Rnordman

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is treating a B2B buyer like a B2C buyer. When you’re dealing with a member of the public, you can rest easy that you won’t have to deal with someone who knows your business like you do. In the case of a B2B buyer, you’re dealing with someone in the same industry. The whole mechanics of the purchase is different.

If you want to make a good impression when you next meet a B2B buyer, bear in mind the following tips.

1. Stop Skimping on the Homework

It’s blatantly obvious when you didn’t do your homework. Looking up a few quotes from the CEO simply isn’t enough. You’re not attending a job interview. Know the ins and outs of how your buyer does business. Don’t ask them what they do or how they market. That’s a wasted twenty minutes of chatter.

Know how your buyers do business before the meeting. If you need to ask a question, ask through email prior to the meeting. Not only does this maintain efficiency it shows you’re genuinely interested, which always leaves a good impression.

2. Selective Listening

Selective listening is where you’re taking in the conversation to give off the impression of listening. Really, you’re just looking for an opportunity to jump in and explain why your product is awesome and why they should give you money.

The fix?

Shut up. Listen to everything and stop trying to jump in. Don’t speak until at least a few seconds of silence has passed. It’s better to be a good listener than a good talker.

3. Reading from a Notebook

The modern B2B buyer understands they don’t know everything. They’re looking for an education as much as they are looking to convey about what their business does. Stop reading from the notebook and form targeted and unique opinions based on the client’s situation. Throw ideas around and don’t worry about saying what the client wants to hear.

4. Leave the Business Pitch at Home

The business pitch is a dull lecture filled with slides nobody really wants to endure. A pitch doesn’t invite discussion. It’s explaining what you have and going through a list of benefits. Stop this method of B2B selling. Your buyer should feel as if they’re in a two-way meeting. That’s how you’re going to keep them interested and intrigued.

5. Aggressive Negotiations

Sales is often characterized as an industry of aggression and power. It’s about challenging buyers and demolishing targets. They want to solve a problem and they want you to help them solve that problem.

Change your perspective in sales. It’s about you and the buyer versus the problem. When you alter your views in this way, you’ll soon discover that buyers react more favorably to you. Unfortunately, many modern businesses still see sales in the 20th century manner. Get out of the habit!

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VB INSIGHT:

If there is one thing marketers enjoy, it is getting more money back than they paid out. In fact, that is pretty much the job description.

In a new study on email marketing solutions from Jon Cifuentes — in which he studied a broad audience of 1,300 marketers, and evaluated over 48,000 companies — it is clear that email is still both king and queen of return on investment (ROI).

In fact, mid-sized businesses are enjoying an average of 246 percent ROI thanks to email marketing.

If only that were the whole story.

While the returns are high, email marketing is also one of the most expensive marketing channels to manage.

“You can think of email as the center of orchestrating all of your customer relationships,” Cifuentes, an analyst at VB Insight, said. “It can be an expensive control booth, just based on all the things you can accomplish with it. The infrastructure costs add up. Email infrastructure partners, ESPs, analytics partners, agencies and content services, media spend for growing subscribers, and finally talent to run the show. It adds up, but the potential ROI you can achieve with email marketing shows you how vital it is to get it right.”

I discovered a similar cost pattern in my State of Marketing Technology Winter 2015 report, where a separate set of 2,119 marketing technology users told us that email marketing required high levels of resource to manage properly — 85 percent of email marketing users are at manager level or above, and that is expensive time in anyone’s book.

But while email marketing is costly to maintain, there is no doubt as to the results it produces.

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VB’s new email marketing buyer’s guide is available for
$299 on VB Insight, or free with your martech subscription

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Mid-sized businesses are clearly the big winners. Small to medium businesses gain 183 percent return. And enterprise-level organizations average 117 percent ROI — which is put into perspective somewhat when you consider the revenues at play in the Fortune 500 space.

And in a world where instant and in-app messaging solutions grab the headlines, email is quietly still gaining traction, even after all these years. Market research firm Radicati is predicting worldwide email users to grow over the next four years to over 2.8 billion users. And it’s easy to see why. Email remains the most prevalent and ubiquitous form of online communication today.

In fact, email is so much part of our everyday life now that we insist that marketers personalize the messages that hit our inbox; if they don’t, we consider that message as spam. Compare that to how we feel about personalization in other forms of marketing, such as location-based triggers, or retargeting campaigns on social platforms.

“For a number of reasons, we’ve been trained to be sold to via email,” Cifuentes said. “It may be that with targeting on a mobile device, there’s just a finer line between useful and creepy. I’m watching that space with interest, and am excited to see new research on data privacy, and consumer preferences”

With up to 246 percent average return at risk, high internal costs, and an ever-expanding target audience, it seems email marketing requires as much of your attention now as it did when it was the new kid on the digital marketing block.

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Jon Cifuentes’ report — Buyer’s Guide: How to navigate the email marketing landscape — is available now for $299, or free with your VB Insight subscription.

You wouldn’t stir your coffee with a shovel or dig a hole with a spoon, would you? Similarly, marketers have many tools to use, and often through trial and error they discover which tool is best for a specific job. Yet I continue to hear about marketers attempting to use online meeting tools to run webinars, only to obtain lackluster results.

So what’s the reason behind these lackluster results, you ask? It’s simple, really: an online meeting tool doesn’t meet the same needs satisfied by a webinar platform. You may need both, but they are ideally suited for very different applications.

When to use an online meeting tool
An online meeting tool works great for small, collaborative groups. You may want to use an online meeting tool further down the buying cycle when it’s time to engage 1-on-1 with a prospective customer, for example.

When to use a webinar platform
Webinars are very effective at driving your prospects through every stage of the buying cycle. Use a webinar platform when you need to generate sales-ready leads through high-engagement webinars. Use the detailed analytics to identify the most effective leads, setting your sales team up for success.

• Effectively reach large, targeted audiences
  A webinar platform will empower you to reach large, targeted audiences. Using tools such as enhanced Q&A, group chat, Twitter, resource downloads, polls, and surveys, you can effectively engage with your audience during a webcast.
• Advanced analytics
  A webinar platform will provide you with so much more than just basic information about attendees. The key benefit is that a webinar platform increases the engagement of users so that you can focus on the hottest leads. Using the engagement actions of a webinar such as questions, polls, surveys, resources, viewing time, and widget activity, a webinar platform can measure the engagement of individual viewers. This is huge for marketers!

A meeting is NOT a webinar
Meeting and conferencing tools are built for…meetings and conferences. Webinars created on meeting tools are less reliable and less accessible and offer very little in the way of audience analytics. So don’t “dig” a webinar with a spoon—use a shovel, a purpose-built webinar marketing platform.

Social selling. Sounds good, right? Millions of modern marketers from around the globe are discovering that they can use digital channels to reach their buyers online. Sounds simple, obvious really.

“We’ll use LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook to post information and images about what we do and they will flock.”

But is it really that easy or is this a rerun of Field of Dreams?

Build it and they will come has never panned out online. We tried this with online communities and the internet is awash with digital litter of empty forums and unanswered questions.

Yet, we are at it again building social selling campaigns and pushing out images and information in hopes someone will see it.

Let me remind you, this approach will not work.

Marketing and sales need to flip the megaphone around in order to fully listen and respond from a place of genuine helpfulness and thought leadership. This builds trust, and creates the foundation for the relationships at the heart of purchase decisions.

But who has time for trust building –asks the sales professional who is under pressure to perform?

Filling the pipeline is all that matters when your feet are to the fire with a sales quota, right?

A recent study by Kitedesk of 524 sales executives found that those who are skilled in digital relationship building are 6x more likely to exceed their sales quotas than those who do not interact online. Forbes wrote about the study here and if you are a data geek like me, you can download the report here.

How we listen, respond and interact matters the most.

It is a nuanced skillset. In fact, 47% larger purchases result from nurtured leads than non-nurtured leads. (Source: The Annuitas Group)

Only a few firms truly understand and embrace the foundation of social selling. The ones that do are pulling up a chair to the sales table to listen and engage. They are the pioneers who are hearing the buyers’ needs, understanding their concerns and advancing their relationships with those that are interested in learning.

What they all have in common is that they listen more than they talk.

1.) Share useful content: This doesn’t mean retweeting like crazy, but taking the time to curate high quality information, and comment on why you think it is special.

2.) Share “intelligence”: including market buzz and insights on the industry. In this fast moving world, it is impossible to keep up. By keeping your finger on the pulse, people will look to you for what’s happening.

3.) Start a conversation: You can, and should, talk to people online. Comment, compliment & query. People are very approachable online – sometimes even more so than in person!

4.) Offer advice: When you see someone sharing a problem, genuinely jump in with help or an idea. Gratitude is a powerful emotion and you will have done a good deed.

5.) Ask for advice: Tap into your intended audience’s know-how and help them shine. Not only will this signal that you value them, but you may also learn something along the way.

6.) Collaborate with a customer: Model your collaborative spirit online while showcasing your customers. You model good behavior and positive customer relationships for all to see.

7.) Provide customer support: helping a customer is always a high return activity. Share what you know, solve a point of pain or bring in the right people to solve a need.

8.) Co-innovate new solutions: gather a few thinkers on a key topic and “ideate” online. You never know where a mini crowd-sourced brainstorm may take you. (Be sure to share the information with your firm so they can use it too.)

Just remember, quality trumps quantity.

You may think the measure of social media success is how many times you post or tweet. The numbers are not important – but the quality of your content, and your audience, is critical. You don’t need a huge volume of tweets to a huge number of followers who will never buy your products or services.

To succeed at social selling, to get the right crowd to your field of dreams focus on the relationship: listen, be useful, build trust. How do you use social to engage?

This is the second in a new series of blogs where we identify 5 deadly trends that are hobbling sales management and then provide tactical ideas for overcoming with each one. See Trend #1 here.

If there is a single, unrecognized issue that we see holding back the evolution of sales management, it would have to be the lack of a common language in the sales force. We observe this issue time and again in our clients’ organizations, but it’s rarely acknowledged as the serious problem that it is. Let me give you a simple example to demonstrate the point.

We were recently working with one of the world’s largest companies to update their sales manager training program. As a part of that effort, we interviewed a dozen or so sales managers to understand the specific sales challenges that they were facing. Here are two real conversations we had in one of the company’s field sales offices.

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Manager 1: Well, if there is one thing I’d like to see my reps doing more of, it would have to be call planning.

Vantage Point: What exactly do you mean by ‘call planning?’

Manager 1: You know… When my reps have an important sales call coming up, I want them to spend more time beforehand thinking through how they’re going to conduct the meeting… What is their desired outcome? What questions will they ask? What objections do they anticipate? Things like that.

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Manager 2: I tell you, I really wish that my sellers would spend more time on call planning.

Vantage Point: I think I know what you mean, but could you tell me more about the ‘call planning’ that you’d like your salespeople to do?

Manager 2: Well… I want my reps to be more deliberate about the customers and prospects they call on. I’d like for them to sit down on Friday and map out the visits they’re going to make the following week. Otherwise, they tend to spend a lot their time calling on a bunch of low-value customers just out of convenience.

You Know What I Mean?

You see, ‘call planning’ means something totally different to these two managers, even though they work in the very same sales force.  For one sales manager, call management is about having a better conversation during an important customer visit. For another, call management is about picking the most important customers to visit in the first place. And what if I’m a salesperson reporting to one of these managers. “Hey Jason, I’d like for you to do more call planning.” Well, maybe I will and maybe I won’t – depending on what call management happens to mean to me.

And ‘call management’ is only one example where communication misfires get in the way of better and more consistent sales management.  What does ‘coaching’ mean in your sales force? Would every manager agree? And what counts as a ‘qualified lead’ in your sales pipeline? Does every salesperson know?

This might seem like a game of semantics, but it’s anything but that. Efficient communication is critical to operating an effective organization. With a common language, you can dance effortlessly from conversation to conversation and never miss the other person’s point. Without it, you can have entire conversations that never reach a point. That’s why accountants learn Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and manufacturing uses Total Quality Management frameworks. These common ‘languages’ enable solid conversations where each person leaves knowing what just happened and what’s supposed to happen next. Wouldn’t it be nice if sales had one of those?

