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Haggling with a salesperson is just as much about establishing a rapport as it is about driving down a price. By avoiding yes or no questions at first, you can keep sellers from dismissing you immediately and earn some time to engage with them.

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Denis Pombriant shared a copy of his new book. The words “Solve” and “Customer Science” on the cover grabbed my analytical attention. In the introduction he says:

“Customer Science is now a necessity because so many customers are so dissatisfied — and they are not timid about telling the world why. This is a business problem and much can be done to solve it. “

The book, however, turned out to be full of empathy for the customer with terms like “bonding” and  “moments of truth”

In his foreword, Paul Greenberg expresses it well:

On the one hand, businesses value profitability, revenue, shareholder value, and customer satisfaction — things that you easily can measure. On the other hand, customers value being valued. It’s a feeling, not a mathematical construct.

Not that Denis avoids mathematical areas – he simplifies complex concepts like subscription pricing and quantification of customer sentiment. My books tend to be case study heavy so I liked Denis’ similar exploration of concepts using HubSpot, HP Vertica, New England BioLabs and United Airlines among other examples. 

It’s an easy (and humorous)180 page read - and shockingly under-priced at $ 2.99 for the Kindle version.

Well worth the time investment. 

There was no pressing need to write this. But write it I did. I admit to liking the term "Customer Entanglement." (Not to mention "WOW-ification.") Here goes: *Eye-popping customer SERVICE/PURCHASE PROCESS *Eye-popping customer SERVICE/SUSTAINED FOLLOWUP *Customer KINDNESS (K = R = P/Kindness = Repeat business = Profit.) *Fierce customer LISTENING!! ("Core Value" #1? NO KIDDING!!) […]

The post 32 Customer Entanglement Strategies appeared first on Tom Peters.

One of the most prominent cases we encounter when meeting with new clients that are struggling with their lead-generation process is the lack of a marketing strategy. The unknown KPI’s, end objectives, and lack of sales integration leads to wasted marketing budgets and lost hope. In order to build a robust marketing strategy, you have to always look at each element of your marketing efforts and rate them accordingly. A common concern we typically hear from our clients is how to make sure their marketing efforts will bring in measurable results that they can present to executives at the end of the day. It’s not an easy task, but that’s why many companies tend to bring in an outside agency to work hand-in-hand with them and ensure they are maximizing their budget returns. Take a look at your marketing components and ask yourself: How much am I investing on each, how am I tracking results, and how am I adapting over time?

Ads:

• TV/print ads: These might not be the best route for every company, but depending on your target market, you can potentially have a very effective TV/print ad campaign. The biggest hurdle with these types of ads is tracking and capturing leads to calculate the return on investment. One way to increase the effectiveness of these ads is by tracking the leads through call tracking. Your sales team can then tailor their messaging based on the lead source. Meanwhile, as a marketing manager, you can calculate your returns by tracking how many leads came in from each source and attributing it to sales.

• Digital ads: These are the most commonly used ads these days and are much easier to track. With A/B testing, you will be able to test the waters with a few versions of your digital ads, with different images and messaging, to adjust accordingly based on which ones are getting more traction and capturing more leads. Another reason why we encourage the use of these ads is the capability to pinpoint your target market and deliver offers through channels that they regularly utilize.

Email Campaigns:

Did you know that “email marketing yields an average 4,300% return on investment for businesses in the United States?” (Direct Marketing Association). That is quite the return! But in order to make the best of your investment, a considerable amount of time must be invested to ensure you are sending targeted emails, addressing specific pain points to each target group. There are many components that must be included in an email marketing campaign to ensure it yields to profit, or else, you will be wasting your time sending emails just for the sake of sending them.

Website:

Many companies tend to settle for a generic basic website and forget about it over time. But we cannot stress this enough, your website is one of the most important marketing components. Many times, it will be the first touch point with your customers so it is definitely worth investing in to ensure you are setting the right impression. Within your website, you should build each page with the customer in mind. Here is a list of questions you can use to ensure your website is up to par and is actually capturing the leads you expect it to.

Content:

It seems like everyone has been talking about content recently. There is a clear reason why. There is no longer a cookie-cutter form of content that every company can follow. Whether it’s on your website, ads, emails, social, your content is what represents you, what you offer, and what value you will bring your customers. It is essential to nail down your content strategy by understanding exactly how to approach each one of your target personas, capture their attention, and entice them with and offer that directly relates to their needs.

Social:

When it comes to social, it’s all about putting your company out there, listening to customers, engaging with them, and building an unbreakable bond with them. Every company must include a social media strategy in their 2016 budget. In relative to other forms of advertising, social media is one of the more cost-efficient and effective options for brand awareness and building relationships.

At the end of the day, the most important step to take is to identify your company’s KPI’s for each one of these elements. What is the end goal of each element? How much time are you investing and what are you getting out of it? At all times, your marketing and sales team must work hand in hand and ensure they are on the same page when it comes to lead nurturing and taking the necessary steps to convert leads into customers. A disconnect between the two departments will result in a dysfunctional system and a lot of money wasted.

If you are struggling with your current marketing strategy, let us help you.

In 1997, Microsoft built Terraserver, a vast one terabyte storage system that was the forefather to the big data centers today. On it, the company hosted the first-ever publicly available satellite imagery of the world. Essentially, Microsoft built Google Earth — four years before Google. 

Unfortunately, Microsoft executives didn't see the potential of what the company had done and the project was killed, according to Motherboard. Seeing your house from space was not, they reasoned, something a normal person would want to do. 

"[T]he company didn't care about the information [on Terraserver]," Tom Barclay, the man behind the project, told Motherboard. "Google was an information company first. They saw the value of the information." 

Hindsight is 20/20 and both Google and Microsoft have grown into two of the biggest companies on Earth with respective market valuations of $505 billion (£332 billion) and $420 billion (£277 billion). 

Terraserver, in its 1997 form, could have been Microsoft's future, but the company chose to use it to host other people's data and is now one of the biggest hosting companies in the world with tens of billions in revenue per year. 

The information Google gleaned from launching Earth in 2001 likely became part of Mail, Drive, and Search, all of which are key parts of Google's strategic focus, generating slightly fewer billions than Microsoft. 

"The very first demo we did, I chopped Bill Gates's house in half, which was not very good," Barclay told Motherboard. "In the first year, I got 20,000 emails, and the vast majority of them said one of two things:  'I love Terraserver, I saw my house' or 'I hate Terraserver, I didn't see my house.'"

It would seem that Microsoft executives were in the latter camp and so Google got to put the whole world inside a computer. You can read Motherboard's full interview with Barclay here. 

SEE ALSO: Microsoft is making a big strategic change

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 6 cool things the Microsoft Surface pen can do

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Microsoft today launched Office Insider, an ongoing preview program for Office 365 subscribers looking to test new features and improvements coming to the suite’s apps. Office Insider currently only applies to Office 2016 for Windows, which arrived just two months ago, though Microsoft said that a Mac version “is coming soon.”

This is essentially the Microsoft Office counterpart to the Windows Insider program, which allows anyone to try preview builds of Windows 10. Testers can report bugs, try new features, and offer feedback to Microsoft on soon-to-be released features and improvements. The main difference is that the Windows Insider debuted before Windows 10 even went into preview, while Office Insider is launching long after Office 2016 has already shipped.

Nevertheless, the move ties into Microsoft’s plans to update its Office apps on a monthly basis. “Every month the Office engineering team ships updates across the Office apps, to include new functionality,” a Microsoft spokesperson told VentureBeat. This month, the big highlights are two new PowerPoint features: Designer and Morph.

The first is a cloud-powered recommendation engine and the second is smart animation technology. Both are tools that help automate the creation of slides and presentations, cutting down the time it takes to build a polished PowerPoint deck.

Designer

PowerPoint Designer is all about helping you build “differentiated” presentations. The workflow is as follows: Drop an image into your presentation, and if Designer detects that it can help, it will provide you with several design ideas in the right-hand pane which you can apply to the current slide. All you have to do is pick one.

So it’s like Clippy? Microsoft sure as hell hopes not. For Clippy, “pretty much 100 percent of the time you didn’t care,” Chris Maloney, senior program manager of PowerPoint, told VentureBeat. Designer is data-driven, meaning the right-hand pane only shows up “when we believe we are able to deliver something of value to the customer.”

In fact, the feature uses machine learning: automated design and smart image analysis. Microsoft says professional graphic designers helped develop over 12,000 creative blueprints for Designer, which leverages cloud intelligence to analyze and figure out which blueprints works best with your content. The company used its own in-house professional graphics team to build the design ideas, though some originated outside of Microsoft.

Designer can detect if the image is a photograph (as opposed to clip art), contains a natural scene or a face, is a graph or chart, and so on. Based on that, it can decide which parts of your image should remain visible, if anything can be cropped, whether the image should go in the background or foreground, and what blueprints to suggest. “The end result is a high quality and customized presentation, in seconds,” Microsoft claims.

Because it is powered by the cloud, Designer will improve over time. Microsoft will not only add more design ideas, but it will also expand which slide types the tool can tweak.

Morph

PowerPoint Designer is all about helping you build “more impactful” presentations. The workflow for Morph is a lot more complicated: You’re essentially duplicating slides you want morphed together, moving objects based on how you want them to animate, clicking Morph, and hoping it knows what you’re trying to pull off.

It’s quick and dirty. But, when Morph works, the process can take just a few minutes to a couple of hours, depending on what you’re trying to create. That’s certainly better than days or even weeks for serious animations.

You provide the various states you want your object to shift into, and Morph does the heavy lifting. Transitions are set to 2 seconds by default, though you can naturally change this as you see fit.

You are building “cinematic motions,” as Microsoft calls them. Put more simply, Morph animates across slides. Rather than regular text or image animations, the tool can animate 3D shapes. It can be applied at a word or even character level, including text wrapping.

The goal is to make it more accessible to everyone who wants to use animations. Experts meanwhile get even more control and features around shape transformation.

Office

The above features will only be available to Office 365 subscribers. Furthermore, while Microsoft is promising monthly updates, there is a delay this time around, largely due to the fact the Office Insider program also launched today.

“Moving forward, the first public availability of those updates will be Office Insider for consumers, and Office 365 First Release for commercial customers,” a Microsoft spokesperson told VentureBeat. “This allows us to get customer feedback from a small, actively engaged customer base and adjust if needed prior to rolling out more broadly. In many cases for monthly feature releases, there will be just a week or so between availability for Insiders and the broader customer base.”

In short, you can expect Designer and Morph to hit Windows users in two to four weeks and reach other platforms “in the coming months.” Starting in December, monthly updates will start rolling out broadly just a week after Insiders get it.

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Your thoughts, actions, and even your choice of words could mean the difference between living a wealthy life and an average life.

"If you spend time around the wealthy and the middle class, it's an eye-opening experience to hear the differences in how the two groups speak," writes Steve Siebold, a self-made millionaire who has studied over 1,200 rich people.

"The middle class tends to be negative about money, and when it comes to earning a lot of it, most believe it's not possible for them."

Here are eight seemingly harmless things many of us say all the time that you wouldn't hear from the rich:

SEE ALSO: I spent 5 years studying rich people, and here's the best piece of advice I can give you about money

'I hate my job.'

Do what you love, or you will lack the energy to become truly successful and wealthy.

"No man can succeed in a line of endeavor which he does not like," writes Napoleon Hill in his 1939 masterpiece, "Think and Grow Rich."

Nearly a century later, and this emphasis on passion and enthusiasm is just as — or even more — relevant. In a more recent study of over 1,200 of the world's wealthiest people, self-made millionaire Steve Siebold uncovered similar findings, which he details in his book, "How Rich People Think."

"The rich know that passion is the real secret of getting rich," writes Siebold. "It's a cause and effect relationship between effort and passion, but while the masses see passion as the effect, the great ones see it as the cause. In other words, the average person goes to work every day and hopes to find passion in his or her efforts. The rich go to work every day feeling passion for what they do, and their passion fuels their efforts."

Rather than saying you hate your job, redirect that energy towards finding a job that you're enthused about. "The first belief you must adopt is that it's possible to do what you love and get rich doing it," writes Siebold.

'I can't afford it.'

It's a seemingly harmless, but highly unproductive phrase.

"By automatically saying the words 'I can't afford it,' your brain stops working," writes Robert Kiyosaki in the personal finance classic, "Rich Dad Poor Dad." It lets you off the hook, and doesn't force you to problem solve your way to actually being able to afford whatever it is that you want.

Rather than stating "I can't afford it," ask, "How can I afford it?"

This doesn't mean you should buy everything, Kiyosaki emphasizes. The point is that you should constantly be exercising your mind, coming up with creative solutions, and thinking how can I make something happen, rather than I can't make this happen.

'Rich people deserve to be wealthy (and I don't).'

"There is a pervasive belief among the masses that tells them they don't have the right, nor are they good enough as human beings to ask, hope, or pray for prosperity beyond their basic needs," explains Siebold. "Who am I, they ask themselves, to become a millionaire? Who am I to live a lifestyle fit for a king?"

Meanwhile, he says, rich people ask, "Why not me?" They believe that success is natural — they believe that they deserve it.

"Being rich isn't a privilege. Being rich is a right," explains Siebold. "If you create massive value for others, you have the right to be as rich as you want."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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(By Ben Gruber, Reuters) – For Marcus Weller the idea started off with an accident. He was riding a motorcycle in Barcelona when he took his eyes off the road to look at a road sign and smashed into the back of a car. A couple of years later he dreamt about that accident, but in the dream Weller didn’t crash.

“It was an exact flashback dream of that experience. But the important difference was I wasn’t looking around for street signs and trying to figure out where I was going because I had these GPS maps and they were floating out in front of me like a hologram,” said Weller, the Founder and CEO of Skully Inc.

“I’m going down the road and because I am looking forward I see the car break and I swerved around it and I didn’t get into the accident. That woke me up out of a dead sleep and I sat up in bed and I had goose bumps and I was like ‘that is going to save peoples lives’,” he added.

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From VentureBeat

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That dream was the inspiration for what Weller describes as the smartest motorcycle helmet ever developed. Utilizing a state of the art video system, a powerful on board computer and a heads-up display built into the visor, the AR-1 smart helmet enables a rider to basically see in every direction at once with no blind spots.

“What the video system in the helmet does is with zero latency it takes a 180 degree blind spot camera. Its an ultra wide angle camera and it gives you eyes in the back of your head and it renders that in the heads up display,” he said.

Weller says humans aren’t designed to travel at 120 kilometers an hour, an evolutionary hurdle the developers needed to overcome to ensure the technology was in sync with how the human brain processes vision.

“It is leveraging or capitalizing on the way our brains and our visual systems naturally work to put that information back into the field of view, back in infinite focus to wherever I look it is in focus and reducing the reaction time, reducing the likelihood of a life threatening accident,” Weller said.

The helmet syncs to a phone via Bluetooth enabling hands-free calling, GPS navigation, and music streaming – all while keeping your eyes on the road. After years of R&D, the first helmets are scheduled to start shipping out to buyers just in time for Christmas.

If you’re in sales, it’s time to rethink how you’re approaching your prospects.

A field that was once built on reps holding all the power has become one that is focused on the buyer. Today's prospective buyer has just as much information as the sales rep, and doesn’t need to go to them for much other than to actually purchase the product or to seek clarification.

So as a sales rep, it’s up to you to adjust accordingly. In this new era of the empowered and informed buyer, traditional sales strategies are becoming less and less effective. Cold calling and “show up and throw up” are fading into the sales twilight while warm outreach and relationship building move to the forefront.

Instead of hard selling, modern reps need to start developing and using new sales techniques that are both good for the buyer, and good for the seller. Here are five sales tactics from the new playbook of inbound sales that salespeople must embrace to remain relevant.

Modern Reps Don’t Sell, They Help

Thanks to the internet, buyers no longer need to rely on reps for basic product information, and this drastically changes the role of the salesperson in the buying process. High-pressure sales tactics no longer work on informed prospects who are more than capable of gathering data and making their own decisions.

