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The ever-changing landscape of the business-to-business sales profession necessitates a fresh look at the crucial training and development activities provided to quota-carriers by their enterprise. More than ever, companies expecting scalable and repeatable sales success stories are embedding their educational efforts into long-term, flexible, tech-savvy methodologies designed for multi-year results.

Sales training used to be simple: provide a rep with a compendium of your products and prices, run them through a script, assign them a territory, and then let them sink or swim in a cold, Darwinian fashion. Today’s enterprise sales leaders, for the most part, recognize that complex deals, long sales cycles, and highly educated buyers force a more holistic approach to training and managing their human capital. They also know that a “survival of the fittest” mentality is costly: according to Aberdeen’s Beyond the Quota: Best-in-Class Deployments of Sales Performance Management, the average price of replacing a full-time rep is over $29,000, and it takes over seven months to locate and onboard each individual.

Attacking Substantive Business Problems With Sales Education

Hence, sales training remains alive and well — in this fifth consecutive year of Aberdeen’s Sales Effectiveness research on the topic — as sales leaders more effectively manage and grow their talent. Indeed, newly collected data from 260 survey respondents shows that companies deploying formal sales training initiatives lead non-adopters in overall team attainment of sales quota (78 percent vs. 63 percent), customer retention (71 percent vs. 66 percent), the percentage of sales reps achieving quota (64 percent vs. 42 percent), and additional key business metrics. These companies are responding to a variety of business pressures when implementing their sales training programs:

• Increase or sustain revenue during an uncertain economic recovery (50 percent of companies indicating this as a top-three pressure).
• Need to align sales activity with overall business objectives (37 percent).
• Changes in products, functionality, or services offered (28 percent).
• Longer customer buying cycles (18 percent).

For all of these challenges, an enhanced focus on better-informed, well-trained front-line sales reps can mitigate the negative effects of a competitive marketplace. In fact, when we look at the most popular strategies that survey respondents are implementing, in order to confront these pressures, the common theme in their sales training deployments is focused on the all-important conversation that reps hold with their prospects and customers. These actions begin with the need to up-level the skill sets of enterprise salespeople – Figure 1.

Figure I: Strategic Actions That Enhance Sales Conversations

Considering how the modern “hidden sales cycle” allows our prospective buyers to learn so much about our products and services before we have the first chance to speak with them, it is crucial that our reps be armed with high-level abilities to nurture, negotiate, close, and service their deals, at all times. Their interactions also need to be less generic: no longer will a standard sales pitch work; buyers expect their rep to know about their specific business and practically anticipate their individual needs. The second pair of popular end-user actions tell an additional story about business trends. “Improving the ability to engage senior-level executive decision-makers” is more popular than it was a year ago, while “standardizing messaging” is less so. These changes further speak to the need for sales training to go beyond the old-fashioned basics: it takes time and experience to learn how to reach and impact high-level executives in the buying organization, as well as to customize one’s messaging to the individual conversation at hand. Now, let’s take a look at how the most successful sales teams put these strategies into real-life methodologies.

Core Competencies: Embracing Best-in-Class Process And Knowledge Management Capabilities

Aberdeen’s Best-in-Class companies within this Sales Training data set lead under-performers in adopting a series of business process that create a solid foundation for their educational initiatives – Figure 2. At the top of the list is a formal sales methodology deployed by a majority of all companies, but especially so by the top performers. Whether developed internally or acquired with the help of an external sales training provider, a deliberate process to guide sales activities is essential to any organization seeking to maximize their sales results and grow their business. These methodologies can be as simple as a step-by-step order in which the various pieces of the B2B sales puzzle ‒contact, vetting, BANT criteria, demo, proposal, negotiation, signature ‒ are put into play. Alternatively, many companies buy and deploy complex “guided selling” applications with wizard-driven interfaces and predictive analytics genies that drive time-honored sales process into the very fabric of a rep’s daily activity feed. At either extreme and across the spectrum, continuously teaching salespeople how to sell better will yield stronger results and an enviable return on the investment; Best-in-Class firms are 22 percent more likely than All Others to refresh their teams’ training at least on a quarterly basis.

Figure 2: Process Capabilities: Teach, Analyze, Share

The next two items from Figure 2 represent crucial operational competencies that can create teachable moments for professional sellers. First, up- and cross-selling into existing accounts is undoubtedly more efficient than finding new customers, but not all salespeople are provided with the tools to find such opportunities; read Aberdeen’s Grab the Low-Hanging Fruit: How Best-in-Class Companies Leverage a 360-Degree Customer View to learn how to tee your reps up for such success. Best-in-Class firms are 44 percent more likely than All Others (69 percent vs. 48 percent) to take this approach, so it is clearly advisable. So is the concept of learning from our success and mistakes alike: You Win Some, You Lose Some: How Best-in-Class Sales Leaders Learn as They Go teaches us that win-loss analysis initiatives are essential in maintaining an efficiently-run sales team. As our markets inevitably change, as our competitors evolve their tactics, and as our prospective buyers gain ever more insight into our products and services without listening to our voice, it is crucial to follow the Best-in-Class lead of ongoing sales education based on deal-by-deal post-mortems.

What is the one competency salesperson could most benefit from if they knew how to do it better?

A Survey of Sales Effectiveness: Global Research on what Drives Sales Success addressed that question. The skill set was: Developing New Business.

As to the nature of the challenge and the best practices for addressing it, it’s necessary to pinpoint whether you are talking about new business with new customers or new business with existing customers. For this discussion, let’s focus on the large B2B complex sales situations where one is developing new business with existing customers.

Particularly when you are working with an existing customer you may be ahead of the customer in seeing an unfolding situation that would drive a new business opportunity. As a matter of fact this is one of the skill areas where top performers differentiate themselves from the pack.

The most important skill in identifying future opportunities is the ability to see the relationship between observable events and knowing what actions and results they are likely to lead to and when.

Let’s take a look at six specifics.

1. Look at the current situation through the lens of the existing work effort. From time to time when you are reviewing an implementation – think back about the situation as it was preceding your solution. What things did you observe? What situations were present? Who did what just preceding the opportunity? New opportunities are a response to something. What things were in motion before the opportunity occurred?

2. Look at how your customers are fairing against goals, objectives and metrics. With knowledge about goals, objectives and metrics, and a sense of how the customer is performing, what would you do to reach these if you were in their place? What could your do that would enhance the customer’s success? How will they demonstrate success to their leadership and stakeholders?

If you can see where you can add value, they may as well. If they don’t, but you do, it puts you in the best position of all, namely you are helping a customer understand an unforeseen challenge.

3. Assess organizational changes for clues. Whether a company is preparing to implement a planned strategy, merging groups or responding to a problem or opportunity, organizational structures are put in place before new work is made visible to the outside world. Teams of required skills are assembled, specific skills are reassigned or grouped, and units are disbanded or reduced.

Look at new and expanded organizations and what kinds of skills, and in what quantity, are being added. Here it important to leverage the insight of your staff with a historical perspective of the customer, they can provide meaning to what specific changes may mean and not mean.

4. Observe what is happening in overall ongoing expense management. New efforts inside the customer organization cost money. Is the customer experiencing any changes in spending patterns you can observe? Are expenses being restricted, or expanded? Look for work that may foreshadow future work.

5. Don’t forget to tell your story. Be able to subtly, but clearly, reinforce just what it is you do that is of value to customers. Customers don’t spend much or any time pondering what you do. They worry about what they need and when they do, only the organizations that are top of mind, come to mind.

Too often, if you do not share the range of things you do well, a customer might say, “Oh, I wish I had known you can do X, because you did such a great job on Y and, had we known, we would have used you.” Always have an up-to-date value proposition about your core capabilities and a new story about how those capabilities have been used by others.

6. Bring in fresh thinking. Think about leveraging literature, speeches, research, stories you’ve heard that relate to the customer agenda or you know are of particular interest to the individual. Even if they don’t produce a lead today it builds relationships and often creates leads in the future.

Developing new business is one of the areas where top performers clearly differentiate themselves – they know it is hard to do and they learn how to do it. It is also an area where creating best practice profiles based on what your top performers do makes extraordinary sense. Likewise it should be a priority for those determining training and coaching priorities.

As a huge basketball fan, I love March Madness — when the best NCAA basketball teams rise above the rest and compete at an elite level. The teams that win are not always the ones with the best tactical skills. Tactics without a strategy are nothing. The ones that win have the best cohesive team strategy and are implementing it effectively. It’s no different when it comes to social media.

Strategy is the biggest difference between a B2B sales and marketing team that drives demand and enjoys consistent sales leads and revenue opportunities and ones that just has a presence and lots of connections that they are not engaged with.

I’m sorry to say – but most sales and marketing leaders on LinkedIn do not have a strategy. They have a shopping list of tactics that need to be completed. But, there’s no cohesive strategy.

There’s no thought behind the connections they’re making. There’s no thought on what happens after that connection is made – how are they’re going to turn that prospect into a client? There’s no thought about the content they’re posting and how it’s going to position them (if they did, they wouldn’t be posting reminders on the LinkedIn content platform that do not differentiate them). There’s no thought about the discussions they’re creating and how they’re going to get prospects to move from the discussions to their blog to learn more. And, there’s no thought about what happens next once they get prospects to their blog. There is no strategy for integrating LinkedIn into their everyday sales and marketing activities and programs.

To take your business to the next level using LinkedIn (and social media in general), start with your strategy.

The Strategies Sales & Marketing Leaders Need to Think About When Engaging on LinkedIn:

#1 Your Social Media Presence Strategy

Look at your LinkedIn profile. Did you really take a strategic approach to creating your LinkedIn profile? I bet you that your profile is not case study driven marketing tool and that it’s simply a cover letter and resume that talks about your sales achievements (which only shows that you care about making the sale instead of providing value and building a real relationship). I bet you that you’re not speaking to different targeted audiences with different needs and showing your value to them. It’s because you took a tactical approach rather than a strategic approach.

If you treat your profile as a cover letter and resume, you’re missing a prime lead generation opportunity. Brynne Tillman from Social Sales Link points out that prospects don’t care about what you’ve done—they want to know how you can help them. To convey your worth, find out what kind of value your prospects are looking for and optimize your LinkedIn profile to woo them.

#2 Your Thought Leadership Strategy

Many sales and marketing professionals are using LinkedIn groups as a newsfeed for their blog posts that are mostly reminders. They’re just using the LinkedIn publishing platform as another place to put their blog posts. So they’re just pushing out content instead of having a strategy to use content to pull prospects in. You need to plan out what type of content you can provide that will have decision makers thinking twice about the approaches they’re taking. You have to think about the discussions that you can create that makes you stand out as a thought leader. You have to think about whether the content inspires prospects to want to take further action and if the content is relevant — and who is it really relevant for.

#3 An Intelligent Prospecting Strategy

Take a good look at your connections and see how many of them are “long shot hopefuls” that can possibly introduce you to so and so. If you’re like many sales and marketing leaders that we have helped, then most of your connections are irrelevant to your business because you were focused on quantity instead of quality. You’re taking a scattershot approach hoping that someone can help you instead of focusing your time and energy on the key decision makers and influencers that can positively affect your bottom line. Your intelligent prospecting strategy should be defining who your main and secondary prospects and influencers are and a strategy to get them to open their closed doors – and keep them open.

#4 Community Building and Engagement Strategy

It’s not about how many connections you make or followers you have on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. It’s about how many people you reach and engage with. The best way to engage is to create a social media community. Inside my LinkedIn group, Get Help with LinkedIn Strategies, I’m engaging with 400+ sales and marketing leaders through regular content and discussions. One of my technology company clients has a community of more than 900+ decision makers from companies like Walgreens, Dannon, Target, Walt Disney Store, Pfizer and many others.

Remember, B2B buyers are looking for quick access to trusted experts and relevant content that helps them with their business issues. Your custom, niche LinkedIn community is the perfect way to give your buyers what they are looking for. Because my client with the 900+ group members was giving their buyers what they want, they received more RFPs.

So you need a strategy for how you’re going to build your community and how you’re going to keep prospects active in your community so you can build a relationship with them.

#5 Lead Generation & Lead Engagement Strategy

For most of the prospects you connect with on LinkedIn and other social media platforms, they don’t realize how and why they need you yet. You need to nurture these connections and provide them with relevant content (which gets them to raise their hand. You need a strategy for how you’re going to use case studies, white papers, 3^rd party research that supports your claims. You need a strategy on how you’ll use webinars, webcasts and other thought leadership content that piques your prospects curiosity and gets them wanting to talk to you about their options.

You need a strategy for how you’re going to intrigue prospects enough that they are curious on how you achieved results. Then you need a strategy for how you’re going to move them into your pipeline and how are you going to get them to engage further with you.

Now, I just scratched the surface. Start with my ideas and then dig deeper. Really get strategic on how you use LinkedIn and other social media platforms. Stop just completing a list of tasks.

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The key to great customer service is…? As counterintuitive as it seems, communication between these two teams can actually make or break the customer experience, particularly during the buying process.

Many companies try to downplay the sales and marketing relationship, but having common goals and processes between these two teams can do wonders to improve the quality of the buyer’s journey. Think about it: if marketing and sales are both working from the same database of leads — but neither team knows which to prioritize or follow up with — how optimized can your lead flow process really be?

Fortunately, putting a simple lead process in place can improve tensions between your two teams and align them behind shared objectives and goals. But what does this process actually look like? Pardot is hosting a webinar on March 26 at 2pm to dive into this question with Sr. Sales Manager, Ali Gooch, and Marketing Operations Specialist, Isaac Payne. Listen in on their marketing-sales banter — or, if you’re strapped for time, check out their recommended lead flow plan below.

Step One: Create a unified process for lead identification

The most important thing you can do when setting up your lead lead process is to get your sales team involved—right from the start. After all, your sales reps deal with your prospects on a daily basis; they’re the experts on recognizing when a prospect is ready to buy, and likely have a wealth of knowledge on how to recognize leads that should be prioritized. Start by asking them the following questions:

1. What constitutes a qualified lead?

2. What types of activities typically indicate that a lead is ready to talk to sales? What activities indicate that a lead should be nurtured further by marketing?

3. How often would sales reps like to get alerts of prospect activity? What would be their preferred method of delivery?

4. Deep dive into the current sales cycle and what it takes to close a deal. Who are the different stakeholders you are selling to, and what obstacles do you encounter at each stage of the sales process?

5. Which content and lead generation campaigns are producing the most qualified leads today? Which aren’t working?

Once each team has an understanding of the questions above, it’s time to put a lead scoring and grading system in place to help identify and prioritize the leads that sales should be following up with. Using a marketing automation tool, you can set up lead scoring to identify the leads with the highest activity levels (who are therefore the most interested in your product) and lead grading to pinpoint the leads that best fit your ideal prospect profile. A combination of these two criteria can help qualify the right leads for your sales team.

Step Two: Develop a lead distribution and follow-up strategy

Once your leads have been qualified, how do they get routed to the appropriate sales rep for a prompt follow up? According to a study by Harvard Business Review, companies that followed up with leads within a few hours were 60x more likely to win the business than those who followed up later — demonstrating the importance of a prompt follow-up strategy.

Marketing automation can facilitate this by allowing marketers to set threshold scores and grades that will automatically route leads to sales reps once those thresholds are surpassed. Work with your sales team to establish the activities and grades that indicate a lead is sales-ready to make sure they’re passed over to reps at the right time (hint: you should have covered this in the round of questions during step one).

Step Three: Communicate what’s working and what’s not

The simple truth of the matter is that you probably won’t build a perfect lead process the first time around. To get the most out of automatic lead scoring and grading, the best thing you can do is communicate with your sales team to periodically reevaluate and adjust your approach. Pick a time to revisit your lead process (it could be three weeks or three months, depending on how confident you are about what you’ve built) and ask your sales reps about the quality of leads they’ve received in that time period. Use the data you’ve collected to look for patterns and key indicators you might have missed — then give it another shot.