Reversing the Trend

As with most sales management problems, there’s no magic solution. In fact, no magic is required. You just need to do the obvious things:

• Identify the important activities in your sales force – like call planning, coaching, or pipeline management
• Define each one and how you want to talk about it
• Train your sales teams to use the common language

I know this might seem too basic to actually do, but it’s our consistent observation that sales management should be much easier than we make it. And a common understanding of frequently used terms is one of the most fundamental things that we need to enable effective communication within our teams… No matter how rudimentary it might seem.

So let’s just do it. Let’s choose to communicate better using consistent terms with clear definitions. Then suddenly call management might actually mean call management. And a qualified lead might actually be a qualified lead.  Then sales managers will know what to say, and salespeople will know what they hear. And everything will be just a little easier for everyone.

Probing questions are at the heart of an effective, consultative selling approach

Being able to win opportunities is what separates a great sales professional from a good one — those who excel, understand the structure of sales meetings, and stay in control. Great sales professionals know where they are going with their questioning strategy and what they want to accomplish at every point in the dialogue. They hone their focus on probing, learning, and fully comprehending the client’s needs before ever talking about their own product. In my last blog post, I focused on tips that will help with open-ended questions, today, I will look at probing questions.

Probing questions are at the heart of an effective, consultative selling approach — one that is all about the client, not how much the sales professional knows or the great products to be offered.

“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”

― Theodore Roosevelt

At the start of a client relationship, you should show interest in the other person’s world, which may include work and family responsibilities, hobbies, sports, or career development. Let the client take the lead, and then use probing questions to explore what the client has just said and to demonstrate your level of interest and caring.

Probing questions are a great way to demonstrate to your clients that you are listening and picking up on key “neon words” — those that can be easily overlooked but greatly affect meaning — to ask for clarification and additional information.

Active listening and pacing are key when asking good probing questions. You should be conscious of the pauses and even silence between questions. If you ask a great open-ended probing question and get only silence, be comfortable with the silence. Don’t jump in with another question or repeat the same question (what I call “parrot phrasing”) or answer the question for the client. Show confidence by giving him/her time to think and formulate a response.

Another way to describe probing questions is drill-down questions.  Sometimes, too much probing can be counterproductive. It’s helpful to go by the rule of threes: drill down or probe at least three times for every vague word or statement. Too little probing will diminish your chances of uncovering the different levels of the client’s needs. Too much probing will feel like you are in a cat-and-mouse chase, with the conversation going in circles.

If you don’t know where to probe, and the client doesn’t give you clues, use trading to open up new avenues. Trading is the process of giving information to get information. By exchanging information, you can help clients think, often triggering ideas they might not have considered. An example of trading is the following: “We are seeing a big change in the industry with X becoming a much bigger part of the mix. How has this affected your operations?”

A sales professional skilled in using probing questions can more easily build rapport that encourages clients to openly and honestly share information about their needs, decision criteria, pricing, competitors, and other information critical to winning business. With this questioning strategy in your wheelhouse, you will be better able to uncover client needs and then position your product or service in a strategic, client-focused way that wins sales opportunities.

Learn more about Richardson’s Consultative Selling Sales Training Solutions.

The post How to Ask Probing Questions during Sales Meetings appeared first on Richardson Sales Enablement Blog.

A typical sales development process consists solely of phone and email touchpoints, with the occasional in-person meetings or networking connections in some circumstances. But what if you included social touchpoints into your cadence? How would adding that extra-personal connection affect your sales process?

Social media activity varies by prospect — from which platforms they frequent most, to which profiles they dedicate to professional or personal use, to whether they’re even active at all.

Because the majority of professional social activity occurs on LinkedIn, some SDRs will simply view the prospect’s LinkedIn profile as their first touchpoint. The automated notification to the prospect helps warm up their call or email, making it the default initial touchpoint. Others will take an even deeper approach, sending an InMail message based on something eye catching on the prospect’s profile.

A more casual approach to social touches with a prospect is interaction through Twitter. A simple retweet or favorite can go a long way in the introductory stage.

But do these social touchpoints have a specific place in your sales process? And if so, what would that process look like?

Take it from HireVue, a SaaS company with a Talent Interaction Platform™ and a vested interest in bringing personal relationships back to business. As they’re currently undergoing a heavy social media push, the concept of having Twitter engagement or LinkedIn messaging as a touchpoint option would fit perfectly into their process. Not only would the touch help ramp up their social presence as a sales team, but the importance of having these engagements seamlessly logged into Salesforce.com is an even stronger advantage for their process.

That being said, cadences should only include social touchpoints IF buyers spend time on social. When prospects are on Twitter and LinkedIn, here’s how it should work:

1. The SDR sets up their cadence of phone calls, email, LinkedIn invites/messages, and Twitter touches.
2. SDR then executes phone and email steps.
3. System next prompts SDR to send LinkedIn InMail message and helps them by presenting the link via the cadence.
4. Once an InMail message has been sent, system automatically saves the activity in CRM for measurement purposes.
5. System looks up all prospects to see which have a Twitter account and allows SDR to auto-follow all prospects.
6. System highlights most important tweets from prospects, allowing SDR to easily favorite, reply, and retweet these messages. System automatically saves the activity in CRM for measurement purposes.

Just like with email and phone touches, consistency is key when adding social touchpoints to your outreach process. It’s likely only effective when added as a specific touchpoint, accelerated for execution, auto-saved to CRM, and measured scientifically for success.

Do you think all of these social touches should have a place in SalesLoft Cadence, and if so, what would that process look like to you?

The post Including Social Touchpoints in Your Cadence (Efficiently and Sincerely) appeared first on SalesLoft.

There’s a lot of attention been paid to Forrester’s recent projection that 1 million B2B sales people are going to lose their jobs to self-service eCommerce by 2020 in the US alone. Their report highlights the growing disconnect between B2B buying preferences and traditional B2B selling behaviors.

But the projected decline in sales force numbers isn’t universal. Forrester identify 4 types of B2B buying environment and match them with 4 types of sales profile – and one of those sales profiles isn’t in decline – it’s actually projected to grow. Unsurprisingly, it’s all connected with the value that sales people can bring to these different buying environments…

4 buyer archetypes

Forrester’s report – “Death of a (B2B) Salesman” – by Andy Hoar, Peter O’Neill and others –  includes a wealth of information, but I’d like to concentrate on my interpretation of one of the most interesting aspects of the report – the alignment between Buyer and Seller archetypes. Forrester’s 4 B2B buyer archetypes are defined by the relationship between the complexity of the product or service and the complexity of the buying environment. Let’s delve into these two dimensions in a little more detail:

Product/service complexity

High-complexity products and services tend to be expensive considered purchases – they are often initial purchases (effectively “design wins”) rather than repeat purchases. Their value may not be immediately obvious to the buyer. As well as selling the solution, the vendor may need to persuade the prospect of the need for change. Classic examples include the purchase of an ERP or CRM system, or the delivery of transformational business consulting.

At the other end of the scale are low-complexity products or services requiring little or no customisation that can be bought against a simply defined specification. Competitive products are often hard to differentiate and issues such as cost, availability and/or an existing purchasing relationship are often central to the value proposition.

Buying environment complexity

High-complexity buying environments typically involve multiple stakeholders and a lengthy multi-stage buying decision process. Very often the challenges of getting internal alignment are as complicated as are the challenges of identifying the right solution. This is a buying environment that often requires orchestration.

Low-complexity buying environments, on the other hand, are often transactional in nature, with fewer people actively involved from the prospect organisation. The buyers often know what they want, require minimal education, and are looking for the simplest possible purchasing environment with – at the extreme – little or no human interaction to get in the way.

4 Distinct Quadrants

Effectively, the results in 4 distinct quadrants, each with a dominant buyer type and a dominant sales person type:

What Forrester describe as “Serve Me” buyers (simple product/solution and buying environment) are best served by an “Order Taker” sales model, which may or may not involve any human intervention. The customer’s questions are often best addressed on-line rather than through conversation. Any conversation that does take place is unlikely to be complicated. This is where the deepest cuts are happening to human sales resources: Forrester project that 33% of these order taker sales jobs will disappear by the end of the decade. I’m surprised that the figure isn’t higher.

“Show Me” buyers (complex product/service but a relatively simple buying environment) have a budget and a relatively simple decision path to navigate internally, but don’t know enough (and/or can’t learn enough online) about the product/service category to make the decision unaided. Forrester identify the “Explainer” sales role as being best suited to this environment: they help the prospect to gather and interpret the information they need to compare and choose between alternative options. Deep solution familiarity is more important than political nous in these roles. Forrester project that 25% of these roles will disappear before the decade is out.

“Guide Me” buyers (simple product/service but a more complex buying environment) are best served by what Forrester call the “Navigator” sales model or archetype. They know what they want to buy, but may need help from a sales person in mapping, navigating and orchestrating multiple internal stakeholders and/or budget resources. Political nous is more important than deep solution familiarity in these sales roles. Forrester project that 15% of these Navigator roles will be eliminated by the end of the decade.

The fourth and final buyer type is the “Enlighten Me” buying team – these are almost never individuals, but multiple stakeholders. This involves a complex product/service plus a complex buying environment scenario. The buying team may be undecided or unaligned as to what they need, who best to buy it from, and how to finesse the complex internal decision making and approval processes. This calls for what Forrester describe as the “Consultant” sales model – and it’s the only sales archetype whose population is expected to grow over the course of the decade – by around 10%. These consultants are at the pinnacle of the sales profession – able to combine deep solution familiarity with significant political nous.

I like Forrester’s model. It goes beyond the simple binary transactional consultative sales divide to acknowledge that both the solution on offer and the buying process can have different degrees of complexity. It recognises that initial “design win” purchases may require a consultative sales model but that subsequent servicing and expansion of the account may be better served through a different model.

The Role of Digital Sales Enablement

Digitally enabled sales models are likely to predominate in the Serve Me / Order Taker scenario. But even in a Enlighten Me / Consultant model, the sales and buying experiences can be enhanced and made significantly more effective by intelligently combining human and digital resources. I am convinced that the organisations that manage to strike (and evolve) the most effective balance will gain significant competitive advantage over organisations that cling on to old-fashioned notions until they are long past their sell-by date.

What do you think? Can you position your sales organisation into one or more of these quadrants? How are you trying to align your sales roles and competencies with your customer’s buying preferences? What role is digital sales enablement playing? And how do you see this all evolving in the future?

You’ve undoubtedly heard the mantra “content is King.” Nowhere is this more true than in the world of B2B, where purchasing decisions take a considerable amount of time, research and deliberation and include multiple stakeholders within the organization. After all, investing in a $100,000 software product isn’t quite the same thing as shopping for a sweater. For B2B marketers, success depends on attracting the right audience, and then establishing a long-term relationship with them.

With content that educates and captivates your audience, quality leads will come to you.

And inbound leads don’t just cost less to acquire. They’re also five times more likely to become paying customers than outbound leads. At the same time, customer attention has never been such a scarce commodity. According to Nielson, customers see more than 2,000 marketing messages every single day. There’s more content out there than ever, and it’s all immediately available for consumption. In order to stand out, B2B marketers need to get the right content in front of the right audience at the right time. And they have just seconds to make an impact—or risk losing the customer forever.

Don’t panic. We’ve pulled together some proven content marketing strategies to help get you get the leads you need to move your business.

1. Build awareness about a problem

B2B marketers mistakenly assume that their audience knows they have a problem, and that the solution to that problem involves spending a portion of their budget to alleviate it. Meanwhile, their target customer either hasn’t identified this as a line item on their budget or doesn’t even realize there is a problem in the first place.

That’s why marketing leaders must create a demand for their product or service—and they do this by building awareness about a problem facing the industry or job function. Whether it’s in a white paper, a blog post or a webinar, your job is to highlight the pain points most relevant to a particular audience. In doing so, you also set the stage for your future sales pitch. Now that your audience realizes there’s a problem, they’ll be more receptive to the solution you have to offer.

2. Be a thought leader

If customers see you as an expert, they’re more likely to listen to what you have to say. To be a thought leader, you need to find out what questions your audience is asking, and then create content that answers those questions. It takes a dedicated approach to understanding the internal perception of the customer, but it pays off in spades.

And when you’ve reached the limits of what you or your team can offer, don’t be afraid to look beyond the company walls. Reach out to influencers in the industry or sector and ask them to write a guest blog post, share an eBook or host a Twitter chat. The important thing is for customers to see you as source of valuable information—even if you have to go outside your organization to get the expertise you need.

