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How Much is The Human Factor a Part of Your Business?

April 21, 2018 by Malik Muhammad Leave a Comment

Human beings are the ultimate computers and represent the best of higher technology and advanced thinking. Everything that is created comes from the mind and/or actions of a human being. The systems that enable our bodies to function. The organs with their complex job specifications. The magnificence of our body parts. The greatness of our minds. This synopsis of our functionality is the basis for the conclusion that the human factor is essential in all areas of growth, productivity and progress.

How much is the human factor a part of your business?

This may appear to be a silly question but the heart of the business is still about people and profits. International trade and commerce or selling a few kilograms of potatoes are ultimately about getting people to purchase your product. They buy from you because they choose to have relations with you. An investor may understand your business plan, respect the rationale of your cash flow projection and visualise the potential of the product.

A thorough investor will also look at the person behind the product because they are also investing in you – the human being. One of the reasons brands such as Louis Vuitton are at the premier end of the buying experience is due to how they interact with the persons who patronise their stores. One is greeted then allowed to casually stroll around the store until help is requested. Prior purchases can be checked on the system and, if required, advice is offered as to future purchases. Excellent product knowledge coupled with professional yet friendly manners are evident from team members and a welcoming atmosphere enhances one’s shopping experience. A gem master specialist such as Living Stones Jewellery (UK) Ltd in Hatton Garden, London has a similar ethos within its corporate culture.

On another note – online shopping is both easy and convenient. It is also generally cost effective and reaches a wider audience. Poor reviews about a customer experience also spread very quickly by social media and often to an even wider audience. Negative publicity can result in reduced sales leading to lower profits or even calls to boycott the brand. There is real competition from similar businesses for the goods/services that you supply. You can distinguish yourself through your customer service.

When product quality and prices are more or less similar; the competitive edge comes from excellent customer service coupled with an overall positive experience. This brings us back to the importance of considering the human factor.

7 ways to enhance the customer experience:

Responding to emails or complaints in a timely manner
Developing a user-friendly website
Training team members in effective communication and how to properly observe and interpret body language
Engaging in cultural sensitivity workshops
Seeing your brand/product or service through the eyes of your clientele
Keeping abreast of global, national and local factors that affect your business
Understanding how your product continues to add value to people’s lives

These suggestions are by no means exhaustive. They merely serve as a catalyst to help you focus on the customer experience in your business. People will pay for experiences and things they value. Price is relative once a value is ascertained. A handbag is a handbag and a gem is a gem. The value to the customer justifies the actual price they are willing to pay.

The positive emotion attached to the buying experience will make customers seek to repeat said experience with your business. This is applicable online and well as in person. A little friendly conversation at the point of sale, a dynamic advertising campaign or emailed updates about new / the same products or services will foster goodwill between your business and your (potential) customers. It’s often the little things that make a big difference. Being mindful of the personal or human factor gives you that extra advantage in this ever competitive business environment.

About the Author

Malik Muhammad was raised and educated in Jamaica, read law in London and is the conceptualiser of The Empowerment Mastery System.

Malik enjoys vegan cooking, quad biking, jazz and yoga. He is an after-dinner speaker, workshop facilitator and convenes international & corporate inspirational seminars.

Malik is the host of online talk show ‘Reasoning Sessions’ and specialises in sharing self-empowerment strategies with diverse and multi-faith audiences.

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What Is a Sales Opportunity?

April 16, 2018 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

“To succeed, jump as quickly at opportunities as you do at conclusions.” — Benjamin Franklin

Of course, before you put your gym shoes on, you need to step back and look at your sales process. Does your sales team know what distinguishes sales opportunities from leads? Are they prioritizing their time and channeling their efforts where they get the most returns?

It is important to define what a sales opportunity is. As basic as this sounds, your definition becomes the qualifiers that move people from lead to opportunity. It gives your sales reps guidelines to follow so they can manage their leads consistently with the rest of the team. And, in turn, you get forecasting accuracy and a true picture of where people and accounts are in your sales pipeline.

