You’re receiving InMails daily from recruiters. You’re busy closing deals. You’re not in the market for a new position. There’s an intriguing InMail in your inbox…What do you do now? Discover these tips for a sales interview.

Schedule the Call. Always take the call. Listening is free and you don’t need a resume. You owe it to yourself to learn about new opportunities in the marketplace where you can develop your career and professionally soar. You’ll learn about the position, the product, the people, etc. Yes, there is validity to the saying that “timing is everything,” but how will you know if timing is right unless you’ve learned all the information before making an educated decision? Give yourself time to assess. Taking the call doesn’t mean you’re committed to the entire interview process; taking the call means a conversation. All of the questions below can’t be answered online; you’ll get your answers on the call.

During the Call. Ask questions that are important to you.

• Tech: How mature is the product? What key customers use the product? Is there proven ROI? What about the technology separates the company from the pack? You’ll want to know you’re selling or supporting the best product in the market and that it solves a real problem for customers.
• Company Trajectory: Everyone says they’re the “leader” in the market - is the company truly the leader in the space? What are they disrupting and how big is the market they are disrupting? What are the market share and market cap? Sometimes they will tell you verbally and in person when they are reluctant to disclose on the in email. How many paid clients do they have and what is the client retention rate? Don’t let them fluff their client numbers with beta and non-paid. Who are their competitors? You’ll want to know the company is moving in a positive direction.
• Management: Who would be your manager and what’s this person’s professional background? Who is on the executive management team? You’ll want to know you’re working with smart, successful and supportive leaders.
• Role: What is the quota and territory? How are leads generated? What are the average deal sizes and sales cycles? What is the career path? How many folks are on the sales team? Is there formal onboarding and professional sales training? What is the target prospect? You’ll want to know if you would close a lot of deals in the role.
• Culture: How do they describe their culture? Who is an example of a great cultural fit in their org? Who will you be working alongside? Is it work hard/play hard? You’ll want to know if your peers are smart and fun to be around.
• Compensation: What is the range? Let’s face it, you’re in sales for a reason. Will you make more money than you are right now? Yes, hearing the numbers is important but remember, making those big bucks is dependent on the answers above. You’re having a conversation with a tech startup, so let’s look at the definition of the word venture: “a business enterprise or speculation in which something is risked in the hope of profit” and the definition of capital: “any form of wealth employed or capable of being employed in the production of more wealth” (dictionary.com). Does your view on changing your career mirror the definition of venture capital?

Listen and Win. If the recruiter passes you to the next round, chances are – you’re solid. The recruiter is the eyes and ears of the hiring manager, which is your potential manager, so you’ll want to win with the recruiter, too. Perhaps there is a real potential here for you, but while you’re still getting more information and assessing - make sure you win on the call. Treat each conversation as if the people you’re speaking with are a prospect you’re trying to close. Win each conversation, even if you need more time to assess. Win as if you’re already sold.

It sounds interesting, but you’re still not sure if you want to take it further.  Now, is the time to reach out to your recruiter to clear hesitations if you have any. Here are more tips for a sales interview.

What do you do now?

Pre-Interview

• Research the company just as you would before a meeting with a prospect. Go on LinkedIn. Who are you speaking with during the meeting? Plan how will you create rapport. Know who you’ll speak with before you walk through the door.
• Visit the company’s website. What about the company lights your fire? Know what gets you excited and the company strengths and where those passions meet.
• Use a site like CrunchBase (or other tech info publishers). Which venture capitalists backed the company? Who are the competitors? Does the company have differentiators? Know why the company is special.
• Read the job description. What is the company looking for in an ideal candidate on paper? Anticipate the questions that may be asked ahead of time.
• Dress to impress. Dress as if you are going to see a prospect. Know that you will be in a formal setting. Yes, you’re speaking with a startup, but this won’t be your everyday attire.
• Maintain the athletic perspective. Walk through the door with your head held high and prepare to crush it! The reason a defeated athlete walks through the locker room with their head held low, buried in his/her shoulders – is because they’re defeated. If you’re not feeling confident and good posture isn’t enough, you may be suffering from poor preparation. Do more research and contact your recruiter to ask more questions. The recruiter is your champion. The recruiter has the strongest relationship to the hiring manager (your potential manager) and knows exactly why you are a great candidate.

