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This post originally appeared on Inbound Insiders, a new section of HubSpot's Inbound Marketing Blog.

Opinions are like blogs: Everyone has one.

In fact, most of the business world has finally caught on to the fact that in order to succeed in a post-outbound world, you need great content.

But what happens once everyone has caught on and businesses are blogging simply to stay healthy, kinda like eating their green beans?

What happens is you get a ton of boring, uninspired, mediocre content polluting your RSS feed.

As Maximus famously proclaims in Gladiator, “Are you not entertained?! Is this not why you are here?”

Well, no.

We’re here to be inspired, right? I mean, I’m not talking the last twenty minutes of Rudy inspired, but rather inspired to read more, and maybe buy something. We have a challenge. A question. A need or even a want. And we're looking for that moment of inspiration to help make our purchase decision easier.

Somewhere along the way of this mass information age, many forgot this. They forgot that storytelling is the main ingredient for inspiration.

It’s why we cry at the end of Forrest Gump. It’s why we cheer at the end of Rocky (all six of them). It’s also why some of us buy Dunkin’ Donuts over Starbucks (or vice versa).

We’re here to be told a story. And in the process, be inspired to take action or behave in certain ways. And while storytelling goes far beyond just your blog posts, it’s often your most shared resource; therefore, it’s the best place to start.

Story vs. Article

Let's consider the difference between marketers and journalists. Journalists remove themselves from articles to ensure objectivity -- but marketers? Marketers should be inserting themselves into their stories. That's what differentiates an article, from a story.

Great brand stories are not objective. In fact, the most successful ones are highly subjective.

Is Snapple really made from the best stuff on earth? Of course not. However, millions of people buy into this story every single day.

Shift your focus from writing articles to telling more stories. Start by asking yourself, "What am I trying to accomplish for my customers?" Then consult your buyer personas and focus on key personality traits to identify the type of tone and language that will be most effective at appealing to them.

Get creative. Insert yourself into each story. Detail your experiences.

This makes you and your brand much more relatable. 

Hyperbole vs. Jargon

Often we get caught up in those industry buzz phrases we think are necessary in order to attract business.

"Achieve Your Goals and Experience an ROI."

... As opposed to those other companies that vow to not achieve your goals and guarantee no ROI?

No company is saying that. As a result, we all end up saying the same thing. How are you supposed to separate yourself from the competition with a strategy like that?

No one understands this concept better than the household brands we all know and love. Part of the reason we do know and love them is because we identify with their story.

Does America really run on Dunkin'?

Is Folgers really the best part of waking up?

Probably not. However, we buy into these stories because of the way they make us feel.

A healthy dose of hyperbole never hurt anyone. In fact, it's highly effective in telling a remarkable story and differentiating your brand.

Experience vs. Words

Stories don't always have to be about words.

In fact, great storytelling encompasses your entire brand experience, not simply what is written about or said.

Take Starbucks, for instance -- I know, I know, I've got caffeine on the mind -- who goes after an entirely different audience than Dunkin' Donuts. This effectively separates them from an already massively successful brand. Starbucks targets a more affluent audience and aims to create a more high-end, "our barista remembers the way you like your coffee," type of atmosphere. Everything from the furnishings, to minimal drive-thrus, to a menu most people have a hard time pronouncing, stays consistent with the overall story.

Starbucks customers are willing to wait a little longer. They're even willing to pay a little more.

Is the coffee that much different? Or is it the story and experience these particular customers are buying? It's certainly debatable, however, these two massively successful coffee chains have managed to dominate completely separate markets and attract two different audiences all through the act of storytelling.

So while many of us may not be able to match their marketing budgets and overall reach, we can certainly learn a lot from the manner in which household brands separate themselves from the noise with hyperbolic, unique brand stories.

Developing Your Story

In developing a unique story, consider your buyer personas and focus on both personality and behavioral traits in order to develop a story that resonates.

Who are you trying to attract?

How can you tell a story that inspires them to act?

This story will be the core of your entire marketing strategy.

Your story shouldn't be about what you sell, but rather how you sell it.

This is a guest post by John Bonini (@Bonini84), marketing director at IMPACT Branding & Design. Visit the IMPACT Blog for more content from John and the agency.

As a small business, I’m sure you are finding that having a strong presence on the web is becoming ever more important.  Especially with the rise of mobile phone technology, customers can look for your service or product when they are ready to make a purchase.  If they don’t find you in their search, or hear about you in their social networks, you lose the sale.

One of the best and safest ways to get your small business website noticed by search engines is to provide regular, quality content on your site.  Above and beyond your product or service descriptions and white papers, this also means a variety of news and information that are relevant to your customers.  This is called Content Marketing, and it is becoming the key focus of marketing for businesses big and small.  Content curation is a key part of this effort, and focuses on finding articles and information related to your business that provide value to your clients.

Why Content Marketing?

While you can write about your products and services, how they can help your customers and discuss use cases and tips, you also need to come up with content that is not just about you.  This content could include news about your industry, trends in your city, news and ideas about items related to your product or service, maybe new technology that may impact your products or services in the future.  This has several advantages.

• You build authority by discussing and reviewing overall trends in your industry or niche.
• You are providing new content that your customers value, and they’ll come back to your site to read it.
• Search engines see a wider range of content and keywords that makes your site look deeper and authoritative
• Search engines see regular, new content showing up on your site, and they love active sites.

Content Curation

Finding this related content is what Content Curation is all about.  There are people already writing about your industry or niche, many of them great writers with a large following.  Finding the best of these sources and articles and bringing them to your site for your clients is the focus of content curation.  Some examples of how small businesses might use curation include:

•  A real estate agency that posts interesting articles on the local community
• A local fashion retailer bringing the latest trends to their site
• A law firm highlighting articles on how new tax laws may affect their clients
• A valve company keeping up with trends in their main niche of water treatment plants

To make this effective, you need to add your comments and opinions about the articles and news you post – and always provide an attribution link to the original article.  Start with a paragraph about why you think this is valuable for your clients.  As you get in a routine, you can start to expand your writing.  Maybe you write a longer discussion of how this trend will affect your clients business.  You could also post quotes from several articles and discuss the difference between their viewpoints.

The more you personalize and write your own discussions, the more effective content curation will become for your site.  It is your voice that not only builds authority and engagement with your clients and prospects, it is what also creates ‘valuable’ content in the eyes of the search engines.

Content Curation Tools make it Easier

To help make this more efficient, or speed it up, it helps to have some curation tools. Sites such as Scoop.it or Storify can help you organize your curation. They make it easy to get started as well as plug you into a network of other curators. If you want to focus your curation and later creation efforts on your blog or marketing site, you might use a tool such as the MyCurator content curation plugin for WordPress blogs. These tools can help bring an efficient, repeatable process to your curation efforts.

Most tools provide the most support to the discovery process.  They search the web for content relevant to your niche or business.  With MyCurator for example, the articles found are automatically created with an excerpt, image if found, title and attribution to the original source in a private section on your blog.  You can update the quote or excerpt by just clicking on relevant paragraphs of the full article text available in the WordPress editor.  Similarly images that are included in the article can be added to your curated post with a click.

Of course, it will now be up to you to start writing a short discussion of why you think this article or post is important – no tool will make that easier!  Start small though, and focus on getting an article curated once or twice a week.  After a few weeks, you can start expanding your writing and discussion.

To help you with longer curated discussions and even writing your own content, you may want to save several articles found by your tool for later.  If your curation tool doesn’t have that feature, a product like Evernote can be a great way to save material.  MyCurator has a Notebook feature built in that lets you save important articles found by MyCurator for later use.  You may then easily add the full text of all the articles in your Notebook into  your editor as you create a post.  From their you can easily click to copy quotes, images and attribution into your new piece.

Curated Resources for Further Learning

After getting a few curated posts under your belt, you may want to dive a little deeper into the how and why of curation.  I’ve gathered some of my favorites for further research, but you will find there is a wealth of writing out there on this topic.

The first post to read is the most referenced discussion of content curation by Beth Kanter:

Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme.  The work  involves  sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information.  A content curator cherry picks the best content that is important and relevant to share with their community. It isn’t unlike what a museum curator does to produce an exhibition:   They identify the theme, they provide the context, they decide which paintings to hang on the wall, how they should be annotated, and how they should be displayed for the public.

View Original at www.bethkanter.org

As mentioned in this article, curation is just one aspect of producing content for your site.  This article has 5 tips on building content for small businesses:

Just because you don’t have the marketing budget of Nike or an army of copywriters at your disposal, however, doesn’t mean you can’t produce enough content for your small business. While you’re competitors scramble to blast out content at the expense of important business matters, you can produce enough content for your audience without having to sleep under your desk at night and/or write blog posts in the shower.

