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One of the biggest stories in global markets continues to be the epic rise of the US dollar against the world's big currencies.

While it's good news for importers, it's bad news for exporters. It's also rough on the US-based multinational companies that do a lot of business overseas. This is why the strong dollar is the No. 1 thing S&P 500 companies have been complaining about.

With the Federal Reserve on the verge of tightening monetary policy with higher interest rates, many economists think the dollar has room to go higher.

"Optimism on the dollar is widespread, and our house view is for further dollar strength," Credit Suisse's Andrew Garthwaite said in a new note to clients. He noted that a recent Credit Suisse survey found that 70% of investor clients expected the dollar to continue appreciating over the next 12 months.

But what if the consensus is wrong?

In his note — titled "Where could the consensus be wrong?" — Garthwaite identifies reasons the dollar's rally may be near its end.

Among other things, he found that history is not on the consensus' side.

"The dollar has historically fallen after the first Fed rate hike; indeed, the first rate hike on the last five tightening cycles was associated with a dollar weakening by around 10% over the following three months," he said.

Indeed, we can't rule out the possibility that all of the dollar's recent strength is actually the market already pricing in rate hikes.

SEE ALSO: King dollar has cost S&P 500 companies $244 billion of balance sheet pain

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In just a few years, big data technologies have gone from being science-fiction wishful thinking to becoming a key asset for the digital-age enterprise.

Problem:  Mark was a high tech salesperson, selling complex hardware and software solutions to distribution companies.  Relatively new to the job, his ability to close was frustratingly poor.  But he was in good company, as the other salespeople in the company suffered from the same problem.

Analysis:  Bernie was Mark’s sales manager, and was “old school.”  He was a disciple of J. Douglas Edwards who, along with Dale Carnegie, were early pioneers in sales training.  Bernie has been in sales for 30 years and had learned his craft well.  He was proud of the fact that he had been successful selling a variety of products, starting with vacuum cleaners and progressing to aluminum siding, and then retail computer parts before landing a job with a hard drive manufacturer.  Recently, he convinced the president of this company to hire him to manage the sales effort.  He loved to regale his troops about his closing prowess, telling them that the best salespeople were the ones who could sell something to someone who didn’t need it.  Of course, his techniques were highly manipulative but they worked well in vacuum cleaners and aluminum siding (remember the movie Tin Men?) He subscribed to many sales technique blogs and required his people to memorize the closes.  The sales trainers he hired to train his people reinforced these manipulative techniques.  “Tell them our story and then go for the close,” exhorted Bernie as he rehearsed his people in selling features and benefits.  Of course, Bernie was the problem.

Solution:  Bernie, like too many other sales managers, failed to realize that there’s a big difference between the simple sale (vacuums, siding and other “commodity” type products) and the complex sale.  A short selling cycle where quick decisions are made primarily on price characterizes the simple sale.  It’s basically a transaction.  The consumer knows the product well and is mostly concerned with price and availability.  The salesperson brings little to the relationship, except the ability to agree to a lower price in order to get the order.  The problem was that Bernie’s company sold complex solutions to a sophisticated customer.  The complex sale is characterized by a longer selling cycle, multiple decision makers and influencers, a relatively large financial investment, and a high degree of risk for the buyer if a wrong decision is made.  In a complex sale, the relationship between buyer and seller is key because it’s typically not a one shot deal; the seller will be involved well past the contract signing.  For that reason, manipulative techniques simply turn off the buyer.

The complex sale must be consultative.  The seller must be able to understand the buyer’s issues and then prescribe a solution.  When a seller can do this, he brings value to the relationship.   If you’re in a complex sale business and you treat the sale as a simple transaction, you’ll never reach your true potential.

Good Selling!!

If you are a salesperson, this really is the million-dollar question, isn’t it?

The people you’re aiming to sell to are more connected and accessible, in many ways, than ever before. But they are also more distracted, and earning their attention is more difficult than ever. What can today’s sales professional do to stand out and get meaningful responses to sales outreach? In my experience, here is your core formula for success:

There is no formula: Abandon the idea that a single given approach or tactic is the best path to lead generation or a sale. In any business function that involves person-to-person interaction, the cookie-cutter approach is dead and gone. Do not let yourself think this way – sales prospecting is an investment, and the best sales pros diversify their approach.

Thoughtfully consider the need that corresponds with your offer: We get too hung up as professionals on the features and power of what we’re offering to businesses or consumers. We embrace our own offering and neglect to think carefully and primarily about the needs that correspond with what we’re selling. That need is the key to success.

From need to person-in-need: After you’ve identified the needs you can address – and I do mean you, individual salesperson, not just your company’s head of marketing – you can position your outreach for success. Find the people whose needs will match what you have to offer in the sincerest terms. By sincere, I mean you have thoughtfully studied these individuals to the best of your ability and are committed to not just selling to them, but to helping them as well.

Get creative: Develop the sales touchpoint that is right for a given prospect. That could be a cold call, an appointment at a conference, a thoughtful card, or an inventive, personalized mailer. Your first attempts may not stick, but if you’ve done your homework on what needs you can fulfill, you will eventually break through. Creativity involves some trial and error, and it often requires time. Don’t shy away from investment and even re-investment of resources.

Resist the urge to sell: After you’ve made that first contact, resist the urge to hard-sell. Keep focusing on needs, and think long-term. Sales cycles can last years. You may even enter into final negotiations or RFP, lose the opportunity, and have it come back later. Focusing on needs and being helpful over straight-sales often helps secure longer-lead opportunities, and impresses shorter-term prospects. I’m not saying don’t ever close – I’m saying be thoughtful.

Keep organized and add value: Maintain meticulous records of interactions and try to “predict” where your most important contacts are going next in terms of needs and business moves. Find non-sales-related reasons to reach out, offer suggestions or a compliment, and find the right time to make an offer. Overall – be more than a salesperson. Be a reliable and trusted resource.

Every sales organization and situation will be different, but over my career, these principles always apply. Think outside of the box, be aware of needs, be creative and thoughtful, and be resilient, and you’ll be on your way to sales success. It’s been working for me for a long time now.

A whole new Salesforce means a whole new way to sell. Learn more by downloading the free e-book.

In less than two years, Slack turned itself into a massively popular business-messaging app worth $2.8 billion.

Now, Slack wants to be more than just a work-messaging app.

It wants to be a broader platform that grows its software into a central hub for all work communications.

It also wants to be an investor.

On Tuesday, the 2-year-old startup launched a new $80 million VC fund that will primarily invest in startups building apps on top of Slack, and an app store called App Directory, where users can download third-party apps that integrate with Slack.

"We really want to encourage all kinds of different applications on our platform," Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Business Insider. "We've worked with a number of big companies to do integrations, but we're also investing in really cool little things starting up."

The new fund is backed by Slack with additional capital coming from its partners, including Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Spark, and Social Capital. It will primarily make investments worth $100,000 to $250,000 in seed-stage startups that make Slack their core foundation.

That means you'll see more apps like Howdy, an app that runs status-update meetings for teams through Slack's built-in bot, which automatically collects feedback.

April Underwood, Slack's head of platform, told us it's already made three investments out of the new fund, including Howdy, and that it will make investments regularly throughout the year.

"We think there's a real opportunity for these companies to build a sustainable business on top of our platform," Underwood said.

The App Directory is launching with 150 different apps that integrate with Slack's platform, including Dropbox, Google Drive, and Twitter. There will also be lesser-known apps, like Blockspring, which makes it easy to pull in data from outside sources and answer questions right within a Slack chat window. A lot of these apps will have a conversational UI, taking advantage of Slack's communication-based design.

"There's so much to explore by offering capital and support to these companies, and we'll see more of it, which means we'll see more apps on the platform, and our customers will get more value out of Slack," Butterfield said.

Textbook enterprise play

Slack's move to launch its own app directory is a textbook play that many enterprise-software companies follow.

Salesforce, for example, has a huge app marketplace called AppExchange, where Salesforce users can download third-party apps that can be used right within the Salesforce platform. Some of those apps are only available on Salesforce, but they're still able to build a sustainable business because Salesforce has such a huge userbase.

Smaller players like Box, Zendesk, and Atlassian all have their own app marketplaces, too.

By offering app marketplaces, these platforms become a central destination for business workers, making their products more valuable — and keeping customers using them longer, rather than switching to different services. Butterfield conveyed a similar idea, saying, "If we can make our customers' use of their existing tools even better because they use Slack, then that's a huge win."

Launching a corporate VC is also a common tactic among large enterprise players, although you rarely see it from a company of Slack's size. Salesforce has become one of the most active VC firms lately, while Cisco and Intel also have sizable investment arms. It lets the companies to work closely with startups, and often leads to acquisitions, too.

The bigger trend: ChatOps

From a more technical perspective, Slack's new platform ties into a growing trend called "ChatOps," where companies are increasingly combining everyday apps with chat programs.

In a nutshell, what ChatOps does is allowing users to access third-party app content right within the chat programs, bypassing the need to open up another app to see it.

For example, Slack has made it possible to call a Lyft cab directly within its app using its popular "slash commands," while Slack rival HipChat just announced an Uber integration that lets you call a cab without having to leave the chat app.

"Imagine every software tool that you needed to use, their notifications, it just came in through Slack," Underwood said. "That's part of the reason teams have fallen in love with Slack."

But the overarching goal is to continue to expand its user base, and Slack seems to be doing well on that front, too. It now has 2 million daily active users, and 570,000 paid members. Just two months ago, it said it had 1.7 million daily active users and 470,000 paid users. It's why Butterfield wants to see more Slack-integrated apps.

"People spend hours on Slack," Butterfield said. "You tend to have Slack open at work, so that's the perfect place to have these other apps available and these integrations to be happening because you're already looking at it."

SEE ALSO: The next big thing in computing is called ChatOps, and it's already happening inside Slack

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Oil is diving again on Wednesday.

The commodity's miniature rally on Tuesday looks to have been a tiny positive hiccup in the otherwise grim story of its ever-increasing spiral downward.

Brent crude, the major European benchmark, started Wednesday at $38.44 (£25.62) a barrel, up around $0.40 or 1.05% from the start of trading on Tuesday.

But the benchmark has taken another tumble Wednesday, dropping by around 1.7% as of 1:40 p.m. GMT (8:40 a.m. ET). This makes Brent one of the biggest fallers amongst widely traded commodities right now.

It also means Brent is hovering around the $38 (£25.32) a barrel mark once again. Last Friday, Brent dropped below that mark for the first time in more than seven years.

Here's what the price of European crude oil looks like on Wednesday:

West Texas Intermediate, the generally cheaper American benchmark, is also back to declines on Wednesday, albeit not as severe as Brent. WTI is down by roughly 0.8%, hovering just above the $37 (£24.66) mark.

The gap between the two benchmarks has now closed to less than a dollar a barrel, signalling the first real narrowing since the start of the shale-oil boom in the US, according to Reuters.

Elsewhere in the commodity markets, the price of natural gas is continuing to plunge, thanks to the unseasonably warm weather on the east coast of the US, which has lowered demand for the fuel substantially.

Having fallen to a 16-year low on Tuesday, natural gas has dropped by as much as 2% Wednesday morning, to a low of $1.782 (£1.19) per million British thermal units. It has now recovered a little bit, and has lost around 0.5% of its value today.

In equities, oil's return to losses doesn't seem to be worrying European investors too much, with the FTSE 100 seeing gains of more than 1.1% and Germany's DAX also trading up by 1% from the morning's open, at 10,554.3 points.

Here's the FTSE:

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Focusing on Holistic Customer Success

San Francisco welcomed another stellar group of Customer Success pros last week, thanks to Totango’s CS Summit. While listening to the impressive list of speakers, it was great to hear about the different ways companies are embracing CS and sharing their best practices to help others do the same.

Events like these are great for learning but sometimes it can become too easy to only focus on the shiny, new product or support experience, rather than crafting a holistic, cross-functional program. In B2B, companies need to help their customers achieve results, not just push products.

For example, these ideas can definitely work when combined with a larger dialogue about goals.

• The CMO of the messaging app, Slack, mentioned the practice of hiring more Customer Support reps than Sales reps as a basic principle for CS. He maintains the idea that it shouldn’t all be about obtaining new logos but making the customers you already have happier, which will in turn lead to more word-of-mouth referrals, has been their personal key to rapid success. This concept is especially important in B2B, which is what we’ve even detailed in our book Failure Sucks! but certainly needs a cross-functional communication structure to disseminate info from Support to Marketing, Sales, and Product teams.

• The rise of customer marketing also focuses on communicating with current install base to keep them successful, rather than trying to obtain new customers. SendGrid spoke about their Interesting Moments program which congratulates customers on a milestone they achieved, whether it’s a celebratory email for sending their “1 Millionth Email” or getting another round of funding. Another way of doing this is to send informational messages on new functions and features to guide users through any new steps. To help with servicing low-touch customers who make up a large portion of the customer base, Revinate introduced video tutorials and in-depth walk-throughs for onboarding and eventually when launching new features. The methodology worked so well, they noticed a 30% decrease in new support tickets, which usually spiked just after a new release. (Curious minds: this tool provided by WalkMe.)