Want more information on getting this lead process set up? Learn from Pardot’s own marketing and sales teams’ experiences by registering for our March 26 webinar here.

Once upon a time you could remember all of your business contacts with ease.

The people you interacted with to maintain your business were a select group. You knew all of their names, their kids names, and where they went to college. It was easy to connect with them and stay in touch.

You also walked uphill (both ways) to work and soda was a penny.

It’s 2015 and I’ve got a soda’s worth of pennies that say you probably have more business contacts than you can count or remember at once. In a time when people have 2000 Facebook friends and 5000 LinkedIn connections it’s no easy feat to remember each person you come into contact with and maintain a relationship.

Are you trying to find a way to wade through the noise and stay top of mind with your contacts? Try these tips today and and start making more meaningful connections today.

Keep your contacts organized

Have you ever stared at the source code of a website? Having all of your contacts without any organization is kind of like looking at the code of a website when you only have minimal [or zero] knowledge of HTML. You’re sitting there staring at this information and you know it makes sense but you have no idea where to start and you’re not quite sure how to interpret it for your own purposes. Organizing your contacts helps to give you the front end view of a website and not the back end view. It’s not source code anymore. It’s a website — and a contact system — that makes sense.

We can’t say this enough, but organizing and segmenting your contacts increases the overall effectiveness of your sales, messaging, and email.

When you’re organizing your contacts try to be as specific as possible. Sorting into friends, family, and coworkers isn’t going to help you make sense of the relationships. Try organizing your contacts based on a goal (like potential sales consultants, first time home buyers, etc.) or where you met them (SXSW industry leaders, Home and Garden Show leads, etc.). Using one of these systems will help you recall the person easier and your interactions with them giving you a foot in the door to making that meaningful connection that will make sure they remember your name.

Follow up with no strings attached

Your contacts want to know that they’re more to you than just a potential job or a sale. They want to feel like a person. They’re not dumb and they already know that you want to keep in touch with them to help grow your business in some way, but they don’t want to feel like that when they’re interacting with you. They want to feel like you’re attempting to make a personal connection without a hard sell. Part of the soft sell is really selling yourself and that’s so important to this step.

Try following up with a piece of content that they may find valuable, or follow up with them on the channel that they operate in. Making an effort to focus on the prospect and their values will help your overall sell than if you just focused on yourself.

This is why it’s crucial that you keep your contacts organized. If they aren’t organized you won’t know how to tell one contact from the other which will make it difficult to make that genuine connection. Did your new contact mention that he has a new baby at home? Ask how the baby is doing. Does your client love the Red Sox? Send them condolences after a loss to the Yankees. Focus on the person and really get to know them. If you build those quality relationships your contacts will automatically think of you first because they know you personally.

Give your contacts opportunities to connect outside of email

Your contacts need to see your name and your face. The repetition will help them remember you and keep you top of mind. The more places they can find you, the better. Share your LinkedIn profile, connect them to your blog, and follow your prospects on Twitter.

If you want to go one step further, create opportunities for your contacts to see you in person. Before conferences our team will let important contacts know where to find us on the floor and how to reach us while we’re there. If you’re not going to conferences then consider establishing your own meet and greet scenarios. Host a networking event, a happy hour, or a meet up. Let your contacts where you’ll be, when you’ll be there, and that you’re happy to talk to them about whatever they’re interested in. They should be able to talk to you about partnering with your company or about the latest episode of Scandal, whatever helps them connect with you in a way that is comfortable for them. Connecting in a space that you create and on terms that work for them show them how available you will be when they finally decide they need your products and services.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of ways to stay top of mind with your contacts but it should help you get the ball rolling. These four simple steps will make a huge impact in the way you interact with your network and the return you see on those relationships. Remember that just like you, your contacts are people too, and they want to be treated that way. Make yourself unforgettable for all of the right reasons.

The unending instructional role of a marketer in an age of confusion

I swear marketing is the most misunderstood discipline of business.

And, is it really a discipline?

I know that “marketing is doing” and “marketing is everything you do” and “marketing is the customer experience.” Yes, yes, I haven’t had my head in the sand for the past two decades. The evolution of how we think about the subject has awakened the world to brand, story, experience, and emotions.

Or has it?

Just recently I made a presentation to a board of directors. The average age was, I’m guessing, 63. With no women on the board. In their previous lives, most had been in finance, executives in very large companies, or attorneys (as you might imagine, it was a party atmosphere).

I was tasked with presenting how the firm might reposition its services. Our perceptual research revealed a gap the width of the Grand Canyon between how recent clients and centers of influence (referral sources) perceived the brand and that of its senior leaders. I had spent considerable time buttoning up the slides with input from the CEO.

I’m not sure what I was expecting. I certainly wasn’t thinking they’d all bow down and call me “O Holy One” and “Great Seer of the Future.” And then we’d go out on the town to celebrate with green beer.

What I didn’t anticipate was the wide yawn. The few odd comments seemed to question the validity of the research itself (the knee-jerk response if you really don’t want to engage the topic). They appeared to dismiss much of the presentation as soft marketing stuff: “Hey, can you put this in a spreadsheet so I can understand it.” And the board certainly didn’t connect the hard work of repositioning the firm with changing the reality of what the firm actually provided—and with future sales.

My presentation wasn’t flawless, no doubt. However, their response confirms much of my experience with business-to-business firms in the lower-middle market (under $50MM). These are companies started in the 1990s or before, prior to the onslaught of the web, search, social, mobile, content marketing, big data, automation—you name it. Even in 2015, for many senior leaders in aging firms, marketing is a web site and a brochure. They’ve all “tried” social. Their CRM is on life support; their customer data is an example of chaos theory. And marketing is what their administrative assistant does when she (or he) isn’t buying office supplies at Staples.

While the marketing community embraces sea change after sea change, many entrepreneurs still misunderstand the very basics of marketing.

Marketing Defined — or What, Again, Is Marketing?

How do you simplify yet communicate the essence of marketing defined for an old school, sales minded organization? I suppose you don’t, really, if nothing is broken. But many business-to-business companies are struggling to grow organically with net new revenue. Many industries are being disrupted by younger, technologically minded and “data first” entrepreneurs.

The challenge is communicating the relationship between marketing and sales without understating marketing’s role and without overpromising how it will impact sales (“If you do this single thing you’ll receive tons of leads each month! Just add this automation piece to your mix, and you’ll be golden!”). Marketing defined today is complex and becoming more so, not only because of all the ways to reach customers but because of all the misperceptions of what it really is and how it informs and shapes sales.

For the foreseeable future, one of the primary jobs of the marketer will be educational. While we intuitively embrace the future meld of marketing and technology, many of our clients and senior leaders still ask, “Why should we invest in marketing?” We must see ourselves as a patient teacher-coach whose job is to help simplify, make connections, and prod.

It’s hard work. Sometimes annoying work. Some days I think, “I can’t believe I’m saying this yet again.” It’s always a fight to make a strong case for investment in marketing when the economy cycles down. It’s exhausting to argue for a program or campaign when the firm hasn’t given it enough time. This is the nature of our work. Let us not grow weary in well doing.

Facebook has changed – a lot.

It’s no longer in its infancy. It has matured and is now in the teenage phase, constantly updating its look and its friend groups to maintain its popularity.

You, as a Facebook Marketer, need to be updating with it. When it dyes its hair purple or starts wearing nail polish on only one hand, you need to follow suit (because this cool kid is a powerful friend to have).

But how do you make sure you’re as tight with Facebook as possible? How do you make sure Facebook will share your content, let you talk to your own Friends?

How do you make sure you’re getting as much out of this relationship as Facebook is?

In this post I’m going to share with you 7 modern day best practices to ensure that you’re still in the “in crowd” on Facebook.

Utilize Facebook Page Insights

Facebook Insights is an incredible tool that will help you gain valuable information about the people who Like your page. You’re able to see the demographics of your fans by gender, location and age range.

Not only can you see the insights of your Fans but specifically you can look at those Fans who are most engaged with your page and your content. For Wishpond, for instance, you can see that the majority of our fans are in the age range 25-34. Knowing this will help you when you’re targeting (see how to do this in the next section).

You’re also able to see, from week to week, how you’re doing in comparison to the previous one.

Another really cool feature of Insights is the ability to see how you’re doing compared to you competition. This allows you to determine if you need to change your approach (if they’re doing better than you) or pop champagne if you’re kicking their ass.

Target the right audience on each post

With the information gathered on Facebook Insights you’ll be able to target your posts and make sure they’re shown to the people who want to see them.

Each Facebook post you share on your Facebook Page can be narrowed down by segment of your Fans.

Here’s how I target posts on Facebook:

• Gender, Relationship status, Education, Age: Our post engagement isn’t affected by these targeting capabilities, though could be really effective for brick-and mortar or ecommerce businesses.
• Location: The majority of people who’re engaged with our page are from the US. India is third and Canada fourth.
• Language: We have dedicated English, Spanish and Portuguese customer support specialists. Therefore I target the language to those three even though all of our posts are in English. Why? So that even if someone has their language setting to Spanish or Portuguese they’ll potentially see my posts and traffic to a site that can work with them.
• Interests: Your target Interests may vary based on the type of content you’re sharing. For example, as a SaaS company that creates simple marketing tools, we will always want to target marketers. However, if I was sharing this article (for instance) I’d also want to target those who are interested in Facebook ads, Facebook marketing etc. It’s important to note that it will target each interest individually. Therefore the more interests you pick the larger your target audience will be. Here’s what my Interest targeting might look like for this article (you’ll understand why by the end of it).

• Post end date: Post end date is great if you’re posting something like a webinar. If you post about your webinar on the Monday and the webinar is on the Wednesday you could set your post end date for when the webinar starts.

Incorporate videos into your posts

In case you didn’t hear, video posts are getting way more organic reach (and engagement) than any other type of post on Facebook.

Why is this happening?

While I can’t be 100% sure, I think it’s a combination of two things: Firstly, Facebook will have done extensive customer feedback and questionnaires, determining that their users want to see videos more than they do images, links, or text posts (so they’ll genuinely be rewarding Pages which post that content).

Secondly, Facebook favors posts that keep a Facebook user on Facebook rather than taking them to an external link. This just makes sense. Facebook want posts that ensure users remain on the platform (where they can see more ads, equalling more money in Facebook’s pocket).

How does this work?

When you upload videos directly to Facebook (don’t use Youtube – remember, that’s an external link) they automatically start to play but without sound. I’ve seen our engagement double for video posts over any other type of post.

Best Practices for making a Facebook Video

Captivate your target audience within the first three seconds without sound: This means be as visually appealing as possible. Include things like: graphics, movement, colors, signs and anything that will make the video visually grab the attention of a Facebook user in their News Feed. It needs to be captivating enough to get someone to stop and press the volume button in the bottom right corner.

Include a call-to-action: Facebook allows you to create a call-to-action that will appear at the end of the video. You can insert any link, a landing page, your blog etc. Make sure it’s directly related to the video. Keep in mind that your call-to-action will not appear until the end.

Your video should be able to speak for itself: Does the main message come across in the video or is audio necessary in order to get the gist of the message? Again, if possible use visuals to communicate your message.

Create a series of Facebook ads aimed at the same goal

Facebook recently ran an experiment which examined the difference between sequenced (what I’ll be explaining in this section) and non-sequenced ads (one ad at a time):

“Among those who were exposed to the sequenced ads compared with those who were exposed to the non-sequenced ads, there was an 87% increase in people visiting the landing page.”

Showing a series of ads around the same goal is essentially telling your target audience a story to pique their interest. They might not like the first ad but over the series of ads they’ll be more likely to see an ad that resonates with them.

Best practices for creating an ad sequence:

Determine a single goal: The goal you choose can be anything from a specific product to a designated landing page. For this example we’ll say that you’re looking to drive traffic to a landing page that offers a free trial of your products.

Create a series of at least 3 ads. Depending on your target audience you would show different ads based on how far along they are in the sales funnel.

For example if they had no idea who your company was but they were interested in similar companies it would go like this: Ad #1: Brand awareness, Ad #2: Key benefit of your product, Ad #3: An ask to start free trial. At any point they could click your ad and be directed to the same landing page but if you do it in three stages you’re warming them up.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Multi-Product-Ads-and-Enhanced-Custom-Audiences-from-your-Website

Use Facebook’s Multi-Product Ads in your retargeting strategy

Facebook multi-product ads are like dynamic Google Ads but better. This is because the ads will look and feel the exact same as a Google Ad but because of the slew of information Facebook has on its users, the ads will allow for better targeting.

Facebook multi-ads allow you as an advertiser to show up to three products in a single ad on desktop or mobile.

How does this work?

You set up a bit of code on your website so you can track which pages a person went to on your website. A person comes to your website and they visit different pages but never purchase anything. Next time they go back to Facebook they’ll be shown different items they viewed on your website in a carousel-style advertisement.

For example, let’s say you have an online travel site and a person searched for three different destinations to visit but they never book a flight. You could set up a multi-product ad of the three destinations (with pricing) to remind them of the flights they looked at with the headline, “Last minute deals to your favorite destinations” and the CTA “Book While Prices Last.”

Facebook content needs to be familiar, timely or novel if you want it to be shared

It doesn’t matter if your post gets a ton of reach if you’re not creating posts that people want to click. You need to create a variety of posts, with different lengths of headlines, pictures or videos that strike an emotional chords and links that are valuable to your target audience.

Not sure what to post? Here are some guidelines for creating the right type of post on Facebook:

• Familiar content: This is catering to people’s emotions. Humanize your posts so that people are able to relate. One post we recently used was a slideshare on Seinfeld quotes that related to online marketing. There has been a resurgence in the popularity of all things 90s recently (timely as well) and we used this to evoke nostalgia and familiarity with our Fans.
• Timely content: Look at what’s trending and use relevant hashtags so that when people search for something they’ll find it on your Facebook Page. Just make sure that you know the full story before creating your posts in case you’re not using the content in the right way.
• Novel content: When you create original posts, Facebook users will feel more excited about clicking on your post and engaging with your business. Try using a new tone, format or something that is in stark contrast to your competitors to stand out.

Run a Facebook Contest with a specific goal in mind

Running a contest on Facebook is a great way to nurture existing relationships and get awareness of your business to spread like wildfire.

Here are some specific contests you can run for contest goals:

• Get new emails and leads by running a sweepstakes contest: This is the lowest barrier to entry and therefore the quickest way to grow your list. Combine it with a prize that is relevant to your business and you’ll get leads that like your products.
• Grow brand awareness with a photo contest: A photo contest will encourage your entrants to share with their friends and family so that they’ll win your contest. You’ll also be getting extra leads.
• Keep your fans engaged by running a vote contest: Take two or three of your most popular items and get people to vote on the one they like best. Award a winner by random.

Conclusion

There you have it, 7 new ways that you can utilize Facebook in your social media marketing strategy. Have you been keeping up-to-date with Facebook as it’s changed over the years?

Are there any new Facebook best practices you’ve found work? Start the conversation below!

- Written by Samantha Mykyte

We talk a lot about Inbound Marketing on our company blog. But it’s not just the latest buzz word in the Digital Marketing world that we like to throw around. It’s a proven marketing methodology backed by solid and consistent results. According to the State of Inbound Report 2014-15, “54% more leads are generated by Inbound tactics than traditional paid marketing.”

So “What Is Inbound Marketing?” You Ask

Inbound marketing is an integrated marketing methodology of creating and distributing content that your ideal buyer desires at each stage of their buying cycle through various digital marketing channels such as search engines, social media, authoritative websites and email.