View Original at www.business2community.com

 This is a great list of ideas for content curation, from where to find articles to what type of content to curate:

Curation is not an opt-out or quick fix. It happens over time. When a brand does a good job of defining what it stands for, demonstrating a commitment to an editorial calendar that remains on-topic will play a powerful part in building consumer trust online. Of course it cannot exist in isolation, being active in relevant social networks, industry events and of course originating your own content play a part. Curation can play the central role in creating awareness and credibility when it’s well integrated. It could be that as much as 80% of your content can be curated too, it’d depend on your marketing objectives and strategy.

 View Original at www.smartinsights.com

Finally, a great discussion of why curation expands your approach to prospects from just sales to offering solutions to their problems:

Brands need to look beyond themselves because in order to integrate their company and content into the lives of their target audience, they have to answer a need or want. Their is an expectation that digital content goes far beyond marketing messages; you can thank all the savvy marketers before you for that. Now, many brands are quite adept at generating their own unique content that connects back to the business in a more tangential way. However, there is an additional way to widen your content scope to complement your original content and become known for more than simply provider of product XYZ – content curation.

View Original at fanboom.net

This article was originally published on www.target-info.net

(Credit: BitLock)

Hauling a u-lock around is bad enough, and keeping track of its key can also be a headache. Is there a better solution?

One approach is BitLock, a keyless lock controlled by your smartphone that lets you set up a public or private bike-sharing network.

Developed by San Francisco startup Mesh Motion, BitLock launched Tuesday with a Kickstarter campaign aimed at raising $120,000.

When you're within a few feet of BitLock, the Bluetooth link senses your iOS or Android smartphone and lets you unlock your bike with the push of a button.

Related stories

• Do you need a 'black box' camera for your bike?
• Track your stolen wheels with BikeSpike
• Turntable Rider turns your bike into a DJ mixer

To lock it, you press the button again.

That's easy enough, but BitLock's networking capabilities make it interesting.

With the BitLock app, you can give frien... [Read more]

Related Links:
Cyclist bikes across SF Bay, no bridge required
Charity Miles turns your workout into a charitable donation
Customize Notification Center on lock screen with iOS 7
August smart lock, from Yves Behar, to ship in Q1 2014
Distracted? Giant MyFocus button blocks all your messages

This post answers the most persistent question facing HR leaders who support Sales organizations. “How can HR help Sales Make the Number?”

In a word, become more Agile. This post focuses on 10 areas where HR can make a positive impact. I also offer the Agile HR Leader’s Scorecard. It’s a convenient tool to assess HR’s support for sales. It includes links to resources for each area of opportunity. To get your copy, simply register for this year’s Annual Tour here.

How Sales Support Becomes Agile

HR’s focus is on attraction, retention and development of human capital. Partnering with Sales presents unique challenges. The pace of change is dictated by new buying practices and an accelerated decision timeline. Buyers are increasingly more educated and self-sufficient. At the same time, competitors are advancing the evolution of the sales role. Everyone is racing to adapt to new buying behaviors. Agility is the key to success.

10 Dimensions of Agile HR Leadership

1. Recruiting – LinkedIn has changed everything. Agile HR leaders connect with candidates in the places where they are already spending time. Social media have evolved as the most potent recruiting channel.  Example: A recruiter monitors "A" players who work for competitors. She mines their LinkedIn profiles for new connections to other top performers.
2. Mobile Reach – Communications must be formatted to engage tablet and smartphone users. Recruiting and employee engagement initiatives are most successful when they are mobile-friendly. Example: The annual employment engagement survey was formatted for smartphone response. Employees were able complete it while waiting in line for morning coffee. The result was record high response rates. 
3. Social Selling Profiles – The LinkedIn profiles of the sales team must shift from an online résumé to a powerful selling tool. Enable sales teams to communicate their value to buyers when they aren't present.  Example: An HR leader conducted an audit of sales reps' profiles. Then he led a workshop to help enhance their profiles. The result was an increase in appointments accepted by prospects.  
4. Social Networking – Lead by example in social networking. Expand relationships with potential candidates and professional colleagues. Who you know is more important than what you know. Example: An HR leader joined the LinkedIn group "Linked:HR." He participated in discussions that yielded ideas he used to solve a turnover problem.
5. Agile Onboarding – Traditional strategies of Learning & Development stifle rapid new hire development. Sequenced and layered content are the keys to quick ramp to productivity. Example: By changing the flow of the new hire curriculum, sales reps retained more knowledge. And they produced sales results sooner.
6. Upgrading Legacy Talent - Ensure legacy sales talent does not become obsolete. Keep "A Players" fresh and competitive with social and mobile skills. Example: An initiative to teach Social Selling invigorated a tenured sales force. They found new ways to connect with prospects and customers.
7. High Performance Teams – Utilize small teams to solve problems while developing talent. Build a culture of collaboration and success with cross-functional project teams. Example: A cross-functional team streamlined the pricing exception process. Sales reps were actively engaged with IT to bring the Voice of the Customer.
8. Employee Engagement with Gamification – Overcome the isolation of remote workers with fun and teamwork. Turn the CRM system into a competitive arena with scoreboards and prizes. Example: A sales team embedded the monthly sales blitz contest in the CRM system. Activity reported in the system nearly doubled compared with manual activity tracking. 
9. Internal Social Communications – Join the sales team on-line. Listen, engage and collaborate with internal social media like Salesforce.com’s Chatter or Yammer + Microsoft Dynamics. Example: By reading and posting regularly in Chatter, an HR business partner built credibility. The result was that her opinion was sought more often by the sales team. 
10. Thought Leadership – HR business partners maximize value to Sales when they understand trends and best practices. Example: An HR leader built a reputation as an expert in Sales. He began by regularly reading and forwarding online articles to Sales colleagues.   

Take an Agile Step Forward Today

Technology has leveled the playing field for most Sales and HR leaders. Social media platforms, cloud-based CRM, and chat are pervasive. Mobile devices allow access to every resource from any location.

Competitors all have similar tools. But few have figured out how to take advantage of this landscape loaded with promise. The race is on. Those who are most Agile in adapting will thrive. The rest will struggle to copy and keep pace.

An Agile approach requires a holistic view of sales effectiveness. Sales leaders are not experts in Human Resources. Re-shaping a sales force depends on the coordinated efforts of the sales leader and HR business partner.

Take action now. The Agile HR Leader's Scorecard is a convenient tool that lets you:

• Assess your current state
• Link to ideas and tools to address areas to be more Agile

Sign up for SBI's Research Tour and receive your free copy of the scorecard. You'll also receive dozens of other valuable sales force effectiveness tools. 

In just a few minutes, you’ll have an assessment of your current program. Uncover areas of opportunity in your HR programs. A more Agile approach will build the momentum you need to Make the Number. 

Author: John Kenney

Follow @jdkenney

Follow @MakingTheNumber

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All those wearable devices hitting the market are going to make a lot of people flithy rich.

The wearable devices industry, which includes smart watches and glasses, will be worth $19 billion by 2018. That’s a big jump over the $1.4 billion the industry is expected to pull in this year, according to Juniper Research, which produced the numbers.

Why such massive growth? Juniper points to two factors: consumer demand and the rise of subscription services.

The latter is particularly key. While most wearables are being sold solely as devices right now, it won’t be long until every wearable maker also offers a separate service component to generate recurring revenue. Consider devices like the Filip, a kid-friendly smartwatch that can also make phone calls. By teaming up with AT&T, Filip is creating an extra revenue stream that goes beyond just device sales.

In other words, hardware + demand + services = $19 billion.

Juniper’s Research comes not long after fellow research company Berg Insight estimated that wearable device sales will climb to 64 million by 2017.

“A perfect storm of innovation within low power wireless connectivity, sensor technology, big data, cloud services, voice user interfaces, and mobile computing power is coming together and paves the way for connected wearable technology,” Berg analyst Johan Svanberg wrote earlier this month.

The two research firms, it seems, are very much on the same page.

Svanberg, however, took Berg Insight’s observations further and argued that, in order for the wearable industry to see those big numbers, companies first have to create multipurpose devices that can also stand on their own.

The point is a valid one. One of the biggest issues with Samsung’s Galaxy Gear (which we aren’t fond of) is that the device needs to be connected into a smartphone in order be truly useful.

But does the rise of multipurpose devices also that mean we’ll see fewer devices like the new Nike+ Fuelband SE, which is very good at fitness tracking but not much else? Probably not.