So what’s a sales rep to do? Prioritize helping over selling.

Modern reps help their prospects by answering questions, brainstorming solutions to pressing problems, and offering clarification about their service or product. If a prospect wants to know the differences between their product and a competitors’, helpful reps answer honestly and enable the prospect to better understand the relative merits of each option.

Helping also means being there when it comes to support issues. Some reps might hand the problem off to another team member after the deal is inked, but helpful reps stand by their customers’ sides through the thick and thin. If the customer isn’t delighted with their purchase, inbound sales reps work hard to solve the problem.

Here are five questions to ask next time you’re speaking with a prospect to make it clear you’re committed to helping them above all else:

• Is there any part of the product you found confusing and would like clarification on?
• How can I help you decide whether or not this product is for you?
• What kind of value do you want to see out of this product?
• What can I do to help you better understand our service?
• What are the major challenges you’re grappling with, and how can I help you solve them?

Modern Reps Build Long-Term Relationships, Not Short-Term Sales

In the past, once a prospect signed on the dotted line, the rep would often vanish (until the time came to renew the contract).

The modern day rep has a different approach altogether. Developing a relationship with prospects is critical in today’s sales environment. As author Ken Cook puts it: “Relationships matter because selling today has evolved. Twenty-first century sales success depends on trust before solutions.”

And the relationship has to start from day one. The old sales playbook advocates for trying to build a connection out of thin air with cold calls. But consider that 64% of sales reps say cold calling hasn’t improved in the last three years. The modern inbound sales reps researches their prospects, engages with them online, and seeks warm introductions to build rapport -- before they ever pick up the phone. After the relationship is forged, then and only then is it time to introduce the buyer to their product.

Here are three easy ways to build a relationship with a prospect:

1. Engage with them on social media. Whether it’s LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, sparking up a conversation and becoming familiar to a buyer is an easy way to foster a connection.
2. Ask a ton of questions. Get to know your buyer. Ask questions that go beyond the usual “How’s business?” Dive into family, sports, the weather, interests, passions, goals -- any and all topics that might help you build a relationship.
3. Follow up often. By sending a “Hey, how are you?” email every two or three weeks, you’ll start to develop a personal bond with your prospect. Not only is communicating regularly a great way to build rapport, it will also help you stay top of mind with buyers.

Modern Reps Sell Strategies, Not Products

Prospects have overarching plans and goals for their businesses, and as a sales rep, it’s your job to help them achieve these objectives. In other words, a modern sales rep isn’t just the “product guy,” they’re also business strategists.

Solving for the prospect and/or customer is the most important part of being a sales rep today. Instead of dumping a product into buyers’ laps, offer them strategy advice to help them achieve their goals. Approach every prospect as if they could become your next great case study.

The best way to help with development and strategy is to learn where your prospect is on both a business and personal level today and where they want to go. It’s important to ask open-ended questions here and give your prospect a chance to candidly speak to their challenges, goals, and dreams.

A few easy ways to assist with strategy:

• Analyze the prospect’s market and look for opportunities for improvement.  
• Share content and case studies of companies that experienced success with new tactics, and ask for buyers’ feedback.
• Hop on the phone for regular check-ins to ensure they are staying the course and getting to where they want to go.

Modern Sales Reps Are Authentic, Not Scripted

Cold calling with a one-size-fits all script in hand is no longer an effective method for building a relationship. Buyers now expect personalization and customization in all their interactions.

Gaining trust is critical to building rapport with today’s buyers, and the best way to do that is to be genuine from the get-go. In fact, Brian Tracy says that a sales reps’ unique personality can be responsible for up to 80% of their success.

The easiest thing to do to start embracing your personality is simple:

Throw away the script.

By researching your prospects, creating tailored decks, and getting rid of the generic sales script every other salesperson on the floor is using, you'll allow your personality to shine through. Don’t miss your chance to go a little off the grid and connect with prospects on a personal level, and not just a business level.

Modern Sales Reps Issue Guidance, Not Demands

Because inbound sales reps take the time to discover what their prospects need and genuinely care about buyers' goals and challenges, they aren’t focused on simply forcing a product down buyers’ throats. Instead, the modern day sales rep believes in providing guidance and options to every prospect to ensure that they are getting what’s best for their business -- if it’s the product they sell, or another.

As HubSpot’s VP of Sales Pete Caputa said, sales reps should “give more than they receive.”

On your next sales call, put together a list of three options for your prospect. The first one might be your product, the second a competitor, and the third the status quo. Objectively discuss the pros and cons of each decision and how it could affect business in the long term. Instead of bragging about your product, present all the choices the prospect has, build trust, and then let them make a decision.

Modern Sales Reps Are Inbound, Not Outbound

While outbound sales reps cling to outdated and no longer effective cold sales tactics, inbound reps are adopting the above behaviors to better serve the modern buyer. Rather than automating obtrusive sales tactics of old, inbound reps are revolutionizing the way they sell.

The inbound sales rep has all of these new tactics in their back pocket. They’re focused on being themselves with every prospect, offering help, building long-lasting relationships, assisting with strategy, and offering guidance and options as each prospect enters their funnel.

How do you think sales reps can better serve the modern buyer? Share your perspective in the comments.

Your sales team already knows the value of a well-placed connection. Existing clients, board members, alumni -- each provides an entry point into your prospective customer base, a way of securing warm introductions instead of relying on cold calls.

So any salesperson worth her salt should already be accustomed to digging through her Rolodex for connections to prospective clients. Perhaps, as a sales leader, you've also dived into the old contact list to help fill the funnel.

But what about all your other employees’ contacts? Are you leaving potential revenue on the table by not fully leveraging the relationship capital of your entire organization?

Lead and rev gen are enterprise-wide imperatives with stakeholders in each and every department at your organization. Fortunately, these same people can also help drive revenue growth. All of the stakeholders in your company possess a network of relationships which, when shared with the rest of the company, can open up broad swaths of new business.

It's the job of C-suite members to figure out how to utilize those webs of connection so leads can flow more quickly and efficiently through the funnel. So, what's stopping you from opening up these new streams of revenue?

The fact is, leadership tends to think too narrowly about networks, focusing on their own and maybe the contacts of one or two other colleagues at their level in the food chain. They fail to see the forest of rev gen solutions for the individual trees. After all, some executives might think, if Joe Engineer has worked in IT for a decade, how can he possibly help with an organizational strategy aimed at garnering financial services clients?

First, it's critical to understand that networks are not two-dimensional. They exist in layers. Joe's primary network might indeed be 80% IT but what about the people those contacts know? Secondary contacts are often far more valuable to strategic networkers than the people most close to them; they require less upkeep in terms of outreach and at that level of remove offer a broader range of professional backgrounds.

Secondly, senior leaders might assume that employees are unwilling to share their personal or professional contacts with the administration. This is a stickier situation. It's perfectly understandable for people to feel cautious about their personal information. But that doesn't mean they won't open up their relationship capital to the rest of your company. As with most requests, it's all about how you frame it.

Start by explaining the specific strategic goals you're pursuing and how access to and understanding of the company's entire relationship capital will help fulfill them. Assure employees that their contacts will not be approached by anyone other than themselves and only with permission (and stick to that promise). Finally, if your team still seems a bit wary, try incentivizing through referral bonuses.

And employees aren't the only revenue generators you should be looking at. Board members represent a significant rev gen opportunity. Chances are, their ability to make and leverage connections is what helped them get to your board in the first place, so why not utilize their networks to gain introductions to potential clients? While you'll need to work to build the same trust with your board members in terms of protecting their relationship capital, making the ask will be simpler with these individuals than with your average employee; they're more likely to have been approached about making connections in the past. Plus, you'll look good for coming to them.

Finally, your existing clients can open up new streams of revenue through their connections and referrals. But as CEO, it's critical you start developing the kinds of high-touch, communicative relationships with your top-level clients now that can pay dividends later. That way in six or 12 months when you ask to be connected to one of their partners, you not only secure an introduction but a warm referral as well.

Of course, you can't ask your clients to open up their contact lists to you. Instead invest in the time and resources to research the companies to which your clients have access and then make a specific request.

The bottom line: Every one of your employees and board members and many of your clients are -- or could be -- revenue generators. People outside your sales team can help generate leads by opening up their networks of relationships and providing sales reps with the access they need to prospective clients.

Members of the C-suite are directly responsible for unlocking the relationship capital of non-sales employees, board members, and clients by building understanding and consensus across the entire enterprise. The leads -- and conversions -- will follow.

Great webinars share three common traits:

• They cover topics that are interesting to a specific target audience.
• They come in formats that showcase the speaker’s expertise.
• The speakers are engaging.

When creating your webinar, start by determining a topic that will resonate with your audience. Once you’ve got a topic, you can create assets such as emails, a landing page, and the event itself. Here are 10 tips to help you develop that webinar that meets your goals and gets the results you plan for.

1. Agree on the topic of your webinar

You and your team should determine a topic. This topic (and its associated content) will help drive how intrinsically interesting and potentially compelling your event is – which influences the number of leads the webinar generates. The topic should be highly relevant to your target audience, and it should be unique (or have a unique view; you don’t want to rerun a topic everyone has done this year) and actionable. You can also sometimes attract a larger audience by choosing a topic that is provocative in nature.

2. Specify the format

Webinars can have different formats. With few exceptions, there should always be one moderator and at least one speaker. Here are a few possibilities:

• One presenter: This is the simplest format. The speaker needs excellent presentation skills, since a single speaker can lose the interest of an audience if they’re not very engaging.
• Two presenters: Two speakers handle different parts of the presentation. It can be more interesting to the audience than a single speaker, especially if they interact with each other, rather than doing a handoff halfway through.
• Interview: This could be a question-and-answer session or a tag-team approach to a topic.
• Panel discussion: A panel discussion is usually moderated by one of the speakers or by the organizer. Because it provides more room for different points of view, it can be very engaging. However, it can also go off the rails without a good moderator and a strong focus. Allow more time and coordination for managing multiple speakers (including rehearsal) and create a structure for the moderator to follow in order to keep the discussion on track.

3. Identify and recruit speakers

Recruiting moderators and presenters is the next major step in the production process. Your speakers must be engaging and articulate in order for the audience to stick with the webinar to the end. Boring speakers, or speakers who really have nothing (or nothing new) to say, bore the audience and make your brand look unexciting. Presenters who have strong personal brands can also be a major draw for the event.

You may have in-house experts who can speak, but don’t overlook the possibility of choosing third-party speakers to present educational content. Nobody wants to sign up for an hour-long sales pitch; having a third-party speaker adds credibility and reduces scepticism about the content.

4. Meet with the speakers to discuss the topic

This is absolutely key: hold a kick-off meeting with the speakers. You should brief them on the topic, key themes, format, and production schedule. Let them know how you plan to promote. Make sure they can meet the deadlines required for the webinar’s scheduled production date.

5. Develop your landing page

As you use email and social to promote, you’ll be driving potential attendees to a landing page where they can register to attend. Make sure this is a good-looking page that carries your brand messaging. Reinforce the value, to convince anyone who’s interested but hesitating. Key best practices include: promoting the speakers, making the date and time of the event clear, using a simple registration form, providing a clear description of the webinar, and creating copy that clearly tells the prospect WIIFM (what’s in it for me). Don’t make other offers on this page; stick to your webinar.

6. Create your promotional emails

Email is the most powerful tool available for promoting a webinar. Create promotional emails that invite people to the landing page where they can sign up for the webinar. For inspiration when starting out, look in your own inbox. Pay attention to the invitations you get, especially email from a company that already successfully runs webinars. Make sure you follow standard email best practices such as creating a compelling subject line, email body copy, and one single call-to-action.

7. Develop materials for other promotional channels

Use other channels to promote your webinar. Do you have a place on your home page to promote events? Your blog? Post on the social media channels that your existing customers use to reach a similar demographic – and new prospects.

8. Create your operational emails

Email isn’t just a way to recruit people to a webinar, it’s the most effective way to communicate with people who’ve have already signed up for the event. At a minimum, create the following emails:

• A registration confirmation email (with iCal attachment)
• A pre-event reminder email that’s sent 24 hours before the event
• A post-event thank-you email for attendees
• A post-event thank-you email for non-attendees (perhaps with a link to a recording of the event)

According to recent research by ON24, your best bet is to drive registration over longer periods of time. The promotional cycle for webinars continues to grow in duration, which means you can increase the number of emails and messages you send to drive webinar registration and attendance.

Use an auto-responder email so the registrant gets immediate acknowledgment of their registration. You may also want to add an automated calendar event to the confirmation email to allow registrants to easily block out the time on their calendars.

After the event, be sure to send a thank-you message within 24 hours or less, and include any content that was promised to the attendees. Be sure to include a link to the archived webinar; close to 25 percent of webinar attendees will watch the recorded, on-demand version, and many people who skipped the live event will watch the recorded version on their own time. Add sharing links so recipients can pass the recorded version of the webinar to their colleagues. You can also consider creating a library of your on-demand webinars for you audience to access similar to Act-On’s Video Hub.

9. Work with speakers to create the presentation materials

The speakers should create slides to present during the webinar. The most important part of the webinar is what the speakers say, but good visuals will keep people engaged and listening, and deepen their understanding of what’s presented. If possible, it’s best if the speakers prepare their own slides. Offer concrete guidance on presentation best practices, such as immersive or interesting images and large fonts; essentially, lots of pictures and few words. (Note: if the slides can stand alone, then you won’t need to do much to the deck to make it a SlideShare.)

10. Conduct a quick review of your plan and all your materials

Once you’ve created all the materials that will support the webinar, you should conduct a review. Focus on making sure that you’ve checked off all the things that need to be done.

Review all the materials to make sure they’re consistent (with each other, with your brand, with the messaging) and on point. You should also make sure that you have everything you need to meet the production date.

And finally, if you can afford the time, have a read through to make sure the timing synchs up with your schedule and that there aren’t any places where the pace is too fast or the energy lags. This acts like a rehearsal to help your presenters feel comfortable, and gives them a chance to identify and correct anything that isn’t working for them.

Now, you’re all buttoned up – and ready to rock, with confidence.

Want to dig deeper into presenting perfects events? Be sure to check out this guide for information on hosting perfect online and in-person events.

We’ve talked to hundreds of companies about sales portals, and what we’ve heard is remarkably consistent. If they have a sales portal, they hate it. If they don’t have a sales portal, it’s because they are pretty sure they’re going to hate it.

Everyone knows that there must be a better answer. We live in a time when technology has revolutionized our ability to get the information we need .. in our personal lives. Want to learn about almost any topic in the entire pantheon of human endeavor? No problem, you can get what you want in seconds on the Internet. Need to find a crucial document to help close a deal? Sorry, good luck with that. It doesn’t have to be that way.

A modern sales enablement platform connects sellers to the most effective content and makes sure that it is working hard to deliver the sales results you need. You can take advantage of the same techniques that Internet services use to connect millions of people to the information they want. The right solution also integrates with and enhances the tools your company already relies on – services that track your sales activities (like Salesforce), that manage your files (like Box), and that you use for Web conferencing (like join.me).

Why do traditional sales portals so consistently fail to deliver, even really expensive ones and what can be done to fix them? We will answer both sides of this question in this article.

So What’s the Problem?

Let start by examining the five reasons sales portals typically fail.

1. It’s too costly to make them good

A great sales portal has many features that are very expensive to implement. For example:

• Rich support for many mobile devices.
• Integration with cloud file systems like Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, and Google Drive. That’s where content is authored and updated, so it should be easy to publish and update from within those systems.
• Integration with cloud applications. When a sales rep looks at an opportunity in Salesforce, they should see the content they need for that opportunity right in their Salesforce tab.
• Automatic distribution of new versions of an item to the people who use it.
• Analytics that show publishers what is landing across the organization.
• Support for user collaboration via commenting and other social interaction.
• Ability of non-technical users to organize and reorganize information at any level of scale.

