Category: Branding

The Benefit of Strong Logo Design for Your Brand

A killer logo is critical to the success of your brand and organization. After all, you want your brand to be clear, recognizable, and persuasive so you can attract clients and build your business. Pulling together the right design elements into a logo can elevate your brand — and your sales.

Curious to learn more? Keep reading to understand why you need to prioritize logo design when building your brand!

Strong Logo Design Makes a Strong First Impression

First impressions are everything, right? And you want to make the best one possible when you’re establishing a brand. That’s where a dynamic logo can set you apart from the crowd.

With a logo, you need a design that plays into your consumers’ expectations for your brand. Think about what kind of tone you want to communicate. What colors, shapes, and icons can come together into a fresh and appealing logo?

By having a strong logo, you’ll make the right impression on potential customers. People have busy schedules and a lot of interests competing for their attention, so you need to hook them right away. They’ll be more likely to check out what you have to offer within your brand if they are wowed from the start.

How do you make that first impression? You hire experienced designers who can listen to your expectations and craft the perfect business logo design.

Hiring the right design team is a big piece of the branding puzzle since you need designers who can capture your brand with well-chosen design elements and a little originality. Work with your graphic designer to help them understand the mission of your organization so that you can make that strong first impression.

The Right Shapes Can Work Wonders

Recent studies suggest that the shape of a logo impacts the way a customer understands an organization. What does that mean? It means that when it comes to graphic design for logos, you’ll need to choose your shapes wisely.

Think about how you want your audience to perceive your brand. Do you want them to see you as friendly and service-oriented, or efficient and commanding? Do the research to know who your target audience is, and find ways to incorporate the visual qualities best suited to that audience.

It’s also important to determine what visual qualities work best. These will depend on your goals. An experienced graphic designer can choose the right tools for the job, and then walk you through the design theory behind their choices.

When it comes to shapes, curves and rounded lines tend to create a sense of warmth and approachability. So if your brand serves people in a very direct way, curves can be a wise choice within your brand identity.

Sharper lines and edges suggest professionalism as well as brand strength. A simple, more sever design might communicate that your brand is forward-thinking and cutting edge. Keep the corners sharp and the details minimal.

If you and your designer do opt for text, talk it over with them. Make sure you’re clear on the visual difference between serif and sans-serif fonts. They project very different images, so know which one serves your brand identity better!

You’ll Communicate Your Brand Clearly

Your brand logo needs to communicate your product or service clearly. If it doesn’t, you risk losing potential customers to your competitors.

If you’re real estate agent, for instance, it makes sense that your logo would communicate a sense of orderliness and structure — or maybe even an image of a house. With logo design, the goal is for someone who hasn’t seen your mission statement or anything else to be able to have some sense of what your brand represents.

A good rule of thumb is to show your logo design to other people for feedback. These can be friends, family, coworkers, or strangers. A good designer will be open to feedback and work with you to make sure that you’re satisfied.

Logos Make You Instantly Recognizable

You want a logo that people will recognize in any context. This is a challenging goal to achieve, but it is possible through excellent design work. And excellent design work means that even a simple shape or abstraction can speak volumes about who you are and what you do.

In today’s competitive world, consumers have grown distrustful of advertising that says too much. Advertisements that make false claims or seems too good to be true actually can damage a brand. This means that heavy-handed, text-heavy logos are falling out of favor.

Clean and comfortable logos are the better way to go. Brands like Nike have stayed relevant in part because of their memorable designs. Everyone knows the Swoosh, and there’s nothing aggressive about it.

Paying for a logo design might seem like a big upfront investment, but it’s one that pays off in the long run. And don’t think you can design something on your own if you don’t have a design background. It’s better to hire the right designer so that your logo looks professional and not amateurish!

When you’re developing your brand logo design, aim to create something that people will recognize whether it’s on a poster, website, or article of clothing. Brand recognition is huge, and you don’t want your brand to get lost in the shuffle.

Logos Help With Social Media Marketing

It’s important to leverage social media to showcase your brand, too. The days of relying on print materials are gone, so upping your digital game is crucial to your brand’s success. Set up social media accounts and use your brand as your profile picture whenever possible.

