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The term “customer success” is fast becoming one of the most talked about topics in business today. A whole industry has emerged around customer success and a plethora of resources have been created to support the new function and mindset: websites, white papers, webinars, conferences, and technologies exist to guide, advise and help you along the way to not only help add “customer success” as a department, but to instill it as a mindset across your company culture.

The Golden Rule and Every Touchpoint

Everyone has heard of the Golden Rule: “Treat others as you would want to be treated yourself”. But what does that have to do with customer success? Well, as it turns out, just about everything.

The Golden Rule is really at the very heart of what customer success is all about. A recent article on the Avention website says to, “Look at your organization through your customers’ eyes and be as constructively critical as you can be; look for the “soft underbelly” of your business that can be the most cumbersome and arduous part of the way a customer does business with you. Whether this is with your sales, billing, or on-boarding, keep asking yourself, ‘Does this obey the Golden Rule?’.”

Customer Success teams need to be the very embodiment of the Golden Rule as they interact with more customers and users than any other group in a business. Very often the interactions that your customers have with your customer success manager or customer success teams will drive their lasting and abiding thoughts on the company as a whole.

Be Proactive Not Reactive

The Golden Rule is not exclusively tied to when a customer reactively contacts your business or goes through a defined process, such as Billing. It applies at every touchpoint as you help customers proactively get maximum value from their significant investment in your business. This is a true “win/win”; not only does your customer get a better return on their investment, but your organization’s renewal and upsell rates also increase.

Keeping the Golden Rule as the standard benchmark for people, processes, and products will help ensure that your customers remain excited, engaged, and happy. The outcome will be very tangible—renewal rates remain high. While there are many ways your organization can put customers first, here are some tactical ways to get started and ensure the Golden Rule is applied throughout the entire business:

8 Ways to Apply the Golden Rule in Customer Success

1. Return customer inquiries promptly, no matter how big or small the matter.

2. Listen to customers and seek to understand their point of view, no matter how vocal they may be.

3. Be proactive in reaching out about potential issues versus reacting and waiting for the customer to act first.

4. Find reasons to thank customers whenever possible, whether it’s thanking them for being a valued customer, for a piece of valuable feedback, for a product idea, for a referral, and etc.

5. Be your customer’s advocate and always do what’s best for their business, for their projects, and for their goals.

6. Teach and share knowledge with customers and invite them to participate in company learning events such as webinars, conferences, or even the latest ebook or case study.

7. Over-communicate as often as possible to ensure both your organization and the customer are always on the same page, reaching for the same goals.

8. Build relationships high and wide throughout the customer’s organization.

How does your organization embody the Golden Rule as it relates to your customers? Customers are the lifeblood of your business, so no matter how far behind you might be, it’s never too late to begin honoring the Golden Rule.

From a one-man startup to a large established company with international sales teams, to big successful exits, I’ve lived through the startup process twice and am now starting it again here at Spiro Technologies.

One of the questions I’m most often asked is how to scale and grow a sales team from the bottom up. At an early stage start-up, who should be in charge and what roles do I need as the company grows?

I’m going to focus on the two earliest stages here because they’re probably the most difficult. As an old professor of mine said, “it’s a big difference between zero and one.”

Stage 0: Defining Yourself

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

You’re starting from nothing – it’s just you and maybe one or two other people in your company. You’ve created a product and you think you’re ready to sell it. (If you’re worried you’re bringing it to market too quickly, listen to the words of Reid Hoffman: “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” )

How do you go about selling your somewhat embarrassing product? At this point, you might be tempted to hire sales professionals. DON’T.

This early engagement with prospects is the kind of experience you don’t want to miss out on. It’s critical that you’re a part of defining who your company is and what your company can offer.

When I began my CRM consulting company, Innoveer, I was thrown into the mix with no ground to stand on when it came to competing against the big boys. We had to get some solid customers to vouch for us and we had to do it fast.

For the next three months I called everyone I knew, doing trial and error pitches until it coalesced into a few good ideas. We trimmed a lot of fat and eventually came up with a streamlined angle that won us our first big customer: Reynolds Metals, makers of aluminum foil.

We were on the 20th iteration of our pitch at the point when we finally broke through. We told them that our company was a specialized firm that could deliver projects much more quickly than Accenture, whom Reynolds was working with at the time.

Our latest pitch boiled down to “we had a highly specialized team doing projects at a fraction of the cost and half the time of Accenture.”

Our pitch was simple, but effective, because we had an angle that defined us and a customer who understood our value.

Reading our value proposition today you might be tempted to say “gee, that sounds simple; what took you 20 iterations to get it right?” When you’re at a zero stage startup, it’s tricky to know exactly the right message because all the possibilities in the world are in front of you. You will know you found the right message when it seems so obvious.

Stage 1: Growing a Reference Base

After answering the all-important product-market-fit question, most startup folks then focus on scale: starting marketing campaigns, adding new employees, etc.

But what about having the right references to make it all work?

You’re nobody until you’re somebody. It sounds like circular reasoning, but it’s true. Without a solid bunch of customers vouching for you, you’re just another Joe Shmoe wan-trepeneur.

It’s important to not only have references, but to choose the RIGHT references. The good ones will help shape and guide your company to other future customers who are the right fit. So how do you determine who you should be targeting?

Start by defining your ideal buyer.

Don’t hold back. Make a list of all the qualities in your dream customer. Use data you’ve collected from Stage Zero’s trial and error experience defining your angle: keep track of what works, what doesn’t work, and key metrics.

What you should be paying attention to depends on your market. At my first company, Open Environment, for example, we were primarily looking at the size of a company, what their technical infrastructure was like and the maturity of their business processes.

It can seem like an uphill battle to convince people to buy your product when you’re a new startup. In our case, we had to convince companies to buy mission-critical, middleware software from a startup with a limited track record.

Once Open Environment started working with Freddie Mac (also known as the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation), an organization that transacted billions of dollars worth of mortgages over our platform, everything changed.

We now had an ideal customer to overcome our number one objection in the sales process.

We name-dropped Freddie Mac as our customer everywhere we went – at trade shows and in all of our presentations. We put one of their key employees on our customer advisory board and made sure the technical support they received was second to none.

They were a key reason for our success which lead to an IPO and eventual sale of the company.

Stage 2: Scaling

Because you now have a model of what your target costumer should be, you should start building your sales team with Business Development Reps. BDRs, as they’re called, are going to be focused on setting up appointments for you as a founder to talk with prospects to grow your company even bigger.

This stage is all about scaling and you’ll need to hire more BDRs and enhance your marketing programs. You’ll know you’re ready to move to this stage once you’ve built the right references.

Before I became an entrepreneur, I was a salesman, and like many successful salespeople, I’m very goal-focused. To set goals, you must ask yourself some questions:

• -What do you envision your sales team looking like?
• -Who’s going to do the selling, what roles do you need?
• -Of course, it all depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

The most important thing in starting a team from the ground up is making sure you give it a good foundation. Use you head, and think strategically. Make sure you fit your market by testing out a bunch of pitches until you see what works, then target your ideal buyer to build a reference base.

Start with your feet on solid ground and you’ll go far!

While understanding the kind of engagement an influencer’s content drives, as well as the level of quality content an influencer produces, are two of the first questions typically asked by brand marketers, when selecting an influencer, many critical questions get left on the table.

Below are six key questions marketers should remember to ask prior to choosing influencers for an upcoming campaign:

1. How often is the influencer posting?

Frequency of posts is important, as this impacts Google search and visibility to the influencer’s site. It is also indicative of whether the influencer views blogging as a profession or simply a hobby. Consider how much of his or her content is sponsored posts – the more sponsored content, the more likely the influencer is in the business of blogging.

2. How long has an influencer been working with brands?

The tenure of an influencer is a good indicator of their knowledge and experience in brand-sponsored blogging. Newbies might need more handholding, support and detailed instructions compared to someone who has been blogging for three or five years. On the other hand, influencers who have been in blogging for a long time may have lost their passion for writing, so also be sure to ask for recent samples of branded posts to get a feel for an influencer’s tone and writing style.

3. Does the influencer have an email list?

What is the size of the influencer’s email list? Do they use it syndicate their content? How often do they send out an email newsletters? What is their average open rate? Rarely do brands think about old-school marketing tools such as email, but almost every influencer has an email subscriber list to help drive traffic to their websites or other social platforms—which can help increase eyeballs on your sponsored content.

4. What tools or apps are the influencer to increase viewability?

Social media and blogging sites like Google+, Reddit, Medium, or Triberr are great platforms for increased content exposure. For tech-savvy bloggers, automation and syndication tools make sharing content quick and easy. Be sure to watch influencers on newer platforms like Snapchat and Periscope to gain insights on how they incorporate brand-sponsored messaging into their snaps and videos.

5. Does the influencer only run single-platform campaigns?

Nowadays, most influencers are sharing content beyond their blogs – think Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. However, if running an Instagram-only campaign with an influencer, for example, will he or she still use other social channels to share messaging on your behalf?

6. What about references?

If you are working directly with influencers rather than through an influencer marketing company, don’t be afraid to ask for references. While on paper, an influencer might look great, client contacts may paint a different picture.

Final thought: Influencer content is a must-have component of brand’s marketing strategy, but choosing the right influencers for your brand means first doing your homework and asking the right questions to ensure success. Be sure to exercise caution on staging your questions, however, as not to overwhelm them. There is an appropriate time to get in the weeds; after all, you’re looking to tap into a network that has taken them years to build, and influencers understand their value.

The data about average sales-team size in this post comes from our ongoing benchmarking analysis of hundreds of B2B SaaS companies. We will be releasing more benchmarks and key findings over the next few months.

• You can download a free PDF of the key findings mentioned in this post here.
• Click here to learn about the study’s methodology and participant breakdown.

At a tech industry event a few weeks ago, respected VC Jeff Bussgang found himself in a conversation with a woman who was considering changing jobs. Her plan was to move from the large public tech company where she worked to a much smaller startup, but she was worried that her skills wouldn’t translate to a younger, growth-focused setting. Naturally, Bussgang asked her what her role was.

“Sales Operations,” she told him.

“Holy crap!” Bussgang responded. “You’ll be the most valuable hire a growth-stage company could ever make.”

In his recent post recounting the encounter, Bussgang explains why he felt so certain about this woman’s success ‒ why, in other words, he believes that “sales operations is the secret weapon to scaling startups.”

“One of the largest friction points to rapid scaling is the sales force,” he wrote. Startups trying to double (let alone 10x) revenue in a short period can’t afford to double (or 10x) their sales force ‒ it’s just not financially sustainable. Instead, they need to find ways to get more from their sales team without simply adding more to their sales team. Indeed, the challenge of increasing per-rep revenue generation as a company matures is one of the most important components of effectively scaling.

One of the largest friction points to rapid scaling is the sales force.”

In Bussgang’s view, achieving this increased productivity comes down to one thing: using sales ops, technology and training to make your AEs more efficient.

In this post, we will look at our recent research revealing that sales teams shrink (proportionally) as companies scale, as well as dig in a little deeper into Bussgang’s thoughts on how to ensure that sales teams book more revenue per rep as they scale.

Jeff Bussgang, VC at Flybridge

How to Make Your Sales Team More Efficient as You Scale

The Incredible Shrinking Sales Team

InsightSquared recently completed a comprehensive sales benchmarking analysis, and one of the most important findings was that the size of sales teams (relative to overall headcount) decreases as companies grow.

In fact, the trend is incredibly clear: As startups mature (surpassing 100ish employees, 10 years of existence, and/or $10 million in annual bookings) the proportional number of AEs is fully sliced in half, from around 40% to less than 20%.

Here’s a way of visualizing that trend:

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Why is this trend so important? Quite simply, it means that more mature tech companies need to maintain (or even accelerate) revenue growth even as their salesforce shrinks proportionally to the company’s overall headcount. In other words, every quota-carrying sales rep must book more and more revenue as their company scales.

This finding directly supports Bussgang’s belief that increasing the efficiency of your sales team (without significantly adding to its headcount) may be the most critical project for the modern startup.

That’s why when the woman he was speaking with told him she was in sales operations he was so excited. As Bussgang sees it (and he’s not alone), increasing the efficiency of your sales team starts with sales ops.

1. Using Sales Operations to Improve Efficiency

The best sales operations leaders allow the sales team to spend more time selling and less time worrying about reporting, cross-functional coordination and operational management.”

The more time your sales reps spend actually selling, the more revenue they’re going to bring in. Unfortunately, there are a lot of things sales reps have to do that don’t fall into the “selling” bucket: inputting information into Salesforce, researching prospects, sending nurture emails, forecasting opportunities. These are all important parts of the sales process, but they’re also countless hours AEs aren’t spending closing deals.

That’s where sales operations comes in. As Bussgang told the woman contemplating a job change, sales operations is the number one factor in getting more from a scaling sales team.

A recent report from IDC bears this out. The report identifies many ways that sales ops can help your sales team more efficiency, but it all boils down to this: “[Sales ops allows] sales management to focus solely on revenue-generating activities.”

This quote helps illustrate an important piece of the puzzle for making your growing sales team more efficient: economies of scale.

Economies of Scale

As your go-to-market machine grows, you have more opportunities to streamline, batch and automate parts of your sales process. The report from IDC highlights a few of these ‒ the quote-to-order process, forecasting, performance measurement ‒ but the broader message goes beyond these specifics: Companies that find ways to move non-closing-related tasks off the plates of closers and put them in the hands of more specialized colleagues are likely to reap the benefits of an economy of sale.

This philosophy, of course, is not new, but it is something that the modern startup must pay close attention to. If you’re paying a dollar (in headcount) for every new dollar you bring in, you will never scale efficiently enough to become truly profitable.

But sales operations isn’t the only way that growing companies can help their closers become more efficient.

2. Using Sales Training to Help AEs Reach Their Potential

The difference between ramping a productive salesperson in 3 months versus 6 months could be life or death for a scaling startup.”

In early-stage startups, sales is often in the “let’s learn this together” mode. There are rarely sales managers or different tiers of reps ‒ it’s just a small group of people trying to fine tune a sales process, learn how to sell a new product, and build a working team as they go. More often than not, these early-stage sales reps are happy doing all of this at once. There’s a reason they’re often called “evangelical sales reps” after all.

But as sales teams (and the companies that contain them) grow, this dynamic changes. All of the sudden, you’re hiring different types of sales reps with vastly different skills and experience levels. You may split your team up into closers and development reps. Perhaps you add a sales manager or two. So now, instead of a cohesive, small team of evangelical reps, you have a diverse (and rapidly) growing team.

This is when you need to ramp up your sales training.

A recent article from Harvard Business Review explains the benefits of and strategies for improving sales training: “The decision to create a coaching culture must be done in the context of a broader corporate goal ‒ a growth strategy to increase revenue, perhaps, or a need to speed the time it takes new salespeople to become productive, or a desire to decrease costly sales turnover.”

In this way, it’s easy to see how sales managers make your quota-carrying reps more efficient. They help them learn (and follow) your sales process, they onboard reps more quickly, and they identify areas of weakness (on an individual rep and team-wide basis).

It may seem weird to add a non-revenue-generating salesperson to your team with the intention of bringing in more revenue per rep, but it’s been proven to have enormous returns.

But there’s one more common way that growing sales teams can book more revenue without adding much more revenue.

3. Capitalizing on a More Well Known Brand

Getting your product to ‘sell itself’ will allow you to scale your sales process efficiently.”

In the previous two sections, we’ve discussed how adding non-closing salespeople ‒ like sales ops and trainers ‒ can increase the overall efficiency of your sales team as you scale. But we’ve ignored one huge part of the equation of achieving an economy of scale: Over time, your product should actually become easier to sell.

Why is this the case? There are two main reasons:

1. You have more brand awareness
2. Your product gets stronger and more targeted as it matures

Let’s take them one by one.

