Rnordman

Sales thought leader Dave Brock and I are in the homestretch of a series for sales managers we’ve been writing for OpenView Labs / Venture Partners. I was honored to contribute at Dave’s invitation, and we’ve had a lot fun sharing the straight truth about sales management, offering guidance to new managers, and attempting to shake some old veterans out of a slumber!

Simplifying sales management has been top of mind as I’ve worked on Sales Management. Simplified., and I’m excited for its release in October.  [Reminder to those who subscribe to my Insider Insights that I’m going to make you a crazy offer once Amazon is fully in-stock…so don’t run out to buy your copy yet. If you are reading this post and not yet signed up to get my posts and special insights via email, you can do that by clicking here, and then you’ll also receive the offer for the new book.]

The five posts I wrote for the OpenView series got more traction and attention than I was expecting, particularly the one about increasing accountability without coming across as a micromanager. And the latest post on the power of your (anti) sales culture garnered a ton of play and comments on social platforms. Since many of you may not have been aware of this series, I wanted provide the opportunity for you to see the topics and if any of the articles might be helpful to you or sales team right now.

Stand figuratively with me at the five-way intersection pictured above and take a look down the various streets. Below I’ve provided a brief description of each post. If one sounds intriguing or particularly relevant, just click on the title to link over to the original post on OpenView’s blog.

 

Do Not Underestimate the Power of Your (Anti) Sales Culture – pulls back the covers revealing the ugly traits of organizations with prominent anti-sales cultures, and also offers a brief description of the single healthiest sales culture I’ve ever seen. I do my absolute best to make the case that culture is not a “soft” topic, but something that deserves a lot more senior management attention.

 

A Double Dog Dare to Relook at Your Sales Roles –  points out that a significant percentage of the sales performance issues I observe in companies revolve around lack of sales role clarity and not having the right people in the right roles. The truth is that a salesperson is not a salesperson. There are as many different types of sales roles as there are colors of crayons, and like the title of a chapter in Sales Management. Simplified., a one-size-fits-all approach to sales roles typically produces ineffective teams and poor results because when it comes to sales positions, one-size does NOT fit all.

 

3 Ways Sales Managers Are Made (and Make Themselves) Completely Useless – is a bold reminder that your job as the sales leader is to ensure your sales team produces results, not to do work. You are not judged on the amount of work you do, the number of emails you send, or meetings you attend. Your job is to get your sales team to produce results. Period.

 

How to Have Sales Team Meetings That Aren’t a Waste of Time – looks at why most sales meetings are painful and seen as a burden by the sales manager and drudgery to the salesperson. It doesn’t have to be that way; sales meetings should engage, energize, equip, and align the team. This post provides three tips to help you create that type of meeting and also a handful of potential agenda topics to get you started.

 

A Foolproof Way to Increase Accountability without Micromanaging Your Salespeople – was the most viewed and shared post I wrote for the series. It contains a very, very simple best practice that has the power to transform your sales culture and increase accountability and results-focus without demotivating the team or causing the manager to be perceived as micromanaging. The key is understanding and implementing a proper “sales management accountability progression.” Read it. I think you’ll like it, appreciate the perspective, and want to dive right into Chapter 20 of Sales Management. Simplified. when it arrives

Hope you find one of these articles valuable. If you there’s one you’d like me to unpack further, shoot me a note and I’ll tackle it in a future post here.

BRUSSELS – An EU official says Russia and Ukraine have ended months of uncertainty and finally reached agreement on supplies of natural gas to Ukraine for the coming winter.

Gas disputes between Russia and Ukraine have led to cut-offs of supply in the past, and one standoff in 2009 caused serious disruptions in shipments of Russian gas to EU countries.

Last winter, Russia and Ukraine struck an emergency deal on gas prices, but that agreement subsequently expired.

EU-brokered talks seeking a similar agreement on gas for the coming winter began in March.

Maros Sefcovic, an EU Commission vice-president, said the new deal was initialed Friday in Brussels by Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak and Ukrainian Energy Minister Volodymyr Demchyshyn. He said it assured Ukraine would receive Russian gas through next March.

The post Russia, Ukraine reach long-sought agreement on winter gas supplies appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Facebook is the top social commerce platform, driving more than two-thirds of mobile e-commerce traffic and boosting social media's quickly growing share of e-commerce web traffic. 

Facebook accounts for 50% of total social referrals and 64% of total social revenue. The site’s social commerce initiatives, including a recent focus on its Messenger app, largely reflect social media's increasingly important role for online retailers.

In a report from BI Intelligence we analyze social media's impact on online retail — whether that's driving direct sales with the use of embedded "Buy" buttons on social media posts, or referring traffic to retailers' websites and apps. We measure the impact social media has on e-commerce by looking at metrics such as conversion rates, average order value, and revenue generated by shares, likes, and tweets. We also outline the latest commerce efforts by leading social networks. 

Access The Full Report By Signing Up For A Full-Access Trial >>

Here are some of the key points from the report: 

• Social is driving much bigger increases in retail traffic than any other online channel. Social media increased its share of e-commerce referrals nearly 200% between the first quarters of 2014 and 2015. 
• For retailers to maintain these social gains, they will need to pay special attention to mobile, where social engagement with retail content is still limited. Social media users are 35% less likely to share a brand's or retailer's social post on mobile than they are on desktop computers.
• Pinterest is a major social commerce player despite a relatively small user base. The pinning platform drives 16% of social commerce. New buy and action buttons on retailer posts should make Pinterest an even stronger referral and revenue engine for brands.
• Twitter is losing its influence for mass-market merchants, but it could still have a role to play among sporting and events marketers, especially for location-based promotions. Recently, NFL and NBA teams have used Twitter to sell game tickets and merchandise. 
• Instagram doesn't drive significant sales activity for retailers but high-end companies have been leveraging the platform for branding purposes. New Buy buttons on paid posts, as well as increased targeting capabilities, could make the app a more important direct-response driver.

In full, the report: 

• Sizes social media's role for retailers compared to other referral sources such as search and email. 
• Examines how social media's transition to mobile is impacting the role of different social platforms.
• Looks at how the different social networks stack up in terms of conversion rates, share of social-generated retail sales, and average order value. 
• Highlights up-and-coming social commerce players such as Snapchat and Instagram, and how brands are using them for influencer marketing. 
• Outlines the latest major commerce moves by Facebook and Twitter, which could help drive up conversion rates from social. 

To access the full report from BI Intelligence, sign up for a 14-day full-access trial here. Full-access members also gain access to new in-depth reports, hundreds of charts, as well as daily newsletters on the digital industry.

Join the conversation about this story »

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Only 1 in 5 marketers earn top marks from the C-suite for their ability to prove their value and contribution, according to a recent marketing performance management survey. That’s not good—and it’s being caused by the fact that the B2B marketing landscape is becoming an increasingly complex, omni-channel environment.

In response to this trend, we’ve seen an influx of more than 1,800 software vendors across 43 categories coming to market with solutions to help B2B marketers address this issue from the top of the funnel to the bottom. However, effective marketing attribution is as much about team alignment, process and strategy as it is about the platform stack.

In today’s post, we’re going to examine how these three “P’s” (people, process and platform) are coming together in the most effective B2B marketing and sales teams today.

Pipeline marketing

Pipeline marketing is the methodology of not focusing lead generation efforts on visits, average time on site, bounce rate or even lead or MQL quotas. Instead it’s based on revenue contribution and working from revenue back to the top of the funnel to dictate decision-making. Visits, average time on site, or bounce rate are only a few of many levers that marketers can use to increase their contribution to pipeline, not the be-all end-all.

For pipeline marketing to be successful, not only must your platforms be aligned to track attribution from the very top of the funnel to the bottom, but also your process and team must be completely aligned around this goal. You need this alignment because marketing is held accountable as a “customer” to the sales team to deliver qualified leads, while sales must also uphold its side of the service-level agreement from SQL to close-won opportunity.

When done correctly, pipeline marketing can significantly accelerate growth. Here’s a great post from Bizible discussing the impact that pipeline marketing has at its organization.

The chief revenue officer

To help foster the alignment, strategy and oversight necessary for this pipeline marketing system to be successful, we have seen the rise of the chief revenue officer.

This rise can be best exemplified by looking at data from Google Trends, which shows the volume of search queries for a given term. We can see the rise of the chief revenue officer emerging in 2011 and gaining adoption ever since:

A former CRO of Interact, Jim Herbold, has observed the rise of the CRO role taking shape, “especially at hyper-growth startups like AdRoll, Mixpanel and New Relic.” In most companies, the CRO will be responsible for a combination of these three core pieces of the growth equation:

1. Sales deals and issues
2. Marketing and the demand funnel
3. Customer success and renewals

This level of executive leadership is a cornerstone of the foundation for pipeline marketing success to ensure that the technology stack is adequate and the team goals and processes are aligned towards the appropriate revenue goals.

The revenue team

The next logical progression of this trend is the revenue team. As the rise of the CRO continues, and marketing and sales departments become increasingly intertwined, CROs will need to move fluidly across these historically separate departments to create and maintain effective management of both people and process.

A unified revenue team can enable visibility throughout the funnel, faster time-to-value from marketing and sales and the ability to use this data to drive better decisions across the funnel. With this in mind, be sure to choose your technology stack wisely from marketing automation to CRM, lay a clearly documented and carefully built marketing and sales process and ensure that both marketing and sales teams are aligned around the same goals. With people, process and platforms all positioned to drive growth, it just becomes a matter of saying “go!”

Social media seems to have been with us forever.

In fact Facebook has turned ten!…that is an eternity in tech. Social media is so old that the fun police have turned up and are threatening to ruin the party.

The no rules and the dope smoking, beer swilling social media parties have started moving into the board room. The swinging 60′s of social have started to be invaded by the serious suits.

The politicians are now even pushing for social media privacy and protection laws. The lawyers have also joined. So don’t post anything too controversial on Facebook.

You may get sued. It is becoming legislated and legal.

At the big end of tech town, companies like IBM and Oracle are investing big bucks and building Enterprise software for social. It is now all about process, management and control.

How boring is that?

But in 2008 when I joined Facebook and Twitter, it was the wild west. There were no textbooks for social and people just leapt on and started playing. Tweeting with someone on the other side of the world who you didn’t know was so cool.

But questions were asked

When there are no rules then the general population feels a bit uncomfortable and starts asking for directions. The command and control economy is still embedded in our psyche.

How many times should I tweet? Is posting on Facebook once a day enough? Should I start a blog or is micro-blogging enough? Can I use my Facebook page like a website?

But maybe it’s time for social to grow up and develop some rules and guidelines and become accountable.

Is that bad?

No. It is time for the social zealots to become more responsible and the return on investment question is not to be shouted down but to be taken on board. It is not just about engagement. That is just the start of the conversation. Social media needs to convert engagement and trust into real leads and sales.

Is it a tad more boring?

Maybe.

There are some new social toys

But there is a still a lot of fun to be had for people who love shiny new toys.

This year has seen the emergence of some exciting new social platforms that remind me of the time I discovered social for the first time. Meerkat and Periscope have introduced us to live video streaming.

When I first used Periscope to observe someone in London streaming their walk to work while chatting it was was bizarre, confronting and very voyeuristic.

Just last week I joined Blab and watched as 4 social media pundits held a late night chat fest while sipping some wine and downing some cans of beer. This was done with 200 people on the virtual reality sidelines cheering, commenting and asking questions.

Conversations and questions centred around how engaging the live global video interaction was and would Blab rule in this connected world.

This engaged global connectedness that social brought us is still intoxicating.

But will these new platforms be game changers?

This question is often asked.

But at the end of the day it comes down to asking some key questions that need to be raised without wearing beer goggles.

• Could they drive more traffic? Not sure at this stage but looks like it may not be worth all the focus, time and the effort for achieving that goal.
• Will they provide more engagement with your prospects and customers? I think the answer to that is a big yes.
• Is it worth the time? Maybe and maybe not. That then begs the question of where and how should my time and resources be best spent.
• Can they make more money for your brand? That is maybe not what a social media purist wants to hear but the CEO will want to know.

The Pareto principle needs to be applied here.

If 20% of your efforts produce 80% of the results then being distracted by shiny new toys could be a tyre spinning exercise. Fun for sure but not a good use of resources.

At the end of the day they will be useful tools to consider for your marketing in the midst of many others.

The growth rates were astronomical

The growth rates at the beginning of the social media revolution were astronomical. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and other social networks grew at rates that hadn’t been seen before in a web world.

That pace has slowed and it is much more organic in 2015.

That is except for some of the new kids on the block such as Periscope, Meerkat and Blab.

One significant driver of social media growth and engagement in 2015 is the impact of smartphones. This is due in part to the populations in developing countries using mobiles as their primary internet device.

So what are the social media facts as we approach the end of 2015.

Facebook facts

Facebook still rules the social media world and is consolidating its dominance on a lot of levels. Sheer size, social advertising spend and dominating the mobile screen are just a few.

Here are some Facebook facts:

• Facebook has over 1.49 billion monthly active users
• Revenue hit $4.042 billion for the last quarter (second quarter 2015)
• For the the first time Facebook had 1 billion users log on in one day
• Mobile-only monthly active users have now reached 655 million
• Mobile advertising revenue is now at 76% of total earnings

Twitter facts

Twitter was always an accidental social network. It was never intended to be social. It was originally designed as a private internal messaging service for a podcasting company.

It is a technology experiment that escaped.

• 316 million monthly users
• 500 million tweets per day
• 80% of active users are on mobile
• 4,100 employees
• 50% of the employees are engineers

One other little known Twitter fact is that if you tweet more you will get more followers.

Source: Agorapulse

YouTube facts

YouTube has been with us since 2004. In 2005 it was acquired by Google for $1.5 billion. This is when Facebook got started. Facebook is now on a mission to replace YouTube as the largest video platform on the planet.

Here are some YouTube facts to ponder.

• Over 1 billion users visit YouTube every day
• Over 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute
• 25% of views are from mobile devices
• 6 billion hours of video are watched every month
• More content is uploaded in 60 days on YouTube than all 3 major U.S. Networks generated in the last 60 years

Source: Internetmarketingdojo.com

LinkedIn facts

LinkedIn was a little slow to the content marketing party and only introduced a publishing feature for all its members in 2014. A new tool called LinkedIn Elevate is being trialled to help companies leverage their content by making it easy for companies to increase sharing of their content via their employees.

We will see how that pans out in powering companies to build more engagement. In the meantime here are some of the latest LinkedIn facts via Linkedin.

