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Miami (AFP) - A previously unknown giant planet, nicknamed Planet Nine, may have been discovered lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system, US scientists announced on Wednesday.

The object "has a mass about 10 times that of Earth" and follows a "bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the distant solar system," said a statement by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

"In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the Sun." 

The report was published in the Astronomical Journal.

Researchers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown say they found the planet through mathematical modeling and computer simulations, and have not yet observed the object directly. 

The celestial body has about 5,000 times the mass of Pluto.

"This would be a real ninth planet," said Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy. 

"It's a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that's still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting."

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Chevrolet has redesigned its 2016 Malibu and by most accounts the new model is significantly better than previous versions.

As a way to show how much improved the new model is, Chevrolet invited “Real people. Not actors” to take a look at it and give their well-edited opinions that you can watch here. The twist is that all the badging and logos have been removed so that they give their honest opinion of the car, not biased by brand perceptions.

They are indeed effusive in their praise for the car commending it for its styling and cool features. The moderator asks them to guess what brand it is and they come up with a range of luxury brands like Audi, Lexus and BMW. He also asks them to guess the price, and their guesses range from $50,000 to $80,000. Then, the big reveal: “What if I told you it’s a 2016 Chevy Malibu?” Not surprisingly, they are surprised “No way,” “Holy Cow”, “a Malibu?” and then even more surprised that the starting price point is only $22,500, some $57,500 lower than the top range of their guesses. “This has completely changed my mindset,” “It’s a game-changer,” “I want one,” the real people conclude.

“More than you expect, for less than you imagined.” ~ Chevrolet

As an ad, it follows a formula also used with the “It’s not your father’s Oldsmobile and “I thought you bought a Buick” ads, trying to get people to give their previously-undesirable cars another look. But this version was interesting in what it reveals about the value of the Chevrolet and Malibu brands. There was a huge gap between the real Chevy pricing and what these real people thought that the unbadged car was worth. They were guessing prices, on average, more than twice as high as the actual price, more than $30,000 higher.

Based on these numbers, the Chevy and Malibu brands are costing GM at least $6 billion per year (200,000 Malibus sold annually x $30K). That’s a hefty price to pay for years of neglect and shows the cost of many years of poor product delivery. Once expectations are low and people have set opinions about your brand, it can be very difficult and very expensive to get them to change their minds.

Clearly, making better cars and letting people know that you’ve done that is part of the solution but it takes time. Otherwise you have to do something dramatic, something like what Domino’s did with its pizza, to really break people’s perceptions down.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Become A Better Marketer. Build A Stronger Brand. Join us for The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World, May 2-4, 2016 in San Diego, California. A fun, competitive-learning experience reserved for 50 marketing oriented leaders and professionals.

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FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

Email has come a long way since we first started by putting thousands of names into the BCC field. However, one part of it that has not evolved is the idea of personalizing emails. Most businesses think that if they just include the receivers name in the subject or body of the email they are personalizing the email. While this is true, we can do better. Let’s explore 4 ways you can take personalizing emails to the next level.

Building Personas Around Your List

You can begin by building personas around your list of emails. Start to segment people into the types of content they are interested in. Those that primarily click on resource downloads, those that usually click on blog articles, and those that usually click on videos. You get the idea. Then begin to send those people more emails about the type of content that they like.

As you begin to build personas, you can then start to see trends of crossover. So for instance, people who usually watch videos also often download resources. So then combine those into 1 email to this group.

Think About Location

You spend lots of time thinking and analyzing our reports to see when the best time for a specific audience to send emails too. However, if you have an audience that spans time zones, you want to make sure that you are keeping in mind the time differences.

If you are a B2B company and generally send emails at 9:00 am and are in the Eastern time zone, you are emailing your California customers at 6:00 and likely to get caught up in the late night spam. Create segments based on location and then schedule accordingly.

Using The Right Message Based On Buy Cycle

Whether you want to believe it or not, not everyone who visits your website are ready to buy your product. However, they are interested to some degree. Based on their actions you can determine where they are in the course of making their decision and then begin to target messaging based on what stage they are in.

If you are selling cars and a user downloads a white paper about the benefits of a crossover, do not begin sending them trim packages and pricing. Begin by sending them more information about why people choose crossovers, testimonials from crossover owners, etc. Then through time, you can walk them closer to buying.

Trigger Emails Based On Website Actions

Finally, make sure that you are tracking website activity for specific users that have filled out forms. So what you can do is if someone downloads a specific resource then start monitoring them to view a specific blog article. Once they do, you can send a follow up email that offers more information about that specific blog post.

You can also use this to target specific users that look at a particular product page. If they look at a product page but they don’t view the shopping cart page, then you can begin an email campaign to them about the benefits of that product.

So now you have 4 new tools you can begin using to personalize your email campaigns beyond the users name. Let’s all do email better!

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — As its U.S. subscriber growth tapers off, Netflix's Internet video service is setting out to conquer the rest of the world in an audacious expansion likely to sway the company's stock and the prices it pays for TV shows and movies.

The stakes riding on Netflix's next act came into sharper focus Tuesday with the release of the company's fourth-quarter report.

Netflix added 1.56 million U.S. subscribers from October through December, slightly below what management had predicted. It marked the second-straight quarter that Netflix's subscriber gains in the U.S. have disappointed.

But international growth topped the company's projections to give Netflix nearly 75 million worldwide subscribers through December.

Netflix Inc.'s fourth-quarter earnings also exceeded analyst forecasts, helping to lift the company's stock by more than 6 percent in extended trading.

Although most of Netflix's subscribers are in the U.S., the overseas markets are now the company's marquee attraction. The company picked up another 4 million international subscribers in the fourth quarter to give Netflix 30 million customers outside the U.S.

The Los Gatos, California, company expects to add another 4.4 million international subscribers during the opening three months of this year compared with a projected gain of 1.75 million in the U.S.

"Our high penetration in the U.S. seems to be making net additions harder than in the past," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings conceded in a letter accompanying the fourth-quarter report.

Netflix's international ambitions took a quantum leap earlier this month when its service simultaneously debuted in 130 more countries. The service is now in every major market on its international agenda with the notable exception of China, where Netflix still must find a suitable partner and satisfy the concerns of government regulators who block the country's population from watching some content.

Despite its early inroads overseas, Netflix appears to be facing more challenges internationally than it did nine years ago when it moved beyond its DVD-by-mail service and began streaming video to Internet-connected devices in the U.S.

Netflix now must secure enough programming to cater to the disparate tastes and languages of people scattered across 190 countries while bidding against richer rivals Amazon.com and Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube that also are trying to reel in more overseas viewers to their own video services.

In an effort to gain an edge, Netflix has been investing more heavily in shows such as the award-winning "House of Cards" and "Orange Is The New Black" that can only be watched on its service. Netflix will feature 600 hours of original programming this year, up from 450 hours last year.

But Netflix has been losing the rights in recent years to other popular programming from TV networks Nickelodeon, Starz and Epix.

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter predicts that trend will continue as other TV networks demand money that Netflix might not be willing to pay, but Amazon probably will.

"Take a cue from the deals that aren't being done with Netflix," Pachter said. "It is a sign that the content providers are willing to walk away and go elsewhere."

As it is, Netflix already plans to spend about $5 billion licensing video this year. That's on top of the more than $9 billion that the company has already committed to pay to studios by September 2018. The company currently generates annual revenue of about $7 billion and ended December with $2.3 billion in cash.

Some analysts believe Netflix won't be able to pay much more for programming without further raising U.S. subscription prices that have already climbed from $8 per month to $10 per month for its standard plan during the past two years.

A price freeze that kept rates at $8 per month for an estimated 22 million U.S. subscribers expires in May, threatening to trigger a wave of cancellations during the spring and summer.

Netflix's rising costs for video and expanding into other countries already has pinched its profit margins. Netflix earned $43 million, or 10 cents per share, in its latest quarter, a 48 percent drop from the prior year.

The uncertainties looming over Netflix has kept its stock in a holding pattern after a searing ascent that turned the company into a Wall Street star.

The shares climbed $7.26 to $115.15 in extended trading, in the same range where it stood six months ago. Over the past three years, though, Netflix's stock has surged to an eight-fold increase in value.

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Many sales people seem to have an abiding fear of hearing the word “no”.

As a result, they go to often-extraordinary lengths to avoid asking questions that might cause the prospect to give them a negative answer that will kill the deal.

But this desire to avoid negative answers usually turns out to be an entirely counter-productive strategy, and here’s why…

Avoiding wasted effort

One of the abiding differences between top b2b sales performers and the rest seems to be that top sales people have too much respect for their own time (and too much confidence in their own abilities) to waste it chasing opportunities that are going nowhere, whilst their weaker minded colleagues often seem to cling onto opportunities until all hope is lost, for fear that letting go of them will make their pipelines appear smaller.

Top sales performers know that even in a highly-effective sales environment, the majority of “opportunities” entering the top of the funnel are destined to either decide to do nothing, or decide to do something else. So they determine to systematically qualify prospects in or out early.

Their sales funnels tend to narrow quickly from the top as they exclude these poorly qualified “opportunities” early on in the process, and their average sales cycles are typically shorter because the remaining opportunities have real momentum, and they can afford to pay enough attention to each remaining deal to do every one of them justice.

Logjams and zombies

Meanwhile, the middle-to-late stages of their serially underperforming sales colleagues’ pipelines are often log jammed with poorly qualified opportunities that - by any rational assessment - they have no chance of winning, and should have been thrown out long ago.

They won’t give up until the prospect has finally said “no”. Of course, many prospects never actually get around to saying a definitive no. By denying the sales person closure, these (for the most part) unwittingly cruel prospects contribute to a lifeless army of directionless zombie deals.

Needless to say, even if their pipelines appear larger at face value than those of their more discriminating colleagues, the value is illusory and never likely to be converted into revenue. It’s not unusual to find deals that have hung about in the same place for months or years without any real signs of life.

Knowing when to say “no”

There are a number of reasons why you will want to say “no” to an opportunity:

• The prospect is unlikely to do anything - usually because the problem or project isn’t sufficiently compelling, or because the champion lacks the authority or political nous to get the project approved internally

• The opportunity is a poor fit for your solution, or the organisation is nothing like your “ideal customer” profile - so that even if you can persuade them to buy from you, it’s unlikely to ever turn into a successful implementation or a referenceable customer

• The opportunity is unlikely to ever be profitable enough to justify the effort required to win the deal - so that your efforts would be much more productively applied chasing more attractive opportunities

• The prospect’s requirements or decision process are unfairly biased to another solution or vendor - so that the odds are heavily stacked against you from the start and you end up being disrespected and treated as “column fodder”

• As a specific variation of the above situation, you receive an unexpected RFP that you have had no involvement in shaping or which appears to have another vendor's fingerprints all over it

If any or (heaven forbid) many or all of these characteristics apply to a potential opportunity, you are usually far better off politely declining to bid at the earliest possible stage in your sales process.

Assuming a negative outcome

Despite the obvious common sense in qualifying out opportunities that are a poor use of their sales time, it’s remarkable how many sales people come up with reasons why they should not abandon them just yet.

Unfortunately, most of their arguments depend on either a miracle or an unnatural act happening - and neither of these are a sensible basis for a rational sales strategy.

So I'd like to suggest an alternative approach to opportunity qualification, which I’ve seen used to very great effect in a number of sales organisations: the sales manager starts from the presumption that the opportunity should be qualified out unless the sales person can come up with a credible rationale and strategy that depends on neither miracles nor unnatural acts.

So the onus is on the sales person to justify why their resources - and those of their colleagues - should be invested in pursuing the opportunity. If nothing else, this mind-set (the presumption of a negative outcome) forces the sales person to be much more rigorous in thinking through why the opportunity is worth the organisation’s continued attention.

Implementing this strategy does not guarantee that the customer will not say “no” at the end of the day. It is also possible that an occasional outlier deal will get rejected that could - through extraordinary effort - have been closed. But the remaining opportunities are much more likely to be closed and average sales cycles are likely to be significantly shorter.

That’s why it’s better to say “no” before your prospect does…

by Jeffrey Slater, {grow} Community Member

Of all the marketing strategies that professionals will embrace in 2016, I believe teaching and education will rise in prominence. Educational marketing isn’t well-understood, but it is actually quite simple. When you are helpful and provide knowledge to current and potential customers, you are building depth and emotional bonds for your brand.

Educational marketing means you are providing wisdom and insight to customers to help them do their jobs. Typically you do this in a non-commercial framework.

Do you remember a wonderful teacher who inspired you? Did they help guide you through complex and fascinating subjects? Teaching creates strong emotional connections. For marketers in 2016, I see a teaching framework as a lens to view our work.

The following are three examples demonstrating the ways that solopreneurs, small businesses, and larger companies are using education as a fundamental marketing strategy.

Three Examples

1. The Exchange

Five years ago, I was looking for a way to reach marketing decision makers in the wine industry. I could have chosen many different tactics to communicate key messages to them about our products including traditional trade advertising. Instead, we decided to organize a live event that would bring together fascinating speakers, great conversation, and a platform for a free exchange of ideas.

We brought in authors like Gary Vaynerchuk, Robert Scoble and Mark Schaefer to educate and inform our audience. We organized panel conversations made up of folks who are important customers for our customers, like master sommeliers and wine educators from Whole Foods, Safeway, and Spec’s Finer Foods. Important industry thought leaders like Stephanie Gallo, Carolyn Wente, and Jean-Charles Boisset also spoke at our conference presenting their views on the state of wine marketing. We filtered every decision we made for our conference from an educator’s perspective. Let’s teach or share something of value and earn the trust and respect of industry colleagues.

We created a place for marketing professionals to connect, network, and discuss some of the pressing marketing topics of the day. In short, we positioned ourselves as facilitating education. We called our event The Exchange, and it continues as a teaching platform for the wine marketing community. Everyone goes home with a wonderful book as our gift, and we are helping to bring insights, ideas, and inspiration to our industry. In the coming year, we will expand this platform to Europe to help bring help to global marketing professionals.

2. Udemy

Solopreneurs looking for a new revenue stream are heading to Udemy, the online teaching platform with over nine million students and over thirty-five thousand courses. Taking your content and packaging it into a class is quickly becoming a part of how small business owners are earning income through education. Can you teach someone how to code, bake sourdough bread, or use advanced templates in Photoshop?

By becoming an educator, you are harnessing the ability to bring new, highly-targeted customers into your community. Whether at list price, discounted through coupons or free, Udemy has people taking courses in everything from coding to cooking cod – from teaching yoga to making homemade yogurt. They not only help you teach with a simple to use platform, but they bring customers to you through their own highly targeted Facebook advertising and discount coupon system. (Think Groupon meets a MOOC- massive open online class). Could teaching a class help you make some money and build deeper bonds with existing clients? Even open the door for new business?

My daughter Fanny, who won The Rachael Ray Great American Cookbook Competition, has a cookbook available for sale in March 2016, Oranges, Lavender & Figs. She is preparing to teach a class through Udemy to help extend her brand and to create a new income stream. It is the perfect platform for small business owners to attract new clients for other services like her food writing, recipe development and other bespoke food-related services. She is even pitching some companies to pay her to teach a course in how to use their products properly.

3. Counter Culture Coffee

Counter Culture Coffee is a Durham, North Carolina company that imports and roasts exceptional fine coffees. They sell their beans to coffee shops in select markets. In every place they sell, they set up teaching academies for both consumers and the trade, who learn the proper techniques for making sensational coffee products.

Their classrooms are their marketing in each city; they believe that educational marketing can help develop consumers who appreciate what they brew, but it also helps train new retailers, the backbone of their business. Want to open a coffee shop? Take a class, learn from Counter Culture Coffee, and become a certified expert in the coffee arts. The more they can educate their customers, the deeper the bonds and the more powerful the connection to the Counter Culture Coffee brand.

How Will Education Play a Role in Your Marketing in 2016?

There are unlimited tactical approaches to an educational strategy. You can turn your training into online webinars that emphasize learning not selling. Companies are finding that giving away knowledge is a door opener to build a deeper connections and to help train potential customers on critical points of difference. Self-publishing books or eBook allows you to position yourself or your company as an educator or thought leader too. Meetups in local markets provide opportunities to teach a live class to an interested audience of potential customers.

What will you teach in 2016 and how will an educational framework help you grow your brand?

Jeffrey Slater is currently Global Director of Marketing for Nomacorc, the leading wine closure company. He blogs at The Marketing Sage and provides helpful marketing advice, consulting and coaching. He is the author of Unraveling the Mysteries of Marketing. Earlier in his career with his wife, he built Rachel’s Brownies, one of INC Magazine’s fastest growing companies in the 1980’s.

