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Listen to your customer !~Listen ! Listen ! Listen !
11 Sept 2017
There is probably one part of the product management job we can all agree is the hardest – people. People are unpredictable, have strong opinions and unconscious biases, and many people in your organisation have more power than you, yet are wrong just as often. In this illuminating talk from Mind the Product San Francisco 2017 Janna Bastow, Co-Founder of Mind the Product and Co-Founder and CEO of ProdPad, shares her own stories of dealing with people, and how she handles the toughest part of the job.
First of all, let’s start by giving a definition of sales, selling, pitch, leads, strategy, techniques and tactics.
You can use a monolingual dictionary to help you understand the similarities and differences among these words but you have to elaborate the 3 definitions with your own words.
Make it clear (easy to understand & catchy), simple & short !
2- Vocabulary Acquisition: Idioms. Answer-key to correct your answers in exercise 2.
Idioms are phrases established by common use to have a meaning not immediately deducible from the words themselves. When we say that your colleague “let the cat out of the bag” for example, we do not (in most offices) literally mean that she had released a wild ginger tomcat from her purse but that she had spilled some secret or spoiled some surprise – comparative to a bygone era when cats actually were put in sacks of potatoes to surprise unsuspecting consumers.
Aside from making languages much harder to learn, idioms provide wonderful sales tools. They provide a way of saying something precise without being overly technical. They tend to be informal, social language, and their use helps to warm up social situations, since both people are both “in” on the coded meaning.
Read the following idioms, try understanding their meaning, then write it down so as to be able to explain their meaning to a person who does not know them, never has heard of them, and has a low intermediate level of English. Remember the 3 rules for effective communication: make it simple, clear & short !
1. Play It By Ear
Originally coined by musicians who would play a tune by ear – using their sense of sound rather than a fixed sheet to guide the way – this expression is all about process. It means starting with a basic plan or first step and then responding to feedback and modifying the direction as you go.
“How do you want to go forward with this, Mary?”
“I’m not sure … there are so many variables.”
“Why don’t we play it by ear? We can get moving with stage 1, arrange a review meeting and then map out the transition into stage 2.”
2. Start the Ball Rolling
This idiom is about making that first interaction in order to get the wheels of something much bigger in motion (excuse the double idiom!). According to the oldest origin story, it is a sports expression taken, of all places, from the game of croquet.
“Harry, we’ve been talking about this for a little while now. Why don’t we start the ball rolling? Are you free for a meeting next Tuesday?”
3. Put the Cat Among the Pigeons
The leading edge of any sales pitch involves unsettling the status quo. You want to draw attention to a way your prospect’s situation can be improved, which means pointing to gaps in their current processes. This idiom – useful in the context of challenger selling – originally refers to the disturbance likely to be caused by putting a cat inside a dovecote. The leading edge of any sales pitch involves unsettling the status quo.
“I know I’m putting the cat among the pigeons here, Samantha, but I really think there might be substantial room for efficiency improvements in your organization. Have you ever considered X? We can help with this…”
4. Hit the Ground Running
This idiom is all about preparing ahead of an important meeting or before the implementation of a solution. It is actually a 20th-century idiom with origins related to various ways in which a person might hit the ground running, ranging from drifters jumping off freight trains to troops dropping into enemy territory by parachute.
“So, Harry, we’d really like to spend some time asking questions and doing our research so that we can hit the ground running with a fantastic solution to meet your requirements next year. How does a preliminary meeting on Monday sound?”
5. Bend Over Backward
Let’s say you have a difficult client or a prospect who really needs to be impressed. This idiom is a great one to try. This phrase was used as early as 920 A.D. to compare the gymnastic act of back-bending to doing something difficult.
“We always make a major effort to deliver a premium experience to our clients. And Jane, I can assure you, we’ll bend over backward to get this sorted for you…”
6. Hit the Nail on the Head
This idiom is about correctly identifying a problem or a potential solution. Imagine, for example, you are trying to diagnose your customer’s requirements. In the process of asking questions and describing your service, your customer spontaneously makes a remark – perhaps on what differentiates you from the competition or what exactly your service will aim to solve.
“You the hit nail on the head there, Sam. Exactly right. Let me talk with you further about how that works…”
7. Elvis Has Left the Building
Finally, if you’re brave enough to try this idiom, it provides another way of saying, “It’s over!” It is a phrase that was often used by public announcers at the end of Elvis Presley concerts to disperse audiences who remained in hope of an encore.
“I’m sorry to hear that, George, but Elvis has left the building. If you had been more up front with us about this problem in the original meeting, we might have been able to come up with a different solution.”
There you have it! I would, of course, recommend particular phrases to use and questions to ask at particular moments in the sales process, such as, “How would you like to move forward?” (when closing) or, “What do you look for in a supplier?” (when building the initial relationship). But at a time when establishing dialogue and building rapport is an essential focus area for salespeople, perhaps idioms should also be encouraged as tools to help them build confidence and mutual understanding at every stage of the sales process.
a) Read the following 9 sales principles, try to understand the main idea that each of them transmits and prepare a short piece of writing to explain each principle to another person.
b) Then decide which one/s are the most useful for you, your context, your company or business and fundament your answer.
In this guide, we’ll help you build the foundations of a strong sales strategy so that you can generate more leads and win more deals
By establishing a strategy based on these proven sales principles, you’ll create a culture that values efficiency and empowers reps to do their best work. It will help provide your customers with value at every step of the customer journey.
You’ll also learn the sales activities and elements to include in order to create a well-oiled system.
Setting goals at each sales stage Create benchmarks based on past performance Collect qualitative insights and customer data-points Get clear with your core differentiator Adopt a consultative selling approach Target a specific market segment Implement a robust qualification system Automate your follow-up processes Speed up the process with cold calling
4- Listening Skills: improve your listening comprehension, pronunciation and fluency.
Answer-key: Now turn on the subtitles so that you can correct your notes & speech.
Watch the following video and take notes to identify the most important ideas. Then write a 2-minute speech to summarize the video contents.
Answer Key for the Reading Comprehension in exercise 3:
Setting goals at each sales stage
We don’t need to wax lyrical about setting data-driven sales goals. By using data to drive decision making, you can set reasonable and attainable goals at every stage of the sales pipeline.
Each stage requires a different approach, messaging, content and, most importantly, unique sales activities. The objections and obstacles you’ll come across will also vary, which is why setting goals for every deal stage is key.
The desired outcome for one stage of the sales process is different from the next. Let’s take a look at some of the most common pipeline sales stages:
Prospecting Qualification Appointment/meeting/discovery call Needs defined Proposal/presentation/offer Negotiation Deal won
For example, the desired outcome of a discovery call is to identify a problem, as well as to qualify whether a lead will be a good fit for your solution. At the proposal stage, however, you must position yourself as the best solution for their problem, prepare for negotiation and win the sales.
Establish goals in two categories:
Activity-based goals: These are the inputs required to take a sales opportunity to the next stage of the pipeline (e.g. email outreach, follow-up calls etc.) Results-based goals: A quantifiable number needed to reach your “true north” goal (e.g. number of appointments made, number of follow-up emails sent etc.) This is where mapping your entire sales process is invaluable. When you know which actions are required to guide a lead to the next stage of your relationship, you can work on optimizing those activities.
Another sales strategy example, as advocated by Tom Pepper, Director of Marketing at LinkedIn, is to use a bottom-up revenue forecast:
Build a bottoms up forecast to get visibility into the business, then set a stretch goal on top. A target should feel ambitious but achievable. As a guide, feeling 80% confident hitting your number is about right. This approach is centered around assessing your current situation and capabilities to see what you can reasonably achieve from there.
You’ll also get an objective view on how much effort, time or resources it will take to reach your set of key predefined goals (e.g. number of sales across a period or revenue), helping you with your sales plan efforts.
Understand the customer journey across your entire organization
Your sales teams don’t work in silos, and every company has their own customer journey. Start by collecting insight on how leads are generated, new customer onboarding processes and solution fulfillment.
A consulting firm’s sales strategy example could see them attracting leads through their demand generation efforts. Those leads are then passed on to sales reps, who work to qualify and guide those leads to an appointment. Then, once the problem has been identified, the reps work with account managers or other consultants in order to develop a proposal with a possible solution.
Whatever this process looks like for you, make sure you have a clear view of every step of the customer journey and client relationship.
Create a process map structure
No matter which tool you use (from pencil and paper to software like Lucidchart), you’ll need a method of illustrating your process using a specific structure.
Using Lucidchart for reference, you can choose from several ‘shapes’, or charts, to visualize the nature of each stage of the sales process. The shapes range from top-down family tree style charts to circular charts to process diagrams, and each one works better in different scenarios. The key is to identify what chart works best for each stage of the sales process so that you can easily optimize and adjust your sales strategy down the line.
Map your existing sales process
To improve and optimize your sales process, you must understand the activity and steps you’re already using. Start by interviewing other reps and stakeholders throughout your sales organizations.
Here are some example questions you can ask based on different roles and responsibilities:
Sales: How do you generate new leads? Once a lead enters the pipeline, how do you guide them towards the close? Sales Development: Do you have a structure for different areas of the sales development function? How are leads prioritized before handing them over from marketing to sales? Marketing: What are your top lead sources? How do you assign leads to sales teams and sales development reps (SDRs)? Asking these questions will fill out any gaps when mapping your sales process.
Uncover opportunities
With your existing sales process mapped out, it’s time to look for where your strengths lie and any opportunities you can take advantage of.
For example, you might have a strong workflow that nurtures existing leads towards the close, based on fewer leads dropping out mid-process, but your initial lead generation could use some work. Digging deeper, the biggest problem might be getting inbound leads to agree to a discovery call.
Here, your strength is the process you use to close leads once the initial appointment has been made, and your opportunity is generating more leads and increasing the conversion rate to appointment.
Optimize your process map
With your sales process mapped out, you can now work to create a future sales process to fill in the gaps and increase performance across your entire organization.
First, you need to build a map of your existing process. Here’s the possible process map of a sales strategy example:
When developing your sales strategy template maps like this can really help guide you. Go back to the opportunities you outlined above. These will act as the goals for your sales process optimization. Here are a few sales strategy example goals:
Increase the response time between inbound lead notification and initiating a first sales touch-point Optimize the appointment-making process to make it easier for a lead to schedule a call Use data enrichment, like finding and consolidating publicly available information about your new lead, to speed up the qualification process Finally, it’s time to set goals for each existing and new stage. Again, you must set activity- and outcome-based goals throughout the sales process. For example, goals for the appointment-setting stage could be:
Activities: Reach out to new leads within an hour of them entering the pipeline Outcome: X% lead-to-appointment rate
Create benchmarks based on past performance
Sales process mapping is about understanding the activities required to close a deal. But how do you measure those activities and create accurate performance benchmarks?
The first step to setting benchmarks is, of course, measuring the right metrics. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you measure will depend on the activity. Here, we’ll run through a simple, three-step process to developing sales performance benchmarks for your sales strategy.
Step 1: Collect the right metrics
With your sales process mapped out, choosing and measuring your sales metrics will be 10 times easier.
