For Salesforce.com Secret Sauce, See Infographic

In looking to grow at a rapid clip in the coming months, take a page out of Salesforce.com’s book (or, for that matter, Mintigo’s) and get deeper insights on your customers.

This week, more than 130,000 people will travel to San Francisco for the salesman’s ultimate training conference: Dreamforce. As a business, Salesforce.com itself is rapidly growing due to the fact that they know the DNA of their best customers.

Sustaining More Than 20% Year Over Year Growth:
Earlier this month, there were reports that Salesforce.com is expanding into healthcare in order to give patients “21st Century Customer Service“. And now they have even launched a financial services cloud. According to Forbes, “Salesforce, which specializes in CRM solutions and is the leading vendor in this segment, is tackling slowing growth as it approaches a $7 billion annual revenue run rate. To be sure, the company is still managing to grow at over 20% year on year every quarter…” and theMotley Fool reported that Salesforce.com revenue jumped another 24% in Q2.

The Secret is to Know Thy Customer Intimately
This kind of rapid growth materializes when you know your customers on a very deep level–the kind of level that marries Big Data with key insights–including how to find and attract your very best customers.

It’s no wonder that an effective Big Data company like this is taking over – while they’re teaching businesses to know their target customers and tailor their marketing to them–Salesforce.com is an expert at doing exactly the same thing they teach.

Mintigo Analyzes Salesforce.com’s Customers
It only makes sense to further dissect this incredible growth company using Salesforce.com’s own winning formula–analyzing the available Big Data about the very customers Salesforce.com knows so intimately. Mintigo took a data driven approach to examine the profile of the average Salesforce.com user, using theiraward-winning sales and marketing intelligence technology. And what they found may surprise you. Specifically:

  • Salesforce.com users are not as big as you might think–74% of companies that use Salesforce.com have annual revenue between $1M and $50M (with 28% of Salesforce.com users are companies with between $1-5 million in revenues, while 23% of users are companies with annual revenues of $5-10 million).
  • Tech using tech to sell to tech–63% of Salesforce.com users are either in software, business services, or manufacturing.
  • 28% of Salesforce.com users also use a marketing automation platform.
  • Marketo is the undisputed leader among Salesforce.com users, covering 37% of the market.
  • There are 4X more sales and marketing employees in the org chart of Salesforce.com companies. That is, 87% of companies using Salesforce.com have sales reps as compared to only 24% of other US companies.
  • 38% of Salesforce.com users also use VMWare and Oracle
  • Over 40% of Salesforce.com companies are looking for Business Analysts, Agile Developers, and Engineers–this would indicate where most businesses are expecting their future growth from all the data they are collecting.

The DNA Of Salesforce Users [Infographic]

Image Source: Mintigo

If you’re looking to grow at a rapid clip in the coming months, take a page out of Salesforce.com’s book (or, for that matter, Mintigo’s) and get deeper insights on your customers. These platforms are not only getting smarter, but easier to use.

As you tie your CRM and Marketing Automation systems together, you’re learning a lot about your customer’s habits, wants and needs. After all, isn’t that what today’s selling is all about? It’s always been about listening to your customers. What’s changed is that with all the data your customers naturally create, you don’t have to pester them for the insights–you can use platforms like Salesforce.com, Marketo and Mintigo to help you turn your Big Data into Big Insights.

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3 Exponentially Better Alternatives to Banner Advertisi

With the average click-through rate at a historic low of 0.06 percent, banner ads are failing to deliver results 99.94 percent of the time. Here are 3 viable alternatives with proven results.

Having started my career in 1994 building some of the very first commercial websites, I have more than 22 years of digital marketing game footage to draw upon. I even placed MasterCard’s very first banner ad on Yahoo in early 1995. At that time, we were delivering click through rates north of 10% on a consistent basis.

My how times have changed. What astounds me, however, is just how ineffective banner ads are and yet how prolific they still remain. As the CEO of Trepoint, a digital marketing agency, I am often asked what we think of banner ads. My answer is simple, we don’t recommend them nor do we take on banner advertising business. Betweengrowing ad blocking technologies, massive ad fraud, and banner ad blindness, is it any wonder why the average click through rate is hovering at 0.06%? But because 63% of all digital media is bought programmatically, it’s understandable why banner ads continue to flourish despite all the evidence that they are ineffective. So what are the alternatives?

