The subject line of your email is really no different. Add enough information, context or interest to gain the click. Here are eight specific tips to make your subject lines better.

1. Tease
Please don’t confuse an effective tease with bait and switch. Whatever you imply in the tease had better be reflected fully in the body of the email. But giving a hint of what’s to come is a great way to build interest, anticipation and action.

2. Personalize
The same subject line for all recipients often fails to engage and drive the action and response you want. Personalization also doesn’t only apply to first names and company names. Speak to the recipient’s industry, an upcoming event they’re attending, or something else they care about.

3. Be specific
A tease that’s too ambiguous can still go well over the recipient’s head. Be specific enough with your copy that the reader fully understands what you mean, what you’re talking about, and what you likely have in store from them after the open.

4. Prioritize
Use the most important words or subject matter as close to the front of the subject line as possible. The farther out you go, the less likely the recipient is to read it, and the more likely it will be truncated by the email client (especially if the subject line is being read on a mobile device).

5. Use numbers
If you’re offering advice, tell the reader how many tips the email includes. Copy such as “Three pitfalls” always drives more response than “Common pitfalls”.

6. Watch your length
Try to keep the subject line below 50 characters. Bonus points for 35 or fewer.

7. The From line should be a real person
Please don’t send your emails from the company. Or a generic alias (such as sales@companyname.com). Or, worse, an email address such as “do-not-reply@companyname.com). Emails from people (even if they’re made up) are 23 percent more likely to get opened than emails from nonentities. (This isn’t really subject line related per se, but it’s important)

8. Test
Whenever possible, test variations of your subject line to get optimal open rates in subsequent sends and campaigns. Although emails offer a wide variety of variables to test, subject lines are among the fastest and easier to test, and also offer the highest potential to increase overall conversion and impact (since they’re hear the top of the email-specific funnel).

How? We often measure the most obvious costs, and either forget about or ignore the “soft” costs that add up quickly. Many marketing departments, for example, calculate acquisition costs solely based on out-of-pocket spending – media costs, sometimes software or tool licenses. But what about the salaries of the people managing those campaigns? What about the designers, copywriters and developers required to build campaign infrastructure?

And that’s just on the marketing side of the house. Many organizations combine a marketing figure with the salesperson’s commission. But in complex sales environments, a sales engineer may have invested hours and hours into a deal. Is that time included in your overall acquisition cost calculation? What about travel costs, and sales management time?

And then there’s opportunity cost. If you have reps chasing after bad and/or unqualified deals, you’re still paying for that time (a percent of their base, at minimum) and implicitly NOT using that time to go after more qualified, ready-to-transact business.

Of course, you can drive yourself nuts adding up every little detail and fraction of someone’s time to get a true cost of acquisition. But by at minimum being aware of all resources that contribute to the sales process, and generally understanding their hard and soft costs, you can at least start to better value those resources and manage them more efficiently.

Are the sales engineers focused on the right, high-conversion-potential deals? Is an investment in a marketing automation solution more cost-effective than paying a larger marketing team to continue manually sending campaigns week after week? Do you have documented, consistent processes and templates that make subsequent work faster, more efficient and more effective?

Worth thinking about.

Guest post by Michael Leeds

There is near universal agreement about the value of a personal introduction. You quickly build trust, focus more clearly on understanding your customer’s needs, and close deals faster. Whether you are a new rep with your first quarterly quota or a seasoned SVP sales, you have experiences where personal introductions made *the* difference between winning and losing deals.

With this obvious value, everyone in sales should be connecting and collaborating with co-workers to get personal insights and introductions to their business prospects. And this is great news because we are all more connected than ever with networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

But even with this unprecedented connectivity, many sales, business development, and marketing professionals are still relying on an increasingly outdated approach: buying leads, adding them to a nurturing campaign, making cold calls, and following up with more email. And we all know what happens next. The delete key. According to this recent post, people quickly delete half of all email.

While a portion of sales effort will likely remain a “numbers game” (send an email to 1,000 people, 20 may click, and 1 might even buy), we recommend that you try this single, smart adjustment to help close more deals.

Simply step back and ask yourself this one question: “if I could get a personal introduction to my prospect, would I want it?” Then take 10 to 50 of your leads and:

- Search on both LinkedIn and Facebook for connections between your co-workers and your leads
- Prioritize your leads based on the strength of those connections
- Connect with your co-workers and ask for insights and introductions

One important note: make sure you let your co-workers know that you are happy to help them connect with their prospects as well. And finally, for leads where you do not have any co-worker connections, just follow your existing process.