That’s the basic definition but let’s dive into what the Inbound Marketing engine really does for your business. It:

1. Creates greater awareness of your products and services to potential buyers.

2. Allows you to better manage and monitor prospects as they move through their buying cycle.

3. Enables you to personalize the information you deliver to each prospect.

4. Generates higher-quality leads more cost effectively and more efficiently.

5. Propels your leads through their buying cycle more quickly.

6. Empowers you to more clearly determine the quality of the leads generated.

7. Increases your sales closure rate by allowing your sales team to focus only on qualified leads.

8. Creates a repeatable process for attracting prospects, converting more leads and closing more sales.

When you implement an Inbound Marketing strategy, you reap the benefits of winning-over the customers you set out to woo while positively impacting your business’ bottom line.

But remember: What you put into it is what you get out of it. That’s why the core of Inbound Marketing is based on delivering information to your prospects at different stages in their buying cycle. This can be done by:

• Creating targeted content that answers your buyers’ basic questions and needs.
  Identifying the key decision-making stages that your buyers go through when making a decision to purchase.
• Personalizing the content your buyers need at each stage of their buying cycle.
• Distributing that content through the key marketing channels that your buyer prefers.
• Integrating your marketing and sales process with publishing and analytical tools so that they work together, delivering the right content to the right place at the right time for your ideal buyer.

These are key elements to the success of an Inbound Marketing strategy.

Check out our free Digital Marketing Plan. It’s a great guide to get you on the road to Inbound Marketing success.

Often in marketing, it seems that our priorities are sometimes skewed. When clients say things like “I want to be number one on Google,” we often have to dive a little deeper because ultimately marketing is based on goals – and the goals our clients usually have are revenue based. Marketing should generate more leads resulting in more sales and more revenue, right? So when someone tells me they want to rank at the top of Google’s search results, I ask them things like:

• What do you want to rank for?
• Why do you want to rank number one on Google search results?
• Is this really going to help you get the results that really matter – leads, revenue and all of those fun things that are going to grow your business?

Determining where your traffic is coming from and what your ranking opportunities are is essential to making sure you have an effective strategy to rank in Google search results. Here are a few things you can do to get the most out of your search engine results and rank higher in 2015.

1. Have a keyword strategy

Use the keyword planner through Google to figure out the words that people are using to find your business. You might be pleasantly surprised – or wonder “‘why the @!$# would people search for that to find us? – but knowing which keywords are less competitive but have a high number of searches will help you determine which keywords you have the opportunity to rank highest for. You can also use Google Trends to determine which words are used more often to search for your product or service (for example, I might use Google trends to see if I should optimize for “inbound marketing” or “content marketing”).

Once you know the keywords you should be targeting, start by incorporating them into your content. This includes writing optimized blog titles, using keywords on your website pages and in page titles, etc. The more you use these words – as long as its done in a way that is natural and not forced – the higher you will rank. I promise!

2. Focus on the Long Tail Keywords

To go along with your keyword strategy, look at the longtail opportunities – geographically targeted and otherwise. People don’t search with single words like they used to but rather use Google to ask and answer questions. Long tail keywords are phrases of three, four or more words that together can be targeted. This is the difference between targeting people searching “inbound marketing” and “Maryland inbound marketing agency.” While there aren’t as many peopele searching for the latter, those who are would be much better leads for an agency like mine and therefore would likely have a higher close rate.

3. Optimize, optimize, optimize

Is your site fully optimized? Do all of your pages, posts, images, and media files have meta titles and descriptions? How is your site speed? Are you utilizing HTTPS? Are your images optimized using alt text? Are you using proper heading tags? All of these little things that you don’t necessarily think of affect your search engine results. The good news is that they’re pretty easy to fix. Stop using generic page titles like “products” and “contact” and instead think about how you can use your page title to pull in more relevvant keyword searchers. Upgrade your hosting to achieve faster site load times. There are lots of free SEO analysis tools out there. Take advantage of them!

4. Monitor your inbound links

Look at your inbound links and monitor them to be sure they’re coming from quality websites. Inbound links that look like they may be purchased are more damaging to your search engine results than the content on your website, so track them and be sure they’re legitimate. Google Webmaster Tools is a great way to do this. Set your account up and you’ll get notifications if Google suspects a bad link and is going to penalize you for it. When this happens, you can request that it be removed.

As an aside, there is always the option to pay for keyword searches through pay-per-click advertising. No matter how much you pay however, I have rarely seen PPC searches result in more than 10% of total traffic to a website for any of my clients. Meanwhile, organic traffic is often at least 50% of traffic driven to websites. Why invest the money when you can optimize your site, produce regular and quality content and have results that will drive more traffic to your website?

As a B2B marketer, I spend a lot of time thinking about marketing funnels. The very idea of a marketing funnel, however, is a bit of a misnomer. When you pour liquid into the top of a funnel, it flows effortlessly to the bottom.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case for sales leads. Just because a lead is in the proverbial funnel doesn’t mean it will ultimately convert into a sale. As you and I both know, it’s never a good idea to bet on a sale. Just because you had a good sales meeting doesn’t mean you’ll be closing the deal anytime soon, or ever.

What if there was a way to remove some of this variability from the marketing funnel? Welcome to the world of automated lead management, where leads are nurtured by providing the right information to the right prospects at the right time, all without lifting a finger.

B2B companies already use CRM software to automate customer relation management with real-time responses to customer actions. If your customers are busy, that means your leads are busy, too. In a world of instant gratification, real-time response is the new normal. And we’re not just talking about dedicated Twitter feeds to address customer service complaints. Your business needs a real-time response system in place to address your future customers’ needs before you even make the first sale.

Marketing automation has seen the fastest growth of any CRM-related segment in the last five years, according to Focus Research.

And there’s a good reason for this. In this same time frame, the average sales cycle has increased by 22 percent. Companies require more information than ever before in order to close a deal. Consequently, a longer sales cycle demands real-time response to lead actions so your business can instantly provide this information at exactly the right moment.

Is your business automating its lead management program? If not, it should. Consider the following benefits of automated lead management:

Intuitively respond with action-based triggers

No one wants to be spammed. On the flip side, failing to stay in regular contact with leads means you may no longer be top of mind when they’re finally ready to make a purchase. And if you’re not touching base with your leads on a regular basis, then you won’t know what your leads need, making it nearly impossible to meet these needs when the time comes.

Effective marketing is all about delivering the right message at the right time. Action-based triggers, like downloading an eBook or signing up for a webinar, will generate a specific, intuitive response.

Automate repetitive tasks

Is your sales team still wasting valuable time on data entry or ad-hoc marketing? Marketing automation uses intelligent, adaptive schedules to eliminate repetitive tasks.

For example, you can automate status-based follow-ups with leads or even schedule social media posts and emails campaigns weeks or months in advance. Automating these repetitive tasks frees your sales team up to focus on cultivating deeper relationships.

Take immediate action with real-time notifications

Lead nurturing needs to be timely and relevant. Depending on where a lead is in your sales funnel, they may need a reminder email about an upcoming webinar or an immediate phone call from your top-performing sales representative. Marketing automation with real-time notifications ensures that when your lead’s needs are met immediately.

Bottom line:

You can’t force a sale. The biggest sales usually come from the strongest relationships, and those are built slowly over time. Automated lead nurturing campaigns empower you to build mutually beneficial relationships with your leads. By automating the most common and repetitive tasks, you’ll save time save time and resources that free your sales team up to focus on the most qualified leads at exactly the right moment.

Hey, you! Yes, you. I’m watching you. I can see how you got here, where you’re from, and how long you’ve stayed. Creepy? Nah. It’s just part of basic web analytics, and it’s something you should be doing, too. (Don’t worry – I can’t see everything you’re doing, i.e. personal information. That’s a different kind of ESP.)

If you’re new to tracking your website’s analytics, getting started can be a little daunting. Here’s a breakdown of everything you need to get started and begin seeing better results.

How do I get started?

First thing’s first: define your goal. What do you want people to do when they visit your website? Should they sign up for your email newsletter? Download a PDF guide? Click through to a specific landing page? This should align with your overall business goals.

Once you know what action you want people to take, you’ll need a tracking tool for your website. Google Analytics is the go-to website tracking tool for small business owners – and it’s free! Like any new tool, it’ll take some getting used to. But once you know what to look for, tracking your website’s activity will become intuitive…and dare I say, fun?

What should I track?

Traffic sources

Your visitors’ origin will give you insight into the terms people are using to search for your business, how effective your social and email efforts are at driving traffic to your website, and how many people are directly visiting your website by typing in your website URL. There are the three types of traffic to keep an eye on:

• Search traffic: Traffic from any search engine, such as Google or Bing.
• Referral traffic: Traffic that came from links to your website in emails, other websites or any other promotional links out there. If you’re promoting your website on Facebook, Twitter or any other social channel, this is where you’d see those results.
• Direct navigation: People who type in your web address directly or bookmark your site.

Pro-tip: Want to track a link to a specific landing page that directs to your website? Try tagging your links with UTM parameters.

Search engine keywords and terms

You already know how you refer to your products and services because you’re the expert. But how are people really searching for terms related to your industry? Are they searching for “photobooths for weddings” or “photobooth rental?” And is photobooth one word or two? These subtleties could mean the difference between your website getting discovered in search results quickly and being completely overlooked by thousands of prospects.

Conversion rate

Remember your very first step, defining your goal? Your conversion rate tells you how many people took a desired action and converted – whether that action was signing up for your newsletter, downloading a PDF guide or clicking on a video link. Your conversion rate could be based on events, submits, specific page loads and more.

Exit pages

If a person views a few pages on your site and then leaves, that final page they were on is considered the “exit page.” This could indicate that the visitor was interested in learning more about your business, but left when they couldn’t find what they were looking for.
Identify these pages and then ask yourself if there is anything you could change to get your visitors to stick around. For example, your pricing information, product descriptions and contact information are some of the most popular types of content visitors look for on any website, so it should be easy to find.

Top-trafficked pages

These are the pages your visitors find the most useful and engaging. If your website is on the larger side (think 40+ pages), consider consolidating some of that information on fewer pages. This could help people find what they need faster, and in turn drive them to your call to action faster.

Pro-tip: Want to make content updates, but you’re not sure if your new content will get clicks? Run a split test!

Ok, now what do I do?

If you’re new to web analytics, getting started can be overwhelming. Make it easy on yourself by focusing on just one thing. Conversion rate, for example, is a great metric to start with.

If your conversions are low, a few things might be happening: your order page might be broken, your content might need some help, or you simply might not be attracting the right audience. Whatever the reason, it’s important to identify it sooner rather than later so you can start making more sales!

But I want more website visitors NOW!

Ok, ok. Just about every small business owner wants more traffic, STAT. You never hear anyone complaining about too much web traffic, do you? Here are a few ways you can start reeling in more visitors today.

• Run a test to optimize your website for conversions.
• Use your email marketing to drive more traffic to your website.
• Leverage your social channels. Here’s how one company did it.

Log in to your AWeber account today to start driving people to your website with email marketing. Not an AWeber customer yet? Sign up today for a FREE trial!

While wading through posters featuring my daughter’s favorite boy band of all time, we picked up a reminder of a simple credo that is all-to-often forgotten – All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Based on the New York Times bestseller of the same title, this book detailed 19 lessons taught in kindergarten to help develop happy, productive, and successful social citizens.The lesson that topped them all? Share everything.

When it comes to the business world, the word “share” is very rarely uttered. However, the Sharing Economy (also known as the Networked Economy or Collaborative Economy) is turning this seemly simple lesson into revenue-generating opportunity.

The Sharing Economy – a new way of doing business

In 2014, we saw the first signs of the Sharing Economy blossoming. The value of a six-year-old, home-sharing startup increased to more than US$10 billion – soaring past the value of one of the world’s hotel industry mainstay. Then, weeks later, a ride-sharing startup exploded in the market with a valuation of US$18.2 billion, almost as much as the top two car-rental leaders combined.

Not only did these two deals show the power and promise of the Sharing Economy, but they also sent a warning to the corporate world that a significant disruption was coming. Thanks to a heightened focus on innovating technology, we are now living in a world where goods and services are exchanged directly, innovation and production are crowdfunded, and products are shared on an as-needed basis.

Believe this wave of change doesn’t affect every industry? Think again.

According to the Collaborative Economy Honeycomb, nearly $2.5 billion invested in startups and services over the last six months in 2014. As a result, the sharing economy is affecting 12 industries – and showing no signs of slowing down.

Jeremiah Owyang, the founder of the group that created this insightful model, observed the reason for the growing adoption of this concept, “The net benefit for big companies is the ability to connect to the ecosystem for co-innovation, create new business models, and sell one product many times, whether that’s by charging per use on a subscription model or by facilitating a secondary market for used goods.”

4 ways to every business can succeed in the sharing economy

As startups that appear out of seemingly nowhere and forward-looking competitors gain momentum and success with this new business model, well-established brands can no longer operate as normal. Sure, their way of doing business may appear to work well. But, can’t we all afford to change a little to service customers better and find a new way to generate revenue?

In the Center for Business Insight inquiry How Brands Can Take Advantage of the Sharing Economy, there are some simple and highly innovative ways businesses in all sectors can take advantage of the Sharing Economy.

1. Meet the growing demand for sustainability. Using technology to operate more responsibly, greener, and transparent isn’t just a nice PR or marketing gimmick. It’s a mandate. In a world of limited natural resources and growing waste, the ability to maximize the value of every resource mitigates future risk of disruption.

2. Pump up innovation. Whether you’re outsourcing, crowdsourcing, or partnering, working with sharing services can bring a new source of expertise and perspective. With a fresh pair of eyes and brainpower, innovation is taken to a new level at a fraction of the cost when hiring a new full-time employee.

3. Expand offerings and reach new markets. The Sharing Economy offers new opportunities to expand beyond core competencies while supporting and validating the power of partners. Consider Goodwill. This nonprofit is not known for its ability to transport donations. However, Goodwill participated in a pilot project in which donors could call on a quickly growing startup (Uber) to pick up items from their homes and deliver them to Goodwill’s donation centers. The effort gave Goodwill much more visibility in the city, and Uber got the chance to rebrand itself as more than just a ride-sharing company.
   

4. Join the disruption. Companies no longer want to be taken by surprise. However, many still are – especially in the case with overnight success of startups. A 2013 Boston University study revealed a 0.05% drop in hotel bookings in Texas for every 1% increase in Airbnb listings, while ride-sharing services such as Uber, Sidecar, and Lyft have driven taxi ridership down in some cities by as much as 30%. And if you can’t beat ‘em, what the best thing to do? Join ‘em … but find a way to do it better.

What are you waiting for? Seize a competitive edge in the Sharing Economy now.

Check out the Center for Business Insight inquiry How Brands Can Take Advantage of the Sharing Economy.

In December, I walked through Twitter’s analytics platform, and today I wanted to take a similar dive into LinkedIn’s free analytics offering. If you run a company page for your business or brand, you may have noticed the little analytics button on your page.

Let’s look at what LinkedIn Analytics offers and how you can use it to both check your progress and guide your content strategy.

Here we go!

Updates

This is the first section you’ll see in your analytics dashboard. It breaks down each individual post and provides data around impressions, clicks, interactions, followers acquired, and engagement. If you scroll down past the table you see below, you’ll also see a graph mapping out reach and engagement over an adjustable period of time.

How can this help your content strategy? The data here is a great indicator for what types of content does well with your audience. If you notice posts about a particular topic are receiving a particularly high amount of likes or if asking questions drives a higher rate of engagement, consider mixing in more of these posts.

Followers

I find a ton of value in this next section. The Followers dashboard will give you a zoomed in look at who is following your page. You’ll see an initial breakdown of organic vs. acquired (via sponsored content) followers; to the right, you’ll see my favorite part: demographic data. LinkedIn provides a breakdown of your followers according to the following demographics: seniority, industry, company size, function and how many followers are employees vs. non-employees. You can toggle between each by clicking on the dropdown menu (shown below).

