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• Arbor Ventures managing partner Melissa Guzy says there's a big benefit to being a tech investor based in Asia.
• Being in Singapore and frequently traveling around Asia has given her insights into business trends there and the challenges companies face there, she said.
• Her experience living, working, and investing in Asia helped inform her firm's recent investment in InCountry, a startup that helps companies store data in the countries in which they operate.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Silicon Valley remains ground zero for the venture capital industry, but Melissa Guzy thinks there's a big advantage to being based in Singapore instead.

Living in Asia and traveling extensively in the region has given Guzy, a cofounder and managing partner at Arbor Ventures, a different perspective than she'd have if she were based in Silicon Valley, she told Business Insider in a recent interview. It's given her an up-close perspective on what's going on in Asia and the challenges faced by companies operating there.

"If we were sitting in California, we're just another firm," Guzy said. "When you live globally and you see how different markets are evolving or you see different challenges," she continued, "it really does impact our investment strategy quite a bit."

Guzy's knows from experience. She was a managing director for a Silicon Valley venture firm — VantagePoint Capital — for nearly 12 years before starting Arbor in 2012.

In Silicon Valley "you have less awareness of what the global challenges are"

Last month, Arbor led a $15 million Series A funding round in InCountry, a startup that helps companies store date in the countries in which they operate. A growing number of countries have put in place laws that require data about their residents to be stored within their physical borders or put restrictions on how such information can be used. Companies of all sizes — from giants like Visa or Lufthansa to small startups — are starting to having to contend with such regulations, she said.

Thanks to its position in Asia, Arbor saw this trend emerging and developed an investment thesis around it about a year ago, Guzy said. Because of that, investing in InCountry was "an easy decision for us," she said.

"You don't have to explain to us the problem," Guzy said. "So it's just a question of how good is the solution, because we see the problem. Our companies [that Arbor has invested in] experience the problem."

Read this: This tech CEO has sold 6 startups for a combined $500 million. These are his top tips for selling at the perfect time.

Another example of how Arbor's location has influenced particular investments is Forter, a startup that provides online fraud protection services. Credit card companies usually protect brick-and-mortar retailers when people use stolen cards to make purchases or other types of card fraud. But they don't generally offer the same protections to online retailers; instead, online stores generally have to eat such costs.

That's made many apprehensive about approving transactions that look unusual or sketchy for any reason. Forter and other companies like it, including Signifyd, review and approve transactions on behalf of online retailers and assume the liability for any card fraud.

That investment was informed by Guzy's own experiences living Asia. She'd attempt to purchase an item from a US-based online merchant, but would be denied, not because she couldn't pay or her credit card company rejected the charge, but because the online merchant thought it was too risky, because the order was coming from overseas.

When you're based in the US, as opposed to elsewhere, "you have less awareness of what the global challenges are," she said.

Why Hong Kong is fading, and Singapore is rising

Arbor, which has offices in Singapore, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo, focuses on financial technology companies, defined very broadly. It invests about 80% of its funds in early-stage companies — those raising seed and A rounds — and the other 20% in more mature companies raising later rounds of funding. It splits its events roughly evenly among companies based in the United States, those based in eastern Asia, and those based in Israel or the greater Middle East.

Until November, Guzy and Arbor's main office were based in Hong Kong. Over the last 10 years, Hong Kong has become less of an international business hub and more of just a special region of China that's focused on serving the needs of its parent country, she said. Singapore, by contrast, has started to become the kind of regional center — particularly for technology and venture capital — that Hong Kong once was, she said, noting that the city-state has convinced Google, Facebook, and Palantir to set up offices there in recent years.

"They've done a really, really good job of growing the community, and so we thought it was a necessity for us to be there," she said.

Got a tip about venture capital or startups? Contact this reporter via email at twolverton@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

• Read more about venture capital and startups:
• This VC helped jump-start the app economy by launching the iFund. Now he thinks an overlooked part of the enterprise-software market is about to explode.
• This founder's startup developed a super-efficient chip to help self-driving cars 'see' the world around them. Here's the pitch deck it used to raise $25 million to get the chip in production.
• This VC firm managing $500 million in assets tries to invest in as few companies as possible. And it only wants startups with management teams looking for help.
• One of the first backers of Skype and Wix.com explains why the European startup scene is starting to close the gap with Silicon Valley

SEE ALSO: Here’s the pitch deck that convinced investors to pour $6 million into a startup trying to take on Slack and Asana despite entering the market years late

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's why phone companies like Verizon and AT&T charge more for extra data

• Doctors in China have used 5G to perform remote surgery, inserting a stimulation device in the brain of a Parkinson's patient from nearly 1,900 miles away.
• 5G makes this possible by cutting latency to an almost instantaneous 2 milliseconds between devices, allowing surgeons to conduct procedures as if they were right next to the patient.
• The tech could give private healthcare providers an edge over rivals, and the ability to provide services to patients further afield as 5G coverage increases.
• Click here for more in the Putting 5G to Work series.

In January this year, cameras were on hand to film the jaw-dropping sight of the world's first 5G remote surgery on a lab animal.

Two months later, it was a human's turn , when a doctor in the Chinese city of Sanya inserted a stimulation device in the brain of a Parkinson's patient nearly 1,900 miles away in Beijing, according to state media.

At this point, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were watching a sci-fi film set sometime in the future, but this is actually present-day surgery, thanks to 5G technology.

Until now, remote surgery using wireless networks has been impossible, because the lag time between input and output lasts around a quarter of a second, sometimes as long as 2 seconds — a delay potentially harmful, possibly fatal, to a patient. Now, 5G promises to change all that, with its latency reduced to an almost instantaneous 2 milliseconds between devices.

Dr Michael Kranzfelder, a senior physician at Munich's Technical University, explains that this speed resembles surgery using traditional cables, when surgeons are able to work directly from monitors without delay, but with the added benefit of being able to operate at a much greater distance from the theatre.

Read more: How 5G will banish awkward video conference calls when you're out of the office, and cut your commute time

This will apply to both 'tele-presence,' where a surgeon can merely follow an operation on a video connection and offer expert support, and for 'tele-surgery,' where he or she actually operates the surgical device from far away.

The other equally valuable benefit of 5G, according to Kranzfelder, is the increased volume of data that can be processed at great speed during surgery.

"We'll be able to connect many more medical devices together and gain data from the patient, in a way that isn't possible at the moment. Different specialists, not necessarily in the same place, will all be able to work together for the first time," he says.

5G could give private healthcare providers an edge

Such technology has the potential to transform the wider surgical industry, with huge benefits for patients. It could also give private healthcare providers an edge over rivals, and the ability to provide services to patients further afield as 5G coverage increases.

"From medical training to providing emergency assistance, it will become much easier to help people in areas we have previously found difficult to access," he says. This means that among the major beneficiaries of 5G will be those in areas currently lacking in medical expertise.

In the longterm, it could also cut the cost of surgery, Kranzfelder says.

"While 5G may eventually bring down the price of surgery, in the initial stages, it may increase it because of the costs of technical investment," he explains. "So the main immediate benefit will be the quality of medical treatment that those who can access 5G will get to enjoy."

For the medical ethicists, there will also be the challenges of managing the huge volumes of medical data that will become so much more easily available. For aspiring surgeons, however, life will not change that much when it comes to training or gaining even more specialist skills.

"We are the generation that already encompasses robotic surgery, so using 5G will not be that much of a leap," reflects Kranzfelder.

SEE ALSO: Virtual shopping goes viral: Retailers will use 5G-powered augmented-reality to let you try before you buy

Join the conversation about this story »

• This is a preview of THE SOCIAL COMMERCE REPORT from Business Insider Intelligence.
• 14-Day Risk Free Trial: Get full access to this and all Payments & Commerce industry research reports.

Social media's immense popularity and influence have built a huge potential audience for shopping through social platforms. Global internet users spent an average of 142 minutes per day on social media in 2018, up from 90 minutes in 2012, according to a report from GlobalWebIndex cited by Digital Information World.

This has made social media a major influence on consumers' purchasing habits, with 36% of US internet users saying social networks have become as important as other information sources for making product choices, up from 27% in 2015, according to a survey from GfK cited by eMarketer.

As social media's influence grows, social commerce is becoming an increasingly important channel in online shopping. Consumers have used social media to learn about products and brands and find inspiration for over a decade; the term "social commerce" was introduced by Yahoo! in 2005. But in the past few years, platforms have been working to eliminate the friction of buying a product elsewhere after discovering it on social media by adding buy buttons and digital wallets, for instance, so users can make direct purchases.

In The Social Commerce Report, Business Insider Intelligence estimates the current size of the social commerce market, forecasts its future growth, and examines why its growth has been stagnant so far — as well as why that's set to change. We also look at the top social media platforms' social commerce offerings and analyze the future of each company in the space.

The companies mentioned in this report are: Amazon, BHADgoods, BigCommerce, Calibra, Depop, Facebook, Instagram, Kylie Cosmetics, L'Oréal, Pinterest, Poshmark, Nike, Samsung, SeatGeek,  Snap, Venmo, and Walmart.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

• Growth in social commerce adoption has ground to a halt in recent years due to concerns about the channel's safety and legitimacy.

• But adoption and usage are set to pick up thanks to social media's popularity, its influence, and social platforms' improved commerce capabilities.

• Top platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Snapchat have upgraded their commerce offerings in the hopes of becoming shopping hubs as social commerce takes off.

In full, the report:

• Forecasts the value of the US social commerce market over the next five years.
• Examines the obstacles and growth drivers for social commerce adoption and usage.
• Covers the commerce features being introduced by Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Snapchat and discusses their various strategies, strengths, and weaknesses.
• Looks at companies with different involvement in social commerce including marketplaces and payments platforms that use social tools and how they fit into the social commerce market.

Interested in getting the full report? Here are three ways to access it:

1. Purchase & download the full report from our research store. >> Purchase & Download Now
2. Subscribe to a Premium pass to Business Insider Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and more than 250 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. >> Learn More Now
3. Current subscribers can read the report here.

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By Sheena McKinney, Executive Assistant at Heinz Marketing

Have you ever looked at or typed a word and for a minute it just doesn’t seem like it could possibly be spelled right? Recently I was writing an email and could not for the life of me figure out why spell check didn’t like it.  I was incensed.  I checked and double checked and added and removed a letter and still…. that blasted, red squiggly underline.  Then I realized my error…. I had morphed two words (diligent and vigilant) into one word:  Viligent.

I do have an excuse.  I’ve had 17 weeks of chemo and “chemo brain” is real, the struggle is real.  Once I realized what I’d done I laughed out loud at myself. Then, out of curiosity (and being a fan of words in general), I looked up both of these adjectives and then thought about how this relates to marketing.

The difference between these words is that vigilance is alert watchfulness while diligence is conscientiousness or determination or perseverance when doing something.

I decided you could be both vigilant and diligent and that viligent should be a new word.

Check out the full definitions below.  Particularly interesting to me are the antonyms of each one.

Diligence: attentive and persistent effort

Synonyms:  assiduity, assiduousness, industriousness, industry, sedulity, sedulousness

Related Words:  application, attentiveness, attention, care, concentration, doggedness, perseverance, persistence, tenacity, tirelessness bother, effort, effortfulness, pains, painstaking, trouble

Near Antonyms:  carelessness, negligence, slackness, idleness, indolence, laziness

Vigilance: the state of being constantly attentive and responsive to signs of opportunity, activity, or danger

Synonyms:  alert, alertness, attentiveness, qui vive, red alert, watch, watchfulness

Related Words:  aliveness, awareness, consciousness, mindfulness, receptiveness, receptivity, sensitivity, care, carefulness, cautiousness, chariness, heedfulness, wariness, preparation, readiness

Near Antonyms:  absentmindedness, abstraction, daydreaming, daze, distraction, absorption, engrossment, obliviousness, preoccupation, unawareness, unconsciousness, carelessness, heedlessness, inattention, inattentiveness, inobservance, unwariness

We’ve heard of due diligence, what about due viligance?  As a marketer are you watchful and determined on behalf of your clients? Are you regularly keeping abreast of your clients’ industry, competitors, customer pain points and social conversations? Are you doing watchful research?

I like how Lumen Learning, in Marketing 101 describes why marketing information and research matters (emphasis added).

Because no one has all the answers all the time.

Because people and attitudes and behaviors change.

Because customers, competitors, the economy, and other factors can all affect your success.

Marketing is an increasingly data-rich field, and these days, doing it well means using all the information you can to gain insights into what your customers want and how you can give them value. Without that information, you’re trying to shoot a target in the dark.

Marketers should always be tapping into regular sources of marketing information about their organization and industry in order to monitor what’s happening generally. For example, at any given time marketers should understand how they are doing relative to sales goals and monitor developments in their industry or competitive set.

Knowledge Is Power Against the Competition

The business environment is increasingly competitive. With something as simple as a Google search, customers have unprecedented opportunities to explore alternatives to what any single company offers. Likewise, companies have ample opportunity to identify, track, and lure customers away from their less-vigilant competitors. A regular infusion of fresh customer insights can make all the difference between keeping customers and losing them. Marketing information and research are essential tools for marketers and the management team as they align strategy with customer wants and needs.

Recently our own Josh Baez, Engagement Manager here at Heinz Marketing joined president, Matt Heinz on Sales Pipeline Radio to talk about the things he’s learned along the way about creating research and the importance of commercial insights.

Check out the recording and/or read the transcript here.

“The cool thing about commercial insights and research is that really I think that anyone can do it. I don’t think that you necessarily need to have this team of analysts and data scientists and all of that just to essentially get research done.”

You heard him.  Anyone can do it.  Do your clients justice.  Don’t shoot in the dark. Take justice into your own hands by being viligant.

The post Could this be a new marketing term? appeared first on Heinz Marketing.

SaaS products may be the future of how we work, but that future will only happen if we can overcome significant obstacles along the way.

And the biggest obstacle is trust.

Consider:

• • • According to a recent 2018 report on Enterprise Cloud Trends, 61% of IT decision makers identified data privacy as the most significant concern for moving organizational operations to the cloud.
    • In a separate report, enterprise IT and security professionals found security to be the biggest barrier to SaaS adoption (State of the IT Enterprise Infrastructure & Security 2019).
    • All of this while the impact of GDPR is still being sorted out—and the CCPA going into effect is just months away.

This 2019 Cost of a Data Breach Report from IBM Security examined the cost of a data breach, looking specifically at factors that mitigated (decreased) or amplified (increased) cost. The top 3 amplifiers of expense were extensive cloud migration, compliance failures and a third-party breach.

All of this as each week brings with it another newsbreak regarding privacy missteps—or some new customer data breach. The New York Times even has an ongoing “Privacy Project” with weekly articles dedicated to these topics.

Everything suggests there’s a breakdown in trust: Consumers struggle to trust companies with their data. Companies struggle to trust the SaaS products they need.

Until the problem of trust is addressed, these struggles will continue. So how can you be upfront with your customers and build trust?

Build a Trust Pyramid

How do businesses address the problem of trust?

Well, how does trust work? When you try and explain how trust works (we have), you see just how complex it really is. This is because the concept of trust is tacit knowledge—one of those things we understand intuitively but have a hard time explaining.

Thankfully, though explaining what trust is can be very hard, evaluating how trust is earned is easier. Consider “The Trust Pyramid,” a framework developed by user experience research and consulting firm Nielsen/Norman Group (“NN/g”). The Trust Pyramid is a bit like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Like Maslow’s hierarchy where lower needs must be satisfied before higher needs, in order to build trust—and move up the Trust Pyramid—you must first satisfy lower levels of trust. Trust is built from the ground up.

Take a look:

As a consumer moves from the base of the pyramid to the top, more and more trust is granted.

We can illustrate how the Trust Pyramid works with an example.

Imagine you arrive at a new website (or app) you’ve never encountered before. According to NN/g’s Trust Pyramid, you’ll arrive with a clean slate—no trust in the site, whatsoever. What tells you the site is safe? Maybe it’s that Google lists it. Perhaps it loads rapidly. Or maybe it’s designed neatly and reacts as you’d expect when you interact with it.

As you ascend the Trust Pyramid, you go from baseline trust—which is to say, not very much—to light transactional trust. Take this common digital experience for example: Imagine you add an item to your cart, suggesting you are at least entertaining the idea of making a purchase. Then, based on signals during the checkout flow, you determine you can give the site more sensitive information like your credit card number, shipping address and phone number. As the step-by-step flow proceeds as you expect it to, you go on to complete the purchase. Once the goods are delivered to your satisfaction, perhaps you even reach the top of the pyramid—and go on to make future purchases.

As NN/g puts it, you now have a “willingness to commit to an ongoing relationship.”

A close look at the pyramid levels shows us that the most fundamental requirement is for the site (or app) to match user expectations at each level of trust. Begin by giving the user control of the experience. Then, through continuously offering value to the user, mirror user engagement by meeting their expectations every step along the way.

