JESHOOTScom / Pixabay

For the last few years, every mobile marketing trends piece seems to include the words “AI” and “mobile pay” somewhere. Admittedly those are always trending and new possibilities are entering those respective arenas, hence their constant inclusion. But to avoid getting off on the wrong foot with this trends article, let’s get those two out of the way quickly: AI will be a trend line for the remainder of 2018 and into 2019, but largely by way of AI-powered ads. Mobile pay is probably 10 years away from “mass market” — at least in the eyes of Apple executives — but with Chase, CVS, and other major brands/retailers on board now, you’ll increasingly see the option as part of mobile marketing campaigns, in-app purchasing, etc.

OK, with the “big two” out of the way, what other trends can we expect for the back half of 2018?

Increasing awareness of fraud protection

Fraud is beginning to creep its way into App Store Optimization (ASO) processes, and with 2016-2017 being a period where there were a lot of news stories about hacks, breaches, data being compromised, etc. — mobile users want to know they’re safe. We’re arriving at a place psychologically where users are OK giving up their information because they know it could lead to more targeted offers, but they absolutely want to make sure that information is kept safe aside from a few push notifications about sweet new sneakers. The problem in this space right now is that the “attack surface” — how someone can exploit a mobile network, in other words — increases almost hourly, but security staffing (the number of employees a company hires to police their networks) has almost flat-lined. Automated security will probably eventually be the answer, but will that require a lengthy, tedious verification process for a simple install, thus corrupting user experience?

Focus on the broader ecosystem

Mobile is more than just ads and apps. An overly-myopic focus there can be problematic, especially in an era when many CMOs/marketing teams are being asked to own “customer engagement” as well as conventional marketing metrics.

Chatbots

This trend has been on the rise for a few years, but by late 2019/early 2020 it might be to “scale.” The most interesting application of chatbots are probably within the recruiting/hiring space — increasing communication, transparency, etc. — but within mobile marketing they can help automate parts of the process and, when the tech is a bit more advanced, even help with cross-sells and upsells in-app. The hurdle here has always been (and remains) how natural/organic the process feels. If a user feels as if they’re talking to a bot, they may not engage as fully, opting to move to a real person. Until that “human touch” quality is there, chatbots will be a nice to have within apps and general mobile marketing processes; once that human connection is determinable, they become a “need to have.”

Improved targeting

Snap recently worked with Nielsen on this, and with good measure — effective audience targeting is the Holy Grail of mobile. Without it, you’re pushing fluff. As some mobile marketing suites become more nuanced (a trend you’ll also increasingly see), marketers should spend time looking at what their partner platforms offer. How can you segment? What groups are dynamic? How can you better target based on past activity? Sometimes as marketers we get obsessed with the shiny new tools, as opposed to sitting down with a pen and paper and thinking through all the steps of who we are, what we offer, and how to effectively get that in front of people.

What other trends do you expect to see before the conclusion of 2018?

• Kai-Fu Lee has a lesson to offer US tech execs about doing business in China, a market where success has eluded most of them for decades.
• US managers operating in China need to adopt more of the local businesses practices, or else homegrown rivals will outmaneuver them at every turn, Lee said. 
• An added  benefit of studying Chinese entrepreneurs is that they might teach US counterparts something that can help back at home.
• After all, China has succeeded in a couple of tech segments where Silicon Valley has failed. 

US internet services and tech products have largely failed to catch on in China. The causes are many but those American technologists interested in spotting one of the bigger ones need only stare into a mirror, according to Kai-Fu Lee.

Speaking at the Artificial Intelligence 2018 Conference in San Francisco last week, Lee, a longtime US tech exec working in China, showered all kinds of criticism on the efforts of American tech companies operating in that country.

“American companies tend to treat China as just another market,” Lee told conference attendees. “The local team isn’t empowered with full resources and ability to build new product suites targeted and customized for local customer needs.

“Secondly because the people who are sent by American companies are professional managers whose next aspirations is to become the senior VP of sales,” Lee continued, “they will behave by corporate standards and achieve (the results) that gives them the promotion, and not roll up their sleeves and work 24-7, and fight the competitor."

But the problem with this, according to Lee, is that “everyone else in China is doing that.”

This is how we get rid of this parasite on society.' Credit cards are adding no value to our lives

He said what this means is “you’re going to be a foreigner, who doesn’t speak the language, who doesn’t work as hard, who doesn’t (understand) local customers, who don’t get all the resources, who is afraid to make your boss unhappy. So how can that possibly succeed?”

A lot is at stake in China for US companies. The country has a population of 1.4 billion people. The number of Internet users in China is 770 million, more than twice the population of the United States. Income has risen steadily, so China is a rich and growing market that US tech companies have largely failed to penetrate.

Among the top 50 websites in China, only a handful are American, and none are in the top 10.

Just next door in India, another populous country where internet use is growing, the story is much different.

“American companies dominate the internet (in India),” the New York Times wrote last month. “Facebook’s WhatsApp is the most popular app on phones. Virtually every smartphone runs on Google’s Android system. YouTube is the favorite video platform and Amazon is the No. 2 online retailer.”

'Credit cards are adding no value to our lives'

American companies face tough challenges in China, some involving politics that are largely are out of their control. But US execs operating there can improve their position, said Lee, who has a lot of experience in this area.

Read more: Underneath all the AI hype is the likelihood it threatens the poor, says this former Microsoft and Google exec

After working as a researcher for Apple, Lee helped set up a Microsoft Research division in Beijing. In 2005, he tried to jump to Google but Microsoft sued to stop him, citing a non-compete clause in his contract.

Eventually, Lee became president of Google China. He stayed until September 2009, leaving not long before Google pulled out of the country over the government's demand that it censor information. Since then, he has become a well-known technology magnate in China and a respected expert in artificial intelligence.

At the conference, Lee said Chinese technologists have a thing or two to teach American counterparts and not just about how to operate in China. Lee says Chinese “gladiator” entrepreneurs know how to build “impregnable business models.” They have also succeeded in a couple of tech sectors where success eluded the Americans.

