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Experienced product marketers know that to have a great product launch sales teams need to be armed with effective sales training, messaging and sales tools. Whether it’s a major launch or a minor release with a few new features, before you go to market you need to at the very least update your sales reps with new messaging and positioning and review your content and tools to make sure outdated information is replaced in the context of the change in your offering.

To plan your upcoming product launch, here are tips on creating the best content for your sales team:

Internal FAQs

Many sales reps appreciate a list of product launch frequently asked questions and corresponding responses. It’s a quick read that’s used internally for refreshing their memories on launch details and is not designed to be shared with buyers. Typical questions and information include a brief description of the new product/feature, pricing details, key messaging and differentiators, information on launch promotion plans and links to relevant resources. The PR and customer support team also find the FAQs useful to prepare their parts of the launch.

Persona profiles

If you haven’t yet created persona profiles, check out Hubspot’s template for developing buyer personas from scratch.

If you have been using buyer personas, add any new personas related to your new offering. For existing personas, does the product and/or its new features affect the prospect’s buying decisions? Does your new offering help the buyer solve a business problem or help achieve a business goal? Once you’ve added this new information to your persona profiles your team can use the profiles as the foundation for new messaging and sales tools.

Critical content for sales conversations

The demand generation content created by marketing to support your product launch will be useful to your sales reps, but they’ll need additional sales content to help them succeed and add value during their sales conversations. Here are 5 sales content elements that you should provide for each of your buyer personas and revisit or update with each new product offering.

1. Key Messages – to best position the company’s unique value propositions. These statements can be used in sales calls, meetings and email exchanges. They describe your solution’s key capabilities and associated benefits for your buyer personas. They must include your unique business value.
2. Insights – to help the buyer answer their own questions and issues around their related business problems. Examples of good insights are research, statistics and trends on the consequences and magnitude of the business problem, what other companies in their industry are doing to solve similar problems, and the financial benefits of taking action.
3. Questions – that sales reps should ask the buyer, relevant to the buyer’s challenges. Great questions not only show the sales rep’s expertise in the buyer’s industry and business segment, but also reveal the buyer’s motivation to buy.
4. Competitive positioning – to show your offering’s unique advantages and benefits that are significant to the buyer persona, as compared to the alternatives. These statements should focus on how your offering solves business problems and should not get into a feature-by-feature comparison versus the competition.
5. Objections – typically asked by the buyer and the best responses for overcoming those objections.

Sales tools

To engage the buyer during sales conversations and progress to winning the business, reps need supporting tools for each stage of the buyer’s journey. Here are important content assets to consider for your product launch:

• Thought leadership pieces: For demand generation as well as for sales reps to share during their conversations at the early stage of the buying cycle, provide thought leadership relevant to the business challenge that your offering addresses. This content could take many forms – ebook, video, blog, webinar. A major product release might warrant the creation of brand new content, while updates or feature enhancements might just require some editing of existing pieces. Ideally you’ll create multiple versions, repurposing core content and then targeting it for each of your buyer personas.
• Email templates: To make it easy for reps to prospect and to keep nurturing conversations with existing leads, provide email templates for each persona at different stages of the sales cycle with calls to action relevant to the product launch.
• PowerPoint slides: If this is a minor launch that doesn’t require drastic messaging changes, make sure current presentations are updated to reflect new features and benefits. If this is a major launch, create persuasive presentations that tell a story focusing on the challenges of the buyer and how they can meet their business goals with your new offering. Develop different versions of your presentation to match the challenges and goals of each buyer persona. Include a script and talking points for your reps.
  For inspiration on using storytelling to really engage audiences with your presentations, learn from presentation expert Nancy Duarte in these videos.
• Customer quotes, testimonials, case studies: These assets are very valuable but notoriously difficult to source and develop by the time of the launch. For your most important launches, make it a goal to get a customer quote as part of your beta program. Conducting surveys as part of the beta program may be a good way to get positive feedback and statements that you can incorporate into sales tools and marketing messages.
• Analyst quotes: Work with your PR team to schedule briefings with analysts and identify opportunities to get quotes from respected industry analysts. You may want quotes from respected analyst and thought leaders relevant to each of your most important buyer personas.
• ROI and value calculators: Help your sales team reinforce the value message with tangible examples and numbers. The more you can customize the value calculator, the better, because different personas will focus on different variables.
• Proposal documents: Make sure that your sales reps have updated information that reflect your new offering in any documents they present prior to the contract phase. Also review and update your standard RFP responses and contract language prior to launch to prevent any delays or confusion during the last stages of the buying cycle.

Sales training material

Once you’ve created and/or updated your sales tools and you’re ready to release, how do you make sure you distribute them in the most effective way possible? Out of all the messages and information that the sales reps receive every day, how do you make sure they’ll pay attention and prepare for this product launch? It’s not enough to send an email with links to the new material. You’ll need to show sales reps how and when to use these tools, and how the tools can help them sell more and faster.

An engaging way to prepare reps for the launch is to create a video showing new the features and benefits of the new offering. Video makes the product really come to life and will help busy reps digest and remember the most important information. Product managers, product marketing managers and subject matter experts are all great candidates for narrating the video. Aside from demoing the features, the script should include talking points on how they benefit each of the target markets. You could also edit and repurpose the videos to share with PR and customer support teams, or even include them on your marketing websites as part of launch promotion.

An online meeting/webinar with your sales team is a great way to prepare them for a launch. Go over the main points discussed in your FAQ and tools, and make it interactive so you can take questions from reps. Record the webinar so it can be viewed by sales reps who couldn’t attend and add it to your sales content library so reps can refresh their knowledge.

For major product releases, review any training material used for new hires and update with content on your new offering, if needed.

The 7 attributes also apply to product launch materials

By the time you’re ready for launch, you will have put a lot of effort in creating all this valuable content. To make sure that it is being “consumed” as much as possible, use the 7 attributes of effective sales content as your guide while creating each piece.

A final note: before your next product launch consider making a content asset management improvement. Does your current CMS meet your content organization and delivery needs? Is your content creation, storage and delivery process as streamlined and efficient as possible? Are you tagging your sales content to make it easy to recall and update as needed? Adding product version and feature tags to your content will make the next product launch easier because you can filter by tags and quickly find the content that needs updating – instead of having to review all your content for potential outdated information.

The rout in commodities has claimed a British victim in the form of Caparo, a UK steel firm.

Caparo is set to go into administration, according to reports from Press Association, with the loss of around 1,800 jobs.

Nick Dakin, Labour MP in Scunthorpe, blamed intense competition from China, in an interview with BBC News.

The loss of industrial competitiveness is fast becoming a political issue.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, questioned Prime Minister David Cameron over whether he would raise the issue of cheap Chinese steel "flooding the market" with the Chinese president during his visit to the UK this week. 

The fall of Caparo comes a week after the closure of the 98-year-old Redcar steelworks in the North East at the expense of 2,200 jobs.

Falling industrial demand in emerging markets, especially China, has sent commodities prices fall through the floor and made it harder for firms like Caparo to turn a profit. 

Here's how Bloomberg's Commodities Index has performed this year:

Combine falling demand with Chinese competition and a strong pound, which makes steel exports relatively more expensive, and you have a recipe for disaster for UK steel firms.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Floyd Mayweather just spent $4.8 million on one of the fastest cars in the world

After two decades of failed efforts to spur innovation and competition in Europe’s lagging communications sector, the European Commission has promised “an ambitious overhaul” next year as part of its far-reaching Digital Single Market initiative. Until now, the EU had hoped to drive down prices for DSL-based Internet services by forcing network providers to open their facilities at discounted prices to new entrants. But that policy came at the cost of badly degraded incentives for providers to invest in new technologies, leaving the EU with minimal cable Internet, fiber-optic networks, or high-speed mobile broadband.

At least for voice services, the U.S. took a similar path in 1996, requiring local phone companies to “unbundle” their old networks at rates overseen by the Federal Communications Commission. Congress, however, wisely left the internet out of that experiment, letting fixed and mobile broadband access markets to develop largely on their own.

As a result, the U.S. has seen nearly a trillion and a half dollars in private investments for cable, mobile, fiber, and next-generation copper/fiber hybrid services. This has helped contribute to the development of innovative Internet-based businesses, where 11 of the top 15 Internet businesses, most started in the last decade, are U.S.-based, with the rest coming from China. None are from Europe.

So it’s no surprise that European regulators are now eager to reverse course and open their markets to real competition. And, conversely, no surprise that partisan critics of the light-touch U.S. regime are just as determined to make sure the EU instead doubles down on a strategy widely acknowledged to have failed utterly.

Case in point is a recent report from Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, a German think tank. The authors, an American team consisting of a legal academic and a communications professional who have long urged nationalization of U.S. internet access, admonish the EU to “avoid the mistakes” of U.S. policy and instead “continue promoting the competitive market framework that has served European consumers well.”

Even the most conservative reading of measurable outcomes of EU policy on every imaginable metric, however, says otherwise. To explore this, let’s simply compare the results of U.S. and EU policy on their five most relevant characteristics — investment, availability, competition, adoption and price. And let’s use conservative data, nearly all of it from official sources:

Investment. Most damaging to an argument in favor of continuing the European policy of mandatory unbundling is the devastating impact that policy has had on infrastructure investment. Since 1996, and even during the most recent recession, private network operators in the U.S. have spent freely, racking up investments of $1.4 trillion — over 20% of the world’s total Internet infrastructure. The result is that the U.S. now has multiple high speed networks using a variety of wired and mobile technologies, including fiber optics, high-speed cable, VDSL (high-speed fiber/copper hybrid), 4G LTE and satellite.

 

In sharp contrast, European network operators who are unable to recover their investments continue to fall farther behind. According to Commission data collected in a definitive 2014 study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Christopher Yoo, the wide gap in investment per household between the two economies expanded dramatically between 2007 and 2012 (the last year so far reported). In 2007, for example, U.S. network operators invested $600 per household compared to $389 in the EU. By 2012, that gap had increased by another 20%.

 

Availability. Despite the vast size of the U.S. and its significantly dispersed population of mountain and rural residents, access to broadband service is still nearly universal in the U.S., even if one doesn’t count high-speed mobile broadband, which the FCC so far does not. The most recent report from the FCC finds that at the end of 2013, 95% of all U.S. households had access to a 10 Mbps wired connection, with 84% having access to so-called next-generation broadband with download speeds of at least 25 Mbps. More current data from the Department of Commerce shows almost 90% have a choice of two or more wired connections and over 50% have a choice of three or more. Based on current census reports, more Americans have access to broadband Internet than indoor plumbing.

 

Regardless of speed or technology, broadband availability in Europe is far behind. By the end of 2013, for example, the European Commission reports that only 62% of Europeans had access to next-generation broadband services, more than 20% less than in the U.S. According to research from Aalborg University, the U.S. has deployed fiber to nearly a quarter of U.S. homes, twice as many as in Europe and a similar ratio as for cable broadband, which is almost universally available in the U.S. Outside of major cities, lightly-regulated U.S. providers already offered next-generation service to 48% of rural consumers by the end of 2013, compared to only 12% in regulated Europe.

Include mobile services, for which the FCC claims unconvincingly that it doesn’t yet have any usable data, and the difference becomes even more dramatic. The data show that 98.5% of all U.S. consumers, regardless of location, now have access to 4G LTE service, compared to only 59% of the geographically much smaller EU.

Competition. Some, like the authors of the Stiftung Neue Verantwortung report, argue that U.S. market structure has dangerously collapsed into a single dominant technology—cable broadband. And, because of early regulatory follies in local franchising rules that made cable competition illegal, most U.S. consumers face de facto monopolies of one or at most two providers for cable-based next generation Internet access.

This argument dismisses any chance of effective challenge to cable access from fiber or VDSL services from former telcos or new entrants including Google Fiber. And, they claim, the lack of competition will mean higher prices, as more consumers elect higher-speed services from fewer providers.

This idea ignores the continued importance of competitive access service below 25 Mbps, the preferred choice even among subscribers with access to higher speeds. Even assuming, as the FCC and other policymakers do, that future video, Internet of Things, and other emerging applications will create a “big bang” push to higher-speed services, it doesn’t follow that cable technology will monopolize that market. Former telephone companies, including AT&T, already offer very high-speed fiber/copper VDSL service in most of their national markets. Even now, over 60% of AT&T more than 25 million household broadband footprint can get 45 Mbps or better speeds from the company’s U-Verse service — and many can now receive 75 Mbps.

U-Verse, along with cable, has the potential for speeds approaching 1 Gigabit or faster, currently the sole realm of fiber to the home service from Verizon’s FiOS and other providers — a third source of cable competition for next-generation service that is considerably more robust than the authors are willing to admit.

Gigabit speeds are also on the horizon for mobile networks. Already, providers are experimenting with gigabit speeds in both licensed and unlicensed (Wi-Fi) networks, innovating a combination of more efficient use of spectrum, new antenna and cell design technology, and smarter smartphones that can automatically jump to less congested frequencies. The next generation of mobile service, known as 5G, will likely support speeds of up to 10 Gbps in the next decade.

Meanwhile, the competition story in Europe is bleak, despite (or perhaps the result of) mandatory unbundling and regulated pricing. The EU’s most recent Digital Agenda Scoreboard, with data through 2013, doesn’t mince words. Nearly every broadband goal and target set by the Commission has been missed. Consumers, for example, have adopted next generation speeds at a slower rate than U.S. consumers, with less than 10% willing to pay for advertised speeds of 30 Mbps and only 3% buying 100 Mbps or faster service. This despite subsidized fiber deployments in some EU capitals that the report’s authors hold up as prime examples of European Internet superiority — claims that few Europeans would find passes a smell test.

With private European network providers having little incentive to build faster networks or deploy new technologies, nearly three-fourths of EU consumers are stuck with slow DSL connections of less than 10 Mbps, often their only choice from multiple providers using the same infrastructure.

And despite strong interventionist policies, even virtual competition in Europe has failed. Incumbent phone companies, many still at least partially government-owned, must lease their networks at regulated prices to all comers, yet incumbents still control 42% of the internet market. In a third of EU countries, incumbents provide over half of the broadband subscriptions. The failure to create virtual competitors comes despite EU regulators continuing to push down the regulated price for unbundled access — the same policy that slows new investment. It’s lose-lose.

Adoption. Adoption of broadband Internet access has been impressively high over the last decade in both the U.S. and the EU, but again the more open U.S. market has delivered the better results. In the FCC’s most recent findings, which go through 2013, nearly 75% of all U.S. households had a wired broadband connection; double the world average. Already, 30% of these connections are 25 Mbps or faster. Overall, according to the OECD, the U.S. had 100 million wired broadband connections at the end of 2014, almost four times that of second-place Japan.

