THE MAGIC OF PERSISTENCE AND A STRATEGIC CADENCE IN YOUR SALES DEVELOPMENT

When you want sales, you’ve got to stay top of mind.

You’ve got to position yourself as the best option, and you’ve got to be there, ready to go when your prospects are. How do you do that? With consistent follow-up. There’s no way around it.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the “Law of Frequency,” a principle of association stating that the more often ideas, events (e.g., stimuli and responses), or other items co-occur, the stronger the connections between them. In other words, the more your prospects sees you, hears from you, or has some type of contact with you, the more they trust you. 

This post will lay out how to spark the magic of follow-up, discuss the cadence with which you should follow up, as well as when to finally give up (if you should).

Let’s start by understanding this fact...

Fact: Only 3 percent of your prospects are ready to buy now.

No one explains it better than Chet Holmes, author of The Ultimate Sales Machine, with his Demand Generation Pyramid:

While Chet’s experience revealed that only 3% of your target market are actually ready to buy at any time, on the flip side, it means there’s a 97% chance that they’re not ready to hear your offer and will immediately shut you down.

Another fact: 

92% of businesses, marketers and sales professionals
give up after the 4th touchpoint, but 80% of prospects say no
four times before they say yes. (MarketingDonut) 

This is crazy! Salespeople tend to give up right when they’re prospect starts opening up to a real conversation.

This shouldn’t be surprising that it takes at least four touch-points though. Even if a prospect is the right person to be communicating with, they may not even be aware that a solution like yours exists yet. 

That isn’t a negative.

By knowing that information upfront it can inform the right strategy or approach you should utilize to build relationships with the right kinds of people that will generate both short-term sales and long-term opportunities with the perfect buyers for your product or service.

The reason outbound lead generation and sales development works is that it is proactive and disruptive. Your prospects may not be actively seeking your solution today. But you can build that awareness and interest through the right outreach approach.

Considering this a failure is short-sided. Any relationship needs momentum and momentum can take time. Consistency leads to familiarity. Familiarity leads to trust. Trust leads to action. Action turns prospects into clients.

INCENTIVES CAN BE A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

In business, behavior almost always follows the available incentives. We regularly see this in sales. Business leaders often assume that creating incentives for salespeople is consistently a good way to drive results—salespeople who get commissions for every sale are motivated to sell as much as possible, driving revenue for the business.

But any experienced sales leader knows incentives are a double-edged sword; salespeople often devote their strategies to maximizing their incentives, even if doing so isn’t what’s best for the company. They may push projects with the highest commissions or try to overprice their accounts to meet their quota. The best sales leaders know there is a delicate balance to creating incentives that serve their salespeople, their business, and their customers.

Key takeaway: Don’t kick yourself for wishing you saw an opportunity earlier, focus on the outcome you want, find the partners that deliver, build your business on the right platform, and let the incentive alignment take the rest.

FOUR WAYS TO BUILD STRONG RELATIONSHIPS WITH YOUR USERS

In the marketing world, there are several ways to boost your conversions and achieve your goals. And every business knows about them. Whether it is through email marketing, social media marketing, paid promotions, or influencer marketing, the list is endless.

But if you want to beat your competitors, you have to focus on building relationships. It’s one of the most effective ways to take your business on the right path and help it achieve its goals.

But building relationships with your audience and clients isn’t a one-day job. You need to have a proper strategy and need to invest your time and effort to be able to build successful relationships with your clients.

So what strategy were you to use to develop a positive image for your business and build strong relationships with your audience?

Let’s find out.

1. Prioritize Customer Experience

You won’t have to struggle too hard to build relationships if you prioritize customer experience as your business goal. Offering a good customer experience is extremely important for the sustained growth of your business.

It helps foster positive relationships with your users by building brand advocacy and promoting loyalty. This, in turn, will help you boost your sales and increase your overall conversion as well.

So how do you improve the user experience for your business? There are several ways of doing that. For example, when a potential customer lands on your website, he/she should be able to reach out to you for any pre-sales queries that they might have.

But you don’t want them to keep waiting for an answer. So adding a live chat feature can make things fast and easy for you as well as for your lead. Another way of boosting user experience for your business is to offer top-notch customer service.

Sometimes after purchasing an item from you, your users might need assistance for using the product, setting it up, or anything similar. Make sure that you’re available for their assistance whenever the need arises. Be quick in helping them solve their problem. This will boost customer satisfaction and help boost brand advocacy.

2. Establish Trust

Just like our personal relationships are built on trust, in marketing, building trust becomes super important for establishing strong relationships with your users. This can be done by sticking to your words.

