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5 Sales Tech Challenges When Hosting Virtual  Meetings

9/28/2020

 
Reps Face New Sales Tech Challenges Associated with Virtual Meetings
New trends in virtual meetings have given rise to sales tech challenges for many teams. In March 2020, Zoom saw more than 20 million new users download their mobile app. While the Work From Home (WFH) business model has been gaining traction for years, the current socio-political climate radically sped up the advent of technology like video conferencing. At the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, more than 300 million people participate in Zoom meetings every day. Add that to the immense number of people who use rival services such as Google Hangouts/ Meet, and you have a major shift in global business practices. 

That level of explosive growth isn't without problems, though. With so many first-time users adopting this new technology, things are bound to go wrong. Tech issues and sales meeting challenges are likely to arise. Here are five sales tech challenges that I see my clients struggle with every week, along with instructions on how to solve them.  

1. Attendees Click the Wrong Meeting Link 

​Google's entire suite of products is built on user experience. They have led the renaissance of easy-to-use applications that integrate seamlessly with one another. For the most part, it makes life much easier for the end user. Sometimes, Google's quality-of-life updates can be intrusive, and create a sales tech challenges.  

Businesses hosted through Gmail who choose to integrate with an enterprise platform like Outlook are subject to Google Meet/Hangout links where they might not want them. Google automatically embeds a link to their Meet/Hangout application in email and Google's calendar. Meet was formerly known as Google Hangouts, but over the summer of 2020, Gmail was upgraded to include additional video conferencing functionality, and thus Meet was born. 

Because Google automatically injects the embedded link into emails for enterprise users, people who you've invited to your Zoom sales meeting might be confused. Instead of clicking the Zoom link in their email, they click the embedded Meet/Hangout link instead. This link correlates to your Google calendar and is dependent on it. No matter how clear you make it in the body of the email, there will still be clients that click the embedded link anyway. Fortunately there is a fix.

It requires your business's Gmail administrator to adjust a setting in your Google calendar to prevent Google from automatically embedding the link across your G Suite. If your business is smaller in scale and you aren't using an enterprise account, you can turn this feature off yourself by going into your calendar settings and turning off the "Automatically add Google Meet video conferences to events I create" option in your calendar. 

2. Zoom Only Allows the Host to Share Their Screen

Being able to share what's on your screen is an important part of a virtual sales meeting. To implement a truly functional WFH model, your video conferencing platform has to foster productivity. By default, Zoom only allows the sales meeting's host to share what's on his/her device screen, however. This information can include: 
  • The user's full mobile or desktop screen 
  • A customized, partial view of their screen
  • Audio files only 
  • Content routed from an external camera
  • Other user-defined applications 

Fortunately, there is an extremely easy fix to this sales tech challenge, allowing everyone in the meeting to share screen content. To allow multiple users to share the contents of their screen, the meeting host must click the up arrow icon on the right side of the screen. This will open a menu where the host can select the "Multiple participants can share simultaneously," option.  

It should be noted that this is a change to the default option, which is set up so that only the host can share. Clicking a simple radio button located below the previous option allows the meeting attendees to share their content as well. 

3. Time Zone Confusion Creates Sales Tech Challenges

Large, multinational companies may have sales meetings that involve participants from all over the globe. That means participants operating out of different time zones. 

For some users, time zone conversion can be a painful, time-consuming process that involves consulting an outside source and then doing the math manually. For default Google users, it involves setting up a secondary time zone for each invite that has international attendees. That's where plugins come into play. 

Plugin calendar apps like Calendly or Acuity integrate easily with your G Suite, and provide valuable time zone information for your sales meetings by default. These extensions allow for easier time zone access, such as rolling over an attendee's name to show information, including time zone. 

For example, with Acuity integration, you simply click on the appointment in your Google calendar to see each attendee's time zone. The initial time investment that it takes 
to set up plugins like these are more than worth it given their overall convenience and effectiveness at solving this sales tech challenge. 

