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I often get asked to provide salespeople with the “Ultimate Closing Questions.”  The problem is they just don’t exist.  There is no such thing as a closing question that works in every situation. In fact, using a great question at the wrong time can be disastrous.

Moreover, this whole concept of a trial close can be equally as disastrous if you are just throwing out a question that someone told you would work.  Unless the timing and context are right, it won’t work.  In fact, nothing will work unless you are in sync with your customer.

#SalesTip – There is no such thing as a closing question that works in every situation.
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Here are a few examples I pulled from articles on closing business. “If I can get you that price, can we sign the contract today?”    “Is there anything else we need to do before we sign the contract?” Or trial closes  “How do you feel about what we discussed so far?  Or “What changes would you make to the proposal”?

Any of these could be great questions at the right time. Any could be deal breakers at the wrong time. Let me give you an example, and you will have to forgive me for going to the cliché car salesman situation, but I just had an experience that illustrates my point so beautifully, I couldn’t resist.

I was looking at cars and found I was interested in one I knew nothing about. I had done no research, didn’t know what the pricing should be, what kinds of ratings it had or any number of other things I would want to know before I walked in to buy a car.  I asked the price and a few other questions. Knowing I needed information, I said I needed to do some research, and I would be back if it all made sense.  The salesman then asked what I needed my monthly payment to be. Since I was planning to pay cash, it was irrelevant.  He asked what price I wanted to pay. Not having had time to think about it, I pulled a number out of thin air. He asked if he could get that number would I buy today.  Dumb question, since I had no idea, and moreover since it was an arbitrary number, he couldn’t get it.

He asked the wrong question, because he wasn’t listening.  Price wasn’t the issue.  Lack of information was, and I told him as much.  He could have asked “What is it you are looking for, and can I help you find it.”

Any question that moves the buyer toward making a decision is the right question to ask. The “Ultimate Closing Question” comes after you have spent some time understanding what is going on with the client, and helping them obtain the information they need to feel comfortable making a buying decision.  It comes after you have done all the work.  The moment is right when you have heard him confirm that the product meets the identified need, there are no significant impediments to implementing the solution, everyone who needs to be on board is on board, and the price is close enough to the budget that they can move forward.

So, what happens when you ask the wrong question at the wrong time?  Well… nothing.  Nothing happens. You get dead air or blank stares. You do not get progress.

Before you start closing or even trial closing, make sure you understand where they are in their thinking process and whether or not things are lining up for them.  You need to ask what I call “Understanding Questions”  like: “What are you trying to achieve?”  “How does this solution meet your needs?”  “Are there any needs we are not meeting?”  “What is most important to you?”

Don’t jump the gun.  When everything else is in place, the closing question will make itself obvious.  The real issue is knowing when that moment has arrived, and asking it clearly and confidently.

The post Why Your Closing Questions Aren’t Working appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

In our study The Top-Performing Sales Organization, 40% of respondents said "Improving sales opportunity approach and planning" is a top priority for the next year. Along with two related initiatives—improving ability to communicate value (41%) and optimizing sales processes (32%)—these represented three of the top four sales initiative priorities altogether.¹

No two ways about it: sales leaders are planning heavy focus on their sales process and activities directly related to it.

Recently, however, there's been backlash against sales leaders focusing on improving their sales processes. The following was published in the Harvard Business Review.

Crude oil tumbled below $40 a barrel on Wednesday for the first time since August.

It’s the latest sign that the world still has more oil than it needs despite production cuts in the U.S. This is great news for American drivers, many of whom are already enjoying gasoline prices near $2-a-gallon.

Oil plummeted to a low of $39.91 a barrel on Wednesday, down 14% so far in November.

Crude oil prices have reached their lowest level since August when markets reacted to China’s suddenly collapsing market conditions.

Oil prices began to rise in September and October over the believe that the global recession was slowing. In early October, oil hit $50 following Russia’s launched attacks in Syria which raised concerns over supply disruptions.

OPEC and U.S. suppliers feed the oversupply

Last week, the International Energy Agency warned the supply glut is actually getting worse. The agency reported 3 billion barrels of oil in global stockpiles, describing it as a “massive cushion.”

The IEA pointed to “vigorous production” from OPEC nations such as Saudi Arabia, which has steadfastly refused to cut output despite depressed prices.

Recently it was revealed that Iraq is flooding the United States with cheap crude oil. Iraq has more than doubled its exports to the US since August.

U.S. suppliers are also proving how resilient they can be in the face of sinking oil prices. American oil production actually decreased significantly from August to September to a one-year low. However, U.S. suppliers have learned to act in a nimble fashion, quickly ramping up supply when prices increase, allowing them to capture more of the market.

The U.S. Dollar

The U.S. dollar also continues to strengthen which has allowed producers to purchase oil at cheaper prices. The Federal Reserve is finally ready to raise interest rates but for now the U.S. dollar has increased 3% against a basket of currencies in the last month.

The U.S. dollar has nearly reached parity with the euro.

When the U.S. dollar is strong commodities such as oil are more expensive for foreign buyers, who then buy less crude oil, which in turn allows supply to far outweigh demand.

On a positive note, with oil prices continuing to remain low, U.S. consumer sentiment is continuing to climb, just in time for retailers to capitalize on the holiday shopping season.

Each year, Canadian Business compiles a list of the executives, entrepreneurs, politicos, and thinkers who are changing the way Canada does business. Click or tap any name on the list to read more on canadianbusiness.com about where they got their influence and why they matter now.

For the best mobile experience, switch to landscape mode.

The post The Canadian Business Power 50 appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In the last few months, over a dozen readers from across the US have been generous enough to share their budgets with Business Insider.

From a 25-year-old with impressive financial management skills to a would-be retiree trying to figure out if he can afford to take the plunge, they all have something to teach the rest of us.

Here are some of the highlights.

Don't sweat the dollars and cents.

It doesn't matter exactly how much you spend, just how it relates to the amount you planned. Clarence Reed, a 57-year-old from Atlanta, Georgia, highlights any cell in his Excel spreadsheet that shows he's spent less than 75% or more than 125% of what he planned.

And if a few categories seem a little out of whack in a month, he doesn't drive himself crazy about it.

"I love to travel," he tells Business Insider. "I spend what I consider a reasonably high amount of money, but as long as the yearly number is within the realm, I'm perfectly OK. Boating is another bigger one: I do not care about it."

See Reed's budget.

Keep your budget in perspective.

Brett Schock, a 32-year-old father from Fort Worth, Texas, has two budgets: His real one, based on his actual income and spending, and his "happy budget," or how much he and his wife estimate they'd need to live a life that makes them happy.

In fact, the Schocks have started earning enough money — $142,000 a year before taxes — that their happy budget is more reality than dream. 

"The 'happy budget' is more of a self-realization thing, because I've seen too many people who work themselves really hard for that little bit of extra money, and I don't know if it's worth it," Schock explains. "Right now things are pretty good — we feel like we've kind of made it."

See the Schocks' budget.

Start planning for retirement as soon as you can.

Ron Zahn explains that he and his wife Joan have been investing for retirement from "day one."

"In 1962, we started investing $25 a month into a mutual fund," he remembers. "Those investments, over time, allowed us to have resources in retirement, and I committed to not extracting more money than the required minimum distribution each month."

In retirement, the Zahns live comfortably on a little over $4,000 a month, and don't touch the bulk of their retirement savings.

See the Zahns' budget.

Email deliverability should be a top priority for every email marketer (and here’s why). After all, you can’t be successful at email marketing unless your emails are reaching your subscribers’ inboxes.

The best way to improve and maintain your email deliverability is by keeping a clean and healthy email list. List hygiene (as we like to call it) needs to be a frequent and consistent habit for every email marketer.

To help you get started, here are four “problem areas” to watch out for, as well as actions you can take to keep your email list squeaky clean:

Problem Area #1: Typos in the Email Address

One of the most common reasons why emails bounce is because of typos in the email addresses. This happens when a subscriber misspells the email domain name (e.g., @hatmail.com vs @hotmail.com), duplicates the domain (e.g., @gmail.com@gmail.com vs @gmail.com), or makes a typo in their own name.

The Fix

The easiest way to prevent email addresses with typos from showing up on your list is to use confirmed opt-in (aka double opt-in), which requires people to confirm their subscription before getting added to your list. If someone enters the wrong email address, there’s no way they’ll ever receive that confirmation email. This helps keep your list clean of undeliverable messages because no email addresses with typos will pass through to your list.

Let’s say you prefer not to use confirmed opt-in. Another option is to use an email validation service like BriteVerify, FreshAddress, DataValidation or Kickbox to verify which email addresses are legitimate and which ones aren’t. Simply import your email list, start the validation process, and remove the email addresses that aren’t valid.

You can also comb through the validation report to identify any misspelled email addresses, fix misspellings, and add correct email addresses to your list. To ensure that you’re 100 percent confident that your subscribers want to receive emails, you should use confirmed opt-in when importing those new email addresses.

Problem Area #2: Dead Email Domains

Another common reason for bounces? Dead email domains. Unless you use a reputable email marketing provider (like AWeber) that monitors dead and blocked domains and prevents them from being added to your list, you might have some in your subscriber list.

The Fix

I probably sound like a broken record, but using confirmed opt-in will ensure that only valid email addresses are being added. If you’d prefer not to use confirmed opt-in, email validation services (such as the ones mentioned earlier) would be the next best thing to identify dead email domains. Once you find them, you can delete them from your list.

Problem Area #3: Email Address Changes

Did you know 30 percent of your subscribers will change their email address every year? That means nearly a third of your subscribers will “go cold” on you.

It’s pretty difficult to predict when someone is no longer using an email address. So, what can you do to prevent this from happening to your email list?

The Fix

Your email analytics can be a good indicator of this. If you’re noticing that someone hasn’t opened your email is several months, it might mean they’ve changed email addresses. If that’s the case, you can either attempt to re-engage them or remove them from your list.

Some email validation services like FreshAddress are able to handle changes in email addresses. With a tool like FreshAddress, they’ll be able to identify bouncing and inactive email addresses and update them with active, engaged ones.

And of course, make sure you use confirmed opt-in when adding these new addresses to your list. You can’t assume they still want to receive your emails, so asking them to make sure will help them and you in the long run.

Problem Area #4: Transfers of Email Address Ownership

Have you ever moved into a new place and continued to receive mail for the old tenants? Well, that can happen with email addresses too.

Yahoo, for example, recycles old email addresses after 12 months of no activity, which means someone else can begin using that email address once that year is up. If you still have those email address on your list, the new owner will start receiving your emails, even though they never opted in to get your emails in the first place. When that happens, that person might flag your emails as spam, which can hurt your deliverability overall.

The Fix

If someone hasn’t opened your emails within the last three to six months, there’s a good chance they’re either no longer interested in your emails or they’ve abandoned that email address. That means it’s a good time to a) send a re-engagement email or b) say goodbye.

Cleaning Up Your Email List

Regular list hygiene is essential to maintaining a healthy email list and good deliverability. As you ensure you’re emailing the right people and removing inactive or incorrect addresses, you can expect to see better results from your email marketing.

Want more help with your email deliverability? Download our free email deliverability guide.

The post 4 Things That Hurt Your Email Deliverability (And How to Fix Them) appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

New York Times Bestselling author of five books and host of National Geographic’s “Crowd Control,” Daniel H. Pink reveals why looking good in a bathing suit shouldn’t be your goal.