• 39 million students and recent college graduates are on LinkedIn
• 380 million users
• Total annual revenue is 0ver $2.8 billion
• Add 2 new members per second
• 8,700 employees

Instagram facts

Instagram is still one of the fastest growing social media properties. The reason. It’s mobile and visual which are two of the fastest emerging trends in social media marketing.

It is not just for images and photos and individuals can also post 15 second videos and has recently removed its ban on rectangular images.

Here are some Instagram facts.

• Over 400 million users
• It is estimated that Instagram will bring in $595 million in mobile ad revenues in 2015
• Mobile ad revenues are projected to surpass Google and Twitter by 2017 at $2.81 billion
• It is estimated that 9ver 27% of the U.S. population use Instagram in 2015
• 90% of Instagram users are younger than 35

Pinterest facts

Pinterest has been one of the most female dominated social networks since its inception. That has continued. Many of its images are about fashion (4.5 billion pins), recipes (1.7 billion) and home related images.

• 73 million global users
• 85% of Pinterest users are female
• 53 million monthly unique user in the USA
• There re 1 billion Pinterest boards
• 50 billion Pinterest pins

The new social toys

Despite social media maturing there are still some new toys that are filling niches and also leveraging emerging technologies and faster data networks.

Here is a quick look at some of the fast emerging social media platforms. What isn’t surprising is that they are mobile, video centric and live. It is all about engagement.

They are live streaming video apps that drive a lot of engagement and make sharing fun and highly engaging.

Meerkat fact

Meerkat allows you to broadcast live video from your mobile. This app launched in 2012 but broke through into public consciousness at SXSW in March, 2015. It then had a direct competitor launched a few weeks later.

The latest facts about the app that are hard to get due to its non-disclosure:

• It had an estimated 2 million users in May, 2015

Periscope facts

Periscope was Twitter’s answer to Meerkat and shortly after launching it also cut off Meerkats access to it’s API and service that made its growth trajectory much more muted.

• It announced on August 2 that it had reached 10 million accounts just 4 months after launch
• 40 years of video are being watched every day
• Daily active users – approximately 2 million

Blab fact

Blab only launched in April.

It allows up to 4 users to run a live video streaming conference that can be watched from the sidelines by others. The best way to describe it is Google+ Hangout for mobiles. It can be recored for later use and is a lot of fun. It feels like a mobile stadium. A few people on the stage and onlookers sharing feedback via questions and chatting visibly via text on the side column.

Signing up to Blab.im from your desktop is as simple as using your Twitter account. At this stage the mobile app is only available for the iPhone.

A lot of the top bloggers and social media early adopters have been hosting “Blabs” over the past few weeks. It’s fun and highly engaging.

An interesting Blab fact: Blab is a new start-up launched by the founders of Bebo. Bebo was a social network started in 2005 by Michael and Xochi Birch and bought by AOL in 2008 for $850 millon when it had reached 45 million users. It went into decline and was bought back by the couple for $1 million in 2013.

OMG. BRB. LOLz. Millennials may get a little lazy (or perhaps it’s efficient?) when it comes to spelling out phrases in their entirety, but when it comes to consumption, they’re nothing but active. With 80 million millennials in the United States alone and $200 billion in buying power, marketers everywhere would be mistaken to discount the value of their eyeballs.

While marketing days of old may have enticed audiences with outbound methods that included magazine ads, direct mail campaigns, radio ads, etc., millennials require a bit more “out-of-the-box” thinking. According to Forbes, 33% of millennials place their trust in blogs and other forms of social media before making a purchase, compared to just 3% for TV, magazines and books.

What does it take to connect with such an influential and modern crew on your business’ social channels? Let’s break it down.

You’ve Got 8 Seconds

Surveys have shown that, thanks to smartphones, the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 8 since 2000. And for a demographic that didn’t know a world before the advent iPhones, the span could be even shorter.

This means your campaigns, your content has limited time to set the scene. Get to the point and build a connection right off the bat, which means visuals are your best friend. Just make sure if you opt for videos, to keep ’em short and sweet. Like, seconds worth of short. Ain’t nobody got time for one minute.

A Feed Full of Besties

89% of millennials trust recommendations from friends and family more so than brands themselves when it comes to purchasing products. It’s no surprise influencer marketing has gained such traction in the last couple of years, huh? Use your business’ social channels to breakdown the wall that separates brand from actual human being. And if your current marketing team runs into difficulty doing so, find the advocates that’ll do it for you.

The content produced needs to draw a line to something other than your product. Be natural, be genuine and as counterproductive as it might sound, stop selling. Find the right message and the story behind your content will do all the selling for you.

A couple takeaways to keep in mind with this “best friend” approach. Get natural with your copy. This doesn’t mean throwing around emoticons and “lol” all the livelong day but at the very least, don’t fear a contraction. “You’re” comes across more casual, more natural than “you are” every time.

Kick those stock photos to the curb. No matter how pretty they might be, millennials can smell staged [and fear] from a mile away. Whip out that smartphone and capture moments.

Appeal to Curiosity

Even the most boring and seemingly not hip product can find common ground amongst a group of trendsetting millennials. It comes down to embracing technology and giving glimpses of products in ways previously unseen.

Take a company like Downy, for example. Fabric softener? Whatever, square. But a GoPro recording from inside a washing machine? Now you’ve peaked some interest.

Take millennials beyond their screens and appeal to the endless curiosity always found in abundance amongst the younger generation. They’re on their devices discovering something new and making decisions on what’s worth their time every day. Make sure you’re showing up where it counts.

This post came from a Tweet that generated buzz during a presentation by Michael Leis, Senior Vice President of Social Strategy for Digitas Health LifeBrands, at the Social Media Strategies Summit conference in San Francisco. Here, Michael elaborates on just WHY this concept resonates with the social media marketing community and HOW you can tap its potential.

Everyone struggles with how to calibrate social media content for their audience. Meeting after meeting, people sit around tables looking at data: What is the best time to post? What content do we have to offer them? What is our competition doing?

Stop the meetings! The single most effective way to understand your audience is also the simplest:

Ask them.

The catch? Just asking open-ended questions is a terrible idea. Like the myth of crowdsourcing, throwing a vague question will get a slew of irrelevant answers. Here are a few ways we’ve asked networks what they want, and have exponentially scaled many (many!) highly engaged brand communities.

1. Listen to the conversations people have with each other.

When people are talking about your brand in social media, they know it’s in the open. And, they want human interaction from the brand. When they talk, ask them what they mean. It’s really that simple.

While managing KFC’s Twitter, we saw two people talking about getting fried chicken on Friday, and used the hashtag #friedchickenfriday. We wondered, “Is this a thing?” So we asked our followers. People responded, driving a weekly tradition where people would post to their friends at mealtime about getting KFC together on Fridays. In terms of our competitive set, we now owned a whole day of the week they couldn’t.

2. Give people choices.

Look for opportunities to let people vote. We started this on cover photos. Normally, our team would create four or five options and then working with a client we would select one to post. Then we realized, if they’re all generally good representations of the brand, why not post them all, and let the one cover photo that gets the most vote go up on our page. That makes the network feel invested in the brand, and rewards engagement with action. Plus, it structures the engagement in a way that is positive for everyone.

3. Embrace the ‘either/or’ option.

One of the more interesting triggers in post construction is giving people the chance to vote between two things. This popped for us when we noticed that among all posts for a particular brand, a simple question like, “At the movies: Gummy Bears or Popcorn?” exploded their comments.

Why? It’s so easy to answer.

The brand has already written the answer for people and no one feels put on the spot, as though their answer could be wrong. The bonus is that by creating the either/or scenario, you will unearth people that feel strongly about a third, personal option. In the example, there were a number of people who jumped in with a snack that wasn’t popcorn or gummy bears.

Hopefully, these examples help give you some structure around what should be the most important facet of your social media presences: giving your biggest advocates the opportunity to tell you exactly what they need to go and evangelize to their friends about what makes a brand great.

We expose brands to insight and tools from leading social media marketers and digital storytellers. Learn more.

In B2B sales coaching, I find that most B2B companies are not adapting fast enough to keep up with the changing landscape of B2B selling. And this is verified by the research below.

I also find it interesting, and unfortunately tragic, that most B2B companies do not train their most important personnel, their sales and marketing teams.

I call the B2B sales and marketing team the most important personnel because without customers you don’t have a business. And the only way to get customers is to sell your products/services to a B2B business.

Amazing But Sad Statistics

According to CSO Insights, a B2B sales research firm, the following happened in B2B companies in 2014.
• The win rate of forecast deals was 47.9%.
• The percentage of salespeople achieving quota was 54.6%.

CSO Insights has developed a four level sales process. It goes as follows;
• Level 1—Random Process:
• Level 2—Informal Process
• Level 3—Formal Process:
• Level 4—Dynamic Process:

Without going into detail on each process level, I believe by looking at the names of each process, you can ascertain how sophisticated each level is.

CSO also found the following levels of performance within the first three levels. I am unsure why they didn’t include the forth level, but my gut instinct tells me it is because there aren’t enough companies at the fourth level to give meaningful statistics.

2014 Sales Performance Comparisons

However, as you can see, there is a significant difference between the performance of level 1 companies compared with level 3 companies.

Sales organizations that optimize their sales processes, for engaging and working with clients, significantly outsell their less adept competitors, achieving sales performance edges such as:
• 17% improvement in overall revenue plan attainment,
• 21% increase in percentage of sales reps making quota,
• 31% increase in win rates of forecast deals,
• 43% decrease in sales force turnover,

The higher your performance level, the better your company will obviously perform.

So why do so many B2B companies not use and train & coach their reps at a higher process level?

And here are other amazing but sad statistics;

Revenue Performance as Related to Level of Sales Process % of Reps Making Quota

B2B companies that use a Dynamic sales process achieve their quota 55.3% more often than B2B companies that utilize a Random process. And they achieve quota 20.7% more than the companies that use a Formal process.

These are very significant numbers, no matter what your revenue streams are.

So how does your B2B company become a Dynamic Process company?

Well, through more and better training and coaching of your sales and marketing people.

Here is another graphic, from CSO Insights, on training & coaching B2B sales and marketing people.

As you can see here, sales managers are not spending enough time with each rep. training and coaching them. That is a major reason their reps are not making quota.

Selling to Key Accounts

Sales teams’ ability to develop and implement effective account plans.

And when it comes to your Key Account Managers ability to grow your current clients, CSO Insights found that 73% of B2B companies do not sell and market to their current accounts effectively.

B2B Sales Coaching Results

Finally let’s look at two graphics adapted from the “heart of coaching by Crane”.

As you can see from the first graphic, training gives a one-time boost in sales behaviour and results, but people quickly slip back into their old familiar behaviour without coaching reinforcement, and increases in sales are negligible.

However, with B2B sales coaching after training, you can see that although there is a slight dip in both graphics right after training, the sales people who received coaching keep getting better and better results.

Through all of my coaching years, I have found that coaching costs very little compared to the increased results that have occurred. In many cases, coaching fees were less than 1% of the overall increase in revenues.

So, if you truly want to grow your business, you need to have your sales people trained and coached by professionals. And in most cases, this means hiring outside professional B2B sales coaches. You will see a very worthwhile ROI.

Conclusions

Through all of my coaching years, I have found that coaching costs very little compared to the increased results that have occurred. In many cases, coaching fees were less than 1% of the overall increase in revenues.

So, if you truly want to grow your business, you need to have your sales people trained and coached by professionals. And in most cases, this means hiring outside professional B2B sales coaches. You will see a very worthwhile ROI.

It becomes pretty obvious that training with coaching pays off.

Are your B2B sales reps, marketers and executives getting the training and coaching they need to understand B2B sales and marketing better, and to able to reach quotas?

In order to better understand why your company needs coaching for B2B sales people, marketers and executives, you can get a free copy of my new book to help your company grow, click this link – Why Can’t My Sales People Sell: 15 Ways To Grow Your B2B Business.

When I started writing website content back in 2003, business sites were nothing more than glorified online brochures, banner ads were all the rage, and “below the fold” was blasphemous.

A lot has changed…

But some things – some writing best practices – remain pretty similar.

In the past 12 years, I’ve worked on website projects big and small, for clients as different as night (Fortune 500s) and day (nonprofits). And I’ve realized: while user expectations and experience have transformed dramatically, the basics of good storytelling and online writing hold true.

Here are 12 timeless things I’ve learned after 12 years of writing websites:

1. Your website is not for you.

Your website is not a catchall for content. It’s not the place to post any story or update or idea that is shared with your marketing department. And it’s not the place to make every department in your company happy.

Your website is your most important marketing tool. And for that reason, it needs to be written for your audience. This will mean disappointing some of your internal audiences. But keeping your website focused on your external audience’s wants, needs and challenges is the only way to keep it working for you.

2. Your website is also not for Google.

SEO. Three little letters that have the power to make rational communicators crazy. Too many of us get hung up on the idea that there is a magic way to get found online. But here’s the thing: SEO isn’t a mystical answer. It’s always changing. And what most people think about when they think about SEO isn’t even SEO anymore.

Look, there’s no winning this game. You’re not going to out-Google Google. But you can convince Google that your website is the best resource for queries related your services – and you do that by writing really good copy. For your audiences, not for the search engines.

3. Readers don’t want to know it all.

We often feel like we need to include everything on our websites. That if we leave something out – some little detail, or feature, or benefit – a reader will most certainly notice and question it.

But the truth is, readers don’t read. They skim. They take in the essence of your content and decide if your story has given them enough reason to move forward in their relationship with your brand. They don’t need the history of every initiative to do so. Instead, they need to be enticed. Which leads me to…

4. Your website is the “hello”, not the conversation.

Think of your website as the start of your conversation with a prospective or new client. When you meet someone new, you don’t bombard them with every detail of your life. Instead, you try to break the ice. Find common ground. And, if all goes well, figure out a way to stay connected.

Websites are meant to start a story and entice the reader to continue forward by taking action – by reading more, contacting you, subscribing, connecting in some way.

5. A new design doesn’t make your content any better.

One common mistake I see is brands spending big bucks on a new website design and structure … and then transferring their old content over to the new site.

This is a huge waste. Because while design and user experience is critical, so is the content on the page. If your website isn’t telling the story your audience wants to hear, you’ll lose them. Content is just as important as the design and technical aspects of your site – if not more so.

6. Style matters. AP style, that is.

The Associated Press hasn’t published and updated its renowned style guide for 60+ years for nothing.

Clarity and style are synonymous. Sticking to basic style guidelines and editing rules makes content more professional and polished. So having an understanding of AP style is important when writing your website content.

7. Headlines are worth the effort.

The headline-writing gurus at Copyblogger report that on average, 8 out of 10 people read headline copy, but only two out of 10 will read the rest.

