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There is no doubt that marketing your business on the internet can help you attract new customers and clients, but how can you tell if it is worth the return on your investment? How do you gauge the overall success of your local SEO campaign and measure the effectiveness of an SEO service provider? You may be surprised to find that there are several ways and very specific indicators to help you better determine if your local SEO campaign is worth the return on investment.

Search engine optimization is the most cost effective solution and will have a much higher ROI. It provides long term benefits and continual traffic, yet it takes more time to establish and get ranked among search engines. Some of these time consuming tasks should be outsourced to industry professionals, as the rules of the game change constantly. Hiring an SEO company will also ensure that your website does not have any potentially negative characteristics that can hurt your rank.

There’s nothing more powerful than speaking with real buyers to take the guesswork out of what content they find valuable. In 2014, I had the pleasure to interview over 100 business and IT executives across a variety of industries about their buying journey and what resources they consulted to guide their decision-making process.

Here are some of the things they had to say about the content they came across as they searched for and evaluated solutions, what worked and what didn’t, and how you can make their buying experience better.

1. Help me to build the business case for change

“Anything that a company can provide that helps me translate the business case to the decision-makers in my company is a benefit. Any kind of comparison tools that show, not just ROI, but the impact of your solution on my business.” – Senior systems administrator, manufacturing industry, enterprise

More often than not, your solution is competing with other projects for finite resources in the buyer’s organization. B2B buyers need your help convincing senior executives to make your solution a strategic priority. The content you give them, therefore, needs to go beyond demonstrating the ROI of your solution. It has to communicate the ROI of fixing the problem that your solution addresses.

You can help stakeholders understand the profound impact your solution will have on their business with one of these approaches:

• Parts-whole relationship: Paint the big picture by explaining how this problem affects a bigger problem or goal on the organization’s radar.

• Opportunity ROI: Explain how fixing this problem will enable the organization to pursue new opportunities for growing revenue, saving cost, or mitigating risk.

• Compare and contrast: Simulate what it will be like working in the new environment. Compare and contrast the new business systems, processes, and user experiences with the existing ones.

• Pros and cons: Weigh the positives and negatives of fixing the problem versus doing nothing. Explain how those attributes might change over time and why.

• Case study: Provide proof of the value. Share what tangible and intangible benefits and ROI organizations have seen as a result of fixing the problem.

By helping buyers to build the business case for change, you’ll become a valuable resource and make it on their list of top companies to consider once they secure the budget and begin the buying process.

2. Tell me in 90 words or less why I shouldn’t eliminate your product/service from consideration

“You have a potential customer’s attention for three to seven seconds, and what you say in that time period is pretty important. And so, that’s what I was looking for. Something that in 90 words or less came closest to fitting what I wanted and needed to do.” – Owner and operator, professional services, small business

Buyers quickly scan your website to determine if you appear to have a solution that meets their needs. Because they screen a long list of vendors, they look for any reason to eliminate you from consideration and focus on vendors who “get it.” The short-form messages on your home page and product-landing page help convince buyers whether it’s worth their time to take a deeper look at your solution. To get your value proposition under 100 words and ensure it truly resonates with buyers, you need to be absolutely certain that you understand what they’re looking for in the first place.

You can achieve this by interviewing buyers and probing for the following insights:

• Buying criteria: What are buyers looking for in a solution and vendor? What criteria do they use to compare you to your competitors?

• Business impact: Why is each criterion important? What impact does it have on their business?

• Evaluation process: What does the ideal solution look like with respect to each criterion? How do buyers evaluate this among the vendors?

• Final decision: How do buyers decide which vendor to choose? What is the tipping point or number one thing that sways them?

After interviewing buyers, don’t be surprised to discover that your web content is misaligned with buyer expectations. In my experience conducting buyer persona research, only 30 to 40% of what buyers care about is typically addressed on a vendor’s website.

3. Give me more in-depth product info so I can determine if I should short-list you for evaluation

“We wanted more than just the data-sheet stuff that you find on a website. The providers that didn’t make it through didn’t have robust sets of marketing materials that helped us understand what the breadth and the depth of their offerings were and their capabilities as a company.” – CIO, utility industry, enterprise level

“I expected to have more non-marketing related evidence as to why it was a bad idea or a good idea. I hate to use the word empirical, but more specific in nature that wasn’t driven by a marketing group. What is your demonstrated research? What are your demonstrated metrics? What have you done to actually test the assumptions you’re making?” – IT director, manufacturing industry, mid-market

If your short-form message resonates with B2B buyers, they will spend more time on your website to have an in-depth look at your solution. At this point, they’re trying to determine if you are likely to meet all or most of their buying criteria, and whether to put you on the short list for evaluation. Your web content, therefore, has to do more than just restate the benefits buyers expect and confirm that you meet their criteria. To be persuasive, your content has to explain how you meet each criterion, why you do it better than your competitors, and how you back up your claims with proof points.

The best way to do this without overwhelming buyers is to layer your content so that they can drill down on each criterion as they choose:

• Criteria overview: Open with a brief value proposition on your main product page, followed by a bulleted list of the buyer’s criteria that your solution addresses.

• Criterion “how” page: Link each criterion to its own dedicated web page explaining how your product/service meets the criterion, and why your approach is better than the competitions’.

• Formats and lengths: Use different formats and lengths to accommodate information preferences and time constraints (i.e., text, infographic, video, screenshots, demo, etc.).

• Criterion proof points: Include industry research, product metrics (up-time, MTBF [mean time between failures], fail-over rates, etc.) and customer proof points (ROI, benefits) to back up each claim.

• Criterion deep dive: Provide an in-depth explanation, including technical details, of how your product/service meets each criterion. Lock down the content behind a form to generate leads.

If your long-form content is persuasive, you’ll make it on the buyer’s short list of vendors to contact and even could affect the criteria it uses to evaluate other vendors.

4. Give me detailed case studies for companies like mine

“Case studies are useful as long as they have enough detail. A lot of case studies tend to say what the benefits are, but they don’t go into enough detail to tell us whether it’d be applicable to us in our environment or not. Also, we didn’t come across a lot from mid-market companies. There were some from the Bank of Americas and Chevrons, but not much on how you do it with a small team.”  – CIO, retail industry, mid-market

Convincing B2B buyers that you can successfully solve a problem isn’t enough. They need to get a sense of whether your solution is within their means without having to contact your sales team. Your case studies, therefore, need to go beyond the standard, two-page “about the company,” problem, solution, and benefits format. You need to provide more details so buyers can determine whether they can implement your solution in their specific business and IT environment using the resources available to them.

The good news is that when you interview buyers to uncover insights about how they make their purchasing decision, you’ll capture 90% of the information you need to produce more helpful case studies, including:

• Goal: What were the organization’s key business goals or priorities?

• Problem: What was preventing them from achieving their goals?

• Trigger: What triggered them to finally do something about the problem?

• Expectations: What did they expect to change after implementing the solution?

• Environment: What people, business processes, systems, and technologies were affected?

• Time and resources: What time, budget, and people did they have for getting this done?

• Challenges: What were some of the major challenges they had to overcome?

• Requirements: How did all these factors shape their requirements?

• Vendor selection: How and why did they choose the vendor that they did?

• Outcome: What benefits (tangible and intangible) and ROI did they see?

• Lessons learned: What advice do they have for others looking to solve this problem?

This may seem like a lot of information to cover in a case study. However, if it’s written in first person from the customer’s perspective, as is this case study from e-SignLive, it can tell a captivating story that’s easy and enjoyable to read.

5. Help me to sell your solution to our internal stakeholders

“The vendor we chose helped us market the idea of it, why there was a need for it, selling it to the top tiers of the organization. They put together a message for each group and in some cases for each person. They said this is what’s important to them. This is what you can anticipate the questions being.” – HR director, insurance industry, enterprise level

Consensus-based selling is the new normal in complex B2B-buying decisions, as the book The Challenger Sales: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation points out. The HR director’s quote supports the book’s argument that you need to tailor your message to a wide variety of stakeholders to maximize resonance and get consensus. The authors and researchers recommend doing this on four levels: industry, company, department, and individual. Most organizations, they add, don’t contextualize messages at any level, so this provides marketing with an opportunity to add tremendous value to the sales process.

When tailoring your content to each level, consider the following:

• Industry: Explain how your solution adds value to industry-specific business processes, channels, and customer segments, while complying with all applicable regulations.

• Company: Reinforce how the problem you solve is linked to a broader business objective the company has and how your solution will help to achieve it.

• Department: Address the specific priorities, concerns, and requirements of each department that is responsible for or affected by the problem.

• Individual: Appeal to individuals’ intellect and emotion. Explain how solving the problem will help (or not hinder) the individual’s professional and personal life.

Bottom line: You don’t get a second shot to get your message right with buyers.

Unless you’re one of the few lucky companies that have no competitors, your solution must compete with dozens of options for buyers’ confidence. At every stage in the buying cycle, your content will either persuade buyers that you deserve to move to the next stage – or cause you to be eliminated.

By interviewing real buyers of your solution, you’ll pinpoint precisely what they’re looking for in a solution, enabling you to move away from generic messaging that focuses on the least important things – to sharing specific details that assure them that you understand what matters most to them.

Want to learn more about how buyer persona insight can help your content marketing? Check out the CMWorld 2014 sessions available through our Video on Demand portal and make plans today to attend Content Marketing World 2015.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 5 Things B2B Buyers Want Your Content To Do appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Invest in Sales Enablement or Marketing Content? It shouldn’t be an either/or situation.

If Marketing and Sales were both aligned to the new buyer journey, the content that marketing created to feed their lead development engine would be exactly the same content that would enable Sales to close more business. After all, it’s the same buyer, on the same journey, right? Apparently, not.

Imagine the smiles on everyone’s faces if the company was growing 10%+ faster than its peers, Marketing generated-leads represented an irrefutable 40%+ of the Sales forecasted pipeline, and 75%+ of the sales reps were achieving quota. Companies that are better aligned to their buyer are smiling a lot according to published research studies.

Also imagine the positive impact to customer experience if both Marketing and Sales communicated to buyers in the same voice, with the same message, at the same time, using the same content!

I know it all sounds like the impossible dream, but it isn’t. Let’s first ground our discussion with a quick look at the self-educating buyer.

The New Self-Educating Buyer Journey

The B2B buyer has been empowered by high speed internet access, social media and mobile platforms to become self-educating and in control of their purchasing journey. They are on a continual purchasing journey, consuming information about industry challenges, potential problems and opportunities that could impact their company, and solutions that best fit their particular situation.

Up to 70% of their purchasing journey can be done online without engaging any sales organization.

The B2B buyer is really a buying team consisting of various personas who are consuming information which is tailored for them: the decision maker plus their recommenders and influencers, or, the business person plus their technical, financial and operations person.

The more the B2B Buyers learn, the more they realize how little they know. Each document they consume allows them to increase their knowledge, but also triggers new questions and concerns. The buyer will probably need to consume multiple pieces of content before they are ready to go from one stage of their purchasing process to the next stage of their purchasing process.

The Content Marketing Challenge

Content Marketing has become the fuel that drives Marketing’s lead generation machine and Marketing Automation. The current goal of Content Marketing is to engage the buyer with content of value and develop buyer loyalty through branding.

If the buyer consumes a newsletter, they might be in the “Top of Funnel” in Marketing’s lead generation process. Viewing a whitepaper might suggest they are in “Middle of Funnel” while downloading a technical guide might suggest they are in the “Bottom of Funnel”.

When the buyer engages a particular piece of content or multiple pieces of content, they become a lead. Sometimes they immediately become a lead just by downloading a “Bottom of funnel” piece of content. In any event, in most cases we don’t know whether the buyer actually read the content piece completely, partially or not at all!

As a reward for engaging our content, the buyer will now immediately receive multiple unwanted calls and emails from our sales organization, assuming Sales follows up on the “lead” of course. There’s got to be a better way.

Even with increased content marketing budgets, the highest quality content, and the best marketing automation technology that money can buy, only 25% of the Marketing generated leads are “Sales-ready”, and over 80% of the Marketing generated leads never convert to sales at all, according to MarketingSherpa.

Therein lies the reason why Sales reps are reluctant to follow-up on Marketing leads. It takes a Sales rep multiple hours/days to contact, meet and qualify each Marketing-generated lead. If only one in five leads are potential customers, then that means we are asking a sales rep to waste 80% of their time chasing poor leads in return for having 20% of the leads turn into customers sometime in the future. A Sales representative’s job and their mortgage payments require them to make quota this quarter, not some time in the future! Right now, they probably feel that they have a better chance achieving their quota, with a better personal ROI, through their own lead generation efforts.

One or two downloads of a whitepaper or case study doesn’t tell us enough about the buyer’s journey. More specifically, it doesn’t tell Sales enough about where the buyer is within their purchase journey and whether they are a real prospect for them. And, it’s not a great experience for the buyer!

The Sales Enablement Challenge

Sales Enablement Content is the grease that Sales uses to shorten their sales cycle.

The goal of Sales Enablement is to deliver the right content, to the right seller, at the right time, to move the sales process forward. The right content addresses the buyers concerns and enables the buyer to progress more quickly through their purchasing process. For additional insight into the existing sales process see Best New Business Leads for Sales.

Even with the increased new volume of content from Marketing, 55% of Sales representatives have difficulty finding tailored selling content when they need it, according to a study by Qvidian. There’s just not enough content that meets the needs of the existing Sales process.

Marketing and Sales Alignment with the Buyer Journey

Marketing and Sales must better align with their target buyer and offer content that engages, educates, and helps them move through their purchasing journey at their own pace and in their own way.

Here are 3 key steps that Marketing can take today to better align with the buyer’s purchasing journey. while providing more insightful lead qualification data to Sales:

1. Influence the Journey: The more breadcrumbs the buyer leaves behind as they consume our content, the better we can understand and support where they really are in their journey, and where they need to go next. Therefore, design content for each persona of the buyer team that specifically answers the typical concerns/ questions they would have at a particular stage of their journey.
2. Track Buyer Behavior: They downloaded it, but did they actually read it? Design the content and the campaign to track real consumption (e.g. did they click on the hyperlink at the end of the content offering the next piece of content for the journey? How long did they view the video? )
3. Motivate the Self-educating buyer to become Self-qualifying: Use progressive profiling techniques to help qualify them as a potential lead for the company. Offer them opportunities throughout their content journey to speak with a product/sales specialist. See Best Marketing-generated Leads for additional insight.

The advantages to both Marketing and Sales of aligning with the new self-educating buyer is compelling: increased company revenue growth, fantastic Marketing ROI, more Sales reps making quota, increased sales forecast reliability, and a superior customer experience.

So how do we make it happen?

Bridging the Gap between Marketing and Sales

Marketing and Sales need to get on the same page; it’s good for your company, good for your function, and in your best self-interest to participate.