1. What is the most effective strategy for getting healthier?

Change your environment so that the mindless, default choices made throughout the day are healthier ones. So if your partner works in an office, pack her a healthy lunch instead of just letting her eat fast food. Get rid of processed foods in your own home and make healthy food available so that there’s not even an option to eat garbage. When you want to have a talk, go for a walk instead of lounging on the sofa.  Changing your partner’s default food and health choices is an act of love. To me, the best thing we can do is make it easier to eat well and harder to eat poorly — both in our homes and as a matter of food policy.

2. Why do we crave unhealthy foods?

Those of us in the U.S. and elsewhere live in a world of cheap, abundant calories. Yet our brains and bodies evolved in a world of scarce calories — and haven’t come close to catching up.  So the problem is our Stone Age brains in the modern world.

3. What is your most effective strategy for managing stress?

Running. I’m not a fast or accomplished runner. Not even close. But if I didn’t run regularly, I’d be a crazy person — or worse.

4. People wait until they are sick and unhappy to make lifestyle changes. Why is this?

In two words, hyperbolic discounting. That is, we inevitably prefer a small reward now to a bigger reward in the future. We eat that slab of chocolate cake this afternoon because it tastes good, rather than eating something healthier that will make us better off in the long run.  When those bad choices accumulate, we’re often in a world of hurt — and in retrospect, we wish we had acted differently.

5. Based on your research around motivation, how do you suggest people motivate their partners to make healthier lifestyle choices?

One of the legends of motivational science, Edward Deci of the University of Rochester, always points out that motivation isn’t something one person does to another. It’s something people do for themselves. So we need to think less about motivating others than about helping them find their own motivations. In this case, it’s far more effective in the long-term for people to make healthy choices for purpose-driven reasons (to stay healthy for other family members) than for vanity reasons (to look good in a swimsuit).

6. What do you think is the secret to longevity?

Having close social connections and sense of purpose.

7. What gives you a sense of purpose?

Seeing my kids grow into terrific human beings – and trying not to do anything to screw that up. Also, to the extent I can in my books, helping people see their world more clearly and live their lives more fully.

8. Do you have a “tribe” that provides ongoing support? 

My wife and kids are my main tribe.  The only problem is that it’s tough for anyone to kick someone else out of the tribe. We’re kinda stuck with each other.

9. If you could give one piece of advice to people, what would it be?

Be skeptical of advice from self-proclaimed experts.

Order Daniel Pink’s new book Drive
to find out what truly motivates all of us
and how you can apply that to your life.

The post Mindless Health: 9 Questions for Daniel Pink appeared first on Blue Zones.

If you know someone who is gearing up to travel, looking to tidy up their home, or wrangle their chaotic cables, we’ve got you covered. These gifts can help the most disorderly of people in your life achieve organizational nirvana.

Read more...

Travel planning usually takes a lot of work. Travel site Hipmunk wants to help you with that with its new travel planning assistant called Hello Hipmunk.

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When you’ve got a headache, a sprained ankle, or some other pain, should you ice it or apply heat? Consult this handy reference chart for the solution.

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Haven’t we all had those beyond awful customer service experiences? I recently had one of “those” experiences and was stunned that every interaction and communication with this major brand assumed that the customer was wrong and could not be trusted. It is shocking that this kind of behavior is still so pervasive today.

According to Shep Hyken, customer service expert, “Customer service is not a department, it is a philosophy.”

And, this is why so many companies still get it wrong. Most customer service departments are disconnected units built as battle grounds to defend corporate policies or disseminate complicated procedures that presume the customer is always wrong.

Companies must finally fix this by imposing customer engagement and retention behaviors and metrics for every channel used by customers.

According to the report Customers 2020 by Walker Information in collaboration with Customer Think and the Chief Customer Officer Council, by 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

Here are some other stats to consider:

• By 2016, 89% of companies expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience, [Tweet this] versus 36% four years ago.
• 40% of customers begin purchasing from a competitor because of their reputation for great customer service.
• 98% of the U.S. consumers surveyed said that customer service is very important or somewhat important in their choice of or loyalty to a brand

These insights are corroborated by findings from Voice of Customer Learnings from 15,000+ hours of research conducted by our firm, ERDM;

• High quality customer experiences must occur at every point of contact, every medium and every part of the customer journey.
• High value experiences are now a key competitive differentiator for consumers.

Marriott International Puts People First

With a slogan, putting people first, Marriot International has recently been named to the “2015 Customer Service Hall of Fame” by 24/7 Wall Street.

On their website Marriott International notes:

• We put people first – Take care of associates and they will take care of the customers.
• We pursue excellence – Marriott’s reputation for superior customer service dates back to J. Willard Marriott’s original goal for his business… We take pride in the details…
• We embrace change – We’re driven to continually challenge the status quo and anticipate our customers’ changing needs.

Marriott trains its staff to understand each other so that it can understand consumers. According to Nancy Curtin Morris, Marriott’s National Director of Training:

“Our focus on customer service has been strong for more than 70 years. (The ability of) managers and their staff to understand and relate to customers–and that is where the payoff comes in…”

Marriott’s Second quarter 2015 net income totaled $240 million, a 25 percent increase over 2014 second quarter net income.

TakeAways

1. Don’t think of customer service as call-center or chat based. Think of customer service as a company-wide commitment that transcends every touchpoint throughout the customer journey.
2. Companies need to develop customer service policies and metrics that are relationship builders rather than merely avenues to defend company policies or disseminate impersonal information to customers who cannot be trusted.
3. Train employees on communication and empathy so they can better navigate situations with each other and with customers to more efficiently and effectively.

According to Scott Broetzmann, President of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting, “Many companies today are simply awful at resolving customer problems…” And in the Arizona State University’s “customer rage” study it was noted that “satisfaction with service is actually no higher than it was in the 1970s.”

Companies need to take a new look at old, outdated customer service that cultivates a combative “us vs. them mentality.” Companies must rethink customer service as a revenue generating skill that builds, repairs and grows long-term relationships.

Break out the cake and confetti; it’s time for a birthday celebration. From gifts to parties, birthdays are filled with lots of great things including birthday emails.

Birthday emails are one of the most effective emails you can send.

• Birthday emails have a 481% higher transaction rate than promotional emails.
• Birthday emails generate 342% higher revenue per email than promotional emails.
• Birthday emails have 179% higher unique click rates than promotional emails.

_{(Source: Experian)}

With success rates like that, who wouldn’t want to celebrate?

To help your business create and send effective birthday emails, we’ve created this helpful guide. We’ll cover what, when and how to send the best birthday emails that motivate subscribers to celebrate by buying your product or service.

What to send

Birthdays are synonymous with gift giving, so give your subscribers something they can’t pass up. Typically, birthday emails have a special deal, offer or free gift. Often, these deals can be used online or in-store, and should be easy to redeem.

Here are a few ideas that you can use:

A can’t-resist coupon

Give subscribers a real birthday treat by offering a can’t-resist coupon. For example, Campaign Monitor customer, Birchbox, offers $10 off of a $50 purchase. They sent the email at the beginning of the month and allow the subscriber the entire month to redeem the coupon before it expires.

Mystery savings

Send a mystery coupon to your subscribers on or before their birthday. You can use a tool like Scratch-it to create an offer that enables subscribers to “scratch” a digital card to reveal their 10, 20 or 30% off coupon.

A free gift

Everyone loves freebies on their birthday. Why not give your subscriber a free gift?
Have the birthday boy or girl come to your store to claim a free gift, or provide a coupon code to use online to receive the gift in the mail. The gift can be something small like a laptop sticker, an appetizer or service upgrade. You can require a minimum purchase to claim the free gift if you’d like.

Free shipping or discount

On a subscriber’s birthday, try to clear any obstacle that keeps him or her from placing an order. For example, as a birthday treat, offer to provide free shipping and take care of the sales taxes by discounting the item by 8% (or whatever the sales tax rate is in your area.) It’s a simple gesture that could entice a subscriber to buy.

Birthday email best practices

Is it best to send birthday emails on the exact birth date or before? Should you send a follow-up email? If so, when? They’re all great questions, and we’ve got the answers.

Send the offer on the actual birthdate

More than half (55%) of birthday emails are sent on the exact birthdate. About 38% of birthday emails are sent one to three weeks prior to the birthday.

Send a reminder

To make sure your subscribers remember to take advantage of their birthday offers, send a reminder email. Reminder emails generate rate increases of at least 20% in open, click-to-delivered, average order value and revenue per email, according to Experian data.

Use email automation

Even the most organized business couldn’t possibly keep track of every subscriber’s birthday and send an email offer on that day. Fortunately, you don’t have to.

Email automation turns what could be a tedious, time-consuming job into a few clicks.

Campaign Monitor customers can use automated emails, which are emails that are automatically sent to a subscriber when certain conditions are met. In this case, when the subscriber’s birthday arrives, an email is automatically delivered to his or her inbox.

Use these step-by-step instructions to set up an automated email for specific dates.

Personalize subject lines and messages

When you get a birthday card in the mail, the person sending it personalizes it, right? Of course. That’s what makes the card special. You should do the same thing with your birthday emails. Use a subscriber’s first name in the subject line and inside the email message.

Here’s a great example below from Benihana. The subject line was, “Time to Celebrate – Your Birthday Gift is Inside, Kim.” The personalization is in the subject line and in the body of the email:

Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened and marketers have found a 760% increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns. Campaign Monitor makes it easy to personalize every email, including birthday emails. Take a look at these instructions to personalize your campaigns.

Create a clear call to action

Every email should have a clear call to action, and birthday emails are no different. Make sure your call to action stands out. Consider using a button like the one above in the Benihana email. Use a color that’s used sparingly for the button color and create an action-oriented call to action for your button. Something like “Claim Your $30 Coupon Now” or “Redeem Your Birthday Gift”, or “Shop Now” like Chandon uses in the example below.

Keep the message short

The best birthday emails are short and simple. The message should wish the subscriber a happy birthday and explain the treat. There’s no need for long copy.

Here’s a great example from Wine.com. In less than 20 words, the email accomplishes its goal.

Make it festive

It’s a celebration. Birthdays are fun, so make sure your birthday emails have a festive feel to them. In the example above from Wine.com, there’s an image of people celebrating with a toast, and the example below from DSW uses big, bold letters to create a whimsical feel.

Use a combination of colorful text and images to make your birthday emails stand out. Use confetti, party streamers, balloons, birthday cake, or pictures of people at a party to liven up your email.

If you need help finding birthday images, check out our list of sites to get amazing images for your emails.

Wrap up

Birthday emails should be part of every brand’s email marketing strategy. By automating the process, you can create and send personalized, revenue-generating emails in a snap.

“The only thing that isn’t worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don’t.”

“Death is our friend,” Rilke wrote in an exquisite 1923 letter, “precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.” And yet one of the defining features of the human condition is that we long for immortality despite inhabiting a universe governed by impermanence.

Eighteen centuries before Rilke, the great Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius addressed this abiding human paradox of life and death with astonishing lucidity in his Meditations (public library | free ebook) — his indispensable proto-blog, which also gave us the philosophic emperor’s enduring wisdom on how to begin each day for maximum sanity and what his father taught him about honor and humility.

Aurelius, translated here by Gregory Hays, considers how befriending this eternal interplay of life and death can inform and ennoble our existential priorities:

Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.

