Categories
video

How Important Is Video In Your Sales Strategy?

The past few years bore witness to the rapid growth of video marketing. According to a 2021 report by animated video company Wyzowl, 93% of marketers believe that video is an important part of their marketing strategy, and 86% of businesses are using it as a marketing tool.

The pandemic saw a drastic surge in video consumption, with 96% of consumers reporting that the amount of video content they’ve watched online had increased. With people isolated in their homes and teams stretching reduced budgets and resources, marketers have turned to video to sate our desire for human interaction, to impressive results.

The use of video is expected to keep growing well beyond 2021, with 96% of marketing professionals saying they’ll either increase or maintain their video spend.

This makes video a critical medium of communication that your revenue team should take full advantage of.

What can video offer that other mediums cannot?

  1. It can make complicated concepts easier to understand.
    Most people—around 60 to 80%—are visual learners who process information better when it’s presented using images, charts, maps, or other forms of imagery.

    This is what makes video so effective.

    In a two-minute explainer video, you can explain difficult concepts in a digestible format that cannot be replicated by an essay. You can use infographics and animations to explain what your product does, and how you can make the most of it. If you put all that into words, you’d spend hours on a long essay that readers would never read word-for-word.

  2. It humanizes the creator.
    A video proves to the viewer that they’re getting information from a real person. It allows you to show your personality and your interests outside of work, making it a good way to add that warm, human touch that’s missing in most marketing and sales communications.

  3. It’s an engaging medium.
    Video is extremely easy to consume. It can capture a wide target audience, and works on customers with varying levels of interest in your product.

    It also encourages social engagement, bolstered by social media platforms’ push of the medium.

  4. It can be tracked for buying intent data.
    One of the great things about video is that you can easily track its statistics: who has seen it, how long people have watched it, the amount of engagement it has received. This lets you gauge its effectiveness and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Using Video In The Sales Process

In the past, video was primarily used for product demos. But it can be used in all stages of the sales cycle, from prospecting all the way to closing.

During Prospecting

Video can capture a viewer’s attention more effectively than any other medium. Capitalize on this by using it to communicate with leads early on during the sales process. You can use video during prospecting to introduce yourself, explain what your product is all about, and encourage prospects to take the next steps. 

While Nurturing Leads

Once you’ve got a prospect in your pipeline, nurture your relationship with them using personalized video messages. It’s a great way to explain your product’s value proposition more clearly and connect with prospects on a deeper level.

Moving Deals Towards Close

Use video frequently throughout the sales process to get your prospects accustomed to you. This can help them feel like they know you personally, giving you an advantage over your competitors. Create micro-demos and explainers for them if they have concerns, and send personalized videos to remind them about meetings and updates.

When The Deal Is Won

Video remains useful after a deal is closed. Use it to answer any questions the client may have, as well as to ease their handoff to the customer success and support teams.

How To Get Over Your Fear Of Video

With video’s popularity at an all-time high, it’s the perfect time to use it in your sales strategy. It’s an affordable way of engaging your prospects, and it’s easy to share.

But despite video’s benefits, a lot of sellers and marketers are still hesitant to use it to communicate with prospects and clients. Their number one reason: They’re scared of putting themselves out there.

“It’s very hard to go on camera and expose yourself,” says Sales for Life COO Amar Sheth. “But something that I’d love to remind you of is, I have the same fear that you do. I’m also afraid of exposing myself on camera like this and being vulnerable. What will people think of this idea? Will they think it sucks, or will they think it’s okay? Will they think it’s amazing? I wouldn’t know. Until I’m out there, sharing ideas on a regular basis on this video medium, I simply wouldn’t have feedback.”

There’s only one way to get over this fear: Just start doing it and don’t stop until you’re comfortable with it.

At first, it’ll probably feel awkward to talk to yourself in front of a camera or a phone—and that’s normal. But the more you do it, the more natural it’ll feel, and the better you’ll be. Remember that you’re doing this to help your customers in the most efficient way possible, and keep that in mind every time you get your message out.

So go ahead and hit the record button—you’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

Categories
sales strategy

How To Increase Your Customer Renewals

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.

3. You’ll have a higher chance of getting customer referrals.

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?

How To Increase Your Customer Renewals

Here’s something all sales professionals should know: The more contacts you have within an account, the more chances you’ll have of entering sales conversations—which can lead to customer renewals.

“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

  1. Count your total number of customers at the end of a specific time period.
  2. Subtract the number of new customers you’ve acquired during the same time period.
  3. 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.

  1. Get the number of returning customers.
  2. 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.

  1. Divide your gross annual sales by the total number of unique customers in a year. This is your average revenue per customer.
  2. See how many years each one of your customers has stayed with your company, and get the average. This is your average customer lifespan.
  3. 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.

Categories
Social Selling

How To Make Your LinkedIn Profile More Attractive To Buyers

If you want to succeed in today’s modern selling environment, you have to accept that the power lies in the customer’s hands.

Our access to information has drastically increased in the last couple of decades, and customers are taking full advantage of the availability of objective data to form their own opinions and beliefs about the options at their fingertips. Buyers have never been more in control of their purchasing decisions, with the product being the only variable that sellers can adjust.

The impact of this change is especially felt by B2B sellers. In the past, buyers would, upon discovering a need for a particular product or solution, reach out to different companies to get information about their offerings, their features, and their prices. Conversely, sellers can easily cold call decision-makers and help them uncover a need they did not know existed.