So much of social media is visual, so logos offer an easy way to engage new clients. With the average person spending over 5 hours on their phones each day, people are encountering so much visual content — and at a rapid speed. Make sure that your brand logo is active on a number of social media platforms as part of your marketing strategy.

Assign your savviest employee to handle the responsibilities, and make sure to document the metrics so you can see how your audience responds to your logo. If you notice that your logo is not translating into an audience or new sales, look into making some revisions.

You’ll Build Visual Consistency

From a branding standpoint, nothing is worse than an inconsistent public image. If the text and colors on print materials differ from those on Instagram, you’ll confuse your audience. And if the text is serif in one place and sans-serif in another, you won’t be building brand consistency.

With a logo, you create a clean symbol that you can include in any branding materials, whether digital or print. Think of it as a stamp or seal. Everything else you write or design should complement and enhance your logo.

And make sure that your logo works well in black and white. While most digital platforms will allow you to use color, be prepared for other formats — like print media — where you may be limited to grayscale. Design a logo that has enough contrast and clarity to translate to black and white formats effectively.

Ultimately, consistency is the key. Since part of your goal is to draw in new customers, keeping your logo uniform and clear is an essential step to creating a strong brand. Your brand will be more memorable and easier to recognize in a crowded field of competitors.

You’ll Build Brand Loyalty

You want your customers to come back, right? If customers have a good experience with your product or service, they’re more likely to do that. That’s why you want them to make a strong visual association with your brand — and a logo can help you do that!

Aim for a design that is timeless and not gimmicky. Designs that are based on trends will feel stale quickly. Things like drop-shadows, gradients, and handwritten text might seem like fun design choices at the moment, but you might be sick of these trends a year from now.

If your design has staying power, your clients may be more interested in sticking around, too. A logo that changes frequently could suggest that your brand is unreliable.

The Bottom Line

Good logo design has the capacity to elevate your organization’s visibility and sales. With some research and collaboration, you can build a brand that people will know and want to come back to. Make sure logo design is the next thing you pursue to strengthen your brand.

When you’re ready to craft the perfect logo, contact us and we can work with you to realize your vision!

10 Ways to Measure Brand Awareness

80% of people crave good stories but wish brands were better at it. Creating a business brand is about telling your story. It’s about customers purchasing something and experiencing your story. Your brand should listen to your customers and communicate with them about their needs. This is why you need to measure brand awareness.

You need to see if you are listening to the needs of your customers. You need to figure out if your customers are feeling that your brand is about them and not you.

Here are 10 ways to measure brand awareness that can help you create or boost your brand to your customers.

1. Surveys

Surveys are an excellent way to measure your brand awareness. You are measuring how familiar people are with your business and what you do.

You are assessing how recognizable your business logos and products are with customers.

Surveys can be done by email, telephone, a website, or you can ask a customer in-person.

The goal is to see how well people recall your brand.

You can also see how videos promote your brand’s message in this blog post.

2. Check Your Website Traffic

You can use Google Search Console to check and optimize your website traffic.

Over a span of months, you can see on Google Search Console how much people are clicking or visiting your website. It gives you other data on what’s working on your website and what’s not.

Your website also gives you an indication if people are positively engaging with your business brand.

You can also check blog traffic and social shares in your website traffic to give you an idea of how people react to your brand.

3. Social Listening

Social listening is about why, where, and how people are talking about your brand.

You can see what people are saying on social media when it comes to your brand. You can also ask questions to generate responses.

Social listening means you are checking social engagement, social media traffic, and how often your leads are converting.

4. Leads

A consistent flow of leads is a good measure of how well your brand is performing.

It gives you an idea of people who are seeing your brand and recognize it. You should, however, assess how many leads are coming in on a week to week basis.

You should figure out how many leads are coming in and how many are converting.

5. Revenue

How many leads convert will reflect what your revenue is.

Seeing how your revenue fluctuates gives you an idea of how many customers you have and how well they recognize your brand.

You should specifically see if you have returning customers or life-long customers, which gives you a better idea of how many customers come back based on your brand and how they feel about it.

