Rnordman

If you're a football fan, you're no doubt familiar with the woeful tale of Johnny Manziel’s brief professional football career. Manziel was a star college quarterback who won the Heisman trophy as a freshman in 2012. The Cleveland Browns later drafted him in the first round of the 2014 NFL draft, where he played for two injury-prone seasons in 2014-2015.

Manziel’s time at Cleveland was plagued by questions about his behavior, work ethic, substance abuse, off-the-field problems, as well as his inability to translate his college game to the professional level. The impact on the Cleveland Browns was catastrophic. They wasted a precious first round draft pick as well as lost time and money. Here is a description of how he hurt Cleveland as well as a litany of his bad behavior. 

Most of the recommendations for improving Marketing and Sales alignment revolve around how these two organizations need to work together. Misalignment is often attributed to a variety of factors, such as different goals, different timelines, and different psychologies. Market dynamics such as commoditization, the Internet, mobility and virtualization, and changing business models only compound the problem.

Trying to tighten the alignment of marketing program activities within the sales cycle, improving coordination around lead generation, creating service level agreements, and increasing Salesforce participation in the Marketing process are approaches many organizations take to improve alignment of the functions. Regardless of various approaches taken by companies to address this issue, the lack of alignment and collaboration between Marketing and Sales persists.

While no one can offer any guarantees, aligning Marketing and Sales makes good business sense and ultimately has an impact on the bottom line. The alignment of those two organizations determines how well a company attracts buyers and sells to them. The relationship is more than just a simple hand-off at the point a lead is generated; it is the foundation for profitable revenue growth.

The conversation about aligning Sales and Marketing is most often around lead management. But Sales and Marketing need to be aligned in at least these four areas:

• Market and customer segmentation
• Go-to-market strategy, process, and planning
• Customer engagement
• Opportunity management

One of the most critical enablement and alignment tools is the Marketing AND Sales playbook.

What is a Marketing and Sales Playbook

A Marketing and Sales playbook is a collection of tactics or methods that characterize the roles and responsibilities for both functions. The operative word here is “AND”. The playbook lays out clear objectives, identifies metrics for measurement, and provides a common framework and approach for finding and acquiring customers that is deployed and used by both organizations.

The playbook helps you implement a common marketing and selling methodology that leverages the processes used by high performers. The outcome? You can more effectively anticipate and address different selling scenarios, position against a particular competitor, or communicate the value proposition to each person in the buying process.

What Makes A Good Playbook

In the sports world, a “play” is an action designed to achieve a specific purpose in specific conditions. When you design a playbook you need to define the conditions.

A good playbook should:

1. Define your internal Marketing and Sales customer engagement and opportunity management process
2. Identify how your process maps to your customer’s buying process
3. Tell you how to engage with a prospective customer
4. Diagram the engagement experience
5. Accelerate sales effectiveness and accuracy

At a minimum, the following knowledge needs to be integrated into the playbook:

1. Customer analysis
Identifies the market, key trends, key buyers and influencers, a profile of the ideal customer, the customers’ pain points and preferences, and the critical business issues customers are trying to solve.

2. Buying process
Identifies conditions or events that trigger consideration, evaluation, and purchase. What are the behaviors of a qualified lead?

3. Company offer and value proposition
Describes and clarifies what your company offers and the ways in which your products and services address the customer’s pain points and business issues.

This is the place to explain why your company exists and how your company makes a difference to the customer and in the market.

This section of the playbook is not complete until it clearly answers two questions. First, “Why should people buy this product from you?” Second, “What is the value they receive buying this product from you?” Part of this section should be dedicated to giving examples of questions that draw out the customer’s business needs and pain points. This section is also a good place to include use case scenarios.

4. Competitive analysis
Details how competitors position themselves in the market and what their selling process is, as well as typical moves by each competitor and recommendations on how to counter these moves.

5. Selling methodology
Maps your selling methodology to the customer buying process.

While this section should outline the stages your customers move through as they investigate, evaluate and select solutions, it should go beyond just describing the steps in the sales cycle. It should provide instructions on what content and touch points are needed at each stage in the process, identify the players in each step, and how to assess the opportunity.

The opportunity assessment information should recommend standard methods and tools that help determine where customers are in the buying process, enable them to analyze the situation, and anticipate what they might do next. This section of the playbook should also provide the guidelines for entering and exiting opportunities and a list of the resources, skills, knowledge, and tools needed for each stage in the process.

6. Countering objections
Gives specific instruction on how to address each common objection sales might encounter. This section should include a message map for each primary competitor. Create a visual representation of all your compelling and relevant messages to ensure consistency.

7. Best practices
Lists proven tips, techniques — and under what circumstances to use them. This section should also capture what hasn’t worked in the past and associated lessons learned.

8. Your buyer roles, profiles and personas
A section that provides insights into the influencers, recommenders, and decision makers and their associated roles, profiles, and personas.

Why Invest in a Playbook

While developing a Marketing and Sales playbook is an extensive investment of your time, it has a big payoff in that it surfaces customer pains and preferences, improves selling effectiveness and productivity, and exposes and corrects weaknesses in the way you currently operate.

When completed, your playbook becomes a living document of your SELLING methodology and provides tactical guidelines and instructions that enable you to discover important ways to address the vulnerabilities of both your company and competitors.

With a practical playbook, you can leverage strengths, differentiate offers, prove business value, and ultimately improve your win/loss ratio. More importantly, a SELLING playbook serves as a powerful alignment tool for the Marketing and Sales functions with everyone operating from the same page.

If you have business accounts on social media, you are already engaged in social selling, though you may not be using that term specifically. You already know that “selling” on social media is not directly promoting your product or service. It is meeting consumer demand for a relationship with you. It is letting that consumer know who you are and engaging them in a conversation. The goal is simple and direct – when that consumer is ready to make a purchase, your brand is the first one that comes to mind.

How Effective is Social Selling?

Effectiveness of social selling is sometimes a bit difficult to quantify. But here are a few stats that may motivate you to get and stay more active on social media for the purpose of selling:

• 75% of B2B buyers use social media to make purchasing decisions.
• 45% of those who use social media for purchasing either influence, or make the final decisions on a companywide level.
• Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing.

Social Selling is All About Increased Engagement

The more a brand can engage its followers, the greater the chances of those followers becoming leads and, ultimately, customers. And satisfied customers love to share their experiences with their tribes and make recommendations.

During this holiday season, consumers are expected to spend 4.1% more compared to last year with the average amount being $1,007.24 according to National Retail Federation. You naturally want to grab as much of that spending and social selling can be an integral tool to do just that.

1. Do the Research First

You have a product or service that will meet needs of certain consumers, either for themselves or for those on their gift-giving list. You have obviously spent time identifying your target audience and you know where they hang out on social media. Step up your game now. It is not just about their needs but about the needs of those for whom they are purchasing gifts. What problems will your product or service solve? What is the value you can provide? How can a gift-giver look like a “hero” to others on his gift list?

Pinterest, for instance, has shared some curious data illustrating the current trends in gift giving:

• Shoppers have saved +123% more home decor ideas this year.
• Goods in the jewelry category were saved 37% more often.
• Saved ideas in the wellness category have grown 231% year over year!

By knowing what’s high on your audience wish lists, you can align your social and content marketing campaigns accordingly, introducing your goods to the prospects at early stages of their buying journey.

2. Engage on Topics Unrelated to Your Product

“What do you want Santa to bring you this Christmas?” “What unique or fun traditions do you have during this season?” “Can you post a picture of your ugliest Christmas sweater?” “What was your biggest Christmas disaster?”

People love to share their stories, and this is the perfect time to let them. Once you get followers engaged in telling their stories, conversations follow. Everyone wants to get in on the act. It’s all about consumers feeling good about your brand and your reaching out to them at a personal level.

Take Airbnb’s Instagram account for example. They are absolute masters of curating their properties with quick story captions, setting the scene for prospective travelers. The comment section is always full of prospects asking the details for this specific property on the platform. That’s how “selling-not-selling” works.

View this post on Instagram

Superhost Sally’s turquoise cottage matches the color of the surf in Yallingup. From the moment you walk in, you’ll realize the tall windows, white washed walls and lofted bedroom make it the best kept secret in the Margaret River region. After grabbing coffee at your host’s favorite spot, Andy’s Cafe, take a short walk to the Caves House Hotel for a bite to eat and some live music. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Photo: @pruchapman

A post shared by Airbnb (@airbnb) on Nov 26, 2018 at 4:43pm PST

3. Take Note of Your Reputation

Your reputation is critical all the time, but even more so during the holidays. You do not want any customer “trashing” you because of a bad brand experience – late delivery, products-out-of stock and other mishaps that took place during your last year’s holiday madness. And you certainly do not want those reviews to be the first thing prospective buyers will notice on social media or in search results.

Rob Sides, vice chairman at Deloitte, writers that this year nearly 23% of shoppers will turn to social media platforms to assist in their holiday shopping process. The majority (74%) will trust peer recommendations on social media, followed by tips from brands (58%) and retailers (48%).

So you will need to take a proactive stance on your online reputation during this season. Gear up with social media monitoring tools to track and respond to all the conversations happening around your brand, and in the industry. Remember, that communications on all social media platforms will have to be checked throughout the day, so that you can respond immediately and resolve any issue that arises.

Austin Wampler, founder of Vision Smash Marketing Agency, also writes that online reputation management (ORM) is no longer that difficult or expensive, given the technology available today. It’s the prime tool for increasing consumer trust in your brand – an integral element of higher conversions and long-standing loyalty.

4. Don’t Forget the Deals

Research shows that holiday shoppers are looking for deals and specials, and when they follow a brand, they want to see those offers. Some of the most successful social selling campaigns repeat postings of their special deals on a daily basis, so that no matter when a follower arrives, they are front and center.

You can also proactively reach out to the budget-wise shoppers, pitching them your special offers and coupon codes.

5. Let Customer Shop Right on Your Social Media Account

It’s sometimes frustrating for consumers, especially on mobile devices, to have to link over to your website to do their shopping. Put the technology in place for them to shop right from your social media platform. Ease of purchase is a huge motivator.

Instagram has Shoppable Posts and recently also added Shoppable Stickers to Stories, enabling users to check and purchase featured product in one quick tap. Buyable Pins from Pinterest have also proven to drive superb results for brands using those. “Consumers come to the platform in a buying state of mind”, the company says. “93% of Pinners use the platform to plan purchases and 87% have made a purchase after seeing a product on Pinterest.

Get The Balance Right

Social selling is a combination of several elements. First and foremost, it is the continuation of the relationship-building activities that you engage in all year – just with a holiday flavor this time. Second, it is the authentic explanation of the value that you bring to customers, both for themselves and to those on their gift lists. Third, it is the provision of offers and deals that they just can’t refuse. Diversify your posts to include a good balance of all of these things, and you are likely to see a nice boost in traffic and sales.

I was invited to participate in a roundtable on the topic, “Is technology hurting or helping our ability to sell and drive revenue?”  It’s a fascinating topic, my response is an unequivocal YES!!!

Before I go further, I have proclaim my obligatory fascination and bias toward all things technology.  Most of my career has been working for or with leading technology organizations, spanning electronic components/devices, hardware/systems, licensed/cloud based software, all things communications including devices through the operating companies, through to analytics and AI.  I’ve been on the founding teams of several very successful software and analytics companies.  To further buff my image, I’m a total geek.  I’m one of those that’s in line at 4:00 am waiting to be one of the first buyers of every new geeky technology.

But the issue really isn’t a technology issue, any more than asking, “Does pencil and paper help or hinder our ability to sell and drive revenue?”

The issue is how we exploit the technologies, incorporating them into our customer engagement, sales and marketing strategies.  By itself, technology offers nothing but promise and possibility.  As implemented, too often technology enables us to create crap at the speed of light.

Technology, as a replacement to things that technology does far better than human beings is powerful.  As we look at transactional/order taking selling processes, increasingly exploitation of technology creates greater value/convenience for customers and has the potential for significantly decreasing costs.  Stated differently, if you are an order taker, you should be looking for a different career.

We have decades of electronic ordering including EDI, through web based shopping sites/shopping carts, to chatbots helping advise/manipulate us to making certain purchasing decisions.

Already, 10’s of thousands of sales jobs have been displaced by the increasing use of technology for order fulfillment, transactional selling processes.  10’s-100’s of thousands more of these jobs will be displaced in the coming 5-10 years.

But now let’s look at the application of technologies to complex buying/selling processes.  It offers huge promise, in our own company it has enabled us to more quickly and more deeply research markets, customers, individuals.  We are leveraging technologies to recognize patterns in markets, organizations, and functions within organizations.  I get daily alerts that enable me to more accurately reach out and engage the right customers, with the right insight/messages, at the right time.  Within our own company and a small number of our clients we have seen technology enable huge results and dramatically improve productivity.

Unfortunately, I have to say that most of the applications of technology I see actually hurt our abilities to drive sales and revenue.  But it’s not the fault of the tool, but how we exploit–or fail to exploit the promise of the tool.

Some examples:

Marketing automation platforms have been around for at least a decade.  They provide us very rich capability for segmenting, targeting, personalizing our messaging to our customers.  They can tell us, “Based on Dave’s history with us, we should reach him with content about these issues/topics, but not send him materials about these issues and topics.  We should also send him materials at this frequency, and we should make sure to call his company Partners In EXCELLENCE, not Excellenc (our web URL).

And this is the most basic application of marketing automation technology.

While these platforms have tremendous promise, very few organizations actually exploit it.  Instead, it’s far easier to send everything to everyone.  As an example, this morning, in the space of 75 minutes, I got three different emails from the same Sales Enablement platform giant.  They were presenting 3 different things, only one of which was slightly relevant to me.  The others had absolutely no applicability because they were for applications and businesses very different than ours.  This company should have “known” me better, we’ve done business with them and have had lots of engagements of varying types.

We see data supporting this.  Email data–opens, click throughs, forwards are plummeting.  To get the same number of responses, volumes of electronic garbage have skyrocketed.

Other platforms have the same problem.  I can’t imagine a sales person or organization not using CRM.  Our own company would struggle if we didn’t have CRM.  Yet, CRM compliance/utilization remains a huge issue.

We have all incorporated new technology language into our vocabularies–I suppose because it’s modern and cool, but we talk glibly about “sales stacks,” and get into the frat party comparisons, “mine is bigger than yours….”  But when we audit utilization, people aren’t using them.

Other technologies–not because of the technology, but the way we’ve implemented them are driving customers away, rather than enhancing our ability to reach and engage customers.  Power diallers and related technologies are supposed to help us actually reach customers and talk to people.  Instead, we have managed to train prospects and customers not to pick up the phone.  Do a random survey of your colleagues, customers, and friends.  How many answer phone calls from numbers they don’t recognize–particularly those with the area code and exchange exactly matching yours?

Then there is the “distraction effect” of technology.  Countless studies show how just the visible presence of our mobile devices create micro distractions.  Cumulatively, these distractions accumulate to hours in a day.

We think–or rather don’t think–about technology correctly.  We mis-apply it, using it as a crutch, not a tool, in effect, dumbing down our sales organizations.  We are fast losing the ability to think critically, to listen, to engage in deep conversations.

We have technology vendors selling great technology very poorly.  For example, one vendor tells me all I have to do is ask 4 questions in the discovery process or that my introductory pitch has to be 9.1 minutes, not 11.4 minutes.  Doing these cause us to win–the data clearly shows this.

I tried this recently, I met with a prospect, I planned my call to focus on 4 discovery questions.  Carefully crafted, rechecking the math, I asked, “Hi, my name is Dave, what’s yours?”  “I see you’ve been having cold weather recently, how’s it impacted you?”  “What did you think about the game last night?”  “Are you the decision-maker?”

You can guess how impactful that call was.  I left confused, I had asked 4 questions, that should have been a slam dunk for a win!

Technology is a great excuse for failure.  It’s all too easy to blame the new tool, rather than our inept implementation and utilization of the tool–it’s never our fault, it’s the tool’s.

You know I can go on and on, but I’ll stop here.