Here’s how NN/g puts it:

“The site’s requests and the users’ trust needs must be in equilibrium: Don’t make demands at higher levels of commitment until you’ve addressed all the trust needs at the inferior levels.”

Sites that want to ask more of their users must exercise caution, proceeding slowly. Asking for too much too soon—or asking for more than what’s absolutely necessary—can shake lower levels of trust. Also, remember that the experience of building trust with a brand isn’t something explicitly realized by the customer. Similar to how trust works in real life, people don’t notice the small steps they take as they increase their levels of trust.

NN/g’s Trust Pyramid is simple to understand for B2C companies—but when it comes to building a Trust Pyramid for SaaS, there’s a lot more to consider. Not only must a SaaS company build trust with never-before-seen audiences, they must earn the trust of all the new users after the deal is closed. SaaS products establish ongoing relationships with new dependencies.

With so much at stake, what does a Trust Pyramid for SaaS look like? In this article, we’ll walk you through each level of the Trust Pyramid for SaaS—all the way from the foundation to the top. We’ll start with those new to your brand and then end with a look at what building trust with new logged-in users looks like.

Building the Trust Pyramid for SaaS Products

What follows is an overview of how you can think about NN/g’s Trust Pyramid as it pertains to a SaaS product. We’ll cover everything from the foundation to what the pyramid looks like at each level.

Start With a Foundation for Trust

A Trust Pyramid must begin with a solid foundation for trust. As any builder knows, the foundation is critical because it is the footing on which the entire structure stands. If the foundation is not rock-solid, it will eventually fail.

And when it does, the entire Trust Pyramid could very well fall with it.

SaaS companies build a solid foundation for trust by first satisfying the demands of privacy, security and compliance.

There are no shortcuts here. Security must be engineered into every facet of the product. For compliance, regulations must be studied, understood and addressed. And as for privacy, consumer expectations must be kept in constant, proactive focus—lip-service about “taking privacy seriously” simply won’t cut it.

Addressing privacy, security and compliance are beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say that only once you are thoughtfully and aggressively addressing privacy, security and compliance should you focus on building the next levels of the Trust Pyramid.

Level One: Baseline Relevance and Trust That Needs Can Be Met

Pyramids are built atop a wide, sturdy base. The success of each level will affect the success of each higher level. That’s why each level must be built properly before the next level is attempted.

For SaaS companies, Level 1 concerns establishing that user needs can be met. This is done through satisfying expectations regarding dependability, speed and perceived security—while also presenting baseline relevance through empathy and clarity.

Dependability/Uptime

How do you trust a service if it’s not predictably, reliably available? Customers depend on SaaS products to get their job done. If software services go down, work grinds to a halt. This can be a trust-shattering event.

The other day Slack suddenly became slow and unreliable. We Slack users had to determine whether or not it was the service—or our Internet connection—that was the problem. Once we realized it was Slack that was down, we struggled to communicate. Our normal workflows had been compromised leading to frustration, wasted time, and needless distraction.

If you want customers to trust your service, it must be consistently, reliably available. Take measures to prevent catastrophic service outages. Stress-test your systems and plan out what to do when things go wrong. And secure a third-party status page (like statuspage.io) to validate your dependability.

Speed

A core value proposition for SaaS products is that they help customers work more efficiently and effectively—the best SaaS products make customers more bionic.

For SaaS users, speed matters. If your SaaS product is slow, user trust will degrade fast. Studies have shown a 500ms delay can increase peak frustration, decrease engagement and “seriously undermine overall brand health” (Radware). If it’s too slow, usage will decline and eventually, your customers may simply give up.

Over the years, one of the most staunch advocates of speed has been Google. In 2012, Urs Hoelzle shared research that a mere 400ms delay in returning search results translated into a 0.44% drop in search volume. Google’s focus on speed doesn’t stop with their search engine, they go so far as to consider website speed for search rankings, too, and have been doing so for nearly a decade.

How fast is your SaaS? Exactly where is your service bogging down your users? Like Google’s millisecond analysis, do you have any sense for how the speed of your service impacts customer trust? Vigilantly monitor latency. The milliseconds you save will directly translate into increased trust from your users.

Perceived Security

How do users perceive security for a SaaS product?

For one, it’s standard practice now that websites should use `https` to send data between a browser and a website. Sites that do not serve their websites using `https` are now flagged by Google Chrome, which is a red flag they aren’t trustworthy.

If you have `https://` set up, check to make sure your site can’t be accessed at `http://`. If you find your site is available at the unsecure URL, set up proper redirection rules so that any connection at http:// redirects to https://.

You can also check to see how your site appears in Google (or DuckDuckGo or Bing) search results. A blank meta description could make your search results look “off” to users before they even access a page on your site or app. Providing search engines with proper title tags and meta descriptions for your site will ensure that visitors make a proper first impression—before even loading your site or app.

Make sure image assets and CSS loads properly. Broken image tags and janky designs undermine trust.

Baseline Relevance

How might a user know if a site or app has their interests in mind? Build baseline relevance for users by combining empathy with clarity.

For empathy, recognize the job the user is trying to do. Then make it clear how to do that job with the product. Copy is critical for clarity. For example, in any marketing copy, clearly articulate the problem consumers have. Then, explain how the product or service solves that problem. Avoid hyperbolies and buzzwords whenever possible.

Continuously test your assumptions by putting yourself in the shoes of your audience. Identify common paths on your site or app. Analyze your users sessions, especially the ones that show high levels of frustration and dropped conversions. What problems are your users trying to solve at each step? Where are they getting frustrated or lost? Missing relevance can manifest as friction in the user experience—think rage clicks, going back and forth between the same pages, failed search queries, thrashing mouse, page idling and subtle signals can point to a lack of relevance.

Solving for relevance builds trust. Understanding user expectations and meeting them consistently through clear information will establish your site or app as a trustworthy source of information.

Level Two: Interest and Preference Over Other Options

As NN/g sets forth in their Trust Pyramid, Level 2 is about providing your audience with confirmation they are in the right place. Having established baseline relevance through empathy and clarity, you must now bring even greater clarity to users, paying special attention to making them feel confident about their continued engagement.

Empower your audience at this level by proactively addressing their concerns through “Upfront Disclosure.” Another UX concept from NN/g, upfront disclosure recognizes the needs of your audience and then addresses them proactively. Upfront disclosure can mean anything from pricing transparency to easy-to-find contact information.

Remember, unlike B2C websites where a customer may only ever make a single transaction, B2B SaaS relationships are expected to last months or even years. Being forthright about what your services offers—and, at times, what it doesn’t offer—is a powerful way to match customer expectations through transparent, helpful communication.

Again, put yourself in the shoes of your customer: What questions would you have of a company like yours? What are common questions your sales team encounters when engaging with prospective customers? Identify the most common desire paths—those places your users tend to go on their own accord in order to meet their needs. Determine the pages on your website that are visited by users before they convert—e.g. submitting their email address to be contacted. Hypothesize what boxes users check in order to feel confident about their decision to engage further. Once you identify these common paths, “pave them.”

Users will learn to rely on your site to meet their needs—that’s trust.

Level Three: Trust With Personal Information

Now that Level 1 and 2 of the Trust Pyramid are satisfied, you’re at a critical junction for trust.

If you ask the user to give you some personal information in exchange for a promise of more value, will they run away or engage further?

Here, the goal is to make users comfortable with a small commitment. Don’t ask for the moon.

At times with SaaS companies, this is a point that can be abused. For example, gating content—or product trials—can leave a user begrudgingly offering up their email address to get the “FREE!” report or signing up for a trial they’re not ready to take advantage of.

The same goes for interrupting the user experience with a request that must be dismissed. For example, chatbots offering help—or lightbox requests for email subscribers—can come at inopportune times, distracting a user from their current experience. Use them thoughtfully to enhance the customer experience, not interrupt it.

When users aren’t ready for Level 3, it’s evidenced by low conversion rates. Often, it’s simply too much, too soon.

Success at Level 3 requires looking for clear signs that it’s the right time to ask for personal information. Time spent on the site, pages visited, content consumed—these are all signals to consider. Take advantage of digital experience analytics if you have them and build a conversion funnel. Zero in on pages visited before asking for personal information. Create multiple funnels and analyze results to see if there is any correlation between conversion and pages visited prior to asking for personal information.

Also, when you do ask for personal information like an email address, make it unambiguous how that information will be used and follow through!

Level Four: Trust With Sensitive/Financial Information

If you’ve made it this far, you might think you’re in the clear—not so fast.

Users are certainly timid about submitting their email address, but they’re on high alert when money—or sensitive personal information—is on the line.

That’s why when asking for sensitive and/or financial information, exercise extreme caution.

• • • Don’t ask for more information than is necessary. Users are primed to look for aggressive asks.
    • Be clear about how any information submitted is handled. Use visual cues to signal any information will be handled securely and safely.
    • Take it slow. Use confirmation screens to let users set the pace. This will make it clear it’s the user who controls their information.

Assuming success here, make sure to confirm receipt! Confirm from within the site or app as well as through email whenever possible.

Satisfying Level 4 trust is a big accomplishment. It’s also a big responsibility—because now your company has their sensitive information. Customers have put their information into your hands—a sign of trust that really matters.

Level Five: Willingness to Commit to an Ongoing Relationship

Having established Levels 1 through 4 of the Trust Pyramid, a SaaS company must now sustain the trust of customers indefinitely.

And you thought you’d reached the top! There’s still much work to be done—really, the work is never done.

SaaS products are frequently used by seat holders who were not the original purchasers of the product. New users are likely to be skeptical of your product—and you really can’t blame them. You haven’t earned their trust! This is a potentially dangerous situation for SaaS companies: It’s so easy to make the leap that, since a customer (a company) is paying for your SaaS product, every user at that company will automatically trust your product.

Nope!

For each new user of your SaaS product at a company, the entire Trust Pyramid must be re-established—very likely from directly inside the product experience.

Success begins by satisfying the criteria of Level 1—dependability, speed, perceived security and baseline relevance. Offering helpful, low-friction onboarding experiences for new seat holders will inspire confidence that any questions they have will be easy to answer. Clear user interfaces, concise and relevant copy and even tool-tips can make a world of difference.

Move all users up the pyramid by offering content that further establishes relevance and brings value. Meet customer expectations at every turn with value.

Assuming the SaaS product manages data for users, the product must also instill confidence that any personal information or sensitive data (as with Levels 3 and 4) submitted into the app will be handled safely and securely.

Once you do all of this for users old and new, sustain their trust through continued vigilance:

• • • Continue managing efforts regarding your foundation of privacy, security, and compliance. The foundation always comes first!
    • Maintain expectations in perpetuity regarding your app’s dependability and speed. Beware complacency!
    • Empathize with the needs of your top users and your new users, alike, meeting them where they are with clear copy and intuitive product design.

You’ll also have to be ready when things don’t go as planned. Things will break. There will be unexpected complications. And when a customer files a support ticket—or calls in to customer service upset—it’s critical their need is met with empathy and responded to with action that restores confidence and restores trust.

A Pyramid Built to Last

SaaS technology is transforming how businesses operate. However, moving operations to cloud-based technology has risks—the kind of risks that can send would-be customers running. And earning the trust of would-be SaaS customers won’t be easy.

How is your SaaS company building trust with customers? How is it earning the trust of larger organizations and new seatholders? How do you see the landscape for privacy, security, and compliance affecting SaaS companies in the future?

The post How SaaS Products Ascend the “Trust Pyramid” appeared first on OpenView.

Managing third-party selling is not easy. But in many sectors, it is very important! The intermediaries hold the key to increased income from existing clients and winning new clients.

Third-party selling can either be the way the company delivers customer intimacy or a barrier to customer intimacy.

In the past companies often took the view that provided the results were good (right volumes, right margins, right compliance) then the activity of distributors did not really matter. It was almost part of the deal: “as long as you deliver the result we will leave you alone. You get your freedom. We get our results?”

But today’s major economic, demographic, regulatory and technological changes make it essential for companies to focus not just on results (the outcomes, the “lagging indicators”) but also on activity (the inputs, the “leading indicators.”)

This is particularly important in a multi-channel environment where a decision to buy may be influenced by media campaigns driving responses, outbound telephone calls, internet presence (both B2C and C2C) as well as local sales activity.

Many companies want to move to a more hands-on, more scientific, more professional approach to managing their distribution—to move towards more performance management.

This may involve more accurate and regular use of a CRM. It may be a question of tracking responses to avoid duplicating effort and irritating prospects. It may require a defined sales approach as part of a multi-channel campaign.

This all seems reasonable from the manufacturer’s or provider’s perspective. But it causes alarm bells to ring in distributors. It raises questions about “who owns the customer?” and ignites intermediaries’ fears that the company is trying to “steal my customers” (a strange but very prevalent view!).

Distributors are often angry that the company is trying to control them, to remove the very freedom that made them want to be third parties, not employees. They don’t want the increased workload that performance management seems to bring. They do not believe that performance management will help them sell more. In short—if it’s sometimes difficult to introduce performance management to an employed sales force it is much more difficult to bring it in for distributors.

So what should companies do? Just put the idea away in the filing cabinet “under too difficult?” Just accept the status quo? Water down the proposals so that they cause no offense but don’t achieve anything either? Take an aggressive position that alienates even the best agents and drives them into the arms of the competition? There must be a better answer than these!

Based on our experience of working with distributors themselves and the businesses who well through them, we believe there are certain keys to success.

1. Base decisions on real information not on what you think you know.

Distributors are salespeople. They express their opinions strongly, whether in the field or in head office.

Try and get at the true picture or at least understand the range of opinions. For instance how many individuals are motivated by success and financial gain and therefore are willing to work harder to win more business; and how many are satisfied with their income but would be very motivated by ideas that would allow them to achieve the same result but for less effort?

Before embarking on a performance management program you need to know what people think, what they believe really matters, what the obstacles are, and what rewards they are looking for. One tool for doing this would be to segment individuals in a distributor into four different categories, and then design different approaches to get the best out of each group.

2. Make it easy

However valuable the performance management process you bring in, it will not be used if it is not easy and quick. This is true for most salespeople but it is even truer when it comes to third-party selling.

Most people want to be independents partly for the freedom it gives them. Whether that is the freedom to go fishing on a Friday afternoon or just not having “the boss” looking over their shoulder. So if you need them to capture data—for a CRM system or an account plan then try and minimise the work involved.

Ask yourself if you really need that piece of data? Look at ways of making data entry easy (web access, form design, apps, etc). Consider who is the best person to provide the information—it may be best done by an office-based employee rather than a field-based agent. Consider the need to train people to do what you want, making sure that they are able to do the required task.

I remember being shown a beautiful, elegant, sophisticated account planning tool built in Excel. It was very clever. I asked how many distributors were using it—none! Keep things as simple and easy as possible.

3. Show the benefits

It is amazing that if people believe that a task will make their job easier, more rewarding or more enjoyable, they will find a way to carry out that task. I was talking to a product manager responsible for distributing asset finance through a distribution channel.

The distributors swore that the product was unsaleable and inappropriate for the relationships they managed. The VP Sales worked with the CFO to change the reward system in a way that did not reduce economic profit but which increased the reward to the distribution sales force.

With no change in marketing support and with no extra training sales went up by 25 percent during the next 6 months! So look for ways to make your performance management initiative attractive. It may involve making the business case, perhaps using a pilot group and a control group to demonstrate improved results.

Maybe you can reward compliance, providing more marketing support or even more leads to agents who do what you want. You could consider a retrospective hike in commission (for example based on completing relationship plans or information returns to a certain standard). Whatever you do, ensure that agents and agency owners can see that it is in their interests to comply.

4. Demonstrate trust

It may be unfair, but most distributors believe that any new way of working brought in by the company is designed to cheat them! If the big issue in your distribution network is “who owns the customer,” then don’t go behind the sellers’ backs by using information from a CRM for a direct marketing campaign. Be transparent. If that is what you plan to do then be open about it and demonstrate how it can help them. (See point three.)

5. Take the managers with you

Don’t try and bring in performance management without the commitment of managers. You will succeed or fail to the extent that you win over the managers—whether these are employees of the company or owner managers of their own agencies or managers employed by the distributor principals.

Sometimes even if the company cannot be directive with its agents, the owner-managers can. But they will only do this if (as above) they believe it is in their best interests. There need to be both negative and positive arguments (i.e., the changes will not involve extra work and they will give a significant payback). It is usually worth taking the management into your confidence early in the process.

6. Be ready to enforce as well as encourage

If you are serious about introducing performance management with your distribution then you will need to be willing to enforce it if needed. The credibility of your initiative will need to be maintained by demonstrating that you mean what you say. This is particularly important if you are going to ensure you keep the commitment of those who are finding the new demands onerous.