This logic not only applies to online articles and blog posts. It’s true for website content. Each page of your website should have a headline that appeals to your audience. I like writing page headlines that make a promise or prompt some type of action. This involves readers with the content and demonstrates why they should read on.

8. Less (content) is more.

As mentioned in #4, keeping messaging simple is key. But it’s not just about simple messages. It’s also important to include fewer words. Fewer blocks of texts.

Instead of writing novel-worthy website content, create white space by keeping content short and sweet. Include bulleted lists to break up text. And use subheads to allow your audience to absorb the key points without reading every word.

9. Call-to-actions are critical.

You never want your great content to come to a dead end. That’s why call-to-actions are the most important words on the page.

A well-written call to action can encourage further interaction with your business—online and off; make your audience aware of other products, services or resources your company offers; and prompt your audience to share their information with you. They’re the best way to fend off the dreaded bounce.

10. Content development always takes longer than expected.

Projects that hold off on content development until well after design and programming and under way always blow their deadlines. Always.

Why? Because content is a sensitive matter. It takes time to craft a compelling story. And website content often needs to travel through layers of approval before finding a place online. Considering that large websites can have hundreds – or thousands – of pages, the content development process needs to have a realistic timeline, or it will hold everything up at the end.

11. Too many cooks = a really dirty kitchen.

The most successful website projects I’ve worked on all have one thing in common: they have a very small content maintenance team.

Once you devote time and resources to developing a strong online story, it’s important to protect that story. That means that editing capabilities should be restricted to a small group of people. Think of these people as your website content “gatekeepers” – all edits should be submitted and approved by this team before they are made on your site. Otherwise, your site will soon become cluttered with internal speak and unnecessary details.

12. The “publish” button is deceiving.

You know that dusty box of old brochures you have in your storage closet? Imagine if you handed one of those to every prospective and new client that came through your door. You would never, right? Well, that’s what you’re doing if your website content is out of date.

The key thing to remember is that when you press “publish” online, that does not mean your website content is complete. Content isn’t static. You can’t print it and forget it. It requires continuous attention and maintenance. So it’s important to reframe your idea of what it means to launch your site or publish your content.

These 12 lessons have, so far, stood the test of time — which is crazy, since we all know that Internet years are a little like dog years, things change so fast. Who knows what the next 12 years will bring!

Changes to Canada’s temporary foreign workers rules are worsening the shortage of technology talent in B.C., delegates to a conference in Vancouver heard Thursday. “We have a bit of a crisis here. We need more talent to be moving to Vancouver to soak up those jobs that are available,” Brian Buggey, director of strategic initiatives and sector development at the Vancouver Economic Council, told a session at the conference organized by HR Tech Group, an organization representing more than 90 mid-sized and large companies in all areas of technology.

Salesforce.com, as you might guess, is doing a lot of things right in the marketplace. Okay, that’s an understatement: They grew 35 percent in last year alone. But they’re not stopping there.

In the Elevate Value Case Study breakout at Conversations That Win, Larry Shurtz, SVP of Enterprise Business Unit at Salesforce, and Conrad Smith, VP of Consulting Services at Corporate Visions, talked about how Salesforce.com chose Executive Conversations to elevate their sales team with the skills needed to match their rapid growth.

Here are a few key highlights from the discussion:

• Many sales people are adept at talking about products. In fact, recent research by Forrester says that 88 percent of executives see sales pros as really good at the sales product conversations. However, only 24 percent of executives say salespeople are proficient at business conversations. Yet, executives want business conversations four times more than product conversations.

• Five years ago, Salesforce.com talked to prospects about opportunities and contracts. Fast forward to now, and it’s all about customer engagement. This is a materially different conversation, a major shift in corporate strategy—one that’s more aligned to having better conversations.

• You do need sales professionals effectively trained in product knowledge, but that should function as the bridge that gets them over to the business conversation.

• There are three basic challenges that salespeople typically encounter in conversations with executive-level decision makers (competence, confidence and the ability to demonstrate a compelling business case to justify customer investment). To overcome these challenges, they must have 1) Specific conversational business competencies so they can go toe-to-toe with executives; 2) Confidence to speak with authority about what’s really important to executives; and 3) a strong training support structure to enable them to adopt and deliver the skills salespeople learn in Executive Conversations.

• The best way to instill confidence is through repetition. In Executive Conversations training, salespeople are paired up so they can learn from each other and offer help if needed. Practice, repetition and reinforcement inspires confidence.

• Due to improved conversations, Salesforce.com has increased their number of big deals, shortened sales cycles, and grabbed more senior-level conversations. There’s now much more confidence when walking the halls of the C-suite.

• Salesforce.com started with Power Messaging then moved to Executive Conversations. But interestingly, Shurtz recommends starting with Executive Conversations before moving on to Power Messaging. These two workshops in combination can be transformative.

 

Paul George of Corporate Visions kicked off the Three Value Conversations in Action track with Thomson Reuters’ Matt Etzell and Laurel Ley. Here are three takeaways in particular that sparked the interest of attendees:

• Mobilize Your Messaging Efforts — A limited budget is one of the most common roadblocks you’ll encounter when trying to implement a new program in your organization. But that didn’t stop the team at Thomson Reuters—instead of compromising or giving up on their initiatives, they shared their goals with internal cost center owners and asked for help. This strategy not only raised the money needed for implementation, it created an incredible alignment across the organization. Many stakeholders now had skin in the game, spurring the change needed to propel the messaging efforts forward quickly and efficiently.
• Be Strategic and Build Groundswell — Key stakeholders and marketing managers should always be involved in Power Messaging workshops. You need their input and buy-in because they carry the weight to bring the message forward and drive adoption within their teams. Listen for people in the workshop who are really excited and have them demo the message in the field to determine what works and what doesn’t. Once the story has been refined, have them schedule training and set expectations for their teams.
• Leaders Must Lead — The most powerful messaging in the world is a failure if it’s never rolled out. Support your leaders so they can educate and enlighten sales staff about the power of conversational messaging. If they are believers, their teams will be too.

In the digital marketing world there’s an annoyingly persistent myth which undermines the work of marketers all across the world.

That myth is that great content is enough.

This all stems from that often repeated marketing mantra that content is king. The idea that if you write good content, readers will flock to your website, consume all your blogs and shower you with comments, shares and backlinks.

Sadly, it’s just not true. It’s a fantasy concocted by industry onlookers who spin generic blogs about content rather than actually designing, implementing and testing strategies.

I’m not exaggerating when I say the If You Build It, They Will Come content strategy is seriously and dangerously flawed, and will sink your website if you follow it blindly.

You see, a content strategy is much more than just content creation. It’s a strategy. It’s a comprehensive approach to marketing that encompasses the creation, publication and distribution of content.

It’s the way you create content and use it to attract readers, engage influencers and earn backlinks.

One of these strategies is the Skyscraper Technique from Brian Dean of Backlinko fame. With so much floating around the web either praising and damning the technique, I decided to put it to the test myself and see whether it actually could deliver the results it promised.

How Does It Work?

The Skyscraper Technique is an absurdly simple system. In fact, it can be broken down into three simple steps:

• Step 1: Find some link-worthy content
• Step 2: Make something better
• Step 3: Outreach your content to the right people

That’s all there is to it. Find something good, make it better and show it to the right people.

Brian explains the technique with this rather apt analogy.

“Have you ever walked by a really tall building and said to yourself: ‘Wow, that’s amazing! I wonder how big the 8th tallest building in the world is.’

“Of course not.

“It’s human nature to be attracted to the best.

“And what you’re doing here is finding the tallest “skyscraper” in your space…and slapping 20 stories to the top of it.

“All of a sudden YOU have the content that everyone wants to talk about (and link to).” [Source]

Sounds simple, right? Well, here’s how it works in practice.

Step 0: Find a problem

Our strategy actually starts a little bit before Brian’s and to explain why I’ll need to tell you a little bit about our agency.

When we were first sketching out our own content strategy, we decided that our blog was going to be tailored towards providing practical advice to SMEs and freelancers.

What payment gateway should I use? How should I run a giveaway on social media? How can you leverage negative feedback in your marketing? Which of these payment gateways is going to cost me the least? And so on and so on.

You have a problem and we have the solution. It’s a match made in heaven.

However, for this content strategy to work we needed a problem. A good problem. A right doozy of a problem that hadn’t been documented within an inch of its life.

Thankfully, one landed right on our doorstep.

You see, a few months ago we took on a new SEO client. Let’s call them Blueridge Cupcakes. This gourmet patisserie used to work with one of our rivals and had been with them for years. However, for whatever reason they decided they wanted a change.

As their contract was expiring, they stuck their SEO contract out to tender and digital agencies across the country buried it under pitches, presentations and applications. We threw our hat into the ring too and, after several rounds of competition, won the contract.

Champagne and caviar all round!

The first thing I did was review all the work our competitor had previously done. I was actually quite impressed. Their campaign was content-forward and ethical, the sort of stuff that wasn’t ever going to come back to bite them.

They had created a handful of really attractive pieces of content and these were continuing to attract visitors to the site in their droves.

However, two weeks into Blueridge’s new campaign I received an email forwarded to me from their marketing manager. It’s originally from Getty Images.

Sigh.

Now, anyone who’s worked in digital knows exactly what an email from Getty means: someone’s used an image they weren’t supposed to use and it’s going to be expensive.

Sure enough, after a quick dig we discovered a nine-month-old blog that used an image of a sunset from Getty’s RM section.

It was just one image, and not even a particularly good image at that, but it was one that we simply didn’t have the right to use.

A quick Google for sunset found the image on some blog that collected pictures of sunsets. Hardly exculpating in the eyes of a stock photo goliath but certainly an explanation for how someone confused it for an image released for free use.

While it was frustrating to shell out money for someone else’s mistake, the whole ordeal did give us a problem to solve. Silver linings and all that.

You see, I don’t think people use copyrighted material because they’re cold, heartless and hate photographers. I think they use copyrighted images because they simply don’t know where to look for quality free alternatives.

And just like that we had a problem to solve.

Step 1: Find some link-worthy content

So we had got a problem. The first step in the Skyscraper Technique is to find a model piece of content. Something unique and valuable. Something useful and helpful. Something people genuinely want to link back to.

Brian calls content like this a linkable asset.

So off to Google I went and did a quick search for Best free stock photography sites. The top result a Bootstrap Bay article called 17 Amazing Sites With Breathtaking Stock Photography.

I took Bootstrap Bay’s article and ran it through Raven’s Backlink Explorer, which returned 1,781 backlinks pointing at the article.

An additional 689 shares on Facebook, 285 retweets on Twitter and 465 mentions on LinkedIn confirmed my suspicions: this was was definitely a linkable asset.

Step 2: Make something even better

The second step in the Technique is take your linkable asset and make it even better.

I set out to improve Bootstrap Bay’s article across three key areas: length, relevance and detail.

It’s worth emphasising here that I wasn’t trying to do anything original or innovative. All I was trying to do was take something that was going well and make it better.

The first thing I did was increase the number of entries. I scoured my own bookmarks list, trawled online discussions, borrowed from other Best Stock Photography Sites lists and finished off my search with crowdsourced recommendations from our social followers.

When I was finished, I had almost three times as many websites as the Bootstrap Bay article.

Next I wanted to make sure my article was the most up-to-date article on the web. So off I went on the hunt for the freshest sites out there. If the site was too new to have been included in the Bootstrap Bay article, I wanted it in mine.

The quality of the website blurb was the final thing I wanted to tighten up. I focussed on writing blurbs which gave a brief background of each site, explained whether it has a speciality and detailed what license images are released under.

Once it was finished, I published the full article on our blog and promoted it through our usual channels.

Step 3: Outreach your content to the right people

Linkable asset identified and improvements made, it was time put the final part of the technique into action.

I headed back to Raven and grouped the 1,781 backlinks by linking domain. That gave me a list of 104 websites which linked back to Bootstrap Bay.

I fired up BuzzStream and used the list of contacts to create a prospecting list. Over the next few hours, I worked through the list and updated each entry with contact details.

During the prospecting process, I filtered out a few sources that it didn’t make sense to contact. The final list stood at 96 contacts.

I emailed all of the contacts with the following template:

And that’s it. That’s the Skyscraper Technique. Find a linkable asset, improve it and promote it. But does it work? Did my new content earn any backlinks?

Let’s find out.

Results

Of the 96 emails, I received 20 replies and 12 links. That’s about a 12 percent success rate, which is actually slightly better than what Brian achieved in his own case study.

Some replies even brought a nice warm feeling, including this one from the owner of an online consultancy.

Now, if you’re one of SEO old guard, you might be my results as insignificant. You can buy 800 “high quality backlinks” on Fiverr for five bucks so why would anyone be fussed about a dozen?

Well, while it’s true that you can buy links for little more than pocket change, that doesn’t mean you should. The vast majority of bought links are garbage and given time will probably hurt your website.

Conversely, Skyscraper links are generally very good. They’re natural, they’re from websites related to my niche and they’re permanent. They are the type of links that Google likes and that makes pretty them safe for the future.

Since I put the Skyscraper Technique into effect, it’s having a measurable effect on traffic too.

Since I began started the Skyscraper Technique, organic traffic to my article has increased by 72 percent. Site-wide organic growth for sits at around 40 percent during the same period.

Does it work?

The Skyscraper Technique divides digital marketers. Some swear it’s a foolproof method for SEO success and others label it yet another SEO fad.

Dale Cudmore is one of the the Skyscraper Technique’s biggest critics and didn’t pull any punches in his infamous blog Falling From A “Skyscraper”: Why Famous SEO Strategies Won’t Work For You.

His argument is that most SEO strategies suffer from the Facebook Effect, that you see all of the successes and none of the failures.

Cudmore decided to put the strategy to the test and followed Brian’s instructions to the letter. However, he was unable to replicate Brian’s results. Yes, he did earn some backlinks but they had nowhere near the effect Brian writes about in his case study.

From my own results, however, I can see legitimate value in the Skyscraper Technique. I followed the three basic steps and I did earn links and it did have a long-term positive effect. And while I didn’t build the biggest content skyscraper, my article certainly drew in a sizable crowd.

My advice to curious digital marketers would be to give the technique a test and see if it works for you, your business and your industry.

If it works, you’ve gained a bucketload of links and established quality traffic streams. If it doesn’t, you’ve still got your content and you’ve made contact with hundreds of potential future influencers.

Last October, Gareth Pon—an influential Instagram photographer based in South Africa—organized a worldwide InstaMeet. Which of course begs the question:

What is an InstaMeet?

As Gareth knows, an InstaMeet can offer an excellent opportunity for like-minded folks to explore their common passions in a local setting. At Curalate, we tend to agree. In a world where digital communities connect millions of consumers to their favorite brands, an InstaMeet is a unique and interesting way to bring that relationship to life.