The starting point is to collaborate and pool our knowledge about the buyer.

• Who are our ideal target buyers? The buyer team personas?
• What is their purchasing process? What content are they interested, when will they did it and why do they need it?
• How do they make and implement decisions?

The goal is not to boil the ocean or redesign the company. It’s to make a few meaningful, impactful tweaks to the existing Marketing and Sales processes; to deliver measureable positive impact within a short period of time..

However, getting everyone on the same page won’t be easy.

The reality is that Marketing may be great in one-to-many communications, and Sales may be great at one-to-one communications, but Marketing and Sales have a very difficult time communicating with each other. Simply having the two functions agree on the definition of a “lead” has been challenging, to say the least! We need a better future for Marketing and Sales: Alignment, Integration or Collaboration?

Marketing and Sales have different vocabularies, different metrics, and a legacy of misunderstanding and mistrust. You will need a senior person or an independent consultant who speaks both “Sales” and “Marketing” fluently, to facilitate and lead the discussions. To gain and maintain the trust of the participants, and the functional sponsors, the person will also need to have experience within the Sales function plus experience within the Marketing function to allay any fears of functional bias during the collaboration.

What will be your next step? Please keep the discussion going by commenting and sharing this post with your colleagues.

“A cult brand doesn’t need to be only for a select few.” John Fluevog in the location he opened in Toronto’s Distillery District in 2013. (Richard Lautens/Toronto Star/Getty)

John Fluevog founded his first shoe store in Vancouver 45 years ago and has since built his cult footwear brand into an international chain with 19 stores across North America. Having supplied custom kicks to celebrities like Madonna, Jack White and Alice Cooper, he talked with us about the importance of turning customers into a community.

You’ve been selling shoes for a long time—since 1970, when you opened the Fox & Fluevog shoe store with your former business partner, Peter Fox. What have you done to stay relevant?

I’ve been through a lot of eras. I started off selling to hippie and natural types, then it veered into disco, then rock, then into the alternative scene. I think part of my longevity is that I’ve never become fully immersed in any particular era; I never went completely into a “look.” I’ve always kept away from being trendy. Obviously, I’m in the fashion industry; I have to appeal to different feelings that come into the market. But I’ve always tried to maintain our own identity. It’s not an easy game.

Has the Internet age helped or hindered your business?

It has changed things dramatically for us. We’re selling fashion; we’re selling a feeling. When someone can go onto the Internet and find so much, it becomes a little more difficult to stand out as original. But at the same time, thanks to the Internet, there are now so many different ways we can interface with the customer.

How have you used the Internet to deepen your relationship with your customers?

Well, with something like FlueMarket [a portal on the Fluevog website that allows customers to buy and sell used Fluevog shoes], we saw eBay becoming big and thought, Well, if people are selling used Fluevogs, they might as well come to our site to do it. That way, even if they’re not buying new shoes, they stay in our community. So we set that up, and other than hosting it on our site, we really have nothing to do with it. Our customers keep it going.

What about Open Source Footwear, which allows customers to submit their own shoe designs to the company? Why let the public weigh in on your design process?

It seems such a trendy thing to do now, but really, it came out of something that had been happening for years: I’d be in a store, and people would say, “I have an idea,” and hand me little scraps of paper with sketches on them. After a while, I thought, We might as well give them a vehicle to do this. I see our customer base as a community. It’s precarious, and it’s precious. So with things like Open Source Footwear, I feel I’m providing a service for like-minded people. I feel privileged to be able to do that.

There are stories of Fluevog customers who collect your shoes; some of them have 100 pairs. Did you set out to create a cult brand?

I never expected that to happen. It surprises me when people get so into it. People will meet me, shake my hand and say, “I’m glad to meet you and glad you never sold out.” I never know what to say, because I don’t see it like that. I just do my own thing, and I see no reason why it has to have limited appeal. As long as we maintain the originality of the product—the ethos of what we’re doing—I think it’s great when more people can enjoy it. A cult brand doesn’t need to be only for a select few.

Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

No, it wasn’t what I wanted to do at all. I was shy, dyslexic; I didn’t do well at school. I couldn’t get into university, so I started selling shoes in a store. I started working with Peter Fox, who was 15 years my senior. He told me he wanted to go out on his own, and he asked me if my father could help him out. My father is not a wealthy man, but he’s from the Prairies—he’s a frugal type of guy who saves his money. So we went to my dad, and he said ,“Yes, I’ll lend you $15,000… if you make my son a 50% partner.” And that was how we started the business.

You bought out Fox’s share of the company in 1980. What made you want to go it alone?

It wasn’t really me—it was him. He wanted to go out alone and start his own line. Peter was very much a mentor. He was artistic, and he understood the market quite well. And he taught me about things like margins and markups. But for the first 10 years, I worked in the stores, and he basically ran the business. It wasn’t until I bought the company from him that I really started to be an entrepreneur, in that I was making decisions on my own.

What did that process teach you?

I was thrown into the deep end. I had to deal with all the things a small business owner has to: cash flow, marketing, staffing. And it was the mid-’80s, and we’d just gone through a recession. It was a rather difficult time for me.

Do you miss having a partner?

I’m very happy to not have a partner. I’ve had one, and I am happy not to have one now.

Why is that?

This is purely personal, but like Sinatra, I’ve done it my way. I grew the company out of its own profits and my own energy. If I’m being critical, maybe that’s a point of pride because I’m insecure. But it means a lot to me. The business has been a vehicle to find out about myself personally and to express myself. It’s almost been like my own art project. As entrepreneurs, we create something that wasn’t, something that’s new. It’s art, and it’s awesome.

Fluevog is known for having a strong corporate culture. How have you maintained that as the company has grown?

In the early days, when we just had one store, I ran the business on love. I’d visit the store; people would talk to me; they’d say, “That John is such a nice guy. I want to work for him.” That doesn’t work anymore. We have 19 stores now. I physically can’t be there all the time, and besides, I don’t have the energy anymore. But I’m very conscious that even though I personally can’t be solely responsible for keeping morale high, and the community and culture strong, as a business we have to put energy into it. So I have people on staff who talk to employees about their personal goals, how we can help them meet those goals, and how they can fit into the company as a whole. And that helps us make sure people understand Fluevog as a brand. Not everyone gets it, and that’s OK, but we need to hire people who get it. What we sell is a feeling, an emotion that makes people feel good. People who work here need to understand that.

What’s the best lesson you’ve learned about running a business over the past 45 years?

You can’t just look at what’s going on around you today, because that can make you very discouraged. You have to have a broader vision of what you’re doing. Those are simple words, I know. But I can get quite down: There are days when things are going sideways, and I’m putting out fires; everything is wiggling and wobbling. I’ll get stuck in my little office, worrying about numbers and whether a category is going down and all this nonsense we as business people have to think about to keep going. It can become overwhelming.

So what do you do to combat that?

As an entrepreneur, you do need to be detailed, to a degree, but you cannot let the details tear apart your larger vision, or you’ll go crazy. I’d also encourage business people to set aside a piece of the profits for charity, for things they’re passionate about. Some days you come to work and it’s crap on crap. On those days, if you’re doing some good in the community, at least you have that. Those things give longevity to our careers and help us carry on.

What excites you most about Fluevog’s future?

Because of our strong culture and unique product, Fluevog has the potential to really go global. I may take it there. But even if I don’t, the idea that I can is nice. It’s like buying a Ferrari: You’re never going to go 300 kilometres an hour in it, but you can. Just having the potential feels good.

MORE INTERVIEWS WITH ENTREPRENEURS:

• Elaine “Lainey Gossip” Lui on turning a passion into a job
• Tyler Brûlé on how journalism trained him to be an entrepreneur
• Trainer to the stars Harley Pasternak on keeping people motivated
• Interview: Wind Mobile CEO Tony Lacavera on never throwing in the towel
• Lessons from Shannon Rogers, Canada’s Top Female Entrepreneur

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The post Interview: John Fluevog on how to turn your customers into a community appeared first on Canadian Business.

Artificial intelligence is about to take off in a big way.

According to a new report by Goldman Sachs, AI is defined as "any intelligence exhibited by machines or software." That can mean machines that learn and improve their operations over time, or that make sense of huge amounts of disparate data.

Though it's been almost 60 years since we first heard of the term AI, Goldman believes that we are "on the cusp of a period of more rapid growth in its use and applications."

The reasons? Cheaper sensors leading to a flood of new data, and rapid improvements in technology that allows computers to understand so-called "unstructured" data — like conversations and pictures.

Other industry insiders are confident that AI will continue to evolve at a much higher rate while affecting wage growth in many industries. Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google, believes that human-level AI is coming by 2029.

So who are the players going to be?

First, several big tech companies have been storing up patents related to the field.

IBM is the leader, with about 500 patents related to artificial intelligence. IBM's super-computer — Watson — is an example of the shift to AI, as it entered the healthcare sector in 2013 and helped lower the error rate in cancer diagnoses by physicians.

Other big patent players in the space include Microsoft, Google, and SAP.

A lot of big tech companies have also been buying AI startups.

In the last two years, Google bought five different companies having to do with technologies like image recognition, natural language processing, and neural networks. Yahoo set its sights on boosting its image recognition and natural language processing abilities. Twitter bought a deep learning technology last year to power its image recognition capabilities, while Home Depot uses a recently bought data analytics lab to help with their pricing. 

Then there are the AI startups who have received substantial amounts of funding, including Rethink Robotics ($127 million) and Sentient Technologies ($144 million). 

Analysts from Goldman Sachs are particularly bullish about AI technologies that come from Asia and the US, while Europe lags. 

So how do investors capitalize on the coming boom? 

Goldman believes Japanese hardware company NEC — the number one facial and text analysis company in the world — is a good investment. They also recommend several companies that sell AI components into cars for scenarios like helping drivers park: Nidec, MobileEye, Nippon Ceramic, and Pacific Industrial.

Marketo and Opower, both based in the U.S, are also rated as buys.  Both of these companies focus on personalizing customer engagement through the use of AI to analyze massive amounts of customer data. Goldman's analysts are also bullish about Amazon and Twitter, two companies that use AI to boost revenue and customer loyalty. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 14 things you didn't know your iPhone headphones could do

It's common advice that you should keep your emails short, and in most cases, I agree with it.

For example, if you're sending out cold emails, be concise and have a clear call to action.

But if you want to determine the ideal length of your drip emails, there's a better way than dogmatic adherence to either the "short vs long email is better" theory.

Make your drip emails as long as they need to be to achieve the desired effect.

In order to do that, you need to be aware of where your readers currently are, and where you want them to be.

Keep your audience's mindset and expectations in mind.

Let's look at one of our lead nurturing drip campaigns, our free startup sales course. It consists of relatively long emails. When you sign up, you get a new sales lesson every third day. 

People join with the intent of learning how to sell. They expect to be educated. If I'd just send out short motivational sales quotes, most people would unsubscribe or complain, because that's not the practical how-to information they expected based on what we promise them on our sign up page.

But then consider the life of someone working in a startup: they're busy, all the time. So even though they have a desire to learn, they do operate with real time constraints. They expect results, practical advice, not fluff.

When you're planning your email drip campaign, put yourself in the shoes of the person you want to reach. (The best way of doing this is to have actual one-on-one conversations with a couple of these people, ask a lot of questions, and listen very carefully to what they tell you).

Our most effective drip email...

There's one email that generates the highest number of free trial signups for our sales CRM in this drip marketing campaign. It happens to be the longest email of the whole sequence.

Here it is:

Noticed something?

That email is basically a sales letter.

We write about

• the story of how Close.io came to be,
• the major pain-points our solution eliminates,
• how it makes the life of a sales person better,
• why we're different from every other sales software provider out there,
• what our higher purpose is,
• what customers say about us,
• how you can benefit from Close.io,
• why you should not buy our sales CRM...

Why don't we break this one long email up into several shorter emails?

There are plenty of self-proclaimed experts who would look at this email and say: "Nobody will ever read such a long email! You should break this up into several emails, to make it more easily digestible."

But at that point the engagement level of our average subscriber is so high that they want to read it, and it would lose its effectiveness if we'd break up the narrative flow.

There's a lot more to be said about what makes this particular email work, but for the purpose of this post, we want to stay focused on its length.

Does your drip marketing appeal to various buyer types?

Is this email so long that plenty of people won't read it because their eyes glaze over by just looking at all that text?

Yup.

Is it so informative and engaging that it makes some people take the next step and sign up for a 14-day free trial of our sales software?

You bet it does ( it works so well we started sending this drip email to trial users as well and it instantly became our highest converting trial user email).

Different people have different ways of making decisions. Some people want to read a lot and learn a lot of details in order to make a buying decision. Others just want a short value proposition with three bullet points.

That's why it's good to create drip marketing content that appeals to different styles of decision making.

Make your long-form emails scannable.

Even though our email is long, it doesn't look like an intimidating textbook. It has a very clear structure - there are subheads, certain words and sentences are bolded, we make use of bullet points and numbered lists. 

This makes the letter more easy to navigate. Recipients can quickly scan the email, without fully reading it, and maybe one bullet point or one phrase catches their attention and makes them read a certain paragraph.

When crafting long drip emails, format your text in a way that makes it easy to read.

Think long-form emails don't work for your market?

A lot of people who work in startups snub long-form drip emails. They think these lengthy letters might work for people buying hair growth potion, but not for their sophisticated B2B prospects.

If you're one of these people, I encourage you to put this assumption to the test: send out one really well-crafted and strategically timed drip email and look if it creates better results.

What Joanna Wiebe has said about sales pages also holds true for drip emails:

"Like everything, the length of your page depends on your visitors and prospects. It’s not about picking one length or style of page out of a hat and simply shoving your messages into that." - How Long Should Your Pages Be?

Want to learn more about writing long-form copy?

The same principles which made long sales copy so effective a hundred years ago when marketing pioneers like Robert Collier and Claude Hopkins were practicing "salesmanship in print", still make long sales copy effective nowadays.

Here are some great case studies of how web-savvy companies have utilized and experimented with long sales copy - studying them will give you plenty of ideas to create killer drip emails:

• How we made $1 million for Moz (formerly SEOmoz)—with one landing page and a few emails
• Behind the scenes: Highrise marketing site A/B testing part 1
• How We Grew Conversions 100% by Rethinking Our Design Strategy
• Long Copy + Short Copy = “Hybrid Pages” (With Instructo-Graphic)

Dropping coins on a counter or handing over dirty, germ infested paper money may be looked at by future generations as we do towards those who used to trade goats for wheat. Digital wallets are slowly becoming the new mode of tap-and-go consumerism, making fiscal transactions seamless, transparent, safe and incredibly convenient.

It is the future of pay currently in flux and you might want to re-evaluate any technophobias you may have. It is an industry that offers you the opportunity to embrace cryptocurrency, mobile pay and many more digital money opportunities that just may make your life less cumbersome and more streamlined in our ever-changing cyber race.