Order Takers

First we’ll look at the role of brand awareness in scaling. In the early days of a company, you have to work pretty hard just to educate your market, especially if you’re selling software. You have to educate them about why they need your product or service and how it will help them. But you also need to educate them about who you are.

Time spent convincing prospects about all of this is time your reps aren’t able to spend closing that deal or working others. And it also reduces your reps’ win rate, as prospects may ultimately end up going with a more recognizable (read: trusted) competitor.

Order Takers

First we’ll look at the role of brand awareness in scaling. In the early days of a company, you have to work pretty hard just to educate your market, especially if you’re selling software. You have to educate them about why they need your product or service and how it will help them. But you also need to educate them about who you are.

Time spent explaining this to prospects is time your reps aren’t able to spend closing that deal or working others. And it also reduces your reps’ win rate, as prospects may ultimately end up going with a more recognizable (read: trusted) competitor.

This is where marketing comes in. Marketing is not only responsible for bringing in leads, but also for expanding your brand recognition and incrementally improving your product’s position in the minds of prospects. Done right, your reps incrementally become more like “order-takers” and less like traditional salespeople. Securing positive reviews or getting influencers to endorse your product are just a couple of ways that the best marketing teams make the jobs of their sales reps easier.

The Responsive Product

The second piece of the puzzle is an improving product-market fit. Evolving your product over time, and making it more essential in the eyes of your target market, is critical for increasing revenue in a nonlinear fashion. This is especially true for software companies, who are always (or should always be) iterating their product to increase its perceived value to prospects.

Over time, highly requested features must be added, experience-harming bugs should be squashed, and your product, overall, should generally become an “easier sell.”

Of course, these product improvements won’t sell themselves ‒ they must be explained to sales reps so that the reps can position them correctly. Product marketing, the product team in general, and sales enablement are all essential tools for improving the “build-measure-learn feedback loop.”

If this happens correctly, your product will always be growing easier to sell. And this means that your sales team will be able to closer more and bigger deals on a per-rep basis.

Unlike traditional business models, where a product launches and then it’s left to the go-to-market side to find customers, SaaS companies are built around the belief in agile product development. Understanding how customers are using your product (or, conversely, why prospects aren’t buying it) is essential to improving your offering so that it becomes more essential over time.

The Hyper-Efficient Sales Team

These 3 factors ‒ sales operations, sales training, and brand awareness ‒ are the critical ingredients in a more efficient sales team. Together they can help you solve the difficult problem of growing revenue non-linearly to AE headcount.

Of course, they’re not the only pieces of the puzzle. The right VP, an effective and efficient sales process, and a strong recruitment program are all important too.

I recently sat down with a good friend and fellow entrepreneur to catch up. We get together on a fairly regular basis and I value our time together as a chance to share our experiences, challenges and successes through our respective careers. And because we are at very different points in our entrepreneurial journeys, we are able to provide each other with a new perspective.

During our last conversation, my friend made a reflective observation that I really admired. He told me that he’d been recently pondering the impact of his inevitable departure from the company he has run for the past thirty years. Although he has no immediate plans to retire or leave, the truth is, he won’t stay in his role forever.

In a recent town hall meeting, he came to the stark realization that the way he behaved every day sent messages to his team. Whether intentional or not, his people took his cues on how to behave within the company to heart.

Faced with this immense influence and responsibility, my friend realized how deeply his departure would impact the organization he had worked most of his adult life growing. As a result, he has become very intentional in planning his departure in order to minimize any negative repercussions.

The Impact and Influence of Founders

Founders have enormous influence on the culture of their organizations. Their personal beliefs and assumptions about the right and wrong way to do things takes on a life of its own as they onboard new employees during the startup phase. If the beliefs of the founder don’t make for good business, the organization will fail to thrive and will likely shut down. If the organization succeeds, that success only serves to reinforce for members of the organization that those ways of working are, in fact, the right ways to work.

As the organization continues to grow, new members will either adapt to the culture or fail and depart. More time and more success only serves to further embed the culture and way of doing things as the ‘right’ way. Even when founders leave an organization at this stage, their legacy can continue to drive thinking and behavior in the organization for years to come.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The danger arises when the organization is reliant on the embedded ways of working despite changes in the environment that change the game. Being great at baseball is fantastic so long as the game doesn’t suddenly change to football and you’re left wearing a batting helmet.

A Challenge or an Opportunity?

When founders have been successfully leading their organizations for long periods of time, their departure can be extremely challenging. It may come at a time when the organization finds itself at a crossroads; a point where the old ways of doing things may not be the best path to the future.

In these cases, the culture may need to evolve in some ways to better position the organization moving forward. But a founder’s poorly planned (or unplanned) departure can leave the organization they created set on autopilot as the remaining team members continue on the path that was established for them.

This type of situation can bring an organization to its knees as people grapple to make sense of the departure and try to understand how they will continue without them.

While certainly challenging, this does provide the founder with the opportunity to be proactive about preparing their organization for the time when they finally make their exit.

How to Prepare for a Proper Exit as a Founder

Here are four things to ensure that your departure as a founder goes smoothly:

1. Take the time to properly reflect. Consider the beliefs, assumptions and values that you hold and how they have shaped your organization. This may require seeking the help of others as you reflect on the current culture of your organization and all the strengths that may come with it.

In order to do this right, founders and their leadership teams need to understand the culture in which they operate and think deeply about how it may serve the organization well, or potentially derail them, in the future.

Founders can then begin an intentional process of shaping the culture over time, by role-modeling needed future behaviors, by shaping recruiting processes to hire the right talent, by shaping the compensation structure to reward and reinforce the needed behaviors in the future, and by evolving other key systems and processes to carry the organization forward and yield sustainable success.

2. Don’t wait to develop your plan. Waiting until your departure is imminent will only leave you regretting the chance you had to plan ahead. More importantly, it puts the sustainability of your company at risk. If for nothing else than to mitigate risk, planning for your exit now helps ensure that no matter what, your team will be able to carry on in a sustainable way.

3. Select a successor early enough to implement a thorough transition. Often, founders will wait too long to identify and begin grooming their heir. Take the time to engage your successor in reflecting on the current culture and how it may need to evolve to help drive the behaviors required for success during their tenure. By partnering with your successor in this process, you can reinforce your underlying beliefs and assumptions about what is important. Then, you can both understand how those beliefs may or may not need to evolve to set the organization up for success once you are gone.

4. Keep your team engaged. As the time of your exit nears, take the time to engage your team to help them understand what is happening and what it means for them and the organization’s future. Culture is a collective concept; so actively engaging team members in understanding the culture, the strategy and the ways in which things may need to change can be beneficial. It allows people to become a part of the process rather than sitting back and feeling like something is being done to them. It also helps align them around what may need to change and what must remain stable in order to succeed in your absence.

Whether by design or default, no founder can guide the ship forever. Eventually, things will change. Preparing for this eventuality can have a profound effect on the future of what you and your team have worked so hard to build.

As a founder, you and your team have all had a hand in building a solid foundation that has weathered many storms. You’ve all seen it grow and evolve over the years and the foundational culture that you’ve created together has helped drive that success. Being thoughtful about your departure is like adding that final coat of varnish on the house that will help team members seal and protect that foundation as they carry on in your absence.

There’s a small section of your LinkedIn profile that follows you everywhere you go on the platform.

Despite all the hype around personal desktop 3D printers, consumers never warmed to the idea of machines only really useful for making toys—most kids already have more than enough plastic figurines lying around for their parents to step on.

Rather than fuelling a movement of makers and tinkerers, the technology will have its biggest impact in enterprise manufacturing. But don’t look for assembly lines to be replaced by building-sized 3D printers that spit out finished products any time soon. Instead, the technology will enable two value-creating steps in the manufacturing process: rapid prototyping and mass-customization.

“Over the last couple of years [3D printing has] gone through this massive hype cycle where it’s going to print you a cup and fill it with coffee,” observes Ben Wynne, chief Technology Officer at Vancouver-based Wiivv Wearables. Wynne has been working with the technology for over a decade, including a stint leading a skunkworks engineering team at HP.

Consumer demand for personalized products is growing according to Wiivv, which plans to 3D print its “body-perfect” gear, starting with the Base insoles it’s currently pre-selling via Kickstarter. The company’s “adaptive manufacturing system” turns scans into printable files in short order, enabling it to theoretically produce everything from snugger earbuds to palm-fitting golf club handles.

3D printing makes it possible to produce geometries that can’t be machined or moulded, and to create blended materials. (Imagine “a solid bar, where one end is plastic and it goes to rubber on the other end, but in the same way that a rainbow goes from red to violet,” suggests Wynne). But it won’t completely replace the factory manufacturing process. “When you’re building end-user products, you still have a component that involves assembly and completion,” notes Shamil Hargovan, Wiivv’s co-founder and CEO, who met Wynne while working at HP.

Instead of end-to-end manufacturing, 3D printing could be used to produce personalized parts that go into a finished consumer product. Among the investors that contributed to Wiivv’s $3.5 million seed round in December was MAS Holdings, a Sri Lankan company that is one of the largest manufacturers of apparel and footwear for brands like Nike, Victoria Secret and Lululemon. Other assembly line operators could similarly team up with customization-enablers to bring personalization to their product lines. “If I want a pair of dress shoes, I’m going to get them made in leather,” says Wynne. “The part that makes it custom could just be a 3D-printed plastic part that’s folded into the conventional manufacturing process.”

The end-to-end manufacturing hype ignores 3D printing’s cost and speed limitations says Duncan Stewart, Head of Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) Research at Deloitte Canada, and author of the consulting firm’s much-cited annual TMT Predictions report. “We’ve really got to calm down on the idea that 3D printing is going to be a major thing in final-part manufacture for any industry at scale,” he says. “3D printers are slow, expensive, and almost always require extensive after-printing post-processing.”

Rapid prototyping is a more practical use for the technology, and manufacturers seem to agree—Stewart says it’s what 80–90% of 3D printers are used for today. He uses the analogy of jewelry: Historically, large jewellers were able to offer customers rings, say, in hundreds of different designs in various sizes because they owned thousand of moulds. Smaller competitors couldn’t afford to maintain an inventory of that size. “You can now print out a mould in the exact right size, do a prototype, have the customer sign off, then produce the ring through traditional gold manufacturing using the mould,” says Stewart. It’s not about changing the market, so much as levelling the playing field between big and small players.

In terms of prototyping, 3D printing is transformative says Stewart. “It dramatically reduces costs and accelerates time to market, both of which are worth in aggregate tens of billions of dollars around the world.” Major manufacturers in say the automobile industry may set up labs filled with 3D printers, smaller business may only need a single machine, or access to one through a service bureau.

And while the 3D printer-in-every-garage vision some futurists have been touting may never materialize, enterprise manufacturing may lead to a different kind of ubiquity. While Wiivv is vertically integrated at the moment, it envisions a future of distributed manufacturing. “To scale, we need an order of magnitude more of access to [3D printers],” explains Wynne. “From a cost perspective it doesn’t make sense to invest in that amount of hardware.”

Instead, the company’s platform allows facilities with the right machines to sign on as manufacturing partners, who Wiivv can tap if it needs extra production capacity. “We’ve always described our manufacturing and R&D facility in San Diego as our Ocean’s Eleven vault, where we build it once and others can replicate it,” jokes Hargovan.

So don’t shut down your factories just yet. “To a very large extent, 3D printers are additive—pun intended—to existing supply chains rather than substitutive,” says Stewart. “They aren’t competing, they are complementing.”

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I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Jonathan Farrington, CEO Top Sales World, together with Jay Mitchell, President and Founder of Mereo LLC. This interview was first published here: Top Sales Magazine, February 2016. In my humble opinion, this interview provides a rare blend of our research at CSO Insights, and a lot of experience and practical implementation tips.

JF: Sales enablement still means many different things to different people. What does enablement really mean and how did it evolve?

TS: Yes, the term “enablement” needs clarification, depending on an organization’s context and current maturity level. But the common ground is to equip sales forces’ ability to evolve their “how to sell” approach according to changed buyer behaviors. That’s why we came up with a new definition:
Sales Force Enablement is a strategic, cross-functional discipline, designed to increase sales results and productivity, by providing integrated content, training and coaching services, for salespeople and frontline sales managers, along the entire customer’s journey, powered by technology.
This definition belongs to the recommended maturity level, what you should be doing. Organizations who are currently focused on either the content or the training stream (required maturity level) should begin to align and integrate their enablement services (“no training without content, no content without training”), based on a solid “customer-core” enablement framework. That means to map the customer’s journey to the internal process landscape before defining the scope of enablement. Then, enablement services can be tailored to different customer’s journey phases, buyer roles, and more.

JM: While there has been a mountain of research done in the last 3-4 years indicating the journey for B2B buyers is shifting, there has been very little talk about selling differently in these changing times. The way many sales professionals sell today is not much different than the B2B selling hey-day of the late 1990s/early 2000s. Why? Because too often sales leaders don’t know what needs to change, don’t have a model for a new approach or don’t know how to equip their sales teams appropriately. At Mereo, we have the honor of working with dozens of organizations trying to embrace the new dynamic of buyer and seller. The most successful of these companies address sales enablement as an operational discipline, rather than an independent function of their go-to-market operations. They employ cross-functional resources to deliver interdependent messaging, sales ready assets, training and coaching to their sales channels in a way that is synchronized with their client’s buying journey.

JF: That’s a comprehensive definition! Let’s look at the goals. What are the specific goals of enablement apart from increasing revenue that lead to sales performance?

JM: For most organizations, the macro objectives are fairly straightforward: to grow profitable revenues and increase quota attainment/revenue delivered per sales professional, while lowering cost of sale. While those are absolutely accurate, the market leaders we serve benchmark sales enablement success by the tenets that power revenue performance – that is, metrics such as elevating average deal size, enhancing the wallet share captured from each client, accelerating the on-boarding window for new sales professionals and shortening the sales cycle.

Beyond those traditional sales metrics, there are some clear measurements of marketing’s impact in sales enablement. For example, a recent CMO Council study revealed sales professionals waste two days per week creating their own messaging and tools. It is no wonder that the inability to communicate value messages to customers and prospects is still the biggest inhibitor to sales success.” Measuring marketing’s contribution to sales enablement may be “softer”, but it is still a fundamental gauge of success.

TS: Our CSO Insights 2015 Sales Enablement Optimization Study (membership required) shows that enablement is a multifaceted discipline with a wide variety of goals of similar importance. Increasing sales efficiency was reported to be the most important goal (82%), which is the equivalent to lowering the cost of sale, as Jay mentioned. The second most important goal was increasing revenue as both of you mentioned (76%), and increasing new account acquisition (69%). The list continues with performance goals such as increasing the win rates, the reduction of sales cycle length and increasing revenue in existing clients. It’s important to understand that enablement goals have two critical dependencies: context and maturity. Context examples are, e.g. a growth path versus defending a market position, disruptions, or tech innovations. All have one in common: they impact and change how buyers want to buy and what’s valuable to them.

JF: The obvious question I have to ask: Where does enablement belong in the organization? In marketing or in sales?

TS: For years, in the absence of data, the question has been “Is enablement in sales or marketing?” Now we have to reframe the question to “where in sales is enablement?” based on the data of our 2015 Sales Enablement Optimization Study. More than three quarters (78%) of all surveyed organizations placed enablement within sales – executive sales management (53%) or sales operations (25%). Only 7% indicated their enablement function to be in marketing while another 15% said enablement reports to various functions such as product/portfolio management, training, HR and others. There is an interesting difference for large organizations, above $250b in revenues: Also here more than three quarters (77%) report into sales, but less to executive management (36%) and more to sales operations (41%). And more of these large organizations have their enablement function within marketing (11%).