But this isn’t the case anymore. In fact, most of the B2B buying process is performed out of the seller’s sight, with buyers doing their own research digitally via online content and social media, specifically on LinkedIn.

Social selling on LinkedIn: the key to B2B sales success

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social networking site, with over 800M members across 200 countries. This makes it the perfect platform for social selling, with nearly endless opportunities to generate leads and referrals, prospect efficiently, and build relationships with your customers.

Social selling success on LinkedIn hinges on the sellers’ application of both outbound and inbound strategies. This is the only way to achieve undisputable results that could be felt across the entire organization.

Outbound social selling strategies

What comes to your mind when you hear the word “sales”?

Chances are you’re probably imagining a sales rep reaching out to a customer to promote their product or service, maybe through a phone call or via a meeting. This is exactly what outbound sales is: The process in which the seller initiates communication with a prospective buyer via sales activities such as emailing, cold calling, or social selling.

While outbound selling methods are clearly effective—that’s how sales reps have been meeting their quota for years—it’s not enough if you want to surpass your sales goals. You can make the most of your outbound sales efforts by strategically targeting only the accounts with the highest likelihood of conversion.

Still, this isn’t enough to be successful in sales. The best sellers complement their outbound sales techniques with inbound sales methods. This turns them into lead magnets, attracting customers in their sleep.

Inbound social selling strategies

Turning your LinkedIn profile into a lead magnet requires a strong, carefully crafted personal brand. Your personal brand should show that you are an active participant in your industry, thus establishing your authority and knowledge. Do it right, and expect to reap its benefits—the most notable of which is an increase in the inquiries you’ll get from prospects.

To achieve this, the first thing you need to do is to optimize your LinkedIn profile.

How to optimize your LinkedIn profile

An updated, optimized LinkedIn profile can boost the reputation of any professional, but it’s especially helpful for people in sales and marketing. It adds credibility to both you and your company and helps you reach a broader audience.

Ready to revamp your LinkedIn presence? Start with the following areas of your profile

1. Your Profile Photo and Background Photo

Your photo is the first thing that people notice when they visit your profile. Upload a high-resolution, well-lit headshot, preferably one where you’re smiling to give a friendly, approachable impression. While you’re at it, update your background photo to indicate your professional brand. Remember, first impressions last—so you better make sure your photo creates a positive impact.

2. Your Headline

Your headline is where you can highlight what you do and how you can help your customers. Use action-based keywords to project confidence and authority, and use terms that clearly define your role and contributions.

3. Your About/Summary Section

Your summary should complement your headline, adding more details about how you can help your customers win. Use this section to position yourself as a thought leader in your field. Try not to exceed 150 words—any longer, and it’ll be tedious to read.

4. Your Recommendations

Recommendations serve as social proof of what you have written in your Headline and About sections. For customer-facing roles, a minimum of five recommendations would be ideal.

5. Your Activity

This is where your profile’s visitors can see your perspectives about your industry. Share relevant content, comment on your connections’ news, and engage with posts that resonate with you—these simple actions go a long way in showing that you’re an active, contributing member of your online community.

Conclusion

A strong LinkedIn presence is necessary to survive and thrive in today’s modern, cutthroat B2B sales environment. The sooner you accept this, the faster your revenue team can meet quotas, grow pipeline, and maximize profitability. 

The easiest way to strengthen your LinkedIn presence is by optimizing your profile. 

Upload clear profile photos that reflect your personality, write a headline that shows your professional capabilities and include a personal summary that sheds more light on your accomplishments. Don’t forget to post and share content regularly, and ask for recommendations from people whom you have worked with.

Categories
LinkedIn

How Can You Fully Utilize Your LinkedIn Sales Navigator Investment?

With nearly 800 million members worldwide, LinkedIn’s status as the world’s largest professional social network is indisputable. Though LinkedIn gained popularity as a way for job seekers to connect with hiring scouts and get potential recommendations, it has also become an international hub where global professionals can expand their networks and form industry-shaping connections. As time went on, sales professionals learned to leverage the platform to improve their bottom line.

With an ever-climbing percentage of companies using LinkedIn for sales and networking, can your organization keep up in today’s increasingly competitive social selling environment? To own your place in the digital sales ecosystem, you need to be serious about your LinkedIn strategy–starting with your usage of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

All About LinkedIn Sales Navigator

The free version of LinkedIn can be used by any member of any company to find leads, reach out to prospects, and close deals. However, its capabilities are severely limited. If you want to take full advantage of what LinkedIn can do for your revenue, you should invest in Sales Navigator.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s roster of features is specially developed with sales professionals in mind. It allows users to search and reach out to more leads and companies, keep track of changes within your prospect accounts, and engage with your network in bold and different ways. 

The most popular function of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is probably Advanced Search, which makes prospecting on the platform a breeze. There are over 20 filters you can apply to narrow down your search to get the most promising leads. You can also perform boolean searches in keywords, title, and company fields, allowing you to find the people who fit your ideal customer profile to a T.

Let’s take a look at some other features of LinkedIn Sales Navigator:

  • LinkedIn InMail: InMail is an incredibly useful tool for any sales professional, but it’s not available on the free version of the service. However, the basic version of LinkedIn Sales Navigator comes with 20 InMails per month. The Team and Enterprise tiers of Sales Navigator add even more opportunities to reach out, giving you up to 50 InMails per month. The more InMails you can send, the more potential first connections you can make with prospects of interest. 