Possible sanctions include holding back leads from those who do not provide accurate data, withdrawal of marketing support or (depending on contractual terms) termination of the agency.

Whatever sanctions you use, agents need to believe there are negative consequences for non-compliance. Another necessary step will be to check the accuracy of the data being input. If agents do not think anyone is checking their data they may start cutting corners, so some form of a check will be essential.

Of course, it will always be better to encourage than to enforce, so although you need to be ready to be strong if required, concentrate on making your performance management easy to use, productive for all concerned, engaging for your managers and based on hard facts.

Conclusions

Third-party selling can be very rewarding. It can help you manage risk, and seize opportunities. However, it requires a special approach to sales management to reap the rewards and avoid the downsides. If you are looking to drive growth through third-party selling then contact us to see how to improve processes.

Imagine if you could give your customers that “day 1” feeling of excitement and potential throughout the entire customer journey.

That’s the goal Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has for his customers. In his 2016 letter to Amazon shareholders, Bezos describes the preservation of this day 1 feeling as the biggest driver for pursuing a customer-centric approach. He believes customers desire “something better” and that your business needs to provide that kind of continued value. It’s a sentiment that has applications for exclusively B2B enterprises as well.

The benefits of customer-centricity lie in promoting a feeling within customers that your mutual partnership is always leading them toward that “something better.” As the digital transformation of business offers more options for customers, keeping things fresh and exciting is the key to long-term success.

3 Benefits of Customer-Centricity

The rise of the subscription economy has empowered customers to pursue short-term, low-risk commitments. This means the majority of customer revenue is now spread over months and years of recurring renewals rather than being captured in a single sales event.

To cultivate customer lifetime value in this environment, you have to view customer relationships as the mutual pursuit of growth over time. Customer-centricity means sticking closely to your customers throughout their journey, constantly monitoring their progress and looking for ways to improve their experience.

Some of the benefits of customer-centricity include its ability to:

• Promote new value
• Increase existing customer value
• Reduce churn

By applying the central tenets of customer-centricity to everyday customer relationships, you generate the value that is vital to both your success and that of your customers.

Customer-Centricity Reduces Churn

High renewal rates are essential for growth in a recurring revenue business model. If you focus on maintaining customer relationships long-term, you will see more renewals and increase customer value over time. As such, you need strategies to keep customers from wanting to stray.

Customer-centricity lowers churn by maintaining product relevance and a strong relationship with the customer. Since you’re always keeping customer goals in mind, you can monitor feature usage to be sure the product is helping the customer progress toward their goals. Or, if a feature is not providing value to a customer, you can suggest other features or use that information to improve the product. Beyond the features of your product, it’s also important to monitor your customer’s progress through each phase. For instance, did the user struggle to stay on track during onboarding or did they have an issue understanding a feature? If not handled effectively, issues like those could have a major effect on the customer experience during other stages.

By constantly monitoring the daily realities of the customer experience, you can be sure the customer is always receiving the value they desire from your product or service. For example, monitoring metrics known to have a direct impact on customer business success—think license utilization, feature adoption, and more—helps you implement proactive customer engagements. If a customer has low usage rates of features that could add value to their daily workflow, then your team can create campaigns to educate them about the feature and check in on their goals. This way, you can be sure the customer is getting the most out of your product and possibly prevent them from churning due to a lack of perceived business value. It’s also one reason why you need to really understand your customer’s business goals so that you can determine which features will add value for them specifically.

Customer-Centricity Increases Existing Customer Value

While new customer acquisition will always be an important part of business, existing customers are invaluable. After all, retaining a current customer costs less than gaining a new one and can lead to long-term recurring revenue.

As such, you need to prioritize the customer experience so that current customers receive continued value from both the product and their interactions with your team. Closely monitoring the customer experience provides insight into customer needs and reveals ways to improve product performance and the processes your company uses when interacting with them. This could come from an analysis that demonstrates a customer has maximized their license utilization, complex metrics that measure how product use leads to business success or feedback that escalations are not handled satisfactorily. Whatever the scenario, customer success depends on optimizing the customer journey and nurturing them every step of the way.

Customer-Centricity Promotes New Value

You should always be monitoring and nurturing customers to keep them satisfied. Happy customers are more likely to renew, but they are also more likely to become brand ambassadors who spread the word about your business—which may lead new customers to your doorstep.

Sales and customer success can work together to make sure that you’re both retaining current customers and gaining new ones. If information is being shared across teams, you can use insights that the customer success team discovers to also improve the sales process, and vice versa.

The benefits of customer-centricity, therefore, overflow your existing customer relationships and permeate into the realm of future customers. Establishing your enterprise as a responsive, personalized service focused on the growth of your customers will attract new people looking for that kind of experience.

Building a Culture of Customer-Centricity

Customer success is about understanding the everyday customer experience and constantly looking for ways to improve it. However, a customer-centric approach is also a great deal of work when done manually. After all, there’s a lot of data to gather, organize, and track, and it really adds up if you have many customers. Fortunately, achieving this is much easier with a customer success platform that collects all your customer data in one central location, making it easy to share information across your organization.

With a customer success platform, your team will have customer data at their fingertips and the ability to communicate early and often with customers. You can monitor customer health scores that provide an at-a-glance look into how a customer is doing. You can set up automatic engagements triggered by certain key events, such as an important goal completion. And it will alert you of warning signs that might indicate looming churn, such as low feature usage rates, so you can proactively intervene and retain customers. Simply put, such software makes it easier to effectively run a customer-centric campaign.

Customer-centricity promotes long term, mutually rewarding growth by allowing enterprises to maintain that day 1 feeling of future potential. Closely monitoring customers lets you better act on their behalf and achieve lifetime customer value.

You can run, but you can’t hide. You can fake it, but you won’t make it. The era of thinking that you can behave one way in one situation and a different way in another is long gone. Your reputation arrives before you do.

It continues to amaze me that salespeople think they can craft this perfect image with customers but behave like a jerk in other situations. Each conversation we have and each sale we make leads to the next one; there is no such thing as a dead end conversation. Too often, I salespeople respond is a less than professional manner to one customer and then become shocked when other customers won’t do business with them.

Watch my video below:

 

 

My mother always said good news travels fast but bad news travels even faster.  In today’s world, this truth applies more than ever. Your reputation arrives long before you do. The customer who you want to meet with will check you out online before agreeing to work with you. Before you buy from the customer, they will talk to others who know you and your reputation.

Don’t think that you can be nice and polite to one customer and then go ballistic moments later with someone else. A true leader is the same with each person they meet, regardless of their stature or position in life. Warren Buffet uses a phrase a lot that goes something like this, “it takes a lifetime to build your reputation, but you can lose it in a moment.” Think about the power of that quote the next time you’re tempted to get upset with someone.

It’s more than other people observing your two-faced behavior, it is the damage that you do to your own mindset. Once you allow yourself to have split-behavior, it’s amazing how easily it can creep into more and more of your thinking and change your mindset. Ultimately, we do what we think, so the best way to ensure you have a solid reputation is to only think in an honorable manner.

Your reputation does arrive before you do. Your customer is checking you out on Google before they will ever allow you in their office or even talk to you on the phone. Your reputation is built on two things: first, the things you craft, create and write on social media sites and second, how you behave in the real world. The two had better line up, so don’t think that you can fake it. Yelp gives us reviews about a restaurant and similarly, our customers speak to others about us.

The question we have to ask ourselves is: are my actions consistent? I am the only one that can craft my reputation. I cannot blame anyone; therefore, it’s up to me to be consistent in what I do, say, write and share. If you don’t walk and talk the same language, you will be seen as a fraud.

Copyright 2019, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Result

Whether you use cold calling scripts or go impromptu, this article will show you that cold calling still works in achieving the results that you want. Keep reading to learn more. RELATED: A Guide To The Basics Of Cold Calling In this article: What Is Cold Calling? Sales Reps Hate Cold Calling and Prefer Emailing […]

The post Cold Calling Still Works – If You Do It Right appeared first on The Sales Insider.

What would you do if you had to build a sales training program from the ground up?

When Tori Belkin came in as Director of Sales at Ceros, she was tasked with building the sales training program from scratch. Learn how she approached it and the three strategy pillars she’s employed to scale the sales function.

Bonus: listen to Tori and Jeremey role-play establishing an upfront contract using the Sandler methodology.

Listen to this episode for answers to questions like:

• What qualities should you look for in new sales hires?
• How do you assess curiosity in the hiring process? (Hint: you should know after the first conversation.)
• What are the 5 key areas sales training should cover?
• How can you leverage territory assignments in scaling an organization?
• What’s a good structure for getting the most out of 1:1s?

Listen here, and keep reading for some of the highlights from this episode below.

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What to Look for in a Sales Hire

Jeremey: What do you look for when you hire? What are the green lights and red lights as you’re hiring?

Tori: Coachability is my number one thing. I always want to hear examples of what a  rep that I’m talking to an interview has been working on with their current manager, where they were before, and where they feel like they’ve gotten. I think that that is the number one driving factor. I also want to find someone who is independent and consistent.

Additionally, I want someone that has a genuine curiosity. That’s really a skill you need to have in sales. You want reps that get on the phone and listen to their prospects and actually want to learn and are genuinely curious. Then, they’ll want to ask those discovery questions, the ones that we need to understand if it’s going to be a good fit or not.

Assessing Coachability and Curiosity in Hiring

Jeremey: How do you actually go about assessing coachability in the hiring process?

Tori: In terms of coachability, reading through scenarios with them again. Asking, ‘what are you working on with your manager currently? Where did you start? Can you give me examples of how you implemented it?” I feel like having them tell real stories about where they were and what they’ve been working on, shows you their coachability level.

Jeremey: What about curiosity? How do you test for curiosity?

Tori: We usually base that one off of the questions that they come prepared with. If they come with blanket interview questions that are not really tailored to Ceros, then they’re not genuinely curious. You want them to come in with a baseline understanding, obviously having done the research That’s another thing that we look for – how well are they prepared for the interview? That’s a good indication of how prepared they’ll be as a rep. Are they asking genuinely curious questions about the product, the team, how we’re scaling vision, the future… all of that. Then also the follow-through. We look for genuine curiosity in the follow-up email, as well as a measure of how much they actually took in.

Processes to Scale

Jeremey: What are the processes you’ve modified as you scaled up the sales team?

Tori: We scale up our process for how to learn how to sell using technology. I put that all on Lessonly. The biggest process I put into place that didn’t exist before was how we get reps on the phone; defining the checkpoints that they have to get through in order to get on the phone.

Obviously, when a new rep starts they’re really anxious. They want to start closing their first deals. Making sure that they know enough to have intelligent conversations the moment that we do put them on the phone is important. A lot of that is in Lessonly. We also do mock calls with a few other people internally. That process wasn’t in existence before last year, if you can believe it.

Jeremey: Yeah, I can’t believe it. I think a lot of places are growing quickly. Things happen in an ad hoc way. And managers themselves are tasked with figuring out how to do things. It’s only as the company evolves and matures that they realize that consistency and certification matters… with a rubric and a checklist.

Tori: Exactly. The other process that I put in place for my team was consistent weekly check-ins. Some reps like that, some don’t. I found it helpful to have the rep decide what they want to cover in their 30 minutes with me once a week. It could either be picking a call that they want to review, strategize more in detail about deals that we didn’t get to, pipeline review, or whatever that is.

Having consistent check-in points with each rep individually, and holding each other accountable, to actually make that meeting happen every week has been super important and super helpful as we’ve been scaling up the team.

Jeremey: I got a great tip on one on ones from a person who works at CB Insights. It’s so simple. I’m sure it’s a universal thing and probably doesn’t sound very novel, but it’s to keep a running Google Doc that has the running 1:1 list.

He made sure that there was this evergreen part of it that said, “Here is what I accomplished in the last week and here’s what I’m committing to and the next week.” Then every week, you’d go back in and be able to see if you actually accomplished what you committed to. It helps calibrate people’s activity levels, but also their forecast accuracy.

Tori: I think it definitely holds them more accountable if they’re actually typing it out as a commitment and know that they have to go back to it and admit to themselves if they did it or not.

THERE’S A LOT MORE AFTER THIS! Listen to the full podcast for more on building teams and creating community. 

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If you have a passion for the art and the science of sales, are looking to further your career, or just want to hear some great, practical tips, ‘Hey Salespeople’ is the podcast for you. Subscribe so you can follow along as Jeremey interviews the brightest minds in modern sales to bring you immediately actionable advice. Listen and subscribe here.

If happiness is a state of being which at times can be vague, joy is an intense, fleeting emotion that we experience physically, in small moments. While the pursuit of happiness is a long-term endeavor, little moments of joy are easier to find and more accessible. Ingrid Fetell Lee is a designer who has been studying joy and happiness for 10 years. As part of her research on “The Aesthetic of Joy” and for the purpose of her book “Joyful,” Ingrid teased out four key benefits of Joy: Joy is contagious. When we are in a state of joy, we are more physically attractive to other people.

For example, when we walk into a store and the associates are joyful, we will spend more time in the store, buy more things, and are more likely to return. Joy sharpens our minds. That is, people are more productive and make better decisions when they are in the state of joy. For those of us who negotiate, we are more likely to make better decisions and take the upper hand in negotiations when we are joyful. Joy opens us up to new ideas. While fear forces us to deal with things that are immediate, joy leads us to explore. Our brains become more cognitively flexible, a property psychologists call cognitive flexibility. Joy makes us more resilient. Small moments of joy have a big effect by counteracting the physical response to stress.

Where does joy come from? Some of us tend to be more introverted or extroverted, left brain or right brain, but all of us tend to find joy in the same way. Fetell Lee went on a quest for clues that trigger joy, no matter our age, gender, or race. She found out that hot air balloons, rainbows, googly eyes, and fireworks are examples of things that bring joy across generations. Objects that bring us joy have similar physical attributes, what designers call “aesthetics.” They are often round (like donuts and merry-go-rounds), have a lot of bright colors, have symmetrical shapes and repeating patterns, or are available abundantly and bring a sense of elevation and lightness. We often dismiss these things as trivial pleasures, but these are the little things that connect us to humanity.

The Role Of Joy In Building Brands

Of three brands we’ll explore that use joy in their marketing, Johnnie Walker is one of the high-profile brands that has managed to incorporate joy into its marketing efforts. The Scotch Whisky brand enlisted the help of psychologist Matt Killingsworth, a specialist in human happiness, to inform its campaign. Killingsworth’s research shows that happiness makes success more likely. Based on these findings, Johnnie Walker evolved its tagline from “Keep Walking” to “Joy will take you further. Keep Walking.” The intent is to promote the idea that starting from a place of joy and optimism accelerates an individual’s progress and success in life.

Proof that you can succeed without a multi-million-dollar budget, Primal Joy is a food company that has centered its marketing around “food happiness.” Primal Joy’s brand strategy is to convey the heart-warming feeling of home-made, natural food. Its logo is shaped as a hand-drawn heart that merges the initial of the company. Its tagline “Natural Food Happiness” is welcoming and concise. Primal Joy’s Instagram boasts colorful, uplifting pics that illustrate how to use its products in simple recipes.

In 1971, advertising executive Bill Backer envisioned positioning Coca-Cola as more than just a can of soda. He saw Coke as something all people liked in common, regardless of their origin. To bring his vision to life, Backer and three song-writers wrote “I’d like to buy the world a coke,” which feel-good lyrics treat the whole world as if it were a single person. Shortly after, he shot the “hilltop commercial” that featured young people from around the world singing the song in chorus on a hillside. The success was instantaneous: Coca-Cola received over 100,000 letters about the commercial. Some listeners even called their radio stations begging to hear it.

Case Study: Las Vegas

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas “What happens here, stays here,” also referred to as “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” is one of the most famous taglines in modern tourism marketing. The campaign was created in 2003 by agency R&R Partners to promote the Vegas brand for something other than gambling. After a year of market research R&R concluded that the emotional bond between Las Vegas and its customers was freedom. Freedom on two levels. Freedom to do things, see things, eat things, wear things, feel things. In short, the freedom to be someone we couldn’t be at home. And freedom from whatever we wanted to leave behind in our daily lives. Just thinking about Vegas made the bad stuff go away. At that point the strategy became clear. Speak to that need. Make an indelible connection between Las Vegas and the freedom we all crave.

You will find many more case studies and tips in my new book Brand Hacks: How to Grow your Brand by Fulfilling the Human Quest for Meaning.

The Blake Project Can Help: Get actionable guidance from experts on Brand Strategy, Growth Strategy and Building Emotional Connections

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

There are so many tools at a marketer‘s disposal.

You’ll find everything under the sun, including project management software, social media dashboards, Facebook Messenger chatbot builders and so much more.

With all the options, it can be come a little overwhelming — to the point that a lot of these powerhouse, unicorn tools get lost in the shuffle.

