Tag: engagement

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Clarity is Key to Communicating Purpose

Purpose is defined by ambitions, actions, plans and principles. In business, our purpose is revealed through communications, both intentional and unintentional. What we say is who we are, in perception and reality. The words we choose to share in describing ourselves, our businesses and our outlook, illustrates our purpose.

Simplicity empowers the communicator. Simplicity frees the recipient from interpretation due to a lack of clarity. Complexity in content and message strangles good communications. Complexity will often leave your audience lost in intent and making assumptions in purpose and desired outcomes. Simple and clear direction produces higher quality results.

Clear and concise messaging is the key to convincing others to take action. It is no secret, business leaders are often frustrated by the lack of understanding when they “feel” they provide explicit direction or orders. The frustration comes from the failure of communications, which is often caused by lack of clarity. The associated business risks and costs of failed communications can be astronomical depending on the purpose and use. Bad communications can negatively impact revenues, growth, relationships and confidence.

Clarity improves connection and engagement because it increases trust and transparency. Clarity exposes purpose by unveiling expectations. Clarity tells people exactly what you want.

“Clarity is power.” Anthony Robbins

Testing your message reduces misinterpretation and failure in communications. Here is a quick way to test your clarity. Share one sentence with no less than 10 words and no more than 15, with a person or group. After delivery, ask that they repeat it back to you verbatim. What were the results? Are you surprised by the fact some won’t recall “exactly” what you said? Now really test your clarity, ask them to tell you what you wanted based on that sentence. Did they properly interpret your expectations and purpose?

Communication success if often defined by how close we reach an audience. Sampling tests will identify if there is clarity or your audience has a “gist” of what you are trying to say. A clarity test is a also way to show understand how people will imply their own assumptions, listen selectively and interpret the message. This presents a clear and present danger for the person delivering the message, which is why critical communications need good testing protocols.

Know your audience and set your own expectations as the communicator. Humans are not skilled in being great listeners. We also have very active brains, myriads of distractions and sadly our attention spans are less than goldfish. Yes, that is actually proven through science. Microsoft reported in a 2015 study that people now generally lose concentration after eight seconds, while goldfish can focus for nine seconds. Your message has to cut through a lot of noise to be heard, no matter the content format. Clarity makes a difference.

Definition of Clarity: Clearness or lucidity as to perception or understanding; freedom from in distinctness or ambiguity.

Seven Tips for Creating CLARITY in Communications

  1. Concise messaging improves connection; be brief and succinct
  2. Laser-focus on anticipated actions and intentions
  3. Ask specifically what you want without ambiguity
  4. Results orientation informs your audience on how you will measure success
  5. Identify how you will measure the impact of your communications
  6. Target your message to your audience
  7. Yes responses confirm agreement in understanding and expectations

Another valuable bit of advice from a practiced marketer, avoid the noise. Using hyperbole and jargon complicates the message. Ideas will be lost in translation. Simplicity improves clarity. Concise communications boost understanding and retention.

Definition of Assumption: a thing that is accepted as true or as certain to happen, without proof.

Never assume. “They didn’t get it.” “That’s not what I meant.” “You don’t understand what I’m trying to tell you.” Have you ever felt this type of frustration after delivering what you thought to be very clear communications? Communication is tricky. It’s an art. The biggest mistake made in business today is assuming others will clearly know what you are asking and what you want.

For critical communications, it is important to follow through with post analysis. The results may require sharpening the messaging or providing clarifications to ensure the message is clearly understood.

Who is to blame? When there is no clarity, the communicator often blames the audience for not understanding. When in fact, it was really just bad communications that produced unintended consequences. There was simply a lack of clarity. The owner of the message owns the results.

Let’s be clear, clarity of intended expectations will sharpen a message and improve delivery. Clarity reduces frustration resulting from perceptions and judgement. No matter the content type, whether corporate communications driven from the CEO or marketing campaigns to draw in new prospects, say what you want with clarity and purpose. You’ll be happier with the results.