  • Extended Network Access: The free version of LinkedIn imposes a monthly commercial use limit on the amount and extent of the searches you can run. Only being able to search a limited number of profiles every 30 days can seriously impede your ability to generate leads and follow up with potential prospects. LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives sales professionals access to an unlimited number of profiles, increasing your potential to generate new leads. You can also save your searches and create alerts to keep track of any changes within your target accounts.

  • Integration with your sales tools: LinkedIn Sales Navigator is designed to integrate seamlessly with your revenue team’s daily sales and relationship workflow. That’s why it has certified integrations with the most popular CRMs in the market, including Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Hubspot, Oracle CX Sales, Pega, SAP, and SugarCRM. You can access Sales Navigator as a viewable embedded profile within your CRM, or you can actively sync it with your existing software to efficiently move important data like leads and accounts from one platform to another.

Given all these benefits, you might think that the next logical step is to get Sales Navigator accounts for your entire revenue team. Let’s get one thing clear: Sales Navigator is absolutely worth it—but only if your team knows how to properly use it.

What You Should Consider Before Investing In LinkedIn Sales Navigator

 Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator worth investing in? All signs point to “yes.”

According to data that LinkedIn has gathered from usage reporting, Sales Navigator users have reported experiencing the following benefits:

In an industry where connections are so powerful, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a worthwhile investment that can maximize your potential for lead generation. If used correctly, there is no doubt that this purchase can make your company’s sales strategy skyrocket in terms of efficiency. 

But just because you can afford it, doesn’t mean you should buy it for your whole team.

Process Before Platform

A lot of sellers would ask us if they should invest in LinkedIn Sales Navigator accounts for their entire revenue teams. Would it be a worthwhile investment, or would a mix of free and premium accounts make more sense?

The answer will depend on your organization’s unique situation. The key, says our CEO Jamie Shanks, is to remember that your process should dictate your platform.

“If your team does not have a process for using the tool, it doesn’t really matter. You’re going to have terrible seller utilization,” says Shanks.

He compares it to giving a sports car to every member of his team because they all need to get to work early, only to find out that not everyone can maximize it. Some people use different forms of transportation, so they can’t take full advantage of the car. On the other end of the spectrum, there are people who can’t even drive in the first place, rendering the car useless.

“If your own team is not socially surrounding your customers, not developing robust social networks, and not altering their own social platform profiles, then what is Sales Navigator going to offer them from an account-based sales development standpoint?” asks Shanks.

“Yes, you can organize accounts and create lists and save these lists in more structured ways, but if they can’t do the fundamentals…why do you need to give them a Porsche?”

That said, Shanks’ advice is to give Sales Navigator access to only the sellers who can really maximize the platform: your business development representatives and your key account executives with robust total addressable markets (TAM). Sales Navigator will allow them to efficiently analyze, segment, and contact the most qualified leads to speed up their sales process.

Conclusion

Always remember that an effective sales process is the key to maximizing LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Getting the most out of this investment is a whole process that requires dedication, attentiveness, and a perceptive eye for sales opportunities.

Sales Navigator offers tremendous opportunities for prospecting, so don’t be afraid to integrate it as tightly as possible with your existing sales strategy. When your sales goals are properly defined and aligned with your strategy and tools, your sellers can propel your company onto the top of the market.

Categories
b2b sales

How To Start Building Your Personal Brand

If you want to stand out from the rest of the sellers in the market, you need a strong personal brand that reflects what you stand for.

Your brand tells potential buyers what they can expect from you. It tells them about your personality, your processes, and your working style. And, depending on how well you build your brand, it tells them how reliable you are as an authority in your industry.

The Importance Of Having A Personal Brand

At Sales for Life, we believe that a strong personal brand isn’t just nice to have as a seller, but a must-have.

In fact, one of the first things we teach in our flagship course, The ScalePipeline System, is the importance of building a strong personal brand. We have a whole module about it: Modern Branding Fundamentals, where we teach sales professionals how to build their professional reputations and increase conversations by strategically creating and sharing content on LinkedIn. This gradually builds you up as an authority in your industry, making prospects see you as someone they can trust.

Build your personal brand well, and you’ll have customers reaching out to you instead of the other way around. You’ll have the power to draw in leads in your sleep. And that’s why having a strong personal brand is the best inbound sales strategy.

So how can you get started building your personal brand?

3 things you need to know when building your personal brand

The first thing you need to know when building your personal brand is that there are three things that will ultimately determine the results of your efforts. Think of these three factors as levers that determine the effectiveness of your engagement efforts: Many times, when your sellers’ messages aren’t resonating, they’re probably not manipulating some of these levers.

  1. The stories you tell people: the stories have to offer value for your prospects: You should be able to make them money, save them money, or mitigate their risk.

  2. The mediums through which you tell stories: The medium by which you engage with your prospects informs your message. Whether it’s email, video, text, snail mail, or LinkedIn—creative sellers will consider a variety of different mediums, recognizing that they can’t predict which medium is going to land with the customer. It helps to use an omni-channel approach, testing different engagement strategies to socially surround that customer.

  3. The cadence and sequence: This pertains to the order and operation by which you tell your stories. Key account selling is not for two-week closes. It takes several weeks and months to close deals—and that’s why you need to engage with your audience regularly and repeatedly in order for your brand to stick in their minds.

