Rnordman

Think about the initial objective of your prospecting efforts. If you think the goal is to close a sale, deliver a presentation, submit a proposal or schedule an appointment, think again.

Ask anyone who has to prospect or cold call in order to generate new business what their initial objective is when making that first personal contact and you will hear many of the following responses or some type of measurable action step they hope to take as a result of making that call:

• Schedule an appointment
• Close a sale
• Pitch the benefits of my product or service
• Provide a demonstration
• Get the Request For Proposal
• Submit a quote
• Have the prospect take some action (complete a survey, sign up for a free trail, make a donation, visit your website, etc.)
• Find the decision maker(s)
• Deliver a presentation

If your initial objective is focused on achieving any of these next steps, think again. Actually, concentrating your efforts on accomplishing any of these outcomes is actually the very thing that contributes to call reluctance, wastes your time and sabotages your selling efforts.

To even the playing field and build off some common ground, here’s my definition of prospecting we can reference.

“Prospecting is defined as any activity or conversation you engage in to position yourself in front of a potential customer with the intention to inquire, assess, discover and educate so that you can determine whether there’s a fit and a relationship that’s worth pursuing which can then lead to an opportunity to deliver value and earn their business.”

Now, think about your cold calling and prospecting efforts. Does your approach mirror this definition and accomplish this primary objective?

Consider this. Rather than focusing all of your energy on making the sale or working towards any of the outcomes I described, first determine if there’s a good fit between you, your prospect, and what you are selling.

Find the Fit – Or Miss Your Sales Targets

Instead of feeling that the initial goal of prospecting is to pitch features and benefits, close a sale, provide a demonstration, submit a proposal or schedule an appointment, the initial objective of that first conversation is to determine if there’s a fit worth pursuing.

Take a moment and think about how this change in your attitude and mindset would change your prospecting strategy or cold calling approach, as well as your experience.

While your traditional approach may be to produce a measurable result, now your primary objective is to discover whether you and your prospect are a good match and if this relationship is worth moving to the next stage of your selling process.

If you feel that you constantly have to push your sales process forward, you’re not taking into consideration that the prospect may simply not be ready, let alone may not be a good fit for what you are selling. Pushing the sales process forward before a prospect is ready only creates pressure for the both of you, fostering an unhealthy relationship from the start.

The Better Sale

While many salespeople and solution providers feel their solution can benefit anyone, it doesn’t mean that everyone is a fit. After all, think about the people you speak with on a daily or weekly basis. Can you honestly say that you want every potential prospect to become one of your customers? The fact is, some people and companies aren’t a good fit.

And a good fit isn’t limited to whether or not they can afford your solution and can benefit from it. To authentically determine a good fit, you need to look beyond this myopic definition and consider these additional factors that would create or destroy the win-win relationship.

1. Will they be a good customer? Do they possess the attributes of your ideal customer?
2. Are you aligned with them ethically?
3. Do you share the same values and priorities?
4. Are they easy to work with?
5. Are their expectations of your product or service realistic?
6. Will they become advocates or adversaries?
7. Is how they like to buy a fit with how you sell?
8. How do they typically treat and engage with outside venders/service providers?
9. Are they willing to allocate the proper funding/budget, time and resources to realize the full benefit of your offering?

While a great salesperson can close business, you don’t want to waste time calling on, following up with and closing prospects who simply aren’t a good fit. If you’re calling on and following up with the wrong prospects, that means you’re not leveraging your limited time calling on the right ones. The exponential cost; missed sales targets and lost opportunities.

So, instead of asking yourself, “How can I sell this person?” change this question to, “Do I even want this person/company as a customer?”

Notice that the second question shifts the balance of your power back to you. Now, you’re the one making the choice about pursuing the relationship rather than surrendering all of the decision making power to the prospect regarding whether or not they will buy from you, let alone listen to you!

Seek to Understand – Then Disqualify!

Think about how this shift in your mindset will also change your approach. Instead of feeling as if you have to convince or push the prospect into the sale (appointment, demo, proposal, free trial, etc.) by regurgitating your pitch all over them, now you’re going to want to learn as much as you can about this particular prospect.

How do you determine if there’s a fit worth pursuing? Typically, you would conduct a process of inquiry or an investigation. Woven into the fabric of any investigation are questions. Instead of the prospect interviewing or qualifying you, this brings new meaning to the phrase, “Qualify your prospects!” Now, you’re the one who’s truly assessing the fit. The fact is, the qualifying process goes both ways.

Of course; the ultimate objective of your prospecting efforts is to sell more, sell deeper and boost your performance or income. However, to achieve this goal, it’s just not where you are going to focus your initial efforts, energy and thoughts.

Realize that when you’re prospecting or cold calling, one of your objectives is to open up your prospect’s thinking to the possibility of working with you in order to provide them with a better solution or eliminate a recurring problem.

As such, if you are looking to change the perception or mindset of your prospects, whose mindset do you think needs to be changed first? Yours, of course!

By identifying and embracing this common misconception around prospecting and shifting your focus to assess the fit, you will develop a strong foundation for prospecting success. Now, you can think like a top producer and subsequently, respond to each prospect in a healthier, more productive and more enjoyable way in order to attract better customers – and more sales.

Photo Credit: Redshinestudio (via Shutterstock)

When you’re running a small business, time is a precious commodity. And marketing can take up plenty of your time. Have you ever considered outsourcing some of these resource-demanding tasks?

Some business owners still view “outsourcing” as a dirty word—but today’s outsourcing is worlds away from the cheap, badly produced overseas industry it used to be. Outsourcing your online marketing tasks is a smart move for many businesses.

Here are ten good reasons to consider adding outsourcing to your Internet marketing tool box:

1. Save Time for Everyone

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Whether you have a staff of one or one hundred, handing over your marketing tasks to a third party frees up time across the board. All those tedious hours spent on writing marketing material, developing social media platforms, creating and managing email lists—with outsourcing, you can get those hours back.

This leaves you and your team free to work on what you do best: your core business.

 

2. Get Professional-Level Service

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India is no longer the only place you can go for outsourcing. For today’s professionals, independent consulting and freelance work holds a lot of appeal. It’s easier than ever to find an experienced and affordable online marketing professional who will work with your company to learn your goals and implement effective strategies on your behalf.

 

3. Gain an Outside Perspective

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You’re close to your business. You understand exactly what you do, how you do it, and why. But do you know exactly what attracts your customers? Your concepts of which aspects of your business should be enhanced in your marketing may be slightly biased.

When you work with an outsourced marketing professional, you’re able to benefit from a fresh perspective. Online marketing consultants understand how to attract and convert buyers—and they can offer you valuable insights into new marketing angles and unique selling propositions (USPs) that you may have missed.

 

4. Leverage Built-In Expertise

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If you have someone in your business that does marketing, chances are they have additional responsibilities. Entrepreneurs handle all the hats themselves, and smaller companies may have online marketing tasks split between a handful of team members who are also customer service reps, bookkeepers, or human resources.

When you work with an outsourced provider, you’re getting an expert in marketing. That is their primary occupation—and they have not only the experience, but the resources to get more effective results for you through targeting and analytic research. You’ll also be able to benefit through benchmark comparisons to competitors, and more effectively measure the success of your company’s marketing—without having to invest time and resources in an extensive market study.

 

5. Gain Access to Specialized Technologies

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Your company may use a variety of platforms and technologies for different functions, but how many marketing-specific programs do you use? Especially for smaller businesses, the answer is usually either not many or none.

When you outsource your internet marketing, you’ll be able to work with professionals who use the latest, cutting-edge technologies for marketing, analytics, automation, and more—without having to invest hundreds or thousands in additional software or tools.

 

6. Increase Your Flexibility and Agility

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When a marketing opportunity arises, is your company equipped to take advantage of it? Outsourcing gives you the flexibility to launch online marketing projects on an as-needed basis—letting you scale up or down according to your current needs, without having to make staff changes or interrupt your core business flow.

 

7. Reduce Stress and Increase Productivity

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Entrepreneurs and small businesses often don’t have the resources to dedicate to full-time, in-house marketing. This leads to the burden of marketing falling on you as the business owner, or employees who are working on other tasks alongside marketing initiatives. Things can get stressful—particularly when some of your online marketing campaigns are ineffective.

Working with a third-party provider for your Internet marketing can dramatically reduce the strain of marketing for you and your staff. When you’re free to concentrate on your core business, everyone will be happier and more productive.

 

8. Do More With Less

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If you’re handling your online marketing in-house, you may not be using many channels. Maybe you’re concentrating on your email lists, or a single social media platform like Facebook, or a PPC campaign. And you might not have time to work on basic online marketing maintenance, such as updating your website or keeping your small business blog going.

Outsourcing lets you work on multiple channels without overwhelming your team. You can hire a graphic designer to update your website, a copywriter to handle your blog or email newsletter, and a social media expert to automate your platforms. With a variety of outsourcing services available, you can turn over single campaigns, specialized services, or even entire marketing functions to a capable third party.

 

9. Save Money

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It’s true that you have to pay for outsourcing. However, you often save more than you invest by reducing your expenses for staff (including space, salary, recruitment, and training), specialized software, and other overhead costs.

Additionally, you’ll benefit from the fixed costs of outsourcing. With most third-party providers, you’ll have a predictable, recurring expense that simplifies your budgeting and helps to guard against unexpected outlays of money and resources.

 

10. Facilitate Rapid Growth

When your company is expanding rapidly, your growth can be slowed or even halted if you have to launch a lengthy recruitment campaign to bring in enough staff to handle the increased business. You may also end up rushing the hiring process and hiring the wrong people—which can set you back even further.

Outsourcing allows you to quickly add qualified experts to your marketing team, and handle the overflow until your staffing levels catch up. You can also use outsourcing to provide additional hands for new product launches, service upgrades, or other one-time events that require a temporary boost in marketing reach.

 

Conclusion

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For many small businesses today, outsourcing your Internet marketing tasks simply makes sense. Have you ever worked with outsourcing? Would you consider it? Let us know in the comments!

By Megan Totka

Image courtesy of Tax Credits

Focus on what an investment will produce, not its price; stick to what you know; and don’t try to predict what the economy or stock market will do.

Value pricing, unlike cost plus pricing, considers that customers care how much value they receive at a particular price not how much it costs companies to make it. 

Every year companies spend billions developing and launching new products from ‘revolutionary’ to ‘incremental innovation’ to catch up with competition.

When should pricing teams get involved with new product development? 

How can value pricing help minimize conflict between finance, marketing, and sales?

If pricing is an afterthought, there’s a higher risk of failure on new product launches. The failure can manifest in either lower than forecasted unit sales, lower than expected margin percentage, or lower than expected revenue.

Use a robust price setting process!

Companies with high pricing power share certain traits: a culture dedicated to pricing, sophisticated tools to quantify customer willingness to pay and customer price elasticities, and robust pricing processes.



Krishna Vankayala, CPP Director Global Pricing Schneider Electric, Singapore.

During the PPS 2nd Annual Asia-Pacific Pricing Workshops and Conference in Singapore keynote session New Product Pricing: Intersection of Sales, Marketing & Finance: Value Pricing, Krishna Vankayala, CPP will describe how Schneider Electric’s product refresh in the Japan market led their team to implement Value Based Pricing in its new product development process.

We hope to see you there!

Is it me, or are all websites starting to look the same these days? Certainly in the high-tech sector, especially SaaS companies, most websites seem to be playing copy cat, with huge banners filling your desktop screen and simple messaging with one or two calls to action. I thought it would be interesting to look at the hottest SaaS players, those that are growing rapidly and attracting IPO interest to see what they’re doing with web design. IDG Connect listed 20 Red Hot, Pre-IPO Companies in 2014 B2B Tech. Here, we take a look at the first 10, and will continue with the next 10 in a second post.