What’s next?

The Interview

• Use the information the recruiter gave you. Identify what stood out to you. You’ll want to show you’re excited.
• Ask relevant questions. What questions do you need answered from your potential sales leader to be successful? What is important to you? Ask the questions that mean the most to you; don’t just ask to ask and to fill up space. The conversation will be richer if you don’t give typical interview responses, and it will mean more if you ask those ‘hard-to-ask’ questions you need answered before taking your next big career move. This is a two-way street.
• Know your Numbers. What is your quota vs. revenue attainment, average sales cycle, average deal size, etc.? Numbers really do speak louder than words.
• Sales Process. What is your structure to close a deal? You’ll want to show you’re process-driven and be able to take a hiring manager step-by-step through a deal.
• Deal Execution. What is your motivation to close? You’ll want to emphasize that you’re hungry and energetic and why.
• Sales Training. What is your sales training background? Own that you’re a professional salesperson.
• Sales Techniques. What sales techniques would you use on a prospect? Close each and every person.
• People do business with people they like. Have fun. Take the time to like the people you meet. The more you’re genuine the better you’re perceived and the better you’ll feel. This is your time to show what you’ve got. Crush it.

Now what?

Decompress but don’t retract. It isn’t over… yet.

Post-Interview

• Follow-ups. Each person you spoke with during the interview should have a followup the same day as the interview took place. Each followup should be tailored to each personality and should mention at least one specific reason as to why you’re a fit and something that stood out to you in the experience. Resist the urge to send the same email to each person; they will likely compare. You created rapport during the interview and answered important questions; add that content to the email. Think personal and professional. Stand out. Be original.
• Make a decision. There are a lot of variables to run through when choosing to make a move. Do those positive variables of the company you’ve interviewed with outweigh your current situation? Be decisive and make it happen. You’ll want to show you’re able to react fast just like you would in the sales cycle.

What do you do now?

Have a look at BrightEdge jobs here: http://www.brightedge.com/seo-careers

For eCommerce clients, managing product listings can be a challenge from an eCommerce SEO standpoint. Products often move in and out of stock, and no company wants to regularly delete pages. Not only does that create a terrible user experience, but it would be detrimental to eCommerce SEO.

When products go out of stock, eCommerce vendors have a few goals they need to consider. One, they want to preserve the customer experience. Secondly, they want to make sure their site maintains all SEO rankings they may have earned from this particular page. Finally, they also want to keep their prospective customers engaged, even if the site didn't have the product needed at a particular point in time.

These goals can be largely accomplished when eCommerce brands and retail brands with eCommerce presence pay attention to to the page setup and optimize it to take advantage of opportunities to build relationships with clients.

Frustrations customers encounter on eCommerce sites

Imagine you are shopping for a pair of rain boots. You find the pair you like in terms of color and style. You click on the product page and go to select your size, only to discover that this item is out of stock. For consumers, this situation can be very frustrating. They go through the trouble of finding the product, style, and color they want, but when they get to the final step, they find that they cannot actually purchase the desired item.

Imagine another day and you want to buy a new sweater. You search through Google and find a few results that you like. You click, therefore, directly to the product page. However, when you click on the item you want, you find yourself automatically redirected to similar products, but not the one you had selected. You do not receive any explanation for this redirection. Chances are, you now feel similarly frustrated with the brand and their website.

Brands must carefully balance avoiding disruption for their visitors, maintaining their eCommerce SEO, and encouraging people to continue to engage with the brand even though this particular product has been sold out.

Watch our Industry Focus - eCommerce webinar

Consider what the product line will look like in the future

To determine the best course of action for your page, you will need to first define the future of this particular product. Will this item definitely return? Your strategy will differ depending upon whether or not your product will be restocked.

If your product will not return, think about other products your brand offers. Do you have related products that would fit the needs of many prospective customers?

Once you know how your brand will handle this particular product moving forward, you will find it easier to plan the appropriate strategy.

Optimize product pages for items that will be returning for eCommerce SEO

When you know your product will return, you want to do everything possible to maintain your relationship with your customer. You can do that through clear communication that lets customers know exactly what is going on. Letting people move forward in their product search and only letting them know at the last minute that a product is out-of-stock does nothing to help the brand-client relationship, and it could hurt their user experience. Instead, you should let people know about the item's status as early as possible.