If you isolate each one of these levers, you’ll be able to develop an engagement action plan. But first, you need to recognize that a one-time approach doesn’t work. Sending one message and hoping you get a response is not a strategy.

Always think about how you can manipulate these three levers to alter the results and outcomes that you’re trying to achieve. As a seller, you should always think five chess moves ahead. That’s why the best key account sellers have at least five sales plays in their pocket, being delivered over weeks and months. This way, they’re constantly engaging with and nurturing their customers.

LinkedIn: The Best Place To Start Building Your Personal Brand

One of the most optimal mediums to build your personal brand is LinkedIn. It’s the most conducive platform for building a professional presence that properly showcases your work to your network.

 Below are the five basic things you can do to improve your LinkedIn profile—and, correspondingly, your personal brand.

  1. Add a professional profile photo: Pick an appropriate profile photo that corresponds with your role. It doesn’t have to be taken by a professional photographer, but it has to be clear with a non-distracting background and should showcase you in your best light. 

  2. Write a distinctive headline: Your default headline is your current employment position, but you can write your own to demonstrate your expertise or your role. Think of your headline as your personal tagline—include the words and phrases that you’d like to be used to describe you.

  3. Change your LinkedIn background photo: You can upload a LinkedIn background photo to tell your network more about who you are and what you do. You can use it to echo your company’s brand, or to share your own hobbies and achievements.

  4. Optimize your summary and experience sections: Your LinkedIn profile and your resume should not show the same things. Your experience should list your major accomplishments and the key positions you’ve held, along with brief explanations of each role. Meanwhile, your summary is where you can dive deeper into your vision for your role or company. Back up your achievements with statistics, and use keywords to make your profile easier to find.

  5. Ask for recommendations: The most effective kinds of advertising are those done for you by other people—and that’s exactly what LinkedIn recommendations do. Recommendations from trusted contacts whom you work or have worked with will be visible to your network, giving your reputation an instant boost.

Conclusion

Building your personal brand is necessary to boost your professional reputation. It’s doubly important when you work in sales. A strong personal brand can turn you into a lead magnet, thus functioning as your inbound sales strategy.

Being active on LinkedIn is one of the easiest ways to build your personal brand. Optimize your profile, network strategically, and publish content regularly. Keep in mind the three levers that will affect your engagement strategy: Your stories, mediums, and cadences. Adjust your sales plays constantly to get the results you want, and constantly engage your audience so your brand will leave a strong impression on their minds.

Categories
b2b sales

How To Identify Your Customers’ Pain Points

Heart disease is the top cause of death worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. It accounts for 16% of the global death toll, and the number of its victims keeps rising year on year given the lifestyle we’ve cultivated.

There are ways to decrease your risk of suffering from heart disease, such as adopting a healthy, balanced diet, exercising for at least 2.5 hours per week, and giving up vices such as smoking and excessive alcohol consumption. These things aren’t that difficult to do. But why isn’t everyone doing them?

It’s because those who aren’t shifting to a healthier lifestyle haven’t experienced the pain of heart disease.

People buy for one main reason: To improve their condition. In the B2B context, this boils down to either helping your customer make more money or helping them mitigate risk.

Whatever the driving force is, the customer is, to a certain degree, dissatisfied with how things are. They know their situation could be better. And the fact that a stakeholder is thinking about shaking up their status quo means that there is a pain point that you, as a seller, could capitalize on.

What are customer pain points?

Pain points are the specific problems or issues that your clients may experience while on their customer journey. Since there could be a lot of problems, it’s important to prioritize which ones really need to be addressed. Think outside the box and put yourself in your customers’ shoes: What could be done to improve the account’s profitability?

As a modern seller, you need to focus on helping and educating your customers rather than selling to them. In the age of digital selling, your customers are bombarded with information and advertisements from all fronts. What will work best is a targeted, personalized approach centered on their agenda—not yours.

Always keep in mind how uncomfortable it could feel to be at the receiving end of a relentless sales pitch. You don’t want to be the pushy kind of seller that people can’t help but avoid. So shift your messaging slightly and focus on your genuine desire to help your buyers. While nobody likes being sold to, everyone likes to be helped out—and if you prove your value to your customers, they’ll be more inclined to purchase your product. 

Identifying Your Customers’ Pain Points

Before you can address your customers’ pain points, you need to identify them first. Your customers could be facing several problems at the same time—which issue should you address first? How can you unlock opportunities within an account by addressing this problem?

1. Social Listening

Social listening is probably the easiest way to reveal a customer’s pain points. Keep your eyes and ears open to see what your current and target buyers are doing online and what they’re saying on social media. You’d be surprised by the amount of valuable information you can from an account’s decision-makers, employees, industry peers, and competitors.

2. Qualitative Market Research

Qualitative research allows sellers to get detailed responses from customers about their buying journey and the problems they face. It’s harder to conduct than quantitative research—you’d need more time and effort to write sentences compared to encircling a number on a scoring system—but it yields better results given the fact that no two pain points are exactly the same. Since qualitative research lets the customers explain their problems in full, you’d be able to see the most common problems and the most serious roadblocks in your transactions.

You need to ask the right questions in order to properly conduct qualitative research. As we’ve said earlier, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and try to visualize what your problems would be. Ask open-ended questions that can help you get to the root of the issue.

