Marketing and sales alignment working together as one team is really about the customer.

Why? Because today, buyers are in control.

For this reason, we can no longer have an artificial divide between marketing and sales.

That’s why I interviewed Heidi Melin (@heidimelin), CMO at Workfront on how to get sales and marketing operating as one revenue team.

Brian: Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Heidi: Absolutely. I’m a career CMO.

I’ve been in marketing for my entire career, having started really on the advertising side, but mostly focused on fast-growing software businesses.

So, I have recently in the last year joined Workfront and I am the CMO at Workfront.

How can sales and marketing operate as one team

Well, throughout my career I’ve had the opportunity to work well with some sales teams, and I’ve also learned my fair share at working with sales teams and marketing teams that don’t align very well.

Also, so all those lessons learned include things like ensuring that the goals are aligned and ensuring that the marketing team has the same goals as the sales team.

And indeed, the marketing team tends to have a broader view of the marketplace on a longer-term view. But the immediate term goals must be aligned.

So being aligned on lead generation or demand goals with the sales teams are critical.

We talk about it inside Workfront as one view of the truth because so many times we’ve all probably sat in meetings with sales and marketing executives and you spend most of the meeting arguing about whether or not the number is right instead of diagnosing what we need to work on to improve.

So, ensuring that you’re working on a common set of numbers is hard.

It sounds straightforward, but it’s hard.

And so that’s one of the things that I think is the key to success–ensuring that measurement and all the programmatic, as well as the process-oriented partnership between sales and marketing, is aligned because it’s one business process.

One business process focused on revenue

The way that I think about it is marketing and sales historically have been thought of as two separate business processes; we talk about it as a critical handoff.

But the way that I think about it is that it’s one business process, and inside a company, it’s really focused on the revenue of your business.

It starts from the time that a marketing team targets a specific customer or prospect, and they raise their hand and ask for more information or engage all the way through to close business. So, it’s one business process, not two separate business processes.

And, oh, by the way, it’s aligned to something way more important than a sales team or a marketing team: it’s aligned to how a buyer buys your product.

And we forget that sometimes, we’re like, “Oh, well the marketing process does this…”

I’m like, oh no, no, no.

We’re just trying to facilitate a buying process.

Flip your focus on the customer

Heidi: Yeah, and so when you flip that, and you look at the focus on the customer, all of sudden marketing and sales from an outreach, from an engagement perspective, has one unified goal, which is to move a buyer through a buying process.

And when you have that change of mindset that becomes important.

I’ve worked in businesses where we focus cleanly on that critical handoff, and that handoff is the most vital piece. And frankly, it’s an essential piece, but it’s not the crucial piece.

Heidi: Yeah, it should support, and we have the tools to help that entire life cycle.

When I first joined Workfront one of the things that we did was as soon as we handed off an opportunity to the sales team, it was like, we’re out, we’re done, check, we’re finished.

Frankly, there are so many tools in a marketing toolkit that we can align with a selling motion and be more successful in helping to nurture prospects through a buying process.

To me, that has been an evolution that has been enabled by technology and is one that is critical in ensuring that sales and marketing are aligned.

Brian: As we talk about this whole idea of alignment, and you brought up measurements sounds easier said than done to get marketing and sales to agree on what common goals and measures are.

How to get sales and marketing using the same numbers

Heidi: I think it must start a big picture and really understanding targets and targets by sales teams and working backward from there.

Because if we realize that as our goal, our goal from a marketing perspective is undoubtedly to raise awareness for the business and drive demand for the business.

Our goal is to drive revenue for the business. And so, we can all understand our revenue goals and then the steps that we all need to take to get there.

So, to meet our revenue goals, backing out of that, what kind of demand generation volumes do we need to have to achieve those revenue goals.

We then agree with the sales team not only on what we are going to use as our qualification criteria, how we are going to evaluate whether or not a lead is indeed a good lead or a bad lead.

Also, ensuring that, from a volume perspective, the marketing team is lined up to support the revenue goals of the company.

So, backing it out from revenue is critical.

And we’ve all been in situations where there’s a pendulum swing that goes from, “The leads are terrible, and we’re getting way too many of them” to “The leads are high quality, but we’re not getting enough of them.”

That’s a constant balancing act with engaging with the sales team. And there may be reasons to shift or change a qualification criterion based on the maturity of a field sales organization or a time during the market, like during market seasonality. There are lots of reasons to make those changes, and you can’t do that in a vacuum.

What works to remove barriers of teamwork?

Heidi: You must go back to the customer, and you must understand the buying process of a customer.

And if you can look at the buying process of your customer and map that out to not only the activities and programs that you engage with to move that prospect or customer through a buying cycle but understand how it maps to a sales process, is essential.

So, if you can get to a place where you can map out the buying process from the time someone raises their hand or engages in some way through to closing business and revenue.

Also, understand how the customer or the buyer operates during that and how that maps to our internal process, you can actually really demonstrate where marketing adds value and where sales is adding value and where both of us add value.

Heidi: That’s where you can look at language and metrics and ensure that at each stage, you have the right metrics that you all agree on and the right language that you’re using to describe.

You must go back to, “how does your customer buy your product?”

If you don’t know that process and you don’t know how your marketing programs or your sales teams operate aligned to that, then you’re missing a big piece.

Brian: What have you found that works or what advice might you have for someone who would like actually to go back to that beginning?

Is it journey mapping? Is it interviewing customers?

What are the steps you would recommend?

Understanding how your customer buys

Source: Journey map based on what they are doing, thinking, feeling via markempa

Heidi: I think that there is nothing more valuable than interviewing customers that have just been through that process.

As marketers, we don’t always have as much engagement directly with customers as I think we should.

So, sitting down with customers that have just gone through a sales cycle, understanding the process that they went through, really listening to what their needs are and starting to look at that; you see commonalities for how customers buy whatever product it is.

Then taking that, making some assumptions, standardizing it, and then mapping it to internal processes.

I know we just did this recently at Workfront and we learned a lot.

One of the most valuable things that we learned is that there were stages that we weren’t touching.

We weren’t touching the buyer in the buying cycle, and we were getting them to engage, but then we weren’t continuing that conversation in a way that helped move them forward or we weren’t providing the kind of nurture programs that we could in the early stages of the sales cycle.

Spend time listening to how customers buy

Just taking the time to step back, and to spend time with customers, listen to how they buy is the place to start.

It’s excellent practice for marketing teams to do that work and creates many synergies with the sales team because many times the criticism of a sales team is that they’re on the front lines. They’re the ones on the phone; they’re the ones in person talking to customers.

And a common criticism is that the marketing team is sitting in a back room somewhere developing programs and campaigns and not listening and touching customers.

So, having and leading that discussion with a sales organization is beneficial because it demonstrates the engagement that we all need to have with those customers as they go through a buying process.

Brian: I’m so glad you brought this up because I do find that, to your point, for the most part, marketers often do get isolated, especially in B2B, because salespeople are usually having more conversations or sales development reps are or whomever. And so, what you’re saying is, get this buyer insight and from that marketers will have a different perspective.

Marketing must understand the customer perspective

Heidi: That’s correct. It brings a different level of perspective, and it also takes away from where marketing teams can sometimes get stuck which is in activity-driven programs where they’re doing just a lot of programs that are generating volume and activity but not necessarily moving the ball forward.

So, paying attention to how we can do things at different points in time to move the ball forward is awesome. It also gives them a broader perspective of not just stopping when that lead is handed over, like, we’re done.

Marketing’s done, marketing’s green, we’re good. Yes, taking responsibility for that portion of it, but our job doesn’t stop there.

And so really stepping back to from the customer perspective is a way to do that.

Mapping the entire customer lifecycle

I think the first step is really to sit down and map it out together, and you must start somewhere.

So, I’m a true believer in, in beginning with a rough idea based on customer insight of what that buying process looks like through the life cycle and not stopping just at revenue but looking at how do we continue to engage those customers.

Because in the case of Workfront, like many businesses, we have a land and expand strategy where that relationship with customers continues well beyond that first sale.

Review and refine the customer lifecycle as a team

So, understanding that all the way through and having a sort of the first pass and then sitting down as a senior leadership team and really refining it together, both the sales and the marketing team members, is really valuable because then you start to share a language, as we talked about.

You start to understand where the disconnects are.

Sometimes when you do that, there are insights that you uncover that you thought, “Oh my gosh, they thought we were doing this, and we thought they were doing this and no one’s doing it. We have this big gap.” And it gives you much visibility.

To me, that is an extremely valuable exercise, and it doesn’t have to be perfect either.

People talk about journey mapping, and they spend months and months and sometimes years on mapping that journey.

To me, if you can get a basic journey down and map your business process to it, you’re going to be much farther ahead than most companies, and the quicker you can move on that, the better.

Revenue team meetings include finance and operations

Heidi: Then, you refine it over time. One of the most valuable tools that I have used in my career is when you bring together the sales team, the marketing team, and the finance team together as a revenue team and you solve problems within that group, things get a lot easier.

To me, that’s one of the tools that I have that I think is beneficial because we must all be operating as a team. That’s the only way that you can get away from, “Marketing’s not doing what they’re supposed to do” or “those salespeople aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

We have a weekly revenue team meeting at Workfront, and that includes our CFO, our head of sales, and me as well as folks on the operations team.

We go through a standard set of metrics. We have one view of the truth, and then we also go through and tackle challenges that we may have, for example, we see this in our pipeline: how do we tackle that issue? What’s the right way to do that? And that combination of people; we’re all addressing the problem.

It’s not a marketing problem; it’s not a sales problem; it’s not a finance problem: it’s a revenue team problem. So, shared ownership issues.

Make sure marketing campaigns are known and agreed upon by sales

I think the strength of sales enablement programs is tremendous. So, as you look at developing marketing campaigns, ensuring the inclusiveness of those campaigns with the BDR, ADM, inside sales function, as well as with the sales and sales leadership teams and ensuring engagement and alignment.

Because to me, that is one of the most valuable pieces of communication: ensuring that the campaigns that we’re investing a company’s money in are well understood and agreed upon by the sales organization so they can support them as they continue through a buying process.

And ensuring that it isn’t just about developing a campaign to identify a lead and a qualified sales opportunity and stopping there. Instead, developing the campaign and enabling the field representatives, whether they be on the phone or in person, to carry those same messages forward and giving them the tools to do that.

That is one thing that I feel strongly about. One of the areas that can be frustrating is when a sales and marketing team isn’t working as well together.

Focus campaign development on the entire buying process

If the sales team is like, “I don’t understand or know the campaigns that you’re running in my territory…”

There’s no excuse for that anymore.

We have a technology that enables that today, and we have common systems and platforms that we’re using, whether it be a marketing automation platform or a CRM platform. There’s no excuse.

So, to me, that’s a really important part that marketing has responsibility for is ensuring that campaign development is not only informed but also supported through the buying process.

Brian: That’s great. And what I was wondering is, we talked about sales enablement, what other advice might you have to marketers and listeners out there who want to improve operating as one team?

Creating shared goals and standard key metrics

Heidi: I would say aligned and shared goals.

That is certainly something that a common set of key metrics that the entire team is looking at and that it’s not metrics by team or by channel. It’s metrics for the marketing organization that we all play a role in.

