Rnordman

On the surface, John looked like the perfect up-and-coming executive to lead BFC’s Asia expansion plans. He went to an Ivy League B-school. His track record was flawless. Every goal or objective the organization had ever put in front of him, he’d crushed without breaking a sweat.

But something broke when John went to Asia. John struggled with the ambiguity, and he didn’t take prudent risks. He quickly dismissed several key opportunities to reach out for feedback and guidance from leadership. It became clear that John had succeeded in the past by doing what he knew and operating rather conservatively within his domain. It also became clear that the company was going to massively miss the promises it had made to the Board and the Street if John remained in the role.

With a heavy heart, BFC’s CEO removed his promising protégé from the role and redeployed him back in the US. He decided he had no choice but to put a different kind of leader in the role – Alex.

While talented, Alex had come to be known behind closed doors by the moniker “DTM” – difficult to manage. He marched to the beat of his own drummer, and he wasn’t afraid to challenge the status quo. He loved a challenge, and he was comfortable taking risks. It turned out to be the best move the CEO ever made.

No stranger to ambiguity, Alex was flexible in formulating his strategy and sought feedback from the people around him. He made a risky move at the beginning that backfired on him. But as a result, he learned what not to do and recalibrated his approach. That was the key to success. His tendency to buck the established BFC way of doing things was exactly what was required for the company to successfully flex its approach and win in the new territory.

What Alex’s success exemplifies is the importance of “learning agility”: a set of qualities and attributes that allow an individual’s to stay flexible, grow from mistakes, and rise to a diverse array of challenges. It’s easy to assume that those qualities would be highly prized in any business environment. Flexibility, adaptability and resilience are qualities of leadership that any organization ought to value.

But in practice, this is not the case. As a rule, organizations have favored other qualities and attributes – in particular, those that are easy to measure, and those that allow an employee’s development to be tracked in the form of steady, linear progress through a set of well-defined roles and business structures.

The Link Between Emotional Intelligence and Learning Agility

Learning agility, by contrast, has until recently been hard to measure and hard to define. It depends on related qualities such as emotional intelligence that are only just beginning to really be valued. It also relates to behaviors – such as the ability to recover from and capitalize on failure – that some managers would prefer not to think about.

The Pillars of Learning Agility

According to the researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Center for Creative Leadership, learning agility is defined as follows:

Learning agility is a mind-set and corresponding collection of practices that allow leaders to continually develop, grow and utilize new strategies that will equip them for the increasingly complex problems they face in their organizations.

Learning-agile individuals are “continually able to jettison skills, perspectives and ideas that are no longer relevant, and learn new ones that are,” the researchers say.

The research identified four behaviors that enable learning agility and one that derails it.

The learning-agility “enablers” are:

• Innovating: This involves questioning the status quo and challenging long-held assumptions with the goal of discovering new and unique ways of doing things. Innovating requires new experiences, which provide perspective and a bigger knowledge base. Learning-agile individuals generate new ideas through their ability to view issues from multiple angles.

• Performing: Learning from experience occurs most often when overcoming an unfamiliar challenge. But in order to learn from such challenges, the individual must remain present and engaged, handle the stress brought on by ambiguity and adapt quickly in order to perform. This requires observation and listening skills, and the ability to process data quickly. Learning-agile people pick up new skills quickly and perform them better than less agile colleagues.

• Reflecting: Having new experiences does not guarantee that you will learn from them. Learning-agile people look for feedback and eagerly process information to better understand their own assumptions and behavior. As a result they are insightful about themselves, others and problems. In fact, in prior studies, Green Peak Partners discovered that strong self-awareness was the single highest predictor of success across C-suite roles.

• Risking: Learning-agile people are pioneers – they venture into unknown territory and put themselves “out there” to try new things. They take “progressive risk” – not thrill-seeking, but risk that leads to opportunity. They volunteer for jobs and roles where success is not guaranteed, where failure is a possibility. They stretch themselves outside their comfort zones in a continuous cycle of learning and confidence-building that ultimately leads to success.

The learning-agility “derailer” is:

• Defending: Being open to experience is fundamental to learning. Individuals who remain closed or defensive when challenged or given critical feedback tend to be low in learning agility. By contrast, high learning-agile individuals seek feedback, process it and adapt based on their newfound understanding of themselves, situations and problems.

How do these five facets translate into behavior, performance and results at work? The researchers found that learning-agile individuals are notably:

• More extroverted: They are more sociable, more active and more likely to take charge.

• More focused: They continually refine and polish their thinking and their work. They are more organized, more driven and more methodical.

• More original: They are more likely to create new plans and ideas, seek complexity and readily accept change and innovation.

• More resilient: They are more “at ease,” calm and optimistic. They rebound more quickly from stressful events.

• Less accommodating: They are more likely to challenge others, welcome engagement, and express their opinions.

The research also shows that while many individuals can model some aspects of these behaviors, learning-agile individuals stand out in particular for their resilience, calm, and ability to remain at ease. It’s not just that they are willing to put themselves into challenging situations; it’s that they’re able to cope with the stress of these challenges and thus manage them more effectively.

The “derailer” – defensiveness – also has an impact on performance, of leaders in particular. When the researchers reviewed 360-degree evaluations, they found that leaders who ranked high on the “defending” scale were considered less effective. By contrast, peers and direct reports rated more highly the leaders who ranked high on the “reflecting” scale.

Researchers at Columbia University and the Center for Creative Leadership collaborated to develop an objective test for learning agility, called the Learning Agility Assessment Inventory (LAAI). It’s a 42-item survey that measures learning-agile behavior by asking individuals about how they respond to challenging situations, then scoring the answers against the four enablers – innovating, performing, reflecting and risking – and reverse-scoring the derailer, defending. In developing the test, researchers compared the scores to a 360-degree assessment and to another established personality test, the Workplace Big Five Profile.

We then administered this test to over 100 executives –mostly private-equity backed C-suite leaders — that we had previously assessed in a rigorous half-day structured interview. In a 2010 study with Cornell University, we showed that our assessment grades predict performance, as measured not only by revenue and EBITDA but also by boss ratings (often issued by the Board). The more recent study extended that research by showing that those who out-performed in our assessments also scored higher on the LAAI.

Taken together, the two studies demonstrate that high learning-agile individuals are also high performers.

Cultivating Your Own Learning Agility – and Coaching It in Others

One of the best ways to coach for learning agility – or for that matter, any desirable set of behaviors – is to recognize and develop it in yourself. Becoming more learning-agile will help you cope with the turbulence of the workplace. And it will make you more aware of how to bring out the potential in your learning-agile people.

Among the ways to cultivate learning agility in yourself are:

Innovating. Seek out new solutions. Repeatedly ask yourself, “What else?” “What are 10 more ways I could approach this?” “What are several radical things I could try here?” It doesn’t mean you do all of these things, but you explore them before proceeding.

Performing.  Seek to identify patterns in complex situations. Find the similarities between current and past projects.  Cultivate calm through meditation and other techniques. Enhance your listening skills – listen instead of simply (and immediately) reacting.

Reflecting. Engage in “counterfactual thinking” – explore “what-ifs” and alternative histories for projects you’ve been involved in. Regularly seek out real input. Ask, “What are three or four things I or we could have done better here?” Frame the question in specific terms, instead of simply asking, “Do you think I should have done anything differently?” But make sure the questions are still open-ended – that will encourage colleagues to speak up.

Risking. Look for “stretch assignments,” where the probability of success isn’t a given.

Avoid defending. Acknowledge your failures (perhaps from those stretch assignments) and capture the lessons you’ve learned from them.

Reaping the benefits of learning agility takes effort and commitment. That said, the first step is simple: Recognize its attributes and that it is an asset that you need to cultivate. After that comes the hard work – creating accurate screening methods, putting the systems in place to identify learning-agile individuals and creating career paths and management techniques to get the most out of them.

But once you have started that process, you will begin to realize the benefit – an organization that is more flexible, more adaptable, better able to respond to business volatility and therefore more competitive in the face of unprecedented challenges. The results might even be revolutionary.

Buyers are doing their research ahead of time and they are pulling information from company websites, blog sites, social media and other people. Buyers are out there acting on decisions quickly and are making big decisions based on information available to them. Buyers are all over the place with respect to decision-making. They are in control of the process and want results now.

This is where the culture is today. Are you still figuring out what is best for your clients? If you are, your ideas may be old ideas by the time they are implemented.

Old selling methodologies are being replace by newer methodologies, (These methodologies are being defined today!) Strong customer service is the way to meet client needs at the present time. If companies do not embrace client service then they are really falling quickly behind the curve. Client service staff need to be well-informed employees who can ultimatley be empowered to answer client questions and have to understand a businesss’s products and services.

The sales funnel today has all types of holes in it. (Literally.) People are coming in and out of the cycle. Buyers needs are changing daily and many are looking for a quick fast way to resolve issues or take them to a better place. It is a challenge for marketers. Cold-calling techniques do not work anymore. This year I am trying to find new techniques and finding moderate success. It is definitely a work in process.

Here are some of the processes I am seeing success with:

• Having face-to-face discussions – There is a huge need to have discussions with clients and sit down and work together to see where a win-win success can be achieved.
• Build a network outside of your traditional industry – It is more imporant than ever to not only grow your contact base within your industry but also outside your industry. Connect with other marketing professionals and talk through ideas and develp some potential solutions.
• View social media as a human relation investment more than a financial investment. Get your name out there and connect with the best of the best. Watch time spent here. Monitor and listen more and talk and chat less. You simply do not have the time.
• Focus more and more on your inbound marketing needs. Think like your customers would. Develop client personna’s and continue to try different ways to reach people.
• Don’t work by yourself. Tap others in your workplace, outside your workplace, online. No single person has all the answers and there are thousands of examples of great marketing examples ocurring everyday. We have never seen anything like this in our lifetime. It’s exciting and challenging every day!
• David Merriman Scott says it best…You cannot dabble, You cannot tweet twice a month, It is about a lifestyle change. Listen to the full interview here.
• Simple messages sell.

Everyday, as part of my to-do list, I look for ways to constantly improve and look at things from a new perspective. Today, I’ve decided that I need act on these changes in a much more quicker manner and work towards having a real-time approach every day. You never know what tomorrow will bring. Old methods do not work and new methods need to be quickly developed from ideas. Testing and measuring is the only way toward better success. Change can only start with change. Old methods need to be converted to new methods. It is a daily process.

Picture Source: Pixabay

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

Some may remember one of Reagan’s more famous statement in 1987, while he was addressing folks gathered at a nuclear treaty signing, Trust but Verify, could also be part of every keynote at your everyday B2B sales Kick-off.

I use this expression not to suggest or imply a lack of trust between sellers and their potential buyers, but to ensure that sales people make the most out of their most precious resource – Time. The better you do things the first time, the more time you have to execute other important parts of the sales day, instead of having to repeat things you thought you had completed last week. Some ways to bring this to your selling will insular, specific to things you do, and some will face externally, and ensure that others are also part of your sales success.

One great place to apply this mantra is your pipeline. We often find that we have a lot of opportunities in our pipelines, and it feels good, but if we were verify the quality, or reality of those prospects, we may not have as many as we thought. Verifying is easy if you want to do it. Does it meet your minimum thresholds, i.e. is the prospect a good fit for you, or are they just a placeholders because your manager has a silly rule of having a pipeline three times the size of your quota. Are they really engaged, one easy way to validate is to not only get next steps, but give they homework that will verify that they are. For example, I always like to ask for the opportunity to interview a sample number of their reps after my initial meeting and going any further. If they do, it is a clear indicator that they are willing to invest in the process.

Another area where sellers benefit from a Trust but Verify approach is during the process of prospecting and qualifying. It is easy to sprinkle things with a little sugar, go on appointments we know are not likely qualified but are available. A little scepticism goes a long way, and while it may result in less appointments, they will all be of a better quality. When qualifying a prospect, that crucial phase between hand shake to proposal, how well you choose to verify will dictate whether it will be a solid proposal that will lead to a close, or a not so solid one leaving you to having to resell and negotiate your way to the finish line, or an “oh so close death”. It is easy to have a positive outlook, take everything a prospect says with a sprinkling of hope. It is more practical to verify and deal with the best opportunities, not any old opportunity.

