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In a recent webinar on establishing sales credibility, I had a chance to ask some tough sales questions from the webinar attendees. Here’s a look at the answers from sales experts Craig Elias, creator of Trigger Event Selling and RingLead CEO, Donato Diorio.

How do you establish sales credibility?

Craig Elias: Charlie Green wrote the book called The Trusted Advisor where he talks about credibility building. The people who had the most trust or credibility basically had two things: 1) Reliability, or when you say you’re going to do something you get it done in the timeframe. 2) Intimacy, and the power of small talk. Let somebody know who you are and find these common connections. Once you do, people will tell you stuff they won’t tell other people. However, when I reach decision makers at big corporations, I’m not sure that they want my empathy; they want my answers.

Donato Diorio: Today, sales outreach response rates are 3% on the low, to 9% on the extreme high. I believe that this is a credibility issue, not because people are less credible than they were 20 years ago, but because there is so much noise today, and so much additional data, that unless you stand out, you’re not going to get a response. Therefore, without credibility, you don’t have a sale.

What sales triggers can we seek out to establish credibility?

Craig Elias: I’m a big fan of understanding a prospect’s fiscal year end. They very often have money left over from the last fiscal year, or you get on their budgeting cycle for the next fiscal year. I’m also a big fan of location changes. You can take one change in a decision maker and create multiple opportunities out of it, and that includes when there’s a change in location.

Craig Elias: If someone is changing location, the question is who used to be in that location, and where have they gone? And the place that they may have left vacant now gets filled by whom? For me, there’s three big events; the first one is what makes somebody want to change that allows you to get in early. This drives your close ratio from an average of 16 or 17% up to 74%.

Craig Elias: The second event is when someone can afford to change. That’s very often around time or money, such as fiscal year end. The last one is customers that won’t jump. They’re sitting on the fence and we just can’t get them to finally say yes. What I’ve learned is that the vast majority of those people aren’t jumping because they have not found a way to justify their purchase to others. If you pay attention to the competition of your prospect, very often what a competitor does becomes the justification the prospect can use to finally do what you want them to do.

At what point should you establish credibility?

Craig Elias: When you get in front of a decision maker in a new role, help them define the problem or redefine the problem. Then, help them design the solution, while you’re developing a relationship and establishing credibility. Credibility must come on the front end, before the prospect reveals anything.

Donato Diorio: Develop metrics for credibility, specifically in the case of sales outreach. For example, I came up with a 100-point system including:

• Contact venues (such as phone calls, emails or LinkedIn direct messages)
• Peer influencers
• Industry knowledge
• Prospect knowledge

Each approach gets a certain number of points, for instance, if you reach out to someone via phone or email, you’ll get more points than a Twitter DM, because phone tends to be more effective. Mentioning a peer influencer will establish more credibility than not mentioning one. Developing a scoring system is very important to determine where and when to establish credibility.

How soon in the process should you start talking about pricing?

Craig Elias: Talk about the prospect’s problems before you talk about pricing. That helps you understand how you compare. Ask, what is the problem and what are the implications of that problem? More times than not the customer thinks they have a two-dollar problem, and they’ve got a five-dollar solution. If we help the customer understand that they have a ten dollar problem, and we have a five dollar solution, that’s great.

Donato Diorio: After value is established, price doesn’t matter. However, I like to talk price sooner than later because I want to screen prospects out. If it’s just a budget issue, a year-end thing, etc., I want to know that sooner to before I bring other people in. This approach rarely backfires if you truly establish the value first.

Craig Elias: I want to at least give ballpark pricing for two reasons; 1) I want to make sure that the person knows where we are from a pricing perspective. They can decide if they want to continue, and if I get a sense that I’m way over budget, I’m going to add value. If there’s a big disconnect, I can offer those who are less expensive if the prospect wants less value. I have given business to my competitors because there’s no fit between what I have and what the decision maker wants. But when they move to somewhere else, who do they remember? They remember me when I phone and follow up with them in their new role, and that’s when I make it up.

Get more sales tips in the RingLead ebook, Sphere of Influence Selling: An Inside Sales Approach to Crushing Your Quota.

Meg Whitman said on Wednesday that HP is on track to formally split into two companies in November.

So she told investors at the company's annual meeting as reported by Bloomberg's Jack Clark. (We've reached out to HP for further comment and will update this post when we hear back.)

The timing isn't a surprise. When Whitman first announced the split in October (the end of its last fiscal year), she said that the process would take about a year.

Many analysts say that HP's stock is a good deal prior to the split, since investors will wind up owning shares of two Fortune 50-sized companies afterwards. So now there's a clearer deadline for that.

Over the past few months, Whitman and CFO Cathie Lesjak have been slowly dolling out bits of information about the split. Here's a summary:

Whitman also said Wednesday that HP's iconic and newly redesigned Palo Alto headquarters would remain the HQ of both companies. HP will divvy up the buildings into HP Inc. (the PC/printer division) and HP Enterprise (servers, services, cloud and everything else). HP plans to do the same with all of its locations around the world, Whitman said.

The split will cost about $2 to $3 billion, depending on how you count. Lesjak told analysts in February that direct costs this fiscal year (2015) will be $1.3 billion for things like fees related to finance, IT, consulting, legal and real estate and another $500 million next year (fiscal 2016). Plus, it expects to pay another $300 million in capital expenditures. And it thinks it will owe $750 million in foreign taxes.

HP will likely continue to cut jobs after the split. The company is on target to downsize by 55,000 employees as part of its massive multi-year layoff plan. But HP is still huge, still around 300,000 employees, and Lesjak indicted in February that when the company splits, it could identify more jobs to shed. She didn't say how many.

Shuffling in the leadership ranks is already happening. A few months ago, HP named the senior execs of both companies, but as the time draws near, that's already shifting. For instance Marten Mickos was supposed to lead HP's crucial cloud efforts (which goes by the brand name HP Helion). But he's already shifted out of that role. Mickos joined HP when the company bought the cloud startup he was leading, Eucalyptus.

(Mickos is well-known in the open-source world for his eight-year stint running database startup mySQL unitl it was bought by Sun Microsystems for $1 billion in 2008. That ws an astounding sum at the time for a company that essentially gave its software away for free.)

As we've previously reported, HP employees we talk to seem pretty un-phased by the ongoing layoffs and separation. They tend to know which company their business unit will belong to. While cutting jobs overall, HP is also investing in hot areas like cloud, networking, and advanced systems, and some of them are finding new jobs in those business units.

SEE ALSO: This man just sold the company he founded 13 years ago for $3 billion

Join the conversation about this story »

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Apple keeps growing. 

At the end of the 2013 fiscal year, it had 80,300 employees, according to MacRumors, and that number increased to 92,600 by October 2014.

In an interview with Fast Company, CEO Tim Cook revealed how the $700 billion company maintains its culture as it grows.

It starts with hiring.

"You're trying to pick people that fit into the culture of a company," Cook said. "You want a very diverse group with very diverse life experiences looking at every problem. But you also want people to buy into the philosophy, not just buy in, but to deeply believe in it." 

It's harder than it sounds. Research shows that diverse groups make better decisions. But when managers interview job candidates, they unconsciously look for people who remind them of themselves, which is bad news for diversity. 

Cook also told Fast Company that Apple culture gets baked into employees in the on-boarding process.

"There's employee orientation, which we do throughout the company all over the world," he said. "Then there's Apple U., which takes things that happened in the past and dissects them in a way that helps people understand how decisions were made, why they were made, how successes occurred, and how failures occurred. All of these things help." 

Founded by Steve Jobs in 2008, Apple University is the internal training program where new-hires go to learn what it means to be an Apple employee, the Guardian reports. For example, employees take a course on How Apple Does Things. The core theme: Arrive at simple solutions to complex problems.

"You go through more iterations until you can simply deliver your message in a very concise way, and that is true to the Apple brand and everything we do," an employee who took the course told The New York Times.

This focus on simplicity was handed down from Jobs, who said that "you have to work hard to get your thinking clean," and it shows the power of the culture he cultivated, which Cook and design SVP Jony Ive have spread to the company's thousands of employees.

"Ultimately, it's on the company leaders to set the tone," Cook told Fast Company. "Not only the CEO, but the leaders across the company. If you select them so carefully that they then hire the right people, it's a nice self-fulfilling prophecy."

SEE ALSO: Why Apple Employees Learn Design From Pablo Picasso

Join the conversation about this story »

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The post The 15 Most Innovative Canadian Companies of 2015 appeared first on Canadian Business.

NEW YORK, N.Y. – New York’s 13,587 yellow cabs are in competition with smartphone-driven newcomers on city streets, especially the 14,088 registered Uber cars that now outnumber cabs. Here’s a look at how the basic operations of the two compare.

YELLOW CABS

—Hailed on the street by customers looking for an “on” light on the vehicle rooftop, meaning it’s available. One of the most common scenes on New York City streets are people waving their hands in the air, often shouting “Taxi!”

—Fares are set by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, at an initial fee of $2.50 plus 50 cents per 1/5 mile, or 50 cents per 60 seconds in slow traffic or when the vehicle is stopped.

—Taxis operate under a medallion that now costs as much as $800,000. Most drivers do not own the medallion or the car; they must lease the medallion at a cost of up to about $140 per 12-hour shift, plus fuel.

UBER

—Cars are hailed with a smartphone linked to the Uber driver, using an app that’s set up ahead of time with a credit card. The car nearest to a customer responds, with location automatically designated through the app.

—Basic charge is $3 plus 40 cents a minute, or $2.15 per mile, but larger or fancier cars cost more. Uber fares can skyrocket at market rates based on customer demand during rush hours, bad weather or holidays; customers are warned if they’re riding at a “surge pricing” time.

—Most Uber drivers own their vehicles, but others are given use of a new car at special financing rates, regardless of credit history.

The post Facts and figures on New York’s more than 13,000 yellow cabs vs. Uber’s 14,000 cars appeared first on Canadian Business.

Every business, no matter how large or small, strives to increases their productivity. This fact is just as true for the many businesses that are trying to build their clientele through content marketing. If your company already uses content marketing strategies, you know the importance of educating your target audience to peak their interest in your product. It has been proven that an educated audience does not have to be sold a product, they already want to buy it. You are likely also aware of the importance of adding value to your marketing campaign. Sometimes however, that can be difficult to accomplish.

Here we will look at 7 different websites a content marketer can utilize to improve their productivity and overall business. These sites were all created in and around the concept of content marketing; the vital role it currently plays in our media climate, and the role it will continue to play in the future.

1. Contently.com – Contently is a tech startup (based in NYC) that creates software to help brands reach audiences through quality content. They are not a “content farm” but instead a platform for brands and freelancers to share ideas and portfolios, creating a better understanding of the needs of the media. Contently also produces a magazine for freelancers to assist in their endeavors of creating valuable content. Contently is a site with a strong clear vision for the future of mass media, therefore they are constantly striving to meet the challenges of that climate head-on.

2. Inbound.org – Inbound is a self-proclaimed community for marketing professionals. It is essentially a hub or forum for marketers that allows its members to share ideas related to marketing. This is also a valuable site to use if you are trying to overcome certain marketing challenges, as the thousands of members are full of ways to help your unique situation. This is a great place to find stories of others successes and failures; either of which can be a valuable learning tool.

3. Notebook.zoho.com – Zoho Notebook is the software a marketer can use to increase their sales while also increasing their productivity and managing all of their day to day activities. This software is available both on desktop and in app form, for those who need to handle their marketing on the go. It supplies a streamlined program for ensuring productive marketing all in one system. They believe that it is possible to handle all of your marketing needs, from the cradle to the grave, through the tools on their site.

4. Canva.com – Canva is the site to use if you wish to create designs for web or print applications. This can include blog graphics, presentations, Facebook covers, posters, flyers, invitations, and much more. This Australian based start-up company already has thousands of users, and is connected to over 500 different marketing companies’ worldwide. Their designs are unique, never copies, which has earned them a very positive reputation in the content marketing world.

5. Aussiewriter.com – Aussie Writer is a service for persons looking for quickly written essays. This site does not sell pre-written essays, everything they create for their customers is “from scratch” based off of the instructions given by the client. Essays are not the only product Aussie sells, they can also create research proposals, lab reports, case studies, and much more. These papers are incredibly useful for educating clients about your content.

6. Shareist.com – Shareist is a site that allows content marketers to manage their business through one location, rather than needing to visit multiple sites. They provide a streamlined approach to posting on services like Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress; all done directly through their site. When time is managed correctly, productivity automatically increases.

7. Skyword.com – Skyword is a site created for content marketers who are interested in creating a “sustainable content marketing solution”. The founders of Skyword thoroughly believe in the importance of creating valuable stories behind a brand, and they know how to market those stories or content to grow your business needs. They are striving to provide a site that will not only help your business become a success now, but stay successful long into the future.

As a content marketer, it is crucial to not only “keep up with the times” in relation to marketing a product, but also to look towards the future. In a world where the average person relies on electronic media to supply their daily content (as opposed to print media), the need for highly productive content marketing is paramount for success.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an idea that has oscillated through many hype cycles over many years, as scientists and sci-fi visionaries have declared the imminent arrival of thinking machines. But it seems we’re now at an actual tipping point. AI, expert systems, and business intelligence have been with us for decades, but this time the reality almost matches the rhetoric, driven by the exponential growth in technology capabilities (e.g., Moore’s Law), smarter analytics engines, and the surge in data.

Most people know the Big Data story by now: the proliferation of sensors (the “Internet of Things”) is accelerating exponential growth in “structured” data. And now on top of that explosion, we can also analyze “unstructured” data, such as text and video, to pick up information on customer sentiment. Companies have been using analytics to mine insights within this newly available data to drive efficiency and effectiveness. For example, companies can now use analytics to decide which sales representatives should get which leads, what time of day to contact a customer, and whether they should e-mail them, text them, or call them.

