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I’ll Pretend I’m Selling, If You Pretend You’re Buying
B2B Marketing and Sales, Buyer Engagement, Chief Revenue Officer, Revenue Growth, Sales Effectiveness, Sales ExcellenceIn my four decades in sales leadership at both large enterprises and early-stage growth companies, and in my subsequent consulting & sales advisory practice, I have witnessed and resolved many poor sales practices. If sales leaders do not diagnose and correct these Deadly Sins of Selling, then accelerated and predictable sales outcomes will be in jeopardy. I recount these sins with amusement since they also tell us something about human nature and how that factors into successful selling practices. Individual sellers, their sales managers, sales trainers, and sales coaches can all benefit from being on alert to these common sins.
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The Essence of RevOps and its Role in Driving Business Growth
B2B Marketing and Sales, Chief Revenue Officer, Revenue Architecture, Revenue Growth, Revenue SystemsThe focus for Revenue Operations is aligning and optimizing revenue-generating functions to achieve business objectives. This strategic function helps align and optimize the activities of sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive revenue growth.
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Toward World-Class Buyer Engagement
Account-Based Marketing, B2B Marketing and Sales, Buyer Engagement, Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Revenue GrowthWe believe that businesses need an enduring and well-constructed approach to capturing customer value. They need a Revenue Architecture that delivers world-class buyer engagement. Buyer Engagement is the universal approach to delivering the right experiences and messages at the right time to the right buyers. Buyer Engagement is about prospect care and building meaningful relationships with buyers – with an equitable exchange of value – that translates into predictable and sustainable revenue growth. Buyer Engagement happens across the organization and across marketing, sales and service.
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The Flywheel Effect in Customer Lifecycle Marketing Sales and Service
B2B Marketing and Sales, Buyer Engagement, Revenue Architecture, Revenue GrowthRevenue comes from one place – the customer. Too often, companies don’t fully consider the complete revenue picture when pursuing their revenue growth strategy. This post reinforces the importance of taking an end-to-end customer lifecycle and full-funnel perspective to create and optimize a comprehensive revenue architecture.
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What Comes Next: Creating Logical Pathways
Buyer Engagement, Investment Management, Revenue Architecture, Revenue Programs, Revenue StrategyCreating Logical Pathways™: How to build a clear engagement path via content – to advance buyers and increase conversion through the buy cycle by 300% or more!
It’s crucial to buyer advancement and conversion to seed content in logical, sequential parts of your buyers’ UX (user/visitor experience) by using your various digital assets/properties. It allows you to use “guided selling” techniques to capture additional depth of understanding via progressive profiling. One good content asset deserves an even better one, and then an even better one after that.
Or…to put it another way: By providing increasingly attractive incentives on each successive page of your digital properties (website, registration, thank you or landing pages, etc.), you’ll be able to focus prospect behavior and streamline data capture. It works very simply: upon their registration for an initial asset for which you ask for only minimal information, pull prospective buyers further into their journey with an even stronger content offer of higher perceived value — provided, of course, that they take the “next step” you’ve guided them towards.
See for yourself how this is a powerful tool for engaging prospects and collecting essential information about their companies, current situation, challenges, pain points, needs, and stage in the buying process. The value in monitoring and analyzing their digital body language is vital.
It’s all about leaving breadcrumbs along the conversion path you want your prospective buyers to follow. And always, define calls-to-action everywhere (social media, blog posts, landing pages, on your website, in automated lead nurturing e-mails, via links within all types of content assets such as eBooks, guides, etc.). What do you want the buyer who consumes content to do next? (Below is just one simple example of the practical application of this principle.)
What questions are buyers trying to answer at the early and middle stages of their buying process?
Your content should help specific audiences (i.e., Engagement Personas™) answer questions like, “do I have a problem?” or “do I have THIS problem?” and “how should I solve it?” You’re attempting to surface pain-in-the-present and demand long before the conversation shifts to what solution is best. Your solution is obviously the best, but TRUST is what makes it obvious to a discerning buyer.
To that end, one of the most valuable aspects of Engagement Personas™ when they’re constructed effectively, is to anticipate and answer the questions a buyer would ask at each step of the process. If you have content that answers them in a way that’s relevant to the specific prospective buyer, fantastic. If you don’t, then that’s where you start. The other suggestion for enabling Engagement Personas™ to drive strategy is to develop engagement scenarios.
E-BOOK: Exposed. The False Promises of Revenue Marketing.
We published an e-book series that describes the 9 Principles of Effective Buyer Engagement. These principles serve as a practitioner’s guide to increasing leads, conversions, pipeline velocity, and revenue impact.
Volume: Generate “Top-of-the-Funnel” Visits & Inquiries
Value: Get Better Qualified Inquiries
Velocity: Increase Conversion Rates
Revenue: Optimize Engagement for Revenue Impact.
Get a copy of your e-book here.
9 Best Practices for Demand Generation and Buyer Engagement
B2B Marketing and Sales, Buyer Engagement, Content Marketing, Demand Generation, Inbound Marketing, Revenue Architecture, Revenue Growth, Revenue Marketing, Revenue Strategy, Sales EnablementA typical priority in revenue growth transformation and Revenue Architecture design is getting to the next level of Demand Generation and Buyer Engagement effectiveness. Quite often, companies come to us with what they perceive as a “marketing execution” issue. When we dig a little deeper in a Diagnostic, it often becomes clear that while there are always improvement opportunity in the mechanics of marketing execution, core issues often revolve around a broader view of buyer engagement strategy.
For better demand generation performance, it is helpful to validate your buyer engagement strategy by answering these 3 central questions and following these 9 best practices:
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