The first one he cited was video-based social networks. Sure enough, excluding YouTube, there is a long list of defunct or all but forgotten US startups in this category: Vine, Chatroulette, and Airtime. The other segment was mobile payments. According to Lee, America has clung to the idea of paying with credit cards, while electronic transactions in China are much easier and more efficient.

"Paypal is too afraid of the credit card companies," Lee said. "What if (PayPal managers) just said, 'Sorry shareholders, we’re going to see our share price drop, but we’re not doing credit cards anymore. We’re going to do direct transactions for you. Connect us to your banks and you’ll save transaction fees. For the time being, we’ll lose a bunch of business, but this is how we get rid of this parasite on society.' Credit cards are adding no value to our lives."

"I carry no cash , no credit cards and I probably save five minutes a day not doing all the transaction (process)," Lee continued. "I’m now buying things so much more easily and no one is making 3 percent. Think of all the small and medium businesses that survive on a 3-percent margin and that’s all just taken by the credit card companies. They served a great purpose for America. They pushed us forward to become a spending society, but their historical purpose is over. It’s time to accept modern payment, a real mobile payment.”

SEE ALSO: Google's former China boss says the search company won't stand a chance against today's Chinese 'gladiator' entrepreneurs

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How humans can communicate with aliens

(Editor’s Note: This article about creating a learning culture is guest written by Rebecca Twomey. Rebecca is the Director of Marketing at Criteria for Success, a Manhattan-based sales consulting and Sales PlayBook development organization. She is the host of the Let’s Talk Sales Podcast and has authored over 22 eBooks on topics like How to Generate Sales Leads Using LinkedIn, Sales & Marketing Alignment, Time Management, Sales Management Planning, Social Selling, and many more.)

Marketing professionals and executives are now spending approximately one-third of their budgets on channels they didn’t even know existed 5 years ago. This is according to the latest Salesforce State of Marketing report that surveyed 3,500 marketers across the globe.

The report showcases the evolution of 10 digital marketing channels, finding that websites (83%), social media marketing (77%) and email marketing (75%) remain the most used channels, with the fastest growing channel being video advertising (176%).

While the report provides an excellent perspective and insights into the channels that marketers invest the most, it does not cover how these channels reach their customers. What happens when your growth strategy depends on partners, resellers, or distributors? How can you empower them to take advantage of prominent marketing channels and invest accordingly?

Nowadays, building a growth strategy is a must-do for any successful organization. It’s the foundation that helps startups build traction and become scale-ups. It’s also the ‘bible’ that helps these scale-ups stay dynamic and create systemic growth.

Creating systemic growth is not a “get it done now” task. Despite the hype around growth hacking and the attention it brings towards building a growth engine, not all companies can easily implement a mindset that revolves around growth.

Yes, you probably read the infamous stories of growth from Airbnb or Dropbox. You also might have read a bazillion articles with quick wins such as “How I Increase My Website Traffic By 380% In 30 Days Without Spending a Dime on Advertising” – yet all these stories are built around the fact that most businesses sell directly to their target audience. It’s also fair to mention they didn’t have to deal with GDPR back in the first glory days of marketing disruption.

But what if you sell indirectly? There are countless businesses that have an indirect sales engine depending on their distribution and resellers network to create revenue and product growth. In these cases, growth strategies do have some limitations because you rely on the mindset, willingness, and knowledge of your partner to achieve your goals.

So, what can you do to create a systemic growth engine through partnerships and indirect channels? Here are five recommendations to help you out, in no specific order of preference.

1. Build your partner persona

Yes, it’s a must. Most businesses build a persona to understand the type of customers they’re dealing with. A well-done customer persona will help you grasp what the customer’s traits are, how they purchase services/products, what their lifestyle is and what are the major touchpoints in your relationship with them.

Building your customer persona is key and sharing it with your partners is highly relevant to them. To go even further, it’s absolutely crucial to train your partners on how to reach such a persona and how they can do the research themselves. This will not only enable partners to align their market approach to yours, but also understand who is the target audience, what are their pains and gains, and where they hang out.

Here’s an example from EVBox, a leading global player in electric vehicle (EV) charging solutions. EVBox works with indirect channels such as partners (think of resellers, distributors, full-service providers, car manufacturers etc) and installers (installation companies or networks of electricians that install electrical appliances).

How can our partners use such input?

EVBox provides both partners and installers with extra insights into their target audiences. An example of such usage is done by partners that have a B2C strategy, will use the electric driver persona to better understand how they can reach more electric drivers in a more efficient and persuasive way. See example below:

Building such personas helped EVBox understand the pains, gains and key questions installers face on a daily basis, but also align their understanding of the end customer with the company’s overall view from the persona exercise. Creating a persona can seem hard to do but it boils down to talking to current resources (employees, customers, partners, management, etc) to identify key elements that define it.

Test different variables and see what’s most important to your company. Work down from name, job title, income, demographics to goals and values, fears and challenges and conclude with your marketing message to them. A great way to sharpen the profile of a persona is to build an elevator pitch for them. If you’re looking for a beginner’s guide to building a persona, Buffer has a great template for you.

2. Define the role of partners in your customer journey

What does that mean?

Take a moment to look at your customer journey. There are different approaches you can use, here’s an example of customer journey stages you can consider: awareness, consideration, decision, delivery, first use, support, loyalty. After you’re done mapping out the customer journey, identify where partners play an active role in influencing the customer experience.

If a partner offers your service as part of a bigger package, who takes care of the support in this case? What kind of communication does the customer receive? How can you enable your partner to offer the best experience to their customer? Remember that being customer-oriented also means you’re helping your partners reach their customers.

Bonus: Don’t know where to start your customer journey?

CustomerThink wrote a great summary on five simple strategies to execute a customer journey that includes key elements meant to help partners understand the customer journey. The better your partners understand the customer journey and your buyer personas, the more they can improve their growing actions and strategy.