For example, if you have a money-back guarantee, make sure to let your users avail it if they request it. Similarly, if you say that you offer 24*7 customer assistance, make sure to be available 24*4.

You should also have secure payment options so that your users feel safe when making payments. Ultimately it’s about keeping the word you give. If you can’t meet their expectations, don’t set them in the first place. So think before you set expectations.

3. Reward Loyalty

Another brilliant way to build strong relationships with your users is to reward them for their loyalty to your brand. Appreciate them for being loyal customers by offering discounts, reward points, scratch cards, gift hampers, etc.

If you’re a small business that isn’t financially ready for this, you can even give a shout-out to your customers on your social media page. Although it’s not possible to do that for all your users, you can set criteria for when you would do that. For example, it can be for customers purchasing products from you for X amount of money.

Doing this will make your customers feel valued, and they will be encouraged to come back to your website again. It’s also a great way to build strong relationships with your customers.

4. Seek Feedback

Another very effective way of building relationships with your users is to seek feedback from them. But don’t simply end it there. You need to make sure that you work on the negative feedback you receive. This will make the customers feel appreciated and valued and help you build stronger relationships with them.

So these are a few tips to try out to build strong relationships with your customers. Now it’s your turn to use them for your business. Meanwhile, if you have any other tip that has a drive result for you, do let us know in the comments below. We would love to hear from you.

FOUR BRILLIANT WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR EMAIL OPEN RATES

Do you know the average open rate for emails?

You’ll be shocked to know that it’s just 17.92%. But, if you can increase your open rate, you can use it to generate an ROI of 4,400% for your business.

Probably that’s the reason why 61% of bloggers are using email marketing to attract visitors to their website.

However, it’s not simply enough to incorporate email marketing into your marketing strategy. You also need to focus on how to make it more effective in order to improve your overall open rates.

To help you do that, I have listed down a few email marketing ideas that can help you boost your open rate and increase your conversions.

1. Focus on Your Subject Line

Your subject line is the first thing that your users notice about your email. 47% of people open emails based on the email subject line alone. But unless it can gain your recipient’s attention, the chances are that they will move on without even opening it.

This makes it super important for you to ensure that your subject line is able to gain attention from your users. One way of doing it is to draft it in a way that raises curiosity in your users. For example –

‘Did this happen to you?’

Something like this will leave people wondering about what you’re referring to. So they will click on the email to find out more about it.

Another way to make your subject line interesting is to use the element of FOMO or Fear of missing out. For example, if you say –

‘This is how I earned $10k from my blog in less than 10 days.’

People would definitely want to know the secret behind this result. And this will encourage them to click and open your email without any delay.

Just keep in mind not to disappoint your users after the email is opened. By doing that, you will lose trust and encourage your users to unsubscribe from your email list. So make sure to deliver what you promise through your subject lines.

2. Be Relevant

One of the major aspects that makes your emails interesting is their content quality. If the information you share through your emails doesn’t match the interest of your users, then a lot of your emails will remain unopened.

People love reading information that helps them solve their problems, conquer their fear, ease their pain or help them achieve something they want.

They want to use the information in your email newsletters in their real-life scenarios to make their lives easier. They find such content more relevant and love reading emails with such information.

So it’s important for you to focus on your content quality when you’re drafting your emails. Do some research to understand what your audience wants to read about.

Once you know that, spend time creating high-value content that is not only useful and relevant for your users but is interesting too. This will help boost the open rate and will improve user-experience as well.

3. Know the Best Time to Send it

Another very important aspect to consider before sending your emails is the timing of sending them. You must have heard different marketers say different things about the best time to send out emails.

But the problem is that this time is different for different industries. So how do you know what’s your best timing? One way to find out your best time is by sending your emails at different timings of the day. Try experimenting with your timing to find out what time gets the best response in your industry.

Once the experiment is done, stick to the timing religiously. That way, you can quickly increase your open rate.

4. Personalize your Emails

Another very effective way to make your emails stand out in your subscriber’s inboxes is to personalize them. By doing that, you send the right email to the right person and increase the relevance of your email. This not only increases your open rate but also boosts your conversion.

One of the most widely used personalisation tips is to use the first name of the recipient.

But don’t limit yourself to that. Go beyond the name of the user. Based on their browsing history, you can ask them the right question or offer them the right solution through your emails. This is a brilliant way to increase the relevance of your emails and improve the open rates.

So these are a few easy tips you can try out for a better open rate. Try them out, and let us know if it worked for you in the comments below. We would love to hear from you.