Since it is hard to build all of those features, most custom sales portals don’t bother. They offer a poor experience that leads to low user adoption and engagement.

2. Teams can’t reorganize and remix

Teams often need their own “mini sales portals”. Maybe the sales team in Germany wants to mix official content (like the pricelist) with regional information. Or there’s a sales initiative to focus on health care deployments. The team wants a place to share guidelines, pitch decks, case studies, and deployment guides. Some of it is official sales content and some is custom tailored. All the official content on a mini-portal should automatically be updated whenever a new version is released. Custom sales portals usually make it difficult or impossible to build mini sales portals. Since teams often have very little access to IT resources, they need a solution they can create and manage on their own. So they cobble something together to get the job done, using whatever tools they can. The result is sales portal sprawl, with many small silos of information scattered across the company. These islands of content lurk mostly unseen, insecure and full of information that is often wildly out of date.

3. Frontier content never gets shared

There is official content that goes through a review process, and it’s crucial that employees can find it quickly and efficiently. But that isn’t the only valuable information in the organization – at the frontiers, people are constantly creating new content that they need to do their work. They send it in email, keep it on their machine, and share it in Dropbox .. content that is dynamic and alive, representing working knowledge that would be valuable for the whole organization. But it’s much too hard to get that frontier content onto the official sales portal. Would-be publishers have no idea how to get it approved, and probably wouldn’t bother even if they did. So it ends up living “off the books” where most people never see it .. and it never gets used to improve the official content so that everyone can benefit.

4. Custom sales portals are expensive to evolve, so they get frozen in time

When a sales portal is built, it reflects the needs of the organization at the time. Since it’s costly to change, mostly you leave it alone. But your business does change, constantly. Teams get reorganized and renamed, product lines evolve and change, competitors come and go. The way you structure your information needs to keep up with the speed of change in the business. Sales portals that are hard to evolve tend not to evolve. So they get more and more out of date, reflecting an organization that has become a distant memory. The real action sweeps onward, leaving them behind.

5. Custom sales portals get worse as they grow

Modern Web services like Google, Facebook, and Pinterest apply advanced machine learning to understand what users care about and how they relate to each other. The service gets better and smarter every day as more content is put into it and more activity happens on it. That’s why those services are so compelling. If your home page never changed on Facebook, nobody would use it. Search works so well because it constantly gets better at figuring out what people are looking for. But custom sales portals virtually never work this way – it’s too difficult to implement. They ignore what users are doing, showing everybody the same thing all the time. Search never works well and gets worse and worse, not better, as you add more content.

So what’s the answer?

A sales enablement platform should deliver on these six essentials, to make sure that your sales team gets the maximum value from the content you work so hard to create.

1. Search That Works

What do you do when you need to find something on the Internet? You search for it, and you’ll probably find what you need, almost instantly. All of your employees do that dozens of times a day .. unless it is something they need at work. Then they glumly wade through piles of largely irrelevant content or send an email to their friends hoping somebody might know where it is. Let your content live in the modern age. Your sellers should be supported by the same kind of technology that they take for granted in their personal life. It should do the work to dig through all the content used by your company and find the most relevant results. It should know which content other people are finding the most interesting and useful, and rank it at the top. Then reps can spend their time at work doing their job, not sifting through useless content or recreating documents that already exist (somewhere).

2. Intelligent and Relevant Recommendations

The field seller who is pitching solutions in Korea doesn’t need the same content as an inside sales rep working the phones in Texas. The system should adapt to the needs of each user, intelligently recommending the best content based on their role. It should analyze and score how content is performing with other reps and with customers, so that every seller can find the information that will most effectively move deals forward.

3. Browsing and Filtering

Today, the document you need is probably out there … somewhere. But it takes too much time to hunt around for it. The system should provide powerful ways to browse and filter content and help sales reps pinpoint the most effective content for each situation. Reps can browse content using meaningful characteristics such as product line, customer segment, geography, or anything that makes sense for the business. Using these same meaningful characteristics, reps must be able to further refine using filters to narrow down results.

4. Only the Good Stuff

Are there five versions of the pitch deck floating around in your company, and three of them are completely off message? Do your reps give up on wading through mountains of mostly useless files and just throw something together on their own? A great system should help you make sure that only the most recent, most effective content is available. It should let you update items so everyone has the latest and greatest version. It should help you track down content that is out of date, that is being ignored, or that is not resonating with customers, so you can fix it or get rid of it.

5. Evolve Without Requiring IT Support

Changing most sales portals requires costly and scarce IT resources, so they soon freeze in place and are left behind. The way you organize and share your content needs to keep up with the speed of your business. Do you sell exactly the same products you did in the past? Face competitors who never change their approach? As business conditions evolve, so must your content and the way it is organized. You can never keep up if you need to ask for IT support every time you want to update something. And it isn’t just one centralized sales portal that needs to move forward. Regional teams often need to remix and supplement the content. Maybe they have decks on local market conditions and documents in their own language – whatever is needed to drive the business. But regional teams usually have very limited access to IT resources .. so they are often forced to cobble together an alternative solution that takes the place of the centralized sales portal. Now you don’t have one bad sales portal, you have many of them. Prevent “sales portal sprawl” with a system that can be easily and quickly adapted by everyone in the business who needs to manage information.

6. Integrate With the Tools You Use

Keeping your files in a cloud file system is a great way for people to collaborate on creating the best possible content. A sales engagement platform should integrate with those systems, so you aren’t forced to maintain multiple silos of content. You should be able to publish or update files directly when they are ready for the rest of the world to see. Similarly, if you use Salesforce to track sales activity, reps should be able to get access to all the content they need right from the environment where they live.

You don’t have to settle for a sales portal that you hate. Use a sales enablement platform that supports these six essentials, and your sellers will be able to find what they need to close a deal … as quickly as they can find a great cat video.

Here are the facts: Smartphones are ubiquitous, the compact camera market is fading and GoPro's got the action market locked up. So you'd think the last thing an upstart design firm would do is create a new type of compact camera and attempt to launch it themselves. But Seoul-based BOUD reckons they can pull it off.

What BOUD—that's an acronym for the Bridge of Unique Design—has come up with is the Flex Cam PIC, which has an entirely new form factor unlike anything on the market. 

On top of that the retail price is an absurdly low $89. When I first saw it I thought it looked frivolous and a bit silly, but the video and some of the proposed applications got me turned around:

While I'm not going to be hula-hooping or entering b-boy competitions anytime soon, the ease with which the PIC can be attached, as in the cooking video or the dog shots, makes me think it could come in handy for instructional videos.

But two things remain to be seen. One is if end users will find that the 124-degree lens adequately compensates for what I assume will be an inability to precisely position it.

The more pressing issue is whether BOUD can really get the thing to market. They managed to crowdfund it earlier this year on IndieGogo, netting $154,750, but they've already missed their ship date (September) and have not revealed a hard deadline; an update from a week ago says they're doing "last-minute tuning" and urges backers to "please wait a little more."

Despite that, the Flex Cam PIC has reportedly already been awarded the CES 2016 Innovation Award in the Digital Imaging Category. Backers will no doubt be waiting to see if actual units are on hand for the show in January.

You don't have to be a money expert to get rich, but it can help to read up on investing and achieving wealth.

Good news: There are several concise books loaded with valuable information about accumulating wealth that you could start and finish in an afternoon. 

We can't guarantee a book will make you rich, but if you've always wanted to learn how to properly manage your money and never made the time, start with this list of brilliant personal finance books all under 160 pages.

'Rich Habits: The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals,' by Thomas Corley

In "Rich Habits," Corley outlines his findings after studying the lives of both rich people (people with an annual income of $160,000 or more and a liquid net worth of $3.2 million or more) and poor people (people with an annual income of $35,000 or less and a liquid net worth of $5,000 or less) for five years.

He managed to segment out what he calls "rich habits" and "poverty habits," meaning the tendencies of those who fit in each group. 

His 94-pager provides 10 principles to help you start developing the right habits and walk in the footsteps of the wealthy.

'If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly,' by William Bernstein

William Bernstein, cofounder of investment management firm Efficient Frontier Advisors, originally published "If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly" as an e-book for $0.99 on Amazon (and made it available for free on his website).

The quick 48-page read details how people early in their careers can retire comfortably with $1 million in the bank if they take a few critical steps. 

You can get a preview of his thoughts in the article he published on Business Insider.

'The Psychology of Investing,' by John Nofsinger

Investing is one of the most effective ways to start building a fortune, and the earlier you start, the better.

Nofsinger, a finance professor at Washington State University, explores the ways psychology affects investors in "The Psychology of Investing," while also providing a concise overview of how to make smart investing decisions when just starting out.

 

 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The British Columbia government has approved a $1.5-billion expansion plan it says will turn a small ski resort near Agassiz into an all-season recreational area.

Gmail is a ubiquitous and easy to use email service, but it’s not without its faults. Many people choose to supplement their Gmail experience by using apps like Boomerang, which can help you schedule emails for a future time. But, there’s another way you can supercharge your Gmail that you may not have thought of: Google Drive Add-ons. Announced last March, Google Drive Add-ons are meant to supplement Google Docs and Google Sheets, making both of Google’s online tools even more useful. Google Drive works offline and its productivity tool like Google Sheets is already a popular Excel alternative. So by taking advantage of...

Read the full article: Supercharge your Gmail with These 4 Google Drive Addons

 Soon, you may see a warning in Gmail that tells you that an email has arrived over an unencrypted connection. Gmail already defaults to using HTTPS for the connections between your browser and its servers, but for the longest time, the standard practice for sending email between providers was to leave them unencrypted. If somebody managed to intercept those messages, it was pretty trivial to… Read More

There's no one else on Earth who's more familiar with the surveillance capabilities of governments, spy agencies and criminals who is also willing to discuss those capabilities. Edward Snowden's wide-ranging conversation with the Freedom of the Press Foundation's Micah Lee on operational security for normal people is a must-read for anyone who wants to be safe from identity thieves, stalkers, corrupt governments, police forces, and spy agencies.

Much of Snowden's advice takes the form of simple self-help measures (use Tor Browser for sensitive lookups: think about where you take your phone; encrypt your storage, calls and messages with the easy-to-use Signal; turn on two-factor authentication where it's available).

Some of it is more philosophical (ad-blocking is a good idea because dynamic ad-brokerages have bad security and are prone to serving malware).

But Snowden doesn't believe that the solution to surveillance and insecurity is self-help measures. As important as these are, we also need significant political and technological advancements to attain real security and privacy.

The part that really stuck out for me, though, was his discourse on privacy and sharing: just because you choose to share, it doesn't follow that you have no privacy, nor that your privacy is worthless.

Yes, that’s selective sharing. Everybody doesn’t need to know everything about us. Your friend doesn’t need to know what pharmacy you go to. Facebook doesn’t need to know your password security questions. You don’t need to have your mother’s maiden name on your Facebook page, if that’s what you use for recovering your password on Gmail. The idea here is that sharing is OK, but it should always be voluntary. It should be thoughtful, it should be things that are mutually beneficial to people that you’re sharing with, and these aren’t things that are simply taken from you.

If you interact with the internet … the typical methods of communication today betray you silently, quietly, invisibly, at every click. At every page that you land on, information is being stolen. It’s being collected, intercepted, analyzed, and stored by governments, foreign and domestic, and by companies. You can reduce this by taking a few key steps. Basic things. If information is being collected about you, make sure it’s being done in a voluntary way.

EDWARD SNOWDEN EXPLAINS HOW TO RECLAIM YOUR PRIVACY [Micah Lee/The Intercept]

When was the last time you took a first aid class? The ‘80s? ‘90s? Like everything in the medical field, first aid is constantly evolving, and what you may have learned to do as a first responder 10 years ago could be completely wrong today. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest changes over the last few years.

Read more...

Aaron Franklin, proprietor of the Franklin Barbecue in Austin, Texas, has been lauded for his pit master skills, specifically in smoking beef brisket. Bon Appetit anointed his fare the best barbecue in America, and he was awarded Best Chef: Southwest by the James Beard Foundation. Barbecue lovers line up hours in advance of the restaurant’s 11 AM opening, and the limited supply of brisket, ribs, chicken, pulled pork, and sausage usually sells out by 2 PM.

Franklin’s prized brisket is priced at $20 a pound, in line with local rivals County Line ($20.58), Ruby’s ($21.95), and Rudy’s ($17.58). Given the high demand for his cuisine, it’s fair to wonder, “Why doesn’t Mr. Franklin raise prices?”

Economists are typically incredulous about sellouts — events such as rock concerts and sporting events, as well as in-demand products like Mr. Franklin’s barbecue. Their standard advice: “Raise prices — set the market clearing price where demand equals supply.” But in most cases, I believe this armchair advice can be detrimental to a business. Why? Because customers have long memories.

What economists often fail to understand is price creates an emotional response within customers that affects their loyalty. Getting a good deal generates euphoria, while high prices provoke feelings of anger over getting ripped off. As an extreme example of that, a pharma company recently raised prices by 5,000% and was met with national outrage. Conversely, it’s common to experience elation over finding a bargain – consider the excitement as stores open their doors on Black Friday.

Emotions generated by a price formulate a perception of a business – “low,” “reasonable,” or “high” – which affects future purchase decisions. Before we as consumers make a purchase, we search to find the best price. Often times, it’s easy to rely on memories of past pricing experiences with a business. We revisit stores we recall as offering “fair” prices and avoid ones where we felt the sting of being taken advantage of. Due to consumers’ long memories, the price a business sets today directly affects future purchase decisions.

When business is strong, it’s often best to resist the urge to boost prices. Think of tempering price increases as a form of “insurance” against a future drop in demand. In Mr. Franklin’s case, Bon Appetit may decide another restaurant serves the best barbecue in America (or even in Austin). It’s also possible that cheaper competitors may pop up close by that are “good enough,” or overall demand may drop (due to recent health scares from processed meat, for instance). If high prices were set during a moment  of good times, it will be challenging to communicate lower prices to customers. Banners declaring “new low prices” can damage a brand, by coming off as desperate. Alternatively, a low price embedded in consumers’ minds will help keep the lights on during slow periods.

There are steps that businesses can take to squelch the emotions brought on by high prices. Restaurants, for instance, offer premium-priced set menus on popular holidays such as New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day. Since the product is different (set vs. a la carte menus), this minimizes diners associating the higher price with the restaurant’s everyday fare. For a service business, keeping price-related emotions intact can be as simple as explaining, “We are super-busy right now – as a result, we’ve had to raise prices temporarily to cover overtime. You can buy right now or I can contact you when we are less swamped and our prices are lower.”

A handful of industries have heavily invested to educate customers that prices will vary over time. We’ve come to expect fluctuating prices from airlines and hotels. The goal of educating customers is so they understand and accept prices will be high at times, but that they also realize there are “off-peak” options available at a discount. As a result, most of us aren’t offended that prices at fancy resorts are astronomical during Christmas-to-New Year’s week compared to other time periods. Training customers to expect varying prices can be a significant undertaking though. Despite its best efforts, for instance, Uber has faced strong backlash over its surge pricing strategy, which can often be seven times the normal price.

There are two key issues to consider before boosting prices during a period of strong demand. First, how confident are you that the good times will last? Second, what initiatives should be taken today so if need be, price can be gracefully rolled back? For many businesses, it may make sense to forego a few extra dollars of momentary profit and instead follow what Aaron Franklin practices in both setting prices as well as smoking meat…go low and slow.

The post 4 Delightful Editing Tips to Make Your Words Dazzle and Dance appeared first on Copyblogger.

If you’ve visited the internet lately (and, given that you’re probably reading this on a website I’m guessing that you have), you may have noticed a trend: people are creating content at a staggering pace.

Some of this content is good, quite a lot of it is mediocre, some is downright terrible, and a very small percentage is unequivocally great.

Content marketers and the brands they work with are feeling increasing pressure to create content that falls into that last category, particular as our readerships get overwhelmed by the tide of terrible, mediocre, and good stuff.