Such mining of digitized information has become more effective and powerful as more info is “tagged” and as analytics engines have gotten smarter. As Dario Gil, Director of Symbiotic Cognitive Systems at IBM Research, told me:

“Data is increasingly tagged and categorized on the Web – as people upload and use data they are also contributing to annotation through their comments and digital footprints. This annotated data is greatly facilitating the training of machine learning algorithms without demanding that the machine-learning experts manually catalogue and index the world. Thanks to computers with massive parallelism, we can use the equivalent of crowdsourcing to learn which algorithms create better answers. For example, when IBM’s Watson computer played ‘Jeopardy!,’ the system used hundreds of scoring engines, and all the hypotheses were fed through the different engines and scored in parallel. It then weighted the algorithms that did a better job to provide a final answer with precision and confidence.”

Beyond the Quants

Interestingly, for a long time, doing detailed analytics has been quite labor- and people-intensive. You need “quants,” the statistically savvy mathematicians and engineers who build models that make sense of the data. As Babson professor and analytics expert Tom Davenport explained to me, humans are traditionally necessary to create a hypothesis, identify relevant variables, build and run a model, and then iterate it. Quants can typically create one or two good models per week.

However, machine learning tools for quantitative data – perhaps the first line of AI – can create thousands of models a week. For example, in programmatic ad buying on the Web, computers decide which ads should run in which publishers’ locations. Massive volumes of digital ads and a never-ending flow of clickstream data depend on machine learning, not people, to decide which Web ads to place where. Firms like DataXu use machine learning to generate up to 5,000 different models a week, making decisions in under 15 milliseconds, so that they can more accurately place ads that you are likely to click on.

Tom Davenport:

“I initially thought that AI and machine learning would be great for augmenting the productivity of human quants. One of the things human quants do, that machine learning doesn’t do, is to understand what goes into a model and to make sense of it. That’s important for convincing managers to act on analytical insights. For example, an early analytics insight at Osco Pharmacy uncovered that people who bought beer also bought diapers. But because this insight was counter-intuitive and discovered by a machine, they didn’t do anything with it. But now companies have needs for greater productivity than human quants can address or fathom. They have models with 50,000 variables. These systems are moving from augmenting humans to automating decisions.”

In business, the explosive growth of complex and time-sensitive data enables decisions that can give you a competitive advantage, but these decisions depend on analyzing at a speed, volume, and complexity that is too great for humans. AI is filling this gap as it becomes ingrained in the analytics technology infrastructure in industries like health care, financial services, and travel.

The Growing Use of AI

IBM is leading the integration of AI in industry. It has made a $1 billion investment in AI through the launch of its IBM Watson Group and has made many advancements and published research touting the rise of “cognitive computing” – the ability of computers like Watson to understand words (“natural language”), not just numbers. Rather than take the cutting edge capabilities developed in its research labs to market as a series of products, IBM has chosen to offer a platform of services under the Watson brand. It is working with an ecosystem of partners who are developing applications leveraging the dynamic learning and cloud computing capabilities of Watson.

The biggest application of Watson has been in health care. Watson excels in situations where you need to bridge between massive amounts of dynamic and complex text information (such as the constantly changing body of medical literature) and another mass of dynamic and complex text information (such as patient records  or genomic data), to generate and evaluate hypotheses. With training, Watson can provide recommendations for treatments for specific patients. Many prestigious academic medical centers, such as The Cleveland Clinic, The Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering are working with IBM to develop systems that will help healthcare providers better understand patients’ diseases and recommend personalized courses of treatment. This has proven to be a challenging domain to automate and most of the projects are behind schedule.

Another large application area for AI is in financial services. Mike Adler, Global Financial Services Leader at The Watson Group, told me they have 45 clients working mostly on three applications: (1) a “digital virtual agent” that enables banks and insurance companies to engage their customers in a new, personalized way, (2) a “wealth advisor” that enables financial planning and wealth management, either for self-service or in combination with a financial advisor, and (3) risk and compliance management.

For example, USAA, the $20 billion provider of financial services to people that serve, or have served, in the United States military, is using Watson to help their members transition from the military to civilian life. Neff Hudson, vice president of emerging channels at USAA, told me, “We’re always looking to help our members, and there’s nothing more critical than helping the 150,000+ people leaving the military every year. Their financial security goes down when they leave the military. We’re trying to use a virtual agent to intervene to be more productive for them.” USAA also uses AI to enhance navigation on their popular mobile app. The Enhanced Virtual Assistant, or Eva, enables members to do 200 transactions by just talking, including transferring money and paying bills. “It makes search better and answers in a Siri-like voice. But this is a 1.0 version. Our next step is to create a virtual agent that is capable of learning. Most of our value is in moving money day-to-day for our members, but there are a lot of unique things we can do that happen less frequently with our 140 products. Our goal is to be our members’ personal financial agent for our full range of services.”

In addition to working with large, established companies, IBM is also providing Watson’s capabilities to startups. IBM has set aside $100 million for investments in startups. One of the startups that is leveraging Watson is WayBlazer, a new venture in travel planning that is led by Terry Jones, a founder of Travelocity and Kayak. He told me:

“I’ve spent my whole career in travel and IT. I started as a travel agent, and people would come in, and I’d send them a letter in a couple weeks with a plan for their trip. The Sabre reservation system made the process better by automating the channel between travel agents and travel providers. Then with Travelocity we connected travelers directly with travel providers through the Internet. Then with Kayak we moved up the chain again, providing offers across travel systems. Now with WayBlazer we have a system that deals with words. Nobody has helped people with a tool for dreaming and planning their travel. Our mission is to make it easy and give people several personalized answers to a complicated trip, rather than the millions of clues that search provides today. This new technology can take data out of all the silos and dark wells that companies don’t even know they have and use it to provide personalized service.”

What’s Next

As Moore’s Law marches on, we have more power in our smartphones than the most powerful supercomputers did 30 or 40 years ago. Ray Kurzweil has predicted that the computing power of a $4,000 computer will surpass that of a human brain in 2019 (20 quadrillion calculations per second). What does it all mean for the future of AI?

To get a sense, I talked to some venture capitalists, whose profession it is to keep their eyes and minds trained on the future. Mark Gorenberg, Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners, which is focused on investing in analytics and data startups, told me, “AI historically was not ingrained in the technology structure. Now we’re able to build on top of ideas and infrastructure that didn’t exist before. We’ve gone through the change of Big Data. Now we’re adding machine learning. AI is not the be-all and end-all; it’s an embedded technology. It’s like taking an application and putting a brain into it, using machine learning. It’s the use of cognitive computing as part of an application.” Another veteran venture capitalist, Promod Haque, senior managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners, explained to me, “if you can have machines automate the correlations and build the models, you save labor and increase speed. With tools like Watson, lots of companies can do different kinds of analytics automatically.”

Manoj Saxena, former head of IBM’s Watson efforts and now a venture capitalist, believes that analytics is moving to the “cognitive cloud” where massive amounts of first- and third-party data will be fused to deliver real-time analysis and learning. Companies often find AI and analytics technology difficult to integrate, especially with the technology moving so fast; thus, he sees collaborations forming where companies will bring their people with domain knowledge, and emerging service providers will bring system and analytics people and technology. Cognitive Scale (a startup that Saxena has invested in) is one of the new service providers adding more intelligence into business processes and applications through a model they are calling “Cognitive Garages.” Using their “10-10-10 method” they deploy a cognitive cloud in 10 seconds, build a live app in 10 hours, and customize it using their client’s data in 10 days. Saxena told me that the company is growing extremely rapidly.

I’ve been tracking AI and expert systems for years. What is most striking now is its genuine integration as an important strategic accelerator of Big Data and analytics. Applications such as USAA’s Eva, healthcare systems using IBM’s Watson, and WayBlazer, among others, are having a huge impact and are showing the way to the next generation of AI.

I’ve talked at length recently in previous posts about the benefits of using Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) to target in-market consumers. DaaS is a process that leverages the modern data ecosystem and real-time data analytics to create a customized “always on” dataset. It is completely changing the game for today’s marketers, fueling customer acquisition and retention strategies for marketers across all industries.

DaaS combines a company’s first-party CRM (customer relationship management) data with real-time triggers and Hard-to-Find-Data (HTFD) sources to deliver better targeting and a stream of in-market consumers.

DaaS has the potential to really bring new competencies and competitive advantage to marketers in new and exciting ways. But don’t take our word for it – check out these real-life examples of how companies are using DaaS to boost revenue and ROI:

Example One – Financial Services

A national banking client was seeking ways to boost customer acquisition. They used the following data sets to identify in-market targets:

1. Mortgages: First Time Home Buyers:

• Identified a list of the bank’s customers and targeted prospects.
• Suppressed those that are current homeowners, leaving non-homeowners with specific traits (age, head of household, HHI, etc.).
• Monitored the resulting file for mortgage activity with a specific FICO level indicator – e.g. 680.  When a “hit” is identified, bank was notified and a fair offer of credit can be made to the potential homeowner.

2. Mortgages: Refinance Variation:

• Secured a list of property building permits on specific bank customers and high end prospect records. When a substantial amount of work is being done at a property, this could designate the opportunity for a refinance.

3. Investments:

• Scraped public record data in bank’s footprint to ID consumers and businesses that have experienced a significant liquidity event.
• ID people looking to sell a high end auto.
• ID pre-movers.
• Monitor life triggers, such as marriages, divorces, and new births.

4. Businesses:

• Monitor email server activity.
• Scraped public record data in bank’s operating footprint to ID businesses that are moving, have moved, or have received certain levels and kinds of funding.
• Review of other financial activity that may be leading indicators of growth or decline.

Example Two – Automotive Industry

The following data sets are being used by several well-known names in the automotive industry:

Example Three – Furniture Retail

FurnitureROI^TM is a furniture retail data product used by a large, multi-regional furniture retailer located in the Northeast.

1. DataMentors’ Consumer Database: Identify New Prospects
   • 250MM US Consumers
   • NCOA Scrubbed
   • 300 Data Elements (Age, Income, Home Ownership, Home Improvement and Decorating Interests, Expectant Parent, Recent Divorce, Recent Home Buyer, Home Square Footage, and more).
2. Millennial Data: Target Millennial Consumers with Multi-Channel Messaging
   • Data on 42MM millennials
   • Segment millennial consumers by proximity to your store location, income, home-owner or renter
   • Lifestyle interests, including technology, home improvement and decorating interests
   • Rich contact data including email address and mobile number
3. Pre-Mover and New-Mover Data: Send Offers to Consumers Who May Soon be In Market

Innovative web mining technology identifies pre-movers and new movers who may soon be in-market for furniture. This real-time data is gathered across a comprehensive network of websites and includes information such as new rentals, houses sold, geography, income level and more.

1. Social Signaling Data: Boost Customer Acquisition Through Social ProspectingFurnitureROI^TM monitors social media for furniture purchase signaling, such as “excited about the move”, or “looking for a leather couch”.
2. Onboarded Data: Digitally Addressable Dataset for Real-Time Messaging

These unique data sets are integrated and structured to form an “always-on” stream of prospects. Data is onboarded to link offline data to online IDs for customized ad delivery through your channel systems.

The datasets sourced through DaaS are uniquely customized to each company. While we have shared just a few examples of how DaaS can be used across industries, the possibilities are truly endless.

For years, organizations have been reliant on their internal data or data enhancements from list brokers. This is stagnant data compiled from third parties. DaaS on the other hand is transformational in nature – a revolutionary way of mining today’s massive data sets to find qualified prospects in the market now for what a company is selling.  DaaS is the next leap forward in the modern data ecosystem, fueling competitive marketing advantage in new and exciting ways.

Be sure to download the white paper for a more in-depth overview of DaaS.

How do you determine if a prospect's a good fit for your product or service?

Sales qualification is the answer.

Not every lead is a good fit for a product or service — no matter how strongly a salesperson believes they are (or wants them to be). Buyers don't buy just because they have a serious need, a looming deadline, or money to burn. They buy because of a combination of all of these factors, and more.

During the sales qualification process, salespeople can't determine a fit based on one of these criteria. They have to establish a fit based on all relevant factors.

While the specific sales questions a rep asks will depend on the product or service they sell, here are some solid conversation starters that can help you recognize who's a successful customer in the making, and who's better suited for another solution.

Sales Qualification

Sales qualification is a part of the sales process where salespeople determine whether or not a prospect is a good fit for the product or service they're selling. Salespeople have an ideal customer profile and compare the prospect's characteristics to the profile. If the prospect is not a good fit, the salesperson won't sell to them.

Sales Qualifying Questions

1. What business problem are you solving with this offering?

Change isn't easy, and businesses don't overhaul systems and processes for the fun of it. If there's no real problem the prospect is trying to solve, there's no real reason for them to buy. Establishing a business pain (either from a known issue or from a problem the prospect wasn't even aware of) before diving into other questions can help you understand what the problem is and how you can help.

2. What's prompting you to do something about it now?

Prospects who have recently experienced a significant trigger event, such as a change in leadership, market shift, legal issue, or major company development, will have more incentive to address the problem now rather than later.

3. What has prevented you from trying to solve the problem until now?

Do other priorities keep taking precedent? Is there a bend in the path to a solution? Learning what has historically blocked the way to fixing this problem can help the salesperson understand where it falls on the prospect’s list of priorities, and reveal potential pitfalls.

4. Have you tried to solve this problem in the past? If so, why didn't that solution work?

Alternatively, it could be that the prospect has attempted a solution before, but for whatever reason, that patch didn't stick. Digging into the past could reveal that what you thought was a perfect fit isn't actually so great — or that your prospect needs what you sell ASAP.

5. What happens if you do nothing about the problem?

If the answer is "well, not much," the prospect doesn't have a pressing need. At this point, the salesperson should either disqualify the lead, or explain to them what might happen if the problem goes unresolved.