Featured image by Counter Culture Coffee via Flickr CC

The post Teaching is the New Marketing appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

We’ve all heard it before. You’re deep in conversation or on a demo, being sold to, and the sales rep asks you, “Does that make sense?”

You quickly agree, “Absolutely!”

But what you’re really thinking is, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I can’t wait for this call to end, so yeah, sure, it makes sense.”

What’s worse than hearing this phrase is saying it. And I know you’ve used it too. Asking “Does that make sense?” comes from a place of innocence – maybe even a place of compassion. You want to affirm that your prospect understands what you’re saying, so you ask the question and mean it. Unfortunately, it actually just confuses the prospect, which is the opposite of what you were going for.

Here are three reasons why it’s such a horrid phrase, and three new ways to ensure your prospect is adequately informed.

Why You Shouldn't Ask, "Does It Make Sense?"

1. Instead of reassuring the prospect, it creates uncertainty and doubt.

If a sales rep is good at communicating she doesn’t need to ask the question. During sales conversations, you’re not only supposed to be the expert of what you’re selling, but also of how you sell it. But asking “Does that make sense?” casts uncertainty on you about the accuracy or veracity of your content and puts you in a position of weakness.

Oftentimes there are more decision makers involved than are on a call. If your pitches and explanation aren’t clear enough and you’re not sure if you’re articulating the value clearly, how is your prospect supposed to communicate back to their team and other decision makers? They won’t, at least not effectively.

In addition, the phrase sounds like you’re questioning the prospect’s ability to understand what you say or appreciate the content. How condescending!

Try this instead: “How does that sound to you?” is a great first step and will give you a true sense of how they interpreted your information so that you can adjust accordingly. It’s an easy phrase to start adopting right away.

2. You’re just using it as a transitional phrase

Chances are that you employ the question when you’re about to explain something entirely new. The prospect can tell, too! They know you’re not looking for a true answer. They understand there’s more to dive into, so out of habit they say yes so you both can move on.

In sales, don’t ask questions you don’t really want the answer to, especially if the answer is always going to be the same. If you’re using the worst question in sales, your prospect can tell you want to move to the next step, and you’re essentially choosing not to empathize with their level of understanding.

Try these instead:

• “Let’s stop here before we move on. What are some things you still have questions about?”
• “Before I move on, I’d like to share some examples and get your feedback.”
• “Thanks for letting me show you some examples, I’d love to hear your feedback.”

3. It’s a dumb question

In sales, dumb questions are the ones that don’t give reps more insight into their customers’ buying journeys. When you ask, “Does that make sense?”, what you’re really asking is, “Am I doing my job?” People don’t want to respond no to that question.

Smart sales questions, on the other hand, don’t typically evoke a yes/no response. Smarter questions make the prospect talk ... a lot. Avoid “yes/no” responses and get the prospect to open up about how they view the value of what you are selling for a more honest, valuable exchange of information.

Try these instead:

• “In what other ways would this (e.g., the feature) impact your day-to-day?”
• Follow up: “How would you see this impacting other members on your team?”

4. You don't expect an answer

This is the type of question you're not expecting an answer to. So, when a prospect actually says, "No, I don't understand," you might be a little caught off guard and appear unsure of yourself or the product/service.

If there's a moment where you ask, "Is that clear?" be prepared for a negative response, and instead of forging ahead with an answer, ask clarifying questions.

Try these instead:

• "Which part didn't make sense to you?"
• Follow up: "So, what I'm hearing is you're confused by [repeat back what you've heard the prospect say]. Is that correct?"

5. Not everyone feels comfortable answering

We've all been in meetings where the presenter asks, "Does that make sense?" and, while you're extremely lost, no one else says anything so you keep your mouth shut.

The presentation moves on, but you lack crucial understanding that makes the rest of the slides seem jumbled. Don't risk this in your presentations. If one person's lost, it's likely others are as well. Rephrase the question so it's more approachable to all attendees.

Try this instead: "So, I've just explained [give a one sentence recap of what you've just covered]. People often have questions here. What questions do you have?" You've given a brief overview of the topic, and you've lowered the barrier to questions by explaining many people need clarification at this stage.

“Does that make sense?” is an incredibly common question on sales calls, but one that provides very little additional value to either party. Instead of relying on it as a filler or using it to force a transition, try out the alternatives above to create a more productive conversation that actually makes sense.

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If we believe what we’re being told, marketers in 2016 should be able to take the overabundance of data at their fingertips and leverage it for their benefit, day in and day out.

But according to a new study, released today by the CMO Council and conducted in partnership with Pegasystems, it appears this isn’t the case at all.

In the report — entitled “Predicting Routes to Revenue” — only 5 percent of marketers say they have mastered the ability to predict the customer journey, adapt, and truly understand which actions will derive maximum value.

That’s a pretty grim finding, but it gets worse.

The study — which is based on insights from more than 150 senior marketing executives surveyed primarily across North America and Europe during the fourth quarter of 2015 — also reveals that only 3 percent of respondents said they were realizing the full revenue potential of their customers. Almost half (47 percent) said they were not maximizing revenue, 44 percent said they were working on it, and 6 percent revealed that they simply didn’t know how well they were doing at all.

When it comes to delivering on brand promises to customers, the outlook is equally bleak. Only 16 percent of marketers feel that their organizations are delivering customer experiences that fulfill their brand promises while two-thirds say their efforts in this area are hit or miss, and 14 percent say they are completely missing the mark.

“So the cynic in me says this is an age-old marketing story that spans from the early days of sales force automation and data aggregation, and seems to just morph into new buzzwords every few years,” Liz Miller, senior vice president of marketing at the CMO Council, told me. “It feels like the more things change, the more the challenges stay the same. But the realist says that the reason for the bleak picture has more to do with the rapidly evolving marketing landscape that must race to meet the continuously shifting customer consumption behavior. Both customer and marketer are moving on equally fast hamster wheels!”

There is certainly a case for this idea. The number of products available to help marketers do their jobs over the last year has seen triple-digit growth (for the third year running), the number of marketing channels has exploded into the hundreds, and mobile is the fastest growing, most competitive marketplace we’ve ever experienced.

“In reality, this bleak picture is really a statement about the next big leap in marketing,” Miller said. “I think of it as a shift from ‘campaign-brain’ to customer life cycle experiences. We have to stop thinking about customer experience as a loosely connected tapestry made up of random acts of marketing. And while yes, we now have ample data to refine, optimize and even personalize those random acts, we need to take that next step to remove ourselves from the marketing bubble and think of the customer experience across every touch point.”

But it isn’t all bad news.

Personalization remains a high priority for marketers, and 31 percent of respondents say that they are able to provide better customer experiences, largely due to the accessibility of customer intelligence data.

This enables them to become more relevant to customers, which is critical in light of how customer expectations for personalized experiences have skyrocketed. My study of how consumers feel about personalization concurs, finding that almost 78 percent of “digital natives” now expect a personalized web experience.

“It’s funny,” Miller said. “When many CMOs hear talk of a ‘single customer data record’ thoughts immediately shift to the painful task of corralling legacy infrastructures, fighting for compliance, ownership, governance, and negotiating with operational silos about where systems can reside. In other words, many think of hard work and the impossible. I think of it in the terms of a single instance of customer truth — a single decision hub that the entire organization (and not just the entire marketing organization) contributes to and benefits from.”

And are the bigger companies in the survey more prone to these issues? Do the smaller businesses have an advantage over those that might be working to update legacy systems and data?

“We actually did not see any data differences between company size,” Miller told me. “I can say, from my conversations with CMOs, that the issues we face are universally around experience, data and how we turn our customer service strategies into revenue. The difference is often that large companies have large legacy processes, cultures, and silos to overcome. Small companies have resource constraints that span every conceivable aspect of the business, from talent to technology. What can be said for smaller companies, especially those in the venture funding stage of business, is that there is an opportunity to build the culture of the organization to be centered on the customer from the ground up.”

In general, however, the report offers a hard reality check, showing once again that in the real world of marketing, having access to the data isn’t, in itself, that useful. Having clean data, that provides a full 360-degree view of the customer, thereby opening up the opportunity for personalized marketing, does help. Unfortunately, most marketers just aren’t there yet.

The full report is available to download from the CMO Council website today.

This is a guest contribution from Julia McCoy.

If you’re like most bloggers, you’re probably wondering how you can produce huge results, the kind other bloggers retire doing. Or, you’re looking to gain a serious boost for your business via blogging, but not sure how to get rolling.

Fortunately, this success isn’t just blind luck – it is the direct result of a series of efforts you can apply to your own blog.

If you’re looking to increase your SEO, blogging is the first and most important step. According to HubSpot’s 2015 blogging frequency benchmark data, companies that blog earn 97% more inbound links than companies that do not. Additionally, companies that post more than 16 blog posts each month get roughly 3.5 times more traffic than companies that publish four or fewer posts each month. (We recently gained over 300 keyword positions in a single day—and it was 100% through our content & blogging.)

Read on to learn more about the SEO importance of blogging and how you can triple your SEO efforts through regular, high-quality posts.

Blogging 101: Why it’s so Darn Important for SEO

When it comes to SEO, there is arguably nothing more important than blogging. In order for content to rank well, there has to be content in the first place and multiple industry leaders have shown that companies that blog regularly do better than companies that don’t. 

HubSpot’s aforementioned blogging frequency benchmark data shows that when small companies with 1-10 employees publish more than 11 posts each month, their sites get three times as much traffic as companies of the same size that publish only one post per month. What’s more, sites with 11 posts each month earn twice as much traffic as companies that publish between 2-5 posts each month.

For slightly larger companies, the results are comparable: companies with between 26-200 employees that publish more than 11 posts per month get twice as much traffic than companies who only publish one post each month.

It’s obvious that blogging frequency really does matter and that, in order to boost traffic and improve SEO, you need to produce relevant, useful content on a regular basis.

One of the main reasons for this is that old blog posts stick around long after they’ve been published. In fact, when HubSpot conducted a study of their own blogging traffic, they found that 90% of the leads their blog produced actually came from old posts. That said, it’s possible to generate, in equal parts, traffic from both old and new content, as long as you know how to create content that is genuinely interesting and valuable.

How to Blog for SEO: 6 Takeaway Tips

Now that you know how important blogging is for SEO, here are 6 tips to help you blog better and produce better results.

1. Create quality content

This may seem obvious, but creating content is one of the most important aspects of SEO. This is because each post you write adds a new SEO page that has the potential to be crawled and indexed by Google. Additionally, each new post can be optimized for unique long-tail keywords which allows bloggers to create pages full of new ranking opportunities. Blogs also offer the opportunity for high-quality backlinks and plenty of organic traffic to your site.

2. Write attention-grabbing headlines

If you do it right, every post you write can create high-quality traffic that gets you noticed. Unfortunately, most people don’t do this right. This is because they focus only on getting content written and distributed rather than creating viral content that maintains its value. The first secret to doing the latter is to make sure that your headlines are irresistible.

Eight out of 10 people read headlines while only two out of 10 read body copy, so you can bet that people will click through to your blog if you get your headline right. Need an example? Consider Upworthy for a moment. Upworthy launched two years ago and now boasts viral posts and 88 million visitors, which makes it more popular by visitor numbers than the Huffington Post, Business Insider, and Buzzfeed. The secret to Upworthy’s success? Attention-grabbing headlines first of all, and then minimal sharing buttons and the use of short, intriguing videos to grab users.

Once you’ve mastered killer headlines, you’ll want to ensure that your content is the correct length. At Express Writers, our blogs are generally between 1000-3000 words and Buzzsumo has found that its most popular posts range between 3000-10,000 words.

3. Solve your readers’ problems

No matter how quality your content is or how shocking your headlines are, it isn’t going to carry you to SEO and sales success if it doesn’t pertain directly to your readers. This means that, in order for your blogging efforts to work in favor of your SEO standing, you need to understand your audience very well. You should know what they’re interested in and which problems they’re struggling with and you should be able to synthesize new content ideas that will help make their lives easier.

To get a better handle on who your audience is and what they want, use sites like Quora to get involved in niche-specific conversations and then head to BuzzSumo for help in creating and generating new ideas for content. BuzzSumo allows users to plug in keywords and see what other related topics have gone viral on social media. Another great tool for this same purpose is Ubersuggest, which is fantastic for generating ideas for blog posts and advertises itself as “Google suggest on steroids.”   

4. Make it evergreen

It’s one thing for your posts to be attention-grabbing but it’s entirely another for them to hold their value throughout the months or years. This is where Evergreen topics come in. According to Moz, evergreen content offers “continued and sustained success.” To put it another way, evergreen content doesn’t rely upon passing trend and it doesn’t rely on the re-posting of old content. Rather, it uses foundational industry truths as topics from which to branch out. Examples in the world of blogging include “How to Blog – The Steps to a Successful Blog Start,” “Revealed: 19 Things to Know Before You Start a Blog” and ProBlogger’s own “How to Blog: Blogging Tips for Beginners.” These posts all take one evergreen topic (blogging) and offer helpful tips and tricks on the subject. Because of this, these posts aren’t going to come into and out of fashion. Instead, they will continue to be highly searched-for and will continue to be a major source of traffic for their home sites.

5. Use long tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are and have always been a big traffic factor for bloggers. Take Search Engine Journal, for example, who noted a huge 78% jump in traffic after optimizing their content for long-tail keywords. In order to optimize content for long tail keywords, it’s important to create extensively researched, lengthy, valuable content that utilizes your long-tail keywords in a natural way.

Since long tail keywords show you what your users are looking to do, there’s a high probability that content optimized for them will produce far better conversions than content that is not. Additionally, longtail keywords can help you understand how to better structure content in order to solve a searcher’s problems or provide value for their needs.

6. Use CTAs to collect emails

As of 2013, there were more than 3.6 billion email addresses worldwide with upwards of 247 million emails sent on a daily basis. According to many email marketing experts, for every $1.00 bloggers spend on email marketing tactics, they earn $42.00. If you need an example, you can think about QuickSprout, which created a revenue of $43k from one email blast over a single 24-hour period.

That said, it’s wise to collect emails every time someone visits your site. Do this through a special landing page or embed email popups or subscription forms throughout your blog. Accompany these with powerful CTAs and then use the gathered emails for email marketing down the road. In order to get the most emails possible, ensure that your site is structured properly and easy to use. This means that your site should be compatible for all devices and very readable (in terms of font type and actual writing). The site should also load quickly and be easy to navigate. When your site provides a positive experience for users, people are much more likely to click and subscribe than they would be for a difficult site that wasn’t intuitive.

Conclusion

While increasing SEO can be confusing, it’s obvious that blogging does in fact have a large impact on SEO. Follow these 6 tips to help you blog better, increase SEO rankings, and make more sales. Happy blogging!

Julia is a serial entrepreneur and content marketer, and the founder of Express Writers; she loves to blog and is a soon-to-be published author.

The post How to Triple Your SEO Efforts Just By Blogging appeared first on ProBlogger.

Tired of sending emails to prospects that never get opened? Tired of not getting responses from your customers?

Salespeople of yesteryear never had these problems with in-person meetings and phone calls. After all, it's hard to ignore someone when they're across the desk from you. But, as the world shifts more and more to asynchronous communication like email, text messaging, and facsimiles (just kidding on the last one), unanswered emails are real challenges that prevent sales professionals from achieving maximum productivity.

Lucky for us, the HubSpot product team recently launched a new feature in our free Sidekick product called "Send Later." The feature, as you might imagine, allows Gmail users to schedule an email to be sent at a specific time in the future. This allows you to draft an email, schedule when you want it to be sent, and then forget about it.

As someone who relies heavily on email for communication with contacts internal and external to HubSpot, I immediately found the “set it and forget it” aspect useful. But after playing around with it a bit more, and getting others’ opinions on its value, I also realized that it’s sometimes better to send an email later instead of now. Waiting a while can actually better your odds of connecting in certain instances, making this feature doubly valuable.

Here are nine situations when a delay can increase your chances of getting the response you want.

1) When you’re working during non-traditional hours.

The main reason to use the "Send Later" feature is to increase the chances that your recipient will open, read, and respond to your email. If you're working late at night, you're probably better off scheduling that email to hit your prospect’s inbox in the morning.

As salespeople, we don't always work normal hours. We might work 9 to 5, but we're also adding extra hours at both ends of the sun's daily cycle. That doesn't mean our prospects are, though.

If you send an email at 9 p.m. at night, chances are that it'll be at the bottom of your prospect's list of emails when they open their inbox in the morning -- reducing the chance that they’ll read it with fresh eyes (or at all). Instead, get your email up to the top of the buyer’s inbox by scheduling it to send when they start their day. While you might not know exactly when they first check their email, a 9 a.m. send as a rule is better than the night before.

