Archive for category: Business

Lead generation begins with understanding your perfect prospect profile. It starts with identifying the demographics and psychographics of those companies that have the best strategic fit with your organization’s products, services, and values. Knowing your perfect prospect profile is the way for marketing to create targeted campaigns to elicit interest in your company’s solutions and for sellers to prioritize their prospecting calls.

As you know, marketing is the functional group that is tasked with promoting their company’s products and services to an identified audience. They cast a digital net via many outlets like email, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and webinars. They also host events at trade shows, engage with analysts at Gartner, Sales Mastery, or Forrester. They speak at industry events where all this activity has one and only one objective: To create Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) so the sales force can engage with these prospects and ultimately close business.

Communications and messaging are the sole medium and channels that marketing uses in all its promotional events, including each of the above-mentioned tactics and a host of other marketing strategies. The core of marketing is communications and messaging—period.

How they position the company and the value of its products and services is key to the financial viability of any company.

With a company’s financial future depending on marketing’s communications and messaging efforts, what can leaders do to ensure the messaging resonates with their perfect prospect so that these prospects ultimately become marketing qualified leads?

1. Call to Action (CTA). A compelling, direct call to action is the most important part of every single marketing communications. Whether it’s an email, LinkedIn message, trade show event, or webinar, marketers must let prospects know how they can further engage with your company. The CTA should be strong, clear, and concise. It should provoke emotion and/or enthusiasm, and it should include why your prospect should engage with your company.

 

2. Sales and Marketing Alignment. Sellers are on the front-line. They are conversing with prospects day in and day out. They know exactly what messaging resonates with buyers and what doesn’t. It’s marketing’s role to discern that their messaging, and supporting communications tools, resonates with the prospects that salespeople are talking with.

 

3. Success Stories. There is nothing better than showing a prospect how one of your customers in their industry has successfully used your solutions and realized tremendous results. It is documented that success stories have the biggest impact on sales effectiveness and is a key contributor to moving a prospect from “suspect” to a marketing qualified lead. It’s important that marketing identifies successful customers, creates case studies, and messages these successes to their perfect prospect profile.

 

4. Lead Scoring. The only way to know if a prospect is a marketing qualified lead is by measuring each contact against a lead score. This goes back to identifying and knowing your perfect prospect profile. How close is this person to your perfect prospect? In addition to your perfect prospect score, there are other scores to consider like the prospects interest level in your solutions, overall fit with your business, and their BANT score. Do they have budget, authority, need, and timing? Lead scoring requires precise communications between sales leadership, marketing, and the sales teams.

The primary reason for any (for profit) company to be in business is to earn revenues for themselves and/or their shareholders. It is a company’s marketing organization through their communications and messaging that serves as the primary vehicle to engage prospects and ultimately convert them to marketing qualified leads for sellers to pursue and close business.

 

For More Information Contact:

Dave Toole
CEO
The Gig Economy Group
408-482-9854

When thinking of Artificial Intelligence (AI), images of space ships and space men come to mind. While AI is likely part of Elon Musk’s company Space Exploration Technologies where they manufacture space transportation services, AI is actually part of today’s every-day business applications.

A case in point. The Gig Economy Group created an AI-enabled application for LifeVantage, a publicly traded, direct selling, company whose sole purpose was to create a communication’s vehicle designed to improve the messaging and interactions between corporate, their distributors, and their new distributors.

The problem LifeVantage faced was that their independent sellers were typically between the ages of 45 and 60 who are looking to supplement their income and most likely didn’t have the communications acumen required in business to effectively present solutions to customers.

Additionally, LifeVantage had some loosely connected apps to support their business and its communications, but they weren’t intelligent—meaning they weren’t learning over time and weren’t optimizing the distributor’s sales performance. Because of this, LifeVantage didn’t have their finger on the pulse of their business.

They looked to the Gig Economy Group to develop an application from the ground up using AI and machine learning that could recommend the optimal communication practices and methodologies for any situation.

By partnering with the Gig Economy Group, LifeVantage was able to provide to their entire distributor network of 70,000 independent consultants in 19 countries, an AI-driven, mobile app solution that effectively guides each seller step-by-step through a set of communications and selling processes that helps them to achieve increased sales volumes in less time than before. The app, through a series of communication prompts successfully onboards new distributors in a consistent manner, provides coaching and mentoring when it is needed, and delivers best practices to their entire distribution network. All of this, and more, was accomplished through the Gig Economy Group’s AI-powered communications application with its recommendation engine—substantially improving LifeVantage’s bottom line.

In our next email, we’ll share with you some of the extraordinary benefits LifeVantage attained by implementing the Gig Economy Group’s AI-driven mobile communications app.

