Premier John Horgan’s comments about this fall’s referendum on electoral reform at the recent Union of B.C. Municipalities annual convention are disturbing for three reasons.

He said: “I’m going to campaign as hard as I can in the next month to convince other British Columbians to join with me and take a leap of faith on a change that works in jurisdictions around the world. Do not be put in a place of fear.”

Obviously, the premier’s briefing notes were wrong. The assertion the options presented in B.C.’s referendum are used around the world is incorrect. Unless “around the world” means “four countries, specifically Germany, Lesotho, New Zealand and Bolivia.” Those are the only national elections that use any of the forms of proportional representation British Columbians will be asked to vote on. To be fair, variations are also used in a few sub-national elections like Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Australian Senate. A couple of countries like Venezuela use a hybrid.

Ninety per cent of the nearly 100 countries that use proportional representation rely exclusively on party lists. You elect parties, not people. And there are at least four ways of selecting names from a party list, but the point is they are party lists, not locally elected MLAs like we have now.

The party list form is used around the world, but not on our ballot. Therefore, nice-sounding generalizations about worldwide proportional representation are not applicable to our referendum. When something sounds too good to be true, it is.

What is on the ballot, you might ask? Two systems never tried or used anywhere in the world, and one used in the four named countries above. Even that third option is mired in uncertainty for British Columbians. Attorney General David Eby listed 11 key aspects that will have to be dealt with after the referendum. Those include the number of MLAs, what the electoral map will look like, how party lists are generated, and even whether voters will have one, two or more votes in general elections.

This creates confusion.

That is a pretty big, risky leap of faith. I’m reminded of the most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Blind trust on something as important and complicated as electoral reform is enough. Couple that with what you hear all over the province that this is about ensuring retention of power by the current government and it’s an Olympic long jump.

The second reason the statement is flawed is because the process is flawed. The only consultation with British Columbians was an online questionnaire. Compare to the Citizen’s Assembly of 2005. Randomly selected British Columbians worked for nearly a year, examining electoral reform. The provincial government established a conventional approach to constitutional change with a two-step hurdle. More than a majority of the votes and a regional requirement to ensure that all areas of the province were included.

The 2005 referendum failed to meet that bar. The second referendum in 2009 also failed. Note that both of those presented a clear choice between two options, not the two-question obfuscation we face this fall. And the Citizens Assembly rejected Mixed Member Proportional, now on our ballot, as they felt it took away too much power from the voters.

We can argue about whether the appropriate threshold for provincewide support is a bare majority or 60 per cent. However, there should be no argument about the second hurdle, which allows us to reflect our urban and rural fact of life. If 50 per cent plus one of B.C.’s constituencies also had to vote in favour, it would ensure that no one region, such as the Lower Mainland, would overwhelm another, like the Interior. The fear in our rural areas over the potential loss of their MLAs is real.

The third reason is the direct involvement of all the political parties in the debate. This did not happen in 2005 and 2009. It is impossible and inappropriate to gag elected officials. However, in the past this was done gingerly and with respect. The motto seemed to be “Let the people decide!” and that sentiment is one we should be following today.

The direct, vocal involvement of the leaders of all three political parties represented in the legislature and the registration of political parties as third-party advertising sponsors detracts from the necessary public debate. The partisan tone makes this not a sober discussion of electoral reform but a raucous re-fight of the last election. That is a mistake when we are looking at constitutional reform at the core of the relationship between elected leaders and voters.

The debate needs to be thoughtful, fact-based, passionate, opinionated, but non-political.

This is not a party issue, it is a people issue.

The premier asks British Columbians to take a leap of faith. To not act out of fear. However, the very nature of political discourse in this province will lead in exactly the opposite direction.

True leadership on political reform requires something elected politicians of every stripe are not very good at. They are take-charge kind of folks, who believe their way is the right way.

However, on electoral reform, it is one of those times when we should “Let the people decide!”

Bob Plecas was deputy minister under five premiers that crossed the political spectrum. He is a founder and director of the No Proportional Representation Society of B.C.

Letters to the editor should be sent to sunletters@vancouversun.com. The editorial pages editor is Gordon Clark, who can be reached at gclark@postmedia.com.

CLICK HERE to report a typo.

Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.com.</p

There I stood in the produce aisle at Publix when I saw a young woman walk by wearing the trendiest dress that I NEEDED to have in my closet. “Should I go up to this stranger and ask where she got it?” I thought to myself. Nah, it’s 2018, people don’t approach random strangers in the grocery store.

WHAT IF… I could low key take a quick photo of her dress without her noticing and my phone could just tell me where it’s from?

Great news, everyone.

Pretty soon, you can do just that using Snapchat!

Snapchat and Amazon’s Partnership

This past Monday, September 24th, Snapchat announced their partnership with Amazon and the new point-and-shoot shopping feature. All you have to do is scan an item or barcode using your Snapchat camera and you’ll receive a pop up window in the app that showcases the item, similar items, pricing, review scores, and Prime availability. Selecting a presented listing will direct you to Amazon or a website in your browser where you can purchase the item. Convenient AF.

Snapchat will be releasing this feature to a small percentage of U.S. users before they decide to expand to other countries. After recently losing a multitude of users and money (down from 191 million to 188 million daily active users last quarter while burning $353 million, according to Tech Crunch), this new point-and-shoot shopping feature could really help them bounce back.

Keeping Up With the Competition

With Instagram’s latest shopping tag feature and Shopping channel in Explore, social commerce continues to advance, allowing for an easier, more convenient user experience. Pinterest has also recognized this shift in social commerce by recently launching their Shop the Look pin, allowing users to tag the products showcased in their organic pins. With more than 250 million monthly users on Pinterest, more and more users are adapting to these changes.

What Does This Mean for Us?

In a world where people rely on immediate gratification, we, as marketers, need to continuously find ways to keep up with this fast-paced, ever-evolving environment, in order to keep our businesses thriving. Social technology is constantly changing and advancing. If we can’t keep up with the trends, we’re never going to grow as a business.

The key is to be susceptible to change and adapt to new ideas before they fully take off in order to put yourself ahead of the game. And like any new strategies you fit into your marketing plan, don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t work the first time. Everything is trial and error, which is why I’m curious to see how this new Snapchat feature takes off.

While this new feature sounds incredibly convenient and awesome, I have a lot of questions about how this launch will turn out. Will old users who gave up on the app give it another chance? How accurate will the point-and-shoot listings be? Will competitors jump on this bandwagon and hijack their idea? Stay tuned…

Want to keep up with the marketing trends but don’t know where to start? Download our Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing for some helpful tips and tricks.

"Lately I seem to have a much lower level of engagement (views, likes, comments or shares) on the articles I'm writing and the things I'm posting on LinkedIn."

I hear this frequently from my consulting clients as well as people in my LinkedIn network. They want to know why this is happening and how they can get back to "the good old days."

First, more people are writing and sharing than ever before on LinkedIn, so the news feed is getting more crowded. Secondly, because LinkedIn has set up an algorithm to decide what information goes into people's feeds, not everything you share goes into every one of your connections' feeds. Check out this article to get more details about how the algorithm works.

Because fewer people are receiving your articles and status updates, it's more important than ever to share the type of information your network is most likely to find useful and thus share, like or comment on—or, better yet, directly engage with you.

Because I understand that might be easier said than done, here are some ideas and resources that have worked for me and my clients and may help you, too, get the amount of engagement you got "back in the day."
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Strategies to increase engagement with your LinkedIn posts

In addition to the suggestions below, feel free to check out LinkedIn's helpful guide Sharing Content on LinkedIn–Best Practices.

Make sure your content is relevant and interesting to your target audience. The topics or questions you've discussed with your clients and professional associates this week are probably on the minds of your network as well. Therefore, this is the type of helpful information you should be sharing. Personally, this is how I choose the topics for my weekly LinkedIn email and blog.

Be sure your post is visually interesting and appealing. When you share something on LinkedIn, make sure you post an image—or if you're sharing a link, be sure the visual that is populated from the web page is interesting. Also, LinkedIn seems to be giving feed algorithm preference to video right now; so sharing any form of video will typically result in higher engagement than simple text.

Take advantage of hashtags. Hashtags are like a filing system for all content shared on LinkedIn. Thus, if you don't include them, your content may not be included in the mix. Be sure to include several relevant keyword hashtags at the end of your comments or weave a few into the comments themselves. LinkedIn will also suggest hashtags you could select that may apply to the topic of your post.

You can find more details about the use of hashtags here.

Draw individuals to the post by mentioning them. LinkedIn now allows you to tag or mention (using the "@" operator) individuals or companies that may be mentioned in the article or video you're sharing or that you want to be sure see your post. Because the individual or company is notified when you use the Mentions feature, they may be inclined to engage with your post.

You can get more information on the specifics of LinkedIn's Mentions feature by clicking here.

Respond to their engagement when it is your turn to do so. If you get notified that someone commented on or shared your posts, be sure to "like" their comment or share and thank them for doing so. Don't just type "Thanks for sharing, Wayne" but use the Mentions feature, and grab their name as part of the thank you by adding the "@" sign ahead of their name. Then when their name shows up on the drop-down list, click it, and LinkedIn will populate their name in the comment. In addition, that populated name is now a hyperlink to their profile, and they'll be notified that you mentioned them.

Ask a question or elicit an opinion. That sounds pretty simple, but I've found that if you ask people their opinion on something you've shared, you'll get responses from some of the people in your audience.

Sharing is caring. If the information you are sharing is something that comes with a very high value at a fairly low or no cost (e.g., a free webinar, download, etc.), then why not simply ask readers to hit the Share button and share it with their network—and don't be surprised when they do.

Implement these strategies, and watch engagement with your posts increase—and hopefully it will result in lots of calls, meetings, and productive email exchanges like in the "good old days."

The post Are You Finding that No One is Listening to You on LinkedIn? appeared first on Wayne Breitbarth.

It’s time for a new approach and mindset for contract negotiations, time to leave the old me-first, I-win-you-lose strategy far behind, replaced by highly collaborative partnerships.

What if the agreement you negotiated was more than just a short-term, legalese-burdened piece of paper specifying a bunch of transactions, terms and conditions, self-interested risk avoidance provisions and liability limitation procedures? That mindset is old school and inadequate for today’s economic and business realities. A new way of thinking about business relationships is needed, a new paradigm that can take you and your partners beyond the handshake and the initial yes to Get to We.

What if instead a set ethical of social norms based on mutual trust was the foundation of the deal? The latter course may sound naive and impossible to achieve, but our research found that companies of varying sizes and industries established highly collaborative relationships on a foundation of common social norms. Our new book, Getting to We, outlines the six social norms—which we call guiding principles—and describes a five-step process that will make establishing highly collaborative relationships a reality.

Getting to We is a paradigm shift for business negotiations processes based on the application of Vested’s proven “what’s-in-it-for-we” (WIIFWe) business relationship approach.

The WIIFWe mindset is the foundation of a Vested relationship; it is a change in social norms from a “what’s-in-it-for-me” (WIIFMe) mindset. WIIFWe is the philosophical mantra that forms the architecture for a collaborative and trusting relationship. Once embraced, a WIIFWe mindset has the power to deliver a powerful competitive advantage for the parties long after a deal is signed.

Here’s the crucial element: The Getting to We mindset and process changes the goal of the negotiation from the deal itself to the relationship. In other words, the relationship itself becomes the focus of the deal, throughout the life of the deal.

This unique and compelling idea says that once parties have gotten to yes in a contract negotiation, some real work and resources are needed to forge a lasting, collaborative, shared-value partnership in which all of the parties prosper.

The Getting to We process changes the goal of the negotiation from simply getting the deal itself done to forging a win-win partnership. Following this process helps companies change how they view the relationship—helping them embrace the WIIFWe mindset. This is done through an approach based on trust and six vital core principles that flow from a true commitment to trust: reciprocity, autonomy, honesty, equity, loyalty and integrity.

These principles, so important in our personnel endeavors and interactions, should drive collaborative business behaviors; this is especially true in today’s highly volatile and uncertain global economic climate. And it applies equally to existing relationships and to new ones. Therefore, to ensure a constant state of collaboration each party is responsible for always following the principles. For example, if the parties take seriously the principles of loyalty and integrity, they will look out for and strive to preserve the interests of the relationship, which means that some very common ways in which companies negotiate become unacceptable, such as coercion, or bluffing, or lying.

Negotiating the true nature of the relationship under a Getting to We mindset means that the parties move out of the competitive tit-for-tat cycle of actions and instead go on to create a negotiation atmosphere that encourages cooperation. There are three things about a WIIFWe relationship that alter the conventional tit-for-tat strategy:

• The players turn into partners for success. They set out to enter into a long-term relationship where each partner intends not to “eliminate” their partner by moving to another supplier or customer. The intent transforms a transactional business relationship into strategic relationship.
• The relationship adheres to the common set of principles (outlined above) that drive cooperative behavior.
• The partners live the WIIFWe approach in daily interactions and use a formal, governance structure to ensure compliance with cooperative behavior.

Thus the relationship itself generates successive rounds of cooperative tit-for-tat thinking to create value that is mutually beneficial to the partners.

Originally published here.

Engagio recently released its ABM Outlook Survey 2018 report, focusing on the strategies, organizational structure and measurement processes organizations are using as they implement ABM. The survey also looked to identify the key challenges respondents were facing, including the primary concern: getting organizational buy-in to fully embrace ABM. Let’s look at some of the key trends outlined in the survey and identify some takeaways that will allow your organization to strengthen your ABM strategy.

ABM Strategy

Not surprisingly, most respondents (65%) are splitting their overarching marketing strategy between traditional demand generation and ABM. Just under a quarter of respondents said that their ABM programs were well underway or advanced, but half of the audience said that their efforts have just begun. ABM spend is currently around 20% of the total marketing budget. However, it’s exciting to see that spending is jumping to nearly 30% of total spend heading into 2019. In a lot of ways, this makes complete sense. For many, 2018 served as a year in which many organizations piloted ABM initiatives to help define their strategy and approach, with plans to extend those programs in the coming year.

Organizational Structure to Support ABM

While the benefits of ABM have been well documented over the last few years, organizational structure within most marketing teams has yet to be optimized. In most cases, the CMO or VP of Marketing ‘owns’ ABM, but it touches nearly every function within the team. Over time, I expect to see more organizations unifying Marketing and Sales Operations into one department to further strengthen the staffing model necessary to support ABM, particularly in the areas of data management, account tiering and enablement of more personalization.

ABM Adoption – Where are Marketers Making Strides?

When asked to rate their organization’s sophistication in key areas, the top three answers were:

• Sales and Marketing alignment
• Establishing an account foundation
• Running ABM plays

Overall, these three areas make a lot of sense and should serve as the foundation of ABM. Not surprisingly, organizations rated their ability to measure the impact of their ABM programs as the function that had the lowest level of sophistication. Just like with traditional demand generation, marketers want to ultimately understand their impact on the pipeline, but ABM presents a number of challenges. Chief among them is the challenge of unifying data from a program that for many teams consists of multiple systems that aren’t integrated.

Key Challenges Moving Forward

Respondents in the survey mentioned two primary challenges that need to be addressed in order for them to realize the full value of an ABM-centric approach: getting necessary organizational buy-in and having the ability to execute. While there is some correlation between these two challenges, they ultimately impact the marketing team in different ways.

Having the necessary buy-in really boils down to being able to build the appropriate business case to support the investment necessary to be successful. Teams struggling in this area should fully embrace the notion of developing an ABM pilot as a first step in which the budgetary investment represents a fraction of the overall spend and aims to utilize as much of the existing tech stack and team resources as possible. This should also include the ability to represent how incremental investments would impact the program. For example, if a pilot is focused on 5-10 accounts within an organization’s Tier 1 accounts, what would the impact be if resources were allocated to run ABM programs for the top 25?

For the organizations struggling with the ability to execute, the focus of their efforts should be on maximizing how they can do the most with the team they have. Let’s face it: marketers love to embrace the latest and greatest…the newest shiny object. And ABM is really the holy grail. It allows marketers to build out their MarTech stack and explore new strategies. But savvy marketing teams know that the secret to early (and sustained) success – ultimately the foundation of a solid ABM program – lies in data.

A strong Marketing Ops function that can establish the appropriate lead management, segmentation and data enrichment strategies empowers teams to run more effective ABM plays that will result in the type of engagement that shows that this strategy works. More technologies are coming online every year to support ABM, and these will continue to help organizations scale. But a data-first strategy managed by a strong Marketing Ops function will ultimately provide the strongest return for your ABM program.

A bank can give you a credit card with little trouble. The goal of the bank is really to get you to borrow money, as that is how it profits from the transaction.

You can give the razor away without making any money. You need the recipient to buy the razor blades, the real reason you gave them the razor without capturing any value in that transaction.

You can ask people sign up for your service and get a high number of people to register. That small commitment is easily gained, but the more difficult commitment is getting them to buy what you sell.

The loyalty card provides benefits to those who possess it, but it does very little to improve loyalty.

Your prospective client can allow you to sign up as a vendor without ever placing an order with your company. By allowing you to register, they may benefit by getting rid of you, telling you they’ll call you when they need you.

It’s easy to mistake small commitments as something more than they are. When you sell to businesses, the small commitments often mask that you have not obtained the larger commitment you really need. You can go all the way through some process with your prospective client only to find out they have no real commitment to change.

The Big Commitment

In The Lost Art of Closing, I put “the commitment to change” as the third commitment in a series of ten commitments, even though the framework is mostly non-linear. The reason the commitment to change follows only “the commitment for time” and “the commitment to explore” is because you can get all the way to the end of the process to find out there was no real will to change. These deals are lost to the decision to do nothing—or to postpone the decision to some future date.

Without the commitment to change, your prospective client agree to all kinds of things that feel like progress but are no real indication that you are moving closer to a deal—or them to the better results you are trying to help them achieve.

Essential Reading!

Get my latest book: The Lost Art of Closing

"In The Lost Art of Closing, Anthony proves that the final commitment can actually be one of the easiest parts of the sales process—if you’ve set it up properly with other commitments that have to happen long before the close. The key is to lead customers through a series of necessary steps designed to prevent a purchase stall."

Buy Now

The post Small Commitments Mistaken for Larger Commitments appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Homeowners in Metro Vancouver, the Fraser Valley and along the Sea to Sky Highway pay vastly different levels of property taxes and user fees, depending on where they live, to fund the services run by their municipalities.

An analysis of provincial finance data for 29 cities shows how much the owner of an average detached house in each area would pay the municipality for standard items, including emergency services, parks, recreation facilities and road maintenance.

We used this to determine where homeowners pay more or less; how much these taxes and fees have increased since the last municipal election in 2014; and whether they go up by a smaller margin in an election year when voters are deciding who to support at the ballot box.

We also spoke to leading mayoral candidates to find out, if elected, whether they would lower or raise these taxes and fees, and how they would spend — or not spend — the revenue they generate.

The answers varied as widely as the mill rates across Metro Vancouver.

In Surrey, candidate Doug McCallum said he would ratchet back tax increases so they would grow only at the rate of inflation, and said he could do that without cutting services. In Vancouver, candidate Kennedy Stewart insisted that would be impossible to do.

“By law, cities can’t run deficits, so if you are going to cut taxes you are going to be cutting services, immediately,” Stewart said. “Which library branch do you close? Which park do you stop mowing the lawn? Which neighbourhoods get fewer police patrols?”

The figures

Postmedia’s data analysis used spreadsheets provided by the provincial government that show the total “property taxes and charges” collected each year by municipalities, and what that amount was for the owner of an averagely priced single-family detached home in each city. (Condos and townhouses were not included in the calculations.)

