Points of Parity and Points of differentiation: The players of innovation
We often compete to be different. But what happens when the audience can’t relate to us? Think, it’s all about parity.
Competition between organizations is a necessary factor for economic growth. As markets worldwide become saturated with solutions, the buyer asks: What do you do differently?
This is an overlooked, almost silent question lurking in their minds.
The customer drives comparison between two businesses. They want something different; they want to be served according to the market standards.
A business must offer what its competition has and more. It’s called parity and differentiation.
Parity and differentiation are crucial for a brand to thrive in saturated markets. While this may seem like a lot to ask for, business success boils down to meeting a customer’s needs better than anyone else.
But how can a brand create a positive loop that benefits customers and organizations alike?
Parity and Differentiation are a positive loop that drives innovation.
Innovation has driven every part of our society and will continue. Especially in the knowledge era, we find novel solutions to most problems. But are these innovations in your opinion?
Innovations are considered great works. To do great work, Paul Graham of Y Combinator says, one must find a knowledge frontier and identify its gaps.
Within the context of brand strategies, it means recognizing the points of parity and bringing differentiation.
It is a continuous process as standards evolve and new opportunities arise. Brands that succeed at this process sit at the top of the food chain for longer periods. They identify emerging trends and cause disruptions. But to understand how you can do it.
You need to understand
What are Points of Parity (POPs) and Points of Differentiation (PODs)?
Points of Parity: Every industry has a standard that they must maintain. If a business wants customer segments to take them seriously, they must provide these services. These services are uncompromising and expected from any player. Explore Lead generation services.
Points of Differentiation: These are the unique selling points of a product. What does a business’ product do differently than a market? PODs empower a business to bring a change that gives them a competitive edge.
What makes them so important?
As we have said before, you could say these two are the dimensions necessary for innovation.
If your product is too different from its competitors and does not do the basics of what is needed, there is a chance it could be ignored completely. On the other hand, if it is just as good as the competition, then there is a zero-sum game. For new companies, it is difficult to supplant an existing player in the field.
For brands and their organizations, if they wish to create a difference, they first need to provide the market with what they want. Blind differentiation or straightforward parity will cause difficulty in competing, slowly causing downfall.
And that is best exemplified by the two products below.
The Google Glass:
Google Glass is an innovative technology. But it was ten years ahead of its time. General people did not understand the use of the glass. A unique product with no competitor. And that is where it failed. Only tech lovers understood what it was trying to do. It was not relatable to the public at large.
There was no parity.
Between privacy concerns and low profits, Google had to discontinue the product, to the dismay of many. In the VR/AR market, it is difficult to imagine the product losing.
Microsoft Zune:
The Zune presented itself as a competition for the iPod. But it did not take off. Zune was plagued by a single problem: It had no differentiating features.
The iPod was established, and it had the advantage of iTunes and Steve Jobs backing it up. Zune, on the other hand, failed at conveying its message. There was no clear message. Zune presented these beautiful and artistically inspired ads but it failed to reach the wide market.
And in the end Zune couldn’t establish a real reason to choose it over the iPod. Causing its failure.
For a brand and product to work, it has to walk the thin line of parity and differentiation. Organizations are bound to this loop, but it is not a negative loop. This loop sets the industry standards and then breaks them by innovating inside the frame of reference.
It allows customers to adapt and change with the product instead of causing a backlash or misunderstanding.
That is true innovation.
Points of Parity: Competitive Advantage
Parity can be used to undermine your competition’s uniqueness by adopting it as a market standard. As such, these innovation loops are not just good for isolated companies but for the competitive market in general.
Point of parity avoid the pitfall of alienating the audience by providing context and a frame of reference for the product. Ensuring that a large portion of the market does not find the product irrelevant or unrelatable.
And they empower a business to disrupt another by emulating or providing a better experience for the end customer.
Example: Google Workspace has been disruptive to Microsoft Office. Google’s tools allow users to collaborate worldwide because of its cloud-native solutions and cost-effective pricing.
It enabled small businesses to set up their workspaces quickly and at cost. On the other hand, big organizations could use sheets, docs, and Google Meet to set up meetings and work on large projects together.
This caused a problem for Microsoft. So, what did Microsoft do to break this advantage? They adopted Google’s toolset. They rebranded Office 365 as Microsoft 365, providing cloud applications and AI-driven features. And integrated Teams in their suite, helping businesses streamline their communication in one place by offering safe file sharing, chatting, and video conferencing.
Even though Microsoft was an early player in the productivity game, Google broke it by adopting its point of parity and then putting their spin on it. They overtook Microsoft by a margin, making Microsoft adopt their differentiation as a new point of parity.
By understanding a market’s point of parity, you can position yourself as a disruptor, thereby adopting the points and differentiating.
Understanding your brand and the market is the road to finding parity and differentiation.
Discovering parity is not as simple as copying the existing trends that your industry falls into.
A phone that does not provide advanced network connectivity will fail to the one that does. Even though it is the same market, there is a difference in expectations.
The two dimensions are closely linked together. And differentiation, essentially, is putting a spin on parity.
To find parity, an organization will usually go through these steps: –
Identify customer expectations and existing solutions.
Match your product to the existing market
If the product is not ready to be understood by the market, it lacks relevant parity.
Integrate customer expectations (A picture editing tool, for example, must have a .raw file editor)
Rematch the product to check if it has the basic functions of an “industry-standard” product.
Once you know the points of parity. What is your brand or organization ready to add to it?
Adding your unique proposition to the market standards will create differentiation and innovation.
For Google Workspace, this was their cloud-native environment.
Equality and difference— that is innovation.
Parity and differentiation cannot exist in silos. To bring forth innovation, organizations must base their brand strategies on implementing the two together.
A unique perspective that does not resonate with the intended buyer will fall flat. And the same set of solutions will not rouse anyone into buying either.
