It happens every day. People come to me and tell my agency that they want to go viral online. This used to drive me insane. Getting content to “go viral” online is complicated, sometimes expensive, and can be largely based on luck.
But, I get it.
The assumption is that you can post something online and within minutes you’ll quadruple the eyeballs on your startup.
In 2015 63% of global internet traffic consisted of video. By 2020 that number will climb all the way to 79%.
Brands get this. They know that they need to create video content for online consumption. The issue is that they’ve been creating video content (commercials) for television. With television taking it’s last gasps, there can be a steep learning curve as brands enter the digital landscape.
Here’s how you do it (at least on Facebook and Instagram).
1. keep it short
According to L2 Intelligence Report Video 2016 June 2016, videos that were less than 15 seconds on Facebook generate 50% more engagement than those videos longer than a minute.
You may ask yourself if you should consider posting your brand videos on Instagram, and YouTube.
Well, consider this first, Instagram videos have increased 109% year over year. Facebook videos have increased 46% year over year, and YouTube videos uploads have remained flat.
The average duration of a brands YouTube video has decreased by more than 60 seconds since April, 2015.
2. turn off the sound
2/3 of Beauty brand videos and 5/6 of luxury videos don’t have audio at all. They may have some background music, but other than that — nothing.
Our agency is drawn to video that place with time lapse, and slow motion. Leveraging powerful tools that can create visually compelling content like Flixel works well too.
Flixel is a magical tool for visual storytelling. They’re compelling, different and you can use them as ad units on Facebook also.
Wrapping it up. Focus on beautiful, short videos that will tell your brand story. Here’s the only issue. Simple is hard. Look for partners that can help extricate your brand’s zeitgeist, transfer that to video, and share with the world via Facebook or Instagram.
Keep the videos under 15 seconds, and stay off YouTube.
Many small business owners in the B2B sales space are constantly trying to sell their product or service based on the idea of what makes their solution better than the competition. While it’s good to know your solution’s unique value proposition and be up to speed on your product’s features and benefits, the truth is, many B2B sales are driven not by “positive” features of your solution, but by certain “negative” aspects of your competitor’s solution. Many B2B buyers are motivated primarily not by optimism, but by pain.
What do I mean by “pain?” Think about the last time your organization made a new purchase. Was it because you read about some exciting new product to make your life better, or was it because you had a more mundane problem that your existing system or solution was not adequately solving? Many B2B buyers get motivated to buy from you because they’re not happy — they’re in pain in some way — because their existing setup is not working for them.
By understanding these common “pain points,” you can better understand your buyers and make bigger sales.
big pain points of B2B sales
1. The Buyer’s Current Vendor has Bad Service
Many B2B buyers are already doing business with an incumbent vendor. That means in order to get new business, you need to displace a competitor that already has that client’s account. One of the common causes of an incumbent vendor losing a client is when the vendor’s service is inadequate. Maybe the vendor isn’t paying enough attention to the client. Maybe they failed to solve a problem. One of the most important questions to ask when talking to a prospective client is, “How are things going with your current vendor?” Sometimes you can uncover some problems and pain points that can give your company a chance to move in and win that account.
2. The Buyer’s Current System is Patched Together
Other B2B buyers — especially if you sell IT systems or software — might be receptive to hearing from you if you can deliver a solution that is more comprehensive and elegant than what they might already have. A surprisingly large percentage of businesses are still using manual methods like spreadsheets to keep track of key business data. If you can show them why your solution, software or system is a better way to do business, you can win their attention and earn their trust.
3. The Buyer is Managing Too Many Different Vendors or Solutions
Sometimes B2B buyers get overwhelmed by having a piecemeal process of working with too many vendors or solutions at one time, each of which is responsible for supporting a small part of their overall operations or business processes. They might need to work with one vendor that can deliver everything that they need, or that can help them simplify their jumble of existing products and services. If your company can serve as a helpful consultant to show the buyer how to simplify their processes and create clarity, you will help them overcome this common pain point.
B2B sales is not just about price or data, it’s about human emotions. People buy B2B solutions because they have a problem that needs to be solved, they have an ongoing business situation that is causing them pain and distress, and they want someone to help relieve their stress. Pay attention to the mindset of your prospect — not just the positive aspects of your solution, but also the negative circumstances that motivate your prospect to consider buying from you in the first place.
