In a show of retail strength, Amazon says it has broken its holiday sales record, as per reporting by Retail Dive. During 11-day holiday shopping period from Nov. 17 to Cyber Monday, the e-commerce giant reported sales that eclipsed previous years’ numbers during the same period, setting a new benchmark for its performance.

The shopping frenzy saw customers snapping up over a billion items from Amazon, with independent sellers contributing to half of these sales.

Stock market reacts to Amazon’s holiday sales

According to Benzinga, the announcement of these record sales initially pushed Amazon’s shares close to the $150 mark, indicating an almost 2% increase. However, the stock market’s reaction to such news can be nuanced and short-lived. Amazon’s shares subsequently experienced a slight dip of 1.40%, a reminder that sales success doesn’t always translate into a steady climb in stock prices.

At present, Amazon’s stock is trading around a crucial support level of $142, in line with the daily 20 simple moving average. This point is key for investors as it often marks a potential shift in the stock’s trajectory. To signal a strong comeback, the stock needs to break past the pivotal $150 resistance level.

Despite the recent ups and downs, a long-term view of Amazon’s stock reveals a robust 69% increase over the year, with a notable 9% rise in November alone. This consistent growth suggests a positive trend for the company’s future.

Ending the trading day on Dec. 1, Amazon’s stock stood at $147.03, marking an increase of 0.69%. This positive close, following a period of record-breaking sales, positions Amazon for ongoing upward momentum in the competitive world of e-commerce.

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The Digital Retail Revolution in the world of E-commerce logistics has emerged as the backbone of seamless shopping experiences. The final stretch, often called the ‘last-mile delivery,’ has become the focal point of innovation. This article delves into the intricacies of E-commerce Logistics and the Last-Mile Delivery Revolution, unraveling the strategies reshaping how your online orders reach your doorstep efficiently and swiftly.

The eCommerce Boom

E-commerce, once a novel idea, now drives global trade, breaking traditional barriers and thriving in the digital realm. Over two decades, online markets burgeoned, spanning everyday to luxury goods local to international trade—a transformative revolution shaping modern commerce.

This shift hasn’t just impacted online platforms; it has challenged traditional retail, forcing adaptation. The convenience and variety of e-commerce have altered consumers’ preferences, leading to innovations like integrated online/offline experiences.

Efficient logistics are now paramount. Timely deliveries, accurate tracking, and secure packaging have become the lifeblood of online businesses. Innovations in supply chains and transportation tech aim to sell products online and deliver them faster and more efficiently than ever.

E-commerce Logistics Fundamentals

Understanding the fundamentals of e-commerce logistics is crucial for online retailers looking to thrive in a competitive marketplace. Let’s peek behind the curtains to understand the fundamental gears that power this phenomenon.

Supply Chain in E-commerce

Procurement and Sourcing: Before you even think about clicking buy, there’s a complex dance of procurement; E-commerce companies carefully select their products, ensuring quality and availability. Think of it as handpicking the best apples from the orchard just for you.

Inventory Management: Have you ever wondered how your desired item is always in stock? Inventory management is the magic that maintains the right balance. It’s like a chef having all ingredients ready before cooking; the products await your order.

Warehousing: Products are stored strategically, ensuring they can be quickly retrieved when you purchase. It’s akin to having a neatly organized wardrobe, making finding your favorite shirt a breeze.

Transportation and Distribution

Shipping Methods: Shipping methods are the pathways from the warehouse to your door. The choice is crucial, whether it’s a drone, a van, or a bicycle. It involves picking the fastest route on a map to reach your friend’s house.

Inventory Routing: Just like a GPS guides you through traffic, inventory routing ensures that products take the most efficient route. It’s about avoiding congestion (or delays) and reaching you in the shortest time possible.

Inventory Visibility and Tracking

Technology and Software Solutions: Behind the scenes, advanced technology and software solutions keep track of every product. It’s the same as having a digital map showing where every product is at any moment, ensuring nothing gets lost in the shuffle.

Real-time Tracking: Have you ever received a text saying your package will arrive between 2:00 pm and 4:00 pm? That’s real-time tracking. The live update system lets you know exactly when your eagerly awaited parcel will reach you, down to the minute.

The Last-Mile Delivery Puzzle

In the complex world of e-commerce logistics, the last mile refers to the final leg of a product’s journey to reach the customer’s doorstep. It’s the crucial step where packages transition from distribution centers to individual homes or businesses. Essentially, it’s the bridge between the virtual world of online shopping and the tangible delight of receiving a package in hand.

The anticipation of ordering your favorite gadget online builds with each tracking update until it finally arrives. This moment, often the first tangible interaction with the online store, significantly shapes customer perception. The last mile isn’t merely about delivery; it’s about delivering smiles. Timely, hassle-free, personalized deliveries enhance customer satisfaction, building trust and loyalty. In essence, the last mile can turn a one-time buyer into a loyal customer, making it a pivotal aspect of the overall shopping experience.

While the last mile brings joy to customers, it also raises environmental concerns. Traditional delivery methods contribute to pollution and congestion. This challenge has spurred innovation. Companies are exploring eco-friendly vehicles, optimizing delivery routes, and embracing green packaging. Sustainable practices reduce the carbon footprint and resonate positively with environmentally conscious consumers.

Innovations in Last-Mile Delivery

This involves the revolutionization of how goods reach consumers’ doorsteps. This phase is critical, often determining customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Innovations in this area encompass various technologies, strategies, and sustainable practices aim to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and minimize environmental impact. Some of the innovations made include:

Drone and Autonomous Vehicle Delivery:

Source: Freepik

Recently, technology has made it possible for packages to glide down from the sky, not in the hands of a delivery person, but a drone. Drones, resembling high-tech birds and autonomous vehicles navigating the streets without drivers are reshaping the delivery game. These silent carriers are not just efficient; they are also reducing our carbon footprint, heralding a new era of greener logistics.

Crowd-shipping and Collaborative Delivery:

Have you ever thought a neighbor could be your delivery hero? Welcome to the world of crowd-shipping and collaborative delivery. Now, your parcel might travel the last mile in the backpack of someone heading your way. Think of it as a modern-day version of neighbors borrowing a cup of sugar but on a global scale. It’s not just convenient; it’s creating stronger communities, one delivery at a time.

Micro-Fulfillment Centers:

Source: Unsplash

Micro-fulfillment centers, or MFCs, are miniature warehouses strategically located within cities. These compact spaces are bustling with activity, packing, and dispatching orders at lightning speed. By bringing the warehouse closer to the customers, delivery times are slashed, ensuring you get your favorite products almost as soon as you click ‘buy’.

Data Analytics and Predictive Modeling:

Numbers have never been this exciting! Data analytics and predictive modeling are the warlocks behind the scenes, foreseeing what you might order before you even think of it. Companies can stock products in nearby warehouses by analyzing your preferences and behaviors, minimizing delivery times. It’s like having a psychic personal shopper, ensuring you receive your orders before realizing you need them.

Challenges and Obstacles

The pulse of cities often quickens to a chaotic beat, especially during rush hours. Delivery trucks merging with commuters create a logistical labyrinth. However, innovative route optimization software and collaboration with local traffic authorities ease this pain point. By dodging traffic snarls intelligently, deliveries are becoming more punctual than ever.

E-commerce packages (like pakfactory dotcom), containing treasures are highly coveted, inviting unwanted attention. Theft, a persistent woe, has spurred ingenious solutions. Smart locks, real-time package tracking, and community watch initiatives are turning the tables. With vigilant eyes and modern technology, these once-vulnerable parcels are reaching doorsteps safely and securely.

Navigating the maze of regulations is no small feat. Every region boasts its own set of rules, making cross-border deliveries a regulatory acrobatics routine. The e-commerce industry, however, is adapting swiftly. Collaborations between governments and industry players are simplifying these complexities. Clear guidelines and transparent communication pave the way for smoother, legally compliant deliveries.

Conclusion

The Last-Mile Delivery Revolution is reshaping how we receive goods, making online shopping more convenient than ever. With advanced logistics, speedy deliveries, and innovative solutions, the e-commerce landscape is evolving rapidly. As consumers, we can anticipate even more seamless, reliable, and personalized shopping experiences in the future, highlighting the continuous progress of e-commerce logistics in enhancing our everyday lives.

Featured Image Credit: Nataliya Vaitkevich; Pexels

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In the ever-evolving landscape of e-commerce, it’s evident that the last decade has witnessed a remarkable expansion. A paradigm shift in consumer shopping habits has transformed how we engage with products and services. From the convenience of online grocery shopping to the experience of trying on apparel within the confines of our homes, the e-commerce realm has revolutionized the retail sphere. Moreover, consumers are increasingly turning to e-commerce platforms for products they once only considered purchasing after in-store trials. Notably, beauty-specific e-commerce has seen an exponential surge, nearly quadrupling between 2015 and 2022.

As we traverse into the next phase of e-commerce’s evolution, one entity reigns supreme: Amazon.

As the world’s largest e-commerce company, boasting a market capitalization exceeding $1.3 billion, Amazon significantly shapes the trajectory of e-commerce trends.

In 2023, we observe a discernible trend where brands progressively favor third-party, or 3P, selling.

What Is 1P vs. 3P E-Commerce?

In a 1P, or first-party, e-commerce model, brands sell their products to Amazon, entrusting the platform to sell them to the public. Conversely, the 3P model allows brands to sell through Amazon while retaining their identity as vendors.

A 3P e-commerce model has been gaining momentum over the last few years. While about half of all Amazon vendors use a hybrid approach of both first-party and third-party selling, as of the second quarter of 2023, 3P sellers sold 60% of paid units on the platform.

Why the Shift?

This paradigm shift toward 3P selling directly responds to evolving consumer buying patterns. It offers brands extended reach and more profound connections with their customer bases, driven significantly by the vast reservoir of data at Amazon’s disposal. The capacity to leverage Amazon’s extensive data resources in targeting customers throughout their shopping journey has proven irresistible to brands seeking to optimize their advertising investments.

Though a 1P marketplace might be simpler because it mimics the traditional wholesaler-retailer relationship, 3P offers vendors continued ownership, including more significant levels of visibility into sales data and more control over packaging, marketing, and category options.

Operating in an Open Marketplace

The shift to 3P also reflects the challenges many brands face in the 1P marketplace. In general, 1P sellers are more restricted. They have less control over pricing, for instance. Amazon operates as an open marketplace and does not adhere to the suggested retail price (SRP) or minimum advertised price (MAP) guidelines. Moreover, using algorithms to determine pricing strategies often leads to abrupt reductions to compete with marketwide discounts.

However, despite the shift from 1P to 3P, brands wishing to leap must be ready for the demands of an open marketplace. They will need to summon their external and internal resources to support demand planning, content creation, SEO, marketplace compliance, and promotional strategy and logistics. Will the move be worth it?

How Brands Can Benefit From Moving to 3P

Weighing up 1P vs. 3P e-commerce means considering how your brand will maximize the opportunities of a move to third-party selling. How will you make the most of its benefits as other companies rush to do the same? Start with these tips:

1. Access Innovations as They Arrive

Amazon is at the forefront of e-commerce innovation and implements new technology to improve its services. As a third-party seller, you will gain access to data tools, giving you deeper insight into sell-through performance, the long-term value of customers, the share of the basket, and other essential marketing metrics. And, when Amazon gets involved with generative AI, you know it will change the marketing game.

2. Elevate Your Brand Presence

Success in the 3P model hinges on elevating your brand within Amazon’s ecosystem.

Crafting a distinct brand identity and showcasing unique qualities is paramount in standing out among the vast array of sellers.

Leveraging the storytelling tools available to 3P sellers can enhance your brand’s visibility and appeal.

3. Diversity Revenue Streams

Access to a larger market means access to more diverse revenue streams, which can be revitalizing for brands looking to grow and potentially add new product lines. Plus, acting on some of the other opportunities of third-party selling — such as brand-building social media or collaboration with influencers — can give your brand extra power in the marketplace so that those diverse revenue streams keep multiplying.

The truth is that nearly all e-commerce companies could benefit from the 3P model of e-commerce. The question is, how will you manage that transition and properly support its growth? When will be the right time in your strategy as a business to leap, or are you already prepared?

Featured Image Credit: Provided by the Author; Photo by Christian Wiediger; Unsplash

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Major suppliers to Apple in Taiwan recorded another substantial sales decline in September, falling 16.4% year-over-year to NT$1.24 trillion ($38.7 billion). The drop comes despite the launch of Apple’s latest iPhone models and new Android devices from competitors and follows similar data from the PC market.

According to an Oct. 12 Bloomberg report, the sales decline extends a downward trend that began in 2022 for Taiwan’s contract chipmakers and electronics assemblers that supply Apple and other tech giants. The September figures mark the steepest monthly drop since June. For the first nine months of 2023, sales have fallen 8.8% compared to the same period last year.

The new iPhone 15 lineup went on sale in September, with upgrades to the base model receiving positive reviews. However, the iPhone launch did little to boost suppliers’ sales. This highlights the smartphone market’s maturity and Apple’s challenges in spurring demand for new models.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, recorded a 13.4% sales decline in September. This was better than many analysts feared, reflecting TSMC’s strength in non-smartphone segments like high-performance computing chips.

Device assemblers like Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn) and Compal Electronics posted double-digit percentage declines in September. Quanta Computer, another major Apple contract manufacturer, also saw significant decreases — revealing challenges faced across Apple’s Taiwan-based assembly ecosystem.

The sales downturn reflects both softening consumer demand for personal electronics like smartphones and market saturation in developed countries. The next catalyst for growth in the smartphone market is unclear, as new features like foldable displays have yet to go mainstream.

Going forward, Apple and its suppliers must target growth avenues outside smartphones and PCs, including new product categories like AR/VR headsets. Software and services have become increasingly vital to Apple’s results as hardware sales moderate — but, in the near term, Taiwan suppliers face more uncertainty and potential downside amid a sluggish global economy and weak electronics demand.

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Generative AI in sales, especially through platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is revolutionizing industries, transitioning from content to customer service. Now, according to a recent report by Wired, it seems that the next frontier for the technology will be generative AI in sales.

AI-powered sales pitches

ChatGPT’s generative AI capabilities in sales go beyond merely answering queries or producing text. The AI model is now being trained to handle sales pitches, potentially revolutionizing the way businesses approach their sales strategies. With its ability to analyze vast amounts of data, understand customer preferences, and tailor pitches in real time, ChatGPT presents a formidable tool for businesses looking to optimize their sales processes.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that human sales representatives will become obsolete. While ChatGPT can handle initial interactions and basic inquiries, the nuanced art of sales, which often requires a human touch, empathy, and relationship-building, remains a domain where humans excel.

The double-edged sword of AI in sales

Incorporating generative AI, like ChatGPT, into the sales journey brings a plethora of benefits. Speed, efficiency, and the ability to handle multiple queries simultaneously are just a few of the benefits. Moreover, the AI can be trained to stay updated with the latest product information, ensuring that customers always receive accurate and up-to-date details.

Yet, there are concerns. AI’s impersonal nature may not appeal to customers who value human interaction and a personal sales touch.

Additionally, there’s the looming question of job displacement. As businesses lean more into AI for cost-saving measures, the role of human sales reps might diminish.

A future of collaboration, not replacement

Experts believe that the future lies in collaboration rather than replacement. ChatGPT and similar AI models can handle the initial stages of the sales process, filtering inquiries, and providing instant responses. Human representatives can then step in for more complex discussions, negotiations, and relationship-building activities.

While the introduction of generative AI in sales via ChatGPT is captivating and opens up many opportunities, the essence of human interaction in sales is still unparalleled. Businesses looking to integrate AI into their sales processes should aim for a balanced approach, leveraging the strengths of both AI and human representatives.