3. Focus on the customer

Too often, marketers let their products and solutions drive content decisions. However, the customer’s purchase decision doesn’t typically follow this line of thinking.

Take the time to learn your customer’s pain points. Send out surveys, attend conferences, monitor Twitter conversations and conduct keyword research. Whatever it takes to really understand the customer’s point of view. Choose topics they care about, even if they don’t directly relate to what you’re selling. And keep in mind that different pain points exist, even within the same organization. Members of the buying committee might be more focused on details, while executives look at top-line challenges and benefits. If possible, create content that can answer both.

The goal here is to position yourself as a trusted player in the space, one who understands the customer’s dilemma and can articulate the best path forward. You can give them a more direct sales ask once they’ve identified interest or understand they need help, but the first step is to just get them there.

4. Talk to people like they’re people

Writing for robots? B2B marketers are notorious for this. We’re just so used to reading dry, jargon-heavy content, it’s easy to forget that there’s another way. Talking to customers like they’re a friend or coworker is a way to differentiate yourself. Use the simplest language possible to get your point across. A business might be the overall target, but it’s a real live person who’s going to read and react to your content. And that person isn’t just busy, she’s also distracted by other vendors (remember those 1,999 other marketing messages?). The best B2B marketers find a way to tap into the human angle, whatever the subject matter. They strive to entertain their audience, or at the very least, not bore them to tears.

5. Test, test, test. And then test some more.

The boss might love that blog post or subject line, but that doesn’t mean your audience will. Make sure your decisions are driven by data, not gut instinct or how things worked in 2013. Never before have marketers been able to test so many things with a minimal investment. Now, we can A/B test headlines, CTAs, content architecture, graphics and more. However, effective testing requires a strategic approach, one that identifies what you hope to learn and how learning it will improve your future content investment.

Whatever you decide to test, trust the outcome, even if it’s not the one you expected.

6. Think beyond the white paper

There’s no denying that white papers have their place in B2B content marketing. They’re the tried-and-true path to thought leadership. But today’s busy, on-the-go customer is also looking for shorter, more engaging content. Think: Infographics, videos, checklists and anything else that stands out against traditional content. Remember, customers are busy. You’re vying for their attention amidst thousands of competing marketing messages. The more entertaining and easy-to-digest your content is, the more chance you’ll have at capturing—and keeping—their attention.

7. Get social

What was once thought of as more of a B2C tactic has become a must-have in the B2B marketing toolkit. Social media helps you raise awareness for your brand and offers a unique opportunity to engage with customers.

For B2B marketers, LinkedIn is the preferred medium. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 90 percent of B2B marketers distribute content on LinkedIn. That’s not surprising, given its position as the professional social network. LinkedIn also allows users to use its site as a publishing platform—you can publish entire blog posts and articles right there on your company profile, instantly reaching your network of followers, who will potentially share your content with their followers. And whether it’s Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, remember that social media is a conversation. Leave comments, answer questions, repost content and like other people’s posts, then watch your network grow.

8. Make the move to mobile

How many times have you checked your smartphone in the last hour?

Think B2B customers are any different? By 2019, WiFi and mobile devices will account for 66 percent of IP traffic. With more and more content being consumed on mobile devices, B2B marketers need to ensure their content is optimized for mobile viewing. Whether it’s an email, article or landing page, you don’t want your audience to turn away because your content won’t load properly on their smartphone.

“Responsive design” should feature prominently in your marketing vocabulary in 2015. This approach ensures customers have a great viewing experience no matter what device they’re on, making it easier for them to engage with your content, from reading an article to filling out a contact form or even making a purchase.

You may also consider new, mobile-friendly forms of content, like a cool app that solves a business problem, or a short video designed for mobile viewing.

9. Create a formal business strategy around lead generation content

Businesses can no longer ignore the importance of content. And yet, just 35% of content marketers have a documented marketing strategy. It’s not enough to just haphazardly post to a blog or come out with the occasional white paper. Leading B2B marketers know that creating a formal content strategy is the only way to have a real impact on the bottom line. Like other initiatives, the content strategy must be tied to real business objectives, and campaigns need to be measured against those objectives. A content calendar should be created to support those objectives. The content strategy should be documented and integrated into the larger marketing strategy. Only then can businesses truly gauge the effectiveness of their content marketing and make the improvements needed to take it to the next level.

LinkedIn isn’t simply a platform for job hunters and recruiters, but also multi-dimensional social media channel to build your circle of influence and network with other professionals.

The stats alone will convince you that LinkedIn is a marketing tool you just can’t ignore.

1. There are more than 350 million users on LinkedIn — in 200 countries and territories. That’s quite the global reach.
2. 35% of users access LinkedIn everyday
3. Reachforce found that 44% of B2B marketers have generated leads via LinkedIn.
4. There are over 1 billion LinkedIn endorsements
5. Over 25 million LinkedIn profiles are viewed each day

Your LinkedIn profile will act as your laser-focused billboard, presenting you as the subject matter expert in your field. Writing it may seem like a daunting task, but simply set aside some time, maybe a weekend to brainstorm what you want to share. Gather your information in outline form and dive in. If you aren’t confident with your skills, hire out the creative writing aspect but keep in mind, you’ll have to do some of the heavy lifting as well.

Headline

By default, LinkedIn will populate this field with your current company and job title. You are not obligated to retain this. Mix it up and get creative using robust keywords and phrases. List your expertise and other credentials as well, but don’t overwhelm the header with details. It can be overkill. Try to keep it to about 10-15 words. Less is more.

Summary

Design your killer profile to gain traction with a strong summary, industry keywords and in the first person tense, using “I.” Example: “I facilitated a team of 18 people to drive sales 24% above the previous quarter.” List 4-5 of your principal achievements. It’s important to note that you are writing to your target market, so make sure you are hitting some of the crucial points that would make the most sense to them.

Photo

If you don’t have a professional headshot, make time for a photo shoot. Wear something businesslike, no flash or bling. AND smile. It portrays you as someone who is real, reachable, open and personable. People are influenced by visual images, so keep in mind that you have just a few seconds to make an impression. Make it a good one.

Content

Fill in the blanks: awards, recognition, special achievements, education, associations, volunteer work and so forth. It helps to clearly demonstrate your well-roundedness, diversity in projects and skills as well as making you appear more versatile.

Endorsements/Recommendations

It never hurts to ask. Reach out to people you know, past and present clients, or even colleagues. People are always delighted to share a few kudos. Give it a try. Here’s a small tip for you, reciprocate the kindness.

Claim Your Custom Profile URL

LinkedIn’s default profile URL is not only hard to remember and share but it doesn’t showcase your name or your brand, making it more difficult for Google to display your profile page in the search results. Personalize your custom URL with your name or company name that is consistent with your other social media platforms. Click here to update your profile URL settings.

Status Updates

Everything you share is a direct reflection of yourself, your brand and your company. Your content is the cornerstone of building your digital footprint and circle of influence. It’s how you communicate your expertise with your target audience. It helps establish you as a credible source by nurturing the relationships with real content that drives conversation, educates, and encourages that coveted SHARE. With each post, consider what your audience wants and needs. Don’t get too comfortable on the soapbox because if that’s where you’re shouting your message from – trust me, no one is listening. Always remember that good content solves your customers’ problems. This is what drives your own personal influence. There’s no need to shout how awesome you are. Your content will speak for itself.

Consistency and frequency are key to authenticating your online reputation. It isn’t good enough to share a post on LinkedIn once a week. You won’t be able to develop a watchful audience unless you maintain a visible presence. Sharing content that matters – and doing it often – is the only way to build your personal brand.

To keep yourself in check, outline the topics or themes you’d like to share in support of your keywords and phrases. Write your own posts as a LinkedIn Publisher, in addition to searching for quality content from others to share as status updates. Authoring your posts in the Publisher format allows:

1. People to follow you
2. You to write long form posts
3. Google to index your posts
4. Your posts to reach a larger public audience
5. Showcase your expertise

You’ve got your posts all lined up but what’s next? When to post? According to HubSpot research, the best times to share content on LinkedIn are on Tuesday’s 10-11 am (via AddThis) while Fannit stated the best times are 7-8 am and 5-6 pm. My suggestion is also to test different days and times to see what produces the best results with your personal audience. Science and social metrics can be a struggle, but pay attention to your engagement, comments, likes and shares. Everyone is different as are their goals and tactics. Find what works best for you.

Start with this as a recipe for posting

1. Post 2-3 times per day, 7 days a week
2. Mix up your posts with URLs, images, or even quotes
3. Comment on other people’s content
4. Share in various target groups
5. Write long-form posts as “LinkedIn Publisher”
6. Search for our keywords and phrases in the “posts” section

Growing your network

The next rung toward your success is to join a few industry groups with like-minded peers, target audience and influencers. Participating in LinkedIn Groups affords you the opportunity to further develop your own thought leadership with professionals in your field. They function as a “private” space to interact with other members that share common interests, skills and industries, further widening your network and affiliations. While you are permitted to join up to 50 groups, it is advisable that you maintain a level of sanity and be a little choosy with the number of groups you join. It can be overwhelming to try and keep up with the discussions as well as share relevant content. Don’t overextend yourself.

Creating your profile, posting and joining groups is the foundation to your LinkedIn success but as with any SOCIAL network, it requires the human touch and by that I mean engagement with your community. Set aside time each day to fully engage in conversations and comment on posts that resonate with you. It is the nurturing of relationships that builds trust in you and your brand. People buy from people. That will never change.

How much do you really know about your prospects?

Maybe you don’t need to know how they take their coffee, but you do need to know enough about to get in their heads.

If you want to get responses to your outreach emails, you need to offer your prospects value. But before you decide which benefits your emails should focus on, first understand your prospects’ desires and pain points. Then and only then can you craft a relevant and persuasive message.

Check out my new video course on How to Craft Great Sales Emails (with Workbook Activities and Real-Life Examples!)

Although researching 500 prospects one at a time isn’t efficient, make the effort to write targeted, personalized messages. With 10 minutes of research, you can learn enough about your buyer persona to double your email response rate.

Here are three questions about your prospects that you must answer before you write a single sales email.

1) What does your ideal buyer persona care about the most?

Your prospects are not identical, so your emails cannot be one-size-fits-all either. The VP of Sales for a Fortune 500 company and the manager of a restaurant have very different jobs. Different buyer personas require different messages that appeal to their specific pain points and desires.

Discovering what matters most to your prospects is as easy as conducting a simple online search.

LinkedIn profiles offer a treasure trove of valuable information about your prospects’ mindsets and behavior.

For example, if you’re targeting CROs in the Greater Boston area, your LinkedIn results would look something like this:

Let’s take a closer look at one of the profiles that came up in our search: Mark Roberge, Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot Sales Division.

Understanding your ideal buyer persona is key to crafting highly targeted messages that will engage your prospects on a more personal level. Think about the job of a CRO. What responsibilities do they have? What are their priorities? What are their goals?

Pro Tip #1: A simple Google search reveals CROs are primarily concerned with managing sales and generating revenue. Your message should address relevant pain points. Looking at Mark’s profile for a minute shows he’s focused on accelerating sales. Therefore, your messages should discuss how your product can help improve the quality of HubSpot’s leads and increase sales.

Pro Tip #2: If their LinkedIn summary section is blank, the recommendations they’ve given and received are a great source of information. These show how they see others, how others perceive them, what they value.

Pro Tip #3: Look at your prospect’s featured skills, college major, who they follow, and which associations they belong to.

Piecing together this information helps you understand their personality, talents, and values.

2) What language or keywords resonate best with your prospects?

If you want your prospects to take your emails seriously, you need to speak their language.

Pay close attention to the words in your prospects’ online profiles. Are they using highly technical or industry terms in their About section or role descriptions? Do they use a formal or conversational tone? Formal writing might just be copy and pasted from their marketing team, or it could be the way they like to write. Do they have a sense of humor? How your prospects communicate helps us understand the tone and words that resonate the most with them.

Looking through Mark’s profile we notice a few words that give us better insight into how he thinks.

Mark’s BSE in Mechanical Engineering and his recent publications indicate he probably responds to hard data. He won’t be fooled by salesy jargon and cheesy pitches.