Almost every business conceivable has a digital presence today, from the cheap noodle shop next door to the massive upscale supermarket an hour’s drive away. But simply having a website isn’t going to cut it anymore.
Companies today increasingly use information technology to improve their productivity in a number of key sectors. Consider going digital in the following areas to improve your business’s overall efficiency and boost your bottom line.
make human relations great again
Ah, the HR department. From sifting through piles of resumes to reminding employees about casual Fridays, HR has never been particularly glamorous — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t critical. After all, obtaining and retaining the best people is probably the most important thing a business can do to ensure its long-term viability. And fortunately, big data is coming to the rescue.
There’s an increasing number of cloud-based software services, such as Talentsoft, that provide easy solutions for businesses to find and interview the best candidates for a position. These services crunch vast amounts of data that would take ages for humans to complete. That’s much easier than letting resumes pile up and hoping for the best.
There’s also a host of performance appraisal software available that can help employees provide constructive feedback, which means less time and money spent on HR and better suited candidates for a position.
make sales simple
Sales is an excellent place to start implementing digital solutions to improve productivity. If you’re not conducting at least part of your sales online at this point, you need to reconsider.
Tweak your business’s website, so customers can obtain exclusive deals by signing up for newsletters and the like. You can also add a custom ordering section, so your clients can order products without visiting the store only to discover what they want just went out of stock.
A price estimator on your websites can save your employees time and effort, and you can adjust your website to offer more customised products as well. Such services are simple additions that could provide significant benefits.
harness social media in your marketing efforts
Everyone’s talking about social media, and there’s a reason for that: Social media is an easy and almost completely cost-free way to boost productivity. If your business can creatively engage customers online, you will experience raised product awareness, which can mean more sales.
How does social media make your business more productive? It’s free, but it’s also efficient as a way to reach existing and potential clients. If you own a small business, you can manage your own social media relatively easily.
If you’re a medium-sized business, consider hiring a “growth hacker” to create authentic engagement that will translate into added visibility and sales. Hiring a growth hacker usually comes with a onetime fee, and it can be a good solution if you don’t want to spend too much effort trying to build an audience on social media — a process that can be hit or miss.
revolutionise your internal communications
Remember your employee’s face at the latest meeting when it was clear she hadn’t read the company-wide memo? Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen again. Research shows that poor internal communication in a business leads to obvious losses of productivity. When your employees aren’t up to date, or managers are not giving clear orders or opportunities for feedback, your business will suffer.
Fortunately, easy digital solutions can improve the productivity of your workers through better communications. User-friendly services, such as Slack, make sure employees can quickly and efficiently communicate with each other or within different groups. Slack makes it easy to form teams that communicate directly with each other, making it efficient to share files and search archives — a much less painful task than trawling through your email to find an old PowerPoint presentation.
going digital makes sense for everyone
It doesn’t matter if your business is large or small. Digitising basic processes by going paperless makes financial sense. For small businesses in particular, the rewards can be even greater. Employees often waste time looking for documents — some firms waste as much as 6 hours per employee per week. It’s no secret that going paperless helps the environment and saves supply costs. Besides making your employees more productive, digitisation will make your business more efficient and help your bottom line.The Time Is Now
Running a tight ship in our current “knowledge economy” means going digital. Beneficial digital solutions are currently in vogue for a good reason: They cut costs and allow you to focus on your core business, which, as any good boss knows, consists largely of keeping your employees and clients happy. Once you accomplish that, the rest will come easily.
There is a country song with these lyrics, “Everyone wants to go to Heaven, no one wants to die.”
We want things, but we don’t do what is necessary to have those things. This truth is easier to recognise in others than ourselves. If you have clients, you know they want better results without having to change.
goals and outcomes
Your dream client explains to you that they need a new outcome. What they’re doing isn’t working. Not being able to achieve this new or better outcome is starting to have serious consequences to their results, and they’re certain that things will only get worse in the future.
Your prospect has a problem worth solving. This is how new opportunities are created, and it is also how you remove your competitor and displace them. If only it were this easy.
constraints, real and imagined
The reason your dream client isn’t getting the results they need now is because they have constraints that they have been unwilling to address. You have likely experienced this with a prospective client who sees the value in what you sell and believes that you are the right person to help their company improve their results. You have their full support. Until you discuss the investment necessary to produce the results they need.