 

By comparison, the 2014 EU Digital Agenda Scorecard finds only 30 fixed broadband subscriptions per 100 people in the EU, “which corresponds to a take-up of 76% of homes. The number of subscriptions are still increasing, but the growth rate is low.” Most of those subscriptions, again, are for older DSL connections, even in markets where next generation speeds are available. (The growth rate is higher in mobile broadband, which is poised to offer next-generation speeds and, in the U.S., from multiple national competitors.)

As in the U.S., adoption in rural Europe is lower, as it is with older and poorer populations. So why doesn’t everyone have a broadband connection? The reasons are complicated, but data from the Pew Internet Research Center and others consistently show that availability and price are only secondary factors. A perceived lack of relevance and a lack of technical skills are by far the most common reasons given.

Price. In the Pew data, relevance (almost 50%) and technical issues together account for nearly 80% of the reason given for not having broadband at home. Only 10% of non-adopters cite price as their principal reason. And adoption in both the U.S. and EU is slowing as the remaining holdouts conclude, correctly or otherwise, that they neither need nor want broadband Internet at any price. Subsidizing the cost of broadband — the focus of policy initiatives in both Europe and increasingly in the U.S. — is therefore unlikely to close what remains of the digital divide.

Yet the authors of the German report ignore EU reports of slowing adoption and undisputed findings in the very surveys they cite that make clear price is not the principal obstacle for non-adopters in either market. Instead, direct data and common sense is wished away for a preferred and unsupported conclusion that it is only “America that has gotten stuck on a plateau of adoption,” a problem caused by the fact that “Americans pay higher prices than Europeans for similar high-speed Internet access products.” Neither fact is supported by ample evidence to the contrary.

In their arguments on adoption, competition, and investment, the authors of the Stiftung Neue Verantwortung report repeatedly come back to consumer pricing for Internet access as their talisman for superior outcomes under the failed EU regulatory regime.   Even if Europeans have spottier access to slower Internet services they fail to take advantage of, the report’s authors conclude, EU policies can at least be credited with giving Europeans cheaper Internet than in the U.S.

Except that it can’t. Though the report acknowledges that a direct comparison of prices between U.S. and EU is “challenging,” they don’t do a particularly good job of trying to overcome the many analytic hurdles. For one thing, countries differ widely on the costs built into consumer prices for broadband. Monthly triple-play prices in both markets bundle in the cost of video content, for example, but in many European countries video content from national broadcasters is paid for separately via taxes or TV license fees imposed on each household. These fees can run several hundred Euros per year..

Broadband installation costs in Europe may also be higher than in the U.S., where consumers typically bear only modest one-time installation costs (e.g., $100). For example, while the European Commission holds up Sweden as a successful example of low monthly broadband prices for next generation fiber networks, their findings do not incorporate the standard upfront price for installation of about €2000!

In fact, an EU-commissioned study of comparative prices found that, as of 2012, U.S. prices for Internet access were lower than in Europe everywhere except at the higher speeds. And the EU study used median pricing and based its findings on advertised versus actual speeds, which likely skewed the results in favor of European providers. That’s because tests conducted by regulators in both markets concur that almost 100% of U.S. providers deliver advertised speeds or more, while in Europe, on average, “actual download speed is 76% of the advertised speed” and even worse for dominant DSL-based access.

A relatively higher price for the newest high-speed services in the U.S. (services most Europeans with access have ignored) is the thinnest peg possible on which to conclude that the EU communications policy is working while the lightly-regulated U.S. Internet market has collapsed.

And to the extent European Internet access prices have declined since 2009, as the EC finds in its latest scorecard, much of the drop can be credited to artificial reductions imposed by the regulators. But that decision also helps explains the precipitous decline in private European investment in next generation infrastructure, which in turn explains the sorry state of Europe’s Internet economy overall—the very incentive for the Digital Single Market initiative in the first place.

These measured outcomes are all based on actual data, none of it controversial, contested or convoluted. Encouraging policymakers in the EU or the U.S. to ignore the data in evaluating the obvious success of one set of policy choices and the failure of the other, as the Stiftung Neue Verantwortung report does, is simply dangerous.

The U.S. doesn’t have a perfectly functioning broadband market (or any other market), but a bi-partisan decision by Congress to leave broadband Internet access largely unregulated since 1996 has clearly worked better than the opposite approach taken by the Europeans. The European Commission is right to be working quickly to overhaul an obviously failed strategy.

All the wishful thinking and tortured logic of advocates with unrelated political agendas can’t change reality. For the sake of EU consumers, let’s hope it doesn’t needlessly delay European policymakers on the path to reform. Or provide solace to U.S. regulators who have increasingly strayed from the wise course of lawmakers.

Financial technology, better known as fintech, has exploded over the last 5 years.

The rate of investment is growing by 45% annually and $13.7 billion was ploughed into startups in the space in the last year alone, according to CB Insights.

As investment booms, finance and banking are being transformed by innovations like peer-to-peer models, crowdfunding, and contactless payments.

These changes have been driven not by established financial players, but by startups including now-huge players like LendingClub, Kickstarter, and Funding Circle.

Amy Nauiokas, founder and president of fintech investment firm Anthemis, says: "Big organisations can see where the markets have been, where they’re going, they can identify those trends. But I think the startups are always going to be able to move a little bit more nimbly."

Nauiokas worked in mainstream finance at places like Bear Sterns, Barclays, and Cantor Fitzgerald before setting up Anthemis in 2008.

"We spent quite a long time in this space trying to convince people of the future," she says. "You’d seem like a crazy person running around with a spreadsheet about how all the businesses were going to change on the back of technology and innovation. Some would listen and some wouldn’t."

Those who didn't are likely all ears now.

Loans: 'They're doing things that were impossible 5 years ago'

Perhaps the biggest area of upheaval has been in the way people and organisations lend and borrow money. 

Traditionally, banks had the monopoly on this. They took deposits, and extended credit. In the process, the banks make money by charging borrowers more interest than they offer savers.

But recently a crop of startups have found a way to squeeze these margins and offer a better deal to savers and, often borrowers, by adapting an online model first popularised by music piracy — peer-to-peer.

Platforms like LendingClub and Prosper in the US and Funding Circle and Zopa in the UK have exploded in popularity, doing hundreds of millions of dollars and pounds in loans and attracting huge valuations.

Peer-to-peer as a model first rose to prominence with personal and business loans, but companies like SoFi and Earnest are applying the model to student finance and specialist lenders are also springing up doing everything from mortgages to invoice financing.

"One of the big things that P2P lending is doing is really making it easier for people to borrow money — that’s the big value proposition," says Peter Renton, the founder of global peer-to-peer conference LendIt.

Where banks can take weeks to approve a business loan, peer-to-peer lenders take as little as 24 hours. The platforms automate huge parts of the underwriting process and plug into a myriad of data sources.

Renton says: "It’s easier, it’s quicker, it’s more user-friendly. These companies are not steeped in finance, they don’t have necessarily this background thinking that things have to be done in a certain way. They’re reinventing the wheel in a much more efficient way.

"Kabbage is the most innovative small business lender on the planet. They deliver a loan to a small business lender in 7 minutes. The way they do it is they connect all the data and the more data you connect with them, the cheaper it’s going to be.

"It started off with eBay data. They pull in all your eBay data and see what’s your daily sales volume, ratings. Now they pull in dozens of sources — UPS data, Amazon, QuickBooks, Yodlee, Yelp, Facebook. They’re doing things that would have been impossible 10 years ago, that probably would have been impossible 5 years ago."

Renton says that "this is the true innovation in this industry — the ability to work with data, databanks won’t work with or can’t work with."

There are a crop of online-only loan companies who aren't following the peer-to-peer model but are still beating the banks at lending by simply using data in a smarter way, making them faster and easier for borrowers. 

Banks are starting to recognise the skill of many of these startups. SunTrust Bank acquired online lender FirstAgain in 2012, later re-branding it LightStream.

Christian Faes, boss of UK peer-to-peer platform LendInvest, says many of his biggest customers are banks that lend over the platform. LendInvest specialises in peer-to-peer mortgages.

Faes says: "The short-term mortgage market is quite specialist. Banks see the short-term market as a good opportunity but they can’t really be bothered to go set up a desk, to hire business development people, to originate deal flow, to hire underwriters.

"It’s a lot easier to come along to a platform like LendInvest. That is really where peer-to-peer ends up. You get specialists in origination in particular asset classes and institutions come to them to get exposure of particular assets."

Payments: Blockchain is coming

Alongside the way people lend cash, the way we pay for things is also being overhauled.

"We’re just coming out of probably a good 3 years of being pitched any and all payments model," says Pascal Bouvier, a partner at fintech venture fund Route66 and a fintech blogger. "I’m personally suffering from payments indigestion."

On the business side, companies like Sweden's iZettle and Square in the US are making it easier for small businesses to accept card payments through cheap terminals. Companies like Sweden's Klarna and Stripe in the US also make it easy for small businesses to accept card payments online.

Meanwhile on the consumer side, services like Apple Pay and bitcoin are offering people new ways to pay for the good they buy.

International money transfers are also being disrupted. UK companies TransferWise and WorldRemit have both attracted big investments from Silicon Valley funds for their approach to international money transfer.

Like the lending startups, the key appeal of these money transfer businesses are they make sending money abroad easier, faster, and cheaper. TransferWise uses peer-to-peer to match people with others sending money in the opposite direction, saving fees.

WorldRemit specialises in sending money to mobile wallets in emerging markets, essentially digitising the Western Union network.

Bouvier says: "A lot of the investments to date were on the easy stuff — digitalisation of front-end distribution channel, personal payment solutions, some type of debit card coupled to an app."

But now there are signs of deeper changes in payments, within the so-called "rails" — the deep-rooted infrastructure used to actually process payments within and between banks.

22 banks from around the world, including JPMorgan, Credit Suisse, and Barclays, recently formed a coalition to develop common standards and use cases for the blockchain in banking.

The blockchain is the software that both powers and regulates cryptocurrency bitcoin. In its most basic form, it records ownership of bitcoin, as well as transactions.

Transactions are signed off by the parties involved using the software, then added to the blockchain, a long string of code that records all activity.

Once other transactions are added on in front of an exchange, the exchange is stuck there forever and can't be changed, in the same way you can't change a brick once it's been built into a wall.

The software cuts out the need for a "trusted middleman" to sit in between parties in a transaction as it acts as that middleman. This makes transactions quicker, cheaper, and easier when compared to the current systems banks use. 

The coalition of banks looking to adapt blockchain to mainstream finance is headed by R3, a startup headed by 32-year Wall Street veteran David Rutter. 22 top investment banks are now signed up.

Rutter told Business Insider recently that while payments are one use for the blockchain in finance, his remit is to explore everything from issuing shares on blockchain to using it as a "smart contract", where the code generated is itself the contract.

Investment: 'Platforms like ours deal with thousands of investors'

The blockchain could have a big impact on investment then, as well as payments. And investment is another area of finance that has already undergone huge changes thanks to technology.

The most noticeable change in investment over the last few years has been the rise of crowdfunding. A model pioneered in the US by Kickstarter, crowdfunding lets ordinary people fund projects online, either by lending them money or buying equity in the project or company.

In the US, platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are dominated by idea or cause based crowdfunding campaigns — people can fund cool ideas like the Pebble smartwatch before they're built, or even a new project from a big company like chip maker Marvell. 

In the UK, however, crowdfunding on platforms like Crowdcube and Seedrs generally takes a different form. Established, growing businesses such as BrewDog and JustPark are turning to crowdfunding platforms as a way to raise money.

The "crowd" buy in just like traditional investors would when buying shares, rather than fund a specific project. The big difference between buying shares on the open market is there's no way to trade once you own them.

But soon that could change too — Crowdcube, the UK's biggest crowdfunding platform, recently partnered with City of London stockbroker Numis and the pair plan to launch the world's first crowdfunded IPO next year.

At the time the partnership was announced Crowdcube CEO Darren Westlake told Business Insider: "IPOs are obviously public offerings, but if you look at what's happened over the last couple of decades it's been less and less possible for ordinary people to participate, as the majority of the listing have been filled out by institutions.

"The reason for that is because whoever's running the book, it's very difficult for them to deal with thousands of people rather than just one institution. However, platforms like ours have been set up to deal with thousands of investors — that's where our strength is."

Another big development in investment is the introduction of social and gaming elements. Israeli platform eToro lets investors "follow" other traders to see what they're buying and selling. There's even a feature that lets investors automatically copy the trades of people they follow.

And companies like Acuity Trading, Selerity, and iSentium are trying to harness data from platforms like Twitter to give an indication of investor "sentiment", which in turn gives them an idea of which way to trade.

A recent study from the European Central Bank found Twitter has a "statistically and economically significant predictive value" for stock markets in the US, UK and Canada.

Challenger banks: 'You don't go to the banking sector for tech'

There's plenty of competition in the US banking sector, but in Europe, and particularly the UK, the landscape is dominated by a few big players.

That's starting to change, thanks to the rise of so-called "challenger banks", such as Metro Bank in the UK and Fidor in Germany.

This new crop of lenders prioritises technology. Atom Bank, Mondo, and Starling are 3 pre-launch challenger banks in the UK that are planning to have no branch network and operate primarily through mobile phone apps.

Atom Bank CEO Mark Mullen told Business Insider in June: "Our inspiration is not coming from banks. You don't go to the banking sector for technological excellence. We're working with tech companies with credits in the motor industry, gaming."

Not only are these new banks rethinking what a bank should look like, they're also re-imaging how it should work.

Germany's Fidor was one of the earliest to pioneer a banking model that works more like an app store than a traditional lender.

Fidor offers core services, but it also lets customers use third-party products like peer-to-peer loans or currency trading. The bank is more like a marketplace where people can shop around.

Fidor CEO Matthias Kröner told Business Insider he sees the role of a bank becoming the guardian of a customer's identity, acting as a trusted gateway in the same way Facebook does when you use it to log into other sites around the web.

Kröner said: "A bank's role in future will be protecting your identity. Identity will be the biggest asset."

The future: 'Things are barely beginning here'

Not all parts of finance are being turned upside down though. One big area that has yet to be revolutionised is insurance. 

Investors and companies want that to change — an accelerator programme to help insurance startups grow is launching in London next January, backed by big names like UK car insurer Admiral and German insurer Allianz.

Route66's Bouvier told Business Insider: "Insurance companies need to be way better at sifting through universes of structured and unstructured data. Things are barely beginning here — the network of data that’s going to be coming out of the internet of things is going to be massive."

Insurance has plenty of room for new business models like peer-to-peer and efficiencies like automation that have hit finance over the last few years.