6. Do you have a budget allocated for this project? If not, when do you expect to have one?

Money isn't everything, but it certainly has bearing on whether or not a prospect is worth pursuing — so make sure you qualify on budget sooner rather than later. The specific number doesn't matter as much as the fact that your offering's price and the prospect's ability to pay are within the same ballpark. For instance, if your product costs $1 million and the prospect can only afford $100, the sale isn't going to go through so it’s best to disqualify the prospect.

7. How does the purchase approval process work?

This question can uncover additional financial decision-makers that need to be looped in sooner rather than later. For example, who is the final decision maker and how soon can you get them on a call? Having this information upfront can help the deal go a lot smoother later on.

8. What are you currently spending to solve this issue?

If the prospect already has a competitive solution in place, the salesperson can get a benchmark of how much they're used to spending. And with a firm number, the salesperson can then ask if the prospect would be comfortable going higher.

Here's how former HubSpot Sales VP Pete Caputa phrases this question in his sales qualification calls:

"We've established that your goal is X and that you're spending Y now to achieve X. But it's not working. In order to hire us, you will need to invest Z. Since Z is pretty similar to Y and you're more confident that our solution will get you to your goal, do you believe it makes sense to invest Z to hire us?"

9. How would the decision process work with an offering like this? What would be your role in the process, and the roles of others on the decision team?

Is the person you're talking to the decision-maker? Or is the decision-maker someone else? Make sure you understand the dynamics of the buying committee and who has authority over what. For example, while one stakeholder could be the "ultimate" signer, another might be the financial approver.

10. Has your company ever considered/used a product like this before? If so, what happened?

The best way to make sure you don't repeat history is to study it. Compare your buyer's expectations and perceptions of "good" and "bad" to your offering. If there's a significant mismatch, it's best to disqualify the prospect now before you spend any more time on the deal.

11. What hurdles could crop up and derail this project?

Too many potential potholes might not make the deal worth pursuing. For instance, there may be a change in staffing on the prospect’s end and the decision-maker could change during the course of the sale. It might be best to hold off on pursuing the lead until their team is ready to move forward.

12. What challenges do you think you'll come up against with the plan I've laid out? Do you think you'll struggle with Z or Y?

When is a prospect who has the requisite need, authority, and money to buy as well as the correct solution timeline not a good prospect? When they won't be able to execute the plan you've laid out. While some offerings require more elbow grease than others, every new product or service requires some effort on the prospect's part to get it up and running. And if the prospect is unwilling to put in the work, they're not going to get results. Find this out early so you're not dealing with an unhappy customer later.

13. What other solutions are you evaluating?

In some cases, an additional vendor is brought in after a prospect has already decided on another in the name of due diligence or to put price pressure on the incumbent provider. Listen carefully to the prospect's answer to assess whether their engagement with you isn't totally authentic.

14. What does success look like to you, both in terms of qualitative and quantitative results?

Whether a prospect becomes a happy customer or a detractor largely depends on their expectations. If their definition of success does not line up with what your offering can provide, it might be time to disqualify.

15. What does solving this problem mean to you personally? What do you stand to gain if the issue was solved? What do you stand to lose if it goes unresolved?

An internal champion can often be more effective at corralling the buying committee around a particular product or service than the salesperson herself. The more skin the prospect has in the game, the more likely they are to be a helpful advocate.

16. Based on what you've seen so far, do you think our offering could be a viable solution for your problem?

Peppering mini agreements or commitments throughout the buying process — even in the qualification call — can lay the groundwork for the ultimate agreement at the end.

17. When do you need a solution in place?

If there's a firm date the problem absolutely needs to be fixed by, the salesperson can then work backward to determine a signing date.

18. Do you agree that the next step is X by Y date? When would be a good time on or around that date to schedule a call or meeting?

This isn't so much a qualification question as a sales best practice. Every sales interaction should end with a next step tied to a date. If the buyer is truly committed to moving forward, they won't have any trouble agreeing to a second meeting or call. Interest: secured. Prospect: Qualified.

19. Do you currently have a solution in place? If so, why are you switching?

It's always good to know whether they have a solution in place already — and what they like/dislike about it. Not only is this helpful to your sales strategy, but it's great intelligence gathering on your competitors.

20. Is this a pain point for everyone on your team? Is there anyone who might serve as a barrier to this solution?

Find out who your potential roadblocks will be as soon as possible. Is the whole team on board? Is your prospect the only champion? These questions will help you build a roadmap to success and tell you how much support your champion will need to sell this solution internally.

21. Tell me about your average day and how this solution would impact that daily work.

This is a great ice-breaker. It's also a subtle way of finding out whether your prospect is a decision-maker, what level of responsibility and buying power they hold, and whether they've purchased a solution like yours before.

Sales lead qualification is a process that can be iterated and improved by just about every sales manager out there. Frameworks like BANT, FAINT, ANUM, and CHAMP are praised and criticized, but they all share some of these same underlying principles.

1. Awareness

The first step to qualifying a lead is to briefly assess how aware they are of your industry and product. If your company sells a niche product or is creating a new product category, this step will be critical as you determine whether the prospect will be a good fit as a customer.

Another reason you should ask the prospect how aware they are of what you sell is that they’ll need to itemize this expense in a category within their budget. If they aren’t familiar with what it is you offer, this could create roadblocks down the line when you ask about their budget for this type of expense.

2. Budget

All sales have an exchange of money, no matter what. The companies your leads work for are probably meticulous about budgets, as they should be, in order to run a successful organization. Early on, figure out how much of that budget is allocated to the team your prospect works on — and what percentage of that budget is dedicated to the category of products and services you offer.

3. Authority

Who exactly is making the final decision in this sale, and who are they influenced by within their organization? Keep in mind, the contact information on the lead form may not be the person making the final decision, so as you ask these qualifying questions, you may have to run through this checklist again when you meet with someone who has decision-making authority.

4. Need

It’s one thing for a single employee at a company to identify a need for what you sell, but if their team, and sometimes even the entire company, don’t find a need for your product or service, the deal may not be worth pursuing. Qualifying a lead based on need goes hand in hand with authority, so as you move further along in the sales process, continue to revisit these two criteria. You’ll want to check that:

• Everyone’s in alignment on what the team’s/company’s priorities are, and
• The problems your product or service solves are relevant to the work the prospect is directly responsible for.

5. Roadblocks

Any good sales rep will tell you a closed deal always follows a pain point. By identifying roadblocks your prospect experiences early on, you can position your solution as a reprieve to those roadblocks. Perhaps the prospect’s team has issues with bottlenecks, productivity, or adding value to the company's revenue generation goals. Intentionally identifying this issue upfront gives you a way to add value that will be relevant to them from the first conversation, forward. Find a realistic, truthful, and ethical angle where your product can save the day, then communicate it throughout the sales process.

6. Timeline

Accurate forecasting is a significant part of the role of a sales rep, so establishing a timeline during the lead qualification process is essential. Don’t mistake asking about a timeline as an invitation to negotiate moving the deal along faster than the lead is comfortable with. This criterion simply gives you an idea of when the deal could close. If you are closing out a quarter and want to get this deal through in time to hit your quota, you could lead this part of the conversation with a suggested timeline based on what you learn about the prospect’s situation. If they agree, it’s a win-win for both parties.

Fill Your Pipeline with Qualified Prospects

Qualifying questions are a crucial part of your sales process. They help you discern whether you can help your prospect and whether continuing is a smart use of both sides' time. Customize and carefully craft each set of qualifying questions you use. The results will be well worth the effort.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in May 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

How many times have you, as a buyer or observer, listened to sales reps lead with product capabilities, emphasizing the strength of their company and the greatness of their offering. Yes, it’s exhausting. And it’s really a turn off. It’s the type of meeting that results in a response like: “You’ve given us a lot to consider, thanks. We’ll be in touch once we’ve had time to think about it.”

We can do a lot better than that, and one of the keys is focusing on outcomes rather than products. Solution selling strategies have emphasized the need to lead with diagnosis—asking good questions that uncover buyer pain points and vision for the future. That approach is certainly not out of date. But too many questions can also frustrate buyers.

So we need balance in the discussion. We have to give buyers some return on investment—confidence they’re not wasting time—for all the great information they are providing. The answer is business outcomes.

Somewhere early in the discussion, sales reps need to clearly share the outcomes they bring their customers. After some open ended questions and uncovering basic needs, reps need to let buyers know this is going somewhere—that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

• Here’s an example: “It sounds like this is an area we can help you. We normally reduce the time it takes a marketing staff to execute quarterly document updates by 250% within 2 quarters. Sometimes as much as 400%.”

When you give buyers this kind of confirmation, they really open up. It gives them confidence they’re making a good time investment and provides you the information to fully diagnose and determine to what degree you can help. I’ve watched this work beautifully so many times I can’t even tell you.

A few points on delivering the outcome message.

Carefully prepare your outcome messages

Focus on the most important challenges you solve. You might have one key outcome message, or several depending on your solution or service. The simpler the better.

Use an X to Y by Z format for your outcome message

“On average, we reduce sales rep turnover by 16% within 1 year of program implementation.” This lays it out in clear, simple terms with no extra fluff. Buyers can quickly understand the message and apply it to their situation.

Jill Konrath does a great job discussing the importance of focusing on outcome messages in her book “Agile Selling.” She has some excellent sales resources on her site: www.agilesellingbook.com. The Value Proposition Tool Kit is all about crafting effective X to Y by Z messages.

Deliver the outcome message artfully

Make sure you deliver your outcome messages naturally. No blunt instruments please. Ask questions that will setup your delivery. After delivery, ask good follow up questions that refocus the discussion on the buyer’s situation.

Stay away from product pitching

After delivering the outcome message, don’t get lured into product talk. That will take you into the weeds, pricing discussions, and all that. Plenty of time for that later. Instead, refocus on the buyer’s situation, the pains they have and their vision.

A quick story to end…

We were looking to implement an inbound marketing strategy a few years ago. We were working with a great little company in Philadelphia that specializes in inbound marketing and marketing automation. We were going back and forth, discussing needs, where we were, and so on. I knew these guys were good and could help us, but they wanted us to sign up for a sizeable contract. Then, Eric, the head of sales said, “Pete, we can probably increase your organic visits from X (where we were) to Y by the end of this year.” Y was 650% greater than X.  It was the whole reason we were pursuing a solution. I was sold.

I’ve had several sales executives and CEOs tell me "My salespeople can’t close." I always wonder if they realize the problem may be that their reps can’t sell.

Prematurely asking for the business puts undue pressure on buyers. However, it's common practice because sellers have monthly, quarterly, and annual numbers they are responsible for.

But the best selling efforts can mean there is no need to close. If a seller covers all of the eight items listed below, and the buyer realizes there is a cost of delaying their decision, there are instances where they will volunteer to buy.

Before earning the right to close I believe decision makers should:

1. Know the price.
2. Be aware of the business outcome(s) they want to achieve.
3. Know why they can’t achieve outcomes without the offering.
4. Be able to articulate capabilities needed to achieve outcomes.
5. Know the full cost of buying and implementing offerings.
6. Be aware of the scope of implementation.
7. Know the cost vs. benefit.
8. Have a sense of how the offering compares to those of competitors' both in capability and price.

If all of these items have been covered, buying should be the logical last step of a sales cycle. 

Premature closes (when one or more items have not been addressed) can abruptly change buyer relationships as sellers go from consultative sales to high-pressure tactics. Even if successful, sellers often have to discount or make other concessions to incent buyers. The worst outcome is that sales are lost because buyers are offended by aggressive closing tactics.

In workshops I often ask students to tell me when they can be sure it’s time to close without pressuring buyers. This question causes the room to get quiet for several seconds. My answer is that it’s time to close when buyers have everything they need to make buying decisions -- the eight items listed above.

How to Set Up a Perfectly Timed Close

One of the best ways to orchestrate a perfectly timed close is to see if you can review a draft proposal with the decision maker or buying committee. Being granted this opportunity is a strong indicator that you’re likely to win the business. After the draft content has been reviewed, the salesperson should incorporate changes in the final proposal.

Once the changes are made, and the decision maker or committee confirms they're in line with their expectations, this actually is the first time a seller has earned the right to close. The seller can simply ask, "I can deliver the proposals next week, but since nothing will change, would you like to go forward with our recommendation today?"

In my mind, a buying cycle is much like a play. If the first two acts are awful, a fantastic ending won’t salvage the show. Unfortunately some sellers think they can close any order regardless of how poorly the selling effort has gone.

It may not happen often that a buyer volunteers to buy instead of being pushed by a salesperson to close. But when it does happen, it feels awfully good for both sides, and it reflects a well-executed buying cycle.

They say good things come in 3’s. It’s no different for social selling. The Power of 3 is an established formula that has been concocted deep in the sales laboratories. It will help you succeed in understanding, mastering and implementing social selling. Here is the recipe: The 3×3 Rule, The 3­Approach, and The 3 C’s.

The 3×3

The 3×3 is a rule that helps you manage your time when executing social selling activities and research in to your prospects. The rules states that you should have some context before attempting to reach out to someone. Use web and social media channels to find 3 pieces of contextual information in under 3 minutes. This will arm you with ammunition you can use to personalize you reach outs whether they be by email or phone. It will also give you the opportunity to quickly understand your buyer more than your competition and improve the ability to find common ground to ensure a good relationship in formed.

3­-Tier Approach

The 3­-Tier Approach involves finding the right people, at the right time, with the right messages. In order to do this one must take a holistic approach to social media and find all of the networks that potential buyers are using and must surround them socially. This is the right people. One must listen to these networks for signals or triggers that the buyer or buyer’s company may be looking to make a purchase now or in the near future. This is the right time. One must deliver specialized content to the buyer to help inch them towards purchasing your products through strategically sharing content and insights meant to lead the buyer. This is the right message.

The 3 C’s

Are you looking for the social selling recipe for success? Well here it is, the 3 Cs. The recipe for can be broken down into 1 part connecting, 1 part content, and 1 part context. If you follow this recipe, you social selling endeavors will pay huge dividends.

