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Happy Friday Sales Hackers!

Cheers- You’ve made it through another week! I’ve put together some of the highlights from our LinkedIn Community this week. We round up the best content that we can for the blog, but we’ve realized there are so many good discussions going on in our community that we don’t want overlooked!

Please let me know if you have any feedback, or have something to contribute to next weeks Community Round Up. I look forward to hearing from you! Enjoy the weekend… you earned it!

Best,

Jessie Barnes

This Week’s Question:

Jake Reni: Discussing sales pricing early… What are your thoughts on the topic?

Best Responses from our Sales Hacker LinkedIn Community:

Scott Ward: Why would you drive a cycle with someone if you don’t have an idea if you are in the same ballpark . While BANT is a little dated I would say its at least a good idea to know if they are in the realm of affordability. Saves time from unqualified prospect. I read an article that said top producing sales people on average spend 2 more hours a day selling than average reps and they are also ruthless where they spend and prioritize their time. My 2C

Derek Neuland: I believe pricing should come up either when the customer asks while in the sales cycle, or when you are going to trial. That way you can qualify them before you get too far into the sales cycle.

Brandon Redlinger: Pricing often comes up early in sales conversations, so I think you definitely need to prepare for it. However, it’s often dangerous. Many people jump too quickly to price without fully understanding the product or knowing the real value for them.

My favorite approach answering that question is “it depends.” And it does. Essentially, you say “we have a few different pricing options, but it really depends on what you’re looking for. Can you tell me more about your needs? I want to make sure you get the right product/service, and make sure we’re even the best fit for you.” People generally appreciate custom solutions rather than one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter solutions.

Of course, you’ll inevitably run into people who just keep asking and asking for price without giving you any other details about their needs. Ideally, you would have done your research before jumping on the call, so you have a good idea of where they fit, and you can give them a ballpark. Then quickly dive deeper into needs development, etc.

Dara Joelle de la Torre: There is always a time and place for the pricing discussion and this differs from prospect to prospect.

In my experience as an AE…

For prospects that like to know off the bat, they tend to cut to the chase and ask the question about price then and there. I typically don’t bring up the pricing discussion voluntarily until I feel I’ve 1) learned their needs and 2) built value around how I can help them address those needs.

In thinking about the meetings I’ve had lately, pricing discussions have happened in various situations:

* at the end of an awesome discovery call

* after a demonstration

* when we’ve discussed some technical requirements that may include additional costs

Before I was an AE, I was an LDR. In this role, I would ask the budget question if I got the impression the prospect may be price sensitive. This way, I could give my AE a heads up that pricing may be an obstacle to deal with later. I would still let my AE handle all things related to pricing. We found that in some instances, the need for our product helped loosen their company’s purse strings a little, giving them enough budget to buy. That would’ve been a deal we missed out on if we disqualified them too early.

Jeremiah Boehner: It depends on what you’re selling but you should not be afraid to tell the price. I certainly don’t want my BDR’s giving prices to customers because we’re ad network and price’s customers pay are based upon a variety of factors, but they do have some standard responses.

However if you’re selling a service or flat price product don’t be afraid to tell them the price right away. Why waist 2hrs of your time telling a customer all about something raising their buying temp to find out at the end that it’s out of their budget. I always try to find out if a customer has a budget the first 5 minutes of a call if they don’t I try to end the call as quickly as possible.

Shaun Ricci: I personally like to talk price early on only if I am pushed on it. My preference would be to build value of course, but if someone presses me on price I don’t want to dodge their question. When I am a buyer, I often have a good idea of value before I talk to a rep so when a BDR tells me “I don’t have enough information to give you a price” when their price is likely a flat per seat charge it just frustrates me.

Loren Padelford: The job of sales is not to get to a yes, but to uncover the no as quickly as possible. Price drives a lot of no’s. I agree with Mark and many others, bring price up early and get over it. Better than wasting a lot of time in discovery only to find out that the prospects budget is below what you can sell for. For us, price comes up in the first conversation.

The post Discussing Sales Pricing Early appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Not a lot of companies get to a $1 billion valuation, or the so-called “unicorn” status.

And some of them manage to do it faster than others.

These are the companies that got to a $1 billion valuation faster than anyone else, based on data from research firm Pitchbook.

SEE ALSO: The epic 30-year bromance of billionaire CEOs Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff

14. Square makes accepting payments easy

Time it took to reach $1 billion valuation: 2.93 years

Latest valuation: $6 billion

Total funding to date: $590 million

What it does: Square, founded by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, is a mobile payment company that simplifies the way businesses accept payments. It’s best known for its point-of-sale stand and credit card reader, but it lately started making small business loans as well. In July, it was reported to have filed for an IPO.

13. Zynga used to be the hottest online game service in the world

Time it took to reach $1 billion valuation: 2.88 years

Latest valuation: $2.5 billion (market cap as of Aug. 15)

Total funding to date: Went public in 2011

What it does: Zynga is an online game service provider that created some of the most popular social games such as FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and Zynga Poker. It used to be one of the hottest gaming companies in the world, but lately has been struggling a bit, as its shares lost more than half of their value over the past 18 months. Zynga's founder Mark Pincus returned as CEO in April 2015.

12. Lazada is the Amazon of Southeast Asia

Time it took to reach $1 billion valuation: 2.75 years

Latest valuation: ~$1.12 billion

Total funding to date: $710 million

What it does: Lazada is one of the largest online shopping sites in Southeast Asia. Incubated by Rocket Internet’s Samwer brothers, Lazada targets people in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand. Last year it had $154.3 million in revenue, but its net operating loss was $152.5 million.

Selling is a complex and dynamic human interaction. There are a lot of things that can wrong that can cost you a deal. But there are two that tend to dominate the “reason” category for losses. The first is the lack of relationship, and the second is a lack of value creation.

Relationships Matter

I have met and spent time with Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson from CEB, the authors of The Challenger Sale. They’ve explained to me—and to countless other people—that their research suggests that Challengers (those who are willing to challenge their prospective clients) major in Challenging and minor in Relationships (where they had the second highest scores).

I’m not privy to CEB’s research, but I believe that the reason the Challenger can effectively do so is because they have excellent relationships (as well as a ton of business acumen and situational knowledge, something more than an insight provided by marketing). Matt and Brent’s hyperbolic headline notwithstanding, I don’t believe that they intended for you to stop worrying about relationships.

Right now, there is a ton of market pressure driving companies—and the people that make them up—to be more transactional. The communication methods we use are less personal than the traditional methods. The sales processes we implement are more transactional than they should be. The drive to reduce costs across all segments of the business, including sales, is causing companies to move parts of the sales function inside. And a lot of salespeople believe that are supposed to be transacting.

The more complex, risky, and expensive the solution you sell, the more you need relationships to succeed. Not going to meet your client because it is a plane trip away is a decision to ignore how important relationships are. Not spending time with your dream clients building trust and deepening your understanding is a decision that suggests you believe selling is really an arms-length decision. The trouble is, your clients will allow you to be as transactional as you want to be.

Don’t be surprised when you lose because no one really knows you. If you think that being known, liked, and trusted isn’t important, try to sell without them.

Value Matters as Much

This much is true: the friendship component that used to be the foundation of the relationship is no longer enough. The lack of a friendship’s ability to carry a deal is a dramatic change in sales over at least the last two decades. The shine on your shoes and smile on your face? Nice, but not enough. The dinners and the tickets to the ball game? Really nice, but still won’t substitute for real value.

Most of the time when we believe we lose because our price is higher we really lose because we didn’t create enough value. Sometimes we have trouble helping our clients perceive the value we create (something I won’t even pretend is easy). And occasionally we lose because our prospective client stubbornly adheres to the immature and expensive belief that lowest price is the only real value (something that should have been discovered early in the process).

One of the real challenges some people have in increasing the perception of value is that they haven’t spent enough time on the relationship to have all of the conversations necessary to changing that perception. They haven’t built the trust that the additional investment they are asking for is worth paying and that their prospect will capture the additional value. They also haven’t created a preference for themselves and their company, something that is often worth the difference in their price and their competitor’s price.

We can roll up dozens of problems to lack of value. Not following your sales process means not creating the right value for your prospect at the right time. Not gaining the commitments you need means failing to help your prospect take the necessary steps to get results, often because you fear imposing on them, or some such thing.

If your business is super-transactional, like Wal-Mart or Amazon, then by all means drop the relationship and get to lowest price as fast as you can (If Amazon hasn’t already beaten you to it, they soon will). But if your business is about customer intimacy, then work as hard as you can to move the only other direction can and get super-relational.

That means you develop relationships of value.

• Look at the last few deals you lost. Were you known, liked, and trusted? Were you known as someone who can help deliver results?
• Look at those same last lost deals. Did you create the right level of value, making price something less an important than the real outcomes your prospective client needed?
• How did you lose the last deal you lost? What was the cause you lost? What would you change if you could go back and do it all over again?

The post The Two Ways You Lose Deals Now appeared first on The Sales Blog.

San Francisco (AFP) - American billionaire George Soros's fund has sold most of its stake in the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, according to regulatory filings. 

In its quarterly statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Soros Funds Management said that as of June 30, it had sold all but nearly 60,000 Alibaba shares, valued at $4.88 million. 

At the end of March, the fund still had 4.4 million shares valued at nearly $370 million.

Similarly, the Tiger Global Management investment fund reduced its stake in the Chinese group from 6.7 million shares at the end of March to just 93,494 shares three months later, filings show. 

Alibaba reached historic highs in November, two months after its initial public offering on Wall Street but it has since lost 37 percent of its value. 

The group's latest quarterly results, published this week, showed a more pronounced slowdown than expected in sales growth, disappointing Wall Street.

The two largest shareholders of Alibaba are still Japan's SoftBank (31.75 percent at the end of 2014) and Yahoo (15.27 percent).

Founded by Jack Ma in 1999, Alibaba is China's biggest e-commerce company but is seeking to expand beyond its traditional business.

The Chinese company and Amazon are considered competitors in some areas, but unlike the US firm which makes its own e-book reader, Alibaba has no products of its own and simply provides a trading platform.

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Is the concept of ‘value add’ or ‘value added’ overused? Perhaps it’s more correct to ask, is it misused? Has ‘value added’ become like the tipping issue? Many of us tip automatically, whether it’s deserved or not. Has the term ‘value add’ become interchangeable with just doing a good job, or simply meeting expectations, not exceeding them? What happened to going above and beyond, every time that you can? To me, that’s value added.

The retail landscape is rife with ‘value adds’

The retail landscape is rife with ‘value adds’. Think about extended warranties. You purchase a new refrigerator. You wanted value for your money, so you likely paid for the brand name as well as the fridge’s features and benefits. Brands that have been around for a while, proved their worth, built a following, have intrinsic value. But as you’re buying that brand name fridge, the salesperson encourages you to purchase an extended warranty beyond the standard one-year warranty — a warranty that will protect you — and one you’ll have to pay for. Where’s the value in that?

What is that saying about the product? Shouldn’t you be able to expect that the refrigerator will work for you a heck of a lot longer than one year? And if it’s not going to, then shouldn’t the manufacturer promote an offer to fix anything that does go wrong in the 13th month after you bought it, and fix it for free. That would be a true value added proposition! Same thing goes for a car purchase and the extended warranties that go along with those purchases. Fundamentally, these types of things are not adding real value, they’re just up-selling and increasing the profitability of “you”. I believe I should be able to expect that most high-ticket items that I purchase are going to last a while; that they’re going to meet my expectation of performance, without me having to buy protection in case they don’t.

‘Value added’, from a business owner’s point of view, is having my vendors go beyond… which make them partners… not vendors.

‘Value added’, from my business owner point of view, is having my vendors go beyond. It’s having their service and their staff perform well beyond my expectations, not just meet my expectations. I hired them to meet my expectations. And I’m ecstatic when they exceed them! In other words… you got the business, now keep it by impressing.

In terms of my clients, value added doesn’t mean giving them great creative. They expect great creative. Why else do you go to an advertising agency? It doesn’t mean delivering on time, that’s an expectation from the outset. It doesn’t mean delivering results. That’s expected too.

‘Value added’ happens when we anticipate what the client needs before they need it.

Value added happens when we anticipate what the client needs before they need it. It’s when we nudge them by showing them there’s a better way. It’s by surprising them with things that they didn’t expect; things that help and delight them. Value added is exceeding beyond what our clients expect, and giving them a reason to keep coming back. It’s making them feel good about working with us because not only are we delivering on their expectation, we are adding value to the service and valuing them as clients, by exceeding their pre-conceived expectations. At its core, value added should be about building relationships.

Jump! How High? That’s not value added.

Jump! How high? That’s not value added. Leap as high as I can for my clients before they ask me to jump… now that’s adding value.

What is your idea of ‘value added’ in your ‘world’? I’d be interested to hear!

Click here to see »

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NOW WATCH: New aerial footage shows aftermath of explosion in China

After weeks of being built up as a Black Friday in July, Amazon Prime Day finally arrived, and the world… yawned. Groggy consumers who stayed up late for the opening midnight madness of summertime savings were greeted with seemingly random and underwhelming deals that many likened to a garage sale. The virtual doorbusters, it turned out, were mostly just busts.