We stripped from this data all money that municipalities collect for other levels of government, such as for schools, TransLink and regional districts, because city halls do not control or spend this cash.

What was left were general municipal taxes, which the municipalities use to run services; user fees, which can include street parking, utility fees and community centre charges; and parcel taxes, which are temporarily applied to certain properties to help the city pay for major upgrades or new infrastructure, such as sewers.

We added together these three sources of revenue for 29 municipalities, stretching from Pemberton to Hope, and found the following:

• In 10 municipalities, an average homeowner pays $4,000 or higher annually, including Vancouver, White Rock, North Vancouver District, and West Vancouver — the latter has the highest average bill at nearly $6,500.

• In 14 municipalities, an average homeowner pays between $3,000 and $4,000 annually, including Surrey, Delta, Burnaby, Richmond and Coquitlam.

• In five municipalities, an average homeowner pays below $3,000 annually, including Pitt Meadows, Chilliwack and Hope.

Taxes and fees for an ‘average’ home

Increases were higher in the three years after the 2014 election and then, in most cases, were more modest this year, just before the upcoming municipal election. Click on each municipality to read the data:

* Overall property tax bills are higher than the amounts above because municipalities also collect taxes for schools, TransLink and other levels of government that have not been included because city halls do not control or spend that money.

** Taxes collected by these five small municipalities are higher than shown because they pay a police tax that is not included in these figures. Source: Government of B.C.

Most homeowners will have a much higher municipal tax bill, perhaps double these amounts, when the money for other government services is included. Both Vancouver and West Vancouver say they get to keep only half the money collected for property taxes, utilities and other fees each year. Vancouver reports that nearly a third is handed over for schools, 12 per cent for Metro Vancouver, and seven per cent for TransLink.

With the next municipal election three weeks away, we also wanted to know by how much these taxes and user fees increased since this round of mayors and councillors took office in 2014.

• In some cases, municipalities that already had high taxes and fees, such as Lions Bay, Vancouver, West Vancouver and Port Moody, also increased them significantly — between 20 and 35 per cent — over the term.

• Other jurisdictions, such as Surrey and North Vancouver City, raised their payments substantially since 2014 as well, but their homeowners still pay relatively low or average amounts of taxes and fees compared to other cities.

• By comparison, Richmond and Burnaby have average taxes and fees, and in Pitt Meadows and Hope they are even lower, but none of those municipalities has increased them noticeably over the term.

• Places like Whistler and Bowen Island have higher tax bills but have also kept their rates relatively flat each year since the last election.

The Postmedia analysis also showed that in nearly every one of the 29 municipalities, increases to taxes and fees were the highest in the first three years of the term. Then increases fell dramatically for this year — an election year.

Is this an election ploy to woo voters into thinking kindly of the outgoing mayor and council, who may be running for re-election?

No, say Surrey councillors Bruce Hayne and Tom Gill, both running for mayor. According to the provincial government data, money paid by the owner of an average house in that city increased six per cent each year between 2014 and 2017, but only three per cent in 2018. Both candidates, though, maintained the taxes and fees collected were consistent each year and that there was no plan to reverse the rate of tax increases in time for the election.

One of the most extreme examples was in North Vancouver City, where taxes and fees increased an average of seven per cent in the first three years of the term, but then dropped two per cent in 2018.

This may have been an effort to curry voters’ favour, says Guy Heywood, a former North Vancouver City councillor who is now running for mayor. “Spending always goes down before an election. Staff will curtail expenses as the mandate of a council comes to the end and councillors want to look fiscally prudent,” said Heywood, who was a councillor from 2008 to 2014.

But he added that some expenses do fluctuate each year beyond the control of city halls, such as weather-related issues like snow-clearing and social challenges like the opioid crisis.

North Vancouver City Coun. Linda Buchanan, who is running for mayor, did not directly answer the question about this apparent decline in money collected in 2018, but said council generally accepts recommendations from staff about tax rate changes, which she has disagreed with at times when she worried there may not be sufficient revenue being collected to fund services.

Voters must decide

Voters will decide on Oct. 20 who they want to run their city halls, and so we asked some of the main candidates to discuss taxes and fees, and what they would spend the revenue on or what services they would cut.

In Vancouver, the owner of an average house (valued at $2.5 million) paid $4,400 in taxes and fees in 2018, the seventh highest amount of the 29 cities, behind areas such as West Vancouver, Whistler and White Rock. Between 2014 and 2018, taxes and fees jumped by 22 per cent — one of the biggest increases in the region.

During a recent Vancouver mayoral debate hosted by The Vancouver Sun and Province newspapers, candidates were asked if they would support the same rate of tax increases, or a higher or lower amount.

Contenders Ken Sim, Hector Bremner, Wai Young and Fred Harding all said lower. Stewart said increases should stay about the same.

Shauna Sylvester noted Vancouver’s rates are lower than West Vancouver and some other North American jurisdictions, and said the city raised taxes because senior governments have off-loaded major costs such as the overdose crisis and affordable housing. It is impossible to make promises about local taxes, she argued, without discussing the roles of Victoria and Ottawa.

Bremner, though, insisted they must come down. “There are people who are being taxed out of their homes right now,” he said.

He, along with Sim, Young and Harding, all promised some type of financial audit of the city to try to find efficiencies to cut spending.

When pressed about cuts her city hall would make if elected, Young suggested she would save money by stopping major projects, such as the demolition of the Georgia Street viaducts and construction of more bike lanes.

Stewart argued a major portion of a city’s budget is emergency services, such as police, fire and ambulance, so it is very difficult to make sizable tax cuts without trimming services. He dismissed as “wishy-washy” the other candidates’ plans to limit taxes and fees without significantly impacting city amenities.

Bremner, though, insisted it would be possible by increasing revenue in a new way, such as generating more profits from city land by building small, walkable, business-friendly communities.

“It’s not about cut or spend. It is not a zero-sum game,” Bremner said.

In Surrey, Metro’s fastest-growing city with 1,000 additional residents every month, the taxes and fees paid by the owner of an average house (valued at $1.1 million) are lower than two-thirds of the cities analyzed, at $3,369 a year.

But the amount collected in Surrey between 2014 and 2018 increased by 23 per cent, a higher rate than in all the other cities except two.

Gill, a two-term councillor with Surrey First, the party that has dominated council since 2005, said Surrey’s rates have traditionally been low, so even if they are increasing more quickly, homeowners are still getting good value.

“When you look at the revenue collected on a single-family home, we are still significantly lower than Vancouver,” said Gill, who is running for mayor under the Surrey First banner. “Imagine the windfall we would have if we were taxing the equivalent of Vancouver.”

Surrey’s outgoing council passed a 10-year recreation plan for Surrey, including new ice rinks in Cloverdale and Whalley, and a transportation plan to ease congestion, which Gill said are priorities for him.

He criticized the administration overseen by McCallum, who was mayor from 1996 to 2005, for financing a tax freeze by selling off public lands.

Bruce Hayne, who was elected a Surrey First councillor for the past two terms but recently split from the reigning party and is running for mayor as an independent, agreed Surrey’s taxes are increasing because the city is “slowly playing catch-up.” He said cutting taxes is a great sound bite, but doesn’t get desperately needed amenities built in a growing city or provide a sufficient number of first responders.

He believes more options are needed for youth in Surrey, but something more than sports facilities; if elected, Hayne would like to see a youth centre built that offers arts, music, dance and drama.

McCallum, though, is proud of his record of freezing taxes over his nine years as mayor. If elected again, he would continue that trend, but says he could still bring in a municipal police force and avoid cutting existing services by eliminating financial waste and “redistributing” revenue among departments.

Among the crowded field of mayoralty candidates in North Vancouver City, Coun. Rod Clark agrees with trying to keep tax increases to the rate of inflation — something he said he proposed but wasn’t supported by outgoing Mayor Darrell Mussatto and his slate of councillors.

Despite this call to reduce the amount of taxes being collected, he still champions securing affordable rental housing through negotiations with developers, and the still-to-be-built Harry Jerome community centre project — for which one per cent of the tax rate is being designated.

The 2018 amount of taxes and fees paid by the owner of an average North Vancouver City house, valued at $1.7 million, was $3,847 — higher than in Surrey but lower than in Vancouver. Since the last election, taxes and fees have increased by 20 per cent, the eighth quickest pace in a field of 29 cities.

His council colleague, Buchanan, said council opted to raise taxes “modestly” to ensure it has the funds to offer services and public amenities the growing city will need in the future. “By contrast, we have seen in neighbouring municipalities the decision to cut services and to burden future generations by borrowing, rather than saving, to pay for needed public infrastructure,” she said.

Buchanan would like to continue the save-for-a-rainy-day tax model of the current council. “We ensure that we build the financial reserves necessary to repair and replace in the future. We do this for everything from roads, to water and sanitary, to replacing major pieces of firefighting equipment like ladder trucks,” she said.

At the same time, she wants a “rigorous review” of the costs of the massive Harry Jerome centre, saying she would like the project to proceed but that her city must “build smarter” so it has the money to invest in other priorities such as greenways and arts and culture facilities.

Her competitor, Heywood, argued that municipalities with urban cores, such as North Vancouver City, New Westminster and Port Moody, spend more on policing, social issues and housing than suburbs like North Vancouver District without a downtown area. Heywood believes savings could be found, and taxes potentially reduced, if there was better collaboration between the two neighbouring North Vancouver municipalities — a concept that he said has not been welcomed by the existing council.

If elected, Heywood’s priorities would include finding financial efficiencies and reducing traffic gridlock.

Mayoral candidate Kerry Morris, a fierce critic of the previous council, said taxes went up unnecessarily because of spending on projects he dismissed as frivolous, such as some bike lanes and the Lonsdale energy system.

The owners of single-family homes have been hardest hit by tax hikes, says Morris, because of factors including council’s decision to allow coach houses on every lot, which led to increased property values, and a tax shift from condos to houses.

“So single-family homes have indeed borne the largest increase and priced many who own those homes out of the market,” he said.

City by city, there was no correlation between the amount of taxes and fees paid and the price of an average home. For example, the 2018 taxes and fees paid by the owner of an average home in Vancouver and Port Moody are the same at about $4,400 even though the value of an average house in Vancouver is $2.5 million while the value of an average house in Port Moody is $1.3 million.

And the fees paid by homeowners in Hope represented a much larger proportion of their relatively low home values compared to in West Vancouver, where the tax bill was pennies on the dollar of an average house value.

The taxes and fees are based entirely on the budget of each municipality. And how much your bill will be in 2019 will depend on the mayors and councillors elected, and their priorities for taxing and spending.

lculbert@postmedia.com

twitter.com/loriculbert

Note: There are five municipalities for which we could not include the money they pay for policing, so this means their overall tax bills will be higher than the numbers in this article: Bowen Island, Lions Bay, Anmore, Belcarra, and Pemberton. Because they have fewer than 5,000 residents, they pay a police tax rather than fund an entire detachment; that expense was captured in a catch-all “other” category in the government data which Postmedia eliminated because it mainly included money collected for services by other governments, such as TransLink.

A lot of people still get paid to sit in offices and do repetitive tasks. In recent years, however, employers have been pushing harder to find ways to outsource that work to machines.

Venture and growth investors are doing a lot to speed up the rise of these worker-bots. So far this year, they’ve poured hundreds of millions into developers of robotic process automation technology, the term to describe software used for performing a series of tasks previously carried out by humans.

Process automation funding activity spiked last week with a $225 million Series C round for one of the category leaders, New York-based UiPath. Sequoia Capital and Alphabet’s CapitalG led the financing, which brings total capital raised by the 13-year-old company to more than $400 million, with a most recent valuation of $3 billion.

A Crunchbase News analysis of funding for startups and growth companies involved in robotic process automation indicates this has been a busy year overall for the space, with more than $600 million in aggregate investment across at least seven sizable deals.

Below, we spotlight some of the largest 2018 rounds in the space:¹

UiPath, for its part, has a grand vision and an impressive growth rate. Its broad goal, laid out to incoming employees, involves “liberating the human workforce from tedious, repetitive tasks.”

And employers are willing to pay handsomely to liberate their employees. UiPath said that in one 21-month period, it went from $1 million to $100 million in annual recurring revenue, an absolutely astounding growth rate for an enterprise software company.

Marketing is becoming ever more personalised, and for long-term success, your business needs to keep up with the trend. You need to be building relationships, and doing that means being where your customers are. Online is key, but how can you leverage that beyond your own networks?

One essential key to expanding your reach and connecting with new, larger audiences is to develop a partnership programme.

Whatever your business – whether you are an expert coach, author, trainer or speaker and exchange time for money by selling your services, or own a brand selling products – in order to grow a sustainable business you need partners to help promote what you offer to a much wider audience.

By ‘partner’, I’m not talking about just having a Facebook page, or paying a high profile influencer to talk about you.

I mean strong, personal, 1-1 relationships with individuals (or organisations) who have the same target audience as you, and who are looking for a win-win-win scenario.

This will almost certainly mean a range of partners, for different areas of your business. How many, and who, is a mixture of quantity and quality. Or, perhaps more accurately, relevance. That win-win-win comes from you having something relevant to offer your partners for sharing, and by definition backing, your brand with their audience.

Investing in relationships to build strong partnerships

For you to understand what’s relevant to them, and for them to appreciate how what you offer adds value to their customers, you need to take the time to build that strong relationship. How that works depends on your business and location and theirs, but developing it almost always means ‘giving’ them something – something that shows them the value of your thought leadership, services or products, and demonstrates how your brand adds value to theirs.

That could be as simple as you building your profile through personal networking, spending time with people (yes, this is always about people) to give them the benefit of your knowledge. But whatever you choose to do, remember that building strong, long-term partnerships is the same as building any other relationship – you have to invest time, effort and a bit of yourself in them. It’s not just about selling.

How I use partnerships in my business

Let me give you an example. In my own business, I have various revenue streams that come from different target audiences. For each stream, I need a different type of partner:

As a speaker
As a keynote speaker, I work internationally. But, to be able to speak in the Middle East, Germany, Finland, Israel, Holland and Romania (to name just a few countries I’ve worked in,) I need a partner company that is present in that country. It’s not just about them having the local database, though that’s vitally important. They also know the local language and culture, and can help me promote myself in the right way for that market.

For this to be a success, I have to supply marketing material so my partner can promote me. And we need complete transparency, so that if I am contacted directly by a company in that local market, my partner knows whether that’s an existing client of mine or whether it’s a potential client lead that they have delivered to me.

That’s not to say I don’t use my own network as well. LinkedIn is my main tool for contacting other organisations to get speaking engagements, but I’m looking for long-term success. To achieve that you need a partner who both understands the local market and knows you and your area of expertise.

As an author
As an author, I simply need a partner who can print, distribute and manage all of the online and offline bookstores and send me a review of sales on a monthly basis.

As a trainer in the room

As a trainer, I work with a huge range of businesses – everything from MBA to start-up, from business owners to corporates. But to do this successfully I first have to create different content that works for each of these target customers. Only then can I go out and find partners with that specific target audience.

My partner might then do one of two things, each of which has its pros and cons:

Fill the room and pay me a day rate.

This gives you a fixed fee. You might not always get your true day rate, but you could get booked for 10-20 days a year.

Open up their audience for me to market to in order to fill the room, and I give them a commission for every delegate that signs up.

This has the advantage that it enables you to be in control of the sales and profit. But you’re responsible for the marketing and sales, so if you’re not a strong marketer or sales person you need to be careful.

Both options have their positives and negatives, but if you’re working internationally I would definitely recommend option 1.

As an online trainer

I’ve been running online training courses since 2012. Audiences differ, and prices range from £197 to £2,500, but in each case I still need partners to work with to fill the (online) room.

For you, selling online through partners could be via global brands like Groupon, or with other businesses and experts who don’t specialise in your skillset but do have the same target audience as you do.

You can of course promote your online event via places like Eventbrite or Conferize, but with these platforms you do not have that personal relationship, which in my experience is key to achieving a better ROI.

Getting started with your partnership programme

1. Think quality not quantity

Partnership marketing is, in part, about numbers. Expanding your reach is vital – but at the same time, you must understand the audience and be offering something relevant to everyone.

Hubspot has some good advice here, suggesting that:

“The partners that are solely focused on the financial motivation are typically not the best for long-term success. The partners that want to add value for their clients and pick the best solution for them are the ones that will ultimately develop the best relationship with you and your brand.”

Think carefully about how your partner’s brand adds value to yours, as well as the other way around, and choose partners who share your target audience.

If you’re venturing into partnership programmes for the first time, a few, quality relationships will bring you better results than trying to go for volume without substance.

2. Proactive engagement

Keep front of mind by being in touch with your partners regularly. Make it easy for them to learn about what you offer, and how to partner with you. That means
developing relevant content and incentives, as well as supporting your partners, and training them if necessary.

You might need to offer them the benefit of your experience through 1:1 conversations, which is a great way of building the trust that leads to long-term collaboration.

This matters, even where your business is done entirely on-line. With so much on offer, buyers are increasingly relying on partners, peer-to-peer referrals, thought leaders and brand ambassadors when making buying decisions.

3. Offer the right incentive

There’s no single right answer to this, so your partnership programme needs to fit the needs of your company and your partners. My most important piece of advice is to keep it simple – making it easy to explain, implement and pay out incentives in return for leads.

Particularly if you’re setting up large-scale partnerships with online businesses, where your leads come via automated online platforms, you’ll need to consider automated payouts; otherwise a successful programme will quickly become unmanageable, and drain on your resources.

Types of incentives you could consider are:

• Revenue share – a commission representing a percentage of the total purchase. Think PayPal, which takes a small fee for each transaction.
• Dual incentives – if both partner and referee get a reward for sending you business, there’s a win-win-win built in.
• Limited-time rewards – Exclusive rewards for high performing partners are a great way to encourage participation. For example an award for the highest monthly performer.

Does your business really need a partnership programme?

In a word, yes. Did you know that B2B buyers are typically 57% of the way to making their decision before they engage with a sales process? For your business, that means that to get that sale, you need to have given your audience multiple opportunities to discover, learn about and engage with your brand. If your audience has already learned about you from brands they trust and buy from, you are far more likely to get their business.

Partnerships take time, effort, energy and commitment to form, but if done correctly by ticking all the boxes and providing mutual benefit to all parties, they will help you build a sustainable business and form new, lasting friendships.

Originally published here.

The truth is the current workplace has already been revolutionized by technology-driven platforms. The moment the entire globe has gone digital, companies and institutions are on their way towards something bigger and better. Organizations have made quite a leap in terms of advancing their operations.

Today’s progression in every working environment, as we see it, is largely attributed to the need to increase efficiency. Whether you are into sales and marketing, or logistics and warehousing, or systems programming and storage, achieving more at half the time is most certainly the main objective.

What tomorrow may bring to enhance the performances of your workforce will depend largely on how you are able to integrate new processes and platforms into your organization. The future of sustainability does not merely affect you. Every employee under your wing will become a part of an imminent turnaround at the workplace.

Any discussion about improving an organization will most certainly begin with your people. Manpower is crucial to the direction in which your company is heading judging from their functional capabilities. Investing in the development of human resources is not merely about upgrading an individual’s know-how. It is also about redirecting their efforts with technological advancement.

Valuing Information

Primarily, it is important to know how information is being valued in your firm. It is no secret that data are the bases of procedures and methods inside every working environment. The value of information has never been highly regarded as it is now. How your people put knowledge to run its course is key to the progression of your firm.

At this point, it is essential to reiterate that facts and figures can turn an otherwise successful organization into a besieged institution. This downturn is almost certain considering the fact that competitors are out to make a run against you anytime if only to grab the upper hand in the market.