Connections

Ever heard of ABC? Well now it has changed: Always Be Connecting. Everyone involved in social selling should always be connecting in order to leverage the power of their contacts, coworkers, and colleagues. Since the modern buyer is digitally and socially connected, it’s never been more important to have contacts in place that can introduce you and give you credibility to your potential buyers. By connecting daily with people, you increase the likelihood of being able to get an introduction or to get exposure to buyers you never knew existed.

Content

Content is equally as important and is the backbone of showing your potential buyers that you are insightful and knowledgeable about the space and the topics that they are interested in. Sharing good content that your buyers want to read can make a direct impact on them by pointing to you as a trusted advisor and sources that can help them. By sharing content daily, you are also leaving a trail of content breadcrumbs that will lead potential buyers to you by finding your content and driving them to you. Since buyers are finding enough info online to have the buying process 70% before engaging a rep, you need to be the one to shape their decisions through sharing content that supports your products and initiatives.

Context

Context is what can give you the ammunition you need to have powerful conversations with buyers. LinkedIn provides serious context to someone professionally, but personal networks like Twitter give you context into the buyers personal life. This enables you to have a 360 degree viewer of each buyer and truly understand what makes them tick personally and professionally. This is what sets you up from the spray and pray traditional salespeople that are offering you their lunch. Utilize information you uncover online and work it into your traditional communications in order to personalize them and increase your success rates. With the availability of this information, there is no reason to ever do a cold call or send an email template again.

The Power of 3 is designed to make social selling practices repeatable and develop a consistent understanding across your sales team. These practices can be applied to both B2B and B2C settings.

You’ve crafted a beautiful website as awe-inspiring as a Michelangelo painting and as innovative as a NASA shuttle. If Steve Jobs were alive today, he’d weep at the perfection of the user experience and the flawlessness of the responsive design. In 100 years, history books will be titling this decade as the era of the greatest manufacturing website ever built—yours.

You’ve busted your back to improve your site, and now you’re raking in oodles of traffic. There’s just one problem: everyone is leaving.

For about as long as websites have existed, data analysts have been scratching their heads over bounce rates. Industry professionals have published hundreds of white papers, best practice guides and blog posts in an effort to help companies wrap their minds around bounce rates and keep prospective customers interested through better development and design.

But, when it comes to keeping users engaged with your website, it’s about more than just great usability and visual performance. If you’re not keeping potential leads hooked, maybe it’s time you address your manufacturing content strategy.

Why is Bounce Rate Important

Before we delve into how you can decrease your bounce rate, we need to make sure we’re on the same page as to why you should care in the first place.

Your website’s bounce rate indicates the number of viewers who visited to your website, but left before viewing any other pages. It’s the digital equivalent of walking into a store for one item, not liking the display by the front door, and leaving without looking at any other merchandise. In addition to indicating potential leads aren’t happy with your site, a high bounce rate can negatively impact your search engine ranking.

While you’re always going to have a bounce rate, it’s ideal to stay between 26 to 70 percent. While blog posts are generally going to err on the higher end of the spectrum, they should not be over 90 percent.

Tip 1: Ensure All Content Targets at Least One Persona

If you owned a company that sold rural farming equipment in the midwest, would you buy ad space in Time Square? Probably not. Why? Because most of the folks hanging out in the middle of a bustling Northeastern metropolis probably aren’t planning to purchase a harvesting tractor in Iowa.

Creating content without direction, and creating content for the wrong persona, is, quite frankly, a total waste of your resources. Each and every piece of content on your site, from the homepage messaging to the latest eBook, should target at least one of your personas. If you’re not making an effort to speak directly to the most influential people in the buying process, you’re just wasting words and driving away potential leads.

Remember, you have about 2.6 seconds to make an impression online. By addressing your personas immediately, you have a better chance of keeping their attention. The more value a user feels they’ll gain from your website, the more likely they are to engage.

Tip 2: Determine Your “Stickiest” Blog Content

For content to be effective, you need to properly research your market, identify the needs of your buyer personas and develop a compelling brand voice. But, even after all of this, some manufacturing brands still find their bounce rates a little lackluster. That’s because, despite a thorough understanding of their buyers, these brands are failing to publish content that resonates.

Defining your sticky content, or content that holds the attention of viewers for longer periods of time, is key to decreasing bounce rates. Take time to dive into your analytics and review the performance of each post. Which topics enjoyed the lowest individual bounce rate, highest CTA clicks and highest number of views?

Make note of which types of blog posts received the most engagement and make efforts to replicate those results. For example, you may find a recent blog post titled “3 Ways Plant Managers Can Increase Team Efficiency” received twice as many views and a 25 percent more CTA clicks as a blog post titled “Why We Have the Best Plant Automation Tools on the Market.” This may tell you your readers are more interested in best practice guides than promotional content.

Tip 3: Hold Up Your End of the Bargain

We’ve all seen those spammy click-bait blog post titles advertised on social media and news sites promising to teach you how to “Lose Your Belly Fat in 1 Week Using This Trick” or “Make 5 Million Dollars Working From Home.” If you’ve been unfortunate enough to click on one of these articles, you probably only made the mistake once.

There’s nothing quite as frustrating as landing on a piece of content hoping to gain something valuable only to be lead down a disappointing rabbit hole. If you’re not following through on the offer promised in your blog title or meta description, you’re not much better than a spam site hocking wrinkle-erasing snake oil.

In the manufacturing industry, your readers are industry professionals seeking a solution to a problem. Well-researched, well-written content that adequately addresses their concerns will inspire trust and ensure continued action.

“There are many causes of a high bounce rate,” says Mashable Associate Editor Elisha Hartwig, “but one of the main causes is not delivering upon the expectations of your users.”

Bonus Tip: Don’t Focus on Bounce Rate Alone

Your bounce rate is an important metric, but it’s not the sole measurement of website success, or the effectiveness of your marketing as a whole. Keep in mind bounce rate measures the number of people who leave your website after viewing only one page. This doesn’t account for people who take another action, such as making a phone call or emailing you outside your contact form.

The key takeaway today is to focus on providing valuable and targeted content, and using previous successes to drive future campaigns. As long as you’re staying within a healthy bounce rate range, and continually working to deliver high quality content, you’re well on your way to attracting and converting new leads.

You’ve probably heard about inbound marketing. You may have forayed into inbound for your ecommerce company –– optimizing for search terms, starting a blog or being active on social media. That’s great!

Below are steps to help you move inbound, while remaining on budget.

Assess Your Current Marketing Strategy

If you’re thinking about inbound, it’s likely that there are areas of your marketing strategy you can improve. Analyze your current marketing activities and highlight areas where you can reallocate your budget toward inbound efforts. See if there are legacy tactics you’ve been doing forever that aren’t as effective as they used to be.

For example, you’re spending on email programs, market research, marketing software, mobile, PPC, social media… and maybe even direct mail and printing. You could reallocate some of your PPC budget to go toward efforts to increase organic traffic. Or, redirect budget from your direct mail and printing efforts. This way you can move toward an inbound strategy while staying within your current budget.

Consider Your Ideal Customers

Inbound is all about reaching your ideal customer. Who are your ideal buyers? Is your marketing aligned to appeal to them wherever they are? If it isn’t, fix it! Make sure you’re on the right channels to reach your ideal buyer persona, and that you’re creating content that appeals to them. Your content should speak to the pain points that your products can fix. You want to ensure that your marketing efforts are directed in the right places, especially if you’re on a budget.

John Maxwell of John Maxwell Co. does this particularly well. His site offers executive coaching and training programs, and his blog is targeted specifically to the concerns of working professionals. The site also includes an obvious newsletter signup option so that Maxwell can speak to his customers on their time.

Take Your Current Activities Inbound

While you’re analyzing your current marketing strategy, think about ways you can adapt it to be more inbound and attract buyers to you. Think about the terms that they would be searching for to inform your SEO strategy. Use these terms on your website, your blog, in your content and on your social channels. Make sure you’re creating useful and informative content for your buyers, which they can actually find. This is the key to attracting your ideal customers.

Your current team probably divides up responsibility for different marketing channels or activities. By taking steps to make all of those activities more inbound, you’re influencing the overall strategy of your marketing toward inbound, without adding headcount or overloading a single individual’s responsibilities.

Subscription box service Goodebox does this particularly well. By maximizing for popular or trending beauty keywords and gather intel from their merchandising teams as to what products will be in their upcoming boxes, the team creates marketable content that speaks to the trends and to the actual service.

Branch Out

Don’t be afraid to branch outside of marketing when assembling your team of content creators. Do you have an account or customer service manager who has the answer to every question? They could be tapped as a resource. If they don’t want to write for you, you could interview them and blog about it. Or take them out to lunch and pick their brain about questions they’re constantly getting asked to inspire a longer content piece.

Lay Out a Content Strategy

Now that you’ve figured out who’s doing what and attracted prospective customers to your site, you need to give these prospective customers the opportunity to convert. Content provides an opportunity for ecommerce conversions that aren’t only concerned with checkout. Two lightweight ways to immediately provide pre-purchase conversion opportunities are by adding a subscribe button to your blog or giving potential customers the option to sign up for an email newsletter.

Not sure where to get started with content? As a starting point, repurpose some of your blog posts into a standalone ebook that you can put behind a form. If you aren’t blogging yet, write a couple of blog posts with the intention of bundling them into an ebook at the end. You likely already have the content in different forms, you just have to bundle or repurpose it appropriately. You can create recipe collections, buying guides or lookbooks. Once you’ve created this content, point to it with clear CTAs. You want your prospective buyers to be able to find the helpful content you’re producing.

Ecommerce store Isharya, for instance, is using lookbooks, color collections and other useful content to drive increased visitors to her site. Each content piece has a beautiful photo (making it easy to share on social) and a strong CTA that links back to the appropriate product page.

Help Prospective Customers Purchase

There are other ways to use content, too. Prospective customers are used to outbound marketing – they give up their email, only to be spammed constantly. In exchange for their email, prospective customers want something in return.

In ecommerce, it’s easy to give a discount code and call it day. But, a better way to encourage them to come back and purchase is by giving them content that they can actually use. Create helpful Youtube videos that show how to wear a look, give them a behind-the-scenes explanation as to how you source your products. Allow customers to get a feel for your personality. After all, customers don’t just buy based on price. They buy based on who they like, too.

Check out Stacy, founder and owner of Scrapbooking Made Simple. She regularly posts Youtube videos, many upward of 45 minutes long! And yes, she has viewers that follow her all the way through –– nearly 10,000 of them. For her, customers don’t just buy on price. They buy on personality.

…And Help Existing Customers Purchase More

And, once they’re customers, you can upsell them and nurture them into reordering – increasing their lifetime value (LTV) via a combination of personalization, email and marketing automation.

We’ve all had it happen to us – you buy a camera and then all of the sudden you’re getting emails about camera cases you might be interested in. Provide your customers with helpful and relevant upsell opportunities, and they’re more likely to take the bait. Alternatively, if your product expires or is consumable, send customers a friendly notification when they might be running low to encourage them to reorder.

Analyze, Analyze, Analyze

Now that you’ve done the work of moving your marketing inbound, take the time to analyze your efforts. What’s working? What isn’t? Maybe you thought your prospective buyers were on Twitter, but it turns out there are more of them on Facebook. Or maybe you thought your lookbook would be a huge hit, but your prospective buyers are only interested in your product guide. By analyzing the impact of your efforts, you can put your resources into the ones that are working, and take them out of the ones that aren’t – allowing you to make the most of your budget.

This post is part of a series of Executive Interviews of top sales and marketing solutions company executives. We ask the same questions of every executive so readers can learn about their unique positioning  and their vision for the industry. 

This week I interview K.V. Rao, CEO of Aviso.

Nancy: What does Aviso do? What problem/s are you solving for sales and/or marketing organizations?

K.V.: Aviso provides the leading predictive insights software designed to help sales teams optimize their performance and exceed their revenue goals.

The weekly sales forecasting  process is the heartbeat of a sales teams’ activities, and intended to be a roadmap for the selling period. Today, this vital business process is plagued by archaic tools, namely spreadsheets or simplistic and inflexible bolt-ons in CRM applications.

It currently takes legions of spreadsheets and armies of analysts in sales operations to roll up a sales forecast which ends up being immediately out of date.  These static sales forecasts are unable to provide true insights into the business. The net result is that enormous time is spent scrubbing the pipeline and rolling up a forecast, leaving sales managers less time for selling and making their number.  Sales teams end up relying on gut, intuition, and emotion to make critical decisions around deal prioritization, resource allocation, and pricing/discounting.  As a result many executives realize too late that they will miss their number!

Nancy: How does your solution uniquely address the problem (or in what way do other solutions fall short from solving the problem)?

K.V.:  Aviso makes sales forecasting easy, by automating the process with a secure and always up-to-date cloud application which produces a trusted roadmap for sales performance.

Our flagship product, Aviso Insights, delivers powerful business analytics that help sales people prioritize deals, deploy resources, get early warning indicators, thereby driving revenue growth for any enterprise. Aviso Insights is integrated very tightly with leading CRM applications and fits seamlessly into existing sales workflows.

Using a unique combination of machine learning algorithms and portfolio management techniques, Aviso discerns patterns from historical data and from market signals, and translates these to insights that help sales teams exceed their revenue goals.

Nancy: What’s the most important thing that today’s business decision-makers should look for (or ask, or consider, or solve)?

K.V.: Business leaders are inundated with information, including a plethora of reports and dashboards that claim to automate decision making.  Often these reports and dashboards are simply pretty charts of historical data which provide very little insight about what will happen.  What business decision-makers need is an effective decision-support system that empowers them to leverage their experience and judgment to make the best possible decision, given all the available information.  Aviso empowers business leaders to trust their judgment and experience while taking into account the risks and tradeoffs, and enables them to make decisions with confidence to consistently hit or exceed their revenue goals.