That’s why I rounded up the marketing tools you actually need.

Every tool on this list is a tool I stand behind, and use in my day-to-day work life.

Read on to discover the 15 tools I can’t live without!

1. VisualHunt

Good content marketing involves having high quality images to go with your text.

Having a source of those high quality images is necessary to deliver the best content possible.

VisualHunt is a great source of free high quality images pulled from many online sources.

Their photos have Creative Commons Zero license, making them free for commercial use.

They also have Creative Commons and Public Domain photos you can embed on your content directly from the website.

Just search the keyword or theme you’re looking for and you should find the images you need.

2. MobileMonkey

Facebook Messenger marketing is one of the hottest digital marketing trends out there, and with good reason.

Facebook Messenger messages earn an 80% average open rate an 20% open rate — and those numbers blow email marketing out of the water.

If you want those impressive levels of engagement for your own brand, then the first thing you need to do is a build a Facebook Messenger chatbot.

Enter MobileMonkey.

MobileMonkey is the best Facebook Messenger chatbot builder out there — and did I mention it’s free?

With this MobileMonkey, you can build your first Messenger chatbot easily, with no coding required.

You can use your bot to send out messages (a.k.a. chatblast), answer questions, interact with contacts, conduct surveys, and so much more.

It can help jumpstart your Messenger live support and marketing campaign.

Use your MobileMonkey-powered chatbot to attract leads and drive engagement!

3. Venngage

Nothing beats infographics for delivering information in a visually engaging way.

They’re often better than text, video, and photographs alone, making them a must-have in your content marketing.

With Venngage, you can create amazing infographics for your content in three easy steps.

You can choose a template in Venngage, add your data into charts and visuals, and then customize your design.

With over a hundred templates to choose from, Venngage is one of the best places to create infographics quickly and easily.

4. Contentful

This service is great for those looking to add more juice to their content marketing efforts.

Contentful boasts a new, more flexible approach to content management, promising to make blogging and content creation a breeze.

It’s an API-driven content management infrastructure designed to create, manage, and distribute content to any platform or device easily.

Basically, it’s like WordPress, but has a lot more bells and whistles that make it more secure and does your content management for you.

Companies like Spotify, Urban Outfitters, Red Bull, and so on make use of Contentful for their websites.

Running your website on Contentful lets you be steps ahead of everyone else with your content marketing.

5. Serpstat

If you’re looking to get serious with your digital marketing, then you need an all-in-one SEO platform you can depend on.

Serpstat was designed for professional marketers who are looking to gain that extra edge.

You can get that by having all the data before you to make decisions on any online business marketing plan.

Serpstat has research tools with advanced analytics for you to learn about your audience.

It keeps record of historical data over time, giving you a bird’s eye view of your performance.

You can also group keywords by tags while also gathering insights in your traffic distribution.

That lets you know where you’re getting results from and what needs improving.

6. Hotjar

Being able to understand how your audience behaves when they view your website can give you tremendous insight.

Hotjar lets you see where your visitors tend to click with its heatmap, letting you know what catches their attention.

You can then adjust your web design and content to encourage more clicks and engagement with your content.

It can also give you recordings of where their mouse cursors tend to go, how fast they scroll, and so on.

You also get to see your conversion funnel, showing how much of your audience goes from landing page to actual conversion.

With the information you get from Hotjar, you can fine-tune your website to bring in more customers and increase your revenue.

7. WP-Chatbot

Having a Facebook Messenger-powered chat widget on your website is a surefire way to take your engagement and time on page to the next level.

The WP-Chatbot plugin adds a Facebook Messenger widget on your website.

It has complete integration with Messenger and your Facebook business page.

Visitors can then engage with your business easily without having to leave your website.

Since chatbot is integrated with Facebook Messenger, every person who interacts with you on the site will be added to your ever-growing Facebook Messenger contact list — which means you’ll be able to follow up with your chat participants after that initial site chat.

No doubt about it, adding a MobileMonkey chat widget to your site will increase engagement, provide new leads, drive conversions and boost revenue.

8. Todoist

The rigors of day-to-day digital marketing work can bog you down over time, making it seem like you’re no longer in control.

Todoist can help you take that control back by doing things like give you reminders on things you tend to forget.

You can enter your tasks for the day and have a list that lets you remember what to prioritize.

But Todoist isn’t just like any other productivity service as it’s designed mostly for business.

This lets you use a sleek interface for tracking your own thoughts, work tasks, errands, and so on easily.

Todoist can definitely help organize your work life with greater deal of clarity.

9. DrumUp

If you’re looking for more help on your content and social media marketing, then this app may be for you.

DrumUp is a free and easy-to-use app that lets you manage multiple social media accounts more easily.

You can curate top content in your niche easily and save time on managing all your accounts by up to 90%.

It can even help you do more and reach out to more people with its great features and compatibility with many platforms.

DrumUp also lets you measure the social media engagement you’re getting through its analytics.

Keeping your profiles updated need not be such a big chore anymore thanks to DrumUp.

10. BrightEdge

Artificial intelligence has made digital marketing even more convenient in recent years, and BrightEdge takes advantage of it.

It lets you do SEO and content marketing more effectively through its AI to power organic search performance.

BrightEdge lets you track and use deep data and context to better your search engine optimization.

It also helps you run a high-performing website through its data intelligence.

You can then create high-quality content that satisfies customer demand through BrightEdge.

11. Visage

Visual storytelling is an art on its own, as it’s all about showing instead of just telling.

Visage is a visualization platform that lets content marketers create on-brand visual content easily.

This relatively new app features enable data visualization without all the finangling and hair-splitting.

You just need to enter your data and choose how it can be best shown, and you can edit it there like in Canva.

It also has additional features that makes it great for collaboration, which makes for seamless for group work.

Visage enables seamless ideation, design, distribution, and analytics for your visual content.

12. Buildfire

Adding an app to your business can be quite an upgrade, letting you reach even more users who use mobile devices.

Buildfire lets you build your own app from simple templates with no coding required.

If you know how to build stuff like websites, chatbots, and so on with templates, then you should be able to build an app here.

It’s almost like MobileMonkey, but for mobile apps on iOS or Android instead of chatbots in terms of what you can do with it.

Of course, building apps involves a lot more than just setting triggers and tasks for a chatbot.

Buildfire helps you throughout that process, letting you create an app that works for your business as you like it.

The best thing about it is it’s free to build an app in Buildfire by yourself, and you can also choose to hire Buildfire to do it for you.

13. ContentCal

Making content is one of the more daunting tasks in marketing, but also one of the most crucial as it’s the meat of the campaign.

But it does get tedious over time and it may seem like you’re no longer in control of your time when you’re in the thick of it.

ContentCal can help you take back control with its visual calendar designed for planning and auto-publishing your social media content.

It’s used by many big companies and agencies for their content and social media marketing needs.

You can learn more on how to go about your content and social media through its analytics.

It also lets you customize your setup so you can tailor-fit ContentCal for every sub-brand, client, or company you work with.

Victory loves preparation, and you too can taste success every single day with a plan laid out in ContentCal.

14. Vidyard

Videos can be some of the best content you can make to increase engagement and conversions.

Vidyard is a tool you can use to make personalized videos easily without having to be an expert at video editing.

It lets you customize your video with ease, and you can then embed it anywhere you want.

With videos you make with Vidyard, you can maximize your first impressions and endear your business more to the people.

15. Oktopost

Managing all your social media activities can be tedious over time, especially for businesses.

Oktopost makes that easier for B2B enterprises, combining three separate solutions into one.

You get social media management, social employee advocacy, and social media promotions in one tight package.

If you’re looking to up your social media game for your B2B business, Oktopost is worth looking into.

Originally Published on Inc.com

World-class sales teams embrace competition and collaboration, which ultimately result in increased sales productivity and sales efficiency.

“Competition makes us faster. Collaboration makes us better.”

Competition is in our nature. We compete against other teams or individuals in sports, we compete with siblings for our parents’ attention, we compete with our peers for the best jobs, we compete with coworkers for a raise or promotion. Sales in particular is known for its dog-eat-dog, quota-oriented nature, which serves to basically position colleagues against each other. But for an organization, this can be a waste of time, effort, and resources, when the true competitors are external forces.

Sales teams are increasingly chasing more aggressive goals with greater pressure to over-achieve, but the question is whether high performance comes from promoting competition amongst reps or encouraging collaboration. Let’s explore!

Why Should Sales Teams Compete?

Competition is traditionally how sales team have been driven, in both B2B and B2C. Some of the touted benefits include the following:

Motivate the sales team

Some sales reps thrive on competition and under the sense of urgency. They crave the reward, as well as the personal sense of accomplishment.

Foster innovation

Competition encourages sales reps to constantly seek out ways to improve and to push themselves further. Is there a different process they can follow to get ahead? Is there a new technology that can help them advance pipeline faster? Is there other messaging that can convert prospects more effectively?

Discourage complacency

Competition pushes reps out of their comfort zone as they strive to be in that coveted top 20% of performers. For leadership, it also separates the leaders from those who are just sliding by with the bare minimum.

But competition usually means that sales reps don’t share their secrets to success in order to achieve higher individual goals, sometimes even at the expense of corporate goals.

Why Should Sales Teams Collaborate?

Collaboration encourages sales reps to work with each other instead of against each other, leveraging best practices and, in turn, increasing efficiency. In a collaborative situation, sales reps share their best practices and learnings to help the organization succeed as a whole. Everybody in the company has something to say and undoubtedly has some value to contribute.

Learn from others

Collaboration provides an opportunity to learn from each other’s successes and failures so that the organization as a whole can understand and grow. This collaborative learning more effectively supports long-term goals for the organization.

Break down barriers

Collaboration within the sales organization is important, but collaboration extends to other departments as well. For example, the customer service team knows what customers are saying about the product, the sales team understands what challenges prospects face on a daily basis, and senior management can likely offer broader perspectives on the industry.

People in other departments may be able to see the bigger picture in a way that others cannot. And team members shouldn’t be afraid to speak up, ask questions, and share their experiences. A culture of collaboration serves to leverage the internal pool of untapped talent and subject expertise but also improves internal communication and empowers employees. As a result, silos of data, information, and communication are eliminated.

Share goals

Everybody in the sales organization, from the VP down to the individual sales rep, should share a common vision with buy-in from all employees. What is it that the organization is trying to achieve? What is the end goal? And along with that, it’s important to observe successes. Remember, a win for an individual is a win for the company, and that’s something that everybody should celebrate.

Competition vs Collaboration – Can a Sales Team Do Both?

The best sales teams encourage both collaboration and competition – reps should collaborate with their peers to compete against the industry and the standard quo. Your sales reps should act and function as a ‘team’ – not just a group of revenue-oriented individuals. Collaboration here isn’t about ‘leveling the playing field’ – it’s about helping each rep be their best and work toward a common goal.

And it’s important to note a few things about competition.

1. It doesn’t have to be on an individual level – it can be on a group or team level, or there can be multiple winners.
2. It doesn’t always have to be revenue-based. Competition can also be based around activities, such as emails sent or phone calls made, or based around goals, such as meetings set or number of deals advanced.
3. It doesn’t always have to include a monetary reward. Winners could receive perks such as having a half day off work, getting to choose the location for the next team outing, or receiving an upgrade to their office chair or desk.

The Role of Sales Enablement Technology

Collaboration serves to leverage the internal pool of talent, knowledge, and experience but also improves internal communication and empowers employees. The result is a boost in productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness, driving bottom-line results.

Technology empowers today’s workforces by connecting more employees than ever before. A sales enablement tool such as Seismic improves marketing and sales collaboration and communication by using real-time data from best practices and peers to determine what content is most effective at progressing deals and generating the highest ROI and then surfacing recommended content based on the Salesforce record, right in the CRM and email. This allows sales reps to deliver the right message at the right time and allows them to remain focused on sales objectives, rather than on how to out-perform their peers.

• WeWork pitched itself as a tech firm in the initial public offering documents it released Wednesday.
• Investors tend to pay a premium for tech companies.
• But WeWork's revenues, expenses, cash flow, and assets show that it's not really a tech firm.
• Instead, they show it's clearly a real-estate company.
• Read more WeWork stories here.

WeWork would like potential investors to think of it as a tech firm.

But its numbers tell a different story. No matter if you look at WeWork's revenue and expenses, its assets, or just its cash flow, it looks far more like a real-estate company than a typical tech firm.

The distinction is more than just semantic. The company's valuation in the public markets will be in large part determined by how investors classify it. They tend to be willing to pay a much steeper premium for tech companies than for real-estate firms.

WeWork, or rather the We Company, its corporate parent, certainly pitched itself as a tech firm in the initial public offering paperwork that it released on Wednesday. The document mentions "technology" 93 times, many of them in connection with its business offerings or investments.

Read this: WeWork files for IPO, revealing spiraling losses of $1.6 billion

"We offer a space-as-a-service model that we operationalize by using a global-local playbook powered by technology," We Company said in the part of its IPO filing where it describes its business.

To date, its venture and other investors have bought that line, valuing WeWork like a tech company. With a $47 billion valuation in the private markets, it's worth more than 15 times its annualized sales for this year, a relatively steep valuation considering it has consistently posted losses.

But public investors may have a different take. That's because, as its IPO paperwork makes clear, it's not really in the technology business, no matter how many times it tries to wrap itself in that mantle.

Here's what its financial numbers show:

SEE ALSO: Here are the 5 biggest questions facing WeWork as it prepares for its IPO

Nearly all of WeWork's revenue comes from renting office space.

Last year, the We Company posted $1.8 billion in sales. Of that, $1.7 billion, or 93%, came from memberships and services.

Memberships are basically leases, and they represent the fees WeWork's customers pay to rent space from it. Services are essentially additional fees that get tacked on to customers' rent, for when they use more than their allotment of particular items or for additional products they request related to their office space.

In other words, the We Company's revenue largely resembles that of a landlord.

It's growing revenue from other activities, but tech-related things are just one of them.

Not all of WeWork's revenue comes from memberships and services. It also has a growing amount of its sales coming from "other" sources.

This other revenue comprised nearly 7% of We's sales last year, up from just 2% in 2017. And in the first half of this year, that proportion grew even larger, hitting 12%.

Some of this revenue comes from services that might be classified as having to do with technology. Revenue from Meetup, a startup WeWork acquired in 2017 that helps people and companies organize and schedule in-person meetings, is included within that line item. So too is revenue from Flatiron School, an organization that teaches computer programming.

But much of WeWork's other revenue comes from non-tech-related activities, including such things as selling tickets or sponsorships to events it hosts at its properties and designing office spaces for corporate customers. 

Its business has very low gross margins.

Technology companies, particularly those that focus on software or online services, have nice gross margins because their fixed, direct costs of offering their services are usually fairly low. That means they tend to have a lot of money left over to spend on sales and marketing and research and development — or to deliver to investors in the form of profits and dividends.

Take Google parent Alphabet. Its gross profit margin — the portion of its revenue left over after accounting for its direct costs of offering its products and services — was 56% of its sales last year.

Unlike Alphabet, the We Company doesn't have a "cost of revenue" line on its income statements. But it has something that can serve as a proxy, something it calls its "location operating expenses." Those expenses include the costs it incurs to operate and maintain the spaces it rents to its members and related costs such as insurance on those spaces. It also includes the costs of the services it offers to its tenants, including telephone connections and internet access.

Last year, such costs gobbled up 84% of We's total revenue. In other words, its gross margins — the portion of its revenue it had left over after such costs — were only 16%.

WeWork's gross margins improved in the first half of this year, rising to nearly 20% of sales. But that's still a far cry from those of the typical tech company.

Research and development isn't a primary expense, but one of many.

One of the typical hallmarks of tech companies is that they spend a lot of money on research and development as they try to improve on their existing products and invent new ones. Microsoft, for example, spent more than 13% of its revenue on research last year and Facebook spent a whopping 18%.

Unlike those companies, the We Company doesn't specifically break out how much money it spends on research and development. Instead, it lumps such expenses into a line item it calls "growth and new market development" costs.

A substantial and growing portion of We's revenue is going toward such expenses. It spent $477 million, or 26% of its sales, on growth and new market development last year. That was more than quadruple the amount it spent in 2017, when such expenses accounted for only 12% of its sales.

If all that money was going toward research and development, WeWork would have a good case to make that it is indeed a tech firm. But R&D represents only a portion of such costs, and in its IPO filing, WeWork indicated that they account for only a small portion of them.

Here's how WeWorks describes what's included in its growth and new market development line (emphasis ours). Note how many items it mentions before it gets to technology R&D:

Growth and new market development expenses are expensed as incurred and consist primarily of non-capitalized design, development, warehousing, logistics and real estate costs, expenses incurred researching and pursuing new markets, solutions and services, and other expenses related to the Company's growth and global expansion. These costs include non-capitalized personnel and related expenses for our development, design, product, research, real estate, talent acquisition, mergers and acquisitions, legal, and technology research and development teams and related professional fees and other expenses incurred such as recruiting fees, employee relocation costs, due diligence, integration costs, transaction costs, contingent consideration fair value adjustments relating to acquisitions, and other asset impairments and write-offs.