But what is great content? How do you know when you’re finally on the trail of this wily and elusive Holy Grail of content marketing? You’ll probably see most, if not all, of these 11 signs.

1. Great content naturally reproduces

When you read some great content, it should be like fireworks going off in your brain as multiple follow up ideas bloom in your imagination.

But let’s be very clear here: a follow up idea is one that is a logical extension of the ideas presented in a post. It’s not a way to answer all the things you didn’t cover in your original piece of content.

Great content is complete on its own, but it should also be part of an ongoing discussion. It’s one star in a constellation of conversation, and it should help guide you and your audience on to the next avenue of exploration.

2. People get excited about great content

Is your sales team chomping at the bit to share your latest white paper with each and every single one of their prospects? Did you have to restrain your social media team from starting to tweet about your new article so you could add one last image? Are there comments thanking you for covering this topic?

Social media engagement, comments, and generally high levels of giddiness from your fellow team members signal the presence of great content.

3. When your content is great, you want to share

If we’re being honest, all content marketers have hesitated about sharing something they’ve created on their personal social media profiles.

Maybe we found the topic boring, or the execution just didn’t live up to our expectations. Whatever the reason, there are times when we’re just not thrilled to tweet our latest work under our own handle.

Our pride in great content, on the other hand, drives us to share it far and wide.

Consider whether or not you’re keen to post your latest work on your LinkedIn profile as an example of your work. If you’d rather not, it’s unlikely to fall into the “great” category.

4. Other people share great content (without you asking them to)

There are few more exhilarating feelings than seeing that other people have been sharing your content before you have. The idea that others are eager to distribute what you’ve created is simply thrilling, and this is what happens when you make great content.

As a bonus, great content also lends itself to constant and consistent sharing over a long period of time. If your content lives on a website, you want a pageview graph that looks something like this:

Great content has a share spike early on, then continues to pull in readers for months (and possibly even years) afterwards.

5. Feedback on great content is welcome

Even if the feedback comes in the form of constructive criticism, the author of great content usually welcomes it because it’s just making the content better.

When our content is mediocre or just good, we can feel defensive about feedback because we’re already acutely aware of the shortcomings.

Editing sessions for great content are usually filled with the phrase, “Yes! And…” while those reviewing less-than-great pieces tend to feature, “Yes, but…” responses. The difference seems slight, but the outcomes are miles apart.

Great content lends itself to edits because its author sees its potential, so if you find yourself bristling at commentary, take a minute to decide if the source is the content quality.

6. Great content is helpful

Are you getting comments on a blog post that say things like, “Thank you for writing this! I’ve been struggling with this problem and your idea is exactly what I was looking for!”

Those kinds of comments are the hallmark of great content online.

Lest we forget it in the mad dash to produce thousands of words per week, the larger goal of content marketing is to provide value to our audiences. It stands to reason, therefore, that great content will provide a great amount of value.

This might be a how-to blog post, an insightful case study, or a revelatory infographic, but the greater the content the more helpful it will be.

7. People read great content. All of it. (Or at least most of it)

I’ve written before about online reading habits and how they contribute to patterns of scanning articles and other content.

The bottom line: people don’t read word for word when they’re on a computer.

Most of the time, they’re skimming. If you’re lucky (and good at structuring your content), they’ll stop and read a section here and there.  

But for great content, people will read. On content heat maps you’ll see huge swaths of red. In scroll depth reports you’ll find numbers like 70%, 85%, or even 95%. Time on page climbs up past two or three minutes.

All these signs are like giant high fives from online readers. They like your content, they really like your content.

8. You smile when you see great visuals, even two weeks later

Images are a vital part of online engagement, and therefore they need to be part of great content. The problem is that in our constant drive to add “appealing” images to our content, we can fall victim to the convenience trap.

We grab stock photos, even though we know they can hurt our overall credibility. Or we skip the visuals altogether, thinking we’ll get back to them later. Or we throw something together in a few minutes, upload it even faster, and hit publish.

On those rushed pieces, we cringe when we come back to those pages, and we secretly hope people have images disabled in their browser when they see it.

But when great content imagery comes along, we smile every time we visit the page. Those clever graphics still look good with a few days of distance, and there isn’t a stock photo in sight.

9. Great content becomes a chameleon

It’s easy to imagine great content fitting in almost any format or setting. When you’re talking about it with your team, you’ll hear things like, “I would love to use this in my email campaign” or “How quickly could we get a Slideshare out of this?”

Hopefully you’ll also hear things like, “When was the last time you had a raise?”

10. Google loves great content almost as much as you do

When you’ve got content that answers real questions, gets engagement, and gets shared on social media, you’ll find that Google is one of its biggest fans.

Organic search traffic to great content tends to remain steady and even grow over time. Its high click through rate, strong engagement metrics, and strong social profile create a beautiful cycle of more traffic and more shares.

One of the great things about great content is that it enhances the overall search reputation of the domain on which it was originally published, so getting one piece of great content noticed by Google makes it easier to get its future siblings featured too.

11. Great content delivers conversions

Whether its job is email signups, sales, or good old fashioned brand awareness, great content makes it happen. You can usually spot great content on a report because its numbers are substantially more impressive than those of its good and mediocre brethren.

Is the average conversion rate for your blog posts 1.5%? Your great content could easily double that.

One caveat here: you’ll be most likely to see this particular characteristic of great content if it’s in line with a larger content marketing plan. You can certainly have great content that’s not part of a larger scheme, but it’s far more likely to convert at a high rate if it’s driving toward your higher aims.

Does Your Content = Great Content?

Do these signs look familiar to you?

If you answered yes, congratulations! You’re routinely creating some seriously great content. Now go out there and do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.

Because that’s how great content marketers roll.

If you answered no, don’t despair. The journey toward great content can be long, it can be grueling, and it can be fraught with pitfalls.

But the great thing about creating content is that even if your first, second, third, and fourth attempts all fall short of greatness, you’ll have the chance to do it again, and again, and again.

Because that’s how great content marketers roll.

In the meantime, go find some people who are creating great content, and see if you can emulate them a little more while you forge your path to greatness.

A version of this post originally appeared on MarketerGizmo.com

Scaling your customer support in the right way will help ensure customers stay happy.

When you’re scaling a business, it’s difficult to make sure customer support keeps pace. The difficulty stems from the fact that as a business grows and evolves, so do your customer support needs. This means your support team is always changing and evolving. As it does, make sure you don’t lose sight of the value a strong customer service team has to your business. Here are five things to remember when scaling your customer support:

1. Outsourcing customer support eliminates valuable feedback
Many businesses reach the scalability dilemma and decide to outsource their customer support to a specialized company. While this produces immediate results, it eliminates a valuable form of feedback from your customers, according to ReadWrite.

“The more contact you have with your customers, the easier it is to see how to better serve them.”

The more contact you have with your customers, the easier it is to see how to better serve them. This can mean updating your products or services, or simply providing them with better support. However, if your business chooses to outsource your customer support, it is much more difficult to identify how to improve, because you no longer have a direct connection with customer issues.

2. Hiring in-house customer support reps is an investment for the future
Although it can seem like a long and difficult road to take, developing an in-house, well-trained customer support team will pay off in the long run. Customer support reps who respect and are enthusiastic about the business they work for will help that business retain more customers and increase revenue by providing wonderful support. When a customer support rep feels a strong connection with the business they’re working for, they will go the extra mile to ensure customers are happy, because they are personally invested in their employer’s success. In-house reps will also learn and grow with your business, so you don’t have to invest in constantly training an outside team.

“Even the best team of reps will fail at providing great service if they don’t have the right customer support software.”

3. The right customer service tool makes all the difference
Similar to hiring the right people is the need to equip your customer service reps with the right tools for the job. Even the best team of reps will fail at providing great service if the business outgrows the software and they can’t properly  manage tickets as demand increases. The best software tool is one that can scale with the team as the workload grows. The solution also needs to work with multiple channels of customer service so that no customer requests or issues fall through the cracks.

4. Collaboration can help your team handle more
Collaboration is often the key to scalability. When your team can work together on tickets, you will improve productivity so they can effectively manage more customer issues. A customer support software solution that supports collaboration can do wonders to improve your team’s success rates and allow for greater scalability as time goes on.

5. Self-service can deflect some customer service tickets
Customers don’t want to wait for answers. They want to have access to information whenever and wherever they need it. One of the best and easiest ways to support customers is to give them self-service options like FAQs, a searchable knowledgebase they can utilize before submitting a customer support ticket, or a community where they can connect with their peers.

When your company provides customers with self-service options, you’re giving customers what they need without doing much more work. Because customers can help themselves, your support team doesn’t need to worry about them, and you can move on to additional tickets. It’s also a way to expand your support hours without having to hire more staff.

Scaling your customer support in the right way comes down to having a team of individuals with strong service skills and the correct customer support tools at their disposal. While it might seem easier to outsource support as your business becomes more complex, making an investment in-house will help keep customer satisfaction rates high and yield better results in the long run.

There's no question that automation is transforming digital advertising.

It has reduced media-buying inefficiencies and improved audience targeting.

It's allowing both publishers and brands to deliver more relevant messaging to consumers.

Until now, automated advertising, such as programmatic, has used a waterfall or daisy-chain model for generating ad-inventory revenue.

This waterfall system is efficient. It sells inventory, but as the impressions funnel downward, their value typically decreases. Not every buyer is eligible to participate in every auction, so competition for impressions drops, along with CPMs. That has publishers wanting a change.

Enter header bidding, or "pre-bid technology," a system designed to level the playing field between direct buys, ad networks, and exchanges — and ultimately increase revenue yield for publishers. While it's been on the automated-marketing radar for years, header bidding is quickly becoming the go-to work-around for dealing with lost revenue.

Header bidding gives publishers a much-needed advantage by streamlining auctions and allowing them to sell more of their inventory at a premium. Multiple platforms bid on an impression at once, before your inventory's trip down the waterfall, so its value is retained. More competition and more potential buyers translate into more demand and higher bids.

Giving publishers an edge

When you break it down, header bidding is about putting publishers back in control — of inventory allocation and revenue potential. Those that have already applied the header bidding model to their sites are seeing firsthand its capacity to drive incremental revenue.

Publishers that have not had enough inventory demand in the past can harness their ad servers' capabilities to attract new buyers moving forward. In essence, they can create a private marketplace model where one didn't exist.

If they hope to participate in this model, though, publishers need the technology to deploy it. Obtaining this requires a partner that can help them avoid the "race to the bottom" by making improvements to site code up top.

One such company is real-time media technology provider Yieldbot, which recently launched Pubfood.js, an open-source bidding software created to empower publishers by helping them manage bid partners and assess bid data. It allows publishers to increase the value of their media and gives them a leg up in yield management.

Another benefit to the technology — one that's sometimes overlooked — is that header bidding can help create a better site experience for consumers by giving publishers the tools to improve page-speed performance. Passback tags and the cookie-matching process that can occur both before and after ad inventory is selected can slow load times, but some header-bidding systems can assess page-latency data and offer features designed to reduce it.

Pubfood, for example, lets publishers set time-out thresholds for bidding partners to allow for faster load times. It's built on a flexible open-source framework so publishers can ensure their header-bidding system keeps up with whatever changes automated marketing may bring.

For all of the advantages that auctions and exchanges provide, there's no disputing they have also affected publishers' ability to optimize revenue. Header bidding promises to help publishers reverse course and regain control of their revenue generation.

With the right partner — one well versed in this innovative implementation — publisher teams can profit from higher bids, higher yield, and decreased page-load latency. That makes header bidding the solution many publishers has been waiting for.

This post is sponsored by Pubfood.

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You don’t need to boast to buyers that you know everything about their industry, business, and goals for them to trust you. In fact, this type of bragging often backfires and causes prospects to cast a skeptical eye toward sales reps. How could a salesperson possibly understand the intricacies of the buyer’s business without working at their company?

It’s more effective to admit you’re not totally sure about or familiar with a particular situation or problem (learn how to use this approach in your sales calls here). What’s not effective is broadcasting your insecurity or nerves.

Here are four words and phrases that make salespeople seem nervous and unconfident to buyers. The next time you pick up the phone with a racing heart, pause to remind yourself to leave these verbal tics out of your conversation.

1) Repetition

One of the hardest things sales reps must do during calls is to actively listen to their buyers while simultaneously queuing up a follow-up question in their minds. And when salespeople get too distracted by the inner dialogue happening in their heads, they start to repeat the prospect’s words back to them:

Salesperson: “When does your fiscal year end?”

Prospect: “It ends in December.”

Salesperson: “Oh, okay -- it ends in December.”

The repetition of what you just learned makes you seem nervous. When in doubt, simply fall silent after the prospect answers a question. Let the answer land, and then move on.

2) Excessive use of adjectives

Adjectives are necessary parts of speech, but they shoot sales reps in the foot when they’re used to comment on a buyer’s answer:

Salesperson: “When does your fiscal year end?”

Prospect: “It ends in December.”

Salesperson: “Great!”

Salespeople who use words and phrases such as “great,” “super,” or “makes sense” to respond to a prospect’s answer don’t add anything to the conversation. Instead, the exclamation serves as an odd form of approval for the answer. And do you really need to approve of your buyer’s fiscal year? It’s simply information -- neither good nor bad -- so accept it without comment and move on.

3) Modifiers galore

Let’s say a prospect asks you if your system is compatible with their in-house platform. How do you respond? Most reps say something along the lines of “it’s totally, completely compatible.” But couldn’t a simple “It’s compatible” have worked just as well?

When reps use modifiers such as “totally,” “absolutely,” “super,” “really,” “very,” and others to dress up a simple statement, they draw the buyer’s ear away from the meat of the answer and weaken their overall statement.

If you’re confident in your product, there’s no need to go overboard. Just state the facts, and let the value shine.

4) Too many choices

Reps should end every call or meeting with a discussion of next steps. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to introduce next steps.

Here’s the wrong way:

Salesperson: “Let’s plan to get on the phone for a follow-up meeting next week. Would Monday at 5 p.m. or Tuesday at 10 a.m. or Thursday at 3 p.m. work for you?”

That’s a lot of choices. By using that simple yet dangerous word “or,” this rep made it clear they’re nervous about getting the buyer to commit to another call.

Here’s the right way:

Salesperson: “Let’s plan to get on the phone for a follow-up meeting next week. Would Monday at 5 p.m. work for you?”

If the buyer isn’t able to attend the meeting at the time the rep suggests, the two can work out an acceptable time from there. Bombarding the prospect with options linked with “or” will only serve to expose the rep’s nerves.

These four verbal tics are all borne of two conversational bad habits common in sales: Talking too much, or failing to fall silent. What’s the solution? Speak in simple, direct sentences. When you hit the period, respect it and stop talking. A rep who uses pauses and silence to their advantage comes across as far more confident than their overly chatty peers.

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During a research interview on behalf of a highly innovative tech manufacturer, I asked a customer what this company’s greatest strength is. The answer—my sales rep.

B2B Prospecting Is Personal

It’s a tenet of my marketing belief system and a strong competitive differentiator. The better we understand our prospects and customers as people, the better we can communicate with them about their goals and challenges.

Are We Making B2B Marketing More Personal or Making More Marketing?

Here’s Scott Brinker’s ChiefMartec 2015 infographic of the industry’s 1,876 marketing technology vendors. Staggering and slightly more dumbfounding when you consider that this is roughly double the number of vendors depicted in the 2014 version. Let’s put that together with Gartner’s predictions that the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO by 2017.

Quantity vs. Quality

Think about this—according to Microsoft, our average attention span has shrunk to 8 seconds. Goldfish come in at 9 seconds.

Yet, per a 2015 study by CMI and Marketing Profs, 70% of B2B marketers are creating more content than they were one year ago (B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends—North America). While I can’t find statistics to support this, I don’t think there has been a corresponding rise in the number of B2B decision makers.

Perhaps the emperor is buck naked and farting into the wind.