Cold or warm.
Tired or well-rested.
Despised or honored.
Dying … or busy with other assignments.

Because dying, too, is one of our assignments in life. There as well: “to do what needs doing.”

In another meditation, he revisits the question of our inescapable impermanence:

Some things are rushing into existence, others out of it. Some of what now exists is already gone. Change and flux constantly remake the world, just as the incessant progression of time remakes eternity.

We find ourselves in a river. Which of the things around us should we value when none of them can offer a firm foothold?

Like an attachment to a sparrow: we glimpse it and it’s gone.

And life itself: like the decoction of blood, the drawing in of air. We expel the power of breathing we drew in at birth (just yesterday or the day before), breathing it out like the air we exhale at each moment.

With breath-stopping simplicity, Aurelius crystallizes the inevitable and indiscriminate nature of this inhale-exhale cycle that is life:

Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died and the same thing happened to both. They were absorbed alike into the life force of the world, or dissolved alike into atoms.

But rather than being dispirited by this awareness, he suggests, we can find it in an enlivening force of moral solidity in the face of our ephemeral existence:

Keep this constantly in mind: that all sorts of people have died — all professions, all nationalities. Follow the thought all the way down to Philistion, Phoebus, and Origanion. Now extend it to other species.

We have to go there too, where all of them have already gone:

… the eloquent and the wise — Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates …
… the heroes of old, the soldiers and kings who followed them …
… the smart, the generous, the hardworking, the cunning, the selfish …
… and even [those] who laughed at the whole brief, fragile business.

All underground for a long time now.

And what harm does it do them? Or the others either — the ones whose names we don’t even know?

From this he extracts the ultimate moral:

The only thing that isn’t worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don’t.

Meditations is a requisite read in its entirety — the kind that stays with you for a lifetime and rewards anew with each rereading. Complement it with Seneca, a fellow Stoic, on how to fill the shortness of life with greater width of aliveness and Bertrand Russell on the paradox of immortality.

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Apple chief design officer, Jony Ive, sat down for an interview with Wallpaper Magazine and revealed why the company did a U-turn on making a stylus, something Steve Jobs famously decried. 

The iPad Pro comes with a Pencil, an electronic stylus that is aimed at those who draw. Jobs famously said that any company that included a stylus "blew it."

"It was fundamentally important originally not to develop a user interface that required another instrument," Ive said. "It was important that we develop the UI based upon multi-touch, based on our fingers." This explains why Jobs disliked the stylus. 

However, the focus changed with the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. "I think it is equally obvious that you’re just not as dexterous as you are with a pen or a pencil for certain things," Ive continued. These certain things are exactly what the Pro, which launched in early November, is aimed at. 

"What we found is that there’s clearly a group of people that would value an instrument that would enable them to paint or draw in ways that you just can’t with your finger," said Ive. "And I suspect that this isn't a small group of people." 

So there it is: Apple saw a new market for an iPad — creative professionals — and built the tools that they need, irrespective of whether Jobs would have approved. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 5 best features of the new Apple iPad Pro

Here’s a word we don’t use in business too often: love. But maybe this is more important than our industry obsession with “traffic.” Read on.

New research on America’s favorite brands from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) includes Apple, Amazon and Wal-Mart at the top of the list, while Netflix, Costco, Samsung, Coca-Cola, Target, Jet Blue and Chick-Fil-A round out the Top 10.

No surprise, right? But what is it that keeps these brands close to the consumer’s hearts, minds … and wallets? The study suggest that the uniting force behind their greatness is an ability to forge an emotional connection based on trust with consumers. “Companies may use technical and functional attributes to drive the original choice but win by owning the heart and the mind,” says Michael J. Silverstein, of BCG.

Silversten calls these customers “apostle customers,” a concept similar (perhaps identical) to what I wrote about in a chapter called “The Alpha Audience” in my new book The Content Code.

Focus on the Alpha Audience

“Apostle customers are only two percent of the customer base—but they drive the vast majority of sales and profits, because they love the brand, make it part of their lives, and recommend it fervently to family, friends and total strangers,” Silverstein said in a recent article.

According to his research, one ultra-loyal customer from your Alpha Audience can generate eight times his or her own consumption through word-of-mouth advocacy. And two percent of consumers directly contribute 20 percent of sales. They drive 80 percent of total volume via their recommendations. They deliver over 150 percent of profitability, buying products without a discount and without regard for seasonality.

That, my friends, is why we need to change the marketing conversation.

Are you obsessed with “traffic,” or focused on the audience who believes in you at the deepest level. The audience who will be with you to the end. How does an incredibly deep connection like that develop?

Value from your content: Trust … or traffic?

In my book, I feature a wonderful PR professional, Shonali Burke. Shonali is certainly a member of my Alpha Audience. We met over Twitter and then over the years that weak relational link grew into a real collaborative friendship.

Shonali helps ignite my business in a small way every day when she shares my content. In fact, she shares every piece of content I write! Why would she do that?

In her own words:

Shonali Burke

One service I use offers the ability to automatically share people’s content. Now, I did not choose to do this for a long time, because not everyone’s content is consistent. That’s fine; we all have our bad days. But when you are between a rock and a hard place, trying to ensure you curate at least a minimum level of reliable content, you need it to be consistent! That means you have to absolutely trust the quality of content coming from those people.

That’s where your content comes in. You are one of the few people whose content I always share, because I trust you. I’ve read your blog for so long now, yet I’m regularly amazed at the smart content you publish—not just from yourself, but from other bloggers. So often I have those, “Why didn’t I think of that?” moments after I read your blog. To date, there has not been a single post that made me scratch my head and say, “Meh.” I don’t always comment because by the time I get to it, you have 76 other comments (!), but I do read. And given that I currently don’t have a lot of time to actively source more content, I have to go with content from those I trust: and that group includes you.

You’ve talked often about how hard you’ve worked to grow your audience, which is one of the things I like most about your blog {grow} (and you): You share your lessons learned openly and honestly, without minimizing all the hard work you’ve done. And one of the wonderful consequences of this hard work is that your audience—of which I am one—trusts you.

So, simply put, it comes down to trust, which is one of the keys for businesses grappling with a socialized world. The lesson I learned from you is that building an audience means 1) creating great content that people can trust; 2) curating good content regularly so that people can trust you’re not just out to put the spotlight on yourself; 3) participating actively in the social web by giving way more than you get (commenting on other blogs, talking to people and not just at them, and so on).

It makes me consider … what are we all willing to do to build so much trust that your audience would be willing to share your content blindly?

What are YOU willing to do to build trust?

Trust. That is a word I heard over and over again as I interviewed people for my book.

Trust is the launch code for the Alpha Audience rocket.

Trust cements you to the only people who truly matter in your digital world.

The question at the soul of this bond with your Alpha Audience is not “How can you trick, seduce, or coupon your customers into loving you?” It is “How loyal are you to your customers? Do you truly care about them?”

The people on the other end of your content aren’t just avatars, users, or a target audience. They’re human beings who might be suffering, experiencing joy, or simply feel exhausted from caring for their children. And maybe in the moment of connection, they need you in some way. What every organization needs before conquering a digital strategy is a human strategy.

As I first wrote in The Tao of Twitter many years ago, the most successful marketing organizations don’t think of themselves as B2B or B2C—they’re P2P, striving every day to use these miraculous technologies to connect people to people.

Anybody can figure out ways to generate short-term web traffic. But that’s simply a battle for attention you can never win. Let your competitors knock each other out over that. Place your focus in just one place — nurturing a truly loyal audience by running your business in a way that demonstrates mutual respect, gratitude, enduring trust, and … dare I say it? Love. Love is not a word usually embraced by businesses, but how can you create unyielding loyalty without it? Maybe love is the ultimate killer app.

How would your business be transformed if your focus was demonstrating respect, gratitude, and love instead of “traffic?”

This is the digital crossroad, a genuine point of business differentiation today. You can pay people to create great content and then pay people to promote it. Huge companies will escalate and automate their content arms race with breath-taking, epic videos. Eventually computers will be creating excellent content for you with a push of a button.

But traffic alone will never, ever create an Alpha Audience.

Are you focusing on traffic … or trust?

{grow} fans, check out Shonali Burke’s new online PR masterclass and upgrade you skills NOW for 2016. No commercial affiliation. I just believe in Shonali.

Illustration courtesy Flickr CC and qthomasbower

The post To drive value from your content, focus on trust, not traffic appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

        

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Are you getting the most out of your business blog? Chances are marketers and other business owners have told you that you need a business blog to improve your sales online. But there are simple steps you can take to make sure that your blog is working for you the way it should be.

Eight ways to increase sales with your business blog

Include a Call to Action – Your audience may not take you up on your offer if they don’t know what you want them to do. A call to action can simply be asking those who are interested to reach out by email. It can be a link to your product page. If your post is truly genuine, your audience won’t mind the one sentence pitch at the end. And it may make all the difference for you.

Offer Something that Matters to Your Audience – There’s nothing wrong with making an offer in your blog post if it is done with tact, and not done too frequently. Whatever you decide to offer, you’ll want to make sure it is something they will likely be interested in. It is important to know and understand your audience.

Be Authentic – To put it bluntly, your audience can smell a rat. If you are not being genuine, if you are acting like a spambot, they’ll notice. I’m sure you’ve heard the adage that people do business with people they like. So go ahead, put your interests out front. I’ve included my obsessions with Cubs baseball, Bears football and Sons of Anarchy before. I’ve written about my son. All of these things have served as conversation starters for me. You never know who might identify. Your business blog should not be all sales all the time. Have a little fun. It can go a long way.

Educating Your Customers on What They Need – You know more about your business than your customers do. You have experience and an expertise. It’s up to you to educate. It’s up to you to show them what they might need. A word of caution on this, however – your customers likely don’t have the same background that you do. You may need to find ways of explaining your subject matter without all the high-end industry lingo. Don’t talk down to them, but don’t assume they know all the industry vocabulary either.

Stress Benefits Over Features – When you think of features, think of a bunch of computer guys sitting around talking about RAM, programming languages, or CPUs. This may all make sense to a serious computer aficionado, but to the average user or customer, it may as well be Greek. To follow through with the metaphor, the benefits of a good computer might be large amounts of memory, good for storing music, photos, and videos. It might be a fast processing speed that allows the computer to function quickly with several programs open. Benefits are how your product helps your customer, which should be the focus of your business blog anyway.

Learn to Provide Value Without Selling – Your customers may not always be looking for an immediate purchase. A lot of times they might be conducting some research, or looking to have a few questions answered. If you can become that resource for them, they may just buy from you when the time is right. If your business blog can serve as your customers’ resource, it will improve your chance at building a loyal customer base.

Promote Your Blog to Widen Your Audience – Are you doing everything possible to promote your business blog? You can post it on your Facebook page, Facebook groups, Twitter account, Google Plus account, LinkedIn account, LinkedIn groups, and many, many other places. You can set up an email subscription so your customers can access your posts from their inbox. There are also ways to syndicate your material to reach a wider audience. All of these things have the potential to bring in more readers and grow your customer base.

Cross Promote Your Print and Web Marketing – Make sure your blogging efforts are part of your larger digital and print marketing strategies. The customers who receive your print materials should also be aware of your social media accounts. Your social followers should be aware of your print or in-store marketing efforts. Everything should tie together to help you sell more. When your business blog reaches your entire audience, you win.