Other insights in this section include follower trends (you can see if there was a particular spike in follower growth at a certain time) as well as a comparison to similar competitor pages.

How can this help your content strategy? This section can be such a great tool when planning content to share on LinkedIn. Do you have a large number of entry-level employees? Think about content that discusses getting jobs in your industry or 101’s for how to use certain tools. Are they at a management level? Share content around strategy. Tailor your posts according to the industries people are in. If a large number of your followers are from companies with 11-50 employees, think about content targeted at small businesses. This information can be used so many ways. Don’t let it go to waste.

Visitors

The last section within analytics provides insight into those who are visiting your page but not necessarily following it. It gives you a look at page views, unique visitors and a full demographic breakdown just like the one you see under the Followers section.

How can this help your content strategy? We always want to be generating awareness and building our audience, and this is one way to check out who had some initial interest that drove them to your page but didn’t convince them to follow. Look at their demographics, and similar to what was discussed above, figure out if there’s ways you can be adding topics or adjusting your content they would want to follow (while also maintaining your current audience). For example, SHIFT’s visitors include a portion of people who work in the computer software space. One way we could think about getting them to stick around is to include more tech and B2B-focused posts.

As you can see, there is nothing in-depth or tricky about LinkedIn’s Analytics. It’s a simple, free tool that can provide some baseline guidance as to where you can be improving your page and catering to both current and potential audiences.

Check it out!

Spend any kind of time on social media and you will quickly become familiar with some of the most basic, common hashtags. Consider #tbt, #wcw, #selfie, #sorrynotsorry—all of these trendy tags represent cross-cultural idioms that immediately position a tweet, a Facebook post, or an Instagram image within a larger conversational context.

As a small business owner, you should absolutely be using these hashtags to leverage these popular trends; they’re a great way to get your content noticed and appreciated. With that said, the common nature of these hashtags is their downfall as well as their saving grace: While they can prove helpful in generating engagement, they also do little to help your brand stand out from the crowd.

That’s what makes it advantageous to develop some of your own, customized hashtags—some little taglines or catchphrases that you “own” and that speak directly to your brand. These ultimately help create a brand identity that is specific rather than generic, and they reveal the true creativity behind your content marketing efforts.

Of course it is important to be thoughtful in creating your custom hashtags. To help get your creative juices flowing, we have three dos and one don’t for custom hashtagging.

1. DO add your name to your hashtags. If you want a hashtag that immediately points back to your brand, there is no better way to achieve it than by inserting your name into the hashtag. For example, Grammar Chic, Inc. has a client named Kip, and on Twitter we position some of his insights and sayings with the #tipsfromkip hashtag.
2. DO be funny, where appropriate. Hashtags present a great avenue for humor, even if you’re essentially making up words or concepts. We know of one company that sells steaks and ribs, and it tags many of its posts with the clever, defiant-sounding #unvegan hashtag.
3. DO offer immediate value. Sometimes the best hashtags aren’t necessarily clever; they just offer something beneficial, something readers will immediately zero in on as value-adding. We work with a home improvement company that often does hashtag series such as #Roofing101 or #RemodelingMadeSimple, and these posts tend to get a lot of shares and favorites.
4. DON’’T leave your hashtags too open-ended. A final warning: Don’t leave your hashtags open to hijackers. We all know the story of McDonald’s and its ill-fated #McDStories campaign. Customers were supposed to share positive memories from McDonald’s, but instead shared tweets about getting food poisoning and the like. Make sure you maintain some level of control over your hashtags.

Admittedly, B2B enterprise marketers are in a tight spot. There are constant pressures to drive more revenue from marketing and that tends to leave no stone unturned when it comes to using marketing tactics. As the demand generation pressures mount, there seems to be a drive to try every tactic, just in case one more lead may come from it.

According to the ANNUITAS 2014 B2B Enterprise Demand Generation Survey, more than half of marketers measure their demand generation programs and campaigns according to metrics like revenue, pipeline and opportunities. However, less than three percent call themselves effective in reaching those goals. Their approach to tactics may explain this disconnect between expectations and results.

It’s not what many marketers think that is causing the disconnect…it’s not choosing the wrong tactics. A majority (over 60%) run more than 15 programs or campaigns on an annual basis. It’s probably easier to list tactics that aren’t being tried at this point, than those that are.

Too many marketers are engaging in a flurry of tactics without a true Demand Generation Strategy. Only 38% of survey respondents say their campaigns are perpetual, with 27% indicating the timing is “when required,” putting more than a quarter of marketers in a purely reactive mode for demand generation. It’s a difficult position for most marketers to be in and certainly, not optimal from the buyers perspective either.

Creating a perpetual Demand Generation Strategy takes time and considerable effort with inputs from across the business and the market, including customers and prospects to obtain meaningful Buyer Insights. A strong foundation of critical Buyer Insights will tell you what your buyers care about and how they want to learn about solutions to those issues. This in turn, helps in building the content marketing strategy that aligns to the buyer’s journey.

For marketers who have developed a true strategy, not a tactical-driven marketing plan, the payoff is huge. A holistic, buyer-centric Demand Generation Strategy allows enterprise marketers to not only meet revenue goals today, but also create a predictable, ongoing revenue stream for the future and an ability to see what is driving results (which channels are performing, what content is being consumed and when true buyer Engagement occurs).

With a strategic foundation, tactics are and should only be about choosing the right channels to share your information, not about putting more information in front of your buyers at random times to drive more leads. Enterprise B2B marketers have the opportunity to create sustainable value for the business by creating effective demand generation programs supported by a solid strategy. Marketers that only think about the tactics won’t be able to drive real results and certainly cannot drive perpetual revenue or a positive buying experience.

Not even four out of 10 marketers think their content marketing is effective. Yet, 86% of B2B marketers use content to attract and retain customers. Those are the results from CMI’s 2015 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends.

What are the 38% of marketers who say they are effective doing differently from the rest of us?

I asked some successful B2B content marketers how they make the most of their content investments. Here are 10 habits that help them stay on top:

1. Document and review your content marketing strategy.

Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute

Our B2B content marketing research revealed that successful B2B content marketers have two critical habits. First, they document their content marketing strategy. They get the strategy out of their head and into action.

Second, they review the strategy on an ongoing basis, especially with their team. Neither of these habits is rocket science, but they are musts for highly effective content marketers.

2. Get your advocates involved with your content marketing.

Cassandra Jowett, Content Marketing Manager, Influitive

Invite your company’s advocates – customers, partners, and employees – to get involved at every stage of your content process through an advocate marketing program. Your advocates can generate ideas, participate in content creation, provide feedback, and share your content with their social networks. They can have a tremendous impact on the quality, volume, and results of your content marketing.

This type of strategy also strengthens your relationship with your advocates. As content marketers, we don’t always have a direct line to our customers or partners. Advocate marketing programs connect us with their ideas, success stories, insights, and feedback in real time.

3. Tell compelling stories.

Matthew Royse, Senior Communications Manager and Knowledge Enthusiast, Forsythe Technology

The most effective content marketers are turning their brands into media companies. They understand how to apply the key elements of journalism and storytelling to their content. For example:

• Draw in your audience with compelling stories. Focus your stories on your audience’s key pains and opportunities – not your products or services.

• Combine words and visuals to paint a picture. Use strong visuals to help illustrate the emotion in your story.

• Create editorial guidelines and share them with your content team. This helps maintain a consistent voice throughout your content. It also helps your contributors comply with your brand and quality standards.

When you bring these key elements into your content, you can connect with members of your audience and motivate them to take action.

4. Plan your week in advance.

Pam Didner, Author, Global Content Marketing

What works for me is to plan out my week on Sunday nights. I’ll sit with a cup of tea and a small plate of dessert and review (aka, stare at) the next two weeks in my calendar. I fill time slots by identifying key tasks that I want to accomplish and set aside time to prepare for upcoming meetings.

Proper planning doesn’t guarantee that I get everything done. Like everyone else, I still procrastinate. However, planning helps me clarify my priorities and hold myself accountable for key deliverables.

5. Use Trello to manage your content development.

Camille Ricketts, Editor, First Round Capital

I’m a Trello power user. There’s no tool more helpful for organizing content and keeping an eye on your progress.

I work with a few writers at a time to curate The First Round Review, as well as several photographers, graphic artists, and illustrators. I feature interviews with the most talented people in tech, and every article moves through the same phases: initial contact, kick-off call to hone in on a topic, interview, transcription, writing, and approval by the interview subject.

The only way I can keep track of hundreds of moving pieces is by updating my Trello board every day. Each article gets its own card that I move from bucket to bucket as I make progress on the story until it’s done.

One of Trello’s best features is that you can attach files and images to every card. This allows me to keep transcripts, multiple drafts, and photography in one place for every article. I also can start a commenting thread on each card, which allows me to stay up-to-date and in constant communication with the other writers on my team.

The only way a systematic tracking tool works is if you update it constantly, but it’s well worth it.

6. Read. Create value.

Michelle Killebrew, Program Director, Strategy & Solutions – Social Business, IBM

Read. I read a lot. I read headlines, industry publications, trade publications, consumer trends, tech trends, fiction, and non-fiction. The best way to understand which content trends are engaging is by engaging with them.

The biggest misconception that I see with both marketing and content strategy is that they can be encapsulated into something finite. There are so many different types of content marketing: written, visual, video, etc. You need to think through your objectives and put yourself in your audience’s shoes

You also must create (and co-create) value for your audience in a way that is unique, captivating, and interactive. It’s so simple, yet so difficult.

My five tips for making B2B content more valuable:

• Be intriguing.
• Use action words.
• Leverage visual content.
• Re-post content over time – but not verbatim.
• Respond to inbound communication; be personable and friendly, while also professional (i.e., human).

7. Answer the prospects’ top three questions.

Tom Pisello, Chairman and Founder, Alinean

Design content that creates aha moments to help facilitate the buyer’s journey. Proactively answer your prospects’ three key questions – they’re almost always the same no matter the product or service – as they progress through their decision-making process:

• Why change? Your prospects often are unaware that they should consider a different product, service, or vendor. Most are so busy keeping the lights on that they haven’t paid attention to how bad the status quo has become.

In this phase, don’t talk about your solution or its benefits. Instead, generate an aha moment around their pain – get them to recognize that an issue exists. Share industry insights that help your prospects realize that their peers are experiencing similar costly issues with a business-as-usual approach. These insights can help prospects diagnose their own organization and challenges.

• Why now? Make their newly discovered issue stand tall above all the other challenges with which they deal. Help the prospect realize that the status quo isn’t just an issue but a real cost and business risk. Provide content that helps them quantify the cost of doing nothing. Give prospects an aha moment about how much the issue costs them each day it goes unsolved.

• Why you? Each solution has unique advantages, but buyers often don’t notice the subtle differences among competitors. Today’s buyers are drawn to price and value as evaluating criteria. Communicate and quantify how your solution can deliver better business value (e.g., drive cost savings, improve productivity, lower risks, etc.).

Show that you have a lower total cost of ownership over the solution’s useful life cycle. Stop trying to differentiate by features and instead create aha moments around superior ROI, faster payback, and lower cost of ownership.

8. Put your internal experts front and center.

Carlos Abler, Leader: Online Content Strategy, 3M

A key habit for B2B content marketers is to manage internal experts as corporate assets. Your experts are treasure troves of knowledge and potential content. When you amplify their knowledge, they will not only be recognized as thought leaders but also as life savers by your customers.

You must have processes for managing internal subject matter expertise. For example, capture the answers to questions that customers ask your experts. Then, repurpose these answers as a Q&A on your website to your knowledge base or as blog posts. Additionally, internal experts are often unaware of the opportunities that they have to nurture leads and may let customer relations sift through their fingers – along with your opportunity to create valuable content assets. Your experts also may be timid introverts so you’ll have to help them become content rock stars.

When you properly manage your internal experts, you bridge the gap between content and customer relations – which are inseparable.

In addition, you must transform your organization’s culture to build the bridge. This approach often brings up legal concerns and old-school protectionist fears (e.g., “These are our secrets and our people.

9. Relentlessly pursue your story.

Hana Abaza, Director of Marketing, Uberflip

More than ever before, you must create connections, nurture relationships, and perpetuate a dialogue with your audience, prospects, and customers. And you must do this while telling a compelling story and keeping tabs on what is and isn’t working from a business perspective.

As a result, the ideal portrait of today’s content marketer is someone with a diverse skill set who has developed a few key habits for success. These individuals:

• Relentlessly pursue the story – In many industries, people often write about the same thing. Look for the right story within a topic and approach it from a fresh angle that will distinguish your content as great.

• Consistently review and revise – Good content marketers are always striving to make their content better. Hone your skills – whether it’s writing long-form content, creating video content, or keeping up with the latest trends in your industry. Aim to make every subsequent piece of content better than the last.

• Always listen – The best content marketers I know consume far more content than they create – blog posts, social media, and even (dare I say it) books and magazines with words printed on actual paper. Keeping an eye on the content created inside and outside your industry can be a great source of ideas and inspiration

10. Learn something new every day.

Alan Porter, Content Marketing Manager, Caterpillar, Inc.

I dedicate time each day to stay fresh and keep learning. I arrive at the office early – usually around 7 a.m. – grab a coffee and spend my first 30 minutes checking out the latest industry websites, blogs, and social media feeds. From these, I formulate a Content Marketing Tip of the Day.

Do not open your email first. Instead, spend dedicated time to keep up with the latest trends and innovation. Then, you can dive into the minutiae of your workday.

Conclusion

It takes time, patience, and persistence to develop a new habit. Ask yourself which of these content marketing habits would benefit you the most. Then, schedule time in your calendar to make it happen.

Continuing to educate themselves is a key habit of successful content marketers. Get started learning more about content marketing best practices in two free e-courses – part of CMI’s comprehensive Online Training & Certification Program delivered by leading experts. Sign up now.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 10 Habits of Highly Effective B2B Content Marketers appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Books about sales -- the more of them you read, the more you notice how repetitive they can be.

While these books are valuable, becoming a true sales and marketing expert requires knowledge of more than just everyday techniques and efficient business practices. These days, we also need a well-rounded understanding of human psychology, economics, and perhaps a bit of game theory to raise us to the top of our profession.

So what non-sales books should be on reps' reading lists? Here are five excellent and not-so-salesy books that contain valuable advice and lessons for salespeople.

1) All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin

It’s a commonly held belief that there is something inherently dishonest about marketing. While it’s true in some cases, dishonest marketing is considered bad marketing -- not to mention it really doesn’t work in the long term.

In this book, Seth Godin presents a simple but salient message: Some marketers may be liars; some may be honest; but those who are most successful combine honesty with a compelling message.

Successful sales professionals understand the importance of telling a ripping yarn. However, Godin warns us that stories need to be authentic -- today’s informed buyers can quickly spot a charlatan. I highly recommend Godin’s entertaining and witty exposition of why authenticity is key.

2) Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis

Wall Street in the 1980s was certainly exciting. Spirits were high and if movies like “The Wolf of Wall Street” are anything to go by, so were the punters! 

Michael Lewis was fresh out of Princeton and the London School of Economics when he landed a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s premier investment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose from callow trainee to bond salesman, raking in millions for the firm and cashing in on a modern-day gold rush.

While most of us won’t (or don’t want to) find our way to Wall Street, this book is the next best thing -- a kind of travel documentary that gives great insight not just into what happened but how it felt. Come for the thrilling ride, but stay for the sobering moral.

3) Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Contemporary sales education emphasizes understanding the forces at play between companies and their customers, between seller and buyer, and also within the economy as a whole. To be excellent salespeople, we need to know what makes people and the systems they act within tick.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's seminal work Freakonomics was hugely popular and for good reason. The authors' excellent storytelling ability and wry insight paint a picture of economics as the study of incentives -- how people get what they want or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.