3. Your Customer Service Team

A customer’s pain points can change during their buying journey. What might be their most pressing priority while evaluating your purchase might cease to be a problem after signing the contract.

This is when your customer service team comes in.

Your customer service team is on the frontline of your business, fielding calls and complaints from your clients. This makes them crucial sources of information when it comes to fine-tuning your messaging. The key is digging deeper into the problems the customers have presented, distilling them into the simplest possible point. For example, if a customer said that they didn’t purchase again because they weren’t offered a discount, that could be an indicator of a financial pain point—and you could be missing significant opportunities because of this practice.

Conclusion

As we’ve mentioned at the beginning of this blog, people buy to improve their condition—and the fact that they’re thinking about purchasing from you is significant.

One final bit of advice: The next time you have a conversation with your client, try asking them outright why they think you and your company can help them. This can reveal significant information about what differentiates you from your competitors, and how you can improve your messaging.

We hope this helps!

Categories
Account Based Sales Development

Using The Sphere of Influence To Select Your Accounts

When we launched our initial sales training services back in 2012, we were stuck in a basic sales quandary: We had very limited time until we ran out of money, but we had thousands of potential accounts in the Toronto market that we needed to target.

If you were in our shoes, how would you start?

If you’re only familiar with analog sales tactics, you’ll probably create a list of the fastest-growing companies in your target industry or vertical and call them, one by one, to talk about your product or service.

Now, this route wouldn’t take you very far.

Yes, given enough time, you might be able to crack into one of these accounts. And yes, the financial value and brand reputation of these accounts would have been excellent, and they would make a great addition to your company’s portfolio.

But this process is extremely tedious, and chances are you would have run out of money way before you could reach your target.

This all changed when we created the Sphere of Influence account selection process—a much faster way of securing leads.

What is the Sphere of Influence account selection process?

The Sphere of Influence sales play is usually implemented at the first point of engagement with the customer. This sales play aims to humanize the seller by demonstrating the high social proximity shared by the seller and the customer. This sales play reduces the customer’s apprehension of unsolicited engagement, pushing them off their status quo. 

Your company’s Sphere of Influence may include: 

  • The employees who currently work at your customer accounts
  • The previous employees of your customer accounts
  • The competitors of your customer accounts
  • The vendors and partners associated with/supplying your customer accounts. 

Your own personal Sphere of Influence may include: 

  • Your family
  • Your friends
  • Your sports, community and/or religious social network
  • Your previous school alumni 

These are experiences and relationships that your competitors can’t easily replicate. That’s why each of these relationships creates varying degrees of asymmetrical competitive advantages for you.

Starting your Sphere of Influence account selection process

If you are a sales professional, you should first forget about the predetermined named or targeted accounts that you’ve already focused on. While some of your targeted accounts might have been pre-assigned to you for various reasons (as is the case of most sales professionals globally), a portion of the accounts within your territory can be selected at your discretion.

This is where you should apply the Sphere of Influence.

1. Choose an existing customer: Select an existing customer that can present a large opportunity base of new accounts. Here are some examples you can start with: 

  • Accounts with high churn (but great success with your solution) – Key stakeholders that may have used your solution during their time with the existing customer and have since moved on to become directors, vice-presidents, and/or C-level executives in their new companies.
  • Accounts with large partner ecosystems – Brands that are highly recognizable and whose name would easily attract a new buyer’s attention when mentioned in future sales engagements.
  • Accounts that are renowned in their respective fields – When a company has an excellent reputation, especially in highly competitive industries, even the mention of their name will generate engagement.

2. Focus on your advocates who have moved on to new companies: The Sphere of Influence sales play has created more opportunities and revenue for Sales for Life’s customers than any other account selection action. In fact, one study conducted by one of our customers showed that their highest-converting opportunities were their customer referrals, clocking in at 68.7%.

Now, how can you achieve these numbers for your organization?

First, look for your customer’s previous employees using LinkedIn. Focus on those who are in a position of power and have become a potential champion, influencer, or decision-maker at a new account that meets your ICP. Prioritize people who switched companies less than 1 year ago—newly hired key stakeholders are keener to bring change, and might also bring along the people, processes, and/or technology that helped drive success in their past business. 

3. Map your existing accounts, including their competitors, partners, and vendors: The most common sales play you can then do is to identify the competitors of your customer base. You can also identify companies that sell to the same vertical or even buyer persona as your existing customers. While they don’t directly compete with your customer, they compete for mindshare and budgets.

For partners and vendors, look for channel partners, alliances, and vendors of record. These companies know your customer’s name well, and their successes are intertwined.

4. Look at the social proximity of referral candidates: Remember that each of your existing customer accounts is made up of people with high social proximity to like-minded people, who could very well be key stakeholders in other companies that you want to do business with.

Organize the people that have relationships with their customers. If necessary, seek out these relationships yourself. With sales quota attainment on the line, leveraging customer relationships in order to broker sales opportunities will give you an asymmetrical competitive advantage.

Don’t limit your options to only the customer advocates that your team really likes and deals with all the time. Push your team to extend their social proximity range by assigning them to form a 1st-degree LinkedIn connection with champions, influencers, and decision-makers within their target accounts.

5. Determine the accounts and connections with the highest social proximity to your customer base: Your Total Addressable Market (TAM) can increase when you can see the entire social networks of your 1st-degree LinkedIn connections. The ensuing web of connections could be overwhelming, so focus on the first five accounts that an advocate has the highest social proximity to. Perhaps they used to work at that company, or they have family who works there, or they’ve been a vendor or a partner of your advocate for a few years.