For decades, "outsource offshore" has been the cost-cutting refrain of the business world. From managed IT functions to customer service, more and more jobs that used to be done here in the US have been shipped overseas in the name of lower labor costs. But lately that trend has changed a bit — and for good reason: It turns out keeping outsourced solutions in the US can be an even bigger boon to businesses' bottom lines. 

There are many reasons for this shift. First, wages in China and India—common locations for offshore outsourcing—are on the rise, according to The Economist, which lowers the labor savings associated with offshoring. Without the advantage of cost savings, the disadvantages of outsourcing at such a physical and cultural distance have a greater net effect on companies. It's no wonder more companies are choosing to reshore more of their own operations, as well as the functions they outsource to other businesses. 

One company giving American businesses the opportunity to outsource onshore is Bell Techlogix. The IT managed services company has found that locating its operations in the US has a positive impact on customer satisfaction to a degree that gives their customers a competitive advantage.

The key ingredient for Bell Techlogix's onshoring philosophy is quality. That quality is ensured by what the company calls Heartland Labor Arbitrage, a delivery model focusing on tools, labor, and facilities based in the US. Bell Techlogix locates its facilities in areas of the country, with relatively low costs of doing business while accessing the high quality talent of the American workforce.

"Our people are really at the epicenter of how we drive an outcome," says Anthony D’Ambrosi, president of Bell Techlogix.

This commitment to quality is paired with the company's unique service solution, Service Desk 3.0. It's a help desk offering that delivers customers greater advantages than clients have been offered before, including customization, efficiency improvement, and more.

This pairing of innovation and quality talent has paid off for Bell Techlogix. The company was named a niche player in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for End User Outsourcing report. The designation highlights just how successful a company can be when harnessing the power of bringing outsourcing solutions onshore — just as other American companies are realizing the value of bringing jobs back to the domestic workforce as well.

This post is sponsored by Bell Techlogix. 

Find out more about Sponsored Content. 

Join the conversation about this story »

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Take away the bells and whistles of marketing, strip back the hype of a product/service launch, cut away the popularity of a brand, and you can boil down the single most important question to ask yourself as a business owner when attempting to satisfy the customer: “What’s in it for me?”

What’s in it for me (WIIFM) is being able to answer the real questions a customer may have about your product or service. The answer is personal and caters to the customer’s desires and needs. When the customer understands the value of your offer it expedites the sales funnel and turns them into a loyal, long-term customer that knows your business has their best interest in mind.

So how does one answer the question and add personalization into their business and all they have to offer?

Before going deeper into answering that question and explaining how it’s done, just take a look at these handful of examples of personalization:

· Apple allows you to add personal engraving to iPods, iPhones, and iPads

· NewEgg (and certain PC brands hosted on the site) allows you to build a personalized computer, from scratch, that caters to budget, design, power, and aesthetic

· Nike will allow you to completely customize the color, accessories, and personal messages on their shoes

When brands allow their customers to customize products or have a say through community voting (see flavor selections by Ben & Jerry’s) it adds a special touch of uniqueness for those that are ambassadors to the brand. These are the individuals that are die-hards; they are ones that continue to support the business and are very vocal about their satisfaction (which, as you know, is great word-of-mouth marketing).

So what are some real-world examples you could use in your business?

Ecommerce, as one example, benefits greatly through the use of custom recommendations for products, accounts (which develop taste profiles), social proof and reviews to share what others are purchasing, personalized discounts, and custom retargeting through email and ads that remind them of a product they viewed, though may have been distracted and backed out on the purchase.

Label printers have presented an easy way to further customize the ecommerce experience in ways such as creating copy and creative ideas for specific individuals or regions, adding catered instructions to a product, or doing short-run prints for exclusives to give them a special look and feel (like collector’s editions).

Services are immensely effective when they are presented in a way that speaks to the sole individual. A lead generation page, for example, could drive traffic from a specific source (let’s say cycling enthusiasts) and present them with a sales pitch that identifies and answers the WIIFM questions these individuals are bound to have. Once they make way further into the sales funnel they are continued to be presented with a personalized message once enough information has been collected (such as data pulled from a Facebook/Twitter login). The backend, then, can be customized for specific individual to show the product/service modules they require without overloading them with other parts that would go unused.

Face-to-face type businesses, such as personal trainers, food trucks, crafting, and the like, can add a personal touch to the activities in ways such as offering custom t-shirts for their customers, magnetic menus that have a customer’s favorite food (or a special discount), or branded tools for the craft. These small items go a long way because they feel they’re less a customer and more of a close companion to you and the business; they feel respected and part of the family.

When we talk to customer service we want to hear our name. When we open the box we want the product to feel it’s our own. When we share our experience we want to be addressed.

Answer the question “what’s in it for me?” your customers present, find the solution, and cater your response to the individual – this is how you stand out from the competition and gain customers for life.

How can you generate more leads?

It’s a problem faced by all B2B marketers, and there’s rarely an easy answer (if there was, we wouldn’t be writing this blog).

You follow all the best practices, spend months planning your activity, invest in new and proven digital channels…

…but the leads just trickle in.

B2B marketing is branching out…and it looks good.

This TOFU stage of the funnel is all about building awareness with your B2B buyer, identifying their needs (not your wants) and introducing your company as a trusted and recognised brand.

Here’s our pick of the top do’s and don’ts to turbo-charge your top-of-the-funnel activity:

DO

Do identify your real B2B Buyer Personas using website visitor information

What industry are they in? What size company are they? What content do they like to read on your website?  By implementing data-driven buyer-personas, you’ll build a clear picture of the challenges, needs and pain points of your B2B buyers, as well as understand the motivations and goals behind their purchase intentions.

Use this information to build accurate data-driven buyer personas, fuel your marketing communications and deliver influential TOFU content to the right prospects.

Ready to identify your B2B website visitors? Here’s how.

DO provide value with relevant and educational blogs, guides and communications

B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads per month. At this stage, your blog content needs to cover industry news, reports and statistics that support (but don’t overly promote) your product or service offering.

We can’t say it enough: Give your buyer’s valuable, informative and educational content – and be promotional at your peril. Your B2B prospects may not be looking to buy something that day, but it doesn’t mean you can’t provide them with valuable insight.

DON’T

Don’t undertake any new TOFU marketing activity until you’ve forecast the best, expected and worst possible ROI outcomes.

According to the IDM B2B Barometer, 30% of marketers said “lack of budget” and “demonstrating importance” were their most significant challenges this year. And guess what? They both tie back to ROI.

Before you invest any money in top-of-the-funnel advertising or marketing activity, you need to understand exactly what results you need to drive in order to deliver a healthy return. Try benchmarking your performance with this tool to take the guesswork out of your TOFU marketing activity.

Don’t forget it’s a (very) long lead generation game

There can be a tendency in B2B marketing to over-fish the lower funnel, where prospects are closer to converting, but with a detrimental effect!

Take a long-term approach with your funnel strategy and focus on prospects who might not buy now, but in a year – two years’ time. Invest in TOFU activity to not only build your bottom line, but strengthen your brand awareness too.

Ready to turbo-charge your lead generation?

Download the Ultimate B2B Marketing Kit with four free templates to kick start your lead generation.

Here’s an interesting thought exercise: how many separate problems do you think you have to solve in order to get outbound sales to work? And what are your chances of solving each of them immediately?

The answer to the first question is pretty scary. Even if you have strong evidence of product/market fit -- and a sales process that can close business at a predictable rate -- there are actually 12 other discrete problems that still need to be sorted out to get from zero to your first outbound sale.

I know this because not only am I CEO of CIENCE, a company that specializes in helping the sales teams we work with build long-term client relationships, but I’ve run right into all of these problems myself while learning how to conduct successful outreach.

Complicating things further, all 12 of the problems are related but discrete problems. Your ability to solve any one of them doesn’t necessarily predict your ability to solve others.

Worse, in order to get this type of outreach strategy to work at scale, you must solve each problem -- not just a few of them.  A “zero” or “unsolvable” on one could mean a zero result on outbound overall.

As a result of the “failure to solve one-step means failure to finish” dynamic, the math is simple. Let’s say you have a pretty good team and an 80% chance of overcoming each obstacle. In that setup, your chance of getting outbound sales right the first time around is a whopping 6.9% (.80^12).

What seemed like a simple problem (e.g., “Let’s reach out to people who look a lot like the customers we already have and start a conversation.”) is suddenly not so simple.

Fortunately, these 12 obstacles are all surmountable. I can say that confidently, because we overcome them every day on behalf of all of clients. Here’s the way we think about them.

The reality is there are actually six discrete problem “categories” each of which has a zero to one (“Can I make this work at all?”) and a one to n (“Can I make this work at the scale I need?”) component. Below are these six problem categories and the obstacle for each.

Outbound Sales Mistakes

1. Sourcing the right leads

• 0 to 1: Once you’ve identified your ideal customer profile (i.e., you’ve figured out exactly who you’d like to speak with), search the internet for anyone else that fits the profile and identify ways to connect. This is harder than it seems, as many prospect segments have constituents that don’t identify themselves on LinkedIn or in other social channels. Once you’ve found a lead, the task of finding a matching email and/or phone number is next.
• 1 to n: Assuming you were able to find just one or two prospects matching your ICP, the question remains: can you find hundreds or thousands more? And through what sources would you find them, over how much time, and for what resources expended?

2. Delivering and connecting

• 0 to 1: Assuming you’ve solved the first problem and identified your leads and their contact information, decide if you can engage them in a channel that catches their attention. This means connecting with them on the phone or in their inbox.
• 1 to n: Solving the email deliverability or phone pick-up problem once doesn’t mean it’s solved at scale. That’s where a new set of challenges await, including domain reputation and email deliverability issues, phone dialers, and refined scripts.

3. Engaging

• 0 to 1: Getting in your prospect’s inbox isn’t enough. The right subject line compels a prospect to open and read; the right copy compels them to take positive action. The right mix of timing, target, subject line, copy, and call-to-action must align to get a response. And until you hear from them, you have no idea how you’re doing.
• 1 to n: Once you’ve gotten a result, the question becomes: “How can I achieve consistent results across multiple reps, campaigns, and touches over time?” Carefully measuring what’s working (and what isn’t) is the key to success here, and it’s nearly impossible to measure activities when they aren’t consistent.

4. Finding the right people

• 0 to 1: The average salesperson sends over 100 messages a day. The most effective SDRs are smart, congenial, and hungry -- and most companies hire the wrong person for the role at one point or another. Getting the right SDR in the seat the first time is difficult.
• 1 to n: Even once you’ve figured out what kind of employee makes the best SDR for your business, sourcing those candidates as you scale can be incredibly difficult, especially when you consider varying performance and employee churn. Most strong sales teams are perpetually hiring SDRs because they want to scale and need to deal with SDR attrition.

5. Training people

• 0 to 1: SDR’s should formulate a successful campaign approach but will also likely discover they hit diminishing returns quickly. That’s because the techniques that worked three months ago are likely to be different this month, and an SDR who isn’t consistently learning new techniques and tools won’t be able to deliver over the long term.
• 1 to n: This problem of SDR education is even more difficult at scale.

