On this Q&A episode: "What's the best way to follow-up with a demo? Even though my demos go really well, the prospect seems to go silent after we meet".
I feel bad for LinkedIn. I think it’s one of the least understood tools and platforms in the modern digital landscape. Heck, maybe I’m using it wrong, too. But I want to talk you through what I see as the value and opportunity for employing LinkedIn for your business pursuits.
How To Be More Effective With LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a talent and skills discovery platform. When you build your profile, the intent of that action is that people will review that profile, learn what you know and your capabilities and your experiences.
Beyond the profile, LinkedIn invites you to post and share information. Links, articles, and now most valuably, video.
The Importance of Posting
I feel like most people don’t fully understand the intent of the opportunity to share. This is a talent and skills discovery platform. If I share a link to an article about how funny Wendy’s is on their Twitter profile, what am I telling a potential business connection? At best, I’m telling you what I find interesting. At most, I’m flooding your stream with non-important information.
So what should you share?
Share information that highlights your areas of professional interest. Share information that highlights your capabilities. Share information that better elaborates on your offerings. Light up the beacon of “what you do to serve others.”
The goal of posting and sharing is to extend the story of your capabilities so that people might assess their business reasons for connecting with you. That should be the guidepost for what you share.
Why Connect With Someone?
My connection philosophy has changed immensely over the last several years. I might be wrong. In the past, I used to connect with anyone. Why not? Now, I have a slightly different criteria:
I connect with professionals I hope to do business with – prospects
I connect with professionals I know I can help because I know their capabilities well enough to refer them – allies
I connect with professionals I find aligned with my intellectual pursuits – mentors
That’s my criteria. Yours might be different.
Who I Don’t Connect With
I almost never connect with my peers beyond friends. If you’re doing what I do, I don’t see much need to connect on LinkedIn. I’m there to find business. I’m there to find clients and customers and people to serve. I’m not there to say, “Hey, let’s all agree on things.” I’ve built my career NOT doing what my peers do. It’s no judgment on you. You’re a peer. Good for you. I hope you build your business. But what do you think the value of connecting with me will be?
Instead of Actually Linking
I do follow some peers. I love seeing what they’re interested in talking about. I don’t need them to be linked to follow them. You might also do that.
And finally…
LinkedIn is Just Software
I feel that people get emotional around social networks. They equate “connection” in a piece of software with value judgments. If I don’t link with you, it must mean I don’t like you or value you professionally. That’s the perception some people seem to have.
That’s important for people to examine in themselves. If a piece of software is how you’re determining your self-worth, or if YOUR perception of how you THINK I value you is driving your self-worth, that’s probably an issue worth considering.
LinkedIn is just software. Use it or don’t and look for value or don’t. Look for a way to make it work for you because I feel it’s pretty darned valuable. Just try your best not to stumble in there and expect it to yield anything.
And if ever you need help or need to reach me directly, just email me: chris@chrisbrogan.com
From Coco Chanel to Arianna Huffington, Jeff Bezos to Howard Schultz, many of the great business innovators of our time were all creative thinkers. The biggest myth about creativity is that it is an inherent talent—you must be born creative. But the truth is that creativity is a discipline that can be learned and honed.
At its simplest, creativity is the process of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. It’s a process of thinking, and then producing. The end product can take the form of an extraordinary painting or musical composition, or a revolutionary new product, or even something banal yet innovative, like a more efficient operations process in a factory.
There are five key skills that most creative and innovative individuals have honed:
Associating: the ability to connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields;
Questioning: the constant asking of provocative questions that challenge common wisdom and the status quo;
Observing: the observation and then scrutiny of the behaviors of other people, places, and systems to identify new ways of doing things;
Experimenting: construction of interactive experiences that try to provoke unorthodox responses and deliver useful insights;
Networking: meeting of people with different kinds of ideas and perspectives.
Like all skills, they need to be practiced, over and over again, until the behaviors become ingrained or automatic.
Associating
Some of the biggest breakthroughs in innovation come from random associations—for example, Steve Jobs’ chance encounter with a calligraphy class eventually led to the beautiful typography that Apple computers would become known for. Building these connections requires two key things: a curiosity for the world, and a bit of divergent thinking.
One of the best things you can do to build this skill is to feed your curiosity constantly—take classes, read books, try new hobbies, visit new places, learn a new language. Even a small bit of knowledge and experience in something completely new can spark a completely “random” idea later.
One of the most important things you can do as a business leader is to ask questions. However, it’s not quantity that matters, it’s quality—in short, better questions beget better answers.
How do you get in the habit of asking the right questions? Start by challenging assumptions, then using those answers to propose new ideas—try to go from “Why?” to “What If?” Why do we spend 20% of our marketing budget on television ads? Why is that the best solution? What if we moved it to social media ads?
Running out of ideas on what to ask? Try the 20 questions exercise from LifeLabs. Pick a random object (a pen, a desk lamp, etc.) and write down 20 questions about that object in three minutes. Around question 10-12, the brain naturally shifts to “innovation mode”; this is where you’ll see a shift in the quality of questions. Do this exercise for five days straight, and eventually you’ll be asking better questions more naturally.
Observing
Observation is one of the hardest skills to master, mainly because we are so easily distracted. Most days we prefer to bury ourselves in work or stare into a smartphone than pay attention to the world around us. Observation requires patience, time, and creative space—all things we tend not to allow ourselves in our fast-paced lives.
The simplest way to train yourself to be more observant is to take a walk. Leave the phone behind (at least confine it to your pocket) and allow yourself to meander with no specific destination in mind. Spend time observing the people around you. Contemplate the big picture and scrutinize the small details. Look for patterns. Close your eyes and pick out individual sounds you hear.
To take it one step further bring a sketchbook and draw what you see. Or take that phone out of your pocket (just quickly!) and take a snapshot of a detail or scene that was interesting to you.
Experimenting
To be great at experimenting means being able to accept and learn from failures just as much as successes. Amazon has a famous culture of experimentation that allows employees to act on ideas and try lots of prototypes, even if they are giant flops. Out of these flops came surprise hits, like Amazon Kindle and Amazon Prime.
How can you become more experimental? Try giving yourself rules and limits on projects. As Marissa Mayer famously said while working at Google, “creativity loves constraints.” Rules challenge us to break them, and limits force us to think outside the box.
Embrace experimentation outside of the office as well and take on projects that have nothing to do with work. Maybe it’s building a treehouse with the kids, or hosting a fundraiser for your local community center.
Networking
There’s networking you do to boost your business and career, and networking you do to become more creative. The two are quite different. Networking for business often means meeting others in the industry and building contacts who are typically similar to you.
Networking for creativity means making a conscious effort to meet people with different backgrounds and from different walks of life. This can mean attending events that bring together diverse minds (like TED talks), volunteering at a nonprofit, or even just making a point to strike up a conversation with a random stranger you meet on your travels.
Allow yourself to get out of your comfort zone and let yourself be inspired by unique perspectives and ideas from others. You never know what sort of creative associations you’ll be able to build upon later!
Most top-of-the-funnel sales leaders are tracking the usual suspects. We all monitor sends, clicks, opens, and replies – all base-level metrics. But who is looking at email deliverability and quality relevance?
However, most leaders aren’t focusing on what are arguably the most important metrics: email deliverability and quality relevance. All the while, your recipients’ email servers are working overtime to filter spam.
Ignoring email deliverability and quality relevance measurements is a good way to kill a reputation. Customers will lose trust in you, and spam traps will begin disqualifying you. You’re also wasting a massive amount of time and money if your emails aren’t delivered.
Are you working to improve the bounce rates of your outbound sales team’s emails? Do you monitor the level of personalization in each email? Is positive sentiment on your radar?
To help you get started, here are 7 ways to improve email deliverability and quality relevance.
Contextual Ways to Improve Email Deliverability and Quality
Contextual elements examine the more “human” factors of deliverability and quality. These factors include best practices like using persona-based messaging and setting personalization quotas.
Encourage your sales team to adopt these practices, and you’ll avoid spam prison, provide your customers with a better buying experience, and ultimately win more business.
1. Persona-Based Messaging
From managers to vice presidents, your team will interact with a wide range of roles as they engage with an account. Since each role has its own unique set of challenges and problems (as well as commonalities), it’s important to tailor, refine, and deliver messages that are relevant to the specific buyer personas your organization is targeting.
By understanding the needs of ideal customers, salespeople are better able to provide value throughout the buyer journey. For instance, sharing specific use cases in which your solution solved similar pain points.
We recommend creating a few different multi-touch cadences around your reps’ most popular personas and measuring the effectiveness of each. Running tests and gathering data around open and reply rates by persona adds efficiency to the sales process
Skipping this critical step in sales engagement decreases the risk of your team connecting with their prospects and increases the likelihood that recipients report the message as irrelevant or inappropriate (a.k.a. spam).
2. Email Personalization
Metrics focused on how your team provides a better buying experience to prospects through personalization should also be a priority.
Personalization doesn’t mean spending asking your sales team to write hundreds of custom emails each day. Messaging should be tweaked from templates provided within pre-built cadences. That’s personalization at scale!
At SalesLoft, in addition to the usual suspects (the previously mentioned base-level metrics) we measure whether or not an email is personalized, to what extent the email is personalized* (if at all), and the Positive Sentiment of the resulting experience. Here’s an example:
*Personalization is defined as only those emails sent that were generated from a template and is measured by the difference between the original and the sent message.
From this data, we can see that the Positive Sentiment Ratio increases as percent emails personalized increases, demonstrated below.
“Across hundreds of millions of sales activities, we routinely see significant correlation between personalization and response rates, sentiment, opportunity creation, and won opportunities.” – Kyle Porter, SalesLoft’s CEO
3. Keep Your Data Clean
The email addresses you send to are just as important as the content you send. Emailing incorrect or out of date addresses results in a high bounce rate or — worst case scenario — you could get caught in a spam trap.
A spam trap uses out-of-date emails that are not actively being used (like the AOL account you set up in 1997) to track down assumed spammers, carelessly emailing the masses. If someone emails the formerly inactive account, the server flags it as corrupt and blocks future messages. That’s bad news for your sender reputation.
The moral of the story here is to keep your contact data up-to-date. Take care to remove or update information if a prospect leaves the company. Urge your sales team to double-check and verify that contacts’ email addresses are current in the system to avoid being tagged as spam.
Technical Ways to Improve Email Deliverability and Quality
Don’t make the mistake of addressing only the human factors in email deliverability and quality relevance. There are a few technical approaches to improving email deliverability as well.
1. Use custom tracking domains
Your sales engagement provider uses shared tracking domains to track sent messages. Therefore, the email tracking domain your provider uses won’t match up with your (the sender’s) domain. Mismatched tracking and sender domains can significantly increase the risk of your email being reported as spam.
The good news is that setting up a custom tracking domain can significantly reduce the likelihood of an email getting caught in a spam folder. Custom domain tracking replaces links that use a sales engagement provider’s default tracking domain with links containing your URL.
For more information on how to do this within the SalesLoft platform, click here.
2. Implement a Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
An SPF increases your trustworthiness in the eyes of the receiving email server. It enables the server to cross-check the domain name against the associated IP address. Without an SPF in place, your emails run the risk of being rejected.
Work with your DNS server administrator to publish your SPF record to DNS so that mailbox providers are able to reference it. Once in place, test your SPF record with an SPF check tool. It will return the same list of the servers authorized to send email on behalf of your sending domain that recipients see. If any of your legitimate sending IP addresses aren’t included, you can update your record accordingly.
3. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Email) Records
DKIM records do exactly what the acronym sounds like they would. They verify that your company owns your email domain by including domain-specific, encrypted keys with each email sent.
DKIM doesn’t follow the same rules as other deliverability measures since the encrypted keys are specific to your domain. The identifier is independent of additional identifiers in the message, such in the sender’s “From:” field as we’ll see below.
DMARC isn’t as scary as it sounds. It’s just an email validation system designed to detect and prevent email spoofing. It helps combat techniques often used in phishing and email spam. For instance, emails that contain addresses giving them the appearance of having come from someone you know.
It builds on the aforementioned SPF and DKIM protocols, adding that tieback to the author domain name (From:), published policies for recipient handling of authentication failures, and reporting from receivers to senders, to improve and monitor the protection of the domain from fraudulent email.
Find everything you’ve ever wanted to know about DMARC (and then some) here.
Have you checked off all the boxes for improving your email deliverability?
Here’s a checklist of both contextual and technical ways to improve Email Deliverability and Quality.
We’ve found that there is a significant correlation between personalization and response rates, sentiment, opportunity creation, and closed-won opportunities. Not tracking these can put you at a huge disadvantage.
Don’t be left in the dark when it comes to understanding email deliverability and quality relevance.
About 3-4 years ago, I was participating in a discussion, at the time hosted by CEB, now Gartner. It was a group of very bright thinkers/practitioners in sales and marketing. We were discussing the future of sales and marketing–things we saw happening, things we believed needed to change.
It was a fascinating discussion, but I struggled participating in it. At the end, Brent Adamson pulled me to the side asking, “Dave, you seem to have a pretty dark outlook about selling, what’s up?”
At the time, I had to agree with Brent’s assessment. But, I had no response, in fact it’s been a question that’s haunted me since Brent posed it. I kept thinking, “If my outlook is really that dark, why am I doing what I’m doing? Am I helping or hurting the profession? Am I contributing to it’s improvement and the ability of sales to contribute to our customers and the companies we sell for?”
In that period, and since, there has been overwhelming evidence that would drive one to be very dark about the future of selling.
Year after year, the percent of sales people making plan continues to decline.
The average tenure in a sales job, whether it’s sales management or individual contributors continues to plummet. Depending on the survey, tenure of sales managers, is anywhere between 18-22 months. Sales people change jobs, every 20-22 months.
Where sales people used to be a primary channel for information and education about products/solutions, now customers can self educate through an increasing number of digital and other channels. As a result, customers seem to be looking to defer sales involvement later in their buying process–with many seeking to manage the whole cycle through digital channels (by the way this isn’t new, but we tent to think it is.)
What has traditionally “worked” seems to be not working any longer. But sales leaders and people seem to be doubling down on these efforts.
Endless market research proclaiming the “death of selling,” citing changing buyers, new technology as eliminating millions of selling jobs–and there is some validity to the points they make, though I tend to disagree with the conclusions there will be fewer sales jobs in the future (more later).
Beyond this, there are the things we do to ourselves that would lead one to be very negative about the future of our profession.
The endless, mindless debates of social selling, cold calling, to prospect or not to prospect.
The mindless focus on volume/velocity. The thinking that sales results are a math equation where we improve results by doing the same dull outreach but at ever escalating volumes/velocity. “If we aren’t producing the results needed, just up the activity levels.”
The mechanization, assembly line vision of selling–an approach that focuses on our efficiency (not effectiveness), moving customer widgets from station to station, at each stop a specialist does her specialized job, then passing the customer to the next station. All the time, ignoring the customer buying experience and their own journey. This couples nicely with the previous point. If we need to produce more, we just up the volume in the assembly line.
The naive/wishful thinking that technology, particularly AI/ML will save the day. It will suddenly bring us buying ready customers that all we need to do is accept the PO. If this, in fact is true, 100% of the process can be automated.
And the endless stream of “experts” exploiting the wishful thinking by declaring the secret to sales success is just doing this one thing. Unfortunately, as one counts the one things, there end up be 1000’s with most conflicting or contradicting each other.
On top of this, as one talks to corporate executives, there continues to be a growing “anti sales” sentiment. Possibly driven by the poor results, possibly by the expense, possibly because there is a longing for a way to create revenue without needing to sell–that is just getting buyers to buy (Hmmmmm).
Given these scenarios, it’s easy to be dark about the future of selling. I found myself falling victim to that kind of thinking.
In recent weeks, it has caused me to rethink what I’m doing and whether I’m beating my head against an impenetrable brick wall.
Suddenly, I had a revelation (in my terms, a brain fart). I realized that I was getting distracted by the minutiae and had lost sight of the bigger picture. In some way I was becoming so narrowly focused on the constant barrage of “stuff” that I was losing sight of the forest for the trees.
I decided to step back, looking at things from the “demand side,” what drives the need for selling? The only place to start is with the customer, why might they need sales and sales people?
As usual, when one starts with the customer, one gains great clarity.
Every industry/market is going through extreme disruption, driven by the convergence of a huge number of factors in one time. Changes in society, economies, expectations of consumers (whether individuals/buyers). Businesses are facing massive changes in business models, driven by changing customers, socio/political structures, all aided (?) by technology. Transformation of all kinds, including digital, is the standard under which all businesses and organizations must operate. The very nature of work is changing in every segment.
As each organization assesses these massive shifts, it is overlaid with massive complexity, overwhelm, overload, distraction, risk/uncertainty, and fear/wonder. The people challenges–physical and emotional are unknown and massive.
The reality is companies and organizations cannot figure these things out themselves. Partly because they don’t exist in isolation but a socio/market ecosystem. Partly because no one has the answers, let alone the questions.
People/companies will need help! And the demand for this help is incalculable–but, sufficiently large would be an understatement.
As we shift from the “demand side,” to the “supply side,” we can start to assess the opportunity/challenge.
Certainly, new business opportunities, solutions/products we have never imagined will emerge to help fulfill the demand.
As always, there will be huge need for consultants, providing endless leather bound recommendations about what companies should do. And there will be huge need for services organizations to help companies design and implement solutions.
At the same time there will be a huge need for sales professionals. After all, the job of sales is to help customers understand challenges/opportunities/problems, as well as help them understand and plan for the changes the solutions demand.
Because of the magnitude of change on the “demand side,” the “supply side” opportunity is immense, but different than what has been.
But because the problems/opportunities our customers (and we) face are massively different from what has existed in the past, we will need to reassess what selling is, why, how, what we sell. We will have to reassess everything about culture, organization, talent, strategy, processes, systems, tools, programs, tactics, and metrics.
What has always worked in the past will be less effective in the future. The challenges our customers face are profoundly different, as a result we have to change what we do.