The problem isn’t the technology.  Technology can enable us to do great things to drive sales and revenue.  It also can do the opposite.

The real issue is the people side of technology—how do we sell it, how do we use it, are we using it to maximum impact?  It’s all the thinking that underlies the tools we choose and our strategies to exploit them to achieve the goals we want.  It’s hard work, there are no shortcuts, and too often it is simply not done.

As had been said so many times before, “A fool with a tool/technology is still a fool.”

 

Customer service is one of the most important aspects of a business that should not be overlooked and in the world today, quality customer service could help propel your business forward. The best customer service is helping your customers efficiently and in a friendly manner, to ensure that they are satisfied with your service. This includes providing a professional and high-quality research before, during, and after all requirements are met.

A customer can become your most important asset, which is why much emphasis is placed on ensuring that they are satisfied. However, as important as this is, not every business provide a professional customer service good enough to keep a customer. A 2011 research on the effects of customer service in Turkey found that there is improved customer satisfaction and customer loyalty when customer service is improved.

Hubspot Research also found that successful customers can become your best salespeople and 77% of the subjects shared positive experiences that they have had with companies in the past year. In addition to that, the research also established that acquiring new customers is about 5 to 25 times more expensive than keeping the current ones. The same research in their 2017 State of Inbound report showed that about 63% of respondents described generating traffic and leads as their top marketing challenge. This has been linked to poor customer loyalty due to poor customer service.

Customer satisfaction is a great way to boost your business and if you have never considered it a priority, it is never too late to begin. If you also feel you have been getting it wrong all along, despite your efforts, you can always change the approach and try again.

Here are a few crazy ideas you can try to help improve your customer service:

1. Answer Questions with Videos

Answering questions with videos is an easy and interesting way to communicate with your customers, especially if the questions are complicated. You can put videos up on your site to address frequently asked questions and also take it a step further by responding to emails with videos. Most online retailers tend to use the same template consistently, which could get boring in the long run. You can spice it up a little by including personalized videos and addressing the email properly. Personalize the video by mentioning the customer’s name, introducing yourself properly and then addressing the question asked. Although a little bit tasking, it helps improve customer service.

2. Build Credibility by Publishing Reports

Every customer would want to rely on your credibility and a great way to build it is by publishing reports for them to see. Be transparent enough and let them see where the company or business is per time. Publish reports that show a summary of your support metrics, how you interacted with customers, your small and big moves and progress so far. You can decide to do this monthly or yearly and watch it help you connect with your customers and increase your revenue in the long run.

3. Send Personalized Appreciation Notes

Say “Thank You” in a special way by sending out personalized appreciation notes. Make the notes as special as they can get, even if it involves them being handwritten and addressing each customer by their names. When a customer purchases a product, whether online or offline, try to include a small personalized appreciation note. There are several mailing options, like MailChimp, that can help customize online notes to be sent via emails. However, for handwritten offline notes, MailLift can do the job and send them directly to your customers on your behalf. There is a higher tendency that these customers will be back to shop with you again.

4. Send Heartwarming Cards

This is similar to appreciation notes, but you can take it further by sending cards on special dates when people create memories, like birthdays and special holidays. Many adults tend to forget their birthdays as they age, but you can make them remember the day in a special and fun way by sending cards. Apps like Happy Birthday Email will help collect the necessary data and send a personalized birthday message to every customer. You can also send holiday cards at the end of the year to appreciate your customers and wish them a blissful holiday.

5. Get Social Media Friendly

Social media is the cool way to interact with customers today and you may want to utilize that to its maximum capacity. Respond to your direct messages as soon as possible; you could get a social media manager to help manage your accounts effectively and improve your customer service. Also, try to repost pictures from your customers when you are tagged in their photos. Most of the time, they want recognition from the brand that they have patronized. If you think reposting all pictures will mess with your feed, you can utilize the story feature on Facebook and Instagram, for example, and share their content. It will help them love you better and strengthen loyalty.

You can also create a Facebook group of your most loyal customers and engage them in discussions about your brand. Introduce coupons and VIP sales in the group once in a while, to make them feel special about being a loyal customer.

6. Make a Donation in your Customer’s Name

If your brand does a form of charity every year, this could be your chance to make your customer happy by including their names on the list of donors. You can then send a mail to them, including details and screenshots, to let them know. Knowing that they are giving back to the community by just patronizing your brand, they will want to come back again and spend as much as they can on your products.

7. Give Special Discounts

One of the ways to appreciate your loyal customers is by giving them special discounts, You can add this to the appreciation notes or customized special cards. Send them uniquely via email to show them how special they are to have been chosen to get such a deal. You can also give out random freebies at specific times during the year, especially on special holidays.

8. Take Customers on Vacation with Brand Employees

Some of the best companies to work with are those that take employees on vacations. You can take it a step further with your brand by bringing in customers once in a while. Look out for loyal customers that deserve such honor and let them join your employees on a vacation. This will not only put a smile on the faces of your customers but also promote your brand positively to other potential customers.

9. Community Outreach

Coordinating a community outreach is a way to give back to the community as a company. It also helps to build your brand reputation, as more people will trust you even more and it helps your brand embody a positive personality. In addition to this, you will attract other people in the community to know more about your brand and even if they can’t afford to buy from you, they will have positive remarks about you.

10. Create a Customer Service “Hall of Fame” with Your Best Customer Testimonials

When you provide an amazing customer service, you will get amazing customer reviews in return. Consider creating a hall of fame with your best customer testimonials to give people an idea of the excellent service you render and also to honor some of your loyal customers as shown on Lyfe’s testimonial page.

This increases trust for first-timers and act as proof or reference for intending customers.

Conclusion

These ideas, if maximized well, could help improve your customer service. If you have tried any before and there were no tangible results, you may want to give a second try now and be more deliberate about it. You can also try other ideas and observe your results. Improving customer service can help increase traction for your brand and also help you build a credible and reputable brand in the long run.

You can also be a little extra by adding some humor and an interesting tone. You don’t necessarily have to sound official with your customers when you can as well just play around with words and put a smile on someone’s face. Quit using the usual default template most brands use and try to have a conversational tone while responding to your customers.

It’s been quite the tumultuous year in the tech industry, most notably for companies like Facebook. Google, Tesla and Salesforce. And, based on Glassdoor’s latest ranking of the best companies to work for — in addition to employee protests and walkouts — it’s clear that employees are paying attention.

Unsurprisingly, Facebook is no longer ranked as the top large company to work for in the United States. Following scandal after Scandal, employee sentiment at Facebook decreased from an average 4.6 rating in Q1 2018 to 4.3 in Q4. Though, it still ranks seventh among companies that employ 1,000 people or more in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Salesforce’s rating has dropped from 4.5 to 4.4, but it’s ranking has increased from 15th best overall last year to 11th best this year. It’s worth noting that no tech company achieved greater than a 4.5 overall rating. Last year, however, the top tech companies (Facebook, Google and HubSpot) came in at 4.6. TL;DR Employees are generally less satisfied with tech companies this year than they were last year.

Quick fun sad fact: None of these companies are led by female-identifying, trans or non-binary people.

But without further ado, here are 15 best tech companies to work for in 2019.

15. Microsoft (#34 overall, 4.4 rating)

CEO: Satya Nadella

Positive employee reviews: “Clarity of work, growth, smart coworkers, benefits”

Negative employee reviews: “Salary, hierarchical, deep rooted long term relationships/loyalties in teams made it hard for new team members.”

14. Compass (#32 overall, 4.4 rating)

CEO: Robert Reffkin

Positive employee reviews: “Great management and leadership, amazing community of staff and agents, huge emphasis on being your most authentic self and maximizing your strengths. Great benefits.”

Negative employee reviews: “would be great to have a 401K one day!”

13. Adobe (#30 overall, 4.4 rating)

CEO: Shantanu Narayen

Positive employee reviews: “Great culture, fun people, world class products! people were eager to help out and improve the customers experience”

Negative employee reviews: “Leadership teams were distant from product capability and misunderstood how to influence product development teams”

12. SAP (#27 overall, 4.4 rating)

CEO: Bill McDermott

Positive employee reviews: “Flexible, inclusive, innovative culture, generous benefits and pay packages, tons of really smart people here.”

Negative employee reviews: “Long hours, changes often and quickly and projects sometimes are done without good change management”

11. Fast Enterprises (#26 overall, 4.4 rating)

CEO: Martin Rankin

Positive employee reviews: “Great pay and benefits. Strong culture of being supportive, collaborating, and giving back to the community. Interesting work and opportunities to try different types of projects at different locations”

Negative employee reviews: “Mid to high amount of mandatory or non-mandatory-yet-expected overtime. Fine for young, single professionals, but demanding for those with families.

10. Paylocity (#20 overall, 4.4 rating)

CEO: Steve Beauchamp

Positive employee reviews: “The product is great, and I love the service/development teams.”

Negative employee reviews: “With the recent change in management over the sales team, culture is out the window. This company feels like Paychex from a management standpoint. Every call is recorded, every hour is tracked, and you will be told if they decide they want your opinion. Otherwise, I’ve been told in no short terms on a team call to “keep our mouths shut” unless asked. This is not the company that I was hired by 5+ years ago.”

9. Ultimate Software (#18 overall. 4.4 rating)

CEO: Scott Scherr

Positive employee reviews: “Great Company and Benefits, emphasis on keeping employees happy.”

Negative employee reviews: “Changes happen slowly, and with an emphasis on keeping employees happy, leadership is sometimes afraid to make necessary changes if it leads to making employees unhappy.”

8. DocuSign (#17 overall, 4.4 rating)

CEO: Daniel Springer

Positive employee reviews: “Overall great work life balance and supportive management.”

Negative employee reviews: “There is no path to promotion . No HSA or gym reimbursement. No incentive for parents or daycare discounts.”

7. HubSpot (#16 overall, 4.4 rating)

CEO: Brian Halligan

Positive employee reviews: “I’ve been at HubSpot now for almost 4 years and there’s nowhere else I’ve even thought about working in that time. Why? HubSpot is a great place to work. I feel like I’m valued. I have a lot of autonomy in how and when and where I work. I feel strongly about the mission of the company. All in all, I’m extremely happy here.”

Negative employee reviews: “As the company grows, scaling communication and decision making becomes more difficult. Luckily, it’s something that’s top of mind for many people who are working to make communication easier and better.”

6. Salesforce (#11 overall, 4.4 rating)

CEO: Marc Benioff

Positive employee reviews: “Very supportive environment. Unlimited learning potential. Positive company outlook and morals.”

Negative employee reviews: “Big company issues like politics are present and although much is said about “equality” and “transparency”, some divisions still have the usual corporate bullshitters. Many internal projects fail due to lack of leadership or management ability and much is swept under the rug.”

5. Google (#8 overall, 4.4 rating)

CEO: Sundar Pichai

Positive employee reviews: “Free food, subsidised massage, good benefits are all true benefits. They also do a lot of interesting work in tech. The claimed corporate culture of openness, a flat organisational structure and acceptance of employees’ true selves is a good ideology, though clearly sometimes a failed practice.”

Negative employee reviews: “Google management are surprisingly penny pinching in allocating sufficient resource to projects by way of staff, office space, and budget. Success here depends on how good your boss is at politicking and how good you are at politicking with your boss, rather than actually being focused on the merits of specific investments – the scale is too large to be accurate when it comes to brass tacks.”

4. Facebook (#7 overall, 4.5 rating)

CEO: Mark Zuckerberg

Positive employee reviews: “The challenges we face in the wake of press mentions and bad actors abusing our platform causes us to band together and focus in on fixing problems.”

Negative employee reviews: “Work life balance is terrible. Everyone in my team works outside regular hours, night and weekends. No one will explicitly say that you have to do this but given the competitive culture, you pretty much put in extra hours.”

3. LinkedIn (#6 overall, 4.5 rating)

CEO: Jeff Weiner

Positive employee reviews: “Many of the smartest and most talented leaders in Silicon Valley are here.”

Negative employee reviews: “Competition among incredibly bright employees is fierce.”

2. Procore Technologies (#4 overall, 4.5 rating)

CEO: Craig “Tooey” Courtemanche

Positive employee reviews: “Excellent culture, world class people and benefits.”

Negative employee reviews: “Extreme growth has it’s challenges, intention is there to get things right.”

1. Zoom Video Communications (#2 overall, 4.5 rating)

CEO: Eric S. Yuan

Positive employee reviews: “Great product, in fact, best on the market. Zoom has amazing benefits and tons of perks in the office. There are some great, integral people here at Zoom to work with. I consider many people on my team friends. CEO genuinely cares and listens to his employees.”

Negative employee reviews: “I’m afraid this culture has shifted in a negative way over the past year and a half. There are way too many salespeople – upper management is starting to notice, and doing drastic things to get people out. There aren’t real territories carved out, unless you’re in a higher segment. It seems that the lower segments are at the bottom of the totem pole in the organization.”

Every day for the last several weeks, I receive an email or a message on LinkedIn or Facebook Messenger from someone who has read Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away From Your Competition. Most of these notes are to inform me that the contents of the book are helping them to produce better sales results, and a good many of them are around the language I used to demonstrate how one might prospect effectively.

The language goes something like, “I am calling to ask you for a 20-minute briefing where I can share with you the four trends that we see having the biggest impact on businesses like yours over the next 18 to 24 months.”

The language is my attempt to share what works now, making it practical and tactical. One of my biggest complaints as a reader is when authors who teach provide a concept without demonstrating it in a way that makes it easy to put to use. I have endeavored to make all three books something like field books, something you can use. However, that said, I don’t want you to cheat yourself of the principle behind the practical and tactical application.

The principle that undergirds the sample language above is the Trading Value Rule. The Trading Value Rule says that one must provide an equal or greater amount of value for the commitment they are seeking to gain. You violate this rule when you say, “I’d like to stop by, introduce myself, tell you about my company, and learn a little about you and your business.” I didn’t decide that this offer trades too little value; the prospective clients we call on concluded it offers too little value in trade for their time.

Here’s what you need to know. The language works now, in part, because it is a new and novel approach and one that now indicates that the person making the ask has something worth trading twenty-minutes to obtain. But the real power is in the principle: Trading Value.

When you realize the principle, you open up more opportunities to trade value. You could offer to analyze your dream client’s current processes and give a report on what they might need to do differently to produce better results. You could offer to share an assessment of the industry to show where the industry is going and what makes one a leader or a laggard in the industry. You could do something as simple as inviting your dream client to a customer forum to listen to you, and some of your existing clients share the changes you believe are necessary to do better work together in the future.

The principle here is more than the the example in Eat Their Lunch. Moreover, it applies broadly across all the commitments you need from your clients, which is why I published a chapter on Trading Value in The Lost Art of Closing before releasing Eat Their Lunch.

The post Don’t Mistake the Example for the Principle appeared first on The Sales Blog.

In 1909, Harry Gordon Selfridge, founder of Selfridge’s department store in London, coined the infamous phrase, “the customer is always right.” It was meant to be a message to customers that they will get good service at his stores, but it was also a service model to his employees directing how he wanted them to treat their patrons.

More than 100 years after Selfridge introduced this notion, it still makes a point, but most would agree that point is well outdated and can cause more harm than good.

In the PR and marketing services industry, this holds true as well. Any sensible client already knows this: they aren’t paying you so they can be right. They are paying you for a service. They are paying for your counsel and expertise. Just saying ‘yes’ to them blindly will create more problems than it solves.

We can’t all be ‘yes’ people

For someone new to the PR and marcomm world and trying to establish themselves, rushing to say ‘yes’ is a common mistake. While well founded and exemplary of a good, can-do attitude, just saying ‘yes’ without a strategy behind your answer can lead a team down a tricky path. Especially if the goal is just not attainable and a failure has to be admitted.

Striking a balance

Providing good client service requires striking a balance. There will be plenty of opportunities to impress clients with ‘yes’ and deliver the strong results for which they asked. But there will also be times when you need to lessen expectations. It’s not uncommon for a client to feel something they’re announcing or a problem they are solving is newsworthy, when it’s not to anyone outside of the organization. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this view, as most often it just represents the pride they have for their organization, which isn’t a bad attitude.