First, let’s go through some common sales metrics based on different activity categories:
Activity metrics: These include the number of emails sent, follow-ups, cold calls made. Pipeline metrics: These measure the health of your overall pipeline. Metrics include sales cycle length, total close rate and open sales opportunity by period, team and rep. Lead generation metrics: These include volume of new opportunities, lead response time, number and percentage of leads followed up with. Outreach metrics: These include email metrics (open rate, response rate), phone metrics (number of leads who agree to an appointment, call-backs) and social selling metrics (InMail response rate, LinkedIn connections accepted). Conversion metrics: Opportunities closed, and the percentage of those won or lost. Most importantly, you must always measure high-level sales KPIs. While the above metrics will give you an overview of activity performance, sales KPIs are what indicate the health of your entire sales organization. Metrics that fall under this category include:
Total revenue New business revenue and percentage of overall revenue Growth year-over-year Customer average lifetime value (LTV) Revenue segmented by product/service offered Finally, you must ensure each metric and benchmark is assigned to the different roles within your organization.
For example, an SDR will be most keenly focused on their lead generation and outreach numbers. Whereas a sales manager will need a top-level view of these numbers, as well as how they’re contributing to the core sales KPIs.
Step 2: Calculate your benchmarks
As you collect data over time, you’ll have sufficient volume to calculate accurate benchmarks. However, the way in which these are calculated will vary.
Let’s start with sales KPIs. Sales benchmarks for these are often straightforward, depending on how complex you’d like to segment them. For example, you can set long-term benchmarks across the previous year to set 12-month goals. You may also wish to set revenue benchmarks per month and quarter to keep up a more aggressive sales strategy.
Then, there are activity-based benchmarks. As performance will vary between reps, a team-wide average may not always be the best approach. Therefore, you have two options:
Calculate averages across the entire sales organization Set criteria for different levels of performance, and average out the numbers within those segments The latter is more complex, but will allow you to set personalized goals based on the performance of your reps.
For example, if a top-performer is surpassing team-wide benchmarks every month or quarter, they’re not going to feel challenged. This then presents a problem for talent retention.
Segmenting benchmarks by performance can help keep your best reps engaged while contributing to the continued growth of your organization. It will also help other reps focus on what they need to do in order to do better.
By segmenting teams you can also add a healthy level of competition. Use a tool like Pointagram to visualize and reward performance, in a way that boosts morale.
Step 3: Implement benchmarks into your sales training
With your benchmarks defined, it’s time to communicate these with your salespeople, SDRs and anyone else involved in the day-to-day operation of your sales organization.
There are two ways you can use benchmarks to drive team performance:
Communicate sales KPI benchmarks (revenue etc.) in team meetings and training sessions Set activity-based benchmarks on a one-to-one basis Communicating revenue benchmarks will boost team morale and provide a tangible number everyone can aim for. It’s also a team effort, with everyone working towards hitting your revenue goal.
For activity-based benchmarks, save these for your one-to-one interactions. Show reps what someone within their percentile should be aiming for, and provide the data behind why those benchmarks are made. Most importantly, keep their morale high and show them why they have the ability and talent to achieve those numbers.
Finally, use these benchmarks to set more ambitious goals. Couple these benchmarks with the opportunities you uncovered when mapping your sales process earlier.
Ask questions like “how can you double the rate of growth by focusing on this opportunity?” This is how sales can stimulate explosive growth for their organizations.
Collect qualitative insights and customer data-points
While this sales tactic is often seen as an activity reserved for marketing, collecting and sharing your own data about leads and customers will not only help you close more deals, but help the entire organization expand and improve.
Collecting customer insights has several benefits:
You can craft more compelling outreach and follow-up emails that gets to the crux of their pain-points You’ll know exactly when to hone-in on a certain aspect of your solution or features with each customer demographic and buyer type You’ll be able to address sales objections not just by logic, but based on the prospect’s goals and motivations With this in mind, let’s look at some practical ways to collect customer insights to fuel your sales strategy.
Record frequent pain-points
Listening is one of the best soft skills a salesperson can have. You talk to your target audience on a daily basis.
Every single conversation you have is an opportunity to learn more about their common pain-points, challenges, desires and the things that keep them up at night.
Start using this skill, and make a note of the common (and even one-off) pain-points and challenges that your prospects raise during sales calls.
As a sales leader, it’s also up to you to encourage this behavior. Create a process that allows your reps to collect these insights. It could be something like:
Note down the timestamp during the call when the pain-point was mentioned Use a call recording system within your CRM to go back to that point Note down, word-for-word, how the pain-point was framed and the language used Store this insight in a global spreadsheet Over time, as you collect data around this insight, you can help your reps identify which are mentioned most often. Standardize how they’re positioned by looking at the common language used, and order them by importance.
Scour publications for research
Some publications have already done the hard work for you. Say, for example, you sell software (like Pipedrive) and many of your customers work in sales development. By searching for “top sales development challenges” in Google, you will find some of the challenges SDRs will face, such as high-performance expectations.
When selling to SDR teams, mention this pain point in your pitch and then explain how your solution can help them tackle this common challenge.
Use data to make an argument
Anecdotes and stories will only get you so far. Sometimes, you’ll need cold hard data to make an argument (especially when selling to senior decision makers).
There are two main ways you can use statistics to make an argument:
Collect your own proprietary data from owned assets (user engagement, results etc.) Collect third-party data from other sources Do both if you can. Third-party data and statistics can help make an objective, impartial case for your sales pitch.
Again, you can usually find a collection of third-party stats through a simple Google search.
Collect the relevant statistics in a single place, such as a spreadsheet, and use them during your pitch when addressing objections.
Get clear with your core differentiator
This is another activity that’s often up to marketing to figure out. But just like customer pain points, you’re in a unique position to uncover gaps left open by your competitors.
There are two stages in your sales conversations where you can collect insights on competitors and uncover gaps in the market:
The initial conversation, asking the prospect which supplier they currently use During objection handling, where inevitably they’ll measure you against other vendors Let’s look in-depth at both approaches:
Approach 1: The initial conversation
During the qualification phase, you’ll be asking questions that ensure a prospect is a good fit for your solution. This includes simple things like budget, as well as more qualitative insights on how they and their organization currently does things. You’ll learn more about this in the section: ‘implement a robust qualification system’.
But another, often forgotten question is around the solution, product or service they’re currently using. This is a prime opportunity for uncovering what attracted a prospect to you, and why they’re dissatisfied with their current vendor.
To uncover gaps your competitors are leaving open, when the opportunity arises, ask questions like:
Why did you originally decide to work with [COMPETITOR]? Which of their features did you find most useful? Why are you looking for a new solution? Dig deeper into their responses by asking follow-up questions. This is where you find their true motivations and frustrations.
Approach 2: Objection handling
You’re nearly at the close, and you’re confident you’ll win the deal… only to have the dreaded “Competitor X does this, and you don’t” objection.
While this can be disheartening for many salespeople, it’s a tremendous opportunity to learn and figure out the gaps in your own positioning.
When you get an objection like this, follow-up with “why is this important to you?” or “how do you feel this will solve [their problems] better than [your feature]?”
Not only will you better position yourself against the competition, but their response will provide a platform to address and overcome these objections.
For more guidance on tackling objections, check out our sales objections tool.
Adopt a consultative selling approach
What’s the best way to build long-lasting business relationships based on trust? Consultative selling.
As per our definitive guide on the subject, consultative selling is “a philosophy rooted in building a relationship between you and your prospects. A salesperson who practices consultative selling develops a holistic and nuanced understanding of the buyer’s needs, and then they try to fulfill those needs with a customized solution.”
As poor customer relationships are one of the biggest causes of churn, it’s wise to do everything you can to connect with leads at every stage of the customer journey.
Let’s look at what it means to adopt a consultative selling philosophy as part of your sales strategy.
Build your authority
To successfully create a consultative selling approach, your prospects need confidence in your expertise on the problem they’re looking to solve.
To build authority and position yourself as an expert, follow these tips:
Collect evidence: You need to back up your claims. This can be in the form of case studies, or third-party stats and data (as we covered earlier). Show them how you’ve solved their problem in the past. Create content: Create content on LinkedIn, and even your company blog, that addresses the common pain-points of your customers. It’s a great way to attract new leads while nurturing existing opportunities. Address criticism head-on: This will happen, especially if you create content with polarizing views. Instead of hiding from it, address it head on—in comments, on social media and wherever your content can be found. Lead the conversation
Part of consultative selling is understanding that no two conversations are the same. A key skill to cultivate is leading your conversations, uncovering a prospect’s pain-points and their true motivations.
This means asking the right questions at the right time, while making sure your prospects feel understood. Make a list of these questions before the initial call.
Do some research on their organization and role to get a feel for what their pain-points might be in order to elicit the information you need to craft a relevant solution.
For example, you might discover that they’re already using a competing solution. Therefore, you could ask them why they’re looking for a new solution now, and perhaps why they decided to use the competitor in the first place (as discussed earlier).
Consultative selling requires a full picture of your prospect’s current situation. Ask the right questions, and you’ll get the right insights to craft the best solution.
Create a bespoke solution
With the right information, you can begin to craft a solution specific to their needs. This can be as simple as tying software features to specific challenges, or as complex as building a bespoke done-for-you service to help them achieve a big project or goal.
When crafting a bespoke solution for your prospect, follow this three-step process:
Ensure you truly understand their needs: Listen for common themes and challenges throughout your initial conversation. If they say a particular feature, goal or objective is important to them, ensure that it’s part of your solution. Get into the pain: According to CEB Marketing Leadership Council, “personal value has twice as much impact as business value” for B2B buyers. No matter the industry, people buy based on emotion. If you can show how your solution will personally benefit your prospect, you’ll double the value your solution delivers. Demonstrate the solution in action: Allow prospects to experience your solution during the sales process. This doesn’t mean just showing them the features or an in-depth proposal, but rather the results your solution can bring. Couple this approach with traditional elements, such as case studies, to bring the sale home. Demonstrate how you can solve their specific problems by showing them the results you’ve got in the past.
Show them how you can get similar results while maintaining relevance to their unique situation.
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Target a specific market segment
For salespeople, a strong position in the market can often make the job ten times easier. But not every salesperson works for a recognized market-leading business, and for those who do, taking this stance can be difficult—especially when you don’t truly understand your customer.
Which is why, especially in today’s competitive climate, targeting a specific segment of the market can help you get the attention of those who operate in it.
For example, you may offer a solution that helps SaaS companies generate more leads for their business. But each segment of the SaaS market has their own set of challenges and goals unique to them.
So, you could go one level deeper and focus on MarTech. With a little research, you’ll find that selling to marketing decision makers is harder than most other roles. Therefore, you can position your product or service as the best solution to this problem.
To do this, you’ll need to collaborate with marketing. However, understanding your position in the market and how that ties into your sales strategy is key. Let’s go through a proven process to help you do this.
Identify market segments and their needs
The first step is to identify the right market segment to target. This can be done through a number of data points and qualities, but the place to start is with the market itself.
Ask yourself, which market niches are saturated? Which have you already generated ample amounts of traction with in the past? Which market has particular pain points that your solution or product can help solve. Look for markets that you have plenty of experience and in-roads with.
Once you’ve found a niche, it’s time to get specific about shared commonalities among potential customers in the niche. This might include company size, the way they market to their audience or the average amount raised during Series A fundraising.
Once you know the market you’re targeting, it’s important to truly understand the individuals you’re serving within those markets. There are a number of ways you can collect qualitative and data-driven insights on these people:
Collect customer data: Look at the data you already have on customers and users. What products or services do they invest the most into? Which features of your software do they use most often? Survey them: Send out an email survey to this specific segment and ask broad questions around their organization and day-to-day job role. Interviews: To get more qualitative insights, get on the phone and talk to them. This allows you to dig deep into their responses and truly understand their motivations. Finally, collect information on the average buying cycle, as well as their lifecycle as a customer. For example, does the average deal take three months to close and include several stakeholders? This is all information worth collecting.