That, to me, is extremely important.

Providing visibility into programs

Also, ensuring that there’s visibility to the work that’s going on in the business.

Not to be self-serving, but that’s one of the places that Workfront actually helps us a lot is that we can see what everyone else is working on.

And that is a really valuable tool to ensure alignment and also ensure better use of our investment dollars, so we’re not overlapping with each other, or working against each other. And so, the visibility into the programs that we’re investing in at a very detailed level is an essential part of working together as an organization with a common goal.

How technology is impacting marketing today

Well, marketing has changed so much.

That’s such a loaded question because you look at over my tenure, not just at Workfront, but over my career, the technology that we have at our fingertips today as a marketer is overwhelming.

So, one of the skills that I think it is really important for marketing leaders across marketing organizations regardless of B2B, B2C, doesn’t matter, is to understand technology and the impact that technology has on your business process and understanding where technology can help you solve problems, and look at technology to support business process, not to drive it.

The reason why I say that is because I’ve worked in many organizations where there are so many tools out there that will solve problems.

It’s really easy to say, “We have this problem, let’s go get this tool.”

I call this “that-tool-itis,” and we’ve had our fair share of it.

I’ve seen that certainly Workfront as well as at other companies that I’ve worked for but understanding at a deeper level how the technology can support your business and your business goals is a critical skill.

The impact of digital transformation

That speaks to digital transformation. You think about marketing as one of the organizations in an enterprise that has been digitally transformed.

We do marketing so differently, today than we did ten years ago, so digital transformation has really driven lots of change, not just in marketing, but in departments, in large enterprises. They’re always changing and having to adapt the way they work.

To me, that is sort of the most significant change that’s going on in the industry today is, as companies, no company on the planet would say, “We’re not going to transform digitally.”

Companies must keep up today.

However, it happens department by department, marketing being on the early end, but it’s changing the way knowledge-workers work in any organization, and to me, that’s the hardest thing to keep up with.

Brian:  I think many listeners are nodding as you’re speaking to this right now that we deal with every day. So, with all this technology, how do you see empathy or customer empathy fitting in?

Where does empathy fit into marketing?

Heidi: Well, I think that it is an area that has probably been overlooked.

As marketers, especially, have adopted technology, it’s become all about the data; it’s become about the analytics, it’s become about the numbers.

So, we’ve forgotten that there’s a customer on the receiving end and that it isn’t just about the numbers.

It’s about tying to the emotions and how a customer feels as they go through a buying process and being deliberate about ensuring that messaging is targeting people is hard.

It’s one of those things that I think many companies have forgotten in this age of digital transformation, this age of an overwhelming amount of data.

The marketing job has become a data-centric job, not a people-centric job and I think that it needs to balance out.

I think both are critically important because of the concept that it’s people, even in a B2B setting.

You’re not selling to companies, you’re selling to people.

Unlocking the insights, the emotional triggers that people have is how you’re going to move things forward and how you can use technology to support that versus just using technology as an enabler.

So, I think it’s gotten lost as marketing’s gone from almost 100% art to really science-based.

We’ve forgotten the people component, and that’s something that we must layer back in.

And the companies that are doing well are the ones that have done that successfully.

You may also like:

4 ways to adopt human-centered marketing and get better results

The Biggest Contributor to B2B Revenue

31 ways to improve marketing-sales alignment quickly

3 Good Questions to Align B2B Marketing, Sales, and Strategy

How Sales Hustle and Automation Can Hurt Customer Experience

The post How to Get Sales and Marketing Operating as One Team appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

Has our devotion to work and hustle turned into the UnAmerican Dream?

Some of the hardest working people I know are in sales and marketing.

We often read success stories about how hustle and grit drove fantastic success.

That said, the relentless pursuit of success can leave behind damaged relationships and personal life carnage in its wake.

Take me, for example.

Shortly after building up and selling a successful company, my 17-year marriage ended.

There’s a reason entrepreneurs have a higher divorce rate.

For me. My pursuit of business success left my health and my personal relationships in a severe need of help.

I needed to redefine the kind of life I wanted to live, make different choices, and set better boundaries.

It wasn’t easy.

Now, my health, relationships, and personal and professional happiness are so much better.

That’s why I was excited to interviewed Carlos Hidalgo (@cahidalgo), CEO of VisumCX and author of the new book The UnAmerican Dream.

In this interview, you’ll hear Carlos’s story about finding personal and professional happiness and establishing work-life boundaries.

This is a must-read for sellers, marketers, and entrepreneurs.

Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background?

Carlos:  Yeah. Hey Brian. Always a pleasure to talk to you. I have been in B2B marketing and sales for over 20 years. I think right now it’s about 25 years, which is hard to believe.

I’ve been both client-side, and then in 2005, I co-founded an agency. That agency is still running. I left that agency at the end of 2016, beginning of 2017 to start another business. So, could say I’m a bit of an entrepreneur. I love creating things.

Now, I work with B2B companies in the whole area of customer experience under the new brand VisumCX, and then just wrote my second book.

The first book was on demand generation, so if you ever have insomnia, go for it. You can read that.

But this book was the UnAmerican Dream, which is more my story and a whole lot more personal than the first one.

Why did you write The UnAmerican Dream?

The UnAmerican Dream

Brian Can you tell the story about why you wrote this book, The UnAmerican Dream, and why now?

Carlos:  Yeah, great question. When I left Annuitas, which was the first company that I had co-founded and started, I put a post on LinkedIn about why I was going.

It was more to get back to what I should have been doing in the first place, which was cultivating those meaningful relationships, especially with my children and marriage.

I was struck by the number of calls and emails I got from fellow entrepreneurs and fellow business leaders who were saying,

“So, how did you do this? What steps did you take because I am at my wit’s end? I’m never seeing my family,” or “My marriage is falling apart,” or insert whatever they were going through.

I was shocked.

Wow, this is not just me going through this.

So, that’s why.

But the why now, is the idea of that book came to me over two years ago.

But I needed to work on me first.

I had to get some things straight in me, and one of those things that I start with the introduction, I believe, saying I first had the idea in 2016.

When I told somebody the title, they said, “It sounds like an angry book.”

I believe if I had written it then, it would have been an angry book because I had a lot of things that I had to work through and deconstruct some things that I had held to be true which weren’t right.

So, I needed to wait. Waiting, I believe, made it a much more authentic book, a much more vulnerable book, but not an angry book in any way.

Walking away from the UnAmerican Dream

Brian:    I’m going to ask the same question you got asked by many people on LinkedIn. How did you walk away from this UnAmerican dream, and what do you mean by that?

Carlos:  Yeah. Wow. How I did it … From the outside, it probably seemed like, oh, he woke up one day and was like, “I’m done.”

It was a 10-month process for me. I really wrestled with the decision. And you know, Brian, you’ve started businesses. You’re an entrepreneur yourself.

When you start something from scratch, and you put everything you have into it, you really … The term I hear often is, “This is my baby.”

I wanted to make sure that, first and foremost, I had come to a place where I’m like, “I’ve got to do everything I can to get back those relationships that I had neglected for so long.”

So, I tried to do that within the context of the first business.

That took me 10 months.

I kept wrestling with what should I do and how should I do it?

Getting the courage to make the decision

Carlos:  It was a conversation which I’ve told many times, so I want to elaborate in case there’s an overlap with people who have heard this before.

But, a conversation with a colleague in the lobby of the Westin who encouraged me.

He said, “You know what you need to do. You just need the courage to do it.”

I called Suzanne, my wife, at that point, a few hours later and said, “I’m leaving.”

When it came down to it, I really just pulled the ripcord because I didn’t have a big buyout waiting. I didn’t have this significant hoard of cash in the savings account where I could run for months and months.

It was a risk.

It was scary.

It was like, “Okay, so what am I going to do now?”

But everything panned out, and everything worked out. I would do it again in a heartbeat. It was the best professional decision I ever made.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Brian:    Well, Carlos, for our listeners, it will come through. You and I are good friends. I was just thinking about you as an entrepreneur and as I know you. I mean, entrepreneurship is in your blood. It’s part of your history, part of your family history.

As I was reading the book, you wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What’s getting in the way of that?

Carlos:  Wow, so much is getting in the way of that. I think, first and foremost, is we as Americans are on this treadmill and this pace, and we have made work our God.

We work more than any other group, any other nationality in the world.

So, just think about that. I just read a stat last week where 32% of Millennials will not take more than a four-night vacation because of work. 70% of the population says, “I don’t have work-life balance.”

I was at Nashville this last weekend, and the people we stayed with, he’s like, “I didn’t take all my vacation. I can’t.”

I think part of what’s getting in the way of our happiness is we’re slaves to our jobs, we’re slaves to our career, we’re slaves to our businesses, and that’s a choice that we have made.

I know people will debate me on that all day long, but it is a choice that we have made.

Quitting weekend work

I literally, before this, saw a LinkedIn post that said, “If you’re reading this on the weekend, it’s clear that you’re a top performer.”

So, the message there is if you’re not connected to your profession on the weekend, you’re not a top performer.

That is a total fallacy because I don’t work weekends anymore. I used to all the time. I don’t any longer.

That means I’m not on LinkedIn, I’m not promoting anything, I’m not doing anything for my clients, and everybody knows that.

That’s a boundary I chose. I think that’s one thing.

How social media impacts happiness

The other thing that I think that it’s really getting in the way of our happiness is social media, and these stinking things. We are so attached to, and I will use the word addiction, to our devices, and to social media.

To the point where we’ll put something on Facebook and then 20 minutes later we’re going and seeing how many likes.

We retweet.

“How many followers do I have?”

We have created what I call social loneliness where we are so socially connected, but we are so utterly lonely because people don’t really know us.

We haven’t built a relationship, and as human beings, we’re wired for connection.

I think when we put those things ahead of what we’re wired for, our happiness or our ability to choose joy, severely wanes.

Brian:    There’s so much there, Carlos, as I’m listening to you. Something I remember from a conversation you and I had a while ago, and you had been going back to when I was trying to start my company again, as I was starting something new. You talked about setting boundaries instead of trying to get work-life balance. Why is that?

Why Focus on work-life boundaries, not balance

I don’t believe in work-life balance because I tried it for … At different parts of my career, I tried it.

At other parts, I was like, “I’m completely unbalanced, and I’m good with that.”

Now, when I think about it makes me want to shake my head.

The stats will show you 70% saying I can’t achieve work-life balance. So, when I see that, I know the reality is it doesn’t exist.

The picture I get is my daughter, who was a gymnast for 14 years. Upon that balance beam and nothing made me more nervous.

I had kids in theater and kids in sports, and they could perform, and I’d get a little nervous, but man, when she was there, you think about that. It’s hard to balance.

It’s hard to balance across a trajectory of time.

So, what I did is I rejected the idea of balance.

Maybe it’s semantics, but for me, the idea of boundaries is they are more permanent.

If I draw a boundary or install a limit, it takes work to move. So, I’ve adopted boundaries, and when I say “I have,” we have because I’ve done it in community, first and foremost, with my wife.

Building boundaries in community

Brian, you and I have talked about my boundaries, and I’ve invited you into that community of people who have permission to be like, “Hey, I’m kind of seeing this stuff,” or “What’s going on here and how are you doing with that?”

