The Buddha’s tenet for modern day sales strategies – Part II

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Closing a sale takes time

 

Every time I pick up the phone and call or come up with a Sales campaign, it takes anywhere few days to few weeks to at least see some measurable results. And it takes weeks and months to optimize to a point where I can get a cost per lead/ conversion cost. People see the results not the point where is actually started the process. It’s like weight loss infomercial. You don’t see the people going to gyms, you just see the before and after result in one second split image.

Buddha had simply stated the fact that it takes drop by drop to fill the jug.

People don’t see the countless hours of endless emails, non-stop calls, fine-tuning, testing, media creation, and all that hard stuff no one wants to do.
So stop focusing on these “I need results NOW” and focus on the little things that eventually accumulate to a big thing. All good things come to those who wait and have the patience to see the real outcome. Don’t be in a hurry, wait and watch for yourself how patience can help you achieve a lot more in business.

The Buddha said be Attached while you are detached
You only lose what you cling to – Buddha

If you are one or have had the opportunity to meet a new entrepreneur or marketer, you will not escape the feeling that they’re often in “LOVE” with their ideas. They put in their heart and soul and get into a complete vacuum to bring this idea alive even if the idea is not validated or it’s a product that no one needs or wants.

What happens is anybody’s guess. The business goes kaput.

The entrepreneurs so in love with their ideas and invention were stuck on the idea of the event and not the process. In such a scenario they lose hope as well as motivation.

Instead, why not lay emphasis and focus on bettering yourself and becoming a better marketer? Throw your ideas around and test them to see if people are willing to pay for them, instead of using all that time and money to make something you THINK people want?

But the most important part is to DETACH yourself from what happens and not get attached to the idea in the first place.

If the idea fails, move on quickly. Don’t dwell in it. Pick up pointers and learn from what happened and try again. There is no dearth of good ideas out there. Pull yourself up and do it again.

What can storytelling do for your product marketing?

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Once upon a time, there was a boy who loved his kitchen set. His father thought that these were great signs of things to come. We’re sure you want to know what ensued next. That’s what stories do to us. And this is not a new phenomenon, throughout history, mankind has delved into and transformed the art of storytelling as per the times. From cave paintings to the big screen and small print, tales of heroes and villains have fascinated and enraptured audiences for millennia. However, did you know that storytelling can do wonders to your brand and product marketing? It’s true! Storytelling is vital to decoding everyday life and everyday business too!

 

A lot of organizations have flourished and kept their customers glued to them with the use of storytelling. Take for example the case of the mediation app Insight Timer. It has a simple yet straight forward story for new users. The welcome screen talks about stories of the app having helped thousands of others and even has a few forms of social proof to help validate the product’s value.

A lot of brands believe that its story can change consumer perceptions, especially if you want people to become your brand ambassadors and repeat the narrative on your behalf.
A good story helps you feel good and people would want to buy products from brands they can relate to and understand. They wanted to grasp the brand’s values and their commitment to excellence; be inspired and intrigued. Storytelling is by far the best and the most powerful way to convey these ideas.

Mascots are kind of like your product’s hero. Like heroes to a story, they exemplify the main themes of your product. .Look at the case of Customer.io. Ami, their delightfully adorable mascot has done wonders for the customer experience.

It’s a minuscule yet the meaningful emotional connection to a character that feels human and expressive. Ami catches the eye, conveys a friendly personality, and ever since she came to life, the brand discovered that customers are naturally drawn to her.

Move from Linear to Systemic Story-Building
When brands decide to engage in systemic story-building, they start layering communications to form a single narrative. This works much better than the linear storytelling of the past. With systemic story-building, the brand creates the base layers of communication, which helps their audience to know and understand them better through the core idea as well as video executions. Complementing this with content co-created with media partners or created by consumers adds another dimension of reliability and trust for the brand.

Lead from the front
Automotive experts sincerely believe that storytelling in their industry has been vital in marketing campaigns ever since the advent of interactive/social media. This can be something metaphoric, yet simple, like a journey, to something more in-depth, with use of roles and a plot for the more adventurous.
Making your brand play the lead role in any of the cases is really important.
Keep the story simple, uncomplicated and ensure that the brand is intrinsically linked to the story’s message. This can vary from ensuring your brand is known as one that will deliver quality results, to perhaps setting the brand above its rivals, be it as a champion, a maverick, or both.

Get high on EQ
Storytelling can beautifully lend itself to hit that emotional chord with your customers. Tell stories that have happened or at least based on real stories and tell them in a manner that arouses feelings and emotions and makes them think. Do not under any circumstances try and hit that emotional level just for the sake of hitting it for consumers will see right through you.