Pro Tip #4: Any message you send Mark should incorporate quantitative proof,such as percentages and dollar figures, illustrating exactly how your product could help HubSpot increase its revenue and make Mark’s life easier.

3) How do your prospects interact with others?

When searching through your prospects’ LinkedIn profiles, make sure to look beyond just their background and experience. Your prospects’ “Recommendation” sections often contain clues to how they do business and work with others.

We can see from Mark’s recommendations his presentations are “dynamic and full of actionable insights.” From this, we can gather that Mark likes to offer practical solutions to his clients. Gimmicks and fad products probably aren’t going to grab his attention.

People like Mark will respond better to short and concise messages that center on product benefits. Avoid long-winded and self-centered emails. Make sure to include a clear call to action, so that your prospects know exactly what type of action you want them to take next.

Pro Tip #5: Mark’s recommendations also reveal he likes to use case studies in his presentations, telling you he appreciates the promise of value. Including a “case study sentence” pointing to past results will help build credibility with him. This proves your product works, that you haves happy customers, and makes it easier for data-driven prospects like Mark to say yes.

Pro Tip #6: Job search websites are another great place to find useful information on your prospect’s role, objectives, and top-level concerns. Review job posts similar to the titles/roles you’re targeting to see:

• Which departments they collaborate with and why
• Where their job fits in the organization
• Whether they interact with clients or suppliers (and if so, how frequently)

If you’d like more advice on writing better emails to build relationships and close more deals, check out Video Course: How to Write Great Emails That Will Get Prospects to Open, Click and Reply, a free resource brought to you by SalesFolk and HubSpot.

One year ago I made a decision that changed my life forever. I didn’t have many expectations as I sold everything I owned and bought a one way ticket to Spain. I figured I may learn a bit about other cultures or drink some sangria by the ocean. I was young, inexperienced and most of all open-minded. While I did drink my fair share of sangria (trust me), I ultimately came away from my trip with much more than just a buzz.

I learned how to reframe and systematically prioritize my objectives in life. It sounds melodramatic I know, and trust me not everyone would gain the same lessons from living out of a small backpack for a year. But for me personally, it was transformative and taught me most of what I know about marketing and social media today.

Here’s what I learned:

Go Where the Locals Eat

A common issue you’ll run into when you enter a new city is finding a reliable place to eat.And by reliable I mean: doesn’t leave you immobilized and cramping the next morning. You can scour the top TripAdvisor reviews for the best place, but you’ll usually end up in a soulless tourist trap. Every seasoned traveler knows to keep an eye open for the small nondescript taco stand with a line of locals wrapped around the corner.

The same can be said for social media. Avoid following advice from “tourists” who don’t actually understand or use the space as intended. Go listen to the locals, follow regular users and learn from them. As marketers it can be so hard for us to remember that most people use social media for their everyday life. We’re so entrenched in analytics and trends that we end up disrespecting the space. You will never find a local eating in a Hard Rock Cafe, just as you’ll never find a Twitter native responding to a constant barrage of links to your website. So, go where your users are and learn their language. Speak to them like humans and respect their attention because you’re in their space and they don’t owe you anything.

Ask yourself: How are people using social media in their everyday life? What are they saying, what voice do they respond to and how are they using the medium? How can I add value to their social real estate with my thoughts?

Learn to Value Relationships

Life on the road can be tremendously lonely. Friends tend to come in peaks and valleys. Typically you’ll be alone for days or weeks at a time until you find a fun club and are suddenly overwhelmed with new faces and names. However, without fail the next day everyone will go their separate ways, leaving you right back where you started.

This lifestyle forces you to appreciate quality over quantity with your relationships. When you travel you only have time to stay in touch with maybe 10% of the people you meet.

The same can be seen in social marketing as well. Focusing on how many followers we have is something we’re all guilty of. Watching that number grow is addictive, but truthfully it’s a complete waste of time as most people will fade into the noise. Choose to focus on who matters. Identify your best followers using tools like Social Draft or Social Rank and laser focus your attention on them. Make them your best friends, the ones you stay in touch with after the vacation.

Ask yourself: Are you guilty of saying things like “I only have 100 followers”? If so you’re one of the lucky ones. This means you now have the opportunity to create 100 deep and meaningful relationships with people who chose to be with you. Don’t fall for quick fixes in life, take your time, be yourself and the right people will find you. Having a small following means having time to engage and keep your humanity. If your engagement is stellar your followers will grow in size and quality. Period. Your engagement is a filter that allows you to sift through the masses leaving only the best behind.

Forget What’s Familiar and Embrace the Unknown

When it comes to life and social media, there is no one formula that is “the answer.” I thought I had a pretty ideal life before I left for my trip. I owned a nice place in Austin, Texas and thought I had it all figured out. However, pushing myself to explore new lifestyles has ultimately led me to learn things I never could have imagined or even known existed.

Travel is about taking you out of whatever you consider normal and showing you that “normal” can be defined seven billion different ways.

Your social strategy is not perfect and frankly it never will be. I don’t care how many conversions that grumpy cat meme got you last week. To be truly successful you have to forge your own path. You have to push yourself to hit the restart button even and especially when you think you don’t have to. When you’re at your best you’re still not perfect, so take note of what’s working and start again.

Ask yourself: When is the last time I’ve refreshed my social strategy? What am I learning from my current strategy? How can I refine my strategy further from what I’ve learned so far?

Always Keep Perspective (Especially When Everything Goes Wrong)

I remember sitting on a park bench in Mexico reading Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way when one particular passage popped out and latched itself onto my brain forever. It’s become a personal mantra for me and it goes like this:

“We must try:
To be objective
To control emotions and keep an even keel
To choose to see the good in a situation
To steady our nerves
To ignore what disturbs or limits others
To place things in perspective
To revert to the present moment
To focus on what can be controlled”

For me, travel is 100% perspective. It’s about taking you out of whatever you consider normal and showing you that “normal” can be defined seven billion different ways on this earth. There is no one normal and there is no one right way to view or interpret a situation.

Use this mindset the next time you have to do damage control for your brand. If you have a customer complaining about your product, I want you to first calm your nerves, place things into perspective and realize where they’re coming from. Then focus on what can be controlled and analyze what you can do to reach the best possible conclusion to the situation.

At the end of the day you don’t have to travel to learn or gain new perspectives. Sometimes it can be as simple as taking a walk in a poor neighborhood you usually avoided, or writing an article for your corporate blog that challenges a popular opinion. The point is to constantly refresh your perspective and to embrace whatever life throws at you with an intention to learn.

Approach your marketing with the intention to learn no matter the outcome. Push yourself into unknown territories and focus on real lasting relationships. You’ll see results instantly both within your following and yourself.

The post How Traveling the World Can Reframe Your Marketing Perspective appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Whole Foods' new millennial-focused discount chain will be called 365 by Whole Foods Market, the company revealed Thursday.

The name comes from Whole Foods' private label brand, also called 365.

This is more evidence that the concept will be similar to the popular grocery chain Trader Joe's, which sells primarily private label products at cheap prices.

The new chain, which will start opening stores in 2016, will be led by 20-year Whole Foods veteran Jeff Turnas Turnas was previously president of the company’s North Atlantic region. 

"We are excited to introduce 365 by Whole Foods Market to bring healthy foods to even more communities with a fresh, quality-meets-value shopping experience that’s fun and convenient," Turnas said in a statement. "A modern, streamlined design with innovative technology and a carefully curated product mix will offer an efficient and rewarding way to grocery shop."

The new chain is meant to fend off growing competition in the organic foods market and catch up with Trader Joe's, which sells twice as much per square foot as Whole Foods.

But the cheaper prices could end up hurting Whole Foods' existing stores, according to Deutsche Bank analysts.

"It could backfire if price points are materially different, because an obvious price spread between the two formats could create doubts with their existing loyal customer base, and this could lead to erosion of their very strong brand equity," analysts write in a recent research note.

Whole Foods could also face a challenge keeping rent and labor costs low enough to make the "mini-me millennial" stores profitable, according to the note.

"Real estate and labor are both becoming scarcer, which could complicate this endeavor," the analysts write.

SEE ALSO: Whole Foods just offended its most important customers

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Today, Huawei is the only Chinese company – out of the 91 mainland Chinese companies listed on the Fortune Global 500 list – earning more revenue abroad than in China. Huawei’s revenue from overseas markets exceeded that from the Chinese market for the first time in 2005. In 2012, Huawei surpassed Ericsson – at that time the world leader in telecommunications and networks – in terms of sales revenue and net profit, and this trend continued in the fiscal year of 2014 when Huawei reached an all-time high sales revenue of $46.5 billion and net profits of $4.49 billion (both in U.S. dollars).

What makes it so successful? As the saying goes, “Success has many fathers.” But as with many great companies, we find part of the solution to this puzzle by looking at the specific values that define the culture of Huawei. Having interviewed people working for Huawei, reading articles, letters and keynotes by the founder Ren Zhengfei, and finally interviewing Ren Zhengfei allowed us to understand the foundation of Huawei’s value-driven culture.

Customer-First Attitude

Strong leaders provide a sense of purpose to their people, and Ren Zhengfei is no exception. His first and foremost concern is the customer. Many companies adopt a customer-focused attitude, but how many of them truly live it? Huawei distinguishes itself from the competition in this regard. In our conversation, Ren Zhengfei mentioned repeatedly how in the early years of Huawei everyone in the company had to turn their eyes to the customers and their backs to the bosses. For example, several years ago an institutional investor delegation led by Stephen Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, visited the Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen. Such visits were usually made by venture investors hoping to get a buy-in to Huawei. Ren Zhengfei asked Fei Min, his executive vice president of R&D, to entertain the delegation. Later, Roach said, in disappointment, “He was rejecting a team with $3 trillion.” The explanation by Ren Zhengfei was quite telling: he told us that he would meet any customer in person, no matter how small they were, but that Roach was not a customer.

Another example of this customer-first attitude comes from another early episode in their history that’s since become something of a company legend. In desert and rural areas in China, rats often gnawed the telecom wires, severing customers’ connections. The multinational telecom companies providing service at that time did not consider this to be their problem, but rather that of the customer. Huawei, in contrast, viewed the rat problem as one the company had the responsibility to solve. In doing so, they acquired extensive experience in developing sturdier equipment and materials – such as chew-proof wires — which helped them later on to gain several big business accounts in the Middle East, where similar problems stymied the multinational firms.

Since then, there have been other projects where Huawei experienced severe climate challenges, such as building the highest wireless communication base station in the world (6,500 meters high on Mount Everest) and building the first GSM network within the Arctic circle. These, too, have helped acquire useful knowledge. For example, when Huawei expanded their 3G market in Europe, they noticed that European carriers expected base stations to be more compact, easier to install, greener, and more energy efficient, while offering wider coverage. Based on these customer needs, Huawei became the first company to launch the concept of distributed base stations that enables radio access for large to small private networks. This innovation made it cheaper for carriers to deploy base stations, and was popular with European carriers.

Employee Dedication

Huawei emphasizes that the only way to obtain opportunities is through hard work. For example, in the early years of the company, every new employee was given a blanket and a mattress. Many of them would work late into the night, then sleep in their offices, perhaps taking a catnap during lunch again the next day. As one Huawei employee said: “The pads were to us a representation of hard work in the old days and this idea has now been translated into the spirit of being dedicated to do the best in anything we do”.

Knowing that a dedicated and committed work force makes companies more competitive is not a too difficult concept to understand. The way to promote dedication and make it accepted by its employees – as it is the case in Huawei – is, however, a more difficult nut to crack. Huawei does it in part with the type of incentive performance system the company employs. Huawei is not a public company, and is in fact owned by the employees. Ren Zhengfei’s shares account for nearly 1.4% of the company’s total, and 82,471 employees hold the rest (as stated in Huawei’s 2014 Annual report). This employee shareholding system is referred to within Huawei as the “silver handcuff.” It is a system that is different from the more common stock option arrangement, which is often termed the “golden handcuff.” The idea underlying this scheme is that Ren Zhengfei wants to share both responsibilities and benefits with his colleagues. As he puts it, he wants everyone to act like the boss. Important to note, however, is that that only those who perform well enough qualify to participate.