It feels like with all our technology that we’re slip-sliding away, churning out more stuff that is wide of the B2B prospecting mark and populating the trashcan in the cloud. There’s a distinct possibility that producing more content doesn’t make marketing and sales more successful. Instead of relishing the pasta that sticks, prospects are turned off by all they see on the floor.

Listen Before You Speak

There is an answer. We could actually talk to our customers and prospects and believe what they say. The creation of Prospect Personas goes beyond the obvious and generates real insights into who these executives are, how they learn, and how they make decisions. If this stuff doesn’t go into the marketing automation at the front end, it’s certainly not going to come out of the other.

Here are three cases that illustrate my point that these research-based Key Prospect Insights made the marketing more personal and made all the difference:

• Looking to move from their traditional SMB market to the enterprise, Prospect Personas taught Asigra that about one-third of the targeted CIOs, each crucial to the decision making process, were open to their benefits but were completely turned off by their current positioning. Refocusing and rebranding opened CIOs’ ears.
• Maxwell Technologies learned that just because their new ultra-capacitors are more powerful, smaller, and cleaner than traditional batteries, no one is waiting with open arms. The road to acceptance is, shall we say, circuitous. They learned how to talk, who to talk to, and the specific circumstances for “crossing the chasm” into sales, implementation, and ultimately test cases.
• Baxter, a long-standing medical device manufacturer in the uncomfortable position having to catch up to competitors, uncovered a contributor to the buying center that they had not previously identified.

It’s Not Going To Come from Automation

According to SiriusDecisions, understanding buyers is the main ingredient to high performance marketing, but 60% of B2B prospecting organizations admit they don’t really understand or know their buyers.

In a recent survey conducted by ITSMA, B2B marketers worldwide expect that understanding buyers will be their #1 responsibility in two years (85%)

Two years should give you plenty of time to eat their lunch.

B2B brands have been navigating a changing sales process in recent years. And since strong sales performance is a key component in any company’s health, other departments should be alert to these shifts in the field.

Since their specialties can be so connected, marketers in particular should be closely attuned to the needs and wants of their sales reps. B2B field marketers in particular can offer a lot of support to their companions on the sales side.

Here are some important takeaways for field marketers who want to understand today’s sales process.

1. Relationships Are Still Key

This is one thing that hasn’t changed. Sales has always been a relationship-based trade, and marketing is the same.

Even though the sales process has gone through some upheaval thanks to new technology, relationships are still at the crux of success. Trends also point to more and more people being involved in a customer’s decision to make a purchase.

Field marketing creates an opportunity to see a ground-level view. When you’re actually talking to people face to face, walking around a conference with them, or sharing a coffee, you gain valuable insights into their priorities, likes, and needs.

The relationships you build can provide a strong foundation that sales reps will use to close.

2. You’re Not the Only Expert

Here’s where the shifts come into play.

In many traditional models, prospective buyers had to rely on sales and marketing pros to get their information. Thanks to the Internet, however, now anyone can brush up on the topic of their choice.

This is good and bad for the sales process. It can speed things along, making prospective customers more aware of their options and needs. But it also changes the role of a sales rep in the customer’s eyes.

That’s where field marketing can make a big difference. You offer prospective buyers a different type of education. When you give a demo or a class about your product, you should be prepared to tailor it to more informed audiences. You’ll hear more technical questions (and the askers will expect competent answers).

You’re helping them be ready to interact with a sales rep who will take on the role of a consultant rather than a teacher. Go into your marketing events ready to treat your prospects as equals. They may know a lot more than you think.

3. Know Your Sales Team’s Tools

We’ve come a long way from the Rolodex and index cards. Today’s top sales teams are working with vastly more sophisticated systems for managing their information and customer relationships.

To be most helpful for your sales colleagues, the marketing team should also be up to date on what software the sales team is using. Ideally, you should be using it too.

Getting both field marketers and sales reps in the same ecosystem can help them become closer allies. It offers your whole organization a centralized place for sharing insights, which makes it easier for both groups to do their jobs.

What marketers learn in the field can help land a sale, while the sales reps’ insights can help create stronger, more targeted marketing content and events. It’s a place where all the involved parties share what they learn, what they’ve done, and who they’ve met in the course of landing a customer. By the time final paperwork is signed, that adds up to a huge volume of data that nobody will want to keep in their heads.

There are many options and features available to B2B operations in the CRM software market. Make sure you’ve got tools that both sales and marketing departments can and will use. For instance, some will help you create customized reports about the sales process that can help present information to the top brass. If you’re having trouble explaining the ROI of field marketing work or making strategic suggestions, good data can make your argument more convincing.

4. Be Online and Be Social

Field marketing focuses on live, in-person events, but that doesn’t mean you’re exempt from having an online presence. Being active on social media has several benefits in the modern sales process.

For starters, social media is a gold mine of information about your desired audience. With all the tools available for social insights or targeting, smart field marketers and sales reps can get a leg up if they’re observant.

Plenty of the B2B world is equally as active on social media networks as they are at conferences and conventions. Besides, social circles can help give you more ins with the locals—even before you’re on the ground.

Beyond the opportunities for getting cold hard data, having a social presence has become a must for any field. Networking today is more than just schmoozing at cocktail parties looking for an in. Building a group of genuine connections inside and outside your field is a big part of how the business world works today.

So, chat with people on Twitter, LinkedIn, or whatever networks are most useful for your industry. Be a part of the online community, and you’ll find a large amount of crossover into your real-world connections.

Along with the above tips, the most important thing for sales and field marketing teams to do is to stay in contact. These departments should be checking in with each other regularly to make sure goals are aligned.

The sales process isn’t done changing, and neither is marketing. Things are usually in flux at the industry- and company-wide level. Keep the communication channels open so that you can be the best allies possible. Make a strong relationship with your sales team a part of your B2B marketing playbook.

Many of our clients have been very interested in Account-Based Marketing, and understanding the implications of adjusting their strategies to focus more on targeted accounts rather a demand strategy focused on volume. The best marketers understand that pipeline generation and revenue are more important than lead volume, but volume still plays a role regardless to how success is measured. Demand generation has long been focused on that lead volume number, with lead scoring acting as a governor to regulate the flow of leads to sales. It’s a numbers game designed around generating enough leads with a high enough lead score that they can be forwarded to sales as MQLs (marketing qualified leads).

Side note – I personally don’t care for the term “Marketing Qualified Lead” because it implies that marketing is the only one involved in “qualifying” them. Is sales not involved in that decision string?

The math is simple. Say that it takes 100 leads to generate 10 MQLs. If my goal is to create 250 MQLs this quarter, I need to generate 2,500 new leads.

So, those MQLs are shipped over to sales as they come in, and sales is doing some math of their own. They are looking at those 250 MQLs, but they are not considering the lead score (the methodology for which they likely helped to create) when deciding if they want to follow up on that lead. They are looking at the accounts these leads are coming from and deciding which ones they think they actually have a shot at selling to.

Here’s the new math, the “sales math.” They are thinking that they get 25 good accounts out of every 250 MQLs. If they need to have at least 50 leads from good accounts every quarter to hit their revenue targets, they are going to need 500 MQLs next quarter.

Odds are, marketing doesn’t have (double) the budget to generate the 5000 leads they need to create the 500 MQLs sales needs. But consider this … there could be many “unqualified” leads from “qualified” accounts in your lead queue already. They are likely not qualified because of a hole in your lead scoring that does not figure in an account-based component.

I’m not suggesting that you reach out to prospects that are not ready, based on their content consumption and activity history. No one wants to receive calls from salespeople after they registered for a webinar that they did not even attend. I’m also not suggesting that you lob calls at every big company that visits your website, just because they are in the Fortune 1000.

What you need to do is adjust the emphasis in scoring to accentuate account-based considerations and de-emphasize things like title or department when an engaged prospect is visiting from an account on your target list. In other words, adjust scoring enough that a manager-level visitor from a target account is worth as much as a VP-level visitor from a non-target account. This approach makes even more sense when you consider that most B2B buying is a group activity, and those managers are likely to be influencers on the buying committee already.

There are a few things to consider, however, when you are contemplating a shift towards Account-Based Marketing. Volume doesn’t matter as much as quality, and activity and interest from target accounts is much more valuable and important to identify and track than other interactions. Technology can help, but it may require some investment in strategy and tools. Even so, there are some technological challenges to consider, like the ones I highlighted in a previous post called The Problem With Account-Based Marketing. So where do you start? Build that target account list.

Author: Jason Stewart @jstewart_1 is Vice President of Strategy, ANNUITAS 

 

Want to learn how to fill your sales pipeline with qualified B2B leads, set appointments and close deals? Here's the full recording of our 1 hour B2B cold email course—Steli shares some of his best tips and strategies on using emails to make sales.

Prefer to listen? Just click the link below to download the MP3 or listen right here in your browser window.

Presentation slides

Transcript

Intro: Why are we even discussing cold emails?

All righty guys, let’s get started. So, super excited about the webinar today on how to crush it with cold emails. It seems like it has never been a more relevant topic. I mean, just measured by the sheer amount of cold emails I get personally every single day, I think there are lots to be learned out there. There are lots of lessons we can learn, lots of best practices we can adapt, mistakes we can avoid. And ultimately, cold emails can be a deadly weapon to help you crush it in your market, help you grow, get customers, get revenue, and ultimately succeed with anything that you do.

What I’m going to do today is I’m going to give you—start out by giving you a little bit of context on who I am, why I know a thing or two about cold emails, why I care, then I’m going to jump into the basics of cold emails. And when I talk basics, I’m not talking basics that you guys already know. I’m talking basics [that] you know but you probably either avoid or don’t take as seriously as you should. So we’re going to go through some really important, crucial steps that you need to take and make right, not to be dead in the water from the get-go with your cold emails, not to have a cold email dead in the water before you even hit the send button.

So, we’re going to go through the basics and then I’m going to share some more advanced shit. So I’m going to show you a killer cold email I received—or my co-founder actually received just yesterday. I’m going to give you as fresh of an example of a good cold email as I can. We’re going to discuss the anatomy of it and why it’s so effective.

I’m going to share some, you know, amazing cold email hack that one of, if not the, fastest SaaS startup in history is utilizing today. You would not hear this anywhere else. If you don’t work at that company, you won’t know what they do to be so successful. I’m going to share with you the hack today exclusively and I’m going to give you some real killer tools on how to get anyone’s and everyone’s email that you want to reach out and how to think about and how to execute a cold email strategy that kills.

All right. So let’s jump right into giving you guys some context. And as I said, as you have questions, comments, feedback, please use the chat window in real time to post these things. I have about 40 minutes of content for you and then we’re going to do 20 minutes of Q&A. So the more questions I’ve piled in the chat, the more value and the more content we’re going to be able to churn out. I’m going to jump right into your questions right after the presentation.

Who is Steli Efti?

All right. Let’s get rocking and rolling. So, my name is Steli Efti, originally from Greece, grew up in Germany, used to joke that I have the best that Europe has to offer. It’s more about, you know, the two cultural opposites, united in one person. I dropped out of high school to start my first business and I’ve never had a real job in my life. I’ve been a serial entrepreneur my entire life.

Eight years ago, I sold everything I had. I bought a one-way ticket to Silicon Valley and I started my first tech company. My first tech business was a huge soul-crushing, catastrophic, defeat and failure. I’ve learned a lot about that. And the second business that I started in Silicon Valley became a very, very big success and that’s the business that I’m running today. And that’s the business that’s most relevant to why I care about cold emails and why I know a thing or two about it.

Silicon Valley’s best kept secret

So, let me tell you just a few things about that business. When we originally started, we started as ElasticSales. And ElasticSales, what we did is we offered B2B SaaS startups in Silicon Valley that were venture-backed an outsourced sales team on demand. So, we would do sales for, you know, we did sales for over 200 venture-backed startups in Silicon Valley, some of the most amazing brands you know, companies you admire.

We were their virtual sales force. We would send cold emails, make cold calls, close customers, and drive massive growth for them and represent them to the customer in a way that was invisible.

So the customer didn’t know. Nobody knew that ElasticSales existed other than CEOs in Silicon Valley and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. So we jumped it for a while. We were the “best kept secret” in the Valley. And we had this massive kind of sales lab in the heart of Silicon Valley:

• Testing out all kinds of sales technologies, methodologies, tactics, strategies
• Seeing what works and what doesn’t work
• How to build scalable and predictable sales models for new technology companies
• And also talking to everyone and anyone in B2B, learning about everyone’s problems, about everyone’s ideas, solutions, hacks.

So we accumulated an insane amount of knowledge. Our salespeople alone, during the ElasticSales time, sent millions, millions of cold emails. So we have a shit ton of experience when it comes to cold email and just from doing it for our customers.

The secret sauce

Now, one funny thing that happened is that from day one, we built a little internal tool called Close.io. We used to call it our “secret sauce.” It was internal sales software that allowed our salespeople to outperform other sales people. It allowed them to be better at cold calling and making sales calls. It allowed them to be a lot better in sending sales emails. So it was a communication tool or a CRM with a high communication and inside sales focus.

That tool at the beginning, we wanted it just to be an internal tool that empowers our people to be really, really effective. But over time, it became so good that we decided to release it as Close.io in January 2013. And that little software grew so fast that within a year, it was a much bigger business than the services business, although it had not even a tenth of the employee count.

So at the end of 2013, we decided to fully focus on Close.io, and that’s all we do today. Close.io is a CRM that’s focused on inside sales that has VoIP built-in so you can make calls, receive calls, and really kill it on sales calls within the CRM.

It has email integrated in a way that’s the most powerful email integration in CRM today. You could send bulk emails so just write one email draft and send it to multiple people. You can set follow-up reminders. You could do all kinds of crazy things and all email communications. It doesn’t matter if you send it through Close.io or your Gmail account or any other email client. It’s automatically and magically tracked.

When you create a new lead in Close.io, we bring in all the historic communication that you ever had with that person within your Close.io lead timeline. It’s beautiful. So it’s really made for inside sales tools.

And within Close.io today, we are highly profitable. We are growing really fast. But one little nugget that you need to know is that our customers—and we have thousands of customers around the world—our customers are sending literally tens of millions of cold emails. This is the cold emails, not the warm ones, cold emails [they’re sending] through our system every single month. So we know a thing or two about cold emails and we deeply care about doing cold emails right, especially because the amount of startups that started using cold emails is going up rapidly. The amount of cold emails I get is going up rapidly and the quality is going down dramatically.

This webinar’s goals

So, what I’m going to try to do today in this webinar is:

• Share the best practices.
• Teach you how to avoid the common mistakes.
• And give you some cutting edge shit that people do today, not a year ago, not ten years ago but right now to crush it with emails.
• And [I] hope to raise everyone’s game and make the world a better place by sending better emails.

The Startup Sales Success Email Course

Let’s get almost started right into it. So guys, we love email, we teach through email, we sell through email. If you’re not on the 30-day Startup Sales Success Email Course that we have, make sure to be on that thing. It’s free. If you go to Close.io/free-sales-course, you can type in your first name and email address and you will get an amazing amount of content from me on how to create a predictable and scalable sales model for your startup today.

You’re sending cold emails to the wrong person

All right. Let’s get started. Now, you think the first thing that I’ll talk about is how to write emails. But the very first thing that I’m going to talk about is foundational. It’s how to think about the person that you’re even attempting to send an email to: your customer DNA. Listen, most cold emails are dead even before you hit the send button. And why are they dead? Why are they not effective or not successful? It’s very simple. It’s because you’re sending it to the wrong person. And you’re sending it to the person you don’t quite understand yet.

So what I want you to do and I know this is boring and I know this is kind of like brush your teeth, eat broccoli, work out. It’s basics. It seems so simple that it’s so easy to avoid. It’s not sexy. But because it’s not sexy, it is what makes the difference between successful companies and companies that fail. If you want your cold emails to succeed, if you want them to be opened, read, and responded to, and if you want these responses to lead to conversions that mean money to your business, you need to understand who you’re sending these emails to.