JM: As I mentioned earlier, we find that the top-performing organizations view sales enablement as a cross-functional discipline that engages resources (budgets and people) primarily from sales, marketing, solutions/products, services and training. That said, the leadership for the sales enablement team most often resides in sales, either reporting directly to the senior sales executive or to one of his/her chief lieutenants, in many cases sales operations. An important attribute we are finding in many of our clients is the importance sales enablement plays on the radar of the CEO/General Manager. For our most successful clients, when the CEO/General Manager takes a keen interest in the significance of sales enablement to their overall plan, revenue growth naturally follows.

JF: Let’s switch to what enablement teams provide for the sales force. A specific term that’s discussed almost everywhere is the term “playbooks.” For which purposes do I need a playbook, and how does that look like today, in the age of technology?

JM: The backbone of sales enablement is a consistent, well-tuned sales process aligned with the ideal buyer’s journey, as it provides a framework from which the key outputs of a sales enablement platform resonate. We see two key pillars of sales enablement, underpinned by a critical cultural tenet. The first pillar is a value-based messaging framework, which includes the ideal client profile, the pains ideal clients are encountering, discovery questions for igniting those pains and differentiated messages that are not only unique and provable, but also valuable to the audience. Ideally, these value proposition fundamentals are encapsulated in an interactive playbook that serves as a guide for sales to navigate the sales cycle with messaging that supports each conversation. Ultimately, messaging manifests itself in customer-facing, sales ready assets, such as prospecting talk tracks, pencil pitches and even proposal language and presentation templates. Once the messaging – the content – is in place, training sales to use the sales kit in context of their sales process is next. The second pillar of sales enablement – training – includes LOTS of role-plays where applying the messaging and sales kit is modeled and practiced. Which brings us to the critical cultural tenet of sales enablement – coaching. This is the most important facet in a sales enablement program and is predicated on sales managers intentionally learning the messaging, using the tools themselves and then practicing with their team, while providing relevant counsel.

TS: Amen, Jay! The term “playbook” is often as confusing as “enablement.” Playbooks are one of many content services, of course, an important one, mostly used in complex environments. Playbooks are interactive tools that guide salespeople along the entire customer’s journey with the right value messaging, content and sales tools, ideally tailored to any specific buying situation, powered by technology. A playbook is not a big book nobody will ever read. It’s a digital tool that’s ideally created per opportunity, depending on its stage, industry, buyer roles, business challenge, etc. And that requires a solid content management framework that’s designed along the customer’s journey.

We asked the participants of our enablement study to rank enablement services’ effectiveness. Playbooks and other enablement services that have to be designed with the customers at the core were reported rather ineffective compared to “old-fashioned” product sheets or product training services. While organizations made progress in aligning their sales processes to the customer’s journey, there is still a lot to do to translate this advantage into effective “customer-core” enablement services. And that requires a mindset shift.

JF: Enablement cannot be discussed without technology. What’s the state of the industry and what are the trends?

TS: There are many enablement vendors out there, and the market continues to grow. Years ago, you saw lots of enablement point solutions; desktop focused. And just a few years later, enablement solutions are available on any device, mostly integrated with CRM Systems. Furthermore, enablement technology equips salespeople with suggested content and training sessions right at their fingertips, allows them to share content (also videos) with prospects and clients, while customer interactions and buyer behaviors are tracked in parallel, as a foundation for often already integrated coaching features. Furthermore, enablement technology allows content creators (not only marketing) to define and maintain content management frameworks. An aspect that’s often underestimated, but when organizations want to provide tailored content to specific buying scenarios, they have to have a content management framework in place that’s defined along the customer’s journey.

JM: Tamara nailed it. It has evolved from point solutions, to technology purposely used for sales enablement and synchronized with the CRM system. The most effective solutions deliver the messaging, the sales enablement assets and even role-play training at the sales professional’s device – often a tablet or iPad. We have partnered with a number of vendors in this arena, and have seen our clients develop proprietary solutions for it. The established, proven solutions have delivered better results almost every time.

JF: To create all these enablement services, collaboration must be a big challenge and also an important “enabler” for enablement. How does the reality look like?

JM: The biggest obstacle to sales success, according to sales managers, is the sales team’s inability to communicate value messages, based on CSO Insights research. For me, this means too many organizations are not synchronized on the real purpose of sales enablement— to equip the sales channels to create more value in EVERY interaction with a prospect/client. As I’ve already mentioned: sales enablement is a cross-functional discipline that is rooted in an alignment between sales, marketing, solutions/products, services and training as the primary contributors. Alignment is the key word here. When these, often disparate teams are united by a common mission — to enable the sales force to serve their audience first — unleashed revenue performance is guaranteed to be the result.

TS: The survey results on collaboration were as surprising as the question where enablement belongs in the organization. More than 80% of the participants reported to collaborate on an informal (42%) or an ad hoc basis (41%) which means that they have no formal collaboration, collaboration framework or model in place. Only 12 % of the participants reported collaborating on a formal basis. Interestingly, a snapshot on larger organizations delivered the exact same results. In reality, organizations allow themselves NOT to leverage a huge potential for efficiency, which is a prerequisite to achieving sales performance goals. From opinions to data: there is a significant correlation between collaboration and quota attainment. Between those with an ad hoc and a formal collaboration approach, there was a 21% difference in quota attainment. Which sales leader can allow not to leverage such a quota attainment potential?

 

Related blog posts:

Evolving Enablement to Sales Force Enablement: The New Definition 

Where Does Enablement Belong? Debunking A Myth

Enablement Goals Depend On Context and Maturity

Relationship Building With Customers: Content Counts

Enablement Services: Training, content, and what else?

Dynamic Value Messaging: Part 1, Defining Messaging Criteria

Dynamic Value Messaging: Part 2, Different Buying Scenarios Matter

Dynamic Value Messaging: Part 3, Value Messaging Types Along the Customer’s Journey

 

The post Getting Clarity on Sales Enablement appeared first on Sales Enablement Perspectives.

Let’s face it, sales as we know it has changed, from how to attract distracted buyers to how to nurture a long-term relationship when loyalty is diminishing almost as quickly as our attention span. Fortunately there is new information that …
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One of the critical questions that every expansion-phase B2B focused company needs to consider is “what’s the most appropriate Sales and Business Development organisation structure for our product or service offering”?

There is no single perfect answer to this – but the choices you make have a huge impact on your ability to create and close the maximum number of qualified opportunities, as quickly as possible.

As well as taking into account the packaging and price points of your product or service, it is important to pay close attention to the expectations and needs of your buyers.

You obviously need to identify the problems that your solution solves, focus on the types of organisations are most likely to suffer from these issues and distinguish which roles are most likely to lead the search for a solution. But there’s more…

If you have a relatively simple, easy-to-explain, transactional product or service operating in a mature market where buyers know exactly what they want, your organisational options are straightforward. These purchases are increasingly web-based and automated with only occasional human intervention to handle enquiries or exceptions – and cost-of-sale, customer ease-of-use and business efficiency considerations mean that this model is becoming the norm for such transactions.

Designing for the most effective interactions

However things are not as obvious or as simple if your product or service offering is a high-value considered purchase, with a lengthy and complex sales process involving multiple customer stakeholders, each with their own agenda.

For these types of sales, a significant level of human interaction is always going to be required and this has a profound impact on your options regarding sales structure and process and on your resulting cost of sale.

Here are some of the most important organisational structure considerations:

• Are you selling into an existing and well-understood solution category, trying to reshape an existing solution category with a radical new approach, or trying to create a brand new solution category?
• How coherent is your target market? Is it well or loosely defined? What are the common characteristics of your ideal target organisations and key potential sponsors?
• How much education does your target audience require? Is the need for your solution obvious, or do prospects first have to be alerted and educated as to the scope and nature of the problem you solve?
• How important is it that you assess your initial contact’s ability to mobilise the rest of their organisation around the need for change and the specific advantages of your approach?
• What alternative options do your target customers have for solving the identified problems? Can your approach be generically differentiated from these options, or does your positioning need to be hand crafted on a case-by-case basis?
• How easy is it to make a business case for implementing your solution? How aware are your prospects likely to be of the costs and consequences of sticking with the status quo?

In almost every scenario, educated, articulate and well-informed sales and business development resources have a critical role to play in the early stages of customer engagement.

Solution Category affects Strategy

When you are selling in to or trying to reshape an already well-defined category with which your prospects are familiar, you have a reasonable chance that your most promising prospects may have already started to recognise the problem and the need for change. In this instance, for them to move forward with you, they need to believe that of the available options, your offering is the one that best solves their specific problem. The challenge here is to persuade them to engage with you early on in the process, before their thinking has been unduly influenced by other potential suppliers.

If you are attempting to establish an entirely new category or concept that your prospects are less familiar with, before they can move forward with you, they will need to believe that there is a clear need to challenge the status quo and that the perceived risk and disruption involved in implementing a new, different way of working will be more than compensated by the upside of the outcomes the change will generate. Here the initial conversations will need to focus more on uncovering the underlying issues and implications – neither of which may be initially obvious to the prospect. Creating curiosity, interest and intrigue is particularly important in the initial interactions.

Appealing to senior executives

The solution category question is particularly important because of its impact on your prospect’s preconceptions and expectations – and the level at which you need to sell. If you’re seeking to create a new solution category or re-invent an existing one, your initial conversations will typically need to be at a more senior level within the prospect organisations – the people who are concerned with shaping strategy rather than implementing it and who have the ability to mobilise their organisation to take action.

These senior executives expect to have constructive business conversations, and do not take kindly to being subjected to a crude sales pitch. So it’s absolutely critical that even your initial conversations need to include valuable business insights that will stimulate them to want to learn more.

Adding real value from the very first conversation

Driven by the pressure from investors to deliver growth (and sometimes a belief that the product will just ‘sell itself’), it can be easy for an emerging technology organisation to build or outsource a demand generation team without having fully assessed what their buyers really expect from those initial conversations. Deploying the wrong capabilities in the wrong situation can have a major impact on growth.

The key organisational challenge is to accurately define what a well-qualified opportunity looks like and then to create a business development capability that can replicate these conditions time-and-time again so that the field sales organisation can operate at an optimised level. Here are some key questions:

• How much do you need to know about the prospect’s situation before you can confidently identify them as a qualified opportunity?
• How important is it that you are able to accurately assess your initial contact’s ability to mobilise their organisation around the need for change?
• How soon do you need to start engaging with the decision team as a group?
• Which level of prospect executive is likely to recognise the challenges you are seeking to solve?
• How much education and/or persuasion will be required to persuade your prospects to want to move forward?
• What level of interaction do your competitors offer?

Your business development/demand generation team must be of a much higher quality than a transactional business needs to employ. Every conversation matters; your teams must be fluent in understanding the problems your solution solves and not just the capabilities of your product or service.

Taking these factors into account can help to design an effective organisational structure and sale process that has the right level and balance of sales and business development resources to optimise sales outcomes – and it can help to ensure that your organisation implements the optimum structure from the beginning.

Quick question: When is the last time you deleted a promotional email from your inbox or marked it as “spam”?

Probably a few minutes ago.

Well, that’s exactly what B2B buyers are doing to your marketing messages (i.e. tuning them out).

What does grab our attention is a personalized recommendation from a friend. According to Linkedin, 84% of B2B decision makers start the buying process with a referral.

If B2B brands build engaging referral programs, their customers could be helping them connect with like-minded professionals—who are more likely to take notice and buy. So here’s a few B2C referral program examples your B2B company can use as inspiration for your own referral strategy.

1. Hulu Plus

How it works: This streaming service’s referral program benefits both the referrer and the person they helped sign up. Current Hulu Plus customers receive free streaming service for two weeks for every new user that signs up using their personalized link (up to a whole year). When successfully registered, these brand-new Hulu Plus members are also granted a complimentary two-week period to enjoy the service.

Ideas to steal: Rewarding your customers will encourage them to invite their friends. But providing the same perks to the people they refer can be even more effective. Your customers will feel more inclined to refer knowing both parties will benefit. Plus, prospective users are likelier to register if there’s something in it for them. This can also strengthen your relationship with new customers since they’ll feel appreciated from the start–bringing you one step closer to turning them into loyal brand advocates who will refer others in the future.

2. Airbnb

How it works: Airbnb’s revamped referral program encourages customers to refer their network by offering cash credits towards future Airbnb accommodations. But it’s their simple and convenient method of allowing users to contact their friends that makes this program unique. When users log on, they’re given the option to import their contact from Gmail and send customized emails. To make the process even easier, Airbnb recommends contacts they believe would be interested in the promotions they’re offering.

Ideas to steal: Making referring simple and convenient is important. Nobody wants to spend extra time trying to figure out how they can invite their friends and advocate for your brand. With this referral program, Airbnb does the work for their customers—all you have to do is click “Send”.

3. Tesla Motors

How it works: Tesla Motors expanded their successful referral program by offering different levels of rewards to Tesla owners who met criteria in four categories:

• Top referrals by region. Owners who referred the highest number of qualifying leads in their region (North America, Europe and Asia/Pacific) were rewarded with a Ludicrous P90D Model S (worth approximately $167,247 CAD), and an exclusive VIP invitation to the Model 3 unveiling event (accommodations included).
• First to 10 by region. The first owner to refer 10 qualifying leads in their region received a Tesla Powerwall Home Battery with all of the installation costs included.
• 10+ qualifying referrals. All the owners who made 10 or more referrals were invited to attend the exclusive Model 3 unveiling event.
• 5+ qualifying referrals. Each owner that made 5 or more referrals received an invitation to the Gigafactory opening event, with transportation costs included.

Competition was so intense in this referral program that one owner sold more than 188 Tesla cars in less than 2 months–which translated to $16 million in new business for Tesla. (Who needs car dealerships when you can have passionate advocates instead?)

Ideas to steal: Creating levels of perks will drive your customers to compete for bigger and better prizes. Having more than one category of rewards will also benefit those who don’t have a large network but would appreciate some perks.

4. NatureBox

How it works: NatureBox, a healthy snack delivery subscription service created a timely campaign to drive referrals. During the the Super Bowl, NatureBox offered their customers (and their referred friends) 50% off snacks for their Super Bowl parties. All they had to do to secure the offer was share a customized promo code via social media or email.

Ideas to steal: Giving your B2B referral program a timely theme is an effective way to capitalize on current events (especially ones your advocates are passionate about) and generate excitement for your product.

5. Trunk Club

How it works: Although not technically a referral program, clothing subscription box company TrunkClub has created a share-worthy experience for their customers. Each order comes in their unique packaging and the stylist who chose the items for the customer even sends a handwritten note explaining why they selected each piece and how to care for the garments. This personalized experience delights their customers so much, many of them eagerly share their purchases on social media.

Ideas to steal: Wowing your customers can lead them to share something positive about your brand on social media. This digital shout-out is like a passive referral to your customers’ entire networks. To subtly encourage your customers to do this, give your customers a referral code or hashtag whenever you delight for them—like when they first use your product, or have a support problem successfully resolved.

Report: What You Should Know About B2B Referrals

Based on a survey of more than 600 B2B professionals from across North America—including sales, marketing, operations and executive leadership—this research uncovers some striking findings about the impact of referral leads on sales pipeline and revenue growth.

Download now

What’s one thing people like Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson have in common? They are examples of people who are superb at selling.

"Selling” isn’t just for salespeople. To define your destiny, to accomplish anything in work or life, you need to know how to sell. To sell yourself, your ideas, or your stuff.

Getting a job or promotion, getting buy-in from coworkers on a new project, inspiring people to volunteer, finding distribution for a film, getting press, raising money for a nonprofit, raising venture capital, starting a company, recruiting people … these all require “selling.”

Selling in the traditional sense can be noble, too. The skill of selling brings money into companies while inspiring customers to adopt new practices. People who sell (including entrepreneurs) are on the front lines every day; they are a company’s most important
point of contact with customers.

Here are eight tips to keep selling -- whatever type you do -- both real and really effective.

1) Adopt a New ABC.