By morning, consumers had already begun to vent their frustration on social media. They lamented the lack of desirable items, sales that ended too quickly and the alarming ubiquity of socks. (It was, in retrospect, a small mercy that no one created an #amazonsocks hashtag.) In celebrating the 20^th anniversary of Amazon, Prime Day was a prime opportunity to show the world the power of data-driven marketing in the 21^st century. Instead, it was a throwback to the kind of disorganized, impersonalized online marketplace that Amazon sought to displace 20 years ago.

The real tragedy of Prime Day isn’t the PR hit that Amazon took. Prime is still a great service and Amazon is still a great brand. But Prime Day could have been something so much better, if Amazon had only followed their own marketing rules and made the customer experience memorable for the right reasons.

In our marketing post-mortem, Amazon made several deadly mistakes with Prime Day:

They targeted their audience (Prime users) without targeting their marketing.

Amazon knows its customers and are masters at the cross-sell, but you wouldn’t have known it on Prime Day. Instead of personalized offers and recommendations, customers were left on their own to scroll their scores of socks, flashlights and other items in the hope of finding something that interested them. As for the lightning round deals (billed as a barrage of doorbusters throughout the day), they were completely hit or miss, ranging from great deals to ho-hum discounts.

They short-circuited the buying process.

Here again, this was puzzling because Amazon understands better than almost any company the importance of research and price/feature comparison in the buyer’s journey. A big reason why Black Friday is so successful is because it gives shoppers six hours or more to research and compare products before the sale. Amazon did an excellent job of creating general anticipation for Prime Day, but by keeping mum on specific deals it failed to give its customers time to research and compare products. Amazon did point out that Prime Day buyers were quick to purchase once they were on the site, but it’s unclear how many of those fast purchases were for small-ticket items or brands/products that the customer already trusted.

They ignored the Prime directive.

Amazon Prime is many things to many people: a customer loyalty program that offers free shipping on many items; a streaming video service that rivals Netflix; a free audio streaming service. What it’s not is a discount club. But instead of giving people a taste of those services, Amazon chose to celebrate Prime by focusing on something it has never been associated with: discounted merchandise. As a result, it’s likely that more than a few customers confused Amazon Prime with JB’s (Jeff Bezos’s) Wholesale Club.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but what we’re really talking about here isn’t the need for more foresight on Amazon’s part, but more insight. Customer relationships are a collection of moments in time, and companies need to make the most of those moments through real-time, personalized marketing. Prime Day focused on the products rather than the people, and paid the price. Had Amazon used analytics and its vast store of customer data to turn Prime Day into a million personalized Black Fridays, it would have knocked our collective socks off, instead of prompting us in our boredom to pick up an extra pair of them.

I remember the first time I was really involved in putting a webinar together. My boss was running around like a chicken with its head cut off, stressing about every little detail. (I tried to remain calm.)

It can be a stressful affair. For many companies, a webinar represents the only time they present to a large audience of leads, customers, industry experts, and sometimes, press. And usually, it’s live. So if you screw up, it’s pretty public. “Technical difficulties” (I hate that term) are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what can go wrong.

(My most panic-inducing moment was when our in-house expert and webinar presenter was stuck at his house because it had dumped several feet of snow that night and his car couldn’t get down his ridiculously long, snow-filled driveway. [Picture is of just the flat part of his driveway.])

While putting together a webinar may never be as easy as 1-2-3, even getting started on the right path can be daunting if it’s your first webinar. However, a webinar is one of the greatest tools in a marketer’s box for all stages of inbound marketing (attract, convert, close, delight) and, depending on the content, can appeal to people in all stages of the buyer’s journey.

Kicking Off Your First Webinar with 5 R’s

1. Research

After you’ve determined the purpose of your webinar (including target persona and whether your primary goal is to attract, convert, close, or delight), planning should begin at the research level. Some questions to explore:

• What other webinars are popular in your space? (Industry sites, competitors, customers’ presentations, etc.) If you can find out which ones were more successful, this is extremely helpful.
• Depending on your purpose, what should the content focus around? Should it be educational, product-focused, company-focused, etc.? If it’s educational, what specific topics are most relevant to your product and company?
• What would be the best way to present the topic? Via one presenter? Via a panel? Should the speaker(s) be in-house or external? Should the webinar be live or pre-recorded?
• Once you’ve determined a topic, are there existing experts you can contact and ask to present? If you decide to utilize an internal speaker, who has the bandwidth to handle putting together the content?

2. (Get) Ready

Okay, you’ve done some research on topics and speakers and have decided on both. Prior to promoting the webinar, you’ll need to have the following details nailed down:

• Date and length of the webinar. Tuesday-Thursday is usually considered best and make sure you select a time zone that works for your target audience.
• Title, abstract, photo of the speaker, and biography of the speaker. Develop these in conjunction with the speaker, if possible.
• Software to host the webinar. I highly recommend GoToWebinar as I have found it to be the easiest to use and least prone to problems. GoToWebinar registration also integrates with HubSpot.
• If you will have a moderator and who that will be. A moderator introduces the speaker and verbally asks the audience’s typed questions to the speaker at the end of the webinar.
• Questions for the audience. What questions do you want to ask people who register for the webinar? Do you want to have any polls during the webinar? Do you have any questions for them after the webinar is over?
• Promotion plan for getting people to register. Are you going to use email, social media, etc.?
• Registration form in HubSpot or webinar tool. This needs to be live prior to any promotional activities.
• Always have a technology run-through with the speaker and moderator using the software you plan to use. This has saved more headaches than I could possibly count. I also found for internal speakers that a dry run was very helpful.

3. Reach

Now it’s time to reach your audience with your webinar offer! Don’t overlook any of these tactics:

• Email your in-house database. My experience has found that three emails work best: the first email two weeks in advance, the second email one week in advance, and the final email the day prior. Try both HTML and text emails to see which type your audience responds to. Also make sure emails #2 and #3 filter out people who have already registered. (I get so annoyed when I get invites to webinars I’ve already signed up for.)
• Social media. Use social media to promote your event and get new leads interested in you! Try a combination of Facebook ads, posts, and events, LinkedIn ads, posts, and groups, Twitter ads and tweets, Google+ posts, and any niche social media your target audience visits.
• Add it to your website. Depending on the topic, you may want to add CTAs on every page of your website or the home page to gain additional exposure.
• Have all employees add it to their email signature line. It’s free and easy.
• If your speaker is external, have them email their list and post to their social media. Great way to expand your reach.
• If the topic is particularly meaty or you have a really great speaker, put out a press release. You could also just send a note to an industry web publication journalist you already have a relationship with.

4. Roll out

Difference Between a Webinar and Webcast

The terms “webinar” and “webcast” have been used pretty interchangeably to describe presenting a web seminar (“webinar”) or web broadcast (“webcast”). Some people have differentiated the two terms by level of interactivity with the audience, but this distinction is often overlooked. Recently, though, Citrix (a premier provider of online meeting software) defined GoToWebinar as a product for up to 1,000 attendees and GoToWebcast for up to 5,000. We will have to see if this definition takes off.

The day has finally arrived and you are ready to go live! This is the really scary part! Here are some tips:

• Have the speaker log in about 15 minutes early to make sure everything is working. Ask him or her to mute their phone (cell and office), put a sign on their door, close out of email and chat, etc.
• Have a designated “tech person” to answer chat questions regarding sound issues, not being able to log-in, will the slides be available, etc.
• Always mute the attendees; otherwise, you’ll end up with awful feedback. Also mute the moderator while they aren’t speaking.
• Make sure to record the webinar and have a “back-up” recording mechanism in case one fails. GoToWebinar has a recording feature built-in, and I have used Camtasia as a fail safe.
• Always have back-up questions in case the audience doesn’t have any questions. There’s nothing worse than sitting there at the end of the webinar to dead silence because there are no questions.

5. Revisit

After the webinar is done, I usually heave a huge sigh of relief (especially if there were no “technical difficulties”). However, you just had a whole bunch of people engage with you for an hour – now’s not the time to drop the ball!

• Define what the next step for attendees will be. Do you want them to download the slides? Is it a phone call with a salesperson? How would it be most appropriate to present this next step – at the end of the webinar? Via email? After they view the recording?
• Send an email to all the attendees with a link to the recording and slides. Think about segmenting out those who weren’t able to attend and customizing their message slightly.
• Set up lead nurturing where applicable. For new leads, would it make sense to drip email them over the next couple of weeks?
• Think about how you can use the webinar content in other ways. Can you upload the slides to SlideShare? How about writing a blog post using the same content? Webinars are a lot of work, so make sure you get the most out of it you can.
• If the webinar topic doesn’t go stale, continue to publish social media posts with a link to the recording. As you have new followers, they might be interested in the content.

Do you have any webinar tips or tricks to share? I’m currently writing an ebook and would love to include any advice you have.

How to Nurture Leads with BOTH Marketing and Sales

I hear this myth frequently about how sales and marketing departments are at odds with each other. I get a painted picture of the two going head-to-head in a bloody medieval battle. And just like in medieval times, there’s no real victor because everyone loses when the epidemic plague hits, in this case the plague of no leads and no customers.

But it is just a myth. In reality, sales and marketing generally know that each is part of the finished puzzle. The problem is that most organizations don’t know exactly how the sales and marketing pieces actually fit together.

According to HubSpot:

• 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to Sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified.
• 65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing.
• 79% of B2B marketers have not established lead scoring.

The overarching theme over these statistics is that there just isn’t any structure in place to regulate how marketing and sales interact and work with each other. There’s no process, and therefore it is chaos.

In a nutshell, marketing feels good when they generate a lead, and they know sales wants as many conversations as possible. Sales deals with leads all day, so they’re the best ones to handle them, right?

Wrong.

The biggest problem between marketing and sales is that marketing doesn’t know how to nurture and qualify leads, and sales is too impatient to wait for leads to be qualified before taking them from marketing.

The solution to the problem is a defined lead nurturing strategy that defines what happens to a lead when they enter the funnel, and at what point they are ready to be passed on to sales.

A Cooking Metaphor

An excellent metaphor for how this should work is in the kitchen of a restaurant. Each cook in the kitchen has a specific task that leads to an ultimate goal: the happiness of the customer. Every member of the team needs each other. The head chef couldn’t do it with his staff, unless he only wants to feed a few customers a night. The rest of the team couldn’t do it without the head chef, or there would be no consistency and no quality assurance. The restaurant would lose customers.

The separation between the roles is also important. If the head chef swoops in halfway through the task of his staff, important steps could be missed, the finished product could be subpar, and the customer could end up displeased. Conversely, if the staff decides to do the job of the head chef, important final steps could be missed, the finishing touches could fail to wow the customer, and the customer could tell everyone they know that their experience was “just alright” or “forgettable”.

Ideally the kitchen would run in perfect order. The customer places the order, and the order is delivered to the staff. The staff does the majority of the legwork: they prep the food, cook the food, plate the food, and taste the food. They pretty much completely finish the dish before the head chef even sees it. When it is delivered for final approval, the head chef only has to make minor adjustments before the process is complete, and the customer is satisfied.

This is how marketing and sales should be working together, and the process should be seamless.

Leads enters the funnel through a form fill out or an email opt-in. Marketing delivers course after course of relevant, quality content to nurture those leads until they’re drooling over the idea of working with you and your product. Then, once they’re basically begging to sign on the dotted line, the sales team work their sales sweet-talk voodoo magic, and in no time they’re a paying customer. Which is good for everyone. Lavish Christmas parties and huge bonuses are on the horizon, love abounds between marketing and sales, and your great success will continue to draw the best talent, and the cycle continues.

One Last Note: Marketing Automation is Key

In order to make all this work, a marketing automation platform is essential. There is no easy way for marketing to effectively manage lead nurturing without it. Obviously, as a HubSpot partner and expert, I’m partial to the HubSpot platform. I find it much more friendly and actionable than all the other platforms I’ve worked in. However, any good marketing automation platform will have the tools to nurture leads, set up a lead scoring program to standardize when a lead gets passed off to the sales team, and analyze the results and data afterwards. It’s well worth the investment.

Coming up with a variety of lead generation ideas is the first step to creating successful marketing campaigns. After all, it’s your job to generate high-quality leads that turn into sales. As such, you need to make sure that the right contacts engage with your content. So, where do you start?

Check out these 10 lead generation ideas for B2B marketers:

1. Host monthly webinars:

Webinars provide the chance to collect registrants’ data, including their companies, email addresses, and phone numbers. As a result, you can generate more high-quality leads and move them through your funnel.

2. Write regular blog posts:

Did you know that B2B marketers that use blogs receive 67% more leads than those that do not (source: HubSpot)?

Blogging is an effective way to build your company’s online presence and establish your position as industry thought leaders. In addition, you can expand your reach, driving traffic to your website and landing pages. For this reason, your posts should always include relevant keywords, as well as links to your previous content and outside resources.

3. Implement an SEO strategy:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy, which makes it easier for your organization to be found online. Simply put, in order to generate more leads, you need to first bring people to your site by ranking for relevant keywords.

At the same time, you should never stuff your content with keywords. For the best results, only use them in context.

4. Attend tradeshows & events:

Attending tradeshows may not be the most innovative lead generation idea, but it certainly brings results. After all, every event involves networking, which gives you the chance to leave with a list of new leads. To add to that, you can also encourage anyone that stops by your booth to download recent whitepapers and eBooks.

5. Ask for referrals:

When your customers recommend your products and services, they’re contributing to the lead generation process.

Always take advantage of referrals. These people have already heard about your company from someone they know and trust. This means you already have a warm introduction and can begin to nurture them with relevant content.