Within this context, you have to understand that any information about your operations can be seen as a destructive ploy to the overall program if not totally protected. Consider the classified data of giant companies like General Motors, Citibank and Coca-Cola. The confidentiality of their approach at work is a major reason why these firms are on top of their game.

However, once these endless streams of information get in the open, a domino effect will open the floodgates of a disaster which is why protecting information means everything if you want to sustain your organization’s long-term significance.

Until today, the e-mail system remains a vulnerable portal for intruders to acquire data. Although social engineering has been largely used by many to steal documents, methods of cyber intrusion have also improved. While stolen bits of files may have minimal damage effects, the likelihood of a more profound digital invasion tomorrow can be a strong possibility.

You may think that the software against viruses and other related cyber threats are enough to repulse intrusions, it is not so. Your people remain a major cause of concern all the time. This does not mean that you are undermining the trustworthiness of your employees. Getting concerned about their behavior is also about protecting your interests.

Both inside and outside of the workplace, the threat of theft is not a remote possibility. Financial institutions have to deal with this every now and then. Car factories have to repulse the danger of information leaks. Even your government and the military are susceptible to this kind of peril.

The installation of security systems in offices can deter thievery but the ingenuity of human beings remains a factor in bypassing such preventive platforms. The employment of body scans or biometrics will actually help but such an approach is only limited at work.

You need to have something to track illicit trade behavior outside of the working environment. CCTVs can only do so much. Tracking mechanisms like drones need to go small but become far more powerful as tools to confront the challenges of covert information exchange. Putting wall or barrier-penetrating cameras or satellites into action, while difficult and expensive, can help.

In line with this, another alternative can be pursued. Glass offices can be an option to keep activities transparent. In addition, more orientations about data protection must be done in order to institute a deeper understanding of its significance to everyone concerned.

Securing the System

Secondly, and in relation to the first discussion, storing data will be another challenge to contend with in the future workplace. Even with the cloud processes in place, you can never underestimate what runs inside people’s heads which is why lockdown tools are essential. Reigning in all activities within your organization can be done if technology-driven systems are adapted.

Eventually, the storage system will go through various security walls. Passwords, personal identification codes and the like are already there but all these need to be improved. The likelihood of this approach to be successful is the proliferation of items that can be controlled at the workplace.

Although computers are a common sight in many institutions, there are still many companies which continue to stick to conventional apparatus like typewriters. In fact, intelligence agencies are the first offices that come to mind in terms of securing their data. With typewriters, the only problem there is with regards to deciphering or copying valuable files is the carbon paper.

With computers, the entire working environment is wired. Still, ingenuity reigns and clever or smart individuals will be able to ease out information by evading security walls on a system which is why instituting more protective layers should definitely be pursued.

If the entire workforce is using or associated with electronic instruments and gadgets, there is a high chance of managing the employees. Control over an array of connection systems must be established. The approach should not only be limited to computers or tablets. Other equipment like calibration apparatus and related machineries should be controlled by a main digital structure.

Although against privacy, regulating mobile phones can be done. However, the monitoring scheme should go through layers of screening approaches. Various independent networks must be installed. It is not enough to have a blocking platform. A stream of security lines must be in place to withstand a barrage of invasion.

Uncomplicating the Office Clutter

Third, since we are talking about efficiency in the workplace, it is only appropriate that we also tackle the effectiveness of your people. It is highly likely that training and development in the digital realm will be eyed. Most of the time, career advancement is focused heavily on personality, customer relations, and management.

It is possible that a shift in technological progression is being projected in order to boost a deeper understanding of the technical workings of a digitally-enhanced workplace. However, the approach may not lean on some kind of textbook method.

Knowledge will be integrated with segments through a corresponding system for each worker. The reason for such is not merely about overwhelming the employee. It is to allow them to institute a sense of balance between learning new things while still doing their jobs.

At present, workstations are equipped with technological innovations which allow individuals to function to the fullest. This means that tools are made available in order to make their responsibilities easier. More than that, it is so because it allows people to deal with what they are doing trouble-free.

Instead of having employees go to training programs which keep the workforce away for a considerable time, it will be helpful if cubicles or private quarters will be reinforced with items which will allow people to function, to learn and to communicate virtually. The setup will save the company some precious time.

Along with this line, it will also be beneficial if the working environment will go wireless. Not only will it limit the complications at the office. Everyone will find a sense of convenience considering that entanglements with cables will no longer materialize. In addition, mobility will come in easily.

Committing Remotely

Lastly, there is a dimension in the future workplace that is gaining steam. While remote team employees have been in existence for a considerable stretch, a lot of firms seem uneasy about the perspective. Most employers intend to have their eyes monitoring all over the place.

However, this is one aspect where many employers remain uninformed. The remote office is actually a significant piece of the conventional workroom. Any company that is largely looking for results while keeping their expenses under control can lean on remote teams.

Judging from the fact that the business realm has gone global, companies will have a percentage of their workforce functioning from all over the world. Many enterprises don’t know this but the plight of virtual employees has paved way for further advancement in the technological field.

Time-tracking software has been depended upon to monitor the number of hours remote workers spend on assigned tasks. Outsourcing businesses have thrived as more and more individuals get integrated into the employed community.

The future of the workplace is a remarkable perspective to have. Enhancements and advancements are done to better suit the capabilities of remote workers. Calculations in improving productivity and performance have been instituted through programs that measure or monitor distant activities. The workplace of the future will be an open space of technology-driven function and suitability.

There are always disagreements in investing; in fact, every single trade that takes place on the market represents equal and opposing sides. Buyers think a stock is good and destined for greatness; sellers either need the money, or think the stock is going down.

But one thing every investor can agree on is taxes. No one likes them. They are part of investing, but there are ways to at least keep them as low as possible. Here are five tips:

Tax-free savings account

Seriously. Max it out. It is the only true tax-free account we have in Canada. Forget the word ‘savings’ in the title: make sure you put growth stocks inside the account, not GICs. You want large gains to maximize tax benefits. Think of Amazon (AMZN on Nasdaq) or Alphabet (GOOG on Nasdaq). You don’t want super-high risk, but you want growth. You can withdraw money anytime for emergencies, and put the withdrawn funds back in the following year.

• Five under-the-radar U.S. tech giants padding investors’ portfolios
• Don’t fall for the latest market crisis and other investing lessons we’ve learned
• Should I sit out the trade war in cash and more questions from anxious investors

Don’t own any stocks that pay dividends

This may be a tough suggestion for investors to wrap their heads around, because most investors just simply love their dividends. In addition, this suggestion is the exact opposite of the next one, but each is valid, as we will see. If you have no dividend income, and own stocks, then you will be only paying capital gains taxes on your investments. Capital gains tax, for most investors, is the lowest form of tax. Depending on your tax rate and province, the net tax on incremental dividends is about 30 per cent, and the net tax on capital gains is about 24 per cent. But owning non-dividend stocks can help offset the tax burden in other ways: suppose you own 10 stocks. It is likely that, in any given year, three or four of those will decline. You can sell your losers to offset your winners, and, depending on the amounts of losses, may not pay ANY tax. Either way, your losing investments will lower your overall tax burden.

Only own Canadian stocks that pay dividends

This seems to contradict the prior point, but it works wonders for certain types of investors. If dividends are your only source of income, you can earn about $48,000 (in Ontario) completely tax-free, through the wonders of the dividend tax credit. Many individuals, if their house is paid for, can live relatively well on that amount. Once this threshold is met, you can still invest for the future in non-dividend stocks, so you can still have good growth and inflation protection over time, even if your reported net income is relatively low. At the current tax-free income level, and the TSX yield of 2.9 per cent, you need a bit over $1.6 million in Canadian dividend-paying stocks to get the maximum tax-free income benefit.

Sell your losers

Similar to the point discussed above, you should make it a regular habit to crystallize your capital losses as much as possible. Losses can be carried back three years, or carried forward indefinitely. Not only does this strategy substantially reduce your tax burden, but it will also likely help improve your overall portfolio investment performance. Most investors keep their losers far too long. Getting rid of them for tax purposes at least gets rid of them.

Consider specialized ETFs that convert dividends into capital gains 

ETF provider Horizons offers several funds that use derivative swaps to convert dividend income into capital gains. These ETFs pay no distributions, but still rise in value with dividends received from their underlying investments. This structure means unit holders only have a taxable event when units are actually sold. For example, Horizons Canadian High Dividend Index ETF (HXH on TSX) converts Canadian dividend income into capital gains. Fees are low at 0.11 per cent, and the potential tax savings can be significant. Obviously, if you require ongoing dividend income for expenses then these funds may not be for you, but for others they are worth checking out in a tax-planning strategy.

You might notice we haven’t even mentioned RRSPs here. That’s because income coming out of an RRSP is taxed as regular income, the highest rate. If you plan on being a long term successful investor — and you should — you should also plan on always being in a high tax bracket. RRSPs are great for growing your money over time, but they are not so great when it comes to taking money out.

Peter Hodson, CFA, is Founder and Head of Research of 5i Research Inc., an independent research network providing conflict-free advice to individual investors (http://www.5iresearch.ca).

E-commerce emails have three primary purposes: to engage the customer with the brand, to confirm receipt or provide information, or to instigate a customer to take an action. In a referral program, emails need to accomplish all of that and more. A successful email gets the customer excited about both the brand and the referral reward, and gets them talking and sharing about your brand in a way that brings in plenty of new customers.

We help eCommerce brands build their own referral programs. We’ve worked with over thousands of stores, big and small, and generated over $110 million in referral sales, so you can imagine how many emails we’ve sent out in the meantime.

Most of them are pretty great—a member of our Customer Success team works with every customer on improving referral program results, and to offer tips on improving email layout and design and copy. But every once in a while, we’re blown away by the ingenious beauty and creativity of some of these emails and how they manage to accomplish so much with a minimalist look.

There are some basics we won’t go into, like subject lines, ESP deliverability and sender reputation, unsubscribe links and so forth. Let’s take a look at five amazing referral emails and break down what makes them so great.

1. Inform your customers about referral programs.

ZooShoo elegantly lays out the referral rewards and how the program works.

For those of you who’s never heard of a referral program before, an advocate receives a referral link with a special offer they can share with their friends, family or social network. For each friend referred or new purchase made in this way, they receive a reward.

This is a bit of a mouthful to explain to a customer and could clutter up the email with a chunk of text. Luckily, ZooShoo dances around this problem with a gorgeous graphic:

ZooShoo’s referral email explains the program in emoji-inspired graphics

A graphic explanation makes things clear.

Let’s zoom in closer on the first half of the image, which is also on ZooShoo’s refer-a-friend page:

Note that the referral program is explained three times, in three different ways:

• Hero Image Shouts “Give $10, Get $10”: The pointy heels pointing at the offer help catch the eye and focus the attention
• Subtitles Clarify the Terms and Conditions: Just to avoid the dispute, the next piece of text spells out the offer will be applied
• Emoji-Inspired Graphics Explains the Steps: Not only does this spell out the steps but also makes it easier to explain to a friend, say, using a text message with emojis.

Now that their customers understand the referral program and what’s on offer, it’s the best time to strike. Right beneath the explanations, ZooShoo offers three different ways to share, with the referral link and Facebook/Twitter sharing buttons. Their call to action could not be clearer.

You won’t be surprised if I told you ZooShoo sold shoes—it’s in the name and clearly represented in the images. But there’s another way to take branding and visual design to the next level and really make your email pop.

2. Make a gorgeous first impression.

POPRAGEOUS makes compelling design choices to showcase their brand story.

First impressions are important, and much like their leggings, POPRAGEOUS makes a striking first impression.

Just like the brand, POPRAGEOUS’s referral emails are striking, vivid and eye-catching

Based in LA, POPRAGEOUS offer trendy printed apparel inspired by art and pop culture. Their strong visual designs are colorful, energetic and eye-catching, and this is reflected in the elegance of their email that seems to pop out of the screen:

• Bold black border around a white background and simple black text? Check!
• Beautiful hero image featuring vivid colors and bold, POPRAGEOUS outfits? Check!
• Enthusiastic copy that sounds like founder Cher Park is chatting directly to you? Check!

Bold branding for a bold brand.

The fashion eCommerce landscape is hypercompetitive, and branding becomes difficult when there are just so many brands and clothing designs can be copied or mimicked. POPRAGEOUS stands out with its visual style (how they look) and personality (how they speak to their customers), and it’s even echoed in their referral landing page:

POPRAGEOUS helps you look good in front of your friends; not just with the spectacular outfits you’ve got on, but also when you offer them a POPFERRAL so they can look great too.

People purchases from POPRAGEOUS identify with their brand identity; youthful, energetic and full of flair. Our next email example also plays strongly on the consumer’s identity but adds a timely twist of their own.

3. Catch your customer at the right time.

Riff Raff & Co times their referral email offer for the maximum response rate.

Riff Raff & Co make special toys for toddlers which engage with three of their most important senses; sight, touch, and sound. Instead of looking at their email layout, but we’re going to tear down something special they do—the timing of their referral offer.

Right after you complete checkout for a purchase, a pop-up appears with their referral offer, at the same time this email is sent to your inbox:

Riff Raff & Co catches their customers with an email right after purchase, offering an exclusive referral reward. Also, note the huge Share on Facebook button

Some companies choose to send out referral offers after the product is received because it takes some time for the customer to receive the product via shipping, and to start using and fall in love with the product. Riff Raff & Co turns it all on its head by reaching out to customers right after the purchase, when their parental pride and identity is strongest.

A proud parent is a proud customer and a proud advocate.

Imagine you’re a new parent. You want the best for your child. You probably also know a few other new parents, with whom you’ll swap tips and ideas and share support. You’ve just bought a toy comforter your child will love—what better time than to share it with a friend? And, look: if five of them take you up on the offer, you can get a second, spare, for free.

The customers’ will have the strongest connection with the brand right after their purchase. Reaching out to them during this time will make the biggest impression on them—and even if they don’t share the links immediately, they will return to the email after they have had some time with the product.

Happy parents sharing their Riff Raff & Co experience on Instagram

The results speak for themselves; just search online for intrepid parents posting blogs about their Riff Raff & Co toy, or even making video reviews on YouTube! You can read a deep dive with revenue numbers on Sumo.com.

Riff Raff & Co also offers a subtle twist on their referral program with tiered rewards. Advocates don’t receive any benefit, at least for the first four referred purchases – they are only rewarded for the fifth purchase. This adds a bit of impetus for the parents to share more widely—they’ll need to reach five purchases for their reward. But our next email shows how you can encourage customers to max out their referral reward tiers.

3. Stack the benefits of referrals.

YouFoodz dangles the reward offers for maximum effectiveness.

Is there no such thing as a free lunch? Well, if you refer three friends, YouFoodz offers you an entire week of free lunches. And you’ll know this from the first email you get from them:

1 friend = 1 meal, 2 friends = 2 meals, 3 friends = 7 meals!!!

Like with the Riff Raff & Co example, YouFoodz dangles the most attractive reward tier in the lead image and also in the explainer graphic. The user will aim for the big prize, but even if they don’t hit three referrals, they will be reassured that they will still win something so long as they make a successful referral.

The minimum reward of one free lunch appears especially achievable, considering the price point (10 AUD), the immediate value to the friend (who doesn’t love a free lunch?), and the appeal to a broader audience (people who need to eat lunch), compared to parents of young children.

A pre-written message makes copy and pasting easy—and clicking the Facebook Share button easier!

To encourage users that rewards are within reach, YouFoodz follows up with a pre-written message and a Facebook share button so that users don’t need to think – they just need to click. With the lead image featuring YouFoodz meals and promising a week of free lunch, the call-to-action is set up for success and maximum conversion.

(As an aside, the #WinWin hashtag looks like a missed opportunity to use a unique, branded hashtag and to get the promotion trending.)

Whereas ZooShoo used the space in its email to explain a referral program, YouFoodz bets on their audience being familiar with such programs, instead focusing on the multiple reward tiers available.

YouFoodz showcases the escalating reward tiers and makes claiming a free lunch as simple as one click.

But there’s an even better referral email that encompasses all of the above, that makes an offer that’s not just electric, but absolutely Ludicrous.

5. All of the above, plus an unbeatable value proposition.

Tesla makes you an incredible offer you won’t refuse.

We should clarify before we start with a disclaimer: Tesla built their own referral program and has gone through multiple iterations.

We are focusing here on the first and original referral email, but actually, we don’t even have the actual email. All we have is the copy, posted to Reddit by an enthusiastic user (corroborated by news sites). But this is the most spectacular referral email we have read ever:

Via the r/TeslaMotors community on Reddit. Note the cheeky referral link being shared.

To provide context for the program, a Model S Tesla (circa 2015) cost US$75,000 for the cheapest model—this is not for everyone, and sharing on Facebook will not have the same impact.

At the same time, the community around Tesla is an extremely tightly-knit group of enthusiasts, many of whom have a genuine interest in the car and have shared about it through word-of-mouth. In a way, their identity as proud owners of Tesla cars is more important than a discount of $1,000 (slightly over 1.3%).

To this small group of committed, engaged customers, Musk delivers the right message. He spends the first four paragraphs laying out his thought process and rationale for the program, and reaffirming that Tesla does not spend on marketing.

The referral rewards aren’t even mentioned until the final two paragraphs, and then only as an afterthought. In doing so, Musk puts the focus on Tesla’s brand mission and the goal of growing the community of Tesla Owners. While the first tier reward ($1,000 off) is negligible, the second tier reward (tour and party at the Gigafactory) will be extremely attractive to the community.

Of course, offering an exclusive Founder Series Model X (not available to the public) is just the icing on the cake. This top tier reward (which was claimed!) was so effective the second iteration of the program offered an exclusive Ludicrous enabled Model S P90D.

How effective was this referral email letter? In Europe, the winner of the first two referral programs was Bjorn Nylan, the operator of a YouTube Channel—unsurprisingly named ‘Tesla Bjorn’—who has since created 557 different videos featuring the Tesla.

And how effective was this referral email at selling a $75,000 car? Sylvain Juteau of Canada, (who won the first and second iterations in the North America category) estimated referrals led to over 5,000 sales or a third of all cars delivered in the 4th quarter.

And of course, there were over 100,000 views for Bjorn’s video on a robot at the Gigafactory.

Ultimately, claims Juteau, most Tesla owners were only able to refer one or two friends, meaning that most participants only received a 1% discount. From Tesla’s point of view, though, if every customer referred a friend, their customer base will have at least doubled.

Turning it into a contest with incredible prizes was one aspect, but the key-takeaway from Musk’s email must be the way he appealed with emotive, motivational language.

Wrap up

Five very different emails from five very different brands, each of which focuses on a different aspect of the customer-brand relationship and adds their own tweaks to the referral email:

• ZooShoo used emoji-inspired graphics to explain the referral program
• POPRAGEOUS combined image, design and copy to make their emails distinctively branded
• Riff Raff & Co played with the timing of the email to catch customers at their most engaged and committed
• YouFoodz showcased the three tiers of its referral rewards and made each tier look easily achievable
• Tesla drove one-third of quarterly sales by offering a 1.3% referral discount …and also by appealing directly to customers’ love for the brand, by explaining the value of their referral program, and offering an incredible exclusive prize

A willingness to try something new and find a new angle for persuasion helped these five brands write effective emails that moved customers.

The day an IBM scientist invented the relational database in 1970 completely changed the nature of how we use data. For the first time, data became readily accessible to business users. Businesses began to unlock the power of data to make decisions and increase growth. Fast-forward 48 years to 2018, and all the leading companies have one thing in common: they are intensely data-driven.