Based on our experience, you will quickly see quantitative and qualitative improvements. Quantitatively you will see higher close rates. Qualitatively you will build immediate credibility with prospects and, more importantly, reduce the perceived risk of an introductory call.

Remember that there is only upside for you with this experiment. This process will help you leverage the connections you and your co-workers already have, and will act as a simple reminder of the power of a personal introduction.

Please contact me to share your experiences. At my company, IntroRocket, we spend a lot of time thinking about high-quality, multi-graph networking, and I am interested in sharing results.

Michael Leeds
Mike at IntroRocket dot com

Michael Leeds is CEO of IntroRocket, a company with a web-based subscription services helping sales and marketing professionals close more deals.

Originally published on the PointClear blog

The concept of getting sales & marketing to work more closely together isn’t new. It’s been an issue, if not a focus area, for as long as sales and marketing teams have been working together (at least in theory) to drive predictable, sustainable growth for their business.

Discussions around how to make sales & marketing collaboration work have been intensifying of late, which is a good thing. And the fact that we keep talking about it – at conferences, on discussion boards, and blog posts like this – is an indication that we’re far from solving the problem (or should we say, taking advantage of the opportunity).

The fact is, there’s no secret to making the two teams work as one. And the answer is not just more meetings. Below are eight specific shortcuts to help your organization (or your clients) accelerate their path towards sales & marketing collaboration nirvana.

1. Common objectives
It starts with what you’re working towards. Traditionally, sales is responsible for sales and marketing is responsible for leads. That may still be operationally true, but marketing needs to be comfortable with sales and revenue as the lagging indicators of their success.

Yes, the sales team is required to achieve those goals. And the leading indicators of success, the short-term deliverables, will be leads and case studies and microsites and the like. But sales & marketing must first agree on a common set of well-defined outcomes. This is the grounding that becomes the basis for all other work, discussions, triage and execution.

2. Common definitions
With sales as the output, it’s important for sales & marketing to agree on definitions and standards for the critical steps and deliverables that lead to sales. For example, what qualifies as a lead? What qualifies as a short-term sales opportunity?

Your common definitions will manifest themselves in a single dashboard to measure, review and improve results. It starts with a model that predicts the sales or revenue result. How many opportunities are required to get a sale? How many leads to get an opportunity? By combining this model with common definitions of each deliverable and stage, both sales & marketing have a crystal-clear understanding of what’s required to achieve success. All other inputs, opportunities and distractions are triaged based on those goals, metrics and definitions.

3. Common compensation/objectives
This one is controversial, but is a natural next step if both sales & marketing have common objectives and definitions of success. Sales is most likely measured largely on their success in driving new business. Why shouldn’t marketing be similarly compensated?

If you’re nervous about taking this step, start small. Give marketing a goal in line with your objectives & definitions, then give them a percentage of the “lift” achieved above and beyond that.

For example, let’s say you expect to generate 3,000 leads per month with a $30,000/month budget. What if the marketing team can generate the same leads for less? Would you give them a percentage of the budget difference as a bonus? What about if they generated more leads for the same budget? Would you give them a percentage of resulting sales commissions as a bonus? Worth thinking about.

4. Executive sponsorship
If your C-suite doesn’t believe in sales and marketing working together, it will never be a priority at the functional level. If your CEO and CFO mandate certain levels of performance and outcomes based on joint goals and market approaches, you’re far more likely to get everyone in each organization to fall in line and at least figure out how to operationalize the right priorities and tactics.

5. Up-front planning
What if you treated the marketing planning process as if it were a proposal to a customer?

Marketing doesn’t work for sales, but in many companies the primary “customer” for marketing is in fact the sales organization. So if that’s the case, it seems appropriate that the marketing plan each year should at minimum be reviewed and “accepted” by sales leadership as sufficient to help them achieve their own 2012 growth objectives.

This doesn’t mean that sales has complete veto power over strategies and tactics. The “means” by which marketing achieves collective goals agreed to by sales & marketing together should continue to be, ultimately, up to the marketing team.

But before the marketing plan is finalized, it stands to reason that it should be presented to the sales team for review and comment.

6. Daily/weekly triage
Even with the best-laid plans, things will go wrong. Problems will pop up. Tests will fail, campaigns will fall flat. Assumptions will be made, loyalties questioned. And new opportunities will be identified or discovered.

For these and many reasons, it’s important to have regular, metrics-based reviews of what’s working and what’s not, as well as a forum to capture and review new ideas to determine which of them should be operationalized quickly and which should stay on the side burner (at least for now).