6. Getting the handoff right

• 0 to 1: Once an SDR has successfully engaged a prospect and set an appointment, the sales process is almost ready to start. But huge questions await: Will the prospect show? Are they the right contact at the target business? What are they expecting out of the call? What does the sales rep know about the prospect before the call and how do they handle the transition between SDR and rep? Without scripting this carefully, “lost in translation” turns quickly into “lost opportunity.”
• 1 to n: At scale, mastering the handoff from SDR to sales rep is even more critical, because small changes to the conversion rate can have huge downstream effects. For instance, is the SDR using best practices for setting the appointment (getting affirmative buy-in) and using an appropriate reminder cadence? How are no-shows handled? How does the end of the SDR “script” dovetail with the beginning of the sales rep script? This is probably the part of the process that gets the least attention (an appointment is an appointment, right?). Getting it wrong is painful because this is the step closest to opportunity development and eventual sale.

As you can see, solving the entire outbound sales puzzle is not easy. At each step, the outreach team must prove the step can be done once and then economically at scale. Failure at any one step means outbound fails.

Fortunately, there are rigorously tested, data-driven tools and techniques to help achieve success at each step and give your team the best chance at outbound success.

Marketing automation is a lot like investing—the smart money is in a long-term strategy. And just like investing, it’s extremely easy to get caught up in the exciting day-to-day fluctuations while neglecting the long-term picture. For marketers, that often means focusing on highly visible activities like social media, email, event management, and web personalization while forgetting to plant the seeds for long-term lead nurturing.

Increase your wealth of customers
In both scenarios, you’re missing out on the potential to vastly increase your future wealth. For marketers, that wealth is customer retention. So, it’s time to put on your investment adviser hat and craft a portfolio of strategies (aka campaigns) that supplement each other and cover all of your bases to help pay those dividends in the future. And what are those dividends worth? Quite a lot. In fact, increasing customer retention rates by a mere 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%, according to Harvard Business Review.

Many prefer to think of retention in terms of reducing churn, but we encourage thinking about the glass as half-full. You have to constantly be out there winning your customers’ business over and over again each year, or someone else will. This means delivering consistent value, deepening relationships, and planning for the future. While you probably already have a customer success team who is wholly focused on this, they rarely have access to the types of marketing communications tools that the broader marketing team does, making this initiative the perfect opportunity for the two teams to collaborate for a common good.

Use marketing automation to deepen those relationships
The beauty of marketing automation is that it’s consistent and personalized. It can listen and react to existing customers just the same way that it does to prospects. Just like your inbound sales team can’t be everywhere at once and needs your email marketing tools to track and engage with a broader range of people, so too does your customer account management team need help keeping tabs on all of your customers. The 80/20 rule is in full effect here—20% of your customers will take up 80% of their account managers’ time, often leaving fully deserving but less loud customers feeling neglected.

This is why you should engage them all equally using marketing automation! It never sleeps, never forgets to send an email, and knows what people want to hear. Clients will appreciate your well-timed pieces of thought leadership, product education, or workplace humor. And they’ll feel in control of this conversation as you learn their preferences. This is classic engagement marketing—marketing that listens and responds to customers at the right time, in the right place and with a relevant message—and it leaves people with a positive association of your company and keeps you top-of-mind, increasing your chances of retention.

Love the idea? Here’s how you can get started:

3 Ways for Marketers to Invest in Customer Retention

1. Create customer welcome journeys: Retention begins on day-one, and good retention is part service and part experience. As the marketer, you can maximize the experience portion by frequently checking in, measuring engagement, and listening for inactivity. You can also listen for customers who are in trouble and spend a lot of time in your help forums. You goal during this period is to make sure that they’re taking full advantage of your service. While this varies by industry, if they are seeing value in the first 90 days, this will reflect well upon those internal champions who purchased your service and they are more likely to renew. Conversely, if your customer makes it through the first 90 days without getting the attention that they need (and deserve), you’re in a bad spot.

With a good marketing automation system, you’ll be able to create dynamic welcome journeys that segment your customers by their behaviors, demographics, and interests. Exceptional ones will also take into account a full view of the customer, including social media mentions and open support cases. This way, your program can see whether they are on-track or if they need help. Remember to keep your customers’ budget-holders up-to-date on your joint success. All of this helps your customer to understand your product better, see more value, and build a strong positive association with your brand.

Specific programs you can run:

• Automated “Welcome” emails to new users and “Thank You” emails to buyers or decision-makers
• 12-month welcome journey with “timeless” content that educates them on your product
• Communications about your user groups, events, and community resources

2. Craft long-term retention programs: This is where marketers have the opportunity to operate on longer timelines. Shockingly, few companies are thinking 2-5 years down the road with digital marketing, but a whole new part of the customers’ journey is just beginning when they sign on with you and you have the ability to help steward it. When you think about it, your retention team is up against your competitors’ aggressive and hungry sales teams—year after year—so the question is: how can you help them continually deliver value?

Make it a priority to create truly timeless content that doesn’t lose relevance with age so that it doesn’t need much updating and you don’t end up creating more work than you can handle. A good long-term retention program will be set up so that someone in the future can take up the reigns and update old content without reinventing the wheel.

Specific programs you can run:

• Long-term 24-60 month nurturing programs
• Proactive renewal campaigns
• Focus on metrics that give you the whole story, like Customer Lifetime Value, not just early success metrics like “clicks”

3. Stabilize employee turnover and account management support: Employee turnover is a major factor in customer churn, for both you and your customer. Your product’s end-users, executive sponsors, and your own account managers will all change roles over time and take that hard-won relationship, social capital, and loyalty with them. How can you tell if your organization needs help in this area? Ask your account management team if your customers ever tell them, “You’re my nth account manager in X years!” If so, marketing automation can help.

Get tactical and maintain good relationships through the transitions with automated introduction emails. Any marketing automation system worth its salt can send these personalized introductions so that they appear to be coming from the outgoing employee introducing the incoming one. You can also listen for new users calling in or signing up, and start them on their own “welcome” journey.

Now that you have a “transition” defense in place, consider being proactive by setting alerts to detect customers who may be in danger of churning and arm your account management team with marketing-approved email campaigns that they can add these “at-risk” accounts to.

Specific programs you can run:

• Automatic introductions when account owners change
• Triggered “inactivity” alerts for the customer success organization to identify at-risk customers
• Email campaigns that account managers can activate

Invest in a long-term marketing retention strategy—it’s what great leaders do
In his book Good to Great, author Jim Collins highlights eleven companies that saw cumulative stock returns of more than three times that of the market average. Pretty impressive. What did those companies share in common? They all had great leaders who had the foresight to put into place systems and processes that would outlast them.

A portfolio of marketing automation campaigns aimed at increasing retention is exactly this sort of system, and the marketer with the vision to set this up places themselves in the same ring as other great leaders before them. They are actively investing in their customer base to make solid investments that pay future dividends.

Put all of these pieces together and you’ve made your first heavy investment in your company’s long-term success. Now what are you waiting for? Set up a meeting with your customer success team to learn about their needs and get started!

How do you keep your customers hooked long-term? I’d love to hear about your techniques in the comments section below!

I must hear it five times a week or more:

“Bill, your call is the one I look forward to the most.”

“Working with your team is my fun project.“

It’s a sad reality for most B2B marketers these days that content marketing is getting harder, more laborious and less fun.

As demands for planning, creation and promotion pile up, what once felt like an enjoyable sandbox for creative expression has begun to feel a lot more like the repetitive slog of the factory floor. You may get it all done today, but that content assembly line will be back again tomorrow.

So we persist, and are increasingly weary of the content machine that was once the marketing department. We’ve always had content to create. But never at this pace and volume.

And it’s not just you and your team. It’s all of us. Look around. We’re all caught in the same wave.

Even just three or four years ago, B2B content was much rarer. I’m talking real content—intrinsically useful ideas and applications, not merely company brochures and self-serving product posts.

Precisely because it was scarce and served customers, early adopters of real B2B content marketing earned results. Those wins became case studies and eventually best practices (e.g., OpenView Labs, River Pools & Spas). CMI benchmarked it all and—like an arms race—B2B webinars, articles and conferences proliferated. And now in the last year or two, late adopters have finally woken up.

Today, B2B content marketing adoption is 88 percent. We all have the TPS report now, which is why it’s getting harder for you, me, our competitors and the hordes of marketers at that last conference you went to.

It’s all adding up, accumulating like a tsunami of interest on the debt of our declining attention span. We’re all caught in the same wave. Content about content. Marketing about marketing.

The Content Tsunami

So once again we must ask, what are early adopters doing? Those brave surfers riding atop the content tsunami—what route are they taking that others won’t see until 2018?

I believe that it’s something B2C marketers have been mastering for decades. The only novel approach left in B2B marketing is the thing that requires the most courage: having a personality.

The B2B Borg is Real. Refuse to Assimilate.

Though I’ve met a few office robots over the years, I would argue that most business people are in fact humans and not cyborgs from 90’s Star Trek flicks. We have lives outside of work. Families. Interests. Hobbies.

So why do B2B marketers (who are otherwise interesting people) choose to assimilate and market like The Borg?

“We. are. the. leading. provider. of. [insert interchangeable solutions].”

“Our market leading [enterprise widget platform] can drive ROI while substantially [insert industry jargon].”

Why is this our culture? Why do we think generalities and platitudes work? They don’t work on us (when we’re the buyers), so why would it work on others?

Why is most B2B positioning little more than “We’re more competent, so choose us – the emotionless Borg.”? I submit that competence alone is a poor differentiator. It’s merely baseline—the requirement to even be at the table. It may get you invited to the RFP, but rarely wins it.

The intangible is what often wins. The inexplicable email stating that “While your solutions were very good, we went in a different direction” is code for “The winner was more likable.”

Businesses can no longer abdicate likability to the sales team. Our content is now the primary “salesperson” for two-thirds of the relationship. But, if our content is devoid of emotion and personality, we will look and sound like all the other vendors, won’t we? In that case, you better have a damn good salesperson.

Another important reality is that millennials are often doing the research, consuming our content and short-listing solutions for their bosses. So while canned copy sounds competent in the planning meeting (and might have worked 10 years ago), it comes off as old school and impersonal to these unaccounted-for gatekeepers of corporate transactions. They don’t speak cyborg.

Humans (of all ages) crave emotion and connection. We’re wired for it. Just look at what we do on coffee breaks, or over a beer at happy hour. We chat. We say things in an easygoing way. We share our personalities and make jokes.

The reality is that our 24/7 always-on culture is radically changing marketing. And not just for consumer goods. The Borg is killing one business brand at a time. Why? Expectations for B2B content are evolving because of how humanistic and profound B2C content has become.

What we consume at home, with friends or on the subway is rewiring our standards for what’s also interesting in our business lives. Consciously or not, each of us are establishing new expectations for what B2B marketing should be i.e., human and approachable.

Why Being Rare is Remarkable

I’m going to assume your solutions are well thought out and competitively priced, or you wouldn’t be in business. Product/market fit arguably drives most success in B2B.

But content is how we get there—how we communicate, stand out and make those kick ass solutions known.

“Yeah Bill, we get it. We’re telling our brand story now,” you say.

Yes, story is powerful and can activate the brain in new ways. But it has to be compelling. I’ve read one too many snoozefest brand stories that weren’t worth finishing.

It’s arguably more about being interesting—about telling a quick, interesting brand story by displaying real personality.

Early adopter B2B marketers recognize this. They realize that when everyone acts like cyborgs, being human and showing personality actually becomes rare. And as Seth Godin says, rare is remarkable. Rare is worth talking about and engaging with.