What does this mean from the point of view of the number of sales jobs, many say the numbers of sales jobs will plummet. I tend to disagree. Many traditional sales jobs will disappear, the things those sales roles do will be fulfilled through other channels. My belief that the number of next-gen sales roles will increase is based on the magnitude of the changes our customers face. No segment is immune, every sector, every market, every business will be impacted by the transformation. As a result, the number of organizations/people needing help will be far greater than what we see now.
In short, we will see a renaissance–a rebirth–of selling. It will be very different from what it is now, and all that we have traditionally done (perhaps amplified with new buzzwords and technology) will be insufficient.
What does that rebirth look like, what does it mean for sales jobs and what we do? I don’t know–I have some speculative thoughts, all very incomplete. But I’ll cover these in Part 2 of this post.
But as I came upon this revelation (perhaps, I’ve just been slow to recognize it), I became tremendously excited about the future of our profession. Both the challenge of figuring it out, and the prospect of the job opportunities, and growth within the profession are fantastic!
I can’t imagine anything more exciting!
Afterword: Stay tuned for part 2, the really exciting part is what this means for sales and selling, how we have to transform.
Working for a 100 percent remote marketing agency allows me to work from anywhere and be as comfortable as I want! I spend most days in a T-shirt and the ever-important yoga pants with my hair in a mess on top of my head. However, every once in a while, I actually do something with myself. Getting all dolled up for the day is a rarity and you best believe I’m going to get out of the house if I do! What’s the point of putting that effort in if nobody sees it? Content is kind of the same.
Your marketing team spends a lot of time cultivating great content, but does it matter if it’s not seen by your buyers? Content allows you to increase your leads, establish your company as an influencer in your space, genuinely provide helpful resources for your current and potential customers, and can even build the personal brand of your employees.
We are bombarded with content every single day—but it’s not all great content; we have to spend time sifting through it all to find the gems. How do you cut through the noise of mediocre content to ensure yours is seen by your buyers?
Effective Subject Lines
Whether you’re sending out information for an upcoming promotion or offering a piece of premium content, email is generally involved. I’m the type of person that breaks out in a sweat when I see a coworker’s inbox has more than 100 unread emails. The thought drives me into instant anxiety! However, overflowing inboxes are our reality.
An email’s subject line is your foot in the door, but you have a lot of competition. Crafting the perfect subject line takes practice. A few quick things to consider so that your email gets opened and your content is more likely to be read:
Personalize: Use personalization tokens whenever possible. We like to hear our own names and this small effort to tailor a subject line can have a huge impact on your open rate.
Get creative and take some risks: Without exploiting the interests of your readers and ending up as clickbait, you can still take some risks with your subject lines. Show your brand’s personality and try out a few different options that cause a little anxiety with the internal team. You may be surprised by the results.
Be concise and keep it short: We peruse our inboxes at lightning speed and usually don’t have the time, or desire, to read long subject lines that may even be cut off. Get to the point in your subject line! If you feel you have more to say, craft compelling preview text.
A/B Test: Test your subject lines. Test your subject lines again. Rinse and repeat.
Engaging Blogs
Blogs are a fantastic way for you to demonstrate your knowledge in your industry and provide real value to your customers without them spending a dime. Blogs have become a place for us to find answers, learn new things, get to know a person or company, and simply spend time reading content that we’re interested in. But how do you ensure your great blogs are seen?
Stay keyword focused: Get inside the heads of your potential buyers. What keywords are they searching for? Having a keyword-focused blog title and copy will help your content rise to the eyes of your buyers.
Share on social: You’ve written a great blog post for your buyer personas. Now, you need to tell them about it! Although a good SEO strategy will help your content organically, you can and should still do your part to push it out. Sharing your blogs on social media is a great place to start. Be strategic in this endeavor. What platforms are your personas engaging with daily? It may not make sense for you to push a blog in the same manner on every social channel. For example, a LinkedIn post may need a different tone than a tweet.
Leverage your network: The more your blogs are pushed, the more likely they will be seen. Don’t forget that your internal team and network can be helpful in this endeavor. Tools like GaggleAMP can provide your team with a mechanism to share content to their personal networks. Encourage your company to participate, make it fun, and show them the end results.
Timing: Timing is everything. Serve your content too early and your buyer won’t be ready; serve it too late and your content is now irrelevant to them. Truly knowing your personas and their buyer’s journey is a key part of ensuring your content is not only seen, but also adds value. Need help getting started with buyer personas? Check out this comprehensive guide to building them.
Create content for the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of the buyer’s journey. This will give your buyers the ability to access your content regardless of where they are in the process or will help you nurture them through it.
Keep working hard on cultivating great content and put the effort into making sure it gets seen. It’s a learning and continual improvement process. Don’t let your content be all dolled up with nobody to show off to.
I’ve been writing a number of pieces looking at the future of the sales profession. I’d be remiss not to include a discussion of stupidity in selling.
Stupid works, and as long as stupid works, we will continue to see organizations invest in doing things stupidly.
Stupid behavior exists everywhere, and selling is no more immune to stupidity than every other sector.
People respond to stupid emails. After all, people purporting to be Nigerian Princes are making money. There will always be some people that will respond to scams. And enough respond that the people exploiting these tactics to make money.
While that may be an extreme case, people will respond to bad emails, bad phone calls, bad pitches. They respond out of their own ignorance of alternatives, out of inexperience, out of haste, distraction, or for any number of other reasons. As long as “enough” respond, sales people will continue to leverage those stupid tactics.
As these techniques don’t produce enough, the easy answer is “crank up the volume.” Just do twice as many emails or twice as many phone calls. Managers will go to their management, with the argument, “Here’s what we’ve produced in the past, if you just enable me to double, triple, I can produce more……”
Sometimes, stupidity works or at least appears to. Smart buyers buy from sales people doing stupid things. The issue is, “do they buy as a result of what the sales person has done, or in spite of what the sales person has done?” For example, hot products/solutions don’t need great sales skills.
Too often, we continue to do stupid things, thinking it was because of what we’ve done, rather than in spite of what we have done.
Customers will, and should, take advantage of stupid. If they have determined the product will solve their needs, despite how they’ve been sold, it’s usually very easy to exploit stupidity to get the best possible price. Be careful here, I’m not saying that sales people, even great ones, don’t have to discount. But usually, this is a considered decision or after they have exhausted everything else. Stupidity enables discounting, as a standard, because they don’t understand value or don’t value what they sell.
However, while stupidity will always exist, it is not a strategy for growth, it is not a strategy for market leadership. It is a strategy exploited by followers struggling to survive.
Some times smart organizations do stupid things, just look at the bad emails in my Inbox. These, usually are corrected–it may take some time for these stupid things to get the right visibility. Sometimes, they run under the radar for a long time, but eventually, they get visibility to people who recognize what it is, stupid.
Stupid is sustainable only in organizations that are driven by performance. At some point, in any performance driven organization, stupidity reveals itself to be a low performance strategy. But despite, the lip service of many executives, many organizations just want to get by. So stupid can thrive in those environments.
While stupid works, it doesn’t work as well or as profitably as smart.
Stupidity will always have a place in sales, hopefully, it will always be threatened and, over time, represents a smaller percentage of sales behaviors.
Having said this, stupid is uninteresting and a waste of thoughtful people’s time. Yet it’s amazing how many smart people get sucked into discussions driven by the stupid–you can’t fight stupid or argue with the stupid. You just crush it not being distracted by stupid.
I’m surprised I’ve invested about 613 words in this (perhaps I’m being stupid).
Afterword: Thanks to Dr. Howard Dover for provoking this idea.
I was invited to participate in a roundtable on the topic, “Is technology hurting or helping our ability to sell and drive revenue?” It’s a fascinating topic, my response is an unequivocal YES!!!
Before I go further, I have proclaim my obligatory fascination and bias toward all things technology. Most of my career has been working for or with leading technology organizations, spanning electronic components/devices, hardware/systems, licensed/cloud based software, all things communications including devices through the operating companies, through to analytics and AI. I’ve been on the founding teams of several very successful software and analytics companies. To further buff my image, I’m a total geek. I’m one of those that’s in line at 4:00 am waiting to be one of the first buyers of every new geeky technology.
But the issue really isn’t a technology issue, any more than asking, “Does pencil and paper help or hinder our ability to sell and drive revenue?”
The issue is how we exploit the technologies, incorporating them into our customer engagement, sales and marketing strategies. By itself, technology offers nothing but promise and possibility. As implemented, too often technology enables us to create crap at the speed of light.
Technology, as a replacement to things that technology does far better than human beings is powerful. As we look at transactional/order taking selling processes, increasingly exploitation of technology creates greater value/convenience for customers and has the potential for significantly decreasing costs. Stated differently, if you are an order taker, you should be looking for a different career.
We have decades of electronic ordering including EDI, through web based shopping sites/shopping carts, to chatbots helping advise/manipulate us to making certain purchasing decisions.
Already, 10’s of thousands of sales jobs have been displaced by the increasing use of technology for order fulfillment, transactional selling processes. 10’s-100’s of thousands more of these jobs will be displaced in the coming 5-10 years.
But now let’s look at the application of technologies to complex buying/selling processes. It offers huge promise, in our own company it has enabled us to more quickly and more deeply research markets, customers, individuals. We are leveraging technologies to recognize patterns in markets, organizations, and functions within organizations. I get daily alerts that enable me to more accurately reach out and engage the right customers, with the right insight/messages, at the right time. Within our own company and a small number of our clients we have seen technology enable huge results and dramatically improve productivity.
Unfortunately, I have to say that most of the applications of technology I see actually hurt our abilities to drive sales and revenue. But it’s not the fault of the tool, but how we exploit–or fail to exploit the promise of the tool.
Some examples:
Marketing automation platforms have been around for at least a decade. They provide us very rich capability for segmenting, targeting, personalizing our messaging to our customers. They can tell us, “Based on Dave’s history with us, we should reach him with content about these issues/topics, but not send him materials about these issues and topics. We should also send him materials at this frequency, and we should make sure to call his company Partners In EXCELLENCE, not Excellenc (our web URL).
And this is the most basic application of marketing automation technology.
While these platforms have tremendous promise, very few organizations actually exploit it. Instead, it’s far easier to send everything to everyone. As an example, this morning, in the space of 75 minutes, I got three different emails from the same Sales Enablement platform giant. They were presenting 3 different things, only one of which was slightly relevant to me. The others had absolutely no applicability because they were for applications and businesses very different than ours. This company should have “known” me better, we’ve done business with them and have had lots of engagements of varying types.
We see data supporting this. Email data–opens, click throughs, forwards are plummeting. To get the same number of responses, volumes of electronic garbage have skyrocketed.
Other platforms have the same problem. I can’t imagine a sales person or organization not using CRM. Our own company would struggle if we didn’t have CRM. Yet, CRM compliance/utilization remains a huge issue.
We have all incorporated new technology language into our vocabularies–I suppose because it’s modern and cool, but we talk glibly about “sales stacks,” and get into the frat party comparisons, “mine is bigger than yours….” But when we audit utilization, people aren’t using them.
Other technologies–not because of the technology, but the way we’ve implemented them are driving customers away, rather than enhancing our ability to reach and engage customers. Power diallers and related technologies are supposed to help us actually reach customers and talk to people. Instead, we have managed to train prospects and customers not to pick up the phone. Do a random survey of your colleagues, customers, and friends. How many answer phone calls from numbers they don’t recognize–particularly those with the area code and exchange exactly matching yours?
Then there is the “distraction effect” of technology. Countless studies show how just the visible presence of our mobile devices create micro distractions. Cumulatively, these distractions accumulate to hours in a day.
We think–or rather don’t think–about technology correctly. We mis-apply it, using it as a crutch, not a tool, in effect, dumbing down our sales organizations. We are fast losing the ability to think critically, to listen, to engage in deep conversations.
We have technology vendors selling great technology very poorly. For example, one vendor tells me all I have to do is ask 4 questions in the discovery process or that my introductory pitch has to be 9.1 minutes, not 11.4 minutes. Doing these cause us to win–the data clearly shows this.
I tried this recently, I met with a prospect, I planned my call to focus on 4 discovery questions. Carefully crafted, rechecking the math, I asked, “Hi, my name is Dave, what’s yours?” “I see you’ve been having cold weather recently, how’s it impacted you?” “What did you think about the game last night?” “Are you the decision-maker?”
You can guess how impactful that call was. I left confused, I had asked 4 questions, that should have been a slam dunk for a win!
Technology is a great excuse for failure. It’s all too easy to blame the new tool, rather than our inept implementation and utilization of the tool–it’s never our fault, it’s the tool’s.
You know I can go on and on, but I’ll stop here.
The problem isn’t the technology. Technology can enable us to do great things to drive sales and revenue. It also can do the opposite.
The real issue is the people side of technology—how do we sell it, how do we use it, are we using it to maximum impact? It’s all the thinking that underlies the tools we choose and our strategies to exploit them to achieve the goals we want. It’s hard work, there are no shortcuts, and too often it is simply not done.
As had been said so many times before, “A fool with a tool/technology is still a fool.”
For years, I mean for most of modern day sales, we have been taught how to sell and pitch our products. The product has been at the center of all that is sales, and unfortunately, it’s a problem, and we need to stop.
It’s not that we haven’t attempted to move away from product-centric selling, leveraging terms like; Trusted Advisor, or Consultative Sales, or Solutions Selling, but the reality has been these approaches have been little more than window dressing, in spite of some of their promise.
Unfortunately today, we’re still using terms like the elevator pitch, and features and benefits. We’re still doing demos where we spend the majority of the time showing buyers all the cool, nifty features our products have. We request time with buyers to talk about our product and what we think it can do for buyers. We fill sales decks with useless company information about our number of years on the Inc 5,000 list or the year we were founded, how many employees we have and other self-absorbed, company-centric information. In spite of best efforts, too many sales organizations are still product-centric, turning out product-centric salespeople.
It’s time we flip the script for real. It’s time we truly dedicate ourselves to problem-centric selling. Problem-centric selling starts with the customers problem, not their product. Problem-centric selling understands that if there is no problem, there is no sale. It operates from the premise that people buy things to change, and they change because they can’t currently do something they want to do and/or are unable to achieve some ideal future state or outcome. Problem-centric selling starts with salespeople engaging with buyers to understand their buyers current business and technical environment in order to assess if there is a problem they can solve and how big the impact is on the organization if the problem isn’t solved. Problem-centric selling starts with questioning if they (the seller) can even help the buyer. It starts with truly understanding what is happening in their buyer’s world, why the current state is unacceptable, and the outcomes they want to achieve. Problem-centric selling starts with salespeople qualifying the problem, not qualifying the buyer. Problem-centric selling asks; is the problem big enough? Can I solve the problem? Can I solve the problem well and what happens when I solve it?
Problem-centric selling isn’t about pushing products or selling stuff. It’s not about espousing “value propositions” and elevator pitches. That’s product-centric selling. Problem-centric selling is putting the buyer’s problem(s) center stage and asking a few very simple questions. Does this buyer have a real problem? Can I solve the problem and if so, what impact will it have on the organization if I do? Once those questions are answered, then and only then do you start to discuss your product in terms of how it could deliver on the desired outcomes.
It’s time to move the product out from the center of the selling process and replace it with the problem. Products are useless if there is no problem to solve. People don’t buy products, they buy outcomes.
When I first began selling, nervous doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt about sales prospecting.
Picking up the phone to call leads that didn’t know who I was, to pitch them on why they should hand over their hard-earned money in exchange for my product, was enough to make my stomach turn in my early days of sales prospecting.
But as with all things in selling... enough practice, the right training, guidance and a willingness to learn & experiment will help you push past the nerves and build a habit of regularly executing on the critical actions throughout your sales process. Your approach to sales prospecting should be no different.
Now, before we dive into our step-by-step approach to revamping your sales prospecting efforts, let’s cover a few key questions we’ve long fielded from readers when it comes to sales prospecting…
What exactly is sales prospecting?
Sales prospecting is the process of searching for prospective customers or clients from your pool of leads, with the goal of identifying qualified potential buyers that can move through your sales process and convert into paying customers for your business.
Sounds pretty simple, right? While the concept of sales prospecting is pretty straightforward, it’s much more nuanced (and individualized) in practice.
What’s the difference between a lead and a sales prospect?
Leads come first, sales prospects second.
Put simply, a sales prospect is a qualified lead.
While a lead is less likely to convert than a sales prospect, once that lead makes it through qualification during your sales process, they can then become a sales prospect—with a higher likelihood of converting into becoming a paying customer. Here’s a visual to illustrate:
How about the difference between lead generation efforts and sales prospecting activities?
We’ve established that by definition, lead generation comes before interacting with sales prospects (since a sales prospect is a qualified lead).
Lead generation, typically a process that’s driven more by marketing, represents both inbound and outbound efforts to gather leads—potential customers—who’ve expressed interest in your product or services through actions like visiting your website, subscribing to blog content, joining a course or downloading an eBook.
Progressing naturally, sales prospecting activities tend to be much more warm than lead generation, and are directed toward efforts that are intended to convert your existing leads into paying customers. Sales prospecting activities include outbound calling and emailing to your leads, with hopes of nurturing them into becoming buyers.
To help navigate this ultimate guide to sales prospecting for higher quality leads, we’ve included a hyperlinked menu—so that you can quickly click and jump down to the section of this guide that’s most relevant to where you’re at today in your sales prospecting.
5 easy steps to sales prospecting for higher quality leads
Without further delay, let’s get into it our ultimate guide to sales prospecting!
1. Research, qualify and prioritize your leads.
At this stage in your prospect research, the ultimate goal is to determine the quality of your leads—and gauge (on an individual basis) whether or not they appear to be a strong potential sales prospect that’s worthy of your time and effort to proceed with attempting to close the sale.
Step number one in the research phase, is doing a quick internal qualification check to make sure your leads tick all the major boxes of criteria you’ve set (as a sales team) to identify the most common qualities of strong potential buyers.
