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
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
pipeline development

Creating The Optimal Business Development Strategy

For a lot of people, business development is practically synonymous with sales. And while they have their similarities—both are geared towards profit, after all—they are two distinct entities.

What is Business Development?

Business development is the creation of long-term value for an organization via customers, markets, and relationships. It’s the sum of all the strategies, tactics, and activities used to acquire new clients and expand existing ones.

Given this definition, we can assume that business development representatives are in charge of growing your business. This means finding opportunities for expansion and having expert knowledge of the current market, their target audience, and potential business partners. Thus, they’re the ones who have to prospect and qualify leads before handing them off to the sales team, who will then nurture the new relationships in order to close the deal.

Business Development vs. Sales vs. Marketing

The lines between business development, sales, and marketing are very blurry. There are several overlapping responsibilities between the three teams, and it doesn’t help that business development can look very different from company to company.

Let’s take a look at their differences:

Marketing: Marketing is the customer-facing branch of your organization, and its primary goal is to attract customers.  The marketing team is responsible for brand management, using websites, social media, advertisements, and other channels to stay at the forefront of your customers’ minds. They are also in charge of educating customers about your company and your products, and they handle offers and promotions.

Sales: The difference between business development and sales is murkier. Some companies even treat the two departments as one team, interchanging the responsibilities of the two.

However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Business development and sales operate in separate stages of the same customer journey. BDRs are responsible for top-of-the-funnel activities: finding leads, starting conversations, and educating potential customers. They are in charge of filling the sales pipeline, while sales representatives nurture the pipeline by turning qualified leads into prospects, eventually convincing them to buy.

The Optimal Business Development Strategy

When planning your business development strategy, it helps to think of it as a system with several interconnected parts.

This is because a lot of business development strategies tend to lack clarity and focus. Oftentimes, they’re too complicated and have lost sight of the revenue team’s overarching goal—which is to answer why a potential customer should buy from you instead of the countless other options in the market. The inability to answer this question can lead to useless tactics, poor execution, and confusion for both your revenue team and your clients. 

The story and the purpose of your business should be the cornerstone of your business development strategy. You need to differentiate yourself from the competition. All of your revenue team’s actions should be able to reflect your unique position in the market.

As mentioned above, business development intersects with the other departments in your revenue team. Though the lines are blurry, it’s not really a matter of reassigning certain tasks to the other team. Instead, the affected teams should work together towards the common goal: The company’s continued growth.

Business Development and Marketing

Marketing and business development should work together to tell your organization’s story and strategize how to generate leads. Together, the two teams can help prospects make informed decisions about engaging with you and availing of your company’s services via the following factors:

Your Positioning In The Market: The way your company is positioned in the market defines the backbone of your entire business development plan. It provides a clear blueprint of your target market, effectively acting as a North Star for every business decision you make. 

Customer Traffic: The right amount of traffic and traffic from the right people to solidify your position in the market. Exposure to your company and your core message is required to get results.

Messaging: Your message should be compelling enough to be able to stop people in their tracks when they hear it. Remember: The more you can gain and keep someone’s attention, the more chance you have of landing a new client. 

Channels: Your marketing channels can greatly affect your overall business development and marketing strategy. For example, to establish authority and solidify your position as a thought leader in your market, you’ll need to post insights on social media, speak in events and interviews, and publish original content regularly. 

Business Development and Sales

Your sales process starts with finding the right clients—after all, you can’t close deals when there are no customers to begin with. With this, let’s go back to your company’s position in the market. Your positioning helps dictate the people your business development team will reach out to, filtering out all but the best prospects through a stringent qualification process. 

Now, your sales strategy should support your qualified prospects’ ability to make good decisions—specifically, to sign contracts with you. Inversely, your sales process should also eliminate customers that fail to meet the criteria in your qualification process. Otherwise, you may experience unnecessarily long and unpredictable sales cycles, which could affect your quota attainment. 

Business Development and Product Delivery

Business development doesn’t end when the contract is signed. Before the ink is dry, you should be able to deliver on your promises.

The product delivery experience can create additional value for your customers, opening the door to more opportunities for your business development program. Let’s look at the three main components of the delivery process: your product, your service, and your customer life cycle. 