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Lead generation is a critical aspect for all types of businesses, regardless of their industry or size. It allows businesses to generate sales leads, nurture prospects, and convert them into real paying customers.

However, in the absence of a lead generation model, businesses struggle to find new customers and grow their business. 

The digital era brought many technology companies into the limelight, specifically after Covid-19. Fast-track digitization enabled the rise in demand for tech professionals globally. This has underpinned the technology sector’s health and put it at the top of the pile.

Numerous technology firms today have created and captured future growth opportunities and saw the biggest jump in median five-year annual TSR. Now that we know tech comes out on top, the question is, can it stay there? To ensure its consistent growth, it becomes requisite for technology companies to generate leads.

In this piece, we’ll go through the best strategies for lead generation for technology companies to help them reach their prospective customers.

Lead Generation for Technology Companies- Top 12 Strategies!

Any marketing plan must include lead generation as a key component. It can help you identify new customers, attract potential customers, and drive revenue for your business.

You can produce leads for high-value prospects through customized B2B lead generation efforts. But the question is: how do you go about it? How do you implement these strategies? To help you out, we have compiled a list of strategies facilitating lead generation for technology companies.

1) Build an Interactive Landing Page

Having a well-designed and optimized landing page is crucial for generating leads. A professionally designed website can build trust and credibility with prospects, increasing their likelihood to purchase.

In terms of design, ensuring the landing page is visually appealing and easy to navigate is essential. It includes using a compatible layout, clear and persuasive language, and highlighting the key features of the products or services.

The landing page should be optimized for conversions. It includes using A/B testing to experiment with different design elements and using analytics tools to track the page’s performance.

A landing page’s speedy opening and mobile device optimization are also crucial. It entails implementing a responsive design and enhancing pictures and other content to load devices quickly.

2) Use Chatbots

Chatbots can respond to frequently asked questions and qualify leads by gathering information from potential customers through a conversational interface. They can simultaneously handle a large volume of 24/7 leads without human interaction. It enables organizations to reduce labor expenses while expanding their reach and consumer base.

Additionally, chatbots can be programmed to ask specific qualifying questions, which can help identify and prioritize high-quality leads. It also ensures that the sales team spends time on the most promising opportunities.

The chatbot can ask questions to gather information such as contact details, budget, and project requirements. The collected data can then be used to determine if the lead is a good fit for the business or should be passed on to a sales representative for further follow-up.

3) Host Webinars

Hosting a series of webinars to educate potential leads on addressing a particular need is ideal for positioning your company as a thought leader. You prove your knowledge and win over potential consumers by offering insightful information on a specific subject. It can raise brand recognition and trust, eventually encouraging leads and sales.

Webinars can also be used to introduce new products or features and provide demonstrations or case studies to showcase the value of your products and services. Additionally, webinars can also be used to engage with potential leads, allowing them to ask questions and provide feedback. It can also help to qualify leads further and identify their areas of interest.

4) Offer Free Trials

Offering free trials can be a great way to generate leads for a business. They offer potential customers the opportunity to try out the product or service before committing to a purchase, which can increase the likelihood of them becoming paying customers.

By allowing potential customers to try a product or service without paying any penny, businesses can build trust and demonstrate the value of their offering. Free trials can also gather valuable information about potential customers, such as their needs and preferences, which can be used to tailor future marketing efforts.

5) Use Content Syndication

Content syndication is publishing similar content to other websites to increase visibility and reach a larger audience. By syndicating your content, you can get more visitors to your website, which can then be converted into leads through calls-to-action or other forms of engagement. It might assist you in growing the audience for your brand and producing quality leads.

However, it’s important to note that when you syndicate content, you should include a rel=” canonical” link pointing to the original source. This tells search engines that the original content is authoritative and should be indexed, while the syndicated copies should be ignored.

Moreover, it ensures you don’t run into issues with duplicate content, and your website’s SEO is not affected. However, you must choose the correct platform for content syndication to ensure the right visibility and audience.

6) Send Surveys

Sending out surveys can be another effective lead-generation strategy for a business. By making the survey available across multiple channels, you can increase the chances of reaching a wider audience and getting more responses to boost the conversion rate.

Surveys allow businesses to gather valuable information about potential customers, including their needs, preferences, and pain points. This information can be used to tailor marketing efforts and create targeted offers that are more likely to be successful.

Furthermore, making more educated assessments of your product and marketing strategy will enable you to understand your target market’s demands better.

7) Explain Complex Topics in Videos

Using videos to explain complex topics is another excellent way to engage and educate potential customers about your product or service. Videos aid in simplifying complicated ideas and making them easier to understand for your target audience.

Videos facilitate lead generation for technology companies by demonstrating the capabilities of the software or other technical products. They can show how the technology works in a real-world setting and give potential customers a better understanding of its features and benefits.

Remember that the video should be concise, brief, and professionally crafted. It should be tailored to the target audience’s preferences and highlight the key features of your products that add value to their lives.

8) Consult with Recent Clients for Referrals

Asking for referrals from existing customers can also drive leads for a business. This strategy can be particularly effective if the existing customers have a positive experience with your business, as their referral carries more weight than a traditional advertisement. It is a mere fact that happy and content customers are more eager to share their experiences with their friends, relatives, and coworkers.

There are many ways to ask for referrals. It may include offering incentives, such as discounts or rewards, for customers who refer new business or simply including a referral program as part of the customer’s experience.

It’s important to make it easy for customers to refer others to your business by providing them with a referral link or code.

9) Collaborate With Influencers

Influencer marketing has become a popular and effective lead-generation technique for technology businesses. By collaborating with industry influencers, you can reach a wider audience and generate a high ROI through authentic and personal sales techniques.

Influencer marketing can be effective for businesses that sell consumer products or services, as it allows them to showcase their offering in a relatable way. Influencers’ recommendations are more believable than traditional advertising since they’ve gained the audience’s trust.

Influencer marketing campaigns can be implemented on various social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. The campaigns can include sponsored posts, giveaways, product reviews, influencer takeovers, and more.

It’s important to note that influencer marketing should be well-planned and executed, as it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Finding the right influencers that align with the brand’s values and target audience is essential. Also, to measure the campaign’s success, it is important to establish clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) before starting the campaign.

10) Ask For Testimonials

Customer testimonials can be a powerful tool for B2B lead generation in the technology industry. Positive reviews can help to enhance a company’s reputation and be used to promote its products or services. Additionally, satisfied customers may be willing to refer their contacts to the company, which can also be a valuable source of leads.

Furthermore, customer reviews can also increase website traffic by making it more likely that a company’s website will rank higher in search engines. This can lead to more potential customers finding the company’s website and potentially bringing in more leads.

11) Use Social Media

Being active on social media can help you generate more leads. Are you thinking how? The idea is to increase brand awareness and make it easier for potential customers to find and contact your business through social media.

You can increase your visibility by regularly posting engaging content, responding to comments and messages, and actively reaching out to potential customers.

Additionally, social media platforms have built-in features to create targeted ads and campaigns to reach specific audiences. But, companies need to evaluate which channels their target audience is most active on. Instead of dividing their attention across too many platforms, they should prioritize those channels.

A company may attract a larger audience by being active on several social media platforms. However, it also requires resources to maintain and create content for those channels.

12) Leverage Intent Data

Intent data can be a valuable tool for B2B technology companies to generate leads. The term “intent data” describes user actions that reveal a definite interest in purchasing or conducting research. These acts can be as simple as looking at product or price pages, downloading whitepapers, or conducting keyword searches or other resources.

By analyzing the actions of potential customers, B2B technology companies can gain insight into the interests and needs of their prospects.

Using intent data, you can target these prospects with personalized messaging and offers, increasing the likelihood that they will engage with your company and ultimately become loyal customers.

Wrapping Up

Lead generation strategies are the most critical aspect of sales. An organization’s sales funnel is empowered by drawing in more leads. And in today’s digital world, there are an array of options to nurture leads and improve sales.

The primary purpose is understanding the needs and interests of your target audience and matching their expectations. Try adapting one or more of these strategies to improve your lead generation efforts and spur your company’s market growth.

To win in this competitive market, you need the best Lead Generation System made for SaaS companies.

Inner Image Credits: Provided by the Author; Pixabay; Thank you!

Featured Image Credit: Provided by the Author; Thank you!

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Top startups today have no time for routine tasks related to data entry and administration. This is where sales automation comes into play for the best startups, which helps optimize your manual tiresome and time-consuming assignments. 

Marketing automation allows your sales assistants, managers, and CMOs to focus less on the organization of the whole marketing process and more on their direct function – selling.

Luckily, there is a wide choice of special tools that can help you automate lead lists building, send sales emails and follow-ups, schedule meetings and calls, and perform other tasks.

Why Is Sales Automation Important for Your Startup?

It Helps Save Effort and Time 

Marketing automation can help increase sales efficiency by 14.5% and decrease marketing expenditures by 12.2%. Besides, business owners, CEOs, and CMOs claim that the biggest advantage of sales automation for their company is saving time at 30%. 

With business administration getting tough these days, 68% of companies use marketing automation somehow. 

It Provides Insight Into the Effectiveness of the Sales Process

An increase in earnings (85%) and marketing productivity (69%) are the main reasons businesses want to implement automated lead nurturing. Moreover, 63% of companies are beating their rivals, thanks to sales automation.

It Helps Identify Sales-Ready Leads and Maintains Relationship with Leads

When used to nurture leads, marketing automation tools show an increase in qualified leads. The reason is simple – automated instruments give you detailed data about your prospects. This helps push every deal down the sales funnel and propose a personalized, data-driven offer so that your lead is more willing to make a buying decision.

It Helps Grow Revenue

As reported by 60% of users, implementing sales automation tools in their business has improved the number of leads that convert to deals. And this increase can be as high as 225%! Even just after one month of use, 3x more prospects can be converted to sales. 

Types of Sales Automation

Modern technologies and artificial intelligence can help you save way more time than you could imagine. If you automate routine tasks throughout each sales funnel stage, you will have enough freedom to focus on interesting and creative tasks. As a result, you will sell more.

You will be surprised at how much can be automated by software:

1. Automate Sales Prospecting

If you implement a dynamic CRM, you can use countless criteria to filter out the most suitable leads based on the required conditions. You can also get a personalized email, Slack notification, or in-app alert once a new lead matches your demands. Put differently; you will keep getting a prequalified list of contacts regularly without lifting a finger.

2. Streamline Processing and Enrich Your Lead Database

The more knowledge about the target audience and existing clients you have, the more powerful you are. Data about your lead’s job position, presence on social media, solutions their business provides, existing suppliers, etc., will help you successfully get in touch with them.

3. Stop Entering Data Into CRM Manually

Set up workflows in your marketing automation software to track records of your qualified leads automatically. For instance, you can determine all the contacts that have submitted the form or downloaded the price list as “qualified.”

4. Automate Your Email Campaigns

Do you still send each email manually to all your leads or copy and paste the same messages? Alternatively, try using email templates, personalize, and schedule letters for every client’s best conversion. You can try using tools like Snov.io for that purpose.

5. Manage Marketing Collateral

Sales reps spend tons of time searching for useful content or writing texts to send to their leads. Ensure your business has a сorporate shared Google Drive folder where you store valuable files. This way, it will be easier for you to access the most important marketing documents, saving time during every contact with prospects.

6. Schedule Calls, Meetings, Mailouts, etc.

Planning a meeting with a sales lead over email can take time and reminds us of a tennis game. You suggest one meeting time to your prospect; they propose another option, then you offer a third solution, etc. This is tiresome and can also destroy the impulse in your sales negotiations.

Instead, you can use one of many meeting-scheduling tools (like Calendar, for example). They give your contacts direct access to your calendar and enable them to plan the meeting in any free time span if you dd customized scheduling links 2020 to your email messages and signatures. Most such tools grant free trials, so it is easy to study and test them.

7. Use AI-Powered Analytics of Sales Conversations 

If you want to analyze your calls, check your campaigns’ efficiency, and improve your sales approaches, try using sales communication AI-software. It allows you to quickly check what topics you discussed in a call, what rivals you mentioned, and study the talk-to-listen portion. Tools like Gong and Chorus pull out key pieces of your talks and give you AI-powered insights.

8. Automate Lead Management 

If you spend hours managing your CRM instead of making calls and bringing contracts, try automating all the activities related to prospects and deals. The market offers plenty of instruments to record your conversations, schedule meetings, and plan emails for you. Check if your current CRM offers workflow automation and start implementing it.

9. Manage Deals and Papers

Today, most of the contracts and offers are mailed and signed over the internet. Tools like Hellosign or Adobe Sign offer solutions for e-signing, lots of impressive analytics features, and functions that can help boost your conversion rates. 

This is just a small part of the many marketing activities that can be automated. In the age of AI and robots, all types of routine organizational tasks can be automated, while a real live contact with the prospective or existing client should remain to be carried out in person.

How to Choose the Best Sales Automation Tool?

Selecting the best tool or several tools that suit your needs might take some time, as many options on the market claim to be the best. We hope these pieces of advice will help you choose the best instruments for your business.

Decide What Processes You Would Like to Automate

Check all marketing processes you have at the moment. Does lead qualification take much of your daily routine? How much time do you spend on lead nurturing, prospect engagement, and content marketing daily? Do you schedule follow-up calls or send reminders manually? How long does it take to organize bulk seasonal offerings? 

There can be dozens of similar questions. Analyze your answers and think about what processes should not take so much time or where you can avoid manual work from you or your team.

Make a List of Essential Functions

After you’ve chosen the main processes, try to create a list of specific features you’ll require, such as email marketing automation or mobile availability. If you do not select features and must-have’s your business needs, you might end up with a complex product you cannot use. Choose the required functions and, after that, compare several platforms according to the list of criteria.

Finally, Test the Product in Practice

Once you have specified the must-have functions, prioritize them and shorten the list to several most important items. After that, compare the software once again to see which tool you can start using right now. It would be great to test-drive each platform by getting a free trial or an interactive demo to get a more comprehensive vision and make a more prepared decision. 

This might look like a lot of work, particularly if you are working hard to help your company survive. Still, experience proves – a couple of hours invested now will pay off a dozen times in the future. 

Top Sales Automation Tools

Snov.i0

Snov.io is an integrated cold outreach automation platform used by sales departments, marketers, startups, and simply anyone who needs high-quality outbound research and outreach tools.

This all-in-one toolkit allows you to speed up creating and managing lists of prospects and bring your brilliant ideas directly to their inbox. It works for every stage of your marketing process:

• Non-stop lead gen and verification. You can automate your lead generation, pump up your funnel with targeted leads, and accelerate conversions with this solution. It boasts 98% email deliverability thanks to the high quality of new and existing leads guaranteed by the 7-tier verification.
• Nurture, engage, convert. Boost engagement with effective nurturing based on automated outreach. Personalized triggered email drip campaigns can help you easily convert leads and smoothly move them down the sales funnel. Schedule campaigns for existing clients, automate follow-ups and track email responses from your Gmail.
• Study market rivals. Snov.io research tools allow you to monitor what sets you apart from your competition and discover new ways to convert. You can check full company profiles and tech stack behind your rivals and leads. 
• Grow and scale your business. Keep your efficiency always in control – sync across platforms with over 2,000+ powerful integrations. 

Pricing: Snov.io offers unlimited freemium with credits that are renewed every month. Paid plans that start at $33 per month billed annually.

Moosend

This marketing automation platform comes with some features that promise to help users generate more clicks and sales. Surprisingly easy-to-use and with a short learning curve, Moosend allows you to create and send email campaigns designed to respond to the prospect’s needs.

From user onboarding to abandoned cart sequences, this platform allows you to design workflows that make sense for your audience and lead prospects further down the sales funnel. 

Users can select any event to trigger the automation, such as visitors browsing a specific page or viewing a product, and set it in motion in a simple manner. What is more, you can test one of the ready-made automation workflow recipes.