Alternative #1: Influencer Marketing
In case you missed it, earlier this month I reported on a groundbreaking Nielsen Catalina Solutions study which highlighted the incredible impact of Influencer Marketing had on WhiteWave Foods. In short the results of the study showed thatInfluencer Marketing delivered 11 times ROI over all other forms of Digital Media. The study further provided a direct attribution between Influencer Marketing and in-store sales lift. Specifically, for every 1,000 impressions delivered through Influencer Marketing, WhiteWave Foods received $285 of incremental in-store sales.

So what is Influencer Marketing and why is it delivering substantially higher ROI? Simply put, Influencer Marketing is about sponsoring and supporting the people who your customers look to as subject matter experts. Whereas digital marketers like me used to hire celebrity spokespeople, today your customers trust well-known bloggers and social media pundits who may only have tens to hundreds of thousands of followers (instead of the millions we used to focus on).

If you’re looking to learn more about Influencer Marketing, I recently did a keynote speech about it and have posted my presentation online. I’m a big believer in this methodology because it requires that the content come directly from the influencers you engage which, by definition, dramatically reduces the two largest expense areas in effective digital marketing: content creation and distribution.

Alternative #2: Native Advertising
Originally, I was NOT a huge fan of Native Adverting. The early pioneers of Native Advertising were not diligent about disclosing the advertising nature of native and there was a lot of unnecessary consumer confusion. While it’s still not perfect, the recent federal mandates along with industry self-policing have helped clean up its act and now we’re seeing a substantial rise of Native Advertising.

Like Influencer Marketing, Native Advertising is exponentially more effective than banner ads with 3rd party studies an overall 88.6 percent increase in brand awarenessamong those exposed to the campaign. As savvy digital marketers look for viable alternatives to banner ads, more and more of them are turning to Native Advertising. Moreover, programmatic native adverting networks such as Instinctive, are even exploring entirely new business models such as charging for time spent with your content rather than industry standard metrics of “impressions” which typically only require a partial view (i.e. 60%) of a banner ad for one second.

Changes in the way you measure the levels of engagement with your content will ultimately lead to better targeting and even better ROI from your Native Advertising investments, which are arguably already substantially more valuable than traditional banner ads.

Alternative #3: Give It Up For Free
Before anyone will buy from you, they must first know, like and trust you. How do you get someone who’s never used your product or service to do that? The answer is to give your ideal customers something of value before you ever ask for the sale. What you are giving up for free will, of course, be different for every industry, but the core idea is the same. By giving something of value that no one else is willing to offer, you will stand out in a world cluttered with “me to” offers.

By giving it up for free, you are being disruptive to the status quo. In fact, it should even feel a bit uncomfortable and scary because you are taking a leap of faith that when your ideal customer receives this value from you that they will want more and, having had a great experience for free, they will pay you for your product or services.

This model can be seen in every industry and is usually the start of a massively high-growth company. Netflix, for example, continues to give you 30 days free of their streaming video service before they every ask you to pay. This model ultimately brought down the powerhouse that was Blockbuster. Google’s Android operating system completely disrupted the mobile phone industry and knocked out several major players who had previously dominated the space (think Blackberry, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericson, etc.) Successful restaurants give entire meals away for free, Zappos was the first to give away free shipping BOTH ways, Wix gives website design away for free, and the list goes on.

While every industry may have a slightly different variation on the theme, the act of giving it up for free tends to be a disruptive business model that forces the larger players to respond (or ignore at their own peril).

Stop Your Banner Advertising Addiction
Regardless of which one you choose, the only bad choice is sticking to what’s no longer working just because it’s what you’re comfortable with doing. Go to BAA (Banner Advertising Anonymous) if you have to in order to free your marketing dollars for something that actually works.

You’ve known for quite some time now that the banner advertising model is broken. It’s simply irresponsible as a digital marketer to stick with a broken model when there are substantially better and more viable options out there. If you need a “sponsor” to help you with your banner advertising addiction, you can find one on our Facebook group. Together, we can kick this addiction and build a better digital marketing future for everyone–especially your ideal customers.

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Transmedia Marketing Is the Future of Brand Storytelling

Brand storytelling has evolved and it’s capitalizing on the prosumerism movement. Here’s what you need to know about Transmedia Marketing and why it’s the future of brand storytelling.

