Sometimes, we find ourselves with too many prospects sitting in front of us. The problem is that not all of them are good.
How do you know which ones are worth spending time on? And how do you ensure that the people who are ready to buy your product or service do?
Here’s a quick guide to help you out:
Set up meetings with people who have expressed interest or are willing to commit to your product/service. This can be done through inbound marketing or a cold call.
Use qualifying questions during the initial phone call to determine whether they’re a good fit for the position. They should be able to answer these questions without hesitation:
What problem does this solve for your company?
How much money will this save you over time?
What impact will this have on your business operations?
Focusing on the Right People
It’s no secret that making a sale is more than just finding a lead. You need to be able to convert that lead into a customer, but how? The answer is simple: by using social media.
Most B2B companies are using social media these days to find potential customers. They’re using it to connect with them in real-time and build relationships that lead to sales.
This is because social media has become an essential part of business culture. The average consumer spends about five hours daily on social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter! That’s a lot of time for companies to connect with potential buyers—and win new clients.
Having More Than One Key Contact Per Account
If you work with just one person in each account and they leave, or something happens to them, you will be left without access to that client. So it’s much better to build a team of people who know you and your product well.
To be sure, establishing multiple relationships with key decision-makers is crucial. But what happens when you’ve identified your entire target list and have built relationships with everyone on it? You still need to keep working and growing those relationships because they are not static—they change and evolve like your company.
When you have one relationship in an account, you have a greater chance that the other people in that account won’t know you or your value proposition. If they don’t know you or your value proposition, they won’t be able to help you make deals. This can lead to wasted efforts because nobody knows who you are or why you’re there.
On the other hand, if you build multiple relationships within an account and with different stakeholders (for example, executives and mid-level managers), then these people will be able to introduce you to others within their organization who might also benefit from knowing about your product or service offerings. In addition, this strategy allows for more opportunities for introductions and referrals without relying solely on one person who may not always be available due to their busy schedule or priorities within the company.
The fact is that your customers are going to change too. That means that if you don’t stay involved in your customers’ lives and how they use your product or service, you risk becoming irrelevant—and potentially losing them altogether.
You’ve just sent an intriguing and persuasive email to a prospect. You get a reply. They’re interested. They want a demo. They’re ready to speak with you. And then…that’s it. All work and no follow-ups make Jack a dull boy.
When making outbound sales, it’s easy to focus on setting the hook. The initial contact. The opening email. But more likely than not, you fail to continue the conversation and close deals after your first outreach.
In this article, we’re going to explore the often-overlooked follow-up.
What is an Outbound Follow-Up?
You’ve just made a sales pitch. You’re excited and hopeful, but there’s one small thing you need to do before you can put your feet up: follow up.
Following up with a potential customer is a great way to ensure that the customer does not forget about you or your company after the initial contact at the top of the sales cycle.
A sales follow-up can be the key to landing a sale. Follow-ups are a salesperson’s prompt to the prospective customer to take action, whether making an appointment, scheduling a meeting, or placing an order.
Setting your follow-up schedule can be challenging. You don’t want to annoy your prospects, but you also have a limited time frame to get the appointment or sale. The best way to approach this is to send emails or calls, beginning immediately after your initial contact and continuing for about a week after.
Sales follow-up is essential because it helps create a friendly, familiar relationship with your potential customers. It also allows you to answer any questions they might have and ensure they understand exactly what they’re getting into if they decide to purchase from you.
How Many Follow-Ups Should You Make?
When you reach out to someone cold, you must realize that they might not be expecting your email. The best way to get through that mindset is by following up with them multiple times. The first time, you should send a terse and concise email explaining who you are and what your company does, along with a link to your website and an offer that will help them.
You can follow up three days later with another email or call-to-action, but if they haven’t responded, it’s probably time to move on to other prospects.
If the prospect responds positively, it’s time for a more extended conversation—maybe over the phone or in person!
If the other person is a colleague or someone in your network, you might have an opportunity to connect with them again. But if it’s a stranger, you should probably move on.