It’s nice to have a full pipeline, but it also creates a false sense of confidence, one that releases strange endorphins in a seller’s mind, endorphins that prevent sales people from prospecting for new prospects. It is true that the fuller a rep believes their pipeline to be full, the greater the likelihood that they will not prospect for new opportunities. Verify the pipeline, and a more honest view will dictate their emotions and resulting activities.

Tibor Shanto    

The complexities of the evolving and robust global digital economy are introducing new sets of goals and problems for B2B organizations. Long tenured B2B companies are seeking ways to adapt and to remain sustainable. While nimble and digital technology savvy firms are either grabbing larger chunks of market share at a faster rate or are creating new business models shaking the very foundation of established markets.

It is no wonder, then, that CEOs are making understanding buyers and buying behaviors top priorities for many B2B organizations.

The Deeper Understanding Needed

In attempts to gain deeper understanding of buyers and their behaviors today, B2B organizations are getting tripped up by immediately gravitating to the “who” and rational based paint-by-numbers profiling of buyers. While it is helpful to know more about “who” your buyers are, this form of tunnel-vision leaves a canyon-size gap in true deeper understanding.

True deeper understanding comes from the melding narrative of who, what, how, why, where, and when of buyer stories and their goal-directed behaviors. As mentioned, new complexities are being introduced due to a robust digital economy and B2B organizations are faced with new mountains to climb as a result. The imperative for B2B CMOs today, is to gain insight into these complex stories and new forms of human interactions taking place.

Only having insight into the “who” of this melding narrative will be a very shortsighted outcome of efforts to understand buyers and buying behaviors.

What Exactly Is A Buying Scenario?

For nearly fifteen years, I have used the term buying scenario in describing one of the critical components of buyer insights research and buyer persona development. A buying scenario is the modeled melding narrative I speak about and provides much-needed context and in-depth understanding into the complexities confronted by buyers. More importantly, it dispels the myth of belief in one generalized recurring buying process or buyer’s journey.

Persona-based scenario development and planning has been at the heart of personas since their origins. This includes buying scenarios planning specifically for buyer persona development. It is important for B2B firms to understand the true meaning of the term buying scenario and not confuse with rational-based buying attributes. Nor should they to be confused with traditional day-in-the-life scenarios, which also has application in both user and buyer persona development.

With buying scenarios planning, the focus is not on predicting the future, as we have seen with Big Data. The focus is on exploring the context of the future. In other word, what will be the likely buying situations and stories, in which we can be prepared for. Another important note is the purposes of scenarios are to serve as informing, planning, and decision support perspectives for CMOs engaged in formulating current and future marketing strategies.

The three essential types of buying scenarios needed by B2B CMOs today are:

1. Contextual Buying Scenario: This scenario is an attempt to bring deep understanding of the context surrounding the situational problems confronting buyers. We get a sense of how problems and goals are driving certain buying activities and interactions with others. In any given customer and buyer environment, there may be multiple contextual scenarios happening simultaneously. For instance, three Fortune 100 organizations I helped with goal-directed buyer persona research and development, each uncovered four to five contextual buying scenarios they needed to plan for.
2. Key Buying Path Scenario: In this scenario, we attempt to determine the buying path-to-decision by which buyers are attempting to fulfill important goals, as well as, address situational problems. This includes their human interactions with internal as well as external sources. These are more structured views of how certain paths map back to specific situational problems and goals. It also reflects on the multiple goals and decisions buyers engage in along a specific buying path. This offers a much richer and deeper view of how buyers actually buy than generalized views of a buyer’s journey. As an example, in a recent buyer persona research study in healthcare information technology (I conducted on behalf of a Fortune 50 company), a new influential senior-level role was uncovered. This new role, which had distinct goals, stayed engaged throughout more than sixty percent of the entire time in evaluations and decisions related to healthcare information technology.
3. Future Buying Scenario: In this type of scenario, it requires envisioning skills and techniques to bring context to how goals can be fulfilled and situational problems can be resolved. Specifically, prototypical marketing, sales, and services capabilities are introduced to envision how customers and buyers get their goals fulfilled and problems resolved. This type of scenario also serves as a validation point of whether what you have prototyped or designed can be capable of helping customers and buyers to fulfill goals.

Critical Components Of Overall Goal-Directed Customer Engagement

These three types of buying scenarios, which are qualitative research-based, should be viewed as important components towards the overall strategizing and design of customer engagement. Together, they shed light on how customers and buyers engage in fulfilling goals and resolving problems. Taking the guesswork out of attaining deep understanding of the goal-directed buying behaviors and activities buyers are most likely to act upon as they pursue a path towards a decision. The type of insights needed to design and assemble the right level of customer engagement.

Buying scenarios planning also allows for a perspective in which no amount of Big Data or marketing automation can provide. Which is, a proactive means of deeply understanding the context of scenarios customers and buyers are most likely to find themselves in. Accompanied by the ability to envision how and why these scenarios can change when your organization provides the right capabilities. As opposed to relying solely on the historical-based and reactive nature of data crunched from CRM and marketing automation.

Buying scenarios, defined and researched adequately, can also change another important scenario. That is, it can change the scenario of how marketing can plan, as well as, be more effective at connecting with customers and buyers.

(What follows is a short video on how one organization, Shell, has actively used scenario planning for nearly forty years. This includes having a dedicated Shell Scenarios Team. For B2B CMOs today, it may well be worth considering having a dedicated Buying Scenarios Team engaging in buying scenarios planning. I welcome B2B or B2C CMOs to contact me about this for a spirited conversation on this topic.)

Most modern sales professionals don't resemble the pushy, dishonest "used car salesman" stereotype of the past. Well ... they don't think they do, at least.

A new survey from the American Management Association surveyed 1100 buyers on the sales tactics and behaviors that got under their skin the most. Here are their nine answers, ranked from most to least offensive:

1. Being too pushy
2. Not taking "no" for an answer 
3. Not listening
4. Talking too much
5. Bait and switch
6. Reading from a script
7. Using meaningless sales jargon
8. Upselling
9. Being impatient

Pushiness (24%) and refusing to accept a "no" (23%) were by the most offensive behaviors to survey respondents, with not listening (18%) trailing close behind. On the other end, upselling annoyed a mere 4% of respondents, and being impatient, a tiny 2%.

What are the takeaways? Here are three conclusions:

• Sell on the buyer's timeline -- don't force prospects to buy on your timeline. You won't have to be pushy if you maintain a pipeline full of prospects in various stages of the buying process. That way, you'll have prospects ready to close -- on their own terms -- each and every single month.
• "No" isn't a bad thing. Keep in mind that "no" is better than "maybe." When prospects disqualify themselves, you have more time to spend on better fit opportunities.
• Reps who listen, sell. How will you be able to put together a solution for your prospect if you don't truly listen to and understand their needs? Ask questions and carefully listen to your buyer's answers so you know how to best help them.

What do you think is the worst sin on this list? Share your thoughts in the comments.

If you operate within a 5-mile radius of the digital marketing industry, you’re probably aware that things are scaling up for content marketing – and fast.

The Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 B2B and B2C studies both prove that things are ramping up:

• 42 percent of B2B and 48 percent of B2C businesses publish content daily or multiple times per week.
• 70 percent of both B2B and B2C businesses say they’ll publish more frequently in the future.
• 28 percent of B2B and 25 percent of B2C marketing budgets are devoted to content marketing.
• Almost 60 percent of B2B and B2C businesses intend to increase that budget over the next year.

Given that things are moving so fast, I’d like to pump the brakes for just a second to talk about the many different forms of content marketing available to marketers. More than that, I’m hoping to provide an idea of how each asset might work best in your marketing funnel and the buyers’ journey.

So let’s hop to it:

1. Blog Posts

C’mon, everybody knows blog posts, right? It’s no surprise why: Blog posts make great top-of-funnel content for attracting leads, earning links and demonstrating your thought leadership.

They also work well across the awareness and consideration phases of your buyers’ journey, operating as an opportunity to talk about the topics your customers find compelling in a low-stakes environment.

Though most brands probably have a blog by now, the truth is, few brands do them well. In order to do a good job with blog posts, you need to be acutely aware of your customers’ questions and their pain points – not just the ones you think are important.

Metrics to measure: traffic, links, shares, and loyalty. Watch to see if those who engage with your content come back for more.

2. E-Newsletters

An e-newsletter should be sent to your business’ private email lists. Individuals on the list can be current customers or prospects, though I recommend separating the two groups. For example, you don’t want to send introductory offers to folks who already hired you.

E-newsletters are a rare form of content that work great across the entire funnel. For new leads, they deliver calls-to-action and keep the prospect from wandering off to a competitor. For closed deals, it’s a way to prompt repurchase and keep in touch.

Metrics to measure: sign-ups, open rates, and click rates. It’s also important to measure assisted conversions (how often your emails prompt a sale down the line).

3. Infographics

Infographics are visual representations of stats and stories. More often than not, they’re based on interesting numbers that have been turned into compelling visuals.

Infographics tend to work best in the early stages of the buyers’ journey because they can make a case for your product or service. They also make compelling interest pieces that earn links, which in turn boosts rankings and makes you more visible to early-stage searchers.

Metrics to measure: links and shares. A single infographic is unlikely to spark brand loyalty, but it’s good for attracting temporary interest.

4. Webinars

Webinars are online hangouts/seminars where a qualified pro discusses an idea, detail, product or service.

Webinars are fantastic because they kick off so many other forms of content. For example, the webinar presentation can be shared on Slideshare, the talk can be summarized for a blog post, the video can be shared on YouTube and so on.

Webinars work well at both ends of the funnel: to introduce new ideas (entry-level questions and basics) or close the deal on a product or sale. They can also be used as a retention tactic by increasing the knowledge of your current customers. Just make sure that the topic is actionable and tactical.

Metrics to measure: sign ups, attendees, shares, and links. Again, webinars are great for generating spin-off content, so the value goes beyond the immediate event.

5. Photos/Images

Whether it’s a meme, inspirational quote or just an interesting shot, photos are attention-getters. They are highly shareable, and can convey a lot of information in a very short time. They’re ideal for social networks or as supplementary content to blog posts and other content formats.

Because of their magnetic attraction, photos are good for the early stages of the funnel, when you want people engaging, chatting, and sharing.

Metrics to measure: shares and interactions, such as comments.

6. Video

Because it’s such a broad medium, video can slot in virtually anywhere on the buyers’ journey.

For example:

• Explainer videos are great for the consideration phase, since they point out the customers’ needs, address pain points and push toward purchase.
• Product videos validate the benefits and features of your product, making it ideal for the purchase phase.
• Vlogs can be widely shared and linked to, helping to generate new leads in the awareness stage.
• Funny or personal videos can be great for retention, reminding customers of who you are and what you value.

Metrics to measure: views, shares, and referral traffic (if it’s hosted on YouTube). You want to make sure people are watching the entire video and, if possible, offer a call-to-action which prompts them to view more.

7. eBooks

eBooks are a commitment. They’re a commitment to produce – and a commitment to read, too. That said, they’re also an opportunity to more thoroughly educate a client.

Because of their depth, they make great lead-gen assets at the early stages of the funnel. They can also be used during the consideration phase if the content of the eBook is sales-orientated.

Metrics to measure: downloads, shares, links, and readership (much easier with an interactive eBook).

8. Social Posts

Social media serves as a delivery medium for other content formats, though it deserves consideration as a content format of its own.

Social crosses the entire spectrum of the buyers’ journey, from introducing customers to your content (awareness) to solving customer problems (retention).

Metrics to measure: shares and engagement (i.e. comments or clicks). It’s also important to measure sentiment and level of response so that you can improve your activity over time.

9. White Papers

White papers are similar to eBooks, though they tend to be more data-rich, text heavy and formal (as brilliantly explained here). They’re highly educational assets that explore an in-depth idea, and can be quite persuasive because of their valuable insights.

