Tips For Prospect Engagement

5 Tips For Prospect Engagement


These are five important tips for prospect engagement that
will improve attracting your target audience, forge trusting
relationships with them and make it more likely that they will buy from
you.


All buyers look for outcomes and your prospects have important
decisions to make before they buy. These decisions are dependent on the
solutions you can offer for their business problems, how familiar and
comfortable they are with your company, how much trust and confidence
they have in you, and whether or not having a business relationship will
be beneficial.


Therefore, your prospect engagement efforts should always be
geared towards creating these outcomes, because establishing this type
of relationship will inevitably lead to more sales.





Tip 1) Reach Out to Quality Prospects


Sure, it’s handy when someone clicks on one of the blog posts or
pulse article you wrote, revealing interest and establishing themselves
as a potential customer. One that needs to be nurtured. But sometimes
you might be so lucky. Sometimes you could be waiting around a while
before someone shows interest in your company.


Don’t forget that an old-fashioned introduction still goes a long way
toward establishing prospect relationships, and this includes reaching
out on social media to someone you don’t yet know. But if you’re going
to reach out to someone, make sure that they are a quality lead. Because
lead nurturing isn’t easy. It involves a lot of work to establish trust
and engage with them consistently over a long period of time. So don’t
waste your time introducing yourself to just about anyone. You also need
to understand their company’s business needs, as well as their personal
goals. The most effective and efficient way to find quality prospects
is by investing in automated lead generation services. This way, lead
generation experts can source your most relevant prospects and keep your
sales pipeline full.


Once you’ve collected all that information, you’ll be able to forge
strong, authentic connections that go a lot further than the cold, hard
sales pitches of yesteryear.


Tip 2) Give Them the Answers to Their Problems


Let’s face it, not many people are interested in hearing about office
technology, document solutions, or network services. What your
potential customers really care about is their own business. They don’t
want to listen to product pitches. They want to hear solutions to their
pains and problems. They need answers to their questions.


Focusing on the prospect’s business issues is crucial to solution
selling. And today, it is also crucial to online marketing. Darrell Amy,
from ProspectBuilder.net, believes “You are an empty shirt in the
solutions business until you understand your clients’ business
problems.”


You can develop a better understanding of buyers/customers desires by
reading through relevant industry websites and LinkedIn group
conversations. With this information, it is much easier to know exactly
what content your prospects are interested to read, allowing you to
tailor your content accordingly.


Make it meaningful. If a prospect expressed a certain difficulty
their business faced in a LinkedIn conversation, try delivering helpful
content to them through an email. Ideally you want to make it as
personal as possible, so include a simple message that helps the
prospect understand the topic and why you think it is important for them
to read.


Tip 3) Leverage Social Media to Stay Top-Of-Mind


More and more, getting to know your target audience and establishing
relationships with them is an essential part of today’s sales process.
And it turns out that social media can help you achieve this quickly and
easily.


In order to solve problems for potential clients, leveraging social
media is a must. “Social media allows salespeople to see what prospects
are saying about their brand and competitors,” says Janet Fouts, a
social media coach and chief executive of Tatu Digital Media, an online
marketing agency. “You can really get to know his or her needs through
social listening. It’s a great way to research a market and initiate
conversation leading to a sale.”


Colleen Francis (president of Engage Selling) claims that she has
witnessed sales people pursue leads through social media and end up
closing deals between $30,000 and $250,000.


LinkedIn is the most appropriate networking site for sales of
business-to-business products or services, Francis says. “LinkedIn is a
more professional networking environment, so this is the right place to
connect with people at big corporations that might be interested in your
product or service.” So this is the place to join groups, participate
in conversations, like and share prospects posts, and share interesting
and helpful content.


Twitter can be used for all kinds of sales, Francis says. “But the
number one use should be listening, not broadcasting. Use what you hear
as leverage to pick up the phone and call. Listen for problems that can
be solved.”


Tip 4) Become a Thought Leader through Educational Content


Filling the role as a thought leader and trusted advisor, you’ll
serve the role of both information library and subject matter expert. As
you expand your own repertoire of knowledge, think of new and
interesting ways to share that knowledge with your target audience.


“Education is the most powerful weapon to change the world.” This
Nelson Mandela quote reigns true in most contexts, as well as in the
business world. I believe that the brands that prioritize educating
their target audience through the creation of insightful content are
wisely choosing the road less traveled.


As already mentioned, customers don’t particularly care about the
products or services we’re offering; they care about their own
interests. Considering this, we must also accept that the majority of
the information we produce for marketing purposes cannot be about
ourselves. Our content must be based on fulfilling our customers’ needs
and interests, so that they come to build a trusted and emotional
connection with our brands.


Content doesn’t always have to come in the form of text. Images are
content. Infographics are content. So are videos. And slide shows. And
downloads. In fact, the use of imagery and video is more likely to reach
and engage a much greater audience. People love visual – they are
attracted by content in the form of infographics, relatable photos and
data. You know the old saying – “a picture is worth a thousand words”.


Just remember this – the more you educate or entertain your prospect, the more they don’t mind being sold to.





Tip 5) Consider your Relationship Long-Term


It’s easy to approach a sale with a short-term goal, that being
making a sale. But it’s time to start looking at it a little
differently. Nurturing your leads should be an essential part of your
selling strategy that should not be ignored. Not only do you want your
prospects to buy, but you want them to come back for more.


So let’s say that you’ve just made a sale. Your work shouldn’t end
here. Continue to nurture this lead. Maintain that trusting relationship
you’ve worked so hard to establish in the first place. This will
benefit you with extended financial rewards.


Did you know that it costs five times as much to attract a new
customer, than to keep an existing one? No? That’s ok, you’re not alone.
44% of companies place greater focus and energy into acquiring new
customers, while only 18% prioritize retaining customers who have
already bought from them. The probability of selling to an existing
customer is 60-70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect
is 5-20%. This should prove that the first rule of any business is to
retain customers and build a loyal relationship with them.


Abandoning a conversation after getting what you want is running the
risk of ruining good relationships. So thinking of every prospect
relationship as long term and you could well be on your way to earning
some customer advocates. These are the valued people who are likely to
recommend you to their own communities. You know, the type of
word-of-mouth social selling that’s gone on since day one.


So there’s 5 important tips for engaging with your prospects.
Implementing these tips and strategies will help your sales and
marketing team move prospects through the sales funnel and keep them
coming back for more.

What is Sales Intelligence?

One of the latest buzzwords in sales is “sales intelligence“,
so what exactly is it?. Well Peter Coffee (VP and Head of Platform
research of Salesforce) describes sales intelligence using this
metaphor: “Without sales intelligence, you’re driving with dirty
windows. With it? GPS with real-time traffic/weather feed”.


This statement refers to if your sales team is consistently making
cold calls with low returns, having a hard time finding the right
decision makers, or only have enough time to find out the most basic
information about potential buyers, that probably means you need better
sales intelligence.





What is Sales Intelligence?


There is nothing particularly revolutionary about sales intelligence,
it is simply any information that can be useful to improve sales
effectiveness. This can mean researching a prospect, their target
market, their industry, their company, who the big decision makers are,
or the most recent news about their business. Anything you can work with
to make a sale more likely to happen. This arms sales teams with better
insights into who exactly they are engaging with and enables them to
strategize their approach in order to increase favorable results. Better
sales intelligence can give you the strategic vision to uncover better
sales opportunities. Just think of a prepared sales person as the
classic cocktail party hero – better prepared to interact with everyone
effectively.