Or, a client might suggest submitting for an award that is a notorious pay-for-play and carries no industry value, or they’ll might want to pursue a briefing with a reporter known for being difficult or writing inaccurate articles, that could lead to brand damage instead of promotion. Rather than saying yes to every request, you have an opportunity to educate based on your knowledge of the industry, that this approach may not help them, and recommend a stronger alternative.

When striking that balance, trust your expertise, and don’t just say ‘yes.’ Advise your client. Counsel them. Understand what they are ultimately trying to accomplish and how to best get there. Explain why something may not yield the desired results, but be sure to offer an alternate strategy that may better help them reach their goals.

Business relationships mirror personal ones. If promises are made, it’s expected that one will keep that promise. Blindly saying yes and agreeing to get a client whatever they ask for can often result in a promise broken. Broken promises usually lead to broken business relationships. Pushing back from time to time and setting realistic expectations, will help assure that one’s word is kept.

Be more than a vendor, be an extension of their team

At Metis Communications, our first core value is to believe in chemistry. This means many things, including, in order to do your best work, you must have the trust of your teammates and your clients. To gain trust, just do your best work and deliver great results to everyone, both internally and externally.

Once there is trust, collaboration always takes off, teams generate strong results and a team begins to become a true extension of their client. “Us” and “them” becomes simply, “we.” When that chemistry solidifies, teams become capable of truly great things.

News that General Motors plans to cut up to 14,800 jobs in the U.S. and Canada was initially reported as a conventional business-cycle adjustment — a “trimming of the sails.” The main causes of the cuts were understood to be slowing demand in the U.S. and China, slumping demand for sedans, and the need to reduce over-capacity in North America.

Then the story turned political, as President Trump lashed out at GM while some observers framed the news as a blow to the president’s promises to bring jobs back to the U.S. heartland.

And then others focused on the community disruption of plant closings in the Rust Belt and how it might be mitigated.

While all of those perspectives are relevant, the most revealing aspect of GM’s announcement may well be what the layoffs say about broader technology trends. GM’s layoffs are not just incremental but existential, in that sense: They are about accelerating the staffing changes mandated by the company’s aggressive transition from analog to digital products and from gasoline to electric power. As such, the new layoffs (and associated future hirings) are likely an augury of much more disruption coming — in the auto sector, for sure, but also in firms all across the economy.

Central to GM’s announcement is, in our view, what we call the “digitalization of everything.”  By that, we mean that GM’s layoffs significantly reflect the talent and workforce strains associated with the diffusion of digital and electronic technologies into nearly every industry, business, and workplace in America.

Specifically, the advent of consumer electronics, IT, electric and battery powered drivetrains, and — soon — autonomy in the automotive industry are placing excruciating new demands on its workforce, and forcing painful change. Where once the auto-sector workforce was anchored by workers responsible for mechanical and machine-maintenance roles, the need for electrical skills is now growing exponentially due to the increasing electrical and electronic content of the car. Likewise, where mechanical engineers once predominated, the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are increasingly looking for software engineers, energy management experts, and data scientists able to build electric and self-driving vehicles.

Our recent analysis of the digital content of hundreds of occupations in the American economy shows that the digital content of auto work has soared in the last 15 years, with huge implications for workforce development in the sector. The mean digitalization score of workers in the advanced manufacturing sector, of which auto is a part, surged 60%, from 24 to 39 since 2002. This has reoriented the occupational mix of the industry, changing its hiring needs and layoff decisions.  As of 2016, for example, the fastest growing occupations in the auto sector were computer network support specialists and software developers while two of the fastest shrinking were drilling and boring machine operators and sheet metal workers. Similar patterns of cutting and hiring are visible in last week’s announcement.

 

Nor is that all: Look for more of the same in the future — from GM, and from all other companies in the sector.  According to our calculations, employing task-level work assessments provided by the McKinsey Global Institute, nearly 65% of all auto-sector jobs have task-level automation potentials of at least 70% in the next 10 or 15 years, meaning they are potentially susceptible to significant work changes, if not termination. With that said, as one of GM’s statements last week noted, “GM’s transformation also includes adding technology and engineering jobs to support the future of mobility, such as new jobs in electrification and autonomous vehicles.”

 

In that vein, last week’s layoffs surely were a response to changing near-term market conditions. But beyond that, the cuts went much deeper, to respond to massive, technology-driven changes in the nature of the work at hand.

As to what needs to be “done” about these transitions, the proper response almost certainly bears no resemblance to any of the ideas President Trump offered last week.  Trump is fuming at the plant closures, and appears to want to reverse the actions GM is taking to stay ahead of emerging technology and skills changes. To that end, Trump called on GM to close one of its plants in China.  And he threatened to strip the company of modest federal incentives to stimulate electric car production. However, that would only hurt GM’s and America’s competitiveness by hindering the company’s plans to invest more in the technology and people needed to produce electric and self-driving cars as those become viable products.

What should be done instead? As a nation, we should be embracing transformative technology and its widespread deployment whether it be electrification and hyper-efficient batteries in the auto sector or automation and AI more broadly. Likewise, we should be increasing our investments in education and workforce training (and re-training), with a focus on digital skills. Only in that way will workers be able to ride out the coming waves of tech-driven staffing changes. And finally, the nation needs to do much more to provide basic supports for people and places struggling with the harsh impacts of labor market change. To be sure, workers must adapt, but firms, governments, and regions all have a responsibility to help.

All of which is to say: GM’s announcement of layoffs last week is much more than a routine course-adjustment by a company alert to market softening after a good run.  Rather, it’s a wake-up call about the labor market implications of the “digitalization of everything.”

Image courtesy of Pixabay

Are you adding data to your journey maps?

Back in 2015, I wrote a post titled Hey! You Got Your Metrics in My Journey Map! In it, I advocated for mappers to add data to their journey maps. I wrote that…

…mapping tools had to evolve because people failed to see the value in mapping with the then-current approaches; in addition, maps were not proving to be that catalyst for change that they are designed to be. In order to be that catalyst, maps have to be actionable. And the only way they can be actionable is if you have some data to support or to drive that action. Executives love data and metrics, right? Data-driven decisions are all the rage, and rightly so.

What kind of data? There’s no shortage of data, right?! Obviously, the data needs to be related to the journey you’re mapping, but here are some examples of the types of data you can add to the map.

• Voice of the customer/customer listening data, including reviews, ratings, diagnostics, and verbatims
• Emotion data, especially from qualitative sources, e.g., text and voice analytics, sentiment analysis
• Persona data: incorporate what you learned about the persona for which you’ve mapped that might help you improve the overall experience
• CX metrics, including NPS, customer satisfaction, customer effort score
• Other customer data, including interaction, transaction, customer lifetime value, reason for call, number visits to site, where they went on the site, etc.
• Operational/call center metrics, including agent performance, call volume, first call resolution, hold time, time to resolve, # transfers, channels used
• Business data: for a lack of a better way to label it, this data is all about the business impact, which will then be used to prioritize moments of truth; it’s revenue, profitability, retention, cost to fix, time to fix, effort to fix, impact to fix type of data.
• Artifacts, including call recordings, videos, invoices, receipts, pictures, documents, screenshots, etc.

Clearly, if you’ve started mapping with butcher paper and sticky notes, which I highly recommend, you’ll need to digitize your maps and have them in a journey mapping or journey analytics platform that supports integrating various data sources into the map.

There are a lot of reasons to bring data into your maps. Data is a critical ingredient for improving the customer experience. It helps us to understand our customers, make better decisions, and deliver the experience they expect.

Other than bringing the maps to life, why incorporate data in your maps? Data helps or allows you to…

• Measure the journey (each of the steps and the overall journey)
• More deeply analyze the experience and facilitates understanding
• Identify and clarify high points and pain points in the experience – what’s going well and what’s not
• Understand where channel optimization needs to occur
• Bring additional customer perspectives and behaviors (outside of those in the room) into the map, shifting the map and the process from one that’s been fairly qualitative to more of a quantitative effort
• Shift the perspective from inside-out to the outside-in by adding another component (data) to put the experience in the customer voice
• Make the maps actionable
• Add validity and credibility (because there are multiple data sources or feedback channels and because it’s now quantitative rather than qualitative)
• Identify key moments of truth
• Prioritize improvements

These last two points are important ones to make: the maps themselves don’t identify or prioritize moments of truth. You must use feedback, data, and metrics to do that.

The world is now awash in data, and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways. -Max Levchin, PayPal co-founder

We all know the famous saying, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. This can be applied to the way many organizations have trained their Buyers to buy, particularly in Q4. Discounts become the primary weapon of sales reps

Categorize this post as “thinking out loud.” I’m not sure what I think about this issue, so I’m using the post to help me think through it and to get your input and ideas.

We all know the story—buying has changed profoundly, complex buying is chaotic, we need to be customer focused/driven, we need to create value in every interaction…..

At the same time, customers have many more sources/channels for information to help in their buying decisions, AI/ML technologies will make many transactional sales roles less necessary (tough this isn’t new news).

And we have the convergence of information overwhelm, increased sources of distraction, accelerating change, and skyrocketing complexity–in our customer’s markets, in their own organizations, with competition/partners, and within our own organization.

In the face of all this, for the most part we are training our salespeople in the same skills I learned many decades ago, and my predecessors learned decades before that.

To be fair, the training programs have advanced somewhat in their current implementation, though much of it seems cosmetic. Many are leveraging technology for delivery or to provide implementation support tools, but when I speak with both vendors and customers, I find them describing the same skills I learned: prospecting, qualifying, questioning/probing/listening, objection handling, closing, effective demos, competitive selling, territory management, account management, deal strategy development, pipeline management, understanding customer decision-making, understanding buying processes, financial selling, negotiating, developing relationships, trust-based selling, and so forth. Even concepts of insight based selling are repackaging of consultative, solution, customer-focused selling programs of the 60s, 70s, 90s. And, there’s always endless product training (actually most of sales training ends up not being selling skills, but instead product training.)

At the risk of repeating myself, these programs have been upgraded in how they are being presented. Rather than heavily product selling focused, they leverage more customer-focused language, but under the covers, they haven’t changed substantively. Otherwise, why do customers constantly complain about being pitched, salespeople not understanding their problems, and so forth.

At the same time, sales performance continues to stagnate or even decline. The gap between what customers consider helpful and sales people’s ability to be helpful is increasing.

At the same time, sales execs and sales enablement execs are trying to fill the rapidly increasing gap between what customers want/need and sales’ ability/skills to execute.

Where possible, products/solutions are being repackaged to making buying/selling easier–in essence “transactionalizing” what had been a complex sale. Rather than making an enterprise sale, we are making individual or departmental sales. This has a number of advantages, skill levels don’t need to be as high, we can leverage role specialization more effectively (creating sales assembly lines with customer widgets passing through each station), and we can effectively leverage all the traditional selling skills. Also, these are the easiest applications of AI/ML technologies. The more “predictable” the process is, the more it can/will be managed by technology, bots, and automated agents.

Where this can be done, it should be–but the more it can be done, the more we and customers will leverage technologies to reduce/eliminate the need for sales people. Stated differently, I’d hate to be a SDR (the way we currently define the role) in the 2020’s. Even many AEs will be unnecessary in the transactional environment.

But there are limitations to this. Many of the original SaaS companies have found they cannot effectively scale this approach (costs, staffing, and other issues). Many complex buying/selling processes simply cannot and should not be “transactionalized.”

As we look at the changes that are happening with our customers, their markets, their competition, their growth strategies, the internal complexities they have in getting things done/achieving their goals, and the challenges they face in buying. The question arises, “Do traditional selling skills help us more effectively and impactfully engage our customers, helping them get things done?”

Of course, there are skills we call “selling skills,” that are critical to everyone in an organization. The ability to listen, question, probe and communicate effectively is important to every professional, whether they sell, or whether they work on teams internally. Internal teams don’t think in terms of “objection handling,” but they have skills at resolving differences of opinions, contention/conflict within their own organizations. But one wonders, “do we need sales specific training,” or might we be more effective if salespeople went through the same skills training as the people they would be working with?

There are a lot of skills we don’t focus on in selling, but are critical to our customer success and our own internal success. Critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, project management, curiosity, facilitation, business management/analysis, dealing with risk/uncertainty/ambiguity and so forth.

What if we started training our salespeople in the same skills that are critical to our customers and within our own organizations? Would they be able to engage the customer and our own people much more effectively, enabling both they and sales make more progress?

Maybe there’s a further step, why do we need to make these programs specific to selling? What if we mixed different disciplines/functions/points of view in the same training programs. Rather than a sales focused training workshop on problem-solving, what if salespeople train with finance, engineering, operations, and manufacturing people?

For example, one of the best training programs I’ve been through was a 6 week program on Commercial Banking at Wharton. It wasn’t “How do you sell to commercial bankers,” rather it was on critical issues in commercial banking, all the participants except for 3 of us were commercial bankers. In that workshop, I was learning with them, understanding their perspective, how they thought about things. It paid huge dividends in my ability to have discussions with commercial bankers in how they could leverage the solutions I sold.

Increasingly, we both conduct and observe workshops that aren’t focused on salespeople but bring people from various disciplines together to learn. How better to learn collaboration than to work with people you need to collaborate with, or curiosity by learning about different functions, or project management with people that will actually be on the projects we will be helping our customers manage?

Undoubtedly, there are training programs that need to be specific to salespeople, just as there are for other functions. But:

• Are the old-time, traditional sales training programs even necessary given the challenges our buyers and we face today?
• Do we need to design those programs to be specific to sales, or could we get more value by conducting them for a multifunctional audience?

I could argue both ways–really I’m not sure, but leaning away from the traditional sales skills training. What do you think?

Potential gender differences can be a touchy subject, especially in today’s environment. In our research on sales email engagement, we had to move past our fear of addressing the question of gender. We wanted to answer one simple question: When it comes to B2B sales emails, does gender matter?

Background

To get past our trepidation and ensure sensitivity, we share data from a very large sample without commenting on differences in seller ability (which we assume to be gender agnostic). We pulled 20 million sales emails and classified the senders and recipients by gender using a publicly available name-to-gender database.

Our sample contained 6.5 million B2B sales emails sent by females and 13.5 million emails sent by males. Our sample was comprised of ~33% females. This proportion is consistent with recent research published by LinkedIn that women represent 39% of sales professionals.

Regarding recipients, our sample contained 7.6 million emails received by women and 12.5 million emails sent by men. The percentage of women recipients is 38%. This number is consistent with LinkedIn’s research that found the active workforce to be 41% women.

Did Gender Affect Sales Email Performance?

Let’s start by looking at the reply rates of men versus women. In our sample, women responded to women at a rate 18% higher than men responded to men. This finding is inconsistent with a more rigorous academic study (albeit one with a sample size of just 376) that reported:

“We find no interactions across genders, indicating that men are just as trusting and trustworthy toward women as toward other men, and women are just as trusting and trustworthy toward men as toward other women.”

Note: Population proportion z-stat for difference between female sender->female recipient and male sender -> male recipient is 38.0, indicating the difference is highly statistically significant.

Next, let’s look at the propensity to respond to B2B sales emails by recipient gender. Here we found (see Figure 2), women recipients are almost 15% more likely to reply to B2B emails than men. This finding is consistent with the academic research cited above which found that “women are more trustworthy than men,” which was concluded based on the finding that women recipients returned 15% more (somewhat coincidentally the same number!).

Note: Population proportion z-stat for difference between female senders and male senders is 14.5. This indicates the difference is highly statistically significant.

Finally, we return to the question we started out with – ‘Does sender gender matter?’ The answer statistically is yes, but the difference is a tiny 4% as shown in Figure 3.

The Bottom Line

The absolute advantage that female senders have in reply rates, though statistically significant, is a tiny 0.1%. Hence, we conclude, as we would expect, that sender gender does not matter.