You can usually tell if someone is interested in your offer when they say something like “I’m interested in learning more about [product name]. Do you have any time next week?” or “I know our schedules won’t sync up but let me get back to you when they do! Thanks for thinking of me!” This doesn’t mean they will buy from you—just that they’re willing to learn more about what you’re offering.
Here’s a general outline you can follow. It is possible to tweak this depending on your product and what conversations you’re having.
1st day: Follow-up #1
3rd day: Follow-up #2
7th day: Follow-up #3
14th day: Follow-up #4
28th day: Follow-up #5
Two months after: Follow-up #6
One follow-up for each month after
What To Do (and Not Do)
DO: Be persistent but not annoying. Inbound leads are easy because they come to you, but outbound sales require a little more work and persistence, so don’t give up too quickly if someone doesn’t respond immediately. If they don’t answer their phone or email, try again later in the day or week. If that doesn’t work, send them another email or call them again later in the week (but not too much later).
DO: Take notes about what worked for each person you call so that you know where it went wrong with others and can adjust accordingly the next time someone from that company calls you back.
DO: Be specific about what you want from them. Don’t just say, “Please reply if interested in scheduling a meeting next week at 3 p.m.,” because many people will simply delete that email without replying or taking action. Instead, clarify why they should respond (e.g., “If interested in scheduling a meeting next week at 3 p.m., please reply with confirmation and availability details by Tuesday morning”).
DO: Send them your email only when you have something relevant to send them. Don’t send random emails just because you haven’t sent one in a while. That will annoy them more than anything else.
DO: Follow-up with them if they reply to your email with a question or comment. You don’t have to write an essay every time, but at least acknowledge that you received their message, so they know you read it and care about their response.
DON’T: When you send an email asking someone for their information or a quote, you mustn’t make them feel guilty about not responding. If they haven’t responded yet, that means they’re busy and haven’t had time to get back to you yet. If you contact a prospect and they don’t respond, it’s not necessarily because they’re ignoring you. It could be that they just haven’t had time to reply. Or maybe they’re waiting for something else (like a response from another sales rep). Or perhaps they’re just not interested in what you’re selling.
If your job was to prospect for potential clients looking to buy from your company, what strategies can you use to help close more deals?
Ten years ago, just about any business owner that possessed a camcorder, a tripod, and the ability to turn on the recorder could film a commercial. These days, video marketing needs a little more creativity and professionalism. Video offers a personal touch when communicating with prospects and lets them know that you care enough to put in extra effort for them.
If you’re looking to create a video that will truly stand out, then it’s essential to follow these guidelines:
Keep it short and sweet. Keep your sales prospecting videos under two minutes. This ensures you can get your point across without overwhelming your customer.
Make sure your script is on point and tight. A poorly written script for a sales prospecting video can lead to even worse results than no video. You want to make sure you’re saying what you need to say to get those prospects on board with your brand message and sales pitch.
Keep it simple and easy to understand. Don’t overcomplicate things by being fancy or clever — it won’t work in this situation! Everything about this video makes sense for your audience, from start to finish.
#2: Always Leave a CTA.
A call to action (CTA) is simply an instruction that encourages people to take some kind of action. This could be signing up for something, buying a product, or even sharing the video with their friends.
It can be anything from signing up for a newsletter, downloading an ebook, sharing, subscribing, or following you on social media.
There are many ways of including a call to action in your video. Here are some ideas:
At the beginning of your video – If you want people to take action at the end of your video (for example, subscribe or share), then it’s best to include the CTA in the beginning. This way, viewers will remember what they’re supposed to do when they reach the end of your video.
In the end – This is probably how most people include CTAs in their videos. You can either ask directly for viewers to take action (for example, “please subscribe”) or use a subtle hint – for instance, by saying something like “make sure you don’t miss out on our next video.” You can also leave it up to the viewer’s imagination by asking, “what should we talk about next?”
#3: Be Prepared. Have a Script Ready.