Related Article: Guide to Accepting Apple Pay at Your Business

Integration

Digital wallet technology is popping up more and more. Below are a handful of descriptions regarding why leaving your cash as well as your debit and credit cards at home could be your best choice yet.

• Big Corp: There’s Apple Pay, Google bank, PayPal and Amazon Pay which are all on board with digital wallet technology. If you are loyal to any of these companies in any way it is in your best interest to stay on top of their digital wallet advancements.
• Square: For small businesses, Square is a smartphone appendage that plugs in to the headphone jack allowing merchants that do not have a digital setup to accept all types of card payment on their device.
• Bitcoin and friends: Bitcoin is the grandfather of cryptocurrency, a fluctuating Wild West of digital wallet money. Using this technology allows people to surpass government regulated banks. Perfect for libertarians and off-the-grid wannabes wary of the continued broad clench of Big Brother’s hand.
• NFC: This is Near Field Communication which, with a free downloaded app, allows the user to ‘tap-n-go’ their payment directly from their phone.
• The Coin Card: This is a one card fits all, capable of storing credit, debit and even loyalty card info all in one place.

Safety

Simply pressing your fingerprint button on your iPhone is all it takes to purchase items with Apple Pay. The safety of this mobile wallet usage is pretty sound given that no one else has your fingerprint sans removing your actual finger which may be the only risk; not too probable, though.

However, NFC (mentioned above) has spawned digital thieves with devices that can snatch your info by simply walking by you and tapping into the radio frequency used by your phone. To thwart this, stay alert while using your device to pay. Closing all open apps and either shutting or putting your phone on ‘airplane mode’ may also deter this cyber threat.

Bitcoins and similar applications are still sorting out their safety issues. Because there are no government regulated banks involved in this cryptocurrency industry, the risks could be high. Yet, they do carry intricately coded algorithms which do make stealing them very difficult, but not impossible.

Related Article: Should Your Business Accept Bitcoin?

In addition, cryptocurrency carries volatile worth meaning that unlike a one dollar bill with minimal value fluctuation, cryptocurrency can rise and fall exponentially.

These and other varying issues make businesses, large and small, still wary about using cryptocurrency yet mobile pay has been and continues to be very successful.

Current Users

Depending on the demographic, it may not seem that many people are using digital wallet technology. However, it’s difficult to know given the stealth ability of tools like mobile wallets that simply tap and go or get it all done before a purchase is even picked up.

In a study by Thrive Analytics, demographics were the key factor in the ‘new consumer’ approach.

It was found that,

“Looking further into digital wallet usage, demographics matter. Key findings from the survey indicate consumers are carrying less cash today, especially on-the-go females, with 50 percent of all consumers carrying less than $20 on a regular basis. Of the survey respondents who carry no cash at all, three out of four are under the age of 40. Also, nearly 60 percent of all digital wallet users are male despite carrying more cash than females. Females (18-29) tend to use merchant digital wallet apps such as Target, Macy’s and Home Depot more often than males to look for discounts/coupons (72 percent) and price shop (56 percent). When males use merchant apps, they tend to browse and engage in service related activities like paying bills and looking up retailers’ product and contact information.”

The study went on to cite that most digital wallet usage was done through mobile phones (about 60%) for purchases under $10. This entails basic everyday products such as groceries, coffee and drinks, retail items and games and books.

As this mode of consumerism continues, the mainstream will eventually get used to the application and branch out to more advanced purchases.

Staying Ahead of the Curve

There was a time when everyone was getting a cell phone and certain people (maybe you) turned their noses up at such rapidly moving technology. Now, many of those people are just trying to keep up. Being a technophobe when the pendulum is swinging so far into the digital stratosphere could certainly take its toll.

When it comes to digital wallets, being surpassed by so many important monetary transactions and decisions could hamper way more than the ability to text, email or simply talk on a device.

As this technology continues to expand it just may become as useful as so many other inventions that were at first frowned upon and now cannot be lived without. The opportunities seem limitless as digital wallet applications could expand beyond simple over-the-counter consumerism and into transactions such as:

• Real estate closings
• Mortgage, utility and educational payments
• Fundraising and donations
• Transferring funds
• Medical payments
• Portfolio shifts
• High end purchases (i.e. cars, jewelry, boats, etc.)

Whether you like it or not digital wallets are the current technology of future pay. Keep an eye out for how these applications that may apply to you and hop on the mobile, crypto and/or digital pay bus.

With the proliferation of social data in the media and the availability of digital data in general, there is the temptation by many to use this to publish analysis around major events or interesting stories.

And for good reason – the media are undoubtedly bewitched by reporting predictions using social data.

Let’s take last night’s Oscars ceremony as an example.

Putting a number, something tangible and real, on a byline about who might scoop the Best Actor or Actress statuette means guaranteed clicks (or indeed, news-stand sales). Predictions about who would triumph at the ceremony have been doing the rounds since last summer, when some of the films actually nominated hadn’t even seen the light of day.

The importance of context

However, simply publishing raw volumes of mentions, or ‘buzz’, around such things can invite dangerous conclusions, and, much like with sentiment data, as an industry we should take care to help contextualize and analyze data before others reach conclusions about the raw numbers unaided.

Context should be provided using additional information to further enrich the results and ensure that the social data is not devalued.

The social space is overflowing with examples of data where, without a consideration of the broader context, meaning can be misconstrued entirely – take the 2013 study, ‘Extracting Diurnal Patterns of Real World Activity from Social Media.’

The research combined Hurricane Sandy-related Twitter data and Foursquare data for the wider New York area, and revealed that during the peak of the storm, the majority of Tweets were actually from Manhattan, reflecting Twitter usage patterns rather than storm damage or impact.

Data promoted by Adobe Social and Hootsuite about last night’s Oscars is another example of this, illustrating how often, in the hands of the media without the context of analysis, erroneous conclusions can be drawn.

Both companies used total buzz figures – ie; most discussed overall – to make their predictions on who would take the golden prize home in each category. Take Hootsuite’s predictions as an example.

With 2.7 million mentions, American Sniper was the most talked about motion picture overall, however with a little bit of digging we know that there are various reasons that this film was likely to be most talked about – reasons that Hootsuite went into themselves.

“Several important considerations keep us from proclaiming American Sniper the ultimate winner… many mentions could be references to the book, as well as the controversial figure of the late Chris Kyle himself, or the influence of the film adaptation of Kyle’s life may have on the outcome of his accused murderer’s trial (which is still in progress).

Lastly, extensive media coverage of the conflict over royalties for the film adaptation of Kyle’s book has undoubtedly contributed to some of the social discussions.”

This is certainly not criticism of those vendors, as both stated that measuring the sheer volume of mentions alone was unlikely to have any impact upon what is essentially a closed-door panel decision, rather than a public vote.

Furthermore, without an open dataset or publication of working, there is no unified way of comparing accuracy.

Even after accounting for differences in the quality of spam filters and varying search term inclusions and competencies, Hootsuite and Adobe’s data differs by an order of magnitude.

Caution is key

Though this year we opted not to delve too deeply into data around the Oscars, we did tweet a few graphs from our @PeerIndex account relating to the topic.

It’s more interesting and insightful to place published data within a context, and use more sophisticated searches to begin dissecting the data.

For example, segmenting the conversation by gender reveals that conversation about each nominee differs in its split, as shown for actors in the tweet below, and for films in the below Tweet.

#Oscars2015: Social media posts show that #ImitationGame and #TheoryofEverything are discussed more by women. pic.twitter.com/xyfN3HvkUN

— Brandwatch PeerIndex (@PeerIndex) February 23, 2015

Moreover, even when releasing raw ‘buzz’ figures, it is best to be cautious not to imply that this might mean an actor or actress will have any stronger chance of winning or not, simply that discussion is increasing and that nominees are discussed at varying volumes over time.

But what value can social data add to events like the Oscars?

Well, rather than track buzz alone, using Query language we can actually isolate just the conversation that directly focuses on explicit predictions.

#Oscars2015: It’s warming up. pic.twitter.com/rVyX8WKPAX

— Brandwatch PeerIndex (@PeerIndex) February 23, 2015

This tends to have a closer correlation to the actual results, perhaps because ‘the wisdom of the crowd’ comes close to anticipating the opinions of the 5000-strong membership of Oscar voters.

This was demonstrated by analyzing the public conversation data for direct predictions in the week running up to the ceremony itself.

Not just a numbers game

We have delved into Oscars data before however, in both 2013 and 2014, when we worked with the Motion Picture Association of America (The Credits).

Instead of simply tracking total mentions, we divided the audience into a group of critics and general members of the public.

By listening to conversation from those groups, again targeted to only find direct predictions of the results, more meaningful insights could be drawn. These included examples of critics predicting one winner, the public predicting another, and the real winner being someone else entirely.

By being explicit about the type of conversation tracked, and by granting users the tools to dive into the data and discover their own insights, a better picture of the capabilities of social data could be drawn.

And, for what it’s worth, both the public and the critics predicted most of the winners correctly, managing to anticipate 15/18 of the tracked award winners in 2013 – more than Nate Silver, the American statistician who famously correctly predicted the outcome of the most recent US election in all 50 states, who managed just 67%.

Social data is more than just buzz counting

“While social media can’t tell us who will win, we can learn who would, if the internets had their way” stated Hootsuite before this year’s ceremony.

They, and Adobe, were right to distance themselves from the more controversial conclusions drawn by some – such as the headlines proclaiming that total buzz equaled a win – but 2015 should be the year when social data matures from buzz counting and develops into a technique that genuinely uncovers insights and adds value to the topics it is pointed towards.

After all, data without context is really no story at all.

Sometimes the best advice and perspective doesn’t come from the public figures we hear at conferences or see quoted in publications. It comes from the people who are hands on, doing the work in a wide range of situations.

Toby is one of those guys. You probably don’t know Toby, but maybe you should. He recently joined Business Insider as the Sales Director for the Southeast, after a number of years with CBSi, parent to B2B technology focused properties ZDNet and TechRepublic (among others). Like many of the people I work with at publishers, Toby works on more programs in a month than many of us work on in a year and that position gives him first hand insight into what is working, and what isn’t, at scale.

I had a chance to talk to Toby recently (when he was still with CBSi) and he shared three of the most common mistakes he sees B2B marketers make when they first start working with publishers. I thought it was great insight for B2B marketers looking to work with publishers for the first time (and a healthy reminder for many of us). So, with a hat tip to Toby, here they are, along with some of my thoughts he sparked:

1. Setting Unrealistic Expectations

When our expectations are unrealistic, we don’t have an opportunity to be successful. What many marketers would consider a success will be seen as a complete failure, not even as a modest result that can be built on.

Toby highlighted two areas in particular where he sees marketers coming in with unrealistic expectations.

• ROI. Yes, marketing should build the business, but it doesn’t make the trees around your office burst into beautiful blooms of money. If your expectations of ROI would make even the most risk-averse CEO give you a blank check, you are setting yourself up to fail.
• Content. We are all awash in content today. If a publication can target your audience, you are likely one of dozens of marketers trying to offer up your content to their audience. Content focusing on the challenges or needs of one audience can’t be used effectively with other audiences that don’t share the same challenge. Particularly with “lead guarantee” programs, where a publisher contracts to provide a certain number of contacts meeting specific criteria, marketers fall into the trap of believing their content isn’t critical.

Toby shared a number of examples with me, including a marketer that expected more than $1.2 million in revenue from a $15,000 lead generation program and another that expected to use content created for help desk administrators in a program to increase visibility with VPs and CIOs. These are extreme examples, but unfortunately mismatches like this are not unusual.

When you set unrealistic expectations, you have nowhere to go but down.

2. Underinvesting

Publisher sites are noisy places, some have more than a dozen ads on a single page and 10′s or 100′s of millions of ads served every month. You are one of many marketers, and if this is one of your first ventures into advertising, you are likely one of the smaller and lesser-known ones.

In addition, each publisher represents only a tiny slice of the total time your audience spends online. Is your buy really big enough to meaningfully sway perception when your competitors aren’t just sitting silent? Often, the answer is “no.”

One of the best ways to address this is to narrow your focus. Many marketers start with retargeting because it reaches a very finite audience that is already familiar with your company (people who visited your site) and is relatively inexpensive. When you look at larger B2B publishers, start by focusing the specific sections of the site.

Toby highlighted the tendency many marketers have to run small pilots with a large number of companies and then conclude advertising won’t work. Instead, focus on just a one or two partners, at a scale that delivers a more meaningful impact. Not only will you see better results, you will be testing programs that are more like the ones you will ultimately roll out.

3. Jumping Straight To Sales

Someone downloaded your perspective on industry trends, market research you sponsored, or your tip sheet. No, that doesn’t mean they want to buy from you. Chances are they still don’t even know what you do!

Yet this is still what many marketers are doing. I’ve received the calls, I’m sure you have too. But buyers hate it, it is interruptive, presumptive, and rarely successful. Even worse, many marketers don’t have a separate long-term nurturing process for the vast majority of people who may actually be interested in the future, but don’t want to talk today.

If you are asking for someone’s email in exchange for content or information, you better be ready to followup with additional content that is useful, entertaining or timely. If your plan is to cold call everyone on the list, just skip the content promotion, buy yourself a list, and start making calls.

[Photo Credit: Melissakis, H.]

There are a few statistics that are used to torment marketers. We’ve all had some chief something or other office sneer that 50 percent of advertising is wasted. We’ve all had that business of how much more it costs to acquire a customer than to retain one and, since June of 2012, we’ve been dealing with the apparent end of solution selling.

That’s when the Corporate Executive Board announced that B2B buyers were getting through almost 60 percent of the process without contacting a sales rep. More than a few startled Squirrels were heard to drop their nuts that day and, not long after, Scott Gillum in Forbes proclaimed that “57 percent of the sales process just disappeared.” Goodness. Just like that? Where do you think it went?

Just the other day, my friend Lisa Shepherd was suggesting on LinkedIn “…that B2B buyers are now self-nurturing and… sales needs help from marketing to enter the sales conversation earlier”. With all due respect to Lisa, Scott and CEB, I’m not sure we actually have a problem here.

For years now, we’ve been whining about how much more educated consumers are about the products and companies that make them. Darned Internet went and ruined everything.

This seems to be predicated on the notion that there was a time when business purchasers woke up in the morning, decided to buy something and, based on nothing more than an ad they’d once seen or a crumpled business card in their sock drawer, engaged a sales professional to lead them on the purchase journey. You don’t remember this time, do you? Neither do I. So let’s all get over the absurd idea that intelligent buyers of anything significant ever made purchases that way.

Long before the internet, we had such a thing as research, marketing content and highly educated buyers-of-things both in the P-Cube and at the user level (the F-Word). They read magazines, they attended conferences, they called up their friends and asked what solutions they were using to solve the vexing issues of data management or quality assurance or recruiting and they generally got on with the job of making a purchase decision.