Product: The product you deliver should speak for itself. It should demonstrate your company’s value to your client, making employees tell their friends and colleagues about how great of a job you’re doing. This increases the chances of getting referrals

Service: The quality, speed, and ease of using your service can likewise boost business development by inspiring referrals. It’s important to fulfill your deliverables, don’t forget to create a good customer experience as well.

Life Cycle: Your customer life cycle is tied directly to your positioning. Telling your brand’s story increases traffic through the right channels, which you can take advantage of by creating a sales process that targets the right people with the right offer. When the contract is signed, you should deliver a product in a way that creates more value for your client and lets them see what else you could help them improve upon, effectively selling more of what they need along the way. 

Conclusion

In the end, there’s no such thing as a perfect business development strategy. Leads can enter your sales funnel in unexpected ways and can be removed from your pipeline just as well. 

By understanding the different components that drive business development, the different departments of your revenue team can work together and adjust your strategy to minimize risk and grow your profitability. 

Categories
Sales Management

The 5 Components of a Winning Sales Team

As sellers, it’s our responsibility to stay abreast of the latest sales trends and best practices. So when we read the Harvard Business Review article “The Sales Playbook of Successful B2B Teams”, we immediately wanted to share it with you because it really resonated with us.

Right at the onset, the article, which was written by four Bain & Company partners, mentioned one of the most common problems that sales teams face: underutilizing the tools at their disposal.

“Every major B2B company invests millions each year in sales technologies, yet 62% of 167 companies surveyed recently by Bain & Company said the return on their investment fell short of expectations. What companies hoped would be an intelligent CRM system ends up being used as a simple accounting and workflow management system. They’ve bought a high-octane car but lack driver training.”

At Sales for Life, we’ve also encountered a lot of companies with this same problem. Solving it isn’t as easy as it seems. It’s not just a matter of installing the tool on everyone’s computer or browser and enforcing its use. All the technology in your roster should work together seamlessly to achieve your organization’s goals, and there has to be an overarching strategy governing their usage.

The 5 Factors of a Winning Sales Team

Revenue teams need to develop different sales strategies for different occasions. Similar to how sales teams these days use data and statistics to select their players and create training routines and game plays, all of your revenue team’s moves should be based on proven facts instead of relying on gut feel or following what’s popular.

While different revenue teams have different priorities, thus having different strategies, the article’s authors observed that the highest-performing sales teams have certain distinct commonalities. These factors, described below, enable them to surpass their peers in terms of revenue growth and market share gain.

1. Detailed, specific data and sales signals that lend insight into an account’s priorities and spending habits at the individual customer level.

These data should go beyond contact information and surface-level company and financial data. Sellers should likewise know their target accounts’ priorities and goals, ensuring that their communication efforts address these.

Sales reps should also take note of Compelling Event Signals, which are specific, time-sensitive insights and events that can be leveraged to gain a competitive advantage. Compelling Event Signals give sellers a heads-up when there’s a particular situation that the seller can capitalize on, such as the installation of a new C-level executive that used to work at one of your existing customer accounts. If such a Signal comes up, the seller should act fast and play the appropriate sales strategy.

2. A sales play factory that can churn out a variety of plays that can be used for every conceivable occasion: Securing new accounts, upselling and cross-selling to existing accounts, renewing expiring accounts, and winning back former customers.

Selling isn’t a one-size-fits-all scenario. Different customers have different priorities and situations, and they will naturally have different ways of responding (or not responding) to your outreach efforts.

That’s why it’s important to have a selection of various sales plays, ready to be deployed if a particular situation calls for it. By applying a variety of themes, messaging, engagement strategies, your sellers would have a higher likelihood of providing value to your customers during the activation cycle.

3. A command center that tracks and manages sales plays, pushing out the most effective plays to the rest of the team.

In the same way that sports teams analyze their games and continuously refine their strategies and training regimens, sales teams should keep working on their most effective sales plays in a strategic manner, at the same time shelving sales moves that failed to produce favorable results.

In addition, the best sales teams also have a global command center for their sales signals. All their signals are aggregated on one platform, which is easily accessible to the entire revenue team. This way, sellers can take note of the hidden links connecting all the accounts in their total addressable market, allowing them to see the sales opportunities and risks that might be present. When all the information is centralized, they can roll out the best sales plays for any situation.

4. Consistent, intensive coaching like what Sales for Life offers, which delves into specific areas of improvement and requires actual results.

