But the same isn’t true with cloud-hosted live chat solutions. At the same time, if we do something like a Mad Men reading list or a Pinterest board, there could be something relating to that in the branch-a book display. Also of note is that Surfshark allows an unlimited number of device connections at a given time, compared to an average of around five for competing services. Devices with activity trackers collect and deliver individual fitness metrics like the number of steps, sleep quality, and heart rate. Define and map the typical decision-making unit of main point of contact, users, influencers, functional approvers, economic approvers, etc. yy What does their buying journey look like? Customer Buying Journey & Sales Flow yy Who are all the people involved in the buying process at a typical target customer? Proactive live chat – where you prompt the customer asking whether they need help – is a great opportunity to leverage your website and customer journey analytics, helping you to choose just the right moment for a prompt to chat. Have we mapped all the sales and marketing touches at each stage in order to proactively educate and address the common questions/issues/objections in order to help them choose our solution?
Who is responsible for the ongoing marketing of the product portfolio to ensure success and achievement of revenue goals? Marketing plan – layout the integrated plan for creating the: website, content assets, sales presentation & tools, advertising, demand generation programs, PR & social media, email campaigns, reviews/ testimonials/case studies, employee advocacy, etc. o Sales training plan – layout the plan for getting the team up to speed and ready to sell: target customer definition and personas, product technology, features/benefits, pitch/demo, sales tools/collateral, objection handling, pricing, order entry processes, differences between current and new customers, compensation, incentives/spiffs, sales contests, etc. o IT / Operations plan – define the systems required, systems changes needed, process flows and integration with other systems, etc. o Buzz / excitement plan – set the dates and tactics for the both the internal and external launch events and associated communications to employees, partners, press, analysts and customers o Risks and mitigations – define the potential obstacles and risks to a successful launch and what steps are being taken to avoid them o Win/loss analysis – define who and how you will track all sales won and lost during the initial launch period along with the rapid feedback loop to the team yy How is pricing and merchandising handled at the company?
Conducting market and competitive analysis in order to recommend changes to features, positioning, marketing and pricing o Evaluating and recommending changes to merchandising strategy including price changes, bundles, offers, promotions o Monitoring the customer experience and recommending improvements o Soliciting customer feedback and feeding it to the product management team, while also creating testimonials and case studies o Getting feedback from Sales and channel partners and working with them to modify selling stories and create new tools o Determining if the pricing and bundling are appropriate and making changes as needed o Working with field marketing and marketing communications on demand generation campaigns o Evangelizing the product internally and externally through webinars, thought leadership content, analyst briefings, press pitches and speaking opportunities o Partnering with product management to launch new versions of the product and line extensions yy How do you manage the product marketing roadmap with all the projects for version updates, new features and major new product launches? Build A “Smarketing” Team The “smarketing” team helped us break the typical us versus them mentality and set the standard and example for the rest of the marketing and sales professionals. While you may not be ready to create a single “smarketing” team at the very least you need to deeply understand every aspect of the sales function and align resources from the marketing team to help them drive more revenue.
Until LPSN exits this transition phase (most likely in 2015), a more appropriate valuation method for FY14 is EV/Sales, which is consistent with the SaaS space. You can think of it as a touch of LiveChat’s flavor to make the typing test a bit more interesting. Life alert systems can make aging in place safer for those with mobility difficulties and for those who receive in-home care. Especially if you get lots of traffic, sales reps won’t want to chat with every single person who lands on your homepage. Who “owns” pricing – product, marketing, finance, other? What market research and modelling do we do to support and validate pricing decisions? How do we come up with introductory offers and promotional pricing? Zoom is another popular option that offers clear video and convenient features. Pricing: Olark offers an extremely competitive prices model with a 12% discount rate for annual billing and 29% discount for 2-year billing.