The world has woken up to the fact that data has the power to transform everything that we do in every industry from finance to retail to healthcare– if we use it the right way. And businesses that win are maximizing their data to create better customer experiences, improve logistics, and derive valuable business intelligence for future decision-making. But right now, we are at a critical inflection point. Data is doubling each year, and the amount of data available for use in the next 48 years is going to take us to dramatically different places than the world’s ever seen.

Let’s explore the confluence of events that have brought us to this turning point, and how your enterprise can harness all this innovation – at a reasonable cost.

Today’s Data-driven Landscape

We are currently experiencing a “perfect storm” of data. The incredibly low cost of sensors, ubiquitous networking, cheap processing in the Cloud, and dynamic computing resources are not only increasing the volume of data, but the enterprise imperative to do something with it. We can do things in real-time and the number of self-service practitioners is tripling annually. The emergence of machine learning and cognitive computing has blown up the data possibilities to completely new levels.

Machine learning and cognitive computing allows us to deal with data at an unprecedented scale and find correlations that no amount of brain power could conceive. Knowing we can use data in a completely transformative way makes the possibilities seem limitless. Theoretically, we should all be data-driven enterprises. Realistically, however, there are some roadblocks that make it seem difficult to take advantage of the power of data:

Trapped in the Legacy Cycle with a Flat Budget

The “perfect storm” of data is driving a set of requirements that is dramatically outstripping what most IT shops can do. Budgets are flat —increasing only 4.5% annually — leaving companies to feel locked into a set of technology choices and vendors. In other words, they’re stuck in the “legacy cycle”. Many IT teams are still spending most of budget just trying to keep the lights on. The remaining budget is spent trying to modernize and innovate, and then a few years later, all that new modern stuff that you brought is legacy all over again, and the cycle repeats. That’s the cycle of pain that we’ve all lived through for the last 20 years.

Lack of Data Quality and Accessibility

Most enterprise data is bad. Incorrect, inconsistent, inaccessible…these factors hold enterprises back from extracting the value from data. In a Harvard Business Review study, only 3% of the data surveyed was found to be of “acceptable” quality. That is why data analysts are spending 80% of their time preparing data as opposed to doing the analytics that we’re paying them for. If we can’t ensure data quality, let alone access the data we need, how will we ever realize its value?

Increasing Threats to Data

The immense power of data also increases the threat of its exploitation. Hacking and security breaches are on the rise; the global cost of cybercrime fallout is expected to reach $6 trillion by 2021, double the $3 trillion cost in 2015. In light of the growing threat, the number of security and privacy regulations are multiplying. Given the issues with data integrity, organizations want to know: Is my data both correct and secure? How can data security be ensured in the middle of this data revolution?

Vendor Competition is Intense

The entire software industry is being reinvented from the ground up and all are in a race to the cloud. Your enterprise should be prepared to take full advantage of these innovations and choose vendors most prepared to liberate your data, not just today, but tomorrow, and the year after that.

Meet the Data Disruptors

It might seem impossible to harness all this innovation at a reasonable cost. Yet, there are companies that are thriving amid this data-driven transformation. Their secret? They have discovered a completely disruptive way, a fundamentally new economic way, to embrace this change.

We are talking about the data disruptors – and their strategy is not as radical as it sounds. These are the ones who have found a way to put more data to work with the same budget. For the data disruptors, success doesn’t come from investing more budget in the legacy architecture. These disruptors take an approach with a modern data architecture that allows them to liberate their data from the underlying infrastructure.

Put More of Your Data to Work

The organizations that can quickly put right data to work will have a competitive advantage. Modern technologies make it possible to liberate your data and thrive in today’s hybrid, multi-cloud, real-time, machine learning world. Here are three prime examples of innovations that you need to know about:

• Cloud Computing: The cloud has created new efficiencies and cost savings that organizations never dreamed would be possible. Cloud storage is remote and fluctuates to deliver only the capacity that is needed. It eliminates the time and expense of maintaining on-premise servers, and gives business users real-time self-service to data, anytime, anywhere. There is no hand-coding required, so business users can create integrations between any SaaS and on-premise application in the cloud without requiring IT help. Cloud offers cost, capability and productivity gains that on-premise can’t compete with, and the data disruptors have already entrusted their exploding data volumes to the cloud.
• Containers: Containers are quickly overtaking virtual machines. According to a recent study, the adoption of application containers will grow by 40% annually through 2020. Virtual machines require costly overhead and time-consuming maintenance, with full hardware and operating system (OS) that needs managed. Containers are portable with few moving parts and minimal maintenance required. A company using stacked container layers pays only for a small slice of the OS and hardware on which the containers are stacked, giving data disruptors unlimited operating potential, at a huge cost savings.
• Serverless Computing: Deploying and managing big data technologies can be complicated, costly and requires expertise that is hard to find. Research by Gartner states, “Serverless platform-as-a-service (PaaS) can improve the efficiency and agility of cloud services, reduce the cost of entry to the cloud for beginners, and accelerate the pace of organizations’ modernization of IT.”

Serverless computing allows users to run code without provisioning or managing any underlying system or application infrastructure. Instead, the systems automatically scale to support increasing or decreasing workloads on-demand as data becomes available.

Its name is a misnomer; serverless computing still requires servers, but the cost is only for the actual server capacity used; companies are only charged for what they are running at any given time, eliminating the waste associated with on-premise servers. It scales up as much as it needs to solve that problem, runs it, and scales it back down, turns off. The future is serverless, and its potential to liberate your data is limitless.

Join the Data Disruptors

Now is the time to break free from the legacy trap and liberate your data so its potential can be maximized by your business. In the face of growing data volumes, the data disruptors have realized the potential of the latest cloud-based technologies. Their business and IT teams can work together in a collaborative way, finding an end-to-end solution to the problem, all in a secure and compliant fashion. Harness this innovation and create a completely disruptive set of data economics so your organization can efficiently surf the tidal wave of data.

Originally published here.

Writers are NOT on the front line, working directly with your prospects or customers. That’s a position and perspective reserved for those sweet-talkin’ kings and queens of the prospect pipeline, your sales team.

So your sales people are busy trying to make sales. We know. That doesn’t make them any less necessary to your content creation process.

Maybe they really don’t have the time or skill to write a weekly or monthly blog. They should still be made open and available to consult with your website and blog writers. It’s an investment in their own future income.

Unfortunately, the first instinct of clients is usually to shield the sales team from anything that’s not selling. This is a mistake.

Here’s why:

Salespeople are a Lifeline for the Marketing Agency You Hired

It’s so tempting to make your content and agency-powered projects the sole responsibility of your marketing department. After all, that’s what they’re paid to do.

It’s a trap.

Here’s the thing, during a website rewrite, your marketing department is a middle man and your c-suite is too far removed from the details to be helpful. They’re not exactly expendable, but when it comes to actually writing your website and blog content (not managing the process), they’re not your MVPs.

The absolute best thing your marketing department can do to contribute to your content is connect the writers to your sales team and product/service managers. Ask them to put the phone down, tell them it’s a priority and make a meeting for us, instead of finding an alternative person for us to talk to.

Why?

Salespeople and product/service managers are subject matter experts (SMEs). These cats know your company, customers and services better than anyone in the world. In the detail-driven content creation war, they’re your front line soldiers.

Let me explain how I write a website.

My first meeting is with the marketing team/c-suite, to decide on a tone of voice, learn about buyer personas and craft an editorial style guide to direct the project or campaign.

At the end of that meeting, I slice up the workload of pages into logical chunks we call phases. Then, I work with the marketing team or c-suite to narrow down the most knowledgeable people in their company to tap for details. THOSE are the people I interview for each product/service page.

My mission as a content writer is to research, study your industry and conduct interviews of your team until I understand your products and services so thoroughly that I’m actually qualified to simplify and explain them to your potential customers. (On a level that makes even you forget that I don’t work for your company.)

The only way to do that is to pick the brains of your experts and that almost always includes the sales department.

Copy Needs Strategy to be Relevant and Effective

It’s not enough to just keep your blog fresh by letting your staff write whatever they want about the marketing world. Not only will you get blogs that absolutely none of your customers care about, written for buyer personas you’ll never sell to, inbound marketing just doesn’t work like that.

Think about how the buyer’s journey works. It all starts as a problem and a search for answers. On the other side of that search is your blog and website content, ready to serve up solutions and make you look awesome.

The kind of insights your writers need to get in the minds of your consumers is the same insight your salespeople need to eat and pay their mortgages. Your sales department (along with your SEO team) should be steering the overall direction of your content team, by feeding them information they can take action on, including:

• Current lead and traffic volume or needs
• Trending inquiries
• Why deals are being lost
• Why deals are being won
• Common hesitations
• Competitive advantages
• Frequently asked questions
• Buyer persona insights

In turn, your content and inbound marketing teams can leverage that information into:

• Buyer personas that determine your ideal tone of voice and marketing strategy
• FAQ pages that drive SEO
• More effective web pages focused on pain points
• Blogs that drive the right traffic to your site
• Valuable gated content offers that drive conversions
• Explainer videos
• Campaigns targeting the metrics you care about

Marketing and Sales are Better Together

While they might often be at odds or misunderstand each other, make no mistake that these two silos are way better when they’re working together.

Just think about the core objective of the roles.

The goal of your marketing team is to generate leads for your sales team. Not every website visitor will become a lead. Out of the small percentage of those that do, not all will be good leads. Salespeople use specific criteria that qualify the leads they’ll pursue.

It’s sort of like your sales team is making dinner and sent your marketing team to the grocery store. If they’re open and communicating, the marketing team will have a shopping list. If they’re not, sales is going to have to settle for whatever the marketing team brings home. Yikes.

Make it Happen, Captain

It makes complete sense, so how do you actually get sales talking? Depending on the size and structure of your business, the volume of your marketing and the projects you’re undertaking, there’s a few different strategies you can take:

• Set up interview-style meetings between your content writer and the relevant salesperson.
• Get key salespeople into your marketing brainstorms for content planning.
• Plant a key content strategist in sales meetings to identify opportunities to support the sales team with content.
• Form a smarketing team to create a permanent partnership between the two departments while empowering key staff members to keep the communication flowing.

Stop Sabotaging the Partnership

It’s not always easy to forge a harmonious and mutually-beneficial relationship between marketing and sales. Most organizations unknowingly sabotage it by simply doing what’s always been done. If you want different results, it’s time to think differently.

Value and Acknowledge Everyone’s Contribution

There’s nothing like cash and prizes to drive a wedge between coworkers. Think about offering incentives to everyone, to level the playing field. If sales incentives are a part of their actually pay structure, make sure that’s widely understood. Essentially, you can offer incentives, just make sure they’re being offered in a way that doesn’t drive animosity.

***If your marketing is done by an outside agency, don’t worry about this one.***

Don’t Physically Separate Sales and Marketing

It’s easy to dismiss or marginalize what you never have to see (and so much harder to collaborate). Just being exposed to each other’s notes and conversations can foster better communication and joint efforts.

Be Transparent and Encourage Questions

Share stats, figures and goals with everyone in a forum where they can ask questions. If your leads are down 40 percent, everyone needs to know, in order to discuss both the reasons and solutions together, rather than throwing blame around or trying to solve the problem without a full-circle approach.

Start Thinking of Salespeople as Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

Good salespeople have a lot more to contribute to your team than sales, so give them the opportunity. Let the rest of your company see these superstars for the experts they really are. Let them hear the sales team pitch your products, so we can all can understand how they’re addressing the pain points of your consumers in their conversations.

Keep the C-Suite and Send Me Your Sales Team!

Stop hesitating and start changing the way you think about content creation. Let these walking, talking encyclopedias of your services supercharge your content creation, point you in a better direction and be the wind beneath the winds of your content marketers. You’ll be glad you did (everyone will.)

After spending a lifetime in the industry, Jen Gluckow knows a thing or two about how to make better sales. She talks with Anthony on this episode of In the Arena about how you can own your career as a salesperson and how to connect better with your peers and leaders. She also answers 5 main questions that will help you become a better salesperson and ignite your career. All of these insights and more are included in Jen’s upcoming book, “Sales in a New York Minute,” available for pre-order now on Amazon and everywhere January 1. Be sure to check it out, and catch the full story on this podcast episode.

#1 – Why do you need to pursue your own leads as a sales leader?

Most salespeople enter into the business wanting to make a difference, either in their own life or in the lives of others. Why is it, then, that so many salespeople sit back and seemingly wait for marketing to send them quality leads? You cannot afford to rely on others to make your career happen, and you have to be diligently working on securing your own top leads. Start talking with everyone you meet, and don’t hesitate to act because you’re waiting for the “perfect lead” to appear that simply doesn’t exist.

#2 – What can you do to become a better networker?

Networking can change your life if you let it, but great networking is not about quantity. The ultimate goal of networking should always be about making quality connections with people who can either send you business referrals or add value to your life. How can you make those types of connections? Start by being specific and targeted in the meetings and groups you pursue. Then, become a value-provider for the people you meet. You can’t expect quality results from new connections if you don’t first convince them you’re worth building a relationship with.

#3 – How can you combat the temptation to make excuses for your work?

No matter what market you’re involved in, the temptation to make excuses for poor performance is always present. Making better sales starts with taking responsibility for your action – and inaction. Both Jen and Anthony believe in the power of a great mindset and attitude when striving for selling success. Take 10 minutes and identify your top excuses that you tell yourself and your boss. Then, figure out ways to crush those excuses. The minute you stop making excuses is the minute you start making better sales.

#4 – How can you become the CEO of your territory?

If you aspire to become the CEO of your sales territory, you can’t spend all your time analyzing every decision. Company CEOs take action and implement strategies daily – they don’t overthink everything. Becoming a top sales leader is all about identifying your own style of leadership, committing to that method, and owning it.

#5 – What’s the key to effectively following up with prospects and making better sales?

No one enjoys getting those calls from salespeople that say, “Hey, I’m just checking in!” What that message actually conveys is a nagging need to know how the sale is coming along – not a desire to help the prospect make a good decision for their business. Jen encourages sales leaders to add value to their prospects’ lives instead. Send them interesting and relevant articles, connect them to professionals they need to know, etc. If you do that, you’ll not only make better sales but also grow a deeper network of industry peers.

Outline of this great episode

• Jen Gluckow’s passion is helping others make better sales
• New York is different when it comes to sales, and it inspired Jen’s upcoming book
• #1 – Why do you need to pursue your own leads as a sales leader?
• #2 – What can you do to become a better networker?
• #3 – How can you combat the temptation to make excuses for your work?
• #4 – How can you become the CEO of your territory?
• #5 – What’s the key to effectively following up with prospects?

Resources & Links mentioned in this episode

• Jen’s website
• Follow Jen on Facebook
• Follow Jen on Twitter
• Follow Jen on Instagram
• Connect with Jen on LinkedIn
• Jen’s upcoming book, “Sales in a New York Minute: 212 Pages of Real World and Easy to Implement Strategies to Make More Sales, Build Loyal Relationships, and Make More Money”
• The Iannarino Sales Accelerator – 833-426-6274

The theme song “Into the Arena” is written and produced by Chris Sernel. You can find it on Soundcloud

Connect with Anthony

Website: www.TheSalesBlog.com

Youtube: www.Youtube.com/Iannarino

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iannarino

Twitter: https://twitter.com/iannarino

Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/+SAnthonyIannarino

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iannarino

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Each day you impact and influence other people.  This is something you do regardless of whether you think you’re doing it.

Just as you’re impacting others, so too others are impacting you. Again, this is regardless of whether the other person wants to.

Being seen as a sales leader requires a different set of expectations.  If we don’t see ourselves as a sales leader, then how do we expect others to see us as a sales leader?

Challenge is being a sales leader is not like playing Fortnite or any other video game where you can always push the replay button.  Sorry, life does not have a reset button, especially with regard to how others see us.

Watch this 67-second video where I talk about the power of influence and impact as a leader:

Sales leadership is a lifestyle you choose to live. When you choose to live it, you do so 24/7.

This means with everyone you meet, regardless of their title, their profession or how they look, you see them as people you have the privilege to help. You help by making their day better because of the interaction you had with them.

This is the essence of impact and influence, and when you do, you know you will have earned the right, the privilege, the honor, and the respect to meet with that person again.

Sales is a process that never ends. It is anything but a one-off transaction, regardless of how some may want to view sales.  This means each relationship you make and each person you meet holds the potential to open or close the next door.

Success is not something achieved in an instant. That’s called winning the lottery, and I doubt anyone is going to build a business plan around winning the lottery.  Success is the reward of leadership, and it’s seen in the people you lead, regardless of their title, role or position in life.

Your job each day is to approach it with focus to make a positive impact and have influence on each person you meet.   In the video I refer to it as having a big E.G.O. —  Empowering Greater Outcomes in those you come in contact with.

And don’t forget that a coach can help you excel in your sales career! Invest in yourself by checking out my coaching program today!

Copyright 2018, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

The best techniques and technology in the world won’t help you if you don’t know how to use them. Annoyingly, with it being so new, it’s hard to tell what machine learning marketing use cases there are to base your efforts on.

In other fields, the breakthrough tech is being used in medical diagnoses, spam filtering, fraud detection, translation and more. All you need is some inspiration to get started with your own uses.

That’s why this post exists.

I’ll cover, in detail, the key ways machine learning is affecting marketing, and how it can be used to handle some of your business process automation, provide actionable data insights and predictions, and even win $1 million on Jeopardy.

Machine learning marketing uses

Getting content suggestions for news and new ideas

RSS feeds are vital for keeping on top of the latest industry news and learning new tips and techniques in your field. It’s also a great way to fill in your dead time (e.g., on your bus ride home) and let you read more, which is a great way to generate blog ideas for your own content.

Feedly is an awesome example, with their mobile app letting you subscribe to various blogs, websites, and content aggregators to make reading the best articles around a case of scrolling through a single feed.

The main problem comes when you’re trying to find the websites to subscribe to. It’s hard enough to keep on top of recent articles without having to spend time vetting new sites for valuable content.

That’s where Feedly’s machine learning element comes into play.

Instead of recommending sites based on vague categories, Feedly assesses the user-assigned tags of every website and uses them to assign categories and relevant topics. Other factors like follower count and engagement amount are then used to dictate which websites are recommended with a higher priority, with the entire model being assessed and automatically updated based on current user tags and interactions.

The result is a recommendation system which detects the best relevant websites to offer to make getting the best content easier than ever before. Don’t sit around – get inspired.

Enhancing existing tools

Marketers rely on analytics and predictions on who to target, what they will interact with, where the best place to find them is and so on. This is usually done using a formula, looking at recent trends, as part of an overarching technique (eg, targeting relevant keywords) or via the highest paid person’s opinion (HIPPO).

Trouble is, customer behavior is changing constantly, meaning any plans or formulas currently being used by your marketing department will become inaccurate and need updating sooner or later.

That’s where machine learning can help through services like Salesforce Einstein.

Using machine learning to crunch data and automatically update predictions for everything from customer reactions to conversion rates, Einstein lets Salesforce users take advantage of the power of machine learning without the need to create their own tool.

The result is a powerhouse suite of tools which lets teams do what they do best instead of getting mired in the tasks of data organization and analysis.

Automatically answering questions

Imagine a program which could automatically interpret what someone is saying and respond in kind. This would mean your team wouldn’t have to worry about answering basic questions and could focus on more valuable tasks like creating content or guest posting.

It’s called Natural Language Processing and, although there’s not a perfect solution available, machine learning is getting us close to achieving it.

“Human communication is frustratingly vague at times; we all use colloquialisms, abbreviations, and don’t often bother to correct misspellings. These inconsistencies make computer analysis of natural language difficult at best, but in the last decade NLP and machine learning has progressed immeasurably.” – Seth Redmore, Machine Learning vs. Natural Language Processing

Watson is a system developed by IBM which does precisely this. Originally developed to answer questions on Jeopardy, companies like Caffe Nero are already using it to gather customer information, answer simple questions when customers sign up, and so on.