After all, the race is on to provide an unmatched experience. But if the experience is not a mix of known and unknown, the end buyer will be disoriented and unable to understand what you offer, even if it is good.
Only by incorporating old strategies, finding their gaps, and then spinning them will organizations place themselves as customer-centric and innovators at the same time.
Business Intelligence (BI) Platforms to Help Optimize Your Workflow
How can businesses overcome the challenges of data mining to unlock the hidden potential of raw data and convert them into meaningful insights?
Organizational discipline is the key to workflow management. Decluttering and sorting through the data we work with streamlines our operations and boosts productivity.
To play chess, the pieces must be staged in a specific way and move strategically. We consider all the positions on the board before making a move against the opponent.
Managing the heaps of data is one of the most complex tasks. Our business objective should be improving our management skills to curate a smart business strategy. The more sorted the data is, the higher the possibility that it’s manageable, accessible, and easier to understand.
Data is omnipresent but how we interact with and study it remains different. We streamline these ways by engaging and understanding it through data analysis software.
Businesses require such tools for swift and comprehensive analytics to drive growth.
Each department in an organization understands and presents the relevant data differently to condense the condition of the business.
Significant BI tools for workflow management
Business intelligent platforms are crucial tools for workflow management.
These platforms combine software and additional services transforming raw data from multiple channels into actionable insights.
Business intelligence platforms work as catalysts, converting raw data into meaningful information, i.e., declutter and sort. These platforms collect, manage, organize, and analyze large quantities of data to make informed business decisions.
Additionally, it is through their functioning that data becomes accessible. They help businesses retrieve the latest, past, in-house, third-party data, etc., to help evaluate the performance. BI platforms allow the IT and other departments to work with and understand each other beyond making assumptions.
The nervous system of your organization
The right business intelligence platform works as the nervous system of your organization.
Business intelligence software integrated with visualization tools, advanced analytics, and data mining technologies offers a centralized platform.
By providing accessible insights, this software propels your business to become data-driven, and gain a competitive edge by helping simplify customer behavior.
In this fast-paced juncture where everyone requires a kickstart, business intelligence tools help you stay ahead of the curve.
How do these tools help us do that?
In practical terms, the standard BI tool helps identify the snags and address them accurately to streamline workflow operations. Additionally, it has become an efficient tool to optimize overall operations and track key metrics introducing cost-effective solutions into the business structure.
Business intelligence solutions are integral in administering your organization as data-driven.
Automation is the vehicle unleashing its potential to become one.
Use of automation in the fast-paced digital world
Across the business intelligence landscape, automation is crucial to maintaining a competitive edge in the fast-paced digital world.
Automation in business intelligence helps streamline, optimize, process, and analyze the collected data by boosting the capability to save time. Equipped with automation tools, business intelligence platforms underscore strategic and recurrent business decisions and tasks.
Have you heard of the terms, technologically-challenged or technophobe?
This is what you are labeled as if you manually attempt to collect and enter data into the system.
Introducing automation in business intelligence platforms helps save time and effort. Certain automated processes help avoid manual data entry or processing, increasing employee productivity by allowing them to focus on other strategic tasks.
Automation also helps negate other human mistakes. It reduces and corrects any errors in reports, ensuring the business maintains updated, precise, reliable, and accurate data.
In simpler terms, there are specific components of automation through which business intelligence platforms cater to your data processing and management preferences:
Data collection
Data collection is the first and most basic step of data processing.
In this step, raw and unstructured data is collected from different sources (internal and external systems), segregated to find clean authentic data, and structured uniformly for comprehensive data analysis.
Clean data is a requirement for accurate, to-the-point insights. Hence, the automation highlights and eliminates any inconsistencies, duplicates, or discrepancies.
Data Analysis
After collecting, cleaning, and integrating data, the next step is inspecting and transforming data i.e., data analysis.
Automation helps in the reliable data description, modeling, and interpretation to make data-driven decision-making using advanced analytics. In this stage, the tools help identify patterns and trends to establish correlations between data sets.
After finding a correlation, it becomes much simpler to extract meaningful insights, accentuate important information, and draw conclusions to plan a roadmap for the future.
Monitor and Track
After swift data analysis, automated processes leverage the easy access to big data to monitor and track the workflow performance.
It simplifies report generation through customizable dashboards for a clear visual representation of data and automated reporting tools.
By creating and sharing detailed and accurate reports across a user-friendly interface, stakeholders can easily access important business information.
Automation in business intelligence platforms can manage and organize large heaps of data. As the business gradually expands, it is needless to expend additional costs and resources as the automation tools have scaling-up capabilities.
The overall function of business intelligence platforms is catering to real-time insights for organizations without slowing down, such that resources and time are freed up for more significant tasks.
Understanding market trends with business intelligence tools
But the major question is – are they reliable?
Each organization has distinguishable business requirements. Choosing the perfect business intelligence software depends on the department’s needs and the volume of data.
With the data mountains inherently present within, how do businesses harness their power? Through BI systems.
However, before finalizing the right tool, your business has to consider particular specifications –
Ease of access and use: The BI platform should be easily accessible by all employees, i.e., from tech-savvies to technophobes. It should confidently allow the user to configure the data, process natural language, and provide required setup assistance.
Automation capabilities: Automation is the principal foundation of business intelligence platforms. The chosen BI platform should then seamlessly integrate automation, and support natural language insights and visual report creation with one click.
Does it support AI? With the onset of AI, we aim to look past data. To establish simpler customer service structures within the business, the software should allow chatbot assistance and other interactive and conversational AI services.
Seamless Integration: To elevate operational management and seamless integration of processes, is the BI platform part of an ecosystem of apps? This enables an organization-wide improvement in productivity. Does the BI software allow integration with multiple data sources?
Broadly, your chosen business intelligence tools should be adept at data management. It should assist data warehousing, allow easy data mining, and aid in data modeling processes.