These are important points and ideas, to be sure. But Customer Success is far more than product adoption. Just because customers are using your product doesn’t mean they are successful with it. Remember, if the objective is to create raving fans that spread positive word-of-mouth, then you’ll need more than a user-interface to drive success. You’ll need to make sure that people at all levels – from executive budget holders and decision makers, to key purchase influencers such as project managers and “power users” – are obtaining something more with your products and services. In other words, you’ll need to make sure you’re adding value, and helping the people interfacing with your company realize that value.

Do you truly understand why a specific account spent money with you? Are you helping that business achieve the outcomes that drove them to do business with you — instead of your competitors — in the first place? Or, have you just chucked products over the wall and left the notion of best practices entirely up to them? Knowing that you are the expert, how are you transferring that expertise to your customer at all levels?

The takeaway…

It’s so common to think that investing in Support or providing product “tips” will accelerate customer success, but it’s not always the case. So how do you know where to focus enhancements for the customer journey?

Begin with collecting voice-of-customer feedback, which can be tricky to do correctly in B2B.

• What questions to ask? and When?
• What to do if no one responds?
• How do we action the data?

---

Check out this eBook for more tips on how to design your program so that you are armed with the best metrics out there.

Everyone here at Showpad is excited for the next critical juncture in the evolution of sales enablement, and most of us are also anxiously awaiting the new Star Wars, so a space analogy seems fitting. Every galaxy goes through formative phases of evolution where particles come together, invisible energy rises, smaller galaxies combine, and something new emerges, all in a perfect balance. Similarly, yet on a very different timeline, technology “disruptions” occur, combining existing capabilities with new innovations in order to solve problems more effectively.

Salespeople experienced this with the evolution of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Companies first tried to solve the problem of managing customer data and relationships in a number of ways, from creating complicated spreadsheets to customizing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms to salespeople’s needs. Then, things changed. CRM systems like Act! and Siebel emerged, adding concepts of how to manage prospect and contact data, along with revenue and forecasts. These were disrupted once more with SaaS and new cloud-based deployment models like Salesforce.com that had similar capabilities, yet were much more cost effective. These models had far easier implementations and faster time to value, not to mention less risk and higher adoption. Since then we entered the advent of a “platform approach” with integrations, mainstream adoption of mobile platforms with smartphones and tablets, along with many other factors which led us to where we are today; a new renaissance of CRM and maturity of the space.

However, CRM platforms have yet to solve for the challenges that exist between marketing and sales, along with sales and the customer, which is why something in a galaxy not all that far away came into being. In the early days people leveraged a content management system (CMS) or portal to enable sales, largely focusing on a direct sales force. Then, sales asset management systems came into existence, building a stronger bridge between marketing and sales by managing and distributing content. One of the biggest disruptions was what we call sales enablement 1.0, which created capabilities that directly impacted more constituents, including channel partners and the buyers themselves. It also created greater collaboration and feedback between marketing and sales. Where will sales enablement 2.0 lead us? It is just behind the maturity curve of CRM, entering that perfect storm for a new disruption.

These are the 4 major areas of change we see in our customer base causing this disruption and evolution to sales enablement 2.0:

1) How We Think about Buyers is Changing

Today buyers educate themselves largely before interacting with your sales team, and are much more stringent with the  purchases they make. Although Marketers have done a good job capturing the buyer’s journey over the web, most sales teams are still not armed with this kind of data during the sales cycle. Sales enablement 1.0 provided individual sellers with more  buyer insights. The next wave of buyer innovation will provide deeper insights all the way back to sales leadership and marketing, and directly into CRM systems. If you’re focused on aligning more to the new buyer journey, here are a few tips from our VP of Sales.

2) Salespeople, Organizations, and Investments are Shifting

Leaders are becoming far more metrics-driven with sales reps, choosing to focus more on effectiveness than effort. They are centralizing the groups that enable sales, which is understandable given a CSO Insights report recently found that organizations with a sales enablement program achieve 8.2% higher revenue over those that do not. Today this represents only 25% of companies out there; however, in the next evolution this function will be similar to the growth in sales operations, which impacted the adoption of CRM systems.

3) Content and How Marketing ROI is Measured are Both Evolving

Back in the days of sales portals, content was mostly PDFs or PowerPoint presentations, and organizations measured downloads. The 1.0 evolution shifted towards media and measuring content engagement with customers. Much like the Internet, 2.0 enablement will focus on interactive experiences such as HTML5, which is leveraged 7 times more than documents. The next generation of sales enablement customers will also tie content to revenue, adapting content creation strategies based on learnings, and using this data as a recommendation engine to fuel higher sales effectiveness.

4) Software and Devices are Innovating Together

Portals and CMS systems were developed for desktops, sales asset management systems became more cloud friendly, and then sales enablement 1.0 focused more on mobile apps as adoption of devices skyrocketed. However, the shift that’s coming is largely human centered and hardware neutral, with a consistent mobile user experience across any device. The simplicity in user experience with apps will also exist in the web version for desktops. Also, as we see more and more in our personal life with email, mapping, file sharing and music apps, we will see innovations in the “hybrid model” with the benefits of a cloud deployment, yet offline apps so sales can be productive anywhere.

If we had known more about the new Star Wars plot line other than the great trailer, a more specific movie analogy could have been crafted for this blog. We’ll all just have to wait until after December 18th. All of these shifts are coming together at the perfect time in space to form the second awakening of sales enablement, much like what happened when Salesforce.com brought a new cloud model and simplicity to CRM. There are still many more changes occurring at the same time as email moves to interactive communication, rigid becomes guided sales workflows, and static training moves to contextual coaching.

Where do you think the sales enablement space and 2.0 sales galaxy are heading? Why are you excited about the end of the year and new Star Wars (no spoiler alerts please)?

This article originally appeared on the Showpad blog.

With the typical raise averaging 3 percent next year and necessities like rent and health care increasing way faster, consumers are going to be looking for ways to save a few bucks next year.

Turns out, there are a few areas where consumers spend their money that could see price drops in 2016.

That’s welcome news, since every dollar saved on gas or prices or airfare can help offset those rising bills, or be put into a savings account.

That’s harder to do, as the increase in the cost of living nationally outpaces the growth of wages. Of course, there’s one way for a consumer to make almost all of his costs go down across the board: Move to a place with a lower cost of living relative to income.

A recent NerdWallet analysis found that incomes in Houston, Texas for example have grown by 33 percent over the past 10 years, while the cost of living has only increased 24 percent. In Atlanta, Georgia, by contrast, the cost of living increased 16 percent, but wages only grew 4 percent.

A family making $100,000 in Houston would need $103,000 to live the same lifestyle in Atlanta and $178,000 in San Francisco, according to CNNMoney.

Despite the financial pay off, moving is difficult and can be expensive in the short term – especially for two-income couples with children. For consumers who won’t be calling a U-Haul anytime soon, here’s a list of things that will probably cost less no matter where you live.

HERE’S OUR LIST OF 10 ITEMS THAT COULD COST LESS NEXT YEAR

Gas prices. Gas prices were again flirting with $2 per gallon this December, and analysts say we could see prices as low as $1.79 this winter. The falling costs reflect a global over-supply and declining demand.

Computers. As consumers spend more time on tablets and phones, the need to upgrade desktop and laptop computers constantly is falling. That’s led to a decrease in demand in an already saturated market. Computer prices fell 4 percent in 2013 and 2014, and they’re expected to continue to fall another 1.4 percent this year and next, according to IHS.

Bonds. The Fed finally appears poised to start raising interest rates next year, and when rates go up, the price for bonds goes down. That doesn’t matter for folks who own individual bonds and plan to hold them to maturity, but weak prices will hurt the value of bond funds. Switching from intermediate- to short-term bond funds will shield you from interest rate hikes but will also bring a lower yield.

Drones. As a growing number of companies introduce consumer drones, competition is heating up and driving prices down, particularly in the categories of aerial photography and toys.

GoPro, which is set to unveil its entry in the category in 2016, is rumored to be pricing its pro drone below $1,000.

Financial advice. If 2015 was the year that robo-advisers really took off, 2016 looks to be the year that personal advisors fight back.

The growing competition from robo-advisers will likely put downward pressure on the fees charged by traditional advisors, much like the advent of index funds pushed traditional mutual funds to focus more on costs.

Airfare. Thanks to record-low oil prices and new competition from cheap international carriers, the price of high flying is going way down. Hopper travel data shows that the average price for a ticket in January will be at a three-year low.

Part of that decline, however, is artificial as airlines move toward “unbundling” fees from tickets and charging passengers separately for things like choosing a seat or checking a bag.

Gold. At an average $1,156 per ounce this year, gold is down more than 40 percent since its 2011 peak, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

The expected rate increase by the Fed as well as a stronger dollar internationally will keep an umbrella on the price of gold next year, depressing prices to an average $1,114 per ounce, according to bank polled by The Journal.

iPhones. In addition to the iPhone 7, Apple is expected early next year to release a new four-inch iPhone that will cost less than $500. That price point would allow Apple to market the phone to more entry-level consumers as well as those in emerging markets.

Heating Costs It’s going to cost less for consumers to heat their homes this winter despite colder forecasted temperatures in some parts of the country, with prices falling 25 percent for those with oil heat, 18 percent for propane heat, 10 percent for natural gas, and 3 percent for homes that heat with electricity, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Antique prices Prices for collectible furniture and home accessories have been falling for years, thanks to aging buyers, a sluggish housing market, and changing tastes. The trend appears poised to continue next year, which could spell a buying opportunity for savvy collectors.

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A pushy salesperson isn’t good for anyone.

Sales today is about helping people solve problems like a doctor or a consultant -- not slamming deals like a used car salesman.Social media didn’t exist decades ago, but today, 75% of all B2B buyers (including 84% of C-level and VP-level executives) use social media to research their buying decisions. If you’re consistently too aggressive while closing deals, you’re setting yourself up for bad press and damage to your reputation that can last a long time.

For more advice on closing, check out The GSD Show -- tips for salespeople, by salespeople.

To excel at modern sales, reps have to juggle a multitude of activities -- learning their product, listening actively, handling multiple stakeholders, and mitigating curveballs -- all while remaining professional, helpful, accommodating, and staying in control of the process. Setting the right expectations and helping people are important parts of selling today and will likely grow in importance over the next 20 years.

But wait -- isn’t sales harder this way?

Maybe, but we have no choice. The rules have changed and you have to change with them. The days of taking prospects golfing to close deals are over.

At the same time, you still have to hit your quota. So what happens if your prospects take their sweet time to make a decision or are spending a lot of time in education or exploration mode?

The key is to manage your deals and sales process in a way that helps prospects move along at a steady clip without being a jerk. The seven strategies below help me exceed my number month after month while still being a helpful, consultative sales professional.

1) Manage a broader pipeline with more deals.

Some of your deals will roll to next month, or next year, or not close at all. Accept that as part of the reality of being a salesperson. In an age where strongarming prospects into signing a deal this month is no longer a viable sales strategy, you have to manage a broader, longer-term pipeline so you have enough volume to hit your number.

Part of managing this pipeline is understanding how to manage your prospects. If your prospects need to delay their start date for a short period of time, that’s fine -- but you can’t forecast based on hopes and dreams. Always be as specific as possible when a deal rolls to next month by establishing a specific date and time to follow up. There’s a huge difference between “We’ll start next month” and “We’ll execute the payment link on Thursday, December 17.”

2) Only spend time with prospects who have real business pain.

Good prospects have real business pain. Your job is to help them formulate a good problem definition. Both are necessary for a purchase, and so my priority is finding and defining business pain.

I’m not above saying, “That doesn’t sound like real business pain to me,” to a prospect. After all, it’s more productive for me to offer to stay in touch and periodically send resources to a prospect in education mode if it doesn’t sound like they have thought through what they need. It’s wasteful to spend calories bringing them through the entire sales process, only to have the whole thing go belly-up because their need isn’t acute enough to buy.

But just because your prospect doesn’t fully grasp the pain doesn’t mean there isn’t any. A top salesperson can dig deeper to see if a mere nuisance right now is caused by an underlying problem that will mushroom into something problematic down the road. You are doing your prospect a huge solid if you can help them anticipate future problems.

3) Identify your prospect’s stage in the buyer’s journey.

The modern buyer’s journey has three stages (awareness, consideration, and decision), and buyers have three corresponding modes: education mode, evaluation mode, and purchasing mode. If you treat all your prospects like they’re in purchasing mode and try to aggressively close them, you’ll lose deals and waste time.

Instead, learn to diagnose what stage your prospect is in. For example, if they tell you they need to achieve a certain goal by March 2016 and are speaking with reps at three different companies, they’re clearly in the buying stage. But if they’re still researching what could have caused below-average performance in their last fiscal year, it may be too early to present them with product options.

If the prospect isn’t ready to buy, let Marketing work them instead of Sales. Send them information and then drip them free resources through predefined workflows and have them reach out to you with questions. As they educate themselves on their problem, reach out every few weeks or months to stay connected and check on their progress.

4) Create a buying plan with the prospect’s needs in mind.