6. Video Metrics

If your business has a YouTube channel or has informational videos on your website, it can give you an indication of how well customers recognize your brand.

Video metrics include comments and clicks. You are checking to see if your customers respond to video.

Although video is becoming more popular, you shouldn’t use it as the only metric to evaluate how your customers feel about your brand.

7. Search Volume Data

Similar to website traffic, you can also see how people find your brand organically without paid advertisements.

You are looking at metrics that see how people found your brand based on the products they searched.

This method is also an effective way to see how your brand compares to your competitors. You are seeing if people after they find your site, are clicking and purchasing or going to competitors’ sites.

8. Earned Media

Earned media refers to all the mentions and referrals you get without paid forms.

You are seeing how many people or businesses are mentioning you without your involvement. It’s a testament to how many people recognize your brand and want to mention it to others.

There are some online tools that can measure earned media. These tools can give you an idea of the number of clicks and posts from social media sites.

9. Check Reviews

Another important metric to measure your brand awareness is to check online reviews.

You should check Yelp and Google and see what people are saying about your business. It’s a good measure of what people think of your business and what kind of review they leave.

It also gives you feedback on what you can improve in your business.

More importantly, you can see what people remember most from your business, which also gives you an idea of brand awareness.

10. Employee Brand Advocacy

Lastly, employee brand advocacy is measuring how many employees talk about your business.

An example is using actual employees in advertisments instead of paid actors. By doing this, you are showing how authentic your business is.

Employees understand everything about your business, which is why they are great advocators.

In addition, employees understand your brand, your mission statement, and the story you telling. It’s one of the most authentic ways to spread your brand.

You can measure employee brand advocacy by looking at post engagements, conversions, web traffic, and other metrics.

Overall, this list of 10 ways to measure your brand awareness can give you understanding of what your customers think of your brand. The overall goal is to achieve a postive message and these 10 ways can help you achieve that goal.

Why You Need to Measure Your Brand Awareness

The goal of why you measure brand awareness is to see how well people recall your business, your story. You want people to buy something and feel the story around something they bought.

Brand awareness is checking how people recall your business identity, your business story. You can boost your brand by when you understand how your customer perceives it, how aware of it they are.

For more information on marketing, you can contact us here.

Why Is Audio Such an Intimate and Effective Advertising Medium?

Effective advertising in the digital age often is a matter of tell-don’t-show, in a manner of speaking. Sure, you still have to use concrete language and tap into the target audience’s emotions. More and more, however, that can be done through the sense of hearing rather than sight or touch.

We’re talking about audio advertising and the compelling power it has to reach educated, diverse markets. In the following article, we’re going to explore the reasons audio is so intimate and effective for this market. First, however, let’s look at whether the audio hype is myth or reality.

Is Audio Effectively Better for Advertisers?

Anecdotally, audio seems like a viable platform for advertisers to get their messages in front of the right people. One look at the plethora of podcasts, streaming platforms, and radio listeners will tell you that. What do the numbers say, though?

Well, 40% of surveyed consumers use voice to purchase something every month. Furthermore, over half of podcast listeners have annual household incomes of $75,000. Most listen to around seven podcasts per week as well.

We know from this data that the use of voice-related applications is on the rise from both user-activated and consumer standpoints and that the people listening are on-the-rise with more money to spend than the average person. Ever wondered why it’s that way? Here are some reasons.

1. Listener Behaviors Are Well Established

Podcast sponsorship is a pretty safe bet for getting into the audio advertising market. That’s because podcasts easily can list their subscribers. In fact, it behooves them to have that kind of transparency.

Also, given the niche focus of most podcasts, you know automatically what type of behaviors and preferences these users have established. You really don’t have to do as much legwork to figure out everything.

2. Listeners Subscribe Based on Their Trust of a Personality

Something else podcast marketing has going for it many other forms of advertising do not is a built-in endorsement. See, listeners choose a host or team to listen to because they’ve already been engaged. Engagement is built on trust.