Nancy: What are you most excited about for the next 12 months?

K.V.: For the last two and half years we have been building the Aviso Insights Platform, working closely with a dozen companies, of which more than half are publicly traded. It has been gratifying to see how delighted our customers are with our product. Sales Managers and Sales Ops are quickly abandoning their archaic forecasting tools and vigorously adopting Aviso Insights. While we continue to build out our capabilities, we look forward to sharing this experience with a much broader audience and bringing these powerful capabilities to 100’s of companies seeking to grow their revenues efficiently.

Nancy: What do you think is the biggest underlying theme or trend for sellers and/or marketers in the next 12 months?

K.V.: Sellers/marketers have access to a lot of information, and they know they need to be smarter leveraging that information. The customer/revenue lifecycle spans marketing, sales, and customer success.  The barriers between these different functions are breaking down organizationally as well as from an information systems perspective.

With the right tools that can provide an integrated view of the customer account, including both leads and opportunities, marketing and sales can be much more efficient in targeting their efforts to maximize the value of their pipeline. Incentive compensation and territory assignment plans are becoming more sophisticated to take into account this longer term view of the account.

Nancy: What would you challenge sellers and/or marketers to think about for the near term? 

K.V.: Sellers/Marketers always have a tough job ahead of them, and the explosion of data and rapid pace of change has made their work harder.  In order to succeed, they need to develop the confidence to execute on that job:  confidence in their own experience/judgment while taking into account the myriad signals from the markets and from their past performance. Just as they have a personal financial portfolio they manage for risk and reward, they need to think about their sales/marketing pipeline like a financial portfolio and manage/optimize appropriately for risk/reward.

It requires a bit of a mind shift to think of risks in their sales pipeline, when a typical sales rep is accustomed to thinking about risk in making her incentive compensation. If she can manage risk in her pipeline with the proper combination of judgment and predictive insights, she will be successful in achieving and exceeding her targets.

note: to learn more about Aviso go to www.Aviso.com and view a video on how RingCentral benefits from Aviso.

For the past 18 years, FORTUNE’s Most Admired Companies issue has been the high school yearbook superlatives section for the global business world. But the list is more than just a popularity contest. Companies that score top marks are often also the most profitable.

So how does admiration translate directly into success?

Research fielded by the FORTUNE Knowledge Group, in collaboration with gyro, lends insight about the nature of this relationship.

One of the most striking trends identified by “Only Human: The Emotional Logic of Business Decisions” is that decision-makers have a strong preference for partners who demonstrate a commitment to values. Case in point: A full 71 percent of the 720 executives surveyed said their feelings about a company’s reputation, culture and demonstrated character motivate them to work with that organization, even if it means sacrificing immediate bottom-line gain.

This powerful desire for trust and long-term partnership is one of the strongest reasons why companies on the Most Admired list are often also highly successful. In fact, those who rose in rank or joined the list for the first time in 2015 often stand out for their choice to risk profit in order to stand by their convictions – mirroring the behavior attested by the executives in the survey.

Perhaps the most striking example from 2014 is how a risk can pay off. For example, #45 CVS pulled a Don Draper when it stopped selling cigarettes in all 8,000 of its stores nationwide, despite a projected $2 billion in lost sales. Leadership stood by the decision, even as front-of-store retail declined 4.5 percent in the quarter after the ban went into effect (and same-store sales were affected by 480 basis points).

But the determined convictions of CVS succeeded in attracting strong loyalty and powerful advocates. The end of tobacco sales improved CVS’s ability to attract employers to its pharmacy networks (expanding its footprint) and its prescription management business. CEO Larry Merlo earned himself a spot next to First Lady Michelle Obama at the 2015 State of the Union address. These new partnerships ended up paying off in sales, too. In fact, instead of posting a loss in Q4 of 2014 – the first full quarter without tobacco sales – CVS’s revenues increased by 12.9 percent to a record $37.1 billion.

Not all values and convictions are equally important to decision-makers. One of the most important is a company’s commitment to its own workers. Fifty-two percent ranked “a strong culture committed to shared goals” as one of the most important factors influencing their choice of partner, and 50 percent cited respect for employees demonstrated by management.

Costco, #16 on the list, has famously embodied these values for years. With paying a starting wage of $11.50/hour and an average $21/hour wage for all hourly workers, the company has repeatedly affirmed its belief in providing not only a living wage but also health coverage to its employees. In 2014, while major competitors, ranging from Walmart to Trader Joe’s, cut benefits for those working less than 35 hours a week, Costco has remained committed to providing healthcare coverage for those working 23 hours or more. In fact, a full 88 percent of its employees are covered.

Costco CEO Craig Jelinek, himself a 30-year veteran who started as a warehouse manager, set his company’s convictions in ink, when he penned a letter to Congress last February requesting that the federal minimum wage be raised to above $10/hour. His philosophy, “Before you ever open up your doors, you have to start with your employees,” has paid off in profits and operational efficiency. Among those employed for more than a year, the company has only 5 percent turnover – a figure that’s even smaller among the executive ranks. The results are there: While 2014 saw Walmart’s sales flatten, Costco’s grew by 6 percent.

Fortune’s list of Most Admired Companies is full of stories like Costco’s – Chipotle, Toyota, Nestlé, and Johnson & Johnson all took risky gambles this year in order to stand by their values. In today’s world, more than ever, those choices – and the reputation they ultimately convey – matter increasingly more to decision-makers and potential business partners around the world. As senior editor at large Geoff Colvin of FORTUNE puts it, “The days where corporations could sort of just operate in the background without getting much notice are long gone.”

Fortune’s full list can be accessed here. The “Only Human” research study can be found here.

Building a healthy, targeted, robust email list is one marketing practice that will help your business drive long-term revenue. With a solid list, keeping in touch with your existing customers to boost your referral and repeat business becomes easy. But why stop there? Continually adding to your list is going to drive even more new business for you over time.

The formula is quite simple:

Build an epic email list + send incredible content = Trust, retention, referrals, and business growth

Starting your email list isn’t difficult. While it can be tough to build a crazy-successful email list filled with the right prospects, it’s very doable once you know how to make your existing website and social networks work for you.

That’s why I’ve put together this collection of tricks, tips, hacks and secrets to help you do just that.

Secret 1: Homepage Capture Form

Most likely, your business website’s homepage gets the most page views. With high traffic concentrated on a specific page, it’s your job to maximize this opportunity, and you can you do it with a homepage email capture form.

By limiting sidebars, and avoiding long scrolling and text-heavy distractions, you can increase your form conversions. Treat your homepage like a lead capture form and experiment with incentivized calls-to-action that provide immediate value. Check out Expensify, Social Media Examiner, and OutboundEngine for some good examples.

Extra tips:

• Make sure your form provides some value in return and doesn’t take away from someone’s ability to navigate the rest of your site.
• Maximize the visibility of this space to really grow your email list.

Secret 2: SumoMe and Instant Gratification

SumoMe is one of the more clever tools I’ve come across lately. It’s a collection of WordPress plugins that are easily installed and designed for people with very little, if any, website coding knowledge.

By using the SumoMe Leads App, you can add a button to your blog or website to incentivize someone to take action. I use this plugin to add a PDF download button for bonus content. Check out this blog post on OutboundEngine for an example of what it looks like.

You can also edit the colors, text, message, actions and images. I like to keep mine simple and clean. The email addresses you collect are stored within the app or are directly connected to a supported email service.

Secret 3: Export Email Addresses from LinkedIn

If you’re an avid LinkedIn user or even moderately active, your connections there are a goldmine of email addresses for your database. Even if you have these contacts in your database already, it’s always a good idea to export updated information. People can often change companies, and, therefore, email addresses.

LinkedIn has made it easy to export emails into your database, too. They’ve documented the whole process here. If you connect with people you’ve met in groups or other professionals you’ve met offline, this tip is a great way to make sure they get added to your email list.

Secret 4: Incentivized Popups Using OptinMonster

Mentioning popups and popovers is usually met with skepticism, groans and eye rolls, but they can be effective. The key is offering something worthwhile to the person you just interrupted.

OptinMonster is a WordPress plugin that’s easy to install and configure, and connects to most email tools. It can also be customized to fit your needs.

I’ve got the plugin configured to show up to readers only after a certain time frame and set so that a visitor will see it only every few weeks or so. The time frame qualifies them as interested in the content, and chances are there might be more content that will grab your attention in the future. Offering our readers an opportunity to receive an email update for new posts is a low-commitment barrier and it works.

Secret 5: Quizzes and Surveys

Quizzes are a hot marketing strategy right now. They are huge traffic drivers because people are naturally inclined to share and compare with friends or colleagues and they fuel our identities and egos.

I’ve been experimenting with a tool called CredSpark to see how I can translate this experience into something more relevant than “Which Disney Princess Are You?” Last year, I created a quiz for real estate agents.

Like all good quizzes, you get to see the answers at the end, but I did mine with a little twist. I gave quiz takers an email address opt-in form so they could get the full report to see how they stack up against others in the industry.

In conclusion, when building your email list make sure that you’re giving your audience a genuine incentive. Don’t snag someone’s email address and then spam them with sales pitches. That’s just bad content marketing.

Do you have any other email list building secrets? Share them in the comments.

Driving ROI through the partner channel is no easy feat. It requires the regular successful execution of partner initiatives, which can present significant challenges. Traditionally, these initiatives have required a lengthy process that includes partner proposals, vendor approval and months dedicated to program development and execution, often with very little hard data or ROI captured to show results. There are a few key obstacles that suppliers often encounter when undertaking partner channel initiatives. One is that the traditional approach of “ingredient mixing” in partner marketing (utilizing print, email, ads and other avenues) doesn’t work. In fact, the average adoption for marketing bottoms out at 15-20 percent. Partners’ bandwidth is another key issue contributing to poor adoption, as resellers often balance six to seven vendor relationships at once and cannot keep up with the various initiatives across these relationships. All this adds up to frustration for vendors and partners alike and indicates that we need a new strategy for improving ROI in the channel.

Let’s take a step back to examine what “best in class” partner programs have in common. Most start with strong partner and field data and most include marketing training that increases both participation and execution capability. Many of the strongest programs also employ concierge-like services and utilize pre-programmed plays with fewer events that are more outcome based. Lastly, best in class partner programs tend to be predictable and measurable.

Here are four steps marketers should follow to better align themselves with these best practices, drive higher adoption and improve ROI throughout the channel.

Partner Data Collection

Build partner profiles through data collection. Start by collecting profile data from partners and field input that can help you determine what type of activity will drive leads in the target markets. For example, use through-partner marketing automation to collect data from all levels of the partner marketing funnels. By doing this, you can see where the partners stack up among the community. This will also show you what type of sales and marketing tools and campaigns they currently leverage, telling you what works and what doesn’t. This data will help measure a level or two away from sales and will help you see where you need to start to push your partner program in the right direction.

Channel Marketing Enablement

Getting partners to adopt new content, tools and programs requires a concerted effort to engage them. Remember, in the enablement phase, it’s important to lead partners to the specific activities you want them to execute and make it as easy for them as possible. For example, think of your partner program like a restaurant. Never make any partner cook their own meal, or in this case, build their own marketing campaign. The more work it takes partners, the less effective your campaign will be. Make sure that the “marketing plays” are all aligned and determine in advance where and how to use them. Doing so will result in happier partners and better results.

Demand Creation Through Partners

In the demand creation phase, remember your steps from the enablement phase. Keep marketing plays as easy or automated as possible. Consider connecting all of your marketing plays together with Through-Partner Marketing Automation. For example, ensure your partner’s social updates are connected with the campaign’s content on the partner websites. This is the same with emails and promotions. Also, don’t forget the bottom of your partner marketing funnel. That means your indirect sales reps need help as well. Distribute up-to-date content and tools to help them close deals faster and more efficiency in the field.

Performance Measurement in the Channel

Knowing the health of your partner community is a complex equation for most organizations. Logically, most people stare at the bottom line. As any channel pro knows, there are many layers in the funnel that can influence a channel’s bottom line. That’s why it’s important to look at the entire funnel. Only then will you be able to understand and influence each stage to net the best possible result. For example, leverage tools that help you see traffic behavior on your partner websites. That will show you how effective your content is. Also consider measuring enablement and brand control. This will help you make sure your partners are up-to-date and correctly presenting your products. At that point, start understanding how leads are generated. What quality of leads are you helping generate currently? And lastly, what are you doing to help your partner sales reps convert sales into customers? The other overarching item that should be measured is work. How much work are you requiring from your partner? The smaller the amount of work and the more automation, the more partners will participate and succeed.

Key Takeaways for Partner Communities

Driving revenue in the channel is a challenge. It means the successful execution of partner initiatives, which requires a concerted effort to engage partners and then lead them to the specific activities you want executed. Getting this process started can be daunting. It’s good to begin by piloting a fast-track process with a small number of partners, employing each of the steps and measuring performance results. Then scale the process out to a larger number of partners, ensuring you are delivering an end-to-end, streamlined process. I guarantee that you will not go back to the traditional way of executing partner programs.

Check out this helpful E-book, “The Channel Marketer’s Guide to Demand Generation” for more details on how companies can measure ROI in the Channel Marketing funnel.

Over the next 12 months, 55% of B2B marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget, a sure-fire sign that more marketers are seeing content marketing as a legitimate strategy rather than just a trend.

Unfortunately, as there is so much hype around the “right” and “wrong” ways to practice content marketing, some brands will end up wasting their money and time on unnecessary activities. If your content marketing budget is increasing (or even if it isn’t), steer clear of these eight ways businesses waste their resources on content marketing:

1. Pitching management on the wrong concepts

Content marketing is becoming a widely accepted element of marketing plans among many businesses. But to some high-level managers and executives, it’s still just a buzzword – often associated with household name brands.