In my experience, prospects tend to forget that their journey doesn’t end the day they make the purchase. In fact, the hard work has just begun. To help them understand this, a good technique is to start with their business goals and work backwards to the date they’ll need to implement by to see their ideal results.

The most valuable way to approach this exercise is to have your prospects talk through the timeline themselves and supplement their plan with your knowledge. Having them draw conclusions on their own is far more powerful than telling them what you think, even if you’re right.

Remember to always focus on the implementation, not the purchase, and back up the plan with as much data as possible to create a sense of urgency.

5) Expect curveballs.

Some of your deals will inevitably get delayed or fall through altogether, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Don’t get emotional -- understand that at least 10% of people will be irrational or that life will get in the way. I’ve had deals delayed due to car accidents, last-minute vacations, and illness. Eventually, you’ll experience all these things too.

The key is to not get emotional. Many prospects are afraid to call you back when curveballs rear their heads because they don’t want to have a difficult conversation or be strongarmed into doing something they can’t or don’t want to do right now. So always react calmly, and mutually come to next steps with your prospect so they don’t feel attacked.

6) Be comfortable “firing the prospect.”

Know when to say “when.” I’m happy to offer help to any prospect, but it’s illogical to spend a lot of time on a deal that doesn’t exist or is going to be too hard. I’ve had prospects who have asked me for help over five distinct sales pursuits over several years and just can’t pull the trigger. After a certain point, I have to realize that prospects who aren’t ready to buy after multiple sales processes aren’t ever going to be ready, or I’m not the right person for them to work with.

You have to know your own limits for what makes sense -- for me, it’s two sales processes that go nowhere. Whenever this happens, closely review the process to determine what you could have done differently. This way, you’ll learn to spot the signs of a prospect who will forever drag their feet and won't repeat your own mistakes.

7) Ask happy customers for referrals.

Remember when I said earlier that bad actions can destroy your reputation? Your professionalism and excellent sales execution can do exactly the opposite. By leveraging your existing network of customers, you can make future sales easier.

Whether it’s asking your customers to write you LinkedIn recommendations, having them serve as references for prospects, or blogging about your product, your customer base can help you do your job. After all, there’s nothing more valuable to moving a sale along than having someone who’s gone through the exact same process explain how easy it was.

Ultimately, sales is like dating. Ideally, you’ll find a prospect whom you’re a mutual good fit with, and you can close the deal. But if you find a prospect who isn’t ready for you yet, you have a choice. You can force the relationship and have a hard breakup where you’re left with the person you care about bad-mouthing you. Or, you can let the deal go and accept that it’s just timing or other external factors that are off.

Sales is human, but buyer behavior isn’t personal. All too often it can feel that way, but the best sales professionals remember to keep their heads cool so they can be as productive as possible.

Is it just me, or do surveys on “Family Feud” sound like companies are secretly using the game show to conduct market research? Over the years, “The Feud” has slipped in some suspicious-sounding surveys, such as:

• Name a company that makes batteries.
• Name a type of salad that people eat at a picnic.
• Name something that people use a coupon for.

Did Duracell drop in an unaided brand awareness question? Was the National Fruits and Vegetables Alliance working on a summer promotion? Was Groupon looking for leads on which product categories to target?

The conspiracy theorist in me suspects I might be onto the biggest scandal since Congress investigated TV quiz shows in the late 1950s. The content marketer in me, however, thinks doing research to fuel content-driven initiatives is a great idea.

I’m not alone. According to Demand Gen Report’s 2015 Content Preferences Survey, 73% of respondents strongly agree that brands should use more research to support content. Another 25% said they “somewhat agree.” At Content4Demand, we even try to develop surveys that help us gauge new trends in the B2B community. In fact, we currently have one in the works focused on 2016 budgeting and planning!

We’re sometimes fortunate to find timely data from highly reputable third-party research firms, universities, government agencies or trade associations that we can use in exchange for attribution. But counting on the kindness of strangers for updated information to reinforce marketing messages is a risky proposition.

Data Fatigue

Increasingly, it seems that the most interesting data is already being used by competing companies to tell similar stories. Data owners are a little less generous about sharing the information they collect. And as marketing messages become more precisely targeted, finding relevant data in the public domain — okay, on the Internet — can be an exercise in frustration.

Since none of this diminishes your customers’ appetite for reliable and updated information, conducting your own survey can be a rewarding marketing tactic. If the survey is done thoughtfully, the data can provide you with information to make mission-critical decisions while also delivering the building blocks for a wide variety of marketing vehicles.

Breaking News

Like B2B buyers, business journalist love data and will eagerly share “newsworthy” statistics with their readers. Sharing your data with the media — for instance, by offering an influential publication an exclusive look at the results — should be high on your to-do list. If you are lucky enough to have your survey results covered by the press, the data’s authority — as well as your own reputation as a thought leader — immediately soars. Better yet, the pass-along value of press coverage improves the odds that online search engines will discover it.

Survey data is excellent source material for presentations at industry conferences, sales events or during webinars. It can also be used to create a variety of marketing materials, including:

• White papers
• Infographics
• Blog posts
• Social media posts and graphics
• Native advertising materials

Extend the value of your data indefinitely by updating it with subsequent surveys. Using the original results as a benchmark, schedule regular updates to identify patterns and trends — again, information you’ll want to share with the press.

Good Data Takes Great Planning

Thanks to the increasing number of survey technology vendors, collecting data is relatively affordable. That being said, the value data provides doesn’t come cheap in terms of planning.

Generating meaningful or actionable data that your customers value requires its own research and a lot of planning. Before you invest anything more than your effort, spend some time learning what your customers need to know, and think about how you and they both might use the results to build your businesses.

If you want to learn more about conducting your own survey and using the data to support a robust content marketing program, we can help.

By the way, Energizer batteries beat out Duracell 52 to 23.

Modern B2B marketers like numbers. We want to know conversion rates, cost per lead, revenue generated and a host of other stats. In our mission to build demand generation that delivers real results, here are a couple to keep you up at night:

B2B companies’ inability to align sales and marketing teams has cost them upwards of 10% or more of revenue per year, according to IDC.

76% of content marketers are forgetting sales enablement, according to a study by HubSpot.

Isn’t it painful to think that the transformation you’ve been neck deep in for months could all fall flat if you forget about the proverbial “last mile?” Handing off leads that go nowhere? Confused and frustrated sales teams? Poor customer experience with no continuity? Watching all that time, money and energy go down the drain hurts.

There are many reasons why sales management should be all too happy to get involved with and become champions for your demand generation program. It just so happens that in areas where sales effectiveness needs improvement, well-designed perpetual demand generation programs excel. A 2014 CSO Insights study on sales effectiveness showed that:

• 55% need improvement nurturing leads
• 50% need improvement in identifying trigger events
• 40% need improvement in qualifying and prioritizing opportunities

If you can show sales management how your program is going to fill those gaps in early pipeline to augment the sales skill set, you should have a rapt audience ready to engage from the beginning and throughout the process.

And then when it comes time for the rubber to hit the road and you develop sales enablement for your program, keep the following in mind:

Time is money:
Successful sales people are obsessive about prioritizing their time, and rightly so. Your program is going to help them spend time with only the leads that are most worthy of their time, but you need to keep this concept in mind as you develop processes and training for sales as well. Do a little obsessing yourself about what it would take to complete your hand-off processes. Do they need to log into multiple systems? Are there steps you could combine or eliminate? Can you minimize the number of screens and clicks? Can you deliver training in bite-sized nuggets? Are there cheat sheets that could serve as job aids? Is what you’re training on relevant to their day-to-day job or in the “nice to know” category?

Work the system:
Inevitably you will need to change some processes and tools to have the most effective program. Whenever possible, look to see what existing frameworks might already be in place that you could leverage. Do they work from dashboards, list views, tasks? Are they using mobile apps? Are they already used to receiving training in team meetings? Is video their format of choice? Do they have a playbook? The more you can connect your new and improved processes with the things they already value, the better your chance for affecting real change.

Bring in reinforcement:
Adult learning theory tells us that adult learners retain more when the process is more experiential. For example, we retain 5% of what we hear, but up to 75% of what we practice. Plan for these realities by ensuring that there are some opportunities for the sales team to apply what they’ve learned. Make learning task-oriented and provide refreshers over time. Additionally, consider the WIIFM concept (what’s in it for me) to make sure sales understands that this isn’t marketing’s latest shiny object, but a way for them to earn more.

Author: LeeAnne Wimberly @lwimberly is Director, Strategy for ANNUITAS

A knowledgeable researcher has done their homework by visiting multiple vendor websites and leveraging their social network prior to reaching out/being willing to talk with a salesperson. Many have been happy to avoid early seller involvement. They have an inherent distrust of sellers and feel they may try to skew the requirements to gain a competitive advantage with no concern about how they are meeting buyer needs.

Problem: Despite the fact that vendors agree their sellers are getting involved in buying cycles later than ever before, most leave it up to each individual salesperson to determine how they are going to align with potential buyers that have already established their requirements. The most common mistakes they make are:

1. Failing to give buyers a chance to share with them what requirements they have already determined. This is unfortunate because they completely disrespect the time spent in acquiring knowledge about offerings and start from ground zero as though the buyer were a novice. Poor alignment = Poor buying experience.
2. Those sellers that ask what requirements have been established make premature attempts to change the requirements list. This will upset (infuriate) buyers and sellers will run the risk of not making the short list of vendors to be seriously considered.

Sellers fail to understand the buyers that have done research have a vision of the features/capabilities they feel are needed. In the language of some sales training professionals, these buyers are already in Phase 2 of their buying cycles (evaluating offerings). In order to align with these buyers it is necessary to:

• learn what they think they want,
• then take them back into Phase 2 (solution development), and
• by asking questions hopefully have buyers conclude there were some missing requirements.

Executing this successfully will provide better buying experiences, have buyers conclude sellers are competent and provide a better chance of being Column A (the vendor of choice).

Okay, all of you Star Warriors, the time has come. It’s the dawning of a new episode in the Star Wars saga, and the time of year couldn’t be more perfect for such an epic milestone. In a month where resolutions are coming to a close, new initiatives are being set, and selling days are narrowing in the final quarter — it’s time to pull out that lightsaber and fight for those last big goals of the year.

To get in the spirit of the Star Wars “holiday” (ask any Wookie-fan — Star Wars is a religion), we’ve decided to round up some of our favorite blog posts inspired by the Force. Here are our top three picks for how to use Star Wars to streamline your sales process and become a B2B Jedi Master:

1. The Funnelholic – “Call High and Wide” Said The Wise Man

In this post by Jedi Master Craig Rosenberg, calls on all “Young Jedis” (i.e. green inside sales reps and SDRs) and encourages them to go back to basics with old school selling techniques. Using the old sales adage, “Call high and call wide,” Rosenberg urges reps to go overhead to the decision maker when navigating a sale. By stopping at the champion in the sale, you risk a deal disappearing act. But if you go straight for Jabba, and don’t stop until he says no (so long as the lead is an ideal client fit), you’ll be the Jedi Knight of the sale.

2. Salesforce.com – How Star Wars Can Help with Your Data Problems

Jim Hopkins of Data.com is a self-admitted Skywalker follower, himself. He took the advent of the new episode as an opportunity to share with the SFDC community how apply the lessons learned in the first six installments to B2B data. He assimilates B2B “data” with the infamous “Force,” because when harnessed in the right way, data can be the driving force behind the growth of a business. Navigating the murky waters of data can be a difficult task, but by taking the Obi-Wan approach to data and it’s application (understanding the purpose of data, looking at who is using the data and how, and not being lured by incorrect data), any SDR can become a data Jedi.

3. The Harris Consulting Group – 10 Easy Tips To Becoming a Sales Jedi Master

Taking the simple but effective route to imparting the saga’s wisdom onto your sales process, The Harris Consulting Group pulled together 10 lessons from the films to help reps finish out the quarter and 2015 with power. Our top pick?

• “When you think you are done, you are really only 40% of the way there.” The sales process takes heart, patience, and persistance. Just when you think you’ve hit your call quota, emailed all the prospects you can, or your leads have gone mute — push harder. Chances are you’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg.

A few of these salty suggestions may be a little bit of tough love on some reps inching towards the finish line… but as the great Yoda says, “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

These are just a few examples of some Star Wars-inspired motivators meant to push each and every rep to close out the year strong. Not only do the lessons apply as we put the pedal to the metal in these last few active selling days of the season, but they apply to your year ahead as you set goals and initiatives in your sales process.

And, if anything, the premiere is causing quite a stir in the creativity of some of our SDR candidates in the interview process. When one candidate was prompted to “Be creative,” in his application process, this is the “cover letter” he chose to send our Inbound SDR Manager:

Whether or not it worked out for this candidate… his creativity sure caught our eyes! To all of the future SalesLoft SDR Jedis out there… may the Force be with you.

—

Register today for Rainmaker 2016 to learn more Jedi secrets to streamlining your sales process in the new year. Rainmaker is the first conference of it’s kind 100% dedicated to the rise of the sales development cloud — or in this case, beyond the cloud. Are you Vader-heads in?

The post Streamline Your Sales Process, We Will appeared first on SalesLoft.

TORONTO – A report by the Bank of Montreal suggests Canadian drivers aren’t reaping the full benefit of lower oil prices when it comes to prices at the pump.