To efficiently communicate with customers, some brands will find it helpful to keep customers notified as products start to get low. For example, a notice that there are less than 10 of a particular item left not only provides a sense of urgency for people considering a purchase, but it also helps to prevent customers from being caught off-guard when the item is sold out a little while later.

Within your site, on product search pages, make sure you clearly label any products that have gone out of stock. You also want to be as clear as possible regarding why this product is unavailable. This will give customers a better idea regarding what will happen in the future.

For example, if a product is out of stock because of high demand, let people know that it has gone out of stock because of many people interested and that you anticipate having new products as soon as possible. If a particular product is seasonal, letting customers know that it will return the following summer, for example, will also help manage their expectations.

If you can, you should also let customers know your estimated time for when the product will return. This will help them plan ahead to see if they really want this product from your particular brand, or if they will want to look elsewhere.

Watch our Industry Focus - Retail webinar

Note on sizes and out-of-stock SEO

Sometimes, brands have trouble because they run out of stock on a certain size of a product, but they might still have other sizes. In this situation it can be a struggle to let customers know early on in the process that certain sizes are sold out without accidentally discouraging people who might be happy to buy the in-stock sizes.

You may have to experiment with a few different strategies to determine the best course of action in this situation. Some brands may have success letting people know on the product page that some sizes are sold out. Others may choose to simply make the sold out sizes impossible to click with a clear notification.

If clients can filter your products by size, you want to make sure that products with out-of-stock sizes don't show up in the results for searches performed for those sizes.

If your online store ties closely with a brick-and-mortar store, you can also help point customers to potential inventory that might be available in stores.

Maintaining communication with customers

You can also use this opportunity to capture information from these customers. A simple "keep me updated" clickable option lets you capture the interested user's email address so that you can let them know when the product comes back in stock. Generally, this will provide you with the best opportunity to avoid losing a sale on this particular product.

This information, however, will also provide you with highly specific information about this particular prospect and what they want to buy. Therefore, you can target them appropriately in marketing campaigns moving forward.

Once you let customers know that this product is out-of-stock, many brands will also find it helpful to let customers know about related products that may be helpful to them. For example, if you carry the same product in other colors or slightly different styles, many customers may elect to purchase these rather than wait for this particular product to be restocked. Make sure that your recommendations are highly related to the missing product and have a reasonable chance of answering the customer’s needs.

Optimizing for a product that won't be restocked

Sometimes brands determine that certain products, for a variety of reasons, simply do not serve their company well. In these situations, organizations need to let customers know that certain products will not be available without hurting their eCommerce SEO or user experience.

You have two main choices in this situation. One, you can create a custom 404 page and let customers know explicitly that this product is no longer carried by your brand. With a custom page, you can individualize it to the user’s experience, stating the product is no longer available and then offering them alternatives that might fulfill their needs. If you end up removing  a number of products, however, this may not be the best solution as having numerous deleted pages does not work well for eCommerce SEO.

If your product page does not receive a lot of traffic, or if you will continue to stock very similar products, you might also consider redirecting customers to related products. The key to success here, however, continues to be communication. Customers do not want to be automatically redirected to something they did not select without receiving a reason why. Let them know that you no longer carry the product they initially wanted, but that you think these products may help them.

Product page redirect best practices

Before setting up redirects for out-of-stock items you should confirm the final status of the product(s) being redirected. Remember the basics of 301 redirects vs. 302 redirects, if the product is going to be restocked in the near to mid-term future then use a 302 temporary redirect and deactivate it once your inventory is restored.

If the product's being cancelled, will remain out of stock indefinitely, or is being merged into a different product line (the one whose product page you're redirecting users to) then you should use a 301 permanent redirect. Depending on how your CMS handles sitemaps, you may also want to manually update your sitemap.xml to remove the URL of the product that no longer exists.

When you no longer carry a product, make sure you let Google know as well. Often, handling internal traffic will be easy - the deleted product will no longer appear in your searches within your website. You need to make sure the product does not continue to appear on Google Shopping pages either.