Lack of money is a constraint. The lack of time and resources is a constraint. An unwillingness to allow leadership and other stakeholders who would be required to agree to any change into the conversation is a constraint.
Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die. We want better results, but we don’t want to do what is necessary to produce those results. This isn’t only true for your clients; it is equally true for you. If you think about something that you want for yourself but haven’t achieved, it’s certain that you know what you would need to do to have it and that you have some constraint, real or imagined, that prevents you from getting what you want.
But this isn’t where this problem ends. The biggest challenge we have in business is helping people change. That is a psychology problem.
The presenting problem, the constraints or behaviors that prevent someone from getting what they want, is not the root cause of why those constraints or behaviors persist.
behind the constraint
Constraints are not permanent. Most people don’t lack resources; they lack resourcefulness. If you are going to help someone breakthrough and transform their results, you have to get to the real constraint, which is always fear.
Why doesn’t your dream client have the money they need to make the investment necessary for the results they need? Here are some ideas:
Maybe your contact has asked for money in the past and failed, and he is afraid of failing again and risking his position in the company. Maybe your dream client’s company is spending for money in another area and won’t be able to free up the budget for 6 months. Maybe your contact has a rocky relationship with her leader and doesn’t believe she can pull off a request for a budget increase. Or maybe, the real fear is the fear of failure, and it has nothing to do with money.
Until you help your client deal with what’s really behind the constraint, they are not going to get the results they need, even though you could easily produce them. What is behind the constraint is almost always some deep human need.
What does this mean we need to do as change agents?
First, we have to be willing and able to help the people we serve to identify their constraint. This is usually easy because your contacts are more committed to their constraints than they are to their desired outcome, or goals. If it were otherwise, they’d be producing the results already.
Second, we have to be willing to help identify the fear behind the constraint.This is what consultative salespeople do. They “go there.” If your client had to deal with this constraint, what would have to happen, and what is preventing that from happening?
Finally, we have to generate options that allow us to address the fear (which, by the way, is very real) and deal with the constraint. We have to help our prospects fear the right danger and deal with their assumptions that no action can be taken that doesn’t hurt them. Most often, they get hurt when they don’t make the changes they need to make.
Whether you’re a seasoned SEO or someone who runs your own business, you know there are fluctuations in your organic traffic, but you may struggle to pinpoint the root cause.
Organic search, unlike its paid counterpart, comes with a unique set of challenges in diagnosing a decline in traffic and conversions. There are some obvious places you can mine for insights (Google Analytics, Google Search Console), but other factors at play can be harder to quantify.
From basic issues to advanced issues to factors that are largely out of your control, following is a list of things to check for when diagnosing major fluctuations in organic traffic or search engine rankings. By examining both internal and external factors, you can start to piece together the puzzle.
basic issues
1. your pages aren’t indexed
Conduct a quick Google search using “site:yourwebsite.com” to make sure your pages are actually indexed. If you’re noticing that critical pages aren’t appearing in the SERPs, you’ve likely found the culprit. Check your robots.txt file to make sure you haven’t blocked important pages or directories. If that looks good, check individual pages for a noindex tag.
2. bot filters
Are you currently excluding all known bots and spiders in Google Analytics? If not, you may be experiencing inflated traffic metrics and not even know it. Typically, bots enter through the home page and cascade down throughout your site navigation, mimicking real user behaviour. One telltale sign of bot traffic is a highly trafficked page with a high bounce rate, low conversions and a low average time on page.
While it’s best to create a custom dimension for filtering out bots, applying the generic bot filter is a good place to start. It’s important to note that filters cannot be applied retroactively, so if you’ve recently turned on this feature, you should be receiving less traffic. Additionally, double-check that you are filtering out your own traffic and IP address.
3. recent site updates
If you’ve recently modified your on-page copy, undergone a site overhaul (removing pages, reordering the navigation) or migrated your site sans redirects, it’s reasonable to expect a decline in traffic. After reworking your site content, Google must re-crawl and then re-index these pages. It’s not uncommon to experience unstable rankings for up to a few weeks afterwards.
If you’ve changed your URL structure or removed pages from your site, it’s important to have a 301-redirect strategy in place to preserve link equity and avoid a loss of rankings/traffic.