6. Include Clear CTAs:

Including gated content on your login page and other relevant website pages can help you expand your reach. But remember, you can’t generate leads without a clear a call-to-action.

Ideally, you should end every piece of content with a short blurb and a reason for people to contact you.

7. Shorten your lead gen forms:

If you want to improve your lead generation, shorten your forms. Your team may need qualify incoming leads; however, if your forms are too long, people often give up or provide fake information.

Learn more about the importance of short lead forms here.  

8. Utilize social media:

Social media might be known primarily for its links to brand awareness, but it’s also a great lead generation idea.

Think about it this way: your followers have already shown interested in your company. And any time they share or interact with your content, it reaches their network, as well. This provides you with even more opportunities to generate leads (especially if you’re promoting gated content).

9. Pay to promote content:

It’s possible to generate leads through social media organically. However, if you want to guarantee results, you may need to pay.

If your company doesn’t have a lot of brand recognition, it can help to use a combination of Promoted/Boosted posts on Facebook, Sponsored Updates/Direct Sponsored Content on LinkedIn, and promoted tweets on Twitter. These platforms allow you to create targeted campaigns, so you can reach more of the right contacts.

10. Emphasize internal promotion:

According to Kapost, 65% of sales reps say they can’t find content to send to prospects. And yet, most marketing teams create whitepapers, blog posts, and other resources on a regular basis.

Sending your internal team weekly or bi-weekly updates can help you leverage your lead generation content. You can also ask them to share your content on their personal social media sites, which results in increased engagement.

Have you incorporated any other lead generation ideas into your marketing strategy? Let us know in the comments below!

Hank is the founder and CEO of Trapit. You can follow him on Twitter.

If you’re in any way involved with content marketing or especially with B2B social media, then you’ve likely experienced the push into social selling over the past year. Chances are, demands are being made down the chain for better social ROI, sometimes even without a real strategy or even deep understanding of how social selling integrates with other channels.

On one hand, the social selling emphasis is great for social marketers. It shifts social to a more direct value proposition that is understood by executives, and arms marketers with lead gen and conversion metrics to gauge and prove success and show that social can impact the bottom line. It’s also an excellent new channel and opportunity for salespeople. If we think of social selling as the methodological approach to lead identification and nurturing over social, bringing the value of direct 1:1 interactions to those approaches, then we can also see that it also requires a shift in thinking of both these marketing and sales roles.

Just as with the early days of B2B social adoption, when companies were trying to establish brand awareness and community across social networks, social selling has now become a ubiquitous buzzword and company mandate, and the lack of best practices around what metrics to work towards and how the role of the social seller should be defined confuses even the most progressive sales and marketing leaders.

Strategy comes first

If a company is committed to investing in social selling, they need to begin thinking deeply and strategically about their approach. The stats around why companies should emphasize social as a sales channel are well documented (though still very nascent): from studies showing that salespeople using social outsell 78 percent of their peers, to the recognition that when a lead is developed as a trusted relationship of an employee through social networking, that lead is seven times more likely to close, than other forms of leads.

Despite these convincing stats, only a third of companies have an actual social strategy for their sales departments, and as of 2013, an astounding 93 percent of sales executives had not been given any formal social selling training. That has hopefully improved somewhat as social selling comes into focus, but more often than not the demands in social ROI are not accompanied with a clear overall strategy for social selling.

The lack of strategy is concerning, and companies are getting hung up, so how can we turn this train around before it has gone too far down the wrong track?

The metrics that really matter

More and more major companies may be shifting their social emphasis from likes to leads in deference to these trends, but now we are entering an era of social ROI and metrics that we haven’t quite fully defined.

For so long, social campaigns have been designed for reach rather than conversion. They have focused on tracking for likes or followers or shares, and likewise many of the social media tools developed and now used focus on optimizing to those metrics. We already have a legacy system problem with the tools used for social as we shift focus to selling.

Social of course now needs to be tied into companies’ CRM systems, and leads tracked across networks and nurtured strategically, whether on social, through email campaigns, or other traditional touch points. Social is no longer just a siloed marketing channel.

So how will we measure the value of social in relation to the bottom line, moving from measurement in likes to actual leads and sales? What is the metric for content sharing as it impacts sales, for content as lead-gen?

Content marketers leveraging social need to start with better tracking of campaigns, able to identify how much a piece of content was shared as well as what leads came directly (or even indirectly) from it. That’s not a simple problem to solve. We’re essentially talking about measuring content influence, and how much a piece of content influences thinking after consumption.

And of course the ultimate metric that we looking for to tie the value of content and social to sales is new revenue created, a kind of “revenue index score.”

Content and social is commonly held to top of the funnel activity, but that’s not enough.

One of the challenges for social selling is that it does not operate like the traditional sales funnel. Sales leads and nurturing can jump across platforms and networks, and they can increasingly enter the funnel not just at the top, but much further down.

Any new metric or revenue index score needs to account for every step towards conversion that social can provide. It needs to register and identify targets’ potential to become a lead, turning targets to actual leads, nurturing through the sales funnel, and finally in converting that opportunity into money. Every piece of content and interaction should have a revenue scoring capability associated to it.

The unique new role of the social seller

It’s not simply about the metrics that we might identify and define, however. This quantifiable layer is necessary, and possible in a way that it never was before. But more interesting is the new role that social selling has evolved for companies.

Just as the original social media manager role (and value) had to be defined within organizations, the social seller requires a unique perspective and talent, especially for B2B. It is a combination of content marketing, social management, sales strategy, CRM, and lead generation.

Social teams now sit at a crux of sales and marketing that opens a huge and opportunity for them, but also requires those teams to think and operate as both marketers and salespeople. In essence, it requires the insight of both marketing and sales to the extent that now on social, marketing is sales and sales is marketing.

When we look at what skills and understanding the new social seller will require, a few key features become clear. The social seller needs to be able to:

• Understand 1:1 authenticity as both marketer and salesperson
• Understand key social media strategy beyond brand awareness, and how social engagement relates to the funnel (Credibility > Visibility)
• Needs to be well versed in short-hand and industry lingo of their audience and target market
• Understand how social fits into and is best applied in their unique funnel
• Be up-to-date on industry trends, and have opinions and ideas to share, essentially serving as an industry expert that can foster social leads
• Disseminate that knowledge and empower their teams to likewise be experts and share relevant content
• Thoroughly understands the unique nuances of the social media habits and expectations of their target customers
• Believe in conversation and dialogue as a fundamental component of every step in the funnel
• Value getting to know the buyer even when personal and professional matters intersect, and be trusted with that relationship
• Understand the unique metrics and KPIs for sales and marketing, and how they intersect and overlap

Social selling requires new metrics, new lead-gen strategies, new content and advocacy approaches, and perhaps most importantly, a new mindset that can work within all of these elements.
The companies that are realizing this new marketing and sales overlap now, and genuinely fostering the authenticity of those social efforts and relationships, are positioned to lead this new channel. And those companies will be the ones to define the terms and metrics for success as social selling rapidly evolves.

From likes to leads: The new metrics for B2B social selling originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.

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• How brands can entice and maintain the “everywhere customer”
• How to move digital marketing beyond the “Like”
• Why the CMO should run HR

Business users are turning to apps and cloud-based communications tools to skip the dreaded email inbox and get their colleagues’ attention right away.

It’s safe to say email is overwhelming everyone in business. Each day, an average of 205 billion emails are sent and received, according to The Radicati Group, Inc. That’s expected to reach 246 billion by the end of 2019.

The average office worker sends or receives 122 emails a day, which should grow to 126 emails daily in 2019, the research firm estimates.

Meanwhile, consumer email traffic is slowing. “Consumers on average are sending and receiving fewer emails and are opting instead for other forms of communication such as social networking sites, instant messaging, Mobile IM, and SMS/text messaging,” according to Radicati.

With consumers often bringing their favorite devices and apps to work—witness the “Bring Your Own Device” phenomenon of the past few years—it’s no surprise that businesses are starting to use alternatives to email via mobile apps. If you really want to get a colleague’s attention, are you going to send an email or a Snapchat? Some project management and other tools feature built-in chat as well, helping workers stay focused and productive within the context of whatever they’re working on.

Here are 13 communications tools that can help you stay out of email purgatory.Project Management/Productivity Tools with Built-In Chat

Google Docs includes a chat tool for communicating with colleagues when collaborating on a text file, spreadsheet, or presentation. For instance, as you and a co-worker are looking at the same blog editorial calendar spreadsheet, you can easily ask each other questions or make suggestions. There’s no need to jump to another tool, such as Google Hangouts, to ping each other with messages. The paid Google Apps service offers similar chat features.

Trello is a freemium project management tool designed for individual and team collaboration. Once you share a project board with others, you can post comments to a card (which is an item on a list, in essence) and add a file attachment if desired. Paid plans, which aren’t required for sharing comments, start at $3.75 per user/month.

Speaking of Evernote, you can share notebooks with others and message them within this freemium note-taking service. The free basic plan allows for in-notebook discussions. (Paid plans start at $25/year.)

Redbooth (formerly Teambox) integrates cloud-storage tools from Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive with group chat, project management tools, and high-def video conferencing. The software is often praised for its clean, streamlined interface, and its pricing plans ($5/user/month and up) are easy for small businesses to swallow.

Teamwork.com is a Cork, Ireland-based company offering a suite of business software tools, which include Teamwork Projects for group collaboration and project management, Teamwork Desk (for customer support) and Teamwork Chat (currently in beta). Though the other tools require paid plans, Teamwork Chat is free.Top Business Communications Tools/Email Alternatives

HipChat is a popular team chat tool that includes video conferencing, file sharing, screen sharing, and integration with many other tools such as GoToMeeting, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, MailChimp, Trello, WordPress and Wunderlist. The free plan includes group chat, instant messaging, file sharing, and unlimited user/integrations. Paid plans add voice and video chat and screen sharing and start at $2 per user/month.

Slack competes with HipChat in the team-messaging arena. It offers the ability to organize colleagues in channels, such as a project, department, or topic; send and receive direct messages; and create private groups for confidential messaging. You can share files from Dropbox, Google Drive or Box, too. Slack has a free plan with plenty of features. Paid plans start at $6.67/user/month.

If you’re not sure which might be better for your team, check out this detailed comparison between HipChat and Slack.

Wickr is a bit different from HipChat and Slack, billing itself as “the most trusted messenger in the world.” Messages are kept secure using peer-to-peer encryption and are “forensically wiped” from mobile devices after the messages expire. Wickr is available for Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Linux devices. Plus, it’s totally free. The app developers have vowed never to charge users or sell user data. Instead, they’ve launched B2B security tools that other developers can incorporate into their products.

Other business communications tools worth checking out include OfficeChat (freemium; paid plans start at $3/user/month); Cotap (freemium; paid plans begin at $5/user/month); and Avaamo (freemium; the premium plan adds administration controls and other features but you must contact the company for pricing).

Popular messaging apps among teens and Millennials are also finding their way into the business world. For example, ephemeral messaging app Snapchat is gaining traction not only for group messaging but for social media marketing.

“I don’t want to look stupid.”

Some salespeople are afraid to call their dream clients because they believe that they may be asked a question to which they lack the answer. They are afraid that by not knowing the answer that they will lose their credibility. In their worse fear, instead of being perceived as a value creator, they may be perceived as a time waster.

Like all fears, there is some real danger in looking stupid. But if you have to know the answer to any and every question your dream client may ask of you, you are always going to fear being stupid. The whole of human knowledge doubles every five years, and there is no way to keep up. The different questions that may be asked of you are limitless, and there is no way to anticipate or prepare for every question.

Fortunately, there are ways to not “look stupid.”

You Don’t Know Everything

First, don’t pretend to know everything. If you really want to avoid looking stupid, don’t answer questions for which you don’t know the answers. Nothing will ruin your credibility more than speaking about something you don’t know.

If you don’t want to be exposed as a time-wasting salesperson, then don’t pretend to be an expert in areas you don’t know.

You Are the Conductor

Second, when you are asked a question to which you don’t know the answer, say this, “That’s a great question. I don’t have an answer for you now, but I am going to get with my team here and get our best thinking on that. I’ll call you back this afternoon and tell you how we would answer that question and what we might suggest.”

The longer you work in one company or one industry, the more you gain the situational knowledge you need to answer your client’s questions. But you never have to know the answer to every question you might be asked.

As a salesperson, you orchestrate results. That means you are the conductor, not first violin. You are always allowed to lean our your subject matter and technical experts to serve your clients. Being resourceful enough to know how and where to get the answers your clients need is as important as developing situational knowledge.

• What do you do when you don’t know the answer to a question your client asks?
• How do you exercise your resourcefulness in helping your clients solve their biggest challenges?
• Where do you go to get help answering your client’s questions?

The post How To Not Look Stupid appeared first on The Sales Blog.

You have read a literal mountain of articles, whitepapers, and eBooks on how to craft the perfect email subject line. You’ve taken great strides in mastering this art, creating that one line that captures your reader’s attention in the fraction of a second.

But in order to fully understand how the email subject line works, you can’t just focus on the best. You also have to explore the worst.

Email subject lines are a delicate touch point. You can create a brand advocate with a great one, but you can also lose a subscriber, get marked as spam, and lose all credibility with your audience with a poor one. Oftentimes, there’s a fine line between what is considered “good” and what is just outright “bad”. Where is the line? How do you avoid crossing it?

