By Jim Graf, CEO & Founder, Kazzcade
As 2021 ends, we wanted to highlight the 3 strategies or tactics which stood out, this past year, as having the greatest impact on driving engagement and sales pipeline with target audiences. We have provided details as to how these tactics/strategies were employed and quantified their impact. Hopefully, you find this helpful. Enjoy and Happy Holidays.
tl:dr
1. Video/Visuals.
2. Effective nurture strategy for funnel.
3. Training.
A Picture or Video is 1000x More Effective
Professionals are starved for time, videos or visual illustrations are wildly more efficient at communicating the message. As evidenced by the popularity of media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, coupled with the use of emojis in communication, videos and illustrations are also more effective. We see it on our own platform.
Kazzcade launched its own Virtual Product Room platform. For many of our clients we build out a virtual product room that is used to drive top-funnel engagement. The traffic and engagement with this medium are conservatively 3x what we normally get. On average our site will garner 1800 monthly visitors, predominantly driven by our video format. Whether you are following up with a prospect or engaging them for the first time, be sure to ask yourself; “can I communicate this visually?”.
Nurture Versus Nature
Human nature prefers an immediate impact from their efforts. Especially in sales and marketing. But the reality is the enterprise buying process is NOT linear and therefore no concrete order of engagement occurs during the buying cycle. It is paramount sales (and marketing), nurture the deal flow beyond the initial conversation. To do this effectively, we have to be helpful and creative when it comes to reaching back out to the prospect to nurture the deal forward.
This can be a challenge. How do we keep reaching back out, but at the same time add value to the deal process? Simply “following up”, will not cut it. It adds no value and is more of an annoyance. Here are several reasons to reach back out, to keep the deal moving forward, while adding value.
New Product Offerings or New Pricing Schemes
New ROI Calculator
Anything “New” is a Great Excuse to Re-engage.
Examples of Your Product in Use
Client Feedback which Underscores the Value Your Product/Service Can Provide
Key Industry Insights
Your product or service solves a problem. The goal is to effectively articulate how your product is best at solving that problem. Most salespeople rely on simply giving product information to their client or telling them how the product can add value. For a salesperson to really stand out take a sense making approach.
Practice Makes Perfect
Training. It is the difference between good and great. Hard stop. We expanded our training efforts to include ALL inside sales professionals and Customer Success Managers. Regardless of seniority or level of production. At the same time, we increased the frequency of training. We now train daily across multiple departments. The results have been astounding.
- 50% less time to ramp a new hire.
- 16% increase in production per inside sales rep.
- 3x improvement in designing proper specs and expectations for campaigns.
Here are a few key tips when devising your training:
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- Consistency. Training is about efforts compounding over time. It is NEVER one and done. We have training sessions every day. Even our most senior people have training 2xs a month minimum. Our Customer Success Managers train 3xs a week. After 3 months the improvement was palpable. Gartner research finds that B2B sales reps forget 70% of the information they learn within a week of training, and 87% will forget it within a month.
- Breadth. Expose anyone with Customer Facing responsibilities to training. Expand what you train. For example, we train on solutions, phone skills, problem solving tactics, and campaign building. This has had an immediate impact on the quality of our product.
- Hit the weight room. People learn by doing. So feeding them information is a good first step, but they need to practice what they learned. Have them teach the topic for which you just provided them information. We have them present a topic to managers with the objective being, they have to pretend they are presenting to an 8 year old. This ensures they really understand the topic. When it comes to phone skills – we role play. This is akin to hitting the gym and lifting weights. It is not about scripts, it is about being comfortable navigating any conversation. Having used inflection and emphasis with certain statements, over and over.
- Consistency. Training is about efforts compounding over time. It is NEVER one and done. We have training sessions every day. Even our most senior people have training 2xs a month minimum. Our Customer Success Managers train 3xs a week. After 3 months the improvement was palpable. Gartner research finds that B2B sales reps forget 70% of the information they learn within a week of training, and 87% will forget it within a month.
Training is paramount to long term success and the positive impact was evident within 60-90 days. It is a never-ending journey.
Learn how you can leverage our team of trained professionals to build your sales funnel.
Happy Holidays to all.
– Kazzcade Team