Jamie Glass, CMO + President, Artful Thinkers, a sales and marketing consulting company.

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Coordinate and Communicate Touchpoint Strategies for Greater Impact

How many touchpoints does it take to convert a target into a buyer? 

Marketing and sales experts will often quote a common belief that it takes seven touchpoints to convert an identified target to a customer. This is a good rule of thumb for budgeting and planning. Pipeline data and analytics should confirm whether this is true within your organization.

Whether three, seven or 13 touches are required to convert a target to a buyer, the fact remains that well-coordinated touchpoint strategies between sales and marketing are critical to fully maximize the value of any investment in customer acquisition. This applies to people, methods and technology. The key to successful returns on this investment is identifying the “best” mix of touchpoints that amplify results. And this requires constant analysis, agility and oversight by sales and marketing executives.

The initial step in maximizing the impact of touchpoint strategies begins with a coordinated sales and marketing plan detailing each touchpoint used for awareness and engagement.

The touchpoints plan should outline every organized touch along the customer’s buying journey. From the initial stages of targeting and brand awareness campaigns to engagement with a sales professional, all touchpoints should be deliberate in activity, call-to-action and expectation of results. This applies to both B2B and B2C.

A touchpoint is defined as the contact made with a customer or prospect in the buying and selling process.

What are the most frequently sales and marketing touchpoint strategies used to convert a target from awareness to engagement?

  • Email: Outbound, Inbound
  • Phone: Outbound, Inbound
  • Web: Sites, Landing Pages
  • Advertising: Digital, Print, Display, Broadcast
  • Social Media
  • Content: News, Opinion, Blog, Online, Print
  • Events: Webinars, Trade Shows, Sponsorships, Speaking Engagements, Hosted Events
  • Direct Marketing: Mail, Email, Phone, Subscription
  • Point-of-Sales Display and Storefronts
  • Meetings: Online, In-Person
  • Employees and Stakeholders
  • Referrals, References and Word-of-Mouth

As you can see from the list, it is easy to find at least seven methods to reach your target audience. Each method can have multiple uses and characteristics. Experience, time, target types and cost will help determine the most effective methods for selling your products and services.

It is vital to utilize a mix of touchpoints and apply them to every single target to increase your conversion probability. Obviously, the goal is to convert with fewer touches; however, it is essential to plan for the complete mix.

Touchpoint strategies should not be left to circumstance. A touchpoint plan must answer who is responsible for each touchpoint, the medium that will be utilized, what will be said and how it will represent the brand. It needs to outline the schedule of activities and KPIs set against the expected outcomes to benchmark and measure success. Again, touchpoints should be married to the customer journey to ensure that every touchpoint is fully utilized to push and persuade the contact to buy.

A touchpoint plan should outline:

  1. Roles and responsibilities
  2. Medium
  3. Frequency and timing
  4. Key messages
  5. Call-to-actions
  6. KPIs
  7. Investment

Consistency in outreach, timing and messaging for all areas within the plan requires alignment to the business goals and should be shared company-wide.

One of the greatest failures is not leveraging the entire customer journey to completely benefit from all touchpoints. This happens when sales and marketing are not setting expectations on how, what and when touchpoints are utilized and who is responsible for delivery.

Resources that can help coordinate effective and consistent touchpoint strategies across an organization include:

  1. Company fact sheets and FAQs to ensure everyone is speaking the same language
  2. Brand guidelines help organizations articulate and represent the company in look and feel
  3. Content libraries and online resources that are maintained with the latest marketing and sales support materials
  4. Corporate templates for presentations, emails, marketing communications
  5. Marketing technologies (MarTech) and customer relationship (CRM) management platforms to help organize and manage critical touchpoints in the sales and marketing process
  6. Communication and event calendars to keep the organization informed of when there are opportunities to engage with key targets and customers
  7. Company events and training that detail the plan and set expectations for everyone’s role to support the outcomes
  8. Reports and dashboards that show the results of each touchpoint and ROI

Everyone in a organization sells. This means everyone should fully understand and value the sales and marketing coordinated touchpoint strategies. It is the leadership of sales and marketing that must then work hand-in-hand to ensure that the investments made into touchpoints are actualized to generate results.