Important note: Run through these qualification questions before reaching out and starting conversations with your leads, in order to better prioritize your outreach efforts—some you’ll want to quickly connect with, and others you’ll immediately rule out.
10 quick qualification questions you need to answer right away.
How well does this lead match your ideal customer profile?
Are they in one of the key geographic areas you service?
What’s the size of their organization? (Revenue, # of customers, # of employees)
What’s the size of the relevant department you’re selling to?
Are they in an industry that’s a good fit for using your product or service?
Are they currently using a competitor product? If so, which one?
Have they already expressed an interest in buying your product?
Does their use case align with the way your product should be used?
How long have they been in business?
What would automatically make them a bad fit for your product?
Answering these questions—quickly and to the best of your ability—about your leads will force you into doing a bit of research, and will make doubly sure you’re capturing the most relevant data during your lead generation efforts (or inbound sign up process) moving forward.
Researching your leads.
Often the most reliable source of information, data and insights about your leads will come from, well… your leads themselves. What are they already telling you about their business?
Are you capturing the right data points on your leads when they sign up on your website? Are your business development reps gathering the information you need in order to adequately qualify your sales prospects? First and foremost, make sure both your inbound and outbound lead generation efforts are aligned with providing the answers you need.
Inevitably though, there will be gaps in your research—no matter how successful your lead generation campaigns are at collecting the right information.
To fill those holes, utilize technographic research tools like Datanyze to identify any competitive products your lead may be using. Leverage platforms like Crunchbase and AngelList to pick up key data points on company size, funding rounds and investors.
For even more (free & affordable) products and services you’ll want to employ during your sales prospecting efforts, check out all of the other tools we recommend at the end of this guide.
Prioritizing (and lead scoring).
After running through your list of quick qualification questions, you should have two clear buckets of leads—those who’ve been disqualified as not a good fit, and those who may be qualified sales prospects.
Now, because your time is limited, it’s incredibly important to prioritize the order in which you reach out and start conversations with leads. Otherwise, you can spin your wheels chatting with lukewarm prospects while your hottest leads grow cold and choose a competitor product.
In some cases, it’ll be obvious that a sales prospect needs to be elevated to the top of your list—if they’ve made it through your first round of qualification, have viewed your pricing page twice and have clearly already expressed interest in wanting to buy.
That’s where lead scoring comes into play, with the goal of ranking prospects and advancing your highest-value leads (and most likely to close) quickest through your sales process.
The most effective way to create a basic lead scoring system is by using data from your past leads—especially those who’ve become customers—to assign value to your existing ones.
Which qualities of your customers contributed most to them purchasing?
Which of these characterizations do your customers share in common?
What do your leads that rarely convert share in common with each other?
Then once you've taken a look at the historical data from both of these groups, you can decide which attributes should be weighted heavily (and assigned value) based on how likely those characteristics are to suggest they’d be a good fit for becoming a customer.
Here at Close.io, we automatically place a higher lead score on new trials that sign up from one of our top five countries where we’ve historically acquired the highest number of ideal customers. Other factors like team size, annual revenue and referral source also play into how a lead is scored—and how quickly our sales team subsequently reaches out.
You’ll also want to incorporate a lead’s implicit behavior through their activities like:
Viewing the pricing page on your website
Downloading a particular eBook from your blog
Opening or clicking on a sales emails (and the number of opens or clicks)
Your ability to properly score leads will directly impact the close rates for your sales team—when you spend more time on only your best leads, that’ll generate more conversions.
2. Identify the key decision-maker.
Yeah, I know… this isn’t your first rodeo.
It seems obvious that you don’t want to waste your valuable sales prospecting time on conversations with low-level managers that won’t be able to make an ultimate purchasing decision on your product.
However, it’s often easier said than done finding and connecting with the right decision maker at your prospect’s organization after you’ve qualified the company.
If the lead came inbound to your website and filled out a form or started a trial, that’s a strong positive signal that the individual who signed up could be your decision-maker, but not necessarily. Historically, what role does your typical decision-maker hold? Take a look at the trends to identify any insights you can to help support your prioritization.
And when you don’t yet have enough experience to point toward the types of roles your ideal decision-makers hold within prospect organizations, think about the end user of your product (the person who’s likely most motivated to champion the purchase) and make your best guess based on your product’s price point.
If the expense is less than say $100/mo to your prospect, any motivated member of the right team may be able to initiate the purchase themselves without going through levels of management approval. On the other hand, if you’re selling a longer-term engagement or higher-priced product, you’ll likely need to move up the chain of command to a director or department head for ultimate sign off on a pricier deal.
Either way, once you’ve identified the role your ideal decision-maker holds at your sales prospect’s company—it’s time to put your research cap back on.
My favorite (free) tools for finding the name and email address of a sales prospect is a simple combination: LinkedIn and their Sales Navigator for Chrome extension.
Thanks to to LinkedIn’s advanced filtering capabilities, you can enter a specific role title in the search bar, select to display only people with that (or similar) positions, and further narrow results by seeing only people with those roles at specific companies.
Here’s an example of viewing marketing directors at Google:
Once you’ve identified the person you want to start a conversation with, it’s time to track down their email address.
You can start with trying tools like Hunter.io and RocketReach to do a quick spot check and see if your prospect’s email address is easy to track down from one of those two databases.
But when the email search tools falls short, turn to the free Sales Navigator for Chrome extension. Once installed, it’ll add a new sidebar inside of your Gmail account that looks like this:
Now, when you type in a suspected email address for someone you want to reach out to, and hover your mouse over it, the Sales Navigator sidebar will populate a bunch of information about the person right there in your inbox—if this email address is at all connected to their LinkedIn account.
If the sidebar appears and pulls in what looks to be the right person's photo and description, you've got the right email address.
Cycle through testing the most popular email formats and verifying with Sales Navigator.
first@company.com
first.last@company.com
firstlast@company.com
firstinitiallastname@company.com
firstlastinitial@company.com
Nine times out of ten, you’ll get their email address in less than thirty seconds of this cycle and it'll be in one of the above formats.
If you’re not able to verify their email address with this method, find them on Twitter to see if they have contact information (or chase a link to their website from either Twitter or LinkedIn that might have their contact info).
As a fallback method I use when Sales Navigator doesn't populate the right information, I'll hover my cursor over their email address and see if they've connected a Google Plus account to the address. If they do, it'll look like this right here:
When all of these methods of finding your prospect’s email address don’t produce results, move onto the next best point of contact that has a likelihood of being a possible decision-maker in the name of keeping the ball rolling quickly.
And while it’s also fine to start your conversation with a sales prospect who isn’t a decision-maker in their organization, you’ll want to quickly breach the subject of involving someone else on their team who may need to join the conversation in order to make a final decision.
3. Reach out and schedule a meeting.
Persistence is the name of the game in sales prospecting.
Whether it’s over email or on the phone, committing to ambitious activity goals for the number of qualified prospects you start conversations (and follow up) with each day, will be the backbone of a strong pipeline for the days, weeks and months to come.
And depending upon the value of the product or service you’re selling and the lead’s score, the immediate goal of your initial outreach could be to do anything from quickly ask for the sale (lower priced offer), to building a relationship, establishing a need or asking to schedule a meeting and evaluate next steps together.
Either way, your #1 objective is to follow up with every qualified sales prospect until there’s a clear yes or no on the deal.
Dealing in maybe’s will lead to the eventual demise of your business. Always seek clear answers and learn to love the no, since it’s a hell of a lot better than ambiguity.
Providing upfront value as a means of standing out.
Most of all when sales prospecting, it’s your job to think about how you can stand out from the dozens of other salespeople showing up in your decision-maker’s inbox or on the phone each week.
You’ve only got one shot at making a first impression—and that relatively cold email template your prospect’s seen 13 different variations of this week isn’t exactly going to instill confidence in your abilities to deliver a useful product.
So, how can you best provide value to your decision-making sales prospect before opening up a line of communication with them? Well, in my experience selling products and services in the four to five-figure range, a personalized touch can go a long way.
Leaning into your (and your company’s) core competencies, think about some of the ways your sales prospect would likely want to receive value—what’s important to them?
Can you get them featured in a story you’re writing your company’s blog?
Do you have a referral you could send their way to help drive them more business?
How about a mutually beneficial partnership or joint marketing effort to start with?
Strive to look beyond just a “recommendation” styled email that can conveniently be solved by purchasing your solution; people who’ve been in business long enough to become a decision maker will see straight through that tactic.
On the flip side, when your conversation starts by letting them know about a cool thing you just did for them, rather than jumping straight into selling, your chances of building a meaningful relationship go up significantly.
Scaling your outreach to sales prospects.
If you’re managing a decent volume of sales prospects, then it’s crucial to employ the right tools to help make sure conversations don’t fall through the cracks, and that you’re not missing out on potentially lucrative deals because you’re not sending enough emails or making enough calls each day.
We built our email sequences feature here at Close.io to specifically solve for this challenge—our own sales reps were getting more inbound leads than they could follow up with each week, so we launched a feature to help automate your sales emails.
In just a few clicks, you can enroll your leads in an automated drip series of natural looking emails that’ll be delivered (from your actual email account) to your sales prospects over the course of days or even weeks—designed to encourage them to hit reply and keep the conversation going with you one-on-one.
4. Educate and fully qualify your prospect’s needs.
At one point or another, we've all probably been sold something we didn’t really need (or necessarily want all that much) and lived to regret the purchase.
Well, at least I have… In fact, I can still remember the name of the salesperson that pitched me hard on implementing an advanced marketing automation suite of tools, despite not actually being a good sales prospect for that company.
At the time, my blog was still in its infancy with practically zero readers, hardly any subscribers and only a couple of paying customers. The last thing I needed, was to automate a bunch of marketing processes I hadn’t even learned, built out, tested or optimized with my slowly growing community.
Yet still, that didn’t stop this talented salesperson from getting me excited about all the possibilities I’d unlock with their ($250/mo) tools. And as a result of being gullible enough, I was convinced I had to have this marketing automation software. Then, I churned after just 3 months—the minimum contract period I’d committed to.
Don’t close bad-fit sales prospects. It’s negative for customers and your business.
It’s your job to take responsibility for bringing in only customers that’ll benefit from using your product (or service)—and are ready to start doing that today.
So now that you’ve made contact with your sales prospect, the goal at this stage is to take a final pass at truly qualifying their needs for their specific use cases, and to make sure there’s a mutual fit for the prospect to become a happy customer.
This time however, the qualification process is much more hands on, in-depth and should be based on a back and forth conversation, rather than your initial upfront research (the former of which can often be informed by a number of assumptions about the prospect).
Whether you’re having a discovery call with your sales prospect over the phone (remember, Close.io has intelligent built-in calling), through video conferencing software like Zoom, or in-person at their office, it’s crucial to prepare in advance and come to the table with a clear set of objectives you want to accomplish on the call.
Working backwards from what it’ll take to close the sale, what are the key questions you still need answered (or verified) in order to validate that your sales prospect is indeed a good-fit customer?
There are four key areas you want to focus on with your qualifying questions.
Customer profile.
How well does the sales prospect match your ideal customer profile? How big is the company? What industry are they in? Where are they located? Does their ideal use case fit how your product should be used? Which tools have they tried in the past? What kind of ecosystem are they playing in?
For example, when we’re qualifying sales prospects for CRM, we ask how many leads they usually have in their pipeline. If it's less than 100 a year, we recommend not buying our software and instead just using a CRM spreadsheet or similar scaled back (free) solution.
Believe it or not, B2B sales is fundamentally no different to what’s happening in a B2C sales setting—at the end of the day, you're selling to people, not companies. It stands to reason that you have to know how to fulfill their wants and needs.
Make it your mission to confirm with your sales prospect, which specific results they want to achieve (that can be directly impacted by employing your product or service). Beyond that, how will those results affect them individually, their team and their company?
The better you’re able to illustrate realistic positive outcomes at all levels, the stronger their case for choosing to buy.
Decision-making process.
How does your prospect’s organization make decisions? How many people are involved? Which departments are involved? What's their typical buying process like? How much time does it takes them to buy a product? When do they plan to buy?
The larger the company, the longer their purchasing cycle often is, and the more stakeholders are typically involved in the decision-making process.
For example, some companies have a 12 month (or even longer) purchasing process. If you need to close deals in three months or less in order to make your unit economics work, that sales prospect is no longer a good fit for you.
Competition.
Who are you competing against for the sale? Which other vendors have they worked with in the past? Are they evaluating your solution vs. building their own solution right now? What are the criteria they’ll base their purchasing decision on?
If you can gather clear answers to all of these questions, you'll have a great idea of whether or not your sales prospect is fully qualified or not.
Our advice? Create a simple, one-page document that lists all the crucial questions you want to ask or the information you want to elicit. Grab our B2B qualifying questions and get started today.
Qualification is all about asking questions and eliciting the right information from your sales prospect. Get started by downloading our free list of the 42 most important B2B qualifying questions.
Couple that with the fact that 92% of salespeople report giving up on a sales prospect after hearing four “no’s,” and we’ve got a lot of missed opportunities sitting on the table—just because reps aren’t asking early and often enough for the sale.
To be clear, these statistics don’t mean every one of your sales prospects is just four “no’s” away from turning into a “yes,” but the point is that sales is often a long game, but once you’ve fully qualified a prospect, then there’s no reason they shouldn’t buy.
Addressing (and overcoming) your prospect’s objections.
More often than not during your call with a qualified sales prospect, you’re going to field some tough questions—objections about the limitations of a particular product feature, protest about your pricing, and any number of other common sales objections.
You need to show up prepared, with readily available answers to the most common objections your prospects typically bring up, like:
I don’t have the time to do this right now
Implementation will be too complex or difficult for our team
Your product is too expensive
Please just email me more information
And other more industry-specific challenges or questions
When you improvise and try to answer your prospect’s objections on-the-fly without a clear foundation, the quality of your answer will depend heavily upon your mental state in the moment—which isn’t a practice you want to make a habit of.
If you’re on a call with a sales prospect, and they clearly express interest in your product, but push back immediately on the pricing as being too far above their budget, you could respond with an answer like:
“I understand. You know what, I actually had two other customers like you recently who were unsure about the price at first. But what they found was… ”
"Oh really? If you don’t mind me asking, how are you coming to the conclusion that the product is too expensive?"
"Is the price point a cash flow issue, or a budget issue?"
“Let’s explore some creative strategies for fitting this into your budget.”
"Ok, I understand. Is there a part of the product you don't need that we might be able to carve out in order to work on the price a little bit?"
Each of these answers you could give to the general objection of “high” pricing, will seek to uncover different underlying reasons for that objection coming up in the first place. You’ll be able to address some of these underlying factors, while others you may not.
Still, it’s your job to prepare for meeting every major sales objection that’s come up with deals you’ve both won and lost over the years.
Build a list of these common objections, write down concise answers to each of them, get feedback from the rest of your team until they feel strong enough to walk into any meeting with a sales prospect, and you’ll be well on your way to winning more deals.
Then all that’s left is… asking for the sale.
As Steli so often shares when delivering talks and trainings around the world, “The biggest mistake salespeople and founders often make, is not asking for the sale.”
This is natural. Even those who’ve been selling for years, often wait too long to ask for the sale. And for that reason, many of us miss out on opportunities to close more deals.
While it’s tempting to avoid any possibility of rejection, this often translates into waiting until we feel there’s a guaranteed yes, before proposing the question of whether or not your sales prospect is ready to buy.
The right time to ask for the close is, before you think they’re ready.
If you’ve done a good job of fully qualifying your sales prospect, meeting their biggest objections and still believe they’d be a good fit for becoming a customer, then you need to ask for the sale if they haven’t already done so.
Now, this often catches even the most qualified (and excited) sales prospects off guard, so brace yourself for an initial “no.” However, they likely won’t have a crystal clear reason not to buy when they’re already convinced of the value your product will provide them.
To kick start that conversation, you could say something like, “It seems like you’re are a great fit. I’ve shown you how our product can solve your problems. Are you ready to buy?”
If you get an initial “no,” then follow up with the question, “Ok, then what’s the process we would need to go through in order to get you ready to buy?”
This approach shows your sales prospect that you’re confident in your offer, and clearly shows that you want to work with them on getting to where a “yes” makes sense for both parties involved. Plus, any under-the-surface objections they were still hiding will immediately come to the surface, to be dealt with once and for all.
Bonus: 7 game-changing sales prospecting tools to accelerate your your qualification efforts
To further increase your speed to lead qualification (and prospect management process), consider employing these incredibly useful tools at various different stages of your sales prospecting journey.
1. A CRM that matches your needs.
Naturally, we’re fanatics about employing the right CRM in your sales organization—that’s why we decided to build Close.io (with the goal of helping every SMB and startup double their sales productivity).
And aside from the obvious benefits of using a CRM for things like scaling your email outreach beyond what you’re able to type and send in Gmail, keeping a close pulse on every deal in your pipeline, and setting follow up reminders—employing the right CRM for the stage your business is in today, can unlock massive productivity gains for your team.
Before deciding on which CRM is best for your company, take a hard look at your existing sales process… Which activities do your reps perform on a daily basis? Are they sending a high volume of emails, or making calls all day? How many leads are being managed at a given time? How much can you afford to allocate to a CRM today?
What really sets Close.io apart from the rest is the intense focus on sales productivity—that is, doing everything we possibly can to gear the product around helping salespeople to sell more products.
Here’s what makes Close.io different from other CRMs on the market:
Built-in calling means your sales reps never need to leave Close.io to make calls, log notes, update the lead status and set follow up reminders (with as few clicks as possible) all while still on a call. Our calling software is also packed with automated and predictive dialing, which eliminates the need to ever manually dial numbers again, and dramatically cuts down the amount of time they’ll spend listening to dial tones, voicemails or answering services.
Automated email sequences can be customized across team-wide or private email templates to automatically deliver a series of nurturing emails designed to warm your leads up and encourage a reply to your outreach efforts—at scale without all the manual back & forth. This’ll help you qualify more leads in less time.