Top services to manage your workflow
The ideal tools and services for your business can transform your workflow and instill productivity.
Here are the 5 best business intelligence platforms of 2024:
QlikSense by Qlik
Qlik is available for Web, iOS, and Android.
QlikSense comprises a diverse range of visualization and data reporting features offering versatile options.
QlikSense is a complete, fully customized analytics solution.
Sample data is already available within QlikSense which saves you the importing time. This BI platform works efficiently with one dataset or hundreds, enabling comprehensive visuals detailing the sales numbers.
These are structured into customizable graphs and provide an overview of the dataset(s). After the platform completes uploading and visualizing your data, its built-in AI-powered Insight Advisor allows you to ask questions regarding natural language, insights, summaries, and predictive analysis across different data sources.
One of the best features of this platform is its accessibility. Available across different devices, you can access your reports and graphs to make edits anytime and anywhere – all-in-one-functionality.
Microsoft Power BI by Microsoft
Microsoft Power BI is available for Web, iOS, and Android.
Power BI is one of the most widely used business intelligence platforms.
It allows effortless integration with other Microsoft products to quickly track any edits/changes made to the available data. One of its most supportive features is access to Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams with a click.
Microsoft Power BI, a web-based business analytics suite, highlights real-time trends and offers valuable insights through comprehensive data visualization. This BI tool seamlessly integrates and is highly intuitive. If two datasets are connected, it can recognize the correlation, and changes to one are visible in the other dataset as well.
Zoho Analytics by Zoho
Zoho Analytics is available for Web, iOS, and Android.
Zoho Analytics is a self-service business intelligence software.
Zoho Analytics offers in-depth analysis and reports using automatic data syncing, scheduled periodically. This BI tool is one of the straightforward platforms to navigate and learn through a free on-premise plan.
It has built-in AI-powered features such as conversational AI, unlimited detailed reports, and predictive analytics and allows third-party integrations.
Zoho Analytics is designed to help solo entrepreneurs manage and analyze big data, even for the novices.
If you do not understand its functionalities, it offers demo videos with a user-friendly interface with walk-throughs.
Zoho Analytics leverages visual data representation to signify data flow from one end of the pipeline to another. It offers geo maps, i.e., map layering that unearths multiple data layers and identifies the hidden dimensions.
One of its most fascinating features? Immersive report viewing between different tabs, widgets, and an upgraded dashboard builder.
Domo Data Experience Platform by Domo
Domo is available for Web, iOS, and Android.
With cloud computing taking over the internet for flexible resource sharing and economic scaling, Domo is one of the best business intelligence tools for optimizing your workflow.
Domo allows seamless data integration from multiple sources such as databases, spreadsheets, social media, etc. It is entirely cloud-based with a faster load speed, making it easier for multinationals and small businesses.
Imagine it as a data library that connects, supporting over 1000 pre-built ones. Once the data is connected, managing it is as easy as a pie.
Additionally, it helps prepare your data, identify relationships, automate, and filter without any prior SQL knowledge. The Domo app hosts APIs, data management, and manipulation tools for all your data management preferences. It can also make the required data calculations with the Beast Mode available in the app.
Tableau by Salesforce
Tableau is available only on the web.
Tableau is one of the dynamic data visualization builders that allows diverse sharing options for team collaboration.
Tableau is one of the top-rated BI tools for team collaboration. It specializes in data visualization and discovery and its collaborative capabilities.
Using this, you can share dashboards and workbooks with your teammates. They can leave the necessary comments on the work and collaborate on the data analysis process to streamline workflow.
Tableau supports data integration from multiple platforms such as SalesForce, Google Analytics, and MS Excel and has in-built workbooks, known as Accelerators, to support the imported data. Tableau offers different products depending on your business needs, such as Tableau Server for organizations, Tableau Desktop for the general audience, and Tableau Online for hosted analytics.
Making important business decisions in the minimum amount of time is the need of the hour.
Business intelligence platforms rely on technological advancements to analyze data and help employees and high-level executives make significant decisions.
The business intelligence platforms help administrators extract, monitor, and enhance data from internal and external systems while producing reports and dashboards easily accessible to stakeholders and decision-makers.
Graphs, infographics, and scorecards are increasingly necessary to develop these reports.
The BI platforms offer a helping hand in Zoho analytics, data mining, modeling, and statistical analytics to harness insightful conclusions and curate these embedded graphics smoothly.
Data is the backbone of every industry.
Business intelligence platforms offer a structure to this heap by organizing and attributing meaning to them.
With the focus on automation in recent years, the demand for BI software will increase significantly for all businesses as they rush to propel their decision-making processes with confidence that their data is accurate and trustworthy.
AI turns a 50 year-old-dream of scientists into a reality! A chess genius creates history.
For a groundbreaking discovery, Sir Demis Hassabi was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Google DeepMind Director, Dr. John Jumper. Hassabis, the Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs invented AlphaFold— a unique system that integrates predictive analysis of protein 3D structures from their amino acid sequences.
Over recent years, the world has witnessed impactful transformations introduced by the advent of artificial intelligence in various domains. There is a new addition to this list of applications—protein design.
Protein structure is increasingly complex, involving a series of amino acids in different arrangements/patterns. For several decades, researchers have attempted to decipher proteins’ 3D structures with various experimental techniques that involved extensive procedures. Predicting the structure is cumbersome and intense, but not anymore. The latest AI-integrated innovation has simplified this process and made it possible.
Before pioneering AI to decode protein structures, Demis Hassabi was a chess prodigy. He believes that the strategic thinking he applied in chess was the driving force behind his AI journey. In 2018, when he first competed with the algorithm, it was based on a comparative analysis. However, the updated model added deep learning which is quick to identify patterns and determine protein structures accurately.
There is no doubt that the AI revolution is an asset for not only brands but also scientists. It is paving the way for technological adoption in developing novel solutions for complex processes such as protein sequencing. As the world continues to adopt and integrate AI on a larger scale, we are sure to experience more marvels thanks to this technological advancement.