High social connections in an account are usually correlated to high social proximity, making this an asymmetrical competitive advantage that will provide you a higher “propensity to buy” score.

Conclusion

The Sphere of Influence concept is the overarching framework that leverages relationships with high social proximity to gain an asymmetrical competitive advantage over your competition. If you already have relationships within your target accounts, it’ll be easier to influence their decision-making process. Their high social proximity to your successes, customers, and advocates will make it easier for them to relate to your stories. 

With the Sphere of Influence sales play, you can develop targeted account lists by using your existing network to gain an asymmetric competitive advantage. This involves thinking outward from a customer-centric core, rather than just using subjective biases such as the potential commission score. The result: A larger customer base, higher conversions, and stronger customer relationships.

Categories
Account Based Sales Development account basedsales Social Selling

Social Surrounding: A Critical Aspect of Account-Based Selling

As a B2B seller, one of the most important things you should remember is that you don’t win companies. You win people.

Winning people involves building relationships with them. Relationship-building requires showing the other person that you genuinely care about them and the things that are important to them.

The good thing is that there are several tools at your disposal that make it easier to build long-lasting business relationships. You can use social selling techniques not only to improve your online presence and reputation, but also to find more information about your customers that can help you position yourself accordingly. And when you know how their world looks like and what their pain points are, you’ll have a better idea of how you can add value to their lives.

Now, the average sales professional has relationships with 3 contacts from an account. That doesn’t seem like a bad number. But buying decisions are made by committees, and in a typical organization, there are around 8 people who influence and contribute to the decision-making process. Even in smaller companies, most salespeople just have 1 relationship, when there are at least 3 people involved in a sales decision. 

This isn’t ideal.

Why You Should Nurture Several Relationships Within An Account

The average employee changes their job every 2.5 years. This may seem like a long time, but in B2B, that’s just a couple of sales cycles—which means that your contact only has a few chances to persuade the buying committee. And if your contact leaves, who will be left to champion your cause?

“The amount of flux that’s happening—the talent going in and out of businesses—means that a company’s priorities are shifting, ebbing and flowing all the time,” says Sales for Life CEO Jamie Shanks.

Think about it: If you have a relationship with a company’s chief information security officer, that person probably has a good understanding of what you’re talking about and what you can bring to the table. However, the other people in the IT department might not know who you are, or might not have any experience with your solution. And you’ll probably be more of a stranger to people from cross-functional departments such as legal, procurement, finance, or human resources.

So how can you build relationships with them?

This is where social surrounding comes in.

Using Social Surrounding for Your Target Accounts

The entire purpose of social surrounding is to get information fast, while automating much of its collection. The easiest and fastest way to go about this is to make this a part of your account planning process.

You can include your social surrounding research when selecting which accounts to prioritize—this process is tied to your customer accounts after all, and it will be easier to have all your account information centralized in one place.

Advanced search strategies for social surrounding

1. Browse a stakeholder’s LinkedIn profile and start collecting insights about them. Any useful information you can find should be captured.

2. In LinkedIn Sales Navigator, press the save button on someone’s profile to:

  • Follow the person. This way, any like, comment, or share will appear neatly in the Leads section of your Sales Navigator homepage.
  • Follow their company. This lets you easily access any content shared by their company page. You can view this in the Account section of your Sales Navigator homepage.

3. Use Boolean Search on the Bing browser to do research. Do these two searches:

  • person and company search
  • company and topic search

After using Advanced Search strategies to find out who the stakeholders are in your target accounts, it’s now time to do your research on them. Believe it or not, 92% of salespeople and CSMs don’t do any research because they think it takes too much time—and this is a mistake you shouldn’t commit.

Remember that the purpose of social surrounding is to speed up research so it takes less than 2 minutes per contact, instead of trawling the internet for the crucial data you need. These advanced search steps will allow you to automatically capture insights on the people that you want to have a relationship with, using both LinkedIn and Bing.

Conclusion

It’s difficult for sales professionals to build relationships within their customer accounts. You can’t exactly do site visits with every department, especially cross-functionally, because these departments might be located in different cities, states, or even countries—more so now, when there’s a global pandemic going on.

But it’s necessary.

You see, in all your accounts, there are two things that could happen. One, the buying committee will come together and reach a consensus, requiring you to have more advocates inside the organization. Two, if somebody in the buying committee leaves or is replaced, you’ll need to find out who the person is, what happened to them, and who will replace them.

Using LinkedIn and other social platforms to connect with the stakeholders within your customer accounts will allow you to monitor their activities and engage them, keeping you in a stronger position to influence and ensuring you’re ready to act should something happen.

Categories
Uncategorized

6 Ways to Keep Your Sales Pipeline Full

Keeping your sales pipeline full seems to get more challenging with each passing year.

Quotas keep rising, but the number of people you can sell to seems to be decreasing.

How are salespeople supposed to hit their targets this way?

One of the leading causes of this problem is a lack of prospects. Think of it this way: When there aren’t enough leads at the top of your sales funnel, you would eventually be left with zero opportunities to close deals.

Unfortunately, most sales methodologies begin at a point where there are already prospects that you can convert. The focus more often than not is on closing, not on prospecting. 

But if you don’t have any prospects, you can’t close any deals.