BMO senior economist Benjamin Reitzes pointed to a chart that showed when the Brent crude oil price was last at today’s levels in 2008, the average gasoline price was less than 80 cents per litre.

However, the average regular gasoline price today remains around $1 per litre.

The Brent crude oil price is a major trading classification of sweet light crude oil.

“With last week’s plunge in oil fresh in my mind as I headed into the weekend, I couldn’t help but notice how gasoline prices had ticked higher from the previous week,” Reitzes said.

“With Brent crude falling below C$55, a level last seen in 2008, gasoline around $1 per litre seemed odd.”

The average gasoline price in the U.S. has been around the US$2 per gallon level in recent days and broken below the key psychological barrier in some states.

The post BMO report suggests Canadian drivers not reaping full benefit of lower oil appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

With less than a month until we ring in 2016, I am going to cling to the belief that you have started working on your marketing plan for the upcoming year. I want to get a message to you before you are too far along in the planning process.

Do half as much.

That’s right – my prescription for a successful 2016 is to do half as much marketing. Here’s what I am not saying:

• Spend half as much
• Invest half as much time
• Try half as hard
• Reach half as many people

What I am saying is I’m betting that you’re stretching yourself too thin this past year. Let me sketch out a typical company’s marketing effort and see if you recognize a bit of yourself.

Company A has a robust marketing program, with most of their efforts being focused on attracting new customers. These new customers are needed, according to the marketing and sales team, to achieve the aggressive 2013 sales goals set by leadership.

The company has committed to a print media buy and fully intended to create a new series of ads for this effort. Unfortunately, the team was spread thin, so they only created one ad, which they ran throughout the schedule. They also identified the top trade shows for their industry. By the time they got around to planning the new booth, the rush charges would have killed the budget. So instead, they’re using last year’s booth and giveaway.

They also send out direct mail to key prospects (they really hope to follow these mailings up with phone calls in 2016).

Recognizing that only using traditional marketing methods was shortsighted, the marketing team decided to embrace content and digital marketing. The goal was to create one new article or white paper a month that would be used for a customer and prospect newsletter and as new content on the website. The team got five new articles written, and for the other newsletter issues they just advertised the current special. Only 10 of the 12 newsletters went out, but eight of them were on time.

The team launched a Facebook page, Twitter account and started a digital ad/retargeting campaign. They linked the Facebook and Twitter accounts so the updates were duplicated because they didn’t always have time to create fresh content for both. The digital ads were supposed to support and promote the new article every month, but in the end it was easier to just drive traffic to the website’s home page with a pricing teaser that proved marginally successful.

You see where I’m going with this, right? Every tactic that my imaginary company implemented can be very effective. There are an infinite number of marketing solutions but unfortunately, both your budget and your time/staff resources are finite.

This has always been the case, but the addition of digital marketing tactics has just exasperated the challenge. Marketing has evolved into a never-ending spinning plates exhibition, with the marketing professionals trying to catch the plate that’s closest to the floor.

The result? By trying to do too much, nothing gets done as well or as often as it should. Key audiences get ignored or short-changed and opportunities are lost.

I’d like to suggest a different path for 2016. Identify your three most significant audiences, based on your company’s goals. Then, decide on the one or two marketing tactics that will have the greatest impact on moving each audience deeper into your sales cycle. Put together an action plan that outlines how you are going to get those tactics accomplished with more depth, frequency and quality.

Your mission – keep it simple, focused and do it better than you’ve ever had the time/budget to do it before. Then, watch what happens.

The post Simplify your marketing appeared first on Drew's Marketing Minute.

If your company is experiencing these developments, you may need to protect your job.

In a recent CIO Magazine article, Moira Alexander of Conture Business Advisors points out that an in-house PMO isn’t a foregone conclusion. Depending on your industry, type or size of business, and the specifics of your organization, your CIO might consider outsourcing the project management function to be a sensible move. What are some of the signs that your company might go in this direction, and what can you do to save your role?

Low Staffing Levels

Alexander says that many businesses do not have adequate staffing levels for one or more employees to solely focus on managing projects. You, your team, and other existing resources may already be overextended and only able to focus efforts on the daily operational duties that keep the business afloat. If you’ve been running around like crazy doing the work of three people for as long as you can remember, this scenario might apply.

Shortage of Experienced Staff

We all know that project management is not an easy skill set to hire. You might have it, but do others in your company? Alexander comments that outsourcing may make sense if internal team members do not have the PM experience and/or training to effectively take a project from inception to closeout. Lack of specialized expertise in a particular area may be a factor as well.

Cash Flow Issues

In all industries and types of organizations, budgets are shrinking. It may be more costly to find, hire, and train project management staff than to find a vendor who can offer similar services on a per-project basis.

Business Model Decisions

Today’s business world is constantly in flux, and if your company experiences a re-organization or a shift in its business model, senior leadership may not be sure where an internal PMO will fit. Alexander says, for instance, that if the majority of your projects are of the one-off or ad-hoc variety, it may be more cost-effective and less of an administrative burden to outsource.

The Case Against Outsourcing

Now that you know what you’re up against, how should you build your case to keep the project management function in house? You can start with what Alexander outlines as the risks of outsourcing. External vendors, for example, often run into political snafus with internal staff. Projects become more challenging to execute and everyone is less productive as both parties struggle with trust and buy-in.

There’s also something to be said for institutional knowledge. Internal PMs have insider information and background that a vendor simply can’t match. The former understand business objectives and operations, and are close enough to the action to comprehend the nuances. Exposing vendors to confidential company information can result in a data breech even when non-disclosures are signed, and reliability may become a problem because a vendor is not as personally impacted by the business outcomes of the project as an internal team member.

You versus the Faceless Vendor

In addition to these arguments, you should strive to communicate the value you bring as an individual PM. Make sure the powers that be know why the company is better off because you work there, and how your projects have exceeded expectations and helped the business be more profitable. You should be able to rattle off, at a moment’s notice, concrete success metrics and the reasons an external party couldn’t possibly replace you. And, if you have people who work for you, it’s your responsibility to ensure that they are adding value – and showcasing that value – in the areas and to the people who matter.

So, we all know that getting referrals is a great source of new business. If someone is referred to you there's a bunch of inbuilt trust and credibility that makes it much more likely they'll become a paying client (and you don't have to go out hunting for them either!).

The problem is: few of us get enough referrals.

The biggest cause if this, in my experience, is that the people we'd love to refer us are often hesitant to do so. They like us. They trust us. They think we do good work. But there's something that holds them back, even if you ask them directly.

I explain what it is and how to get over it in this week's 5 minute marketing tip video…
 


 
Here's my blatant affiliate link for Contactually I mentioned in the video. If you sign up through this link you get access to my library of my best follow-up emails to send to your contacts, including my 21 word email and the other Re-Ignite emails. And I'm adding more emails all the time.

>> Get a 30 Day Free Trial of Contactually

Video Transcript

Hi. It's Ian here. Welcome to another 5-minute marketing tip. This week's tip is about how to motivate or incentivise people to refer you more often.

Now, we all know that referrals are a great way of developing new business. If someone refers someone to you, there's a good chance they'll become a client because there's a high degree of in-built credibility and trust already there. Problem is most of us just don't get enough referrals. One of the biggest reasons is that even if someone would like to refer us if they like us, they trust us, they know we do a good job, often, they're very hesitant to do so. I'll explain why and how you can get over that after the break.

Hi. It's Ian. Welcome back. So why is it that people who like us, trust us, who think we do a good job, why are they hesitant to refer us? The answer is in the way that we often ask for referrals. Most common we ask for referrals, we ask for an introduction to someone, and the unspoken message is that when you introduce us to that person, we will see them as a potential client, and we'll try and get a meeting with them, and we'll try and bring them on board as a client. In other words, we'll try to sell to them.

Now, of course, we might be expecting to build a relationship in a very nice way and nurtured, et cetera, but the risk for the person doing the introduction is that essentially, they're setting up their friend or their colleague that they're introducing us to for a sales meeting, and nobody really wants a sales meeting, especially if the person doing the introduction doesn't know that the person they're introducing us to actually needs our services right now. It could be a wasted sales meeting, so that's what's causing the hesitation.

Now, often, many attempts to try and motivate people to refer you or incentivise them to refer you miss the point, so they'll offer a financial incentive for people to refer. That works in some industries where it's accepted practice, but most of the time, it doesn't work all that well, and that's because it's not hitting the reason why they're not referring it. The reason why they're not referring isn't that they're not motivated to. Usually, liking you and trusting you is enough to motivate them to refer you. The problem is this hesitation and this unwillingness to set someone up with a sales meeting, and incentivising them by paying them some money to make the referral doesn't help with that. In fact, it makes them feel a little bit sleazy about it.

Here's what works better. It's to use what I've called in the past the “Dropbox Strategy.” If you've ever signed up for Dropbox before, probably, you will send the link by someone, a friend of yours who said, “Hey, I've just joined this great service, Dropbox, free online storage. If you click this link, you'll get some extra storage.” The point with that is if you click that link and signed up for Dropbox, then the person who referred you, sent you that link will get some extra storage on their account. That's their incentive, but crucially, so will you if you sign up via that link, so it's a dual incentive.

It's not just incentivising the person sending the link, it's also giving you a better deal than you could've got if you just gone to the Dropbox website. That means that the person sending you the link feels good about themselves. They feel as if they're doing you a favor by sending you that Dropbox. Not only are they getting some extra storage, but you are too, so they feel good about it. It overcomes that hesitation.

In fact, I've seen an even better version of that strategy very recently. You may remember that I wrote a blog post called “The Almost Ultimate Guide to Follow Up.” In that blog post, I recommended the CRM system Contactually. It's the CRM system I use, and the reason I like it so much is, first, it's simple. Second, it's focused on follow-up, which the other CRM systems aren't. It actually monitors your communications with your contacts, and if you've said you'd like to keep in touch with a contact on a regular basis, it notices if you haven't and send you a proactive reminder to get back in touch. Really great strategy. Thirdly, it has a whole bunch of templates you can set up to make your follow-up much easier to do because of the predefined templates.

Now, what Contactually does is for their partners who signed up to refer Contactually and introduced people to the system, it lets them set up a library of predefined templates for those emails. In my case, for example, I just signed up very recently after I've used it and decided I wanted to become a partner because I really think it's a great system, and so I've uploaded to that library my 21-word email, the other emails in my Reignite system, and a whole bunch of my follow-up emails. If someone signs up for Contactually through my referral link, and there's an example below, they obviously become a Contactually member, but they automatically get a library with all my best follow-up emails in them.

That means that not only do I get an incentive for referring people, I think it's something like a 20% commission, but more importantly, I feel good about the referral because I know that the people who use my link will get my very best follow-up emails that they couldn't get from Contactually themselves and they couldn't get from anyone else, so I feel good about it. Now, you can use the exact same strategy. You don't have to have a piece of software to do it. If you're a service provider, for example, but you've got a free report, a lead magnet type thing, you do high-value briefing, you share a benchmarking study, anything piece of useful valuable information you have, for example, you can use that to get a referral.

Instead of contacting a common contact and saying, “Hey, I noticed on LinkedIn you're connected to Jim Smith. Could you introduce us?” which to the common contact feels a bit like he's going to set up Jim for a sales meeting, you can say, “Hey, I noticed on LinkedIn you're connected to Jim Smith. We've recently created a benchmarking report that covers the 7 top factors that pharmaceutical companies need to get a grasp of to improve their profitability in the 21st century,” whatever it might be. “If you were me, how would you go about getting a copy to Jim?”

Now, to the person you've asked for the referral, the introduction then, it now feels like they're doing Jim a favour because Jim will get a copy of your great report, or your benchmarking study, or a presentation from you, or a really valuable information. Whatever you choose to use as your referral gift will make your common contact feel good about referring you, and that's really the key. Instead of now feeling hesitant and as if they're setting that person up for a sales meeting with you, they feel as if they're doing them a favor by introducing them to you, and so they are much more likely to do it.

Have a think about what you could use as a referral gift to get the people referring you to offer to the people you'd like to be introduced to that will be valuable to them, that would involve them interacting with you. Ideally, in a meeting where you review it, or you could send them a copy of it, and then follow up afterwards, et cetera, et cetera, but make sure you got something great that you can allow people to give on your behalf that will make them feel really comfortable doing that referral. It will really increase the number of referrals that you get.

See you next week.

Here's the Contactually Link again:

>> Get a 30 Day Free Trial of Contactually

The post How To Motivate People To Refer You More Often appeared first on Ian Brodie.

Google Panda has the dubious distinction of being one of the first “shockwave” algorithm updates that Google unleashed upon the SEO community. In the Fall of 2011, this ravaging bear came rampaging through the internet, punishing those businesses and websites that only were crafting and publishing content to game search engines, while doing nothing to serve actual users.

Prior to Panda, several companies had based their business model on one of web content arbitrage. Essentially they would buy and post cheap content, rank for highly valued terms, and the traffic and advertising revenue would create their profit margin. It was a deviously simple way to game the system, and truth be told it’s amazing it lasted as long as it did.