Weaknesses in your sales pipeline are detrimental. Can sales pipeline metrics help elevate the buyer’s journey?
Numbers and data, when isolated from each other, are meaningless. They exist within specific contexts.
We turn them into a quantifiable metric by tracking, analyzing, and comparing them to churn out meaning. This is how metrics help us gauge the effectiveness of a method.
Across the marketing and sales landscape, metrics help us assess and measure sales performance or production. It quantifies your marketing efforts to measure their effectiveness in boosting conversion rates and lead sales velocity. Sales pipeline metrics operate in the same manner.
Importance of sales pipeline metrics
Tracks prospect journey
A sales pipeline helps examine a prospect’s journey through different stages of a purchasing process.
A sales pipeline is a visual representation of how your prospects are moving through the different stages in the sales funnel from initial contact to a close. It tracks the movement of each prospect across the sales process, analyzing the overall buyer journey.
The sales pipeline is unique for every business and industry because it depends on the buyer’s journey, depending on their interests, preferences, priorities, and research.
Each buyer moves distinctly to accommodate the pipeline according to their journey, i.e., personalizing and making it effective. More than being sturdy, the pipeline is elastic and adapts to the prospect movements.
It generally includes three processes: lead generation, lead nurturing, and deal closing.
And, these are broader stages covered within the sales pipeline:
The most crucial objective here is that the pipeline should be able to handle the volume of leads without compromising the engagement quality or performance. If your brand is witnessing low conversion rates, certain challenges within your pipeline should be addressed.
Some of the common challenges your sales and marketing team may encounter comprise:
Lack of visibility or knowledge regarding the status of the sales pipeline
No use of effective CRM tools to track leads
Not following up on cold leads
Inadequate conversion status updates
Neglected workable and high-quality leads
These are the potential weak spots of your sales pipeline.
So, how do we overcome them?
Metrics to improve sales stages
Certain metrics let us assess how to alleviate these concerns and improve the different stages across the sales journey.
Pipeline metrics are crucial.
Each team member should familiarize themselves with tracking them regularly. Even if the sales pipeline metrics vary for businesses, some general ones should still be tracked by your team.
Understanding what drives your prospects to close a deal in a win or what makes them drop off midway through these metrics also offers significant opportunities for improvement.
What are the most common sales pipeline metrics
sales pipeline metrics that your sales team can consider to assess if your efforts bear any weight.
Opportunities
The total number of opportunities matters because it portrays the results of your lead generation efforts. Your lead generation efforts should target prospects fitting the ICP, i.e., the ideal customer profile.
What factors qualify prospects as opportunities? There are some criteria most businesses focus on.
A prospect does not have to follow each criterion, as they vary according to the organization.
The focus is on the lead quality, which eventually becomes the most valuable lead and easily converts into opportunities. By analyzing who you count as an opportunity, your team can optimize its marketing efforts and improve lead nurturing processes to keep them engaged as they move through the pipeline.
How can we assess and track the number of opportunities?
To simplify this, your sales team can use the BANT or MEDICC lead qualification framework.
The opportunities should be tracked and assessed weekly, monthly, or bimonthly, depending on the preferences of your company. However, it can also be done regularly in case of rapid market fluctuations, multiplying lead volumes, or during push season due to an event.
New Leads
Tracking the number of new leads entering your pipeline helps analyze the success of your marketing campaigns, outlines your brand’s market reach, and offers quantifiable data to back your efforts.
It is necessary to highlight these new leads to establish whether your lead generation strategies are efficient.
Once in a while, we should question whether we are chasing hollow leads with no future potential and wasting our resources.
The end solution follows a comprehensive tracking system and establishes a timeframe depending on the pace and volume of generated leads. Record the leads, analyze the trends, and then compare the different lead gen efforts to help optimize your strategies.
Overall, the quality of the lead aligns with your sales and marketing efforts. It largely depends on the business size, industry, and marketing strategies.
Hence, there is no “good” or “bad” number of leads. If your tracking system tracks the acquired leads regularly, the results will convey if your strategies are useful.
MQL to SQL Conversion Rates
This conversion rate calculates the number of marketing-qualified leads who convert into sales-qualified leads. They show interest, sign up, provide their contact info, and subscribe for a demo period to further inspect the solutions offered to them.
These metrics highlight the effectiveness of your lead qualification strategies. An effective lead nurturing process with suitable engagement results, such as high conversion rates, indicates a healthy alignment between the sales and marketing teams.
How often do we assess the MQL to SQL conversion rates?
Calculate MQL to SQL conversion rates monthly. At this frequency, you allow the lead qualification processes to work at their pace, enabling you to make adjustments and understand their effectiveness.
The acceptable range for these conversion rates depends on the industry, business objectives, and past performance. These are your MQL-SQL conversion rate benchmarks.
Lead Velocity Rate
Velocity measures whether an object is accelerating or decelerating. This applies to a sales pipeline. The lead velocity rate compares the leads generated in the current business period to the previous one.
The velocity rate calculates qualified leads, helping you analyze whether your lead-generation efforts are fruitful and effective. It aids in strategic resource allocation and sales processes, amplifying your efforts.
If the number of generated leads for the latest sales cycle remains similar or lower than the previous sales cycle, you know you’re doing something wrong. Thus, it should be assessed monthly or quarterly depending on your company’s needs.
There is no acceptable velocity rate.
It depends on the industry and your business. Remember, you are your biggest competition.
In every sales cycle, the target should be to generate more leads through improved strategies compared to the previous one.
Average Deal Size
Average deal size is another significant factor that measures the health of your sales pipeline. It represents the monetary value ascribed to a sale.
Tracking the average deal size your business is partaking in helps with sales and demand forecasting.