Pricing: Moosend offers a free forever program for up to 1,000 subscribers that includes most features. Paid plans start at $8 per month billed annually.

Juro

There is nothing worse than a sales team getting a prospect to commit before month-end, only for the deal to get stuck in the contracting phase. Word documents fly back and forth, versions go missing, data is lost, and visibility is non-existent. 

Sales teams at high-growth startups are turning to new, in-browser tools to end this manual process. Juro is a contract collaboration platform that enables your team to self-serve, agree, and manage routine contracts at scale from one unified workspace.

Salespeople use a natural language Q&A flow to spin up a contract in seconds, from a template over which legal has oversight. They can even generate contracts directly from Salesforce, with two-way data sync making sure versions are the same in both platforms. 

Parties negotiate in-browser in the sidebar and can then eSign securely on any device to help salespeople close deals on the move. Post-signature analytics help stakeholders spot bottlenecks and friction to keep deals moving fast and make contract management data-driven.

Juro is used predominantly by high-growth tech startups with lots of contract volume, like Deliveroo, Wolt, and Babylon Health. 

Pricing starts at free, with bespoke plans depending on the integrations required.

Paperform

Capturing leads is the first and most foundational step in the inbound-driven sales process. Paperform is a versatile form and page builder that might help you do just that: collect leads and kick off the conversation seamlessly and elegantly.

Paperform stands out among the alternatives thanks to its modern interface and customization features. It is easy to make forms and landing pages look unique and fit your company’s broader brand.

There are more than a hundred form templates available, so you will never have to start from scratch no matter what kind of form you are looking to build.

The built-in email automation feature makes Paperform even more useful. Your startup sales department is likely to have limited bandwidth, especially when responding to leads across different time zones.

You might leverage Paperform to send out automated yet highly-personalized emails to leads that submit your forms. Later, once the conversation is already ongoing, your sales reps can catch up quickly and take it further.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $15 per month.

Outfunnel

Outfunnel is an email marketing tool with deep CRM integration. Whether you are using Pipedrive, Mailchimp, or Copper, it has you covered. You’ll be able to create drip or one-off campaigns with defined segments for your sales team using lead-scoring while automating and reducing tasks that were previously done manually. 

With dynamic sender information and smart workflows, Outfunnel will help you stay on top of your leads while continuously allowing you to build up relationships with your current and future customers.

Pricing: Outfunnel offers a free two-week trial. Paid plans start at $19 per month.

HelpCrunch

As an all-in-one customer communication tool, HelpCrunch allows businesses to automate numerous aspects of the sales process. Once you sign up for the tool and install its live chat widget, you can put inbound lead generation on autopilot.

First, HelpCrunch helps businesses engage their visitors proactively with the help of automated chat messages. You can offer help in your website’s strategic places, such as product, pricing, or checkout pages, and initiate conversations on your terms.

People will see a quick and convenient way to contact you and will not hesitate. Simultaneously, you can use live chat to collect leads’ contact information and pre-qualify them on the go with pre-chat and offline forms. Visitors will specify their names and email addresses and choose a department that will better cater to their needs.

While the shared inbox will contain all incoming requests in chronological order, sales reps can create their custom inboxes to filter conversations by their tags, assignees, departments, etc. This way, they will be able to assist warm leads on a first-priority basis.

To keep the conversation going, your team can follow up on their leads with the help of automated email sequences and accelerate deal closure.

Pricing: The ‘Live chat’ subscription by HelpCrunch is available for $12 per month per team member billed annually. If you want to enjoy the ‘Live chat + Emails’ plan, its pricing starts from $23 per month per team member.

Zapier

Zapier is a tool that brings together all your favorite apps, such as Gmail, Slack, Mailchimp, and more. You can automate repetitive tasks, and you do not need to know coding, or rely on developers to build the integration.

Create thousands of different workflows (Zaps), e.g., schedule events in your Google Calendar directly from new Trello cards, save your Gmail attachments to Dropbox, or post tweets across multiple Twitter accounts. 

Zaps consist of a trigger and one or more subsequent actions. A trigger is an event that initiates your workflow. Zaps automate your processes in the background, allowing you to concentrate on more important tasks. 

Zapier counts every task you run through your Zap. To decide which Zapier plan suits you best, you should keep in mind the number of tasks your Zaps run. 

Pricing: The service offers a free trial so that you can study some popular Zap templates. Paid plans start at $19,99 per month billed annually.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is an SMM platform that supports social network integrations for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. The tool helps you boost your organic and paid ads’ effectiveness with the Hootsuite automated ad solution. 

Hootsuite allows you to advertise on social media easily. Manually or automatically, you can target key audience segments or market niches by age, location, and user interests. The tool can help you reach more of your social media audience, monitor feedback about your brand and rivals, and use social analytics to make data-driven business decisions.

Besides, its mobile apps allow you to manage your presence on social networks from any location. You can also connect your existing instruments with over 250+ apps and integrations in a single toolbox. 

Pricing: A 30-days free trial is available. Paid plans start at $19 per month.

Wrapping it up

Nowadays, more and more businesses realize the power of sales and marketing automation tools and implement them in their workflows. Accordingly, new instruments in this market niche are emerging a dime a dozen. 

Analyze your needs and select the best toolkit that will help you seamlessly automate your whole sales funnel: lead generation, nurturing, engagement, follow-ups, conversion, and growing a loyal audience.

Image Credit: Ola Dapo; Pexels

The post Top‌ ‌8‌ ‌Sales‌ ‌Automation‌ ‌Tools‌ ‌for‌ ‌Startups‌ ‌in‌ ‌2023 appeared first on ReadWrite.

In the rapidly evolving B2B landscape, effective lead generation is crucial for business growth. B2B leaders must navigate complex payment preferences and O2C systems– to stay ahead of the competition. The digital transformation of recent years has accelerated the automation digitalization of O2C (order-to-cash)processes, offering merchants new opportunities to expand their presence and reach. However, with a well-managed payment strategy, the entire process can continue. This article will explore how optimizing O2C processes can drive successful B2B lead generation, foster customer loyalty, streamline operations, and unlock business growth.

Embracing Customer-Centric Payment Experiences

One of the critical considerations in B2B lead generation is providing B2C-like purchasing experiences. Buyers today expect seamless payment options and immediate gratification. However, by offering multiple convenient payment methods and streamlining the purchasing process, merchants can improve customer satisfaction and transaction speeds and ultimately increase business success.

In a Forrester study, “Optimize Your Payment System to Seal the Deal,” more than 90% of respondents stated that improving payment options for B2B customers would enhance customer satisfaction, transaction speeds, and overall business success. To meet these expectations, merchants must provide painless purchasing experiences that mirror the ease and convenience of B2C transactions. This includes offering multiple payment methods, such as credit cards, electronic funds transfers, and digital wallets, with the ease of one-click purchasing.

Streamlining O2C Processes for Improved Cash Flow

Automation is pivotal in transforming O2C processes. Automated systems eliminate manual tasks, reduce errors, and expedite invoicing, credit decisions, and reconciliation processes. Merchants can remove complexity and improve cash flow by integrating comprehensive B2B payment solutions with existing platforms, such as P2P and ERP systems.

Manual processes can be time-consuming, error-prone, and hinder cash flow. Businesses can achieve significant cost savings and operational efficiencies by automating order creation, invoice generation, and payment reconciliation. According to the Boston Consulting Group, companies implementing automation in order creation processes can achieve cost savings ranging from 15% to 30%. However, industrialization also improves the customer service experience, leading to more loyal clients and reduced non-payment risk.

In addition, implementing automation technology facilitates instantaneous cash flow monitoring, allowing enterprises to make informed judgments and enhance their working capital management. By streamlining O2C processes, companies can free up resources, reduce administrative burdens, and allocate more time and effort to strategic activities that drive lead generation and revenue growth.

Leveraging Instant Decisioning and Credit to Drive Sales

Offering trade credit and establishing dedicated financial relationships can significantly impact B2B lead generation. Buyers tend to spend more when provided with favorable payment terms and credit lines. By enabling fast decision and credit evaluation, merchants can attract new customers, increase sales, and cultivate a loyal buyer base.

By providing flexible payment options and efficient credit evaluation, merchants can cater to diverse buyer preferences and increase their sales potential. Research shows that 15% of B2B buyers spend more when offered trade credit. Moreover, 82% of buyers would choose a vendor that provides invoicing at checkout with extended payment terms over competitors.

Instant decision-making systems leverage data analytics and technology to assess buyers’ creditworthiness in real-time.

This enables businesses to offer appropriate payment terms and credit lines based on individual customer profiles, mitigating non-payment risk. However, by simplifying the purchasing process and providing attractive credit options to buyers, merchants can differentiate themselves from competitors and secure a larger market share. Fast decisions help attract new customers, nurture repeat business, and build long-term customer loyalty.

By leveraging instant decisions and credit capabilities, merchants can offer personalized payment options tailored to each buyer’s needs. This flexibility enhances the purchasing experience, encourages larger order sizes, and promotes customer satisfaction. Additionally, with dedicated financial relationships and credit lines, buyers are more likely to choose a particular vendor over others, leading to increased sales and market share.

Unlocking Sales Growth and Efficiency through O2C Transformation

Transforming O2C processes can yield significant benefits for B2B businesses. Dynamic pricing, streamlined orders, faster payments, and automation drive sales growth, cost savings, and process transparency. However, these enhancements increase customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and a stronger b2b lead generation foundation. Here’s how to choose the right B2B lead generation company for your business.

A well-optimized O2C process enables merchants to offer dynamic pricing and promotions to attract buyers. Moreover, by automating pricing calculations and integrating them with customer data, businesses can provide personalized pricing strategies that optimize revenue while meeting customer expectations.

Streamlined order experiences are essential for driving lead generation. Moreover, by automating order processing, merchants can reduce manual errors, ensure order accuracy, and expedite fulfillment. These results in improved customer satisfaction, faster order delivery, and increased chances of repeat business.

Real-time complaint resolution and fewer disputed invoices are critical for maintaining strong customer relationships. However, by implementing automated systems that enable quick and efficient issue resolution, merchants can address customer concerns promptly, build trust, and foster loyalty.

Merchants can proactively communicate order status, provide real-time updates, and maintain open lines of communication, resulting in a positive customer experience and increased customer loyalty. Moreover, increased process transparency allows merchants and buyers to see the entire O2C journey. This transparency builds trust, reduces disputes, and fosters smoother collaborations.

Optimizing B2B Lead Generation: O2C Process Transformation Guidelines

To optimize B2B lead generation through O2C process transformation, follow these essential guidelines:

1. Understand Customer Expectations: Gain insights into your B2B customers’ payment preferences and expectations through research and feedback. This understanding will guide your O2C transformation strategy.
2. Embrace Automation: Leverage technology and automation tools to streamline O2C processes. Integrate payment systems with existing platforms to eliminate manual tasks, reduce errors, and expedite cash-related processes.
3. Offer Multiple Payment Options: Cater to diverse buyer preferences by providing a range of payment methods, including credit cards, electronic fund transfers, and digital wallets. Simplify the purchasing process with one-click options.
4. Implement Real-Time Decisioning: Utilize data analytics and technology for instant decision-making on creditworthiness. Tailor payment terms and credit lines based on customer profiles to increase sales potential and mitigate non-payment risk.
5. Communicate Transparently: Maintain open communication channels with buyers, providing real-time updates on order status, shipping details, and payment confirmations. Also, address customer concerns promptly to foster trust and satisfaction.
6. Continuously Optimize: Regularly evaluate O2C processes and monitor performance. Also, make necessary adjustments to improve efficiency, customer experience, and lead generation.

By following these guidelines, businesses can enhance lead generation capabilities, strengthen customer relationships, and drive growth in the B2B landscape.

Conclusion

In today’s rapidly changing B2B landscape, optimizing O2C processes is essential for successful lead generation, business growth, and customer satisfaction. Customer-centric payments, automation, and efficiency help enterprises thrive in the digital era.

Optimizing O2C (Order-to-Cash) procedures enhances operational efficiency and establishes a strong foundation for building lasting customer relationships. Businesses can unlock their full potential in b2b lead generation and achieve sustainable growth by prioritizing a seamless end-to-end payment strategy and leveraging digital tools.

Featured Image Credit: Monstera; Pexels; Thank you!

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Personalization platforms are a new must-have for all businesses, but sometimes they look like a Christmas tree covered with decorations. To help everyone who has experienced this pain, here is a how-to guide for choosing a retail personalization platform.

In this article, I will share my opinion about why marketing personalization has become so popular, what principles should be followed when choosing a personalization platform, and what a typical decision tree might look like.

Why marketing personalization is so popular

Nobody likes spam and unnecessary offers. However, spam, robotexts, and robocalls will increase dramatically in 2023. If a store makes marketing at least a bit more human by remembering previous purchases and personalized messages, the customers’ attitude towards it changes. This approach is often called “human2human marketing” or “marketing with a human face.” This means: do not spam; do not pressure a buyer; help them make an informed choice based on personalization.

Below is the data I’ve collected on the added revenue from personalized campaigns among Mindbox clients. The dark green bar is the lowest added revenue among the companies in a particular industry. The light green bar is the highest one.

For example, newsletter personalization can add 3-16% in revenue among retailers selling home goods and furniture.

When brands realized the potential of personalization, the marketing tech sector exploded.

The number of martech companies increased from 150 in 2011 to 9.9 thousand in 2022.

There are now so many viable technologies to pick from, each with its own functions and merits.

So, how do you choose the right personalization technologies without losing your mind

Marketing personalization (automation) technology is a complex tool. Be ready for the fact that the preparation and selection of a platform will take longer than implementation.

Here are my top five tips for successful implementation:

1. Formulate the implementation goal: a metric of success and expectations for it. Decide who will use the tool and if such people are in your company.
2. Describe examples of scenarios for using the technology.
3. Decide if you need customer data integration.
4. Estimate the speed of implementation and changes.
5. Estimate the ROI.

Principle 1. Formulate a metric of success and outline your expectations for it

The goal of platform implementation is the most important. If your team cannot agree on a clearly defined goal, you’ll never reach success. So it’s better to postpone the purchase of automation technology until everyone is aligned. Strong goals include success metrics, timelines, and a chain of responsibility that everyone agrees on.

Essential points about the metric

• Agree on the method of calculation. Make sure that it is challenging to simulate its achievement without seeing real benefits.
• Formulate expectations for the metric. A metric without expectations doesn’t work.

For example, the team implements a website personalization technology and makes a statement about success: Conversion has increased by 0.5%. What is this measured against? Is this a large or small amount?

Examples of bad or ineffective metrics

• Revenue growth from an email channel measured by Google Analytics’ last-click attribution model

This metric is easy to inflate: improve the campaign design and the number of emails sent. Sometimes this is precisely what is hidden behind flashy terms like “growth hacking.” You will receive more orders attributed to the email channel using this metric.

The reason for the apparent growth in this case is traffic redistribution. Customers will often visit the website using a link from an email with a new design rather than typing a URL or using a search engine.

The changes may not affect the turnover and marginality of the business.

• Share of customers who are members of the loyalty program or a higher average order value from members of the loyalty program

Real-life example: A chain of canteens inside business centers has implemented a loyalty program. Both metrics show excellent growth, but the company’s turnover and revenue are not increasing. Why is this happening?

The problem is that no new customers have appeared in the canteens since people from the outside simply cannot get there. The same employees from the same business centers continue to go to the canteens that they used to go to before. Only now, the audience has been divided into layers—people who spent more money registered in the loyalty program first. As a result, both metrics look rather good.

The number of program participants is growing, and the average check per participant is higher than for ordinary customers. However, there are no real benefits for the business. Moreover, there are drawbacks. The marginality of sales fell because regular customers began to buy at a discount.