That’s why building a strong sales pipeline is important.

What is a sales pipeline?

The sales pipeline is a visual representation of all the stages of your sales process, from your first interaction with a lead or a contact all the way to capturing a sale. It shows your selling performance at a glance, allowing you to easily see which activities and strategies are working and which ones need more work.

Now here’s the tricky part: There isn’t one foolproof, tried-and-tested way to build pipeline. Since sales pipelines vary from business to business, different sales organizations tend to have their own unique processes and rules for pipeline creation. At times, it even varies per member of the sales team.

The lack of standardization in pipeline creation poses several risks, such as:

  • Difficulty identifying specific areas for improvement
  • Less accurate sales outcomes
  • More good leads getting stuck in dead zones

That’s why salespeople who can create, maintain, and improve pipelines will have a higher chance of thriving in today’s cutthroat world. 

How to Keep Your Sales Pipeline Full

Having plenty of sales opportunities prevents you from relying on bad sales practices that could harm your bottom line, such as offering discounts or guilting prospects. A full sales pipeline allows you to confidently set the price your product deserves, knowing that there are plenty of other opportunities you can fall back on. This results in a larger average deal size, more referrals, and positive feedback.

1. Always be prospecting

Spend time every day to look for new leads on LinkedIn, look for buying triggers in the news, and reach out to new prospects via email and phone.

Your prospecting efforts need to be consistent. You see, if you let yourself take a day off one time, you’ll be tempted to do it again a week later, and then the week after that.

And before you know it, you won’t have new leads in your pipeline anymore.

Try blocking some time on your calendar, setting an alarm on your phone, asking another salesperson on your team to keep you accountable, or writing “prospecting” on your daily to-do list. Force yourself to prospect daily—whatever it takes to make it a habit.

2. Upsell and cross-sell.

Sure, working non-stop to attract new customers is exciting. However, if you want to increase revenue without ramping up your lead generation efforts, upselling to existing customers is key.

You see, with new customers, you need to establish trust before they’ll even listen to you, let alone buy your product.

In comparison, your existing customers already trust you. Since they already purchased from you before, they’re much more likely to buy from you again—provided they’re happy with your service.

It’s also a lot cheaper to sell to existing customers than to new ones. According to the 2016 Pacific Crest SaaS Survey, the median Customer Acquisition Cost for upsells is just $0.28 per $1. This is a bargain compared to the $1.18 spent to acquire $1 of revenue from a new customer.

So take the time to regularly check in with your existing customers. Keep providing them with value and identify win-win opportunities to upsell them.

3. Incorporate social selling.

Social selling is necessary to survive and thrive in today’s modern, digital sales environment. The sooner you embrace this, the faster you will meet quotas, grow your pipeline, maximize your profitability, and elevate your team’s skills.

The SPEAR Selling strategy is an effective way to fill your sales pipeline and prospect more efficiently. First, a seller needs to be accountable for their own territory by visualizing their Total Addressable Market (TAM). This allows them to see clearly where gaps and opportunities lie, and they can apply signal intelligence against accounts in their TAM so they can objectively Select and Prioritize the most promising prospects using data-based Signals.

From there, the seller moves on to Planning—developing executive business plans for the top accounts. Engagement starts after, powered by synchronous and asynchronous video.

Next, the seller Activates customers by applying the signal intelligence and the stories they have created against their accounts. The seller should gauge the customers’ feedback—also known as buying intent—before moving to the Reprioritize phase. In this last stage, the seller will redevelop their TAM based on all the data they have gleaned.

4. Ask for referrals.

Your current customers are the best source of your next customers. They believe in your value proposition; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have bought your product.

So once a customer has crossed a certain lifetime value with you, ask them to refer you to someone in their sphere of influence who can use your product.

“Traditionally, when B2B salespeople ask for referrals, they would ask the customer to determine who they should be introduced to,” says Amar Sheth, Sales for Life’s COO. “That’s actually very dangerous. It’s not a smart thing because the customer now has to think about it, which means that there’s a high likelihood that this request may not even be fulfilled.

The best way to go about it, Sheth continues, is to aim for an introduction to a specific person.

“if you could find out who they’re connected to using the power of social media, then you can ask for strategic referrals,” he says. “Using tools like LinkedIn, you can determine who they’re connected to and ask for a strategic and precise referral. This way, you can enter accounts of your choice, not just the choice of the customer.”

5. Know your top customers and focus on them.

a. Grow deeper in existing accounts

In time, you’ll observe that your team closes more deals with companies from a certain industry. For example, if you close six times more deals with mining corporations than food companies, then it makes sense to focus on mining corporations. 

The same logic applies with roles within a company. If historical data says you’re more likely to win a deal when you work with the research team versus the culture team, you should get an introduction to a research team member ASAP.

b. Focus on account retention

Account retention entails building relationships with your customers and maximizing revenue from every single one of them. But it’s not a one-way street: You have to provide more value to your existing customer base as well.

Your sellers should ensure that the customers they have acquired will have a great experience with your company and will stay satisfied with your products and services. Some strategies include improving customer support, offering discounted renewal rates, and rolling out multi-channel engagement campaigns for existing clients.

6. Automate as many processes as possible.

The simpler and easier prospecting is, the less you’ll dread doing it—and the more efficient you’ll be.