Leads VS. Sales Opportunities

Simply put, sales opportunities are people or accounts that have been qualified. You’ve called these contacts and talked about their needs. You’ve assessed their fit. They’re in your pipeline and are in touch with you. You feel good about the possibility of closing the deal.

Contrast this with leads. A lead is just a contact that you have minimal information about. It could be a marketing-generated lead, which is inbound and top-of-the-funnel. The contact might have downloaded content or filled out a form. Or, it could be a sales-generated lead, gathered through efforts of your outbound sales team or SDRs.

Communication lies in between. You need to talk to your leads and gather enough information to help you qualify them. Do they share the top characteristics typical of your sales opportunities? Can you justify devoting more of your time and effort to nurturing these leads?

Top Characteristics of Sales Opportunities

“Find your trigger. Find the qualities that make a lead more likely to convert, and focus on those leads.” – Brian Kardon, CMO at Lattice Engines, a B2B cloud applications company.

In time, you will notice similar characteristics that are shared by leads who convert to sales opportunities. Take note of the top three: need, interest, and fit. These characteristics help you come up with an accurate profile of your ideal customer. You can then focus your efforts on nurturing leads that more or less fit into this mold.

Need: This pertains to the common pain points shared by your ideal customers. Your qualified sales opportunities experience a similar problem. The primary motivation to buy is to fix this problem and lessen the pain. Your sales rep’s job is to help identify the pain and frame your product as the best-fit salve.

Interest: Having a need for your product – or a pain point that has to be resolved – is just the start. Need does not always translate to interest. For instance, a start-up might need a CRM software. But, if they’re set on using MS Excel for their client management needs, a CRM system is going to be difficult to sell.

Fit: Here, you need to consider your product and how it fits into your lead’s current business and its capacity. Because, as much as you are able to lessen pain points, a SMB is not a good fit if your product is enterprise-scale. A business with a few hundred bucks to spare will not be able to buy your million dollar solution.

How to Manage Your Sales Opportunities

“It’s not about having the right opportunities. It’s about handling the opportunities right.” – Mark Hunter, author, speaker and lead expert at The Sales Hunter

In a lot of ways, the line between closed deals and lost sales depends on how you manage sales opportunities. Here are some things to consider:

Accurately qualify your leads: There may be cases wherein you promote your leads to sales opportunities prematurely. It could be that the lead needs further nurturing, and is not yet sales-ready. When you inaccurately qualify your leads, you end up devoting your efforts on opportunities that take longer to close.

Know your buyer: It takes trust and rapport when you want to develop business relationships with your sales opportunities. To get to this point, you need to know your prospective buyer like the back of your hand. So, do the groundwork and understand your prospect’s business, their buying processes, needs/ motivations and the decision-making team, among other aspects.

Know your prospect’s obstacles to buying: There are always perceived risks when buying a product or solution. Understand what might keep a prospect from making a purchase and address these issues.

Track the deal’s progress: Once a lead becomes an opportunity, it becomes more important to track deal milestones, instead of monitoring activity levels. A prospect’s time on your website, their downloads and all that are still good indicators of interest. However, you need to focus more on where they are in the decision-making process and their requirements to move this process along.

Don’t be afraid to disqualify: Not all sales opportunities move to the next stage. Some of them become lost opportunities due to something that you discover as you engage with them. When this happens, don’t be afraid to disqualify. This is ultimately better than devoting your time to opportunities you can’t close.

This article first appeared on Tenfold

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6 Sales and Marketing Tips & Ideas to Grow Your Business

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What Is the Meaning Of Pipeline in Sales and Marketing

A Guide to Choosing the Best Digital Channel for Your Business

April 2, 2018 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

The availability of digital channels is now more widespread than ever. From one standpoint, this phenomenon can make marketing services easier for marketers. It’s not only faster to deliver your message through digital marketing channels, but it’s also a convenient way to measure the results of your marketing campaigns through data analytics.