Send better, not more, emails

I’m going to give you a few basic pointers that you need to understand. Number one, quality over quantity. Too many companies make this mistake. They’re like, “Steli, we bought a 100,000 email addresses from companies that are between 100 employees and 10,000 employees because that’s our target customer. And we wrote this one stupid little cold email and we want to send 100,000 emails to get started. Can we assume that 1,000 of them will respond and buy our product?” Well, fuck no! You can’t assume that because it’s not going to happen.

3 reasons you shouldn’t send out a massive amount of emails

1. You will get blacklisted by Google

Here is the deal. I mean sending a huge amount of emails all at once has multiple problems with it. Number one, you’re going to get blacklisted or if you send it—if you are hosting on Google apps, if you use Gmail for your email, they’re going to lock your access. They’re going to lock you out of your email account.

Actually, if you send – usually and I’ll give you this tip, if you send over 200 to 300 cold emails with the same subject, same body of text every single day and you get marked too many times as like spam or something like that, within like two, three or four days, Google will lock you out of your email account. Not forever but for a day or two and you’re going to have to send an email to the support and it’s going to be a pain in the fucking ass. And if that happens multiple times, they might lock you out indefinitely.

So you want to be careful with sending too many emails at once because it’s going blacklists you or gets you out of the email game all together. That’s one.

2. You won’t be able to split test your emails

The second reason why you don’t want to send a huge bulk email is that you can reiterate and improve on it. So you want to make sure that you send small batches so that you see what works, what doesn’t work, and you can split test. You can change the subject line. You can change the body, the call-to-action. You can experiment. You can learn and put these learnings into practice and get a return on these learnings versus you send everything at once and then you realized, “oh shit! Our subject line was bad.” Now, what do you do? You already blew up all your leads.

3. You will be overwhelmed by the responses

And the third reason why you don’t want to do massive quantity—and if you have questions guys, just keep putting them in chat. I’m going to be responding to them at the end of the webinar. Keep writing everything. Get it out of your system as you have questions. Just put it into chat. I’m going to respond to it, I promise at the end of the webinar.

So, the other reason why you don’t want to send massive amounts of emails all at once is that you’re going to get overwhelmed by the responses. And if you get good responses, it’s going to suck even more because you’re not going to be able to be as responsive, schedule as many calls. You’re just going to overwhelm yourself. There’s no sense, there’s no strategy behind that.

Start small

So what you want to do is you want to start in small batches. You might want to do 20, 30, 40 leads a day not—maybe 100— but definitely not 500 emails a day. What you might want to do is at the evening, as an SDR or sales rep, you send out that 30 or 40 really well-researched, really high quality leads. In the morning, respond to these emails. You schedule the next calls and you jump on your scheduled demos and whatever else you have. And at the last hour of the day, you send another 20, 30, 40 leads. You make it a workflow and you improve and you test and you learn.

Narrowly define who your customer is

You need to really narrowly define who your customer. Too many times, people define their customer audience way too broadly. The problem with that is that your results are going to be super inconsistent. If you say, “Hey Steli, we sell an HR solution. And our customer is anyone between—any company that has between 10 to 10,000 employees.”

Here’s what’s going to happen. If you send 100 emails every day and it includes a wide variety of size and industry of company, your results are going to be super inconsistent. And when you get inconsistent results, you don’t know what to do with the results. There are zero learnings in them.

I get this all the time. Companies come to me and they say, “Steli, we sent the same thousand email every single week and we get totally different results every week. How is that possible?” And I don’t even have to look. I can tell them it’s probably because the lead segmentation that you have is fucked up. It’s too broad. Please start very, very, very, very narrowly, so narrowly that you think it’s too narrow.

When people tell me, “But Steli, this is so narrow. It includes four companies in the whole world.” I say awesome because if it’s only four companies, let’s go get them. What you want to do is you want draw a really small circle that only includes a very finite number of companies. And then once you filled that circle up, you want to draw slightly bigger circle around it and then a slightly bigger circle around it. And eventually, the circle is so big and hopefully it includes the entire fucking planet. But you start insanely, uncomfortably narrow.

And don’t be afraid of being too narrow. Narrow is good, because narrow will give you consistent results. If you get very, very narrow, the specific industry, the specific person, title, and position in that industry, the position, the specific size, even location: only companies of this size in this industry in California that have a Facebook page.

Whatever it is, just create a very narrow customer DNA and then go get these people. You’ll get very consistent results and you’ll learn if it works or it doesn’t and then you start expanding on it narrowly one step at a time. If you do that, you’ll get consistent results. If you get consistent results, you’re going to be able to create predictable results.

And that’s, ladies and gentlemen, is the name of the game. You want to have consistency. You want to know, ‘If I send 100 emails, I’m going to get $4.50 in revenue per email I sent.” You want to have that level of accuracy and consistency to be able to scale your business. To get to that, you need to be able to really narrowly define who you email, really narrowly segment and make sure that you don’t do quantity, but you do quality and you do it consistently.

The basics of a cold email

All right. Now that we got that out of the way, let’s think about the basics of writing and sending a cold email. Here are the four very simple steps. But just because they are simple doesn’t mean they are easy and just because they are simple doesn’t mean people follow them. Honestly, guys and gals, if you guys follow these four steps, you’re going to be crushing your competition because most people don’t.

1. Write subject lines that get emails opened

The very first step, the most important thing when you written a cold email is that you need to realize that people need to open that email. That’s the simple math. People need to open the email. If an email is sent and nobody opened it, it doesn’t exist. That means that the subject line of the email is the most important thing you write.

The funny thing is that most people spend all their time on the body of the email, almost no time on the subject. I get this all the time. People send me an email and they say, “Steli, can you give us feedback on this cold email?” My response is no. And then they respond back, “Well, why Steli?” And I respond, “Because you didn’t send the fucking subject line to me. I cannot give you feedback on a cold email if it doesn’t include the subject line.”

The subject line is the first thing that I’m going to judge on to decide if I would ever open this email or not. You need to spend 80% of your time on the subject line, 20% on the body, not the other way around. Don’t make that mistake. Get the subject line right. And I’ll give you some examples later on.

Also guys and gals, if you have a cold email and you want feedback from me, Steli@Close.io. Send me that cold email and ask for feedback and don’t make the mistake of not including the subject line. I’m going to yell at you via email. All right? Please let’s stop making these mistakes. Send me your cold email. I’ll give you feedback. I’ll help you raise up your cold email game, Steli@Close.io. All right?

2. Make every sentence a pitch

So, the very first thing you need to do when you send a cold email, they need to open it. Now once they’ve opened, they need to read it. And read it, you need to think about this in a very simple term like every sentence you write is a pitch for them to keep on reading. You can’t bore your lead. I’ll share all the tactics on what to do to make sure that people will actually read your email. Once I’ve read your email or once people read your cold email, they need to respond.

3. Have a call-to-action

And since most people – so you need to really get your call-to-action right and be precise and have one single thing you ask me to do. And we’ll talk about that in the few slides.

4. Have a follow-up game plan

And then last but not the least, most people, since we know most people would not respond to a cold email the first time. We need to follow up and have a follow-up game plan in place before we even send the first cold email.

Now, Larry Braden wrote in chat an excellent question about follow-up and I’ll respond to that in the Q&A at the end of the webinar. But I want this to be a stimulant, a reminder to everybody, as you have questions, it doesn’t matter if it fits to this slide or the next slide or whatever, put them in chat. Start writing your questions in so when we get to the Q&A session, we can really bang out lots and lots of content and I can go through these one by one by one.

The most likely reasons your subject line sucks

All right. Let’s jump right into this and go through the basics. Let’s start with the people need to open your email. So the subject line as we said is key and we need to focus 80% of our time and effort on getting the subject line right. Now, there are some best practices. There are some common mistakes that people do right now.

You don’t sound like a human being

So number one, you need to sound like a human being. And this sounds kind of basic, right? This is not like blowing your mind. But most cold emails don’t sound like humans sent them. Please don’t use all caps or don’t capitalize every single letter in your subject line. Don’t write a subject line that sounds like it’s a newsletter or a marketing email.

So, I’ll give you a good example. An email subject line that says, “Ten Ways of How Close.io can help your sales team be more effective” doesn’t read like a human being sent it to another human being. It sounds like a marketing email. I’m going to ignore it.

Here’s the funny thing. As human beings, people are going to be a lot more responsive if they have the perception that another human being is talking to them. The moment I think that it’s somebody talking to an audience, it’s a one-to-many communication, somebody sent this email to 10,000 people and I’m just one part of those 10,000 people, I’m not going to respond.

This even is true in teams. I’ve realized this early in our team. Whenever I would send an email to all ten people on our team and ask them for a feedback about something, nobody would respond because nobody felt personally called out. So if I would send an email I would say, “Hey, I would to have everybody’s opinion on this.” Nobody would respond. If I send everybody individually an email and say, “Hey, I’d like your opinion on this,” everybody would respond. So once you know that, you can make that, take that as an advantage. You need to sound like a human being.

How to personalize subject lines

So what you can do to do that is you can – you want to sound personal. Maybe you have all small letters. There are some hacks like, sometimes you need to test this and play around with this, but sometimes having a misspelling in the subject line will massively spike the open rate. Why? Because misspelling a word seems human. It’s as easy as that.

You want to use their name. People like and respond to their name. They like seeing it. They are feeling responsive to it. So if you say, “Steli, can I have – can I ask you a question?” It’s better than just writing in the subject line, “Have a question.” “Steli, I have a question,” is much more personal.

Learn the basics but don’t get stuck on tactics

Having question in the subject line is good. People respond to that. But please, there is an overused subject line and this is something you’re going to learn here. Just overall as a philosophy—and that’s why I’m going through the basics with you guys—because if you get the basics right, the tactics are cool but the tactics will always change and the text will go up and down in terms of their effectiveness.

For the longest time, writing the subject line that says, “Quick question” has been very, very effective. The problem is, because it has been very effective, people have been teaching that it’s very effective. I’ve been teaching that writing “quick question” is a good subject line and an effective one.

The problem is that by now, I get like five emails a day that have the subject line “quick question.” You know what I do with these? I archive them. I auto select them out. I’m not even looking at them. If you send me today an email, in the subject line, it says, “Quick question,” I’m not even looking at it.

I’m getting too many of these and I know that they read my blog post or somebody else’s blog post about how to write effective cold emails and they just used a tactic that used to work but once it’s spread too much, once we are teaching it too much, it goes down in effectiveness.

So that’s why if you get the basics right, if you understand how to fish, and I don’t just catch a fish and give it to you like giving you the subject line, I’m teaching you how to think about writing good subject lines. That’s a skill that you can use your entire life. You be careful.

I’m going to share some tactics later on today. You can steal some of these tactics. But make sure that you always keep track of “do they work or not, are they going down in effectiveness?” And if they are, it might just mean that too many people are using them and you need to reinvent and reimagine a new subject line.

Keep your promises

So again, use people’s names, keep it brief, no caps, maybe you want to test the spellings, maybe you want to test asking people question, raise their curiosity, but most importantly and this is important because that’s another thing people get wrong is you want to make sure that you keep your promises. You want to make sure that whatever you promise, you keep because a lot of times people, what they do is they – I mean I can write a subject line that will get all of you to open it but it doesn’t mean that what I promised in the subject line I’m delivering in the email. And this is very crucial.

I could write you a subject line today that says, “I have your mother as a hostage.” And even if you don’t have a mother anymore, you will open that fucking email like 100% of the time. I’m going to open that email, although I know it’s unlikely but I’m still going to open it. And then you can write, “Ha ha ha! I was just joking. I wanted you to buy my HR software.” I’m going to tell you, “Fuck off!” I had all kinds of people that tricked me into opening their email but then it doesn’t mean that I want to respond to the message.

People ask me all the time, “What’s the most effective subject line you’ve ever seen?” The most effective subject line I’ve ever seen was a subject line where somebody wrote, “Very disappointed…” and it was after a weekend, Monday morning. I opened my email account, I have hundreds of emails and I instantly and instinctively zoomed into that subject line. And I was like, “Very disappointed...?” Instantly, I think we fucked something up. We made a mistake.

So I opened that with a sense of urgency and then the rest of the message—so the subject line read, “Very disappointed…” The rest of the message read, “… that we haven’t been able to connect. I tried to call a few times blah, blah, blah.” And I was like, “Motherfucker! You got me. Awesome subject line. Wow! That was so smart.” Delete. Delete. If you tricked me into opening it and what you are promising in the subject line has nothing to do with what you’re delivering in the message, I don’t want to do business with you. So keep that in mind.

Make sure that you deliver on what you promised. Don’t be too deceiving. There needs to be a balance. You need to think about the entire email as a user experience from the subject line to the message, to the call-to-action, to your follow-up. It’s the start of a relationship. You want to make sure that that relationship is strong, is authentic, has not just charisma but also character and that you start off the relationship on the right foot.

All right. Keep the questions coming. I see that more and more people are putting in question at the chat. That’s awesome. I’m going to respond to all of them in the Q&A session in a sec.

Keep it brief

So now that I opened your email, I need to read your content. Keep it personal and keep it brief, please. For cold emails, I have very long emails that I sent in kind of a drip email sequence that get me amazing results. But when I send somebody a cold email for the very first time, I keep it brief.

You need to think about this like every single sentence is a pitch why you should keep reading. So don’t bury the lead. Like if you have something really important to say, don’t say it at the end of it because you imagine people will read it the way you wrote it. People are not going to read it. People are going to skip over stuff. People are not going to be careful in reading your shit. Every sentence need to be selling me for why I should keep reading. Every sentence need to answer the question, “OK, so what?”

“We do blah, blah, blah.”

“All right. So what?”

“It’s important for you because da, da, da…”

“OK. So what?”

You need to keep selling me why I should keep reading.

If you keep it brief, if an email—here’s the hack. If an email is just one sentence, it’s harder for me not to read it than to read it. Think about that. If an email is just one sentence or just four words for instance, it’s harder for me, it takes more energy of me to not read it than to read it. You want to use that momentum.

If I open email, the shortest way for me to delete your email is if you send me a 10-page email. If your email is longer than like three paragraphs and we’ve never met before, I’m going to archive it. It tells me that you don’t respect my time. It tells me that you don’t respect your time.

You don’t have the social capital yet with me to ask me to give you 10 minutes of my fucking time before I know who the fuck you are. Keep it brief, please. Keep it brief. Come out swinging. Tell me what you do, why it’s important to me, and what the next steps are. Keep it simple.

Add credibility to your email

And if you can, give me some credibility. Like why should I believe you? Who else has believed you? What ways of credibility do you have that you can utilize to make me believe the words that you say because it’s not just about what you say? You could say in an email—I can send you an email right now and I’ll tell you, “Hey, you want $10 million? I’m going to give you $10 million.” The content of that email is amazing. Think about it. What would be better than getting $10 million right now? Nothing.

The problem is that I have zero credibility. The problem is what are you going to do if you get an email from somebody you don’t know that tells you, you just won $10 million? You’re going to delete it. Why? Because I have zero credibility. So, you want to make sure that it’s not just you say great things but you back them up with something credible.

All you need is one: add a call-to-action

At the end of the email, please give me a call-to-action and give me just one strong, clear call-to-action. I hate this. People do this all the time. They over pollute their emails. “Hey, Steli. I’ve attached ten case studies, three presentations, and here’s a link for a free trial but also a link for webinar and here are 12 times where we can jump on a call but also here is a calendar link so you can select the time you want to do a one-on-one coaching with somebody on team.” Like get the fuck out of here. Like I don’t have time to devote my next three weeks for your fucking email.

Don’t give me too much homework. Don’t give me too much shit to do. The relationship starts out with too much work, it means this is going to be trouble and I don’t want it. So just keep it clean. What’s your one call to action? You want me to click a link? That’s it. Then that’s all you’re allowed to do. Pitch me why I should click this link. You want me to jump on a call with you? That’s it.