Watson also serves to eliminate some of the standard marketing automation tasks such as reminding customers when their subscription card balance is low or when seasonal offers occur.

Outperforming A/B tests with multi-armed bandit testing

“Multi-armed bandit testing” might sound like a predatory gimmick but it’s actually a powerful machine learning marketing use case. It’s also got nothing to do with the gambling machines it’s named after (hence why I don’t feel sleazy recommending it).

Regular A/B testing displays two options to audiences and gives equal weight to both, measuring the results. While this gets the job done, it wastes a lot of time and traffic on the less-effective method and requires a lot of manual management.

Bandit testing doesn’t need the same level of human intervention to get quality results.

Instead of using two elements, bandit testing typically arranges three (or more) and adjusts the weight it gives each option according to its performance. After the initial performance data is received, the testing model is automatically adjusted to send more traffic to the better performing results, letting you benefit from them immediately with next to no downtime.

Here’s where knowing precisely what classes as “machine learning” is important.

If all bandit testing did was send more traffic to better performing results it wouldn’t technically be a machine learning marketing technique. Instead, the required self-improvement comes through the program asking itself “what is the probability of option X being the best?”, working out that probability for each arm within a certain data set, then repeating that every time new data is added.

With every new piece of data, the pages will be assessed and the traffic formula automatically adjusted to represent that, making the technique an example of machine learning.

Bandit testing naturally allows for more elements to be tested at once, thus improving your services faster and spending less downtime setting up the test for another run. Instead of ending the experiment and resetting the options, all you have to do is swap out the worst performing one with a new option and keep the test running.

It’s simple but effective – exactly what a marketing team wants to hear when it comes to continuous improvement.

Making SEO easier and more relevant

I have a huge amount of respect for anyone who can fluently speak a second language – the furthest I ever got was learning how to say “to take away please” to my local pizzeria when living in Florence.

Now imagine having to understand over 100 languages well enough to accurately predict what someone means when they ask you a question. That’s exactly what Google’s search engine has to do every time it’s used.

Manually programming every potential response simply wouldn’t have been possible, and so Google introduced RankBrain to handle unknown factors for them.

“On a daily basis, 15 percent of queries submitted — 500 million — have never been seen before by Google’s search engine…” – Dan Farber paraphrasing John Wiley (lead designer for Google Search), Google Search scratches its brain 500 million times a day

This example of machine learning uses Google’s vast data reserves to make accurate guesses for when a search term is interchangeable with another. In other words, it helps people find relevant content more easily, making it more important than ever to have a central optimized keyword in your content.

For example, let’s say you search for “how to use a guitar”. In this case, “use” could be replaced with “play” and it would mean the same thing. However, “play” couldn’t be substituted in if I searched “how to use a toaster”.

Images of trying to “play a toaster” aside, RankBrain helps people using Google to find useful content which is optimized for relevant keywords to their search. All you have to do is make quality, targeted content.

Getting actionable insights from analytics

There’s a fair bit of overlap with the examples of machine learning marketing uses but that’s for good reason. By the very definition of “machine learning”, they have to be tasks which could be performed by people, have an evolving model/prediction, and all be based on large data samples.

In this case, it’s interpreting data from Google Analytics, with machine learning allowing insights to be gained more easily.

Take the language interpretation ability of RankBrain and the innate power of Google Analytics and you have Analytics Intelligence. This lets you ask questions to find custom variables and views of your analytics more easily than setting them up or searching for them yourself.

Say you want to find out how many users subscribed to your blog in the last week or what your desktop bounce rate in a specific country is. Problem being, you don’t want to find the result manually or create a formula to do so.

Instead, all you need to do is ask the question in natural language and Intelligence should be able to interpret and fulfill the request automatically.

Yet another case of machine learning making data analysis easier and more accessible to everyone. After all, who doesn’t love the ability to understand their audience more effectively and accurately?

Segmenting customers by interests (not useless facts)

Half of the battle with marketing is knowing your target audience – the other half is taking that knowledge and effectively catching their interest. This usually involves grouping your customers by factors such as their age, spending habits, and so on.

Affinio uses machine learning technology to group customers into interest groups using data such as social media activity. This lets you know more than the bare facts, showing what topics and emotional tones you could use to resonate better with your target audience.

If all you know is that your primary targets are 18-24 years old and don’t spend much, you have very little to work with in terms of marketing to catch their attention. If you know that most of them love cooking, holidaying in the sun, and watch the latest blockbusters, you suddenly have three massive topics which can be used to tie into your marketing.

Affinio’s graphs also make visualizing the size of audience interest groups incredibly easy to see. In the age of machine learning and social media, there’s next to no excuse for not knowing how to resonate with your target audience.

Predicting customer conversion

Predicting customer conversion is a massive deal. The more accurately you can predict whether someone is likely to convert, the more effectively your team can focus their efforts on the easier wins and produce better results.

You don’t want to waste time trying to convert a big lead if they didn’t have much chance of converting in the first place – effort would’ve been better spent closing 3-4 smaller deals which were a more surefire success.

As you might have guessed, machine learning can help greatly with this, as predicting conversion likelihood involves analyzing a huge amount of data and takes too much time to act quickly enough to follow up on the customer’s initial sign-up. That’s one reason why customer priority is often defined by their potential deal value.

All you need is a little developer knowledge to really get the ball rolling.

As Joseph Ferraro and Vincent Reeder (both of Mavens Consulting) demonstrate in this Salesforce Live show, a little API manipulation allows you to do things such as assess customer conversion likelihood in a fraction of the usual time.

Their demo shows Google’s Prediction API assessing new customers via the data they submit (such as the products they own) in Salesforce. This is compared to existing data sets which can be manually supplied by the duo, then produces a rating which is fed back to in Salesforce automatically. This lets the team know which customers are likely to convert (based on previous data) and should thus be high priority.

Being a machine learning technique, the predictions will only get more accurate as more customers sign up. There will always be outliers but the ultimate conversion rate will affect future predictions with each closed lead.

Analyzing customer sentiment

This next example is from the same Salesforce Live video used above, except this time looking at our old friend customer sentiment. This lets you automatically know the mood of your customer according to their messages.

Once you know how your customers are feeling, you can target the more negative messages (and thus upset customers) with your high-end support faster than working through every request manually. In other words, it lets you apply help where it’s most needed or where failure will be most damaging to your reputation with the customer.

Ferraro and Reeder trained their prediction model using random tweets containing various emoticons. These tweets were given an emotional value according to whether they were positive or not (a smiley face would be four points while a sad face would be zero).

This trained the machine learning model to recognize by association what language it could expect to see in positive and negative messages. Thus, when they apply it to a new message logged in Salesforce via a customer email, it’s able to automatically detect words such as “sad” and assign it the appropriate negative sentiment.

Support teams can then perform their duties more effectively by focusing their talents on the most negative sentiment messages first, potentially reducing customer churn in the process.

Machine learning is like automation – it’s more powerful with creativity

As shown above, machine learning can’t be applied in only one way. You get the most out of it by getting creative with your uses and thinking about what’s possible, rather than what’s obvious.

Not to mention that new breakthroughs are being made with machine learning all the time. The future only knows what advanced AI, machine learning, and natural language processing will do for marketing and businesses as a whole.

So what are you waiting for? Identify tasks that you could use machine learning in and find out how you can save time, money, and resources.

What do you think of machine learning in marketing? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

Aymanjed / Pixabay

As the late, great George Carlin once said, we’re all just trying to find a place for our stuff. Any enterprise organization is going to run into the problem of having to decide where they’re going to store and manage all their stuff. Most of the time this boils down to content being stored in a handful of different repositories and becoming increasingly difficult to navigate. So how does a large organization tackle this problem? A sales enablement platform is the perfect document management system.

Before we get into explaining why that statement above is true (and believe me, it’s absolutely true) let’s explore why an organization would even care about this problem. For a long time, the idea of content management boiled down to ‘set it and forget it.’ Marketing would pump out a ton of different content, throw it into some sort of unsophisticated document management system and leave Sales to hunt on their own.

Basic Document Management Systems Don’t Fit the Bill

At a basic level, that reasoning seems to track. If Sales has a ton of content options to search through, then surely something must fit their needs, right? What more could a document management system do than simply provide users with a way to store and retrieve content?

Well, this is the 21^st century so there’s plenty more than a document management system can do for sellers and marketers alike! No longer should we be beholden to the idea of simply creating as much content as possible and seeing what sticks. No, we have the technology now to actually dictate smart content strategies that speak directly to buyers’ needs, give Sales exactly what they want, and demonstrably drive revenue.

How do we have this technology? Was it gifted to us by a species of extraterrestrials in the form of a meteorite that crash-landed in the middle of a field in Kansas? I wish! No, sales enablement platforms have revolutionized the way sellers and marketers approach a document management system.

Salesforce has found that “85% of marketing’s content is never used because reps can’t find it, don’t know what content to use when, or lack the confidence that it will help advance their deals.” That means there’s a lot of wasted time and resources being poured into content that never sees the light of day. Boiling it down into hours makes this problem look even worse. RingDNA has found that sellers waste 30 hours each month looking for or creating their own content.

So it’s clear that this is a problem right? If everyone is in agreement let’s move on to how we solve this problem. If you’re not quite ready to move on yet, just turn off the lights and close the door behind you when you’ve finished. Thanks.

A Sales Enablement Platform is the Best Document Management System

Enter a sales enablement platform to save the day (as it often does around these parts). A smart sales enablement solution is one of the most powerful tools that an organization can leverage. It rolls many different capabilities into one easy-to-use, intuitively designed platform.

But because this is merely a short blog and not my magnus opus on sales enablement (find that here), we will stick to talking about it’s capability as a document management system. An intelligent sales enablement streamlines the process of document management by giving Marketing tools to properly, and deeply, tag content so that it only shows up in relevant ways. Marketing can rest easy that content is being surfaced solely to people for whom it’s relevant.

For Sales, a sales enablement platform that is powered by artificial intelligence will benefit sellers in two ways. First, sellers can search for content based on anything they remember about a piece of content. If they remember the full, exact title? Great, no problem. But if they only remember that someone spoke about a red balloon in a video, they can search for that term they remember, and it will pop right up.

The second way is by having content find them. Your generic document management system is a static, unliving thing. But a smart sales enablement solution will alert sellers when a certain piece of content is trending, has been successful in the past, or is even contextually relevant to the deal they are currently working. And the content finds them wherever they are: CRM, email, or on the road.

A sales enablement platform has many uses, but these content situations present some of the quickest and most time-saving benefits there are. Here is where I’m supposed to close with a thought-provoking and resounding kicker sentence. Instead I already wrote the perfect summation for my thesis in the title, so here it is again: a sales enablement platform is the perfect document management system.

Take a hard look at the best sales teams -- the ones that really blow their quota out of the water. What do you see? Look past the high fives, the ring of the sales bell, or even the energy on the floor at any given moment. You’ll see the best sales teams are getting better every single day.

They make it easy for new and seasoned reps alike to improve, which gives them the best chance to beat quota. How do they do it? Here are the tips for creating a winning sales culture through sales training and beyond.

4 Tips for a Winning Sales Culture

1. Make it start with you

As the sales manager or leader, your strategy for getting better can’t be having your reps smile and dial. You set the standard for what good looks like. So, show your team that it’s good to take time to develop a strategy for outreach and write down assumptions.

Remember, in sales, we’re graded on outcomes as well as activity. Reward your most efficient and effective reps in addition to your volume players.

2. Focus on your offering

One of the most important parts of sales training is understanding the product. Every single team will focus on the product category (e.g., “This is why having a CRM is important.”) or the competition (e.g., “Why we’re better than Competitor Y.”).

What most sales teams forget to tell you is what exactly you’re selling (e.g., “Are we selling vitamins or painkillers?”).

This makes a massive difference. To a person in pain, a painkiller is the only solution. There will be implicit urgency, and your product has a built-in answer to “Why us?” -- one of the toughest messaging questions in sales.

If you’re selling vitamins, you must discover how to manufacture that urgency. The more exposure you can give new reps to your customers to answer the vitamin or painkiller question, the more effective they’ll be in talking with prospects.

3. Create an environment of iteration

Some sales teams come in every day and do exactly the same thing. They send the same emails at the same time and read from the same dial scripts day in and day out. Are these teams getting any better?

Compare that with the team that kicks off a three-week campaign where reps are trying a new sales script variation or a new channel (e.g., LinkedIn automation or handwritten letters after the call).

Some of the new tactics might not work, but the ones that do will become ingrained in your new sales process -- one that yields better outcomes.

By creating an environment of iteration, you make it possible for your reps to work smarter, not harder. Having regular ideation meetings and reviews instead of simply weekly updates can drive massive results for your team.

4. Foster autonomy

Larger sales teams live off consistency, sometimes at the expense of rep autonomy. If you want a team that learns and improves over time, you must get comfortable handing the steering wheel over to your reps.

Let your team know what’s set in stone and what isn’t. Encourage them to test the waters and author some of the plays in your sales playbook. If you don’t make this abundantly clear from the beginning, your team will get stuck in what’s worked in the past and forget about ways to innovate and improve.

If your business is like a war, your sales team is on the front lines. A single BDR has more interaction with customers and prospects in a month than a product manager has in a year.

They’ll know when the tide of battle is turning in your favor or against you. They’ll also be the most willing to adapt, if you let them. By creating a feedback loop and letting your sales team iterate, you’ll learn about the customer and how to win business every single day you walk into the office.

Sales Training Tips from Expert Trainers

Earlier this year, HubSpot released a list of the 25 top sales training programs across the nation.

In this list, a few of the honorees weighed in on the best advice they give to reps on a variety of topics. Sales managers, forward these thought-provoking tidbits to your teams to shake up their status quo.

1. ValueSelling Associates

"Most sales professionals want to push their products. They focus on their pitch and their presentation. At the end of the day, it isn’t about us -- it is about our clients. We need to know their industry, their business, and how they want us to add value. We have to listen and engage more and pitch and present less."

Notable clients: Rosetta Stone, Google, NCR, Motorola

2. PI Worldwide

"To study and master your craft, be an expert in product knowledge, sales skills, sales process, and execution. Harness your stamina, resilience, and natural drives for success. Know yourself well and work from your strengths."

Notable clients: AutoNation, American Red Cross, SONY

3. The Brooks Group

"Stick to the fundamentals and always focus on what your buyer wants to have happen. By overcomplicating the sales process or getting too focused on what you want to have happen instead of what the prospect wants to have happen, your chances of success drop to virtually zero."

Notable clients: Chase, Caterpillar, John Deere

4. Janek Performance Group

"Stay true to the process. Your customers will take you to different places during your sales interactions, and as sales professionals, we must always know where we are and maintain a clear path to where we want to end up. Focus on the steps that are necessary and maintain control of the conversation. If you don’t stay true to the process you'll find yourself advancing the sales process too quickly or not fast enough, or working with the wrong people. This will hurt your chances to close and build lasting relationships."

Notable clients: Daimler, JP Morgan Chase, Chick-fil-A

5. Revenue Storm

"To be successful, you can't rely on your old way of doing things. Buyers don’t need salespeople to educate them on products and services anymore. They want ideas on what they can do to improve their businesses -- not just a solution for today’s issues. They want sellers to be thought leaders who can give them advice and, more importantly, provide valuable insight that pushes their own thinking further. Therefore, sales professionals must transform their dependence on buyer-initiated buying processes to seller-initiated sales campaigns. That means selling is no longer just a function of uncovering or responding to preexisting demand. It is about creating demand where none existed before."

Notable clients: HP, IBM, Waste Management

6. Richardson

"As a sales rep, you have two objectives with your customer: create value and build trust. Every interaction with a customer should accomplish these objectives in some manner. You can create value for a customer by sharing a big, bold idea. But if they don’t trust you they will simply take your idea and bring it to someone who they do trust to implement it. If you just build trust but don’t add any value, then your customer will think of you as a good guy but won’t have a compelling reason to buy anything from you. This is why creating value and building trust is important."

7. Sales Readiness Group (SRG)

"Make sure that you are providing value to existing and prospective customers throughout the sales process. Ultimately, your ability to add value forges a relationship that goes beyond likability and positions you against competitive threats, especially competitors who sell solely on price."

Notable clients: Sysco, Maritz, Convergys

8. HubSpot Academy

"The internet changed the buyer/seller relationship. Now, the needed information that the buyers use to make a purchase decision is just a click away. The power in the buying and selling process has shifted from the seller to the buyer. So if the buying process has transformed, should your sales process transform to match today’s empowered buyer? Of course it should."

9. FranklinCovey

"Find a learning partner -- another person who you can coach and can coach you -- and commit to learning something new every month. If you stop learning, then something else will stop, too: revenue growth."

10. Sales Performance International

"You are busy, there is no doubt, but be busy doing the right things, with the right people, at the right time, on the right issues. Rigorously use your process, methodology, and tools to win more business and make more money than those who don’t put these enablement tools to work."

11. Profit Builders

"Expand your peripheral view of who you can coach and positively impact. You can coach your peers, partners, customers, and stakeholders -- and you can also effectively coach your boss. You can deliver your message in an effective way regarding how you like to be coached, managed, held accountable, communicated to, and supported. You can also discuss certain tasks, projects, problems, people, or commitments in a way that won’t put your boss on the defensive and instead, create a healthy platform for collaboration and discussion."

Notable clients: Johnson & Johnson, Salesforce.com, New York Yankees

12. ASLAN Training and Development

"Be other-centered. I promise you your competition is centered on self. If you truly make the decision to serve your clients and build awareness of what is important to them -- becoming an expert at solving their problem in the process -- receptivity grows, and your recommendations will be embraced."

Notable clients: FedEx, Apple, AAA

13. Wilson Learning

"The purpose of a business is to solve a specific problem in the market. But often times, salespeople believe the purpose is to make money. While businesses need to make money, that, in fact, is not the objective. Your job as a salesperson is to help businesses achieve their purpose. Your discovery needs to focus on what the business is trying to do and the issue they are trying to solve -- not how the business is trying to use your product or service. When they win, you win!"

Top Sales Training Companies (and Their Specialties)

If you want to give your own sales training a boost, here are some of the top companies in the space and what exactly they can help you with.

ValueSelling Associates

ValueSelling Associates helps B2B companies compete and win in markets crowded with seemingly similar products and services. If you need a good answer to the “Why Us?” question, they can help you refine, and ramp your sales team. And with over 20 years of sales training leadership under their belt, they’re an established player in this space.

The Brooks Group

Ever wonder “What if I could make my sales reps the most street-smart reps in my industry?” They would inherently know how to navigate tough conversations, flip positions into interests, and get around those tough objections.

The Brooks Group is a corporate sales training and sales management training company focused on doing just that. Their training systems provide street-smart, actionable strategies that help salespeople sell more effectively and help sales managers coach and lead more successfully.

They’ve seen good success with this approach, as 94% of The Brooks Group’s training participants win new accounts as a direct result of the training.

Janek Performance Group

Janek Performance Group’s mantra is to never stop improving. And this sentiment is upheld through their continuously updated, research-based sales training programs.

They’re doubling down on the sales environment of iteration and can help you do the same by developing, testing, and rolling out new sales training programs and enablement tools.

On average, Janek’s customers hit a 21% performance lift after their first 90 days on the training program.

Lessonly

A learning solution used by top sales teams, Lessonly knows the best managers are phenomenal coaches. Whether refining a pitch or closing a deal, great managers can level up their reps by practicing and providing a clear feedback loop.