Imagine an event in which a handful of lucky fans are invited to the factory in which your products are made and given free artistic reign. Or, maybe you choose an influential member of your Instagram community to lead fellow evangelists on a city-wide tour, sponsored by your company. No matter how you choose to get started, the experience offers a fresh perspective on your brand. And the result is a ton of inspirational, authentic content from a group of dedicated fans.

But, there is a catch. Organizing an InstaMeet is no easy feat. It takes thoughtfulness, foresight and planning. Lucky for you, Gareth was gracious enough to answer 15 basic questions that are likely top-of-mind – from how to send out invitations to “what’s an infogram?” If an InstaMeet is up your alley, keep reading …

1. What’s the best day of the week to hold an InstaMeet?

This really depends on the type of people you want to invite. Weekends work best because the meet ups can be any time of the day, and people are generally more flexible with their time. We find that Sundays are great because cities are quieter and more casual. It makes for easier opportunities to take photos without needing to fight with crowds of people.

2. What time of day should I plan for, and how long should it be?

You should plan for Magic Hour: an hour before and after sunrise or sunset. This is when the light is ideal and best for photos. I usually plan for an hour before so we can explore with some afternoon light, and then after sunset, we head out to a cafe for some drinks and socializing.

3. Who, ideally, should be in charge of leading the event?

The person who knows the area the best! InstaMeets are admin-heavy, and someone does need to take the lead. Ideally, this person can make quick decisions and knows the route really well. It also helps if the person in charge is well connected with the group that is attending, so if anything changes, he or she can announce them easily.

4. What should I look for when scouting out a route or location?

Photo opportunities and eye candy!

6. How long should I plan to stop at each one?

15 to 30 minutes. Keep it short and sweet, while providing enough time to explore.

7. What’s the protocol on asking local proprietors for permission to take photos?

It’s all about conversation and relationships. Each proprietor will be different, but we’ve generally had very welcoming responses when we want to collaborate with local people. It’s also great publicity for them, as the Instagrammers showcase and in some cases tag their areas.

8. Is there an ideal number of attendees? Is there such thing as “too few” or “too many” people?

We find a good group size is between 20 and 30 people. Any bigger than that and the group gets too big if there is a planned route. If the meet is just one location, then any number of people is OK.

9. How can I generate awareness around my InstaMeet? Who should I invite?

You should invite the most influential Instagrammers in the city. Incentivize them to promote the InstaMeet and invite their followings to join. Bring along a few bloggers, celebrities and people who aren’t Instagrammers, because they’ll love the experience.

10. How can an organizer create a subtle branded experience? Are there best practices around invitations, “infograms” or hashtags?

Branded experiences should be invite oriented, where individuals are incentivized with experiences, gifts and even money. As soon as an InstaMeet becomes branded, you need to be as honest as possible. People can smell advertising from a mile away.

Alternatively, brands can sponsor prizes with no strings attached. That way, their presence will be there, but the InstaMeet will still remain about photography – not about the brand. Infograms (Instagram images with details overlayed) should always be visually strong with only the main pieces of information. Hashtags should be themed, original and related to the area or brand involved.

11. What’s the best way to kick off an InstaMeet? How can I make everyone feel excited and comfortable?

Introductions, name tags, hugs, explain the route, talk them through it, and give them a few ideas about taking photos. It’s all social! The meet will be awkward initially, but as it goes it’ll become more casual and fun.

12. How important is it to be hands-on at each of the locations, providing tips and instructions?

Be casual. Allow people to feed off each other’s knowledge. Try not to be too “show-and-tell,” and rather allow the people on the InstaMeet to teach each other. It’s easier to set up a workshop before or after the meet and allow people to opt-in for it. You want to avoid treating people like school kids, because most people who attend will be pretty capable of creating a cool image.

13. What’s the best way to wrap up?

Drinks or eats! Social all the way. InstaMeets aren’t always about just photography.

14. How can I continue the conversation with the group and share stories with my community?

Leveraging Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups and community groups on other platforms. Create follow-up posts on community accounts, and feature peoples’ images from the walk. Engage a lot as people share photos.

15. What’s the value of an InstaMeet? How do I know whether it’s appropriate for my brand?

InstaMeets are great for producing content and culture so long as your brand caters to that. Photo opportunities are always the main priority. If your brand isn’t a visually strong brand, you may have to think outside of the box to create an InstaMeet that features your brand and integrates the culture of Instagram. You should plan one if you want to grow your base, start a conversation and create visuals that tell the story of your brand. Or, plan one if you just want to create an amazing, visually strong experience for those who attend.

Jia Jiang is an entrepreneur and the CEO of Wuju Learning. This post is republished on Business Insider with permission. 

What happens when you are a regular employee at a big company and you randomly run into the CEO, who asks you what you have been working on?

It would be great if you are cool as a cucumber and give an amazing elevator pitch, making the case that the work you’ve been doing is crucial to the company’s success. The boss is so impressed that he invites you to a private coffee meeting to hear more of your insights. Wouldn’t that be a dream come true? But what happens when you are so flustered that you peed your pants instead? Would that be a nightmare or what?

I lived through that nightmare, and it cost me millions of dollars. It wasn’t because I bombed my answer, but because how much I let it affect my confidence afterward. I will share what I learned with you so you won’t get crushed by your own failure.

In the summer of 2008, I was in between my two years of MBA at Duke, doing a summer marketing internship for LinkedIn. At the time, LinkedIn was a young company, but showing tremendous promise. Just a couple weeks after my arrival, the company was valued at $1 billion (it went IPO in 2011 and is now valued at $25 billion). I was employee #180 (they have over 8,700 employees now). Most of my colleagues who joined around my time are now multi-millionaires based on the appreciation of their stock.

I, on the other hand, was only a summer intern with no stock options. I would need to perform well to turn my gig into a full-time job and then collect the millions. But I didn’t care about money. I LOVED LinkedIn (I still do today), LOVED my job, and LOVED Silicon Valley. At the time, I was the only person in the company doing market research and development for the Chinese market. Given how big that market has become today, my job was crucial to the company’s future.

Then, one day as I was working extra late trying to impress everyone around me, I ventured into the company kitchen to grab a drink. In came Dan Nye, the CEO of LinkedIn at the time. He saw me and gave me a smile, asking what I was working on. I had no prepared answer. My heart was pounding, the hair at the back of my neck was standing up, and I started stuttering. Trying to be cool but passionate, smiling but serious, humble but important all at the same, I behaved like a fresh graduate in film auditioning for the next James Bond role. I incoherently fumbled through words such as “market size,” “statistical significance,” and “cluster analysis,” hoping the combination of these words would somehow make sense to him. One minute later, I still had no idea what I was talking about. Dan gave me a polite smile, said “OK, good luck," and left.

I wanted to hit my head against the wall… maybe I did, but I can’t remember now. That CEO encounter marked the turning point of my promising summer internship. I lost tons of confidence about myself and my work, and I never fully recovered. I started to behave more timidly and was afraid to take any risks.

My performance dropped like a rock. As the result, the full-time job offer never came when I was an intern. No full-time job, and no stocks.

It literally cost me millions.

Many nights after that day, I silently sang Eminem’s Lose Yourself — “If you had one shot, one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted. In one moment would you capture it or just let is slip?”

I didn’t just let it slip. I let the moment bury me.

Now looking back at this episode with all the knowledge I have now, what should I have done before and after my elevator pitch?

1. Prepare 

Whether you are working as an intern, an executive or even an entrepreneur, you have to prepare an elevator pitch of what you are doing and why it is meaningful. It’s not just about showing your value to the CEO, your manager or colleagues, but also understand your own value. Trying to wing it is a disaster waiting to happen.

2. Practice 

No one shows up and charms like Bill Clinton, unless of course, you are Bill Clinton. But even Clinton spent hours and hours preparing for his debates, speeches, and meetings. And some of the best business communicators such as Steve Jobs and Marc Benioff were notorious for tirelessly rehearsing what they say. The best way to be confident about what you do is to have done it successfully in practice.

3. Turn rejection/failure into opportunities 

You do the above to minimize the chance that you will fail. But when you do, and you will, you can use it as an opportunity. If I were to bomb my pitch today, I would try to schedule a meeting with Dan, or “run into” him again, and tell him I didn’t explain my role well last time around. I would tell him what I do is to prepare LinkedIn for its entry into the biggest Internet market in the world. I would prepare data, insights, stories, or anything that’s better than what I said in that encounter.

What I did seven years ago was the worst thing a rejected person could have possibly done – walking away in shame and letting the rejection define myself. But, my story had a happy ending. I ended up studying the topic of rejection more than anyone in the world, because I know the fear of rejection too well from my personal experiences. When people are afraid, they lose confidence, perform at an extremely low level, have a hard time recovering, and sometimes vomit mom’s spaghetti. But, on the other hand, when they are not afraid, they are calm, commanding, inquisitive and perform at their highest level.

I eventually became an entrepreneur, a vlogger with millions of YouTube views, a bestselling author and public speaker on the subject of “rejection”, and a business bravery trainer who trains sales people to become rejection-proof at some of the best companies and universities in the world.

I will be giving a keynote in next month’s LinkedIn Talent Connect Conference, along with Jeff Weiner, the current CEO of LinkedIn. And when I changed my LinkedIn profile yesterday for my new company, the first person who congratulated me was none other than Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and the Oracle of Silicon Valley.

When I run into them again next month, I will know what to say this time. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 5 insider tips for getting noticed on LinkedIn

Most everyone today knows the one-to-many, brand-consumer dynamic has undergone a dramatic shift, with consumers now firmly in control of when, where, how, and even if brand engagement will occur. It’s become more and more difficult for brands to control their own message, as consumers who trust each other for advice, opinions, and recommendations have their ear. Smart brands are now turning to trusted, well-connected influencers to keep their audience informed and their messages delivered.

The influencer is at the pinnacle of social advertising. When spun correctly, the words of an influencer carry more weight to their followers than traditional posts sponsored by brands themselves. These modern influencers hail from all walks of life – industry and topical experts, activists, celebrities, bloggers, academics, YouTube producers, etc. – and are leveraging the Web’s connective tissue (along with consumers’ longstanding preference for word of mouth recommendations), to build, inform, engage, and influence dedicated populations of followers.

Consumers voluntarily and openly follow the interests, outlets, and influencers who are most important to them. Influencers facilitate this process by building passionate, informed and, in some cases, brand-focused followers. Influencers and their followers generate great volumes of data that can be used to better understand and engage them. Capturing and analyzing this data through a social business cloud and its complex algorithms, this data can be used to identify and influence brand-relevant influencers.

According to an Augure study on The State of Influencer Marketing in 2015, 93% (over 600 marketing professionals from around the world) of those surveyed said that their current relationship with influencers brought them real profits.** Influencer marketing is no easy task. Brands need to forge a true conversation and relationship with an influencer before asking them to speak on their behalf. It’s all about authenticity. The process of identifying, engaging, and partnering with influencers requires strategy and patience.

How do we reach these influencers?

Given the power of influencers, marketing and PR professionals have an opportunity that shouldn’t be missed, so, how do we reach these influencers? The Influencer Marketplaces are a good place to start. These online hubs pair marketers with influencers. Some do it according to niche, others do it according to type of content. Many of these marketplaces will also extend the service to help brands with influencer campaigns and tracking results.

One of the best ways to capture the right influencer is through social listening. Gathering insight on mentions, reviews, and forums, a solid social media business cloud can reveal deep insight into influencers and their various social profiles. This powers the brand with opportunities to begin forging relationships. A social media business cloud can also help prioritize investments by comparing influencers to each other including key metrics such as volume, reach and impact.

It is critical to look beyond mere keywords and social metrics and examine the metadata that defines these influencers, their relationships and networks. Humans are dynamic creatures, constantly evolving, learning, growing, and changing. Smart influencer marketing takes this into account and seeks to capture and mine the informational subtleties that will better explain influencers, their followers, and the relationships between them.

Top 5 influencer attributes

Relevance

Relevance is the degree to which an influencer’s messages, posts, comments, and other social mentions align with your brand’s most important keywords and interests. The more precise your company’s understanding of these connections, the more easily you can rank and prioritize the particular influencer relationships you wish to pursue.

Reach

Brands also should consider the influencer’s potential reach – which is the total number of followers, fans, subscribers, etc., who are connected to the influencer across different media channels. Popularity alone does not equal influence. Instead, brands are advised to consider less obvious but more substantive expressions of an influencer’s reach, such as the number of followers actually engaged on a particular subject or the influencer’s credibility on a topic. As social media strategist Julia Cantor writes, the influencer a brand may really want to engage is “someone who has regular conversations with their audience and engages their followers in particular ways.”

Impact

Impact measures the number of followers who interact with an influencer’s brand-relevant posts as well as the number of interactions generated by a particular social mention. Impact can be gauged across the entirety of an influencer campaign, including:

• Ranking influencers during the selection process
• Measuring audience interaction
• Determining whether those interactions translate into direct brand engagement (i.e. does an audience member actually buy or otherwise make contact with your organization)

Quality

Quality takes into account the number of followers interacting with an influencer and, more importantly, gauges their relative value. A weighting formula gives credit proportionate to the quality of the interaction, meaning that a retweet is going to rank lower than a reply but higher than a Facebook like. The deeper the degree of audience engagement, the more relevant the post and/or influencer. In other words, the more effort put forth by the follower, the more likely the influencer’s post is resonating with he or she. A single-click action is not going to rank as high of a response to a blog post, for example.

Activity

Activity tracks where, when, and how often your influencers post. This information is important not simply for determining the ideal intersections with your own brand goals, but also will enable you to monitor their posts and follower engagement once your influencer campaign has begun. For example, your influencer campaign might kick off by establishing measurement benchmarks for what an influencer said, where and when they said it, etc., then compare with the same data collected during and after your campaign. This is particularly important given the constant evolution in the kinds (and popularity) of channels, devices, content types, and influencer outposts. Each influencer uses one or more combinations of social channels to communicate, foster conversation, drive engagement, and interact with an audience and it is imperative that your brand be in the right place and right time to have the best chance of driving brand-friend activities.

Measuring the impact of your influencer campaign is more than just the growth of a follower base. Engagement, sharing of content, reach of content, referred traffic from the influencer, and of course conversions are all good metrics to determine the efficacy of the campaign. Test out different content and influencers to define the most efficient course of action.

*** Bloggers are arguably the strongest spoke in the wheel of influencers. A report from Technorati shows that 86% of influencers also operate at least one blog. One of the bonuses of targeting bloggers is that they almost always are active across many social media platforms. ****

Influencers gain more notoriety, trust and sway when the timing, content and messaging are right. Not to mention, they get paid. It is common for influencers to forge business relationships with brands, however, your most valuable social assets will be those influencers who trust your brand based on their personal history, and who want to create and share positive experiences with others.