There’s a shared belief within the company that an IPO would result in only a few people getting very rich, and the majority losing their motivation. Ren Zhengfei has emphasized that avoiding an IPO and hewing to the current employee-ownership structure is what helps the company maintain a strong collective fighting spirit.

Long-Term Thinking

The employee-ownership arrangement not only helps Huawei attract and retain dedicated employees, but also allows the company to plan for the long term. Ren Zhengfei has also credited it with allowing them to stay close to their goals and long-term vision. For example, Huawei plans the development of the company by decade, whereas most of their competitors such as Ericsson and Motorola plan it by financial quarter or year. Being privately held has allowed Huawei to work on its 10-year plans, while its competitors struggle to follow near-term fluctuations of the capital market.

For example, Huawei has introduced the use of a rotating CEO system in which three deputy chairmen take turns acting as CEO for six months each. At the same, time Ren Zhengfei maintains his oversight role, acting as a mentor and coach for the acting CEO. This innovative management structure is inspired by a book on new leadership called Flight of the Buffalo (authors James Belasco and Ralph Stayer). While it will make the company less vulnerable if one chief fails or derails, it’s hard to imagine a publicly held company getting away with such an unusual plan.

Gradual Decision-Making

Ren Zhengfei is known for avoiding quick decisions and forcing himself to take time to reflect. His company reflects these traits. Again, he ties this in part back to their ownership structure: it keeps the decision-making power under company control – no outside investor will gain relative control over Huawei. As we’ve seen, they have much more freedom and less pressure from the market to consider their next steps to take. Their system of rotating CEOs helps support a gradual, more democratic decision-making process. It also helps Ren Zhengfei make a gradual decision about his ultimate successor.

Huawei also emphasizes what they call “the power of thinking.” The company philosophy is that the most valuable thing is the power to think. For example, efforts are made to ensure that intellectual exchange happens as a matter of routine. Executives are urged to read books outside their area of expertise and books have to be present in each office. Furthermore, ideas are communicated frequently to every employee by both senior executives and Ren Zhengfei. Importantly, however, and demonstrating the international character of a once-Chinese company, feedback is always invited across the company to improve those ideas that will ultimately feed the future vision of the company.

As many people know, Ren Zhengfei is a man with an army background – he served in the People’s Liberation Army – an experience he credits for his drive to fight and survive, qualities that are reflected in one of his favorite slogans in the early days of Huawei: We shall drink to our heart’s content to celebrate our success (ren sheng de yi xu jin huan), but if we should fail let’s fight to our utmost until we all die (ju gong jin cui, si er hou yi). So far, Huawei has had many successes to celebrate.

Scott Keyes is an expert when it comes to getting the best possible price for airline tickets.

The reporter for Think Progress and author of the e-books “How To Fly For Free” and “How To Find Cheap Flights" is so good at it that he has planned a world trip that will take him more than 20,000 miles to 13 countries, all for free.

When Business Insider spoke with Keyes, he said one of his favorite hacks for getting cheap flights was taking advantage of "throwaway tickets," something that many fliers have never even heard of before.

“This one can be a huge money saver,” Keyes told us about his favorite throwaway ticket website Skiplagged. “You just have to know how to use it.”

For those who don’t know, throwaway tickets — also known as "hidden city" or "point beyond" tickets — are flights you purchase to an unpopular destination.

Say you were trying to buy a ticket from New York to Chicago. Because of demand, these tickets will be much more expensive than flying from New York to Milwaukee, for instance.

A throwaway ticket would be if you found a flight to Milwaukee with a layover in Chicago. Then instead of getting on the plane to go to Milwaukee, you would throw away that leg of the ticket and exit the Chicago airport.

"The only thing that people need to know about Skiplagged is just making sure they understand how to approach it," Keyes said. "Never buy a round-trip, because once you skip a leg of your trip the rest of your itinerary cancels. You also can't check any bags since they'll arrive at the throwaway city and not your actual destination."

With that in mind, Skiplagged can find you some much cheaper airfare, especially if the city you're visiting is a major thoroughfare such as New York, Chicago, or London.

This hack can save people hundreds of dollars, but is highly frowned upon by the airline industry. The website is currently being sued by both United and Orbitz, and now links out to third-party websites where you can purchase the airfare.

"Skiplagged's sole purpose has always been to help you become savvy travelers," Skiplagged founder and computer whiz Aktarer Zaman explained on the GoFundMe website he created to raise money to battle the lawsuit. "Unfortunately, we have been doing too good of a job so United Airlines and a big travel partner teamed up with a lawsuit to get in the way. Everything Skiplagged has done and continues to do is legal, but the only way to effectively prove this is with lawyers."

Airlines, for their part, compare the practice to switching prices on goods sold in a store. Here's a sample letter American Airlines will send to its fliers explaining why the ticket pricing is structured differently for certain cities:

"Because we compete with other airlines with different route structures, we sometimes find it necessary to give a traveler who is traveling beyond a connecting point a better price than travelers who are just traveling to the connecting point. For example, a passenger who is traveling to Austin, Texas from Los Angeles can go on one airline via Phoenix for a price that is lower than the cost of traveling on American between Los Angeles and Dallas. If we want to offer the same price to Austin as the other airline, but the only way we can get travelers there is via Dallas, we find ourselves charging the Austin passengers less than the Dallas passengers."

It's also worth noting that passenger

Bonn (AFP) - Climatologists call it the "urban heat island" effect -- when a heatwave transforms a city into a furnace where citizens swelter, suffer or even die.

The phenomenon is a major worry in hot countries where global warming will drive peak temperatures even higher in coming decades.

Urban planners and researchers, gathering in a parallel conference to UN climate talks in Bonn, turned a spotlight on the problem on Wednesday.

But they also pointed to an emerging arsenal to fight it, from planting trees to designing breeze-channelling buildings.

The urban heat island derives from simple physics.

Cities store heat from the Sun and traffic in concrete and tarmac during the day, and release it at night.

But in a heatwave, an infernal cycle starts up. 

The night is not long enough for all the heat to dissipate, so at dawn the new day is already warm... and can only get warmer.

Without cooling or respite, old or sick people are especially at risk. A heatwave that gripped Europe in 2003 killed more than 70,000 people, according to peer-reviewed research.

"Urban heat island is a big problem for us," said Catarina Freitas, head of sustainable environment management for Almada, a city south of the Portugese capital, Lisbon.

The difference between central Almada and its outskirts can be a whopping four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit), she explained.

"In the summer of 2013, we were caught in a severe heatwave. We had 1,400 more deaths during this period compared to previous years... We had a night-time temperature of 33 degrees -- we couldn't cool down our bodies, it was a nightmare."

Michael Boswell, a professor at California Polytechnic State University, said Los Angeles, a sprawling car-dependent city of four million people and few parks, has also found itself vulnerable.

"Currently, downtown LA experiences six days a year that exceed 95 Fahrenheit or 35 C," he told AFP.

"By 2050 they anticipate 22 days -- and by 2100 they anticipate 54 days."

So what can we do to roll back urban heat?

"The first thing that you can do is plant trees, to provide shade," said Ingrid Coninx at Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands.

"But when you plant trees you have to do it in the right way. If you prevent downward breeze from reaching the street, you could make things warmer and trap pollution.

"So you have to have a better understanding of how your city interacts with the weather systems and about the kind of vegetation that works best."

Another quick and relatively cheap weapon is moving water: streams running through cities are not only a source of pleasure -- they also absorb a remarkable amount of heat from the air, said Coninx.

Other ideas are "green" and "cool" roofs -- planting shrubs and trees on the tops of buildings, or painting or covering roofs to reflect sunlight.

"Green" roofs are popular in north European cities like Hamburg and Berlin, while California brought "cool roof" requirements into its building code in 2005.

But such measures only ease heat with large-scale deployment.

"If you do not go beyond 20 or 30 percent of green roofs, you won't see any result at street level," said Saskia Buchholz of the German Meteorological Office.

 

- Desert test-bed -

 

Masdar City, a brand-new city being built in the United Arab Emirates and portrayed as a champion of urban sustainability, is being closely watched for new ideas.

"They are seeking to reduce heat architecturally, through the shaping of buildings and through wind towers, which are big, clever tubes that capture wind up above the roof line of the city and push it down to street level," said Boswell.

Computer models for mapping city temperatures using satellites and instruments at ground level, are progressing fast.

In the near future, such data could be incorporated in real-estate apps, predicted Coninx.

"I can imagine that 10 or 15 years from now, home-buyers will consider whether a place will experience a high number of heatwave days -- and this will translate into the price of the property as well."

Join the conversation about this story »

If another person marches out the tired old phrase “people buy from people they like.” I’m going to throw up in my mouth.  This phrase is the dumbest and most detrimental phrase to selling. It’s a shallow, stupid, simplistic thesis. A thesis one too many people use as the basis for their own selling philosophy.

Ya, ya, ya, people buy from people they like, no shit.  But what this phrase doesn’t say is people buy from people they don’t like and they DON’T buy from people they like.  The world is not zero sum. Just because someone likes you doesn’t mean they are gonna buy from you AND just because someone doesn’t like you, doesn’t mean they won’t buy from you.

When it comes to sales, buyers are not in the friend business. They have enough friends. Buyers are in the improvement, growth, and opportunity business. Buyers need solutions that increase their ability to exceed their goals and crush it. Therefore, what buyers care more about than liking you is how much value can you and your product or service bring?

Buyers want value and they don’t need to like you to see the value. Without value, there is no scenario where a buyer buys from you simply because they like you.

Spending time getting your prospect to like you is wasting valuable time you could spend demonstrating the value you and your organization can bring.

The objective of selling is to deliver value. That’s it. The more value you can bring, the more you will sell.

If people like you, great. It makes it easier. It gets you access. If you can’t deliver value, then it doesn’t matter if they think you’re the coolest person on the planet. They’ll have a beer with you. They will take your call. But, they ain’t buying shit.

If your buyer doesn’t like you, it’s OK. If you’re product or service delivers more value than the competition, if it can solve a pressing pain in the ass problem, then buyers will buy from you — period.  The majority of the things I’ve purchased over they years, I’ve purchased from people I don’t like.

Now,  before you get all worked up defending this long-held belief you’ve had, let me say, you can’t be an asshole.  You can’t be a dick. There is a difference between not being liked and being an asshole.  No one wants to be around an asshole and if you’re an asshole stop it. If you’re an asshole, buyers will look for reasons not to do business with you, even if your product has value. But being a dick is different than just not being liked.

The premise that says, people buy from people they like is a myth. People buy from people who deliver the most value and if they happen to like you on top of that, it is gravy.

Stop worrying about whether or not your buyer likes you and focus your attention on value. Ask yourself how much value are you bringing to this person and make sure it’s a lot.

Value trumps likability EVERY time — be valuable, not liked.

As much as sales professionals would like it to happen, the reality is that buying decisions are almost never made when sitting in the room with a prospective client. Those decisions are increasingly made after the meeting takes place when the client is reviewing the information presented and likely comparing it to other offerings.

To me, this is the most critical part of the sales process. The salesperson is no longer in the room, but the actual buying decision is being made.

This begs the question – how do sales professionals ensure their message is clearly presented at this most critical part of the sales cycle? Does a string of emails with content attached really put you in the best position to win the deal?

To answer these questions I think we need to break down exactly what is happening in today’s world of B2B sales:

Your point of contact is pulling more people into the internal conversation

Buying decisions are made by committee, but sales professionals typically only have access to a small portion of that committee. The job is to gain the trust of your point of contact, empower them with the information they need, and make it easy to review and evaluate your product or service during larger internal conversations.

Your information is increasingly being accessed on mobile devices

The statistics around use of mobile devices to aide in a buying decision vary. At PointDrive, we estimate 44% of B2B buyers review content on a mobile device when evaluating a new product or service. The reality is, whatever the actual statistic, we all know that content is being viewed on mobile devices. Further, we all know that use of mobile devices is increasing and showing no signs of slowing down.

Buying signals become digital actions

When you are in the room, you pick up on the client’s buying signals. The reaction someone gives to part of your presentation dictates what you do next. You get a feel for what’s important to the client and begin to tailor your message. In today’s world those signals are there, but become digital actions like spending more time reviewing one document over another, or downloading a certain part of the presentation. The signals are there, but you need the right tool to pick up on them.