We’ve all been there. You’re recording a video, and you realize that you don’t know what you’re going to say.
It’s not a good feeling, and it can make the difference between a successful video and one that flops.
To avoid this scenario in your videos, write down your talking points before recording. When it comes time to record, you’ll be prepared with ideas for what to say next.
This can be as simple as writing down bullet points on paper or in a word processor — whatever works best for you.
It’s common for people to get nervous about being on camera and forget what they want to say, so you must have everything written down ahead of time.
You can use bullet points or complete sentences, but it’s best if the notes are short and concise. Don’t worry about the length of the talking points — just get the main points out there.
Once you’ve written down your talking points, you’ll need to memorize them. Practice saying them out loud until they feel natural. If you’re not sure how to practice, try reciting them while driving or doing chores around your house.
Finally, don’t be afraid to ask someone else for help if they notice something that needs fixing or improving in your presentation style. You’ll be surprised at how better people will react when they see that you’re trying hard — not just winging it!
#4: Connect with Your Audience.
When speaking to someone on camera, your eyes are the most essential part of your body. When you talk to your audience on camera, make sure that you look at them as they watch what’s happening in front of them with interest and focus.
When we speak to someone, there’s an unconscious connection between our eyes and theirs. To make it work in a video, simply turn the camera toward yourself to capture your face from the side while you’re talking. Then, turn the camera back toward whoever is listening to you so they can see what you see onscreen.
The viewer will be able to see that connection between their eyes and yours through this process — making it easier for them to feel like they know who you are and what you’re experiencing together in real-time.
Because video is an emotional medium, it’s important that your viewers feel connected to you through their feelings about what’s happening onscreen — rather than just watching passively from an outsider’s perspective.
#5: Add Some Personality To Your Videos!
A sales prospecting video is one of the best ways to get your message to your target audience in a way that they can relate to. It’s a great way to show off your personality, and it offers you an opportunity to be yourself.
For example, if you’re a consultant, you might want to show how easy it is for people to reach out and ask you questions. Maybe you want to explain why you do what you do, or perhaps you just want to give some tips on how they can get started on their businesses.
If you’re a freelancer or contractor, your prospecting videos should focus on why clients should hire you instead of everyone else offering similar services. Show them why they should choose you over all the other options!
When producing a sales prospecting video, it’s tempting to use stock images and generic music. You may think that having a generic look will help as many people hear your message as possible.
That might be true, but it also means that your prospects will be less likely to pay attention. If they’ve seen a million videos just like yours, they’ll tune out before you get started.
The best way to promote yourself is to show off who you are through the videos you create. Don’t hide behind the camera or pretend that you’re someone else — let your personality shine through so that prospects can see who they’re dealing with.
Here are some tips to achieve this:
Show off your office space.
This is a great way to give prospects a chance to see what working at your company would look like, but it also gives them a chance to see where the work they do every day happens. If you have any cool features like slide shows or other office amenities, definitely include those!
Have fun with it!
This is an opportunity for you and your team members to be themselves—show off their personalities and let people get to know them better. This can help build trust with viewers since they’ll be able to see that they’re dealing with real people who care about what they do.
Use humor whenever possible!
It goes without saying: people love humor, especially when it’s used effectively—and the best part is that there’s no wrong way to do it! Just make sure that whatever jokes or puns you use are appropriate for the audience you’re reaching out to
Sales professionals have always used storytelling to persuade and inspire. Abraham Lincoln used advertising stories to speak out against slavery with the help of the newspaper. Mary Kay Ash took part in personal development classes through storytelling.
Today, salespeople and other professionals rely on marketing stories for different purposes such as sharing tips, inspiring, or even persuading customers. Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that Facebook was initially built because he wanted people to share their stories.
Have you ever had a salesperson tell you how good a product or service was, and it just left you cold? You’ve heard the story before from another seller — the same features, the same benefits, the same story — and decided to buy from someone else.
I’m not interested in telling you that my product will save your business $10,000 per month. I’d rather show you. This is the mindset you should always have when making your pitch.