Keep reading for three ways to achieve rarity in 2016:

1. Have a Strong Voice & Be Hard to Copy

Picture your best friend. You know their voice. They know yours. Flip off the lights in a crowded room and you’d find each other in just a few minutes. It’s easy because you’ve spent time together and have learned each other’s voices.

In a world drowning in content, your company voice needs the same [could find-you-in-the-dark] humanity. Tone. Style. Enthusiasm. The little imperfections that make you approachable. Swap out the logo. (Turn off the lights.) Can we still tell it’s you?

How to Create Strong Brand Voice:

Marketers are brilliant people, but we don’t always follow our own advice. Most of us create personas for our content. We use short names like Anne and Steve to describe who the person is in each target segment, how they behave, and what their preferences are.

We then proceed to create content for these personas, but we only have it half-right.

Here’s what I see in B2B communications:

Old way: company to company
Current: company to persona
To stand out in the content tsunami: personality to personality

I propose this: Instead of personas, consider the power of creating a personality for your brand.

Let’s call her Anne.

Anne personifies the best about your company. She has the business acumen to go toe-to-toe with any of your competitors, but doesn’t always need to prove it. Anne is approachable and instead of bowling readers over with industry jargon, she speaks plainly. It’s clear that she is a deep well of insight and knowledge, that her reserves are nowhere near exhausted. She’s someone worth knowing. Someone that can be counted on.

But what makes Anne worth remembering—what makes her rare in a B2B Borg world—is that she communicates in an engaging, human way. She speaks normally, and goes for connection in every content piece. She’s confidently relaxed and shares like a trusted advisor or even a friend. She has a sense of humor and makes doing business with your brand enjoyable, and worth talking about.

I don’t offer any formulas for this—just digging into your company culture to discover what personality is authentic. Who is your “Anne”?

But let me just say that you’ll need to take some risk or you will end up sounding like everyone else. Real branding requires courage, not merely Photoshop.

By challenging convention, you can develop a brand voice that is both real and defensible—a voice that can be heard atop the roaring content tsunami.

2. Make Your Personality Visual

It’s no great insight why visual content is critical to B2B marketing. The human brain is wired for visual imagery, and processes images much faster than text. In fact, it’s roughly 60,000 times faster. Synaptically speaking, that’s like a turtle (text) racing a Bugatti (visual). No contest.

Combined with a strong brand voice, visuals can deliver serious attention and engagement.

Nine out of ten articles I read about visual content regurgitate the same top ranked tactics you’d see in a CMI report (e.g., video and infographics). We marketers tend to take what works, and then lovingly ruin it by repeating it to death.

My approach to visual content marketing is the same as my approach to investing: Question what the crowd is doing and look for undervalued assets. It’s how you get ten times the return on a stock and ten times the return on attention and engagement. You stand out more, simply because fewer people are doing it.

Consider these “undervalued visual assets” for your B2B content strategy:

Undervalued Visual Asset #1: Slideshare

• Fact: Slideshare gets 60 million visits a month by people looking for business content.

• Fact: Slideshare is an under-utilized platform in B2B. (only 15 percent usage!?)

• Fact: Barry Feldman did a much better post on Slideshare than I’m going to do here.

• Fact: I feel like Dwight Schrute sharing all these facts. Even though I do run faster than 80 percent of all snakes.

Undervalued Visual Asset #2: Branded Comics & Cartoons

I grew up in the 80’s. And as a kid, every day for four years I crawled out of bed long before the sun rose to deliver a stack of newspapers. For me, it was the Des Moines Register. One Hundred and seven dailies. One hundred and thirty on Sundays. That sucker was heavy!

When Jordan and The Bulls weren’t playing, the first section I turned to was the comics, otherwise known as “the funnies.”

Peanuts. Doonesbury. BC. Family Circus. I loved them all because they added some much-needed levity to my other interests, namely op-eds and global politics. By the late 90’s, I was buying Dilbert books and one-a-day Far Side calendars for my desk.

My story is not unusual. Daily & weekly comics have built readership and engaged audiences for decades. Think about that. Isn’t that your goal, too—to create content that’s anticipated and eagerly looked for?

I believe this is the hidden power of a well-crafted series of branded comics. Your company has unique insights and (hopefully) humor about what you sell. But it doesn’t all have to be funny. Consider industry absurdities too, as they are fodder for great comic insights.

The key is shared experiences, shared frustrations even. Brands that can pull this off—creating strong voice and a relational connection—make it hard for competitors to copy what they’re doing.

Imagine if your audience sought you out like readers do Dilbert. Imagine if you captured your brand insights & humor in a regular comic embedded in your newsletter or popup. You’d have fans, not just B2B readers.

For example, our latest popup comic is driving double digit increases in opt-ins for Contently. Why? Because it shows personality and is completely unexpected.

Undervalued Visual Asset #3: Meaningful Post Graphics

Nearly everyone uses stock photos. More and more of us are using Canva. It’s about being quick and just finding something, right? After all, the content is in the post, isn’t it?

Wrong. We have it so wrong.

We’re filling social feeds with millions of images a day that barely relate to the content we want them to click on. It’s time to have a Jerry McGuire moment. Less content. Smarter visuals. More relevance.

What, then, is a meaningful post graphic? It can be any and all of the following:

• A visual representation of your post’s Big Idea
• Completely unexpected (in fact, the more unexpected, the better)
• A visual metaphor
• A custom graphic or illustration

I’m obviously biased, but comics also work very well for a compelling visual component. The key is that the visual stands alone as a representation of what you’ve written. It’s a teaser—a lead-in to the meatier ideas in the long-form post. But it also truly stands out amidst all the Canva-esq visual noise in your audience’s feed or inbox.

Example 1

My visual content agency helped build a client’s Facebook following from 8,000 to over 60,000 in 15 months using this strategy. This is a B2B software company in the uber-conservative energy sector.

The kicker? We accomplished this while Facebook was tanking organic reach.

Example 2

My B2B comics agency recently crafted this Napoleon Dynamite-inspired comic for Bill Carmody’s post on Inc.com. Far and away, this has been his most successful article to date.

3. Create a Must-Listen Podcast

Notice how I didn’t just say, “Start a podcast.” Much is being written right now about B2B podcasting, and for good reason.

Audio is arguably the most personal thing we can create in this content-tsunami world. Audio creates attachments. Listeners take you with them on walks, during their commutes and to the gym. People feel like they know you when they’ve learned your voice. (Remember the earlier example about finding your best friend in the dark?)

Combine that with a strong perspective, interesting ideas, humor and personality, and you have the beginnings of a real relationship—with your content and your brand. But only if it kicks serious ass. So here’s what you’ll need to stand out in the Great Podcasting Land-Grab of 2016:

1. A unique angle on a subject interesting to your audience. Or, what Joe Pulizzi calls a “Content Tilt” in his book, “Content, Inc.” Don’t just start another run-of-the-mill interview podcast where you try to get A-listersto talk about marketing. That’s been done to death already. Study what’s been done, and then be original.

2. A unique format. Check out NextView Venture’s excellent podcast “Traction” for an example of this. Again, don’t just rip off the format. Let it inform you and spur you to create your own approach.

3. An engaging & entertaining voice. This is a bit like show business. Your host either has it or they don’ So make sure it’s the most interesting person at your company. It could be an executive. It might be you. But it absolutely must be the person in your organization who is a natural and who enjoys people.

Personally, I think podcasts are where smaller B2B companies have an edge. Let’s face it, larger organizations have decision hierarchies for how their ginormous brand should communicate and be represented. Podcasts are too spontaneous and a bit of a wild card for slow moving, decision-by-committee marcom teams. The big guys will catch up, but smaller players have a window of opportunity right now to develop loyal listeners. Don’t squander it.

Isn’t All of This Pretty Risky Business Behavior?

I get a kick out of people who want great returns from their efforts, but always begin with this question.

Life is risk. Commuting to work is risky. That spring break flight to Cancun is risky. Prioritizing brand personality is not risky if it’s truly you.

I hate that marketers have made “authentic” yet another buzzword. Being authentic is a state of being. It demands our very best. It says, “Take the damn walls down, and just be the guy or gal I’d laugh over a beer with.”

My opinion is that waiting is risky. Because those that wait to show brand personality are going to look like market positioning copycats come 2018:

“Hi! We’re fun, too!”

Ugh. Don’t be that company. Show some courage right now.

Consider recent marketing history for a moment. Many B2B brands (maybe even yours) took a wait-and-see approach to content marketing. Here’s roughly how I remember the innovation lifecycle applying to B2B Content Marketing:

Innovators (today’s A-listers) were blogging back in the mid-2000s. By the late aughts, Early Adopters were making it a priority and other content formats entered the picture. Recall that at this time, it was less about content and more about social media marketing. But content creators understood the priority was content (the juice) and platforms were merely the containers (the glass).

By 2011 and 2012, the Early Majority was on board. And just in the last two or three years, the Late Majority and Laggards have jumped on the content marketing bandwagon. Thus, the 88 percent adoption mark in CMI’s 2016 benchmark report.

Here’s how I see the adoption lifecycle applying to brand personality in B2B:

We’re in the Early Adopter stage, but it’s going to move fast. As the roar of the content-tsunami grows, B2B brands will be forced to act and sound different. Or become easy to ignore and ultimately irrelevant.

B2B leaders innovating with useful content & interesting personality will strengthen their position, and earn dramatically higher engagement with customers. That will lead to increases in likability, sales and market-share. Promoted content (with baked-in brand personality) will take over feeds.

And then, like all boom and bust cycles, it will contract again. Those that have established themselves in the hearts and minds of their market will go on and absorb the opportunity left by those going out of business.

Your Content Needs Personality—Now More Than Ever

Put your flag in the ground. Establish strong voice, compelling visuals and must-listen audio.

If your organization is stuck in the B2B Borg, share this article with your team. Observe the trends. Challenge my conclusions, but also consider how happy you are (or aren’t) in your current content factory.

My hope is that you jump off that content treadmill and come jog in the park of personality with those of us having a good time.

Attribution is a complicated process and it seems B2B marketers are in constant struggle to choose the correct model for their company. First touch, last touch, lead conversion, U-shaped, W-shaped, Time Decay… the choices and data surrounding the different models can be overwhelming. So much so, that 57% of CMOs aren’t confident they are using the right attribution model and 43% chose their model simply because it was easy to implement and use.

We recently hosted a webinar discussing advanced B2B marketing attribution and Bizible’s newest feature, TouchPoints. In this post, we’ll dig deeper into the different attribution models discussed in the webinar and help you decide which is best for your company.

Attribution is the process of assigning revenue value to the different marketing channels in a customer’s journey down the funnel. It helps marketers optimize the channels that drive customers and put revenue value behind their marketing efforts. No longer is it a guessing game as to which channels work and which don’t.

In the 2015 State of Pipeline Marketing Report, we learned that most B2B marketers are using a single-touch attribution model. Traditionally, single touch works well for B2C companies due to their short sales cycles, but for B2B it can prove inaccurate and inefficient.

Single-Touch Attribution

A single-touch attribution model assigns revenue value to, you guessed it, a single touch. It can be the first touch, last touch or lead conversion touch (organizations may have different naming conventions and qualifying events for each). First touch assigns credit to the channel that first got a prospect to visit your site. This can be any number of things from social to paid search, anything that first grabbed the attention of your visitor and drew them to your site. Lead conversion touch is the channel or page that a prospect visited that got them to fill out a form or sign up for an email list, anything that required them to hand over their information. Last touch is a similar concept as first touch, except it assigns credit to the point at which a prospect went from MQL to SQL; the last marketing touch before being passed to sales.