On the other hand, having too many digital channels may also present challenges to your marketing team. It could get confusing and overwhelming to develop an integrated digital marketing plan, where you’re able to leverage every piece of digital marketing technology out there. Some companies, however, end up spreading themselves too thin in their earnest desire to establish a strong presence in the online marketing space.

While it’s important for your marketing strategy to include the use of digital channels, it’s equally crucial for you to identify where to focus your efforts and resources. Take note that digital marketing channels may use varied tools and systems on their platform. Therefore, you’ll need to have a thorough understanding of how each one works vis-à-vis the goals, budget, and desired results of your team to help you match the right platform for your business.

Use the accompanying infographic as your starting point.

Infographic by Connext Digital

A Simple Guide To Making Your Meetings Count

March 29, 2018 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

Meetings.

Just about every business or organization needs to hold them. Meetings are an excellent way to gather team members to brainstorm and work on projects together. They’re also necessary for planning major initiatives and making tough decisions in the company.

The problem, however:

Not all meetings are valuable, and some are even downright harmful to an organization’s productivity and profitability.

Did you know?

Employees spend 31 hours on meetings per month on average. And how do meetings goers spend those hours? More than 90% daydreamed, 73% did other work, and 39% even slept during the meeting!

As a result, businesses in the United States lose $37 billion annually on salary costs all because of unnecessary and ineffective meetings.

The stats have spoken. We need to change the way we conduct meetings, and this guide will show you how to make them effective and productive.

The First Question To Ask

“Do I really need to call for a meeting?”

The answer depends on whether the outcome of the meeting will impact the organization in a big way. Here are three legitimate reasons to hold a meeting:

To Make A Tough Decision: Rolling out major changes (ex.: overhauling your employee policy) without keeping your team on the same page can raise a lot of questions and misplaced fear. A well-organized meeting can allay your workforce’s biggest concerns and even increase buy-in.

To Respond To A Crisis: Declining sales for the past three months, a data security breach, or a natural disaster are situations that require a meeting. Your business is fighting for survival and everything hinges on how you react as an organization.

To Get Approval: You’re about to take on a major project (ex.: a big client just signed up). You and your team have come up with a plan. All you need to do now is get the right people to commit, and calling for a meeting is often a good idea.

If you’re still not sure if you should call for the meeting, then calculate how much it will cost. Better yet, use a meeting cost calculator such as this one from the Harvard Business Review.

For example:

You want to call for a meeting with the sales team to get an update on their progress.

The team is made up of four sales reps and a sales manager. Using the median annual salaries from US News, a 30-minute meeting with your team will cost $144.

Note, though, that the cost doesn’t take into account other factors outside of the meeting. This includes the time attendees spend going to the meeting and back or the loss of momentum.

Is paying $144 and ruining the momentum of your sales team to get an update and 30 minutes facetime justified?

In most cases, the answer is no.

Set An Agenda And Direction For The Meeting

The executives over at Amazon have a tight schedule. If you need to call for a meeting, you need more than a meeting agenda. You better be able to write a six-page document detailing the agenda. CEO Jeff Bezos calls these ‘narratives.’

Here’s Bezos’ justification for the requirement:

“Full sentences are harder to write…They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”

To ensure the meeting flows smoothly, Bezos requires attendees to spend the first 30 minutes of the meeting reading the document. Doing so eliminates many of the initial questions attendees may have, which can interrupt and derail the meeting.

Amazon’s approach to meetings will not suit every organization, of course.

But the message is clear:

If you want productive and effective meetings, you must ensure everyone is on the same page.

A six-page narrative may not be necessary, but you want a detailed enough agenda to steer the direction of the meeting. Here are the essentials the agenda must have:

Set Start/End Times And Location: If a meeting starts late, it will end late. So be firm about start and end times. And don’t forget to double-check if no one else is using the space. If you switch to change locations, let every attendee know. Having to arrive at a room on time only to find the meeting is taking place in another is beyond annoying!