Alec Baldwin gave the greatest sales rant of all time in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. In it, he reminded the team to “ABC," or in other words, "Always Be Closing.” (Haven't seen this classic scene? I urge you to check it out -- it’s the best investment of seven minutes you can make).

But there's a problem with this acronym: it exemplifies a “sell something to someone whether they need it or not” approach. The best kinds of sales are when both parties win. You make money, they get a problem solved, and you both feel good about it.

So, here’s an alternative ABC that all modern salespeople would be wise to embrace:

• A = Ask questions. Listen more than you talk. Insightful questions make it easy to have conversations with customers or prospects, learn about their problems, and know what solution will help them best. People won’t be ready to listen to you until after you’ve listened to them.
• B = Be honest. About why you’re doing this, and what your personal story is. In being curious about the prospect, their situation, and what they care about. What you’re passionate about. Why you think they should or should not do this. That you’re new and don’t know the answers, but that you know where to get them.
• C = Customer success. If you stay focused on what will help your customers succeed, you can’t go wrong. Become an expert in what you do, and you will guide people in helping decide what’s best for them. Through experience, you’ll learn how to challenge people to get out of their comfort zone, to make a decision, and move forward -- even when at first they’re uncertain or resistant.

2) Accept that people buy on their time.

Your primary goal should not be to close a deal, but to help your customers (or whoever you're "selling" to) solve problems and realize success. 

Recognize that buyers don't buy on your timeline. Don’t be desperate or needy. 

3) Practice.

The only way it gets easier, and you get better, is by doing a lot of selling. And as you gain experience, it’ll become easy to identify when you should challenge people on their beliefs. Don't hesitate to say “you should/should not do this for these specific reasons … ” when an opportunity to challenge arises.

4) Be pleasantly persistent.

Do you often find yourself saying, “I sent them a message and they didn’t respond ... so they must not be interested”?

Following up, repeatedly, is vital. Not optional. Required. Who says they even saw or read your note?

Don’t be afraid to follow up on your follow-ups; just do it in friendly ways. The only way you’ll be annoying is by actually being annoying.

5) Always be testing and learning.

In addition to ABC, embrace "ABT" and "ABL" -- "Always Be Testing" and "Always Be Learning," respectively. The best way to learn is to try it out and see what happens. You can’t whiteboard your way to success. If you close zero out of 10 opportunities, step back and figure out what needs to change.

6) Take “no” as information.

A "no" isn't criticism -- it's information. If people aren’t buying, look at is as market research. Are you targeting the right people with the right need, right time, and right message? What needs to change to improve?

7) Ask the hard questions like the easy ones.

Oftentimes, salespeople struggle with asking “hard” questions, such as finding out if the prospect has the money to pay for the product.

My best advice about how to ask a hard question is to just ask it. Pretend you’re asking about the weather -- “Is it raining where you are?” Ask “How would you pull together the budget for this?” with the same ease you would check if the sun was shining in their city. In addition, get help in crafting better questions and role-playing to practice.

Can you imagine what a company would be like if everyone there could sell effectively and honestly -- whether to customers or internally? A lot of great ideas are stifled because employees have them … and have no idea what to do with them. A lot of customers don’t get what they need, because employees on sales, support, or success teams are afraid to “sell” the customer on something they might need. Use these eight tips to master the life skill of selling, and watch your opportunities multiply.

Editor's note: This post is an excerpt from the upcoming book From Impossible to Inevitable, and is published here with permission. Pre-order your copy here.

Sometimes great short-term sales success can be a bad predictive of future sales excellence. Let’s take a look at why that might be and examine the consequences.

There are a number of market and company specific reasons why this troubling dilemma tends to materialize at various times. In most cases when these factors are the source of the problem, sales reps has very limited ability to manage and correct the problem. However, there is an alternative source of the problem that is directly related to the sales rep – is one they can manage and correct. It’s all about the phenomenon of “comfort zone freeze.”

Some sales reps achieve success and avoid failure by sticking to “the tried and true.” They stay in their comfort zone. They don’t, for example, sell the innovative solution because it requires work to get smart about the particulars or because it is risky due to potential “hiccups” in implementation that can’t immediately be solved.

Another permutation of the “comfort zone freeze” is the sales rep that assumes a cautious attitude simply because it’s safer from a financial perspective – “I’d rather go for a sure thing with a lower commission rather than going for a big hit and losing it all.”

What’s wrong with “tried and true” or a too cautious attitude? Isn’t there a lot to be said for the old axiom – “better safe than sorry?” But Sales in 2016 is going to be about disruption – which has implications for staying within one’s comfort zone. Let’s look at two specifics:

• Markets. Today markets are going through transformational changes. The healthcare and technology industries are classic examples. Buyers are changing what they buy, how they buy and what they are willing to pay for it. And in the future the dust is unlikely to settle and a new steady state is unlikely to emerge. Instead the new constant is a constant state of change. In such a market environments there is limited room for the “tried and true.” Doing the same old, same old is not going to carry the day. If buyers change how they buy, sellers need to change how they sell.

• New Products. Due to market demands and advances in manufacturing technologies, companies will likely double their rate of introducing new products in the next several years compared to their recent past. New products require sales teams to adjust and adapt their selling skills. The more innovative the product the greater is the need for upgrading. In some cases it will not be a matter of doing a better job doing what you are dong. It will require a “horse of a different color.” It will be about doing something different.

What are the consequences? Some will say there are none because this characterization of the future as a world of constant change is a story heard many times before that has never produced the projected dire results. Possible … but the suggested market disruptions look like the real deal. So if they are, what are the likely consequences of staying with the “tried and true?”

• Sales Rep. Sales reps that don’t test the limits, that don’t adapt to changes in the buying environment, that simply limit their aspirations to doing a better job doing what they are doing are likely to leave “money on the table” and limit their long-term performance skill development. They will survive but are unlikely to prosper because they are continuing to repeat the same sales behavior while the buying world around them is changing.

• Companies. A new set of winners and losers tend to emerge during times of disruptive change. Just because you are a market leader does not guarantee you will remain one. Such times provide great opportunities for small and nimble companies to make significant competitive gains. The problem for many big companies is doing too little, too late.

Buyers are changing the expectations they have about the people on the other side of the table today. They want sales reps who are trusted advisors not product facilitators. Sales reps or companies that adopt the “let’s just stay the course” approach are likely to continuously erode their competitive advantage. “Tried and true” is likely to reemerge as “Sorry and Sad.”

It is clear that 2016 will mark a period of change for the 4.5 million business-to-business sales professionals in the United States. Large industry trends such as new technology, reliance on social media, big data, the relationship between sales and marketing, workplace diversity, and the influx of Millennials will all have a major effect on the sales industry and its leaders.

In any business, staying ahead of the curve is critical if you want to beat out your competitors. That means adapting growth strategies and tactics to industry trends so that forecasted growth estimates can be realized.

Since launching Peak Sales Recruiting in 2006, there may never be a more pronounced year of trends that sales and business leaders alike will encounter than in 2016.

Here are the top 6 B2B sales trends of 2016:

1. Science of Sales:

More than ever, sales organizations are embracing the science of sales. According to the CSO Sales Management Optimization Study, training investments are increasing on a year-over-year basis, with sales process training ranked at the top. The study indicated that more training resulted in better sales management performance. In addition, it was found that businesses whose sales force adopted a sales methodology noticeably had better sales performances. Undoubtedly, it is evident that businesses are taking note of the direct link between the science of sales and a sales force’s success and quickly jumping on the trend. In 2016, organizations will allocate resources to the implementation of sales methodologies and sales leader training of the scientific processes of sales.

2. Big Data and Tools:

Over the past few years, big data has played a major role in the evolution of B2B sales. While there has been an explosion of powerful tools to support other functional areas in companies, the sales function hasn’t had the same evolution in tools – until now. New sophisticated and powerful tools for analyzing data, prospecting, networking, and supporting sales have emerged. In fact, the Peak Sales Recruiting Sales Tools Survey found that many new tools are emerging and are expected to play a more prominent role in 2016. For instance, the survey determined that social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter are increasingly becoming a more relied upon tool in a B2B sales manager’s toolbox – Twitter even landed in the top 5 most used sales management tools of 2015. Other CRM tools such as Oracle, MicrosoftDyn and Hubspot are becoming more relied upon by B2B businesses.

Furthermore, with salespeople actively traveling or conducting meetings outside the office, efficient mobile access to sales systems is becoming a requirement to remain competitive in 2016. HubSpot named Evernote, Keynote and LinkedIn among their top mobile applications to optimize time on the go. This adoption of new management tools will grow by leaps and bounds in 2016 since companies now have access to an unprecedented amount of information on customers and can attribute new revenue to specific channels and selling activities. There will be an increased premium on tracking conversion rates along every step in the sales process, including responses to marketing qualified leads (MQL) and sales qualified leads (SQL). As a result, sales executives will be able to acquire new insights into the selling behaviours, methods, and approaches that deliver the highest return-on-investment (ROI) and build their sales force with talent that can successfully execute these new discoveries.

3. Social Selling Will Become Part of Your Sales Force’s DNA:

For far too long, business leaders, particularly those in the B2B space, have ignored the benefits that social media channels offer to sales teams. With traditional buyers being replaced by a digitally minded and social media obsessed workforce, it will be critical for CEO’s and CSO’s to embrace these new channels in their sales strategies. According to Salesforce.com, 73% of salespeople using social selling this year outperformed their peers, 43% of B2B businesses gained a new client from Facebook and 65% did the same through LinkedIn. Social selling offers a unique opportunity to research clients, find out their likes and dislikes, listen to honest feedback and communicate with them on an intimate basis. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest are all expected see increased presence of B2B sellers in 2016.

4. A New Found Focus on Your Company’s Online Reputation:

A recent publication by The Vision Council found that the number of digital device users has increased from 45% of American adults in 2012, to nearly 70% in 2015. As a result, access to information has never been easier to acquire and this is impacting the buyer-seller relationship. Prospective customers can now conduct in-depth research and evaluate product and service offerings without engaging in formal discussions with sales reps. For companies that have a poor online reputation, the introduction of these new touch points decreases the likelihood of acquiring a new customer. In 2016, companies and sales leaders will devote more and more resources to enhancing their brand’s online reputation.

5. Hiring and Selling to Millennials:

With 83 million members, Millennials now make up the largest sector of the U.S. population, and by 2025, they will make up 75% of the workforce. The bottom line is that companies that do not hire and sell to these ‘lazy’, tech-savvy, narcissistic, social media ‘brats’ will not be able to compete in today’s global economy. When recruiting Millennials, it is key to offer them a career and not just a job, embrace new innovation and technology, embrace diversity, offer tuition reimbursement and international assignements, and have a compressive philanthropic practice in place. The hiring of Millennials also has the added benefit of helping them sell to one another, which is critical since Millennials have $1.3 trillion in annual buying power. Your new Generation Y employee can easily tap into their vast network to generate sales from day 1. And, as outlined above, with social selling on the rise, Millennials can help cultivate this channel and educate senior staff on usage and best practices.

6. Embracing diversity: 

America in 2016 is comprised of the most diverse generation in the history of the country – 42% of Millennials are minorities, while more women are working than any other generation. Diversity in the work place is no longer about optics, it is critically important to both short and long-term success. By hiring more women and people from different backgrounds, business and sales leaders will get innovation, fresh ideas and valuable contrasting perspectives that will lead to more sales in 2016 and beyond.

The post The Biggest B2B Sales Trends in 2016 appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

We all know that content creation is a fundamental component of a strong marketing strategy. Great eye-catching content can be used to attract more visitors, nurture your leads, and even help your sales team close more customers.

And part of having an effective content strategy is publishing new content on a regular basis.

But it’s not always easy to come up with topics to write about, especially when it starts to feel like you’ve already written blog posts on all the relevant topics you could possibly come up with.

If you find yourself stuck trying to come up your next blog post topic, use these 25 title prompts for inspiration. We made it super simple for you to just plug in topics that are relevant to your specific audience, and start writing. Check our list below and feel free to Pin the graphic we created for future inspiration.

1. How to Spend Less Time/Energy/Budget on [ACTIVITY] Starting Today
2. 15 Lessons on [TOPIC] We Can Learn from [FAMOUS PERSON / INDUSTRY THOUGHT LEADER]
3. 50 Top [INDUSTRY] Blogs to Subscribe To Right Now
4. 7 Proven Tactics to Overcome [COMMON PROBLEM FOR YOUR AUDIENCE]
5. 10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About [TOPIC]
6. The Ultimate Cheat Sheet on [TOPIC]
7. 21 Facts You Didn’t Know / Shocking Statistics About [TOPIC]
8. The Worst Advice We’ve Ever Heard About [TOPIC]
9. 5 Must-Use Techniques to Successfully [COMMON CHALLENGE FOR YOUR AUDIENCE]
10. What Will [INDUSTRY] Look Like in 10 Years?
11. 9 Questions to Help You Discover Why You [COMMON PROBLEM FOR YOUR AUDIENCE]
12. 3 Things About [TOPIC] Your Boss Wants to Know
13. 12 Tools Everyone in [INDUSTRY] Should Be Using
14. The 7 Critical Factors You’re Forgetting in Your [ACTIVITY] Process
15. This Simple [TOPIC] Trick Will Save You Several Hours a Day
16. How to Determine if [TASK] is Worth Investing In
17. Infographic: How to Choose the Best [ITEM] For You
18. 8 Essential Tips for [TOPIC]
19. 3 Simple Hacks to Find Out [VALUABLE INFO]
20. Infographic: Which Type of [DESCRIPTOR] Are You?
21. How to Prevent [COMMON CHALLENGE FOR YOUR AUDIENCE] From Happening To You
22. How to Master the Art of [TASK]
23. 4 Trends That Will Define [INDUSTRY] in 2016
24. 13 of Our Favorite [INDUSTRY] Campaigns To Use For Inspiration
25. 9 Data-Backed Tips to Help You [ACTIVITY] More Effectively

Did we miss any? What are some title formats that have been most effective for your blog posts? Share your favorites in the comments.

Sales and marketing have evolved into business development. Why shouldn’t recruiting mature into talent acquisition development?

It’s difficult to pinpoint when organizations started using the term “business development.” Some historians tie the concept to the young enterprise models spawned by the Industrial Revolution. Others, perhaps more accurately, place its origins in the early 1990s. What’s important is the idea itself, and how it’s transformed the way companies attract and retain customers. Business development is holistic. It’s an approach that incorporates traditional aspects of marketing, advertising and sales — and then integrates relationship management, branding, expansion across markets, inbound marketing, and vertical sales in parallel with organic growth. Business development is internal and external. It transcends a variety of departments and skill sets, such as finance, legal, operations, research and development, and customer relations.

More than a narrow focus on sales or marketing alone, business development has proven to be a powerful avenue to growth, sustainability and profitability. One reason is because business development, by its nature and structure, can thrive during periods of change. That’s critical today, especially as technology continues to alter the purchasing and shopping habits of consumers. So why aren’t we patterning our recruitment efforts this way? The same technologies and market dynamics are also reshaping the job search habits of candidates. Perhaps it’s time we stop thinking of hiring in terms of sourcing or recruitment and develop a total talent acquisition approach inspired by business development practices.

Changes in Consumer Behavior Reflect Similar Changes in Candidate Behavior

At the end of December 2015, Gartner Research Director Robert Hetu astutely identified how changes in shopper behavior have permanently transformed the retail industry: “The traditional role of the retailer as the expert on products, trends and styles has significantly eroded. Consumers learn about and experience products through social and other forms of media and then focus on price and availability to make the acquisition decision.” In short, impulse shopping is going away. “Mission shopping,” as Hetu puts it, has taken over.