They managed all of this without the help of a sales person, and economies grew, products were sold and life went on. I would bet that long before we could Google our way to insight, B2B buyers were about 25 percent of the way in before they picked up a phone. In this scenario, once they have invited the Squirrels over for tea, the access to information becomes much more difficult since it’s now gated by a sales organization and doled out based on the understanding of as little as one rep who may or may not actually know what the buyer is after.

It seems likely to me that at the point a sales organization is engaged, the momentum of the process slows pretty significantly while everyone figures out what everyone else is talking about.

That’s okay too because the buying and selling processes are asynchronous, right up to the point where the deal is finally done. In other words, the speed of the sale cannot be measured by the rate at which the sales representative is running his or her mouth. I’m sorry if that is news to anyone.

Another thing that’s quite all right is that sales is not joining the party from the outset. The early stages of a purchase process are rather introspective and involve a lot of needs analysis, gap analysis, analysis of the analysis of the needs and gaps, the formation of the purchase committee, the stomping off of half the purchase committee, the reforming of the committee, the arguing of budgets and all that fun stuff. The presence of a sales person in this will, at best, gum it up and at worst destroy its integrity.

Sales Squirrels are expensive little beasts and turning them loose at this stage is a costly waste of talent if all they are doing is making a bunch of noise and generally pissing people off. This is marketing’s bit. While all that internal muck is happening, we need to be nudging the relationship along from awareness through to consideration. The timely delivery of information that supports the purchase rationale, gently informs the innocent, sets the table for the budget discussion and creates broad credibility is much more cost-effective than sending in the sales folks and far less likely to screw up the buying process by trying to accelerate it.

As well, it allows us to be eliminated where we are not a good fit. Lisa says buyers are self-nurturing. I disagree; I think they are self-qualifying and saving us the cost and bother of trying to sell to someone who has no use or no budget for our product or service.

Our job is to keep our brand in the right game until the customer is ready to declare a preference or even a few preferences and then we need to hand it off to sales and get the heck out of the way so they can run it the rest of the way.

Whether we are competing with solution selling, challenger sales, disruptive thinking or just discounting the crap out of our offering, we need to respect the buying process as something different from the selling process and stop worrying so much.

It’s not unusual for reps to get fired up about social selling at the beginning of a new month or quarter … and then trail off a week or two later. Social selling doesn’t deliver immediate results, and salespeople can become frustrated with spending time on something that isn’t bolstering their closing power in the short term.

But sticking with it pays off. So how can sales leaders increase social selling stickiness among their teams? Here are a few ideas I’ve seen work.

1) Make reps accountable.

If leaders aren’t measuring social selling, reps won’t do it. Add it to the agenda of deal or pipeline reviews so sales managers check reps’ progress on a regular basis. Are they following their buyers on Twitter? How many people from their buyers’ and customers’ companies are they connected with on LinkedIn? What pre-call research are they doing? If reps know they’ll be asked these questions, they’ll be more conscientious about incorporating social media into their workflows.

2) Get leadership involved.

If sales and executive leadership isn’t on board with social selling, those who report to them won’t be either. Leadership must create a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing where social selling can thrive.

3) Offer training.

If you just tell reps to “do social selling,” you’re probably going to get a roomful of confused faces. It’s not going to be sticky if you don’t train it. What specifically do you want salespeople to do? Get a Twitter account? Participate in LinkedIn groups? Blog? If you don’t spell out the activities and teach salespeople how to do them, the initiative will fail.

4) Form a partnership between Sales and Marketing.

My third social selling pillar is “Use Content to (Re)Engage Your Buyer.” Salespeople should be sharing, posting, commenting on, and liking third-party articles and company branded content. But they don’t have to go it alone -- Marketing can and should help with this. Marketing is suited to identify the experts that salespeople should be following, in addition to sourcing and creating articles that resonate with buyers. The right support can do a lot to increase stickiness.

5) Create guidelines and policies.

Tweeting scared isn’t a good idea, and if reps aren’t sure what’s sharable and what isn’t, they’ll err on the side of caution and keep quiet. Depending on the size of your company, you should have some sort of social media policy in place that reps can refer to when they’re unsure. But if your organization is on the smaller side, don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be.

6) Run a contest.

Salespeople are competitive by nature, so consider running contests around social selling to ingrain the habit. Some ideas:

• Who can add the most customer LinkedIn connections
• Who can add the most VP-level and above connections
• Who can get the most Twitter followers

Find ways to gamify and make social selling fun -- not just another thing they have to do.

Want to learn the how and the why of social selling from Jill Rowley for free? Subscribe to HubSpot’s Sales blog in the month of February to be entered to win an hour-long social selling consultation. 

One of the easiest ways to fail as a salesperson is to avoid preparing for an upcoming meeting. Too often, salespeople show up to a prospect’s office with a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants approach and cross our fingers that they’ll buy what we are selling. For example, how often have you…

• arrived at a meeting without a proper agenda?
• forgotten your personal business cards?
• neglected to send an email confirming the meeting beforehand?
• chosen not to do your research about the person with whom you’re meeting?

While these actions may sound simple, they are essential steps in your sales process.You establish credibility by following a process that makes it easy for your prospect to do business with you.

The day before your next sales meeting with a prospect, take these 5 steps to properly prepare.

1. Send an email reconfirming the meeting.

Just because the meeting is on your calendar doesn’t mean that it’s on your prospect’s calendar. We’re all working off of different platforms and systems – and wires can get crossed very easily, even if digital meeting invitations were sent last week. To avoid miscommunication, send a simple email reconfirming the meeting. An easy way to inconvenience someone is to show up at the wrong date and time. Avoid doing so by taking 2 minutes to send an email.

Here’s a simple template you can use:

“Hi [Name] –

Just a quick note from our team to let you know that [name] and [name] are looking forward to meeting with you [date, time] at [location].

Thanks again for making the time for us. Kindly please let me know if any issues arise.

Thanks.

Best,

[Name]”

[Tip: It’s important to note a specific suite or office number here as well so that you’re not wandering a large building looking for the right room!]

2. Gather materials that are essential to the meeting.

You should always (always always!) arrive prepared with an agenda. No matter how simple the discussion may be, you want begin with a simple outline of talking points. This is a great opportunity to differentiate yourself from competitors, communicate your level of brand awareness, and to determine the focus of the discussion. You may also want to include the agenda as an attachment when you send an email confirming the meeting. Regardless, you should arrive at the meeting with a hard copy for everyone in the room.

Another item that every salesperson should be prepared with is …. (you guessed it) a stack business cards. While you may not need them at every single meeting (at least we hope not – you wouldn’t be moving through the sales process that way), you should always have 2-3x as many as you think you will need. Make it easy for prospects to contact you. [Tip: always keep your business cards in the same pocket/folder. Don’t spend time digging in your bag when you could be spending time in an important discussion – that eventually leads to a sale.]

Other questions to consider:

• Are you walking your prospect through a sales presentation?
• Do you know what, if any, technology limitations there are in the office?
• If a screen is not available, do you have enough hard copies of your presentation for everyone in the meeting?
• Are you prepared to tell a story that communicates how your solution helped a customer alleviate a specific pain point?
• Can you articulate how you’re different *and better* than your competitors?

Once you have all of your materials pulled together, make sure you have extra copies of each and that you’ve practiced (out loud!) the specific things you’d like to say in the meeting.

It’s important to note that it is possible to have too many materials. You don’t want to muddy the conversation or confuse your prospect by throwing all of your materials on the table, forcing them to decide what is most important. Be ruthless in choosing what you bring to this meeting and remember that you may have an opportunity to use other (perhaps less useful) materials down the road.

3. Practice the Purpose, Benefit, and Check.

We’ve written about the Purpose, Benefit, Check many times on this blog. This is because it’s the easiest way to begin a sales meeting – and the easiest way to avoid arriving at the end of the meeting with the realization that you had two separate objectives all along. At the beginning of the meeting, state its purpose, the benefit that everyone in the room is hoping to receive, and check to see if the group is in agreement. If you’re aligned, then move right along through the agenda.

If you’re not in agreement, take 2-3 minutes to discuss. You may need to either add to or drop specific items from the agenda in order to come to a consensus. How many times have you arrived at a meeting and wondered what you were supposed to get out of it or how you were expected to contribute? It happens too often. Help your prospect cut through the noise by clearly stating the objectives outright. By doing so, you’ll make your prospect comfortable knowing that you’re not wasting his or her time.

4. Review the meeting attendees.

Do you know who is going to be in the room? Do you know why it’s important that he/she be there? Who is the decision maker?

Involve each person in the conversation. Don’t neglect anyone. Speak directly to each person and ask tough questions to uncover their needs. Depending on the size of the meeting, it may be difficult for you to address each person but you’ll be better off by reviewing this information the day before the meeting than if you try to do it on the fly.

If you haven’t met one or several of those invited to the meeting, you have an opportunity to do your research (with tools like LinkedIn) that may help you move the sale to a close.

5. Write down the 3 most important items they have stated are important to them.

If you are prepping for a face-to-face meeting with a prospect, you’ve likely had 2-3 specific discussions with one or several folks at the company about their needs. Hopefully, you’ve done a good job of qualifying and you know that this company is an ideal customer for you. [Note: if you haven’t, you’re not ready for the meeting and you need to schedule an exploratory call with the prospect first.]

The day before your meeting, take 5 minutes to think about what 3 items are most important to your prospect. What have they told you in previous phone calls or conversations about their priorities? These are clues. Use them! In your meeting, speak directly to these priorities; make them feel heard and understood. When you can communicate that you’ve listened and that you are serious about solving their pain points, you demonstrate your value as a salesperson. Again, if you can’t write down their three priorities they you’re not ready for the meeting.

Preparation is key to a smooth sales meeting with a prospect. The day before the meeting, send a confirmation email, gather essential materials, practice the PBC, review the attendees, and write down your prospect’s priorities.

You’re on your way to closing the deal.

Good luck!

74% of the buying decision is made in advance of the first sales call, 50% before an email address is captured. So why wait until marketing automation or CRM to tailor the digital experience?

Digital Marketing is an ecosystem– one that’s consistently expanding to include new categories of marketing technology. The marketing technology landscape of 2015 is varied and dynamic. A look at the more than 2,000 logos in Scott Brinker’s MarTech Supergraphic gives us an idea of just how many solutions work together to make digital marketers successful in creating digital experiences that resonate with audiences.

Even in this gigantic mosaic of martech logos, the Web Content Management System (WCMS) is a bedrock. As Scott Brinker himself points out, “All roads lead to the website (and hence the CMS).” Of all the marketing technology on Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape, “CMS is arguably the only required category in the entire landscape.” And the more channels emerge for customer engagement, the more crucial content becomes to securing business goals online.

The Evolving CMS

As content becomes increasingly crucial to online business, the CMS must evolve without losing sight of itself. The web content management system must adapt to customer demands, while still remaining “best of breed.” Rather than simply “managing” and publishing content, the CMS must become an intelligent tool, offering actionable insights on content performance across contexts, personas and devices.

Major themes for thinking about the evolving digital marketing landscape:

● Content Marketing- The days of “push” advertising are over. Create relationships with potential and existing customers by providing informative, relevant and engaging content that addresses the higher need behind their purchase. Watch this excellent video from Forrester analyst Ryan Skinner on why content marketing matters.

● Content Performance- Data Driven Content Marketing metrics. Actionable insights on the performance of pieces of content, rather than pages. Content Performance metrics provide insight on which content provides value and which doesn’t perform, enabling you to continuously refine your content marketing strategy.

● Progressive Profiling- Continuous learning about visitors based on contextual data and real-time behavior enables you to create customer personas, and custom tailor their digital experience based on these insights

Content powers the entire customer journey

Lead to Revenue Management
Digital marketers– particularly in the B2B space– will be familiar with the concept of Lead to Revenue Management, often depicted with a funnel.  As a lead matures, it goes from

Lead to Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) to an Opportunity to a Deal

As a lead matures, it is cared for by Marketing, Sales and Account Management/Customer Service, respectively. For more on Lead to Revenue Management, follow the blog of Forrester Analyst and L2RM Expert Lori Wizdo.

The role of content in the customer journey goes way beyond the early stages: content is central to supporting business processes at all stages, from marketing to sales to customer retention. It can also be key to moving a customer through the customer journey, from one stage to another.

Content is crucial to supporting online business processes– that’s why marketing technology integrations like

● CMS and Marketing Automation
●CMS and Customer Retention Management Software (CRM)
●CMS and Social Sentiment Analysis and Helpdesk or Customer Service Software

are so important.

A CMS can turn visitors into leads

Visitor to Lead Management

Relevant experiences don’t have to start with Marketing Automation. 74% of the buying decision is made in advance of the first sales call, 50% before an email address is captured. So why wait until marketing automation or CRM to tailor the digital experience?

Understanding Content Performance helps you personalize the digital experience even at the anonymous visitor. Measuring and understanding which content is being consumed in real time, in combination with contextual data, helps you resonate with your visitor before the email address is captured, earlier in the funnel– before marketing automation plays a role.

CMS and Visitor to Lead Management
How does a CMS help with Visitor to Lead Management? A content management system with powerful targeting and personalization combined with strong content performance analytics can start tailoring the digital experience for even unknown, anonymous, first time visitors.

With content performance, Hippo CMS helps you understand which content performs, which doesnt for which audiences and personas, helps continuously refine content strategy–so, before Lead to Revenue Management comes into play, you can turn visitors into leads.

Visitor to Lead Management Metrics

Your content’s performance is key to turning visitors into leads. These metrics go beyond standard analytics, “which base their measurements on final html renderings of pages rather than the substance from which they are generated: the content itself.”

Content performance metrics use metadata that corresponds to the customer journey to understand content topics, forms, and editors which resonate with audiences at the various decision making stages. This enables to CMS to optimize and personalize the content delivered to each individual visitor– and turning that visitor into a lead.

This is how Content Performance brings the feedback loop into the CMS market. Content Performance gives the marketeer insights like:

●Persona trends and persona discovery
●Content gaps per persona in the content lifecycle
●Editorial effectiveness (show which editor or design is creating the best assets for which personas)

By adding business goals to assets, marketers have access to metrics including:

●Brand awareness
●Engagement
●Customer acquisition
●Conversion

The Next Step in Marketing Accountability

When Lori Wizdo coined Lead to Revenue Management, she set a precedent for using marketing automation to make marketing data driven and accountable. By measuring content performance, Visitor to Lead Management further professionalises the marketing discipline, by making content marketing accountable and data driven as well.

This blog was originally published on Hippo’s blog

Emma Vas: How do you think B2B marketing and sales have changed the most in recent years?

Carlos Hidalgo: “It used to be that marketing was just doing what sales wanted or needed you to do. That has changed dramatically. From a strategic approach, marketing is much more important because of how things have changed from a buyer perspective.”