Evaluate commercial viability
Now it’s time to use this insight to measure whether or not this segment is worth pursuing. After all, if it’s harder to sell than other segments of the market, it might be worth pointing your focus elsewhere.
Here are some qualities to look for:
Market size: First of all, is your target market broad enough to segment in the first place? Is the segment you’ve uncovered large enough to achieve your core business goals? Differences: Does each segment of the market have large enough differences to justify segmenting? For example, the goals of a SaaS product that targets marketers must be clearly unique in comparison to solutions targeting other professionals. Accessibility: Can you actually reach this audience? Do you have the ability to get your message in front of them? Profitability: Will you generate an ROI from your growth initiatives? Unique benefits: Your chosen segment should benefit from your solution in different ways.
Establish your position With these questions answered, you can now move on to establish your position in the market. Positioning maps is an easy way to do this. For example, here’s what a positioning map looks like:
The variables used here are “price” and “quality.” It maps where each brand sits along these two variables, giving a clearer view of their position in the market.
To create your own map, start with the two variables that make the most sense for your brand and solution. Common positioning variables include:
Quality Price Market share Complexity Market perception Practicality Once you’ve chosen your variables, use the map to place your competitors and evaluate their own market positioning.
This doesn’t have to be an accurate representation. We’re using it to simply identify gaps in the market.
Use this to drive your overall position in the market, using the core differentiators you identified earlier to lead the way. Couple your features and service offerings with common pain-points to show you’re the best solution for your chosen segment.
Implement a robust qualification system
For sales organizations dealing with a large volume of leads, unqualified opportunities are a huge time-suck. An effective sales strategy includes a reliable qualification system that targets leads in a meaningful way.
A strong qualification process should be positioned at the beginning of your sales process.
Here, we’ll show you how to create a process to focus on the strongest opportunities that enter your pipeline.
Defining what makes a qualified lead
Much like the market segments above, not all qualified leads are the same. It’s up to you to figure out the qualities of a qualified lead, and what the best sales opportunities look like.
There are three stages of qualification that you should consider when defining what makes a strong lead:
Organization: What’s their company size? Do they sell into your industry? Check out their website and company LinkedIn to see if they fit your ideal organization profile. Stakeholder: Do they have the budget? Who is involved in the buying process? These are questions you must ask before and during any initial sales conversations. Opportunity: Do they even have a challenge or problem that you can solve? This is probably one of the most important things to establish as you begin the sales cycle. Knowing when to disqualify
Letting a sales opportunity go is a difficult thing for salespeople to do. We’re so hungry for leads that it’s a shame to end a conversation when the opportunity isn’t a good fit.
But disqualification is a key part of an efficient sales strategy. Wasting time on poor leads distracts you from other tasks that will bear better fruit.
Disqualifying is about knowing when an opportunity doesn’t fit the criteria you set above. For example, if you see that a company has only been in business for a year, and you know that your ideal clients are well-established with 100+ employees, you can end the process without setting an initial appointment.
But it’s also important not to get misled by signs of a golden goose. For example, you might speak to a stakeholder that has ample amounts of budget. However, upon digging into their needs, if you find they don’t have a problem you can solve, they’re still not going to be a good fit.
Ask qualifying questions
Asking the right questions is a foundational piece of the qualification process. These questions will elicit the information you need to know to decide if an opportunity is worth pursuing.
Some qualifying questions include:
What industry are they in? How long have they been in business and size is the business? How did they hear about you? What are the top challenges they and their team face? What results are they looking to achieve? How would these results benefit them? What will happen if they don’t achieve these results? What’s their buying process look like? Are they the key decision maker? Do they have the resources and time to implement a solution short-term? Questions like these will help you evaluate whether or not they fit your ideal customer profile. They’ll help you figure out if they have a need, budget and the timeframe they’re looking to implement a solution.
Using the BANT framework
While every customer and client is different, the opportunities that lead to won deals will share various qualities. You can use the BANT framework to measure an opportunity against these qualities.
BANT stands for:
Budget: Do they have the resources allowing them to buy? Authority: Do they have the ability to make the final decision? Need: Can you solve their problem(s)? Timeline: When are they planning to invest in a solution? Using the questions laid out earlier, your reps can qualify a prospect based on these four criteria. For example, by asking them what results they’re aiming to achieve and how it would benefit them, you can quickly ascertain whether or not they have a need.
Finally, look out for signals that might make for a poor lead. If they provide short answers to your questions, then this might be a sign that they’re not truly invested in looking for a solution, and are simply “window shopping.”
Automate your follow-up processes
A great sales strategy incorporates effective solutions that save valuable time. One of the easiest ways to reclaim time is to streamline your processes with automation tools.
Without a doubt, following up on leads and opportunities can take up the bulk of a salesperson’s day. From making calls to sending emails (“touching base”), there’s a lot to be done when nurturing a potential customer.
But this doesn’t always have to be the case. By using the right technology and processes, you can automate many steps of the follow-up process.
A study conducted by Drift found that, out of 433 companies, only 7% responded to new leads within the first five minutes. This presents a huge opportunity for organizations looking to improve their follow-up processes.
Let’s look at how to empower your reps to close more sales while saving time.
Start with your CRM
Your CRM is the heart of your sales strategy, and acts as the foundational platform to your follow-up system. Without a good CRM that manages sales opportunities and conversations at scale, your reps will constantly be swimming in their inboxes trying to stay above water.
A good CRM platform should free you from common administrative tasks, not simply get you to perform them in different ways. If you’re evaluating different CRM vendors, make sure you find one that ticks these boxes:
Business function: Does it help you achieve common tasks and achieve goals specific to your organization? Cost: Does it provide those features within budget? Data quality: Does it enrich your data and help you personalize your follow-up messaging? Brand: Are they familiar? Do they have clout in the industry and a proven track record? Scale: Will they handle your sales plans for growth and expansion? Your chosen CRM platform should have the features to automatically follow-up with prospects. For example, in Pipedrive, you can create workflows that automate various follow-up tasks for you:
At the very least, your CRM should integrate with tools that can automate these tasks for you. Find out what tools integrate with Pipedrive in our Marketplace.
Know when to automate
With the right technology in place, it’s time to automate! But not so fast. First, you must identify the tasks that don’t need you to execute them.
In fact, this practice should be used beyond the follow-up process. Any task that doesn’t need you should be automated, which will allow you and your reps to focus on the tasks that have a bigger impact.
Here’s a simple process to figure out what can be automated:
Can it be eliminated? If it’s not truly bringing value to the sales organization (or your prospects), it might be best to remove it from your sales strategy altogether. Can it be automated? Not all tasks can be taken off your plate through technology. For example, if it’s a type of email that requires manual personalization it, it’s going to be hard to automate using technology. If it can’t be automated, can it be delegated? Can you give this task to someone else to take care of? With a list of common follow-up tasks, you can begin working on automating them. In order to do this effectively, you must know what the trigger and action are for each task.
For example, when following up on a proposal, the trigger and action might look like this:
Trigger: Proposal email sent five days ago Action: Send email template Get the timing right
Sometimes, your emails might get lost during a time when the prospect has other priorities, or something has come up in their personal lives. Not getting a response doesn’t always mean rejection.
Therefore, your follow-up sequence should have multiple touch-points. Take all eventualities into consideration. Perhaps they are indeed busy, or they don’t trust you enough just yet and need more convincing.
Take these factors into account when crafting your follow-up emails. For example, a simple four-step sequence might look like this:
Follow-up 1: A simple message, asking if they had any thoughts on your proposal Follow-up 2: Similar to the above, offering to answer any questions Follow-up 3: Provide insight or results you helped an existing customer gain Follow-up 4: Share a piece of content that provides insight on a specific pain-point Spread this sequence over time, and you’re likely to dramatically increase your response rate.
Of course, you shouldn’t go too far. After five or so follow-up emails, it’s more likely that the lack of response means “no.”
If this happens, limit your follow-up emails to once a month. Send something that the prospect will find of value. These are all activities that can be executed using automation.
Set reminders and use personalization
Your CRM should allow you to set reminders for tasks on specific dates. Sometimes, when personalization is key, you’ll need to use these reminders to set the right emails at the right time.
For example, in Pipedrive, you can schedule various activities on specific days:
You’ll then be reminded to execute the relevant task on the date and time you scheduled it.
As you can see, automation is two-fold: it’s using technology to handle the execution of simple tasks, while also empowering you to simplify the activities that need your input. Know when to use which approach, and you’ll have a bulletproof follow-up process that runs on autopilot.
Speed up the process with cold calling
Email is the centrepiece of modern communication. But let’s not forget about the trusty telephone. Indeed, there’s no better way to build rapport and dig deep on prospect motivations than talking to them directly.
In every sales strategy template calling scripts can help reps engage leads. Let’s look at some effective ways to apply cold calling to your sales strategy, and how your sales reps can connect with prospects on a deeper level.
Research your prospect
Get an understanding of which segment your prospect falls into by conducting some research. This means getting your hands on the insights that will make an impact during your first conversation.
LinkedIn is a gold mine for this insight. Visit their profile and check out what their career journey has been like. For example, if they’ve just started in a new role, it’s likely they’re looking for new approaches and vendors to make a positive impression.
Here are a few ways you can research your prospects:
LinkedIn: What groups are they involved in? Who do they follow? Do they create their own content? Twitter: What content are they sharing? Who are they connecting with? Google: What comes up when you search their name? Do they have a personal blog? Do they create content for their company? Having this insight will start your cold calls off on a strong note. It’s the difference between this:
“Hi Mark, my name is James and I”m calling from Pipedrive. We help sales managers like you optimize their sales processes by…”
And this:
“Hi Mark, I recently checked out your article on cold calling (which I loved by the way) and thought you might find this of interest. My name is James and…”
The latter has clearly been given more thought. Make your prospects feel like you already understand them before jumping into your pitch to make a strong first impression.
Build an outline While we have plenty of cold calling scripts for you to take inspiration from, it’s good to use a proven structure to build your own. Here’s one we advocate here at Pipedrive:
Introduction: State who you are and why you’re calling. Keep it short and sweet. Opener: Use personalization (like in the example above) to connect with them early on. Mention something you share in common if applicable. Reason: Why are you calling? Why should they pay attention, and how can you help them? Offer: What’s your value proposition? Who do you work with and how have you helped them get results? Questions: Gauge their interest and use qualification questions to see if they’re a good fit. Close: Provide a call-to-action and lead the conversation towards the next step of the sales process. By using proven outlines, you can fill in the gaps with your own messaging and use anecdotal evidence in the right way, at the right time.
Collect early stage objections
The objections you get during a cold call will differ to those later in the sales cycle. Therefore, make sure you’re well prepared.
For example, “I need to think about it” is a common pushback received during cold calls. Sujan Patel, partner at Ramp Ventures, has a great response to this objection:
“What’s holding you back from making the decision? During this time I usually send the customer 1-2 case studies or include a few testimonials from customers that are in the same industry as my prospect.”
Start collecting a library of responses to these common objections. Collect them in a knowledgebase to make objection handling easy as they arise.
It’s all about timing
Knowing when to call is as important as what you say when you’re connected. According to InsightSquared, the best time to call is between 10 AM and 4 PM.
However, each industry is different. Experiment with different times and see what your customer personas respond best to. For example, you might find it’s common in your industry for prospects to be active at 8 AM to get a head start on their workday. See what happens when you dial around this time.
As well as time of day, there may be certain “trigger events” that make cold calling appropriate. These trigger events might include a round of funding, new members added to their team or an acquisition.