Because God forbid if I’m the only one who’s going to determine am I balanced.

Defining what you value and want to protect

What we did was to define what we want to protect? What do we want to value?

For me, time with my family, time with my wife is priority number one.

My health, both physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual is essential.

So, I go to the gym regularly. I meditate.

I take time just to stop and think and shut off my phone and close my computer.

Some days, it’s just staring out the window. If you were to look at me, you’d be like, “Is this guy really working or what?” But I’m thinking.

So, it’s those types of things that I protect.

The counter to that is I’m so much wildly more productive in my work because there is a boundary around the time that I’m working. I’m not engaging in friendly conversation or texting or meeting a buddy for lunch. I am absolutely focused in on what I’m doing for a living.

So, my clients get the best of me as well as my relationships.

How to set work-life boundaries

Brian:    For those out there who are seeing this, it’s not easy to do. At least, for me, it isn’t. Do you have any tips, and advice on what you found we can do to get better at setting boundaries or non-negotiables in our life?

Carlos:  Yeah, you’re right. It’s not easy to do.

I’m the first to say I don’t have this all figured out.

I’m on the journey with everybody else. I may be a few steps ahead, but I also know people who are so much far ahead than I am. It’s something I’ve been doing for two years. I shared with Suzanne the other day, I hate when people say, “Well, they’ve really done their work.” Like we’ve all arrived, we should all be experiencing.

Three weeks ago, I picked up my phone and wanted to check my email at 8:00 at night and Suzanne’s like, “So, what are we doing because this is two nights in a row?”

And it was utterly appropriate, total gentle, not any kind of like … But that’s what I wanted.

Start with your closest relationships

Carlos:  Anyway, back to the question. I think, first and foremost, you have to do it in community with your closest of relationships.

If that’s a spouse, that’s a boyfriend, girlfriend, close friend, close co-worker, even your boss, right?

Say, “I want to give the best of myself in all aspects of my life, professionally, personally, whatever else.”

Whether it’s work, if you’re going to the gym by yourself, I want to give the best while I’m there.

Write down what you value

So do that in community and then sit down and really write down what do you value.

I was talking to somebody the other day who was talking to me how much they value their physical fitness.

Then literally, almost in the same breath, it was like, “Well, I don’t have time to go to the gym.”

Okay, so you don’t really value your physical fitness.

When I say to them even go for a run outside because if you’re shunning that, or if you’re shunning the annual checkup or whatever that is, you don’t value … You may say you do, but your actions say you don’t.

Clarify what is getting in the way of what you value

Carlos:  So, really define what you value, and then say, “What are the things that I’m letting get in the way of those things that I say I value?”

When you do that in community, you’re going to get a much different perspective than if we just do it in isolation.

Because often the people we surround ourselves with, that we are close with, can kind of point out our blind spots which are of massive value to us and should be embraced.

I would say those are a couple of things that I would highly recommend.

Identify blind spots by doing this

Brian: That’s really good. I can identify with the blind spots and the need to have a feedback loop. There are things every person has that we can’t see how we’re living our life or how we’re showing up.

We won’t know unless we ask people, “What do you see that I’m missing?” It sounds like to get to that place you got to have an intention or purpose, too.

How would someone start the conversation about this?

Asking for additional help

Carlos:  I think it’s starting with being really honest, first and foremost, about here’s where I’m at. I’m not here to judge people who are going to work 14 hours a day.

If that’s what you and your community have decided is good and works for everybody, who am I to say you’re wrong?

That’s not my place.

I think just asking the question, “How are we doing?”

Asking the question, “Hey, here’s what I want to be doing.”

I value family time, I value fitness, I value fun, which can be a value. It may be something you like.

Ask “What do you see that I’m doing that’s getting in the way of that?”

If you’re going to ask that question, be prepared for the answers.

Part of the work I had to do was to sit down and hear some pretty unpleasant things.

I didn’t want to hear about things I had done, the choices I had made, the decisions I had made.

That is not a fun thing to go through, but it makes us better. It makes us more aware.

Communicating your boundaries

Carlos:  I am so much more aware now, even more so than I was also just a year ago, or when I’m in my personal boundary after working hours of not checking my phone, not trying to stay engaged, not returning that text.

I’ve gone to this extent to make my partners, and my clients, and my professional connections aware of that, so oftentimes if I do get a text at 7:00 at night or 9:00 at night, what I’m starting to see is, “Hey, I know you’re not going to get this till the morning.”

I’m like, “Yeah, you’re right.”

Even if I see it, I’m not going to respond to it.

Why work devotion and hustle porn are destructive

Brian:    So, I was thinking about the LinkedIn post you brought up about, “Hey, if you’re looking at this on a Saturday … ” There’s this whole notion of work devotion or hustle porn. Why is that such a thing today? Why is it destructive?

Carlos:  I think the reason it’s a thing today is you’ve got so many loud voices out there promoting it.

You’ve got Kevin O’Leary who’s talking … Literally says, “25 hours a day.” In the interview that I think I quote in the book is, “It’s 24/7. Get used to it. Get over it.”

You’ve got Jack Ma with his ridiculous 9, 9, 6. 9:00 to 9:00, six days a week. You’ve got Grant Cardone with his unhealthy approach to 95 hours a week, and the list goes on.

Daymond John’s, “Rise and grind.” We’re not real entrepreneurs unless we do this. I think those voices are so loud, and it’s this idea … I couple that with if I’m the scarce resource to my organization, which means I’m working long hours. I’m always available, we make that part of our identity, it is a perfect storm.

Carlos:  The reason it is destructive is we only have a certain amount of time each and every day. 24 hours a day, 86,400 seconds.

If I’m devoting the majority of that time to my work, something has to suffer. Either I suffer which, if I do, I can’t give the best of myself to my relationships.

So, either way, my relationships take a hit.

When I go back to fundamentally as human beings we were wired for a connection, then we have to start to think about, so, what does that mean?

When we begin to move against what we’re wired for fundamentally, we begin to see anxiety, we begin to see anger, we start to see sleeplessness, we begin to see loneliness.

More socially connected but more lonely

Carlos:  I was doing research on that this morning. It is off the charts.

Over half of Americans are saying they have feelings of loneliness even though we’re so connected.

Just like all porn, hustle porn is destructive. It’s toxic, I agree with Alex Ohanion. I applaud him for taking a stand against it.

Honestly, I would be delighted to have the individuals that I just named shut up because they are doing a disservice to entrepreneurs and business leaders and families everywhere.

That’s why I had Suzanne write a chapter because there is a story on the other side of every hustle story.

I lived that hustle lifestyle for far too long. It’s not sustainable. It did damage to us as a family and to me personally.

Sellers and Marketers are overwhelmed

Brian:    I really appreciate you just sharing that there is another side to this. As you mentioned and as entrepreneurs, and you and I have worked in the sales and marketing world for a long time, is this happening in sales and marketing? If so, what can we do to change it?

Carlos:  Oh, it is. I work with marketers on a day to day basis. I see more and more.

When you say, “So, how’s it going?”, they’re like, “Oh, my word. I’m slammed. I’m overwhelmed. I have so much to do. There are not enough hours in the day.”

I get emails from clients at 10:00 at night. I got a text from a client not long ago that said, “I feel completely overwhelmed, and I’m so down. I don’t know what to do.”

I go to conferences. At the last conference I was at, I asked a bunch of marketers, “How many of you feel there’s not enough time to accomplish what you want to do in a meaningful way?”

Virtually every hand out of 200+ went up.

I definitely see this on the marketing and sales front.

Giving people permission to turn off

I think what we can do about it is, first of all, business leaders if you’re listening, start to create a culture that gives your people permission to turn off.

Carlos:  When you are sending them emails at 10:00 at night even if you’ve said, “Hey, we have a culture where we have our working hours,” you’re putting them in a position of, “Can I tell the boss to wait?”

That is a disadvantage you’re giving to your people.

If you really want the best of them, you will allow them time to step away and turn off and not feel they have to shorten their vacations or be connected on vacation or connected at 9:00 at night.

That’s number one as a business leader.

Designing your job to fit your lifestyle

Number two, there’s a corporate profile in the book of a lady named Claire Potter who is in a sales role.

Claire works for a multi-billion dollar organization.

What she did was,

“Hey, I just had my first child. I travel. My husband travels. That’s not sustainable. I’m going to create a new job role in my organization, and at the same time, I’m going to create a plan B. I’m going to start to talk to recruiters and understand what jobs are available that would now suit my lifestyle.”

Then she went to her organization and said, “If you want me to stay, this is my new job.”

Her new organization said, “That’s awesome. We value you. We want you in the organization.”

She took the initiative to say this is what I’m going to do.

Defining the kind of life you want

Another profile in the book, Elle Woulfe, who is the CMO at PathFactory.

One of my favorite lines in the book, she closes with, “Life is short. I want to make sure I’m here for it.”

Elle had an opportunity to get a very high profile job with a great company.

She decided for her family and for her own sake, she was going to take a role which is still a significant role with PathFactory, but it didn’t pay as much.

But it enabled her to live the life she wanted. Define what kind of life you want, and then go design your career, your job, your business around that and what that looks like.

We talk about that as well in the book.

You may also like:

The UnAmerican Dream book website

Why purpose matters to marketing to drive growth, revenue, and profit

Transform your customer success journey and drive revenue

The B2B Roundtable Podcast

The post How to stop the hustle and establish work-life boundaries appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

One small thing changed my work in a big way.

About five years ago, someone sent me a video on a Tulsa, Oklahoma business that changed the entire way I approach sales and marketing.

The first thing that caught my attention was that Mother Teresa had publicly endorsed the business. “Wait,” I thought. “Mother Teresa endorses businesses?”

The second was that the CEO got nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

This amazingly compassionate company?

A collections agency.

Yes, you read that right.

I was shocked.

How helping drives better results

The CEO of the company, CFS2, had decided to rethink the collections agency, business model.

Instead of browbeating debtors, they decided to offer free services to help their customers pay their bills by renegotiating their debt, helping them find jobs, and getting them back on their feet.

It was revolutionary and straightforward.

You can’t get money from a customer who has none, so how might we help them do better financially?

Here’s the 3-minute video from CBS News:

Yes, it’s a great feel-good story.

But you may be asking yourself: what was the bottom line impact of giving away all these free services?

CFS2 was 200% more profitable than any of its competitors.

They’re making double the profit by doing good.

The CBS news anchor closed by saying CFS2’s strategy was kindness, but I thought they had it wrong.

I saw CFS2’s strategy was built from empathy.

Here’s what I mean:

They were putting themselves in their customer shoes, and this changed their business model.

After watching the video, I knew in my gut that I wanted to try something different.

My “Jerry Maguire” Moment for empathy

I love the Jerry Maguire vision scene. This is the one that keeps him up at night… and he has the moment of clarity that sparks THE Mission Statement.

Many of us have had Jerry Maguire moments, where the difference between what we know is right and what we are actually doing becomes clear to us.

I thought if a collection agency can do this in an industry with terrible customer experience, what would happen if tried something like this in B2B?

What if we focused on helping potential customers – no strings attached?

