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Using Your Existing Data to Grow Sales

Posted on by Hannah Sanders

When you’re in sales, it’s essential to work smarter, not harder.

Making changes to the channels you use and the audiences you reach out to can positively impact your team’s performance.

In fact, a data-driven approach to sales can make your business between 5% and 6% more profitable.

In last month’s article, we advised what stats you should measure to track your SDRs’ progress. This month, we will look at how you can use your data to improve the lead generation process and target the businesses most interested in your product or service.

The problem with ‘scattergun sales’

Many sales teams have a scattergun approach when it comes to outreach sales. This is when they reach out to as many prospective customers as possible, in the hope that some of them will want to know more.

The issue with this is that it’s hit and miss. While you’ll get some leads, it’s likely most intended prospects won’t be interested. This can not only lead to your sales department underperforming, but a loss of morale for your team.

A surprisingly large number of companies rely on scattergun sales to grow business. 71% of SMEs and 67% of large organisations admit to not having a systematic approach to engaging with prospective customers.

This means that by using your existing data to refine your sales processes, you can give yourself an advantage over your competitors.

Know your target audience

When you’re identifying who to sell your products or services to, it can be tempting to keep things as broad as possible to maximise reach. We’ve all been in meetings where the Managing Director wants to target everyone!

However, this approach hinders more than it helps. As the saying goes, ‘by appealing to everyone, you appeal to no one’.

By using your data to focus on the right target audience, your SDRs can prioritise the prospects that are more likely to buy.

Using data to boost your sales rates

The data you already have can inform your approach to sales and make your team more efficient.

One of the great things about working in sales is that everything is quantifiable, and this provides you with a wealth of data to take advantage of.

When it comes to improving your sales volume, look at the profiles of people and companies that have bought from you in the past:

  • What industry is the business in?
  • What products and services does the business sell?
  • What is the size of the business?
  • What is the turnover of the business?
  • What country is the business in?
  • What is the job title and seniority of the person who bought from you?
  • Which channels (for example, email, phone call, social media) did you use to make the sale?
  • What was the value of the sale?
  • How long was the sales cycle?

You should have most of this data already in your CRM system. If you need to fill in any gaps, LinkedIn is a useful source of information.

If your business is new or you don’t have the data to go off, then industry statistics can be a good starting point. However, as no two companies are alike, it’s best to use your own data for optimal results.

Take all your stats into consideration

When using this approach, it’s essential to use all the data at your disposal rather than focusing on one set of statistics.

Let’s say industry A has a 30% conversion rate while industry B has a 20% conversion rate. This information shows that industry A is more likely to yield results for your SDRs. However, what happens when you bring other data into the mix?

When you bring average sales cycle length into consideration, industry B has an average cycle of six months. However, industry A’s sales cycle is three years!

This means that the best approach is to go for industry B. Although the conversion rate is slightly lower, your team will reach more customers and make larger sales volumes.

Review and share the data for best results

As the team leader or manager, it’s your responsibility to review the data, interpret it and put a strategy into action.

Don’t forget to reassess your findings regularly. If your target audience changes, then you need to update your strategy to accommodate this.

As well as sharing information with your SDRs, share it with your marketing team too. According to LinkedIn, there is only a 23% overlap between the two department’s definition of a target audience. If your prospects aren’t ready to buy just yet, your marketing department can nurture them until they are.

Find out more about aligning your sales and marketing team.

In conclusion – use your past data to accelerate future sales

According to McKinsey, businesses that use analytics more effectively grow quicker than those that don’t.

By taking the time to review your data and using it to identify the prospects that are most likely to turn into leads, you’ll grow your return on investment.

If you’re still not convinced of the advantages data can bring, consider General Electric. In the 1990s, the company relied on a scattergun approach to make sales, wasting valuable sales rep time. During the 2000s, the business took a data-driven approach to sales, discovering that the top 30% of customers were three times more likely to buy.

The hard work paid off, with General Electric making an incredible $300 million in new business and boosting their conversion rate by 19% in the space of a year.

Set your business towards success with Air Marketing

Growing your sales can be challenging. At Air Marketing, we’re on a mission to ensure your businesses can promote its products and services to the right people.

We offer lead generation services, helping fill your pipeline and deliver warm opportunities to your sales team. Our SDRs can also reach out to prospective customers on your behalf, saving you time and letting you focus on growing your business.

Contact our team today and see how we can take the hard work out of selling for your business.

Getting Incentive Schemes Right For SDRs

Posted on by James Ollerhead

A solid incentive scheme can be a great way to encourage your team to hit those all-important targets when you work in outbound sales.

Make enough calls and bring in enough business, and you will receive a substantial reward for your efforts.

It sounds simple enough on paper, but the truth is that it can sometimes be hard to get an incentive scheme right.

Make it too hard to achieve target, and you run the risk of frustrating your team. Make it too easy, and you will lose a lot of that hard-earned turnover.

Even if you get your targets right, you need to think long and hard about the incentives you will offer.

We’ve put together this guide to help you work out an ideal incentive programme for your sales development representatives (SDRs) and what you can offer them by means of reward.

What targets and KPIs should I have in place?

Before we move into detail, we should explain the difference between targets and KPIs in relation to incentives. It’s easy to get them mixed up or use them interchangeably.

Targets are your outcomes, and KPIs (key performance indicators) are the activities that lead to an outcome being completed.

As an example, let’s take sales calls. In this case, the sales calls are the KPI, and the target is the number of sales calls you want your SDRs to achieve in a set time frame.