To protect your user experience and ensure that you keep people engaged with your site, consider the optimization strategies above.

 

You're in the marketing department and you are working with a new boss. Now, ponder these statistics:

• From Deloitte University Press: “86% of companies say developing new leaders is an 'urgent' need.”
• According to Inc.: “Three-out-of-four employees report their boss is the worst and most stressful part of their job.”
• The Ken Blanchard Companies report: “The average organization is 50% as productive as it should be, thanks to less-than-optimal leadership practices.”
• According to The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine research shows that: “Employees who have managers they didn’t like were 60% more likely to suffer a heart attack.”

Your boss affects not only your job performance, but health performance as well.

Let’s discuss how to optimize your relationship and make working with a new boss successful in your new role and enjoy your new responsibilities. Your boss defines success benchmarks, interprets your results for key players within the organization, and allocates the budget and resources you need. Determining how to have a productive working relationship with him or her while you establish yourself and negotiate for resources is your priority from day one.

Determining Metrics

It’s very important to understand how your boss will measure success. What are the metrics that must be met, and what is the schedule to meet them?

• Have a meeting early on with your boss, preferably within the first week or two of starting. Develop a specific agenda. Ask your boss to define your initial work mandate. Request he/she define goals and success metrics. You may need resources, and if you do, then secure commitments for them up front. You want to set yourself up for success, so negotiate for resources — people, funding, and knowledge — to meet goals needs to happen at the same time as you commit to meeting your objectives.
• Set mutual expectations early. For example, “I need a budget of X for a social media campaign. You’re giving me a budget of 50% of X; so, you can expect incremental results of Y based on the greatly reduced budget.” Managing your boss’ expectations early and getting his/her buy-in allows them to either fix the problem or manage expectations up the organization. Equally important is the need to shape perceptions of what can and should be achieved. If a certain assignment seems misguided or trivial, discuss the priority of all projects you're managing.
• Marketing campaigns can have unexpected results sometimes good and sometimes bad. When a marketing campaign goes south it’s important to share the bad news early with your boss. This gives them more options and garners support for managing bad news.
• When developing a schedule; look for projects/campaigns that you know can produce quick wins. It’s also helpful to confirm these “low hanging fruit” projects are also a priority for your boss. If not, discuss why you want to pursue them, what the benefits are and get buy-in. Early wins are important especially when a boss has shared ownership of your success. It allows him/her to passionately share positive results with his/her boss.
• Get to know your team and build supportive internal relations. Surprising, “70% of employees would like to spend more time with their manager.” Your boss may think highly of some team members who are now subordinates. These team members have pre-existing work relationships and need to be connected with, as they’re going to continue to communicate with your boss. It’s important to get praise from those whose opinions your boss respects. The bottom line is having a friendly and collegial work environment is important.

What’s Your Boss’s Communication Style?

Don’t allow misunderstandings to complicate your relationship; spend time up front discussing how you can work together effectively.

Understanding the best method to successfully work together is pretty simple. Ask questions about communication preferences at the start of your relationship. For example:

• How much information would you like me to share about my project status?
• How often should I update you?
• What's your preferred communication method?
• How often would you like face-to-face meetings?

Conversations that Matter – Understanding Business Dynamics

It is critically important you understand the business dynamics of the organization you just joined. To do this it’s worth planning for conversations that will help you connect the dots.

Key early conversations to have:

Week 1: Business situational awareness. How does your new boss see the business situation? Is the company sustaining success, a startup, a turnaround, or in a realignment situation? How did the organization get to this point? What are the organizational goals for your team? How can you help them achieve their goals? What are the factors that make these goals reasonable or a challenge? What resources within the organization can you draw upon?

Week 2: Style counts and understanding your boss’s style will make working together more impactful. The key question is what is the best way the two of you can interact on an ongoing basis? What your boss' communication preferences? Text? Email? Face-to-face? A phone call? By voice mail? How often does he/she like updates? What constitutes an emergency? What kinds of decisions does he want to be involved in? What decisions do you have authority to make the call independently?

Week 3: Defining your success story. What are the few key things that your new boss needs you to accomplish in the short term and medium term so he/she can meet goals with management? What does the organization consider a success and what does your boss consider a success? When do these things need to be accomplished? How are key performance indicators measured? Make goals realistic and matched to resources available.