The relationship with podcast marketing differs from even radio advertising, which wears the stigma of corporate sponsorships and one-size-fits-all. Podcasts are built around interests, and influencers in this arena understand that when they welcome an advertiser aboard, they’re indirectly adopting acceptance of the brand they’re pitching.

You, as an advertiser, benefit from the intimacy that influencer has established. That can be a win for everyone involved with the right offer.

3. They Are More Forgiving of Audio Interruptions

The standard video commercial doesn’t play to a captive audience. They get up, check the chicken in the oven, use the restroom, or catch up on chores until their program-of-choice is back.

Audio advertising usually plays to a captive audience driving to and from work or handling something work-related at their desks. They are far more forgiving of these interruptions because a) audio advertising usually is shorter (20 seconds to a minute per break), and b) it’s generally tailored to whatever piece of content they’re listening to.

In other words, they find the advertising shorter, more relevant, and easier to digest. As a result, they’re going to be willing to listen instead of redirecting their attention somewhere else.

4. They Continue to Adopt Audio in a Variety of Forms

The captive audience thing is so important when you think about those primary ways your audience consumes audio content or audio stories. Whether it’s through podcasting, listening to a streaming service like Pandora or Amazon Music, or playing a radio app, the audience is mentally ready to engage.

5. Listeners Also Appreciate the Conservative Size of Audio Files

Data usage is a growing concern for consumers trying to control costs. Downloading audio files goes quick and smoothly over a Wi-Fi network, allowing your audience to listen whenever and wherever they choose.

Ways to Use Audio to Your Advantage

Now that you know why this form of advertising and content consumption is so intimate and effective for your target audience, you need to shift your focus to how you can use this knowledge and formatting to your advantage. Here are some quick suggestions.

Content First

Start by being a consumer first. Listen to the programs and platforms you’d like to capitalize on. Note how long each advertising spot is, when it appears, and what type of information it covers.

From there, invest in high-quality equipment for shooting and editing. Use layers to enhance the sound quality and noise cancellation to buffer out any remaining distractions. Last but not least, test multiple ads across several programs and platforms to learn what works.

Add Color and Background

Beyond the content itself, listen deeper for maximum effect. By that, we mean to note any use of background music and sounds. Find ways you can incorporate those effects into your own advertising.

Make sure you have permission or the legal right to use whatever you choose for adding to the end-listener experience. This especially is important for longer-form advertising like audio stories (see Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale podcast for examples of this technique done right). Lastly, choose the right voice-over person for your ad.

Partner with the Right Creator

Tailor an offer to the specific audience. That means partnering with a content creator in your niche. Someone who can deliver the right target market for your product or service.

Change It Up

Use different content creators and change up your messaging and offers. There’s no better way to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t then trying to best your best effort.

Review Your Results

Pay close attention to the analytics. Using promo codes on special offers that are tailored to that audience is the best way to see if you’re getting an adequate return on investment.

Audio Is Effective Advertising Because Listeners Choose You

We recommend audio as one of the most effective advertising methods because it’s one of the only venues where the listeners choose you. By that, we mean they’re more likely to stay engaged with your content than other forms of advertising.

Good luck as you build your audio advertising campaign. If you need professional assistance in any or all of the above-mentioned areas, contact the Killer Spots Agency today.

How to Make Brand Videos That Enhance Your Company’s Message

While developing their marketing strategies for 2020, more companies have decided to add brand videos to the mix. In fact, marketers who use video in their branding grow revenue 49% faster than non-video branding. However, you need to make sure your videos properly portray your brand first.

Don’t rush it. Instead, make a plan and stick to it!

Here are eight tips to help you improve your brand videos this year. With these tips, videos can communicate your brand and help you connect with customers.

Ready to give your brand a boost? Get started with these eight essential tips for the best brand videos!

1. Determine Your Goals

The first step to creating the best brand videos is to determine what you’re hoping to achieve in the first place.

For example, are you trying to increase brand awareness for your company or a new product? Maybe you want to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Either way, video marketing can help you get there!

Knowing your goals will help you determine what type of content to include.

If you want to expand your brand, create videos that are entertaining or inspiring. Make your videos so engaging that viewers can’t help but share them.