What does matter? From our prior research, the best way to increase B2B email response rates is to be persistent in a way that is pleasant and personalized. Specifically, personalize the first 20% of emails (especially in the subject line and initial text) and to engage multi-touch, multi-channel cadences that are intense at the start and then allow for some breathing room.

Moreover, overall gender diversity matters. We recently conducted a survey of 400 buyers and sellers that looked at the desire for diversity in the sales profession. It uncovered that 91% would like to see more women in sales. The desire for diversity overall was a theme. Respondents indicated an almost unanimous desire for a workforce inclusive of more women, LGBTQ people, people of different races and cultures, and people from different generations.

---

Learn more about ways to have more successful sales interactions at this year’s Rainmaker conference. Don’t miss the Women’s Breakfast on Wednesday, March 12th.  It was one of last year’s most popular events!

The post Men vs. Women: When it Comes to B2B Sales Emails, Does Gender Matter? appeared first on SalesLoft.

By Tibor Shanto

I have talked a lot on this blog about the need for sales people to get past or over their product.  Yes, your product is important, but in the end, and I am sorry if I am minimizing it for some, just a deliverable nothing more!

It may do great things, open many doors, expose abundant opportunities, but there is no denying, that it is something that is delivered after the terms are agreed to.  It may lead to great things, but in and of itself it is not a great thing, just a product, a thing.  Understanding that is crucial, believing that it delivers value to everyone in the value chain is dangerous.

The problem is too many sales people confuse the deliverable with what the buyer set out to achieve with said deliverable.  I want my bank to be safer, so the Russians can’t get at my money (they can have my vote); I don’t care how the bank does it, as long as my money is safe.  I want the security of knowing my money is safe, don’t care or need to know the type of encryption, centralized or decentralized database, layers of this or that, years of experience, who else uses it, blah blah blah… any of that product related stuff sellers love to believe.

Rosetta Stone

The challenge is communicating that value to people at different points across the value chain, distinguishing between how “users” view your product, and how “economic beneficiaries” relate to your product, or more accurately, how they don’t.  There is no doubt that some people you will meet in the process of selling will clearly gravitate towards product, it’s specs, all the chrome, etc.; these people live for “product”/”deliverable” elements and demos, after all, it’s their job, they are the operators/users or implementers.  That’s why they ask those great questions that line up so nicely with your brochure and training.  And these people do count in the scheme of the decision, but not as much as others.

In the 6.X number of people involved in a decision, some voices count more than others, just follow the money.  But since our role is to get a decision not to just demo, we need to bring them all to the table in a way that they all see a way of moving forward together.  This requires us to become multi-cultural and multi-lingual.  The multi-lingual is the easier of the two, not hard to figure out how to speak to someone in the corner office differently than the supervisor on their shop floor in Memphis.   But becoming multi-cultural is an entirely different ask of most sellers.  Relating to someone whose shoes they have never walked in, challenges they contemplated, and candidly, many things did not care about till it came to this sale!?!

Bore Them to Shit with Bits and Byte

The economic beneficiaries, those people who never come in direct contact with your product, but do indirectly benefit from the output and synthesis from your product and many others they cannot identify, but indirectly rely on.  But they don’t know about or care about your product.  They care about their ability to use the output to do what they do better.  Things like mitigating or identifying unseen risk; change the financial reality in ways other than just “more revenue” or simply just “cost take out”, and more in terms of balance sheet and stretching credit, etc.; introduce a measurable change in productivity; shift time in their favour, or other things that relate to outcomes, rather than product.

Rather than believing that our “Bits & Bytes” are the differentiators, we need to understand how we can impact realities in their view of their business, not our view of where we see ourselves in the market.

What’s In Your Pipeline?

The roots of this challenge can be traced back to the pipeline.  Go through most pipelines, and you’ll find sellers much better equipped to tell you why they “believe” an opportunity belongs in the pipeline, then an understanding of the opportunity.  When we apply a simple litmus test of “Next Step” to most pipelines, you’ll find nearly half of the opportunities don’t belong or suffer from over-enthusiasm.  By the next step here we mean something the prospect has clearly agreed to, not a plan you are keeping a secret from everyone, including the prospect.

Believing is a good starting point, both with buyers and with pipelines, but we quickly need to move that to an understanding that leads to mutual action and results.

The post It’s One Thing To Believe – Another To Understand appeared first on TiborShanto.com.

Demand generation is a rapidly changing field, but it is also critically important to support the rest of your marketing activities further down the funnel. That’s why we put together these demand gen stats for you—to set your strategy up right so that your pipeline doesn’t become a ghost town come Q2.

Being successful in the world of demand gen today means keeping up with a rapidly evolving landscape, which is why it’s important to keep up to date on what’s working for marketers, and what isn’t. Start with the research and takeaways below to help you get the lay of the land as you set up for a successful 2019.

1. Marketers who document strategy are 538% more likely to report success than those who don’t and marketers who document process are 466% more likely to report success than those who don’t. (source)

Takeaway: Planning the work and working the plan is the demand gen marketer’s secret to success. It is important to be explicit about both your goals and also the tactics that will support your achievement of those goals.

Build your plan thoughtfully and share it widely across your team to keep everyone focused on and accountable to your goals in 2019.

2. 50% of the average marketing database is useless, largely because of duplicate records (source)

Takeaway: You can build a killer marketing strategy built on demand gen darlings, like newsletters and email blasts, but if your database isn’t clean, your efforts will be wasted.

source

Make sure a data preservation and scrubbing effort is a primary point in your 2019 plans.

3. Only 56% of B2B organizations verify leads before they’re passed to sales (source)

Takeaway: What are the other 44% of you up to, B2B marketers? Ensuring your lead quality improves efficiency and means your sales team is spending their time chasing down the right leads, not someone who is just interested in that awesome eBook you slaved away on.

Focusing on lead quality instead of quality opens up the doors for better marketing as well. If you are focusing your efforts around driving higher quality leads by collecting qualifying information on your prospects, your nurture efforts can also be more targeted and effective.

4. The most effective lead nurturing programs result in a 50% increase in sales-ready leads and 33% lower costs (source)

Takeaway: Lead nurturing is critical to driving real results with marketing today, especially in the B2B space. Prospects are inundated with messages, and hoping your initial social ad made a lifelong impression isn’t going to cut it.

source

Savvy marketers will develop personalized nurture programs that span channels to support both customer acquisition and retention.

5. 70% of B2B marketers claim that videos are more effective than other content when it comes to converting users to qualified leads. (source)

Takeaway: While video can seem daunting, this type of content can be very much worth the creation challenges. Video is quickly becoming a preferred content type for buyers and an effective tool for marketers.

Whether you decide to go with an outsourced team to help you create the videos of your prospects’ dreams or build in-house talent, video can’t be ignored when thinking about the future of demand gen efforts.

6. Emails for nurturing leads generate an 8% CTR compared to general emails, which generate just a 3% CTR (source).

Takeaway: Not only do leads that are nurtured convert faster and at higher rates than un-nurtured leads, demand gen tactics are more effective when used on nurtured leads. This means that marketers can think critically about what they put in front of prospects when.

7. 82% of purchasing consumers view at least 5 pieces of content first, from the winning company. (source)

Takeaway: Meet your prospects where they are, with stellar content. Stellar demand gen strategies are built off of a framework of rock solid content that provides real value for prospects.

Explore using strategies that connect content with traditional demand gen tactics, like LinkedIn lead forms and gated content downloads on well designed landing pages.

8. Only 10% of marketers use gamification to attract buyers. (source)

Takeaway: This untapped market could be a huge win for demand gen marketers today. As buyers increasingly prefer more visual, interactive content, gamification creates an opportunity to make marketing fun again.

If you need a gamification refresher, start here

Explore how you can create content that engages, and weave gamification into your existing marketing efforts this year.

9. Bundled nurturing content within a resource hub (rather than multiple emails) produced a 3X increase in lead to pipeline ratio. (source)

Takeaway: Don’t let tired “best practices” limit your strategic thinking as you build your demand gen strategy for next year. Instead of segmenting out your content on your schedule with nurture emails, why not let your prospects binge all of your content at once?

Consider building out a content hub or resource center on your website that allows your prospect to engage with your content on their terms and track activity as a part of your demand gen strategy.

10. 64% of B2B buyers they prefer podcasts at the top of the funnel, while 48% said webinars were valuable to them in the mid-stage of their buying journey. (source)

Takeaway: Make sure that your demand gen strategy and activities include varied content types that support different buyer preferences throughout the funnel. You can also repurpose content for later in the funnel, like repurposing podcast audio into content for a recorded video webinar.

11. 70% of marketers say their demand gen budgets will increase, and 34% say their spending will grow by more than 20%. (source)

Takeaway: Demand gen spending continues to increase across the board, and as competition for paid activities increases and organic reach becomes more difficult to gain, many demand gen marketers are lobbying for budget increases.

Making sure your budget is healthy can help you compete in demand gen in 2019.

12. Successful marketers are 242% more likely to report conducting audience research quarterly whereas 56% elite marketers conduct research once or more per month. (source)

Takeaway: Build in at least quarterly audience research to make sure your other demand generation work is resonating with the right people. This stat reminds us that as marketers, our job at the end of the day is to connect with people, and that’s a lot easier to do when we know more about our prospects.

Source

Build out research benchmarks and secure your research process so it becomes an ingrained portion of your monthly or quarterly reporting process.

13. Most midsize to large organizations average less than 5,000 marketing qualified leads (MQLs) per month. (source)

Takeaway: This is a useful benchmark to assess how your overall lead generation tactics are performing, as well as your qualification process. If you are blowing your lead numbers out of the water, but coming up short for your organization size in the Marketing Qualified Lead department, consider revamping your nurture and qualification plan.

Keeping an eye on other organizations of similar size to set realistic goals and assess how your existing efforts are performing.

93% of online experiences now begin with a search engine (source)

Takeaway: This stat has huge implications for how you build your 2019 strategy in terms of tactics. Here you can see the evidence for focusing on organic search traffic, through tactics like keyword research and placement.

By focusing on optimizing content for search and building paid efforts that support well-orchestrated organic campaigns, demand gen marketers can capitalize on search traffic in 2019.

Here’s to a Successful 2019

With these demand gen stats and takeaways, you are sure to be able to build a killer 2019 strategy. Want more great tips and ideas to start off the new year with a bang? Try our demand gen marketer’s guide to interactive content to learn how to engage, nurture, and convert leads to customers with interactive content.

Sales drives revenue. Demand gen creates leads. Customer success reduces churn. What does product marketing do? If you can’t answer, don’t worry. You’re not alone. Having built and led worldwide product marketing teams for over a decade, the question I most often got from employees across the business was, “what is it your team does again?”

It’s not a simple answer, and that’s likely what has led to the confusion. Product marketing teams can report to product (as it does at Samsung) while others sit in marketing (like it does at Apple). Some teams play more of an inbound or upstream role, owning the product roadmap, while others take an outbound or downstream role, taking the product to market.

The best description I’ve seen of product marketing’s value to a business comes from Google. Simply put, it’s the job of product marketing to ‘Know the customer. Know the magic. Connect the two.’ Unpacking and understanding the role of product marketing will help you leverage your product marketing team to accelerate growth.

Know the Customer

One of the most important roles that product marketing needs to play is to champion the voice of the customer into the business. They need to possess a deep understanding of what lives in the minds and hearts of customers, and be able to evangelize that insight across the business. This goes far beyond needs and pains but delves deep into their psyche to understand the emotional drivers of purchase and use. In this respect, the role of the product marketer is more akin to that of sociologist or psychologist than product manager or technologist.

When I was in my role leading product marketing at Vidyard, one of the ways our team championed the voice of the customer was through a project to uncover the strategic, boardroom level problems we could help them solve.

We interviewed our sales reps, sales engineers, and customer success teams. Hypotheses were tested and refined through dozens of deep-dive phone interviews with customers and non-customers. We validated and prioritized value drivers through an online survey to 500+ users. Sales resources were developed and training was facilitated across teams.

Plans for Success

The output of this project became the blueprint for how we communicated across marketing, had sales conversations, and priced our solution. Product management and development even latched on to the value driver outputs to help shape and prioritize the product roadmap.

Other roles product marketing plays in knowing the customer include:

Win/Loss Analysis

As an unbiased, third party (not sales or customer success), product marketing can drive win/loss analysis—a process aimed at deconstructing why we won or lost deals by conducting customer interviews and surveys. Buyers will often open up to product marketing in the spirit of improving pricing, messaging, value propositions, or the sales process. 

Ideal Customer Profile, Segmentation, and Buyer Personas

Product marketing identifies the group of customers that is the best fit for driving growth. This is brought to life through market research and real data about existing customers.

Keys to Knowing Your Customer

Talking to Your Audience

I’ve always been a firm believer that product marketing is not an armchair quarterback role. Successful product marketers need to get close to the front lines to understand their audience and the changing market dynamics. Product marketing managers should spend at least 20% of their time interacting with their audience by joining sales calls, attending conferences, and interviewing customers.

Spending Time with Sales

No team better understands the questions your customers are asking than your sales team. Spending time with sales will help build customer empathy and help you understand the feedback that is coming from the front lines.

Know the Magic 

Knowing the magic is about possessing a deep, unmatched knowledge of the product. Product marketing is the product evangelist and cheerleader, inside and outside of the company. They are responsible for articulating why your product is different, better, special, and for how best to convey the value it adds in the customer’s own language.

In the last few years, my wife and I have taken to puzzling. I’ve come to see that the process of solving a 1000 piece puzzle follows the same pattern to how I’ve always approached unlocking the value of a product. First, you need to flip over all the puzzle pieces and get them right side up. Then you start to group the edge pieces, the corners. Next, you sort the colors and finally, you start to put them together. Crafting the narrative for a product follows a similar path. Starting to assemble the puzzle before first flipping over the puzzle pieces will slow you down in the long run.

The key to flipping over the puzzle pieces is close alignment to the product organization. I’ve always strived to align product marketing managers to product managers one-to-one on my teams. When product marketing teams has been most successful, product marketing managers and product managers are attached at the hip and working in concert. When we’ve been least successful, they are territorial, siloed or unclear on responsibilities.

Partnering with Product

To build this strong working relationship, I aimed to sit with my counterpart on the product team at least two days a week and book weekly product marketing interlock meetings. The output of this well-oiled partnership was that product felt they had an ally in marketing who could help them communicate the value of what they’re building, and marketing felt they had a simple, cleanly packaged story to tell.

Here are some of the questions product marketing can ask to ‘know the magic’:

• What inspired this feature?
• Why did we build it this way?
• What other approaches did we try to solve this problem?
• What was the biggest problem we had to solve in reaching this point?

Other roles product marketing plays in knowing the magic:

Packaging: Bundling features together to simplify the way buyers buy and maximize the perceived value

Pricing: Developing simple, easy-to-understand pricing models built around value rather than features

Keys to Knowing the Magic

Market & Category Insights

Product marketing must understand the category, market dynamics, and trends that drive consumer behavior. This comes through from following the industry closely, including what’s happening upstream & downstream in the value chain. Product marketers gain this insight by reading industry materials, attending trade shows, and following influencers and analysts.

Competitive Environment

Product marketing must be experts on the share-of-mind and share-of-wallet competitors and their relative standing in the eyes of consumers. This doesn’t stop at in-category competitors, but also competitors from adjacent or alternative ‘outsider’ brands that might fulfill similar needs.

Connect the Two

Connecting the two is where the rubber hits the road. Product marketing is the steward and caretaker of your narrative across the business. It rests on product marketing to shape a clear, compelling, consistent voice for the product in the market. More difficult still is ensuring that this story is well told and aligned across customer-facing touchpoints.

When I started my career at BlackBerry, product marketing didn’t exist as a dedicated and well-established function. The need for what would become worldwide product marketing became clear one day when I walked into the office and found myself standing in front of three banners promoting the same smartphone. Each told a dramatically different story about what the product stood for and why consumers should buy it. Without standing for something, the product stood for nothing. It confused our channel partners, our enterprise sales reps and prospective buyers.

