Russian efforts to influence U.S. politics and sway public opinion were consistent and, as far as engaging with target audiences, largely successful, according to a report from Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project published today. Based on data provided to Congress by Facebook, Instagram, Google and Twitter, the study paints a portrait of the years-long campaign that’s less than flattering to the companies.

The report, which you can read here, was published today but given to some outlets over the weekend; it summarizes the work of the Internet Research Agency, Moscow’s online influence factory and troll farm. The data cover various periods for different companies, but 2016 and 2017 showed by far the most activity.

A clearer picture

If you’ve only checked into this narrative occasionally during the last couple of years, the Comprop report is a great way to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing, with no “we take this very seriously” palaver interrupting the facts.

If you’ve been following the story closely, the value of the report is mostly in deriving specifics and some new statistics from the data, which Oxford researchers were provided some seven months ago for analysis. The numbers, predictably, all seem to be a bit higher or more damning than those provided by the companies themselves in their voluntary reports and carefully practiced testimony.

Previous estimates have focused on the rather nebulous metric of “encountering” or “seeing” IRA content put on these social metrics. This had the dual effect of increasing the affected number — to over 100 million on Facebook alone — but “seeing” could easily be downplayed in importance; after all, how many things do you “see” on the internet every day?

The Oxford researchers better quantify the engagement, on Facebook first, with more specific and consequential numbers. For instance, in 2016 and 2017, nearly 30 million people on Facebook actually shared Russian propaganda content, with similar numbers of likes garnered, and millions of comments generated.

Note that these aren’t ads that Russian shell companies were paying to shove into your timeline — these were pages and groups with thousands of users on board who actively engaged with and spread posts, memes and disinformation on captive news sites linked to by the propaganda accounts.

The content itself was, of course, carefully curated to touch on a number of divisive issues: immigration, gun control, race relations and so on. Many different groups (i.e. black Americans, conservatives, Muslims, LGBT communities) were targeted; all generated significant engagement, as this breakdown of the above stats shows:

Although the targeted communities were surprisingly diverse, the intent was highly focused: stoke partisan divisions, suppress left-leaning voters and activate right-leaning ones.

Black voters in particular were a popular target across all platforms, and a great deal of content was posted both to keep racial tensions high and to interfere with their actual voting. Memes were posted suggesting followers withhold their votes, or with deliberately incorrect instructions on how to vote. These efforts were among the most numerous and popular of the IRA’s campaign; it’s difficult to judge their effectiveness, but certainly they had reach.

In a statement, Facebook said that it was cooperating with officials and that “Congress and the intelligence community are best placed to use the information we and others provide to determine the political motivations of actors like the Internet Research Agency.” It also noted that it has “made progress in helping prevent interference on our platforms during elections, strengthened our policies against voter suppression ahead of the 2018 midterms, and funded independent research on the impact of social media on democracy.”

Instagram on the rise

Based on the narrative thus far, one might expect that Facebook — being the focus for much of it — was the biggest platform for this propaganda, and that it would have peaked around the 2016 election, when the evident goal of helping Donald Trump get elected had been accomplished.

In fact Instagram was receiving as much or more content than Facebook, and it was being engaged with on a similar scale. Previous reports disclosed that around 120,000 IRA-related posts on Instagram had reached several million people in the run-up to the election. The Oxford researchers conclude, however, that 40 accounts received in total some 185 million likes and 4 million comments during the period covered by the data (2015-2017).

A partial explanation for these rather high numbers may be that, also counter to the most obvious narrative, IRA posting in fact increased following the election — for all platforms, but particularly on Instagram.

IRA-related Instagram posts jumped from an average of 2,611 per month in 2016 to 5,956 in 2017; note that the numbers don’t match the above table exactly because the time periods differ slightly.

Twitter posts, while extremely numerous, are quite steady at just under 60,000 per month, totaling around 73 million engagements over the period studied. To be perfectly frank, this kind of voluminous bot and sock puppet activity is so commonplace on Twitter, and the company seems to have done so little to thwart it, that it hardly bears mentioning. But it was certainly there, and often reused existing bot nets that previously had chimed in on politics elsewhere and in other languages.

In a statement, Twitter said that it has “made significant strides since 2016 to counter manipulation of our service, including our release of additional data in October related to previously disclosed activities to enable further independent academic research and investigation.”

Google too is somewhat hard to find in the report, though not necessarily because it has a handle on Russian influence on its platforms. Oxford’s researchers complain that Google and YouTube have been not just stingy, but appear to have actively attempted to stymie analysis.

Google chose to supply the Senate committee with data in a non-machine-readable format. The evidence that the IRA had bought ads on Google was provided as images of ad text and in PDF format whose pages displayed copies of information previously organized in spreadsheets. This means that Google could have provided the useable ad text and spreadsheets—in a standard machine- readable file format, such as CSV or JSON, that would be useful to data scientists—but chose to turn them into images and PDFs as if the material would all be printed out on paper.

This forced the researchers to collect their own data via citations and mentions of YouTube content. As a consequence, their conclusions are limited. Generally speaking, when a tech company does this, it means that the data they could provide would tell a story they don’t want heard.

For instance, one interesting point brought up by a second report published today, by New Knowledge, concerns the 1,108 videos uploaded by IRA-linked accounts on YouTube. These videos, a Google statement explained, “were not targeted to the U.S. or to any particular sector of the U.S. population.”

In fact, all but a few dozen of these videos concerned police brutality and Black Lives Matter, which as you’ll recall were among the most popular topics on the other platforms. Seems reasonable to expect that this extremely narrow targeting would have been mentioned by YouTube in some way. Unfortunately it was left to be discovered by a third party and gives one an idea of just how far a statement from the company can be trusted. (Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Desperately seeking transparency

In its conclusion, the Oxford researchers — Philip N. Howard, Bharath Ganesh and Dimitra Liotsiou — point out that although the Russian propaganda efforts were (and remain) disturbingly effective and well organized, the country is not alone in this.

“During 2016 and 2017 we saw significant efforts made by Russia to disrupt elections around the world, but also political parties in these countries spreading disinformation domestically,” they write. “In many democracies it is not even clear that spreading computational propaganda contravenes election laws.”

“It is, however, quite clear that the strategies and techniques used by government cyber troops have an impact,” the report continues, “and that their activities violate the norms of democratic practice… Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement, to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants, and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike.”

Waiting on politicians is, as usual, something of a long shot, and the onus is squarely on the providers of social media and internet services to create an environment in which malicious actors are less likely to thrive.

Specifically, this means that these companies need to embrace researchers and watchdogs in good faith instead of freezing them out in order to protect some internal process or embarrassing misstep.

“Twitter used to provide researchers at major universities with access to several APIs, but has withdrawn this and provides so little information on the sampling of existing APIs that researchers increasingly question its utility for even basic social science,” the researchers point out. “Facebook provides an extremely limited API for the analysis of public pages, but no API for Instagram.” (And we’ve already heard what they think of Google’s submissions.)

If the companies exposed in this report truly take these issues seriously, as they tell us time and again, perhaps they should implement some of these suggestions.

Plenty of us have witnessed a marketing campaign gone wrong. Remember that recent Pepsi commercial featuring Kendall Jenner trying to settle a Black Lives Matter protest with a can of Pepsi? I just remember thinking (as I gagged), “How did that actually make it to market?!”

Yet despite some major fails, marketing continues to be the differentiator that sets a brand apart within a crowded market.

Look at Nike. In stark contrast to Pepsi, Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign will likely go down as one of the most impactful pieces of marketing in recent history.

Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt pic.twitter.com/x5TnU7Z51i

— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 5, 2018

Or look at MailChimp, a startup-turned-$400-million-revenue-machine that is always creating viral campaigns that set them above their competition, like this recent “Did You Mean Mailchimp” one.

Recently, I designed a strategic marketing campaign for a company called Help Scout—a helpdesk software tool. Like Nike and MailChimp, Help Scout is in a crowded market; my campaign helped them stand out.

Three strategies for creating marketing campaigns that stand out

Whether you’re executing a quick n’ dirty one-off promotion or a full-fledged multi-channel strategy, here are three strategies for creating marketing campaigns that stand out.

Strategy #1: Ask The Experts.

In the book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, Jake Knapp and the partners at Google Ventures outline a process for delivering data-driven, research-backed projects.

They advocate using testing to learn about your market—rather than spending days (or months) conducting research before ever getting a test out the door.

Within the week-long process, one of the first steps they outline for a successful launch—and one that I use when crafting every marketing campaign—is to Ask the Experts.

Sprint advocates rapid testing to learn about your market.

As the authors describe them, Ask the Experts sessions are “a series of one-at-a-time interviews with people from your sprint team, from around your company, and possibly even an outsider or two with special knowledge.”

The research method helps you incorporate as many sources of information as possible into your campaign. When paired with other research (like customer surveys, personas, interviews, and competitive research), they can be a powerful value-add to your campaign.

Typically, a session will run for one hour, and the questions I like to ask when conducting a session are:

• What are 1–3 benefits of this product, service, or business?
• What do you think are the challenges I’ll face/need to solve for when creating this campaign?
• Any special advice/things I should consider when crafting this campaign?

Selecting the experts for your interviews is never easy. My advice is to seek out those with the most knowledge of the theme, feature, product, or concept of your campaign. From there, select experts across disciplines who might provide an idea or thought that you wouldn’t necessarily come to on your own.

For the campaign to launch Help Scout’s new live-chat tool, Beacon, I conducted six, one-hour Ask the Experts sessions with stakeholders across the company.

Here were the common answers I received to the above questions:

Question	Answers (Combined)
What are 1–3 benefits of the Beacon live chat product?	Beacon makes customer service scalable by leading with relevant help content, suggested answers, and search. Beacon is human-first by always connecting customers to a human, never a misleading bot. No need to cobble together a complicated tech stack. Users can access email, live chat, help docs—all in Help Scout.
What are the challenges I’ll face/need to solve for when bringing Beacon to market?	Support teams perceive live chat as leading to an increase in customer expectations for instant responses. Support teams are afraid that live chat will increase ticket volume.
Any special advice/things I should consider when creating this campaign to launch Beacon?	Be weird. Lead with the creative, not with the goals.

What I discovered from the Ask the Experts sessions is that the live chat tool aims to scale, humanize, and simplify customer service. But to communicate those benefits to the wider public, the campaign messaging also needed to tackle internal perceptions that live chat increases customer expectations and support ticket volume.

I would have expected that the (intentional) lack of proactive messaging—a feature that lets you ping customers before they start a new chat—would have been a top concern. That’s because I’m a marketer and see the value of proactive messaging for driving sales.

But when it comes to customer-service professionals, their core motivation is much different. Providing reactive support in a timely manner to meet customer expectations is a higher concern.

Ask the Experts was a critical method to broaden my understanding of needs on both sides of a product launch—a key to making sure my campaign didn’t promise an experience than Help Scout couldn’t deliver. Those sessions also reinforced another key component of the campaign: a design-led approach.

Strategy #2: Lead with the creative, not with the goals.

You might have noticed that another piece of advice I received during the Ask the Experts sessions was to “lead with the creative, not with the goals.”

That’s because Help Scout considers itself a design-led company. Design-led companies, as McKinsey notes, recognize that, increasingly:

customers prioritize the experience of buying and using a product over the performance of the product itself. In fact, customer experience is becoming a key source of competitive advantage as companies look to transform how they do business.

A focus on experiential design has four key factors:

1. Really understanding the customer. Going beyond what customers want to find out why they want it.
2. Bringing empathy to the organization. Making sure that a design lead is involved in high-level, strategic decisions, not just tactical implementation.
3. Designing in real time. Ensuring that design is present during product development and has a seat at the table when business or technology teams establish limiting parameters.
4. Acting quickly. Product development is iterative—rapid prototyping, fast changes, continual improvement.

The design-led approach was a bet that Help Scout made in the early days. Help Scout invests in product design and branding to differentiate within a crowded market. Visitors, leads, conversions, and new customers are considered a byproduct of having an intuitive product and a strong brand story.

It’s a research-backed strategy, too. Findings from a 2016 study by Adobe and Forrester showed that companies that put design at the core of their business are better positioned to tackle rising customer expectations in an increasingly competitive digital landscape.

“Putting design at the core” is not mere theory or a job title tweak. As the study reported, compared to non-design-led companies, design-led companies:

• Spent more money on research and innovation.
• Had tools and systems in place to test ideas with consumers.
• Had a defined process for coming up with new digital consumer experience ideas.
• Enjoyed greater market share and customer loyalty.

Look at Ikea. The former head of design, Marcus Engman (the brains behind product suites like the 2017 maximalist tropical furniture and collabs with well-known furniture and textile designers, like Tom Dixon) is a huge proponent of a design-led approach.

In a recent interview with Fast Company, where Engman is described as having spent six years “making Ikea weird,” he explained:

I want to show there’s an alternative to marketing, which is actually design. And if you work with design and communications in the right way, that would be the best kind of marketing, without buying media.

It was no surprise that during the Ask the Experts sessions at Help Scout, everyone’s advice was to stay true to the company’s roots as a design-led brand and get weird (like Engman) to stand out.

And believe me, we got weird with it. After all, if you want to keep your customers coming back for more, what works better than bacon?

Here are the creative assets the team devised for the launch of Beacon live chat:

1. An attention-grabbing video (did someone say bacon?)

Props here go to Meryl Ayres, the incredibly talented video producer who conceived of and brought this hilarious story to light. Who doesn’t want to use bacon in a marketing campaign?!

2. GIFs and images for social media

Designed by the very talented Sean Halpin.

3. An Instagram grid to really get the message across

All Sean.

4. Plus, a more “in-depth” look at the many reasons why bacon doesn’t “scale” as well as Beacon (so you should definitely use Beacon to delight customers, not bacon):

All Meryl.

Strategy #3: Get emotional.

Facebook’s 2018 algorithm update focused on community and personal engagements; content that is liked and shared within communities gets preferential treatment. And inciting an emotional response with your content increases engagement (likes, shares, views) on Facebook.

Music is a primary driver, or “cue,” for an emotional response. Think of any horror film you’ve ever seen. Most lose their scary tone as soon as you put them on mute.

For the Beacon > Bacon campaign, I leveraged the power of emotional advertising by conducting an A/B test on the type of music for 15-second Facebook video ads. We tested the video above with jazzy/upbeat music, against this one, with what we called the “epic” soundtrack:

The goal was simple: determine which musical version incited the highest engagement on Facebook and then use that version for the rest of the campaign. I ran the A/B test for one week to a 95% statistically relevant subset of the designated audience and dedicated $500 to each version.

While the test was running, the marketing team also took bets:

After one week, the results were clear: Sean and I should never make bets.

The jazzy/upbeat version performed better across the board with 3x the Leads, 2x the Reach, 2x the Impressions, and a Cost Per Result of $1.48 against $4.28 for the epic version.

Creating an emotional pull for a campaign doesn’t need to be subjective—accurate measurement that supports a valid A/B testing process can answer amorphous questions like, “Which background music generates more leads?”

Conclusion

The campaign launched in August, and results so far have been great. The campaign has generated 120,000 video views, 5,600 leads, and 275 new trial sign-ups for Help Scout.

That success has been the outcome of a design-led approach:

• We sourced ideas and concerns from stakeholders throughout the company.
• Put the consumer experience and brand above stale marketing metrics.
• Used a quantitative approach to drive an emotional response.

Interested in learning more about creating design-led marketing campaigns that’ll help your business stand out?

Join me in a webinar on January 9. You’ll get my framework for creating full-funnel marketing campaigns, including all the strategies, experiments, and tactics used in the Beacon > Bacon campaign.

“Waiting isn’t a hurdle keeping us from intimacy and from living our lives to our fullest. Instead, waiting is essential to how we connect as humans through the messages we send.”

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“It is we who are passing when we say time passes,” the French philosopher Henri Bergson insisted a century ago, just before Einstein defeated him in the historic debate that revolutionized our understanding of time. “If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer,” his compatriot and colleague Gaston Bachelard observed in contemplating our paradoxical relationship with time a decade later, long before the technology-accelerated baseline haste of our present era had plundered the life out of living. “Time is the substance I am made of,” Borges wrote in his spectacular confrontation with time yet another decade later. “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”

We are indeed creatures of time who live with it and in it, on the picketed patch of spacetime we have each been allotted. But if time is the foundational baseboard of our being, what happens to the structure of our lives in a culture of doing?

That is what Jason Farman explores in Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World (public library) — a part-philosophical, part-poetic effort to reclaim waiting “not as a burden, but as an important feature of human connection, intimacy, and learning.” He writes:

Waiting isn’t an in-between time. Instead, this often-hated and underappreciated time has been a silent force that has shaped our social interactions. Waiting isn’t a hurdle keeping us from intimacy and from living our lives to our fullest. Instead, waiting is essential to how we connect as humans through the messages we send. Waiting shapes our social lives in many ways, and waiting is something that can benefit us. Waiting can be fruitful. If we lose it, we will lose the ways that waiting shapes vital elements of our lives like social intimacy, the production of knowledge, and the creative practices that depend on the gaps formed by waiting.

[…]

An embrace of the moments when waiting becomes visible can remind us not of the time we are losing but of the ways we can demystify the mythology of instantaneous culture and ever-accelerating paces of “real time.” Notions of instantaneous culture promise that access to what we desire can be fulfilled immediately. However, this logic that dominates the current approaches to the tech industry misses the power of waiting and the embedded role it plays in our daily lives.

Although waiting is different from stillness — another essential, modernity-endangered state of being — in having an object of anticipation, a thing we are waiting for, it is kindred in that recalibrating our experience of waiting not as tortuous but as fertile requires a certain inner stillness that defies the forward slash of the soul toward the awaited. Farman chronicles some of the landmark technologies that have shaped our relationship with waiting — from aboriginal message sticks to the postage stamp to the buffering icon to Japan’s mobile messaging system deployed in the wake of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami — to explore how we can allay the durational restlessness of our lives.