As a company that works with partners, you enable them to identify opportunities and offer your growth expertise to reach customers.

3. Engage them with your product in a special way

Building a growth strategy is based on the culture of experimentation and scaling up what works. Imagine the possibilities once your partners can cultivate both the right mindset and their own library of content to extend your growth strategy beyond your reach!

To empower your partners to implement such a culture, you need to get them on board with your way of thinking. This means that your partners are potentially aware of your product roadmap, when features are coming up and how it can influence them and their customers. If you offer a service instead of a product, then they should be aware of how you plan to evolve your offering and if they can be the early beta-testers of such service.

A great way to engage your partners is by building an Early Adopter Program, that can help key partners evaluate and access your product before being publicly open to everyone. Think of this as an advanced Beta program.

How to make this happen?

You need to think of the Early Adopter Program as a funnel from onboarding partners to helping them become evangelists of it.

The above illustration explains a bit the steps and flow in order to help a Partner become more than just a Partner – to also become an Evangelist.

There are 3 phases to consider: Onboarding, Rollout and Reporting, and Public Launch.

During the Onboarding phase, the critical element is to invest most of the time explaining the vision of the product, what is today and where is headed, as well as how it will help the partner advance their business.

Once the Partner onboards the program, then starts the Rollout and Report phase, where stability in processes is key. It’s recommended to focus on a journey that includes engaging your partners in getting ideas on features, evolve the roadmap, move features to production and communicate with the partners and gather feedback.

This is built upon training, documentation and also some business model innovation as new features can bring new sources of revenue for both entities.

The final phase is the Public Launch, where the Partners know competition might also join, so it’s important to emphasize their contribution to the existence of the product and celebrate accordingly with a special deal or even an event where you bring the key partners together.

4. Execute parts of the growth engine for your partners

If engaging your partners in experiments does not work, you can always execute parts of it for them. In the most recent State of Inbound report, 63% of marketers say their main challenge is generating traffic and leads. Well, this will probably be true not only for you, but also for your partners – so how can you help them out?

There are a couple of tactics and ways of doing it. Again, it depends on your customer journey and what matters the most to your partners, but let’s say they have challenges in generating traffic – you can always:

• Create a section on your website that talks about the partnership and where your partners’ presence adds value – point to their website
• Share success stories on how they nurtured and won deals – ask for pictures, testimonials and share their success on your distribution channels (e.g. social)
• Engage, build and execute joint-marketing campaigns to generate traffic to an independent initiative (co-built by both you and your partner)

There are plenty more ideas that could be shared, but the point is that you are helping your partners by not only generating referral traffic, but more important, engaging them on potential joint-strategies where you can empower growth tactics from your side and help them become autonomous in executing them.

Another great example from EVBox is the switch in the mindset on generating leads. When I joined, the company had publicly available pricing on the website. This was damaging the relationship the partners (visitors could easily compare prices), but also did not allow any interaction with visitors.

Through a well-built SLA (service level agreement) with the sales team, the pricing strategy evolved into a dynamic quotation module. Once the leads get into our system, we nurture them, understand their needs and pass them along to a preferred partner. The advantage? We became even more important to our partners because they also recognized EVBox’s value as a lead generation channel for their business.

And what about content?
benchmarks and trends report from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs shares that more than 60% of marketers say that their content marketing strategies are more effective than one year before. Building a content empire is an ambition of every marketer, especially if you can develop articles, how-to guides, whitepapers, and more in every part of the customer journey.

Since content is still a key component of growth for any company, how can you get that in the hands of your partners? Here are three simple rules to keep in mind:

1. Don’t create content for them
2. They are your partners. Let them access your knowledge base and walk them through it
3. Give feedback and help them create their own content

Last but not least, let them be involved in parts of your rapid experimentations – perhaps they want to test how to increase traffic through guest blog posts, or increase lead generation by having a joint-social media campaign. Be open to working with them and make time to support their experiments.

5. Sell through direct channels when possible (and if it makes sense)

This can be seen as a strange recommendation. Aren’t we hurting our partners by doing direct sales? Sure, this can be true. On the other hand, you can only understand the full extent of your customer journey with the challenges your partners are going through by interacting with customers.

Want to sell direct? Then start by defining the right criteria. For example, the importance of a prospect can be such criteria. Once you define it, it’s easy to determine which prospect goes to a partner and which you will handle internally. Other criteria can be the strategic importance of customers.

Think of key customers you want to do business with yourself because they are key players on the market. Having these criteria in place does not happen overnight, but it does require a focus on identifying what’s critical for your business growth.

All in all, it’s highly recommended that you do direct business, even if the majority of your go-to-market and growth strategy depends or is influenced by the partner network you’re building.

John Kedzierski, the Corporate Vice-President, North America Service and Commercial Markets for Motorola Solutions covers this aspect in this great interview about working with indirect and direct sales.

“In my opinion, in a properly designed channel there’ll always be some channel conflict across your various routes to market, not just direct and indirect, but across multiple indirect channels if you have those. You want some channel conflict, otherwise ,you risk having white spots in your markets or your product is too hard to buy, by end customers. However, it’s critical to manage that so that you make your product financially attractive to sell too much coverage and you’ll go to the wrong end of that pendulum. It’s a constant balance. You must work at managing it.

When it does flare up in our case, we think we do manage it well. It’s typically when we have customers that bridge across different product lines and you have overlapping channels, that they might be interacting with, but we try our best to keep that in minimum while making sure that our products are relatively easy to buy by our customers.”

Let’s wrap it up – what are the 5 steps to keep in mind when building your own growth story through partnerships?

1. Define your customer and partner persona and share them with your partners.
2. Create a joint customer journey where you emphasize what roles partners can play to ensure a great customer experience. Enable your partners to deliver wow moments in that journey.where is clear the different roles partners can play in ensuring a great experience with many wow moments.
3. Engage your partners in your experiments, content or create joint-initiatives.
4. Execute parts of the growth strategy for them – become an important distribution channel yourself.
5. Be a sales agent yourself to fully understand the pains and gains of customers, and support even better your partners.