4. Solve Tech Issues by Enabling Advanced Functionality Tools

Add-ons like Calendly greatly augment what you're able to do with your video conferencing platform, helping you overcome multiple sales tech challenges at once. The basic version of Calendly includes free meeting scheduling functions, while their premium service allows users to do much more. 

Using Calendly's advanced features allows hosts to embed a link right on their website that allows potential clients to set up a meeting without having to go through an additional platform to initiate contact. Calendly also allows you to set up PayPal or Stripe payment options within the video conference itself, allowing for functional, results-driven sales meetings. 

Each new meeting type that the host sets up will walk them through a checklist of options for their prospective meeting, allowing them to easily initiate advanced features like these.  

5. Make Video Conferencing More Secure

Users worldwide have made a big deal out of the potential security issues inherent to free-to-use platforms like Zoom, and with good reason. Those security threats have introduced a new term into our collective vernacular: Zoombombing.

Sales people deal with sensitive information on a regular basis. The integrity of our customers' information and our internal communications is essential. Video conferencing, however, has become a modern-day necessity. What can users do to overcome this specific sales tech challenge?

While both Google and Zoom have added additional layers of encryption over the last few months, as well as unique meeting invite codes, Zoom users have a frontline defense they can proactively employ. Before starting a meeting, users can log in and access their settings. Under advanced options there is a setting to enable a virtual waiting room. This allows the meeting's host to pre-screen people attempting to join the meeting. 

Iron Out the Kinks

As with any new technology, there are millions of unanticipated issues that will inevitably arise. With the WFH business model, sales people worldwide are experiencing a major operational shift that will affect the industry as a whole. Experience is the best teacher available, even as we all try to figure out sales tech challenges together. Fortunately, each of the video conferencing platforms currently on the market are customizable, designed with the end user in mind.

For more tips, tricks and insights on videoconferencing and the evolving sales environment, sign up for our newsletter, or visit our website for webinars and other valuable business resources. 

Why You Need to Focus on Sales Attribution Right Now

9/16/2020

 
The buyer's journey involves numerous channels and touchpoints.
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
  • Optimized Marketing Spend: Attribution models give marketing teams insight on how to best spend their marketing dollars by indicating which touchpoints garner the most engagement from users. With this information, marketers can adjust their budget and media spend accordingly.
  • Increased ROI: When you have effective attribution insight, your marketing team knows how to reach the right customers, with the right message, at the right time, which ultimately leads to higher conversions and higher ROI.
  • Enhanced Personalization: Marketing teams can also use attribution data to better understand which marketing channels and company messages better resonate with individual customers, which leads to more effective targeting throughout the buyer's journey.
  • Better Product Development: Individual-level attribution enables marketing teams to better understand the personal needs of their customers. These personalized insights provide a valuable reference when updating a product that targets the functionality customers want.
  • Optimized Creativity: Attribution models can also optimize the creative elements in a marketing campaign, which enables marketers to hone in on their visuals and message. A solid understanding of your messaging helps your company better communicate with users.

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:
  • Correlation-Based Bias: When analyzing the customer's journey, attribution models are sometimes subject to correlation-based bias, which can make one event look like it influenced another, when that may not be the case.
  • In-Market Bias: In-market bias refers to customers who were in the market to buy a particular product, regardless if they saw your ad or not. The ad may not have been a deciding factor in the final purchase. However, it gets attribution credit for converting the user anyway.
  • Cheap Inventory Bias: Cheap inventory bias gives an inaccurate view of how your media is performing, making it look like it influenced the conversion rate when it might not have played any role. For example, cheap inventory falls under most people's price range, while more expensive inventory has a much more limited market. Therefore, there could be a correlation between cheap inventory and someone buying your product, rather than an ad leading to conversion. 
  • Digital Signal Bias: Digital signal bias occurs when attribution models do not factor in the relationship between offline sales and online activity. Marketers must make optimized decisions on both offline and online data, not just the data they find online. If you do not take offline sales into account, you do not fully understand the impact of your online marketing campaign, thus creating bias.  