If your message can wait a few hours, schedule it to be delivered at 11 a.m. As you can see from the graph below, when we analyzed 20 million emails sent by users of HubSpot's sales software, we found that 11 a.m. is the optimal send time to maximize an email’s chances of getting a response.



(Download the full report on the best times to send email here.) 

2) When you work in a different time zone than your prospects.

Calling on a company outside of your time zone is a perfect time to use the "Send Later" feature to send an email. Emailing prospects across the country, or in another country or continent? Just look up what time zone your prospect is in and schedule the email to be opened during their working hours. We’ve found that it’s always better to schedule your emails to send during their business hours, not yours.

Sidekick’s Send Later feature even offers a time zone dropdown menu, so you don't have to do the math yourself.

3) When you're traveling.

Sometimes, you have to take a trip that puts you in a different time zone. Not only might you be checking your email at odd hours -- in between meeting with prospects -- but you may also be working different hours than normal. Use Send Later, once again, to deliver your message when your prospect will likely be checking their email.

4) When you want to avoid distracting responses.

Smart salespeople block off time for different activities. For example, at HubSpot, we advise our salespeople to block off two to four hours per day for prospecting.

Blocking off time to respond to email is also a clever thing to do, especially for those of us who receive a lot of it. Why? Email can be distracting and many of us could literally live in our inboxes all day -- and get nothing proactive done. (Been there too often.)

To counteract this, I recommend two things. First, ignore your email inbox most of the day. Second, schedule "email time" on your calendar that's reserved exclusively for responding to emails. (For more tips on scheduling email time from the best-selling author and extremely successful entrepreneur Tim Ferriss, check out this blog post.) 

If you do end up scheduling "email time," batch your outgoing emails to send an hour or so beforehand. When is the optimum time to schedule "email time?" If you're going to read and respond to email during the workday, then you should schedule it for sometimes in the middle of the day. According to an MIT research study, the worst time of the day to call someone is 11 a.m. So, to make sure you're not sending and checking email during prime calling hours, send your emails right before 11 a.m. and block off time between 11 and 2 to read and schedule responses.

5) When you know a person checks their email at a specific time.

The recommendations above are based on data from a few different studies. While they are the best data I've found that recommends when to send prospects email, nothing beats real time notifications that show us when a specific prospect reads our emails.

Every prospect has different habits. And while we haven't invented any way to record your prospect's every action, our sales and marketing software does track when prospects are looking at your website or reading your emails. By looking at your prospect's contact timeline, you can see exactly when they typically are in front of their computer. Time your email to be delivered at that time.

6) When the timing just isn't right.

Let's say you're making your prospecting calls. You get through to a prospect but, for some reason, the timing isn't right for a full exploratory conversation. Maybe your prospect is up to their neck putting something together for their boss, or they're leaving on a two-week vacation. Whatever the reason, they ask you to reach back out in a month.

While I'm a big fan of scheduling a call when you have them on the phone (or simply trying to call them again in a few weeks’ time) chances are that some prospects will just insist that you send an email. So, in addition to scheduling a task to call them, it makes sense to quickly schedule an email to send too.

7) When it’s a special occasion.

I first met Auren Hoffman in 2006. I've probably spoken to him only a handful of times over the phone since then. We've never actually met in person. But, he never forgets my birthday or my wedding anniversary. Every year, I get a quick note wishing me a "happy birthday and a great Thanksgiving" (since my birthday is November 28th). While I don't know exactly how he does it, I imagine he uses some kind of automation to send those messages.

With Send Later, you can quickly set up a nice birthday wish days or even months in advance. Don't limit yourself just to birthdays, though. There are all kinds of customized messages you could send based on your prospect's interests. Ask if they're watching their favorite football team this coming weekend, ask them if they're going skiing this season, or wish them a happy X holiday.

With the fast pace at which we all move today, personal connections matter even more. Use Send Later to schedule a batch of perfectly-timed well wishes.

8) When you need to give an email extra attention.

Sometimes you're in a rush, but you just can't resist checking your email. But after reading a particular message, you know you won't be able to respond quickly.

You could use Gmail stars or the "mark unread" feature to remember to read it later, but if you're like me, you never get back to some of those. What I've found works best for me is putting the message back at the top of my inbox.

With Send Later, I can put that message at the top of my inbox when I know I'll be sitting down to answer emails. Simply address it to yourself and set the time.

9) When you want to show someone just how hard you're working.

On a slightly more fun note, the Send Later feature can help you give your boss the impression that you're working long hours.

You might already be burning both ends of the candle. You’re driven to do 2x your quota and you're willing to work whatever hours it takes to get there. But, just in case you're not and your boss values the hustle, schedule emails to send at times outside of normal business hours, like 5 a.m. or 11 p.m. For maximum impact, send emails at all hours every day of the week for a full week. See how long it takes for your boss to notice.

"Send Later" feature: Trick ur boss into thinking u r burning both ends. https://t.co/G8MIkEMN6D by @jeffreyrusso pic.twitter.com/RV2gtClIRf

— Peter Caputa (@pc4media) January 4, 2016

Another time to schedule emails for later (err ... earlier) is when you are applying for jobs. Everyone loves an early riser. Schedule your emails to send at 5 a.m. the next morning, and see what kind of reaction you get from the hiring manager. You can also use this trick with clients if you're on a tight deadline and you want them to think you're working around the clock.

I say these last few tips mostly in jest. But, hey, the technology is there. You choose how to use it. I won't judge. ;-)

How to Use Sidekick's "Send Later" Feature

If you’re a Sidekick user, this feature has been available now for a few weeks. If you're not already a Sidekick user, you can download the free app and start scheduling emails immediately. It works for Gmail and Google Apps.

The feature is pretty simple to use. Instead of clicking “Send Now” in the compose email window in Gmail, you should see a small clock with a dropdown. Just click the clock and enter the time you want your email to be sent.

All of the scheduled messages get stored in your Gmail drafts folder. Afraid you said something wrong or silly? Did you end up connecting by phone and talking about the content of your email? No problem. If you want to cancel a message or revise it before it gets sent, you can do that. Just go into your draft folder, open it up, and revise or delete the message.

It’s getting harder and harder to reach prospects and customers. Everyone is busy. Timing emails to be delivered when prospects are likely to read them has been proven to increase open and response rates. 

As salespeople, we need to leverage every trick available, so that we can connect and explore new business opportunities with the volume of prospects we need to hit our goals. With Send Later, you can increase the chances of getting your message read, and ultimately, getting that appointment.

Let us know how Send Later works for you in the comments below. If you come up with other ways to use it, please share those too.

If you’re vacationing in Europe, you can apply for a value-added tax refund on your souvenir purchases there. It’s fast and free, and most travelers leave that money on the table. There are certain restrictions, but the paperwork can be worth it.

Read more...

If you haven’t been thinking about the future of personalization — you should. The CMO Council released a fascinating study today, looking at how marketers are viewing/using personalization and what that means for all of us down the road.

 The study, done in partnership with Pegasystems, is entitled “Predicting Routes to Revenue, and found that nearly half of marketers say their current analytics programs have the ability to give a clear view of past performance but do little to shed light on the road ahead.  The study is based on insights from more than 150 senior marketing executives surveyed primarily across North America and Europe during the fourth quarter of 2015.  You can download the complete study here.

The study also found that marketers looking to deliver exceptional customer experience will increasingly turn to personalization as the key driver to maximize customer value. This will require redefining data¹s value and primary role, moving away from using data as a vehicle to calculate past performance metrics and into a critical tool to uncover new, real-time insights about customer behavior.

The study also found that marketers looking to deliver exceptional customer experience will increasingly turn to personalization as the key driver to maximize customer value. This will require redefining data¹s value and primary role, moving away from using data as a vehicle to calculate past performance metrics and into a critical tool to uncover new, real-time insights about customer behavior.

Gone are the days of simply including a customer’s name in an email and considering that to be personalization. Today, customers expect that brands will understand who they are, what their habits are, what they want to see on their device screens, what they want, how they want it, when they want it…and the list of expectations goes on. These requirements are making it all the more imperative for organizations to be able to craft robust experiences that are targeted to the needs and desires of all of their customers.

A one-size-fits-all approach reveals to the customer that a brand does not understand them and opens the door for customers to defect and leave a brand’s fold in favor of one that does. In a world where customers have a multitude of options for nearly everything they are looking to purchase—and where new contenders are willing to offer almost anything to gain their business and loyalty if given the opportunity—the demand to know and effectively engage customers has never been greater.

Read more about the study’s findings and the recommendations from the CMO Council and Pegasystems and then identify personalization opportunities inside your own organization.

Seems like the time is now if you’d like to be an innovator in this space.

The post The future of personalization appeared first on Drew's Marketing Minute.

In the summer of 2013, Rolling Stone published a long article titled “Goodbye, Miami,” which claimed that climate change will submerge much of the titular city. “By century’s end,” the article warned, “rising sea levels will turn the nation’s urban fantasyland into an American Atlantis. But long before the city is completely underwater, chaos will begin.”

Such predictions are not uncommon as the science behind climate change becomes increasingly unassailable, and they are not unique to Miami. In America alone, a majority of the population lives within 50 miles of a coast. Many of the nation’s most beautiful and productive cities — New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and others — abut the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. As sea levels rise, are these cities doomed to an underwater future?

I doubt it. As an economist, my training in how individuals invest during times of uncertainty leads me to a much different prediction: America’s coastal cities are going to adapt, get ahead of climate change, and be just fine.

How can I be so optimistic? Similar to citizens who heeded Paul Revere’s warnings over 240 years ago, coastal urbanites and firms have been alerted that climate change is imminent. Asset owners and investors thus have clear information about the strong incentive to adapt to this emerging risk. What value that cannot be protected will be replaced in the form of new business opportunities for entrepreneurs who can design solutions to pressing problems.  The induced innovation literature has taught us that drug companies focus their efforts on researching and marketing new drugs for which there is expected to be great demand (think of aging baby boomers’ aching knees). This same logic holds in the case of climate change adaptation.

Insight Center

What will this adaptation look like?  The answer varies by location. Companies such as Coastal Risk Consulting are developing flood risk statistical models at the parcel level. Competition in forming accurate forecasts will incentivize such firms to design high-quality, useful forecasts. Real estate investors will have strong incentives to respond to these forecasts.

Around the world, coastal cities will upgrade existing structures to reduce flood risk and build new structures and infrastructure that is more resilient in the face of sea-level rise. For those now located in 1-in-10-year flood plains, there will be growing demand for engineers who can design solutions for reducing flood exposure. Rising demand will lead young people to enter the field and the ensuing investment in new skills and human capital will lower the cost of future adaptation efforts. For-profit insurers will write premium contracts that encourage the use of resilient materials and methods.

For those who decide to build in flood risk areas, construction teams will be able to use modular materials that can be disassembled like Lego pieces. Such a materials base will give the real estate owner the option to later disassemble the property and thus detach the land from the structure which could be moved to “higher ground.” While pessimists posit that a city losing its land area will lose its population base, they forget that a city can build up on “higher ground.” In Manhattan, for example, the area close to the Empire State Building faces little risk of flooding.

Urban economists have argued that stringent zoning regulation in American cities such as New York are a major reason for high home prices. Such regulations often take the form of limiting how tall buildings can be. Once the climate scientists identify which parts of a city are “higher ground,” then one adaptation strategy will be to build taller buildings there. Only local zoning rules could inhibit future real estate magnates from building in the objectively safer parts of the city and protecting the populace by building more units higher up. Some coastal land will be submerged, but other land in the same city will appreciate in value. Pessimists about the costs of climate change ignore such latter effects.

I trust the invisible hand. If incumbent property owners do not make investments in self-protection, they will suffer a huge asset loss as they will not be able to resell their (submerged, damaged or threatened) properties.  Self-interest is a powerful force nudging all asset owners—whatever their political affiliation—to adapt.

Many have noted that coastal cities are our economic hubs. If America “loses Wall Street” to flooding won’t the U.S. economy be crippled?   This viewpoint implicitly assumes that physical places such as Southern Manhattan anchor national productivity.  I reject this point.  Anywhere where skilled traders and bankers cluster will become a productive hub. Wall Street solves a coordination problem but other locations (for example, Greenwich, Connecticut) could easily replace it.  Firms would incur one-time costs to relocate but if a major firm such as Goldman Sachs moved, I’m certain many others would follow before it is too late.

While this discussion has been framed as an emerging future issue, firms are already taking steps to adapt to emerging challenges in anticipation of future disaster risk. For example, Sims Metal Management recently approved a design for an elevated recycling plant at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal. The added elevation (four feet above city requirements) added around $550,000 to the $100 million budget, but has already paid for itself. When a storm surge during Hurricane Sandy hit Brooklyn in October, 2012, the plant did not flood.

As individuals and firms anticipate the new risks that climate change will unleash, this will create the aggregate market potential that rewards entrepreneurs who can design new technologies and products that help U.S. cities to adapt.  Market-driven adaptation will allow these coastal cities—the jewels on America’s hem—to continue to thrive.

Oscar, a health insurance startup, is reportedly raising new funding that could value the company at $3 billion, Fortune's Dan Primack, Erin Griffith, and Leena Rao report.

The new funding is said to be led by Fidelity, and $150 million has been committed so far.

In September, Oscar raised $32.5 million from Google Capital at a $1.75 billion valuation.

Previously, Oscar raised more than $300 million from a slew of prominent investors including Khosla Ventures, Oscar cofounder Josh Kushner’s own Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Goldman Sachs, and Google Ventures.

Founded in 2013 by entrepreneur and venture capitalist Joshua Kushner, Microsoft's former director of health care Kevin Nazemi, and former McKinsey & Company computer scientist Mario Schlosser, Oscar rivals established health insurance companies like Aetna and UnitedHealth.

In 2014, Oscar had just 15,000 users signed up. In September 2015, it had 40,000 users. Now, it has 125,000 users. Though Oscar launched in New Jersey and New York, it's since expanded to serve users in Texas and California.

Oscar users can buy health insurance coverage from the marketplaces created under the Affordable Care Act. The company uses technology and design to make its statements and services easy for anyone to understand.

Schlosser told Business Insider last year that in New York, its market share is upwards of 12%. "The biggest reason why we now decided to raise a new round of capital is that we think the opportunity we originally saw is even bigger than we realized early on," Schlosser told Business Insider. "We started three years ago with the very distinct idea of creating a better user interface for healthcare, and most specifically health insurance."

Oscar did not have a comment on reports about its fundraising.

SEE ALSO: 'Uber for helicopters' startup Blade wants to be your private chauffeur during Sundance Film Festival

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NOW WATCH: Everything we know about the iPhone 7’s new features and design

To paraphrase David Packard, sales conversations are too important to leave to sales people. B2B sales conversations for key touch points should be designed. This optimizes conversation effectiveness and simplifies selling. It provides a common baseline that makes feedback and continuous improvement possible. How have you designed the sales conversations for your key touch points? How well do each of your sales people handle conversations at key touch points, or with different stakeholders? How consistent is the delivery of your messages across your sales teams? How does stress affect these results? I’m talking about the conversations where, when they are performed well, you’re in the game. You’re gaining respect and trust that makes it possible for you to educate buyers and influence a buying vision and decision criteria. Poorly performed conversations mean you might not even get into consideration, or might just be pricing fodder. According to SiriusDecisions, 71% of sales leaders identify customer conversations as their biggest challenge to hitting their revenue targets. Why Design Sales Conversations Our premise is, for complex, B2B, solution or value sales, “how you sell” is more important that what you sell. This sales requires educating and gaining consensus from 4 to 14 buying team members, 5.4 is a considered average. At this level it’s ALL about sales conversations. The objective is to actually create value for customers, and differentiation for vendors, through conversations that deliver insights and useful ideas. To optimize effectiveness, sales conversations must be relevant to the interests of each buyer and […]

The post B2B Sales Conversations — By Design appeared first on Avitage.

Author: Divya Dutt

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Research has shown that 96% of website visitors are not ready to buy, and that only 2% (on average) convert on the first visit. They land on your site, click around (hopefully), see something they like—and then something draws them away. Opportunity lost? Maybe not.

Retargeting, or remarketing, is an online marketing strategy that keeps your brand in front of users who have bounced out of your site. By placing a tracking pixel on your website, you can follow them when they leave and place an ad on another, unrelated website, just to remind them of how awesome your products or services are—and persuade them to come back over.

Users leave websites for all sorts of reasons: a toddler came screaming into the room, their boss walked up to their desk, the waiter brought dinner, etc. It doesn’t always mean they changed their mind about you, so sending some strategic reminders at a more convenient time can be a powerful marketing weapon. In fact, 90% of marketers say retargeted ads perform as well or better than search, email, or display advertising, according to AdRoll’s State of the Industry 2016 report.