If you are interested in exploring how to bring speed into your sales transformation and seeing how other companies have successfully implemented strategic initiatives, and as a result have increased their bottom line, I invite you to reach out to the contact below to schedule a 30-minute overview.

Prior to the global COVID-19 pandemic, most companies’ world-wide workforce worked in a traditional office environment where employees commuted to the office and worked their shift under the watchful eye of their manager. Managers were hesitant to allow workers to work from home. One of the biggest reasons was trust; they were unsure if their workers would actually work without supervision. Why was this such a big issue? The reason: organization’s communication misalignment in the office would likely exacerbate with remote workers. This is the #1 Issue in Sales Transformation with Communication Misalignment.

These managers are in deep, profound trouble as SiriusDecisions’ research found that highly aligned B2B organizations achieve 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher profitability when employing a remote workforce. Couple this with the fact that sellers who work from a home office spend 62.8% of their time doing core selling activities like face-to-face Zoom calls, phone calls, and emails—all that drive increased revenues.

In our last blog, The High Cost of Communication Misalignment in B2B Companies, we were astonished to find that the cost of communication misalignment across enterprise B2B companies with approximately 10,000 employees cost companies $6.24M to the bottom line each year. ¹

The main causes for gaps in communications are due to the myriad of communication tools used today such as smart phones, regular phones, SMS, email, text, video, and Zoom meetings coupled with the manner in which we communicate which is oftentimes ad hoc and informal. Few companies have implemented a repeatable communications process that would enable them to measure the effectiveness and the results from all their communications.

We ended the blog by stating alignment in communications is critical. Communication research focuses on interactive processes assumed to be automatic in humans; it also offers important implications for human-machine interaction.

What can be done to help companies close their communications’ gap and drive increased revenue?

First and foremost is for leadership to recognize the critical need to create and implement a repeatable communications’ process. They just have to look at their own manufacturing group that has repeatable processes in place to ensure their defect levels are within or better than industry standards. The purpose of implementing a communications’ process is to clearly articulate all communication pathways; internal and external to the organization, to drive consistent, measurable business outcomes, and to ultimately drive increased revenue.

To be successful in today’s dynamic, fast-changing corporate environment impacted by the global COVID-19 pandemic requires human expertise and technology platforms enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to support and enhance a company’s rapidly changing communications.

The advent of AI and ML in software enables computers to learn over time. This means that with these types of technologies, communication pathways and messaging can be effectively measured and tracked. As more and more people use the software, the system recognizes gaps in communications and can deliver best practices on how to bridge the gap or to alleviate it all together.

At the beginning of 2020, we did a case study on one of our customers, LifeVantage, to show the results they achieved by implementing The Gig Economy Group’s Adaptive Communications as a Service for Remote Teams platform. It was a case study in that the purpose was to understand LifeVantage’s current challenges, what their objectives were in an effort to solve their challenges, what solutions did they review, what solution did they select, and what was the ROI for implementing the solution chosen. They following is a synopsis of the case study.

LifeVantage is a publicly traded, direct selling, company that specializes in a science called Nutrigenomics. They have 70,000 independent contractors also known as distributers in 19 countries where they sell 19 products focused on wellness and personal care. LifeVantage boasts revenues of a quarter-billion dollars each year where The Gig Economy’s Adaptive Communications as a Service for Remote Teams platform delivered their global communication efforts between LifeVantage selling teams around the globe.

Before employing The Gig Economy Group to help solve their communication gaps, LifeVantage had some loosely connected apps to support their business and align their communications, but they weren’t intelligent—meaning they weren’t learning over time and weren’t optimizing the company’s overall business and communications’ performance. LifeVantage needed to make some fundamental changes in how they communicated across their business. They looked to the Gig Economy Group to develop and implement a technology platform using AI and ML that could recommend optimal communications pathways and messaging, determine communication gaps, and recommend best practice solutions—all that were objective-driven to business results and measurable to outcomes.

The results realized by LifeVantage?

A key metric for all independent distributor networks is the concept of first dollar. First dollar means how many new sales distributors sold in the first month.

By implementing The Gig Economy’s solution, they found a 400% increase in independent distributors getting to first dollar sold in 30 days. They also realized a 250% average increase in enrollment rates of net-new independent distributors and buyers purchasing LifeVantage’s products.

At LifeVantage, getting independent resellers to first dollar ensured they had a salesforce that would sell for them for the foreseeable future. But to ensure they could drive increased revenue required their sellers to grow their own downline distribution network where these sellers would, in turn, develop their downstream network. The Gig Economy Group’s Adaptive Communications as a Service for Remote Teams provided best-in-class performance for the sellers by delivering optimal communications’ pathways, proven and effective messaging, and best practices recommendations to enable their sellers to close the communications’ gaps with LifeVantage corporate, their buyers, and their independent downline distribution network. All in an effort to drive increased revenue.