However, the post-Panda era of web content creation is one that requires a bit more good old elbow grease to get search engine eyeballs on your work. Accordingly, there are very specific guidelines that Google themselves outlined in a blog post that Los Angeles-based Search Marketing Firm Wpromote have crafted into an Infographic (the original is actually an animated GIF… funny)

The Infographic is based on Google’s own “how-to” guide that they published in the wake of Panda. That document was designed to challenge users and content creator to objectively review their content and ask themselves a very difficult question: “Do I really need to publish this? Does this add ANY value to a conversation?”

And of course, if the answer to that very heavy query is indeed “No” then it’s highly likely that your content would get “Panda’ed” out of the SERPs, so you’re better off doing some revisions.

Yes, the heady days of cheating Google out of relevance by smattering your website haphazardly with bad content have gone the way of the Dodo Bird, and it’s for the best. Truth be told, the web and the world are a lot cleaner and less chaotic without the scourge of search engine spam gumming up the Google gears for nefarious fun and profit. And as a result, those of us who work in web content are all probably a little more honest because of this Panda. So for that we can all be thankful.

Glassdoor recently released their annual list of the best places to work across North America. Unlike most roundups, the results are based off of actual employee ratings and reviews from the Glassdoor platform. The companies listed aren’t surprising- they’re who we often look to as industry benchmarks for corporate culture and employee engagement. They’re the gold standard. So what do they do that allows them to create such an incredible employee experience? Let’s dive in.

The top trend? The importance of organizational culture. With Millennials leaving their jobs twice as fast as older generations, averaging a tenure of about three years, we need to start identifying what we can do to improve poor retention.

Transparency
Make transparency more than just a buzzword. In establishing it as an immediate priority, companies will not only create a more engaged workforce, but also improve their bottom line. Zillow is highly reviewed by its employees because they feel like they understand their place in the company.

“I always look forward to hearing how and what the company as a whole is working on. It’s extremely meaningful to hear how your role fits into the company’s overall vision and what other groups are learning or experimenting with.” (source)

What can you do?

• Start each day with a daily scrum meeting. In the meeting, each team member lets everyone know what they’re working on and if they have any blockers. The process allows everyone to get an idea of what the team is working on, and helps foster team collaboration.

• Led by your company leader, a company-wide all-hands meeting could also help get everyone on the same page. The meeting should be a “state of the union” to address where the company is that week and what plans are on the horizon. Are you hitting your sales goals? Are you planning on hiring more team members? Let everyone know.

• Make your team calendars visible.  The added insight into your team’s day-to-day will help improve your internal communication.

Invest in your employees’ future

According to a report published by PWC, Millennials rank personal learning and development as their first choice benefit from employers. Glassdoor’s report reflects this- most companies in the top 10 place a large importance on the development of their employees.

“Nestle maintains a corporate structure that fosters career development and growth. There are numerous opportunities to progress within the company and often times employees are able to switch disciplines if necessary. This flexibility allows an individual to find a fit that makes them happy, and in return, the company benefits from higher productivity.” (source)

What can you do?

Invest in your team. Like Nestle, Purina, and AirBnB, offer opportunities for entry level employees to find a role in the company that best suits their interests and experience. If your company is smaller with limited lateral mobility, invest in learning opportunities like conferences and consider offering tuition reimbursement.

Learn from each other

We can all learn from Bain & Company’s collaborative and supportive environment. Their internal ethos,  “A Bainie never lets another Bainie fail”, showcases their internal support system and determination to make sure everyone succeeds. Hubspot employees also note that they feel empowered to make decisions during their day, but understand that they have the support of the organization should any need or question arise. It’s that type of support and comfort that makes organizations stand out and candidates jump on open positions.

What can you do?

Start weekly lunch and learns. If anyone on your team is an expert in excel or photoshop, have them teach a few classes during the lunch hour. Your team will benefit not only from the learning opportunity, but also from the time spent together.

Recognize Great Work

The number one reason employees leave their jobs is because they don’t feel appreciated at work. The solution? Let your team know you appreciate them. Employee recognition reinforces organizational culture and company values. It’s no surprise that a leading trend across the top 10 (and top 50 for that matter) is a strong employee recognition program.

When implementing a program, keep in mind:

• Timing– be as “in the moment” as possible. Let your employees know you appreciate their work in the moment, not a week after the act is complete.
• Authentic– Be genuine in your feedback. Your employees won’t improve if you aren’t truthful.
• Consider adding apps to your program. Tools like 15five, AnyPerk, and Perk.com provide a platform for you recognize great work and reward them how your organizaiton sees fit.

What perks matter?

In creating a benefit and perk system, it’s easy to jump to the obvious selection of ping pong tables and nap pods. Take note from Glassdoor’s list and simply ask your employees what they want. What do they value the most? What can you do to help challenge them and create a supportive learning culture. Free lunches and gym memberships are nice, but an overwhelming number of people prefer a focus on health benefits and personal development. By asking your team to contribute to the overall picture, you’ll be well on your way to joining the list of best places to work.

The international agreement reached in Paris on climate change is the most far-reaching in many years. We checked in with HBS professor Forest Reinhardt, co-chair of the school’s Global Energy Seminar, for a backgrounder on how business people are thinking about sustainability. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

HBR: How have businesspeople’s attitudes toward environmental issues evolved over the years?

Reinhardt: The response has never been monolithic. There are always people who see environmental issues as sources of additional short-run costs and who focus on minimizing those costs. And there are always people who see the efficient use of natural resources as an economic imperative and who try to work out what that means for their business.

You can find both of those groups in any period, any industry, any geography.

And how has the social context they’re reacting to changed?

If you go back to the post-war years in the U.S., there was a broad sense that the government was responsible for public goods, the private sector for private goods, and that each ought to do what it did best. During the sixties and seventies, a whole series of new environmental laws was enacted—the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and a lot of others—plus a major new government agency, the EPA, was established (which by the way happened under a Republican president, Richard Nixon).

After 1980, new legislative initiatives became much rarer. This was a period when large numbers of politicians and voters in the English-speaking world developed a sense that governments were failing to solve social problems. Government generally got delegitimized. This shift wasn’t entirely in response to actual government failures—there was some ideology involved, too.

So activists and consumers increasingly looked directly at companies themselves for changes in how natural resources were used. Broadly speaking, that’s where we’ve been stuck—but the picture changes with the global accord on carbon emissions approved Saturday night in Paris. It’s encouraging to see that governmental institutions have been able to adapt as our scientific and economic understanding of the climate improves.

What are some recent ways that companies have responded to sustainability challenges?

Many companies have good economic reasons to get creative—and you should never underestimate the actions that individual companies take in their own interests, but which also have positive social effects. Here’s just one example. In California, government management of water resources has been highly dysfunctional (though it’s getting better)—but even so farmers are doing a much, much better job getting exactly the right amount of water to plants at the right time, and doing the same with fertilizer. In a sense they’re substituting information for resources: by knowing exactly when to apply water and fertilizer, they use fewer resources and do less damage to the environment.

This isn’t just a developed-world phenomenon. I recently visited a Heineken plant in Ethiopia that had been shipping barley from France to use in making the beer—meaning that they had to ship it through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea to Djibouti, and then put it on a truck and drive it to Addis Ababa. Well, Ethiopian farmers have grown barley for centuries, the land is well-suited to that crop, but the methods were pre-modern—not because Ethiopian farmers are less competent than French farmers, but because they just haven’t had access to modern inputs and capital. It turned out that if Heineken helped them obtain modest amounts of modern seeds and fertilizer, they could double or triple their yields, supply barley to the malting factory, and completely transform their economic circumstances. The company loved eliminating the foreign exchange risk and the logistical expenses, and the Ethiopians benefited from the improved agriculture, obviously. And by the way—the government isn’t subsidizing this. Heineken is just acting in its own economic interests.

It’s not always so easy to break the tradeoff between sustainability issues and developing-world growth.

First, we should be clear about one thing. We’re not going to be able to make the planet sustainable without paying attention to the needs of the poor. We can’t expect people who can’t illuminate their homes to be engaged with this topic. If solutions appear to impose unfair constraints on that population, they aren’t going to fly. That makes the situation doubly challenging.

But second—and this might be more encouraging—as China, India, and dozens of other countries become more prosperous, their citizens put pressure on their governments to pay more attention to the environment. Elections help, but even in their absence governments are waking up to this.

And (speaking of Paris) collective action is clearly back on the table. What’s the smartest approach going forward?

For the energy industry, obviously, the discussion has been around a cap and trade system—or, more generally, a regulatory system that creates incentives for companies to emit less carbon dioxide.

It’s interesting: a lot of the big sustainability issues (not just energy) come down to pricing—putting a price on natural resources that we used to see as free. There are a lot of examples where this has been done in the past. Fisheries, for example. Around here, off Cape Cod, you used to be able to drop a net into the ocean and pull it up, filled with fish. Nobody had put a price on the fish—it was free if you had the tools to get it. But as demand grew and fish became more scarce, countries had to develop fisheries management systems that make the cost of the fish reflect their scarcity. Usually this means that the fishermen collectively have a “total allowable catch” but that they can buy and sell quotas within that overall limit—and overall the system works pretty well. They make a decent living, the fish are coming back, and consumers are willing to pay the higher, unsubsidized prices for fish in restaurants or at the supermarket. Basically we are just creating property rights for fish in the sea, so that people have incentives to use them as wisely as they do other private resources.

We’re moving away from subsidizing fishermen and consumers of fish—but we’re still subsidizing the oil and gas industries and ourselves, their customers, passing the costs for that onto our children and grandchildren. But collectively we’ve just taken a big step toward addressing that.

Regardless of ideology, there are generic ways that companies think about these as business issues. You outlined those fifteen years ago in an HBR article—have they changed?

Not really—and that’s because they’re simple, analytic questions—the kind of thing we teach in first-year strategy. For any company, these are the things to think about:

• Can you benefit from resource constraints by creating a differentiated product that appeals to consumers who are willing and able to pay more for them? (Tesla, for example.)
• Can you change the rules of the game to tilt it in your favor, perhaps by affecting regulatory actions?
• Can you cut costs by using resources more efficiently?
• Can a change to your business model—like leasing instead of selling equipment—create advantage for a period of time, and ultimately change how your industry operates?
• How will you manage the risks that environmental change create? (The risks are changing all the time—probably more than the other factors.)

Articles about sustainable capitalism—like the piece we published from Michael Porter on “creating shared value”—seem to start a lot of conversations. But we don’t know what the real impact is. What’s your guess?

When people talk about “corporate social responsibility” they might be talking about either of two things. One is the purpose of the firm—strictly to serve shareholders, or something broader? This question sparks a lot of rhetoric and not much in the way of action.

A second question is how business people, without rethinking their basic objective, can contribute to solving social problems and still make money. You don’t hear a lot of rhetoric about this one—but it’s having a very big impact on business behavior. And while unilateral business initiatives are not a substitute for collective action, businesses can empower collective action by showing governments, credibly, what the technological and economic possibilities are. In fact this is a big part of the story of Paris.

How optimistic are you about our capacity to “make the planet sustainable”?

Look at it this way. If I felt that we needed to reorganize our whole economic system, then no, I would not be optimistic. Most attempts at wholesale reform of institutions don’t turn out so well, right? But that’s not what we need. We need to internalize some social costs and get the prices right—we know how do that, and we’ve done it before. We can certainly do it again.

A new year usually brings with it new expenses, in the form of company-wide pay bumps. But business owners may be able to find significant savings in the “Payroll” line-item of their 2016 budgets by offering employees new benefits or perks instead of salary increases.

In a survey of 2,000 employed American adults by job review site Glassdoor, 79% of respondents said they’d prefer additional benefits to a higher salary, with more comprehensive health insurance plans (40%) rating highest. While Canada’s universal healthcare system shields employees from a lot of medical costs, the Sanofi-Aventis 2011 Healthcare Survey found that given a choice between their benefits and up to $20,000 in cash, most Canadians prefer the perks.

Other themes highlighted in the Glassdoor survey appear to be universal. For instance, companies are reining in costs and limiting the number of paid sick days (32% of respondents said they’d like more of them) and paid vacation days (37%) they offer—if new employees are offered them at all.

The desire for benefits over extra pay is especially prevalent with the younger set, those aged 18-34: 89% of them said they’d prefer benefits or perks to a pay raise. Compare that to the response of those aged 55—64, the majority (66%) of whom said they’d prefer a higher salary over perks and benefits. Of course, baby boomers likely already have jobs with benefits, having entered the workforce during a period of economic expansion and relative job stability.

Here’s the complete breakdown of what the benefits the respondents would take over a salary raise:

Interestingly, the researchers attribute the shift in expectations to a strengthening U.S. economy. “[As] job market confidence continues to rise, there is no doubt it is a job seeker’s market,” says Rusty Rueff, Glassdoor career and workplace expert. “This is a clear signal to employers that in order to compete in today’s labor market, it’s not just about salary and compensation, employers should be communicating clearly about non-traditional compensation.”