When visitors bounce from your site, retargeting is a way to keep in touch, and keep your company’s product or service top-of-mind to get them back. But retargeting can be tricky. There’s a fine line between effective retargeting and internet stalking, and you certainly don’t want to wear out your welcome. The key to successful retargeting is to reach the right audience and engage them at the right time with the right message. Let’s take a look at how you can do this:

Retarget the Right Audience

Segmenting your audience is the first step to a successful retargeting strategy. Your ideal customer should not be “anyone who visited the site this month.” Here are some specific audiences you should consider targeting with customized messages:

• Cart abandoners: These are likely your hottest prospective customers. They loved your products so much that they put them in their cart, but then they left your site without purchasing. Maybe they changed their mind, but chances are good that they were just distracted with a work deadline or cat video.
• First-time visitors: These people were interested enough in something you offer to visit your site. Figure out where they came from and where they landed, and you may be able to draw them back. For considered purchases, it may take a few visits for a visitor to be convinced. 
• Repeat customers: These people already know and love you. If they haven’t purchased in a while, they might just need a reminder.
• Recent visitors: These may be recent visitors shopping around for the best deal or on a time crunch. Grab their attention before it’s too late.

Other opportunities—older visitors (less recent visitors), for example—are not a lost cause. Some audiences are easier or more time sensitive than others, but good timing and the right message can speak to any type of audience.

Find the Right Time to Retarget

No matter how well you know your audience, your retargeting efforts won’t succeed unless you capture their attention at the right time. Nailing down the timing of your retargeting effort will depend on the type of audience member you are targeting and the type of product you are offering. Here are timing options to consider:

• Quickly: For most audiences, your first retargeting ad should show up fairly quickly. Catch cart abandoners before they really do change their minds, the first-time visitors before they forget about you, and the recent visitors before they go with your competition.
• Around occasions: For repeat customers or old visitors, you can time your ads around a new product launch, service upgrade, or an event or holiday. Occasions are a great way for marketers to reactivate their audience without seeming too intrusive. With Valentine’s day coming up next month, jewelry stores can start retargeting consumers with relevant ads. Or if you’re a B2B marketer, retarget them with a registration discount before your next tradeshow.
• Before customers restock: If your product is perishable, retarget existing customers around the time their last purchase is due to wear out. For example, you can monitor how often a business reorders printer cartridges or how long it takes the average runner to wear out a pair of sneakers. In other cases, however, you may need to retarget much faster—before the show leaves Broadway or the customer’s software contract is over.
• Considerately: As you space out subsequent retargeting ads, don’t wear out your welcome. Create a “frequency cap,” to ensure your retargeting dies a natural death by controlling how often and how long your ad displays to your customized audience. And don’t be the nasty telemarketer who continues to harass someone even after they’ve bought in: if someone successfully converts, make sure you have controls in place to remove the ad and/or replace it with an updated one.
• Based on behavior: There are tools such as Marketo’s AdBridge that also enable you to retarget buyers or potential buyers based on key behaviors like visits to a particular page, a lead score, or recent purchase.

Send the Right Message

Once you put together whom you are retargeting and when, the final step is to craft the right message, one that resonates with your audience. There are five things to keep in mind when creating a retargeting message:

1. Design: Believe it or not, your ad may not be instantly recognizable—especially to a first-time visitor or a repeat customer who hasn’t been to your site recently. Make sure that your logo stands out and that the look of your ad is consistent with the look of your website. Use big, eye-catching images, and make sure the CTA is visually distinct.
2. Language: Convey your message without being wordy so your audience can absorb it at a glance. Use simple language and an active (start with a verb), direct call to action. Focus your appeal on the benefit to the user, not the characteristics of the product.
3. Feature: This is where segmenting your audience really comes in handy. Cart abandoners and recent visitors should see the items they left in their carts, while first-time visitors might need a special offer like free shipping. Repeat customers should see something that complements their last purchase or reminds them it’s time to replace a consumable.
4. Link: Don’t automatically send them to your home page and expect them to click around to find what they want. Send the user directly to the product or service page, or to a complementary page, for the image or CTA they respond to.
5. Demographics: You can also leverage a solution, like Marketo, to retarget key buyers based on who they are. This is critical because it enables you to have a more tailored message and offer, which increases the likelihood of conversions.

If you’re unsure about any element of the ad, use A/B testing to test and try out your options.

Ready, Set, Retarget!

Now it’s time to put it all together. Use this checklist to get your retargeting program started today:

• Segment your audience: Determine which audiences you are going to reach and with what messages, based on your budget.
• Schedule your ads: To schedule the timing and frequency of your ads, consider the type of audience member you are retargeting and the product or service you are offering.
• Design a strategic ad:  Keep your brand identity consistent, use direct language, and send them directly to what they want.
• Track your responses: Try A/B testing to see if it’s a specific headline, a visual, or an offer that helps convert.

Retargeting is a proven method for increasing conversion and reaching new and returning customers. The key is to find the balance between efficacy and overreaching so that your retargeting will sell, rather than repel.

Have you started integrating retargeting into your digital marketing efforts? I’d love to hear how it’s going in the comments below!

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Sell, Don’t Repel: How to Make Sense of the Retargeting Landscape was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post Sell, Don’t Repel: How to Make Sense of the Retargeting Landscape appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

There are 12 ways that a seller can build or erode trust with their buyers, demonstrated by the 12 Dimensions of Trust. Each associated action creates a connection or causes a disconnection. We’re reviewing all 12 dimensions each week, so that sellers can be empowered to create strong connections founded in trust, and avoid creating […]

The post Keep Buyers from Thinking You’re Tricking Them appeared first on People First.

It’s awfully hard for many sales people to resist the “itch to pitch” when they come across a prospect that seems a perfect fit for their solution. After all, why would they want to hold back? It turns out that there are many compelling reasons why rushing to present your solution is a really bad idea.

Closing a sale in one call might be possible in some transactional sales environments – in fact it may be the only economic way of dealing with low-value opportunities. But in complex, high-value buying decisions, the last thing most prospects are interested in at the start of their buying journey are the fine details or unique capabilities of your solution. Here’s why…

When the vast majority of B2B customers make significant investments, they do so thoughtfully (even if it may not always appear that way to sales people). They typically follow a buying journey that – although it may differ in its details – tends to evolve through three critical phases:

• First, they need to acknowledge why they need to change
• Then, they need to decide what they want to change to
• Finally, they decide how to accomplish the change

I’m not suggesting that these are always neatly defined discrete stages that are followed in a completely linear fashion. The boundaries are often blurred and the decision-making team (it is almost never one individual) will often revisit a previous phase – but these phases reflect the general evolutionary path that most successful buying decision processes seem to follow.

One of the key factors that appear to separate top sales performers from the rest is their ability to accurately assess where their prospect is in their buying decision journey and to adapt their sales strategy accordingly. As a result, they often spend longer at an earlier stage than their less patient sales colleagues making absolutely sure that the opportunity is real.

They tend to qualify more deals out earlier in the sales cycle – but from that point on, the rest of their sales cycle is usually significantly shorter and their win rates appreciably higher. So what are the tell-tale signs that can enable salespeople to assess where their prospect really is in their decision process?

Why Change?

Any organisation will always have dozens – maybe hundreds – of interesting issues that appear to be worth investigating. But a much smaller subset of those issues will be regarded as important enough to merit a serious evaluation. And fewer still will be seen as compelling enough to ensure that your prospect takes action.

Let’s face it; change is hard. It carries risks. It consumes time, money and resources. It may distract attention from other even more important issues. That’s why the default decision is usually to stick with the status quo. Organisations can only be guaranteed to do something when the costs and consequences of inaction are so high that they outweigh the perceived cost and risk of change.

This is the critical question that buyers need to answer (and sales people need to know) before they decide to move to the next stage of their buying journey: is sticking with the status quo likely to be so painful and costly that we are going to be forced to take action?

Top sales people have a critical role to play at this stage of the process – by helping the prospect acknowledge the full implications of their current situation, by highlighting who else might be affected, and by enabling the prospect to recognise the full cost of inaction.

What To?

The prospect may have recognised the need for change – they may even have assembled a coalition of willing stakeholders who agree the need for change and are going to form the nucleus of the decision-making team – but their next challenge is in working out what they need to change to.

They now know what bad looks like: it is their current situation. But now they need to define what good looks like, and what sort of solution they are going to have to implement in order to achieve it. This is the phase during which their vision of a solution and a potential vendor shortlist emerges.

But as well as trying to align around a coherent vision of their future solution, membership of the decision making team needs to be finalised, as well as a clear and (hopefully) rational process and timeframe by which the solution selection decision will be made.

Forrester recently conducted some research showing that vendors who played a significant role in shaping the prospect’s vision of a solution were three times more successful than vendors that only managed to engage after that vision had already been established. The time invested by sales people in ensuring that the prospect has a clear vision of a solution that aligns with the capabilities of their solution usually proves to be time very well spent.

Why You?

In the third and final phase of their buying journey your prospect is trying to select the best available option of all the solutions available to them. That may still result in a decision to “do nothing” although that possibility is made much less likely if a truly compelling and urgent reason to change has already been established.

Imagine the difficulties faced by a vendor who only arrives at the party when this stage has already been reached. Yet this is exactly the situation faced by vendors who decide to bid in response to an RFP whose content they have had no previous influence over. You can understand how the odds are heavily stacked in favour of vendors that manage to engage early.

Even if you have been involved from an early stage, simply complying with the prospect’s defined requirements may not be enough to win. You still need to amplify the costs of inaction and establish your solution as the highest-gain, least-risk option available to your potential customer.

And one last thought: if you want to stand out from all the other options, make sure you focus not on demonstrating features and functions but on proving how and why your approach is different from all the solutions they might be considering – and why it is likely to result in superior outcomes. Do that, and you will put yourself in pole position to have your prospect answer for themselves “Why You?”

Email is one of the primary tools available to B2B salespeople – and is a part of the triad for modern sellers along with a telephone and social media communication system. Let’s put it this way – if sales were a gladiator sport, email would be one of the primary weapons that would be selected by each participant. Therein lies the problem. Everybody is doing it. Decision makers are bombarded each day with hundreds or thousands of emails trying to solicit their attention and their budgets. Before looking any further, here are 4 key stats about the state of email:

• This year, about 84% of all email traffic will be spam. (The Radicati Group)
• Personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened. (Adestra July Report)
• 3% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone. (Convinceandconvert.com)
• 64% of decision-makers read their email via mobile devices. (TopRankBlog)

These statistics all demonstrate where email is going – use of email is increasing, spam emails are at an all time high, and the success of your email depends on being both personalized and mobile optimized.

This is where social media and social selling come into play. Prospects and customers are leaving trails of personal information and golden nuggets for you to find online. Gone are the days of the spray and pray email template – and in are the days when you tug the emotional heart strings of the buyer with personalized messaging and subject lines.

People buy from those that they like and that they feel comfortable doing business with. Social media gives you the opportunity to find key pieces of information online about your buyers that will both increase the effectiveness of your communications, and also the probability of closing the deal.

I’ll tell you a quick story going back to 2013, we were testing to see which reach outs had the most success and one particular play comes to mind. We had been trying to contact a decision maker with value-added communications targeting their critical business issue via both phone and email. 2 months later – still no response. Finally we went to Twitter and found that this prospect loved the Green Bay Packers and Aaron Rodgers. We then tried the subject line “How about those Packers?” followed by a brief sentence about the upcoming game and then right into our solution with a call to action for a phone call. Within minutes the email was opened and a call was booked. 2 months of trying traditional techniques had failed – and social selling saved the day.

Some friends at Contractually have put together an infographic that outlines 4 key practices for increasing the success of your emails.

What are you waiting for? Start eating your competitor’s lunch – it tastes good!

Some pretty specific stereotypes exist around salespeople, and they're often negative. That got us wondering: What do consumers and buyers really think about salespeople? What can a salesperson do to create a positive and valuable experience for their prospects? And how do salespeople today approach potential customers?

These questions matter because the evolution of the buyer's journey has created a lot of change in the traditional sales process. Many organizations still haven't evolved the way they do sales -- think cold calling -- and as a result they end up bothering potential customers and further perpetuating a negative image of salespeople. 

HubSpot Research invites you to take part in our short survey. Tell us how you work today as a sales professional. We'll use the data to break down what prospects expect from salespeople and help sales pros like you become trusted advisors.

 

In 2015, engagement analytics gave many sales organizations their first look at how prospects interact with their emails and content. However, as we enter 2016, engagement analytics will play an even bigger role, become essential for selling advantage, and turn into the bedrock for measuring sales performance.

Only engagement analytics give the visibility your team needs into every single stage of the sales process – from prospecting to qualification to conversion to close.

At the top of the funnel, stats show that half of a team’s selling time is wasted on unproductive prospecting.[i] As a sales leader, improving prospecting efficiency and effectiveness has become imperative. Engagement analytics help teams prioritize opportunities by showing the buyers that are the most engaged – and the buyers that aren’t.

Engagement analytics also provide a clearer picture of the qualification process. Sales leaders can see how reps follow up with prospects, how frequently, and the type of follow-up that delivers the highest response rates. If you don’t have data about your reps’ activities and behaviors, how can you improve team performance or your processes?

Engagement analytics support more intelligent – and more personalized – outreach. Aberdeen Group has found that companies that personalize content have up to a 36% higher lead conversion rate and that simply personalizing emails alone can increase conversion rates by 10%![ii]

Recognizing and understanding the roles of different stakeholders is also critical for conversion. According to Gartner Group, in a typical company of 100-500 employees, an average of 7 people are involved in a buying decision. By using engagement analytics, organizations are quickly and easily identifying decision makers. These tools instantly reveal all interactions –showing when a sales proposal is forwarded and to whom – be it the CFO or legal.

Everything in the sales cycle always has and will continue to revolve around customer engagement. How your reps interact with prospects affects your sales organization’s success more than anything else.

But today, in a digitally disrupted sales environment, analytics have become essential to do this. Engagement analytics give the insight your team needs to find the right customer to engage with, engage with that customer in the right way – and do it faster than the competition.

A new year always provides an opportunity for change and improvement. As we enter 2016, consider how engagement analytics can raise your team’s performance and accelerate the sales process. Best-in-class organizations are already adopting these technologies. Isn’t it time for your team as well?

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To learn more about how personalization can improve sales performance, you can get a free copy of Aberdeen’s research “Engage, Personalize, Analyze, Win…Repeat.”

[i] The B2B Lead

[ii] Aberdeen Group

Original Post

An Aberdeen Group study reported that highly aligned organizations achieved an average of 32% year-over-year revenue growth. Whereas those who did not, saw a 7% decrease in revenue. But what is even more concerning is that according to a study from Forrester, just 8% of companies say they have tight alignment between sales and marketing.

The first questions you may want to ask yourself are; what does sales and marketing alignment look like? How do you know if it’s happening in your company? And if it’s not, what should you do about it as a sales leader?

Everyone knows who their best customers are, how they buy, the problems they help them solve, and how the results impact them.

To see if this is true, independently ask your team members to answer those questions in less than 100 words.

If there is a lot of gaps in the answers, ask your salespeople to recount how the last customers bought from them.

• How did they describe their problem?
• What is their role in the company?
• How did they go about searching for a solution?
• How does the problem impact them in their role?
• What impact does that have on their company?

Share this with marketing and ask them to share information about how those customers found them and what information they looked at. Then together build a profile of all the key players involved and list resources that marketing can help build for each role that salespeople can use.

Meet with your marketing counterpart weekly to share new information about buyers and determine what the resulting sales and marketing plan will be for the coming weeks and months.

Everyone speaks the same language and respects each other’s interpretation of the data.

To test this, ask your salespeople what they think about marketing leads. If you hear, “They suck.” then you have a problem.

Ask them to explain why and hold them accountable to dig deeper and follow up more than 1-3 times. Coach them on how to sell through influencers to get to decision makers.

Also, compare the reports you run as a sales leader with the ones your marketing counterpart runs.

• Is there jargon either one of you doesn’t understand?
• Do you run them at the same frequency?
• Do you both agree on what a good lead is?
• What do you call each stage?
• What is the buyer behavior happening at each stage?
• What is the corresponding marketing and sales behavior that happens as a result?
• Are you tying those behavior benchmarks to the same outcomes?
• Are you counting on marketing delivering a certain type and number of leads and do they agree?

Record the answers to these questions in a sales and marketing service level agreement (SLA). As part of your weekly roundtable meeting with marketing, make sure you both agree to the metrics and responsibilities. Use both of your reports as the agenda and backdrop to learning more about how the customer is buying and to track progress towards your company goals.