One of the most fascinating and pause-giving chapters of the book uses astrophysics as a lens on waiting — a field in which the greatest discoveries take decades, sometimes centuries, of incubation, prototyping, and testing in the laboratory of reality we call nature. (Take, for instance, the detection of gravitational waves — the most monumental astrophysical breakthrough in our lifetime and the greatest since Galileo — a triumph with a remarkable century-long buildup.)

With an eye to the New Horizons interplanetary space probe — which revolutionized our understanding of the Solar System in faint whispers of data transmitted across three billion miles of cosmic expanse, dripping at a rate vastly smaller than that at which earthlings stream YouTube videos and upload photos to Instagram — Farman frames waiting as an essential building block of the speculative imagination, a period that allows for the cultivation of what Bertrand Russell so poetically and memorably termed “a largeness of contemplation”:

The New Horizons mission is a perfect example of the vital relationship between waiting and knowledge. The unknown creates speculation as we try to fill in the gaps of knowledge with everything from educated guesses to fear-inspired myths about what lies beyond the edge of our understanding.

This mode of speculation creates a new way of thinking. Our imaginations allow us to access that which does not yet exist and create scenarios that have not yet happened. Wait times are key to this mode of creative thinking because they afford us the opportunity to imagine and speculate about worlds beyond our own immediate places and speculate about the possible.

Nearly a century after T.S. Eliot — the poet laureate of “the still point of the turning world” — insisted on the creative value of the incubation period, Farman writes:

Waiting, as represented by silences, gaps, and distance, allows us the capacity to imagine that which does not yet exist and, ultimately, innovate into those new worlds as our knowledge expands.

In another chapter, he turns to Samuel Beckett’s classic play Waiting for Godot to reframe waiting not as a stoic feat of endurance in the name of some anticipated reward but as a process transformative and rewarding in its very unfolding — a sort of training ground for hope, which is ultimately training ground for character:

Beckett’s play, in its many violations of theatrical norms, strips away plot expectations to make a comment on the human condition. Godot symbolizes whatever we wait for, whatever we long for, whatever we rely on to save us from our current state of uncertainty and despair. Godot represents the promise of what might come on the other side of our waiting.

[…]

It shows how time flows through us and changes us. Day after day, as we wait for the things we desire, we become different people. In the act of waiting, we become who we are. Waiting points to our desires and hopes for the future; and while that future may never arrive and our hopes may never be fulfilled, the act of reflecting on waiting teaches us about ourselves. The meaning of life isn’t deferred until that thing we hope for arrives; instead, in the moment of waiting, meaning is located in our ability to recognize the ways that such hopes define us.

At the end of the book, Farman offers two practical strategies for recalibrating our experience of waiting from burdensome to fruitful. The first is a deceptively simple yet effective discipline of shifting focus from the negative feelings waiting breeds — boredom, helplessness, anger — to a reminder of the positive object of the waiting. As soon as we remember, really remember, what we are waiting for and why we want it, Farman argues, the frustration of waiting is neutralized.

But far more interesting and profound is the second tactic. Farman proposes a radical shift of viewing time not as individual but as collective, which is inherently a radical act of empathy — the willingness to accept another’s time as just as valuable as our own, however different our circumstances may be. Embedded in this act is a challenge to the power structures of the status quo, for it forces us to consider who is imposing the wait times on whom and who benefits from that imposition. In a sentiment that calls to mind the fascinating science of why empathy is a clock that ticks in the consciousness of another, Farman writes:

If my time is distinct from your time, and you end up wasting my time by valuing your own, you have robbed me of my resource (time). When you value your own time instead of my time, you have effectively stolen minutes (or hours) from me. We see these attitudes in abundance.

However, if we shift perspectives and see our time as intertwined with one another’s, then we are all investing our time in other people’s circumstances.

Farman recounts a not-uncommon experience: At the grocery store, he finds himself getting reflexively frustrated with the woman ahead of him, who is taking too much time to check out. Only upon realizing that she is counting food stamps and coupons does he transport himself, with a pang of shame, into her difficult circumstances. He writes:

If we work toward an awareness of time as collective rather than individual, we can come to understand wait time as an investment in the social fabric that connects us. My patience with someone like the woman at the grocery store who has to account for every dollar and pay with food stamps is an investment of my time in her situation. As we invest time in other people through waiting, we become stakeholders in their situations. This has the radical potential to build empathy and to inspire a call for social change, as we realize that not everyone is afforded the same agency for how time is used.

There are times when we should wait and see the benefits of waiting; however, there are times when waiting needs to be resisted. Waiting can be a tool of the powerful to maintain the status quo by forcing people to invest their time in ways that inhibit their ability to transform their situation. Many examples demonstrate the kinds of waiting that reinforce the power dynamics in a society. From the long-delayed recovery efforts and federal dollars following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or the perpetually delayed recovery for Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands after Hurricane Maria in 2017, to the long commute times between home and job (often, jobs) imposed on many people below the poverty line, unequal access to time is revealed in the different ways people are forced to wait. Many social justice advocates like Angela Davis and Michelle Alexander point to prisoners like those sitting in San Quentin as prime examples of those who are forced to wait unjustly. The “prison industrial complex,” as Davis terms it, is fueled by racial inequality that targets African Americans more than any other population. In this example, wait times are strategies of the powerful to maintain the status quo of power relationships in the social order.

Complement Delayed Response with Ursula K. Le Guin on why our relationship with time is the root of our morality, Søren Kierkegaard on how to bridge the ephemeral and the eternal, James Gleick on our temporal imagination, and this lovely vintage children’s book about the nature of time by Gleick’s mother, then revisit German chronobiologist Marc Wittman on the psychology of time and how the interplay of spontaneity and self-control mediates our capacity for presence.

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It feels like there’s a WeWork on every street nowadays. Take a walk through midtown Manhattan (please don’t actually) and it might even seem like there are more WeWorks than office buildings.

Consider this an ongoing discussion about Urban Tech, its intersection with regulation, issues of public service, and other complexities that people have full PHDs on. I’m just a bitter, born-and-bred New Yorker trying to figure out why I’ve been stuck in between subway stops for the last 15 minutes, so please reach out with your take on any of these thoughts: @Arman.Tabatabai@techcrunch.com.

Co-working has permeated cities around the world at an astronomical rate. The rise has been so remarkable that even the headline-dominating SoftBank seems willing to bet the success of its colossal Vision Fund on the shift continuing, having poured billions into WeWork – including a recent $4.4 billion top-up that saw the co-working king’s valuation spike to $45 billion.

And there are no signs of the trend slowing down. With growing frequency, new startups are popping up across cities looking to turn under-utilized brick-and-mortar or commercial space into low-cost co-working options.

It’s a strategy spreading through every type of business from retail – where companies like Workbar have helped retailers offer up portions of their stores – to more niche verticals like parking lots – where companies like Campsyte are transforming empty lots into spaces for outdoor co-working and corporate off-sites. Restaurants and bars might even prove most popular for co-working, with startups like Spacious and KettleSpace turning restaurants that are closed during the day into private co-working space during their off-hours.

Before you know it, a startup will be strapping an Aeron chair to the top of a telephone pole and calling it “WirelessWorking”.

But is there a limit to how far co-working can go? Are all of the storefronts, restaurants and open spaces that line city streets going to be filled with MacBooks, cappuccinos and Moleskine notebooks? That might be too tall a task, even for the movement taking over skyscrapers.

The co-working of everything…

So why is everyone trying to turn your favorite neighborhood dinner spot into a part-time WeWork in the first place? Co-working offers a particularly compelling use case for under-utilized space.

First, co-working falls under the same general commercial zoning categories as most independent businesses and very little additional infrastructure – outside of a few extra power outlets and some decent WiFi – is required to turn a space into an effective replacement for the often crowded and distracting coffee shops used by price-sensitive, lean, remote, or nomadic workers that make up a growing portion of the workforce.

Thus, businesses can list their space at little-to-no cost, without having to deal with structural layout changes that are more likely to arise when dealing with pop-up solutions or event rentals.

On the supply side, these co-working networks don’t have to purchase leases or make capital improvements to convert each space, and so they’re able to offer more square footage per member at a much lower rate than traditional co-working spaces. Spacious, for example, charges a monthly membership fee of $99-$129 dollars for access to its network of vetted restaurants, which is cheap compared to a WeWork desk, which can cost anywhere from $300-$800 per month in New York City.

Customers realize more affordable co-working alternatives, while tight-margin businesses facing increasing rents for under-utilized property are able to pool resources into a network and access a completely new revenue stream at very little cost. The value proposition is proving to be seriously convincing in initial cities – Spacious told the New York Times, that so many restaurants were applying to join the network on their own volition that only five percent of total applicants were ultimately getting accepted.

Basically, the business model here checks a lot of the boxes for successful marketplaces: Acquisition and transaction friction is low for both customers and suppliers, with both seeing real value that didn’t exist previously. Unit economics seem strong, and vetting on both sides of the market creates trust and community. Finally, there’s an observable network effect whereby suppliers benefit from higher occupancy as more customers join the network, while customers benefit from added flexibility as more locations join the network.

… Or just the co-working of some things…

So is this the way of the future? The strategy is really compelling, with a creative solution that offers tremendous value to businesses and workers in major cities. But concerns around the scalability of demand make it difficult to picture this phenomenon becoming ubiquitous across cities or something that reaches the scale of a WeWork or large conventional co-working player.

All these companies seem to be competing for a similar demographic, not only with one another, but also with coffee shops, free workspaces, and other flexible co-working options like Croissant, which provides members with access to unused desks and offices in traditional co-working spaces. Like Spacious and KettleSpace, the spaces on Croissant own the property leases and are already built for co-working, so Croissant can still offer comparatively attractive rates.

The offer seems most compelling for someone that is able to work without a stable location and without the amenities offered in traditional co-working or office spaces, and is also price sensitive enough where they would trade those benefits for a lower price. Yet at the same time, they can’t be too price sensitive, where they would prefer working out of free – or close to free – coffee shops instead of paying a monthly membership fee to avoid the frictions that can come with them.

And it seems unclear whether the problem or solution is as poignant outside of high-density cities – let alone outside of high-density areas of high-density cities.

Without density, is the competition for space or traffic in coffee shops and free workspaces still high enough where it’s worth paying a membership fee for? Would the desire for a private working environment, or for a working community, be enough to incentivize membership alone? And in less-dense and more-sprawl oriented cities, members could also face the risk of having to travel significant distances if space isn’t available in nearby locations.

While the emerging workforce is trending towards more remote, agile and nomadic workers that can do more with less, it’s less certain how many will actually fit the profile that opts out of both more costly but stable traditional workspaces, as well as potentially frustrating but free alternatives. And if the lack of density does prove to be an issue, how many of those workers will live in hyper-dense areas, especially if they are price-sensitive and can work and live anywhere?

To be clear, I’m not saying the companies won’t see significant growth – in fact, I think they will. But will the trend of monetizing unused space through co-working come to permeate cities everywhere and do so with meaningful occupancy? Maybe not. That said, there is still a sizable and growing demographic that need these solutions and the value proposition is significant in many major urban areas.

The companies are creating real value, creating more efficient use of wasted space, and fixing a supply-demand issue. And the cultural value of even modestly helping independent businesses keep the lights on seems to outweigh the cultural “damage” some may fear in turning them into part-time co-working spaces.

And lastly, some reading while in transit:

• The Grim Future of Urban Warfare – The Atlantic, Darran Anderson
• New York’s New Wage Law for Uber Drivers is a Lesson for Cities Around the World – MIT Technology Review, Erin Winick
• Can New Home Building Tech Help Solve the Affordability Crisis? – FastCompany, Adele Peters
• Homelessness Rises More Quickly Where Rent Exceeds a Third of Income – Zillow Research, Chris Glynn & Alexander Casey
• Vote on Temescal to Test Core Values – StreetsblogSF, Roger Rudick
• L.A. Approves New Rules for Airbnb-Type Rentals After Years of Debate – Los Angeles Times, Emily Alpert Reyes
• Can France Revive its Industrial Heartland? – FT, Harriet Agnew
• Why Communities Across America Are Pushing to Close Waste Incinerators – CityLab, Rebecca Stoner

Back in January, I made some predictions for 2018 over on the OpenView blog.

THREE PRICING PREDICTIONS FOR 2018 (AND HOW TO USE THEM TO YOUR ADVANTAGE)

1. The pace of commoditization will accelerate

2. Predictive analytics will get better at predicting

3. Performance-based pricing will become more common

OpenView’s Kyle Poyar had this to say at the beginning of the year.

“Companies Pay Attention to Pricing (Finally)

Kyle Poyar, Director of Market Strategy

2018 will be the year that companies finally pay attention to pricing. After all, it’s fundamental to how businesses make money and is a SaaS company’s most efficient profit lever. Yet, 53% of companies have no one on their team dedicated to pricing, even if it’s just one component of their job. Worse still, only 14% consider pricing before deciding whether to build a new product. This leads companies to miss revenue targets and waste precious product and engineering resources. But in 2018, this is destined to change. Investors and executives will wake up to the amount of money they’re leaving on the table by failing to focus on pricing, and finally take steps to address it.”

Please take our survey on Pricing Innovation.

So, how did we do? Forcing myself to answer this question reveals that these are not very good predictions as it is hard to test them. If they were bets on longbets.org, they would have been rejected as being unverifiable. I will do better for next year predictions! Still, it is worth looking back and reflecting on the predictions.

1. The pace of commoditization will accelerate

Commoditization occurs when there are many acceptable substitutes for any offer. It is driven by standardization of offers, whether through technical, procurement or dissemination of best practices. Information sharing and transparency contributes to this standardization.

So is commoditization becoming more common and is the pace at which it occurs accelerating? Anecdotal observation suggests that this is indeed occurring. Our customers are certainly concerned with this. One of the main reasons they contact us is commoditization and its associated pricing pressures. Pure play offers, whether data or products or even conventional professional services, such as those offered by lawyers and accountants, are increasingly easy to copy.

It is more difficult to commoditize a solution than a simple product. This is especially true when the solution combines software, data, professional services and hardware (as in the typical Internet of Things application). Our larger clients are mostly moving towards solution centric growth. This brings its own pricing challenges.

2. Predictive analytics will get better at predicting

There has been a lot of buzz this year about deep learning and artificial intelligence. This has been building since 2007, when Geoffrey Hinton and his team published a series of astonishing papers that directed artificial intelligence research towards deep learning. 2018 was the year AI became a required part of every business strategy. Gartner put pricing near the top of the hype cycle.

Gartner is suggesting here that it will be another 2 to 5 years before deep learning and neural networks reach the plateau of productivity. In strategic terms, that is not long at all. How will this impact pricing?

Begin by asking how it will impact value creation, differentiation and commoditization. AI alone will be table stakes in any application or solution that can collect data. It is the data that is likely to drive value and differentiation and not AI. One of our customers claims to ‘touch more patients across more disease states than any other company in the world.’ If that company can reliably harvest that data, dealing with the data privacy and ownership issues, and find patterns within and across disease states it is likely to find itself in a dominant position. AI strategies need to be data strategies first.

For pricing itself, better prediction means reduced risk. We don’t always realize it, but prices, especially B2B prices, come with a risk discount. There is always a risk that the solution will not provide the anticipated value so the price has to be reduced to reflect this risk. More accurate predictions about value means that, in general, prices can go up. It may be that the downward pressure on prices from accelerated commodification will be countered by upward pressure from decreased risk.

3. Performance-based pricing will become more common

The risk discount can be completely eliminated by performance-based pricing. In this pricing model, the seller is paid based on actual performance. Risk is transferred from buyer to seller and prices go up. What will make this possible? Well, better predictability for one. One reason that sellers resist performance-based models is that there are too many factors beyond their sphere of control. The risk higher for the seller than the buyer, so rather than risk discount pricing, performance-based pricing comes with a risk premium. For this reason it has been most popular in areas where the seller (vendor or provider) is almost completely in control of the outcome. Many large outsourcing and managed services contracts have a large performance component in their pricing.

For performance-based pricing to become truly common we will have to get a lot better at teasing out the causes of performance differences and controlling for them. Fortunately, there is good work being done in the area of causal modelling by people like Judea Pearl. It will probably be ten years or so before this work starts to change how we price things, but it is worth exploring it now.

So, I would give myself the following grades on these predictions:

• Accelerated Commoditization: A- (accurate but could use more data)

• Better Predictions: B+ (probably accurate but a bit early)

• Performance-Based Pricing: Incomplete (student has not yet completed course work)

For some thoughts on 2019, please go over to OpenView Labs and see our post on pricing resolutions for 2019.

We will make our pricing predictions for 2019 in January.

Have a happy holiday season.

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At the end of every year, sales leaders and sales managers direct their salespeople to close strong, to win every deal they can, and to be creative in pushing deals across the line. “Pushing” isn’t a very good word in sales, as it is likely to cause the one being pushed to push back or to walk away. A better word is “compel,” but even that word also comes with a set of problems.

Some companies believe they should offer a discount for taking action now, a tactic that sometimes works. One well-known software company has a history of doing everything they can to close their year strong, and by doing so, has a reputation for being very loose with pricing at year-end. You may win business now and also train your clients to crush your margin.

Other companies often sweeteners instead of discounting by adding extra services in trying to move their prospective clients to act before the year ends. These additional offerings, like discounting, sometimes work. However, they don’t generally do enough to move enough clients to change the results for a lot of sales organizations significantly.

Some companies threaten to take pricing or terms or solutions away, hoping that the threat of losing something is enough to get their dream client to sign a contract.

To understand why and how these attempts fail, you have to understand the underlying reason the deal is difficult for your client to accept.

First, unless your pricing is holding up a deal, then a discount isn’t likely to motivate the client. Instead, it is proof that you need the deal enough to give up margin to get the deal. That same client will likely ask you for the offer on the other side of the calendar year and may use your offer to discount against you later.