Offering added perks and benefits could be a useful recruiting tool. Millennial employees flock to employers that will help them achieve a healthy balance between work and their personal lives. Members of Generation Y also tend to have strong value systems and view work as an outlet to help better themselves and the world, rather than just a means to a paycheque—meaning their salary expectations are lowered. The demand for these kind of perks likely stems from millennials’ desire to maintain their lifestyle, which they wouldn’t be able to do without their employers’ help.

MORE ABOUT HIRING, CAREERS & EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT:

• 70% of employees would quit their jobs for a remote-working one
• Great employee engagement starts as soon as the hire is made
• How companies can stop making their best employees miserable
• Millennials are forcing Canadian firms to up their mobile game
• Job candidates get hired faster in Canada than anywhere else
• Millennials are now the biggest in the Canadian workforce
• The rise of the boomerang employee

The post The perks and benefits that employees want more than a raise appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Since the birth of the digital marketing landscape, it has seen industry-wide exponential growth. More and more companies are shifting a significant proportion of their marketing budget from traditional to digital initiatives. For example, Mondelez, the processed foods company, has cut their spending on TV advertising nearly in half while boosting their digital marketing spending enormously.

The core of good digital marketing is engaging content. Content has to encourage people to interact with the brand and engage personally.

That is why content is king in marketing.

Settling on the content to use and the keywords to target is just about the most important decision in a digital marketing campaign. In this article, we will talk about how to do blog research and why it matters.

Knowing Your Audience

First of all, each deployment of content has a unique purpose. Marketing executives are very excited when their content manages to go viral, becoming extremely popular over a short period of time.

Viral content doesn’t happen by accident; it’s the result of many man-hours of planning and execution. Viral content usually has an innate quality of authenticity, nostalgia, or some other emotional appeal. Crafting content to go viral is quite difficult, and most attempts fail. The ones that do succeed, however, can significantly increase brand awareness and engagement.

One of the most important elements of creating content is research. Every piece of content should have an intended audience, and the marketing team needs to know everything they can about that audience.

For example, if your target market is members of the Army or Navy who are currently dispatched, you would need to account for the fact that your audience most likely only has access to VSAT equipment for satellite Internet service. That would mean they prefer fewer images and more text because it would load faster and take up less bandwidth.

On the other hand, if you cater to an audience of young professionals you need to consider a strong mobile presence, so the content needs to load properly and look correct on all the leading mobile browsers and OSs.

Here a Little There a Little: Optimizing for People and Bots

It’s not only about people. Content needs to appeal to search engines as well. Google and other search engines have algorithms that they use to determine rankings on the search result pages for search terms. Being in the top few spots is a major game-changer for a brand, as long as the content and web design have been created to match the search listing.

The things that Google rewards are usually, but not always, the same things that directly create value for consumers. Taking the extra step to make sure you have covered on-page best practices could mean the difference between making the first page and the second page of results.

Regarding traffic, the difference is typically astounding. Choosing the format and frequency of content publication plays into this: Google prefers sites with fresh, regularly updated content, but also looks for quality and community engagement like shares and backlinks. That means all of the content has to have inherent quality and shareability.

Your content does not always need to knock it out of the park, but a consistent stream of strong content will convince search engine algorithms to move the page up in the rankings.

Choosing the Right Keywords

One of the trickier and more technical parts of content creation is choosing the right keywords. In brief, more popular keywords have more traffic, but there will also be more competition for space on the search result pages.

Google has some built-in tools for keyword research and analysis if you sign up for their Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools services. That opens up the ability to use Google Keyword Planner, a free service that tracks many dimensions of keyword performance, such as the characteristics of search queries and which keywords lead to clicks to which pages.

The sheer scale of the data Google controls means that using Google Keyword Planner provides a useful first pass. You might want to use a more advanced keyword analysis tool like Moz if you want something broader, such as if you wish to measure the nature of competition for a keyword.

Regardless of the tools you utilize, doing both preliminary keyword research and on-going research to track how well you expect a keyword to work and to ensure that your prediction was correct is fundamental to deploying content. The right keyword will draw more traffic for less time, effort, and money.

The Final Word: Research is Critical

Content can completely change a brand’s performance by reaching more customers and moving them through the sales funnel. Just remember that the foundational research groundwork has to come first.

It can take a lot of time and effort to craft good content and build a strategy for deploying it, but careful planning will greatly increase your chances of success. Don’t skimp on research and spend effort on creating content that never reaches your audience. Research helps you get it right the first time.

The modern buyer’s journey is far from linear. It’s complex. It’s unpredictable. And it’s constantly evolving. But that complexity shouldn’t discourage you. I think successful businesses today are the ones that have the ability to adapt and connect with buyers at every stage.

In this article, I’ll dive into the latest buyer’s journey statistics and unpack actionable insights you can apply directly to your business strategy. Stick around until the end, where I’ll walk you through a step-by-step guide on how to define your buyer’s journey using HubSpot’s customer journey analytics tool.

Table of Contents

• What the Buyer's Journey Looks Like for Consumers in 2025
• How the Buyer's Journey Is Changing: Trends From My Buyer’s Journey Research
• HubSpot’s Customer Journey Analytics Tool
• Final Takeaways About Buyer’s Journey

What the Buyer's Journey Looks Like for Consumers in 2025

The buyer’s journey has evolved significantly over the years. While the traditional awareness–consideration–decision framework still holds value, I think it’s rapidly being reshaped by real-world experiences that influence how buyers make decisions today.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the buyer’s journey, I recommend starting with this quick read.

To get a clearer picture of how the buyer’s journey looks in today’s landscape, I’ve explored recent research and studies. I’ll first walk you through the key findings from those reports (including what they reveal about modern buying behavior) and then share my own takeaways and insights.

Emblaze

In their report, Discovery Isn’t Dead - How to De-Escalate Committed Buyers, Dr. Leff Bonney points out that the buyer’s journey has changed, but discovery conversations haven’t caught up.

Today’s buyers do most of their research independently (often using AI) and are typically 50–70% through their decision before speaking to sales. But being far along doesn’t mean they’re on the right track.

Many buyers become deeply committed to the wrong solution due to a bias known as “escalation of commitment,” where emotional or financial investment makes them resist change. The biggest problem of sellers is that they struggle to identify this and guide buyers toward a better path.

The escalation of commitment is mainly caused due to cognitive dissonance and sunk costs fallacy.

Source

A key insight from the research is that negative feedback leads to investing more resources. For example, executives who made substantial initial purchases were more likely to double down and commit even more resources by the third decision point — despite earlier setbacks.

Nowadays buyers enter the conversation having already made significant progress on their own. This shift means sellers must quickly evaluate whether the buyer is heading in the right direction. And also be ready to tactfully redirect them when they’re not.

Gartner

Gartner’s study, B2B Buying: How Top CSOs and CMOs Optimize the Journey, highlights that the key to mapping an effective buyer journey is delivering integrated and consistent engagement across all touchpoints.

When buyers experience strong alignment between a supplier’s website and their conversations with sales representatives, they’re 2.8 times more likely to close a high-quality deal. Consistency in messaging builds trust. And trust drives conversions.

How much of the buyer’s journey is digital?

Much of the buyer’s journey nowadays has become digital. Gartner found out that B2B buyers are 1.8 times more likely to close a high-quality deal when they use supplier-provided digital tools alongside guidance from a sales representative.

The study highlights the importance of integrating the digital experience with the human experience.

Source

Weaving value-framing, value-affirming content, and buyer engagement insights directly into the seller’s workflow better guides conversations and drives stronger outcomes.

Again this is proven by data.

Buyers are 2.3 times more likely to feel assured about the value of their purchase when engaging with supplier representatives than when interacting with digital channels.

Buyers who make purchases through digital self-service channels are 1.65 times more likely to experience regret compared to those who buy through traditional, rep-led interactions. On the other hand, when sales reps assist buyers during the digital purchase journey, the likelihood of regret is cut in half.

G2

In 2024’s Buyer Behavior Report, G2 has packed up a lot of decent findings. Let’s start with the ROI metric that everyone seems to have on the top of their mind when they make any purchase

decision. Of the survey respondents, 78% said that they expect ROI within 6 months of implementing software.

As AI-powered software is becoming more prevalent in the market, ROI expectations are shifting as well.

Source

An impressive 75% expect their company to achieve a positive ROI on AI investments faster than with other investments. In contrast, only 54% of non-power-users share this expectation.

Distrust in vendor websites is growing — 9% of buyers now see them as unreliable, up from just 3% last year, making it a leading barrier to purchase decisions.

In fact, buyers today trust their peers more than traditional analyst firms. Of software buyers, 82% say peer experiences heavily influence their choice of provider, highlighting the power of word-of-mouth in the decision-making process.

Another interesting finding is that when asked which sources they found most valuable throughout the buying process, respondents consistently favored independent software and service review sites at every stage of their journey. When buyers refer to review websites, they are most interested in the pricing information.

TrustRadius

I think the title of TrustRadius’s research report is telling: 2024 B2B Buying Disconnect Report: The Year of the Brand Crisis. To better understand the buyer’s journey, the study explored key insights around buying cycles and the composition of buying groups.

When segmented by company size, small (53%) and mid-sized (39%) businesses typically have 2–3 people in buying groups. Enterprises (34%) typically have buying groups that peak at 4 to 5 members, as shown below:

Source

As for timelines, 87% of buyers complete their purchases within a six-month sales cycle.

It’s standard practice for buyers to create a shortlist when evaluating purchase options. Most shortlists (63%) include just two to three products, and 96% have five or fewer.

When evaluating options, 66% of buyers prefer established market leaders over niche (19%) or new (11%) products. Notably, 78% choose products they were already familiar with before beginning their research. For enterprise buyers, 86% shortlist products they’ve heard of before starting research.

Once the shortlist is made, 71% stick with their initial top choice, while only 12% switch to another option. And since 78% of buyers start their research on Google, it’s clear why brand-led growth (BLG) companies with strong brand recognition and solid SEO consistently outperform in the B2B space.

How the Buyer's Journey Is Changing: Trends From My Buyer’s Journey Research

Brand-building is key to gaining customers.

Making it onto a buyer’s shortlist significantly boosts your chances of being selected. In fact, if your product is already known to the buyer, there’s over a 75% chance it will make the shortlist. Given this, I think it’s clear that brand building and awareness play a crucial role in influencing purchase decisions.

People are looking for authentic product reviews.

In the past, product reviews played a major role in influencing purchase decisions. But today, consumers are increasingly skeptical of reviews on websites and platforms like Amazon, largely due to the rise of fake or overly polished feedback.

Consumers and buyers are now researching products and tools differently. They turn to communities like Reddit, where discussions are raw, unfiltered, and often more trustworthy than website reviews. The peer insights there help buyers feel confident that others have successfully navigated the same journey.

I think as people are becoming better at spotting what’s inauthentic, they’re placing more trust in genuine, peer-driven recommendations instead (which brings me to my next point).

Delight your current customers so they recommend your brand.

As buying behavior is evolving, people are turning to peers, colleagues, and networks for recommendations before making a purchase. That’s why a company’s long-term strategy should prioritize leaving a lasting, positive impression on current customers.

I suggest always going the extra mile to delight your existing customers. Whether it’s building a custom feature they’ve asked for or including a small, thoughtful gift with your product. Basically any gesture that helps keep your brand top of mind. When customers feel valued, they’re far more likely to share their positive experience with others.

Regularly check in with customers to ensure they’re finding value. And guide them to support when needed. The aim is to build strong relationships that naturally lead to positive, voluntary reviews and referrals.

For example: Someone might come across an honest LinkedIn post where a peer shares a challenge they faced and how a tool helped solve it. This kind of authenticity instantly builds credibility — especially when the reader knows or relates to the person sharing the experience.

Improve the buyer’s journey with real data.

From my experience, the real way to improve the buyer’s journey is by looking at my customers’ data to capture real, unfiltered customer sentiment from the channels they naturally engage in.

The following are some of the best ways to get that valuable data:

• Sales pitch and discovery calls.
• Product demos and walkthroughs.
• YouTube video comments.
• Customer support or service call recordings.
• One-on-one customer interviews.
• Chatbot conversations and scripts.
• Quick polls and in-app surveys.
• Reddit discussions and threads.
• Quora answers and discussions.
• Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams conversations (whichever is applicable).

Even if you’re only using some of these channels, you already have a valuable stream of qualitative feedback from which you can understand your audience, identify pain points, improve messaging, and shape product direction with more confidence.

Maximize ROI for your customers.

When it comes to ROI, the smartest approach is to lead with a focused offering. It can be a small plan or a core feature that tackles the buyer’s biggest pain point right away.

If your solution delivers measurable results within the first few months, and the initial investment is modest, it builds trust. From my experience, that’s when customers are most open to expanding their commitment through add-ons or additional features.

Understand your buyer’s day-to-day.

A great place to start is by mapping out “a day in the life” of your B2B buyer. Take time to understand what kind of content they consume, which touchpoints they interact with, and how they make decisions. (Check out the next section, where I discuss more about customer journey analytics.)

This exercise can reveal key insights into their behaviors, pain points, and priorities. Once you have a buyer persona that actually reflects reality, you’ll be in a much stronger position to understand the buyer’s journey.