The next day in our Monday morning I talked with our CEO and then my sales team.

We watched the video together as a team.

I always felt like the best marketing and selling feels like helping (because it is)

Now, I wanted to really do something.

I asked, “what do you think about us focusing on helping instead of converting people into leads?”

I waited.

Crickets.

Eventually, someone asked, “If we do this, how will we get leads and sales?”

This started a bigger conversation.

Getting better at helping customers

What’s the reason people fill out a form for your content or to register to access a webinar or other resources?

Are people excited to hear from us?

No. They’re crazy busy.

Who wants yet another business development rep calling them, right?

People are looking for answers to questions. They have jobs that need to get done.

So what if we helped them do just that?

Understanding motivation with empathy

So we focused on doing this:

Getting a better understanding of what motivated people to access our content in the first place so we could get them what they wanted.

How could we help them and give them clarity?

Empathy map sketch: Get the empathy mapping checklist here: https://www.markempa.com/blog/

Inspiration from hotel concierges

As we talked about our approach, and what we could do differently, I thought of hotel concierges.

What’s a hotel concierge’s goal?

To help meet the needs of guests and perform various tasks including making recommendations.

Do concierges give the same advice to all hotel guests?

Of course not. It’s based on what the guest wants to know.

Concierges focus on the task the guests wants to get done and helps them do it.

With that in mind, we started to test this strategy:

First, we needed to know our potential customer’s motivation for engaging our content (i.e., The WHY). And then help them get what they wanted with strings attached.

Next, I asked my team to throw out scripts, and our qualifying approach, and we considered how we might change our approach to model hotel concierges.

To get the process going, we started asking:

• What are the most common questions they’re trying to get answered with our content?
• What frustrations could we remove for potential customers and improve their experience?
• What content and resource roadblocks could we remove?
• What wins could we help them achieve?
• How could we be a plus to their day, so they feel good about talking with us?

Why customer empathy matters

I’m fascinated by the neuroscience behind the way people think. Mainly the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who discovered how critical feelings are to our ability to make even the most straightforward decisions.

People, as Damasio says, are “feeling machines that think.” Getting to the root of what a person is feeling is key to connecting with them. So, of course, connecting with your customers is the key to marketing.

When your customers find your content, they’re looking to solve a problem.

I alway felt like the best selling feels like helping (because it is).

Instead of viewing your customers as objects to be converted –checkpoints along the funnel of your sales process –what if you focused on helping them solve a problem?

Emotional resonance is about connecting with emotions and helping negative states move to more positive feelings

We also considered our approach by being the customer and answering:

• If I were on the receiving end, why would I want this?
• What’s in it for me? So what?
• Why is this helpful to me? Why would I want to talk to someone about this?

Positive emotions that drive buying decisions

A new approach

I hypothesized that we’d get sales opportunities leads simply by helping people get what they were looking for and not focusing on converting them.

But this meant the entire system for our team needed to change because everything was built around converting people to leads.

Commissions were on the line. And we made sure the reps wouldn’t make less money testing this new approach.

But first, needed to unlearn the habits of qualifying people.

It was wasn’t easy.

It required getting lots of buy-in from my team, hours of additional coaching, changing our whole approach, and restructuring commissions.

We took the pressure off of leads, opportunities, and focused on being “customer concierges” to help people have super helpful experience.

We honestly didn’t know how hard it was going to be.

But in the end, it was worth it.

After six months of focusing on helping people rather than trying to generate leads them, we got 303% percent more sales opportunities!

In sum, when we stopped trying to convert leads and focused on helping customers get what they wanted, we got triple the results.

Applying empathy

B2B complex sales are way more emotional because the stakes are high.

That’s why the strategy of empathy especially powerful for B2B complex sales.

Trust matters a lot, but to build trust, you need to connect with people emotionally first.

Sales conversion is the result of building a trusted connection.

I use the analogy that when your customers are trying to make a change in their organization, it’s like a group of people trying to climb the mountain.

Being a buyer sherpa

Stop pulling and pushing people into funnels.

Change your sales analogy from the funnel to helping customers climbing a mountain. The customer is the climber, and you’re the Sherpa.

Consider this:

Some people don’t want to climb it all.

Others might want to go to different paths or different mountains.

When they have a larger team making a decision, it gets even more complicated.

The best way to help in this case is to become a buyer sherpa.

Here’s a video about becoming a buyer sherpa.

As a Sherpa, you can’t do the climbing for the customer. The climber still has to climb, but you can help carry the load, you can provide resources, you can offer guidance and share stories of how other organizations solved similar problems.

Help them.

The emotional buying journey: people often start with hope and quickly to despair when they realize how hard it is to get others to buy-in. Help them.

Emotions influence the buying journey.

Today, technology is making it easier than ever to connect with masses of customers in a way that feels personal.

Data can help us make empathetic decisions, and artificial intelligence and chatbots can move us toward the promise of real one-to-one marketing.

However, without empathy, all that technology ends up feeling inauthentic.

You still need to connect with the human on the other end of the database, to have honest conversations to discover their problems, and focus on how you can help.

After all, your customers are already looking for help — and they’re going to find it somewhere. Why shouldn’t it be with you?

You may also like:

What is empathy-based marketing?

How to improve your account based marketing results

4 ways to adopt human-centered marketing and get better results

New Research: Customer Empathy and How to Solve Buying Problems

The post We stopped trying to convince customers and got triple the results appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

Why does most marketing stink?

According to Michael Brenner, “the reason most of the marketing that we do that stinks and doesn’t work is that some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.”

On top of that, marketers are not in a happy place.

According to MarketingProfs 2019 Marketer Happiness Report, “Only 10% of marketers say they were very fulfilled in their work.” The report looked at the dimensions of feeling fulfilled, valued, energized by the work, that our work is impactful, and engagement.

That’s why I interviewed Michael Brenner (@BrennerMichael), the CEO of Marketing Insider Group to talk about his new book Mean People Suck.

We need more empathy and inside our companies so that we can empathize more with our customers.

According to Michael Brenner, “The most counter-intuitive secret to success in business and life is empathy.” I’m excited to bring his thoughts on empathy to you.

In this interview you’ll learn about asking what’s in it for the customer, rethinking your org chart, and the changes you need to make to be more successful today.

Why did you write Mean People Suck?

Michael: Again, I must give you credit. You were out in front of this empathy topic in marketing.

I think long before me. Kudos to you. It just took me a little longer, but mainly as a content marketer and as a former internal corporate marketer, I reached out to folks that I know that are still living and breathing corporate marketing struggles every day.

And I found a couple of things, number one was that marketers were miserable. It’s like that scene from, I think it’s Poltergeist where the obsessed woman has help written on her. Was it Poltergeist? Anyway, there was a woman possessed, and the words help showed up on her stomach because

I feel like a lot of internal corporate marketers feel that way. They’re miserable.

Why marketers are so miserable?

Michael: When you get down to it, what I’ve found is that it’s mainly because they hate their boss.

They don’t love the corporate culture. They’re not happy with what they’re being asked to do. They feel they don’t have an impact.

When I looked at why content marketing programs aren’t successful, the answer superficially was content ROI. What’s the ROI of content? And if you don’t mind me, I’m not being promotional, but I wrote a book called The Content Formula, All About Content Marketing ROI.

And when I went back to folks, I sent the book to, what I found was that it wasn’t enough. The math isn’t enough to get people over the challenges that we’re facing and how to do marketing that doesn’t suck.

Most marketing stinks for this reason

Michael: The answer is the reason I wrote the book is that most of the marketing that we do that stinks and doesn’t work, is because some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.

Executives love seeing logos on stadiums, and they love seeing super bowl ads, and all the things that we make fun of marketing about primarily come from a request from sales or marketing or product people.

And the companies where content marketing is successful or marketers are happy, they’re making an impact because there’s a culture of empathy. Their cultures don’t suck. The companies don’t suck. The leaders don’t suck. That’s why I wrote the book. Maybe a long-winded explanation, but that’s why.

Why empathy is more important now

Brian:  It’s hard for marketers to care about the customer when they don’t feel cared about too. They don’t feel safe. They’re anxious, or they’re frustrated, or they’re overwhelmed. You also talked about empathy. Why does empathy matter, especially to marketers and does it lead to better results?

Michael: Yeah, One of the stories that I tell in the book, the very first corporate book that I read, and I have to give credit to the former CEO at Nielsen, my first company who made most of us in the company read the book. And I was like, “Oh, here we go. And I read the book. I was like,” Wow, this is actually really pretty cool.”

It’s called the Service Profit Chain. I write a lot about it.

It’s a book that isn’t talked about much, but the premise is simple. Three or four Harvard business review professors got together, and they said, wait for a second, we’ve seen this correlation between engaged employees are happy employees, happy customers, and higher stock prices more satisfied stock investors.

They did some actual research, and they found that where there’s employee engagement, there is customer loyalty. Where there’s customer loyalty, there’s higher spend rates and retention and higher stock prices.

The counter-intuitive secret to success 

Michael: The key to those environments, those cultures, those companies where there were happy employees, was empathy. The company’s purpose was to make their employees happy because they knew happy employees created delighted customers. It’s totally intuitive, and yet it’s counterintuitive.

That’s one of the reasons we reconnected was my LinkedIn post’s empathy is the counterintuitive secret to success. The thing is, I think that life has beaten us down and gotten us to believe that we should take what we want, and we should put our elbows out and get to the front of the line. It’s the opposite. It’s counterintuitive that if we help people, we can get what we want.

It’s right for marketing, which really has a bad reputation. Most people think marketing is propaganda and promotion, but the companies that have effective marketing are those that are empathetic. It’s those that are empathetic to their customers and don’t just create advertising and propaganda.

Empathy really is the key to marketing and business and in life. I kind of wrote the book kind of really trying to straddle all three of those perspectives. I hope your listeners look, and hopefully, they can maybe get back to me and tell me how well I did to try to straddle those three.

Brian: Well, I just want to say I’m excited for you. I’m passionate about this book because big-picture empathy or caring for customers or wanting to help people it’s easy to talk about. Right? I think if you were asking your own executives, do you care about your customers? Do you have empathy for your employees? I don’t think anyone would argue with that, but it’s easier to talk about than it is to do.

Getting customers to care (begins with caring)  

Brian: One of the things you talked about was just the customer journey, and what the experience is for customers, why they don’t care about brands anymore and how the brand doesn’t matter. So why is that?

Michael: Well, the first thing is I think it’s essential for marketers and especially brand marketers, corporate marketers, but I also believe those who are in the trenches there need to understand how to explain this to executives. And that is that we just aren’t that important. We’re not as exciting or important as we think we are.

My former company, Nielsen, did a survey of brands and found that consumers wouldn’t care, 77% said they wouldn’t care if the brands they use disappeared completely. We’re seen as replaceable in many aspects. While we think we’re super important, and we believe we are fascinating. Our customers are just trying to get through every day and trying to meet the challenges they face.

They’re trying to stay awake. The bar is low. Yet so many brands don’t create any kind of messaging or sort of stories that resonate. And so that’s really the trick is if you genuinely care about your customers, you don’t talk about yourself as much.

When I meet somebody new, I don’t say, “Hi, my name is Michael Brenner, and I’m awesome.” That’s the last thing I would ever say.