As success with social selling continues to grow, sales professionals will find it crucial to turn to social media as a way of generating leads and reaching their sales goals. The process may seem daunting, but setting up optimized social sales profiles on social networks is actually fairly similar to setting up a social media account for any other purpose. There are just a few tips you’ll want to keep in mind in regards to taking your account from social to social sales. Read on for suggestions that will help you optimize your Twitter account for social selling.

1. Profile Picture

Not adding a profile picture on Twitter can lead other users to view your profile as a spam account, ensuring that you will never reach your full potential of followers. Instead, be sure to add a professional and appropriate-looking photo of yourself. If you have a LinkedIn profile you may want to use the same image to give a vibe of consistency across your social presence. Remember to make sure the photo you choose is appropriately sized as Twitter’s avatars are fairly small and can be hard to see.

2. Bio

While it is important not to be perceived as too “salesy” on social media, using your bio as a way of describing your job, company, or the products you sell can be a great way to generate potential leads. Be sure to use 2-3 keywords that relate to your field and the products you are selling. This will improve your search rankings, helping you to be found when prospects search for these terms on Twitter.

Remember to fill out each area of your bio. You may only have 160 characters with which to describe yourself and your purpose on Twitter, but you can use the “location” area to appeal to local prospects and include a link that leads followers to more relevant information such as a your company’s website or blog.

3. Content

There is a fine line you need to respect when sharing content on Twitter. Sharing too much information about your company or products may come off as spam to other users, causing them to unfollow you. Instead, make sure that at least 70 percent of the content you are sharing is about general industry trends, news, and other content that your general audience may find interesting. The other 30 percent of y0ur content may have direct relevance to your company and products, but should include Twitter-specific language such as relevant hashtags and dynamic links to more information.

4. Hashtags

Hashtags are a great way to increase the number of impressions your posts receive and to get information in front of users who are interested in the topics you are discussing. Make a list of 10-12 hashtags that are relevant to your industry, company, or the products you sell. Using your discretion, include 1-2 of these hashtags in each of your tweets. Make sure the hashtags you choose to include are already receiving traffic used on Twitter by performing a quick search to see how often they are used and if their current use aligns with the definition you assigned them.

5. Interaction

When it comes to Twitter, pushing out information is not enough to generate leads. You also need to be interacting. Retweeting and responding to content in your “Tweets” feed can help you take cold leads to warm leads, which will help increase your sales success. Engaging in interactions will also make your profile more robust, increasing your search rankings and growing your network size.

6. Stop Auto Direct Messaging

It may seem like a good idea to automatically engage with users when they follow you, but Twitter users are becoming increasingly displeased with automated direct messages that have no apparent relevance to their needs. Instead, take a few moments to write a personalized tweet that thanks your new follow and engages them in a sincere and personal way.

You’ve heard the saying, “What’s the one thing people fear more than death? Public Speaking”.

That’s why so few people do it. That’s why I avoided it at all costs for many years.

But then I became so interested and passionate about the work I was doing, I decided to accept a speaking request in 2005. At 7am in the James J. Hill Library in St. Paul, I presented “Organic SEO, PPC, Blogging – What does it all mean?” to a group of about 70 people.

And I didn’t die.

Since then, I’ve given presentations all over the world, from New York to London to Hong Kong and next month Madrid and Moscow.

The funny thing is, I’m not a natural public speaker. I’ve had to work at it. I’m STILL working at becoming a great “infotainer”. Along that journey I’ve been able to learn a few things that might be helpful to other reluctant or new speakers who have a chance to represent yourselves or your company in a public forum.

Check out these 8 quick tips and try them out.

1. Make sure you create the presentation with the audience in mind. Think about what they might want to know vs. what you want to share or promote. To do this, ask the event organizer about who the attendees are. Types of companies, position titles, etc.

2. Ask a qualifying question at the beginning – an easy to answer, but thoughtful question to show you are interested in them. To make sure you don’t forget, put this question into your presentation and include an illustration. Make it funny, but most of all, make it relevant.

3. Tell stories. Back them up with stats or examples, but what’s most interesting are stories. As I like to say, “Facts tell, stories sell”.  Use a story as a metaphor that aligns well with the key points you are making. Or relate real world experiences you’ve had as an example.  I’ve shared my story of social crowdsourcing the itinerary of a trip I took to NYC with my son and the social sharing and content creation that resulted many times as a way to introduce the notion of consumer information discovery, consumption and action.

4. Optimize your slides. Make slides visual and include tweetable quotes and stats. Include your Twitter handle and the event hashtag (if there is one) in the footer or header of each slide. People WANT to tweet interesting and useful things to their networks, so why not make it easy for them? Don’t be so coy as to ask the audience to tweet a particular slide. But do make quotes in large text that are compelling and even provocative. If it’s good, they’ll share it.

5. Be enthusiastic, but don’t talk too fast. Don’t go too slow either. Presenting in a routine and subdued way can be boring for an audience. However, speaking so fast that they can’t comprehend the full value of what you’re saying is even worse. I’ve found this out in my efforts to be “info-taining” that sometimes I speak too fast. There is the belief among some speakers that you should cram as much information into your deck as possible. But if the audience can’t understand you, it can be incredibly frustrating.

When you’re passionate about a topic, audiences won’t care if you miscue or make verbal mistakes. Laugh at those roadbumps and focus on telling your story and sharing your information. Remember to take a breath after a key point and let it sink in for the audience. That gives them time to absorb (and tweet).

6. Always include takeaways.  Create an outline of our presentation and then use that outline to distill 3-5 key points. I often write these key points as large text slides and then compile them all into one takeaway slide at the end. This reinforces the key points your making and helps the audience summarize in their mind what you’re trying to convey.

7. Give them something to do at the end. Download, contact you or a task. Challenge them to take the next step. When you’ve captured people’s attention for 45 minutes, they are looking to you for leadership. For direction. If you’ve been effective at presenting your point of view, then help translate the experience they just had listening to you into something tangible.

8. Have fun! A few years ago when I keynoted a conference in Minneapolis, I made up an illustrated rhyme to tell the story. This was out of my comfort zone but the story was near and dear, so it was fun to do. People still come up to me at events in the Twin Cities and mention that presentation because it was fun and interesting, not just educational.

Remember, that audiences are mostly interested in “info-tainment”. Be yourself and show your personality. Do your best to connect with the audience and they’ll open up to your information.

What are some of the tips you’ve learned from public speaking?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Have to Give a Presentation? Here Are 8 Quick Tips To Go From Zero to Hero | http://www.toprankblog.com

Here’s the number one business opportunity in marketing today: Teach marketing leaders, social media gurus and SEO professionals how to ask the right questions about data.

I’m serious. There is a golden opportunity here because many businesses leaders don’t seem to know enough about basic marketing analytics to know whether their programs are growing or not. We are leading “by our gut” in a world that promises true wisdom and insight if we can understand the numbers.

The implication is that we are potentially (and probably) making incorrect decisions because we’re mis-interpreting the numbers … perhaps we don’t even know the right questions to ask.

If you’re in marketing, you MUST understand this issue!

I believe that just a basic knowledge of measurement tools can go a LONG WAY in helping to propel and differentiate your business … and so does Tom Webster, the co-host on the Marketing Companion podcast. While this may sound boring, I promise you that our latest edition of the podcast is not. In fact, as you will soon hear, it is downright magical. We explore what we consider the number one issue for most marketing leaders today: Understanding metrics to make business decisions –

– The biggest business opportunity in marketing today

– The danger of focusing on the what instead of the why or the how

– Tom’s five fundamental questions to guide a content marketing strategy

– Getting drunk on growth

– The importance of talking to people

– Content marketing at the end of the sales cycle

– Content marketing as “fishing” — are you even in the right lake?

– Guest appearances from Gini Dietrich and Sean McGinnis

– The magic metrics for content marketing and lead conversion

Are you ready for this? Can you HANDLE THE TRUTH? Here we go:

Other Ways to Listen to this Podcast:

• Click here to download the latest episode or subscribe in iTunes
• Click here for the show’s RSS feed – for Android listeners.

Resources mentioned in this podcast:

The book Good to Great by Jim Collins

Our friends Gini Dietrich and Sean McGinnis

Doug Henning

Voices Heard Media

Further reading: Marketing and social media measurement

This content was created as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

The post The number one business opportunity in marketing today appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Regardless of the challenges that sales leaders are facing today, most would agree that having a more creative sales force would help, or at least it can’t hurt. Or can it? After all, selling does not require the creativity that writing or sculpting do, but as most sellers would say, it does require a certain amount of artistry.

In the past, we’ve published research on the topic of Manager Innovation, showing that top performing sales managers are skilled at ideating and finding creative ways to unlock stalled deals. But few, if any, sales organizations are focused on developing reps’ creative skills. Indeed, the fact that the sales are becoming more variable, requiring reps to engage a growing number of stakeholders and face longer sales cycles, suggests that as sales become more complex reps will have to engage with customers in more creative and new ways in order to break apart from the pack and move deals forward.