Be honest. Be true. Be real.
A fitness club used stories to talk about staying fit and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. They inspired their readers and clients with real-life stories of ordinary people who broke the bad habit in ways that were less than ordinary. They touched lives in such a way that readers actually thought emotionally and got into action.

Make them come back for more
Which brand wouldn’t give up an arm or a leg to make its customers or prospects come back for more? And this ‘more’ can take many forms. It could be sales or could be service or a combination of both but the best way to keep them coming back is via storytelling. And good storytelling at that.
Research has put the figure of 100,000 digital words that Americans consume every single day but 92% say they want brands to tell stories in all those words. So don’t just try to impress your prospects and customers with one stat after another. Tell them a story!

Key takeaways:
Stories have an enormous impact on the way people decide to buy. Most middle-class consumers would love a good story and would rather buy something with a positive or interesting backstory, even if the product hurts their pockets a bit. The customers love it when they realize that their coffee is harvested by families in Ecuador who care about the environment and are paid fairly. Likewise, they’ll heartily support decimating a product that is linked to a bad story. And also pat themselves on the back as they give something a second chance because of a redemption story. But if there’s no story behind your product? Good luck.

How DATA impacts CFOs

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By now we all have easily established that organizations big or small, all need and also manage to collect overwhelming quantities of Data. They could garner it either from internal functions and operations or external customer interactions. With business analytics presenting a robust promise to evaluate data for competitive gains, real-time insights across the value chain has become critically important for Chief Financial Officers.

 

More often than not, CFOs need marketing data to run a tight ship and manage the strategic aspects of the business. Datakart offers ready and relevant data that not only helps CMOs but also other C-suite and helps them take their business to a new high.

CFOs can meet many a challenge using data wisely because:
Relevant data is unquestionable
Data from Datakart is relevant as well as actionable data and can easily be your “ace of spades”. But to use that card and win the game, you need to first have it in your deck. If your organization wants to make decisions based on facts, having actionable data on-hand empowers you to answer all the questions that begin with ‘why’? To make it easy to comprehend, we can safely say that relevant data which is reported correctly is indisputable. Actionable analytics and insights remove the subjectiveness in business.

Relevant data lends itself to unbeatable strategies
Once you have a hypothesis, paired with relevant data, you can create a strong, measurable strategy and put it to work! The structured criteria of a hypothesis, including data, is your foundation to base and execute the strategy. Compare results to the hypothesis regularly and make sure that the campaign is right on track. If it’s not, make amendments to reach your desired goal. Having the hypothesis, based on relevant data, allows your team to achieve more goals.

Relevant data can help you optimize
How can you empower and enable your team if you don’t hand them over the right tools? Just the same way, your team will not be able to optimize anything if you don’t have meaningful data to support making changes. Many a time, people blur testing with optimizing. Testing is a part of optimizing, but they aren’t one and the same thing. Testing is measuring to check the quality, performance, or reliability of something. Optimizing takes those measurements a step further. It means to make the best of or most effective use of something.

Relevant data gives you the purpose of work
As much as you’d like to ignore it, the numbers don’t lie. Data can prove that the projects you’re working on are where your limited time is best spent. It can also let you know what not to work on. For example, maybe you spend 15 hours on email marketing, and you put on quite a many per month thinking they’re driving leads. But once you look at the report, you realize the emails account for 25-50% of your time on the clock and only bring in 2-5% of leads. Maybe then, you will realize that your time might be best spent on a totally different lead generation campaign.

Key takeaways – Data and its analysis are still in their early stages of development, but that they offer endless possibilities for companies to use is beyond any doubt. Every single piece of information, inside and outside the organization can be employed to better structure the business on all levels. In this framework, it is likely to witness major shifts in the roles and responsibilities of CFOs in the years to come. Datakart with its ready marketing data is there to help the CFOs understand the opportunities better.

Data is the kind of universal resource that we can mould to provide new innovations and new insights. It’s all around us, and it can be mined very easily.

We’ve got to use every piece of data and piece of information, and hopefully, that will help us be accurate with our product evaluation. For us and anyone else in marketing, it is our lifeblood.

Tips to use data wisely

When analyzing your sales performance consider data for the following:
Pricing changes eg. price increases or discounting
Competitors entering or exiting the market
New product or service launch growing sales
New product or service cannibalizing existing product or service sales
Customers moving between products or services
Changes in customer demand eg. increasing or decreasing
The segments and distribution channels you operate in

Debunking the myths of B2B marketing

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When we, as an agency meet clients, we are more often than not met with questions that are cringe-worthy. When clients want to dig deeper and want to know, “Which of these designs has skyrocketed our competitor’s sales?”, we want to say that along with the design, there definitely was a strategy in place coupled with content as well as creative.