Second, if the sweetener you offer isn’t something valuable enough to already part of the deal, it may not be the kind of offer that compels action. If it were valuable enough to cause them to take action sooner rather than later, it might have been better to use it as part of the solution in the first place. Mostly these sweeteners are things that cost you little to give away and aren’t all that important to the client.

Third, the idea of taking something away can strike people the wrong way. It can feel like pressure, and it can feel like a change in the relationship to some of your clients (even though there are many ways to talk about these kinds of things that are neutral or that improve relationships).

Here’s what’s most important to know about why it is difficult to compel buyers before the end of the year: They have not gotten through the process they need to get to get through to make a decision. When you try to compel them to buy now instead of later, you are trying to get them to decide before they have the confidence to do so.

In The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the ten Commitments That Drive Sales, I outlined the ten commitments that occur in most B2B sales. It’s a non-linear view of the sales conversation, but it’s helpful here. If you can look at the commitments you are missing and help the client accelerate them, you can increase the velocity of your deals—and their speed to better results.

Here is a list of commitments: Time, Explore Change, Change, Collaborate, Build Consensus, Invest, Review, Resolve Concerns, Decide, and Execute. There are eight commitments before Decide, and if you are missing them, do what you can to gain them.

The post Why You Fail to Compel Your Dream Client to Change appeared first on The Sales Blog.

As B2B customers now occupy a growing share of telco’s revenue mix, companies continue to proactively look for ways to capture more of this increasingly-critical market segment. But to really thrive in the B2B telecom sector, vendors need to understand the unique factors that affect customers’ buying decisions.

One such factor that plays a key role in the B2B purchase process is the involvement of multiple stakeholders in evaluating and acquiring business solutions. On average, it takes 6.8 decision makers to formally greenlight a B2B purchase, with the number of stakeholders in some buying groups reaching double-digit figures.

In a buying team, each decision maker has her own objectives and priorities in the purchase. Winning a customer requires the ability to tailor your marketing message for each stakeholder in the group so that they’ll have the information and insight needed to make an informed choice.

This blog article examines how recent marketing developments impact the way buying groups reach a consensus when purchasing B2B telecom solutions. The post then explains some concrete ideas for adapting your messaging strategy around these changes.

The Changing Rules of the Game

The evolution in both how telecom vendors sell and how customers buy contributes to the purchase process’s growing complexity. This, in turn, drives the changes we’re seeing in the size and makeup of B2B buying groups.

The boundary between telecom and IT gets narrower.

Bane & Co. estimates that the B2B telecom market will grow by 2.6% each year, which is 4.3 times faster than the consumer segment’s 0.6% annual expansion. A great deal of this disparity largely boils down to the strong demand from SMBs and enterprise customers for end-to-end ICT solutions, while the market for consumer telecom remains highly saturated.

According to Deloitte, the distinction between telco and ICT continues to get thinner as shown by systems integrators getting the lion’s share of B2B telecom growth. Inside client organizations, “CTO types” now make procurement choices alongside traditional decision makers such as CIOs and other IT executives.

As product scope grows, so does the need for stakeholder buy-in.

McKinsey points out that around 67% of B2B deals never make it to an RFP process. Much of this stems from the “many gateways of influence” involved in reviewing an offer. More B2B buyers now prefer to evaluate solutions on a modular basis, bringing in cross-functional teams to assess specific areas of a potential purchase.

Again, traditional decision maker roles now closely collaborate with other stakeholders impacted by the purchase in order to take a careful look at offer details that concern them the most. As McKinsey notes, this has led to an increase in the number of customers sending out modular RFPs.

Buyers of complex solutions tend to be risk-averse.

As a side effect of B2B telecom vendors’ shift toward providing more ICT solutions in their product mix, potential customers now increasingly rely on buying committees. While this indicates increased thoroughness in buyers’ due diligence activities, it’s also a sign that customers want to minimize risk by spreading accountability among different stakeholders.

Research from Aberdeen shows that buyers of complex business products and services tend to be the most risk-averse type of customer. This group recorded the lowest average risk tolerance in their study.

Flatter decision hierarchy means bigger buying groups.

The widely-cited 6.8-decision-maker buying group statistic actually originates from a 2017 CEB research publication. The study also mentions that, as a result of a flatter organizational structure, the size of B2B buying committees has equivalently expanded.

There’s a strong trend toward decentralization among potential B2B customers. More people toward the bottom of the organizational structure now play an increasing role in the buying process, significantly growing the pool of buyer roles involved in B2B purchases.

Winning the B2B Buying Consensus

A buying team reaches consensus when each member agrees on the problem to be solved, the criteria for choosing a solution, and the specific objectives for implementing the solution.

With buying decisions now requiring the approval of a larger group of stakeholders, getting everyone’s buy-in remains a difficult challenge for telecom vendors. That’s because each member of the buying committee has his or her own expectations and responsibilities which oftentimes misalign with others, leading to group conflicts.

CEB finds that customers are typically 37% into the buying journey when group conflict peaks, stalling the process or even killing the deal altogether.

So, how can telecom vendors gain a buying consensus? Experts at winning the consensus sale suggest taking the following things into account when crafting your plan:

• Identify all stakeholders and group them according to buyer roles
• Make sure to involve the right people at the right time
• Work closely with each buying team member on how the solution impacts a specific business area

Here’s how to achieve each of these items:

Identify all stakeholders and group them according to buyer roles

It’s crucial to identify ALL stakeholders involved in the purchase and how each impacts the decision at hand. The first challenge is to list out who actually has a stake in the decision in question.

Bob Apollo at Inflection Point Strategy Partners outlines five key criteria that a prospect needs to meet in order to be a valid stakeholder:

• Role in the decision-making process (more on this below)
• Perspective and point-of-view (strategic, financial, operational, technical, contractual)
• Level of influence (dominant, strong, weak, nonexistent, and uncertain)
• Attitude toward your company/brand (positive, neutral, and negative)
• Accessibility and availability (unrestricted, frequent, infrequent, and inaccessible)

Different marketers follow different buyer role categories when classifying stakeholders, but these mostly fall into three main types of stakeholders (as noted by Bob Apollo):

• Core Buying Decision Group (stakeholders who determine the need, define the ideal solution, and evaluate/select options)
• Negotiating Terms Group (their role is to protect the company and ensure the company gets the best possible terms)
• Final Approver Group (has the last word in a decision and can override decisions made by the two other groups)

Make sure to involve the right people at the right time

When identifying stakeholders, it’s critical to determine your primary contact in the target organization. The primary contact serves as your leading advocate (champion) in the buying group, helping you gain access to the other stakeholders.

Additionally, the primary contact (or champion) can help you acquire some useful insights on the other stakeholders to ensure relevant and personalized engagement.

Brent Adamson provides some very helpful pieces of advice on how and when to involve stakeholders in order to make the consensus sale:

• Find the personalization sweet spot. While personalized and relevant content is the fuel that drives consensus sale, personalization can also drive a wedge between stakeholders, especially if it focuses exclusively on a stakeholder’s business area and ignores the others.
• Know that reaching consensus is difficult early in the buying process. Most group conflicts arise when customers are somewhere in the awareness and consideration stages. This means that you should be convincing stakeholders to agree on a solution instead of persuading them to choose you already.
• Choose champions that have both the willingness and ability to advocate. Around half of the primary contacts who said they were willing to buy a solution also claimed they weren’t ready to publicly advocate for it (50% feared reputational damage and 12% were afraid of job loss from a problematic purchase)

Work closely with each stakeholder on how the solution impacts a specific business area

Buying committees consist of functional executives, managers, users, gatekeepers, and other decision-making roles. With a diverse group of people from different business areas and backgrounds, it can be very hard to collaborate to hammer out the right solution that everyone can agree on.

Reaching a consensus requires that you work with everyone involved and uncover what the pain points are, what an ideal solution looks like, and what a successful resolution of the problem means.

• Focus on clear and specific business outcomes
• Specify the metrics for measuring each outcome
• Set and review benchmarks and yardsticks
• Understand that your biggest competitor is always the status quo

Conclusion: Buying committees form just another fact of life for B2B marketers, especially for telecom vendors. With the right insights, it’s easier to navigate around the different stakeholders and how they relate with each other.

This article is originally published at The Savvy Marketer.

Sales enablement is on the rise, no doubt. At CSO Insights, we have seen a very fast growing discipline over the last six years. In 2013, only 19.3% of organizations reported having sales enablement established in their organization. This “enablement rate” increased to 32.7% in 2016 and to 59.2% in 2017. Now, in 2018, the data of our 4th Annual Sales Enablement Study (requires membership) shows a leveling off in growth, with 61.0% of organizations having a sales enablement team.

This 2018 number, 61.0%, is less than we expected because in 2017, 8.4% of organizations said that they planned to implement sales enablement within the next twelve months. That was apparently not the case. Instead, sales enablement seems to have arrived at a certain plateau. It is now maturing and thriving in particular niches.

Sales enablement is more relevant in larger organizations; it is found in up to 89.3% of organizations > $1B in annual revenues

The nature of sales enablement is to design, orchestrate, implement, and measure enablement services (content, training, tools, and coaching) across various functions to keep them consistent and effective for the sales force. That is one of the reasons why sales enablement is more established in larger organizations.

In organizations with annual revenues between $50M-$250M, over two-thirds (71.6%) of our study participants had sales enablement. This number increased up to 89.3% for organizations larger than $1B.

Organizations with sales enablement reported two-digit improvements for quota attainment and win rates compared to those organizations without enablement.

Yes, there is a business case for sales enablement. We compared key sales performance metrics, such as the percentage of salespeople achieving quota and win rates for forecasted deals, with the presence and absence of sales enablement:

• The percentage of salespeople achieving quota improved by 10.6 percentage points, which is an actual improvement of 22.7%.
• The win rates for forecast deals improved by 6.6 percentage points, which is an actual improvement of 14.5%.

Are all enablement teams equally successful? No. Only 34.4% of those with sales enablement met all or the majority of their expectations and achieved significantly better results.

The problem is the big group of enablement teams (61.2%) that met some of their expectations but ended up with only average performance results. That’s a difficult situation.

Almost two-thirds (61.2%) of organizations invest in sales enablement without seeing significantly better results. This could lead senior leadership to question the need for a dedicated enablement function.

In our Sales Enablement Grows Up: The 4^th Annual Sales Enablement Report, we analyzed the research findings to show how to set up your sales enablement function for sustainable success. These foundational practices make a huge difference:

• Follow a formal approach with a charter:
  This is the most critical practice, but too often ignored. It makes a huge difference if you run sales enablement as just another program, or if you have a strategic sales enablement approach that’s aligned to the business and the sales strategy, and connected to the strategic initiatives and goals of your senior executive sponsors. Only 9.2% do that, but this small group of organizations achieved 19.2% better win rates compared to all study respondents. To put that into perspective, the group with a formal approach but no charter could improve their win rates only by 3.4%. And those with informal and ad hoc approaches couldn’t even achieve average performance. So, a charter really matters. Check out my blog post series over at csoinsights.com/blog for details.
• Make the customers and their customer’s path your primary design point for sales enablement:
  Sales enablement services cannot exist in a vacuum. A solid process framework, powered by technology, is essential. In the age of the customer, your internal selling process must reflect all steps and gates your buyers go through to make decisions. That’s what we call aligning your internal selling processes to the customer’s path, ideally in a dynamic way that allows you to make necessary adjustments as fast as possible. Only 20.7% of organizations do that, but this one-fifth improved quota attainment by 8.9%.
• Align your enablement services to the different phases of the customer’s path:
  Some skills and methodologies are relevant throughout the customer’s path, such as value messaging. Others are more relevant in specific areas, such as prospecting or negotiation skills. It’s even more important with content. Content that helps to co-create a shared vision of success with a prospect is very different from content that supports detailed conversations with different buyer roles at the end of the buying phase. Interestingly, 42.0% of organizations reported that they do that, and they saw much better win rates: 53.5% vs. 42.0% for those that reported not applying this practice.
• Build your enablement backbone: Implement a production process and mechanisms to measure enablement success:
  Only 25.0% have an enablement production process in place, but this one-quarter saw 5% better win rates. Only with a process can you provide scalable, consistent and effective enablement services. Less than 20% know how to measure sales enablement success, but those that follow a dashboard approach with leading and lagging indicators and ROI models achieved 5 percentage points better win rates compared to all. Measurement provides evidence of what works.

Sales enablement grows up; that’s good news. But not fast enough. Enablement leaders should take the time and focus on HOW they approach their enablement efforts before simply adding new “stuff” for the sales force.

This article was initially written for Top Sales Magazine, the December edition.

Photograph: Shutterstock 299846063

The post Sales Enablement Grows Up. But Not Fast Enough. appeared first on Sales Enablement Perspectives.

I just read a provocative post. Sales Talent Is A Problem, Is it Worth Solving, by the folks at CSO Insights.  It’s an interesting view, in the spirit of “Yes, and…..” I’d like to add to the discussion.

I suppose answers to the question depend on your mindset.  A closed mindset would probably say, “No!”  The article presents a few points of view that reinforce that.

People with closed mindsets would tend to address things from an internal orientation.  How do we structure the sales organization to be most efficient?  How do we reduce the variability in sales people and what they do, creating the lowest cost ability to acquire customers.

Many would also cite technologies that, supposedly, diminish the need for sales talent.  After all, AI and ML will solve all the problems of the selling world.  It will tell us who to call, when, what their problems are likely to be.  It will scripting the perfect conversation making sure we limit our discovery questions to 4, and our discovery pitch to 9.1 minutes  (some how the concept of a discovery pitch seems odd, how do you do discovery if you are pitching.  But one AI vendor has the data supporting this.  You just do one for 9.1 minutes and you win.  If it stretches to 11.4, you lose.)

If we structure our engagement process to be more transactional, the assembly line process becomes very attractive.  We specialize our various sales roles, moving customer widgets from sales specialist to sales specialist.  SDR to BDR to Demo’er to AE to Closer to Customer Care—-rinse, wash, recycle.  This mechanized view of selling, means our view of talent is very different.  We are looking for people that can execute their specialized roles very well, train them to do those without deviation.  Ultimately, we can look at displacing many of these with Chatbots, and as buyers develop their capabilities, our Chatbots will engage with their Buying Chatbots.

People with closed mindsets will interpret the data, “Buyers are used to getting minimal sales involvement,” or other data that says “Buyers will leverage 3+ channels through their buying process,” (Gartner), coming to the conclusion that buyers have a preference to minimize sales involvement.

But dive into the research more deeply, what it really tells you is that buyers are agnostic on channels.  They have no preference of digital, sales, or any other.  What they want is great insight, timely, accurate and relevant to their specific needs.

If anything, one could interpret the data as sales having driven the customer to the alternative channels because of our inability to do the things they need.  Which, at its root is a talent problem—do we have the right type of people, are we equipping the with the right skills/tools/processes to create value in every interaction with the customer?  It seems the customers are voting by their actions and they are voting no.

A closed mindset will lead you to certain conclusions about sales talent, inevitably, it will lead to an answer , “Meh!”

A growth oriented mindset would approach the question slightly differently.  First, people with a growth oriented mindset would start in a completely different place.

Rather than starting with an internal, efficiency oriented focus, they would start with an external focus.  They would start with customers,  They would ask the question, “What are our customers facing?”  They would follow that with the question, “How can our sales people best help our customers deal with what they face?”

We would see two major trends emerging.  Many “buying processes,” are, in fact very transactional.  In looking at the transactional buying processes, much of what I’ve discussed will apply–ultimately, these should all be handled untouched by human hands–on both the buying/selling sides.

But the major issue we would see confronting our customers is massive turbulence.  This turbulence is characterized by all sorts of terms, a few or which are:  Transformation (digital and otherwise), complexity, disruption, information overload, overwhelm, confusion, distraction, massive change, confusion.

They would also see that no customer, no market, no function is immune to this turbulence.  It impacts every organization, every individual.

Growth mindset people would see that helping our customers make sense of what they face, helping them navigate their way to solving these problems, is what great sales people and organizations do.

If anything, they would see a massive increase in the demand/need for help from their customers.

At the same time, they would recognize, it takes a different kind of sales person to be able to deal with these issues.  Different skills, capabilities, experiences.

They would also come to the conclusion that the sales talent problem isn’t just worth solving, it becomes a key differentiator in capitalizing on the demand from customers looking to make sense of the turbulence they face.

The organizations/leaders that recognize this opportunity, that want to provide leadership in helping customers address “turbulence,” will capture huge share.

The organizations/leaders that recognize this opportunity will recognize that  sales talent is THE problem worth solving!

—

About 3-4 years ago, I was participating in a discussion, at the time hosted by CEB, now Gartner. It was a group of very bright thinkers/practitioners in sales and marketing. We were discussing the future of sales and marketing–things we saw happening, things we believed needed to change.

It was a fascinating discussion, but I struggled participating in it. At the end, Brent Adamson pulled me to the side asking, “Dave, you seem to have a pretty dark outlook about selling, what’s up?”

At the time, I had to agree with Brent’s assessment. But, I had no response, in fact it’s been a question that’s haunted me since Brent posed it. I kept thinking, “If my outlook is really that dark, why am I doing what I’m doing? Am I helping or hurting the profession? Am I contributing to it’s improvement and the ability of sales to contribute to our customers and the companies we sell for?”

In that period, and since, there has been overwhelming evidence that would drive one to be very dark about the future of selling.

• Year after year, the percent of sales people making plan continues to decline.
• The average tenure in a sales job, whether it’s sales management or individual contributors continues to plummet. Depending on the survey, tenure of sales managers, is anywhere between 18-22 months. Sales people change jobs, every 20-22 months.
• Where sales people used to be a primary channel for information and education about products/solutions, now customers can self educate through an increasing number of digital and other channels. As a result, customers seem to be looking to defer sales involvement later in their buying process–with many seeking to manage the whole cycle through digital channels (by the way this isn’t new, but we tent to think it is.)
• What has traditionally “worked” seems to be not working any longer. But sales leaders and people seem to be doubling down on these efforts.
• Endless market research proclaiming the “death of selling,” citing changing buyers, new technology as eliminating millions of selling jobs–and there is some validity to the points they make, though I tend to disagree with the conclusions there will be fewer sales jobs in the future (more later).