Whitepapers make great assets for the first three phases of the buyers’ journey, though they can be particularly effective near the purchase stage as a proof of concept or case study.

Metrics to measure: downloads, shares, readership, and assisted conversions.

10. Microsites

Rarely used but hugely powerful, microsites (smaller, offshoot websites for a main brand) can focus around an ad campaign, idea or audience. They’re big collections of content that might include several of the mediums we’ve already discussed, though targeting is usually more direct.

Microsites rely on strong copy to convert, so invest in a copywriter who knows their stuff. Microsites can also be incredible tools for building community or reaching an audience that your primary site might not.

Metrics to measure: traffic, links, shares, conversions, and engagement.

Get your feet wet!

The main point to all of this: Don’t just rely on blog posts. Instead, carefully consider the buyers’ journey and design your assets to cater to what people need to know at each stage. Variety may be the spice of life, but it can also mean the difference between success and failure in your content marketing strategy.

Lead nurture campaigns help you build and maintain relationships with leads, no matter where they are in your sales cycle. Even if leads are not sales-ready, you can still keep them engaged with relevant content. In fact, with the right lead nurture strategy in place, you can prevent leads from going cold and provide the information they need to make a decision.

Follow these 3 steps to get results from your lead nurture campaigns:

1. Segment your database

Did you know that 9% more sales reps make quota at companies that excel at lead nurturing (Source: CSO Insights)? If you want to see similar results from your lead nurture campaigns, you need to first know who your leads are, and what they’re interested in.

Any time you generate a new lead, you should compare that person to your buyer personas. Start by analyzing the common titles, job functions, company sizes, and industries in your database. Where does this new contact fit in? This information will help you segment your database and place new leads in appropriate nurture campaigns.

2. Send a variety of relevant content

Lead nurturing gives you the opportunity to provide value and position your organization as a thought leader. No matter how many leads you’ve gathered, you should treat each one as an individual.

Pay attention to how contacts first enter your database. For instance, someone who signs up for a webinar on ways to shorten the sales cycle should not be placed in the same campaign as someone who downloads a whitepaper on email marketing tips.

In addition, your leads will be looking for different information, depending on where they are in the sales cycle. Providing a variety of content, such as whitepapers, webinars, and email newsletters, will help you gain their trust. As a result, they’ll be more likely to make a purchase in the future.

3. Monitor and update campaigns

Lead nurture campaigns allow you to keep in touch with your leads until they’re ready to become customers. However, this only works if you have the right contact information.

Think about it – the U.S. Department of Labor projects a 30-40% annual turnover rate in corporate America. As such, some of your contacts may no longer be the right decision makers.

Avoid this issue altogether by monitoring your campaigns on a regular basis. If you have a low click-through-rate or a high unsubscribe rate, you may need to update your database.

Do you have any lead nurture strategies in place? Let us know in the comments below!

Effective marketing is personal marketing. The generic “10 tips” blog post and homogenous email blast can no longer be the go-to tactic from the modern marketer’s toolbox.

While segmenting your audience in email marketing is relatively common, segmenting your readers when creating blog and article content isn’t nearly as familiar for most marketers. In this article, we cover how to segment your blog content to drive more leads and more sales.

But first, let’s get on the same page about the term. A segment is a defined group of people within your market and is similar to a buyer persona.

Let’s take the fictitious Acme Fitness Facility and delineate its audience into segments. First, we identify what is known about the customers, such as:

Demographics

• Age (Under 30, 30-45, 46-60, over 60)
• Gender

Psychographics (interests and preferences specific to the market or offering)

• Main goal (weight loss, muscle gain, physical rehabilitation, etc.)
• Interests (classes, resistance training, cardio workouts, personal training, etc.)

Given the data, we identify a few target segments:

• Men ages 30 to 45 with the goal to increase their strength
• Women ages 46 to 60 with the goal of weight loss
• Men over 60 interested in personal training

Put yourself in the gym shoes of someone in the second segment. Which of the following article titles would appeal the most?

1. Sculpted Summer: 7 Tips for Men Looking to Gain Muscle
2. Weight-Loss Principles That Trump Fad Diets and Workouts
3. Lose Weight in Your 50s and Keep it Off for Life

The first title references men so that excludes a category of women, but the third title hits the right demographics (gender and age) and goal. It’s the winner because it’s the most relevant to the segment.

The second title mentions weight loss so it could be appealing to the segment, but it’s generic. Bland messages not only create bland relationships, they create bland results from marketing efforts. The more people feel that a marketing message was created explicitly to meet their needs, the higher your general response rates will be, and the better your long-term relationship with your audience.

I’ve written at length on marketing segmentation and tailored messaging – and the fundamentals always stay the same: Relevance gets attention.

Drive more leads

To attract prospects, the fitness center hosts three blogs – each one designed to reach one of the company’s audience segments. With each post, the company includes an opportunity to capture the reader. For example, a post for the men’s muscle-gain blog includes a link at the bottom for a free e-book: The Men’s Diet Tips Guide: Building More Muscle. When they click on the link, the readers are brought to a “gate” – a personalized squeeze page or lead box – before they can open the e-book.

HubSpot does this segment lead generation well with an e-book call to action on its blog post.

Click to enlarge

These personalized opt-in pages ideally drive the prospects through unique marketing automation sequences based on what we know about their goals and interests. You certainly would not want to promote male-oriented fitness information or offers to readers who initially opted for a women’s fitness e-book.

The automated email sequence following the men’s muscle book download looks like this:

• Day 0 – Subject: Your Diet Tips Guide from Acme Fitness

This email explains the company’s positioning, welcomes the new subscribers, frames the benefits of future emails, and delivers the free e-book that was promised.

• Day 2 – Subject: Men’s Fitness Transformations at Acme – Real Stories

This email highlights the before-and-after pictures of men who transformed their bodies thanks to the help of the fitness facility. It includes a light call to action requesting that the reader fill out a web form for a free fitness session.

• Day 4 – Subject: What’s the Ideal Workout for Muscle Building?

This email feature links to three useful blog posts with videos related to muscle building, filmed by the fitness experts at Acme Fitness.

This automated email sequence would be significantly more powerful than a one-size-fits-all email sequence – and it’s all because the lead source (the blog targeted to a specific market segment) allowed for more targeted follow-up and a likely much higher conversion rate to an appointment or sale.

In addition, these segment-oriented blogs or even blog posts are great content to help the company’s rank on search engines and serve as good social media fodder.

Close more sales

Since newsletter subscribers, some prospects, and previous customers have provided their email addresses, they are more qualified than leads who come through social media or search engines. We need a different kind of segment-specific content for this category of “already subscribed” folks to consume.

A piece of content designed to educate existing subscribers includes a call to action to take them on the next step in the buying process. Let’s look at a few examples of how this strategy would apply to our fictitious Acme Fitness Facility.

In email promotions to middle-aged women interested in weight loss (a specific segment with specific needs), we promote the following articles and corresponding calls to action:

Title: Weight-Loss Success Stories of Working Women

Call to action: Banner at bottom of blog links to an offer for a 14-day trial of women’s group fitness classes

Title: Body Composition – A Measure of Success in Women’s Health

Call to action: Text at end links to a web sign-up form for free a body composition and cardio health assessment

With respect to content for existing contacts, we want it to not only be useful and valuable given the segment’s goals and challenges, but also actively help them make the next step toward a purchase or appointment.

Wrap up

Knowing your important segments allows you to tailor all of your marketing efforts to converting them effectively – to win new leads and new business. You’re scaling the positive effect of face-to-face sales across your marketing media. That’s smart marketing.

Building segments requires having the data to know your audience. Creating an effective content strategy requires good data, too. Learn how to do it with this CMI webinar: Creating a Content Strategy with Data at the Core.

Cover image by PazMadrid, morgueFile, via pixabay.com

The post Segment Your Blog Content to Drive More Leads and Sales appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

We now live in a digital age in which social media rules the roost if you want to market your business to a global audience. If you are a small business owner you may want to give the idea of “brand awareness” much more thought.

According to Google the definition of brand awareness is “The extent to which consumers are familiar with the distinctive qualities or image of a particular brand of goods or services”. By having positive brand awareness you can have a significant edge over the competitors in your industry.

Some of the benefits of increasing brand awareness may include:

• Increase in word of mouth marketing
• Increase in sales and using online data to measure ROI of brand awareness efforts
• Increase in customer loyalty
• Ensuring your brand is competitive amongst similar businesses

Alongside your online efforts you can also combine this with offline, traditional advertising in order to generate further potential for online interaction.

Brands are increasingly organising events to generate human-to-human interaction and build relationships with clients and prospects. This may be a business workshop, careers fair, blogger social event, national business exhibition or even something as simple as sponsoring a charity event.

A great example of this the Blogger Bash held by Search Laboratory, in which footwear chain Wynsors World of Shoes were asked to take part alongside numerous other local and global fashion and travel businesses.

Held in London, the event attracted well-known fashion bloggers from across the country and gave them the opportunity to take part in giveaways, competitions and socialize; whist the brands benefitted from the potential of online coverage and opening up their brand to a new audience.

Social media was a big factor in the success of the event. By publicising the hashtag of #SLBloggerBash to the bloggers, the brands were able to receive on-going social mentions. The brands also used their social media to promote the event (before, during and after the occasion) and this opened up the opportunity with wider online engagement.

If you have never hosted an event it can demand a level of organisation but it really isn’t that daunting. Post-event you should follow up on any potential leads, as well as any online and offline coverage.

By hosting an event, for example, in the form of an exhibition, a blogger meet-up or a career workshop; you have the opportunity to combine traditional forms of advertising with online social media. With a good understanding of your budget, your customers and what you want to achieve, you can really reap the benefits of hosting an event as part of your marketing strategy.

How often do you find yourself saying, “Instead of calling, I’d rather just send a text or write an email.”

This shift in the way we communicate—socially and professionally—is one of the challenges facing today’s sales organizations. It’s not easy to pick up the phone and call someone—especially when texting and email has replaced the phone conversation.

As a Sales Development Representative (SDR), my job is to set up qualified appointments for our sales team. But with 57 percent of the buyer’s journey being completed before even speaking to a sales representative, cold calling is not only difficult, but less effective.

Today, the out-of-the-blue pitch is more like a Hail Mary than moving the ball strategically down the field. But calling a prospect when they are showing a buying signal is extremely valuable, because you’re meeting them at the right time along their journey. A buying signal can be engaging with my emails, taking a “test drive” of our product, or other behaviors indicating interest and readiness to purchase. I connect with prospects on a fairly regular basis who either laugh (in a good way) as soon as they hear my name, or they say something along the lines of, “I’m glad you called, I’ve been meaning to reply to your emails but I’ve been too busy.”

Those connections hit the mark, and often those calls turn into a more in-depth conversation. But these days, sales teams have another difficult hoop to jump through before getting prospects on the phone: find their numbers.

When Mr. or Ms. Prospect shows buying signs and it’s time for me to pick up the phone, I start to hope that our CRM has the correct phone number, not “555-555-5555.” And if I’m lucky, they will have put their corporate main number in the form fill, saving me the time of going to their website to find the main number—but this still forces me through the dreaded phone tree.

One of my least favorite things about calling main numbers is dealing with the systems that ask you to speak the name of the individual you are trying to call. Trust me, they are not fun. For example things like this happen often; “Phil Spring.” “Did you mean, Bill Sage?” “No, Phil Spring.” “Okay, dialing Bill Sage.” CLICK. The headache that often comes with dealing with automated phone systems at corporations is no different then trying to call the airline company. Even getting an operator these days is a challenge. As you have probably experienced, it feels like a miracle when pressing “0” brings you to an actual human being, instead of resetting the automated attendant.

A growing trend that I am beginning to experience is that more and more companies only have a sales line. And a common response I hear when requesting to speak with one of my prospects is, “They don’t have a phone, email is the best way to reach them.” Or, “I’m sorry, I’m not able to give their direct line out.” This typically leads to my deflated response, “I have their email address, I’ll just send them an email. Thanks.”