In the long term, regularly tracking average deal sizes can assist in optimizing and streamlining strategies for marketing and sales initiatives. It is important to reach your brand targets and meet broader market conditions.
Sales Cycle Duration
Analyzing the monetary value of a sale is as significant as calculating the duration of the deal. This metric focuses on the details. It offers an insight into how a deal got stuck and why, with ways to improve it.
Sales cycle duration is the average time a deal spends at every specific stage of the sales cycle. Tracking minute errors resulting in potential delays is easier by calculating the sales cycle duration.
Additionally, this provides crucial insight into the sales cycle length, i.e., the time it takes from the initial contact to the lead being closed. This is also one of the sales pipeline metrics to track.
After all, this also affects the time a deal takes to close.
There are three metrics that we are addressing – average sales cycle duration, sales cycle length, and time taken to close.
These three metrics also help sales forecast, so your brand can establish practical targets.
A long sales duration can cause a huddle in your pipeline, resulting in relatively high lost deals or drop-offs.
Both these metrics depend on diverse factors, such as the complexity of the product or service. In B2B, the sales cycles are generally longer due to the several decision-makers involved in the process.
To overcome this, you should strategize your marketing techniques to understand your target market.
These sales pipeline KPIs are mutually dependent on each other to some extent. But their goal remains the same, i.e., measuring how efficiently your sales and marketing efforts convert leads into paying customers.
Numbers of Deals Won
This pipeline metric tracks the number of successful deals. This is relative to the total number of opportunities during a specific period.
Conversion rates are crucial to driving business growth. The higher the conversion rates, the more your business moves forward to attain its goal; hence, conversion rates are one of the most essential sales metrics to track.
If the conversion rates are low or don’t align with the industry benchmarks, you can implement new strategies by identifying and meticulously addressing areas of improvement.
What factors contribute to a successful deal? What have you done differently to win a deal than the one dropped off?
These are the questions you ask your sales and marketing team while analyzing the conversion rates and other trends in your data.
Most often, the opportunities may be high, but the win rates are low, signifying a major lack in the closing stages of the pipeline.
Age of a Deal
This is one of the effective and simple metrics you can use when a deal is taking an unnecessarily long time to move through the pipeline or the prospect themselves are taking too long to make a decision.
With an increasingly long decision-making period, it is less likely that a prospect converts.
You need to assess why the lead didn’t convert and where they got stuck.
How do you avoid this? – Identify the bottlenecks, remove them, and boost the sales velocity.
To move this forward, your company should equip the sales representatives with the right resources and sales enablement or acceleration tools to drive the purchasing process.
By accelerating the sales processes, the age of the deal will automatically reduce, offering space for more successful closes.
Sales Rep Activity
This metric offers insight into the sales team members’ sales performance. Measuring this helps foster team productivity and takes team accountability.
It outlines how your sales team performs through outreach emails sent, the number of calls made, and the meetings booked by each sales representative. Track the sales and categorize them based on factors such as rep, team, region, product/service(s), etc. using efficient CRM tools for sales in 2024.
Through the results, your team can assess whether the sales rep is compensated for their contributions. And once analyzed, underperformers can be equipped with more resources and support from their superiors.
How do you improve the number of top performers, boost sales rep activity, and amplify sales?
The lack of correct skills and knowledge is a huge obstacle. To improve this, offering regular training and coaching sessions to newbies is a way to go.
The training should include actively engaging with prospects and staying updated with industry trends. Actively assessing and improving individual sales per rep will help boost the sales team’s productivity.
Total Pipeline Value
This sales pipeline metric measures the total value of deals in your pipeline. The total pipeline value depends on the value of the sales opportunity, the pipeline stage, and the time taken to close it.
By tracking the value of the current opportunity, it is possible to measure the total forecasted business revenue. Hence, it is a valuable metric for sales forecasting.
If you compare your total pipeline value with your win rates, it can help you forecast how much sales revenue could be generated at the end of the sales cycle. If combined with the sales cycle length, it can help analyze the total revenue potential.
To calculate TPV, each opportunity is provided with a specific monetary value, helping to estimate the total sales amount.
Customer Churn Rate
Also known as the customer turnover rate, it’s the number of customers you’re losing or the customers dropping off from the purchasing journey.
This can be quite a requisite KPI for businesses, as it indicates customers are losing interest in your product or service. However, this might not be the actual case.
Drop-off rates are as important as win rates. It becomes difficult to identify the improvement areas without highlighting the weak points.
Customer churn rate is a necessary metric in subscription business models.
It calculates the customer percentage that doesn’t renew and cancels their subscription services within a month or a year. Hence, this pipeline metric is significant for companies that rely on a recurring pricing model like SaaS or subscription services.
Implement CRM tools to determine how to boost the workings of your subscription models. And highlight the number of paying customers currently compared to the beginning.
⇒ Customer churn rate formula = (the number of customers lost/total customers at the beginning of the period) *100
For the broader picture, the customer churn rate helps highlight the forecasted revenue, improve customer loyalty, prioritize customer success, and enhance marketing strategies.
Average Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Customer acquisition cost signifies the company’s expenditure on acquiring new customers. It includes marketing and sales expenses, salaries, overheads, commissions, bonuses, etc.
The main expenses entail the content, training, software, and other overhead costs. The goal is to prioritize investments that generate regular returns with the minimum maintenance costs such as curating content-specific blog posts.
It helps you assess the profitability, i.e., the amount you spend on a customer compared to the profit you make from selling your services to the customer.
This metric helps with resource allocation, making your customer acquisition process efficient and simpler. Simply put, there is no significant need to focus too long on this process. Sometimes an expensive customer might not mean that they are equally profitable.
Your sales and marketing teams should incorporate smart and streamlined strategies. An uncommonly high CAC might mean inefficiencies that require vigilance to enable long-term stability.
Remember to research your target audience. Host automated testing regularly to maximize your ROI using the existing customer acquisition efforts.