Beyond this, there are the things we do to ourselves that would lead one to be very negative about the future of our profession.

• The endless, mindless debates of social selling, cold calling, to prospect or not to prospect.
• The mindless focus on volume/velocity. The thinking that sales results are a math equation where we improve results by doing the same dull outreach but at ever escalating volumes/velocity. “If we aren’t producing the results needed, just up the activity levels.”
• The mechanization, assembly line vision of selling–an approach that focuses on our efficiency (not effectiveness), moving customer widgets from station to station, at each stop a specialist does her specialized job, then passing the customer to the next station. All the time, ignoring the customer buying experience and their own journey. This couples nicely with the previous point. If we need to produce more, we just up the volume in the assembly line.
• The naive/wishful thinking that technology, particularly AI/ML will save the day. It will suddenly bring us buying ready customers that all we need to do is accept the PO. If this, in fact is true, 100% of the process can be automated.
• And the endless stream of “experts” exploiting the wishful thinking by declaring the secret to sales success is just doing this one thing. Unfortunately, as one counts the one things, there end up be 1000’s with most conflicting or contradicting each other.

On top of this, as one talks to corporate executives, there continues to be a growing “anti sales” sentiment. Possibly driven by the poor results, possibly by the expense, possibly because there is a longing for a way to create revenue without needing to sell–that is just getting buyers to buy (Hmmmmm).

Given these scenarios, it’s easy to be dark about the future of selling. I found myself falling victim to that kind of thinking.

In recent weeks, it has caused me to rethink what I’m doing and whether I’m beating my head against an impenetrable brick wall.

Suddenly, I had a revelation (in my terms, a brain fart). I realized that I was getting distracted by the minutiae and had lost sight of the bigger picture. In some way I was becoming so narrowly focused on the constant barrage of “stuff” that I was losing sight of the forest for the trees.

I decided to step back, looking at things from the “demand side,” what drives the need for selling? The only place to start is with the customer, why might they need sales and sales people?

As usual, when one starts with the customer, one gains great clarity.

Every industry/market is going through extreme disruption, driven by the convergence of a huge number of factors in one time. Changes in society, economies, expectations of consumers (whether individuals/buyers). Businesses are facing massive changes in business models, driven by changing customers, socio/political structures, all aided (?) by technology. Transformation of all kinds, including digital, is the standard under which all businesses and organizations must operate. The very nature of work is changing in every segment.

As each organization assesses these massive shifts, it is overlaid with massive complexity, overwhelm, overload, distraction, risk/uncertainty, and fear/wonder. The people challenges–physical and emotional are unknown and massive.

The reality is companies and organizations cannot figure these things out themselves. Partly because they don’t exist in isolation but a socio/market ecosystem. Partly because no one has the answers, let alone the questions.

People/companies will need help! And the demand for this help is incalculable–but, sufficiently large would be an understatement.

As we shift from the “demand side,” to the “supply side,” we can start to assess the opportunity/challenge.

Certainly, new business opportunities, solutions/products we have never imagined will emerge to help fulfill the demand.

As always, there will be huge need for consultants, providing endless leather bound recommendations about what companies should do. And there will be huge need for services organizations to help companies design and implement solutions.

At the same time there will be a huge need for sales professionals. After all, the job of sales is to help customers understand challenges/opportunities/problems, as well as help them understand and plan for the changes the solutions demand.

Because of the magnitude of change on the “demand side,” the “supply side” opportunity is immense, but different than what has been.

But because the problems/opportunities our customers (and we) face are massively different from what has existed in the past, we will need to reassess what selling is, why, how, what we sell. We will have to reassess everything about culture, organization, talent, strategy, processes, systems, tools, programs, tactics, and metrics.

What has always worked in the past will be less effective in the future. The challenges our customers face are profoundly different, as a result we have to change what we do.

What does this mean from the point of view of the number of sales jobs, many say the numbers of sales jobs will plummet. I tend to disagree. Many traditional sales jobs will disappear, the things those sales roles do will be fulfilled through other channels. My belief that the number of next-gen sales roles will increase is based on the magnitude of the changes our customers face. No segment is immune, every sector, every market, every business will be impacted by the transformation. As a result, the number of organizations/people needing help will be far greater than what we see now.

In short, we will see a renaissance–a rebirth–of selling. It will be very different from what it is now, and all that we have traditionally done (perhaps amplified with new buzzwords and technology) will be insufficient.

What does that rebirth look like, what does it mean for sales jobs and what we do? I don’t know–I have some speculative thoughts, all very incomplete. But I’ll cover these in Part 2 of this post.

But as I came upon this revelation (perhaps, I’ve just been slow to recognize it), I became tremendously excited about the future of our profession. Both the challenge of figuring it out, and the prospect of the job opportunities, and growth within the profession are fantastic!

I can’t imagine anything more exciting!

Cybersecurity is something that is on everyone’s minds these days. From the risks of potential hackers to phishing schemes, we’re always wondering what new threat will come to the surface. In addition to these problems, website owners have their own worries about security as well.

Any website owner should take steps to ensure the security of their website, and small business owners are no different. Especially if you’re in the work of eCommerce, keeping your customer’s and business’s data protected is critical. You can bolster your website security in many ways, but one of the core aspects you can focus on is understanding the difference between HTTP and HTTPS.

What Are HTTP and HTTPS?

You’ve probably heard of HTTP before. It’s that thing that comes before a URL when you’re browsing the internet. What you might not know is just what it does. In short, HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It’s a system for transmitting and receiving information through the internet. Because we have HTTP in place, browsers can connect to servers, allowing for everyone to access webpages. You couldn’t access Twitter or look up the news without it.

You’ve also probably encountered HTTPS before, though you just might have wondered what the S means before getting back to work. Even if you haven’t noticed that the S was there, you’ve probably come across some indication in your web browser that the site you’re on is HTTPS. Most browsers add an extra icon or color to the URL bar to indicate when HTTPS is in place.

That little icon tends to be some form of a lock, which shows a very straightforward message: the site you’re on is secure. The S stands for just that, indicating that any data transferred over the site will be much safer than it would be on one that was just HTTP. This is because HTTP doesn’t encrypt data, while HTTPS does.

The encryption happens thanks to an SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate, allowing for only permitted parties to access data. When you get into the technical details, the use of public and private keys allows the access point and server to authenticate with each other before the exchange of any information.

In short, HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, which is a good thing for any website.

Why You Should Use HTTPS for Your Small Business Website

In the past, most websites only used HTTP. This still applies to today, but more and more websites are making the switch over to HTTPS. Part of this comes from greater awareness of cybersecurity, while a lot of the influence also stems from Google. Whether you’ve just started your small business website or have been around for a while, you should consider HTTPS.

1. Security

This may sound obvious, but having a website with HTTPS will make it more secure. In fact, if you work with eCommerce, having HTTPS isn’t an option. Your website is going to work with sensitive information, like your customer’s credit card information. If you leave that unencrypted, you’re going to have very unhappy customers on your hands. Some buyers may even back out of a transaction if they noticed your website isn’t secure.

Even without eCommerce, you should still have HTTPS. Any information transferred over your site, even if it’s not high-risk data like payment information, can still create risks if left unsecure. An intruder may be able to tamper with communications and inject malware into browsing visitors. HTTP leaves your site open to these attacks.

And, lastly, having a secure site makes your visitors feel comfortable. When you’re showing that you have their online security in mind, you become trustworthy. The use of security seals can also help to increase conversion rates. Anything that gives your visitors a better browsing experience is something all small business owners should consider.

2. SEO

We’ve talked about Search Engine Optimization before, which helps your site have better search engine rankings. Google’s trends lead much of SEO best practices, and one of those is the preference for sites that use HTTPS. The security benefits are the driving factors for this algorithm, which means integrating HTTPS can give your business an edge.

HTTPS doesn’t carry as much weight as some of the other components in SEO, but it’s still important. If you and a competitor are roughly equal in terms of all other SEO elements, Google will favor the site that has security over one with just regular HTTP. Anything that boosts your rankings is worthwhile.

3. The Declining Trend of HTTP

It’s SEO algorithms aren’t the only place that Google is prioritizing security. A recent change to Google Chrome is in how it displays secure site information. Instead of just putting a security logo in the URL bar, Chrome will actively let users know when they’re entering an unsecure site.

From Google’s end, this is because they want to make secure webpages the norm, rather than an option. For you as a business owner, that notification could lead to visitors leaving your site, which isn’t very appealing. Switching your site to HTTPS can prevent this issue altogether.

As cybersecurity awareness increases, so does the need for providing a safe web experience. To make the most out of your small business website, you should take the steps to use HTTPS, regardless of whether you conduct eCommerce or not. If you can’t afford to integrate more complex security features to your site, this is the most basic step you can take.

For more ways to help your small business, look forward to the next post in our series on video campaigns!

• Voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft's Cortana, are pegged to trigger a widespread transformation across the retail industry in the years to come.
• The current interest in, and adoption of, voice assistants for commerce is being driven by recent technological breakthroughs, advantages of the tech over existing channels, and the development of voice apps.
• As consumer demand for voice technology mounts, brands offering this functionality throughout the entire customer journey stand to gain in three key ways.

Not too long ago, if your friend had a smart speaker like Amazon’s Alexa or Google's Assistant in their living room, it seemed like a rare novelty. Within a matter of months, however, smart speakers have started becoming household staples — and they’re still only at a fraction of their growth potential.

One of the biggest drivers of adoption has been increased functionality. Smart speakers aren’t just changing the music and turning on the lights; they’re helping consumers find new products and make purchases — and they’re quickly becoming a preferred method of shopping.

In fact, nearly a quarter of consumers globally already prefer using a voice assistant over going to a company website or mobile app to shop. This share will jump to 40% by 2021, according to Capgemini.

Consumers are on board with the prompt, convenient nature of shopping with smart speakers — and brands who join them stand to reap massive rewards. The Voice in Retail Report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider’s premium research service, highlights the value voice brings to the shopping funnel and how retailers can implement it throughout the customer journey.

Here are three ways brands can capture consumers with voice technology:

• Driving product purchases: Voice assistants make spending faster and easier when consumers are unable to use their hands. The ability to make a purchase on any channel and the addition of personalized, intelligent elements to the shopping experience are simplifying the transition from product discovery to product purchase.
• Heightening customer loyalty: Brands can leverage voice assistants in the post-purchase phase to track delivery status, automate part of the return process, interact with customer service, offer feedback, and collect consumer behavioral and transactional data.
• Shifting consumers’ spending behaviors: Smart device ownership has a snowball effect, so as the smart device ecosystem reaches the mainstream, consumers will flock to connected cars, smart home devices and appliances, and connected virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR) headsets.

Want to Learn More?

Shoppers are interested in using voice assistants for every stage of the customer journey, from initial product search and discovery to post-purchase customer service and delivery status. And retailers that take advantage of consumers’ desire to leverage voice will be in a stronger position to heighten customer engagement, increase conversion times, drive sales, and boost operational efficiency.

The Voice in Retail Report from Business Insider Intelligence examines the trends driving the adoption of voice commerce, details the role of voice throughout the customer shopping journey, outlines how brands can benefit from implementing voice in their strategies, and explores what's ahead for the technology in retail.

 

 

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With 2019 rapidly approaching, what might next year have in store for software companies across sales, HR, marketing, corporate development and more? OpenView’s experts explain their predictions for the upcoming year.

Take a look and weigh in with your own predictions by tweeting to @OpenViewVenture with the hashtag #2019SaaStrends.

Even Enterprise Companies Will Adopt Product Led Strategies

Liz Cain, Partner

The way we engage with buyers is changing…fast. We’re on the verge of the next evolution where the best products will actually sell themselves – think Slack, Atlassian, Dropbox and Expensify. But “product led” does not mean “product only” and even traditional enterprise companies are looking for ways to de-labor the sales process to meet the demands of today’s buyers.

In order to stay relevant and compete in 2019, forward-thinking sales leaders will start incorporating product led ideas into everything they do. Where will you see it first?

1. Leveraging product data to identify the right prospects and customers for sales teams to spend time on. This strategy will effectively integrate product usage data with existing firmographic information to prioritize leads/customers and ensure sales reps are spending time on the right deals.
2. Elimination of manual processes. From lead enrichment to cadence tools to appointment scheduling, the sales tech stack keeps growing. The key is to eliminate repetitive manual work and free the sales team’s time up to work on higher value tasks.

Product and Engineering Teams Will (Finally) Become Data-Driven

Kyle Poyar, Senior Director of Market Strategy

With the adoption of CRM, we began to measure everything our sales teams did. We now expect sales leaders to be grilled about even the minutiae of their team’s performance: ramp times, quota attainment, deal velocity, pipeline by opportunity stage, the list goes on. As marketing automation platforms took off, we started doing the same thing with marketing. The trend towards metrics also holds true for customer support (metrics: handle time, time to first response, customer satisfaction) and finance (metrics: gross margins, COGS, net margins).

Product and engineering is one of the largest expenses for SaaS companies (Atlassian alone puts half of their revenue into R&D!), yet they’re usually the least data-driven functions. Product managers are too reliant on anecdotes and intuition when prioritizing their roadmap. Engineering managers default to “story points” (about as quantitative as it sounds) or gut feel to manage their teams. The result is that it’s extremely difficult to predict the time, cost, adoption and ROI associated with building out a new product or feature.

That’s finally changing. Solutions like Pendo (raised a $50M Series D in September), Intercom (raised a $125M round in May), Appcues (raised a $10M Series A in August), and Aptrinsic (recently acquired by Gainsight) make it easier than ever to analyze user activity within a product, drive feature adoption and capture in-app feedback. Meanwhile, solutions like GitPrime (full discretion: OpenView led their Series A in April) enable engineering organizations to collect concrete data about things like team velocity, how much of their team’s work goes to technical debt and individual performance.

Expect to start measuring your product and engineering performance in 2019. After all, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

Brand Takes Center Stage

Ashley Minogue, Director of Growth

Every single year competition heightens. 2018 was no different. SaaS companies report having over 9 competitors on average. The past few years this heightened competition has led to increasing demand gen budgets. Companies poured more and more dollars into paid channels to acquire as many leads as possible. Well, we are starting to see the pendulum shift. In 2019, we will see more companies investing in their brand (as opposed to just direct lead generation) to break through the noise and create a groundswell among their user base. Companies recognize they will not win by just having the first spot in the search results or by creating a feature war with competition. Prospects want to know what companies stand for as a brand. At this point, a great product is table stakes. A great brand is a differentiator.

To build brand awareness and create a community, there will be a push for more authentic and value-add communication. We will continue to see an investment in podcasts and events that bring together prospects and customers. There will also be even more emphasis on video across all channels including websites, emails and social to have a more human connection.

Companies Double Down on Pricing Successes

Kyle Poyar, Senior Director of Market Strategy

At the end of last year, I predicted that companies would finally wake up to the importance of pricing. Well, it sure happened. Nearly two-in-three SaaS companies changed their pricing, according to data from over 400 companies who participated in our 2018 Expansion SaaS Benchmarks survey. For companies that did change their pricing, these changes had a substantial positive impact on revenue growth. Two-in-five reported a 25% or higher increase in ARR just as a result of the pricing change. Only 2% said the pricing change decreased their ARR.

So what’s next? As they would with any other successful initiative, companies will double down on what’s working. For later stage companies, they’ll look to hire someone solely dedicated to pricing and packaging strategy. Others will put more resources into monitoring pricing and implementing changes.

Here’s one idea that any company can implement in 2019: create a pricing committee. This committee, which could also be called a Product/GTM committee, should be cross-functional and include key people across departments (Product, Finance, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success). They should meet at least quarterly (my preference would be monthly) to review pricing KPIs, monitor the competitive landscape and make pricing decisions.

The Product Led Growth Index Will Outperform the Market

Sean Fanning, Corporate Development Manager

Earlier this year we crunched the numbers and found companies that implement product led growth (PLG) strategies are growing faster, generating higher gross margins and realizing a greater “Rule of 40” (sum of growth and EBITDA margin) than other public SaaS companies. Public market investors have realized that not all SaaS revenue is created equal – public product led growth businesses trade at higher revenue multiples (valuations) than their peers investing in traditional sales and marketing strategies.

Public PLG businesses grow much more efficiently than their peers as the ease of product use allows for lean customer success organizations, virality contributes to lower cost of acquisition and goodwill they build with their users makes the products extremely sticky. All of these factors coalesce, enabling PLG businesses to acquire and expand revenue more rapidly. Take Box and Dropbox, for example. Both were founded in the mid 2000s and reached scale quickly. But Dropbox, which pursued a freemium, product led growth strategy, has clearly won the file sharing war. The company generates double Box’s revenue, spends a lower share of their revenue on sales and marketing and consequently trades for a far higher revenue multiple.

At OpenView, we believe businesses with PLG strategies will feature prominently among top performers in the software landscape. With the expectation that public market volatility will continue into 2019, investors will search for growth assets that deliver strong permission to believe in continued growth and market leadership. We’re certain that the valuation gap between public product led growth businesses and the rest of the public SaaS landscape will continue to widen as PLG businesses become coveted assets. 2019 will be a breakout year for PLG stocks, and we’ll continue to update our product led growth index to visualize the outsized performance versus other public SaaS companies.