Peter Ostrow of the Aberdeen Group says “You need to know a lot about
that customer, not just their name, their email address, their URL,
that’s almost commoditized information. None of this information
necessarily opens up a chance to have a conversation that will lead to a
sale. True sales intelligence gives your reps information they need to
advance a conversation that potentially leads to a close.” For example,
it may be advantageous to figure out why a particular prospect would
want to buy from you. What business problems are they struggling with
and how can your product or service be the solution?


A Big Issue with Sales Intelligence


Ever since the economic downturn of 2008’s global financial crisis,
companies have been forced to cut spending and sales people have faced
more and more pressure to meet quotas. This has meant that sales
professionals have less time to properly research individual leads in a
world where in-depth information has never been as important and
advantageous for business. This hardly seems fair!


The rise of the internet has presented sales people with an
unimaginable wealth of data to research potential clients. But this
information can often be difficult to acquire because of the vast body
of unfiltered and unorganized internet data.


Researching a prospect in today’s digital world can be tedious and
take up an unnecessary amount of a sales person’s time. Time that could
be spent on the phones selling. Internet data about an
individual lead is not well organized or focused on the needs of a sales
professional who’s about to walk into a meeting with a client. Did they
walk in there having thoroughly researched that potential client’s
business? Did they discover a recent investment made by that company?
Did they even find common interests/hobbies from their social media
accounts to perhaps break the ice with? Or did they go in with the bare
minimum of information, hoping for the best, simply because there wasn’t
enough time to sift through all the internet data when quotas still
need to be met? Sure, companies have a great wealth of information, but
it’s usually not accessible to the members of the sales team in the way
they need it. “Typically, there is a lot of knowledge out there,” says
John Aiello, CEO of SAVO, “The gap is that people can’t find it.”


Ease of discovery is a key metric for sales-intelligence success.
Unless the information sales teams need is simple to find, it will
probably be left untapped. According to an Accenture study in the US and
UK, almost 60% of sales managers have to use numerous sources in order
to collect all the relevant information needed to be successful in their
job. A similar number claimed that this information was poorly
distributed across the organization.


It is “shocking” how few companies truly help their salespeople
prepare to have meaningful conversations, says CSO Insights authors Jim
Dickie and Barry Trailer. “We may want them to do it. We may even demand
they do it. But precious few of us give salespeople access to the sales
intelligence to actually do it.” Only 9.7% of businesses said they had
implemented programs to facilitate easy access to sales intelligence.
The remaining 90.3% admitted that obtaining sales intelligence “required
some hunting, a lot of hunting, or was not available at all.”


It is clear that 90.3% of businesses would benefit from changing
their current method of sales intelligence acquisition. They need a
solution. But how?


Sales Intelligence Services


The top performing firms have invested in sales intelligence
services. The Aberdeen Group recently discovered that over 60% of B2B
sales professionals said that sales intelligence helped them get more
sales leads and better quality sales leads.





Sales intelligence services save your sales team the time and effort
by finding verified leads for them based on your prospect criteria and
compiles quality, detailed sales intelligence on each of them.


For example, not only does Connectors Marketplace consistently
provide your team with a comprehensive list of relevant prospects, their
phone numbers, and email, they also give you the latest news about the
current company your prospect works for, as well as a link to their
LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ account. With easy access to their social
media, social selling becomes a lot easier. It also allows your sales
reps to learn more about the person or engage with them online to
establish a stronger relationship.


The right sales intelligence can let your salespeople know which
companies are the best fit for your solution, and help them find leads
that are most likely to buy from you. It gives your sales people
detailed strategies for how to approach each company or each type of
decision maker, and it gives your sales team a better understanding of
your customer. There’s always a learning curve with finding a new
customer. Better sales intelligence makes that learning curve less
steep.


Having the most relevant data at your fingertips ensures that your
sales people are selling to prospects and current customers as
effectively as possible. They can spend more time selling and less time
doing the legwork and research involved with tracking down data and
finding phone numbers. It’s never been easier and faster for salespeople
to do their jobs with these services, and arms them with information
they need to have better-informed, more productive, more credible
conversations with clients.


Key Benefits of Sales Intelligence


Let me outline the key benefits your sales team will experience with a sales intelligence service:


• Find the most relevant and influential contacts much faster.

• Have a better insight on competitors, the buying habits of potential
buyers, and your potential buyer’s position in the marketplace.

• Automate and centralize data on both cold call contacts and established contacts.

• Improve sales efforts when engaging with prospects that are more prepared to buy.

• Increase the number of sales with increased automation and data accuracy.


When it comes to sales intelligence services, it’s not about how to
get your sales people to do more, it’s about facilitating them so they
can do better. Better quality sales leads, better-informed
conversations, and better relationships with potential clients are
ultimately going to lead to better success in selling. With the current
problems facing businesses today, better sales intelligence is an issue
that all companies will inevitably have to address at some point. Given
the increasingly competitive nature of today’s market, it’s better to
deal with this sooner – not later.





What is Sales Intelligence? | Lead Generation and Social Selling Articles and News

How to be a Lead Genius

A real lead genius knows that selling is a game of metrics and
ratios. Basically, more leads when added to sales training = more
sales. Lead generation is one of the most important activities that any
business can undertake. Because without leads there are no sales.
Therefore, a lead genius is, by extension, also a sales genius!


But if you were to ask a room of B2B business owners what the
greatest challenge their business faced was, you can be sure that most
would say generating new leads. Finding quality prospects can feel like
an Easter egg hunt, leaving sales people to focus too much of their time
simply identifying leads as oppose to actually selling.


So if you’re looking for more success and less fruitless searching,
think about outsourcing your lead generation. Not only can this save
your sales team a lot of time and energy, it is also likely to
significantly boost your sales rate.





A Common Barrier to Making More Sales


According to Gartner, 67% of a sales person’s time is generally spent
completing non-selling tasks. This includes identifying leads,
researching their information, entering their data onto spreadsheets,
and other busy activities. Spending this much time on internal
activities obviously means there is less time available to actually sell
to customers. Instead of adding to the productivity of your business,
these activities amount to wasted effort and resources, and lost
opportunities instead of won deals.


When it comes to better lead nurturing and closing deals, you’ve got
to separate your lead generation from your sales team. One of the
biggest productivity killers is piling a load of different
responsibilities into one general “sales” role.


Leads are typically generated through the marketing process of
stimulating and attracting interest in a service or product for the
purpose of creating a sales pipeline. On the other hand, a sales person
is mainly focused on the exchange of goods and services for money, in
other words – selling something. To state the obvious, these two
definitions indicate that lead generation is not about selling. And
selling is not about generating leads.


So let’s face reality here. Sales people are meant to be great at selling.
When it comes to lead generation, many may lack the skills or
experience to produce those all-important prospect lists in a limited
amount of time. You’d be lucky to find someone who is amazing at every
task you throw at them. Specializing the tasks in your company is proven
to be most productive, effective and can generate the most revenue. Big
brands like Facebook, Cineworld and AirBnB operate at high levels of
specialization. This has enabled them to add thousands of new customers
to their business every day.


B2B lead generation is definitely not an easy task. It requires time
and effort – a lot of time and effort. The problem is that most
companies just don’t have the time, resources and experience to hire a
whole batch of new lead generation staff, put them through a training
program and create an effective strategy of developing and nurturing new
business leads.


But there is a solution to this problem.

Automated Lead Generation Services

These services do the rough work for your sales team by providing
them with a continuously flowing list of prospects that match your
target lead profile. Data collection experts and lead generation
technology deliver quality leads consistently to keep your sales
pipeline full. This way, prospects are only an email or phone call away.


Investing in lead generation services means that your sellers will
come in to the office each day to find a long list of quality leads
sitting on their desk. And guess what, that means they can get straight
down to selling your product.