During the past two decades, most brands have worked diligently to control their messaging with interruption ads and large media buys. Today, customers can easily ignore these ads and are migrating to technology that easily allows them to do so (see related article on Mobile Ad Blocking).

According to the Content Marketing Institute, we need new marketing. Many believe that this new marketing will be Transmedia Marketing, as it focuses on a collaborative approach to storymaking instead of a proprietary predetermined approach to traditional brand storytelling.

Dr. Chester Elijah Branch is an author and Transmedia Architect who teaches digital and social media courses internationally. I recently spoke with him to better understand Transmedia Marketing and why he passionately believes it is the future of brand storytelling. Dr. Branch explains it this way:

“Content marketing has occupied marketers for the last few years and is now heading towards the light. The Internet will expand 500% over the next few years so all of this so-called ‘content’ has already become nothing more than ‘white noise.’ How do marketers break through the clutter? What should we call this new marketing? I believe that Transmedia is the answer. Transmedia marries your brand with your consumers through collaboration and story. Many media strategists propose that transmedia marketing is the future of all digital media marketing. Transmedia basically means totransport a story-world or message into a customer’s everyday life through the use of multiple media platforms.”

But what makes up successful transmedia marketing and how is it different than brand storytelling? To understand these questions, Dr. Branch described how transmedia is exemplified through the context of social currency.

TRANSMEDIA AND SOCIAL CURRENCY
Dr. Branch explained that today, brands can no longer paint themselves as the hero coming to save the helpless customer. In today’s social media landscape, the customer is the hero of their own customer journey. They drive the search engine. As a brand, you are merely a mentor offering encouragement, gifts and wisdom to help them on their journey. “Mastering this concept can open up a transmedia-prosumer model where the brand is no longer the storyteller but a facilitator in story making”, Dr. Branch said.

Jonah Berger, distinguished author of Contagious, Why Things Catch On, considers stories as the ‘Trojan Horse’ for marketing messages. He points out the extreme difficulty in the art of making your brand a critical part of the story so that “your message won’t get lost in the retelling.” When you do this, however, you have created social currency for your brand.

Non-Profits can easily rely on social currency. Because, as Berger points out, people like to tell stories that make them look good. They receive a level of social currency when they can say, for example, “I am a part of this Thirst Project movement”. You’ll often tell a story, if it will make other people admire you.

“This is harder to do with a for-profit company trying to sell a product”, explains Dr. Branch. “Ironically, even when this currency is built into a non-profit, the marketing team may erroneously focus so hard on making a product, event or organization look good, that they may forget that their audience wants to look good too.”

In his book, Winning the Story Wars, Jonah Sachs lays out a story model any brand or cause can use to get its message heard. If you want to be on the winning side of the story wars, you will need to dole out social currency to your customer. This is typically the first step of effective Transmedia Marketing.

TRANSMEDIA AND PROSUMERISM
Prosumerism is the idea that customers are moving away from merely consuming a product to having a participatory role in the remixing and re-making of said product. Alvin Toffler, a digital author and futurist, believed in a transmedia-era like today where the customer would also have the ability both consume and produce content.

“This new reality where consumers produce as well as consume content is also the reason many digital media marketing strategists have said brand storytelling is dead and we are witnessing the rise of brand story making”, explains Dr. Branch.

At Inbound15, David Berkowitz brilliantly laid out the difference between storytelling and storymaking in his presentation, Revenge of the Storymakers. If you haven’t seen his presentation, I highly recommend it. In his presentation, he pointed out that simply telling a story is an outdated “broadcast-era phenomenon.” The goal, in transmedia marketing is always to “craft stories based on the stories consumers are already sharing, as those are the ones that matter the most.”

My favorite slide from his presentation was towards the end where he not only breaks down the difference between storytelling and storymaking, but also what actions you, as a brand, need to take in order to transform from telling to making stories with your customers:

Storytelling vs. Storymaking

Brands should be built WITH and FOR their fans
As Lan Mochari points out, “the big problem with storytelling is it’s a one-way street” with your brand doing all the talking. Prosumerism changed our world from one-to-many broadcasting to a many-to-many experience. Brands today need to be storymakers, not storytellers.