WeWork spends a lot on property and equipment — but little of that is technology related.

If you scrutinize the cash-flow statement of tech companies, you'll see that they tend to invest significant amounts of money each year in property and equipment. "Property and equipment" is a kind of catch-all phrase for long-lived items, such as land and buildings or computers and routers. Last year, Facebook ploughed $14 billion of cash into such expenses, or about 25% of its revenue.

At least as a portion of revenue, WeWork devotes even more of its cash toward property and equipment. Last year, it used up $2 billion investing in such items, which was nearly $200 million more than its total sales for the year.

But if you look closely at the two companies there are stark differences in the kinds of property and equipment they're purchasing.

At the end of last year, Facebook's total property and equipment was worth nearly $25 billion. More than half of that amount — $13 billion — was in the form of networking equipment. Another $1 billion was comprised of software and office equipment, generally office computers.

By contrast WeWork held about $4.4 billion worth of property and equipment at the end of last year. The vast majority of that — 81% — was in the form of "leasehold improvements," in other words, the finish out it does on the properties it leases — the walls, doors, kitchens, and the like.

Only $371 million, or about 8% of the total, was in the form of equipment generally, a category which could include both tech and non-tech items. It had only about $32 million in software, which was little changed from the year before.

Scott Gillum and I were having one of our usual conversations, the marketing vs. sales conversation. As usual, I thought, Scott is a wickedly smart marketing professional. Somehow those words seem like an oxymoron, but in his case it’s pure truth.

During our conversation, Scott said something that stopped me for a few minutes, “Customers feel value.”

I don’t know it Scott intended it that way, but I felt it at the moment he said it.

And I think the ability for the customers to feel value is probably the ultimate manifestation of value creation.

Think to situations where you have been involved in a major B2B purchase. Probably, the differences in products or solutions was minimal. Any one would have achieve your goals.

Then you reflect on your experience with the sales people. In reality they probably weren’t that different. They did similar things, if they were good, they focused on you and what you were trying to achieve. They may have articulated a value proposition. They may have presented a quantified business case. They each may have brought you insights, they may have helped you think about your business differently.

They were creating value. They were doing the things they should do as great sales professionals.

But the person who stood out, probably the person you bought from was the person that made you feel value.

There was a connection at an emotional level, you felt the sales person “got you,” understood what you faced, not only empathized, but genuinely cared.

When the customer feels value they feel caring. They know they are important to the sales person–not as a vehicle to a transaction or a commission check. But they are important to the sales person as human beings, as individuals, as people. The sales person cares for them.

Each of us has had a buying experience where we have encountered a sales person that is different, a sales person that cares, and through that caring makes us feel value.

Security basics should be part of any MVP. Period

After almost 5 years (at least) of constant media coverage around IoT privacy invasions and security breaches, it is staggering to see some sectors of the tech industry apparently still struggling with those matters.

For many analysts, it all boils down to costs; for others, to the limitations inherent to the size of some sensors and the amount of functionality which can be coded on them.

Both aspects are obviously linked (more powerful chips cost more), but the situation is probably more complex and rooted in deeper problems.

First of all, the security of any IoT product should be seen as a functionality, not an add-on, and treated as an inherent component of any use case. Basic security good practices will vary depending on the usage of the product but should be part of any MVP.

So why is it not the case, with so many products?

Let’s eliminate the issue of costs first of all: Yes, security costs money, but when launching a product, every functionality does. The costs issue hides in reality a fundamental prioritization problem, and the perception by product developers that customers will value other functionalities more. Research has started to emerge over the past few years showing that, in fact, this is less and less the case.

Rush-to-market is also often cited as a cause, but again that points more towards a prioritization failure. An insecure product should not be seen as a viable, market-ready product.

This should not be seen as a side topic in cyber security conversations: The Internet of Things is becoming a cornerstone of the digital transformation in many domains. While some security breaches can be laughable, others can have devastating consequences, for example in the healthcare industry.

It is really the culture of some sectors of the tech world which is under the spotlights here, and with it, the short-termism of some of its investors.

Of course, failure to take this seriously and act can only lead to politicians and regulators involving themselves further to protect consumers and citizens. We highlighted it in a 2015 white paper, and beyond the measures already triggered by GDPR where personal data is involved, this is now starting to happen across a broader spectrum of the tech landscape.

Frankly, given the virulence and widespread nature of cyber threats, the need to take security seriously and embed it natively into IoT products should be seen as a simple matter of common sense for product developers and investors. Beyond good ethics, it has quite simply become a matter of good business.

Originally published here.

Have you noticed we’re always talking about what women are doing wrong in business?

We cite statistics like women earn 48.5% of law degrees and 47.5% of medical degrees; yet, only make up 23% of law partners and only 40% of physicians and surgeons.

We talk about how women comprise 47% of the U.S. labor force but when it comes to management and executive positions women represent only 38% of managers in business and under 5% of the CEOs in the Fortune 500.

Pundits say it’s because women either lack confidence, competence, ambition, or a combination of all three. Bestsellers like Lean In or Nice Girls Don’t Get The Corner Office perpetuate these misguided notions.

However, the truth about why women aren’t succeeding in the workplace is far different. If you read, former Google and Facebook marketer Marissa Orr’s book Lean Out, Orr shows the reasons for women’s purported lack of confidence, competence, and ambition are really myths.

The confidence myth

Women do not lack confidence. You only need to look at the McKinsey study of Women in the Workplace 2016 to see the evidence. In the report, men and women agree in equal numbers— 87% each—that they are confident.

Orr says the problem for women is not confidence. The problem is that confidence has been mischaracterized in business as bluster and loudness. The loudest person in the room is seen as confident.

Confidence is not the problem. The definition is the problem. The definition for confidence needs to widen to include people who believe in themselves without demanding all eyes on them.

The competence myth

Women definitely do not lack competency. If you look at the number of degrees women earn, you can see they are prepared as men—maybe even more so. Women earn 57% of the undergraduate degrees, 59% of the master’s degrees, and almost the same amount of law and medical degrees.

Yet, when it comes to hiring, women are overlooked. In studies where the same resume is submitted with a male name and a female name, the male name is called in for interviews more often.

Orr says the problem is not competency. The problem is competence in business is usually associated with self-promotion. Since there are few objective measures for many knowledge-based jobs, the people who self-promote are seen as competent.

The ambition myth

Women don’t lack ambition either. If you consider going after raises and promotions as a sign of ambition, men and women are equally ambitious. In the McKinsey study Women in the Workplace 2018, men and women went for raises and promotions in equal numbers: 29% of men and 31% of women negotiated a raise, and 36% of men and 37% of women negotiated for a promotion.

Women want promotions. However, when it comes to promotions women are passed over. Women are promoted 79 times for every 100 men. This results in a gender imbalance in management: 62% men and 38% women.

It’s not that women lack ambition to be promoted or earn more money. They are not being chosen for those positions.

So what’s the solution?

If women are just as confident, competent, and ambitious as men, then what’s the problem? Why aren’t women succeeding like men? Orr says for women to succeed in the workplace, the corporate environment needs to change. We need to change what’s valued and rewarded at work.

Instead of just valuing competition in the workplace, which favors men, we should value collaboration too. Real metrics should be developed to measure people’s competitive AND collaborative contributions to the job—just as they do in sports. In basketball, for example, players’ contributions for points scored and for assists are both valued.

In the end, Orr says if we start to place emphasis on collaboration in our hiring, evaluation, and promotional practices, the result will be more gender diversity at all levels in our organizations. Not only will there be more women in management and executive positions, but the diversity will also result in higher returns at the end of each quarter.

They say good judgment is the result of prior lousy judgment. That idea has proven true for me over the course of my life in sales. The following stories of nine mistakes are all true, and the name of the person responsible is known to you and cannot be changed to protect the guilty.

1. Buying Clients: I was very young with a flush expense account to entertain clients or prospects. I had called on a contact at a large company in Century City to schedule a meeting, but all my attempts ended badly. I decided to ask the contact for lunch, and she agreed. She ordered two appetizers, two meals, and two desserts. The second of each course was her dinner later that night. She said hardly a word at lunch. However, by saying nothing, she said everything. Although you will see it done from time to time, you can’t buy clients.
2. Not Checking for Competitive Threats: After five or six sales calls with a decision-maker, I gained a verbal commitment and scheduled to pick up a contract the following week. Instead, I received a call that he had chosen my competitor. After I had left the building, a competitor presented and showed hi something I didn’t offer. He liked what he saw and changed his mind. I never asked what other options he was considering or if he had seen anything he wanted that I hadn’t shared with him.
3. Selling Price from Behind: My price was always higher than my competitor’s prices. My strategy was to build the value up before disclosing my higher price as a way to validate it. I had not yet thought of the difference being a more significant investment in the client’s solution, though that is what it was. At some point, I started explaining to prospective clients in the first meeting that my price was higher than my competitors, and the difference in price was how we invested in improving their results. I built the value through the rest of the process. It’s hard to see a higher price at the end of the sale—even when it serves your client to invest.
4. Big Logos: My small company and I won a lot of huge, well-known clients. I created a slide with all the big logos and added them to a slide deck I used to explain our offerings. Many people were impressed. Several smaller prospects, however, had a negative response to the logos. One of them said, “I believe we might be too small for your company.” I protested, explaining that we were also a small company. What I did not understand for some time was that some clients were looking at the list and recognizing the risk of other, much larger, much more prestigious company they were sure would get the attention they needed. You have to know your audience, and the proof you need should match the client’s concern, not create a new one.
5. The Front Door Is Locked: I started by calling on people in Human Resources. Most of them would tell me they already had a partner, and that my services were not needed. Some of them would meet with me to learn enough about my company to be able to tell other people on their team, we were not a good fit—and to protect their incumbent. So instead of walking through the front door, I very literally started walking in the back door of buildings and finding the person who used the service I provided. I found my way to the people who wanted better results and were not married to my competitor. The people guarding the front door found out they were going to be using us only after the decision was made by someone who wasn’t getting what they wanted.
6. Assuming What’s Important: I had a meeting with a client that took me seven years to obtain. To prepare, I read the last three years of their annual reports, including the Chairman’s letters. Having done my homework, I had a list of their three biggest, most strategic initiatives. When I sat down with my contact, I started to describe how my solution could help with the strategic initiatives. He asked me where I came up with those initiatives, and I told him. He replied, “No one in this building cares about any of that. I need people who can drive forklifts. Can you get me those people.” Never one to avoid a necessary change of plans, I quickly said “yes,” without another word about the Chairman’s letter. I overshot the mark by not knowing my audience.
7. Big Does Not Mean Dream Client: At the time, my largest client was spending millions of dollars with my firm. They were always late on their bill, and they were not good partners. There were many people on their leadership team who brutal to my people—and tried very hard to be tough on me, but lacking in effectiveness due to my demeanor in conflict. At some point, I had enough of how they treated my people and their lack of payment. The CEO of the company told me if I ever asked again or mentioned how they handled my people, he would fire me (using much more colorful language and what he thought was a threatening tone). I calmly told him I expected him to pay me, and that I was sending them the thirty-days notice canceling our contract. The money spent doesn’t mean your client is a dream client.
8. New Stakeholder: After serving a client for seven years, they hired a new person into a role with authority over my program. The new stakeholder’s power grew as some of my contacts moved out of the company, always taking my team with them because of the better results we provided them. The new stakeholder wanted to make a name for themselves and decided to attack my company and me over our pricing. I defended the investment they were making and did my best to explain why they had made it in the first place. When this stakeholder had the opportunity, they removed us from the company. We continued to work on the stakeholders who knew us, and because of the decisions the new stakeholder made, within a year she was gone. We were back. Because we held so many relationships and did such good work, we suffered from the false illusion that we were safe. We were not.
9. Not Leading: As a young leader, I found it challenging to get the results I need through others. I started with a terrible premise. I assumed that all people were just like me, self-starters, needing no direction or leadership. That plan, as you might have guessed, was a disaster. I doubled down on that bet by hiring experienced people and compensating them so I wouldn’t have to lead them. The results were even worse. After spending too much time and way too much money, I accepted that everything was my fault, and I started to lead.

There is no substitute for experience when it comes to your growth and development. You can learn as much from your mistakes as you can your successes if you derive the lessons and avoid them in the future. What mistakes have you made, and what did you learn from them?

The post Professional Development: 9 Lessons I Learned in the Worst Way appeared first on The Sales Blog.

The multiple layers of the marketing funnel can bring frustration to even the most seasoned of marketers. There are many chances for leads to fall through, but an equal number of opportunities for a sale to close.

Since its fruition, there have been numerous variations of the classic marketing funnel — some proven to be more profitable than others. The most lucrative of all is one that seeks to improve your bottom line though a data-driven approach to finding worthwhile, quality leads and closing deals

Marketing funnels that integrate an intent driven marketing approach see better and stronger results. Intent data, in general, helps makes the transition from prospect to client informed and straightforward. With this approach, you can improve your performance with IQOs.

What is an IQO?

An IQO is an Intent Qualified Opportunity. Rather than your typical lead, IQOs are a new and different approach to marketing and sales that provide a more in-depth look at your target accounts. Intent data promises more precision with its quality over quantity strategy that ensures that you know who’s actually in-market to buy, and where they fit into your marketing funnel so you can customize your marketing messaging appropriately.

IQOs yield a wealth of valuable information about your prospect, such as:

• Intent Location
• Domain
• Intent source
• Intent score
• Devices researching
• Ads served
• Top keywords
• Top sites visited

How Do We Determine IQOs?

The process of determining is through Intent Scoring.

An Intent Score above 75 means that the prospect is further along in the sales cycle. We recommend you send the prospect to sales, so they can begin reaching out to them.

An Intent Score of below 75 with 1^st Party Intent means that the prospect is showing intent and have been interacting with various facets your site. Those with 1^st Party Intent should also be sent over to sales for further contact.

Lastly, an Intent Score below 75 with 3^rd Party Intent consists of prospects that have shown intent for a product similar to yours, but haven’t directly interacted with your product or service. . The next step here would be to place the prospect on the right sequence in Salesforce in order to get them to 1^st party intent.

After determining the Intent Score and process, you can determine precisely where your prospect falls in the marketing funnel, and what your next steps should look like.

Close More Deals with a Data-driven Approach

Using intent data in your marketing funnel vastly improves your sales team’s chances of closing deals. Rather than grasping at straws, you can study real-time data and information about the client and pursue them based on that intel; creating a higher likelihood that the client will pursue you back.




Twitter is an amazing platform to not only build community and brand awareness but also to generate leads and increase sales! Yes, smart and social savvy marketers know how to generate sales using Twitter.

However, to do this you must understand that Twitter is not designed as a spamming platform. You can’t just hop on Twitter and start spamming URLs to your website, blog or sales page.

Instead, you need to design and implement a well thought out and tested conversion funnel that helps you organically attract, inspire and engage your ideal customer. You need to inspire them to pay attention to you in a way that builds trust, nurtures relationships and helps you convert the business to the desired state over time.

Learning how to increase conversions and sales using Twitter requires both art and science. There are many features within the walls of Twitter than can help you convert more sales. You can tap into the power of Twitter ads, Twitter video, Twitter lists and more.

However, what many marketers do not understand is that what you do off of Twitter is as important, if not more important as what you do on Twitter. Having an integrated, social and digital platform that is ready for the social savvy and mobile customer is a requirement, not an option for brands looking to generate leads and sales using Twitter. If your blog, website, content and engagement strategies suck, your conversions on Twitter will be the same.

Take a listen to episode 202 of the Social Zoom Factor podcast to learn 14 tips and strategies to increase sales and conversions using Twitter. Included are 14 ideas you can implement TODAY to help you increase the ROI of the time and resource you invest in Twitter.

In this 25 minute podcast you will learn:

• 14 strategies and tactics to generate leads, increase sales and conversions using Twitter
• How to tap into features such as Twitter advertising, Twitter cards, Twitter lists to increase sales
• Using Twitter, blog content and other social media posts for A/B testing to increase conversions
• Leverage Twitter analytics for optimized results
• Using web analytics such as Google Analytics to optimize conversions and sales
• How to use Twitter to learn more about your audience and ideal customer
• Importance of a good content strategy and plan to increase sales
• Avoiding spammy tactics to ensure positive brand perception

In 2015, a CMO.com headline declared, “Days of ‘Spray and Pray’ Marketing Are Done.”

While we may not yet have heard the death rattle for marketing campaigns that blast out generic messages far and wide in the hopes that someone will notice, more than one nail is in the coffin.