If I want somebody to listen to me, I say, “Hi, how are you?” My first thing is outreach. It’s empathy. It’s not promotion and propaganda and ego. I think we just forget that sometimes when we’re sitting inside the corporate marketing department.

Brian: Well, you’re illustrating the point, and then I’ll come back, that empathy is more comfortable to talk about than it is to do. We’ve got to overcome our own bias, thinking that we have the answer.

How to use empathy in your marketing approach

Brian: I believe marketers come from the perspective: If I were the customer, how would this appeal to me? Or, as you talked about the leader who wants to see the logo, well, that’s not a customer-focused decision in their calculus.

How might marketers use empathy in their approach to customers?

Michael: In my first book, The Content Formula, I talk about my year-long struggle to get my colleagues inside SAP to see and to have empathy for our customers. I started with data. The data often leads to the conclusion.

For example, at SAP, we were selling a cloud computing solution called SAP HANA, which now has a little brand awareness but then didn’t have any.

What I tried to show my colleagues in marketing was that people weren’t searching for our product name. They weren’t searching even for SAP cloud computing solutions. They were searching for things like what is cloud computing.

In every industry, no matter what thing you sell, if you sell, cybersecurity solutions, and you sell the world’s most excellent cybersecurity solution named alpha, I’m just making this up, people aren’t searching for alpha as much as they’re searching for cybersecurity solutions.

When I found the data didn’t work, I moved to fear, FOMO, in a way, but really fear. I went to the sales team and showed them that I use this term, the buying journey doesn’t start with a search for our product. And the sales team understood that better than my peers in marketing.

And I use search. I said, “Hey, look, when, when I, when I type cloud computing into Google, IBM, and Oracle and Salesforce show up, but SEP didn’t show up at all.” They got angry. That anger then translated to direct mandates over to my peers in marketing, who finally created the atmosphere and environment for me to create customer-focused content. It was kind of like a mafia move if you will. I kind of strong-armed them too to see that it was the right thing to do.

Brian: The point you made is you went to the people who we’re talking to the customer. They had that insight. And ironically, we’re in marketing, we’re supposed to influence messages of customers, but we are not in the building.

Putting customers in the center of your org chart

Brian: You have a lot of great stories in your book. Do you have a favorite story? And if so, which one?

Michael: Yeah. One of the things I talk about how to create empathy inside the organization is to rethink the org chart. I talk about how org charts are boxes and lines, and they show who’s above and below us.

Basically, they highlight who directs orders down to the minions who do the stuff, do the work. I talk about the org charts miss the most important person, and that’s the customer. I’m not suggesting every company should recreate the org chart, but if we rethink the org chart, it will look more like a bullseye, right?

Bullseye org charts focus everyone on the common goal of serving the most important person to the organization, the customer via https://meanpeoplesuck.com/

You have the customer at the center, and all the departments branching out from there would be thinking, how should I best serve this customer? There’s a couple of stories in the book of people, and they’re not all necessarily marketers, but indeed a few who’ve done that.

Cleveland Clinic empathy story

One is Amanda Todorovich from Cleveland Clinic. She has a viral empathy video. If you Google Cleveland Clinic empathy video, you’ll see an internal… It was initially an internally created video to try to get the executives inside Cleveland Clinic to see that Cleveland Clinic is more than just a business. It’s more than a hospital operation.

It’s an organization that serves patients. The concerns that patients have are matters of life and death and giving birth and dying. Amanda’s teams’ video was incredibly impactful. I get chills just talking about it. I use it in every presentation, and it has 4 million views online.

They released it publicly at the behest of their executive team because they really understood the impact of, hey, you know, what makes us different isn’t because we have great surgeons, and we have utilized some particular technique or equipment, what makes us unique is that we really care for our patients.

It’s kind of empathy writ large in a way to a corporate mission in many cases all the way down to the content that Amanda and her team create every day, which serves patient needs. And so that’s one of my favorite stories from an empathy perspective.

There are probably 15 stories. I could keep going. I’ll stop myself because I love talking about the people, I call champions, the champion leaders, the people that celebrated others, and achieved success because of that. That’s the counterintuitive nature of empathy. It’s helping others, live your life in service of others, and you get what you want. And that’s really at the heart of the book.

Brian: Well, in my experience, I 100% agree. I’ve always had the best marketing selling feels like helping because it is. But I had a Jerry Maguire moment where I realized I wasn’t living that. My team was more focused on trying to convert people instead of connecting and help.  We asked hey, what do customers care about? How can I help them get it? Ironically when we stopped trying to get leads, we got 303% more opportunities because we were really helping people.

Do you have tips for developing more empathy customers that you could share with our listeners?

Ask this: what’s in it for the customer? 

Michael: Yeah. There’s a couple of, I guess, tools I wanted to develop for your listeners. For the people who were like me who was sitting, getting asked to do stuff that we know won’t work. And the sort of the highest-level insight is asking what’s in it for the customer.

For example, your sales leader comes over and says, I’d like a brochure for this niche industry event we’re going to. It’s going to cost you $4,000, and it’s a couple of designers and a printer to get created. Just ask, “What’s in it for the customer?” Do people really read our brochures? Are they going to throw it right in the trash? You might think it’s essential to stuff that inside the conference bag, but I’ve never read a brochure myself from a conference.

If we ask what’s in it for the customer as opposed to thinking of our jobs as just doing what the sales team or the product team or our boss tells us to do, the answer, I think, is sometimes surprising.

We wouldn’t do half of what we do if we asked what’s in it for the customer.

The pushback questions

I offer three deeper level questions that there’s a couple of examples of people who have done this. I call it the push back. It just goes a bit deeper.

Who is this for?

Why is it important?

How are we going to measure the impact?

And if you ask those three, those are three deeper level questions from them what’s in it for the customer sort of overview.

Again, you wouldn’t put your logo on a stadium, you wouldn’t create a brochure that costs a lot of money to print and kills trees. You wouldn’t do a lot of the things that we do that we roll our eyes about when we think about marketing and when we think about really all the propaganda that comes outside of companies.

Brian: It’s so funny as I listen to you. As I talk with marketers, often, VPs will lament, and we forget what it’s like to be a customer even though we’re all customers ourselves. That’s kind of the crazy thing.

Any other things you wish I would’ve asked about before we just close?

Michael: No, I think we’ve covered the primary tips. I appreciate you bringing me on and letting me share these tips with the readers. I’d love for your audience to read the book.

Again, everything I do, I’ve done in support of this desire to try to help people. I started blogging before I had a business just because I wanted to share what I know. The keynotes I give, the books that I write, and even the client work that I do get paid for are really to try to help people, and it’s worked for me.

I don’t think I’m smarter than other people. If it works for me, I think it’s the secret for many of us to live a life that’s maybe a little more meaningful, a little more impactful. I just talk to so many people. I talk about this crisis of engagement and empathy. The world feels like a meaner place these days.

Three takeaways from the book

The three takeaways from the book are: be kind, be cool, and be you.

Be kind is just because it’s the right thing to do.

Be cool is don’t take things personally. A lot of the mean people we meet aren’t psychopaths and narcissists, they’re just having a bad day.

Be you is because the people that are, I think, living their fullest life, but they know what their purpose is, and they’re working in support of that, and it’s often in service of others.

You may also like:

Download the Mean People Suck Companion Guide PDF courtesy of Michael Brenner

Bring more innovation to your demand generation now

4 Steps to Do Lead Nurturing That Helps More Customers Buy

8 Questions to Steer Your Marketing Priorities

The post Mean people suck in marketing and what to do about it appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

Lead nurturing is one of those things that’s easy to talk about but hard to do. In this post, I’m going to share how to apply lead nurturing to help advance leads through three stages of your demand generation funnel to get more sales qualified opportunities. Our customer’s don’t see our funnels. Customers only know the aggregate experience of what they see, hear, and feel from our marketing. Still, it’s helpful to notice that all customer buying steps fit into three distinct funnel stages.

The Three Funnel Stages You Need to Nurture

Top of the Funnel (TOFU)

People at this stage are searching for ideas, tips, and resources to help them answer questions and get ideas for problems they’re facing. You’re attracting relevant visitors, but they are unknown. At this stage, the goal is to assist and provide enough value to get a conversion and move them from  anonymous visitors to known people (i.e. name, company, email, etc.)

Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)

At this stage, people took some conversion step to express interest (subscribe, register, or download, etc.). You need to learn if this person and/or their company is a fit and their level of qualification. You also want to learn about their motivation. During this stage, you’ll share content to help progress them from interest towards purchase intent.

Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)

People are moving through a series of micro-decisions on their journey. At this stage, you’re moving them from being a lead to a sales qualified opportunity. This is where the hand-off from marketing to sales takes place and where people ultimately make the buying decision. All three are part of an integrated lead generation funnel, and this article touches on each element while taking a closer look at lead nurturing.

Build your Portfolio at Top of the Funnel 

Don’t rely on just one primary lead source. The best marketers approach their work as a portfolio manager would run their mutual fund. The same is true with account-based marketing. Portfolio managers are always strategizing and testing, the optimal investment strategy. The following mind map shows some of the channels can use in your lead generation portfolio.  Identify what’s working right now in your lead generation portfolio and try new things. Switch channels in and out as you test. Your top of the funnel lead generation becomes a multi-touch process when you use more than one channel. You’ll find one channel is good at starting a conversation while another might work better at advancing your discussion. You begin nurturing leads from the moment you say hello. If you need more leads than check out Marketing 101: How to get started in lead generation To optimize your demand generation read, 4 step lead generation analysis to optimize sales conversion Look at your budget for the top of the funnel (TOFU). Why? Marketers allocate the largest chunk of their budget to TOFU (channels, content, and martech). I suggest you allocate around 20% to 40% of your budget towards the middle of the funnel nurturing and progression.

Middle of the Funnel: Focus on Progression

Think of lead nurturing as an extension of the conversation you started with TOFU demand generation. How can you advance the conversations? Here’s what I mean: Look at the relationships you’ve started through the different lead generation sources and ask what content or information can be shared to advance that conversation. First, the easiest way to begin lead nurturing is to look at the contacts you already have in your databases. If you need help to start lead nurturing quickly read this.

Tactic #1. Enable your inside sales team to nurture better

Your inside sales team is an essential part of building your lead nurturing process. The ultimate goal of lead nurturing is to help people progress on their journey and by doing that you’ll get more qualified opportunities into the pipeline. You can invite inside sales to participate in the following ways:

• Get their perspective from their experience talking with customers
• Ground test ideas for nurture messaging with inside sales feedback
• Ask what they’re hearing from potential clients  about key issues

So what works to get this kind of feedback? Start by asking your sales team questions like, “What’s the content you share with prospects that helps them progress?” or “What’s your favorite content to share that helps prospects the most?” You might be surprised by what you learn. Inside sales reps often talk to more potential customers than anyone else in the company. For more on this checkout, The Biggest Contributor to B2B Revenue.