We all can hope for the one touch that leads to a conversion. Those tales often are ones that are repeated in company folklore. The facts remain, it most frequently takes multiple touches to successfully convert targets to leads, then leads to buyers. Coordination between sales and marketing only increases results and impact.

Work together and expect more. Create your plan, set your targets, define your activities and measure your success. That is how you will maximize the results of your coordinated touchpoint strategies.

Jamie Glass, CMO + President, Artful Thinkers, a sales and marketing consulting company.

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Increasing Your Content Value

Black and white numbers backgroundMarketers today are faced with the increasing challenge to produce more and more online content. The volumes are staggering. We now refer to the amount of online content and words in terms like metadata, moving from terabytes to zettabytes and beyond!

Publishers like Buzzfeed, HuffingtonPost, Business Insider and even the New York Times are pushing out an estimated 350 new content pieces a day according to Digiday. Consumers of content have a continuous twitter feed of new content. UGC, social media, newsletters, blogs… it’s endless. How much is really out there? As of today, the size of the Internet is estimated to be at least 1.79 billion pages. (Source:http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/)

So where is the value? Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves as publishers, marketers and content producers, this question. Is there greater value in trying to win the daily news feed cycle by overwhelming the feeds with our words or should we take your best performing content we have already produced and make it available to a broader audience?

The volume and frequency strategy is supported by the eye-ball attraction game. It’s high risk, sort of a gamble. You hope you hit the mark; however, in the end you just keep pushing out more content to hedge your bet. Hitting it big is measured in minutes and hours. Instead, the expanding reach strategy is taking an investment into quality content and growing it exponentially. Doubling down. If your content is worthy and has universal appeal, perhaps the best best is localizing or translating that content to increase the value.

One informative whitepaper on business intelligence could prove to have 3x or 10x the value when translated into the equal number of languages. Granted, not all content has a global appeal. It requires a measured assessment to determine if extending your geographic reach could leverage your existing asset by simply taking your “words” and making them available to a broader market.

Frequency or expanding your reach – what’s your gamble?

This article was first published on LinkedIn.  You can visit the article and subscribe to updates here: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140221011502-149124-increasing-your-content-value

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How May I Help You?

If you provide service as part of your value, the first opportunity you have to learn about your customer’s needs is to ask one very simple question, “How May I Help You?”.  These five words will enable you to define the pain and opportunity. Carefully listening to the response opens the door for how you can provide the greatest value, how you might actually help!

Asking someone how you can help them may be viewed as a conversation opener. It does provide a moment to engage. Engagement is critical in moving a target to a potential buyer or consumer of your goods and services.  What better way to get the dialogue started by asking how you might fulfill a request or need.

Asking someone how you can help them is different than using professional etiquette to ask, “How are you today?”.  Though this is a nice sentiment, it doesn’t require you to stop and listen. In fact, most people use this as a long form hello or welcome.  Many will respond with a trite and unemotional “good”, when in fact it may not be how they are at all. It limits your engagement.

The better way to open up a dialogue with a potential customer is to ask how to help them.  It requires you to pay attention.  It means you have to participate in a conversation that will have to use your perception skills, your listening skills and your problem solving skills.  A much higher demand upon your brain than a rehearsed canned response of “good”.

A person skilled in the art of providing outstanding service will anticipate the potential requests that will ensue from the question of how you can help.  The proposition of providing outstanding service also demands that the response demonstrates how you plan to deliver the help or better qualify the type of help that will best serve the customer’s needs.

Expectations of your engagement will be defined when you ask how you can help someone.  It is up to you then to determine how you can deliver that help or point them in the right direction.  The first impression is set by your willingness to open the door, invite someone in and learn of their requirements.