Well, we’ve already covered Amazingly Effective Email Subject Lines, so let’s check the other side of the coin and draw the line between what works and what tends to backfire. Here are eight ugly, horrible, no good, terrible subject lines:

1. “Chris, you won’t believe what we have in store for you!!!”

Let’s start out with one that we can easily identify as junk. This combination of vague wording and an obviously lazy personalization combine to create a subject line that will immediately get deleted when it shows up in my inbox. “Clickbait” subject lines are just a cheap parlor trick. They may work the first time they’re seen, but consistent use will leave your audience initially bored, and eventually angry. And think about context: your recipients are probably getting hundreds of email a day. Clickbait fatigue probably sets in at about email number 10.

2. “See What’s New this November”

(See also, “Happy New Year’s!”)

Most companies getting their feet wet in email marketing will start out with the bar set at “monthly newsletter”. Unfortunately, this leads quickly to a rut filled with repetitive and inherently boring information.

Filler words, generic copy, and underwhelming content are the quickest way to kill your open rates. Yes, sometimes you and your staff will do something interesting. But when your readers see the same subject line (or even something remotely similar) each month, they will assume the content within is also the same.

3. “We Know You’ll Love This”

This line is so close to being decent that it physically hurts me to write it. For marketers with a solid database and automated tracking, identifying the individual needs of your demographic and segmenting them appropriately is an insanely effective course of action. There are two reasons why this subject line sucks:

• It’s vague (seeing a theme here?) As the recipient of this email, I have no idea what to expect upon opening it, which typically means I’m deleting it and moving on. I can normally infer the content based on the company sending the email, but if companies offer multiple products, I will want to know exactly what I’m getting into before jumping into an email like this one.
• Will I actually love it? Yes, they think I will, but how accurate is their segmentation? If the content of this email isn’t something I immediately identify as something I need, then I’m unsubscribing. It’s a gamble to run email subject lines like this unless you are a master of segmentation and of identifying your customers’ needs, as well as the degree of emotion they might attach to having that need filled.

4. “We Did a Study and Now We Want You to Read the Whole Thing Right Now So That We Can Get Feedback and Sell You Something”

I like to call this sort of subject line the “Terms and Conditions,” because it’s long, boring, takes forever to get to the point, and I end up just moving on with my life before finishing it.

The absurd length guarantees it will be cut off by most email platforms (no way I’m getting that monster to fit on my iPhone) and the initial wording doesn’t have enough detail to really draw me in. You have to front load your subject line (important keywords first), and keep it short! Brevity is the soul of wit, and the heart of email marketing.

The only exception to this rule is the weekly digest I get from Invision, which I can never seem to resist opening regardless of the fact that I can’t see the full subject line. This length issue can be overcome with top-shelf content, and only after you’ve proven value to your readers with shorter introduction emails.

5. “You Have to Act Now”

Oh, I do?

I really have to act right now, dropping everything to buy your eBook, or score tickets to an event that is still 97% unsold?

This is another one of those “right place, right time” sort of subject lines, and should be used with caution. If you’re honestly communicating something so urgent that it warrants a borderline rude opening statement, then by all means dive right in. But for most of us, this subject line will cause a bit of bad blood and a “boy who cried wolf” relationship dynamic moving forward.

6. “THIS EBOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR BUSINESS FOREVER!!!”

Please stop yelling, you’re going to scream your way right into the trash.

Caps can be used sparingly, but never in a manner that could be conveyed as someone yelling at the reader. Typically, the caps lock button should be reserved for angry YouTube comments and sweet emails from your grandma on your birthday.

7. “Our Service is So Great, Let Me Tell You About It”

Are you only ever talking about yourself in your email subject lines? That’s too bad, since you’re creating a massive rift between you and your readers. A constant focus on “ME, ME, MEEE” doesn’t help connect your product or service to your potential or existing customers. It’s the equivalent of the friend in the group who always has to top every story with their own “much better” tale in turn:

“Oh, you went to Hawaii for 10 days on your honeymoon? Well, I went to Fiji on mine for three whole weeks, and the locals named a sandwich after me. So…”

Please, don’t be this person. (Focus on the benefit of your product or service, and what problems it solves for your readers, rather than how inherently great it is.)

8. “Marketers are raving about a new tool that…”

This is a trick that I like to call “using the force,” since it places an incomplete sentence in the subject line, in an effort to force the reader to open it just to find out if it is worth reading.

Not only will this dance dangerously close to the outright clickbait category, you will likely lose a fair number of subscribers if the content of your email isn’t a perfect match. No one likes to be tricked into anything, and a single open is never worth losing a subscriber for.

Conclusions

So what did we learn? Let’s move away from the cesspool that I just placed before us, and look to a few positive takeaways:

• Be quick and get to the point. (Hemingway should be a solid reference for this point)
• Be specific. No email that your readers open should be a surprise. Set a clear expectation, and fulfill whatever expectation you set.
• Make sure there is a clear benefit to the reader. (This goes for every campaign, and every reader)

Ready to wash the clickbait taste out of your mouth? Learn better ways to write email subject lines that convey immediate value, garner higher open rates, and improve customer engagement with our eBook, 12 Tips for Amazingly Effective Email Subject Lines.

There was a time when email was enough. Remember the Sony Walkman and how you felt complete with it? Email was like that: it was all we needed for our professional and personal relationships online. But unlike the Walkman that was doomed by technology, email kept its mojo. And in the world of marketing strategies, email refuses to be ignored.

Marketers should keep sending consumers emails. A survey by Acxiom revealed that 73% of respondents still prefer receiving emails from companies and businesses rather than private messages, direct mail, text message or a combination of channels. This is why even as Facebook predicted an end to the email era, email marketing strategies still work. In fact, a 2013 McKinsey iConsumer survey shows the inbox is 40 times more effective in acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.

It is clear that email still has it with 61% of businesses who plan to invest more on email marketing this 2015. But no marketer should make the investment blindsided. The medium has evolved and so have the consumers and their preferences. Keeping in tune with the essential changes in email marketing is necessary to fully maximize the power of the inbox. Below are trends you should not ignore.

Mind where you land

Photo courtesy of Takashi Ota via Flickr

The first decision that your target market has to make is whether to click on your email or not. It is normal then that marketers obsess about everything — from the subject line to the message. Why invest so much if you were just going to let it slip away? Let this be among the top rules in email marketing: never drop a user to a generic landing page that doesn’t say anything. If you emailed about a discount promo on a new product, send users directly to that page. A study shows that customized landing pages increase conversion rates by more than 25%. So don’t waste the one precious click to a landing page that doesn’t deliver. And be careful with bombarding users with too many links. Be direct.

Optimize for mobile

Photo courtesy of Judit Klein via Flickr

In case you have been living under a rock or just refuse to notice, people use their mobile devices for everything — from keeping in touch to waking them up. A 2013 research from Harland Clarke Digital reveals that nearly 45% of all emails are opened on a mobile device. Make sure visuals in your email and the landing page are optimized for the mobile platform. According to a blog of Proplerr, a Digital Marketing Agency, you should be aware of your email marketing manifesto and your audience — what they like and what they don’t.

Mobile users are usually multitasking and it is harder to have their full attention. Much more if your page takes forever to load. If your mobile site is difficult to access, 61% of users are unlikely to visit you again while 40% decide to go to a competitor’s site instead, according to Google. Ouch!

Forget email blasts and get personal

Email is arguably the next best thing to a postcard or a letter. It is designed to be personal. Take note that the volume of messages continues to rise so for your email to stand out, it must feel personal. A study by Experian Market Services shows that personalized emails boost transaction rates six times than generic email blasts.

Each email should be custom-made for every user and must be based on click-throughs, browsing history, purchasing history, and overall online behavior. This 2015, no marketer should send newsletters to their entire mailing list without segmenting. Of course, email marketing agencies must invest on customization and a targeting engine so the specific email gets to the right person. And by the way, start this getting personal task by crafting subject headlines that feel personal.

Go easy on text

Photo courtesy of jorma. via Flickr

Users become more impatient everyday. Expect the trend on simpler and more direct email designs to continue for years to come. Go easy on text, long-forms, and cut down on complex design elements.

Use techniques that work for both desktop and mobile to capture the user’s attention. Among the things to consider in email marketing is using more animation, images, and videos. An example is Dell and its use of animated gifs to present its convertible ultrabook that flips. This resulted in 109% increase in revenue compared to previous mails. It is also easier to embed videos in emails now with HTML5 so make sure you take advantage of this.

Measure and adjust

Open-rate metrics are usually used to monitor the success rate of email marketing. But with the essential changes in email marketing, statistics offered by other email automation platforms must not be ignored. Monitor your bounce rate more effectively. Adjust to current trends like Google Mail’s Grid View that allows users to turn all promotional emails in a decorative Pinterest-style. So in your next promotional email, make sure you use quality pictures and get help from several email automation software.

Grow your email list creatively

Photo courtesy of thebestofemail.com via Pinterest

The trend in using pop-up boxes to grow a company’s email list will continue and become more aggressive this year. Today, signing pop-ups do not only mean free newsletters and updates but also promo and discount codes. This call-to-action offers exclusivity to users.

You can also use promotional coupons across social media websites like Facebook and Twitter. It is important, though, that you read promotional guidelines before integrating this in your campaign. A double opt-in method is also becoming more popular as it eliminates malicious sign-ups. This requires a recipient to send a blank email to trigger an opt-in confirmation request followed by clicking on a link to activate a subscription.

Right time, right place

To add more value to your content, you must always be relevant. Real-time marketing means knowing what your audience needs at a particular time. For example, you are a clothing retail company and want to score big this summer, use live images for your summer catalogue and set aside products that are literally out of season.

Another email marketing tip is segmenting your audience based on location demographics. This means you refer to events, landmarks, and stores that are relevant to your target market. This will help drive foot traffic in your actual store.

The inbox is increasingly becoming an online battlefield. Bounce rates and rejections go through the roof as users are bombarded with more and more promotional emails everyday. Getting users to even just click on your email is a great challenge. Be creative, be relevant, be personal, and be always on time. Be ready to fine-tune your content and your strategy to what your audience needs and get your message across.

Social as a communication channel has grown and matured. So, too, have opinions from marketers and community managers on which metrics matter the most. The pure numbers game—who has the most followers, fans, likes—has now smartly shifted to encompass a series of quality-driven metrics based on holistic engagement rather than sheer volume.

Because individuals are unique, the intent behind each social conversation should be unique too. Whether to deepen a relationship with a customer, close a deal or simply join in on an interesting conversation, authenticity is key.

As you focus on improvement rates, not just raw numbers, let’s examine three shifts in social metrics that shed insight into how well your brand engages, what your community says about your business and how well you foster relationships. Unilaterally, this approach to social analytics will be more impactful than focusing on rudimentary numbers showcasing one-dimensional growth.

Then: Audience Size
Now: Audience Engagement

Many times when I speak at events or talk with community managers, the first question I am asked is about ways to quickly and exponentially grow the size of their social followings. When I stop them and ask why this seems to be of such value, they are often hard pressed to find an answer. But can you really blame them?

When social was first adopted by marketers, the overriding focus was on quantity: How many fans does your Facebook Page have? How many Twitter followers can we get? The emphasis was not only on quantity but on the pace at which audiences grew. This apparently was the leading indicator of the influence of your brand. Admittedly, those raw numbers are easy to understand and, if going up and to the right, paint a nice picture for an organization and C-suite that may not fully understand social’s impact.

But let’s be real: Whether you have 1,000 or 1 million followers, what good are you doing if you don’t engage in meaningful conversations by treating each of them as individuals?

As social becomes a deeper part of our daily lives, the quality of audience engagement is a stronger indicator of your brand’s impact. Therefore, social teams should focus on measuring and quantifying components such as inbound and outbound conversations, number of touch points within a conversation and frequency of repeat conversations.

Then: Social Likes
Now: Social Shares

OK, I’ll admit, every time a Facebook post of mine gains momentum and racks up Likes, I can’t help but feel a little popular. It’s human nature, after all, to want acceptance, acknowledgement and even accolades from your family, friends and peers.

Brands are no different. Just as the raw number of fans and followers acquired is traditionally a focus, so too is the number of Likes or Favorites on a given page or post. While basic Likes are a good indicator of which posts resonate, truer value lies in shares. Why? Because while a thumbs up is an nice acknowledgement, a share says a person finds enough interest, humor or relevancy—that is, total value—in what you’ve shown to endorse it and pass it on to a broader community of trusted peers. Put another way, a Like starts and ends with your post; a share or Retweet lets your message reverberate.

How often your audience deems your content share-worthy is a good indicator of how well your messages are resonating at the individual level. To that end, measure what content and messages get shared the most, identify patterns among them and replicate your efforts to continuously provide captivating content that not only resonates with your audience (likes), but that they feel will resonate with their own networks (shares).

Then: Network Expansion
Now: Community Depth

Social marketers used to focus on how large they could grow their audience across all the major platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Snapchat and so on—the more people who saw the brand name, the better.

As social evolves, but resources do not necessarily follow, one thing remains clear: It’s not the scope of networks but rather the quality of your communities that matters. Thousands of scattered connections and disjointed experiences across a half dozen networks are not nearly as valuable to your brand as a few carefully curated network presences that focus on value-driving engagement and adding dimension to your brand story.

