Growth Hacking for B2B businesses - Part 1 - Practical Tactics

Growth Hacking for B2B 

If you are an adept of the “Challenger Sales”, you should appreciate "growth hacking" because the secret sauce of growth hacking is plain and easy: Be a rule breaker.

“Growth hacking” produces great results when there is genuine and strong cooperation between the sales, marketing and development departments.  

I’m not going to delve into the details of growth hacking strategy, per se. Instead, I’m going to give you 6 customer acquisition tactics. (if you want to know more on strategies there is a list of “must-read” at the end) – yes Jeremy… reading! and not just watching YouTube videos.  

Great Content!

Great start-ups are good at storytelling and they know that acquiring customers start by interesting individuals working for these companies who might research the market, your company or your solution.

Tactics 1: Blog hack

With the right content marketing strategy and quality blogs, you are guaranteed to generate higher traffic to your website, increase B2B leads and most importantly, sales. 

These individuals you are targeting must find valuable information that will help to improve your brand recognition and earn the trust of your target buyers.

The greater the content you can provide for your target market, the better your chances of influencing a sale.

One way to do this is to attract external experts writing in your blog – they are many tactics to employ such as asking relevant questions on specialised forums, but my favourite is to ask an “expert” to be interviewed and featured in the company’s blog.

Try to interview a consultant from Gartner of Forester and see the result for yourself!

Tactics 2: Content Upgrade

Once you start to attract a good number of people on your blog start analysing the data to identify the pages on your website that deliver the most organic search traffic, ideally top-of-the-funnel content like top blog articles. You can do this within your analytics platform. 

Filter down on each page using the built-in filter and then select to view the queries for that URL. Now that you know what people are searching for to get to your content, you know what they actually want.

This is important because you can now create a content upgrade, with the purpose of capturing contact information in return for access that relates directly to one of these keywords.

According to my marketing department, we scaled this specific test across around 10 different pages on the website and saw an average increase in conversion rate of over 200%.

Tactics 3: Capturing buyers doing due diligence

Now the intent is to capture the organic traffic that comes to your website with high commercial intent, i.e., the visitor is actively looking to buy, is probably the most valuable traffic you can generate.

In truth, this kind of traffic is often much smaller in numbers than that coming from more informational queries (e.g., “how to do…”).

Outside of capturing people searching specifically for your brand name (if you are lucky enough to have already a recognised brand name), there are a few types of tactics that will often work well to target specific target segments.

Industry-Specific Pages

I am assuming you did your homework and have already defined the target market segments you are going after and the buyer personas within these markets you want to attract.

What you need to do is to match the keywords relating to your product against the market segments you are targeting. Then you analyse them with Google Keyword Planner and prioritise the keywords and start building web pages with content to target each one.

SalesForce is the “king” of industry-specific pages like: “CRM for Financial industry”, “CRM for Healthcare”, “CRM for Retail” etc… They have entirely tailored the content with the relevant keywords, used industry images and include industry-specific testimonials.

The solution is exactly the same – the message and content are utterly specific.

Feature-Specific Pages

These pages are designed to help prospects during their buying journey – once they are interested, they often look for more specific information on features you are providing. 

• List out the main features
• For each feature – explain the problem it solves or the benefits it brings (very important)
• Use the relevant keywords that people are searching for
• For each principal feature – build a page packed with the relevant keywords
• Not only this will help buyers to get more technical information but also help us to be better ranked in search engines for keywords specific to the features of your product.

 Tactic 4: Co-branding with Partners

If you have a channel or technical partners, then create a co-branded piece of content promoting both brands and it will dramatically increase the overall reach of the content as well as leads generated.-          

•     Make a list of partners targeting similar audiences and complimentary to you
•     Work on content together
•     Create a landing page on each website
•     Share out leads

Tactic 5: Answer Quora Questions

Generate qualified referral traffic through to your website by answering relevant questions on Quora.com. This is a long-term play – but can pay big -time.