Finally, learn to truly listen. Ask open-ended questions and dig deep into their responses. Listen to what they have to say and tie their problems and motivations to the specific details of your product or service.
Conclusion To build an effective sales strategy, you must first truly understand your ideal customer.
What are their common challenges? What are they trying to achieve in their career and how can you help them do it?
It’s a common theme we’ve addressed across the entire guide. When you collect insight and data on your customers, you can create a strategy that aligns their needs with your goals. Once you’ve nailed this, your activity will make a bigger impact.
In case its name didn’t give it away, 10 Minute Mail sets you up with a self-destructing email address that expires in — you guessed it — 10 minutes. Your temporary inbox works just like regular email, allowing you to forward and respond to messages, and you can add extra time if 10 minutes isn’t quite long enough. Once you’re done, light a match and walk away.
Any.do is already one of the best task managers for smartphones, and the website is especially useful when you need a big-picture view of your plans. With its grid-based layout, you can easily see everything in Any.do’s four distinct categories (“Today,” “Tomorrow,” “Upcoming” and “Someday”) and drag and drop between them. It’s better than trying to manage your life from a claustrophobic smartphone screen.
For those without serious Photoshop skills, Background Burner does a surprisingly good job of removing background images from photos. You just pick the image you want, and the site automatically figures out what’s in the foreground, presenting a few different levels of background removal to choose from. It’s great for joining the latest Photoshop battle even if you can’t wield a lasso tool.
This endlessly scrolling art site’s been around for at least five years, but it’s still going strong as a way to let your mind melt for a while. But Does It Float is mindful enough to get out of the way, with short descriptions (“In one way or another, we’re all anchored to the book”) preceding works that often stretch beyond the length of the screen. Whether you like the art or not, you’ve got to appreciate the gallery.
You’re already five slides into this list with 45 more to go. Time for a break! Calm.com lets you toggle through peaceful backgrounds and ambient music, with the ability to set a timer for up to 20 minutes. Chill out on your own, or choose a “guided calm” peppered with soothing spoken instructions.
Amazon’s a one-stop shop for many people, but its prices tend to fluctuate on a fairly regular basis. CamelCamelCamel can set you up with email- and Twitter-based price alerts that let you know when a particular item goes on sale. You can also see a particular item’s 18-month price history to decide whether you should buy it now or wait until it gets even cheaper.
In a perfect world, the answer to this question would always be “yes.” But we live in a world of timed release windows, exclusive streaming deals and overly cautious movie studios, so finding what you want to watch can be complicated. Can I Stream.It? makes sense of this confusion with a single search engine that works across Netflix, Amazon, iTunes and other providers, telling you whether you’ll need to subscribe, rent, buy or wait.
No, the irony of using a listicle to celebrate a site that satirizes clickbait isn’t lost on us. But ClickHole is more than just a one-off joke at the expense of obnoxious headlines. It’s an ongoing subversion of every site’s attempt to go viral, frequently veering into non-sequiturs and dark humor to make its point. That’s enough to keep us interested, even if major media organizations are in the crosshairs.
Keep an eagle-eyed view on your neighborhood with CrimeReports. The site blends Google Maps with local police data, pinpointing where crimes have recently occurred and which types of crimes they were. Each crime features a send-to-a-friend link so you can let your neighbors know what’s going on, and you can create email alerts to stay informed on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Connect FileThis to the various services you use each month — banking, credit cards, utilities and the like — and it’ll automatically pull in your statements and paperwork from each one, storing it all for you online, on your computer or in one of several popular cloud-based storage services. There’s a free plan that connects to six services, with 12- and 30-connection plans running between $2 and $5 per month.
Billing itself as a “health and fitness social network,” Fitocracy turns working out into a game, letting you unlock achievements, take on “quests,” duel other Fitocracy members and level up along the way. You can join a team of other Fitocracy users based on which goals you’re trying to accomplish, facilitating discussion and encouragement between your team and your online coach.
The Flappy Bird craze hit its peak around February of this year, but you’ll still find a fair amount of people playing FlapMMO — arguably the game’s cleverest spin-off. It’s just like the original game, requiring you to tap a button to flap between vertical pipes, except there are dozens of other people controlling their own birds, trying to survive for longer. It’s funny to see all these birds engaged in this hopeless struggle — and kind of sad when you get good enough to leave them behind.
Streaming music service Spotify proudly boasts more than 20 million songs in its catalog, but truth is that no one’s listened to nearly a quarter of those tracks. Forgotify finds those unheard songs and gives them an ear. Even if you don’t end up with great stuff, just think how happy Mustafa Chaushev will be that some hipster in the United States finally listened to his masterwork.
Once known as RapGenius, the site is in the midst of reinventing itself as a place where news, historical documents and cultural artifacts can all be annotated by the crowds. (You might even see some creators swing by to mark up their own work.) But it’s still at its best as a place to dissect the meaning of your favorite song, down to every line.
When it comes to selling your gadgets and video games, Glyde looks to split the difference between auction sites and trade-in sites. The result is that you’ll generally make more money than you would from a trade-in site, with less of a hassle than going through the listing process at auction sites. Once someone commits to buying your stuff, Glyde will ship you a pre-labeled box to fill up and send out.
While Microsoft PowerPoint is still the standard for presentations, using its cluttered interface kind of feels like being trapped in a cubicle. Haiku Deck, by comparison, is actually kind of fun, and doesn’t demand much know-how in order to start creating sharp-looking slideshows. Keep in mind the next time you need to make a presentation outside your nine-to-five.
Have I Been Pwned? collects the email addresses and usernames exposed by various high-profile hacks to let you know if your personal data has been compromised. Simply enter an email address or username you commonly use and the site will cross-check it against recent data breaches, telling you which companies leaked your data and which types of data have been leaked.
Torture is staying in a hotel with slow wireless access. Hotel WiFi Test relies on travelers to report speed tests back to the service, compiling the data to return average speeds based on each hotel. The site features speeds for hotels in many major cities, and if a hotel hasn’t undergone speed tests, Hotel WiFi Test provides an average expected speed instead.
Humble Bundle got its start a few years ago as pay-what-you-want clearinghouse for indie games. It’s greatly expanded its scope over the last year, with weekly deals, flash sales, book deals and the occasional charity-driven sale from a major publisher. It’s basically a good place to go if you need some geeky entertainment on the cheap.
Imgur should be easier to describe than it is. People go there to upload images and animated GIFs, which are then ranked by popularity. Many of the images are funny. Some give you “the feels,” as Imgurians like to say. There are lots of cats, dogs and other cute animals. At the end of the day, it’s a pure, simple form of storytelling: Without too much reading, you can get a highly entertaining grasp of what’s going on in the world.
If you’re like most people, you’re probably signed up for a zillion online services — whether you use them or not. Just Delete Me features cancellation information for oodles of popular sites and services, letting you know which sites are easy, medium, hard or impossible to quit and how to go about removing yourself from each one.
On its face, Medium is just another blogging platform. But its minimalist layout and dead-simple writing tools have quickly turned it into the de facto standard for smart writers who want to say something and don’t have a home for it. And for those who are publishing elsewhere, Medium’s no-clutter interface is still a great place to draft your next story.
Want to know where to find the nearest iPad? Milo scours local stores for a plethora of products, mapping out which stores have what you’re looking for in stock and how much it’ll set you back. You can filter your searches by minimum and maximum price, along with minimum star-ratings for the stores in your neck of the woods.
Who needs elaborate channel guides and on-demand video when you have big hair and cheesy commercials? My 80’s TV puts you in front of an old-fashioned tube television — complete with knobs for changing channels — and provides a steady stream of ’80s programming. You can even pick the exact year and filter out the kind of shows you want to see.
Imagine creating a mammoth online superstore stocked with products from Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco, Walgreens, Diapers.com, SOAP and Drugstore.com. That’s the promise of mySupermarket. Cruise through the site and add the items you need to your cart — you’ll see the lowest-priced items available — and when you’re ready to check out, you pay mySupermarket directly, which then facilitates delivery from the aforementioned stores.
We have no idea what Nickelodeon is like now, but Nick Reboot is an exact copy of how the children’s TV channel existed in the late ’80s and early ’90s, right down to the commercials and the station ID messages. The only thing that’s changed is the chat bar on the right side, which lets ’80s babies enjoy the nostalgia trip together. (Nick isn’t involved, but the creator claims it’s legal under fair use.)
Noisli helps you tackle busywork by letting you layer background noises on top of one another. Choose from rain, thunder, wind, lapping waves and several other options while the site’s background color slowly fades from one hue to the next. There’s even a distraction-free text editor that lets you peck out your thoughts without a bunch of buttons and menus getting in the way.
If you can’t seem to sit still while you’re on vacation, Peek serves up a nearly endless list of activities for more than 20 cities around the world. Activities are sorted into groups like “What to do when it rains” or “Under $50,” and there’s a “Perfect Day” section that features hand-picked activities by high-profile experts from each locale.
Persona scours your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts for content you might not want other people — prospective employers, parents, law enforcement — seeing. It’ll reach all the way back to your earliest posts, digging up profanity, drug and alcohol references, adult content and more that you might want to delete. It’ll also monitor your accounts in real time, alerting you to new questionable content as it shows up.
There’s just too much funny viral content to keep track of every day. It’s like a job! Over at Pleated Jeans, Jeff Wysaski rounds up the best of the best, presenting it all with very little commentary. Don’t miss the daily “Funny Pic Dump,” a hodge-podge of amusing images that have popped up across various sites.
Just like Pocket’s phone and tablet apps, the website lets you save online articles and read them later in a clutter-free format. The only thing that’s missing is offline support, but you can get that as well by installing the Pocket web app in Google Chrome.
Though it doesn’t have all the trimmings of Microsoft Word, Quip specializes in helping you get words to paper with minimal effort. It provides just enough editing tools to make your documents look sharp, and an easy way to add comments if you’re looking to collaborate. Your documents also sync automatically to Quip’s phone and tablet apps, and you can export them as PDF or Word files when you’re ready to share your work.
Quirky gleans ideas from designers around the world and turns them into actual products for the home. The result is something like a Sharper Image catalog for the Internet age, with products like a curved surge protector that keeps large AC adapters from blocking their neighboring outlets, and a wine stopper with a stand for laying bottles flat in the fridge. You probably won’t find anything you need, but you might discover something you want.
It’s early days for this site, which lets you search for classic movie quotes along with the relevant video clip. But we’re hoping it quickly expands beyond its current catalog of 143 movies — and that Hollywood doesn’t get antsy and try to shut it down.
If you haven’t tried Rdio before, you have no excuse not to check it out now that it’s completely free on laptops and desktops. Like Spotify, it’s an on-demand service with millions of songs, but its design is top-notch and it’s much better in the browser, as it doesn’t constantly try to force you into a desktop app. Once you get going, be sure to turn on the “You FM” station, which plays a mix based on your past listening behavior.
Feed all of your financial accounts into ReadyForZero and the site will spit back out a customized plan that’ll let you decide which debts to pay down first and see how long it’ll take you to dig out of that soul-crushing hole you’ve gotten yourself into. You can get notifications when bills are due; premium access lets you pay bills directly from the site and features credit-score monitoring as well.
Before you buy anything from an online retailer, RetailMeNot should be your first stop. The site rounds up coupon codes from more than 50,000 stores, so even if you’re shopping at an obscure site, it’s always a good idea to double-check to see if RetailMeNot can keep a few extra bucks in your pocket.