More broadly, we're likely to see many of these innovations enter the mainstream. TransferWise CEO Kristo Kaarmann recently tweeted: "Hope we'll graduate from fintech to finance. We don't call uber cartech nor BI newstech."

Banks and established financial firms are increasingly looking to work with fintech startups to help them keep up with the pace of change.

UBS has launched a competition to find startups to work with; Barclays runs a fintech accelerator programme; and banks like Santander, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan are all investing in companies in doing everything from bitcoin to peer-to-peer loans.

Anthemis' Nauiokas told BI: "I think where you’ll see the success stories is with banks and financial institutions that recognise they can’t do it all, but instead identify the areas in technology reform where they do have an edge and partner with someone to do the rest.

"That’s going to be a model that will be very successful for some financial institutions."

Fintech is going mainstream.

Join the conversation about this story »

The history of the Internet and mobile is that in many categories the winner takes most of the market:

• Search – Google
• ecommerce – Amazon
• Social – Facebook
• Ridesharing – Uber

We can go on and on with making a list like that and I have left off many many markets, but I think this short list I made at least gets the point across.

The reasons are many, but at the core are network effects and the fact that the more users and data a service has, the more value it can create for its customers and users.

We strongly believe in network effects at USV and look for them as the primary form of defensibility in the investments we make. We don’t always get things right and we certainly don’t always end up investing in the company that wins the market. But we understand how these things work and invest with the mindset that winning a market can result in a very large return on investment.

Lately, we’ve been wondering if there is an end to this pattern on the Internet and mobile. We think it is possible that an open data platform, in which users ultimately control their data and the networks they choose to participate in, could be the thing that undoes this pattern of winner takes most. The blockchain is the closest thing to emerge that looks something like that. But the blockchain hasn’t (yet?) shown that it can produce something important like Google’s search or Facebook’s social graph and until it does, we are just waiting.

This is an issue for society to ponder. As I have spent time in Europe this past month, it’s easy to see that the search engine they use here is Google, the social graph they use is Facebook, and so on and so forth. If the US produces the networks that win most of the market, that’s an issue for the rest of the world. The Chinese have dealt with that issue by protecting their market. The rest of the world (mostly) has not.

Will that always be the case? Will the countries with the most sophisticated tech startup communities end up winning the global economic race as we transition from an analog to a digital world in which the winners take most of the market?

It’s unclear to me how all of this plays out, but it’s been on our minds at USV and we are talking a lot about it. So I figured I’d talk a bit about it here too.

There’s nothing more frustrating for a sales leader, a CEO or a Board of Directors than a continued inability to come up with a revenue forecast that consistently hits the target numbers. But – as anyone who has had the responsibility knows only too well, accurate forecasting is a tough task.

That’s particularly true in complex sales environments with multiple variables. And it’s a sad truth that there are no magic wands. But – as I hope to prove in this occasional series on the essentials of effective sales forecasting – there are some basic foundations that need to be laid.

At the most basic level, forecasters – and everyone they depend on for data – have to work off a common set of definitions about what exactly they mean by various forecast categories. It sounds like it ought to be simple, but I’ve been exposed to far too many sales environments where even this most basic objective has not been achieved…

So in this article I’d like to share a framework that has worked effectively for me and for a number of my clients. I’m going to focus on just two simple, basic elements: how you can establish your confidence level that any individual opportunity will close, and how you can establish a reliable overall revenue forecast from all the accumulated opportunities that could close in any given period.

Individual Opportunity Confidence Categories

Confidence categories relate to the probability that any individual opportunity will close at the time and value predicted. I have found the following category definitions useful with regard to these individual assessments:

Closed

The opportunity has already been closed in the current quarter, the order has been processed, and the value is already counted in the quarterly bookings number.

Commit (Sometimes Called Confident)

The projected close date is in the relevant quarter, the sales person is highly confident that the opportunity will close at the targeted value in the relevant quarter and they are implementing a credible and clearly-documented plan to achieve this. The close does not depend on any exceptional or out-of-the ordinary acts. Only an unpredictable and dramatic (as opposed to unpredicted) change in circumstances is going to stop the deal happening.

In any given period, on average at least 8/9 out of 10 committed opportunities should be expected to close as predicted, and of the remainder that do not, most should generally involve only a short and hard-to-predict delay rather than a loss or a decision to do nothing.

Probable (Sometimes Called Forecast)

The projected close date is in the relevant quarter, the sales person confidently expects this opportunity to close at the targeted value in the relevant quarter and they are implementing a credible and clearly-documented plan to achieve this. The close does not depend on any exceptional or out-of-the ordinary acts, but there is still work to do and some progress still needs to be made – but the remaining actions remain very do-able in the timeframe available.

In any given period, the majority of opportunities in this category should be expected to close in the quarter and at no less than the value predicted.

Possible (Sometimes Called Upside Or Longshot)

The projected close date is in the relevant quarter, there is a realistic outside chance that this opportunity will close at the targeted value this quarter, and the sales person is implementing a credible plan to achieve this that does not depend on a miracle happening. This category can also occasionally be used for opportunities that have a most likely close date a quarter out, but where there is a credible chance (and a plan in place) to pull the deal forward.

In any given period, a minority of opportunities in this category are expected to close as planned – value and date. The opportunities in this category can act as a “reserve” for committed or probable deals that unexpectedly or unpredictably fail to close.

Pipeline

The projected close date is beyond the relevant quarter. There is no realistic possibility that this opportunity will close in that quarter.

Omitted

The opportunity is no longer live – either because it has been lost or lapsed.

Application Of Categories

You also need to clearly define which opportunities the various categories can be applied to. Closed and Commit should usually only be applied to late stage opportunities with a current quarter close date. Probable and Possible can be applied to late stage opportunities with a close date in this quarter or (assuming the forecast reporting system can handle it) next. All other deals must be in Pipeline – and the “Pipeline” status must not be applied to current quarter opportunities.

Overall Revenue Forecast Categories

Now let’s turn to the overall forecast. Overall revenue forecast categories refer to the aggregated revenue forecast for an individual sales person, any intermediate entity, or the sales organisation as a whole. The following category definitions might prove helpful with regard to these aggregated forecasts:

Worst Case

This is minimum revenue that can reasonably be expected to be generated. It is based on the accumulated Closed and Commit deal values. Auditable evidence-based adjustments based on the extrapolation of past performance can be made at every level (sales person, entity or total) but must be clearly documented and the original value should also be preserved.

Most Likely

This is the most likely revenue that can reasonably be expected to be generated. It is based on the accumulated Closed, Commit and Probable deal values, with an evidence-based upwards or (more likely) downwards adjustment based on past performance.

Best Case

This is the most optimistic revenue that can reasonably be expected to be generated if all or most opportunity closure plans are perfectly executed. It is based on the accumulated Closed, Commit,  Probable and Possible deal values, with an evidence-based downwards adjustment.

Changes Through The Quarter

It’s to be expected that the accuracy of assessments – both at the individual opportunity level and for the forecast as a whole – will improve as the end of the quarter approaches. There is typically a pattern to this that can be used to adjust early-quarter projections.

Evidence-Based Adjustments

I’ve intentionally referred to evidence-based adjustments – because you can’t afford to rely on gut feel. You need to analyse patterns of performance that, for example, predict how many opportunities of a given type have tended to close in the past, how accurate any given sales person has historically been in their forecasting, and how the typical relationship between forecast and actual values evolves over the course of the quarter.

It’s no wonder that sales analytics is one of the fastest growing areas of investment when it comes to sales performance improvement. Without the ability to analyze the underlying patterns of performance or extrapolate from them, any revenue forecast will simply have to rely on too much guesswork and gut feel. If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend that you invest in analytics now.

In Conclusion

Sales forecasting is part art, part science and part engineering. But without consistently applied definitions combined with evidence-based adjustments the results are likely to be patchy at best. So I hope that you find my suggested definitions useful. And now I’m interested to learn from your experiences. What definitions have you found most effective in your own sales forecasting? And what have proven to be your greatest sales forecasting challenges?

As some of us start counting down to Christmas, tens of thousands of Amazon workers are getting to work packaging millions of products bought from the giant online retailer. 

To handle all of this, Amazon has more than 80 massive distribution centres, which put together, comprise more square footage than 700 Madison Square Gardens and could hold more water than 10,000 Olympic swimming pools.

The following pictures show what it's like inside five of Amazon's factories, located in the US, the UK, Germany, and Poland. The figures are compiled from statista.com, DMR, and Michael Hyatt. 

This article was based on a previous post written by Joshua Barrie.

These boxes help contribute to Amazon's global net revenue, which is more than £47 billion.

 

But it wouldn't make anything without its employees, which number well over 100,000.

 

They help package everything up. Amazon's outbound shipping costs are just over £2 billion.

 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Last week, I was training a sales force to sell value - an absolutely revolutionary concept - when the unthinkable happened, not once, but twice in the same training.  As incredible as it was to me, it clearly illustrates why it is so darn hard for companies to get their salespeople to sell value.

Too many businesses aren’t getting the most out of their social media, while seventy-four percent of shoppers use social media to help them make their purchases. Reaching them depends on knowing how to speak a customer’s language online. Here are five steps to turn fans into faithful shoppers with proven social media techniques.

1. Keep it Brand-Friendly

Just like a website, company’s social media pages should tell visitors what benefits to expect from its products or services, consistent with overall branding and marketing, right down to writing style.  Detailed information not only sets a professional tone, it helps with search engine optimization.

2. Pick and Choose 
The ever-growing number of social media platforms out there means that companies need to use their resources to focus only on the social media that counts to customers. Research can reveal this information, as well as provide insights on customer social media behavior and the types of conversations they’re having, so you can connect your messaging to their personality.

3. Planning is Everything – and Prevents Clutter

The most impactful social media content is planned. Strategic messages let marketers create intentional online interactions with your customers.  Monthly content calendars not only insure ready content, they create fresh and original content as part of the planning process.

While advertising loyalty programs on social media is resourceful, avoid clutter. Pacing can make the difference with content — particularly promotional posts – so posts should be spread out, with a mix of promotional, loyalty, and value-add messages throughout the day.

4. Get to Know Each Other, Then Bring Them Home to Meet Your Brand

After content planning and posting comes monitoring — not only to read comments, but to respond promptly and appropriately to praise and criticism. Relationships start with conversations. After engaging customers on social media the right way, businesses can then impress them on their own social media pages, keeping the conversation going and turning fickle fans into committed customers.

5. Make the Loyalty-Social Connection

As loyalty programs grapple to keep shoppers engaged, brands and companies are using social media imaginatively for their loyalty programs – with steps like encouraging customers to use a specific hashtag to earn a free product, re-tweet a post for rewards points, or share their purchase on their own social channels for a discount.

After creating these relationships and demonstrating their services’ and products’ value, marketers can take the next step — finding out how to score customers by their value to their business — and read CCG’s Have You Scored Your Customers Today?

You’ve likely heard it: the silence in the forest of your content. That’s probably because the majority of marketing content is never used—especially not by salespeople.

Why not?

A variety of research has pointed to the inability of salespeople to find the right content. The CMO Council found that, on average, salespeople spend 40% of their time looking for content created by marketing or creating their own to fit a need that doesn’t appear to be met by the content they do find.

In my work with clients, I’ve also found that even when salespeople do read your content, they often have no idea how to use it to transfer relevant value to the buyer.

This needs to change, and fast.

B2B Marketers Have More Responsibilities than Ever

In the new book The Challenger Customer, research conducted by CEB finds that buyers are 57% of the way through their buying process before they reach out to vendors. Other research reports this number as being even higher.

Buyers are 57% of the way through their buying process before they reach out to vendors

This has put the onus on B2B marketers to take responsibility for even more of the buying process than ever before.

But the sticky point is that CEB also found that buyers reach the height of conflict 37% of the way through the buying process—meaning they may never make it to the point of vendor outreach.

Join this with CEB’s finding that an average buying committee consists of 5.4 people and you can begin to understand the necessity for marketers to help salespeople use content effectively to either:

1. Gain access to earlier conversations with buyers, or
2. Influence those internal conversations in an effort to reduce conflict that could derail progress.

Making It Easy for Sales to Find and Use Your Content

Marketers can create a sales enablement process to help salespeople find, understand, and use content more effectively by tagging content assets for persona, buying stage, topic, problem, and more.

But even better, marketers can make the creation of “cheat sheets” part of the content development process to help salespeople quickly use the right content in support of a buying conversation or prospect’s need.

I explain the concept of creating cheat sheets I call “CliffsNotes for sales” in this excerpt from my book, Digital Relevance:

“CliffsNotes for sales” are summaries of marketing-produced content that include the details salespeople need in order to follow up with a prospect based on an interaction with a specific content asset or to create a new conversation based on ideas that the prospect will find represented in the content if they visit the website.

Components of a CliffsNote for sales include:

• Content Details: This is the basic identifying information for the content, including format, title, a link to where it can be found, date created, author, and, if appropriate, what it was originally created for—such as an event, nurture program or product launch.
• Target Audience: This information helps the salesperson understand quickly who the content was created for and the stage in the continuum it was designed to address. If the content is specific to a vertical, that should also be included.
• Key Points: Include several bullets that distill the key points made in the content.
• Issue/Problem: This is one sentence or phrase that describes what the persona may be thinking, the problem they’re trying to solve, or the objective they’re trying to achieve. This information helps the salesperson understand more about the context of a prospect who has engaged with this content, or content that can be provided if the prospect mentions the issue in conversation.
• Content Goal: A sentence or two about what the content is trying to help the prospect learn or understand that’s relevant to the issue or problem.
• Persona Questions During this Stage: Include a few questions the prospect might have during this stage of the continuum, to help the salesperson understand how to evolve the conversation. While this may not be necessary for experienced field salespeople, these questions have proven very helpful to inside sales teams or newly hired salespeople who are still ramping up their knowledge of target markets.
• Answers Provided: Include brief answers to the questions raised above that are included in the content as talking points for salespeople.
• Conversational Prompts: Given the content premise, key points, and questions answered in the content, provide several prompts that will help salespeople initiate conversations perceived as relevant by the prospect. These conversational prompts should also lead the conversation toward the collateral and follow-on offer to create a transition point as the call wraps up.
• Collateral and Follow-On Offer: Title and link to a related content asset with a sentence about it that the salesperson can use to ask permission to send it to the prospect to extend engagement.

The above may look like a lot of work, but if done at the same time the content is created, it only takes a few minutes.

Much of what’s needed may be in the content assignment document, simplifying the creation of the cheat sheets even further. Providing salespeople with insights about how to use marketing content is a worthy goal—especially when the marketing department is using 30% of their budget to create it.

Additionally, by tracking the use of the content and enabling a closed-loop feedback process for salespeople to share insights about what works, what doesn’t, and how they’re using the content, marketers can continuously improve it.

