 Today's marketing teams require a multi-channel approach to carrying out both online and offline marketing campaigns. While utilizing multiple channels enables marketers to personalize a customer's sales journey throughout the sales funnel, there are some unique challenges when analyzing a particular marketing campaign and its ROI.
One key metric to determine your marketing ROI is through attribution. If your company is not focusing on sales and lead attribution, here is why it should be at the forefront of your marketing campaign. What is Attribution? Attribution indicates how prospective customers enter your sales funnel. Likewise, it serves as a touchpoint of customer experiences throughout the buyer's journey. It specifies what door they came through, what channels and messages resonated with them the most, and what was the deciding factor that led to a purchase. A common flaw for many businesses is they fail to clearly understand attribution, leading to a lack of understanding of which sales tactics and initiatives are working best for their bottom line. Focusing on lead and sales attribution can help your business determine where it is getting the most ROI for your marketing dollars, and what acquisition channels are the most valuable. Why is Attribution Important? Attribution programs require marketers to aggregate consumer data across all levels of your marketing channels. The data is then normalized and properly weighed to give your business better insight into the customer's decision-making process. For instance, if a potential customer receives both an email ad and a display ad, but only clicks on the promotion from the email, it indicates to your marketing team the email was more effective at enticing interest for your good or service for that particular customer. Understanding attribution can improve your business' decision-making process. Attribution helps you determine which channels are better at generating new leads, or which channels are more effective at converting leads into finalized sales. If you find your promotional emails are generating more leads, then you can allocate more resources to your email campaign. To achieve efficacious attribution requires advanced marketing analytics that can take a large amount of data and convert it into personal-level insights, which you can then use to optimize your marketing campaigns. Benefits of Effective Attribution
Avoid the Pitfalls Despite the many benefits attribution can bring to your business, some common pitfalls can obscure the success of marketing campaigns. To ensure you are getting the most valuable insight from your data, these are the common mistakes marketers should avoid when using attribution models:
Attribution Models Single-touch Models First-touch attribution assumes a customer chose to convert after the first advertisement they came across. Therefore, it gives attribution to the first touchpoint, regardless of any additional messaging subsequently introduced. Last-touch attribution gives entire attribution credit to the last touchpoint the customer interacted with before finalizing the purchase. It does not take into account any prior engagements. Both single-touch models fail to account for the broader customer journey. Multi-touch models Multi-touch attribution models look at every touchpoint a customer engages with throughout the buyer's journey. Therefore, multi-touch models are more accurate at depicting the efficacy of your marketing efforts. These models are different by how they divide credit between touchpoints. These include:
How to Improve Your Sales Attribution Sales and lead attribution are crucial aspects for your business, and knowing how to accurately gauge your customer's journey is paramount. Want to learn more, but not sure where to start and need some expert advice, check out our website to view our informational webinars, or sign up for our weekly newsletter. Did you know it takes an average of 18 calls before a salesperson connects with their lead? Multiply that by every lead in the salesperson's funnel, and that's a gigantic amount of time spent chasing down sales. Yet, there's often a perception among company leadership that salespeople have it easy. Nothing could be farther from the truth. If your company doesn't properly value or take the time to understand its sales team, it can affect every facet of your business. Fostering a sales-positive culture helps you obtain long-term success.
The Benefit of a Sales-Positive Culture Success begins with understanding, and understanding comes from the top down. Your company's leadership must set an example by demonstrating respect, appreciation and insight as to how their sales reps operate. It's easy to see how misconceptions are born. For those who've never been a salesperson, speaking to clients seems like a soft skill, chatting and schmoozing followed by a lot of downtime. In reality, the sales rep spends only about 30% of their time talking directly with clients. The rest of that time is spent on administrative tasks like scheduling, paperwork and training. Still, the misconception persists: that no one really understands what sales does, that sales seems easy, and that if the company needs more revenue, sales just needs to sell better or call more people to increase it. Unless your leadership takes measures to stop the anti-sales attitude from taking root, your company's morale and profitability could be in serious trouble. 10 Things Leadership Needs to Know About Its Sales People It's a more effective strategy to build a bridge than it is a fence. Keeping your company's individual departments synchronized boosts morale and overall prosperity. After years of interacting with professional salespeople, these are the most essential things every salesperson wishes their CEO knew about them.