Everyone is engaging on social media and contributing to content that is buyer focused.

To test this, see how many salespeople have social media profiles in the places where your buyer is.

• Are they engaging with educational content that offers insights?
• Are they creating and curating quality content that helps explain the buyer’s problem and options to solve it? A
• Are they staying current with industry trends?

OR

• Is everything left to marketing?
• Does all the content talk all about you, your company and what you do?

If there is little evidence of the first 3 questions, it’s time to empower your salespeople to contribute to content creation (with the help of marketing) and coach them how to use social media to get found by prospects.

As a sales rep working in an industry that targets a broad range of consumers, consider how your perspective influences how you frame goods or services. Your perspective is influenced by your age and social background, such as whether you’re under the age of 35 and grew up as a digital native, you’re aged 35 to 50 and grew up with computers around you, or whether you’re over 50 and learned to use computers as an adult. When technology became a part of your lifestyle affects your consumer views and influences your views on effective marketing.

Regardless of the generation that you came from, here are some sales tips for marketers of every age:

Think like a digital native. Even if you are from a generation that is now older than 35, you can do a lot of research into the ideas and tastes of Generation Y and Millennials. Learn to think like them. Watch how they interact at Starbucks. Note how they only talk occasionally because of their connectivity to devices.

Choose sales approaches that work from the idea that people do everything with their Smartphones. They have an app for everything, and they are constantly connected.

Within your CRM system, your marketing tactics should work from the idea that people expect an easy answer for almost everything. They want to use a technology tool and find a snippet of information so they can make snap decisions. Make information available to them, and then they will only have to think a few seconds before taking the desired action that you want. Then, they give their attention to the next app.

Modern businesses know that they need to engage prospects 24/7, but how can you do this without increasing data leaks and ending up with broken sales processes?

Increase conversions: 55% of companies fail to consolidate their databases with automation, and as a result 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Consolidation will get you back on track.

Complete transparency: No more ‘blame game’. Plugging data leaks with consolidation means that you’ll always know when, how and why a lead is qualified.

Automation as a two-sided coin: Your MA software should reflect your point of view in terms of campaigns and milestones, but it should also be built around your customers – what they do, where they hang out and what they’re looking for, from the moment they first browse your site, through every sales meeting and closed deal.

Consolidating sales and marketing automation lets you give your sales team next-gen tools to close more sales, and makes their job easier by enabling smarter selling at every single stop along the customer journey. Consolidation means you can get back to process-oriented business techniques, using data how it’s meant to be used: to grow your business

It’s time to accelerate your growth. Sometimes smaller businesses and SMEs make the mistake of seeing the “sales cycle” as another term for a “won deal.” In fact, even as you close a deal, you should be figuring out the best way to retain that customer and provide enticing offers for upgrades.

For more information on automated marketing and CRM for your target markets, we hope that you will contact us today. Helping you reach your marketing goals is very important to us.

There is a lot hinging on the performance of your marketing and sales teams to successfully execute on their goals. Without a healthy pipeline, runway, and cash flow can dry up, preventing the business from investing in future growth, its’ current employees and product development.

As a marketing and sales leader, it’s critically important that marketing and sales teams are aligned because nothing can harm a revenue team more than misalignment and miscommunication. This is because today’s B2B marketers must be focused on pipeline marketing–it’s been proven that those who are to achieve much greater levels of alignment.

Image Source: Bizible

How great tech companies align marketing and sales

Implement closed-loop reporting for marketing and sales alignment

The first piece of the puzzle is creating a technology stack that allows you to see end-to-end attribution from marketing’s first touch to a closed-won opportunity. At New Breed, we help our customers achieve this by using HubSpot, Salesforce and InsightSquared. This allows you to base all your future decisions on data and historical performance, as well as track progress towards your current goals in real time.

Use lifecycle stages

Now that you have closed-loop reporting in place, you can begin to create a more granular system of how these prospects are being tracked through the funnel to see exactly where leads are getting stuck. This way you can focus your efforts on the areas that will drive the most value.

At minimum, you should track your leads through these six core lifecycle stages:

• Subscriber
• Lead
• Marketing qualified lead
• Sales qualified lead
• Opportunity
• Customer

If you want to reach an even more granular level of reporting, you can use systems such as the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall which introduces stages such as ‘sales accepted lead’ and other statuses designed to track outbound efforts.

To do this, carefully document the entry and exit criteria for each stage so it’s crystal clear when someone should be moved forward, recycled or disqualified. As well as align your marketing and sales systems and employee training to account for this.

Assign a lead or opportunity commitment

Marketing should be held responsible to clear goals that are tied directly to revenue generation. Mark Roberge, VP of Sales at HubSpot has reflected that putting marketing on a quota was one of the keys to their success. He’s not the only expert that feels this way. Watch Loretta Jones and Brendon Cassidy who led marketing and sales at EchoSign reflect on the importance of a lead commit:

Going back to what Volpe and Roberge did at HubSpot that was so innovative was that they segmented MQL data by type (demo, contact sales, content download, etc.) and then broke down the MQL-to-customer rate and average deal size for each. This way, the MQL commit wasn’t just a number of leads, but actually got marketing and sales speaking the same language, dollars and cents.

For example, this type of analysis might look like this:

Since it’s likely easier for marketing to generate white paper downloads than it is demo requests or trials, converting this value into a dollar figure means that no matter what the MQL type, sales is assured the coverage and volume they need to hit their quotas.

Bonus tip: If you’re implementing this system in HubSpot, I recommend creating not just an MQL Type content property, but also a date stamp assigned in a workflow for each property so that when you analyze the data you’ll be able to easily track these efforts over time.

Create an MQL workflow

So far we’ve talked about activities that focus on sales feeling confident in the quality and expectations of leads that marketing is generating. It’s just as important that marketing feels confident that sales will be held accountable to appropriately follow up with these hard-won leads. An MQL workflow does just this.

Image Credit: InsightSquared

If you want some extra help doing this, we’ve written about how to setup an MQL workflow in HubSpot, here.

With all this in place, document these steps in a service-level agreement (SLA) that addresses both marketing’s responsibility to deliver qualified leads and sale’s ability to close them. This document becomes the cornerstone of the agreement between your teams to deliver on their individual goals and work together so that the company meets its’ goals.

Hold cross-team meetings to maintain alignment

It’s important to bring your team together frequently to review goals, discuss challenges and continue to refine the machine that’s being built. At the startup stage, this meeting can be interactive and foster dialogue and discussion from the group. As your marketing and sales teams grow, this meeting will become a more fast-paced, high-level overview of progress towards goals, and the SLA will ensure ongoing alignment and transparency.

Finally, on a monthly basis, highlight the percent of revenue that was sourced or influenced by marketing. If there’s one number that will most clearly illustrate to your sales team the value that marketing is bringing to the table, this is it.

Align sales and marketing at your company

This may sound like a lot of work, and it is, but it is also the foundation of your future growth. Creating this system and fostering a data-driven marketing and sales culture from an early stage will pay dividends down the road as you’re able to make more educated decisions and grow faster.

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort,” Paul. J. Meyer, founder of the Success Motivation Institute

The Most Effective Content Marketing Tactic

When you think of content marketing, do online tactics come to mind—e-books, white papers, emails and more? If so, it’s not surprising. That’s where a lot of the marketing action is today.

Given our focus on all things web-related, it may come as a surprise to discover that the number one content marketing tactic is good old-fashioned in-person events. That’s according to research conducted by the Content Marketing Institute and their partners. When they asked B2B marketers what their most effective content marketing tactics were, in-person events topped the list. Seventy-five percent of survey respondents said event marketing was the most effective form of content marketing.

While in-person events are impactful, they are also a significant investment. So, how do you ensure a positive return on investment?

Plan for Success

It starts with a dose of planning. Yes, I know you’re likely already spending a lot of time on everything that’s highly visible at your events—the booth, giveaways, entertainment, food, drink and presentation. After all, you want to wow your prospects and customers and outshine your competition at the tradeshow or conference.

At many companies, event planning is all about the sizzle. But who is taking care of the steak—your plan for lead generation and turning prospects into clients?

Think about who you want your company representatives to interact with at the event. You may have some ideal prospects and key customers with whom you’d like to deepen your relationship. So don’t just hope that they stop by your booth. Be proactive. Send an invitation. How you send it is up to you. You might choose email, or to make a bigger impact, you could send a physical letter. Since so few companies are sending snail mail anymore, it may give you an advantage.

Don’t rely on the written invitation to do all the heavy lifting. Reinforce it with a phone call. This one-on-one interaction gives you the opportunity to have a conversation, find out the prospects’ needs, explain the relevance of meeting with you at the event and book appointments. Don’t forget, it’s not only the impressive booth, well-catered cocktail party and engaging presentation that make you stand out, it’s also adding a human touch.

When you plan ahead, think beyond the event. Be prepared for post-event follow-up. Research shows that the vendor who responds first is going to attain 35 to 50% of the sales. Hopefully, you are going to collect a lot of leads. What do you plan to send them? If you want to send an e-book, white paper, brochure or newsletter, you’ll need to create it before the event to ensure fast response.

Follow Up or Fail

If you lack a systematic plan for lead follow-up, all your hard work could go to waste. Surprisingly, the statistics show that salespeople don’t follow up with 70 to 80% of leads. That’s because they want the leads that are ready to buy. Realistically, that may only be a small portion of the names you collected at the event. You will need to nurture many of the leads before they are ready to be turned over to a salesperson.

Think about what you need to know about each of your leads to follow up effectively, making sure that you provide relevant information. To do so, you may need to ask questions at the event and tabulate the answers. If you need detailed information, put together an attendee questionnaire that will enable you to gather it in an organized way.

Your first step after or during the show is to prioritize your leads. You should have a sense of whether they are hot, lukewarm or cold. Sort them to make sure you follow up first on those that are furthest along in the buying journey.

Determine how you plan to nurture your leads. It likely will take a series of steps, each contingent on prospect needs and where they are in the buying cycle. So, decide how you’re going to use emails, phone calls, content, sales calls and more to educate and convert leads.

To learn more about getting the most out of trade shows, conferences and other B2B events get your free white paper: “The Complete Guide to Calculating and Maximizing Event ROI.”

MicroConf is the conference for self-funded startups and single founder software companies. That's why Steli gave a talk at MicroConf on how to build your own SaaS sales machine if you don't have piles of money from venture capitalists lying around.

In this video, you're going to learn the core principles of selling, how to write emails that get opened, why 90% of sucess is in the follow-up, and a ton of other useful things!

Prefer to listen?

Here's the audio-only version of this video:

Transcript

All right, let's talk about sales. So, first off there is a little bit about my background for people who have never heard of me. How many people don’t know who the fuck I am? Just, raise your hands. Be proud. That is the right level of humble pie that I need to start a talk. Nobody gives a shit about you. Nobody knows who you are. That is good. There's still a lot of work to be done. So, for you people let me tell you just a little bit about myself so you know why you should care, listen to me or why you should not.

I have been an entrepreneur my whole life. I'm completely unemployable. I have no credentials. I have no college education. I do not have anything else. I am originally from Greece. I was born and raised in Germany. I have built multiple businesses there and they were all self-funded.

I was just about to say bootstrapped but Hiten is kicking my ass every time that I say that. Self-funded is the new term. It was all self-funded businesses. It was eight years ago that I sold everything that I had. I bought a one way ticket and I moved to Silicon Valley to start my first technology company.

How ElasticSales turned into Close.io

It was five years into that when it turned into a massive catastrophe. There are a lot of entertaining stories about that. Some are public that I can share if you are curious. But, what I did-three years ago I started a business called ElasticSales. At ElasticSales what we did there basically [sic] offered SaaS businesses,  specifically venture backed SaaS businesses in Silicon Valley. It was an outsourced sales team on demand.

We would sell on behalf of you to customers and ramp up your sales process for you. We did this for about 200 venture backed start-ups and we became one of the best kept secrets in Silicon Valley because no one knew of our existence but we knew everyone was doing in the B2B space.

And with a lot of companies that you know that became real big SaaS success stories, some little part of that success we had a role in terms of their sales scale, growing and moving really fast. So, we got a lot of exposure to everything that works, doesn't work, how it works and from the get-go from day one we built an internal little tool called Close.io. A little sell software tool to allow us to do better, close more deals, make more sales and ultimately avoid the pain of using Salesforce or any other CRM that was out there at the time all day long. So, we built a little internal tool. We never intended to release that tool.

We are kind of an interesting case study in the sense that we went from a consulting and outsourcing business, a services business, to a pure software business. The whole thing with us is that we did not do this on intention. There was no strategy where we said, “We want this sweet SaaS money. We want this scalable stuff.” What happens was that we built this internal tool. It started to become better and better.

Then it was eventually our salespeople would show our sales software to their salespeople friends and go, "ha ha. You can't have this. This is only for us." Then we started getting salespeople giving us sales calls trying to sell us on the idea of us selling them our sales software. Once that happens it is a pretty strong signal in the market. Then what happened was that a small group in our team started lobbying for us to release the sales software. It was every single day.

I did not want to do it. I knew that we had an amazing product and eventually we would release it but I was so busy running a services business that was growing that I really did not want to launch another business in parallel. It is a rule that is always true which is the person with the highest level of clarity always wins. I was not as clear and not wanting to launch that this person in the team wanted to launch it.

So, at breakfast, lunch, dinner and every fuck meeting. It was every fuck day that person would be like, "When will you release the software? We need to launch the product. When are we launching the product? We need to launch the product. When are we launching the product?" Until eventually I said, "Oh, fuck it. This is a room. You have four people. There is a three months launch. I don't want to hear fuck anything about it anymore." He was like, "all right." I do not see him for three months and they released the software.

As an entrepreneur, I have been wrong my entire life about everything. I can't think of one time in my life when I was not wrong about something. Once in a while, very rarely I'm really happy that I am wrong. This is one of those cases. I thought it would take forever for us to scale up to the revenue level that we are at in the services business.

It did not. Close.io was a pretty big success from the get-go. We are a very profitable business today. If you are doing inside sales to big companies you want to check out Close.io. Check it out and let me know what you guys think. Enough of that. I don't just release sales software and give sales advice but I also launched baby boys.

So, on the left. That is my oldest one. We launched him two and a half years ago. On the right from your perspective, it’s my youngest one, we launched him year ago. We launched, it was more of my wife [sic] who is the technical founder here. I am more of a support and business development role in the whole relationship. But, those are my bosses. The reason why do what I do and I need to show them off whenever I can.

Sales is simple—but too many people mess it up

All right, let's first talk about salespeople. So most of you when you think about sleazy douchbaggy salespeople you think about someone who looks like me right now. Rob he saved me. I had one more button up. I have the whole douchbag look. But, the role model that I want you to have when it comes to sales is this guy.

This is one of my favorite salespeople. Make no mistake in no room that Patrick ever walks in people say “This must be a sales guy.” Right? Nobody whatever mistaken for that but he is a fuck sales hustler. I fucking love Patrick because he understands a few things and if you understand these things you are a dangerous when it comes to sales.

He understands how to sell based on value. He understands how to not fizzle around about features, pricing and cost. He understands what to truly know what the values he can provide and then refocus the conversation on that. "Can I help you fix something? What is the value that it represents in your life, let's talk about that." Because that completely changes the equation and re-frames the conversation completely differently.

The other thing that he understands is to truly qualify people. This is something that engineers really know well which is to ask questions until you arrive at a level of understanding that needs the least amount of interpretation possible. So, a salesperson when they are on a call and somebody goes, "Well, we need email marketing system integrating with your tool. Do you have that?" The salesperson goes, "Yes, we do email." Or it could be that the salesperson will goes, "Well, what do you need to buy our product?" And the prospect goes, "Well, we really need something that does email marketing as part of your CRM sales solution."

The salesperson will hang up and go to the engineer room and go, "Hey, do we do email marketing? Can we do email marketing? What can we do in email marketing?" Then the engineer goes, "what do you mean by email marketing? Is it a fucking newsletter? Is it a drip email? What is it? Email marketing is everything and nothing." The salesperson says, "I do not know. I will call the customer again."

Then he calls the prospect and says, "What exactly did you mean with email marketing?" The prospect says, "Well, we want to do drip emails based on the actions that people would do on the website." The salesperson that said, "Okay, let me go and check with my engineers to see if we can do that." The salesperson will say to the engineer, " I now know what they need. They need drips based on actions that people take on our website."

"What kind of actions? What is the exact thing that they need? What are they using today? Why? What kind of technology do they need? Do they had engineers on the team? Like, I can't give you any answer on that question because it is to generic", says the engineer.