Connectors Marketplace, for example, supplies sales teams with
verified leads, along with their phone number, email, social media
accounts, picture and general news about their current employers. Unique
data research is conducted for each company. This technology, combined
with their own data scientists can generate highly targeted and detailed
customer information in such a way that cannot be generated using lead
generation tools alone.


The goal of these lead generation services is to save your sales
people time so that they can focus more of their energy on engaging with
and nurturing relevant prospects.





How You Benefit


Full Sales Funnel:


A recent survey revealed that almost 50% of companies said they
wanted the number of sale leads to increase. Automated lead generation
services ensure that your sales funnel will always be full. This lets
your sales people concentrate on focused selling. As a result, the
process allows faster conversion, lesser hassles and better revenue with
a more specialized team.


Lead Enrichment:


The quality of leads and data is also one of the greatest obstacles
sales team’s face today. The same survey revealed that over 35% of
companies claimed that they lacked access to quality prospects.


When you outsource your lead generation, you turn over the
responsibility to a specialist. It’s their core business, it’s what they
do. Through access to better quality data and qualification methods,
lead specialists can uncover leads that maybe your own sales team would
never discover – often at a lower cost than internal sales techniques.
So your sales team will only be targeting the most influential sales
leads so they can start nurturing these powerful prospects.


CMO of Centerbeam, Karen Hayward, said in an interview that
outsourcing lead generation helped her company narrow down a target
market of eighty-thousand to the highest quality twenty-thousand leads.
As soon as her target market was reduced by 75%, the deals closed were
significantly larger than average.


Up-To-Date Data:


Almost 50% of your business’s customer contact information can go out
of date every year without constant updating (Source: Bureau of Labor
& Statistics). So if your team have outdated information collecting
dust in your database, or an excessive amount of inbound leads, lead
generation services make sure your data is fresh and up-to-date.


Cost Efficient:


One reason why lead generation is often outsourced is due to the cost
of maintaining and running an in-house department. Deciding to create
an in-house lead generation team typically means having to hire new
staff, invest in new equipment as well as dedicate a lot of time to
training new employees to the marketing of a company’s products and
services.


So if you want to minimize your company’s costs, consider outsourcing
lead generation to third party companies that already have the needed
equipment as well as highly-capable and trained staff to handle the task
of lead generation. In fact, outsourced B2B lead generation is proven
to be 43% more effective than in-house lead generation (source:
Marketing Sherpa).


So if you want to be a sales genius, you must first become a lead genius. Investing in an automated lead generation service will help your sales team be as effective as possible, and therefore generate more revenue for your business.





How to be a Lead Genius

Selling Techniques – The Bitter Business

Published with permission of The Bitter Business.

In sales, for selling techniques to work effectively there needs to
be clarity in both the actual sales role and in the process of selling.
Successful selling is about always having a clear objective based on
where we are in the sales process.


Challenge the buyer’s journey


Sales people can too often view the sales process as a linear process
with a WIN/LOSS outcome at the end where the prospect either chooses
you or the competition. There is a third option which studies show that
effects up to sixty percent of deals getting marked lost, this is the
“No Decision” scenario where the prospect parks the deal due to the fear
of change or just don’t see the value. One selling technique is to
challenge the status quo of the win/loss scenario and focus on getting
buyers to see that change (choosing your solution) can make them a hero,
will make life easier and has value far beyond the price being paid.





Find the USP


In the sales process there will always be some overlap between what
you provide and what the competition can provide to a prospective
customer. Stark reality is that the overlap could be as high as sixty or
seventy percent. Do not fall into the sales trap of over focusing on
“parity areas” against competitors in the sales process. Rather sales
people should focus on what they can do for the customer that is
absolutely different from what the competition can do; this is
your “Unique Selling Point.” Your USP has to be unique to your solution,
identified as being important to the customer, and can be defended when
push comes to shove.


Share social stories with real meaning


Sales and marketing messaging is about telling a company’s story in
such a way that it attracts prospects to the business and eventually
turns them into customers. The challenge for every company and sales
person is to share stories (social selling) that differentiate from the
competitors. Sharing stories with real meaning can help create a
powerful perception of value in a customer’s mind. So we need to tell
the “before” story and the “after” story, real verifiable stories,
meaningful stories, stories with emotion. Share real stories about the
people who were affected by the challenges in the business area they
were working in. Then share how their situation became easier, more
productive, or less stressful after using your solution to the problem.


The customer is the Hero


Every story has a hero. The hero who got things sorted. In business,
the customer is always the hero, the hero who identified the problem,
who foreseen change was needed, that there was a better way. Reality
check, it is NOT you, your company or your solution. The customer is the
one who needs to save the day, not you. Selling has changed, the sales
role is to adopt the position of a mentor, listening, helping, guiding
and sharing stories to customers so they can see what needs to be
changed and how they can thrive into the future.


Focus on the customer


Successful selling starts by really listening to the customer, the
challenges they have and what they want to solve, rather than just
trying to find a reason to sell them something. No such thing as a
standard sales presentation, each one should be tailored so the way you
present your product or service will match each and every customer’s
requirements. This solution selling technique is a far more powerful
than delivering a template driven, general purpose sales pitch. Now your
sales message can pinpoint exactly how your product suits the customer,
highlighting the points where you have a competitive advantage (USP).
While at the same time, the more information you know about a customer’s
position and what your product could potentially do for them, the more
likely you can prove its value to them, hence reducing the fear to
change barrier.


Focus on the right customers


Customer acquisition and lead nurturing is about focusing on the
right customers. Ask the question “Who do I sell to?” No point hunting
down prospects if the solution you have is not a right fit. While sales
training should include sales tips on getting past the gatekeepers such
as secretaries and to create interest, they do not tell you which
customers to approach. Take the time to understand where your company
can beat the competition, then research customer profiles, draw up a
list of prospects, engage with social selling to create awareness to put
you in a strong position when it comes to considering you or your
solution. Also knowing who your ideal customer profile is will help open
up a sales story and why it is worth a customers’ time talking to you.
Knowing when to sell and knowing when to walk away is a selling
technique not being taught enough.


Clarity in the Sales Process


Think of a sales process as a series of steps to get from A to Z.
Does the sales process have or include a free trial, an on-site visit,
face-to-face meeting, proof of concept or maybe a product demonstration?
What processes have proven most successful in the past? On every
customer interaction, ask yourself, what do I want to get out of this
and where are we in the sales process? Clarity in the sales process
gives you a framework and the time to create a buying vision, the
reasons and case why the customer will change (challenge the buyers
journey) plus the time to share social stories to show how the
prospect’s world can change for the better.


Be Systematic


Success is based on hard work and skill not luck. A systematic
approach to selling is critical to sales success. Have a daily, weekly
and monthly plan for lead generation, sales calls, social selling,
pipeline development and deals secured with specific targets in each
area. Much of this sales activity is a question of efficient time
management so before you start your week, check your sales process and
then plan the number of events you want to progress.


In sales, we are today where our selling techniques have brought us. We will be tomorrow where our selling techniques take us.



 Selling Techniques – The Bitter Business

Powerful Sales Techniques You Probably Haven’t Tried Before

If you are finding it tough to think of new ways to sell or prospect, let me share some powerful sales techniques you probably haven’t tried before. They might just give you an edge on your competition.


1) Learn How to Speak So That People Want To Listen


Leading sound and communications expert Julian Treasure performed a
TED Talk on “how to speak so that people want to listen”. His in-depth
psychological research on speech and voice tone are pretty insightful
and, I believe, should be adopted in the business world as a powerful
sales technique.





Getting someone to want to listen to you isn’t just about what you
say, it’s also about how you say it. The voice is an incredible
instrument, and yet people rarely explore its dynamics to understand the
power of speech.