AUCTION-BASED PRICING CAPITALIZES ON OUR PSYCHOLOGY

Auctions are designed to turn selling an item into an instantaneously competitive process, pushing buyers to drive up the price in real-time rather than carefully assessing what an item is worth and paying for it accordingly. A seller can get a much better price this way than they would by negotiating with an individual buyer.

Auctions capitalize on two psychological tendencies: a habit of fixating on things we can potentially own and a hatred of losing things we possess. In effect, auctions create these two feelings several times over. A person places a bid and begins to picture themselves owning the item. Then, as soon as another bidder tops their price, they feel the sting of losing that same item and bid higher. This cycle tempts people to pay more than they normally would because losing feels intolerable at the moment.

Key Takeaways:

• The most popular marketing channels—especially Facebook, Google, and Amazon—leverage auction-based pricing that makes it easy to get caught up in a bidding war
• The auction-based pricing model benefits bigger brands with higher budgets, specialized consultants, and other financial advantages
• Partnership marketing is relationship-driven and outcome-based, avoiding real-time auctions

THE REAL COST OF OUTSOURCING

A wise man once said, " 'Tis better to distribute your eggs into several baskets than to put them all in one"--or something to that effect. And that's especially true if your only basket is 7,000 miles away in a country that could quite fairly be described as hard-line.

You'd think it would be obvious that sourcing your product, or major components of it, in China would eventually lead to trouble. Yet a lot of businesses continue to rely on contract manufac­turers in far-flung lands to churn out and ship parts for many, if not all, of their products. Well, 2021 taught anyone who counted on the so-called global supply chain a lesson. As Aretha Franklin sang so wisely in "Chain of Fools," "Every chain has got a weak link ... one of these mornings the chain is gonna break." Why are sage words so rarely heeded?

Given the media coverage, you might think that supply chain issues are the biggest hazard of manufacturing overseas. That may be true for very large companies that adhere to the risky principles of "just-in-time manufacturing." But, in fact, relying on distant factories for your precious products poses other risks that have the potential to wreak even more havoc on your business, especially if it's just getting off the ground.

Quality Assurance? Forget About It

Here's an example of what I mean: A few years after I sold Big Ass Fans, news outlets reported the recall of residential ceiling fans that had been made in China and sold through a Florida distributor at big-box stores nationwide. And not just a few fans, but nearly 200,000 of them. According to the U.S. Con­sumer Product Safety Commission, the recall stemmed from the fact that "the blades can detach from the fan while in use, posing an injury hazard to consumers"--in other words, a fan company's worst nightmare. Yes, defects can happen to products everywhere, but your ability to ride herd on quality control diminishes with distance.

Unfortunately, not everyone takes my sermon to heart. Too many founders remain convinced that manufacturing overseas is the only way to go, as central to launching a business as all the other mistakes they've been told is part of the modern business model: landing a big valuation, spending gobs on Facebook advertising, selling on Amazon, and hiring an agency to build a brand.

The main appeal of all of these moves is that they appear to be easier than the alternatives. Founders assume their product and brand will be in the hands of people much more experienced than they are and that, by ceding control, they'll have less to worry about. Meanwhile, I argue that if something's easy, it's almost certainly not the right thing to do, and that if founders are not in control, they're being controlled.

Before we started working with them, several of our partner companies at Unorthodox Ventures had experienced major--but entirely predictable--problems with their Chinese manufacturers. They turned to us to help sort those out, and because they had otherwise good ideas and good products, we were happy to do so.

One had serious quality issues from the get-go, having outsourced the product design to a contract manufacturer. As soon as the product reached the market, customers discovered serious flaws, as quality control seemed nonexistent. Until we fixed the production processes, our on-staff engineers began every day by disassembling the newly ­received gadgets, testing them, repairing if needed, and reassembling them.

You're Nobody Special

Another startup we worked with was left stranded because of a missing sensor that happened to be crucial for its consumer electronics device to work. By the time the overseas supplier came through, the contract manufacturer doing the final assembly was on a two-week break for the Lunar New Year, which led to a domino effect of additional problems. People clamored for their overdue orders, but plants were not going to operate during the holiday.

I've heard all the arguments for outsourcing, but they really boil down to three words: cheaper labor costs. There's no denying that people in the Far East put in longer hours for far less pay than American workers, and if your goal is to make something as cheaply as possible, that can be hard to resist. But, in the long term, outsourcing doesn't come cheap, and if your goal is to create a product and business you can be proud of, then long-term should be the only consideration. At Big Ass Fans, our focus was always on good, not cheap. We charged more for our product and found that our customers were always willing to pay more when they understood why.

And there's one more big problem with going overseas: If you're selling something that can be easily copied, the manufacturer will know exactly how many you're selling, how much it costs to make, and how to make it.