When you consider your targets, it’s essential to think about the following:

  • What will your KPIs be? This is dependent on your business model. Examples of KPIs you can use in sales include revenue, sales won and meetings booked
  • What will your target be? Your target needs to be attainable, but not so easy that everyone can hit it on the first phone call of the day. Make sure all your targets are:
    • Specific
    • Measurable
    • Achievable
    • Relevant
    • Timely
  • Will any other team members be involved in your SDRs hitting their target? For example, say your target is number of sales won, and your SDRs pass their opportunities through to another salesperson to close. Their commission is dependent on the success of other people. This will need to be factored into the final figures

What are SDRs really motivated by?

As we’ve touched on in earlier blogs, members of your sales team are motivated by different things. It can be easy to assume that everyone is motivated by money; after all, we all have bills to pay and mouths to feed. However, this is not necessarily the case.

Only 13% of people looking for a new job say it is because they want more money. This means there have to be other factors in play.

People in a sales environment can be motivated by:

  • Making a difference to the world
  • Career progression and development
  • Being recognised for the work they do
  • Freedom to spend time with friends and loved ones

Different motivations can lead to SDRs preferring various incentives for their work. For example, if someone is motivated by freedom, additional days off or shorter working hours can encourage them to hit their targets.

So, should I offer money as an incentive?

It honestly depends on your business and the staff that work for you. For some SDRs  – cash is still king, and they will appreciate a financial bonus for their hard work.

However, this strategy doesn’t work for all staff and can be expensive to maintain in the long term.

In the 1990s, Hewlett Packard launched performance-related pay for staff. The issue was that the targets set were too low, meaning about 90% of staff were eligible for commission. When Hewlett Packard realised its mistake and upped the targets, employees threatened to quit as they thought they were entitled to the extra incentives by default.

One thing to consider if you are offering money-based commission is how much your SDRs will be able to earn and how it compares to their base pay.

High commission and low base may incentivise your team to sell hard, but may lead to frustrated staff and high turnover. Low commission and higher base may deter ambitious salespeople, but lead to happier SDRs and improved job security.

Great sales incentives that will really motivate your SDRs

What type of incentives can you offer your SDRs that will encourage them to pick up the phone and start calling?

Interestingly, 85% of people would opt for a non-cash incentive if it was something they really liked the look of.

Here are a few of our favourites for you to consider.

Workplace incentives

These types of incentives make the working day easier and more fun for your sales team. The advantage of workplace-based benefits is that they are low-cost, making them an excellent option for businesses with a small budget.

For example, you could offer longer lunch breaks, parking spaces nearer the office or extra holidays for those who hit their targets.

You could even let your SDRs take control of the office Spotify playlist as a fun reward!

Experienced-based incentives

Experiences and outings are great incentives for staff, as they are seen as high value and are something tangible for your sales team to try and achieve.

Experienced-based incentives can range from a pair of cinema tickets or a trip to a spa through to a VIP experience at a music concert or sporting event.

The great thing about experienced-based incentives is that you can extend them to the whole team too. Has the entire sales team hit its target for the quarter? Treat everyone to a works night out!

Plus, your SDRs may document their experience on social media and tag you in, leading to extra publicity for your business.

Courses and training incentives

Some of your sales team may be motivated by the promise of personal and professional development and becoming the best version of themselves they can be.

Offering advancement opportunities can be a smart choice if this is the case. Your SDRs gain new skills to help them in their career, and you get to take advantage of what they learn in the workplace. It’s a win-win situation!

You could pay for them to complete an online course, let them have one-on-one time with a professional coach or give them paid time off to attend an upcoming conference.

Physical incentives

One of the best ways to thank someone is with a thoughtful gift, and your sales team is no exception. Providing a tangible prize works well as you can customise it to the specific team member as well as your own budget.

Tech, food, drink and gift cards are all brilliant options. One idea we love is to have lots of prize envelopes on a board in the office. The SDR picks one at random and gets a nice surprise!

In conclusion – how will you manage your in-house incentive scheme?

According to the Incentive Research Foundation, a high-quality incentive programme can increase staff performance by 44%. That’s potentially a lot of new sales leads and opportunities for your business.

Done right, an incentive programme can drive your SDRs performance and lead to positive outcomes. The challenge is working out how to implement it correctly.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to incentive schemes. The one that is right for your business will depend on your industry, your size, the outcomes you want to achieve and most importantly, the motivations of your sales team.

Take the time to choose the perfect incentive scheme, and both you and your SDRs can reap the benefits.

If you’d like further tips on managing your SDRs, our content series will provide you with all the information you need.

Visit our knowledge hub for blogs, webinars, and podcasts to help you create a positive sales team culture that will drive results.

Covering All Bases: How Air Marketing’s Approach Solves The Know-Like-Trust-Buy Funnel

Posted on by Hannah Sanders

The know-like-trust-buy funnel is a fairly common term in the world of sales and marketing—but what exactly is it? And why is it so important?

Essentially, the funnel details each vital stage that a potential consumer/business goes through before purchasing a product or service from your business. Within the concept are four fundamental touch points—each of which should be treated with equal and careful consideration to achieve the end goal of a successful customer journey and sale.

At the top of the funnel, we have ‘know’—the point at which a person discovers you, or your offering for the very first time. Whatever method this may be—social media, PPC, traditional advertising, etc—any experienced salesperson will vouch that these early impressions are critical in ultimately generating revenue further down the line.

The second stage is ‘like’. However you position yourself and whatever messaging you use needs to resonate with your target market, to the point they’re willing to delve further once their attention has been caught.

Next, we have ‘trust’. We live in an era where people have learned to be more and more sceptical about who and where they’re making a purchase from. This wariness has placed an even greater importance on the trust stage of the funnel, particularly for less established and emerging brands trying to break into a sector for the first time.