Here are some easy ways to remember how to create the greatest value of HELP:

H = HOW the person defines their need when you ask how you can help them. It is your opportunity to determine HOW you can be the best in serving them when you ask the question.

E = EXPECTATIONS are set when a person is asked how you can help them.  Knowing exactly what is expected gives you the opportunity to WOW them with your determination to provide outstanding service.

L = LISTEN carefully when you ask someone how you can help them, as they will assume you will hear and understand their needs.  Your first response will be their first impression of how good you will be in helping them resolve their problem or attain their goal.

P = PREPARE to deliver when you ask how to help.  Every request may be unique; however, you have standard services that will fit the needs with or without some customization.  Know your responses and the value that you will provide in helping them.

Most important, when asking someone how you can help them, is to respond with honesty.  If you cannot help, tell the person you are not able to help.  It is a measure of your integrity.  If you can extend yourself by giving them a referral to others that can help or pointing them to another resource, you will be a better service provider.  Your value to help does not require you to actually provide the help, only yield to a pathway to gets the person to where they can get the help they need.  Then you are truly a great service provider.

Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.  ~Mohammed Ali

By Jamie Glass, CMO & President of Artful Thinkers and Managing Director of Sales & Marketing Practice at CKS Advisors.

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Return on Marketing Requires an Investment

One of the most important decisions a business owner or CEO will make is establishing a budget for marketing. Like talent, product and infrastructure, marketing must be viewed as a necessity in business.  Marketing expenditures are essential investments for growth.

An average SMB (small-to-medium size business) will typically set a marketing budget at 4% to 6% of sales revenues.  There are several factors that can impact this budget.  As an example, a well-funded startup may invest 20% of revenues for aggressive consumer acquisition programs and advertising.  Notice, the “well-funded” qualifier.  Likewise, there is always difficulty in setting a budget for a pre-revenue company. Entrepreneurs will often spend most of their investments in product and then struggle to bring in sales. Startup costs must include marketing.  For every dollar invested in product, people and infrastructure, an equal dollar should be set aside for investment in sales and marketing.

Here are three simplified phases for marketing investment planning:

1.  Brand Awareness:  Your marketing investment should start with focus in reach and awareness including brand identity, a website, company advertising and direct and social marketing.

2.  Engagement: The second phase invests in additional marketing programs that support your sales efforts including lead generation, publicity, web marketing (SEO and SEM), market validation, events, advertising, presentations and customer case studies.

3.  Nurture:  Finally, maximize your marketing investments with customer communications, CRM services, loyalty initiatives and nurturing programs to maintain the valuable potential and existing customer relationships.  Once you have them engaged, use your marketing spend wisely to develop and grow your relationship.

After your marketing budget is defined, you will want to establish how you will measure the success of your investment.  ROMI is the acronym for Return on Marketing Investment.  The calculation is total revenue divided by marketing spend.  ROMI = Revenue ($) / Marketing Spend ($).

Some marketing activities such as branding, advertising, PR and social media are harder to track impact and influence. As a rule of thumb, the simple ROMI equation gives you a thumbnail sketch of your return on your marketing investment.  ROMI is a good KPI (key performance indicator) for leaders to use in the business dashboard.

If you are a startup or pre-revenue, the marketing spend will be set as your budget for purposes of forecasting. Some may argue that there should be other factors added or subtracted, such as attributable revenues; however, most businesses have a difficult time tracking every dollar spent on activities such as advertising. Start with the broadest “buckets” and as you increase your marketing reporting and tracking sophistication, you can scrutinize spending with finer analysis.

Marketing is an investment.  Success in ROMI requires budgeting, reporting and analysis in order to fully actualize the benefits.

In lean times, business owners have a tendency to cut marketing spend. Lost time and lack of investment, even during challenging periods, impacts long-term growth. The result may not be felt right away. It is an illusion. Prolonged periods of reduced marketing spend can dramatically reduce sales opportunities. The fewer dollars you put into a marketing budget the greater the exponential impact on future revenues.