Look at examples of good metrics

The examples below qualify as good measurements because it’s easy to quantify the results and challenging to inflate or misrepresent them.

• Revenue or margin growth

United Colors of Benetton used this metric and looked at segment creation, increase in conversions and average order value to measure progress. INCANTO looked at automated recommendations based on consumer behavior to track this.

• Decreasing costs

Reducing the company’s workload is the primary thing that affects this metric, as shown in the cases of Burger King and Olant. Another factor that impacts these results is reducing total marketing costs, see United Colors of Benetton.

• Increasing transparency and rate of change

Here, the use of control groups and the number of new monthly campaigns are the two main factors that can influence this goal. Flower delivery service Blossom Flower Delivery leveraged both of these to get real, quantifiable data to improve their processes.

Examples of well-defined goals

Examples of ineffective goals

Such goals in practice can mean that the team or a particular marketer does not really understand what to do.

Principle 2. Describe use cases

Are you familiar with the situation in the table below?

This is a classic situation when a large company tries to compare several technologies. Sometimes completely different ones. A giant table is created, sometimes containing several hundred lines, where different departments enter their functionality “wish list.”

Unfortunately, the final decision about which platform to use is often left to the people who are either too busy or unqualified. As a result, they fill out comparative tables based on shallow information like basic presentations or site descriptions. Sometimes they even ask contractors to fill out the tables for them.

However, even in a best-case scenario where everyone is qualified, does great research and creates a high-quality table, there’s still a high probability that it won’t lead to a good choice.

Business Examples of Well Define Goals and Metrics

Imagine you are an advanced marketer: You want to build RFM segments and launch targeted campaigns and promotions based on them. This requires technology, so you decide to do a side-by-side comparison of platforms that each perform very different overall functions:

• One is a gateway for email campaigns;
• Another is a niche technology, such as a big data trigger service;
• The third is a marketing automation system.

When you look at the line “Ability to send campaigns by RFM segments,” all three are marked “yes.” Thus, at first glance, it seems the question of choice comes down to price.

However, there’s a problem: What did they really mean by “Yes?”

1. The specialists presenting the gateway for email campaigns assumed that you would collect data on your side, clean it up, segment it, then send a list of email addresses, newsletter templates, and related data to the gateway for each segment.
2. Colleagues from the big data trigger platform meant they would utilize their programmers according to your wishes, e.g., writing a code that segments data and sends campaigns.
3. The employees of the marketing automation platform meant that their task was to provide a user-friendly design interface in which your marketer would build segments and launch campaigns with a manager who would help integrate and use the platform.

Therefore, you need to decide whether a particular technology suits you based on an assessment of use cases and not on functionality comparisons.

What if you formulate the “wish list” in the form of a workflow

Workflow 1: Our programmers developed a system that counts RFM. I just want to email address lists corresponding to the desired segments.

Solution: An inexpensive email gateway is better suited for the workflow.

Workflow 2: I want to try making targeted campaigns for RFM segments, but I don’t really understand what effect it will give or how it should be done, and I definitely won’t do it by myself.

Solution: You need an agency or a niche service that will quickly and cheaply do everything for you ‒ with a certain degree of transparency.

Workflow 3: I regularly recalculate and edit RFMs. The segment is used for email, SMS, mobile push notifications, and promotions. Each time a new marketing mechanic is launched takes a lot of time from analysts and programmers; it just doesn’t make sense!

Solution: An automation platform is needed here.

A list of workflows (future marketing campaigns) is critically important for making a conscious choice.

Ask potential candidate platforms to do the following:

• Evaluate workflows that are important to you and show implementation in each platform (for example, in a trial version). This way you will understand which product is suitable for your tasks. After, you can filter out companies that cannot help you conveniently or effectively reach your goals.
• Provide contacts of three to five companies (ideally from your industry) that have already implemented similar workflows on the chosen platform. Make sure that your needs are likely to be achieved based on their experience.

I have also prepared a list of essential things to consider when choosing an automation platform.

Principle 3. Think about data integration

Companies that sell their products across online and offline outlets or use several different channels of communication with their customers face a problem called “data integration.”

Customer information is spread piecemeal across several systems and databases, often with considerable overlap.

Buyers’ personal data, behavioral data, purchase history, and promotional points are stored in any or all of the following locations:

• The accounting system of retail points of sale;
• The website database;
• The platform for managing commodity promotions and bonus points;
• The CRM.
• Email services: campaigns, open rate, click rate, emails;
• Gateways: SMS, push notifications with similar data;
• The website: views of products and categories, cart, tags;
• Google Analytics: traffic sources, sessions, tags;
• Call center systems;
• Niche personalization services: your own specific pieces of data.

Synchronization of all of this is not a trivial exercise

First, you have to cleanse and unify customer data. This process should consider possible errors and typos in the full name, cities, and addresses, and the confirmation of contact information (email and phone number). It must also be secure so that when combining the two records, access to the account with the loyalty program bonus points does not get into another person’s hands.

Next, relevant information from different systems should be collected, classified, and merged around this “cleansed” record, e.g., what product a person clicked on in the email, what they looked at on the website, what they bought in the end, how much it cost, how they used bonus points, and so on.

Changing data for a specific person

Ideally, when changing data for a specific person, it is necessary to recalculate the segments they were previously placed in and use common sense when changing communications tactics. For example, after combining duplicates in the database, two supposedly different customers who made a single purchase may now be a single loyal customer with a much higher average order value. This is good news for you, but you do not want to immediately send them an email with promotions and discounts on expensive goods if they received completely different offers to one of their accounts before that.

All of this should work in real-time on large amounts of data (hundreds of millions of events for an average retailer), and it should be possible to manage external systems such as gateways or website personalization technologies.

Data cleansing

Data cleansing and unification (and its sequences for business) is a complex thing from a technical, marketing, and business point of view. Because of this, data integration and systems often don’t receive the attention needed. Instead, businesses simultaneously buy and launch separate niche personalization services, which leads to chaos.

All of the above systems should coexist in harmony with one another

Do you regularly face the following situations?

• You get an offer to buy something at a promotional price, but when you click on the link, you find out, “Oh, this promotion is not available for online customers.”
• You cannot use bonus points from the loyalty program on the website.
• You receive campaigns promoting products that are out of stock, or the prices in the email don’t correspond to the actual ones.
• The store is chasing you with retargeting and social media ads, even though you’ve already bought the product from the store.
• You receive conflicting offers in different channels: for example, a discount in an email, and at the same time a “buy one, get one free” (BOGO) campaign via SMS.

All these are different manifestations of “integration chaos.”

Algorithms

The second, less obvious consequence of ignoring the importance of data is how it affects the usefulness of the algorithms, big data, and neural networks that so many rely on. Algorithms and big data are susceptible to data quality. If you feed them with fragmented and unclean data, the results will be fragmented, messy, and unusable.

The highest efficiency of automated product recommendations, for example, from Amazon, is associated with a large array of uniform, clean, and reliable data that the retailer has collected for many years.

Data integration is the cornerstone of meaningful and effective personal marketing. Without it, there is no point in investing in personalization tools – the result will likely be random.

The problem of effective data integration is so essential that a separate class of platforms to solve this problem was created: the CDP, or customer data platform. In the United States, the market for such systems is one of the fastest-growing, with the CDP Institute forecasting CDP industry revenue will reach $2.3 billion in 2023.

Therefore, if you are:

• A company with online and offline points of sale;
• Using several channels of communication with customers;
• Building a complex, personalized communication, and discount scheme;
• Planning to actively use big data algorithms;

Data integration is essential

Be sure to take time to evaluate the CDP functionality on the platforms you are going to choose. Information on how to consider your options can be taken from this file.

As for interesting resources that talk about CDP (and where there is a directory of platforms, for example), I recommend cdpinstitute.org.

One of the relatively new trends in this industry is the emergence of integrated Customer Engagement Platforms (such as Mindbox). Platforms solve not only the problem of centralizing data, but also include marketing engagement tools. Such a products can significantly reduce the cost of marketing technology and accelerate the marketing team’s productivity by streamlining time-to-market hypotheses and new workflows.

Principle 4: Evaluate the speed of implementation and change – TTM

Time-to-market (ТТМ) is a metric of the speed o f implementation and the “ease” of managing changes in the solution.

One of the largest companies in Eastern Europe uses a German enterprise marketing management system. The transactional email the brand’s online store sends after placing an order is simple text, very primitive, and without any kind of personalization. As we now know, the reason for this is not poor marketing.

To personalize this email, the platform needs to be improved. However, modifications can only be purchased from a system integrator company. The approximate work estimate is $44,000 with a six-month lead time.

Time-to-market changes in the example above are not acceptable.

Unfortunately, this is a classic situation with implementing enterprise solutions according to a technical assignment. One person made the decision, the technical assignment was written by someone else, and a third person implemented these decisions.

Ultimately, specialists who have to use the implementation results find themselves alone with a clumsy monster that has lagged behind the real state of affairs for a couple of years and an integrator company that builds its business on change requests.

The ability to adapt

One of the most critical aspects of personalized marketing is the ability to adapt quickly.  Fashion retailer 12 STOREEZ provides an excellent example of this approach by frequently conducting A/B tests to improve engagement and key metrics. For instance, one test revealed that addressing customers by name in push notifications did not enhance their response rates, contrary to the team’s prior assumptions.

Marketers should be free to take independent action without relying too much on IT, analysts, approval processes, or work plans. This enables them to pivot quickly and seize opportunities as they arise.

RFM segment example

Let’s go back to the RFM segment example and try to understand how it can influence the choice in terms of TTM changes.

The first situation: RFM is calculated by internal development; an email gateway sends newsletters

• To change the logic, you must involve developers: ticket, technical assignment, deadlines, money, project management.
• Pain and suffering

The second situation: RFM is programmed somewhere within a niche solution like a big data trigger service or implemented by an agency

• Changes cost time and money;
• Fast but not flexible;
• The cycle of change is relatively slow;
• Not always transparent;
• Acceptable with restrictions.

The third situation: Marketing Automation Platform

• The logic is rebuilt in the platform interface in just a few minutes;
• A smart marketer is needed (surprise!);
• The fastest, most transparent, and flexible way to manage changes;
• More expensive if we compare only the price of the technology without taking into account the costs of development, project management, etc.

Principle 5. Estimate ROI

So, we have completed all of the previous steps: We formulated a goal and expectations for it,  developed a preliminary scenario and chosen a suitable platform (including CDP) with an acceptable TTM for implementation and changes. We now have to assess ROI.

To estimate ROI

• Summarize expectations by implementation metrics (revenue, savings, speed);
• Estimate costs for platform and integration resources;
• Estimate the costs of people who will use the platform and help achieve the result;

I believe it is risky to implement technologies with integration time frames of six months or longer before any chance of seeing benefits or with a return horizon of more than a year.

This is because:

• By the time the implementation is ready, the current use cases are likely to change significantly.
• There is a high risk of changing the marketing team, potentially bringing a radical new approach. During the trial period, a new team is unlikely to want to deal with a large and complex legacy project from the previous team.
• If the integration assessment period for launching the first scenario is several months, then expect surprises. Most likely, the implementation period delays at least twice (this is not a joke).

Bad example of estimated ROI

One of our clients, a mid-sized retail company, has been trying to implement a marketing automation platform for the second year in a row.

• After the start of implementation, it turned out that they underestimated the amount of data integration work that the retailer had to do on its own. As a result, the customer’s development team has been working for almost a year.
• During the integration period, the retailer’s costs increased. This is because there is a need to pay for both the integrated platform and the current services.

The direct and indirect switching costs start from $500,000 to a million or more.

From an outside perspective, this is a symptom of an insufficiently developed implementation solution.

On the other hand, it may well turn out that there is a plan. For example, to use the platform to increase site conversion by 2%. Then, the economy of implementation will most likely look very good.

A good example of the estimate of ROI

A company that completed all the steps listed above is Blossom Flower:

• The team set out clear goals: launch direct marketing communications, set up automated reminders for existing customers, and acquire new leads using pop-ups.
• The marketing department proposed workflows and ideas. After they implemented it during a demo, they also assessed integration risks.
• The team assessed the chosen platform to ensure sufficient data integration functionality for their goals.
• Calculated ROI.

Results

• 426% ROI within the first five weeks
• Nine workflows with 38 automated campaigns launched, along with behavior-based lead capture pop-ups
• +200,000 “lost” customers

Decision tree:

Step-by-step scheme for decision-making and technology choice

Final thought

Choosing the right personalization platform for retail marketing can be a daunting task. With so many technologies available and each one offering different features and benefits, it can be challenging to determine which one is the best for your business.

However, by following the right principles and taking the necessary steps to prepare for implementation, you can ensure a successful outcome. This includes setting clear implementation goals and metrics, defining use cases for the technology, integrating and cleansing data, evaluating the speed of implementation and changes, and estimating the ROI.

Ultimately, personalization can greatly benefit your business. Provide proper marketing that doesn’t spam or pressure buyers, increasing revenue, customer loyalty, engagement, and satisfaction.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Canva Studio; Pexels; Thank you!

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In today’s all conducive and comprehensive world, brands and entrepreneurs are brainstorming and strategizing the optimum way to market their products. We live in an era where everything is available in an instant. The availability of information in a split second and access to multiple alternatives to the same commodity has fostered fierce competition.

Achieving the sales target at the year’s end has become a daunting task for many sales managers. The goal of marketers is to engage and attain customers who become loyal consumers of their brand. Customers are truly the king of the barter exchange.

Organizations must understand their needs and take corrective measures to improve customer relationships. To engage with customers more interactively, marketers have adopted the omnichannel marketing strategy.

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What is omnichannel marketing?

Omnichannel marketing makes your brand interact with the customers on seamless platforms they use. This type of marketing involves the use of numerous marketing channels to improve the quality of services provided to customers. Customer behavior dictates the strategies implemented in omnichannel marketing.

The crux of omnichannel marketing is that customers tend to use more than one channel while they make their purchases. The omnichannel approach involves active participation and interaction with the customers across these channels.

An omnichannel campaign ensures that customers can purchase online or offline, regardless of their preferred channel. In simpler words, omnichannel marketing allows the business to interact, engage, persuade and attain a customer in the longer run.

The extended marketing omnichannel offers is where they are not just fans of your brand but loyal repeat customers. Omnichannel marketing is a complex version of multichannel marketing lets understand how and their differences

Multichannel marketing and Omni channel marketing key differences

Multichannel marketing is promoting the product via multiple channels like social media, retail outlets, or a blend of these channels to convert the desire to potential leads. The key point here is the choice of the company as to which channel it wishes to choose.

Multichannel marketing is based on the approach that customers have more than one choice to take the informed decision to purchase the product. It involves direct and indirect marketing, online channels such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, emails, video ads, etc. Offline channels include retailers, banner ads, print media, etc.

The fundamental distinction between omnichannel and multichannel marketing is that with multichannel marketing, the same message is disseminated over all media and channels. In omnichannel marketing, the message is adapted and personalized for each channel in accordance with the relevant circumstances. An example of omnichannel marketing would be-

You have started yoga classes, and a few people who live in your locality have interacted with the post on social media, saying that they loved the trial sessions. Now you also send them the catalogs of the timings of the classes, the types of exercises to be covered, etc.

Analyzing their needs, you also messaged them on WhatsApp your e-catalog and the prices per session. You also sent out a google form for collecting feedback and analyzing the response from the clients. In this way, you carry out Omni channel marketing.

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How you can create your omnichannel campaign?

Omnichannel marketing encompasses complex processes wherein you use different channels to market your product and where you meet people in different journeys, locations, and other varied factors. The messages are then tailor-made and specially customized for specific channels.

Here are the steps you need to follow

1) Identify your customer touchpoints– Omnichannel marketing essentially depends on the customer’s intent and approach toward the purchase decision of the product. Omnichannel drives the end user towards the business and impacts their buying behavior.