Since the 1990s, B2B marketers have recognized the potential for taking a more targeted, one-on-one approach that emphasized a personalized interaction with each customer. The challenge, however, was implementation. We lacked the tools to scale the operation effectively.

Today, with access to Big Data, marketing automation, robust CRM systems, personalization, content management, predictive analytics, social listening and artificial intelligence, the opportunity is within reach. These tools empower marketers to support sales and target key accounts with tailored messaging.

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is the realization of one-to-one marketing.

It’s been nearly 15 years since ITSMA coined the term Account Based Marketing, making this the perfect time to ask: What is the state of ABM today? Where is it going? And is it really changing the way we sell?

So, Is ABM Working?

We reviewed several benchmark reports on the state of ABM, and while the numbers differ slightly in each depending on the phraseology of the questions, the trends are clear.

The majority of companies today have implemented some form of ABM, with roughly 10% or fewer admitting that they have no current plans to adopt ABM.

But while most companies are doing something, ABM is still in its infancy. ITSMA’s 2018 ABM Benchmark Study finds that 52% of companies have had ABM in place for a year or less. Another 32% say they have been doing ABM for one to two years. Engagio and Salesforce Pardot’s 2019 ABM Market Research Report shows only 4.6% have had an ABM program in place for more than two years.

But there’s good news that should encourage companies to press forward. ITSMA ‘s 2018 ABM Benchmark Study states:

• 45% of companies that have had ABM in place for less than three years report significantly higher ROI.
• And of the 17% of companies with three or more years of experience with ABM, 80% are seeing significantly higher ROI.

Given these results, it’s not surprising that companies are devoting a significant and increasing portion of their budgets to ABM. The 2019 ABM Market Research Report reveals:

• On average, 29% of marketing budget dollars are devoted to ABM
• The amount budgeted for ABM is expected to rise by 8% this year

Demand Gen vs. ABM

As companies continue to gear up their ABM, marketing is understandably slow to move away from existing programs, most notably demand gen.

According to the 2018 ABM Benchmark Survey Report, 45% of respondents still prioritize their demand gen efforts over ABM, and just 15% of companies are focused on ABM almost exclusively.

But what the Engagio study shows is that as many as 64.8% of companies may be integrating their demand gen and ABM strategies.

So here’s your key takeaway: If your sales funnel is working…if you’re qualifying and converting healthy numbers of leads…and if you have some products and services with short, transactional or online sales cycles, then demand gen makes sense.

But if you also have high-dollar value products and services that require months of working with a buying team, it’s good to know that many companies are successful in blending ABM into their current marketing programs.

How you allocate your marketing and sales resources between demand gen and ABM will depend on your business model and your revenue split.

Benefits and Challenges Looking Forward

While ROI is important, it’s only one of the advantages that companies using ABM report. Also worth consideration:

• Better alignment between marketing and sales—This is key. Marketing and sales are communicating and collaborating. They’re breaking down traditional departmental silos to work strategically—with mutually agreed-upon objectives. This alignment signals a shift in corporate culture toward increased interdepartmental cooperation and communication. Their coordinated efforts mean a potential for higher ROI for sellers and a better, more consultative experience for buyers.
• More personalization and customization—Custom messaging speaks more directly to prospective customers’ specific needs, pain points and objectives. It’s also a strategic move away from generic messaging focused on lead generation to addressing accounts one on one.
• More focused and cost-effective customer acquisition process—While inbound marketing and demand gen moved marketing away from traditional spray-and-pray tactics, ABM is the next generation. If demand gen can be likened to fishing with a net—sweeping up massive numbers of leads—ABM is spearfishing. It’s a proactive, analytical outbound activity that targets accounts that are a good fit for a company’s products and services.
• More efficient use of marketing resources—Marketing can focus more of its time and budget on those accounts most likely to drive revenue.

But you still can expect bumps along the road. Survey respondents cite problems identifying key metrics and assigning attribution. Getting executive buy-in also is critical and requires selling management on the benefits.

But the number one challenge is execution. First, there’s the heavy lifting associated with building a framework that helps sales and marketing prioritize and score key accounts. Second, ABM requires massive coordination of many moving parts across departments — in particular, delivering enough custom content to educate targeted accounts at all stages of the buyer’s journey.

What You Can Do

If you’re still on the fence about ABM or unsure how to build a viable program, here are a few ideas to help you. Focus ABM on:

• High value accounts with potential for significant lifetime value
• Large buying teams and multiple decision-makers
• Long, complex sales cycles
• Opportunities to grow within the account through renewals, upsells and cross-selling into other departments

Identify meaningful KPIs

Rather than wasting energy proving marketing works, focus on measurements that help improve decisions. Look at engagement — contribution to the pipeline, number of qualified accounts, net-new accounts and meetings set. Then measure win-rates, revenue and attribution.

Of course, measuring attribution is easier said than done. It can be especially challenging when your customer’s journey meanders online and offline, goes through multiple channels, takes months or years and involves a large buying committee. Yet all of these issues are typical for companies implementing ABM.

To create a good attribution model, you need to identify the user touchpoints, such as website visits and email opens, which contribute to your desired outcomes. Then define the business results you want to achieve. To make sure you can make rapid course corrections, include top and mid-funnel measurements, such as MQLs, meetings and demos, along with bottom-funnel revenues. After all, sales and profits could be months or years in the making. You can’t afford to wait that long to make changes that have the potential to optimize results.

Blend marketing strategies

Take a lesson from the companies that are integrating marketing strategies (in particular demand gen and ABM). There is no magic bullet or one-size-fits-all approach, and demand gen is still best for low-value, online and transactional sales. And take a more expansive approach to ABM. In addition to the most strategic, one-to-one accounts—where marketers work with individual account teams to develop highly customized content and programs—consider:

• One-to-few ABM: Marketing and sales teams focus on small clusters of similar accounts to scale their content and messaging on accounts with related attributes and needs. For example, you might want to cater an event that targets a market segment rather than a single account.
• One-to-many ABM: Marketing and sales departments align their efforts to define the types of accounts that are the best fit and rely on technology to engage, personalize and track results. One way to do this is to use Vidyard video. It enables you to customize the content, so the video appears to be created for an individual even though you’re sending it to hundreds or thousands of target accounts.

Invest in your teams

Allocate more budget to data and analytics, support collaboration, and provide the resources needed for content creation.

ABM is changing the B2B go-to-market strategy with a more proactive, outbound effort coordinated across departments and targeting accounts (not leads) with more revenue potential.

At the same time, it’s flexible enough to work in tandem with other marketing initiatives to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.

Finally, and most importantly, interdepartmental alignment is breaking down traditional departmental silos and encouraging a change in corporate culture that is stimulating greater efficiency and cost savings while enhancing the customer experience.

What is it about your business that appeals to customers? You might think it’s the high-quality products you make. Another good guess would be the stellar services you provide.

In reality, it’s something else altogether: the unforgettable experiences you deliver.

Of course, measuring the effectiveness of your experiences can be difficult—especially when you’re collaborating with several internal teams, leveraging multiple tools, and engaging with prospects and customers across numerous channels.

But the success of your account-based marketing (ABM) strategy depends on it. For your ABM campaigns to truly thrive, you must be able to measure your efforts, analyze how they’re moving you toward your goals, and optimize your approach to boost results.

Here are a few helpful tips about gathering the insights you need to prove and improve the impact of your account-based experiences (ABX).

Success At Every Level

To ensure successful ABX, you can’t just measure your campaign’s success after deployment. You need to collect the right metrics at every stage of your campaign—and each stage demands different metrics for measuring success.

Whether you’re driving awareness using channels such as social and web personalization or developing leads with executive outreach and webinars, your ABM metrics should be tracked according to the type of marketing initiative.

Let’s take a look at what type of metrics are suited to each stage of the marketing funnel:

Top-Of-Funnel Metrics

In the awareness stage, it’s likely too early to be measuring ROI-centric metrics. Instead, your focus should be on accounts’ engagement with your widespread marketing initiatives. 

This includes identifying how many people are engaging with your social activity, what effect web personalization has on your website visitors, and what kind of impressions and click-through rates your ads are receiving. 

Using these metrics, you can identify areas to optimize your engagement channels and highlight which accounts to guide down the marketing funnel.

Middle-Of-Funnel Metrics

During this stage, you’ll develop leads and accounts captured by your awareness initiatives, so it’s critical you measure account penetration metrics on how accounts are engaging and what’s driving them toward making a purchase.

You need to identify which prospects are opening emails and clicking on the links within them, which users keep returning to your website, and which accounts are repeatedly engaging with your webinars, blogs, and other content.

When you use these metrics to identify what’s working, you can adapt your ABM tactics to continue driving success across your channels.

Bottom-Of-Funnel Metrics

At the final stage of your ABM campaign, you need to gather metrics that measure your overall success, including your campaign’s final ROI.

This involves metrics such as opportunities created and their value to your sales team, total revenue gained from new accounts, and a list of which marketing initiatives generated the most engagement over the course of your campaign.

With these account-level metrics identified, you can use the information to plan future campaigns, prove the success of your omnichannel ABM approach, and develop a strategy to retain the new customers you’ve secured.

Get Our Definitive Guide To ABM

Measuring success throughout your ABM campaign becomes simpler when you adopt a comprehensive ABM solution. With robust analytics and dashboards that give you full visibility of your omnichannel ABM strategy, you can drive greater engagement with your target accounts.

The post How To Measure Account-Based Marketing Success appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Case studies are for closers. Blogs, e-books, and webinars certainly have their own place in your marketing strategy, but case studies—when done correctly—are the most effective type of content for converting your contacts into paying customers.

Why are case studies are so powerful? In the decision stage of the Buyer’s Journey, your prospects are wrestling over whether or not they should trust you with their money. If we sign this contract are they going to deliver?

When you have case studies that report real results from real customers, you immediately give your leads a reason to trust you, and more importantly, a reason to confidently sign on the dotted line.

If you work for a professional service company, follow each of these four steps and soon you’ll be creating case studies that actually close deals.

1. Choose the Right Client

Financial advisors, lawyers, and accountants know this mantra well: Relationships are the key to sales. And in this instance, relationships are the key to a successful case study.

Before you move an inch, you need to find a willing (and worthy) participant. Start by asking yourself these two questions:

• Who are your most successful clients?
• Which clients do you have the best relationship with?

The perfect case study candidate is where this Venn diagram overlaps. Happy clients that know you well will not only be willing to participate, but will also help you produce the highest quality of content—something that’s worth showing off on your website.

When you present your best client relationship as a case study, you’ll attract more ideal clients that are cut from the same cloth.

2. Ask the Right Questions

When asking questions during the interview process, keep in mind that the case study should be relevant to several of your buyer personas—not just the specific customer you’ve chosen to feature. The majority of your leads should be able read the content and think, That sounds just like us. To accomplish this, ask general, open-ended questions like these:

• What was the pain point you were looking to solve?
• How were you trying to solve the problem before working with us?
• Why did you choose our solution?
• What happened when you started using our service?

Prospects reading your case study already know they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution. Your mission is to gather information that will show them your company and service are the right solution.

3. Create the Right Message

When creating awareness and consideration stage content, you should very rarely talk about your own company. Even though case studies (decision stage content) are the green light to do some self-promotion, there’s still a right and wrong way to approach this.

When writing the narrative of this success story, remember that your client is the hero, not you. This is their story. Keep this basic storytelling structure in mind when creating the copy:

• A client wanted something.
• A problem or obstacle got in the way.
• A guide (that’s you) stepped in and gave them a plan.
• An action plan led them to success.

As a professional services company, the story of your case study should present your company as a trusted guide. Your expert, knowledge-based services help your clients overcome obstacles so they can get what they want. Properly positioning yourself as the guide—not the hero—is the secret to building trust with a case study.

4. Use the Right Implementation

Now that you’ve created a proper (and powerful) case study, you’ve got a weapon that needs to be used wisely. For best implementation, follow these inbound marketing techniques carefully:

• Place a call to action (CTA) at the end of the case study with an offer to speak with your team or request a demo.
• Repurpose your case study into several pieces of content such as videos, infographics, and webpages in order to maximize reach.
• Promote the case study in consideration stage blogs that are relevant to the topic of the case study.
• Build a library of case studies on your website to show that you weren’t just a one-hit-wonder.
• Feature and link to the case study toward the end of the sequence in lead nurturing emails.

Remember, the right message used at the wrong time is the wrong message. If you want your leads to trust you, don’t present the case study to a contact until it answers the question that they’re already asking.

The Takeaway

As a professional services company, trust is the name of the game. Creating a case study—one that makes your customer look like the hero—will give your leads the confidence they need to pull out their wallets.

At the end of 2018, Gartner identified five critical priorities the majority of sales leaders wanted to address and invest in for 2019. Let’s revisit them and see how you’re stacking up so far.

Prospects are dodging sales communications at greater and greater rates. 

Armed with better filters on their email inboxes and cell phones, they can block just about any sales message. Which means email open rates and call connect rates are dropping.

This should make every sales leader nervous. It makes me nervous, too. 

The question is, What should we do about it?

I believe that answer can be found by looking at what’s driving the incremental declines in “top line” conversation rates across the Sales Development profession: automation and saturation. 

You see, it’s easier than ever to automate email blasts and spoof local area codes with your power-dialer software. 

The problem is, buyers know that, and they’ve upped their game in response. We need to up ours as well. 

Robots can now do what used to need to be done only by people. Now we need to ask, What can’t automation do yet?

This is the next frontier of the human-powered Sales Development team — sales skills that go beyond automation, sales tactics that engage on a human level.

In this article, we’re going to dive into why this is so important, and how social selling and storytelling in sales can help you make that human touch.

You’ll also learn how I see this playing out — the future of Sales Development, if you will. And along the way, I’ll share some actionable tips for making sure you stay ahead of this trend.

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

• Social selling & brand
• The perspective shift: storytelling in sales
• How do we get there?
• How can we move to story-led sales development?
• How do we implement this on your sales team?

Social Selling & Brand

The answer to the difficulties we’re experiencing is: brand. 

What do I mean by “brand”? I mean content. Perspective. Interpretation. Education. Social Selling. 

Whatever you want to call it, it’s all pointing toward the same thing — and that’s to build a powerful, trustworthy brand.

Let’s get one thing straight: interruption-based prospecting still works just fine. 

I’ve been running teams for years now that set 1000+ appointments per year for AE teams. It works. Cold calling is NOT dead. Nor is cold email. Nothing is “dead.” I’m just talking about improvements and net-new strategies.

This is a way to add 15-30% to your monthly numbers, and hedge your skillset against future defenses put up by prospects, who are trying their best to prevent you from getting into their inbox or phone.

You can programmatically display ads offering a white paper, but you can’t automate the interpretation of that white paper’s advice, put it in the context of one particular buyer’s role at their company, help them understand when the right time is to read it, or help them have confidence in who it is on their team that should be spearheading that effort.

That requires a human touch.

The Perspective Shift

It means that SDRs should think of themselves as the “last-mile branding team.”

Instead of an appointment-setter, a high-power SDR is, among other things, a skilled marketer who happens to have a quota of SQLs instead of MQLs.

To take a page out of the Challenger Sale playbook: it’s the SDR’s job to take the Commercial Teaching proposition of the company — NOT the features list! — and make that relevant to their individual prospects in a way that simply can’t be done at scale by automation or by a centralized marketing team.

One way to think of it is this… 

SDRs should be: 

• Defining their personal brand
• Understanding the company brand
• Integrating the two
• And building their sales process based on that combination

If you’re a sophisticated sales leader, you’re probably already doing this and thinking, “So far, this guy hasn’t said anything new!” 

First, congrats, because 95% of sales teams aren’t doing this. You’re on the right track. 

Second, keep reading, because we could all use help in amplifying the core value proposition of the brand-led SDR across their organization.

How Do We Get There?

To start, we need to rebuild the bridge that we’ve been burning with Marketing all these years.

Case in point: I worked with one sales team whose relationship with Marketing was so poor, they advised me to disguise a marketing services proposal as an outsourced sales proposal, so that they could get it approved without going through Marketing.

Yikes. We should all be working TOGETHER, not fighting like this.

I see SDRs of the future being trained by marketing as well as by sales, regardless of who they report to. 

And hey, let’s face it, marketers (bless them) are usually pretty poor at sales work, just as salespeople make terrible marketers. But they have a lot to offer to the SDR role — because Sales Development combines elements of what marketing and sales are both good at.

Next, SDRs need new to start developing two new skills that are very familiar to creative, brand, and marketing folks: storytelling and copywriting.

Let me put this in perspective. I’m not talking about being able to write film scripts (though that wouldn’t hurt!). 

I’m talking about replacing features-based cold call language (“Our product does X Y and Z”) with stories that start with, “One customer I helped this past Summer….”

I’m talking about telling stories on social media, especially LinkedIn. 