When speaking to a potential customer, consider:

• Voice register – Research has found that the pitch of the human
  voice can strongly influence how people are perceived. It revealed that
  people are more likely to vote for politicians with lower voices,
  regardless of whether the speaker was male or female. Former British
  Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, for example, had vocal coaching to
  lower the pitch of her voice. Psychologists say we associate deeper
  voices with power, authority and trustworthiness. So instead of speaking
  from the throat, add some weight by speaking from the chest.
• Voice Prosody – This is the musical sequence in our sentences.
  Speaking without prosody means that you are speaking all-on-one-note and
  therefore, very hard to listen to. The word ‘monotonous’ even comes
  from the word ‘monotone’, and therefore a very clear indication that
  sales people should avoid this.
• Pace – Instead of getting a prospect on the phone and blurting out a
  sales pitch really quickly and excitedly, try slowing it right down to
  emphasize your point. Of course, this also means that what you say needs
  to be of value from the beginning of the conversation. If you get
  straight to the point of why you are calling, and do so at a calm pace,
  you are likely to come across as confident in what you are offering and
  more likely to be listened to.

2) Ask – “What Could Be Improved With Your Current Supplier?”


If you prefer to skip the small talk at the beginning of a cold call,
try opening with a question. Ask what the buyer wants and what they
would like improved with their current supplier. Basically, you’re
getting the prospect to start thinking about what they dislike. A top
sales professional will pull out the pain points that the prospect is
experiencing.


Of course, not every buyer will want to badmouth their long-term
supplier to a stranger over the phone. Work around that by discussing
issues in a more generalized way. Tell them that you have researched a
specific problem (the one you’re prospect is facing) across their
industry and you’ve discovered there’s a widespread problem. Then follow
up with: “What’s your experience been of that?” Use the word
‘experience’ not ‘problem’ so it doesn’t place any blame on them.


Add some more weight to this issue by asking them what the long-term
consequences would be on your company if this problem continued. Ask how
quickly they would need it resolved to prevent lasting damage. By
sowing seeds of doubt and urgency in the prospects mind, it will make
them more willing to listen to the solution you are offering – which you
can now customize to their needs, having discovered what they’re really
looking for.


3) Equip Yourself with Data


The infinite supply of information in the internet age means that
today’s buyers are experts in the field. According to CMO.com, 72% of
millennial consumers research their options online before even setting
foot in the store. By the time a sales person even reaches a potential
customer, you can bet they already have an idea of what they want to
buy, how much they’re willing to pay, and where else they can go to get a
better deal. This applies to B2B buyers also.


This unlimited access to information influences the entire selling
process. A Sales rep can no longer get away with empty promises or false
examples of success stories your product/service had with somebody
else. Today’s informed customer values proof.


Today’s sales professionals need to convince their prospects with
cold hard facts. Come equipped with data that proves your point.
Skeptical buyers can’t argue with the facts. Numbers don’t lie. A
frantic sales pitch will cause more harm than good, but supporting
numbers and facts build credibility and trust between salesperson and
the customer.


4) Leverage Your Losses


Take a moment to reflect on the last few deals you didn’t get. Ask
yourself why you didn’t get them. Do you know why? If not, take some
time to figure out what the buyers didn’t go for. Good things come from
analyzing your losses:

• You’ll become a better seller.
  If a prospect chose your competitor over you, take the time to research
  what they offered that was better, or different. Take this into
  consideration so you have a better chance to win the next deal.
  Rainmakers aim to constantly improve through feedback. Equip yourself
  with all the knowledge you can to ensure your next deal has a better
  outcome.
•  You’ll resurrect the deal.
  The timing might have been off last time, or maybe there was one
  prospect who nixed the sale and three others who were ready to buy. It’s
  beneficial for you to find out what happened and perhaps you can turn
  things around.
•  You’ll generate referrals.
  Perhaps the corporate powers that be decided it wasn’t such a good idea
  anyway. In most cases, your contact at the company really wanted to
  move forward – and to do so with you. This puts you in the perfect
  position to ask “Who else in your network can you think of that could
  use some help with…?

5) Take Note of Event Attendees


Maybe you’re company is looking to sell to medical device
manufacturers. If so, then find the event that they will be attending.
Event pages are easily found on social media, and the great part is that
it will display the whole list of attendees. So get your interns to
copy and paste the trade-show leads into a spreadsheet or your CRM to
get you kicked off. And the best part is, you won’t even have to attend
the event.


6) Organize a Formal Lunch for CEOs


This is a tough one to pull off, but can be extremely advantageous if
executed properly. People enjoy being around people who are like them
or aspire to be like. If you invite a CEO to a regular seminar, don’t
hold your breath expecting a reply.


However, invite that same CEO to an exclusive, invitation-only CEO
luncheon where they get to rub shoulders with other fellow CEOs, you are
more likely to get an amicable phone call from their executive
assistant.


In order for this to work, make sure that:

1.  It is a small, carefully chosen group of senior players
2.  It sounds, feels, and is exclusive
3.  It combines a meal with a “big question”.

This sales technique may be a little slow going in terms of sales
prospecting. You’re not bombarding CEOs with a sales pitch, you’re
allowing them to network while at the same time getting to know you. Not
only will your attendees be conversing with the big dogs, but you will
be too. You get to listen first-hand about the issues that CEOs face in a
room full of them. The importance of this luncheon lies in the great
opportunity to make connections and build relationships, as well as
letting them know you are available when these contacts need your
service or product – and they usually will eventually.


So there are a few useful sales techniques you might not have
tried before. They might just give you an edge on your competitors who
are still using the most mandatory and common sales techniques used
everyday.



Powerful Sales Techniques You Probably Haven’t Tried Before

Social Selling using Data – The Bitter Business

Note. This articles on social selling using big data has been republished from The Bitter Business.



Business loves the concept of social selling, tapping into the social
networks combined with big data to lower the cost per lead and to speed
up the sales and marketing process like never before is appealing. The
good news for sales and marketing leaders who want to use social selling
as a sales tactic is that “Big Data” is now a commodity. The sheer
volume of data available to marketers today is staggering including
social media insights, CRM data, sales records and web traffic alongside
a multitude of other online sources. The adoption of social media by
consumers and business buyers alike to buy and build our lives means the
quantity of data is growing on a massive scale. To put it into
perspective, social media currently accounts for over fifty two Trillion
words shared every single day.



Read full article here.

Social Selling using Data – The Bitter Business

Customer Acquisition Is Harder Than You Think

Customer Acquisition Is Harder Than You Think


Customer acquisition is harder than you think. That’s right, the
thing that seems so blatantly obvious and crucial to business success is
also the most difficult and, surprisingly, the most overlooked when it
comes to evaluating business ideas.


Hypothetically, let’s say that you start up a new business that sells
what you consider to be the greatest new product on the market today.
Product investors have thrown boatloads of money at you to produce this
incredible new creation. You have total and utter pride in your
innovative product which will solve problems, make lives easier, and
help others succeed at their job. Customers will surely be running to
your door to get their hands on it. This product will basically sell
itself. Sorry to tell you, but this is just not true.


The reality is that even if you have a great product or service to
offer people (which is definitely important), this isn’t the hardest
part of creating business success. The hard part is what comes next –
getting the word out there and convincing people to pay for this product/service in a scalable way. This is customer acquisition.





Why is Customer Acquisition Difficult?


The important thing to remember here is that a product or service is NOT going to sell itself.
Even if this service will end world hunger, your team still needs to
help people know that this service even exists, remind people there are
others in need of food, and get in contact with them so they can make a
deal.


Customer acquisition, involves a lot of planning and strategizing in
order to convince prospects to buy from your company. Ask yourself these
questions:


– Who is our target audience?

– Where will we source data about them?