Over the coming years, we built the worldwide product marketing function to help address this challenge, among a host of others, with the goal of crafting and telling a well-told story that connected a deep understanding of our customers and market with the magic of our products.

Product

This manifests itself in a number of ways:

Cut Through Positioning and Messaging

Product marketing defines the product value proposition, the experiences that support it and the product attributes that underpin these experiences. Product marketing then shapes messaging—how we communicate

Channel Enablement

Product marketing partners with sales enablement to define the content and support the delivery of training programs for sales and partners. Product marketing provides the fodder for the training content, while sales enablement determines how best to serve it up. This could take the form of demo scripts, competitive battle cards, sales collateral, pitch decks, and more.

Go-to-Market Strategy

Product marketing works with go-to-market leaders like the Chief Revenue Officer, VP of Sales, and Chief Marketing Officer to define the go-to-market strategy and establish the connective tissue that aligns the target segments, value prop, routes to market, and marketing campaigns to drive demand. In this role, product marketing is serving as offensive coordinator, calling the plays and ensuring that every team is working towards the common goal.

Demand Gen

Demand generation teams rely on product marketing to help support demand campaigns by defining what experiences to highlight for which audiences and what language to use.

Web and Design

Product marketing develops the briefs that drive the creation of website pages, marketing assets, including what experiences you should highlight, what screenshots to feature, and what language to use.

Video Production

Work with the creative director to bring the value proposition and the product’s magic moments to life through explainer and demo videos.

PR

Product marketing works with PR to write launch press releases, ensuring that the story is well represented, that the key differentiators are adequately highlighted and that the language will resonate with the market. At launch, PMM serves as a spokesperson for the company with media, doing demos and sharing the product and go-to-market strategy.

Launch Readiness

Many technology companies struggle with executing flawless launches. Products are ‘launched’ when code is ready, leaving marketing, sales, support, and customer success teams scrambling. Oftentimes, this is driven by no cross-functional launch coordination, a role that product marketing helps to fulfill. Product marketing owns the launch checklist ensuring that all go-to-market teams are at a state of ‘internal and market readiness’ before the product is launched.

Watch Outs

As experts on the customer, market, and product and with the ability to move fluidly between strategy and tactics, it’s customary for product marketing to get pulled in a lot of different directions. Product marketing often becomes a jack of all trades.

Starting the product marketing team at one startup, I was attending events, delivering sales training, building collateral, joining sales calls and more. I was wearing a lot of hats and that gave me an opportunity to get to know the customer and the product even further. But soon, I found all these execution tasks standing in the way of tackling the strategic initiatives that would set the company up for growth over the next horizon. I was feeling more like a firefighter, responding to requests from sales, than providing strategic marketing leadership.

When I work with product marketers and marketing leaders, I get them to do a time study of how much time in an average week they’re spending on various tasks. I’ll ask them to color code the chart below to represent the health of each activity. Green if it’s in great shape. Yellow if it’s done, but needs improvement. Red if it isn’t receiving much or any attention. It’s not uncommon to see a lot of red on the left with progressively more green towards the right.

With a better understanding of which tasks are going overlooked, product marketers can work with their marketing leadership to carve off time to tackle the strategic deliverables that will fuel sustainable growth over the long term, and reduce the amount of time responding to fires.

 

Do you have any best practices for product marketers you’d like to add? I’d love to keep the conversation going.

 

The post Why a High Performing Product Marketing Team Is the Key to Growth appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

A lot of financial and investing firms dabble with marketing automation; however, few have built a full-scale program that they use across their entire customer journey. Firms are collecting vast amount of operational and marketing analytics data long before a prospect becomes a client. Most firms don’t realize they are sitting on a gold mine that can be used to personalize and contextualize every communication they have with their customers.

For any service organization to be successful, there needs to be growth of new customers and retention of the existing client base. You can’t expect to sustain growth if you focus on one but not the other. Marketing automation should be used for both sides of this equation.

Marketing automation isn’t just about blasting emails to every lead. Smart automation is much more. Here are three areas where you can use marketing automation for your financial organization:

Lead Generation:

Growth starts by bringing people in at the top of the funnel. Once they’re on your website, how do you get them to convert?

1. Chatbots: When prospects come to your website, they have a specific need or question in mind. Don’t use the same generic chat message on every page of your website. If your prospect is interested in trading commodities, your chat message should be tailored and specific to this product. Automate your chatbot messages based on URL.

2. Contextual Content: Your prospects are likely coming in from a number of channels (SEO, paid media, referring websites, social media, and so on). Do you greet every prospect the same way? If you know a prospect came from a paid search campaign aligned with a specific persona, then personalize your copy, imagery, and CTA buttons to this contact. This personalization can happen automatically based on rules you set. These rules can be configured around device type, referring source, preferred language, or country.

Lead Nurturing:

Now that you have a consistent supply of fresh leads in your database, how do you get them to open an account?

3. Email Workflows: This is what comes to mind when people think about marketing automation. A few tips on nurturing your financial clients:

A. Don’t over-email your prospects: Set a limit on the number of workflows they can be in and how many emails a prospect can receive. Consider building a suppression list that will remove leads from a workflow if they haven’t opened your last 10 emails. No need to keep sending emails to prospects who don’t want or need them.

B. Keep an inventory of your workflows: You need to have a 5,000-foot view of all of your workflows. If you don’t, you’re at risk of having people receive conflicting messaging or receive information that doesn’t align with their needs.. We see some clients that have too many workflows and don’t know how certain workflows overlap with others. This is a problem because then you may be sending your contacts conflicting or confusing information

C. Test your workflow delays: Some sales cycles take longer than others, and you don’t want to blast five emails within the first week to a prospect who may need several months to move forward. Test early and often to make sure you aren’t seeing increased unsubscribes or spam complaints. The opposite is true as well. When a lead is hot, use a combination of emails and phone calls from sales to get them to the next stage.

4. Lead Scoring: Every lead that comes in your database will come in with a different level of buyer readiness. Build out your lead scoring criteria so that your email workflows are tailored toward your buyers’ traits (company size, role, lifecycle stage, and so forth) and behavior (number of pages viewed on site, number of emails clicked, number of webinars attended, and so on).

Customer Success and Retention:

Now that your customers are starting to trade or invest in specific assets, how do you keep them around?

5. Customer Feedback: Measuring client happiness or NPS (net promoter score) over time is a critical part of reducing churn. NPS automation can be employed to send out surveys on a rolling quarterly basis. No need for you to manage these feedback surveys anymore. This can all be done automatically.

6. Upsells: Automation doesn’t just involve communication to your customers. It also includes internally notifying your account managers/executives when a customer seems to be a good fit for additional products or services. Assuming your lead scoring is configured properly and that you have notifications set up when engaged customers come back to the website to browse your other products/services pages, this can create numerous opportunities for increasing revenue and offsetting churn.

7. Client Education: How are you staying in touch with your customers beyond trying to sell them your next product? Your customers are looking to you for financial advice and guidance. By continuously educating them on them on the markets, trading strategies, and trends, you are empowering them to be more confident in their investments and trades. One of the best ways to educate your clients is through contextual banner ads that feature webinars, e-books, blogs, or training on their areas of interest. These banner ads should be featured within your client login area as well as within customer marketing emails.

As you can see, marketing automation is much more than machine-gun blasting your emails at your list. Take an intelligent approach and your whole organization will benefit from increased productivity, client happiness, and revenue.

Freemium and free-trial signups have one thing in common: Neither generates revenue.

You may agonize over the decision to choose one path over the other, but you can save that strategic energy for figuring out how to transition more free users into paying customers.

This post details the freemium and free-trial models and considers the key questions—about your business, your market, and your product—that guide you toward the best option.

What both strategies are—and are not

Neither freemium nor free trial will rescue an ailing SaaS company. If your onboarding experience is terrible or your product uninspiring, you’re wasting time with the “freemium vs. free trial” debate.

A freemium or free-trial approach impacts the micro-conversion of an unpaid product sign-up. And optimizing for micro-conversions can undermine macro-conversions, especially if your marketing team never sees what happens after a form fill.

So what should you do first? Define your go-to-market strategy. As Wes Bush details, you have three options for a SaaS go-to-market strategy: sales led, marketing led, or product led. Both freemium and free-trial programs are product-led strategies: they show instead of telling.

If you haven’t committed to a product-led strategy, you can stop reading now. But if you’ve already started down the product-led path—and can get it right—there are plenty of benefits.

Why product-led strategies work for SaaS companies

Freemium and free-trial strategies can reduce customer action costs (CACs). Research from ProfitWell shows that both have lower CACs compared to no product-led option—with the gap continuing to grow:

Even with a product-led strategy:

• Will you still spend marketing dollars to get users to sign up for freemium or free-trial versions? Yes.
• Will you still need sales support for some enterprise accounts? Probably.

But rather than spending marketing dollars on expensive, bottom-of-funnel ad buys—or on content that attempts to explain the value of a product—a product-led strategy lets consumers create their own “Aha!” moment. And if you’re not spending money persuading those users with ads or whitepapers, you can pour those resources back into product development.

Consumer psychology also suggests why product-led strategies may enjoy more success:

• Endowment effect. We value things more highly if we own them. Freemium or free-trial access increases a sense of ownership and, therefore, may increase its perceived value.
• Mere-exposure effect. If we’re more familiar with a product (person, or anything else), we’re more likely to have positive feelings for it.
• Loss aversion. We fear loss. A pending end to a free trial can encourage a purchase. With freemium, it’s relevant only if a company bumps up against a freemium limit and must upgrade to premium or migrate to another product.

Despite the benefits, getting unpaid users to become paid users—”crossing the penny gap”—is hard.

The formidable penny gap

Scaling from $5 to $50 million is not the toughest part of a new venture—it’s getting your users to pay you anything at all. The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny.

– Josh Kopelman, First Round Capital

The penny gap is the transition point from unpaid to paid customer, and both freemium and free-trial options must convince users to cross it. The gap is even wider for freemium offerings: At the onset of the relationship, user expectations are that the product is free.

To dispel this perception, Sixteen Ventures’ Lincoln Murphy emphasizes the need to immediately and repeatedly remind users that they’re accessing the freemium version of a premium product.

So, realistically, how many of those freemium and free-trial users can you expect to convert?

Benchmark conversion rates: freemium vs. free trial

Benchmarks have limited value: A “good” conversion rate is one that’s improving. Still, which product-led strategy—on average—converts better: freemium or free trial?

As Ada Chen Rekhi details, free trials usually convert at a higher rate, but rates vary widely:

• Freemium. Lincoln Murphy cites a 3% conversion rate for SaaS and B2B web apps; a 2012 article on several leading platforms suggested a range between 1 and 10%. Slack, in 2014, converted at 30%.
• Free trial. A much-cited but dated Totango study pegged the conversion rate (for opt-in free trials) at 15% for SaaS businesses; the rate jumped to 50% for opt-out trials. Single-company reports in 2016 from Chargebee, Justuno, and Recapture.io ranged from 10 to 25%.

The spread of conversion rates stems, in part, from the myriad ways you can deploy a freemium or free-trial strategy.

Freemium, free-trial, and hybrid models

Murphy argues that the choice is not between freemium and free-trial strategies but between freemium and premium products. (The latter may include a free trial.) Why the distinction? Because a freemium version is an independent, forever-free product that requires a conversion strategy.

Too often, SaaS companies roll out freemium strategies under the assumption that freemium users naturally cross the penny gap to become paying customers. In reality, freemium users are often an unmonetized segment that helps top-of-funnel marketers hit their numbers—but little else.

It’s one of many critical distinctions. These are the others:

Freemium models

A freemium strategy offers perpetual access to a restricted version of a product. Restrictions come in many forms:

• Feature limitations. This is the most common form of a freemium product—a no-frills version of its premium counterpart (e.g. Evernote).
• Usage limitations. The freemium version limits storage or server access (e.g. Dropbox), or caps the number of users (Canva).
• Advertisement additions. Not every restriction removes functionality. Freemium versions can also include advertisements as a limitation on the experience (e.g. Spotify).
• Cross-sells. Some freemium products are fully functional (e.g. iTunes), but access to them is an entry point to an ecosystem that incentivizes future purchases (e.g. iCloud).

Other products are fully free (e.g. Instagram) with other means of monetization, like advertising. While not freemium products—there’s no paid version to which you can upgrade—they represent one end of the free vs. paid spectrum.

If freemium still seems like a barrier to acquisition, you’ve got plenty of money in the bank, and you’re crossing your fingers for a buyout by Google or Facebook, a fully free product may make the most sense.

Free-trial models

A free trial gives users full access to a product for a limited period of time.

In an interview with HubSpot’s Kieran Flanagan, Ty Magnin of Appcues suggests that a free trial is the “demo of 2018.” That’s because most SaaS products are accessible immediately via a browser or app and automate onboarding: they’re self-paced, time-limited demos.

There are two ways to structure free trials:

1. Opt-in. Users sign up for free without including any payment information. They can explore the product until their trial expires, at which point they’re prompted to sign up—pay or get out.
2. Opt-out. Credit card information is taken at the start. At times, a nominal fee such as $1 is charged, often to placate payment processors or to cross the penny gap early on. If the user doesn’t cancel by the end of the trial, they’re billed automatically.

An opt-in free trial typically generates more trials because it reduces friction at signup; however, an opt-out free trial generates a higher percentage of sales (often of the “Gotcha!” variety), as some users forget to cancel in time. Those near-term sales, while enticing, may erode a brand and hurt retention.

Credit-card walls are also a tactic to keep out the “riff-raff,” an option Murphy cautions against:

a CC-wall doesn’t prevent abuse, it just lets fewer people in so you have less abuse [. . .] putting up a CC-wall doesn’t make a lot of sense most of the time; it is often used to cover up things that should be fixed or because you don’t believe that your Free Trial is setup to convert customers (which it probably isn’t).

In other words, a credit-card wall has consequences, not all of them desireable: It will keep out bad and good prospects, and it will tank your sign-up conversion rate (while likely skyrocketing your post-trial conversion rate—see the benchmarks above).

A Cloud Guru has enjoyed exceptionally high conversion rates for opt-out trials. Note that they clearly advise users of pending charges.

For some, opt-out free trials are essential—you may have more leads than you can manage or face rampant trial abuse. Nonetheless, sharpening targeting for user acquisition or offering a trial only to some users (e.g. those already on an email list) may reduce the need for an opt-out version (and sign-up friction for legitimate prospects).

Hybrid models

What should happen when a free trial expires? For SaaS companies with hybrid strategies, those users migrate back into a pool of freemium users:

(Image source)

If loss aversion isn’t enough to catalyze a purchase at the end of a free trial, a hybrid free trial–freemium strategy can keep those users in the funnel—assuming there’s a strategy to advance them through to purchase (or product advocacy).

Murphy highlights that concern in a similar user flow:

(Image source)

Well-known SaaS companies have succeeded with a hybrid model. (HubSpot offers free trials within freemium and paid versions of their products.) But how do you know which makes sense for you?

How to choose between freemium and free trial

As detailed below, the use cases for freemium are limited, and, if your company isn’t a fit, a free trial is the fall-back option.

Getting to that decision point comes down to answering questions about:

1. Your business.
2. Your market.
3. Your product.

Questions to ask about your business

Who are you selling to?

Is it the same person who uses your product on a day-to-day basis? If not, a product-led strategy may not be right at all. (A sales-led strategy may work better.) On the other hand, a freemium strategy may work well with a bottom-up approach that requires time to scale.

Consider Slack: At a large organization, the eventual purchasing decision may come from the C-Suite (where it’s used sparingly, if at all), but the request for that purchase could develop over time as more and more departments within the company rely on it for communication.

The inertia that regular use builds—historical knowledge, platform familiarity, etc.—makes switching difficult. Reaching that level of inertia takes longer than the duration of a free trial.

Advocacy depends on widespread adoption, but users are not homogenous: Freemium accounting software may be simple to a college administrator but complex to an independent contractor. Ensure that “easy to use” applies to every target demographic.

What are your goals?

