Vengreso - Three Lessons Learned from Our Black Friday Special

Three Lessons Learned from Our Black Friday Special

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I admit, when my CMO Bernie Borges suggested that we run a Black Friday special, I wasn’t ready to sign up for the idea. In fact, I was skeptical.

Why should we discount our service when we provide so much value?

After all, we offer an on demand, digital sales training program that focuses on changing behavior to help professionals create more sales conversations and improve win rates. Additionally, we have an active community of learners who share success stories and participate in monthly live coaching events.

Why should we offer a discount on this incredible service?

Bernie reminded me that I’m the guy whose motto has always been “don’t do normal.” While you could argue that Black Friday specials are very normal, they aren’t for a digital selling training company.

We’ve been planning our transition to learning-as-a-platform, so I thought why not test the waters with a crazy special and aggressive Black Friday marketing campaign? The more I thought about it, the more the idea appealed to me to put our Vengreso On Demand platform on Black Friday special.

There are tons of #BlackFriday deals. But nothing like the CRAZY discount on #SellingWithLinkedIn that @M_3Jr and @BernieBorges offered. Read the article to learn tips for your #B2B marketing campaign. #DigitalSelling #SalesClick To Tweet

3 Lessons for a Successful B2B Black Friday Marketing Campaign

Often, our marketing campaigns target larger organizations with teams of 25 or more sales reps, such as Conversica, Miller Heiman Group, Reliant Technology, among others. But our Black Friday campaign would target a different set of potential customers. For this campaign, our marketing strategy would target entrepreneurs, SMB owners, and individual sales reps who want to transform their selling techniques to reach the modern buyer.

So, our campaign was a little different than normal. After all, that’s what we’re good at (not normal). We developed a plan to reach that target audience to help them achieve greater success in 2020. Our mission at Vengreso is to change the behavior of sales reps to become the modern seller the modern buyer needs. We wanted to reach as many professionals as possible to make sure that every single one had the opportunity to benefit from our on demand training program AND we wanted it to be so affordable that no one would pass it up.

So, here are three things that we learned from our Black Friday 2019 marketing experience.

1. Go Big on the Offer!

Bernie convinced me to go big with our offer, so big we went! We discounted our Selling with LinkedIn – Individuals and Selling with Sales Navigator – Individuals digital sales training programs by 50%! Normally, Selling with LinkedIn Individuals is $597 for a 12-month subscription and Selling with Sales Navigator is $797 for a 12-month subscription.

Our Black Friday special at 50% off dropped the price to $298.50 and $398.50 respectively for the same 12-month subscription.

I admit I was concerned about potentially cheapening our brand by discounting it by 50%, especially with all the value we offer. But Bernie advised that we should “go big or go home!” So, we went big on the offer with 50% off!

For a #BlackFriday marketing campaign to succeed you have to go BIG! That’s how @M_3Jr and @BernieBorges priced the award-winning #SellingWithLinkedIn training. Learn what that CRAZY offer was! #SocialSelling #SalesClick To Tweet

2. Aggressive Marketing

Once we had the offer figured out, next we devised a marketing plan. We decided that this offer was “CRAZY” and that should be the theme.

That was easy for me because I’m crazy mad about the pathetic ways that so many sellers use LinkedIn, such as spraying and praying or spamming their connections. These sellers are ruining LinkedIn for everyone! I even recorded a video where I let it all hang out with my “crazy” frustration on this issue, and where we announced our CRAZY Black Friday campaign.

We also designed several graphic images to promote the campaign on social media and on our website. My favorite image is the one that shows me being confronted by highway patrol because they think our CRAZY offer is “a steal.” Isn’t it hilarious?!

 

We started to promote our Black Friday special on November 12th, a little more than two weeks before Black Friday. Our promotion included a social media storm with several posts on LinkedIn from me and our Vengreso team, shared through our expansive employee advocacy program. We also tweeted the offer from our company handle and from Vengreso team member’s Twitter accounts. We posted images to our Instagram feed and to our IG story as well, with everything linking back to our main sales page.

Additionally, Viveka von Rosen our CVO, recorded seven videos which were also posted on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Each video contained a valuable tip and a brief introduction to the CRAZY Black Friday special.

We also promoted the special discount to everyone who is subscribed to our weekly and monthly newsletter. Our sentiment is that we share helpful content all year long, so we’ve earned the right to promote a CRAZY special offer, especially when it can help so many salespeople.

The icing on the cake was in our final email, when we sweetened the offer with a 20% discount on our Gold LinkedIn Profile Makeover plan. That offer really boosted our responses and subscriptions!

3. Be Available 24/7

As the holiday weekend approached, our promotion continued to escalate in frequency and reach. The response we were getting was really exciting! People were taking advantage of the CRAZY 50% discount for both Vengreso On Demand sales training options.

As the special ran through November 30th, we knew that we’d need to be responsive to people throughout the holiday weekend, especially since many respondents were outside the U.S. In fact, I personally responded to emails and even had phone conversations over the weekend with people who responded to the offer or who had questions about the program.

One of the most common questions was: Who should take the training? That’s easy! Anyone who is responsible for producing revenue and realizes that the modern buyer has changed the game. This includes individual sales reps, SMB owners, entrepreneurs, and soloists.

Another common question was: What are the benefits of the training? That was even easier! The on demand program lets you learn whenever it’s most convenient for you. And, you can go back to any modules to reinforce the training. Even better, you have access to live monthly coaching sessions and the active community of learners for a whole year.

It’s no wonder that everyone I spoke with ended up subscribing to one of the two Vengreso On Demand training programs. Talk about a great conversion rate – 100%!

Why We Offered 50% Off

Far and away the biggest take away for me is that many salespeople need the training we deliver in Selling with LinkedIn – Individuals and Selling with Sales Navigator – Individuals. While our Black Friday marketing campaign was successful within the scope of that event, we realized that we want to reach many more sales professionals to help them start more sales conversations. After all, we limited the Black Friday special to only the first 500 subscribers.

As I mentioned above, our mission at Vengreso is to help sales professionals engage the modern buyer more effectively to start more sales conversations. The frustration we experience every day is that too many salespeople are failing to leverage LinkedIn to generate more sales conversations.

We want the modern seller to be “attractive” to the modern buyer. We’ve educated more than 140,000 professionals and we know firsthand that once a sales professional learns how to develop their brand and how to find, engage, connect and feed their network with relevant content, the result is more sales conversations!

There is one thing that has not changed in the sales profession: You cannot make a sale if you are not having conversations with qualified buyers.

Too many #B2B salespeople still use LinkedIn wrong. They #SprayAndPray hoping they find a prospect. That’s why @M_3Jr and @BernieBorges offered a CRAZY #BlackFriday deal on #SellingWithLinkedIn. Learn their tips here. #SalesClick To Tweet

Announcing Cyber December

We want to help more sales professionals become the modern seller that the modern buyer needs.

We’re passionate about helping salespeople bring value to their buyer so their buyer engages them in qualified opportunities. We don’t want to limit the opportunity to be a gift during the biggest gift-giving season of the year.

Every day we cite the data from CSO Insights that states when a sales team has a social selling adoption rate of 76% or higher, their win rate is 61.5% compared to the average win rate of 41.9% with a social selling adoption rate of less than 25%. You can’t argue with data points like that.

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