Use a SEO tool and do a search on Quora for relevant questions.

Answer the questions that make sense to your business and remember not to sell too much – promote yourself as subject matter expert. You can use links to your website but be careful Quora moderator can remove your answer in no time. Preferably use links to testimonials.

Tactic 6: Republish Content to Medium

Boost your traffic by tapping into Medium’s referral engine and give your existing content a second life.

Medium is pretty amazing. You can duplicate your content on Medium and add canonical tag (your SEO will appreciate that) so that you do not have to worry about content duplication.

Truthfully, there is very little to lose in doing this. Medium's referral engine can get a lot of readers on your content, so I'd recommend taking some of your content that you think will be most suited to Medium and importing it.

There you are… 6 practical tips for growth hacking.



Of course, growth hacking is much more than this and includes many more activities. Honestly, growth hacking is so vast that I am learning new tricks every day.

Nonetheless, I hope I gave you a flavour of what can be done with growth hacking for B2B businesses.

Good hunt.

Some must-read:

-          The Growth Handbook, Andrew Chen & Intercom-team

-          100 Days of Growth, Sujan Patel

-          Lean Analytics, Alistair Croll

-          Lean Marketing for Startups, Sean Ellis

-          Don’t make me think, door Steve Krug

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What is Account Based Selling

What is Account Based Selling

So John, what is Account-Based Selling (ABS)?

(a following blog from “Selling Disruptive Technology”)… 

First, let me tell you that ABS is not for everyone.

#1. Know when not to do ABS

It is clear that ABS requires more work on the seller’s part, including a high degree of personalization, and takes longer.

ABS works best for strategic/complex sales that require multiple levels of buy-in.

ABS is not beneficial for low value/high transaction sales.

If you’re selling into enterprises, where more buy-in is required to purchase your product or services, this model works well.

#2. Research target accounts

For ABS to work – do your home-work, select the target markets your solutions would fit best.

• Talk to your sales stars. What customer profile spends the most? What customer profile is happiest with your product or services? What customer size buys your solution most frequently?
• Use your CRM and reports on past win by industry. Uncover the top 2-3 top industries/markets that buy your solution.
• Talk with your CEO and executives. What is their vision for the company? What problems do we fix and who would benefit?

List the markets and the companies within these markets - be sure to add in revenue, employee size, and location to your target list and whittle down to 10 to 20 accounts to maintain focus and make it easy to measure execution.

#3. Identify target persona and define messages

In large companies, it is nearly impossible to deal with only one contact.

Sellers must engage at different levels and within different departments. This can mean that they could engage with 10 people in a single account.

• Select the type of persona you need to contact and define:
• What do they do? what problems do they have? what success looks like for them?
• Where do they prefer to get market information from?
• For each persona (for example CISO, CIO, DevOps director etc…) – define the specific benefits that your solutions would bring to these important people.
• Create a specific value proposition for each persona. For example, a CISO could be more interested in saving cost, when a DevOp director could prefer to reduce dev time. Whatever the benefits make sure they are clearly defined and test them with your colleagues and existing customers.
• Now it is time to create a specific elevator speech for each persona that you and your SDR will use when reaching people within your target companies.
• If you are a senior professional, you will probably also design battle cards which include specific answers to specific objections.

#4. Engage continuously 

Now that you have your targets accounts and persona – you know their pains – you have defined the benefits your solution brings and you have developed a specific value proposition for each of them – it is time to reach out.

Enter “value Acceleration”

CRM organizes the sales process, it doesn't necessarily accelerate the sales process. 

A proper sales acceleration increases the velocity of the sales process.

-        It is about responding quickly to online leads

-        It is about cold calling the right way – the warm way!

-        It is about automating customised email campaigns

-        It is about information sharing with the community

-        It is about nurturing prospects and keep them informed

Value acceleration is a mix of software solution, a strong understanding of customers needs, accurate marketing cadence, aggressive but knowledgeable outreach campaigns.