So how can sales managers encourage rep creativity, and help their teams develop the adaptability they need to cope with today’s sophisticated and informed buyers?

A body of research on the topic of creativity suggests that some commonly used techniques for inspiring innovative thinking can apply to sales:  

• Stop punishing failure—painters who create great works of art often paint a few misses first. The creative process, experts say, involves making some mistakes along the way to generating great ideas. Sales organizations disproportionally reward individual rep success, but they should also encourage risk-taking by not punishing rep mistakes.

• Don’t be so comfortable with rejection—when faced with rejection some people respond by experimenting in order to overcome their shortcomings. The self-awareness and change in posture that sometimes grows out of rejection can spark creativity. Sellers face rejection every day, but they are fairly good at coping with rejection. To motivate innovative thinking, make sure you  are making rejection feel uncomfortable for your reps.

• Work hard, play hard—studies suggest that playful, enjoyable activities encourage creative thinking. When we play our brain edits itself less and allows thoughts to flow more freely. Many sales organizations do in fact have a “work hard, play hard” atmosphere. But to spark creativity, organizations should encourage more on-the-job play time, rather than after-work happy hours.

CEB Sales Members, review our Ideation Toolkit and see our Manager Innovativeness Self Assessment.

Share your thoughts with us, and let us know how you are inspiring creativity in your reps.

It’s a commonly held trope that salespeople are coin-operated. The thinking goes that if you offer reps more money, they will sell more. Our friends at the CEB Compensation Leadership Council decided to conduct some research into this and what they found out is that, well, this is all true. Increasing incentive pay does in fact lead to improved performance from sales reps.

But this is only part of the picture.

Increasing incentive pay does improve performance, but it does so at a very high cost. What the CEB Compensation Leadership Council discovered is that in order to boost the performance of an average sales rep from 95% to 105% of goal using variable pay alone, you would have to increase his or her incentive pay 1.8 times. To improve performance by the same amount after that, you’d have to increase pay by an even greater multiple. So while increasing compensation is technically effective at improving performance, it is hardly an efficient way to do so.

Fortunately, increasing incentive pay is not the only way you can leverage compensation to drive performance. A much more effective and efficient way to improve rep performance is to improve the perception of pay. In fact, the study found that improving pay perceptions can improve performance against goal by 11 percentage points, which amounts to an increase of nearly $143 million in sales for the average large organization.

Sales reps’ perceptions of pay are influenced by three factors: the extent to which they believe their pay plans are fair, how easily understandable the plans are, and how closely they meet their risk/reward preferences.

Pay Fairness

The biggest way to improve overall pay perception is to improve the extent to which your sales reps perceive their pay to be fairly designed, allocated, and communicated by your organization. Perceptions of pay fairness can be improved by doing three things:

• Sales targets should be set based on not only organizational goals, but also market potential.
• Targets should be reviewed multiple times throughout the year to identify and react to changes affecting sales potential as market conditions evolve.
• Target-setting criteria and target revision policies should be transparent and proactively communicated to sales reps.

See how Wyeth targets communication to reps’ most common misunderstandings of the comp plan.

Pay Complexity

Many sales reps have difficulty understanding the basic information about how their plans work, such as how much they will be paid at different performance levels. Even if the number of performance measures is limited to just a few, reps tend to overestimate the number of measures and view their pay plans as overly complex.

Beyond merely reducing the number of measures included in plans, to improve perceptions of pay plan complexity, you must determine and address the underlying reasons for this perceived complexity. Poor communication, compound measures, and multi-step processes can all add to a plan’s perceived complexity.

See how DuPont uses tools that allow reps to see how their behavior will impact payout.

Pay Risk

The selling environment in which reps must work these days is more complex than ever. Customers have more options and more buyers vetting each purchase. Sellers are engaged later in the buying process, decreasing the chance for reps to influence their decisions. This makes performance and payouts less predictable for reps. As such, reps increasingly value the extent to which pay plans can appropriately mitigate risk.

However, too small a proportion of variable pay decreases the risk of underperformance, disincentivizing reps from expending enough effort to close additional sales. On the flip side, too large a proportion of variable pay increases risk too much, distracting reps from attending to important, but less directly tied to pay, aspects of the job.

Review our 10-step process for designing effective sales compensation plans.

CEB Sales Members, to learn more visit the Compensation topic center. Also, check out our Manager Guidebook designed to help managers handle tough conversations related to compensation changes.

Yes, price is only a state of mind, and it’s not your mind you need to be concerned with.

Discussing with a salesperson the concerns he or she is having closing sales is something I do quite a bit. On one particular occasion, the salesperson shared with me how his company’s prices are simply out of line for the marketplace.

He wanted to walk me through one example after another about sales he lost because his boss wouldn’t cut the price.

After hearing two examples, I cut him off. He immediately became defensive and began telling me how I don’t understand the severity of the problem and won’t ever grasp it until he shares every situation.

It’s as if by my comment of not wanting to hear more that I had somehow taken the oxygen out of the room — or at least he would like to believe it.

Contrary to his thinking, my belief is that by cutting off the discussion, I’m putting oxygen back into the room.

Only thing the salesperson wanted to do was discuss with me how his price list was simply not appropriate for his market. Everything was about his market, his territory, his customers — or I should say, “lack of customers” and his belief system.

Emphasis on the last point — his belief system.

He had become so convinced about his pricing being out of line that he was refusing to believe or see any other option to succeed. To him, success was only going to occur when pricing came down. Until that happened, he would be faced with rejection 100% of the time.

Problem is he was allowing his belief system to overpower his ability to listen to the customer. His belief was so strong, he was not willing to listen to what the customer was saying.

When I asked him what his customers said about his pricing, he couldn’t give me one concrete comment. Only thing he had was what he believed the customer was thinking. His argument is because his price was higher than the competition, the only reason why somebody would reject him was because of price.

This was nothing more than a belief based on what he wanted to believe. It had nothing to do with what the customer was saying.

Don’t allow your beliefs or what you want to believe to become reality in your mind.

Price is purely a state of mind. The only mind that counts is the mind of the customer. That’s the mind you want to believe.

 

There are only two things happening if your losing on price.

1. You’re selling to the wrong person/company
2. You’re doing a terrible job selling

Apple charges $100 extra dollars to double it’s iPhone storage memory (16 to 32 GB). It charges $200 dollars to quadruple it (16 to 64). Android phone memory sells for about $50 bucks for 64 GB. Apple is charging 4 times as much as Android — and they’re getting it.

Smart phone memory has never been so cheap. It’s come down almost 75% in the last 5 years, but Apple hasn’t lowered it’s prices.

Why?

Because they are selling to the right people AND they are doing a good job selling. When you sell to the right people and you sell well, price IS NOT AN ISSUE. Hundreds of millions people are paying MORE for iPhones that cost substantially more than Android. Price isn’t an issue for Apple.

To avoid getting bogged down in narrow, price only discussions you’re going to have to elevate your game.

Know who your customers are:

It’s critical to know where your product fits best and who benefits the most from it. Don’t waste time selling to buyers who you can’t deliver the value to or who aren’t good fits. Selling to the wrong customer profile will almost always deteriorate into a price discussion. Almost everyone would buy a Porsche if it were cheap enough.

Your doing a terrible job selling: 

This is the bigger problem of the two.  If you’re selling to the right buyers and you’re constantly struggling on price, it means you’re not selling well. It means you haven’t demonstrated a value that warrants the price. It means the customer doesn’t see how spending that kind of money is worth it. It means they can’t see a justifiable return.  It means you haven’t done your job.

You want to stay out of price wars sell to the right buyers AND sell better. Build value that’s worth the price your asking, focus on outcomes, know how you are affecting the business or the buyers world and make it worth it.

OK, there is a 3rd reason you are losing on price.  The price is too high. If that’s the case lower the price across the board, add more value via features, uses, etc. or just top selling it.  If the price truly is too high, that’s an entirely different problem that must be addressed company wide. Most of the time however, the price isn’t too high. You’re just selling to the wrong people and not doing a good job at selling it.

 

At a loss for how to create content that connects and converts?

Just remember the acronym RESONATE.

