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Professional Selling with LinkedIn

B2B Marketing and Sales, Content Marketing, Revenue Programs, Sales Enablement, Social Media

Professional selling is senior selling. It may be a seller-doer model, as in consulting, or an expert-driven sales model for high value products and services. Professional selling is not about directing a junior team of salespeople, it is about senior people doing the selling – establishing their personal brand, actively building a network and engaging both existing relationships and new prospects with thought leadership and insights.

Clearly, LinkedIn is an established resource for professional sales. It helps senior professionals find and engage with specific prospective clients or buyers with personal 1:1 interaction, establish professional credibility and share content and resources to nurture and develop prospects. It also offers paid options to build awareness and encourage lead conversions.

So how can senior professionals take advantage of LinkedIn? You can simplify it with three steps (and a few sub-steps). 1. Develop a strategy, 2. Establish the systems you need, 3. Execute your program(s).

April 8, 2020/0 Comments/by John Stone

9 Questions for Your Sales and Marketing Plan

B2B Marketing and Sales, Chief Revenue Officer, Revenue Growth, Revenue Marketing, Revenue Strategy

Accelerated, predictable, and sustainable revenue growth requires a company-wide commitment. When developing a marketing plan, consider these questions. These can help you develop your Revenue Architecture and expand your revenue performance potential.

The 9 dimensions take a broad view of revenue growth dimensions and help you focus your sales and marketing planning.

January 24, 2020/0 Comments/by John Stone

Mapping Your Way to Greater Advisor Engagement

B2B Marketing and Sales, Buyer Engagement, Revenue Architecture, Revenue Strategy

“The failure to follow a well-established development process is causing many organizations to miss the mark when it comes to designing content and campaigns that resonate strongest with their customers and prospects.” -Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy & Marketing Office, Corporate Visions

Everyone will agree that building demand is one of the primary goals of marketing. In fact, it may well be Goal #1. The question is, what can asset managers do to create stronger demand for their products with advisors?

In the world of demand-generation marketing, we hold that creating Message Maps centered on a Pain-Empathy-Insights approach is a critical step in the process.

Building Message Maps is a great way to bring structure to the development of communications assets designed to escort prospects through the buying cycle.

Before we describe them in more detail, let’s consider a serious challenge Simon Sinek issued to conventional thinking about prospect engagement.

Simon got it right.

For those of you who haven’t read his books or seen his Ted Talks, Simon Sinek is a highly regarded marketing consultant and educator who has inspired tens of thousands of people to turn his concepts into action.

Simon says companies that do marketing right create overtures that focus on why they do what they do rather than on what they produce.

This only stands to reason, he says, because it corresponds with how people behave in the marketplace. They buy based on why they need not on what they get.

How does this apply to you and the messaging you create?

Relevance is the answer.

Focusing on the why allows you to speak to your ideal audiences in their own voice and to create communications that are specific and pertinent. That’s the way to maximize your impact and fulfill one of today’s marketing’s most important missions – relevance.

To develop high impact, content-driven demand marketing and persuasive selling, start by focusing on the buyer’s pain, offer up empathy by describing and understanding their individual role, then provide insights in the form of thought-leadership content.

Here’s an example of what this looks like in a Message Map model:

Engagement Persona: Time Strapped Independent Advisor

Before you begin any coordinated communications campaign, we suggest that you build Message Maps targeting your ideal advisors.

Remember, a Message Map approach is designed to get your prospects to take the next step. You want to incent them to deepen a dialogue with you.

That’s how true engagement is created.

Download a copy of the Buyer Engagement eBook: “Exposed: The False Promises of Revenue Marketing”

Download

January 16, 2020/1 Comment/by John Stone

B2B Digital Buyer Engagement

Account-Based Marketing, B2B Marketing and Sales, Buyer Engagement, Revenue Growth

Collaborative platforms enable B2B account-based sales .