If you want to establish yourself as a thought leader, consider sharing your expertise. For example, you can create an educational how-to video or provide product demonstrations. You can also create a complication of facts and stats that are relevant to your industry.

Maybe you want to inspire people to visit your website. If that’s the case, create a teaser to pique your audience’s interest. Then, you’ll entice them to click over to your website for the full content.

Brand videos can help you drive sales as well. For example, you can use videos to demonstrate new products or provide customers with helpful tips. You can also create branding videos that include a limited-time offer to encourage purchases.

Determining a goal for your branding videos can keep your videos focus.

Then, you’re more likely to achieve your goals!

2. Know Your Audience

In order to create videos that resonate with your audience, you need to know your audience first.

What problems do your customers face each day? What solutions can your product or service provide them? What videos will pique their interest?

Consider creating buyer personas for your customers. Separate them by:

Age
Gender
Marital status
Location
Income
Shopping behavior
Interests

Then, determine what your audience is already searching for. You can explore the videos your competitors have already created to see what works—and what doesn’t. What video elements do viewers respond to the most?

Maybe you’re addressing an audience that doesn’t know a lot about your industry. In that case, you’ll need to create branded videos that explain the basics. If you’re talking to experienced customers, on the other hand, you can focus on providing them with additional value.

Your messaging will differ based on your target audience. By catering your content to a specific audience, you’re more likely to attract them to your brand.

3. Use Your Voice

Your company brand consists of different elements, including your voice, tone, personality, color scheme, and logo. Since your brand videos are an extension of your company brand, they need to include some of these elements. This includes your voice and tone.

Take a look at your website copy. How do you speak to your customers? What words and phrases do you often use?

Keeping a consistent voice in your brand videos will show people your brand is consistent, too.

As a result, customers are more likely to recognize your content on different channels.

4. Visualize Your Brand

Remember, your brand is composed of visual elements as well. Try adding your brand colors to your videos. This tip can help people recognize your company’s content.

You can incorporate your company colors in the background of your video. If your office walls are painted with your company colors, try filming there! You can add photos, text, or other visual elements to your videos as well.

Adding elements that match your overall brand will help you tie various brand materials together.

Don’t forget to add your logo as well! Some companies include their logo as a watermark in the corner of their video. This can help improve brand recognition even as people continue watching your video.

5. Choose a Style

There are many video styles you can choose from. These include:

Culture
Interviews
Events
Product reviews
Tutorials
Presentations
Vlogs
Webinars
Testimonials/reviews
Animations
Behind-the-scenes
Live streaming

Consider your target audience and goals. Then, choose the type of video style that will best help you achieve those goals.

6. Shoot & Edit

Once you have a plan in place, start shooting! Consider creating a script beforehand so you can make sure to keep on track.

Don’t forget to end your video on a strong call-to-action (CTA). A compelling CTA can help you increase conversions and sales. According to this report:

Mobile video consumption grows by 100% each year
90% of customers report videos help them making purchasing decisions
87% of online marketers are using video content
Adding a video to marketing emails can increase clickthrough rates by 200 to 300%
Embedding videos on your landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80%

After creating your video, edit it thoroughly. Take this time to create a transcript, which can improve your search engine optimization. That way, more people find you and your brand videos!

7. Get It Out There

Once it’s perfect, start sharing your new video. Consider where your customers spend their time. This can include social media platforms, YouTube, or your own blog.

Don’t forget to optimize your videos with target keywords to expand your reach.

8. Analyze & Optimize

After a while, review your data. Which videos are your viewers responding to? Study each video’s analytics, including views, shares, and other metrics.

Then, use this data to optimize your future videos! That way, you can expand your viewership each time you film.

Enhance Your Company’s Image: 8 Tips for Making Brand Videos

Expand your brand! With these eight tips, you can make brand videos that resonate with your customers.

Ready to stand out from the competition? Contact us today to get started!

4 Website Design Tactics That Improve User Engagement

The success of a website design is determined by user engagement. However, what does this mean? As a business, the ultimate engagement you are seeking is a product purchase or a quote request. Nonetheless, if visitors are not interacting with your website design, you are not making sales.