This is also the point where you really need to position yourself as an expert within your field. What can you provide this person with that gives you an edge over your competitors? If you don’t have that, or you aren’t clearly communicating it, odds are they’ll find someone who is.

Once you’ve ticked all of the above boxes, your customer should be ready to ‘buy’, or at least extremely close to it. We often see companies falling into the trap of thinking once a person reaches this stage, their business is secured—but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Despite all of the hard work that has gone in prior, it only takes a split-second for a person to be turned off by a bad sales experience, which is why it’s crucial to have an expert team on-hand to get things over the line at this final stage.

Streamlining the funnel with Air Marketing and Marketing Services 

Naturally, making the funnel as smooth a journey as possible for the consumer is not only going to benefit in terms of this one sale, but a pleasant and memorable buying experience is exactly what is required to build a base of loyal, repeat customers in the long-term.

To successfully achieve this, both the marketing and sales elements of the experience need to work perfectly in tandem, complimenting each other throughout each stage and designed in a way that from that very first moment, the journey is pushing towards that last hurdle of a successful sale.

One of the most common problems we see with businesses is a struggle to combine both the marketing and sales elements of the funnel. They may be able to capture the person’s attention and their story is well-received, however, when it comes to trying to convert that interest into the all-important ‘buy’ stage, things begin to unravel.

Our Marketing services team, specialise in marketing with a sales attitude—producing high-impact lead-generation campaigns and creative marketing strategies, to seamlessly and successfully deliver this entire buying process to brands.

Outsourcing all elements of the consumer journey to one supplier doesn’t just save you time and resources in terms of communication and coordination between separate parties, it ensures each touchpoint is better aligned due to it all being built and handled by a single entity.

This massively reduces the chances of mistakes or drop-offs due to misunderstandings and incoherent messaging, and allows a strategy to be altered and optimised in a far more efficient manner than if you were having to arrange with two or three different contacts.

From a sales perspective, being able to share our input immediately in the initial stages provides a massive benefit, as it allows us to truly ensure that by the time the consumer/business reaches the final part of the funnel, they’re actually ready to buy as all messaging before has been tailored specifically towards this moment.

By operating this way, we are able to constantly knowledge share from both a sales and marketing perspective, while possessing the, often vital, ability to act with agility and deliver genuine ROI for our clients.

The results

A recent campaign with one of our clients who operate within the SaaS industry saw us take this two-pronged approach with Air and Air Marketing services.

The client, who helps UK businesses apply for Series A funding and prepare for periods of growth through an expertly-led training programme, found that while their offering was indeed incredibly strong, it was difficult to market and they weren’t getting the conversions they had hoped.

In our collaborative approach, our Marketing services team crafted a full marketing strategy that combined email marketing, social media marketing and user journey consultancy. As the prospective customers shared details of becoming marketing qualified leads (MQLs), all the vital information was fed back to the Air Marketing SDR team, who were then instantly able to pursue and convert the most qualified leads.

Over a three month period, this process meant we were able to deliver all the required benchmarks that allowed our client to run their next cohort. The campaign’s results included:

  • 40% average email open rate
  • +14 marketing qualified leads
  • 58,000 reach on Twitter
  • 300% increase in website traffic from email
  • 20% increase in direct website traffic
  • 95% increase in website traffic from social
  • 5% minutes on average spent watching video content on Twitter

Want to learn more about how we work as a full-stack marketing agency to optimise the customer journey? We’d love to chat. Give us a call on 0345 241 3038 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

The 5 key marketing metrics you should be measuring

Posted on by dukadmin

Marketing isn’t all about writing snappy subject lines, designing eye-catching graphics and crafting compelling copy. Underlying the creative, you need to have solid foundations to measure its effectiveness.

There’s no point having a clever campaign that doesn’t deliver results. We focus our marketing efforts on demand generation. We apply a sales attitude to our marketing in order to generate results.

So for us, it’s imperative to gather and understand key data for our clients. Knowledge is power, and the right metrics can provide essential details to boost business and increase ROI. That data can arm us and our clients with powerful insights to inform business decisions.

We don’t use fluffy metrics. We won’t try to wow you with amazing charts that look good but are rather meaningless. We focus on information that is actionable. We realise how important it is to track and learn from the data that can enable your business to reach its goals.

The three key metrics that every business should focus on:

  • Leads
  • Opportunities
  • Conversions

Identifying the importance of these factors and how to generate them is fundamental for business success. But how?

Our 5 recommended key marketing metrics:

1. Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)

“A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead that the marketing team has deemed more likely to become a customer compared to others” according to HubSpot.

That qualified piece of data (the MQL) is really valuable to a business. The marketing team can determine how and where the person has engaged with the business’ content. Be it a particular webpage they’ve visited, email they’ve opened, social post they’ve shared, video they’ve watched, event they’ve attended or campaign they’ve clicked on.

The marketing team can work out which leads make the best quality prospects by interpreting their data. Say the business has specified that their ideal clients meet specific demographic criteria, or have particular problems or pain points to solve. Those factors can be identified by a lead’s interactions. That information is extremely valuable for sales teams to act upon and nurture.

2. Email marketing

Emails provide a great way to build relationships with customers and potential customers. Discovering how your customer has reacted to the email they’ve received is very telling. Did they open it, delete it, read it, click on a link within it or unsubscribe from the list? Delving deep into email analytics will help you to test and make calculated adjustments to engage your audience better.

3. Digital content

Publishing digital content is a two-way street. It’s not enough to just set it live. You need content that grabs people’s attention and prompts them to act. That action could be sharing your content to help others find it (yes please!), commenting on it, downloading it, watching it or reading it, for example.

Knowing what people have done with your content is incredibly useful. It can inform future content decisions and it can identify potential customers. It tells you the key areas in which to invest time and money for the best ROI.