Knowing that your point of contact needs to present your information on your behalf, that more than likely that information will at some point be accessed on a mobile device, and that buying signals are available if you can get to them, I’ll pose the question again:

Is a string of bulky emails full of attachments, bullet points, and links the optimal way to position yourself at the point in the sales cycle when the buying decision is being made?

I’d argue it definitely is not and that true sales professionals are in desperate need of an alternative, one that:

• Allows them to package up and share critical content in a more engaging way

• Ensures that content is easily consumed on any browser or device

• Truly makes it easy for the client to then share and review the information with all decision makers

• Provides meaningful analytics that replicate the buying signals clients give off during in person meetings – essentially putting the sales professional “in the room” even if they can’t physically be there

There are so many tools available to help with lead generation, prospecting, managing contacts, and running remote meetings. Each of these is critical and help at various stages of the sales process, however, there is no tool that is being used at that most critical part of the sale when the buyer is actually making the decision.

The post Buying Decisions Are Made After The Meeting appeared first on Sales Hacker.

With social media marketing we have the opportunity to extend our top of the pipeline to a new audience. An audience that either never heard about us or hadn’t really engaged with us on our owned media (Website, Blog) yet. But as always, when engaging with an audience, we want to make sure we engage with the right one, with the potential buyers that are the best fit for our business. Otherwise, we risk spending time and resources on buyers that will eventually not buy or will buy small deals.

(Image Designed by Freepik)

This is where Persona Based Marketing comes into play and allows you to plan, test and engage the most relevant audience for you:

Quick reminder – Persona Based Marketing

Persona Based Marketing is a technique for businesses to analyze and put together major buyer profiles to be able to better relate to their key buyers. Using Persona Based Marketing organizations get to know better their buyers, how they like to purchase, what are the ways to connect and communicate to them, and what they think about your products.

Persona Based Marketing is focused on answering questions such as:

• Who is the customer?
• How do customers make buying decisions?
• What do buyers like most about our products/services?
• What type of information customers prefer during the buying cycle?
• What are the best ways to communicate with prospects and/or existing customers?

Building a Persona-Based Twitter strategy

1. Define your audience: Start by building a list of your top ideal buyer types. For each put down their top areas of interest as it relates to your business, ideal content for each persona to get started with, key terms that may attract them etc.
2. Test your assumptions: Since Twitter is mainly Keywords or Terms based you want to make sure you use the more appropriate ones for your audience. There are a couple of ways to do this:
   • Look into your competitor’s website, blogs and Twitter accounts as a way to validate and refine your buyer personas. Pay special attention to keywords and SEO optimization on the Blog and Twitter as well as for the type of content offers and calls to action used
   • Manually search in Twitter for the key terms you are considering in your Persona profiles and see what you get as results
3. Create your initial follower base: If this is a new Twitter account you want to get started somehow. There are several ways to help you get your Twitter account off the ground.
   • Follow existing customers/contacts: Start with the people you know in your industry. These people can be your customers, prospects, partners, industry bloggers and speakers etc. and typically once you follow a person they will respond by following you back. Assuming they know other relevant people in your industry and that some of them are their followers it can help you spread the word quickly
   • Leverage your employees: Ask them to follow your account as well as to spread the word to their relevant industry contacts
   • Use audience building software services: Try software services that can increase your Twitter audience such as http://followerfrenzy.com/ . You will need to set these up with keywords and terms that are relevant for your buyers, which is why it is important to do your Persona Based Marketing planning before. Most of these services offer a free trial or a free version so you can experience the value before any commitment
   • Search for new prospects: Here you can use your Persona Based Marketing profiles to manually search for partners, prospects or industry figures. Once you find and follow them most likely they will return the favor and follow your account, too
4. Optimizing your tweets: Sharing on Twitter helps you grow your audience as well as engage with your existing followers, so you want to make sure every interaction counts:
   • Make sure to use the proper hashtags for key industry terms you use. For example for Marketing Automation you can use #marketingautomation. For Content Marketing use #contentmarketing etc. If you are not sure if a hashtag exists you can search for it
   • Try different hashtags in case there are several options and repeat the tweet across several days where once a day you try different tags
   • Leverage employees, partners etc If they have Twitter accounts
5. Monitor: In order to improve constantly you have a lot of monitoring to do:
   • Successful tweets: Try to do more of what works. If some tweets work better (Get more Likes, re-tweets) then others analyze their success
   • Audience building software services: Leverage their analytics to see which of the keywords and terms work best and constantly replace underperforming keywords with others to try and improve. In the sample report below you can see that the important metrics to track are Conversion Rate as well as Impressions. Ideally you want to get a good mix of both as high conversion rate from a 10 person group is not going to help you much but a solid conversion rate from a 10,000 person group is much more productive for you
   • Measure yourself against others in your industry: See that you Twitter followers growth rate makes sense compared to other you know that are of similar size and seem to invest similar resources
   • Qualify your Twitter generated business: Once Twitter starts referring the audience to your Website and you start to engage with them you can validate if these are the Personas you were going for in your Persona Based Marketing plan
6. Refine: You can refine your content efforts, Persona Based Marketing profiles and their related keywords based on your results and success. You will also want to monitor your SEO success as its reflecting which search terms help people find you online. Funnily enough monitoring the search keywords that DON’T generate clicks for you can help you gain ideas on new content or new hashtags to use with your audience. As you can see in this Google Webmasters Tool example below if we were to improve our SEO efforts on Content Targeting we can potentially engage with additional 968 people a month

To learn more on how real time personalization complements marketing automation see “HubSpot Customers Integrate BrightInfo for Automated Personalization to Anonymous Visitors”

This article appeared on http://www.raintoday.com Freud famously wondered, ‘what do women want?’ Professional services (and most B2B salespeople) wonder, ‘what do buyers want?’ Unlike Freud, however, they often think they know the answer. The received wisdom—very often—is that buyers want “a compelling value proposition.” As John Caddell puts it in “Another kind of value proposition” […]

The Internet has change the retail world. The ability to have a virtual storefront open to twenty-four hours a day each and every single day has allowed buyers across the globe access to products like never before. Retailers of every shape and size have jumped into the digital world hoping to get a piece of the massive electronic retailing pie.

Online shopping carts have become necessary for sellers with more than one product, and offering a secure place to complete purchases is just as important. For these reasons, businesses are turning to secure shopping cart software to improve sales and protect both parties.

Online Shopping Carts

Companies with a single product to sell generally have an uncomplicated website and infrastructure, but retailers looking to make a strong impact on the digital landscape can offer hundreds or thousands of products for sale each and every day. Instead of requiring customers to complete a checkout procedure for each product, shopping carts allow users to place several items for purchase and complete a single process. In short, the online experience becomes much more familiar to traditional shopping in a real life store. Not only do companies win with a simplified experience, but buyers are able to purchase multiple products in a single transaction.

Secure Payment Processing

The primary method of payment for electronic companies is credit and debit cards. Buyers have become increasingly aware of the risks associated with using a card for electronic payments, which is why secure processing has grown in popularity. Sellers also can reduce chargebacks and fraudulent purchases by opting for software that makes sure the payment process is completed. In short, secure processing and shopping carts instills a degree of confidence for buyers and sellers that can result in more sales. More sales and a better bottom line are the goal of every online retailer.

Effective Online Selling

Secure websites and shopping carts do not cost a lot of additional money. Lower overhead means that businesses do not have to raise prices for secure services and buyers do not have to be burdened with higher prices. The return on the investment of a buying and selling process with enhanced security measures can be higher than a site without the features. Security can be a key selling point for any website. Plus, many customers simply demand another layer of protection when considering a purchase from any type of digital storefront. A secure experience makes a huge difference.

In the end, carts and security go hand in hand. By mitigating risk and the chance of incorrect payments being made or worse, online retailers and buyers can shop with confidence. That confidence improves the buying and selling experience exponentially. Since prices for the service have become extremely manageable, companies like 1ShoppingCart have become valuable business partners for the electronic age. Sellers can improve the online experience, and buyers can make purchases knowing their privacy is protected and their bill will be exactly what was determined at checkout.

We conceptualize how two of the NFL’s most prominent coaches, Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll, would operate if they were patrolling a sales bullpen instead of an NFL sideline.

It’s rare that we get to discuss sales coaching in a way that actually makes us uncomfortable.

We’ve compared bad management to coaching catastrophes, new hire let-downs to Fantasy Football busts, and published not 1, but 2(!) articles discussing Greg Schiano.

But today, we’re entering uncharted territory. In the wake of #Deflategate, it’s time for a blog post analyzing (deep breath) Bill Belichick.

Sales Coaching Styles: Bill Belichick vs. Pete Carroll

We’re about to do a deep dive on the coaching styles of Pete Carroll and Bill Belichick, and apply them in the context of sales org management.

Guess which coach we’re loathe to cover? (Hint: It won’t be the happy, smiling one).

Let’s get right to it. Up first: The man who dresses, carries himself and treats justice with a contempt similar to only one man – Star Wars’ Emperor Palpatine – Bill Belichick.

The Bill Belichick Style of Sales Coaching

I’ll describe Bill Belichick’s management style in one word: Ruthlessness.

For readers who may have spent the opening half of 2015 isolated in a sensory deprivation chamber, Deflategate was the major news story surrounding the Super Bowl, as evidence began turning up that the Patriots had been deflating the balls they used on offense below regulation, to get a competitive advantage.

The whole thing culminated with the above press conference, where Belichick proceeded to deflect blame for his role in the scandal while throwing his 4-time Super Bowl champion quarterback under the bus.

But before you feel bad for Tom Terrific, remember that he was also the beneficiary of Belichick’s first heinous crime against fair competition, 2007’s Spygate.

To what extent? An incredibly well-researched book on the scandal references tons of insider sources, one of whom estimated that Tom Brady knew the defensive play the opposing team was running on 70 percent of his offensive snaps.

Bill Belichick as a Sales Leader

Bill Belichick is like Dick Cheney, only less charismatic. He’s the shadowy, strong-willed, syncophant terrorizing those non-compliant to his grand scheme.

He’s as good at getting away with slick, unethical and under-the-table deals as Shelley “The Machine Levene.”

Bud Fox.

Chris Varick.

And Jordan Belfort.

And that’s behind the scenes.

Whereas those four famous sales sleazeballs were at least charismatic, likable, and (in some cases) even diplomatic leaders, Bill Belichick’s three favorite activities on the field of battle include scowling, galavanting after officials, and if possible, both at the same time.

Picture an uncharismatic Gordon Gekko who throws Bud Fox under the boss. Or a scenario where it was Jonah Hill, and not Leo Dicaprio, running the show in Wolf of Wall Street and snitching on DiCaprio as his boss, rather than his underling.

Now, look at this great visual excerpt from USA Today’s coverage of Bill Belichick’s “Deflategate” press conference:

Belichick is the classic paranoid, politics-obsessed top sales executive. He’s reached the apex, now he believes the only way to maintain that position is to pick up a tire iron and smash his moral compass into a thousand pieces. While using the other to douse gasoline all over the rule book before setting it afire and watching it burn into nothing but charred ashes.

A Belichick sales administration would primarily consist of him spying on competitors (external and internal), taking ethical shortcuts, hiding behind his top lieutenants and, if necessary, throwing one of those top lieutenants under the bus to save his skin.

He’s spend the entire sales technology budget on competitor intelligence platforms. A suspiciously high number of his top underlings would move on to top sales executive roles at other companies, only to almost all mysteriously fail miserably.

And yet…

He commands the respect of his personnel. He makes sharp choices in terms of bringing on new talent, whether it’s savvy draft picks on hidden future greatness (Brady) and utter forces of nature (Rob Gronkowski) or shrewd acquisitions of big-name veteran talent (Randy Moss).

The Patriots have always had an identity under Belichick. With the exception of the infamous (and no doubt karmic) 17-1 season in 2007, they’ve operated with steely clutchness in big moments.

Contrast that with, say, every Andy Reid-coached team since the new millennium.

Because of his status as the only NFL head coach to be caught dead-to-rights cheating in the past decade – and twice at that – we’ll never know how much of Belichick’s success can be attributed solely to his coaching and management acumen.

He’s the NFL version of Jordan Belfort — excerpt with the personality and demeanor of Walter Matthau circa Bad News Bears.

The Pete Carroll Style of Sales Coaching

Now that we’ve just completed the darkest swath of content in Ambition history, let’s step into the light. And that light is Pete Carroll.