Keep in mind that unless you're a big business, your relationship with any manufacturer, anywhere, is bound to be lopsided: You're going to care a lot more about them than they about you and your intermittent orders. And, because you're not that important, there is less incentive for them to do a good job. Before you know it, you have fan blades flying off.

Maybe you'll be advised to pick a partner that is as concerned about quality as you are before you sign a contract. But, seriously, how in the hell are you supposed to do that? Do you really think a foreign manufacturer who barely knows you are going to care about your product? I'm not saying there aren't some good contract manufacturers out there. But, even with a good one, there's always going to be a barrier when you interact: Not only is there a chance that you will not speak the same language, but there will also be cultural differences that may be impossible to fully overcome.

Kiss that IP Good-bye

And there's one more big problem with going overseas: If you're selling something that can be easily copied, a manufacturer will know exactly how many you're selling, how much it costs to make, and how to make it. Its employees have access to your intellectual property--they know your product even better than you--and there's no way to guarantee it won't launch a competing product at a lower price because it doesn't have the other expenses you do.

One of our own partner companies woke up one morning to discover its electronic gadget for sale on Alibaba, with the same name and packaging. Yes, there's a long history of American retailers knocking off a supplier's product and undercutting that supplier. But at least you have access to U.S. courts, as Sonos did when it prevailed over Google for infringing on its IP for wireless speakers.

And let's not forget the geopolitical issues. Relations between the U.S. and China could hardly be called warm these days, which has led to tariffs and heightened concerns about tech security.

I'll admit it: I manufactured Big Ass Fans in Kentucky because I was, and am a control freak. If a product was going to be sold with my company's name on it, I wanted the production lines close enough that I could be a constant presence and that there would be no delay in fixing a problem once it had been identified. Proximity to our production lines and our suppliers was essential to maintaining quality control. The vast majority of our suppliers were within a six-hour drive, which meant we could jump in the car and look at their operations at a moment's notice. Being nearby allowed us to build the kind of relationships that are so crucial with vendors, one of the most rewarding aspects of doing business. You lose out on all that when you hire manufacturers overseas.

There's a well-known saying that cheap things aren't good, but good things aren't cheap. Again, why is it that we can recite proverbs out of the wazoo but refuse to heed them? The A-Team star Mr. T famously said, "I pity the fool," but maybe he should pity the wise man--and woman--even more. No one seems to pay them any mind.

Ultimately, every entrepreneur will need to decide which road they're on: the cheap or the good. But I can almost guarantee that if you squeeze those pennies too tightly, eventually you'll come up empty-handed.

If that's not a proverb, it should be.

BY CAREY SMITH, FOUNDER, BIG ASS FANS AND UNORTHODOX VENTURES

IN OUR AI FUTURE, PEOPLE WILL BE THE REASON MOST COMPANIES SUCCEED

Imagine trying to find a particular image within the National Football League’s historical archive of hundreds of thousands of videos. A single season produces more than 16,320 minutes (some 680 hours) of game footage. If you include coverage of every pregame, halftime, and postgame show, every practice, and every media interview, you have a seemingly endless amount of footage. And that’s just for one season.

To make it easier for staffers to create highlight reels and other media from all this material, the NFL partnered with Amazon Web Services in December 2019 to use artificial intelligence to search and tag its video content. The first step of the process required the NFL’s content creation team to teach the AI what to find. The team created metadata tags for every player, team, jersey, stadium, and other visually recognizable content it wanted to identify within its video collection. It then combined those tags with Amazon’s existing image-recognition AI system, which Amazon had already trained on tens of millions of images. The AI was able to use both sets of data to flag relevant imagery within the video library, and the content creation team was able to approve each tag in just a few clicks. Whereas employees once had to manually search, find, and clip each video, store it in a repository, and then tag the video with metadata, Amazon’s AI automated most of the process.

In a previous HBR article (“Collaborative Intelligence: Humans and AI Are Joining Forces,” July–August 2018), we described how some leading organizations are defying the conventional expectation that technology will render people obsolete—they are instead using the power of human-machine collaboration to transform their businesses and improve their bottom lines. Now several companies are not merely out-innovating their competitors with this approach; they’re turning even more decisively toward human-centered AI technology and upending the very nature of innovation as it was practiced over the previous decade.

In the NFL’s case, for example, AI accelerated the image-recognition process, but the system would have failed without employees determining which data needed to be uploaded and then approved. And the NFL didn’t simply hand the job of making highlight reels over to AI; content creation experts performed that work, but they did it faster and more easily thanks to AI’s unique ability to quickly sort through massive volumes of information.