How can you calculate the customer acquisition cost?
First, add all the sales and marketing expenses. Then, divide this total by the number of new customers.
⇒ CAC = (sales expenses + marketing expenses)/total number of new customers
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
After spending an ample amount on your cost acquisition efforts, how do you assess whether it is profitable?
Through customer lifetime value.
This metric calculates the value the customer brings to your business, including the amount they spend on your services, their time as customers, and their purchase frequencies.
By taking individual CLV into account, you can analyze the value of your entire customer base. It will offer insight into how much effort you should spend on customer acquisition.
To enhance CLV, focus on customer retention.
Implement new customer service strategies promptly addressing their concerns to build a strong professional relationship. When the customers are satisfied and happy, they are likely to remain loyal and purchase your services.
The most significant sales strategy for driving customer lifetime value is improving customer service – personalized recommendations, discount offers, user-friendly websites, etc.
Now that we have listed the most significant and common sales pipeline KPIs, why is it important to track them?
Assess why a lead did not convert by tracking their movement throughout the sales pipeline and using the right metrics.
Finding a solution based on the metrics can help you improve your sales and marketing strategies. One of which would be to reduce the stages in the sales funnel that are unnecessarily time-consuming.
After passing through this milestone, the opportunity pool should remain approximately the same, and the probability that the opportunity is won is highly likely. This is the make-up of a healthy sales pipeline.
To some extent, we may think about how the shape of the sales pipeline aligns with reality.
The stages and the shape of this movement vary according to the buyers, industry, and sales processes.
Why is sales pipeline analysis crucial? To optimize your sales performance, and client experience and drive business growth.
Maintaining a simple and efficient sales pipeline is healthy for your business and sales revenue. But how do we know what “healthy” looks like?
With an undefined sales strategy, reaching the critical mile may seem like an endless struggle. These 5 steps map out the route to closing more deals.
The success of your brand relies on a solid sales foundation. Without knowing the critical markers, it is hard to measure sales performance. The lack of a clearly defined sales strategy may be why 45% of surveyed sellers believe their biggest challenge is incomplete data. When your sales team follows a system, it allows them to take the right actions at the right time. The 5-step sales process is a structure to improve the efficiency of your closed deals. It is a guideline to ensure that you are on track and open to tweaking your sales approach.
While the sales approach requires tailoring as per your product or services, the five-step sales process lays a strong foundation to get the pipeline moving. Your sales team can utilize this linear approach to move through each step efficiently. These sales steps allow you to seamlessly monitor the performance and identify gaps that require improvement.
Mastering this framework makes it easier to tweak or modify your sales process strategy in alignment with your goals and the client’s needs.
Step 1: Prospecting
Prospecting involves developing a list of prospects likely to convert into paying accounts. This step has everything to do with researching potential leads and knowing them as much as possible. Understanding the target niche is the stepping stone to drive a sales strategy that yields the results. Focus on your ICP instead of randomly targeting a pool of audience and going nowhere in the journey.
Step 2. Connecting with the customers
Ace the first impression with your target audience. While interacting with the prospects, work toward not making the conversation sales-y. The goal of this step is to transform from a generic call to schedule a first appointment that could potentially close a deal. So, setting the tone right is of utmost importance here. Building a strong relationship with your client can go a long way.
Step 3: Identifying the pain points
Spend enough time figuring out the challenges of your target audience. You can begin by asking relevant questions to draw out the problem and understand how your offering could address the pain points. As you do your research, also find out their preferred solutions and whether they have budget constraints. Communicate your understanding of their problem and how your solution can help. When doing so, emphasize the winning points while at the same time not sounding too sales-centric.
Step 4: Sealing the Deal
Closing a deal involves a series of discussions and reasonings. As you move towards the final step, make sure you walk through the right questions. Talk about the details of your sales flow chart and be open to handling questions and client objections. Have a clear plan in place as to what you will do if the client objects or if they are not ready to commit yet. Such preparation will pave the way for overcoming roadblocks swiftly.
Step 5: Keeping up with the Follow-up
The journey doesn’t stop at signing a deal. Once you have closed a sale, make sure to follow up with the client. You need to make sure that the client receives the product/service as discussed and the whole experience simulates customer satisfaction. This small initiative can work in your favor, promoting brand loyalty. A happy client is likely to be loyal to your brand. At this stage, do not hesitate to ask for referrals to generate new leads.
Wrapping up
Sales are centered around fulfilling milestones. Every aspect of the sales cycle revolves around garnering the right clients, identifying their pain points, strengthening bonds with them, and offering an ideal solution. These 5 steps can be a real game-changer for your business, aligning with your vision and adding structure to an otherwise complex sales process. You gain clarity and can deliver the best solution to address the customer’s pain points.
With advertisers keen to follow the trends, are podcast ads the ideal strategy to attract positive attention toward your brand?
Today, we can perform a single task in multiple ways due to the onset of AI and other technological advancements.
Remember newspaper advertisements? Feels like ancient history.
In this fast-paced digital era, we have conveniently moved to screens (at the cost of our eyesight!).
And if screens were not enough, humans have found another way to consume content – listening. As much as we run towards convenience and comfort in this modern age, our senses are at maximum capacity.
Making us believe that listening and not watching is more comfortable is a marketing tactic. Today, there are over 546.7 million podcast listeners worldwide in 2024.
Why have podcast become so common?
Podcasts mix education with audio entertainment to elevate your mindfulness while you continue with your daily tasks, propelling a significant transformation in the advertising landscape.
Yes, we do commonly associate advertisements with visuals. But how do you elevate your storytelling? By utilizing multiple formats to drive a niche and unfamiliar audience base.
How does advertising strategy work itself into podcasts? We will help you understand this.
Podcast Ads are an underrated but rapidly growing advertising front. They allow you to boost your brand awareness and establish trust when speaking to potential buyers.
In 2024, over $4.02 billion was spent on podcast ads.
