Chart of the day: Closing more deals remain the top priority for sales teams worldwide, whilst getting a response from prospects remains a challenge - part 3 of 10.
Last week, my chart showed the priorities and challenges of a marketing team. This week we will delve deeper into the sales team within businesses to uncover their priorities and challenges.
What are your company's top sales priorities for the next year?
For the majority of sales professionals, closing more deals remains a top priority (71%). However, improving the sales funnel is in second place (44%) and social selling and other sales strategies are third (29%).
Investing in sales technology (16%) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) (14%) are the lowest scoring priorities.
What is the most difficult to do in sales compared to 2 to 3 years ago?
Even though…
Each teacher is a gateway to hundreds of pupils and parents. Here's how to reach them.
It's back-to-school season for more than just students and teachers. It's time for marketers, too, to dust off their school supplies.
What do I mean by that? I'm not talking about today's marketers needing additional education (though some of them would certainly like it). I'm talking about business opportunity.
Earning and Learning
According to the National Center for Education Statistics' May 2016 data, the U.S. spends an average of $9,200 per full-time elementary and secondary student. At the post-secondary level, that figure jumps to $27,900 per full-time student. With more than 70 million students in the U.S., that's some serious untapped revenue.
What's more, educators make a grade-A audience for brands. Teachers spend an estimated $1.6 billion per year out of their own pockets on school supplies. And when you reach teachers, you reach parents. At the elementary level, each teacher influences the buying habits of 30 or more…
Avoid these mistakes to prevent digital transformation failure
There's no doubt that Digital Transformation initiatives have been a major trend in 2016 which look set to continue into 2017. This chart from 2016 research by Smart Insights shows the popularity of digital transformation initiatives.
You can see that over one-quarter (30%) of businesses already have a transformation programme in place, with many businesses looking to launch their digital transformation programme imminently.
Yet shockingly, according to Forbes, 84% of digital transformations fail. For each one of you reading this from an organization about to embark on the process, only one in eight of you will succeed. But perhaps the high failure rate is unavoidable. 86% of leaders think digital transformation is necessary within their organization yet only half feel that they fully understand it.
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Tap into freelance creative talent for your next campaign
When I started my career in 1999, the best and brightest creatives still worked full time. The freelancer revolution was close to 10 years away, and independent contractors were not yet thought of as a valuable resource for many companies. In some situations, they were treated like a bit of an afterthought: warm bodies that could come in to complete the low-level work the internal creatives turned up their noses at.
Then, during the first dot-com boom, something changed.
The Evolution of the Freelancer
Suddenly, there were all these new companies starting from scratch all fighting for attention. Simply existing and offering a service wasn’t enough anymore. So to stand out from the competition, smart companies began prioritizing their product design, their branding, and the quality of their advertising messaging.
Many of these new companies started in-house creative groups to vertically integrate their businesses. They used colorful…
Chart of the Day: Growing SEO and organic presence are higher priorities than product videos and webinars - part 2 of 10
For my next instalment in my Marketing and Sales 2017 statistics breakdown series, I am focusing on inbound marketing priorities and its challenges.
Over 70% of respondents worldwide stated that they primarily conduct inbound marketing. This shows a strong focus on inbound marketing across the globe, yet Asia showing the lowest percentage of inbound marketing priorities at 64%.
Thinking specifically about inbound marketing projects, what are your company's top priorities?
SEO and organic search presence are a higher priority, across all 5 geo-demographics surveyed, for inbound marketing projects (61%). Secondly, importance was placed on blog content creation (53%) and content distribution (47%).
It seems that companies are prioritizing SEO and content marketing in their inbound marketing projects and pushing freemium trails (6%), webinars (19%) and…
Some easy inbound marketing strategies to make you rethink your content
Just as the printing press opened the mind to the imagination of the world’s greatest literary story tellers, so the early days of Hollywood introduced the world to some of the world’s most ingenious visual storytellers. Amongst the greatest was Buster Keaton.
Every Keaton gesture and scene explained all an audience needed to know. Whereas the average silent movie featured over 240 captions (or subtitles) Keaton never used more than 56.
Appealing to both logic and emotions, Keaton’s perfect balance of understated and conspicuous actions caught the eye and then enthralled audiences through empathy… pathos…heroism… as well as every shade of human attachment in between.
Whilst other screen icons went through just the mechanics of a well-rehearsed process, Keaton treated each tumble, grimace, smile, climb, leap, forlorn gaze, and even collision as a unique opportunity to explore creativity.
Beyond a great screen actor, he…
Blocking a visitor from Live Chat should be your last option, but sometimes it is necessary.
Usually, you can find lots of information online on how to improve customer service by using live chat software. But when is it necessary to block visitors that are abusive?
Learn to tell apart a challenging customer and an abusive one
A challenging customer is still a customer. First, do all that you can to resolve an issue, reassure your visitor and provide great customer service.
While using a live chat software the agents have opportunities to learn general customer behavior patterns faster, as they can handle multiple customers at once. There are two patterns that are quite similar for challenging and abusive customers.
While every abusive customer is also a challenging one, not every challenging customer is an abusive one. It is important to understand this fine difference, as resolving an issue for a challenging customer can convert…
Use brand stories to connect with your customers
Story telling isn’t limited to novels or tucking kids into bed at night. In this age of short attention spans and masses of information being available, it’s incredibly difficult to capture someone’s attention and even more difficult to be memorable and encourage someone to spend more time focusing on your brand and business. Writing a story and building an emotional connection with your customers is one of the most effective ways to build a long lasting relationship and ensure that your customers come back over and over again, and consider your business their first choice in all their needs. The following five steps help to create stories that make you memorable and appealing to customers.
Writing a story and building an emotional connection with your customers is one of the most effective ways to build a long lasting relationship and ensure that your customers…
Social Media Essentials: 6 key updates in social media this week
Spotlight story: Amazon launches Spark
Amazon has launched Amazon Spark, a new feature aimed at improving product discovery. The idea behind the platform is to bring some of the social buzz that goes on beyond the website into the Amazon app. But here's the catch - it's only available to Amazon Prime members.
Many have said the platform was inspired by Instagram and its use of shoppable photos. Users are able to post stories, ideas, and images of products they like, which others can react to with comments and like.
To access Amazon Spark, you have to use the Amazon mobile app. When you join spark you tell it your 5 top interests so Amazon can create a customized feed for you. There are also a number of niche categories you can select to further define your personal interests. Read more about how the app…
Chart of the day: length of time for results is the biggest challenge for account-based marketing, according to those in the field
Research by #flipmyfunnel amongst account-based marketers has found that length of time for results to show is the biggest challenge. Getting started and content marketing related to ABM are also big challenges.
The study also found that:
8 in 10 (80%) engage one on one via email outreach to engage with clients and prospects, with just over 7 in 10 (71%) using the phone.
Almost 6 in 10 (57%) say their marketing and sales teams are fully aligned.
45% say that revenue generation is the main goal of their account-based marketing approach.
More than 8 in 10 (83%) plan to expand their marketing stack for account-based marketing purposes in the next year.
Source: #flipmyfunnel Account-Based Marketing Survey
Sample: 250 B2B marketers
Recommended resource: …