The new human-focused approach to AI is changing assumptions about the basic building blocks of innovation. Companies such as Etsy, L.L.Bean, McDonald’s, and Ocado are redefining how AI and automation can knit together a wide range of cutting-edge information technologies and systems that enable agile adaptability and seamless human-machine integration. (Disclosure: Several companies named in this article are Accenture clients.) These path-breaking firms have invested in digital technologies at unprecedented rates to respond to new operational challenges and rapidly shifting customer demands. They’ve dramatically increased investments in cloud services, AI, and the like, and they’re generating revenue at twice the speed of laggards, according to a 2019 Accenture survey of more than 8,300 companies. A second study, of more than 4,000 companies in 2021, shows that the 10% making the biggest commitment to digital technologies are rocketing even further ahead, growing revenue five times as fast as laggards.

We’ve turned what we’ve learned from this research into guidance that business leaders can use to compete in a world where most companies will owe their success to humans rather than machines. Our IDEAS framework calls for attention to five elements of the emerging technology landscape: intelligence, data, expertise, architecture, and strategy. It can help both technical and nontechnical executives to better understand those elements and conceive of ways they might be woven together into powerful engines of innovation.

In this article, we use the IDEAS framework to examine examples of businesses that have implemented human-driven AI processes and applications to solve problems in e-commerce, online grocery delivery, robotics, and more. You can do likewise, marshaling the skills and experience of your own people to manage technological innovation in everything from R&D and operations to talent management and business-model development.

Intelligence: Make AI More Human and Less Artificial

Human intelligence and artificial intelligence are complementary. No machine powered by AI can match the ease and efficiency with which even the youngest humans learn, comprehend, and contextualize. Accidentally drop an object and a one-year-old who sees you reaching for it will retrieve it for you. Throw it down on purpose and the child will ignore it. In other words, even very small children understand that people have intentions—an extraordinary cognitive ability that seems to come almost prewired in the human brain.

That’s not all. Beginning at a very young age, children develop an intuitive sense of physics: They expect objects to move along smooth paths, remain in existence, and fall when unsupported. Before they’ve acquired language, they distinguish animate agents from inanimate objects. As they learn language, they exhibit a remarkable ability to generalize from very few examples, picking up new words after hearing them only once or twice. And they learn to walk on their own, through trial and error.

Conversely, AI can do many things that people, despite being endowed with natural intelligence, find impossible or difficult to do well: recognize patterns in vast amounts of data; defeat the greatest champions at chess; run complex manufacturing processes; simultaneously answer many calls to customer service centers; analyze weather, soil conditions, and satellite imagery to help farmers maximize crop yields; scan millions of internet images in the fight against child exploitation; detect financial fraud; predict consumer preferences; personalize advertising; and much else. Most important, AI has enabled humans and machines to work together efficiently. And contrary to automation doomsayers, such collaboration is creating an array of new, high-value jobs.

At Obeta, a German electronics wholesaler whose warehouse is run by the Austrian warehouse logistics company Knapp, human workers are teaching a new generation of robot pickers how to handle differently sized and textured items. The robots employ an off-the-shelf industrial arm, a suction gripper, and a vision system. Crucially, they are also equipped with AI software from Covariant, a start-up based in California.

To train a robot, Knapp workers put unfamiliar objects in front of it and see if it can successfully adapt to them. When it fails, it can update its understanding of what it’s seeing and try different approaches. When it succeeds, it gets a reward signal, programmed by humans, to reinforce the learning. When a set of SKUs differs totally from other sets, the team reverts to supervised learning—collecting and labeling a lot of new training data, as happens with deep-learning systems.

Thanks to the Covariant Brain software, Knapp’s robot pickers are acquiring general-purpose abilities, including 3D perception, an understanding of how objects can be moved and manipulated, the capacity for real-time motion planning, and the capacity to master a task after only a few training examples (few-shot learning). These abilities enable them to perform their job—to pick items from bulk storage bins and add them to individual orders for shipping—without being told what to do. In many cases, the items have not been precategorized, which is unusual for industrial packaging systems; it means the robots are learning how to handle them in real-time. This is a critical skill to have when dealing with electronics, especially when you consider the different care required to handle a light bulb and a stove.

To succeed in a commercial environment, robots must perform to a very high standard. Previously, Knapp’s robot pickers reliably handled only about 15% of objects; the Covariant-powered robots now reliably handle about 95% of objects. And they’re faster than humans, picking about 600 objects an hour versus 450 for humans. Nevertheless, they have not caused any staff layoffs off at the Obeta facility. Human workers, instead of losing their jobs, have been retrained to understand more about robotics and computers.