Networks are valuable for building brand awareness, but weak network presences are nothing in comparison to strong communities. Brand advocates don’t come from your “network”; they come from your community. When you shift your focus to cultivating your community, instead of simply expanding your networks, you establish a stronger base of loyalists who are ready and willing to spread the word about your brand. Identify the networks with your most engaged audiences, build relationships by tailoring your content to those audiences and enlist the help of your social data to identify patterns and trends to improve performance and organically grow.

Make the Most of What Matters

Social was once a space in which quantity prevailed, but it’s crucial that brands don’t stay stuck in that mindset forever. Remember, a strong community that engages with your brand is more valuable than millions of followers who sit dormant. Your brand is not a lifeless force—so the people you attract shouldn’t be either.

Indochino co-founder Kyle Vucko. (Indochino)

The CEO and co-founder of Indochino on what it means to be an eight-year-old startup and why the Vancouver-based suit e-tailer is going big in bricks and mortar.

You started Indochino in 2007 as an online retailer, but you’ve been opening more and more physical retail locations. Pop-up shops have made way for six permanent showrooms, including a new store in Boston this month. Why does going full bricks and mortar make sense now?

The pop-up stores were really our version one, and they were wickedly successful. We had huge amounts of revenue, and we were able to get customers all across North America. But pop-up stores are very difficult to execute. It’s like opening a store, but instead of paying back that opening cost over years, you do it over days. We had big enough sales that we could do that, but it put a lot of pressure on the business—and just the amount of travel, and the back and forth made it hard. We also had to hire a lot of temporary staff. Some temporary staff are great. But some we weren’t able to train as well over such a short period of time. So we found that by being in the market permanently we could offer a more consistent, better customer experience over time, not only on their first purchase but also on subsequent purchases, on perfecting things after you get the garments a few weeks later—those sorts of things.

Your Boston location is on Newbury Street, next to some very high-end retailers. I know affordability is one of the keywords associated with the Indochino brand. Are you conscious of not wanting to feel—for want of a better word—cheap?

How Frank & Oak brings a personal touch to digital retail

What we offer is the best value for money. That’s really the core of our brand. We offer the absolute best suit for $500: custom, half-canvas, high-quality wool, natural fibres and so on. And it’s personalized. We also offer suits as expensive as $1,000, but the value equation is the same. You’re getting a $2,000-plus suit for $1,000. Most men can appreciate value. Having retail stores allows us to communicate that value to a broader set of people, because they can feel the quality of the garment and compare it to what they can feel down the street in some of those high-end retailers you identified. We don’t look to be beside high-end retailers. We look to be in locations in cities that are convenient to where our guys shop, where they live and where they work, and every city’s a little different. In Boston, Newbury really is the primary spot that people go to shop, and it’s a really tight downtown core, so it’s a relatively convenient location. In other markets, like Chicago for example, which is frankly a bigger city, we will likely have multiple locations in time, some in higher-end areas and some in other areas.

I was surprised to see Indochino has had customers in over 140 countries. I imagine some of those bring in only a small number of orders. But a lot of e-commerce retailers stick to North America. Why the wide scope?

There’s depth and breadth. North America is our focus—that’s where we’re opening all our stores. The U.S. and Canada make up the majority of our business. That doesn’t mean we want to alienate everybody else out there, because as a brand we had big aspirations about helping guys get dressed and helping them look good and enabling them to be successful in their lives, whatever that means. We’ve got meaningful cohorts of customers in the U.K. and Australia and Germany, and it grows our business. It helps them, and we don’t lose. We’re maybe unique in that our supply chain can enable that. We have facilities in Asia, and a third of our team is based in our office there. And we deliver from Asia globally. Most e-commerce brands set up fulfilment infrastructures—they bring over finished product and ship from within the continental U.S. or Canada—so they’re limited by their business model, which we aren’t.

The speed at which you are able to deliver custom clothing is impressive: made-to-measure suits in as little as three weeks. How do you manage to combine custom with speed?

Our big idea is that if you can get custom clothing at a similar speed to buying off the rack and getting it altered, it’s a fundamentally better offer. We’re one of the largest custom clothiers on the planet. We went to China and nobody there could do what we wanted, which was custom clothing at value prices with some element of speed. So we just did it ourselves, and built that supply chain from the ground up to where we are today. And so that concept of custom, personalized and speed is really built into the DNA of how we grew up.

Does that put pressure on your margins?

We think about margins very differently from traditional brands. The majority of their product is sold through wholesalers, and so half the margin is eaten up with wholesaling; inter-point shipping; multiple layers of packing, warehousing and distribution; and the list goes on. We don’t worry about inventory in the same way. There’s the infrastructure of holding inventory, but there’s also the risk of inventory: you oversell something and you aren’t able to sell more of it; you don’t sell something and you have to sell all these finished goods; you have to pre-buy, which increases all of your risk and also makes financing more complicated. We remove a lot of that complexity and risk out of the equation. And we sell on value as opposed to brand image. You can have garment costs that vary by single percentage points, but they’re sold to the consumer for dramatically different prices, depending on whether it’s a high-end fashion label or a discount suit retailer. Typically, the manufacturing costs are equal—one just has to pay more for marketing and a different brand experience.

You started the company eight years ago. Is Indochino still a startup?

It’s a nuanced answer. We’ve got 100 staff. How do you approach things like payroll and managing teams and policy and procedure? Those things have to get implemented, because I think that’s just a function of scale. But the flip side is we’re still very iterative with how we approach retail and how we approach mobile and omnichannel. There are always places in the company where we are younger in our approach or less stable or still figuring things out. So I always see it as a bit of both. I think we very much hold on to our entrepreneurial roots, and build structure and stability around those roots, so things can still run on time—and you actually have a well-operating company in addition to a highly innovative one.

Simons CEO Peter Simons on the new department-store wars

What do you feel your role is? What do you bring to the table as co-founder and CEO?

More than anything, what I have is a depth of continuity and experience that very few people have in the organization—just having been here since day one and from employee one; from one customer to 100,000-plus; from no retail to coming up with the idea of retail through pop-up and then permanent stores. When it comes to actually running departments or functional leaders or even my C-suite, they all have far better and deeper expertise because they’ve managed large organizations before. What I bring is continuity, context and the intuition of where to poke and prod, and also help to avoid pitfalls or things we’ve tried before but didn’t work for any number of reasons.

Is there something beyond custom suits? What’s going to continue to grow Indochino?

Suits are always going to be at our core. Dress shirts is a growing business for us. The idea is that, in time, everything in your wardrobe could be custom. That can be casual pants, a broader range of dress pants, accessories: You name it, and I think, in time, we will do it. All of the above, including suits—if anything, led by suits—is what’s going to drive our growth.

Is it a big enough market? Is the future of Indochino everything for everyone?

No. I mean, I get excited by the idea of offering Indochino for women. I think there’s a really clear market and opportunity. But how you do a great job of product and experience in apparel for women versus for men is just very different. So while we see a huge opportunity there, we see such a huge amount of room for us to learn in menswear.

MORE ABOUT DIGITAL RETAIL & MEN’S FASHION:

• Interview: Hudson’s Bay president Liz Rodbell on taking retail upscale
• Most Canadian retailers don’t know who’s in charge of their e-commerce
• How Nordstrom built the world’s best customer-service machine
• Why Canada has a serious e-commerce problem, in one infographic
• How to break the office dress code the right way
• Some badly needed real talk about wearing a short suit to the office

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The post Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko on taking digital retail to main street appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Over the past week, Beijing devalued the renminbi several times.

Naturally, a currency devaluation brings up fears over what that means for other countries who have an economic relationship with China.

Analysts were quick to point out that commodity exporters like Brazil could get burned in the aftermath. There's also some concern for the US since the strong dollar makes US-made goods more expensive and less competitive in the international marketplace. More directly, US goods are now more expensive for Chinese importers.

For the most part, however, the experts argue that the US should emerge relatively unscathed.

"We believe that the economic and financial fallout on the US economy from the downward adjustment in the value of the Chinese currency will be limited," argues Wells Fargo Global Economist Jay H. Bryson.

He attributes that call to the fact that the US has relatively little economic exposure to China:

"The direct economic and financial exposure of the United States to China is rather limited. China accounts for only 7% of total America exports, which represents less than 1% of US GDP, and American multinational enterprises (MNEs) derive only 2% of their net income from China. American banking exposure to China represents less than 1 percent of banking system assets. Even when indirect effects, which operate through the exposure of other countries to China, are considered, it appears that total American exposure to China is rather limited."

In sum, the US has limited directly exposure to China, and therefore, it is not expected to get whacked by the yuan's devaluation.

SEE ALSO: There's an important, overlooked angle to China's big move in the currency market

Join the conversation about this story »

Getting physically fit and shedding excess weight is a lot like getting your sales team fit for business. We know what we need to do:

• Follow a regime of activity and exercise
• Eat plenty of wholesome food, and cut out the rubbish
• Mix with likeminded folks to share ideas and tips

The problem is, while it all sounds fine in theory, maintaining such a regime over a period of time can be difficult. The first few days, buoyed by our enthusiasm for this new healthy lifestyle, we wake up early to do a 5km run on our new treadmill. We poach our eggs, grill our bacon and swap buttered toast for crispbread and low fat spread.

But then, the weekend arrives. We reward ourselves with a lie-in, followed by fried breakfast and maybe some pancakes on the side. Over the course of the weekend we revert back to our old bad habits and undo the good work we did the previous week. Monday morning arrives and, instead of reverting to our healthy regime and heading out for a run, we decide it’s not worth the hassle and throw in the towel.

Compare this with the actions we need to take to follow a tried and tested sales process:

• Only pursuing the right deals
• Carrying out the right tasks and activities at the right stages
• Collaborating in teams to share knowledge and get expert input

Time and time again, we see companies start off the year with a resolution to ‘do sales better’. So they roll out a new internal sales process with great enthusiasm and fanfare. But, similar to our fitness drive, we see a strong uptake in the early days as strict controls are in place. But, as time goes on, shortcuts are taken. The CRM isn’t updated as exhaustively as it should be. Account reviews get less frequent as other priorities jostle for attention. Reports become less frequent as data becomes less reliable. And, pretty soon (often by the end of Q1), the new sales process is in tatters before it has been given a chance to prove its value.

So what can be done to solve this problem? And what lessons can we learn from a sustainable health regime to achieve and maintain long term sales success?

Lesson 1. Set realistic goals

Be realistic about both your ambitions and your performance. Hitting your annual sales target in Q1 is about as likely as losing 25kg in 28 days.  The aim is to have sustainable change and improvement. The goal isn’t to lose 3kg in a week and put 5kg back on a week later, any more than you want to hit your Q1 target and miss Qs 2, 3 and 4. Sustainable and continual improvement is critical for long term success.

Lesson 2. Do your research

What food is healthy? What exercise is most effective for you? When should you eat/exercise?  All this takes time and effort to research, but those who do are significantly more likely to succeed than those who leave it to chance. To really succeed in sales, you should make it your goal to get to know your customer, understand their challenges and what they are trying to achieve.  Once you do, your welfare, health & success will relate directly to theirs.

Lesson 3. Collaborate

Millions of members of healthy living/weight-loss groups and communities meet up, or chat online, to compare thoughts and tips on what works and what doesn’t. Morale and practical support helps maintain momentum and ensures you don’t feel isolated. Similarly, look around your business (not just the sales team) and consider how much knowledge and expertise you have access to. What hints, tips and suggestions can they offer you to remind you of the right path and help you explore new directions you hadn’t even considered?

Lesson 4. Stick with what works

When you find a formula that works, apply it consistently. If you have a balance of protein, calcium, fruit and enjoyable exercise, stick with it. Once you effectively combine proactive account/territory planning with structured qualification and execution (in the right portion sizes), your business development and closing will take care of itself. Don’t be afraid to try new things of course, but systemize the process.

Lesson 5. Get back on the horse

We all crave the odd chunk of chocolate or glass of wine, and that’s OK. In fact it’s important to earn the occasional reward to avoid feeling deprived. But, it’s crucial we don’t overindulge and allow these to destroy all the good work we’ve done. It would be folly to suggest we get every campaign right or that we achieve 100% win rate. We all suffer setbacks but, like gorging on a late night burger or failing to prep for a meeting, we know it’s wrong and we should learn from our mistakes. The trick is, not to let bad habits become the norm.

Lesson 6. Stamina

This is probably the most critical aspect of change. Stamina on the treadmill or diet is a lot like stamina in behavioural change – we sometimes need help, or a kick up the backside. Maybe something to aim for or aspire to. But it’s the ability to keep at it that makes good practice part of our DNA. When that happens, staying fit is as natural as breathing. It’s a lifestyle change, not a once-off event!

So that’s it. They’re my views on the sales lessons we can learn from following a sustainable, health & fitness regime. I’d be interested to know how you got your business/sales performance fit and healthy. And, more importantly, how you kept your sales figures in ‘beach body’ shape all year round.

Please leave your comments below.

TAMBOPATA, Peru (AP) — Patricia Quispe sat sullen on a black suitcase outside a dismantled mining camp, nursing her baby son and waiting for her husband, who was among 41 wildcat gold miners arrested in Peru's latest crackdown on illegal mining in the Amazon.

The 24-year-old mother said she didn't know where she would be getting her next meal.