Creating content that no one uses is a waste of time, effort and resources. By making it easy for sales to use your content, you’ll gain a higher return and value from your investment in marketing content.

If that’s not convincing enough, look at it this way—you’ll also gain another targeted distribution channel.

The growth and success of your team begins with you, and more specifically, the perception you have of each individual on your team—who you think they are and who you need them to be.

Stop Branding Your People – Part 2 (Excerpt from Keith’s upcoming book, Coachquest.)

In Part 1 of this series, Stop Branding Your People, I shared a story about my experience when I was in Santiago, Chile, delivering my sales leadership coaching program to a team of seasoned sales managers. They had all jumped on the bandwagon of despair, as to why some of their people just aren’t coachable and more successful in their role. I coached them to recognize the danger of their assumptions and the cost that ensues.

Just like the assumptions that salespeople make about their prospects and customers can prevent them from closing more sales, the assumptions that managers make about their people, often based upon their prior experiences with them, blind them from recognizing and creating powerful, authentic coaching moments. This prevents them from truly developing their people, making them more valuable, and fostering healthier, more rewarding relationships.

Here are 22 examples where managers have created self-imposed limitations on the health and growth of their team by mis-branding people.

Now, you may initially think that branding someone in a positive way is a good thing. After all, people want to create a positive personal brand and a legacy they are proud of and as such, often go to their manager or their own coach for assistance in doing so.

However, are you coaching, communicating to, and supporting your people based on the facts? Do they actually have the skills, drive, confidence, and attitude to achieve more in their role, or are there certain assumptions you’ve made about them and their abilities, solely based upon your prior experiences with them and consequently, react to them accordingly?

Here is your opportunity to expand your peripheral vision and become more mindful around how assumptions and branding people a certain way can limit the positive impact you can make on others, preventing you from leading and coaching people to achieve unprecedented, breakthrough results.

As you read through these, you will see that I could not fabricate these examples even if I tried! These are real world situations that I’ve observed. So, take a moment and reflect upon each one to see what would be possible if these negative brands were challenged by taking a different approach when interacting and communicating with those around you. It all starts with you.

22 Toxic Ways We Set Our People Up to Fail

1. Megan is always playing the victim. It’s never her fault.
2. My boss is uncoachable and is not open to feedback. He is so ‘old school,’ so I just tell him what he wants to hear. Besides, I want to keep my job!
3. Sandra is the whiner.
4. We’re dealing with a legacy senior leadership team. They will never change or see the value in what we’re trying to do in the field and with our teams, so we just have to continually come up with ways to work around them to get what we need done.
5. There are silos in our organization that cannot be broken down because the other departments just don’t get what we’re trying to accomplish here!
6. Jose is not a team player.
7. You try telling the CEO to change and what to do! Let me know how that goes.
8. The silos in our organization make it difficult to get anything done and John is really the only one equipped to work well cross-functionally with other teams.
9. Lucas is overly sensitive and does not take constructive criticism well.
10. Ahmed is never going to use the CRM the way we need him to. So, let’s find another way to work around this. Can we afford to hire an assistant for him so this gets done?
11. Maria is difficult to talk to and always seems as if she’s on the defensive or someone is out to get her.
12. Eleri is always late and is terrible with time management.
13. Frank is abrasive and I’ve heard this from a variety of sources. He will also stab you in the back and steal your clients. So, I’m just warning you now.
14. Why would I even question Brian’s performance when he’s hitting his sales goals each quarter? The numbers are there.
15. HR is only good for dealing with compliance issues or if I have to make sure I’m following the legal procedures and protocol needed when it comes to terminating someone. That’s the only time I need to get HR involved.
16. Stephanie has been selling successfully for thirty years. Let her follow her way of doing things and we will just have to train all the new hires on our company’s sales process.
17. Marketing doesn’t understand what a qualified lead actually is. They don’t understand the role that my salespeople are in and I’m not 100% confident of the value of these leads and the opportunities they send us.
18. Patrick will never hit his number. He just doesn’t have what it takes and I already know he’s not coachable.
19. I already know how Angelina is going to react if I bring this up. She is going to freak out and I don’t feel like dealing with that right now.
20. The sales engineers have no idea how to sell and what it takes to bring in a closed deal. All they keep pushing for is more data and information about the project and specifications. Let me just do what I do best as a salesperson and sell. We can worry about that stuff afterwards.
21. Hector is amazing at managing the projects with his team. I never have to worry about him. That’s why I just leave him alone and stay out of his way.
22. Matias is from (fill in country), so you know he’s going to react poorly if you ask him to work better with the account managers and get them more involved up front during any client meetings or proposals that we need to deliver to certain prospects.

Once you brand people, think deeper regarding how this impacts you, as well as the person you branded? How do your assumptions about people change the way you interact with them? How does this affect their personal brand within your company? What does this do to their reputation? What message are you sending about this person to others who don’t know them and may one day, have to work with them in some capacity?

Are You Getting Paid to Brand People?

Here’s another point to consider. When branding people, what are you getting from doing so? Is there some payoff for you? Remember, as human beings, we will tap into any available energy source, even if it does cause suffering or difficulties.

Do some of the assumptions you make about others help justify your own actions, behavior, decisions, and results? Do they give you the out, the right to complain, or the ability to justify your reasoning as to why you cannot take action to better the situation or relationship?

You Cannot Change What You Do Not See

The greater cost is, notice that with each of these assumptive statements, consider that important business decisions are then made based on the assumptions you believe to be true, rather than focusing on creating a new possibility or brand for others. The fact is, no manager can truly look in the mirror and say they’ve tried everything because just like these managers in Chile had a major blind spot, so do you. It often takes someone else, such as a coach, to help each person see what they cannot see on their own.

Before you give up on certain people, throw your hands in the air, and think you’ve truly tried everything, consider this as your defining moment, your crossroad and your choice to re-brand or re-invent your perception and relationship with each person in your company, and in your life. When you evolve by challenging your limiting thinking and choose to communicate in a more engaging, collaborative way, that’s when greater opportunities will present themselves.

Photo Credit: Vectors.1 (via Shutterstock)

How suggestible are you? Much more than you might think, it would seem.

In one experiment in 2008, psychologists showed participants brand logos for IT companies with distinctly different brand associations, then asked them to try out a task that measured their creativity. Surely, you say, just looking at a logo can’t change the way we think?

Turns out, it can. Participants that were shown the Apple logo – a brand that people associate heavily with creativity – performed significantly better in the task.

That’s the power of brand association. That’s the power of social cues.

And that’s why, if you walk into just about any “creative” business in the world – designers, architects, video producers, ad agencies, you name it – a line of shiny silver Macs with glowing Apple logos is practically a given.

Creative agencies buy Macs partly because they’re powerful computers with great graphics cards that are built with design programs in mind. But they also buy them because that’s what the people they’re looking to hire have come to expect.

And why do creative industry employees expect Macs?

Because it’s become deeply embedded in their collective consciousness.

Because self-described creatives Instagram artsy pictures of working on their MacBooks. Because people tweet Steve Jobs quotes as shorthand for innovative thinking. Because Appleseized on the potential of this brand narrative all the way back in 1984 and continue to disseminate that vision through its enormously popular YouTube channel.

… And, most importantly, by cultivating a community of creative people who would never think of working on anything else, who are so vocal about their brand loyalties that they set up their own Facebook fan pages and release Slideshares on Apple’s behalf, and who turn their nose up at a business environment that doesn’t embrace these sensibilities, too.

Selling is social. Anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t get how people work.

Okay, so you might not work on a Mac. You might not work in an industry that aligns itself with the Apple narrative. But have you ever genuinely been persuaded to buy something you’ve never been remotely exposed to before, entirely on a whim, without any context or past experience to guide your decision?

I doubt it.

People do not exist in a vacuum, and their choices are influenced by social cues all day long without them even knowing it – without them registering how this impacts on their desires or decisions.

The average adult in the US spends 15.5 hours exposed to media messages every day. Londoners’ eyes will see over 3,500 adverts in that time. And now that we spend 28% of our time online checking social media, the sheer scale of this influencing stimuli has exploded.

Plus, it’s not as if “social” makes a distinction between personal and business. Most companies today have a Twitter Feed, a LinkedIn presence, even a Facebook page. Social media sites track us throughout our day and send retargeted ads our way in our spare time for things we Googled during work.

All of this means that we’re getting a huge proportion of our information from networks and newsfeeds, all day long. It’s where we’re most social – and it’s where the sales journey should begin.

Ah, you might say, this is all well and good in a B2C context, but I’m pitching to other companies. What does a procurement manager in my client’s firm care for social selling?

In fact, B2B is no different. If anything, it’s even more social.

Why? Because we put so much more thought into our B2B purchases. We’re accountable to others – and that means we can’t buy spontaneously, on a whim. You don’t get “impulse buys” by committee, after all. And that means your customers are even more reliant on the opinions of their peers when they’re thinking about whether to buy from you.

What’s more, we now know that 57% of the buying journey is complete before a sales rep even gets involved.

Your customers have already engaged with your brand and with others’ opinions of it multiple times before you get a chance to present your case. They’ve already read reviews and checked out your Twitter feed. They’ve Googled you – and probably looked at your individual LinkedIn page, too.

Your first step should be to take control of the conversation.

This means you should be using social media tracking platforms to make sure you know exactly what people are saying about you.

It means you should be talking to your customers and responding to any complaints or bad reviews with good grace and maturity, taking the opportunity to show other clients what great customer service you offer and how willing you are to listen to their concerns.

Or, as Intelicare’s Gabriel Bristol puts it: “You’re not going to convince someone that she actually had a good experience after she left a bad review, so don’t try.

“Use this opportunity to shine as the bigger person. People will read the bad review but if they see you’ve responded to it, they may withhold judgment until they read your side of things. So make it good.”

Next, you need to work out where B2B clients are spending their time.

You want potential customers to stumble across you looking your best. In a B2B context, they’re most likely found on LinkedIn.

At the very least, you need to make sure that when a prospective client clicks on your name or your company profile, they find something that looks 100% professional and trustworthy. If it’s not, it could sabotage your sale.

But, for best results, you need to go a step further and use the platform to promote yourself as an authority in your field – and to help you close those all-important deals.

LinkedIn has fast become a go-to site for industry insights from influencers ranging from Richard Branson to Arianna Huffington. So why not start positioning yourself alongside them? Writing regular, well thought-out posts pertaining to your industry is a great way to create value for potential clients and to show off your expertise in their field.

What’s more, LinkedIn is a goldmine when it comes to figuring out what issues and topics your customer base is preoccupied with – and how you might be able to adapt your business case accordingly.

Tracking which industry-specific groups your clients have joined, which articles they share and what comments they leave on posts will give you an invaluable insight into how they think. You can then use this information to establish exactly how your product or service aligns with their needs, increasing your chance of a sale.

Thirdly, harness the power of reciprocity.

Cold calling is hard. The person you’re talking to doesn’t owe you a thing, and they know it.

The best way to get past this hurdle is to offer something before you ask for something.

Reaching out to prospective clients through social media to offer them a free, top-quality whitepaper or access to a video series tackling problems in their industry will be a lot better received than asking straight-out if you can give them a ring to talk about your product.

What’s more, when you’re offering something for free, people are (unsurprisingly) a lot more willing to part with their email address or signup to a mailing list in order to get it. If they love the content you’ve given them and they’re starting to get a feel for your brand, they’re much more likely to tolerate a follow-up call that’s more commercially-orientated.

Social selling isn’t about giving it the hard sell. Tracking down prospective leads through social networks and hammering home your message isn’t going to work and more than marching up to someone at a networking event and launching into a pitch is going to work – it’s just going to make them feel cornered and annoyed.

Rather, it’s about starting a conversation. It’s about getting to know the challenges your prospects face and laying the groundwork for a relationship. It’s a chance to have a chat, be charming and see what you might be able to do for them to tackle pain points in their business.

Get it right and, like Apple, your products might even start (social) selling themselves.

What does it take to become a successful sales professional today? Is it charisma? Is it luck? Is it a compelling personal brand?

The answer, of course, is all of the above.

But when it comes to gaining competitive advantage, there is one tool many sales pros often fail to use: content marketing. When used right, content can provide salespeople with the ammunition they need to support their pitches to prospects and stay competitive in their industry.

Here are 4 ways you can leverage content to elevate sales and use it as a silver bullet to close deals.

1. Prove that you know what you’re talking about.

Buyers today are very knowledgeable. They have so much information at their disposal that they probably know just as much—if not more—than you do. When they’re looking to buy products and services that will solve their problems, they want to know that they’re in good hands and that you know what you’re talking about.

The good news: Content can help establish the credibility of your company. In fact, if you’re producing content yourself, it can also help build your reputation with buyers.

Produce content that’s useful, insightful and provocative. This is especially true for “top of the funnel” content like blog posts and infographics. The purpose of these pieces isn’t to sell. Indeed, the biggest mistake you could make in content marketing is talking too much about your product. Instead, you want to use content to establish thought leadership, position yourself as an expert and bring buyers into the conversation.

2. Establish your trustworthiness.

Let’s face it: many buyers believe salespeople are crooks. The sales profession still has a reputation for telling lies and over-promising. This reputation is why buyers usually do their own research before approaching sales professionals. They want to be equipped with (what is hopefully) objective information so they’re not going into the sales conversation completely clueless.

Of course, the bad reputation of the sales profession isn’t entirely fair. Most sales professionals are honest and transparent about what their products and services can and cannot do. But content can help build trust with prospects more quickly.

Also, buyers don’t just buy based on features and functionality; they buy based on emotional factors, too. They’re more likely to buy if they know why your company does what it does. Through inspiring and interesting content, your company can communicate this why and get buyers to buy into your own perspective.

Embracing transparency in your content can also help you gain trust. One thing you could consider is to create content that objectively shows what your company can offer compared to what competitors can. When done right, info sheets and other types of content that compare the buyer’s choices can make the buying process easier for prospects—and if you offer the solution that they’re looking for, you’re more likely to win that deal.

3. Move the conversation forward.

If you’re in the enterprise space, the sales cycle can be anywhere between 6 months to a year. Given the price of enterprise software, it shouldn’t be a surprise that it takes that long to close deals. But the worst thing that could happen is for the talk to halt to complete stop—for prospect to stop talking to you.

Content gives you a good reason to keep communication open with the buyer. Sending new, relevant blog posts and other types of content to your buyers could help ensure that you’re top of mind. Of course, the key is to make sure that you’re not being annoying: make sure that when you’re sending content to buyers, it’s relevant and you’re doing it in a personalized and non-obtrusive way. Briefly explain why you’re sending the content to the prospect so they don’t think of it as spam. When appropriate, ask for a good time to connect on the phone about the content.