Which is why engineers are also good at sales. If they truly understood the power that they had. If you know how to ask questions to arrive at truly understanding the prospect and all that you have to do at the end of that is to decide if I can help this person or not. If the answer is yes, then you just have to tell them. "Based on everything that you said I can fuck help you. Here is how." That is it. That is all the sales education that you need in order to be really effective.

The problem is that most people do not ask the questions. Most people start selling. They say, "We can do this. We can do this." They were throwing darts into the dark and hope that something will stick. They say, "Hopefully, if I say 20 positive things about my product something is going to be in there that they like." That is a waste of time. That is really bad salesmanship. You can be an amazing salesperson by asking the right questions, qualifying people correctly and then if you can help them you tell them. If you cannot help them. Say, "I cannot help you." That is it.

One thing that Patrick learn recently made him even more dangerous is how to follow up. I'm going to speak about that later on. But, that is my religion. That is probably the single highest advice that I give.

Today it's almost daily that somebody sending me an email telling me how they closed deal, raised a round, got press, got married because they follow up indefinitely until they got a result. That is until they got a yes, or no. Patrick sends me emails once in a while that like say, "Oh, shit Steli Efti. I just closed this deal because I followed up several times." I go, "Oh my gosh. Sick" He is my favorite.

Whenever I get an email from Patrick I'm so excited because it is going to be some deal that he closed or some fucking awesome stuff that he's done. He is not your atypical salesperson. So, you can be really dangerous in sales without fitting the mode of what you're preconceived notion of what sales really entails.

Content is also for sales

Right, let's get more tactical. So, they are couple of things. I'm going to try to share as many tactics when it comes to you if you are small team how to build a sales machine. One thing quickly to touch on is that content is not just for marketing. Content is also for sales. If you content right, it can be your invisible salesperson in the cloud.

I was not aware of this myself. I always thought of content as an marketing activity. All the marketing that we do at Close.io is content marketing. We out teach our competitors because we think we know more-we do not think, let me not try to attempt to be humble. We know more about sales than any other company in our space. So, all we do is that we try to educate people on sales.

The one thing that I did not realize is that I thought that-we do that so that people know about us. They build a relationship with us, then they discover our software and they become customers. The one thing that we learned is that a lot of our customers buy our software. They make a buying decision of the software before they know if the software can do everything that they want based on the content that we give them.

So, a person will sign up for a trial. They will get the email course that I have. They will read a few blog posts. Within the first two days they would decide-that person will decide that these people really fuck know sales. So, I want to really know sales so I should buy from them. It really bumps our conversion numbers dramatically up in terms of our trial to customers.

The other thing that is awesome about content is that it compounds. It took me two years to figure this out. Just like SaaS revenue you start and it is fuck nothing. You do it consistently for two years or 20 for some people. That little, little shit compounds to a really massive amount of traffic, customers and sales. Think of content as potentially as salespersons. The content can convince people of buying the software. That you are an expert. Your company and your product is really the best tool to help them solve a certain problem.

Three steps to writing emails that get opened

Let's talk a little bit more about sales emails. I know that you guys know shit about email. So, I'm going to try to be focused on the things that might have not being covered as much. To me, emails are simple. It is a three-step process. It is really a fourth but whatever. Three steps. Someone needs to open that fucking email, read it and respond. That’s it. That is how I approach emails.

Write the right subject line

The first is I think what do I need to write to make somebody open that email? Now, you know a lot about subject lines, right? The subject line should not be all caps. It should not read like it is written to a-it is not a newsletter or something. If it reads like it comes from a human being to a human being it is going to get a lot higher open rates.

Some hacks here, sometimes I see people get better open rates when they have a misspelling in the subject line. It is crazy. If you do something that is weird or wrong it seems more human. So, people will respond to it with more humanity and open it.

Then the other thing that you need to be concerned about is that you can do a lot of hacks to make people open your email but then you want to deliver what you promise. It's about starting the relationship on the right foot. Some people asked me, "What is the most effective sales email line that you've ever gotten?" I ask, "What is effective? What is the definition of effective?" Well, if you open it immediately. I want to tell you the most effective email in terms of me opening in it immediately was a subject line that started, “really disappointed."

I open my email box and there are 150 emails. I zoom in instinctively to the title I'm really disappointed. I am the CEO of a business. I am like, "What did we fuckup? Did I fuck? I am like what the fuck." I instantly open that with a very high level of intensity and urgency. The email continues-it started by saying, "I'm really disappoints" and then it continues, "that we were not able to connect yet. Our outsourced blah blah blah…" Then I go, "mother fuck" I'm like, "Jesus, that is brilliant. My gosh. That is a great subject line." Delete. Then I say, "Fuck you, if you want to trick me."

Somebody else had a re- as if this is a reply to an email chain. They did a re- sign but it is really a trick. I was like yes delete. Yes you get me to open but that is not all there is. But you do want to do things. Not capitalize, write like human beings and short is good. Quick question is not deceiving if you really have a question. If you have any quick question subject then your entire email is a pitch then you are an a*hole. You promised me something that you did not deliver.

Every sentence is a pitch

The next thing is that I need to read the shit. So, here is the way that I think about copy in general but email copy in specific. Every sentence is a pitch for why I should give a fuck and read one more sentence in this.

Now, there are exceptions to this rule. If your email is just two sentences it is harder not to read than it is to read. Reading your email is less work for me than having the cognitive energy to decide not to read these five letters. So, when something is short, people will just read it.

But, in general if you have a little bit more content then you need to understand that you can't bury the lead. You can't put the most important shit at the bottom. You have to start with it. After every sentence at the end I need to go, "and why should I waste one more second of my life with this email."

One call to action is all you need

Then I need a response. So, you need one clear call to action. You need just one. You guys know this. Don't ask me for three things. Do not have a pdf attached, a PowerPoint, 12 links that I should click and a question that you have for me. Don't make me work too hard. That is simple stuff.

You're not sending enough emails

For people that have SaaS products and people that are in trials, you are not sending people enough email. Here is the deal. Whatever amount of email that you sent multiply it by two and by the end of today, this conference was fucking worth it. If a certain amount of people don't think that you are spamming them, then you not sending enough email. You are not. You are not.

Don't optimize your business on not offending anyone on this planet. If I get three out of 10 people to love me and I get them successful. And seven out of those 10 people to hate me than I am okay with that. I would rather have that than 10 people who are equally indifferent about me and I have made no difference in their lives. This is not a popularity contest. It is about creating by value.

So, send more email. In our trials, people get seven emails during the 14 day trial. Those emails are all personalized. It is going to be like an account manager that reaches out and says, "Hey, I am your account manager if you have any questions let’s chat." Then a day later you will get an email from me saying, "Hey, I'm the founder of the business. I want to walk in you. If you ever need anything." Then two days later, based on what you do or you don't do with the product you get a few emails. Two days before the trial is over, you will get an email that will ask you, "If you want an extension.  We should chat."

At some point I will send you a really fuck email that tells you the entire history of humanity with parts of it as our story. It is a fuck humongous email and it converts really well for us. We send a ton of email in different formats. The reason why we do that is because we want to communicate with you. We want to start building a relationship. We take it is our responsibility to make you engaged during the trial. All that we try to do with the emails is to get people to respond.

We built a sales machine where we send a shit time of email and all that we want you to do is respond. The moment that you respond you are now part of our sales funnel. We would jump on a call-maybe we won't reply to your email, if you think it is a big enough opportunity. If you responded with three questions, the next second you're getting a phone call from us. We'll answer those questions on the phone. Send emails that are always personalized.

You guys know that there are some hacks. I don't even know if I want to do this anymore. They used to be a time and some people used to do this successfully. It is where you do automated emails. You can send it via iPhone or something at the bottom. Again it gets response rates up because it makes it more human. It makes it more real. It is a little bit of a "gray thing". But that is it. Most of this shit you guys should already know. So, cold emails. For people that don't do SaaS trials. If you want to start cold emailing people that don't already know about your business, there's a book called Predictable Revenue. It is written by a friend of mine named Aaron Ross. Somebody here knows it. They gave it two thumbs up.

Predictable Revenue, the book for enterprise sales

If you really want to do enterprise sales, you should buy this book and read it. Just buy Predictable Revenue and read it. He developed this process where if you really wanted to go up into the enterprise he would try to find somebody that is a few levels above his buyer. Instead of trying to convince the buyer directly in the enterprise. He would go to levels above the buyer asking for a referral down. So, it would be like, "Hey, CEO of the business. I am doing this one sentence thing that is really valuable. Can you point me in the right direction. Who in your organization is the right person to chat briefly about this?"

Then at 30% to 40% of the time if you write that email correctly the CEO doesn't give a shit, so they would just forward it to the right person which will then gets you a call. It does not mean that they will buy but you would know who the right person is and that person will respond to your call. It is a much better process to go from the top down versus the bottom up. That is something worth exploring. That is if you're doing enterprise sales and cold emails.

90% of winning is following up

So let's talk about follow-ups. This is my favorite thing. Winning-90% of the time when I win it is because I follow up when no one else is. I have a very simple follow-up philosophy in life. I never ever, ever, ever stop following up until I get a response. [Clap] You are my man. You said it at the right point. Yes, I get all the love. That is awesome. Here is the thing. Here is the basic philosophy.

Most people think that silence equals rejection. And that’s wrong. It is as simple as that. I am not a mind reader. If we had a positive interaction we have a call, a meeting or something and you say, "Yes, your product looks really good and I really want to test it. I really want to have a call or something", then you go silent on the me, I am not going to make up a story for why that is.

I send you one email and I don't hear anything. I send you a second and I do not hear anything. Then a third email and I don't hear anything. I'm not then going to go, "He, really hates me. He thinks I'm ugly." I'm not going to make up stories for what has happened. I'm just going to keep following up. My assumption is always going to be that you got busy. You have another life and I'm not the center of the universe. You got busy. My job is to manage this relationship. If it is important to me is my responsibility to keep up, follow-up until something happens. There are many stories for me.

We raised a shit ton of money from a billionaire investor. It took only 48 follow-up emails after he said yes to meeting us to then get the meeting. I got a press article the other day on Tech Crunch. It only took nine months and 12 emails to different people pitching that article until somebody responded saying, "Yeah, this is great." I am like, "No, shit it is great. I know. I've been pitching it to you for nine months."

There is magic that happens when you follow up. That is where everyone else drops the ball. You are the only person left in the race. The race starts really crowded. Everyone wants to get started, show up, do the first pitch, send the first email, have the first call and everybody-it is so crowded. It is so competitive. Then after a little while when requires a second or third follow-up, you are alone now. You can walk as slowly as fuck since you are going to win.

Every day I get a case study. I'm going to write a specific book just about follow-up. Trust me this shit works. Just keep following up relentlessly. Magic will happen in your life. This only one thing that kills companies. It is not success or failure. It is not a "yes" or "no" that is going to kill you in sales. The thing that is going to kill you is the maybe. It is the I don't know what the fuck is going on with this deal. That is what fucking companies, careers and lives. That is what I fucking hate. I can deal with a no. If you reply and tell me to fuck off, I will leave you alone. That is a result. I can deal with the results. But, when there's nothing and I have to come up with stories that is where really bad things happen.

The break up email

I'm going to give you a hack that speaks against following up endlessly. But, if you want to do follow-up at scale then it might be a tactic that you want to use. It is called the breakup email. So, here is what you do. A lot of big companies do this really successfully. You send a bunch of emails and you don't get any response. Eventually, instead of doing what I say with big important things-investors, large accounts, press or whatever it is that you want to do. What you do at some point is you send a breakup email.

The breakup email basically says, "Hey, I've been trying to get in touch with you for fuck ever.  I'm just going to have to assume that you don't care about this. I'm going to take you off my list. I'm going to delete you from the list of people that I need to get in touch with. Here is all my contact information. If you ever want to talk about this I'm excited. Goodbye forever from my side." That email is incredibly effective. I will give you two quick examples.

This is from Hubspot. So, I got four emails from Hubspot salespeople once a signed up for the trial.

The first four were all like, "Hey, I'm your account manager. Hey, how can I help you." The third email was like, "Hey, I have a discount coupon and only have two. One is already spoken for." Bullshit whatever… Like it was all kinds of shit.  I always was like archive and archive. Then I received this email which was basically saying that I'm taking you off of my list. I responded to it. I was like, "No, no, no… I am interested. I just did not have time." If you email me at Steli @ Close.io, I will give you the slides and everything else that you want except my children.

So, the other thing is-this is another email. This is from Trunk Club. It is an end consumer product. It is the exact same fucking thing and timing. First it said, "Hey, I am your stylist. I am your account manager. Hey we had this discount card. Blah blah blah… This and that." I did not reply. The fourth email is like, "Goodbye from us." I responded to that email. It is a very, very effective method. If you take something away from people they will snap into action. Even if it is that you will stop hearing from me. They will say, "No, no, no. I want to keep hearing from you."

Demo better, close more deals

The other thing that I want to highlight. So, this is about emails. Now let's talk a little bit about you demonstrating your product. If you are B2B and you have to do sales calls and demos. These are few things that you need to do.

Demonstrate value, not features

Stop wasting everybody's time. Your product demo is a demonstration of value, not the features. It is a sales call, not a training call. I see this all of the time. 60 minute demos where the person goes, "Hey, I'm now going to show you everything that I know about my product." Then they will go into details that are painful. For example saying, "Here is where you can update some information. Let me do that." Then they will update the information right in front of you. Then they will also push the button that says update. They will say, "Ppdate." Next, the spinning wheel spins. Then the'll was say, "Now, the information is updated."

Really? Do I need to sit here and watch you click the fucking update button? Is that really what you want to demonstrate? Just get to the fuck point. Qualify me, understand what I care about, what is the problem that I have, what is that thing that I need and give it to me. Demonstrate how your product is going to deliver the value. How it is going to be the solution to my problem and then stop. Demos need to be seven, eight, nine minutes and then you give them a few minutes for questions. That's it.

They will not remember anything, anyways if you do anything that is longer than 10 minutes demonstrating a product. Don't "clickety click" around. Just go, "This is the page where you do this. This is the page where you solve this problem. And here's the thing that is going to change your life. Does that sound fair? What are your questions?" That is it. Don't go into, "Now, let me going to settings to change the avatar." I'm like what the fuck. I see this consistently. The CEOs and people who are very successful, very junior people and everybody thinks that it must be 60 minutes of me talking. Don't do that.

Be prepared for when shit hits the fan

Also when something goes wrong and it always goes wrong, don't be rattled by that shit, you should expect it. Something will go wrong. Here is what we do when things go wrong and we do a product demo. We go, "This is a perfect opportunity to show you how to deal with problems." So, I got an error message in the application. What should you do when this happens? You go up and to the right of the screen in Close.io then you click on support chat. Do you know that the chat goes directly into our engineering room. Let’s do that together right now. Do you see that chat room. 'Hey engineers I am doing a demo with this company and we just got this error message how do we fix this?'"

That will demonstrate how to solve the problem versus being like, "Oh, it is an error message. This never happens. Let me refresh the app. Oh, shit I just lost my internet. Uhh...well...let me call AT&T while you wait or Comcast to try to fix this fucking problem." No, you just need to move on with life, expect it, turn around and embrace the shit that happens. Then go on to say when shit happens this is how you deal with it. If you are Comcast, call us and we will call them for you. It is whatever that you want to do but don't get rattled by that. Here is some more advice.

How to build a sales team for free

How am I doing on time can somebody give me some kind of approximation?

Oh, that is great because I have a great story that I want to end on. The much time that I can get for that the better. Alright, so let me finish with a last thought that I think hopefully is useful for some of you guys. That is how to build a free sales team. Build a massive sales team without hiring anyone or paying anyone anything. So, that might be interesting for some solo founders. Here how I want you to think about a virtual sales team. Anyone and everyone that you know are now part of your sales team.  I am now part of your sales team if you are smart enough to make me so. Here is what I mean by that.

I have two older brothers. My middle brother when he was 5 years old came home one day. We had a neighbor and she was there at our place having dinner with us. Our neighbor asked my brother. Hey, Nick do you have a girlfriend yet? My mom and her were laughing. You would expect- my brother is pretty shy and you would expect him to be super – that why she asked, embarrassed and turn red in the face. My brother was like, "Yes." My mom and the neighbor was surprised. They were like, "really? You have a girlfriend? What is her name." My brother is like, "I have four." Our neighbor is like, "You have four girlfriends. Really?"  Then my mom was like, "Wait, do they know that they are your girlfriends?" My brother is like, "No."