In a three-day operation that ended Thursday, Peruvian security forces cleared out nearly six square miles (15 square kilometers) in a crater-pocked jungle zone where some 10,000 people lived. About 1,000 police and soldiers blew up 154 gasoline motors used to extract gold from the sandy soil.

The government has staged 15 such operations in Madre de Dios state since unlicensed, wildcat mining was declared a crime in 2012. In raids that the government says cost an average of $370,000 each, troops have blasted dredges, backhoes and motors to bits and expelled thousands of miners and their families from muddy makeshift jungle settlements.

But many of the miners return to the camps after the soldiers and police leave. Even after their losses and with gold down to $1,084 an ounce, the work remains profitable for hardscrabble migrants from Peru's poor highlands.

According to official figures, at least 5 percent of the 141 metric tons of gold that Peru produced last year came from illegal mining. An investigation this year by the Ojo Publico reporting consortium found that two Swiss companies were among the biggest buyers until the government cracked down.

The 108 mining camps that were dismantled this week had restaurants, hotels and bordellos.

"Here, crimes are committed, including human trafficking. I call it slavery. There are girls who arrive, deceived, from the Cuzco region and God only knows if they make it out alive from these jungles," said Cesar Sierra, the former police colonel who oversees the government raids.

The nonprofit group Huarayo, which runs shelters for adolescents rescued from sex work, says about 300 work at any one time in the region.

Alluvial mining, in which small gold flecks are sifted out of sandy sediments deposited by runoff from the Andes over centuries, is heavily dependent on mercury and the surrounding jungle has been poisoned by tons of the toxic metal.

A researcher for the Peruvian Environmental Rights Society, Lenin Valencia, says raids alone aren't enough to dislodge illegal miners.

"There is slowness in the criminal justice system to prosecute the chain" of businesses that extract the gold, which ends up being bought in U.S. and Swiss markets.

Join the conversation about this story »

Do you know what question causes accidents when prospective buyers are taking cars for a test drive?

It's the salesperson asking, "Is this the type of vehicle you would like to own?"

Huh?

Yes, it's true, according to car salesperson Jim Miller. A question like that, preceded by the proper set up, creates a state of suspended animation that causes the mind to do strange things.

In Douglas Rushkoff's book Coercion: Why We Listen to What They Say, Miller explains that before posing this question, car salespeople usually subtly make the potential buyer feel bad about the bucket of rust he now drives:

"How does the ride compare to your car?"

"How do the seats feel? Comfortable? Just like an armchair?"

Then they follow up with the crash-causing question. Boom.

Why does this happen? Car salespeople joke that this question causes a split second of customer insanity. "The mind goes blank, the body paralyzes, the eyes get glassy, dilated. And you'd be surprised how many people have an accident at just that moment," Miller says.

The book's author, Rushkoff, says the power at work here is "disassociation."  The prospect is already in the vehicle but is then asked to imagine owning the same type of vehicle. The buyer's present situation is reframed in fantasy, creating a momentary disassociation from the activity they're involved in. (It's kind of like me asking you, could you imagine yourself reading this blog post right now?)

And this is why so many test drivers crash, according to Rushkoff. "It's a momentary loss of awareness during which the customer's defense mechanisms and rational processes are disabled," he writes. In fact, the technique is so powerful that it's in the CIA's interrogation training guide.

Am I personally buying into this?

I don't know. Who am I to argue with the CIA?

Here's my two cents. The example cited just one car salesman, although he did add that the technique was taken from a popular training program in auto sales.

What I do know is that the technique is similar to what I've been suggesting for a long time: Identify and embellish the prospect's need, pain, or problem. Next, present your recommended solution. Then ask for commitment.

Once you've uncovered a need area, resist the tendency many salespeople succumb to: talking about your product or service. Instead, ask more questions to get the buyer to further visualize, relive, and feel the pain:

• "How often does that happen?"
• "Then what do you have to do?"
• "What other problems does that cause?"
• "Then what?"
• "What does that cost you?"

Present Your Recommendation

This is where you talk about your solution. Use the buyer's words as much as you can -- they won't argue with what came out of their own mouth. 

Ask For Commitment

Here's where you can ask the "magic question" cited by the author to put them in that state of stupor -- or at least get them to imagine owning and enjoying the results of your product or service. Think of it as sort of a trial close.

• "How do you feel you would use that?"
• "What do you feel that would do for you?"
• "Do you see this as something that would help you avoid those problems in the future?"
• "How much do you think this would help you make/save?"

The buyer's answers, of course, are designed to get them to mentally take ownership of what you sell. And that makes the real close a lot easier. After all, if they sell themselves, that's better than you having to do it, right?

Think about these ideas, adapt them, and use them in your own sales process. Just don't cause any car wrecks.

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

If you're a salesperson who feels uncomfortable using social media as part of your job, you're not alone. A recent PeopleLinx study revealed that only one in four salespeople knows how to use social to sell.

And the knowledge that approximately 75% of your peers aren't exactly jumping on the social selling train might make you wonder: Is social selling all hype? If it was so great, wouldn't more people be doing it? Confident in the belief that you're not behind the curve but instead part of the majority, you forge ahead with the same sales channels you've always used. 

Unfortunately, this is a huge mistake. For the reason, look no further than the following infographic from SterlingKlor. After surveying over 2,000 B2B technology buyers, research firm IDG found that 56% seek product information on social media sites, and 54% take to social to get answers from vendor representatives. 

Modern sales is all about being where your buyers are. With that in mind, you need to be on social -- your buyers are waiting for you.

Sales Mastery 2015

According to Bain & Company, B2B sales executives have seen a tremendous disruption in how customers buy in recent years – and they see no reason to think it won’t continue.

And if buyers change how they buy – salespeople need to change how they sell.

How well are companies meeting the challenge? The folks at Bain surveyed 550 B2B sales executives. The overarching finding was – “few companies are completely prepared for the changes taking place.”

There are a variety of perspectives from which to view this challenge. Let’s focus on what it means relative to the skills of the sales team. First, what did the survey have to say about sales skills?

• Only 40% said their sales reps have a strong understanding of their company’s differentiation.
• Almost one-third said the majority of their sales reps do not have the requisite skills.
• Three-quarters have made significant investments in technology – but less than a third have realized marked improvements in sales effectiveness from those investments.

As they say – not so good. If a company is going to among the winners in today’s disruptive market, they will not only need a sales team that is better at doing what they are doing, but one capable of doing something different. This will require a new and different skill set – “a horse of a different color.”

If one believes the “horse with a different color” message, then the question for those of us concerned about the field of sales training becomes: What are we going to do about that? What do we think companies should do in addition to training in foundational sales skills to help sales reps adjust and adapt to the changes in the buying environment?

Is it about coming up with higher impact instructional designs for delivering the same content? Is it coming up with more advanced models for framing the existing content? Or is there an entirely new set of sales skills that require greater attention? Or, perhaps we should just wait for a revolutionary technology to emerge from our colleagues in educational technology?

What to do is not so easy and there may be more than one right answer. But one thing for sure – simply doing the same old, same old is not going to carry the day. And of course, re-labeling what we are doing and calling it new is even worse.

So how do you select the right colors?

To get the discussion going, we suggest the focus should be on new content – a different set of skills than traditionally addressed in sales training programs. What are the guideposts that could be used to determine what that new content might be? Two make the short list.

• Customer Expectations. First, focus on how customers are buying in today’s market. Today what customers expect from salespeople is changing dramatically. Customers want sales reps to be trusted advisors, not product facilitators. Customers need fresh ideas and creative insights for addressing a set of needs and opportunities that are both new and challenging. They expect sales reps to be knowledgeable about their industry, company, and issues at a higher level of proficiency than ever before. They expect insights not product pitches.

• World-of-work. Second, tune into the changes in the background and expectations of the people that are becoming new sales reps in 2015 and how these people are likely to function in today’s world-of-work.

What does the horse look like?

So what might be some of the subject areas that could be incorporated into future sales training programs that would help sale reps adjust and adapt to the changing market demands? Recently we came across an interesting article in HBR Review that explored the top 10 most important work skills in 2020. We borrowed from the list those we thought would be particularly important for salespeople and then added a few of our own. Let’s take a look:

• Business Acumen. Being able to integrate a business and economic perspective into customer interactions.

• Adaptive Thinking. Coming up with creative and innovative solutions that are not rule-based.

• Computational Thinking. Being able to translate vast amounts of data into useful information.

• Virtual Collaboration. Working effectively and efficiently as a member of a virtual group.

• Transdisciplinary Competency. Knowing how to integrate knowledge and concepts across disciplines and areas of expertise.

• New Media Literacy. Being able to leverage new media technologies for creating and delivering persuasive conversations.

But to borrow a phrase, these skills are “necessary, but not sufficient.” A study by Millennial Branding and American Express, for example, reported that 61 percent of the managers surveyed felt that soft skills were more important in new hires than hard skills, or even technical skills.

The study goes on to report the soft skills most often cited as critical to success. Although the report was focusing on professionals in general, we thought the work held merit for those concerned about doing something different in Sales.

• Communication. Communication moves beyond sending emails, texts, and Instagrams. Everyone inside companies must be able to effectively engage people face-to-face. Nowhere is this more critical than for salespeople who must engage a wide variety of customers across a varied set of situations.

• Teamwork. B2B sales increasingly are moving away from salespeople as the lone wolf to sales teams – with multiple salespeople or technical specialists. This means salespeople must develop the skills required to lead and participate in sales teams.

• Flexibility. Flexibility provides some unique challenges for salespeople. Beyond simply being flexible about schedules and responsibilities, salespeople increasingly are being called on to marshal and leverage internal resources and to be part of – or manage – sales teams. In today’s environment salespeople are required to play different roles at different times during the sales process.

• Positivity. Salespeople need to learn how to leverage praise from people for what they do and avoid overreacting to criticism and bad news. But, salespeople have a special challenge – not only do they have to work with colleagues, they also have to work with prospects and customers where it’s easy to say “yes” – but yes is not always the right answer. Salespeople must learn how to effectively say “no” or disagree or present a different view to prospects and customers and have the customer view that interaction positively.

• Confidence. Confidence is an underpinning of every salesperson’s success. Salespeople must learn to display confidence – it’s at the heart of building their credibility and credibility is a key for success. When someone is new to a company or new to sales, building confidence and credibility can be tough to do. One answer is leveraging your company’s capabilities and success stories until you develop your own tales of success.

If one believes the soft skill story, then a challenge emerges for sales managers. The first part of the challenge is to recognize these capabilities are not inherent traits but learnable skills. Second, it’s likely that many salespeople will not develop these soft skills on their own. As a matter of fact in some situations, time may actually degrade the skill. For example, a salesperson could very easily lose confidence due to failures vs. learning from the failures as to what to do next time.

And finally … Overall when looking at what needs to be done, one thing that will not be different as the future unfolds is the importance of sales coaching. If we want a “horse of a different color” sales coaching will be more important than ever.

What organization doesn’t want a loyal following?

As Joe Pulizzi says, “If you build engaged audience members who devour your content, and thus, trust and like you, they will begin to change their behavior. They will stay longer as customers. Or they will buy more. Or they will close faster …”

Building a strong and growing subscriber base takes work, but the payoff is great (and, note, this is different than generating leads). Not only do you have an enthusiastic opt-in audience, you also have numbers to show the impact of your content marketing efforts on the organization.

Knowing you need to build your audience and getting new subscribers are two different things, of course. Thankfully, our Content Marketing World presenters can offer some tips.

Step it up

Creating good and frequent posts is the No. 1 thing you can do to grow any subscriber base. After that, it is important to test sign-ups like any other conversion metric. Focus on how you can show visitors the value of your newsletter and test different ways of communicating that value to them.

Sachin Kamdar, CEO & co-founder, Parse.ly | @SachinKamdar

Be genuine

Give them an authentic reason to return. That’s easier said than done. Think about the blogs or other sites you visit regularly. What newsletters do you opt to receive? What drives your interest? That’s the same thing that drives your audience. Give them what they want or answer what they search.

I read John Scalzi’s blog, every day. I do it because of the type of content he publishes, his wit and humor, and his willingness to speak bluntly about controversial topics in publishing and American politics. He has a specific and clearly defined point of view. Too many blogs take a shotgun approach to content. There is no cohesive plan, no single voice, no target audience. One size does not fit all. Ever.

Kathleen Gossman, project manager, EnVeritas Group | @EnVeritasGroup

Go deep

Be consistently good for a long time. There is no secret that trumps quality and consistency.

Jay Baer, president, Convince & Convert | @jaybaer

Back to basics

This is Content 101 — actively create content your readership hungers for and then consistently connect that content from your blog to social media. Subscribers see the value, read and share, and growth happens.

Aubrae Wagner, chief operations officer, EnVeritas Group | @AubraeAWagner

Make it prominent

You must focus your efforts on making your blog subscription form a prominent part of your design. On our blog, we recently implemented a larger call to action to sign up for weekly updates, and have seen tons of subscribers roll in. (We previously had an RSS button tucked away in the header and a small email sign-up button on the sidebar.) By elevating and strengthening the visual component of our subscription sign-up strategy, we have seen huge leaps in the number of subscribers in a short time. Reassess the visual prominence of the main action you want your visitors to take, and run tests to see what copy and placement works the best.

Arnie Kuenn, CEO, Vertical Measures | @ArnieK

Take the pen and paper

My answer relates to my personal side project – ComicBookSchool.com. I have a newsletter that I send every three weeks or so. When I speak at events like comic conventions, I bring a little clipboard with a sign-up sheet. I usually have a helper who circulates the clipboard.