• Consumers visit brick-and-mortar establishments less frequently, which means they also no longer turn to a store’s in-house staff for advice or product guidance.
• They know what they want to purchase and from what type of retailer. Ads have less impact in attracting mission-centric customers.
• Modern consumers rely heavily on peer reviews and ratings from social media, like Yelp, to influence their decisions.
• They also rely on those same digital interactions to ask for advice, opinions and recommendations — and not from a company’s sales associates; they’re consulting other shoppers.
• A company’s brand is crucial, and it’s now established, in large part, by the reputation it gains from its customers and employees.

When you really start analyzing these characteristics, it becomes difficult to ignore how much they mirror the behaviors of modern job seekers.

• Talent aren’t visiting staffing agency offices, reading printed want ads, or spending as much time on Monster or CareerBuilder. They’re interacting with recruiters through social networks, mobile apps and even SMS messaging.
• Top candidates are identifying the jobs they want and targeting their searches to specific employers — they’re no longer browsing job boards to see what pops.
• They rely heavily on social media, like Glassdoor, to influence their decisions. Negative reviews from past and present employees carry as much weight as those that evangelize the organization.
• They are less attracted to opportunities from job postings and ads — they want a strong sense of connection with a company’s culture, promoted through a compelling employment brand and career page.

Candidates Are Customers

Like modern consumers, today’s job seekers know what they want. They’ve transformed into mission shoppers rather than impulse buyers, to use Hetu’s example. Finding the talent you need isn’t significantly different than wooing new customers. As Decision Toolbox CEO Kim Shepherd points out, the sales process aligns well with modern recruitment necessities: “The first step is to treat candidates as customers — not only because it will help land talent, but also because every candidate is, in fact, also a potential customer. That means nurturing every candidate who sends a résumé.”

In a business development approach to staffing, recruiting professionals think of prospective talent as leads that need to be enticed and nurtured:

• Define a meaningful value proposition — give the candidate a reason to consider leaving his or her current position for one that offers a better culture, closer alignment with personal and professional aspirations, opportunities to develop new skills or advance, and more.
• Refine the value proposition into a message that has impact and a hook.
• Get that message out through every channel that matters.
• Manage leads, stay in contact with them, and follow through until the deal is closed.
• Use applicant tracking systems the same way business development professionals use CRMs: develop a pipeline, measure leads through analytics, monitor conversion rates, and use the data as business intelligence for honing processes and forecasting.

Stay Connected

The most effective business development professionals stay connected to their leads. Exceptional talent acquisition leaders do, too. Although a growing majority of consumers no longer seek out in-store salespeople for product advice, businesses that manage the same process through social media are thriving. This also applies to recruiting. Today, most job hunting and candidate sourcing activities take place through social networks that keep talent integrated with their peers, employers, recruiters and society.

Right now, 71 percent of U.S. adults own a smart device. They shop through them, communicate through them, and they conduct their job searches through them. We’re not just describing a millennial propensity. As it stands, 54 percent of people between the ages of 44 and 54 use mobile devices to find jobs. Even more fascinating is that 35 percent of adults over 55 are doing the same.

Your Brand is Your Business

A compelling brand is mission critical today — for your business, its products and its employment culture. Never before in history have all of these components become so intertwined. Social reviews do more now to influence your reputation. Consumers obviously won’t shop at an establishment that has negative reviews about its products or services. Yet now, many people shun organizations perceived as treating their talent poorly. Likewise, talent don’t seek positions with companies whose missions, products and services they can’t endorse. For that reason, having employee evangelists as brand ambassadors has become as imperative as five-star customer reviews — for attracting exceptional workers and customers alike.

Hootsuite’s #FollowTheSun campaign capitalized on this concept by tapping into a different type of social media to augment hiring efforts. A few months ago, the company decided to use a video sharing service called Periscope to showcase its employment culture to prospective talent around the globe. Workers of all levels across the enterprise used streaming video to highlight the business culture, working environment and colleagues.

A bold and refreshed company career page is equally essential. One of my favorites is Mindvalley’s talent-centric career page. The site creates its employment brand by showcasing the people who work there. It’s packed with photos of employees working happily in comfortable settings. And it bolsters this positive impression with testimonials that depict innovative perks and incentives, unique events focused on growth and rewards, and a slew of videos that provide amazing insight to a culture anyone would want to be a part of. Mindvalley doesn’t stop there. It outlines a simple and streamlined application process, supports mobile apps, and encourages its talent to post their experiences with the company on its blog.

Best Practices

There’s really no end to the recruitment possibilities in a model inspired by business development methods. Creativity, commitment, drive and engagement win the day. With all that said, though, I’ll leave some best practices to consider, tailored to recruitment from successful business development initiatives.

• Design a repeatable process that can still be customized to each candidate.
• Create consistent messaging that stands out from your competitors.
• Focus on pipeline development and understand the possible outcomes.
• Define your market: attempting to be all things to all people can only dilute your brand.
• Know your prospects’ key drivers.
• Know the industry, along with the prevailing regulations, standards and performance metrics that will affect candidates in the role for which you’re hiring.
• Know your competitors.
• Define expectations and terms.
• Document all the stages of your recruitment cycle.
• Utilize tools for each stage in the cycle.
• Be prepared and organized.
• Know your client and candidate needs intimately.
• Be a truly consultative business partner who listens attentively — not one who pushes positions on candidates or clients that will not benefit them.

If you’re attending this year’s VMSA Live event, I would love to meet with you to discuss these and other concepts. Please join me in Florida on Wednesday, February 10, for an engaging and interactive discussion about the evolution of total talent acquisition. My first speech, “Crowdstaffing: A bold and disruptive model for hiring success,” takes place at 11:30 a.m., followed at 1:15 p.m. by my interactive session on “Trends, Disruptors and Technology.” I look forward to seeing you there!Click to edit your new post…

Need a way to rein in leads who wander off before completing a call-to-action? Retargeting is the solution.

Retargeting is a form of online marketing that works by using insights about a person’s online activity to serve them with relevant display ads. As AdRoll puts it, “retargeting converts window shoppers into customers.” The marketing tactic has two main goals:

1. Creating awareness about a brand
2. Inspiring return visits or search inquiries.

But does it work for B2B?

Many marketers think not, because most of the information on retargeting is directed toward the B2C community. But think about it: The buyer’s journey is far more drawn out in B2B because no business decision is made lightly. There’s usually several decision makers involved, budgets to consider, approvals to obtain—in which case, retargeting is a perfect way for brands to stay in front of businesses as they deliberate about purchases.

The Power of Retargeting B2B Leads

There’s no shortage of mind-blowing statistics related to the efficacy of retargeting for B2B marketing; this is why businesses need to start using it.

• Advanced Web Ranking claims retargeting can increase conversion rates by 150 percent
• Marketingsherpa says they’ve seen a 278 percent increase in conversion rates
• ComScore did a study and reported a whopping 1,046 percent increase in conversion rates

Marketers who haven’t tried retargeting practices yet are usually holding back because:

• They lack understanding
• They have a limited budget
• They doubt retargeting will work for them

One of their chief questions is, How does the customer feel about being stalked by retargeting technology? According to one source:

• 30 percent of customers felt positively about retargeted ads
• 59 percent were neutral
• 11 percent felt negatively about retargeted ads

3 Types of Retargeting

Retargeting performs best when implemented as part of a larger marketing plan that incorporates inbound, outbound and demand generation strategies. Content marketing, AdWords and social media efforts do an excellent job driving traffic—but they don’t necessarily help convert leads into customers. At the same time, retargeting’s focus isn’t on increasing traffic. Therefore, you need both to reap full potential.

There are three main types of retargeting, each with different advantages depending on your marketing goals.

1. Pixel-based retargeting works like this:

• The marketer places a javascript code on its website. This code is completely hidden from visitors and doesn’t affect site performance.
• The code drops a cookie (also referred to as a pixel) on a visitor’s browser. Cookies are tiny pieces of data that store information about the visitor’s activity.
• When the visitor continues their Web browsing elsewhere, the cookie goes with them and signals your programmatic marketing platform.
• Your programmatic marketing platform automatically bids on ad space and displays an ad wherever they’re currently browsing.

Benefits

Retargeting can happen immediately after a visitor leaves your site (while their inquiry is still relevant). It’s also behavior-based and personalized, meaning the visitor will be served with an ad based on which page(s) he or she viewed on your website.

Drawbacks

It depends entirely on the number of visitors you draw to your website. And it may take extra time and effort to properly code JavaScript depending on your website.

2. List-based retargeting works like this:

• The marketer compiles a list of contacts (including email addresses). This list can be from an email marketing campaign, a landing page form, etc.
• The marketer uploads the list to a retargeting campaign (usually a social media network like Facebook or Twitter).
• The social platform identifies users with matching contact information and serves them with a specially targeted ad.

Benefits

You can get extra personal with this type of retargeting because it uses more than just behavioral data. You have control over how lists are organized based on other criteria.

Drawbacks

It’s more time-consuming and less automated. Moreover, if your contacts gave you one email address, but registered on a social network with another, your retargeting campaign will turn up with low match rates. For best results, use list-based retargeting with large contact lists.

3. Search retargeting works like this:

• The user keyword searches in Google, Yahoo or Bing.
• Third-party data companies embed cookies in the user’s browser (post search) which creates audience segments.
• The marketer sets campaign rules and, when these rules match the audience segments, users are served a display ad.

Benefits

You can market to individuals who have never visited your website. This means marketers can connect with new, relevant audiences and expand reach.

Drawbacks

It does not necessarily help nurture the leads your business has already acquired, such as first-time website visitors.

Tips for Retargeting in 2016

1. Segment Audiences

Like lead scoring, categorize your contacts into groups based on behavior and sales-readiness. This will help determine which ad they receive (depending on where they are in the buyer’s journey) to create a more personalized interaction.

2. Use Frequency Caps

Frequency caps are limits you can put on the number of times a particular ad will be served (and thus regulate the number of impressions you make on a prospect). In other words, they help prevent you from being obnoxious. According to ReTargeter, the recommended number of times you should serve an ad to a prospect per month is 17 to 20.

3. Play Around with Duration

Duration refers to the lifespan of the cookie. Test longer campaigns (one to three months) versus shorter campaigns (a week or less) to see which converts more leads.

4. Try Burn Pixels

If your product or service is usually a one-time purchase, use a burn pixel (JavaScript code that’s located on the transaction page). The script will recognize when a visitor is on that page, and will stop serving them with ads once they complete their transaction.

5. A/B Test

Not enough marketers are taking the time to reflect on which ads perform best and why. A/B testing can be done to figure out which size, content and value propositions work best.

6. Keep Ads Fresh

Nobody wants to be served the same dish 17 to 20 times a month, even if it is one of their favorites. Eventually, they’ll become frustrated or blind to them. Keep your ads fresh by routinely rotating them and mixing in new ads.

Retargeting Tools to Check Out

GoChime

GoChime is a retargeting tool that re-engages prospects via their Facebook newsfeed and right rail ads. GoChime matches email addresses with Facebook profiles. When a match is made, the contact is served display ads directly on their newsfeed.

AdRoll

AdRoll specializes in retargeting products for cross-platform and cross-device display advertising. What they do differently than most is offer users a rich dashboard that delivers complete transparency into campaigns and enables greater controls and options.

ReTargeter

ReTargeter offers site retargeting and a display-focused platform that targets visitors based on demographics, location or content verticals. They are highly regarded for their customer service and ideal for large-volume websites.

Chango

Chango (which was acquired by Rubicon Project this year) offers search and site retargeting, and scores extra points for having a huge network of data partners. They also implement a scoring system that allows you to evaluate each visitor based on what they did before, during and after they visited your website.

While retargeting is a great way to re-engage leads once they have left your site, there are several other demand generation strategies your B2B marketing efforts should consider, too. Find more of them in The New Demand Generation eBook.

There’s a lot of great information out there on how to create an inbound marketing machine. Entire businesses were built on inbound marketing, HubSpot being a prime example.

But what happens after a lead comes inbound? It’s a topic worth exploring more, especially since the rules of sales development are rapidly transforming.

Just because a lead converts on a piece of website content doesn’t mean he or she is necessarily a hot prospect, ready to buy. The chances are greater that an inbound lead will close, but pursuing each and every single inbound prospect is not always worth the time. How a sales rep spends his or her time prospecting is crucial to their success. That’s why it’s important to establish a clear and well thought out protocol for handling inbound leads.

However, I see many salespeople making mistakes with inbound leads that cost them time and money. As a lead comes in and goes through your sales funnel, mistakes along the way jeopardize your chances of closing. Let’s walk through the five most common and costly mistakes with inbound leads.

1) Not delegating the responsibility of inbound leads to a specific person or team.

In order to build an effective sales development machine, you must implement a process for dealing with inbound leads. If you’re like most companies, you have a dashboard for all untouched inbound leads, and they’re all up for grabs. But if everyone is responsible, then no one is responsible.

So who should own the inbound leads? Should Marketing be responsible for following up since they are largely responsible for their conversion? Or should Sales be responsible because they’re ultimately tasked with closing them?

In my opinion, since Marketing is the first team to get notified of an inbound lead after a form has been filled out on your website, it’s Marketing’s responsibility to field those leads. Every organization is structured a little differently, so the first line of response could actually be Sales, Marketing Operations, or even Sales Operations. The bottom line is that there needs to be a clear cut process in place. 

Once someone has been assigned responsibility, the appropriate department can follow up correctly, and no opportunities will be missed.

2) Not properly qualifying inbound leads.

After you know who is responsible for your inbound leads, the first step is to qualify those leads. Simply put, is this prospect a good match for your product/service or not? You must establish and clearly articulate criteria for what is considered a qualified lead.

Some important things to consider:

• Is this lead a part of an account already in your system?
• Does this lead match the profile for your ideal account?
  
  • Company size
  • Industry
  • Funding
  • Company age
  • Revenue
  • Technology they’re using
  • Etc.
• Does this lead match one of your targeted buyer personas?
  • Title
  • Department
  • Tenure
  • Pain points/challenges
  • Goals/aspirations
  • Etc.

If the answer to these three questions is “no,” then put the lead into a marketing drip campaign; there’s no use following up at this point. However, if the answer is “yes,” then it’s time to pass the lead on to Sales. 

If the answer is “maybe” because you don’t have all of the information to confidently make a decision, you have a few options. You can choose to put that lead into a marketing drip campaign and offer additional valuable information to progressively profile the lead until you can qualify him or her. Alternatively, you can manually do a little background research and manually qualify him or her.

To begin uncovering the necessary qualification information, visit profiles of your prospect and his/her company on sites like:

• CrunchBase
• Angel.co
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• VentureSource
• Alexa.com

3) Not conducting proper research before reaching out.

Now that you’ve qualified the lead and passed him or her along to the sales team, it’s important for the sales rep responsible for following up to do more research. Another big mistake I see sales reps make is reaching out blind. Sure, you may know what company the person works for, but do you know what that company does? Do you know what that specific person cares about? Do you know why the person downloaded a specific piece of content? 

By having a good CRM in place and tracking the right behaviors, you’ll be able to read buying signals. This will give you a good idea about a prospect’s intent and interest. Look for:

• What offer the prospect converted on
• What type of content the prospect has viewed
• What emails they have opened and clicked on
• To what degree they have engaged with your company on social channels

Just as with traditional prospecting, it’s very important for a rep to perform proper research on an inbound lead before reaching out. First impressions matter. Small errors get amplified. 

The caveat here is to avoid spending too much time or waiting too long to follow up. According to a study by LeadResponseManagement.org and InsideSales.com, a lead contacted within five minutes of converting is 100x more likely to convert than if follow up happens 90 minutes later.

If you don’t have access to or can’t find the proper information quick enough, it’s perfectly reasonable to call your prospect and simply ask. You might say something like this:

“I noticed you were checking out our [type and name of content]. Were you able to access it? What challenges are you having around [topic]? How is that affecting you? Let’s schedule another time to chat and see how we can help you achieve [specific results].”