With these time-wasting and ineffective marks against cold calling (two adjectives salespeople hate), strategic email communications are more impactful—and important—than ever. The power of a great “Why You Why You Now” email with a compelling piece of content that resonates with your buyer can accelerate the time it takes to get your prospect to a phone conversation.

The challenge now becomes, how do you know which piece of content to send your prospect? And with 65 percent of sales reps saying they can’t find content to send prospects, sales enablement is a hot topic.

This is where marketing and sales alignment, particularly when it comes to content, becomes key. While I’m emailing, calling, and educating prospects on our product, I’m also searching for the right piece of marketing content to send them via email. And, again, salespeople don’t want to be wasting time. It needs to be easy.

Internally, Kapost solves this problem with the Kapost Content Library. The real value I get out of the Library is that every content asset is tagged to a specific persona, and specific stage in the funnel. This enables me to quickly go into our Content Library and select a piece of content, based on where my prospect is in their buying process. Without a doubt, my ability to accelerate prospects interest is dependent on the quality content that is delivered to me from our marketing team.

But if you don’t get have software in place to manage this process, Kathleen Pierce of Illumina outlines the seven steps you need to take to ensure your sales team gets the content they need to curb the cold calling. Check out her post to get started—and if you get a follow up email from me, I’ll be curious to hear what you think.

The seller’s demeanor is what will either negatively or positively begin the sale cycle that either leads to an answer of “no” or “Yes!”

In order to attract a positive flow of sales, the following adjectives come to mind: Be respectful, kind, thoughtful, inquisitive, an advisor and a benefactor. The last descriptor, “benefactor” refers to working to ensure your client is better off for having worked with you.

The process begins with greeting people by name, and asking for correct pronunciation when needed. This is true for every type of encounter, and particularly so, when you are hosting an event. It becomes your duty to thank everyone in the room personally for attending. Few speakers or hosts adhere to this principle, but two examples below illustrate the importance.

An equal component to greeting someone by name is to do so for everyone in your presence. As a host of an event, it is in your best interest to thank each person for coming, ask for questions during the time allotted, and thank each person once again before they depart. This is the mark of a memorable event. These goodwill gestures also serve to encourage further business.

A few years ago, I was asked to host a sales workshop on the afternoon prior to a talk I was to give at a convention. I chose to work the exhibit hall first, by greeting each exhibitor. I introduced myself, asked questions about their services, and then invited them to my workshop to be held later that day. Most arrived at my room. They were each personally greeted as they entered, and everyone remained for the entire session. Prior to their leaving I personally thanked each attendee once again.

After the event, I learned that the other workshops had to be shut down because those speakers were merely thinking about their talk and themselves. The outcome proved that your audience and clientele should always be at the top of our thoughts.

Recently, I attended another meeting. Upon entering, I instantly recognized that the host was deep in conversation with one person, and the rest of us were not o disturb them.

When the presentation officially began, it was interesting, however, lengthy. Over half the invitees left before the meeting ended. Given that the host did not make an effort to say hello upfront, and that many departed before the end, he lost the ability to connect with the majority of attendees. The value in the room was lost.

Afterward, an email of apology was received that the conversation was with an investor. We can all agree investors are important to business. However, that message compounded the problem for me because it indicated that I am very low on the totem pole. An improved approach would be to schedule with the investor after the presentation for a more in-depth conversation.

When you work the room by treating everyone with equal respect, and show your appreciation for their time, you are far more like to build new relationships. Reciprocity come with building a respected personal brand. Follow-up leads to many more sales including securing the right investor.

The value is in the people with whom you connect.

Treat them appropriately and you will enjoy the Smooth Sale!

Get to know your sales tools in just 2 minutes a week. This week, Nancy profiles SalesPredict, a Customer Life-Cycle Intelligence and Predictive Lead Scoring solution.

Sales ToolSkool Video Transcript:

This week’s topic is prioritizing your sales activities so you can optimize your revenue. I’ll be talking about a predictive, customer life-cycle intelligence solution called SalesPredict.

SalesPredict analyzes your won and lost opportunities, along with other historical data within your CRM and outside sources. It uses the information to predict which prospects are most likely to turn into customers, which customers are likely to buy more, and which customers are most likely to churn.

Here’s why you need SalePredict.

With hundreds or more prospects and customers to keep track of, it’s simply not possible to manually prioritize and allocate time in the best way.

With SalesPredict, a salesperson’s activities are automatically prioritized based on a score. The score is the result of analyzing key buying signals that indicate a prospect’s likelihood of purchasing.

Just as important as activity ranking – is knowing what’s behind the ranking. Salespeople can click on the ranking to get all the information they need. For instance, here you’ll see that Uriel Alvarado has an 82% probability of converting.

The salesperson will see the key factors that went into that rating so that they’re better equipped for capitalizing on the opportunity.

On the flip side, let’s say you have a large opportunity but it ranks as a ‘c’. SalesPredict can tell your salespeople why the deal is at risk as well as recommend action to turn it around and get it back on track.

SalesPredict scores leads based on scientific probabilities, prioritizes activities so salespeople close more deals in a shorter period of time, and makes it possible to reduce customer churn which has a huge impact on profitability, and THAT’s why we’ve named SalesPredict one of our Top Sales Tools of 2015.

Go to SalesPredict.com to learn more.

That’s it for this week’s ToolSkool.

Stay tuned for next week’s episode when we talk about a system that helps you discover, engage, close, and onboard customers.

Until then… Sell Smarter, with smart selling tools.

Recently, Joe Pulizzi wrote a great article on the importance of subscription goals for content marketing.

Joe pointed to CMI research that highlighted how less than a third of marketers consider subscriptions as a key metric. He also talked about an advertising industry report that didn’t even list subscribers as a key metric for content marketing.

And he referenced his upcoming book, Content Inc., where he will explain how countless entrepreneurs build content brands by focusing on consistently delivering amazing content to a slow-and-steady growing list of subscribers.

I’m first in line for a signed copy.

The key metric of content marketing success is subscribers

I found this to be the case when I was running content marketing at SAP.

But it didn’t happen overnight. I spent the better part of a year building the business case for content marketing and highlighting the content challenges we were facing as a company.

On Joe’s advice, we created our content marketing mission statement. We started with almost no budget and built an army of volunteer contributors who were writing consistent and high-quality articles to answer our customers’ top questions.

We struggled with how much branding the site should have. We battled over whether the site should be on domain (the company URL) or off domain. Finally, after nearly 13 months, we launched with more than 25 articles across four major categories, all written by me from campaign assets that were sitting on the shelf.

SAP’s goal was to reach, engage, and convert early-stage prospects we would never have reached with traditional advertising and promotion.

We spent a whole YEAR trying to convert our hundreds of thousands of visitors to the site into something the business could value. And for us, that was mostly leads.

The design of the site included dozens of links to product and solution pages. We promoted links to our e-store and our training courses. Users could chat with a sales rep. They could click to call our inbound sales team.

We tested dozens of approaches. None of them worked. After the first 12 months, the site had achieved more reach than we could have ever imagined. Engagement on the site was beyond our wildest dreams.

And despite hundreds of thousands of deeply engaged visitors, all consuming content on solution topics that directly related to the software solutions the company sold, we only had a few thousand clicks on product pages.

We had about two dozen “clicks to call” with our sales team. Total. After a whole year.

We did show a positive ROI through conversion of online training courses, but that was more a function of our low-cost structure. The revenue barely scratched the surface.

Redesign to focus on subscribers

After scratching our heads, we decided to redesign the site. We wanted to make it more visual, more mobile friendly, and we wanted to provide stronger offers for subscription.

We modeled our pop-up after the one right here on the CMI blog using the Pippity Popup plug-in for WordPress. And we set up an account with MailChimp, which automatically pulled our articles into a branded template for daily newsletter distribution.

The solution was simple, elegant, and relatively inexpensive. But would it produce results?

It didn’t take long. After just one month, hundreds of subscribers signed up. We emailed the subscribers with a few harder offers like event invitations, e-books, other pieces of thought leadership, and even our hard-sell “click to speak to a sales rep.”

We didn’t expect anyone to convert until we had built an audience of thousands of subscribers.

But the numbers proved us wrong. The results were small to start, but the subscribers were 10 times more likely to convert to a lead. And like at most B2B companies, leads had value we could quantify.

We were getting campaign registrations on white-paper landing pages. We were getting event registrations. We even sent our subscribers to paid search landing pages. The value of each visitor could be quantified based on the cost per click of our CPC-based paid search program.

Create an infographic to demonstrate your results

Now we were showing real results. Not just the vanity metrics our CMO was tired of seeing.

We were getting requests to present our results all over the organization, so we created an infographic template to highlight our key metrics.

For reach, we looked at visitors, page views, and traffic from unbranded (early-stage) search.

For engagement, we measured the time on site (averaging over five minutes), bounce rate, pages per visit, social shares, and traffic from (unpaid) organic and social traffic. For us, engagement was a measure of the baseline “health” of the content and the experience of the platform.

For conversion, we started by trying to measure clicks to the e-commerce platform (e-store), clicks to call/chat, and visits to solution pages, but we ended up focusing on subscriptions.

We knew that visitors didn’t convert. But subscribers did convert — by a factor of 10 to 1.

Subscriptions allow you to better optimize your site

One more thing we learned about subscriptions: It is the best lever to test optimizations.

If you want to change the design of your site, test the impact on subscriptions. If you want to invest in one type of content over another, test the impact on conversions. You want to see if the changes keep your engagement steady but increase subscribers. We found subscriptions were a great tool to figure out how to build a digital experience that is great for your reader and effective for your business.

Tips for delivering value from your content marketing with subscribers

Here is what we learned:

1. Set clear goals and business objectives up front. Creating a blog is not a goal. Publishing content is not a goal. Getting traffic is not a goal. Serving your customers and driving value for your business is a goal. Subscribers can help you get there.

2. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Buyers are unlikely to go from an early-stage search to ready-to-buy right away. Resist the temptation to sell too early. Earn your audience’s trust by delivering great content consistently. Create content your buyers want and then get your readers to opt in to the content.

3. Focus on subscribers as the road to content marketing value. Determine the conversion path your visitors make. Segment subscribers in your reporting and measure their conversion or goal completion rate.

4. Test common design elements, content types, and frequency to optimize your site for conversion.

What do you think? Easy right? Please let me know what you think or ask your questions in the comments.

Want to understand and measure what is working with your content? View the Content Marketing Institute webinar, How to Be a Jedi Master of Content. The transcript and slides also are available.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How SAP Used Subscribers to Fuel Content Marketing Success appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

We all know this feeling. Here are five common sales mistakes and how to avoid them.

Great leads are not easy to come by, so we get pretty bummed out when we see salespeople fumble them. Here are some of the most common mistakes we see, along with pointers on a better way.

1. Checking your email first thing.

This is a tell-tale sign of a salesperson with a “reactive” schedule—rather than one that’s built around the best times to connect with targets. First thing in the morning, when most people are just getting to work and checking their email is usually a great time for you to be making calls. Same goes for lunch-time, when many of your targets may be eating lunch at their desks, and after 5 p.m., when many senior people are still working and more likely to answer their own phones.

2. Failing to connect with the C-Suite up front.

Enormous amounts of time get wasted and many deals are lost because salespeople fail to loop in the CEO or other high-level executive until late in the sales process when the deal gets passed up the food chain for a final decision. The fact is that most companies don’t communicate well internally. If you get a lead from middle management or below, it pays to reach out to the C-Suite before you even connect with that lead. Then keep leaving messages or sending emails at key stages throughout the sales process to stay on the executive’s radar.

3. Treating an executive’s admin like a receptionist.

If you connect to an executive admin, don’t just leave a message! At most companies, the CEO’s admin is a wealth of information and pretty powerful in their own right. If you get a chance to ask them questions, grab that opportunity with both hands. Ask them: who’s the right person for me to talk to? How does the buying process work in your company?

4. Not using data to optimize calling and emailing strategies.

Make sure you have data to support your call and email strategies.

Without data, you can’t identify patterns. If you don’t know exactly what you did, you can’t know how to do it better. Setting up clear processes, tracking your activities, and analyzing your results is the only way to improve. For example, what days of week and times of day do the most people open on your emails or answer your calls? What subtle differences in your email subject lines or calls-to-action dramatically improve your click rates?