As a result of this misconception, pitching higher-ups on content marketing and social media may not get you far. However, although those in management may not understand the latest and greatest in marketing, they do understand helping your audience, especially when it leads to your audience spending money with your brand.

How your resources could be better used: Rather than concentrating your pitch on the ever-elusive concept of content marketing, emphasize the notion on which content marketing was built – helping, teaching, and entertaining your customers. This small change in positioning can be the difference between getting funding for your content marketing initiative or not.

2. Living and dying by a full-on content marketing strategy

The first step in the content marketing process is usually creating a strategy: Outline how you will achieve business goals and objectives, define roles and responsibilities, timelines, measurement metrics, etc. (You can download CMI’s guide on how to document your content marketing strategy.) However, a strategy is only useful if you actually use it.

How your resources could be better used: Regrettably, many businesses spend resources on building a well-documented strategy – never to reference it again. CMI research shows that not only do you need to document your strategy, but you also need to use it. However, you can achieve content marketing success without a complete “60-page” strategy. Content calendars, templates, checklists, and even a one-page strategy can go a long way – especially when piloting a new program.

3. Succumbing to content shock

Content shock is the theory that while the content supply on the Internet is growing exponentially, content demand is flat. Of course, as content marketing becomes more mainstream, more and more content is being produced and published. Some businesses waste their time hand-wringing and debating the value of content marketing and inevitably get lazy and complacent, resulting in poorly crafted content being promoted and distributed across the web.

How your resources could be better used: Get beyond the content shock. Instead of worrying about the potential burst of the content bubble, focus your efforts on creating high-quality content that is useful to your audience. Content has been around since the days of the caveman. The best content always rises to the top.

4. Being overwhelmed by storytelling

Yes, being a great storyteller can have advantages when it comes to content creation, but it certainly isn’t necessary for every piece of content. Often people get so caught up in the storytelling aspect of content marketing that they forget about the task at hand: Create content that is truly useful to your audience.

How your resources could be better used: Your content doesn’t need to win the Pulitzer Prize, but it does need to address audience pain points, fill content gaps, and educate.

5. Excluding departments and teams

Creating content personalized to audience pain points is arguably the most important part of any content marketing strategy. But to do that, you need to know exactly what your audience’s pain points are. What better way to find out what your audience cares about than to ask your employees who spend the most time with customers?

How your resources could be better used: Some marketers may not see the value in involving other departments and teams in the content marketing process, but salespeople and customer service representatives can be extremely valuable resources. As they spend so much time speaking with clients and customers, they know the most common customer complaints, problems, and frustrations. This insight can be used to brainstorm, plan, and create content.

6. Publishing only “perfect” content

It’s understandable to spend time double-checking content for typos and errors before hitting “publish” (you can view this publication checklist from Heidi Cohen). But letting small, insignificant details hold up the publishing process can sometimes do more harm than good. Yes, creating high-quality, compelling content is necessary, but it doesn’t need to be perfect.

How your resources could be better used: The truth is: Sharing a short video or social media post that’s useful is much more efficient than spending time working on a long-winded blog post that’s “perfect,” but not as impactful. Put more time into providing the best, most relevant, and helpful information to your audience in a consumable way, rather than striving for perfection every time. Remember, content waiting for approvals isn’t working for you, it’s just collecting dust.

7. Trying to measure everything

Though concentrating only on certain metrics can be limiting at first, measuring everything can be costly as well. Many businesses get in the weeds trying to measure too much, spending long hours analyzing social media metrics like retweets, shares, and brand awareness, yet not understanding what the data means or if it’s even useful.

How your resources could be better used: What information is really necessary to measure your ROI? I suggest clients spend the majority of their time measuring traffic, leads, and sales, which I consider to be the most important metrics for calculating return. Once you understand the most important metrics and their impact on ROI, only then consider taking a deep dive into additional analytics.

8. Caring only about conversions

With analytics in hand, too many businesses see value only in the direct ROI metrics – conversions, sales, and leads. Engagement metrics also can be quite telling. As social networks can drive traffic, increase your reach, and help to build relationships with your audience, some engagement metrics can illustrate where your audience hangs out online and what type of content is most popular.

How your resources could be better used: Consider referral traffic. What sites are driving the most traffic to your content pages? That is where you should focus your promotions. Also, look at the time on page to see where users are investing their time, as that content resonates most with your audience. Though engagement metrics can’t always directly correlate to your bottom line, they can help you measure success in more qualitative ways.

In summary, content marketing can be an expensive endeavor, but it doesn’t have to be. There are many ways businesses can stretch budgets and resources while still achieving success. Getting engrossed in developing a full-fledged strategy, speculating on content shock, and measuring every metric under the sun can cost you more than time and money – it can cost you your sanity. Focus on what content marketing is all about – helping your customers – and you will see results.

What other mistakes can cost businesses time and money with content marketing? Share your thoughts in the comment section.

Want to get more out of your resources? Sign up today to receive the Content Marketing Institute’s daily email with tips and insights, and receive exclusive content from CMI Founder Joe Pulizzi to improve your content marketing efforts.

Cover image by Viktor Hanacek, picjumbo, via pixabay.com

The post 8 Ways You Waste Precious Resources on Your Content Marketing  appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Are you generating leads with modern, inbound marketing but trying to sell to them with traditional sales tactics? Here’s how to align the methods.

Ah, the good old days. Back when it was a seller’s world. Remember when the buyer had to come to the seller to research their purchase?

What made it so great? Information. The buyer had it and the seller wanted it. And each time the buyer need more information the seller could exact another pound of flesh and exert influence over the seller. Buyers hated it.

But now, with nearly unlimited information on the Internet, the buyer can avoid the seller until much later in the process… after the buyer is armed with all the information they need. It’s as if the buyer has a magical salesperson shield that protects them while vanquishing their sales nemesis.

How the mighty have fallen.

Buyers are now about 60% through their research before they FIRST contact the seller, according to a study by Corporate Executive Board. Most other studies indicate that percentage is higher.

Buyers have become like Ninjas. The sneak around, doing their buying research without the seller even knowing about them. And then, BAM! They pounce on the seller, a fully armed and educated buyer ready to talk about the only thing left to discuss – price.

Of course, this new, helpful approach is not just affecting sales. It’s affecting marketing as well. Rather than interrupting prospects with unwanted, irritating outbound messages that can be increasingly tuned out, marketers are turning to inbound marketing.

To deal with this fundamental change in buyer behavior, successful sales organizations are revising their approach. Admitting defeat in the longstanding buyer-seller war, sellers have resorted to the only successful tactic remaining. Being helpful.

Sellers are transforming the way they are selling to this new, well-informed buyer. Would you like to make that successful transition?

Here are the four keys to successfully align your sales approach with inbound marketing.

1. Targeting

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of the person who influences a purchase. One of the tenets of inbound marketing is identifying the buyer persona and having a deep understanding of them.

Some of the most important things to know about a buyer persona include what triggers a buyer’s search for a solution (like yours), what would make the buyer successful (in the buyer’s mind), what their barriers to buying from you might be, what buying steps they tend to go through and what their decision criteria usually are.

The use of buyer personas is not limited just to marketing, however. With successful sales resulting from inbound marketing, the sales people have just as keen an understanding of whom to influence during a sale.

Knowing this helps sellers not only better understand and empathize with the buyer, it also helps salespeople avoid targeting prospects who are not a good fit.

Successful targeting does not stop with just knowing who the ideal buyer is. It also involves understanding where their buyers are in their journey. Is the buyer in the awareness stage still trying to determine what their problem is? Or have they given a name to their problem and are investigating solutions? Or are they ready to make a buying decision?

Answers to these questions also help the inbound seller to determine which prospects should be more quickly targeted. Understanding the buyer persona helps the salesperson more quickly determine where a buyer is in terms of “fit” and “interest.”

If there is a fit and interest, sales needs to follow up quickly. If there is a fit but low interest, Marketing needs to nurture the lead – and not send it to sales just yet.

By focusing on the buyer persona, the salesperson is able to more efficiently invest their time and resources on the right people at the right times.

2. Prospecting

So you’ve captured an inbound lead and you’ve determined that outreach to the prospect makes sense. Don’t pick up the phone just yet.

Research the prospect thoroughly to get as much context as possible. One of the ironies of this era is that while it’s never been more difficult to connect with prospects initially, it’s never been easier to find out about them.

Start with company information. Look for things like company size, revenue, what they sell, who they sell to, the operational role of your lead, what other decision makers might be involved, etc. By having this information, you’ll be able to give the prospect a more relevant and personal experience.

Read up on their industry. Understand their business from a news perspective. Find out if they have new funding, are hiring, expanding their territory, have upcoming events, etc. Look on

Use social media. The benefits of social selling are compelling. Social selling expert Jim Keenan reports 72.6 percent of people using social media as part of the sales process outperform their peers and exceed quota 23 percent more often.

Check LinkedIn to read your lead’s profile, see if you have any shared contacts or groups. Check other social media platforms (like Twitter and Quora) to see if they are actively talking with other companies or researching other leads.

Check the lead’s digital body language. Take a look at the lead’s engagement with your company. See what they have downloaded from your site, what pages they have looked at, which emails they are reading and what seems to be resonating with them overall. Are they reading industry information on your site or looking at pricing information?

Still, with all that information, the most important thing to do before picking up the phone to call the prospect is determine the goal of the call.

3. Connecting

When you do connect with a prospect, don’t go for the kill right away.

Instead, focus on building rapport. Establish commonality based on the research you’ve done.

Did your research indicate that they have outside interests? (My LinkedIn profile lists these interests and I’ve never heard any of them mentioned in a voice message from a sales person.)
Perhaps they are in a part of the country you’ve visited, or they went to a school or worked for a company you know something about.

Building rapport is important because people don’t remember the sales process, they remember the experience.

Know your audience. Are you speaking with the decision maker, an influencer or perhaps the researcher (most likely). Tailor the conversation accordingly so that it will resonate with them.

Speak their language. Weave in industry terms and company names that will enable you to establish credibility.

Most important, however – be helpful. Have a tip, educational offer or other content to give to the prospect to let them know you understand their pain and how you can help. The prospect should walk away from the encounter having learned something from you no matter the outcome.

4. Evolving

Companies that are using inbound marketing to generate leads are changing the perception of salespeople. For the better.

Successful inbound sales people are more sales educator than sales bully. They are becoming the ultimate listening machines who truly understand their prospect’s pain and challenges.

They are master diagnosticians. Like your doctor. They ask the right questions. They are trusted advisors who are liked and trusted and provide a relevant, personal experience for their prospect, regardless of the outcome.

Conclusion

The way people buy has changed. Dramatically. Sellers no longer have an asymmetrical information advantage over buyers. And that has had repercussions in not just how best to market to people, but also in how to sell to them. Successful sellers are now empathetic, trusted advisors with keen keen listening and teaching abilities.

photo credit: P7147915 Sacramento 20130714 via photopin (license)

other graphics: HubSpot

Social media automation, when done with care and the right strategy, is awesome. It can amplify your great content while freeing up your time to create more of it!

We’ve talked before on the blog about automating some processes through services like If This Then That and Alfred, and in this post I wanted to share some of our favorite uses of another fantastic automation tool: Zapier.

Zapier integrates with more than 400 different web apps, which means most marketers are bound to be able to find at least a few ways to use it to work smarter, not harder. (See all of them and find tips on getting started at their Zapbook.)

First: How Zapier works

In a nutshell, Zapier lets you create connections to push data from one app to another using triggers and actions. They call each connection, made up of a single trigger and a single action, a “Zap.”

To set up an integration, you follow these steps:

• Define a trigger: The first event that instigates another action. The trigger might be something like “A New Email in Gmail” or “A New Payment in PayPal.”
• Define an action: An action is what happens after the trigger. It might be something like “Create a Contact in Highrise” or “Send an email to the accounting department.”
• Check to make sure your Zap works and then you’re all set. Zapier will monitor for the trigger and complete the actions associated.
• Repeat for more tasks! You can make up to 5 Zaps for free, and Zapier has paid plans that offer lots more functionality.

Let’s take a look at some ways to use Zapier for marketing and for supercharging your Buffer account. I’ll also show you how we use Zapier at Buffer to streamline our communication as a team.

Ways to use Zapier for social media marketing

With so many tools available to work with, the ways to use Zapier for marketing and social media are really limited only by one’s imagination and tool set. I scoured the web to find some of the most useful and unique Zaps out there; maybe this will trigger some ideas for you.

Click on any photo to dive deeper into learning about the topic or setting up that Zap!

Share new content automatically

First thing first: Sharing your new content everywhere! You can create Zaps to send posts via RSS to many of your favorite social media sites, or into your Buffer queue.

Build your email list

Integrating with Mailchimp, AWeber, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor and more, Zapier could be super helpful for building and maintaining your email list.

Use Wufoo forms to collect email addresses? Set up a Zap to add them directly into your AWeber account. Have GoToWebinar sign ups entered into MailChimp. Create a new Salesforce lead every time someone fills out a form on your website.

Zapier has collected a ton of interesting email list building Zaps that you can check out here.

Promote events on the perfect schedule

Create a new event in your calendar, or in a meeting app like Meetup, Eventbrite or GoToWebinar, and Zapier will share your events on your social networks. You can even have Zapier delay the post to make sure it’s seen by the most people possible.

Later, you can share event reminders, too:

Create and nurture leads following events

This Hubspot post provides a number of ways its customer can maximize their efforts with Zapier, including the idea of simplifying lead collection at events like tradeshows and conferences through a Zap focusing on Eventbrite.

Just choose “New attendee in Eventbrite” as your trigger, and “add or update a contact in HubSpot” as your action. As users register for events, they’ll get a contact record in HubSpot that you can use to trigger emails, workflows, build lists, and more.