Pete Carroll is the coach Rex Ryan wished he could have been. Exuberant, player-friendly, and able to coach a brash, young team with a shaky, even younger quarterback to Super Bowl victory.

Before Pete Carroll, I and the rest of the world outside of the Pacific Northwest, shared the same feeling about the Seattle Seahawks. Totally agnostic.

But then came the 2010 Wild Card game – the 7-9 Seahawks at home versus the defending champion, heavily-favored Saints. The top media narrative heading into the game — the Seahawks as an indictment of NFL playoff seeding.

Then America met Beast Mode, Qualcomm Stadium registered on the Richter Scale and the skepticism towards good ol’ USC Pete Carroll began to dissipate.

Flash forward 5 years, and you can find Pete Carroll coaching the Seahawks to back-to-back Super Bowls, sprinting NFL sidelines like an 11 year old fan, and, most telling of all, earning the player’s vote as the coach they would most like to play for.

Pete Carroll as a Sales Manager

Carroll is the ultimate depiction of the enthusiastic, perpetually upbeat top executive. Spend 5 minutes watching Pete Carroll mid-game, and you’ll see a guy with a big personality who also excels at tempering boisterousness before it become bloviating.

A true testament to Carroll’s coaching abilities is the colorful cast of characters that make up his Seahawks team.

All-Pro Defensive Back Richard Sherman celebrated their first NFC Championship by giving the most intense post-game interview in NFL history and briefly (wrongly) getting villfied by a genuinely rattled middle America.

Fellow All-Pro and franchise foundation Marshawn Lynch has been prone to going into Beast Mode, inhaling packs of Skittles after touchdowns, mocking reporters in hilarious fashion and making it clear where stands on action (about it).

Star receiver Percy Harvin went into a bizarre, mid-season melodramatic spiral that even Shia LeBouf would have found tough to watch. He was traded to the New York Jets after week 8.

I could go on, but you can see this was a complicated band of performers under Carroll’s watch. And in a matter of years, they became Super Bowl champions.

Pundits and journalists love to rave about Carroll’s philosophy-driven coaching style, which would fit right in at executive retreats throughout corporate America.

Just look at Level 1 of Carroll’s “Win Forever Pyramid.” (Actual name).

Three rules: 1. Always protect the team; 2. No whining, no complaining, no excuses; 3. Be early.

Style: Great effort, great enthusiasm, great toughness, play smart.

Beliefs: It’s all about the ball. … Everything counts. … Respect everyone.

Philosophy: Do things better than they have ever been done before.

In sales organizations helmed by Seahawks fans, there’s a very good probability that an exact replica of the above — with “customer” replacing “ball,” is plastered somewhere in the office.

Carroll is a coach who respect talent and gives elite performers the freedom and flexibility to dictate the tactics and processes they perceive will help the the team reach its desired outcome.

Which is why scary Richard Sherman can get on camera and break down hyper-complex reads, matchups and developing offensive sets on command.

Then, he goes out and plays like a feral, ball hawking jungle cat.

That’s the sign of great coaching, be it sports, sales or any other profession – creating a system where your elite team members become eager students of their profession, then use their raw talent and intellectual advantages to execute at the highest level when it’s gametime.

A Gridiron Approach to Sales Coaching

Before we go, it’s imperative to condition that, in both sports and sales management, likability is not necessarily a prerequisite to success.

Being a mean-spirited curmudgeon doesn’t make you a bad coach (just ask Bill Parcells). Nor does being a beacon of positivity guarantee that you’ll be a good coach (just ask Wade Phillips).

With that said, respect for personnel seems to be the common thread that runs through the DNA of great coaches. Contrast Carroll’s Seahawks with, say, what happened in Tampa Bay under Greg Schiano, who couldn’t have respected his players less.

Ultimately, both Belichick and Carroll, in their own ways, excelled the most as coaches in empowering their personnel to succeed. That, more than anything, sets the precedent for sales managers to follow — if not in tactics (see: Belichick), then in principle.

Which leads us into a fitting final point for this post. From a managerial standpoint, the cardinal sin that Bill Belichick made at New England was not spying on opposing defenses or deflating balls.

It was throwing his top, loyal performer under the bus when he could have been the one to step in front. Advantage: Carroll.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to submit your comments below and check out Harvard Business Review’s article on “The Sales Director Who Turned Work into a Fantasy Sport.”

Are your social media and inbound efforts generating enough quality leads to keep your sales pipeline healthy? If so, you cannot get better than that.

However, for most salespeople, they must proactively prospect on top of other initiatives to make sure they achieve their goals.

Prospecting is an emotional as well as intellectual endeavor. When your energy and enthusiasm for pursuing new business lags, you may be suffering from sales call reluctance.

Sales call reluctance is the emotional hesitation to prospect and self-promote. In our culture, the highest rewards do not go to the smartest, best prepared, or the hardest working individual. The rewards go to the person who is most willing to prospect and self-promote.

Here are four steps you must take to overcome your fear of picking up the phone.

How to Get Over a Fear of Phone Calls

1) Lock in your motivation.

You must be motivated and have the will to succeed. If you are not motivated, you have a completely different issue. It might look and feel like sales call reluctance, but it requires a totally different treatment. You may need to contact a psychologist, a career counselor, or a well-trained coach to get your motivational infrastructure in place to succeed.

2) Identify your “negative intruders.”

What are negative intruders? Well, what goes through your mind when you reach for the phone -- and then stop? What are you thinking about when you swing around and check email one more time, refill your coffee cup, get into a conversation with a coworker, and then realize it’s lunch time and push off your calls until after lunch? What is causing you to hesitate? What thought stops you from making prospecting calls?

Here is a list of thoughts that stop many salespeople:

• The prospect probably already have a vendor they are happy with.
• They will say, “No, I’m not interested.”
• I’ll appear unorganized.
• I don’t know what to say.
• I worry about their perception of what it is I am trying to accomplish.
• I am not comfortable with my script. I need a new script.

Your freedom from sales call reluctance lies with identifying your negative intruders.

3) Realign your thinking.

Your brain works in amazing ways. It allows you to create visions of the future and dream about achievements. How do you envision your success? How will it change your life? Learning to visualize your future success is important to overcoming sales call reluctance.

Stop reading right now and answer this question: “What would I love to achieve or have in my life?” Is it easy for you to answer that, or are you struggling? This is the key to transforming your sales results.

Conversely, the brain has a way of creating obstacles through limiting beliefs, assumptions, perceptions, interpretations, and the ever-present inner critic. If you allow yourself to identify with or believe your obstacles, overcoming call reluctance will be difficult. Awareness is key!

Human beings are meaning-making machines. We are always attempting to make meaning out of what we experience. Our stories can either serve or sabotage us. It is the way we are wired.

Here's an example. Think about the last time you had an “engaged” prospect who agreed to the next step in your sales process; however, when you attempted to reconnect they ignored you. What kind of stories did you start making up? Maybe you thought, “Oh, he is just an insincere jerk,” or, “She was just placating me to get me off the phone.” Then you probably stopped contacting them, simply because you bought into your own story.

Thought realignment is one of the crucial prescriptions to overcome call reluctance. Remember: The situation doesn't cause you anxiety -- your thoughts about the situation do.

Read more about psychology tips that can better enhance your sales call.

4) Don’t judge yourself (or others) harshly.

After you have allowed yourself to admit to your negative intruders, say, “These are very interesting.” Notice you are not adhering a negative label. There is no better word to neutralize the negative than "interesting."

Here’s an exercise for you: Choose one of your negative intruders and counter it. In the case of “I don’t know what to say,” immediately counter it with, “That is not true. I simply need a script with a value proposition from my prospect’s perspective.” Another one: “What if they say ‘no?’" Simply counter that with, “I will have at least three pattern interrupts to combat the reflexive ‘no.'”

Your confidence will soar once you start prospecting. Self-confidence is the by-product of productivity!

The rule goes that things in threes are more effective. And, if you take a look at today’s highest performing organizations, you’ll see that the rule of three is definitely working to their advantage.

These companies, including market leaders like Box, Comcast, and Groupon, have adopted not one or two, but all three critical technologies needed for tomorrow’s sales success:

#1. CRM

#2. Marketing automation

#3 Sales acceleration

Most organizations, whether they’re a small startup or a large Fortune 500 company, have been using CRM systems for years. Marketing automation has also quickly become a business mainstay, with more than 60% of top-performing companies using marketing automation.[i] Without a doubt, these systems have proved their business value.

But the companies that are the early adopters of the third piece of the puzzle, and embrace the sales ‘rule of three,’ are the ones best positioned to get the upper hand and long-term competitive advantage in the changing sales landscape.

An Incomplete Customer Profile

By letting every member on a team quickly see where things stand at a given moment, CRM systems give companies an efficient way to manage and store customer data. But CRMs primarily maintain the seller’s activities, the seller’s interactions, and the seller’s records.

Showing that a buyer visited a website and clicked on a piece of free content or offer, marketing automation provides its own insight regarding buyer activity. But, as sales teams have discovered, this data falls significantly short in its ability to adequately qualify a buyer. Just clicking on a sales email doesn’t indicate a customer’s interest.

Because both CRM and marketing automation only deliver partial views, organizations can’t create the type of customer profile needed for the new selling paradigm. Additionally, without having this complete customer profile, sales reps waste a lot of time tracking down leads that simply turn out to be dead ends. All of this detracts from the time needed to get a better understanding about the most viable customers.

Shining a Spotlight on Buyer Activity

By augmenting CRM and marketing automation systems with sales acceleration technologies, organizations gain a powerful trio that delivers more insight on the buyer side. As the early adopters are already discovering, this new ‘set of three’ brings enormous value – completing the buyer picture while improving overall efficiencies.

The key to understanding why sales acceleration is so critical to the future of sales comes from its ability to drive repeatable sales processes. Two areas dominate sales acceleration, and both power repeatable sales processes that increase the speed and timing of the purchasing cycle: buyer side engagement and automated tasks.

Buyer Side Engagement Analytics

With deep engagement analytics, sales acceleration increases understanding about the buyer, so:

• Sales teams can see how long a prospect views a document; whether they’re more interested in feature A or feature B; and better time follow-up

• Sales teams can filter out unqualified leads to focus their efforts where they have the biggest return

• Sales teams get an advantage in complex sales by instantly seeing every time documents are re-shared and download and getting profile information for all recipients to quickly spot stakeholders across multiple departments in an organization

All of this gives sales incredible insight into the purchasing process. Furthermore, teams can reuse this knowledge for future deals within the account and as a repeatable template for success across similar accounts.

Automated Tasks

Sales acceleration delivers automation that increases the focus on core selling activities, so:

• Sales teams can eliminate time-consuming routine tasks – 65% of businesses say their reps spend too much time on non-selling activities, limiting time to understand client needs[ii]

• Sales teams get more unique customer insights, such as which content produces the highest engagement, by combining analytics with task and sequencing automation

• Sales teams get systems that have been specifically designed for them, with the features sales reps need to personalize interactions and engage with prospects in context

Get the Edge with the Set of Three

Top companies are always looking for new ways to grow their business and stay ahead of the competition. Market leaders are rapidly adopting sales acceleration tools to give them that edge.

To outperform competitors, 21^st century sales organizations must have the set of three – CRM, marketing automation, and sales acceleration. Businesses that embrace all three categories the soonest will give their sales teams the biggest advantage to increase buyer understanding, strengthen customer relationships, and speed the purchasing cycle. LearnLearn more about the growth of sales acceleration technologies in the infographic ‘The New Billion Dollar Baby.’ This article previously appeared here.

[i] Forrester Research

[ii] Sirius Decisions

Looking for a job? Go to LinkedIn. That’s pretty much how the average person views the social platform. B2B marketers, on the other hand, see it quite differently. For them, LinkedIn is viewed as perhaps their greatest social media resource; an active community of potential prospects just begging for relevant content and engagement.