I’m talking about innovating on the email templates you were given by your manager, to make them your own so they sound authentic.

How Can We Move to Story-led Sales Development?

Humans are wired for stories, not spreadsheets. And that hurts me to say because I personally LOVE spreadsheets. But I love stories more: it’s biology.

Educating prospects like this helps them picture themselves as the hero of their own journey. THEY are the hero, NOT you and your product. 

Storytelling for sales is an enormously helpful skill to build, and while I can’t capture it all here and whole books have been written about it, here are some basic rules to live by, based on the work of today’s top storytellers. 

7 Rules for Storytelling in Sales

These rules are pulled from Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling. As you read them, think about the Pixar movies you’ve seen, and make the connection to what you do every day as a salesperson.

1. You admire a character for TRYING more than for their SUCCESS

Real talk: when you only talk about how your case study customers breezed to a 2000% ROI when they adopted your product, you’re not convincing anybody. You’re causing the prospect to be skeptical, and you’re making their eyes glaze over while you’re at it. 

Don’t gloss over the struggle your customers experienced. Make your product a supporting character in that story — not the protagonist.

2. What’s FUN to write might differ from what’s INTERESTING to your AUDIENCE

Please stop spitting out the same templated promotional content without thinking about it. Stop talking about how much of a quota-crusher you are, and how you’re a top AE who always makes it to the president’s club. 

That may be fun for you, but unless your audience is “other salespeople,” they won’t identify with it, and they certainly don’t care or find it interesting.

3. What is your character GOOD at and comfortable with? Throw them the opposite!

Here are some examples of taking a “character” (your prospect) out of their comfort zone in a positive way:

Example #1: You sell martech allowing VPs of Marketing & Social Media Directors to attribute Google Maps search data to in-store purchases. 

They haven’t done this before, so you use stories to talk about how specific marketers have improved their skillsets as professionals, and didn’t just “wing it,” and succeeded immediately. 

In this example, you don’t act like everyone is falling over themselves to adopt your product. That’s likely not true, and prospects won’t believe you.

Example #2: You sell retail packaging IoT SaaS to enterprise CPG Marketing & Supply Chain executives. 

How did the supply chain leaders start to see themselves as marketers? How did the marketers start thinking more deeply about personalization, transparency, and corporate sustainability than before? Why did that benefit both them and their whole company?

Tell these stories. Help your market understand how others like them have grown out of their comfort zone, and why they should too. And by the way, how you can help them do that.

4. Look at the stories you love. Pull them apart. Figure out why you like them.

Look at the call scripts and templates you’ve been working with. Do you secretly hate them? Great, start looking elsewhere. 

What ads, brands, salespeople do you absolutely love? Write down why you love them. I’ll bet they’re following a lot of these rules, and not just going around spitting out features and talking about themselves.

5. Give your characters OPINIONS. Passive and malleable is boring. Polarize!

This is HUGE, in my opinion. If you’re just a corporate shill, I can probably use clever technology and low-paid admin folks to automate your job. If you’re a thoughtful salesperson with business acumen, and you have opinions that polarize others — if you take a STAND, and you’re bold — then you’re worth your weight in gold.

It’s not just okay to foster disagreement, it’s encouraged. 

Don’t be a clickbaiter, but I hereby give you permission to get your prospects’ tempers up a notch. They should feel something!

6. What are the STAKES? Give the audience a reason to ROOT FOR the character.

This is a classic Challenger Sale technique. Your product solves a big problem, and people don’t often realize how big of a problem that is. 

Hopefully, when you started reading this article, I made you a little more nervous than you’ve been up to now about your long-term job success as a leader or an individual contributor. I did that by reminding you of Gmail filtering and iOS cell phone call auto-blocking technology. That was my way of deepening your perspective on how big of a problem this is.

Do the same for your prospects. Use your stories to communicate how important the problem is.

Talk about other customers who were up against serious challenges — losing budget, losing their job, their company declining, whatever it is — yet ended up looking like an absolute BADASS, a HERO, because of the journey you helped them go through. 

In this story, your product is merely the sword in the stone — not King Arthur.

7. If you were this character, how would YOU FEEL? Honesty brings credibility.

This one is simple but difficult. If you hate your sales outreach cadence, prospects hate it even more. If you genuinely don’t understand what you’re selling, the impact of it, or the ways you’ve truly changed lives and helped people as a result — if you don’t FEEL it — then you can’t really communicate that feeling to others. 

Make your prospects feel what it will be like for them to go through the struggles (as well as the successes) when they adopt your solution. 

If you guess at these parts of the story instead of getting them authentically right, then your story won’t be believable and your prospects won’t trust you.

How Do We Implement This On My Sales Team, Right Away?

Here are some tangible techniques you can run with right away:

1. Integrate storytelling into your call scripts.

Collaborate with marketing to go deeper into your customer stories than you did before, digging out the emotional data: 

• What did the struggles feel like? 
• How did the nervousness during onboarding make way for relief? 
• What was the joyful impact of their success as a customer of yours? 

The next time you get an objection during your demo or your cold call, instead of talking about percentage-increases in particular KPIs, tell 20- to 30-second stories in the format I gave you above. You’ll create real emotional impact.

2. Post valuable content on LinkedIn.

This is one of RevenueZen’s most powerful secret weapons. If you get a whole team — AEs, SDRs, Marketers, VPs of Sales & Marketing — aligned with this brand-led social selling strategy based on storytelling, and you’re all speaking your authentic, knowledgeable truth within the circles that your prospects live and work, then you’ll create: 

• Buzz
• Additional inbound lead flow
• Increased opportunity win rates

And you’ll have more fun, too.

If you don’t believe me, look at what Drift has done with LinkedIn content, or send me an email and I’ll show you examples of leaders and salespeople that are excelling with this strategy with our help (shout-out to people like Justin and Kevin at PatientPop, Amy Volas who runs Avenue Talent Partners, and Dale Dupree “The Copier Warrior,” who all excel at this!). 

Think about what thousands of additional connections, hundreds of thousands of engagements and post views, and all those new leads, could do for your quota.

3. Whatever you do, make sure you stand out.

As an individual salesperson, your North Star throughout all of this should be to be different. 

If you’re just one of the crowd and your messaging and techniques look very similar to peers in other industries (or even your competitors), you’re more in danger than ever of an innovative tech company disrupting your job or allowing it to be offshored. 

And in the short term, you’re not going to be as successful with quota as you otherwise could be.

If you’re a sales or marketing leader, you should be thinking about how to empower your team members to stand out too. Since you can’t really do it for them, you can just lead by example.

If you’re a founder or executive, you already know how beneficial it is to stand out: You competed aggressively for your investment funding and initial customers, and you understand the power of having a brand (or the struggle of not having a strong brand!).

Closing Thoughts

Now you have another strategy in your toolbox, and hopefully, you’ll go back to your sales playbook with fresh eyes, trying to integrate these principles of social selling and storytelling into your process. 

Keep your focus squarely on communicating authentic, rich stories to your prospects about what they should consider, and what they can accomplish, and you’ll do well.

The post The Power of Social Selling (+ 7 Rules for Storytelling in Sales) appeared first on Sales Hacker.

We believe the fuel that powers the world’s most exceptional products is customer experience. To drive progress and build a better experience for your customers, they need a seat at the table.

We believe the fuel that powers the world’s most exceptional products is customer experience. To drive progress and build a better experience for your customers, they need a seat at the table.

Every decision and action you take needs to start with the customer’s experience. You need to understand their expected outcomes from using your product, address their specific needs and use-cases, and provide the solutions to help them succeed.

To create an environment where employees can listen to the customer and invent for the customer, brands invest in Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs. A deep-level understanding of the customer ensures the business goals our closely aligned to customer interests.

Despite the considerable value they offer organizations. Many companies fail to treat VoC programs seriously. Executives often fail to see where the voice of customer efforts turn into action and more importantly, an increase in revenue performance.

We feel this needs to change so businesses can start making better decisions and start doing customer experience the right way. We’re writing this article to help you rally the troops across your organization. Pull together different stakeholders, put aside competing interests and work together to create a voice of customer program that can turn insights into action.

Read on to discover how you can design a case for building a better VoC program, one that delivers results for you and your customers.

Why VoC Programs are Important

VoC programs provide insights into what customers want and need from the companies they do business with. In the most basic sense, you can explain VoC in four steps:

1. Listening to customer feedback
2. Interpreting the resulting data
3. Action to improve the customer experience
4. Monitoring customer experience performance

In a study from Aberdeen, VoC leaders have about 55% higher retention rates than their competitors, resulting in a 10x higher year-over-year increase in revenue. Internally, that commitment to VoC resulted in a 37% increase in employee engagement and a 24% decrease in costs associated with customer service.

When done right, VoC programs can drive innovation progress throughout an organization. After all, what business doesn’t see the value in retaining their employees and customers? Or increasing revenue?

The problem is, that the connection between customer experience efforts and their impact on an organization’s health isn’t always transparent to C-Suite in an organization.

Voice of Customer programs backed with the right tools and insights can provide huge value to a company, enough to supersede top priorities for executives and grab their attention.

Motivate the unengaged through emotion and logic

You have fantastic insights that can motivate employees across an organization and establish credibility in your CX program. You just need to tailor your approach to the different audiences you encounter in your company. It’s not a one size fits all approach.

When your busy working away separated from different departments it can be easy to misunderstand and stay in touch with varying points of view.

When sharing your insights focus on the outcomes that matter to them, understand what matters to your executives, managers, and front line employees.

One effective method to drive emotion is to share quotes and stories both good and bad. Verbatim feedback from surveys, support tickets, call transcripts and online reviews can help employees empathize and bring to life the customer’s experience.

To drive a logical connect, for instance, if company leaders are more concerned with budget cuts, your VoC program needs to be framed in a way that aligns with cost-slashing goals. Otherwise, executives may not make CX a priority.

CX professionals must be prepared to take concepts like NPS and CSATs and connect them to broader company success metrics by extracting insights from customer feedback to more tangible KPIs like sales, savings, and retention rates.

Use language that makes sense to your stakeholders—and be sure to highlight the financial benefits associated with a strong, unified push toward VoC excellence.

Nurture a Customer-Centric Culture

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Customer service has long been seen as the domain of someone who answers the phones or responds to complaints and questions from customers.

And yes, while this position still exists in most companies, this specific role isn’t the only kind that needs to get on board with creating and maintaining a positive relationship with customers.

A customer-centric culture:

• Puts the customer first—this means working to see the world from the customer’s perspective and acknowledging that a business is only as strong as its customer base.
• Focuses on the wants and needs of the customer, developing products and services based on those wants and needs.
• Nurtures relationships designed to help the customer get the most out of their experience with a product or service.
• It is enriching the customer experience at every possible interaction, starting with customer acquisition through to transaction and aftercare.
• Builds strategies dedicated to keeping customers happy for the long-term.

While this sounds really simple, the reality is that developing a multi-touchpoint, customer-centric strategy means CX teams must coordinate several moving parts at once.

It also means getting everyone from the C-Suite to the front line service desk on the same page when it comes to your customers.

Identify What Drives Loyalty

VoC teams may need to do a bit of hand-holding when it comes to jump-starting the CX program to help the strategy “grow up.”

It’s challenging to take action when you don’t have a good sense of what metrics prove success or a map for improving the customer’s experience.

VoC teams need to help unfocused employees take effective action by showing them what drives their success metrics.

For example, if your company used NPS as its primary CX metric. To operationalize NPS, measure your strategic drivers, in the case of a food delivery company, this may be food delivery speed, food quality and ease of transactions. They’d also want to measure tactical drivers of each strategic driver, such as ease of using the product, which drives ease of transactions. Leading CX teams can rank issues based on their impact on NPS and understand the effect each driver has on top-line metrics.

Approach this process with the goal of changing internal behavior so that it positively impacts the customer’s experience and leads to long-term gains. Such as increased referrals and repeat purchases, while also decreasing the number of complaints received.

To uncover the metrics that make the most sense for measuring success in the context of your business, ask “big-picture” questions as a starting point. These questions might include the following:

• Why do your customers choose to work with you?
• Where do you add the most value?
• Where can you improve?
• Are there recurring complaints?
• Do customers ask specific questions more than others?

You should also closely monitor the metrics listed below:

• Problem resolution time
• First response time
• NPS score
• CES score
• CSAT score
• Net Sentiment
• Review scores
• Referrals
• Churn rate
• Retention
• Contact volume by channel
• Average deal size

While metrics will vary based on your business goals, connecting them to common complaints and questions will help you start identifying your biggest CX issues.

Present VoC Data in Role-Based Reports

Not everyone in your organization is a data expert, so you may need to make some adjustments to how the data is presented. Role-based reports, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, allow teams to review data in a way that helps them make decisions based on their function or hierarchy.

In other words, it’s a means of presenting data in a way that makes sense to different people within your organization, allowing them to take action by tailoring the presentation to their needs.

To set up role-based reporting, you’ll need to start by first identifying the CX metrics that have the most influence over business outcomes.

This means pulling in data from NPS and CSAT surveys, as well as unstructured data from social media or support requests. It also means looking at structured data like how much customers spend on the average deal, or churn rates.

One example of a company approaching this the right way is Raymond James. The firm’s CX team made a point of reaching out to internal stakeholders, asking what would help them get more out of the VoC program, and what it would take to earn their buy-in.

The CX team gathered feedback from internal stakeholders, gaining more understanding over which metrics were important to them based on their roles and functions. The team developed new dashboards that were populated with metrics designed to help employees deliver a better customer experience, while also de-emphasizing the metrics that were irrelevant to their roles.

Beyond that, the CX team also made a point of scheduling standing meetings to discuss results. This kind of ongoing communication is pivotal when it comes to driving VoC action; it turns your CX strategy into a responsive, ongoing conversation, not a twice-yearly, “Hey, we really should measure NPS.”

Problem Solving is Everyone’s Problem

It’s well documented that employees develop a sense of purpose and drive they understand their company’s strategy and direction.

From math problems to workplace rules, people tend to respond better when there’s a clear “why” behind their actions. Tapping into employee can help find solutions for customer issues increasing both the recommendations for improvements as well as stakeholder buy-in.

When you translate CX concepts into the language of the organization, it becomes easier to bring everyone together to drive change.

Unified metrics, role-based reporting, and a direct link to financials give employees the power to identify the root cause of a problem and find a solution.

Not only does bringing different experience and knowledge into the fold improve customer outcomes, it also boosts stakeholder buy-in. Why? Because employees will quickly see how making changes improves the process for their customers.

Turning Insights into Action with Your Voice of Customer Program

Many brands tend to start off with a decent VoC data collection strategy, but find themselves suffering from that productivity killer, analysis paralysis. You’re looking at data from several sources at a time, which understandably, can be overwhelming.

Source

After you’ve pulled insights from various channels, here are a few steps you can take to prevent that crippling organizational roadblock.

• Review your organization’s process for measuring feedback and closing the loop.
• Do you have a structured approach in place for analyzing, prioritizing, and addressing feedback? If not, ensure that you develop a step-by-step protocol.
• How do you measure success? Define clear expectations to determine ROI.
• Empower your employees with the right tools? Make sure you have the right tech to extract insight from customer feedback, the best data source to understand how your customers think and feel about their experiences with your brand.

Wrapping Up

Building on the last section, we totally understand how difficult it can be to take all of the data you’ve collected and turn it into a better experience for your customers, as well as for your internal stakeholders.

CX teams understand the value of VoC programs, but it’s hard to get buy-in when you’re communicating exclusively in CX jargon.

Great customer experiences depend on engaged employees and open communication. At Chattermill, a big part of what we do is turn your data–sourced from social channels, surveys, behaviors, and complaints–into organized, digestible insights that can be understood and implemented by everyone.

We love nothing more than empower teams to take their understanding of their customers up a level. Get in touch to see how Chattermill can helps you understand your users, rapidly release better product experiences, and grow your business today.

There’s often an unspoken tension between sales and marketing teams. On one hand, marketing might feel like sales isn’t following up with the leads they’ve generated. On the other hand, the sales team might feel like marketing isn’t handing off quality leads.

CEOs everywhere are hitting their heads against a wall.

In most cases, it’s not a marketing or sales issue—rather, it’s an alignment problem. In order to turn your sales and marketing teams into one revenue-driving machine, here are a few steps that will help you achieve true sales and marketing alignment.

Get sales and marketing on the same page

Many sales and marketing issues occur because there’s a breakdown in communication. Sales expects one thing from marketing. Marketing delivers what they think sales wants. Sales doesn’t end up using the leads/sales collateral/pitch decks that marketing is providing them. And the cycle goes on and on.

Instead of allowing this to happen, take a step back and identify the areas of confusion. The confusion often is directly related to metrics being measured (or not measured) or how target audiences are classified.