How To Craft Stories That Sell
#1: Create a connection powered by relevance
Stories have the ability to create a connection between your audience and what you are trying to sell. It should be based on real-life experiences and not be theoretical or too much in the future.
For example, if you’re selling advertising space for a website, don’t talk about how great it would be to have an unlimited supply of targeted traffic. Tell them what happened when your client ran out of targeted traffic and couldn’t afford to pay their bills.
If you sell medical insurance, tell them about a client who lost her job due to an illness and had no way to pay her medical bills.
If you sell financial services, tell them how you were able to help someone get out of debt or plan for retirement by using those products.
#2: Compel through concrete storytelling
When we tell stories, we’re not just recounting events — we’re building connections. A story is a way of showing the kind of person you are and the values you hold.
When you tell a story, you’re doing more than just sharing an experience — you’re creating an emotional connection with the other person. And when they connect with you, they see themselves in your story and realize that they can relate to it as well.
To make your stories memorable, use concrete details.
In order to make your stories more powerful and compelling, you need to be able to tell them from different angles. That’s why most people have a hard time telling good stories. They can only think about one angle at a time.
But when you understand how stories work on multiple levels, you can change your perspective on any given story and see it from many different angles. This will help you make your stories better and more engaging for your audience.
#3: Honesty is still the best policy
Storytelling is an art form that can be used to connect with your audience, create a sense of community, and prompt them to take action.
The best sales stories are simple, authentic, and memorable. They’re told in a way that feels natural and relatable to the listener.
Stories help you connect with your customers on a deeper level by getting inside their heads and making them feel something genuine — empathy, excitement, or even fear.
But too many salespeople fall into the trap of using canned or trite phrases when they try to tell a story. This makes it harder for listeners to relate to what you’re saying because it doesn’t sound like something they would actually say.
A great way to illustrate concepts or processes is by using examples from your own life or from other people’s lives. For example, if you’re selling software that helps businesses track their inventory, talk about how this software has helped other businesses reduce costs because they didn’t have to ship out extra inventory when they sold out of a particular item. Or if you’re selling an online course on personal finance management, share stories about how people have been able to pay down debt by setting up savings accounts for emergencies and sticking to their budgets.
#4: Tell your story with flair
Storytelling is about more than just telling a tale; it’s about sharing an experience that connects with the audience. And this is how you get customers to buy from you: by making them feel something.
So if you want to be an effective salesman, be an effective storyteller first!
Here are some storytelling techniques that will help you sell like a pro:
Use vivid details
Tell stories that reflect your audience’s concerns (and not yours)
Create characters with whom people can empathize
Focus on what matters most to your audience
Storytelling is an art form that engages people at an emotional level — it’s not just about facts and figures. It’s about connecting with people as human beings who have problems they want to be solved or desires they want to be fulfilled. When you tell stories in your presentations, you make yourself approachable as a person instead of just another vendor trying to sell something.
Alternatively, use analogies and metaphors to explain complex concepts more clearly.
Conclusion
Storytelling is an ancient art form.
It’s been around for thousands of years and has been used to tell all kinds of stories. The Bible, for example, is full of stories about people’s lives, struggles, and triumphs. Ancient Greek mythology is full of tales about gods and goddesses. And today, we are still telling stories through books, movies, television shows, and more.
But storytelling isn’t just for entertainment purposes — it can be a powerful tool in business as well. If you haven’t already realized this, then you need to start incorporating storytelling into your sales process immediately!
Almost every prospect you speak with has sales objections or reasons for not buying your product. If they didn’t have qualms about the price, value, applicability to their situation, or purchasing ability, they would have bought it already.
While dealing with objections is an inevitable aspect of the sales process, it may be a significant stumbling block for moving prospects through the pipeline. Accepting the complaints and sending a breakup email right away may be tempting. If you’re going to be successful, you’ll need to learn how to find and overcome these concerns.
What is a Sales Objection?