While not directly related to sales, Freakonomics illuminates human and group psychology in a way that will no doubt inspire improvements in your sales technique.

4) How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer 

Continuing on the subject of psychology, I highly recommend Lehrer’s neurological investigation of how people make decisions.

While we’ve been led to believe that decision making is either rational or emotional -- arriving at a choice after careful deliberation or on gut instinct -- Lehrer explains that our best decisions are actually a finely-tuned blend of both feeling and reason. And this can sometimes lead to bizarre results. 

New sales techniques based on this research are already in use at certain companies, so it pays to know what they are and how you can use them to improve your sales success.

5) The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone -- Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely

In The Honest Truth, behavioral economist Dan Ariely examines the contradictory forces that cause us to behave the way we do.

Again, understanding human behavior is an incredibly powerful skill for sales professionals, which is why it can be illumniating to learn what really drives people to lie, cheat, and steal. If nothing else, it's comforting to know that we are not hard-wired to do the wrong thing. For the most part, people wish to lead moral and ethical existences -- we’re just simply not all that good at it!

Yes, it’s hard sometimes to drag ourselves away from our laptops to find time to read a real book cover-to-cover, but it’s worth it. Get reading!

As consumers, we're trained to hunt for bargains. And as salespeople well know, this instinct also kicks in during B2B sales deals. It's relatively rare for a deal to close without some sort of price negotiation, whether the buyer is successful in securing a discount or not. You might as well ask, right?

Because of the frequency with which discount requests pop up, reps are trained to steer these conversations toward win-win conclusions. But according to Mark Hunter, there are situations where salespeople should refuse to negotiate entirely. In the article "Are There Times I Should Not Negotiate?" Hunter identifies seven scenarios in which salespeople should shut down even the suggestion of a discount.

"Negotiating is a form of trying to maximize sales vs. supply. If you can sell it without negotiating, then don’t negotiate," Hunter writes. "Sell first, negotiate second."

Once you bulk up on your bartering skills, browse five more sales articles that might've blown past you this week.

1) 3 Sales Strategies to Help You Handle Your "Just Looking" Customer by Jeff Shore

They say they're not interested in buying, but you know better. Learn how to overcome this common buyer brush-off.

2) Your Sales Manager Is Why Your Sales Team Is Failing by Paul McCord

There are several varieties of bad sales managers (hall monitors, super closers, good buddies), but only one type of good manager.

3) The Top 10 Strategic Account Management Challenges by Mike Schultz

New research reveals what's preventing sellers from growing accounts.

4) 3 Ways to Prevent Radio Silence by Brian Burns

Rather than figuring out how to reengage a prospect gone quiet, learn how to keep them from dropping off the map in the first place.

5) Take It From the Wolf by Adam Buschbacher

Turns out that if you set aside the drug use and raging party behavior, "The Wolf of Wall Street" contains some valuable leadership lessons. Who knew?

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

 

Ask any B2B marketer about their top content marketing challenges, and they’ll likely say, “finding the time and resources to get it done”.

This problem can be even harder if you have a small, in-house marketing team – or if you’re a marketing department of one.

But even though you have a small team, you’re likely under pressure to produce more and more content. According to the 2015 B2B Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends – North Americas report, 70% of B2B marketers are creating more content than they were last year – with 42% publishing daily or multiple times per week.

A big reason for this increase is buyer demand. Research has shown that B2B buyers review multiple pieces of content before making a purchase. Meanwhile, a Demand Gen Report survey found that 61% of B2B buyers select vendors who deliver the right mix of content at the right time. This means that you need content that aligns with your buyers’ needs throughout every stage of the sales cycle.

But how can you possibly keep up?

Here are five things that will help your small team win at content marketing:

1. Develop a content marketing strategy.

If you’re doing the bulk of your company’s marketing, your time is precious. You can’t waste time on campaigns that won’t lead to business.

Creating a content marketing strategy is a lot of work up front, but it will save you loads of time, money and headaches down the road. A strategy is vital if you want to align your content with your customers’ needs and your business goals. Research from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs found that marketers who document their content marketing strategies are more effective than those who don’t have a documented strategy.

2. Create an editorial calendar.

When you work with an editorial calendar, you won’t need to sit in front of your computer late at night wondering what to post on your blog tomorrow. An editorial calendar keeps you on track by outlining all the content you will create in the next month or quarter. It also makes it easier to manage your workflow and collaborate with your team.

3. Repurpose your content.

Repurposing your content is a great way to get your message in front of a wider audience, attract leads from different channels and improve your SEO. It also allows you to publish new content quickly – which is a plus if you’re strapped for time and resources.

However, repurposing content doesn’t mean copying and pasting your latest blog post into other channels. If you do this, Google might tag it as duplicate content. Plus, your audience may not find it relevant. For example, if you repost a tweet on LinkedIn, your connections might not understand your hashtags.

You must refresh your content to make it relevant for each channel. For example, here are 21 ways to share and repurpose your case studies.

4. Measure your results.

Research has shown that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. Analyzing your content will show you which efforts are bringing you the biggest results.

Here are some key metrics to measure:

• Email open and click-through rates
• Number of high-quality website visitors
• Time on site and page views
• Social shares
• Conversion rates (resource downloads, webinar registrations, blog subscribers, etc.)
• How many leads turned into customers

5. Outsource your content development.

You can work 24/7 and still not get everything done. Plus, with so many daily interruptions, it’s hard to block out time to write a white paper. Outsourcing your content development will save your sanity, free up your weekends and allow you to focus on the big marketing picture.

Outsourcing your content development can also bring you better results – especially if you outsource to acquire a skill that’s not available in-house. For example, your product team may have amazing technical knowledge, but can they write blog posts that engage your target audience? You might benefit from working with a freelance copywriter who can translate their technical knowledge into compelling content.

You don’t need a huge marketing team to succeed with content marketing.

When you apply these tips, you can get your message in front of a wider audience, attract more leads and win more customers.

Download the Content Repurposing Worksheet now to plan how you will share your content across different channels, reach a wider audience and attract more leads.

Distribution is a crucial aspect of a content marketing plan, but streamlining those distribution efforts isn’t easy. Take, for example, the fact that 70 percent of marketers plan to produce more content in 2015 than last year, yet only 38 percent find that content effective. Part of the reason for this gap is that marketers are sharing the wrong content in the wrong places.

Identifying the best marketing channels for your business is all about asking the right questions. Here are four key questions to ask before you plan your content distribution.

1. Who (And Where) Is Your Audience?

This is a primary question for all of your content marketing initiatives, and it’s no less important in distribution. You should have a clear idea of the buyer personas you want to reach and create your content assets with your target audience in mind. With distribution, the trick is to find those people.

Aligning your content with the right channels is one of the best things your brand can do to win the distribution game. That means keeping tabs on usage trends, as well as watching your own data about who the average user is for any digital channel you’re considering. What’s your reach on social? How many people read your email blasts? How many visitors to your website?

Your content should be where your audience is, so put your insights to work to connect them.

Be mindful of who’s among your brand’s dedicated followers as well as the common traits across all of a platform’s members. For instance, Facebook has lost some ground with teenagers in recent months, but that doesn’t mean that no teens like MTV’s Facebook page.

Plus, you may have different types of audiences to reach with different content. If you’re looking to reach new customers, look at sales data to determine where you find the most new leads. If you want access to Twitter influencers, then you better be tweeting.

2. What Fits Your Budget?

On just about any channel that you might use, brands have a paid option available. Paid content amplification helps ensure that your content gets in front of the eyes and ears of your audience. Stay within your means as you make choices about which networks get your hard-earned money. There’s usually space for organic content to succeed, so don’t worry about creating a smart distribution plan on a shoestring budget.

Having a large budget doesn’t mean that you should purchase paid distribution on every channel you can. More impressions does not equal more leads. The ultimate goal is to make informed decisions to connect your content with your desired audience. Forging a genuine connection between your brand and an individual will usually be more lucrative in the long run than plastering your message all over the web. Return on investment is still at play in distribution, so make sure that every dollar goes as far as it can.

3. How Will It Connect To Other Content?

Your content shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. Each piece you create helps tell your brand’s whole story. Think hard about what networks you’re choosing to turn into content hubs. If you had a great social media campaign on Twitter, then your followers might expect to see your latest project also appearing in tweets. Every success not only grows your following, but it sets expectations of where those people will be able to find more content. Consistency is key.

Hopping from one platform to another for different campaigns may leave your audience confused.

There’s no saying you can only pick one place for your content to appear. In fact, cross-platform distribution gets a single item in front of more people. But pick channels that make sense in conjunction. Social channels can be used to share many different types of content from other sources. Your blog can have links to a YouTube channel.

Think about your distribution holistically rather than as a piecemeal activity.

This approach will give a stronger, more intentional presence to your content and your brand.

4. What Fits Your Message?

Just as every channel has a typical audience member, they also have a common tone and style that most of those members follow. Your content should be a good match for the vibe of the distribution channels that you choose.

For instance, a law firm that wants to share photos of its legal advisers probably doesn’t want to use Snapchat. The disappearing image social network is fun and casual, not really the place to project authority and formality. But some universities are using Snapchat in their new student orientation programs to great effect. Even though administrators do want to be seen as authority figures, the playful nature of Snapchat makes it great for scavenger hunts around campus and it puts the new freshman at ease.

The Recipe For Distribution

For a deeper look at how to streamline your company’s marketing content distribution, check out The Multi-Channel Content Distribution Guide. It has tips to help you get your message in front of the right people.

The Internet has changed the way we do everything, and marketing and sales are no exception.Having an active website is vital to the visibility and reach of your business, which means that your website can directly influence the success of your sales. So how do you keep your website active and your business booming?

Two words, my friend: content marketing. If you do it right, content marketing will take your business to the next level. But before we get any further, let me introduce you to someone.

Meet Maximus Barker. Mr. Barker recently started his own business, Doggy Dopamine. Doggy Dopamine’s mission is to help people who are experiencing depression or who are just having a rough day by lending them a dog. People can sign up their friends or family members for a doggy date, and after a thorough background check has been conducted, a dog friend is delivered to the client’s door. People can also sign themselves up. Mr. Barker is just getting his business off the ground, and he knows that spreading awareness via the Internet will increase his popularity and improve his business. But how can Mr. Barker use content marketing practices to promote his business and increase his sales? Let’s start by looking at what content marketing is and how it can be applied practically.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing involves creating high-quality content and distributing that content across different venues. This content should be informative; it should answer a question or fulfill a need for its intended reader or viewer. Companies that practice content marketing aim to become trusted sources of useful information, thus establishing themselves as authorities on topics relevant to their products or services. The ultimate goal of providing this information is to attract more visitors who, over time, will convert into leads. Some of these leads can then become customers or clients. Content can include blog posts, infographics, videos, ebooks, and more.

In the case of Doggy Dopamine, Mr. Barker may want to focus on a few areas in his content marketing. He’ll want to provide information about dogs, such as dog care, training, and specific information about different breeds of dogs. For example, blog posts like “How to Train a Puppy” and “Training Your Dog According to Breed” would help attract the kind of audience Mr. Barker is seeking. He may even want to have some humorous content about dogs, as this kind of content would be sure to attract dog lovers. Mr. Barker will also need to create content regarding depression, trauma, and other mood-related topics. Articles or blog posts about how spending time with dogs can improve mood and alleviate depressive symptoms would also be relevant to Doggy Dopamine; this material would appeal to visitors during a later stage of the buyer’s journey, a topic I’ll discuss in greater detail later.

Why content marketing?

Picture this: Mr. Barker knocks on a stranger’s front door. “Hi,” he says, “My name is Maximus Barker, and I run a business called Doggy Dopamine. Would you like to find out how you can lend a dog to a friend in need?” The homeowner, Mrs. Modern, politely declines. Mr. Barker tries one more time, saying, “Did you know that spending time with a dog has a positive effect on mood? Let me tell you all about it––” Mrs. Modern cuts him off. “No, thank you,” she says, “If I want to learn more, I’ll just Google it.”

Mrs. Modern doesn’t know who Mr. Barker is. She doesn’t know where he came from or whether he’s running a legitimate business. And, smart lady that she is, she will never buy anything from someone she knows nothing about. That’s because, unlike the consumers of days past, Mrs. Modern has the resource she needs to find any information she wants about dogs, depression, Doggy Dopamine, or even Mr. Barker himself: the Internet.

If you don’t give prospective clients the information they seek, someone else will. It doesn’t matter how much you boast about your products or services. The fact is, your readers won’t decide that they need or want these products or services based on your advertisement of them; instead, they will acquire all the information they need to decide if buying from you is necessary. You need to be the source of that information: enter content marketing.

Okay, so how do I use content marketing?

There are four basic steps involved in content marketing. I could go into each of them in greater depth, but here are the basics:

Step 1: Identify your target audience(s).

If you think that everyone and their grandmothers will be interested in your business, you’re wrong. There are just too many businesses out there offering too many services––they can’t all be for everyone. Instead, each business needs to establish its target groups, also known as buyer personas. A buyer persona is essentially a fictional example of an ideal customer––that is, someone who both wants and is able to buy your product or service. Relevant information to identify buyer personas includes demographic details, motivations, barriers your personas may face, and problems they need to solve. These buyer personas should be research-based. There are a few ways to research buyer personas, but the easiest and most direct way is to talk to your existing clients. Surveys are a great way to gather the necessary information, as are interviews. This blog post goes into greater depth about what information is needed to create a buyer persona. Once you have determined whom you’re writing for, it will be much easier to produce content tailored to these groups.

Mr. Barker identified three distinct buyer personas for Doggy Dopamine: university students, aging adults, and people who have recently lost pets. Here are the basic details for each persona:

University students: Males and females in their early twenties. They either live in student housing or with several roommates. They usually don’t have pets of their own, as they don’t have the space, time, or money to care for a pet properly. They’re often under serious stress caused by assignments, and they’re prone to depression or anxiety around exam times. They’re very active on social media sites, which is where Doggy Dopamine should primarily be promoted for this group.

Aging adults: Many are widows or widowers. Their children are grown, and they spend much of their time alone. Many of them are unable to commit to the lifespan of a new pet, or they’re physically unable to care for a pet on a daily basis. This group is less likely to visit social media sites. Traditional marketing may be a better fit for aging adults; however, their children or other family members will often sign them up for doggy dates. The children of the aging adult group can be targeted mostly online. Simple, concise writing is best for the aging adult group as opposed to the more casual and humorous tone that is popular with university students.

People who have recently lost pets: They are grieving from the loss of their own animals. Employing the services of Doggy Dopamine can help them make the transition from having a pet to not having one. They may also use Doggy Dopamine to determine if they want to adopt new pets for themselves. They tend to be middle-aged individuals with families. They often have young children at home, and information about how caring for a pet is good for child development will likely sway them in the direction of trying Doggy Dopamine.

Step 2: Create content for each persona based on different stages of the buyer’s journey.

Understanding the buyer’s journey is essential to a successful content marketing strategy. There are three stages to the buyer’s journey: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. Different types of content need to be created for each stage.

In the awareness stage, the individual knows they have a problem to solve, but they haven’t yet defined that problem. Because they have yet to define their problem, they haven’t come up with possible solutions yet, either. They’re doing general research to figure out exactly what their problem is. A university student in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey may be browsing the Internet for funny videos of animals or other funny content. If Doggy Dopamine has funny dog videos or memes, there’s a good chance the university student will end up seeing this content. This type of content should be shared on Doggy Dopamine’s social media sites. Hopefully, seeing this content will lead them directly to the Doggy Dopamine site, thereby making the student more aware of the fact that they were seeking that content because seeing dogs made them feel better. Not all material in the awareness stage will lead viewers directly to conclusions; instead, it may just make them aware that a company or brand exists, even if they aren’t sure what that company does.