Except for some illegible handwriting issues, this tends to result in good sign-up numbers with a low unsubscribe rate. I tag them according to event registration, so l know which events are most effective. The pens always get lost and the clipboard sometimes vanishes, but it is a really effective technique for building my mailing list.

Buddy Scalera, senior director content strategy, The Medicines Company | @MarketingBuddy

Go elsewhere

Guest blogging. My answer may sound ironic because it focuses on other brands’ properties, but hang with me.

For four-plus years, I’ve networked with the leaders in online marketing and content marketers whom I most admire and offered to write for their blogs. It’s been a key to the growth of my subscriber base and growth in every way. The days (and weeks following) that one of my posts appears on a site like Content Marketing Institute or one of the others, traffic to my blog skyrockets, as do email opt-ins.

Barry Feldman, founder, Feldman Creative | @FeldmanCreative

Crush the cats

Every day our inboxes are flooded with spam lottery notifications, Candy Crush invites, and Love My Cat newsletters that you completely forgot you opted-in for. Or is that just me? My point is that you need to stand out.

Being creative and being prepared (excuse the cliché) to step outside the box in a way that conveys a clear message about your product or service are effective strategies. Showcasing a distinct point of difference in the content you share is important. Make it clear that what you’re delivering to your audience, they can’t get in the same way, anywhere else.

Jordana Borensztajn, social media trainer, Social Needia | @JordanaOZ

Work out every day

Make a daily habit of creating great content – written, spoken, video, all of it. Get aggressive at asking your readers to subscribe to receive more. If it’s more of the valuable content they’re used to, you’ll be surprised how many of them opt in. We have clients who have seen five- to 10-time increases in newsletter subscriptions by launching a pop-up on their blog. A pop-up!

Matt Heinz, president and founder, Heinz Marketing | @HeinzMarketing

Don’t just sit there

When you create a great piece of content, make sure to promote it. You should ideally spend more time promoting the content than writing it.

Don’t be satisfied with your conversion rates. If your blog posts have an opt-in for people to subscribe via email for updates make sure to test it regularly to improve conversion rates. Use tools such as Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer to set up tests.

Find out the content that gets the most traffic and create content upgrades for it. An upgrade typically adds more valuable content to the post that people can access by subscribing via email. If you create a content upgrade specific to a particular post, your conversion rates can be much higher.

Ian Cleary, founder, RazorSocial | @IanCleary

Pop it

First is super-high-quality content. Don’t waste people’s time by trying to drive them to a site that doesn’t deliver value. Next is a simple pop-up box that asks them to subscribe. We all know they’re irritating, but they work. I hear brands, especially B2B brands, say that pop-ups are cheesy and imply that their organizations are better than that. You have to be smart about what you’re offering. Brands complain about not being able to build an audience and they will do a lot of things, just not “that.” You can be an elitist all you want, but don’t knock pop-up boxes until you’ve tried them.

Carla Johnson, president, Type A Communications | @CarlaJohnson

Check please

A really simple thing to do is include a checkbox on each lead-generation form asking if they want to be subscribed to your blog. People coming to your landing page may have never seen your blog. If they are interested in the content on your landing page, they would likely be interested in your blog as well, but you have to offer it to them. All of our lead forms include a pre-checked box to subscribe to the blog, so they need to uncheck the box if they don’t want to subscribe.

Stoney deGeyter, president, Pole Position Marketing | @StoneyD

Give it away

The most important tip is to focus on creating content so good that people want to subscribe. Next is making sure you provide ample opportunity for your readers to sign up without becoming obnoxious. I suggest testing different designs and approaches. And providing a free giveaway as part of the process certainly doesn’t hurt.

Michael Brenner, head of strategy, NewsCred | @BrennerMichael

Deliver regularly

Well, after delivering real value (duh), I think a regular cadence of content probably helps a lot. We’re bad at this for ourselves but preach a good game.

Doug Kessler, co-founder and creative director, Velocity Partners | @dougkessler

Ask, ask, and ask again

Make sure your email sign-up form is above the fold on every page of your website. Better yet, try a pop-over “light box” that shows up as visitors are about to leave your website. If you’re going to a trade show, collect names there. If you have a partnership with a relevant, non-competitive company, ask them to invite their subscribers to sign up for your list, too. No matter where you’re asking, give a good reason to sign up.

The truth is that you’re not looking to acquire an email address. You’re looking to acquire a prospect and use the email to turn that prospect into a customer. Where do you find new customers now? Are you offering value (content) in exchange for contact information like email address? If you’re willing to pay a little, try sponsoring events or content created by others, finding searchers looking for your solutions, and exploring other cross-channel campaigns for acquisition.

Jessica Best, digital marketing evangelist, emfluence | @bestofjess

Use social and be in real life

Twitter has worked for me personally, but it can backfire. When you’re constantly broadcasting your own content, it can get boring and irrelevant. Make sure you are keeping the conversations balanced.

I always mention my Twitter handle at in-person events and I mention our email newsletter. It’s amazing how many more subscribers we get after a presentation. I also take as many opportunities I am given to be featured as an expert. That content exists to validate to my subscribers that they are consuming valuable advice.

Ahava Leibtag, president and founder, Aha Media Group | @ahaval

Stop pestering

I think this is the part where I expose myself as a dirty, filthy millennial. For me, it’s actually less “find the user, register them for emails, retarget!” and more “constantly create cool content, delight and entertain, make a difference.” No one really wants to be pestered by a brand. If I know your brand, if I like your brand, I’ll come to you.

Erin Monday, marketing manager, Lenovo | @ErinMonday

Take every opportunity

Always include a “subscribe to the blog” option on contact forms, especially content downloads. It’s so simple, but it works.

Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO, PR 20/20 | @PaulRoetzer

Use three letters

I’ll use one of my favorite sayings from sales training years ago: If you don’t A-S-K, you don’t G-E-T. It’s one of the oldest strategies out there: Tell a friend and ask her to share. Referrals are a fantastic way to build your base.

Jeannine Rossignol, vice president, global marketing for large enterprise operations, Xerox Corporation | @j9rossignol

Want to hear more from these experts about building your subscriber base or improving other parts of your content marketing programs? Register today to attend Content Marketing World 2015 this September in Cleveland and use code CMI100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How to Grow Your Subscribers: 19 Experts Weigh In appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Sales is a profit center. It doesn’t matter how smoothly operations are running or even how forward thinking your organization’s management techniques are -- at the end of the day all that matters is whether your sales team is able to bring in revenue or not.

Generating revenue has never been an easy job, but it’s critical for the success of the company. When the overall sales targets are not met, there could be negative repercussions for the business’ valuation, share price, investors, and other organizational aspects. Therefore, sales targets are sacrosanct.

What leads to a missed month or quarter? A failure to understand the sales team. For example, just how well do you know

• The factors driving sales performance?
• Why certain sales teams meet or exceed targets while others don’t?
• Areas that need improvement?

In this blog post, I put forward four simple mantras that can help sales leaders truly understand their team. If you can put these into practice, prepare for the best quarter ever.

1) Rely on historic performance.

Prior performance is a dependable indicator of future performance. From my experience, I’ve observed that almost 50% of current underachievers tend to perform poorly in coming quarters as well.

When you see poor performance, don’t ignore it. Intervene when a team has consistently performed poorly over a number of previous sales cycles.

2) Get to 25% of target in the first month.

Anything less than 25% of target attainment in the first month significantly increases the chance of missing the quarter. Therefore, during the first month of the quarter, management should intervene with teams that have achieved less than 25%.

3) Go for the small opportunities (they add up).

I’ve noticed that excellent performers always target a high number of small and short-term opportunities in order to achieve their quota. In another words, they are not waiting for the big fish to fall in their nets -- instead, they’re attacking several smaller ones.

4) Never increase plan by more than 10% for underachievers.

When the plan is increased by any more 10%, the likelihood of poor performance increases as well. There is a natural fear that hits salespeople when they see a plan increase by 10% or more. Instead of picking an arbitrary percentage, base bigger quotas on the previous quarter’s performance.

Internalize these four simple mantras to assess, refine, and elevate your sales team for maximum performance. 

What do you think of these mantras? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Lead generation at all stages of the sales and marketing funnel isn’t easy. There are many different approaches, strategies, tactics and techniques, and no one person has all of the answers.

However, the basic B2B formula online looks like what we call inbound marketing today. That’s all good, but with the plethora of businesses adopting inbound marketing, it’s never been harder to drive leads online. There is a silver lining, however. Inbound marketing can be augmented with acceleration-driving technology and tactics.

There are basically two ways a marketer can increase lead acceleration via inbound marketing and sales. The first is by minimizing barriers to consumption. That essentially just means you make it as easy as possible for someone to consume the strategic content you’ve created. The second way is by increasing the number of opportunities your content has to convert or nurture a consumer through promotion channels (paid, earned or owned).

You Have Website Traffic. Now What? from Relevance

This deck is filled with GIFs. To view them you must download the presentation and open in full presentation mode –http://bit.ly/1ehEKB1

For those inbound marketing adopters still struggling to drive enough leads, the below list represents proven tools and tactics that will help accelerate your current lead generation activities.

1. Content Discovery

Many marketers associate content discovery with native advertising platforms like RevContent, Adblade, Taboola and Outbrain. While those are indeed content discovery networks, they represent the paid media channel.

The channel that most often gets overlooked for content discovery is owned media. Tools like Contextly and BrightInfo allow marketers to recommend like or similar content to website visitors. This keeps them on the site longer while potentially serving up ebooks, guides and whitepapers for conversion. These tools increase the likelihood of a conversion.

Most marketers are believers in the power of email as a content promotion channel that helps nurture leads down the funnel – and with good reason. However, many marketers aren’t aware that mobile push notifications have a 30x better opt-in rate than email. Companies like Roost have developed technology to empower marketers without mobile apps to leverage push notifications across devices, screens and user interfaces. This has the potential to help bloat your middle of the funnel with nurtured leads.

2. Conversion Rate Optimization

If you recall above, minimizing barriers to consumption helps accelerate lead acquisition. However, as marketers, we need prudent data and lead intelligence to properly nurture leads. This represents a problem for many lead generation departments. If they ask too many questions they won’t get enough conversions. However, if they don’t ask enough questions they won’t be able to work the lead.

This problem is easily solved with the Smart Forms solution from ReachForce. This solution bridges the gap between too many form fields and not enough. It’s able to use captured information like email and IP addresses, and augment it with all of the known company information in its database. It can literally take five data points acquired by a form and produce 23 or more additional data points. This will help increase your conversion rates.

I’d be remiss if I failed to mention A/B and multivariate testing. This is the act of changing the look, feel, interface or message of a landing page to produce more conversions. There are whole books and blogs solely dedicated to this subject, so I won’t bore you with a synopsis. If you don’t have a landing page testing program I highly recommend you look into one. By the way, one of my favorite A/B testing newsletters is from whichtestwon.com. It delivers results from real A/B tests every week.

3. Progressive Profiling

Since we know that the number of form fields we use impacts conversion rates, utilizing a methodology like progressive profiling can help marketers gather robust amounts of information over time without negatively impacting rates of conversion. This can be accomplished by asking new and unique questions on future subsequent visits. This type of information gathering, coupled with email lead nurturing, can produce very robust lead intelligence over time.

4. MQL Optimization

Producing an MQL is not easy. However, today’s technology empowers marketers to build robust lead management programs. Generally, these systems include some type of marketing automation system and CRM. However, just having this technology does not produce a lead management program.

Traditionally, Sales handles the CRM and Marketing handles automation. Makes sense, right? Unfortunately, Sales and Marketing tend to be quite separate and siloed in many organizations. This is where closed loop marketing comes in.

Many successful lead management programs have at least one individual that sits between Sales and Marketing that facilitates the free flow of lead intelligence and feedback through scoring, both up and down the funnel – from marketing automation to CRM and back again.

Having a program like this in place will not only optimize MQL generation, but will help you optimize all stages of your marketing and sales funnel.

For those of you struggling to keep your Sales folks busy with heaping mounds of inbound leads, it’s my hope that some or all of the insights, tools or tactics mentioned above have a positive impact. Lead generation isn’t easy, but with enough hard work, the right technology and proven processes, it can be a successful endeavor.

We know that sales of iPads and tablets are in a funk. In an excellent analysis by Neil Cybart at his Above Avalon blog, he concludes that it’s worse than we think.

I think his analysis of the numbers and the reason for the startling drop are spot on. It’s his proposed remedy that I think is off base. While Cybart argues for a change in Apple’s iPad strategy, I think the drop in iPad sales isn’t the disaster for Apple that it might appear to be.

First, let’s start with Cybart’s number crunching.

In the most recent quarter, reported last month, Apple said it sold 10.9 million iPads compared to 13.3 million in the year-ago quarter. Bad, by any measure.

Cybart, however, says the seasonal ups and downs of iPad sales make it hard to see the real decline. He calculates the trailing 12 month average of sales (see chart on his post). This shows a steady decline in growth starting in early 2012 that became flat in early 2014 before turning increasingly negative.

“This smoothing effect highlights that the iPad and tablet have been on the decline for years and things continue to worsen with the overall tablet market hitting negative territory for the first time,” Cybart writes. “All momentum has been lost.”