5. Promoting your product instead of your value.

When it comes to generating leads by building your personal network, your primary goal is to build trust and authority in your area of expertise. When you participate in LinkedIn groups, blog, tweet, and so on, you want to be seen as a resource and a thought leader. If you mention your product at all, it should be secondary to offering helpful information, perspective, or advice on the broader topic at hand.

Bonus tip!

The idea of promoting your value instead of your product has broad ramifications. It’s very easy throughout the sales process to fall into the trap of selling features, rather than benefits. Be sure to keep your focus on how the specific person or company you’re selling to can benefit from what you offer—rather than the bells and whistles of the product/service itself. That means listening more, talking less, and knowing your audience as well as possible.

Get more advice on Looping in the C-Suite, Building Your Day Around Your Customers, and much more in the first book of the Pipeline Way series: Building a Lead Machine.

Client acquisition.  It’s a must have for any business that’s looking to grow.  Maybe you’ve had a strategy that has worked well for you for years – it may even involve a Rolodex.  Maybe you’re a dabbler who tries a little bit of this and a little bit of that and have been able to piece together an ok program over time.  Maybe you keep trying different things and haven’t found anything that works consistently.  There are a lot of ways to approach client acquisition.

Regardless of your approach, your customer keeps evolving, and so should you.  There are some amazing statistics available that provide tremendous insight into the client mindset that should be shaping and informing your acquisition strategy.  Let’s dive on in and take a look!

57% of a buying decision is made before a customer even talks to a supplier.

This first statistic from a CEB Study is mind blowing.  Think about that.  Before you even talk to a prospect, they have made the majority of their decision.  They likely have preconceived ideas about your firm and your competition.  But it begs the question, if they’re that close to their final decision and they haven’t spoken to you, then where are they getting their information?

The answer is simple – online. They’re reading articles about the issue they’re trying to solve.  They’re following links and solutions mentioned in the articles and they’re creating their own path for educating themselves.  They’re doing this in their own time and without the possible pressure from a sales situation.

By the time a prospect gets to you, they are likely very well informed on their problem, possible solutions and your company.  But fear not, there is a way that you can be a part of their research path, and that is to provide valuable, educational content that will catch their eye along their exploratory journey.

85% of buyers believe companies should present information via social networks.

This nugget from Iconsive follows naturally from the point before, and is true of B2C and B2B.  As we said, by creating great content, you can be a part of your prospect’s information gathering path.  But creating content alone isn’t enough – you have to get the content out there.  One of the top ways to distribute your quality content is via social media.

We have other posts that go more in depth on social media and why it’s important (you can find them here and here,) so we want to focus on the “why” of this statistic.  In short, prospects want you to present information on social networks because they are spending time on social networks.  Doesn’t that make sense? Isn’t it easier to have information coming to you in the places you already are when you’re trying to research something than to have to head out to parts unknown?

It’s possible that we just heard a collective groan when social networks were brought up.  Maybe it’s not a place where you spend a lot of time, or maybe you do, but you use it only for personal use and you yourself don’t use it for business information gathering.  That’s ok.  Different strokes for different folks.  The most important thing to take away from this isn’t about your comfort level with (or opinions of,) social media.  It’s about the expectations of your customers – and they expect you to be there.

B2B marketers who use Twitter generate twice as many leads as those who don’t.

Keeping in the social vein for a bit, Social Media Today has determined that B2B Twitter users generate twice as many leads as those who aren’t using Twitter.  Yes, that was a statistic worth repeating.  Honestly, that is a statistic most never would have guessed at.

The starting place for your client acquistion efforts has to be building leads into your funnel.  And if using Twitter can DOUBLE the number of leads that you are putting into that funnel, why wouldn’t you be using it?  As we’ve talked about in the two previous points, you want to provide educational information (not sales-y information,) to prospects during their “private” research period.  And you also want to reach them where they are.  Twitter can help you achieve both of those.

Inbound marketing costs 61% LESS per lead than traditional, outbound marketing.

Our friends at HubSpot have done tremendous research into the impact of Inbound Marketing on client acquisition, retention and more.  This tidbit is a pretty huge point.  By utilizing Inbound, marketers are able to achieve a savings of 61% per lead versus the traditional methods.

So what is “traditional, outbound marketing”? Essentially, it’s the way that things were done.  It’s interruptive methods, reaching people at times that they are not receptive.  It’s expensive tactics like advertising, frustrating ones like cold calling and ineffective ones like pay-per-click programs.

Inbound, on the other hand, focuses on permission based engagements.  Providing educational information in the right place at the right time to be of value to the prospect and/or customer.  It is made up of elements such as blogs, eBooks, webinars, email nurturing, and much, much more.  It is customer centric and much more pallatable to prospects.  And as this stat shows, it is also much less expensive.  (If you’re interested in learning more about Inbound, please check out our guide – The Magnetic Approach to Client Acquisition: An Intro to Inbound Marketing.)

Inbound marketing provides twice the lead generation of either outbound or self-sourced programs.

Decision makers, by definition, are difficult to get in touch with. With the power to make strategic decisions on behalf of the organization and authorize large purchases comes a plethora of meetings and requests. Salespeople must deftly maneuver past gatekeepers to secure a time slot on the ultimate decision maker's calendar. It's a tricky task, and sellers sometimes fail or throw in the towel.

But no matter who you're trying to book a meeting with, I doubt this person is as in demand as, say, Warren Buffet. And yet, Gillian Zoe Segal, author of the new book Getting There, was able to wheedle an hour long meeting with the eminent investor.

How in the world did she do it? Segal reveals her secrets to getting a meeting with ultra-busy people in her post "You Can Meet Anyone You Want: Here's the Formula I Used."

"If you are not a big name or don't have something major to offer, accept that you will not be at the top of anyone's priority list -- no matter how important your request might seem to you. You will be ignored and rejected a lot, and you can't take it personally or allow it to depress or discourage you," Segal writes. "Make yourself as human as possible -- the less human you appear, the easier it is for someone to reject you."

After you discover actionable tactics that will help you block time on just about anyone's calendar (if someone books Oprah, let me know), check out five more of the week's top sales articles below.

1) 7 Reasons Your BDRs Aren't Making Quota by Matt Heinz

Is it the leads? The process? Or the BDRs themselves? Get to the root of the problem.

2) How Sales Professionals Create Value For Customers by Tamara Schenk

If you're struggling to sell value over price, this thoughtful post is worth a read (and maybe even a bookmark).

3) Extroverted vs. Introverted Sales Reps: Who Should You Hire? by Paige Schaefer 

Discover the relative strengths and weaknesses of introverted sales reps.

4) Confessions of a Non-Salesy Salesperson by Audra Bloom

Bloom maintains that she hates sales ... even though she's in sales (and seems to like her job). Find out how she resolves this conflict. 

5) 11 Rules For Email Etiquette in Sales by Brianna Bowman

Salespeople send a lot of emails, so it's critical to get them right.

What were your favorite sales posts from this week? Share in the comments.

In the past week alone, I received two emails from companies that were trying to “reactivate” or “re-engage” me as a customer. I thought it would be a good idea to examine these emails and also to think about “reactivation” techniques in other channels—like mobile and display/paid media.

What Is Reactivation?

Reactivation (or re-engagement) is a technique used by marketers to reach out to those people who have previously expressed interest, purchased, or otherwise engaged with their company but have since “gone dark” or disengaged. The goal is to encourage them to become active again.

Typically, the most common (although not used enough, in my opinion) method for reactivation is via email. But now that we’re in 2015, and mobile marketing is king, marketers need to think about how they’re doing reactivation on mobile as well as on display/paid media channels.

Why Should You Do a Reactivation Campaign?

A marketer typically has a list of customers, with as many as 25-50% of these people classified as “inactive”. These people have raised their hand in the past, either through showing intent, engagement, or making a prior purchase. Therefore you have spent valuable time and not to mention probably a good amount of money on grabbing their attention in the first place. So, I ask, why not try to get the most value out of your efforts? I implore you—don’t let these viable opportunities slip through your fingers! Frankly, ignoring these prospects will not serve your bottom line. So, here’s your chance to seize the opportunity and pursue a reactivation campaign! Keep reading…

Best Practices for Reactivation Campaigns in Email

A 2014 study by Return Path assessed the email reactivation campaigns of 33 retailers. As a result, researchers were able to determine a handful of best practices. Here are my favorites:

• Tip 1: The best subject lines to use for reactivation campaigns include “Miss You”.
• Tip 2: Don’t just send one email. Instead, send a short series of engaging emails over a period of time with a message showing that you miss and care about winning back the customer’s business. Perhaps end the engagement series with an incentive, like a discount mentioned in the subject line. Of note: subject lines that included a discount in the form of an exact dollar amount were nearly twice as successful as subject lines that included a discount in the form of a percentage. Food for thought!

Additional Email Tips

And to double your reading pleasure, here are a few other best practices that I’ve learned over a long career in digital marketing and email reactivation:

• Re-engage your audience relatively early—think 30/60/90 days and definitely no later than 180 days (six months). Just think—if you got an email from a brand more than six months after initial contact, you’d probably assume that the brand is not paying attention and doesn’t really care about you.
• Reference prior engagement, purchases, or other data so that the customer recalls their relationship with your company. This shows that you care about them!

How Can You Do a Reactivation Campaign in Mobile?

In the mobile channel, marketers can engage via several methods to reactivate their users. They can do push notifications or in-app messages, or they can use email to drive re-engagement.

A few examples that I personally like are MyFitnessPal’s push notifications reminding users to log back into their app (re-activation) and to log their food items. MyFitnessPal also understands that if a user is not responding to their notifications, that user might want to change his preferences.

Insight for Reactivation in Display/Paid Media Channels

Marketers can also pursue reactivation via the display/paid media channels. One example of reactivation via display or paid media channels is email-display retargeting: Email-display retargeting works similarly to traditional website visitor retargeting, but it allows you to target your email subscribers (people who are already in your database) rather than just anonymous website visitors. Email to display retargeting is relatively easy to set up: you place a line of code in your email signature or in the HTML of your email, and anyone who opens your email (but perhpas doesn’t click or doesn’t complete the desired action) will be served digital display ads around the web, wherever they are. This is a particularly powerful way to keep your brand in front of your customers without sending too many emails and risking high complaints and unsubscribes.

Another example of reactivation in display/paid media channels is that you can provide a list of your inactive customers to a data onboarding company (Acxiom’s LiveRamp, for example) to then pass through to your DMP/DSP to execute paid media buys to target these consumers with display ads. This is all in an effort to encourage customers to return and engage with you! What is a DMP/DSP, you ask?

According to Clickz, a DMP is a data management platform that helps all parties involved in the buying and selling of ad inventory to manage their data, facilitate the usage of third-party data, enhance their understanding of all this data, pass back data, or port custom audience data to a platform for even better targeting. And the DSP or demand-side platform allows advertisers and ad agencies to more easily access and efficiently buy ad inventory off an exchange because the DSP aggregates inventory from multiple ad exchanges. DSPs eliminate the need for another cumbersome buying step, the request for proposal (RFP) process.

To learn more about how you can use paid media to do reactivation, check out my blog post from earlier this week on Monday, June 1st!

Every sales team strives for the same essential goals: More deals, larger deals, faster closes. We all know that whom the sales person speaks to and how they move the customer through the sales process profoundly impact these goals. But in an ever-shifting B2B buying landscape, and more decision makers as part of the process, it can be even more difficult to engage the people who have the authority to allocate funds for a pricey purchase.

It boils down to a salesperson’s ability to attach to the customer’s largest business problem. Salespeople who speak to low-level problems will be delegated to low-level employees. If the salesperson talks like a network administrator, they will find themselves only selling technical solutions.

When you’re bogged down with conversing back and forth with those who have fixed budgets, you may close opportunities but you won’t gain any traction increasing your deal size. Remember:

• Funding is typically attached to the customer’s biggest problems.
• The most influential people in the organization define and own the biggest problems.
• Organizations want their biggest problems solved immediately.