– How will we market our product/service to them?

– What is our social selling strategy?

– Who will be on the phones actually selling?


To be more specific, the most challenging part of starting a business
is figuring out the cost of acquiring a customer – otherwise known as
customer acquisition cost (CAC).


Customer Acquisition Cost


This is basically the amount of money you spend to acquire a
customer. Calculating it and monitoring it will help you to optimize
your sales and marketing plan to boost profits. Below is a list of
common cost pressures in customer acquisition.


– Marketing

– Advertising

– Sales and sales funnel

– Hosting

– Support

– Custom development

– Setup


The number one reason why 50% of business startups fail is because
they couldn’t get enough paying customers, and yet, so many companies
today put little effort into figuring out their customer acquisition
model.


CAC should always be one of the primary concerns in a company. What
if some of your teams activities aren’t effective at all? You might be
wasting money somewhere.


Costs can quickly get out of control if they are not kept an eye on.
You also need to be sure that you are getting your money’s worth, and
that you aren’t paying more to acquire a customer than you are receiving
in return. So if I’m willing to spend $1 on getting a customer, I want
to make at least $2 back in a sale. Of course, the lower the CAC, the
better. If you spend more on customer acquisition than you can make
money out of them, your business is not going to last that much longer.
What’s great about calculating CAC is that it can empower you to
optimize your business model. In order to effectively plan, implement
and maintain a successful marketing and sales strategy, it is essential
to know and monitor your customer acquisition cost.


Today, some of the most common methods of customer acquisition in
sales and marketing plans are paid search, PR, SEO, inside sales,
channel partnerships, etc. While these methods are effective, they are
also just plain expensive. So figuring out where you can lower CAC will
help you to make more money!


Ways to Lower Customer Acquisition Cost


Of course, there are many ways to do this, but here are two web
marketing techniques that will help to lower customer acquisition cost:


Inbound marketing 
can be used to good advantage to get pre-qualified sales leads.
Traditionally, marketing was done through paid ads, flyers, cold
calling, spam — anything you had to pay for to catch the eye of
potential customers.


Today, however, inbound marketing is all about producing and sharing
content, both useful and insightful, that demonstrates what your brand
is all about, and attracts those interested people who are likely to
become future customers. Rather than cold calling a random list of
people who are most likely uninterested in what your sales team are
offering, web marketing can utilize search engines and social media to
find and engage with people who are actually looking for your services
or product. And by the time you actually reach out to them, they may
already be set to buy.


Keep in mind though that inbound marketing is not easy. Your brand
must consistently produce good content. Content that will genuinely
intrigue your target audience. They also need to do proper SEO to be
sure that they are correctly indexed and displayed for key search terms.
Sharing valuable content that other sites, including social media
sites, want to link to will further extend marketing reach at little or
no extra cost.





Leveraging Social Media.
No business can afford to ignore the power of social networks in
today’s digital world. But hey, it is generally lower cost. It does,
however, require a good bit of manual work to set up, maintain and
monitor. If the content your marketers are creating is good enough,
people are going to share it with others. With social media you can
leverage the power of the crowd to get your name out there so your
business can reach a far greater audience.


A note of caution with regards to social networking sites. It is not a
platform where blatant advertising is welcome. In fact, sales pitches
will put potential customers off interacting with your sales people and
thus, your brand. It does take some consistent effort to join groups and
interact with prospects, and it will definitely benefit your business
to listen first, and then share links to your non-sales oriented content
as a way to help, inform and pique their interest.


Don’t Forget about Your Sales Team’s Greatest Tool


The telephone is still the sales professional’s greatest tool. So
much effort goes into effectively marketing your brand and attracting
the attention of potential customers. But to turn these potential
customers into actual customers, it is important to have your
sales team on the phones selling. It is the most powerful device for
customer acquisition when it comes to actually making and closing sales.
Yet, many sales people are very vocal in their distain of cold calling.
But the reality is that every year millions of people are buying on the
phone. The phone is money, and everyone has one.


Of course, selling your service/product face to face is ideal and
most effective, but that’s expensive and can cost as much as 8x more
than making a phone call. Calls are instantaneous and powerful if you
can get the right person on the phone and know how to use that time
effectively.


So if you’re a business owner or manager, make sure you understand
your customer acquisition cost so you can optimize your marketing and
sales strategy and maximize profits. Customer acquisition and lead generation
is not easy, it may be the toughest part of business – one that
requires sufficient attention and consideration. Products and services
don’t sell themselves. Because even with the greatest product and sales
team in the world, a business will not last if nobody knows or cares
about what it can offer them.

Upgrade Your Team to the Sales Loft

Upgrade Your Team to the Sales Loft | Lead Generation and Social Selling Articles and News


As a sales manager, you want to do everything you can to boost your
sales team’s productivity, performance and success. Upgrading your team
from the sales basement to the sales loft is not just about having the right selling techniques and training. It is also about:


– The company’s culture

– The right tools

– The right technology.





As a sales manager or leader, don’t just stop at how your actions
impact your customers, think about how your actions impacts your
employees. Top performing companies have happy customers and happy
employees. And while you may not be able to control how the overall
organization is run, you can provide your team with the most efficient
selling tools/technology and help create an environment that is more
productive and rewarding for your own team.


Culture


The top performing businesses seem to just ooze an atmosphere of
passion and opportunity. They draw in the most talented professionals,
those of which act as a magnet to entice the most valuable customers.
These organizations have created just the right professional culture.
But, how exactly do they build this culture?


Knowing Where Your Business Adds The Most Value For Customers:


Sure, the most successful businesses might offer the most competitive
prices, but you can be sure that the companies with the best culture
offers undeniable value. Have a discussion with your team about where
they believe your company can uniquely solve prospects problems. As a
sales manager, it is essential to clearly outline where exactly your
business adds value. By defining this, it ensures that your team fully
understand where they help your customers the most, and not just a
vague, wishy-washy idea of what they are offering. And while it might
sound obvious, it is not possible to have a successful selling culture
if your team does not believe in what you are selling.


High Level Morale and Motivation:


Have you been noticing some of your team members taking a sloppy
approach to simple tasks? Your team might be suffering from low morale.
Low morale does not mean that a sales rep just so happens to have had a
bad day, it stems from a withering sense of job satisfaction. The daily
working environment does little to motivate them to be the best employee
they can be.





The Employee Motivation Theory states that the ‘alignment of aims,
purpose and values between staff, teams and organization is the most
fundamental aspect of motivation.’ Successful companies have used
motivational and inspirational quotes, posters, quest speakers, personal
stories, team building exercises and games in order to boost employee
motivation levels in all kinds of organizations. And while some may find
these methods cheesy and unnecessary for selling products, these
experiences for employees have been proven to significantly improve
attitudes, confidence and performance. Genuinely motivated people are
capable of dramatic achievements.


Remember that “Good Job” goes a long way. Back when I worked a part
time job in retail during college, I remember a new floor supervisor
stopping to tell me how good of a job I did helping a certain customer.
From then on, I found myself working harder for more positive
recognition and to maintain my newly realized reputation for excellent
customer service. Celebrating a job well done in your sales team’s
day-to-day work is the easiest, cheapest, and most effective way to
boost morale.


Even minute details such as the color of the office walls has been
proven to psychologically affect a sales person’s mood and productivity
levels. According to research, greens and blues create a calm, serene
atmosphere, but too much of these colors may slow down productivity
levels. Adding a smidgen of orange, yellow or red somewhere is said to
increase the energy flow and enhance productivity. Maybe stay away from
too much yellow though, it is said to cause stress and anxiety in some.


Tools and Technology


Your sales team are only as good as the tools they are given. Happy
workers use the most efficient tools and technology for prospecting,
lead nurturing and cold calling so they can maximize productivity and
drive better results.