Birst

Birst is a cloud-based enterprise business intelligence (BI) toolkit for analyzing sales, marketing, financial, HR, supply chain and recurring revenue data. The website is attractive, simple and well organized. I love the M & M’s analogy in the first banner image. It conveys the “order out of chaos” message well. I like the H1 “Think Fast,” too. It’s clear what the main benefit of the software is, and the H2, “Enterprise-Caliber BI Born in the Cloud,” reinforces the “what is it?” message and helps you to self-qualify: This software is not for small businesses. My suggestion would be to add more differentiation—how is Birst different from other big enterprise BI players like SAS, IBM, MicroStrategy and Oracle?

Box

Box.com is a well-known player in the online file sharing industry. It’s a clean, simple design with visitor-friendly navigation, a clear value proposition, “Simple, Secure Sharing From Anwhere,” and a single call-to-action, “Sign Up.” What else do I need to know? I’m not sure how valuable the rest of the homepage content is, but what I want to know is why Box and not Dropbox? It would be helpful to see some comparison reviews and pricing so I can quickly decide whether to join or move on.

Bromium

Enterprise security software company Bromium also has a big-banner design with a bold statement on the first banner, “The World’s Most Secure Endpoint Solution.” Some proof points would be helpful up front. The banner does nicely illustrate some of the buyer pain points, like “Why be compromised at all?” My suggestion would be to reduce the number of banners to one, unless your metrics tell you people actually engage with the rest of the banners. We find that they usually don’t.

Cloudview

Cloudview enables you to connect closed circuit TV (CCTV) to the Internet for all kinds of purposes. It’s a nice, simple site, and the homepage graphic nicely illustrates what the system does. I have to admit, I was a bit put off by some of the design features though. The problem is, the entire home page scrolls within a static window bordered by the header and the footer. At any one time, you can only see part of the graphic and messaging, at least on my MacBook Air. At the bottom of the screen, there is a big “Our website uses cookies” warning punctuated with a large exclamation point. I think this may be scaring visitors away, and it’s not really necessary. Nearly all websites use cookies. Just put your warning on your Privacy page like everyone else.

HortonWorks

At first glance, I was pretty confused by this homepage. HortonWorks does Hadoop, and I didn’t know what that is, so I had to look it up. I imagine buyers know what Hadoop is, so it’s probably not a deal killer. It would be nice to hear why Hadoop is so important and what’s in it for me, the buyer. More focus on the Customer, and less on the Brand and Product is always a good place to start a website.

Kaazing

Kaazing makes HTML5 Websocket gateways that speed up two-way Internet communication. Again, I didn’t know what that meant, so I had to look it up. You know your buyer personas better than I do, but assuming everybody understands your language may be a mistake. I wouldn’t “dumb it down,” but instead explain how your technology will make people’s lives better. Anyway, the website looks nice and the banner graphics do a nice job of illustrating the main value proposition—SPEED!

Looker

Looker is another cloud-based business intelligence platform. Are you paying attention Birst? It’s a nice looking design again, but I do have some trouble with the first banner messaging. It’s a bit fluffy for me, and I’m really not sure why I should bother to watch the video. Maybe if you tell me more about what I will learn, that might help. Sorry for piling on, but one more mistake. When sites have “Why” as the first navigation menu item, I wonder why myself. Why am I bothering to visit this website? You should tell me why and what’s in it for me.

Mimecast

Mimecast does email security (spam etc.), email archiving, email continuity (during outages) and file archiving. I’m having trouble understanding how this is any different from what my email provider does. Are you providing email services? Server software? Both, on the cloud? It’s not clear from the first banner. I like the Case Studies section, but I’m still back at the “what we do” question. Again, as Steve Krug put it so eloquently years ago, Don’t Make Me Think.

Mulesoft

According to MuleSoft, the company “provides the most widely used integration platform for connecting SaaS and enterprise applications in the cloud and on-premise.” Wow, that’s awesome! The only problem is, I had to drill down to the About Us page to find that explanation of what they do. My advice? Tell me what you do and why it’s good for me. Help me solve my problems. The Gartner announcement is powerful, but not first. Save it for later, once you get buyers to the Consideration stage of the sales funnel.

And finally…

NewVoiceMedia

Yay! Only 4 banners on the homepage! We have a winner, sorta. OK, props to NewVoiceMedia for spelling out what the service does and the value proposition in the first banner. Good job. Add to that, it also has content for a conversion opportunity. The only problem is the 10 Tips to Deliver Amazing Customer Experience video is hidden on slide No. 3 of the rotating banner. I would create a CTA for it instead and reduce the banners down to one. Don’t make the CTA say “Watch Replay.” That sounds like recycled stuff from a year ago (I hope it’s not). Say “Watch Video Now.”

SaaS Website Design Takeaways

In a nutshell, here’s what we advise all B2B websites to do these days:

• Minimize the number of rotating banners
• Focus on messaging—what’s in it for the potential customer?
• Make sure the “what we do” and value proposition are prominent and near the top of the page
• Include top-funnel content and CTAs for lead conversion
• Speak to your buyer personas and explain your technical content and its value
• Include key differentiators from your competitors
• Don’t mimic other websites—do something unique!

We’ll see how the next 10 SaaS companies do soon…

Facebook Ads helped the social network generate record fourth quarter revenue, and according to an advertiser, his $640,000 was a complete waste.

Raaj Kapur Brar runs various online fashion magazines, and like many other publishers, wanted to get new fans and drive traffic to his sites.

However, according to Brar, Facebook delivered thousands of fake likes and clicks. This isn’t the first time that such claims have been made.

According to the social network’s recent report, 0.4 to 1.2 percent of worldwide monthly active users are spammers. This includes fake accounts, and means nearly 15 million accounts on the high end.

Brar saw promise with Facebook Ads back in 2012 when he ran a small beta test after being trained at Facebook’s Toronto office.

Soon, he’d launch a major campaign, which he says was closely monitored with Bitly and Google Analytics.

Here’s where things allegedly went wrong:

“Facebook’s analytics said the campaign sent him five times the number of clicks he was seeing arrive on his sites. There was a reasonable discrepancy between the Bitly and Google numbers, Brar says, but not the five-fold margin between Google’s and Facebook’s click counts.”

According to Brar, Facebook said it delivered 606,000 clicks to his websites, but he only actually saw 160,000 clicks.

Brar stuck with the campaign, setting a budget of up to $100,000 per day, and eventually called it quits:

“I don’t know what to say, right? This is a huge loss. This ran for four days, then we just stopped the campaign.”

Combined with other efforts, he claims he spent around $640,000 on Facebook Ads.

While it’s possible that Brar’s claims of Facebook delivering fake likes and clicks are true, the fact remains that the campaign ran for several days with a huge budget behind it.

Brar allowed the campaign to keep running, and the money to be put behind it.

Through it all, Business Insider makes an important distinction:

“Nonetheless, a badly targeted campaign can generate huge numbers of fake fans and bogus likes. This appears to be what happened to Brar.”

In a way, advertising is a more sophisticated version of gambling. You put money in, and expect a return.

Unfortunately, many never see a return on that money, and are left with nothing to show for their effort.

Brar’s case is a reminder for all businesses to start off small with the most effective strategies in place than to go all in on red.

Facebook can only promise exposure, and your results depend on a number of different factors, factors that you should have already thoroughly researched.

Photo credit: Ervins Strauhmanis via photopin cc

Traditional ways of raising tax do not work well in a globalised world.

Louis XIV's France minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, famously declared that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing."

When it comes to taxing companies, a modern finance minister might rephrase this as "the largest possible amount of revenue with the smallest possible amount of economic and political damage."

Studies have shown that high corporate-tax rates discourage business investment and entrepreneurship, and countries that try to squeeze their firms too hard often have larger black (or informal) economies. In a globalised world, high taxes may simply lead businesses to move to places that offer more competitive rates or tax breaks to companies that set up operations within their borders.

Yet if the public suspects that companies are not paying their fair share of taxes, governments come under pressure to take action. Multinationals have plenty of scope to reduce their tax bill because different governments offer a choice of rates and ways of taxing businesses, including tax breaks for activities such as research and development. "If you stick to the rules, you can lower your tax rate very substantially," says Martin Sorrell of WPP, the advertising and marketing group. "But if you’re too aggressive, it can cause issues with your stakeholders."

In recent years the public has increasingly come to believe that big businesses can get away with paying little or nothing in the way of profits tax. Many people now think that corporate taxes in their present form are no longer fit for purpose. "The corporate-tax system is completely broken," says one technology executive. Executives from Amazon, Google and Starbucks were brought before a parliamentary committee in Britain in late 2012 and berated for paying very little tax there.

The coffee company was so embarrassed that it promised a £20m ($32m) voluntary payment to the British tax authorities. Yet defenders of corporate-tax tactics point out that executives have a fiduciary obligation to shareholders to maximise profits and dividends, and there is no reason for them to pay any more tax than is legally required. If the tax rules have left loopholes, then the best remedy would be to change the rules.

The G20 group of leading economies recently asked the OECD, a mainly rich-country think-tank, to take a look at corporate-tax avoidance. In its report on "base erosion and profit-shifting", released last year, the OECD expressed concern that "due to gaps in the interaction of different tax systems, and in some cases because of the application of bilateral tax treaties, income from cross-border activities may go untaxed anywhere, or be only unduly lowly taxed."

Sharing out the feathers

It is widely but wrongly believed that the only tax paid by businesses is the one levied on their profits (known in America as the corporate income tax). In fact, a study by PwC, an accountancy firm, shows that, on average, companies pay more tax on labour, such as employers’ social-security contributions, than on profits (see chart 2, next page). In addition there are property taxes, sales taxes, environmental taxes and so on. The average global company pays some 43.1% of its commercial profits in tax, of which 16.3 percentage points is labour-related, 16.1 profit-related and 10.7 others.

Since America levies a federal tax of 35% on corporate profits (among the world’s highest), this source accounts for a large proportion of its corporate-tax revenue. But European firms pay a lot of labour taxes, so the total tax take from companies is almost identical on the two sides of the Atlantic, at 40-45% of profits. According to the PwC survey, the total tax take from the corporate sector in the developed world has remained at much the same level since 2004.

Tax revenue from profits has declined since the economic crisis. OECD figures show that the average country now raises the equivalent of about 2.7% of GDP in the form of profits taxes, compared with 3.5% in 2007. But that probably just reflects lower profits since the crisis, not a structural shift. In the longer term the share seems to have held fairly steady.

As the PwC report points out, "our current tax regimes were developed in economies largely concerned with the exchange of physical products made and sold in physical locations." Moreover, the system was devised at a time when companies were more national in character and global trade had a smaller share of GDP. The modern economy depends heavily on services and intangible goods that flow across borders. Individual American states, too, have found it difficult to impose sales taxes on goods traded over the internet.

There are three approaches to taxing profits, known as residence, source and destination. The residence is where the company’s owners are based; the source is where the goods or services are produced; and the destination is where the goods are consumed. So for, say, an American-owned company that produces medicines in an Irish subsidiary which are sold in France, America is the residence, Ireland the source and France the destination. All three countries can claim a share of tax revenues.

A sales tax or value-added tax would focus on the destination, France. A profits-based system would concentrate on the source, Ireland. And a system based on personal taxes would raise the money in the residence, America, when shareholders receive dividends or make capital gains. In practice, elements of all three systems are used.