This process allows for an unlimited set of new ideas to be input and addressed, with a specific process to, together, determine where the focus should be moving forward.

7. Offline relationship-building
All work and no play, well, you know how that ended. You can’t force offline or out-of-office interaction, but you can encourage and facilitate it. Get the teams together for happy hour, do a March Madness bracket that mixes the teams together, or other activities that fit your culture that help sales and marketing leaders get to know each other outside of their professional focus areas. When you can connect about sports or music or family, it’s easier to get through the professional obstacles and sticking points as well.

8. Measure before and after team satisfaction
Salespeople want to make more sales. Marketing, believe it or not, wants to help salespeople make more sales. The blame-game that exists in many organization not only keeps companies from closing more business, but frustrates members of both teams. Driving effective, successful collaboration between sales and marketing will drive both sides to feel better about their contribution, the direct line it provides to revenue, and greater satisfaction in their day-to-day execution to achieve those results.

Originally published in the Puget Sound Business Journal

It was assumed just a couple years ago that in-person events, conferences and trade shows would diminish in number, attendance and importance with the onset of social media and the deterioration of the economy. But now, in fact, the opposite may be true. Business travel and event expenses are expected to increase this year, the annual CES conference in Las Vegas set an attendance record last month, and CMOs at companies nationwide are increasing their investment in events as a key sales & marketing channel.

I believe social media – the very trend that was expected to make in-person events irrelevant – is actually making them more attractive, more important and more accessible for businesses and attendees alike.

The reason is quite simple – social media channels and the content therein is dramatically increasing our awareness, interest and discovery of the amazing content, networking opportunities and other benefits that getting together in person provide, and is actually increasing people’s interest in taking the time and money to be there.

There was once a fear that making event content more readily available online would discourage potential attendees from making the trip. Now we’re seeing that the opposite is true.

Without significant staff requirements or expense, you can proactively leverage social media for your next event, conference or trade show too. Start with the following tactics before, during and after the event.

Before The Show

• Take a quick survey (informal is fine) of your members or expected audience to prioritize their existing social media tendencies (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Use social channels to share offers to register, as well as highlights and teasers about the agenda, speakers and topics
• Identify prospective attendees based on their social content and bios, and send personal invitations to join you
• Start a Facebook or LinkedIn group specifically for your event, for attendees to start networking with each other right away
• Identify particularly socially-active registrants and invite them to be part of your event’s “social team”, so that they’re spreading the word before and during the event on your behalf
• Create an editorial calendar of content to post on your blog, in the Facebook & LinkedIn groups, and via social channels that corresponds with the agenda and session topics planned

At The Show

• Create an official event hashtag, communicate it in all your pre-show and at-show marketing materials, and designate someone (or a team of people) on staff to share highlights, retweet others and keep the Twitter conversation hopping (not only for those in attendance but those who couldn’t make it and are already prospects for the next event)
• Create and claim your event on Foursquare, and allow participants to “check in” there each day with a rotating set of special offers
• Record each event (even better, stream it live) and post it on your blog (with links through your social channels) for others to share
• Create session and end-of-day summaries of ideas shared, key participants and their social details, and post these in your various content and social channels to promote readership, pass-along and retweets
• Curate content and summaries written, shared and tweeted by others

After The Show

• Package and repurpose content from the event, and send links to these summaries to all attendees
• Build a list of those who participated online, tweeted or retweeted, and/or joined your event’s Facebook page, LinkedIn page and Twitter handle (this is your immediate prospect list for next time)
• Convert your Facebook page, LinkedIn page, Twitter handle and more to immediately reflect and promote the next event
• Post social media-exclusive offers to book registration for the next event right away

Unfortunately, in our zeal to measure and manage, we often focus on the wrong metrics. If left unchecked, this not only allows reps to game your system, but can also reinforce and/or require behavior that is in fact counterproductive to finding, qualifying and closing good business.

Here are five of the most meaningless metrics still actively tracked and enforced in many current sales organizations.

1. Dials
Of course, the one thing that every sales rep can control is how often then pick up the phone and talk to a prospect. They can’t control inbound lead volume, market conditions, weather events or other external factors. But they can control dials.

Problem is, dials rarely if ever have a direct, independent correlation to pipeline-building and closed business. When aggressive dial expectations are in front of a sales rep, they too often fill their daily-dial quota with unqualified dials, too many dials to a not-ready-to-buy prospect, or (if they really want to game your system) they’ll dial the same dead phone number over and over to inflate their numbers.

