5 Tips to Maximise Your Small Business SEO
Traditional online marketing techniques such as paid digital advertising work, but advertising costs have left small businesses struggling to compete. An effective alternative to paid advertising is search engine optimisation (SEO), which allows your small business to stay competitive and keep costs relatively low.All it takes are the seeds of a robust strategy, a bit of hard work, and time for the fruits of your labour to become reality. If you’re looking maximise your small business SEO, you find these tips, benefits and services beneficial.What you’ll learn:What is SEO and how does it work?What is small business SEO?Five tips to do small business SEO rightThree benefits of small business SEOHow should small businesses get started with SEO?How to choose small-business SEO servicesWhat is SEO and how does it work?SEO is a technique to improve a website’s organic visibility online. The goal is to have your web property show up as close to the top of the first page of a search engine’s results as possible (such as Google). Well-executed small business SEO can increase traffic to your website without having to pay for an ad.Many components can contribute to better organic visibility. A few that are the most important include the page’s content, targeting the right keywords, and backlinks. Good SEO also hinges on some technical aspects, such as site speed and mobile optimisation.Before jumping into the details, here’s a glossary of common SEO terms:Organic search results: This is also called the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). When a search engine user types a query or search term into a search engine like Google, a list of results is generated. This list is made up of the most relevant pages to that keyword.Keyword ranking: This is your web page’s exact position in search results for a specific keyword. Most web searches result in hundreds of pages of results, and usually there are ten or more results on a page. The closer you are to ranking number one on the first page, the more visitors and in turn the more traffic your website will receive.Local search/Local SEO: This aspect of SEO is used to promote a local business online. For example, if a user types “shoe store Boston” into the search engine, the search results will list the web properties of any shoe stores in Boston that rank well for that keyword. This is very different from just typing in “shoe store”, which would likely turn up online retailers not specific to a geography.Backlinks: These are links from other websites to yours. Backlinks can help increase your page authority and keyword ranking. But if you’re not careful, they can decrease both and hurt your website’s ranking. Check to make sure you only have backlinks from reputable sources bringing traffic to your page. Every couple of months, keep an eye out for anything that looks spammy and disavow the links to prevent them from bringing down your ranking.Technical SEO: The technical side of SEO, as opposed to the content side, ensures that search engines can crawl and index your website (meaning “read” your content and know how to rank it against similar content). Technical small business SEO focuses on backend information like your HTML code, site speed and mobile optimisation (see below), your sitemap, and website architecture. Site speed: How long does it take for your website to load? This is your site speed. Google considers this an important factor when ranking websites in search results. The search engine favours websites that load more quickly and efficiently because it improves the user experience. If your site is bogged down by heavy images or videos, for example, and not designed to load quickly, it will take a hit in search.Mobile optimisation: How your website displays on mobile devices is another important factor in website ranking. If you built your web property on a desktop and did not check to see that it scales on a variety of mobile devices, your site will take a hit in its search results.What is small business SEO?Small business SEO is the process of improving your small business’ website presence on search engines, so it is visible in queries that relate to what you offer.There is a difference between small business SEO and local SEO. Local helps businesses appear in location-based search results. While it may overlap, some small businesses need to leverage local traffic, however, small business SEO is now global, worldwide due to digital demand. If you’re an SMB that can ship your product or service anywhere, local SEO doesn’t make sense to you.SEO is important for SMBs as it helps you increase organic traffic without spending money on advertisements — something all small business has to navigate. When your website ranks higher in search, you drive more traffic, generate more engagement, make more sales, and gain more loyal customers. You see the beautiful arc here, it’s every SMBs dream.Five tips to do small business SEO rightThese tips will help you understand how to implement SEO for your small business.1. SEO is not only for GoogleAs a small and growing business, your site should look good on Google. But depending on your audience, other sites may be equally as valuable (or more so), including Amazon, Reddit, Yelp, YouTube, Instagram, and others that have their own SEO strategies. Figure out where you want to spend the majority of your efforts and start there.2. SEO strategy is effective, but not instantWhile SEO isn’t free or instant, it is effective. How long it takes for SEO to work depends on where you start. If you are in the early stages of building out your SEO strategy, expect at least six months to see results – even more if you’re building a new website. Remember that SEO is a continual process and it builds upon itself.The foundation you lay during those first months will make the process easier later. The more effort you devote to SEO, the harder it will be for your competitors to outperform you.3. Target the right keywordsPlan your online content with keywords specific to your business. Not sure which keywords to target? Use a keyword research tool such as Ahrefs, SEMRush, AnswerThePublic or BuzzSumo; there are a few that aren’t too costly. This will help the right audience find your most relevant content and website.4. Write for humans first, and search engines secondHigh-quality, engaging, and relevant content that incorporates the targeted keyword will entice people to stay on your website, read for longer, and interact with more content. If you can, consider answering popular questions relevant to your business. Showcase solutions your customers would want to see.Tempting as it may be, do not include irrelevant keywords or content that is stuffed to the brim with the same keyword. Your human readers won’t stand for it, and this content will negatively impact your search visibility. Search engines strongly take this into consideration when determining which results to display.5. Maximise local search to your advantageYour small business can find huge success targeting local searches. As the stats prove, people searching locally are potential customers waiting to be converted. According to Sagapixel data, almost half of all the searches on Google have local intent. Seventy-two percent of consumers that perform a local search visit a store within five miles of their current location.When doing local search optimisation, be sure to claim your Google Business page. This will help you show up in Google maps and in “near me” search results. For more localised results, weave your specific city or state in with your target keyword.Benefits of small business SEOAccording to BrightEdge research, organic search accounts for 53% of all online traffic and contributes to 44% of revenue share. SEO brings in more online readers through organic search – the largest digital channel. SEO improves brand awareness. Good SEO will help you to show up ahead of competitors in search results. If researching prospects come across your site, your brand will be top of mind when they are ready to make a purchase.If done correctly, SEO is highly effective – but it’s not something that happens overnight. It takes time and effort to set the foundation, but once you have it, the rewards are great. Like growing a plant, the more you nurture your SEO, the more it will grow.How should small businesses get started with SEO?The first step is to complete a technical audit and a content audit. Audits highlight areas where you are doing well and areas that need improvement. An audit is a great place to start whether you have done a little bit of SEO or none at all. Once your audit is completed, you will know the exact scope of work needed to improve your SEO.Conduct a content audit for SEOA content audit should do two things: Help uncover opportunities for new content, and highlight existing content needing attention. It should be a full list of all your web content, like blogs, combined with traffic, engagement, ranking keywords, and backlink data.Learn more about content audits here.Conduct a technical audit for SEOThe technical audit will show you areas where your website structure and backend need improvement. Highlight pages with missing or duplicative page titles or meta descriptions. You should also track page speed, broken links, or redirect chains on each page. You can even get more technical and dive into canonical tags, hreflang, or schema markup.Learn more about technical audits here.How to choose small-business SEO servicesNot sure you want to tackle this all yourself? There’s no shortage of SEO experts waiting to help small businesses with an SEO strategy. Finding the right agency or person should be as important as getting the right strategy.While an in-house SEO expert is probably not a viable option for your small business, there are other ways to get your SEO needs met. Many agencies offer a variety of packages to suit small businesses. Some may even propose a flat rate contract based on the services you want.This option will let you know the project’s exact cost and guarantee fulfillment. If you are willing to do the work but need guidance to get started, you can look into hourly SEO consultants.As with most business services, you get what you pay for when it comes to SEO. You want whomever you hire to provide you with quality recommendations. Here are some questions to ask a potential agency:What niches do you specialise in?What does the process look like, and what will you be working on month-to-month?What is your link building strategy?How do you track progress?How do you report?How often will you review and update the strategy?Do you have any case studies of similar projects?Is there a minimum term commitment?Whether you decide to tackle SEO on your own or hire an expert, it is critical to have the right SEO foundation and strategy. In the long run this can be a huge benefit to your business and your bottom line.Digital marketer and SEO professional Rosy Callejas contributed to this article.
5 Ways a CRM Can Help Financial Services Close the Personalisation Gap
Digital transformation has been an imperative for financial services institutions over the course of the pandemic. The LIKE.TG Trends in Financial Services report shows that as customer demand for advanced digital capabilities soared, the financial services industry prioritised implementing new technologies over improving customer experience. However, this has left only 27% of customers feeling the financial services industry is customer-centric. Rather than replacing customer experience with the implementation of new technologies, there is an opportunity here for both of these priorities to work hand-in-hand. Indeed, new technologies, including customer relationship management (CRM) tools, can help create the personalised experiences customers demand from their banks and insurers. 1. Enabling a seamless omni-channel experience Digital-first fintechs are already offering digitised personalisation. This inspires traditional banks and insurers to digitally transform as well. With face-to-face meetings with customers becoming less common, it’s essential for financial services institutions to offer innovative alternatives. Using a CRM for financial services can help. By bringing together real-time customer data from multiple sources and channels, a conversation can move seamlessly from chat bot to Messenger to email to phone call and back again. Given that 65% of customers say they often have to repeat information to different representatives, this kind of continuity is essential to providing personalised service. Digital engagement is built into the LIKE.TG Financial Services Cloud platform, giving companies a 360-degree view of the customer. This interaction never falters as information from one encounter is carried through to the next in a timely, collaborative way. Banks and insurers often grapple with multiple systems, processes, and teams in an effort to create connected experiences for their customers. MuleSoft can integrate multiple systems to support the omni-channel experience that customers desire. 2. Making every communication count Meeting the digital transformation imperative doesn’t mean bombarding the customer with emails and messages just because you can. Rather, it’s about using technology to offer relevant communications to the right customer at the right time. The State of the Connected Customer report showed that 52% of customers expect offers to always be personalised. Financial Services Cloud can facilitate personalised interactions with client profiles centred on personal goals, pivotal life events, and business milestones. It can help businesses nurture deeper relationships by staying in touch with proactive tracking and event alerts to remind you to reach out when a customer needs you most. Tools like Email Studio segment audiences so banks and insurers can filter profiles rapidly and make relevant offerings to the customers most likely to respond. Journey Builder can expand on personalised communications by helping banks and insurers to deliver the right information to customers not just via email, but across web landing pages, ads, and apps. Instead of getting one-size-fits all solutions, customers are guided through a journey that adapts to real-time events like purchases, app downloads, or service cases. 3. Predicting needs with artificial intelligence Key to solving a customer’s problem is knowing the customer. With CRM providing a single source of truth, the information needed to address an issue is always at hand. A CRM tool that leverages the power of artificial intelligence (AI) can take that customer knowledge and personalisation to the next level. With Einstein, banking and insurance representatives can get deeper insights into their customers. Have they bought a new house or had a baby? Were they made redundant during the pandemic? Did they buy a new car? It’s the kind of knowledge that allows banks and insurers to engage more proactively with their customers and more accurately forecast problems and opportunities. Einstein Discovery, together with Tableau and Financial Services Cloud, allows banks and insurers to prescribe corrective actions to help minimise client churn and maximise opportunities to grow account assets. Einstein Relationship Insights (ERI) brings critical insights from disparate sources (including the web, news, and internal and external documents) to uncover the most relevant information for every customer and reveal new leads. AI capabilities can also help banking and insurance representatives engage with more empathy. This quality is in increasingly high demand, and one that represents a valuable competitive advantage. LIKE.TG research shows that 68% of customers expect the companies they engage with to demonstrate empathy, but only 37% say this actually happens. Transparency and regulatory compliance around how personal information is gathered and accessed is crucial. With consumers more aware of digital privacy regulations, having a clear data protection policy presents an opportunity to nurture a relationship of trust with the customer. 4. Supporting collaboration Integrated with LIKE.TG Financial Services Cloud, Slack is a powerful tool for collaboration that ultimately helps improve the customer experience. Slack enables banking and insurance representatives to pull in the right people and the right data for a conversation in the context of a specific opportunity, case, or campaign. Case swarming is a collaborative approach to customer service. Service agents can resolve issues by calling upon expertise from other teams, while simultaneously guiding the customer. Slack’s integration with CRM gives a 360-degree view of the customer, while the channel format allows the representative to gain input at speed. In corporate and investment banking, Slack integrates with Financial Services Cloud to offer dedicated deal rooms. These rooms are where all the parties involved in a complex sale can stay on top of the ebb and flow of account activities. For investment banking and advisory teams competing to win more deal mandates, Slack and Financial Services Cloud are now purpose-built for deal teams. Together, both can help fuel productivity with actionable insights and research, a deeper understanding of clients, and built-in compliance to collaborate and share sensitive information throughout the lifecycle of a deal. 5. Using automation for efficiency and personalisation Automation has a key role to play in improving efficiencies and the customer experience in financial services. Whether it’s opening a new bank account, applying for a loan, updating an insurance policy, or reporting a stolen card, customers expect a seamless digital process. CRM can help achieve this by automating as much of the process as possible. That could include forms that are automatically populated with the customer’s data or automating a series of personalised emails that take the customer through the loan application process. Digital Process Automation (DPA) can extend the power of Financial Services Cloud by providing click-based configuration and integration tools that simplify the creation and delivery of branded, automated customer experiences. As autonomous finance emerges across the banking and insurance sectors, automating tasks such as account transfers or claims processing will further leverage the power of AI to deliver optimised, personalised customer experiences. Discover six strategies for using a CRM to deliver the personalised experiences customers want. Download our e-book, Hyper-personalisation: Key to the Future of Digital Banking in ASEAN, here.