4) Not personalizing follow up communication to inbound leads.

If you weren’t able to get in touch with that inbound lead immediately, no problem. Though your chances of connecting may drop, if there’s one thing that I know it’s this: persistence wins.

There’s a lot of focus on creating and sending effective emails to sourced prospects, but salespeople don't often take those same principles and apply them to inbound leads. The reason you’re reaching out is a given: they requested some information and you’re following up with them. However, they still want to connect with a human, so you must personalize your messaging. Automation kills rapport -- no matter what. 

You can even take some of your best-performing email templates, do a little re-tooling, and use them with inbound leads. For example:

5) Not following up enough times.

Though there’s no standard for the number of follow up attempts you should make with sourced prospects, any smart sales rep knows persistence is important. But most reps don’t think of applying this same mentality to inbound leads as well. Effective follow up strategies can and should be used for managing inbound leads too. 

Email and phone are not the only ways to follow up with your inbound leads. This is where social selling comes into play. Use social channels to warm up your prospects by building familiarity and trust.

Here is an example of a tempo that I’ve found works well:

• Day 1: Call and email
• Day 2: Email and Twitter follow
• Day 3: Twitter favorite and retweet
• Day 5: Email and LinkedIn connection
• Day 7: Email
• Day 10: Call and email
• Day 17: Email and blog comment
• Day 21: LinkedIn like
• Day 28: Call and email

When following up, keep offering value at each touch. When you say “just following up” or “just checking in” that’s when you become an annoying pest rather than a welcomed guest. Instead, when you’re following up, consider re-emphasizing business value, offering insights, educating or sharing relevant industry news.

Inbound leads are an essential part of any company’s sales development effort and overall growth. However, if you don’t follow up with them properly, you’re missing great opportunities. Investing the time to create a process and getting on the same page with your marketing team will pay off tenfold. Establishing the right practices for following up with qualified inbound leads can launch your growth into hyper speed.

Have you ever seen a basketball team abruptly go ice-cold during a game? Out of nowhere, they’ve missed 13 straight shots and are down by 20 points. As the team heads down the floor for their next possession, you think to yourself, “This time they have to score. They’re due.”

In reality, the team isn’t more likely to make the next basket if they’ve missed the last 13. You’ve just succumbed to gambler’s fallacy: Thinking things in life will average out.

Our minds are naturally prone to these kinds of biases. And depending on the field you’re in, certain inclinations can play a huge role in your overall success. In sales, biases can be a rep’s worst nightmare. They can lead a rep to jump to inaccurate conclusions about a prospect or themselves, resulting in a lost deal.

Recognizing that we all have unique biases is the key to overcoming their potential negative effects. Below are 12 psychological biases we’re all susceptible to and how they affect salespeople.

12 Psychological Biases Affecting How You Sell

1) Anchoring bias

Anchoring bias is our tendency to overemphasize the first piece of information we learn by using it as our criteria to make a decision. 

If a salesperson latches on to the first pain point a prospect mentions and believes it’s a higher priority than anything they learn afterwards, they’ve fallen victim to anchoring bias. The first pain point a prospect raises might not be the most important. While reps should always solve for the customer, solving a low-priority problem isn’t enough to close a deal.

Reps should spend time learning as much as they can about prospects through research and thorough discovery. Salespeople can’t provide prospects with valuable advice unless they have an accurate understanding of their prospect’s goals and pain points.

2) Hyperbolic discounting

In a scenario where people are given the choice between two similar rewards, we tend to value the one that arrives sooner. For example, if you were offered $20 now or $30 in two months, you would likely prefer the $20 now.

Salespeople often take advantage of this bias through hyperbolic discounting -- slashing the price to influence a decision and reach their quota faster instead of planning for the long-term and working on the prospect’s timeline. 

Although it’s tempting to offer a discount just to get a deal signed earlier, reps should prioritize the long-term benefits of the relationship. Customers who are loyal for years are much more valuable than a prospect who churns after a few months. 

3) Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is interpreting information in a way that confirms what you already believe. 

Sales reps can fall victim to this bias if they ask prospects loaded questions because they’re in search of a specific answer. For example, if a rep thinks a prospect could benefit from new onboarding software, they might ask, “Would you like to get your new employees producing better results, faster?” Of course the answer is yes, but that doesn’t confirm the prospect needs new onboarding software. 

While it’s helpful to have research-backed assumptions prior to talking to a prospect, reps need to remember to be open to new information and be ready to admit their educated guess might be incorrect. 

4) Clustering illusion

When you notice a pattern in a completely random series of events, you’ve fallen for the clustering illusion.

This happens in sales when a rep has success with a few prospects using a specific selling strategy, so they use that technique in every sale going forward. This bias is likely how the sales script came to life: If it worked with one prospect, the thinking goes, it will work with all of them.

While a pattern of success with a few prospects is great, it shouldn’t drastically influence how you approach every prospect going forward. Having a one-size-fits-all mentality will result in more lost prospects than won deals. Keeping each outreach personal and specific allows reps to connect with prospects in a genuine way, and provide significant value. 

5) Planning fallacy

The planning fallacy occurs when you drastically underestimate how much time you need to complete a task.

When a call goes well after a salesperson does limited work prior to picking up the phone, they can fall into the trap of thinking this is all the time they need to be successful. The planning fallacy seduces reps into doing the minimum amount of work while still expecting good results.

Providing yourself ample time for tasks is key to success. Instead of doing the minimum and believing you’ll see maximum results, you should set aside a significant amount of time for every task to ensure you’re doing the best job possible.

6) Curse of knowledge 

The curse of knowledge is when you’re unable to relate to an uninformed person’s problems, because you have better information. 

Sales reps who know their product can benefit a prospect might fall prey to this bias by dismissing a prospect’s objections because of their expertise. Instead of listening to objections and taking time to explain points of confusion, this bias causes reps to revert to, “But it works! Trust me!”

Instead of insisting that the product addresses their prospect’s concern, salespeople need to act as trusted advisors. Reps can handle objections through sound reasoning, customer reviews, and testimonials, but the key is education. If your prospects are still asking questions disguised as objections, they don’t understand your product’s value well enough.. The prospect isn’t interested in whether the product works, they want to know how it will work for them.

7) Galatea effect

The Galatea effect states if you believe you’re going to be a top performer, you’ll actually become one because of that mindset. 

The Galatea effect rears its head when a rep believes they were solely responsible for winning -- or losing -- a deal. After a deal goes bad, a rep can start to question their skills, which can lead to worse performance. On the other hand, if a call goes well, a confidence boost can be the foundation for a hot streak.

To overcome this bias, reps should examine every factor in each call and listen to coaching from their manager to remain objective. While the rep does play a major role in the decision, many other factors influence a prospect’s choice to buy or not. 

8) Choice bias

The choice bias leads us to retroactively view our past choices in a positive light while overemphasizing negative attributes of options we didn’t select.

In sales, choice bias impacts your response to making a mistake. If a prospect turns out to be a bad fit, the bias influences the speed at which you come to terms with the mistake. It also protects you from being too hard on yourself, because you’re likely to remember the positives and look past the negatives. 

In order to be successful, make sure to pay attention to all relevant emerging information. Instead of assuming every decision you make is great, recognize when things haven’t gone the way you expected. Learning from your mistakes is a powerful tool.

9) Recency bias

Recency bias is the tendency to believe patterns that have recently emerged are likely to continue in the future even if they contradict long-term data.

If a rep notices commonalities in their last five deals and abandons time-tested strategies, they’ve fallen for the recency bias. New data is exciting, but it could be an outlier. A larger sample size -- the rep’s history over several months -- is likely to be more accurate.

If the commonalities continue over time, however, reps should use these new insights in sales conversations going forward. Gut decisions have no place in modern sales; the data should speak for itself.

10) Gambler’s fallacy

The gambler’s fallacy is the belief that an event is less likely in the future because it’s happening often in the present, even if the outcome of one event has no statistical impact on future ones.

After a rep has four or five bad calls, they might think their next one will go better because things will average out. But they’ve failed to realize that their previous calls have no impact on their upcoming one. 

This bias is dangerous because it can cause salespeople to expect their luck to change without any behavioral changes on their part. Reps can avoid this by digging deeper to understand why calls went poorly, and adjusting their strategy accordingly. Instead of trying the same thing over and over, changing tactics can put an end to the bad streak.

11) Hot hand fallacy

The inverse of the gambler’s fallacy is the hot hand fallacy -- the mistaken belief that if you succeed (or fail) at a random event in the present, you’re likely to have more success (or failure) in the future because of it. 

When a rep closes several deals in a row and concludes that every call he makes going forward will be easy, he’s succumbed to the hot hand fallacy. These deals are closing because of hard work put in over the last few weeks, not because the rep is “heating up.”

Ultimately, it’s sales fundamentals that affect a rep’s success. Prospects convert because of hard work, research, and a great relationship, not because the rep is on a hot streak. 

12) Empathy gap

The empathy gap is a phenomenon where we have difficulty putting ourselves in other people’s shoes if we aren’t currently in the same physical or emotional state -- for example, if we are angry, we have a hard time understanding how others could be happy.

When reps and prospects are in completely different states of mind, reps need to be hyper-conscious of putting themselves in their prospect’s shoes instead of dismissing or minimizing their feelings. The empathy gap makes it more difficult for them to reach common ground, and can create disdain between the rep and prospect, souring the relationship before it even begins.

Ultimately, we don’t know which biases we have and how they’re affecting our behavior at any given moment. But we can learn to identify bias and adjust our behavior accordingly. Sales can be a highly emotional job -- staying level-headed is part of being successful.  

Sales and PR have a lot in common—even if both sides are reluctant to agree. Sure, the goals are varied, the methods are unique, and even the personalities among types of professionals can greatly contrast. But there are still elements that can be borrowed from sales and repurposed for success within PR.

How can you leverage the traditional sales funnel and tried-and-true sales techniques to lend powerful insight to your PR efforts? It’s time to think like a salesperson.

Relationships Move the Needle

We know relationships are everything in PR, but sales folks tend to use relationships a bit differently. Rather than simply inquiring about a prospect’s child or buying him a cup of coffee, they take time to understand their pain points and use that to move them through the sales funnel. This might sound disingenuous, but it doesn’t have to be.

Let’s say you’ve spent months corresponding with an editor, sending them relevant news and story ideas, and sources for pieces they are working on—some of which may not have even been related to your clients—but there’s still been nothing to show for it. At this point, you might be feeling some heat from your boss or a client to get some traction.

This is where the savvy of the sales pro comes into play. From the beginning, a good sales person has their prospect’s pain point top of mind. Understanding the problem they need to solve for their prospect and what motivates them helps direct their conversations and strategy.

PR pros should be taking the time to understand the journalist’s pain points. (highlight to tweet)

More often than not, journalists are contending with pressures to increase readership and churn out more content but have few resources to do so. Find out what their specific challenges are, then determine how you can help. If you discover there’s a perfect way your client can help achieve their goals, then by all means, suggest it. If not, see if there’s another way you can be of service. It might not mean a mention of your client or brand right now, but it could raise your standing in the eyes of this influencer and lead to a greater willingness to return the favor.

In other words, focus on the relationship first, and become a problem solver. If you can be a true ally to your media contacts and influencers, you just boosted your value as a PR pro.

Capture, Report, Repeat

Long before the digital age, top-earning sales leaders depended greatly on their Rolodex. That mini filing cabinet was their pot of gold, as it contained business cards flagged with pertinent information about prospects and their buying stage.

With the advent of customer relationship management (CRM) systems several years ago, this entire process continued, but in a digital forum. By recording prospects’ contact information and demographics, along with how far along the sales funnel they are, salespeople tap into the power of data to fuel their actions.

PR pros can do the same. If you find yourself scrambling to find notes you jotted down about a reporter, or spending far too much time scouring your email history to determine what you last said to an influencer, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. It’s time for you to learn from the sales masters and invest in a CRM tool or similar technology.

You can’t analyze what you don’t measure. Do away with acting haphazardly, and start capturing and measuring your interactions and results.

Defining the End Game

A key difference between the traditional sales funnel and the journey a PR person takes with a member of the media is that the sales funnel culminates in one thing: a sale. The PR pro, conversely, isn’t always dealing with just one potential outcome. This is where it becomes important to make a conscious decision about your goal.

Let’s say you’ve set the goal of familiarizing a key influencer with your client’s software. What are the goals of engagement with the journalist? Sure, you want them to cover your client, but if that doesn’t happen out of the gate, what are the steps to move this contact down your PR funnel?

For example, if you are lucky enough to get a “no” instead of just an ignored email, do you follow up with a respectful “why?” You might learn that they really don’t cover startup software, only enterprise, etc. The next question is, what do you do with that journalist, and how do you ensure that your entire team is aware?

Sales people know where to put their leads within the funnel. Our PR team sets quarterly media outreach goals. They set a goal to engage with specific journalists at least two times per quarter with a goal of a response—any response. From there, they decide if it’s time to move on to another contact or revise the strategy.

Sales people don’t waste time leaving unqualified leads in the funnel, and PR pros should take on that mentality. The Techcrunch founder went as far as drafting a PR pitch outline that he expects PR people to mirror when pitching him. What happens if you follow it to the tee and he doesn’t cover your client? This is the definition of PR measurement in its purest form: measure how many times you pitched him and the results. Is this the best use of your time?

All this is to show you that your funnel in PR isn’t going to be as neat and tidy as the typical sales funnel would be. But that’s okay. What matters is that you’ve defined your goal and are taking steps to get each member of your intended audience there.

Get yourself in the habit of recording and measuring your media interactions, efforts, and results, and shift your thinking about the ways in which you nurture relationships with the media. By being intentional about the goals within your own funnel, you’ll be on your way to garnering a better return on your investment of time and labor, and PR results that’ll make you proud.

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Using Buyer Personas to Accelerate the Sales Process

So your marketing team created buyer personas. Are they wasting away at the bottom of a desk drawer, gathering dust up on the wall of your office, or sitting ignored on the company intranet? It’s time to reimagine their potential to help you close more deals, faster. Personas can be INCREDIBLY useful tools to train sales staff, drive more profitable conversations, decrease sales cycles, and improve the relationship between marketing and sales.

In fact, in a recent B2B industry benchmark study we conducted, the majority of high-performing organizations leveraged personas as part of the sales process and within sales training. Surprisingly, only 8.2% of those surveyed felt that at least 75% of their organization could confidently name their personas and key attributes.

If your marketing team knows what should go into a buyer persona, they’ve given you a critical strategy tool. Here are some fresh ideas for using this tool to drive more sales:

1. Use words and phrases from the persona to ensure your sales prospecting echoes the word choice, tone, and voice of your potential customers.

2. Understand the preferred channels for each audience segment to tailor your outreach to the ways they prefer to be communicated.

3. In discovery calls, use the priorities and drivers of your persona to explore critical, top-of-mind issues at their particular organization.

4. Make personas available within relevant leads/contacts in your CRM to empower sales enablement and give your sales team critical buyer insights for more relevant conversations and cross/up-sell opportunities.

5. Help your sales executives understand the various members of the buying committee, what they each distinctly care about and how to build consensus to close the deal.

6. Onboard new reps faster by including personas in your sales training materials to equip the team with what they need from day one to have relevant, empathetic conversations.

7. Bridge the gap between sales and marketing by fostering a unified understanding of the SAME target audience.

If you think your marketing team hasn’t created useful personas, remind them of 6 ways your personas are wasting sales time. After all, time is money!

Did you know you could play chess with a friend directly in a Facebook chat window? All you need is a special phrase to launch the chess board and start playing.

Read more...

The B2B buying process has changed considerably in recent years, thanks to digital and social technologies. But, the one constant that can open doors or shut them forever is how well the sales professional performs in the moment of human interaction with the buyer.