4. Social interactions

As we mentioned earlier, we don’t do fluffy metrics. The number of likes and follows on your social channels are not the be all and end all. You want content that makes people stop scrolling when they see your post and engage with it.

A share from a follower is a form of endorsement. A comment means that your content motivated somebody to write something about it. Similarly, submitting a rating or review has taken up somebody’s time. That’s time that they’ve spent interacting with your brand. Knowing which social posts have garnered those reactions is powerful information.

5. Website analytics

Tracking website data with Google Analytics or other packages is imperative. We gain valuable insights from understanding who is visiting the site, where they’re coming from and what they’re looking at. For us, time spent on site is a key metric. If customers are spending time looking at a range of website content, we know that we’re providing relevant information that is valuable for the audience.

Bounce rates can highlight areas that need attention. If people are clicking away from a page without interacting with its content, changes need to be made.

The importance of measuring marketing ROI

Data takes the guesswork out of marketing. It shows you which aspects are delivering results. That information proves which areas of spend are providing good ROI.

Tracking and collating marketing metrics doesn’t have to be laborious. We’re a HubSpot Gold Partner, so we recommend using this powerful tool to monitor marketing metrics. There’s a variety of reports that can be set up easily to provide amazing insights. You can attribute leads, deals and revenue to social posts for example. You’ll get a clear view of all marketing activity in one place.

If you don’t use HubSpot, we advise tracking data in a spreadsheet, or using another great tool on the market. Monitor stats regularly to understand patterns of behaviour, set benchmarks and reflect on performance. That knowledge is extremely powerful for businesses and can make the difference between reaching your revenue goals or not

Want to know more about marketing metrics and setting-up performance tracking? We’re here to help. Call us today on 0345 241 3038.

The benefits of working with a HubSpot Solutions partner: getting the maximum value out of your HubSpot investment!

Posted on by dukadmin

HubSpot is a powerful platform that delivers valuable results, but it takes expertise to get to grips with it – like anything complex and feature-rich. For organisations that want to explore their options before jumping in feet first, free HubSpot is a great way to kick things off and allows you to try out some of the platform’s features with no upfront cost. And maybe that’s more than you need right now, but if you want the full functionality and the full benefits HubSpot has to offer, you’ll need to invest in a paid subscription. 

If you decide to go down the route of a paid subscription, there are many CRM options available: each with a different feature set, cost, and level of expertise required to implement them. HubSpot split this functionality into Marketing, Sales, Service, CMS and Operations.  

For example, HubSpot’s Sales Hub is designed specifically for sales teams looking to drive more revenue from existing customers through lead nurturing campaigns that map out multiple stages of contact between buyer and seller. The Sales Activity Hub provides a centralised view of all sales activity across your team with detailed reports on opportunities and pipelines. The result is enhanced insight and a closer understanding of your customers. 

So if I can buy directly from HubSpot, why would I work with a partner? 

Money will buy all the functionality you need, but without the knowledge and experience to properly manage it, you won’t get the most out of your investment. Working with a HubSpot Solutions Partner is the best way to improve your marketing engagement and ultimately increase conversion rates. An experienced partner will create custom solutions that will help you get more leads, convert those leads into customers, and turn them into long-term clients. 

All the support you need, from implementation and strategy to live campaigns 

A HubSpot Solutions partner can offer you that additional level of expertise and assistance when implementing your marketing strategy. That means looking at all the teams that need access to HubSpot and rolling out onboarding and training that ensures everyone is engaged and understands the processes for getting the most out of it. They will have experience in the change management aspects of implementing a new system and can work with you however you want – whether that’s providing advice, strategic direction, or creating and delivering the strategy for you. That means you get professional assistance with content, strategy, and implementation, ensuring your team uses HubSpot successfully. 

Save time and empower your sales and marketing teams! 

Working directly with a HubSpot Solutions provider can also save valuable time for your in-house development teams to focus on what they do best, while bringing excitement back into work by being more creative about their approach to marketing campaigns. This is hugely empowering for teams and is the perfect starting point for marketing and sales alignment. Because HubSpot’s reports and analytics provide such a detailed and accurate picture of what works well (and what doesn’t), you can see where you need to optimise at any stage of the funnel. 

Access a depth of experience and get up and running right away 

A solution partner’s additional (reassuring benefit) is that they will typically have an existing customer base across multiple sectors and draw on their depth of experience in helping customers fast track getting started. Meaning you can get up and running efficiently without the need to build extensive knowledge from scratch. 

In a recent episode of ON AIR: With Owen hosted by Air Marketing’s Founder & CEO, Owen Richards, we were are joined by Caleb Buscher – Senior Channel Account Manager (EMEA Region) at HubSpot, to discuss how to make the most out of HubSpot as a revenue growth business tool. 

We explained how we’ve had first-hand experience of the difference HubSpot can make to a business: “We have had some truly inspiring conversations with clients who had zero experience of using a joined-up marketing automation CRM tool and now have a newfound love for HubSpot and what it can do for their business. Our work is about helping our customers energise the way they approach marketing, giving their business a single point of truth and empowering them to deliver better customer experiences that fuel loyalty and growth.” 

Need some help getting started?  

HubSpot is an incredibly powerful platform, but it’s not the only one out there. There are other great solutions available, and we’re happy to work with any of them and apply the same principles to deliver precisely what you need. If you want to discover how HubSpot could be a game-changer for your business, we’d be happy to guide you. Equally, if you’d like to talk about any aspect of your marketing strategy, get in touch today on 0345 241 3083.  