Monitor a Twitter community or list

If you’ve got a Twitter community or list that you want to keep an extra special eye on, Zapier has a few Zaps that can provide a big assist:

Build a list of people who share your content

Wondering who you biggest advocates and influencers are? Uberflip’s François Mathieu wrote a great post of 9 marketing automations hacks powered by Zapier. This one was super interesting: He suggests feeding Twitter into Google Docs to build a list of every tweet that matches your blog domain. You’ll end up with a spreadsheet of useful data, including the people who tweet your content.

You can also use Zapier’s Twitter search integration to find specific keywords such as like, love, and awesome when mentioning your brand name, or create this spreadsheet for mentions of a particular keyword or group of keywords instead of your blog domain.

Get notified of Reddit mentions

I’ve found Reddit a bit challenging to monitor in the past, so I’ve just turned on one of these Zaps for Buffer. These recipes allow you to automatically search Reddit for mentions of specific topics and then gather those mentions wherever you’d like to read them.

Personalize your webinars with Unbounce and GoToWebinar

A very cool example from KISSmetrics follows their well thought-out webinar path that increased signup rate by 1,000 percent.

KISSmetrics uses GoToWebinar for their events, but uses an Unbounce landing page for signups, in order to have more control over the look and feel and run A/B tests to increase conversions. Zapier connects the two services.

Send content ideas from Feedly to your team

Danny Schreiber of Zapier shares lots of cool ideas to work with Feedly through Zapier in this post. I particularly liked the idea of using a Zap to share ideas that occur while reading through your Feedly sources.

There are lots of ways to do this, depending on how you like to share ideas with your team:

Get push notifications for things you want

Push notifications are a really helpful way to get real-time alerts for the activities that matter to you. With Zapier, you can create push notifications for activities like new support tickets, new calendar events, new YouTube videos, and lots more. Here are some neat ideas for Twitter specifically:

Get SMS alerts for crucial activities

Prefer to get notified via your phone? Set up Zapier with Twilio or use Zapier’s own special phone number to quickly set up notifications for anything you want to be alerted about. (You can also create email alerts in a similar way.)

Sync Linkedin connections with Gmail contacts

Another great list of Zapier uses comes from Jessica Malnik at SheOwnsIt. She notes that it can be a challenge to have to sift through your email contacts plus all your Linkedin ones separately and suggests using Zapier to sync them like so:

Share posts to your preferred real-time “chat” communication tool

If you use a tool like WordPress or Tumblr to share content or even internal information, Zapier can share posts those to chat tools like Slack, Hipchat and Yammer.

Create a Mailchimp autoresponder

This one comes from Brad Knutson and is an interesting workaround if you want to add a bit more customization and individuality to your email autoresponder. He provides a whole tutorial on this process here.

For even more social media and marketing Zaps, check out Zapier’s great resource, 101 Smart Ways to Use Social Media Automation for Sales and Marketing.

Ways to use Zapier to supercharge your Buffer account

If you’ve got a Buffer account (grab one here if you like!), there is plenty of potential to use Zapier to make your account work even harder and connect with tons of handy tools that might also be part of your workflow.

(One note about how Buffer works with Zapier: We like to give you as much control as possible at Buffer, so when you choose to connect any of these networks to your Buffer queue, you’ll be able to select which queue in specific: whether it’s Facebook, Twitter LinkedIn or Google+.)

Social media automation to Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and more

With Buffer, you can share, queue and schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. With Buffer plus Zapier, there are some really cool additional networks that might be helpful. For instance:

• Instagram to Buffer: When you post to Instagram, like an Instagram post, or tag something on Instagram, you can use Zapier to send that post to your Buffer queue.
• Pinterest to Buffer: When you pin something on Pinterest OR when anyone adds something to a specific board you’ve selected, you can use Zapier to send that pin to your Buffer queue.
• YouTube to Buffer: When you post a new video to YouTube, you can use Zapier to send that video to your Buffer queue.
• Other social media accounts to Buffer: If you like, you can also connect Twitter, LinkedIn and/or Facebook to your Buffer queue through Zapier. Depending on your workflow and needs, this might be handy—for example, if you wanted to connect a business account to a personal account, or vice versa.

Connecting blog posts to Buffer

Another popular automation is to connect your blog to all your social media accounts so that every time you publish a new post, your social accounts gets updated as well.

Zapier makes it easy to connect a WordPress blog or a Tumblr blog to your Buffer account to make this process automatic.

Later on, you can go back into your Buffer queue and check out your analytics to see how those posts did.

From there, you can change the wording or the formatting, try a new headline, add a new or different image and share it again. This is one of our favorite ways at Buffer to A/B test headlines and other elements of social media posts to always keep honing in on what’s most effective.

Curating content

Content curation is a great way to grow your authority, trust and thought leadership, but finding content to share is one of the things that takes marketers the longest.

You want to create a system where the best content is easy to find, easy to tag, easy to access. Once you’ve got that, you can sit down for a few curation sessions a week and fill up your social queues with great content really quickly.

If you use tools like Evernote, Feedly, Trello or Google Docs as part of your content curation process, Zapier and Buffer can lend a hand.

• Evernote to Buffer: When you create a new note in Evernote and tag it with a word like Buffer for example, you can use Zapier to send that note to your Buffer queue
• Google Docs to Buffer: When you create a new row in a Google Sheets spreadsheet, you can use Zapier to send that article to your Buffer queue
• Trello to Buffer: When you create a new card or list in Trello, you can use Zapier to send that activity to your Buffer queue
• Feedly to Buffer: However you might use Feedly for content curation, you can likely use Zapier to send specific articles, categories of content or whole feeds into your Buffer queue

If you find yourself returning to the same sources of great content, you might want to check out Buffer’s Feeds feature. Awesome and Business customers can add up to 15 RSS feeds to your Buffer social profiles and share links directly from your favorite sites from right inside your Buffer dashboard.

Sending Buffer posts to communication or workflow tools

So far we have talked about actions you can take that will create an activity in your Buffer queue. In this section, we’re going to talk about the reverse: An action you can take in your Buffer account that will create another activity elsewhere.

These are handy Zaps for those who want to communicate their social media activities within a team or keep a quick record of what has been posted to social media accounts. Some of these examples might be:

• Buffer queue into Slack, Hipchat, or Yammer: Great to keep the whole team aware of new posts and shares. This is really handy if you’d like to encourage teammates in sharing your content.
• Buffer queue to Trello, Evernote, RescueTime: Perhaps useful if you’re keen on time tracking or project management for a client.
• Buffer queue to a spreadsheet: This could be handy for your own records or as a kind of basic reporting to others.

If you find yourself regularly reporting to a client or a boss we would love for you to give Buffer for Business a try! It gives you lots of rich analytics, insightful charts and graphs, easy ways to sort your best-performing content and export all your data.

Learn how to make these Zaps in our webinar!

I recently had the pleasure of talking with my friend Alison Groves of Zapier about all the ways one can combine Zapier and Buffer for social media marketing super power. Check out the webinar recording here:

How we use Zapier at Buffer

Finally, I thought I might share a few of the ways that we personally use Zapier in our daily work and communication here at Buffer, in case it might spur any ideas for you.

Sending what we’re reading to Facebook through Buffer

At Buffer, each teammate gets a Kindle and unlimited books for free. Reading is important to each of us, and this amazing perk that helps us focus on our self-improvement goals.

To keep up with what everyone on the team is reading, we use a Zap that sends each gifted book, which we keep track of through Trello, to our Facebook Group for Buffer team members. The end result looks like this:

We also send these book selections to Hipchat through Zapier.

(P.S. If you’d like to keep up with what we’re reading, we keep our Pinterest board updated with the latest)

Sending Github notifications and pull requests to Hipchat

Buffer’s development team uses Zapier to funnel both Github notifications and pull requests into the Hipchat Engineers room.

Sending new blog posts to Hipchat

We blog quite a bit at Buffer. Here, on the Buffer Open blog, on our Overflow developers blog, and on many team members’ individual blogs. So we’ve enlisted Zapier to help us keep track by connecting all our blogs’ RSS feeds right into Hipchat, our remote work central “office,” so to speak.

This way we all get notified when a new post is published, with a link to go check it out:

Sending blog comments to Hipchat

In a similar Zap to the blog posts one above, we also send any comments on any of our Buffer blog posts into our Hipchat Crafters’ room.

This is super helpful so we don’t have to sign up for notifications though Disqus for every post we write—Hipchat simply collects them all as they come in, like so:

Then we can quickly go in and answer questions and comments from our audience.

How do you automate?

If you’ve given Zapier a try, I’d love to hear about your experience and your favorite Zaps for marketing, productivity or anything else. Share your insights in the comments!

SEE ALSO: These fascinating diagrams reveal how to manage people in different countries

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(Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty)

On March 23, Canada will launch the first trading hub for Chinese currency in the Americas. This is the latest new rung in the ladder for Canadian businesses seizing opportunities in Asia. Canadian businesses can now shave off a significant cost in doing business with China, and reach a wider universe of customers in the Asian nation—customers who do not have the resources to conduct business in foreign currencies. In conjunction with the fall announcement of a foreign trade and investment protection agreement (FIPA) with China, Canadians will also have increased access to Chinese securities and investment opportunities. These policies signal the beginning of a new era in Canada’s trade and investment relationship with China.

And the timing couldn’t be better. Canada’s exports to China—and more broadly, Asia—have long been concentrated in commodities such as coal, metals, agricultural, and forestry products, with very few exports of consumer and commercial goods and services. Moreover, only a small share of Canada’s known global foreign direct investments are destined for Asia—and this share has been declining. With the commodities supercycle drawing to a close, and China’s shifting gears to focus its growth on domestic consumption, Canada will need to shift its engagement with the region to maintain its competitive position and maintain the prosperity that exports to Asia has brought with it.

Asia’s importance for Canada’s global trade is paramount. Canada’s economy and living standards benefited tremendously from Asia’s seemingly insatiable demand for natural resources over the last decade.

What little growth in trade Canada has experienced in the last decade can largely be attributed to its relationship with Asia. Bilateral trade with Asia almost doubled in the last decade, making it Canada’s second most important trade relationship after the U.S. While trade with the U.S. and Europe is expected to accelerate in the short term and remain critically important for Canada, neither region offers the type of growth opportunities that Asia does. Indeed, Canada’s economy and living standards benefited tremendously from Asia’s seemingly insatiable demand for natural resources over the last decade, and it is important to continue this momentum.

Despite the wealth of growth opportunities for trade and investment in Asia, Canada has largely focused on supplying Asia with natural resources, and has struggled to maintain its share of Asia’s market. Twenty years ago, Canadian goods accounted for 2% of Asian imports, but by 2013 Canada’s share had been cut in half, even with its surge in natural resources exports to Asia.

Next week, the Conference Board of Canada is releasing two reports that detail the past, present, and future opportunities of Canada’s trade and investment with Asia. This research identifies relatively untapped fast-growth opportunities in Asia that are also Canadian export strengths (see table below.) While many of these fast-growing opportunities remain rooted in natural resources, there are additional opportunities to supply Asian economies with Canadian services such as finance or engineering, and consumer goods such as vehicles or pharmaceuticals.

Businesses will need to take the lead with more hands-on involvement in Asian markets. Previous Conference Board research has highlighted the need to spend time building relationships in emerging markets. It will not be easy to gain market presence in Asia by remaining on the eastern shore of the Pacific. Targeted foreign direct investment can help Canada boost its trade relationship with Asia, by facilitating increased sales of Canada’s goods and services abroad, and a deeper integration into Asian “tangled web” of supply chains.

But Canadian businesses will have to be proactive in making the switch to RMB. Being first to the plate as a trading hub in the Americas will only be to Canada’s advantage for a limited time. The U.S. and South American countries also conduct a lot of trade with China and will also use Canada’s hub or establish their own. Furthermore, China is liberalizing its capital accounts and this will further level the playing field within the next five years or less.

Armed with knowledge of Asian markets, relentless innovation, strong leadership, and international networks, and supported by trade and investment policies (such as trade deals and currency exchange hubs), Canadian businesses can take on the next phase of Asian demand, and continue to tap into one of the fastest growing regions of the world. Seizing new opportunities will allow for a more dynamic and sustainable trade and investment relationship with Asia that is less exposed to changes in commodity prices and demand.

Jacqueline Palladini is a Senior Economist with the Conference Board of Canada and contributes to research on global trade and investment as part of the Global Commerce Centre. Follow her @J_Palladini.

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The post Canada’s big opportunity in China is services, not just resources appeared first on Canadian Business.

MISSISSAUGA, Ont. – The federal government is putting up $50 million over five years for export development.

The money will be available to small and medium-sized businesses who want to export to emerging markets for the first time.

Recipients will have to match the government money for activities such as trade missions and research.

The program is expected to help as many as 1,000 exporters a year.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper made the announcement today at an event in Mississauga, Ont.

He also announced an expansion to the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, which provides advice to entrepreneurs.

The post Ottawa promises $50M over five years to support Canadian exporters appeared first on Canadian Business.

Starbucks just announced a 2-for-1 stock split.

This will become effective on April 8, 2015.

This is the sixth stock split since the company began trading publicly.

It's important to note that stock splits do literally nothing to change the financial or operating structures of the company.

All that happens is that one share of stock becomes two shares. The shareholder will continue to hold the same percentage stake in the company.

Companies often do stock splits when the price of a single share of the stock becomes too high. Starbucks is currently trading at around $94 per share.

So, you might interpret a split as a reflection of management's confidence that the price of the stock won't crash.

“This split is a direct reflection of the past seven years of increasing shareholder value, enhancing the liquidity of our shares, and building an attractive share price," CEO Howard Shulz said. "It also takes place at a time when Starbucks shareholders are experiencing an all-time high in value as we continue to deliver world-class customer service and, in turn, record profits and revenue.”

More to come...

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This is probably not the best way to attract foreign business to your country.

Citigroup has found itself in an incredibly uncomfortable position in the case between Argentina and a group of hedge fund creditors suing the country for over $1.3 billion in defaulted debt.

The bank wants to leave Argentina, but Buenos Aires says that's not happening.