4. URL confusion
Do you have a content strategy in place, or are your efforts more “off the cuff?” Not having a clearly defined keyword map can spell trouble — especially if two or more pages are optimised for the same keyword. In practice, this will cause pages to compete against each other in the SERPs, potentially reducing the rankings of these pages. Here is an example of what this might look like:
Fortunately, if you have access to a keyword tracking tool, you should be able to see a day-by-day breakdown of which URLs Google chooses to rank for that particular keyword. With a little time and effort, you should be able to remedy the situation.
advanced issues
5. structured data markup
Implementing structured data markup (such as that from schema.org) might seem like a one-time project, but that “set it and forget it” mentality can land you in hot water. You should be monitoring the appearance of your rich snippets on a regular basis to ensure they are pulling in the correct information. As you change the content on your website, this can alter the markup without warning.
Likewise, depending on your back-end merchandising setup, products could be triggered to show “out of stock” schema if one color variation goes out of stock. As you can imagine, this can wreak havoc on your click-through rates and lead users to purchase from your resellers — or worse, your competitors!
6. promotional cadence & the “sale hangover effect”
Did you run a big promotion last year, such as a sample or flash sale? Did it coincide with the same week this year? If not, your year-on-year comparison will be skewed.
If so, were your past promotions equally enticing? Did your brand launch a new product line or offer limited-time products? These factors alone are difficult to measure, and we’re not even accounting for PR efforts, which will also impact your organic metrics.
There is also significant evidence to suggest that the “Sale Hangover Effect” is not just a phenomenon. It deals with two factors: share of mind and share of wallet.
Tim Kilroy, co-founder of AdChemix, explains this anomaly:
Consumers only have so much attention and so much money — and for each, they set a “budget” for how much they want to spend with the brands that are important to them. Consumers invest their attention and money into big promotions. Typically, big promos have big results for the retailer, but the flip side is that the promo has emptied the consumers’ budget for attention and money. If the promo is big enough, it even entices some consumers to overspend a little bit (or a lot). When consumers have expended or exceeded their budget, they tend to engage with your brand less. They become immune to marketing messages and spend fewer dollars.
7. price point & product depth
As a savvy digital marketer, you’ve inevitably nailed the four Ps: price, product, promotion and place. However, a well-planned strategy means nothing without the fifth P: people.
Here is a common narrative that many e-tailers can relate to: You identified your “sweet spot” in the marketplace and know that charging above this threshold leads to price sensitivity. Your core products drive volume — which allows you to achieve amazing growth. Then, one day, your focus shifted. Maybe you stopped churning out iterations of your best sellers, or maybe you tried to focus on your higher-revenue products — all the while alienating the people who liked your previous offerings.
This quickly turns into a “chicken-and-egg” situation. Are fewer people coming to your site due to poor visibility in the SERPs? Or have you shifted your product focus, and is that why consumers are no longer interested in your brand? For a quick check, look at Google Search Console data, and pull positions and clicks by page. If position is staying relatively stagnant, this means your brand is not losing visibility in the SERPs, and there may be a bigger issue at play.
uncontrollable factors
8. being outranked by re-sellers & affiliates
For maximum exposure, you may have launched an affiliate program or have several re-sellers under your belt. This is typically a non-issue — until, of course, your re-sellers start to outrank you for branded keywords. While this might not derail your revenue goals, it’s a sure bet you’re losing traffic to these sites.
9. new google ad placement
With Google killing off right-hand rail ads, many brands may be seeing more of their direct traffic being cannibalised by paid search ads. It will be some time before we’re able to quantify the full effect, but you should be mindful of this.
10. industry trends & waning brand interest
With the exception of crude oil and Picasso’s, very few industries are “recession-proof” and experience an inelastic product demand. Look at how your competitors are faring, and see if they’re experiencing the same problems. While you should take Google Trends data with a grain of salt, looking at the bigger picture may help provide some clarity. I’d suggest taking this a step further by conducting trends research and reading industry reports.
Brands hold a wealth of customer information that may often not seem applicable to SEO — and many times, it’s not. However, if you’re working with an SEO agency, sometimes sharing this knowledge can provide the missing piece to the puzzle. Knowing something as simple as “Consumer preferences are shifting around the colour black” could help explain why your traffic is down if your products are often paired with black shoes. Sometimes it’s as easy as connecting the dots.