Great content is:

Relevant

Great content touches on the interests, the needs, and the pain points of your audience. (Tweet this)

Engaging

Draw your audience in by speaking their language and using a friendly tone. (Tweet this)

Succinct

Keep your content right and tight: cut out any fluff and unnecessary details. (Tweet this)

Observant

Keep up with the current events that affect your target audience, and weave those observations into your content. (Tweet this)

Narrative

Offer your audience a good story, well told, and they’ll never forget you. (Tweet this)

Accessible

Make most of your content freely accessible through your blog and social media channels to amp up your SEO. (Tweet this)

Targeted

Get a clear picture of who is in your target audience and focus all your content around that person’s needs and expectations. (Tweet this)

Electric

Ho-hum content generates ho-hum results; make your content buzz with colorful language and a lively, conversational tone. (Tweet this)

Got your own keys to killer content that you’d like to share? Post them in the comments—we’d love ot hear from you!

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One of the most critical components of an effective demand generation strategy is lead nurturing, and most of the buzz surrounding lead nurturing today focuses on the marketing automation tools (Marketo, Eloqua, Genoo etc.) that help us make it happen.

However, you can’t automate strategy or smart tactics, and tools can only take you so far. In her  Demand Generation Certification Program, B2B marketing expert Kim Albee dives deep into the “how” of lead nurturing, including how to implement a nurturing sequence with small, digestible steps that easily pass leads on to the next step in the process.

If you still need more convincing on the “why”, here are 10 compelling lead nurturing statistics that will help you prioritize it within your organization—ASAP.

Why You Need a Lead Nurturing Strategy

1. On average, organizations that nurture their leads experience a 45% lift in lead generation ROI over those organizations that do not. (Source: MarketingSherpa)

2. 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance. (Source: MarketingSherpa)

3. Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. (Source: DemandGen Report)

4. Companies with mature lead generation and management practices have a 9.3% higher sales quota achievement rate. (Source: CSO Insights)

5. Lead nurturing emails get 4-10x the response rate compared to standalone email blasts. (Source: SilverPop/DemandGen Report)

6. Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. (Source: The Annuitas Group)

7. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost. (Source: Forrester Research)

8. 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified. (Source: MarketingSherpa)

Why Marketing Automation Should Be Part of Your Lead Nurturing Strategy

9. Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. (Source: The Annuitas Group)

10. About 56 percent of marketing automation users rated their demand generation performance as in line, above or far above expectations. This compares with just 41 percent of non-marketing automation users. (Source: Software Advice 2012 B2B Demand Generation Benchmark Survey)

The Future of Business is being defined right in front of our eyes. Massive changes brought on by the internet, social media and mobile technologies are transforming business models faster than our ability to keep up. Consider:

• Over 40% of the companies that were at the top of the Fortune 500 in 2000 were no longer there in 2010.
  
• By the end of 2013, there will be more mobile-connected devices than there are people on earth.
  
• Facebook has more than 1 Billion network users.
  
• By 2030, 5 billion people – nearly two thirds of global population – could be middle class.
  
• The amount of data stored is doubling every 18 months.
  

All these forces are leading to an unprecedented amount of change in the way we interact with our customers, our employees, and with the way we manage our resources. This is causing new business models to spring up, taking advantage of the more closely connected business and social networks.

At the individual level, as consumers of information, products and services, we are all empowered to dramatically change the very nature of the way we interact with the brands we support. We are demanding new customer experiences:

• Millennials are 3 times as likely to follow brands over a family member on social networks.
  
• 73% of people surveyed wouldn’t care if the brands they use disappeared from their life.
• The half-life of a piece of content shared on top social networks Twitter and Facebook is 3 hours.
• Globally, more people trust regular employees to tell the truth than CEOs (50% vs. 43%).
  
• Newspapers have lost $40 Billion in advertising revenue since 2000.
  
• The average number of sources of content consumed by a shopper in a purchase doubled from 2010 to 2011 going from 5 to 10 pieces of content consumed.
  
• More than 70% of customers surveyed believe small businesses are more concerned about their needs than larger companies.
  
• It is 6 to 7 times more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to keep a current one.
• Content on the internet tripled between 2010 and 2013.
  

And we’re seeing a re-definition of the relationship between employee and employer. This is forcing businesses to consider the future of work. In the future, businesses will need to move beyond productivity as the sole measure of an employee’s value and put programs in place that make the most of their worker’s human potential:

• Only 7% of Gen Y works for a Fortune 500 company as startups dominate the workforce for this demographic.
  
• Worldwide, more than 3 billion people are working, but nearly half work in farming, small household enterprises, or in casual or seasonal day labor.
  
• Gen Y will form 75% of the workforce by 2025 and are actively shaping corporate culture and expectations. Only 11% define having a lot of money as a definition of success.
  
• More than 620 million young people are neither working nor studying.
• India will add a million new workers every month for the next two decades. Equal to the entire population of Sweden joining the labor force every year for 20 years.
  

In the larger context, we’re thinking in new and different ways about how to manage and optimize resources that are feeling the strain such as time, information, and of course, natural resources. Companies that leverage solutions to manage big data are seeing massive increases in operating margins. Consider these facts with regard to resource optimization:

• Fathers in the US have nearly tripled their time with their children since 1965. Today’s mothers spend more time with their children than mothers did in the 1960s.
  
• 1.2 billion people were still living on less than $1.25 a day in 2010, a decrease of 100 million since 2008.
  
• By 2050 more than 40% of the world’s population will live under severe water stress.
  
• The global rate of extreme poverty fell to 20.6 percent, less than half the 1990 rate of 43.1 percent.
  

And we’re taking advantage of new Social and Business Networks to manage the breathtaking amount of data and the real-time connections being made over the social web:

• Typical mobile users check their phone 150 times per day.
  
• 90% of all internet traffic in 2017 will be video.
  
• 29% of Millennials find love through Facebook while 33% are dumped via wall posts or text messages.
  
• Wearable devices have grown by 2x month over month since October 2012.
  

In support of all these amazing and transformational changes driving the Future of business, we’ve gathered 99 Facts on The Future of Business. We’ve created this resource to help you – whether you are a business leader, a social consumer, a millennial employee – to help drive transformational change within your corner of the world. Because no matter what you do, where you do it, how much experience you have or whatever industry you serve, the future of business will be created by you.

Click here to view all 99 Facts on The Future of Business.

99 Facts on the Future of Business

This post originally appeared on Forbes. Let me know what you think in the comments below. 

We talk a lot about community. It’s one of those buzzwords we throw around when discussing this new age of marketing in a world of social media. And that’s a good thing. Community is important.

But we generally have it wrong.

When it comes to talking about, and building, a community around a business we tend to be shortsighted and selfish.

The idea is that you use social media to build a community. The interpretation is that that community is built with your business at the center, and the community exists for you and your success.

But in reality, that’s not what community is about. As my friend Brenda showed in her guest post yesterday about her memoir, community is about so much more. It’s not about being at the center and having people focus on you. It’s just about being there and contributing to the greater good.

That means that, yes, sometimes it will be about you. But more often than not, it’s about someone else. If you business has an online community, it’s as much about you giving as it is receiving. It’s about you focusing on others – your customers – more than it is about them focusing on you. It’s about contributing on a regular basis, and supporting the other members of your community.

This goes against the grain for most businesses, because they are self-absorbed and inwardly focused on profit and the bottom line. But the sustainability of the community is a better long term strategy than self-preservation. Businesses need to think about the good of the community, and they will benefit as well.

Community is not about you. Community is about shared experiences and defining one another’s lives. It’s about how we treat our employees and our customers. It’s also about how we treat other businesses, and even those who might never become our customers.

It’s important to understand the difference.

Do you know of any businesses that consistently show a true sense of community?

Creating tons of demand generation is great, and driving interested and qualified traffic to your website is a recipe for success. But not capitalizing on the time and money you spend getting someone to your website can be chalked up as a complete loss of great opportunities.

If you make this mistake―as most of us do―the last thing you should do is carpet bomb the consumer with more email. The same goes for display ad retargeting. It’s a natural reaction to retarget shoppers only with offers based on what they left in their cart. But while you might actually see small gains, they’re likely neither sustainable nor scalable. Plus, the haunting effect of following someone around the web can cause more harm than you think to both your brand and to the relationships you have with your customers.

Retargeting shoppers only with offers based on what they left in their cart is like sending another, and another, and another email about the same product and offer that didn’t get their attention in the first place.

I love the term coined by Forrester called the perpetually connected customer (PCC). While I agree with Forrester that by 2013 half of online adults worldwide will become a PCC, I actually think this estimate is too conservative. Regardless, just the idea that more consumers are “always on” means that there’s an increasing amount of consumers who expect amazing experiences to happen wherever they are on the web.

The prevalence of this new empowered customer drives home the need for brands to become more customer-centric in their marketing efforts, and this includes display retargeting. And with the incredible amount of data available, focusing on your best prospects and customers based not only on what’s in a cookie, but including technographics, recent browsing patterns, and “in-the-moment” behaviors will take your display retargeting and other demand generation efforts to brand new levels.