#5. Monitor and measure activities

Nowadays with tools such as Hubspot and Outreach, it is easier to detect the more effective messages, and analyse which communications channel get the best result.

With engagement occurring across multiple contacts, someone within a target account will surface as your champion and this is where the sale process moves from Sales Development to Qualified account.

Clearly, we are still at the beginning of the sales process but nonetheless we reached an important stage where we finally speak directly to a targeted individual and this is where the fun starts.

This is where you want to use the best sales methodology for the early stage of the sales cycle – Challenger sales or SPIN for example….

This modest blog only scratches the surface but I hope it gives you a good introduction to the power of ABS.

John… good hunt

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Selling Disruptive Technology - Is there a better way to sell?

Selling Disruptive Technology

I would like to thank John (I hope life is great in San Diego) for asking me to write a few lines on provocative-based selling…

There is nothing new about the debate on sales methodology and what’s right for your company, however, there has been an uptake in the belief that disruptive technology start-ups need to adopt Challenger Sales methodology.

Even though I have sold disruptive techno most of my life and used the Challenger Sales with great effectiveness, I still love the “solution-selling” methodology and its principles can be very useful at the back end of the sales process.

In fact, I am a great believer that you can even be more successful when picking appropriate bits from different methodologies and applying them at the right stage of your sales process.

Provocative at the front-end of the sales process

Under the conventional solution-selling method that has prevailed since the 1980s, salespeople are trained to align a solution with an acknowledged customer needs and demonstrate why it is better than the competitions. 

When selling disruptive technology, customers might not know they have a need for your solution and, therefore, the vendor has nothing to align it with.

Introducing the “Challenger Sales” methodology; the vendor identified a process that is critical for its customers, develop a compelling point of view on how it is broken and what that meant in terms of cost, and then connected the problem to a solution that the vendor is offering.

Once you have identified a high-impact issue, one of the most difficult aspect of this methodology is to develop a provocation stance to help your customers recognize the issue.

In my experience, not many salespeople are capable of doing it on their own, therefore the marketing, sales and development teams must work together to put a strong business case behind our provocative stance.

Once we have the provocation stance, the proof for it and the solution to fix the issue – then we can present it to the right ears.  Start by convincing your customer’s internal sponsor, agree on the business case figures and move up the ladder.

Consultative at the back-end of the sales process

Now that you have displaced the traditional players, the “solution selling” principles can be useful at this stage.

Once you create the business case with your sponsor, educate the relevant stakeholders of the benefits, savings and ROI, then you enter the closing stage where your negotiations skills will be put to the test.

If you want to sharpen your negotiations skills – have a look at the books written by Roger Dawson.

https://www.rdawson.com/

Conclusion

Should every sales call your company pays from now on be a provocative one? 

Probably not, unless you are a start-up focused on one offering and one target market. 

Provocation-based sales cycles—though much quicker than solution sales cycles—are resource-intensive, so only a few can be run in parallel;

In fact, in my experience, provocative-based sales work very well when you follow an account-based selling strategy.

What??? (John added) An account-based selling strategy? What is this?

Well… I guess, John, this will be the subject of my next blog post.

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Selling Artificial Intelligence - the gap between POC and reality?

Selling Artificial Intelligence - the gap between POC and reality?

As a great fan of Isaac Asimov, I have always had a great interest in anything touching robotics and AI and when one of my former employers asked me for advice on closing an AI deal, I decided to create this blog.

AI is much more than just a technology to help robots and it seems that AI has countless potential applications in all industries, all around us.