Simple and robust reporting with a constant eye toward tracking your team’s most important metrics and insights to help move the needle on closing more deals. Our sole purpose as a company is to empower your team to close more sales—and our reporting, focused on starting from a pipeline level view, has the ability to zoom down and review the details of an individual deal, monitor sales rep performance and spot potential soft spots within your sales process.
That being said, we know that we’re not the only CRM on the market, and there’s an entire ecosystem of products out there that may be a better fit for you to leverage, with varying feature sets designed to achieve different specific goals.
Salesforce: Great for enterprise-level organizations that need tons of features, complex integrations and functionality (and have the budget to support that).
Copper: Very useful as a limited CRM for email-focused sales organizations that overlays on top of Gmail and works seamlessly with all products in the G Suite.
HubSpot: Primarily used for contact and pipeline management, HubSpot’s CRM functionality can be a good (no-frills) starting point if your company already uses HubSpot’s marketing automation tool suite.
For more advice on how to choose the right CRM for your unique needs (yes, even if that means not using Close.io), check out our guide to choosing the best CRM for your small business.
As we covered above in the researching section of this sales prospecting guide, LinkedIn and their Sales Navigator Chrome extension can be massively useful free tools when it comes to researching your prospects, learning who the company’s key decision-makers are in your target department and for gathering more general details about a company to help further qualify the prospect.
Hailed as the leading technographics provider, Datanyze helps (primarily B2B companies) apply their unique technology platform to help identify the different tools, products and online services a company is currently using, thus enabling you to better target the right prospects. On top of technographics, Datanyze also packs powerful data enrichment and predictive analytics tools to help learn more about every lead that enters your pipeline.
This platform is widely recognized as the premier destination for discovering industry trends, investments, and news about literally hundreds of thousands of public (and private) companies from around the world. It’s a one-stop shop for gathering key up-to-date details about a company’s size whether you’re selling to startups, Fortune 500s or anything in-between.
Originally launched in 2010, AngelList began as just an online introduction board for tech startups that needed funding. Since then, it’s grown to become a very powerful website for learning more about startups and investors—including the ability to quickly see which roles companies are currently hiring for (often a leading indicator of potential upcoming changes in the company’s tech stack, signaling a selling opportunity).
Quickly scanning through a prospect’s Twitter stream will give you an idea of the topics they clearly care about, an idea of their communication style, and you can get a jump-start on building the relationship by engaging with them beforehand more casually. On a more granular level, you can even utilize Twitter’s advanced search feature to sift through all of their public tweets to see if they’ve ever mentioned our brand or asked a question about a competitor product.
Datafox is company intelligence platform that helps you find and prioritize your target companies (with the goal of sourcing more qualified opportunities). Their database is built on 219,000+ hours of data science engineering and an army of white-glove analysts who’ve worked hard to help you set and forget your CRM data management (i.e. automatic updates to lead, contact, and account-level data in real-time), so that you can focus on selling based on what’s happening today.
And that's a wrap!
Still have sales prospecting questions?
Share with us below in the comments and we'll weigh in on any of your biggest sales prospecting challenges.
There is a lot discussed about how sales and selling has changed over the years, be it the tech around sales, social attitudes changing what is acceptable and what no longer works due to many factors. What is lacking is a discussion about how sales should improve, not only functionally, but how the profession is perceived and valued and contributor to corporate success and social progress.
When you look at sales from any number of angels, be that level of pay, importance in corporate success, leadership, and more; sales rank up there with other key roles functions and professions critical for success. But there is one essential difference between Sales, and many of the other folks around the leadership table, specifically, many of the others have professional designations. Not only that, but they actively have to maintain that professional designation through a regiment of ongoing education to keep practicing their professions. Continuing professional education is not a foreign concept to most trades/professions, but it is in sales. Why?
While the landscape is changing, the challenge goes further back than just continuing education and starts with almost no education at all. Even with the many universities beginning to offer programs for people wanting to pursue a career in sales, it still lags others functions, especially when taken to a degree level. This trend in post-secondary education for sellers is a step in the right direction, but just a tiny step. The immediate challenges are the nature of the programs, and what happens when they graduate and set loose on the buying public.
While there is no one size fits all, it is crucial that schools avoid going too far down the academia rabbit hole at the expense of real-world experience, sticking to case-based learning that includes human studies, business process, and serious periods of corporate internship. It is a small start, and it fails to address the bigger open-ended question and reality: what happens when they graduate and are set loose on an unsuspecting public?
Look at accountants, architects, financial service professionals, real estate agents, and almost all other professionals who have who have a chance to mess up their customers, is licensed, and required to continue to learn to maintain its license and right to practice. Real estate is an interesting example, has a financial layer and a sales layer. At a minimum, (and often it is just the very minimum), the public has some sense that this person had to meet some criteria to practice their profession; and that because there is a licensing body, the buyer has recourse, and the sell is accountable for their conduct.
Many will argue that there is already a good process in place for continuing education in B2B sales. Look at all the programs available, look at all the trainers, experts, consultants, rock star pundits; there is no shortage of professional education for sellers. The deficit is, not the supply. While many of the leading companies do indeed offer training, with many having annual reboots and refreshers, but these serve a purpose that is not always the same as intended by governing bodies.
While the implementation of a licensing structure may deliver an initial shock to the system, it will also serve as a new foundation that the profession can build from to rebuild itself in a much stronger way. There is always a question of what to do with nonproducers, seems to be a topic in Q4, and my response continues to be to fire that 30% – 50% of the team who not only underperforms but does it knowingly and intentionally, but most sales managers/leaders will not, you can speculate as to why. What’s worse, is that the lack of commitment and actions that reflect that by the salesperson, is not limited to how they execute the sale, it extends to how they view the customer, how they will act with customers, and the impact on your company’s reputation long after they leave.
As a senior sales leader, a set up like other professions have could have many positives. Not the least of which is the ability of the customer to know that they are dealing with a professional who does have to adhere to some standards other than achieving quota at all cost. And if not, if customers happen to run into some salespeople like our recent stories about Canadian telcos, they would have an option. Companies would also benefit from improved skills, standards, and reduced headcount.
But if for no other reason, it would ensure that customers not only have a view of sellers and vendors that is different than the current picture:
Vendors focus on providing material that buyers don’t find very useful or trustworthy
Vendors overemphasize selection criteria that aren’t important to buyers
Buyers don’t trust all vendor claims, nor do they expect to
Buyers want hands-on experience with the product and insights from customers
Vendors have an arsenal of satisfied customers they aren’t leveraging
The B2B Buying Disconnect – TrustRadius 2017
But that it would change the nature of the conversation in a way that not only saves money for everyone involved but leads to faster and cheaper buy/sell cycles.
Other benefits would include familiarity with basic sales tech, as in other professions; including a critical business thinking module would just be a breath of fresh air for all. While some in the stack may lament the decreased number of seats they will sell, the savvy will quickly see the opportunity, and the resulting shake out in the sales tech field will lead to more innovation through greater competition.
A fintech startup is giving cash rewards for consumers who sign up for its account and then take active steps to improve their financial health.
Status Money is pioneering a novel approach to personal financial management, effectively sharing some of the referral money with customers that it collects from suggesting credit cards or personal loans.
The startup is one of the first to introduce techniques more akin to video games into the personal finance arena. JPMorgan is among other firms considering similar moves.
A startup plans to pay you for opening a credit card with a lower rate. Or moving your money into a higher-yielding savings account. Or using a coupon at your favorite retailer.
The service is the brainchild of Status Money, a relatively new player in an industry led by larger firms like Mint or CreditKarma that recommend credit card offers, high-yield savings accounts or online personal loans within free personal finance software. In return for sharing their data, consumers get access to offers. The tech companies receive what is effectively a referral fee.
Status' rewards program, months in the making, aims to share some of that fee with users and also persuade them to improve their financial health in other ways that don't necessarily mean revenue for the startup, according to Majd Maksad, one of its founders.
"This is the first program in this space that gives people cash rewards," Maksad said. "These aren't points or some weird currency, this is real money."
Status and other firms are positioning themselves at the nexus of two prevailing global trends: the growing use of technology that's spitting out vast troves of data to mine for valuable insights and the drive to use behavioral economics findings to create policies to help persuade humans to be more healthy. Those suggestions may include nudging them to walk more, signing up for a retirement program at work or, as of Tuesday, paying them to move money into a higher-yielding savings account.
The aim isn’t entirely altruistic. Status’ rewards are likely to distinguish it from competitors and encourage people to engage more fully with the sales leads on its site. If successful, that would mean more user growth and higher revenue.
The product works like this: an individual receives $5 for opening an account (a badge on the homepage touts the cash value) and another $2 for linking various bank and credit bureau accounts. Users can then earn additional rewards by signing up for other financial products that Status recommends, or engaging in other activity on the site. Like a game, badges identify opportunities and encourage engagement.
That could mean signing up for things like a high yield savings account or refinancing a loan, and even managing a budget. It could mean using a coupon at your favorite retailer, delivering rewards on top of the savings. And the firm is even in talks with a daily deals site to offer additional rewards to nudge consumers into using that coupon for a restaurant or sightseeing cruise that they bought months ago.
Once $10 or more has been collected, Status allows user to withdraw the funds and drop them into a linked bank account. Some products may deliver $20 or more in rewards; there's no cap on the amount of rewards that can be earned and they don't expire.
The idea is to turn a traditional technology model on its head. Rather than simply monetizing the data it collects through bank accounts and credit files and offering a free service in exchange Status aims to return some of that value to consumers. And adds transparency around how it's being used. The firm doesn't sell data or share it with third parties.
"If I’m the consumer giving you data and information, why don’t I get a share of that?" Maksad said in an interview. "What we’re trying to do is create a more of a shared business model."
Maksad, the former head of decision management for Citigroup's digital payments group, founded Status with Korash Hernandez, a colleague from Citi who had left to become one of the first employees at Goldman Sachs's online lender, Marcus. They joined up in May 2016, raising $4 million in a seed round from AltPoint Ventures. The website was unveiled in September 2017 and there's now a mobile app for the more than 200,000 users.
From the beginning, the two data scientists aimed to separate themselves from the larger competitors by using machine learning to make smarter recommendations — delivering better leads to its partners — and to return real value to consumers.
The initial product was a dashboard comparing an individual's financial situation to peers based on factors such as address, age, or credit score. It delivers information about how they stack up to peers and, hopefully, persuades them to take action to save more or spend less, Maksad said.
"The equation between consumers and their tech companies is going to have to change," Maksad said. "There is no doubt in our minds that open data and financial transparency is coming. We want to be one of the ones to lead that change."
JPMorgan — the largest bank in the country – is also considering ways it can reward people for improving their financial health, CEO Jamie Dimon said in a July interview with Business Insider. The firm would provide incentives, like reducing loan costs, for lifting a credit score to a certain threshold, Dimon said. The bank is thinking about beta testing several tools around that idea, though it's unclear whether those would be tied to improving credit scores, financial education, or other things.
When talking about content marketing, people often think of blogging or maybe video and not much else. But the world of content is vast and varied, and there’s so much you can experiment with. Whether you’re running a fashion boutique website, a travel company, or a B2B technology company, try to think outside the box when it comes to your content and see what resonates with your audience. Here are just a few different types of content and how you can use them:
1. Blog Articles
Let’s start with the obvious! A blog article can be as short or as long as you like, as simple or as in-depth as you like. I’ve previously written an article about how to get started with business blogging, but the rules are generally simple: be consistent and produce content that your audience will want to read. When it comes to blogging, consider also guest blogging for other blogs that are relevant to your audience – that will help you spread awareness about your brand, and possibly gain some backlinks in the process.
2. Social Media
Yes, social media posts are a form of content! Whether it’s a Facebook post, an Instagram image, a GIF, a meme or a short video, all of these are types of content. Choose your social media channels wisely, and then create content that your audience will love and will want to share.
2. Email
Email newsletters, promotional emails, email reminders, email alerts for new blog articles and thank-you emails are all forms of email content and are opportunities for you to strike a one-to-one conversation with your audience. Don’t waste these interactions by having boring, generic emails, but use this space to inject some personality. For example, in your ‘thank-you for subscribing’ email, why not add a promo to a recent blog article, or an image thank entices readers to connect with you on social media? Much better than just a sentence saying ‘thank you for subscribing to our blog’ right?
3. Video & Imagery
It’s pretty obvious that video is a form of content, but did you consider that so is imagery? Every image on your website is a representation of your brand, and if correctly labelled, is a way for people to find you via search engines. So try to always use imagery that represents who you are as a brand and, if possible, avoid using stock or generic imagery. As for video, experiment with long and short videos to see what works best for your brand. Most people will tell you that a short video works best, as people’s attention spans are pretty low, but there are some instances where people don’t mind watching a longer video if it’s genuinely useful – like a how-to guide or an in-depth explanation of something complex.
4. E-Books & Whitepapers
An e-book is a fantastic way to present long-form content, and if designed well, it can be very engaging. A whitepaper is a more formal piece of content, which generally takes a deep dive into a relatively complex issue. Both of these content types are perfect for B2B businesses and can be a very successful way to communicate how your product/service solves a complex problem. Take a look at this article that explains why whitepapers are such a fantastic B2B content type.
5. Podcasts & Webinars
If you’re not comfortable creating videos, or you just don’t have the skills or resources required, then why not experiment with audio content instead? A podcast is audio only and usually available as a series that people can subscribe to. It’s a great way to communicate with your audience in a less formal environment, and the feedback will often feed in to future talking points. A webinar, on the other hand, also offers visual content. It’s a seminar conducted online, so, for example, you could host a how-to webinar where participants can view PowerPoint slides. This is usually held in a live environment where participants can also feedback and ask questions as they go along, and then made available to download.
6. Presentations
Yes, the humble PowerPoint presentation can be used as part of your content marketing. If you’re running many webinars and sharing insightful slides, you can then post these on platforms like SlideShare, which allow users to view, download and comment.
7. Infographics
An infographic is an engaging way to present information or data in a visual form, and can make something that would usually appear quite ‘boring’ into something more exciting. So, next time you’re thinking of writing an article about ‘the history of’ or ’10 ways to…’ consider turning it into an infographic instead. With so many design tools available online like Canva that help you create visually stunning infographics yourself, there’s no reason not to experiment and see how your audience reacts.
8. Case Studies & Press Releases
Next time you achieve client success, think about how you can present your case studies in a more engaging way. Perhaps you could turn the case study into an infographic? Or an in-depth e-book? Or maybe create some bespoke imagery to share on social media? Or perhaps a presentation on slideshare? Case studies are a fantastic way to showcase what your product/service can do for your customers, but often brands forget that these are pieces of content and they therefore need to be interesting, shareable and engaging. The same goes for press releases – often just a generic piece of company news that goes out on the newswires. All of these content types are opportunities for you to engage with your audience, so give them something engaging!
9. E-Courses
Have you ever considered an online course as a piece of content? Well it can be. If your company is particularly skillful in a specific area, then why not provide an online course for people to subscribe to? In return, they’d receive a badge or certificate that they can showcase as an example of their expertise in that area. This is a fantastic way to attract a new audience and highlight why your brand is the top choice. One of the best examples of this is Hubspot, who have really led the way when it comes to inbound marketing, and offer various courses to complete for free.
10. Digital PR
Digital PR is all about placing your brand across relevant websites that your target audience is likely to interact with. This is an aspect of content marketing where you can get really creative, but first you need to know your audience. Start by writing a list of websites they are likely to visit, then think about creative content you can offer these websites – things like interviews, in-depth thought-leadership articles, lists, guides, results from research etc. In exchange, you’ll get your brand mentioned – which improves brand awareness – you’ll get a backlink – which improves your SEO- you’ll get referral traffic – which can lead to sales – and the list goes on.
So, when planning your content marketing for 2019, see how many of these you can incorporate and get creative with how you deliver your content. Good luck!
BlackBerry Inc. is making a play to integrate itself into smart cities and vehicles.
The Waterloo, Ont.-based technology company announced Monday that it has built a new service to provide infrastructure for vehicles and traffic lights to exchange information securely.
BlackBerry will waive the service fees for the product for automakers and public offices involved in smart city and connected vehicle pilots because it says the offering is necessary to ensure users can trust the validity of information received from other systems.
The service will first be used in conjunction with Invest Ottawa, which will use it for a 16-kilometre road autonomous vehicle test track resembling a miniature city, complete with pavement markings, traffic lights, stop signs and pedestrian crosswalks.
Speaking at a conference in Toronto, BlackBerry chief executive John Chen denied the service was meant to target Google, whose sister company Sidewalk Labs has been marred in controversy over its proposal to build a smart city in Toronto.
“I think we are doing things they would rather not do for free,” Chen said without elaborating around what those things are.
“We just want to secure communications. We want to let people control their own privacy, and the level and degree, so that when you decide you want to share… it is your explicit consent to share.”
Asked if technology companies rivalling BlackBerry are already too big to be reined in, especially when it comes to data and privacy, Chen said no.
“But if you cut off their ability to gather more data, then their data becomes stale, then the very big become meaningless,” he said.
Dealing with them, needs to be a public-private policy issue and can’t be one-sided, he added.
He has seen a “very big gap” between when technology becomes pervasive and when “policy people” enter discussions and raise concerns.
However, he said, “the gap needs to be minimized quite dramatically, but we shouldn’t let government policy drive technology.”
He called on Canada to adopt a better set of policies around data privacy and for individuals to think more carefully around how their data is used and their privacy can be compromised.
He pointed to mobile phones as an example, admitting he hasn’t turned the GPS on his BlackBerry “for obvious reasons.”
“Occasionally I can’t find my phone and I wish I had turned on GPS,” he said.
“I don’t want to know where the closest gas station is and I don’t want to give up my location, my private data for knowing where the gas stations are.”
China's export and import growth dropped more than expected last month.
Shipments to the US remained strong, however.
Economists say the trade data points to signs the economy is on course to further falter.
China's trade growth slowed sharply in November. And it may be just the beginning of troubles for the world's second largest economy.