Employee volunteer days and donation-matching programs are excellent ways for businesses to give back. But companies today are exploring new ways to contribute to their communities, simultaneously stimulating employee (and customer) engagement and having a great impact overall. Here are seven ideas you can start implementing right now:
1. gamify ‘going green’
Composting isn’t new, and let’s be honest…not very exciting. But you know what is? Gardening, and getting outside during the work day! Helen Rogerson of Churchill Education says her team has a bucket for food scraps in the company kitchen which they empty regularly into a compost bin. They eventually use that compost to plant and grow a small herb garden on-site.
Team members are able pick out the herbs, plant them, and share the resulting produce. This is a fun and hands-on way to engage your employees and promote good environmental health throughout your business.
2. auction off some goodies, and give away the proceeds
Auctions are a simple way to raise money for a cause you care about, as people are more inclined to purchase products when the profits go towards a philanthropic project. This raises awareness about your company and your cause, and is a fun way to showcase your new and exciting products.
Bluethumb and Handkrafted have a great model in place for this kind of fundraising. They teamed up with local artists to auction off one-of-a-kind artwork online. This is truly win-win: the artists get exposure and the businesses get to give back.
Bonus idea: You could add some extra creative flare and turn this idea into a penny auction to maximize impact, and give more people “the gift of giving.” Bidders would commit small amounts of cash, even a few pennies, towards the item being auctioned. The highest bidder gets the prize, but all the other bidders’ contributions would still go towards a great cause.
3. better yet, just give away your awesome [extra] products
If your company sells a physical good, you are bound to have extra materials and old models laying around. Don’t let them go to waste! Take Orion Labs as an example: the San Francisco company now has its second generation of wearable communication devices on the market.
So what happened to the leftover first generation inventory? Operations guru Andrew Sherman saw an opportunity at a local homeless youth organisation that could put the product to good use. He provided the devices and arranged training for the nonprofit’s team so that these new electronics could improve communications within the program and help it run more seamlessly.
4. add ‘giving’ incentives for meeting deadlines
Whether it’s incentivizing clients, customers, or employees to hustle towards a business goal, adding in a “giving” reward is a sure way to move them to action. UK-based accounting firm Jonathan Ford & Co used this method to motivate their clientele to file their tax returns on time, by promising to sponsor one child’s malaria treatment overseas for every timely return received.
Tax season is stressful enough, so not only is this helping the kids, it’s helping the employees’ work-flow management as well.
5. use your work space during off hours for a ‘can’t miss’ community event
This is a good way to show your company’s commitment to the local community and become more integrated within it. You can offer a free event, like Amaze Education’s “movie night” where anyone can come and enjoy a peaceful evening catching a new flick at the company’s early education centre.
6. or donate your space to other causes
Nonprofits and charities are often looking for space to use for meetings, events and fundraisers… so why not let them use your empty after-hours work space to do so? You can give back simply by not letting your space go to waste!
7.give ‘giving’ for special occasions
Providing “giving credits” to your employees or clientele so that they can give to the causes of their choosing is a great way to celebrate achievements and milestones. Jane Burns of Lighthouse Health Group has each of her employees designate their “cause of choice” during their birthday month to which the company contributes towards. This kind of “giving gift card” could be replicated for employee (and customer) engagements, weddings, and birth announcements!
Despite all the online ways to link up with potential clients, I still believe making in-person connections needs to be a part of every business owner’s networking regimen. When you’re face-to-face with people, you can form bonds more easily because they get a more complete picture of who you are through your voice, body language, and appearance.
That’s powerful and wonderful … unless you get careless.
While face-to-face networking can result in prospects gravitating to you, it also holds the potential to drive them in the opposite direction. Could your networking habits be turning off other professionals and causing you to lose out on business opportunities?
Avoid these networking no-no’s:
1. Interrupting conversations. “How rude!” That’s what I think when someone walks up without apology and interrupts a conversation I’m having with another person. Although discussions won’t typically be too in-depth at networking events, it’s still in bad taste to cut off conversations between others.
2. Practising the “hard sell.” Want a surefire way to make connections eager to avoid you? Then push your products and services right from the start when meeting them. Doing so makes you appear aggressive as well as desperate—definitely not the impression you want to make!
3. Complaining. Remember, you’re there to connect with other professionals. While commenting on the venue location, décor, hors d’oeuvres, or other amenities can help ease you into a dialogue with someone, it can have a negative impact if your words are uncomplimentary. Others might perceive you as snide and ungracious.