The problem with a single-touch B2B marketing attribution model is that it puts too much weight on one channel — it’s called model bias. Last touch undervalues the awareness channels like blog posts, social, or advertising. These channels play a huge part in building your brand and are a valuable component to any company.

To the other extreme, first touch overvalues the awareness channels and makes it hard to place actual value on a single visit. B2B sales cycles are long, so what if a prospect initially came in through paid search, left your site and didn’t visit again for another 30 days? Or 90 days? How long is too long to attribute credit to an early source and determine that it had a legitimate effect on the prospect’s purchase?

The moment a lead converts is a valuable touch, but focusing solely on this channel undervalues all of the research B2B buyers do before, and after, filling out a form.

First touch, lead conversion touch, and last touch all provide useful information into the B2B buyer’s journey, which is why the most accurate model for B2B marketers is a multi-touch attribution model. Multi-touch considers and assigns revenue value to the multiple channels that influence a buyer’s journey.

Multi-Touch Attribution

Rarely will a buyer in a B2B marketplace click an advertisement, read a blog post, then purchase your product in one visit. Typically, there is a great deal of research involved in B2B sales and that research requires multiple website visits, sometimes even multiple people. This is where account-based, multi-touch attribution comes to play.

The person assigned to research a product, may not be the same person with the power to make the buying decision. It’s necessary to merge contacts into a single company record because, ultimately, there is only one purchase. The multiple account touches represent the buying journey for the company, not individuals.

U-Shaped Attribution

The simplest multi-touch attribution model is U-Shaped Attribution. U-Shaped assigns greater revenue value to the first touch and lead creation touch, then distributes remaining revenue across the other touches in between.

For example: A customer first visits your website by clicking a display ad, then they visit a week later and read a blog post on attribution and another on marketing trends, two weeks later they fill out a form to download an e-book, then two days later they request a demo and purchase your product for $1,000.

Forty percent of that revenue ($400) will go to the display ad (first touch), 40% ($400) to the e-book download (lead creation touch) and 20% distributed between the two blog posts ($100 to each). The biggest drawback to U-Shaped is that it leaves out the last touch/opportunity creation (demo request). The last touch is important because it ultimately was the last thing a customer saw or did before they decided to buy.

W-Shaped Attribution

A W-Shaped Attribution model takes into account all major transitions from when a customer first visited your site, to when they converted into a lead and then into an opportunity. Using the same example from above but applying W-Shaped attribution, 30% of that revenue ($300) will go to the display ad (first touch), 30% ($300) to the e-book download (lead creation touch), 30% ($300) to the demo (opportunity creation) and 10% distributed between the two blog posts ($50 to each). This comprehensive model is a great choice for B2B companies as it attributes revenue value to the three most important touches in a customer’s journey.

Z-Shaped or Full Path Attribution

If you’re an attribution pro and have mastered the W-Shaped model, your company is ready to look into Z-Shaped Attribution, also known as Full Path Attribution. Z-Shaped is a deep dive into attribution. If you’re doing any marketing that’s targeted at people who are already in the sales funnel, then you should consider using a Z-Shaped model.

Using the same example from above, but assuming the customer didn’t purchase after the demo, they instead visited your booth at an event, revisited your website a week later, and then used the live chat feature to talk to a sales rep and close for $1,000.

Z-Shaped would attribute 22.5% of that revenue ($225) to the display ad (first touch), 22.5% ($225) to the e-book download (lead creation touch), 22.5% ($225) to the demo (opportunity creation), 22.5% ($225) to the live chat (closed deal) and 10% split between the two blog touches and the event ($33.33 to each).

Multi-Touch, Omni-Channel attribution gives credit where credit is due. It is the most accurate way to track all of your marketing efforts back to revenue, aligning your sales and marketing teams. If you’re a small company who only uses a few channels, a U-Shaped model may be all you need. But if you’re using multiple marketing outlets that include online and offline channels, and you’re unable to include each one of them in a monthly revenue report, a W- or Z-Shaped model is the way to go.

For more information, check out our TouchPoints SlideShare.

Are you overwhelmed by an incessant barrage of questions from your sales team? Frustrated because they aren’t doing the things you did automatically as a salesperson? Perhaps you are exhausted from hounding them about meeting their obligations.

Never fear, sales managers…each of these three pervasive sales management ills has a relatively simple remedy. The best part? The solutions are in your grasp, and have been all along.

#1: The Avoider Disorder

You tend to avoid conflict. In a sticky situation, your art of avoidance may elevate to the level of Where’s Waldo?

The Problem:

You’ve let one (or more) of your salespeople slide on their administrative obligations and you’ve put off having a conversation about it with them. Perhaps you have justified it because you are busy, they are busy, and despite the slacking, they are still producing at a relatively acceptable level. Meanwhile, you feel like you have to nag them about turning in their paperwork, updating their pipeline, entering their notes into the CRM, and so on.

It may seem benign, but when you avoid having difficult conversations with your team, you undermine your own authority. This often stems from what the OMG Sales Assessments refer to as a “Need for Approval Weakness.” In layman’s terms, it means the desire for people to like us is greater than our desire for them to perform at their highest potential. Giving in to this weakness short-changes both you and your sales team because you aren’t taking action to end sub-par behavior and you are enabling the salesperson to under-perform.

The Cure:

Tackle your problem head on. Sit down with your salesperson and help them make a fresh start. Tell them that what has been happening is undermining the sales process and there are going to be some new expectations to help them be their most effective. Clearly and specifically, establish those expectations. They may include: report completion, self-generated leads, call numbers, etc. Next, set consequences for not living up to expectations (leads withheld, expense checks withheld until compliance, etc.). Finally — and this is the hardest part — remove your emotions and enforce the consequences.

#2: The Sightless Leader

In this case, our manager is blind to what makes a salesperson tick, and what motivates them. Without getting to know them and understanding their “why,” it is impossible to tap into a salesperson’s motivation and help them reach their goals. Assuming that all salespeople are similarly motivated is short-sighted, indeed.

The Problem:

You may have been promoted to sales manager after being a superstar salesperson, highly self-motivated and driven by commissions. Now that you are the manager, you are befuddled by salespeople who aren’t motivated by money. Like you.

You end up frustrated with your salespeople because they don’t do what you did when you were a salesperson. You don’t see why they wouldn’t be self-motivated to work tirelessly towards closing more business (and bagging the associated commissions). You are tired of harassing them to take the most basic, obvious steps.

The Cure:

Open your eyes. It’s not true that all salespeople are money-motivated. It’s also incorrect to think all salespeople will perform as you did. To be successful as a sales manager, you have to learn how to tap into each individual salesperson’s motivations. See them for who they are, not as reflections of you. It’s up to you to bridge the distance and help each salesperson perform.

# 3: The Guru Complex

This may start out because you enjoy the attention and it makes you feel important: all the salespeople are coming to you for answers! Each question strokes your ego. Not to mention, it’s very expedient. Another. Problem. Solved. By the Guru.

The Problem:

If you are telling not asking, you aren’t coaching. If you expect your salespeople to employ consultative selling methods and become experts at asking questions, you need to model it for them. Spoon-feeding them all of the answers stunts their growth. It’s better for salespeople when you empower them to answer their own questions and nurture their independence. Lastly, feeding your guru complex means your time will be sucked away by constant questions from the salespeople who depend on you for all of the important answers.

The Cure:

Get off your soapbox. Change the conversation. Pose the questions back to them, and help them get comfortable with finding their own answers. It will free up your time, make you a better coach, and make them much more capable salespeople. For example: What could you have done differently? What are you going to do differently next time? What do you think you should do? What advice would you give you if you were me?

Want to get serious about upgrading your sales management skills?

Take our Sales Manager Evaluation and use it bolster your areas of weakness. Get a sample here:

Do you know The Guru, The Avoider, or The Sightless Leader? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credits: © wavebreakmediamicro / 123RF Stock Photo, © wavebreakmediamicro / 123RF Stock Photo, ©bowie15 / 123RF Stock Photo; all modified by resizing, cropping and text overlay.

Marketing automation is kind of like your phone.

You don’t need to know exactly how it does the magical things it does to know it’s amazing.

I know that when I press these 10 buttons in the right order pizza is delivered to my house in 20 minutes. I don’t really need to know how the touchscreen works to know that’s awesome.

That’s marketing automation: press these 10 buttons in the right order and leads and sales are delivered.

But you do need to know what it can do, and how it can work for your business, even if you don’t need to know how the lines of code are set or the API integrated into your website.

This article will be a simple guide to how marketing automation can work for B2B companies and what you can do with it. I’ll give a simple bullet-pointed breakdown of the how and what and then a couple examples of its capabilities.

How marketing automation works and what it can do

Let’s keep this part simple…

• Your marketing automation platform provides you a section of code which you place in the back-end of your website’s code.
• This code allows your marketing automation platform to “see” every visitor who comes to your site.
• Each visitor is tracked individually: their behavior, actions, traffic source and the details they provide your business.
• This information is sent to your marketing automation platform, where you can view each visitor’s details individually.
• By manually setting up lists or segments, you can place individual visitors into larger groupings based on actions they’ve all taken, ways in which they’ve all engaged, places they are in the world (or your sales funnel), and more.
• You can also trigger automatic actions to occur when a visitor or lead meets a specific condition. This can be anything from an email being sent, a retargeting ad being delivered, a change being made to your website’s design, and more.

What it looks like:

Here’s a screenshot of all the visitors (people who are not yet leads) seen by our marketing automation platform:

On the right side you can see the actions of one particular visitor (codename 4f38aq4kae1f7u1h) who’s been selected.

Here’s a screenshot of all the leads currently active on our website:

If you were to select any of those leads, you’d see each action they’ve ever taken on our site or piece of information they’ve provided our business.

To get more specific, here’s a screenshot of all the leads who converted on one of our popups (this list is automatically created when you create a campaign):

Perhaps you already get the feeling that marketing automation can be as straightforward or as advanced as you like. For the purposes of this article, we’ll be keeping it simple to give you a better grasp of marketing automation as a whole.

Marketing Automation Example for B2B Lead Nurturing

Here’s a simple example of a squeeze page – an email-gated piece of content:

Once you’ve created your landing page (which you can do right within the Wishpond platform) and published it to your website, you choose your nurturing content and write your nurturing emails.

For more on lead nurturing content and emails, check out my article How to Create Email Drip Campaigns to Nurture Leads.

Firstly, set your conditions…

This is pretty straightforward: all leads who have converted on our landing page meet the condition for our workflow.

Next, let’s set the actions for this workflow. Essentially, this is the answer to the question “what’s going to happen after a lead meets the above conditions?”

I’ve set a 7-minute delay after the initial condition is met (conversion) and then 2 or 3 days between all the subsequent drip emails being sent. I send them around the same time every day to better personalize the campaign.

Here’s a screenshot of a separate workflow which stops the early-stage funnel and moves our leads to the next stage:

If they opened but didn’t click through (or didn’t open), set an action which places them either into a general lead nurturing drip email flow or simply your newsletter mailout.

If your workflow’s conversion goal isn’t a paid plan (but rather a late-stage drip campaign, perhaps) simply set the conditions accordingly.