The firm should pay attention to the sources of information about the customer that help them in understanding the needs, cognitive biases towards a particular marketing approach or channel, behavioral mannerisms, and feedback of past customers. The business can examine the data and develop the next steps

If you use first-party data, such as CRM software, is the best. If you use an analytical tool for your website, you can analyze the number of clicks on your page and the engagement of the audience with your content.

2) Analyse the data and determine 3-4 channels where there is maximum engagement

After you have analyzed the data using the CRM and the analytical tool, find out which is the most used channel for confirming the purchase of the product. Map your marketing strategy accordingly.

3) Engage with your customers daily and ask for their feedback

We live in a constantly evolving world; it is important for marketers to regularly connect with customers. It may also happen that the firm might have missed the point in its strategy, or the clients might not be happy with the work.

Client feedback helps you understand what needs to be done.

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Conclusion

Additionally, omnichannel marketing lessens cross-channel repetition. The omnichannel ecosystem keeps track of customer behavior throughout the customer journey and across channels. Customers do not have to repeat procedures or read redundant information when switching channels if they start in one channel.

All the channels offer a coordinated, smooth experience and are equally informed of client behavior. Organizations can better understand their consumers’ behavior and preferences because of this information sharing.

Featured Image Credit: Dominika Roseclay; Pexels; Thank you!

Related Post: Best Productivity Tools of 2023

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Ever wonder why some brands consistently outperform others?

It’s not just luck or a better product. These brands are successful in creating tailored strategies for the channels they sell through. You will achieve the best results by choosing high-performance sales channels that support the sale of your Products.

It has been proven that this strategy leads to better sales, better buyer relationships, and better yearly profits—a strategy not to be underestimated.

Live Shopping, also known as Live Video Shopping or Live Commerce, is an emerging trend revolutionizing eCommerce that can be an effective means to diversify your sales channels. This allows brands to take their power back and host Live Shopping Shows on their eCommerce Websites.

The goal of this article is to show you how you can diversify your sales channels by adding Live Shopping experiences within your e-commerce website & apps, using Live Shopping Platforms.

According to the statistics provided on this link, brands across industries are making the most of livestream shopping by generating 5x in Sales, 3X in engagement, and a 50 % reduction in return rate: https://channelize.io/why-channelize.io.

For eg:

       A leading Beauty Brand Successfully hosted 75+ Shopping Shows

Five of the brand’s most recent shows garnered: 

• Average Live Engagement Rate of 25% approx
• 150 Average Comments per show
• 350 Average Reactions per show
  
  A leading Haircare Brand Successfully hosted 55 + Shopping Shows

Five of the brand’s most recent shows garnered: 

• 300 + Average Viewers per show
• 200 + Average Comments per show 
• 500 + Maximum Concurrent AudiencesA leading quilt brand Successfully hosted 25 + Shopping Shows

Three of the brand’s most recent shows garnered: 

• 650 Average show Viewers per show
• 300 Average Comments per show 
• Average Live Engagement Rate of 35% approx

What is Live Shopping?

Livestream Shopping is the practice of selling products through live video streaming. It has become extremely popular as an effective sales channel as it transforms the buyer journey into an engaging experience.

The experience is part informational, part entertainment, and part shopping. Your shoppers will experience the same shopping experience as they would in a store. The result? 

Brands from all over the world are creating live shopping shows. From skincare and fashion to food and beverage and consumer electronics, brands use it to reach new buyers, boost sales, and create and increase loyalty.

A brand’s ultimate goal is to drive traffic to their website rather than building new strategies across multiple platforms. And live shopping on their website enables them to do so.

The Past and Future of Live Shopping

This new type of eCommerce originated in China and has rapidly made its way into the Western eCommerce markets when Back in 2016 Alibaba launched its live shopping platform. It was Alibaba’s Singles’ Day pre-sale campaign in 2020 that generated a total transaction value of $7.5 billion within 30 minutes. This made Livestream Shopping popular.

West has taken longer to adopt live shopping than Chinese eCommerce. But fast forward to 2023, and we can say that this new way of shopping has reshaped the eCommerce market globally. 

To prove it, here are the numbers:

As for last year, live selling experiences hit $20 billion in revenue. What is even more encouraging is the estimated growth of this trend. By 2025, the market is expected to grow almost three times, reaching $57 billion.

How does Live Shopping Diversify your Sales Channels?

Here’s how Live Shopping can help Diversify your Sales Channels:

Increases Engagement

Live shopping provides brands with an opportunity to interact with shoppers in real-time, answer their questions, and receive instant feedback. This can help brands build stronger relationships with their buyers and increase engagement.

Depicts Authenticity

Livestream Shopping allows brands to showcase their products through live video. As a result, buyers can gain a better understanding of products through a dynamic, personalized, and authentic experience. 

As a result of this dynamic showcase, many questions can be answered that otherwise would remain unanswered. They see how the products perform. And they see it from multiple angles. A live show ensures authenticity by eliminating the need for Photoshop and video editing.

Improves Brand Image

Live shopping can help brands improve their brand image by providing a unique and innovative shopping experience. This can help brands differentiate themselves from their competitors and create a lasting impression on their shoppers. As a result, Live Commerce is a fantastic way of growing brand appeal and differentiation. 

Generate Buzz

Live shopping shows can generate a lot of buzz and excitement, especially if they are promoted well in advance. This can help brands create a sense of anticipation and attract new shoppers to their products.

Increases Brand Awareness

Live shopping can help businesses to increase their brand awareness and reach a wider audience, as customers can share their experiences on social media and through word-of-mouth.

Shoppertainment

Live commerce is a fresh and exciting offering. Bringing shopping and entertainment together increases shoppers’ engagement and allows them to interact with fellow shoppers and influencers they enjoy. But Live Shopping is not just entertaining, it’s also informative. A live shopping show can help shoppers learn more about specific products by hearing from the experts.

All in all, live shopping helps to accelerate conversion, it is entertaining, informative, interactive, and immersive, keeping viewers watching longer and bringing the products to life as if they were in the store. Buyers can better justify how they would use, style, or enjoy a product. 

In a nutshell, all this leads to a boost in sales for brands, enabling them to diversify their sales channels.

How to get started with Live Shopping?

1. Choose a Platform

The first step is to choose a platform to host your live shopping shows. Here are some of the Platforms you can choose from:

Channelize.io Live Shopping Platform

Channelize.io is an end-to-end Live Video Commerce enabler that enables E-Commerce Brands globally to add Live Shopping Experiences within their Websites and Mobile Apps. The Platform can be easily integrated within existing websites and apps with Pre-built integrations for Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, Wix, and more, and via API, SDKs, and UI Kits.

Bambuser

Bambuser is a Live Streaming Platform that specializes in interactive shopping experiences. It allows brands to showcase their products, answer customer questions, and offer real-time promotions during live shopping events.

ShopShops

ShopShops is a Platform that connects brands with customers all over the world. Brands can host live shopping events and sell their products directly to customers in real-time.

Livescale

Livescale is a Live Shopping Platform that offers a range of interactive features, including product demonstrations, Q&A sessions, and social sharing. It also integrates with popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Magento.

Talkshoplive

Talkshoplive is a Live Shopping Platform that focuses on the entertainment industry. It allows brands to showcase their products during live events featuring celebrity hosts and influencers.

CommentSold

CommentSold is a Platform that integrates with Facebook and Instagram. It allows brands to sell their products directly through social media by commenting “sold” on the post.

2. Plan your show: Once you have chosen a Platform, it’s time to plan your show. This includes deciding on the date and time, choosing products you want to showcase, and planning any promotions or special offers you want to offer during the show.

3. Promote your show: To ensure a successful live shopping show, you need to promote it to your audience. This can include promoting it on your social media channels, email newsletter, and website.

4. Prepare your products: Make sure you have all products you want to showcase ready before the show starts. You may also want to prepare any props or materials you will need during a show.

5. Practice: Before going live, practice and make sure you are comfortable with the platform and any features you plan to use during the show.

6. Go Live: Once you are ready, it’s time to go live. Make sure you have a good internet connection and a quiet, well-lit space for your show.

7. Engage with your audience: During the live shopping show, engage with your buyers by answering questions, offering product demonstrations, and providing any additional information they may need to make a purchase.

8. Follow up: After the event, follow up with your shoppers by sending a thank you message or offering any post-event promotions.

Wrapping-up

It’s no secret that Live Commerce also known as Live Video Shopping is on the rise. And it won’t be long before it doesn’t seem revolutionary anymore. Give your brand a leg up on the competition by producing Live Shopping Shows by leveraging an effective Live Stream Shopping Platform. We hope this guide helps you.

The post How to Diversify your Sales Channels using Live Shopping on your E-commerce Website appeared first on ReadWrite.

What does it take to build, manage, and develop a sales team? It takes a lot of patience and problem-solving abilities. Sales management is not an easy job, nor is sales recruitment. At least not as easy as it seems in guides, blogs, and sales tactic videos. A breakdown of the sales manager’s day at work by Dr. Adam Rapp shows that 32% of the time is invested in managing salespeople.

Requirements of different sales teams may vary in many contexts. But, there is a persistent similarity in all of its patterns. There’s a need for constant evaluations and re-evaluation of each sales agent in the team. Starting from the base of sales recruitment until the sales performance reporting. The process of collecting information needs to be automated, quick, and easy to access.

Technology for hiring salespeople needs to be better in order to hire the best sales reps. Sales skills assessments reduce your headache with standardized questions as they screen your candidates and identify the perfect fit. Next to sales recruitment comes sales enablement. It is very essential for an organization to provide a proper platform and adequate tools to the sales team.

The basics ensure smooth functionality in pitching clients and earning sales leads. Sales performance monitor will be secondary to the sales hiring and sales enablement as it obtains the data of output with respect to the input of your salespeople. Performance reviews keep you updated on the progress of individual sales agents and the team’s overall contribution. This article will help you understand the initials of sales management better.

Right Talent at Right Position

GrowthPlay studied 900 sales forces with the findings that Top Performers (20% of the sales force) generated 52% of revenue, Dependable Performers (60%) contributed 45%, and Low Performers (20%) contributed 3%.

Not every sales agent is high performing, and not every high-performing salesperson can take up leading responsibilities. Therefore, the first and foremost step to building an effective sales team is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your sales agents. This helps align the team members and gives leadership insight into understanding the members individually.

Identifying your salespeople as potential assets for your organization will help you utilize their skill sets for higher productivity. Sales performance improves when the organization has quality sales agents who perform their daily tasks and set goals for tomorrow. An active sales team benefits a company immensely.

Sales Performance is Dependent on the Organization’s Efforts

The sales performance is dependent on the organization’s efforts. Turning sales agents into assets is a three-step process.

• Recruiting the right sales aspirants

It can be tough to identify the salespersons who are genuinely interested in your work culture. Per PMaps — the best way to filter the best sales agent is to adopt a visual-based sales assessment with a culture fit assessment. It will help you onboard candidates that align with your organization’s culture and values.

• Identifying and resolving training needs

These assessments will obtain a complete profile analysis of the applicants. It uncovers the true weaknesses and strengths so that you can arrange the appropriate training. Training is the foundation of building a winning sales team for your organization.

• Deployment of the right talent into the right position

Once you are acquainted with the new set of skills adopted by your new hires. You can rearrange the formation for optimal sales processing. The frontliners and leading sales managers of your team are important agents who provide form for your sales team.

Smart Sales Enablement: Availability of Equipment

In the research article, Practical Insights Of Sales Force Digitalization Success by Taylor and Francis, the researchers have rightly portrayed the importance of digital awareness and utility in the economic sector for improving sales effectiveness.

It is essential for salespeople to stay updated on the current trends, and this can be achieved by hiring a tech-geeky Gen-Z sales force. Customers currently have higher resources, making them less likely to settle soon with a product.

The world today expects higher-quality consumables, which elevates the competition in the industry. The sales effective framework proposed by Andris A. Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha, Dharmendra Sahay, Arun Shastri, and Sally E. Lorimer consists of the following:

• Digital readiness of the organization

This refers to the availability of digital resources and a sales force competent enough to utilize the resources. Failure of either one of the components can cause disruption in obtaining the right potential productivity for the organization.

Employment of advanced software programs for recruiting, monitoring, and prospecting will help the sales force to perform more on specific actions and targets effectively. It will also provide you with a blueprint of your ongoing sales process.

• Usage and adoption of digital solutions by the sales team

Digital solutions refer to the quality of training and education provided to the sales agents during and after the provisional period. To effectively implement digital solutions, salespeople must adopt technologies proficiently.

There must be an equal amount of cooperation from each salesperson in holding on to the changing trends. Hiring candidates with adequate technical knowledge is as necessary as their sales skills.

• Actions for driving sustained impacts

The organization is responsible for driving actions that help preserve sales assets and revitalize inputs to bring net profits. It also refers to the minimum input and optimal output in sales performance.

This helps the organization to procure higher and prolonged sales effectiveness. The loss in such a sales process is also minimum, and productivity is often guaranteed on the basis of consistency.

Digital Monitoring Of Sales Performance: KPI Ensures Activeness

According to Javid Ghahremani-Nhar & Hamed Nozari, “Using key indicators of digital marketing performance can increase the productivity of marketing activities and help increase the effectiveness and optimization of the spending budget in marketing.”

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are among the most necessary tools for all sales representatives and managers. This helps in tracking and analyzing input and output. It easily obtains performance metrics with the help of advanced technological calculations.

The technology of KPIs allows you to gather information with every report. Keeping a track of sales performance becomes easy and hassle-free with advanced monitoring KPI systems.

It is a critical aspect to secure appropriate KPIs for businesses to improve sales performance. These tools help managers to monitor the sales team and meet the lags before they become a problem.

KPI Software Calculates Four Aspects of Performance

These performance indicators have 17 sets and four activity sectors — giving you a clear view of productivity.

• Input: Average revenue per unit, Average purchase value, Revenue per sales rep
• Process: Sales target, Customer acquisition cost, Customer lifetime value, Number of sales opportunities, Sales opportunity score
• Output: Average sales cycle, Lead-to-Opportunity ratio, Opportunity-to-Win ratio, Profit margin per sales rep
• Outcomes: Sales growth, customer attrition rate, Lead conversion ratio, Upsell and Cross-sell rates, Incremental sales by campaign

Sum Up

Your sales team is the lifeblood of your organization. Prioritizing their requirements is the first step to producing better sales. Along with the structural management of your sales reps, remember your salespeople must be highly driven.

The next step to retain the activeness of your salespeople is genuine feedback and acknowledgments. Rewards, recognition, position, and accomplishments drive enthusiasm.

When you ensure your sales team has the basic motivation and the tools they require for their work, and you notice, recognize, and reward greatness in effort and productivity — you can assure yourself of a highly-driven sales team.

Featured Image Credit:

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My business partner Konstantin Krauss and I are both longtime SaaS entrepreneurs. In our careers so far, we founded, led, and sold technology companies, witnessing companies both thrive and fail. The one thing that rings true for most of these companies is that sales are the heartbeat of the company. Naturally, the entire company must be reliable for sales to be effective. Connected digital assistants will change the way we work and sell.

The sales team is responsible for ensuring that the bottom line is healthy.

Based on our sales experience and after talking with hundreds of seasoned professionals over the years, we noticed that smart, connected technology is missing from the workplace. Most sales and marketing teams use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) program.

While using this tool, they develop a love/hate relationship with it. However, the hole we are talking about goes much deeper than just implementing a smart CRM. Over the past couple of years, smart assistants take the consumer market by storm. You couldn’t visit a park without hearing five people say, “Hey, Siri.”

Now when you walk into a home, more likely than not, you’ll find more than one connected device. Whether it be a smart thermostat, a fitness tracker, wearables, a personal assistant, they’re everywhere. Amazon even gave away smart devices with the purchase of a select product on Prime Day.