HOW DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER BRANDS CHANGED HOW WE BUY

In 2011, a pair of entrepreneurs challenged an industry ruled by a few giant companies. They did this by asking a question that changed business: Is Gillette really the best a man can get?

The pair were frustrated by the process of buying razors in a store where blades from giants like Gillette were priced so high that stores kept them in locked display cases. Betting that others were looking for a cheap, convenient alternative, the duo launched Dollar Shave Club and began selling razors and blades for as cheap as $3 a month and shipping them directly to customers.

Within a year of launching, they raised over a million dollars in seed money; within a decade, they had a $1 Billion valuation—disrupting the established norms of how we buy.

Key takeaways:

• The rise of DTC brands has made direct customer acquisition more valuable than ever
• Subscription brands can get a high lifetime value from a single customer
• The best publishers have figured out how to enhance their content and marketing placements to optimize the user experience and drive better results for brands

MAKING A CASE FOR PARTNERSHIP

What is Partnership Marketing?

To illustrate the effectiveness of partnership marketing, let’s start with a simple question. Would you rather: Pay $100 for an ad placement that yields 1000 advertising impressions but only 5 sales? Offer a marketing partner $10 per completed sale, leading to 10 sales for $100 each? It doesn’t take someone with an MBA to know you should choose the second option. This is the crucial advantage partnership marketing has over similar data-driven models under the umbrella of performance-based marketing. With many forms of performance-based marketing, you can measure the effectiveness of your advertisement only by analyzing campaign data retroactively, rather than paying for only the outcomes you seek. The structure allows you to make small adjustments and smarter decisions in the future, but you still end up paying for poor results if a campaign underperforms. Brands don’t have any guarantees in many channels of performance marketing—they can only learn from their mistakes. In contrast, in partnership marketing, you only have to pay for what works best according to your definition of success. Rather than investing upfront and hoping for the best, you pay an agreed-upon percentage or fee billed only after you have obtained the desired outcome. And because partners get paid according to those same metrics, it is in their best interests to deliver the best outcomes. The incentives of brands and partners are aligned. Key takeaways:  Partnership marketing is a powerful, scalable, sustainable channel brands can use to grow their business Partnership marketing creates an incentive alignment between brands and partners driving mutually beneficial, agreed-upon outcomes

HOW COMPANIES ARE AIDING THE UKRAINIAN RELIEF EFFORTS

The war in Ukraine is now a full-fledged humanitarian crisis. 

The United Nations estimates that more than 1.7 million refugees have fled Ukraine in the first 11 days of the conflict. They're going to neighboring countries like Poland, Romania, Moldova, and Hungary, which have largely opened their borders to those seeking safety.

While different nations have necessarily stepped up to help, businesses are also lending a hand. Here are a few ways companies are offering donations, a place to sleep, or other acts of charity to help Ukrainians in need:

Offering temporary housing

Airbnb announced on February 28 that it would provide temporary housing for up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, with the stays funded by Airbnb and supported through donations to the company's nonprofit arm, Airbnb.org. The company is also actively seeking volunteer hosts, particularly in Poland, Germany, Hungary, and Romania.

CEO Brian Chesky also recently pointed out another way its platform is helping: After a tweet that recommended booking Airbnbs in Ukraine as a way of getting funds directly to Ukrainians went viral, the company confirmed that it was waiving all guest and host fees on the bookings, so it was not profiting on the crisis.

Donating profits to charity

A straightforward way other businesses are getting involved is by donating to relief efforts in Ukraine, by matching employee donations, devoting profits to a cause, or making a charitable contribution directly as a company. Over the course of two days, the Mansfield, Missouri, seed company Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company donated 100 percent of its sales to the nonprofit World Help, which is working with Ukrainian organizations to provide food and water to refugees. Baker Creek raised $1.6 million, in its largest charitable effort to date. As founder and owner Jere Gettle wrote on Baker Creek's website, this cause hits close to home: His great-grandparents, German immigrants to Odessa, fled Ukraine because of Soviet aggression in the early 20th century.

Setting up charitable funds

The San Francisco-based expert-on-demand company JustAnswer, which has about a quarter of its workforce in Ukraine, set up a crisis fund, which will go toward the Ukrainian armed forces and refugees, with donations facilitated by the Ukrainian charity Lviv ІТ Cluster. JustAnswer raised over $50,000 in under 24 hours, and CEO Andy Kurtzig says the company is also matching the first $50,000 raised by JustAnswer employees and experts.