Building Bridges Your sales department is the driving force behind your revenue and prosperity, but they're often misunderstood by fellow employees and company leadership. It's important to view your sales team as essential and look for ways to enfranchise them. It's always better to build a bridge than it is a fence. For more SMB advice and insights, sign up for our newsletter, or visit our website for webinars and other valuable business resources.  Before you continue to find fault with your sales organization, consider the possibility that you’re lacking alignment from the foundation up and that is the root cause of poor sales performance. You are not alone, however. This is a universal problem, and sales forces are picking up and moving on at staggering rates. According to a 2018 survey by Marc Wayshak, only 17.6% of respondents rate their job satisfaction as "outstanding," and 47.1% rated their jobs as just "good." If you’re feeling frustrated with sales performance and revenue, it’s possible that some core strategies and relationships need to be reconsidered. Take a deep look at your foundations, your team and your leadership. How can you give sales performance a boost? Consider these three steps. Increase Sales Performance by Revisiting Your Foundations Are you clear on your company value foundations? You must know what problems you are here to solve and who you are solving them for. Take the time to really define your value proposition and how you’re different from other companies. Without a concise foundation, your sales team's performance will suffer. Make sure everyone is aligned with your purpose by training your team to understand the organization's well-defined foundations. Explore Your Sales Team Dynamics Chances are that among your group, there are individual strengths that merit individual approaches. Look at the sales team and understand who they are. The result will be higher sales performance because you have set them up for success by giving them opportunities that speak to their strengths. From here, work towards group solutions and create a collaborative environment. If you have provided safety and encouragement through listening and asking questions, your team will feel relevant and confident. Be bold and ask them what they would do if they ran the department. How would they solve their frustrations and yours? You might be delighted by the answers you receive. Reexamine Your Sales Leadership It’s imperative that you create an environment for your team to be successful. Have you made them feel trusted, empowered and knowledgeable as individuals so that they can be aligned as a team? You don’t need new hires. I’m a firm believer that most salespeople are good at what they do if given the opportunity to sell the way that best supports their strengths. You are responsible for putting each team member in the right role and fostering skills that will bring their sales performance to peak levels. Remember that your team must be heard. Listen to them. Ask what they need and keep in mind that there are numerous ways to sell. Teach them trust and mutual respect through providing it yourself in your leadership. Spotio’s Sales Career Statistics states that the typical account executive spends 2.7 years on the job and takes 4.7 months to ramp. You can do better. It’s hard to see oneself as the culprit of other’s dissatisfaction or for a company sales slump. However, looking inward and accepting that changes need to be made can lead a poor sales team to greater happiness, higher performance and increased loyalty. An experienced, well-equipped and determined sales team can lead any business to success. The problem many companies face is that they have poor sales team performance. In many cases, it doesn't have to do with experience or determination. The reason lies in the lack of understanding, empowerment and engagement. Today, 75% of companies say that closing more deals is their top priority. If you are among them, showing trust and giving the necessary tools to your team can give your business a giant push forward. Consider these five ways to improve sales team performance. 1. Learn More About Your Sales Team
Being a sales rep isn't a profession. It's a calling. To be successful, these experts need to feel the buyers' pain points and offer suitable solutions, while guiding them down the sales funnel. All that requires determination, passion and hard work. Unfortunately, many business owners don't understand the variety of challenges these sales professionals face. From that comes a lack of respect and encouragement, resulting in poor sales team performance. That's one of the reasons for a high sales rep turnover rate, compared to other industries (35% vs 13%). If you feel unhappy with your team's sales performance, start by learning more about your team. As you work on your involvement, you can uncover various factors to help improve the team's performance.
2. Increase Sales Performance by Encourage Strengths All sales reps have certain professional strengths and weaknesses. When you want an employee to increase sales performance, focusing attention on their weaknesses is counterproductive. According to Gallup, building on employee's strengths is much more effective than trying to improve on their weaknesses. It's up to the employer to create a work environment to cultivate the sales rep's strengths. A supervisor's understanding of his/her reps' strengths has an impressive effect on the company's bottom line because managers play a crucial role in maximizing employee output. You can empower the sales rep to discover and develop their strengths. Once you do that, adjust their role to exploit these strengths fully.
3. Support Teamwork To boost sales team performance, sales reps need to come together as a united group. This could be problematic for experts, who are used to working alone. As you get to know each team member's strengths and weaknesses, you can figure out the best way to bring these people together.
4. Ask For Feedback...And Listen To It The best way to discover a problem in the workplace is to ask. If your team isn't performing as well as you expect, ask your sales rep why they think it's happening. The information you can acquire simply by asking could change your entire approach to team building, workplace environment and much more. Don't hesitate to ask your sales team for ideas. They may already know how to solve the problem. Listening to your employees and trusting their professional opinion could help you achieve many business goals in addition to improving sales team performance. 5. Promote Engagement And Involvement One of the top reasons why employees are unhappy with their work is the lack of meaning. When sales reps don't see a meaning in what they do, their performance suffers. Employee disengagement costs the U.S. more than $550 billion a year in lost productivity. Even when scaled down to one company, the losses could be devastating. To increase engagement, employees should be invested in the company's mission, vision, value and goals. It's up to the leader to show the sales team why its work is highly meaningful to the company. You should help sales reps understand that the work they do contributes to the company's success directly.