This is exactly the same deal here. So, your customers can be your extended sales family. They actually have to. Every person that buys from you could be part of your sales family. They could be your lead generation team. Here is what I mean by that. Ask for referrals. When I close a deal, I’ll close the deal and I will go, "Now, that we got this amazing amount of value that is going to be traded on both ends who else do you know that you like that should know this exist?" Here is what happens. It is 9 out of 10 times that person will go, "I need to think about this." This is where most people leave it alone. You go, "Okay". That is back to the old thing. You do not want to be an ass. You do not want to inconvenience people.

But, this is business. It is not about being liked. So, here's what I do when someone tells me that I need to think about it. I am like, "I want you to think about it every day, any day and for the rest your life but just for right now one name. It is just one person who you really like. Come on help me out here." Out of the nine people that said no, four or five will say, "All right this is a name." It is just because I miss them one more time.

The rest will say in a nice or not so nice fashion will tell me, "Really. fuck off. I said that I need more time." Then I will back off. I would say that I would not be doing my job if I did not bother you just one more time. "That is fine. I'm totally excited about it."

Once you get a referral from a customer. You need to get referrals from customers. Once you get it and it works out and they become customers. The moment that they become customers you need to ask them, "Who do we need to thank for this? Who do we have to thank for this deal happening?" They always look at you like, "Do I have to thank you?". I say, "No. Who got us in touch in the first place? Bob, right?" They will say, "Oh, yeah.". Then I say, "Can you do me a favor? Let's write Bob a thank you note right now so that he knows you and I appreciate that. I'm writing it right now please do the same." The moment that the initial referral gets two emails from both sides saying that this was amazing. Do you know what happens? You get more fucking referrals.

Now, you can turn this into an engine, a process something that can help grow sustainably and repeatedly your business versus something you ask in a shy fashion and you run away when they cough or something. So referrals get you more great leads from your best customers. If there's a customer that you do not like, don't get referrals from them. He will get you more that type of customer. But, if you are really successful customer you can get more of these referrals from them.

Also, when you are trying to close really big deals, you should use your customers as a virtual salesperson that helps you close the deal at the final stages, not at the beginning. You don't want to burn them out as a resource. But, when things are really hard and eventually you want to get in touch with the customer that you love and have a great relationship with.

You go, "Hey, it will be awesome. I'm trying to close this big company and I know they totally respect and love you. They appreciate you there. They are very aware of your brand and everything that you guys have accomplished. It would mean so much if you can send them a quick email letting them know how your experience was." Or asking them, "Would it be fine for me to put them in touch with you? You could just jump on a five-minute call and tell them how your experience was authentically."

You do not tell them to say nice things. You know they are going to if you choose the right customer. You just tell them can you make yourself available to help me with this. If you do that correctly it is going to make all the difference in closing really big deals.

The other thing is if you do it correctly and you don't burn your customers out on this. Only do it when you think you can close the deal if the customer gives a really strong referral. If you do that the customer will get more and more positive reinforcement that they are on a winning team every time they talk to a prospect.

A week later, you go back to them and you go, "Hey, they became a customer." When they become a customer you tell them, "Do you remember when you talk to John who is a customer of ours. Was that helpful to you? If it was helpful could you send them a quick thank you email telling them that you are a customer now too." All of a sudden they are on team winning. They are like, "yeah, I want to talk to more people about why we're winning with this product because every time that I talk to somebody they turn into a customer." That is a great feeling. You need to be really resourceful and turn anyone and everyone that you know as part of your extended sales family.

Now that you know me and you have my email address any time that you are in negotiation with a big deal, small deal or any deal and you need help or advice or anything else then send me an email. What is the worst thing that could happen? I will ignore you. It is purposely because I want to see if you will follow up. Then you send me another email. Then I will go, "Fuck yeah."

You are all the kind of people that I cannot say no to. I say no to so many awesome people. I say no to investors every day, "No, fuck you." I say no to the partnerships from a big corporation. "No fuck you" but, when an entrepreneur is like, "I struggle can I get your time." It is hard to say no because all my people and I have been that person. So, make everyone and anyone a part of your extended sales family. Here's a story that I want to end with.

The millionaire junior sales intern

So, this is Flavio. He is a really good friend of mine. Flavio is originally from Switzerland. He is a computer science graduate, entrepreneur and he built a few start-ups that did not go anywhere. Then he built one startup and Switzerland that he sold for millions of dollars. He is today what you would call a growth hacker. He is an engineer and he can code. But he is more in the marketing side of things.

The other day he came to a sales workshop that I gave. He was setting up the camera and I was joking that, "This is the most overqualified cameraman." He is the only guy in this room that sold a company for millions and millions of dollars. That is how I roll. At the end of the sales thing he comes to me and he goes, "You know what I'm really on this sales shit. I should do a sales internship with you. Man, I should just-can I be your junior sales guy for a month?" I was like, "That is a pretty cool idea. Let's sleep over this see if we’re still excited about it tomorrow."

So, the next day we go, "Yeah, all right would do this. Hustle internship. A multimillionaire startup founder is going to fucking intern as a junior sales guy for me." It was kind of cool. All right let's do it. I really like him and we are really good friends. So, he starts his internship. On day one he starts making calls by calling new sign-ups for Close.io. He welcomed them to the trial, qualifying them and all that good stuff.

I hear a few of his calls and do you know when you had an expectation, you trusted somebody deeply and then your heart is broken. You know then it was the wrong decision. I hear him on the first two calls and internally I am dying. Externally I am saying "Good job buddy." Internally I am fucking dying. I am like, "Oh my gosh he is so bad. How can he be so bad at this? I have talked to him before." He is a loud guy so how is he so nervous? He was horrible on day one.

Then three days later I was like "Oh, my gosh I can't believe how good he became. I can't believe how fucking awesome he is on the phone." He had the biggest turnaround from horrible to amazing in just a few days. It was exceptional. The cool thing is is that he credits all of this to me. It is good. I have one guy was running around telling every founder he knows that he needs to be an intern with our company. So, he became really good really fast but he is a really cool example-and what I want to share is his attitude that you should apply to your life and your business.

So, it is date eight on his hustle internship. He calls new trials. Our trials go on for 14 days. He calls these people. The purpose of the call is to help them with answers, figure out why they came to us and what they're looking for. To see if there is a real opportunity that we need to focus on. If they are the wrong type of customer then we need to point them in a different direction. It is all of that good and early stuff.

So, he calls the new sign up in the morning. He qualifies them. He goes through all of the questions and figures out that, "Yes I think we would really be the right solution for you guys." No, sorry this is not even a trial. This is somebody who filled out the contact form. So, we got a contact request about some information about our product and he calls them to qualify them. They're not sign up for trial yet. He calls them and he qualifies them.

At some point they start off with objections. They say, "Well, what about this. What about that? Well Salesforce has all of these integrations." He says, "Why do you need integrations? What kind of integrations? How do you do things today?" They are like, "Yes. We're not really using integrations but eventually we are like five salespeople and if you want to scale to 5,000 then we worry about this specific integration."

Then at some point he goes, "All right buddy. There's a reason why this is not call fuck around.io but Close.io." If you want to fuck around go to Salesforce but if you want to close fucking deals let's move on with life and not worry about these things. The person on the other line starts laughing. They say, "You're so funny… Blah blah blah. You know everything there is to say. Okay, we’re going to do it."

I heard that line and we all got really entertained at that the company. We tried to buy fuck around.io. They did not sell it to us. The Indian Ocean thought it was probably improper. They’re going to do some bad things on the URL website. They said no to us trying to buy. So, we had a lot of fun in the company.

He said, "This is a cool line to say." He had another call scheduled with a co-founder of that guy. So, they jump in on of the call and he does a demo with them. He does a demo. He asks a bunch more questions. At the end of the call he goes, "I see you still have not started the trial. Start the trial guys. Let's get going. I really want to champion you. I really want to have you start making calls, closing deals. Let's do this." They are like, "Yeah let's sign up. Within the next hour and if we have questions will get back to you." Then he hangs up.

9 PM and we go for dinner. We come back to the office and we are chitchatting. He goes, "Oh, let me check if they signed up for the trial." He checks it and goes, "Motherfuck they still haven't signed up for the trial." I am like, "Yeah, some people are blah blah blah" I'm the aggressive salesperson. The guy is like, "I am calling them." Then I'm like, "All right, I'm not going to say anything about this. If you want to call them then go ahead and call them."

So, he calls them. And he says, "Dude, I just came back in dinner with Steli the founder of the business. I told him all about you guys and there is no trial. Why have you not signed up a new for trial yet?" The guys goes, "You know we have these questions about the integration how to get all of the data migrated into it and really didn't want to use up a day of our 14 days free trial. We really want to wait until we had everything figured out." Then Flavio goes,"You can't stop fucking around can you?" The guy starts laughing. He goes, "Yeah, okay I'll sign up for trial."

Then Flavio goes, "Yes, you are right now. Let's do it." The guy goes, " Alright, I am signing up for a trial. Do you see it yet? " Flavio says, "Yes, I see your trial. Alright awesome. So, let's get your data." All of this is like being aggressive, flamboyant, a hustler and all of that. Now, he does everything that a normal salesperson would not do to make them successful. He does not go, trial is sign up my job is done. He goes, "Let's get your data into this." That guy does a data import and gets an error message. They do a screen share. Then Flavio debugs the shit. He gets the CVS file. He makes the columns correct. It takes 35 minutes. It is 10 PM at this point. 45 minutes. Now, that he gets all the data in. He goes, "All right buddy."

The guy clicks on a random lead and the one thing that we do really well is that we integrate email communication automagically. So, when you put in a lead in Close.io a few seconds later you see all of the historic email threads that you have with him in our product already. We can give you data analytics on that. So, the guy looks at a lead and sees the email threads pop up. He goes, "Wow. This is awesome."

He goes, "Do you think that is awesome? Let's do something else. Let us go to the lead page in Close.io. and now I want you to type this into the search bar. Show me all leads where the last thing that happens is they get email from us they did not reply and it has been two weeks ago. The guy selects all these options from the 500 leads it goes down the 43 leads. Flavio was like, "Do you know what this means?" He says, "I need to fucking get in touch with these 43 companies." Flavio was like, "Right. Are you ready to buy right now?" He says, "Yeah. fucking let's do it. Where can I put my credit card in?"

All of this magic and literally I was like, "Wow. This is awesome." One day closed turn around. They did not get to really trial anything. That's the magic when you start stop fucking around. Sales at the end of the day is you being the most decisive person in the room. Once you really are truly convinced that you can help them it is your responsibility. Is your duty. It should be your religion to make them successful with your product.

You want a hustle internship. Look to join a kick ass team. We are just six people. We are tiny. We are profitable. We are going insanely. We are kicking ass. Our nearest competitor is 150 people. We are kicking their ass every day. So, let us know. If you want me to be part of your extended sales family just shoot me an email at Steli@Close.io. Thank you so much.

Q&A

Audience: My name is William. I'm with GreenRatio. First of all thank you for advice. About 10 minutes ago, we had a potential trial customer that I just said, "Okay. I will give them another two weeks to wait for sign up." While you're talking I sent them an email and about two minutes later they signed up. So, thank you.

Steli Efti: This is why this conference is awesome. You're awesome. Send me an email about this.

Audience: I feel like I want to go and make a cold call or something. I'm all pumped up

Audience: Hi, Steli. Thanks for the talk and the motivation. I think everyone here needs to follow up more and I am the most guilty of this. I have six months old leads that I have not touched. But, anyway with that confession aside your title is-your presentation is titled Solo SaaS sales machine. How does this change for non-SAAS products. When you do not have trials. When you just have software. When you have volume licensing customers that you are nagging to buy your stuff. You're dealing with enterprise. You are doing with budgets and you know how it is. How does this change?

Steli Efti: Philosophically is the same thing. There are some different tactics. There are different things that you need to anticipate. You need to have a different customer lifetime value. You need to have a different approach and patience for how much time it takes to get something done. But, at the end of the day you are always selling to human beings. You always selling to people. There is no IBM that can buy software. There's only fucking people that are working for IBM.

So, once you understand that. Once you have made that into a shift. You realize the complexity that comes with enterprise sales is that you not just convincing one person. You need to understand their needs and their problems but also 20 people’s problems and needs. And they are all conflicting. They are all not perfectly aligned with the overall needs of the business. So, that a lot of technical differences but in approach and philosophy it is very similar stuff.

With enterprise sales, you have to follow up very religiously. You have to manage the entire process all the way to the pilot after the pilot and everything. You need to sell them what to do at every single step. When it comes to negotiation, you need to know what your price is and the value that you provide. A lot of these things are not universal but tactically maybe there are some differences.

Audience: Thank you very much.

Audience: I just want to echo you on persistence. I had a $20,000 deal close in six months. I emailed them every two weeks. It was finally closed and you're right on the money. Follow up. You get it done. Do not be afraid to follow up. Here’s a question. Do you map out your follow-up emails? Like you say, "Hey, here's email one, two, three and four or do you just fly.

Steli Efti: It depends. When it is automated you mapped out. So, for sign up for our trials there certain followers that we do and they are all automated and mapped out. Personally-if it is a big deal and I want to close the deal than I do not map out I just do it. I make sure that I have a system in place that reminds me that a week or two has passed and nothing is happening. So, I keep doing things.

There are all kinds of cool-on a blog, if you go to blog at Close.io this is a shit ton of information. Also, on follow-up you can put something fun in your follow up. I learned about using really funny gifs like a cookie monster that is waiting. After about four or five emails and you not getting anything back just send them a waiting cookie monster gif. People will respond. They will laugh. There's all kinds of cool little things that you can do. Yeah, I don't map it out. Whenever I do it personally I just do it by gut.

Audience: You mentioned making your customers part of the extended sales team and making them feel part of the sales team. Do you ever offer them any sort of reward or affiliate type of relationship?

Steli Efti: No. I personally do not pay for referrals. Now, that is different if you are an end-consumer application like Dropbox or a bunch of other apps that you can do some affiliate referral magical things. But in B2B when I'm talking to somebody that is the CEO of a business, I'm not going to offer them a small shit thing or little bit of money. It is going to devalue the referral.

Now, sometimes people ask me and they say, "Hey, if I bring you this customer will I get something?" I tell them once I got the customer, yes we can figure something out. But usually I do not offer something proactively. The value proposition here is that you're getting value. You are successful. Who else do you know that you like that should also know that this exists? That is you providing information and giving somebody something of value not being selfish. I find that will make less people excited about it.

Audience: Hi, Steli. It's good stuff. I'm curious what are your thoughts are for methodology for hiring salespeople. I have rejected salespeople before just to see if they actually follow-up.

Steli Efti: Nice. Yes that's not bad. So, the methodology for salespeople. This is actually interesting. I have a lot of content around sales hiring and I was surprised how many people were asking me about sales hiring stuff because it did not fit my solo sales machine theme of the presentation. I do have shit to give you. I have a lot of videos. I have a lot of presentations around that. But, my basic philosophy on the hiring part is that you cannot ask a question to know somebody is going to be good at sales.

It is like saying what is a question that you going to ask to know if somebody is a really amazing basketball player? Somebody yesterday told told me, "How tall are you?" That is not bad. But, that does not exist for sales. The thing is with sales it is a performance art. So, you need to see the person perform.

You need to make them sell and I will get that person-if somebody interviews with my company that person has to do sales calls on the first fucking day at that interview. They have to pitch our CTO. They have to pitch our intern. They have to pitch anybody and everybody. If they are not comfortable with that then that is fine. Everybody is nervous but I want to see how do they do with that? Do they have a little bit of a hustle? Do they like it or how do they overcome their nervousness?

The other thing is that when it comes to salespeople I interviewed a lot of salespeople. Some think I know a lot about sales and I would never say when I hire somebody in the first day I would never say that I hired an amazing salesperson. Because I don't know. It takes me three months to know someone if someone is going to be really good at sales. Because, what makes the difference from somebody being okay at sales and somebody being truly great is consistency.

Can they bring it every fucking day? That's a hard thing about sales. Every morning that you show up. It does not matter if you had a fight with your wife, your children hate you or whatever. You have to bring it today. It does not matter if yesterday was a great day. You have to bring it again today. It does not matter if it was a bad day. Every day, that is hard. Most people don't want to or cannot do this. The ones that do that you want to hold on and never ever in your life let go of them. These people are amazing.

Audience: If you don't get a response to the breakup email do you stop or keep going?

Steli Efti: Honestly, I'm not sending the breakup email. So, I don't know. I just showed you Hubspot and Trunk Club are doing it. If you ask me for my opinion and not my experience. The answer is no. If I tell you something in the email. Again, it is part of our relationship. If I say that you would never hear from me again then I usually will follow through. If I don't then I need to make it-now that I think about it I might follow through but it depends. It better be something good. Then I would have to start with the email saying, "All right, you got me. I was bluffing." This is all just a joke. If you have not seen the email don't read it. Now, that we got that out of the way let me tell you while I'm emailing you today." You need to address it. You can't just ignore the fact that you told me something then you’re acting completely different.