While there’s no shortage of ways to plan a long trip by car, Roadtrippers makes it easy. You plug in your route, and the site will point out what you should do and see along the way. Roadtrippers caters to lots of interests, from sightseeing to eating, and includes curated descriptions of your path’s hidden gems. When you’re done planning, you can load the app on your phone for quick access from the road.
In the ebook world, there’s a small battle brewing to see who can be the Netflix of ebooks. We have three major contenders so far: Scribd, Oyster and Amazon, which promise 400,000+, 500,000+ and 600,000+ titles, respectively. They’re all fine options, but Scribd gets the nod for its $9-per-month subscription fee; Oyster and Amazon each charge a buck more.
For basic scheduling and reminders, Sunrise isn’t much different from other online calendars. But what makes it stand out is its ability to plug into other web-based services. Use TripIt? Sunrise gives you an easy to way schedule around your next flight. Using Google to sync your calendars? Now you can have the Facebook birthday and event reminders that Google Calendar doesn’t include on its own. If you already use Sunrise on your phone, bookmarking the website is a no-brainer.
Your cupboards and fridge are full of various items, yet you have no idea how to combine them into something that tastes halfway decent. Luckily, Supercook can do the hard work for you. Tell it what you have on hand, and it’ll show you a bunch of recipes culled from popular cooking sites such as Food.com and Epicurious.
Time is money. If you have one but not the other, TaskRabbit could be your answer. For the monied among you, the site can set you up with people to help you get organized, clean your house or courier packages around the city. For those of you with time who need money, you can sign up to become one of the TaskRabbits, picking up odd jobs for extra cash.
Nothing fancy here; just plug in the year you want to get nostalgic about, and the Machine spits back a grid of music videos — songs plucked from the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles list for that year — that you’ll probably realize time forgot for a reason.
If it’s wonderfully weird, over-the-top and available for purchase, it’s probably on This Is Why I’m Broke. At last check, there’s a hamburger bed, an iPhone-controlled paper airplane, pencils engraved with Anchorman quotes and a glider that pulls you along underwater behind a boat like a manta ray. Prices range from cheap to not-in-your-lifetime.
Treat drags greeting cards into the 21 century, allowing you to personalize messages across a broad range of how-do-you-dos. You can add your own writing and photos, and the service will mail the card directly to your recipient. You can even schedule cards to be mailed on specific days. Might as well take care of every anniversary and birthday for the next five years at once, huh?
As much as everyone loves being pressure-sold for hours on end at car dealerships, TrueCar cuts through the nonsense by showing you the average price other people in your area paid for the vehicle you’re thinking of buying. Dealerships that partner with TrueCar — there are close to 8,000 — can then lop a few extra bucks off and let you pick up the car without a bunch of unnecessary haggling.
Whether it’s worth a billion dollars to Google or not, you’ve got to appreciate Twitch’s ascent over the last couple of years, and its impact on gaming culture. To call it a site for watching other people play video games would be dismissive, as it’s really a way for people to hang out around a common interest — a virtual version of the way we’d hang out around a single television as kids.
Even if you have no followers and don’t care to share your own six-second videos, Vine’s website is still a fun way to soak up some short bursts of creativity. The curated home pages offers a taste of everything from cute animals to comedy, and you can turn on TV mode for a stream of big-screen videos if you’re feeling lucky.
As part of a new wave of “explainer” websites, Vox is at its best when it’s providing deep background on the biggest news stories. It’s a great starting point if you’re lost on topics like the Israel-Palestine conflict or the battle over net neutrality, giving you just enough know-how to confidently dive into editorials and breaking news pieces elsewhere.
Randall Munroe’s nine-year-old web comic has been on a roll lately, branching beyond geek humor with ambitious projects like a massive drawing to explore, a 3,099-panel comic that panned out over several months and a deep dive into common Google searches. He’s even helped make sense of the news, with a clear, illustrated explanation of the Heartbleed bug that compromised so many websites earlier this year. You may not need to stop in every day, but XKCD should be on your radar.
You never get a second chance to make a first impression — that’s why your homepage is undoubtedly one of the most important web pages on your website.
For any given company, the homepage is its virtual front door. If a new visitor doesn’t like what they see, their knee-jerk reaction is to hit the “back” button.
That’s right — unfortunately, a lot of people still judge a book by its cover.
What makes a website’s homepage design brilliant instead of blah? Well, it takes more than looks alone — it also has to work well. That’s why the most brilliant homepages on this list don’t just score high in beauty, but also in brains. But before we dive into the 15-real-life examples, let’s dissect some of the best practices of homepage design.
What Makes a Good Website Homepage Design
All of the homepage designs shown here utilize a combination of the following elements. Not every page is perfect, but the best homepage designs get many of these right:
1) Clearly answers “Who I am,” “What I do,” and/or “What can you (the visitor) do here.”
If you’re a well-known brand or company (i.e. Coca Cola) you may be able to get away with not having to describe who you are and what you do; but the reality is, most businesses still need to answer these questions so that each visitor knows they are in the “right place.” Steven Krugg sums it up best in his best-selling book, Don’t Make Me Think: If visitors can’t identify what it is you do within seconds, they won’t stick around long.
2) Resonates with the target audience.
A homepage needs to be narrowly focused — speaking to the right people in their language. The best homepages avoid “corporate gobbledygook,” and eliminate the fluff.
3) Communicates a compelling value-proposition.
When a visitor arrives on your homepage, it needs to compel them to stick around. The homepage is the best place to nail your value proposition so that prospects choose to stay on your website and not navigate to your competitors’.
4) Optimizes for multi-device usability.
All the homepages listed here are highly usable, meaning they are easy to navigate and there aren’t “flashy” objects that get in the way of browsing, such as flash banners, animations, pop-ups, or overly-complicated and unnecessary elements. Many of them are also mobile-optimized, which is an incredibly important must-have in today’s mobile world.
5) Includes calls-to-action (CTAs).
Every homepage listed here effectively uses primary and secondary calls-to-action to direct visitors to the next logical step. Examples include “Free Trial,” “Schedule a Demo,” “Buy Now,” or “Learn More.” Remember, the goal of the homepage is to compel visitors to dig deeper into your website and move them further down the funnel. CTAs tell them what to do next so they don’t get overwhelmed or lost. More importantly, CTAs turn your homepage into a sales- or lead-generation engine, and not just brochure-wear.
6) Always changes.
The best homepages aren’t always static. Some of them, like Whitehouse.gov, are constantly changing to reflect the needs, problems, and questions of their visitors. Some homepages also change from A/B testing or dynamic content.
7) Employs great overall design.
A well-designed page is important to building trust, communicating value, and navigating visitors to the next step. As such, these homepages effectively use layout, CTA placement, whitespace, colors, fonts, and other supporting elements.
Now, get ready to learn about excellent homepage design through the following 15 real-life examples.
15 of the Best Examples of Website Homepage Design
It’s easy to consume. There is much debate on whether short or long homepages work better. If you choose to do the latter, you need to make it easy to scroll and read — and that’s exactly what this site does. It almost acts like a story.
There’s great use of contrast and positioning with the primary calls-to-action — it’s clear what the company wants you to convert on when you arrive.
The copy used in the calls-to-action “Try it Free for 30 Days” is very compelling.
The sub-headline is also great: “Join 5 million people using FreshBooks to painlessly send invoices, track time and capture expenses.” It zeros in on a common pain point for freelancers and small businesses (FreshBooks’ target audience) — typically accounting software is often “painfully complex.”
It’s a super simple design with a strong, no-jargon headline and sub-headline.
The homepage gives off a secure but easy-going vibe, which is important for a product that handles financial information.
It also contains simple, direct, and compelling call-to-action copy: “Sign up free.” The CTA design is also brilliant — the secured lock icon hits home the safety message once again.
It’s simple and straight to the point — from the headline and sub-headline, it’s clear exactly what Jill Konrath does (and how she can help your business).
It also gives easy access to Jill’s thought leadership materials, which is important to establishing her credibility as a keynote speaker.
It’s easy to subscribe to the newsletter and get in touch — two of her primary calls-to-action.
Dropbox’s homepage and website is the ultimate example of simplicity. It limits its use of copy and visuals, and embraces whitespace.
Their headline, “Your stuff, anywhere” is simple, yet powerful. No need to decode jargon to figure out what Dropbox really does.
It has a focus on one primary call-to-action: “Sign up” … But if you want to learn more first, that’s easy, too. Click “Learn more,” and see how Dropbox describes its primary benefits with four, easy-to-scan statements directly below the primary CTA.
The homepage for Dropbox’s business offering is a great example of providing a different website experience for a different audience. Unlike their main homepage, which was originally built for the consumer side (above), their business users require more information and additional proof points that Dropbox for Business a safe and scalable solution for companies (a perception issue that Dropbox addresses on their homepage directly).
Dropbox continues to carry over it’s simple design and branding. It includes only what is important: elements such as customer logos and testimonials, and a video with supporting copy.
Building a website that supports an entire nation is no easy task. Whitehouse.gov is a constantly changing to reflect top concerns and priorities — the homepage alone has gone through hundreds of revisions. Testing and optimization is a key component to a brilliant homepage design.
What’s particularly great about Whitehouse.gov is that it is completely unlike most government-related websites. It has a clean design and fosters a community.
It’s fairly easy to find what you’re looking for when you land here. And if you can’t find it immediately, there’s even a “What are you looking for?” search box.
While it’s difficult to tell from the static screenshot above, this site captures your attention with its subtle use of animation while scrolling down the page. It’s a very clever way to organize information without interfering with user experience.
It also has a very clean and simple design. The design highlights the features of the app, and then immediately shows the primary call-to-action — not much else.
Drool. That’s what I think when I arrive at the website for 4 Rivers Smokehouse. Combined with great photography, the headline “Brisket. 18 years to master. Yours to savor.” sounds like an experience worth trying.
The parallax scrolling guides you on a tour through their services, menu, and people having a great time — a great use of this popular design trend.
The only negative? I don’t live close enough to this place. Boo.
Over the years, Evernote has turned from a simple note-saving app into a suite of business products. This isn’t always easy to convey on a homepage, but Evernote does a nice job packaging many potential messages into a few key benefits.
This homepage uses a combination of rich, muted background colors and bright green or white highlights to make conversion paths stand out.
Following a simple headline, the eye path then leads you to their call-to-action, “Sign up now.”
“Stuffy enterprise” isn’t the feeling you get when you arrive at Telerik’s website. For a company that offers many technology products, their bold colors, fun designs, and photography give off a Google-like vibe. Just one important aspect to making visitors feel welcome and letting them know they’re dealing with real people,.
I love the simple, high-level overview to their six product offers. It’s very clear way of communicating what the company does and how people can learn more.
The copy is lightweight and easy to read. They speak the language of their customers.
For those love birds planning their big day, eWedding is a great destination to building a custom wedding website.
The homepage isn’t cluttered and only includes the necessary elements to get people to starting building their websites.
They’ve included excellent product visuals, a great headline, and a call-to-action that reduces friction with the copy, “Create your free website in under 5 minutes.” Genius!
Landing Page Inspiration: 17 Examples to Spark Your Creativity
June 15, 2015
“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”
Although the precise origins of this controversial statement have been hotly disputed for years, it was the late Steve Jobs who famously attributed it to Pablo Picasso. Regardless of who actually said these words, they have given countless artists the “creative license” to be inspired by other artists and incorporate great ideas into their own work.
That’s what I’ll be doing in today’s post – giving you permission to be inspired. If your landing pages need a little “oomph,” then read on to see 17 beautiful examples of landing page inspiration from around the web. Hopefully, these examples will give you an idea or two of how you can make your landing pages better, increase your conversion rates, and provide a better experience for your users.