Identify Prospects More Efficiently:


Identifying relevant leads can be one of the biggest frustrations a
sales person can face. Prospects are the first key ingredient to
business success and every happy seller has a continuous flow of leads
coming in at the top of their sales pipeline. Here is where
technological tools can help.


For example, with the Self-Service Social Data from Connectors
Marketplace, prospect generation suddenly becomes a lot easier. This
lead generation tool provides list after list of social media prospects
for your sales people to search through. It allows them to customize
their search by category and select keywords in order to find perfect
prospects for your business. By providing each lead’s social media
accounts, your sellers can search to find more detailed information much
faster than sourcing leads themselves.





Nurture Leads More Efficiently:


In today’s business world, smart companies are utilizing powerful
lead nurturing tools and technology to help their prospects get to know,
like, and trust them, and close deals when competitors can’t even get
past the front lobby.


SwiftPage, for example, is one of the many nurturing tools that
allows your sales team to send out batches of custom emails to
prospects. This email can contain a link to a quality article, blog or
maybe even a webinar your prospect will find interesting. SwiftPage
differentiates itself from other automated email tools because it then
sends your sales team a ranking report based on how the prospect
interacted with the email. The best time to follow-up is when you know
your prospect is interested.


While LinkedIn Sales Navigator is useful for identifying leads, it is
also handy for helping sales people leverage this social media network
to turn cold calling into warm conversations. Prospect’s account
activity will show up on your sellers LinkedIn Sales Navigator newsfeed
so they can track their goings-on, rather than having to seek it out.
With this information more easily accessible, salespeople will be able
to social sell and build stronger relationship with clients.


Cold Call More Efficiently:


They’ve identified their prospects efficiently, they’ve nurtured
relationships efficiently, now your sales people need to get those
potential customers on the phone efficiently. Auto dialers make cold
calls and lead generation
much easier, both because they help sales professionals pace themselves
properly on days when there is cold calling, and because an auto dialer
can make sure that sellers do not waste time with wrong numbers and
voicemail.


They can also be programmed to send custom messages to your potential
customers, which allows businesses to automatically confirm
appointments so no-show rates are a lot lower. This enables companies to
never waste time from missed appointments.


VanillaSoft customers say they are calling five times as many
contacts as they were before investing in an auto dialer. Other top auto
dialers for 2016 include Connect TCM, Tenfold Sales Dialer, and Five9
Auto Dialer.


Having the right sales techniques and training are of course vital to
your sales teams quality of work and level of success, but without the
right tools and technology, and that core selling culture of motivation
and purpose, those techniques and training methods aren’t worth very
much. All of these components must come together in order to send your
team straight from the sales basement to the sales loft.

Inbound Marketing Guide – The Bitter Business

Inbound Marketing Guide – The Bitter Business


There is allot of talk around “inbound marketing” and as a guide to
what it means to a business. Social media marketing agencies and
practitioners seem to have developed a language of their own as digital
marketing has become the dominant channel. Terms such as marketing
automation, marketing qualified leads, social selling and lead nurturing
are now common place words in the quest for business to find more
customers. Here we will try to help you understand some of this
vocabulary.





To start with, most inbound marketing plans would focus on five key stages


Attracting visitors/web traffic to a site,


Converting visitors to leads,


Convert those leads to paying customers,


Turn the customers into repeat purchasers,


Analyse KPI’s and metrics to improve results,


Some reasons that have boosted inbound as a marketing tactic would
include the fact that companies with a content driven strategy have 50%
more website visitors than those that don’t and

leads captured from inbound marketing cost 60% less traditional forms of lead generation.

The reality is that an inbound marketing strategy has more or less
the same goals as outbound marketing so the difference between them is
not what any company wants from the marketing effort but how it goes
about getting it. Inbound marketing is focused on attracting IN buyers
to consider a brand usually with content as the bait (articles, videos,
images, whitepapers etc) while outbound marketing employs diversion
tactics (online ads, direct mail, cold calling) to get buyers attention.
Most businesses would use a mixture of inbound and outbound marketing. A
worrying trend is that some effective outbound activities like
prospecting and lead generation via sales people is becoming dormant as
too many start-ups or small businesses rely exclusively on inbound
marketing to deliver leads and sales.


For a whole host of reasons, inbound marketing is now the primary
channel deployed to engage buyers when considering a purchase due to the
more non-interruption nature of inbound marketing.


Below are a list of activities and terms relating to inbound
marketing, so next time a social media marketing agency speaks about how
to put in place a plan then you will be well prepared to talk about it.
While content is the rock upon which inbound marketing is built there
is more to this strategy than articles, it also includes the use of
social selling, targeting long tail keywords, interest sharing, engaging
in social network conversations, attracting social media influencers
and managing multi platform social channels.

So here are some inbound buzzwords to improve your marketing speak.


 Inbound Marketing Plan;


The inbound marketing plan is basically a publishing calendar of
activities including goals and targets covering blogging, content
themes, articles, and whitepapers, landing pages, social networks
engagement, social selling, lead generation, traffic and engagement in
social media conversations.


Growth Hacking;


A recent term added to the marketing vocabulary. Mainly a tactic
employed by start-ups in the App or SaaS space, growth hacking works on
out of the box thinking blended with technology to try to achieve
massive growth in numbers in a short pace of time. The sole focus of
using this as a strategy is to grow big (web traffic, social media
followers etc but not revenue) quick so every action is designed to
drive that growth.


Viral Marketing;


This is about taking a marketing campaign, seeding it to other people
and hoping the content appeals on a large enough scale to make the
campaign grow rapidly. It is the multi level marketing of the digital
age. Think “Ice Bucket Challenge”. Lots of marketing people go to bed at
night dreaming about their image, video or article going viral. However
the reality is there is little control when it comes to what will go
viral. To try and make viral marketing work the key is to create some
unusual content that will get lots of people to promote it for you. The
more people who share your content will lead to increased brand
exposure. It boils down to encouraging people to plug you to their
social media audiences.


A/B Testing;


This refers to the testing of two different versions of the same
email template, landing page or call to action (CTA) to figure out which
version delivers the best results. A/B testing is something all
marketers should do. Examples would be to take a call to action and test
it with different strap lines, colours, text, and or with a different
image. This allows you to determine which call to action performed
better. So don’t guess as different messaging works to different
audiences and even geo-locations. Always be testing as even a small
percentage increase in leads or traffic can have a huge impact on sales
(depending on your average order value).


Content Marketing;


Content marketing is the seed that will grow to capture future
opportunities for web traffic, leads and customers. It is the bedrock
upon which inbound marketing was formed and still powers. It involves
the creating and distribution of valuable, relevant content on a
consistent basis (daily, weekly) to attract buyers with the goal of
getting the customer to take some predetermined actions. The content
created is heavily keyword/SEO orientated the majority of time for a
start-up and a high percentage of the time for companies with larger
databases.

Marketing Automation;


 Marketing automation is software that is used to
automate large parts of the marketing process like lead nurturing,
content publishing to social media or auto-responder emails. This
software usually appeals to mid-sized upwards companies with larger
databases or well trafficked sites.  Marketing automation is mostly used
to improve the nurturing, conversion and closing stages of the sales
funnel and is not a one fit fits all solution. The hard work of getting
traffic and creating content is still yours to complete.


Social Selling;


Social selling is a great inbound tactic, despite its name it is not
focused on sales but rather selling oneself or a brand to raise
awareness to buyers of what you offer. It is a subtle and patient tactic
where time is spent building up trust or “emotional lodgements”. It
works on the premise that social media accounts are a fantastic
broadcast channel while also a place to gradually build relationships
and make connections. The key is to share content from other sources
(not just your own), like other articles, participate in social
conversations and provide regular updates. Social selling can be used as
the key to unlock sales calls if used correctly, otherwise you are seen
as a smash and grab merchant.