5 Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Advertising Sales
Artificial intelligence (AI) is getting real in the marketing suite. When asked where they planned to invest this year, marketers ranked AI as their #1 priority, according to our most recent State of Marketing Report. AI adoption is surging: 84% of marketers reported they use AI somewhere in their acquisition and retention engines, up almost three times over just two years ago. What are these intrepid marketers doing with AI? Reported uses are expanding rapidly, from enhanced personalisation to improved segmentation, insight discovery, predictive modeling, and process automation. Advertising technology also rode the wave of big data-driven AI adoption, as programmatic platforms revolutionised the process of buying and selling digital ads. Programmatic ad sales are soaring, from $60 billion in 2019 to an estimated $97 billion in 2022, according to eMarketer. It may seem from some angles that ad sales would become a kind of self-driving car, requiring the occasional redirect but not much else from the salesperson. How do these salespeople feel about the impact of AI on their world? Two words: cautiously optimistic. On the one hand, 86% of sales executives see AI as having a positive influence on their future roles, according to our latest research. However, 68% of the same executives voiced concerns, primarily about the ongoing relevance of their current jobs. Thirty-one percent said automation might ultimately hurt the “art” of selling, as human-to-human relationships are replaced by optimised digital touchpoints. Five reasons to be happy about AI in ad sales Despite a natural fear of the unknown, there are good reasons to believe AI will make the business and — yes — the current jobs of ad salespeople better. It augments selling while leaving people to do what they do best: be human. AI can level the playing field for both advertisers and publishers, giving even hard-working salespeople who don’t work for Fortune 100 tech or media companies the tools they wished they’d had in the past. These AI-driven superpowers can help sales professionals improve both their effectiveness (how well their product works) and their efficiency (speed and productivity). 1. Better data unification and harmonisation With the impending deprecation of the third-party cookie in Chrome and Apple’s ongoing privacy changes, marketers are looking to first-party data to power their programs — including media programs. An impressive 88% of marketers said first-party data was a strategic priority for them in 2021, according to Merkle’s 2021 Customer Engagement Report. For publishers, first-party data is key to building audiences that advertisers need; and for advertisers, first-party data is increasingly important as a seed for matching, targeting, and lookalikes. However, first-party data is often fragmented and poorly organised, as well as complex. For example, 64% of customers start a purchase journey on one device and finish on another, per LIKE.TG research. Marketers face a daunting average of 12 major sources of customer data, up 20% from 2020, according to our State of Marketing Report. Often the data sitting in these sources contain inconsistent identification information (IDs), out-of-date information, and eccentric taxonomies. AI can often be combined with a solution such as a Customer Data Platform to greatly improve identity matching. Algorithms can be applied to perform “fuzzy matching” on IDs and resolve discrepancies. AI can also be used to make sure data from different systems is mapped to a common data model to ensure consistency. 2. Stronger segmentation and audience discovery Customers of today, especially digitally native millennials, say they expect relevant experiences: that is, messages that are useful and timely in the context of their digital lives. Delivering a personalised experience requires both organised data and intelligent algorithms to find segments and uncover needs that are difficult to uncover using manual methods. AI excels at smart segmentation — uncovering groups of customers and prospects who have attributes in common — at a scale and depth that isn’t possible for human analysts. AI algorithms can traverse billions of rows of customer data looking for patterns that might mean the difference between a valuable publisher audience and the same old “18-to-35 mom.“ For example, imagine a publisher with an established audience of science fiction enthusiasts. Suppose there is a significant subgroup of people who prefer robot-driven stories to human-driven stories, but there is no way to tell that without combining data from content analysis, web analytics, social listening, email, and commerce. Without AI, the publisher would sell a broad “Sci-Fi Lovers” segment. With AI, they can hyper-target “Gear-Head Sci-Fi” to — say — a campaign for a futuristic new vehicle. 3. Natural language interfaces with technology Few areas of AI have more potential for impact on our lives than natural-language processing (NLP) and image recognition. Already we’ve seen the rapid rise of conversational chatbots in service. Voice interfaces are familiar to any of us who have ever asked Alexa to tell us a joke or told Siri that we’re in the mood for sushi. Voice is already built into call centre software and some analytics tools, but marketing technology is at the beginning of the adoption curve. Imagine an ad salesperson never having to touch a keypad again or — even better — have to click through drop-downs and menus looking for exactly the right command to select. AI can reduce these time sinks, as speech recognition approaches 95%+ accuracy and voice navigation becomes commonplace. Efficiency will increase (less key clicking), and so will completeness (less reason to procrastinate in updating call records or ideas). The outcome is less time spent searching and updating and more time spent selling. 4. More efficient back-end processes and production We’ve already mentioned how AI can help automate manual data plumbing and “munging” tasks such as ID mapping and harmonisation. It can also help make salespeople more efficient by prioritising their efforts, sifting through tasks and leads, and focusing their efforts. One of the first areas of the sales process to benefit from AI was lead scoring. Despite initial reluctance from some sales teams — “What can a machine tell me about a good lead? I know one when I see one!” — many now routinely use algorithms to improve their priority lists. The same is true for tasks from summarising call notes to planning the best way to get from one customer meeting to another, in which order. For ad salespeople, AI can help match available inventory with direct-sales opportunities that are most likely to close, minimising time spent on frustrating low-likelihood leads. 5. Improved measurement and optimisation Accelerated by the pandemic, digital advertising’s rise has been impressive. More than half of all ad spend is now digital, with an increasing proportion flowing through the largest platforms and publishers. AI can help to ingest and analyse all that data in a way that helps both publishers and advertisers estimate the impact of campaigns on desired outcomes, such as sales. Measuring the impact of multi-channel campaigns requires ingesting information from dozens of sources and applying complex models to determine which creative elements, channels, devices, publishers, and tactics (such as time of day or ad size) made an impact. “Noise” can include factors such as competitive moves — Did they run a sale at the same time? Was there a new product launch? — the economy, and even the weather. AI is well suited to help ad salespeople separate signal from noise and identify what works and what doesn’t. Some leading AI-driven tools already provide automated optimisation recommendations based on the historical performance of marketing and ads. AI excels at automating tasks that are mundane, and also at sifting through daunting amounts of data at dizzying speed. Humans do not. By letting the AI assistants do what they do best, we are already making ad sales jobs less artificial and more intelligent. This post was originally published on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
5 Ways Financial Services Can Drive Profitability Through a Unified Customer Experience
Increased competition, changing customer expectations, and the rise of omni-channel experiences are all driving change for financial services. This means financial services institutions need to evolve the way they engage customers to stay competitive. “A lot of financial institutions have to reimagine their operating model, as many banks and insurers are disintermediated by fintechs and insuretechs,” said Cyril Cymbler, VP Financial Services Practice EMEA & ASEAN, LIKE.TG. He was speaking during a discussion at the recent IDC Asian Financial Services Congress 2022. “To overcome that challenge, banks and insurers are focusing on initiatives to simplify their processes and create efficiencies, while improving the customer experience.” This shift highlights the link between customer relationships and profitability. However, LIKE.TG research revealed that in recent years, exceptional customer service and support became more important than ever due to changing customer expectations in the digital age. This presents a massive opportunity for financial services institutions to stand out among the competition by elevating the customer experience. How are customer journeys being reimagined in response? What opportunities exist to drive profitability? Here are five strategies to help financial services institutions drive profitability through a unified customer experience. For details on this infographic, please click here.
5 Ways Marketing Is Changing in ASEAN Countries
Marketers are coming to terms with major changes like evolving customer expectations, advances in technology and tools, and new ways of working. How is the profession adapting to face future challenges and seize opportunities? According to the latest edition of our State of Marketing report, marketers are now focused on a future of innovation and real-time engagement. We surveyed over 8,200 marketing leaders from all over the world for this report. More than 1,700 participants came from Southeast Asia. We have pulled out the insights specific to marketers in ASEAN countries. Some might be a surprise, and some are a call to action. Others show how marketing professionals in this region are staying ahead of the curve. Read the infographic below to learn more: For details on this infographic, please click here.