Any concern a prospect expresses about a barrier impeding their ability to buy from you is a sales objection — an unambiguous indication that you’ll need to handle more areas of the buying process than you thought.
According to Brett Trainor in an Expert Talk, customer objections are a sign that they don’t grasp your value or your ability to solve their problem. When customers raise objections to a purchase, it’s a sign that they’re interested in what you’re offering. They enquire, demand more information, and express their worries.
Instead of being afraid of sales objections, learn to see them as chances to move your sales process forward.
How to Deal with Sales Objections
While objections are one of the hardest and more unpleasant aspects of sales, they are not necessarily dead ends. Let’s look at how you can get around these potential stumbling blocks.
Taking care of objections
Dealing with objections is an inevitable and frustrating part of the sales process. The process entails specific actions and skills that every salesperson should be familiar with. Situational awareness, gathering background knowledge, leading with empathy, and asking intelligent, open-ended questions are just a few.
Being aware of the situation
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to managing objections that will address all of a prospect’s concerns. You’ll need a good sense of where you are in the sales cycle, the kind of the deal you’re chasing, and your prospect’s demands and interests, among other things.
Understanding the conditions that shape a prospect’s objections is critical to effectively addressing them. As a result, you must retain situational awareness as your talks with a prospect proceed.
Getting a lot of background information
This argument follows the previous one: comprehensive background information informs effective, actionable situational awareness. Investigate your prospect’s company and, to some extent, the prospect themselves.
What are the company’s current challenges? What problems do the prospect’s industry peers regularly have? If you’ve previously worked with similar-sized firms, try to recollect their concerns.
And, in the event of your contact, be aware of their responsibilities. What authority do they have to make decisions? Daily, what areas of the company’s operations do they deal with? What are the most common issues that someone in their job faces?
If you know all of this and more, you’ll be in an excellent position to answer objections gracefully.
Empathy in leadership
Objections are a normal part of the sales process, and they often — if not always — reflect legitimate concerns. When your prospects push back a little, you must avoid being visibly upset and impatient with them.
Every great sales effort starts with empathy. You shouldn’t sell to a prospect solely to make money; you should sell to them because your product or service is the best fit for their problems. As a result, you must always keep their wants and interests in mind.
You may set yourself up to anticipate and effectively answer their objections if you stay on top of their problems and circumstances and approach them with compassion and understanding.
Posing open-ended, thoughtful questions
Every other element on this list can be bolstered by the capacity to ask meaningful, open-ended questions. If you want to comprehend and effectively resolve the objections raised by your prospects, you need to go to the bottom of their problems.
Asking them meaningful, courteous questions and providing the opportunity to address them thoroughly is an excellent place to start. Avoid queries that can only be answered with a single word, “yes or no,” and don’t be afraid to use silence to your advantage.
There could be more underlying objections that the prospect hasn’t expressed or has merely hinted at. Before you can react successfully, you’ll need to ask open-ended questions to assist you in uncovering all of the objections.
Allow your customers to express themselves. Determine their issues – and put yourself in a position to anticipate their objections.
New business is always great. In most situations, the more customers, the better. That’s why almost all revenue teams devote most of their time and resources to acquiring new customers. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually on advertising and marketing each year—in fact, the United States saw over $240 billion in ad spend in 2019 alone.
But while a new customer is always a worthwhile pursuit, you shouldn’t forget that customer renewals are just as important. It’s imperative that companies allocate time, effort, and resources to put together a comprehensive customer retention or customer success strategy. Here’s what you stand to gain from a high customer retention rate.
The Benefits of Customer Renewals
1. Retention is cheaper than acquisition.
It’s more cost-effective to keep an existing client than to bring in a new one. According to this Harvard Business Review article, acquiring a new customer is five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. While retaining customers may not always be easy, it definitely pays off.
2. Existing customers are more likely to purchase from you again.
If a customer is satisfied by the value of your product or service, they’re more likely to purchase again. So it makes sense that retained customers have been proven to buy more often and spend more than new ones, and it’s estimated that almost 65% of a company’s business comes from repeat customers.