The reasons, according to Cybart, mirror almost exactly the situation in my home. We have an iPad 2, which represent 20.5 percent of iPads currently in use, according to his analysis. I would estimate that while we have various apps and some games on it, 95 percent of our iPad use is watching Netflix or YouTube.

As such, there’s not much incentive to rush out and upgrade. We’ll use this until the day it dies. Cybart believes that’s bad news for Apple.

“A product category with a use case summed up by Netflix watching is quite problematic since it is that much harder to sell a differentiated product, leading to a rush to the bottom in terms of pricing, quality, and features,” Cybart writes.

Where I disagree with Cybart’s view of this problem is that it’s actually a problem. Because he views it as a problem, he calls for a major rethinking by Apple.

“It is time to fundamentally address the problems with multi-tech tablet computing,” he writes. “The answer is to introduce a new product subcategory at the high-end of the tablet market.”

This view comes from the basic assumption that for a product to be successful, more of it has to be sold each quarter and each year. Naturally, this is how an investor or former Wall Street analyst like Cybart might view the world.

But I think Apple (smartly) thinks more broadly and long-term than that, which has been one of the keys to its success. Rather than worrying about propping up a declining product, like the iPod, it follows the users (and leads them in some cases) to where they are happier and more satisfied.

The real question Apple should be asking is: What do users want?

In many cases, the answer is turning out to be…a Mac. In the most recent quarter, Apple reported that it sold 4.8 million Macs, led by growth in MacBooks, a figure that represents a 9 percent year-over-year increase.

Cybart wants Apple to develop a new iPad that stands out from the MacBook and iPhone. But why should Apple care if I’m buying an iPad or a MacBook?

For many of the enterprise and education customers Apple is chasing, the MacBook is likely a better solution than the iPad. No need to over-analyze this. The reason is simple: The iPad doesn’t have a keyboard.

No matter how many clever productivity and creativity apps people build, at some point you need to input things by typing. And typing on the iPad’s virtual keyboard (or any tablet’s) remains clunky and slow and tiring.

You can always type faster on a real keyboard, which is why many schools are shifting to things like Chromebooks over iPads. And if you’re taking notes in a meeting, it’s going to be stressful pecking away on the iPad. Yes, you can get a bluetooth keyboard for the iPad, but that’s basically turning it into a half-assed laptop, so what’s really the point?

The good news for Apple is that, thanks to cloud computing, it seems like the world is coming back around to the Mac. As more services operate over the Internet and through the browser, the operating system matters less and less.

I think this is why we’re seeing things like IBM’s recent announcement that it’s starting a new service to help enterprise customers integrate Macs into the office. It seems silly to try to contort the iPad into a form that makes it a better substitute for a superior product you already sell. If a business wants Mac, sell them a Mac.

If anything, as the prices for the MacBook Air continue to fall, I would expect to see more and more schools give these a look. It’s probably a better future for Apple’s education efforts than the iPad.

If there is one shift I’m looking to see, it’s whether Apple will eventually bring touchscreens to Macs. No matter how many times I remind my kids that my 7-year-old MacBook doesn’t have a touchscreen, they still instinctively put their fingers all over the screen expecting things to happen.

None of this is meant to suggest Apple should just give up on the iPad. I certainly don’t expect the iPad to follow the iPod into near-oblivion. Even if quarterly sales are declining at the moment, the universe of iPad users is still likely expanding. Apple chief executive Tim Cook noted back in April that, of the iPads sold, 40 percent in the U.S. and 70 percent in China went to first-time buyers.

“As we look at the usage statistics on iPad, it remains unbelievably great,” Cook said on the most recent earnings call. “I mean, the next closest usage of the next competitor, we’re six times greater. And so these are extraordinary numbers. It’s not like people have forgotten iPad or anything. It’s a fantastic product.”

I haven’t bought a new iPad in years. But we still use it every day. Apple might have a bigger problem if people were slowly putting iPads in the drawers and forgetting about them. But they’re not. And so eventually, they’re likely to get new ones, even if that upgrade cycle is looking more like MacBooks than iPhones.

Despite quarterly or 12-month cycles for iPads that are weak and getting weaker, it’s easy to look around the world and see that more people in more countries are using more Apple products every day. That’s driving higher App Store sales and creating openings for new products like the Apple Watch (we’ll see whether it ends up in drawers or not) and the soon-to-be revamped Apple TV (I have the old one and would buy a new one the day it goes on sale).

It’s hard sometimes to look past a bad data point to see the bigger picture. But if any company has the discipline and culture to do that, it’s Apple.

No need to panic about the iPad. Just keep calm and carry on selling Macs.

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We’ve all been there. You’re at a party and… no wait… someone double dips. Gross!

Except, this isn’t that kind of double dipping (phew).

This past month I bought a mattress. To this day, I still get endless mattress ads on my browser, since I spent so long sifting through mattress sites. That’s because they’re remarketing to me.

Remarketing is a huge buzzword these days. It’s all about targeting people who have already viewed your site. I’m a delicious chip dip. They dipped their mattress selection into me once, and I didn’t buy. So they dipped again. And again, until I did.

Isn’t it remark-able?

Content Remarketing: The New Frontier

Content remarketing is just one subcategory under this umbrella. Rather than trying to draw you back to an abandoned cart or a mattress sale you once viewed (ahem), content remarketing targets people who took a quick glance at your content, but left before taking any action.

These people are super valuable. They already expressed interest in your content, which is why they have better odds of converting once you pull them back in.

How many times have you seen a free ebook that really interested you? You travel to the landing page, which asks for your contact information before the free download begins. If you’re anything like me, you think ‘oh, I don’t have time for this’ and leave the page.

This is a nightmare for content marketers. You get so darn close to getting that lead. Maybe, just maybe, if you could get them back to the page again, they’ll sign up.

This is what content remarketing is all about.

Case Study: WordStream

If you don’t take our word for it, listen to Larry Kim. For those of you who don’t know, Larry Kim is a PPC messiah and founder of WordStream.

WordStream is one of the huge preachers of content remarketing. Kim wrote an article for WordStream, but also spread his gospel on other outlets (such as HubSpot and Moz). Essentially, content remarketing played a huge part in WordStream’s rapid growth.

Before remarketing their content, WordStream saw a steady 8.4% growth, compounded every month for five years. That’s great. But far too many of these visitors were new, and bouncing quickly.

As a result, conversions were stagnant. Growth is great, but you want to see that translate to conversions.

Tweet This

To solve the problem, Kim and the WordStream team created a campaign to target past visitors. The campaign was designed to hit 44 million impressions per month, and was split between search ads and display ads.

As a result, WordStream saw their metrics leap. Average time spent per page jumped 300%, and the number of visitors who filled out forms jumped by over 50%. They saw huge improvements on multiple fronts:

• Increased repeat visitors.
• More branded searches and better brand recall.
• Higher engagement on all fronts.
• More conversions, leads, and sales.

After such success, Kim ventures to say that “it’s crazy to be doing SEO without at least some remarketing.” I’m inclined to agree.

Hit the Ground Running

Not sure where to start? Google is a very popular choice. The display network alone can reach up to 92% of all consumers, and it’s easy to set your targets (odds are, you’ll be able to reach the majority of them).

If you’d like a more in depth guide, Kim lays out his entire process in his WordStream article. Google has also taken the liberty to lay out a short retargeting page, specifically for their platform.

Of course, content remarketing is only one part of an overall remarketing strategy. Beckoning past visitors back to your content can increase the number of people entering the top of your sales funnel. Other retargeting efforts can be made to push them through the middle, and out the bottom, of your funnel.

Think of retargeting as patching a leak. You work hard to get your leads. Once they start leaking out of your funnel, you want to patch it up as quickly as possible.

Which is why you need to hit the ground running. Time is quite literally money. You’re wasting potential sales that are leaking out of your funnel, and the longer you wait, the more you lose.

Are you overwhelmed and confused about creating the ideal content for increasing traffic, leads and sales? It’s nothing a stiff drink can’t cure.

Many Great Ideas Started Over Drinks In A Bar

The United States Marine Corps, Southwest Airlines and Shark Week, to name just a few.

So when it comes to growing your business, there’s no reason a similar approach can’t help you.

And the way to grow your business is by selling a lot of something. Sales can really take off when you have the ability to generate your own, quality leads.

Lead Generation Has Changed

But generating leads has changed quite a bit in recent years because the way people buy has changed. In the not-too-distant past when a buyer was researching a purchase they had to contact the seller early on in order to learn about their options.

At that point, the salesperson could guide (or strong arm) the buyer along their sales process, using the information the buyer sought as leverage. Buyers never really liked that but there weren’t many other options. The seller held most of the information cards.

Thanks to the Internet, buyers can now do extensive research before they engage with the seller. In fact, studies show that in a B2B sale, buyers are now 60% to 90% through their buying journey before they first contact a seller.

And at that point the buyer is most interested in price because they already have most everything else they need to know.

That’s driving many old school marketers and salespeople to drink. Or create content.

You see, if you don’t want to wait for your buyers to contact you after they have done their research, you need to get found while the buyer is researching.

And the way to do that is to publish helpful content online that is aligned with the buyer (and their search terms) as they go through the buyer’s journey.

Notice I said “helpful.” That doesn’t mean creating content exclusively about your company, its products and services. Your buyer is not interested in that. Not at first anyway. Once you show you’re interested in your customer and their problems, only then will they become interested in you.

Follow The Buyer’s Journey

The journey the B2B buyer takes is not linear. In fact it can be pretty erratic.

From first realizing that they have a problem (or some other trigger event that starts their research), to determining what their problem is, to selecting a solution, it can look like a whirlwind.

Forrester illustrated the chaos of the buyer’s journey in this image.

So should you have content for every single one of those steps in the buyer’s journey? In a perfect world that would be nice. But to get started, try to break the buyer’s journey down into just three sections: Awareness, Consideration and Decision.

1. Awareness – This is where a buyer is expressing the symptoms of a problem (or an opportunity). The buyer isn’t sure what his problem is. He is looking for more educational research to understand the problem. The buyer tends to be looking for educational, third party, vendor-neutral content related to identifying problems or symptoms. Examples of helpful content at this stage includes eBooks, white papers, editorial content and research reports.
2. Consideration – Once the buyer has given a name to his problem, he then starts to consider all the available approaches/methods to solving it. At this point he is interested in things like comparison white papers, expert guides, webcasts, podcasts and videos.
3. Decision – The buyer has reached this stage when he has defined his solution strategy, method, or approach. He is starting to compile a list of available vendors and products within his solution strategy. At this stage, he will need supporting documentation, data, benchmarks or endorsements in order to make or recommend a final decision. The right content for this stage includes vendor (or product) comparisons, case studies, trial download, a live demo, product literature, etc.

OK, so you have three “stages” of your buyer’s journey, but how do you know what the heck the content should be about for each one?

Here’s Where The Drinking Comes In

Go to a bar with three other people and order three martinis. Make sure the drinks are served with cocktail napkins. That’s real important.

Now, you can’t go to the bar with just anyone. If you’re a marketer, you need to bring your head of sales and your CEO (or whoever sales and marketing reports to). And most importantly, bring one of your customers.

Notice that there are three drinks served and four of you at the bar. You are not actually going to do any drinking. (As an aside, my years working at ad agencies on New York’s Madison Avenue taught me the benefits of the three martini lunch. The trick is to let everyone else do the drinking.)

Then, once the juices are flowing, start by asking your customer the following question from Adele Revella’s book, “Buyer Personas:”

“Take me back to the day when you first decided to evaluate a new … [whatever category of solution your product fits into] and tell me what happened.”

Listen to their answers and try as best you can to probe for “The Five Rings of Insight™” described in “Buyer Personas” (but don’t ask these specific questions):

1. Priority Initiative – What was it that got them to reject the status quo and decide to finally do something about the problem or make a change?
2. Success Factors – What, personally and emotionally, did your customer expect from purchasing a solution like yours? What was keeping them up at night related to this?
3. Perceived Barriers – What resistance did they encounter or expect to encounter from considering your solution? The resistance could have been internal or based on a bad experience with a similar solution to yours.
4. Buyer’s Journey – What was the process they went through to evaluate options, eliminate contenders, and settle on their final choice?
5. Decision Criteria – What were your specific product attributes that they evaluated as they compared their options?

Now take the first napkin and write the word “awareness” at the top. Write down what the customer’s key questions were when they were first looking to solve their problem – before they had heard of or considered your company. Use the customer’s terms and expressions, not your industry terminology. These questions can serve as the genesis of your awareness stage content.

Next, take the second napkin and write the word “consideration” at the top. Write on the napkin the questions that the customer had after they had determined what the solution to their problem could be. Who offers this kind of solution? Ongoing costs? Implementation? This will become the basis of your consideration stage content.

Finally, on the third napkin, write the word “decision” across the top. Write down what questions the customer had before they decided to pick your firm. What did they need to see or hear in order to make a decision? A demo? References? Guarantees? The answers to the questions on this napkin will direct the type of content you should prepare for the typical buyer’s decision stage.

Conclusion

Many companies are intimidated by a content-based approach to lead generation. One reason is because it’s new and different. But another reason is because they just don’t know how to get started. The three-martini approach to B2B lead generation content planning is intended to begin what should be a more detailed approach to mapping and producing content that will increase site traffic, generate leads and nurture them toward a sales.

Cheers!

“Bright-Field Lighting” by Kyle May – originally posted to Flickr as Bright-Field Lighting. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.