These sponsored ads communicate through or during a podcast episode, an uncommon form of paid marketing.
You might wonder whether podcast advertising works the same as radio advertising. Yes, both advertising channels use digital audio ads delivered by the host and some personal experience with that product or service. Also, check Programmatic Advertising Strategies.
But podcast advertising is undeniably different from radio.
Radio ads reach a broad audience, are irrelevant to the content of the radio show, and may seem vaguely random. However, podcast ads centralize targeting. They are placed cautiously within an episode to reach a targeted audience for deeper engagement. The advertisement aligns with the contents of the podcast episode such that its placement seems natural.
In podcast advertising, the target is an interested audience. The only objective is to create purchasing intent.
According to Spotify 2024 Podcast Trends, over 45% of Gen-Z and millennials and 62% of total study respondents stated that they trust the promoted brand during a podcast due to the easy-going relationship the host shares with them. This resulted in talking and searching.
Podcasts take engagement one step further. They offer interactivity features such as polls, real-time Q/As, comment sections, anonymous stories and questions of the week sessions, video podcasts, etc., underscoring a personal and one-to-one relationship with the host.
Podcast advertising takes advantage of this easy-going mode of communication between the host and his audience.
Consider the most popular podcast platforms – Apple, YouTube, or Spotify. To listen to a podcast, users log into their accounts. Hence, advertisers gain in-depth insight into who is watching and listening to their content, guiding them toward curating more targeted ads.
Podcast Ad Types
Podcast ads are placed at an episode’s beginning, middle, or end.
As an advertiser, you have to consider where to place your ad. Placement is a significant component of advertising. The main objective of advertising is to boost your brand visibility and to help you how to market your brand.
How do you catch the attention of your audience? By providing them with a distraction-free environment.
The approaches you use – how – to place or insert an ad into a podcast episode decides the where. You can occupy the spot in an episode in two ways:
Baked-in Ads
This ad placement is permanent, added to the podcast audio file beforehand, appears anywhere within an episode, and is available as long as the episode is on the chosen platform.
Every unique listener hears the same ad. And, even when a new listener goes back to listen to an old episode, they can still hear the ad embedded within.
Dynamic Ads
This form of ad insertion is an ad placed in a chosen spot to reach a targeted audience.
Through dynamic ad insertion strategy, you can offer a better listening experience by personalizing the ad and ensuring that you help maximize the effectiveness of the client campaign.
Here, the ads stay updated because the older podcasts are embedded into new ads. When a listener reverts to an old podcast episode, they listen to the ads, monetizing the back catalogs.
Dynamic ads are inserted by matching the brand with the relevant episode across the category collections – inserting ads with the relevant podcast discussion topics.
Types of ads according to the placement
Following the ad insertion into a podcast, there are three types of ads according to the placement:
While reading a novel, we rarely drop it in the beginning. We often DNF it as we cannot read beyond the middle mark.
Are placing ads at the beginning of a podcast effective? Most listeners hit play and linger near the device to listen to the episode, boosting the chances they hear the ad. Consequently, if the podcast listener is listening to one of their favorite podcast series, they might be inclined to let the ad play as it eventually leads them to the podcast audio.
Initially, listeners are more patient, so they remain concentrated on the ad content showcasing minimal interest in the services.
Mid-roll Ads
If the ads are banded together one after another at the beginning of the episode itself, your listeners could suffer from ad fatigue. As an advertiser, you place them strategically throughout the podcast episode, figuring out the perfect placement where the listener pays the maximum attention.
Mid-roll ads are placed in the middle of 10-minute or longer podcasts. Is this a lucrative spot?
When podcast listeners reach the middle mark of an episode, they are already engaged in a side activity like cooking or exercising. The strategy is that by being engrossed in a physical activity, they are less likely to pause the ad, allowing them to play through.
What a way to monetize our distractions!
Post-roll Ads
Post-roll ads witness the lowest possible audience.
Readers likely DNF a novel before they reach the second half. This also applies to podcasts.
Most listeners directly skip to the next episode before the current one ends. If this is the last episode of the podcast, they are also most likely to close the app before they have heard the last few words.
An ad placement may seem effective at the end of a podcast when the listeners are busy with another task, so they let the ending play. This is beneficial when the episode is the last one in the series or the next episode is yet to be published.
A risk you have to take!
We explore the three distinct ad formats after how to insert podcast ads in the different placements or spots.
One-size-fits-all is not the right approach here. You need to focus on ad delivery at this junction.
Podcast AD Formats
Which podcast ad format would generate the most interest and create a lasting impact on the audience?
Pre-Recorded Ads
These ads are also pre-produced or announcer-read, targeting a specific audience demographic.
They are commercial messages relayed to the audience by, generally, a voice-over artist and not the host themselves. These are pre-recorded audio ads by the advertiser beforehand and then offered to the podcast host to play during an episode.
They run for over 15 to 30 seconds and are insertable across different slots.
Pre-recorded ads are dynamically inserted into the podcast to target a specific audience.
A targeting campaign helps the advertisers decide which audience should hear the ad based on demographics, geographic location, campaign dates, podcast categories, etc.
Host-Read Sponsorships
Have you ever heard of a live-read during live podcast episodes? Let me break it down for you.
A brand offers the podcast host a messaging brief and also provides sponsorship for the specific episode. After this, the podcast host puts this brief into their own words, changing its tone and fine-tuning it into more native, authentic, and creative content.
They blend it into the contents seamlessly to make it seem more natural. A connected shift in the ad entails more engaged listening from the audience, lasting over 60 seconds to a couple of minutes. It makes the audience think the ad is just another part of the episode.
Host-read ads are commercialized, edited into editorial messages, and recorded by the host. The benefit of host-read ad sponsorships is an improved listening experience resulting in deeper engagement.
In sponsor ads, the priority is driving engagement by blending relevant ads with native podcast content.