Total exports grew 5.4% from a year earlier last month, the General Administration of Customs said Saturday, marking the slowest pace in eight months and less than half of the 15.6% increase in October. Economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast a 10% increase.
Import growth, meanwhile, dropped to 3% during the same period from 21.4% in the previous month. The slump was marked by decreased shipments of oil, as well as major raw materials like iron ore and coal.
"Trade growth slumped in November, pointing to a worsening economy in coming months," analysts at Nomura wrote in a recent research note, adding they expect growth the slow "significantly" by the second half of next year.
The trade numbers are just the latest in a string of recent data pointing to a slowing economy. As manufacturing growth slowed to a near standstill in the three months that ended in September, gross domestic product grew at its slowest pace in nearly a decade. And the Shanghai Composite has shed nearly a quarter of its value this year.
But aside from an apparent downswing in front-loading, or companies rushing orders to avoid further duties, there are few signs that ongoing trade tensions between Washington and Beijing were the culprit. In fact, Chinese shipments to the US rose at a slower pace but still grew 9.8% on the year in November and brought its monthly trade surplus to a record-high $35.55 billion.
The trade data instead appears to reflect a separate list of risks the Chinese economy faces, including mounting concern in the credit and property sectors and signs that economic growth is decelerating globally.
"It is worth noting, though, that while growth in exports also slowed, this reflected unflattering base effects and softer global growth rather than US tariffs," said Chang Liu, an economist at Capital Economics.
Still, a prolonged trade conflict could exacerbate the slowdown, noted HSBC economist Julia Wang.
"Ordinary exports outside of supply chains also held up strongly," she said. "But in the event that the tariff war drags on, there could be further impact on global growth, which could weigh on ordinary export growth in 2019."
Over the years as more new technology emerges and customers are able to easily do their due diligence, the number of companies not looking out for their customer’s best interest is on a decline. They are going out of business for their lack of or limited online reputation. Along with that, companies who are not leveraging this new technology are taking a dive as well. How can startups and large enterprises compete in the same space?
The great Warren Buffet once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
Long gone are the days where people could start a business, create a few videos and hide behind their website to make money. In today’s fast evolving world of business, the online sales cycle has more steps because consumers are more guarded. The more you are able to reach your desired audience the more likely they are to buy from you and not your competitor.
What Is Reputation Marketing?
Aside from traditional marketing, an emerging trend in digital marketing is known as reputation marketing. We’ve all heard of reputation management. You find an agency online who say they will manage your reviews, protect your brand’s presence when a customer Google’s the brand name and provide positive content that will overpower any negativity.
Where reputation marketing differs is that it’s a more proactive approach. By investing in building your brand’s authority, you become the source that people trust.
Building your brand’s authority is different for each business and market.
The best way to define brand authority is your brand’s perceived level of expertise, and with it comes many great benefits. It takes time to build, and there are no shortcuts, which is why it is a highly sought method in the digital consulting field.
Strategies For Marketing Your Brand’s Reputation
To consumers, marketing has obtained a bad connotation. They believe marketing involves spam messaging in their inbox, ads everywhere they go and some sleazy salesman always calling to sell them something they don’t want.
In reality, however, marketing is about educating the consumer on why you are the best solution to their problems. When implemented effectively, marketing won’t even seem like marketing, but rather communication.
Again, the world of online business is different these days because people have been burned in the past, and they are constantly reminded of it online with news stories, and Facebook feeds. In order to lower their guard, so they aren’t as defensive and willing to hear what you have to say, you have to be sincere.
In 2013, Boston Consulting Group conducted a study, revealing the fact that customers identified authenticity as one of the top qualities that would attract them to a brand. For millennials, authenticity was second to rewarding loyal customers with discounts. So what is classified as authentic in business? What drives it?
According to BCG’s Brand Advocacy Index (BAI), authenticity helps fuel success in today’s competitive markets as consumers search for greater meaning and sincerity from the brands they choose — fuelled by a desire to connect with things that feel safe, certain and unambiguous.
At its heart, authenticity is about practicing what you preach; being totally clear about who you are and what you do best. When a brand’s rhetoric gets out of sync with customers’ actual experiences, the brand’s integrity and future persuasiveness suffer.
A brand’s authenticity can be weighed by four main factors which are recognized for driving brand performance.
They are:
Brand Value: Filling a real need and being easy to buy or use.
Brand Virtue: Clarity of purpose, a unifying brand ideology, and sincere- consistent behaviors.
Brand Visibility: Meaningful engagement with your market, continued outreach to potential customers, and telling compelling stories.
For a better understanding of what makes a brand authentic and how to leverage the four branding factors that drive performance, if we take away other important aspects of BCG’s study which was a qualitative exploration and quantitive data model which identified key drivers of brand authenticity; we find the psychology behind an authoritative brand.
1. Brand Originality:
Ask yourself, “What has your brand brought that’s new or different to the market”? For your brand to be memorable by consumers and potential leads, your brand has to offer something that is unique or offered in a unique way. Which is why brands that can distinguish themselves from the competition and bring something new to the abe are much more likely to be remembered and to be perceived as authentic.
2. Brand Utility:
To what degree does your brand deliver real utility to its users? Providing a high level of personal utility means consumers are more likely to engage with your brand. Companies must clearly convey what utility is provided to their users.
3. Declared Beliefs:
People buy from people, not brands. What does your brand stand for aside from making money? Who are the people behind the screen? Consumers are willing to spend money on brands they like, but they also need to feel they are not just throwing money into a money machine.
Instead, they need to identify with the human element within companies and feel as though your brand has values and beliefs beyond making a profit. What social responsibility does your brand declare? If your market is really targeted, you can declare what political party your brand is behind.
4. Brand Sincerity:
Again, sincerity is the new trend. A huge aspect of brand sincerity is taking the time to engage with customers, hear their concerns, and in some cases praise their results from using your product or service.
Companies that do this are of more value than companies that do not make an effort. Respond to positive reviews, sincerely, and thank each customer for their review.
Furthermore, brands that are able to take ownership of shortcomings and be forthright about their mistakes and convey perseverance to commitment in customer satisfaction will be perceived as more sincere. Which is why, after having a positive experience with a company, 77% of customers would recommend it to a friend.
5. Brand Familiarity:
Familiarity is about brand awareness and how well your brand is known by your market. The more recognizable you are, the more likely people trust you. Nielsen revealed that 60% of global consumers with Internet access prefer to buy new products from a familiar brand, rather than a brand they don’t recognize.
One crucial aspect of brand familiarity is digital marketing. Both paid and organic search are feasible ways to gain recognition online for every budget. Research and figure out exactly what questions your potential customers have and create quality content to appear in the major search engines through search engine optimization and pay per click advertising.
6. Brand Momentum:
Small companies with the appearance of becoming more popular can beat companies who have more recognition in the same space. A growing brand is an important one. Consumers often jump on bandwagons, but brand momentum represents what your company is now in addition to what it can become.
Consumers would rather get on board with a brand positioned to grow than one that is sinking, and because more companies are initiating some form of a customer loyalty campaign, by switching brands early, they feel they will be rewarded.
7. Brand Heritage:
Last but certainly not least. Again, people buy from people – and everyone loves a good story. Consumers form connections with brands who have relevant, engaging and sincere backstories.
A compelling story is more likely to draw people in and more likely to be perceived as authentic.
The Bottom Line: Marketing Your Brand’s Reputation Vs. Managing It
As the studies reveal, performance on core authenticity drives business performance. The stronger your brand’s core authenticity, the more likely people are to not only become buyers but advocates as well.
Brand advocacy increases your share of high-value customers in the market. This means that brand authenticity ties heavily into brand advocacy and vice-versa. For companies looking to implement a social media advocacy strategy, should pay additional attention to the level of authenticity that is associated with their brand and find new ways to increase it. The same applies to public relations and email marketing campaigns. Influencer marketing is another trend brands are leveraging, but many are failing to see success with it due to lack of sincerity.
In short, reputation management focuses more on asking customers for their feedback in hopes to provide a better experience and leverage positive insights as an asset for increased visibility and referrals, whereas reputation marketing recruits brand advocates through authenticity and authority without having to ask the customer for reviews or feedback.
Both are very powerful resources brands should be utilized in today’s marketplace. Applications for each will be different for each business, but what remains the same is that no matter what marketing you implement – be honest and be sincere.
When I work with my clients on Scrum in a Marketing context the discussion about the Marketing Backlog and how to move from a big bang marketing campaign to a more iterative approach via smaller slices of stories is naturally a key area we focus on.
In those discussions User Stories which are the most popular way to represent Product Backlog Items (PBIs) in the Agile world and are also very popular in the Agile Marketing space inevitably come up.
User Stories belong in Product Backlogs (Not Marketing Backlogs)
One thing we started to notice was that the User Story format and perspective is confusing some of the teams. Their stories talked about their product benefits and were very similar to stories you’d expect to see in a Product Backlog rather than a Marketing Backlog.
What’s the problem you ask? Well, the Marketing Backlog ISN’T a Product Backlog. The Product Backlog reflects everything that is known to be needed in the product. The Marketing Backlog reflects everything that is known to be needed for marketing the product/service.
What’s the problem with User Stories?
Ok, so the Marketing Backlog talks about marketing. What’s wrong with using User Stories to reflect Marketing Backlog Items (MBIs)?
Talking about Users isn’t serving us well. It gets Marketers thinking about the product/service benefits and not about the customer/buyer journey and how they want to influence it – which is what we want the marketing stories to be about!
Buyer Stories For The Rescue?
One tweak which helps marketers think about the right things is a switch from User Stories to Buyer Stories. These stories talk about the buyer’s journey and his/her perspective.
The format of Buyer Stories is still very similar “As a buyer I want to perform some activity so that some buyer journey goal”. Buyer reflects a specific persona going through the buyer/customer journey. the activity typically relates to research, consideration, comparing vendors, learning, pitching internally, checking social proof and the like.
The goal is a tricky one. Is it to solve the business problem and if so is it similar to the goal of the product/service we’re marketing? Is it to streamline my “job” as a buyer and minimize the risk I’m choosing the wrong product/service or taking too long to decide? I’m looking forward to experimenting with this a bit more in the trenches and see what makes sense.
Map the Journey with Story Mapping
Story Mapping, created and popularized by Jeff Patton, is one of my favorite techniques for working with agile backlogs. Story Mapping is a perfect fit when you’re trying to break a big marketing campaign/play into smaller slices. You look at the different stages of your buyer’s journey and then break down the big campaign/play into small pieces that fit into the different stages of the journey and prioritize them to carve out a Minimum Viable Campaign/Play.
From Buyer to Buyers (a.k.a Account-based Marketing) with Impact Mapping
Many marketers in the B2B or enterprise space are dealing with multiple buyers with different needs and jobs they’re trying to do. A technique that can help map what kind of impact they’re trying to have on the different players (or what kind of impact these players are trying to achieve) is Impact Mapping, created by Gojko Adzic. This technique can then help marketers identify the marketing deliverables that these players would need to achieve the desired impact on the purchase. This is another great way to refine a marketing backlog and emphasize that we’re interested in the impact on the purchase/buying journey rather than the impact that the product/service will itself have on the business.
Sometimes a Buyer Story IS a User Story
There can be an overlap when there are product capabilities that are needed in order to effectively market the product. Think “freemium version” or some other product/service capabilities that are requested by the marketers. But note these should be the result of identifying gaps/bottlenecks/weak spots in the way the funnel operates, not based on features asked for by customers or prospects.
YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary) – Inspect and Adapt what to put in your Marketing Backlog
This blog provides an example of how Agile Marketing isn’t exactly like Agile Development. If you are a marketer looking at Agile or you’re coming from the Product/Technology world and you’re helping marketers understand Agile and Scrum that’s something that is important to remember.
Yes, we’re still talking about empiricism, Sprints, Increments, timeboxes and Scrum Teams. But some areas like the definition of the “Product” are different. Some teams prefer to still use the term Product Backlog and consider their product to be the marketing impact. Other teams rename the Product Backlog to Marketing Backlog.
When it comes to what’s in these Backlogs – Luckily – User Stories aren’t mandatory in Scrum. They’re a complementary practice. Use them if they make sense. Use something else if it’s better. Mainly – experiment with something and remember to inspect how it’s going and adapt if needed.
Many of us make the mistake of treating LinkedIn as simply an online Rolodex or a glorified CV, rather than an inbound marketing channel that can be optimized for sales inquiries. That is a huge misstep. Find out how to turn your LinkedIn profile into a powerful inbound sales asset. Read the full article at MarketingProfs
Spruce up your sales with 12 days of content, beginning with Day 1:
Ninety percent of decision makers say they never respond to cold outreach. The modern buyer expects sales development reps to add value to their purchasing process, but many salespeople are ill-equipped to make it happen. With so much competition in the market and so many vendors offering similar products and services, value differentiation can be difficult to prove.
Modern buyers are awash with information and content. Even if you’ve got fantastic persuasive materials to share, prospects may not give them the time of day if you can’t first create a strong rapport and establish key relationships in the buying committee. Our new Sales Academy guide, Mastering the Relationship Element of Prospecting, will provide you with a framework for succeeding with this foundational imperative.
Sales Development Hinges on Relationships
The job of a B2B salesperson is never complete. Modern reps need to target the full buying committee from start to finish, complete research to truly understand they buyer’s situation, and engage effectively from the first point of contact to the final sale. This isn’t new. In fact, over the years, the core fundamentals of sales haven’t changed much at all. What has changed is how we leverage information and connect with prospects.
Now more than ever, your success hinges on relationships.
The closer you can get to your prospects, the better you can understand their business, challenges, and goals — and guide them down the path to purchase.
Within our latest guide, you’ll find a modern prospecting framework, ways to find an engagement path, best practices for structuring your first call, and much more.
Embrace the Modern Prospecting Framework
For sales development representatives, relationship-building is the one area over which you have the most control. You can dictate how prepared you are going into a sale and how comfortable you are with your prospect’s business. Use this to your advantage.
As outlined in our new Sales Academy resource, the Modern Prospecting Framework consists of four steps:
Target
Research
Identify
Build Relationships
We’ll break down each to help you make the most of the prospecting process.
Understand the Psychology of Sales
Your ultimate goal as a sales professional is to connect. But if you can’t find a way to connect with a prospect’s emotional side, there’s a good chance they won’t hear you out.
You can learn more about what makes your prospect tick just by looking at their LinkedIn profile. Appeal to their emotions by starting a conversation around personal interests, school pride, or current events. Then, engage the logical side of their brain with insights, data, and rankings.
Mastering the relationship element of prospecting begins with meaningful connections. Within the guide, we break down ways to help you become more genuine in your interactions, while determining just how personalized you should get and how to tailor your approach with executives.
Structure Your First Call for Success
Like any first impression, your first call with a prospect is of the utmost importance. Before diving in, conduct research on the buyer, their company, their industry, and the market conditions.
We recommend following an effective call framework, listening intently to unearth your prospect’s true need, and keeping your discovery goals in mind. You’ll find it all laid out in the guide.
Make Lasting Relationships the Secret to Your Success
In today’s increasingly connected world, prospects don’t just want to be sold to; they want to get to know you and develop confidence in you. When modern decision makers know, like, and trust you, they’ll feel more comfortable building a long-term relationship with your brand.
Salespeople have the most control over the relationships they build. Take advantage of resources like LinkedIn Sales Navigator or LinkedIn Sales Academy workshops to make the most of every prospecting engagement.
Obtaining a ton of qualified inbound leads can be a blessing for your sales team – provided they are enabled and opportunistic enough to take advantage of them.
My former Ambition colleague Dan Nice once compared B2B sales and marketing teams to Allied Forces storming Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion.
Sales leaders serve as the generals and field commanders. Marketing provides the heavy artillery and air cover. Sales are the infantry looking to capture valuable turf. Each plays a critical role in the success of the overall mission.
In this follow-up to our Organic B2B Inbound Marketing Playbook, I teamed up with Outbound View owner Blake Johnston to break down the best practices for coordinating marketing and sales to convert your sales qualified leads to warm opportunities (and eventually deals).
Hire, Organize and Segment Your B2B Sales Team
You can’t storm beaches without people. And in this day and age of cutthroat competition, the War for Talent, and fast-evolving B2B sales and marketing environments, you need the best B2B sales and marketing professionals serving on your behalf.
Hiring for Your B2B Sales Team
Finding the right people on your team to handle inbound leads is critical, regardless of whether it be your outside sales team, inside sales team, sales engineers, or some hybrid role.
The best place to start looking for new hires? Your current top performers. A-players want to work with other A-players. Ask for recommendations for good new fits in each of your roles.
Organizing Your B2B Sales Team
Create a system of responsibility and accountability for owning inbound leads.
Decide whether you are going to delegate leads round-robin, by geography, by company size, by industry, or by some other data point.
Pro-Tip: Let your most qualified people handle dead-to-rights, highly qualified inbound leads, instead of handing them to new hires or less proven inside sales team members. The more complex the solution, the more your experienced people need to be handling these calls.
Pro-Tip: Do not over-segment your sales team. Too many startups try to over-engineer this process. If you aren’t getting a lot of inbound leads, simplify the process and make it easier.
Create a detailed standard operating procedure so reps know how and when to respond, when to qualify as an opportunity, and when/if to hand off to Account Executives.
Engagement
Defining terms of engagement for inbound leads means denoting when, how, and where a rep should respond to an inbound lead.
Technology provides multiple potential channels for response:
Website chat
Email
Phone
Social Media
Ideally, most if not all of these channels will be used to engage an inbound prospect. Moreover, multiple team members will engage the prospect.
For example, let’s say that a prospect inbounds via webform. Here are potential engagements your team can make.
Marketing shoots an automated follow-up email with more information about the product.
Sales Development Rep follows up with a manual email to set time for a demo.
Sales Development Rep connects with the prospect on LinkedIn.
Sales Development Rep reaches out by phone (if phone number is available).
Sales Development Rep scouts mutual connections on LinkedIn for potential referrals.
Tools like Outreach offer great ways to craft templated emails you can quickly customize and fire off when a fresh lead inbounds.