The trickiest issues arise when it comes to deciding where profits are generated. The subsidiaries of multinational companies trade with each other all the time. The big concern is that they will distort the market through "transfer pricing" so that subsidiaries in low-tax countries overcharge subsidiaries in high-tax countries to maximise the profits generated in the low-tax jurisdiction. To get around this problem, the tax authorities ask for intra-company transactions to be made on an "arm’s-length" basis, meaning that the prices are similar to those a company might pay if dealing with an unrelated business.

This principle is easy to apply to standardised goods such as commodities, but much harder when it comes to more specialised products. If a multinational retailer uses a franchise system, the individual franchises clearly depend on the parent’s brand and need to pay a fee for the privilege. The "intellectual property" of the company can be held in a subsidiary in a low-tax country.

"Historically there has been little to stop a company transferring its intellectual property to any jurisdiction in the world and then charging the high-tax jurisdiction for the rights," says Ben Jones of Eversheds, a law firm. This is a perfectly legal way of reducing the tax burden.

Another approach is to load up subsidiaries in high-tax companies with lots of debt, perhaps borrowed from subsidiaries in low-tax regimes. Since interest payments are tax-deductible, the effect is to lower the group’s overall tax bill.

All this has led to a series of cat-and-mouse games as governments try to crack down on such strategies and companies devise ever new approaches to exploit the rules to the full. Most experts now believe that the corporate-tax system is in urgent need of reform. In Britain the Mirrlees review in 2010, led by Sir James Mirrlees, a Nobel economics laureate, concluded that the current system resulted in both "very high compliance costs for international companies, and very high administration costs for tax authorities".

In their 2005 book, "Reforming the US Corporate Tax", Gary Hufbauer and Paul Grieco of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, argued that "the corporate income tax badly serves the United States. It hobbles the country in global competition; it does little or nothing to promote equality, its original and still commonly recited justification; it is rife with distortions that erode efficiency; and it promises to get much worse in the future."

The big question is whether it makes sense to tax corporate profits at all. A company is merely a legal entity; if it is taxed, it must pass the levy on to its shareholders (in the form of lower dividends), to its workers (in the form of lower wages) or to its customers (in the form of higher prices). If governments want to tax shareholders, workers or consumers, it may be better to do so directly.

America’s companies have not been sitting on their hands. The biggest change in the country’s corporate governance has been the rise of business structures such as partnerships that act as "pass-through vehicles". Provided that all profits are remitted to investors each year, such structures avoid corporate income tax. America now has more such partnerships than it has traditional corporations.

But this leads to a three-tier tax system. Partnerships escape the tax on profits. Multinationals can reduce their tax bills by shifting production and profits to lower-tax regimes. The losers are smaller companies, which have less room for manoeuvre.

Worse, as governments try to crack down on the multinationals’ tax strategies, the tax code gets more and more complex, increasing the administrative burden for small companies. According to the National Federation of Independent Business, an American lobby group, five of the ten biggest worries of small businesses are tax-related.

Time may help reduce the problem. With many businesses already escaping the profits tax, and with some governments lowering their rates to attract multinationals, the world may very slowly be moving away from it. Perhaps in 50 or 100 years’ time it may have disappeared altogether. Many economists think that would be a sensible reform.

But abandoning the profits tax in isolation might invite new forms of tax avoidance. "If you abolished corporate tax, that would let people shelter money in companies and might undermine personal income tax," says Bill Gale of the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank. A profits levy acts as a withholding tax, says Pascal Saint-Amans of the OECD; if it were abolished, the loss of revenue might be substantial. Many shareholders, including pension funds, have tax-exempt status, or they are based overseas, often in low-tax centres; they might make no contribution at all.

Pending a drastic overhaul, the OECD report suggests some possible rule changes to crack down on tax avoidance. But they will require international co-operation; if a few countries decided to opt out, they might become the tax domicile of choice, and revenues in the rest of the world would decline. Some commentators are pessimistic about the prospects.

Mr Hufbauer points out that in America a commission has spent 50 years trying to come up with a formula to divide tax revenues among the individual states, so far without success. The reason he cites is the same that may make an international deal impossible: "When the crunch comes between attracting jobs and upholding the uniform tax code, the jobs will be more important."

The big question is whether it makes sense to tax corporate profits at all. A company is a legal entity; if it is taxed, it must pass the levy on

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In online marketing, and in conversion rate optimization in particular, there’s a relatively large danger of missing the forest for the trees. Some marketers are so obsessed with conversion rates that they forget to look at conversions with respect to the bottom line.

Frankly, that misses the entire point of conversion rate optimization. Sure, you can easily jack up your conversion rate but at the risk of tremendous damage to your business. As my friend Amy Africa is fond of saying, you can easily quadruple your conversions just by blocking all non-converting traffic.

For most retailers (and sometimes even B2B marketers), however, the favored way is slashing prices to attract more buyers, which inevitably creates a race to the bottom. That’s just insane. So here are four ways to make sure you’re not increasing conversions at the expense of your brand and profitability:

1. Control your coupon and “sale” addiction

Pricing is important, and it’s one of the things your users will think about as they browse your site. But competing solely on price has its disadvantages.

By being overly reliant on coupons, for instance, you can start training your visitors not to use anything BUT coupons to purchase on your site. The better strategy for coupons is to selectively use them for targeted sales. The ecommerce behemoth Amazon.com rarely sends its customers coupons. When it does, it’s for a very specific segment of products where they want faster inventory turnover.

The same goes for having a “sale” category on your primary navigation—you might increase conversions for the product group within the section, but inadvertently tank everything else on your web site. Flat out, you should not display “sale” or “offers” as a category. Visitors may find that you have a sale for shoes, clothing, or handbags once they dig deeper into those categories, but those main categories shouldn’t have to compete with a sale section. Pricing tactics can be the garnish, but unless you have a significant cost-of-production advantage in the market, deep discounts can’t be the main course.

2. Don’t give excessive price reductions for retargeting abandoned carts

Retargeting is another one of those tactics that can be incredible when used sparingly, correctly, and tactfully. Unfortunately, because retargeting works, it’s very tempting to broaden its reach, lessening not just the impact of retargeting but of the rest of the web site as well.

Say you have a way to capture emails for carts that are abandoned. You can use the email you already have to start retargeting the visitor—you can nudge the visitor immediately after the cart is abandoned. If that does not work, you can send them a reminder with testimonials or reviews the day after. A week later, if the transaction still has not occurred, you can send your “last ditch” email with a discount to try and get the visitor to convert.

No one will fault you for improving conversions this way—as long as you don’t do it every time. The danger is in some of your prospects never transacting normally with you. The more often you do this, the more likely you are to train a subset of users whose sole interaction with you is through retargeted discounts.

Make sure you have a mechanism to keep track of the users who have received discounts, and only use it once per user. Your customer retention strategy should be loyalty rewards and lead nurturing, not exploited discounts via retargeting.

3. Increase value by providing alternative incentives

Instead of inundating customers with coupons, try other offers that enhance value from the perspective of your customers. For instance, Nordstrom.com and Zappos.com attract customers with their free shipping and hassle-free return policies:

And don’t be discouraged by the thought of shipping costs cutting deeper into your profit margins. A Monetate infographic shows that a free shipping offer is more enticing than discounts and encourages customers to spend more.

Another alternative is offering freebies that are of little to no cost to you but are highly valued by your customers. Beauty products retailer Sephora.com offers freebies such as product samplers when orders reach a certain pricing threshold. Trial packs of beauty products may seem cheap or worthless compared to a $5 coupon, but not for Sephora’s target market of beauty-conscious and fashion-forward women (and men, too) who delight in trying and testing the newest products out there.

4. Do reward your loyal customers

Last but not the least: focus on building long-term relationships with your customers. It’s here that you stand to gain the most from coupons and discounts. You can use exclusive coupons to reward your most loyal customers. Or you can implement a cash-back system similar to the Drugstore.com and Sears.com loyalty programs, where registered members are allowed to earn and accumulate points which they can later redeem as a discount:

Then again, you can also try imitating Sephora’s offers for its Beauty Insider community, which lets members purchase exclusive product bundles and enjoy access to free limited edition samplers.

It’s easy to miss out on the broader strategy when you’re caught up with daily, monthly, or quarterly targets, ultimately forcing you to depend heavily on tactics to pull in the numbers. But you have to remember that raising your conversion rate shouldn’t be about creating a race to the bottom. Quite the opposite, CRO is about creating websites and online experiences that inspire trust and confidence. Truth is, your online visitors will act without the coupons if they’re highly motivated and transacting with you is easy enough. Treat coupons, massive price reductions and sales either as an ultimatum or a gift for loyalty, but never as a necessity.

Online shopping image courtesy of Shutterstock.

It’s a Marketing Content and Data Avalanche

Marketing has always been about people. Yet, it’s a pretty un-human marketing explosion out there. There is too much content and jargon-laden stuff chasing too little mindshare. In 2010, Google’s then CEO, Eric Schmidt, proclaimed that there is more content created every two days than in all of human history up through 2003. More recently, IBM stated that 90% of content today was created in the last two years alone.

The annual Edelman Trust Barometer continues to show a steady decline in customer trust of companies. And along with the decline in trust, we have a growing deficit in attention span. We’re on social overload and it isn’t pretty.

We’re filtering for our very survival. That means way too much information is being created and yet, simultaneously, we’re facing a paucity of meaningful marketing. Against this backdrop of marketing ‘Big data,” marketers are fighting to be heard. This can a good thing – it forces companies to rethink how they are communicating.

It’s time to change the marketing game to one that is more human, relevant and purposeful.

The Buying Journey Has Changed

The buyer’s journey has changed. According to Forrester (October 2012), buyers are approximately 67% – 90% through their decision-making process by the time they contact the company for information. That means they are doing self-directed searches, talking to their networks and getting information from your detractors and advocates. This has huge implications for advocacy today. Forrester’s data shows that 94% of us trust advocates compared to 18% of us who trust influencers. Why? Because unpaid advocates are believed to be “people like me.” I don’t trust corporate spokespeople and media ‘influencers,’ but I trust people just like me.

Make Your Marketing Work for People

While there are a lot of ways to humanize your company and content, here are three ways to stand out.

1. Tell Stories.

Tell simple stories. Humans are storytelling animals. Stories simplify and cut through the noise in ways that data alone cannot. According to Jennifer Aaker at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, stories are remembered up to 22X more than facts alone (Stanford studies). Stories give us reasons to care where facts fail. Neuromarketing – the intersection of neuroscience and marketing – tells us that humans make decisions with emotions and facts. Yep – emotions are critical. Stories that answer “why,” and that tell your market who you are and what you care about are more powerful and meaningful. Even in B2B. It’s time for business to stop thinking it is above the rules. Most of us don’t check our humanity at the door when we go into a work building. Surveys show that 92.3% of audiences are, in fact, made up of people (we really don’t know about the rest)!

Companies today need to elevate the discussion of what they do to a discussion of who they are. It’s not about products and services today; it’s about standing for a purpose that is bigger than the company. For Zappo’s, it’s delivering happiness and great customer service no matter what it takes. For Patagonia, it’s the environment. For IBM, it’s being part of an ecosystem that creates a smarter, better planet with technology. Find your higher purpose, and you’ll connect in a more meaningful way. Products come and go – movements have longevity.

2. Flip Expectations.

Turn assumptions on their heads. Once we’ve seen or heard new messages, we acclimate to a pattern. Over time, the novelty factor wears off. So what better way to shift expectations than to flip them occasionally? If people expect serious, give them humor. If people expect humor, change the message. Humor is human, and it is one of the best devices for communicating because it operates as an incredibly effective pattern disruption technique. Humor gets around the intellectual ‘facts’ filter. Once I make you laugh, your attention is high and your filter is down. I am now able to get my messages through in a way I could not before.