Before we get started, a couple of quick disclaimers. Firstly, unlike Picasso (or whoever really said that quote), I’m not advocating for blatantly stealing ideas from others. Plagiarism isn’t cool, and neither is openly ripping off someone else’s work. Be inspired, but don’t be a thief.
Secondly, not every single one of the following examples is a “true” landing page – some of them are homepages, but they can still serve as valuable examples of techniques you might want to incorporate into your own pages.
With those two caveats out of the way, let’s get started.
1. Use Aspirational Copy
Aspirational language is one of your most powerful weapons as a conversion copywriter. One of the best examples of aspirational copy on a landing page I’ve ever come across is this landing page by artist funding site Patreon:
Patreon connects working artists with fans of their work, who support their favorite artists financially through small donations and contributions. Think of it as an ongoing Kickstarter platform for artists. This means that, essentially, Patreon is asking its visitors to give money to artists.
The site could have taken numerous approaches to get visitors to part with their cash, but by using aspirational language, Patreon appeals to visitors’ desire to become a crucial part of the creative process.
People who support artists on Patreon aren’t giving someone money, and they’re not “donating” to a cause – they’re patrons of the arts, a term typically reserved for the kind of wealthy individuals after whom new wings in prestigious art galleries are named. This positioning is very clever, as it gives artists’ benefactors the opportunity to not only financially support artists they love, but also to think of themselves in a different way.
2. Put Trust Signals Front and Center
The inclusion of trust signals on your landing page can be enough to convince even the most hesitant prospect to take action. This is particularly true for companies operating in potentially sensitive areas such as financial applications. One company that understands this is billing automation provider Recurly, as demonstrated in our second example of landing page inspiration:
As you can see, Recurly uses its impressive trust signals to great effect on this landing page. Not only are the company logos positioned very prominently, but the logos themselves speak volumes about how secure and trusted Recurly is as a service – if LinkedIn, Adobe, Zillow, and Groupon are satisfied customers, chances are prospects will be, too.
Aside from the excellent use of trust signals on this landing page, the copy is also very clever: “Sophistication your CFO expects. Ease of use your team demands.” This clearly indicates that Recurly’s ideal customers are financial professionals who report to an executive team but have their own managerial responsibilities. This might seem straightforward, but appealing to people with such precision in so little copy is harder than it looks.
By positioning itself in this way, Recurly demonstrates that it keenly understands the needs of its prospects and appeals to them in terms of the benefits of using their system. Brilliant.
3. Leverage Your Unique Selling Proposition
Your unique selling proposition should be integral to your landing pages and your wider marketing initiatives, but that doesn’t mean you have to beat prospects over the head with it. In fact, taking a more subtle approach can be very compelling, as this example from college social network CampusTap demonstrates:
This minimal landing page might not appear to offer much in the way of valuable information, but it actually says a great deal.
Prospective users can infer a lot from the four words of supporting copy beneath the site’s name. It’s obvious that CampusTap’s unique selling proposition is privacy, a sore spot for many social media users who are concerned about what they post on Facebook or Twitter. This alone could prove tempting to college kids hoping to keep prying eyes out of their digital lives.
The copy also suggests an air of exclusivity. Sure, college might not be quite as cliquey as high school, but there’s still a very delicate social ecosystem present at many colleges – something that some users might find appealing. The word “private” suggests not only security of users’ data, but also a curated sense of community that’s within the user’s control.
4. Add Interactive Elements
Today’s web users are increasingly savvy, and expect not only the information they want, but an immersive, rewarding web experience. One way to exceed your visitors’ expectations (or at least meet them) is to include interactive elements on your landing pages.
This technique can be very powerful. The example below (and its accompanying ad), from custom clothing retailer Tailor4Less, adds interactivity to the page to create an engaging way for prospects to design their own suits:
Even the promise of an interactive experience makes the call-to-action more compelling. This approach requires a little more technical overhead than a static landing page, but I’d wager the engagement and conversion rates are higher.
5. Let Images Do The Talking
Businesses offering somewhat abstract products or services might be tempted to use reams of text to explain what they do. However, in most cases, simple copy combined with a strong “hero” visual can actually explain what you do far more effectively than a wall of text. Case in point, this landing page from ad optimization firm Chatterbox Labs:
Even to experienced marketers, the concept of audience segmentation can be tricky to convey visually. However, this landing page makes excellent use of a hero visual to accompany its brief copy to get the point across in an easily digestible, visually appealing way.
Rather than use words to explain how complicated audience segmentation can be, or how diverse audiences themselves can be, Chatterbox Labs uses a familiar scene in its hero visual – a busy New York City street scene. This implies the complexity of audiences without resorting to lengthy copy that would clutter an otherwise minimal page.
Granted, the call-to-action could be a little clearer, but you get the idea – let your images do the talking.
6. Make It Effortless for Visitors to Convert
Before we dive into our next example of landing page inspiration, take a quick look at the previous five. Notice anything? You got it – they all have single call-to-action buttons.
Making it as easy as possible for your visitors to convert will increase your conversion rates considerably. The more work you ask prospects to do, the less likely they are to do it. One service that leverages this principle very well is to-do list app Todoist:
If you’re looking to grow the user base of your app, for example, social integration is an excellent way to make the conversion process effortless, as this example from online payments service Venmo does:
It’s important to mention that what actually constitutes a conversion varies widely. For some businesses, a conversion might be as simple as a visitor clicking through to a page with more information. Others might define a conversion as the submission of a lengthy web form, complete with name, age, salary range, job title etc. Regardless of what you want your visitors to do, make it as easy as possible.
Landing Page Inspiration: 17 Examples to Spark Your Creativity
7. Get to the Point – Fast
Many marketers assume that just because someone clicked an ad or a link in a social media update that they don’t have to explain what their business is about on their landing page.
This is a mistake.
Your landing pages should be unique to the sources that directed users to them in the first place, but you also need to make sure your visitors can figure out what you do, what you sell, or what you’re offering almost instantly. The longer it takes for them to figure it out, the greater the risk you’ll lose them. This is why you need to get to the point almost instantaneously, like this landing page from AskNative.com does:
Although this is actually AskNative.com’s homepage, it doesn’t matter – there’s no ambiguity whatsoever about what you can expect from AskNative as a service. The copy is clear, brief, and explains exactly what AskNative offers, before prompting the user to sign up via a social integration with Facebook (a smart move – see #6).
The faster you get to the point, the more likely your visitors are to click through and convert. Don’t make them waste time trying to figure out what you do by including “clever” copy or outlandish design choices.
8. Help Visitors Visualize a Better Life
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. People don’t want to buy things – they want to solve their problems and make their lives better. Helping prospective customers visualize this better life can be a powerfully persuasive technique, as this example from small business software company Wave proves:
Wave is essentially a bookkeeping, taxation, and invoicing tool. Although all these things are crucial to the success of any small business, they’re not exactly sexy and they’re definitely not why people launch their own businesses in the first place. That’s why Wave focuses on the outcome – and the emotional payoff of using Wave – rather than the specifics of its software.
The combination testimonial/hero image is a shrewd move. It not only shows a real, satisfied customer (which serves as a trust signal), it also helps visitors imagine their life as a Wave customer. To most entrepreneurs, the idea of “doing what they love” while a single software package “does the rest” is very alluring, and this is exactly what Wave wants prospects to feel.
9. Include Video
Many businesses are put off by video out of an assumption that videos have to cost thousands of dollars and feature slick, top-notch production values. We’ve talked about video landing pages before, and it’s worth repeating that the inclusion of video can take a landing page to the next level.
Check out this example landing page from chicken coop manufacturer ChickenSaloon.com (and the ad that directs users to the page). It features a short video from reality TV show “DIY Yardcore,” which highlights one of its products, the Tavern coop:
Video doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg, and its inclusion on a landing page can make it a much “stickier” experience for the user. In this example, the video also lends the brand and its product additional authenticity, and helps establish trust in the viewer.
If you’re not sure how to get started with video for your landing pages, check out this post on producing marketing videos of your own.
10. Help People Make Better Choices
Choosing the right bottle of red to accompany a delicately braised shank of lamb or a rare porterhouse can be a minefield for the uninitiated. That’s why Vivino, an app that helps people choose the perfect wine, positions itself as an essential tool for aspiring foodies and wine enthusiasts.
Vivino takes the guesswork out of purchasing the right wine, and helps users pick the perfect vintage of wine for virtually every occasion. This helps people make better decisions, which once again appeals to their desire to solve their problems – even ones as seemingly trivial as choosing the right wine.
Another benefit of this approach is providing people with the means to appear more sophisticated or knowledgeable. One of the primary motivations people share certain content on social media is to appear intelligent and well-informed to their peers. If people share content to appear smarter, it makes sense to leverage this desire to seem worldly with your landing pages, too.
11. Make a Bold Statement
Sometimes, what you’re trying to do is so important, so powerful, that you don’t need to do much else besides get people to stand up and take action. Case in point, this page from Last Days of Ivory:
Design-wise, it doesn’t get much bolder than this. The contrast of the white-on-black is a powerful visual statement, and there’s very little going on aside from the logo (which also serves as an unorthodox call-to-action), some branding icons to show which organizations the campaign is affiliated with, and the “real” CTA in the top-right corner.
In examples like this, simplicity and the power of the message do all the heavy lifting, and to great effect.
12. Know Your Brand and Take ‘Risks’
Let’s face it – most marketing material is deathly boring. One reason for this is because too few brands are willing to take creative risks with their campaigns. One brand that doesn’t shy away from risk is Tapely, an online mixtape sharing site:
Digital music services like Spotify are great, but a curated playlist will never have the same raw feel as a mixtape. That’s why Tapely channels the emotion, energy, and attitude of the bands that changed our lives and the bootlegged tracks we shared with our friends to create a landing page that doesn’t take any shit from anybody.
Only you can decide how far you can go with your marketing campaigns, and obviously this approach won’t work for everyone. However, for certain lifestyle brands, doing something that most people might think of as a little risky can strengthen your brand and offer a sense of authenticity that’s sadly lacking from most marketing material.
13. Ask Questions
One of the best ways to tempt your prospects to convert is by engaging them with a question. This can be a remarkably effective technique to get visitors to click through to another page, as this example from real estate website Trulia demonstrates:
Sure, homeowners know how much their house was worth when they signed their mortgage, but has the value appreciated or depreciated? By leveraging users’ curiosity, Trulia makes it tempting to provide their personal information and convert – very clever.
Regardless of what prospects are looking to buy, they want to feel something – better about themselves, more secure in a decision, adequately informed about an issue.
One of the biggest reasons why most B2B content and marketing is so bland is because many companies purposefully avoid trying to solicit an emotional response from their prospects – a mistake that results in dry, forgettable messaging.
Done well, appealing to prospects’ emotions can be highly effective. This landing page from Happify, an app that tracks emotional behavior over time to promote a happier outlook, leverages this technique very well:
In addition to the visuals, which suggest the kind of freedom and time to relax and indulge that many of us lack these days, the copy is powerfully persuasive. It creates a sense of urgency without being overly forceful, and hints at the benefits of using the app without resorting to the hard sell.
The combination of the imagery and copy results in an emotionally appealing page that spurs the curiosity of the prospect and leverages their desire for an emotional payoff. Speaking of emotional payoffs…
15. Speak Directly to Your Visitors
Another mistake that far too many B2B companies (in particular) are guilty of is using distant, third-person language in their copy. This might be suitable in certain situations, but for the most part, all it will do is alienate your visitors.