Because the sale is truly made in those moments in front of the prospect and in the execution of compelling customer dialogues, there is still a great need for improvement in this area among salespeople:

• Only one in ten executives say that they get value from meetings with salespeople. (Forrester Research)
• The #1 reason salespeople miss quota is an inability to articulate value. (Sirius Decisions)
• Only 17% of salespeople get a second meeting with an executive. (Forrester Research)

These numbers could be significantly improved if sales leaders coached their teams to the desired behaviors necessary for engagement.

The impact of sales coaching has proven its value time and again. According to Forrester Research, in 2014, 63.2% of organizations with a formal sales coaching methodology achieved quota vs. 54.6% of organizations without coaching. Additionally, only 27% of organizations reported having a formal coaching methodology in place.

From the salesperson’s perspective, the Amabile Study (Harvard University, 2010) found that salespeople are more motivated when they make progress and grow. This speaks to the outcome of coaching, which supports the personal and professional development of those being coached.

Additionally, in 2009, the Gallup Organization reported that top sales coaches achieved overall:

• Fifty-six percent higher customer loyalty
• Thirty-eight percent higher productivity
• Fifty percent lower employee turnover

As you can see, it’s easy to make a case for sales coaching, and what adds the most impact is coaching to those behaviors that are necessary to winning in the moment that matters most — in front of the prospect, executing a compelling dialogue.

It starts with coaching to develop key selling practices:

• Thoroughly preparing for client interactions, from setting an objective and questioning strategy to preparing to handle possible objections that might be encountered
• Learning to ask questions in order to better understand client needs, objectives, and challenges vs. conducting a monologue or pitching products
• Practicing a natural, conversational tone and actively listening to responses instead of following a script and focusing more on the points that you want to make
• Positioning solutions that are tailored to the client’s situation and needs, rather than pitching the same idea to every client in a generic manner
• Asking for the business or next steps in order to maintain momentum on sales opportunities
• Keeping lines of communication open by providing useful insights over time, from market trends and the latest research to new perspectives and the views of peers and competitors

In order to achieve that moment of truth with clients, it is crucial to engage sales professionals in their development processes. Get them to talk about their experiences and where they see their own strengths and weaknesses. Then, ask for their suggestions about a potential course of action that will hone their craft. Provide guidance and suggestions to sales professionals, but keep a light touch. The aim is for them to take responsibility and accountability for their own development and, of course, to prepare them for the human dynamic of face-to-face selling.

The post Sales Coaching for the Moment of Truth appeared first on Richardson Sales Enablement Blog.

Author: Mike Telem

Do you know what your top content assets were for the last quarter? In terms of lead generation that is. Any idea which specific assets contributed directly or indirectly to your pipeline?

I don’t necessarily mean the assets you sent to your known database of leads, but the ones that visitors on your site or social channels were eager to read or view and helped you gain new names and fresh leads. And not just the gated content, but also blog posts, videos and any other ungated asset that drove people to connect with you.

For many marketers, these questions can feel hard to answer.

Marketers often talk about the “value of content marketing” and rightfully praise its ability to bring in new business opportunities, but can’t actually measure its exact impact. But how can you identify specific high-performing content assets and their contribution to lead generation and nurturing?

Recent advances in marketing technology have made it easier to trace leads back to specific content assets. In this blog, I’ll walk you through one approach on how to understand the performance of specific content assets and demonstrate the value of your ongoing content marketing efforts.

Starting with the Basics: Measuring Lead Generation

If you’re still evaluating how valuable an ebook or blog post is based on page views only, you’re not alone. Until recently, this was the easiest—and, in many cases, the only way to judge. This lack of analytics goes hand-in-hand with a recent statistic from the Content Marketing Institute, which found that only 38% of B2B companies felt their content marketing efforts were effective.

However, with today’s advanced analytics tools, you can determine whether a visitor becomes a lead as a result of your content asset—whether that happens immediately or several clicks later during a visit (direct leads) or during a later interaction (assisted leads). Understanding this path allows you to actually identify the types of content that attract the most conversions, and then use this insight to create similar assets going forward.

In the example below, you can see how Marketo’s Web Personalization App offers marketers actionable analytics—displaying not only the views of every content asset, but also the number of direct leads and the conversion rate of each one.

Sample dashboard from Marketo Web Personalization displaying content engagements and leads generated

Content can have a direct impact on lead generation; for example, directly assisting them by providing a whitepaper when someone fills out their information or indirectly assisting them by educating them further and advancing them in the sales cycle. Let’s take a closer look at the difference between direct and assisted conversions as they apply to content marketing.

Direct Leads
Direct lead generation can occur in two different ways:

1. A prospect converts immediately after reaching a landing page on your website, as a result of an ad, organic search, social media post, etc. The prospect then fills out a form with her contact details and, in exchange, receives access to gated content (such as an ebook, webinar video, template, or whitepaper).
2. A prospect browses several pages before converting. In this scenario (a very typical one), your visitor might read a blog post or case study, or view a product video and then continue to browse your site to further educate themselves before he reaches a positive decision and submits his details. This scenario is often overlooked by marketers because they don’t know how to track and measure it effectively. And that’s unfortunate because this is a common scenario that has a significant impact on measuring the success of your content.

In both scenarios, a specific content asset on your website directly contributed to a conversion.

Assisted Leads
While direct conversions occur within the same visit or session, their assisted counterparts happen over the course of multiple sessions. For example, a prospect can reach your website through an ad, click on a few different pages and leave—only to return a few days later and convert through a landing page.

Typically, assisted conversions count as such as long as they happen within a three-month period.

When it comes to assisted leads, the weight of the conversion doesn’t necessarily fall on one specific asset—it’s the result of multiple touchpoints over a period of time. This is a softer measurement because it isn’t as straightforward which action or content asset tipped the scale and convinced the buyer to convert, but it is still critically important to identify those that typically had a positive influence and understand which combination of assets played a part in the conversion.

Connecting the Dots Between Content Marketing and Lead Generation

Now comes the key element—understanding exactly which content assets are driving both direct and assisted conversions, and leveraging that knowledge to further drive conversions.

Which specific case study or video is generating more leads for you? Is that ebook you recently published working better to attract a practitioner or decision-maker crowd? Do they belong to a certain industry or share the same position?

In essence, answering such questions can help you learn which assets to use for which audience and if your existing assets met your goal to attract a specific audience (or if you missed the mark). At this stage, you can analyze top-performing content based on factors such as:

• Content Format: ebook, case study, webinar, video, blog post, infographic, etc.
• Length: bite-size, snackable content vs. long-form content
• Subject Matter: specific keyword, vertical, topic, etc.
• Visuals: number of images in the post, types of images, etc.

Creating content is an expensive, time-consuming process, and understanding which elements help you attract your “ideal lead” is key to making better decisions. Since most marketers spend a set amount on content development, the clearer your understanding of which content works, the better.

Removing the Hassle from Content Marketing Analytics

With the right tool , you can access the most advanced analytics available, which will allow you to ensure that you’re spending time creating the right assets. Look for a tool that will give you the whole picture, even if a visitor reads one of your posts, and then continues on to other pages, or leaves entirely and returns two months later and then converts. You want to be able to track every touchpoint.

Sample dashboard from Marketo Web Personalization displaying specific content performance

Want to learn more about how to implement advanced content analytics at your organization? Check out this webinar which will walk you through how Marketo Web Personalization’s Content Analytics can help you do the heavy lifting and provide you with actionable data.

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Beyond Views and Downloads: Use More Advanced Content Analytics was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post Beyond Views and Downloads: Use More Advanced Content Analytics appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Strategy That Works: How Winning Companies Close the Strategy-To-Execution Gap by Paul Leinwand & Cesare R. Mainardi, with Art Kleiner, Harvard Business Review Press, 288 pages, $32.00, Hardcover, February 2016, ISBN 9781625275202

You might expect a book coming from institutions like the Harvard Business Review and consulting firm Strategy& to be a bit traditional, safe, or stodgy. A title like Strategy That Works: How Winning Companies Close the Strategy-To-Execution Gap doesn’t do anything to belie that expectation. But Paul Leinwand and Cesare R. Mainardi, along with Art Kleiner, have written a book that upends that expectation, disenchants the reader with the strategy dogma of the day, and replaces it with a new proposition.

In Strategy That Works, the authors explain why the current, cookie cutter conventional wisdom of business strategy is misguided, and espouse five acts of unconventional leadership to replace them.

Conventional management practices lead to conventional strategies, and because such strategies are not specific to your company, there’s a good chance it won’t fit. (Think of last week’s review in which we discussed how anything designed to fit “the average” ends up effectively fitting no one.) Companies become truly successful by differentiating themselves and their capabilities from other organizations.

So rather than a focus on growth and chasing down any opportunity for it, which often leads to organizations getting trapped in a “growth treadmill” that never ends, the authors want you to commit to an identity. Rather than trying  to pursue functional excellence, “striving to be world-class at everything but mastering nothing,” they would have you translate the strategic to the everyday. Rather than having to reorganize your entire organization to drive change, they suggest you put your culture to work. Rather than go lean and cut costs across the board, they explain how you should cut the nonessentials so that you can more heavily invest in the things that really matter, how to cut costs to grow stronger. And rather than attempting to become agile and resilient, reacting to the market winds and constantly changing course, the authors teach you how to shape your future.

Each of those five acts gets its own chapter. As the authors see it, these are not five separate strategies, but five pieces of a holistic approach to company strength and wellness. Following this approach may lead to a rather idiosyncratic company, but that is a strength in itself. It means no one can copy you. Companies, like individuals, each have a separate makeup and history that makes what they offer the world unique. And each of the fourteen companies the authors focus on closely in Strategy That Works (and the many others they look at from a greater distance) are idiosyncratic, which leads to differentiated capabilities unique to them and a stronger position because of it. Speaking of the companies they chose to profile, they write:

[A]t first glance, they seem to have little in common, and they are rarely thought of together. And yet, they have all built the kind of differentiating capabilities that give them a major strategic advantage.

Capabilities are the link between strategy and execution. They are the place where a company truly differentiates itself, and where the work takes place. But it’s not enough to simply have good capabilities; all companies have them, or they couldn’t compete. A truly winning company is one that manages itself around a few differentiating capabilities—and deliberately integrates them. When companies accomplish this, we say they are coherent.

 

My favorite part of that quote is the acknowledgement that a company’s capabilities are “where the work takes place.” Because even the wisest management theory and most carefully constructed strategy in the world isn’t going to work if it isn’t executable “where the work takes place.” That means it has to be understood and implemented almost seamlessly across the organization. To be a coherent company, the strategy needs to be coherent—almost obvious—to those executing it on the ground floor. Or as the authors put it:

[W]e articulated some of the tangible reasons why coherence yields these benefits: it leads to greater effectiveness, greater efficiency, more focused investment, and an atmosphere where every employee understands what the company does well, how their efforts fit in, and how all of this creates value.

 

The ultimate goal is, of course, to close the gap between strategy and execution. And the best way to do that is understand your organization and what you already do well:

Your strategy is no longer just about where you go or where to grow. Now, it’s primarily about who you are and what you’re great at.

 

Reading a book that peels back the layers of organizations like this causes any reader to reflect on their own company. That became even truer for me as the authors discussed the importance of putting company culture to work. While we can certainly always do better here at 800-CEO-READ, I think we have a solid foundation in all five acts of unconventional leadership, but I believe it is our commitment to our culture that has kept so many of us here for so long. Like many companies, we’ve gotten off track at times, but we’ve also had near uprisings amongst our employees to protect the identity and the culture we’ve built over the years. Since this review is in danger of becoming too self-aware, I’ll wrap this up by simply saying that this book reinforces that fighting for our culture was the right thing to do.

But it’s not just us. When the authors asked the leaders of the companies they had found that closed the strategy-to-execution gap what their company’s biggest asset was, “they nearly always named their culture.”

In a coherent company, the elements of the culture, often dismissed as merely personal, reinforce what the company is trying to be.

 

IKEA CEO Peter Agnefjäll, speaking to why their culture is such a differentiating strength, says:

You could copy our Billy bookcase or the retailing format or our warehouses, but how do you copy our culture?

 

It is that non-duplicability that makes it such a strength. And when people find a culture they enjoy working in, they tend to stick around.

But while all cultures are unique to the companies they exist in, all the companies they studied all seem to have three facets in common: “emotional commitment, mutual accountability, and collective mastery.” So rather than focusing on culture change efforts that almost always prove futile, the authors will teach you how to identify the aspects of your existing culture that align with the companies identity, find and tell stories that support it, and “accelerate the cultural evolution already going on there.” But it all has to be based on what your company believes and already does well:

The culture reflects not just what people believe, but what they do exceptionally well. Behaviors lead to stories, stories engender new behavior, and everything ties in with the value proposition and capabilities system.

 

In other words, your company culture is not just about your values; it is about the value your company creates. Closing the gap that exists between your strategy and execution enhances that value.

The surest way to do that, and what I believe the book boils down to (if I may be so bold), is this: define the underlying identity and strengths of your company and the people in it, align your strategies to the unique and idiosyncratic value that exists in that strength, support and spread the authentic storylines and behaviors within your company that support those strengths, cut bait and costs on everything else so you can invest in what you do best, and build the future of your business on that unique vision and value you have to offer your customers and the world.

So, rather than chasing what you think is working elsewhere or trying to implement others’ best practices, staying true to what is unique about your organization and your employees and strengthening those capabilities turns out to be a strategy that works.

This post was written for AWeber by Christopher Riegger, an expert on list building and growth for small businesses. Check out his writing at Growth Fruit.

I know the feeling. You’ve got something of value to offer. Maybe it’s a new product that’s fresh from production and ready to be shipped. Or maybe you’ve finally decided to launch the consulting business you’ve always been thinking about. Regardless, you have a beautiful, problem-solving widget and you’re only lacking one small ingredient to catapult you to success…an audience.

You’ve talked to a few companies that swear up and down that if you buy an email list from them, you’ll acquire only bona fide, opt-in email addresses.

If you find yourself in this situation, there’s only one thing to do. DON’T BUY THE EMAIL LIST.

Purchasing an email list is one of the more damaging things you can do to your business and brand. Here are three reasons why.

Reason #1 – Low open and response rates will yield crappy results and hurt your reputation.

Let’s just be honest for a moment. Marketing a product or service online is (at least in part) a numbers game. You will (or at least should) always be thinking about your funnel. Let’s say the goal of you buying an email list is to drive clicks to your website so more people buy your widgets. Here’s what your funnel might look like: Emails Sent > Email Accepted (Didn’t Bounce) > Emails Opened > Emails Clicked > Purchases Made.

With every step of that funnel, you will lose people. For instance, if 30% of people open your email (a very healthy open rate), then you’ve just lost 70% of potential buyers in your funnel. Make sense?

The problem with buying an email list, is that the people you are sending to don’t know you at all. And because they didn’t choose to hear from you, your message is just plain “not relevant.”
The result is that your open rate will be terrible (probably around 5%) and your click rate, as a result, will suffer tremendously. Simply put – Buying an email list hurts your sales funnel.

In addition, the people who do see or open the email you send will automatically be skeptical about who you are and what you’re selling. Heck, selling is hard enough. Can you imagine selling to someone who is already programmed to not like you? Talk about getting off on the wrong foot!

Reason #2 -Reputable email marketing services won’t let you use purchased lists.

My friends over at AWeber put it best. Here’s what they have to say:

“Attracting subscribers is a deliberate process. The only thing you’re really buying when you buy an email list is a massive headache – you end up having to deal with the damage that a purchased email list does to your email deliverability and your reputation as someone doing business online.”

To clarify, reputable email marketing platforms like AWeber care a great deal about their deliverability (basically the percentage of mail they send that hits inboxes). It’s their livelihood. So they won’t take a customer that is sending to a purchased email list. Your only alternative will be to use a smaller, less reputable email marketing service that has poor deliverability. Remember that funnel I mentioned above? Yeah. It looks even worse now.