Listen And Dig Deep

Learn to listen and drill down on specifics. Don’t let the prospect describe the problem without asking pointed questions about the impact of that problem. If you’re speaking with someone at a lower level within the organization, there may be a lack of awareness of the bigger problems. To get to the problems with large business impact – ask questions focused on money, time, and risk:

Money: How much does the company stand to lose if they don’t fix a particular problem? The higher the dollar value, the more likely this is a biggest problem.

Time: How quickly does the problem have to be solved before it becomes a game-changer for the organization? The more urgent the problem, the more likely it is to be the customer’s biggest problem.

Risk: What are the potential risks associated with not addressing the problem? The greater the risk, the more likely you’ve found the customer’s biggest problem.

Differentiate

Once you’ve uncovered the problem, it’s important your buyer understands why it makes sense to purchase your solution over other alternatives. If you’ve effectively quantified the business impact, you likely can cross out “Do Nothing” from the list. If the problem is big enough, the prospect should have concluded that it can’t wait. Your next step is effectively demonstrate why your solution is the better one.

Here’s how:

• Speak about your differentiators in a way that helps your customer form a link between your solution and the positive business outcomes your customer is looking to achieve.
• Be audible-ready to focus your conversations on comparative differentiation – how your solution is better and/or different than your competition in a way that shows value for your buyer.
• Use trap-setting questions to effectively build your differentiation into the solution requirements.

One of the most effective ways salespeople can shorten sales cycles is to link their solution to an issue that is so critical to an organization, the prospect can’t go another day without fixing it. If the problem is big enough, it doesn’t matter what your product costs. Opportunities move forward a lot faster when they’re aligned with an issue that can’t go another day without correction.

Many digital media companies have embraced monthly and annual subscriptions. The business model allows digital media companies to provide a premium experience that offers more than the basic, often ad-supported service level.

Subscriptions are enjoying a new prominence as a revenue model for digital content and apps. Internet companies are exploiting the opportunity to boost ARPU (average revenue per user), thanks to recurring payments from a subscriber base.

In this new and exclusive report from BI Intelligence we look at how prominent players in five separate categories have tried to build a subscription-based revenue stream alongside ad-based businesses: the categories are video, music, news publishing, social networks/messaging, and dating apps.

Access The Full Report And Data Sets By Signing Up For A Trial Membership »

Here are some of the key takeaways:

• Most companies operate on a "freemium model." Subscriptions typically operate alongside an advertising business.
• Success in freemium boils down to offering a core audience exclusive value that can only be accessed beyond a paywall. The key is to target the most loyal audiences, and sell them on an expanded offering — bundles of features or content — that they find irresistible.
• Some publishers and apps have had mixed results with subscriptions, and vary in terms of how hard they have pushed them. Part of the problem is that ad-dependent companies are worried about limiting audience if they pack away too much value into a subscription tier. 
• The proportion of paying subscribers within the total user base varies considerably across digital media industries. Each category is obviously different, and won't face the same challenges and opportunities in dialing up the percentage of subscribers and subscription revenue. Here are some of the proportions of subscribers in apps' user bases: Spotify (25%), WhatsApp (21%), Pandora (5%), Match Group (5%), The New York Times (3%), and LinkedIn (2%). 

The report is full of charts, data, and case studies that can easily be downloaded and put to use. 

In full, the report: 

• Analyzes the most common subscription-based digital media revenue models
• Explores the drivers that allows some subscription or freemium business models succeed  
• Explains the revenue mix and business opportunity in several key digital media industries
• Outlines companies that have succeeded with  subscription-based business models

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

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Forget Kim Kardashian — the 'butt selfie' queen of Instagram is a 21-year-old from Long Island

It's important for your solution to have a strong ROI. Equally important is the buyer's emotional connection to your solution and to you. If they aren't emotionally connected, it's easy for them to walk. It's essential, therefore, that you recognize the buyer's emotion, relate to it, and adapt your approach. 

B2B marketers are directing an increasing percentage of their energy and budget towards content creation. But the consequent focus on quantity rather than quality is leaving B2B buyers unimpressed: according to recent Forrester research, more than three out of four believe that vendors are generating too much material for them to sort through.

Much of the content is simply a weakly disguised product pitch. But even when content addresses a relevant subject, much of it simply leaves the reader feeling that they have been subjected to a worthless re-hash of ideas they were already familiar with, and that they have learned nothing new.

One thing is obvious: if you don’t know what your target audience is likely to see value in, you’re unlikely to be able to create the sort of content that will engage them and make them want to learn more. So B2B marketers are now seeking salvation in buyer personas – but many are making crass mistakes in their implementation…

In my experience, a lot of the blame must rest with the airheads in many B2B marketing agencies who have swallowed the buyer persona phenomenon hook, line and sinker without enough regard for the profound and dramatic differences between B2B and B2C buying.

B2B is complicated

The B2B buying decision process is complicated. It typically involves a number of stages and multiple stakeholders. Significant amounts of effort may be involved, and significant sums of money may be at risk. If consensus cannot be achieved, the most likely outcome is a decision to do nothing.

Let’s be clear: I believe that, when properly crafted and based on genuine research-based insights, buyer personas can be an incredibly effective tool for B2B marketers. But the process needs to take account of the complexities of B2B buying, and avoid the irrelevancies.

Stop the vacuous speculation

In short, it’s time to kick the Shih Tzu out of B2B buyer personas. Vacuously speculating on what dog your archetypal prospects own, how many children they have or what sports team they support has no relevance whatsoever to crafting messages that will resonate with a B2B audience.

What’s worse, if your sales people see anything that trivial in a buyer persona, they have every right to laugh marketing out of the room, and the marketing department will have suffered another well-deserved hammer blow to their credibility. It’s time to put the trivia aside.

9 essential elements

So what ought to be included in B2B-focused buyer personas? Ardath Albee, author of the excellent “Digital Relevance”, is one of the leading experts in this space – and she identified 9 key elements in a recent webinar (you can watch the video here).

• You’ve got to identify what their key responsibilities and objectives are.
• You’ve got to identify the problems that are preventing them from achieving these objectives.
• You’ve got to anticipate the obstacles that could prevent them from taking the next step.
• You’ve got to anticipate the questions they are likely to ask at each stage.
• You’ve got to understand the personality traits that are typically associated with the role.
• You’ve got to understand what keywords and phrases they might use when searching for solutions.
• You’ve got to understand how to engage them at each stage in the buying decision journey.
• You’ve got to be able to understand what a day in their life is like.
• You’ve got to understand how they consume information – and not assume it’s all through social media.
• And just in case this wasn’t already clear: no dogs, no family, no vague generalities.

You’ve got to be specific, rather than generic, in your conclusions – for example an objective to “grow revenues” is far less helpful than understanding that they need to “strip out the inefficiencies from their go-to-market process” when it comes to identifying compelling topics for content marketing.

You can’t afford to make this stuff up

I’ve seen too many buyer personas that seem to have been solely based on speculative internal conversations between members of the marketing team. There is simply no substitute for getting out there and interviewing your key customers and prospects. But – as Ardath points out – these interviews need to be conversations, and not interrogations, and you need to be prepared to adapt your line of questioning in the light of what you hear.

How many personas do you need?

The latest research from the CEB found that the typical B2B buying decision involves an average of 5.4 stakeholders. So does that mean that you need five to six separate buyer personas to have any chance of understanding their motivations?

Fortunately not. Stakeholders tend to fall into one of three clusters – strategic, operational, and technical. Members of these clusters tend to think about the world in broadly similar ways. So if you start by crafting representative buyer personas for these three archetypes you will have gone a long way to understanding their role in the buying process.

Help is at hand

One of the problems with the traditional approach to buyer personas is that it is a static process, supported by very little enabling technology. But if Cintell, a Boston-based start-up has anything to do with it, this is all going to change. Their solution is in beta at the moment. I suggest you keep them on your radar.

Oh, and by the way: organizations have personas too…

P.S. the Shih Tzu in the photo is called Poppy. She’s absolutely delightful. But the only purchases she influences are dog-related.

Time is money, no matter what your line of work. Whether you provide support for the back-end operations of a bank, or develop a mobile game, every bit of time you spend on development, support, marketing, sales… it all contributes towards your cost. Now, you’ll find many, many ways of reducing costs by reducing the money you spend on your various business functions – but you can’t really boost efficiency and productivity unless you factor in the time your employees spend on dealing with ‘unproductive’ issues  – prospective deals that promised to be the biggest you’ve ever had but eventually fell through, customer queries that could have been answered with a simple FAQ section but ended up getting channelled through to your phone support staff.

Wasted time has a cost attached to it

Consider this scenario – your sales team is approached by a prospective buyer who wants to know all about the cost involved in implementing your software offering at his workplace. So they set up a few meetings, spend hours trying to understand the client company, prepare a few presentations, take along a developer to better explain the benefits…. In all, your employees could have spent several man-days in pitching for their business, only to find out that your ‘perfect customer’ now thinks that your product might not really be suited for his business, or eventually makes a purchase that’s just too small to justify the effort you made. This is a scenario that could repeat itself quite a few times each year, leading to the wastage of valuable resources – including that most valuable of them all – your employees’ time. And that’s just one example from one department.

What it doesn’t mean

Let’s first take a quick look at what this doesn’t mean – When you’re looking at reducing the time and money you spend on deals that either don’t materialize, or don’t make financial sense, you’re not talking about being arrogant or laid back. It doesn’t mean that your sales team lose their hungry edge by only going after deals they know are a sure bet. And it doesn’t at all mean that you dismiss prospective clients who might not present the best opportunity at this moment. And it certainly doesn’t mean that you jump to provide service for a big customer at the expense of a smaller client. What we actually mean by asking you to streamline your sales and support functions is that you handle them in the manner which allows you to maximize your resources across the board. And here’s how you do it:

Streamline your sales and support channels

1. Find your niche and make it clear

Land Rover wants to sell luxury for off-road enthusiasts or SUV lovers. Rolls Royce only sells to the super-affluent. American Express cards have long been invitation-only. Keeping it exclusive works great for branding and keeps those tire kickers out. Make it clear – in every marketing message your company sends out – as to who your intended target is. Tailor your messages, choose the correct medium, and target only those you want to respond. If you’re making a new helpdesk product, do you really want your messaging to reach 20-year-old students?

Here’s some more information that should come in handy when you’re seeking the perfect niche for your business.

2. Sort out your lines of communication

Twitter, phone support, web feedback forms, Facebook, your online help desk… You’ve got it all sorted out and you think you’re well placed to deal with any query. But you also need to direct  enquiries and questions to the correct department without tying up your support teams. Create specialized support & sales channels for your various customer categories, and make sure you direct people to the correct one. Advertising your business accounting package? Make sure your sales contact information isn’t the same as the one you use for your personal finance app. You could even maintain separate websites for your home and corporate users. When you’ve got specialized sales and support staff for your various products, why not save their time by making sure they don’t get sidetracked directing enquiries around? Instead, make your employees more efficient by directing your customers to the right sales channel at the start.

Make sure your marketing message is on point with these tips.

3. Pre-empt enquiries

Is your sales team reeling under a deluge of enquiries that can be better handled without their intervention? Perhaps basic technical or pricing queries – you certainly don’t need a sales staffer to explain this to everyone! Save your time and keep personalized attention for when it’s required by setting up FAQs and other informative sections on your website. If an FAQ can explain to most of your prospective clients what the hardware requirements are for your new app, must you really money on dealing with these queries over the phone? Make sure the information is out there, and that it’s easy to find, giving your sales team a break from spending their time answering basic queries.

4. Automation

You’d be surprised how often people just turn to a business’s Twitter handle or Facebook page to ask a question. Why not automate the process? At least in terms of acknowledging requests, directing queries to your website, or even automatic, keyword-based responses… You can extend this to email support as well – automation can help you in filtering and redirecting queries based on who’s calling, and even by dealing with basic queries without needing to involve a support or sales staffer. In essence, think about building systems that’ll reduce the need for human interaction unless essential. Let your staff only have to deal with queries that require their response, not for every question that can be more efficiently dealt with by using an FAQ section!