A lot of marketers talk about the value of genuine connections, simply because they’re so rare. Similarly to the example above, you want your visitors to feel something when they visit your site or arrive on your landing page, and one way to do this is by directly speaking to your prospect. Check out this example from the now-defunct video chat app Awesometalk:
Although Awesometalk folded a while back, this landing page remains a great example of how directly addressing your visitors and appealing to their emotions can make even a relatively common online service significantly more attractive.
The copy directly appeals to the visitor and makes it easy to convert, two crucial factors for a business operating in a (very) crowded space. If nothing else, this example shows how simple copy can have a big impact.
16. Poke Fun at Common Problems
One of the most effective ways to stimulate interest in a solution is by drawing attention to and acknowledging the problem. Many companies do this indirectly, but sometimes, a more straightforward approach can be more compelling, as this example from Meeting Hero demonstrates:
Productivity app Meeting Hero (which is now WorkLife) not only acknowledges the problem it tries to solve, but does so in a slightly humorous way. By adding a little character to the copy and gently poking fun at the fact that most meetings are terrible, this page makes the implied payoff of using the app more appealing.
Unfortunately, Meeting Hero lost this messaging when it became WorkLife, which favors the typically bland positioning you’ve seen countless times before. However, this example still shows that a little humor and directly acknowledging a problem everyone is aware of can be a great way to get visitors interested in what you have to offer.
17. Think About Color
So far, we’ve spent most of this post looking at messaging, copy, and tone, but we haven’t examined one of the most important elements of a landing page – the color palette.
Although color may not be as immediately obvious in its message as copy, it says a great deal about your product, your company, and your brand. Let’s take a look at this example from password management service Mitro:
This page isn’t just aesthetically pleasing with a sharp, modern design, it also makes excellent use of color. The blue signifies trust, strength, and dependability – all things you want in a password manager. The subtle blend of green also implies peace, suggesting that Mitro users can rest easy in the knowledge that their passwords are safe in Mitro’s hands.
When you’re designing your next landing page, think about what you want the color palette to say about your business. Do you want to emphasize strength and trust, or convey a sense of boldness and excitement? Check this color chart to see what colors signify and think carefully about what you want color to say about your product.
Over the last 15 or so years the internet has revolutionised marketing. Not only has it helped create new techniques and new channels, but it has also introduced something that was in many cases missing before: measurability. Whether using advertising, email, affiliate or search marketing, transparent and easy to use tools allow marketers to track campaigns from first click to final action, enabling them to optimise them, measure ROI, and report on them accurately to clients.
With the advent of measurability came full responsibility. No longer could agencies say ‘It’s not the campaign, it must be the product’ – with digital marketing it was possible to identify exactly what went right, and what didn’t. And this brought about a change in thinking by marketers and clients alike: if we can measure results, then why pay before you get them? Even as click-through rates on banners bought on a cost per impression basis tumbled in the early ‘noughties’, performance-based approaches were born, led by Cost per Lead and Cost per Click.
CPL AND CPC: HOW DO THEY WORK?
Cost per Lead (CPL) and Cost per Click (CPC) are two of the best ways to drive traffic to a website today and generate business whilst controlling your budget and minimising risk. Their names pretty much sum them up:
– Cost per Lead: the client purchases a number of leads – forms filled in with validated contact information, and only pays when they have received them
– Cost per click: the client purchases a number of unique visitors in the form of clicks to their site and only pays when they have received them
With both approaches the important point is that a certain level of performance is guaranteed for the investment made. But how do you choose between them?
COST PER LEAD OR COST PER CLICK – COMPARISON
As the diagram above shows, there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, and it is really a question of ‘horses for courses’ – it depends on the product or service you are selling, your target market, and how difficult it is to convert a visitor to a lead and then a sale on your web site.
From a risk perspective, however, cost per lead is definitely the safest approach as you can define the exact criteria you wish to be included in a lead, and you will receive concrete data to verify. In addition, lead generation experts offer the additional step of lead qualification, where every lead received is called back within an hour of filling in a form in order to confirm their details and check their eligibility.
If you could pull just one of these levers in every PPC account you touch, which would you pull and why?
Andrew Goodman: Hello! It’s all about bids. 🙂 I would ignore QS and bid my keywords to appropriate goal metrics, and QS would largely take care of itself in most cases.
Brad Geddes: You need both – there’s no way around it. Quality Score is optimizing for Google. Bid Management optimizes for conversions. Even if you are using spreadsheets for bid management, if you are significantly over or under bidding then you are not maximizing profits, and could be losing a lot of money. If your quality scores are too low then you’ll never get exposure.
There are some accounts where all the quality scores are 7s; so the main issue is bid management. There are some accounts where almost all the traffic comes from the content network, so quality score is less of an issue and bid management is more important. If all your keywords are on page five because of low bids, raising your quality score does not do much good.
There are other account where all the quality scores are under 3, so the ads aren’t even showing which makes bid management useless until the quality scores are fixed.
However, you can’t just use one or the other. Every keyword has a quality score. Every keyword has a bid. Only by pulling both levers (along with conversion optimization, ad copy testing, etc) can an account reach its full potential.
Dave Davis: I’ll assume you’re talking about a “rule based” lever. In 99% of cases I would actually use a bid to CTR rule but there’s a fine balance to be struck. The the higher the CTR, the higher the quality score which in turn reduces your click prices. However, you have to always be testing and optimizing your ads as your CTR is “normalized” or measured against other ads in any given position and historically in that particular position. You have to bear in mind too that more clicks can drain your budget so you have to pay very close attention to conversion rate too and always be testing your landing page conversion rate. They all lead into each other.
George Michie: Bid management, hands down. Obviously if the QS is horrible and we’re not allowed to fix it bid management will be futile, but if the copy is well-written and targeted sufficiently well there isn’t any need for ongoing “QS management”, the QS will take care of itself. However, the quality of traffic varies depending on seasons, promotions, stock-positions, economic conditions, etc, so having the ability to manage bids ongoing is essential to maintaining peak performance.
Larry Kim: Quality Score, because:
Quality Score is a more “foundational” lever to pull: Optimizing for Quality Score implies doing a good job at keyword selection, and micro-targeting of specific keyword groupings to relevant ad text and landing pages your website – and I really think you should focus on this first. Put another way, if you’ve picked irrelevant keywords and have a poor account structure, it really limits the effectiveness of any bid management strategy.
Quality Score is Bid Management: Optimizing for high quality scores improves your ad rank and lowers your actual CPC (as opposed to your maximum CPC).
Greg Meyers: This question is not an as easy as you would think. Even though Quality Score is the primary tactical best practice that should be followed with every campaign, making sure your client/advertiser is ranking above the fold competitively (such as noted in PPC Visual Click HeatMaps) is just as important, if not more important. With that said, PPC marketers, as well as the companies they represent in search engine marketing are faced with many “living and breathing” variables that affect AVG Position beyond Quality Score. These variables include, but are not limited to Day-Parting, Daily and Monthly Budget exhaustion, Affiliate Display URL Hijacking, Trademark Infringement, etc…
So to answer this as honestly as I can, no matter how great your Quality Score maybe for a specific term or Adgroup, Bid Management is always going to need attention, especially for your Top Converting Keywords/Adgroups which need consistent optimal performance. If you are noticing increased competition from Affiliates/Resellers and competitors, then you need to consciously monitor the Bid Positioning of your top terms (most likely these are your branded ones or unique products/services).
It really does not matter how great your quality score is because even though you are always #1 -#2 position, increased competition and saturation will increase your CPCs and force you to be more attentive in order to meet your client’s goals and objectives.
Marty Weintraub: Quality score is more important, because the immediate effects on cost and ad position are more of a detriment than the incremental improvements gained by first automation. That’s not to say that PPC automation does not rock the tails. Still quality score threatens the entire endeavor with ruined accounts and serious budget bloat. There are plenty of amazing campaigns run by hand, though most would agree that some degree of automation is prudent, especially towards the ultimate goal of transparent attribution.
Tom Demers: I think Quality Score has a larger overall impact on campaign performance; if you have strongly and consistently integrated Quality Scores throughout your account you’re likely to see a strong conversion experience for your searchers, pricing discounts, and a well-organized campaign.
Richard Cotton: A horrible question as the two are so inter-related. However, having just watched a whole election of people evading straight questions I’ll go with this;
Quality score is not the ultimate deciding factor of a keyword’s worth. If a keyword is producing conversions at the right cost then that is the most important thing so I’ll go with bid management. (Although clearly I want to pull both levers…and even answering the question without hedging and fence sitting based on account by account specifics is uncomfortable…can I just pull the quality score lever a little?)
Geordie Carswell: Quality Score for sure. Google’s entire bid auction is Quality Score-centric. Improvements in Quality Score have a bigger effect on your ad placement and frequency than bid increases as Hal Varian’s video shows. Simply bidding your way to where you want to be is unlikely to be profitable in the long run. Quality Score optimization is also typically more poorly understood and your competitors are less likely to be actively working on their Quality Scores vs. just upping their bids, so you can quickly hammer out an edge there.
Josh Dreller: Interesting question. At first glance, my thought was Bid Management for sure. I always think people obsess too much about Quality Score because some of the variables are out of our hands, but Bid Management is as vital as keywords and ad text. However, as I thought more about it, optimizing Quality Score is basically great Bid Management. You’re ensuring that you’re not paying a premium on your keywords while increasing your Ad Rank at the same time. Click costs are going to be whatever they’re going to be based on the value of the term, so basic Bid Management is simply playing in that space–Quality Score helps you change the rules in your favor. So, I gotta go with Quality Score on this one.
Elizabeth Marsten: Bid Management. You pay what you pay. The fact is a low QS can influence and drag things down, but money is money. Bidding smarter and spending will pretty much render QS to a secondary factor in any optimization. Particularly since Google has said that there are some keywords and industries where there will always just be a low QS because of industry performance and how the keyword does for Google.
For example- I have a client that sells “baffle box feather beds.” It’s a type of feather bed and that is what it is called. They sell it. The ad goes to a baffle box product page- that has that keyword plastered all over it. The ad says “baffle box” the keyword list is all around “baffle box” and that is the only product in that ad group in a campaign about feather beds. Absolutely could not get the QS above a “4” and when the Google rep was specifically asked about this keyword and this instance the reason given was that historically that keyword does not perform industry wise and therefore is a lower quality keyword and gets a lower quality score. The answer seemed to be “we can’t profit from it. Therefore, bid on something else that we can.”
Joe Kerschbaum: This is a difficult question to answer. This would be on an account-by-account basis. If the ad groups are in pretty good shape, then I would focus on bid management. If the ad groups are in disarray, then I would work on the ad group structure first. Overall, I would work on ad group structure. This is because bid charges are only that, bid changes. However, Quality Score management can help improve CTR, conversion rate, CPC, and Quality Score when done effectively.
Jenny Anderson:Quality Score is my answer, but bid management is actually where we spend most of our time. I would choose quality score because it seems (theoretically and based off of the video) the more important factor, but bid management is more transparent and easier to control.
Question #2 What do you do to attack an account with Quality Score problems? In other words, which factors determine which ad groups/keywords you focus on first (ie Quality Score, cost, number of keywords per group, etc.)?
Andrew Goodman: Most accounts run on what we consider a normal Quality Score profile. We glance at Quality Scores in such cases, but in no way do we “optimize” to that statistic or focus heavily on it in our detailed marketing implementations. That would be a bit akin to trying to build your business around toolbar PageRank.