For example, it’s impossible for marketing to deliver quality leads if sales and marketing aren’t clear on what a quality lead looks like. Is a lead simply anyone who has shown interest in a product? Or is a lead someone that has a specific job title in a certain industry at a company with over 500 employees? By drilling down and being hyper-specific about who a lead is, it may be more difficult to obtain as many qualified leads, but the leads will be—at least in theory—a better fit to purchase. By keeping lead definitions higher-level, a company can generate more leads, but perhaps fewer will be truly a fit to buy.

The same applies to metrics and goals. While it makes sense for both sales and marketing to have specific goals to run towards, make sure those goals complement—not contradict—one another. It might seem great for marketing to generate a ton of demand, but if sales can’t handle the amount of leads sent their way, the overall customer experience may suffer. As such, goals should remain both attainable and manageable.

When in doubt, make sure you’re creating clarity around target audiences; the definitions of leads, MQLs, SQLs and opportunities; and what goals both teams are running toward.

Build empathy through understanding

Another issue that pops up between sales and marketing teams is that each team doesn’t have a clear understanding of the role the other plays. Sure, they know marketing is responsible for the brand and engaging certain audiences. But do they understand how marketing is capturing information? Why they’re capturing that information? What messaging they’re using (and why)?

The same can be said the other way around. Do marketing team members understand why leads are being followed up with at a certain time, or by a certain method (phone, email, direct mail)? Maybe certain leads aren’t being contacted at all, which could be frustrating for marketers to see. Dig deeper to understand—maybe the leads weren’t a good fit after all.

Having a deeper understanding of each department can help build empathy between the two teams. Some businesses even make marketing and sales shadow one another—a person from the marketing team sits in on a sales call or demo, or marketing brings sales in to talk through audience targeting for an upcoming campaign, for example.

Communicate and iterate

They say good communication is the key to any relationship. The relationship between marketing and sales is no different. If your marketing leaders and sales leaders aren’t already meeting regularly, you have some work to do.

Does that mean you need to talk through processes every week? Absolutely not. But it does mean that you need to find a cadence that works for your company. Make sure there is open communication between meetings, too. This is especially important if sales and marketing teams are working on different sides of the building, or even the country.

A few questions to consider for hosting meetings between marketing and sales leaders:

• • • Who needs to be involved?
    • How often do we need to meet?
    • Should we put a cap on meeting time?
    • What do we need to keep a consistent pulse on?
    • How can we make the meeting more efficient?
    • How do we inform our departments of the outcomes from the meetings?

It will likely take some time to find a good rhythm. But regular communication with specific goals will fix a lot of headaches down the road.

Know how the data is flowing

This is often overlooked, but it helps tremendously to understand how customer information is getting from point A to point B. One major frustration from business leaders everywhere is attribution—is the money spent on marketing making a difference? Should we hire more salespeople? What’s influencing revenue the most?

Without reliable data, marketing can’t prove its value, and sales misses big opportunities.

To fix this issue, marketing and sales need to work together to identify the best way to use their CRM, marketing automation platform and more. Again, this relates to defining different audiences and lifecycle stages, but goes even further in that you know your role in the ecosystem. This ensures that marketing gets credit where credit is due, and that sales has all the information they need to close a deal.

Alignment is an on-going process. Embrace it.

When two teams are working across departments, across the building or across an ocean, there will be issues from time to time. But they don’t have to be permanent. Instead, work with each other, build empathy, communicate and clearly define who you’re targeting and what qualifies leads to move down the funnel, and you’ll start building trust—and revenue—between the two departments.

The post 4 Steps Every Organization Can Take to Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment appeared first on OpenView.

Can you pick my passions?

Recently during the Q&A after my Turning Conversations Into Customers webinar, one of the attendees asked, “Do you have any suggestions for quickly creating empathy with sales prospects?”

I didn’t have a good, quick answer. So today, I’m answering her question and hoping that you too find some value here as you work to leverage empathy-based sales prospecting to help you #SellGreatly.

Intend to Connect vs Convert

Yes, the first step is actually this easy. Sales Prospects can feel disingenuous conversations. We’re wired to sniff out bullshit and this BS filter is even more active at face-to-face events like conferences, trade shows and networking functions.

So do yourself a favor and remember that social selling success hinges on the social not the selling.

Smile & Make Eye Contact When You Say Hello

The eyes are the window to the soul. But more importantly, when you make direct eye contact (and hold it) with another person it helps you become and stay present in the conversation.

And when you smile it not only makes you appear friendlier and more engageable, science has shown that smiling actually makes you feel better emotionally by releasing a little dopamine hit to your brain. So you’ll actually enjoy this initial contact more than if you don’t smile.

Ask a Question About Something Specific to Your Sales Prospect

This should be an observation-based question. Don’t ask where they’re from or why they’re at the event, etc., notice something specific about them and inquire.

Then the hard part starts.

Listen. Actively. Really actively. Pay attention to everything they’re saying but more importantly, what they’re not saying.

The absence of information is information.

Specifically, the kind you can probe or use as a basis for a follow-up question.

Follow Up With a Feeling Question

Feeling questions scare folks because they require the person asking to actually care about the response. This is important. When your sales prospect answers, they’re giving up a little piece of themselves to you. They’re entering a vulnerability zone by offering up something emotive to you. They risk you not approving, lacking interest or worse, being turned off and ghosting the rest of the conversation.

That’s why folks always seem to ask fact-based questions during networking or face-to-face prospecting encounters. Fact-based questions are easier. There is less work required on the part of the asker and less risk on the part of the responder.

BUT – fact-based questions and answers don’t help you find common ground that can build the basis for creating an empathy-based connection.

Ask “Tell Me More” Questions

Far too often people ask closed questions when networking. They’ll ask if the person is enjoying the conference or the last session. And because most people dislike conflict or difficult/negative conversations, the response is almost “yes” or “it was good” even if they hated the session and or conference.

So now you have to start an entirely new line of questioning to start a conversation that you might turn into a customer — the goal of all networking.

Instead, ask what their favorite part of the conference has been. Who was their favorite speaker or session. Then when they answer, you can follow up with “why” or “interesting, what was it that you liked the most?” type questions. After they answer that question, again, try and ask more feeling questions, maybe even switching to what did you dislike the most about their session?

I’m oversimplifying here obviously, but you get the point. Always try to ask a question that can’t really be answered in a single response, unless the person is naturally verbos.

Pinpoint Their Passion

The goal of all this questioning is creating a conversation that leads to common ground where you and your sales prospect can connect and build a little island that only the two of you can occupy.

Often, the best place to find this common ground is passion. If you have the opportunity to learn about a sales prospect before meeting them online or offline, then invest your time in social reconnaissance. Leverage the enormous amount of unstructured data available to you via social media, Google and friends and contacts to uncover potential or obvious passions.

For instance, here is a random snapshot of my Instagram posts. Take a peek and then ask yourself, what are Tom’s passions? What might you ask me when you meet me that would stimulate a conversation — a conversation that would allow you to connect, find common ground and ultimately, turn that conversation into a customer?

Get Excited About Y’alls Passion

Once you’ve found a shared passion, be real. Don’t act all grown up and professional. Don’t let your sales prospect think you might be gaming them or just faking interest so that you can create a false sense of connection.

I get it — showing your true feelings feels odd. Do you know why? Because when we show our true selves, our true feelings, I mean really show them… we become vulnerable to another’s response.

We think to ourselves, “will they think I’m a goofball?” or “will I scare them if I get all fired up about cold smoking salmon?” and then we remember some sales trainer or boss somewhere in our past that told us to always be professional.

Uggggg. Forget that crap.

Just be you. If you get fired up about cooking, making cocktails, smoking meats, or creating healthy recipes that make dieting a snap… find me at the next event I’m speaking at because we’re gonna have a great conversation! Let your passion shine! There is just absolutely nothing wrong about caring about something or someone and showing that to the world.

But more importantly, find everyone else that like you, loves that stuff. You’ll have so much more fun, make far stronger connections and just maybe one or two of those conversations will convert to a customer or at least a Social Agent.

I promise you. People are so tired of weak connections, bullshit and in general everything that is passing for culturally acceptable (and completely boorish if you ask me) behavior. Go be real. Take the risk. Sure you may meet a few folks that will flinch and their reaction will make you momentarily feel kind of stupid. If that happens, get another drink at the bar, reset and repeat because you never know where the next great conversation will lead.

Don’t Sell Anything

And finally, for the love of all that is holy — don’t sell them anything. Don’t even allude to it. That’s not your conversation goal right now. So stick with and achieve your goal – connecting over a passion that can form a common ground.

You’ll be more successful and a sweet little side benefit, that oftentimes happens, is that by not selling or even trying to, your new bestie might actually want you to sell them something.

True story.

I was speaking at a tourism conference and during the opening night networking event, I was catching up with a few folks I knew and they were introducing me to a few that I didn’t.

And with each conversation, I just focused on finding mutual passions that drove fun, interesting conversations. About an hour or so into the event, one of my client side friends, a Social Agent that has never hired my firm to do anything, pulls me aside snickering.

She goes on to tell me that one of her folks told her,

“You know I love that Tom isn’t trying to pitch me his stuff. But… I kind of want to hear the pitch.”

Folks, if that’s not the beginning of a conversation that can turn into a customer, I don’t know what is. And even if it doesn’t, and it didn’t in this case, it is always easier to make a sales call that has been requested by the sales prospect vs one you’ve pressured them into accepting.

Till next time… go forth and sell greatly.

SEO is a crucial component of a successful content strategy. In addition to giving your content all that sweet, sweet organic traffic, it increases your brand’s visibility and site authority, helping ensure that the people who want or need your type of product or service can actually find you on the Internet—ideally before they find your competitors.

That said, good SEO doesn’t just happen (unless you’re incredibly lucky). As the Internet becomes more crowded, you need to create content around the right keywords to get your brand the best rankings.

Why Keywords Matter to Your Content Strategy

Content marketing is all about getting your brand’s valuable content in front of people—to position your brand as a helpful resource and, by default, a better option than your competitors. The stronger your keyword strategy, the higher you rank, and the more people can be exposed to and engage with your content.

However, it’s not just about getting your content in front of people; you want to get it in front of the right kind of people, those who will find value in what you have to say, and who one day may have need for your products or services. That’s why you need to find the right keywords to maximize your visibility.

However, finding the right keywords to target can be tricky. Go too broad, and you might get a lot of traffic but very few leads. Go too niche, and your content can languish in obscurity. It’s all about finding the sweet spot.

Unfortunately, many marketers struggle to find the right keywords—often because they’re confused or intimidated by this work, or they don’t know where to start. Some play it safe with high-level keywords, making little headway yet unsure of how to change it. Some simply guess which keywords they should use. Others take the spray-and-pray approach, and simply hope for the best. And some don’t target keywords at all. (If you fall into any of these camps, don’t beat yourself up too much. We’ve committed all of these sins at some point over the last decade, too.)

Luckily, however, it’s never too late to start over—or start a new keyword strategy from scratch. We know this firsthand. Three years ago we completely revamped our keyword strategy and increased leads 78% in six months.

So, if you’ve been languishing in keyword purgatory or afraid to take the plunge, we say it’s time to dive in. Here, you’ll find our simple step-by-step guide to find the best keywords for your brand.

1) Start With Your Goals

If you’ve created a comprehensive content strategy, you should know exactly what you’re trying to achieve. (If you haven’t, follow our guide to create a content strategy.) Your keyword strategy will support your larger business goals. So, for example, if you’re trying to attract more business for a specific product or service you offer, you’ll want to prioritize keywords related to that subject.

2) Know Your Personas

In some ways, a keyword strategy is reverse-engineering your buyer’s journey, helping you identify:

• Who you’re trying to reach
• What information they’re interested in
• What search terms they use to find the information they want

The “who” is crucial, which is why you need to clear personas that detail the demographic and psychographic attributes of the people you’re trying to reach. (Here’s how to create personas if you don’t have them already.)

3) Brainstorm Your Keywords

To hone in on the right keywords, start by compiling a list of all the keywords, subjects, categories, or themes you want to cover. If you’re not sure what these are, talk to your key stakeholders, especially your sales team. (They know what customers are thinking about, looking for, and curious to know.)

You’ll also want to dig into Google Analytics to identify what terms people are using to find you now. (Check your traffic sources and related keywords.) You’ll narrow down the list next, but first you want to identify every potential keyword under your umbrella.

4) Research to Find the Right Keywords

Now it’s time to take a keyword deep dive, identifying and refining the exact terms to target. To do this, you’ll need access to keyword tools like Google Keyword Planner, Wordtracker, or Moz. These tools will help you assess how difficult it will be to rank by providing information about search volume, click-through rate, etc.

Your goal here is to identify contenders, based on several factors:

• Search volume: The more people are searching for the keyword (the higher the volume), the harder it is to rank. You want something with a decent search volume (but not so high it will be impossible to rank).
• Relevancy: The more relevant the keyword, the better for your brand (e.g., “ice cream” vs. “gluten-free vanilla ice cream”).
• Competition: You’ll want to consider what your competitors are and aren’t ranking for, and where you might be able to make headway.

Once you’ve research all potential keywords, you can identify and prioritize the keywords that would be smartest to target.

First, start with your general categories. You can start with your master list of keywords from your earlier brainstorm, which will likely include the general keywords related to your product or service categories. Plug in each term and assess the info provided by your keyword tool, including search volume, click-through rate, keyword difficulty, etc. (We use Moz, FYI.)

As you research, however, remember that keyword strategy is half art, half science. Even if you are targeting a more difficult term (in terms of search volume), you can still rank. There is no specific range to target for search volume; however, consider ranges for keyword difficulty.

As Rand Fishkin of Moz points out, “I personally think of [Keyword Difficulty] scores in the 20-35 range as being quite low, 36-50 in the middle, 51-65 pretty tough, and 66-80 as very difficult.”

Ultimately, it depends on your goals, your domain authority, your relevance, etc. (Experimenting is a big part of content strategy, too.)

For example, as we built our content strategy, we knew we’d need to create content to support our core services, such as infographics, motion graphics, content strategy, etc. However, when it came to the actual keywords, we needed to identify the specific terms to use, as well as the variations (e.g., “infographic” vs. “infographics” vs. “infographic marketing”).

In doing keyword research for words related to infographics, we found the term “infographic” to be a good candidate. It had a large search volume (70K-118K), a decent click-through rate (60%), and was a high priority. However, it had a tougher difficulty score (57).

Still, because we decided it was a high priority keyword, we went after it. Now, having created several content campaigns targeting this word, we currently rank #9.

Depending on your product or service, you may find your more generic keywords to be decent options. However, if they are too broad or too difficult to rank for, you may want to explore more specific terms, also known as longtail keywords. (It’s likely you will also have versions of these on your list. If not, your keyword tool will offer related keyword suggestions.)

Next, search your longtail keywords. The more people are searching for a term, the harder it is to rank. Thus, it’s easier to target a term that is more specific. Longtail keywords are the more specific words or phrases that people use when searching for something (e.g., “infographic” vs. “infographic design”). While these terms tend to have less search volume, they are more specific to your business and, ideally, have lower competition.

So, for example, as part of our keyword research, we found that the longtail keyword “infographic design” had a much lower search volume. Still, as it is a keyword that is highly relevant to our work, it is tremendously valuable for us. (Again, having created content targeting this term, we’re currently ranking #4.)

Once you’ve completed this research, you should be able to identify your priority keywords.

5) Check Your Competitors’ Rankings

To help you figure out what to target first, check your competitors’ rankings for your target keywords. This valuable insight can show you where the low-hanging fruit is. For example, you might find a search term that is lower volume but your competitors aren’t ranking for. That’s an easy win that can help you gain more visibility quickly. For example, we found the term “annual report design” didn’t have much competition, so we did a content campaign to target that keyword and are currently #1.

Every business and industry is different, but your goal should be to rank for as many terms as possible. With this combined insight, you can identify your keyword priorities, then use those to guide your content ideation going forward.

6) Optimize Your Content

There’s no point in doing all that work if you don’t properly optimize your content for your target keywords, so make sure to include keywords in your headers, subheads, image titles, body copy, etc. Luckily, tools like Yoast will help you optimize your content, flagging what’s missing or offering suggestions. We also find it helpful to create an optimization checklist to make sure you don’t forget anything. (For more tips on optimizing for SEO, find out how to optimize your infographics and blog.)

7) Track, Measure, and Tweak

Remember: Your keyword strategy will evolve with your content strategy, so don’t get discouraged if you aren’t seeing the results you’d like. The more you track, the more you’ll identify ways to tweak, iterate, and improve. You may find you need to target a keyword with a lower or higher search volume. Or you may find a different longtail keyword to be much higher converting.

We suggest revisiting your strategy on a quarterly basis to make sure it still works for you. (We usually target three keywords per quarter. Sometimes they change, sometimes they don’t.)