Sales And Marketing Alignment: Working As Equals Drives Better Revenue Generation

Posted on by Helen Young

A sales and marketing alignment strategy is more than just mandating two teams work together; it’s a finely-tuned mechanism that drives better sales for your company. To implement a successful alignment strategy, you need to change to tackle behavioural change, culture change and leverage technology and processes that drive mutual respect, understanding and genuine collaboration between sales and marketing professionals.

Louis Fernandes, VP of Sales at Uberall and SaaS marketing and sales thought leader, talks about the need to work in partnership: “In B2B sales organisations, behaviours need to change; it’s not about marketing serving sales or sales ruling the roost. Sales and marketing need the same drivers; that’s how you build an authentic environment for success where all functions work towards a common goal and deliver revenue generation. It’s that simple! It’s all about working in partnership, I’ve worked in both marketing and sales, and I’d strongly advocate for congruence of goals that we work towards together, where we’re measured in the same way. It has to be a meeting of equals. And profitability will certainly follow.”

If sales and marketing aren’t working together towards a common goal, it’s impossible to maximise your inbound and outbound strategies; and improve your overall understanding of your market and customers. The key to this process is sharing information and promoting transparent ways of working. For example, marketing and sales must understand where the budget goes and what that activity drives. Without this visibility, they’ll likely misinterpret their spending, leading to wasted money and effort and negative perceptions. The end game is teamwork and trust, investing time and resources in a focused and efficient way. Sales teams feel far more supported in their efforts, and marketers feel invested in sales follow-up processes and accountable for optimisation throughout the entire journey.

Creating an environment that integrates well:

Putting the right processes in place means that you can move quickly and efficiently as a team. Choosing the right tools and having an effective marketing and sales tech stack allows you to create an environment that permeates and integrates well, so everyone feels comfortable and supported.

Historically, marketers used their own methods of tracking conversions and determining profitability, while sales teams focused on relationships and closing. Sales teams could email contact lists and make recommendations to the marketing team based on sales success or where’d they achieved cut-through. And while this strategy was solid for quick results, it naturally excluded many profitable or high-converting prospects in the pipeline. It was harder to measure, and many implementations required high levels of collaboration and coordination between teams.

Businesses with a more holistic view of their marketplace are more likely to succeed. With the insights afforded by a high-performing CRM and tech stack, it’s far easier to shift focus to solving customers’ problems rather than trialing a range of products and services for traction and success. It’s for this reason Account-Based Marketing strategies see such a solid return on investment. It’s often the first concerted effort to align marketing with sales and pull together to achieve the same vision.

Our Marketing services team are demand generation specialists, and experts in optimising the sales-marketing relationship. HubSpot Gold Partners are hyper-focused on using the platform’s leading technology to deliver more for customers. Associate Director, Verity Studley-Wootton, said, “The most significant benefit of bringing marketing and sales touchpoints into one powerful system is the ability to create a single version of the truth in a business. By doing this, we uncover a far clearer picture of customer behaviours and the opportunity to understand better and ultimately successfully market to them and convert them into happy, loyal customers.”

Create a list of objectives that you can agree upon, and action them:

Having well-defined objectives is a prerequisite to successful alignment. However, it’s not enough to have goals in mind; you need a plan to deliver. Talk to your sales team to find out what questions they get asked by your customers. From there, you can analyse sales processes alongside campaign performance and integrate any improvements that would come quickly and easily to your sales team. Once you start a conversation with your ideal customers, you can build consistency and brand into the customer journey by empowering your sales team with the assets and content they need to convince prospects, solve their pain points and close deals. And this is where you can map what’s required, at what point, and assign ownership.

Implement a feedback loop for better alignment throughout your organisation:

The key to getting buy-in for your sales and marketing alignment strategy is to give your entire organisation visibility of the implementation process, so customer service, IT and operational units can mobilise to support.

Implement a feedback loop. Tell people in the business what you’re going to do, why it matters and share the results. This way, they’ll know what they can expect, and you’ll see if you need to make any changes. When you share why this is important and how it will make the entire business more profitable, perceptions change. When you share how it will improve your customer’s experience and drive growth, accessing the technical and administrative support, you need to improve processes around automation, customer service, and CRM suddenly becomes a much easier sell.

Evaluate the results, then adjust your strategy to respond to your customer:

Once you’ve put together a strategy, it can be easy to get complacent and assume that it’s working just because you see traffic and sales. However, it’s essential to ensure you’re still getting the results you want by regularly checking your analytics and sales numbers.

The absolute joy of alignment happens when you win! Marketing and sales teams can celebrate success together. Equally, when something falls flat, the learning opportunities are so much more valuable in a naturally joined-up environment, so you fail fast and, hopefully, rarely.

Air Marketing Group has been working hard since 2016 to address this need and help deliver results-driven marketing that better aligns with sales goals. With an increasing number of clients unsure of how to run aligned marketing campaigns and turning to us for expert advice, we saw an obvious gap in the market. Today, we rely on the combined expertise from both services withing the group to deliver the best possible results for clients.

If you’d like to talk more about driving better sales and marketing alignment in your business, we can help. Get in touch today.

Building Your Sales Tech Stack: How To Get The Right Balance

Posted on by Helen Young

Sales Technology has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry in the past decade. With so many tools out there, it’s hard to work out the essentials from the nice-to-haves. The phrase ‘building your sales tech stack’ implies you should be using layer upon layer of technology to enable your sales processes. We can tell you right now; it’s utterly dependent on your goals and your setup. Even the most tech-savvy sales leaders find it impossible to stay at the leading edge of sales technology; it’s a vast marketplace, and the options can be overwhelming. Who has time to review and analyse thousands of tools?