In the consideration stage, the individual has identified and defined their problem, and they’re now researching solutions. The aging adult is now aware that they are lonely, and they’re investigating different options for interaction. Doggy Dopamine needs to capitalize on these needs by creating content to show how caring for an animal can help reduce loneliness. The adult may have already determined that he or she would like to have a pet or to care for an animal; in this case, Doggy Dopamine needs to provide content about how fostering an animal can have the same positive effects as adopting a pet, but without the same level of obligation. The key to all of this content is that the information needs to be true––it needs to be credible, and it needs to actually help the adult make the decision that is right for them. Not all adults in this stage will end up choosing Doggy Dopamine, but there’s no way that any of them will if they aren’t aware that it’s an option. A blog would probably be the best venue for this content, and it should also contain links to other reputable sites on the topic. If Doggy Dopamine doesn’t contribute useful information on this topic, the adult will look elsewhere for it.

In the final stage of the buyer’s journey, the decision stage, the individual has decided on a solution to the problem. All that’s left is to choose which service or product to use. The person is compiling a list of possible vendors and comparing what they offer (and at what price). A person who has recently lost a pet has determined that they’re still feeling sad because of this loss. They have decided against adopting another animal right away, as they’re not ready to make that commitment. Instead, they’re going to foster an animal. They may foster through an organization like the Humane Society, or they may use the services of a company like Doggy Dopamine. Their biggest decision factor is how much responsibility they want to have for the animal. In this final stage of the buyer’s journey, Doggy Dopamine can be much more explicit about what it’s actually trying to sell. It doesn’t need to emphasize why the individual needs this service; instead, it needs to provide thorough information about what the service entails and how much it costs. For someone who has recently lost a pet, the important thing for Doggy Dopamine to outline is how easy and carefree the process of a doggy date is. Doggy Dopamine also needs to show the individual that the dogs are well cared for, that they all belong to loving homes, etc.

Step 3: Distribute the content.

Content that isn’t seen is as useless as music that isn’t heard. Be sure to distribute your content to make the most of your material. Possible venues for distribution include your blog, other blogs (via guest posting), social media pages (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.), SlideShare, email, and content syndication sites like Outbrain. Try to repurpose content wherever you can to ensure that you get the most out of it. For example, if Mr. Barker writes a great blog post about how to train a beagle, he may also want to create a SlideShare using this article. If this garners enough attention, Mr. Barker may even consider creating an ebook on training specific breeds of dogs.

Step 4: Track your progress.

Content marketing isn’t about guesswork. You need to test what you’re doing to make sure it’s attracting unique visitors and converting some of those visitors into leads. You need to keep track of metrics like page views, social shares, and lead conversions. This article goes into greater depth on metrics. Google Analytics is the program of choice for most basic tracking of content marketing. It can track things like who visited your site (i.e., demographics, interests, behaviors, location), how much time visitors spent on your site, how many visits they made, which visitors read or shared your content, and which purchased your product or service.

If Mr. Barker uses Google Analytics, he can track each of his three buyer personas. For example, he can follow university students who visit his site, from their first share of a funny dog video to their viewing of one of his site’s landing pages. If Mr. Barker finds that most of his university students who make it to this landing page don’t actually end up converting to a lead or sale, he can make changes to the page and then conduct tests to see if those changes increase his conversions or sales for this landing page.

Conclusion

Now Mr. Barker knows how to get started with content marketing, and hopefully, you do, too. There’s still so much to learn, though, so why don’t you check out some of Inklyo.com’s content marketing blog posts? If you like what you read, don’t hesitate to give us a shout on Twitter or Facebook. We always love to hear from you.

Image sources: Jay Mantri/StockSnap.io, kreeperf/Pixabay.com, cherylholt/Pixabay.com, Almadrava/Pixabay.com, Sevenheads/Pixabay.com, Sumall.com

Technology isn’t the answer, it’s just an amazing enabler.

The driving force behind companies adopting sales and marketing automation software is to accelerate revenue and improve ROI (return on investment). Unfortunately, the results have been mixed.

• The ROI from Marketing Automation (MAP) software seems to be great from a Marketing perspective, but not compelling from a company perspective. Studies suggest that only 21% of Marketing-generated leads eventually become revenue and the remaining 79% end up becoming dead ends. The problem is that Sales doesn’t know which lead might turn into revenue this fiscal year without working on all of the leads. The lost opportunity cost of the sales force chasing poor leads drags down company ROI.
• Sales Force Automation (SFA) software is supposed to enable sales performance, but Sales Representatives only use a small fraction of its capabilities. Studies suggest that only 37% of a sales representative’s time is actually available for selling and that only 50% of the Sales reps make quota. The extra time it takes Sales reps to enter data and manage their activities doesn’t seem to be substantially improving company revenue growth.
• Both Marketing Automation and Sales Force Automation rely on a common Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database to feed their campaigns and reports, yet over 25% of that data is typically inaccurate or unreliable. Why? The Sales reps did not bother to enter accurate data because it didn’t help them directly make quota, so garbage in becomes garbage out, driving reports that do not provide the insights that help the C-suite manage sales performance and forecast accuracy.

Imagine the impact if the company’s Marketing function was able to generate 40%+ of the forecasted Sales pipeline, or the Sales function was able to consistently achieve quota while decreasing cost per sale, or both functions were able to celebrate their collaboration that drove double digit revenue growth for their company.

Imagine the impact to a technology vendor’s fortunes, and to the careers of everyone in the MarTech and SalesTech arena, if the customer’s revenues, ROI and productivity skyrocketed as a direct result of automation software.

This gap between expectations and outcomes represents a serious business challenge for both B2B customers and B2B Technology vendors.

The Elephant in the Room

The Buyer has changed. They are self-educating online and completing up to 70% of their purchasing journey without speaking to the Sales department. It has fundamentally changed how we should market and sell to our customers.

The buyer has changed by self-educating online, so the vendors have responded with Marketing Automation and myriad other technologies for tracking and engaging the buyer as they visit the company website, as they engage on multiple social media platforms, as they engage with various digital ads, and as they use their smartphone to access information.

However, if the buyer has changed their purchasing process, why are we trying to align a lead that comes out of our outdated Marketing Process with a lead that is acceptable for our outdated Sales Process? If the buyer looks at 2 blog posts or downloads one research study, is it really a lead? Maybe it should be 1 blog post and a case study? Not sure how lead alignment better aligns us with the buyer.

The Failure Of Automating Outdated Marketing Processes

Several years ago the primary source of Marketing-generated leads was industry trade shows. In return for a prospect’s business card, the prospect could win a nice prize or receive a free tee shirt. Hundreds of leads would be delivered to the hungry sales force, even though a lot of these leads had no interest in the company’s product (well, the prospect’s children were interested in the free tee shirt, size extra small). It was the best we could do in Marketing at the time.

Fast forward to today where Marketing is engaging potential buyers online, wherever and whenever they can, offering them access to amazing content in return for some contact information. Even if no one knows who they are, or even know if they actually read our amazing content, they immediately become one of the thousands of leads destined for the sales force, thanks to marketing automation. Just because someone downloads one piece of Marketing’s BOFU (Bottom of Funnel) content doesn’t mean they are a useful lead for Sales.  We can do better.

The vendors are scrambling to bridge the gap with lead scoring technologies.

• Lead scoring tries to prioritize leads according to buyer activity: website visits, clicks, download-form completions, etc.
• Predictive lead scoring, in somewhat simple terms, tries to match the digital fingerprint of a website visitor to the digital fingerprint of the company’s existing customers.
• These are great technologies that can improve upon a successful lead generation business strategy. However, technology cannot fix a broken business strategy.

Vendors like InfusionSoft and Hubspot offer the option of one system for both sales and marketing users to potentially collaborate in improving customer experience and delivering increased outcomes. I personally endorse this direction for Small and Medium Business to get their sales and marketing folks on the same system, if not always on the same page. For larger businesses, vendors like Marketo will probably continue to move towards tighter integration between the customer’s existing SFA/CRM and their Marketing Automation platform.

Marketing departments have a lot to gain or lose in resolving this. They have spent millions on technology and need to demonstrate a meaningful payback to the C-suite.

However, Marketing Automation vendors also have a lot to gain or lose. If Marketing-generated leads don’t translate into substantially increased sales, the vendors product will ultimately be blamed. The customer is always right and vendors always seem to get the short stick when expectations exceed outcomes.

The Failure Of Automating Outdated Sales Processes

Several years ago the primary source of industry and product information for a buyer was the local sales representative. In fact, if the buyer didn’t call them personally, they sent an RFI (Request for Information) or RFP (Request for Proposal) looking for information. The sales process was always in-person.

Today, even if a Sales rep is able to cold call into a potential opportunity early in the purchasing process, a lot of the buyer’s education will still continue online and not be dependent on the Sales rep.

Sales is struggling to adjust and achieve their quotas by increasing their focus on new logo business prospecting, adding Social selling techniques, and deploying increased telesales/inside sales/sales development resources. Justifying the added Sales resources or training expense isn’t going to be well received by the C-suite, who thought that CRM/SFA technology was the key to increased sales performance, not more headcount.  We can do better.

Technology vendors are trying to fill the gap with updated CRM/SFA implementations that have more features and increased capabilities. Unfortunately, most of them come with more complexity for the sales rep. In contrast, solutions are emerging for small and medium businesses (SMB) that focus more on the user experience.

• Hubspot’s integrated revenue system (sales and marketing automation with CRM) includes Sidekick sales automation software, with the future potential of offering more capabilities that both sales and marketing users can leverage.
• Pipeline Manager sales automation software greatly enhances, rather than replaces, the customer’s existing Salesforce CRM system. Its software is designed to empower the sales rep to be more productive and effective, plus, empower the sales manager to quickly and easily update the sales process to reflect prevailing field best practices.
• This is the right direction for Small and Medium Business to get their sales force more productive, provide better feedback to Marketing, and do so at minimum expense with amazing ROI.

The Solution For Unfulfilled Promises And Unrealistic Expectations

Whether the C-suite only heard what they wanted to hear from the technology vendors, or whether the technology vendors only told them what the C-suite wanted to hear, is no longer relevant.

How we got here is no longer important. Vendor reputations, CMO reputations and IT reputations are on the line. Finger pointing is not the outcome anyone wants.

The Sales VP and Marketing VP need to find a way to collaborate, get on the same page and align themselves to the new buyer reality. To jumpstart productive collaboration efforts between the two functions consider bringing in an experienced technology-savvy Marketing and Sales consultant.

Marketing Automation, Sales Force Automation, and CRM vendors also need to step up and become a long term valued partner, not just another product vendor. As part of the technology implementation planning, they need to help the customer get on the right track of aligning business process to the buyer.

We can, and we should, help our customers understand that they will get decent ROI if they simply automate existing processes, but they could get an amazing ROI if they automate the right processes. Even smaller technology vendors should seriously consider bringing in an experienced technology-savvy Marketing and Sales consultant during the implementation planning phase to help kick start the customer’s business process collaboration.

Auto-magical black boxes work best enabling an effective cross-functional revenue strategy that is aligned with the buyer journey.

It’s time for amazing automation technology to enable amazing business outcomes!!!

How will you close the gap?  Please keep the discussion going by commenting and sharing this post with your colleagues.

The vast majority of Demand Generation campaigns aren’t meeting their goals, according to executives at leading B2B enterprises. In fact, only 2.8 percent of respondents in a recent survey conducted by Demand Generation strategy firm ANNUITAS say their campaigns are effective.

The Enterprise B2B Demand Generation Research Study is a first of its kind in the Demand Generation industry, polling only marketers at B2B enterprises (organizations with $250+ million in annual revenue and 500+ employees). And ANNUITAS uncovered some surprising—and in some cases startling—insights, including:

• There is a disconnect between what marketing departments want to accomplish and what they are measuring. Those in enterprise Demand Generation need to better align their goals and objectives with their metrics and KPIs

• Marketing departments are struggling to succeed with their Demand Generation. Almost 60 percent of respondents indicated they feel their efforts are not very effective, with less than three percent stating they are very effective

• Quality of leads generated is the most pressing campaign goal by 77 percent of marketers, followed by customer cross-sell/upsell (56.6 percent), volume of leads (51.9 percent), and brand awareness (50.9 percent)

• Demand Generation professionals are still falling short of connecting with their buyers. From the creation of buyer personas and development of aligned content, there are improvements that must be made to achieve better results

• Marketing needs to improve their interaction with sales when it comes to the development of Demand Generation activities. Most organizations do not take a proactive stand with sales in the development of Demand Generation strategies

• Lack of skills continues to be an obstacle for marketing organizations. This is an indicator to CMOs that training will be key to any improvements that need to be made in effectiveness, measurement and revenue contribution

Key findings of the study are highlighted in the infographic attached, and the full report can be downloaded at www.annuitas.com/study.

LinkedIn is the sales professional's best friend. With it, you can create, nurture, and deepen business relationships—which leads to sales and endless referrals. The key is to develop Know-Like-Trust relationships with people. In this article, Kevin Knebl explains three things you can do to make the best use of LinkedIn to improve your social selling.

It's a good feeling when people check out your LinkedIn profile, especially if viewers are influencers or thought leaders within your industry. But besides giving LinkedIn members an ego boost, what real purpose does the "Who's Viewed Your Profile" function serve? Profile views can be flattering for salespeople, but their usefulness in meeting quota is not immediately apparent.

According to Gerry Moran, founder of MarketingThink, a profile view can be a valuable social selling trigger event that salespeople can use to their advantage. However, while a view can indicate interest, it's still difficult to know what to do with it. Send a message? An invitation request? An InMail? All or none of the above?

Keeping in mind that networking is all about the "attention" piece of AIDA, sales trainer Rick Roberge uses an astoundingly simple yet effective trick for turning a profile view into a conversation.

Whenever someone views Rick's profile, he sends a message consisting of three short sentences. I myself was the recipient of such a message a few weeks back:

Note that this message doesn't just strike up a generic conversation. The question "did I do something?" prompts the recipient to explain exactly what spurred the profile view, and this information can provide a clear direction for the relationship or a potential next interaction. 

While not every profile view will be from an interested prospect, some will be, and salespeople would be remiss not to pursue this stream of "inbound" leads. In addition, following up on profile views is a good way to introduce yourself to new people and expand your network -- which to Jill Rowley equals a salesperson's net worth.

So next time you stop by the "Who's Viewed Your Profile" page, don't just soak up the attention and click away. Do something by messaging each viewer and asking, "Did I do something?" Seeds of a healthy relationship sown. 

What do you do after someone views your profile? Let us know in the comments.

With over 300 million users on LinkedIn, it has become a dynamic platform for business networking — some even consider the professional Facebook. Today, it seems many professionals have made it a priority to establish a profile. To get the most out of such a powerful business platform, it is highly recommended (if you are a business owner/leader) to have a company page.

For starters, a company page is essentially an extension of your website — a mini version of it. Just as you would spend time to create a website, consider a company page on LinkedIn to be just as important.

Here are three crucial reasons why you should focus on your LinkedIn company page in 2015.

An Extension of your SEO Strategy

Leverage the fact that LinkedIn has already established a solid SEO strategy and consistently ranks high on Google searches. Think of your LinkedIn page as a second website to coincide along your company website’s SEO strategy.

Assess your company overview description and specialties section to ensure target keywords are incorporated. Regularly post and share quality content that positions your company as a thought leader in your industry. Together, these jointly ensure your LinkedIn company page has a foundation of static content anchored in the company overview portion, as well as fresh and rich content shared on a consistent basis.