Start Improving Sales Team Performance Today The success of your sales team doesn't just depend on its professionalism and experience. A big part stems from your attitude. By getting to know your team better, encouraging its strengths, improving the workplace environment and promoting engagement, you can improve the sales team's performance tremendously. Work with your sales team as much as you can. Such an effort can bring an impressive ROI. For more information about improving your sales team performance and other important tips, please sign up for our weekly newsletter. Ask Yourself Daily: What Will Create the Most Value? I can easily get caught in the trap of "busyness." I remind myself daily, my job is to create value for myself, my team and my prospects with the actions I take today. I have to start by being mindful of how I create value and what will create value. Then, I prioritize. The discipline required to remain focused on long term goals amidst the actual execution of a strategy is a rare skill, but is highly valuable to clients. Following a disciplined process typically leads to higher quality and faster results. TIP: On a weekly basis, I challenge assumptions made when originally setting goals, and seek input from the team on whether our goals need to be modified.  Set Mutual Commitments Together Similar to defining next steps, setting mutual commitments while you still have everyone’s attention on a call or in a meeting is a vital way to ensure progress. It also creates mutual accountability and builds ongoing trust. Don’t forget, trust built over time equals longer client engagements, larger projects and great client retention. TIP: Don’t shy away from directly asking each contributor on the call what they plan to bring to your next meeting and when. The simple act of asking typically forces everyone to shift their thinking to consider everything else that is demanding their time. That way any commitments they make are realistic, and positions everyone for long-term success.  Always Define Next Steps I have learned to have next steps already in mind before I ever start a call. I purposely leave some margin in what I expect to accomplish so I can dedicate time to define next steps when wrapping up. Defining next steps is a valuable way to build on your momentum toward your sales goals. TIP: Remember it’s also important to solicit key contributors for any next steps they consider most important. While you are the owner of the call, you don’t want to be the dictator of your agenda. That is a quick way to break trust.  Know the Stakeholders and Show Up as the Owner of the Call Prospects, stakeholders or clients (with whomever you are meeting) have a tendency to take over-scheduled calls and meetings. When this happens it’s typically because they are trying to get to what is important to them. Find out what matters most to them and come prepared to deliver it, so they can stay focused and engaged. It’s your job to ensure everyone’s time is consistently well spent and is key to having a successful sales call. This gets back to the importance of always building trust (and maintaining it). Tip 1: I set my meeting agendas at least a day in advance and share them with my clients for input, so we have shared ownership of how we use the allotted time. Tip 2: I put the meeting agenda directly in the calendar invite along with links to any docs, decks, etc. I might plan to reference on the call. This saves significant time for clients since they don’t need to fish around their inbox for the attachments they need. Tip 3: I always give those on the call permission not to be fully prepared, but tell them to consider our calls working sessions. Developing a cadence of weekly time set aside to focus on marketing activities frees up mind space for busy clients. Do not spend time in a meeting for any tasks that could otherwise be handled in an email, short phone call or similar.  Are Great Sales Reps Born or Made? We are so excited to welcome today's guest on the Quota Crusher™ Podcast is Karl Becker! We debate on whether great sales reps are born or made. Listen to today's episode to hear what qualities we think make a great sales rep and if its something your born with or not!