There are several CRM tools that you can use to make sales pipeline management easier. You should set reminders and create automated emails to reach out to prospects. Always try to move them further along the pipeline, even after the deal goes cold. Automation lets you focus on warm leads while keeping an eye on cold ones, as well as prospects with longer buying cycles.

Conclusion

Creating and maintaining your sales pipeline isn’t an overnight affair. You have to take good care of properly plotting your pipeline in a customer-centric manner, and this is a process that could require a lot of trial and error. But the result will always be worth it.

Above all, you should never stop prospecting.

A lot of people only prospect at the start of the sales cycle, and that’s not a good strategy. As a seller, you should always find ways to drive new business, no matter where you are in the customer life cycle. You need to be intentional about it, and all your actions should be centered around the creation of new opportunities.

Remember: Building sales pipeline for the sake of building pipeline is meaningless unless you understand what you need to achieve by what date as milestones to get you to your goal. You need to be pointed about the actions and activities—the only things that you control—you should do to achieve that goal.

Categories
Blog Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Sales Enablement

Sales Glossary: What Is a Buyer Persona for Sales?

Know your buyer.

Whether you’re in marketing or sales, it’s important to keep this in mind when targeting customers and crafting messages. Emails, phone calls, and even face-to-face interactions become infinitely more valuable when you consider the needs, fears, and goals of each customer.

But your buyers aren’t cut using the same cookie cutter. The priorities of a VP for marketing, for example, would be different from those of an operations manager—even if they’re both from the same company. In fact, according to advisory firm Corporate Executive Board, a buying decision requires, on average, the input of 5.4 decision-makers, champions, and influencers. That’s a lot of different ideas, perspectives, and knowledge to consider.

This is why a buyer persona (also called prospect persona) are so important in sales. They help sellers better understand their customers, allowing them to book more meetings, generate more pipeline, and increase revenue. The number of personas your company has depends on how many different personalities or roles you sell to.

So what exactly is a buyer persona?

HubSpot’s definition of a buyer persona applies to both marketing and sales:

“A semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. While it helps inbound marketers like you define their target audience, it can also help sales reps qualify leads.”

But though both sales and marketing follow the same definition—the process of building a profile for your ideal customer—each department’s goals vary.

  • Marketing wants to craft resonating messages, increase traffic, and improve conversion rates.
  • Sales wants to book more meetings, grow pipeline, and generate revenue.

An effective buyer persona will allow your team to achieve these three objectives:

  • Identify commercial insights that will create an impact by driving behavioral change
  • Save time and effort by only creating content tailored to your customers’ needs
  • Generate useful customer information in a more efficient manner
buyer persona creation

Planning Your Buyer Persona

The first thing you need to do is to identify the information you need in order to create a buyer persona template. In “The Sales Development Playbook” by Trish Bertuzzi, she outlines sections to address for prospect personas.

  • Target Title: What role does your prospect currently hold? Is your prospect a VP of Sales? A Chief Marketing Officer? A Sales Enablement Manager?
  • Role and Responsibility: What does the job entail for each of these positions?
  • Challenges and Obstacles: What are some of the major challenges specific to each role?
  • Professional Success Metrics: What are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) relevant to each position? For the sales team, performance is usually measured by meetings, revenue, and year-over-year growth, margins, and P&L. On the other hand, marketing measures success according to impressions and views, as well as the number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) that were created, converted and have subscribed. 
  • Risks and Fears: On a more psychological level, what are some risks and fears that relate to each person’s position? For example, a VP of Sales might worry because others in his position only last 18 months, so he feels like he has very little time to make an impact on the bottom line.
  • Consequences of the Status Quo: To make a difference, you first need to know what needs to be changed. What are the old tactics that aren’t working? Are the sales and marketing team encountering recurring issues?
  • The Big Win We Deliver: How does each position contribute to the success of the company? Do they generate pipeline and revenue? Do they facilitate alignment? This helps you objectively determine if it’s worth it to invest in regular training for your team.

Putting It Into Practice

Different companies have different ways of creating a buyer persona. We’ll show one way of doing so in the situation below.

The Scenario:

Company X wants to target the heads of human resources (director or above) of companies with 250 or more employees.

Step 1: Identify your target prospects’ titles and roles. Map out everyone that sits in the buyer committee—you need to form relationships with as many of them, not just the main decision-makers. This sets the stage for the kind of content your team will create—your outreach efforts should appeal to as many of the buyers as possible.

Step 2: Gather demographic and firmographic information about your prospects. Determine what each prospect wants to accomplish at the company, and how you can help them achieve their goals. Generating great commercial insights will debunk myths and paint a clearer picture of the opportunity cost, so it’s critical to understand what your buyers need.

Step 3: Strategize how you’re going to help your prospects. Remember to speak the language of your buyer, and to craft messaging that addresses their pain points.

Step 4: christen your buyer persona with a name like “Marketing Mary” or “Fred, VP of Sales.” Include a photo to further humanize this abstract persona. As trivial as it may seem, this gives your sellers a more complete picture of who you’re targeting.

sample buyer persona for sellers
A sample buyer persona.

Salespeople, like marketers, can use buyer personas to better understand both current and prospective customers. The best personas are based on market research, but they can also be built from interviews and trends based on their own database.

As Bertuzzi maps out in her book, creating a grid of your ideal buyers’ thoughts, fears and values will help you to not only better understand them, but to also leverage insights accurately, efficiently, and consistently to book meetings and close deals. Good luck!