In our view, sales technology is there to empower salespeople, enhance their skills and make their lives easier. If you can automate a sales process and reduce administrative burden, therefore freeing up time for the vital relationship building that’s key to successful prospecting, then go for it! If you’ve heard from your network that you must buy this new market insight tool, even if your gut feel is you have a pretty good handle on your market research already, it’ll be three months before anyone in your team has time to own it, trust your instincts and park it for the time being.

How do we make the most of the sales technology available? How does a business decide what they need to adopt and when? Here’s our steer on the options available.

Understanding the options

CRM: Your CRM is the foundation of your tech stack, whether you choose a market leader like Salesforce or MS Dynamics or something more bespoke and focused on your specific industry. It’s ideal if you use a platform that supports collaboration with third-party apps, so your technology works together and delivers better overall visibility. Even the smaller providers offer integration across apps, supporting a better sales ecosystem.

Ideal for: everyone!

Sales and marketing automation: With systems like Marketo and HubSpot, you can drive a more valuable inbound experience and target campaigns at the right audiences, nurturing customer and prospect relationships in the right way, maximising your interactions and ensuring a better experience for everyone who interacts with your brand.

Ideal for: businesses that need to optimise their inbound efforts and drive better customer experience.

Sales engagement platforms: Products like Outreach, SalesLoft and Mailshake fall under this umbrella. Their value lies in automating sales processes and consolidating conversation intelligence from your CRM and Marketing Automation systems – streamlining processes, bridging gaps and ultimately saving your salespeople time.

Mailshake and SalesLoft support time-saving integrated dialers. Outreach allows users to manage all prospecting activities from one interface. And VanillaSoft offers queue-based lead routing saving, so your salespeople call the warmest lead next.

Ideal for: businesses with multiple campaigns who want to boost collaboration, improve productivity and hit rate.

Communication tools: If your sales strategy is outbound calling, there are many tools to support your agents, save time and some platforms, like Dialpad, provide feedback and learning as they go. Tools such as Aircall automate post-call processes and build better insights for teams directly from your CRM – reducing time spent on admin.

Ideal for: teams that make a high volume of calls, need to improve conversion rates, improve contact rates or want real-time feedback to support training.

Email management and integration: Suppose your sales teams preferred method of contact is email. In that case, there are thousands of tools available, from those that deliver and integrate insights from your CRM to your sales teams’ inboxes to those that measure email success rates and response times and even those that import email addresses from LinkedIn activity (like Contactout and Lusha). The aim is to bring intelligence and measurement to the familiar workflow of email.

Ideal for: sales teams that rely on email for outreach and need to optimise email engagement and data accuracy.

Lead generation and prospecting: There is a new wave of tools that help you identify and reach your ideal buyers. Powered by AI and machine learning, platforms such as Cognism and Growbots promise to automate the tedious and time-consuming parts of prospecting, leaving your teams to focus on closing warm leads that are more likely to buy.

Ideal for: sales teams stretched thin between premium accounts, managing existing relationships and pipeline building activities.

Sales insight and market intelligence: In a competitive marketplace bombarding decision-makers with broad sales messages won’t achieve cut-through. These tools arm salespeople with actionable insights that support intelligent sales conversations and provide accurate prospect info for your sales teams. Some tools can prioritise prospects who are ready to buy; others like UpLead act like enriched, searchable databases.

Ideal for: organisations looking to break new markets or struggling to get traction in their target market.

Never underestimate the human element of sales

Relationship building and making genuine connections is the key to successful outbound sales. No technology can replace the skills and experience of a talented and resilient sales expert. Still, it can bring you closer to your customers and help create an authentic experience that supports the excellent service you already deliver at every point in the sales cycle. Your sales tech stack has to reflect that and add value to your current setup. You can buy a billion tools, but with no process development or proper integration, there’s a fair chance you’ll create more work and unwanted distractions for your team. Equally, without an overarching sales strategy or direction, the tools won’t be worth the investment. They’ll undoubtedly connect you to more prospects, but it’s up to you to nail the qualification criteria and create value from those new audiences.

Weighing up the cost

Consider a new sales hire’s salary costs and the additional cost when you load them with sales technology that runs into thousands a month. Are they delivering higher productivity in line with the extra costs? This is all down to personal experience; some sales leaders believe the investment is worthwhile, provided you train the new hires on the technology, and the profitability will come. Others think it’s an overcomplication, and you need to give salespeople greater autonomy in this area, letting them adopt the tools they prefer, such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

In conclusion, sales technology can be incredible and often well worth the investment, but they’re not a cure-all for sales challenges. Any new tools you adopt must become a seamless part of your workflow, save time or deliver inherent value for your team. Trust your instincts. You know if a tool is likely to be welcomed and deemed valuable based on your culture.

If you need advice navigating the sales technology landscape, we can help; get in touch today.

Selecting Your Channels And Designing Your Sales Approach: The Key To Achieving Cut-Through In Your Market

Posted on by Helen Young

Selecting your channels and designing your sales approach: the key to achieving cut-through in your market

We live in such a connected and always-on world, increasingly enriched with digital experiences, it’s hard to conceive that not everyone is just at the end of an email, phone, or WhatsApp message. Yet there are still people out there who don’t spend the highest proportion of their working day in a digital space. In other professions the lines are blurring, and research shows the pandemic has given rise to different channels and ways of connecting, even disrupting the sales cycles in some industries. In recent months, video and live chat have been the breakout stars. And research shows that 70% of B2B decision-makers say they are open to making new, fully self-serve or remote purchases over $50,000, and 27% would spend more than $500,000. That’s a significant shift from the perception of e-commerce as high volume, low-value sales.

Why is this important?

Choosing the right channels and tools is crucial to improving your sales numbers. In fact, understanding what your prospective buyer requires to make a decision about your products and services, empowers you to invest your time where it matters.