Coach your sales team on nurturing

The goal of lead nurturing is to help progress leads from initial interest toward purchase intent. It’s about progression. Salespeople often struggle with developing nurturing content without support from marketing. Here’s an example of involving Sales in the lead nurturing process. Let’s say you just did a webinar or an online event. You can equip your sales development or inside sales team with a nurturing follow-up email template and content such as an executive summary or main takeaways from the webinar. With that content, your sales team can call these leads and say, ‘I saw you attended our webinar last week, and we put together an executive summary and a two-page document with the main takeaways, what did you think of the event? Was it helpful? Another question, I like asking is, “what motivated you to register or attend?” Why? Because when you understand their motivation, you can better help them. Giving Sales this lead nurturing content provides them with a valid business reason to engage the prospect. It’s about building relationships and adding value to people, even if they never buy from you. Empower your sales team to do nurturing. For more on this read, you can’t automate trust. Read more at How Empathy Will Grow Your Sales and Marketing Pipeline Also, check out Getting Sales Enablement Right to Increase Results

Tactic #2. Nurture human to human, not just automation

Larger companies with marketing teams will likely have tools such as marketing automation and CRM software that help automate parts of lead nurturing. When you use automation, you need to emphasize the human touch more than you think. In sum, you can’t automate trust. But you can build it over time by being intentional and seeking to add value with each touch. That’s at the core of nurturing. That might be opening Outlook and actually sending a personal message. Or picking up the phone talk to your potential customers. Focus on helping your future customers achieve what they’re trying to do at each step of the journey. For more idea on this read, 4 Ways you can humanize marketing to get better results now.

Small business nurturing challenges

Small businesses face challenges in being disciplined with lead nurturing. The solution is to set up a nurturing calendar with a particular time every day, or at least once per week, to nurture the database. Create a plan to add value every time you touch your future customers with valuable ideas, content, and resources. Also, I recommended making this time either during non-business hours or during the non-revenue generating time and also suggested leveraging email or blogging to share content. For more ideas read 5 things you can do to improve lead generation, If you’re just getting started read Lead Nurturing in 6 Simple Steps

Simple single lead nurturing track

The tactics you employ and the frequency of touches will depend on what you sell and the buying process. In the following example I use a cadence of one nurturing touch per month:

1. Phone and follow-up “thank you” email
2. Educational third-party article via email
3. Send a blog post link via email and leave phone voicemail referencing email
4. Call for upcoming webinar or event with email follow-up
5. Send with link to a third-party article via email
6. Email relevant white paper or e-book via email
7. Direct mail campaign and follow-up phone call
8. Email section with follow-up call mention email
9. Email link to a podcast and ask feedback
10. Send Free report via direct mail with a follow-up call
11. Invite to webcast via email with a follow-up call
12. Email link with a discount code or link to trade show your attending

As you can see the above example is pretty simple. It uses email, phone, events, and direct mail as channels to share different types of relevant content.

Multi-track lead nurturing based on role

As you get more advanced, you can move from a single track to a multi-track nurturing based on further segmentation. For more on improving nurturing, you can also read 7 Tips to Boost Lead Nurturing Email Results Immediately

Tactic #3. Repurpose content for nurturing

Reuse the content you already have — repurpose it and use it in a new way. The first step is to inventory existing content and think of a way to extend that material. For example, a white paper can be broken into three to five articles that share a point of view. This is a good strategy because I see more and more readers who would rather read short nuggets of information than longer. I heard a speaker use the term “Nugifying your content.” If you are doing live events, record the event and convert that video into another content asset. Post snippets of material as well. Looking at the earlier webinar example, the executive summary and key takeaways provided to Sales are examples of two additional pieces of content from one online event. You are already creating content, you probably just don’t recognize it. So first, use what you have, catalog it and determine how you can bring new life to it. When you’ve leveraged what you already have, and have tracked it, then you can start finding gaps in current content areas.

Content and channels to use for lead nurturing:

For more on this read Content Marketing Tips and Ideas for Lead Nurturing

Tactic #4. Curate and leverage third-party content

Third-party content is another great source of material for lead nurturing, and they bring you added credibility through the halo effect. Research where your customers and clients are going for information. I would start by first asking your sales team what types of content publications your customers are currently reading, where are they going for information and what are the questions Sales is asking those customers. Use online alerts to the main phrases in your industry to find content from bloggers and industry publications that are vendor agnostic and can share with your lead nurturing audience through a short synopsis and a link. For more ideas on content check out this post.Empathetic Marketing: How To Connect With Your Customers

Tactic #5. Keep the touches coming

Most lead nurturing programs don’t begin to impact conversion before at least five meaningful touches.  It’s important to continue nurturing leads whether it takes five touches or 25 touches to get them to the sales-ready point. For example, if you have a nine-month sales cycle, you should nurture a lead in those nine months, and that’s at a minimum level. So that means nine nurturing patterns during that lead.

More resources:

6 Ideas to Create More Relevant Emails7 Tips to Boost Lead Nurturing Results Immediately Ebook

Bottom Of The Funnel: Convert More Opportunities

The goal of lead nurturing is to convert leads into highly qualified opportunities and ultimately customers. If that relationship were a baton, there is a point in time where both Marketing and Sales hands are on the baton, and you are making that introduction. Make sure you’re clear at what stage Marketing is going to hand the lead off so that Sales can run with it, and so that you don’t drop the baton or drop the relationship. For more on this read, How to Improve Marketing Qualified Lead Routing Results. You can find this ideal point in the relationship by leveraging lead scoring and lead qualification, and I recommended this lead qualification occur through your inside sales or sales development team. There is only so much information that you can get off a web form, or that someone will volunteer in an email. Even if Marketing hands the lead to Sales once the prospect is ready to talk to a salesperson, it doesn’t mean that Marketing is done. What we are looking to do is help accelerate leads in the sales pipeline, and that is part of where we can work with the sales team to understand ‘what are the key issues?’ and, ‘what are the problems that they are facing?’ to help drive conversion. This is called full-funnel marketing.

Conclusion

This post touched on all three stages of the lead generation funnel. At the beginning of the lead gen process, you most likely ask a lead to raise their hand and request more information. In the end, the prospect is ready to hand off to Sales. The extended middle portion — lead nurturing — is how the lead proceeds down the path to becoming a converted customer. I hope you can apply these ideas to your lead nurturing and help advance more people through three stages of your lead generation funnel (TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU) to get more qualified opportunities.

You might also like:

How to Do Lead Management That Improves ConversionHow to Use Conversational Marketing to Get More Leads3 Good Questions to Align B2B Marketing, Sales, and Strategy16 proven ways to get better opportunities now  

The post Lead Nurturing: 5 Useful Tactics to Get More Opportunities appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

Do you know what CEOs want most from B2B marketers? They want clarity about marketing metrics and revenue contribution.

CEOs often ask questions like “How much revenue is our marketing contributing and what’s our ROI?”

They expect their marketing leaders to provide clear metrics and be accountable for meeting their pipeline numbers just like sales.

In short, CEOs want marketing leaders to go beyond metrics like marketing qualified leads, engagement reports, and squishy metrics around a brand that aren’t tied directly to revenue or growth.

For example, I read this chart via MarketingCharts about the State of B2B marketing metrics.

Current State of B2B Marketing Metrics

They report, “The majority of senior B2B marketers are using basic marketing analytics tools such as web analysis (91%) and spreadsheets (80%)…” citing a recent report [download page] from Regalix.

Additionally, I found this great comment from Ardath Albee, CEO of Marketing Interactions in TrustRadius’s new 2016 Buyer’s Guide to Marketing Automation. She sheds light on why this is such an issue. Ardath said:

They [marketers] have a hard time proving value, as they cannot tie to revenue. Many only can do last-touch attribution. They lose visibility once a lead moves into the sales realm. Marketing is often removed once it goes into sales, which is a mistake. There’s no continuous thread.

Read on to learn what you should measure.

Every CEO cares about Lifetime Value of Customer (LTV) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) but what other marketing metrics do they actually care about?

6 Marketing Measures that Will Give You an Edge and your CEO Clarity

Here are six big-picture questions you can answer work on solving and measuring to give you an edge to help your CEO get clarity.

1. Marketing Influenced Customer Percentage 

What’s the impact are your marketing investments making on sales productivity? On the sales pipeline? On revenue velocity?

2. Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) 

• What’s your return on your marketing investment (ROMI)?
• How much are you putting in marketing and what are you getting out in revenue? The difference between these two numbers gets expressed as a percentage.

3. Marketing Originated Customer

• How many and what percentage of your new customers are marketing generated?
• How much revenue can you attribute to sales leads coming from your account based marketing or demand generation efforts over a given period?
• How many customers started via marketing qualified leads?

Also, this measurement is simpler to track if you have a closed loop system.

4) Time to Revenue

• What has your marketing done to help shorten your time-to-revenue?
• What has your marketing done to lower the combined expense-to-revenue ratio of sales and marketing activities?

5) Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

• What is your average expense of gaining a single customer?
• What does your combined marketing and sales cost/divided by the number of new customers?
• What is your marketing a percentage of the total customer acquisition cost?
• What’s the total cost of your lead account-based marketing or demand generation efforts during a particular period? This number includes Marketing team total compensation, Vendors, marketing technology, costs, and materials)

6) What is your ratio of lifetime value to customer acquisition cost (LTV:CAC ratio)?

• Calculating this ratio will show if you’re spending too much to acquire each customer or if you’re missing opportunities from not spending enough.
• The higher the ratio, the better. 3:1 or 4:1 is excellent.

If you want help calculating LTV:CAC, check out this post.

Cheatsheet for CEO-level calculating marketing measurements via HubSpot

6 Marketing metrics your CEO actually cares about Source: hubspot.com

Conclusion

You can start working on these six key marketing measures now. I’ve seen marketers who really dig in and answer these big-picture questions get an edge. Also, they ultimately get bigger budgets and have more influence inside and outside their companies. These are high-level measures will are supported by more detailed metrics you need to dig in to gather and use with your team and share with other departments.

You might also like:

How to Do Lead Management That Improves Conversion

New Research: Customer Empathy and How to Solve Buying Problems

How to Use Conversational Marketing to Get More Leads

Lead Definition: Why 61% of B2B marketers are wasting resources and how they can stop

Bring more innovation to your demand generation now

Transform Your Customer Journey and Accelerate Growth

The post The Most Important B2B Marketing Metrics for CEOs appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

How can marketers better connect with people we hope will become our customers?

Over the few years, I’ve been researching why there’s such a disconnect between marketing and customers so I can understand how to bridge that gap.

Why? Because right now, the trust gap between marketers and customers has never been more significant.

For example, this recent Gallup Poll showed that public confidence in the honesty and ethics of marketers and sellers is at the bottom of the list.

And this survey by Hubspot showed that only 3 percent of people surveyed consider marketers and salespeople trustworthy.

How can marketing get unstuck?

I’ve asked myself: how can things get better?

Marketing forgets the customer experience

This is a problem we face in marketing. And as you’ll see much of problem is self-inflicted.

Here’s what I mean:

I think we marketers can be cynical and even snarky at times. We know good marketing. And we have well-tuned B.S. meters. We’re customers who know a great experience too.

For example, I talked with a VP of Marketing yesterday about these ideas, and he shared a recent negative marketing experience he had as a customer.

He said, “It sucks, but here’s the thing: I’m guilty of doing the same thing too.”