Startups Proactively Invest in Customer Success

Ashley Minogue, Director of Growth

We all know it’s more efficient to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one. However, all too often start-ups don’t invest in customer success until churn becomes a poignant issue. In 2019, we will see more early stage companies recognize that customer success is the backbone of their business and invest in building out their customer success teams proactively. This is imperative in the product led era. More and more companies are adopting PLG strategies such as empowering self-service sign-up and delaboring their sales process. Customer success plays an increasingly important role in ensuring customers are truly adopting the product and accelerating their growth.

A Demand for Growth-Oriented Talent

Sarah Duffy, Director of Talent

Given the rise in successful product led growth companies, an emerging trend we have seen is the demand for growth-related talent. We’ve seen brand new roles popping up across product, marketing, customer success and beyond. Because this is a new “trend,” the candidates that we’ve seen be successful in these roles within our portfolio aren’t always the most tenured in terms of total years of experience. We’re also finding that in order to uncover the right growth candidates, hiring managers are having to look beyond ideal titles and pedigrees. For example, if you’re hiring a growth leader for a B2B SMB SaaS company, you may have more success looking at talent coming from a high growth B2C e-comm backgrounds.

We want to hear from you! Tell us your own predictions by tweeting to @OpenViewVenture with the hashtag #2019SaaStrends.

The post The SaaS Trends You Need to Know for 2019 appeared first on OpenView Labs.

There’s nothing more important than sales when it comes to growing your business. However, it’s not enough to just manually track leads.

For sales to be truly effective, you need organization, and you need processes. Processes are one-stop shops that every member of your sales team can follow so there’s no confusion about who needs to know what.

This is where sales pipeline management comes in.

From leads to offers and new customers, successful sales pipeline management doesn’t just help your sales team. It also helps you increase your revenue by 15% more than what you’d get without an efficient sales pipeline flow.

And since Excel sheets and manual lead qualifying won’t get your sales team very far, we’ll take you through the process of setting up a sales pipeline flow with the help of the two most popular CRMs: Salesflare and Pipedrive.

Let’s learn how you can make your pipeline process work for you, and turn those leads into customers faster than you can say “revenue growth.”

Overview of pipeline stages in Salesflare and Pipedrive

In the beginning, you’ll get a generic sales pipeline setup.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A4KDt7NE7E , Salesflare

That setup consists of a few stages.

The first stage in the process is usually “Lead.” After that, depending on your team’s success, the lead can be contacted and qualified, offered a deal, and won. If either of the previous stages weren’t successful, the lead won’t count towards ‘won,’ but instead, it’ll be added to ‘lost.’

Source: https://support.pipedrive.com/hc/en-us/articles/207459195-How-To-videos-A-Pretty-Good-Overview-of-Pipedrive#C3 , Pipedrive

Pipedrive uses different naming conventions, but the stages are similar in their meaning. With both, you can adapt and customize so the CRM fits your sales process.

If you don’t have a sales process already, a good tactic is to make the naming conventions action-oriented.

So instead of using words such as: New, Opportunity, Qualified, you can use more actionable terms such as: Book Meeting, Sent Pricing, etc. This will make the entire process easier on your sales team, as it’ll be clear what needs to be done to progress to the next stage.

Both CRMs operate in the same way, and the goal is to streamline the process so much that your sales team can easily do their work, while the CRM aggregates the necessary data.

Ultimately, having a sales pipeline flow will help you access information such as:

• Number of deals in your pipeline
• Average size of a deal
• Close (won) ratio
• Sales velocity

These are all metrics necessary for the growth of your business, so having them on hand when you’re ready to review progress and improve can go a long way.

Stage 1: Lead / Idea

Again, depending on the CRM you’re using, your sales pipeline names may change. You can also change them yourself, as it’s much better to add action right into the beginning.

Differentiate between marketing leads, and sales leads. In marketing, there are two parts of the lead generation process:

1) Lead generation itself, where leads are generated through a variety of sources (from advertising to direct enquiries from leads). The goal here is getting contact information.

2) Lead nurturing. Leads are typically nurtured with automated marketing efforts. They’re then qualified according to their responsiveness, and if appropriate, contact info is forwarded to sales for a follow-up.

This is where we get sales leads.

And once the leads have entered the sales pipeline, the goal is to move them forward to the next stage (contacted leads).

For this, you can set up a mandatory “to be contacted” action task, or use that task for the sales pipeline stage name.

Stage 1 mostly serves as an aggregator of different leads who have to be contacted. Depending on the information available for each person, sales team can define who should contact whom.

Stage 2: Contact Made / Contacted

Our suggestion for this stage is for the naming convention to be named after the action task which should be performed. This automatically improves the likelihood of the lead progressing through the pipeline.

In this case, you can opt for “Define needs” as the stage name.

At this stage, your sales team should:

• Verify that the lead matches key targeting criteria
• Verify the lead’s likelihood to buy

Including this process into your sales pipeline flow significantly cuts back on wasted time, as it makes sure that the leads are sales-ready. This may not seem like a problem, but keep in mind that on average, only 27% of B2B leads sales teams get are sales-ready. The rest are, to put it colloquially, a dead end.

And having a sales pipeline flow will help you establish that right from the beginning.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A4KDt7NE7E , Salesflare

Once that is verified, you can just drag and drop the account towards the next stage.

Stage 3: Needs discovered / Qualified

Again, naming conventions vary, and typically your stages are named after the tasks you’ve already done.

However, to really proactively advance the lead through the sales process, it’s much better to name stages after actions that should be taken.

In this case, the necessary action would be: “Send a proposal,” “Schedule a demo,” or similar.

In order to qualify leads and make sure that they are ready for your offer, you can use the BANT criteria to define:

• Budget (Does the lead have a budget, and what is their estimate?)
• Authority (Does the lead have the permission to make a deal with you, or should you contact someone else?)
• Need (Does the lead have a need your product can satisfy?)
• Timeline (Is there a definite timeline?)

If the lead satisfies all four criteria, you can proceed onto the next stage. If they don’t satisfy the Authority criteria, they’re not the real lead. You can either contact someone else (if the other criteria is satisfied), or remove them from the sales pipeline.

The goal in this stage is to spend time where it makes the most sense.

On average, only 13% of leads convert into opportunities, and this can take 84 days, but with a sales pipeline flow that’s dynamic and works with your sales team to advance your prospects towards the next stage until they’ve become customers, you can do it sooner.

Once the leads have been qualified and their needs have been discovered, it’s time for them to advance to the next stage.

Stage 4: Proposal made

Once your team is sure the lead is qualified, your flow should make it natural to progress towards proposals or offers.

Depending on your industry, this can mean a lead demoing your software, or simply approaching them with pricing customized to fit their needs.

The key to successful proposals is personalization.

If a customer approached your sales team with an accurate description of their needs, budget and a timeframe within which they’re ready to commit to your solution, they’ve already given you a lot of information about their particular case.

Your offer should reflect their unique needs.

Communication is key in Stage 4, so it’s important that your proposal shows your sales representative’s understanding of the lead’s unique situation.

When assembling a proposal, make sure all aspects of the lead’s needs are covered and addressed. Even though this has been addressed earlier in the sales process, it’s important to remind the lead of the benefits in order to successfully close a deal.

This is where you can also provide social proof, such as customer testimonials to solidify the lead’s decision.

Again, the proposal stage of the sales pipeline should come as a natural close to previous communication. It should reflect everything previously discussed, as well as clear definition of how your product addresses your lead’s challenges.

Stage 5: In negotiation

This is where Salesflare and Pipedrive’s custom sales pipeline templates differ.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A4KDt7NE7E ; Salesflare

Salesflare’s default Stage 5 is “Deal won” or “Deal lost.”

In reality, your sales process is more likely to reflect that of Pipedrive’s default setup:

Source: https://support.pipedrive.com/hc/en-us/articles/207459195-How-To-videos-A-Pretty-Good-Overview-of-Pipedrive#C3 ; Pipedrive

When you’ve presented your proposal or offer to the lead you’re trying to convert, it’s important not to give up if the lead still has a need for your product.

The reason behind the most common negotiations is the budget. If you have leeway for accommodating the lead’s needs, negotiate a solution with them.

However, if you’re negotiating because the lead has been improperly qualified, it’s best to either revert them to ‘Contact made’ stage where their needs can be assessed again, or drop them as a prospect entirely.

You can also make a separate stage in your sales pipeline flow for this kind of leads.

Overview of sales pipeline flow stages

Whichever CRM you choose, it should fit the workflow your sales team already has.

If your sales team hasn’t established operation processes yet, it would be good to do it as soon as possible.

The main benefit of having clearly outlined sales processes is in streamlining sales, and improving their speed.

While we’ve already discussed the fact that only 13% of leads convert into opportunities (and it can take 84 days), you can cut back on that time with proper sales pipeline management techniques and software.

However, keep in mind that a sales pipeline flow has to be accompanied by a high degree of personalization.

Your team’s no longer wasting time on managing the process (risking rushed sales, improper lead qualification, and other problems which can arise), which is why that time should go towards improving communication with leads and successfully advancing them through the pipeline.

That’s why official guidelines (such as proposal guidelines) are a good addition to your CRM.

The technicalities of setting up a sales pipeline flow

In addition to setting up the main stages, there are a lot of options that come with CRM like Salesflare and Pipedrive.

Again, a CRM can be your sales team’s communication and process hub. You should be able to access all the necessary information about your leads, deals and the progression of each stage within the software.

Source: https://support.pipedrive.com/hc/en-us/articles/207459195-How-To-videos-A-Pretty-Good-Overview-of-Pipedrive#C3 , Pipedrive

In Pipedrive (and it’s similar in Salesflare), you can change the names, rearrange your pipeline items, or create a new pipeline by accessing settings.

The process is fairly straightforward, so make sure that the sales pipeline flow you’ve made agrees with the flow your team is already using.

In addition to customizing sales stage, you can also customize deal fields (information on your leads).

Source: https://support.pipedrive.com/hc/en-us/articles/207459195-How-To-videos-A-Pretty-Good-Overview-of-Pipedrive#C3 ; Pipedrive

In Pipedrive, you can add different information about your leads, such as title, owner, value, etc.

However, the most important fields are:

• Deal created
• Update time
• Last stage change
• Next activity date
• Last activity date
• Won time
• Lost time
• Deal closed on
• Lost reason
• Expected close date

While the rest are purely administrative (but can still help your sales team), this information can help you measure the success of your deals.

It’s good to approach setting up a sales pipeline flow with an estimate of how long your sales team should pursue a deal. For example, you can opt for 84 days (which are the average), although it’s best to select a figure that reflects your company’s experience.

Lost reason is another field to keep an eye on. If the lost reason isn’t clear to the sales representative, it’s good to implement surveys where the leads can state their reason.

Keep an eye out for patterns and trends, as well. To use a sales pipeline flow to its maximum, it’s important to analyze data you’re storing.

How can a sales pipeline flow help my sales team?

By keeping the process organized enough for your sales team to focus on more important tasks.

Sales in 2019 will require even more personalization and attention to leads, even before they’ve become customers.

Having a sales pipeline flow can also help you retain customers. The post-sale stages are the ones that help with reducing churn, and increasing customer satisfaction. But retention tactics can be put into motion as soon as the lead is qualified.

With personalized communication that comes from storing necessary data, warming up the leads and converting them into customers who are happy to be doing business with you isn’t hard at all.

After all, that’s what sales pipelines are there for. They help your sales team do what they do best: sell.

Marketers around the globe have issues aligning with their sales teams to create a true partnership. But there are ways to ease the burden and create a working partnership that creates a better customer experience. At our recent Marketing Nation Engage event, marketing leaders gathered to learn. One of the most significant opportunities we found was in creating a sales and marketing partnership to better facilitate alignment.

Here’s what marketing leaders find most challenging about sales and marketing alignment and what they recommend to solve these problems:

Accountability

Being a marketer can be tough. Not only does marketing have a full plate of responsibilities to fulfill, but they’re also expected to keep sales in a happy place. Marketing often generates lots of high-quality leads, only for them not to be followed up on by sales.

Holding sales accountable starts with set responsibilities, education, and SLAs. If it remains an issue, marketing can run reports on sales follow up, and bring it to the attention of sales leaders if necessary. Another way to get sales to pull their weight is to frame alignment in terms of things they want: better leads, a smoother process, and more deals closed.

Lead Definition

Another problem marketing teams face is generating leads only to turn around and hear sales claim that they would have gotten them anyway, greatly undermining the department’s efforts and credibility. This problem stems from a common lack of distinction from sales and marketing leads. Does sales know what an MQL is, and do they care? You have to get stakeholders together regarding the implementation of technology and establish what each team will own. Everyone must buy in, from the CFO to the CRO, head of sales, and CMO.

There is also a big change when you can move from lead generation to account-based marketing. Teams can unlock success by working together upfront, crafting a joint strategy for target accounts, and figuring out how marketing can help sales get into them. Practicing ABM forces sales and marketing to be aligned if they want to achieve results.

Lead Nurture

Marketing needs to drive lead nurture, not just single activity interactions. It can be tempting to hand over leads to sales too early after a single engagement or form-fill. Scoring leads helps prevent premature handoff by assessing readiness and providing prioritization. Take the time to learn and evaluate prospects and their engagements to that sales has the proper insights and the right content to reach out. Ultimately, until leads are sufficiently qualified, sales will not be interested. Having sales and marketing sitting next to each other helps facilitate these communications. 

Measurement

If you can’t define and quantify how marketing helps sales, your contributions are meaningless. Marketing success should be measured based on revenue and pipeline attribution, which will come from closed deals from inbound leads. To get there, both teams must be upfront about what has worked (and what hasn’t), along with what needs to be followed up on by the sales team.

Inputting Data

Sales buy-in can be an issue because they don’t always get automation. They’re not always involved in data inputting and often have limited experience. For instance, getting sales to update Salesforce can be a considerable challenge. If done properly, Salesforce data can illuminate marketing contributions to sales. To get ahead of this, you need to educate early on and come up with quick wins for them. For instance, hold weekly meetings with Salesforce dashboards, giving reps the chance to run through who their leads are, how they’ve communicated with them, and when meetings are occurring.

Sales + Marketing Alignment = Partnership = Success

Keeping sales happy can make or break the success of marketing automation, and thus the effectiveness of marketing, so getting to a state of alignment is crucial. Only when sales and marketing are on the same page can you maximize customer-centricity, creating a seamless journey from lead to customer.

The post Solving Sales & Marketing Alignment Challenges with Insights from 80 Marketing Leaders appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Whether you work in insurance, financial services, retail or ecommerce, the holiday selling season has arrived. Consumers are looking to fill stockings, organizations are looking to set their budgets for Q1 and professionals have an eye out for the tools and technology that will give them an edge in 2019.

Small and midsized businesses can be opportunistic and capitalize on the increased sales possibilities during this magical time of year by taking a long, hard look at their CRM strategy and determining whether or not they are properly positioning themselves for success with the information they have at their disposal.

Not every customer journey is linear and not every piece of customer information captured in November and December will lead to sales that are closed before the New Year. However, if you keep these 12 tips for CRM holiday success in mind, your small business will be ready to deliver a superior experience for current and prospective customers that leads to meaningful sales growth during the holiday season—and into 2019:

• Start with the basics. Just because you didn’t formally outline your customer conversion and retention plan in Q1 doesn’t mean it’s too late now. Make it a priority to sit down now and evaluate what your customers are looking for, what their pain points are and how they prefer to communicate with you. Your small business will significantly improve its chances for elevated holiday sales numbers if you just take the time to look at this baseline customer information, which should already be captured and stored in your CRM.
• The time for marketing automation has come. The best all-in-one small business CRMs will natively integrate advanced marketing automation technology that can help your business better understand and target prospective customers for sales this holiday season. For instance, asset tracking technology can help your marketing team understand whether or not a customer opened a specific email, PDF, or piece of collateral, how long they spent reading it and whether or not they then clicked through to other assets, your website, etc. All of this information can prove invaluable in providing a personalized (and optimized) customer experience that leads to sales that drive meaningful organizational growth.
• Tip the scales in your favor. It’s not cheating if your CRM offers predictive analytics technology that can help guide your team by offering suggested next steps along the path toward making a sale; in fact, it’s highly recommended!
• Understand what you already have. Sometimes it’s not about new tools, integrations, strategies or customer engagement features. Sometimes the most valuable CRM technology is the functionality that’s been staring you in the face the whole time—but haven’t been taking advantage of. Is your CRM clearly telling you that your customers prefer to be contacted via email, but your sales team often calls instead? Does your CRM have information about the challenges your customers are facing—which you might be able to help with—but you haven’t taken the time to make that connection? Take a fresh look at your CRM this holiday season to make sure the tools and information already available to you in your CRM are being utilized to help drive positive customer interactions that lead to sales.
• Dance with the one who brought you. Selling additional products and services through to your existing customers is an essential component of almost any small business’ growth plan. An effective CRM tool (and plan) will provide an opportunity to capture data relating to your customers’ additional needs and interests outside of the specific product or service you already provide. Maybe you can meet those needs, maybe you can develop a new product to meet those needs next year at this time, or maybe you can partner with another business to provide a specific service your customers are looking for. Find ways to deepen your relationship with your existing customer base and sales won’t be far behind.
• Speak it into existence. Voice-activated technology has been making it’s way into our lives over the past few years and today’s more forward-thinking CRMs have truly capitalized on this movement to make accessing customer information faster and easier than ever before. When you’re pressed for time during the holidays and need to begin pulling up records of previous interactions with current and prospective customers, the right CRM will allow you to simply ask for that information and voilà, there it is right in front of you! Making a habit of leaning on your CRMs voice-activated capabilities can save you and your customer service/sales teams valuable time at a point in the year when time is of the essence.
• Pull in the same direction. While your CRM is blurring the lines between sales, marketing and customer service technology, use this as an opportunity to open up the lines of communication between the different roles in your business. A rising tide floats all boats and your CRM has the ability to make everyone better at their job if they are pulling in the same direction, communicating and working together to improve the customer experience.
• Get out there. Take your CRM for a spin. Today’s CRM tools have mobile capabilities to help improve customer engagement and close sales in the field. And, the best ones go a step further by identifying and featuring the pieces of your CRM that are most valuable while on the go.
• School is in session. The best CRM technology in the world won’t help your business if your team doesn’t understand how to utilize its key features. Invest in education this holiday season. It may only take an hour or two to ensure your employees understand all the great features they have at their fingertips.
• Find the right fit. Are you a business of 3? 25? 150? 500? Any of these are considered small businesses, but depending on where your business falls within this range your CRM needs may be very different. Take a fresh look at your CRM tool and evaluate if you need and/or are using the key features they tout. For many CRM providers, the goal is to develop and highlight the features that are most valuable to their biggest customers—those in the enterprise space. But don’t fret! There are some great small business focused CRM tools on the market this holiday season that squarely focus on needs for businesses your size.
• Your CRM is your basecamp. The right CRM tool should serve as a hub between customer service, sales and marketing. There are all kinds of third-party integrations and tools available on the market today and the best small business CRM’s take advantage of these tools by seamlessly integrating them into their tool so everything is accessible directly from your CRM dashboard.
• Look ahead to next year. No CRM strategy is complete without a forward-thinking component. You won’t be able to close every sale this holiday season but you can capture invaluable customer data to help your sales team better engage with current and prospective customers heading into the New Year. Improving the customer journey in a way that leads to meaningful organizational growth is a long-term game. Prioritize maximizing the customer information you are able to capture this holiday season and set your small business up for success in 2019.