Napa Valley, what a wonderful place to visit. Some of my favorite wineries are in Napa. Paraduxx, Far Niente, Harlan, Mascot, Nickel and Nickel, Chandon, Domain Carneros, Cuvaison, Schug, just to name a few. Napa is also a wonderful place to work. And, I recently had an opportunity to do so when I was asked share my vision of the future at the Senior Living Innovation Forum.

I’m not an expert in senior living care nor am I a master of its business models and regulations. But I’ve studied the evolving nature of consumer expectations, preferences and their strengthening power of choice. I’ve studied how entrepreneurs, investors and bold legacy businesses are paving new roads to deliver modern products and experiences that cater to this evolving generation of connected customers. At some point, we are all the customers we are trying to reach. We all want experiences that build upon or at least deliver no worse, but hopefully better and more enchanting than the last great experience we had…regardless of industry.

I wanted to share with you the summary of my talk and also a video (below) of the presentation to help you re-imagine the work you’re doing, where you’re looking to grow and how you’re planning on getting there. At the same time, I’d like to offer a what I hope is a complementary narrative to also help you update or upgrade your work from a human-centered perspective.

The core of this presentation applies to every business and every institution.

Why Every Business Needs to Re-Imagine Experiences for a New Economy

In a talk that offered fresh insights applicable to senior housing, futurist Brian Solis stressed the essential differences between ‘iteration’ (refining what works to make it work even better) and ‘innovation’ (developing something genuinely new).

Recognizing that they need to embrace change at some level, many large companies have begun launching Innovation Labs, where a various stakeholders collaborate to create and prototype radical solutions to problems. However, about 95% of the developments these companies are calling ‘innovations’ are really just refinements of current processes. Truly radical ideas get watered down.

“Success makes us complacent; we become risk averse,” the award-winning author, keynote speaker and principal analyst at the Altimeter Group told the Senior Living Innovation Forum. “So we iterate. We do the same things better.”

Senior living falls into this iteration trap, said Solis, who shared case studies of companies in other industries that are truly innovating backed by examples of what they’re doing right, as well as cautionary tales of brands that refused to change. If your business is being complacent, someone will come along and develop something better. “Remember, there was a time when business as usual was leading edge.”

Experience Has Replaced the Kodak Moment

“We have to remember that what was offered in the past and what is offered today were designed for different times and expectations in a world that didn’t have much to choose from,” Solis said.

“Convention, business as usual, was very much the standard. What if we looked at other industries, other markets, other customers?

Solis referenced the fall of Kodak, which once dominated its industry.  If you’re over a certain age, you know the story of Kodak. “Someone in your house was the keeper of the pictures. Those were memories. That was the Kodak moment.” But digital photography changed our relationship with pictures. “They went from memories to experiences.”

During this transition, Kodak’s leadership dug in its heels, allowing the industry giant to be left behind. It filed for Chapter 11 in 2012. “Kodak lost touch with what the Kodak moment meant.”

Experience Drives Innovation

Addressing senior living industry leaders, the author of “What’s the Future in Business”  added: “There’s a group of us who don’t want to change. Who want to hold onto the world as we know it. The one thing I’ve learned about disruption is that disruptors can be disrupted. Every company is ripe for disruption.”

Solis defined experience as “something you feel, something you sense and interpret. It’s measured by how you react.” Through his research he’s learned that experience is the number one driver of innovation. “Those in the know have figured out that the customer has changed. There’s a new normal.”

To benefit, the senior living industry needs to embrace an experience design approach to improving and reinventing its communities. Experience design is the practice of developing  products, processes, services, events, environments and more with focus placed on the quality of the user experience.

He asked his audience how every aspect of a senior living provider’s operation—from your website to your landscaping/interior design and staff—makes the people who will be living in your communities and their families feel?

To remain relevant and competitive in the coming decades, senior living (like all businesses) must embrace experience design and make it work for them. “Experience design is nascent, but it’s going to be a key differentiator from here on out,” he said.

“You are in the experience business and your clients are guests. Their children and loved ones are your customers too. And they have an increasing set of demands that center on experiences. Every single day technology is teaching them a new set of demands they’re entitled to.”

If, as an industry, senior living is slow to adapt, it’s not alone. “Most companies around the world haven’t yet put their finger on this new normal,” Solis said. “This creates a growing epidemic of out-of-touchness, and it has led to an innovation divide between executives and customers.”

Iteration vs. Innovation (Know the Difference)

As we mentioned above, funding Innovation Labs has become common practice across many industries, including hospitality. A number of these companies have invited Solis to study their methods and offer feedback.

While he finds that many of these labs are constructive, the improvements they’re developing are usually iterations, refining existing practices, rather than true innovation, which often means tossing our existing practices and introducing new ones that make current practices obsolete.

Real innovation is a shock to the system, he emphasized. It means abandoning practices that are working today for ones that take time to implement and may not hit their stride for years.

“We spend our lives following rules, but innovation asks us not to follow rules. It’s hard to wrap our minds around this and change our behavior.”

A quick example of innovation vs. iteration in the same industry–while TV technology continues to both innovate and then iterate to create an ever-evolving product, each new version of the television remote is the same-old/same-old with new features attached. “On average there are 70 buttons on a remote control.”

Banking With Google?

Industries like senior living — which, obviously, addresses an older demographic — still need to understand the impact apps and online services are having on society.

Recently, Solis has been working with a number of banks and other financial institutions. “About 73% of millennials said they expected to bank with Google, Amazon or Apple over the next five years,” he said, emphasizing that none of these three currently offer banking as an option.

“That is such a powerful response in that they don’t want to even think about banking with a bank because it’s so different from the apps they’re used to,” Solis said.

Social media and apps are making us more discerning, while our expectations for goods and services rise daily. “The more connected we become the more informed we become. The more informed we become we get empowered. We become demanding. We become impatient. And that plays out in decision making and how we sit and experience.”