5 Ways Retailers Can Innovate and Stay Relevant Amidst COVID-19
In an industry as diverse as retail, it’s no surprise the impact of COVID-19 has been uneven. Department stores, for example, struggle due to store closures and reduced foot traffic. On the other hand, some ecommerce players are attracting new shoppers and experiencing record growth. Our LIKE.TG Shopping Index revealed that parts of Asia experienced 200% year-over-year (YoY) digital revenue growth in April, as a result of more consumers spending online. This is positive news not only for those succeeding online already, but for retailers ready to embrace digital opportunities. I discussed how retailers can recover and grow post-COVID-19 during a recent joint webinar with eTail. Joining me on the panel were representatives from some of Asia’s most innovative retailers: Pomelo Fashion, Gojek, and Razer. The consensus was clear: retailers need to accelerate their digital strategies and stay relevant to customer needs. Jean Thomas, CMO of Pomelo Fashion, made the point that engaging customers on their preferred digital platforms was an imperative even before the pandemic: Innovation is not just about cutting edge technology. It’s about meeting your customers where they’re at and finding meaningful ways to add value. Here are five practical examples of how retailers innovated and stayed relevant. 1. Double down on shopper experience There’s a distinct rise in different ways to buy online. Customers can use apps, messaging platforms, social media, smart speakers, and more. We call this shopping at the edge, where brands provide customers with experiences and transaction opportunities on the channels where they’re already spending time. Antoine De Carbonnel, Chief Commercial Officer at Gojek, said they are helping retailers and consumer packaged goods companies understand the different channels where they can sell. 2. Embracing contactless engagement Contactless payments are not new. But with COVID-19, we’ve seen more brands embrace tap-to-pay options and contactless delivery. Some new services, like curbside pickup or free click and collect, are likely to remain popular in the early business reopening phase and could be here to stay. One example is the You Shop We Drop service introduced by Gaysorn Village, a high-end mall in Thailand. Customers can shop online and pick up their goods at designated locations, without leaving their cars. 3. Responding with empathy and creativity It’s been inspiring to see many brands living their values and pivoting their businesses to do social good. We saw this with Razer, which used its production line to produce more than a million masks for the Singapore community. Yvonne Lim, Global eCommerce Director at Razer, says: 4. Turning every employee into a brand hero Employees are the real brand heroes in retail. Brands have been focused on employee health and safety, while finding ways for everyone to stay productive. This has led to dynamic new offerings like digital concierge services, where in-store employees can apply their skills at home. Beauty brand Sephora, for example, lets customers book online makeup and skincare consultations with the retailer’s beauty experts. COVID-19 has also sparked conversations on the future of customer service and whether some teams still require a physical location. These conversations will continue as retailers shift their business strategies. 5. Improving merchandise agility and visibility Retailers have been working behind the scenes to minimise disruption to their supply chains. Building on this, retailers should be able to provide customers with up-to-the minute inventory visibility. This is important as customers are now more selective about how they shop. Customers don’t want to visit a physical store, only to find out something’s not available. The ONI Global website, for example, allows customers to see which health products are available, so that they know what they want before going to the store. Takeaway Customer demand for frictionless experiences on- and offline haven’t changed. However, the last few months have put a megaphone on the demands that customers have continued to request. To meet these demands, retailers need to listen and respond in a fast and personalised way. Register for LIKE.TG Live: Asia and learn how retailers like ONI Global and Toys”R”Us Asia are responding to customers and navigating today’s new business environment.
5 Ways Sansiri Creates a Cohesive Customer Journey
Marketers must create a cohesive customer journey across channels and devices. This is the top priority for Thai marketers, as revealed in the 7th edition State of Marketing report. Kavin Manomaiudom is VP and Group Head of Tech BI at Thailand property developer, Sansiri. He believes creating a cohesive customer journey begins with digital transformation. “It’s about cultural, organisational, and operational change,” he shared at a LIKE.TG webinar. “We must combine an agile mindset with processes and tools to deliver value to customers.” Mr Manomaiudom outlines five ways Sansiri is creating a more cohesive customer journey. 1. Respond to changing customer behaviours Sansiri turned to LIKE.TG three years ago to begin its digital transformation. Mr Manomaiudom says LIKE.TG technology helps the company identify changing customer behaviours. This has been vital to staying agile during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Before COVID-19 hit Thailand, our customers were visiting showrooms in person,” he says. “Now, we have a significant number of customers viewing our properties virtually. We needed to react fast by adjusting our marketing priorities.” Mr Manomaiudom says that means using customer data “to know more, see more, and do more. Marketers must leverage customer data to analyse and understand changes in customer behaviour.” 2. Map customer journeys New customer journeys must align with changing customer behaviours. Sansiri used Marketing Cloud and Journey Builder to map a range of new customer journeys. Mr Manomaiudom explains that it’s helpful to begin with the customer’s end destination. Then reverse engineer the customer journey. “We always begin with the end in mind,” he says. “Our customer journeys at Sansiri have evolved with COVID-19. To date, we have built a total of 25 journeys. This has decreased customer attrition. These journeys have also increased sales conversion across all customer touch points.” 3. Personalise customer communications Link customer communications to specific points on each customer journey. Doing so helps to personalise customer communications. Sansiri uses marketing automation to achieve this. “We send an automated email to remind customers about their viewing appointments,” Mr Manomaiudom says. “We also send relevant messages to convert our customers when they register online.” This, says Mr Manomaiudom, has doubled conversions. “It helps us make sure we are achieving good return on investment (ROI) against our marketing spend.” 4. Innovate digital payments Payment is a critical point on every customer journey. Sansiri launched an online payment gateway during the pandemic. The company also now accepts cryptocurrency. Mr Manomaiudom says that digital payment innovations help to engage the younger generation. This stimulates revenue growth. “One of our big steps is to make cryptocurrency purchases in the real estate sector a reality,” he explains. “Especially amongst the young generations who are keen on using this technology.” 5. Stay agile and use data as your guide Customer behaviour may continue to change over next 12 months. Mr Manomaiudom says marketers need to stay agile. They also need to track campaign ROI, and shift priorities when needed. “We started to shift our advertising budget to online, but surprisingly did not see as strong returns for some product segments and some zoning,” he explains. “As a result, we reallocated the budget back to offline marketing. “Marketers must be agile to run successful campaigns, stay on budget, and hit KPIs. You must be adaptive at all times and do not stick with what might work.” Rather, use customer data to identify what will work. This is how marketers adapt to change and keep delivering cohesive customer journey. Download LIKE.TG’s 7th edition State of Marketing report in English or Thai for more marketing trends and insights.
5 Ways Tech Businesses Can Drive Gender Equality
In her role at LIKE.TG, Wendy leads marketing in the region; helping businesses grow and connect with their customers, partners, and employees. As a passionate advocate for Equality, she is also President of the LIKE.TG Women’s Network; with a charter to empower, invest, and amplify the progress of women, creating gender-equality allies and taking action on equality. This year we mark International Women’s Day on March 8. Established in 1911, the purpose of this day is to take the time to acknowledge the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women everywhere. Even as women have blazed new trails, women still face unequal opportunities in every aspect of professional and public life. Since gender inequality still exists, International Women’s Day raises awareness about how far we need to go. Pre-COVID, the World Economic Forum estimated, at the current rate of progress, it would take 257 years to close the gender gap. Initial evidence shows the pandemic has stymied this already slow progress and has disproportionately impacted women globally. But even before the pandemic, LIKE.TG’s commitment to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including Goal 5: Gender Equality, ensured our ongoing support of equity and inclusion initiatives. For instance, Tableau Foundation joined the Equal Measures 2030 Partnership Council last year to support women data journalists and increase opportunities for women and girls. While women represent 46.9% of the global labour force, only 29% hold managerial positions. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, pay equity in the workplace won’t reach gender parity until 2059. It is clear work needs to be done. To start, we can acknowledge interactions with colleagues and in our community can impact others and our efforts can move the needle. Here are ways you can support gender equality in tech: 1. Create and support gender equality programs in the workplace The first step in driving gender equality is to make time and room for authentic conversations on women’s issues. Advocate for holding internal meetings, like town halls, to create safe spaces to educate allies, share personal experiences, and provide resources. Use the outcomes of these meetings to mobilise and shift company culture. At our annual gender equality event, the Trailblazing Women Summit, we invite speakers from outside our company to elevate conversations around gender equality in tech, business, media, politics, and other industries. In Asia, we’re holding internal activities this week to support focus areas of inclusion, equality, and philanthropy. Our employees will host 150 one-on-one mentoring sessions with young people throughout the region. They will also participate in I am Remarkable sessions to celebrate achievements in the workplace and learn through discussion. We’ll come together in an Inspiration Circle to get energised for the year ahead. We’re also proud to host a fireside chat with President of Daughters of Tomorrow, Kim Underhill. We’ll explore how it helps women from the low-income community access sustainable livelihood opportunities. Our internal employee resource group, LIKE.TG Women’s Network (SWN), produced these events to empower and inspire employees to lead without limitation. 2. Offer inclusive benefits to all employees As a company, reevaluate your benefits package to promote gender equality. LIKE.TG offers benefits to support individuals and families no matter where they are in their life. We offer paid parental leave for all parents, childcare subsidies, surrogacy and fertility benefits, paid family sick time, and flexible time off. During the past year, additional support benefits to parents included enhanced family benefits such as child education or childcare at home and caregiver support for elderly or infirmed relatives. Beyond generous inclusive benefits, we encourage employees to take their work-life balance seriously. For example, when tennis star Serena Williams and husband Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian welcomed their first child together, Ohanian took 16 weeks of paternity leave. 3. Perform a company-wide equal pay audit Pay parity is one of the most obvious ways inequality shows up in the workplace between men and women. To address and understand compensation gaps, conduct a comprehensive equal pay audit. This ensures a readjustment so all employees are paid equally for equal work, regardless of gender. LIKE.TG conducts an annual pay audit to ensure equal pay with our current employees. Since our first equal pay audit, we have invested more than US$12 million to address any unexplained compensation inequities between men and women. 4. Consider intersectionality in all equity decisions Intersectionality takes into account the whole person as an individual when experiencing multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism and sexism) and how this overlapping reality can’t be separated out. It is particularly prominent in experiences of marginalised individuals or groups. Women are often underrepresented in the business world, but the additional challenges for intersectional women can be different. For people who don’t face these intersectional challenges, unconscious bias training can assist in understanding and navigating complexities around equality. If you have programs and resources around gender equality, consider ways to highlight specific intersections and how they may affect underrepresented groups. For example, at LIKE.TG, we have 12 employee resources groups. We encourage groups like LIKE.TG Women’s Network (SWN) and Outforce (LGBTQIA and allies) to work together and elevate the discussions around the nuances found at this intersection. 5. Be an ally An ally is someone who advances the rights of, supports, and advocates for a community they may not identify as belonging to. At LIKE.TG, we say allies ask, listen, show up, and speak up for one another. We also recognise allyship is a journey. We know that some may be at the very start — curious — they want to learn more. Others may be further along the journey and are — courageous – ready to use their voice or platform to speak up. We strive to create a workplace that reflects the diverse communities around us and where everyone feels seen, heard, valued, and empowered to succeed. We have created the SWN Inclusive Allies program to help raise awareness about gender equality through a specific ASEAN regional lens and to offer guidance to colleagues who want to support equality through allyship. The program will give everyone an opportunity to share a common language, tools, and actions to practice being a stronger ally. It consists of a series of workshops and materials where our employees can learn more about gender equality and be inspired to be an ally. If you are a leader, think of ways to use your platform to advance a woman’s career and promote gender equality in your business. Just as technology companies have revolutionised and disrupted industries, we are in a unique position to lead the way for equality. To reach gender equality, we all need to take consistent steps along this journey. Learn more about our inclusive leadership practices and how to champion equality in business. Finally, use Trailhead to reflect on the value of diversity and inclusion at work and what you can do to promote equality. Portions of this article are based on ideas written by Isabel Gonçalves for The 360 Blog.