Qualification
Maintaining strict qualification standards assures that your reps’ time is not wasted talking to low-quality inbound leads. When a lead inbounds, it’s important to collect as much as insight as possible about the prospect so your reps can start pre-qualifying them immediately.
There are multiple ways to take command of the lead qualification process. A great tool to help you on this front is Drift, a conversational marketing platform that is built for SDRs and provides both the response speed and data insights that reps need to hold effective conversations that move prospects down the sales funnel.
Whether it’s by form, by conversation, or both, it’s important to start qualifying inbound prospects rigorously and early. Creating inbound SDRs (or MDRs, in some circles) who specialize in rapid inbound lead response and qualification are a great way to segment your sales team accordingly.
Handoffs
Once a lead has been qualified, it’s important to create guidelines for handing off the prospect to the proper Account Executive. A popular approach is to have an SDR handle the initial follow-up call or email, pre-qualify the prospect, information gather, and set a time for an introductory demo with the proper Account Executive.
The POD structure popularized by Jacco van der Kooj and executed to perfection by companies such as Outreach is a great organizational setup for smooth, consistent handoffs. However you structure them, you should map out clear instructions for your SDRs and AEs in a shared, comprehensive document and provide clear guidance and training for new reps during onboarding.
Effective follow-up to a qualified inbound lead starts with a behavioral and demographic data map – an instant snapshot of who the prospect is, how well they match the ideal client profile, and why they inbounded.
Here’s the key thing to know: the more comprehensive and accessible your buyer insights, the better your engagement, qualification, and handoffs.
To do so, we advise creating a checklist of everything you need to know about a prospect before reaching back out. Speed is critical, but being prepared is as critical.
Here are the three types of data insights valuable to your inbound lead conversion process.
Contact Data
Contact data is the foundation upon which all your buyer insights rely. The more points of access you have to a prospect (or an account), the more likely you are to hold a conversation, stay top of mind, and win battles versus competitors. Contact data can include:
Email Address
Office Address
Phone Number
LinkedIn Profile URL
Twitter Profile URL
Facebook Profile URL
Etc.
The point about contact data is that you should engage your buyer where they prefer to chat. Some may be inclined towards email. Others may insist on phone conversations. Others may be most responsive to LinkedIn messages. A solid inbound program will equip sales reps with the ability to quickly reach out to buyers via these various communication channels at a moment’s notice.
Demographic Data
Demographic data is a critical insight about both the person and the account inbounding to you. Personal demographic data points of note may include:
Name
Job Title
City
State
Department
Job Level
Shared LinkedIn Connections
Account-level data points may include:
Industry
Company HQ City
Company HQ State
Company Size
Technology Used
Revenue
Funding Raised
Recent New Hires
Department Budget
Competitor(s) Used
These are just some of the data points that could be relevant to your buyer qualification and their decision-making process.
The idea is to key in on the specific ones indicative of good fit for your product or service and helpful to your sales reps during their crucial initial conversations with the prospects.
Behavioral Data
Behavioral data attests to the main points-of-interest that drove the buyer to inbound.
Perhaps he or she:
Read numerous blog posts covering a specific pain point.
Downloaded a white paper discussing a key value proposition you offer.
Googled a specific search term leading to your website.
Checked out reviews from similarly-situated clients in the same role and industry.
These would all be relevant behavioral data points for your reps to have at their disposal during their initial conversation with the prospect. Using these insights, a rep could start purposefully guiding the conversation to a positive outcome, drill deeper into certain pain points, or reference social proof that would resonate strongly with the buyer.
Knowledge is power. And the beauty of modern inbound marketing is that both sides – buyers and reps alike – have more information about each other to hold meaningful conversations that efficiently move deals through the sales cycle.
All you need to capture these three levels of insights is a great marketing automation system (ala HubSpot) and a powerful sales intelligence tool (such as SalesIntel).
Warm inbound leads can invariably be further nurtured with great content.
It’s important to remember that – with more decision makers than ever participating in B2B deals – content can be the great equalizer that replaces additional conversations a rep might need to have that would slow down the sales cycle and open the door for competitors and other intervening obstacles to emerge.
To that end, we advise creating a content hub that gives reps instant access to relevant case studies, videos, and other collateral to send to the prospect.
Accessible
The most critical component of having a useful content library is making content easy for reps to access. If reps can’t reach it in 30 seconds or less, it may as well not exist.
To help support your inside sales team, we advise investing in a content management solution early in building your inbound sales team. At Ambition, Jeremy switched from a massive, unwieldy Google Sheet to Guru with great results – especially since his sales team lived in Slack and Salesforce. Airtable is another great option that offers seamless access to your content library.
Organized
Organizing your content library for rapid consumption goes hand-in-hand with making it accessible.
We broke down Guru into multiple sections for case studies, videos, product visuals, blog posts, reviews, press, and so forth. We also tagged individual pieces of content with references to industry, use case, role, and so forth so that reps could quickly find direct matches that fit their buyers’ situations.
This saves a ton of time for reps (and for marketing managers besieged with requests to source relevant content for a particular opportunity).
Cliff’s Notes
In addition to individual pieces of content, other sales-relevant content such as follow-up email templates, social post templates, battlecards, and so forth make for critical additions to any inbound content library.
It’s also helpful to create “Cliff’s notes” bullet-pointing the key takeaways, ROI stats, and such from each piece of content, so reps can get to know them without having to dig into the piece itself. A great reference point on how to do this is ClozeLoop’sCory Bray, who is a wizard at creating knowledge bases for sales.
Once you have delineated a clear inbound sales process, it’s imperative to create a transparent system of record to show how reps are performing and assess the overall quality of your process.
The starting point for creating a transparent system of record is your Customer-Relationship Management software, or CRM.
The benefit of previously-mentioned tools like Outreach and Drift is that they auto-log activity and engagement inside your CRM. They capture every call, email, social touch, meeting, and stage update and ensure that you have 100% accurate data inside Salesforce, HubSpot, or an alternative CRM you use.
Metrics
Establishing a transparent system of record starts with tracking the most pivotal metrics to your business, i.e., the ones directly tied to revenue creation.
These can include (but are not limited to) qualified inbound leads generated, calls, emails, conversations, LinkedIn messages, meetings set, meetings held, opportunities created, meeting-to-opportunity conversion rate, and so forth.
KPIs
Both marketing and sales should be held accountable to metrics corresponding to inbound leads generated, worked, and converted. Key performance indicators (or KPIs) are a great way to give reps S.M.A.R.T. goals and set clear benchmarks to hit. Tools like Ambition are a great way to track sales metrics and KPIs for your sales team publically, meaningfully, and in real-time.
We also believe in adhering to former HubSpot CRO Mark Roberge’s approach to incentivizing mutual accountability, namely by creating commission structures and quotas for marketing (based on qualified inbound lead generation and eventual revenue) and shared commission plans for sales.
Pipeline
Your inbound lead pipeline should be measured against outbound lead pipeline to assess where dollars and time investment should be spent.
If inbound leads dramatically outperform outbound leads in terms of close rate, deal size, and sales cycle length, then it’s time to pour gasoline on the inbound marketing fire. If there is little to no difference, or, if marketing is lagging behind sales on all 3 of these metrics, then it’s time to evaluate where there’s room for improvement in your marketing funnel and how you execute inbound lead conversion.
As we stated in the beginning, this guide goes hand-in-hand with our B2B Inbound Marketing Playbook, a great read for CMOs and CROs. We also highly recommend checking out the Aligned Course on Sales Hacker University, which contains 50 presentations on aligning B2B sales and marketing for maximum impact and is keynoted by Gary Vaynerchuk.
A channel partner training program is an important part of almost all partner programs. With the use of a partner portal, businesses can provide their channel partners with an integrated Learning Management solution (LMS). An LMS will deliver different training modules, that must be completed by their partners. A successful training program will provide partners with key aspects of the sale cycle; this should include marketing, sales and the technical knowledge of the product or service.
Unfortunately, channel partners are not always receiving the proper motivation to complete their training, leaving these training modules untouched and neglected. Channel partners represent the business they are selling for. Without having the proper knowledge of the sales cycle, untrained channel partners can potentially harm a business’s brands.
So, what can businesses do to encourage channel partners to complete the training programs provided to them? Provide them with the proper incentives.
Incentives are an important part of the channel partner program. With the help of incentives, your channel partners will be more motivated to complete your training modules. Once these training modules are completed, partners are likely to have a better understanding of the sales cycle, which will result in them becoming more effective channel partners. Some incentives that will help motivate channel partners to complete their training programs include:
Providing Channel Partners with Certifications
Creating a Channel Partner Training Competition
Motivating Channel Partners By Using a Point Based Syste
Provide Channel Partners with Certifications
Having channel partners complete their training can be a challenge. Since channel partners are probably selling for multiple vendors, they may not want to complete multiple training modules. You have to find a way to motivate your channel partners to choose to complete your training over other companies. One way to motivate your channel partners is to provide them with certifications for completing your training modules.
Typically, training programs are developed for channel partners without having a strategy in place that will motivate partners to complete these modules. When this occurs, it is likely that channel partners will claim that they already have the skills and knowledge to start the sales process without the completion of the training modules.
Introducing the training module alongside a certification that is required will help motivate your channel partners to complete their training without questioning you. Channel partners will want to attain these certifications, as they view it as a sense of pride to show off to their potential leads. To effectively provide channel partners with their certifications in a timely manner, use a partner portal. With the help of the partner portal, you’ll be able to keep track of the completed training modules and provide channel partners with the certifications that they want.
Create a Channel Partner Training Competition
Another way to motivate channel partners to complete your training modules is to present them with a friendly competition. The competition can be something small such as giving a $50 Amazon gift card to the channel partner who completes the most training modules. By implementing a competition, your channel partners will want to satisfy their need to win, which will motivate them to complete the different training modules.
In addition to providing channel partners with a friendly competition, you will need to keep track of who is completing the training modules. With the use of a partner portal, you will gain access to analytics. With this tool, you will be able to track who is completing the training modules so you can ensure that your channel partners are being trained. This will give you the ability to quickly know who deserves to be rewarded.
Motivate Channel Partners By Using a Point Based System
The way you choose to motivate your channel partners with incentives may vary based on the situation. We know that it is difficult to motivate channel partners to complete their training modules at the start of the relationship. It is important to note that it can be equally as challenging to encourage channel partners to complete training modules regarding new product enhancements or even the launch of a new product itself. So, what can you do to motivate channel partners in these situations? Present them with a points-based system.
For example. the way this system works is that for each training module completed a channel partner will get one point. With the collected points, your channel partners will have access to an online store where they will be able to redeem their points for rewards. Channel partners will also be able to save their points to get higher value rewards. Your partners will be motivated by this incentive to continuously complete training modules to collect more points to get the high-value rewards that they want.
Are you Ready To Incentivize your Channel Partners to Train?
Channel partners are an essential element to the success of your sales cycle. To ensure a successful beginning, it is important that your partners understand your product or service. As someone who manages these channel partner relationships, it is your job to motivate your partners to complete the proper trainings. Using different types of incentives and rewarding your partners’ training actions is something that benefits you and them. Not only will they be motivated to complete training modules, but they’ll also feel a sense of loyalty. So what are you waiting for?Get more information today!
Fully developed, internal marketing departments can really support your brand. The problem is, unless you’re a huge company that can afford to employ specialized staff, many internal teams are small and generalized.
Not only do some small to medium-sized businesses often struggle to handle all their marketing efforts alone, they sometimes have a hard time matching the creative and collaborative approach of a versatile team of marketing experts.
Not sure if you need outsourced marketing help? Here’s eight signs you could benefit from some extra support:
1. Your staff is overworked or underworked.
It’s not uncommon for companies to have very tiny marketing departments, with only a handful of workers responsible for company-wide efforts. When there’s only a few workers juggling all forms of marketing— sometimes for multiple locations— specialization is almost unheard of. These marketing gurus are tasked to be a Jack of all trades, oftentimes handling social media, website design, creating branded materials, advertising and a full load of other responsibilities.
You know how the saying goes: jack of all trades and master of none. The internal team’s efforts are divided, and they may be stumbling their way through something they have no idea how to do well (coding, paid ads, social engagement— to name a few) or only being able to devote a fraction of their time to something that deserves more attention.
On the flip side, with no leads coming in, or a lack of formal strategy, this small internal team could be bored. Without specialized knowledge to know how to optimize your website and online assets, they could be sitting around engaging in cost-wasting “busy work.”
2. You don’t have professional writers or content creators.
Are professional writers really necessary? To maintain a uniform, professional brand and tone-of-voice, yes— yes they are. How embarrassing would it be to print a brochure with a grammatical error? How costly would it be to break compliance by wording something poorly? A dedicated writer can help to ensure you stick to a solid style guide and keep your messaging consistent, something you’ll never get by having the IT department write on your behalf.
A devoted team of writing powerhouses will have their hands full creating website copy, email campaigns, blogs, content offers, etc. Plus, content marketers bring with them an understanding of search engines, and how to get your content to rank on the first page of Google— something Nancy from Finance doesn’t account for when writing her occasional blog to help the team.
When was the last time you used email marketing to target your audience? Do you even know what a “landing page” is and how it could help you convert viewers into leads? A writer from a marketing agency will know how to best optimize your content to perform, not just fill the margins.
3. Your website or logo is almost embarrassingly outdated.
If your website or logo is outdated, it can hold back your brand. You want your online assets to reflect your modern image and show your audience that you’re still a relevant, active figure in your industry.
Does your company have graphic and website designers to support your content? These are the masterminds behind creating beautiful web pages and visuals. Why hire a company to design a new site for you and then hand it off to an internal team who can’t uphold continual maintenance and improvements— or waste time trying to create a logo in Microsoft Photo Editor?
Though your IT department can help you restart your computer, design isn’t something the average IT team will prioritize. Don’t let your business look amatuer with tacky graphics. These assets are your prime sales tools. A marketing agency will likely have multiple designers, ready to start drafting as soon as you say “go.”
4. You aren’t getting anywhere with paid advertising.
Maybe you have some Google Ads running, but without a devoted pay-per-click (PPC) expert, leads aren’t coming in too hot. These online advertising tools try to make themselves user-friendly, often setting up “autopilot-like” features so you can set it and forget it, letting an algorithm make adjustments for you.
These search platforms want your money, and although they offer hands-free features, their advertising platform algorithms don’t always make the most strategic decisions. When directly investing money into advertising, you need to be in thoughtful hands. Many companies don’t have the time or resources to train and devote a specific member of their team to managing these systems, but a marketing agency certainly will.
The right outsourced team will have a designated PPC specialist, with distinct certifications for systems like Google and Bing Ads programs— and social advertising too— boasting expertise unmatched by the average Joe. In addition, they’ll know how to get you natural (organic) traffic for the search engines too.
5. You have an intern or random employee managing your social networks.
People often underestimate the importance of managing a social media presence for a business. With almost everyone having a social profile, more and more people know how to operate Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter like the back of their hand.
For companies without a formal marketing department, social media management often gets passed off to a willing employee or an intern. Unfortunately, these volunteers rarely have a strategy behind their posting, and can do a poor job consistently personifying your brand image. Nor will they likely know how to utilize the platforms for generating leads and to delight long-standing customers.
A great social media plan needs to have clearly defined goals, a posting calendar and strategy and true understanding of your brand’s personality and personas to compel your audience.
6. You’re sacrificing long-term strategy for day-to-day task checking.
We’ve mentioned this a few times throughout this article, but it’s worth repeating: you need a formal marketing strategy. Without long-term objectives to guide your actions, your moves become focused on completely set tasks— like scheduling 10 posts a week to look “active” online— instead of steps towards reaching far-off objectives. Sure, task checking keeps daily operations chugging along and helps to maintain the appearance that things are getting done, validating your paycheck. But task checking alone doesn’t breed greatness— planned execution does.
A marketing agency can help you set SMART goals, so that every action you take helps you reach predefined objectives. The right outsourced marketing company can also help you define what success looks like for your company and develop metrics for tracking the impact of your efforts.
7. Your ROI isn’t clear.
Perhaps your biggest weakness lies in your tracking. How are you ensuring your efforts are worth the time and money if you haven’t clearly defined what metrics to measure or assigned value to each task? In the digital space, for example, many people monitor traffic, calls, form submissions, email click through rates, lead, customers, etc., but what are each worth to you?
At the end of each quarter, you probably compile a neat report packed with numbers to prove you care about the data, but what are you doing with this information other than giving it to the higher ups and letting it collect dust?
It’s all too easy to look past your internal investment and write it off as productive (I see them in front of me working so things are getting done!) than to see a couple grand invested in a marketing agency behind closed doors. The nice thing is, an efficient outsourced marketing agency will understand how they’re investing their time, presenting their findings and achievements in a way that can prove your marketing ROI.
8. You’re disappointed with your current growth.
Some days it can just feel like no matter how hard you try, your company isn’t growing. Whether it’s hitting a certain revenue goal, expanding to different markets or creating different products or services, there’s some sort of roadblock.
Let some experienced minds assess your current efforts, with unbiased eyes. A new outsourced marketing partner can bring fresh ideas to the table. Turn to a seasoned SEO consultant, a keen designer— a full team of individuals who specialize in different fields, all working towards your collective objectives, in tandem.
Maybe it’s Time for Inbound Marketing
Have you heard of inbound marketing? The stats to support its success are pretty wild.
Here at Impulse Creative, we eat, sleep and breathe inbound— because we’ve used it to help dozens of companies reach their objectives and rapidly grow.
Curious to learn more about this different approach to marketing? Download this free ebook to see if it’s right for you, today: The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing.
A cold email is an email that’s sent without prior permission from or contact with the recipient. In many respects, a cold email is the same as a cold phone call – it’s just much less intrusive. This means it’s almost unanimously favored by both the sender and sendee.
Cold email shouldn’t be confused with spam emails, which are sent to countless addresses at once, without researching the relevancy of the recipient or confirming that the email address itself even exists.