A great example of this is IBM’s ‘Art of the Sale’ (all seven of them!). When it first came out, the video was a huge hit – growing traffic for the company’s smaller, newer mainframe product by 25X. Why? No one expected humor from IBM and, more importantly, IBM did something even more unpredictable: it parodied itself. It was “un-iBM” and that’s why it worked so well – generating trade press and earned media that paid advertisements could never have generated.

When you have been running with the same messages for a while, flip expectations, and you’ll create a deeper connection with your audience. Be sure to jumpstart your messaging innovation curve. Messages have short product life cycles because of the amount of noise out there.

3. Let Your Personality Shine.

No doubt about – brand personalities matter. If your company was a person, who would it be? And, more importantly who do customers believe it to be? B2B companies have personalities, too. Only most of them are incredibly boring and outdated. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Weave personal interests alongside business information, so your audience knows something about you as a person and can connect with you on that human level, before building a business relationship. We do business with people we know, like and trust – let people get to know you and trust you by liking you first. It’s easy to add fun bios to company sites and to social networking profiles.

And a big part of the personality of the company is its people. The best storytellers in a company are those closest to the customer (not those in the C-suite!). Shocking, right? Let those storytellers engage with customers. Look at how Cisco Systems used Gen Y –intern turned Internet rapper, Greg Justice. This intern put a relevant, hip face on an older technology company and spoke to other Gen Y’ers in ways that company execs could not. Remember, advocates matter as customers are doing their own searches before they even contact a company for information. Advocates are “people like me…” – they are trusted far more than company spokespeople and media influencers.

Sometimes the best storytellers also live outside the company – they are passionate, rabid, unpaid advocates who share their stories out of dedication and loyalty. These loyal customers tend to refer 5X (Forrester) more customers on average than their non-advocate counterparts. A great example is Starbucks Melody, a Seattle-based lawyer who loves Starbucks and talks about the company passionately to her tens of thousands of listeners. Engage, empower, and catalyze your advocates with great content and stories and let them tell their stories their way! IBM, too, has a lot of fans both inside and outside the company – so, yes, B2B, it is possible.

Customers Want Simple and Meaningful

By telling simple stories, turning expectations upside down frequently, and letting your personality (and people!) come through, you’ll stand out in a noisy world today. While there are many ways to humanize – the most important thing is to forge deeper connections with your audience in order to increase marketing results.

Every marketer communicates, yet few truly connect. Be the latter.

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In a startup culture that glorifies funding, it’s not often that entrepreneurs hear that too much funding can actually harm their company.

For the rare bootstrapped tech startup, there are dozens of seed-stage companies that dream of getting showered in venture capital. I would argue, however, that raising too much capital too early can set unrealistic expectations, sabotage sustainable growth and create an inevitable conflict of interest between the entrepreneurs and investors.

To prevent this scenario, early-stage startups and investors need to focus on capital efficiency and raise the right amount of money.

Too much money can hurt your exit options

When a startup raises too much capital too early, the entrepreneurs lock themselves into a set of expectations and a specific exit strategy — and often they are unaware of having done so.

For example, $10 million in Series A funding raised at a $20 million pre-money valuation will lead to a post-money valuation of $30 million. Early stage VCs would want to see at least a 10-fold increase in value. So, they’re expecting an exit valuation of $300 million, and that does not take into account additional investors who join in later rounds. In this case, an exit under $100 million would be completely out of the question. Most professional VCs will have strong veto rights to legally prevent an acquisition, and they’ll exercise that right if the offer price is too low.

Overfunding can also send a tech startup into expansion mode too early, before it achieves product-market fit. When an early-stage startup with proprietary technology raises lots of money, the team will often spend the money even if it’s against their better judgment. Under heavy pressure to accelerate the business units of the company, they will hire expensive marketing and sales personnel.

However, they have not reached the stage where they know what they’re selling, to whom, and at what price point. Their marketers and salespeople begin scaling, even though it usually takes multiple product iterations to reach the stage where expansion makes sense. The new hires cost millions, and they struggle to sell the product. The premature expansion causes the company value to flatten or depreciate. In short time, the startup has gorged itself on unwarranted capital and it can’t raise more.

Now, the tech startup might fail, given what I’ve described. Or, let’s say it beats the odds and becomes a $100 million valuation company. By most standards, this looks like success, but given the $10 million raised in Series A, the investors want to sell for $300 million. When strategic acquirers come along to buy the startup, they offer $60 or $70 million.

The founders would love to sell — at that price, it would put $10 million in the founders’ pockets, which would be life-changing. Their investors, on other hand, won’t go for it. Their $20 million return is chump change in a half-billion-dollar fund. The investors and entrepreneurs are now locked in a conflict of interest. They have a product that is valuable, but a company that can’t gain value without heavy injections of capital.

How much funding is the right amount

At some stage, a startup may need to raise a lot of money and stop being capital efficient in order to scale. The trick is to recognize the right timing, which is often later than entrepreneurs or investors expect.

The antidote to overfunding is to raise the right amount of money from the beginning. In our opinion, a seed-stage startup should raise no more than $1 million to $3 million.

A double-digit B round is only appropriate when the company is selling the right product to the right customer at the right price point through the right distribution channel. If buyers make an offer before Series B, a startup that has raised only a few million can sell for $60 to $70 million and satisfy both the entrepreneurs and investors.

Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf has been a successful tech entrepreneur and investor for the past two decades. YL Ventures, which he founded, invests early in cyber security, cloud computing, big data and Software-as-a-Service software companies, and accelerates their evolution via strategic advice and Silicon Valley-based operational execution. YL Ventures is currently investing out of its $27.5 million second fund.

As an affiliate you have a lot of choices as to what type of products you can promote. I wanted to focus on two main types of products that have the most controversy in the topic of what sells better. So what does sell better Information products or Physical products?

That is a good question, and even a better one if you are an affiliate marketer who is wondering what to sell next or where to even start. In this report I am going to cover the pro’s and con’s of both information and physical products. Now I am not going to say that one is better than the other, as they both have their good factors and bad ones. I’ll stop my blabbing now and just get started with the information you are looking for.

Information Products Pros and Cons

Information products have a wide range of subject material and can reach audiences of all types. The main purpose of an information product is to do one thing and that is teach someone how to do something they don’t know how to do, in other words solve a problem. These types of products can be highly detailed in subject matter, and can provide simple step by step instructions on how to accomplish a given task.

There are many types of information products out there for example: how to books, recipe books, diet and exercise routines, and much more. The fact of the matter is these type of products contain detailed instructions and can provide a customer with exactly what they are looking for.

Pros

The biggest pro to information products is that they can be accessed immediately by download, unless the consumer purchased a physical book. They get right to the point and solve problems rather fast. Yes you have to look through the book to find answers, but all the answers will be inside most every information product out there related to the specific need that is being addressed.

There are no shipping costs, which dramatically reduces the price of the item right out of the gate. This is very appealing to a lot of consumers who don’t have much to spend, and are looking to do a particular project themselves.

These type of products are packed full of useful information, and can solve the consumers problem that night if they purchased a downloadable product. Conversions can be pretty high when targeting problem specific people, who need things done quickly at a cheap price. These type of people also are the do it yourself type, so after getting one project done they are ready to start another one, making them a great repeat buyer.

Cons

Sometimes there is so much information packed into one book that it causes information overload in the customer. This drives them to get frustrated and causes them to get stopped in their tracks. just a quick tip, when choosing a information product to promote make sure it is organized and easy to read.

The information can be unclear and hard to understand especially if there aren’t any pictures to go along with the writing. This can cause a consumer to stop doing it themselves and break down and hire someone, and then that puts the do it yourself information products out of business.

A downloaded version can be hard to access if the project that is being performed in outside away from their computer. Yes they can print these products, but it does take a lot of ink and paper to accomplish that. That is why when looking to promote an information product see if the product owner has the option of a printed version as well as the downloadable version, making it easier for the consumer to take with them.

Physical Products Pros and Cons

Physical products are well known and are usually associated with some type of brand. This instills trust in the consumer creating a sense of security when buying a product. Another factor to consider is where the product is being shipped from. Most consumers will look to Amazon when looking to buy physical products online, and they tend to keep their shipping costs low, but there are many physical product affiliate networks out there that may not be as trusted as Amazon so always keep that in mind.

Pros

These products are almost always very popular among consumers, and are very well known worldwide as well. Let’s take T.V.’s for example, everyone knows what flat screens are and they are very popular with a high price tag. They are made by trusted brands like Samsung and Toshiba so most of the selling is already done for you.

You can easily convince someone to purchase a physical product when it is popular, in demand, and sold from a trusted online store.

Cons

The biggest drawback to physical products is the shipping cost, and the fact it does take some time for their product to arrive. The only way you are going to make any real money as an affiliate selling physical products is by selling high price items. This in itself is a con, in that not a lot of people have all that much money to spend so your targeting has to be very precise.

Some consumers are a little wary of purchasing physical products online, especially high prices ones. They can’t touch it to make sure it works, and to really see the quality of the product. They have to wait for it to arrive in order to see if they made a good purchase or not.

As an affiliate your job is to convince them of trust and safety of the products they are looking to buy. The selling is already done through the brand name of the item’s you are selling. Convincing consumers to buy high price items online can be a chore, and the reason you have to be selling high priced items is that the commission percentages are pretty low like 4-5% to start out, so 10-60 dollar products are not going to bring in the revenue you are looking for. You need to be selling 500-1000 dollar products in order to make your effort worth it.

The Facts Of Both Physical and Information Products

So as you can see from above both types of products have their up’s and down’s. Information products are much easier to sell online, but can lead to more frustration within the customer than needed, when they try things on their own. Physical products already have trust built in with the brand name items you are selling, but the whole visual aspect of the product is taken away when selling online.

It is all in the targeting within your marketing plan that is going to get you the sales you are looking for. Since information products are usually on the cheaper side you are going to have to sell more to make good ROI. With physical products you have to focus on high ticket items or sell a ton of low priced items to make up for the small commission percentages provided by affiliate networks like Amazon.

In the end it is up to you to choose which product to sell online. They both can bring in good revenue, but need to be marketed differently. Find the do it yourself crowd and sell them the information products, and then find the crowd that has money to throw around and sell them on the physical products. That is the main difference in audience and reach. Physical products restrain you, more likely, to Your home country, as information products can be bought worldwide.

Get out there and start doing your market research and see where your potential buyers are for both types of products and then see how much it would cost you in advertising for each product. Testing is a big part of any marketing campaign so you might want to test both types and see which one brings you more ROI, or focus all your energy into one or the other.

Sometimes it is better to just focus on one thing at a time and when you master that move onto the next, another little hint for you. All in all as an affiliate there are a lot of products and niches to choose from in both information and physical products. Use your imagination mixed with raw facts to make your final decisions.

When it comes successful social selling and meeting your sales quota, being more like a car mechanic, instead of a car salesman, might be the key to your success. Huh? How are you going to meet your quota if you don’t act like the tenacious and famous car salesman, Cal Worthington?

I have purchased over 10 cars in my lifetime and cannot remember any of the names, faces or other details of the people who sold them to me. However, I remember every car mechanic I’ve ever worked with. I remember each of them because we built a trusting relationship. They taught me and did not sell me. They showed me how to maintain my car and advised me on what to look for when buying a new car. They were my trusted advisor who helped me fix my current problem and frame my future purchase. Wow!

Whether you are selling enterprise software solutions in the cloud or trading show shipping services you can position yourself as a teacher, like my car mechanics, and reap the rewards of being a top seller.