What’s the next hot app?

While social media addiction has become a problem, Silicon Valley continues to innovate in ways that make our lives better, even when the exacerbate our tendency toward impatience.  “How long is too long to wait for an Uber before you open the Lyft app?” asked Solis. “In New York City that number is five to six minutes. Doordash, Apple, Tesla and others are changing the normal.”

He referenced an app many hadn’t heard of: Filld. “It’s the Uber of gas. A truck will pull up and fill my car and I don’t even have to be there. The minute I used this app for the first time was the last time I went to a gas station. Because it was disruptive. It introduced new value and made the old process obsolete,” Solis said.

“This got me thinking, where’s this for dentistry? Why isn’t’ my doctor doing this? That’s all coming.” He prompted senior living to begin thinking along these lines.

Lessons Senior Living Can Learn From Airbnb

In any industry, when competitors innovate, the natural response is often to ignore the disruptor for as long as possible, then try to shut it down and regulate it. Key examples include traditional taxis vs. Uber and, closer to home for senior living, Airbnb vs. hotels.

“Of course, the final response is learning how to compete and not lose (more) customers to the innovators,” Solis said.

And, often, even the innovators need to innovate. After its initial success, Airbnb hit a roadblock when it realized hosts and guests were having bad experiences, which, as a startup, could mean the end of investor funding.

So Airbnb did what all businesses should do, including senior living—they pulled all their data and then looked at the experiences in industries that people love. Next, they hired a Pixar storyboard artist to humanize the ideal Airbnb experience.

This approach would work for senior living, if developers choose to design resident experiences “like a Disney or Pixar movie, complete with character and story development, woven into a  thoughtful and methodical universe where the experience is linked, immersive and enchanting in every moment of truth,” he said.

“Airbnb went thru the Pixar storyboarding process to learn how to reimagine its brand and the experience for guests and hosts. This lead to a cohesive vision and a guide to help hosts deliver and guests receive a desired brand experience.”

Solis added, This process allowed Airbnb to transform their brand’s guest experience, to “humanize” it in ways they never saw before.  “Now there are conferences and communities of hosts; they’ve become an extension of the Airbnb brand.”

Hard, but Necessary, Work Ahead

While some innovations can seem obvious once they’re in place, a lot of effort goes into getting there, he stressed.

“None of this is easy. We have to ask ourselves ‘Where we are operating from? All innovation starts when we step outside our comfort zone,” Solis said. “All innovation comes to life when we allow ourselves to see how people live differently, how they want to live differently and do the things that connect the dots between where we are and where we want to be tomorrow.”

Brian Solis

Brian Solis is principal analyst and futurist at Altimeter, the digital analyst group at Prophet, Brian is world renowned keynote speaker and 7x best-selling author. His latest book, X: Where Business Meets Design, explores the future of brand and customer engagement through experience design.

Please, invite him to speak at your event or bring him in to inspire colleagues and fellow executives/boards.

Connect with Brian!

Twitter: @briansolis
Facebook: TheBrianSolis
LinkedIn: BrianSolis
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The post Tomorrow’s Products and Services Need to Offer Innovative (Not Just Iterative) Experiences appeared first on Brian Solis.

Let the computers do the legal busywork so attorneys can focus on complex problem solving for their clients. That’s the lucrative idea behind Atrium LTS, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan’s machine learning startup that digitizes legal documents and builds applications on top to speed up fundraising, commercial contracts, equity distribution, and employment issues. For example, one of its apps automatically turns startup funding documents into Excel cap tables.

Automating expensive legal labor has led to a rapid rise to 110 employees and 250 clients for Atrium including startups like Bird and MessageBird. Atrim only came of stealth a year ago with a $10.5 million party round before going into Y Combinator last winter. Today it announces its raised a $65 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

In characteristic dude fashion, Kan tells me “I’m pretty stoked about that because of having more resources for Atrium.” The venture firm’s partner Andrew Chen taking a board seat and famed co-founder Marc Andreessen joining as a board observer. “I wanted a visionary who’s always going to be pushing us to build something really big” Kan says. YC’s Continuity Fund and Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures are also joining the round

With the massive new funding round, Atrium will be able to develop more internal tools it can use to crank out client work faster than its traditional competitors. “We can ultimately be this platform on top of which you’re building these legal business and eventually other professional services and software services” Kan explains,”They’re all sitting on top of the platform that understands legal documents.”

In more Atrium news, Y Combinator’s leading partner Michael Seibel will join the startup’s board too. And it’s acquired Tetra, a YC artificila intelligence startup that had raised $1.5 million to analyze voice, “to help us build our platform that understands and structures data” Kan tells me.

What Kan didn’t initially mention is that two Atrium’s co-founders, CTO Chris Smoak and legal partner BeBe Chueh have left. He later admitted that had transitioned out of the company several months before the new funding. “BeBe wanted to spend time working on family (she just got engaged); Chris and I disagreed on his job role” regarding the definition of the CTO position, Kan tells me. He’ll now be running Atrium with remaining co-founder Augie Rakow, formerly of mega-law firm Orrick, and Kan’s long-term business partner and former McKinsey analyst Nick Cortes.

Justin Kan (Atrium) at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017

The law firm business model has left the door open for disruption by technology companies like Atrium. “Law firms generate revenue from hourly billing, and lack an incentive to vastly improve efficiency” Chen writes. “Many law firms dividend out all their profits at the end of each year, making it hard to invest in the expensive investment of building software. Software is hard to build inside a software company, much less a law firm”.

But Atrium is an engineering company with a legal clientele. It takes the most common and time-consuming activities — often related to ingesting mountains of documents — and builds machine learning workarounds. Atrium’s lawyers can focus on advising their clients on what to do, rather than burning the midnight oil doing it as they look for tiny quirks in the paperwork. The legal services get faster, cheaper, and more predictable so Atrium can offer upfront pricing.