Evacuating employees 

The Tel Aviv-based website builder Wix has about 950 employees based in Ukraine, which led CEO Nir Zohar to take serious action, he told The Washington Post. An internal team of about 20 Wix employees worked together to book travel and lodging to help about 500 Ukraine-based Wix employees and their families to flee the country amid the conflict and is in close contact with the workers who remain in Ukraine. Wix kept a close eye on the developing conflict weeks before Russia invaded the country, and started helping employees evacuate to Poland the second week of February. Since Ukraine restricted men ages 18 to 60 from leaving the country, Wix is unable to evacuate all of its remaining employees but is still actively helping families flee, paying employees their salaries in advance, and providing refugees with food, cash, diapers, and other essentials.  

Getting customers involved

The Chicago-based phone company Mode Mobile, which was founded in 2017, allows users to earn points through an app or smartphone that rewards them for activities like streaming music and reading or playing games, which they can redeem for gift cards in value up to $600 per year. On March 3, the company started offering its users the ability to donate a set number of points toward an individual $5 donation to the Ukrainian armed forces through the charity savelife.in.ua. Mode says it will match up to $1,000 in donations--a number it has already hit--and will send funds in Bitcoin to the charity via Coinbase.

LET YOUR CLOSERS CLOSE AND YOUR SALES TEAM MORE PRODUCTIVE

Your sales team could be selling more.

Did you know that InsideSales found that salespeople on average spend 60% of their time on tasks that aren't actually selling?

This brings into question what types of tasks your sales team is actually be doing. Here’s the problem: Good sales talent is hard to find and if they’re only spending 30% of their time on actually closing sales, is that the best use of their time (and your budget)?

This blog post will show you how to build out a sales development team that allows your closers to focus on what they’re best at closing.

First, let’s take a look at what sales teams actually spend their time on.

In most cases, they’re doing lead gen, prospecting, and admin work. Incredibly, according to Hubspot, salespeople actually spend 66% of their day on admin tasks.

Frankly, that is a shocking statistic. Your sales team is a valuable asset that needs to use its experience and skills to close sales. Not prospecting. Not doing admin work. Your sales team needs to be the hunter, not the gatherer and you need to provide support for them to be able to focus on hunting, or in other words, on spending more time on using their talent to close sales.

Outreach.io agrees,

“Since a hunter should have one job and one job only — hunting — your team should be
comprised of members in supporting roles whose job is to give your hunters the tools
they need to work as effectively as possible at all times.”

If you feel that your sales team isn’t as productive as they could be, or that they are focused on tasks other than closing, it could be indicative of a deeper problem…

Ask yourself: Is your current sales process actually standing in their way?

It may be.

Here’s why:

Sales pros spend only 36% of their time on selling-related tasks. (Salesforce)

And...

42% of sales professionals say prospecting is the hardest part of their job. The rest say it’s closing (36%) or qualifying (22%). (Hubspot)

What this means is that most B2B businesses have their sales team spending 60% of their day doing tasks that:

A. Are not the main reason they were hired.

B. Are what 60% of sales professionals struggle with the most.

So not only are your closers doing work that does not directly result in revenue, you are also risking burnout by having them do tasks that they do not fit into their core competencies.

Frankly, it’s likely that your sales team could be selling more.

You should care about this. Here’s why:

According to Forbes Agency Council, “Optimistic sales professionals outperform pessimists by 57%. That’s even true when pessimists have better selling skill sets.” (Forbes, Seligman)

If your best salespeople are spending the bulk of their day doing admin tasks, they are likely underperforming. The numbers will show.

Your closers should be closing.

Not tinkering around on LinkedIn. Not writing and sending one-off emails. Not prospecting. Not cold calling a leads list.

Overloading your sales team leads to missed opportunities and communication breakdowns with prospects.

4 EXPERT TIPS THAT WILL SKYROCKET YOUR EMAIL SIGN UP RATE

If you’re like most of us, you want to boost your email signup rate. Email marketing is a powerful way to connect with new prospects and loyal customers alike. A list that’s populated with engaged leads can help you drive traffic to your site, learn about your audience, increase sales, and much more.

However, it’s almost impossible to go from 0 to 10,000 subscribers overnight. As a result, many marketers get discouraged and think that their company isn’t suited for email marketing. I’m here to tell you that this is not the case.

Online businesses across all industries can benefit from building a robust lead list full of active subscribers. The thing is, this process takes time, effort, patience, and a little ingenuity.

Today, I’m going to explore several strategies you can use to skyrocket your email signup rate. I’ve successfully used these tips across our brands, and I’m confident they will work for you too.

Let’s dive in!