Social Selling Lessons | Be A Teacher Not A Seller

1. Differentiate Yourself From The Sales Sharks. With InsideView reporting that 90% of CEO’s do not return cold emails or calls, becoming a trusted advisor and teacher to your customers makes sense. It’s the only way to break through to them. Don’t ‘look’ like the typical sales professional and you will separate yourself form the herd of sales sharks.

2. Don’t Be All About Making A Deal. Instead of focusing on a small amount of sales, build a large social network people modeled after your customers and their influencers. 75% of B2B decision makers use social media to learn. So, plug into this larger network, to bust your quota.

3. Pass On Valuable Information. Don’t use your social media and network channels to promote your solutions. Pass on valuable information, instead, to lead the conversation to you when the time is right to buy. You want to be known for handing out knowledge and not brochures.

4. Associate Yourself With Great 3rd-part Brands. You are the company you keep, so keep good company. Associate yourself with great knowledge brands, like Harvard Business Review, Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, to build your reputation and brand.

5. Think Outside The Trade-Show Booth. Cast the trade booth sales mentality away and spread your knowledge so people will eventually visit your trade booth when it’s time to buy; 73% of customers are willing to engage with you on social media, so get to it!

6. Use Social Media To Teach And Not Sell. Selling is best done face-to-face. However, Social Media Today reports B2B buyers look at an average of over 10 digital resources before ever making a purchase. Since customers need to learn before they buy, use this opportunity on social media to connect. Your customers are there whether or not you are.

7. Teach And Connect With Today’s Technology. Connect and get on the radar of your customers and potential networks by retweeting, sharing, commenting and favoriting others’ content. Intersecting with their learning tools is a great way to build a relationship instead of finding and phoning them from a LinkedIn search. LinkedIn reports 85% of IT Decision Makers use social networks for business, so your future customers are waiting for you to socially engage.

8. Develop Insights. Before you teach and connect with your customers, you need to listen to the customer and their customers. Listening is a great way to prepare for your connections and calls. SirisuDecisions reports 82% B2B decision makers think sales representatives are unprepared for meetings, so this insight-driven approach will help you build the best social selling lesson plan.

9. Tap Into The Ready-made Network. There is an entire social community on LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs, where customers are tapping to learn how to be smarter, more effective, more efficient to make more money. Determine how to tap into this potential, leverage the rules of engagement, and position yourself as a teacher; especially since the Sales Benchmark Index reports reps with 5000+ linked in connections have a 98% chance of attaining quota.

10. Be A Publisher. In addition to curating and passing on the great content to your network, create your own assets on a blog. Blogging is the social selling secret weapon. Hubspot reports that 92% of companies that blog multiple times per day have acquired a customer from their blog, so this strategy seems like a no-brainer!

Do you have another teaching tip to share? If so, please comment below. Or, contact me directly at MarketingThink.com, on LinkedIn, Twitter or Google+.

If you are looking to set yourself up as a social selling teacher, you might enjoy learning how to:

• Create the perfect LinkedIn profile
• Create the perfect Twitter profile
• How to create the perfect blog post

So, quit selling the sales sizzle to focus on educating your customer. If you are looking to make quota then a differentiating social selling approach, like an advising car mechanic, will place you in the driver’s seat to success! And if you have a recommendation for a new mechanic, let me know. Mine just retired!

Image Source: BTSTire.com

You won't have to fork over a lot of cash to get a 64-bit smartphone this year -- at least, not if MediaTek can help it. The company has just unveiled the MT6732 (not shown here), a system-on-chip aimed at mid-range phone buyers who are willing to...

Russian mobile-making startup Yota Devices has just unveiled the next generation of its dual-screen smartphone, the YotaPhone. As with the current first-gen model, which went on sale in Russia and select European markets last December, the handset's flagship feature is that it's two-sided, with a full colour touchscreen display on the front and a low-power consuming e-ink display on the rear. Read More

Recently I had a conversation with a Sales Enablement leader.  He mentioned the obstacles he faces in creating compelling sales training for new products.  One of his biggest hurdles was the lack of alignment between training and marketing.  He shared a story about a new product launch that failed.  Sales was telling one story while the marketing content said something else.  The message confused the buyer and the unique value proposition was unclear.

Unfortunately this situation is common in many organizations.  There is a solution.  The Sales Enablement leader can bridge the gap between sales training and marketing.  An important question to ask is: “Can marketing help my sales enablement efforts?”  This is especially important for a new product launch.  The answer to the question is unequivocally yes, if the two functions are aligned.    Download the Sales Enablement and Marketing Collaborator for tips to increase your marketing alignment. And improve your ability to train salespeople on new products.

Sales enablement needs to align with marketing to be more successful

Forrester Research reports that only 8% of B2B companies have sales and marketing alignment.  As the Sales Enablement leader, you are in a position to bridge the gap.  It begins as a dialog with your marketing colleagues.  Invite them to brainstorm together.  Discuss what “story” works in the field and how marketing can reinforce it.  Then let marketing share their buyer research.  Blend the learnings from both groups into a better “story”.  That is the one you teach your salespeople during training.  This is also the one that they tell their buyers.  With this alignment, marketing collateral supports the sales efforts with one consistent message.

Alignment involves many things - like common goals, processes and investments in technology.  Yet communication is probably the most important component.  You and the marketing team need to get on the same page.  Involve them early in the sales training content development discussions.  If not, then all the best technology and processes won’t make a difference.  If you do, you increase the chance that your training is aligned with marketing’s communications.  Consistently sending the same messages to your buyers is powerful!

Work together to improve your ability to understand the buyer

Marketing is known as the face of the customer.  Good marketing departments continually research marketplace buyers.  Understanding how, why and when your buyers make purchases are differentiators to your salespeople.  Your ability to leverage this knowledge will strengthen the content of your sales training.

Jointly build a plan to better understand your buyer.  Answers to these questions will give you the insights you need to start:

• What questions does the buyer ask before they buy?
• What sources of information do they use to research their potential purchase?
• What are their trigger events that stimulate them into action?
• How can you monitor their activities to gauge their stage in the buying process?
• What are their objectives and obstacles?
• How do they measure success?

After these questions are answered, profile the buyers in your target market.  Build a buyer persona by giving the profile a name and picture.  Your persona now has a personality with a name that everyone recognizes and understands.  This helps you effectively communicate to your target and facilitate their buying process.  Using this approach means you understand the buying tendencies of your target audience.  Thus increasing their propensity to purchase.

Teach salespeople to sell benefits and use marketing as support

When you were collaborating you learned a great deal about your buyer.  You identified events that cause them to take action – trigger events.  And your sales training content aligned with marketing.  You now:

1. Know the factors that influence their purchase decisions. 
2. Understand that they rank some benefits higher than others. 
3. Have skilled salespeople who sell benefits that resonate with your buyers.

Now is the time to solidify your cooperative sales training approach.  For instance, portability is a benefit of mobile devices.  However, your collaboration with marketing revealed that your buyer prefers a high coverage area.  Your salespeople now ask the right questions to confirm this preference.  They communicate the high coverage area benefits directly to your customer.  At the same time, marketing collateral communicates the same benefits to this buyer audience.  The deal closes without complications.

You have now achieved a milestone.  Your sales enablement efforts have resulted in consistent messaging, buyer knowledge and benefits selling.  This is a formula for success.

“Can marketing help my sales enablement efforts - especially with new product launches?”  To find out, download the Sales Enablement and Marketing Collaborator.

Author: Tom Maloney

Follow @tommaloneycro

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Asked how they "check out" potential professional services providers (such as an accounting, marketing, legal, consulting, or tech firm), 81% of buyers say they head to the seller's website to do research. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Like many other digital marketing agencies, we’ve been on the hunt for digital and content marketing talent on a continuous basis over the past few years. Increased demand and competition are driving the need to find people with skills that can actually create impact, vs. fuzzy “potential”.

Companies looking for agencies are in the same boat, challenged to find partners that can actually affect business goals. Sadly, there are few knights in shining content marketing armor, like our friend to the right.

In both cases, the ease of publishing online makes it easy for individuals and agencies to present expertise – whether they really have it or not.  There are a few ways to sift through the fluff and puff and one of them is knowing what skills, capabilities and experience your business actually needs.

Since a lot of companies are maturing in their content marketing abilities, I think there are a few key skills that stand out in 2014 and beyond. Some of these skills are for individuals, some are spread across an organization. To be truly competitive, I think they need to be present along with creativity and analytical skills.

Customer Segmentation – The ability to identify customer segments through available resources is pretty important for any kind of customer targeting. That means using anything from interviews and surveys with existing customers, sifting through web analytics and conversion data, social media monitoring and other demographic, psychographic and behavioral data sources. Few individuals have most, let alone all of these skills, but the simple task of identifying best/worst customers with data to support profiles is essential.  While building customer profiles and personas from segmentation data is an important skill, so is the maintenance of those profiles over time. Direct Marketers, Email Marketers, Advertising Pros and experienced Content Marketers in particular seem to have these skills.

Buy Cycle Stories – Understanding customer segments also means knowing their journey across the sales cycle. The ability and experience of mapping what questions buyers have as they move from awareness to consideration to purchase are essential for creating a content plan. Beyond answering the questions, “What is it?, How will it help me? “How much does it cost and where can I buy it?”, is the use of storytelling to communicate both practical answers and a narrative for how your brand delivers the solution in a unique and meaningful way. Stories help make an emotional connection with customers and the ability to both anticipate the customer journey and creative ways to communicate your brand value are highly valuable for content marketing.

Multi-Channel Content Planning – When you see how customer segments move across the sales cycle, it becomes clear that single channel marketing like email, SEO, PPC, mobile, etc is a disadvantage. Customers get information from multiple sources and a multi-channel approach helps brands become “the best answer” wherever buyers are looking. Being able to take customer segmentation and buying cycle insight to create a multi-channel content plan is key for delivering the best answer experience for target audiences. That doesn’t mean “expert” at PPC, SEO, Social, Email, PR, etc – but it does mean experience with the planning, integration and coordination with others that do have specialized expertise. Not everything that can be integrated should, so the ability to prioritize according to resources, timeframe and goals are just as important as the planning skills.

Editorial, Creation & Curation – A big part of content planning is the mix of content and media types. How much content should be evergreen? How should it be repurposed? Which content can be co-created with influencers, customers or with internal resources? What role will curated content play in this mix? Answering those questions are an ongoing part of any content planner’s experience and are essential for successful content marketing programs. Beyond planning of content types is familiarity with the tools to help manage their function from content marketing software like Kapost to curation software like Curata.

Community Building - The intersection of content with social media cannot be ignored. No social media marketer can succeed without content and the same is true with community and content marketing. Empathy with the target audience as well as the communities they are influenced by is an essential consideration for content marketing. Being able to plan and promote content that engages and grows a community is very valuable skill.

Amplification & Promotion – Content unread is content that is dead. OK, I just made that up, but it speaks to the importance of content promotion for awareness and exposure. Noise levels are high and it’s a shame (as well as a waste of money) when great content goes unnoticed. Identifying, engaging and managing promotion resources is an important skill in order for the investment in content creation and curation to pay off. Whether it’s integration with email, social networks, social ads, SEO, paid per click, sponsorships, influencers, retargeting, blogger outreach, public relations or any other type of amplification method, the ability to promote content is a skill that is as important as any other or more for a digital marketer.

Nurturing & Marketing Automation - For longer sales cycles common to B2B companies, content is sustenance that draws buyers through an educational and engaging journey from wherever they start to become a lead and a customer. The ability to plan, implement and optimize content performance in conjunction with marketing automation software like Marketo, Eloqua or Infusionsoft is a distinct competitive advantage.

