(1) over 3x as many average monthly landing pages activated. It appears these companies are engaging with their buyers at every opportunity and are likely testing creative regularly.

(2) 3x the sales reps enabled with communication tools from marketing. Perhaps this isn’t much of a surprise at all, as these companies have to drive tight alignment across sales and marketing in order to close that loop in the first place.

(3) only slightly improved email response rates – for example, 10% email effectiveness rate v. 8%. This could indicate that while email is important, it is not their only driver of overall campaign effectiveness.

The post Focusing on revenue yields better results for marketers first appeared on True Sales Results.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/selling_is_not_about_relatio.html

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1. How do people perceive you now? Honestly. No,honestly.  Get some unbiased feedback from someone who does not work for you. Go and get training.
2. How do you want people to think of you in a years time after the next 20 talks and how does this fit into that? Put a stake in the ground.  Think of this of just a series of stump talks.
3. For this talk specifically, who is in the audience and what do they care about / what’s hot right now on their mind?
4. What do you want them to believe / think differently after the talk?  You have a chance to inform, to educate or create believers .. try for the latter.
5. Whats on their mind preventing them from believing you? Your style, your company, what you are saying, their misconceptions?
6. Based on this what is your one big message? (Not something you want to inform them of .. something you want them to believe).  A short assertion statement that is credible, provable, different and unique to you.
7. What are the 5-7 points you need to make to get that message? Not messages – just things you need to say / points you need to make to get it across.  These become your slides.  Remember .. a maximum of one slide every 2 minutes (and then cut it by 50%).
8. What are your opening and closing statements?  Write these down on a piece of paper and practice them. Once a subject matter expert gets going they are fine … they just need to kick it off and wrap it up well. Everyone remembers only what you first and last said.
9. In terms of the jokes .. its not really about jokes its empathy. You are looking for people to say ’ this guy gets it ..’ Avoid jokes unless you are good at them. Question here is: how can you get them on your side to listen to your serious message?

The post Best practice: nine questions to plan your keynote first appeared on True Sales Results.

Mobile – Seven Rules to Cultivate Deep Mobile Relationships : MarketingProfs Article

The post From Marketing Profs .. 7 best practices for mobile engagement first appeared on True Sales Results.

1. Businesses that blog average 55% more website visitors than those that don’t.

2. Companies with 30 or more landing pages generate 7x more leads than those with fewer than 10.

3. 91% of online adults use social media regularly.

4. The click-through rate on triggered email messages is 119% higher than regular email messages.

5. 33% of B2B marketers don’t measure marketing ROI.

The post Some nice best practice stats from HubSpot first appeared on True Sales Results.

48% give IT department final approval on cloud and 39% consuilt with them.

1/3 of companies have restructured IT to add new skills for cloud.

Nearly half of companies who transitioned to the cloud (44 percent) say they made the transition because the cloud was “simply better for multiple reasons.”

The post Is cloud paying off? first appeared on True Sales Results.

The post What is your list of the ten best content marketers? first appeared on True Sales Results.

The post Only 36% of content marketers believe they are effective first appeared on True Sales Results.

• conversion ratios are falling,
• fewer sales reps are making quota,sales rep attrition rates are rising,
• it’s taking longer to effectively ramp up new sales team members,
• and there is increasing misalignment between sales and marketing.

To overcome these challenges, every sales leader needs a strategy and systematic program to build key sales capabilities and deliver them to the entire team via focused content and iterative training. In other words, they need a sales enablement plan. For each week that you can shave off the time it takes to get a new sales rep to productivity, you can see the benefits in the form of real revenue dollars. It’s really as simple as that.

Yet, when we sit down with clients to build out sales effectiveness content and training, we scratch our heads at their misconceptions about what sales enablement means. Here are the top five misconceptions we hear:
1) “We’re swimming in messaging content … let’s do some more and organize it better!” At the most basic level, sales enablement requires two key things: the right content and effective training to get it into the brains of action oriented sales people. The skew in a lot of organizations, however, is on volume of messaging content rather than a balance of content and training. Worse, the problem is not just volume, it’s also the type of content they make available – most construct “product-out” messaging, when most effective sales people think “customer-in” messaging.

2) “Just give them the value props and they’ll work out how to sell it.” Sure, maybe the top 20% will do that, but the others will simply struggle and pretend that they get it. A good sales enablement program strives to make “the many” as good as the best practices of “the few” based on tribal knowledge from the field, where the real lessons are being learned every day.