Vas: What is the most important factor in Demand Generation that Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Revenue Officers are missing today?

Hidalgo: “I think the biggest thing they’re missing is the need for Change Management. Too many organizations are repeating the same practices over and over again but expecting different results – which is the definition of insanity.

Most companies are running around 15+ different marketing campaigns per year, which is more than one a month. This number is confirmed by studies from ANNUITAS, the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and Forrester.

Typically, these short campaigns are ineffective. Their turnaround is too quick, and they don’t truly qualify the ‘leads’ they generate. There’s also no continuity between different campaigns.

Unfortunately, a lot of organizations are built to support that campaign model. They have a lot of teams that are siloed with individual tactics. Chief Marketing Officers have to understand that there is a need for Change Management from the perspectives of people, process, content and technology.

We have to change the way we do B2B marketing, because buyers are light-years ahead of us in terms of sophistication. They want conversations; they don’t want campaigns. They want dialogue; they don’t want one-off contact. They don’t want to be ‘handed off’ to sales; they want continuity with an organization.

Those things all take substantial change. It changes how we think. It changes how we develop content. It changes how we design programs. It changes how we use technology. And it certainly changes how we’re organized as firms.

Change Management involves an element of cultural transformation, which you may not be willing to make as an organization. But, without Change Management, you sink a lot of money into technology and content, expecting different results. You may end up marginally moving the needle, but with more organizations expecting you to drive greater revenue and pipeline growth, your investments won’t yield a significant result.

Demand Generation isn’t just about content marketing. You have to fundamentally change if you want to succeed in this modern, sophisticated, buyer-centric world.”

Vas: What coming changes or disruptions to Demand Generation should CMOs and business leaders be preparing for?

Hidalgo: “They have to prepare for more buyer sophistication. We are already behind from a marketing and sales perspective. We can’t afford to fall further behind.

You need to ask yourself: How are you, as a marketing leader, going to adapt or change your content to what buyers are already doing? And, as much as I talk about marketers being behind, B2B sales people are even further behind.

Honestly, CMOs need to step up and lead. In order to drive this transformation and adapt to what our buyers are doing, it’s going to take a lot of leadership from the top. Those who have the fortitude to lead will see a much better response and return from their marketing dollars.”

Vas: Any closing thoughts on Demand Generation, sales and marketing?

Hidalgo: “From a marketing perspective, it’s our game to lose. With all the changes happening in B2B demand generation, we should take this opportunity to take the bull by the horns and change our organizations for the better.

We have the opportunity to bring tremendous value to our companies, and now it’s just a matter of grasping that opportunity.”

The greatest salespeople aren’t always the greatest CRM experts…and it doesn’t always matter.

Every sales department has one. And, sadly, new recruits born into a world of web often sneer at them. The experienced sales executive who prefers landlines to telepresence, remembers the birthdays of his clients’ children and writes stuff down on paper. Yes, that guy.

The guy who’s kept three £250k accounts loyal for a decade.

Salespeople who started work in a different decade aren’t always familiar with CRM technology and, sometimes, it frustrates their (often younger) colleagues charged with getting the most from their IT investment. To the point where our traditionalist hero – let’s call this hero Bob – ends up excluded from departmental strategy, with the millions of business pounds he brings in, ignored.

Can I change your perspective a little?

Bob isn’t anti-CRM. In fact, he’s the most pro-CRM guy you’ll ever meet. (He just doesn’t always do it through software.) It’s important that you can make sure his decades of learning becomes part of your CRM’s ongoing improvement programme, leading to a positive effect on conversions.

1. Attitude leads to opportunity.

The first time Bob met his client, Fred, he didn’t talk business. A chance meeting in the golf club led to a phone call, then a lunch. Over the steak sandwich, Bob asked Fred about his background. Where he went to school, how he got started in business and the glass extension he’d just added to his house.

Along the way, he learned Fred was friends with the CMOs of two companies on his hit list. Before coffee, he had those names in his notebook.

To today’s goal-focused, results-oriented salesperson, Bob’s approach might sound meandering. But look closer: doesn’t it sound a lot like a CRM nurturing pathway? Bob’s first task was to establish rapport and learn something about his prospect, which is also the purpose of a well-written blog or email marketing campaign.

So while Bob doesn’t think much of computers, his attitude towards Customer Relationship Management is spot-on. The right approach to CRM opens up opportunities far beyond one prospect.

2. Read the situation before acting.

After lunch with Fred, Bob dropped him a note of thanks and said he’d call again next month. Nothing else. Bob’s primary ethos is never make your client feel uncomfortable.

After a few lunches and coffees, Fred started asking what Bob would do about a problem facing his finance department. Bob thought for a few minutes, then asked if he could visit the team to gather information. Still no sale. But the time was right to move closer.

Nurturing sometimes looks like timewasting because some of those nurtured prospects never become customers. But sales is a numbers game. One percent of lunch dates turning into £100k accounts still adds up.

Someone you just met isn’t ready to make a buying decision. How many times have your less experienced sales team lost a hot prospect by drilling them with offers too soon? It’s just as applicable to an e-CRM strategy, from first cold mailing to final contract.

3. Connect through connections.

The following week, Bob called those two connections of Fred’s. He’d heard great things about them and wondered if he could buy them a coffee. Both accepted.

In his highly advanced CRM user interface, (a battered old leather notebook), Bob scribbled out “cold suspect” next to both names and wrote in “warm lead”.

The right CRM application lets you do a lot more than just contact people. It helps you build a relationship in the most effective way. Some are even able to map connections between people and show you the easiest approach pathway.

Flexibility and openness characterize Bob’s approach. A connection through another connection is a lot more valuable than a cold call. It’s messy, it’s chaotic, it’s human and warm. If the digital natives on your team have trouble with this, your most experienced salespeople may be the right people to train them.

4. Keeping customers means more than winning them.

Sales Directors often trumpet their big acquisitions louder than their long term retentions, which is a shame, because Bob’s trio of long term customers delivers a profit margin of 30 percent every year. Contrast that with the three years it takes a new client to break even. Turnover is good, but profits are better.

Every sales person knows it’s easier to win new business from an existing client than a cold lead. So keep congratulating your young team on each big win, but make sure they’re not neglecting last year’s client win. They need to learn the importance of maximising Customer Lifetime Value.

5. Formalize the methods – but don’t freeze them.

Bob likes the golf course but he always checks whether a new prospect prefers football. Expert users of CRM software have a tendency to formalise “what works” in terms of “hard aspects” rather than “soft aspects.”

This is another approach Bob uses that’s perfectly in tune with best-practice CRM. His methods don’t change from sale to sale, but his execution does. Rather than blasting all prospects with the same offer, he adapts each touchpoint to a situation he knows the prospect will prefer. All of this contributes to a sky-high conversion ratio.

6. When the time’s ready, “make the sale” to Bob.

Bob isn’t technoid, but he’s pragmatic. When he sees something working, he adopts it. So when he realizes the wealth of client information in his notebooks can do more for the company as part of its CRM database, make the time to help him put it in there.

As a closing exercise, take Bob’s numbers from last year and calculate your jump in sales if every new client win delivered the same billings at the same profit margin. Thirty percent? One hundred percent? You can do it – with Bob’s help. That’s why Bob might be your CRM system’s greatest asset.

Your old-school sales guys aren’t just sales executives. They’re mentors for the next generation. Your CRM application is just waiting to make use of their knowledge.

Start applying some old-school knowledge to a cutting-edge CRM system with the eGuide: The ultimate guide to: upselling and cross selling.

This post first appeared on the Redspire blog

By Tibor Shanto - tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

I know, they told you cold calling is dead, but it’s not dead, it just smells funny, and those that tell you this, probably confuse Shinola with other matter.

You Don’t Know Your Own Metrics – Many in sales fail to own and be accountable for specific aspects of their success, in the case of cold calling, it is their specific metrics. These same people often know the stats of their favourite hockey or baseball players, but when it comes to key metrics involving their success, they are in the dark. If nothing, else sales people should know what their proposal to close ratio is; discovery to proposal; engagement (or first meeting) to discovery. Once you know how many first meeting you need to drive your quota, you can then understand how many cold calls you need to make, once you back out referrals, marketing generated leads, and sales to current customers. If you do not know this, you will fail at allocating the right time to pursue the right prospects. Without owning your own metrics, you are on a journey with no map and no hint of how much fuel you will need to get there, which why often many don’t get there.

Right Prospects – Above I mentioned the “right prospect”. Many think, and other pundits like to paint, cold calling is just a numbers game where you randomly call people in the hope that they will take mercy on you and give you an appointment. Where in reality the call is cold because you are not on the person’s calendar that day, and you are hitting them out of the blue. But this does not preclude you having done research, understand the value you can provide that person, and making sure that they are indeed the right prospect for you offering as much as you being a good fit for them. This is no different a process than the socialites would espouse, or the referrals only crowd would. Save the fact that those of us willing to pick up the phone and call them direct without waiting for an event, a “social interaction”, or a referral. While they for their own reason prefer to wait, we don’t and succeed by going direct. But it still has to be the right prospect.

Lack Of Process Or Methodology – Most sales people lack a methodology or set of best practices that help them not only succeed, but provide a means for continuous evaluation and by extension improvement. This why they end up with the symptoms above. Which ultimately leads to a lack of success, and doing anything to avoid the activity. But those of us who have a methodology, steps, actions, contingencies, and more, can not only contextualize the results, but deliver great success in prospecting. With that we build a pipeline that give us choices and the opportunity to work with the most interesting companies while delivering to our own goals and those of our employers.

Without the above three elements, you are working in the dark, operating blind, making things much more difficult and scary than it ever has to be.

Tibor Shanto

The proliferation of sale enablement tools is astounding. It’s no wonder everyone is trying to define sales enablement. What if we made the definition really simple?

Sales Enablement is anything that frees your sales people to sell.

The next question to be answered is “What is selling?” The answer might be, “Any interaction with a client that moves the sale forward.” Can you remove those activities that don’t meet that description out of the sales teams hands? Which part of the sales process requires a highly skilled sales person? This is where the discussion gets interesting.

If you want to determine what sales enablement tools you need to employ, you need to know what your salespeople do all day.

Every salesperson spends part of their time doing things that have nothing to do with sales. They may spend time on travel and travel related activities. They have company-mandated meetings to attend. There may be other admin work including calendaring, time documentation etc. The better managed those activities are the better.

What part of the sales process is your sales team involved in varies from company to company. Some companies still rely on sales people to do prospecting, while other companies have marketing teams that deliver qualified leads to the sales reps. Your sales team may be doing research on customers or industries. They may be involved in social media. (New statistics indicate that the most successful salespeople are). They are updating CRM systems with client information. They are making phone calls and emails. They are setting appointments and answering questions.

It is easy to fill a sales rep’s day with activities. If you want to know what those activities are, just ask your sales rep, or call the accounting and HR department and ask which tasks salespeople complain about.

What tools can you offer your sales team to help focus their activities around the client interaction part of their jobs?

What if someone else could do the client research? What if someone else could write the introductory emails? What if the CRM dialed the phone, researched prospects, managed social media, and automated communication? What if reps could speak notes instead of typing? What if sales presentations were available on their mobile devices and were easy to personalize? What if you could use data to pinpoint what to sell to whom when? What if training could be done effectively online?

That is all possible now. So, if you think you know what sales enablement is, just wait a week. Someone will introduce a new sales enablement tool you probably never thought of.

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

*Editor’s Note: Recap post of the Deck presented at Sales Hacker Series in San Francisco on February 3rd, 2015 by Michael Haylon, Director of Sales at Yesware.

When it comes to B2B Sales Emails there’s almost no data to support all the assertions out there about “best practices”.  Sure, there are anecdotes (“this got me a big meeting!”) and intuition (“think about it!”) about what works and what doesn’t, but no real data behind it. For example, after the 2012 presidential election, former Obama campaigners made headlines when they revealed that their most wildly successful email subject line consisted of a single word: “Hey.” By their account, that email alone brought in millions of dollars.

Could you get away with this subject line? Doubtful.

Drawing on data from over 500,000 sales emails sent by Yesware users in Q1 2014, we found that subject lines containing the word “hey” resulted in lower open and reply rates than other common subject line keywords.

One thing that we do know definitively about email though, is that bad emails cost you money. A lot of what many of us do today is email blind. That’s why I wanted to try and lay the foundation today with some data to support how to use email to sell.

Here’s the data:

• More than 1,000 Yesware users (anonymized and used with permission)
• 9 rapidly growing, inside sales-focused software companies
• Over 500,000 sales emails
• Q1 2014

#1 – Include Multiple Recipients (But Only One in the “To” Line)

Now, the first thing I thought when I saw this was: “Yea, no shit. If you include multiple people, you’re more likely to get a response.” Rather than sending to two recipients, when you have the opportunity to copy someone else on the email we found that both open and reply rate increased by 12%.

When two people are in the “To” line, their going to defer to the other person to respond. Whereas if you call out someone specific and make it visible to someone else that you’ve called them out, they’re more likely to open up that message and reply.

#2 – Subject Line Length Doesn’t Matter

Yesware’s research also found that subject line length did not have a significant impact on email open and reply rates. Looking at data drawn from two anonymous companies in the graphic below, we can see that there is no specific pattern that points to any particular word count outperforming others. It’s all over the place.

OPEN / REPLY RATE BY SUBJECT LINE LENGTH:

Try including some of the most effective subject line words mentioned above in your emails to see how they impact open and reply rates. You can perform an A/B test of your own subject lines using Yesware’s template reply reports to track opens, link clicks, and gauge email effectiveness.

#3 – The Wrong Keywords Cost You Meetings

The data reveals that some subject line keywords perform well across the board, resulting in both high open and reply rates. However, other frequently used words weren’t so effective. Here, you can see how keyword performance varies by open and reply rate, as well as results for comparable word groups.

You may be better off asking for a “call”, instead of trying to put some time on their “calendar.” Both words tend to be used when scheduling meetings, yet we see that subject lines containing the word “call” work best (62% open rate, 35% reply rate), while emails bearing “calendar” perform worse (33% open rate, 10% reply rate).

You may be better off asking for a “call”, instead of trying to put some time on their…
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#4 – You May Be Sending Emails at the Wrong Time

This is really tricky. What the data shows is what you would expect. The highest reply rates are between the hours of 9 to 5. When people are working.

• Early morning makes sense with mobile. Check email upon waking up and/or on train.
• 9am uptick. Checking email upon arriving at work.
• 1pm uptick. Checking email after lunch + fewer meetings.
• Evening: Checking email on train, later at work means fewer meetings.

But the key takeaways here are that early in the morning people are not replying to cold emails, as much as they are later at night.

Weekdays or Weekends?

Because of the small volume of emails that are being sent on the weekends it improves open/reply rate. Your email gets noticed.