If you’re sending content in the form of PDFs, you can even get analytics and figure out which part of the content resonated most with the buyer. Doing a quick analysis can help shape your conversation with buyers and increase the likelihood that they’ll move forward with you.

4. Provide more information to the buyer.

Once you’re close to closing the deal, the conversation becomes about case studies, pricing, implementation, security and other specific topics. This types of content are valuable to sales success. Work with your marketing team to produce bottom-of-the-funnel content to make sure that the messaging is consistent and accurate.

Content marketing shouldn’t be just a marketing thing. When done right, creating content that’s useful and thoughtful can help sales people do what they’re supposed to do: sell more.

While listening to recorded sales calls in preparation for a training program, I heard these call endings over and over:

“Well, keep us in mind, OK?”

“Here’s my number in case you need anything ... ”

Really now, what do you think prospects are doing when we say these things?

(Hint: They are not scrambling for a pen.)

When I’m the prospect, I really do feel quite guilty (okay, maybe only slightly guilty ... all right, not even the least bit of remorse) when I respond with an “Okay, I will keep you in mind.”

These call-ending phrases make liars out of prospects.

Face it. They have no intention of “keeping us in mind,” let alone writing down our number.

These phrases don’t accomplish anything positive, and give no reason for the listener to ever want to consider “keeping you in mind” or calling you.

But you can and should salvage something from these calls. Here’s what you should do and say instead.

1) Determine if there would ever be potential for a sale.

A money and time-wasting mistake is hanging on to prospects when there’s no shred of evidence that the person ever intends to buy. These types of “prospects” typically get recycled through your CRM over and over again.

You peruse the notes, and get that aching pang in your stomach recalling your last dead-end call. And since there’s nothing leading you to believe they’re any better of a prospect today, you simply page through to the next prospect, postponing the inevitable. Or you call and experience either rejection or yet another put-off.

What to do instead?

Find out for sure if they have the potential to buy. Ask.

Here's an example of what you might say:

“Ben, under what circumstances would you ever see yourself considering another provider?”

Notice the wording here. It’s a question that not only asks if they ever would use someone else, but inquires after the circumstances that would surround such a decision. If your prospect answers your question with a specific scenario, then you have an opportunity to pick up on that remark and continue questioning.

On the other hand, if they say, “Look, you’re wasting your time buddy. Quit calling me,” write them off and move on. And feel good about it, since you obtained a decision.

When you continue to recycle contacts who will never buy from you, you're simply rescheduling the next brush-off. Don't do that.

Your most precious commodity is time. Protect it with all you have, since you'll never get it back.

2) Proactively give the buyer something to think about.

To reiterate, “Keep us is mind” is a worthless phrase.

If you truly want someone to keep you in mind, give them a reason. And tie it into a problem they might experience -- a problem you could solve.

That might prompt them to not only think of you, but better yet, to call you.

Let’s say a sales rep knows she can help a company lower their property taxes, but they either don’t see the need at this point, or don’t believe her. She might end the call with:

“I still feel we can help you. Here’s something to consider: When you review your property tax itemization, take a look at the specific valuation and charges for your out-of-state properties. If you feel those taxes are high, keep in mind we are specialists on the tax laws in every state, and know the best way to challenge, and eventually lower the bill. I’ll send you an email with my contact info in it, so keep it in your tax file, and give me a call then if you feel it would help.”

Don’t make liars out of people. Determine if there will ever be potential for a sale. If not, move them out of your system and look at that as a victory. If there is, give them examples of situations to look for, and associate them with the problem you can solve. When they do experience these problems, they just might think of you.

Editor's note: This post originally appeared on Smart Calling Online and is republished here with permission.

Salespeople get a bad rap. In HubSpot Research's newest study, Buyers Speak Out: How Sales Needs to Evolve, respondents were asked to submit the word they most associated with salespeople.

The #1 response? "Pushy."

Yikes. Persistence is part of being a salesperson. In fact, 80% of sales require five or more follow-ups. And there's an obvious difference between consistently adding a bit of value with each check-in and doggedly pursuing prospects who have, in no uncertain terms, told you they're not interested.

But the contrast between persistence and pushiness isn't always so clear. If you're doing any of the things on the list below, you might be coming off as pushy without even realizing it.

1. Never call or email without new updates to share.

What you think: You're keeping yourself top-of-mind and on your prospect's radar.

Why it's pushy: You're keeping yourself top-of-mind, all right -- as that annoying salesperson who won't stop calling. Don't reach out unless you have something new to share; otherwise you're taking up your prospect's time without providing any value.

2. Always ask a different question.

What you think: You haven't gotten the information you need, so it can't hurt to ask again ... right?

Why it's pushy: Your prospect has already answered your question to the best of their ability, so why keep beating a dead horse? Try phrasing your question a different way or coming at it from a different angle to avoid exhausting your prospects.

3. Avoid talking about your product right away.

What you think: Your product is great! Why wouldn't a prospect want to hear about it?

Why it's pushy: Never lead by talking about your product. Unless your prospect is already quite familiar with your product's value proposition, starting with the value it brings and how it will change your prospect's business is a more effective way to get a conversation started.

4. Skip declarative words and phrases ("should," "have to," "need to," etc.)

What you think: You try to spend time during each sales call giving advice and sharing best practices with your prospects.

Why it's pushy: Your intentions are noble, so keep doing what you're doing. The problem here is a matter of semantics. Telling a prospect repeatedly what they "should" or "have to" or "need to" do comes off as bossy and condescending even if your only intent is to help. Instead, try phrases like, "Businesses like yours have seen success …" or "What we've found drives results is …"

5. Ask questions instead of making statements.

What you think: You're an expert on the vertical you sell into, so there are a few safe assumptions you can make about your prospect's business.

Why it's pushy: While your prospect's business might function like the hundreds you've seen before in their industry, you don't necessarily know the specifics. Even if you have a pretty good sense of what the answer might be, asking questions such as, "So I've seen X problem a lot at companies like yours, are you experiencing something similar?" shows your prospect that you care about their unique perspective, while simultaneously showing off your expertise.

6. Don't answer objections with "But … "

What you think: You're just trying to handle objections, and "but" is the first filler word that comes to mind.

Why it's pushy: Constantly saying "but" comes off as argumentative and puts prospects on the defensive. Instead, try the Ransberger Pivot:

1. Acknowledge your prospect's objections.
2. Understand their hesitation, or ask questions until you do.
3. Find a common goal burned in your prospect's objections, and build on it to convince them your offering is the best way to achieve that end.

7. Treat all objections as unique.

What you think: You (understandably) want to make the sale, so sometimes you find yourself on autopilot when answering objections.

Why it's pushy: There's a significant difference between, "This problem is a priority for us, but let's wait until next quarter to talk … " and "We've had seven straight quarters of losses -- we just can't afford to implement anything right now."

Not all objections are created equal. Some can be resolved simply by educating your prospect. Some are a result of inertia and can be mitigated by creating a sense of urgency. But there are always objections that stop a deal in its tracks, and treating those like minor concerns that can be talked away won't endear you to your prospects. Learn to spot the difference between brush-offs, points of confusion, and true blockers.

8. Let your prospect off the phone.

What you think: Your prospect actually picked up! You've got to take advantage of the opportunity and cover as much as possible.

Why it's pushy: Your prospect is busy. Really busy. If they're a good fit for your product, schedule a longer call when they have more time and follow up with helpful resources so you stay on their radar.

9. Never force the offering.

What you think: You're trying to pique your prospect's interest by mentioning new product lines or services that could benefit them.

Why it's pushy: Offering an add-on or trying to go for an upsell isn't inherently bad. Just be sure you're telling a coherent story that ties all your offerings together. Making it clear that you're tailoring a specific set of products for your prospect avoids the impression that you're throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.

10. Know when to say when.

What you think: If you just try a little harder, maybe your prospect will buy.

Why it's pushy: It's unfortunate, but let's face it -- you won't win every deal. At some point in most closed-lost deals, it becomes apparent that there's no more you can do, and continuing to pester a prospect will leave a bad taste in their mouths. So know when to throw in the towel. Your time is better spent on prospects who stand a good chance of closing.

11. Get buy-in from your prospect.

What you think: You've gone through this sales process hundreds of times before, and you know what makes sense for your buyers.

Why it's pushy: Besides the fact that it's just not smart to try and run a sales process without confirming your prospect is okay with it, it's also bad manners. At every step of the way, check to see whether your proposed next steps make sense. Not only will your prospect appreciate your solicitousness, getting their buy-in on small steps will psychologically make it easier for them to say "yes" to the big ask -- would you like to buy?

12. Speak slowly and allow your prospect to respond.

What you think: You're naturally a fast talker and an enthusiastic person.

Why it's pushy: You're understandably excited about your product and eager to share its value with prospects. But blazing through a conversation creates the impression that you're just waiting until your prospect's done speaking so you can talk again. Cutting prospects off is a no-no as well -- in fact, the less you speak, the more useful information you're likely to get.

13. Align your calls-to-action with your prospect's buying stage.

What you think: You can tell your buyer has the business pain your product solves, and you want to help them by jumping into a formal sales process.

Why it's pushy: Just because you can tell a buyer suffers from X business pain doesn't mean they've realized it yet. So even if a call-to-action will eventually be useful for them (like a product demo), offering it when they're still in the education stage just makes it seem like you're rushing them along because you want to close a deal. Instead, move the sales process forward by teaching your buyers about their problems and helping them devise a solution that includes your product if appropriate.

14. Take no for an answer.

What you think: You know certain commitments make prospects far likelier to close, so if at first you don't succeed in getting the buyer's phone number, an introduction to the signing authority, or a meeting with Procurement, you keep trying.

Why it's pushy: Your prospect has rejected your request for a reason. They don't feel comfortable giving you the information or help you've requested, and asking again will only make them more uncomfortable.

The issue probably stems from how and when you asked. If you haven't explained why your ask will benefit your prospect and timed it appropriately, of course they'll say no. It's fine to ask for their personal number on the first call (provided you give context, such as, "It'll make it easier to answer questions and schedule future meetings if we have each other's cells.") However, it's typically not a good idea to ask for an intro to the decision maker -- you haven't yet proven your value.

15. Vary your outreach.

What you think: You have the buyer's email address, so when you're trying to connect with them or engage them after they've gone dark, you keep sending emails.

Why it's pushy: It's the "boy who cried wolf" effect. After a while, your buyer will completely tune out your messages. The same holds true no matter which channel you're using -- if you keep calling them or nudging them on social media, you'll quickly become a nuisance.

To avoid this issue, spread your outreach across multiple mediums. Here's a sample schedule:

• Day 1: Email.
• Day 3: Call (leave a voicemail.)
• Day 4: Like their post on LinkedIn.
• Day 6: Call (don't leave a voicemail.)
• Day 8: Email.
• Day 10: Send a break-up email.

Simply mixing up your outreach decreases the chances you'll seem stalkerish.

The behavior that comes off as pushy to buyers likely sparks from your excitement to share insights with your prospects and help as many as possible. This isn't a bad attitude to have. But realize that you won't get through to prospects who are frustrated with yet another "pushy" salesperson. Avoid these bad habits so you never lose a deal for the wrong reasons.

Ad fraud is a constant battle for advertisers, agencies, and publishers alike. We’ve seen who commits online advertising fraud and where it hides, but how do we get rid of it with the rise of programmatic advertising? In short, you don’t, but there are ways to help mitigate the damage.

Programmatic advertising has led to the beginning of the end for the traditional manual ad purchasing model. With programmatic, exchanges are all digital and completed within milliseconds of a page being loaded on a website, allowing purchase decisions to be made automatically.

However with any automated process, there’s a level of uncertainty.

Source: eMarketer

Ad fraud breeds and multiplies when advertising works well. Programmatic advertising brings a tremendous amount of positives to the industry, but it’s a natural alignment for ad fraud to run rampant.

So how do you keep ad fraud out of the programmatic funnel? You don’t. But you can limit its effects. Here’s how.

Domain Identification in the Programmatic Transaction

Fraudsters thrive on hiding their identities and morphing themselves into someone they’re not. Some create websites that have a high-volume of bot traffic and others spoof a trusted website to surpass the whitelists. In both instances, they can breach the whitelist, becoming a trusted advertiser, until they’re caught and placed on a blacklist.

This simply stops that source from tricking the system, but doesn’t stop fraudsters’ other domains from continuing to breach the programmatic transaction.

By making the domain known, programmatic buyers can better understand patterns that pop-up with programmatic purchases from certain domains. Since it’s hard to keep up on the rapidly changing environment, sharing this information will help the entire industry weed out the unscrupulous performers.

Use Dynamic Fraud Elimination Techniques as a Standard

Many advertisers routinely filter traffic through a third-party scoring system to identify what’s considered fraudulent traffic. While this is helpful, it’s only as effective as the filter they’re scoring through.

It’s well known that fraud scoring technology can help remove some fraudulent traffic; but what one company considers fraudulent, another might consider legitimate. And since there’s no set standard among these companies, the programmatic funnel passes muddied results right along through the supply chain.

The digital advertising industry needs to agree on a dynamic fraud elimination standard, and insert it into the programmatic funnel. Once all impressions are judged equally earlier in the supply chain, we can all reduce the bids on fraudulent impressions, taking fraudsters down in the area they benefit the most.

Source: BuzzCity

For brands, if they’re consistent with asking suppliers about their ad fraud practices, a standard will emerge in time. But this needs to be a consistent conversation, not one brands turn a blind eye to when the metrics are outperforming the standard. The old adage “if it’s too good to be true, it probably is” couldn’t be more true with digital advertising.

Include Transparency in Programmatic Supply

Programmatic thrives on split-second decision making and automatic placement of advertising on websites. But, how transparent is this process? It’s not, not at all.

If the process itself isn’t transparent, how are we supposed to understand what’s happening in the marketplace? We can’t.

Brands want that transparency, and want to know exactly where their advertising is displayed and what websites it appears on. Think of programmatic supply as one big puzzle:

• Advertisers focus on one section of the puzzle, failing to move forward until that section is complete.
• Publishers rush to provide all the pieces even before the advertisers might need them.
• Brands step back and look at all the pieces of the puzzle, how they’re arranged, and what’s different or missing.

Brands want the transparency that the advertisers and publishers are missing out on by focusing only on one part of the puzzle. Brands understand that to be truly transparent, they need to know where the puzzle pieces originated, how they fit together, and where the missing pieces lie.

Find a Common Ground Between Quality and Convenience

Source: AdExchanger

Paraphrasing Clear Channel’s Bob Pittman at the recent IAB annual meeting, advertisers love convenience and given the choice between it and quality, quality will fall to the wayside every time.