4. Being all “me, me, me” and not taking an interest in others. Sure, you’re doing great things and everyone should know more about that. But you’ll do yourself a greater service if you forgo making yourself the centre of attention and instead listen to what others have to share about their businesses. By asking open-ended questions and turning a keen ear to their needs, you can assess whether or not they may be a viable prospect. And then later you can follow up to share more about what you can offer them.
5. Having a few too many cocktails. Woot! Yes, networking functions often come in the form of mixers with a bit of a party atmosphere. But I’ve seen otherwise polished professionals turn into hot messes because they didn’t control their alcohol consumption at events.
6. Speaking ill of someone else in the room or about your clients. No, no, no. Don’t EVER do this. You never know who knows whom. Need I say more?
7. Dressing like you don’t care. Although many networking events are relatively casual, take care not to go too far with the informality. If you’re not sure what the dress code is, I recommend erring on the side of slightly overdressed. Worst-case scenario will be that you look a tad more professional than everyone else. No one will think less of you for that.
Done with attention to making a first-rate first impression, face-to-face networking can open doors to lasting professional relationships. Put your best, most engaging you out there every time—and take care to avoid networking missteps that could turn off prospective customers.
With the uproar over last week’s EU Referendum, in which the U.K. opted to leave the European Union, lots has happened: Donald Trump released yet another controversial tweet, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron tendered his resignation, Scotland threatened to make another bid for independence and other countries have threatened to leave the EU.
Publishers worldwide have covered the topic from nearly every angle, thus creating another story in itself: Outlets rely on nontraditional formats to win the public’s attention in an overwhelming sea of information and content. There is no surprise there, considering the fact that a recent study found that interactive content formats demand more attention than non-interactive ones.
In the midst of such a controversial topic that seized worldwide attention and triggered strong emotional responses, these five publishers understood that it was necessary to speak with their readers, not at them.
Fortune asked its audience via a poll: “Should it Brexit or Bremain?” The item, published before the vote, presented a list of pre-referendum arguments and asked readers to read through, and then come to their own conclusion before casting their vote. Interestingly enough, the results differed from those of the real vote, showing that the majority of those who interacted with the poll voted to remain in the EU.
The Telegraph opted for a swiper format to gauge its audience’s take on the topic. This item made it easy for readers to cast their opinion, on which speakers performed well during BBC’s Brexit-focused debate, resulting in 184,000 views.
Lifestyle and fitness publication Men’s Health used a trivia quiz to apply a health-conscious approach to the matter. In an item asking, “Is the EU Good for Your Health?,” the editorial team successfully educated its readers about the EU’s influence on day-to-day well being concerns.
U.K. publication The Tab chose to take the humoristic route, asking their audience, “What’s Your Brexit Strategy?.” The outlet employed a personality quiz that included light-hearted questions such as, “How long would you survive in the wild?,” and results such as, “Live on a fishing boat in the North Sea.” The humour reflected the mood of the nation and impressed The Tab’s readers, garnering an 89 percent completion rate and an average of 2.5 minutes spent on page.
Last but not least, The Huffington Post employed a chat-like format to break down the untruths contained within a flyer campaigning to leave the EU. The conversation, which took a comedic approach similar to that of The Tab’s item, pinned reason and sanity against a right-wing party in the U.K. to point out the hilarity of the document.
The above showcases that pairing good content with the right medium– in this case a format–is the catalyst for compelling content readers crave. Outlets that opt to employ interactive content formats and transform their sites into platforms in which readers can voice their opinions will undoubtedly earn the vote of their audiences.
Sounds obvious, right? You can’t make a sale unless you’ve demonstrated value to a prospect. You can’t do that unless you’ve understood their problems and devised a strategy to solve them. In turn, you can’t do that until you get your prospect to tell you what’s wrong. And so on, and so forth…
The root of it all is the ability to gather and provide information in a way that makes your prospect want to do business with you. Your value proposition, your pricing, even your product’s features — none of that matters unless you’re able to get your prospects to talk to you and also listen to what you have to say.
So before you immerse yourself in buyer personas, case studies, and Marketing collateral, work on these 10 skills to ensure that when you’re talking to a prospect, you’re sending the right message.
10 communication skills the best salespeople share
1. they pay full attention
We’re all busier than ever before, and selling can be an especially pressure-filled career. So it’s understandable that during a client meeting, your mind could wander over to the demo you have to prepare for this afternoon, the prospecting you forgot to do, or the contract you’re waiting on to come in.