5 Ways To Acquire and Retain the Best Talent
The Great Resignation: it’s a concept plaguing organisations globally, and the ASEAN region is no exception. In Singapore, for example, a survey by jobs portal Indeed revealed that 24% of workers intend to leave their current employer in the first half of 2022. Forty-nine percent are unsure if they will stay in their positions for the next six months. So, what’s driving this instability? There are a few factors at play. For one, many employees are re-evaluating what they want from their careers in the wake of the pandemic. Another contributing factor is around retention. Securing a great employee is all well and good. However, if you’re not working to keep them engaged, you risk losing them. In fact, outstanding employee experience (EX) has become the competitive edge no business can afford to ignore. Why? Because highly engaged employees improve customer satisfaction and revenue. Now more than ever, a large number of the workforce is considering ditching their employer for a better offer. Having been recognised as one of the Best Workplaces in Asia for the fifth year in a row, we’ve collected a few tips to help you attract the best talent and keep them engaged. 1. Embrace new ways of working Having a flexible work environment is no longer optional. According to the EY 2021 Work Reimagined Employee Survey, six in 10 respondents in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesian and the Philippines said they would quit their jobs if not provided post-pandemic flexibility. However, 60% of Singaporean respondents to the LIKE.TG APAC Employee Engagement Report said their employers have limited or no technology to support flexible work. This disconnect will be a big driver in employee turnover, as flexible work practices become the norm, not the exception. In a tightening labour market, the most competitive talent will demand flexibility. If your business cannot fully support remote work, it will put you at a disadvantage. Here at LIKE.TG, we’ve adopted a “success from anywhere” mentality, reimagining the physical office as a digital one. Our employees can cut down on time-consuming commutes, while introducing more flexibility to their work and home lives. “From speaking to the market, we hear that most employees want to have the optionality of flexibility,” explained Clarissa Wang, Senior Recruiting Manager, LIKE.TG. “They have also been telling us that many employers are trying to offer this, but when it comes to executing and turning it into a reality, most employers fall short. We find that this is a great opportunity to share how LIKE.TG has frameworks, programs, and trainings to ensure flexible working is scalable and sustainable, and how the “flex team agreements” are critical in boosting psychological safety in a flex setting.” 2. Workplace branding is critical Your employee-focused branding needs to be as strong and unique as your customer-focused branding. Just as you attract, engage, and retain customers, you need to do the same for employees. An ‘Employee Value Proposition’ (EVP) is a useful way to define what makes your organisation special to employees. Gartner defines EVP as having five key attributes: Opportunity: for career growth and development People: quality of managers and coworkers, senior leader reputation Organisation: market position and social responsibility Work: high interest in job and work/life balance Rewards: compensation, benefits, and leave allowance If you can list meaningful responses to these, then you’re close to defining a clear and differentiated message around your employee brand. According to a Mercer COVID-19 pulse survey, 68% of employers in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines said having a reputation as a ‘great place to work’ helps attract talent. 3. Mixing your secret sauce: there’s no such thing as readymade business culture Much like the sourdough starter you fed during lockdown, your business’s culture isn’t something that will just happen. It’s alive, ongoing, and develops with intention. Culture comes from actions and is driven by leaders. Sure, you can take all the pieces of culture you’d like your business to have. However, like a bad jigsaw, it doesn’t mean all the pieces will fit together. To acquire and retain employees, culture needs to be differentiated, authentic and, ideally, built on a purpose beyond profit. It’s worth getting this right. More than three-quarters of employers who responded to the Mercer survey agreed that an organisation’s culture helps to retain talent. Culture can cover many aspects of working life. These include wellness policies, aligning with employees’ values, and fostering development opportunities. Looking after your employees is also good for business. A whitepaper by HDR Asia found that a 1% increase in participation in employee wellness programs translates to a 5 to 10% increase in ROI. 4. Invest in the Employee Experience (EX) Another important factor contributing to staff turnover is a failure to invest in a fulfilling employee experience. In a hybrid environment, you need to make technology work for you. Your business might be bending over backwards to make your Customer Experience (CX) as smooth as silk. However, outdated technology and clumsy processes will leave your employees floundering. More often than not, when a business introduces a technological solution for employees, it is selected and deployed based on the needs of the business. The employee’s needs are neglected, and adoption is low. Smart use of tech can invigorate your staff, drive value into the business, increase innovation, and enable seamless flexible work environments. Frictionless productivity improves EX and benefits the business culture. Something as straightforward as giving employees the power to communicate easily wherever they may be is vital in unifying your workforce and building your employer brand. 5. Make every day count for staff, not just the first one Are you welcoming new staff into the fold? Congratulations! Hopefully, your business provides a stellar hiring and on-boarding experience that sees new employees leaping out of bed to start work. What happens after that? The first few days are just the beginning of the employee retention experience. It’s the rest of the journey that really counts. Just as you map the customer life cycle, the employee life cycle needs similar attention. Managing and planning for the long-term is key to developing and enhancing the employee experience. An engaged employee has clarity about their role and how it contributes to the purpose of the business. Don’t leave them guessing. Instead, show them every day how their actions help build your business success. Just as customers leverage the power of the connected world to explore their options and express their loyalty (or lack thereof), so do employees. The employee voice, when amplified through employer review sites like Glassdoor, is powerful. Smart organisations will nurture their staff and create advocates for their business. We spoke with more than 3,000 office workers and 75 IT leaders in Australia, India and Singapore about the relationship between technology and employee engagement. Download the APAC Employee Engagement Report to find out what we learned from them. This post was originally published on the A.U.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
5 Ways To Make Your Retail Bank More Customer-Centric
Banks, like most companies, face an urgent imperative to reimagine themselves and seize new growth opportunities. Most bankers surveyed by PwC view attracting new customers as one of their top challenges. However, banks also recognise the need to deepen their customer relationships and focus more on customer profitability. Hence, enhancing customer experience is the number one investment priority for banks globally. This renewed focus on customers is crucial, because only 27% of customers surveyed by LIKE.TG describe the financial services industry as completely customer-centric. Similarly, only 27% feel that financial institutions provide great service and support. To close these gaps and improve customer satisfaction, banks need to embark on a transformational journey. This means making everything customer-centric: from marketing and sales, to service and digitalisation. When you start with the customer and work backwards, you will be better-positioned to deliver incredible experiences that build brand loyalty and drive revenue. Here are five ways to build this kind of customer-centricity: 1. Engage the right prospects at the right time To attract new customers, your marketing campaigns need to reach audiences that are actually interested in what you have to offer. The first step in that direction is to define the right audience by combining: Data collected directly from prospects Data on prospects gathered by partners Information on prospect demographics, behaviours, lifestyles, interests, and more, aggregated from third-party sources. Together, these insights can help you zero in on the best-fit prospects for your bank, and then target them on the channels and devices they prefer. Once you’ve gained a prospect’s attention, start building a relationship of trust with them. Provide meaningful, useful, and engaging content in exchange for the customer’s personal data. This, in turn, will help you personalise their experiences further. Next, create an appropriate internal sales cadence. Set up automatic notifications to help sales reps determine when to email a prospect, when to call, when to wait, and more. This streamlined workflow can help reps maximise conversions, and ensure repeatable sales success. 2. Organise your bank around your customers Being truly customer-centric is about knowing your customers in-depth. Build a 360-degree view of each customer, including needs, key life events, products portfolio, circle of influence, complaints filed, satisfaction level, etc. The more you understand your customers, the better you can anticipate and meet their needs. Being customer-centric is also about making the customer experience as frictionless as possible, from onboarding to servicing and beyond. Empower your teams with all the customer information they need at their fingertips, so that they can serve customers seamlessly. When everyone in your organisation has a single source of customer truth, then it won’t matter that your customers are interacting with different teams or lines of business. They will experience your brand as a single, unified entity across touchpoints. 3. Make banking personal Today’s customers expect hyper-personalised experiences. That means understanding each customer as a segment of one. A unique individual whose personality, lifestyle, preferences, needs, and environment are constantly evolving. The challenge is to enable this kind of personalisation at scale. Artificial intelligence-powered tools can help by swiftly processing customer transaction history, digital behaviour, channel preferences, life stages, and other data. With the resulting insights, you can predict the needs of each customer, and determine the best way of serving them. Let’s say you roll out a new offer or marketing message based on your customer insights. To ensure that it translates into the desired customer action, focus on building personalised customer journeys. This set of tailored customer experiences can help you reach customers through the right channels, at the right time, encouraging the desired response. 4. Enable real-time, data-driven customer interactions Customer insights usually have a short life. So, it’s important to evaluate and act on them while they’re still relevant. Interactions need to be analysed in real time to deliver personalised customer experiences. Once you do that, track how the customer responds. Use artificial intelligence to infer their intent. Then, re-adjust your customer interaction strategies in real time. Try and transform each touchpoint and interaction into an opportunity for a meaningful customer conversation. For example, if a customer is accessing knowledge articles around closing a fixed deposit on the bank portal, you could analyse this web behaviour in real time along with signals from other customer behaviour (provided that the customer has consented to this data being used). If a customer is exploring the best credit card options via a bank’s online chat, a next best offer such as “the credit card with the highest cash back” can be generated and sent to the customer via a message, in-app notification, or on any other preferred channel. Finally, measure the impact of personalised communication and offers on your KPIs. The more real-time metrics you have, the faster you can fine-tune and personalise customer journeys to deliver greater satisfaction. 5. Tap into the open banking ecosystem Open banking is an opportunity for your bank to keep customers at the centre, and offer them more choices, convenience, and personalised experiences. You can do this by opening your application programming interfaces (APIs) to third parties to access your data or functionality. You can choose from either of two open banking approaches. Banking as a Service: In this model, you can integrate your digital banking services with the products and services of non-banks to offer customers an end-to-end solution. This approach requires you to have a robust API-led architecture, so that you can seamlessly connect and exchange data with the third-party ecosystem. Platform Banking: The second open banking approach is to build your own comprehensive digital ecosystem where you own the customer experience, but offer products and services (financial and non-financial) from multiple third parties. This marketplace model can help you increase customer loyalty, attract new customers, and generate new revenue streams by charging fees on any product or service sold in the ecosystem. How LIKE.TG can help LIKE.TG enables you to delight customers by putting them at the centre of your business. With our Customer 360 platform, you can listen to customers better, anticipate their financial needs, and deliver seamless experiences at every touchpoint. Rich customer profiles and smart insights help you identify new opportunities to deepen customer connections, and convert more leads. Meanwhile, powerful collaboration tools and artificial intelligence help your teams work faster and smarter to get things done. Learn more about LIKE.TG for retail banking. This post originally appeared on the I.N.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
5 Ways to Measure Customer Experience And Drive Growth
Customer experience is not just a contributor to customer satisfaction. It is also a critical differentiator for businesses. Customer experience (CX) takes on new importance at a time when products are losing their unique selling points (USPs) like brand and price. The LIKE.TG State of the Connected Customer report shows 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services. To create those outstanding customer experiences, businesses must standardise customer service and evaluate customer feedback. But first, why measure customer experience? The advantages of measuring customer experience Measuring customer experience lets you: Define customer success standards and create consistent service quality Use benchmarking to assess and improve performance and productivity Uncover insights like competitive intelligence that can increase sales and enhance customer satisfaction Easily identify new ways of increasing business efficiency Use CX metrics to track return on investment (ROI) and set new goals Measuring CX helps you learn what customers enjoy most about their experience and what needs to be improved. How can you measure customer experience effectively? Here are five ways to measure your CX to increase business efficiency and reach your sales goals. Monitor customer experience metrics Use customer-focused metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Efforts Score (CES) and Average Resolution Time (ART). Look out for scores like Net Promoter Score (NPS), which let you know how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to someone they know. Similarly, Customer Effort Score (CES) can help you get a clear picture of how your customers feel about your business, based on their experience. Too many numbers? An integrated platform, like the LIKE.TG Customer 360, can help you collate customer satisfaction data from different sources and create relevant custom metrics in seconds. Collect direct responses from customers A powerful way to measure your CX is to seek customer feedback with well-designed surveys, questionnaires, and polls. This will give you insight into their pain points and challenges.You can then use this feedback to identify inefficiencies across touchpoints and channels. Analyse customer churn It’s a reality for any business that you will sometimes see customers leave. If you can find out why customers have stopped using your services, it can help improve sales and service delivery processes. Customer data including average churn period, channels with maximum customer turnover, and purchase categories that see higher than average churn, can be revealing. Using an integrated service CRM will ensure all your teams can access insights from the CX data. Study trends in support ticket volume Customer support is an important part of the customer experience. To increase effectiveness, you can leverage support tickets to identify recurring issues, highlight them to respective teams, and smoothen customer journeys .This helps increase business efficiency and drive customer delight. For instance, if data from Service Cloud shows long wait times are undermining customer experience, you can invest in automated responses for common questions. You can also introduce a self-service portal. These portals can offer FAQs and ‘how-to’ videos or tutorials in the customer’s preferred language. Map social media sentiment Tracking customer sentiment on social media is a powerful way to strengthen your CX measurement framework. You can measure sentiment by monitoring brand mentions on social networks and analysing the words used to talk about the company. Identifying positive or negative words, following relevant hashtags, or tracking keywords to monitor your online brand perception are some effective methods. By following conversations related to your brand as well as your competitors, you can stay ahead of the curve in understanding and forecasting your CX score. Use LIKE.TG Service Cloud to create delightful and cost-effective customer experiences With Service Cloud, businesses can resolve issues quickly across any channel and provide connected, personalised experiences. Service Cloud helps you access intelligent, actionable data that can enhance customer experiences, reduce contact centre costs, and boost agent productivity. The end result? Complete visibility into every customer interaction, standardised customer service and a reduction in overall cost. Join us at LIKE.TG World Tour Essentials Asia and learn how LIKE.TG can help accelerate growth, drive productivity & unite teams around a shared view of your customer. Register now This post originally appeared on the India version of the LIKE.TG blog.