The future of digital media marketing isn’t about you broadcasting your message to the masses with a digital media megaphone. It’s about storymaking. As David Berkowitz said, the brand narrative “facilitates and taps into the stories people are creating and sharing with each other.” This story-making framework allows for transmedia-social triggering which expands the narrative into a customer’s everyday life. This immersive concept is at the core of transmedia.

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7 Stages of the Entrepreneur’s Life Cycle: From Independence to Interdependence

Celebrate your accomplishments as you spend time with your friends and family members today. Know where you are in the 7 stages of the entrepreneur’s life cycle so that you can celebrate the independence (or interdependence) of your business.

Today, as we celebrate our founding fathers’ bold move for independence and the founding of the United States of America, it’s a wonderful time to reflect on similar desires and attributes that all entrepreneurs go through when starting their own company. Deciding to branch out on your own is a huge step in every entrepreneur’s life. Here are some of the important phases of evolution from the very beginning, to peak performance, and eventual end of life. Every business goes through a life cycle that is similar to a person and each stage brings with it unique characteristics and challenges to solve in order to move to the next stage.

Stage 1: The Birth of Your Company. This initial stage in the entrepreneur’s life cycle is filled with emotions running the gamut from elated excitement to fear and uncertainty. One thing is clear: The drive for independence starts with an idea. You see something that others don’t see and it compels you to take action and do something about it (for more on this topic, see related article, “Join the Billion Dollar PayPal Mafia Club: Ace These 7 Questions.“) While you may not be crystal clear on how you’re going to get it done, there is a natural drive to start something that doesn’t exist. When you take this step, you are seeking your independence in the business world and creating opportunity for others to join your mission and vision.

Stage 2: Toddlers Seek to Survive and Grow. Assuming that you find a way to successfully launch your company, you’re now looking to survive as a business. Most entrepreneurs will either seek to stay independent or immediately look for investors to give them the cash they need to survive. Staying independent will give you more control over your outcomes, but having a cash cushion will help you sleep better at night knowing you have some time to build your company and get it right. Survival is the name of the game at this stage.

Stage 3: Young Adults Get Cocky. You know your company has reached young adulthood when you are in hyper growth mode but not really in control of your outcomes. It’s at this stage that many companies run into trouble as entrepreneurs, having tasted the success they were seeking and suddenly think they can do no wrong. If you believe you’ve figured it all out and are killing it, you are at the stage right before you usually get blindsided. Rather than measuring and focusing on your desired outcomes, entrepreneurs are enjoying and celebrating their early success at the young adult phase. Many companies spend years cycling between the Toddler and Young Adult phases as they are missing the key ingredient to move to the next phase: stability. Only when a business is truly stable, can it rise to the next stage.

Stage 4: Adults in Their Prime. This is real success and it happens when your company has gone beyond survival and stability, and moved into a more predictable growth phase. This is the phase you want to stay in for as long as possible. This is also the phase when entrepreneurs seek interdependence. That is, other people and companies that can make your business stronger because they themselves are independent and strong. Rather than creating co-dependencies, adults in their prime form partnerships that are interdependent. This further helps maintain the growth cycle and keeps great companies in their prime.

Stage 5: Aging and Early Decline. Perhaps the interdependent partnerships have been strained or some of your best teammates choose to strike out on their own. Often times the marketplace has caught up with your great idea or someone else has seen an even better way to accomplish the vision and mission you set out to deliver. Whatever the circumstance, your business (and perhaps your entire industry) is being disrupted. At this stage you can either disrupt yourself to get back to your prime, or begin the journey to unwind what you have started (see related article, “You Are Either Uber or You’re Being Ubered.“)

Stage 6: Illness and Rapid Decline. If you have not figured out a way to stem the early signs of decline, then this phase is predictable. It starts internally with a team that isn’t sure where to go next and how to fix the problems that have been identified. Inaction leads to faster decline and internal stigmas, fears, uncertainty and doubt set in. Unless massive action is taken at this stage, the company is all but assured it’s going to fail.

Stage 7: Death. While we work hard to ensure that our companies outlast us, there comes a time when it’s clear that staying in business is either leading you into bankruptcy or has already caused such as cash flow strain that there simply is no way to dig yourself out of the hole that has been created. Shutting your doors can feel like a failure, but when the writing is on the wall, it’s much better to close up shop before the business takes everyone down with it.