Happy customers are the best form of advertising. Despite the massive strides undertaken by the marketing and advertising industries in recent years, word of mouth still reigns supreme, delivering higher conversion rates while expending minimal resources.
4. You’ll have a ready market for new products and services.
When you’ve proven your value to a customer, they’ll be six times more likely to try a new product or service from your brand when it becomes available. This also gives your company wiggle room to develop new products, different messaging efforts, and other branding initiatives.
5. Loyal, engaged customers are more willing to provide feedback.
Satisfied customers will be more willing to share their thoughts about your products and services and thus, will be more likely to tell you how you can improve. And if they have a bad experience with your company, they’d be more willing to let the issue slide—as long as it doesn’t happen again.
These are just some ways a great customer retention program can benefit your company. So how can you increase your customers’ likelihood of renewing their contracts with you?
“Let’s assume that you’ve met an extra five, six, seven people [within an account], gone out, and introduced yourself proactively to them. You’ve told them about what you’re doing in that account, you’ve told them that you’re working with their peers and colleagues, and you’re starting to actively strike up more sales conversations,” says Sales for Life CEO Jamie Shanks.
“You can call this cross-selling, upselling—it really doesn’t matter. But having more contacts or stakeholders in an account will absolutely increase the likelihood of renewal and expansion of business in any account that you’re dealing with.”
To expand your network and enter new sales conversations, you need to go where your customers are.
“You’ve got to be on platforms like LinkedIn,” says Shanks. “You’ve got to deliberately, and with intentionality, go out there, find people in all the key accounts, start connecting with them, and start striking up conversations with them.”
Do this every single day, and set targets for the number of people you’ll reach out to per session. This way, you can increase your network size gradually and strike up more conversations with people in your target accounts. Your customer renewal rate will thank you for it.
Key Customer Renewal Metrics
To see if your customer renewal efforts are working, you need to know how to measure customer retention. This allows you to make more informed decisions concerning your sales strategy. Here are the most important customer retention metrics that all sellers should know:
Calculating The Customer Retention Rate
Count your total number of customers at the end of a specific time period.
Subtract the number of new customers you’ve acquired during the same time period.
Divide the difference by the number of customers you had at the start of the time period.
Customer Retention Rate vs. Churn Rate
Some sellers confuse retention rate and churn rate. These two metrics, though related, are vastly different.
The retention rate refers to the percentage of customers that have returned to your company to avail of your product or service within a certain time period. The churn rate, meanwhile, refers to the percentage of customers that you’ve lost over a period of time.
A high retention rate corresponds to a low churn rate, and vice versa. Customer churn is normal—but if it’s higher than five to seven percent, you should take a step back and evaluate your sales strategy.
Calculating The Repeat Purchase Ratio
The repeat purchase ratio refers to the percentage of customers that have returned to buy from your company again. It’s especially helpful for assessing the performance and impact of your company’s customer retention strategy.
Get the number of returning customers.
Divide it by the number of your total customers.
Calculating The Customer Lifetime Value
The customer lifetime value refers to the revenue generated by a single customer. Your customer lifetime value should ideally rise or, at least, stay constant—a shrinking number could indicate that you’re losing customers at a faster rate than before, and that’s not a good thing.
Divide your gross annual sales by the total number of unique customers in a year. This is your average revenue per customer.
See how many years each one of your customers has stayed with your company, and get the average. This is your average customer lifespan.
Multiply the average revenue per customer by the average customer lifespan.
There are more metrics that you should track to get a clearer picture of your customer retention efforts, but you can start with these. The data you can collect from these metrics allow you to improve your customer experience and increase your renewals.
Conclusion
If your company doesn’t have a customer retention strategy in place, you’re missing out on several benefits. Not only is it one of the best investments that your company can make, but it’s also one of the most effective marketing strategies for your business.