If an account has Quality Score problems in isolated areas, and they’re low volume, then why worry? You can simply bid accordingly, or in grave cases, pause those keywords. They’re likely rated that poorly because of keyword intent issues. Seasoned marketers factor keyword intent into the way they build and manage accounts.
Sometimes, diffuse keyword intent is endemic to the keywords you use in your industry, especially in B2B. Patricia Hursh has a great take on that: you’re still generating high value leads at a certain cost. If your important words come up “3” on QS, don’t commit hari-kari: pay the damn money and get the lead!
Of course marketers should tighten up with all the usual best practices including negatives (exclusions) where appropriate, making good use of the search query report and other tools.
I hate to say “it goes without saying,” because I’ve been saying it so long. It’s in both editions of my book and in my previous handbook dating back to 2002: a good skeleton & proper categorization are a great start along the road to a well optimized account. Sometimes I have nicknamed the overall process “Build a Powerful Account.” If you build a powerful account, usually QS will take care of itself. You are then just going for incremental wins for that profit icing on the cake.
If a whole account is in the doghouse due to Landing Page and Website Quality issues, or it’s in a cycle of failure due to an improper (often overly broad, or lazily built, or really weak ads) build from the start, then you need to consider a complete rebuild/reset and your Google reps may even weigh in on the best direction to take — a fundamental reassessment as opposed to tweaking and losing major bucks in the tweakage process.
Brad Geddes: We use two different methods for identifying areas of quality score improvement.
The first method addresses your current spend and impressions. We do a roll-up of normalized quality score at the ad group level, compare it to spend, then run it through an algorithm to determine which ad groups would benefit the most from quality score improvement. In fact, we’re launching this tool publicly soon as it will be bundled with the CertifiedKnowledge.org tool set.
The first method does not address keywords that have few impressions due to either their bids being much lower than the first page bids or due to low ad serving because of current low quality score issues. Therefore, we also examine keywords that have a QS less than 4-5 or first page bids more than 10-20% below Google’s estimate to see which one’s would gather the most conversions if their quality score issues were fixed.
Dave Davis: The first thing we do is determine if it’s an account/site level problem (all keywords with a poor quality score) or just a small subset of keywords/ads. It’s pretty easy to diagnose between the two and there are a number of ways to tackle each. This depends on what the customer is willing to sacrifice in terms of cost, time, traffic and temporary impairment of historical CTR.
George Michie: If you write targeted, compelling ad copy in the first place, grouping closely related keywords appropriately, QS shouldn’t be problematic. If you’ve inherited an account with poor QS, obviously it’s important to prioritize based on where the money is spent. Writing tight copy for KW and adgroups for the top 200 keywords and AdGroups has more impact sooner than tackling the problem randomly. If the QS of the account’s “head” is already good (8+), move to the next cluster.
Larry Kim: In diagnosing Quality Score problems, I tend to look for:
Low Quality Scores (duh!)
Excessive usage of broad matching
Poor campaign and ad group organization
Since every account will suffer from some elements of the above symptoms, focus your attention on the groups that drive the most conversions, traffic or ad spend.
Greg Meyers: Well, before I start any AdWords consulting and scoping out a Google Adwords Account for Quality Score, I must have a good understanding from the client as to their goals, target markets, Cost-Per-Acquisitions, etc… before I start diving into the Campaigns. It is this discovery phase which helps determine priorities of optimization.
Once I have identified the campaigns and Adgroups, I prefer a more disciplined and methodical approach based on the current hierarchical structure from Campaign>Adgroup>Keyword>Text Ads, then at the campaign level I look at Geo Targeting, Networks, Daily Budgets, Negative Keywords, etc…
I then investigate Relevant Keyword Groupings within the Adgroups to see how tightly organized they are. If there are keywords in a specific Adgroup that are grammatically irrelevant or just “out of place” I will either create a new Adgroup based on their relevancy. Once the keyword groups are relevant enough, I would then look at the Test Ads that are being served. If the Ads were not representing some of the keywords in the Adgroup, I would recommend and provide the client with some new “Keyword Rich” Text Ad examples for them to review and approve.
I would follow this same procedure to all campaigns within the account. But most importantly, understanding what the “Quick Wins” are from the client/company will help the PPC marketer “move the needle” more efficiently.
Tom Demers: You really want to cross reference the high spend, low Quality Score areas to identify where your money is being spent on keywords and Ad Groups that could be better structured and segmented.
Richard Cotton: First of all I strip out those with low impression numbers, focusing on those that are, or have potential to, benefit the account. You can always build the keyword list back up, but if the account has quality score issues then cutting away the deadwood will allow the problem keywords with potential to be rectified faster.
Going after the highest traffic terms will obviously make the biggest difference to account performance so I would start with high traffic keywords that produce conversions at poor cost, followed by those high traffic keywords that are still managing adequate cost per conversion and so on.
Geordie Carswell: First, you have to gauge your expectations as to “good” or “poor” Quality Scores for your account. If you have a 1/10 Quality Score and can’t get any traffic, it’s likely due to landing page quality issues that can best be addressed by contacting Google and asking for a human review or some specific feedback. (Important note: If you are an affiliate marketer using Adwords, contacting Google directly may not be in your best interest for various reasons, caution should apply). You might be better off asking for advice from any experienced AdWords Consultant.
If your Quality Scores are consistently 3/10 or 4/10, you need to take a close look at your account, campaign, and adgroup structure. Likely, you could split your campaigns and adgroups into smaller, bit-sized chunks where you can more closely integrate the keywords and themes in your campaigns and adgroups to the ads you’re writing. Cutting your campaign sizes down to a manageable level while you ‘rehabilitate’ your Keyword Relevance Quality Scores will make this easier as well. Starting again with a smaller plate can help a lot.
If your Quality Scores are 5/10 or higher, you’re likely just a few better ads away from increasing your QS. Start aggressively split testing new ad copy that’s entirely different from anything you’ve tried before and see if you can get the CTR up. You’ll need to set your ads to “rotate” to get new ads proper exposure, and monitor them carefully to cut losing ads when you have enough data to make a call.
Elizabeth Marsten: Traffic is what determines what gets worked on first. A keyword pulling in huge amounts of traffic with a low QS is most likely a culprit for bigger problems with QS on an ad group/campaign level and dragging the rest of the keywords down with it- plus it’s probably wasting the most money.
Joe Kerschbaum: At a very high level, advertisers should attack the keywords/ad groups that generate the most traffic/conversions/revenue first. These are the elements of the account that are driving the other core KPIs such as conversions, conversion rate and CPA. By improving the ad relevancy and Quality Score of these ad groups, you can quickly improve the CTR, ROAS, ROI and Quality Score of these mission critical keywords and ad groups. One quick way to determine which areas need attention first is to determine the keywords/ad groups that generate 10-20% of the clicks/conversions and start there (this number isn’t set in stone. This way, you’re gaining ground quickly. Of course, advertisers need to pay attention to an entire account when it comes to Quality Score and those other core KPIs but this method can help you prioritize.
Jenny Anderson: If I have a Quality Score issue, I would focus on those ad groups and keywords that have the lowest QS first. Then I would start to look at relevancy of keywords and ads.
Andrew Goodman: Hello! It’s all about bids. 🙂 I would ignore QS and bid my keywords to appropriate goal metrics, and QS would largely take care of itself in most cases.
Brad Geddes: You need both – there’s no way around it. Quality Score is optimizing for Google. Bid Management optimizes for conversions. Even if you are using spreadsheets for bid management, if you are significantly over or under bidding then you are not maximizing profits, and could be losing a lot of money. If your quality scores are too low then you’ll never get exposure.
Dave Davis: I’ll assume you’re talking about a “rule based” lever. In 99% of cases I would actually use a bid to CTR rule but there’s a fine balance to be struck. The the higher the CTR, the higher the quality score which in turn reduces your click prices. However, you have to always be testing and optimizing your ads as your CTR is “normalized” or measured against other ads in any given position and historically in that particular position. You have to bear in mind too that more clicks can drain your budget so you have to pay very close attention to conversion rate too and always be testing your landing page conversion rate. They all lead into each other.
George Michie: Bid management, hands down. Obviously if the QS is horrible and we’re not allowed to fix it bid management will be futile, but if the copy is well-written and targeted sufficiently well there isn’t any need for ongoing “QS management”, the QS will take care of itself. However, the quality of traffic varies depending on seasons, promotions, stock-positions, economic conditions, etc, so having the ability to manage bids ongoing is essential to maintaining peak performance.
Larry Kim: Quality Score, because:
Greg Meyers: This question is not an as easy as you would think. Even though Quality Score is the primary tactical best practice that should be followed with every campaign, making sure your client/advertiser is ranking above the fold competitively (such as noted in PPC Visual Click HeatMaps) is just as important, if not more important. With that said, PPC marketers, as well as the companies they represent in search engine marketing are faced with many “living and breathing” variables that affect AVG Position beyond Quality Score. These variables include, but are not limited to Day-Parting, Daily and Monthly Budget exhaustion, Affiliate Display URL Hijacking, Trademark Infringement, etc…
Marty Weintraub: Quality score is more important, because the immediate effects on cost and ad position are more of a detriment than the incremental improvements gained by first automation. That’s not to say that PPC automation does not rock the tails. Still quality score threatens the entire endeavor with ruined accounts and serious budget bloat. There are plenty of amazing campaigns run by hand, though most would agree that some degree of automation is prudent, especially towards the ultimate goal of transparent attribution.
Tom Demers: I think Quality Score has a larger overall impact on campaign performance; if you have strongly and consistently integrated Quality Scores throughout your account you’re likely to see a strong conversion experience for your searchers, pricing discounts, and a well-organized campaign.
Richard Cotton: A horrible question as the two are so inter-related. However, having just watched a whole election of people evading straight questions I’ll go with this;
Geordie Carswell: Quality Score for sure. Google’s entire bid auction is Quality Score-centric. Improvements in Quality Score have a bigger effect on your ad placement and frequency than bid increases as Hal Varian’s video shows. Simply bidding your way to where you want to be is unlikely to be profitable in the long run. Quality Score optimization is also typically more poorly understood and your competitors are less likely to be actively working on their Quality Scores vs. just upping their bids, so you can quickly hammer out an edge there.
Josh Dreller: Interesting question. At first glance, my thought was Bid Management for sure. I always think people obsess too much about Quality Score because some of the variables are out of our hands, but Bid Management is as vital as keywords and ad text. However, as I thought more about it, optimizing Quality Score is basically great Bid Management. You’re ensuring that you’re not paying a premium on your keywords while increasing your Ad Rank at the same time. Click costs are going to be whatever they’re going to be based on the value of the term, so basic Bid Management is simply playing in that space–Quality Score helps you change the rules in your favor. So, I gotta go with Quality Score on this one.
Elizabeth Marsten: Bid Management. You pay what you pay. The fact is a low QS can influence and drag things down, but money is money. Bidding smarter and spending will pretty much render QS to a secondary factor in any optimization. Particularly since Google has said that there are some keywords and industries where there will always just be a low QS because of industry performance and how the keyword does for Google.
Joe Kerschbaum: This is a difficult question to answer. This would be on an account-by-account basis. If the ad groups are in pretty good shape, then I would focus on bid management. If the ad groups are in disarray, then I would work on the ad group structure first. Overall, I would work on ad group structure. This is because bid charges are only that, bid changes. However, Quality Score management can help improve CTR, conversion rate, CPC, and Quality Score when done effectively.
Jenny Anderson:Quality Score is my answer, but bid management is actually where we spend most of our time. I would choose quality score because it seems (theoretically and based off of the video) the more important factor, but bid management is more transparent and easier to control.
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