As always, I’d love for you to reach out to me so I can tell you how to make this happen. Feel free to email me (jhealy@monetate.com) so we can set up a time to chat.

Mastering Big Data: Best Practices, Dos & Don’ts
Big data offers big opportunities for marketers, enabling them to deliver the most relevant website experiences possible to visitors. But there are hurdles to overcome. Find out how to avoid big data missteps and stay on the path to success. Download your free copy today.

We have to admit that facing rejections, directly or indirectly, can be troublesome for any B2B lead generation campaign. With the way the business world moves these days, knowing how to compel business prospects to buy from you can be a bit of a challenge. It takes a little convincing and persistence on your part to turn these prospective sales leads into actual business deals. And what if your prospects say no? You have to trust your creativity and resourcefulness in this regards. I know, this is not easy, but if you have a general idea on what to say, then you will know how to proceed on this. Take these as examples:

“Send us some information”

“We have no ready funds for that”

either this is just an excuse or they really could not afford your offer’s price tag. When that happens, try changing tact. See if, price no longer a factor, they would still seal the deal with you. Maybe a little rearrangement of payment terms will do the trick.

“That is not my priority at the moment”

you may not be able to make a sale with them, but they can give you useful business data for use at a later date. Ask them about their current priorities. Sometimes, no B2B leads generated now can be turned into more B2B leads later.
“We already use (competitor’s product)”
now, this is the case where you really are least likely to make a sale, but at least you can ask them about their reasons for choosing your competitor. Who knows what you might learn during your conversation that can help you later on.
“It just costs too much”

do not feel too bad. Actually this is a sign that they are interested. The only reason they are not signing up yet is the price tag. It may just be simple too expensive or the features and benefits not enough to justify the price. You have to ask so that your telemarketing team can adapt.
“Call me back in (period of time)”

do not worry, this might not be a ‘no’. In most cases, they just simply do not have the time at the moment to deal with you. Just clarify with them why they wish to postpone your meeting. This will give your B2B appointment setting team more time to prepare.

“Someone else makes the buying decision”

When you hear that, either the person you are talking to is the gate keeper or a lower-level executive who does not have the final say. Just earn their trust and cooperation, then. They might be able to help you connect faster to the real decision-makers.

It is not that bad, if you think about it. Just follow these tips to help turn the flow in your B2B lead generation campaign

In the challenging economic climate, it remains crucial that businesses uncover and create ways to differentiate themselves from the competition. Given the importance of managing existing customers and new opportunities effectively, a relevant mobile CRM app for your smartphone or tablet could be just the way to do that. You’ll be better connected, have better insight into your planning and real-time access to your business information – improvements stimulating higher productivity and greater efficiency.

A mobile app puts you in a stronger position to view critical customer information in the time frame required for an effective response. You can make use of an intuitive, simple and user friendly interface providing you with real-time overviews of the information you need to manage your relationships effectively.

Valuable, but what are the most important CRM details for representatives, account managers and freelancers? What makes a mobile CRM app a relevant, valuable tool that can positively influence productivity and give revenue a boost?

Complete insight into your planning
Which customers or leads are we going to visit, how long will I be en route to a visit, who’s going to be sitting at the table and what exactly are we going to talk about? Do various systems or registers need to be compiled to give a complete overview of what’s happening at the customer and ensure you have the answers you need? It would of course be brilliant if all this CRM data was easily available in one centralized location. With a mobile CRM app, that scenario becomes a reality.

From your smart phone you’ll be able to see directly in your agenda which meetings are planned, linked directly to the right account, the right contact person, the right project, the right sales opportunity and the relevant quotation.

You’ll also want to be able to click through easily to more detailed account information and further design how the account and contact information is linked. You might also want to zoom in to see what these people have been saying in their latest tweets. That’s how you know exactly what’s keeping your customers busy.

With a socially enabled CRM app, the traditional 360 degree view of the customer can be enriched with relevant, helpful information from outside the CRM system itself. Valuable in a world where being ‘connected’ becomes more and more important in almost every aspect of our lives.

Real-time access to your CRM system
It’s a result for the sales professional when he can make decisions out on the road based on the full range of relevant information. Is there a running complaint procedure on incomplete implementation at the site? Are there invoices that haven’t been paid, and if so, why? Are there other sales opportunities open or unanswered tenders in play? Is there other relevant information entered elsewhere in the system that needs to be included in any meeting preparations? Having this kind of information to hand before an appointment starts can make a real difference to the outcome of the meeting.

Furthermore, a sales executive needs to be able to link back directly to the rest of the organization quickly and easily while at a customer or prospect visit. In an ideal world, the sales person makes a report based on the meeting and saves it under the account documentation in the system there and then – while he’s still sitting there with the customer.

Or the signed quotation can be immediately uploaded to the CRM system so that initial discussion around planning and implementation can take place at the same meeting. In short, technology that supports real-time co-operation across the business, speeds work activities and leads to higher productivity and efficiency.

Improved performance within reach
Complete insight into your planning and real-time anywhere access to your CRM data? This is no longer something for the future wish list. The possibilities are now out there and accessible. Explore the options and turn your CRM system into a tool that can genuinely start to drive better performance from all your users and in turn the business as a whole.

Are you running a Twitter Campaign? A promoted tweet campaign on Twitter for your business? Here is a news for you! Twitter added a feature to let marketers/brands schedule their posts on 14th October 2013, as the company moves to make it easier for advertisers to use its products.

The new tool works for both regular 140-character posts (tweets) and ones that brands pay for to promote their message to a larger audience, the company said it in their blog post. The feature will help companies schedule their content up to a year in advance, making it easier to plan advertising campaigns around a new product or holiday.

How to Schedule Tweets from Twitter?

1. Blue Button: You can schedule a new Tweet via the blue Tweet button at the top right corner of the navigation menu on ads.twitter.com. Twitter has also introduced a new Creative’s tab, at the top of the navigation bar, for users to manage scheduled Tweets and Twitter Cards all in one place.

2. New Tweet box: The Compose Tweet button seen on the Creative’s page will also bring up a new Tweet Box where you can create a Tweet and include a photo, location or card of your choice, along with specific targeting criteria.

3. Scheduling Options: The scheduling can be done in increments of one minute and set up to one year in advance based on your account’s time zone.

But Scheduling Tweets is something that is already stewed into Twitter through clients like TweetDeck, which is owned by Twitter, and through other third party management tools, so the big question is-

Is this really worth it?

Have a look at some of my thoughts about this below-

• With scheduling tweets, it saves time for brands and makes the process easier. But with this new feature it’s a cumbersome process as it’s not as easy as 1 click away! You need to login seperately to Twitter Ads, go to creative page, and click compose buttone and then with the new tweet box you can add pictures and location of your choice. In other 3rd party management tools its one click away! And certain Tools even offer the process of helping you choose the best possible time to tweet, in this application you need to manually decide.
• The only thing that is constant in social media marketing is “change”, twitter is embracing the change but a little late! Don’t you think? As this process is nothing new, there are no new features like targeting based on age, geography etc. With other tools available you can organize your tweets as well, the tools help you decide the best possible time and show results of which tweet yielded best possible results.
• This platform does not integrate other social networks; brands use tools so it can help them use time effectively across all platforms. This newly added feature of twitter you can only maintain the twitter account; with this tool you still need other 3rd party management tools to handle other online properties. Doesn’t it sound more tedious, instead of making it easier!
• Can manage only one account at a time, do marketers have that much time to spend because with this feature they will have to. When only 1 account can be managed at a time, when some brands have multiple pages. Logging in and out will eat more than required time if you handle 4-5 accounts.

The only worthwhile feature of this tool is that it can help brands schedule promoted tweets which is not available in any other third party tools. For your organic tweets this tool will cost you more in terms of efforts and time. Don’t you agree?

Will you leave other Twitter 3rd party tools that you are already using for this new Scheduled Tweets by Twitter?

You’ve seen the word “LinkedIn”. It might have been on a friend’s Facebook status as they announced a new job, or you might have seen it while reading articles here on MakeUseOf. But what is this social network for professionals actually for? Could it be that you’re missing out? Is there some small chance that your current aversion to LinkedIn is in detriment to your career? The bare bones of LinkedIn is that it is a social network that links people by career and industry, rather than by family and friendship. While there may be some overlap (for instance, my...

Read the full article: 6 Reasons You Should Be Using LinkedIn: How It Helped Me

Is “Orange Is the New Black” or “House of Cards” a TV show?  We can watch them on our smartphone, tablet, computer or TV.  And, unlike traditional TV shows, which are released an episode per week, we can watch the whole season at once, totally disrupting the sense of time the television channels have taught us to expect. And yet, as Kevin Spacey recently pointed out at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, we still talk about that form of media in terms of its traditional viewing source.  It’s still a TV show, even if it’s more like an episodically-punctuated-video-feed.