• *http://www.forbes.com/sites/kimberlywhitler/2014/07/17/why-word-of-mouth-marketing-is-the-most-important-social-media/
• ** http://www.augure.com/blog/state-influencer-engagement-20150618
• ***http://www.fastcompany.com/3028278/the-fast-growing-profitable-market-for-teenage-influencer-endorsements-on-twitter-instagram-
• **** https://blog.kissmetrics.com/guide-to-influencer-targeting/

In the book To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, Daniel Pink discusses a survey he conducted on the popular perception of sales reps. Respondents were asked to provide the first word that came to mind when they thought of “sales.” Some of the most popular answers were:

• “Pushy.”
• “Difficult.”
• “Annoying.”
• “Ugh.”
• “Sleazy.”

Seems like salespeople have a bit of an image problem.

The sales rep of 20 years ago might have indeed been described in this less-than-flattering way, but sales is becoming an increasingly consultative and helpful profession. Yet public perception hasn’t necessarily caught up.

With this in mind, many brands are moving away from the unpopular “sales representative” title in favor of something a bit more palatable. For example, earlier this month, Kate Spade New York announced that their sales associates will now be called “Muses.”

The company’s decision reflects a larger trend in the sales profession, according to Liz Dunn, CEO of Talmage Advisors. “The best retail experiences have a heavy service element, and not a heavy selling element,” Dunn told BuzzFeed.

But Kate Spade isn’t the only brand that’s rebranded their sales associates. Read on for a list of seven companies that have given their retail sales workers’ job titles a facelift.

1) Kate Spade: “Muses”

According to Kate Spade chief marketing officer Mary Beech, the title change for sales associates is just one part of a larger repositioning of “Muses’” in-store role. Muses will be given candies, birthday candles, and other items to interact with customers, while stores will feature interactive elements such as a letter-writing table and free Polaroid stations.

The goal is to deliver an “authentic experience that’s customer-led,” Beech told BuzzFeed.

To reflect the expansion of their roles, Muses will no longer be measured solely on sales volume -- they’ll also be judged on the number of Kate Spade customers who return to make a second purchase or are willing to recommend the brand to friends.

2) Apple: “Geniuses”

Apple is another example of a company combining service and sales. All Apple stores include a Genius Bar, an area where customers and shoppers can ask questions and request technical services or repairs from so-called “Geniuses.”

According to a copy of the Genius Training Manual obtained by Gizmodo, trainees must “take ownership empathetically, recommend persuasively, and get to ‘yes’ respectfully.” In the course of their workday, Geniuses “recommend solutions,” “build loyalty,” “cultivate the customer’s relationship,” and “showcase [Apple] technology.”

But make no mistake: It’s not all about service. Geniuses are also tasked with moving products. After all, according to the training manual, “everyone in the Apple Store is in the business of selling.”

3) Origins: “Guides”

Origins, a cosmetics and beauty company, offers services such as free facials and skincare consultations in its stores. These services, as well as transactional purchases, are delivered and overseen by “Guides.”

The choice of the label “Guide” is based in Origins’ commitment to helping the customer, according to global general manager Stéphane De La Faverie.

“The role of a Guide is to welcome visitors -- in this case Origins customers -- and lead them on their own personal journey through the Origins experience,” De La Faverie writes in a note on the Origins website. “Origins Guides never tell customers what to do.”

4) Microsoft: “Advisors”

Similar to sales reps at Apple, Microsoft’s in-store employees take on the dual role of support and selling. “Consumer Product Advisors” perform general customer services such as providing product recommendations, while “Consumer Service Advisors” take on Genius-like support and repair duties. According to a job listing, both Product and Service Advisors must “engage, educate, excite, and empower” customers.

In-store employees were originally called Retail Sales Associates and Retail Customer Service Associates, and dubbed Personal Trainers and Technical Advisors by 2011. Consumer Product/Service Advisors are the latest iteration of Microsoft workers’ job titles.

When the first Microsoft stores opened in 2009, corporate vice president of retail stores David Porter said the purpose of the stores was to demonstrate the breadth of the Microsoft brand.

“Our customers have told us they want choice, better value, and great service when shopping for technology, and that is what we will deliver through our Microsoft Stores,” Porter said.

5) Best Buy: “Geek Squad Agents”

In 2002, consumer electronics company Best Buy acquired the technical services company Geek Squad, and completed the nationwide launch of Geek Squad services in 2004. All existing support staff was rebranded with the Geek Squad logo.

While "Geek Squad Agents" are positioned as service employees, they’re also tasked with selling. According to former Best Buy employees, Agents are taught situational sales tactics and how to sell services to customers.

Best Buy’s “business strategy is to bring technology and consumers together in a retail environment that focuses on educating consumers on the features and benefits of technology and entertainment products,” according to the company’s 2004 Form 10-K. “The Best Buy store format has evolved to include more interactive displays and a higher level of customer service.”

In-store employees not branded with the Geek Squad logo are known as “Consultants,” in keeping with Best Buy’s commitment to educating customers.

6) Lululemon: “Educators”

Another brand that touts the value of in-store education is Lululemon Athletica, a lifestyle and fitness apparel company. Retail employees are known as “Educators,” and their job function extends beyond transactional sales.

Lululemon employees are required to wear the brand at work so they’re able to “speak authentically about product use through their own experiences,” a responsibility listed in an Educator job posting. 

Educators are also tasked with making customers, known as “Guests,” aware of the Lululemon culture and community. Other responsibilities listed in the job posting are “in-store discussion[s] of lifestyle (i.e. yoga, fitness, health, and fun)” with Guests and directing them to bulletin boards advertising yoga, health, and fitness resources.

7) Sephora: “Cast Members”

Sales associates at makeup chain Sephora are referred to as “Cast Members,” according to BuzzFeed.

All Sephora stores are divided into “on stage” (customer-accessible areas) and “back stage” (employees-only) zones. Sephora cast members (managers are known as “Directors”) provide standard customer service, but also make recommendations for makeup and do customers’ makeup in-store.

“We have an obsession with delighting our customers, and everyone [we hire] needs to have that mentality,” Sephora vice president of talent acquisition Yvette Nichols told Cosmopolitan.

Would a Sales Rep by Any Other Name Sell Just as Well?

While new job titles reflect these companies’ desire to communicate sales reps’ evolving roles (especially in the arena of customer service), are the changes really positive?

Britany Robinson of Skaled believes there’s no reason to view sales in a negative light.

“You’re not trying to con people into purchasing a lemon with the miles turned back from 10,000 to 10,” she writes in a WeWork blog post. “You’re connecting people to an opportunity that could improve their lives, and that’s something worth feeling passionate about.”

Moreover, renaming salespeople doesn’t do much to combat negative public perception. Changing sales associates’ job titles to “Muse” or “Geek” because they do more than push products on customers (something a good salesperson wouldn’t do in the first place) might reinforce the idea that salespeople are overbearing.

It also puts the onus of combating the negative perception of salespeople on the shoulders of reps themselves, when perhaps it’s public opinion that needs to change. After all, salespeople who only sell to people who want or need to buy are hardly overbearing or pushy -- they're downright helpful.

As sales trainer Alison Dawkins puts it, “People buy things most days, and if what you are selling is what the recipient needs or wants, your service becomes a valuable part of their business."

What do you think of these revamped titles for salespeople? Do they better represent the role retail employees play in a customer’s in-store experience? Or are they bending to flawed perceptions of sales associates? Let us know in the comments below.

Acquire Your First 10 Customers and Use What You Learn to Acquire 100 More written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Startup marketing is the most creative marketing genre. No one knows if the offering has value until it’s generated revenue. No one can give a one-glove-fits-all-step-by-step guide to startup marketing like they can for optimizing Google Adwords. Startups inherently possess so many variables to scaling product market fit: industry, timing, execution, allusions of grandeur, funding, talent level, location, lucky breaks, quality of offering, etc. However, I can share the key startup marketing learnings from founding a marketing agency that serves early stage San Francisco startups.

Here are my five priorities for acquiring a startup’s first ten customers, and the ensuing learning to acquire the next 100.

1. Define The Offering

What do you have to market? Start with the value you think you can create for your potential customers. What part of their business do you serve? Define it in one word, three one words, one sentence, and one paragraph. Your offering will change over time, but you should always know what it is today.

When you don’t have many customers, it can be easy to promise the world. Sell the vision of tomorrow while being clear about what you can deliver today.

Once you have a potential offering defined, here are some logistical next steps. Scour your network for all people who could provide relevant feedback. Scour your colleague’s networks too. Then talk to them about your offering. Gather all the feedback together like a product manager. And keep in the back of your mind, that each one could become a customer. In addition to giving feedback, they’ll end mentioning people they know who could gain value from your offering.

2. Maximize Referrals

The most important customer acquisition channel for a new business is referrals. Seven of the first eight customers of my marketing agency have been from referrals. The why is simple: past work drives interest in future ventures. The talent and experience of the founder and team play a huge part in the customer’s decision-making process because an early stage startup does not have much in the terms of a business record.

3. Keep Marketing Yourself and Your Team

In the service business, time is always a conflict between serving your clients and growing your own business.  In the product business, the people building the product too often think that the product will sell itself. In nearly any business, there is a face the customer is buying from. Don’t forget your identity.

When you are starting a new business, there is probably a reason. Beyond opportunity, there are personal reasons you started a business – could be a personal passion, evolution of past work, or an obscure desire I have never heard of. Market that reason. Market your team. Market your purpose. Don’t lose your underlying identity but at the same time you must have the empathy to put yourself in the customers shoes.

4. Value You Create vs, Marginal Value Added

It’s easy to say to a customer, ‘if you get everything I provide elsewhere, it would cost more.’ I’m not saying lowering your price can’t be a great way to get in the door, but IMHO only the quality of your offering (and not the price) can create a customer’s long term competitive advantage.

Bottomline, to maximize the likelihood of your offering becoming your customer’s competitive advantage, you need quantify the value add to their business. What job titles at what organizations could have the best quarters of their lives if they chose to become a customer of yours? You may think you are a CEO, but these are your new bosses.

5. Market Your Customer Success

Without customer success, what does it matter if you acquire a million customers? Testimonials are the purest form of marketing. It’s simply a customer saying this works. In the beginning, every successful customer should be a marketing asset. Think videos, guest blog posts, demand generation content, public relations stories, sales enablement content, and the best of all, organic, unsolicited endorsements. By creating an active social media presence, you’ll increase customer willingness to talk about you on Twitter and Facebook. Medium aside, the core question to answer is, how do you increase the audience of your customer’s stories?

Acquiring and serving each new customer is a milestone. To grow your own business, you must be a part of your customers achieving their business goals. It’s the aggregation of a thousand steps in the right direction, a hundred steps in the wrong direction, and the sheer will of your people. Forget all the buzzwords, creative ad spends, and new media platforms; all marketing remains word of mouth.

 

David Smooke (@DavidSmooke) is the founder of ArtMap Inc., the tech marketing agency, and c.how, the corporate social responsibility platform. Listen to his walking podcast with bay area experts, DavidWalks.com, and read his Medium Publication 60+ contributors about the art in marketing & the marketing of art, “ART + marketing.”

 

Content Marketing World, probably the world’s premier event for content marketers, was held September 8–11 in Cleveland. Did you miss it? Me too. But Carmen Hill was there, and she wrote about what she heard and saw in a LinkedIn post. We really liked what we read (it resonates with one of our recent posts, Simple is a Strategy), and we asked Carmen for permission to reprint her post here.

With 3,500 attendees, more than 200 speakers and sessions, and approximately one bazillion tweets in the #CMWorld stream, there are too many takeaways from Content Marketing World to count. But my biggest Content Marketing World takeaway has nothing to do with content and everything to do with me—with us—and the choices we make as a content strategists and marketers.

The Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs 2016 Benchmark study, previewed at the conference, reveals that 76% of B2B marketers plan to produce more content in 2016, and 51% plan to spend more on content marketing. And we’re not exactly starting from zero.

There are proven benefits to doing more. But when content quality hits what Jay Acunzo calls “the crapping point,” that point of diminishing return when trying to do everything means doing nothing well, it’s time to take a step back and make better choices.

There is power in saying no.

Keynote speaker Kristina Halvorson said she was not at Content Marketing World to tell us that that content marketing doesn’t matter. But she said content strategy must focus on two things: business outcomes and customer satisfaction. “That is all there is in marketing,” she said. Content strategy is about choosing a path. “Stop doing a lot of little things, and you’ll see an impact in the things you do.”

And that impact is measurable, not just in quick wins and ROI, but in value over time. Robert Rose said, “Start with your goals in mind and work backward to understand what measures could define your goals. Develop your plan with these goals in order of priority but with the vision in mind.” Because “if content marketing is just more collateral to support campaign marketing, you’ll ultimately fail at both.”

What won’t you do?

One of the biggest takeaways from last year’s conference was that the organizations with the most effective content marketing programs are those that have a documented content marketing strategy. This year, Michael Brenner and Doug Kessler led a workshop that gave attendees a chance to learn exactly what that looks like.

Michael said it’s not enough to simply have a content strategy. “You either have it written down or you don’t have it.” And Doug said documenting what you’re NOT trying to do is as important as documenting what you ARE trying to do.

When Cleve Gibbon, CTO at Cognifide, asked who in the audience was busy, nearly everyone raised their hand. But of “busy-ness,” he said, “You’re only busy if you fail to prioritize. And you can’t prioritize if you haven’t planned. Find your space to plan.”

Create a space for creative thinking.

That also means saying no. No to busy work. No to distractions. No to everything except the problem at hand. Keynote speaker John Cleese (yes, that John Cleese) said to tap into your creative unconscious, you have to set boundaries of time and space.

Referencing the work of cognitive psychologist Guy Claxton and his book, “Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less,” Cleese said we need to step away from our quick thinking, logical brain and into our “tortoise enclosure” where we can let our minds wander and take the time to come up with our best ideas. “Don’t make a decision until you have to,” he said. “You might get more info or have a better idea before then.”

Deciding what not to do.

We can’t do everything. We can’t target every audience. We can’t consistently publish in every channel. We can’t master every tool. And even if time, budget and resources were not a consideration (and is there really any organization of any size that can say that?), not everything is worth doing. Not everything that seems like a good idea will actually support business outcomes and customer satisfaction.

As we come away from Content Marketing World with brains full of new ideas for what we’ll do in 2016, we might also consider the things we will not do. And focus on making every idea count.

So, what will not be in your 2016 content marketing plan?