I asked him why marketers struggle with connecting with customers, and he replied:

I think it’s easier for us in marketing to talk about what we’re comfortable with which is the product/service we sell. And we LOVE to talk them. But what I’m not very good at is understanding what motivates our customer and how to best talk to them.

He’s not alone. I’ve done the same thing.

I wrote more about this topic How Sales Hustle and Automation Can Hurt Customer Experience

Looking at our words to get unstuck

The significant part of the problem is the words and jargon we choose in marketing and sales to describe what we do and the people we’re doing it for. Namely, customers and potential customers.

Why? Because our words affect how we think.

It’s something linguists call the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which suggests that the words and the language we choose influences our thinking. I understood this intuitively, but I don’t know that I’ve helped much.

A decade ago, I wrote the book Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, and it succeeded beyond my hopes. Back then, I wrote that marketing and sales come down to one thing: starting and growing relationships. And I still believe that’s true.

To help, I’ve written about things like

Be human. Use empathy. Remember leads are people.

But I realize that didn’t articulate the problem which is the words we use in the sales and marketing are object-centered, not people-centered.

Let me explain.

How words and jargon influence our thinking and perception

In my experience, our words express more than our thoughts and feelings. They reflect our motivations and values. And our customers feel them. This is why customer empathy is essential.

But more than that, our words influence brain function, i.e., how we think.

Case in point, Andrew Newberg, M.D., and Mark Robert Waldman the authors of Words Can Change Your Brain confirm this through their extensive research. In sum, their research shows that our words actually change brain function and we are astonishingly unskilled when it comes to our understanding and communicating with others.

According to Newberg and Waldman, “We communicate in so many different ways and in so many situations, but if we don’t bring self-reflective consciousness into the equation by reflecting on what we say before we say it, we’ll fail to reach the depths of intimacy and cooperation that we are capable of.“  You can read more about how words influence our brain here.

For example, the minute I call someone a “lead” or “prospect,” I turn them into an object in my mind. And when I see someone as an object, I treat my marketing as something I DO to people rather than something I do FOR them.

We objectify people when we use jargon like leads, prospects, suspects, conversions, opportunities, pipeline, MQLs, SQLs and more.  We also use phrases like, “crush your quota,” “lead magnets, “wins,” ”closes,” “deals,” and more.

When we put ourselves in our customers’ shoes and use empathy, we can begin to see how we unwittingly talk in a way that dehumanizes people and treats them as objects.

Nobody wants to be treated as an object to convert. Instead, we need to address others as thinking and feeling people with individual needs.  So how can we identify with others and connect on a human level?

Closing thoughts

It’s no wonder the perception of marketers and sellers is negative, and we have a trust gap. And we’re due for a change.

It starts with the words we use which ultimately affects how we think and act towards others. We need to think about how we can connect more humanly and engagingly.

We have this incredible capacity to influence people positively or negatively.

That’s why we need to find congruency in the words we use and the ultimate purpose of marketing which is to help start and grow customer relationships.

To do this, immerse yourself in your customer’s world and think from their experience. Begin by looking at what you see and hear. And then consider the words you use from your client’s perspective. This will help inspire new language.

Also, the use of words that people-centered. For example, instead of leads, you can talk about change makers, potential customers, future customers, future advocates instead. See what I mean?

Next steps:

1. How will you change the words that you use to describe customers and future customers?  
2. How might you change the way you talk about what you do inside (an outside) your companies to treat people like humans rather than objects to convert?  

Based on the words and jargon we use, it’s no wonder the perception of marketers and sellers is negative, and we have a trust gap. It’s time for a change.

You may also like:

4 Ways You Can Humanize Marketing and Build Relationships

Why purpose matters to marketing: growth, revenue, and profit

Why Marketers Fail at Customer Empathy and How to Fix it

How Customer-Hero Stories Help You Connect Better

How to deal with change and be a better marketer

The post How to get your marketing words unstuck and connect with customers appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

In this post, I’m going to share seven tips to help you improve lead routing for more sales.

Have you intentionally managed and optimized your marketing qualified lead routing and assignment process?

If not, you could be losing sales, and marketing ROI not know it.

Let me explain.

LeadData’s new report, The State of Lead Management, based on a survey of 527 B2B sellers and marketers found an average 25.5 % of marketing-generated leads get assigned to the wrong account owner.

In sum, over 25% of marketing-generated leads get assigned to the wrong person.

This means individuals who expressed interest are not getting the attention they deserve.

LeanData also discovered sales and marketing leaders also have different opinions on lead follow-up effectiveness. For example, the chart below shows 30% of marketing leaders believe that sales will always follow-up on marketing-generated leads compared to 61% of sales leaders.

Source: http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/b2b-marketers-and-salespeople-point-to-problems-with-lead-management-76968/

There’s room for improvement.

7 Tips to Improve MQL Routing

Tip 1: Set up a service-level agreement on lead routing with sales 

Do you have the following things documented by your sales team?

• Written criteria for lead routing (territories, vertical focus, product interest, etc.)
• Sales time-to-follow-up expectations (2 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours,)
• Management support to help keep the sales team accountable?
• Clear process flow from form completion to sales hand-off?

I helped a client develop a service level agreement to improve lead routing and increased their leads-to-opportunities by over 200%. 

Here’s how.

1. Developed a universal lead definition which influenced how they score. And field sales agreed to engage all marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) within 24 hours.
2. Qualified all leads with inside sales and distributed within two business hours.
3. Used a checklist to update territories often to keep up with changes.
4. Routed leads via automated rules in Salesforce.com. The workflow notifies the salesperson and creates a task with a deadline.
5. Setup rule if a qualified lead is not opened/edited by the assigned rep within 24 hours, they get a reminder message from their manager. And if a sales lead goes more than 48 hours, they get a call to see if that contact needs to reassigned or if they need help.

It takes some time to plan the process and collaborative work with sales. But it’s worth it. Using this approach, they converted 200% more leads to opportunities.

Tip 2: Qualify that people actually want to talk to a sales rep before routing

Use your potential customer’s and your sales rep’s time well. When someone downloads a single piece of content (like a white paper), are they ready for a sales rep to call? Not likely.

The key to lead routing to match the readiness of the lead (i.e., future customer) with expectations of your sales team. If you don’t do this, you’re starting them off with a quick disconnect.

First, you need to qualify each lead to see they are “sales-ready” which means they want to talk to a salesperson. You can find this ideal point by using lead scoring and lead qualification. There is only so much information that you can get off a Web form or that someone will volunteer in an email.

For more, read: Lead Qualification: Stop generating leads and start generating revenue.

Tip 3: Provide tools your reps can use to follow-up after the handoff

Like a relay race, there’s a point when Marketing’s and Sales’ hands are on the baton when you make a handoff.

Here’s what I mean.

You need to be clear when marketing is going to hand the lead off to sales. So don’t drop the baton because that hurts the relationship.

Additionally, salespeople often struggle with their follow-up approach. After working with hundreds of salespeople and seeing their sales processes first hand, I frequently hear this “stuck point.” They often ask, “How do I advance the lead when there isn’t an immediate need?” And salespeople are often stuck wondering, “What else can I talk to them about?”

Without your input, salespeople can resort to boring or irrelevant messaging. This is not because they lack creatively, it comes down to their time. Help your salespeople spend their time connecting and selling rather than building content and messaging.

Create a few emails and some talking points to help them connect with the motivation of leads based on their interest. In sum, provide your sales team with messaging and content to engage relevantly.

Tip 4: Schedule appointments for the sales team and cut “telephone tag.”

Here are three potential ideas you can test to optimize your lead routing for more sales:

Distribute leads based on sales skill

Use lead grading to rank what level of expertise leads need based on the need. More general inquiries can go to inside sales reps first. Do not frustrate field salespeople by sending them people who don’t want to talk to them. Make sure you sort your leads based on anticipated needs or interest then route them as soon as possible.

Send leads to reps by product or industry expertise

Use your sales team’s industry experience and knowledge. The more you know about your reps, the more you can match with leads they’ll have the most success. This is why round-robin lead distribution can be deadly to conversion. It assumes every salesperson is the same.

Route based on the location

If you have a large distributed field team, you likely route leads via territories or regions. But smaller teams and inside sales teams can also use local lead routing too. You can help your sales team make local connections.

For example, if a contact works from home in CA, but their office is located in MN. Who do you route this lead too? Can that person based in CA connect work with someone local? You need to real collaboration with sales to do this.

Tip 6: Develop to track and measure sales follow-up

Does your routing support the real-time tracking and reporting of all marketing-generated leads? You can monitor and measure lead routing in the following ways:

• Stage of the sales pipeline
• Industry vertical and initial interest
• Salesperson responsiveness (time-to-open/edit and initial follow-up)
• Territory performance (benchmark and compare performance)
• A marketing campaign or lead source
• Lead scoring and grading
• Forecasted revenue and time-to-close

For more ideas, read The Most Important B2B Marketing Metrics for CEOs

Tip 7: Use a checklist to make sure no leads get lost or missed

Airline pilots, portfolio managers, surgeons use checklists so why not marketers? By using lists, you can improve your performance and get more consistent results. For more on this, read HBR: Using Checklists to Prevent Failure.

You can use the following list of steps to help you focus on where you need to improve lead routing now:

• Get buy-in from the sales team on your “sales ready” lead definition
• Provide qualification information for each sales lead
• Centralize the lead qualification process with a clear lead definition
• Document the lead hand-off process and accountabilities at each stage
• Qualify and Distribute sales-ready leads immediately
• Communicate lead handoff to salesperson using automated rules and human oversight
• Measure sales pursuit on leads (If not followed up will leads get pulled or reassigned)
• Sales management must also audit and track rep follow-up
• Close the loop on marketing-generated leads -what gets measured gets done
• Train your salespeople on how to follow-up and give you feedback
• Get close-loop feedback from the sales team on leads
• Share best-practice lead generation follow-up across the sales team

Conclusion

In sum, you can get a boost to your lead generation ROI without any extra spending by improving how your route leads. Using the example I started with, if you were to improve lead routing, it’s like getting a 25% lift in leads. Here’s this best part: You can do this without spending anymore more budget. That’s the kind of results we can all get excited about.

It’s your turn. What’s worked for you to optimize lead routing? Share in the comments below.

You might also like

How to Do Lead Management That Improves Conversion

10 Ways to Optimize Your Lead Conversion Rate

Why Not To Focus On Marketing & Sales Alignment In 2019

B2B Marketing: Why Marketing shouldn’t promise BANT qualified leads for Sales

The post How to Improve Marketing Qualified Lead Routing Results appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

I was interviewing a leader about her recent buying experience, who said, “after I got my title, it was like I became a target.”

She was already swamped as her inbox filled with cold emails, calls, email sequences and more.

She wondered why sellers and marketers weren’t thinking about her experience (even before she expressed interest.)

I wondered what would happen if we didn’t treat people as leads (dehumanizing) and instead related our future customers like people.

There’s a difference.

Here’s what I mean:

As marketers, we have more ways to observe customer behavior and can leverage tools like marketing automation, analytics, machine learning, and CRM systems to help us manage all this complexity.