So you have one call-to-action. Tell me why I should jump on a call with you. Make it simple. Don’t ask me to come up with a time. Tell me, “Hey, Tuesday or Thursday? This or that time?” Make it so I can just look at my calendar and say yes or no. Any kind of decision or friction you can eliminate from the call-to-action is going to increase your conversion rates. Keep it sweet and simple on the call-to-action.

How strong is your follow-up game?

And then before you send a cold email, think about your follow-up strategy. Think about your follow-up game. Now, I teach this a lot and people know me for this that I say when you have a good contact, when somebody responds to your email, you have a call with them, a demo, a meeting, a positive direction, my follow-up strategy is [that] I will forever follow up until I get a yes or no. I will never ever, ever, ever stop and I will never take their silence as rejection. I just take their silence as they are busy.

When it comes to cold emails, there are some studies that show that eight follow-up emails is kind of the right amount. A lot of people and I included are usually more on the 4 to 6 follow-up game. But I guarantee you, if you send cold emails and you just send one email, you’re wasting your time. You need to have a follow-up game. You need to think about like what to do to send follow-ups.

And for people that don’t use a CRM and that are too small to use any kind of professional software, what you want to do is you want to use a system like FollowUp.cc which is super simple. If you’re a bit more of the sophisticated, you send like 100 emails a day and you’re really in the game to win, you want to use Close.io. We have automated follow-up in the system, follow-up reminders, and you can send bulk emails, 50 to 100 emails a day. No problem within just one simple click. And we’re going to keep track of open rates, of conversion rates and all that good stuff for you. But you need to have a follow-up game in place from day one.

So I hear from somebody that their sound is being cut off. I don’t know if that’s an individual problem because of internet connection or if other people also have that problem. So anybody in the webinar, let me know if other people have this issue or not so I know if I need to adjust something on my end.

Keep the questions in the comments coming. It’s awesome. All right. So people seem to—most people seem to be hearing me well.

So—and again, don’t over complicate things. I’m going to—if you go to Blog.Close.io/follow-up, you’ll get a whole follow-up kind of game plan on how to think about follow-ups, how to write them, how to make sure that you’re kill it with them. But the key thing is even if you are super boring and all you do is you say, “Hey, I want to quickly follow up on this. What’s a good time to chat?” And you do that three, four times over a period of three, four weeks, you’re going to see a lot better results than just sending one email and forgetting about it.

A fresh example of a great cold email

So, let me give you a recent example of an email. This is an email my co-founder got just yesterday, just yesterday. I need to go to “Escape” because there’s a funny with GoToTraining where I can’t see it on full script. There you go. So this is an email that my co-founder got yesterday and it’s very, very strong cold email.

The subject line says “Robots” with kind of a robotic-looking, I don’t know what kind of a smiley but it’s not the usual smiley with the right—the rounded smile but with a rectangular one. And this is a very effective subject line because it’s kind of tongue in cheek. It’s cheeky. There’s a smile but kind of a robotic smile. It’s says fucking robots.

It’s also in the context of who it has been sent to. Sent—there are three founders in our business, the founder that got this email was not me. It was the kind of the CTO technical founder. It’s the engineer and the founding team, one of the two engineers in the founding team. So, using robots as a subject like that you sent to an engineer with that kind of a smiley, not a bad idea. It makes me curious. I want to know what the hell this is all about. And even better is that it’s not just so fucking cheeky funny thing that has nothing to do with what they say in the subject line, it actually is delivering on the promise when you read the email.

Look at how short this cold email is. It’s basically just two sentences, two sentences. “Hey, Anthony. I saw you’re backed by SV Angel. I know Bryan and Kevin over there. How are you liking them so far?”

So here is somebody that is very personal. He says, “Hey, Anthony.” He is displaying that he knows something about, “Hey, I saw that you have this investor and I know people that work at that investor company.” What does that do? It gives you context. It gives that person credibility. “Hey, I’m credible. I’m also in the startup game. I know these investors that are your investors personally.” What is this doing? Instantly, it’s building credibility.

Then, he’s asking him the question. He’s audacious enough to go, “Hey, how do you like these guys?” I don’t know if I would go with that question but it’s not a bad, right? It’s very authentic, very casual.

All right. So now in the first sentence, this person has established, “Hey, I know who you are and I am credible. I’m not a nobody.” Cool! So now I don’t know—all right. Now, in my head as I’m reading this, I’m like, “Who the fuck are you and what’s the deal with the robots?” So that’s what he’s answering next. His next sentence is, “These days, I’m working on a software development service that combines AI, robots with like explanation marks.”

Again, this is kind of like, this is not taking himself too seriously although he seemed incredible. And this is a nice little balance. He is aware that maybe AI and robots, maybe people take— maybe people think that this is like hyperbole and hype and buzzwords so he’s kind of tongue in cheek with it but then again, he seems to be somebody who knows really credible investors, he seems to be smart.

So he’s like, “Hey, these days I’m working on a software development service that combines AI, robots with crazy good developers so they build your tech faster and cheaper. Any projects we can take off your hands?” What a powerful question. So he says something very interesting. He doesn’t explain everything. He doesn’t give a hundred paragraphs of it. He says, “Hey, we have a software development company that use AI and amazing developers. Is there anything we can take off your hands?” Beautiful. Beautiful. Simple. He explains what he does just enough to raise my curiosity but not enough for me to know exactly what the fuck they are doing. Roger. That’s it.

And then look at a beautiful way to use his signature. It’s not Roger, his email fucking email. I hate that when people have their signature that they use their email. I just got your fucking email. You sent me an email. I don’t need to see your email in the signature. Here is what Roger uses as a signature. Gigster, which is a link to the business. When I asked, like what the fuck is the business? Gigster, which is his business. He’s backed by YC, credibility. Greylock and Bloomberg, credibility, credibility. “Read more on TechCrunch”, even more credibility.

So he is telling me now in the signature what is my business and there’s a link to it, why is it credible, massive investor, massive investor, massive investor and massive business and he is [getting] more press on top of that.

Beautiful. Look at how short, simple this is. Great subject line. Great first sentence. Great little like pitch on what we do, not too much, not too little. Look at the call-to-action, “Any project we can take off your hands?” What a beautiful, simple, human question. Roger. And then, the signature when you ask, “What the fuck is your business? Who else is invested in you? What’s the whole story?” You look how that—the signature is answering these questions. Beautiful.

Zenefits’ exclusive cold email hack

I’ll give you another quick hack on this. So, there is a company right now called Zenefits and if you’re in Europe, I don’t know how much you hear about them. But in the US, lots and lots of people hear about them. If you’re in SaaS, you know and you hear about them all the time because they touted to be the fastest-growing SaaS business of all times. Zenefits.

And one beautiful little cold email hack that Zenefits uses is they have this cold email template where the subject is a RE: like responding to something. And the subject line reads something like, “RE: We should talk to them.” And then what you see is an email that’s “sent” by the CEO of Zenefits to like the sales rep and says, “Hey, I had a contact with somebody at this company before. I think they would be a great fit. We should reach out to them.”

And then the sales rep seemingly has received this email and responds to it by saying, “Hey John, I wanted to introduce you to Zenefits. My CEO asked me to reach out because he thinks we might have a great fit. What we do in a sentence is we offer kind of all HR services under one platform for free for you. What will be a good time to have like a 10-minute call?”

Beautiful, effective hack, right? So the subject line is kind of nice because it’s like, “RE: We should reach out to this company.” And then they seemed that they’re part of an email threat and then they initiate it and originate it by the CEO of Zenefits that says, “Hey, I had some contact in this business. I think they would be a great fit for what we do. Please reach out to them.” And then the sales rep is reaching out to you.

That’s such a beautiful hack and they get massive response rate to that because it is social credibility. Oh, the CEO had some contact with somebody in our business. The CEO asked for their account manager to reach out. And now the account manager says, “Hey, my CEO asked me to reach out. Here is what we do in a sentence. When can we talk?” Beautiful little hack.

Again, once it’s overused, it’s not going to be effective anymore. And this is a hack that if you don’t work at Zenefits, you don’t know about but you guys exclusively have learned this. I didn’t want to put this into the slides. So you need to be live in the webinar to hear about this. But you can use this to your advantage. Use titles, my CEO, “I’m the CEO of business XYZ” even if there’s no other employee than you. You are the CEO of a one-person business. You are the Vice-President of products in a two-person business. Who cares? People respond to titles.

So, anything that gives you credibility, titles, press, investors, big customers, university associations, whatever you can, use credibility to show that you know who you’re talking to and that they—and that you are somebody worth responding to. You want to show them that you know who you are talking to and that you are somebody worth responding to. That’s the motto and that’s the name of the game here.

How to get almost any email address you want

All right. A few simple more things before we jump into Q&A. Here is a simple hack on how to get almost everyone’s email address. There are lots of places where you can go and buy email addresses today. There are tools out there, plenty, plenty of tools. I didn’t want to overload this slide with tools to get people’s email address[es].

But what you want to do is and again, I have somebody that lost audio so I want to make sure that no, no, no. So, this is funny. This is a GoToTraining issue here. So I can’t see my mouse cursor anymore and they pop-upped something that’s cancelling this webinar so I’m not going to click on anything anymore. Let me go back to this.

So, I don’t know how to get out of the full screen mode to be able to click on things. But I’ll improvise. But I hope that other people can see—hear me. So Peter, maybe eh sound thing is something on your end. If other people are experiencing sound issue, please let me know. Otherwise, I’m just going to assume it’s something on your end. Don’t worry about. We’re recording the webinar. So other people might chime in and let him know that he might want to test out his audio and his internet connection on his end.

So guys, where was this? So here’s a very simple email hack. Go and get the Chrome Extension Rapportive. Rapportive is actually there to give you some more social context on people that you’re sending email or receiving emails from. So what it does is if you’re using Gmail, you type in an email address and it populates to write some information about them. Rapportive was blog by LinkedIn. And LinkedIn has pretty much anyone’s business email address today.

So now, Rapportive has pretty much everyone’s email address that you can think of in the professional world. So what happens is – the cool little hack is if you’re typing in an email and you have the Rapportive plugin, it tries to load all the information that they’re getting from the LinkedIn profile.

When they can’t—if Rapportive spins the wheel, what you do is you try to guess their email address based on first name and the company domain, first, last name and company domain connections. What you do is you test to find the right email and Rapportive is spinning. So you’re going to type in SteliEfti@Close.io and Rapportive spins, spins, spins and doesn’t give you result. That means the email is not correct. Then, you type in S@Close.io. Rapportive spins, spins, spins, doesn’t give you an email. It’s not. And then, you type in Steli@Close.io and Rapportive spins, spins, spins, and boom! It will give you a nice little picture of me and some information about me. That’s the way you know that Steli@Close.io is a correct email address.

So you can kind of reverse engineer hack your way into getting anyone’s email and all you need is download Rapportive as a plugin and then you need to know their first and last name, the company email address. You try a couple of combinations, the moment Rapportive picks up a name and gives you some company or some personal information about them, you know that it’s an accurate email address that you can use to send out a cold email. It’s a very, very simple model.

Is the Predictable Revenue Model overused?

Now, I had a question and it’s relevant so I’m going to answer it because the next slide is going into that, about the Predictable Revenue Referral Model. Is that overused? Is it better to go straight to your target individual with highly personalized email?

It’s an excellent question and it is a little a bit overused. I will say that. I will also say that most people don’t realize that the Predictable Revenue Model is best in very, very, very large organizations. So people use this model when they send an email to ten people. That’s stupid.

People send me an email and we’re like less than ten people company although we’re making millions and millions of revenue, we’re a big business, bigger than our nearest competitor that’s 160 employees. But we are a small team and if you know something about us, you know we are a small team so people send me cold emails that say, “Hey Steli, can you point me to the right direction to the person that runs your marketing team?” And it just tells me they don’t know what the fuck they are doing.

So, when you send an email to a super small team, you want to go directly to the person. It takes a minute to research that company and find the right person. So just ping the right person. Just send an email to Coca-Cola, the Predictable Revenue Model is still effective.

So if you – depending on the industry that you’re sending the emails to and the size, it might still be a very effective model. Certain industries especially if you sell to startups and technology companies, this model is very overused because it’s very popular right now within the startup scene. So you want to just test it out yourself and see what results you get. If you get results, it’s still working. If you don’t get good results, it might be overused.

Welcome to the Q&A Game

All right. So now, we are officially at the Q&A session. And now my friends, I’m going to have to take a risk because the—oh, my cursor is back. Thank God. So let me cancel this thing. So I have this big, like in the webinar, popup module and I couldn’t see my cursor and I needed to get out of the full view model so I could actually scroll back and read your questions.

All right. So let’s go into the Q&A game. It’s my favorite part. We have about 20 minutes. You guys can jump off at any time if you want or you can stick around for the entire 20 minutes.

So what I’m going to do, I want you to keep putting in the chat window your questions. But what I’m going to do is I’m going to scroll back and I’m going to go through questions one by one. All right. Let’s do that right now. Scroll back. Let me actually take a second to take a sip of water. Beautiful.

So John was the first person to ask the question. John, thanks for setting the stage and being the first to put in question. Everybody else, please keep putting in the questions.

All right. So let me see. It’s another funny. GoToTraining does it, it pops down and the scroll is not perfect. All right.

So first question, how many times do you follow up before you give up on a cold email?

I think that we answered that – for a cold email, I would say 4 to 6 times should be the ideal sequence.

There are companies that have – there is a startup especially in the UK that has been sending me cold emails for the past one and a half years. They probably sent me 20 or 30 emails. Their emails are always good. They always have really good relevant content. They’re always smart. They’re always short. So I never always archive them and never delete them and I don’t feel harassed by them. I think that they are smart people. What they are offering me right now is something I’m not interested in. But I guarantee you, the moment I want it, I’m going to think about them.

So, some companies sent tons of follow-ups. I would say the sweet spot is 4 to 6 emails when you do cold leads, especially when they don’t respond at all. And you can put some fun in your follow-up. If you type in to Google, Blog.Close.io and then you put in “funny follow-up”, you’ll see an article I wrote about all kinds of strategies to be fun in your follow-up and can make a dramatic difference, especially in the cold emails to get people’s responses. So that’s a good place to go and get some inspiration on how to do this and how to do this well. Excellent question.

All right. So Joseph is next: Any recommendations on where to buy leads where you have had success in the past?

Joseph, buying leads just sucks. Just everything that is not really research-based sucks.

Here is my recommendation. If you sell to professionals, usually buying leads or scraping leads from good sources is a good strategy. So if you sell to like doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers, local restaurants, small tiny businesses, they’re good places to buy or scrape leads and phone numbers and they’re going to be high quality.

If you want to sell to the CTO of Coca-Cola, then good luck trying to buy a lead. You also have to think about like places like Data.com for instance. Whatever you buy, you need to assume that 30 to 40% of those email addresses are going to be outdated.

So it doesn’t mean that it can’t be effective for you but you need to take that into consideration when you try to do your math. People sometimes go, “We bought 10,000 emails on Data.com Steli and we hope to get a 10% response rate. So we are hoping to get 1,000 people to respond to what we are doing.”

Well my friend, if you assume that you bought 10,000 emails on Data.com, assume that only 6,000 of them are actually accurate. So if you get a 10% response rate, hat will be 600 people, not 1,000. And I highly doubt that you can get a 10% response rate on that massive of a cold bulk email.

But you see what I’m saying? Just take that into consideration. I don’t have a great place to share with you because I find that all places that offer you to buy leads are pretty low quality in general, unfortunately.

All right. Let me see the next question.

Any thoughts on using gifs to convey emotion in cold emails?

Scott asked that question. It’s excellent.

Honestly, the first time I heard about gifs in cold emails, I thought it’s kind of gimmicky and stupid, but I’ve changed my mind. I wouldn’t overuse it but I know that Foursquare, which is a customer of Close.io, is using gifts really effectively in a funny way.

If you go to Blog.Close.io and if you search for the Put some Funny in your Follow Up piece, you’ll see that—if you type in “cookie monster waiting” in Google gif, you’ll find a gif of the cookie monster just waiting like just tapping his fingers, looking around, just fucking waiting for a response, super effective.