5. Use collaboration tools to make your staff more efficient

If your sales team is like most others, they probably work on several different clients at the same time. Why not boost their efficiency and teamwork by letting them collaborate? Services like Google Apps and Huddle allow your employees to work together – cutting across location, time, and department – on the same project. The uses for collaboration tools are many – work together on sales pitches, send the most critical projects to your most experienced staffers, direct technical queries to the right team, escalate pending issues… In essence, saving time and money by maximizing the most vital resource you have available to you – your highly trained team.

6. Take your team’s feedback into account

Customer feedback isn’t the only vital source of information that can help you deliver a better user experience – your sales and support teams’ input can also go a long way in making sure you’re not short-selling your product by limiting it. Even if the customer’s happy, and sales are rising, it doesn’t mean things are lining up for long-term success. Have you checked with your sales heads and support experts whether they agree with the rosy assessment? Or does the cheery picture hide difficulties your teams might be facing? Perhaps your marketing message is drawing in too many users of one type that could later put too much pressure on your support teams. Or it could be that while your sales are indeed doing well, they could be doing even better if you tweaked things a bit. These guys are on the front-line – they’re the ones dealing with the customer every single day. Hear them out; see what they feel you could be doing differently.

To see what you can learn from your sales teams, check this out.

7. Work on a process, not just a product

Every marketer knows how important the overall customer experience is, but even then, many businesses, especially startups, fail to implement this lesson into their marketing and support strategy. Even in the early stages of designing your app or product, it helps to look at it from a holistic point – after all, it also has to be sold and maintained. Your developers’ and engineers’ work doesn’t end at making a killer app or device – but only when they create a process that works. A customer doesn’t just buy one aspect of your business and his contact with you won’t cease at the point of sale, so it makes sense to ensure your ‘process’ is easy to maintain and works with the minimum of intervention. After all, your sales and customer support staff only build upon what the developers and engineers give them. So perhaps it makes sense to look at the bigger picture right from the start.

Business success doesn’t stop at making fantastic product. You need to sell it, maintain it, and work on improving it to stay ahead of the competition. But sometimes we can get so caught up in pushing sales as aggressively as possible, we forget this. We end up ignoring possible inefficiencies built into our system that could come back to haunt us later, and we often get so blinded by sales success, we forget to stop and see whether we’re really headed in a direction that guarantees long-term success.

But business isn’t about just powering through in the short term. On the contrary, it’s about the long-term vision. Is your business in the right niche? Are you spending your profits on ensuring an efficient support system that will scale up alongside your business? And are you really making the best use of your most vital resource – your employees? Are your sales and customer support functions as streamlined as possible? Or are they still working in an ad-hoc basis that you imagine fits your freewheeling, startup culture more? These are the questions you need to ask yourself if you’re serious about long-term success.

Every day you want to progress toward achieving positive sales performance. Most days you feel that sense of achievement, but you also see areas for improvement when it comes to productivity levels. 

In our 2019 RFPIO Responder Survey, salespeople in technology, healthcare, and financial services revealed they’re working toward time management and revenue objectives with perseverance. And they realize automation is the missing link in their proposal process.

68% of Salespeople Don’t Have Enough Time to Focus on Sales Activities

At any given moment, 101 things command a salesperson’s attention. Yet, they only want to do one thing: close the next big deal. 

In the RFPIO Responder Survey, 68% of sales teams reported they don’t have enough time in their day to focus on sales activities. When other team members ask sales to contribute to RFP responses, 10% of salespeople see this request as an ongoing challenge because they don’t think sales proposals are a priority.

Sales proposals are a foundational part of the sales process, and they are frequently undervalued due to time constraints. Today’s buyer not only expects sales proposals, they still consider these documents to be a key step in the evaluation process.

While sales proposals may seem like a formality, they are another sales tool for closing deals. The most direct benefit of proposal software is automation, allowing you to reduce manually intensive tasks and focus on producing better sales proposals in less time.

RFP Automation Gives 63% of Reps More Time to Pursue Opportunities

Salespeople choosing to automate sales proposals are winning time back in their day to pursue new business opportunities. According to the survey, 63% of sales teams are improving productivity with the time management benefits of proposal software.

Here are several ways proposal software automates tasks to save you time:

1. Project management 

Proposal software treats every proposal as a project in its own right. Artificial intelligence is changing the way teams manage and create sales proposals by taking over repetitive tasks. AI proposal management software makes it much easier to break up relevant sections, auto-identify response content, and assign questions to your subject matter experts. 

2. Content Management 

The heart and soul of any proposal software is the RFP content library — in fact, 93% of salespeople using RFPIO selected the answer library as their top feature. This is your hub for storing and organizing all of your company content, even beyond sales proposals. Reviewing content is much more systematic as well.

3. Collaboration 

Because collaboration happens within a proposal software platform, 12% of surveyed sales teams report they receive less email during the response process.

4. CRM Integrations

People and technology need to communicate to streamline your sales proposal process. Your preferred workspace is your CRM, so any proposal software you choose should integrate accordingly.

5. Business Intelligence and Analytics

To see the gaps and opportunities in your sales proposal process, you need the ability to analyze data. Dashboards and reporting capabilities provide insights into everything from win/loss analysis to proposal completion time averages. Business intelligence capabilities bring you tangible data so you understand when a new business opportunity is worth your time.

15% of Salespeople Struggle With Having Sales Content Easily Accessible 

Control+F (or, Command+F, for Mac users) is a common keyboard pathway salespeople take to locate existing sales content — such as past RFP responses, detailed product/service information, pricing sheets, customer testimonials and case studies, and other collateral and attachments. 

Another tactic involves continually tapping your company knowledge gatekeepers — your subject matter experts (SMEs) — on the shoulder every time technical questions arise. Depending on the complexity of your organization, this SME shoulder-tapping will happen quite frequently. 

When responding to an RFP, you and your SMEs reallocate valuable time creating repetitive content you’ve built together many times before. When a prospect is waiting for your email reply, you risk the chance of losing them to one of your competitors, simply by not having the answer ready when they need it.

If you’re like the 15% of salespeople from our survey looking for ways to improve sales content accessibility, I can offer some guidance. You need a searchable, AI-powered knowledge repository for accessing approved company information in one convenient place. 

Salespeople who take advantage of an RFP content library tap into a wealth of organizational knowledge for a variety of sales activities. For example, BDRs can keep the RFP content library open on their screen during discovery calls to answer any technical questions on the spot. Ultimately, responding to prospect questions quickly and confidently builds trust. 

22% of Reps Rarely or Never Audit their RFP Content Library 

What is the root cause behind inaccessible sales content? Content management. What impacts your chances of winning or losing a deal? Again, it’s content management. 

Quality content impacts the win potential of your sales proposal. To ensure content quality, you must be proactive with your RFP content library, maintaining responses through dedicated content audits. Keeping sales content accurate and current is an ongoing challenge for busy teams, as revealed in our 2019 RFPIO Responder Survey:

• 10% of salespeople never audit their RFP response content. 
• 12% only audit their content once a year.
• 37% audit their answer library content quarterly.
• 14% prefer monthly content audits.

Quarterly content audits are the frequency we recommend to most proposal management teams. If your products or services change rapidly, you may consider monthly content audits, like 14% of our customers.  

Quality proposal content is all about preparation, making sure your best responses are on-hand when you need them — not buried deep in some spreadsheet. Performing regular content audits gives you a head start when a tight proposal deadline is weighing on your shoulders. 

With optimized sales content in your answer library, you have the strongest possible foundation to work with. Using these content management techniques will speed up proposal completion time, so you can move on to other important revenue-generating activities. 

86% of Salespeople Want to Shorten the Sales Cycle to Close More Deals

“Winning the business” is the sales anthem that drives us forward. It’s no surprise that 86% of salespeople want to shorten the sales cycle to close more deals. Sales teams using proposal software to automate their response process revealed promising results.

Before implementing proposal software, 53% of sales teams spent several weeks completing sales proposals. After proposal software implementation, 39% managed to complete sales proposals in a week and 27% sped up completion time to a one-day turnaround. And, 12% of these respondents are now finishing sales proposals in between two and five hours with RFP automation.

Your time is valuable, but so is the hard work you do to win new business. Getting the best possible sales proposal out the door is only possible with effective time management. If you’re not automating your sales proposals yet, I hope you’ll consider changing your tactics.

Inbound marketing offers great strategies for attracting and engaging your target customers. But what about lead conversion? No matter what your current web traffic looks like, improving your B2B lead conversion depends on your ability to attract and nurture qualified leads. HubSpot offers some useful inbound marketing tools that make it easier to convert more leads into buyers.

1. Responsive Design

Successful lead conversion begins with a responsive website that can be navigated from any device, and with Google’s new algorithm update, mobile-friendly design is no longer optional. HubSpot allows you to design websites that adapt to a variety of devices and help increase B2B lead conversion by providing a frustration-free navigation experience.

2. Landing Pages

Landing pages are designed to convert visitors into leads, but the success of these pages depends on their ability to connect with the visitor at their particular stage in the buying journey. Hubspot makes designing landing pages simple, and allows you to cater to visitors based on their specific interests, industry, or stage in the lifecycle.

3. Smart CTAs and Smart Forms

As part of your landing page, an effective call-to-action and intuitive form is essential for helping guide buyers through the funnel and converting leads into sales. With Hubspot Smart CTAs, you can display the content that best appeals to the particular audience based on list criteria or where they are in the lifecycle.  HubSpot’s Smart Forms are helpful when re-engaging leads, as they hide the questions that have already been answered previously by the lead and use new form fields to collect additional information.

4. Lead Management

Though many marketers recognize the importance of lead nurturing, according to a 2011 survey by MarketingSherpa, 65% of B2B businesses have not yet established lead nurturing. In order to effectively nurture your leads, you need to keep track of their interactions with the company. Hubspot’s sophisticated lead management tools allow you to collect details on every contact point between your leads and your brand. With the Contacts feature, marketers can also easily segment, score and market to leads.

5. A/B Testing

Testing new ideas and analyzing the results is critical to improving B2B lead conversion rates. HubSpot includes A/B testing tools that allow companies to test different landing pages and CTAs to see what the target audience best responds to. This takes the guess work out of marketing and helps save you time and money by delivering measurable results.

Ultimately, increasing B2B lead conversion rates begins with attracting qualified leads from the start. These HubSpot tools help you really get to know what your target market responds best to so that you can create a more successful user experience that converts leads.

In the first 2 parts of this series we discussed the role of executives and best practices for planning and preparation when outsourcing your lead generation program. Now as we wrap up, we’ll address appropriate expectations for a program and two essential components for ongoing success: a shared lead definition and accountability between marketing and sales.

Part III: Expectations for ongoing success: marketing and sales accountability

The Right Expectations

Expect a high volume of unqualified dispositions* at the start of your program. In the first two weeks of the program you will see disproportionately more unqualified dispositions than qualified dispositions or leads. (In fact, you may not even see any leads in this time period.) Unqualified dispositions are naturally the easiest to uncover and will therefore “rise to the surface” quickly, while highly qualified sales-ready leads take time to be developed.  It’s important to be aware of this ahead of time so it doesn’t come as a shock and cause you to doubt the program before it’s barely taken off.

Expect two qualified, sales-ready leads per FTE per week. It may be slightly more or a little less depending on the nature of the program, but from our experience and IP, two highly qualified leads per week is a consistent number. If a company promises more, chances are the quality of those so-called leads will fall short of what you’re looking for.

The best example of this is an appointment setting company that charges by the appointment. They might charge $650 - $850 per appointment, while we might charge $1250 for a highly qualified sales opportunity that sales will trust. Guess what? The appointment is NOT a highly qualified sales-ready lead. The vendors will tell you that themselves. So decide in advance if you are looking for quality over quantity, and if you are willing to wait for leads to be developed that are worth your sales team’s time.

In reality, you cannot accelerate the sales process (or even the buying process). You effectively accelerate revenue by identifying better opportunities and by working them early in the cycle rather than responding to RFP’s won by a more agile competitor.