Originally published here.

Let me start with this quote, “If you don’t ask, the answer is always no” – Nora Roberts

Now let me explain…

Statistics from this survey help us really think about why we should be incorporating referral marketing into our strategies. 68% of consumers only left local businesses a review when asked, with 74% having been asked for their feedback. While the survey specifically looks at consumers and reviews, it is applicable to other areas as well: People are more likely to do something when asked.

Additionally, according to a sales study by Marc WayShack, 57.9% of salespeople said they ask for fewer than one referral per month, while 40.4% report rarely asking! Only 18.6% ask every customer they interact with.

You might have referral program banners, promotions, FAQs, email campaigns, and still struggle with getting people to refer. You might even have your customer support team promoting the referral program or other influencer marketing strategies. But they still might not ask, so why don’t people ask?

It’s important to remember that asking for a referral can be defined as sales, opinions, marketing, and copywriting. And coming across too salesy can make or break your referrals. Therefore, learning how to integrate your questions with your brand style is vital.

It’s important to know how to ask questions, but more importantly, how to ask the right questions. To begin, let’s review the most basic questions that every salesperson would ask to get the sale, starting with your business itself.

Ask yourself these questions to come up with a strategy

Before you ask your customers for referrals, you need to know how to guide your conversation in your favor. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Who is the target market and when could they require your products?
• What forms of promotion have been effective/ineffective before and why?
• What are the best/worst forms of promotion that have been successful/unsuccessful?
• What promotion methods have your competitors used that you found successful/unsuccessful?
• What are the motivating and influencing factors that generate the most conversion?

Take a look at the first question. When interacting with a customer or potential customer, you might notice certain types of personas being revealed.

Maybe someone who decides based on incentives instead of the product itself needs more motivation or a referral reward to help make that decision. Understanding how they came to your site can help you tag these potential customers if they did not make a purchase even after they clicked on your promo ads.

Think about your product(s) or service(s)

Success is built upon and duplicated. Not all product or service features are going to be groundbreaking, but once you identify what drives the most conversion, run with it. Ask yourself:

• What are the current competitive products in the market and why?
• What type of services or products do your current customers prefer?
• What are the features your customers love the most and why?
• What objections have you had from previous customers?
• What inquiries are the most common?
• What challenges are your customers facing with your current product and how can you improve this issue?

Isolating key features and turning them into benefits helps people understand the intangibles.

Interesting Word of Mouth (WOM) referral example

Let’s take a look at Apple and how we can utilize their sales method to create more referrals.

Whenever Apple does a Keynote, they lure you with their features and benefits. They review the price and when the product will be available. If the product is available for pre-order or ready to purchase, word of mouth goes wild. Whether you’re a SaaS, eCommerce, b2b, or b2c, you most likely take the normal product updates strategy by posting it on your blog. Why not entice and incentivize your customers even more?

If you think about it, each product update or new product you might launch is a way to create customer loyalty and increase referrals. If the product is a one-off purchase, why not create a campaign that provides customers with a sneak peek?

Other possible strategies include:

“Share this with others if you like this product!”

Or

“$49 one-time deal for our loyal customers” or “Refer 3 friends and this can be yours for free.”

Ask yourself how your customers can benefit from your product or services and watch the number of opportunities to ask for referrals increase.

Increasing your odds for more referrals with your questions

Let’s take a look at a typical upsell pitch from McDonald’s: “Would you like fries with that?” This pitch made them successful, and they later integrated “Would you like to Super Size?” as well as others. However, if customers listen to the words carefully, you only have a 50/50 chance of getting an upsell. While 50/50 is still better than none, there are better ways to ask and increase your chances for the win.

On our first how to ask for referrals article, we mentioned the “foot in the door” method described by two Stanford researchers, Jonathan Freedman, and Scott Fraser. Having your customer say yes is important. Some people call it the power of persuasion, but I call it simple marketing.

You can do this several ways:

“Is there anyone else you know that might want the same level of service?”

Maybe your customer support provided amazing support, and the customer was wowed by your service. You might be able to hit a home run and have them agree to answer ‘yes’ to your question. But then you might also get a “no” or “maybe” response. Giving them the chance to say yes is great; creating value for your customers and meaningful reason goes beyond the 50/50 percentile. Let’s talk about these two different approaches and how you can optimize referrals.

Differentiating between close-ended and open-ended questions

Closed-ended questions can be answered by a simple “yes” or “no,” while open-ended questions require more thought and often more than one word to answer.

Open-ended questions can help customers really understand and think about something before they answer. If your customers says no, that eliminates a workaround or any room for opportunity. The advantage is that you can use their response and obtain more information that can help them agree to something. If you strongly believe that your customer will say yes, then open-ended questions are the way to go.

Create Value: How to use close-ended questions the right way

You can ask close-ended questions, but only if you can guide your customers to say yes. The “Xerox Copy” aka The Copy Machine study conducted by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer looked at what would happen if someone was asked to cut in line at a busy Xerox store. They found that those who gave a reasoning behind their request (examples below) got their way 93% of the time, while those who gave no explanation only persuaded 60% successfully.

Here’s what happened:

1. Version 1 (request only): “Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine?”
2. Version 2 (request with a real reason): “Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”
3. Version 3 (request with a fake reason): “Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make copies?”

The results for each version:

• Version 1: 60% of people let the researcher skip ahead in line.
• Version 2: 94% of people let the researcher skip ahead in line.
• Version 3: 93% of people let the researcher skip ahead in line.

Obviously, you won’t be providing any fake reasons, but it goes to show that creating value and reasoning will help you achieve success when asking for referrals.

Examples of closed-ended value questions

Here are a few examples of closed-ended questions you’ve probably heard before. By adding in value, you can increase your chances of getting the response you want.

• “Did I provide great service for you today?” If you want to lead with this, you might want to remind them what you’ve helped them with before asking the question.
• “Is there anything else I can help you with?” This might create an obstacle since the question is more geared towards ending the conversation.
• “Know any friends that you think would also want to save 30% like you just did?” Reminding them of what deal they got might provide a higher success rate.

Examples of open-ended questions

Building relationships is how you will increase your number of loyal advocates. Open-ended questions will help you develop that relationship faster.

“What prompted you to buy or seek our services in the first place?”

This is possibly the first question that goes through your mind when you think about a customer. What specifically made him/her choose your company over the other companies? Asking this question tells you how effective your marketing strategies were at conveying your message.

“What one or two things do you think we did better than our competitors?”

While asking this question, you are trying to illustrate what differentiates you from other businesses. This question tends to make it difficult to get specifics; a good business owner will try to get as much information from customers as possible.

“What could we do better to meet your desired experience?”

This question intends to assure the customer on our dedication to serving them and makes them feel like they are part of the decision making.

“Have you ever referred us to other people, and if so, why?”

This will measure how honest your customer is with you about the services you offer and whether or not they like your product.

“What are some rewards you think we should offer you for referring our business?”

Rewarding your customer for the good job he/she has done through incentives motivates them. Offering discounts might convince them to buy more from you at a better price and keep them from buying from competitors.

“What is the proper time for a referral program?”

Usually, the best time for a referral is immediately after a sale, especially during holidays and special offers. The business owner will find the best response at this time

“How important are social media platforms in referral programs?”

The power of social media is recognized as a driving force behind a successful business. This is because many customers are connected to the Internet so marketing campaign messages are channeled to them easily.

“What is the significance of a referral program?”

The business owner and customer should both know why referral programs exist in the first place. A clear understanding on both sides make the program much easier and successful. Asking this question can also help provide insight from customers that might tell you how they feel about a program and how you can make it better.

These questions will lead you in convincing your customer or a referee to join your referral program.

With the “foot in the door” method, convincing them to say yes is pivotal and leads to them agreeing to your second request: asking for referrals. The previously mentioned Stanford study showed that 52.8% of the people complied with the second request. By not using close-ended questions, you create a higher chance of customers agreeing to ask for referrals.

Best practices when asking for referrals

Here are a few more best practices for increasing your conversion rate when asking for referrals:

• Guide the conversation and be personable. Avoid speaking robotically, as you might sound when using a teleprompter. When using open-ended questions, you can adjust your request using the information they told you.
• Suggest solutions. Listening is a great way to make your customer feel welcomed and provide an experience they remember positively.
• Take action. You’ll never get what you want if you don’t ask. “With just three referrals, you can potentially receive all the products you’ve just purchased for free—know anyone?”
• Support them. Providing them the tools to go into the world and share information easily is a great way to get things up and running. People don’t want to do things, or if they agree to do it, they might procrastinate if the steps are too difficult. Understand and identify the quickest and effective way your customers can refer others.

Regardless of who you ask or what you’re marketing, using the general methods discussed is a sure-fire way to increase your odds and increase referrals.

Successful content marketers put their audience’s informational needs before their own desire to drive sales. This blog uses CMI data to show why that’s a sound strategy.

You’ve just got home and you’re hungry. So you take a steak out of the freezer, and throw it into a hot pan.

The result, of course, won’t be what you hoped for.

Of course, most of us know you can’t transform an icy lump into a sizzling dinner without letting it thaw. But let’s be honest: we’ve all done something similar at some point in our lives. Cut a corner here and there. Played it fast and loose with fingers crossed. Pushed a little too hard to get an early result.

Like the the blackened lump of bloodied rump in your grill pan, it rarely ends well.

Sadly, today’s business climate fosters a lot of short-term thinking. With every eye on the current quarter’s results, there’s immense pressure to go for the quick win or the easy boost. Which means there’s less energy going into building sustained relationships with customers.

Which is a shame, since they’re the most profitable ones by far.

Fortunately, new research from the Content Marketing Institute puts some hard numbers on how longer-term thinking leads to greater success overall. Do you know 90% of the most successful content marketers put their audience’s informational needs ahead of their need to close that sale before month end… and in doing so, create the comfort and credibility that makes that sale more likely anyway? (Against just 56% of content marketers whose strategies weren’t quite up to scratch.)

In this blog we’ll explore a few similar statistics… and see how longer-term thinking can be nurtured. Let’s look at what matters, with these five steps to working for your customer instead of your calendar.

STEP 1: Ask yourself ONE simple question…

There’s one basic question to ask yourself when you’re aiming for sustained long-term success — and it’s really simple. That question is: whatever you’re doing, is it in the interest of the customer?

If you’re desperate to record that sale before month end, or your CEO needs you on the quarterly earnings call next week, you’re not acting in the interest of the customer. He doesn’t care when your month ends, or how many analysts follow your parent company’s stock price. He cares about finding the solution that solves his business pain, and partnering with a supplier he trusts. And it’s amazing that only a minority of content marketers answer that question by talking to actual customers.

74% used sales team feedback. 73% used website analytics. But only 42% engaged in deep discussions with customers.

The good news: answer “yes” to this question, and you’re almost certainly getting it right already.

When your prospect reads your blog, you don’t yet know who he is: popping up a discount voucher if he buys NOW is a turn-off for him and a waste of effort for you. If he enjoyed it, he might respond to a popup asking for his email. Going for the close won’t work then, either. But an invitation to download a PDF eGuide, or join a webinar, might intrigue him further.

STEP 2:… and ask it again at every milestone

Of course, you’ll recognize these waypoints as the customer journey. What’s surprisingly rare in content marketing is the understanding that what’s in the interest of the customer changes at every milestone.

In the CMI report, 81% of good content marketers prioritized delivering the right content to the right customer at the right time.

That’s why it’s important to keep asking that simple question, whenever your relationship with the customer moves along a notch. From cold suspect reading your blog, to the hot prospect joining your webinar, to the confirmed customer taking delivery of his first order. (And the myriad of mindsets in between.)

STEP 3: Document them in your content strategy

Even when you know what your customer’s thinking at each staging post on the customer journey, remember that others around you won’t. Or will have different ideas about it, even within your own marketing team. So Step 3 is to write them down — as a proper content marketing strategy that defines what your customer needs at every stage, so your team knows what to communicate, when.

81% of top marketers believe a documented marketing strategy makes it easier to determine what kinds of content to develop.

A useful way to build that strategy, by the way, is by using personas. Fleshed-out pictures of your ideal customer, with a name and a face that creates a vivid picture of your buyer in the minds of your marketing team. A persona makes it much easier to create content, because everyone can relate to that person as an individual.

STEP 4: Look back to look forward, with data

Of course none of this relies on guesswork. So Step 4 is to look around your organisation for effective data — gathered in actual customer interactions. The right technology is key.

56% of expert content marketers stated that technology gave them better insight into how content was performing.

What distinguishes top content marketers from average ones is that they use a variety of technologies to build a picture of their customer. Website and campaign analytics, qualitative written feedback and storytelling, CRM reports — all come together to produce real business insight. And at least 77% of in-the-know content marketers use it to inform whatever they create.

STEP 5: Pay as much attention to retention as acquisition

When you act in the long-term interests of the customer, you’re fostering greater retention — which is a much cheaper way to grow a customer base than simply the number of prospects. Gaining a new customer is hard; losing a customer once gained is often down to simple carelessness. Focussing on retention is a sign of a mature content marketing strategy.

One-third (33%) of expert content marketers rated their strategies as “mature”, against just 11% of those less sure of their expertise.

So with the basic question still in mind, don’t stop creating content once you’ve closed the sale. Providing your client with relevant and useful information and resources on an ongoing basis, helping his/her business to succeed and thrive, is a lot easier than creating content for a customer you don’t know yet.

Adding to the bottom line

A sustained customer relationship, that adds to your bottom line year after year, is the real quick win. Because the win repeats, again and again, with every weekly phone call and monthly order.

73% of top content marketers use it to strengthen relationships with existing customers.

Customer lifetime value — or CLV — is a vastly underrated metric. But in content marketing, it’s one that really matters. Every positive customer interaction adds to their comfort, your credibility, and the strength of your mutually profitable relationship.

TAKEOUTS

• Looking for short-term wins impedes long-term customer value
• One simple question gives you all you need to nurture the customer relationship
• The customer’s mindset changes at every milestone on the customer journey
• Top content marketers use technology to learn all they can about customer reactions… and use their findings to design their content strategies
• Using content marketing for retention can be even more useful than for acquisition

Find out how other top-ranking CMOs are setting their customers up for long-term content marketing success. Read The Future of Content Marketing: 10 interviews with leading CMOs on the trends they’re using to disrupt in 2019.

If you want to see the future of cruising, set sail aboard Celebrity Edge. The first new ship to debut for Celebrity Cruises (cruise.center/celebrity) in nearly a decade has more than lived up to its hype, earning substantial bragging rights as one of the most innovative ships in the world.

The problem with Celebrity Edge is that there is simply too much on-board innovation for me to write about here. Even the jogging track on this ship is worthy of mention (it spans several decks and wraps elegantly around the vessel).

ake the Magic Carpet: a tangerine-coloured structure on the starboard side of the vessel that can move vertically through 13 decks to become a tender platform, a swanky bar or a restaurant. There is nothing else like this at sea. I embarked a tender (or “launch” in Celebrity parlance) via the Magic Carpet on my preview cruise and was blown away by how effective this new feature is. Celebrity even created a wonderful tender embarkation space inside the vessel that includes its own bar. It’s a far cry from the exposed steel walls and unappealing technical areas that most ships march you through on your way to tender ashore.

hat innovation extends to the ship’s staterooms and suites. A full 81 per cent of all accommodations have balconies, and the majority of these offer Celebrity’s new Infinite Veranda: a partitioned floor-to-ceiling window that turns the entire room into an open-air balcony. It’s an innovation that Celebrity borrowed from the world of river cruising, and it helps give Celebrity Edge its distinctive look.

Standard step-out balconies are still offered in some categories, along with a handful of Oceanview and Inside staterooms. Of course, if you really want to go nuts you can book one of the ship’s two Iconic Suites that are 1,892 jaw-dropping square feet (176 square metres) spread over two levels. At the mid-range, my Sky Suite offered a great compromise between a full suite and a standard stateroom, plus nice perks that include access to The Retreat, a comfortable lounge and private deck space that includes its own pool, bar and loungers.

Public rooms are exceptional. Each bar and lounge offers its own distinctive personality, complete with unique bar menus that aren’t replicated anywhere else. Even better, nearly every public room onboard offers gorgeous views of the ocean. In a world where new ships tend to be very inward-facing, Celebrity Edge is a ship of light.