Companies like Spotify and Canva created massive user bases by giving away a high-value product. As Kieran Flanagan explains, however, each did so with different goals in mind:

• Market domination. For a product like Spotify, a freemium version drove rapid adoption that established the company as the dominant business in a crowded market.
• Market disruption. Canva isn’t trying to win a head-to-head competition with Adobe. However, its freemium version is good enough to create loyal users who would rather spend thousands on something other than Photoshop.

The danger, of course, is that both market goals optimize for more free users. Spotify and Canva didn’t become freemium success stories until they monetized their user bases.

And, like bottom-up efforts, both were a slow burn that required tens of millions in funding to sustain the glut of free users that precedes revenue. To generate that financial support, a SaaS product needs mass appeal.

It’s why your market may be the best guide to choosing a freemium or free-trial strategy.

Questions to ask about your market

How big is your market?

If you ask Jason Lemkin of SaaStr, he’ll tell you that you need 50 million active users to make freemium work. (By “work,” he means building a $100 million business.) That’s why most freemium success stories feature products that appeal to most people.

Not everyone is hoping for an IPO, however, which means that freemium is possible in smaller markets if the conversion rate is higher and the revenue per paid user also rises. (Lemkin’s back-of-the-napkin math assumes $10 per month per paid user.)

As Vineet Kumar argues in the Harvard Business Review, it may be easier to identify the right model by targeting a conversion rate. Kumar suggests that a 2–5% conversion rate is a reasonable balance; the more niche the market, the higher you should peg your target conversion rate.

So, if your conversion rate is 35%, you may want to consider a freemium option to expand your market. However, if your conversion rate is less than 1%, you may want to restrict access.

The size of your market isn’t the only consideration.

How mature is your market?

What product are you displacing? Murphy believes the answer is key to identifying the right customer-acquisition strategy.

For B2B SaaS products, the added challenge is that the choice for consumers is often all or nothing: Companies have one CRM, one email marketing platform, one CMS, etc. That’s different from B2C SaaS products (Murphy uses the example of smartphone games), in which consumers may simultaneously use several.

Regarding displacement, there are three potential answers:

1. You’re displacing a popular commercial product. You’re entering a product category with wide adoption for which people expect to pay money—two key benefits. But it may also be the hardest market to break into; you’re a disruptor. A freemium approach, like Canva’s, may motivate users to try an alternative solution.

2. You’re displacing an archaic system. Does your SaaS product achieve something that a patchwork of spreadsheets currently does? Your product may offer a ton of value, but you’re also asking people to pay for something they currently get for free. (Or, at least, the cost of the existing solution is buried in extra hours of labor.)

Is a free trial enough time for users to establish a new habit? Or will it take the promise of a forever-free product to convince them to migrate a process to your product? If you think a freemium version is necessary to inspire a shift, beware that you’re replacing one free product with another. At some point, you’ll need to convince users to pay.

3. You’re displacing nothing at all. Are you offering a never-before-imagined SaaS product? Freemium could expedite adoption and dominance. After all, you have no competition—yet.

However, you also establish the expectation that your new service is free. A free trial may let you figure out quickly—and, perhaps, painfully—that there’s no market at all.

What is the network effect in your market?

Freemium’s core growth engine is social proof aka word-of-mouth marketing. To drive word of mouth marketing, a freemium business needs a community, typically an existing one which falls in love with the business’s product.

– Tom Tunguz

Freemium requires an active, engaged market with a strong referral network to monetize (albeit indirectly) legions of non-paying users. Freemium products expect that a majority of users will never become paying customers; however, those freeloaders pay for their use by spreading awareness.

The network effect is stronger with freemium products—users share something of permanent value.

For generating word-of-mouth referrals, freemium beats free trial: Freemium is a product, not a sample, and, as a result, is worth sharing. Still, that sharing won’t occur organically. As Murphy emphasizes, freemium products must catalyze the network effect (e.g. Dropbox lets you give free storage to your friends.)

Identifying those trigger points—to entice new users and convert them into paying customers—requires deep product knowledge.

Questions to ask about your product

How expensive is your product?

An expensive product, according to Bush, doesn’t work with an opt-out free trial. (Bush argues against opt-out free trials in general.) For one, opt-out “free” trials often create a low initial anchor, like the nominal $1 fee, which makes the full price seem that much higher (to say nothing of the negative impact that even a one-penny price has on conversion rates—free is a powerful word).

Second, they yield unintentional purchases and, with a high price point, ones that may max out a credit card and infuriate users.

A $1 trial may create an anchor that makes a high-cost sale more difficult.

A freemium approach for an expensive product faces a similar risk: The penny gap grows wider, and freemium can devalue a high-end brand.

An opt-in free trial solves the aforementioned issues for expensive products. For inexpensive products, the decision point between freemium and free trial likely resides elsewhere.

Is your product easy to use?

No freemium offering comes without costs, even if those costs are a few GBs of server space. To ensure that onboarding and customer service costs remain low, however, freemium requires simple onboarding and total (or near total) self-service. (Bush offers another possibility: charging for user onboarding or folding those costs into the product’s price.)

As noted earlier, a diverse user base may make product onboarding suprisingly complex. And, of course, if users don’t understand how to use a product, they’re unlikely to become passionate advocates.

The same is true for free trials: The more involved the onboarding process, the greater the need for user qualification (unless you have resources to devote to added customer support).

How much do you know about your product?

Free trials use urgency to motivate a purchase. When trying to convert more free-trial users, you can test trial length—say, 14 days versus 30—but the variables are limited.

With freemium products, the variables are endless. Flanagan details the key questions:

[W]hat are the parts that are valuable enough that will help them spread the good word about how great that product is? And what are the features and things that they’ll need so much that they’re just going to pay you money?

If you want to learn which features users care about, freemium opens the floodgates. Freemium can serve, in effect, as a means to scale user research. You can rapidly test the addition or subtraction of features (to statistical significance) to determine which are stickiest.

At the same time, you may not have the patience (or funding) to endure an influx of new users. Piloting the software with a handful of companies may provide similar information at a fraction of the cost.

Ultimately, that data has value only when it connects to a user decision to upgrade. If you don’t know which features generate a sale—or, as The New York Times learned, exactly how many articles they should let you read for free (the answer was 10, not 20)—you won’t monetize those users effectively.

Of course, if your market is so small that you’ll never gather enough data, there’s no point opening the floodgates to begin with—a free trial ensures every user gets access to the most influential features.

Conclusion

Bush is fond of quoting Rob Walling: “Freemium is like a Samurai sword: unless you’re a master at using it, you can cut your arm off.” The default recommendation—from Bush, Walling, and others—is for an opt-in free trial.

That said, if your current conversion rate is high, a freemium option (or less-restricted free trial) may bring more users into the funnel and generate word-of-mouth to expand awareness.

In contrast, if you’re burning through cash trying to onboard hundreds of no-pay tire-kickers (of the freemium or free-trial variety), you should tighten the spigot.

And yet, in the end, the critical consideration is the execution of either strategy—rather than the choice of it—which has a far greater influence on how many evaluators become purchasers.

For the last eight or nine years, a lot of the content around sales improvement, especially as it pertains to prospecting and discovery, has been about providing insights and ideas, as well as being more strategic. These ideas have been critical to the evolution of sales, especially for B2B salespeople engaged in the complex sale. It is not that these approaches are in any way incorrect, it is that some of us write and speak about them as if they are universal, and I include myself in this accusation.

There is still a case for traditional discovery. There are still companies and stakeholders who benefit just as well from a prospective partner who asks questions to understand the areas where they are struggling. There are as many companies and people who are well aware of the challenges they have, who have really good ideas about what they need to make improvements, who need a partner to talk through how they might make those improvements, and who do not need to be compelled to change through a discovery process that allows them to discover something about themselves.

The role of a salesperson, especially one who would like to be a strategic partner, and whom one day hopes to be considered a trusted advisor, is to serve their prospective client. Many times we start with the idea of a platonic client, a client that represents all clients. At the time of this writing, there is much work being done around buyer personas, mostly generated by looking at an individual’s title to determine how to engage with them. These are useful orienting generalizations, but they are just that, generalizations. Moreover, all generalizations, regardless of how useful, are lies (in this statement itself, is a generalization, meaning it is a lie). The generalization we have started from for the last decade is that our prospective clients are not compelled to change, and we need to start every discovery call with context for conversation around why they need to do something different now. The limit of an orienting generalization is that it isn’t universally true.

The tension between certain ideas is where you can find real value. It’s critical that a salesperson generate strategic outcomes for their clients in a complex sales. But it’s equally vital that they be able to serve the individual stakeholders where they find them. Not every stakeholder is interested in understanding the strategic necessity to change before they talk about doing something different to improve the results. Some stakeholders benefit from a set of questions that help them understand how they can go about making things better, the choices that are available to them, and the trade-offs they may make.

If I were to offer you a principle to guide your actions here, it would be to match your approach to what generates the greatest value for your prospective client.

The post The Case for Traditional Discovery appeared first on The Sales Blog.

This is a subject I’ve referred to before, but an excellent article by Don Mulhern has prompted me to promote a concept that deserves far more attention – and which is driving impressive success in the growing number of sales organizations that have embraced the idea.

Most CRM systems – and most sales methodologies – are based on the idea of the pipeline reflecting a series of sales stages which are assumed to be progressively completed over time. It is also assumed that the further we have progressed through these sales stages, the more likely an opportunity is to close.

Many systems go even further: applying the same default probability to every deal that has reached a certain stage. Even worse, many CRM implementations take the “out of the box” default percentages without ever giving any thought to their accuracy or relevance.

But complex B2B sales are – unsurprisingly – far more complicated than that, and it’s yet another example of how simplistic, statistically derived assumptions that can be made to work in straightforward transactional sales environments don’t apply anything like as effectively to complex buying decisions.

I’ve seen ludicrous examples in which the delivery of a proposal is automatically associated with a 50% probability – despite the fact that at least three vendors are bidding (probably making similar unrealistic assumptions about probability), and without regard to the very real possibility that the customer will decide to stay with their current situation or defer the decision.

Why your sums don’t add up

Even a child can see that the math doesn’t work – and that’s without taking into account the inevitable fact that the vendors and their associated bids are invariably not equal in the eyes of the prospect. It’s a recipe for catastrophically inaccurate sales forecasting.

So – what can we do about this? Well, at minimum, we need to break the link between sales stage and probability and replace it with a mechanism that reflects the specific characteristics of every individual opportunity. For example, we might choose to:

• Down-weight opportunities where we only discovered the project after we received an unexpected RFP – and up-weight opportunities where it is clear that we have engaged early and positively influenced the prospect’s requirements
• Down-weight opportunities where we are dependent on a single point of contact – and up-weight opportunities where we have identified and engaged every member of the decision group
• Down-weight opportunities where we have not completed a formal value assessment – and upweight opportunities where we have completed a formal value workshop with the active participation of key stakeholders
• Down-weight opportunities where projected close date is merely based on when the prospect hopes to act and up-weight opportunities where the prospect has a truly compelling event that will force their hand

Even if some of these specific examples do not have predictive value in your sales environment, it would be astonishing if there were not other factors that had a significant impact on your chances of winning.

But even that approach – relating deal probability to the completion of critical success factors rather than only to sales stage is still something of a kludge. And that’s why I claim that your pipeline doesn’t need (and shouldn’t use) sales stages.

A discredited metaphor

Sales stage thinking is a discredited metaphor. It assumes linearity, and it fails to recognise the complex and essentially unpredictable nature of our prospective customer’s buying process. Like Monty Python’s parrot, if its feet had not been nailed to the perch by the CRM vendors we would have recognised that it was dead long ago.

Our customer’s buying process is almost inevitably non-linear (and often not very well understood by our potential champion). At any point, our prospect can decide to move forwards, to revert to a previous phase, to say as they are, or to abandon the decision journey altogether and stick with the status quo.

It is critically important that we are aware of where they are in their decision-making journey, and that we use this information to guide our actions and assess our chances of winning.

Whilst the process is non-linear, at any particular point in time the centre of gravity of their decision process is almost always in one of these phases:

• STATUS QUO: whilst staying aware of what is going on in and around their company, they currently see no need to change what they are currently doing
• EXPLORING: something has changed – either internally or externally (a TRIGGER EVENT) – that causes them to recognise that perpetuating the status quo may no longer be the right strategy, and they start to both explore the issue and their potential options
• DEFINING: having concluded that they probably need to take action, their attention now turns to defining what they may need to change to, who needs to be involved, what decision criteria and process they should adopt and which options they should shortlist
• SELECTING: the decision group now assesses their various options, receives proposals from qualified vendors, and attempts to achieve a consensus about their preferred option or options
• VERIFYING: the decision group seeks to eliminate any remaining concerns or reservations, to negotiate the best possible deal, to finally discard any other options, and to emerge with mutually agreed terms
• CONFIRMING: but even then, we cannot rely on their order – because if it is regarded as a significant purchase, the project still needs final formal approval (and often ends up competing for resource with other potential investments)

It is normally possible to make an informed assessment of where our customer is in their journey. And instead of thinking only about our sales actions, we can usually identify a handful of things that we need to know or do at each stage to assess the likelihood they will act, to facilitate their buying decision, to positively position our approach against their other options, or to qualify them out because they are unlikely to do business with us.

A simple combination of an accurate assessment of their current buying stage plus a handful of key success factors along the lines outlined above can help us to make a much better informed judgement about whether they are likely to buy, whether we are likely to win, how much the deal could be worth, when a formal order can be expected, and whether all the effort required is likely to be worth it.

All of the available research – from CSO Insights and others – suggests that sales pipeline management and sales forecast accuracy remain at acceptably inaccurate levels. There are some obvious remedies – including the ones I have highlighted above. So – you have to wonder – why do so many sales organisations still base their pipeline around sales stages?

I’ve got a question for you. Do you want to make more money? It’s easy. Just start a relationship.

Now the next question is, what business are you in? If you really think about it, I can answer that for you, because all of us are in the same business. No matter what kind of business you run, we are all in the relationship business, and one of my major focuses is relationship marketing. So, let me kind of explain relationship marketing and I’ll give you five steps that you can use to help create a bigger influence with people.

I was talking with a client and we’re talking about getting Google reviews. Now, he’s done well. He’s got close to a hundred of them. But the question is, how do I get more Google reviews?

The simplest way to get more Google reviews is to bribe people (but Google frowns on that of course). One of the things that I’ve heard people do is they say, “Hey, if you give me a Google review right now, I’m going to give you $25 off your bill.” Okay, that’s not bad. But if you reach into your pocket and you pull out a $10 Amazon gift card and say, “Hey, if you write me a Google review right now, I’ll give you this $10 gift card.” Which one of those two things do you think is going to motivate somebody more?” What’s more valuable and motivating… 25 bucks off of my bill or $10 on a gift card? The thing that motivates people more is the gift card. It has a tangible value and they can use it to go buy toys on Amazon for themselves. $25 off your services sounds like you raised your prices and then discounted them back. So that’s one of the keys in the relationship business. How do you create a higher perceived value without spending a ton more money or a ton more time?

Is LinkedIn The New Business Tinder?

One of my favorite places to engage in relationship marketing, especially since I’m in the B2B space, is on LinkedIn. If you’re in the consumer space, maybe Facebook or Instagram is your thing.

I consider LinkedIn to be the Tinder of networking. Okay, wait, what’s Tinder? It’s a place where you swipe to look for a date, right? That can be a good thing, could be a bad thing, could be a creepy thing. Depends on how you look at it. But the reason I say it’s Tinder is because people tend to put up a higher perceived look of themselves. They try to make themselves look as good as they possibly can.

So when you’re trying to make connections on LinkedIn, wouldn’t it behoove you to make yourself look as good as possible without, of course, lying, because that would come back to bite you just like it would in Tinder? You don’t say that you’re 5’6″, 180 pounds when you’re really 5’2″ and 250, right?

So it’s the same thing with LinkedIn. You have to create a profile that makes people stop when they’re swiping and looking at things and when they’re researching you throughout the process. It has to have a good picture. It has to have a good headline. It has to have good information that acts like that $10 card that has value. Keep that in the back of your mind as we go through the next few steps.