Don’t expect your sales force’s close rate to be 50%. Your sales reps’ close rate might be 50% of what they thought would close (meaning that you have no visibility into the real won, lost and no-decision outcomes). But it is NOT 50% of the sales-qualified leads they work. The close rate is more likely to be 6 – 30%. According to SiriusDecisions, average companies close about 20% of sales-qualified leads and best in class companies close about 30%.

Marketing and Sales Accountability

In order to maximize the success of your program, marketing and sales must first establish a shared lead definition. To circle back to Part I, here’s where executive involvement plays a key role. Hold both sales and marketing accountable by establishing a review process to evaluate leads that sales, either proactively or passively, doesn’t follow up on. Did the lead meet the agreed upon criteria? Or did sales drop the ball, claiming, “I called twice, but they never called back so they must not have been interested”? 

Closing Thoughts

As we close out this series, let’s recap. If you want to get the most out of your outsourced lead generation program you must: 1) have executive sponsorship and reinforcement; 2) participate fully in planning and training; and 3) have appropriate expectations and accountability. On the flip side, failure to implement these practices accounts for approximately 80% or more of the reasons why programs fail. So, why not take my old boss’s advice and dig the type of hole that will allow your program to flourish? Start by putting the heavy work in on the front end and in no time you’ll find yourself reaping the rewards of your labor.

*Disposition - noun: the classification of a prospect account as determined after a cycle of lead qualification activity; verb: to classify prospect accounts using a cycle of lead qualification activity. Standard PointClear disposition categories include: Lead, Pipeline, Nurture, Disqualified, No Response, Bad.

Today LinkedIn has already changed the way organizations Recruit, Market, Sell and Learn:

1. Recruit. LinkedIn is a must have tool for Recruiters and Talent Specialists today. Organizations that are not looking for active talent (with Job Ads) or passive talent (with Recruiter) on LinkedIn are clearly behind the curve and loosing competitive advantage – nothing new here.

2. Market. We have access now to a variety of solutions to establish a brand (Company Pages …) and generate awareness and leads (Ads, Sponsored Updates, InMails …), especially in Business to Business sectors.

3. Sell. The company has already disrupted the prospecting and lead generation space with its the new Sales Navigator. It will quickly become a must have for business development and key account management professionals. Organizations using it are today ahead of the curve.

4. Learn. Pulse and the most recent acquisition of Lynda.com is a strong declaration of intentions. LinkedIn wants to become the go-to place for Business Information and Training.

So … what’s next? What can we expect from LinkedIn in the coming years? How will they help us be more productive? – This is just an exercise and not based on any company information or guidance-.

1. Manage Relationships. Definitely Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a space that LinkedIn must have an eye on. We are already experiencing a reduced version of a CRM on the Connections section. The opportunity for the company here is to bet on a full CRM and wipe out the competition, since they are already the leaders in the “Social” part of the CRM. Acquisitions? Own developments? We’ll see how, but it will happen.

2. Productivity. The opportunity for a Corporate Social Network (CSN) is just enormous. I call it “LinkedIn at work” as it would compete with the soon-to-be-ready “Facebook at work” and this move should be anticipated by current actors. The show-stopper for CSN is usually adoption. Well, employees are already on LinkedIn … what else can be said to see the opportunity for LinkedIn. The question is when they will announce it.

3. Performance. We are starting to see LinkedIn ranking individuals at work. The first employee performance indicators are here. For instance, the Social Selling Index (SSI) is a number between 1 and 100 that ranks a Business Development professional’s performance on Linkedin. The number is a result of an algorithm applied to facts: number of connections, activity, shares, likes, messages sent … and the higher the number, the better the performance and the better the professional since studies show that it is correlated with sales results. Now let’s jump ahead a few years and picture a job interview and the recruiter asking: What’s your SSI? … It is happening now. More indicators to come …

What is your opinion? Do you see it coming too? or would you disagree?

Thank you for reading!

This case study was written by Harrison Rose, who heads Sales & Biz Dev at Paddle.com. 

You can check out his personal blog where he shares sales insights or connect with him on LinkedIn.

About Paddle

Paddle is a developer tools company, aiming to handle the aspects of selling apps & content on desktop, web & mobile, that you don’t want to. All the way from SaaS billing for your web app, to mobile analytics.

Since launch our most successful method of customer acquisition has been through outbound sales. Our journey to finding Close.io, has been a long one.

We’ve used lots of CRMs

Sometimes it feels like we’ve used every CRM offering out there. You name it, we’ve tried it. Picking one that works for you is hard, and the problems among them seem common;

• Great to use initially, but struggle with masses of leads
• Too much time taken to add/manage leads.
• Difficult for other team members to monitor overall progress in the sales dept.

All CRMs aim to solve these problems, but rarely do look to solve these problems AND improve your sales cycle + techniques. This is what sets Close.io apart.

Living in the age of data-driven sales

While solving these problems through a range of features, like the smart views, complex search, and easy to access opportunities overview, Close.io enhances your sales by putting an emphasis on data, and metrics about your sales cycle.

Access to this data helps you iterate on your outreach, improve your techniques, and close more deals.

The three features I’d like to highlight which help achieve this, are as follows;

• Sent Emails
• Activity Overview
• Status Changes

Tracking the effectiveness of your e-mails

As an outbound sales-driven organisation, outreach is important to us. What emails are working, who are the most effective customers we’re outreaching to, and how can we improve?

Close.io makes the tracking is this data easy via the “Sent Mails” view.

Real word email activity of one of our SDRs

With Close you have the ability to setup each of your email templates, track the number of emails sent, the open rate, and the response rate.

In knowing the effectiveness of your emails, you can measure the effect of tweaking their contents, measure which types of email are most effective & to which groups, and thus close more deals.

An example of this is the tweaks to we made to our “break-up” email, covered in a blog-post here. In understanding that open-rates were high, yet response rates could be improved, we were able to tweak the content of this email, and measure the effects.

Improving our outreach, and most importantly, our results.

A top-down view of outreach

There’s been a lot of emphasis made by well-respected sales pro’s that measuring results, and not activities is of utmost importance. Something I wholeheartedly subscribe to. That’s why at Paddle, employee sales performance is measured on metrics like;

• % of new prospects SDRs can engage in conversion
• no. of prospects SDRs can convert into interested/qualified leads
• % of qualified leads Account Execs are able to convert into integrated customers etc.

However when the above metrics are not being met, or financial KPIs are being missed, looking at how many customers are being put into your sales funnel is extremely important. The “activity overview” is helpful in this regard.

Measuring your sales funnel, and employee performance.

I mentioned some of the targets we work towards as a team above, eg. no of leads we’re moving from “Contacted” to “In Conversation” on a weekly & monthly basis. The “Status Change” view is imperative in tracking this.

Tracking one of our SDRs outreach, over a week period.

It’s a simple interface, pulling the data we want and need in seconds.

The Close.io community

In addition to providing you with the features and data to improve your sales flows, Close.io “out-teach the opposition”. Running regular webinars, and a frequently updated blog to help those in our sector. A particular favourite of mine being, “Put some Funny in your Follow Up”.

The team offer simple, actionable advice to help improve you and your skills. Going above and beyond in their role of solving those pesky CRM issues initially discussed.

Love is a funny old thing

In effortlessly solving problems faced using CRMs in the past, but then helping me learn and improve as a biz dev & salesperson, Close.io not only makes my job easier, but makes it more enjoyable.

For me, this is incredibly rare in a piece of software and once found is an awesome thing.

There was a day when you had to choose between quality pipeline and quantity of pipeline. However, with better practices, technology, and data, you can both grow volume, and increase the quality of your pipeline through conversions.

The Old Way of Lead Creation

Once upon a time, lists were a smart lead generation tactic. However, the challenge with this approach is that data degrades over time, and if the lead started hot or warm, it’s cold by the time you get through that list. Therefore, large, generic lists are not a good thing. It gives you high volume with low conversions. Even if they get into the pipeline, they’ll likely not make it all of the way through.

High volume with low conversion is actually worse than low volume with low conversion, because you’re wasting your sales reps time. They’re spending a lot of time talking and rejecting.

The other issue with big lists is the amount of inaccurate data. Giant sources of data tend to be inaccurate, or if it was once accurate, it isn’t accurate anymore.

Contacts change jobs, roles, experience turnover, etc., and turnover rates may be high or low depending on your target industries. The result is BDRs becoming manual data cleansers, rather than pipeline builders. They’re validating and cleaning that data instead of generating qualified, quality lists, and quality leads.

The Lead Creation Solution

Instead of generic lists, look for highly targeted leads dripped steadily into your database. Here, the leads are caught while they’re hot, and you don’t heat them until you’re in a position where they can be caught. Higher conversion rates happen when you have highly targeted leads steadily dripped into your database. They’re right at the point of relevance.

Here’s the key:

The optimal rate of lead creation = the rate of lead consumption

The ideal rate at which you are actually feeding leads into your system should be the same rate at which those leads can be consumed. If you’re feeding them at a lesser rate, then your BDRs are underutilized. If you’re feeding them at a faster rate, then you’re simply risking losing those leads or the leads going cold.

The optimal rate is right in that center, where it’s the right amount of leads for your BDRs.

Get more lessons on lead generation in the free ebook below.

Meet The SalesLoft Staff: Chris Smith

Chris’s Bio: Chris joined the SalesLoft Sales Development team in October 2014 and has been crushing his numbers since day ONE. As one of our resident fitness gurus, Chris brings a level of motivation, energy, and healthy competition to the SDR room that keeps everyone on their toes.

What’s your ultimate sales development productivity hack?

Mom use to tell me everything has a place…This same rule applies to the SDR role. All leads, notes, calls, emails, task, and activity have a place. Staying organized is uber essential and necessary to getting ahead. And I have to give a shout out to Sean Kester. I mean the guy is on a piece of TOAST, literally!! He introduced me to aText… so dope; I even got my wife to use it, LOL. Oh, and SalesLoft Cadence.

Who is someone in the world of startups or sales development that you admire or find inspiring?

I have to return a shout out to Craig Rosenberg, CEO of TOPO, a sales advisory firm. I met him earlier this year at SalesLoft Rainmaker. Craig is an awesome and passionate leader. The content and thought leadership at TOPO is inspirational, practical, and authentic. I have utilized TOPO content in conversations with prospects and clients. Check out their blog here.

How do you use Prospector/Cadence on a day-to-day basis?

Prospector and Cadence are a rhythm themselves. I start with prospecting targeted and relevant prospects. Once I have compiled a list of leads in SalesLoft Prospector, I export to Cadence. I have previously set up my rhythm or number of touches in a certain number of days. We call this an outreach strategy. Be precise. Be calculated.

During this time I have also setup email templates with the framework of my message that I will later personalize depending on my prospect and industry. I finish my export from Prospector into my step 1 / day 1 Cadence. I begin with email outreach and follow up with a phone call. I continue these steps based upon the workflow of my Cadence. All notes from calls and emails are documented in Cadence. Reminders is a built in function in Cadence that I heavily use to keep track of my daily follow-up and reminders. Work flow is consequential.

Nothing, I mean nothing, slips through the cracks.

What quote do you live by, both personally and professionally?

“Live passionately” and “The money turned my tuna into lobster.”

How do you stay fired up to come into work every day and help motivate the team?

Let’s keep it real here…my relationship with Jesus. WHAT? For real? Yes, the core of who I am, my soul, is fed through my relationship with Jesus. This produces grace, satisfaction, joy, peace, motivation and ambition. Colossians 3:17

Being a personal trainer, how do you think the worlds of fitness and sales development relate?

Staying in shape takes discipline. I believe some would agree physical discipline is more brutal than professional career discipline. That is why I ate six donuts last week when a friend brought two dozen Dunkin Donuts in the office (his kind gesture backfired). Others would disagree — believing that bringing sexy back is more important than prospecting, making phone calls, and sending emails.

I also started my career in the fitness industry and if anyone has been called a dozen times by a gym asking them to join… well then you might have experienced my disciplines and hustle.

If you were a professional baseball player, what song would you choose as your walkup song?

Testify by Rage Against the Machine

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