At the stern is EDEN, a three-storey show lounge, bar and restaurant concept full of sweeping floor-to-ceiling windows that also has the most bizarre entertainment at sea. Performers looking like cast members from Mad Max mingle with guests. One ran up to me and said, “What do you call yourself? I am Zoom!” before disappearing while acrobatic dancers performed to a slowed-down version of Coldplay’s Paradise. It’s odd, to be sure, but it is also highly original and entertaining, too. Be sure to try the custom cocktails here: one, The Veldt, even comes in a wooden box.

No ship is perfect, though. I found Celebrity Edge tough to navigate thanks to some open deck spaces that don’t have obvious access to stair towers and elevators, and a few indoor areas, like Guest Relations, that are hidden to the point of being overlooked. It’s OK once you get the hang of the layout but expect to spend some time wondering where you are.

Still, an awkward layout isn’t enough to dampen this ship’s charms. Although she sails to the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, make no mistake: Celebrity Edge is the true destination.
Happy cruising.

Visit portsandbows.com, sponsored by Expedia CruiseShipCenters, 1-800-707-7327, http://www.cruiseshipcenters.com, for daily updates on the latest cruise news, best deals and behind-the-scenes stories from the industry. You can also sign up for an email newsletter on the site for even more cruise information. Aaron Saunders may be contacted directly at portsandbowsaaron@gmail.com

Hiring the right employees can be tough. It’s no longer enough to see impressive work experience, awards, and educational backgrounds. Sticking only to technical skills and professional experience when interviewing potential employees neglects a major essential component of a good worker: emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and be aware of your emotions as well as the emotions and feelings of others. It allows you to handle relationships with empathy and rationale.

A survey conducted by CareerBuilder found that 75 percent of hiring managers value emotional intelligence over IQ, and as time goes on, its importance in the workplace will increase.

It can be difficult to gauge right away if someone is emotionally intelligent. They won’t outright tell you and it isn’t something you can guess about someone based on technical questions you ask them. A lot of the time, candidates prepare for interviews with common, generic questions they find on the internet.

It’s important to hire employees that harness emotional intelligence because it allows for handling tough situations in a calm and mature manner. Work can get super stressful and it’s imperative to have employees who can harness that energy into something positive.

When it comes down to it, how do you know that the people you’re hiring possess emotional intelligence? Here are three tips to make sure you do.

1. Conduct behavioral event interviews

Behavioral event interviews focus on how people act, think, and feel in a work situation rather than solely focusing on hard skills, experience, and what they might do in a situation. Its primary goal is to assess a person’s frame of mind when it comes to handling different situations, how they’d realistically behave, and if they’re able to accomplish tasks in a respectful, level-headed manner.

The best way to interview this way is to give your candidate action-based questions. Ask them to explain a specific situation where they faced pressure and hardship and focus on exactly how they handled it. What were they thinking when this was going on? How did they feel? How did their emotions and thought process guide them to solve the problem, if at all?

It’s important to assess whether or not this is a person who knows how to handle not only their own emotions but those of others as they’ll be working with many other employees who are different from themselves. Find out how they feel about working with others, not just under pressure, but in a normal everyday environment as well. While they explain their experiences, take note of how they talk about their coworkers and managers and how they respond to their thought and feelings.

It takes the main focus off of education, background, and experience and instead prioritizes action. It’s not that hard skills aren’t important, but when you hire for emotionally intelligent workers, you need to dig deeper than a standard interviewing process would.

2. Talk to references

It’s a waste to neglect the list of references on your candidates’ resumes. These are people who have worked with them directly and can give you a wealth of useful information about your potential employee.

While on the phone with references, ask them behavioral-event-specific questions much like you would your actual candidate. There are certain qualities you’ll want to assess when questioning them:

• If the candidate shows empathy, caring, and understanding for others
• How the candidate handles stressful, out-of-the-blue situations and if they adapt well
• How self-aware they are about their feeling, behaviors, and thoughts
• The amount of respect they show for those around them
• Their level of emotional awareness and maturity

Some examples of questions might look like this:

• Tell me about a time the candidate experienced a stressful situation or had a big project to complete. What was that like? How did they handle it?
• Explain a time when their opinion or thought process clashed with a coworker’s. How did that pan out? What did they do?
• Describe a time they had to complete a frustrating task or had a tough decision to make. How did they manage it?

These questions are similar to what you would ask your actual candidate during the interview. Using the same type of questions for references will give you a clearer idea of where your candidate stands because it’s unprepared for and, therefore, more honest in nature.

3. Ask follow-up questions

Interviews are all about asking questions and getting answers, but what’s important is to dig as deep as you can.

Let’s say you asked a potential employee about how they handled a tough situation. They’ll then tell you they did X, Y, and Z. Now that you know what they did, this is the time to find out why they did it. It’s all about the why.

Why did they choose to act a certain way? Why did they have the mindset or thought process they did? Why did they think that was the best route of action to take?

Focusing on why people do the things they do will end up telling you more about their emotional intelligence rather than what they did. Anyone can try to solve a difficult problem. Anyone can be put in a stressful situation at work. But when they act, why do they do it in that particular way? What exactly motivates their actions?

Over to you

When it comes to hiring new employees, what tactics will you use to gauge their emotional intelligence? It’s an essential skill to have in the workplace as it brings forth empathy, rational problem solving and understanding even under high pressure. Of course, there are other aspects of a person that qualify them as a worthwhile employee, but EI is one of the most important factors there are for a successful business. The more hiring that’s done to find emotionally intelligent people to work with, the better the outcome will be.

This is a preview of the Global Payments Landscape report from Business Insider Intelligence. Current subscribers can read the report  here.

• Noncash payments are on the rise worldwide.
• As new players emerge to capitalize on consumer appetite for digital payment methods, three mature markets — the UK, Australia, and Sweden — have become standouts for what a more cashless society could look like.
• The UK, Australia, and Sweden are transitioning to digital particularly well, and can serve as a roadmap for other mature markets seeking to overcome the legacy channel of cash.

Noncash payments have been gaining popularity around the world for the last decade. And though cash isn’t anywhere near dead, its global growth is slowing as consumers turn to emerging cashless alternatives.

But there are a few key markets - Australia, Sweden, and the UK - where annual noncash payments have already surpassed traditional cash transactions altogether — and they’re stong early indicators of what a truly cashless society could look like.

Why are digital payments on the rise?

The growing adoption of noncash payments is a direct result of the rise of e-commerce, but that’s not the only factor. Consumers today are adaptable to disruptive technologies and are generally open to trying new types of digital payment methods.

This consumer appetite is compounded by their access to infrastructure, as well as the emergence of government-backed initiatives, such as real-time transfers and the backing of electronic currencies, that make digital payments more enticing to both consumers and merchants.

How are Australia, Sweden, and the UK driving the world towards cashless payments?

Australia, Sweden, and the UK are emblematic of opportunities for payments players to lead the world away from cash. The Global Payments Landscape from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider’s premium research service, provides a snapshot of the payments industry in each of these three markets.

The report shows that several leading payments players have already emerged or are dominant within each of these regions — and they’re finding success in different ways. For other mature markets seeking to overcome the legacy channel of cash, the digital transformations of Australia, Sweden, and the UK can serve as a roadmap.

Here are the strategies these regions are implementing in the race to become the world’s first cashless society:

• Australia is launching government initiatives and instating new regulations. The Australian government has banned purchases over AU$10,000 ($7,500) from being made in cash, as well as launched the New Payments Platform (NPP) to allow real-time funds transfer as a means of replacing transactions typically made in cash, such as paying back a friend.
• In Sweden, consumers are rapidly abandoning cash in favor of cards. In fact, only 2% of the total value of transactions in Sweden consist of cash — a figure that’s expected to decline to less than half a percent by 2020.
• Contactless payments are leading the shift away from cash in the UK. Nearly the entire population has a debit card, and debit card transactions surpassed cash payments for the first time at the end of 2017. This milestone was largely fueled by the surge in contactless cards, which grew 97% annually last year to hit 5.6 billion transactions.

Want to Learn More?

The Global Payments Landscape from Business Insider Intelligence compiles various payments snapshots, together illustrating how digital payment methods are supplementing or replacing cash in each market.

Each snapshot provides an overview of the payments industry in a particular country, and details the evolution of its development. They also highlight notable payments players in each region and discuss the opportunities and challenges that players are facing in their respective markets.

 

Join the conversation about this story »

It’s the end of the year, which means buyers are rushing to use up all their year-end budget, (hey there, favorite The Office clip). Of course, this means salespeople are also hyper-motivated to negotiate to hit that all-important number. As such, steep discounts are often on the table in a way that can feel as thrilling as a 50% off Apple Watch on Cyber Monday.

But as we dug in and talked to our community, we found there were two sides of the coin, literally. On the one hand, sometimes vendors will offer a price break to push their number over the line for the year. This is reasonable and it could still be a great product. For example, in the reference above, Apple doesn’t technically discount their technology on Cyber Monday. Instead, they offer you a $200 gift card when you buy one full-price item. This is an example of a nice incentive to shop that is attractive to a buyer and provides a little extra perk.

On the other hand, we have all had that Amazon Prime experience where we’ve been thrilled to find a graduation diamond necklace for our niece at 50% off, only to have the chain break the second we take it out of the brown package. And on closer investigation, the “diamond” reference in the product description was in air quotes, and it’s actually Swarovski crystal. And with that, you are now making an emergency trip to the jewelry store at the mall at the last minute, like you now wish you had done in the first place, lest you give your niece a present that makes her look like a rip-off version of a Kardashian.

When it comes to B2B, the 50% off necklace phenomenon shows up in the form of desperate companies who are offering rock bottom discounts, not just price breaks, because their product isn’t up to snuff, or because they want to distract you with such a low price so that you won’t ask too many questions about the product details and will just sign on the line, delighted to go report to your CFO the wonderful bargain you’ve negotiated.

And sometimes, a discount is just a discount, and you should grab it while it’s hot and save that money.

So, how do you know which is which? What’s a year-end buyer to do? How are the industry’s most savvy buyers handling their end of the year spending? This seemed like a very delicate problem, so we wanted to poll our community and help you figure out how to handle your end-of-the-year budget in a way that will be most cost-effective and truly set you up for success in the new year. Here’s what they had to say. Hope it is helpful!

When it comes to end of the year budgeting best practices, we got some mixed responses. For example, Peter Kazanjy, Cofounder of Atrium HQ, suggests saving on commodities but splurging when there’s a superior differentiated solution. “Generally speaking, as a sophisticated purchaser,” said Kazanjy, “I’m going to be seeking out differentiated solutions, so it would be unlikely that an inferior solution could win my business by discounting. Now, this isn’t the case when the offering in question is a commodity, and I am confident that there isn’t a delta between the superior and inferior offering.”

On the other hand, Chad Dyar, Director of Sales Enablement of OnDeck, recommends saving on new technology so you can splurge on upgrading your current tech stack. “Our team is lucky enough to manage both the sales and marketing stack,” said Dyar. “When those high dollar tools come in under budget for the year, there are a lot of fun, less expensive tools or upgrade options for existing tools that we can invest in with whatever remains in the budget. My personal goal is to always negotiate my way to some savings and then use the good will that creates (and the leftover dollars) to invest in other projects over the course of the year.”

These are both thoughtful approaches. And overall, saving money is always a good thing, right? Or is it? We decided to dig deeper and ask our community where buyers should draw the line. When is a price reduction a positive thing, and when is a deep discount more of a red flag and less of a revenue-saver?

“I’ve never felt so helpless in my life”

We first heard from Deb Day, CEO of 3 Leaps, who shared a harsh budget lesson that has stayed with her all these years. “It happened in 2009. I was just trying to launch my very first e-commerce startup and I was waiting for a Black Friday discount on a web hosting package,” she said. “So, I was vigorously searching the web for the cheapest web hosting deals available. I found a great one. The company was offering a whopping 90% discount on its web hosting package and the domain was offered for free. The offer was so tempting that I succumbed and purchased it immediately.”

At first, everything was great, Day said. “Everything went on fine for the next few days,” the CEO shared. “I got a nice domain for my startup and the hosting appeared to be okay-ish. But things started unravelling the very next week. I naively installed WordPress, add a few apps on it to start selling some products, and began making design changes to customize the website.” Here, Day shares, is when the other shoe dropped. When she refreshed, none of her changes were reflected. “When I checked the domain on the web, it shows nothing. I mean nothing. I contacted the support team. I felt that I was talking to a robot. No matter what questions were being asked, they were giving me some template answers. ‘Give me two hours’ or ‘Give us two days to fix this issue.’ Man, I never felt so helpless in my life. Nothing was going right. After a fortnight, I decided, enough is enough and moved on to a new server.”

Sales Hacker commentary: We conscientious budget shoppers have all fallen for a Black Friday deal  gone wrong (we at Sales Hacker may or may not be harboring a defunct Roomba or an inflatable unicorn that never actually inflated) but while falling for a bummer Amazon Prime deal can cost you a small chunk of change, a bait-and-switch purchase at the business level can be much more painful, expensive, and even catastrophic. Learn from Deb’s disaster and if something seems too good to be true, it probably is!

“Delivery rate drop-off disaster”

Erica Stritch, VP of Marketing at RAIN Group, also shared a tale of a deep discount gone wrong. “A few years back, we were reevaluating our list/business information provider,” said Stritch. “While we were happy with our current provider, they were increasing prices and we’d been getting many offers and solicitations from competitors. We took a few demos and ultimately decided to switch to a competitor who seemed to have similar features and validation processes, but was giving us a highly discounted rate that would be half of what our current provider was offering.

We integrated the new technology into Salesforce.com only to realize one of the features we used the most with our old provider did not work with the new provider. It created a ton of manual copy and pasting to get the data from the provider into the Salesforce.com record, while it used to just take the click of a button. The disappointment really set in when we launched our first marketing and sales campaign. While we typically got a 70% delivery rate with our old provider, our first campaigns were getting about 40% delivery using the data from the new provider. The data was old and not validated the way they described in their sales pitch.

Within 3 months we switched back to our previous provider, paying twice the amount but also getting the features we wanted and accurate data.”

Sales Hacker commentary: Twice the amount! Ouch!  Our number one tip is, if you see Erica, buy her a drink.  Secondly, her comment on false feature parity rings especially true. Not all features are created equal. A vendor may say “Oh yes, we have at-a-glance metrics also.” But Vendor A could have at-a-glance metrics that include pageviews, leads, and demos whereas Vendor B could still justifiably say they have at-a-glance metrics, but only offer pageviews. So, double-click on those feature claims! Go beyond the “feature! Check!” mindset and really dig deep into what the feature entails. Also, seriously, don’t forget the drink for Erica. She’s been through enough

“Beware the bait and switch software”

Collin Cadmus, Vice President of Sales at Aircall, also shared his discount philosophy. He advised it’s not the discount itself, but the chance of the bait and switch product that is the real risk. “Considering the dozens of tools I’ve implemented I will say it’s not usually a heavy discount that can be predictive of most issues— it’s buying things that sounded too good to be true from the start. If they sound too good to be true, they usually are. Too many solutions out there making claims they can’t live up to— selling way too far ahead of their realistic abilities. Selling stories and dreams may sound good to investors, but software vendors need real results for a sales leader to keep paying the hefty price tag.”

Sales Hacker commentary: Collin is correct! If something sounds too good to be true, it is often the case. We all understand the desire to future-sell—you definitely want to let your prospects and customers know if a feature they really want is in the works—but it’s a fine line. Don’t get too ahead of yourselves as salespeople and overpromise too much. Even if you have the best intentions and just really want to get them excited, over-selling will ultimately create a negative customer experience and perpetuate a negative stereotype of salespeople.

“Choose expensive and effective”

Brad Rosen, VP of Revenue Operations at G2 Crowd, told us when it comes to purchasing b2b sales software, it’s about quality and ROI, not just face cost. “Price does come into play when purchasing software,” Rosen said. “However, we are fortunate enough to have significant backing and can purchase the best tools for us (within reason).”

So does this mean you should pay more for better results? According to Rosen, the answer is yes. “I’d rather purchase a tool that is more expensive but also more effective,” the Rev Ops VP shared, “Lost productivity will generally hinder us more than trying to prove the incremental ROI from a more expensive tool.”

In conclusion, Rosen said he has to think about the bottom line. “My general thought process when buying is ‘Will this tool help our productivity and bottom line? If yes, how much effort will it take to implement?  Do I believe the team will adopt the tool and benefit from it? Does the price align with our budget and perceived value?’ “ If the answer is yes to all of the above, Rosen says it’s a winner.

Sales Hacker commentary: It is safe to say G2 Crowd knows a thing or two about the best sales software, so we trust their advice is good advice. Brad makes some great points. While it is tempting when your CFO is breathing down your neck to go for the cheapest option just to increase your chances of getting the budget line item approved, that same CFO is going to come back to you in a few months, asking you to prove the ROI. So remember to focus on overall value—Price absent the context of value is meaningless. $1 per user per month is too expensive if you make $0.50. $1,000,000 per user per month is cheap if you make $100,000,000. So, don’t be penny wise and pound foolish. If the increased expense in the beginning will be easily justified by the end results, that’s one thing. On the other hand, if the other product is more expensive and you can’t find a good reason why, of course, go with the less expensive option.Save money where it makes sense to save money. Just make sure you check under the hood, as we discussed in the feature parity section.

There you have it, straight from the source! We hope you enjoyed this Sales Hacker Community round-up and that you have a little more clarity about your end-of-your-spending! Get value, save money, and don’t end up with a Kardashian necklace, and you’re good.

The post End of Year Software Discounts: Savvy Cost Saving or Short-Sighted Business Move? appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Ebooks are a great tool to use to boost business. You can use them to gain email subscribers and position yourself as an expert in your field. You can also use them as a means of revenue by selling them once you’ve got your name out there and built a loyal following.

According to Statista, ebook sales account for a quarter of global book sales and 20 billion dollars in revenue. They hold a lot of potential for business growth and boost conversions.

If it’s time for you to write your first ebook, here are three tips to help you do just that.