Now I want to cover the five to-do’s when it comes to relationship marketing:

1. Network
2. Connect
3. Research
4. Maintain
5. Get personal

Networking

Let’s start with network. You’ve got to get out there. Now, granted, you may not be able to be everywhere. Maybe your clients are in LA and you’re in New York. Maybe that’s just the way it is. But you have to treat social media as if you were in a face-to-face environment. What you want to do is listen. You want to see what people are saying. You want to be an ear to people first. You don’t want to be out there just selling yourself. Think about Tinder; somebody swipes and all of a sudden sends you this message, “I love you. I want to get married.”

Connecting

 

Well, that’s the way a lot of people treat LinkedIn. They make a connection, and the first thing they do is go on and say, “Hey, I sell this. Do you want to buy it?” No. I had a guy do that the other day with virtual assistants who had a virtual assistant agency, “Hi. What’s your feeling on virtual assistants?” “I love them. I have five of them and I also work with a lot of big companies that actually do that work.” “Oh, okay.” He didn’t take any time to get to know me. He didn’t listen. He didn’t really do anything other than try to make a connection. It’s not the way it works. Now, when I’m out networking, I use Evernote. I could take a picture of somebody’s business card and then immediately after I do that it does OCR. It actually fills in their name and their email and all that stuff and it will send them an email and all the email says is, “Hi, nice to meet you. Here’s my contact info.”

80% of the people that get that email actually respond. Another feature included within the paid version of Evernote, a lot of times, is a link to connect on LinkedIn. So I’d click it and see if we can make a connection there. So that’s number two, make a connection. Connect with people on LinkedIn. Be personable and reach out to say, “Hi, nice to meet you.” That’s it. Don’t go in there selling. Go in there just to start the relationship.

Research

Now, the next thing that you can do is research somebody. Go look and find out what are they doing on LinkedIn. Take a look at their posts. Take a look at their friends. Take a look at everything. If they look like they might be a good connection for you, a potential client, check out everything you possibly can, even other social media. Look at their Facebook, look at their Twitter. Just do a little research.

Don’t go creepazoid on it. Don’t friend them everywhere, but just kind of see what’s going on.

Maintenance

 

The next thing that you have to do is maintain that relationship, and the easiest way to maintain it is stay top of mind. I use social media posts to keep myself in their awareness circle so they’ll see things that I post. Maybe they’ll comment on it. Maybe they’ll like it. We’ll see what happens. One of the tools I use is Nimble, and I’ve got a great guest coming up talking about using CRMs and Nimble and how to use that to maintain relationships. But the bottom line is to do your research, and find out more about them before you take it to the next level.

Getting Personal

The last piece of this is to get personal. After you’ve had a chance to do a little research, get to know them, maybe even send them a couple of emails and find out what’s happening or send them a message in LinkedIn or wherever, maybe you want to set up a phone call or a face-to-face meeting. If you just go in right off the bat and do that, it’s definitely a sales pitch. If you do it at a later time and say, “Hey, I’d like to get on the phone for 15 minutes.” They already know you. They may even like you. They may not trust you, but at least you’ve got those first two steps. Part of the relationship building is doing all the courting things that I was talking about before, like in dating. Then you go in and try to get the phone call or get the personal meeting. That’s where the magic happens.

Final Thoughts

Let me leave you with three final thoughts. Number one, we’re all in the relationship business, so realize that relationships take time. You don’t meet somebody in a bar, tap them on the shoulder and say, “Hey, let’s get married,” right? Number two, it’s an investment. It’s an investment of your time. It’s an investment of their time. Make sure that investment has value, and if it does have value, then act on the opportunity. But make sure there’s an ROI for both you and them.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas or questions about showing the concepts presented. Have you had to overcome any of the presented concepts? What worked and what did not live up to expectations? Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?

To learn more about this and other topics on Internet Marketing, visit our podcast website at http://www.baconpodcast.com/podcasts/

Although Amazon dominates the market share of cloud services, there’s been a trend among retailers to choose AWS alternatives. Big-name retailers, in verticals from clothing to electronics, are moving away from maintaining their own data centers in favor of the public cloud’s agility and better access to customers worldwide. To highlight a few:

Gap

Gap Inc. signed a five-year contract with Microsoft, choosing Azure as their primary cloud provider. Employees will also be using Microsoft 365 tools and the Enterprise Mobility and Security suite. They chose Azure to support their e-commerce operations, inventory, and workforce systems.

Gap chose Azure among AWS alternatives because they wanted “a partner that is not going to be a competitor […] in any other parts of their businesses,” as told by Shelley Bransten, corporate VP for global retail and consumer goods at Microsoft.

Walmart

Walmart teamed up with Microsoft on a five-year contract back in July. The partnership, promising to “further accelerate digital innovation in retail,” was a natural fit since Microsoft was already partnered with Walmart, handling significant workloads, apps, and teaming up their engineers.

Furthermore, in a move directly targeting Amazon, Walmart has asked their tech vendors to choose AWS alternatives. Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Toporek told CNBC: “Our vendors have the choice of using any cloud provider that meets their needs and their customers’ needs. It shouldn’t be a big surprise that there are cases in which we’d prefer our most sensitive data isn’t sitting on a competitor’s platform.”

Kroger

Supermarket and retail giant Kroger took a multi-cloud approach, first with Pivotal and Microsoft, and later adding on Google Cloud in 2017. In a CNBC interview, Chris Hjelm, Kroger’s chief information officer, explains why the retailer spends millions of dollars on Microsoft and Google in order to avoid AWS: “For obvious reasons competitively, it doesn’t make sense for us to do a ton to help grow that business for them.”

Target

Target, another retail competitor of Amazon, decided to stop financing its rival in mid-2017 and began dropping down their use of AWS. Microsoft, Google, and Oracle all pushed for their business as discussions were kept quiet, with a Target spokesperson only admitting that they use multiple clouds. Earlier this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed Target as a big cloud customer.

And the list goes on…

In addition to the rest, Spotify, eBay, Best Buy, and LL.Bean all turned to Google to meet their cloud needs. One by one, big retailers with recognized names are choosing Microsoft and Google in favor of Amazon.

Why Retailers Choose AWS Alternatives

Cloud migration requires a massive haul of data, costs, and time from a business. Not only is there a lot to consider in terms of pricing, services, and overall offerings, but there are also certain needs unique to a specific industry. Big retailers turning away from AWS and onto other cloud providers highlights an issue for Amazon as a competitor in the retail industry, providing opportunities for other providers like Microsoft and Google to secure enterprise deals.

Meanwhile, not everyone has chosen AWS alternatives. Amazon still holds the market lead and continues to retain a footprint in the retail industry with customers including Nordstrom, Nike, Under Armour, and Lululemon. So while sources suggest that more retailers are looking for other options outside of AWS, time will tell if Amazon can hold its spot among retailers.

Look, I don’t know the full backstory behind your SAAS firm or its marketing.

I don’t know how long it took you to get from beta to full launch. No idea what your three-year product roadmap looks like. Don’t know what your product’s benefits are.

But I do know this: your SAAS company’s marketing isn’t working.

At least, it’s not working as well as it could be.

Because your marketing is narcissistic.

Reality and a Little Bit of Context

Okay, here’s the reality. I know your marketing isn’t working because a) every company is a little narcissistic, and b) you’re reading this article, so, at the very least, your marketing probably isn’t perfect.

Concerning your SAAS company’s narcissism: it’s an unavoidable consequence of being an organization made up of limited human beings. We have physical needs. We’re trained from birth to pursue them. We’re dependent on fulfilling them to survive. So it’s no surprise that we tend to be a little bit self-focused. And it’s no surprise that the companies we create (and their marketing strategies) reflect that reality.

Concerning the fact that your marketing isn’t perfect: nothing is (except maybe the final season of Breaking Bad). Just like any SAAS offering, no marketing strategy has ever reached an end stage of perfection. There are always tweaks to be made, always tensions to be managed, always metrics to crunch and improve upon.

So, your marketing isn’t working the way you want it to. Welcome to the club – we’re glad to have you. If you’re marketing for SASS companies, you’ll need to come to terms with the fact that absolute perfection isn’t possible. But striving after it is the best way forward.

To that end, here are the biggest changes to make to your SAAS marketing. They all involve messaging.

Focus more on the customer.

Pull up your website, take a hard look at the vernacular you’re using, and make sure your company isn’t an obvious narcissist. What’s the tagline on your homepage say? Is it, “We’ve been proudly providing information security software since 2000″? Are the menu items things like “Our Service”, “Our Features”, and “Our Pricing?”

That’s got to change. When businesses talk exclusively about themselves, people tune out. It’s far better to phrase things in terms that relate to the customer: “Software to help you do x”, for example. Second person pronouns (you / your / you’re) are way more engaging.

Have you avoided self-referential language? Good – most SAAS companies have, which is a plus. The software world has been on the user-centric bandwagon for a while, so you should have a nice head start on your messaging, especially compared to other tech industries. But if you’ve avoided obvious narcissism, there are plenty of subtler points of self-focus that will ultimately shape your success.

Focus on the right benefits.

This is really the crux of all your marketing: finding out what benefits your users actually care about, and then making them known.

If you’ve taken Marketing 101 (or absorbed the equivalent through a combination of Gary V posts and multiple seasons of Mad Men), you know the importance of communicating benefits instead of features. A quick recap: features are what your software does. Benefits are why your software’s valuable. Users care much more about the latter.

But that’s only Level One.

The true difficulty isn’t in marketing benefits; it’s in marketing the right benefits.

Let’s say you sell easy-install anti-virus software for businesses, for example. What value does your software bring?

• It’s easy to setup and manage.
• Because it’s easy to set up and manage, it’s better at protecting devices from viruses.
• Because it protects devices from viruses, businesses will be more productive and avoid downtime.
• Because businesses avoid downtime, they’ll make more money.
• Because businesses make more money, business stakeholders will be able to have nicer lifestyles with cooler things.
• Because business stakeholders will be able to have nicer lifestyles with cooler things, people will think more of them.

Should you focus on the benefit of an easy setup? Or should you trumpet the benefit of public opinion? The reality is that there is no “absolute” benefit; every benefit, at least partly, is only a function in support of another benefit somewhere down the line.

If you’re thinking, “Come on, that’s going a little too far,” – well, yeah, you’re probably right. But far-out benefits are exactly what luxury brands have tapped into. People buy a Rolex to look impressive, not to keep time. For some brands, the benefit customers care about is five steps removed from a product’s function.

The key is in identifying the benefit that users will care most about, and then showcasing it in messaging. Admittedly, for SAAS offerings, the core benefit tends to be closely tied to the software’s functionality.

But here’s the trick: the only way to identify the most impactful benefit is to test messaging against data.

Most SAAS companies think they know what benefit their users care most about (“Oh, people definitely buy our antivirus software because it’s easy to set up”). If that’s you, you might be right. But without data (surveys, A/B tests, etc.), there’s no way to be sure. Don’t assume the benefit you value most is what your users value most. Design your messaging (and your software) toward data-backed benefits, not toward personal preference.

Avoid speaking in jargon.

A lot of the time, SAAS businesses are built on jargon. Sometimes, it catches on. At New North, we’ll “Zoom” each other for meetings, or check our “R2R” in our task management software. When we communicate internally, that all makes sense. But for people who don’t use our software, it’s Greek.

Here’s the thing: most people probably don’t use your software. Coming up with nifty nomenclature for your product’s features is fine (and a little cool). But when you’re communicating with potential customers or users, don’t assume they know what you’re talking about. Actually, assume they don’t.

The reality is that jargon is like an inside joke that nobody gets. It doesn’t make any sense and it kind of makes people feel bad. Not a great recipe for new business.

Avoid it, and be as clear as you can.

Good News: You Can Do This.

No, SAAS marketing perfection isn’t possible. Yes, you’ll always be tweaking your messaging. Quick-fix perfection doesn’t exist, but the more you focus on putting your customer at the center of your marketing, the better off you’ll be.

You can do better marketing, and focusing on your customer is the key. Channels will change and tactics will come and go, but customer-centric messaging will win on any platform, always. It’s the key to SAAS marketing.

Want help? Objectively stepping into your customer’s shoes can be hard, especially when you’re trying to read the label from inside the bottle of your software and industry. We’re here for you. We’ve worked with SAAS companies like yours to put customers at the center of messaging, to remove jargon, and to identify the right benefits of your software offering to focus on – the ones that customers care about as backed by data.

After all, a big part of better messaging is getting an outside, objective perspective on how to center the customer as the hero in your story.

Mass production has become hybridized with customization to allow for the production of unique goods at scale.

To traditional sellers, consultative selling can feel intimidating. Instead of maintaining power in the selling process, the seller must yield it to the buyer. It’s certainly not easy to do, but consultative selling can pay off because it provides the personalized experience that modern buyers have grown to expect today. It requires selflessness and time, but implementing consultative selling techniques can help grow an organization’s sales team, increase customer loyalty, and solve each customer’s biggest needs.

What Is Consultative Selling?

Consultative selling offers each customer a unique solution. Instead of requiring sellers to identify pain points and offer solutions, it empowers buyers to realize how the product meets their needs. Sellers used to drive the buyer to the sale, but consultative selling puts the buyer behind the wheel.

For this to succeed, sellers need curiosity. They must perfect the art of asking good questions that leave room for in-depth responses. It’s definitely not the easiest path for a sales team. It requires sellers to put their skills of persuasion and convincing on hold and replace them with a posture of empathy and helpfulness. While sellers used to focus on pulling prospects to the product, they now must provide the necessary information to empower prospects to lead themselves to the buying decision.

While this may seem daunting, it is certainly worth it. Buyers have said that the three most important elements of a sales experience are having a rep who listens to their needs, isn’t pushy, and provides relevant information. Implementing these consultative selling techniques will ensure that every sales experience meets these needs.

If your organization is looking to implement a more consultative approach to selling, here are a few best practices you can get started on today.

1. Ask Good Questions

Bad questions lead to simple answers that reveal nothing, but good questions pull out information and lead people to discover things for themselves. Developing the ability to ask good questions is crucial for consultative selling and can lead to a better bottom line.

You may be thinking that this sounds too simple, but this skill often gets overlooked in sales organizations. While sales teams may have fallen behind, groups ranging from improv comedians to Greek philosophers have been perfecting the art of asking good questions for years. In doing so, they have developed ways for the recipient of the question to think for themselves and respond accordingly.

With consultative selling, sales leaders can apply this same methodology to potential customers. By asking good questions, sellers simultaneously gain insight into the buyer and build their trust. Good questions also make prospects think, allowing them to discover and understand things about their situation they may not have thought about before. This can help them make a more educated buying decision.

Good questions should be open and give customers a chance to talk. They lead to discovery. Avoiding questions with yes or no answers will build rapport with customers as well as give you the information you need. Good questions to start with can include

• What are the biggest goals for your organization this year?
• How would your organization change if you could accomplish those goals?
• What kind of obstacles currently stand in your way?
• What do you look for when making a decision about buying a new service or product?

To develop these skills, sales training can incorporate playing “The Question Game,” where everyone converses with one another using only questions. Sales enablement teams can also help their sellers by providing them with resources that encourage them to use these kinds of questions.

2. Know Each Specific Buyer

Although every sales technique requires you to know who you are selling to, consultative selling dives even deeper into the customer’s mind. Sales enablement can make this easier by providing sellers with regularly updated buyer personas and sales content that fit each buyers unique needs. Getting into the world of every potential buyer allows sellers to treat each prospect as a unique individual rather than a metric, demographic, or market.

Before engaging with prospects, sellers should gather detailed information to better understand their specific needs and see how to best meet them. Sellers cannot rely on a formulaic, one-size-fits-all approach to prospects. Each buyer is unique and needs to be treated uniquely. What works for a large company’s account may not work for a small business leader. Sellers need to enter each sales meeting knowing exactly who they will be talking to. Knowing this can also help them prepare the right questions for each meeting.