There’s no question that increased activity can lead to more opportunities. But dials alone – without watching list quality, dial-to-conversation conversion, and output of dispositioned leads and/or new opportunities – is a shallow and often irrelevant number.

2. Demos or appointments scheduled
The idea of tracking appointments isn’t the issue. It’s doing it without context or qualification that represents the biggest challenge for sales organizations nationwide. A demo or appointment should imply a level of interest on the part of the prospect. Even if you’re offering something of independent value in exchange for some of their time (a market analysis or audit or similar), the rep shouldn’t even waste their time with the demo or appointment if the prospect hasn’t been pre-qualified somehow.

A good rep who wants to inflate her numbers will grab time with as many prospects as possible, even though most of those conversations are going nowhere. Her appointment metrics look great, but with low conversion she’s not creating real closeable pipeline (and wasting time that could have been spent qualifying other prospects).

3. Talk time
Sales managers often incorrectly correlate talk time with quality prospect conversations. In some cases that may be true, but it’s not universal. Long phone conversations (especially with early stage prospects) can just as often be small-talk than qualifying. Small talk can be great for rapport-building at the early stages of a sale, but it can also fill valuable selling time with chatty prospects who like to talk but have no intention of buying (or who may not be qualified as a near or long-term buyer at all).

This is also one of the easiest metrics to game. Smart reps can dial a number and leave their phone off the hook when taking a break or leaving for lunch. They might also fill their talk-time by checking in with existing or past customers to see how they’re doing (which often leads to more small talk). Good relationship-building for the company (and sometimes for a renewal or upsell), but not always the new sales rep’s job.

4. Salesforce.com log-ins
This metric is especially used in field sales environments, where reps are distributed and not in the office often. The assumption is that Salesforce.com log-ins are equivalent to how often they’re working, or updating their pipeline. Even if you want to better enforce CRM usage, this metric is completely irrelevant. Sure, if a rep hasn’t logged in for over a week, there’s probably something wrong. But having this one on a metrics scorecard belittles your reps and takes focus away from externally-focused metrics that really matter.

5. Logged activities in Salesforce.com
Let’s just say that nobody is going to get an award for recording the most touchpoints and actions with a prospect to get the sale. Measuring daily actions (calls, voicemails, emails) without context or qualification not only is way too broad of a metric, but the micro-management implication to the sales team is nearly always counterproductive.

Rather than measure overall logged activities, start with a well-defined sales process and intent for each action. Ensure that certain logged activities or milestones imply a commonly-understood level of qualification or progress with the prospect. That way, you’re looking at the right metrics, but also can better interpret what they mean as it directly relates to pipeline size and velocity.

What other sales metrics do you see that have little value or meaning on successful management or pipeline output?

Here are 22 things to consider in your business. Some more specific than others, but all with differentiating potential and customer love in mind (all year round, not just on Valentine’s Day).

1. Surprise them with free stuff
2. Answer the phone with a live person
3. Answer the phone on the first ring
4. Over-deliver
5. Teach them something they don’t already know
6. Apologize (quickly) when you do something wrong
7. Be human
8. Badges
9. Thank them often for their business
10. Smile when you talk to them, even on the phone (they can hear it)
11. Ask for their opinion about future products or ideas
12. Retweet their tweets
13. Like their Facebook updates
14. Comment on their blog posts
15. Recommend them on LinkedIn
16. Don’t send them email with “do-not-reply” in the send address
17. Obsess daily about delivering and increasing value
18. No-hassle cancellation policies (you want them back, don’t you?)
19. Treat past customers like current customers
20. Treat prospective customers like current customers
21. Easy-to-understand instructions
22. Executives read and respond to customer emails

It’s free traffic in that you don’t have to pay for the click, but it’s a lot of work to create the quantity and quality of content necessary to drive meaningful traffic growth.

That traffic bump also isn’t immediate, as Google needs recognize, appreciate and index your content first.

Paid search (often referred to as Pay Per Click or PPC) is immediate. Buy keywords today, get traffic today. But it can be crowded, incredibly expensive, and it doesn’t scale well over time.

But if you want a higher-performing SEO program, you actually want to start with PPC. Why? Because traffic isn’t the end goal. Conversion is. And because you don’t have infinite resources to create content and SEO value for every possible keyword (nor would you do them all at once anyway), the immediate data from PPC can tell you not only which keywords drive the best click performance but also the highest conversion on your destination or landing page.

Google may create a visual distinction between paid and natural links (which some consumers still don’t understand or discriminate based on), but keywords are keywords. The intent of the searcher is exactly the same.