Lead Nurturing;


This is the marketing or sales process that is set in motion after
someone downloads or fills in a form (newsletter, white paper) on your
website. In the B2B sales environment it could be a series of emails
together will social selling and direct sales contract. In B2C it
usually involves a series of emails. The skill here is that when someone
downloads a piece of content from your site, you ask (and give reasons)
for them to provide their email address. Now with the verified and
opted-in email address, you can implement a series of emails to be sent
to them in the next days, week or month after they first signed up to
downloaded something. Lead nurturing is important as it reduces your
cost of customer acquisition and allows you to build a relationship as
you know what they are interested in from your offerings. Be careful not
to over expect the speed of developing the relationship or put too much
urgency into the nurturing as their initial sign-up could only be a top
of the funnel action.


Long Tail Keywords;


This term usually applies to your content marketing efforts and is
the SEO keywords you have selected to target. These keywords are
normally three plus words such as “social media marketing in Ireland”
and are not as competitive in Google as a one word keyword such as
“marketing.” Google also auto suggests long tail keywords so research
these as part of your content strategy. Can I target hot or one word
keyword, you ask? Sure as lots of people are probably searching on that
word daily but on the flipside your competitors are targeting these
keywords too. It could take years to even get on page 5 of Google for a
heavily trafficked keyword. Ten or twenty well indexed long tail
keywords when combined will deliver just as much traffic in the medium
term as a single keyword. So when creating content titles and web URL’s,
choose longer, more detailed keywords. If you research your buyer
profiles well enough you will get clicks and views from potential buyers
from your target market faster than you think.


The above is not a complete list of phrases as new words and terms come into play all the time around inbound marketing but hopefully by the time you have read this article, some of them are still relevant. Thanks for reading.

5 Benefits of Social Selling

You might still be on the fence about social selling and
whether it is right for your business. You keep hearing great things.
You hear that your business will benefit from it, that it will set your
business apart in the current digital era. Yet surprisingly, only 31% of
sellers currently use social to sell, despite continuous studies
proving that sales professionals active on social media outperform their
competitors.


The fact is – Social selling is still a relatively new concept
in the business world. That said, today’s inescapable reality of
selling means being social. Technology has transformed the way we buy,
therefore, the way we sell should adapt to the changes too. Outdated
sales tactics need to be replaced. Things are moving too fast today and
the reality will soon be that sales people who do not choose to utilize
social selling techniques throughout the sales process will suffer in
terms of lead generation and revenue growth, and will ultimately be left
behind. To not sell socially in today’s competitive environment is like
leaving money on the table and walking away.





So we get it, social selling benefits business, but what exactly are
those benefits? If you have been still struggling to see its value, let
me outline the 5 benefits of selling socially through online networks
and make your decision a clear one:


1) The Sales Cycle is Reduced


It is a common pet peeve of sales people to wait around and wonder
how long it is going to take to “close the deal”. They may have been
wining and dining a potential buyer for months, and they are left
scratching their head thinking ‘why isn’t this prospect taking any
action?’


The issue with the traditional selling process is that you start off
on the wrong foot right from the get go. Sure, your persistent cold
calling and asking them please to come along to their company’s next
event may have worked for your sales rep, but psychologically they have
set your business up to be real losers in the mind of that prospect.
Why? Because persistent begging on the sales person’s part makes the
prospect feel as if they are doing them a favor being there. It places
them in a position of ultimate control and with the view that your sales
people should be running around after them. Think about it, would you
expect a guy selling Ferrari’s to jump through hoops to convince you to
buy their car? Not likely. This is because the Ferrari brand has value
and the sales rep knows it.


With social selling, you can shorten the entire sales cycle and
achieve more success. Online networks and Google has made the entire
pre-purchase research faster and easier for buyers. Today’s tech savvy
buyers make their decision before they even speak to a sales rep.


Therefore, if your sellers have successfully implemented social
selling into their sales process by sharing valuable information and
interacting with prospects on a human level, potential buyers may decide
to do business with them even before getting them on the phone. This is
because social selling gives value to your brand and establishes your
company as an expert in the field.


In the world of social selling, your sales teams ability to
differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack through timely
information and understanding is the key to success.


2) Generates New Revenue Opportunities


Businesses now have to look at new ways to generate revenue
opportunities. In today’s digital world, the effectiveness of cold
calling and banner ads alone to generate leads and sell their
product/service is simply not cutting it anymore.


Social selling allows sales reps to get an inside look at what
customers want and need. Reps can join social conversations on LinkedIn
or Twitter and monitor what potential customers are saying about their
product or service. By listening to prospects in need of a solution,
sales people can more easily provide them with the information or
service they are looking for. The new way of lead generation makes it
easier for the salespeople to identify the most relevant customers along
with their needs.


The important thing to learn hear is that social selling helps
businesses meet and exceed revenue and sales goals. If you have not yet
jumped on the new-age bandwagon of selling 2.0, you are losing out on
the opportunity to identify relevant sales leads and influence the
buying process.





3) Allows you to Manage your Online Reputation


One of the greatest advantages that social selling provides is the
management of your business’s image and credibility online. Numerous
studies have revealed the enormous impact of online reviews on buyers’
decision to buy a particular product or service. For example, 65% of
buyers feel the vendor’s content had an impact on their final purchase
decision in 2015, according to SalesForLife. Online presence leads to
online popularity, given, you promote it right. Building a positive
reputation among social media prospects will help draw more interested
people to your business. Having a negative reputation can directly
affect your company’s core processes and success.


Here are some of the benefits you’ll enjoy from social selling for managing your reputation online:


• Engaging directly with prospects boosts your brand awareness.

• Establishing a trusting relationship builds likability in the eyes of potential customers.

• Allows you to track your competitor’s online activities against your business activities.

• Allows you to hide damaging content about your brand by pushing it down the search engine rankings.

• Instant notifications of customer feedback which helps you improve your product or service.

• Receive an immediate notification if your name is mentioned online.


4) Builds a Better Customer Relationship


Think about it, if you were in the position of the potential buyer,
who would you more likely do business with – the sales rep calling you
out of the blue to tell you all about their new product, or the online
advisor who shares valuable information with you when you express a need
for help? We must understand that, ultimately, people buy from people.
And social selling creates that better customer relationship.
Establishing trusting relationships gives you and your business that
unfair advantage in the world of sales.


It cannot be stressed enough that social selling is NOT about
selling, it is about directly engaging and serving others in a deeper,
more meaningful way. Your job is to become the person they want to do
business with. Relationships are not built between “Connections;” they
are built between people. Long term, buyers are much more likely to make
a purchase from sellers they have a relationship with than from a semi
anonymous name and profile.


5) Keeps your Customers Coming Back


While new customers are great, returning customers are even better.
For business growth long-term, it is crucial to maintain and build upon a
base of loyal customers. This is where social selling becomes
essential. Sales teams can use social selling techniques to stay on the
radar of both recent customers and past customers. The secret is to keep
them wanting to come back. This involves continuous and consistent
engagement. Engagement through sharing their comments, direct messaging,
and sharing useful content with them based on what they’re looking for.
It means updating them about new exciting offers and information they
can’t find elsewhere. Sharing consistent quality content with your
target audience is the key to growing your community. That means leaving
the sales pitch aside most of the time. Social selling is what keeps
customers coming back.