Join the conversation about this story »

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Having users queue up outside one’s store is a pipe dream that every entrepreneur has had at some point in their journey. Whether it’s having worshippers queue up outside Apple’s retail church, getting fan mail raving about how much they think your product is like Starbucks, or having your brand define your users’ status as a successful go-getter like a Ferrari, there’s no better feeling than when your customers keep coming back.

Each of the brands mentioned above have deeply loyal and satisfied customer bases that they have built and nurtured over the course of decades. What are they doing right that you aren’t? What is their secret? Let’s find out.

1. Actively Foster Loyalty

Yes, sometimes it’s okay to bribe people. Rewarding users for their repeat purchases and actively seeking their loyalty is acceptable and nurtures repeat customers.

According to a study by SumAll, customers who shop once have a 27 percent chance of making a second purchase, while someone who has purchased a fourth time has a 59 percent chance of coming back. Offers like “45 percent off on your second purchase” help bring a value minded user back to your site.

A dedicated loyalty program that rewards every single purchase on an incremental basis is a great way to foster stickiness amongst users, as proven by credit card and airline loyalty programs worldwide.

2. Don’t Let Them Forget You

“Brand recall” is a term that advertisers love. It refers to the consumer’s ability to recognize and associate your products with your brand when they see your message.

Source: Johnny Cupcakes t-shirts packed in cupcake frosting tins

A great way to boost brand recall and repeat visits (other than advertising) is product packaging. Fun packaging makes your products stand out, come alive and in some cases becomes the very reason why your users come back to you for more. Clothing brand Johnny Cupcakes and their quirky packaging is a case in point.

Taking actions that actively engage users with your brand helps you retain a high recall value and an equally high repeat visit rate. These include reaching out to users to ask about their shopping experience, soliciting their opinions on what can be improved in your service or product and getting them involved in market research.

3. Offer Buyers The Luxury Of Choice

In the days of Henry Ford, customers could have the Model-T Ford in any color, as long as it was black.

Unfortunately for today’s marketers, we live in a fiercely competitive world with every customer making a huge difference to how far ahead (or behind) you are of the competition snapping at your heels. The best brands recognize this fact and create products with distinct variations to suit different tastes. A Ray Ban fan will never touch an Oakley, even though both brands are owned by Luxottica.

Although you might tend to think that keeping your products simple leads to increased customer loyalty, a Harvard Business Review study has found that brands that simplify decision making for the customer by enabling them to weigh all options forged the deepest bonds with their customers. Amazon is a business that does this tremendously well.

“Freedom of choice” is no longer limited to product colors or variants. You need to look at creative and practical ways in which you can offer real choice to your users. This extends to key areas like shipping and payment methods.

For example, all e-commerce players offer credit card, bank card and PayPal as payment options. But to be really ahead of the pack, you have to support all innovative systems as they’re being adopted. If you’re an online retailer, you can be in the hallowed company of Expedia, Amazon and Asos by allowing shoppers to pay with bitcoins. And if you have a physical store, you want to join 200,000 other retailers who accept Apple Pay, barely a month after it launched.

4. Redefine Customer Care

Providing good, consistent service is critical for retaining customers. Don’t believe me?

As much as it’s intuitive to think that price is the main reason for customer churn (the phenomena of customers disassociating with a business), the truth is, overall poor quality of customer service is the biggest cause. A customer is also four times more likely to defect to a competitor if the problem is service-related, as compared to price or product related. Also, if you happen to have stepped on a customer’s toes, a dissatisfied customer will tell 9-15 people about their negative experiences—that can result in dire consequences for your business. Even in a negative economy, customer experience ranks high on the priority list for consumers, with 60 percent of them willing to pay more for a better consumer experience.

One of the key expenses that traditional retail incurs is the unavoidable need for sales staff on the shop floor—something that online retailers and service providers blissfully forget about.

For such companies, your customer care staff is the often the only human face of your organization. Trouble is that customer care is not cheap.

Source: Average cost of customer care in the US

Ranging from about 35 cents per call for a completely automated service to about $7.50 per call for a live human on the other end of the line, customer care can be a pretty expensive affair.

However, this is one expense that is actually worth every cent. There’s nothing more frustrating for a customer to call your “customer care” number and being put on hold for all of eternity.

Take a leaf from Zappos’ customer care playbook. Do away with automated customer care over the phone and get real people at the other end of the line. If your user needs to be on hold for a couple of minutes, fill in their wait time with useful information, interesting trivia or even a joke to keep them engaged.

Tap social media for reaching out to young customers on their favored platforms. Instead of littering your social media networks with cat memes and product updates (which honestly, can get horribly boring), use them to showcase stellar customer service, which can be made easy with tools like Zendesk. Brands like Tesco, Vodafone, and Nike owe their existence to intense customer focus that spills over into social media as well.

Want to offer a user the experience of speaking to a real person without the added costs? Invest in a live chat tool like Zopim that offers users the benefit of near-zero wait times and a personalized response to their question, instead of wading through a maze of numbers on the phone.

5. Go The Extra Mile To Make Customers Feel Special

According to the principle of reciprocity, as described by Robert Cialdini in Principles of Influence, when a user feels valued by a brand, she returns the favor by showing special consideration or loyalty towards the brand.

It’s not enough to make a sale to your customer. It is also important to leave them happy about the entire purchase experience, the follow-up to the purchase and even during subsequent interactions with the brand.

A “thank you” email after a first time purchase shows the user that you value the purchase and look forward to seeing them again. Personalizing your marketing communication is almost a given, with 82 percent of shoppers stating that they would buy more from brands that personalize the communication that they send out.

In a previous post, we explored the intricacies of personalizing marketing emails. Another article on HubSpot (from yours truly) has more interesting ideas on how to re-engage your customers and build trust using emails.

Go a step beyond the expected. Include personalized, handwritten (if possible) notes in your packages to provide users a real surprise and that extra warm feeling in their tummies.

In Closing

A brand can expect loyalty from its users only when it can honestly claim to put the customer first in every interaction. It’s easy to fool a customer with the veneer of sincerity once. But if you want them to keep coming back to you over the years, it’s time to drop the act and get real. Now.

I hate failing. I hate failing publicly even more. Yet, I do it all the time, and so should you if you’re managing a sales team.

Do you want your sales people to boldly experiment with new sales approaches, come up with creative ideas to close more deals, even if it means trying new things that might lead to failure? 

Or do you just want an army of sales lemmings, sticking to the tried and true, avoiding risk? 

If you’re in startup sales, sticking to the tried and true just means you’re slowly turning yourself into a dinosaur. You won’t survive for long in a fast-changing marketplace.

But how do you cultivate and maintain that sense of boldness? How do you create an indestructible sales team that’s willing to put themselves out there and fail?

It’s not enough to tell your sales reps that failing is ok - you need to show them that it’s part of the job!

There are two scenarios where this is particularly important.

Training new sales reps

Imagine you’re onboarding a new sales rep. You want to show them how easy it is to close deals and instill a sense of what a great product they’re selling and how the market loves it. You want them to be excited about the opportunity to work with you. So decide to show them by picking a few hot leads, calling them up and closing them smoothly.

That sales rep is now motivated and eager to start selling.

Great!

But what happens if he picks up the phone, and get’s one tough prospect after another, a string of crushing rejections?

It’ll seem bedazzling to him that you’ve managed to close all these deals so smoothly, without any substantial resistance from prospects, while they don’t even manage to talk to a decision maker.

It can make them believe that they “just don’t have it” - even if you then pep them up again with a motivational speech on how selling is a numbers game, or how many ways of not inventing a lightbulb Thomas Edison came up with, or how many throws Michael Jordan has missed.

So make a few hard calls, calls where they’ll actually witness you failing.

That way, they’ll get the full picture: some calls are hard, some calls are easy, but no matter how the call ends, you pick up the phone, dial the next number and keep hustling.

That's how they go from being mediocre to great. That's how they can become great at selling.

Keeping seasoned sales reps out of their comfort zone

When you’re dealing with a team of experienced sales reps who’ve been with you for a long time, and the dynamics have settled in, you still want to fail in front of these people.

It’s important because you want to keep pushing the limits, innovate and evolve. This also means trying things that won’t work.

Don’t just expect them and encourage them to do so, but actually show them how you’re doing it, how you’re sometimes making bets that don’t work out. You have to walk the talk. You have to show, not just tell.

Editor’s Note: Mikita Mikado is the CEO of PandaDoc, a startup that helps sales teams intelligently create, manage, deliver and track sales content to close deals faster.

Building early traction in the B2B software world is hard. In the modern day, many startups are founded by just a few guys. With one, two, or three founders working full time resources are tight. To survive, you must focus clearly on a narrow strategy and execute it well.

One of the early choices all founders make is to choose between inbound or outbound sales models. I made one of these choices a few years ago: a choice that turned out to be the wrong one. Here is my story about choosing inbound sales, but switching to outbound a few years later and learning a lot throughout the journey.

Quick Growth Isn’t Always the Best Strategy

Nearly four years ago we built Quote Roller: a software as a service application that helps to build and deliver sales proposals. Both my co-founder and I were engineers, and at that time we ran a web development company. The product was built out of internal need, and was designed for small web development studios, just like the one we were running at the time.

As engineers, we weren’t really excited about building a company with a bunch of salespeople. We planned to create an intuitive product that clients would be able to discover on the Internet, and figure it out on their own. So the choice of going inbound was natural.

The product was launched in the middle of 2011. We focused on all kinds of online marketing: software marketplaces, content, ads, and search engine optimization. We started to generate a decent amount of traffic, some of which was converting into signups.

By mid-2012 we were getting thousands of signups on a monthly basis. It was all self-service, as we were not trying to be pro-active and some customers converted themselves. We started to build revenue. In early 2013 we raised money to invest in growth.

By the middle of 2013 we had thousands of paying customers, but were nonetheless quite discouraged.

Here is why:

1. Maxed Out Inbound

Our inbound lead channels started to reach full capacity and some channels were already maxed out. For example, we weren’t able to buy more traffic for keywords like “proposal software” on AdWords because there just weren’t enough searches. These conditions significantly limited our ability to scale quickly because the types of leads being funneled into our business were not an ideal fit.

2. High Churn Rate

An unfortunate result of having an inbound-only sales engine was higher churn rates. We were not attracting the customers who needed our product the most and who were willing to pay more for it. Most of our clients were small agencies, freelancers, and companies with less than 20 employees. These target segments were very unpredictable because they frequently traded tools or went out of business.

3. Market Spread Was Too Broad

Another lesson we learned was that our inbound stream of leads was too broad which caused the quality of our leads to be highly variable. We had too many different industries and vertical markets that demanded different things in the product. It started to become very clear to us that we needed to establish a sales/marketing strategy that would attract, convert, and retain loyal customers.

4. Needed A Better Product/Market Fit

Another problem we encountered was our product/market fit started to deteriorate. Over the course of two years, our development strategy followed feedback given by the broad spectrum of customers we acquired through inbound marketing. Because all of these customers were small, we were building a product that was not suitable for larger companies. If we wanted to scale our business and serve a broader unmet need in the marketplace, we had to re-evaluate our ideal customer profile and product/market fit to ensure we were developing technology that would provide value to customers for a very long time.

5. Not A Scalable Revenue Model

As a SaaS startup, there comes a time when growth hacking must transition into meaningful and sustainable growth. In the early stages, we learned how to attract visitors, now we needed to attract the right kind of visitors that would convert into loyal long term paying customers. To achieve this, we needed to build a sound product/sales process to ensure we were chasing highly qualified customers. This is what ultimately creates a stable foundation for predictable revenue and fast growth.

After two years of solely relying on inbound we realized that we had to rebuild our product. We rebranded and launched PandaDoc, which we designed based on everything we had learned with Quote Roller.

All In on Outbound

With this new company we decided to do things differently and started to sell the product before it was built to ensure there was a strong product/market fit. I was the outbound rep, providing demonstrations of clickable prototypes, and gathering feedback from potential clients. During this time I even closed a deal or two with a promise to deliver the software in a few months.

After establishing a successful sales process that was focused on a particular buyer, we established an outbound strategy to optimize customer acquisition.

Here is the structure we ended up with:

The result of this new structure combining both inbound and outbound leads enabled us to do a better job of filtering our leads by asking qualifying questions — we did this by doing more targeted calls, attending more events, and creating more educational material. This opened up a broader range of lead sources and eventually began attracting more relevant traffic and prospects who needed our product. This model also allowed us to focus our product development pipeline because we only built things that fit the needs of our target market.

Within 6 months of adding a more meaningful, targeted outbound strategy, we were able to see real results:

By the end of 2015 I expect us to make 200% of Quote Roller’s revenue. But the best part is that our revenue growth has become increasingly predictable and not dependent on being featured in software marketplaces or Google search algorithm updates.

Outbound was definitely the way to go for us because quick wins in unstable markets did not help us build the loyal, long term customer base we desired. Too bad I didn’t realize this 4 years ago!

Build a Validated Sales Process

Once you have decided between an Inbound or Outbound Sales Model, set internal SLAs and outline the “code of conduct” between multiple departments.

Improve Your Sales Process

The post Inbound vs Outbound – Which Path is Right for Your Startup? appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Now you can check out information on leads and current customers from Salesforce right from within your Microsoft inbox.

The new capability is coming to Outlook 2013, Office 365, Outlook for Mac, and the Outlook Web App as part of the new Salesforce App for Outlook, Microsoft’s Outlook team announced in a blog post today.

“Even better, it’s 100 percent cloud based with nothing to install!” Ryan Atyay, senior vice president of product management at the Salesforce for Microsoft division of Salesforce, wrote in a blog post of his own on the news.

It’s the latest interesting move for the two companies to make as part of their ongoing collaboration. Microsoft competes with Salesforce in the customer relationship management software business for managing sales leads, so it’s a bit surprising.

Find the Salesforce App for Outlook inside the Office Store here.