes should be, establish them ASAP by either looking at what’s already worked for you or testing. There isn’t a “one size fits all” solution to how big or small a rep’s pipeline should be. The only rule is that it has to be big enough for reps to achieve their individual goals…and then some.

3. Discuss new role with previous peers.

If you were previously peers with someone you’re now managing, you must address the new role head on in order to ensure that all will go smoothly and to clear the air if there is any lingering resentment or opposition to you being in this new role. It’s about treating those with whom you work (and don’t work) with genuine respect for what they do.

Schedule the necessary 1:1, grab coffee or a drink and move past this so that you can work on building your business.

4. Set expectations immediately.

This one is huge. Many of our problems at work, and in life, come from mismanagement of expectations e.g. It was assumed you/your rep was going to do something and they didn’t, etc.

Either do this in a 1:1 setting or with your entire team. No laptops, no phones, or anything else that can be distracting. Sit there and explicitly tell them everything that you, as a manager, expect from them (come prepared with this already done) and then ask them to let you know, verbally, what they expect of you.

This isn’t a pop quiz, so ask them to think about this beforehand to increase the quality of their answers. This also isn’t a one-time exercise. Expectations change week to week, month to month and quarter to quarter. Be proactive in asking if expectations have changed as time goes on and letting your reps know of new expectations that you may have, as well.

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Be proactive in asking if expectations have changed and letting your reps know new expectations
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5. Transfer your pipe ASAP.

The funny thing about pipeline is that it’s alive. Meaning it’s born, grows and has the potential to die if not nurtured correctly. Leads, more so than opportunities and clients, have a half-life and become less valuable over time as they sit in an SDR’s view.

So, unless you’re specifically assuming the role of “player coach,” you need to redistribute your own pipeline ASAP. How you do it is another story. You can either bulk redistribute leads in your CRM or make the necessary intros between your reps and existing opportunities/clients.

6. Prioritize your goals.

As a new manager, you will have a lot on your plate and will want to do as many things as you can as soon as you can. This isn’t the way to go. If you spread yourself too thin, you’ll not only be highly unproductive but also become susceptible to burnout.

Take an hour or two and write down three (3) of your top priorities for the quarter and direct all your energy toward those three things. If you find yourself doing something that’s not advancing one of those three priorities, stop immediately. Stop the pointless meetings, creating pointless documents and sending pointless emails.

A few examples of priorities that new Sales managers could include:

• Achieving quarterly goal
• Increase morale
• Decrease ramp time by x,y,z
• Increase x,y,z conversion rate
• Hire ### new reps

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If you find yourself doing something that’s not advancing a top 3 priority, stop immediately
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7. Schedule all necessary meetings.

Yes, you have to do this as well. I doubt spending time on your calendar scheduling, then rearranging various meetings excites you, but it’s critical to making sure that you’re as efficient with your time as possible.

Take the necessary hour to schedule your 1:1s, bi-weekly syncs, weekly reminders, etc. It will save you a lot of time and frustration in the long run. Just remember that anything you put on the calendar has to be driving you and your team towards the three priorities that you set.

8. Draw out a checklist.

It’s very easy to not pay attention to the small details when things are going well. But when things are going badly, you need to quickly assess and diagnose why. This is where a checklist comes in handy. Each day, your reps will need to execute a variety of activities (make calls, send emails, set meetings, run demos, meet clients, etc.)

Whatever metrics you’re tracking, have them written out so that you can run a particularly good or bad week’s numbers against this checklist to better assess which levers were pulled that either led to your team’s success or failure. An example checklist:

• ✓Calls – Have we made enough calls?
• ✓Connects – Do we have a decent amount of connects?
• ✓Total MQLs  – Are we in a good place regarding MQLs?
• ✓Lead Sources – Are we getting the right types of MQLs?
• ✓Time Spent Calling – Are we spending the right amount of time calling the right leads?
• ✓Demos – Are we running enough demos to move opps down the funnel?
• ✓Clients – Have we been meeting with all of our clients regularly

8.5. Take a breath.

Understand that you’re in this new role for a reason – your leadership team believes in you and you need to believe in yourself. You will certainly make mistakes, but it’s truly taking the time to learn from those mistakes and internalize those learnings that will lead to greater success in the future. Get ready for a wild ride and congratulations.

Flickr Creative Commons image via Larraine.

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