Their platform enables easy training authoring and distribution to your team and can cover everything from product knowledge to pitch skills.

Want to always be closing? Always be learning. Lessonly brings continuous learning to your sales team to create engaged reps, happier customers, and more closed deals. 

Sales training companies are often hired when reps need a performance jolt. Numbers are falling, and leaders' shoulders are drooping. Don't wait until you're at that point. Invest in sales training early and often -- and see the benefits immediately.

Professional trade associations are under fire. In fact, they have been for some time. Organizations like IABC, PRSA and AdFed are struggling to find their place in this new, highly competitive world of professional development and networking.

The common challenges?

“We need more members.”

“We need to engage more senior members.”

“We need to be relevant to our members.”

I feel like I keep hearing the same concerns year after year. Yet, in the world of professional trade associations, little changes.

They still have high membership fees that go almost completely to national organizations.

They still have the same conferences they had 20 years ago–and in some cases, they’re using the same speakers!

They still have the same “value prop”–we can provide you with professional development and networking.

The only problem is, everything else around them has completely changed.

For starters, more groups are now in the mix. Locally, MIMA is still relatively new. MN Search is definitely new. BMA wasn’t around 20 years ago. More organizations mean much stiffer competition.

We’ve also seen a huge proliferation of what I would call “networking groups.” These could be more formal in nature (Twin Cities Meet Up–remember that?). Or, they could be more informal (like the two “mastermind” groups I run locally here in Minneapolis). Point is: This is chipping away at these trade organization’s strange-hold on networking.

And finally, the professional development landscape has completely changed. There are now endless online options to learn about everything from content strategy to how to create Facebook ads. Countless new conferences and events have popped up in the last 5-10 years to serve these audiences. Everyone from solos to agencies to third-party vendors are now competing for this time and attention by offering up programming like this.

Point is: The professional trade organizations haven’t really adapted to an environment that’s essentially been flipped on its head the last 10 years. It’s a completely difference space than it was in 2008.

And, as a result, they’re struggling. If (when) the economy goes south, you’re going to see some of these organizations shut down (or, combine–which is an interesting notion). I believe that’s inevitable.

The bigger question I have is this: Is there still a need for the traditional professional trade organization in PR, comms and social media marketing?

Historically, I’ve been a huge supporter of these types of organizations. So, on the surface, I’d say yes–but, a few big things need to change in order for the progressional trade organization of 2018 to survive:

1: The membership revenue model needs to change–DRASTICALLY.

This is the root of many of the problems for many of these organizations. The lion’s share of your annual dues go straight to the national organization. However, the national organization provides little to no value for that money. Almost all of the value in your membership to these orgs is connected directly to the local chapter. I don’t have a big idea for this one, but I do know the current model needs to change. Soon.

2: The professional trade orgs need to start targeting solos and freelancers.

Hey, I don’t say this just because I’m a solo consultant. I say it because in 10-15 years, a substantial portion of the U.S. workforce (including us in comms/PR/social) will be working on our own. The stats and trend lines don’t lie. Yet, many of these organizations don’t even bother targeting solos with anything–professional development, networking opps, nothing. That needs to change. These people are already a key audience–in 10 years, they’ll be a PRIMARY audience.

3: Forget large-scale networking and focus on private networking.

The days where professional trade orgs could own networking opportunities are long gone. My advice: Ditch efforts to facilitate the big group networking events you’ve done in past, and instead, focus all your networking programming on getting smaller groups together in a more intimate setting. I’ve seen the thirst for this first-hand in the two mastermind groups I run, and in a few others people I know around town. People can network on their own now with all the tools available to them–they don’t need professional trade orgs for that anymore.

4: Redefine leadership criteria.

One struggle for a few of these trade orgs has been identifying and finding qualified people to sit on the board. Some orgs (PRSA) require professional certification to sit on the board. Others, tend to look for more senior-level folks to join their board. I’d look at it a little differently. I’d go younger (20-something millennials) and much older (50+ Boomers). Why? Because those are the groups who are more likely to have more time on their hands. You know who doesn’t have extra time on their hands? Parents of little kids, middle schoolers and even high schoolers! Plus, young people–often eschewed because they don’t have the experience–are full of ideas that can spark the change these trade orgs desperately need. Why wouldn’t you want more of these people on your board? And, more experienced pros have seen it all. Their wise counsel would offset the younger set perfectly. This just makes too much sense, doesn’t it?

5: Make volunteering a requirement for membership.

All trade organizations struggle with big thing that’s absolutely key to their existence: Convincing people to volunteer. Its the volunteers who do the lion’s share of the work for these organizations. From marketing to organizing events to working with students, volunteers do it all. But, they always have a hard time finding these volunteers. Why not make volunteering a REQUIREMENT when people sign up as a member? You wouldn’t have to ask for a ton of time. There could even be a minimum time commitment of 3-5 hours a month. Who doesn’t have 3-5 hours a month? Think if ALL your members were donating 3-5 hours a month? How productive would your org be? Of course, people could and would volunteer more time than that. But, making it a REQUIREMENT from the get-go would change everything.

photo credit: bobbyrettew _O8A6151 via photopin (license)

Has your brand noticed a gradual decrease in Twitter traffic? Is your social traffic affected by the new Twitter updates?

The recent Twitter updates have a direct impact on how marketers use the platform. While Twitter is trying to make the content search within the platform easier, but with new rules comes revisiting how marketers will use Twitter. One of the most important updates in Twitter’s announcement was limiting or removing access to certain APIs, marketers are searching for new tools that can outsmart the platform.

In this article we will introduce you to five great tools to outsmart the new Twitter: you’ll take a look at these great tools, what they can do in light of Twitter’s regulations, and what will make your brand stand out. These tools will give you a competitive edge when all other brands are struggling to figure out Twitter’s revamp.

Killing Automation

What’s behind Twitter’s new update? Well with bots manipulating social media, the core impact of social media- being social- is slowly fading. Twitter is taking an active stance to reduce bots, fake content, or other content that may impact public opinion.

Maximizing the Shift

Let’s review some of the Twitter updates and how they impact marketers.

• Simultaneous cross-posting, liking or RT’ing from multiple accounts.

What This Means: Twitter is cracking down on any actions taken across multiple Twitter accounts. Again, this is all in an effort to crack down on bots that were spreading a ton of fake tweets and spammy, abusive content. While companies may have good reasons for multiple accounts, it’s no longer acceptable to simply cross post. From now on, the best suggestion would be to post from one account and share or RT from all secondary accounts.

• Posting multiple updates:
  Intent to subvert or manipulate a topic, or to artificially inflate the prominence of a hashtag or trending content, is never allowed.

What This Means: In the past, bots or fake accounts would hack the feed by sharing or RT’ing the same content to force content to be in the trending topics. Of course, if the topic was organically trending, then it’s not an issue but Twitter will be cracking down on manipulated efforts to hack the system.

• Duplicate or Similar Content: According to Twitter’s new rules: Content can be considered spam “if you post duplicate or substantially similar content, replies, or mentions over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account, or create duplicate or substantially similar accounts.”

What This Means: Prior to these updates, creating “evergreen content” would be a simple way to have a library of prepared content ready for scheduling over time. Having this content ready would allow marketers to leverage their reach. The new Twitter update eliminates ALL posting of duplicate content. While marketers can use the same photo, same link, or similar message, the copy must be different to prior tweets posted from that account. It’s yet to be determined how Twitter intends to monitor. Any marketers who get caught, risk accounts suspension or complete ban.

Important Features of Twitter Tools

What features should the new Twitter tools have?

As always, the answer depends on what the brand is looking to achieve. Generally speaking, marketers using Twitter are looking for tools that can work within the predetermined guidelines set forth by Twitter, save time, and scale for efficiency.

The central features of Twitter Tools are the following:

• • Simplicity
    Keeps content fresh and top of mind
    Organizes tasks and opportunities
    Stays within the guidelines
    Tracks

Here are top 5 Twitter tools that can help any marketer outsmart the new regulations.

• Commun.it is the best Twitter community management tools out there. It is a Twitter tool that lets marketers take a deep dive into social interactions and build more meaningful relationships with their audience. With Commun.it, a brand can identify who is sharing their content, focus efforts on influencers, and track keywords. For the smart social media marketing professional, Commun.it can become an essential tool for daily social media management, ensuring that no conversation goes unanswered and that no opportunities for meaningful engagements go without a proper interaction. In terms of Twitter tools, Commun.it automates many of the most important tasks aimed at increasing engagement for any Twitter profile.
• Post Planner: For social media management, efficiency is key. We’re all busy and we want tools that will work within the guidelines to make the process smooth. While originally optimized for Facebook, Post Planner today is a tool for finding, planning and posting content across social media platforms. One of the best features is the Canva integration.
• Buffer: While placed at number 3, Buffer is by far one of the leaders in providing a powerful tool that plays within the rules. While famous for allowing cross-posting, Buffer worked quickly to modify its platform and meet the new guidelines. Buffer took the lead by implementing simple modifications to three core challenges for social media managers to ensure that managers don’t mess up or get penalized.
• Hootsuite: Like Buffer, Hootsuite offers an impressive suite of social media management including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Most experts claim that Hootsuite is a winner for optimal Twitter management for marketers.
• Ninja Outreach: While not officially a Twitter tool, Ninja Outreach actually performs like a great Twitter tool. It can do much of the heavy lifting for Twitter in terms of SEO and link building. While considered an influencer marketing tool, NinjaOutreach can be used to streamline the process of finding industry leaders, scrape for contact details, identifying and reaching out to them via their Twitter profiles.

Conclusion

With Twitter releasing new rules, marketers are still uncertain how to effectively use this social platform to scale. The forward-thinking brands seek solutions that can bring value and outsmart Twitter, while still working within the guidelines. In order to stay within the rules and still drive results, learning and leveraging these great tools will only prove your value regardless of Twitter’s new guidelines.

Many B2B sales and marketing organisations have an unfortunate habit of wasting huge amounts of time and energy pursuing "prospects" that are unlikely to ever become valuable customers, often because there is no common company-wide consensus about which opportunities everybody should be prioritising.

Allowing your organisation to treat every inbound opportunity equally - or encouraging them to respond to every RFP you receive - is a gross misuse of valuable resources.

That's why defining, identifying and pro-actively targeting your most valuable opportunities is the essential foundation of any successful value selling initiative. These opportunities must satisfy three critical criteria: they must have the potential to buy something that you are offering, they must be willing to buy from your organisation, and the effort required to win their business must be worth it.

The process of targeting your most valuable opportunities involves four key components: recognising your customer's most valuable issues, recognising your most valuable customer and target account organisations, recognising the most valuable and influential roles within these organisations and recognising the most important trigger events that are likely to result in customer action.

This exercise is inevitably an ongoing process - the more you learn, the more you realise you would like to know. But the sooner you get going, the sooner you start learning - and even a modest amount of progress in the right direction can have a transformational impact on the alignment and effectiveness of your sales, marketing and business development activities.

[1] Your customer's most important issues

At any point in time, your target customers will inevitably have a large number of "irritating" issues - things they would like to address but can probably learn to live with. They will have a smaller number of genuinely important issues that they know they have to deal with them at some point. But they will have even fewer truly critical issues - and these are the problems that inevitably demand urgent action (and are most likely to result in sales).

Irritating issues can cause enquiries. Important issues can result in serious evaluations. But it's only the critical issues (or important issues that are tied to a high-priority strategic objective) that will inevitably drive change. That's why our value selling system® was deliberately designed to ensure that your marketing, business development and sales teams all recognise, target, qualify and respond to the same high-priority issues - and avoid low-priority wild goose chases.

[2] Your most promising target organisations

Traditional market segmentation - using demographic indicators such as size, sector and location - may allow you to draw the outer boundaries of your target markets, but these factors have very little bearing on whether any individual organisation is actually likely to buy from you. Structural and behavioural factors (such as the way the company is organised, the systems they have implemented and their appetite for innovation) are consistently far more reliable indicators of long-term potential.

That's why our Ideal Customer Profile framework was deliberately designed to systematically identify the common characteristics of your most valuable target organisations, and to ensure that those insights are applied when targeting your marketing and business development activities, and when qualifying the potential of individual sales opportunities.

[3] Your most important stakeholders

Research by the CEB (now part of Gartner) revealed that the typical high-value B2B purchase decision now involves an average of 6.8 stakeholders - a number that is expected to keep rising. But within that group there are a smaller number of particularly influential individuals - the CEB refer to them as "mobilizers" but you could also think of them as change agents or power sponsors.

These people have significant influence over the decision-making process, and are the most important roles to target when you are reaching out to organisations in an attempt to initiate a buying dialogue. They are also, of course, of vital significance throughout the value selling process because of their ability to persuade their colleagues in the stakeholder community of the need to take action, and their talent for driving consensus around their preferred option.

[4] The most significant trigger events

Identifying and targeting your most valuable issues, organisations and roles can help to establish where Your long-term market development energies should be focused. But the factors that determine whether any account is likely to become a short-term opportunity are situational and related to either internal or external changes in circumstance and trigger events.

One of the most common internal trigger events is the appointment of a new senior executive with responsibility for the function that has the issue. Others include significant new corporate initiatives or challenges with existing projects. External trigger events include significant changes in the balance of market power, new legislation or regulation. That's why our value selling system® was deliberately designed to equip you to monitor, identify and respond to these catalysts for change.

In conclusion

Aligning your marketing, business development and sales organisations and activities around a common agreement about what an ideal opportunity looks like has a profound impact on sales, marketing and business development effectiveness. By targeting the right issues, organisations, roles and situations you stand a far better change of engaging at an early stage of the prospect's buying journey while you still have the chance to influence it.

And of course these principles will also allow your sales people to more accurately qualify which opportunities they should be prioritising and which ones they should be disengaging from.

If any of the above concepts resonate with you, I think you'll enjoy reading our step-by-step guide to implementing an effective value-selling strategy - you can download your copy here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales, an award-winning blogger, a confident and entertaining event speaker and workshop leader, a regular contributor to the International Journal of Sales Transformation and the founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the B2B value-selling experts.

Following a varied and successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates Bob now works as an adviser to some of today’s most ambitious B2B-focused sales organisations, equipping and enabling them to accelerate revenue growth and transform sales effectiveness by implementing the proven principles of value-based selling.

In the two years since Indian social media app ShareChat raised $4 million in funding from Lightspeed Ventures the converging trends of increasing smartphone use, wireless internet connectivity, and cashless banking have combined to create a new social media juggernaut.

Now Lightspeed has confirmed that the company has raised an additional $100 million in financing at roughly a half billion dollar valuation alongside investment partners including India Quotient, Jesmond Holdings, Morningside, SAIF Partners, Shunwei Ventures, Venture Highway and Xiaomi. 

In the years since that first Lightspeed investment, ShareChat has gone from a company with 1 million monthly active users to 25 million monthly active users — and while the company lags behind the messaging giant WhatsApp (whose app is used by more than 200 million people in India) its growth in India is remarkable.

“ShareChat is really looking to tap into the next billion users in India,” says Ravi Mhatre, a partner at Lightspeed, whose investment dollars helped architect the ShareChat rise.

What’s giving this startup the ability to connect to those next billion users is one strategy of a 9-year-old plan to develop what’s been called the “India Stack” — an entirely new digital infrastructure for a country with a population of 1.32 billion spread across an area of nearly 1.3 million square miles.

The push began in 2009 with the launch of Aadhaar, India’s (recently amended) national biometric recording scheme. Seven years later it took a huge leap forward with the implementation of the nation’s massive demonetization plan and the near-simultaneous rollout of a 4G high speed mobile network across the country.

While the demonetization strategy ate into growth rates across the country, and likely didn’t reduce the amount of money in circulation, according to Indian financial publication LiveMint, the 4G rollout was a huge success.

Since Jio, the telecommunications arm of the giant industrial conglomerate Reliance Group, launched its 4G service in September 2016, adoption rates across the country have skyrocketed.

According to a report from the telecommunications analysis firm, OpenSignal, Jio’s contribution to networking India has been massive.

During the quarter ending June 2017, total data usage stood at over 4.2 million terabytes, out of which 4G data accounted for 3.9 million TBs, according to TRAI. The growth is most visible when checking the numbers from a year ago, when 4G data usage stood at a mere 8,050 TBs; that’s a 500-fold increase… [And] LTE availability in India is remarkable: users were able to connect to an LTE signal over 84% of the time, a rise of over 10 percentage points from a year earlier. This places India ahead of more established countries in the 4G landscape such as Sweden, Taiwan, Switzerland or the U.K.

Disrupt telco Reliance Jio laid the foundation for India’s phone owners to switch to using mobile data packages (Photo by Arun Sharma/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

For a startup like ShareChat that means tens of millions of daily active users, according to Mhatre.

Those users are drawn to ShareChat’s broadcast chat feature, which allows users on mobile phones to broadcast conversations and commentary about any topic they wish. “It’s a platform where content that is relevant to you is surfaced to you and you engage with it,” Mhatre says.

The company was founded by three Bangalore-based developers. Farid Ahsan, 26, Ankush Sachdeva, 25, and Bhanu Pratap Singh, also 26 — all graduates from India’s famous IIT Kanpur University — had worked up 17 different prototypes for a product before they finally settled on the version that would become ShareChat.

The company’s founders are also taking a page from the popular Chinese app WeChat and hope to turn their broadcast chat service into a platform for micropayments, education, and other types of entertainment.

What started as a niche site for people to communicate in their local dialects could now become the first true domestic social media giant in India.

There are other Chinese corollaries to ShareChat’s business that may be informative. Toutiao, the news aggregation service owned by Bytedance, is perhaps the closest in kind to ShareChat at the moment, but even that is only accurate to a point.

China’s infrastructure is still somewhat based on personal computers and landlines, whereas India’s is wholly mobile-first. For Mhatre, it’s the first country to make the leap to a digital economy based entirely on mobile computing.

At Lightspeed the opportunity that presents is similar to the mid-90s birth of the Internet in the U.S. and the late 2000 technology boom that created billions of dollars in value for companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent.

ShareChat is built to support India’s plethora of local languages, as opposed to English-first services like WhatsApp

What makes this feat even more impressive was that until two or three years ago, it looked like India wouldn’t be living up to the expectations that had been set for it and emerging market countries like Russia and Brazil that comprise three-fourths of the BRICs that were supposed to be the foundational building blocks of the 21st century global economy.

“If you look at China — the GDP in China is $12 to $13 trillion… India is about $2.5 trillion [but] infrastructure got developed there earlier than in India,” Mhatre said. India is at the same inflection point now, where the infrastructure boom is contributing to the development of new business models. 

The constraints of that infrastructure have also informed the business ShareChat has built as well. Because while digital penetration rates in the country are high, the download speeds are exceptionally low (due in part to overwhelming demand).

Again, the OpenSignal report is informative.

While LTE availability saw a meteoric rise, the same cannot be said of 4G speeds. In our latest State of LTE report, India occupied the lowest spot among the 77 countries we examined, with average download speeds of 6.1 Mbps, over 10 Mbps lower than the global average.

ShareChat’s focus on messaging and sharing data light images is a platform that’s suited to the current strengths and limitations of India’s infrastructure. “You have half a billion people with a high speed internet terminal in their hand and they want to do things with it,” Mhatre said. And ShareChat isn’t just localized in its tech stack. The company also is localized by language. 

As the investors at Lightspeed noted in their thoughts on the deal.