Publish Relevant, Actionable Content

Have you ever finished reading an article from a newly discovered brand and thought to yourself, “I’d like to get more content like this in the future. I should subscribe to their email list!” I believe it all comes down to value. A brand that offers valuable content and offers to their readers are more likely to have an active lead list.

Your goal is to give visitors this same feeling when they find your website. The easiest way to accomplish this task is through blogging. There’s a good reason why brands that blog get twice as much email traffic as non-blogging businesses.

The key to getting more email signups from your blog is to write for your target audience. If you write with your audiences’ goals, pain points, and interests in mind, you’ll have a better chance of convincing them to sign up for emails from your business.

I suggest reviewing your on-site analytics, customer feedback, and buyer personas to write blog posts that captivate readers and keep them invested in your brand. Use what you learn from this data to connect with your readers and address their questions and concerns. If your posts resonate with your audience, you can bet that you will see a surge in new email subscribers.

Include Well-Timed Popups

When used correctly, popups are an excellent way to turn visitors into subscribers. You may be wondering, “don’t popups have a bad reputation?” The simple answer to that question is sometimes. The two big differences between good popups and bad popups are relevancy and timing.

Timing is crucial because you want to reach your visitors when they are most likely to join your email list. For instance, a random popup that’s not based on an action taken by your user could do you more harm than good.

However, if someone is looking at a specific product, a well-timed lead magnet that promotes the benefits of your product or service will likely lead to a boost in engagement. The timing and relevance match what the visitors were doing on your site, so popups can be an extremely effective growth tool in this situation.

There are many ways you can personalize your popups for first-time visitors and repeat customers. I suggest using your buyer personas to create popup campaigns designed for visitors based on what they need from your brand.

So, if you have an online pet store and you want to reach as many customers as possible, you would likely make popup campaigns for individuals who own cats, dogs, birds, and so on. These targeted popups are a great way to show your audience that you understand what they need and want to deliver on your value proposition. If you need more convincing that this strategy works, consider this; 80% of shoppers say they want more personalized content and offers from their favorite companies.

Use Social Proof to Convince Cautious Visitors

Social proof is another powerful way to convince visitors to join your email list. In marketing, social proof is the idea that people are more likely to engage with a business if they see evidence that other people followed in their steps and saw positive results.

The most common form of social proof is user reviews, but you’ll be happy to know that there are other options. If your goal is to boost your email signup rate, I suggest using a number counter to show visitors how many people are currently subscribed to your list.

I found that people are far more likely to complete your signup form if they see that thousands of other people made the same decision. You can even include a testimonial or two on your registration page if you want to further incentivize users to give you their email address and name.

You should also consider the benefits of trust seals. Trust seals, also known as trust badges, are basically signals that your business is trusted and respected by other well-known companies, such as McAfee or PayPal. Many people build bonds with companies that they use for an extended time. So, when users see a seal of approval from PayPal, a brand they’ve used for years, they are far more likely to complete the signup process.

Host a Social Media Giveaway

If you want to quickly get more email signups, look no further than social media giveaways. We’ve had tremendous success hosting contests where we give away full licenses for our products. People who are on the fence about your brand will likely enter your giveaway because there’s zero risk involved.

Social sites like Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are excellent places to promote your event. Believe it or not, the average user spends around 2.5 hours on these platforms every single day. In other words, if there’s someone out there who may be interested in your product or service, there’s a good chance they could stumble across your contest.

The rules you establish for your giveaway are how you’ll grow your email list. You’ll want to allow visitors to enter by liking and sharing your post, but that’s not enough. I like creating several entry methods that enable users to enter however they want. I also encourage our followers to participate through all entry methods because they will get additional chances to win.

You can ask your followers to sign up for your email list and get a value-packed lead magnet or promotion for their time. When you consider that this will boost their chances to win, and they get something that they can use
immediately, it’s not hard to see how these events can result in an explosion of new leads and paying customers.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to skyrocket your signup rate and grow your lead list.

I want to mention one more tip that I think will help business leaders and marketers get more value from these strategies. You should always experiment with the various aspects of your campaigns. A/B testing, or split testing, is a great way to get started.

Essentially, a/b testing is when one or more elements of an advertisement, signup form, or page are modified to achieve stronger results. For instance, you may decide to change your call-to-action to see if this decision impacts your signup rate.

If, for instance, you change your CTA from “Sign Up Now” to “Get My Free Ebook,” and you see significantly more traffic, engagement, and registrations on the changed version, it’s safe to assume that your change had an impact on your conversion rate.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with different elements of your email marketing campaign. There are countless opportunities to fine-tune already successful campaigns and turn them into something truly remarkable.