Reason #3 – You’re doing it wrong.

Successful businesses are built on strong brands. Just scan down this list of 2014 NPS leaders and you’ll see amazing brands like Apple, Amazon, USAA, Zappos, and Southwest. (Don’t know what NPS is? Just read this.)

So what are strong brands built on? Exceptional products that people love to use, relentless execution, and incredible customer service. That’s the formula. Offer a product or service that solves a real problem, build and deliver it with precision and quality, and look for every opportunity to delight your customer.

Buying an email list is doing things backwards. You’re basically just purchasing a list of would-be customers and trying to cram your own widgets down their throats. It’s just wrong.

Convincing someone to opt in to receiving emails from you means earning their trust, and the only way to do that is by solving their problems, providing value, and treating them with respect. That takes time and hustle. For more on that, check out this essay by Paul Graham on doing things that don’t scale. It’s fantastic.

So Now What?

So if you shouldn’t buy an email list, now what do you do? Is there no way to accelerate building an email list? Of course there is! While building your own, organic, opt-in email list takes time, you can use a number of tactics to accelerate those efforts. Check out this article to learn three strategies for building your email list. Happy sending!

The post The Three Problems with Buying an Email List appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

A cliché is fresh for a day.

Clichés aren’t born as clichés. They come into the world as poetry, a new way of talking and thinking and seeing. The first person to say “kick the bucket” to mean “die,” for instance, was on to something big.

Then a few people adopt the term. For a brief while, using it becomes an exercise in linguistic hipness. Eventually, the masses notice that something funky is happening and crash the language party. And before long, a once-sparkling phrase has gone all Woo Woo on us.

If you’ve ever run “raise the bar” — or any other conversation-clogging cliché — up the proverbial flagpole, you know what I’m talking about. Those who occupy even the smallest corner of the innovation “space” will sooner or later use such terms.

The thing to remember is that, in time, all clichés weaken. They are what George Orwell, in his ever-fresh “Politics and the English Language,” calls “dying metaphors.” It’s what Nietzsche gets at when he says “truths” are “illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses; coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal.”

In short: You can’t buy much of anything with a cliché.

Unfortunately, quite a few people in the innovation business think you can. Often these accomplished business people, who know how to scale ideas successfully, are deceived into thinking that the increase in a term’s popular adoption is a sign of power. Why? It may be, as Dan Pallotta points out, the use of certain terms is rooted in an inferiority complex. Or it may be because their skill with words lags behind their expertise in product or software design. Or because they’re desperate to sell the idea to their bosses, or the public, and think some crazy-sexy-buzzy words will work some magic. One thing’s for sure: Many innovation-minded people understand success here purely as a numbers game. To them, the number of users matters, not uniqueness.

This isn’t the way it works with language. With language it’s about quality, and if your organization is going to be regularly speaking with the public on the available communications platform, you or some literary person at your organization had better know, and act on, that knowledge. Language success is about freshness, not scale.

A good motto for building linguistic freshness can be found in Ezra Pound’s definition of literature: “news that stays news.” You want to invest in words that will retain their value. The fact that both people and organizations converse in real time, all the time, means that our language investments are serious business. If you’re speaking in pure cliché, it’ll be obvious and will put people off or lose their attention. It creates distaste, indifference — stuff you don’t want to produce.

However, all this is easier said than written. Very few people are capable of penning lasting works of literature (and certainly not every time they sit down to tweet). But — and this is very important — we can take steps to ensure our words are not stale. We’d do well to keep in mind two of Orwell’s principles:

1. “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” If your figurative language is familiar, be contemptuous of it — and hit the delete key. Most people are quite content to allow the familiar to lodge in language. Good writers refuse to be so accommodating. As you edit your stuff, identify the clichés and work to find good, original replacements for them. No more “moving the needle,” OK? What is this, 1952? Such selection can be difficult work, but it can be quite profitable.
2. “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” Yes, in this slice of advice, Orwell comes off a tad bit peevish and provincial. Sometimes a foreign phrase can be le mot juste. But he’s right in wanting us to ditch the fancy in favor of the plain, simple, and straightforward. (He was, in essence, warning against using exotic, alienating terms to sound impressive.) You got that, growth hackers? Pivot away from the nonsense. Doing so will force your prose in the direction of clarity, which is, almost always, the direction you want your literary GPS to point.

The main idea, innovators: When it comes to creating interesting words, the kind of stuff that will draw a significant audience and win their attention and trust, you need to follow a special model. Look to literature, not advertising or public relations or corporate communications. Literature compels attention because those who write it are committed to making their language as fresh as they possibly can. Follow suit, and people will notice the original, human, interesting tone of your work — and they will respond not in the way they respond to ads, but in the way they respond to great poems, stories, plays: with gratitude. You can build a career, a business, even a new product line on a base of such gratitude. Do so.

One of the critical questions that every expansion-phase B2B focused company needs to consider is “what’s the most appropriate Sales and Business Development organisation structure for our product or service offering”?

There is no single perfect answer to this - but the choices you make have a huge impact on your ability to create and close the maximum number of qualified opportunities, as quickly as possible.

As well as taking into account the packaging and price points of your product or service, it is important to pay close attention to the expectations and needs of your buyers.

You obviously need to identify the problems that your solution solves, focus on the types of organisations are most likely to suffer from these issues and distinguish which roles are most likely to lead the search for a solution. But there's more...

If you have a relatively simple, easy-to-explain, transactional product or service operating in a mature market where buyers know exactly what they want, your organisational options are straightforward. These purchases are increasingly web-based and automated with only occasional human intervention to handle enquiries or exceptions - and cost-of-sale, customer ease-of-use and business efficiency considerations mean that this model is becoming the norm for such transactions.

Designing for the most effective interactions

However things are not as obvious or as simple if your product or service offering is a high-value considered purchase, with a lengthy and complex sales process involving multiple customer stakeholders, each with their own agenda.

For these types of sales, a significant level of human interaction is always going to be required and this has a profound impact on your options regarding sales structure and process and on your resulting cost of sale.

Here are some of the most important organisational structure considerations:

• Are you selling into an existing and well-understood solution category, trying to reshape an existing solution category with a radical new approach, or trying to create a brand new solution category?
• How coherent is your target market? Is it well or loosely defined? What are the common characteristics of your ideal target organisations and key potential sponsors?
• How much education does your target audience require? Is the need for your solution obvious, or do prospects first have to be alerted and educated as to the scope and nature of the problem you solve?
• How important is it that you assess your initial contact’s ability to mobilise the rest of their organisation around the need for change and the specific advantages of your approach?
• What alternative options do your target customers have for solving the identified problems? Can your approach be generically differentiated from these options, or does your positioning need to be hand crafted on a case-by-case basis?
• How easy is it to make a business case for implementing your solution? How aware are your prospects likely to be of the costs and consequences of sticking with the status quo?

In almost every scenario, educated, articulate and well-informed sales and business development resources have a critical role to play in the early stages of customer engagement.

Solution Category affects Strategy

When you are selling in to or trying to reshape an already well-defined category with which your prospects are familiar, you have a reasonable chance that your most promising prospects may have already started to recognise the problem and the need for change. In this instance, for them to move forward with you, they need to believe that of the available options, your offering is the one that best solves their specific problem. The challenge here is to persuade them to engage with you early on in the process, before their thinking has been unduly influenced by other potential suppliers.

If you are attempting to establish an entirely new category or concept that your prospects are less familiar with, before they can move forward with you, they will need to believe that there is a clear need to challenge the status quo and that the perceived risk and disruption involved in implementing a new, different way of working will be more than compensated by the upside of the outcomes the change will generate. Here the initial conversations will need to focus more on uncovering the underlying issues and implications - neither of which may be initially obvious to the prospect. Creating curiosity, interest and intrigue is particularly important in the initial interactions.

Appealing to senior executives

The solution category question is particularly important because of its impact on your prospect’s preconceptions and expectations - and the level at which you need to sell. If you’re seeking to create a new solution category or re-invent an existing one, your initial conversations will typically need to be at a more senior level within the prospect organisations - the people who are concerned with shaping strategy rather than implementing it and who have the ability to mobilise their organisation to take action.

These senior executives expect to have constructive business conversations, and do not take kindly to being subjected to a crude sales pitch. So it’s absolutely critical that even your initial conversations need to include valuable business insights that will stimulate them to want to learn more.

Adding real value from the very first conversation

Driven by the pressure from investors to deliver growth (and sometimes a belief that the product will just ‘sell itself’), it can be easy for an emerging technology organisation to build or outsource a demand generation team without having fully assessed what their buyers really expect from those initial conversations. Deploying the wrong capabilities in the wrong situation can have a major impact on growth.

The key organisational challenge is to accurately define what a well-qualified opportunity looks like and then to create a business development capability that can replicate these conditions time-and-time again so that the field sales organisation can operate at an optimised level. Here are some key questions:

• How much do you need to know about the prospect’s situation before you can confidently identify them as a qualified opportunity?
• How important is it that you are able to accurately assess your initial contact’s ability to mobilise their organisation around the need for change?
• How soon do you need to start engaging with the decision team as a group?
• Which level of prospect executive is likely to recognise the challenges you are seeking to solve?
• How much education and/or persuasion will be required to persuade your prospects to want to move forward?
• What level of interaction do your competitors offer?

Your business development/demand generation team must be of a much higher quality than a transactional business needs to employ. Every conversation matters; your teams must be fluent in understanding the problems your solution solves and not just the capabilities of your product or service.

Taking these factors into account can help to design an effective organisational structure and sale process that has the right level and balance of sales and business development resources to optimise sales outcomes - and it can help to ensure that your organisation implements the optimum structure from the beginning.

Since the days of the first dot-coms, the Internet transformed retail strategies. As e-commerce irrevocably shaped consumer buying behavior, retailers either adapted or died. With the recent advent of touch screens, tablets and mobile apps, consumer demand for convenient access to information and immediate purchasing capabilities continues to drive technological innovation.

Meanwhile, the consumerization of IT is also picking up speed, as a similar wave of innovation and adoption sweeps through the B2B landscape. For many B2B companies and their customers still dealing with overly complex legacy systems and manual processes, this development means that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

The Business-to-Consumer (B2C) World B2B Buyers Live in

Individual consumer habits with regard to finding, evaluating, choosing and receiving goods are radically different than what they were in the days before the Internet existed. By implementing omnichannel strategies, successful retailers and brands provide consumers with the choice of how they learn about and obtain their products. Simple and intuitive online and mobile user experiences only make it easier for consumers to do business with these companies.

Individual consumers can choose to buy online and pick up in-store. They can complete in-store returns of products that they purchased on the website or order an out-of-stock garment right from the store’s fitting room. They may use the store as a kind of showroom and then buy the product online, or vice versa. In store, they may see an interesting new product, and use their mobile phone to learn product details, read reviews, purchase without waiting in line and receive it the next day.

Changing Expectations of B2B Buyers

For B2B buyers, the experience is all too often quite different. Many sales are made in a physical face-to-face meeting between a buyer and a sales representative. Reps go out on the road to visit customers and write orders. During in-person meetings, they introduce new products and discuss merchandising strategies, but most of the time, the meeting is to get an order completed.

The issue for manufacturers and distributors is how to stay top of mind and deliver a great service once the rep leaves the appointment. Without a B2B e-commerce portal, in between sales meetings, buyers are left with quickly outdated product catalogs and have to telephone customer service to find out information on the latest products. Simple reorders become a tedious task of waiting on hold during business hours, filling out and faxing paper order forms, or scanning and submitting them through email. B2B buyers are spending more time and effort during the ordering process than B2C buyers. Yet B2B buyers still lack the assurance that their order was entered accurately, and shipped promptly and in full.

Driven by their personal experiences as consumers purchasing from omnichannel retailers, a new mindset is taking hold for B2B buyers, in which they are demanding a better ordering experience. They are looking for the convenience of going online to get answers to simple product questions, scope out new product lines and place orders for merchandise. In a study conducted by Accenture last year, 75 percent of B2B buyers surveyed stated that they would buy again from a supplier with an easy-to-use website.

Consumerization of IT & the Emergence of B2B Omnichannel Strategies

As B2B commerce technology advances to match its consumer counterparts, more manufacturers and distributors are taking the first step to building an omnichannel strategy. The first step is for manufacturers and distributors to roll out e-commerce websites that deliver intuitive user experiences that resemble what buyers already use. On these new sites, B2B buyers can conveniently order 24/7 and have access to up-to-date product catalogs, real-time inventory availability and past order history, just like their B2C counterparts. Through B2B e-commerce, manufacturers and distributors are able to provide a more convenient, self-service, B2C–like experience for buyers before and after sales rep visits.

While maintaining a direct connection with customers, online is an important initial step for manufacturers and distributors delivering an omnichannel strategy. More business is being conducted on smartphones and tablets than ever before, making mobile a crucial additional e-commerce channel. According to Forrester Research, 52 percent of B2B buyers are doing product research with their smartphones to search for products, browse catalog, and read reviews. Providing them with a native mobile application that converts education into orders from anywhere at any time is the logical evolution for manufacturers and distributors delivering a differentiated service.

For example, enabling a retailer’s staff to place orders on the store floor for immediate submission to the vendor’s back office speeds the processing and fulfillment time of the order. In addition, staff are able to look at the product on the shelf, as well as a high-definition (HD) picture in the vendor’s catalog to confirm that the right product is being ordered.

The most successful wholesale brands will be those who respond to the B2B omnichannel commerce opportunity in a responsive and thoughtful way. Even though orders can now come from multiple channels, including online B2B e-commerce websites and mobile apps, B2B sales is still largely about trust and relationship management. The field sales representative remains an instrumental and increasingly strategic part of the sales process.

The Changing Role of Field Sales

Just as physical and digital channels work together in retail, it’s important for manufacturers and distributors to look at the development of eCommerce as building on their sales teams, rather than eliminating them. Providing sales reps with mobile order writing solutions that include B2C like user experiences makes them more efficient and effective. Armed with such solutions, sales reps will have the product and customer information that they need at their fingertips for strategic conversations with customers and a seamless digital format for writing and submitting orders. Furthermore, messages that sales reps convey during customer visits can be reinforced through the manufacturers and distributors’ websites and apps the next time the buyer logs in.

By delivering multiple direct ordering options for buyers, and providing field sales teams with mobile sales order management solutions that make it faster to write and submit orders, sales reps are no longer primarily focused on taking orders. Instead, they are becoming trusted advisors that provide insights on assortment planning, inventory depth, reordering techniques and lean supply chain strategies.

Using e-commerce solutions, reps can talk with buyers about how to increase margin, phase purchases and understand the competitive landscape. With these insights from sales reps, buyers can differentiate themselves in a world of increasing competition from online channels and other brick-and-mortar players. Most importantly, sales reps can differentiate themselves and their products in an increasingly competitive wholesale environment.

B2C Order Experiences that Reflect B2B Complexity

While technical innovation is helping manufacturers and distributors to evolve their purchasing experiences, there remain critical differences between B2B and B2C buying.

B2B nuances, such as customer-specific pricing, payment and shipping, large volume orders, and minimums and case packs, make the B2B purchase more complex. Wholesalers need solutions that deliver superior customer experiences online and in person by transparently presenting these complexities through simple, elegant and intuitive user interfaces.

By implementing or upgrading sales channels that make it more convenient for buyers to place orders and for sales reps to write them, manufacturers and distributors are removing the speed bumps that existed for so long in their order processes. By making it easier to do business with them across sales channels, these suppliers are enjoying saving on costs, while increasing revenue by expanding their customer base and creating more loyal buyers. Manufacturers and distributors are realizing what retailers already learned in the consumer world: Choice and outstanding customer service is a more long-term differentiator than product or price. Manufacturers and distributors are adopting technology that helps deliver on that promise while reshaping the B2B buying experience.