As consumers, we are accustomed to the efficiency and effectiveness of digital buying experiences. Amazon has set a bar. We search for products using almost any device, shop online, read product reviews, compare and contrast pricing information, review product descriptions, chat with customer service, access Q&As, watch videos, evaluate specs, and consider reviews and ratings. We are conditioned to getting everything we need for our buying process – right at our fingertips. So why don’t we have similar buyer experiences in B2B account-based sales?

December 11, 2019/by John Stone

Build, Measure, Refine, Repeat: How to Maximize Advisor Engagement

Buyer Engagement, Demand Generation, Revenue Architecture, Revenue Strategy

Have you Calibrated Metrics-Driven Advisor Engagement?

To engage advisors, you are using various communications tools/media channels roughly based on their ability to help you target your audience, but you may not have a good feel for their effectiveness. And perhaps there isn’t a cadence to your ‘touches’, that is, a systematic communications plan with some frequency to maximize impact. Further, you may not have a feel for your Revenue Funnel and budgets.

This is an indication that you have not:

Evaluated available communications tools / media based on their ability to help you target your audience, deliver cogent messages, control costs, and provide the highest yield potential.
Planned programs that emphasize frequency to maximize impact of systematic communications and touch individuals, at their moment of readiness when they’re ready and able to volunteer themselves as prospective buyers
Connected revenues and budgets

Metrics-Driven Methodology

To build a metrics-driven advisor engagement strategy, the first step is to connect your business model / budgets with your goals. The next step is to build a good understanding of your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or measurable values that will show the progress of your business goals. Examples include:

Number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
MQL conversion % to Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
SQL conversion % to new clients
Client Lifetime Value

Second, create a high-impact, results-focused marketing plan, choosing tools and media channels in the context of:

Target Audience Reach (how many)
Frequency of Reach (how often)
Impact (engagement/response potential)
Intimacy (relevance, resonance & personalization)

It’s advisable to test and recalibrate your plan and media mix over time. Testing will help to determine the optimal number of impressions or touch points that should be factored into your plan before you begin to see significantly diminishing returns. Testing is also essential to understanding what tactics, messages, content, formats and media are most effective AND cost-efficient.

Start small by using a few key metrics that are easy to track using your marketing automation / CRM; then build from there, ultimately incorporating predictive and other data-driven business intelligence.

Revenue Funnel Metrics

To give your plan a real litmus test, consider reverse engineering your Revenue Funnel and do the “funnel math”: From impressions and leads created at the top-of-funnel all the way through to revenue and ROI at the bottom-of-funnel.

At a high level, there are three steps:

Establish an effective understanding of the engagement potential for each of your funnel segments and channels
Tie it back into your hierarchy of metrics (see related post)
Then model your revenue architecture, that is, the channels and target spend based on top-down market budget and goals.

Taking the Revenue Funnel Metrics approach further, consider the alignment and integration of your Marketing and Sales teams in a ‘closed-loop’ revenue architecture (See related post.) Optimally marketing / sales will:

Work together to orchestrate the customer experience end-to-end and generate leads, nurture opportunities in the pipeline and ultimately convert sales and
Track / measure this end-to-end so marketing and sales can attribute revenue to marketing programs and campaigns and see what is working and not working. We call this a ‘closed-loop revenue architecture’.

Bottom line: a closed-loop revenue architecture and metrics-driven methodology will help you measure and optimize a high performance advisor engagement strategy.

Download a copy of the Buyer Engagement eBook: “Exposed: The False Promises of Revenue Marketing”

Download

November 14, 2019/1 Comment/by John Stone

Have Something to Say, and Say it Well

Brand Presence, Content Marketing, Sales Enablement, Sales Excellence

Persuasive Communications Enhances Sales and Marketing

Persuasive Communications helps you communicate more effectively and deliver your message in a logical and persuasive manner. A very useful framework for communicating and persuasive arguments is S-C-Q-A. At Revenue Architects, when discussing a client presentation, we often ask each other, “What is the S-C-Q-A? ”.

October 17, 2019/0 Comments/by John Stone

9 Questions for Your Sales and Marketing Plan