For now, Atrium’s tech is limited to a narrow band of use cases. But “over $300 billion is spent per year in the enterprise legal market” Chen writes, so there’s plenty of room to grow now that Atrium is well capitalized. They’ll have to convince big corporations to ditch the old way and let computers lend a hand. Luckily, Atrium isn’t a SAAS company forcing clients to use the tech themselves. Done right, they shouldn’t even know it’s machine vision software, not junior associates, pouring over their docs.

Every day I open LinkedIn to find messages waiting for me. Invariably, these messages are from people who recently asked me to connect with them. Within milliseconds of my accepting their invitation, they have pasted the text of a pitch into their browser hit send.

Connect and Pitch

The messages are all the same, even when sent from different people, in different companies, selling different products and services. They begin by expressing their gratitude for the connection. Then they offer to help me with my business, it being rare that they know what my business is. A good many believe that I need B2B appointment-setters, help growing a coaching business, social media marketing support, translation services, or help developing applications for the web.

Let’s set aside the fact that they have created no value for me, nor have they engaged me in such a way that I might be willing to explore doing something different during a conversation. The long description of their product and service offerings are not going to compel cold prospects to engage with them or schedule a meeting. Speaking of scheduling a meeting, almost all of these notes include a link where I can schedule myself on their busy calendar (just for fun, click on one of the links and you’ll get some idea as to how well this approach is working; you will have no trouble finding a time they are available to meet with you).

Spray and Pray and Spam

The social selling crowd will tell you that one of the primary rules for effective use of the social tools is “don’t sell.” I tease them about calling something “social selling” when the first rule is “don’t sell.” Their advice here is sound, and it should be followed as if it is the first of the rules of effective use of LinkedIn (and other social tools).

The approach that we might call “connect and pitch” isn’t a good or professional approach to selling. It also isn’t an effective way to sell, even though I have heard friends say it must work or they would stop doing it, which one might challenge by looking at how many salespeople and organizations do the same thing with email, mistakenly believing the efficiency of an email trumps the effectiveness of other approaches.

Spamming people on LinkedIn, and that is what this approach amounts to, is not the best way to use the tools.

Most of us on LinkedIn understand the power of a large network. With more connections, you can see deeper into the network. Even more important, more connections means me people can find you.

As salespeople, we pay for the sins of salespeople in the past. The negative connotation around the word “sales” sticks, even though most salespeople wouldn’t know how to pressure someone to buy, nor would they try. The more people use the platform poorly, the less valuable it becomes.

It may be time that we ask them to stop.

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• Former Google China president and legendary tech investor Kai-Fu Lee says China is outpacing the US in the development of its mobile applications and AI.
• He predicts that the country's tech will usurp the US in the fields of retail, education, and healthcare in upcoming years.

When Kai-Fu Lee, prominent Chinese tech investor and former president of Google China, considers some of the leading technology products in the United States, he's underwhelmed.

"Look at YouTube or Instagram or Snapchat," said Lee in an interview with Business Insider. "If China had one of those companies and it moved at the pace that those companies move, it would likely be dead in the water."

For decades, Chinese developers closely watched America's tech sector for signs of innovation. But now, with its fast-developing mobile market breaking new ground, the country's tech sector is swiftly gaining confidence.

According to Lee, China has already outpaced the US in terms of creating better mobile applications and mobile payment systems. In the future, he predicts that technologies in the fields of retail, education, and healthcare will all soon leapfrog ahead of their US counterparts.

Notably, said Lee, Chinese entrepreneurs aren't interested in being followers.

"Chinese entrepreneurs are at a stage where they no longer feel they have to copy anyone else," said Lee. "They have enough experience and knowledge of the market and know how to build a deep, long moat around their castle."

This so-called "castle" of China's burgeoning tech sector is among the fastest developing markets in the world, and Lee predicts that it's on track to outpace the US, particularly in the area of artificial intelligence. 

Among the 13 companies Lee has invested in that are worth $1 billion or more, five are artificial intelligence companies. Together, said Lee, these five companies make up a cumulative value of $23 billion. 

See more: 'The future will be won or lost on this technology. I'm very concerned': The co-founder of a $9 billion company warns that China is on track to dominate the US in AI

There's several factors at play in the country's flourishing tech economy.

For one, Chinese companies simply innovate differently than those within the US. 

Lee offered up an example of how video has evolved within the country.

"China pushed the market to change from longform videos to short-form videos," he said. "From there, it changed from videos being watched to videos that you're apart of, and then to real-time videos, to using videos as a form of social networking. There is always someone trying to iterate and do something more."

"In China you assume from the start that someone is coming after you"

Chinese entrepreneurs think differently, as well, said Lee. 

"The business practice in China is 'winner takes all,'" said Lee. "They're not constrained by cornering only a sliver of the market. It's not about having a niche. The entire eco-system is interdependent."

This ecosystem differs from the way US entrepreneurs innovate, said Lee. 

"The American system is a gentlemanly system that involves respect, innovation, and consensus," said Lee. "People work in teams. They brainstorm and go into stealth and then come up with something."

But in China, entrepreneurs are less preoccupied with cultivating a creative, communal process.

"China is a giant experimental ground where people test things out," said Lee. "If they don't work they keep iterating over and over again. They want to be first. In China, you assume from the start that someone is coming after you."

SEE ALSO: People are talking about this amazing photo of Jack Dorsey and Alex Jones as a funny, dystopian, yet iconic image

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NOW WATCH: An aerospace company reintroduced its precision helicopter with two crossing motors

With 50% of customers preferring to hear from brands through emails, and 85% of promotional emails reaching the customer’s inbox now, it has become imperative for businesses to design an email campaign that not only resonate with the subscribers but has the capability to drive traffic and conversions too. Sure, open and click-through rates are important but, if it doesn’t entice the subscriber to convert and buy further, it is of very little or no value.