* * *

Want to explore more possibilities in content strategy and content marketing? Check out Act-On’s free Toolkit:

We humans are a paradoxical species. On the one hand, we are uniquely endowed with the power of extraordinary imagination – the ability to see what could be, but has never been. On the other,we are imperfect. We have weaknesses and we make mistakes, lots of them. It is the ability of our imagination to triumph over our imperfections, weaknesses, and mistakes that has driven human progress over the millennia.

Here’s another paradox: the rise and spread of industrial society was at one level a product of that powerful imagination — and yet that very same society has been on a quest to limit and contain that imagination. Our industrial society embraces scalable efficiency. It thrives on predictability and reliability and views imagination with some ambivalence – yes, it drives innovation, but it also undermines predictability and reliability.

As here’s a third paradox: digital technology has intensified the quest for scalable efficiency and undermined our humanity while at the same time opening up the possibility of a new renaissance of the imagination that can help us recapture our humanity.

Let me explain.

Digital technology indeed has a dark side – a dark side that is intrinsic to the technology. The dark side is mounting performance pressure that comes in three different forms – intensified competition, accelerated pace of change, and the increased likelihood of extreme events that disrupt our best laid plans and predictions. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle: extreme events surface in part because we have turned over decision-making to globally connected machines (such as the automated trading algorithms that have made the stock market more volatile) that react more quickly to extreme events, which surface more regularly as global connectivity, platform businesses, and network effects make it far easier to scale initiatives than ever before.

We all are experiencing that mounting performance pressure as individuals and institutions. As examples of this mounting pressure, my analysis in the Shift Index shows that return on assets for all public companies in the United States has declined by 75 percent since 1965 and companies that manage to make it into the top quartile of ROA performance topple out of that position at an accelerating rate.

The dark side leads to very understandable human psychological reactions. We magnify perception of risk and discount perception of reward. We shorten our time horizons. We tend to adopt a “zero sum” view of the world – it’s a “you win, I lose” world. We therefore find it increasingly difficult to trust each other – just look at all the surveys showing trust deteriorating in all of our major institutions. These natural psychological reactions are in many cases amplified by the isolation that we experience as we begin to interact more with machines than with each other.

While understandable, these psychological reactions are highly dysfunctional, creating a vicious cycle of steadily increasing performance pressure and stress. We tend to become even more conscious of our imperfections, weaknesses, and mistakes and determined to hide them from others, in the fear that they will create vulnerability that others will exploit. In that kind of world, we tend to suppress our imagination and stay within our comfort zone, looking for narrow ways to squeeze out that next increment of performance improvement, hoping that we can at least make it to the next quarter. In other words, we suppress our humanity and look longingly at the efficiency and reliability of the machines around us. We tighten our focus on the computer generated data and analytics that offer the promise of greater efficiency within the world as we know it.

But does it have to be that way? The very same technology that is generating this mounting performance pressure also provides us with the platforms and tools to re-awaken our imagination and overcome the cognitive biases that keep us confined within the practices of the past.

We can harness the powerful processing power of computers to help us imagine, visualize and explore worlds that go far beyond anything we have experienced to date. We can use sophisticated analytic tools to test and refine what we have imagined so that these new worlds can become even more fertile seedbeds of possibility and potential. We can then harness computing power to imagine and design the products and services that will begin to make these imagined worlds a reality.

As our imagination revives, we’ll begin to find ways to compensate for and transcend our imperfections, weaknesses, and mistakes. They are indeed part of being human, and should be acknowledged as challenges that we all face, but they should never be allowed to stand in the way of the imagination that can help us to achieve more and more of our potential. As one example, today we’re able to deploy experimentation platforms that simulate environments and allow us to test new approaches before deploying them in the real world.

Done right, we can unleash a virtuous cycle. The more we succeed in overcoming our imperfections, weaknesses, and mistakes, the more willing we are to imagine more boldly — and the more boldly we imagine, the more motivation we have to address and overcome our limitations.

But the first requirement is to step back and reflect on what makes us uniquely human and what the consequences might be if we surrender our humanity to the mounting performance pressure that we are all experiencing. We need to understand that the choice is ours – that there is nothing inevitable about the trajectory that we are on. If we choose to re-claim our humanity, we can take the very same technology that is squeezing the humanity out of us and re-focus it on ways to reinforce and amplify our humanity. We can create worlds that were previously unimaginable and that will allow our humanity to flourish.

If we choose this path, the mounting performance pressure that we experience today can be transformed into excitement as we begin to see the opportunity to create new worlds that open up new potential and possibility.

It will be up to us to ultimately determine how we use that digital technology. Will we use it to narrowly squeeze out all inefficiency in the work we do? Or will we use it to catalyze and amplify the imagination that makes us uniquely human and that could identify entirely new avenues to create fundamentally new sources of value?

This post is one in a series of perspectives by presenters and participants in the 7th Global Drucker Forum, taking place November 5-6, 2015 in Vienna. The theme: Claiming Our Humanity — Managing in the Digital Age.

LinkedIn is today’s B2B media powerhouse. If you are a B2B marketer, in nearly any sector, chances are you are paying attention to LinkedIn, as well you should. LinkedIn brings three things that make it stand out from other B2B media companies.

• Scale. According to comScore’s July 2015 rankings, LinkedIn is the 15th largest media property in the US. That makes it larger than consumer staples like Weather.com, Conde Nast and BuzzFeed. Chances are, a portion of your business audience uses LinkedIn regularly.
• Data. We directly contribute and maintain our own data on LinkedIn, making it one of the most accurate sources of data for B2B marketers.
• Content Distribution. With Sponsored Updates, LinkedIn’s native ad format, LinkedIn has an offering that is tailored to distributing your content.

So how do you take advantage of it? Here are five things that, in my experience, will make a big difference in the performance of your LinkedIn Sponsored Update campaign.

1. Nail your targeting

With all the data LinkedIn has available, this part should be easy. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Nailing this requires some approaches that can be counterintuitive.

• Keep your targeting lists short. Instead of building an exhaustive targeting list, such as every group your audience might use (and watering down your targeting significantly in the process), use LinkedIn’s audience expansion feature instead.
• Use Skills targeting. Skills targeting provides far more granularity than traditional role or functional targeting. With traditional role-based targeting, you would target marketers in order to reach someone like me. But with skills targeting, you can target people involved in specific areas within marketing, such as B2B Marketing, Demand Generation or Account Based Marketing. Skill and group targeting are consistently the top performing approaches, but skill targeting almost always is able to provide more volume with similar cost efficiency.
• Use negatives. In LinkedIn, not every data point is populated in every profile. Actually, lots of data is missing. Instead of adding new targeting requirements, consider excluding segments you don’t want to reach, such as smaller companies and entry-level staff.

Straight role-based targeting (such as targeting senior IT) almost always costs more, because you likely have more competition, and doesn’t perform as well as more specific targeting criteria like skills or group membership.

2. Expect mobile

It is 2015. Mobile overtook desktop in time spent more than a year ago. According to LinkedIn, 70% of clicks in the main stream are from mobile devices.

Today, social advertising IS mobile advertising, yet it seems many marketers haven’t accepted this reality yet. Just two weeks ago, I stumbled across a company promoting new research and insights on about mobile marketing and today’s mobile consumer. Turns out it was a PDF, possibly the worst format you could choose for a mobile audience. I eventually gave up trying to read it on my phone. And no, I didn’t take the time to save it so I could read it later at my desk. Stop expecting people to work that way.

3. Give people a personal reason to care

B2B marketers love to position the business value of their content and their solution. How to reduce costs, improve profitability, drive growth, etc. But unless you are marketing directly to owners, these aren’t primary motivators. Seth Godin outlined a hierarchy of the needs or motivators of B2B buyers which bears repeating. Here they are, in order:

• Avoiding risk
• Avoiding hassle
• Gaining praise
• Gaining power
• Having fun
• Making a profit

Your ad and offer need to focus on the top of this list, not the bottom.

One of the best converting offers I’ve worked with was a piece of content promoted with the line “we’ve read all the books so you don’t have to.” We didn’t promise profits, growth, or business efficiency, even though that is the space we were working in. Instead, we promised to take the hassle out of getting the information people needed. And it worked extremely well.

4. Hack your social proof

Social proof, particularly in the form of positive comments, matters on LinkedIn. Not only do positive comments help to validate your offer, they also give your ad more real estate in the LinkedIn stream.

But don’t wait around for positive comments. Reach out and get people to comment. Or comment yourself if you must! Not only will it provide social proof, it also kickstarts a virtuous cycle on LinkedIn. Because of the engagement, your ad is favored by LinkedIn. Because of the comments, it captures more attention and more engagement. And then LinkedIn favors your ad even more.

I’ve seen this cycle in practice multiple times: an ad with initial positive comments significantly outperforms the rest of the campaign, yet the exact same ad in another campaign without the comments is a yawn. The difference is social proof.

5. Track and optimize

One of the shortcomings of LinkedIn is that it doesn’t yet support conversion tracking. Making it worse, until recently, posting your content with a tracking link from your advertising or social management platform would actually mask your URL, making it unclear where the link was taking you.

Fortunately, LinkedIn now supports the use of your social or advertising tracking links. So use them! The results will almost always take you down a different optimization path than what you would do purely focusing on the metrics available through LinkedIn.

LinkedIn ads – What works for you?

What has been your biggest frustration with LinkedIn Sponsored Updates, or what tip or trick has worked well for you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

Back in 1964, Bob Dylan was all the rage. Called, “the voice of a generation,” each song he released became an instant classic. However, there was a group of people who were not on the “Bob Dylan Bandwagon.” They claimed that Bob Dylan was stealing songs from other folk singers. Indeed, it is very common for artists to “borrow” from other artists, to transform the work, and come up with something new. This type of creative borrowing spans back as far as humans have innovated.

Creativity and innovation do not happen in a vacuum, and when it comes to business, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Industries can innovate by learning from similar, or even vastly different industries.

When it comes to B2B sales, there is room for innovation, and there is no better industry to learn from than the world of B2C. Giants of B2C –the Amazons of the world – have mastered many elements of the sales process. B2B brands, who have a market potential in the trillions, need to listen to and adapt lessons from the B2C world to create a B2B experience that provides the B2B buyer the same purchasing ease he feels when purchasing his next personal gadget.

Here are three areas in which B2B sales can learn from B2C.

Make it Omni-Channel

Today’s B2C buyer can go to any Gap store to try on a new pair of jeans. The same shopper can fill his “shopping cart” on the Gap website, re-access that order from their mobile device, and then order the jeans to be delivered for pickup at the Gap store in his local mall. This is the omni-channel experience to which buyers are becoming accustomed. Buyers should be able to make purchases how they want and when they want, and all sources of information should be centralized to one location.

We are beginning to see this type of experience in B2B sales for brands and wholesalers. These companies are realizing that their customers’ buying journey needs to be accessible from any point, whether in store, at home, on the train, or on a plane. As such, having a platform that is accessible via an online storefront, as well as a mobile storefront, is the start of a true omni-channel experience for B2B buyers.

User Experience is Key

An experience similar to B2C includes a user-friendly web and native mobile interface, quick payments and beautiful product catalogs. These are now expectations of B2B customers based on their B2C experiences. Granted, purchasing an industrial precision tool is not quite the same as online grocery shopping. However, the online grocery shopping experience provides the push that traditional wholesale distributors need to rethink the online purchasing experience.

B2B buyers need an intuitive platform from which to order. Product images need to be interactive, provided with specs and product details in multimedia formats. Pricing structures must be clearly displayed, and the process of “adding to your cart” needs to be as simple as clicking a button. Not only will this make buyers enjoy the process more, but this type of user experience will increase sales.

A Personal Touch

When a user logs on to Amazon, her homepage may have the following sections: Related to Items You’ve Viewed, New For You, Inspired by Your Shopping Trends, Recommendations for You in Kindle Store, and so on. And, when that user searches for a specific item, whether it be a book, a cellphone case, or a pair of running shoes, she will be presented with further personalization: “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”; “Sponsored Products Related to This Item”; “Special Offers and Product Promotions.” Amazon is the king of offering personalization to its customers.

So too, the B2B world must evolve. A B2B buyer should be able to log in to his account, view his past purchases, decide if he’d like to repeat that order (to refill stock), or place a new order. He should be presented with related products, and special promotions. With this type of a system, B2B buyers can also become more independent shoppers who rely less on the quarterly visit from a sales rep. Instead, using a mobile app gives the buyer independence to order at his leisure, knowing that the right products are being presented to him through the online/mobile storefront catalogs, with full visibility into inventory at hand. This also keeps the lines of communication between buyer and sales rep open between face-to-face visits.

If Bob Dylan can gain creative inspiration from other musicians to produce some of the most influential music of the 20^th Century, surely B2B businesses should learn from the sales innovations of their B2C counterparts. In doing so, B2B players will be able to provide the best possible experience for their customers, and fully capitalize on the tremendous potential of the B2B brands market.

Editor’s Note: My company TOPO has produced a case on the Cloudera Account Based Sales Development Process that I recommend checking out. Click here to view.

Today’s author is Lars Nilsson, VP of Field Operations at Cloudera.

Here’s a plain and simple truth: the best sales development teams today leverage technology to perform smarter, better and faster. The proliferation of, and advances in, sales technology have presented today’s sales development teams with an opportunity to completely revolutionize the way they conduct business.

At its core, the Sales Development role remains the same as ever. Today’s Sales Development Teams, like their account development and telemarketing counterparts of the past, are specialized units focused on prospecting and building qualified pipeline for a company. They are measured by the quantity of their outreach (e.g. dials made/answered and emails sent/opened/replied to), and are typically paid on qualified meetings set up for their Outside and Inside Sales counterparts. The difference is, today’s sales development teams must be smarter and more targeted in their outreach to produce the same amount of pipeline, particularly in the Enterprise. Technology is helping today’s teams achieve this new approach, and has been for some years. Take the case of dialing as an example.

In the early days of Sales Development, a sales development rep (SDR) had to complete a hundred or more phone calls and voicemails per day hoping to “catch” someone live.  Eventually, auto-dialers would make this arduous task easier, but then if nobody answered, the SDR would spend additional time leaving a pithy voice-mail in the hope that perhaps they would inspire the prospect to call them back (yeah right) or at least leave some form of audible company branded product message. InsideSales.com and other emerging technologies now allow SDR’s to pre-record voice mail messages so now even leaving voice mails can be automated and help the SDR get to his/her dial targets within an hour of starting their day.