Despite its growing popularity, there are a few things that many B2B marketers still don’t know (but should) about the social platform. In this post, I aim to share 3 statistics even I was somewhat surprised to see. Take a look:

• 70% of LinkedIn users are outside the US (source): This was not true several years ago, when adoption rates outside the US were as low as 30%. The obvious significance of this statistic is that LinkedIn is now a valuable B2B sales and marketing resource for every company, regardless of geographic location. It also means that you should consider extending the reach of your LinkedIn content and campaigns to new territories – not just on your home turf (if you are US based).
• The average user spends 17 minutes on LinkedIn per month (source): This stat was taken back in 2012, so it’s quite possible that the actual number is much higher today (and I’d be shocked if it weren’t). Nevertheless, it’s obvious that LinkedIn still trails Facebook and other, more consumer-focused platforms when it comes to overall engagement. Thus, the key takeaway here is that if you hope to engage prospects on LinkedIn and nurture them to leads, your content needs to be eye-catching and extremely relevant. Time is of the essence.
• LinkedIn generates 4X as many homepage views as Twitter and Facebook (source): The important thing to note here is relevancy and context. It’s much harder to get the attention of a LinkedIn user versus Facebook or Twitter (see stat above) but it is much easier to get them interested in your brand.

While LinkedIn has always been a key part of a B2B marketing organization’s game-plan, there are many ways to optimize its use. I hope these three statistics have shed some light on how to generate even more social media ROI from this amazing platform.

Have another great LinkedIn stat to share? Let us know in the comments section below!

Did everyone somehow forget that their sales prospects were humans too?

How did we reach the point that people think a 10-15% open rate is “good,” and that a 3 paragraph long email with a 2% response rate was awesome?

Yes, sales is a numbers game, but people seem to have forgotten that there’s a living breathing person on the other end of the inbox.

Everyone is looking for the fastest and easiest way to increase their sales revenue. There’s a hope and belief that there’s some kind of “hack” which will magically triple sales, but if you don’t have your sales fundamentals right, even the best automation software won’t make a difference.

There’s 3 mistakes I see almost every sales person making over and over.

The First Reason Why Your Cold Emails Suck

You Don’t Understand Your Audience At All

Please don’t bother sending cold emails at all if you’re not going to take the time to define your buyer persona.

How can you expect to write cold emails that get responses if you don’t even know who you’re emailing?!

Sending a cold email campaign to a list of 100,000 crappy leads you bought from some sketchy website is usually a bad idea. Not doing any work to clean the list and segment it by title or other firmographic criteria is lazy and guaranteed to flop.

Why on earth do you want to send this much volume?

Because you want to get 100 responses and you only have a 0.1% response rate?

This is a terrible plan.

Spamming the Internet might help you fill your pipeline with leads in the short term, but is not a sustainable strategy and burns through valuable leads.

It’s basic resource management: there is not an infinite supply of leads, and if you spam with a high enough volume you will quickly run out of leads (although your mail server will probably get blacklisted way before that).

Instead of polluting everyone’s inbox with untargeted garbage, which can destroy your business’ reputation in no time at all, why not take a more thoughtful approach and focus?

Yes, sales is a number’s game, and sending one-on-one individual emails isn’t time or cost effective, but neither is throwing spaghetti on the wall and praying that it will stick.

Winning sales organizations have one thing in common: they understand the importance of velocity.

There is a trade-off between speed/quantity and results/quality; but there is an optimal point where you can get the maximum volume for the most results/responses, and this is the point of optimal sales velocity.

I know this because I insist that our clients send a lower volume of emails to a laser-targeted list, and still get them more total responses than they got sending to a large untargeted list.

Example: One of my clients wanted to send 10,000 emails, and had a 0.2% response rate. This means they got 20 responses for every 10,000 emails.

I sent 223 emails and got them 38 responses.

Instead of burning through their entire list, my targeted email campaign only used 2.23% of their regular list and got them almost twice as many results for the same amount of effort.

The Second Reason Why Your Cold Emails Suck

You’re a Terrible Writer Who Needs to Learn Basic Copywriting

I’m collecting a treasure trove of terribly written emails in a folder labeled “LOL BAD emails.”

And clients, friends and colleagues send me dozens of new ones to add to my collection each week.

I realize writing isn’t everyone’s strong suit, but do people really think they can copy/paste generic email templates that were written over a decade ago and still get results?

They’re not horrible templates, but they’ve suffered the plight of the “tragedy of the commons.” Any working professional who has been around for a few years can recognize these “classic templates” a mile away, and send them straight to the trash.

And then there’s the emails that look like short novels.

One of the worst cold emails I have seen had more than 1,652 words!

I doubt anyone would actually take the time to read through this email unless they had a twisted obsession with bad writing (like I do).

And of course you have the same dozen or so mistakes repeated over, all of which leave prospects racing to hit Delete or Spam.

Copywriting takes practice, but I seriously wonder if anyone actually reads what they wrote (or what someone wrote for them) aloud before they press send. If they did, they probably wouldn’t be sending this garbage.

The Third Reason Why Cold Emails Suck

You’re Using the Wrong Tools and Misconfigured Your Mail Server

Even the best cold emails can have deliverability problems if your mail server isn’t correctly configured.

This wasn’t something I was closely checking, but a few of my clients recently had very low open rates, which made me suspicious. I always have at least a 35% open rate (and that’s on the low side), and they had around 9% opens or less.

I was perplexed and frustrated.

My copy was good and their business was amazing.

I immediately assumed that they had a garbage list, and so I asked for another copy of the CSV they had been sending to take another look. But there was nothing wrong. It was a good list.

I was baffled for half a day.

And then I asked them to add me to their CSV and do a mail merge to my email address.

Suddenly it all made sense. By analyzing the header data from the email they had merged to me I realized their servers had been horribly misconfigured.

It’s an honest and simple mistake that was easily corrected, but the effect of this error had almost completely tanked their campaign.

As soon as this problem was resolved they started to get about a 10% response rate.

Spammers obviously suffer from major inboxing and deliverability issues, but even I was amazed at what a big impact a 5-minute tweak had on their email campaigns’ results.

Build a targeted list for email outreach with the free ebook below.

Data is at the basis of digital marketing. It’s what gives it the much craved power of analytics, real-time optimizations and audience insights. But sometimes there seems to be too much data, prompting questions like:

• What are the most important metrics?
• How often should I check them?
• What’s the minimum time frame for that data to be conclusive?

and many, many more.

1. What are the most important metrics?

Let’s talk about that first question first – the marketing metrics that should be top-of-mind on a daily or weekly basis. What we discovered works best for us is using a scoreboard to track our weekly marketing progress (for each customer). A method picked-up from the Small Giants community, having a scoreboard that the whole team can see has proven to be a great way of keeping track of metrics.

On this scoreboard, we’ve written down the critical numbers we use to monitor business progress on a weekly basis – if a critical number moves in the wrong direction we need to quickly figure out why.

For us, the critical numbers vary by customer, depending on their goals and may look something like this:

• Site visits
• Contacts
• Leads
• Keyword performance
• Social engagement
• Linkedin followers

While numbers vary by client, they are linked to business goals that support a customer’s growth aspirations. They help us align our daily, weekly, and monthly efforts with a customers desired outcome.

For your business, the numbers might be different; you could track:

• Landing page conversion rate
• Website page conversion rate
• No. of subscribers
• No. of free trial signups
• No. of leads registered for a live demo
• Contact requests

etc.

The most useful marketing metrics are the goals you’ve set-out to achieve in the beginning of your strategy. They can be an overview or finely-refined detailed goals, but they have to be the ones you’ve built your marketing plan on. It’s this defining property that gives them the power and the usefulness you require.

They become critical from the moment you set out to achieve them and can serve as a daily/weekly pulse of your marketing efforts, prompting you to take action when thing fall below the line.

A friendly piece of advice – These metrics should not be the driving force behind your actions. If you want great results you have to set the next big goal, you have to take risks and test ideas, you have to encourage creative approaches to your marketing tactics in order to attract, convert and delight your audiences.

2. How often should I check them?

I think that also depends on the particular configuration of your marketing team – if you have a smaller, dedicated team with cross functional attributions you’ll probably find it useful to check on these metrics on a daily basis. If your marketing machine is a well-oiled, powerful engine and you require a more strategic overview, going into detail only on a periodical basis, you might benefit from a weekly check.

If you’re a one man show, which is not that uncommon, the burden of daily tasks might prove too much to check on the numbers every single day. You can probably set specific days and a productive periodicity to this exercices, depending on your marketing needs.

3. What’s the minimum time frame for that data to be conclusive?

That may indeed be the most difficult question. Start by defining your buying cycle and tracking conversions through the funnel. You can map your data analysis to these buying cycle stages and time frames.

For content marketing results, the minimum recommended time frame before you can have any conclusive data is 4-6 months.

As the volume of data is growing at an exponential rate, you’ll probably find yourself in need of marketing automation system that can properly track, analyze and segment that that data. These automation software solutions can offer you predictive analytics, audience insights and performance reports that you can check on a weekly or monthly basis. If you insist on a hands-on approach, these marketing analysis techniques might prove to be more useful to you.

A quarterly general performance audit will probably be offer a reasonable time frame in order for that data to be conclusive but, again, it comes down to testing and optimizing what works best for your business.

What are the critical numbers you’re tracking and how do you interpret them?

Image credit: NYC Media Lab

This article is reprinted, with the author Kyle Porter's permission, from the WittyParrot "My Best Tip for Sales Success" eBook published in May 2015.

Monopolizing conversations or asking manipulating questions are two sure ways to push buyers away from you. To connect with prospects, stop talking so much, encourage them to participate in the conversation, and make positive emotional connections with them.

“Social selling”. In our modern digital times, we’ve all heard this term. And, it has become pretty dominant in the industry. But is this really the only thing sales teams should be focused on? Let’s explore…

As a sales rep, I have to admit that Twitter rubbed me the wrong way once it started to go mainstream circa 2009. In short, it seemed like a monumental waste of time. My marketing team was urging me to “use Twitter to find leads”, but I ran an entire geographic territory and doing a Twitter search for terms such as “marketing automation” or “lead nurturing” was not focused enough and created too much noise. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Fast forward a few years and these gray hairs from Marketo’s IPO run have made me just a little wiser. The truth is this: if you are selling SaaS and you aren’t building a brand or presence on social networks like Twitter or LinkedIn, you are missing out on opportunities to be found, and not investing enough in your personal brand. People buy from people and Twitter allows you to initiate a conversation with anyone around the world. Right from your phone, tablet, or computer (notice which one I listed last).

Let’s go deeper though. When I started selling in 2004, only the uber uber early adopters were on LinkedIn. Only the LIONs (look it up) had 500 connections or more, and LinkedIn’s biggest competitive threat was Plaxo. Social didn’t really exist. Selling was done mostly by phone, and email, funny enough, was used to set up phone calls!

Back in my day (as I’m now old per Silicon Valley standards), we had to call the operator and ask “to be transferred to the person that handles X or Y”. Now, with LinkedIn, it’s easier than ever to directly get ahold of the person who handles demand generation or IT infrastructure. Just open up a web browser, use the LinkedIn advanced search, and go to town.

Here’s what has happened though: because it became so easy to access who the power was, these folks had to find refuge from salespeople. As a result, no one picks up their work phone anymore. (Seriously…I haven’t picked up my phone in two years and I’m in sales.) You still have to and should make the calls to get in the door, but these calls are now more of a glimpse into who you are so they are more likely to return your follow-up email. I mean, really, when was the last time someone picked up the phone and re-dialed the number you left on your cold call voicemail?

So then begs the question: How do you effectively reach people in modern times? Is it by phone, email, or social media?

The answer is…drum roll, please…a combination of all three! It’s not “phone selling”, “email selling”, or “social selling”. It’s just SELLING. And if sales is your profession, you need to learn and become a master of all three channels. And yes, I’m talking to you, too, Mr./Mrs. Field Rep who is trying to close big enterprise deals but is still selling the “old way” (you know, without using a CRM tool, but instead, relying on your handy rolodex).

Here’s my rule of thumb for the present: selling is 40% phone, 45% email, and 15% social. (I’ll wait a moment while you add that up to make sure it comes out to an even 100.)

You need to get good at using all three of these tools if you want to truly connect with your buyers and give them the experience they deserve. We can learn more about someone we are just meeting for the first time than ever before. So, I urge you to get to know them as people: take an interest in helping them address their needs and connect with them in a personable and memorable way. Once you do this, your customers will buy more from you, they’ll refer their friends to you, and they’ll become your biggest advocates both personally and professionally. Beautiful.