Sales training and coaching give your team the knowledge and skills necessary to keep growing and supporting your client base. It also fosters accountability in your sales leaders, allowing them to guide their sellers to produce better results.

Remember, building the best B2B sales team doesn’t just entail hiring the best sellers and investing in the best sales tools. While these could propel your revenue team to the top, you’ll need to invest in regular sales training and coaching in order to stay there for a long time.

5. An array of interconnected sales technology tools that are integrated within your existing sales system and are fully utilized by your whole team.

Even if you have all the best sales tools at your disposal, they wouldn’t make a difference if they are not maximized.

“One software-as-a-service (SaaS) company had invested in technologies for customer relationship management, marketing automation, sales enablement and cadence, and call recording, but it was barely using them. By taking the time to embed these technologies properly into its sales processes, the company was able to increase revenue growth by 200 basis points within a few weeks.”

Conclusion

These five factors are essential for revenue teams that want to succeed in today’s cutthroat sales environment. With these systems in place within your strategy, all the departments within your sales and marketing teams work better with each other.

These five components also allow you to address your customers’ needs efficiently. You’ll be able to provide more value at the right time, benefitting your customers and giving you more opportunities to successfully close a deal.

Categories
b2b sales Digital Sales Transformation Sales Management

How To Hit Your Sales Goals: Reverse-Engineering

Achieving your sales goals is easier said than done. There are so many circumstances that can give even the most experienced sellers a hard time meeting their sales targets.

Case in point: The global COVID-19 pandemic, which forced revenue teams to replace in-person, face-to-face networking events and client meetings with social media interactions and Zoom calls.

In order to conquer the curve balls thrown your way, you should first recognize that the only things that you could control in order to achieve your sales goals are actions and activities. Everything else is an influence, aligned to something beyond your control.

For example, you couldn’t control when it would rain. But you can plan ahead to ensure that you’d be ready in case of a sudden downpour. You can always carry an umbrella or a raincoat in your bag, or you could map out a shaded route that you could take while walking to work.

The same principle applies in sales. Keep in mind that you can’t achieve your desired sales goals by yourself. You can only influence them and align with them so you’ll end up in a favorable position.

Working Your Way Backwards From Your Sales Goals

To have the best chance of hitting your annual sales goals, you should create your gameplan by reverse-engineering from your target.

Imagine that there are stepping stones leading towards your sales goals. These are your sales objectives, or milestones, and they indicate your progress towards goal completion.

Milestones inform your revenue team about what success should look like at a certain week, a certain month, or a certain quarter. They help your sellers stay focused and motivated, and prevents them from being overwhelmed by your main sales goal.

For example, if your sales goal is achieving a total annual revenue of $1 million, one of your milestones could be closing a certain number of deals by the end of Q3. Achieving this milestone will indicate that you’re on track to achieving your sales goal.

Take note that hitting all your milestones wouldn’t guarantee a 100% chance of achieving your sales goals. As we’ve said before, you never know when life decides to throw you a curve ball that could derail your strategy. You will, however, have a higher likelihood of hitting your goals since you’ve already made the necessary preparations for it.

Actions and Activities: The Building Blocks of Your Sales Goals

Now, the milestones you set are influenced by the sales actions and activities that you undertake. These are the things that you and the rest of your revenue team can actually control, such as the messaging of your content, the cadence of your emails, and the videos you send to your prospects.

That’s why these sales activities and actions should be carefully planned and coordinated. Cooperation between the sales, marketing, and enablement teams is critical. The whole revenue team should be aligned and focused on one thing: To achieve the sales goal you set for yourselves.

If the revenue team isn’t properly aligned, some departments could find themselves unnecessarily spending time doing arbitrary actions and activities that can boost their own profile, but don’t really propel them towards their milestones. It’s a distraction; a waste of time, effort, and resources.

We can’t stress enough how crucial it is that each member of your revenue team should know what their top priority should be. If a certain sales action or activity can’t influence your milestones, then it can’t lead you closer to your main goal of achieving your sales targets.

To Summarize

To achieve your sales objectives, you need to take to heart these two notions:

  1. Understand that you can only control actions and activities. Everything else, you can only influence to achieve an outcome that’s favorable to you.
  1. To achieve your sales goals (or any goal for that matter), start planning at the end. Reverse-engineer your progress towards goal completion by determining the milestones indicating that you’re on track to achieving your target. Then, figure out the actions and activities that will help you achieve those milestones.