You send somebody two or three emails, they don’t respond you, just send them the cookie monster gif, just the cookie monster waiting, going, “Come on man, just give me a response.” It can put a smile on somebody’s face. It can be very effective. So I think that it’s not a bad idea.

I would not overuse it. It also depends on your audience. I think that some people, if you send like funny gifs to maybe 60-year-old highly technical executive, it might get you a worse response rate than if you send it to maybe younger or hip, more feminine, more emotional crowd. So you need to experiment with this. But I’m open-minded about gifs and I think that in moderation, they can be effective. Excellent question.

All right. So next question.

John: How many emails do you need to send to effectively A/B test a template and draw solid conclusions?

John, that’s such a good question and I don’t have a good answer for you. We could argue a long time about like what has statistical significance. To really make A/B testing 100% accurate, you would want to send very, very well segmented emails at very similar times and you want to have a sample set that’s in the thousands.

But most of the time, reality is not as perfect as we’d like it to be. So what you want to do is you need to be a little down and dirty on the A/B testing and you need to go also a little by gut. What I would suggest you do —so you might just get—sometimes I might draw a conclusion after just a few hundred emails and sometimes I’m going to wait for a thousand of emails. It depends on how strong I feel. It depends on what my gut says. It depends on how dramatic the responses are and the differences are.

But what I would also give you as advice is to really do—to really learn from your cold emails, one big hack to do is at the beginning is to start sending these cold emails and then actually follow up on them with calls. And not make those calls with the attention or intention to sell but with the intention to learn.

So I’ll give you an example. You sent a few hundred cold emails and then you follow up with calling these people. When you call them, you ask them, you tell them, “Hey John, I sent you an email yesterday.” It was a cold email. And I assume that you would never respond to that and you haven’t.

So what I want to do is from one kind of sales person to another, from one business person to another, from one startup to another, just, “Can you give me some feedback? Did you read it? Was it good or bad? What do you think about me? Can you give me just one or two sentences of feedback? I want to make sure. I know that my service is amazing and it hurts me to know that we don’t have the opportunity to discuss it and to figure out if we could work together and create value.

So I want to get better at this. I don’t want to pollute your email with just keep following up with emails that you don’t like. How do you think about my email? I sent it to you yesterday at 4:00 PM. Did you see it? Did you think it’s bad, good? Can you give me some feedback?”

So I would actually call people and ask them for feedback. People that didn’t respond—and I would also in the early days when people respond to my cold emails, I would not just jump right into selling. I would actually, in the name of learning, ask them, “Hey, that’s awesome. Let’s talk about your business. Just a quick question. What made you respond to my email? What was the impression you had when you read the subject line or when you looked at the email, good, bad? What made you respond?”

So in the early days, what you can do, to overcome that you would not have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of emails and data points to make rational conclusions is that you reach out and you grind and you hustle and you actually call these people and you have conversations with them.

And once you hear something two or three times, it creates a pattern. It’s not perfect but it’s good enough to give you a signal and if it fits with your worldview or with what makes sense to you, you might just react to it even if it’s not perfectly validated statistical data, if that makes sense. All right. So I hope that that was useful.

All right. Next question.

Larry asked: “Do the number of opens per email matter? Should you send another email or pick up the phone and give them a ring if they have opened the email multiple times?”

Yes and no. I think people over value the number of opens. There are also some technical issues. I don’t want to get into details with it but sometimes people are like, “oh my God! This email got opened 5,000 times of this company.” Maybe not. You think they send this to everybody and everybody opened it multiple times. Maybe, maybe not.

So I want you to know that some email clients behave certain ways that will make this tracking more or less accurate. So don’t think that the open rates that you’re getting from any software are 100% accurate. But they are a signal. So yes, if you see that somebody opened it in the morning then opened in the afternoon, opened it in the evening and then opened it from their mobile devices as well as their email account, that’s a good signal.

I wouldn’t call them and say, “I saw you opened it four times!” or I wouldn’t call with a 100% certainty that they opened it this many times. Maybe they just opened it twice, not five times. Maybe the software didn’t track it correctly. But it is a signal. So I would pay attention to it but I would not take it as gospel, not assume that it’s a thousand percent accurate, if that makes sense.

And I wouldn’t just place too much value on it. But yeah, I think when somebody opens it, it’s a good time to call them because right now they are paying attention to your message. So if you call them when they open it, more likely that they’re going to pick up the phone. More likely that they’re going to know who you are.

All right. Let me scroll up to more questions. You guys have some excellent questions so that’s awesome. All right. Let’s see what the next question is. All right. All right. All right.

So London asked: “Do you think name-dropping competition that uses your product is effective?”

I don’t know. It depends on your customer. Some customer might respond really well to you telling them their competitors are using you. Some customers might say, “I will never use fucking software that my competitor is using.” It depends on your industry. It depends on your customer and it depends culturally on that company.

So in our case, if somebody tells us our competitor is using them, we’ll probably not going to use them or we’re not going to respond really positively to that.

Another area is they will. So I don’t have a universal answer to that other than I would try it and see what happens.

Azal, hey Azal. Nice to see you in the chat and nice to see you asking questions. My greetings to beautiful Austria to you.

So the question is: How do you know what to say in several follow-ups emails?

Don’t overthink it. Like in the worst case, you don’t say anything smart or original, all you say is:

• “Hey, I want to quickly follow up.”
• “Hey quick bump! What about a time today?”
• “I assume you’re pretty busy. I wanted to check in one more time. What’s a good time to talk?”

Even of you write three emails like that, this is zero creativity, it’s good. Now, sometimes you want to add some, like, news about your company or share with them an article that you think would be useful to them, anything that shows that you care, anything that shows that you want to provide value could be really good.

You can go to the Blog.Close.io and search for the Put some Funny in your Follow Up blog post we wrote and you can be more creative and more funny but don’t’ overthink it. Just start making sure that you follow up to begin with.

All right. Next question is from John. All right. So the question about Predictable Revenue referral model. [Is the Predictable Revenue Model overused?]

So for people haven’t read the book, Predictable Revenue from Aaron Ross, Aaron is a really good friend of mine. He’s about to launch a new book. I’m going to be actually in there with a guest, kind of not chapter, but an article. So Aaron is an awesome guy.

The model is a little overused right now. I still recommend you guys read the book, Predictable Revenue. There are lots of lessons to be learned but you also need to be cautious. Depending on who you are cold emailing, a lot of these tactics are a bit overused right now because too many people are following that model so you need to be more creative. You need to learn the basics.

Don’t just copy and paste what everybody else is doing. Understand the mechanics behind why cold email works so when you send it, you can adapt it, you can adjust it, you can be creative yourself and he ahead of your competition.

Juliet asked, “Do you always send a cold email prior to a call or cold calling alone is still more effective?”

Juliet, that’s another excellent question.

My answer is going to be it depends. There’s no universal answer to this. It depends on your customer, your industry, your market. Sometimes it’s more effective to send people cold emails than to call them. Sometimes it’s more effective to call them.

If you—I know a company that sells software to football, basketball, and baseball coaches, very successful, multi-million dollar startup out of New York. They don’t send emails because coaches don’t respond to emails. But they have a very effective way to get coach’s cell phone numbers so they just cold call coaches on their cell phones and they get a massive pick-up and reach rate and they are crushing it that way.

So if you want to sell to again, professionals where you have more chances to get direct access like lawyers, accountants, teachers, maybe cold calling them immediately is the better way. If you sell to CTOs, good luck cold calling. You’re probably not going to ever reach them or if you send to like head of engineering or something like that. You’re probably going to have to find a way to reach him via email before you call them.

So it depends. You need to test both models and see what works best for your industry. There’s not a universal truth to that question.

Next question.

Juliet asked again, “So working in digital advertising, most of my emails are meant to set up a meeting but people in the agencies are super busy. So what’s the best approach here?”

That’s a good question. So if you know that what you need from people is a meeting but you know that people are busy and they don’t want the meeting, you want to acknowledge that fact. You want to address the elephant in the room. You want to come out swinging. Say it. “If you know what I’m thinking, I don’t want another meeting. I’m busy.” Say it in your cold email.

How about writing a cold email that says, “Hey Steli, here is why I’m reaching out to you. Here is why I’m credible. What I want from you is something you don’t have time for. I know that people are busy. You are busy. You don’t have time for a meeting. But I need a meeting from you. So I know that you’re most likely not going to be able to respond to this message but let me tell you why I sent you the email anyways. Let me tell you why I’m still asking you for a meeting although I know that you don’t want to have a meeting with me or you don’t have the time to have a meeting with me.” And then, give me a good reason. Give me a good reason.

But more importantly, address the elephant in the room. If you know that everybody is thinking something, make it part of your pitch because if I’m thinking, “Oh shit! I can’t do a meeting.” And you write, “I know what you’re thinking right now, Steli, is you can’t do a meeting and I still send you that email. Let me tell you why.” Now, you got my attention. And I feel like you know me and I feel like you’re smart enough to get the challenges that I have in my business, in my position. So that alone, that acknowledgment alone can make a big difference. Try that out and see what results you get and make sure to ping me at Steli@Close.io and let me know.

All right. Next question. You guys have some excellent question here. This is a ton of fun. Awesome.

So Larry says, “Piggybacking on Juliet’s question, how does cold calling fit into the cold emailing campaign?”

Again, maybe I answered this already by saying it depends. My answer is it depends. You want to experiment with these things. You want to send cold emails and see how effective they are and you want to experiment with cold calling people after you cold email them and see what that does. Does that move the needle?

Everything and anything needs to be tested and let the results lead your way. Let the results be your compass. Generate results and then look at those results as a compass on what to do next. Maybe you should cold call after every cold email and maybe you should never cold call.

It depends on your market and your customer, on your skillsets, it depends on many things. But ultimately, do it. Do everything and anything you can think of one at a time, see the results and then adjust and adapt.

Next question. I’m going to do another 5 minute of questions so if you still have them, keep them rolling. Hope you like that type of the lead. The webinar, don’t worry, we are recording everything. You’ll get it.

All right. So let’s see. Next question is from Ret. I hope I spell it right.

What time of day and week for initial email have you found to be most effective?

That’s a beautiful question. You’re going to find a pattern here because I’m going to start answering you the same way I answered a few other questions. It depends. I don’t have a universal answer for you guys and I don’t want to give you bullshit shit.

I know that everybody loves a concrete answer. Tuesdays at 9:00 AM Pacific time is the best time to send emails. Everybody is like, “Oh God! Awesome. I don’t have to do any thinking. I can just do what Steli said.” But you’ll have to apply some thinking here.

You have to ask yourself, “Who the fuck is my customer? What is their day like? What is their week looking like?” And depending on that, a different time and a different day will generate different results.

Now in general, taking all of humanity into account, Tuesdays and Thursdays are good days. Mornings are good times because Monday is typically people are like super behind, catching up. Fridays, people are checking off. So Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are usually good times. But you see my hesitation even saying that shit, because I don’t know for your customer what’s going to be true. Some people have found that weekends are beautiful.

Like if you sell to CEOs for instance, maybe super early or super late in the day is really great. Maybe Saturday or Sunday is super great because lots of CEOs might be in the office on Sunday evening to prepare for the week because nobody else is in the office. And sending them a cold email on Sunday evening might get you amazing results.

Or sending them a cold email at like 11:00 PM might get you amazing results because that’s when they are in their inbox and just quiet and they are home, their children are asleep and they are in the home office just banging out email and then you send them a fresh email and they just respond out of habit.

I don’t know. You have to test. Test it. Test, and what I would do with all tests is go 80-20. Eighty percent of your time, do what you assume to be basic. If I send people emails on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, it won’t be that bad, like considering who they are. And then take 20% of the time to test. I’m going to do some random shit. Every—I’m going to try the next four weekends to send people emails on weekends and see what happens.

And then you’ve done this for four weekends, see what the results are and go, “All right. For the next month, I’m going to test this weird thing, sending people an email at 3:00 AM in the morning and see what happens.” Just use a bit of your time to test but keep the basics for the bulk of the work that you do.

All right. So next question. I’m going to go a little faster now to be able to bang them out before I have to jump on my next call.

Time of day in which you have the week. So Ret already responded to that.

Nigel: “Steli, you are talking about software showing when and how emails have been opened. Yes. It would be great if Close.io give a little bit of information on this. It’s vague at the moment.”

You’re right, Nigel, and we’re working on it. So right now, if you look in Close.io in the lead timeline and you go over, there’s a little stamp, that date and time stamp at the end of every email, if you hover over that, it shows you actually the amount of opens and what devices opened them in times and dates and everything. We don’t do that really beautifully in the kind of overview email statistics and reports but we’re working on that. So we’re going to do a lot more on that front. Stay tuned.

Ryan asks about follow-up frequency: “I found a post on the subject follow-up. Do you still suggest the same frequency 2-4-7-14-33?”

Yes. Overall, the principle Ryan is correct and you want to adjust that for your market and your audience. But the overall principle in the follow-up frequency is you want to do more frequent at the beginning and less frequent later on.

So you want to start being super frequent at the beginning of the relationship and have become less and less and less frequent. It doesn’t have to be this exact amount of days, 2-4-7-14-30-30-60. It could be 3 days, 7 days, 20 days, whatever it. That is not as important but you want to be more frequent at the beginning and less frequent at the end. That’s still the right sauce.

Winceso [(sorry about possible misspelling)] asked, “Do you think that the subject in a follow-up email should be different from the first one or they’ll catch up their attention in different way?”

I don’t have a strong opinion on that. A lot of times you can do—what you can do is you can do a bunch of follow-ups that are just responses to the original thread. So you might do the first two follow-ups in the original thread and you might send one follow-up that’s a new thread and then you might want to send another follow-up in the original thread. So you can mix it up a little bit. I don’t think it matters as much.

Yes, you can just throw a little a bit of variety to mix things up but I don’t think that it’s like super crucial or that it makes a massive difference. So somebody was like, “Please don’t say it depends.” I just shout that first thought you’d have. So I hope that that addressed that. So play around with it. Do a few follow-ups in the original thread and when you won, they go back to the original threat.

All right, John: “A very few of my prospects agreed to having a call off my cold emails. Do you think it might be better to ask questions and start an email dialogue then try to transition to a call when the prospect has more context to see some more value?”

I don’t know. I mean you can try that but my assumption, without knowing more, is that the problem is you haven’t sold them enough. So you might have sold them enough to respond it seems but not enough for them to want to invest or give your their time.

So maybe you need to get back to the drawing board and ask yourself, “Look at your cold emails and ask yourself, ‘Am I adding enough credibility? Am I selling them enough on why they should give me a little bit of their time and that I’m going to be respectful of that’?”

Am I selling them on why that time is going to be wisely invested?And maybe try playing around with your cold action, your messaging and your credibility and see if that does the trick. If not, experiment with asking some questions and going back and forth. But then, see if they actually do go back and forth with you because my fear, or my assumption, is that people might seem to not want to jump on a call with you and just say, let’s say an email, and then you send them these questions and they are not responding.

So see if maybe—so some customers like if you sell to like engineers and highly technical people, maybe a call is going to be really hard to pull off and you have to stay [with emails] because that’s just the way they like to communicate.

So, experiment with changing your messaging and experiment with staying with ask more questions, staying in the email thread and see what works better.

All right. So all right. That’s it. I get a little bit of praise. People are saying that they like the webinar. That’s awesome to hear, guys. You were awesome, amazing questions, great feedback, great energy. If you have questions, you want to send me your cold emails and get feedbacks, Steli@Close.io.

If you like this content, make sure to go to Blog.Close.io and subscribe to our blog, whether it would be doing more webinars, more content and giving you everything we can to help you succeed. Spread the word about it. Anyone that you know that needs to success in sales.

And today, go out there and crush it. Have an amazing day, gals and guys. Go rock their world. Take care. Bye-bye.

 

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