What stage are you grappling with today? As you enjoy our country’s Independence Day, take a moment to recognize where you are in your business and what you need to do to move to the next phase. Before you can move from one phase to another, it’s important to recognize where you are and what got you there.

Celebrate your accomplishments as you spend time with your friends and family members today. Just know where you are in the 7 stages of the entrepreneur’s life cycle so that you can plan your future and celebrate the independence (or interdependence) of your business as well today. As entrepreneurs, we need time to step back and celebrate what we have built and accomplished. Otherwise, why spend so much of our lives doing what we do? Have fun and enjoy your day today!

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10 Things Every Salesperson Needs to Know About Marketing

When done correctly, marketing provides the air cover for the sales teams on the ground working hard to close deals and increase revenue. It’s a much needed partnership.

It’s wonderful when sales and marketing are working together and finishing one another’s sentences. Unfortunately, this tends to be the exception and not the rule. More often than not, the sales team see all that marketing isn’t and often struggle to see the true value that great marketing brings to the sales organization.

To be fair, not all marketing is great. But for the purpose of this article, I’m going to focus on effective marketing that actually drives sales. If your company’s marketing isn’t accountable and isn’t driving sales, then there is a bigger issue at play (and we can tackle that one separately).

  1. No one wants to be “sold,” but everyone likes to buy: High-pressure sales tactics never work, because even when you’ve “won” the sale, it’s at the expense of the relationship. Marketing creates the desire that makes it much easier for sales teams to add value to the decision-making process rather than aggressively trying to close the deal. When a qualified prospect is interested in buying, it’s ready for a knowledgeable salesperson to answer its questions.
  2. People buy on emotion and backfill with logic: Marketing provides the emotional “sex appeal” that tugs at a person’s heartstrings. Before you ever buy a car, your heart has to jump ever so slightly as you fall in love with the vehicle you now need to justify buying. This is true with any sale that’s not an impulse buy. Before a purchase decision is made, you first have to “feel” that the product or service is right for you. Marketing plays an important role in that emotional connection with the very thing you are looking to sell.
  3. Great marketing tells a great story: Behind every great marketing campaign was a simple story just waiting to be told and retold. This is part of why we survived as a species all these tens of thousands of years; it’s part of our survival instinct. From Subway’s story about Jared losing weight eating nothing but Subway sandwiches to Apple encouraging us to “Think Different” to De Beers reinforcing the idea that “Diamonds Are Forever,” these stories help us make buying decisions with confidence.
  4. Big data can help determine when a person is “sales ready”: It’s true that there has been a tremendous amount of hype around the concept of big data, but what you need to know is that your marketing team, when working with data scientists, can strip out all the noise and focus on the attributes that help you know when a potential customer is sales ready. Adobe has built entire ecosystems around these triggering events (which is why it spends a lot more of its resources on technology than on the creative suites that made it famous).
  5. There is science behind the art of persuasion; much of that is marketing: In his latest book, Robert Cialdini identifies 52 small changes you can make immediately to ignite big influence and the desired results for your business. While all of these small changes impact sales growth, most of them are about better marketing techniques that have a proven sales impact. Sales teams benefit, but much of the impact is based on approaches marketers take to persuade people about the product or service being offered.
  6. Word-of-mouth marketing can be grouped into six STEPPS: Jonah Berger wrote an incredible book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, and explained why people choose to share both online and in real life. He researched and published the answer to why people choose to talk about brands, products, and services and provided tons of examples of great marketing that did just that.
  7. Marketing helps prospective buyers know, like, and trust you (or at least your company): Before anyone wants to buy anything from you, the customer first needs to know, like, and trust you. This is because, at the end of the day, everything is about people working with other people. If I’m going to buy anything from you, I need to feel like I know you, then I need to be sure I like you and ultimately trust you. Marketing helps get you closer to these goals by building the brand and providing the social proof needed to establish these core elements.
  8. When done correctly, marketing makes your job a lot easier: Marketing is like having a really great wingman (or wingwoman) who introduces you to someone at a party. Even if you’ve never talked to this prospect before, the marketing that preceded your conversation provided the emotional firepower to endear you to that customer long before you ever talked to him or her. Ideally, the marketing has provided the thought leadership and positioning that led this person to want to speak with you in the first place.
  9. Marketing people love and respect salespeople: When the marketing team understands that the sales team is driving the revenue that pays their salaries, they don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize your ability to drive sales. More than that, marketing people realize just how challenging it is to drive sales throughout the organization, and they respect the people who consistently deliver the results.
  10. You need each other: Marketing can’t do its job effectively without the support of the sales team. Working together is much more powerful than fighting for control. The flip side is also true. Sales without marketing is a much more difficult road to success. Without marketing, your focus is to make up for all that lost ground–telling the story, being persuasive, qualifying the lead, determining the emotional connection, objection handling, and everything else. It certainly can be done, but it’s a lot harder to grow the company without the support of marketing.