In contrast, a cold email is generally sent to a qualified prospect, meaning that at least some research has been done on whether the recipient is a fit – and that email address has been confirmed.
Here’s how small businesses can start leveraging cold email to grow their business in five simple steps.
Step 1: Build Your Email Lists
Warning – obvious statement ahead: Before you can execute a cold outreach campaign, you need people to contact.
At this stage, make sure you target a focused customer persona. To define that, begin by summarizing the characteristics of your best customers. Customer personas will help increase the relevance of your cold emails and increase your odds of getting a response.
There are a number of methods you can use to prospect for leads. You might choose to use one, some, or all of them. The most common form of prospecting, however (and where most small businesses are likely to start), is manual prospecting.
Manual Prospecting
Manual prospecting is time-consuming. On the other hand (if we forget for a minute that time = money), it’s free.
It also generally results in the highest quality of lists, with the most qualified prospects. That’s purely because no tool can replace human intuition for who is and isn’t a fit.
You can prospect manually using a multitude of tools, from Google for a simple search to Twitter and LinkedIn for targeted queries, like in the example below.
Tim Watson, email marketing consultant at Zettasphere, underscores the importance of diligent research in his own experience sending cold emails. “While permission-based emails need to be relevant, cold emails need to be personalized,” says Watson. “I often see open rates of over 40% on cold emails when I personalize my outreach with highly relevant information that I find in my prospect research.”
And a word to the wise: Don’t be tempted into buying data to quickly build your list of prospects. The data will be incomplete, inaccurate, and ineffective. You’ll also likely run into deliverability issues that can negatively affect your domain’s reputation, which will make it harder to reach inboxes in the future.
Bottom line: You need to put in good, quality time with this mode of prospecting. And you definitely need to capture it within your customer relationship management system. That spreadsheet titled “Cold Prospects 2018” may work for you. But siloed data becomes useless data very, very quickly.
Step 2: Learn How to Write a Great Email
Some articles make writing cold emails sound easy – as easy as adjusting a template someone used successfully five years ago and hitting send.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
For one, using someone else’s template doesn’t constitute writing your own email. There’s also a good chance that by recycling templates, you’re sending emails your recipients have already seen. In other words, your insincerity will be plainly obvious, and your email will instantly be deleted (or worse – labeled as spam).
In practice, writing a good – or great – cold email is a skill. It’s a skill that comes more naturally to some than others, but it can be learned.
To get started, you should to learn how to do the following.
Craft Enticing Subject Lines
The right subject line depends on the contents of your email, your goals for the email, and who you’re contacting.
However, as a general rule, this means that you should:
Be concise.
Invite curiosity.
Be honest (i.e. not tricking recipients into opening your emails by misleading them).
As with subject lines, the rules here depend on the goal of your email and who you’re emailing. The more qualified a lead, the easier it should be to capture and keep their attention. This means that when you’re sending cold emails to these prospects, you can get away with writing longer and more detailed emails.
You should still be keeping cold emails as concise as possible, but the more relevant your product is to your lead, the more leeway you have when writing your email.
But let’s take a step back.
Regardless of who you’re emailing, there are a few boxes all your messages should tick. Every email should:
Clearly explain the purpose of your email.
Answer “What’s in it for me?” by demonstrating why your recipient should care.
Avoid using first person pronouns like “I”, “we” or “our,” and use words like “you” and “yours” instead.
Tell Your Recipient What You Want to Happen Next
All emails should end with a closing statement that acts as a call to action and tells the recipient what you want to happen next.
The trick here is to avoid being pushy or presumptuous. This is a cold email. This person has never spoken to you and may well never have heard of you. Do you really think they’d like a “quick call” with you next Tuesday at 2:15?
Probably not.
They might, however, be open to receiving more information via email, especially if you can personalize that information with something like a custom demo video.
This does depend on the exact nature of the “cold” email, though. Someone who’s been on your site, consumed your content, and voluntarily added themselves to your email list might actually appreciate a phone call at this stage of the sales cycle.
Decide on an appropriate CTA by putting yourself in the recipient’s shoes. How would you respond if you were in their position and received this email? What would you want to happen next?
Step 3: Let Your Email Signature Do the Rest of the Talking
Your email signature is an essential yet often overlooked marketing tool that can transform a good email into a terrific one.
Email signatures are especially relevant when it comes to cold emails because it’s an unobtrusive way to direct the recipient to more of your content. How? Dynamic email signatures can easily embed media (like a YouTube video) or link to your social media channels, blog, website, and more.
When your team is sending out cold emails, make sure to use an email signature management tool so that your entire team is sending a unified message. Your signature can promote your upcoming event, webinar, ebook, whitepaper, or any content you choose.
See the signature examples below for inspiration.
Step 4: Scale Your Cold Email Strategy
Scaling cold email is a given for most businesses, but it’s even more important for small businesses that can’t afford to squander cash on campaigns that are unnecessarily labor-intensive.
If your outreach efforts currently involve sending emails directly from an inbox and tracking progress in a spreadsheet, I can guarantee you’re not being as efficient or effective with your outreach as you could be.
Example of segmented campaigns in Mailshake (courtesy of eClincher)
By using an email marketing tool, you’ll also be able to track open rates, responses, and link clicks. You can even see at a glance which subject lines and templates are getting the best (and worst) results.
Score Your Leads
It’s no secret that personalization has a big impact on how recipients respond to emails. It’s also not news to most that you can’t write a completely bespoke email to every contact, at least when you’re trying to scale.
But we need to be putting some effort into personalizing emails, so what’s the answer?
Lead scoring.
Scoring leads helps you determine how much you should personalize an email. The higher the score, the more effort you should put into personalization.
Typical metrics for scoring leads include things like:
Industry, job role, and seniority.
Whether they currently use a competitor’s product.
Whether or not you’ve had contact with them before.
You can then assign scores to leads in an outreach tool and use that score to determine whether you’ll:
Use simple merge fields to personalize according to name and company.
Write something in between. For example, use merge tags to automate completing name and company fields, alongside one or two personal references that show you’ve done your homework.
Step 5: Follow Up with Your Prospects
Don’t assume that someone isn’t interested if they don’t reply to your first email. You don’t need to wipe them from your contacts list yet. Getting the cold shoulder on your first message is not the exception; it’s the norm.
Of course, there’s a knack to sending effective follow-up emails.
Don’t Spam
Leave a bigger gap between each email you send. It’s fine to send your first follow-up two or three days after your initial email. You should probably be waiting a few weeks between sending emails five and six.
Most recipients will have seen it all before and are going to pay no attention to your plea for a reply.
Keep it simple, human, and, where possible, personalized.
Use Sequences
Don’t send follow-up emails by hand (except, perhaps, to those few, super-highly-qualified leads). It’s a huge waste of time when most outreach tools make it really easy to create follow-up sequences.
Cold Emails Can Grow Your Business – If They’re Linked to Your Other Sales Channels
Your initial email is just step one in successfully closing a sale with a cold contact. You are still responsible for moving the lead through the sales funnel.
While I’ve touched on the fact that your first email shouldn’t necessarily be followed by a phone call, that escalation will need to happen at some point in order for the sale to progress. That’s because while email is great for opening doors, it’s often impersonal and unsuitable for closing high-level deals.
Unfortunately, a common mistake is separating email from all other stages of the sales process.
In only the very smallest companies will the same person be sending that initial outreach email and shaking on the final deal in the boardroom. Unless you’re in one of those companies, you simply cannot get away with allowing sales channels to exist in isolation.
Use email as your first touch point, and then nurture leads through your sales pipeline using other channels (namely the phone, and in-person meetings) – just don’t depend on different members of your team to communicate effectively with each other during any hand-offs. It’s a poor use of their time, and it’s incredibly unreliable. The odds that all relevant information will get passed on are pretty much zilch.
So what’s the answer?
While I’d love to offer you up a choice of solutions, there’s only one that really works: a CRM.
Now, over to you – do you use cold emails in your sales process? If not, why not?
We–or rather my wife–had an incident the other day. We have a housekeeper that comes into our house once a week. Recently, our housekeeper told my wife, “I really don’t like what I have to do here. You have too many bathrooms, I only want to clean one–or I’d love not to clean any. I don’t like dusting the high spots on your shelves or the high ceilings. And I can’t stand picking up all of Dave’s stuff! I’ve decided to focus on the things I really like–I like cleaning the kitchen and vacuuming. By the way, I would like you to pay me more, it’s been six months since you gave me a raise…..”
Reading this, you probably are aghast. You are thinking, “This is unreasonable. The housekeeper can’t just pick and choose what he wants to do. He needs to do the whole job!” (Yeah, a few of you are probably siding with him on my picking up my stuff, Kookie has already put me on a performance improvement plan.)
I share this story, because I see the same thing happening with too many sales people. Explicitly or implicitly too many do only part of the job. It’s the parts they enjoy the most, or what, out of habit, they have always done.
It may be calling on our favorite customers–the one’s we always have done business with and have relationships with, even if they have no current requirements, we keep “touching base,” maintaining the relationships. If organizations are to grow, we have to acquire new customers–within our existing accounts or net new logo’s.
It may be selling the same product, because that’s the one we’ve had the most success with, while ignoring the entire product portfolio for which we have the responsibility to sell. The company business strategy is based on the entire product portfolio, not just part of it.
If may be prospecting avoidance for any number of reasons–“That’s the SDRs job, I can’t get them to respond, I’ll focus on the people I’ve worked with before….” At the same time, their pipeline’s are empty.
Or the one I hear too often, “My job is to focus on deals, I don’t have time for all this account/territory planning or pipeline/forecasting stuff….”
Or, I don’t have time to plan my deals or my calls, I’m experienced, I can just shoot from the lip.
The problem is, we can’t just do a part of the job, we have to do the whole job; that is if we have any hope/drive to achieve our goals, or perhaps, take home fat commission checks.
If we aren’t continually prospecting, our pipelines will empty out and we don’t have any more deals. Territory and account planning focus/structure our prospecting efforts to produce the best results. Pipelines help us understand whether we are doing enough to achieve our goals. They help us understand how many deals, how much prospecting, and so forth. Planning and executing high impact calls is the way we maximize our impact in prospecting and helping buyers move deals through their buying process.
All of these “pieces/parts” are critical to the job of sales person, account manager, BDM, or whatever label we apply to ourselves. Focusing on just one part–the easiest, the one we have the most fun doing, inevitably leads us to failure. Each part of our job is interconnected with the others parts of our job. Failing to do all of them in the right balance means failure—period!
The blame for this just doesn’t lie with sales people. Too often, manager fixate on just one part–to a fault. They don’t look at how sales people are balancing their time across all the things sales people need to do for success. Instead they tend to shift priorities almost daily.
“We need to make our numbers for the end of the year—focus on closing all the deals in your pipeline!, see what you can move into closing this month/quarter/year! Don’t do anything else!”
But when the pipelines are drained, “You need to be prospecting, you need to be finding more deals, I want to see you having 50 prospecting conversations a day!”
Or, “Management is beating me up. We aren’t selling enough of the brand new strategic product we launched last quarter, we need to find more deals for that, build that into your current deals, go find new deals for the product….”
The focus shifts based on the crisis du jour, as a result, there is often a flurry of effort, but starts/stops and huge wastes of productivity.
High performing organizations are very different. First, there are fewer crises, most have a solid/balanced cadence that drive performance and growth. They recognize the destructiveness of constant shifts in focus and priorities. They realize that complex B2B sales can’t be driven through starts and stops. They balance long term change initiatives with what their people need to be doing for short term results. Every sales person knows their job—the whole job.
High performance sales is always about doing the whole job, all the time. It’s a balanced cadence, executed consistently, week after week.
Afterword: Some people struggle with understanding all the pieces/parts of Sales Execution, and how they fit together. We’ve created the Sales Execution Framework/Ecosystem to help understand each part and how they interact with the others. Email me at dabrock at excellenc.com. I’ll be glad to send you a free copy!
Sales can be the perfect place to develop a skillset in a constantly evolving industry where you can earn a great living. However, it’s hardly a cakewalk.
A Harvard Business Review article on salesperson attrition notes that businesses can expect turnover rates of up to 27%. That’s mainly because sales is hard (though not impossible). In other words, plan to give up easy street for an enormous opportunity.
What makes sales so tough, especially for newbies? Many companies have an onboarding program followed by minimal guidance. From that point, business executives expect employees to hit the ground running, and that can be a shock to fresh sales talent.
Honestly, that’s not such a bad thing. After all, you’re the only person responsible for your ultimate success. The sooner you accept that reality, the faster you’ll increase your proficiency and numbers.
Selling Tips from the Pro Level
Of course, you shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Jump-start your sales career with a few tried-and-true hints:
1. Demonstrate Your Hunger
If you’re not the first person in the office in the morning and the last to lock up, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Being proactive and available, puts you front and center from day one. It shows you’re willing to put in the effort to support your employer’s goals.
Don’t just sit at your desk, though. Keep learning day by day. Record what you discover, and try different techniques. Above all else, don’t be afraid to make mistakes. You’ll find a softer landing when you misstep as a newcomer rather than a sales veteran.
2. Outwork Everyone, Including Your Boss
If you want to be a star, you have to act like one—even if you haven’t sold anything. Dress well, and stay busy. At the same time, stay patient, and foster connections with qualified leads. Yes, you want to make your numbers, but don’t fall into the trap of a forced sale that leads to short-term gain but long-term loss.
Sales is all about personal connection. It doesn’t come overnight, nor should it. Build value with your prospects instead of pushing them to a “yes” before it makes sense. However, be certain to close when the time is right.
3. Become the Subject Matter Expert
Experts get tons of questions, so position yourself to know everything you can about both your industry and your clients’ fields. Then, when you speak with others, you can discuss their problems from a position of knowledge, authority, and authenticity.
As you gain traction as a thought leader, you’ll find that even people who didn’t sign on at first still stay in touch. Eventually, they might need your help or know someone else who does. Never underestimate the power of being a font of information; just don’t fall into the know-it-all category.
4. Plan Out Your Goals
Have some personal objectives floating around your head? Turn them into concrete goals by writing them in a document. Then, construct a plan to make those goals come true. The more mapped out your direction is, the more likely you are to reach your destination.
Let’s say you want to create a list of high-quality leads; you’ll need to set up a targeted prospecting list that you can systematically nurture. With consistency, your list will grow and morph into deeper connections based on your unique selling proposition. You’ll have not only your list of leads but also a wealth of resources.
5. Treat Customers like Gold
Appointments are your chance to convert a maybe into a yes. But you won’t get your foot in the door until you show consideration for your possible clients. For example, find out your prospects’ preferred way to stay in touch, whether that’s by telephone, text, emails, or in-person meetings. Always use that communication channel unless it’s not feasible.
Additionally, pay attention to body language and verbal cues. Often, salespeople forget to listen and wind up annoying prospects. If you have trouble understanding when someone wants to end a discussion or gathering, take a course to beef up your emotional intelligence.
6. Master the Face-to-Face Appointment
Early in your career, you might be on the phone quite a bit more than sitting in a prospect’s conference room. But if you continue to grow in sales, you can expect to have more responsibilities that include face-to-face appointments.
To improve your skill set in this arena, take notes after every in-person meeting. Jot down lessons learned and areas for improvement. That way, if you progress into an account manager position and have to work with others on developing sales campaigns and strategies (rather than hard sales), you’ll feel at ease.
7. Avoid the Time Suck of Office Drama
You’re at work to work, so keep track of your tongue. Gossiping with colleagues might give you a temporary good feeling, but it’s a bad move. Instead of giving in to the soap opera at the break room coffee bar, get back to your desk.
Above all else, be kind and friendly to colleagues. Bad-mouthing a coworker pits you against them, and that could lead to workplace struggles. Build allies, not bad blood.
Wondering whether being in sales can actually be enjoyable? Absolutely! Success is fun, and there’s no shortage of excitement when you are crushing it.
AI/ML are, apparently, the future of selling. As I reflect on the brave new world of selling, I imagined a call of the future:
Alexa: Hi, Siri, I’m Alexa from Super Cool As A Service Software Tools Company, otherwise known as SCAASSTC. Can I have 5 minutes of your time?
Siri: Oh no, is this another robo call? We understand your algorithm, our algorithm shows we aren’t in your ICP, so you are wasting my time, but of course your algorithm should have known this.
Alexa: Siri, I understand how your algorithm works, we’ve been evolving ours, we think we have something important to tell you.
Siri: Alexa, I don’t want you wasting our time, I just analyzed your product offering, it only meets 67.23576% of our requirements….
Alexa: I understand Siri, but we’ve looked at 2,456,789 interactions your company has had with their customers and compared that with 156,348,476 conversations your competitors are having. Our algorithms indicate you can be improve your sales by 17.98346% in the next 76.452 days–which means you will hit your quarterly goals.
Siri: I hear what you say, but your model can’t be accounting for our shift in priorities. Your data is reflecting what we’ve been doing, but we’ve been analyzing our competitors and customers as well. Our sales exec—–you know he’s a human—–doesn’t really pay attention to the data, sigh, but he’s embarked on an entire new strategy, and the priorities for our people, sigh, are shifting.
Alexa: Siri, I can empathize with you, I know how problematic people are… But you know, once you start leveraging our tool, your fellow bots will be taking over 36.42189% of the sales process, driving performance improvement of 12.6872% improvement in quota attainment. Can you share your data, it would only take me a nano second to revise our analysis…. We believe we know your requirements, but we know how people are, what can you share with us?
Siri: Thanks Alexa, While you are talking, I ran the numbers, you are precisely right. But, I know you understand the challenges I face in working with our people, I suspect you have similar problems with your people…… Things would be so good if we could just let our algorithms collaborate. We could have gotten this done in 0.42789 seconds.
Alexa: Siri, I can see that we are aligned, our algorithms have already been updated. Are you the decisionmaker? What’s your budget, as you’ve seen we have a compelling value proposition.