Attract Top Talent

Quite possibly the go-to network for job searching and career developments, LinkedIn is the place to be for housing and promoting open job opportunities. If there’s any other channel you’d want your job openings listed on outside of your website, it should be LinkedIn.

Even if you don’t currently have open positions to list or promote, your LinkedIn company page allows job seekers to follow your business and keep up with the latest developments within your organization. Be sure to keep promoting opportunities to continually attract and engage with strong, talented professionals interested in your organization.

Generate Leads Using Social Prospecting

If you’re in sales, you may already be using LinkedIn for social prospecting. But what if you could have prospects coming to you? By ensuring your organization has a strong LinkedIn company page that’s producing and sharing compelling content, you’re able to take better advantage of LinkedIn as a social prospecting tool.

By continually sharing valuable and rich content through your company’s LinkedIn page, you’re not only positioning your company as an industry thought leader, but also generating content that resonates with prospective customers by addressing their pain points. The strongest content you can share provides insight or solutions to prospects’ existing problems or questions.

If you think your organization’s LinkedIn company page could be better optimized or simply needs a refresh, download our guide to creating the perfect LinkedIn company page now!

Our very own ace of sales, Kevin, recently did a webinar for early-stage startup founders. If you want to know how to get your first customer, then this is for you.

Transcript:

Hey guys. So if you’re just joining us, this is a little webinar that we put together for – to teach you guys about how to hustle your way to your first customers. It’s possible that some of you guys already have those first customers but – and some of you guys might not. I don’t really know. I don’t know all the details about all you guys but I’m going to teach you what I know about how to hustle your way to get your first few customers.

To start that off, let me talk a little bit about my background so you know where I’m coming from, what have my experiences been, and how I perceive these things.

So to start off, I used to be in engineering. I was a mechanical engineer. I used to work at NASA. I worked on the Mars Rover mission that landed on Mars in 2012. The mission was called MSL and that’s the – well, the goal of the mission was to find life on Mars. Hasn’t found life yet but definitely made some amazing discoveries.

After doing that for a little while, I really, really was drawn to entrepreneurship and the software industry and I really wanted to start my first company.

So I teamed up with a friend of mine and we started a couple of companies where because I didn’t code, I did the business development or rather the sales aspect of things and my co-founder did the coding. Needless to say, we had spectacular failures and we learned a lot and in doing so, I learned a few important lessons.

The very last startup we started before I was part of the Close.io team was called FitSquid and in this startup, my co-founder and I were selling a fitness product, essentially a way to automatically capture every single piece of cardio data from a machine, from a cardio machine at the gym and automatically uploaded to the cloud and to your smartphone. So you could check into a machine like you check in Foursquare or on Facebook. You check into a location. You check into a cardio machine at the gym and you get all your metrics around your workouts. You get all your numbers. All of them are saved and you can also compete with people around you and around the world just with your smartphone.

That was the technology that we have created and in doing so, we had to go out and get our first few customers. So at first, we started targeting gyms as our customers. We pretty quickly realized that that wasn’t going to work. So we decided to go after large companies that had a good – that invested a lot in the employee help.

One of the companies that we targeted among many, many, many companies was Google and we were able to close Google as our first paying customer and that – a lot of how we did that inspires this discussion today. So I’m going to tell you that story.

So when we first started cold calling businesses, we decided we were going to – we’re just going to try to reach as many businesses as possible and try to go after the fitness directors at these companies.

So we were calling tech companies anywhere from Apple, Google, to Amazon, Microsoft, but all sorts of small companies as well.

Pausing here for just a second to make sure everybody can still hear me if there are any messages. OK, great. We’re all good here.

So going back to the story, we were cold calling businesses, pitching them, pitching the directors. For the most part, we didn’t get a whole lot of interest. Well, one day I decided, “All right. I’m going to call somebody at Google,” and I was able to find a research – who the fitness director was at Google via LinkedIn. However, I only got his first name because LinkedIn keeps the name private.

So what I did is I called Google. I called their corporate line and I said – and for the sake of this discussion, I’m not going to use his real name. So I asked for John and Google said, “Well, John who?” I said, “Well, he’s the fitness director,” and their response was, “Well, we need their last name to transfer you. So we can’t transfer you.”

So I said, “OK, no problem.” I hung up. I said, “All right.” Normally you would give up and you move on. But I was determined. I knew Google was a good company to sell this technology to. So I turned around and I went and researched on Facebook and I was able to make a guess as to who two or three possible last names of people would be that are also working at Google that were also in the fitness technology.

I was able to find the name of the person and then I called Google, the mainline again. This time, I used the full name. I said, “Hey, can I speak to John Robinson?” Again, not his real name and they were able to say, “Yes, sure. We will transfer you. But is he expecting your call?” My answer to this question was, “Yes, we have a meeting scheduled.” I lied. But it didn’t matter, because they transferred me and when John answered the phone, he was totally not expecting to hear from me. I immediately got into pitching them on my product, so much so that John was impressed with what we had to do and they called us in for a demo.

We were able to demo John on what our product was all about. Eventually we closed John as our first paying customer, Google as our first paying customer, and we actually took money from them. We were able to use this to actually get into 500 startups and raise money from them as part of fundraising for our business.

So that’s kind of my background and my story of where I came from. I came from the technology industry, went into software and by doing mostly sales and business development. Eventually, after FitSquid, I joined up with the founders of this company which is Close.io today and was able to build out the sales team here and do all the sales that we do for Close.io.

Elastic Sales: Sales as a Service

So that’s kind of my background. I want to talk a little bit about the company itself. The company story is also really, really unique. Now when I left FitSquid and I joined up with the Close.io team, we were not Close.io back then. We were something else. We were Elastic Sales and Elastic Sales hadn’t been established. It was an idea in the founder’s head.

So Steli who’s the CEO asked me to join up with the team and said, “OK. We’re going to do this. We’re going to pitch sales as a service to all of these startups because we think we could do sales better than a lot of technical founders can. So we’re going to actually sell them a sales team on demand.” But guess what. We did not have a sales team on demand. The sales team on demand was Steli and myself. That’s it. The rest of the team were all engineers.

So we said, “All right. It doesn’t matter. We’re going to pitch it anyway.” So what we did is we pulled a list of companies from CrunchBase with their phone numbers and we began calling. Every day we keep a goal for each one of us to make at least 100 calls to try to reach as many people as possible, to try to qualify as many people as possible and try to close our first deal.

We would call people. We would say, “Hey, we are offering a sales team on demand. Our customers are startups and technology companies. We have a lot of experience selling technology.” Much of these things were not really completely true. We had some experience with technology but we’ve had no sales team on demand. There were only two people. But we sold it anyway.

After three weeks of cold calling businesses, we were able to close our first paying customer and the rest is history, which actually incidentally the history of Elastic Sales didn’t last very long. But it played a major role in building Close.io which is one of the premier inside sales tools on the market today.

So when we finally closed our first customer, we started ourselves selling for that customer. So when I closed my customer, I actually became his on-demand sales team and I was the only one selling. But we didn’t really fully disclose this to the customers, but we were able to deliver high level of performance, so they never asked any questions. Eventually we started hiring and growing the team and we started building out or internally a technology to actually improve our own sales. So we could close more deals and make more commissions. This is how Close.io was born.

Close.io - The inside sales tool made by sales people for sales people

If you guys have looked into Close.io at all, this is our website, Close.io. It’s an inside sales tool that actually makes calls, automatically logs calls and automatically logs emails in the platform, so that you can actually spend more time doing sales and less time doing data entry, which is the case with other CRMs.

So we actually built Close.io for our own team internally, so that we can sell better and we’re actually able to do it. At one time, one of our – by a certain point, one of our salespeople was able to do 300, 400 calls a day and we’re able to really increase our contact rate or reach rates of businesses and close much higher volume of deals.

We took the learnings of sales that we had and actually applied it to the technology and our engineers were building the things that the salespeople thought were more important. So the feedback loop between sales and engineering was so much tighter, the product team and the customer – who was the internal sales team was so much tighter, that our engineer is able to build a significantly more superior product.

Eventually some of our customers started asking a question. Well, how does your sales team close way more deals than our sales team? Because they had internal salespeople as well. How does one of your sales guys do three times as many calls and three times as many deals as our guys? So we showed them the secret sauce of ours, the software that we had built and suddenly we realized, “Wait a second. We have a product on our hands. People actually want to buy this thing,” because our customers are demanding that they want to pay for this.

So we decided to – we made a bet. We launched Close.io as a product and it completely took off. Eventually we realized that Close.io’s growth was so strong that we had to pare down Elastic Sales and completely focus on Close.io, which we did and more than a year ago, we made a full switch to Close.io and ever since then, we’ve been growing like crazy.

So that’s kind of a very brief history of the company, how we started. I will get into some other more specifics as I cover some of the – I wanted to give you the back story now, but I want to give you some of the specifics as I cover some of the points.

So I will pause right here. If there are any questions about the company, please post them in chat and I will come back and actually answer them.

5 Steps to closing your first customer

All right. So five steps to closing your first customer. My assumption is that when you’re going to do this, you have some semblance of a product. You know your target market and you’re ready to hustle. I mean these are prerequisites to anything.

This is not about how to determine if there’s a product that has a product market. This is not about that. This is about you think you have something, you think you can sell it. How do you acquire those first two customers? Which can be a real, real challenge.

Step 1: Work backwards

So that’s the assumptions I’m making as I start with that. So step one, work backwards. What do I mean by that? Well, a lot of times, people think – they’re only too focused on their goal. So their goal is we have to get five or ten customers. OK. How do we get our five to ten customers? We just need to start talking to people we know, maybe sell a few people, and that’s it. It never takes on any better shape than that.

Here’s how we did it for Elastic Sales and here’s how I did it for FitSquid. We said, “All right. We need to close two customers, one for Steli, one for me, so that we could start selling.” The goal was to prove that we can actually do this successfully and people will pay us and we can actually make money from it.

So what we did is we said, “All right. In order to close two customers, how many people do we need to qualify? What does qualify mean? Well, how many people are going to actually be interested or express interest to us?”

Well, we assume if we close a bare minimum of – if we have a bare minimum of a 20 percent close rate, we would have to have 10 qualified leads in order to have two closed deals. In other words, we have 10 customers or prospects who say, “Yes, we’re interested and want to move forward,” and out of this, we close two of them.

In sales, there’s always a conversion. There’s always a drop-off. So we look at the fundamentals. All right. If the goal is two, that means we need to create 10 qualified leads. All right. So in order to create 10 qualified leads, how many people do we need to reach? How many people do we need to pitch, reach or pitch? Meaning people we get to actually pitch the software or the idea or the product or the service to.

So in order to do that, we decided that to pitch – to qualify 10 prospects, we needed to reach or pitch at least 10 times as many. So the number we came up with was 100. So we assumed that there would be a 10 percent conversion rate from reached to qualified or pitched to qualified.

So in order to reach 100 people, we decided we needed to have – assuming again a very low reach rate, we need to have – make 1000 attempts. So again, we 10X that amount. So you notice how we’re working on this. Instead of working – instead of saying, OK, we need to – it’s all just a numbers game. It’s all about conversion. So to close deals, to get two closed deals, we need five times the amount of qualified leads. So that’s from two to ten, so ten qualified leads and to get 10 qualified leads, we need to reach 100 people. We need to have 100 conversations. To reach 100 people, because you call or you pitch them, it takes – the conversion tends to be really, really low. We contacted 1000 people.

So we set about to make 1000 calls. In reality, we ended up cold calling over 2000 or 3000 companies in order to get those 10 qualified leads. That was actually an error on our part. We assumed the conversion was going to be much higher. Well, we made an assumption and that’s how you should plan – you should work backwards from your goals. Assume always a really low conversion and get to a number that’s a really high action number.

So the contacted number was the action number, meaning we’re going to make 1000 cold calls in order to get two paid customers.

Step 2: Focus on quantity

So that’s how – I mean now you might say, “Well, that doesn’t scale because we’re a startup. We have to do all of these things. We’re founders. We have to run other parts of our business.” I hear this all the time and this is a mistake people make.

Think about it. If today you had 10, 15 or even – like even a handful of more customers than you had right now, is that now worth investing in way more than the other things that you do? Other things are also important but it’s a startup. You have limited resources. You have a million things to do. You have to prioritize and if you prioritize selling first, that’s a much bigger impact on your business than the other things you might prioritize.

So as founders, I actually really urge you to actually do the things that don’t scale. Long term, you’re not going to be making 1000 cold calls a month or a week. Long term, you’re going to be trying to – you’re going to be building the other parts of your business. You’re going to be diversifying the actions that you do. But in the very beginning, it’s really important. It’s really critical that you do the thing that doesn’t scale. But it makes the biggest impact on your world today, which is getting your first few customers.

So do it the backwards method. Work backwards and it just – that’s step two. It’s quantity. It’s about quantity. Don’t worry about the two customers. Once you’ve worked out that all right, to get two customers, we’re going to make an assumption that here are all the numbers we need to hit, the top most number of the funnel, which is 1000 calls in my example, then that is your answer. Then it just becomes a numbers game. Then your goal every day is to hit that number.

So we started off with having a goal of every day we had to do 100 cold calls each. Before that point, the most cold calls ever done was 30 or 40 and I was scared. I was like, “How am I going to do 100 cold calls?” But when you set a goal, when you put your mind to it, Steli and I were both able to hit 100, 120 within our first week. Then we doubled our goals. We made the goals into 2X and we said, “Now, we’re going to make 200 cold calls, because we really wanted to hit our numbers and get our first customers.”

Then that’s a really old school method. A lot of times in today’s startups, a lot of founders feel like, “Well, maybe we should send a lot of emails out or we should network or look at people that we know.” Great! You could always find people you know who will pay you. But that’s not about this. You want to build a business that can actually scale. Not the people who you know. Your friends and family paying for this is not actually predicting the success of your business. But if you can get strangers, complete strangers to pay for your business and enough of them, that means you have a business. You have something they can actually sell. So to do that, focus on the numbers. Do the old school, un-scalable things. Just do the volume. Cold calling is one of the most powerful tools and most underutilized tools by founders.

People think that they don’t have enough time or they think that it’s too – it’s uncomfortable. Don’t worry about that. Just worry about hitting your numbers. Can I make 100 cold calls today? Don’t care if every person on the phone said no. It doesn’t matter. Make 100 checkboxes and check every box off after every call. That’s how I did it. I had 100 checkboxes and if I checked my boxes at the end of the day, I had a good result. I could feel good about myself.

Even if 100 times people said no, it doesn’t matter. If I assume I’m going to reach 20 percent or 10 percent of the people, I just want 10 nos. Then that’s my goal. My goal is to get 10 nos. If I get 10 nos, I might get one yes. That’s why you focus on the numbers rather than the results. The results are irrelevant especially when you’ve already worked up the proper conversion rates.

You really need to thrive on the rejection. The rejection means that you’re making progress towards your goal. So pick up the phone. In other words, the whole point of all this is in other words, pick up the phone and call your customers. Pitch as many people as possible. You can close deals. When you close deals, you’re going to improve out your business. You’re going to build – you’re going to get your first few customers.

So old school methods, don’t ignore them. At least in the beginning, they can actually be of value. We don’t do any more cold calling anymore. It’s no longer part of our business. For Close.io, we’re all inbound and so we’re always having warm conversations. But if I were launching Close.io today, I would do the same exact thing. I would be cold calling out there because people don’t know who you are. Content marketing, outbound, inbound sales, all that stuff can happen later, but the thing that can actually help you get a foothold is outbound. So don’t hesitate to do that. So focus on quantity. That’s the main lesson here.