Monitoring, Measurement & Optimization – No marketing program can optimize performance or scale without a feedback mechanism. Monitoring social media, news media, web analytics and conversion data are absolutely essential skills for any kind of digital marketer and especially for a content marketer. Optimizing content performance is a process of initial hypothesis, plan, implementation and then analysis of KPIs (key performance indicators) to adjust messaging, creative and calls to action. While many of these skills are important to an intentionally successful content marketing effort, the measurement and performance optimization piece is in the top 3.

I think any organization that can develop these skill sets amongst their digital marketing teams will bring a distinct advantage to the company. It’s also important for business marketing managers to develop these abilities and to inspire and nurture these skills within their organization.

I don’t believe any single individual or organization has mastery in this mix of skills. Most marketing organizations seem to emphasize one area over others and can still be successful. As my business partner, Susan Misukanis likes to say, “You don’t have to boil the ocean to start a successful program”.  However, I am suggesting in this post that it’s important to aspire to a mix of skills like these in order to achieve a competitive advantage, positive ROI, and market leadership.

At a minimum, an individual or a company that is new to content marketing should have the planning, creation, amplification and measurement skills (with a strong emphasis in 2 or 3). Otherwise, they’ll simply be stuck at Production phase and never really be distinguished from the competition and suffer the harsh realities of Mark Schaefer’s “Content Shock”.

Beyond these more technical skills are character and personality traits as well as other skills like strategy, creativity and the ability to draw insight from data. Of course those skills are important for any role in an organization.

What would you add to this list? What would you say are the bare minimum for an individual (according to their role) or a content marketing agency?

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Thanks to recent, groundbreaking research, we now know that getting something to go viral takes much more than mere luck. There are ten traits that companies can bake into their marketing content to leverage the psychology of sharing. Here they are, in alphabetical order:

• Awe
• Celebrity (in this context, celebrities can lend credibility to Emotion)
• Humor
• Practical Value
• Public
• Social currency
• Stories
• Tastemakers
• Triggers
• Unexpectedness

As Dan Clark argues in his latest white paper, when it comes to brand-building in social media, content can deliver far better customer engagement than advertising. For instance, do you really think your “New Widget” ad can compete with mom’s “New Baby” post? Not in a million years. And incorporating the psychology of sharing is the best way to get your content to spread.

But developing relevant, quality content that incorporates the psychology of sharing is a tall order. It takes a strong commitment from marketing management, a good, well-informed creative team, and close collaboration between the two.

Here are the steps…

1.    Determine your goals

What do you want to accomplish with this content? If you’re looking to boost social engagement,Emotion might be your best approach. If you’re looking to simply drive sales of a particular product, the content needs to fit neatly into your sales process and can provide Practical Value. These goals are the first criteria upon which your content should be based.

2.    Know your audience

This is the one thing that requires a senior executive, or at least the key people who most intimately understand what your buyers care most about. You have to put yourself in their shoes. Why do they like your products? What other products do they like? Would they recall your brand name if asked about your category or industry? Knowing answers to these questions and many more give creative folks a critical framework upon which sound strategies can be based. Without such an understanding, and an appropriate conveyance to the creative team, concepts will likely lack a meaningful, deeply emotional connection. In addition to typical intel such as demographics, the creative team needs to know who they are, what their interests are, where and when they typically engage with your brand, why they care about you, and more.

3.    Articulate your brand values

Simply giving your mission statement to the creative team won’t cut it here. What you need to do is make sure your creative team personally understands what your brand stands for. Is it all about customer service? Or is it all about self-empowerment? Is simplicity more than a mere graphic design treatment? The creative team needs to know much more than the brand’s personality. It needs to know its promise. That promise—the values that your brand stands for—is the essence of why customers turn to you. As a result, fully understanding that promise is critical for the creative team to brainstorm concepts that will resonate with the audience. Just like in step 2 above, senior management might be necessary to adequately convey it.

4.    Brainstorm

No one can create stellar content alone. When my colleagues and I collaborate with clients, we uncover new things that bring us from here to there. We throw things out and one thing leads to another. By mixing people who have a solid understanding of the brand with people like me who know little, flowers bloom. Ideas emerge. No one can determine what will happen, and that’s the fun of it. You need to present and capture everything, no matter how silly or mundane it might seem. Create an environment where no one feels marginalized, where all can freely contribute. Since you have no idea where an idea might lead, each has value. Since so many concepts get thrown out during the next step, it is imperative that the creative team brainstorms and documents as many concepts as possible.

5.    Distill and Rank

Following step 4, you likely will have several great concepts worth considering and refining. Compare them against the 10 psychology traits above (assuming you fully understand them) that can lead to increased sharing. If you have a story, can it be elevated with stronger emotion? Would a different character make it funny? Is there a way to stage it such that something that is typically private becomes public? Could a trigger be employed to cause people to think of your relatively unknown brand when a more common thing is seen or experienced? Incorporating the psychology of sharing into your content isn’t a guarantee that it will go viral, but this one step has the potential to give your video strong legs to run on. You can simply put a check mark for each trait and add up each concept’s potential. But while more check marks could be one indicator for greater promise, you’ll still need to rely on your gut for the few concepts that you think will make the greatest impact.

6.    Develop

Once you know which concepts you want to pursue, you should start your development by writing a creative brief so everyone on the creative team fully understands what to do before anyone lifts a finger. With the brief in hand, everyone will know what you hope to accomplish, the tone and style, roles and responsibilities, expectations, milestones, and more. Include stock photography or other visual assets if it aids in conveying the concept to people who may have not attended the brainstorm and distillation sessions. Once your team knows what you wish to create, they can get busy.

Production Notes

With so many flavors of content (video, images, infographics, etc.), and with so many established production practices, I will not attempt to offer advice on how to actually produce your content here; you can easily find plenty of other sources online with the appropriate detail. That said, generally speaking, images are the cheapest. When it comes to video, cartoons and motion graphics are cheaper to produce than shooting live actors. And somewhere in between those two options, and a highly authentic format at that, is to film your employees. You can find more info on this from my friend Dan Clark at Interplay Agency.

You’ll also want to make sure you allow your creative team to do their best work by staying out of the way during production. If you have a solid creative brief, and perhaps an even less ambiguous storyboard, your team should be able to deliver what you want. And, when left alone, they just might surprise you with an even better final product than you had envisioned. In short, stick with what you know and allow them to focus on what they know.

If you are marketing your business appropriately, you should be building a list of prospects long before they are ready to make a purchase. You should be doing this by putting yourself on their research path to buying. But if you are collecting these prospects and they aren’t ready to buy, how are you going to get them to become customers? That’s where lead nurturing comes into play. What is lead nurturing?

What Is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is the practice of communicating consistently with prospective customers in order to educate, build a relationship, and close a sale.

By creating a strategic lead capturing plan and combining it with a solid lead nurturing strategy, your sales team will be able to spend less time convincing and more time closing high quality, ready to buy leads.

For a more detailed definition, check out techopedia’s description here.

How Does Lead Nurturing Increase Conversions?

If someone is doing online research about hiring a company like yours or buying products that you offer, that doesn’t mean they have purchasing intent at that moment. But if someone downloads one of your lead magnets and gets a phone call right away from a pushy salesman, they aren’t going to make the purchase and they’re going to be turned off. All that hard work you got to attracting that prospect to your website and converting them into a lead all went down the toilet in five minutes.

Depending on the type of product or service you offer, the lead nurturing campaign will vary in length. Keep this in mind, the 80% of sales aren’t made until at least the fifth communication between the prospect and the brand.

The more expensive your product or service, the longer the decision process will be for prospects. This is why you have to know your ideal customers before planning any kind of marketing strategy. Understanding what they want and need to know in order to do business with you will guide your entire marketing process from lead generation to customer satisfaction.

Once you have an understanding of what your customers will need to have from you in terms of trust building with your brand, understanding of your product or service, and motivation to become a paying customer, you will easily be able to list the topics of your lead nurturing campaigns.

How To Create A Lead Nurturing Strategy

Your lead nurturing strategy can involve any form of communication ranging from email, phone calls, direct mail, or social media. Normally a combination of multiple communication forms work best. With the technology available today, it’s possible to have your lead nurturing highly automated.

For creating the content that you’ll need for your lead nurturing strategy, you can follow a similar outline to your content marketing campaign strategy:

1. Map your content development to your buyer persona decision making process

2. List all questions prospects have

3. Do keyword research

4. Create articles

5. Setup sign up capturing on your site

6. Setup email campaigns with content from articles

If you plan this appropriately from the beginning, you can actually save a lot of time and duplicate efforts by incorporating the lead nurturing idea while developing content to attract visitors to your website.

What Is Your Lead Nurturing Strategy?

Do you have a lead nurturing strategy? If not, why not? Leave your thoughts and questions in the comments below.

At the Inbound 2012 Keynote Address, HubSpot CTO and co-founder Dharmesh Shah began his speech by showing a picture of his newborn baby. Shah commented that in his experience, when it comes to grabbing people's attention, dogs are good, cats are great, and babies are better.

On social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, marketers and business professionals who are on an endless quest to weed through the clutter in order to attract and engage consumers seem to have internalized Shah’s tactics. Sometimes it might be nice to see a cute baby picture or an amusing video of a cat, but other times you just want to get down to business.

That’s where LinkedIn comes into play. The professional social network. There's no fluff on the professional network; there are no pictures of other peoples’ babies or memes of what their cats can or can’t has. Yet despite the site's total dedication to business and professionalism, it seems that the more "social" social networks receive the bulk of the attention when it comes to using social media to attract new visitors and grow your business.

That why this week in HubSpot content was all about: LinkedIn. In this week's roundup, you'll learn all about the newest LinkedIn updates and features, what they mean for your business, and even get some advice directly from LinkedIn.

10 Ways Real Brands Spiced Up Their LinkedIn Banner Images

Just because LinkedIn is the professional network doesn’t mean you can ignore the look and feel of your LinkedIn Company Page. Such negligence would cause you to miss out on the opportunity to put your brand on display and attract qualified contacts. In this blog post, you can view a SlideShare of some of the most attractive LinkedIn banner images to inspire design ideas for your own LinkedIn Company Page.

Good News for Creepers: LinkedIn Upgrades “Who Viewed Your Profile” Feature

We all know about the “Who Viewed Your Profile" LinkedIn feature. This week, LinkedIn has started to unveil a new “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” layout which provides an even more in-depth report than before. In this installment, discover what the new tool looks like, the new features it will introduce, and how you can use them to your benefit.

Your Top Questions on “Social Selling” Answered by LinkedIn, Evernote, and HubSpot

Social selling is more than a buzzword; it’s a crucial part of how successful sales teams communicate with their leads. That’s why HubSpot, LinkedIn, and Evernote hosted a webinar this week to discuss how organizations can align their sales and marketing teams to develop the tools that make social selling work through context, content, and collaboration.

Toward the end of the webinar, three critical questions were asked regarding social selling. In this post, you'll find answers and explanations to those three common questions.

Want to Publish on LinkedIn? Now You Can

Have you ever wanted to get published on LinkedIn Pulse? Well this week, LinkedIn announced that soon, all members will be able to post on the social network’s publishing platform. Read this post to find out how publishing will work and what it will take to get your work published on LinkedIn Pulse.

A Sales & Marketing Love Story From LinkedIn & HubSpot

It can sometimes feel like marketers and salespeople are from different planets. They might have a rocky relationship or even argue with each other over lead quality, follow-up procedures, social media monitoring, and cost vs. revenue (among other things).

But is it truly a dysfunctional relationship, or simply a few minor miscommunications that, if solved, could turn their relationship into a classic love story? To find out what’s really going on, HubSpot and LinkedIn joined forces to uncover the truth. Their findings and answers are featured in this SlideShare.

What was the most interesting thing you learned this week on Inbound Hub? What do you want to see more of? Leave your feedback in the comments!