For example, a make-up company could post video tutorials about which
color eye-shadow to use to bring out blue eyes. Restaurants could share
new recipe ideas that intrigue, while retailers could post critical
reviews of the most popular products. It’s all about understanding the
perspective of the potential customer. What would make you subscribe to
updates and new content of a certain brand? What would keep you
interested? Keep you coming back? It’s all about being creative. This
type of content will help to build your social media community and turn
new buyers into return customers.


So there are 5 benefits of implementing social selling into your
sales process. Are convinced yet? Social Selling is not difficult. It’s
different. It’s selling 2.0. Social selling is still a relatively new
concept, one that is severely under-utilized by most B2B companies
today. Give your business an unfair advantage against competitors by
capitalizing on social selling and experience the benefits it can bring
to your business.



5 Benefits of Social Selling

Inside View on Sales

Let me share some helpful tips with you on how to get an inside view
on sales teams who are office based. Inside sales are now the primary
sales channel to handle inbound leads and the engine that drives social
selling. These sales reps have more responsibility and power in the
selling process than ever before. So ask yourself, ‘is my company’s
inside sales team being utilized to their full potential?’ If not,
listen up because whether they are on the phones, sending emails or
relationship building through social media, following these tips will
help you tactfully and strategically increase the impact, effectiveness,
success of your inside sales organization.








Tip 1 – Get the Right Tools


If your inside sales teams are tasked with making outbound calls, ask
yourself ‘how long did it take them to source this data?’ Does it take
up most of their time and energy just identifying relevant prospects?
This process is often tedious and less productive in terms of selling.

Software and tools that exist today can dramatically increase the
effectiveness of your sales team. With automated lead generation
software/tools, the rough work is done for you. It tailors its prospect
generation to your specific criteria and provides you with a continuous
flow of your most relevant and influential leads with detailed
information. Automated lead generation significantly reduces the time
you spend simply identifying prospects because this technology produces a
continuous supply of custom profiles and contact information based on
social data. It makes converting leads faster and easier than ever
before. This means you can maximize the inside sales teams time by
getting them to focus their energy on outbound calling and social
selling.





Tip 2 – Respond Immediately


The most effective way of getting a prospect to engage with your
business is if your sales people contact them immediately after their
web submission. Research has revealed that a lead that is contacted
within five minutes is 100x more likely to answer than if a sales rep
were to respond after a half hour. As well as that, the qualification
rate is 21x greater if a prospect is called back immediately.
Interestingly enough, waiting 30 minutes or more will drastically
decrease these chances of getting a qualified lead to answer a phone
call, or any lead for that matter. So sales teams must act fast and
contact those leads immediately.





Tip 3 – Know your Ratios


Playing the ratio game implies driving a higher rate of success with
the lists, offers and context in which you sell. A smart selling
strategy involves taking note of how many calls it takes to have a
conversation with a prospect, and monitor how many conversations it
takes to arrange an appointment or even make a sale. They are aware of
which day and time of day is best to call. They track which industries
have the highest success rates. Knowing your ratios gives inside sales
reps meaningful insight, ultimately improving their consistency of
production.

• Collect Useful Information from Every Call:
  Making the most of each phone conversations by asking leads when the
  most convenient time to contact them is can save sales reps a lot of
  wasted time.
• What Time of Day is Best?
  – This may seem obvious but it’s important to know that calling at
  certain times of day can generally improve your contact rates.
  Contacting a lead between 8:00 and 9:00am or 4:00 and 5:00pm has proved
  to be the best time to reach them. Lunch time is the worst time to make
  contact. Make sure your sales team takes into account the different time
  zones for each lead they contact.
• Which Days of the Week to Call?
  – Just as significant as the time of day, the day of the week also
  plays a role in contact ratios. Getting a hold of prospects can be
  difficult but Wednesdays and Thursdays proved to be the best days for
  contacting sales leads. Unsurprisingly, Mondays are not great. Tuesdays
  happen to be the worst.

Tip 4 – Know When to Stop Calling


As well as the ratio game, inside sales is also a numbers game.
Results are driven by volume. But the top inside sales reps understand
that ringing 100 leads 10 times each will be more successful than
ringing 20 leads 50 times each. They play the volume game but they play
it intelligently. They know when to stop ringing.


Once they know their ratios, sales reps are able to pinpoint that
sweet spot where they have the highest chance of closing a deal or
arranging an appointment. Once that range is discovered, they can manage
their database around it. When 20 leads accept or reject a sales
proposal, they are quickly replaced with a new batch of 20 leads so they
can get more prospects through the cycle.





Tip 5 – Creates a Sense of Urgency




You can be sure that within every sales interaction, prospects will
ask themselves ‘what’s in it for me?’ As a sales manager, you don’t want
your reps to make a call only to ask for something. When they engage
with prospects, whether it be over the phone, through email, or in a
social networking group, they need to be offered something of value.
Something that creates a sense of urgency in the buyers mind. Something
that solves an issue. Something that enlightens them. For free. No
strings attached. This is a tactful way of ‘breaking the ice’ with each
lead they interact with and also establishes inside sales reps as
credible and likable figures to do business with.


A focused Inside sales rep always makes sure that the solutions they
are describing are relevant to challenges the prospect is currently
facing. When presenting prospects with a solution to their business
problems, a successful inside sales rep always makes sure to stress how
their product/service has helped many others within the prospect’s
industry to overcome these issues. This cleverly increases the prospects
interest or desire by giving their product/service credibility, while
also decreasing their sales reluctance.





Tip 6 – Don’t Sound like a Salesperson


Your leads hear sales pitches constantly. They get phone calls all
day every day from different companies trying to sell them something.
Make sure your inside sales team keep this in mind every time they dial
their number and modify their approach accordingly.


Receiving repetitive calls from sales reps can leave buyers reluctant
to answer, making it difficult to get a hold of prospects in the first
place. In fact, it is costly in terms of wasting time. Knowing that they
are on the phone with a salesperson often makes prospects a little
defensive and guarded.


The only way to resolve this issue is if your callers don’t sound
like a sales person. They want to approach the conversation like two
business people having a conversation as oppose to a sales rep rallying
out a speech. As tough as this may sound, the way a sales person
approaches the conversation can mean the difference between closing a
deal and a lead anxiously trying to hang up the phone. So make sure each
seller does a little research into who their prospect is before they
call, discover their interests, the company they work for, etc. This
snippets of information can be used as an ice breaker to get the
conversation flowing. It makes your sellers seem more relatable,
trustworthy and worth listening to.





Tip 7 – Know How to Respond to Objections


This inside sales tip can create an immediate improvement in your
sales teams confidence on the phones and selling success. Sales reps
must train themselves to respond strategically to objections. Your sales
team are inevitably going to face objections to their offers more often
than not. This rejection is the part of sales that cold callers dread
most. Over and over, they will hear:


‘Now is just not a good time’

‘I’m not interested in buying anything’

‘Why are you calling me?’

‘Just send me your information and I’ll get back to you.’


In order to improve their chances of making a sale, as well as make
cold calling a lot easier, tell them to make a list of all possible
objections they can think of. Then, tell them to prepare the perfect
response for each objection to turn the conversation around.


A successful inside sales rep contemplates over why a prospect would
accept an offer or arrange a meeting and analyzes why prospects would
reject their offer. Like tracking ratios, it is important to track these
trends. By understanding what buyers need and what buyers are put off
by, sales reps can adjust their selling strategy by highlighting the how
their product/service will benefit buyers, and prepare strategic
answers to overcome objections to their offer. Clever sales reps will
analyze weakness in each response, and overcome any holes in their
position.


So there are my 7 useful tips that every inside sales rep can benefit
from. Granted, embracing these few ideas involves some sales training
for your inside sales team, but they are ideas worth investing your time
and energy in. You won’t increase your sales revenue by having your
sales team work harder, they just need to work smarter.



Get an Inside View on Sales