50 Sales Statistics that Reveal How Great Teams Sell
Read on to discover the most important sales statistics that reveal how the greatest teams are pushing forward. The data shows there are many bright spots to be found, but a nuanced picture emerges when we look more closely. Yes, revenue is up, but reps are struggling to meet quota. AI is yielding benefits, but data concerns remain. Employee retention is high, but fragile and dependent on high pay. Sales statistics about revenue growthIn the previous State of Sales report, conducted during the pandemic, 82% of sales professionals said they had to quickly adapt to new ways of selling in the face of economic headwinds. Today, that hard work has paid off. Sales are growing this year, partly thanks to recurring revenue and partner sales.Growth is on the rise1. 79% of sales leaders and managers say revenue increased over the past year. 2. 78% of sales leaders and managers say new customer acquisition increased over the past year. 3. 82% of sales leaders and managers feel confident about their company’s 12-month growth strategy4. The top 3 tactics for growth among sales leaders: Improving sales enablement and training, targeting new markets, and improving use of tools and technologies.One-off sales take a back seat to recurring revenue5. Over 90% of sales teams use more than one revenue source.6. 42% of sales leaders and managers say recurring sales is their top revenue source.7. Sales leaders and managers say one-off sales is their third top revenue source, after recurring sales, upsells, and cross-sells.Within 12 months, nearly every company expects to use partner sales8. 83% of sales pros say partner selling has a bigger impact on revenue than a year ago.9. 89% of sales teams currently use partner sales.10. Of those sales teams who don’t use partner sales, 58% expect to within a year.Sales statistics about challengesChanging customer expectations is the number one challenge today. Increasing marketplace competition is adding to the squeeze. Meanwhile, buyers are demanding more personalization than before. But even as sellers are asked to deliver more value, they get trapped in non-selling tasks.Sellers feel the pressure11. 67% of sales reps don’t expect to meet their quota this year, and 84% missed it last year.12. 53% of sales pros say it’s harder to sell than a year ago.Changing customer expectations and marketplace competition are coming in hot13. Sales leaders and managers say their top challenge is changing customer needs and expectations (for example, demanding lower costs, deeper understanding, and greater value).14. 57% of sales leaders and managers say competition has increased since last year.15. Similarly, macroeconomic conditions and inflation still pose a major challenge but is decreasing, with 27% of sales leaders and managers saying it’s a challenge compared to 39% in 2022.16. 78% of business buyers say their company is more careful about spending money than before.*17. 76% of business buyers say their company extracts maximum value from every purchase.**This data comes from the LIKE.TG State of the Connected Customer report.Buyers demand personalization*18. 86% of business buyers are more likely to buy if companies understand their goals.19. But 59% say most sales reps don’t take the time to understand them.20. 84% of business buyers expect sales reps to act as trusted advisors.21. But 73% say most sales interactions feel transactional.*The data in this section comes from from the LIKE.TG State of the Connected Customer report.Sales reps still have productivity woes22. Reps spend 70% of their time on nonselling tasks — a figure that is virtually unchanged from the 2022 State of Sales report, when reps spent 72% of their time on nonselling tasks.23. The tasks that take the most time to complete are meeting customer budget needs, personalizing communication, and building a strong personal relationships.Sales statistics about data and AIFour in five sales teams use AI today. As adoption becomes widespread, sales teams are experiencing powerful benefits like accelerated growth and productivity gains. But data concerns like trust and training gaps are preventing teams from making the most out of AI, and many sales pros fear they’re missing out.Sales teams are benefiting from AI, but obstacles remain29. 81% of sales teams are investing in AI. Of those, about half are experimenting with AI and the other half have fully implemented it.30. 83% of sales teams with AI saw revenue growth in the past year — versus 66% of teams without AI.31. The top 3 areas that AI is improving are sales data quality and accuracy, understanding customer needs, and personalization for customers.32. AI-using sales teams are 1.4x more likely to say headcount increased over the past year33. 33% of sales ops pros using AI say they have insufficient budget, headcount, and training on how to use it.34. Among teams currently using AI, sales ops pros say the top tactic to prepare is to consolidate tools and tech stacks.The focus turns to building a foundation of trustworthy data35. 98% of sales leaders say trustworthy data is more important in times of change.*36. 94% of sales leaders say their organization should be getting more value from their data.*37. 78% of sales leaders say they’re concerned about missing out on generative AI.*38. Only 35% of sales professionals completely trust the accuracy of their organization’s data.39. 73% of sales pros say generative AI introduces new security risks.**40. 49% of sales pros say they’re not sure how to safely use generative AI at work.**41. 39% of sales pros say accurate forecasting is hindered by poor data quality.**42. Among sales pros who don’t trust their organization’s data, 38% say the reason is incompleteness, 37% say it’s because it’s stored in multiple formats, and 37% say it’s because it’s not regularly updated.***This data comes from the LIKE.TG Trends in Data and Analytics for Sales report.**This data comes from the LIKE.TG Trends in Generative AI for Sales report.Sales statistics about enablement and trainingSales teams are improving their training programs for direct sellers and partners alike, a key strategy for delivering more value to customers. Most reps say their company’s enablement programs prepare them to meet quota, rating these activities as the most impactful: support materials, product-specific training, and one-on-one coaching. Enablement is the top tactic for growth24. The number one growth tactic for sales leaders and managers is improving sales enablement and training.25. The top enablement activity is sales strategy reviews, which 53% of sales teams use. The least popular activity is one-on-one meetings with managers, which only 32% have regularly. Enablement helps reps meet quota, but isn’t perfect 26. 76% of reps say their enablement prepares them to make quota.27. But only 29% of reps say they are completely satisfied with enablement materials.Enablement gets a lift from AI28. Among sales teams who use AI for enablement, 70% offer real-time selling guidance, 67% offer customized enablement for individual reps, and 47% offer call coaching. Sales statistics about the employee experienceWhile employee retention has grown overall, it remains fragile. Sales pros say the top reason they’d consider changing jobs is a lack of career advancement opportunities, and the second top reason is uncompetitive pay or benefits. 43. 76% of reps say leadership makes employee satisfaction a priority at their company.44. Sales teams report an 18% average turnover over the last 12 months — down from 25% in 2022. 45. 81% of sales professionals say their pay has increased over the past year.46. 82% of sales reps saying they understand which metrics affect their pay. 47. 71% of sales leaders and managers say overall budget is up.48. 63% of sales leaders and managers say employee headcount is up.49. 64% of sales professionals say they would leave if offered a similar job elsewhere with better pay.50. The top reasons why sales reps are considering leaving their current job are lack of career advancement, lack of clarity from leadership, and uncompetitive pay.