Many of our words are archaic, not just “TV show.”  How many of us still say, “Will you tape that show for me?” when no tape is involved.  We talk about albums, records, and filming.  We “dial” and “hang up” the phone.  At the tollbooth, we “roll down the window” even though we’re not rolling anything.  We refer to a child as a “carbon copy” of her dad. Even our icons are out of date.  You click a magnifying glass to search. (Perhaps Sherlock Holmes, somewhere, approves.) You click a floppy disc to save. (Do your kids even know what that is?) Your mail icon is an envelope. (Too bad for the post office that you don’t need a stamp.)

The words and images we use to describe things affect our thinking. What if the words we use are limiting the solutions we can create?

What if instead of being asked to create a “TV show”, we were asked to create a story using video?  Would it open our mind to more options than broadcast or cable TV? A YouTube channel? Vine or Instagram videos? Something entirely different? What if, when you need a package for your new product, instead of thinking of a package as a separate container to be discarded, it was part of the product itself in some way? Would it still be a package? Would it still need to be thrown out? At a much simpler level, will the solution change if we change our words from “satisfying customer needs” to “delighting customers”? What if we “thrill our customers with easy service” instead of “making it easy to talk to customer service”?  Just by using different language, we can find more ways to be innovative in how we approach problems and opportunities.

Language is paradoxical.  In some ways, it doesn’t keep pace with the rate of societal and technological change (e.g., TV show, carbon copy) and in others, new words are created almost daily in response to our fast-changing world (e.g., selfie, MOOC).  There is a balance between using the past to understand the present and guide the future, on the one hand, and on the other, creating something fresh that leaves the old behind.  We need analogies to understand the new (eg, horseless carriage) yet they also hold us back by it constraining our thinking (eg, horseless carriage).

So I have a challenge for you. Watch your language and the language of those around you.  See what words you are using and how you’re using them. Do they help you and your organization move forward? View the world differently? Open your mind to new possibilities? Or do they constrain how you view the world?

And when you change the words, does the world change as well?

A renowned Indian heart surgeon is currently building a 2,000-bed, internationally accredited “health city” in the Cayman Islands, a short flight from the U.S. Its services will include tertiary care procedures, such as open-heart surgery, angioplasty, knee or hip replacement, and neurosurgery for about 40% of U.S. prices. Patients will have the option of recuperating for a week or two in the Caymans before returning to the U.S.

At a time when health care costs in the United States threaten to bankrupt the federal government, U.S. hospitals would do well to take a leaf or two from the book of Indian doctors and hospitals that are treating problems of the eye, heart, and kidney all the way to maternity care, orthopedics, and cancer for less than 5% to 10% of U.S. costs by using practices commonly associated with mass production and lean production.

The nine Indian hospitals we studied are not cheap because their care is shoddy; in fact, most of them are accredited by the U.S.-based Joint Commission International or its Indian equivalent, the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals. Where available, data show that their medical outcomes are as good as or better than the average U.S. hospital.

The ultra-low-cost position of Indian hospitals may not seem surprising — after all, wages in India are significantly lower than in the U.S. However, the health care available in Indian hospitals is cheaper even when you adjust for wages: For example, even if Indian heart hospitals paid their doctors and staff U.S.-level salaries, their costs of open-heart surgery would still be one-fifth of those in the U.S.

When it comes to innovations in health care delivery, these Indian hospitals have surpassed the efforts of other top institutions around the world. Today, the U.S. spends $8,000 per capita on health care; if it adopted the practices of the Indian hospitals, the same results might be achievable for a whole lot less, saving the country hundreds of billions of dollars.

A key to this is that, faced with the constraints of extreme poverty and a severe shortage of resources, these Indian hospitals have had to operate more nimbly and creatively to serve the vast number of poor people in need of medical care in the subcontinent. And because Indians on average bear 60% to 70% of health care costs out of pocket, they must deliver value. Consequently, value-based competition is not a pipe dream but a reality in India.

Three major practices have allowed these Indian hospitals to cut costs while still improving their quality of care.

A Hub-and-Spoke Design

In order to reach the masses of people in need of care, Indian hospitals create hubs in major metro areas and open smaller clinics in more rural areas which feed patients to the main hospital, similar to the way that regional air routes feed passengers into major airline hubs.

This tightly coordinated web cuts costs by concentrating the most expensive equipment and expertise in the hub, rather than duplicating it in every village. It also creates specialists at the hubs who, while performing high volumes of focused procedures, develop the skills that will improve quality. By contrast, hospitals in the U.S. are spread out and uncoordinated, duplicating care in many places without high enough volume in any of them to provide the critical mass to make the procedures affordable. Similarly, an MRI machine might be used four to five times a day in the U.S. but 15 to 20 times a day in the Indian hospitals. As one CEO told us, “We have to make the equipment sweat!”

U.S. hospitals have been developing similar structures, but there are still too many hubs and not enough spokes. Moreover, when hospitals consolidate, the motive often is to increase market power vis-à-vis insurance companies, rather than to lower costs by creating a hub-and-spoke structure.

Task Shifting

The Indian hospitals transfer responsibility for routine tasks to lower-skilled workers, leaving expert doctors to handle only the most complicated procedures. Again, necessity is the mother of invention; since India is dealing with a chronic shortage of highly skilled doctors, hospitals have had to maximize the duties they perform. By focusing only on the most technical part of an operation, doctors at these hospitals have become incredibly productive — for example, performing up to five or six surgeries per hour instead of the one to two surgeries common in the U.S.

This innovation has also reduced costs. After shifting tasks from doctors to nurse practitioners and nurses, several hospitals have even created a lower tier of paramedic workers with two years’ training after high school to perform the most routine medical jobs. In one hospital, these workers comprise more than half of the workforce. Compare that to the U.S. system, where the first cost-cutting move is often to lay off support staff, shifting more mundane tasks such as billing and transcription onto doctors overqualified for those duties — precisely the wrong kind of task shifting.

Good, Old-Fashioned Frugality

There is a lot of waste in U.S. hospitals. You walk into a hospital in the U.S., and it looks like a five-star resort; half of the building has no relation to medical outcomes, and doctors are blissfully unaware of costs. By contrast, Indian hospitals are fanatical about wisely shepherding resources — for example, sterilizing and safely reusing many surgical products that are routinely discarded in the states after a single use. They have also developed local devices such as stents or intraocular lenses that cost one-tenth the price of imported devices.

These hospitals have also been innovative in compensating doctors. Instead of the fee-for-service model, which creates an incentive to perform unnecessary procedures and tests, doctors at some Indian hospitals are paid fixed salaries, regardless of how many tests they order. Other hospitals employ team-based compensation, which generates peer pressure to avoid unnecessary tests and procedures.

Innovation has flourished in the U.S. in the development of new pills, clinical procedures, devices, and medical equipment, but in the field of health care delivery, it appears to have been frozen in time. In too much of the U.S., system, health care is viewed as a craft and each patient as unique. But by applying principles of mass production and lean production to health care delivery, Indian doctors and hospitals may have discovered the best way to cut costs while still delivering high quality in health care.

Follow the Leading Health Care Innovation insight center on Twitter @HBRhealth. E-mail us at healtheditors@hbr.org, and sign up to receive updates here.

CEOs face countless decisions.  The best executives understand which ones they need to focus on and which ones they can delegate.  While the obvious decisions that CEOs need to get right involve strategy and competitive advantage, too many executives delegate away three critical decisions that they need to own:  decisions about goals, resource allocation, and people.

Goal setting:  As a rule, CEOs don’t give enough attention to setting goals.  The greatest mistake they make is to look in the rearview mirror at what they did last year or at what their competition did.  The brilliant decision-makers look at the runway ahead.

Resource allocation:  These decisions are big because some competitive moves need disproportionate resources.  When resources are allocated from the bottom up instead of from the top down, they get out of sync with what the senior team is trying to accomplish.  At many companies the total cash investment in acquisitions, R&D, and fixed assets has not earned back its cost of capital after adjusting for the time lag in realizing incremental benefits.  That outcome reflects the wrong allocation and/or ineffective execution.  Some activist shareholders are finding gaps in CEO performance by doing this calculation.