Starting with a tight PPC test of your SEO keyword priorities might cost a little money, but in the long run you can quickly convert that investment into more clicks and higher conversions from your SEO efforts.

Originally published in Selling Power Magazine

Want better job interview questions for your next sales manager? Below are five questions hiring managers should ask more often, including some of the answers you’ll want to hear from qualified candidates.

1. Is cold calling dead?
Some interviewees may get defensive, or think this is a trick question. The answer, of course, is no. When all else fails (market conditions, marketing leads, etc.), picking up the phone is the one thing sales reps will always be able to control. But how they cold call – who they call, with what message and offer, at what frequency and cadence – is extremely important. Cold calling must be customer-centric and value-driven to succeed in today’s buyer-centric world.

2. Should reps get warm leads or build their own pipelines?
Similar question, different angle. The right answer is typically to get warm leads, but not because the reps are lazy or can’t successfully build their own business from the ground up. Lead-driven sales are typically more cost effective than having expensive sales reps cold calling. Yes, leads are expensive up-front, but the eventual cost per acquisition and overall lifetime value and margin for the business on those new customers is usually much better when reps are making more efficient use of their time with warm leads.

3. What’s the ideal relationship between sales & marketing, and how do you operationalize that?
It’s more than just inviting marketing to your meetings. The ideal relationship starts with common goals of what success looks like, common definitions of leads, qualified leads, lead stages and short-term opportunities. It’s working together on the same pipeline, and ensuring that success is measured and compensation is dispensed based on overall pipeline performance. Marketing needs to be held accountable for qualified opportunities and closed business. When that alignment takes place, the daily & weekly operational requirements more easily fall into place.

4. Should sales reps be paid commission?
Yes, there are more companies today that put their reps on a salary. But the best reps still want the variability of compensation, because they want the upside. They will happily take the risk (and the occasional bad month or quarter) to earn a C-level paycheck when they hit it out of the park.

5. Why don’t you want to make more money as an individual contributor?
Great question to ask prospective sales managers. The right answer comes down to how many commission checks they want. Sales managers will still have a portion of their compensation come as a performance bonus or commission based on their team’s performance. The best sales managers know they can make far more money as a manager in these conditions, buy not just driving higher sales themselves but improving the performance and consistently higher sales of an entire team. Sales managers still want their money, but they know the upside is actually higher as a manager with a good comp plan.

Check it out again to see if you can catch them all, or keep reading for seven specific business best practices, insights and recommendations from the most fearless animal in the animal kingdom.

“Honey badger don’t care”
If there’s a catch-phrase from the video, this is it. But don’t mistake the intent as carelessness. Honey badger knows what he wants, and doesn’t let much distract him. Bees? Not a problem. Cobra? Scary, yes, but honey badger has a job to do. He’s relentless, but goal oriented.

“He’s getting stung like a thousand times”
Growing a business isn’t easy. You’ll face constant obstacles and challenges. And, if you’re doing something that nobody has ever done before, you’re going to fail. A lot. But despite the fact that honey badger continues to get stung in his quest for honey, he eventually gets his honey. Know what you want, know that it’s going to be a hard road to get there, but carry on.

“Look, he’s going in slow motion”
You have a ton to get done, and things fly at you at breakneck speed. But sometimes you need to be deliberate, and slow things down enough to make sound, strategic decisions. Make time in your day and week to think, reflect, be strategic. Spend most your time executing, but commit time as well to going slow to ensure you’re still on the right track.

“That’s nasty!”
The end-goal may be fantastic, but getting there isn’t always pretty. There’s plenty of “sausage making” in every business. It’s inherent in finding the right market opportunity, getting the product or service itself right, scaling a business from concept to fully-functioning machine, and so forth. But that’s just part of the process.

“He’s the most fearless animal in the animal kingdom”
Honey badger has a strong brand. And I’m guessing he’s stubbornly proud of that brand. What’s yours? How would customers, investors or competitors describe you? Can you live with that? And what are you doing (or can you do now and moving forward) to better manage that?

“Nothing can stop the honey badger when he’s hungry”
No matter what stage your business is in, I hope you’re hungry. I hope you have and keep a sense of urgency. I hope everything you do, everything you prioritize, is relevant to your end-goal, measurable and results-oriented. This is also about being relentless, but with a specific goal in mind.

“Honey badger gets right back up and keeps eating cobra”
You’re going to have haters. Unhappy customers. Disgruntled employees. Impatient investors. Peers who think you’re crazy. Your market, and even business, is going to knock you down repeatedly. Don’t give up. Keep fighting. Eat cobra.