3) “Sales enablement is tactical and should be designed and done by marketing or sales ops.” Sure, both make an invaluable contribution, but the one with the quota should own the show. Our strong belief is that the strategy and ownership of sales enablement should not be delegated by sales leadership to others. Bottom line: sales leadership needs to identify the problem in the gap between company strategy and field sales execution, set a strategy and define outcomes aligned to the buyer’s journey, and orchestrate a sales and marketing process that optimizes your ability to sell more effectively.

4) “Why do it at all? It’s not adding to my top line! Let other companies train our sales reps and we’ll just hire them. Then pistol-whip them to perform.” This is very common in the more, shall we say, “traditional” VPs of Sales (aka anachronistic dinosaurs) who view enablement as just another fad sales methodology or generic sales skills training that they did themselves. Yet, in our two decades-plus of B2B enterprise selling, we have never come across anyone who has been able to staff his or her team with a full complement of such highly performing automatons. In 2012, the reality is that your team is constantly in flux: reps are not making quota, customers are harder to engage, and even normal attrition means you are losing a good chunk of your people annually.

5) “Use technology to deliver the right information at the right time in the sales process to the right person.” Technology is an enabling agent, not a panacea. Salespeople don’t learn by downloading, they learn best by doing and practicing against real world or close-to-reality scenarios in a competitive environment. This, in my opinion is a crucial element that is paramount to the success of any good program.

The post 5 Misconceptions about Sales Enablement Plans first appeared on True Sales Results.

 Here’s the formula that works for us ..

You should be able to tell an engaging ‘why us’ business story in 60 seconds, 3-5 minutes, or 20 minutes on a call or whiteboard as part of a larger meeting.  Effective sales stories are designed from the listeners perspective compared to our value, not from an internal product perspective.

1. Stories are made up of messages, which are short substantiated assertions in the form of a grammatical sentence linking problems to business value.  In others words, a slide bullet point is not a message.  Messages are different from soundbites which are used in stories and are short, illuminating & memorable phrases also used for effect to make a point.
2. Stories reframe the argument in our favor as they are told.  Any question can result in an answer that bridges to our story.
3. Messages, value props and stories must pass the CURE test: Credible, Unique, Realistic, backed by Evidence.  In general credible third party sourced facts, customer anecdotes and use cases must back up all your messages.
4. There are some elements in your story that you can adapt depending on who you are talking to (e.g. depending on their business drivers or the pain points). But retain the structure.
5. Don’t use product names, technical acronyms or internal  jargon.  Stay with business value of technology.
6. While the story remains the same, the way that you tell it varies depending on the time you have available.  For example, while a full story will certainly take a few minutes to tell, an elevator pitch that is 60 seconds long is told emphasizing key soundbites per ‘floor’ that ‘stick’ when you walk out of the elevator.   Because a white board pitch has to be written and read while the listening is sitting, it can take longer and has to link written with spoken thoughts – so it should have a consistent repeatable layout that can be learned and retained.
7. Whatever you do, make the story your own and talk so people really listen and engage.  Especially use your own anecdotes and examples.

Outline for business stories

Always start with a soundbite or summary of the story you are about to tell.  In other words, tell them what you are going to tell them.  For example “Here’s how we manage your social media to allow your employees to connect safely with your customers.”   This establishes why the listener should care to listen further.  End by proposing some next steps and ask for commitment.

From this point, the rest of the story has four basic parts:

1. Start by engaging them with what’s on their mind and framing the problem.  Starting with broad statements about other customers’ problems you’re solving or what you know that they don’t from talking to other people like them. It doesn’t have to just be problems – what do they need to know to care?    Then build this into resulting implications, opportunities and risks. Be sure to establish your credibility:  for example, here’s how we learned this.
2. Describe our solution to these problems succinctly.  So what’s the answer?  Plus, overall, how is this different or better (use the words first, only, best) from alternatives?  Not all alternatives but the listeners nearest choice alternatives.
3. Wrap up by reinforcing our advantages (sprinkled with evidence or examples).  Here’s why you should consider us ..  Here are there other advantages to choosing us ..  Here’s what else should you know ..
4. Paint a picture of the resulting overall value.  How will your offering change the listeners life?  What metrics or use cases you use to prove the value to yourself?

If at any point a customer start engaging and interrupts your story – let them!  Encourage them with broad smart questions that can create a conversation. Such as – were you aware of this?  What are your goals with this?  What challenges to you face like this? Where are you as a company (how mature is your company with ..)?  What’s your next move?  Can we arrange next steps to discuss them?   Ask for commitment to next steps before you conclude.

The post How to tell a business story for B2B sales and marketing. A best practice. first appeared on True Sales Results.