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:
  • Linear attribution models record each touchpoint the customer engaged with leading up to the purchase. It weights each interaction equally, giving each message equal credit for driving the conversion rate.
  • U-Shaped models score engagements separately, noting some have more of an impact than others along the buyer's journey. The lead conversion and first-touch are both accredited with 40% weight while dividing the remaining 20% among all the other touchpoints.
  • Time Decay models also weigh each touchpoint differently. In this case, touchpoints closer to final purchase weigh more than those early on in the buyer's journey.
  • W-Shaped models are similar to the U-shaped model. However, it incorporates one additional core touchpoint in the center. Therefore, the W-shaped model credits first touch, lead conversion and opportunity creation with 30% weight, while dividing the remaining 10% among other engagements.

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.

Develop a positive sales Culture: 10 Things Your Reps want you to know

9/7/2020

 
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.  
  1. Trust us. Sales people are professionals, and speaking to clients is more than just a soft skill. It requires investment and training, but it can be developed with the right support. Leadership needs to approach us with a certain level of faith, but if they see room for improvement, give us opportunities for professional development too. With the right tools and support, we'll deliver. 
  2. Clarity and clear boundaries are better than blue skies. Even the most driven of self-starters needs boundaries and guidance. One of the more common complaints that non-sales people have about the sales team is that they over-utilize resources. From treating potential clients to expensive dinners, giving away samples too freely, to authorizing discounts on products, there's a perception that salespeople waste company assets. We thrive when you trust us, but make sure to set appropriate boundaries for us to work within. Giving a rep total freedom may seem like a good idea, but sometimes a wide open sky can be debilitating. 
  3. We're all different, but kind of the same. There are traits common to every salesperson. According to the Harvard Business Review, successful reps are modest, curious and not easily embarrassed. According to Entrepreneur, all good sales professionals are passionate and knowledgeable about their products. But remember: every salesperson is an individual. Our style and level of skill may vary. Meet us halfway, and appreciate our unique abilities. 
  4. Learn who we are and what makes us tick. A sales team is like a sports team; we don't all play the same position. Everyone has individual strengths and weaknesses, and a one-size-fits-all approach to management won't work. If your company's leadership takes the time to understand what motivates each individual member of the team, it can pay dividends going forward. 
  5. We love when you implement systems of reward and recognition. Sales is naturally competitive. On a large scale, that means competition against other companies for market share. On a local level, it's good-natured competition against one another. Salespeople thrive on systems of reward that recognize both types of achievement. Recognizing your sales force as a whole, while rewarding top performers individually, makes everyone feel appreciated.  
  6. We are the eyes, the ears and sometimes the brain of the company. Salespeople are your customers' first point of contact. We have a lot of actionable information to share with leadership (and everyone else). But we have to have a safe and appropriate opportunity to share it with you. It helps to reserve a block of time weekly where you really listen to your salespeople and get a view of your business from the ground up. 
  7. We're human, and sometimes we need your help to get back in the game. Even the most outgoing salesperson has bad days and periods of low confidence. Days without a sale, or a bad customer experience, can put us off our game. Remind us not to dwell on the past, but to focus on the strength of the company's sales funnel. Every day is a brand-new opportunity. Help us look forward. 
  8. Take the time to be a friend and mentor. Being a good salesperson and having confidence go hand-in-hand. That doesn't mean that salespeople don't need support. We do our best work when there's consistent feedback from leadership. Take time to reward our successes but also to coach us on areas of opportunity. Salespeople need a healthy way to vent frustration. After all, sales can be a wild ride sometimes. 
  9. Ask us to help solve challenges and problems. Sales people provide solutions. Solving customer problems is a huge part of sales. We love to approach the sale process in the role of problem solver. Use that to incorporate us into the larger company culture. Our frontline experience may give the rest of the team unique insight regarding a difficult problem. 
  10. Momentum is essential to our success. Momentum is crucial to sales. When we're talking to customers, we "get in the zone," and it helps if we carry that energy between sales calls. The more administrative tasks and staff meetings you schedule, the more we lose our momentum. It's hard to overcome inertia and start back up again. Streamline your administrative processes as much as possible to avoid unnecessary interruptions. 

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. 

    Meet  Me

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    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.
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