Consequently, it is important to take care of where your subscribers land once they receive your email and click on the call-to-action (CTA). Chances are that it will take them to an email landing page, you have specifically designed for an offer, product, promotion etc.

So, make sure your landing page has the capability to get hold of the customer’s attention. Remember, the longer your subscribers stay on your landing page, the higher are their chances of conversions. Hence, create a perfect landing page and give your subscribers a good reason to stay and convert. Here’s how you can do it.

1. Clarity is the key

The first and foremost step for creating an impeccable landing page is being clear in your approach. You have designed your landing page for a product or offer. So, make sure your landing page serves the purpose and gives your subscribers a clear idea regarding what your email is offering. To put it in other words, it should be simple and easy to comprehend. You can do this by including brief, precise and strictly necessary information within your landing page just the way ace & tate does. Its email and landing page are absolutely in sync.

Here’s the landing page for this email.

Pro-tip: You can make use of bullet points for increasing the clarity and thereby, attracting the customer’s attention instantly.

2. Make it visually engaging

Landing pages are a great way of engaging your subscribers visually and driving conversions. You can start by including relevant images and videos that best describes your product or service. However, make sure you don’t overdo it. It might distract the subscribers and shift their attention from the goal.

J. Hilburn has a visually impressive landing page for its email promoting their 3 in 1 Tech Jacket.

3. Stick to a compelling and single call to action

Your call to action should be compelling enough to drive conversions. So, make it strong and to the point that encourages people to take the necessary action. You can use CTAs like “buy now”, “join free”, “sign-up”, “learn more” etc. These are few of the highest converting call-to-actions.

In addition, you also need to stick to a single call-to-action to draw the subscriber’s attention and thereby, have better click and conversion rates. Do you know having a singular call-to-action enhances click-through and sales by 371% and 1617% respectively? This happens because of their uninterrupted focus on that one CTA. A good way of making your CTA the center of attraction is by making it easy to read and easy to spot. You can do this by keeping its size large and highlighting it with a color that’s not used anywhere else on the landing page.

Have a look at the landing page by HappyForms and the prominent CTA placed towards the bottom.

4. Keep your email and landing page coordinated

Make sure your email marketing campaign and landing page are well coordinated. If this isn’t the case, the email subscriber might get confused and probably suspect your email for a scam or phishing link. Hence, to avoid any such confusion, sync your email campaign and landing page properly. It can be done by maintaining the same aesthetic style such as color, font, logo etc. from your email campaign to your landing page. Also, if you are mentioning any offer in your email campaign, make it a point to repeat it in your landing page too. It can serve as a great opportunity for driving conversions.

Check out MOO’s email.

See how it perfectly syncs with its landing page that the prospects visit:

5. Don’t include typical website navigation

If you want your landing page to deliver great results, avoid including typical website navigation such as header, footer, social media buttons, support links etc. In short, don’t give your prospective customers an opportunity to escape by clicking away on other links. You want them to take immediate action. Thus, give them the reason to not get distracted and keep their focus intact.

Zero to Radio Ready has an awesome landing page in its kitty where there are no distractions of any website navigation and ample white space.

6. Highlight your privacy policy

Highlighting your privacy policy is an important aspect of any email landing page. It is needed to help you build a trustworthy relationship with your prospects. Remember, they are sharing their confidential information with you. So, it is critical to give them the assurance that your company is worth trusting. You can do it by making them aware of your privacy policy and terms and conditions. Include it at the bottom of the landing page or as a pop-up window to avoid any sort of cluttering.

7. Evaluate and test

Testing is another critical aspect of a successful landing page. Therefore, make sure you do A/B test of your landing page. You can make use of Google Website Optimizer for carrying out this test. A/B tests are a great way of knowing what works best for your landing page. From analyzing graphics, fonts and headlines to call to actions and background colors, it lets you know how to drive conversions effortlessly.

Final thoughts

Grabbing the prospective customer’s attention is a tedious task. In fact, even if your email marketing campaign does that successfully, what matters is driving conversions. This is when email landing pages can come in handy. However, as mentioned earlier, it will only help if it is perfectly designed. So, it’s high time you make use of the above-mentioned tips and create a landing page that turns out to be your greatest marketing asset.

Clients ask us all the time to help them with the right characteristics for personas–which are essentially market segments. We use what we call the A2G framework to help you think through all the characteristics that might be helpful:

• Attitudes: What are the visitor’s psychographics? Sometimes called attitudes, these characteristics include Personality, Values, Interests, Lifestyles, Purpose, Feelings, and more.
• Behaviors: What did the visitor do? These actions include search keywords, the timing of the visit, other sites they have visited in the past, behavior within the session, purchase history, lifetime value, and more.
• Completion: Did the visitor complete a task? This includes conversions, but also the completion of other tasks, such as paying a bill, registering for an event, and many others.
• Demographics: Who is the visitor? These characteristics include age, gender, income level, and lots more.
• Entry: How did the visitor find your site or app? Did they come from Google, social media, an email, and ad, or a link from another site?
• Firmographics: What organization are they from? The organizations’s characteristics include the industry, company size, and more.
• Geographics: Where are they from? This can be a country, or much more specific, even down to a block within a town.

We focus mainly on these characteristics to target marketing messages, but they are also highly valuable for segmenting your analytics. Each time you run an A/B test, or look at your analytics, you can look at the results in aggregate, but sometimes it can be very helpful to break things down by these segmentation characteristics. Maybe your test “failed,” but it might be helpful to know that it failed miserably among men but actually worked for women. If you can’t personalize your approach to show something different to men than women, this information might still help you to decide what to try next.

If you aren’t segmenting your numbers, you are missing a key means of insight into your test results and other analytics.

The primary challenge in keeping long lists of tasks is that, on paper, they all seem to have the same importance. The first task on your list needs you to do something to mark it complete and remove it. The second task also makes the same demand on you as the first, as do all of the other tasks on your never-ending list of things you need to do, want to do, and have to do—even if you don’t want to.