Process improvement

Taking a specific industry like finance, which is one of my favourite markets, AI helps in many ways:

• Helping to provide faster and better selection for a credit decision.
• Reducing investment risk by analysing portfolio and leveraging risk issues
• Detecting money laundering by spotting suspicious activities and cutting the cost of investigations.
•  Providing smart chatbots to help customers and reducing call centres workload.
• Automating these myriads of high-frequency repetitive tasks. Robotic Process Automation (RPA), is of the five emerging technologies that JP Morgan Chase uses to enhance the cash management process.

It is clear that AI will have a significant impact on reshaping the business environment in the financial industry.

Can Citizen Data Scientists Help

However, despite 65% (Forbes) of executives expecting positive change from AI, only 30% of them have taken steps to implement AI in their companies.

Furthermore, a recent CIO article stated that while most IT leaders are aware of AI's potential, most organizations still lack the ability to effectively tackle adoption.  

In my opinion, one way to speed up the democratisation of AI would be, in parallel to appeal to Data Scientist, to approach the “citizen data scientist” and enable them to take their data, run it and apply it against different machine learning and deep learning models…to actually get information out the other end. 

Data scientists and their “citizen” counterparts working in tandem in order to get to a quick proof-of-concept (POC) and get more funding and move forward.

However, it seems that many of the AI POCs are struggling to transform into production and real projects.

Improving the chance of POCs success

Having done many POCs in my career, I could maybe apply some of my experience and discuss what can be done to improve the rate of transforming AI POCs into real projects.

1-   Even though POC are often carried out on rather simple algorithms using immediately available data, it is important that all parties consider right from the start the company environment, existing workflows, security and data privacy challenges.

It is clear that AI is a disruptive technology and the project will have a considerable impact on the company’s existing workflows. Ignoring how the AI project will eventually integrate within the working environment might be a rather costly mistake.     

2-   In light of the first point, it would be sensible to select for the first POC a solution that solves a rather simple process which could limit the working environment challenges and create a positive momentum within the organisations.

3-   For the AI POC to move to production, the organisation would need the skills to deploy it to scale and have a structure to support it. Planning and agreeing on a clear RACI chart and resource plan at the beginning would avoid a potential disheartened rejection when the management realises too late the cost and effort to deploy and run the solution.

4-   Specifically, for AI project, it seems that the availability of the data when going live is crucial. Therefore, working with data scientist to get access to real-world data (as opposed to manipulated samples) should reduce the gap between “real world” requirements and POC data set.

5-   If, as recommended in phase 1, we did our homework and understood from the start how the company is going to deliver the required data, we could work with the IT department to plan the integration of the solution within the company’s technical environment.

   

6-   For any project to succeed, you need to have a C-level champion within the organisation who understand the long-term benefit of the solution and be ready to fight for its survival with peers.   

Conclusion

First, a clear relation with the business function is necessary to better understand the business environment and technical challenges to integrating the solution within the corporate IT environment.

Secondly, funding of AI projects often come from the business functions budget so having a champion at C-level enable the project to be real and protected from others business requirements.

Third, a clear planning around access to data and integration to other sources enable to scale the project.

And lastly, given that AI solutions are often disruptive, read the "challenger sales" book (Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson) many times and apply the concepts to your sales process.

----------------- For the people who do not have time to read -------------------

Abstract to the Challenger  Sales

• Challenging customers’ thinking. Develop a deep understanding of your customer, and learn to push their thinking.
• Know their market. Teach your customer something new about competing within their market.
• Re-framing. Learn to re-frame the way a customer thinks about your category of solution.
• Control the conversation. Learn to stay in control of the sales conversation, and when to gently apply pressure.
• All products and services. The Challenger Sales Methodology will work for most industries, but for the complex large scale business sale, it’s even more vital

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The battle for cloud in Asia is heating up.

China is poised to become the second-largest cloud service market in 2019, worth $10.5 billion. The country will also become the fastest-growing market, with a projected 44.9% annual growth rate in the next five years.

Amazon is betting it can expand its cloud computing operations in China, despite announcing just last month that it will shutter its online retail operations there.