People and Organization:  In late 2010, GE CEO Jeff Immelt decided to give country managers P&L responsibility for all of GE in their countries and have them report to vice chairman John Rice, who would be stationed in Hong Kong.  It was the first time a vice chair would be based in an emerging market.  It reflected the reality that a lot of GE’s growth will be coming from the developing world, and the leaders have to be there.  As Keith Sherin, then GE’s CFO put it, “This is where the growth is.  We are shifting our center of gravity.”  Such decisions might be unpopular and break a lot of traditions, yet they set the future course of the company. Decisions to displace people are even tougher, yet when I studied 82 CEOs who failed, I saw that the most common reason for failure was putting the wrong person in a job and then not dealing with the mismatch.  Most of the time CEOs know in their gut when someone is not fit for the job, but they don’t do anything about it.  It’s hard to admit the error, or they have a psychological bond with the person or think they can coach him or her. Sometimes it’s a matter of misjudging performance because they don’t dig into the causes. Today most if not all industries are impacted by digitization—mobile technology, big data, and the like.  It has a tremendous effect on which people are more critical than others.

One CEO of a large Indian company has been bringing a lot of younger people into senior jobs because of their digital experience.  It’s been hard for him to bypass some long-serving executives, but he had the spine to make those decisions. Great decision-makers stay on top of these three areas, because these are the three areas that have the most impact on whether or not your strategy will be executed.  Don’t delegate them away. This article is adapted from the HBR interview with Ram Charan, You Can’t Be a Wimp, Make the Tough Calls found in the November 2013 issue of HBR.

Learning how to hit the pause button while navigating through the procurement department is one of the best ways to building bridges with procurement. Today, more and more customers are setting the rules of this new social economy.  What once was the wind at our back has become the wind in our faces.  It is necessary to revisit how we do business. 

He teaches you how to hammer out your differences.  You’ll learn:

• How to effectively pause during a negotiation,
• Being prepared to mend fences,
• Price matters – if you were having a pace maker put in, would you want the $2,000 model or the $6,000 model?  Clearly the latter!

 Nelson Hyde will be hosting the workshop Negotiating With Backbone at the PPS Conference in October.

It is a fact. Many sales experts and commentators are telling us that 80% of sales roles will change by 2016.

That doesn’t necessarily mean 8 out of 10 salespeople will lose their jobs, but it does mean that most of us are going to have to change the way we sell.

We already know that the way we communicate is changing. We are having far less face-face meetings than before, as we begin to utilize the array of online conferencing tools available to us.

The way we learn is changing, as we use the internet to research and keep up to date – how long before newspapers and books disappear altogether?

The way we develop relationships is changing: We now connect through social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter.

And of course the way in which we buy and sell is changing forever …
Are you ready to change?

Isn’t it time you started hanging out with the winners?
Top Sales World is a unique site dedicated exclusively to the profession of sales. TSW draws the industry’s best-known sales experts – including me – who provide unparalleled information in the form of how-to-guides, articles, and web-based Masterclasses and Roundtables, plus so much more.
TSW is the world’s first online “sales hypermarket,” with the shelves stacked with every conceivable resource front-line sales professionals and their managers could possibly need – and it is all free

You might already have watched the video above 
After you have watched it, get yourself over to Top Sales World, and join with thousands of like-minded sales professionals, who are committed to winning – you will not find many losers over there!

If a business wants to build a real online presence, they need to have a community. From blogs to picture sharing sites, if you look at the majority of the biggest sites on the Internet, a devoted community is the one thing they all have in common. The reason this type of community is so important is because it consists of the people who will help your online presence to grow. While you can accomplish a lot through search engine and social media marketing on your own, things move a lot faster when there are other people contributing to your efforts as well.

Although building a strong online community should be at the top of your to-do list, that doesn’t mean it’s an easy task to accomplish. Getting this type of community up and running takes a lot of hands-on effort. Since getting a community to where you want it to be is all about momentum, it’s important to avoid neglecting it. However, since this task is just one of many that you have on your plate, it may not be possible for you to handle everything that your community needs in order to flourish.

Even though you may not be able to do it on your own, the good news is that doesn’t have to spell disaster for your community-building efforts. Instead, it simply means that you need to have a community manager who can take care of all those tasks for you.

Does a Community Manager Really Need to Be Full-Time?

When a business decides they’re going to hire a community manager, the first decision they have to make is whether to hire someone on a part-time or full-time basis. It’s actually fairly common for businesses to initially assume that a part-time manager is fine for this role. The most common reason they make that assumption is because they simply don’t realize how much work actually goes into building a great community.

As you may have guessed, if you’re serious about building a community that’s going to continue driving positive results for your business, a part-time community manager isn’t going to cut it. Instead, you need someone who’s going to be fully immersed in this role. Although hiring a full-time community manager may seem like a steep expense, it’s actually one of the smartest investments you can make in your online marketing strategy.

By making this position a full-time one, the manager you hire will be able to fully immerse themselves in the community they’re building. That will allow them to be far more effective at providing the highest level of member service. It also means that because they’ll be respected and trusted by the community, their direct influence will be able to drive actual sales for your business.

Could your company benefit from a Community Manager? Web Strategy Plus offers a free consultation and 3-5 page web strategy report to help you identify the areas of your marketing plan that need improvement. Learn More

This post was originally published at Web Strategy Plus.

Do you wish that your sales people were better at closing? Or that their sales forecasts were more accurate?  Are you frustrated that apparently well-qualified opportunities end up with the prospect deciding to do nothing? If so, you’re not alone. I hear these complaints all the time.

These sound like classic “bottom of funnel” challenges. But when I take a closer look at many of these situations, more often than not the real problem lies elsewhere – not at the bottom of the funnel, but at the top. When sales people repeatedly struggle to close opportunities, the issue often lies with how they started the sale, and not with how they are trying to close it.

It’s not how well you close, it’s how well you open

Don’t get me wrong. Sales people need to be able to close. It’s an important skill – but it’s not enough, and no amount of closing skill can compensate for the failure to qualify the opportunity accurately, or for the inability to influence the buying decision process from an early stage in the cycle.

Losing to “no decision” is particularly galling. Being defeated by the status quo is just as unproductive as being defeated by a conventional competitor. Inertia is just as powerful an enemy as the organisation you’re wrestling with for market share.

You can expect your prospects to be asking themselves “why should I change at all”, “why should I change now” and “why should I change to you”. Here are a handful of strategies that could enable you to swing the odds in your favour:

Your prospect must have a compelling reason to do something

You can engage prospects in conversation about issues that are interesting to them. You can get them to evaluate your solution if it appears to address an important issue. But unless they have a critical reason do actually do something, odds are they will stick with the status quo. Have you established a compelling case for change?

You need to engage a sponsor who is a mobiliser, and not just a talker

It’s easy to assume that you’re on the right track if you are engaged with a helpful, supportive sponsor. But unless your sponsor has the power, authority and respect necessary to successfully catalyse change within their organisation, chances are the decision will be to “do nothing”.

You need to be positioned as the least risky of all available options

It used to be said that “nobody got fired for buying IBM”. Today’s more common sentiment is that “nobody got fired for not sticking their neck out”. Buyers have become more risk averse. If you’re going to win, you need to emerge as the least risky of all their available options, including simply staying as they are.

Continuously re-qualify the opportunity

Even if the opportunity initially looks promising, you’ve got to coach and encourage your sales people to continuously re-evaluate each sales situation. Is the prospect’s need critical? What are the odds of them doing anything? What are the chances of doing it with us? And – last but not least – will the effort be worth it?

If your sales organisation embraces this discipline, you’ll probably find that a lot more deals drop out early in the sales cycle. The total value of your pipeline may even seem to go down. But your revenue potential will have risen, perhaps dramatically. Well-qualified, well-managed opportunities will close naturally, and at a predictable time.

And because your sales people will be opening up and managing opportunities in a much more effective, they (and you) will be fretting a lot less about their closing skills. You might like to start by identifying your idea customer profiles, and embedding this into a progressive approach to opportunity qualification.

Note: this blog was orginally published under the title of “4 Keys to Open the Door to More B2B Sales” on the Salesforce.com blogsite.

When your sales efforts lead to nothing because of lack of interest then you might feel like fishing in an empty pond.
If you continue it will probably lead to no results at all.
Youhave several options:
- The first is to start looking for another job and quit as soon you have found one
- The second option is to stay at the salesjob but to change the approach.

Change hook:
Your current sales proposition or selling points are no longer valid. Try a different set of selling points or competitive advantages.

Change bite:
The benefits and/or advantages are not teasing enough, instead try a different set of benefits and/or advantages.

Change target:
Maybe you are aiming for the wrong fish. Instead of aiming for convincing Middle Managers you might aim for Top-Level Managers and CxO’s.

Change pond:
The industry your currently selling to is no longer prosperious enough to purchase your products or services – or they just don’t need your type of solutions. Instead change industry or geography.

How empty is your current pond ?