Maybe you sent me email and you say, "Listen, usually I would not break my promise but here is why I decide to do it today. I told you that I would never send you email. I am breaking the promise. I feel horrible about it. Let me tell you why I decided to do it anyway." Now, you have my attention. I'm intrigued. All that good shit but now you better have something very interesting to say. So, make sure that you can deliver on that promise. I don't have exact experience myself. The most companies that use the breakup email. They use it in an automated fashion for really high volume stuff when they cannot have every single rep do follow-ups indefinitely for every single lead. Any more questions?

Audience: So, just a scenario. There are 1,000 outbound emails with one of my salespeople. All were customized that converted into about 10 demos and 5 sales. So, churning through outbound emails and outbound leads pretty quickly and I'm wondering if I'm just doing it wrong. We should have started with just outbound calls first?

Steli Efti: So, you did 1,000 cold emails. Yourself? You said something that I did not catch the second part…

Audience: It turned into about 10 demos.

Steli Efti: Okay, 1,000 emails and 10 demos. Is that just you or how many people did it take to send 1,000 emails.

Audience: Just one guy.

Steli Efti: How long?

Audience: Using, Close.io btw.

Steli Efti: Okay, so you did it in bulk?

Audience: It was about a week long. It was 70 emails a day.

Steli Efti: So, it took you a week to send 1,000 emails to people. You got 10 demos out of it and 6 closings.

Audience: It was 5 closed so far.

Steli Efti: What is a deal worth to you?

Audience: It is about $3,000 a year at $297 a month.

Steli Efti: So, it is $,3000 a year. So, it is close to $20k a year worth of volume to you. Am I doing the math right? That is four weeks worth of work. Not bad? You are concerned that you are running through a 1,000 emails just to get to that.

Audience: Yeah, I am just concerned that it was a great pop because obviously that is a high closing ratio for just 10 demos. So, I think we are reaching only the most highly qualified or high intent people.

Steli Efti: Here is what I would do if I was you. Those six that bought. Did you ask them? Why did you open my email? Why did you respond to my email? How do you typically buy shit? Who else do you know that is similar to you that should know we exist. Did you really get more than just the sales but you got a lot and insights about the internals?

Audience: Yeah, we do a great job of understanding of what their intent was but we do not do a good job of saying like what are your other buying habits.

Steli Efti: Also, the thousand people were they also exactly the same or where they within a range?

Audience: It was in a range so we had some warm follow-up for previous product that was much higher. It was a $20,000 purchase price. We did some you utm parameters for all of that so our open rate was astronomically higher on the warm follow-up versus the cold follow-up.

Steli Efti: Did they turn into a high percentage of the sales?

Audience: Yeah, the warm was much much higher.

Steli Efti: How many of the six were from the warm?

Audience: Actually, the warm turned into more demos but it was actually 50-50...Cold versus warm.

Steli Efti: Here is what I would tell you. Not to make this too long. We can chat later. But you need to separate what you did with the warm list from the really cold list. Everything that you do in outbound you really need to segment and separate and to look at the results and in a fashion that is not convoluted and with a million different things happening at once. Then, because it took a lot of leads to get to these results. I think the results are good to begin with.

But, you do outbound stuff it is high volume which is the name of the game. Now, if there is hundreds or millions of these types of leads you might be in good shape. If there is 3,000 of them and you are in shit. You can’t do this more than another few weeks. So, 10,000. Now what you need to do is we need this segment-since it is a small list overall the complete list in humanity that you can reach is 5 or 10,000 people then you need to segment that list and write up a lot more targeted emails to these people. Do a lot more targeted things to get the maximum ROI.

Audience: What you think about switching tracks? When I follow up with people I found to send them something physically like when I can't get them to respond. But, all the other ways? What you think about sending-mailing out and things like that?

Steli Efti: There are a million creative things that you can do. I think of these things like black belt in follow-up. So, as long as you have not mastered the basics in follow-up which is to just send 30 follow-up emails. Don't worry about the magical things. You can do humor. You can do physical objects, gifts. You can send them articles but that is so overused.

You can send them articles. I get all these people sending me articles. I care not two shit about them. They say, "Oh, I found this article is really important for you." You can tell that they have done this at scale. If they truly knew who I am they would know that I do not give a fuck about. You need to be careful with these things but try to be helpful. Give a gift and there are creative things.

We got a billionaire to invest a long time ago. The 48 emails that it took for me to get that done. They were not creative emails at all. Here’s what they were: "Hey, another beautiful day in paradise. We released this new feature. When can we meet this Thursday or Friday at this and this time." I didn't hear anything so next week it said, "Hey, it's another beautiful day in paradise. Did you see this article about our company? When can we meet this Thursday. I have time from this and this time." I did not get anything back. "Hey, another beautiful day in paradise. Let me ask you can you do this Friday?" That is it.  

Then after 40 emails his reply was, "I'm so glad you follow-up. I'm so sorry there's a big thing overseas. I was traveling. Can you come tomorrow at 1 PM. I am going to be in the office in San Francisco." So, even in a lack of creativity you can get shit done. Don't be needy. Don't reference back to the original email, "I sent you three emails why have you not replied?” Don't make me feel bad or guilty. You will never get a reply from me. Just keep it clean, simple, friendly and move on with life. In terms of all the ninja stuff we can talk about that. I can send you some cool stuff.

I don't want people to start thinking, "Oh, this is my third follow-up email, I better send them a fucking book. That I know that they always want to read but their mom did not allow them. Like to say let me do some three months research to send them a gift. Just, keep it simple. Keep following up. If you follow-up at least 20 times with everyone magic will happen in your life. That's it. Thank you so much guys.

Transcript Audio End

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Sell it, baby! - Pioneers Festival 2015 startup sales talk
This is the talk for people who are ready to stop wasting time and start selling! Here's how to provide value to people you want to connect with, the secret phrase that will get anyone to help you, and why you should never take the first "no" as a no.

2015 saw huge leaps forward for sales and marketing professionals, and 2016 will see their roles continue to evolve. Last year, Mediafly introduced The Customer Interaction Platform because we believe that the in-person customer interaction demands a greater focus than ever before.

Buyers are changing, and rather than recoil at headlines like “Death of a (B2B) Salesman,” companies need to face that changing landscape head-on. I want to take a moment to look back at 2015’s industry trends, how we see the role of the B2B salesperson evolving into 2016 and beyond, and how companies can transform and not get left behind.

Enterprise mobility trending faster than expected

Click Image to View Full Infographic

I’ll start with technology because technological advances are the primary reason the sales function has changed as much, and as quickly, as it has. Above is an infographic Mediafly put together back in 2013. We revisited those figures last year and found that many of those predictions by experts had been more conservative than the reality. Some of the most telling stats from 2015:

• 80% of companies had BYOD policies or planned to have them within 2 years
• Total app downloads are projected to reach over 1 trillion by 2017
• Almost ¾ of the US workforce is expected to be mobile by 2020
• 2020 might see up to 75 billion connected devices

These all point to what you should already know: everything is mobile. The majority of companies are mobilizing content, and so merely mobilizing is no longer nearly enough.

Companies must also take steps to bridge the gap between the company’s value and what customers perceive that company’s value to be, essentially closing the vision-to-value gap. We call this process Sales Transformation, which companies of different sizes and across many industries are undertaking right now, and will continue to embrace in 2016. Whether companies are able to fully convey the value they hold for customers will be the deciding factor when faced with a sea of choices–not just being “mobile.”

Sales and marketing are growing closer–centered around the customer

Essential to demonstrating a company’s value to customers is how well sales and marketing professionals can come together to deliver the right message. CEB’s 2015 Sales and Marketing Summit brought industry experts, thought leaders and top sales and marketing professionals to Las Vegas in October, and, as in years past, sales and marketing alignment continued to be a big theme. This year, however, there was more talk of going above and beyond alignment, and as Tracy Eiler put it, marketing “extending the olive branch to sales.”

Brent Adamson and other speakers highlighted the growing complexity of B2B sales cycles, now averaging 5.4 individual stakeholders; those stakeholders rarely move along a linear path to purchase and face a barrage of marketing collateral. Trends don’t point to the number of stakeholders or the complexity of those buying cycles going down. That means that, more than ever, organizations have to be attuned to the needs of every buyer at every stage. Here are a few ways that marketers and salespeople can come closer together in 2016:

• Start with the customer: There’s a measurable impact when sales and marketing departments come together. When you work together, customers take notice, so keep customers top-of-mind, and not territoriality or who provides “more business value.” Working together, departments provide more value to customers. Period.
• Being smarter about passing off leads: There are a few ways to go about this, and as buyers consume more content, becoming better at interpreting that consumption is critical. As speakers from BloomReach suggested, one way is that marketers can filter out false positives by putting links to top-of-the-funnel content in bottom-of-the-funnel content and seeing if leads they think are “qualified” click on that early content. With more stakeholders, you might want to also look at things from an account-based perspective, rather than content that individual leads consume.

• Insight into every stage: A lot of the friction between sales and marketing in past years has been because neither one quite knew what the other did; those closed doors can now be opened. With CRM and marketing automation integration, salespeople can see the exact content that a lead has consumed before their interaction. Marketers now also have unprecedented access to in-person sales meetings that lead to a deal closing, and the content that drives them.

Those companies that can figure out how their salespeople and marketers can meet the needs of individual customers and accounts will be ready for success throughout the year.

Sales consultants are the future

As I discussed in my CEB session, the harsh reality is that, by 2020, there are going to be 1 million fewer sales reps than there were in 2015. That statistic is why analysts have talked about ‘The Death of a B2B Salesman,” but it’s not all doom and gloom. Consultative sales reps are set to grow by 10% in that same time period; Forrester analyst Peter O’Neill calls them “Content Concierges,” and they quickly (or preemptively) meet customers’ needs and questions, instead of merely take orders. Every interaction those sales reps then have with the customers is an essential piece of the sales cycle, and not just filling out an agreement.

There is still time for companies to take the initiative to empower their sales reps to become consultants. Here are some areas companies can elevate so that salespeople can better meet customers’ needs:

• Easy access to the right content: Let’s start with the basics: for salespeople to consult anyone effectively, they need to quickly access the right collateral, whatever format or wherever they are, whoever they’re talking to.

• Enabling ‘story-selling’: An article in MarketingProfs recently talked about using modular content to drive sales. It involves marketers creating the blueprint or the outline of the story (e.g. content) and salespeople becoming the storytellers (e.g., bringing personal examples, emotional connections). More individualized content will be ever-critical for differentiation with modern buyers, and crafting a unique story for every customer is an effective way of approaching that.

• Harnessing data: Salespeople and marketers have access to a ton of data, and much has been made of using big data for targeting, but data can also be harnessed after you target as a part of your individualized sales presentation. Whether it’s inputs from your CRM or external data sets that can show the business impact of your product or service, turning raw data into sales collateral has massive potential for content concierges.

2016 is going to present many challenges as buyers continue to become more sophisticated and discerning, but it can be your defining moment. How will you deliver the perfect selling experience?

Learn more about content concierges and how you can empower your sales force. Click below to watch Mediafly and Forrester’s webinar!

A new paradigm for the development of photo-bioelectrochemical cells has been reported in the journal Nature Energy by researchers from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in Israel, and the University of Bochum, in Germany.

It sure feels like the Bank of Canada is going to cut borrowing costs this week. The negatives outweigh the positives in the economy, and we know based on 2015 that Stephen Poloz’s Governing Council puts a greater emphasis on the here-and-now than it does on the theoretical threat posed by a near-zero interest rates. By the late morning Eastern time on January 20, the central bank’s benchmark could be 0.25%, matching the record low set during the financial crisis.

Analysts are split on what the Bank of Canada will do with its first policy announcement of 2016. Mark Chandler of RBC Dominion Securities predicts Poloz will opt to leave interest rates unchanged, but says he has a lot of time for those forecasting a cut. Douglas Porter and Avery Shenfeld, the top economists and Bank of Montreal and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, respectively, say they think the central bank will drop the benchmark rate a quarter point. They also say doing so will be a mistake. Prices for credit assets tied to the Bank of Canada’s target imply traders think there is a 60% chance that Poloz will once again be moved to respond to persistent economic weakness.

In July, when the Bank of Canada cut its policy to its current setting of 0.5%, policy makers expressed concern over weak non-energy exports and a deep contraction in business investment brought on by the collapse of commodity prices. Yet they believed the worst would pass by year’s end, predicting economic growth at an annual rate of around 2% in the fourth quarter. The world hasn’t evolved that way, which is why further stimulus is a possibility. Non-energy exports showed life over the later half of 2015, as the U.S. economy powered out of a moderate slump at the start of last year. But business investment remains a problem. The Bank of Canada’s latest quarterly Business Outlook Survey showed that executives have no intention of spending any more money on machinery and equipment this year than they did in 2015.

That’s mostly due to ongoing decline of the value of oil, the international price of which dropped below $30 (US) per barrel last week. In October, when the Bank of Canada last released an economic outlook, policy makers assumed crude prices would hold closer to $50 per barrel. Other commodity markets are behaving similarly because there  is more supply than a sluggish global economy can absorb. Charles St-Arnaud, a former Bank of Canada economist who now works at the Japanese bank Nomura in London, reckons Canada’s economy grew little in the fourth quarter. Canada’s central bank will release revised economic forecasts this week. If they look like those of St-Arnaud, then Poloz will have all the information he needs to justify additional stimulus.

An argument against cutting interest rates is the twin housing bubbles of Toronto and Vancouver. However, Poloz hasn’t appeared overly fearful of triggering a financial crisis, arguing that lower interest rates will help to avoid one by making it easier for homeowners to keep up with their mortgage payments. The stricter mortgage rules announced by Ottawa last autumn also should allow the central bank to worry less about the housing market. Stimulus help is coming by way of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s infrastructure program, which some analysts offer as a reason to avoid an interest-rate cut, or at least delay one. But it could be several months before federal money makes a significant addition to gross domestic product. St-Arnaud said an interest-rate cut would buy a little time while the federal government gets its programs in place.

Perhaps the best reason to leave interest rates unchanged is uncertainty over what would happen to the value of the Canadian dollar. The country’s currency slid below 70 U.S. cents last week, causing some to recall early 2002, when Canadian officials were forced to beg international investors to recognize that the inherent value of Canada’s currency was greater than 63 US cents, the record low to which it had fallen at the time.

Porter and Shenfeld said Canada’s currency has fallen enough to spark a revival of exports; another interest-rate cut risks volatility and inflicting harm on aspects of the economy that rely on imports. Jayson Meyers, the head of Canada’s main exporters’ lobby and an economist by training, told Bloomberg News that the Bank of Canada should consider raising interest rates, not lowering them. “A little bit of dollar stability would be better,” he said. For years, agencies such as the Export Development Canada have been encouraging companies to insert themselves into global supply chains by investing abroad. A weaker currency makes that more expensive, depending on the country. And an exchange that drops 16% in a year, as the Canadian dollar did in 2015, makes budgeting difficult.

The currency is a valid issue. But it’s noteworthy that Porter and Shenfeld separated their own views from what they anticipate the Bank of Canada will do this week. The central bank has offered nothing that would suggest it is at all bothered by a weak dollar. Poloz says the only rate he cares about is inflation, and virtually every piece of official communication from the central bank notes the boost that non-energy exports are getting from the weaker exchange rate. A lower dollar also softens the blow of the commodity crash by increasing the value of sales priced is the U.S. currency. It is possible the Bank of Canada believes the 70-cent dollar may be keeping some energy companies from going bust.

Bottom line is that if the intervention was justified in July, it is likely justified now. Another thing to keep in mind is that the central bank always can use more explicit language to describe its intentions if it is worried that currency traders could overreact to an interest-rate cut. Poloz says such guidance only should be used in extreme circumstances, such as when it is running out of room to cut interest rates. The Bank of Canada soon could enter a zone where forward guidance is entirely appropriate.

MORE ABOUT INTEREST RATES, MONETARY POLICY & THE BANK OF CANADA:

• Canada’s hiring forecast shows the weakest outlook since 2009
• Why the Bank of Canada needs to get more transparent
• How the Bank of Canada and the U.S. Fed are parting ways
• Stephen Poloz is quietly backing Justin Trudeau’s deficit plan
• Policy options mostly exhausted, the Bank of Canada bets on charm
• Why we need to call a new Royal Commission on the economy
• Inside the toxic politics of cooling Canada’s housing market

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