But advertisers are also the first to point out when quality is not up to par. So what gives? Currently, there’s no common ground between quality and convenience, and there needs to be.

Using dynamic fraud elimination early in the transactional process will help, but it won’t eliminate any fraud that slips in after this step in the process (e.g. scrapped sites, spoofing, etc.). To best conquer this problem, publishers and advertisers have to meet in the middle:

• Publishers need to take responsibility for providing premium, quality traffic inventory. Fraud-free traffic can drive more demand and higher CPMs.
• Advertisers should stop hesitating when investing their ad spend. Once you look at your results, you can (and should) reinvest in true, premium traffic. This will encourage publishers to offer more of this quality inventory.

Once advertisers hold publishers to a higher standard and demand consistent fraud elimination metrics from third-party providers, ad fraud overall will be reduced. Advertisers must hold quality to as high of a standard as convenience to help eliminate the ad fraud issue in programmatic, and elsewhere, once and for all.

What’s the ROI of PR? It depends on who you ask. If you ask a sales manager or a VP of sales, they’re liable to give you a very different answer than the VP of communications, and the answer may not always be pleasant or positive.

Why is this the case, when there are ways to quantifiably demonstrate the value of public relations?

The answer can be summed up in one word: BANT.

In sales, especially in complex transactions (houses, mortgages, cars, high value B2B and B2C), the acronym BANT has been the gold standard of lead qualification ever since IBM introduced it into its sales processes decades ago. BANT stands for four characteristics that define the quality of a sales lead:

• Budget: does the lead have the fiscal means to make a purchase? No money, no sale.
• Authority: does the lead have the ability to sign on the dotted line, or are there others in the approval process? Selling to a committee is much more onerous than selling to an individual.
• Need: does the lead have a need for your product/service? No need means you have to generate demand, a much harder process.
• Timeframe: does the lead have a clear deadline for purchase? No timeframe means no urgency, and a much tougher sale.

The ideal lead to a salesperson is someone who has plenty of money, solo approval authority, a clear need, and an urgent timeframe.

Now, consider the outcomes of effective public relations. Ultimately, we generate audiences who are aware of what we have to offer and trust in our brands and reputation. Awareness and trust are meta-qualities which influence a sale; no trust means the sale never even gets started. No awareness means the customer never enters the funnel at all.

The outcomes of PR are so much higher in the funnel that the average salesperson doesn’t see them at all. Marketing – the process of converting qualified members of an audience into leads – sits between PR and sales.

If public relations professionals want to demonstrate our worth downfunnel, how would we convert what we do into the language of sales? Using attribution analysis tools like Google Analytics, we can help identify the value of the audience we create.

• Budget: are our public relations efforts reaching a qualified audience that has budget? Tools like website visitor analytics (shown below) can tell us if we’re reaching companies of the right size.
• Authority: are our public relations efforts reaching an audience with authority? Look in your marketing automation software at the job titles of people coming into your marketing funnel. Are they the right people?
• Need: does the audience we’re examining have clear needs? Look in Google Analytics at Behavior Flow. Are more visitors (audience) on key pages like services and product pages?
• Timeframe: are our PR campaigns timed to known seasonality in our business sales cycle? Is coverage appearing when buyers are starting to shop or beginning the RFP process?

Here’s an example in Google Analytics of identifying companies. Assuming you have goals and goal values set up properly, go to Audience > Technology > Network, and sort by either number of conversions/transactions or conversion value. Look at the networks where your highest value conversions are coming from. Some of them will be corporations, as shown here:

With this information, you can start to identify if you’re reaching the right businesses and places with your PR efforts.

Sales and public relations can speak the same language, the language of business success. We just need to understand key outcomes for each team and how our results lead to others’ results and vice versa for maximum impact.

Out of all of the functional strategies, marketing and sales are tied most closely.

Amazingly, SBI discovered that 39% of sales leaders have no sales strategy. Without a sales strategy, aligning with the marketing strategy is impossible. But this strategic alignment is critical to hitting your number in 2016.

The sales team needs leads from marketing to be successful. And the marketing team needs feedback on those leads to improve quality going forward. The two strategies are perpetually connected.

You must have a sales strategy that is aligned with the other functional strategies in 2016. It’s the only way to systematize revenue growth. After creating your strategy, aligning with Marketing should be one of your highest priorities. Here’s why.

It's finally done. The contract is signed. Another customer is on the books. It's all smiles and high-fives — you’ve even had a new client celebration within your company.

Everyone on your end is ready to get to work on a new — and hopefully profitable — relationship. But that excitement and eagerness don't seem to go both ways. Your new customer isn't responsive when you reach out, and when they do get in touch, they're throwing out demands that extend beyond the contract they signed.

You don't have a solid grip on what they want, what to expect, or what to do. You're not just on a different page, you're in a different book entirely. Before you know it, all that thorough preparation and excitement go to waste, and what was once a promising relationship starts to sour before you even send out your first invoice.

Plenty of businesses fall into similar traps to the one described above. Those kinds of hitches are both real and cause for major concern — concern that begs certain questions.

"How can I avoid a dilemma like that? Are there any avenues to ensure my new client and I understand each other? What does it take to make sure a customer cooperates without curveballs or pitfalls?"

Well, one of the more prominent, effective ways to remedy those issues is known as a kickoff meeting. Here, we'll explore its purpose a little further and review a template that covers all the bases you need to account for when conducting one of your own.

The first 90 days of a business relationship set the tone for its duration. That's why it serves you to develop an onboarding process that proves they made the right choice and promotes synchronicity between both parties.

Enter the kickoff meeting.

This meeting or call is a conversation with the major stakeholders to ensure that everyone is on the same page. It helps you create a plan, define a list of priorities, and reaffirm the goals you uncovered during the sales process.

Your kickoff meeting will help you develop a deeper understanding of your client's strengths and weaknesses — along with other opportunities that might be at play. And with those key findings at your disposal, you can start to construct a strategic plan involving:

• Concrete business goals
• A competitive analysis
• A review of the client’s previous efforts
• Buyer personas
• Established benchmarks
• KPIs you will measure on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis

Try not to gloss over anything here — this document will be the basis of your work for at least the next three months. And as far as the meeting itself goes, here are some key elements to incorporate into yours if you don't know where to start. 

1. Introductions

Give everyone in the meeting a chance to introduce themselves and explain what their role is. The project team includes both your agency’s staff and the client’s team. It's an excellent opportunity to get to know each other.

This should also give you insight into each person’s expertise — something that will come in handy when delegating and executing responsibilities like creating content.

The ultimate goal here is to build rapport with the group and create an air of collaboration. You'll most likely be working closely with the people in this meeting in the coming months — it's never a good policy to keep them nameless and faceless.

2. Goals

Here's where you finally apply the interests and ambitions you discussed with your client during the sales process — take the vaguer discussions you've had and pare them down into legitimate goals. And when you set those benchmarks and milestones, be sure to make them SMART:

• Specific: Determine the type of goal you're pursuing and make sure it's not too broad or vague. For instance, "getting more views on the company blog" is not a specific goal, but something like "improving average traffic generated by paid social" is.
• Measurable: Establish how you will track the goals. The client might want to increase brand affinity, but you need to develop a process for measuring and reporting the success — or failure — of a specific goal. Extending the example above, you might want to measure the traffic stemming directly from your client's paid social efforts and how it stacks against the total traffic their blog is generating.
• Attainable: Find out the client’s previous efforts. Try to benchmark what has been done before so that you can showcase growth. If a client's blog generated 500,000 organic sessions in the past year, setting a goal of 5,000,000 organic sessions per month probably isn't the way to go.
• Realistic: Similar to the point above, you need to temper your client's expectations if they're too ambitious. Again, 5,000,000 organic sessions for our sample client would be awesome, but it's a bit over the top and sets both parties up for failure.
• Timely: Establish a deadline for achieving these goals. Setting a goal that you'd like to achieve in three months is more practical and motivating than one set without a timeframe in mind.

3. Plans

Based on the goals you’ve established, you can then begin to work out what the tactics for accomplishing those goals will include.

For example, a HubSpot client kickoff meeting could include these sample goals:

• Attract X unique visitors per month.
• Increase visitor-to-lead conversion rate by X.
• Convert X visitors into leads.
• Increase lead-to-customer conversion rate by X.
• Obtain X customers from inbound marketing.

And these plans for reaching the goals:

• Increasing the publishing frequency of the blog
• Developing top-of-the-funnel ebooks and whitepapers
• A/B testing calls-to-action for ebooks
• Using email to nurture leads effectively
• Developing a lead scoring system to identify high opportunity leads

You probably won't (and shouldn't) develop a concrete and exhaustive plan during the meeting, but you can start to outline some tactics that will help the client reach their highest priority goal as soon as possible.

4. Challenges

This section of the meeting is essentially the starting point of a task list — a list you'll refine and polish during your post-meeting reporting. Here, you'll discuss your client's competition, immediate blockers, and other obstacles.

Then, you can start to develop a chart that outlines the findings and insights from your conversation. That will come in handy when you're discussing your broader strategy.

5. Timelines

Based on the challenges and goals you've gone over with your client, you can identify high-priority items that your team needs to address immediately. Also, this is an opportunity to discuss if the client has any company-wide goals they'd like to meet.

If they have quarterly reporting, then you'll want to adjust the pace of your projects to reflect this. You need a clear understanding of the results the client wants to see and when they want to see them.

6. Roles and Responsibilities

You're entering a partnership with the client on the other side of this meeting — a two-way street. There are certain tasks and processes your company needs to deliver on and others that fall on the customer.

Get to know the internal structure and processes the client has in place and determine where your company’s product or service fits in. And don’t be afraid to set expectations for the client. You need to show results, which means you will need information, support, and approval from their team.

An unruly client, operating on a totally different page is a migraine waiting to happen. Both parties need to know what they're getting into, what they expect from one another, and the results they're hoping to see. It's tough to get there by winging it — that's why the idea of conducting a kickoff meeting at least warrants some consideration.

There is no one magic formula for outbound sales success. There is no silver bullet subject line that will make everyone open your email. There is no best time to call a prospect.

Yet sales professionals are in a constant search for an elixir. To be honest, that was me at one point, too. However, with a proven system and some guidance, you can discover the follow-up strategy that works best for you.

There are a lot of resources out there for identifying and creating your ideal client profile. Numerous posts have been written about creating a targeted leads list. There are hundreds of templates for your initial outreach emails.

That’s all great, but now it’s time to tie all of this together in a broader outbound sales strategy.

When creating your outbound strategy, you need to take into account four considerations:

1. Number of touchpoints
2. Outreach channels
3. Time between touchpoints
4. Content of touchpoints

1) Number Of Touchpoints

Often times, sales reps will stop reaching out after two or three attempts. The rep thinks “I just gave them my best pitch. If they don’t buy now, I don’t know when they’re going to buy.”

But this is a mistake. The reality is that sales take time, especially big ticket deals. Much of the sales process hinges on where the prospect is in their buying journey, and there’s no real way to know with 100% certainty.

So how many times should you follow up?

Much research (and debate) has been devoted to this topic. While there’s no golden rule and you should find what works best for you, the general consensus among experts is seven or more touches. Here’s one thing that we know for sure: Persistence wins.

Of course, this isn’t the only piece of the equation. Even if there was such a thing as the perfect number of touches — let’s say it is in fact seven — reaching out this number of times at the wrong intervals through the wrong channels or with the wrong message will doom your campaign.

Let’s look at the other pieces of an effective outbound sales strategy.

2) Outreach Channels

Email isn’t the only way to follow up. Pairing email with phone calls and social media outreach is usually a winning strategy. One effective practice is calling and immediately sending a follow-up email.

If you really want to get on the prospect’s radar without being a nuisance, add social media to the mix by favoriting a prospect’s tweet and then following them an hour later. When they follow you back, you can then send a direct message via Twitter.

You can use a similar approach on LinkedIn. Comment or “like” a post your prospect has written. However, stay away from Facebook and Instagram interactions. These channels are personal environments and not appropriate for sales talk.

3) Time Between Touchpoints

At what cadence should you check in with prospects? I recommend being a little more persistent early on, then tapering off if the buyer hasn’t responded. We’ve seen great results sending the second touch a day or even 12 hours after the first.

Forget about those reports and articles about “the best day to send emails.” Have you noticed they always change? One authority comes out and says Wednesdays at 3 p.m. are the best time of the week to send emails. Then, everyone start sending at that time. Guess which day is now a terrible time to send an email?

Here is an example of a cadence that we’ve found works well:

• Day 1: Call and email
• Day 2: Email and Twitter
• Day 3: Twitter
• Day 5: Email and LinkedIn
• Day 7: Email
• Day 10: Call and email
• Day 17: Email and Twitter
• Day 21: LinkedIn
• Day 28: Call and email

The days are going to vary a little depending on who you’re trying to reach. For instance, people lower on the corporate totem pole often don’t check their email during weekends. However, if you’re starting at the top, then you can follow this calendar to the day. Most directors and VPs check their email every day of the week, and at nearly every hour. We’ve even seen great results from sending emails to VPs at 5:30 pm on a Friday!

4) Content Of The Touchpoint

The content of your email is largely going to determine if you come across as an annoying pest or a persistent businessperson. Starting each successive touch with “just checking in” or “just following up” gets old fast.

Don’t be boring. Have a little personality. Here are four touchpoint content guidelines to follow:

1. Reemphasize business value. It’s all about what you can do for the prospect. Find a way to show them value. Talk to their pain points.
2. Offer insights. Again, make it about them and their benefits. It could be sharing a different way to approach their problems or a novel idea for how they can reach goals.
3. Educate. Don’t pitch in your follow-ups. Instead, offer a piece of valuable content, whether it’s a whitepaper, ebook, webinar recording, case study, etc.
4. Share news. Why do you think social media is so addictive? One reason is that people want to stay up on news. They don’t want to miss out on anything. Follow up with prospects by sending them relevant industry news, product updates, or competitive announcements.

Putting It All Together

Now that we have all the pieces of a successful outbound sales strategy, it’s time to start executing. Decide on a number of touchpoints. Vary the mediums you use to reach out. Assign a schedule to your touchpoints. Finally, decide on and create the content.

You can make all of these decisions in less than 20 minutes. Decide on your strategy, measure your performance, iterate, and improve.

There are a few popular statistics that inbound marketers like to share when extolling the virtues of our customer-centric approach to selling.

• 200 million Americans have registered their phone numbers on the FTC’s “Do Not Call” list
• 44% of direct mail is never opened
• 86% of people skip television ads
• 84% of 25-34-year-olds have left a favorite website because of intrusive or irrelevant advertising

(The other popular statistics concern a) how much cheaper inbound marketing is than traditional, and b) results statistics showing the success of inbound–but those are topics for another time.)