It is this kind of technology that helps more and more people every day be increasingly productive. People across the globe are using connected, digital devices to simplify everyday tasks and to streamline their lives. But, why aren’t more businesses using digital assistants and connected devices the same way consumers are?

Our “A-Ha” Moment.

The business market ripe with opportunity for new SaaS products. Our computers understand us better, so they can help in real-time business situations. We created the digital, connected assistant, designed for the workplace and, more specifically, inside sales representatives.

These assistants and personal connected devices have the potential to make the everyday lives of millions of workers more comfortable. The adaptation rate will be fast, as a result of previous advancements in technology. Virtual assistant technology has already been developed and tested through consumer devices and supports this new business software category.

Sales and SaaS Teams are Booming, but Struggle With Support 

• SaaS sales teams are growing by the day. The SaaS market is anticipated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.20% from 2018 to 2023.
• Inside sales is also a massively growing field. Today, most B2B products and services are sold over the phone or via screen share.
• Sales tools have become overwhelmingly focused on sales control (e.g., CRM for the most part). As previously stated, most salespeople have a love/hate relationship with their CRM. They are ready for an all-encompassing solution.
• While most sales reps want and receive training (usually expensive training), few agree on its effectiveness.
• When in a conversation, most sales reps have no support at all besides their notes and scribbles. Scaling sales organizations, even in large corporations, is like a game of telephone with apparent shortcomings. Conversation support will be a game-changer for sales teams.

CRM Should Not be the Only Sales Tool

A well-managed CRM can be a gold mine. However, a correctly managed CRM is like a unicorn that no one can ever find. A CRM tool is typically full of “buried” information, which is hard to find and hard to manage. For example, salespeople spend just one-third of their day talking to prospects.

The salesperson then spends the rest of their day writing emails, prospecting, and researching leads, going to internal meetings. Between all of those tasks, it’s hard to manage and keep a CRM system up-to-date.

It’s time for the workplace to adopt a productivity tool that allows them to get more out of their days. This new software will save significant time for professionals, especially when synced with their CRM. It houses all necessary data, and assists with critical processes like on-boarding, training, playbook, and suggested language. Not to mention, it ensures consistency across all teams and locations.

The Next Addition to Your Team: “Digital Assistant” 

There is so much knowledge that needs to be shared: sales frameworks, training, FAQs, and product roadmaps. Not to mention all the advice on how to have the best and most productive conversations. Most of the time, this information is either floating around on a server or intranet site, or in someone’s head.

However, the most logical place to manage all that knowledge is in a connected device. It’s accessed instantly or brought up based on conversation tracking, providing it way faster than humans can search for it. The connected personal assistant is an entirely new way for humans to work with computers.

A personal digital assistant for business will support the following functions:

• Emerging Technology

  Previously developed voice technology allows real-time support; think of the talk-to-text and voice-search functions on cell phones. We believe that the role of a digital assistant for business has various advantages. For example, it can offer real-time support by listening to phone calls, providing advice, and transcribing call notes.

• IT Integration

  Existing siloed enterprise software tools commonly have open APIs. An open API allows for new business models, such as a digital assistant, to work on top of them.

• Share-ability
  

  Sales teams have sales frameworks, that is a fact. And with a digital assistant, sales teams can finally sync their daily operations with the company’s existing framworks. Then, sales conversations become a science rather than an art.

When you take all of this into consideration, the workplace is ready for digital, personal support. The assistant is a natural next addition to the “virtual team.”

What’s Next 

A new category of enterprise software is entering the marketplace. A digital, personal assistant that integrates all kinds of tools and provides collective experiences of various experts. With this rollout, we are combining two of the biggest markets – CRM a $193.6 billion global market with training an $87.6 billion global market. All fueled by intelligent software, augmenting human interaction in business.

People benefit from connected devices and virtual assistants, and the same trend stays true for businesses. Productivity leaps will take place, and the use of virtual assistants will become as normal as having a computer.

Although Ciara is the first dedicated digital sales assistant, we expect this category to grow as adoption happens within companies. If you’d like to learn more about Ciara, visit GetCiara.com to sign up for free and access your own personal assistant within minutes.

Try Out Productivity Tools We Are Using

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The significance of sales enablement has been in question ever since an increase in the technological competition in the sales industry. But do you think that ensuring the uniform striving of capable employees in the sales team will bring you higher sales performance? Well, unfortunately, not!

Businesses, therefore, demand effective sales enablement programs that will help improve sales performance. Two significant sales enablement models are explained by a group of researchers and Mereo, respectively. Finally, this article gives you the ultimate takeaway that will help you rev up your sales performance.

CSO Insight estimates that the sales enablement function has grown from 25% to 61% in just five years. Why? Because sales enablement has been effectively improving the performance of sales teams across the globe.

What Is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is a process that equips sales teams with the resources they need to sell products or services efficiently. It connects marketing and sales, delivering the correct information at the right time to the right people.

Basically, sales enablement acts as a cushion for sales freshers and employees to develop accurate leads of clients for an organization. It can also refer to organizations’ processes to help sales reps sell.

Design A: Conceptualizing & Developing

Avinash Malshe, Scott B. Friend, and Howard Dover propose a process for enhancing sales performance based on the factors mentioned in Sales Enablement: conceptualizing and developing a dynamic capability. The factors included in the research paper are:

• Sales Support Diagnostic:

This refers to the managerial sales detection of resources that will provide support in facilitating better sales output. It will make up for the flaws of the sales team about their skills. This will involve the prediction of the frontline sales representatives. In short, it is the overall analysis of sales performance and implementation of aids for improvement.

• Sales Capital Reconfiguration:

This will decide the monetary capital for the functioning sales team. This often results in integrating inter-firm resources and management’s specific orientation of capital.

The monetary investment is directly proportional to the expected output from a sales team. Therefore, effective redistribution of capital is essential in enabling a high-performing sales team.

• Enablement Infrastructure Rollout:

After the reconfiguration of capital, the infrastructure of sales enablement is updated. Then comes the process of rollout, where underperforming techniques and skills are filtered to prevent potential loss. The flaws of a sales team are identified and eliminated.

The sales process is majorly affected by blockages such as inadequate tools, non-functional team members, and lack of sales training. Rolling out your process is an essential step towards sales enablement. It improves the efficiency of the sales process.

• Enablement Performance Evaluation:

This way, the sales team is put to work, and the inputs and outputs are measured directly to determine overall performance. According to this, the advancement of the sales team is predicted.

This evaluation is performed after an observation period followed by the rollout. Therefore, the performance of the salespeople is thoroughly assessed during this phase.

• Enablement Calibration:

This keeps the sales team active and enthusiastic throughout the project. Sometimes, it can be done through feedback, incentives, or other organizational reinforcement.

Based on this step, the sales team members are allotted concerning the sales skill requirement. It is the final step to sales enablement, according to Design A.

Design B: Sustainable Revenue & Sales

Mereo has also proposed a modified sales performance improvement plan to facilitate sustainable revenue performance in the sales enablement program. It consists of the following elements:

• Buyers’ Journey Aligned Sales:

This refers to the customer awareness training and awareness of the sales representatives. This is the foundation that an organization needs to achieve before they approach its customer base.

Awareness of the customer base in any service and product company helps the salespeople pitch effectively. In addition, it can act as a reference for existing sales agents and as a guide for new sales reps.

• Sales Skills and Techniques:

Next, you identify and acknowledge your frontline salespeople’s right sales skills, referred to as discovery. It involves the rearrangement of responsibilities that will beneficially obtain results. This can be done through scientific sales profilers (or sales assessments).

• Sales Ready Assets:

This step takes place after you have selected the competent sales frontliners. Next, there is a need for a proposition that equips them with strong sales assets. There are many assets, depending on the phase of your preparation. (Examples:-prospecting insights, value drivers, solution differentiation, value propositions, and so on.)

• Cross-Organizational Alignment:

This is the final phase comprising sales negotiation. This enables all the teams to put forth their ideas and opinions. In addition, it will provide the sales team with better industry insights. Hence, this contributes to a common goal of higher-order outputs.

This allows the sales reps to step forward and face the client, according to which the improvement is evaluated. Cross-organizational alignment concerns maintaining the relativity of progress with the competitor sales organization.

3 Ultimate Methods to Improve Sales Performance

Briefly, both models pinpoint certain significant factors that can affect the infrastructure of a sales enablement program. First, to keep up with the evolving trends in commerce, the program must be open to creativity and flexibility.

A company’s sales reps must follow the program strictly to generate substantial net profitability (total increase in revenue obtained). The significant components of preparation according to current trends are as follows:

• Customer-Sales Reps Alignment:

This refers to the selection of salespeople compatible with the customer base. This will help increase the rate and quality of relationship-building, decreasing the customer churn rate. In addition, the more familiar your sales reps are with your customers, the better your pitches will be.

• Sales Enablement of Assets:

This refers to continuous skill development and knowledge base development through adopting the authoritative practice. In addition, it allows the organization to permit certain asset utilities for the leading sales frontliners. It also includes enabling sales assets such as advanced and seamless HRTech.

• Evaluation of Sales Performance:

This refers to the final component that ensures continuous productivity. It involves effectively evaluating and reconfiguring teams to deal with the target customer base. KPIs can be used to monitor your sales team’s inputs and outputs. Identify your high-performing sales team and position client actions appropriately and accordingly.

• Elimination of Errors in Sales Process:

This refers to the identification and elimination of flaws in the sales process. It improves the sales output by decreasing the possibility of customer churn. It also enables the sales team to convert leads. On the other hand, errors in the sales process can cost you a heavy loss of potential revenue sources.

Sum Up

Sales enablement is essential because it helps your sales team close more deals. It also allows your team to focus on selling rather than gathering information. And it enables your sales team to develop accurate leads of clients for your organization. Back your sales with advanced technological assets.

Improve your sales process with innovative sales enablement. Adopt HRTech tools for sales recruitment, monitoring, and managing your sales team. Expect the best outputs from the high-performing sales reps of your organization through effective sales enablement.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Fox; Pexels; Thank you!

The post The Best Sales Performance Process for a Winning Sales Team appeared first on ReadWrite.

Do you run pay-per-click (PPC) ads on sites like Google Ads and Facebook? Whether you’re running a small campaign on Amazon, or you’re running a massive campaign on Google, getting your account suspended can put a damper on your marketing plans.

However, getting your Amazon PPC ad account suspended isn’t as bad as getting your Google account suspended. The reason is that Google generally provides a larger share of search traffic to advertisers.

Did Google suspend your Google Ads account?

Just when you think you’ve gotten the hang of publishing effective paid ads, a suspended account could put a wrench in your plans. PPC ads are a major part of your digital marketing campaign. A suspended Google Ads account is a big deal. Your paid ads send traffic to your website, and when your ads stop running, you lose that traffic.

If Google suspends your Google Ads account, you might be wondering how you can reinstate it. Is it even possible to reverse a suspension? While you can reverse a Google Ads account suspension, it’s not as simple as calling someone to explain the mistake.

Google suspends accounts all the time for various reasons ranging from suspicious payment activity to circumventing systems. Sometimes, people are able to reverse this decision, but it takes some finesse. If you make any mistakes, it could mean that Google permanently bars you from having an account. To prevent this fate, here’s what you should avoid doing after an account suspension.

1. Don’t create a new ad account.

When Google suspends your account, your first thought might be to create another account, but that could ruin your chances of winning your appeal.

Google automatically checks information against its database of suspended accounts. They know if your payment information, billing address, website, or company name matches a suspended account. When Google matches the data, they will suspend your new account.

Don’t try to get away with using a different credit card for your new account. Once you enter your website into the system, Google will know you already have a suspended account based on your domain name and/or URLs/URIs.

Once you have two suspended accounts, it’s harder to win an appeal for your first suspension because creating a new account is a direct violation of Google’s policies and will disqualify you from having an account from that point forward. Google says that creating a new account falls under “Circumventing Systems” and is an egregious violation.

It’s frustrating not being able to run ads on Google, but it’s better to avoid creating a new account while you’re working on an appeal.

2. Don’t insert emotion into your appeal.

If you’re like most people, you’ll be submitting an appeal to Google to reinstate your ad account. You’re probably really upset.

However, when you craft your appeal, make sure you leave emotion out of the equation. Google treats appeals matter-of-factly. The more emotion you insert, the harder it is for their reps to objectively assess your situation.

No matter how upset you are, and no matter how unfair the suspension seems, stick to the facts. It’s a given that you feel the suspension was unfair. You don’t want to put any of that in your appeal.

3. Don’t submit an appeal hastily.

Wait a little bit and review your appeal before you submit that appeal to Google asking them to reinstate your ads account. You want your appeal to be as professional, clear, and concise as possible. You also don’t want any spelling, grammar, or punctuation mistakes.

When you take time to review your appeal, you can also catch yourself if you’ve inserted emotion into your document. A clean, professional, factual appeal is more likely to be perceived as genuine than one filled with errors and emotion.

4. Don’t continue submitting appeals.

There is no limit to how many appeals you can submit to Google.

However, it’s not recommended to submit numerous appeals. The more appeals you make to a previously rejected appeal, the less likely your next appeal is to even be reviewed.

Just like if you were to appeal the decision of a judge, only submit a new appeal if you have new, relevant information. If your appeal keeps getting denied, stop and consult with a professional marketing agency dedicated to helping reverse Google Ads account suspensions.

If your situation deserves a reversal, and your appeals keep getting denied, there’s a reason. A professional can help you figure out what you’re doing wrong and help you craft a stronger, more effective appeal.

5. Don’t hire someone from Fiverr.

Be extremely careful if you hire someone from Fiverr to make your appeal. You’re risking a permanent suspension.

Sometimes, there are legitimate professionals on Fiverr who are looking to pick up some more clients, but most of the time, people who offer services are just looking for side gigs and you won’t find people with enough experience to get results.

Thinking about hiring someone to advocate on your behalf for reinstatement? If so, you must exercise caution. Someone who doesn’t have a track record of success could make your situation worse.

If they submit an ineffective appeal on your behalf and that appeal is denied, you may be out of luck. If they submit an appeal on your behalf that contains false information, that could also ruin your chances of a successful appeal.

6. Don’t bother calling Google.

It sounds harsh, but don’t try calling Google to fix your suspended ads account. They can’t help you over the phone.

While Google does provide some technical support over the phone, they don’t provide support for suspended accounts. There is nobody you can talk to from Google over the phone who will be able to help you with a suspended account.

It’s unfortunate that all of your communications have to take place through email to resolve your suspended Google Ads account, but that’s the way it works.

7. Don’t get your hopes up — stay neutral.

If Google suspends you, it is possible to have the company reinstate your Google Ads account. However, don’t set yourself up for major disappointment by believing you have an open-and-shut case.

There are many people who have had legitimate technical errors that caused Google to suspend their accounts. Many were still unable to get their accounts back. It could be that Google is overwhelmed with a high volume of appeals, and many appeals are denied at first glance. It’s hard to say.

Your best course of action is to connect with a professional to have them craft, submit, and manage your appeal.

8. Don’t give up on a rejected appeal.

If you’ve already had your appeal rejected, don’t give up hope. Although getting an account reinstated after a rejected appeal is harder, it’s not impossible.

The key is finding the right leverage to prove you deserve to get your account back.

For example, if Google suspended you because you accidentally created three different accounts when you were actually trying to log in, you need to explain exactly what happened and why. You may even need to suggest looking up the times of your account creations to substantiate your claim.

Remember that Google’s representatives are busy all day, every day, and may not take time to look that deeply into your appeal. In some cases, you might need to make these small suggestions to get them to spend more time on your case.

A Suspended Google Ads Account Isn’t the End of the World.