#5 – If They Don’t Reply Today, They (Probably) Won’t Reply At All

Key takeaway = importance of cadence. Follow up at tighter intervals. After 1 day, it’s gone. Now, this doesn’t mean you want to follow up every day (could piss people off), but 3 days or so is probably fine.

#6 – You’re Not Following Up Enough

#7 – Testing Templates Can Improve Reply Rates >10x

Best practices:

1. Identify the top performing templates.
2. Understand why they worked well.
3. Share the good templates.

Bonus Secret -Increase Call Connection Rate 34% by Calling When Emails Are Opened

Audio Recording of Mike’s Presentation:

Apply these 7 Sales Email Secrets

And discover how to keep your Sales Pipeline filled with Qualified Leads.

Fill Your Pipeline

The post 7 Sales Email Secrets to Drive Deals Forward appeared first on Sales Hacker.

• 70% of content marketers are creating more content than they did a year ago (source: Content Marketing Institute)
• 35% say they have a documented content strategy (source: Content Marketing Institute)
• 21% say they are successful at tracking ROI (source: Ad Age)

Content marketing is more important to B2B businesses. Who is succeeding and why?

Here are 15 B2B case studies. They show how content marketing drives ROI with B2B businesses who:

• Know their audience
• Don’t create content for the sake of creating content
• Use specific content solutions to impact different stages of the buying cycle
• Integrate internally with their teams

1. ADP: Developed a content marketing campaign to connect and engage with their target audience on a ADP solution using white papers and a diagnostic assessment tool. The campaign generated over $1 million in new sales opportunities with several deals closed within the first 3 months of launch.
2. CISCO: Has long been engaged in social media activity, often running campaigns alongside its ongoing engagement strategy. To demonstrate the extent to which this has impacted the company, it launched a new router using only social channels and saved an estimated $100,000.
3. CROWE HORWATH: the public accounting firm used 48 pieces of content in 4 different topic areas. This campaign targeted C-level prospects in financial institutions with $1 billion or more in assets across the buying cycle. Content tactics included: executive briefs, case studies, infographics, checklists, Q and A, and Brainshark video. 778 contacts were engaged with a 70% open rate (vs. 10%), 2 engagement worth $250k in revenue.
4. DEMANDBASE: A B2B marketing cloud helped B2B marketers make the right content technology investment by using a white paper, infographic, webinar, Slideshare, and a live presentation to spotlight tools that can maximize the power of content. The results of the campaign generated 1,700 leads, 125 webinar participants, 5,000 views on Slideshare, and $1 million in new business.
5. FISHER TANK: Makes giant, above-ground welded steel tanks. With clients in the fuel industries, waste water, pulp & paper, and other industrial and municipal areas, projects tend to be big (multi-million dollar) and take a long time to sell (12 months and longer). For more than 60 years, the company has made its sales primarily through cold calling and referrals from existing clients. So it took some moxy to launch a content marketing strategy online. The plan including sprucing up the website, integrating a blog and social sharing, and offering some valuable content by free download. The campaign increased web traffic by 119%, traffic from social media by 4800%, lead conversions by 3900%, quote requests by 500%, and new qualified sales opportunities by $3.4 million.
6. IBM: developed a social sales program for their inside sales team. They identified their target audience and monitored social media platforms for relevant topics and conversation. The company trained their sales team to nurture online relationships and drive prospects to team members’ websites. As a result of this focus on social sales and personnel training, IBM saw a 400% in sales.
7. LINKEDIN: Had to be converted to social selling. After the release of tools such as Sales Navigator and TeamLink, LinkedIn’s own sales team began seeing significant results. Ralf VonSosen, the company’s head of marketing for sales solutions notes, “we started seeing a 50% increase in leads to meeting conversion rates.”
8. LOGICALL: A company that focuses on inbound and outbound customer management solutions, uses content assets such as emails, microsite and ebook, Logicalis developed a thought leadership effort that supported sales teams by enabling custom messaging based on the prospects interaction with the campaign. With a target audience of about 2,000, nearly $8 million in new pipeline business was closed.
9. MAERSK: Danish shipping company Maersk first began using social back in 2011 to raise brand awareness, gain insight into the market, increase employee satisfaction, and get closer to its customers. It focuses on the stories that emerge from within the business, such as how it is helping fuel a boom in the sale of Kenyan avocados and where its staff comes from. Its presence on each network is tailored to that platform, so for example on LinkedIn, it promotes job vacancies and publishes articles about the work culture within the business, while on Instagram it encourages followers to post photos of its ships using the hashtag #Maersk. Maersk now has more than 1.5m Facebook fans (of which around 15% are customers) and 12,000 Twitter followers, as well as active accounts on Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, and Google+.
10. OPENTEXT: A software solution for enterprise information management, created a personalized new customer onboarding site offering a variety of assets (white papers, checklists, product pages, ebooks, case studies) and content to welcome new clients and provide upsell, cross-sell opportunities. The campaign also included a two phase nurturing program. 1,700 new contacts were identified along with 31 new opportunities worth $1.8 million.
11. OPTUM: A health services business, created an integrated marketing campaign to support the launch of a new solution, support sales, and build thought leadership. The content marketing mix included: advertorials, display ads, email, direct mail, and a campaign website. The successful campaign earned a 23.5 lead to conversion rate, 475% increase in website traffic, 2,500+ resource downloads, 28% increase in YoY blog followers, and $52 million in contract value of new business with less than $ 1,000,000 invested.
12. RS COMPONENTS: The electronic product distribution company created a specific social hub, spanning four different languages, having the purpose of being a collaboration and engagement hub for Electronic Design Engineering. One of the centerpieces of the site is the free tool store, which includes a free design tool that’s been downloaded more than 60,000 times, and the site itself gathered more than 45,000 members within its first 12-month period.
13. SAP: The global strategy was aimed at enabling cross-cultural information to be efficiently shared around the company. One year after implementing this strategy, SAP Latin America had more than 100,000 fans and followers (an increase of 900%), and achieved a 17% interaction rate across the region, while a campaign featuring a social app targeting specific buying centers drove more than 12,000 visitors and a 15% engagement rate. SAP has four Facebook pages, four Twitter feeds, and two LinkedIn accounts. These profiles are split by language (e.g. Portuguese and Spanish) rather than country, and aim at achieving a split of 20% promotion material vs. 80% of interesting, engaging content for its community.
14. SHIPSERV: It’s difficult to imagine the maritime industry getting to grips with social media, but Shipserv, one of the leading industry marketplaces, proves that in can be done very successfully. As part of a wider marketing strategy and customer engagement strategy, various social approaches were taken, resulting in greater site traffic alongside increased brand awareness and lead opportunities. From an initial $30,000 social media marketing investment, it’s estimated the overall results achieved would have cost more than $150,000 through traditional media.
15. XEROX: Created a targeted “Get Optimistic” campaign to connect with 30 top accounts and partnered with Forbes to create a magazine that offered relevant business tips. 70% of targeted companies interacted with the microsite, readership increased 300-400% over previous email campaigns, added 20,000 new contacts, generated 1,000+ scheduled appointments, and get this: yielded $1.3 BILLION in pipeline revenue.

Do these case studies convince you of the value for content marketing for B2B businesses? Do the trends below help you with direction with your business? Does your B2B business need to learn how to use content marketing effectively?

Customers are the lifeblood of your business, but winning new ones can be hard in a competitive ecommerce landscape. Earning customer loyalty and driving repeat purchases should be a goal of nearly every decision your company makes.

Brands like Amazon have mastered the art of encouraging repeat purchases. In fact, 66 percent of Amazon’s sales are from existing customers because they optimize for returning visitors. As for the rest of the industry, the average number of repeat purchases is only seven percent.

66 percent of Amazon’s sales are from existing customers because they optimize for returning visitors.

Bigcommerce is dedicated to bringing Amazon-level analytics and data-driven capabilities to businesses of all sizes and our new Analytics tools are designed to do just that. Whether you’re looking to win new customers, build loyalty amongst the customers you already have, or both, below are a few actionable ways to sell more online no matter your company.

Keep Customers Moving Through A Purchase Funnel

Does your purchase funnel data show people are visiting your site, but only a few are buying? Limited-time sales and discounts are a great way to drive conversions. Not only will they create a sense of urgency, but they may also give you a chance to liquidate inventory.

Identify Big Spenders And Keep Them Coming Back

How targeted are your customer communications? You can improve your customer segmentation and personalization based on their purchase behavior. Give your best customers the royal treatment, and engage them in loyalty programs.

Pinpoint Inactive Customers

Do you have customers that haven’t purchased in a while? It is a lot easier to drive revenue from your existing customers than it is to win new ones. Bigcommerce Analytics can help you zero in on customers that haven’t purchased in a while so you can use offers like free shipping or credit toward their next order to win them back.

Win Increased Lookalike Customers

Does Pinterest or Facebook bring you more customers or quality leads? Which ones spend the most? Once you know the answers to these questions it is important to optimize your marketing budget so that you can focus on channels that matter the most. Be sure to lead social campaigns with best selling items or use them as a way to introduce seasonal favorites.

Identify Which Products Are Trending In Real Time

Which products are selling the most right now, and how can you use that information to acquire new customers? Your rockstar products are your top performers, and they drive the most conversions which makes them ideal for new customer acquisition campaigns.

Feature your best sellers on your homepage, in emails and in paid social ads to help your customers make purchase decisions. Where possible, use social proof to reinforce your existing customers’ connection to the product.

Want to learn more? During our 15 minute webinar, we’ll show how you can use Bigcommerce Analytics to improve conversion rates and make the most of every visitor. And don’t forget, all Bigcommerce Analytics reports are in free trial until March 6.

Photo: Flickr, Polycart

How do you serve “ready to buy” customers and “just looking” prospects on the same page?

You don’t want to alienate one group while speaking to the other. However, you still need to offer both sets of customers the next step they need no matter their level of interest.

To answer that question and more for one B2B SaaS nonprofit, Jon Powell, Senior Executive Research and Development Manager, MECLABS Institute, worked with Shari Tishman, Director of Engagement, and Lauren Wagner, Senior Manager of Engagement, both of VolunteerMatch.

VolunteerMatch was selected as the “client” for this year’s Email Summit live test. The team designed a three-part series of experiments, the first two leading up the interactive live test to launch tomorrow, Feb. 24, here at Summit.

Since today marks the first day of Summit activities I’ll be giving you a behind the scenes look at Test No. 2 of the series. Check out the MarketingExperiments Blog to learn about the test background and call for treatment ideas and to learn about the results and what they mean.

Before we get into the specifics of this test, let’s review why this test is important to the series. The solutions page test will help us to understand the most attractive derivative value for actual sales-ready leads to include in the call-to-action section of the email for optimization at the Summit.

Basically, we should be able to take what we previously learned about prospects and transfer it to another channel of testing: email.

Experiment background

Primary Research Question: Which call-to-action variable cluster will achieve the highest contact page conversion rate?

Secondary Question: Which call-to-action variable cluster will achieve the highest total page click-through rate?

Test Design: A/B split test

Before the test

Prior to the test and its control, the VolunteerMatch team had already updated the call-to-action (CTA) on the product page. The original CTA read, “Let’s Get Started Together.”

While the CTA did a good job of attracting customers across the spectrum of motivation levels, it seemed the pipeline became full of leads not motivated enough to move forward. This caused a lot of fruitless time for the sales staff.

That led the team to create a new CTA, which is the control for this test.

Control

To limit the amount of leads entering the pipeline, so that there are more qualified prospects, the team changed the copy to “Contact Sales for a Quote.”

However, this left no option for those prospects simply trying to learn more. This lead to the creation of the two-option CTA for the treatment.

Treatment

When conducting analysis on the solutions page, click tracking showed that 2.39% of visitors were leaving the page to go to the demo page.

Since that would be a useful place for prospects to learn more if they weren’t ready to buy, the team thought it would make the most sense as a secondary CTA. Instead of letting those lower-motivated prospects blindly stumble around the site, a demo CTA would allow VolunteerMatch to guide them there.

The copy of the Contact Sales CTA was also changed. The team hypothesized that “Contact Sales” could have produced a high-level of anxiety in visitors.

There was also a lack of clarity. What exactly does “contact” mean? And what will a quote consist of? To help answer some of those concerns, the team developed the “Speak to a Director” treatment of the CTA.

Results

Let’s look at the metric results to the secondary research question: overall clickthrough rate.

As you can see, adding another CTA increased overall clickthrough. The question after that would be if it this impacted the clickthrough to the Contact Sales CTA. However, there was no statistical difference between the control and the treatment.

In fact, no visitor who clicked through to the sales contact form page on the control filled out the form. However, of those who landed on the sales contact page from the treatment, 30% of visitors filled out the form.

Additionally, of the 8.1% visitors to click on the demo CTA, 12.5% of them converted on the demo.

What you need to know

It’s possible to serve two groups of prospects on one solutions or product page. There can be fear when adding a second CTA that you will lose clickthrough or leads, but you won’t know if you don’t test.

For VolunteerMatch, that wasn’t the case at all. The second CTA did not diminish clickthrough to the contact form page. Rather, it seems as if the update copy in addition with another option to learn more allowed better qualified visitors to click through, seeing as the rate of completion went up.

Additionally, we were able to better guide lower sales-ready visitors to a page that might be better suited for them: the demo.

Adding the demo CTA allowed us to decrease the need for unsupervised thinking on the part of visitors. If left to themselves, visitors might not have found the demo and could have left the site without gaining information that would have led to an eventual sale.

Email Summit live test

Be sure to attend Jon’s session tomorrow after lunch with VolunteerMatch — “Hands-on Live Test Lab: Learn how to improve your already successful marketing” — to contribute to the live test.

If you’re not able to join us here in Las Vegas this week, we’ll be sharing a case study about the Email Summit live test in the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing newsletter after Summit.

If you liked to learn all of the top takeaways from Email Summit 2015, stay tuned to the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Newsletter. An event recap with everything you need to know will be published in the coming weeks.

You can follow Selena Blue, Manager of Editorial Content, MECLABS Institute on Twitter at @SelenaLBlue.

You might also like

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015 — February 23-26, ARIA Resort, Las Vegas

Lead Management: How a B2B SaaS nonprofit decreased its sales cycle 99% [MarketingSherpa case study]

Lead Generation: The power of copy [More from the blogs]

5 Traits the Best Calls-to-action All Share in Common [More from the blogs]

The post A/B Testing: How adding a second CTA increased clickthrough 291% appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

A/B testing is great, and very easy to do these days. Tools are getting better and better. As a result, people rely more and more on the tools. As a result, critical thinking is much less common.

It’s not fair to just blame the tools of course. It’s very human to try to (over)simplify everything. Now the internet is flooded with A/B testing posts and case studies full of bullshit data, imaginary wins. Be wary when you read any testing case study, or whenever you hear someone say “we tested that”.