There are many things that you can do to increase your customer renewals, but the easiest way to go about it is by increasing your connections within an account. This paves the way for more conversations, converts more champions for your brand, and, in time, increases your opportunities to upsell and cross-sell your products and services.
When people think of sales strategies, outbound prospecting methods usually come to mind. Cold calling, cold emailing, LinkedIn networking, direct mail—all these tactics have been proven to generate positive results.
But these aren’t enough to turn you into a leader in your field.
The world’s best sellers have established a great inbound prospecting strategy. They don’t just seek out potential customers—they’ve also found a way for people to seek them out.
They’ve become lead magnets, attracting clients even in their sleep.
Their secret? Brand authority.
Why is it important to build authority in your industry?
The thing about outbound strategies is that they only work while you’re actively doing it. If you don’t send emails or make cold calls or reach out to your social networks, nothing will happen.
However, being known as an expert in your field will change the game.
Always remember that, in order to succeed in sales, it’s not enough to know that you’re selling a great product. Think of it this way: You might be great at what you do, but it doesn’t matter if no one knows it.
It’s not enough to do the things that authorities do. You also need to do them incredibly well, and you also need your efforts to be known.
Basically, you’re competing in a market not only to sell, but also to be known as an authority.
Establishing authority strengthens your personal brand, increasing the level of trust that both your clients and potential customer base have in you and your business. It drives conversations and accelerates customer conversion.
Here are three ways you can establish your authority as a seller.
How To Build Authority In Your Market
1. Go to where the people are
As a seller, you should know where the people in your market are. Where are your ideal clients now, and how is the competition in the space they occupy? And where will they be in the future?
In the context of digital selling, the playing field across all channels is exponentially more crowded now than ever before. Just a little over a decade ago, you can easily get a web page on the front page of Google by stuffing it with keywords. You can’t do that now, and even if you could, the competition is extremely fierce.
But it’s never too late to adopt and adapt.
Take a look at the platforms where your clients do marketplace research and seek recommendations and answers. Are they spending most of their time on LinkedIn? Are they on Twitter or Facebook? Are they watching videos on YouTube, or listening to podcasts?
By spending time on the platforms your clients inhabit, you’ll be able to identify knowledge gaps in your industry. Capitalize on these, and use these angles in your content to set yourself apart from your competitors.
2. Get associated with the other authorities in the industry
Who are the foremost thought leaders in your field? Look for them and take note of what they’re doing. How did they gain their reputation? What are they doing that others aren’t doing? And most importantly, what are they doing to establish their credibility?
What’s interesting is that you don’t necessarily have to be the best in your field for other people to consider you as the best in your field. Perception is reality. Take a look at the most notable names in your industry—you might be surprised by the number of people who are seen as an authority in your field despite not having all the professional credentials.
The bottom line is, you don’t have to be the world’s foremost authority in your industry to validate your claim as an expert in your field. The key is to be known by the right people. Position yourself correctly and take your cues from the established authorities in your field.
3. Make a habit out of content creation
If you want to be seen as a leader in your field, positioning yourself as a source of original knowledge is probably the most effective way to do so.
There are so many ways to make your voice heard. You can create a blog, guest on a podcast (or start your own), churn out content on social media, shoot videos, publish ebooks, start a newsletter. Keep in mind what we’ve mentioned in the previous item: the medium should depend on where your target audience is hanging out and consuming information.
What’s important is consistency. Make a habit out of publishing content. Create a publishing schedule and churn out content on a regular basis.
We’re just beginning March. By now, your sales kickoff has been completed, and you have your comp plans in hand. All your sellers are now out in the market.
A webinar titled, ‘Accelerate Your Sales Process with a Modern Selling Approach’ was held last week on Thursday, February 21, 2019, 11:00 AM PT – 12:00 PM PT. It was a one-hour webinar in which Jamie Shanks, Author of SPEAR Selling and one of North America’s leading Digital Selling experts, and Ray Makela, CEO at the Sales Readiness Group, delivered a virtual talk regarding the techniques and benefits of implementing a modern selling program.