And in case you were wondering, by default all of Wishpond’s workflows are set up for each lead to only be able to meet the conditions once.

Marketing Automation Example for B2B Customer Retention

The B2B market is sometimes focused not on lead generation or nurturing but on getting that initial sale and driving repeat customers.

A lot of this is done through hard work, sweat, and tears: sales associates and account managers grinding it out to get the job done.

But what if it were a bit easier? What if all it would take would be 5 minutes and the click of a few buttons?

Let’s say your B2B company sold office paper to large businesses and a three-month sales cycle (before the customer runs out of paper and you re-sell).

Let’s break down how marketing automation can help:

Step #1: Every time your salespeople secure a business’ patronage, they add that business’ contact details to a “Customers” list. Your customers are likely already in the marketing automation system (as leads) but if not, it’s easy to add their name and all the details you have:

Step #2: Create a simple workflow for all people who are within your “Customers” list.

Every time you add someone to your “Customers” list they’ll meet the workflow’s conditions and the actions below will be started:

Because the business has a three-month sales cycle, we set an automatic “are you ready to buy more paper?” email with an 87-day delay (this, of course, needs to be tested).

We also send an internal email to the sales team notifying them that one of their accounts may need a call.

Note: Remember to set the the automatic “are you ready to buy more paper?” email to be from the sales team so they receive an email if the account responds).

This whole process takes a few minutes, 90% of which is the writing of the emails themselves.

Wrapping It Up

These are just simple suggestions for how your B2B company can use marketing automation to make your work life easier, as well as more optimized.

There are endless opportunities within marketing automation, from simple lead nurturing emails to dynamic website personalization, retargeting and more. If you can think it, marketing automation can do it.

Steps in a Buying Decision is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Not all customers are created equal. You’ve probably had your fair share of one-time customers, who engage on social media or make a purchase once, never to return. And while there are tactics you can use to encourage them to come back, why not focus your efforts on the customers that are most valuable to you instead?

Who are your most valuable customers?

The definition of a “valuable customer” may vary from industry to industry and from business to business. A valuable customer might be someone who:

• Makes repeated purchases of your product
• Shares your content frequently on social media
• Advocates for your brand publicly
• Recommends your product to their friends, family and colleagues
• Contacts your customer service department with suggestions for improvement
• Attends your events
• Subscribes to your email newsletter and engages with the content
• Visits your website regularly

Measuring the value of a customer can be difficult, but as you can see from the list above, it shouldn’t necessarily be measured only in dollars. If you are regularly tweeting back-and-forth with a handful of curious, engaged customers, they should be included in the “valuable” category alongside the big purchasers.

How can you identify your most valuable customers?

Now that you have some idea of who you’re looking for, it’s time to dig into data to pinpoint them.

Social data can provide an in-depth understanding of your audience as a whole, as well as individuals within it. And it’s these individuals that we want to identify.

For starters, you can use social data to determine which of your customers is in the right stage of the buyer’s journey. Those who are expressing buying intent might be more valuable, because they will be most receptive to your messages and ready to make a purchase.

You can also use social data to identify the customers that most frequently engage with your brand on social channels. These are the individuals who retweet, Like, share and comment on your content, and they have the potential to become brand advocates.

Social data is also useful when identifying the customers who are in the right demographic, psychographic and lifestyle group for your brand. These individuals will be more willing to purchase your product and recommend it to their peers.

Once identified, it’s a matter of creating the right content that will resonate with your audience, and rewarding your most valuable customers with deals, discounts, exclusive content and more.

The actions that individuals take on social media, and the content they share, can be gathered, analyzed and used to assess how valuable they are to your brand. Do you know who your most valuable customers are? Share your own ideas for identifying them in the comments below.

Often managers tell their direct reports what to do and expect tasks to be successfully completed. This approach works well when employees are aware of how tasks must be done and ideally have received training.

As a sales manager in companies I worked for, none had a defined sales process or even a consistent approach to selling. When I had salespeople that weren’t achieving their numbers they either left for hopefully greener pastures or were put on a plan overseen by Human Resources and me. In most cases this meant the seller had to get YTD against their numbers in about a 3-month timeframe. There was an agreement made as to the numbers of calls/day that needed to be done, amount of time trying to uncover new opportunities, etc.

I don’t ever recall any plans that resulted in the seller being able to reach a YTD position and keeping their job. What I later came to realize is that performance issues for sellers can be attributed to one or both of the following reasons:

1. Sellers are unwilling – an attitude problem that managers must try to address.
2. Sellers are unable – a skill competency issue.

You can ask sellers to perform tasks they can’t complete, but managers shouldn’t be surprised by the results. It’s analogous to a major league player whose batting average is .200. Whether getting 10, 100 or 500 at-bats, his batting average won’t improve without coaching/skill development. Most sales managers focus on a higher quantity of work (more at bats) but have little or no impact on the quality of effort (batting average).

Being a first level sales manager is an extraordinarily difficult task. Within organizations that don’t have standard pipeline milestones and a common skill set designed to allow sellers to achieve them, the mountain is significantly more difficult to climb. When underperformers are asked to call high, don’t lead with product and establish value (as my first manager implored us to do); the elephant in the room is many sellers don’t have the skills to do so.

Like most SaaS businesses, you offer a free trial for your product. Through the trial, you've done your best to drive customer engagement.

Customer onboarding seamlessly runs new users through all the shiny features of your product, and your mastery of the free trial lifecycle email has them active from beginning to the end.

According to research by Softletter, 66% of SaaS vendors report free trial conversion rates of 25% or less—but industry averages are just benchmarks. Whatever your trial conversion rate is, you want to improve that number.

Don’t stop when the trial does. If you give up on unconverted users after the trial, you lose out on all the potential customers that could be activated later.

Free trial users took the time and effort to sign up for and test your product. They're warm leads you should nurture. Don’t turn your back on them just because the trial’s over. Try to reignite the spark that got them using your product in the first place.

Here are 3 simple ways to get unconverted users back into your funnel—right where they should be.

1. Shorten trial periods and offer generous extensions

A 30-day trial is too long. For the majority of SaaS companies, it’s better to have shorter trial periods, with liberal extensions, than a longer trial period.

These are the main benefits of having a shorter trial period:

1. Users will know they have less time to check out your product, and be more proactive during the trial.
2. Shorter trial periods mean shorter SaaS sales cycles, and lower customer acquisition costs.
3. You’re able to conduct more testing, which allows you to learn faster and iterate faster.

At the end of the day, your SaaS product probably doesn’t take 30 days to evaluate. Limit your free trial to 14, or even 7 days.

You can always provide users who need more time to evaluate your product with extensions.

Don’t just give your extension away, though it’s already free. When it comes to offering an extension, contact trial users and ask, “Do you want me to extend your free trial for you?”

Around 30% of unconverted users will request more time. It's a great way to initiate a conversation with them, find out more about their needs, and eventually steer them along the path to conversion.

The most common reasons prospects need more time are:

• They have to test your product more internally, and go to a higher-level decision-maker for the final call
• They’ve been too busy to try your product out

Larger accounts have lengthier decision-making procedures for implementing new software, and warrant extensions on their trials. They also tend to be prospects you’ll want to focus your sales efforts on.

But even for general users, giving an extension costs you nothing, and allows prospects to gain a deeper experience of your product—which is why you have a free trial in the first place. Use extensions as a way to increase customer engagement with your product, and keep them coming back for more.

2. Send an open-ended exit survey

When the free trial expires, avoid sending a tedious survey with pre-filled answers that ask how users “felt” on a scale of 1 to 10. Most people won’t bother to answer.

Instead, start collecting feedback by asking one simple open-ended question: “What prevented you from choosing our solution?” You’re guaranteed to increase response rates several times over.

The answers you receive won’t be nearly as easy to quantify as those from a survey form. But they’ll often be answers you don’t expect, and more valuable to the success of both your free trial and your product.

Here’s an example of an open-ended exit survey that helped Groove boost their exit survey responses by 785%:

By sending the message from a real person, and giving users the option to hit the “reply” button, you invite better responses:

• Even if the feedback is negative, it opens the door to further discussion, and even potential conversion.
• Trial users will notice bugs and glitches that your paying customers have grown used to, or learned to work around.
• They’ll hand you concrete, actionable feedback that you can implement without waiting for quantifiable data to pile up.

Some of the responses will even present immediate touch points to re-engage—and convert—lost trial users. Pick up the phone, and call them.

Calling new trial users within 5 minutes after sign-up can boost your conversion rate by more than 2x . The same logic applies after the trial.

For example, if a user liked your product, but thought it was missing a certain feature that you already have, get them on the phone. Tell them about the feature, and how best to implement it for their business.

If you're in the early stages of your product and have a very low volume of sign-ups, you can even take an aggressive approach and require them to call you to cancel their trial. This way you increase the chance that you actually get to speak with your users.

Try to streamline a process for incorporating this feedback into your business by dividing it between your various teams. Segment out responses based on the specific problems they address.

• Issues surrounding specific feature implementation can be taken to your Customer Success Team to ramp up your onboarding procedure.
• Problems with user experience and workflow inefficiencies go to your Product Team.
• Concerns about pricing can be delivered to your Sales Team.

Approached the right way, unconverted users will teach you the most about the shortfalls in your free trial process. Learn why they're not buying. Get inside their heads to discover how you can use your free trial to unlock value for your product, and you’ll boost your conversion rate dramatically.

3. Extend your drip email strategy beyond the trial period

Customers aren’t necessarily ready to make the purchase right now—but that doesn’t mean they won’t buy your product in the future. You want to keep in touch with former users without shoving your product down their throats, or blasting out spammy “you’re missing out” emails.

15five is a SaaS product that helps managers maximize team productivity. Take a page from their post-trial playbook, and re-engage former users by launching a drip email campaign that starts after the trial period is over.

Here’s an email from the campaign to Janet Choi at Customer.io

Look for ways you can provide additional value to unconverted users beyond your product. You want to nurture their interest in your company and your mission, without driving them away by being too pushy on the sales side.

Here’s how to proceed once the trial ends:

1. Target your most active users during your trial, who frequently logged into your product and tested multiple features.
2. Launch a drip email campaign over the next six months that delivers relevant and educational content to former users. The purpose of each email should be to enable the success of its recipients.
3. Make it easy in each email for users to reply. Provide a call to action button that puts them in touch with a member of your sales or customer success team.
4. After they respond, you can find the touch points that allow you to reopen the sales conversation with former users — when they’re ready.

Highly active users who don’t convert are some of the best candidates for reactivation later. They’ve already engaged significantly with your product.

These active users probably already work in a field that’s related to your product and your company. Re-engage them with what you’re doing rather than what you’re selling.

By keeping them in the loop, you walk them down steps in your sales-funnel that will help convert them into paying customers in the future.

Optimize your free trial

Your free trial is one of the most important tools in your SaaS sales arsenal. It allows you to prove value to buyers before they spend a dime, and implicitly sells value over price. Keep looking for ways to fine-tune it.

The majority of people who take your product for a spin on a free trial probably won’t convert. But that’s no reason to put them on the back-burner. Not only will some turn into paying customers later, but they’re also a vital resource for improving the overall quality of your free trial.

Your lost trial leads can become your greatest teachers when it comes to optimizing your trial. Whether it’s better onboarding, more valuable lifecycle emails or overall user engagement—they have the answers. They know why they didn't take the next step. Use that knowledge to ramp up your trial, and convert more leads into customers.