We’re all learning about A/B testing. It’s like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it. So it’s only natural that every optimizer (including myself) has made a ton of testing mistakes in the past. Many mistakes are more common than others, but there’s one that is the most prevalent: ending the test too soon.

Don’t stop the test just when you reach 95% confidence (or higher)

This is the first rule, and very important. It’s human to scream “yeah!” and want to stop the test, and roll the treatment out live. Many who do discover later (if they bother to check) that even though their test got like +20% uplift, it didn’t have any impact on the business. Because there was no actual lift – it was imaginary.

Consider this: One thousand A/A tests (two identical pages tested against each other) were run.

• 771 experiments out of 1.000 reached 90% significance at some point
• 531 experiments out of 1.000 reached 95% significance at some point

Quote from the experimenter:

This means if you’ve run 1.000 experiments and didn’t control for repeat testing error in any way, a rate of successful positive experiments up to 25% might be explained by a false positive rate. But you’ll see a temporary significant effect in around half of your experiments!

So if you stop your test as soon as you see significance, there’s a 50% chance it’s a complete fluke. A coin toss. Totally kills the idea of testing in the first place.

Once he altered the experiment so that he would pre-determine the needed sample size in advance, only 51 experiments out of 1.000 were significant at 95%. So by checking the sample size we went from 531 winning tests to 51 winning tests.

You can run this experiment yourself here.

How to pre-determine the needed sample size?

There are many great tools out there for that, like this one. Or here’s how you would do it with Evan Miller’s tool:

In this case we told the tool that we have a 3% conversion rate, and want to detect at least 10% uplift. The tool tells us that we need 51,486 visitors per variation before can look at the statistical significance levels and statistical power.

Magic numbers don’t exist

What about the rules like X amount of conversions per variation?

Even though you might come across statements like “you need 100 conversions per variation to end the test” – there is no magical traffic or conversion number. It’s slightly more complex than that.

Andrew Anderson, Head of Optimization at Malwarebytes

It is never about how many conversions, it is about having enough data to validate based on representative samples and representative behavior.

100 conversions is possible in only the most remote cases and with an incredibly high delta in behavior, but only if other requirements like behavior over time, consistency, and normal distribution take place. Even then it is has a really high chance of a type I error, false positive.

Anytime you see X number of conversions it is a pretty glaring sign that the person talking doesn’t understand the statistics at all.

And – if 100 conversions was the magic number, then big sites could end their tests just in minutes! That’s silly.

If you have a site that does 100,000 transactions per day, then 100 conversions can’t possibly be a representative of overall traffic.

So this leads to the next thing you need to take into account – representativeness of your sample size.

How representative is the traffic in the test?

By running tests you include a sample of visitors in an experiment. You need to make sure that the sample is representative of your overall, regular traffic. So that the sample would behave just as your real buyers behave.

Some want to suddenly increase the sample size by sending a bunch of atypical traffic to the experiment. If your traffic is low, should you blast your email list, or temporarily buy traffic to get large enough sample size for the test?

No.

In most cases you’d be falling victim to selection effect – you wrongly assume some portion of the traffic represents the totality of the traffic. You might increase conversion for that segment, but don’t confuse that with an increase across segments.

Your test should run for 1 or better yet 2 business cycles, so it includes everything that going on:

• every day of the week (and tested one week at a time as your daily traffic can vary a lot),
• various different traffic sources (unless you want to personalize the experience for a dedicated source),
• your blog post and newsletter publishing schedule,
• people who visited your site, thought about it, and then came back 10 days later to buy it,
• any external event that might affect purchasing (e.g. pay day)

and so on.

Lukas Vermeer, Data Scientist at Booking.com

What matters much, much more than the exact number of visitors in your experiment is the representativeness of the sample, the size of the effect and your initial test intent.

If your sample is not a good representation of your overall traffic, then your results are not either. If your effect size is very large, then you need only a few visitors to detect. If you intended to run your test for a month, and you ran it for a month, and the difference is significant, then it’s frikkin’ significant.

Don’t waste your time looking for magic numbers: this is Science, not magic.

Be wary of statistical significance numbers (even if it’s 99%) when the sample size is small

So you ran a test where B beat A, and it was an impressive lift – perhaps +30%, +50% or even +100%. And then you look at the absolute numbers – and see that the sample size was something like 425 visitors. If B was 100% better, it could be 21 vs 42 conversions.

So when we punch the numbers into a calculator, we can definitely see how this could be significant.

BUT – hold your horses. Calculating statistical significance is an exercise is algebra, it’s not telling you what the reality is.

The thing is that since the sample size is so tiny (only 425 visitors), it’s prone to change dramatically if you keep the experiment going and increase the sample (the lift either vanishes or becomes much smaller, regression toward the mean). I typically ignore test results that have less than 250-350 conversions per variation since I’ve seen time and again that those numbers will change if you keep the test running, and the sample size gets bigger.

Anyone who has experience of running hundreds of tests can tell you that. A lot of the “early wins” disappear as you test longer, and increase the sample size.

I run most of my tests for at least 4 full weeks (even if needed sample size reached much earlier) – unless I get proof first that the numbers stabilize sooner (2 or 3 weeks) for a given site.

With low traffic, you need bigger wins to run a test per month, but…

Many sites have low traffic and low total monthly transaction count. So in order to call a test within 30 days, you need a big lift. Kyle Rush from Optimizely explains it eloquently here.

If you have bigger wins (e.g. +50%), you definitely can get by with smaller sample sizes. But it would be naive to think that smaller sites somehow can get bigger wins more easily than large sites. Everyone wants big wins. So saying “I’m going to swing big” is quite meaningless.

The only true tidbit here is that in order to get a more radical lift, you also need to test a more radical change. You can’t expect a large win when you just change the call to action.

Also, keep in mind: testing is not must-have mandatory component of optimization. You can also improve without testing.

Without seeing absolute numbers, be very suspicious

Most A/B testing case studies only publish relative increases. We got a 20% lift! 30% more signups! That’s very good, we want to know the relative difference. But can we trust these claims? Without knowing the absolute numbers, we can’t.

There are many reasons why someone doesn’t want to publish absolute numbers (fear of humiliation, fear of competition, overzealous legal department etc). I get it. There are a lot of case studies I’d like to publish, but my clients won’t allow it.

But the point remains – unless you can see test the duration, total sample size and conversion count per variation, you should remain skeptical. There’s a high chance they didn’t do it right, and the lift is imaginary.

Conclusion

Before you can declare a test “cooked”, you need to make sure there’s adequate sample size and test duration (to ensure good representativeness) before looking at confidence levels.

Sellers and marketers have asked us asked us a lot of questions about Lean process excellence over the years. 

We’re counting down the top five questions, and providing the answers. Last week we answered question #4 Where And How Do We Start Lean Process Excellence?

This week, we deal with the next most popular question:

#3: How Can Lean Process Excellence [Solve My Specific Pain]?

Everyone in every business has problems they want to solve. This is reflected in questions like “Can  Lean process excellence [ … generate leads, find new customers, show best practices, improve sales in a bank, improve sales of commodities, manage large accounts, etc.]?

Unfortunately, when improvement is presented in terms of best practices, tools, or rigid procedures (like DMAIC) it usually misses the point. The result is the Usual Fixes and the Numbers Game. You end up being on a treadmill, working hard and going nowhere.

What IS the point of process excellence? That the concepts and principles of process excellence enable your people to understand the root causes of problems – what the data and evidence mean in your specific context. Process excellence enables your people develop individualized solutions to unique local problems.

The fact is, most companies already have people with plenty of knowledge about how to attract better prospects, how to qualify them, or get them buy now and pay more. What they don’t have is the management system that allows them to implement these practices in a way that optimizes the performance of the entire business, instead of just their local department.

If that interests you, check out “Five Assumptions that Prevent B2B Sales and Marketing Improvement – and How Process Excellence Avoids Them.”

By: Michael Webb

Process excellence separates the men from the boys in business. For a complete guide, visit www.SalesProcessexcellence.com.

HACKENSACK, N.J. – That phone app keeping track of your exercise and meals might keep you out of the hospital one day.

Why give your doctors permission to incorporate data from fitness trackers and health apps into electronic patient records? Well, they might spot signs of an ailment sooner and suggest behavioural changes or medication before you land in the emergency room. They also might be able to monitor how you’re healing from surgery or whether you’re following a treatment regimen.

“Right now we only see our patients for about a 15-minute visit in the office, and it’s a very constricted view,” said Dr. Lauren Koniaris, a specialist in pulmonary critical care at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. “This really globalizes the view of their health status, so that we’re really in contact with them on a much more daily if not hour-to-hour basis. It’s almost like a virtual house call.”

At Hackensack, a handful of patients at risk for heart failure are asked to use a fitness tracker to count steps walked and flights climbed. They are also asked to record what they eat — by photographing the product’s bar code, for instance — using a phone app that has a database containing nutrition information on thousands of food items. Using Apple’s new HealthKit technology, data from the various trackers and apps gets automatically transferred to the Epic MyChart app on the iPhone. From there, the information goes to the hospital’s records system, which also comes from Epic.

Hackensack wants to expand to more patients and start tracking blood pressure and sleep quality, too. But the hospital first needs to ensure that teams are in place to review the glut of data coming in. More broadly, there are consumer privacy and security issues to address, along with questions about whether these trackers and apps really improve patient care. The University of California, San Francisco is studying which gadgets are reliable and whether that reliability extends to patients with extreme conditions. Then they have to figure out what information is really meaningful — not just noise.

Many doctors and hospitals see potential. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, uses Fitbit trackers to monitor hip-replacement patients for a month after surgery. Health workers get data on daily steps and can tell when patients have trouble walking — a hundred or more miles away. The Ochsner Health System in New Orleans is turning to wireless scales and blood-pressure devices to help reduce readmissions for chronic diseases such as heart failure. Noticing a small weight gain, for instance, might reveal fluid buildup resulting from the heart failing to pump normally. Not only can doctors intervene sooner, they can use the data to show how exercise can help lower blood pressure.

“If we’re going to succeed in improving health, we have to get patients more engaged in their care,” said Dr. Richard Milani, a cardiologist at Ochsner.

Heart-attack patients have long been asked to weigh themselves, while those with diabetes have had to check glucose levels. Smartphone technology makes all that easier and gets measurements to doctors more regularly and reliably. There’s no forgetting to record a number or transposing digits.

With Apple’s HealthKit tools, disparate gadgets and records systems can work together more easily. Think of HealthKit as a common language, eliminating the need for translators. Beyond sleep and exercise data coming from fitness trackers, doctors can eventually incorporate devices that measure glucose, blood pressure, respiratory rates and blood-oxygen levels. The devices communicate with the iPhone wirelessly or through the headphone or charging port. Google, Samsung and Microsoft have similar ambitions that will expand monitoring to users of Android and Windows phones, though they aren’t as far along. For now, developers must write separate code for each Android or Windows app to integrate.

Gary Wilhelm, 51, who works at Hackensack on payroll and finance technology, joined the hospital’s app test after he suffered a heart attack in October. He appeared animated during a check-up this month as he showed Dr. Sarah Timmapuri, his cardiologist, various charts on flights climbed and cholesterol intake. There were a few bad days that Wilhelm blamed on the Super Bowl. Timmapuri instructed Wilhelm to monitor his pulse on his new Fitbit Surge. If it gets to about 155 beats per minute, he’s to end his workout.

“Even if I did not do a single thing with the information, just the patient knowing that I’m reviewing it will already have a positive effect,” Timmapuri said.

Mayo patient Randy Smothers, 62, of Chisago City, Minnesota, agrees. He said he was in pain after getting his right hip replaced and would have stayed on his couch without the knowledge that someone was checking on him.

“This pedometer they gave me made me walk every day and move on and get going,” he said.

Apps and trackers could ultimately reduce patient visits, though there’s a risk patients would practice self-care.

“It may be an aid or a tool to help me deliver better care, but it is just a tool,” said Dr. Robert Wergin, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. “It shouldn’t substitute for a face-to-face visit.”

The post Doctors tap fitness trackers, mobile apps to improve care, monitor patients between visits appeared first on Canadian Business.

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*Editors Note: Recap post of the Deck presented at Sales Hacker Series in San Francisco on February 3rd, 2015 by Steli Efti, CEO at Close.io.

Ask Your Customers

Why did you open my email? Why did you respond? How would you pitch this to others?

All right. Let’s start off with the good shit. So here’s a very simple tool when it comes to messaging and pitching. Everything that I will share with you is SIMPLE, but still it’s going to be very hard for you to do. First, when people ask me, “Steli, how can we get our messaging right—how can we get the right subject line, the right email message, the right pitch?” I tell them, “How about asking your customers!” How about asking the people that know…that were convinced to buy.

When you send out the first bunch of emails, and you see some people opened them. How about calling them and going, “Hey, I don’t want to sell you, so you opened it and you don’t want to buy, I assume you’re not interested. I’m interested to know why you opened it in the first place….can you tell me? Was it the subject line? Anything we can change? What did you expect when you opened the email….were you disappointed? Did it disappoint you?” Right?? How about asking some simple questions to another human being to figure out why they opened the email.

Same thing goes for the subject line. “Hey, you responded before I start giving you our demo. When I sent you the email and you replied and said, ‘Sure this sounds awesome, let’s talk!’, what exactly sounded awesome? What exactly about my message was interesting? Let me ask you, before I pitch you what we do, can you pitch me what we do based on the email we sent you??” Super silence. It’s not rocket science, but we all get it.

The other thing is, I had somebody a few days ago tell me, selling them this really complex product and everybody misinterprets in the email what it is and relates it to something in the past, everybody therefore is not as interested as they should be, but when I demo people—the demo kills. They love it. I went, “Cool! Did you ask them after the demo, ‘Hey, if you had to describe what we do to somebody else, how would you do it? What’s your pitch?” Let your customers educate you on the words they use, the way your pitch resonated with them, and then just sealed it. When you hear a bunch of people say the same thing again and again and again, it might be because it works. Take that and use it!

I was talking to Noah Kagan from Appsumo, an awesome guy and really good friend, and we were talking about one of our marketing things that we’re doing, and have instrumented the metrics so we really know how many new customers this thing drives us. I really don’t know, and he’s like….”Steli! You’re crazy! Why don’t you call a bunch of recent customers and ask them if they saw that thing?” I’m like, “Oh, wow. I’m so ashamed. I’m preaching this everyday and still forget??”

I’ve preached this. So many people when I talk to them a few weeks later, they’re like, “We do this a-b test we’ve tried this new pitch.” I’m like, “Did you ask some customers?” …”Not yet” What the hell is going on! These things are simple, but they’re powerful. Just ask a bunch of people. What do you resonate to? What did you like? How would you describe what we’re doing? It’s not rocket science, people.