Just because it’s understandable doesn’t make it acceptable. Showing up to a call isn’t just about physically being on the other end of the line. You have to dedicate 100% of your attention to each call, otherwise you’ll miss details and make your prospect repeat things they’ve already told you. It’ll be obvious when you’re not paying attention, and that’s no way to treat buyers.
2. they practice active listening
Not only do you have to listen, you have to listen actively, otherwise your conversation won’t really go anywhere.
“Too often, salespeople are waiting for their turn to talk or thinking about what to say next, instead of truly listening to the prospect,” HubSpot vice president sales of Peter Caputa says.
Caputa teaches HubSpot reps the following four-step process:
Truly listen to the prospect.
Feed back the content and feeling of the prospect’s words.
Confirm you heard the prospect correctly.
Ask a relevant follow up question to further clarify your understanding of their situation.
3. they can read body language and control their own
The same sentence said by someone who’s smiling, looking directly into your eyes, and sitting up straight is received very differently when the speaker is looking away and slouching — even if they meant the same thing both times.
That’s because while we can say pretty much anything we want, our body language often reveals our true intentions or meaning. Great communicators know how to read others’ body language so they can anticipate the direction a conversation’s heading, and also make sure their own body language isn’t sending out signals they don’t mean to broadcast.
4. they’ve mastered the nuances of voice tone
Like body language, voice tone — your voice pitch, volume, speed, and even your word choice — affects how the words you’re actually saying are interpreted. And if you’re in inside sales, the only thing you have to make an impression is your voice.
Listen to how your prospect speaks, then mirror their speaking patterns when it makes sense. While you probably shouldn’t imitate every slang word or lingo they use, slow down if they speak slowly — or speed things up if they talk rapidly. Match your level of formality and familiarity to your prospect as well. The key is to meet buyers on their turf — and that means speaking in a way they’re comfortable with.
5. they are empathetic
You don’t necessarily have to agree with everything your prospect is saying, but you should always at least try to see things from their point of view. And that means more than just saying, “Hmm, I see where you’re coming from.”
The best sales reps are able to connect with their prospects because they actually understand the things their buyers do at work every day and the challenges they face. Not only does being empathetic make you more likable, it also increases your chances of closing a deal. When you can draw on your knowledge of your prospects’ actual day-to-day, you’re better equipped to understand what they care about, which makes it more likely you’ll be able to help them.
6. they understand what’s not being said
Prospects sometimes don’t tell the whole truth. And that’s okay, as long as you know how to spot when it’s happening. Is your prospect just evaluating your company because his boss told him to present three options? Is your prospect sold, but her manager, the economic buyer, isn’t? These are crucial things to know, and you can’t suss them out until you learn to read between the lines.
7. they speak in specifics
Great communicators aren’t persuasive because they speak in dramatic, sweeping rhetoric. They’re able to convince people because they can point to specific examples or anecdotes that support the point they’re trying to make — and in the case of salespeople, because they can demonstrate exactly how a product or feature will help their buyer.
Be as specific as you can. And if you can throw in a catchy soundbite or two, by all means do it. Just don’t rely on quippy phrases to get a deal to the finish line.
8. they are subject matter experts
Of course, you can’t be specific if you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. If you sell to a specific industry, you should know that industries’ concerns, behaviors, and buying patterns down pat. If you sell to multiple industries, know your value prop as it relates to each cold and use customer references as backup.
Prospects will never trust you if it doesn’t seem like you really understand your (or their) business, so become an expert in your relevant field.
9. they know what they don’t know
But being an expert doesn’t mean you know everything. Unless you’ve shadowed your buyer, you don’t know exactly what they do or every nuance of their business. So don’t act like you do. You should know enough to sketch out the outlines of their situation on your own, but you’ll always have to rely on your prospects to fill in the little details.
Be aware of the gaps in your knowledge, then ask your prospect to help fill them in. They’ll appreciate your honesty about what you don’t know, and you’ll avoid losing deals because of false assumptions.
10. they’re genuinely curious
The key to sales is asking good questions. And if you’re not actually curious about your prospect’s situation, it’ll be all too easy to slip into your elevator pitch before you’ve established whether any part of it is relevant to your buyer. Great communicators are naturally curious about their conversational counterparts, and that’s especially crucial in sales — ask questions first, then answer them later.