So, we decided to give it a shot and come up myths around B2B marketing and try to solve them in laymen terms for everyone out there.

We at Sellosphere design, create, curate tonnes of campaigns, lead generation programs, and creative assets each month, and we can humbly say that our sphere is that of a fair amount of expertise and domain knowledge. And even though each and every one of those deliverables is culled out from actionable data and deep insights. We believe or definitely would love to believe that our work is customized for each one of clients. It’s not a cookie-cutter solution that we are making available to our partners. We look at our client’s objective, do a proper research of our target audience, and only then do we offer solutions

 

It would be sort of utopic to think that agencies like ours have a bag full of ideas, and our task is simplified to just picking and selecting one or a few more ideas from the bag to suit the client’s needs. Another point that needs to be noted is that best practices, even those that have a proven track record, are not in the least an absolute case.
There is nothing in the world including marketing that works 100% of the time. For every accepted norm and guideline in B2B marketing, there is at least one outlier, one organization, one campaign that has gone against the tide and done well anyway.
Another aspect and an important one is that consumer behaviour is never the same. It is constantly changing. Technology evolves and transforms its surrounding. What worked half a decade ago might or might not work in today’s day and age.
As marketers, we need to evolve and change with the time too. If we just decide to go with the flow and do what has already been done, we might not reach a great height any time soon. We need to take lessons from history, not necessarily replicate them all the time. We need to take risks. We need to think out of the box. And we need to become that one organization that everyone looks up to and wants to copy!

Some pointers you can consider as you climb up the B2B ladder.
Embrace transparency
Investing more in social media
Make an emotional connect with the partner
There is definitely room for silly creativity on B2B marketing
B2B marketing is not too different from B2C marketing

How is B2B marketing getting transformed?

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B2B sales are not what they were half a decade back, it is definitely on the verge of a revolution. There are a number of trends completely redefining what it will take to be a market leader over the next few years.

 

 

What was effective some years ago has already lost its sheen or is steadily fading away to give way to newer concepts and ideas. And there are some potentially powerful tactics that have been overlooked for long that need to be relooked at and employed for better sales and marketing.

For example, a lot of fast-growing companies are now using advanced analytics to profoundly improve their sales productivity and drive double-digit sales growth with marginal additions in their sales teams and cost base.
Also with the radical changes in buyers’ preferences, with buyers being more content-driven, tech-savvy, and comfortable engaging via myriad channels, the tables have definitely turned. This has led to the rise of a new breed of sales leaders who bring technical expertise and a strategic mindset. This is also giving sales organizations a makeover, with a sharp drop in field sales and marketing, and rapid growth in inside sales and analytics teams.
So what are the channels that marketers have been using?

One of the most universal B2B content marketing practice is blogging. According to research undertaken, the numbers revealed that 79% B2B companies have a blog.

And this shouldn’t really come across as a surprise because blogs are the core element in Content Marketing. And as the market reveals, statistics have a story to tell:

97% more inbound links are generated by regularly blogging companies. This leads to higher search engine ranking and a higher likelihood of being found.

Along with other SEO strategies, blogging 2-3 times a week can lead to a 177% traffic increase.
B2B companies that regularly blog generate 67% more sales leads than non-blogging companies.
Though there are enough proof and even consensus among marketers that blogging is productive, there are also areas where views differ.

Marketers now think differently about email marketing, event marketing and some other domains such as a mix of inbound vs. outbound marketing tactics

With regards to email and event marketing, it mainly is about the execution that was the bone of contention for marketers. So, even if using email marketing with rented third-party lists for a Lead Generation doesn’t yield great results, maybe using it for lead nurturing will throw up surprising outcomes.

And with event marketing, it is another ball game altogether. While marketers whined about the high cost of live events, they also accepted that events often result in some of the highest-quality leads.
Lastly, when we come to inbound vs. outbound marketing, four out of five study participants said they were trying various mixes for the coming year—with an even split between planning to do more inbound and less outbound, and those planning to do the opposite.

Looking for other options such as Partner Marketing Programs
Even though partner marketing programs were overlooked and not used widely, there is suddenly a huge wave of interest in it as marketers claim now.

With benefits
like:

  • Reaching new audience
  • Expanding brand awareness
  • Aiding with SEO
  • Driving website traffic
  • Enhancing reputation