The “next billion” users in India speak 22 different languages and are spread out over an area the size of Europe. ShareChat’s founders Ankush, Bhanu and Farid blew us away with their insight into this new user base. Their first brush with this user base came in 2015 when they noticed that sharing of photos, videos, poetry, jokes and even good morning messages was at epidemic levels on WhatsApp. Yet there was no easy one-stop shop for finding this content.  ShareChat was born to solve this problem. As they developed the idea, they also saw that this audience hungered for connection and content about their cities and villages of origin. They noticed emergent behavior around users wanting to “look cool” to their friends by finding the best content, solving for loneliness by finding friends in their own language, and even wanting to drive fame and celebrity in their own geographies.  

The Seven Steps to Marketing Success – How to Build a Marketing System written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch on Building a Marketing System

The key to an effective marketing approach is creating a marketing system. This is Duct Tape Marketing’s point of view and our key differentiator. Here, we’ll take a closer look at the seven steps you must undertake to build a successful marketing system for your business.

1. Focus on Strategy Before Tactics

The first step to creating a successful marketing system is to know who your ideal customer is, and what their core problems are. If you don’t understand the value that your business can bring to each engagement, it’s nearly impossible to select the tactics you should use to reach your audience.

When you understand the ideal customer and create the narrowest definition possible for who that is, you can then connect what you’re offering to solving the customers’ problems. This makes your approach not just about your products and services, but about your promise to solve those problems. If you don’t take the time to understand your ideal customer, there’s no way to build a marketing strategy that will speak to them.

2. Guide the Customer Journey – The Marketing Hourglass

Because of the internet, the way people buy today is largely out of your hands. They have so many places to do research, ask networks, find out about you, and discover the products and services to solve their problems before they ever contact a company.

The customer journey comes into play at Duct Tape Marketing with something called the marketing hourglass. The hourglass has seven stages: know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer. These stages represent the logical behavior in buying that many of your customers want to take. Your job is to help them move through those stages sequentially.

Your first step is to understand how somebody would come to know about a company like yours. Likely, they’d turn to a search engine or they’d ask a friend. At these early stages, they know they have a problem, but they haven’t yet concluded how they’re going to solve it. Marketing at this stage needs to show that you understand their pain points and that you might have the right solution for them. From there, you need to establish trust in your brand and perhaps even give them a way to try you. When they do finally buy, that experience must be excellent in order to create repeat business. Not only that, but happy customers will also generate referrals.

All marketing efforts must be built around the concept of the marketing hourglass. When you understand how your customers buy and what they’re expecting to achieve at each stage, you’re able to build a marketing plan that exceeds their expectations along the way and creates happy, lifelong customers.

3. Make Content the Voice of Strategy

Content is not just a tactic, it is the voice of strategy. You have made a promise to solve a problem for your customers; you now need to be ready to meet people where they are (search engines, social media, etc.) and generate enough valuable content to dominate in those arenas.

We use something called content hubs to outshine in search and to create content that is valuable to read, find, and share. This content must also meet customers at every stage of their journey, from know and like all the way through to referrals.

4. Create a Total Online Presence

Even if you do the majority of your business offline and in person, in today’s world, you must have a total online presence. The internet is where people go to have an experience with marketing, to understand a company, and to do research. When someone refers you to their friend, the friend turns to a search engine or your website to learn what other people are saying about you and to see if you actually solve the problem that they have.

No matter what kind of business you run, you need to be tackling all the elements of online marketing. This includes social media, search engine optimization, content, website, and email marketing. All of these pieces must work together as an integrated whole.

5. Build a Reliable Flow of Leads

Leads are the lifeblood of getting your business going, and so you have to find a predictable way to generate enough leads to grow your business. There are numerous channels through which to generate leads, and again, integration is key.

Sales, content, advertising, networking, and online and offline events all play a role. There is no one way to generate leads; the key is in finding the three or four channels that you can consistently mine and establishing a process to develop leads through those channels.

6. Make Lead Conversion Your X Factor

Lead conversion must be your multiplier. The key here is to focus on all forms of lead conversion. Obviously someone buying your product or service for the first time is a conversion, but what about signing up for an ebook, registering for an online course, getting a free evaluation, or making an appointment? Those are all conversion activities.

You need to map the experience of each of your leads and clients so you can be sure that they’re having a great experience throughout. This is how you create repeat business and reactive those clients who have been lost. Once you begin tracking customer experiences, you then need to measure these activities. When you understand customers’ behavior, you can create better experiences; even if that only increases each conversion activity by one or two percent, that has a huge impact on the business overall.

7. Live By the Calendar

When you’re developing a system, you have to have a plan. It doesn’t have to be long-term—focusing on three to four important priorities for the quarter is ideal. From there, you can break those priorities down into activities and projects so that you can plan the quarter and not expend energy chasing the next new thing.

You have to have fewer priories, and you have to make marketing a habit. It has to be something that you do daily. You have to build meetings with the appropriate people to make sure that you’re moving those priorities along. Once you establish that habit, you should start documenting your processes. From there, you can decide what tasks you can delegate, either by adding more staff or outsourcing to others.

The reality is that marketing never ends—it’s a cycle. Once you go through the seven steps and build your marketing system, you want to constantly be reviewing, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and changing your approach accordingly.

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

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The average lifespan of a U.S. S&P 500 company has fallen by 80% in the last 80 years (from 67 to 15 years), and 76% of UK FTSE 100 companies have disappeared in the last 30 years. In stark contrast, organizations in other sectors celebrate their 100th birthday and look like they’ll be here forever. How do they do it? And what can business learn from them?

To answer these questions, we identified seven celebrated Centennials who’ve outperformed their peers over the last 100 years and are admired by everyone. From the arts, we looked at the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal College of Art and the Royal Shakespeare Company (originally the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre). From education, Eton College, from science, NASA (initially part of the US Army), and from sport, the New Zealand All Blacks and British Cycling. Then, we spent five years trying to understand what they do, and how they do it. We got under the skin of each organization, to understand how they live and breathe, by interviewing people who work (or worked) with them, observing them in action and reading everything about them. Surprisingly, we found the Centennials are all very similar to each other, despite their different vocations — and behave in ways that defy conventional wisdom.

As our findings started to emerge, we shared them with 537 leaders from 84 successful businesses — such as 3M, Apple, the BBC, BMW, Cirque du Soleil, Dyson, GE, Google, Hamlins, HSBC, Jaguar Land Rover, Johnson & Johnson, M&C Saatchi, McKinsey, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Procter & Gamble, Rolls-Royce Engines, Unilever, Virgin and WPP — to see what they could learn from the Centennials, and we’ve found 12 tests to help organizations sustain success.

Most businesses focus on serving customers, owning resources, being efficient and growing — but the Centennials don’t. Instead, they try to shape society, share experts, create accidents, and focus on getting better not bigger. They’re radically traditional — with a stable core, but a disruptive edge. And that’s what keeps them ahead.

First, we’ll explain how they do this, and then we’ll look at the 12 tests.

The Stable Core: Purpose, stewardship, openness

The Centennials start by stabilizing their core, to safeguard what they stand for and stay on track.

Stable purpose: shape society, engage kids. They are incredibly strategic, looking 20 to 30 years ahead, to understand how society is evolving, how they can shape it, and how they can get the talent to do this. All the Centennials we studied talked about their impact on society — the beliefs and behaviors they’ve changed — from the minute we met. The All Blacks have always aimed to raise New Zealand’s national profile, Eton to educate 70 disadvantaged children per year, NASA to help mankind, and the RSC to open up the arts to everyone. As the Royal College of Art told us, “We aim to change the world through art and design, and track all our graduates, to check we’re doing this. Currently, our alumni include the Head of Design at every car manufacturer in the world, apart from BMW, 8 of Apple’s 18 product designers and at least one designer in every Paris fashion house.”

Talent is drawn to them, to help them achieve their purpose. But they don’t just wait for talent to turn up. Instead, the Centennials all work with children — sometimes as young as four years of age — to help them learn and use the skills they’ll need in the future. As the RSC explained, “Some of the most important work we do is with schools — it keeps us alive and relevant.” That’s why the All Blacks invented Rippa Rugby to be played in primary schools, the RCA hold a young art competition for 4–18 year olds every year, and NASA runs a 10-week program for school graduates each summer.

Stable stewardship: 10+ year tenure, 1+ year handover. Most organizations change their leaders every five years, but the Centennials we studied keep them in place for more than 10. Not just at the top of the organization, but two or three levels further down too — where key knowledge and influence often sits. And they carefully manage leadership transitions, so nothing is lost along the way. They typically appoint a successor more than four years before they make a change and spend at least 1 year handing over. For example, Eton appoints its House Masters for 13 years, has a two-year handover between one master and the next, and the old master then stays at Eton for five-plus years to continue offering advice and support. The RSC appoints its Executive and Artistic Directors for more than 10 years, with an 18-month handover between one pair and the next, and the old pair then join the governing board.

Crucially, they don’t employ leaders with large egos — as the All Blacks say, “No dickheads!” Instead, they find humble stewards, who are keen to learn from the previous leader, and who are more concerned about the organization they’ll leave behind than how it looks while they’re there. The All Blacks talk about “legacy” and “leaving the jersey in a better place.” One RSC Executive Director told us, “My biggest challenge when I arrived was joining a highly successful company — I didn’t want to mess up.”

Stable openness: perform in public, help others. The final part of being traditional is performing in public, to raise the organization’s profile and encourage everyone to perform at their best. As a former Eton Headmaster told us, “From the minute I arrived, I knew I was being watched. Not just by people inside the school, but those outside it too. I couldn’t make a mistake without it being noticed. It’s different to anywhere else I’ve worked, before or since.” Some of the Centennials perform in high-profile events, which the whole world watches — such as a moon landing, Olympic Games or world cup. But those who don’t deliberately open themselves up to invite scrutiny and create pressure. Eton is designed like a village with a busy road running through it and teachers are on display as they move between classrooms, the RCA open their studios to the public, and the RAM broadcast their performances. And, like many of the 84 businesses we also studied, they find great things to do and then share them with the world through books, articles and films. NASA engineers publish their work online and the All Blacks asked Amazon Prime to make a documentary to show everyone how they work.

The Disruptive Edge: Experts, nervousness, accidents

While stabilizing their core, the Centennials keep waves of disruption crashing at their edge — to stay fresh and get better.

Disruptive experts: 70% part-time, world’s best. While most companies strive to own talent and reduce staff turnover, the Centennials do the opposite. They employ up to 70% of staff part-time, deliberately, to stay fresh and create a continuous flow of new ideas. Critical experts, who want to stay at the cutting-edge. That’s why they have hundreds of associates (Eton, RAM, RCA, RSC and NASA), share support staff with other organizations (British Cycling) or only work together for half the year (All Blacks). Not only does this bring in new ideas, but it also gives them access to a greater pool of talent, people who are busy doing brilliant things elsewhere. As the RCA explained, “We don’t want too many “career academics,” who only work with us. We want people who are redefining practice too. That’s why we asked Ford’s Head of Design to work part-time on our Intelligent Mobility Program, while he was still at Ford.” And the RAM explained, “We keep track of our alumni, and ask them to come back, once they’ve done something interesting – to share their knowledge and experience.” They also make sure they aren’t just recycling old ideas. As Eton explained, “We actively search for new and different types of students, to increase the richness and diversity of our community. To help do this, 21% of students received a total of £7M financial support last year. And our vision is to become ‘needs blind‘ — by finding new sources of revenue, so we don’t rely on fees to fund the school in the future.”

As well as seeking fresh input from part-time staff, they also go out looking for new ideas — but not by tracking the completion. After all, they want to stay ahead of them, not emulate them. Instead, they work out who’s the best in the world at something and try to learn from them. The All Blacks have worked with an astonishing array of groups, including the U.S. Marines, ballet dancers, and cage fighters, to learn how to lead, lift and grapple better. British Cycling learned from the Royal Ballet to improve how they tour and McLaren to use technology better. They also recruit from outside their sector to bring in new knowledge and experience. As Eton explained, “Some of our best appointments have come from outside education. So, we try to help people make that switch. The recruitment consultants call them ‘first bouncers’.” The RCA said, “We use a recruitment consultant for every appointment we make — to shake the trees, rather than waiting for people to apply. It costs us an extra £30k per person, but it’s worth every penny.”

Disruptive nervousness: better not bigger, tirelessly tweak. Most organizations proudly tell you how much they grew last year — but not the Centennials we studied. Growth makes them nervous. As the RCA explained, “We need to be big enough to create impact and be financially stable, but not so big that we get distracted or lose control.” A recent study of the all the Centennials in the world found that 89% of them employ fewer than 300 people — and the same was true for those we studied, with the exception of NASA. They’ve stayed small, with fewer than 300 full time staff (All Blacks, British Cycling, Eton, RAM), or fewer than 300 per site (RCA, RSC). Previous research suggests people can only maintain 150 stable social relationships, so trying to stay small makes sense. That’s why the RAM, RCA and Eton turn down at least two-thirds of student applications each year and haven’t opened universities or schools abroad like their competitors. And all the Centennials carefully work out what to take on and how to manage it, so standards don’t slip. The RSC explained, “Panic set in when Matilda suddenly took off. We hadn’t had a success like that before, and it’s quite different to what we normally do. So we set up a separate team, away from the others, to make sure it worked but didn’t damage anything else.”

Just as growth makes them nervous, so does success. Rather than celebrating it, they unpack it — to work out what they’ve missed, and where they could do better. Obsessing over details, scientifically analyzing anything that might affect performance. The RSC told us, “We get nervous if more than 20% of our new ideas succeed — it means they’re not really new!” NASA spend two years debriefing a mission, to really understand what happened. The All Blacks found they’re more like likely to lose after a big win, so they work even harder when this happens. They prefer to make lots of tiny tweaks, rather than looking for large breakthroughs. As they can be more easily corrected if they go wrong, and are more difficult to imitate as they’re harder to see — such as traveling with your own pillow, to get a better night’s sleep. The All Blacks call this “bone deep preparation.” British Cycling sought “marginal gains” — making a thousand 1% tweaks, to get a 1000% improvement.

Disruptive accidents: move and bump, live like a family. And finally, rather than trying to be efficient, by putting similar people together, they make them walk around and work on different projects, to create movement and bumps. So employees from different disciplines continually question each other, and share problems, ideas, and opportunities. That’s why the RCA keep a diverse range of staff and students (by having a wider range of programs than its peers), put their most diverse ones next to each other (such as Fashion and Architecture) and get them to work on cross-program projects (such as the Neurodiversity and London Ambulance projects). Eton requires its staff and students to walk for 10 minutes between classes and work in different house, subject, and non-academic groups each day, and the RAM asks its tutors to review programs outside of their expertise.

Research Method

They also help people learn from the movement and bumps, by getting them to eat together for at least one hour every day, living like a family. The RCA explained, “We spent ages explaining how important the restaurant was to the architects for our new building. They kept trying to put a small one in the corner, saying it was an inefficient use of space, but we wanted a big one, in the middle, to bring everyone together.” Similarly, British Cycling told us, “People often ask what they can learn from cycling and I tell them, take your team away, get to know each other and find new things to do. Our biggest improvements always happen when we do this.”

Can You Become Radically Traditional?

As one business leader asked us, “This is all very interesting — but what should I do?” Well, after sharing our findings with 537 leaders from 84 businesses, we’ve found 12 tests to help sustain success. These questions can’t always be answered today, but create the right discussion for tomorrow. Try them, and see what you find.

Stable purpose

Test 1. What beliefs or behaviors can you change? How can you shape society? First, identify the beliefs or behaviors you want to create through the work you do and through the people who work for you. For example, Apple, Facebook and Google changed how their customers live and Tesla continues to accelerate the use of sustainable energy.

Test 2. How can you engage kids, tomorrow’s employees? Identify the skills you need in the future and find ways to help kids learn and use them today. For example, Apple and Microsoft developed lessons, guides, and apps to help kids write and use computer code and the BBC holds an annual writing competition for 5–13 year olds.

Stable stewardship

Test 3. Who has critical influence and knowledge? Identify your critical leaders (20 to 30% of employees in the Centennials) and keep them in place for 10+ years, to stabilize knowledge, experience and decision making. And encourage these leaders to look 20 to 30 years ahead. For example, 80% of the 100 most successful CEOs in the world have been in office for 10+ years and 3M believes it takes 10–15 years to change a company’s DNA.

Test 4. How can you manage handovers? Can you bring in a successor 4+ years beforehand, and spend 1+ years handing over? GE and Rolls-Royce Engines usually do this for their CEOs, 80% of the 100 most successful CEOs in the world were internally appointed, and HSBC has only appointed 1 external CEO in the last 150 years.

Stable openness

Test 5. Who should study you? Invite people in to see what you do, how you do it, and the impact it has. Not only will this encourage everyone to perform at their best, it will also build trust. For example, Jaguar Land Rover invites customers to see their car being built. Harley-Davidson and Toyota invite everyone to visit their facilities to see what they do.

Test 6. How can you help others? It’s not possible for everyone to visit you, to see what you do, so find great things to do and then share them with the world. For example, Berkshire Hathaway, Nike and Starbucks have published books explaining their successes, failures and recoveries. British Airways, Steinway and Wedgewood asked the BBC to show how they work and Southwest Airlines ask customers to share their experiences through their blog.

Disruptive experts

Test 7. How can you bring outside expertise in? Once you’ve stabilized your core, then you need to disrupt your edge. You might do this by employing a certain number of freelancers or consultants to help keep things fresh, or by encouraging your full-time staff to get outside the building (or both). Identify your critical experts (50 to 70% of staff in the Centennials we studied) and work out how to keep them at the top of their game, maybe by asking them to work with people redefining practice outside your organization, or on their own projects. For example, Duke CE and McKinsey use consultants part-time, Cirque du Soleil gives creative teams a sabbatical after they produce a new show, and 3M, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Linkedin and Microsoft ask staff to spend 15 to 20% of their time working on their own projects.

Test 8. Who is the best in the world? Find great experts, rather than just managing the ones you’ve got. For example, Cirque du Soleil recruits Olympic athletes (physically and mentally strong) and teach them to perform, and ING Direct recruits artists, jazz musicians, and dancers (creative and open) and teach them to bank.

Disruptive nervousness

Test 9. How can you get better every day? Rather than asking “How big can we get?” ask “How good can we be?” Find ways to increase your impact and revenue, without growing your headcount. For example, the National Theatre and RSC screen live performances to cinemas around the world, so they don’t have to tour as much and Apple helps people develop apps for their products, so they don’t have to. And manage growth by adding together small organizations, rather than creating a large one. For example, Virgin keeps to 150 people in an office, and ING Direct fewer than 200 people in a call centre.

Test 10. How do you unpick success and failure? Try to make lots of tiny tweaks, rather than a big shift — as they’re less risky, and more difficult to imitate. For example, 3M, GE, and Toyota constantly pull apart their products, systems, and processes to find ways to improve them. Amazon and LinkedIn get people to read a 6-page report before a meeting, and don’t use fixed agenda, to better explore problems, and find solutions.

Disruptive accidents

Test 11. How can you create “bumps”? It’s more important to find new ideas and practices, than squeeze every last drop out of the ones you’ve already got. Put different people together, rather than similar ones and design your offices so they have to move around, and bump into each other. For example, BMW designed its head office so people have to walk around and Dyson continually rotate designers and engineers between different teams.

Test 12. How can you get people to live like a family? Work out how to get employees to hang out together, for 1+ hours every day, sharing problems, ideas and experiences. For example, Google give employees three free meals a day and have 170 cafes in their New York office. Facebook have an ‘epic cafe’, 1,500 apartments, and a grocery store in their new head office.

As you answer these questions, remember you’re trying to create a balance across all twelve areas, not a particular strength in one. You don’t want to become so traditional that you stop moving forwards, or so radical that you go off track. And when things do go wrong, as they inevitably will, go back to your core first to make sure you’re stable and on track, before disrupting your edge to start moving forwards again.