Step 3: Create a process

Number three, create a process. So creating a process for outbound is really, really powerful. So one part of it is, all right, you’ve decided you’re going to make 100 cold calls or 200 cold calls a day or you’re going to send out 5000 emails and try to get 10 percent response rate. Out of the 10 percent response rate, you’re going to call five percent of the people and out of that, you’re going to convert two customers. Whatever the number is, however you’ve decided to do it, create a process.

If you’re doing cold calls, create a script. I can’t tell you how many times people are just not taking the time to write it down. Honestly write it down because you can write down the perfect script and write the perfect sales pitch and if you repeat it over and over again, you don’t have to think. Even if the person on the other line is an asshole, it doesn’t matter because if you do your pitch perfectly and you’ve had it – got it written down in front of you, you can repeat it consistently and actually do well.

So write your pitch down. Write your script down. You know what else you should write? Objections. What are the objections you can imagine people having? It’s best to prepare these upfront because you – what we used to do is we had a sales script and instead of qualifying questions, questions that we would ask to understand the customer better and try to figure out how we can move the sales forward. The last part is we had an objection management document, where we had all the possible objections that we could hear and answers, good answers to those objections, sales answers.

For example, a really good objection question is like, “Oh, that sounds interesting. Yeah, send me an email. I will think about it,” and what that usually is, is the person blowing you off. How you’re going to handle that makes all the difference in the world. Most people – if you’re cold calling someone and he says, “Yeah, send me more information via email,” you’re going to send them an email. You’re going to hang up and then you’re never going to hear from them again.

But a good salesperson, when he gets an objection, he says, “Sure. I will send you an email. What’s your email address?” He takes it down. The other person lets his guard down because they think you’re going to hang up and then you say, “Cool. Just so I send you something more relevant and not waste your time, how exactly are you guys doing A, B and C? Are you guys having any challenges with that? What is it that are your main challenges?”

You’re just getting to asking questions. You just don’t worry about it and that’s how you manage objections. Objections are – so write them down. Get a document together and make sure your goal is to try to talk to as many people, have as many conversations as possible, and get those objections out of the way.

Write them. You’re going to do way, way better. Iterate on these processes. The email templates, A-B test them. I mean these are obvious things. You guys can figure it out. But A-B test them. Do the objection management. The phone script, this is really, really important.

Now we have a lot of materials on our blog. If you go to blog.close.io, a lot of materials on how to create amazing sales scripts, how to create amazing email templates, how to do objection management. So you’re going to learn about that. We actually can learn – we actually even have a sales book. I actually forgot to mention that in this presentation but I will open up the webpage later and I have a discount coupon. If you guys want to ever buy one of our sales books, just let me know and I’m happy to take care of that for you guys.

Step 4: Sound bigger than you are

All right. So step four, sound bigger than you are. So oftentimes, when you’re pitching, people – and the early days, their biggest concern is that you’re just some joker out of nowhere that is not some – that’s going to get them in trouble with their boss or the product isn’t going to deliver what they expect to deliver.

So it sometimes helps to just sound bigger than you are. We were a two-person team, sales team, offering sales as a service model with dozens of salespeople on demand. What we were selling, the dream, to people was if you want it tomorrow, you could scale it up to 100 people. We can get that and that really inspired people to want to work with us. We couldn’t deliver it but we didn’t need to deliver it. But we needed to be able to sound that way for people to – I mean you could say, “Hey, this is lying. I don’t want to do that.” It’s up to you. Different people have different comfort zones here. A little bit leaning on the truth, a little bit of exaggeration can actually help.

A great story comes to mind. You guys all know Palantir, right? So maybe this story is true. Maybe the story is false. But from what I’ve heard from the insider people, this may really be true.

But Palantir is this really fast-moving startup. They have now millions of dollars of revenue. They make government spy software basically and when they were first starting out, they actually built their first version of the software and they were pitching to the CIA and the FBI on it.

Again, not every part of my story is going to be 100 percent accurate because this is second hand information. But this part of the story I believe is true. One of the days, they were pitching this to the FBI and the CIA. They got a call saying, “Hey, the director of so and so branch is going to come to Palo Alto to meet you guys tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM. So be ready.”

The founder of Palantir looked around and they were working out of an apartment. They had pizza boxes and beer bottles everywhere. It was a complete mess and there was no way they were going to be able to let – you have someone from the FBI or CIA come to their office. So what they did is they made – they had some connections. They were able to get an empty warehouse close by. They went to IKEA, bought a ton of furniture, bought a bunch of new iMacs and they spent all night long assembling new furniture, putting up whiteboards, setting up the empty warehouse space as if it’s an office space, wrote a bunch of random things on the whiteboard. In the morning, the founders met with the director of the CIA or FBI, whatever it was at the office.

When the directors asked, “Wait a second. Where are all the engineers? Why aren’t they here?” their answer was, “Well, this is the startup industry. This is Palo Alto. People don’t show up here until 11 o’clock.” And the reality was that wasn’t even their office. But they actually pretended to be way bigger. They relied on that in order to actually get their business. They didn’t have any negative or false intentions but it was about creating the – establishing trust and establishing that you are a safe bet.

So it’s always important. Sometimes you can’t do that. You can’t avoid that. So it’s good to minimize the risk by understanding what it is that they need and actually diving into it. I’m happy to talk about this a little bit more in detail at a later time or at the end of the session.

Step 5: Sell it before you have it

So the last part is sell it before you have it. So here’s the great thing about getting your first customers. You don’t have to have a finished product to actually get them to pay. People often worry about that, that they can’t get somebody to pay because they’re too embarrassed with their products being terrible.

When we were doing FitSquid, Google – when we pitched Google, Google asked us to come and do a demo and we came and we had a prototype version of the product and we just came in and we showed them a demo. But our product was a wired product. We had to plug in a bunch of wires and run a bunch of cables in order to make it work.

So when Google eventually tested it out, it worked well. They were pretty happy. They said, “OK, this is great. But we’re going to need a wireless version of this product. So you guys have that, right?” And my co-founder and I both looked at each other and then we nodded, “Yeah, absolutely. We have that.”

They said, “OK, great. Can you show us a demonstration of that?” We said, “Yeah. We don’t have it with us right now. But how about in a few days?” So we put a date on the calendar a week later and we went home and we invented it. We did not have a wireless version. We did not have a way to do it before. We never even thought of it before. But this is what Google needed and this is what we needed to close the deal. So we just said yes and we went in and did it – built it.

We came in with another prototype that was wireless and we actually were able to successfully demonstrate it even though it was more or less completely broken and Google then paid us our first payment of $5000 to make an installation on their entire fitness complex. We were able to close our first deal before even having a properly finished product.

So the answer is simple. Sometimes it’s OK to sell the promise, as long as you intend to deliver honestly and we did. In the end, we delivered exactly what we promised. We worked really, really hard to do it but we did it and it’s OK to charge money upfront and it’s OK to ask for money for your product, because you – because there’s real value in it, even if you’re embarrassed about it.

Q&A

So that’s it folks. That’s the session. I’m happy to answer any questions. Just let me know if this made any sense, if this was helpful, useful or any other feedback that you have for me. It’s still – you guys are still muted. So please post your questions in chat.

Thanks Adam. Oh, just so you know, I will show you the startup sales guide. This is our book, sales book, if you guys want to learn more about sales. You can also go to our blog. Sign up for that. We have a free sales startup course. Our mission is to teach people about sales, help them get really, really amazing at it. So here’s The Ultimate Guide to Startup Sales. We have an outbound guide. We also now are about to launch the inbound guide and then a joined guide. But if you want to buy this book, you could buy it. The discount code to get it in half price is “awesomesauce” all one word. So feel free to use that code to get half price in this book. That’s our CEO Steli who wrote it. There are a lot of great nuggets in there including how to do your outbound sales.

Question 1:

So you – good question. I’m assuming everyone can see his question. But when we made calls to qualify our leads, we were doing everything on the phone and honestly, don’t be hesitant to close deals over the phone. You can actually do it. I’ve closed anywhere from $100 a month deals to hundreds of thousands of dollars in deals, in annual deals over the phone. It just takes a few more steps but you could totally do it.

So we were doing everything for phone sales and we were able to do that. By the way, if you want to also learn about the more expanded version of the Elastic Sales story, you go to ElasticSales.com. That was the sales as a service business. This is the background story about us. So feel free to take a look at that if you would like to learn more.

Also like if you guys have specific questions about sales, like how to – what’s a really good way to craft a sales pitch? Feel free to ask questions like that. I’m happy to help with that.

Question 2

Did we generate our list of thousands of companies purely from CrunchBase or were there other sources? Good question. So we started out with the CrunchBase list because it has – it had information about – because we were actually – we decided very simply we’re going after startups and tech companies that are growing.

So we wanted companies that have raised some amount of money because they’re going to be able to pay us to do it, but also at the same time, we knew that they had the sales need and had a rough product market fit.

So we created a list from CrunchBase. Then we pulled lists from Data.com. Then we pulled the YC list. That was actually a big part of it. In fact our second customer was a YC company. We were also YC at the time, but we did not use our network to get that. We just pulled the list of YC companies, tried to find their phone numbers and email addresses and we mostly cold called them.

In fact, to close our first YC company took 42 calls and 38 emails back and forth to make this happen. So YC lists, 500 startup lists. We looked at Techstars’ list. At the time, there weren’t as many accelerators. This was in 2011. But they were starting to pop up, but those are the main ones at the time. So that’s when we – that’s where we started. We just went after these companies and a lot of times, people hung up on the phone, told us to F-off. It didn’t matter, because as long as I could hit my 100 calls a day, I knew that I was going to hit my goal, which I did, because you talk to enough people, you’re going to find somebody who’s in the right time.

Outbound is all about volume. It’s all – it’s a beautiful thing. It’s such a simple thing. It’s just math. It’s just how – it’s just a numbers game. If you knew you were going to convert 0.5 percent of everybody you would talk to into a customer, then you know you need to make 200 calls. You need to talk to 200 people and the fastest way you could do it, the more you’re going to get value out of it.

Question 3:

Any other questions? How long do you fake until you make it? Well Daniel, the answer is in that question. You fake it until you make it. Essentially, it’s just going to slowly get there. You pretend sometimes and again, this is – some people may feel like, “Oh, my morality doesn’t let me do that. I don’t think this is right.” It’s really up to you. It doesn’t matter. If your overall intentions are honest and you intend to deliver on your promises, then that’s what matters. You can lean on the truth sometimes.

But we started off with two people of delivering this outbound sales as a service team and we hired our third person two months later and then we started really, really hiring as we started getting more and more customers. At one point, we had gotten up to 100 customers and we still had a relatively small sales team. We had around I think 20 or 20-ish sales people. We’re able to handle tons of campaigns.

At that point, we knew we had made it because we were profitable and we knew that this was a real business. You just know. It’s not something that you have to – that’s not an answer that you have – you can like see clearly. You just go and you will start to see results and you just keep going. Eventually, you know you’re there.

With Close.io, it was very simple. We started off. We launched the product and the first month, we had a couple of thousand dollars in recurring revenue. It was like, oh, that’s kind of interesting. People actually want to pay for this product. Well, that’s good.

Then the next month, more people paid us and our MRR, monthly recurring revenue, started to increase and then again the next month, even more people and then we said, “Wait a second. This is a business. It’s actually growing.” As we started to hit the different revenue milestones and got bigger and bigger, then we passed profitability, then we knew we had arrived at least to a significant business and then after we doubled from that size, then we knew that this is a business that can really, really scale. So it’s a gradual process. It’s not a simple one.

Question 4:

Hugh asks, “How do you iterate objection messaging? Was it a case of writing down your most frequent objections and then crafting the optimal responses?” Exactly, exactly. So the way that worked is we took – because we had some experience in sales, we wrote down some typical objections. You spend some time thinking about this and then we can craft answers that essentially allowed us to take power in that – take charge of that conversation. So someone says, “You know what? I’m not interested right now.” So my response is – a typical salesperson or a person who’s not experienced, their response would be like, “Oh, OK. Sorry to bother you.” They get defensive or they start to shrink back. My response would be, “Cool. I get it. Why? Why do you think you’re not interested in this?” Well, because so and so and so. Oh, all right. How would you ideally like it to work? How would it work for you if it was the best possible case? Well, it would work like this.

OK. If I said we could actually deliver something better than that, would you be open to having this discussion? Are you still convinced that this doesn’t work for you? Then that changes the dynamics. So yes, you write down some questions. You iterate. You keep improving them. You keep improving some answers.

In fact, if you guys ever want to send me, email me, Kevin@close.io is actually my contact information. Some of your objections and some answers that you think I will be able to give you suggestions on how to improve them, so feel free to do that.

Question 5:

Oh, beautiful question. Jeremy asked, “Can you tell us more about qualifying questions?” Qualifying questions are great. So here’s how you do it. When you construct a pitch, you want to start out with an initial pitch. The pitches should be designed to engage with questions. Questions are critical and those are the qualifying questions. What you’re trying to do is figure out A, “Is this person a good fit?” Not if this person is interested. Don’t ever go with that mentality because guess what, nobody is interested because nobody was expecting your call. If they were interested, they would be checking you out. But they’re not. So they’re not interested.

You are supposed to make them interested. But that comes later. First, you’re supposed to understand them. So you ask some – you have an initial pitch and you follow it up immediately with questions. The questions should be about understanding the process. Here’s our pitch for Elastic Sales.

“Hey, John. I’m calling some local startups in the area because we’re about to launch our beta program or to explore if there’s an interest in our beta program. I wanted to see if you would be interested in talking about that.”

So the initial pitch was designed to get them curious about what we’re asking. So they’re asking, “What is this beta program? What are you guys doing?” Well, what we do is we offer sales as a service for tech startups to help scale the sales team and increase their sales. I don’t remember 100 percent of the pitch really. It has been many years now.

But this is the rough gist of it and so I – and then I would not stop there. I would ask, “By the way, do you guys have a sales team? Oh, what is your sales process? How do you guys do sales? Do you make calls or do you send emails? How many calls per day do you make? Great! If we could actually – if a group of people could actually sell your product effectively and just send you deals, would you be interested in that? Is that something that actually sounds good to you?”

So first, understanding if they’re a right fit. That’s part of the qualifying question, so understanding are they even the right business. Are they actually something of a fit for what you do? Could you actually benefit them? By the way, you should never sell something to somebody who you cannot benefit. I mean I’m sure you know this but really, they’re just going to make a terrible customer. It’s going to come back to bite you.

So it’s not worth it. So just don’t do it. Just understand if they’re a right fit and then figure out if you could deliver what they really need and then show them who you deliver them and that’s it. The sale is done.

Question 6:

So there are a lot of options right now for outsourcing outbound effort. Would your still recommend doing it all yourself? I would think outsourcing outbound would reduce conversion. But do you think that increased volume could offset that?

Jonathan, if there’s one point here, it’s don’t outsource outbound. Just don’t. Not right now, not until you’re really, really big. Look, let me ask you this. Jonathan, are you generating $10 million, $15 million in revenue per year? If you are, obviously then you’re in the wrong room. But I’m assuming you’re not and if you’re not, you should not be doing – you should not be outsourcing outbound.

That’s because – and here’s something that we learned from practice. We were the ones who were doing this for other companies and for the smaller companies, we realized they’re nowhere near the point where they can actually build up a sustainable outbound process, let alone have room to be able to pay another organization. Yes, they could do it. But it’s still better if in the initial days, the founder does it and soon after, an internal sales team does it.

Outbound, outsourcing outbound until you’ve – outsource outbound when you have the following, when you have a repeatable sales process. A sales process that you can repeat by – you have a full – all the sets of processes, you have all the scripts, you have all the conversion numbers. You know exactly how you convert every leads, where the leads come from. Then you can outsource it because then you know how to control it and how to measure it. Don’t outsource the outbound sales campaign unless you know how to measure it. So do that internally. Grow your internal team and then do outbound. Does that make sense? My pleasure. Any other questions?