5G: An Opportunity to Reimagine Customer Experience
Much has been said about the transformative nature of fifth-generation cellular wireless (5G) services. Apart from the consumer applications like blazing fast mobile downloads, 5G also enables an abundance of smart enterprise and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. These applications can transform the way we do business and how we manage our lives. For communications service providers (CSPs), 5G is a not-to-be-missed opportunity to reimagine customer experiences across the whole customer lifecycle. 5G is a gamechanger in terms of innovation CSPs can leverage a digital-first, cloud-based customer platform to transform how 5G services are marketed, sold, delivered, and supported. Imagine a high bandwidth, low-latency 5G broadband offer targeted at serious video gamers. What if, with a single click on an app, gamers can instantly activate 30 minutes of free play on the 5G network? This would allow gamers to experience the difference in 5G network quality themselves before they purchase. Similar scenarios exist for Enterprise 5G and IoT use cases. What if an enterprise customer needed a high bandwidth and low-latency video for a live event? How can this be provisioned on-the-fly, through a digital self-service portal? As opposed to going through the time-consuming process of contacting the CSP’s account representative to ask for a quote, before placing an order? As 5G network innovation takes place, there needs to be a new approach to Operations Support Systems and Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS) in order to support seamless and engaging user experiences like these. Innovation bottlenecks to overcome Customer expectations are changing in terms of how they wish to engage and consume services from communications and network providers. With the introduction of new 5G services, there will be opportunities for innovation across the overall customer experience, from marketing to post-sale support. Innovation is easier said than done. Delivering excellent user experiences depends on the ease of configuring and adapting the telco’s OSS/BSS. Unfortunately, legacy OSS/BSS stacks are often bottlenecks to 5G innovation. That’s because it is not uncommon for the OSS/BSS to be heavily customised, and extended piecemeal over the years to support each generation of network technology. In the past, this has included 2G, 3G, 4G/Long-Term Evolution, public switched telephone network, digital subscriber line, and fibre-optics communications. As a result, these legacy IT platforms are often burdened with complexity and technical debt. That means that they are not agile enough to support new demands like omnichannel engagement and dynamic service configuration. With legacy IT platforms, businesses will take far longer to launch new 5G products and services (months rather than days). There will also be costly and time-consuming IT development and support. LIKE.TG helps CSPs realise the full potential of 5G A recent LIKE.TG “State of the Connected Customer” survey found that 72% of consumers and 83% of business buyers expect companies to use new technologies to create better experiences. In the context of next generation 5G services, this means: Simplifying products, offers, and business processes, in order to exploit the rich, dynamic, flexible nature of 5G. Putting the customer in control, with self service features that leverage inherent 5G capabilities for zero-touch automation and service intelligence. Engaging with customers on their preferred channels. These channels are increasingly digital, mobile, or social, with seamless transitions across channels. Accelerating 5G service delivery by streamlining and unifying the quote-to-order and fulfilment process through catalogue-driven design. The phased approach is one way to transition from legacy OSS/BSS to a digital-first and customer-centric cloud platform. Another increasingly favoured method is to start with a clean slate, by deploying a new cloud-based OSS/BSS stack for a new service launch. Just as network economics will be transformed by 5G, an agile, cloud-based customer platform will reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and transform IT spend in a commensurate way. LIKE.TG is working with CSPs globally to evolve to digital-first and cloud-based customer platforms. These will set the foundation for CSPs to realise the full potential of 5G services. For example, Orange worked with LIKE.TG to “uberise” the digital telco experiences, and put their customers in control with effortless and instant choices at their fingertips. Maxis is trialling 5G services and has rolled out LIKE.TG as part of the sales transformation of their enterprise business. 5G represents a compelling opportunity for CSPs to reinvent their future networks and drive growth through new business models. 5G is also an opportunity to transform IT in order to eliminate bottlenecks to innovation, and reimagine customer experience and the digital world. Want more insights on how to reimagine customer experience in the communications industry in the age of 5G? Learn how LIKE.TG is working with CSPs all over the world to redefine the B2B digital experience and reimagine next generation digital engagement in the 5G age.
6 Closing Techniques in Sales That Work
Ah — that sometimes elusive, but always thrilling moment of closing deals. That’s why we’re all here. We love to help customers, chase new challenges, and in the process, hit those numbers. But sales is an art, and like art, its style changes over time. That’s why we’ll move past outdated and ineffective sales closing strategies and techniques in this article and talk to sales experts to get the nitty-gritty of what it means to close like a boss in today’s world.What is sales closing?Sales closing, or getting a prospect to agree to a deal and sign a contract, is how reps make their quota and how businesses grow revenue.It represents the culmination of all your efforts. Identifying and addressing the prospect’s pain points is crucial in making a strong case for why your solution can alleviate these challenges. Now that you’ve popped the question with a (sales) proposal, it’s time to find out if this prospect is ready to commit.Getting to that yes takes a lot of patience and persistence. Prospects will often say no before they get to a yes. The problem is, many salespeople give up before they reach that yes.As we’ll explain further, sales closing isn’t the only stage of the pipeline that matters, but it is absolute. You either close or you don’t. The make-or-break nature of sales closing can make it one of the most stressful aspects of the selling process, but it doesn’t have to be.“Fundamentally, closing a deal should be the easiest part of a sales cycle,” said Jay Camp, a strategic account director for large enterprises at LIKE.TG. “There are a series of key milestones you have to hit in order to be in a position to close a deal. If those key milestones are done well, closing is the easy part because the work’s already been done.”What are the most common sales closing techniques?There’s no one way to close a sale. Your approach will shift based on the prospect with whom you’re engaging and what their needs are. Incorporating effective sales closing phrases and refining your sales technique are crucial steps in mastering these closing techniques. But this curated list of tried-and-true methods provides a template of what strategies to deploy and when.Assumptive Close This is a true power move that requires confidence in yourself and your product. In the assumptive sales close, you move forward under the assumption that the prospect wants to buy and that the deal is pretty much done. Instead of asking them if they’re ready to buy, you’ll ask how many products they would like or when the solution could be implemented. The key here is to be assertive without being aggressive, which can ruin the rapport and scare the prospect off. It’s also important to make sure the assumptive close happens right after you’ve driven home the benefits of your offer so it’s fresh in the prospect’s mind. Puppy Dog Close This sales closing technique comes from the idea that if a pet store offered to let you “test a puppy out” and take it home for a few days, you would fall in love with it and never return it. In a puppy dog close, offer a free trial of your product with no strings attached. The hope is that the prospect finds your product so indispensable that after their little test drive, they can’t bear to part with it. Scale Close This is also referred to as the gauge close. You take the prospect’s temperature by simply asking them point-blank how interested they are in your product. (Ex: “On a scale of one to 10, with one being ‘Let’s end this conversation now’ and 10 being ‘Let’s get this solution implemented on Monday,’ how likely are you to move forward with purchasing?”) The scale close does two things: It lets you know if you’ve been effectively communicating the value of your product to encourage prospects, and also gives you an opportunity to address any objections they might not have shared with you.“I would say that curiosity is key. You need to always be asking questions,” said Francois Carle, a strategic account executive at Schneider Electric who has worked in sales for more than 20 years. “You need to be curious about what they’re trying to achieve and drill down into what their challenges are. The risk of a conversation going nowhere is strong if you aren’t listening.”Scarcity Close Also known as the now-or-never close, the scarcity sales close leverages good old-fashioned FOMO (fear of missing out) to get a prospect to buy. You sweeten the deal with a discount or an added benefit to the prospect, but only if they act now and make a purchase. This mainly works when the prospect is sincerely interested in buying, but needs a small nudge to get to yes. Takeaway CloseThis technique capitalises on people’s desire for things that they can’t have, also known as reverse psychology. Note that your solution “might not be a good fit” for them or that their company “may not qualify for your solution like other companies have.” The takeaway close is effective because you’re doing the opposite of what a salesperson typically does, which is sell, so the prospect doesn’t expect it. Similar to the scarcity close, this tactic only works if the prospect has already established interest in your product but hasn’t pulled the trigger on buying. Summary Close Sales cycles can be long, especially for B2B selling. A prospect who’s juggling conversations with different vendors about different products might not remember all the great things your solution has to offer. In a summary sales close, you review the features of the product and how it will help the potential client meet their needs. It gives the prospect one more time to really envision what your product might accomplish for them before making a decision.Get articles selected just for you, in your inboxSign up nowHow do you improve at closing?Okay, so you know a lot of the proven techniques. How do you build on this foundation and get better at sales closing? A key player in this process is the sales rep, who must master these techniques and apply them effectively. Sales reps face the challenge of not only meeting their revenue targets but also engaging with prospects in a way that makes them feel valued and understood. This involves asking for the prospect’s opinion on the product, a technique that not only sways the client towards a yes but also uncovers any potential issues with the product or service. Here are a few pointers to keep top of mind when you’re trying to reel in the deal, ensuring that sales reps are equipped to overcome these challenges and close sales successfully.✅ Know the customerSelling shouldn’t feel like selling. It should feel like helping, because that’s ultimately what you’re doing. The consultative approach will always beat the transactional approach, especially in B2B selling. Use discovery calls and your own research to know the customer inside and out. What are their pain points? How does your solution address them? Are they an ideal fit for your solution? This personalised approach builds trust, and at the end of the day, successful selling is all about relationships. ✅ Know their objectionsPreparation is half the battle. Your prospect will naturally have objections about why this isn’t the right time for them to buy. A very common one is pricing. What’s the competitive advantage of your tool that offsets the cost? Be ready to go with solid answers to whatever pushback they might have. This makes you look more knowledgeable about the prospect and the product.✅ Know the decision makerAre you talking to the right person? If not, how do you get to the right person? So much of sales closing requires getting the correct people in the room who have the power to call shots. You’ll want to suss this out earlier on in the sales process when you’re qualifying leads. Don’t spend too much time communicating the value of your tool to the marketing manager if the person holding the purse strings is the vice president of marketing.✅ Know when to fold ‘emSales representatives don’t close every single opportunity in their sales pipeline. That means a lot of the prospects that come your way may not become customers. It’s also possible a small percentage of leads could bring in a lot of your revenue, which means you don’t have to pursue those unlikely to close. Knowing when to move on is critical. Don’t dwell on prospects that have shown no interest in closing. You’ll lose sight of more promising opportunities.“Every deal, whether it’s a win or loss, has something you can learn from. It’s an opportunity to reflect on how you can evolve both in process and strategy,” said Kelly Myers, an account executive at LIKE.TG who specialises in enterprise-level deals. ✅ Know you’re part of a teamCombined expertise will outweigh one person’s expertise every time. When you’re facing hurdles, lean on your collaborative tools like Slack to connect with your fellow reps or your sales managers in real-time so you can decide your next move as a team. We recommend even creating deal-specific channels in Slack that can act as a repository of knowledge and support for high-level opportunities. “You’re going to win 10 times more as a team than you are as an individual,” said Myers. “There will be a lot of times when you don’t have the answers, and that’s okay. It’s important to know you have a team that will do everything in their power to help you deliver what the customer needs.”What sales closing mistakes should you avoid?Experience can be the best teacher when it comes to knowing what not to do. Here are common pitfalls that the smartest salespeople have learned to overcome. ❌ Going in for the hard closePressure selling is out, empathy selling is in. When you come out early with an ask for the sale and then keep aggressively asking before you’ve even truly established your product’s value, it shows little consideration for the buyer. It makes it appear as though you’re speeding through the sale to meet your quota, and it’s off-putting. After all, selling isn’t about you, it’s about them. “I don’t think the hard sale has any place in today’s market. I always tell people sales is not about ‘selling’ or convincing anybody of anything. It’s about helping people solve problems or achieve goals,” said John Barrows, the CEO of JB Sales, a sales training firm. ❌ Not asking for the saleAn important thing to remember when closing? Ask for the sale. Inertia can be a difficult thing to overcome when working with prospects. Many waffle when faced with multiple vendors and put off making a final purchase decision. If you tell them to “take some time to think about it and circle back,” you may never hear from that person again. After you’ve effectively communicated why your product is a fit and they’ve reciprocated interest, sometimes it’s powerful to simply ask if they’re ready to buy. If they balk, that’s your cue to ask more questions about their needs.❌ Only closing at the endHow do you know when it’s the right time to close? How do you avoid closing too early? Too late? This is a bit of a trick question. There is no singular moment when you go in for the close because, if you’re wise, sales closing is something that happens throughout the sales process. The prospect signing on the dotted line is more of a natural conclusion, not an event.“Closing should happen at every stage of the sales process. You’re closing for the next steps, you’re closing for meetings. It’s ongoing,” said Barrows. Sales closing techniques: next steps“Always be closing” used to be a common saying in sales. That’s shifted to “Always be connecting.” You should always be studying your prospects and adapting your approach to match their expectations and their needs. Understanding and refining sales techniques is crucial for successfully closing a sales deal. Similar to chess, your first moves often determine your final ones. When the rest of the sales process has been strategic and focused, sales closing becomes less of a conquest and more of a collaboration between you and the buyer.