The point is, as the business world has changed and technology has evolved, so has the art and science of Sales Development. Sales Development leaders are constantly evaluating new technologies and best practice ideas to help cover more ground while keeping resources as lean as possible. As a result, many forward thinking B2B technology companies are breeding SDR’s at the same rate as their outside quota carrying sales counterparts, making a new outbound approach possible by a different breed of Sales 2.0 vendors.

Here at Cloudera, we call this approach Account Based Sales Development (ABSD). The SDR team has refined its approach to outbound prospecting into the enterprise with the help of two cutting edge technology vendors; Outreach.io and LeanData – two companies that embody the essence of big data. The ever present and ubiquitous LinkedIn Navigator is the third pillar in our outbound “SDR technology stack”.  Instead of beating on the empty phone doors we’ve seen as industry standard, we have changed our approach to rely on technology to help us understand those that would be more willing to take and accept our calls. Since implementing our ABSD strategy just 3 months ago, we have seen unprecedented results and responses. In our first try within a target account, we sent a three-email campaign using Outreach.io “sequences,” and our ABSD methodology delivered:

• 60% open rate
• 31% reply rate
• 15 net new meetings
• Entry into three new lines of business
• Two expansion opportunities within existing lines of business
•  22 hard bounces automatically purged out of SFDC

The results of all subsequent ABSD campaigns into specifically targeted enterprise accounts netted similar results; all in the coveted double digit email open and reply rates. Using broader and less targeted techniques with Marketing Automation mass emailing, typical open rates vary in the 5-8% range and reply rates in the 2-3% range. I was blown away for I had never seen anything like this in my 20 years of building lead/demand generation teams.

When I first arrived at Cloudera, I faced a “problem” unlike any other in my career: we had too many leads! In our case, it wasn’t just that we had too many leads for the SDR team to manage, but we had too many of the wrong type of leads. Allow me to elaborate… LeanDataForms

For those of you who don’t know, Cloudera provides an open source distribution of Apache Hadoop –  a pioneering and fundamentally new way of storing and processing data. It is commonly downloaded for free. In today’s hyper-connected world where more and more data is being created every day, Hadoop’s breakthrough advantages mean that businesses and organizations can now find value in data that was recently considered useless. Cloudera provides enterprise versions of this software alongside support, training, and professional services that provide a more robust enterprise-class experience. The Cloudera platform includes the leading analytic tools, simple administration technology, and compliance-ready security and governance.

Hadoop (big data) solutions are being talked about everywhere it seems, and Cloudera is at the center of it all. People are downloading research, registering for online webinars and attending our events in record numbers. We found out quickly that most leads that we captured were simply investigating our free technology, and wanted to be left in peace to learn about the technology on their own.

This goes directly against what we ask of an SDR; call 10x times, interrupt their day and push for a follow on meeting with their sales rep. In fact, not only were these individuals not interested in having conversations with us, quite a few of these same “prospects” were individuals we had no interest in either.

To sum it up, our challenge was to determine which individuals were “SDR actionable” versus those prospects who offered too low a value proposition for the dedicated attention of my SDR team.

Armed with industry specific use cases and in conjunction with their assigned Account Executive & Subject Matter Experts, Cloudera SDRs create targeted email “sequences”. These sequences are a series of concise emails that are written with the buyer persona in mind and are designed to generate qualified meetings. For example, a three-email sequence will “drip” out three emails to the same target audience approximately 2.5 days apart in hopes of getting either an email open, or better yet… a direct reply.

The steps we take are:

Step 1: Create a Single View of Each Target Account

This is critical to the success of an ABSD campaign. Integration with LeanData places a custom iframe into the Account Object and makes visible all of the unconverted leads in Salesforce.com that were never converted against the existing account.  By hitting a “Mass Convert” button, all related leads will automatically convert into contacts. LeanData also makes visible any duplicate accounts that may exist in the CRM database making for easier consolidation and merging.

To ensure that leads get converted into existing accounts, we also use LeanData’s “auto-convert” functionality, which proactively converts all new inbound leads within our target market straight to the account record. By isolating our high value target account leads and automatically associating them with their respective accounts we have marginalized the manual work an SDR has to do prior to execution and have identified the highest value leads for more efficient and timely follow ups.

Today, 60% of our lead volume is auto-assigned to related accounts thus giving each SDR hours back a day to focus on inbound lead prosecution, and more time to dedicate towards outbound efforts.

Fig. 1 – LeanData’s iFrame. After integration of LeanData with Salesforce.com, the LeanData detail section can be found in the Account object of Salesforce.com. This will present for you all duplicate accounts and related lead objects that exist against that named account.  In this example, it shows us that we have one duplicate account record and 73 existing lead objects that all come from the account: American Express.  By simply selecting the “Mass Convert” button, you can automatically mass convert these leads into contacts against the American Express account and thus get a consolidated view of all “opt in” contacts that come from one of your target accounts

Step 2. Identify Target Prospects Within Each Account

With visibility to all known titles in the CRM, the SDR team (with account executive (AE) coordination) is able to quickly identify other relevant stakeholders that DID NOT exist in our CRM through inbound inquiries. By using LinkedIn Navigator and DiscoverOrg, SDRs search for people with titles relevant to big data, data architecture and “Hadoop” at the target account and build them into separate lists. The key here is to choose titles you believe carry the pain for the solution your products might solve for them.

What we end up with is everybody that has ever come to us and a target rich group of new contacts we believe will care about what we present them.

Step 3. Develop Relevant Content

SDRs work directly with their AE and a Cloudera Industry Vertical focused Subject Matter Expert (we have SME’s at Cloudera aligned to our top five industry vertical targets) to develop three separate emails designed to send in a sequence a few days apart from each other (we’ve done 2, 3 and 4 drip sequences in the past but prefer 3). The key here is to tailor the message to the specific account, account type and vertical to ensure the short, crisp, use case specific message that aligns to the target’s pain.

This level of targeted outreach wasn’t something we could do had we not been able to combine all the relevant data we had in our CRM; hugely valuable!

Step 4. Generate Outreach.io Sequences

After the emails have been drafted, the SDR loads them into Outreach.io and sets up the sequence to deploy over a week’s time. For our first few sequences we chose to have the first email go out Tuesday morning, the second on a Thursday afternoon and the third on the following Monday afternoon. Over the last few weeks, we have begun A/B testing with the number# of sequences, the days, times, and messaging of the sequences. SDR’s have become very prideful of their open and reply rates and drive each other to push the envelope on weekly performance metrics.

Fig.2 – Outreach.io screenshot showing the results of a completed three email sequence ABSD campaign that saw 56% open rate and a 25% reply rate.  Interesting to note that there were 26 hard bounces and only five “opt outs” This particular ABSD campaign executed on July 28, July 30 & Aug. 1 where most of the resulting activity occurred.  SDR follow-up activity resulted in nine meetings being set leading to three new opportunities being qualified and forecast for $285K

To date, we have targeted 24 companies with individual ABSD campaigns. 86 qualified meetings have been set up resulting in 45 opportunities created rolling up $3.7M of new forecasted pipeline. As the SDR’s and AE’s get comfortable with the process and procedure of setting up each individual campaign, there’s just more pipeline to go and create.  I’ve had to adjust the comp plans for SDR’s as a result of ABSD as the average number of meetings they are setting has increased by 20%.  This drives not only the increase we are seeing in pipeline generating from the SDR channel, but also speaks directly to the Efficiency OKR that our CEO has concentrated the entire company on. We are doing more with less and getting the right kind of activity in our target market segment while driving more pipeline and more revenue. Beautiful!

ABSD is a derivative of the “Account Based Marketing” (ABM) movement that has been gaining momentum as of late.  I just learned that ABM was coined in 2004 by ITSMA but I had not heard of it until earlier last year when Cloudera began using technology to target ads at specific buyer personas within strategic accounts. Jon Miller of Engagio and Sangram Vajre of Terminus are both building technology around ABM and I hope they plan to include more sales related functions along with Marketing functions. In my opinion, ABM should be re-coined as ABS&M as the collaboration and execution between Sales AND Marketing needs to be near perfect to be able to pull off the surgical targeting of each subsequent account with the right messages from marketing together with the right outreach, follow-up, and execution from sales.  I’d also say that ABM was made possible because Marketing Automation (MA) and Sales 2.0 mashes up the main componentry of out-bounding targeted content into specific accounts with the title relevant contacts whose email and phone numbers# can now be so easily found through contact vendors  (LinkedIn,  DiscoverOrg, Data.com, Netprospex).

This particular methodology was inspired by the contributions from thought leaders like Craig Rosenberg and the entire gang at the Topo.  There, SDR leaders gather and bat around technology and best practice ideas and push the envelope of what is possible in today’s emerging Sales 3.0 world. Jill Rowley & Aaron Ross have been banging away for years on their convictions about outbound and social selling and I have picked up so many ideas form them as well.  Props must also be given to Jim Fowler and Garth Moulton (of Jigsaw, now Data.com) for creating the first ever contact exchange allowing reps to offer contact information from their rolodex picked up from past sales cycles in return for the ability to view other rep’s rolodexes. This “buyer persona” or title relevant contact database brought new life to my Account Development team at ArcSight and accelerated pipeline growth to record new levels. This ability changed the rules of the cold prospect outreach game forever in my opinion and will continue to propel ABSD to new heights.

While we are still in the early days of ABSD here at Cloudera, I do see this as the next evolution of inside sales prospecting efforts. We finally have the technology to support the ideal process for triaging, researching, and reaching out to target contacts at specific accounts with the right messaging.

Again, if you want to learn more – TOPO has created a case documenting the process. Click here.

Today’s author: Lars Nilsson is the VP of Field Operations for Cloudera, the company that is revolutionizing enterprise data management by offering the first unified Platform for Big Data, an enterprise data hub built on Apache Hadoop™. Prior to Cloudera, Lars founded SalesSource, a premier business services consulting firm specializing in Salesforce.com customization and sales process development to aid venture backed start-ups scale and drive pipeline. Lars has also served in Sales Executive roles at ArcSight/Hewlett Packard, Riverbed Technology, and Portal Software. All three companies achieved an IPO.

 

Despite the fast-paced world that we live in where we are constantly meeting new people, we often do not allow ourselves the ability to connect with individuals beyond trying to entice them on a product we are looking to sell.  Part of the reason why many of us overlook the importance of building long-term relationships is because they are difficult.  Long-lasting relationships take time and effort on our part, which many of us do not have, in order to create an environment where an individual feels that they are truly valued and not just another name on a potential client list.

It is human nature for us to do what is most convenient at any particular given time.  As it pertains to relationship building, the most convenient relationship is the one that is right in front of us.  To avoid reverting back on our basic instincts, it must be a priority to make meaningful connections not just with those whom we come into contact with presently but also those past and future clients as well.

Whether you are an entry-level sales representative or a high level sales consultant with clients across the globe, fostering long-term relationships are vital.  Today, we will discuss four ways to effectively build long-lasting relationships that will allow you to manage your time efficiently between past and future clients in order to maximize your revenue stream.

1)  A Relationship Tool: Bonding

The ability to create a bond between yourself and another person is a key component to a successful long-term relationship, but you cannot pretend to share something with another person.  It must be REAL.  Bonding leads to relationships where none previously existed.

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You cannot pretend to share something with another person. It must be REAL.
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Many of us want to bond with those we meet in the workplace, conventions, and other professional atmospheres but lack the necessary tools to accomplish such a relationship.

Start with Interests.  Interests help to find a common ground with another individual that will allow your initial meeting to feel like a conversation rather than a sales pitch.  From interests you can move onto finding more about their goals, an important step when evaluating how to negotiate a sale on your product.

Body Language.  Never forget that more information is communicated nonverbally than verbally.  This means that you must be conscious of the way you present yourself.

It’s a balance.  Bonding requires a two-way communication that should be beneficial for both parties.

2)  “Get what you want, while helping them get what they want”

Create a win-win situation.  Yes, we know this is an overused cliché, but when you create a win-win situation you are able satisfy your interests while still catering to the needs of your client in order to achieve an outcome that satisfies everyone.  A win-win situation establishes a history of positive interaction between parties that builds trust and confidence in one another, key components to any successful long-term relationship.

Many times as competitive professionals, we focus solely on winning and more accurately, winning now.  When we do this, we end up creating a win-lose situation where the deal we are set on achieving is so lop-sided that it fosters resentment in the other party.

The concern for our immediate successes in a win-lose situation prevent us from the prospect of future deals with clients and we lose out on the intangible benefits of long-term relationships. Always focus on satisfying your interests but allow your clients to satisfy their interests as well.

The best way to get what you want is to help the other side get some of what they want.

3)  Maintain an Ongoing Dialogue even when you are not looking to Sell

Relationships are made not just when we are looking to make a sale but also when we are NOT looking to make a sale.  Checking in on clients periodically during a dead period can not only spark future sales, but it engages your client in a way that makes them feel valued and not just another name on a list.

Little things such as this can go a long way when you try to re-connect with that same client to make a future sale.  The relationships you foster now, lead to a positive reception to future sales inquiries and a willingness to, at a minimum, listen to your sales pitch.

A real-life example of maintaining an ongoing dialogue with clients is SNI’s own, Ron Shapiro.  Ron is an expert negotiator, sports agent, attorney, educator, New York Times Bestselling Author, and Civic Leader who interacts with new people on a daily basis.  With his busy schedule, Ron still manages to send a holiday card every year to his past clients.  Even if Ron’s only form of communication with these clients is a yearly holiday card, this simple gesture reminds his clients that Ron is thinking about them.

Something so simple, and often overlooked, can make a big difference when re-connecting with past clients to engage them in a future sale.

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Maintain an Ongoing Dialogue even when you are not actively looking to sell…
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4)  Efficiently Manage your time: 80/20 Rule

Long-term relationships help to build your client base, but in the end those relationships must generate sales in order to be worthwhile.  The often referred to “80/20 rule” outlines that 80% of your sales comes from 20% of your clients.

All clients are not created equal.  As we begin to focus on making meaningful connections with our clients, we sometimes lose sight of those who actually generate significant sales.  We must highlight the 20% that generate 80% of our sales.  Trying to please all clients at all times is inefficient and, as I am sure most of you have encountered before, nearly impossible.

Be realistic.  The old saying goes… time is money, but your time is also limited.  We must properly allocate our time to those individuals that generate a significant portion of our sales.  Long-term relationships are important BUT we must never lose sight of our end goal—to maximize sales.

Emphasize your time on maintaining the 20% of your relationships that provide 80% of your revenue.  Remind yourself that sometimes less is more when relationship building because as we discussed in Tip #1, relationships create a bond that only lasts if it is REAL.  Long-term relationships foster a trusting connection between individuals that is real, enhancing your successes not only now but in the future as well.