Long-Form Branded Episodes or Series
What does branded mean? It entails a sense of loyalty and responsibility.
A brand that wants to advertise on your platform sends a promotional message curated themselves. This could be a branded segment, episode, or entire podcast series.
The focus here is to be non-intrusive and centralize the tonality and voice of the message. The promotional message blends into the editorial content – a middle ground between the advertisers and the podcast host.
One content should not overpower the other, so the curated organic content that resonates with listeners should align with the ad message.
It has to utilize the loyalty and trust built between the podcast host and their listeners. It feels like a personal recommendation from a close friend.
Podcast Ads tap into the parasocial relationship the audience builds with the host.
By engaging and being invested in specific content, the audience sometimes develops an on-sided emotional connection with influencers, celebrities, athletes, etc.
This is what podcast ads take advantage of. And this is something that they monetize on.
It has become commonplace for brands to deliver their products or services to the host so that their talk regarding the experiences is more sincere.
In podcast advertising, listeners learn something new about a brand. Its appealing and informative content attracts attention from prospects, boosting purchasing intent and improving your performance across the overall marketing board.
It is not only helpful in lead generation but also in expanding your audience demographics. Podcast ads target a unique audience pool that is younger and has moved away from consuming traditional broadcast media channels.
By targeting younger audiences through podcasts, advertisers can target other audience pools through TV and radio advertisements without worrying about duplicate content.
Another benefit of podcast ads is their ability to have a multiplier effect on different ad formats, increasing the effectiveness of an ad campaign by offering new information about the brand and improving the authenticity of the brand experience.
And when combined, visual cues make podcast ads more memorable, i.e., boost memory retention.
Due to its diverse benefits and creative freedom, podcast ads have become one of the most trusted mediums for advertisers.
YouGov Research backs this by stating that the majority of their research participants felt more deeply connected when they heard a voice, a crucial element in personalized communication.
Podcast ads combined with sponsorships are the ultimate gateway for businesses of all sizes to boost their brand awareness. The diverse targeting methods, such as interest targeting and first-party integration, help advertisers reach the right audience at the optimal time.
Every business has an ideal audience pool, and podcast advertising has made it possible for advertisers to reach them.
But now that you are aware of the benefits that podcast advertising holds, how can you advertise ads on a podcast, and what are the relevant pricing to do the same?
You can implement measures as an advertiser to advertise your ad on a podcast.
Decide the contents of your ad. What is your ad regarding, and what is its theme?
Curate your audio ads and offer the main talking points to the podcast team.
Look for the appropriate podcast. The relevant ad should blend with the native podcast. You may find the contact information of podcasters on social media and websites or reach out to the parent company.
Finalize the ad placement. Decide ad placement and insertion beforehand, and finalize the pricing structure for podcast advertising.
The cost of placing an ad depends on different factors, such as the audience reading your ad, the number of spots booked, podcast popularity, the ad length, placement, and overall campaign duration.
Podcasts levy a fixed fee or place a charge per 1000 listeners – the cost per mile (CPM). The industry benchmark for podcast advertising is $8 CPM for 30-second ads and $25 CPM for 60-second ads.
The period/duration for which the ad will remain in the podcast.
How do you know you have chosen the right podcast? Track your ROI through vanity URLs, surveys, promo codes, and pixel-based attribution.
Podcast Advertising Effectiveness
Podcast advertising can serve as a unique and underrated marketing platform. But how do we gauge its effectiveness?
Particular podcast ad metrics help outline whether your campaigns drive your business growth. Podcasts are a cookie-less audio medium measured through listens rather than clicks or scrolls.
First, for basics, you may track the number of unique listeners who listened to your podcast at least once, comprising streams and downloads.
Second, there are specific attribution requirements mentioned beforehand that you can effectively measure depending on the ad content and funnel structure:
Discount or promo codes: A unique redeemable promo code provided by the podcast host used during the checkout stage of the purchase. It helps track the number of purchases and the number of new buyers.
Pixel-based attribution: How do marketing channels that use content marketing measure the success of their strategies? Through downloads.
Track ad exposure and overall website activity, i.e., every user action. However, how do you track user activity and web traffic once the user activity is taking place offline? The ways to track post-download engagement are complicated and limited.
While the RSS feed makes podcast distribution, i.e., downloading, streaming, and subscription easier, it complicates tracking. The user activity (listening) takes place offline once the podcast is downloaded onto the listener’s device.
How do we track the web traffic then? Pixel-based attribution.
This podcast measurement technique uses the available user data point to match the listener’s unique identifier with the purchaser’s unique identifier even when online cookies are absent.
Surveys: In marketing and advertising, it is crucial to assess whether the channels are effective. It is not easy to analyze or anticipate the exposure, response, and effectiveness, hence, post-conversion surveys help outline the elements influencing the customer‘s decisions.
Vanity URLs: Vanity URLs are unique, easy to remember, and shorter versions of longer podcast links. It mentions where the link will guide the listeners.
It is as easy to assess podcast traffic as other digital media.
Podcast advertisers, to accurately and reliably, analyze the traffic depend on insights illustrating the delivery and outcome of the podcast such as impression, frequency, and reach.
Research states that podcast listeners show favorable consumer behavior due to the positivity exuded by podcast advertising.
Margaret Moe in “Podvertising: Podcast Listeners’ Advertising Attitudes, Consumer Actions, and Preference for Host-Read Ads” published in the Journal of Economics and Behavioral Studies outlines how listeners engage, interact, and react to podcast ads, especially host-read ads.
The research outlines the correlation between podcast advertising attitudes, the authenticity of the host, and the preference for host-read ads. They prefer ads from regular contributors due to the authenticity and trust between them and their favorite podcast(er) host.
With a staggering increase in podcast listeners, advertisers can build more opportunities to nurture engaged listeners interested in listening to host-read ads and purchasing the services discussed.