The bottom line is that, when done correctly, marketing provides the air cover for the salespeople on the ground working hard to close deals and increase revenue. It’s a partnership, to be sure.

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Tony Robbins Explains How a 2 Millimeter Shift Can Make or Break Your Business

It may not seem like much, but even the smallest change in your business can turn out to be the difference between success and failure.

Last year I read a really great book and then wrote an article that talked about the 52 small changes that spark big influence.  I’ve implemented many of these recommended approaches and can attest to their effectiveness. But then I got to thinking that it’s not just influence, but your entire business that is impacted by the smallest things.

This all started when I met Tony Robbins’ golf coach, Tim Hurja, who told me an incredible story about one of the golf lessons he gave Tony Robbins. As you can imagine, Tony Robbins enjoys being the best life coach in the world and desires to bring his A-game to everything he does. Golf was no exception. Tony was pleased to pick up the golf club and immediately start hitting some great shots down the fairway. But then, as is prone to happen in golf, the harder he concentrated and swung his club, the shots became less consistent and more frustrating.

If you’ve ever played golf, you can totally empathize here. When you’re relaxed and not thinking too hard about it, your tension is down and you tend to play pretty well. But, as you try harder and tense up, your game actually gets worse, not better.

It’s at this point that Tim Hurja introduced Tony Robbins to the concept of the 2 Millimeter Shift. “In golf your clubface must be square to the path you’re swinging on to hit the ball straight, it’s less than a 2 millimeter shift that makes all the difference,” he said. “A two millimeter shift may not seem like much, but as you carry that small shift out further and further it has a dramatic impact on your outcome.”

Business Application of the 2 Millimeter Shift

Tony Robbins immediately got it. Not only was he able to improve his golf, but he took that lesson into his world-class events helping his audience understand how the smallest change in your business can have a substantial impact. This is one of the many important lessons Tony Robbins teaches at his Business Mastery event. He illustrates it through a powerful process where he illustrates how a few 1 to 20% improvements consistently delivered can grow your business as much as 72.8%.

Now I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it too. The math doesn’t add up. But what I was not understanding is the compounding nature of these small improvements on each other. Let me provide an example. There are only 3 ways to improve your top-line growth: (1) Get Your Current Customers to Buy More, (2) Get Your Current Customers to Buy More Often, and (3) Get New Customers.

Let’s say you improve each of these by 20%. Logic would dictate that you would grow your business by 60%, right? But no, it’s actually 72.8% when you factor in the compounding effect of doing all three. Let me illustrate. Let’s say that your current customer spends $100,000 per year with you and buys 10 times a year. If you were to get them to buy 20% more each time your average sale would go from $10,000 to $12,000. When multiplied by 10 times, that gets you $120,000, or a 20% increase. Now add the current customer buying more often. At 20%, that’s an 12th purchase at $12,000. So now that one customer is now spending $144,000. Already, we’re seeing more than a 40% increase. Let’s say you’re a $5 million dollar company and for simple math have 50 customers. If you could get 20% more customers (keeping the first two changes), that means you now have 60 customers buying 12 times a year at $12,000 for a total of $8,640,000. That’s not 60% growth, but 72.8%.

Even Smaller Changes That Make a Bigger Impact

If we were then to switch the focus to internal operations, the numbers get bigger faster. One big mistake entrepreneurs make is thinking that all problems can be solved with more top-line sales growth. One of the most stunning examples of where that’s wrong is the entire dot com era where businesses were losing money on their sales and somehow figured they could make it up on volume. The vast majority of internet companies that were going out of business were showing growing unprofitable sales at scale. With razor thin margins and a lack of clear operational controls, growth of the top-line can actually bankrupt your business (see related article, Why 96 Percent of Businesses Fail Within 10 Years).