Design Your Sales Meetings to Generate Value - Tons Of Value Meetings are where you either prove your value or slowly undermine your own credibility and trust. An effective sales meeting builds trust. Trust long-term = revenue. Don’t ever forget this simple truth. Ever. Everyone has blind spots. Take for example, my use of too many words. Beware, your blind spots may be undermining your credibility and the value you bring. It’s pointless to pretend you don’t have any blind spots, and candidly, will only hold you back. Instead, role play what you plan to say with at least one other person on the call. Think through places where you could possibly get derailed – it is a game changer. It’s not a comfortable process but more than once it has saved me from floundering in front of an important client. Tip: Think through the following in advance. What is the one thing you want participants to take away from the meeting? What information and feedback do you require to move forward on a project, proposal, etc.? Where should you have check-in points to gauge for reception? Who are the best people to address key points, and in what order? Use your sales meetings to generate value.  SALES IMPROVEMENT RECORDINGS AA-ISP Sales Improvement Courses - Every three months AA-ISP provides a course focused on sales improvement. Each course is focused on specific fundamentals essential to high performance. Classes are held monthly and provided via Zoom Conference. Classes are a combination or presentations, workshops and real-time Q&A – all designed with actionable content to get your team inspired and moving forward immediately. These courses are all about unlocking the power of the individual, how the individual can invest in himself/herself to play to his/her strengths and perform at a higher level. Commit to your own personal and professional sales growth and improve your sales performance. Gain more confidence. Close more sales. Play at a higher level. Class #1 – How To Immediately Impact Your Sales Performance Sales success is rooted in intentionality and self-awareness. Sustainable sales improvement is about understanding all the little things we do every day and improving each one. This class provides introspection into how we sell today and the refinements we can make to immediately improve our own sales performance. Class #2 – Why You Must Take Sales Personally, Starting Right Now Forget what you have been told. If you are in sales, you need to take things personally. We are directly in control of affecting outcomes; and if we are not generating the outcomes we want, we need to change. This class explores how we show up, how we run sales calls and how we need to proactively guide our prospects through each stage of the buyers journey. Be of real value. Sell more. Class #3 - How You Can Unlock Trapped Sales & Build A Stronger Pipeline
Every sales organization and every sales person has trapped sales that they can unlock right now. There are always strategies and tactics available to generate immediate revenue. The question is whether or not you are using them. This class teaches you how to find quick wins and how to build a stronger, more robust pipeline. You have probably had numerous conversations about integrating sales and marketing, rich with great ideas on how to improve this relationship and start capturing more sales from the leads marketing is generating. But if your organization is like most others, marketing and sales still continues to be siloed, and often at odds with each other. Worse yet, you can probably see the sales that these teams should be generating. You know there is more business there, but this revenue just keeps being illusive. Why is this? It may very well be because there is a historic gap between marketing and sales. If you're curious about this gap, then I invite you to watch this video discussion. After all, if we can get marketing and sales better aligned, sales performance will increase and we’ll generate more sales. If you're looking to solve the marketing and sales gap, then I recommend starting with awareness. Sometimes the most effective first step to aligning sales and marketing is simply to get these two teams talking. A good place to start is to see what each defines as their role within the buyers journey and within each stage of the sales funnel. Leadership teams often get confused about sales people. Don’t worry. It’s natural and pretty much everyone does it. If you don’t believe me, go look at some job postings for sales people and read through everything they are supposed to do in their role. [Go ahead and search for jobs like: sales person, account executive, business development manager. It’s ok…I’ll wait.] What you probably found was a description that combines the skills of a hunter and a farmer into one salesperson. If you read the details, the job description was probably about generating new sales opportunities and growing current accounts simultaneously (hunting and farming). We all want this type of salesperson to exist, and we all see how this makes sense on paper. However, this type of hybrid, dare I say super salesperson that can both hunt and farm, is a unicorn. Really, I mean this in the most positive way possible. If you are this unicorn - then good for you. You are a superstar, no question. And, if you have one of these unicorns, hold on tight because they really are rare. From a realistic point of view, we all only have 40-50 hours a week to do our job. [I know there are exceptions that burn the midnight oil.] In these hours we have team meetings, sidebar conversations that sprout up, emails to answer, general day-to-day activities and personal moments that are all going to get in the way of selling activities. It's just a fact of life. With that context, our hunter/farmer may have 20-30 hours to juggle both jobs. That's really not a lot of time to intentionally generate new sales, while at the same time taking action to grow and nurture current customers. It's just not. New business generation isn't a flick of the switch, especially if you are selling complex or big ticket solutions. It takes an intentional plan, dedicated time, attention to follow-up and an understanding of how to find and cultivate a prospect that is natively interested in your solution [is aware of and has a problem that your offering solves]. Growing accounts is equally time consuming and intense - with multiple external and internal stakeholders that you need to wrangle. [I mean manage.] If you do have a unicorn or if you are a unicorn, then this ebook will become your new best friend. Why, you might ask? Because it’s a clear blueprint of how to hunt in today’s world where nobody answers their phone, SPAM filters are rampant and capturing a prospect's attention is a challenge. As a quick reality check, the days of simply calling leads and asking a prospect if they want to buy are completely gone. [Sorry, I know we all think we just need to call more people and pitch our solutions because they are going to love it and be glad we called them! But the sad news is, this just isn't true.] So what is a sales person, who is responsible for lead generation and opportunity generation, to do? Download this ebook, and start putting these social selling strategies and tactics into action. If you get stuck, reach out and I’ll walk you through it. |
Meet Me
I’m Karl Becker and I help individuals and organizations improve how they sell. My focus is on clear, concise, actionable solutions.
In short, I'll show you how to increase performance and generate more revenue. This blog shares approaches, tools, and ideas that I have seen create success. If you’re interested in discussing anything, please reach out. Archives
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