6 New Marketing Cloud Features To Help You Power Personalisation
The last few years have shown us just how important personalisation is to a brand’s digital strategy. According to the latest State of the Connected Customer Report, 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. That demand is apparent, but marketers face three main challenges in addressing it: Personalising at scale across channels Effectively using owned data to power personalisation Aligning organisations for consistent personalisation The stakes are much higher and the competition more intense. But there is good news — marketers can now access more data and better technology to create better customer experiences. On that note, here’s a look at six new features in the latest Marketing Cloud release that can help you personalise your marketing strategies. 1. Engagement: Data Extensions Query Support for Intelligence Reports Advanced As a marketer, you need to ensure you’re delivering the right message to the right audience. With Data Extension Query Support, you can analyse the performance of your messaging by unique audience attributes stored in Marketing Cloud’s Data Extensions. This helps drive higher engagement and brand loyalty. With this new feature, you can: Enrich your query analyses by connecting up to 30 data extensions to your subscriber-level and aggregate Marketing Cloud engagement data Perform codeless queries with audience attributes from Data Extensions to uncover new optimisation opportunities Understand the structure and rows of your Data Extensions with standalone querying Enrich your customer engagement analysis and uncover deeper insights with Data Extensions. Watch the demo to learn more. 2. Customer Data Platform Use richer customer information and reach people on their preferred channels with Marketing Cloud’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) updates. New features in the CDP can help you achieve better personalisation by: Augmenting the volume and variety of data types that can be shared with Marketing Cloud engagement systems Connecting data across the enterprise from both marketing and non-marketing systems Activating data from Customer Data Platform to Mobile Push contact points in Marketing Cloud engagement to drive personalised mobile messages Expand activation capabilities to drive 1:1 personalisation at every digital touch point. Watch the demo to learn more. 3. Personalisation: Triggered Campaign Messages Triggered Campaign Messages combines the best of Marketing Cloud Personalisation with the powerful outbound communication engine of Journey Builder. This can help you reengage customers on their preferred channel. Deliver personalised, relevant messages based on deep, contextual customer behaviour, all in real time to: Trigger an email, mobile app message, push notification, next best action/offer, or an in-store experience based on an individual’s behaviour Measure the amount of time an individual spends on your site, and understand the business context Use powerful real-time segmentation and sophisticated artificial intelligence to determine and deliver contextually relevant experiences that inspire customers to take action Build relevant customer intent that matters and inspire customers to take action. Watch the demo to learn more. 4. Account Engagement: Conditional Completion Actions When it came to prospects interacting with marketing assets, marketers previously needed to run multiple automations to segment effectively and at scale. The new Conditional Completion Actions allow marketers to run these automations in one place. Get even more granular with personalisation on your emails, forms, and other assets by only triggering follow-up actions if a prospect meets a certain set of criteria. You can now: Suppress certain groups from getting added to lists, engagement campaigns, or receiving auto-responder emails Easily assign prospects to the correct user Route leads to more personalised journeys by further segmenting prospects at the point they interact with content Create personalised experiences with conditional logic in completion actions to increase customer engagement. Watch the demo to learn more. 5. Intelligence: Database Exports Customers are investing increasingly in enterprise database software. These databases act as repositories of information from all teams across the entire organisation. Previously, getting data from the marketing team was a hassle. Marketing data is often complicated and relatively siloed, so teams are tasked with making marketing data more accessible enterprise-wide. We are meeting this trend of database investment with the new Database Exports feature. With Database Exports you can: Automate the export of cleansed and harmonised marketing data into your organisation’s database Make marketing data available to other parts of your organisation for deeper analysis and insights Back up the data you have in Intelligence in your preferred database, creating an audit-proof system of all enterprise data Unlock value in your enterprise strategy with Database Exports. Watch the demo to learn more. 6. Einstein: Einstein Engagement Frequency “What-If” analyser Are you worried that your customers will feel email fatigue from too many messages? The new “What-If” analyser tile on the Einstein Engagement Frequency dashboard predicts how your next email send will affect engagement. This will help you: Avoid email fatigue that comes from oversaturating your subscribers Visually test multiple message frequency scenarios to understand how additional messages will affect engagement over time Determine how many emails to send for your upcoming campaigns Predict how your next email send will affect engagement. Watch the demo to learn more.
6 Questions To Accelerate Your Path Towards Getting LIKE.TG Admin Certified
1. What’s my starting point?2. How can I get prepared?3. Can Superbadge Super Sets help me?4. What’s my time commitment?5. How do I ace the exam?6. Are there more resources? LIKE.TG Administrators are the productivity champions who keep their company’s instances of LIKE.TG running at peak efficiency. They help ensure business processes are automated, create essential reports and dashboards, and train users on how everything operates. Admins help their teams work more effectively.Being the one with all that knowledge and skill pays off! Admins are in high demand, and getting certified can put your career in high gear. Our research shows 148% job growth for admins in the past 5 years (US data) and a median U.S. salary of $86,000.So, how do you set yourself up for LIKE.TG Certification success? Here are the answers to six questions that will put you on the path to becoming an admin #CertifiedPro. 1. What’s my starting point? Trailhead! LIKE.TG’s free online learning platform helps you enhance your resume with the most in-demand skills to prepare you for future LIKE.TG career opportunities. Within Trailhead, the Trailblazer Community also helps you make great connections with Trailblazers from anywhere who can mentor and help grow your network to boost your career. Trailhead allows you to: Learn at your own pace: What learning schedule works best for you? Mornings before work? Evenings after work? Weekends? Any and all options are open because you decide what modules to complete at a pace and time that works for you. Every time you return, you can pick up exactly where you left off, so you never miss a beat. Learn anywhere: With the free Trailhead GO mobile apps for iOS and Android, you can do your studying on the go from almost anywhere! Have a few minutes on your commute? Waiting at the airport, or on a long-haul flight? If you’ve got a few minutes to spare, you can learn something new. Follow a curated guide for role-specific learning: We’ve got guided learning paths called trails and custom learning paths called trailmixes designed especially for admins, and you can follow that preset path to make sure you’re exam-ready. You can also check out the LIKE.TG Associate certification exam. This exam is for those with up to 6 months of LIKE.TG user experience and who want to demonstrate skills in the following areas: How the CRM platform solves the challenge of connecting departments and customer data How LIKE.TG Customer 360 can solve business challenges Key LIKE.TG Platform terms Fundamental functionality in the current version of LIKE.TG at a foundational level, such as requirements gathering, reporting, security, sharing, customisation, and data management You can prepare for your LIKE.TG Associate certification exam with the exam guide and by completing the LIKE.TG Associate certification preparation trailmix. 2. How can I get prepared? We’ve got the tools to help you prepare for your exam, no matter your learning style. We’ve covered all the bases, with exam guides, interactive study tools, videos, trailmixes, and more. Prepare for Your LIKE.TG Administrator Credential trailmix This trailmix includes all the modules, projects, and tasks that will guide you through your preparation for the admin cert exam. LIKE.TG Certified Administrator exam guide This exam guide supplies all the critical details you’ll need, including a full content overview, information about how much time is allotted for the exam, the score required to pass, all associated fees, retake options, and more. There’s a handy exam outline included that details every topic covered in the exam and the relative weight of that topic. It also includes a list of all other recommended training, reference, and study materials to get you on the path to success! Administrator Certification Exam trail You’ll know if you’re exam-ready after you’ve completed the Study for the Administrator Certification Exam trail. The trail guides you through earning four badges, each of which covers a separate section of the exam. It includes interactive content such as flashcards, embedded practice questions, and downloadable materials — all specially designed to get you prepped and ready for the actual exam. The interactive Administrator practice test gives you the opportunity to experience the format and questions you may see on the LIKE.TG Administrator Certification exam. The results upon submission are your guide to strengths and weaknesses to help you focus on areas needed for additional learning. Courses led by experts For a more interactive, face-to-face learning approach, we also offer an array of Trailhead Academy courses taught by LIKE.TG experts to help you prepare for your admin certification exam. These courses include: Certification Preparation for Administrator (CRT 101) Administrative Essentials for New Admins in Lightning Experience (ADX 201) Trailhead Virtual Bootcamp for New Admins (TVB201) LIKE.TG Certification Days 3. Can Superbadge Super Sets help me? The design of a Trailhead module offers step-by-step instruction and bite-sized learning with interactive challenges so you can test your newly developed skills. A superbadge, on the other hand, takes the skills you’ve learned in a specific domain (think: process automation or app customisation) and challenges you to put them to work to solve a complex, realistic business problem. You’ll get a specific business scenario with relevant information scattered throughout the story. Your job is to uncover the business need and design a solution through a series of interactive challenges in a Trailhead Playground. Those challenges are validated in real time as you complete them. Then, you can add on Super Sets, a series of superbadges that cover specific roles. Super Sets allow you to prove your expertise in specific areas and are a powerful cert prep tool. In fact, we surveyed Trailblazers and found that 95% said that completing superbadges made them better prepared for their certifications. Check out the Admin Super Set, which highlights the superbadges designed to help you get ready for your admin certification. And superbadges are a great addition to your resume, profile, and social channels, as they show the world just how much of an #AwesomeAdmin you are! 4. What’s my time commitment? “How long is this going to take?” Don’t worry, that’s everyone’s top question! The answer is that it really depends on you. You’re the best judge of your current schedule and how much time you can commit to studying. The great thing about Trailhead is that your learning really is up to you. How does studying fit into your schedule? Can you carve out a few minutes in between meetings or during your commute? Our on-the-go tools and “pick up where you left off” modules mean that no matter how much time you have, you can probably squeeze in a little learning. And keep in mind that there’s no hurry to get certified. You’re working toward a goal here, which is to make sure you’ve really grasped all the key concepts in a certain module — because these are concepts you need to build on for the next module. So, take your time and learn at a pace that works for you. If you’re nervous about making a time commitment or you’ve been putting off the exam because you’re afraid to fail, don’t let that hold you back! Learning is a process and failing is just one small part of that process. 5. How do I ace the exam? Test-taking is stressful for lots of people. Even if you think you’ve got all the concepts for the LIKE.TG Certification down, you may dread the actual exam just because test-taking isn’t your thing. But you can manage your state of mind and put a success strategy in place to help you breeze right through exam day! Stay calm and learn to manage your expectations. Not everyone passes the exam the first time around, and the internal pressure to pass at any cost may cause unnecessary stress. To be clear — if you don’t pass, it’s okay! There’s no failing on this learning journey. There’s only a new opportunity to do better on your next attempt. Your exam results include section-level feedback, which will help you identify exactly what to focus on to come back even stronger for any certification retake. During the exam, it’s important to manage your time. Exams can last anywhere from 90 to 120 minutes depending on the topic, so you should be able to figure out approximately how much time you should give each question before you move on. You’ll always know the total amount of time you have remaining, and you can easily mark a question to come back to later — so don’t let any single question take up too much of your time. Simply mark it for review and revisit it. Take advantage of available resources. If you’re taking the exam in person, the testing centre will allow you three sheets of paper, which you can use to jot down notes, keywords, and important concepts that you’re afraid of forgetting. Have one concept you continually brain freeze on? Memorised an acronym or mnemonic device that helps you remember it? Jot that down as soon as you get to your station. Your testing time doesn’t start until you hit the start button, so take a few moments in the beginning to get prepared. 6. Are there more resources? Yes, of course! Bookmark the LIKE.TG Admin Career Development page where you can find all of the resources designed to help you grow your LIKE.TG Admin career. Check out the Admin blog— This is the place to find best practices, tips and tricks, insights, and career advice for LIKE.TG Admins. Subscribe to the Admin podcast — We’ve got interesting guest speakers who are ready to share their career insights on a variety of topics, all designed to help you maximise your leadership skills and career potential. Join Admin events in your area — In-person and virtual events let you make great connections with other Trailblazers in your area. Get involved with the Trailblazer Community — This is the place to connect, learn, have fun, and give back with #AwesomeAdmins around the world. You can even connect with a user group close to you, or a study group that will help you get exam-ready! You’re doing a great job — celebrate your progress All of these strategies have one thing in common: to help make preparing for your exam more fun! Enjoy the learning process, and remember, you’re an expert in your field. Getting Salesforce-certified is proof to yourself and your employer that you’ve worked hard to gain the knowledge and skills you need to succeed as a LIKE.TG Admin. So, it’s not a matter of whether or not you’ll get certified — it’s just a matter of when. You’ve got this! And when you do earn your certification, you can pay it forward by taking part in the Trailblazer Community and helping other aspiring admins get ready for their exams.