And the best way to do this? Talk to real people in the roles you’re targeting. If you don’t personally know anyone who fits your ideal buyer profile, consider reaching out on LinkedIn with a polite request for a 20-30 minute chat. Just one conversation can uncover insights you’d never get from assumptions or guesswork.

As Gartner’s research suggested, buyers feel more confident when speaking with a real person. That’s why I believe the core job of modern sellers is to instill a sense of confidence and control in their buyers throughout the purchasing process.

How To Make An Effective Customer Journey Map In 1 Hour (FREE Templates)

HubSpot’s Customer Journey Analytics Tool

HubSpot’s Customer Journey Analytics tool is specifically made to understand how prospects and customers interact with your business. To build customer journeys in HubSpot, navigate to Advanced Reporting and select Lifecycle Stage Progression.

Based on my experience managing HubSpot for a client with a small team, I tailored the customer journey to fit their workflow. Given the limited marketing resources, I marked the MQL stage as optional — leads were passed directly to the sales team since there weren’t dedicated marketing personnel handling lead qualification.

Looking at the buyer’s journey through this lens, I can easily see that we generated 393 leads in the previous quarter, out of which 43 progressed to become SQLs.

In addition to getting a visual breakdown of how leads move through each stage, I get the option to display drop-off points:

This way I pinpoint where customers are exiting the journey. I can also customize the date range to focus on the specific period that I want to analyze and base my decisions on.

Let’s discuss what I particularly enjoy about HubSpot for building and analyzing the buyer’s journey.

What I like about creating my buyer’s journey in HubSpot

HubSpot has a wide range of options that help in tracking customer journeys. Using HubSpot’s powerful attribution reporting, I have the flexibility to identify which interactions — blog views, form submissions, and deal creation — directly influence conversions and revenue.

For instance, here’s my conversion data in a streamlined and intuitive interface:

With this kind of data visualization, it is easy for me to quickly grasp how campaigns are performing.

Here’s the ideal flow for optimizing my marketing and sales efforts with confidence:

• Measure blog performance by checking total views, AMP views, and bounce rates and compare that data to the previous 30-day period.
• View the activity of recently created contacts, such as who submitted a form in the last 30 days.
• Use multi-touch attribution models to evaluate how my marketing efforts contributed to key outcomes such as revenue generation, deal creation, and new contact acquisition.

The best part about this buyer’s journey tool is that I can add filters and define custom stages to show progress through the contact or deal journey. To deep-dive more into the specifics of customer journey analytics, I recommend watching this video:

https://youtu.be/s39HO5JDXSQ?si=RtHsEw 9d7889vDIq

Final Takeaways About Buyer’s Journey

Understanding the buyer’s journey is essential for both sales and marketing success. That’s why staying in tune with how it’s evolving and where it’s headed should be a priority for any business.

The data you collect through your sales efforts offers valuable insights into your audience. It helps you define clear customer archetypes and craft more targeted, effective marketing strategies. I think using customer journey reports is the best way to analyze every touchpoint in the customer experience.

Building and showcasing positive customer reviews ultimately comes down to trust. Remember that consumers trust existing customers more than they do businesses. And existing consumers are more inclined to trust businesses that care about them.

My opinion is that sales teams can play a key role here by staying connected with converted customers, ensuring they’re getting real value from the product or service.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to this: Know exactly who you’re trying to reach and make sure they feel seen, supported, and confident in their decision to choose you.

When I first started selling, I'd experience the following scenario all the time:

I'd leave a meeting thinking I nailed it -- only for the prospect to go dark after my attempts to follow up.

What the heck was I doing wrong?

It turns out that in many cases, I stopped hearing back because the prospect hadn’t bought into making a change to solve their business pain.

They'd bought into having pain and were even sold on my solution, but they hadn’t taken the crucial last step of deciding to change anything about it.

I had assumed they wanted to change but ultimately lost the deal because they decided to do nothing. Even when your buyers realize your solution’s value, it’s still easier to stick with the status quo.

I'd made a classic error: I'd failed to uncover my prospect’s hidden objection -- a reluctance to take action.

The takeaway? Unless you dig for obections, it's easy to overlook them. It’s hard for prospects to fully define their reservations and anxities, so you’ll have to uncover what they are. There's also social stigma associated with rejecting people, and your prospects don't want to feel bad about themselves. So they take the path of least resistance: They go dark, and tell you the real story later (or never at all).

However, there are ways to move a deal forward.

One tactic to overcome inertia is simply asking questions. A few of my favorites are:

1) Do you want to change this?

It sounds simple, but reps rarely ask this.

2) Would this change be in line with your company’s goals?

If the company isn't behind the change, you'll have to do some extra work to move the deal forward.

3) Where does making this change fall on your priority list?

Get specific. Are you in their top three or bottom three? Is there something that’s more important or blocking your deal?

On the flip side, you can use these other priorities to your advantage -- it’s possible your solution will help achieve other goals, but your prospect isn’t aware of that fact.

4) How committed are you to changing this in the next [time period]?

Assuming you're on their priority list, your prospect’s answer will give you a sense of how quickly you can close and start implementation.

These questions sound basic, but surprisingly few salespeople ask them because it’s easy to assume you know what your buyer’s thinking. But that just makes it easy for your buyers to keep the whole truth from you and simply go dark. It’s crucial to hear the whole story so you can focus on overcoming your prospects’ core objections.

Here’s what such a conversation looks like in action:

Prospect: "This is great! I can see exactly how I can use your product."

Rep:"Awesome. Would you want to change from your current process to implement this one?"

Prospect:"Definitely."

Rep:"When do you expect to make a change?"

Prospect:"Maybe in the next year or so."

Rep:"So this isn't really a big priority for you then, is it?"

Prospect:"It is, but we need to redesign our website first, and budgets don’t get allocated until May."

By digging deeper, you're starting to uncover real objections, so you can face them head on. If you had stopped qualifying after your prospect’s first answer, you’d proceed through the sales process with a false sense of security.

Even if you find that your product isn’t a high priority right now, you'll at least know what’s standing in the way and when it makes sense to check back in. That way, you can focus on the deals where you're closer to the money.

If you find that you're high on their priority list, you've just gotten yourself some further buy-in, which will make closing much easier.

When a prospect answers each of these seemingly basic questions in the affirmative, there's a subtle compliance tactic in play. Each small buy-in makes it easier to get to the next larger "yes." Plus, you now can hold your prospect accountable -- we all like to be consistent with what we say.

This is called the “Change Buy-In.” It’s designed to make the “change” step of the Buy-In Method, displayed below, more explicit by asking questions that build on one another.

This is just one of eight buy-in strategies you can use throughout your sales process. By asking strategic questions during each step of the process, you’ll be able to more thoroughly qualify your prospect and make sure they’re willing to commit to each step (and eventually the sale). To get more of these questions, check out the free course on this method here.

Prospective customers are often most responsive to whomever has the quickest response time. Buyers are seeking solutions to solve pressing business challenges, and they want someone who is responsive, efficient, and knowledgeable. Unfortunately, this is an area where many sales organization fail to implement best practices.

To uncover the most effective outreach strategies, and understand how actual sales organizations are responding to leads, my company, Velocify, analyzed the interactions between millions of front-line sales reps and leads, as well as the final outcomes, to formulate its new research report, “The Ultimate Guide to Inquiry Response.” This guide provides sales leaders and reps with the optimal strategy for conducting outreach to leads across multiple channels, ensuring that they are addressing each lead appropriately.

The report revealed an alarming gap between best practices and organizations’ actual processes for following up with prospective customers appropriately. The results show that many sales leaders looking to enhance speed-to-contact and overall conversion rates can benefit from implementing these best practices on a consistent basis. The study shows the improvements sales leaders must make to create and develop high-performing organizations, delivering the ideal contact strategy to engage the best fit for each lead and salesperson.

Key highlights from the study include:

• Leads that receive two voicemails on six missed calls are 34 percent more likely to convert than those who don’t receive any voicemails at all, yet only 12 percent of leads receive two voicemails.
• Making between five and seven calls to unresponsive leads offers the best ROI, yet only eight percent of leads receive between five and seven calls.
• Calling a lead within one minute more than doubles conversion rates, yet only three percent of leads receive a call within one minute.

Email Response

Given today’s highly digital world, it is not surprising companies were better at sending email responses quickly compared to responding with a phone call. This may be a result of the wide array of marketing automation tools available to companies. Despite technological advancements, however, persistence in email was still not up to par with best practices. In fact, only seven percent of leads received between four and six emails, the optimal number of emails from a sales rep prior to moving into a nurture status, while an alarming 28 percent were never responded to via email at all.

Phone Response

Past studies have found that six is the optimal number of callbacks, while this study uncovered that only eight percent of leads received between five and seven calls. Leads are 1.72 times more likely to convert if called back within 30 minutes, and 2.14 times more likely to convert if called back within one minute. Given that the average sales team responds to inbound leads within 48 hours, this was an alarming finding.

Voicemail Response

The study found that while many people no longer think of voicemail as part of a successful contact strategy, it is actually very effective. Research found the ideal number of voicemails when following the six-call approach was two. In fact, leads who received two voicemails on six missed calls were 34 percent more likely to convert than leads who didn’t receive any voicemails at all. However, just 12 percent of leads were left two voicemails, while nearly half of the prospects did not receive a single voicemail.

It is clear that there is substantial room for improvement in many organizations’ approach to outreach. This report shows that organizations can drastically improve their conversion rates by implementing small processes that yield substantial rewards. Now is the time to empower front-line sales reps to achieve consistently better results.

Updated! Last year we wrote a post asking you to steal our content distribution ideas for 2015.

Now that 2015 is nearly over, I thought I’d let you know how those ideas panned out and give you some tried-and-true ways to distribute your content in the New Year.

It’s pretty safe to say that businesses are waking up and realizing that the “write epic shit” phase of marketing is over.

Getting your content seen, getting it to move, and getting your audience to fall in love with the content you’re constantly delivering is NOW.

Here’s how to get that done in 2016.

If you haven’t read our 2015 Content Distribution post, you should definitely do that first to better help you follow along with our content distribution ideas for 2016.

What Is Content Distribution?

We covered a bit of this in the last post, so for this post I’d really like to focus on the different types of online media, or converged media.

There are three main areas your business should be focusing on:

1. Owned media
2. Paid media
3. Earned media

Owned Media Overview

1. Your website
2. Your blog
3. Your emails
4. Your content assets (think downloadable content)

Owned media really relies on inbound marketing, and even though marketers have pushed inbound marketing as a cure-all, it has its limits.

Like when:

• Your clients aren’t searching for you online
• You aren’t asked for sign-ups or leads (or aren’t doing it well)
• You aren’t segmenting your list(s)
• You aren’t offering anything of real value

Organic traffic continues to get smaller and smaller. And only the cream will rise to the top.

Paid Media Overview

1. PPC Advertising
2. Social advertising
3. Content syndication
4. Press Releases (though these are really lagging in shareability, and I think you’re better off with blog posts versus press releases!)

PPC and social advertising are some of the easiest ways to gain entry into paid media with your content.

But the advertising world isn’t what I’d call “easy.”

Earned Media Overview

1. Syndicated blog posts
2. Guest posts
3. Influencer outreach
4. Networking (targeted networking)

Shares are perhaps the most important social metric, and the sharing of your content is a form of content distribution.

So make sure your plan includes ways to get people to move your content!

What Content Distribution Ideas Worked (And Didn’t) In 2015

Last year we gave you 5 ideas to try and that we were trying or attempting to try.

Here’s how they panned out:

1. [Owned] Create content cycles for your sales funnel.

We are still playing “leapfrog” at the end of 2015 and will be continuing to do so in 2016.

“Leapfrog” is really just a fun way to say that each piece of your content should use another piece to be a springboard.

Essentially, this is how you’re constantly nurturing your audience.

• Thanks for reading our blog post, have you signed up for our blog posts to be delivered to your inbox with free subscriber gifts each week?
• Thanks for being a part of our weekly blog subscription, have you signed up for our newsletter/webinar/free event?
• Thanks for attending our event, have you download our ebook on this [topic]?
• Thanks for downloading our book, how about a free consultation?

And so on and so forth.

Get the idea?

2. [Owned, Paid, Earned] Make a distribution plan for your blog.

This was our plan for 2015 and how it worked (or didn’t work) for us:

1. Create a special community for blog subscribers — This works really well and we have extremely high open and click-through rates with this (smaller) list.
2. Running targeted, paid ads to our blog posts (on Facebook) — We did this for a little bit but we stopped after a while since our organic reach and growth on Facebook is higher than the 0-6% organic reach they promise. We may run some targeted ads this year but we’re not running to do this. Now, if you’re a NEW blogger or have a newer Facebook community this may be an area that you have to pay more attention to!
3. Using Triberr to connect with blog readers and influencers — Again, we use Triberr but it isn’t at the forefront of our strategy. The platform hasn’t evolved enough with blogging and content shock, so we use it in targeted ways but not daily.
4. Posting twice per week (frequency) — Though this has been on our “to-do” list for several years, we can’t seem to make it happen. However this year we’re taking it off the list and focusing more on QUALITY content. We’ve enlisted the help of a few guest bloggers who do very well when it comes to getting our content shared.
5. Using plugins to share old content is still a part of the strategy, but we also use automation tools like IFTTT to help reshare evergreen content, as well as do some scheduling by hand.