Embrace Resistance

Use objections to your advantage

All right.  So the next thing is:  Embrace Resistance.  This is another thing that I love.  People tell me all the time, “Stelli, we’re sending this email and then every person replies—the people who reply always reply and tell us ‘We already have something.’”  And I’m like, “And then what did you do?”  “Well, we keep sending this email, but people really already have the solution to this.”  “OK, and how have you adopted and learned from this?”  People, we all want to fight reality instead of embracing it.

Can’t these people stop having the solution? No, they can’t. How about embracing that fact. Have you thought about reflecting that in your email?  How about the next thing that they send is, “You know that a huge portion of the people that you send an email to already have the solution, how about starting with that?  “Hey, my name is Stelli.  Let me guess, you already have a solution. Now you might be wondering why the hell am I sending you an email nonetheless!  Here’s why.”  You know, the last 100 customers we had all had prior solutions, and once we drafted a call for three minutes to discover we could drive “X” amount of value to them.  That prompted us to be more proactive, and that’s why I’m sending you an email.  I know you think it’s not interesting, and I know better than you that it’s going to be interesting.

This might be too crass or too aggressive, but at least it realizes that people have certain thoughts and certain resistances in creating part of your pitch.  The other thing is that there might be that people already have the solution, might be that people think…Lots of people tell me, “Oh, everybody says we’re such a small start-up.”

If everybody says it, how about making it part of your pitch….part of your messaging. “Hey!  I know what you’re thinking right now.  These guys are a small start-up.  And you’re absolutely right. We’re tiny. We’re so tiny, I’m the founder and I’m speaking to you right now. You know what?  We’re so tiny I’m going to be your success manager.  The CEO of the business, 24/7.  I’ll give you my phone number, my address…everything, right?  I’ll buy a FAX if you want to FAX me…everything you want. 100% transparency and access just for you.”

You know what?  Remember when 20 years ago whenever it was, you got an email from Google about advertising on them? They were tiny back then! The same thing here! We’re tiny today. But if we succeed—let’s assume we succeed—if we succeed, would you benefit from being part of it from the early days? What’s the reward/risk ratio?  If we fail, you’ve lost like a few hundred dollars if you cancel in a few months.  What if we win and you were there from the get-go? Embrace it.

You know everybody thinks you are tiny, how about making it part of your pitch versus hiding from it.  Most sales people in sales organization try to wiggle around or avoid the elephants in the room.  They think, “Oh, everybody says this.” So I’m trying to have a conversation and they hold their breath, “Hopefully this is going to be the call when they don’t say this. Hopefully they’re not going to say that word.  Hopefully….” And it’s like the last two minutes.  Yeah, “Yes!  I’ve almost made it to the finish!”  and then they’re like, “Ahhhhh, but you know the only concern we have……” and you’re like, “Oh, god damn it!” It’s just irrational right?  Make it part of your pitch.  It’s not that hard.  Just accept and embrace reality. Very simple.

Use All Formats

Short & Long

OK, the last one.  Use all formats when it comes to your emails….um…..Oh, one last thing about the things I said before, because I saw…the call the people who open your email….please, when you call people that open your email, don’t assume that they actually opened it, that they cared about it, that they remembered it, that they give a shit.

Just because the software tells you somebody opened your email, your job is not done. You’re not calling them to give them support and success.  You still have to sell.  I hear people all the time….”I call these people that opened the email.”  “And then what happens?”  “I don’t know, I call, they’re  like ‘Hey’,  and I go ‘I saw I sent you an email, I wanted to check in with you. Did you have any questions?  How can we move this forward?’ and the other person is like ‘well, I don’t know any email.’”

Who cares right? People, just because you send them an email and the software says they opened it, if you get a lot of people saying, “I don’t know, they’re just not interested, I didn’t see it,” or something else, how about embracing it.  “Hey, you know, I sent you an email, and I wanted to see what you think about it.”  “Well, I haven’t seen any email.”  “I know!  You get tons of emails, right?  Listen, that’s why I wanted to be proactive and call you.

Instead of sending you another 30 emails that you’re going to ignore and clutter your inbox, I thought we’d shed great clarity between the two of us.  Three minutes, three questions, we’ll know and have any clear decision if this is worth our time or not.”  All of a sudden, you take their energy…it’s like jujitsu.  You take their energy to your advantage because you know every person swings at you.  Don’t complain, just make it part of your interaction.  So, I’m a huge fan short emails.  I used to say, and still say, “the shortest way for me not to read your emails is to send me a long email.”  That means you don’t respect my time, you don’t respect your time, you have no respect of yourself, of me, your family, your mother…

So, I’m not reading your email—I’m just going to ignore it.  But, the long emails, if done right can also be super effective.  So, when you sign off or close or you get like that little email—super short—it’s like, “Hey, I’m your Account Manager, this is Kevin. If you ever need anything, let’s chat.”

Here’s the email that you get next….a few days, two or three days later–this thing.

This is a monster.  Look at how long it is! I don’t know if you can see it from the back, but people in the front can see as little as you in the back.  There’s nothing to see it’s so tiny.  It’s a huge email—it comes from me. It’s our best performing email.  If you want to know more about long form sales letters, you know these marketing guys that sell you whatever—like “lose weight” or “change your life”  or something.  Have you ever been on a site like that—it’s super long and you just scroll and scroll and scroll it goes on forever and you‘re like, “these guys don’t know anything about sales.”  You’re wrong.  They’re awesome at this shit!  If you do the long email right, it kills.  It’s just not that easy to do.  Listen up, if you want that email, if you want anything— anything just shoot me an email.  I’ll share everything with you.

So moving along, you know the coolest thing about this email? It ends with disqualifying people. Now that they know the history of my country, my life story, and everything I know – Here’s the people who should not buy. Let me save you some time, if you’re one of these people, in one of these scenarios, please don’t buy this. Don’t waste your time, it’s not for you.

Do you know how many people send an email back to me, trying to argue with that point? “Steli, I know you said this is not for because of XYZ, but I think it is really for me because…” They start arguing. If you take something away from people, you make it very desirable to people.

Follow up Effectively With a Potential Client

Ask what their preferred form of communication is. If they tell you you can hold them accountable throughout the rest of the process.

Improve Your Messaging

The post 3 Simple Ways to Improve B2B Sales Messaging and Pitching appeared first on Sales Hacker.

"We're living in a digital first world. How you play that in your favor is critical." Jonathan Lee, global managing director of planning and strategy at Huge, says that clients must be willing to take a risk, but also clearly define the their brand's capability or service

"One thing hasn't changed and that's value. If you want the user to do something for you, you have to do something for them. We see failure when brands ask users to come to them instead of finding the relevant conversation that's appropriate for the brand, entering it and stimulating from within — thats when organic conversation happens. We used to, for many years, spend time saying, 'Look at me. Look at me.' Now we have to find people, drop ourselves in, gently nudge, chat and find value where we can." Read more...

People often ask me which technologies I use to run my day to day social marketing. There are so many you could use, which makes it tough to determine which ones you should use. I’m going to tell you what’s worked for me, without going deep into the specifics of each technology. They are all easy to use. Also, I think it’s really useful for you to get your hands on each for some trial and error, so that you get a true grasp of how they work.

Begin at the beginning

When you start out social selling, don’t automate any of your processes. Just focus on figuring out how to participate in a social conversation and getting connections through LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Begin with Twitter. It’s the easiest place to start a conversation and get some energy into building a relationship, and once you’re comfortable there it’s easy to do the same on other social channels as well.

Begin with automation. Social selling is really just a form of networking with your buyers and building relationships where they live. Note: we aren’t making rockets with this piece of the sales process, but you will need to automate as your following increases.

Keep in mind that automation is for (ONLY) posting. DO NOT AUTOMATE ANY FOLLOW UP. If you aren’t going to engage one on one, then I suggest you stick to smiling and dialing.

3 social selling technologies to get started with

These three are all easy and simple to use, and are free (or nearly so). They work well as starter technologies for social selling , and for many people they might be all you’ll ever need. Down the road we’ll get into social technologies that are a lot more cray cray, but consider this Social Selling Technologies 101.

BufferApp

Buffer is the bomb.com! It’s completely free for a single account and it allows you to create posts, schedule posts, and even gives you some basic analytics to show you how your posts are doing engagement-wise. You can shuffle your posts (mix them up in random order) and your posting times.

Buffer can connect you to LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, & Twitter. You can automate all your posts to the different channels. I’m not a fan of automating your LinkedIn posts but a lot of people find that useful. If you do it, I suggest monitoring LinkedIn periodically during the day and doing it real time.

Simple Buffer strategy: Add RSS feeds and pull in content that is geared towards your audience. Make sure you add hashtags to your tweets and pictures to increase engagement. Be careful not to post too much on Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn as it can hurt your engagement. How much is too much? You can generate a lot of activity, but don’t do hundreds and hundreds; that tends to look spammy. Here’s what I do:

• Facebook: 2 posts daily; one positive quote, one article
• LinkedIn and Google+: 3 times daily, 4–5 hours apart
• Twitter: 5–10 times daily, or more, depending on what’s new or hot

Here’s what Buffer looks like (Content, Analytics, Schedule)

Use Riffle (By CrowdRiff) to research people

A buddy of mine (@hootreid) showed me this last month and it blew my mind. It’s a simple Google Chrome plug-in that takes about 10 seconds to download and is FREE. It’s incredibly useful for social selling.

Riffle allows you to drill into anyone’s profile and see what social channels they are plugged into. You can then connect directly to their LinkedIn, Klout, Google+, Instagram, and Facebook. Why is this important? Simple: TIME, TIME, TIME! Instead of having to search to find out which social media channels they’re using, it shows you all of them. You can then click the icon and it takes you directly to their profile. Riffle will save you tons of time as you get into making connections across channels for social selling.

Simple Riffle strategy: Leverage Riffle to see where people are from, what’s important to them, and which hash tags they use most often. You can also see what type of activity the user has on Twitter. All this is valuable research. It does take time to engage on Twitter; you want to make sure you are spending your time with a human that’s active so your chances of useful engagement go up.

Use Tweriod.com to research best posting times

Tweriod is a simple Twitter app that takes about 15 seconds to plug into your Twitter account. This was a game changer for me and it’s FREE! Tweriod dives into your Twitter account and tells you the best times that you get engagement. Success on social (beyond being real and interesting) is all data-based. There are peak times that your network is active on Twitter; you won’t know this without some type of technology. It’s really powerful, and lets you “fish when the fish are biting.”

Tweriod strategy: When you schedule your posts in BufferApp, use your insight from Tweriod to determine what times to automate your Tweets to post. I had a 30% increase in engagement within the first two days of using Tweriod. Timing is everything on Twitter for impressions and engagement. It’s like television advertising; do you want your spots to run at prime time, or when no one is watching? If you post at the right times, your results will INCREASE! If you post at the wrong time on Twitter … you might hear crickets.

In Conclusion

All three of these technologies will be enough to get you started leveraging automation and analytics in your social sales process. It’s a marathon, not a sprint and don’t forget that! If you use all three of these in tandem you will be amazed at how fast your social game will go to the next level. Just don’t forget the reason to do it well: It’s all about making it easier and more effective to engage and build relationships. You aren’t selling; you are HELPING!

Want to learn more? Check out the Social Hangout Podcast

If you want to get more insight about how to leverage social media effectively, watch the #SocialHangout podcast every Friday at noon Eastern time. The podcast hosts are @ericlmitchell (head of sales and marketing, Social Audience Development training, at Mobitor) @kevinttully (social selling expert & trainer, Chief Sales Officer, Sales for Life), @gabevillamizar (Social Media Marketing manager, Social Audience Development program, HireVue), and me, @jackkosakowski1

Contact information is easy to get, but how do you turn a lead into a customer? There is no magic bullet for conversion, despite the many wild promises you may hear, but lead nurturing can drive huge improvements. In fact:

• 79% of marketing leads never convert to sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause for poor performance (MarketingSherpa).
• Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at a 33% lower cost (Marketo).
• Nurtured leads makes 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads (The Annuitas Group).

But how do you make sure your lead nurturing efforts are actually engaging your audience? Every successful lead nurturing piece shares five characteristics that make it stand out and connect with your audience.

Your Brand Should Be Trustworthy

Today’s customers are very savvy when it comes to unsubscribe processes, blocking online ads, and “Promotional” Gmail tabs. The social web has changed how brands communicate, and buyers are increasingly wary of overt, outbound marketing efforts.

Create trust by offering a variety of levels for leads to opt into, clearly outlining the goals and setting expectations, and then delivering exactly what you’ve promised. Buyers respond to brands they trust.

Your Communication Should Be Relevant

Who is your audience? What do they want from you, and when? How are you improving?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, ask. Getting input from your customers via a survey, a free site or process analysis, or a live Q&A session can yield loads of relevant intelligence. You can also use social media and industry forums to scan for questions and listen for popular topics.

Categorize your leads via their needs, education level, position in the buying lifecycle, and/or industry. Creating robust personas can help you nurture leads with increasingly customized campaigns.

Your Content Should Be Conversational

Personalized, value-filled campaigns that speak in an authentic voice are essential. Part of this is defining and adhering to a strict brand voice across all of your communications.

The other side to conversational communication is remembering that your leads are people, not just email addresses. Personalize your messages by speaking to each lead about his industry, his pain point, his stage in the buying cycle, etc. Personalization may sound like a lot of work, but the right marketing automation platform can make it simple and scalable.

Your Strategy Should Be Multi-Channel

Is your email marketing robust, while your social presence is on life support? Customers transition from email to website to social channels quickly. Every communication and presence needs to be unified in message and aesthetic. Be instantly recognizable everywhere with consistent, updated branding (highlight to tweet).

Mobile-friendly marketing is becoming more and more important. It’s been a year since mobile internet access overtook PC access, which means that statistically, your buyers are viewing your messages on phones or tablets. How do your emails and website look on mobile devices? How efficient and easy is interaction? Depending on your answer, an update may be in order.

Your Numbers Should Be Strategic and Impactful

Demonstrate (and quantify) your efforts. Your lead nurturing efforts should make an impact that you can measure, and not just with vague terms. For the truly skeptical—or just plain analytical—hard numbers can help. Detail what what was done, how often, and what the results were over a clearly defined period of time. Using bulletproof demonstrations of ROI can convert even the most suspicious.

Nurture for the Long-Term

In a buyer-driven market, with tomes of information and reviews at everyone’s fingertips, the buying cycle is shifting and, in many cases, elongating. At Marketo, we have found that some buyer lifecycles can last longer than two years.

However long or short your average buyer’s journey, lead nurturing is essential to keep them familiar with your brand and moving through their buying journey. Savvy marketers are turning to content in droves to achieve those goals, but many are still looking for a way to fine-tune their process. Make these five characteristics shine through every level of your content, and your brand will be way ahead of the game.

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