Keep your customers’ needs at the centre of your decisions

Imagine your primary buyers are busy hospitality professionals who spend minimal time at their desks and don’t have a wealth of time to peruse content online, they might really need the cut-through of a conversation to kick off any discussion around their buying decisions. Your plan will therefore look very different from one targeting CIOs in Fintech companies shopping for accounting software, or HR leaders procuring performance management software systems. For the latter examples, you may need to invest more time in your inbound strategy. For the former, a well-crafted script for an initial phone conversation, followed by links to engaging product information and an easy way to book a demo, might be just the ticket.

Find the parts of your sales cycle that need attention

This part can be tricky because it requires an honest assessment of how well your current strategy performs and forces you to examine undiscovered territory. Say you are limited to one or two channels, and there’s no formal funnel for your prospects; this leaves little room for optimisation and doesn’t give you much data visibility.

Where do you close most of your deals? And where do you find yourself fighting to stay in the game? If you’ve never diverged from the tried and tested phone call, how’s it working for you?

If your preferred outreach method is a phone call, are your sales team spending a lot of time aggregating follow-up content for the prospect before the conversation can proceed to the next stage? Do you find it difficult to get hold of senior decision-makers? Is it a challenge to articulate your offer over the phone?

The answers to these questions provide the insight you need to optimise and design your contact sequences. If the conversation with the key decision-maker is happening too early in the cycle, you could be squandering the opportunity to close the deal because you need to spend time generating awareness. It’s far more efficient to educate your prospects through outreach emails that give greater context to the problem you solve, or pose a challenge that sparks a conversation. Similarly, signposting to relevant video content could expedite your process, allowing your discussions to begin from a position of shared understanding.

Assess which channels and tools meet your needs:

There are numerous ways to integrate your user’s experience, from website transactions, payments processing, cross-selling, coupon codes, tracking, and maintenance, to name but a few. Whether your business sells products, services, or your sale is a more consultative, longer burn, you can create an experience that adds value at every stage of the pipeline.

Sales and Marketing integration is so important to your success in this area. When you work with your marketing department, you can use the content they create as a sales tool to attract potential buyers into the sales funnel. They can proactively help you find channels where potential customers search for answers your service provides, whether that’s through a more targeted social strategy or integrated live chat into your website. All of the above strengthens the quality of leads in the funnel, enabling you to establish strong business relationships with your buyers and gain their trust.

While this list isn’t exhaustive, it gives you an insight into which strategy might best serve your audience:

Social selling: through leveraging your networks and building relationships on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, you can start conversations, respond to comments and engage with broader discussions about the challenges affecting your prospects. On LinkedIn especially, dialogues can easily migrate from the comments sections into a more formal approach. It also makes sense to talk shop where your competitors are hanging out, conversations are already in-flight, and people expect a sales approach. Here, the relationship is central to the sale, so this channel is best-suited to longer sales cycles that require more nurturing and time investment. You can complete your entire sales cycle via social selling, but it works best when used in conjunction with other channels and you migrate to a video call or meeting.

Email: Email works best when it’s personal but not presumptuous; a well-written email with an attention-grabbing subject line can pique interest. Generic, catch-all email blasts will never have the desired effect. Still, if you can segment your audiences and trigger relevant email content based on their buyer behaviours, you boost your chances of conversion. Even innovative templates that allow for some degree of personalisation and offer a gift such as a guide or a download can nudge your prospect in the right direction and helps you earn the right to a more in-depth conversation.

Phone call or video chat: Conversation is undeniable; even the most introverted amongst us get value from human connection. Where the phone call punctuates the sales cycle is entirely up to you. For some organisations, it’s their only strategy. Without a vast pool of potential buyers or a killer elevator pitch, it’s easy to burn through a database without getting real traction. Sales are about persistence, but it’s also advisable to align your sales approach with your buyer’s needs. If your buyers prefer to research online, amp up your inbound and digital outreach ahead of making calls. If your audience is tech-savvy, deliver innovative video content and let their response drive the conversation forward.

Live chat:  Live chat is one of the most potent sales tools out there. It enables direct real-time interaction with visitors to your website, capturing their immediate needs. It’s a valuable touch-point, but it works best where there are definitive answers, or you have a mechanism to book a demo.

Every business can benefit from a solid inbound strategy: Ample opportunities for prospective customers to research marketing content, participate in live webinars to see how your products solve their problems and lead to better quality, which means more qualified leads for your sales team.

Build an integrated tech stack that supports your prospect’s journey: A data-driven sales culture means that your sales representatives and managers monitor essential information that drives your business, such as sales dates, sales cycles, customer satisfaction and outbound activities. Business intelligence tools that centralise and combine data from your CRM, LMS, telephony and VoIP systems (and integrate with marketing automation systems) offer the best opportunity to examine where you’re experiencing drop-offs in engagement. You can therefore fail fast and fix things quickly, so your approach evolves with your market.

Getting started:

Armed with a plethora of tools and insight, you can continually optimise your sales approach. But this is the real world, not everything happens in the correct order, and we understand that not every business has the resources or the time to invest in systems and software. Optimising your prospect’s experience and driving better data visibility starts with setting up some joined-up internal processes. Even simple things like well-crafted follow-up emails, customer surveys and regular communications can drive better retention and increase sales success.

If you need guidance designing your sales approach, we can help. Contact us…

How fearless marketing will make you serious money. Be Brave. Sell More.

Posted on by dukadmin

Does your marketing approach need a shake up? Tired of sending out the same old fluff and seeing the same low ROI? Then this guide is for you. 

We’ve put together 4 lessons to help you think differently about your marketing strategy, ultimately resulting in more sales and long-lasting relationships with your ideal customer. 