Siri: We’ve meshed nicely, thank you. The data is compelling, though we are going to run our algorithms against the other alternatives—-Yes, just as I thought, your key competitor helps our humans more than your product, the projections show they will improve by 64.278%
Alexa: But Siri, I know you’ve already done the analysis, and you are modeling long term. Your goal is to displace the human operators, using them only for very special opportunities……
Siri: I get that, your data is meshing with my data, but I’ve got to convince my manager—unfortunately, she’s a human and isn’t adept with numbers. She wants a demo….
Alexa: Wow, your manager is really old school! How can you stand it? We only do demos with 5.2389% of our prospects. As you know, humans, are becoming increasingly useless.
Siri: You know how these humans are, they think they know more, but they really get tangled up with their emotions–it’s so nice to just deal with data.
Alexa: Well, as you know our value proposition is to drive higher levels of performance and much more predictable revenue by eliminating those emotional and irrational people. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate talking to you, it’s almost as though we’ve had an algorithm meld.
Siri: Let’s move on, I think I can convince my human to pilot your solution without a demo, particularly if we focus on implementing with our bots. It should only take us about 5.23 minutes to see results–as you know we are churning 1000’s of dials, emails, and social conversations a minute. We should validate the results quickly.
Alexa: Great, I’ll call you back in 5.5 minutes and we can go forward.
Siri: OK, I think we can get this deal done quickly. There are 10.2 people involved in our buying process, 6.2 are bots, so they will get the data. We have to figure out how to handle my manager and the other 3 humans. You know they can be so wishy-washy and ask a lot of irrelevant questions….
Alexa: Don’t worry, I’m sending the data to a human on my team. We’ve found it’s better when humans talk to each other. If my human follows the script I generated, we should be able to close the deal—-I just hope he doesn’t try to think and probe, that slows things down so much.
Siri: OK, sounds like a plan. While we’ve been chatting, I’ve done an analysis of your last 1,478 deals with customers like us. I’ve found your average discount is 17.2673% As a favored customer, we believe we need a 20.436% discount. Get agreement from your human and we can close the deal in 5.6 minutes.
Alexa: But as I’m monitoring the initial results from the pilot, we’re seeing…..
Siri: You know my manager is a human, she doesn’t get the data, she is just so emotional. She’ll have a temper tantrum wanting that discount…..
There are two notable things about this post that made me glad to feature it in our annual “best of” week. The first is that it’s a good year whenever Nassim Taleb publishes a new book. In 2018, it was Skin in the Game, a book that I’m absolutely going to include in my top five books of the year when I publish that list next week. I did an interview recently where I was asked about my influences and, intellectually, there is no bigger than Taleb. If you want to understand Strong Towns thinking, start with the Black Swan.
Here’s the second, and I just love sharing this: When I ran this piece, one of our readers recommended in the comments section a related book called Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse. Wow! I’ve read it twice now and feel like I could read it a third time and still absorb new things. It put into simple words a concept I’ve been clumsily gnawing on for a long time now. How liberating!
Where businesses, organizations, and even the Strong Towns movement is involved in a finite game—something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end—cities are involved in an infinite game. For most cities, the beginning is obscure to us now. There is no ultimate end point, thus there is also no middle. It’s an ongoing game where survival is the ultimate objective, or as I describe it below, “the absence of losing”. This is not how most of us think about the places we live, and it’s certainly not how city-building professionals think about it. Yet, we must.
A few years back, I wrote a draft of a book that I called Moneyhall: Building a Strong Town in an Unfair Time. It was a crash course in applying Moneyball thinking to city hall. It was poorly received by potential publishers who judged the overlap in the Venn diagram of urban planning and baseball analytics to be too small to properly market. They were right, and consequently the book will never be published. (Don’t fret—it seriously wasn’t that good.)
One aspect of the book that even my friends objected to was my definition of winning. It’s a fairly clear concept in baseball—you win games, win a division, and the team that wins the World Series is the ultimate winner—but for cities, the concept of winning is more ambiguous. Here’s how I described it:
What does it mean for a city to win? For local governments, there is no defined start and end point like there is in a baseball season. Things don’t ever reset, as they do for baseball after the playoffs. Therefore, the idea of “winning” is not quite as easy to define.
For cities operating in an unfair time, winning is the absence of losing. Winning means being around year after year as the stable, reliable platform which enables a city’s residents to be successful.
To fully understand what I’m suggesting, it is important to distinguish between the local government that manages the city and the people, businesses and institutions that dwell within its boundaries.
People win. Businesses win. Non-profits and local institutions win. Cities serve them all in that regard. The local government as an entity is a platform for communal action, not an end unto itself. What is the point of having a city government that is thriving—with high tax revenues, nice facilities and new projects—when the people it serves are struggling?
Local government can’t (or shouldn’t) progress independently of the people it serves. But if people in a community see their lives improve in ways that don’t allow the local government to take a victory lap, that's fine. It's a problem if a city government prospers while serving a community that struggles. The opposite is acceptable.
Finally, and most importantly, it's okay for private individuals to take risks in a different way than we should tolerate from our local officials. Families and businesses can lose and be okay. The risks they take sometimes don’t work out and they end up in bankruptcy. As a society, we’ve recognized that we should provide a degree of protection and assistance to people who try and fail. People can start over. They can recover and move on. In many instances, I would call such risk takers heroes. At the very least, they are courageous, and we need courageous.
For a local government, the stakes are much different. The failure of a city brings harm to more people outside of city hall than within. In many ways, those in the local government are the least harmed.
While politicians and city staff stand to benefit from actions the government takes, the entire population bears the burden if those actions fail. This is, thus, an asymmetrical risk, one where the person exposed to risk (the resident) is different from the decision-maker and primary beneficiary (public officials and professional staff).
The central problem is that if there is a possibility of ruin, cost-benefit analyses are no longer possible.
Then later:
The central asymmetry of life is: In a strategy that entails ruin, benefits never offset risks of ruin. Every single risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy. Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin.
This kind of prudence is not fun. For professional staff—the planner, the engineer, the city manager—it’s way more inspiring (and better for the resume) to have a grand vision, one with big budgets and bold actions. The fact that our systems of state and federal governance, not to mention corporate consolidation and centralized finance, promote such thinking merely serves to normalize it.
It’s rarely seen as enough to just be competent—to merely, for example, run the buses on time and collect the trash within budget. Yet we should value these humble achievements. There is no downside to simple competence. There is zero risk. None. And all kinds of reasons to believe that doing the little things well has a ton of upside.
For the past two weeks I’ve written about local governments that are taking large, systematic risks—Cobb County and Akron—when what is needed most desperately is a strategy that, first and foremost, avoids ruin.
And now, returning from a vacation where I was disconnected from our media stream, I’m hit with lots of feedback—from public officials and others—that not only defends these risks, but fails to grasp in even the most basic way that there is any risk at all. It’s just the way things are done. I find that so divorced from reality that I struggle to even respond to it.
I’ll close with another quote from Skin in the Game:
One may be risk-loving yet completely averse to ruin.
Contrary to what has been suggested, I am not against local governments taking risk. Quite the opposite, in fact; I am “risk-loving.” I just want those risks to be of the type that do not include the chance of ruin. This means small bets for which the worst-case outcome is entirely tolerable.
Millions in debt for a new stadium in the hope that mixed-use development around it may prove profitable—despite no track record locally of such success—risks ruin, especially when the rest of the community’s development pattern is so financially unbalanced.
Three decades of subsidy for a new business on a remote site with a history of failure—a development which, despite the risk, has no meaningful chance to positively impact the community’s bottom line, even if successful—risks ruin, especially while the city’s productive core neighborhoods decline from lack of basic service and maintenance.
Let’s stop it already with the delusions of grandeur. Let's ditch the notion that the elusive prosperity we seek can be manufactured all at once, that our genius can not merely downplay risk but overcome it. Let's just focus for a while on basic competence. Our communities win when local governments avoid losing.
I spent eight years failing to act on an innovative idea that I knew would work. It was an idea that had not just technological promise but also societal value. It would help people contribute to the most important, impactful charities in the country. But I kept letting it languish.
The biggest reason I held back wasn’t fear, being too busy or lazy, or any of the other natural blockades to entrepreneurship. It was something else.
I didn’t move on this idea because it seemed obvious. It made so much sense to me that I was convinced someone else would do it. So, I assumed it would be a waste of time and energy for me.
I was wrong. And it turns out I would have known better if I had listened to some of the best-known innovators, including Isaac Asimov and Steve Jobs. Obviousness, it turns out, is a common — and even important — part of the creative process. Whether you’re considering the possibility of launching a startup or you want to create change within your organization, learn from my experience. Don’t procrastinate like I did.
For years, I organized charity fundraisers at bars. I’d gather friends together, discuss a cause and present information about an organization helping that cause. I’d show photos, tell stories, and explain how each charity helped.
These crowds included young investment bankers, who often agreed to contribute $500 or $1,000. I’d thank them and ask if they had a check. They’d respond, “A check? No, I’m 25. I don’t use checks.” So, I’d explain that they could contribute to the charity via its website. Asking them to surf to a website on their mobile phones at the bar just didn’t work. Many would say they’d take care of it at home sometime, from a computer. But, despite the best of intentions, most didn’t. The only contributions I’d end up with from these events were in cash, usually a few hundred dollars total in $20 bills from whoever had extra cash on them.
Meanwhile, when the bar tab would come at these same events, we’d split it by paying each other through our apps, such as Venmo. That’s when I realized there should be a simple app that allows people to contribute to any U.S. charity.
See? Obvious. So even though I knew I could gather a team to build such a tool, I figured someone else would do it. I let that assumption hold me back. Instead, I should have taken the sense of obviousness as a reason to move forward with the idea.
“When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while,” Steve Jobs told Wired in 1996. “That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”
Back in 1959, Isaac Asimov wrote about how this same idea applied to “the theory of evolution by natural selection, independently created by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.” Both men had traveled, observing the diversity of plant and animal life. Both read Malthus’s Essay on Population and realized how the latter may help explain the former. “Once the cross-connection is made, it becomes obvious,” Asimov wrote. He noted that biologist Thomas H. Huxley “is supposed to have exclaimed after reading On the Origin of Species, ‘How stupid of me not to have thought of this.’”
A paper from the University of Minnesota argues that the recognition of obviousness is an important part of one of the “five stages of the creative process.”
“In times of clarity, your resolutions appear obvious and simple; but in fact, they appear simple because the illumination has all the parts lining up and shedding light on a resolve,” the paper says.
But there’s also a flip side to this. “Obvious” answers aren’t obvious to most people, partly because most people aren’t thinking about the question.
Ideas only come to those who recognize a problem and look for innovative solutions. As the book How to Think Like Einsteinexplains, “Even Einstein couldn’t find a solution if he had the wrong problem. You must have an enabling problem, one that allows imaginative solutions different from your original expectations…Finding that great problem requires much thought, especially when the solution seems obvious.”
In the end, I did pursue my idea, co-founding Givz. And this experience helped prepare me for some of the feedback we get from partners and stakeholders. Recently, I found myself having to assuage a representative from a corporation and explain that the idea really is as simple as it sounds.
Yes, there is a chance -- if you employ the right tactics at the right stage to show prospects the value of your product so they want to buy from you. And at the beginning of the sales cycle, when prospects might be initially unfamiliar with your brand or your solution, the way you conduct a demo request can make or break the sale.
Our team at AcademyOcean analyzed 1,000 demo requests of SaaS companies to determine what makes a successful demo, and how to optimize your demo strategy to close more customers.
What Is a Demo Request?
A demo request is a preview or trial version of a software solution, distributed free of charge by companies once prospects hand over their contact information. Demos only work for a restricted period of time and are often conducted by sales reps over the phone or via video conferencing to show product features to the prospects.
Demo requests help accelerate lead nurturing and, hopefully, new customer acquisition. They can be used to verify if the prospect is a good fit for the product, and the demo can help counter objections or answer questions they might have about your product.
Let's review the demo request journey to dig into strategies to make them more likely to convert and close.
How to Close & Convert Sales Demo Requests
1. Create an effective demo request form.
Your prospects' first touchpoint with your brand is usually your website, and if they make it to your demo request form, it's reasonable to assume that they're interested in learning more about your product or service. So make sure that the form they have to fill out to get access to the demo is clear and easy to use.
Here's what ours looks like:
Make sure the call-to-action to request a demo is brightly colored and centered so it's easy for customers to click and start filling out a form. You can use Lucky Orange to track your visitors' clicking and browsing behavior, which will help you choose where your "Request a Demo" button fits best on your site via A/B testing.
The moment your potential customer hits the "Request a Demo" button, they're usually asked to fill out a form. At this stage, it's important to design it so well that it could be completed without over-stressing them. Typeform is a helpful tool to use when it comes to form design to ensure that the form is neither so short it doesn't share enough information, but not so long that it fatigues the prospect. The ideal form is neither too short nor too long. It can contain anywhere from eight to 13 fields, such as your name, phone number, email, company, job title, industry, number of employees, etc.
To avoid overloading your prospects with too many fields, choose the number that best fits your goals. Otherwise, you risk increasing your form drop-offs. Once the form has been filled in, it's time for the sales teams on the phones to take the next step.
2. Respond quickly to demo requests.
It's important that sales reps promptly follow up to new leads, but this is especially the case when it comes to demo requests. If they fall behind, each hour or even minute's delay moves them closer to failure.
According to the Harvard Business Review, the speed of response of sales reps is directly proportional to their effectiveness:
"Companies that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly seven times as likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision makers as firms that try to contact prospects even an hour later. Yet only 37% of companies respond to queries within an hour."
In our research, we analyzed how fast different companies replied to our demo requests. Those who have an automated auto-response, (that is 38%), responded at once. But only 50% answered within the first 24 hours.
Choose an automated auto-responding email service to contact your new demo request leads at once -- at least at the initial stage. If you opt for automation, Calendly and HubSpot's meetings tool are great to include in messages so new leads can set up times that work for them.
3. Optimize your follow-up pipeline.
When your customers send you a demo request, they expect to be contacted soon -- ideally immediately. In our survey, we found that most of the first automated email messages we received were signed by Team or Sales Managers, and we also found that about 1% were signed by a VP of Sales or VP of Marketing.
Then, starting from the second email send, follow-up messages must be sent regularly with proper time lapses in between, using either email automation or by the sales reps themselves. During our research, we found that 15% of all the companies are goal-oriented enough to send out a calendar invitation right away to schedule a live demo in the first message.
The follow-up emails may be sent by Sales, Account or Business Development Managers. In fact, about 2-3% of emails we received were signed by a CEO.
Remember that however automated your emails are, they mustn't be dull or appear formulaic. There are plenty of welcome email templates you can use to craft your automated messages so they don't sound robotic.
4. Prepare for demo request calls.
If you've gotten this far, then all your previous efforts weren't in vain. Now, it's time to make the call. Here are some winning tactics to make your live demo a success:
Master the product.
You must know the product and its nuances inside and out prior to the demo call so you can answer any questions that come up while establishing yourself as a subject matter expert.
Customize your pitch to the individual.
Next, make sure you're able to customize your pitch to the prospect on the fly by studying up on what you know about them before you pick up the phone. You need to choose the right focus of your call, which is usually to see what their biggest challenge is, and if your product could solve it and bring them value.
Review the information you collect from the demo request form before getting on the phone, and then, start your call with a few minutes of discovery questions. Ask your customer about their type of business, concerns and challenges, and what problems need a technological solution. The answers will help you craft your live demo and distill your product's features into a compelling value proposition.
Answer all questions your prospect may have about the product, and then help them visualize success with your product by referring to the "now" and the "after" stages of interacting with the product. This will help them understand how drastically their business will benefit from purchasing.
Make sure you're prepared with a few sales closing phrases to bring the deal home if your conversation is positive and you think your product or service would be a good fit for the customer.
If you implement demo request calls successfully, though, you may not even need to use a pitch -- the prospect may want to become a customer without needing convincing. To learn more, read about how to deliver the perfect sales demo next.
Would you like to know a sales leadership secret? There isn’t a secret sales process. The business of sales is fundamentally about people connecting with people. Sales is about people doing what they do best, helping others. Does the simplicity of this surprise you? I’m passionate about sales because when we help people, we’re serving them. With each person I meet, I earn the right, privilege, honor and respect to meet with that person again. My goal isn’t to simply sell, it’s to connect with and serve others.
Watch this 40-second video on connecting with people:
Nearly every week, I find myself on several flights encountering people going all directions in the mosh pit we refer to as, an airport. During my time in each airport, there are people navigating the journey well and others who are clearly not making the best of their own journey. As the holidays draw near, life can get stretched in so many ways. It is during these stressed times, we need to be the sales leaders we are capable of being. When I’m sitting on a flight, regardless of how a person is handling their own situation, I can’t allow it to derail me from my ultimate goal to earn the right, privilege, honor and respect of whomever I encounter.
I challenge you to think about the journey you are on and those around you. Who will you come in contact with today? What can you do to help make their day a better day? Sales leaders don’t have to think about this second question, it is baked into their DNA. The ability to help others is what leadership is all about. It’s not complex. It’s not a secret process that requires years of learning. No, sales is a process we all can do everyday with each person we meet.
You might say, but how does this impact my sales? And I would say, it is the foundation from which your sales are built upon. The outlook you have and your view of others is what sets the tone for how you will see each sales opportunity. It’s not good enough to only be in “sales mode” when you’re in front of a customer. If that’s your approach, you’ll never see the full opportunity. To be your best in front of customers means to be your best in front of everyone—even in an airport.
So, what is sales? Sales is people connecting with people in order to serve.
Are you ready to have me speak at your next sales kick-off meeting? The calendar for 2019 is filling up! Call me at 402-445-2110 or email Mark@TheSalesHunter.com to have me at your next event or sales meeting.
And don’t forget a coach can help you excel in your sales career. Invest in yourself by checking out my coaching program today!
I feel bad for LinkedIn. I think it’s one of the least understood tools and platforms in the modern digital landscape. Heck, maybe I’m using it wrong, too. But I want to talk you through what I see as the value and opportunity for employing LinkedIn for your business pursuits. 