6 Signs Your Business Needs a CRM
As your business grows, you might find that some of your processes are starting to show their weaknesses. Here are six signs that your business would benefit from a CRM system. When people talk about Customer Relationship Management (CRM), they are usually referring to a system that helps with contact management, sales management, productivity, and more. The goal of a CRM is simple: improve business relationships. By managing your customer information all in one place, you can track your customers’ journey from start to finish, right from the first interaction. Small and medium-sized businesses face a huge range of challenges. These include: acquiring new customers, increasing sales revenue, simply finding the time to run their business, and so much more. CRM can help with all of these. CRM can also help you address some of the challenges businesses have faced due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, enhancing digital customer experiences, or improving collaboration between remote workforces. One more thing: operating your business without a CRM may be costing you money. By using a CRM, you can automate repetitive tasks, free your sales teams up to find more prospects, generate more leads, and win more deals. So, how do you know when your business needs a CRM system? Drawn from our new CRM Handbook, here are some of the signs to look out for: For details on this infographic, please click here.
6 Ways to Make Sure Your IT Investment Pays Off
Many executives spend a lot of time evaluating and justifying the benefits of new tech investments — especially during times of change. But once they make that decision to spend, they don’t spend enough time considering how to ensure it pays off. That is a costly oversight. In fact, a little bit of planning and organisation can make the difference between realising significant value and wondering why they made the investment in the first place. Here are six steps to help you drive and measure success on your IT investment. These reflect LIKE.TG’s methods that can help you get the most value from your technology investments, regardless of your company size, maturity level, or industry. 1. Use our V2MOM framework What’s your vision for how this technology will shape the future of your business? If that isn’t already clear, it’s time to bring the right executives, partners, and users together to align on it. This vision should be broken down into discrete business goals and outcomes – like faster customer onboarding or higher subscription-based revenue. Without that, you lack the compass that guides the purchase. Business goals and outcomes keep you focused on the results that matter. We recommend using a process we follow called the V2MOM, which stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures. The V2MOM is a framework that ensures everyone is focused on the right priorities and moving toward the same goals. 2. Map success metrics to your goals and outcomes How do you measure the success of your investment? Answering that is an important but often overlooked step in establishing your vision for change. You can choose the right success metrics by following these guiding practices: Make them SMART The metrics you select should be SMART, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. It’s not enough to say ‘revenue growth’. You need to be specific about the driver of growth, such as opportunity win rate vs. reduced customer churn vs. improved product mix. Be clear on how you will measure certain metrics, and make sure your targets are achievable and realistic. A lot of projects have unrealistic targets that are doomed to fail in the applicable time horizon. It’s alright to have an aspirational five-year target, as long as the intermediate milestones are more realistic. L’Oreal set a goal to increase average order value (AOV) across its family of more than 200 D2C websites, all powered by Commerce Cloud. It aimed to accomplish this by using Einstein Product Recommendations, so users could be targeted with AI-powered recommendations based on a consumer’s browsing or purchase history. Closely tracking performance of these strategies and metrics over time helped L’Oreal discover that this technology generated 15%-20% of all sales for one of their brands and helped them see double digit increases in AOV from its websites. Don’t forget leading and lagging indicators The set of metrics should include both leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators serve as an early warning sign providing you with timely insights to take corrective actions in pursuit of your stated goals. Lagging indicators simply provide the results and measurements as you can observe them at the time of review. While useful, they don’t help with forecasting.. Together, these two indicators provide the comprehensive dashboard you need to monitor your IT investment. However, most IT investment justifications focus on lagging indicators like revenue growth. But leading indicators — such as monthly active users or incoming calls around a new product launch — can be useful in ensuring revenue growth. Don’t confuse use with value Many companies use adoption metrics — like what percentage of users log in every month — as a proxy for the utility of the solutions deployed. While you certainly need your people to adopt the new technology you invest in, that alone isn’t enough. You should define success in terms of the value created, whether that’s increased revenues, reduced inefficiency, or improved cash flows and productivity. A value tree that combines all these outcomes into a composite metric such as net present value (NPV) or return-on-investment (ROI) is usually useful to summarise the value realised succinctly. 3. Establish the baseline One of the most prevalent and challenging situations we encounter in analysing value realised is that the customer often does not have reliable baseline values for the metrics being monitored. For example, they can tell you what the opportunity win rate is in the current quarter, but they may have no idea what it was six quarters ago. To avoid these challenges, establish the baseline and the operating guidelines at the outset: what are the metrics, how are they calculated, which data sources will be used, how often will they be measured, and who in the organisation will help you get that done? 4. Create an accountability pyramid Any large transformation program requires good governance, including executive sponsorship, cross-team collaboration, efficient communication, and effective decision-making. While we have seen many different approaches, the most effective one has three tiers: the steering committee at the top of the pyramid, which sets the strategic direction and champions the overarching mission the operating committee (typically including a technical account manager), which meets quarterly to monitor progress, eliminate roadblocks, and inform course correction the execution team, which manages the program on a day-to-day basis That kind of accountability pyramid helps to foster agile ways of working that ultimately allow you to create value faster. 5. Know your accelerants and obstacles Accelerants are people or things that help you move fast or build momentum quickly. They are often the change agents who will use their influence and energy to get the project off the ground. Or they may be well-defined pain points in a niche area that create quick wins and useful lessons, helping you expand the transformation to other parts of the organisation. Knowing who they are or where they lie can help you move fast and improve time-to-value. Sometimes these change agents will sit inside your organisation and other times it may make sense to bring in expert partners to help bring your vision to life quickly. Obstacles are people or things that can slow down the momentum or otherwise hinder you from realising the value of your digital capabilities. A common question asked in these planning meetings is, ”Why will this initiative not succeed?“ The goal is to then prioritise those potential roadblocks and proactively address them. For instance, if adoption is a big concern, plan for extensive training as part of your rollout and bring in change experts. 6. Execute, monitor and adapt Having established the business goals, metrics, baseline, and transformation coalition, you are now ready to start the journey. This step is all about executing on the plan and collecting relevant, timely data to inform how you are doing. You need to remain curious about the signals you are seeing. If the leading indicators signal trouble ahead or if the resulting key performance indicators (KPIs) appear less than satisfactory, you should inform all the key stakeholders and promptly address the root causes of the issue. One of our large customers noticed that its sales representatives were using LIKE.TG to enter opportunities when they were ready to close deals but otherwise kept all sales activities and key contacts in Excel and PowerPoint. This limited the power of automation, intelligence, and collaboration that make Customer 360 so valuable. You can’t uncover problems like this if you’re only looking at utilisation metrics. The lesson here is to monitor performance and adapt as soon as issues arise. Making smart IT investments is critical to your long-term success, especially in today’s tough economic environment. But turning those investments into great returns and success stories requires thoughtful planning, disciplined execution, and continuous improvements. This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
6 Ways Toys“R”Us Is Bringing the Magic of Its Stores to Online Shoppers
The shift from physical to digital commerce has been enormous in the past year, with the pandemic driving both businesses and consumers online. For retailers like Toys”R”Us with a large physical presence, this presents a unique challenge. It wanted to provide an experience that offers customers the best of both worlds. Tim Halaska, Regional General Manager of Digital Strategy for Toys”R”Us Asia, shared how the retailer has responded to this challenge and is fuelling imagination in Asia. As Asia’s leading retailer of toys, education, and baby products, Toys”R”Us is a well-loved destination for kids of all ages. Here are six ways it’s capturing the magic of its in-store experience and taking it online. 1. Creating efficiencies in digital commerce As a first step in its online transformation, Toys”R”Us partnered with eWAVE, a global commerce services specialist, to centralise ecommerce with Commerce Cloud. Launched across seven markets in Asia, Commerce Cloud provides Toys”R”Us with a single platform to power more seamless and personalised shopping experiences for its customers. Commerce Cloud also provides economies of scale so that Toys”R”Us can provide equally compelling experiences to each market, no matter its size. 2. Tailoring sites to local needs One of the benefits of Commerce Cloud is that it simplifies merchandising across multiple sites, multiple languages, and multiple currencies. It also supports localisation of sites. Working with eWave, Toys”R”Us has integrated Commerce Cloud with local payment options and enabled shoppers to log in from social media sites popular in their markets. Toys”R”Us has also used Commerce Cloud to centralise activities like site maintenance. This frees up local teams to focus on driving sales locally. For example, they can spend time identifying what products or offers are most popular in their markets and promote these online and in-store. 3. Creating mobile-first experiences Toys”R”Us has launched new websites in seven markets across Asia in the past twelve months. Commerce Cloud’s Storefront Reference Architecture provided a blueprint to speed up site development and embed mobile design best practices to help convert today’s mobile shoppers. These include a seamless checkout flow with as few taps as possible. 4. Delivering consistency across channels In transforming the shopper experience, Toys”R”Us has ensured that whether a customer shops online or in-store, they can find the same products and enjoy the same deals. “One of the things we’ve really focused on is the customer journey and creating alignment between the online and offline experience. So now when an email goes out about a promotion in-store, the customer can also purchase that product online straight away,” said Halaska. 5. Personalising product recommendations Personalisation provides retailers with the chance to turn every interaction into a positive customer experience. It can also lead to increased conversion and cart size. Toys”R”Us is reaping these benefits by using Einstein to provide customers with product recommendations based on their browsing and purchase histories. 6. Rewarding shopper loyalty Now, when customers make purchases on a Toys”R”Us website, they are instantly enrolled into the retailer’s Star Card Loyalty Program. The program allows customers to earn points in-store and online and provides them with access to exclusive offers and events. In exchange, Toys”R”Us is able to track and understand its customers’ behaviour and provide more personalised experiences. “We can now see the customer’s journey from in-store to online. We’re excited to delve into that further and use those insights to connect with customers in new ways,” said Halaska. Learn more about how Toys”R”Us is using Commerce Cloud to provide a unified retail experience.
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