If your boss' expectations are unrealistic, express your concerns early on, provide alternative solutions, and adjust the metrics.

Later conversations to have:

Week 4: What additional resources are critical for your success? Once you have them identified it’s time to have that conversation. Begin with a written list and rationale of what need and how your boss can help. Based on your boss’ communication style discuss this with him/her. The resources needed are not always funding or personnel, but also access to systems or internal or external data, introductions to key employees or guidance/advice. For example, if your new company has structural issues with the marketing organization you’re trying to change, your boss can play a critical role in helping you connect with the right people to help address correct the issues and advocate for solutions.

Week 12 to 16: Eventually, you’re going to want to understand and discuss how your time in this job will contribute to your personal development. You have goals and you’d like your boss to support and help you achieve them. Discuss what projects or special assignments can be assigned to you without sacrificing focus? Also consider, educational options to develop and strengthen your skills. Get his/her feedback on courses or programs that would strengthen your capabilities.

Relationships are built over time. Building a great relationship with your new boss should start the first day on the job. There’s a sequential logic to developing a great relationship. It doesn’t have to be hard or awkward, just applied consistently. Focusing on business situational awareness, communications style, and expectations will build trust.

As you learn more about your role and duties, start communicating about resources needed for your success. When necessary revisit and seek clarification on style, expectations, and business dynamics. Consider discussions on personal development moving forward once your relationship is reasonably well established.

SEO reporting plays a critical role in developing a strong digital marketing strategy. Collecting the right data and knowing how to sort and understand the information can let marketers know what efforts bring customers and what areas need improvements to provide a quality ROI for the company. This is when SEO reports become a critical part in your SEO strategy.

Despite the obvious need for SEO reporting, 74 percent of marketers say that they do not adequately track their results in SEO reports. Similarly, only 22% of marketers say they have data-driven strategies that drive strong strategies.

What makes SEO reporting and analytics so critical?

Brands that do their SEO reporting house in order tend to have a far better idea of what their customers like and respond well to and what they do not. SEO reports and their results can clearly show which topics and types of content attract more engaged customers and lead to a higher number of conversions.

As brands develop a greater understanding of what customers like and do not like, they will be able to better allocate their limited marketing resources. They can focus more time and energy creating content that has a higher chance of properly engaging the target audience and bringing the brand revenue.

Brands with strong SEO reports will also find it easier to detect trends in consumer needs. Your brand might see higher engagement from buyer's with certain topics or types of content at particular times of the year. This will provide greater insight into what people likely look for during different seasons. Armed with this insights in SEO reports, organizations will find it easier to anticipate new needs for customers moving forward.

What are SEO reporting metrics to understand funnel success?

To set up your SEO reporting, you will want to track how well your digital marketing efforts bring in leads and how well those leads convert into customers. This requires a keen understanding of your sales funnel and the metrics that determine your success at each stage. You can read more on digital marketing with these digital marketing books.

SEO reporting requires examining closely how well your outreach efforts encourages people to enter and engage with your site. You then need to track how those leads move through the funnel until you get new customers.

There are a range of metrics you can use to better understand your sales funnel and create SEO reports. At the top of the funnel, you want to gauge how well your content and SEO efforts bring in leads. Metrics here include:

• Traffic
• Content ranking
• Shares/likes on social media

As prospects move through the funnel, you want to see how well your content encourages people to progress close to a conversion. For this stage in SEO reports, you want to measure:

• Engagement rates
• Return users
• Followers on social media

You also want to see how well your traffic turns into official leads, so look at:

• Non-purchase conversions
• Email open rates

Finally, you want to see how well your leads turn into paying customers and how much money you make per customer. For proper SEO reports, you should monitor:

• Your purchase conversion rate
• Your average purchase size per customer

You can then take this information and determine the financial value of your leads working backwards. Your conversion rate will let you know how many leads you need to secure per customer, on average. Then, calculate the value of each lead to input into SEO reporting. Using the value of the lead, you can start to generate numbers that will tell you the value of your various SEO efforts. These concrete estimates can then be used to determine SEO ROI and your more profitable executions in your SEO reporting.