With Twitter disabling share counts for content, we’re seeing yet another way in which content distribution and sharing of content has been affected by non-owned channels.

This is why you MUST concentrate on your owned content and channels (email list vs. social media) in 2016.

3. [Owned] Add new channels for distribution.

Mallie Hart and I launched a podcast last year and we had a good run for a small period of time.

I could blame the shift from podcasting to sites like Periscope and Blab but in all honesty my time grew shorter and shorter as B Squared Media grew and I wasn’t able to invest the time it takes to run a podcast.

This is the very reason we haven’t invested in any of the other new sites like Snapchat, Meerkat, the ones mentioned above, etc. … and now Facebook offers live streaming!

Here’s my honest opinion about all of these new sites: if you have the time to invest in them, go for it.

But if you don’t have hours for testing, research, planning and execution, then stick to what you know. I promise you, it will be okay!

I haven’t let FOMO get the best of me and (partly) because of that I more than doubled my business in 2015.

4. [Paid & Earned] More (and more TARGETED) networking.

One of the biggest payouts for 2015 was being a contributor for Mark Schaefer’s {grow} blog.

Not only did I grow my core audience, I joined Mark on a project called The Content Code, got new clients from referrals, and got an additional two more paid writing gigs — which are ongoing.

These projects and writing gigs led to thousands of dollars in revenue for B Squared last year.

Additionally, I joined two networking groups, one locally in NJ and one in NYC.

To date, I’ve been able to secure nearly $60,000 in new business from these groups, and with what’s in our pipeline, that number could reach $100,000 before I’ve even been in the groups for one year.

Networking, by far, has been the best way to ensure that my content is getting seen, but more importantly, that my business is thriving.

#LessNumbersMorePeople is going to continue to be our mantra for 2016.

5. [Owned] Create more nurture content.

Last year, we took the B Squared Media website through a major overhaul.

That went really well.

However, through our active listening efforts, we found there are still a few gaps with our branding and marketing efforts.

The two major problems are:

• New B Squared advocates call us “B Squared Online Media” versus “B Squared Media.” That’s a BIG branding issue for us.
• Some people still don’t realize that A) we offer done-for-you social services or B) what “done-for-you” means

With that in mind, we’ll be updating our site again for 2016.

When it comes to owned content, content distribution, and nurturing your potential and would-be clients, you have to understand that it starts with listening.

It takes a constant effort on our part to:

1. Listen for gaps in our nurture processes
2. Keep tabs on what areas have the biggest gaps
3. Evaluate which gaps lead to the biggest disconnects (conversions)
4. Make a plan to close the gaps
5. Execute
6. Rise and repeat

5-Step Content Distribution Infographic

Here is everything above, spelled out in five simple steps!

What Will Your Content Distribution Plan Be This Year?

Did you focus on content distribution in 2015? How did it go?

What are your plans for getting your content seen in 2016? We’d love to hear from you!

Give us a shout out below and help us be in the know.

It takes time for new technologies to spur a paradigm shift in behavior. Consider, for example, the switch to mobile devices. The first cellphones that could be carried around came out in 1983 (and cost $4,000). It took until 1996 for Motorola to develop a lightweight cellphone that could fit in a pocket. Fast forward to 2015. We now use our cellphones to surf the Web, take photos, track our calories, navigate when we drive—and on and on.

The point? As technology evolves, behavior and patterns shift, but it’s still a process.

A similar revolution has been taking place in sales, yet widespread adoption has not kept pace with the technology.

Consider this statistic: 80 percent of the sales cycle process used to be driven by the sales team; buyer prospects would only spend about 20 percent of their time researching a product, and the rest of the time they spent engaged directly with a sales rep.

The Internet upended this process in the 2000s, as search optimization completely changed how people learned about products and services before they ever reached out to a sales team member.

Prospective buyers now spend more than half of their time researching before engaging with a sales team member; by 2020, 80 percent of the buying process will occur online without any direct human-to-human interaction. This means that by the time prospects actually speak with sales, they are well-educated on the product, likely have checked out competitors, and are much further along in the sales cycle.

Interestingly, many sales departments have been slow to adopt to this paradigm shift; they’re still conducting sales practices with the previous model that’s focused primarily on outreach rather than nurturing prospects online as buyers move through the funnel.

In short: Sales teams are not adapting their practices to the current technology—marketing software designed for the paradigm shift of how people today research and ultimately buy.

What does this mean as marketers? You have a challenge. Your task is to educate your sales team about the technology and behavioral shift and push your team toward the new buying process. It starts with the marketing software you use.

Here are some education points for getting your sales team on board.

Inbound marketing is the new paradigm in sales

Inbound marketing has been around for a while, but there is still confusion about what it entails, how much of a strategic investment it requires, and the type of technology required to deploy it successfully.

To help your sales team get buy-in, here’s a stat worth mentioning: Inbound marketing generates 54 percent more leads than the traditional outbound methods used in the past (paid advertising in pubs, trade shows, cold calls, etc.). Buyers are going online first to understand a product, so your whole website framework, copy and lead nurturing process should be designed to capture people as soon as they land on your website.

With inbound marketing, you’re educating and solving problems versus pushing sales and promos. When done correctly, you’ll be catching people much earlier in the buying cycle and nurturing them as they move through the funnel. When they are ready to buy, your brand will be top of mind because your process started very early on in their buying decision process.

Inbound marketing requires marketing software

When you work with your sales team to move toward an inbound marketing model, stress that it requires more than just email blasts and blogs, and it’s not a short-term strategy. Successful inbound marketing requires marketing software that is designed to maximize engagement at every level in the buying process.

You’ll need to start off with a website design that is modeled to the type of buyer personas you’re targeting. Marketing software is built around the user experience—across all devices—and it provides alerts and scoring systems as people interact with content and downloads so your sales team has visibility into how engaged prospects are before a sales member reaches out. The automation and triggers marketing software provide are designed to educate buyers as they move through the funnel so your sales team has more insight when they go to personally engage with the target.

Marketing software shifts the focus from product-centric to user-centric

Finally, when “selling” your sales team on inbound marketing and marketing software, emphasize that their sales process will move from a product-centric model to a user-centric model.

The previous sales paradigm stressed products, features and sales or offers. When you use marketing software, the emphasis moves to a user-centric experience. This means that instead of focusing on the product, you’re instead educating and solving a buyer’s problems. You become the go-to source for providing answers, and you’re capturing prospects at the top and middle of the sales funnel instead of at the bottom. Long-term, this leads to not just sales, but customer retention, because marketing software allows you to keep buyers in your ongoing communication process, which includes emails, guides and relevant blogs.

We’re in a new era: Ensure your sales team is, too

Just as the cellphone ushered in a new way of behaving, so, too, has marketing software caused a disruption in how sales teams work. Help your sales team maximize their efforts by spending less time on product-centric sales and more time nurturing prospects through a user-centric model. It begins with the marketing software and inbound strategy your sales team adopts, and, as a marketer, you’ll be working hand-in-hand with sales to deploy and manage a successful inbound strategy.

When formulating a strategy, markets and segments are important categories to consider. But a market never buys anything. Only customers buy. To borrow a telecom industry metaphor, a deal with a customer is the “last mile” in connecting any strategy with business development efforts and marketplace results.

So, for most firms, de facto strategy is the aggregate result of the deals their salespeople bring in. The problem is few firms clarify their deal selection criteria. Either directly in meetings or implicitly in their compensation plans, they basically tell their sales forces to “Go forth and multiply!” And that is exactly what happens.

As a consequence, salespeople tend to sell to anyone they can, often at discounted prices to make a volume quota target. There are also opportunity costs: since money, time, and people are allocated to customer A, they are not available to customers B, C, and so on.

This is ineffective deal management, and it eventually leads to loss of positioning with customers, and, over time, the nurturing of “commodity competencies.” In other words, the sales force gets better and better at striking deals that more customers value less and less.

To avoid this, some companies establish a Strategic Deal Profile — guidelines and parameters that its sales force can use in conversations with actual customers — and make it part of selling behaviors through performance management practices.

Consider the case of Alphatech (a disguised name), which sells software that allows businesses to deploy applications consistently across their desktops, laptops, and other devices. Since every business has a somewhat unique combination of hardware and software, Alphatech grew by taking responsibility for integration and after-sale support. But by 2012 growth slowed, revenues flattened, and margins declined. At that point, Alphatech’s management reassessed its strategy and sales approach.

Here’s how:

Identifying good customers. Management first evaluated who were, and who were not, good customers. Previously, Alphatech considered any organization in which workers used laptops as a prospect. Because of this, selling cycles were lengthy, and, even when reps did close deals, they did so at highly discounted prices and were forced to include unwieldy service requirements. As a result, false positives and negative-value prospects littered the sales funnel, and about 75% of margins came from just 25% of the deals—almost all of which were managed-services contracts versus one-off “project” installations.

With analysis, Alphatech identified regional hospitals—which faced mandated digital-records requirements, and usually lacked the scale and IT staff to do that on their own—as their best customers.

Hospitals presented two advantages. They were accessible because Alphatech could oversee integrations remotely via the internet. And, since they were spread out across a geographically diverse area, they represented a large enough market to support renewed profitable growth.

Creating the right sales processes and incentives. Next, Alphatech set out to redesign its sales processes in order to support its new strategy. It did this in a few ways. It reorganized its sales force to focus on specific segments within the hospital market, and trained both its sales and service teams (which now visited sites early in the sales cycle) on outcome-based selling. It changed its sales compensation incentives from revenue bookings to commission payments tied to margins, service mix, and duration of subscription agreement. It also standardized its proposals to include managed services offerings as an option, and changed its marketing collateral to emphasize its new value proposition. In turn, it tracked the number of calls its salespeople made to hospital administrators at assigned accounts, and included this as a metric in performance reviews.

Following a strategic “Deal Profile.“ At this point, Alphatech knew it wanted to sell its services to the regional hospital market and felt it had the capabilities to do so. But it needed a Deal Profile first — a set of guidelines that would link the company’s strategy with the approaches used by its salespeople.

The first component of a Deal Profile is figuring out how to define success. Sales calls now focused on defining success with the customer, including specific outcomes such as time to deploy applications and system up-time guarantees. These metrics were critical because many of the applications affected patient care, hospital reimbursements, and health-care confidentiality requirements, and various stakeholders had different perspectives.

Establishing a common language of value helped customers to communicate internally, which, in turn, accelerated sales cycles when Alphatech won a deal and minimized selling expenses when a customer and Alphatech could not agree on outcomes.

This method of selling also tended to involve more senior decision makers. In the past, sales reps sold to IT system administrators, but now they were conversing more with CFOs and other executives, which better positioned Alphatech to expand at accounts where it did land deals.

Second, Alphatech had to decide how to communicate value. Alphatech was selling a change process as well as hardware and software services. That meant that to be effective, they really needed monthly conference calls with the customer and periodic Customer Business Reviews (CBR) with IT and administrators after implementation.

For customers, the calls were reviews and reminders of agreed-upon success outcomes. They were also opportunities to talk about best practices and to troubleshoot any issues they were encountering.

For Alphatech, the CBRs provided opportunities to extend or expand a contract, or both. Since a longer term contract needed approval outside IT, it was in Alphatech’s best interest to keep key senior execs involved in the process.

Pricing guidelines were the third key factor. In the past, Alphatech’s pricing had been driven by competing proposals, often from competitors with lower service levels. The sales force was often closing initial deals at a loss in the hope that the value they ultimately delivered would lead to higher prices.

But hope is not a method. With Alphatech’s Deal Profile, sales people were only able to offer 5-10% discounts off book prices if the customer bought at least three months of services. The three-month period was beneficial to both parties. It lowered customers’ risks of trial, while the network and service terms gave Alphatech access to better information about value drivers and change requirements at that account.

Further, experience indicated that, despite value delivered, it was difficult to get higher prices after an initial discount. So pricing with the new Deal Profile provided a basis for profitable future business if and when expanding service became a reality.

The Deal Profile also specified payment terms with pricing. This is an important and often overlooked aspect in many strategy discussions. Any deal affects a company’s economics and valuation. Financing needs are driven by the cash on hand and the working capital required to conduct and grow the business. For most firms, the biggest driver of cash out and cash in is the selling process. Accounts payable accumulate during selling, and accounts receivables are determined by what’s sold, how fast, and at what price, and payment terms. That’s also why a Deal Profile is a strategic issue as well as sales issue.

Finally, there’s measuring results. Business results were outstanding: EBITDA more than doubled in the first year and ROIC increased almost 300%, with fewer sales people. And, while the Deal Profile meant that Alphatech was saying “no” more often than in the past, customer churn for done deals decreased and customer lifetime value and profitability increased as a result.

Not everything went without a hitch. With the Deal Profile in place, many sales people left because they found the new selling behaviors alien to their skill sets and preferences. But the most important lesson here may be this: it is not the customer’s responsibility to inform you when you are barking up the wrong tree. It’s your responsibility to make that judgment and make it real through execution. And a Deal Profile is a basic building block in linking strategy and sales.