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Emphasize your time on maintaining the 20% of your relationships that provide 80% of your revenue.
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The post Fostering Long-Term Relationships: The Key to a Successful Salesman appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Ask a VP of Marketing at a large-scale trade show why they’re at the event and it won’t be long until you hear the word “leads.”

If you share that mindset, I’m here to tell you you’re doing it wrong.

A lead is just data. First name, last name, email, etc. The top of the funnel goal for your business should never be to collect a bunch of data with business cards or badge scans, it should be to connect with ideal prospects, start a real relationship, and book an actual qualified appointment. Tradeshow “demos” don’t count. You want the real deal, on the books, no distractions, logged in calendars, invites delivered, and saved in CRM.

Prior to last week’s Dreamforce, we personally were doing it wrong at SalesLoft. This was our flow:

1. Set a ‘lead quota’ for the event
2. Scan badges, collect cards, and bring them all home
3. Have reps try to follow up with the people they met (not efficient)
4. Hand the second tier leads to SDRs so they could add to a Cadence to call, qualify, and schedule appointments, logging into calendar and saving to CRM
5. Recycle the ones (many) who don’t reply.

Here’s how this would unfold:

A prospect visits the booth and shows interest. They give us their contact information and say they’ll reply and take an appointment if we reach out after the show. Reps reach out after the show and the prospects often don’t reply because they are crazy busy, forgetful, and bombarded by all the others who are reaching out post-event.

Our interaction to appointment ratio was super low.

Preparing for Dreamforce 2015, we wanted to spice things up. From Day 1 we had a goal for actual appointments:

Then we interacted with people. We asked them qualification questions. We avoided taking their cards or scanning their badges. We helped them determine whether we could be valuable. And when they said “yes,” we asked them to take out their phone and find a time on the calendar that would work. It required a bit of tradeshow “sales development” finesse, but it worked.

Then we used a new app we built:

SalesLoft Lead Pass is simple.

Open the app on a mobile device (phone or iPad) and select “Get Started.” Behind the scenes, the app knows your lead pass rules and selects the right sales executive. Because it’s synced to all reps’ Google calendars, the app generates the calendar availability of the rep (in this case Anthony).

From here, it’s as simple as selecting the right time with your prospect and booking the meeting. The minute you do that, the following happens behind the scenes:

1. Creates calendar event for the AE and Prospect
2. Sends invites to both parties including the screen share info and notes
3. Goes behind the scenes in Salesforce to create the right event (in our case: Task action: Demo set) and assigns it to the right rep.

Using this method at Dreamforce last week we scheduled 183 appointments.

I’d rather have 183 scheduled appointments than 3,000 names of leads (data). We can get those pretty simply.

Next challenge?

Monitor and increase the appointments set to demo complete ratio.
From there, you’ll work on appointments completed => ops created => new customers => upgrade / renewal $

What’s your lead to revenue strategy at large-scale events? Leave a comment below and let us know what’s working, not working, and if this sounds helpful.

The post How We Booked 183 Qualified Appointments at Dreamforce and How You Can Too! appeared first on SalesLoft.

A typical telemarketer makes at least 140 live calls, talks to at least 40 decision-makers, acquires at least 10 fresh contact emails, and sends out reference materials to at least 140 contacts – all in a day’s work.

That looks quite a lot to finish in a plate – unless you’re a foodie.

Do all these guarantee a Lead? Let’s see.

Each qualified lead follows a set of criteria. The number of qualified criterion of a certain lead will determine its classification. See below.

Hot Lead

Sizzling and sumptuous to your eyes…

Yes, it’s a Lead! This type of a qualified lead that meets all the required criteria which most of time is set. So how to know if it’s a hot lead, apply the BANT lead qualifying system.

B is for Budget – The prospect has set or prepared a budget and is just ready for disposal at anytime a project proposal is approved by the management.

Qualifying questions for this criterion would be: Do you have a budget? How much is your budget? Are you willing to expend? What is your budget range?

A for Authority – The contact person you speak to could either be the Person In charge, or the Recommender. He should have the final word to either say “yes” or “no” to the proposal.

Qualifying questions are: Are you the person in charge/recommender on this project? What is your role on this? Do you solely make decision on this?

N is for Need – Need would always top the set of qualifying questions in a telemarketing script. When a need from the prospect is identified, this sends a signal of a brewing lead.

Qualifying questions maybe as follows: Are you looking into this type of product/service to improve your process? What product/service are you currently using? Have you encountered any issue? Are there any initiatives from your company to evaluate/replace your current system? What functionalities are you looking at?

T is for Time frame – The point period from the time you spoke with the prospect to the planned or projected period of purchase or implementation of the new product or service.

Most qualifying questions would be: When do you plan to purchase? When do you plan to implement the new system.

Warm Lead

Well-plated and perfectly garnished, but tastes just fine… what’s the missing ingredient?

This qualified lead misses 1 or 2 criteria. But what makes it bagged the qualifying scale is that a Need was identified and the other 1 or 2 qualified criteria should be able to support the first. In most cases, the disqualifiers would either be Budget or Time frame.

But don’t get easily discouraged, these leads are not wasted.  They could still be nurtured and you might be surprise in due time they’ll be contacting you again.

Cold Lead

So, who likes a bowl of cold soup?

A qualified cold lead has 2 or 3 disqualifiers and the remaining qualifier would be supported by the prospects agreement to take a look or compare set ups between their current system and yours. This is the kind of lead which most of the time is set to KIV (kept in view), and further nurturing is needed. Business success is not achieved overnight. It takes time, effort, tools, skills and strategies to be able to reach your target results.

Look at every lead as an edible opportunity. Imbibe hunger for it. Whether it’s HOT, WARM, or COLD, it’s still comestible, isn’t it?

Courtesy: freedigitalphotos.net

This post originally appeared at Callbox Blog.

I often say there are no shortcuts in sales. Optimizing your sales team takes hard work and consistency, and it's usually a couple of months before you see any change.  

That being said, one of those rare short-term techniques that often goes overlooked is giving your team fresh "Reasons to Call," or in the world of email, "Reasons to Contact" (RTCs).

What Is an RTC?

You can think of an RTC as a mini campaign. It’s a new reason to call clients, or a fresh new angle to use on the phone with prospects. Salespeople love RTCs, as they reinvigorate reps' approach to outbound calling and/or emailing.

Many companies generate organic RTCs, such as a new product release, pricing changes, or feature improvements. The problem with these types of RTCs is that the sales team is dependent on other departments to make them happen. Engineering resources are costly, and while it can be beneficial, I’m not sure your product team should be building things just so your sales team has a new pitch.

Why Use RTCs?

Active salespeople get into a groove. They get their story down and they iterate on it with every conversation. But after a while, even the best salespeople fall into a rut, and their story starts to sound stale.  

Once a salesperson start going down this slippery slope, their confidence and conviction often takes a nosedive. This happens most often with follow-ups, where reps aren't as persistent as they should be because they don’t have a good enough reason to call the prospect again.

Some top sales reps will go back to the drawing board, and they might rewrite their pitch to sound fresh. Others get "creative" with the pitch they have. This is where you’ll see outright deceptive sales tactics come into play as metrics get exaggerated, and false stories spun.  Very quickly the pitch starts to sound like a tall tale.

It's also worth nothing that feeling "stale" is at least 50% percent mental. The salesperson may not in fact sound stale -- it may just be their perception. 

Five Fresh RTCs That Give Reps Purpose

Regardless of whether the pitch has indeed outlived its usefulness or the salesperson simply feels it has, you can head negative situations off at the pass with RTCs.

Give them something fresh to say and you will see confidence go up. Your PR team spends its days coming up with newsworthy stories to give to the press, so why can’t you do the same for your sales team?

Here are five examples of interesting RTCs:

1. Breaking industry news. Example: “I came across this article, and I thought you might find it useful.”
2. New client stories. Example: “We just did some work with Client X, and I thought you might finding it interesting because they’re similar to you in Y and Z ways.”
3. New data. Example: “The first time that we spoke you mentioned you wanted proof that our product works. Here are some more recent stats.”
4. Upcoming nearby events. Example: “I’m heading to X location for Y conference, and thought it would be a good opportunity to grab a coffee with you.”
5. Inbound marketing. Example: “I noticed you opened our white paper on X, and I thought I could help you better understand how our product can help you do Y.”

Bonus tip: Combine a new RTC with a call or email blitz where your team sits down and reaches out to 15-20 new prospects or old opportunities.

Your team shouldn't always be burdened with thinking of fresh reasons to call. Invest time in helping your salespeople tell a fresh story. Make this a top priority amongst your managers. Work with PR to get a new sales RTC every quarter, and your reps will feel they're being better supported by the organization.

Want to learn how to construct a rockstar sales organization from scratch? Come see HubSpot chief revenue officer Mark Roberge speak on "Building the Sales Machine." Find more details here.

Editor's note: This post originally appeared on the Building the Sales Machine blog, and is republished here with permission.

According to The Marketing Donut, 80% of sales are made on the 5th to 12th contact. This statistic argues powerfully for persistence in sales.

But the fact remains: Five to 12 contacts is a lot. Wouldn't it be nice if you could engage the buyer on the very first attempt, and bring them to close a lot sooner?

It's not impossible to get prospects' attention on contact number one (although it may sometimes feel that way). So what's the secret to getting buyers to respond to your first email? Constructing a killer message.

Heather R. Morgan, founder and CEO of Salesfolk, gives salespeople a step-by-step tutorial on how to write a response-worthy cold email in the following SlideShare. Read to the end for an email template that led to six closed deals.

Author: Camille Crandall

When I first came on board at Marketo, I was amazed by the power of marketing automation and the data it provided to marketers and salespersons alike. Starting a conversation with a new prospect was easy when I already knew what they were interested in—it was like Facebook stalking for marketing and sales professionals. Sign me up!

A few months into my SDR (Sales Development Representative) role, with the marketing automation engine running in the background, I began to understand what I was selling and changed my messaging to create value instead of only building upon what was already provided by marketing automation. Thinking of it with “if/then” logic, I would draw lines between interests and needs, mapping Marketo’s services to customer pain points.

For example: If a person is showing interest in creating content and they are a marketing manager, then they might be interested in aggregating data to determine what content is the most successful. This changes the conversation from “I noticed you downloaded XYZ whitepaper” to “I noticed your interest in content creation, and so I am curious about your engagement strategy. How are you leveraging data to help your team create marketing assets that will most greatly affect the bottom line?” See the difference?

With a marketing automation platform working in the background, it’s easy for a salesperson to become a fanatic. But what happens when the inbound engine (aka: inbound marketing leads qualified by SDRs) isn’t getting you to your quota? Or what if certain prospects haven’t converted into known leads? You don’t want to miss out on such great opportunities—especially if there is a true business need or pain point your prospect is experiencing that your product could solve.

To meet this delta between what the inbound engine produces for your pipeline and blowing your numbers out of the water month over month, you, the sales rep, needs to explore the world of outbound prospecting. Let’s take a look at just what this entails:

The Outbound Prospecting Landscape

Cold emailing/calling can be a daunting task; however, outbounding is extremely similar to inbounding. The only difference is knowing where a prospect’s interest lies and inferring. For outbounding success, it is imperative that you:

1. Do your research: It is necessary to understand who you are reaching out to and why that individual would care to engage in a conversation with you. We’ve all heard of the Why You, Why You Now (WYWYN) email—now it’s time to put it to use.
2. Reach out to key decision makers and stakeholders: After you’ve done your research and crafted a thoughtful email, make sure it reaches decision-makers (C-Suite, VPs, Directors, etc). You don’t necessarily have to talk to those people, but if you catch their interest, it will trickle down. Look for employees to begin pinging your site and let the inbound engine get to work.
3. Follow up: This may sound pretty simple, but you’d be surprised how effective this can be in getting a conversation with either a decision maker or an influencer. For a well-crafted email, I send two follow-ups on the same thread to ensure they received my note. Reuse the work you have already done (research and personalized emails) as talking points when you call to follow up.

Now, let’s expand on the primary area of successful outbound prospecting: research.

Research — The Key to Successful Outbound Prospecting

The concept of researching harkens back to the good ol’ college and high school days of writing a well thought-out essay. Whether the essay was expository, persuasive, analytical, or argumentative, the most important aspect was to understand your topic. And what’s the best way to truly grasp your topic? Research it! The same could be said today when you, as a working professional, are trying to make connections with potential customers. You need to come off as knowledgeable about them (as much as you are about your product or service).

So how can you increase your credibility in this respect?:

1. Understand the space the company is in and any competitors that are already customers
2. Know the role of the person you’re reaching out to and how your product affects them
3. Leverage 3^rd party data for validation—graphics, images, and stats go a long way

Remember to always ask yourself “why should they care?” If you can’t answer this, then the answer is “they don’t.”

Here are my favorite “go-to” resources for research:

1. Company’s and individual’s LinkedIn pages: These are a quick, one-stop shop to find who you should be reaching out to and what matters most to them (check the recent posts from the company and the individual prospect’s bio).
2. Twitter page: This is the millennium’s version of “a little birdy told me.” It’s great for connecting with a prospect on a personal level on a topic that’s relevant to them.
3. CrunchBase: Find succinct details on a company and its funding rounds. One of my favorite triggers for a newly-funded organization is to discuss the value its sister portfolio companies find when using our product.
4. Company website: One quick glance tells you what your prospect is proud of. Be aware of what they are promoting!
5. TechCrunch: Third-party articles highlight why your prospect is awesome. Be aware of how they are being promoted!

Work Smart and Use Your Tools

Now, as a fan of the “work smarter, not harder” mentality, I recommend using the tools you have available to you to track, prove, and recreate your successes. On this note, try:

• Using your marketing automation tools to track the success of your outbound prospecting: Are prospects opening your emails? Which emails performed best? Are individuals from your target company beginning to interact with your site?
• Saving your favorite emails and using them as templates: If your email to the CEO gets a response, use it again and personalize wherever you need to while keeping the value points from the original email.

Remember: any response is a good response. An email that grabbed enough attention to elicit a reply is useful—even if it’s a “no.” If you get a “no,” ask them what is keeping your product from being top of mind today and when would be a better time to connect. You can use their response to help craft your next touch-point.

Personalize, Personalize, Personalize

Take the time to “be better” and go the extra mile in your outbound activities. We’ve all seen or heard of prospects who buy the product from the sales person they had the best relationship with. Know who your customer is and listen to them (both in what information they make available about themselves and in what they say). Make sure the person they want to buy from is you.

I hope that these tips have been helpful. What advice can you share to make your outbound marketing and sales more effective? Please share your ideas in the comments section below!

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Outbounding in an Inbound World: Tips for Driving Sales Success was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post Outbounding in an Inbound World: Tips for Driving Sales Success appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.