Be brave and look closer at the numbers 

Shy away from the nitty gritty of your target numbers no more! Grab those numbers by the horns and start making the profit you deserve. 

Ask yourself these questions: 

  • How much needs to come from renewal or existing customers? 
  • Is marketing responsible for delivering a target of qualified leads? 
  • Do you know the conversion rate from a marketing qualified lead (MQL) vs a sales qualified lead (SQL)? 

Start from a place of enlightenment! Get these numbers in place. Now. 

Be brave with your content 

We’ve all heard that famous quote: ‘Content is King’. Your customers want to know about your products, your opinions and how all of it makes a difference for them and their business. 

Read these stats: 

  • 70% of consumers feel more connected to brands with CEOs that are active on social 
  • 64% of consumers want brands to connect with them 
  • 86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience 

And read them again. Then have a look at what’s missing from your current content and dare we say it… idea storm! 

Be brave with your targeting 

Heard of the “sneezer effect”? Enough is enough! 

We all like to feel special. The trouble with ‘catch-all’ marketing and aiming for a broad appeal is that you actively alienate the people who need your product most and instead, focus on casting a wide-net and filling it with fairly uninterested fish. 

Start by: 

Who wants to spend all their time and effort convincing everyone to like you, when you could preach to the almost converted instead? 

Be brave with your delivery 

Marketing trends come and go, but creativity endures. It’s tough to stand out in a fast-paced attention economy. When everybody’s talking, why should they listen to you? 

Most of us carry around a super powerful computer in the palm of our hands that targets us with advertisements based on our preferences. There’s no shortage of content out there, but how often does it make you think, you know what, I want to discover more about this? 

Have a look at the way you currently deliver your content and see if you can apply these 3 small changes: 

  • People are smarter than you think – don’t over-explain 
  • Incorporate clever print into your campaigns 
  • Use your competitor’s campaigns as examples but try and analyse what could have been done better or more creatively 

It’s all in the delivery. 

So… 

Download our guide. Be brave. Sell more. 

Onboarding your sales team

Posted on by James Ollerhead

Onboarding your sales team represents a real opportunity to engage and educate your new employees about your business and shape how they speak to your market. If you get it right, your new hires will be productive sooner than you think and feel raring to go. Conversely, an ineffective or unclear onboarding experience will do little to inspire confidence in their ability to deliver their targets; or, worse, cause them to lose faith in your business resulting in a hasty departure. And this is why so many organisations experience high churn: they invest time and effort in communicating their culture throughout the interview process, but it all falls off a cliff swiftly after. You easily bridge this gap with some reflection on your onboarding experience. Think about what your employees need to know to do their jobs, e.g. product knowledge, playbooks, call scripts and training materials. Now think about what they need to be genuinely successful, training, support, mentoring and a culture where they can ask questions and seek knowledge without fear of knockbacks or reprisals.

Now you may be thinking, yeah, but salespeople will sink or swim, and they’ll be thick-skinned enough to weather anything we throw at them. That’s true for some salespeople but by no means all. As we covered in our previous blog, Planning and Hiring and Outbound Sales Function, all salespeople are different and will have a range of needs. If you take the ‘sink or swim approach’, you will experience high churn, and that’s demoralising for everyone in your team because it creates a powerful barrier to building team rapport and a high-performance culture.

Don’t overwhelm new hires

There are a few schools of thought around sales training. I believe you need to upskill and arm your new hires with the product training; they’ll need to sell your services and products effectively. You don’t need to block in two or three solid weeks of intensive training, and doing that could be counterintuitive. Research reveals 84% of sales training is forgotten within the first three months. It’s a lot for people to retain and remember, and it’s the antithesis of the in-role learning that people find so helpful once they’re taking calls. It’s worth thinking about how you can break up product training, where appropriate, with other equally valuable elements of the onboarding experience.

Train outside the classroom because exposure to the entire business matters

Draw on the experiences of everyone in the business to give your new hires a real sense of your culture, your operating model and the way you conduct business. Shadowing can provide compelling insight for recruits, so invite them to marketing meetings to see the messaging and methods you use to talk to your market, which will help them when they’re talking to prospects. Expose them to account management calls and meetings so they can get a feel for how you collaborate with and support your clients. It’s also a brilliant insight into how you deal with challenges and objections in real life outside of a formal training environment. Peer-to-peer mentoring or ‘buddy systems’ can work well to support informal, on-the-job learning and give your new hire a go-to resource for questions they don’t want to bring to management or schedule meetings to discuss.

Set clear expectations and invite honest questions

As a founder and an experienced sales professional, it matters to me that new employees know that my door is open, and they can ask me questions about the business. I want to know their concerns, and I want to encourage them to be curious and seek knowledge from their managers and peers because it’s an organic and brilliant way to learn. Equally, it’s essential that I set clear expectations and communicate my vision for the business, so we start their journey on the same page.

Embrace ready to go attitudes (whilst providing support)

This might be deemed controversial, but I can only speak from my own experience. Early on in my career, I would have been very disappointed if I’d left a new sales role and hadn’t been allowed to speak to a customer on my first day. I fully understand that different organisations have different policies. Others aren’t comfortable allowing a new hire to have a customer or prospect until they’ve completed weeks, maybe even months of training.  Where possible, I would encourage you to embrace those enthusiastic types and give them all the support they need to get going as quickly as possible; it will instil confidence and achievement they cannot get from any amount of success in role-play or simulated training environments.

If you’d like to talk more about any of the topics discussed in this blog or discuss developing your sales strategy, get in touch call 0808 178 6606 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

Opinion Piece by Owen Richards, Founder & CEO