Similar to an investment savings account, the more you put into your “growth” marketing account, the higher potential return on your investment. The more dollars spent on high risk marketing activities, the greater risk to returns. Any sound investment advisor, marketing or financial, will counsel a business owner and CEO to invest based on the organization’s risk tolerance.  Marketing investments should be treated like any financial investment.  Know your risk tolerance, invest accordingly.  If the business has low tolerance for risk, eliminate marketing spend in expensive tactics that are difficult to measure. Always diversify your investment to mitigate risk.

In order to qualify for a return, it requires an investment.  Failing to set aside funds to market is failing to invest in business sustainability.  Expectations of sales without an adequate marketing budget is a business built on luck. Though we would all like to be lucky, if you plan to sell something, invest in marketing to create the sale.

“I have a problem with too much money. I can’t reinvest it fast enough, and because I reinvest it, more money comes in. Yes, the rich do get richer.” -Robert Kiyosaki

By Jamie Glass, CMO & President of Artful Thinkers and Managing Director of Sales & Marketing Practice at CKS Advisors.

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Ready to Engage Your New Customer?

The buzz in marketing circles today is engagement. How do you effectively hook potential customers into a committed relationship? The investment a business makes in the engagement process should be directly tied to revenues. If you expertly and skillfully engage, sales will increase.

Competent engagement helps a business target, influence, nurture and convert prospects to customers.  The more expeditious a business is in engaging with prospects, the bigger impact to the bottom-line.  How are you engaging your potential new customers?

The easiest way to initiate engagement is to view customer and wedding engagements as the same.  The difference between the two are in the details of tactics.  How you move from targeting into proposal are nearly identical in overall strategy.

Engagement begins by determining how to get someone to respond to your offer.  First, identify the target based on the qualifications of a “good match”.  Who is a suitable candidate for engagement?  What are the qualities you are seeking, both in demographics and social behaviors? Then you need to determine what makes you attractive to others.  Packaging and presentation of your “stand out” qualities are critical in the initial step of the engagement process.  Know where to direct your message and selling to the most qualified targets.

Second, you start the courting process, where all long-term valuable relationships begin. This step is more difficult to measure and needs careful preparation. You can spend a tremendous amount of resources influencing others and never get to the proposal. Laws of attraction and suitability apply.  Who you target, what you say and why they are a good candidate must already be known to successfully influence the “right” prospect.

Using engagement tactics like research, focus groups, asking for referrals can speed progress directly influencing better qualified prospects when cultivating relationships. Put out a few “asks”.  Look for agreement.  Identify the buying signals.  Know what makes this prospect want to engage further in the relationship.  Define what is in it for them. It might take some sampling and analysis to reach a successful outcome.

Third, define acceptable terms of the relationship.  Nurture your relationship to fully understand the “how and why” you need to partner.  Build upon the strengths of your bond through mutual consent. Constant communication, validation and envisioning the success of your relationship solidifies the “why”.  This is the beginning of a potentially long-term committed relationship, one that must be mutually beneficial.   Are you both in agreement? Create timelines and set expectations to help control spending, time and resources while nurturing your relationship.

Fourth, make the BIG proposal.  It is time to go all in and ask for the close.  Whether it be a hand in marriage or to partner in business, the only way to get to a “yes” is to make the proposal.  If you have taken time to go through an engagement process, building consensus along the way, you will have eliminated most of the risk in making the proposal.  Converting a prospect to a buyer requires you to “pop” the question.  It is time to seal the deal.

The opportunity to engage is there, are you ready to start the process?  Only if you are able to commit to an engagement, will you be ready to “tie the knot” with a new customer.

[W]hen you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.  ~Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally

By Jamie Glass, CMO & President of Artful Thinkers and Managing Director of Sales & Marketing Practice at CKS Advisors.