The question we should really be asking is, “what are our revenue goals and what does our marketing need to do to bring us enough conversion opportunities to make the sales hit those goals?”

Before anyone can answer this question about their business, they need to know a few things.

What Is A Conversion Opportunity?

In its simplest form, a conversion opportunity is either a phone call or email from a prospective customer, or a filled out form on your site. For retailers, it may also include someone who walks into your store.

Next, you must analyze your current marketing capabilities and financial performance. You wouldn’t fire a gun unless you knew the exact target you needed to hit – marketing is the same. Define your targets.

Almost all of the businesses I have worked with to create their marketing strategy/ plans who make under $5 Million in annual revenues were not asking this question, or performing proper analysis to clearly define their targets before I started working with them.

What To Analyze

To REALLY answer what your marketing needs to do in order to bring you enough conversion opportunities, you need to analyze the following:

• Monthly P&L (profit and loss) statements for the last 12-24 months
• Monthly marketing activities and the revenue yield of each activity
• Examine existing conversion results
• Determine the performance of top and emerging markets
• Analyze the financial yield of your existing customer base

Think about it for a moment, as you read these items did the word “marketing” jump into your mind ? Probably not. These sound more like what a management consultant might help with, right? Not so.

In today’s marketing world there are so many tools and resources businesses have at their disposal that it all becomes confusing – especially when it comes to figuring out what to include in the budget and how much to spend on each area.

You can click on the following link for our free guide: what to include in a modern day business marketing budget.

In the meantime, let’s examine what to analyze to figure out exactly how to define your marketing targets – so you have a better chance of hitting them. Read on!

What Profit & Loss, and other financial statements, will tell you about marketing

You want to measure for the cost efficiency of marketing and revenue yield trends by looking at the following.

1. Average marketing spend as a percentage of the total revenues and percentage of total expenses
2. For every $1 spent on marketing, the dollars in revenue generated
3. Breakdown the categories of marketing expenses (payroll, systems, services like SEM/SEO, PPC, print ads, content marketing)
4. All billings for each customer for the last 12-24 months (this should also include which city they are located in)
5. COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)

Most businesses who are launching a new product or service, or opening up new markets, should budget a total of 18% to 25% of their total revenues for marketing.

Established businesses who want to maintain their brand share in their existing markets should budget a total of 8% – 10% of their total revenues for marketing.

WARNING: If you are spending under 5% of your total revenue, it is likely that you are starving your marketing resources and the chances of them being successful are low.

What marketing results should we measure and what do they tell me?

The Internet has provided businesses with a lot of great tools – like Google Analytics – to measure the traffic that visits your web site.

For companies that have physical retail locations, you can measure people count using sensors. These integrate with your inventory management and sales systems to help you understand conversion on specific items on the shelf.

You can tell a lot by measuring your web site traffic. The following enables you to zero in on how well activities related to your paid ads (PPC), organic search (SEO), social promotion, print ads and local optimization (local citations and such) activities are converting.

1. Unique and New Visitors
2. Bounce Rate
3. Top referral sources
4. Source of traffic by volume and percentage
5. Unique visitors by location
6. Sales win/loss % by source

You are looking to find the sources and locations of your internet traffic – where are they and do they match where you want customers to come from (both physically and by referral source)?

If they don’t, you will need to adjust how your site is locally optimized and where you are targeting ads.

For example, if you are spending a lot of money on LinkedIn and Facebook advertising, but not on SEO (search engine optimization), and all the referrals to your site are coming from search engines (like shown below), you are not getting yield from that marketing spend.

Referrals from the direct traffic source indicate that the marketing you are doing which lists your URL may be working because visitors are typing your URL directly into the browser and not using a search engine to find you.

This could also be a result from good branding – which internet marketing also impacts. Understanding these basic metrics helps you determine your most profitable marketing tactics.

What does combining marketing activity and financial analysis tell me?

Now, put it all together to get a clear picture of what your marketing campaigns are giving you. You need to understand revenue yield (or ROI) on how you are spending your marketing budget, and if it is paying off how, and where, you need it to.

Measure the following at minimum to determine

1. Revenue per referral source
2. Average Revenue per Customer
3. Average Revenue per Market
4. Cost per New Conversion
5. Cost per New Customer

What should I communicate to my marketing team?

As the owner or executive of a company, in order to enable absolute clarity and focus from your marketing team, you should communicate the following as goals.

• We need to bring in X new conversion opportunities at a cost of $Y per opportunity
• Our average revenue per Customer needs to be at least $A
• We need to grow B and C markets by Z% given our average revenue per Customer
• Our total revenue goal for this period (year, quarter, month) is $D revenues

This is very different than telling your marketing resources to go get more leads, so we can increase revenues.

It’s important to be clear on your revenue goals. Not sure where to go from here? Fannit helps companies work through this process, making sure their marketing spend is pointed at the right target(s) and is efficient.

Your company may be executing in all the inbound marketing areas such as social media, email and content creation. Your social following may be growing, email subscribers increasing and website ranking rising in search engine results. But at the end of the day, we all want to hold our marketing responsible for bottom-line results. We want to know how all of it is contributing to revenue growth.

But the challenge with calculating B2B marketing return is that marketing isn’t responsible for closing sales. It’s responsible for providing qualified, ready-to-buy contacts to sales teams. So unless these two departments are aligned, you’re going to have trouble holding marketing accountable for hard dollars.

If you’re having trouble with this, it may be because you’ve skipped the three initial steps to aligning marketing efforts to sales goals. Fear not, though, because we’re sharing what we’ve found puts companies back in control of aligning these two departments.

The First Three Steps To Aligning Marketing & Sales

1. Buyer personas. We all know that marketing and sales need to agree who the buyers are. But too often companies put off having a meeting that is dedicated to defining and documenting buyers’ traits. You can’t assume that everyone agrees on these characteristics. The information has to be continuously updated and made available to your teams. Marketing and sales departments, and the people within those departments, will continue to butt heads until they openly agree on whom they’re targeting and how to do so effectively.

2. Lead scoring. We often use the term “lead” in reference to a potential buyer. But that’s pretty vague when we consider the different stages a prospect goes through during the B2B buyer’s journey. Marketing and sales teams need to agree on how to define a potential buyer based on what stage of the buying process he is in. They also must agree on what signals a prospect will provide to show he’s ready to move on to the next stage of the process. This helps marketing know when to pass a potential buyer to sales and when to keep nurturing him. Once it’s decided how to score leads, much of the nurturing process can be executed online with the use of marketing automation software.

3. Brand message document. This is a document to help you define and differentiate your brand in a way that resonates powerfully with customers, prospects, employees and other key audiences. Essentially, it helps you manage and focus how your brand message is communicated. While the creation of this document is one of the most important steps to aligning your marketing and sales efforts, it’s oftentimes left out of the process.

If your marketing and sales teams don’t have a concise understanding of what the brand message is, they’re going to be sending a lot of mixed, sometimes outright contradictory messages. Marketing will be tweeting one thing, sales will be emailing another, and before a potential buyer completes his journey through the buying process he will be confused. Even worse, the inconsistencies in your messaging may lose you new business.

Communication Is Key

Communication is key to any relationship. Marketing and sales must work as one unit to build a relationship with potential buyers. They must act and communicate according to the brand they represent. When this alignment is accomplished, you’ll be able to more accurately measure the efforts of your marketing.

LinkedIn connects marketers to millions of affluent, ambitious, and influential professionals.

The undisputed leader in business and career-oriented social networking, LinkedIn’s valuable demographic is sought after by marketers. It can help you grow professionally and improve your organization’s networking effectiveness. From contact management to tracking marketing campaigns, the LinkedIn tools below will help you leverage the platform to its full potential.

8 great LinkedIn tools for business

1. SlideShare

Owned by LinkedIn, SlideShare is an easy way to share your expertise. You can create webinars, embed YouTube videos, and upload your sales and marketing presentations, PDFs, portfolios, and conference presentations. Just connect to your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles to broadcast your thought leadership.

2. OFunnel

OFunnel is like Google Alerts for relationships. This cool app alerts you when someone in your LinkedIn network makes new connections. If you’ve ever used the “Saved Searches” feature, you’ll find that OFunnel is more robust. It’s also a great replacement for the LinkedIn RSS service, which was retired late last year. This app is particularly helpful for salespeople who are looking to manage relationships and gain entry to new accounts.

3. SyncME

Yearning for a unified contact list? SyncME synchronizes your smartphone with your connections’ latest photos, email addresses, and phone numbers. Whenever one of them changes something on their profile, such as their job title, the app automatically syncs with LinkedIn and Facebook — no action required on your part. You can see their photos full-screen when they call you, and you can select how you appear on their phones when you call them via the use of a mobile business card.

4. LinkedIn Pulse

LinkedIn Pulse is a visual feed that sends you news, social network updates, and RSS, magazine, and blog feeds to your smartphone. It enables you to customize your news reading experience, explore content, and share stories to your favorite social platforms. Sign in with your LinkedIn account to sync what you’re already following, save articles, and join the conversation.

5. Oktopost

Oktopost is designed for B2B social-media marketers. It distributes content and helps you manage and track the metrics of social campaigns and review/reply to all comments across social networks via one interface. It also captures leads and integrates them with Salesforce.com, Marketo, and HubSpot.

6. Five Hundred Plus

Five Hundred Plus is an app that uses LinkedIn to help you make the most of your connections. Inspired by CRM (customer relationship management) tools, it help you track when you were last in touch with someone someone in your network and when you should get back in touch so they don’t forget you.

7. Outlook Social Connector

Outlook Social Connector synchronizes your LinkedIn contact data with Outlook, helping you obtain information about your friends and colleagues and see their status updates from other networks. It can also display a quick view of related Outlook content — conversations, meetings, and shared attachments — when you click on one of their email messages.

8. Connection Timeline

Connection Timeline visualizes your LinkedIn connections in a three-dimensional timeline that implicitly groups your connections into a social graph. It helps you you reconnect with old contacts and grow your network based on degrees of separation.

Inside sales managers — if you haven’t had a chance to read or digest it yet, you need to take a look at Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace survey (there’s a link at the bottom of this article). 

The big takeaway from the report is that, worldwide, only 13% of employees can be described as actively “engaged” at work – innovating, moving the company forward, and feeling connected to the company. And the rest:

• 63% are “not engaged” — just getting through each day as easily as possible, doing time like a prisoner but not really contributing anything else.
• 24% are “actively disengaged” — undermining what other workers accomplish, monopolizing managers’ time, having more on-the-job accidents, stealing from the company, etc.

US engagement rates are higher, but we still have 54% at the Not Engaged level and 18% at Actively Disengaged. That’s a total of 72%  who don’t really want to be there. Not good.

Marketing expert and Forbes contributor Michael Brenner recently commented on this report, pointing out some issues that have a lot to say to managers. According to the report, companies with high engagement:

• Make employee engagement an important goal for all managers
• Select leaders based on their ability to effectively manage people
• Measure engagement in realistic ways that are meaningful to individuals
• Have measurement activity that leads to actions
• Provide training and coaching for company managers on effective employee management

That last bullet point is HUGE, people! The opportunity for sales organizations to kill their numbers is staring everybody right in the face: train your managers on targeted employee engagement skills!

The overwhelming majority of inside sales managers were promoted because they were successful reps. Everyone knows that a great rep doesn’t necessarily make a great manager — different job, different skills. But these newbie managers were provided with next-to-nothing in the way of leadership training.

Skills improvement has to include managers. Imagine if your organization looked as hard at finding training for their managers as they do for their reps . . .

It’s that time of the year when you should — look into sales management training today!

You can download and read Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report here.