While these core metrics will give you a far better idea of how your SEO and your content throughout the funnel performs, you can also track other metrics for SEO reports that will provide valuable insight into the standing of your content. For example, many BrightEdge customers find it helpful to also track their rate of backlink acquisition. Backlinks provide Google spiders with important information about how your content in SEO reports is regarded by readers - reputable content will regularly be linked to. You can track the number of backlinks on your content through helpful features on the BrightEdge platform.

How long does it take to see the impact of SEO initiatives?

As you implement changes to your SEO strategy, you will want to closely track performance in SEO reports before and after to gauge impact. While you work on your optimization strategies, you should mark important dates in your BrightEdge account with the Page Events capability to later add to your SEO reporting. Marking the day within the system allows you to track when changes were made, simplifying your ability to see ranking changes before and after.

If you make major changes to your site, it can be worth asking Google to recrawl your site, particularly if your domain is smaller and less popular. Otherwise, it might not get recrawled for a few weeks. This could set back your SEO reports. Google tends to crawl larger domains that receive huge amounts of regular traffic on a regular basis, so this would not be as important for them. Google does have a quota to the number of times you can ask for a recrawl, so generally save this strategy for when you make large changes that you would like to see reflected in your rankings immediately. Regardless of whether you request a recrawl or if you allow Google to get to the page naturally, you can watch the progress through your Google Index Status Report and later transfer to your SEO reports.

The rate at which you see progress in your SEO analytics report will depend upon a few factors, including against whom you complete and the authority of your domain as a whole. Generally, SEO updates and changes should start to create some positive changes within a few weeks of making updates. You might not immediately jump to page one, but you may start to see an uptick in rankings and traffic within a week or two. This is important information to be added to SEO reports.

If you do not see any changes in performance within a few weeks after making updates, you should look carefully at your site to see if anything else is holding you back from quality SEO reports, for example the robots.txt file which provides crawling instructions to the the search crawlers. Keep in mind also that the authority of your domain as a whole impacts the ranking of individual pages. Look for ways to boost your site, such as internal links, your site map and see if that helps to lift your optimized pages as well.

What should I do if my analytics SEO reports show drops?

Not only will monitoring your SEO report and your analytics report help you see the success of your digital marketing strategy, but it can also alert you to problems. You can never afford to neglect pieces on your website, especially not those that have secured your top rankings.

If you see your rankings start to drop in SEO reports, you should always inspect your page and its competition. Look to see who replaced you in the rankings and what optimization strategies they use. BrightEdge can allow you to dive into the recommendations for a single page, helping you pinpoint what will help recover your position.

If you notice a dramatic drop in your rankings on multiple page, you will need to inspect your site with your Google search console and check popular SEO sites to see if any algorithm updates may have hit your site. Examine your site for potential problems, such as duplicate content, to include in your SEO reports.

How do I present SEO reports to others in the organization?

Now that you have a solid SEO reporting strategy, you will want to present your digital marketing findings and your analytics report to others in the organization. Providing quality SEO reports can help you convince others in your organization about the value of your SEO efforts, which can make it easier to secure assistance on particular projects--such as the UX team or subject--matter experts within the company who you would like to collaborate with on content. Marketing heads and others in the C-suite want to see SEO reports as well.

Begin compiling your report by identifying key areas that this particular position wants to see. For example, the C-suite will want to see SEO reporting related to revenue, someone in sales or product marketing may want to see information on leads earned in their designated SEO reports. Consider the statistics that matter the most and pull out the numbers that present the positive, strongest picture.

On the BrightEdge platform, the StoryBuilder feature makes it simple to create eye-catching, clear reports that will emphasizes your chosen statistics. The data can be easily compiled into your relevant report.

When it comes to succeeding in digital marketing, understanding the value of the SEO report and how to compile a thorough analytics report remains critical. This type of data will not only make every step of your job more efficient, but it can also impact your budget and collaboration with the rest of the organization. Consider these tips as you build your own strategy, analytics, and SEO reports.

With more than a billion sites online, competition is fierce across nearly every sector. Brands try to get their voices heard above the noise. In a number of industries, however, there are sites that dominate the search engine results pages and seem nearly impossible to overtake. This is why your content marketing for small business strategy is extremely important.