As a last resort, if Google won’t reinstate your account, don’t panic. It’s not the end of the world.

There are plenty of other PPC platforms you can run ads on to make up for your lost traffic from Google, including Bing and DuckDuckGo. You can advertise on social media platforms and ramp up our SEO efforts.

A suspended Google Ads account isn’t the end of your PPC traffic. It just means you need to use other platforms until your sus.

Featured Image: Brett Jordan; Pexels.com. Thank you!

The post 8 Things to Avoid After a Google Ads Account Suspension appeared first on ReadWrite.

If you’re like most businesses, you’re always looking for ways to generate more leads and sales. And if you’re like most businesses, you don’t have a lot of time or money to waste on marketing techniques that don’t work.

That’s where marketing automation comes in. Marketing automation is a new and useful development that can make your marketing efforts easier, faster, and more accurate.

By automating certain tasks, you can free up your time to focus on more important things, like the overall vision and growth of your business.

In addition, automated marketing can help you track your results and measure your return on investment (ROI).

So if you’re looking for a new and improved way to generate leads and sales, consider using marketing automation. It just might be the answer to your prayers.

7 Ways You Can Use Marketing Automation to Nurture Leads

So, how exactly can you use marketing automation to nurture leads?

Nurturing your lead base is all about developing an affiliate relationship with them and making them familiar with your brand.

It’s also a time for you to learn more about them through their behaviors.

As a result, you’ll be able to fine-tune your content creation, advertising, sales calls, and so on. And meet your final goal, which is to close sales.

Here’s how marketing automation can be used for lead nurturing in a number of ways:

1. Sending targeted emails based on customer behavior or interests

Targeted emails are a great way to use marketing automation to nurture leads. By sending customers emails that are relevant to their interests, you can help them get to know your brand better and increase the chances of converting them into customers.

Additionally, targeted emails can help you track the success of your marketing campaigns and measure the ROI.

How does this work in practical terms? What tools do you need?

To send targeted emails automatically to leads, you will need a tool that can track customer behavior and interests. Additionally, you will need a way to segment your leads so that you can send them targeted emails. Segmenting your leads can be done through criteria like job title, company size, or budget. Finally, you will need an email service provider that can automate the process of sending targeted emails to your leads.

2. Creating custom landing pages that are relevant to the leads’ stage in the buying process

Another great way to use marketing automation for lead nurturing is by creating custom landing pages.

These pages are designed to appeal directly to the needs and interests of your leads, helping them move through different stages in the buying process.

This can include offering free trials, guides, or other resources that are relevant based on where the lead is in their buyer’s journey.

Not only can customized landing pages improve your lead nurturing efforts, they can also help you track the success of your marketing campaigns and measure ROI.

To create custom landing pages using marketing automation, you will need to identify the different stages of your sales funnel and your customer profiles.

Social media advertising platforms and search advertising platforms will allow you to create different pages for different campaigns.

If you’d like to automate your campaigns further, then you need to work with a dedicated automation platform or agency.

3. Use a content experience platform

One of the biggest issues with content creation is that businesses crank out endless pieces of content but don’t use it effectively.

The problem isn’t content creation; it’s content distribution and engagement.

You need to repurpose your content or simply share it with the right people at the right time and through the right channels.

And you need to consider which stage of the sales funnel they’re in.

This is complicated in the extreme when you try to do this manually. And this is where a content experience platform (CXP) comes in.

A CXP platform lets you tag your content according to different factors:

• Buyer persona
• Stage of the sales funnel
• Channel
• Content topic and type

You can then generate landing pages based on different combinations of the above, which increases the chances of conversions to a high degree.

To make this work, you need to rely on a content experience platform and take advantage of a different type of marketing automation – one that is more dynamic and sure to boost your conversion rate.

4. Offering special deals or incentives to encourage potential customers to become actual customers

As any business owner knows, generating leads is only the first step in the sales process. Once you have a potential customer’s attention, you need to find a way to encourage them to become an actual paying customer. This is where marketing automation can be a valuable tool.

By offering deals and incentives, you can give leads an extra nudge that encourages them to take the next step and become paying customers.

There are a number of different ways to go about this, but one of the most effective is to use email marketing. With email marketing, you can send automatic messages that offer special deals and discounts to leads that haven’t converted yet.

This can be a great way to encourage them to take the plunge and become paying customers. Additionally, there are a number of different software programs that can help you automate your email marketing, making it easier than ever to reach out to leads and encourage them to become customers.

5. Using push notifications to capture shoppers who are about to leave your website

Another powerful way to use marketing automation is through the use of push notifications. These are messages that pop up on your customers’ phones or other internet-connected devices, and they can be used to capture potential customers who are about to leave your site.

With a well-designed push notification system, you can send out timely reminders that encourage potential customers to stick around and check out your products or services.

There are a number of different software platforms that can help you set up push notifications, making it easier than ever for online retailers to stay in touch with their customers and keep them engaged.

Other ways to nurture your leads automatically with push notifications is to create triggers for certain behaviors like:

• The customer is about to exit a window
• They spend a long time on a page
• They revisit the same product page or some other page
• They ‘favorite’ an item
• They scroll through more than 50% of a shopping page
• They add a product to their cart but show an intention to leave
• They’re generally active online
• They’ve engaged with your ads on social media and so on

Push notifications are powerful because they allow you to stay top-of-mind with potential customers and keep them engaged, even when they’re not directly on your site. And by incorporating marketing automation into your push notifications, you can automatically nurture leads that show interest in your products or services and encourage them to become paying customers.

6. Use a social media automation tool

I’m not talking about typical social media content managers in this case.

Today, you can use serious automation tools to distribute, organize, and publish your material.

Look specifically for social media automation platforms.

On such platforms, all you have to do is create the bulk of your content and upload them using a spreadsheet.

You can then tag or categorize them based on the mood, intention, or type of post you’ve made.

And then have the automation tool automatically assign them to different networks.

They’ll use tags and descriptors to regularly organize your material and post them to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other places.

Automation tools for social media require less manual work than regular social network management tools. And they can free up hours of time and work spent a month or even weeks.

7. Leverage email drip campaigns

Another powerful way to use marketing automation is through the use of email drip campaigns.

A drip campaign, as the name suggests, refers to a series of automatic emails that are sent out over time.

They can be used to nurture leads and customers alike, helping you build relationships with people and encourage them to make a purchase.

There are a number of different email drip campaigns you can use, including:

• Welcome campaigns: These are used to welcome new subscribers or customers and introduce them to your business.
• Educational campaigns: These can be used to share useful information or resources with your subscribers.
• Promotional campaigns: These are designed to encourage customers to make a purchase, sharing details about sales and discounts, for example.
• Behavioral campaigns: These are designed to encourage specific behaviors, such as visiting your website or making a purchase. And they’re based on audience behaviors. For example, a person who views a category of products will be interested in suggestions from the same category.
• Abandoned cart campaigns:  These are designed to encourage customers who have added items to their shopping cart but then abandon the purchase. You can use email drip campaigns in combination with push notifications to encourage customers to complete their purchases.

The key to a successful email drip campaign is to create emails that are personalized and relevant to the recipient.

This means tailoring your content based on their preferences and interests, as well as using triggers such as website visits or abandoned shopping carts to send targeted messages.

By leveraging drip campaigns, you stand to keep people engaged and get them to convert.

Conclusion

Overall, marketing automation can be a great way to encourage leads to take the next step and become paying customers. By offering deals and incentives, you can give them the extra push they need to make the decision to buy from you.

So if you’re looking for a way to increase sales, consider using marketing automation in your business. It could be just what you need to take your business to the next level.

Featured Image Credit: Carlos Muza; Unsplash; Thank you!

The post 7 Ways to Use Marketing Automation for Lead Nurturing appeared first on ReadWrite.

You would be aware of SEO and its benefits; however, SEO checkers might be new to you.

With SEO checkers, you can optimize your content, rank for useful keywords, increase your brand’s visibility and dominate SERPs results.

But what exactly is an SEO checker, and how does it dominate Google rankings?

Let’s dive deeper to know the answer.

What is an SEO Checker?

SEO checker scans your web pages to find technical errors and SEO issues that negatively impact the search engine rankings. It crawls the URL of your website like any other search engine. It then checks the page against over 200 SEO-relevant criteria such as meta information, page quality, site structure, etc.

Now, this SEO checker sees the performance of your website considering these criteria. This performance helps calculate an individual SEO score and provides you with a complete list of errors found on your site. After getting the list of these errors, you can make the changes accordingly.

Search Engine Optimization is always a company’s go-to option to increase a brand’s online presence organically. You need to do SEO if you want to grab your target audience’s attention and drive them to your site. For that, you should perform a proper SEO audit and analysis irrespective of what your company sells.

Intricate Details About SEO Checker:

SEO checker is essential for your website as it makes your site all the more visible, and it means a lot of traffic and opportunities to convert potentials to patrons. Above all, it is one of the essential tools for brand awareness and building relationships with the potential target audience.

You can see that SEO checker is a challenging undertaking that includes several techniques and practices. Moreover, these practices are constantly changing as clients’ and web users’ behaviors change and as new technologies are likely to emerge as search engines change algorithms.

Hence it is one of the essential elements for any company that wants to be visible, so your efforts are worth it without a doubt. Furthermore, SEO techniques can help you accomplish all the business objectives, like enhancing brand awareness. Hence it is here to stay for the long term.

What Can You Do with an SEO Checker Tool?

If we are talking about SEO checkers, this blog cannot be complete without knowing its benefits. So let’s understand what you can do with the SEO Checker or why you should use it:

Increase website visibility

One of the most vital functions of an SEO checker is enhancing visibility, making it easier for potentials to find you when they search for something they offer. Visibility is related to your site’s rankings directly.

Improves site’s authority

In SEO checker, the authority concept is relatively new; however, it is becoming quite important to search engines as it is critical to web users. Authority means your website is high quality and trustworthy and has something to offer.

Boosts business potential

SEO checker can help you build long-lasting relationships with your target audience, enhance customer experience, and improve authority.

It can also drive more people to the site, offer you an edge over the competition, and enhance conversations. All this translates to more sales and loyal clients and, of course, a lot of growth for your business.

Better ROI

SEO checker has performed flawlessly regarding ROI. One of the biggest reasons SEO produces a high ROI is that it attracts a lot of traffic and the main aim of SEO is to show up when the target audience actively searches for your products and services.

In some cases, visitors are ready to purchase your products or services. So when they find your site on top results, they might turn into your buyers.

Track your results to check the progress

SEO checker isn’t volatile, unlike PPC. So you can reduce your monthly budget with SEO, but you can surely enjoy the rewards with the established visibility. Even though results aren’t permanent, they are more long-lasting than other marketing channels.

Increase website credibility

The best part about an SEO checker is that it allows your site to rank higher on search engines. It helps in increasing the business’ credibility. You can add some content to your site and enhance the site’s speed. Furthermore, you can use some keywords under SEO analysis so your site can get a better ranking.

Affordable 

Without a second, though, you can go for an SEO checker because it is very affordable. Search engines tend to crawl sites that help promote valuable content and help you find potential patrons. You need to invest some time to review your content and aim to write the best for your site so you can make the most of your SEO efforts.

Blends perfectly with content marketing

SEO checkers and accurate content always go hand in hand. While creating helpful content for your target audience, you need to ensure that you include relevant images and texts so your site will rank better in search engines.

Above all, it can work better for your content marketing also. All you need to do is ensure that you write high-quality content and have your keywords optimized. Search engines love unique content.

PPC campaigns made simple

SEO checker and paid marketing strategies like PPC works well when amalgamated together. This is because PPC allows your site to appear on top of different paid search results, and SEO does the same thing organically. Hence PPC can help you make the most of your PPC campaigns.

Content Optimization Expert

SEO checker is a content optimization tool designed to help content creators and bloggers analyze and research keywords. All you need to do is plug some topic, and with a click of a button, you can optimize content as per the user’s demand. Above all, organized content will outrank on search engines without a doubt.

What are Content Optimization Tools, and Why Do You Need Them?

Content optimization tools guide you in building a scalable content strategy to improve your ranking and clicks. It helps you compare your blog posts with other content ranking higher on Google. So you make the changes accordingly. It saves you from various expenses like payment of SEO agencies.

Content optimization tool and SEO checker are related to each other because content optimization tool presents your web pages in an attractive manner in the eyes of search engines and users.

Now you may be thinking about how SEO checkers do this?

An SEO checker promotes your site’s ranking by converting the keyword research into the text, and we all know very well that the main motive of SEO is to give your website higher rankings. This reason makes them related to each other.

Perks of Content Optimization Tools

After discussing the SEO checker, you may also want to know about its benefits. So, let’s learn some of its essential benefits that can prove to be very beneficial for your website.

An upper hand over competitors.

SEO checker is an ideal SEO tool for content optimization as your rivals will invest in SEO that you also need to do so.

When you invest in SEO content optimization tools, you can easily outrank the competition in search engines and attain a good market share. It would be best to start by learning about your rivals, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, and creating and managing an online reputation.

An SEO checker will ensure that your site loads in no time and is mobile-friendly. It would be best if you focused on offering the best user experience.

Increases retention rate

SEO checker aligns with all the SEO practices, and the high-quality value content enables the target audience to stay on your site for a long time. When you offer high-quality content to your target audience, it boosts your site’s rankings.

One of the best parts about SEO content optimization tools is that it allows your site to become more engaging. Content SEO does this quickly by using the best possible target keywords, making your content easily findable for your given target audience.

Enhanced user experience

SEO checker is an ideal SEO tool for content optimization for researchers. As the algorithms improve, everyday search engines are also becoming better to provide better SEO results. You can gain a large target audience with quality content as each visitor will find something to relate to it.

Brand awareness

SEO checker goes way beyond building brand trust and credibility as the content you post on a site will help you improve your SEO game. When you have an online journal, you can quickly build brand awareness.

Hence SEO and content creation go together perfectly. SEO allows you to educate your target audience. SEO drive content mainly uses keywords and link building to make the most of brand awareness.

Your site will rank higher in organic searches when you post more content that aligns with your brand. Hence general public gets more aware of your brand.

Easy to navigate website

SEO checker uses SEO keywords research, which allows you to pay attention to the site’s design, page structure, and speed. You can get an idea of how the site works on a mobile device. It would be best to ignore mobile optimization, come what may. Even though you need to put in a lot of effort to build it, it is all worth it.

Total value for money

SEO checker relies on SEO keywords research which offers a long-term commitment to rank higher on search engines. Besides seeing instant results, you will also see SEO benefits after the first investment. It will add some extra perks to your marketing technique.

All you need to do is invest in SEO regularly. One of the best parts about SEO content optimization is that you don’t need to burn a hole in your pocket, as it allows you to make the most of your ROI.

Collection of all marketing initiatives

Several people don’t see SEO Checker as a strategy. SEO content optimization isn’t a single marketing approach that stands out in the crowd, but it merges with online marketing strategies.

All the marketing activities work together when SEO blends with website blog content, copywriting, and online advertising. It helps create a compelling bond that improves your SEO ranking and enhances your brand awareness without a doubt.

Get more reach

SEO checker allows you to integrate various platforms. It will help you enhance your social media followers. The more people learn about your site, the more they will be interested in your products and services.

When people come to your site, they will enter your sales funnel even if the potential visitors don’t become your patrons, as you would have an opportunity to keep the visitors updated with the latest products and services.

Break into new markets

SEO checker allows you to expand your potential target audience, and it also allows you to reach new markets. You can dive into new markets if your content ranks top on search engines. You can also attract new users using content optimization tools. You can use specific keywords to make the most of your new market.

Best SEO Checker and Content Optimization Tools

Here, we will look at some of the best SEO checker tools that you can use to optimize your content and reach your website to a higher ranking.