The post Your Most Valuable Business Asset: Trained Managers appeared first on TeleSmart Communications.

Potential customers' Twitter profiles are full of clues that will help you figure out how to sell to them. Here's what to look for.

Most companies (and individuals) tend to think of Twitter as a way to push information. However, it's also possible to use Twitter as a sales tool, rather than a marketing tool.

Unlike LinkedIn, Twitter isn't really set up to create lists of leads or potential customers. Where Twitter is useful is after you've already identified an individual to whom you want to sell.

Here's what you can learn from examining a potential customer's Twitter profile:

1. What the potential customer tends to focus upon.

A person's tweets, retweets, and favorites provide a running commentary on what the tweeter believes to be important enough or interesting enough to share.

When you look down that list, you are walking backward through the tweeter's days, weeks, and months. You're getting snapshots of the tweeter's personality.

For example, from looking at Guy Kawasaki's most recent tweet (I wrote this at around noon Eastern on Feb. 20), I now know that he likes unusual desserts.

That type of personal information can obviously be very useful in sales situations. If I had a meeting with Guy, for instance, I might suggest that we meet at boutique dessert spot, or, if the meeting were at my office, have such a dessert catered in.

2. Who the potential customer finds interesting.

The list of people whom the tweeter is following is a map of how the tweeter perceives the world. People listen follow individuals and companies whom they want on their radar.

For example, right now, in another window, I'm looking at the "following" list of a fairly famous executive. Based on the profile portraits, the list seems have a greater than random selection of young, attractive women.

Under the circumstances, I think it's fair to say that the executive in question tends to be a visual thinker. Therefore, if I were selling to him, I would be certain to use strong visual cues in any conversation or presentation.

More prosaically, there are a number of companies on his list that fall into the "vendor" category in his industry. That's also useful to know, especially if I sense that I'm getting into a competitive situation.

3. Your potential customer's likely customers.

A tweeter's list of followers generally consists of people to whom the tweeter sells or would like to sell. At the very least, they're the people to whom the tweeter is "selling" their tweets, a fact that presumably reflects the tweeter's business model.

For example, right now I'm looking at a small company CEO with about 500 followers. By simply scanning her list, I can see the companies and individuals to whom she is either selling or intending to sell.

And that would be really useful information if I were intending to sell to her, because, as a general rule, when you understand your potential customer's customers, you're more likely to position your offering in a meaningful way.

4. The inside track with the potential customer.

As everyone knows, it's much easier to develop a new customer when you've got a personal introduction or recommendation from somebody who knows you (i.e. a referral).

So, suppose you discover a colleague or a current customer of yours among either the potential customer's followers or people whom the customer is following.

Bingo! You now have the inside track, according to SEO consultant Kumail Hemani, who suggests the following:

Send them an email and tell them you have a satisfied customer that their company is following on Twitter. Further explain how long they have been your customer, what you did for them, and what that customer says about you. This "bandwagon effect" establishes trust and helps your potential customer relate to your services.

I might add that this method is even more effective if you have your customer or colleague do the emailing for you.

What's more, if you do decide to send that email yourself, you can use what you've learned in the previous three steps to craft an email that's more likely to get a response.

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In some ways, business-to-consumer content marketing is a fairly easy sell. Business owners know that customers and potential customers hang out on Facebook and on Twitter, and they understand that they need to have a presence there as well. Business-to-business content marketing is a slightly different matter, and many corporate leaders have been skeptical about the need to use social channels to reach out to other companies.

Thankfully, this is changing. A number of major brands are using social media to reach out to other businesses—with General Electric being one clear example. Large companies and small companies alike are waking up to the fact that, even in the context of B2B relationships, content marketing can help build brand awareness, increase brand equity, and generate leads.

There are a number of compelling statistics to validate and verify this trend. Social Media B2B reports that B2B companies that blog generate 67 percent more leads than those that don’t. The Content Marketing Institute, meanwhile, affirms that close to 80 percent of B2B companies now employ content marketing to increase brand awareness.

The question is how is it done? How can your business get started with B2B content marketing?

It Starts with Planning

We say this all the time, but it is vital to invest in a strategic plan rather than jumping right into content marketing. Think about your content marketing goals—i.e., to increase sales—and the specific ways in which you will seek to reach those goals—i.e., by growing LinkedIn connections or establishing effective online webinars. Think about your core strategy: Will you seek to establish your company as an industry authority, or as an inexpensive alternative to a larger competitor? Also contemplate your specific methodology; do you need to post to LinkedIn every day? Is Facebook a worthwhile investment for your company?

The Right Platforms

This last point is an important one: Not all B2B companies will need to employ the very same content marketing platforms. All B2B companies are going to want to invest in LinkedIn, which is just essential: It’s the place where strong B2B relationships are formed. Beyond that, everything is open to debate: Many B2B companies profit from a Twitter presence; the same could be said of Facebook, Pinterest, and the rest. In the end, though, companies need to customize strategies that meet their particular goals.

Put a Team in Place

B2B companies need to ensure that they have a strong team in place to actually carry out their content marketing duties. Content is not going to write or post itself—so who’s going to do it? It probably shouldn’t be the summer intern or a temp, because you need your content to strongly reflect the company’s values and identity. The CEO, meanwhile, is likely too busy to handle content marketing tasks. Finding the right person for the job—or outsourcing to a content marketing firm—is essential.

Varieties of Content

Of course, content marketing is also going to require the creation of some content—but what kind? This is something else to include in your company’s content marketing strategy. Do your company’s services lend themselves to explanatory YouTube videos? Do you have visually appealing products you can market with Instagram or Pinterest photos? Will how-to blog posts and informative tweets help sell your products and services?

Think critically here: The content you create reflects the core identity of your company, and will make or break your efforts to reach out to other businesses. At Grammar Chic, we are ready and eager to assist in content strategizing, creation, and distribution. To learn more, visit www.grammarchic.net or call 803-831-7444.

A good selection of photos this week with a lot of interesting angles. I'm sure we could have run the entire contest on the Lions Gate Bridge alone. So thanks to everyone who shot something different!

Excerpt from the article by KISSmetrics:
"Writing great copy is one of the most useful skills a marketer can develop. After all, copy is a key element of successful internet marketing across the board, from emails with sky-high open rates to blog posts that get shared hundreds or even thousands of times.

Masterful copywriting plays a big part in the difference between a website that converts like crazy and one that simply falls flat, failing to engage potential customers.

This resource guide provides links that will give you a strong foundation for writing great web copy.
Here are the main sections of the article:

• E-books, Articles, Infographics, and Guides to Get You Started with Web Copywriting;
• Must-Read Books on Direct Response Marketing and Copywriting;
• Copywriting Courses;
• The Best Websites and Blogs about Copywriting;
• How to Write Amazing Headlines;
• How to Write Phenomenal CTAs (Call to Actions);
• SEO Copywriting – How-To’s, Tips, and Best Practices;
• How to Write E-commerce Copy that Sells;
• Conversion Copywriting and Landing Pages;

These 75 resources should be enough to get you started on your way to becoming a web copy samurai..."

Each section is analyzed with detailed resources and and external links. Read full original article:
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/75-copywriting-resources/

What would you do if your company leadership landed you with a big hairy audacious goal of increasing leads by 2000%? Run for cover? Start putting out feelers in the job market? You’d probably think they were completely out of touch with reality. How could you possible achieve such an absurd goal? The truth is the data shows this is one goal you can achieve with well-orchestrated business-to-business telemarketing.

It just takes a step-by-step process to pre-qualify leads on the Internet, and respond to the crème de la crème quickly. How quickly? Within 5 minutes.

And where does the magic of the 5-minute response-time come from? Here’s the proof: actual data from the InsideSales.com system. When they traced 6 companies that had generated over 15,000 leads and 100,000 call attempts, they made a couple of remarkable discoveries:

• When companies respond to Web leads within 5 minutes, they are 900% more likely to reach them.
• The likelihood of qualifying a lead called within 5 minutes is 21 times greater (there’s that 2000%) than if you wait 30 minutes. And don’t think that 10 minutes is good enough. You’re 4 times more likely to qualify a lead when you pick up the phone and dial in 5 minutes, than if you slack off just a bit and call in 10 minutes.

Bottom line? It’s time to speed up your internal processes and dial your most promising leads ASAP. You’re probably thinking that’s easier said than done. True. But it can be done. Here’s how.

Automate It

First, invest in the latest in marketing automation platform that can help you to capture leads, pre-qualify them, and prioritize them; for example, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot or Act-On.

Next, define a qualified lead. Then, create a form within the automation platform to ask a series of questions every time someone signs up for any of your offers, such as white papers, e-books, and webinars. Design the questions so the answers can help to pre-qualify the lead by telling you whether a lead has the budget for your product or solution, the authority to buy it, the need for it, and the desire to purchase it in the short term. The automation platform will score leads based on these criteria and push the red-hot ones to the top of the list.

Integrate It

It’s no good having scorching-hot leads hanging out in your marketing automation platform until the end of the day when you download them. By then they’ve lost their sizzle. So you need to create a bridge from your marketing automation platform into your customer relationship management (CRM) system that enables your company to distribute leads to your inside sales reps or teleservices company immediately for follow up.

Follow Up in Five

Now, set a policy for following up in five minutes on the ripe-and-ready leads—those with the highest lead scores. To carry out the policy you’ll need enough phone sales people to take care of the calls in five minutes.

Remember, you’ll need to prepare for those times when the leads are flooding in due to a new offer, and assure that bottlenecks don’t occur. If you can’t handle this internally, you can always opt for a reputable teleservices company to take care of the calls. Because they have more capacity, they can be more flexible, and able to meet the peaks and troughs of demand for call-backs.

So get your business-to-business telemarketing processes, systems and people aligned to respond in 5 minutes, and create more qualified leads than you ever thought possible.

For information about how 3D2B can help you with response management call +1 718-709-0900 or +39 06 978 446 60 (EMEA).

There’s no better way to reach thousands of potential customers than with a great online presence, and to build that presence, you need a proven, workable online marketing strategy. Marketing your business online requires some knowledge and some effort, but you don’t have to be an expert to make it work. Here are a few online marketing strategies that are easy to implement and get results.

Create Focused Content:

So many online marketers use an approach that comes down to throwing a bunch of mud against a wall and seeing what sticks. General content may get you some traffic, but you’re not likely to turn those leads into actual sales. Instead, understand your target audience and create online content that’s specifically suited to your future customers’ needs and interests. You may get fewer total clicks, but more of those clicks will turn into revenue.

Integrate With Existing Efforts:

One of the simplest ways to stretch your marketing budget is to make sure that your separate marketing efforts build on each other. This can be as simple as printing your website’s URL on your business cards or as complex as holding special online promotions that are redeemable at your physical store location. Whenever one marketing effort reinforces another, you’re essentially getting extra publicity for free.

Use Contests and Prizes:

There’s nothing like the possibility of a tangible reward to keep people coming back to your website. Hold weekly or monthly promotions and use your whole online presence to build hype. Visitors will constantly check your website to see if they’ve won, and if the prizes are good enough, you’ll build plenty of positive buzz.

Use Customer-Facing Blogging:

Customers love blog posts that help them, not purely promotional content that talks up your company. Use informational articles, how-to posts and frequently asked questions to bring customers back. In addition to feeling like they’re getting something of value from your company, readers will start to see you as a legitimate expert in your field.

Invite Feedback:

Wherever you are on the Internet, plan on opening a dialogue with your customers. Read and respond to comments on social media and have a dedicated contact page on your website. Following up on feedback helps your readers feel valued and builds trust. As a bonus, you may find that some of those suggestions actually help you improve your business.

You may want to check out our new free eBook for more insight on online marketing.