3. Spice Up the Sales Process

Consultative selling requires sellers to get away from the sales script. While organizations need consistency, relying too heavily on scripted sales processes can lead to less memorable customer experiences, and in a time when 53% of customer loyalty is measured by the sales experience, organizations need to make sure that every experience sticks with every customer.

To create memorable experiences, organizations can spice up their sales processes with some variety. Sellers who treat each process as a unique customer experience understand the one thing that every buyer does have in common: a problem that needs solving. By adding variety and spice into the sales process, sellers show that they see each prospect as a unique person with a unique problem. This treatment creates a positive experience for customers and leaves room for them to see for themselves how the seller can solve their problems.

4. Bring on the Qualifiers

Buyers want to know that they are being heard, and sellers can prove that they are attentive listeners by weaving qualifying phrases into their conversations. These small phrases go a long way in making someone feel valued and understood.

Sellers can lead into a solution by referencing a specific point the buyer said earlier. These show that the seller is listening to the prospect and can help bring clarity and focus to the whole conversation. Some examples of qualifying phrases may include

• “You mentioned that your company…”
• “Earlier you said…”
• “I remember you bringing up…”
• “I’m asking this next question because…”

To develop this, sales leaders can take recorded sales calls and listen for consultative qualifiers, focusing specifically on how sellers ask about the prospect’s specific situation. Do they listen more than they speak? What specific words and questions do they use? How responsive are prospects to them? These are all good questions that can help sales leaders evaluate how well sellers are incorporating these practices.

Practice Makes Perfect

The craftiness of consultative selling comes from the seller’s ability to weave these practices into their sales pitch without forcing it. It takes practice, but buyers don’t want to feel interrogated. Each seller has to strategically place questions in the right places of the conversation, hearing the buyer and listening to their needs. Hardest of all, they have to hold back from immediately diving into sales mode. Listen first. Allow the buyer to recognize their need and give them space to make the buying decision themselves.

While consultative selling can take time to develop, incorporating this as an available technique into any organization’s sales process will help solve each unique problem in a unique way.

Every time I see articles that focus on designing for new apps (like Gutenberg, WordPress’ next-gen editor), the latest design trends (like flat design), or visuals that are supposedly “outside the box” (meaning non-standardized) I have to roll my eyes just a little bit.

I’m not saying these things don’t matter because they still do, but that they should they take a back seat to a few other things. You know, the ones that make you money.

Before anything has been drawn or written for your website, you should know what the site’s purpose will be. In other words, you should be able to describe who the website is for, and what you want those visitors to do after they’ve arrived.

This is an area where a lot of web designers will make assumptions, but that’s not a great way to build what should be the cornerstone of your sales, marketing, PR, and recruiting campaigns. Instead of thinking you know what buyers want, or what you have to give them, it’s much better to map things out in advance.

One of the tools we leverage to accomplish this is the marketing persona (or avatar, or ideal client… pick whichever jargon you prefer). Before anything else, we take the time to brainstorm and research the influencers and decision-makers our clients need to appeal to.

The more we know about them the easier it is to put ourselves in their shoes and get into their heads. That, in turn, makes it easier for us to develop the compelling content and sales funnels that are so crucial to online lead generation.

Until you know who your customers are, what they want, and where you can find them, any website you build is just a piece of art, not a functional part of your business.

#2 UX-friendly Website Design

The way you put a website together – and how the finished product looks – is important. However, smart website design is more than choosing the right layouts, fonts, and colour schemes. It’s also about aligning your marketing goals with the buyer personas.

That means thinking about user interaction and traffic flows so they steer visitors towards igniting positive conversions or purchases. It means choosing the right content management system and creating pages that are stable and fully compatible with mobile devices. And, it means generating content that fits with all of these considerations and demonstrates the ways in which you differ from your competitors.

Those are thoughts that aren’t necessarily mentioned in articles about web design trends, but they are fundamentals that can be overlooked. It doesn’t matter how flashy your website is if it wasn’t created with performance and growth in mind.

Form and function go together. Your website has to be visually appealing, but it also needs to be structured in a way that’s consistent with what you are actually trying to accomplish.

#3 Activation and Engagement

Even in 2018, a lot of business owners and executives assume that a good website will generate its own traffic and interest. Unfortunately, that just isn’t the case. It takes a lot of work to interest your prospects and get them to take action.

Activation is commonly thought of as pertaining directly to social media and related content-driven activity. Certainly, you do want to be a thought leader on your blog and a regular source of insights through your social media accounts. These will help you to stay involved in conversations with your customers or clients, and to drive search engine traffic to your website.

However, when it’s done correctly, activation is so much more. It can involve participating in or hosting events, getting mentioned or featured in the media (online or off), and looking for more ways to bring people into the picture and start conversations.

Your activation strategy might include meetups and face-to-face networking that is just as important as a content or ad strategy. Each of these activities matters because they reinforce each other, and because the benefits of thinking outside the blog-and-promote formula can be immediate.

It goes without saying that you should make the most of content and social engagement when you launch a new website, but you don’t necessarily have to stop there. Inexperienced marketers will do nothing to promote their site, and their better or more ambitious counterparts will keep creating content and starting discussions. Only the best, though, blend the strategies while experimenting with other ways to keep meeting new prospects and sparking their curiosity.

Is Your Website Working On All Three Levels?

For many years it was enough to have a website that looked like it was professionally designed. Now, searchers and customers are getting smarter and more discriminating. They want to find companies that understand their needs, and demand more in terms of information and engagement.

If your website isn’t delivering that kind of value it’s going to affect your ability to form relationships and generate leads. When you are ready, reach out to see how we can help you reshape your web strategy into something that delivers stronger results.

A few days ago, I was watching a 2005 episode of Doctor Who with my nine-year-old. He saw a strange artifact in a character’s hand. “What’s that thing?” he asked. “An iPod,” I responded. “It’s like a smartphone, but it could only play music and had a black-and-white screen. No, no touchscreen. It held a LOT of music, though! Like hundreds of CDs! Okay, so a CD is…” The point being: You kids need to get off my lawn. Okay, the actual point being: Technology has changed fast in the past decade, and what used to be mind-blowing is now laughably obsolete. That’s doubly true in B2B marketing. We have the tools and tech to do amazing, iPhone-XS-Max-quality B2B lead generation. But a lot of us are getting iPod results instead. Ready to evolve past the monochrome screen and the click wheel? Here’s how.

How to Refine Your Marketing for Better B2B Lead Generation

#1: Get a Better Audience Match

The ability to target ads is more granular and sophisticated than ever. You can segment your audience on everything from demographics to pop culture preferences to shopping history. It’s easy to choose who you’re going to target — but first you have to know who is most valuable and why. That knowledge is at the heart of better content, smarter amplification, and ultimately more leads. If your lead gen efforts aren’t connecting, start by getting a more accurate picture of your buying audience. Use social listening. Ask them questions. Talk to sales and customer service to refine your personas. Keep in mind, too, that determining who is your best audience means determining who isn’t. Pursuing an irrelevant audience won’t do either of you any good.

#2: Boost Content Relevance

The next step is to bring your content strategy in line with your newly-redefined audience’s wants and needs. Creating best-answer content begins with SEO research. You have to know what your audience is looking for, and how they’re looking for it, to make something worth finding. Modern SEO research is less about pure search volume and more about topic clusters and searcher intent. For example, the phrase “financial management” can mean financial services like hedge fund management. Or it could mean the office of finance in a business, what accountants and CFOs do. If your business does the latter, it doesn’t help to pursue keywords for the former, regardless of search volume. As you plan your calendar, pay close attention to the magic convergence of your industry knowledge, your unique insights, and your audience’s needs. Be hyper-relevant and hyper-valuable with your content, and you’re far more likely to bring more leads into your nurturing track. [bctt tweet="Be hyper-relevant and hyper-valuable with your #content, and you’re far more likely to bring more leads into your nurturing track. @NiteWrites #B2BLeadGen" username="toprank"]

#3: Earn Attention with Next-Gen Content

How can you get people to notice and engage with your hyper-relevant content? B2B marketers need to think beyond standard eBooks, blogs and white papers. What I call next-generation content includes:

• Interactivity
• Strong visual interest
• Multimedia elements

Case in point: This AI in Finance asset from our client, Prophix. You could get the same information across in a static eBook, of course. But we have found the interactive and multimedia elements have made people spend far more time with the asset. And they’ve been beating benchmarks for conversions, too. In fact, within the first 90 days after launch, we saw a 642% increase in asset engagement and a 10% conversion rate to the asset. Read: Interactive Content Marketing: Why B2B Marketers Should Take Their Content from Boring to Bold

#4: Get in Front of Your Audience

All of the above will get you some stellar content. But, of course, smart promotion and amplification is what turns it into actual marketing. Target your most relevant audience with amplification and you’ll be more likely to get the folks who will convert into leads. Part of amplification is organic — your social media feeds, your built-in SEO. Add in paid amplification to those highly targeted audience segments and you’ll make more of a splash. Our agency adds a third ingredient to the mix: Influencer marketing. We co-create content with influencers to make something they’re proud to help us share. That brings value to their audience, and builds credibility and trust that can help improve lead capture. As our CEO Lee Odden often says:

If you want your content to be great, ask influencers to participate.

Read: What B2B CMOs Need to Know About Successful Influencer Marketing

#5: Fill in Gaps in the Journey

Each piece of content should be the beginning of a journey that ends in a conversion. It’s important to have content at the ready for every stage of the funnel. Each piece should end with a next step that’s not only logical, but relevant. For example, there’s no value in sending an email subscriber links to content they’ve already read, or a gated asset they’ve already downloaded. The old days of a single newsletter for your entire mailing list are gone. It’s important to segment your subscriber list, and to build more complex nurturing tracks that feel more personal. [bctt tweet="Each piece of #content should be the beginning of a journey that ends in a conversion. @NiteWrites #B2BLeadGen" username="toprank"]

#6: Optimize for Conversion

When you have people digging your excellent content, taking next steps, staying engaged, the final step is to remove every potential obstacle to conversion. Reduce friction whenever and wherever you can:

• Reduce the number of boxes on forms
• Eliminate multiple form fills (if they download one gated asset, store the info for the next one)
• Cut down copy on landing pages (replace with eye-catching visuals)
• Tighten up your CTAs and be specific: (Read this / Watch this / Register now)
• Add CTAs earlier in content

These are just a few ways to remove friction. A/B testing will yield further candidates for Conversion rate optimization. But it’s important to keep in mind that the actual conversion point is part of a much longer journey. You can make improvements here, and should. But the process of improving lead gen starts all the way back at defining your audience and continues throughout the journey. Read: How Can Marketers Create Stronger Customer Bonds? Focus on Convenience, According to Shep Hyken

Leads: The Next Generation

Lead generation isn’t really a separate discipline from the rest of what we do. It’s simply the culmination of all our marketing efforts. When you upgrade each component of the process, each improvement builds on the last. Level up your buyer audience identification, content creation, amplification, and optimize for conversion. Soon, you’ll marvel at how iPod-like your old tactics look compared to your new results. Looking for more insight on lead generation and lead nurturing? Check out these other helpful blog posts:

• Is Content Marketing a Viable Lead Generation Tactic?
• 10 Easy Wins to Improve Your B2B Marketing Leads
• 6 Best Practices for Nurturing B2B Marketing Qualified Leads

The post Next-Gen Lead Gen: How to Refine Your Marketing to Get More B2B Leads appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Social media may be a hot topic in B2B marketing circles, but most of that buzz focuses on the role of social media advertising. Just listen to marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk, perhaps the biggest champion for advertising on Facebook and other channels, who says that social media advertising is “grossly underpriced” and that companies have a window of opportunity to take advantage before big brands drive up the cost.

All of which begs the question: what about organic? After all, as earned media, the “cost” of organic social is basically zero. And yet, at most B2B companies, social media is still relegated to a role loosely defined as awareness, community-building, or even PR. Precious few B2B marketers can show true ROI from organic social activity, and even less are using organic social media in a systematic way to either generate social leads or drive those leads through the demand generation funnel.

Are B2B marketers ignoring a huge opportunity? I spoke to Daniel Kushner, CEO of B2B social media management platform company Oktopost, for his perspective.

(HS) Social media advertising has taken off lately. Why aren’t more B2B companies making the same investment in organic social media?

(DK) One factor is the new Facebook algorithm, which prioritizes friends’ content over that of companies, so organic reach on the largest social network has gone down dramatically. Coupled with the fact that it’s harder and harder to get audiences’ attention online, companies have come to believe that social media is a strictly pay-to-play arena, understandably so.

However, that’s not necessarily true. In fact, one of our customers, a large global consultancy, recently compared the ROI of social ads with that of social advocacy. They discovered that while ads garnered a nearly 4% conversion rate, which is pretty high, advocacy garnered an almost 52% conversion rate, which is 12.5 times higher.

So yes, paid social media can be an effective demand gen channel. However, given the right strategy, organic social can actually yield better results.

(HS) How does Oktopost help companies capture engagement and ROI from organic social?

(DK) Oktopost is a B2B social media management platform that enables marketers to build, measure and execute a social media strategy that caters to the specific needs of B2B marketers. Using Oktopost, B2B companies can manage and schedule large volumes of content, engage in conversations with their audience and track metrics such as CTR and conversions, as well as likes, shares, comments, etc.

Our advanced analytics suite even goes into granular detail, such as the network, post and exact message which generated the clicks and conversions. Beyond the ability to optimize social media strategy, this allows marketers to confidently demonstrate the value of any given social activity on the company’s bottom line.

In addition, the platform integrates with leading marketing automation platforms, such as Eloqua, HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot. By using this integration, our customers can use social engagement data to build highly targeted lead scoring, segmenting, nurturing and attribution programs.

(HS) What’s the potential payoff from integrating social media into the demand gen mix?

(DK) Social media is a critical component of the B2B buyer journey. Studies show that 55% of B2B buyers conduct their research on social networks, and that social media represents 84% of the influence on purchasing decisions among C-level and VP-level executives.

The conclusion we should draw here is that social media has a critical part to play in buyer engagement, and that therefore there’s a huge opportunity to use social media to both identify potential buyers and to advance them through the demand generation funnel. Social media is no longer only a brand awareness channel.

(HS) Where does advocacy marketing play a role here? How can companies make, for example, employee advocacy a measurable contributor to demand generation?

(DK) Employee advocacy allows brands to amplify their social reach beyond their corporate profile to their employees’ networks. Advocacy also builds relationships and enhances trust with buyers – a recent Nielsen study showed that 83% of consumers trust recommendations from their peers over brands.

This benefit is particularly significant when it comes to social selling. According to IBM, when a lead is generated through social selling or advocacy, that lead is 7X more likely to close compared to other lead gen tactics.

(HS) How do you recommend that B2B companies process, respond to and nurture social leads?

(DK) B2B marketers can capitalize on social engagement data to better understand a potential buyer’s needs, interests, and intent. These insights can then allow those marketers to create more personalized, targeted and (therefore) effective lead nurturing programs.

For example, likes, shares, and clicks are all indications of a buyer’s content preference. If you construct different nurturing streams based on interests, capturing social engagement data will enable you to nurture leads with content tailored specifically to buyer preferences, which increases overall engagement.

Another way to leverage social media is through lead scoring. If a buyer is shown to be engaging (clicking, liking, sharing) mid-funnel (MOFU) content such as case studies or product tutorials, for example, those actions can contribute to an overall lead score that determines sales-readiness.

By incorporating social engagement data into their overall lead nurture strategy, a B2B marketer will have a more precise picture of a specific buyer, and be able to deliver more relevant content to advance that buyer along the sales cycle.

(HS) Thanks Daniel!

It Is A Universal Truth – Salespeople Want More Leads! Supercharge your sales with the game-changing tool that allows you to uncover 1000’s of local business leads in any industry and city in seconds. In every annual reader survey I have published for the last 7 years, the #1 thing that salespeople want and need is […]

The post It Is A Universal Truth – Sales People Want More Leads appeared first on Fill the Funnel.