Define The Meeting’s Objective: When writing down the objective, use clear Do away with words like “review” or “discuss.” If you need to get approval of the proposed digital marketing strategy, then say it as it is. A “discussion” of the marketing plan can go on for as long as people have something to say, obscuring the objective of the meeting.

State The Decision-Making Process: Be clear on how the meeting will decide the issue under discussion. If group consensus is a must, you will want to poll the attendees. If you’re seeking input from the group but want an individual to ultimately decide, then write down the person’s name in the agenda.

Appoint A Facilitator: A meeting can get chaotic, but a facilitator can get it back on track. Aside from keeping the discussion on point, a facilitator’s responsibilities include encouraging quiet members to speak up, end a discussion that’s going nowhere, and observe time limits for agendas to name a few.

Capture Notes During The Meeting

People will raise questions, share ideas, and voice concerns during a meeting. Don’t let these insights go to waste. Capture them with the right tools.

You can go the low-tech route with nothing more than a whiteboard, a marker, and a couple of sheets of paper. This simple set-up works best for small meetings with only 5 participants or less.

For larger meetings, however, you’ll likely need to source better audio-visual equipment.

You may need a projector and a fastfold screen to present data visualizations, important tidbits, and other information related to the agenda. If you need to poll attendees while maintaining anonymity, iPads or tablets with custom polling software are what you need.

However you want to take notes, though, make sure you put them to good use.

End The Meeting With An Action Plan

You’ve done a lot of brainstorming. You, along with the attendees, have identified the essential steps in a major project. Not to mention you’ve got plenty of insightful notes, thanks to everyone’s participation.

But now what!?

At the end of the meeting, everyone may have different opinions on what transpired inside the room and what everyone should do next. If you don’t get attendees on the same page, you can bet nobody will take action based on the meeting.

So the lesson:

Always end your meeting with an action plan!

Make sure attendees know what they should do when they return to their stations.

Go back to the steps, notes, and other findings you wrote down. Right next to it, write down the name of the person responsible for that step or action. Doing so eliminates any confusion as to who should do what.

For good measure:

Review every action item at the end of the meeting and create a copy for every person involved.

For those complaints or comments that are related to the agenda (but are not actionable yet), you will want to visit and resolve those in the near future.

About the Author

Nathan Sharpe is the entrepreneur behind Biznas, a blog where he serves practical business advice and tips to readers. Learning and helping others learn is his passion.

10 Simple Steps for Mastering Social Media

March 12, 2018 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

Social Media is an online platform that came into existence with an aim to build social networks and social relations. Sharing information, similar personal or career interest, backgrounds, activities, or real-life connections is easy to do. It is a computer-mediated tech that commonly facilitates the creation & sharing of ideas, information, career opportunities or any other forms of expression via some virtual communities and social networks.

Most of the available content is user-generated in forms of text posts or digital videos/ photos. In this era of technology, social media has become an effective platform for marketing. The traditional method of marketing is fading with the emergence of online marketing or social media marketing. Following is the list of some top social networking sites where you can promote your business or product:

Facebook
YouTube
Twitter
Pinterest
Linkedin
Instagram
Google Plus

Social media can be overwhelming sometimes but you do not need to worry. You can certainly make a success of social media with this simple formula:

Master the Social Media in just 10 Steps:-

Define Your Marketing Goals: Make a plan in which you need define your marketing goals. For instance, you may want to build brand loyalty with your customers or create a mailing list to promote your new products or other news. You may want to drive traffic to your online portal so that they can know your brand and get converted into sales. Or it can be to increase brand recognition in all-purpose.

Identify Best Social Networking Platforms For Your Business: If you are an artist and want to increase your audience then Pinterest or Instagram would be more suitable social networking platforms for you then YouTube or Twitter. But if you are a comedian then you better switch to YouTube and Facebook to target more audience. For people who are into cooking, they can select YouTube for their brand promotion and generate a good amount of traffic. While to generate leads and sales you must choose Facebook and can also target search engines like Google. Thus, it’s you who need to decide which social networking platform is suitable and perfect for your business.