During Keith Cunningham’s session at Business Mastery, he teaches that “Profit is a theory, but cash is a fact.” And using his tool, CFO Scoreboard, he show audience members in real time what happens when you make incredibly small changes such as increasing the length of time you wait to pay your vendors by a few days versus speeding up the collection of your receivables. To many business owners, operational efficiency can feel like an amorphous mess until you see your own bottom line profit numbers change dramatically with 1 to 5% changes in your operational costs and the management of payment timing.

Your accountant is NOT your CFO. Your accountant is paid to ensure you pay your taxes and don’t get into trouble with the IRS. That’s not the same thing as true financial planning. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs don’t fully appreciate that until it’s too late.

For more on this topic, I encourage you to check out Tony Robbin’s Business Mastery Million Dollar Guarantee.

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3 Little Known Sales Secrets

The more someone trusts you, the more they share their pain points and needs with you. It is at this point that you can make a realistic judgment call to determine if the product or service you’re selling is, in fact, a good fit. When you’re honest enough to turn down a potential sale, you’re actually building a customer for life.

Often we spend so much time thinking about our business, that we overlook the simple, almost painfully obvious things that can help our business grow. Sales, for example, are the lifeblood of any business. To increase the growth of your business, you need to be able to sell your products or services. For fast-growth companies, the challenge with sales comes along when trying to build a sales team. The focus often shifts from what got you started in the business to thinking about scale. When it comes to driving sales, it’s important to remember a couple of things:

  1. People buy on emotion and back-fill with logic.
  2. People like to buy, but no one likes to be sold.
  3. People do business with the people they know, like and trust.

Buying on Emotion In most industries, too much emphasis is given to “speeds and feeds”, which is shorthand for quickly telling people how something works and/or the information they need to make an intelligent business decision. But that’s the first place where most companies get it wrong. Think about the car buying experience. Before you ever check out the window sticker for the details, you first need that “wow” moment; those few seconds you actually imagine yourself driving around inside that car. That emotional “desire” is the moment that draws you into the sales process. You have to want something before you can buy it.

Buying vs. Being Sold
Buying can be fun. The best companies in the world know this and give you the space to enjoy the buying experience. But no one wants to be sold, and there is a difference. In keeping with the car buying analogy, we’ve all been pounced by an aggressive salesperson looking to make a quick close. Being sold feels terrible because, you are not confident that you’re making the right buying decision when you can spot every sales tactic being thrown at you.

Know, Like & Trust
This is why the best salespeople go through a simple, but powerful, process of getting to know their prospects, increasing their “likability” factor and building trust. Getting to know potential buyers may feel a bit daunting at first as it requires putting yourself out there. The simplest way to get to know people is to find ways to add value firstbefore you ever try to sell them something. Using this model, you immediately remove the “sales” barrier and instead focus on where you can add value while getting to know the person you’d like to do business with.

As you’re getting to know your prospective buyer and finding ways to add value, you’re increasing your likability factor. (For more on this topic, see Tim Sanders, The Likability Factor). The more someone likes you, the more they begin to trust you. This transforms the relationship from one of “buyer and seller” to the preferred position of “subject matter expert and interested party”.

The more someone trusts you, the more they share their pain points and needs with you. It is at this point that you can make a realistic judgment call to determine if the product or service you’re selling is, in fact, a good fit. When you’re honest enough to turn down a potential sale, you’re actually building a customer for life.

Allow me to explain. My wife is a die-hard LL Bean shopper, but she could never find a pair of shoes from LL Bean that fit quite right, so she asked her customer service rep to help her. Without hesitating, the LL Bean rep recommended Zappos. My wife was both surprised by the recommendation and delighted by the discovery. The savvy rep, realizing that she couldn’t satisfy the foot apparel needs of my wife, was presented with a unique opportunity to be a subject matter expert. By altruistically helping my wife discover Zappos, the sales rep has received more business to LL Bean through the many referrals my wife has given since then, by recounting this story to her friends whenever there is an opportunity to do so.

There are many stories like this–many of them from Zappos reps who have been trained that “delivering happiness” is more important than closing a single sale. Of course, none of this is possible unless your customer first knows, likes and trusts you. Otherwise, you’ll never be presented with the opportunity to be a trusted subject matter expert in the first place.

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