The above figures are notable for one reason: they all prove that people increasingly hate being sold to.

(For more proof, see a great article Seth Godin recently published about the rise in popularity of ad blocking technology – something that threw “traditional” marketers into a tither!)

And with good reason. Consumers are savvier than ever and know where to turn when they need to solve a problem or challenge they are dealing with. They can be in control of what information they receive, how they receive it, and how they use it.

The time of pushing our way into customer’s hearts and minds is long gone. In some ways, the hard sell has become the desperate approach–the last-ditch effort to get a quick numbers boost. But it’s simply not the way to grow significantly and create long-term customers.

Take sales calls. In addition to the pretty damning figure mentioned above, consider that 57% of a typical B2B purchase decision is made before a customer even talks to a vendor. The customer is seeking out and deciding for themselves what they want and need, and not relying on a hard pitch.

So how are they making these decisions, and how can your company be the decision they make?

Educational, relevant content.

If you want to be considered as the solution, then show your customers that you understand their problem. And not just the problem that will lead them to choosing your product as the solution; that’s the hard sell dressed up as content marketing. Instead, build trust with them by educating them on multiple aspects of the sphere they’re searching. Demonstrate your expertise not just on your product, but within your industry, so that they see you as an authority figure and thought leader, and your website worth their browsing time.

Customers recognize the hard sell phone call, the one that has nothing to do with what they actually want and all to do with the company hitting their monthly figures. The gig is up; they get it, and it’s why so many ignore it. It’s time to give them what they want instead. Valuable content that they actually want to read, information that they are seeking in their online searches.

Do you want to be their solution? Then don’t just tell them that you are with an annoying, intrusive ad. What validity is there in that? Instead, show them by demonstrating your understanding of the world they’re exploring. Address their pain points, other relevant areas of concern, general advice, and yes, maybe how your product can help too, but in a larger context.

Reach your customers where they are, in the way they want to be spoken to, with material that’s worth their time. Rid yourself of disgruntled prospects sick of the hard sell in favor of quality leads who appreciate and seek out the education they get from an informed authority like you.

  Don’t end a sales call without asking one more question! Often when you ask “one more question,” you discover information that then leads to more questions. Ultimately, the customer will share more than you could have imagined, which equips you to better meet and exceed their expectations. Don’t come up short when wrapping up a […]

“Social selling” is certainly a red-hot buzzword but it is also one of the most difficult cultural changes to attain in a company. So often we have training and expectations and then sales people go right back to the way they have always done things.

That’s why I was so pleased to see some real research come out on this topic from Dr. Ari Lightman of Carnegie Mellon University. The work was sponsored by Dell and can be found in its entirety here.

Here are some big take-aways from one of the first real academic views of social selling.

Social selling best practices

Interviews with social selling rockstars revealed these best practices:

• Know your prospects on social media. Transition events can trigger selling opportunities.
• Build social credibility by focusing on relationships.
• Do your social homework. Don’t just follow individuals. Follow companies for relevant organizational news.
• Go beyond the digital divide. Look for social media updates that prompt opportunities for human contact.
• Cold calling — Don’t do it. It fails 97 percent of the time and with social selling there is no need for that any more.

Content as sales catalyst

Strategic and consistent content is providing a competitive advantage for sales organizations. CMU found that 72 percent of B2B buyers actively use social media to build relationships and gather information on a company and products.

However, publishing content consistently is not a catalyst for engagement. Engagement is driven by subjects that capture the attention of the target audience.

Content trends include gamified user engagement, data-driven content, internal links to content, product-specific blogs, and gated premium content.

Another trend is re-publishing “social proof” articles from other media sites on the company blog.

B2B buyers seem to appreciate high quality images. The research showed that posts with high quality images received 200 percent more engagement on LinkedIn.

Developing buyer personas aid many social selling efforts but they must be adjusted on an on-going basis to reflect changing business dynamics and the stage of the decision process.

 

Measuring social sales success

Although actual SALES is what we are all after, companies are also using a variety of leading indicators of progress:

• Number of community members and engagement
• Percentage of support calls saved
• Number of visits to rep pages/profiles
• Product/company mentions across social channels
• Number of new seller connections and contacts

Which social platforms matter most?

The research found that two different platforms had the most impact on purchasing professionals. LinkedIn was named as the most important platform among purchasing executives and company blogs was listed as the most important among non-executive professionals. Some of the interesting findings:

• 40 percent of purchasing professionals use LinkedIn before ever contacting a company.
• A warm referral through LinkedIn increases sales success between 200 and 400 percent.
• While LinkedIn was seen as the most popular platform by both purchasing and sales professionals, sales people name Twitter as the second-most important platform due to the real-time conversations and opportunity for rapid conversations and responses.
• Companies who integrate Twitter into their sales efforts find twice as many leads as those who don’t.
• Facebook is seen as a convenient one-stop shop to access highly-segmented consumer groups, launch marketing campaigns, and advertise.
• Slideshare is becoming increasingly popular to share product presentation decks.
• Spiceworks is a growing platform to share information on IT-related products.

Organizing for success

The best social selling organizations are cross-functional and collaborative. For example, the product manager has the latest information on product developments. An engineer will know how the product works. Marketing communications people can integrate materials and provide creative treatments. The social media team will know how to adjust the content for various platforms.

The best organizations have a process to create high quality content and track its progress and success.

For more information I hope you’ll check out the full report and on-going updates on the Social Selling Facebook page.

This post was written as part of the Dell Insight Partners program, which provides news and analysis about the evolving world of tech. For more on these topics, visit Dell’s thought leadership site PowerMore. Dell sponsored this article, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent Dell’s positions or strategies.

Illustrations courtesy Dell. 

The post New research: An exceptional path to social selling success appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

One short, Liam. (You’ll understand soon.) 

The first thing that you’re taught as a sales rep -- it’s pretty much Sales 101 -- is to solve for the customer. After all, prospects won’t buy your product if it doesn’t do something for them, right?

You need to understand their pain point, and then explain how your product not only solves it, but actually makes that problem a strength going forward.

But how the heck do you figure out what their problem is in the first place?

LinkedIn doesn’t have a “I need a product to fix this for me” section. Odds are, no one can fit a pressing business need in 140 characters or less, either.

So what’s a salesperson to do? Ask questions, of course. Specifically, the same question, five times.

Let me explain.

The “Five Whys” theory was originally coined by Sakichi Toyoda, who instituted it at Toyota Motors.

Here’s how it worked: If a problem arose during mass production of a vehicle, everything had to be stopped, which cost Toyota a ton of money. So to avoid the same problems coming up again and again, Toyoda would ask his employees why something failed, five times.

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

Overarching problem: Why isn’t the car running?

Why #1 - The battery is dead.

Why #2 - The alternator is not functioning.

Why #3 - The alternator belt has broken.

Why #4 - The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and not replaced.

Why #5 - The vehicle was not maintained according to the recommended service schedule.

After five whys, the solution to the root problem emerged. The lesson? Get your car checked when it’s time to get it checked. 

Salespeople can also benefit from this strategy, by simply asking their prospects why five times.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you sell a customer relationship management service and you notice that a VP of Sales has visited your website a few times during the past few days -- specifically the CRM page. You want to act quickly to set up your first call and capitalize on their interest.

After some initial research, you learn the VP oversees a team of 10 people at a company of 100 people. They’ve already read about your CRM and visited the pricing page several times.

This is how some salespeople might approach this call.

Rep: "I saw you were on our CRM page a few times this past week. Why the interest?"

Prospect: "We’re just always looking at different products. Thought it might be cool to see what you offered."

Rep: "Great. Well, let me tell you about all these awesome things you can do with our CRM."

What a shame. The rep dove straight into the product without really understanding why the prospect was on the pricing page to begin with. In other words, the rep has not yet discovered the buyer’s need, and this will make it difficult to sell much of anything.

Here’s how to use the five whys to understand the prospect's real need and naturally cue up your value proposition.

Rep: "I saw you were on our CRM page a few times this past week. Why the interest?"

Prospect: "Oh, we’re just always looking at different products. Thought it might be cool to see what you offered."

Rep: "Why did you choose to come back to our CRM page a few times?"

Prospect: "We really liked the simple interface, and how the system recorded the last contact with a prospect for you."

Rep: "Why did that feature catch your eye?"

Prospect: "It’s just a little different than the method we use now. Thought it could benefit my team."

Rep: "Why would that help your team?"

Prospect: "Well, they’re always calling the same prospect over and over again because the spreadsheet we use now to track our prospects isn’t as up-to-date as it should be."

Rep: "Why isn’t it as up-to-date as it should be?"

Prospect: "Often times, we’ll just forget to update it as soon as a call ends. It’s really inconvenient. It’s actually resulting in lost leads."

We’ve now discovered the problem: An inefficient CRM is leading to a disorganized sales team, and lost leads. This is the pain point you want to address.

Five questions have revealed what you need to solve for this company. During the next few conversations with this VP, hit on the pain point (lost leads) and lay out your strategy for assuaging it. Explain how easy it is to track everything in your CRM and how your product will keep the VP’s sales reps happy and on track.

The Five Whys method is a simple tactic sales folks can use to get to the root of their prospect’s problem. By using this method, we can truly understand and solve the customer’s pain point, and, in turn, make it a strength of their business.

We’ve been talking about sales and marketing alignment for at least a decade. Haven’t we solved it already?

Well, a quick Google search reveals about 29 million results for the phrase “Sales and Marketing Alignment”, with top results like “7 keys to Sales and Marketing Alignment”, “Best Practices for Sales and Marketing Alignment” and “Secrets to Aligning Sales and Marketing”. And, most of these articles open with phrases like “Addressing the rivalry between sales and marketing…” or “Learn how you can align sales and marketing so both teams not only get along…” So it’s clear that we still have a lot of work to do.

A key motivation for aligning sales and marketing is to improve sales productivity, and ultimately to generate more revenue. With sales productivity in mind, if we approach the problem differently and look at filling in gaps between the two functions as opposed to trying to align them, then we can determine what both teams need to be successful. The result should be less finger pointing and more collaboration.

Lead Content

Every lead contains essential contact information: email address, Twitter handle, phone number, mailing address, etc. This content might be purchased from a list vendor, provided by a web form, collected at a tradeshow, or acquired on the golf course.

When leads are provided by marketing, they should come with additional content such as what webinars they watched, what whitepaper they downloaded, how many pages they viewed and other behavior information. They should also come with other content, such as which messages they will be receiving in the next email and what events they will be invited to.

Numerous marketing automation platforms gather this content, but is it being provided to sales? And if it is, does sales use it? This content can be very important for sales productivity, by allowing them to reinforce the messages they have already received, and prepare them for the content they will be receiving.

ACTION: Ensure that sales is receiving this content, and that reps know how it can influence their conversation

When leads are provided by sales, they should contain similar content, such as how and where they were acquired, what product they are targeted for, what message engaged them, and what series of messages they will be presented with next.

Typical CRM platforms provide sales reps with the tools to capture this information, but is this information being provided to marketing? And if so, do they use it? This content can be very valuable to marketing to guide future segmentation and targeting efforts, so they can maximize the lead generation efforts.

ACTION: Ensure that marketing is receiving this content and that it’s used to guide future lead acquisition efforts.

Selling Content

Every B2B sale is a conversation with multiple facets. When conducting these conversations, is sales equipped with the appropriate content? This content goes beyond the collateral that marketing makes available on the web sites, or includes in emails. This content needs to tell the next chapter in the story, and help sales integrate multiple products, overcome objections and position competition.

It’s quite possible that your marketing department doesn’t have this content, or may just not have a mechanism to communicate it to the sales force. This content frequently exists in the mind of individual SMEs, product managers or practice leaders. It can also live in the heads of senior sales leaders.

Marketing may often not be aware of every step that a sales rep goes through in carrying on a conversation with a prospect, and is rarely aware of when (or if) the materials that they produce are used in the sales conversation. Sales rarely has a mechanism for providing feedback on what they are missing, or what content would have helped close the last deal.

Harnessing content from subject matter experts to support the sales conversation is less about producing the next datasheet, and more about making knowledge accessible and consumable to the sales team. Whether it’s the responsibility of someone in sales or in marketing, organizations need a systematic approach to gather, edit and distribute this content so that it’s used in the right way, for the right audience, at the right time during the buyer’s journey.

ACTION: Ensure that sales communicates what they need, marketing understands the process, and knowledge is flowing to sales.                                                                                                                                                                             

Training and Coaching Content

Sales not only needs to know what to sell to a particular prospect, but also how to sell to that prospect. There is often a rich supply of training content that has been produced to onboard new sales people, and provide updates during annual sales meetings, however it’s frequently owned by the training organization, and languishes in LMS platforms. This content could be a valuable asset to both the marketing and sales organizations, if only they had a way of extracting it, and repurposing it.

Converting long-form training curriculums into ‘bite-size’ modules gives new life to this content. It can become a mechanism for providing sales with just-in-time knowledge as they are preparing to engage with prospects. This content can range from information about product configurations and customer pain points, to reminders on how to interpret the prospect’s web behavior and engagement. Making this content accessible (and mobile-ready) improves sales reps’ efficiency as they engage with prospects, boosting sales productivity.

ACTION: Convert training curriculums to modules to provide sales with just-in-time training and coaching.

Conclusion

By focusing on the content of the sales process, and the way in which content flows from sales, marketing and other departments within your organization, the challenges of aligning marketing and sales become less contentious.

The key is to assign someone with the responsibility for creating, repurposing, organizing and sharing sales content to fill in the gaps. You might call them content architects, content engineers, sales enablement managers or give them similar titles. They may report in to sales or marketing. The title and department are not as important as the job description – responsibility for sales content governance and keeping communications open between sales, marketing and other teams.

Once lines of communication are open and focused on knowledge-sharing, instead of criticism, all parties become more willing to collaborate toward the ultimate goal –healthy, growing revenues and company success.

5 Easy Steps to Nailing a Sale written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

If you would have told me 10 years ago that I would enjoy being in sales, I would have laughed. I am the opposite of pushy, don’t love speaking in front of large groups, and only want what is best for people.

Looking back, that thinking came from me not fully understanding what it takes to be in sales. Now that I have a better understanding, sales is one of the elements I enjoy most about my position. It’s not about being pushy and can most definitely include wanting what is best for someone. It’s about listening, providing value, and developing a relationship. The tough “Always be closing” is a thing of the past.

Today, nailing a sale and nurturing a relationship goes hand and hand. Especially when it comes to bigger ticket items such as landing a new consulting gig.

Below are 5 easy steps that I have learned, and try to follow for every single sales opportunity that comes my way.