No matter the business, it is essential to create a user engagement strategy. You may have a beautiful website, but if it is not easily usable than engagement and the site’s effectiveness will be low. So, what website design tactics will improve user engagement?

Easy Navigation

The longer it takes for a visitor to find the information they are looking for, the more likely they will become frustrated and leave. Easily understood navigation is a must. A visitor should find what they are looking for in 3-4 clicks. Once they leave your site, they will find what they are looking for somewhere else.

Stickiness

Each time a user visits your site, it dramatically increases the likelihood of a sale. In marketing, this is called effective frequency. It takes repeated exposure to your marketing message to make a sale. Therefore, use a blog to share content valuable to visitors, creating a reason to engage and return.

Social Media Integration

Social signals are an important form of user engagement, and search engines use this behavior to determine a website’s popularity and reliability. Ensure your site encourages following your social media accounts, and provide tools to share your content. Again, this goes back to creating content valuable to visitors.

Become Mobile-Friendly

Smartphones are increasingly becoming the preferred method for accessing the internet. If your site is not viewable and usable on a mobile device, visitors will become aggravated and move on. A responsive website design will adjust your site based on the device while preserving the content and function.

What haven’t we covered yet that is important to you? If you would like more website design tactics that will improve user engagement, or need additional information, please contact us.

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Seven Sales Strategies the Best Reps Use Daily (and 9 Rookie Mistakes to Avoid)

Who are the superstar salespeople you admire?

Is it David Ogilvy, who literally wrote the manual on sales strategies, or Dale Carnegie, who convinced you it was possible to win friends and influence people?

Whoever your sales icons are, they weren’t born overnight. It took years of fine-tuning their skills to become the amazing salespeople they are. While there’s no shortcut for hard work, we do want to help you streamline the process to achieving sales success. That’s why we gathered the most secret secrets from the best salespeople to share with you as you start on your path to becoming a master salesperson. But, as any good seller knows, what you should do is as important as what you shouldn’t do, which is why we’ve also compiled some of the most common, yet easiest mistakes to avoid. If you’re ready to start to become like your sales heroes (or even surpass them), nailing down these sales strategies skills is the first step. Ready, set, go!

7 Expert Sales Strategies the Best Reps Use

1) Sell benefits, not features.

Research by Impact Communications found 70% of people make purchasing decisions to solve problems, while only 30% make decisions to gain something.

Although your product may have a lot of features that will add to a business, they are more likely to buy something that solves an existing problem. That’s why you want to present them with benefits that reduce the problems the company faces.

2) Set and stick to your ideal buyer personas.

Efforts spread too thin are inefficient and ineffective. Use ideal buyer personas to help you understand the “why” of your ideal customer.

Your buyer personas, which are detailed descriptions of different types of ideal customers for your product, should outline more than basic demographic information, and get to the heart of why a customer needs your product.

By setting clear ideal buyer personas and sticking to them, you’ll stop wasting time with supremely unqualified prospects that suck your energy away from people who could really benefit from your product.

3) Spend time wisely.

Time is money in the sales world, and beyond knowing your ideal buyer personas, you need to have a plan of action each day to maximize your productivity. In fact, the 2014 Sales Execution Trends by Qvidian found that 59% of a salesperson’s time is not spent selling, but is wasted with hunting for sales resources.

Start each day by understanding your goals, and have a clear plan for how you’ll accomplish them. Find a sales or project management platform that can help you keep a strict schedule to maximize productivity.

Another way to increase sales strategies productivity is to limit multitasking. It may seem counter-intuitive, but it takes you twice as long to get a single task done when your brain is pulled in a million different directions. Give yourself a time limit to finish one task at a time; you’ll be more efficient and have a better understanding of what actions are time sucks and when you can get the most accomplished.

4) Personalize your message.

The best salespeople know that developing a personal connection with your clients is the key to success. Start relationships off on the right foot by sending personalized messages to prospects and avoiding “one size fits all” scripts.