The complexity found in things like Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), Sales-qualified leads (SQLs), opportunities, lead engagement scores, and other KPIs are helpful to see trends and measure what we deem important to us, but something is often missing.

That missing piece is customer empathy.

We can get so caught up in our systems, tools, and investments that we lose sight of empathy for the recipients of our messages.

We miss what their experience is like and how they’re feeling.

Here are a few things you can do to improve the experience of future customers:

Talk directly to your customers and potential customers 

I’ve found that marketers don’t often talk directly with the very people they are reaching out to with lead generation messages. All too often, customer success, sales reps, support are the only ones talking to customers live and/or in real life.

Here are some ways to fix that:

• Pick up the phone
• Survey customers on your email list
• Get out in the field with your sales team and meet customers face to face

It is critical to know what customers want in order to serve them better.

Businesses often take the understanding of the customer for granted when this is one thing that should be always valued. For ideas on the questions to ask your customers, read this post: 8 Questions to Steer Your Marketing Priorities.

Use those conversations to understand what customers care about

Instead of worrying about being interesting, you need to first be interested in your customers. Your goal is to understand your customer’s motivation (what they want) and make sure that’s aligned with what you can deliver.

It is most effective to actively listen with empathy to consciously try to understand and see the world from the other person’s perspective.

Avoid “hearing” through a filter formed by your own worldview as a marketer, and do not impose your preconceived ideas on what you hear, because doing so will inhibit your efforts to put yourself in your customers’ shoes.

Apply what customers care about to anticipate what they want from you

You need to move from company logic to customer thinking.

This is a choice.

Customers want to work with people and companies that can step in their shoes and understand the results they are trying to achieve.

But before you can do this, you must first actively listen to them and understand their situation and concerns.

At its core, lead generation is really about relationships.

I’m wondering what would happen if we stopped treating people as leads (dehumanizing) and instead treated them as human beings or future customers. What would happen if we put ourselves in our future customers’ shoes and looked at our messages from their perspective and trying to feel what they are feeling when they hear from us?

If you want to improve your influence and empathetic connection with people, watch this RSA short:

In this 3-minute animated video, Brené Brown reminds us that we can only create a genuine empathetic connection if we are brave enough to really get in touch with our own fragilities.

You might also like

Read more about What is empathy-based marketing

Customer-centric Marketing: How transparency translates into trust [More from the blogs]

Customer-centric Marketing: Learning from customers helps increase lead quality 130%, Sales-accepted leads 40% [Case study]

New Research: Customer Empathy and How to Solve Buying Problems

The post Customer Experience and lead generation, yes really appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

Have you thought about how you can humanize your marketing?

This post is going to focus on why you may want to reconsider your current marketing approach and 4 ways you can practice human-centered marketing.

Why we need to be more human-centered? 

We have more marketing to sales technology to connect with customers today, but they’re tuning us out.

Why? Because marketers and sellers are using technology in a way that is creating barriers to real customer connection.

For example, I was talking with a VP of Marketing recently about helping their SDR team get better results with empathy.

We looked at the SDR team’s activities and saw her team was sending a significant number of emails to targeted accounts.

When she saw the data, she talked about also getting a “ton of cold-emails” and how she felt like every technology provider put her on their ABM hitlist.

She said, “I feel like someone painted a target on my name when I got promoted.”

And then said, “I delete them all… they all seem to copy each other’s approach.”

The irony wasn’t lost that her own SDR team was doing the same exact thing to their potential customers.

What is human-centered marketing?

Human-centered marketing requires empathy because it puts customer experience at the center of all our marketing and sales efforts. It begins with understanding our customers’ perspective, desires, and motivations, so we’re relating to them as humans and not objects we’re trying convert.

It’s grounded on this truth from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.

He said, “We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.”  

When you are marketing to people, you’re trying to get them to do something or buy something you want. That’s object-based marketing. But when you’re marketing for people, you’re advocating for them. You’re focused on helping them get what they want. That’s human-centered marketing.

Being human-centered feels like this to customers

As our marketing technology, machine learning, and tools become increasingly smarter, so do our customers.

Customers know authentic- sincere – communication from the scaled messages we send. They feel it.

Your customers know what good marketing really feels like. They also sense when you’re sending them scaled or generalized messages.

Let’s look at email campaigns.

You may be saying, people write the email templates.

The email (even if it’s well written) and personalized in a few places, still often doesn’t feel right.

Why? Because it’s scaled. The promise of technology to deliver personalization at scale requires us to embrace the human part first.

But it’s easy to forget that when we sit at our desks. Or when we try to think like our customers.

You are not your customer

Saying we are not our customers seems obvious, right?

However, research shows our personal biases and preferences get in the way of understanding customers’ wants, desires, and motivations.

It works like this:

We think, “if I was the customer, how would I feel?” As the customer would I like this?

This starts our marketing from a bias that’s not actually human-centered, and we do this all the time unconsciously.

Check out, Why Marketers Fail at Customer Empathy and How to Fix it

For example, I had an email exchange with Brent McKinley, the Director of Business Development at ExeVision, Inc, who shared this great story:

When I was director for a large tech company in Mountain View CA, my team printed coffee mugs that said “I Am Not My Target Audience!!”

This mug has been on my desk for over 20 years, helping me remember to “get outside of my own mind”.

This constant reminder has guided my marketing thinking and my focus on a customer’s needs, more than anything else in my entire career.

We all should have that mug on our desks as a reminder.

Are you focusing on the customer journey or the sale?

How often are you trying to move your customers to do something that will benefit you, i.e., click, sign up, register, and buy?

Our marketing efforts are driven by our goal, our KPI, our quarterly income, or profits. There’s nothing wrong with those measurements.

It’s just that our intentions may become twisted when we start with our personal agendas as a driver.

What do you measure?  When you focus on the wrong thing, your marketing can become wonky quickly. We’re not just seeking clicks. We want to connect and form lasting relationships with our clients.

When you think about your buyer’s journey, consider being sincere about helping them.

Add the human touch to your martech stack and beyond

Why do we do things that we think scale when at their core relationships are not scalable?

Here’s what I mean.

Forrester Consulting discovered, “65 percent of marketers struggle to employ emotional marketing as they turn to automation to improve customer engagement.”

If you have a martech stack (don’t we all now?), you need to emphasize the human touch more.

That means that your marketing team needs to have actual conversations with your buyers.

Use your marketing technology, database, and ability to segment to refine your initial understanding of your target audience’s needs.

Focus on helping your future customers achieve what they’re trying to do at each step of the journey.

Is this hard to do? Yes.

That said, I believe this is where marketers must focus their energy. This is what makes a better customer experience. We must be more human-centered with our marketing.

For more ideas, Mark Schaefer released a terrific book, Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins. And Mark created this fantastic Manifesto for Human-Centered Marketing for his new book.

Source: A Human-Centered Marketing Manifesto by Mark Schaefer https://businessesgrow.com/2019/01/17/marketing-manifesto

Four Ways to Adopt Human-Centered Marketing

1. Help like a hotel concierge to make the customer experience better

If you want to know how to approach applying empathy to your marketing efforts, consider how a hotel concierge operates. What is their goal? To help meet the needs and be helpful to guests. Why can’t we approach our marketing and sales the same way?

Do concierges give the same advice and input to all hotel guests? Of course not. They do things that don’t scale.

Still, they’ve prepared themselves to answer some of the same questions.

For example, what are the best shows? Where are the best restaurants for each occasion? Can I get a reservation now? Where are the grocery or liquor stores, etc.?

But the key is that they listen, they’re available, and their goal is to help. What can we learn? We can approach our customers by doing things intentionally like a concierge.

2. Do things that don’t scale 

There are things that customers expect to be scalable.

For example, email newsletters. Still, they want relevant content. They don’t expect that every single newsletter personalized to their interests. That said, if enough of the content is irrelevant, they’ll unsubscribe.

People mentally unsubscribe before they finally remove us from their inbox. Customers move from interested, to ambivalent, and ultimately apathetic quickly.

Our salespeople do things that don’t scale all the time.

If we don’t change our marketing automation approach, we’re going to kill the value of marketing automation.

In sum, you can’t automate trust.

But you can build it over time by being intentional, showing you care, and seeking to add value with each touch. That’s at the core of doing things that don’t scale.

That might be:

• Opening Outlook and actually sending a personal message.
• Picking up the phone talk to your potential customers.
• Writing a personal note in your own handwriting.

For example, check out what Drift with their handwritten direct mail campaign.

There are lots of tools that can send handwritten notes. Alex Orfao writes on the Drift Blog, “Since we didn’t want this to look like just another mass mail, we made sure the message and handwriting were personal and human. The note was short and sweet (under 50 words) and personalized with the recipient’s name and company.”

This will humanize your marketing quickly: Be an advocate for your potential customer, be curious about them, and actually care about helping them get what they want.

You want to make each person you connect with feel like they matter to you and care about helping them get what’s in their best interest.

Also, check out this post Growing B2B Sales with Trust and Empathy

3. Shift your focus to building relationships

All marketing, selling, and lead generation is about one word: relationships.

It’s not about technology; it’s about people.

We need to take the time to do things that don’t scale.

This is from a terrific book, The Passion Conversation:

We form relationships in two ways.

The first way is through dialogue, a virtuous circle of interacting through listening and responding that causes more interaction, listening, and responding. Relationships grow through conversation.

The second way we form relationships is through a process called reciprocal altruism. That’s a fancy term to explain where people freely give to others with nothing expected in return.

Relating to people like this is the heart of one-to-one marketing.

It is critical to know what customers want to serve them better.

For more on this read, How to Put the Customer First in Lead Generation.

Also, check out Lead Nurturing: 4 Steps to walking the buying path with your customers

4. Use your applied empathy now

Empathy is your marketing intuition. Use your insight to move out of your mind and into the intention of the client.

Here’s what I mean:

Move away from me-first (company-centric) thinking to customer-centric thinking and speak specifically to their motivations.

If you don’t do this, you’re treating potential customers (aka leads) as objects and not as people. If you do that, your goal is to get them to do so something.

Instead, I advocate that you seek to understand them first; to know their motivation and learn what interests them. And even better, to understand what might be helpful to your customer to get what they really want.

For more read, what is empathy-based marketing?

Ask this as you approach your marketing:

Is that how we’d like someone to treat us? Is this how we’d like a friend or loved one to be treated?

Again, this seems obvious, but it’s not.

Check out, Why Marketers Fail at Customer Empathy and How to Fix it

Conclusion

Human-centered marketing is about building people-first relationships. It begins with understanding our customer’s perspective, so we’re relating to them as people and not objects we’re trying convert.

Remember this: When you are marketing to people, you’re trying to get them to do something. But when you’re marketing for people, you’re advocating for them. That’s human-centered marketing.

By following these suggestions, I hope you can use them to make a massive improvement in how you connect with your customers.

It’s your turn now.

Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments below.

You may also like

Bring more innovation to your demand generation now

Growing B2B Sales with Trust and Empathy

Empathy, Web & People: Improving The B2B Customer Experience

Transform Your Customer Journey and Accelerate Growth

Putting Empathy in Account Based Marketing

How to improve your account based marketing results

Updated: 5/22/2019

The post 4 ways to adopt human-centered marketing and get better results appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.