Do the Research

There is absolutely no excuse not to at least Google the person you are trying to sell to. A next easy step from there is turning to social media to learn a bit more about their experience and/or personal life. It is incredible what you can find out about people online these days, don’t let that resource go to waste. A huge key to selling is establishing a relationship. If you can find something in common with the person before you get on a call, you are one step ahead. You might also be able to find a positive thing to congratulate them on, such as a birthday, graduation, or an award.  The goal here is to either establish a connection or kick things off on a good note.

Ask the right questions

A second very important thing to keep in mind in sales is asking the right questions. People love to talk, if you can get them going, it is usually a good thing. Ask questions with the goal to get the prospect to admit any pain points they may have. And of course, actually listen to what they have to say with they start speaking. Don’t think about where the conversation is going or what you want to ask next, simply sit, listen, and take in what they are saying. The goal is you could then swoop in with a solution to help them fix any pain points and allow them to go back to only focusing on things they love.

Build Trust

Selling is about building trust. By giving away advice, almost to the point you may be feeling like you are giving away too much, you are able to establish a relationship with the client and to build that very important trust. When I have a sales call with a potential consulting client, I like to give them three very valuable recommendations that they could put into place regardless if we work together or not. I have found that this level of giving keeps the prospect engaged and appreciative for the direction.

Continue to Educate

The relationship doesn’t stop after you say your goodbye on a phone call. And the next step is not as simple as sending a proposal and asking for money. Content is king these days in terms of getting your message out there. However, it is equally important when it comes to sales. We have a large library of eBooks on various marketing-related topics. In addition, we have over 100 worksheets that help our clients focus on their marketing efforts. Access to this library allows me to send valuable resources to prospects after a phone call ends versus simply turning on the hard sales press.

Use tools to track leads

There are so many great tools available to keep tabs on the leads in your funnel. One of my new favorites is called Pipedrive. In a very visual way, Pipedrive allows me to see what phase my leads are in. You start with setting up your own funnel with specific steps in your sales process. Next, you add your leads and any information you have on them. Finally, you can set reminders for calls, emails and meetings and get an email in your inbox each day you have a reminder set.  This helps keep my inbox as clutter-free as possible – which is always a goal for me.

Sara Jantsch is the Vice President of Operations at Duct Tape Marketing.  She oversees day-to-day operations to support the growth of Duct Tape Marketing and the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network.  She focuses on strategic planning, goal setting and directing the operations of the company in support of its goals.  Sara is also a Duct Tape Marketing Consultant and has a very strong passion for working with small business owners that started back at the dinner table as a child. Connect with Sara on Twitter.

Ask any journalist her biggest pet peeve when dealing with brands, and she’ll probably tell you it’s PR teams’ spammy emails.

We live in an increasingly sophisticated marketing world, but many PR and marketing departments still think a mass-emailed press release will earn them media mentions and industry credibility.

This strategy will get your emails sent directly to the trash, not to mention drive many a PR-weary journalist to drink. Traditional press releases suffer from dwindling ROIs and short-lived impact, which is why brands need to amplify their voices through authoritative, resonant content strategies.

Brands like Casper and Dollar Shave Club are getting personal with their content. They’ve hired in-house editorial teams to meet customers at their most intimate moments: in bed and in the bathroom. They’re endearing themselves to the public through unique and influential content, generating increased interest in their products.

Once your audience has interacted with your content, it’s critical to follow up, continue to engage them, and help guide them through the funnel. Clayton Wood, CEO of Identity Labs, says his company has a two-hour response time.

“We want everyone who touches our brand to be impressed with our attentiveness,” he said. “This attention, combined with great written content for each of our clients, helps us keep growing.”

But you don’t have to set up your own editorial team or churn out a near-immediate response to drive sales through content. Producing the following types of materials will raise your brand’s visibility and empower your sales team to close more deals:

Bylined Articles

Placing original content with high-profile publications allows brands to differentiate themselves and position their companies as industry authorities. Sales teams can leverage bylined clips throughout the sales process, from initial outreach to prospect education. Potential clients are more willing to meet with you when they see that respected outlets have published your ideas.

The sales team can use bylined articles to overcome prospects’ objections as well. When a potential customer expresses concerns about certain aspects of your product or service, a sales rep can point to content your company has published on the topic.

For instance, a sales rep might say, “You mentioned in an earlier conversation that you’re concerned about the fact that our company takes a team approach to strategy and execution. I thought I’d share with you an article we wrote on Convince & Convert on the proper structure for strategy teams.”

Being able to respond to prospects’ reservations by showing them that you’ve validated your ideas on a third-party site goes a long way toward earning their confidence.

Infographics

Easily digestible content such as infographics quickly engages early-stage prospects. Once you’ve captured their interest, you can push them deeper into your inbound marketing and sales funnel.

Whitepapers

As with bylined content, sales teams can use whitepapers at multiple points in the conversion process. Whitepapers prove especially useful during the follow-up stage, when sales representatives want to demonstrate that your team is expert enough to handle leads’ accounts. These are also helpful for establishing credibility, demonstrating value to leads that have cooled, and educating prospects on the finer points of your offer.

Case Studies

Once prospects have passed the discovery phase, they want to see objective examples of how your product or service will benefit them. Case studies enable sales teams to give prospects that proof by offering examples of success with similar companies. This type of content builds clients’ trust and earns their full buy-in, not just a tentative agreement to try it and see.

Creating a Dynamic Duo

Marketing and sales should work hand in hand on content strategy. The marketing team creates the content, but the sales department adds valuable input on what types are most effective at engaging and converting prospects. The two teams bring distinct viewpoints and approaches to content, and that’s a good thing.

Together, marketing and sales can identify which publications prospects actually read, not just the ones that sound impressive. They know which tones turn people off and which play best among hesitant customers. They’ve seen how clients respond to content at different points in the process and how their experiences complement one another. By working together, they can create powerful content strategies for the entire funnel.

Use these five steps to boost communication and collaboration between your marketing and sales teams:

1. Create a process to develop and integrate content. The two departments should work out an ongoing schedule for analyzing content performance using a data spreadsheet or analytics template. Then, they can present a more unified customer experience throughout the conversion process.

2. Actively push content to the sales team. Your marketing team should update sales as new thought leadership articles and case studies are published and infographics go live. Equip your sales team with the most up-to-date content you have.

3. Educate your sales team on how to use it. Don’t just throw content at your sales reps and leave them hanging. Highlight the main themes in your bylined articles, explain the details in your case studies and whitepapers, and put your infographics into context. This prepares sales team members to answer prospects’ questions and makes for a more cohesive public message.

4. Revisit wins across the team on what content is succeeding. Schedule regular powwows to discuss which pieces are home runs with prospects and which leave them feeling uninspired. Update your strategies based on the sales team’s feedback.

5. Rinse and repeat with winning content. Once you find something that works, build on it. Sales provides powerful insight into what makes customers tick — especially once they’re deep in the funnel. Marketing should let that guide the content creation process. The two departments should have active, ongoing conversations about how to effectively utilize content and where the biggest lead generation and nurturing wins have occurred.

Content has the power to intrigue, educate, and ultimately convert prospects to your brand. Although content creation is typically marketing’s domain, the sales team makes a powerful ally in maximizing your content’s reach. By collaborating with the sales department, you can create compelling content and drive your conversion rates to record highs.

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A year ago, it was nearly unthinkable that  you'd no longer need a cable or satellite subscription to get ESPN, HBO, Showtime, or TBS. 

But this past year has seen more changes to the TV industry than the decade that preceded it.

An increasing number of people are choosing to cobble together their TV diet through a mix of online apps and services like HBO Now, Netflix, Hulu, and Showtime. 

And we’re just getting started. Some of the biggest technology and media companies are challenging, or getting ready to challenge, traditional TV providers like Comcast, DirecTV, and Time Warner Cable.

Sling TV

Sling, a live TV streaming service from Dish, offers a good view of what live TV could look like for many people in the near future. 

Because Sling streams live TV over the internet, you don't need to install any equipment, like a cable box or satellite dish, in order to use it. Anyone in the US who has a high speed internet connection can subscribe to the service.

Sling TV, which is aimed at cord cutters, starts at $20 per month for a core package of channels that includes ESPN, ESPN 2, TBS, TNT, and more. It's much less expensive, and has fewer channels, than the typical cable bundle. You can also add on packages of sports, movie, kids, lifestyle, news, and Spanish language channels for $5 each, or HBO for an additional $15 per month.

Sling, which Dish announced in January, is available to watch on Apple and Android mobile devices as well as on PCs and TVs that have streaming devices like Roku or the Xbox One.

Although it's a great alternative to cable, Sling isn't, at least not yet, a replacement for many people who subscribe to TV from a company like Comcast or DirecTV.

The service doesn't have a DVR and doesn't have any local channels. It's also had its share of hiccups — it’s had prominent outages during some live events, and some users report that it's had other reliability issues — but the company says it's working hard to improve the experience. 

But it has given millions of Americans another option for TV.

Sony PlayStation Vue

Earlier this year, Sony unveiled PlayStation Vue, a live internet TV streaming TV service. Unlike Sling TV, which is available to anyone in the US with a high speed internet connection, Vue, at least for now, is only available in select cities, like Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Dallas, Miami, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Vue has more channels than Sling, and it's priced more like a traditional cable or satellite package — plans start at $49.99 per month for more than 50 channels.

It's also only available to people who have PlayStation 3 or 4 game consoles. 

The interface is fantastic — it’ll immediately be familiar to any PlayStation owner, and will likely pleasantly surprise people who for years have been used to clunky menus from a legacy TV provider. It also offers a virtual DVR so you can record shows and stream them back later.

Channels vary by where you live, but no plans have ESPN or any channels from Disney, ESPN's parent company, which may be a deal breaker for some sports fans.

Apple

In March, the Wall Street journal reported that Apple is working on a live streaming TV service. 

Apple hasn't said anything about it, but there are plenty of clues and reports that suggest we could see an Apple-branded TV service launch next year.

According to the report in the Journal, the service will have around 25 channels, offering a smaller bundle than the typical TV package. The New York Times reported that the service would also cost less than a cable package — somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 to $30 a month — and could include networks from Disney, Fox, and Discovery, among others. 

Earlier this year, Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS, said in an interview with Re/Code's Kara Swisher that CBS had been talking with Apple about including the network on the service. More recently in an interview on Bloomberg, Moonves said that "something will happen" with Apple, but he doesn't know when.

Re/Code also reported in May that Apple has been working on negotiating with local broadcast channels to include them in a service.

The new Apple TV box, which goes on sale later this month, is a natural home for a live TV service. Apple's updated streaming box is built around Siri, and you can ask it advanced questions like "show me all of the James Bond movies with Sean Connery" or "show me animated TV shows for kids." It's easy to imagine asking Siri to do tasks like "DVR the next episode of the Daily Show," or show you "what's on ESPN right now."

And iOS 9, the latest version of the mobile operating system for iPhones and iPads, also has a picture-in-picture mode for the iPad, which allows you to watch a live video while doing other tasks on the iPad. This would naturally work well with a live TV service.

Apple also recently drastically reduced the price of iCloud, its subscription-based cloud storage service. Apple could possibly use iCloud for a cloud-based DVR service that would allow consumers to record shows to watch later.

Amazon

Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw reported earlier this month that Amazon is considering its own online TV service. The recent Bloomberg story built on a report in the Wall Street Journal from earlier last year, though according to Shaw, Amazon has spoken to NBC Universal and Comcast about including their networks on the service. 

Amazon already offers a Netflix-like on-demand streaming service that comes as part of the company's $99 per year Prime loyalty program. Amazon also recently beefed up its own streaming device, the Fire TV, a natural home for such a service.

The Rest

It wouldn't be at all surprising if other tech giants, such as Google or Microsoft, were also working on live TV services. The business opportunity is huge, and thanks to technological improvements in streaming and increasing internet speeds, consumers no longer have to rely on cable or satellite companies to bring them TV. (Though many do have to rely on cable companies for their broadband service.)

Google has built several platforms and devices, like Android TV, Google TV, and Chromecast, to stream Internet content to the TV. And Microsoft's Xbox One and Surface tablets and laptops would be a natural home for a streaming service.

This is great for consumers

It may be difficult to find the exact service that fits your needs —  you may not be able to replace your expensive cable or satellite package with one of these online service just yet.

Still, this migration of live TV to the internet is great for consumers.

For years, there have been very few options for people to get TV. The cable companies haven’t innovated because they haven't been forced to — many people have ugly, clunky cable boxes, deal with unfriendly user interfaces and menus, have bad experiences with customer service, and pay a ridiculous amount each month for the privilege because there hasn't been competition. 

But TV delivered online removes the barriers. So as soon as a new online TV service launches — a Sling TV or a PlayStation Vue — a new competitor is created overnight. Imagine owning a smart TV or streaming box with three or four options for live TV instead of just one. You win.

And we can expect much more competition in the coming years.

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NOW WATCH: You can talk to the new Apple TV — here’s what it looks like

Imagine this: You're traveling around the world, staying a month at a time in new and exciting cities, all without watching your bank account dwindle down to nothing.

That dream might seem too good to be true years ago, but with the growing popularity of working remotely and advances in budget travel options, it has never been easier.

Australian app developer David McKinney, for example, converted his van into a mobile office complete with electricity and internet.

With a certain set of apps and services, and a little imagination, more people are finding ways to live out their traveling fantasies without breaking the bank.

These 17 apps can help you find work while on a beach in Thailand, and get you a room for the night for free. They can help you find the cheapest travel between two locations and connect you with locals who will show you around the city.

Remote OK helps you find lucrative remote jobs anywhere in the world.

Remote OK is a daily aggregator of remote jobs that is especially useful for those in the tech industry. You can find jobs in web development, design, and also non-tech jobs — though these are admittedly not the focus.

Tech jobs are becoming one of the most easily-outsourced sectors, and Remote OK can be a goldmine for a tech worker looking to tour the world while staying afloat financially.

Price: Free (Web)

Couchsurfing lets you pay absolutely nothing to find a place to sleep.

Couchsurfing is the ultimate lodging tool for anyone on a shoestring budget. The app connects people who want to crash on someone’s couch — or spare room — with someone willing to host them for free.

Gifts are appreciated, but no money ever changes hands. The worldwide community has over 10 million members and functions on the goodwill of its users. If you've never tried it, it is a remarkable feat that this type of community is possible.

Price: Free (iOS, Android, Web)

Airbnb can find you affordable housing — even up in the trees.

Airbnb has become an international phenomenon and is swiftly replacing hotels for many travelers. The company has 600,000 listings in over 34,000 cities and is often more affordable than hotels of similar quality — though without the room service.

Depending on your luck, your host might also be willing to share tips like the best places to get public Wi-Fi. And you can even stay in creative abodes like tree houses or yurts.

Price: Free (iOS, Android, Web)

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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