Identify the prospect’s unique pain points and tailor your message to address how you can solve those needs. When a prospect feels like you care, you’ve already made the greatest first impression possible, without even stepping inside the room.

5) Make your process measurable.

In order to learn and grow, your process should be measurable, which means you should have a process for collecting quantitative (useable numerical data) and qualitative (details that help you gain an understanding of underlying motivations) information about your process.

To gather both types of information, practice being obsessive about your process. Keep track of each move you make from initial contact to closing the deal and use that information to pinpoint weak spots. You should also keep track of how many cold calls, follow ups, and meetings you do each day. The goal is to document everything so you can optimize your process.

When you do find weaknesses, make improvement actionable, instead of just telling yourself to “do better.” This will give you specific direction on how to improve, and also help you monitor your success.

6) Take notes.

As smart as you are, you don’t have perfect memory (and if you do, we want to hire you). It’s important that you record the promises you make to clients so you can deliver. You also want to take down feedback and important information about their business; clients should never have to repeat themselves, so pay attention.

Additionally, taking notes does more than give you a hard copy of the conversation—it shows clients you care. Take notes using a pen and paper. This gives clients the impression that you’re more attentive and involved in them than if you simply used a laptop or your phone.

7) Tap into the buyer’s emotions.

Use emotion-centric language to address a buyer’s concerns, since our brains rank feelings above logic when making a decision.

Answer objections with the words “feel,” “felt,” and “found,” and work phrases like “I know how you feel…” and “When this customer used the product they felt…” into your presentation.

9 Rookie Sales Strategies Mistakes You Shouldn’t Make

Feel like you’ve got a lot to practice tomorrow? Well we aren’t done yet! Instantly jump from sounding like a beginner to a seasoned pro by avoiding these mistakes most new salespeople make.

1) Don’t forget to define a goal for meetings.

Every interaction with a prospect or client should have an end goal. Make sure you outline the purpose of every meeting and have a metric to measure your success at the end.

2) Don’t be your only advocate.

There’s a limit to how many bold claims you can make about you and your company to a client. Collect endorsements from objective advocates to back you up.

Additionally, don’t be afraid to ask for referrals from other clients. According to the Dale Carnegie Group, 91% of customers say they’d give referrals, but only 11% of salespeople ask.

3) Don’t make too many follow-up calls to unqualified buyers.

If a buyer is unqualified or clearly not engaging with you, drop it. Don’t waste time on impossible sells.

Master salespeople take the guesswork out of this step. Use 20 Miles to help you track when emails are opened, which attachments are viewed, and how long the prospect spent going through your files. You can use this information to follow up with the prospect with a targeted pitch, now that you know what about your product is interesting to them.

4) Don’t forget to listen.

If you listen to the prospect’s needs instead of overselling them you can directly answer how your product can soothe their pain points. Master salespeople believe you need to see, hear, and process that information before speaking.

5) Don’t leave a meeting open-ended.

Remember to set clear next steps that outline expectations and prompt action from both parties. If you leave a meeting unsure of what the next step should be, send a simple and straight-forward follow up email asking for clarification.

6) Don’t distract clients with irritating crutch words.

Practice pitches beforehand so you can cut out “umms,” “hmms,” “ers,” and “ahs.” These distracting non-words weaken your argument and lose the client’s attention.

7) Don’t bail on commitments.

Don’t develop a reputation as a salesperson who lacks follow-through. Build trust by keeping your word, or stop making promises you can’t keep.

8) Don’t ignore the budget question.

You can easily waste time pitching a service that’s way beyond your prospect’s budget. Ask questions about their budget upfront so you can determine how high they prioritize your service and you can better tailor your offer to fit their needs.

9) Don’t use statements instead of questions.

You want your close to be firm, but not ambiguous. After a prospect agrees to work with you, clarify the sale with a pointed question. Don’t assume you know the final deal without confirmation from the decision maker.

In truth, the secret to becoming the ultimate seller is practice, practice, practice. Understand your own sales strategies process as much as possible and educate yourself constantly.

For more details, visit Hubspot partner Killerspots.com, Inc.

CREDITS: Written by Nicholas Little