For an e-commerce business, Facebook is also upcoming best options to generate leads and sales. For brand promotion related to real estates, finance services you should choose Twitter.

Figure out which social media option will let you achieve your aim. In a nutshell, Twitter will allow you to communicate with your brands with a shorter message and work great. Facebook on the other hands provides live streaming features and several options to create a particular page based on your brand. While Instagram and Pinterest are amazing choices to share images of your product, celebrity, art and many more.

Launch Your Profile: Now it’s time to have a social media presence and for that purpose, you need to create profiles on social networking sites. Social Media is undeniably expanding day-by-day, connecting all cities and countries covering all continents and linking the earth on just a platform. You can begin with a description of your business or brand that gains the user’s attention. Mention a link connecting to your official website. Add the logo of your company/business or brand and then some other pertinent photos. For instance, you can add an engaging cover image on your profile. Use some simple tools to create your own images or hire a professional for that. You can also get a custom FB cover photo at $100 at DesignPax.

Do Regular Posting: Once you are with your profile on social media platforms and have built your social presence for your business then it’s important to keep it updating time to time. Visitors always desire to get some fresh content. So feed the latest news, videos, text, and photos on your social accounts for 3-4 times a week. Well, it doesn’t have to be all original.

Engage People: To engage the audience with your brand, product or company; you need to comment, reply and share. Here you’ve to become social talking, appreciating and sharing own and other’s content. Feed the audience something good and reply when asked anything. Comment on other’s queries. Share what people think about your brand and why they like it.

Start Online Campaigns: Start a campaign on social media platforms like Facebook from where you increase post engagement, get leads and convert them into your sales. For this purpose, you would have to pay a sum of amount to the social networking giant Facebook. You need to define your audience based on their gender, interest, geographic location, education and many more. After choosing your target, create an ad content, then you need to go to PPC (Pay per Click) and pay accordingly. Then you can monitor your conversion rates.

A/B Testing: A method to compare two versions of a webpage, app, or campaign to determine which one performs best. You need to do A/B testing (known as bucket testing or spilt testing) to determine which variation performs best for a specific conversion goal. A/B testing can be done on ads, web pages and for email marketing. In this process, you need to collect data, recognize goals, generate hypothesis, create variations, then run the experiment and analyze results.

Generate Leads: You can generate leads through your web portal or social media campaigns or via email marketing. Most of the people in the market have adapted in-direct engagement such as FAQ. But now with the growing expectations and goals, people started using direct and effective engagement methods like live chat, forums, and help centers. Generate leads from Facebook, Twitter, and email.

Deploy Automation Tools: To save you time, you can deploy any automation tool such as SocialOomph, Hootsuite, Buffer and Zoho Social. You can use automation to plan updates. Automation actually cuts down your workload.

But it doesn’t mean that you forget about the personal link with your followers. You need to maintain a balance between both. You can use this software to get all activities done into a central place that makes you not to run around logging in on various platforms.

But also make sure not to automate everything. Utilize this application only to save your precious time and keep costs low.

Track and Measure Outcome: You can track how many visitors or followers you have got in a day, a week or in a month. Also, measure how much growth is noticed on your social media accounts. Using analytics feature you can your progress towards the set marketing goals. Although this feature is inbuilt in social media; yet you can also use a third-party tool for offering measurements. There are some big names such as Hootsuite, Buffer and Zoho Social for the same purpose. These platforms can handle your posting and alter you to comment on any particular post.

About the Author

Krishna R is research analyst at marketresearch.biz based in New York City, NY. He spent nearly ten years in the digital marketing and market research industry and works as a Research Analyst, his interest in analyses and researches various market data. He is also an avid reader who loves to read and learn new things. Besides this, He is a YouTube and travel enthusiast.

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