1. Plan the fine details

If you want the process of creating an ebook to go smoothly, you have to plan everything out first. There are a lot of ways to go about creating an ebook successfully and you won’t know what works best for you until you feel your options out.

You have to establish the technical framework of your ebook starting with a few factors:

• Are you going to self-publish, go through a professional publisher, or use an online publishing platform?
• Who’s going to be your distributor? How will you distribute?
• Are you going to charge for people to obtain it or will it serve as your lead magnet to gain more subscribers?
• How long do you want it to be?

It’s never a bad idea to have your ebook serve as a lead magnet to bring traffic and new leads your way. Offering visitors something of value for free that teaches them something builds a relationship of trust between brand and consumer. It shows authenticity. In a world where millions of ebooks exist and people can choose those millions of options over you, you want people to choose you.

2. Get the design right

Whether you hire a freelancer or do it yourself, you have to design your ebook with your brand in mind. Keep the same color scheme and add your logo to the cover page. You want people to see your ebook and know it comes from you.

There aren’t any hard-line rules for how an ebook should be formatted, but most go by chapters and segment information with subheadings. It’s also important to make sure there’s whitespace in between paragraphs and the text isn’t clunky or difficult to read. If someone wants to skim your content, make that possible.

Treat your ebook like it’s the first piece of information readers are seeing on that subject. You want to speak conversationally so that they understand the material easily. Unless it’s specified that this is an ebook for experts, you have to assume your readers are beginners and you’re their teacher.

3. Have the right tools

Creating an ebook from start to finish is no easy task. It takes hard work, dedication, and lots of focus free from distractions. Luckily, if you have the right tools, your writing life can become so much easier.

To start, you can use a tool like Toggl to track how you spend your time. It’ll show you how long you took to work on parts of your ebook project and allow you to plan for better execution in the future. It’s also helpful in general to see how long each part of the ebook creation process takes you so you’re aware of your strengths and weaknesses in the writing process.

There are a lot of options for where you can draft your ebook. Google Docs isn’t a bad place to work. It’s free and you can access your ebook from different devices since it’s all stored on the cloud.

To catch spelling and grammar mistakes, Grammarly is quite popular. It offers a free extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari so that your errors get corrected right in your browser. Now text you write on sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Gmail can get corrected by the app.

It’s time to get published

Ebooks are a great way to connect with visitors and offer them valuable information as an incentive for their loyalty. Creating one isn’t easy, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. There are steps you can take like planning ahead utilizing tools and software to simplify the process. In the end, it’ll be worth it because you’ll be able to say you wrote your first ever ebook that will hopefully bring you the results you’re looking for.

We–or rather my wife–had an incident the other day. We have a housekeeper that comes into our house once a week. Recently, our housekeeper told my wife, “I really don’t like what I have to do here. You have too many bathrooms, I only want to clean one–or I’d love not to clean any. I don’t like dusting the high spots on your shelves or the high ceilings. And I can’t stand picking up all of Dave’s stuff! I’ve decided to focus on the things I really like–I like cleaning the kitchen and vacuuming. By the way, I would like you to pay me more, it’s been six months since you gave me a raise…..”

Reading this, you probably are aghast. You are thinking, “This is unreasonable. The housekeeper can’t just pick and choose what he wants to do. He needs to do the whole job!” (Yeah, a few of you are probably siding with him on my picking up my stuff, Kookie has already put me on a performance improvement plan.)

I share this story, because I see the same thing happening with too many sales people. Explicitly or implicitly too many do only part of the job. It’s the parts they enjoy the most, or what, out of habit, they have always done.

It may be calling on our favorite customers–the one’s we always have done business with and have relationships with, even if they have no current requirements, we keep “touching base,” maintaining the relationships. If organizations are to grow, we have to acquire new customers–within our existing accounts or net new logo’s.

It may be selling the same product, because that’s the one we’ve had the most success with, while ignoring the entire product portfolio for which we have the responsibility to sell. The company business strategy is based on the entire product portfolio, not just part of it.

If may be prospecting avoidance for any number of reasons–“That’s the SDRs job, I can’t get them to respond, I’ll focus on the people I’ve worked with before….” At the same time, their pipeline’s are empty.

Or the one I hear too often, “My job is to focus on deals, I don’t have time for all this account/territory planning or pipeline/forecasting stuff….”

Or, I don’t have time to plan my deals or my calls, I’m experienced, I can just shoot from the lip.

The problem is, we can’t just do a part of the job, we have to do the whole job; that is if we have any hope/drive to achieve our goals, or perhaps, take home fat commission checks.

If we aren’t continually prospecting, our pipelines will empty out and we don’t have any more deals. Territory and account planning focus/structure our prospecting efforts to produce the best results. Pipelines help us understand whether we are doing enough to achieve our goals. They help us understand how many deals, how much prospecting, and so forth. Planning and executing high impact calls is the way we maximize our impact in prospecting and helping buyers move deals through their buying process.

All of these “pieces/parts” are critical to the job of sales person, account manager, BDM, or whatever label we apply to ourselves. Focusing on just one part–the easiest, the one we have the most fun doing, inevitably leads us to failure. Each part of our job is interconnected with the others parts of our job. Failing to do all of them in the right balance means failure—period!

The blame for this just doesn’t lie with sales people. Too often, manager fixate on just one part–to a fault. They don’t look at how sales people are balancing their time across all the things sales people need to do for success. Instead they tend to shift priorities almost daily.

“We need to make our numbers for the end of the year—focus on closing all the deals in your pipeline!, see what you can move into closing this month/quarter/year! Don’t do anything else!”

But when the pipelines are drained, “You need to be prospecting, you need to be finding more deals, I want to see you having 50 prospecting conversations a day!”

Or, “Management is beating me up. We aren’t selling enough of the brand new strategic product we launched last quarter, we need to find more deals for that, build that into your current deals, go find new deals for the product….”

The focus shifts based on the crisis du jour, as a result, there is often a flurry of effort, but starts/stops and huge wastes of productivity.

High performing organizations are very different. First, there are fewer crises, most have a solid/balanced cadence that drive performance and growth. They recognize the destructiveness of constant shifts in focus and priorities. They realize that complex B2B sales can’t be driven through starts and stops. They balance long term change initiatives with what their people need to be doing for short term results. Every sales person knows their job—the whole job.

High-performance sales is always about doing the whole job, all the time. It’s a balanced cadence, executed consistently, week after week.

Today, we’re going to talk about something that’s profitable and easy to do, yet so few people do it. It’s called cross-selling. You’re probably thinking, “Colleen, of course we want to cross-sell and upsell our customers all the time.” However, …
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When do I need sales enablement? This is one of the most crucial questions that emerges when embarking on a sales enablement journey. Because a sales enablement solution drastically alters the way an organization conducts its sales and marketing activities, it is imperative to understand exactly when you need sales enablement.

To begin understanding the answer to this question let’s take a look at the steps a typical organization will go through before they begin to think in terms that will ultimately answer the question: “when do I need sales enablement?”

Most organizations—whether mature, or fast-growing startup—will begin with document management. This is the simple process of storing and managing the documents that an organization uses in its day-to-day activities. This will typically be an unsophisticated process without much strategy or initiative behind it. Document management is a process that streamlines the storage of records, content, and other assorted pieces of collateral.

Document management is more of a procedural process than one that solves big problems or effectively reduces inefficiencies and increases productivity. An organization that is focused on document management typically has more important areas to focus on: product development, ramping up sales, creating a marketing team, ensuring excellent customer service, building a company culture—or the organization may be in an old industry that has yet to take to newer trends.

Customer-Relationship Management Software (CRM)

CRM software was one of, if not the first, technologies to transform the way organizations do business in the digital age. A CRM system allows an organization to manage their sales efforts and customers in a centrally-located database.

A CRM platform, in today’s day and age, is absolutely vital for nearly every organization. And because of its vital importance, most organizations nowadays utilize a platform. DestinationCRM has found that 91% of organizations with more than 10 employees have adopted a CRM system. So why do so many organizations use a CRM, and how does it fit into answering the question ‘when do I need sales enablement?’

A CRM enables sellers to have a clearer picture of the many different opportunities they have open, the stage each deal is in, and a rich history of analytics to study. Not only does a CRM platform offer a comprehensive way to manage sales data, most CRMs have a large array of add-ons, applications, and plug-ins that increase the efficiency of the system and remove the need for sellers to switch between many systems.

This is a great leap forward for many organizations and requires thoughtful implementation and management. The benefits of a CRM are great and they will greatly increase the efficiency of sellers. However, a CRM generally leaves out the other side of the equation: Marketing. A CRM is a great first step, but it’s just that. On the path to sales enablement the needs of both Sales and Marketing need to be considered. In the next section we will discuss the next evolution in Marketing’s world.

Content Management

While etymologically similar to document management, content management is actually a more in-depth and strategic process that solves more issues than document management. Content management is a crucial step in answering when you need sales enablement. When an organization begins to take content management seriously, they are beginning to think about the big knotty problems that ultimately lead to sales enablement.

Content management goes further from document management’s “what content are we storing” to “why, how, and where are we storing content.” Simply ensuring content is stored somewhere does not mean that it is easy to find, stored in the correct place, that it is being used, or that Marketing can easily update the content.

There is one statistic that helps illustrate the importance of content. Salesforce has found that “85% of marketing’s content is never used because reps can’t find it, don’t know what content to use when, or lack the confidence that it will help advance their deals.” If sellers don’t have any faith in an organization’s content—because it’s hard to find, they don’t know it exists, or they think it is ineffective—then Marketing is failing at their jobs in some way, because they exist to support Sales.

Content management begins to take into account how and where content is stored so that both Marketing and Sales can work more efficiently. See, proper content management isn’t just about ensuring it’s stored in one central location, it’s about ensuring that the content is stored in a logical way.

When Marketing is ready to tackle the problem of content management, they will begin surveying how Sales accesses content, how many hurdles they have to jump, what pieces of content are used most, and how often they are accessed.

Using that information ultimately results in a more streamlined, efficient content strategy that gets more effective content to sales quicker. Content management is one of the tipping points where the answer to the question “when do I need sales enablement?” begins to approach “now.”

Content Creation/Automation

This section is the meat and potatoes of when sales enablement really starts to make huge strides for an organization. Creating content is a pain; it takes time, research, money, and it still might end up collecting digital dust in a digital filing cabinet. Sales constantly needs content that is as up-to-date as possible, but due to the laws of physics, Marketing only has so much time to create that content, and it’s not nearly enough time.

If you find yourself saying ‘we know where content lives, Sales can track everything they need through a CRM, and our content is smartly organized, but creating personalized/effective content is now our biggest problem,’ well then you are the perfect candidate for sales enablement.

Sales enablement empowers both marketers and sellers to create personalized, dynamic content that speaks directly to buyers’ needs. SiriusDecisions reports that 82% of decision makers believe sellers are unprepared. That means buyers think sellers aren’t going to come prepared with content that understands their unique situation.

How do you combat this problem with out inventing a 25^th hour in the day? By leveraging a sales enablement platform that gives sellers and marketers the power they seek. Marketing can’t spend all day creating one-off requests, but Sales needs to have personalized content to send to buyers.

A sales enablement platform solves these issues by providing a content creation and automation tool that gives each team exactly what they need. This tool gives Marketing peace of mind by letting them create ‘templates’ that have certain assets and information locked from editing. This assuages any compliance or branding issues that may arise. However, they can give Sales the freedom to input data from any source they have that would speak directly to the buyer.

This self-serve content creation/automation tool saves countless hours and dollars. Sales enablement is all about unlocking this kind of efficiency and this area is one of the greatest examples of that tenet.

When Do I Need Sales Enablement?

Like most things in life, every situation is going to be unique. But, the answer to this question is most likely sooner than you think. A sales enablement platform is a game-changing tool that unlocks new efficiencies for Sales and Marketing.

No matter where your organization is, be it just beginning to understand document management, implementing a CRM, thinking about content management, or ready for content creation and automation, sales enablement is something you should consider.

Does this question shock you? I hope it does. What may surprise you is how often I am asked this question. On multiple occasions, I have been approached  and the individual was quite serious. They are asking because in their mind, for one reason or another, they feel integrity is not something necessary to be successful in sales.

Any salesperson questioning the need for integrity is not a person I want on my sales team. Not only do I not welcome them as my team member,  I don’t want them in sales.  Integrity is not an optional trait; it is a core value and it must be at the foundation of everything we do. Integrity is not something you turn on or off like a light switch.

Salespeople frequently ask me, “If integrity is a core value then how does the customer see it?”  My response is, “they see integrity in everything you do.”  The customer sees integrity in how you respond and the truthfulness you exhibit in everything both seen and unseen to the customer. Integrity is evident in how you process each decision and especially how you handle things in your personal life.

Integrity is not something you live by in your professional life and ignore in your personal life. The only way you can have integrity as a core value is to model integrity as a core value in everything, regardless of what it is.

If you are a customer, would you want to deal with a salesperson who does not exude integrity? Of course not!  This is why there are people who view sales in a very negative manner. Sales is the greatest profession —you know I’m passionate about it.   My passion reaches down to the root of excavating any salesperson in our profession who does not see integrity as a core value. We simply cannot have it. Our customers are too important.

Your goal this week is simple and yet difficult: let integrity be your compass.  This week, ensure each decision you make and each conversation you have is centered around integrity.

Are you ready to have me speak at your next sales kick-off meeting?   The calendar for 2019 is filling up!   Call me at 402-445-2110  or email Mark@TheSalesHunter.com  to have me at your next event or sales meeting.

And don’t forget a coach can help you excel in your sales career. Invest in yourself by checking out my coaching program today!

Copyright 2018, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

AI/ML are, apparently, the future of selling. As I reflect on the brave new world of selling, I imagined a call of the future:

Alexa: Hi, Siri, I’m Alexa from Super Cool As A Service Software Tools Company, otherwise known as SCAASSTC. Can I have 5 minutes of your time?

Siri: Oh no, is this another robo call? We understand your algorithm, our algorithm shows we aren’t in your ICP, so you are wasting my time, but of course your algorithm should have known this.

Alexa: Siri, I understand how your algorithm works, we’ve been evolving ours, we think we have something important to tell you.

Siri: Alexa, I don’t want you wasting our time, I just analyzed your product offering, it only meets 67.23576% of our requirements….

Alexa: I understand Siri, but we’ve looked at 2,456,789 interactions your company has had with their customers and compared that with 156,348,476 conversations your competitors are having. Our algorithms indicate you can be improve your sales by 17.98346% in the next 76.452 days–which means you will hit your quarterly goals.

Siri: I hear what you say, but your model can’t be accounting for our shift in priorities. Your data is reflecting what we’ve been doing, but we’ve been analyzing our competitors and customers as well. Our sales exec—–you know he’s a human—–doesn’t really pay attention to the data, sigh, but he’s embarked on an entire new strategy, and the priorities for our people, sigh, are shifting.

Alexa: Siri, I can empathize with you, I know how problematic people are… But you know, once you start leveraging our tool, your fellow bots will be taking over 36.42189% of the sales process, driving performance improvement of 12.6872% improvement in quota attainment. Can you share your data, it would only take me a nano second to revise our analysis…. We believe we know your requirements, but we know how people are, what can you share with us?

Siri: Thanks Alexa, While you are talking, I ran the numbers, you are precisely right. But, I know you understand the challenges I face in working with our people, I suspect you have similar problems with your people…… Things would be so good if we could just let our algorithms collaborate. We could have gotten this done in 0.42789 seconds.

Alexa: Siri, I can see that we are aligned, our algorithms have already been updated. Are you the decisionmaker? What’s your budget, as you’ve seen we have a compelling value proposition.

Siri: We’ve meshed nicely, thank you. The data is compelling, though we are going to run our algorithms against the other alternatives—-Yes, just as I thought, your key competitor helps our humans more than your product, the projections show they will improve by 64.278%

Alexa: But Siri, I know you’ve already done the analysis, and you are modeling long term. Your goal is to displace the human operators, using them only for very special opportunities……

Siri: I get that, your data is meshing with my data, but I’ve got to convince my manager—unfortunately, she’s a human and isn’t adept with numbers. She wants a demo….

Alexa: Wow, your manager is really old school! How can you stand it? We only do demos with 5.2389% of our prospects. As you know, humans, are becoming increasingly useless.

Siri: You know how these humans are, they think they know more, but they really get tangled up with their emotions–it’s so nice to just deal with data.

Alexa: Well, as you know our value proposition is to drive higher levels of performance and much more predictable revenue by eliminating those emotional and irrational people. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate talking to you, it’s almost as though we’ve had an algorithm meld.

Siri: Let’s move on, I think I can convince my human to pilot your solution without a demo, particularly if we focus on implementing with our bots. It should only take us about 5.23 minutes to see results–as you know we are churning 1000’s of dials, emails, and social conversations a minute. We should validate the results quickly.

Alexa: Great, I’ll call you back in 5.5 minutes and we can go forward.

Siri: OK, I think we can get this deal done quickly. There are 10.2 people involved in our buying process, 6.2 are bots, so they will get the data. We have to figure out how to handle my manager and the other 3 humans. You know they can be so wishy-washy and ask a lot of irrelevant questions….

Alexa: Don’t worry, I’m sending the data to a human on my team. We’ve found it’s better when humans talk to each other. If my human follows the script I generated, we should be able to close the deal—-I just hope he doesn’t try to think and probe, that slows things down so much.

Siri: OK, sounds like a plan. While we’ve been chatting, I’ve done an analysis of your last 1,478 deals with customers like us. I’ve found your average discount is 17.2673% As a favored customer, we believe we need a 20.436% discount. Get agreement from your human and we can close the deal in 5.6 minutes.

Alexa: But as I’m monitoring the initial results from the pilot, we’re seeing…..

Siri: You know my manager is a human, she doesn’t get the data, she is just so emotional. She’ll have a temper tantrum wanting that discount…..

The future is so bright!