But while Amazon is upbeat about demand for cloud services in the region, it faces a familiar rival: Alibaba, whose grip on China's e-commerce market meant Amazon was unable to challenge.

In Asia, according to Gartner, AWS is not the big dog and Alibaba Cloud commands 19.6% of the market, compared to 11% for AWS and 8% for Microsoft.

One of the biggest advantages of being the "home team" comes from government regulations that have created barriers to foreign players entering the market.

Also, Alibaba Cloud over the years has created a powerful business ecosystem where it has invested in over 157 companies in China.

AWS, by contrast, will have an edge in winning over foreign companies that operate in China and have already been using AWS's products in offices outside the country.

AWS seems has high hopes for Southeast Asia's cloud services market which is expected to generate $40.32 billion in revenue by 2025, driven by increasing demand for cloud computing among emerging small and midsize business.


But it seems that governments across the region move toward stricter governance on cloud services similar to those in China requiring cloud services operators to store data in local data centers.

Indonesia, for example, ruled that the country's financial data should be housed within Indonesia. AWS announced that it is planning to launch multiple data centers in Jakarta, where Alibaba Cloud already has two.

Fascinating, battle and looking forward to seeing what Microsoft and Google are going to do.

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Cloud security - Busy Securing the Fort when Users Leave the Door Open?

Busy Securing the Fort when Users Leave the Door Open?

There have been few technological innovations that have impacted the course of business processes as much as the cloud. The promise of the cloud offers faster communications, greater collaboration, and a more profitable bottom line. Conversely, cloud infrastructure also creates new security vulnerabilities which enterprises struggle to patch.

It is a never-ending work for the enterprise security team to select, deploy and configure the best security solutions for their environment.

However, on a day to day basis they are faced with the ONE consistent problem that continues to plague security solutions worldwide. Is the generation of too many alerts to the enterprise security teams and the burn out of professionals overwhelmed by a false positive?

The most dangerous and insidious threat of all

Whilst your security team focus on perimeter defenses and endpoint security, there is one element that your CISOs could easily deal with. This is probably the most dangerous and insidious security threat your company have to face with: “The internal misconfiguration of cloud resources.”

Cloud misconfiguration is one of the most preventable, yet common security issues facing organizations migrating to the cloud today.

A simple misconfiguration to set a single option in a company’s cloud service can create a major security risk for the organization and its customers. Almost every day, news of a new data breach spreads like wildfire online. Virtually everyone with any kind of digital footprint has fallen victim to having their personal information made public.

A Common Issue “Cloud Misconfiguration” 

Misconfiguration means that the public cloud server instances, such as storage and compute, are configured in such a way that they are vulnerable to breaches.

Cloud misconfiguration is a matter of human error. In many cases, dev ops or IT professionals accustomed to local infrastructure attempt to recreate their local solutions in the cloud, uneducated and unaware of the intricacies of working with a cloud provider’s particular set of features.

Run Books? Who reads manuals?

The cloud has created a lot of excitement within organizations and many departments such as DevOps, Marketing, Sales, Product development people are busy giving their company a new competitive edge in their respective markets and use cloud resources to do so.  The reality is that cloud configuration is complex, and many companies are still immature. Even though companies are using run books and best practices documents, users simply forget to follow the rules.

While simple misconfiguration seems like a “duh, dummy” moment, the reality is, if it's not done right any security systems layered by the security department on top of your cloud can’t stop hackers running away with your data.

So, what are you to do?

• Use a cloud management company, such as Cass, which will use their supervision tool to constantly monitor your cloud resources and immediately spot configurations holes.
• Protect your security team from false alerts, by using the experts within Cass to diagnose and filter the wave of alerts.
• Go straight to the answer by using Cass recommendations to fix the security mishap.

The complexities of cloud computing, and the chance of human error will hurt you if you do not do anything and can ruin all the security measures you are putting in place to keep undesirable visitors out.

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