Sheryl Sandberg and Jack Dorsey — representing Facebook and Twitter, respectively — recently testified before Congress, this time evading questions about bias on their platforms. We frequently turn to tech executives to answer for such issues because they have the agency to make changes. But they are not alone.

Overlooked are the tech employees — the 10,000 or so at Facebook — that build the platforms executives defend. Tech’s reach makes employees’ agency clear. Consider the two billion active Facebook users — 200,000 per employee. The average U.S. Congressperson serves only three times as many people.

Not only does the reach of employees suggest influence, so do their actions. In the fall of 2017, Mark Zuckerberg said it was “a pretty crazy idea” that fake news on Facebook had an effect on the 2016 general election. Despite widespread public condemnation, Zuckerberg held firm to his position. Through internal complaints, employees led Zuckerberg to change course: the news feed algorithm switched from favoring inflammatory stories — clickbait — to focusing on friends.

The editor of Wired, in his analysis, noted “the place you can put the most pressure on executives comes from the engineers.” So too was it through internal lobbying, prospective employees refusing job offers and protest resignations that Google dropped a contract to help Department of Defense drones better recognize targets.

As a recent instructor on ethics to computer scientists at the University of Washington and a former employee of Microsoft, I know that sometimes what tech employees need is a push. They need a push to realize they are uniquely positioned to act against malfeasance. They need a push that says your bosses hide behind platitudes and your government is checked out, but you can do something.

Still, my students and peers see themselves as limited to only the confines of the tasks given them — as lacking discretion. In class, when faced with a problem without a tangible, let alone code-able, solution, my students moved on. In effect, they said values in the light of profit have no more hope than does a sandcastle in a tide-flat.

They too quickly forget the privilege of tech. According to Glassdoor, the average Facebook engineer earns $130,000 a year. Techies are gentrifying neighborhoods in San Francisco, Seattle and Austin. Their products shape our increasingly digital lives. Concerns about employee replaceability are overblown. Given the dearth of tech talent, tech employees have more agency than they might project.

As articles call for regulation from Congress and responsibility from Zuckerberg, they suggest only those well-known have ethical agency. Rarely do we think of employees as we think of executives — as potential agents of change. Just as we recognize the influence of constituents over those whom they elect, we should recognize the sway of tech employees over the devices that begin our days and mediate our lives.

An employee does not singularly have the agency to shape the course of Facebook as does Zuckerberg, but she is not limited to the tasks she is assigned. Her influence extends beyond the code that she writes to the internal memos assailing Zuckerberg for his position on fake news. Her influence extends to the product decisions she makes, like whether to include screen-reader support when designing a website, even if it takes more time.

My students cried foul at suggestions that they make software systems accountable. “There’s no algorithm to solve it!” Students pushed back against the notion that they could consider values tangential to the design of a system. “Not if it reduces ad revenue!” They lay such considerations at the feet of designers, researchers, management and somebody else. “It’s not my job” not only evades responsibility, but also ignores that the most prominent computing society has a code of ethics.

It is through both discretionary opportunities and collaborative action that tech employees — or any worker — can advocate for a system that prioritizes more than profits. This requires appeals to colleagues, conversations with squirms and averted eyes and a rebuke of the abstractions that wash away ethical quandaries.

As we call to make algorithms accountable and executives — Dorsey, Sandberg, Zuckerberg — responsible, we should remember the people who allow those two to exist. I do not suggest a cessation of efforts to regulate free expression, or any other value. Absent regulation, absent executive responsibility, consider the people behind the product. Phone your friend at Facebook or Google. They need the push.

You’ve dreamed up the perfect event, planned every last detail. Now all you need is one last push to bring in those last minute RSVPs and create buzz for your attendees.

Even if your event is offline, 85% of event marketers choose email marketing campaigns to promote their event which makes sense when you consider that 71% of all ticket buying happens online. A reminder email doesn’t have to be a stale task to check off your list before the big day and definitely shouldn’t be an afterthought.

Instead, a well-crafted reminder can generate enough excitement around your event to garner more revenue, build event and brand recognition, and ensure your attendees have the best experience possible at your event. But for your email to accomplish all that, your audience needs to actually open it.

Here are 10 subject lines that will get your emails opened, read, and engaged to make sure your event gets maximum exposure:

1. The share reminder email subject:

Bring a friend to [Event Name]

This subject line includes the name of your event to signal to readers that it isn’t spam and encourage recognition, it also includes a clear action that’s easy for busy people to understand in an instant. And your purpose here is clear: to get your attendees to share with those who are not-yet-attendees.

Try using your reminder email as an opportunity to fill open slots and boost engagement with your event by encouraging subscribers to share with friends, both by email and on social. Half of the total number of ticket sales take place in the final week before an event. That means that any reminder email sent within that final week should encourage sharing and last minute registration in order to drive revenue.

One of your best marketing assets is the group of people who have already registered so design your email to encourage them to share the event with a friend. Odds are, if this person is interested, they know others who would be too. Include a call to action (CTA) that encourage those already attending to share the event with a friend in order to see a boost in last minute attendance and revenue.

2. The scarce reminder email subject:

[Event Name] is selling out!

People hate feeling left out, so creating an email subject line that emphasizes urgency will encourage your subscribers to take notice and take action. Reaching out to the people who started the event registration process but never finished it is another great way to tap into those last minute sales. According to SaleCycle, nearly half of all abandoned cart emails are opened and over a third of clicks lead to sales back on your site.

Check out how Adidas recovers customers with this abandoned cart reminder:

Source: Really Good Emails

Emphasizing the scarcity of tickets tells your audience your event is popular, it’s a great value, and if they don’t act fast, they’ll miss out; it’s why subject lines that emphasize scarcity tend to perform so well. Just be sure to not use this subject line too often and lose credibility with your audience.

3. The informational reminder email subject:

Don’t get lost on [date]

Since most inboxes stay full, it’s important that your subject line stands out from the others. By writing a subject line like this one, you not only remind your audience that the event is coming up, you also clue them into what other information is contained in the body of your email. Using a subject line that promises to give vital information piques your audience’s attention and leads to a greater number of opens.

This is also a great time to include those ever-so-important details, like the timezone of your event, especially if your hosting an online event or has attendees from a wide variety of locations. It’s also a great opportunity to include information on parking, driving directions, lunch options, etc.

This will cut down on frustration the day of your event and keep your attendees happy and impressed that you’ve thought of everything. Not only are your guests more likely to open the email and engage, they’ll also avoid stress and have a better experience at your event.

4. The offer reminder email subject:

15% off for you and a friend

Another way to increase last-minute attendees is to combine the first and second points into one mega-attractive subject line. People love a good deal so why not lead with your offer? Offering an incentive will encourage your audience to buy their own ticket and bring a friend, a great way to fill two seats and possibly reach customers you haven’t already.

In fact, a study by SocialTwist found that the best way to reach new customers is through email referrals with 50.8% reached via email as opposed to 26.8% through Twitter and 22% through Facebook.

In order to utilize sharing to drive revenue, be sure to include a CTA that encourages sharing and keep the promo code bold and obvious. You want your audience to see your offer at a glance. Just don’t forget to include the name of your event or some other indicator that this email isn’t spam.

Legacybox does a great job of keeping the promo code front and center:

5. The urgent reminder email subject:

Starting tomorrow! [Event Name]

A last minute reminder is a good idea when your audience consists of busy people — and that’s everyone. When your audience has a lot going on, it’s easy for an event to slip their minds, especially if they signed up months in advance. A last minute reminder is a great way to find those subscribers who meant to register but never got around to it.

De Beers uses this tactic by emphasizing the time left for people to take advantage of a holiday sale:

However, you don’t want to drop reminder emails every day for a month leading up to your event. Though it might keep your event at the top of their mind, it might also have a negative effect. Sending emails too often can result in your emails getting deleted without opening or worse: reported as spam. Did you know that 54% of consumers report email frequency as the reason they unsubscribe?

Instead, allow customers to indicate how often they want to receive emails by giving them the option of a preference center. A study performed by MarketingSherpa revealed that though 86% of subscribers wanted to receive promotional emails weekly, 15% wanted to receive emails daily. That’s a big difference. So allow your customers to set their own preferences and then use segmentation to send the right information at the right cadence. That way, all of your subscribers are happy.

6. The question reminder email subject:

Are you ready for [event name]?

If you want to get to know someone, you ask them questions. This is a good practice for email subject lines, too. People respond well to questions and it immediately opens a dialogue between you and your subscribers. Asking a question allows you to then continue that dialogue within the content of your email, encouraging opens and engagement.

Additionally, when you ask a question like “are you ready,” you can include event add-ons such as VIP passes, exclusive offers, upgrades, etc. In your reminder email, showcase the way these add-ons create value and improve attendees’ experiences and add a CTA that makes it easy for subscribers to purchase.

Again, think of your reminder email as a way not only to increase attendance to your event but also to drive additional revenue. What might have seemed too expensive when your attendee bought their initial ticket might be more attractive closer to the event.

7. The list reminder email subject:

5 things to bring to [event name]

There’s a reason lists are everywhere on the internet right now. They work! Including a list in your email subject line accomplishes two main things: a number in a sea of words will attract the notice of your readers and the list will also pique your reader’s curiosity, leading to a greater number of opens and click-throughs. In our own A/B test, the subject line that contained a number got 57% higher open rates than the subject line that contained only words.

A list tells your reader exactly what to expect in the body of your email and provides a handy structure to follow, making your emails even easier for your readers to read and act on.

This tactic also allows you the opportunity to show your subscribers that you want them to get the most out of their experience at your event. By reminding them to bring business cards, for example, you are preparing everyone to make the event the best it can be. Your event will move more smoothly and you’ll ensure your attendees have a great time.

In fact, we at Campaign Monitor use this tactic ourselves:

Source: Really Good Emails

8. The brief reminder email subject:

[Event name] [event date]

Don’t underestimate the power of brevity in your email subject lines. This succinct subject line lets your audience know you aren’t trying to waste their time, but you understand their need for the specifics. It’s a no-nonsense approach for an audience that is highly organized, super busy, and ready to get down to business. According to a study by ReturnPath, keeping your email subject lines to around five words will lead to better open rates.

Be sure that the content of your reminder email follows the same rule by only including need-to-know information, and your reader will reward your efforts by improving your open rates; they’ll realize that every email you send contains something they need. Your subscribers will assume your event will be the same: full of content that matters and nothing extra that doesn’t.

See how this reminder from Deus Ex Machina reports only the most pertinent details?

9. The command email reminder subject:

Reminder, join us at [event name]

People respond well to commands so including one in your subject line removes any confusion for your reader while including the word reminder in your subject line informs your reader of the purpose and the importance of the email, encouraging them to open up and give it a read.

Considering that there was a 50% increase in the use of smartphones for ticket purchases from 2012 to 2014, it’s more important than ever to keep your subject lines optimized for mobile users. That means keeping your subject lines direct.

A subject line like this one is clear and straightforward and who couldn’t use a little more of that in their daily lives? Action verbs create clarity from the very beginning and get your subscribers looking for that CTA. If some of your subscribers are hesitating to sign up, a clear and enticing subject line like this one will help drive revenue and increase those RSVPs up to the very end.

10. The personalized email subject reminder:

Grace’s reminder for [event name]

Personalization is another tactic you might notice in your own inbox. Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened, so consider adding a subscriber’s name to a subject line in order to catch their attention.

But don’t stop personalization after you’ve added a name to a subject line! Email personalization can go much further and so can your results. Personalize the content of your reminder email based on a subscriber’s preferences and behavior in order to see max opens and click-throughs.

For instance, including a subscriber’s name in the subject line and then promoting a list of event add-ons based on a subscriber’s location will tell your subscriber you know them and send relevant content. Collecting data and segmenting your email preferences can lead to an increase of 20% in sales, according to a report by Monetate. So personalizing those subject lines is a great start, but be sure to follow-through with personalized content to really wow your subscribers.

Source: Really Good Emails

Wrap up

The point of every email marketing campaign is to increase opens and drive revenue and your event is no different. Whether you’ve got seats to fill or VIP experiences to push, your reminder email is a great way to bring in a final rush of revenue. In order to make the most of your reminder emails, be sure to:

• Personalize wherever possible
• Include a CTA that makes it easy for attendees to share with their friends either through email or social media to grow awareness of your event and bring in those final registrations
• Pique curiosity and promise relevant, crucial information to encourage opens and click-throughs

Enticing email subject lines are crucial to getting your subscribers to open your emails, so don’t forget to spend time crafting the perfect one that works for your audience and your event. With these subject lines in your back pocket, you’re ready to make the most of your reminder emails and see a swell in RSVPs, event awareness, and revenue.

FirmBee / Pixabay

Traditional sales methods aren’t working anymore. We all know what’s wrong:

• Customers have dozens of places to find answers to their questions about our products and services, including company and competitive websites; shopping sites; social platforms; and especially information provided by other customers (in reviews, “questions answered,” and discussion groups). I used to say that by the time they needed to talk to a salesperson, about 60 to 80 percent of their questions were answered. Now I’d say it’s more like 95 percent.

• Customers have become expert at avoiding our advances. Phone calls are not answered; voicemail messages are not returned; emails are trashed and/or ignored; and even outreach via LinkedIn has gotten sufficiently crowded, rendering the channel less effective.

• Salespeople are not great researchers or writers, and yet we continue to ask them to find new prospects and reach out to them.

• Salespeople are not natural “nurturers.” They are reactive, always more inclined to go after the hot and immediate than the slow-simmering opportunities. And, if not supported by an incredibly ironclad system, they don’t follow up as they should. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen salespeople drop the ball, even when the customer is actually hoping the salesperson will call.

You would think, in the face of all this evidence, that sales managers would be looking for another way. But they are not. They are just doing the same things they’ve always done, while their bosses are wondering what the heck is wrong and are getting really worried.

What is working now: Successful selling strategies

The first place to start is to realize which people should be in the right jobs. We have a new client, Rainee Busby, who helps her clients become more efficient and better-managed. One of the first things she works on is the right people in the right jobs. When I was a rent-a-VP, hired to turn around marketing and sales departments, the first thing I did was to interview customers, so I could understand what we should be doing in marketing and sales. The second thing I did was to meet with each person in the department and ask them, “What do you love doing, and what do you hate doing?” I would then fashion their jobs to accommodate their preferences. Morale and departmental effectiveness always went up as a result.

Recently, I was reading one of the Entrepreneurial Operating System books (Rainee is an EOS practitioner, and the book I was reading is “How to Be a Great Boss,” which is worth reading), and I came across a great story about a big box store that was languishing until they put in a new manager. When he took over, he asked people if they wanted to be a “box” person or a “people” person. Within a few months, that store become one of the top performers, largely due to that change.

The second thing I need to mention is Account-Based Marketing (ABM). Yes, we do it for our clients, and that’s what we call it, but frankly, as it is normally practiced, it is just “sales best practices” by another name. We are making adjustments, though, so it will work better. For starters, we recognize that salespeople are not great researchers and writers. And we move many of the “nurturing” activities out of sales and into marketing.

These are the roles that selling now consists of:

1. Research.The needed information is all out there now; you can look up any company or individual employee and learn all kinds of things, characterizing and ranking that company and individual as a hot, warm, or cold (“don’t bother”) prospect, and understanding a lot about them before you get them on the phone. Yes, you have to pay for the tools. Yes, you should not leave this to salespeople; they are, by nature, not the researching types. Someone else, who is very good at this, should be doing the research and providing all the information the salesperson needs to reach out.
2. Writing. And when it is time to reach out, a professional copywriter should be writing the emails, tweets, LinkedIn, and voicemail messages. Each message can be personalized, including something about the person that proves that research was done. Customers know you can look them up; they are almost insulted if you call them without doing that first. Why should they pay any attention to you, if you haven’t at least first paid attention to them?
3. Appointment-setting.You’ve probably gathered by now that we are mostly talking about heavy- or intense-scrutiny purchases (a topic I cover thoroughly in my book) where, at some point, the customer will want to talk to a salesperson during a phone call, to discuss their particular situation and get specific questions answered. Setting appointments is still a very inefficient process, as it is still mostly done by exchanging emails until the mutually convenient appointment slot is agreed upon. Not the best use of your salesperson’s time.
4. Answering questions. This is another area that is massively affecting the whole selling scene. Most managers are just putting their heads in the sand about it, hoping the whole mess will go away. It won’t. The “mess” is that we still think we need “closers.” The truth is, the traditional pushy closer loses more sales than he secures. When you have on your BUYER hat, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The pushy salesperson’s agenda causes all of these problems:
   1. They don’t listen in a way where they really hear what you are saying. They only listen enough to find an opportunity to begin their rant.
   2. They don’t realize that YOU, the buyer, have an agenda, and that YOU already want to buy, or you wouldn’t be taking the time to talk to them.
   3. They don’t acknowledge and respect how much research you’ve already done and listen carefully while you tell them where you are in your buying process. In fact, they often ignore this reality completely and try to move you to the beginning of your buying process, when in fact, you are almost at the end.
   4. They don’t answer the questions you ask (or are trying to ask). Instead of answering your legitimate and pressing questions, they answer the questions they know how to answer.
   5. They push to close before you’re ready. In fact, during a single call, they may push to close several times. This is irritating and insulting; no one wants to be a “mark.” Traditional selling and marketing have always treated customers as marks; the language alone is anti-humane. “We’re going to go after our target market with a rifle approach,” says the marketer. “I’m going to overcome their objections,” says the salesperson. If someone came into your house and started saying that they were going to do this to you, you’d want them to leave.
5. Helping the customer make the right decision. The most effective “salespeople” aren’t salespeople at all. They are naturally helpful individuals who get up in the morning hoping to help as many people as they can during the day. They often end up working in customer service, but these types of people are certainly not limited to customer service. Personally, I think as more managers get a clue, we are going to find a new type of person to help customers make buying decisions. I have no idea what the title will be, but I think of the person as a Buying Decision Guide. In the absence of companies hiring these people, there are now sites carrying out this role. In the software industry, the sites are Capterra, G2Crowd, GetApp, and Trust Radius, which use customer reviews to help others buy software.

Guiding instead of selling

Imagine, if you will, the pleasure of working with someone who has a deep understanding of his own product or service, as well as those offered by the competition, and has plenty of comparative and customer-generated information to back up his knowledge. Instead of trying to sell you on his solution, he spends the entire call listening carefully to what you are trying to accomplish. He helps you think through your tradeoffs. “Yes, we can do that, but only up to 25,000 items. If you have more than 25,000 items, you probably need a different e-commerce application.”

As buyers, we love this idea. As sellers, it scares us to death. But I can tell you, from personal experience (and performance—my “closing rate” hovers around 85 – 95 percent), that this objective, helpful approach leads to more business than you can imagine.

Why? Because buying something is driven first by desire and skepticism, and then by a willingness to compromise here and there as you find something that comes close, all while being guided by someone who is super helpful. We are all eager to give our business to someone who “deserves” it, even if their solution isn’t exactly what we had in mind at the start. Or even if their solution is more expensive.

Going back to the various roles involved in selling, what does this really mean to your business? It means that you should find a way to fill those roles, so you are selling in a way that makes sense for today’s buyers. Fortunately, sometimes you can find one person to fill a couple of roles, such as the researcher also being able to write great outreach materials and make appointments. And one helpful person might be able to answer questions and help the customer make the right buying decision.

Buyers are far, far ahead of sellers these days, armed with resources that were simply not available even a few years ago. Sellers are still pretending that buyers are still living in the dark ages. If you want to get in sync with buyers—and to out-”sell” your competition—you will embrace the new reality and run with it.