Sitechecker

Sitechecker stands out among the competitors because, in addition to the standard services (site audit, analysis of positions, tracking SERP, checking backlinks), which everyone has, they have functionalities that few competitors on the market. They include:

– Integration of Google Analytics and Google Search Console
– Chrome-extension, with which you can audit the page in the Browser
– Constant monitoring of the site, etc.

Kazan SEO

Kazan SEO is the best SEO checker I have ever used. It is a free and transparent tool that gives you many valuable keywords to optimize.

Now, you may be wondering why this tool is free, so here is the answer. It is free because it is just a passion project, something to give the SEO community back after all that it’s given to the founder.

Market muse

This tool helps you plan, audit, and optimize the content as per the norms of enterprise-level businesses. It is like an SEO checker that gives content the deserving score based on the competition.

SEMRush Writing Assistant

This tool helps you optimize your content by providing the best keywords based on the top 10-ranking pages for your chosen keywords. It gives you the basic information on keywords, topic themes, and readability to help you to improve the quality of your content. There is an issue with this tool as it provides little guidance on the activities of your competitors on SERPs.

Conclusion

SEO provides several benefits or long-term success to any website. Brands that invest in good SEO and SEO checkers feel more connected with their audience than other websites.

These tools dissect, analyze, and tweak your website’s content and provide a good ranking in SERPs.

Image Credit: Inner and top images provided by the author; Thank you!

The post How To Boost Your Rankings on Budget with SEO Checker Optimization Tools appeared first on ReadWrite.

Walnut, the disruptive product demo startup, has designed its buzzworthy Sales Experience Platform to help SaaS sellers seamlessly connect with their prospects. It utilizes personalized, codeless interactive demos that are fully optimized to maximize the B2B sales process.

Walnut’s goal is to perfect the B2B buying experience. This has pushed its founders to minimize and simplify the sales process rather than add yet another layer of complexity to it. The goal from day one has been to revolutionize B2B sales process and rebuild each buying experience from the ground up.

That’s why the startup hasn’t stopped with equipping salespeople with its groundbreaking SaaS solutions. Walnut has also worked to give those on the receiving end of B2B sales transactions a very real voice through its viral #WeAreProspects campaign.

The Struggle to Sell …and the Bigger Battle to Buy (Especially in B2B Sales)

Selling is a complex and increasingly difficult process. The internet has brought the world together, which has naturally increased competition. Target audiences are easily accessible, too. But this can lead to a case of analysis paralysis as sales departments attempt to spread their budgets across a variety of sales channels and opportunities.

While selling remains a complicated challenge, buying isn’t getting any easier, either. In fact, the process of making a purchase has become more convoluted than ever before. Even for B2C interactions — which have thrived in the online 21st-century marketplace — the process of buying something remains intensive and, at times, even overwhelming. Consumers must navigate through an endless myriad of advertisements thrown their way. They need to choose between countless options and different communication channels in order to engage and make a purchase.

And yet, the B2C sales experience is, in many ways, better than its ever been. Consumers have the ability to learn about products. They can both seek out (and provide their own) real feedback. Consumers can ask questions and search for answers. They can conduct research that helps them connect their own pain points and concerns with the solutions that best fit them.

Traditional Obstacles to the B2B Sales Process

In contrast, B2B sales are arguably more difficult — especially in the complex world of SaaS platforms and software. For the B2B sales process, there are many obstacles that get in the way of an efficient sales experience.

For instance, business prospects often need to jump through a myriad of different hoops in order to even get near to a product. This is problematic because, according to Forrester, three out of every four B2B purchasers prefer to educate themselves rather than speak with sales professionals to learn about products and services. In other words, they need access in order to assess their needs and how a particular product might address them. When a product remains elusive throughout the earlier stages of a sales funnel, it can dampen the sales experience and even, at times, kill it prematurely.

In addition, many organizations also focus on the seller rather than the prospect. They employ seller-centric sales strategies that focus on the performance of a salesperson or sales team rather than keeping the emphasis on the prospects themselves.

Data Silos and Fragmentation

Data silos also restrict the ability of many companies to put their best foot forward in the B2B sales department. This means marketing teams and sales reps don’t always have the most relevant and detailed information available when engaging with a prospect.

All of this leads to a stagnant and even frustrating B2B sales experience — and the proof is in the pudding. A recent report released by Gartner claimed that nearly 80% of respondents used the phrase “very complex or difficult” to describe their most recent purchase. It doesn’t help matters that the average B2B SaaS sales cycle is a staggering 84 days long. That’s equivalent to spending an entire quarter making a purchase.

The B2B sales experience is clearly broken, and it’s high time for innovators to do something about the matter. The B2B sales process needs to make a shift that brings it more in line with the B2C model that works so much better. That’s where Walnut comes into the picture.

The #WeAreProspects Campaign Is Rewriting the B2B Sales Experience

In response to the dysfunctional B2B sales process, Walnut has launched its new viral campaign, #WeAreProspects. The brand designed the initiative to attract real-world input from others about how they might want to improve their B2B buying experiences.

The campaign highlights specific cases of poor sales experiences for buyers. It also offers discounted solutions to those purchase-related struggles. These focus on targeted B2B sales solutions starting with Walnut’s own innovative and industry-leading sales demo platform.

Walnut has focused its entire business model on enhancing the B2B sales experience. But that doesn’t mean the company has been exclusive in promoting its own goods and services during the #WeAreProspects campaign. It has also brought a number of other companies in on the initiative with tools that also complement B2B sales.

For instance, Dooly helps improve Salesforce hygiene. Postal aids in automating offline marketing. Additional partners SimilarWeb, Contractbook, Sales Assembly, and Cloudshare all bring their own unique B2B sales support to the table, too.

By offering cloud-based solutions for prospective buyers, the #WeAreProspects campaign is providing relevant 21st-century solutions that are flexible, scalable, and affordable. They can enhance the B2B selling process in the present while also setting companies up for future success.

#WeAreProspects — Every Single One of Us

The #WeAreProspects initiative is focused on one thing: bringing the attention back to the buyer. It is bringing the power of cutting-edge SaaS sales solutions to bear on the B2B sales process.

By doing so, Walnut and its partner companies are trying to overhaul the needlessly complex buyer journey. Current efforts are stifling SaaS platform adoption. They are collaborating to collectively simplify the buying experience between businesses. Walnut hopes to create a more seamless, faster experience for buyers and sellers alike.

It’s a necessary and long overdue change in the B2B sales process. After all, in the words of Walnut’s CEO Yoav Vilner, “we are all someone else’s prospects.”

The post Walnut’s #WeAreProspects Campaign Is Fixing the B2B Sales Process appeared first on ReadWrite.

A few years back, a significant compliance risk was averted with the help of call recording software.

An Account Executive (AE) in the banking industry was selling false commitments on behalf of the bank. And as expected, one call auditor landed on the particular call where the AE had spoken about the products and services with incorrect details.

What are Your Sales Reps Promising on Behalf of Your Company? With Call Recording Software You’ll Know.

Because call recording software was being used by the business, the Account Exec was found guilty, and steps were taken to set a critical example for the rest of the sales professionals in the organization.

The Importance of Call Recording Software

The importance of call recording software is still underestimated. Still, the software’s impact on the business can’t be comprehended without its prolonged application or till it catches a few offenders such as the AE in the above incident.

But let’s not confine our knowledge to compliance and regulations. A call recording tool is much more than that. Let’s deep dive!

What is Call Recording Software for Business?

A sales call recording software is a tool that records sales calls and video conferences over voice over the internet protocol (VoIP) or Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

The tool connects to the meeting and records the call over the internet or via a phone.

The software records call and transcribe calls, stores, shares, and analyzes them.

What are Call Recording Software’s benefits, and why shouldn’t we underestimate its power?

• Sales coaching

Coaching isn’t a task that needs software or a tool — or so some leaders believe.  But without a doubt, you can carry on coaching your reps with higher skill when you use call recording as a guide.

With call recording software you point out the sound of ones voice as they speak, and easily see the behavior of non-listening in the conversation and failure to answer questions asked. Best of all, you don’t need to say a word — you can have your sales rep bring you a list of three to five ways they can improve their communication skills when on a call.

When you add a call recording software tool you will augment and accelerate coaching in your business and make it more productive.

The use of a sales playbook, call recording, automated feedback, and call analysis reports makes the call recording software an asset and an assist — adding instant value to coaching sessions.

You’ll find coaching sessions using call recording software will be beneficial to both you and your reps — and best of all — your coaching and suggestions are immediately measurable.

• Automated note-making

Why would you want your team to invest time in note-making when the crew can easily invest time in core selling activities?

Call transcriptions from the call recording software cut down the manual work behind making notes and add more quality.

The chances of making duplicate entries and missing information are reduced to a large extent. Every detail is captured and noted with more information.

While the software is busy making notes, the rep can get busy asking quality counter questions to the buyers.

• Better follow-up strategy

No one said follow-ups are easy.

It takes approximately eight follow-ups to catch the shark.

Everyone in business knows that a single channel can’t keep up with sales strategy make the cut. The omnichannel approach is a must when it comes to follow-ups.

The real issue is how do you get that kind of data? Who to follow? When to follow? Where to follow? And What to ask?

You need a call recording tool to assist with that kind of data.

The call transcription, client details, call recordings, etc., help you to a great extent in unveiling what clients want. All of the pieces come together to make follow-up more practical and sensible.

Moreover, if you wish to add a pinch of personalization to your follow-ups, you need to invest time in listening to the call recordings.

• Better customer service and support

All businesses need customer service and support.

Your customer service department as well as your sales reps are directly involved with the customers. Each team must stay on its toes to maintain the business and company reputation. It’s essential to manage customer and sales calls on a stable platform that stays connected with other teams.

The marketing, product, and sales teams will need to stay in touch with customer calls.

The other side of the software is about service managers coaching users on different soft skills to improve calls and work with the customer service staff to improve customer experience.

• Greater compliance and regulation

Like the example above, many industries face the same challenges with sales reps taking incompliant methods and intentionally breaking regulations to meet their ambitious goals.

Despite several rules and regulations by the federal government and organizations, sales professionals have bent them time and again to gain monetary benefits from them.

By the time the scam is uncovered, it’s made enough noise not to hold anyone accountable.

With call recording software, it’s easier to catch hold of such incidents, that too- at the bud stage.

• Measurable call quality

Every call recording software may not offer the call quality measurable metrics, but a few conversation intelligence tools provide both.

Check out why companies should invest in Conversation Intelligence Tools here.

If you aren’t using one with call quality metrics, it may not make much difference today, but eventually, it’ll make you lose a lot of opportunities.

For one, there’s no other way to improve call performance and compare with other team members.

• Market Insights

One of the most significant advantages I have witnessed with a call recording tool is getting authentic feedback and insights from prospects and clients, which are hard to find from secondary research.

Prospects spill out major details regarding-

• Industry trends
• Economic drivers
• Challenges and pain points
• Opportunities
• Organization secrets
• Decision-makers
• Product feedback

A call recording software is not a must-have at this point for many organizations, but most of them have started realizing the competitive advantages it brings to the table.

If you’re someone who wants the sales team to make a significant cut this year, you must revisit your thoughts and shoot a proposal over (to the powers that be in your company) to invest in a call recording software.

Image Credit: Pexels; Thank you!

The post Why Companies Should Choose Call Recording Software for Business appeared first on ReadWrite.

Recent digital transformations have remade the B2C experience, and while B2B has been catching up, it still has room for improvement. To meet the expectations of today’s buyers, both B2B and B2C organizations need to move away from legacy systems that focused on sellers’ needs and adopt an empowered sales approach that’s digital, highly automated, and buyer-centric.

Empowered sales combine the right sales architecture, technology, and customer insights to support a guided selling approach that can meet the buyer’s needs at each step along their journey.

In the wake of widescale digital acceleration since March 2020, is now the right time to embark on a new approach to sales? Yes, because empowered sales can help organizations achieve digital transformation goals and build on those improvements.

Here are six key benefits to adopting an empowered sales approach that can optimize sales and drive revenue.

1. Empower a more efficient sales force

Developing the right architecture and implementing the right technology gives sales teams the resources to meet their customers’ needs, earn their trust, and establish long-term loyalty.

Empowered sales technology also streamlines the customer journey across every channel and at each touchpoint. This allows sales organizations to deliver one-to-one personalized experiences at scale across physical and digital channels.

2. Unify the customer experience

Data unification combined with operational streamlining allows organizations to create one CX platform that spans marketing, sales, commerce, and service for a seamless buyer-seller experience regardless of channel or journey stage.

As Forrester notes in its Predictions 2022 report, customers and employees are demanding more seamless cross-channel experiences and more convenience. A seamless buyer-seller journey will lead to increased sales and customer loyalty.

3. Achieve greater customer understanding

Unified customer data also allows for comprehensive account management and generates buyer insights for more timely, personal, consultative and relevant customer engagements.

This approach can help organizations break away from the digital sameness that makes it difficult for many customers to tell one brand’s online experiences apart from another.

4. Develop actionable customer insights at scale

Much of the recent digital pivot has focused on implementing technology to generate clearer customer insights. Despite that, Forrester predicts that three-quarters of automated B2B personalization efforts will fall short of their ROI goals in 2022 due to gaps in customer insights.

The empowered sales approach enables organizations to drive the creation of usable insights by combining automated data collection and analysis across the buyer-seller journey with artificial intelligence-driven insights.

5. Improve workflows to close more deals

The factor that most influences B2B buying decisions is an organization’s demonstration of competence, per Forrester.

The empowered sales approach includes an end-to-end workflow that gives the sales team the product information and customer insights they need in real-time to answer buyer questions and close more deals.

6. Develop new business models

Subscriptions, pay-as-you-go, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL), direct-to-consumer (D2C), and other new business models are easier to launch from the foundation that empowered sales provides. Comprehensive data and insights show where the opportunities are, and unified knowledge bases and workflows allow for faster rollouts and more effective sales enablement.

Planning and implementing empowered sales

The empowered sales transformation is a long-range process that requires support from stakeholders across the company, especially from leadership. Once that buy-in is established, organizations can plan for three key stages: adopting an adaptive sales process, unifying data, and then orchestrating sales, marketing, commerce, and customer support.

Guided Selling Technology Adoption

Guided selling technology adoption and process development give the sales team the tools they need to better know and engage customers in relevant ways at the appropriate times. Properly executed guided selling solutions provide end-to-end support for the sales team and increase pipeline transparency so that sales team members are always ready with the next best step or action or offer for each customer.

Another benefit of guided selling is the easier management of sales relationships with distributors. That can improve the employee experience and give the organization a competitive advantage.

Companies should not forget about Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) to empower their sales teams, in particular, CPQ makes it easy to provide self-service options for B2B buyers that include value-based pricing, customized product suggestions, and highly accurate quotes based on personalization data.

CPQ Conversions

While CPQ drives conversions, upsells and cross-sells, it can also use data to highlight the most in-demand and strategic offers while suppressing offers of less or no value to the customer.

Finally, data-driven insights are necessary for a fully functional empowered selling program.

Because 67% of B2B buyers would rather do their own research before engaging with a vendor, insights about unknown visitors and targets can identify their intentions and help sellers decide on the next best step to engage.

An insights-driven program will focus on generating leads and revenue by collecting in-depth customer and product insights across the organization to suggest the next best steps for sales follow-ups.

Conclusion

The combination of data-driven insights with a guided selling approach and CPQ enables organizations to empower their sales teams to better understand their customers, time and calibrate offers more precisely, and provide self-service that meets customer needs and frees sales team members to work on more complex or challenging interactions.

The result is a team that’s empowered to make the most of their sales resources to demonstrate competence, understanding, and value to customers.

Image Credit: Pexels; Thank you!

The post 6 Reasons to Embrace Empowered Sales – and Where to Begin appeared first on ReadWrite.