The reality is that some tasks, no matter whether you want to do them, need to do them, or have to do them are not equal in their importance—and can be even more disparate when it comes to their impact. Being productive isn’t a matter of completing tasks and being busy. Productivity, or time management, requires that you make values-based decisions.

Productivity is About Values

One way to improve your work and your productivity is to evaluate what you are doing by the impact that it will have over time. The more value over a longer period is a good indication that some task is more valuable than some other work. A longer term view allows for better decisions.

Yesterday I cleared my email inboxes, taking them all down to Inbox Zero, something I do twice a week. At the time of this writing, I have 56 emails in those same inboxes. No doubt, many of the emails in my inboxes are going to include a task I need to complete, and answering email itself is a task. It just isn’t the most important task, and over the long term, almost nothing in my email is going to produce a long-term impact.

One of the tasks on my task list is to create a workflow for one of my projects. Once I establish this workflow, this project will be significantly improved, and it will serve the people in the workflow and me far into the future. That makes this task more important than many others because of its long-term impact.

This is More Important Than That

You have to decide what you do with your time, and one way to determine what to do is to discriminate based on the value of the task or project or activity over a more extended period.

When you start ranking things by their real importance and impact, almost everything on your task list reveals its real value. This doesn’t mean that you don’t have to do what you want to do, need to do, or have to do, just that you need first to make time to do your most important, most impactful work.

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Andy Paul wrote a terrific piece on relationships (visit TheSalesHouse to get some of his thinking).  There is a lot of discussion, pro and con, about the importance of relationships–but little of it drives any clarity about what a relationship is, and why it matters.

There are the “old timers,” who view relationships as key, but define relationships as friendship.  Their approach is to exploit the “relationship,” but not the value they create in helping the customer achieve their goals.  They cite the years of “relationship,” the lunches, golf games, birthday cards to kids, etc.  They trade on this friendship, expecting to get preferred treatment in the sales situation.  (Sure doesn’t sound like the kind of friendship that I value.)

There’s the polar extreme, those who don’t believe relationships are important or meaningful in sales.  Often, these are those with the assembly line version of selling, optimizing our process, treating the customer as a widget they move through the process—lead, SDR, Demo, Account Manager, Specialist, Customer Experience Team…  The customer is an object upon which we execute our selling process, working the numbers.

Neither of those extremes is about relationships, neither of these extremes understands the importance of relationships with our customers.

Andy poses that relationships are about “connection.”  Not the kind we brag about in LinkedIn (how many connections we have).

Connection has a context–it may be around a certain issue, a certain initiative, something common we each want to achieve.

Connection is about meaning–it is about creating value with each other.

Connection involves an active interest in learning–both our individual positions and points of views, but in learning something new–moving forward, making progress.

Connection is about caring–it is about human being engaging with each other, perhaps not agreeing, but about caring enough to listen, learn, and respect each other.

Relationships may involve friendship, but don’t need to.  And true friendships are not about exploiting that friendship as leverage over one another.

Connection is critical to our effectiveness as sales people.  If we can’t connect with our customers, we will never be able to help them achieve their goals, as we achieve ours.

Connection is critical within our own organizations, if as managers we can’t connect with our people, we can’t help them maximize performance.  If we can’t connect with our colleagues, peers and managers, we can’t align to achieve our shared goals.

I worry about those who believe relationships are to be manipulated.  They don’t understand what connection is about.

I worry about this who believe relationships are unimportant, that sales is a mechanistic process, focused on optimizing our own efficiency, but not worried about connecting with their customers.  If this is what drives success, it means we don’t need people involved in the process and our respective bots, interacting, can be far more effective than humans could ever be.

I worry about those who don’t value relationships, it is through these connections that we learn, grow, improve, and achieve.

Relationships are about connection.

Connecting with our customers our people our communities is what makes us better as individuals, organizations, and a society.

Consumers are changing, and this has never been true than in the SaaS industry. Thanks to the Internet which has made all types of information accessible with just a click. The Internet has also allowed buyers to connect with their peers faster; thus, they can get other people’s opinions about a product or service before they buy.

However, this is not the only change that is happening in the SaaS buying process. There are other areas that you need to understand to effectively reach out to your buyers and ultimately close a deal.

Paying Attention to Details: The SaaS Buying Experience

The SaaS landscape is changing, and there are four prevalent factors that SaaS vendors need to focus on if they want to capture the attention of their potential customers effectively:

#1 The buyer makes the purchase decision without vendor engagement.

In the past, buyers interact with vendors when they want to know more about the product. With social media, however, people get more connected, and the modern buyer doesn’t need to go straight to the vendor to ask about the products and services they offer. Instead, they ask their fellow consumers and ask for an honest review – talk about glorified word-of-mouth advertising.

#2 Vendors with recognizable brands still gain the upper hand.

Whether you like it or not, consumers will still choose the familiar brand over something unfamiliar unless they see something of unique value. A well-thought brand strategy will help put your brand on the map.

Start with your core values – what do your brand and your company stand for? Next, how do you want to present your brand to your consumers? Do you want to be quirky or you want to be the voice of luxury?

#3 If you can’t present your product in a few sentences, forget about it.

If you are an unfamiliar brand, you can gain the upper hand by providing consumers an easy-to-use trial because who wants a hundred and one operation guideline? Stop using jargons and technical words that only you or a chosen few can understand. Start using the language your target audience is using, then you have a fighting chance. So you have a choice if you want to gain some market share – be popular or make consumers’ lives much easier.

#4 There’s not only one decision maker.

Decision makers are not the only ones involved in the buying process these days. In fact, they only get in the picture at the end when a final decision has to be made. It shows that there are other people who are given the responsibility to check different products and services. While they might not be the major decision-makers, these people have the power to influence decisions because they are the ones who give the input to the decision makers.

Strategy for the SaaS Buyer

Seeing how the SaaS buyer experience has changed, it calls for an overhaul of what is familiarly used in how we present our products and services to buyers. It’s not about changing the selling strategy but the product itself. This time, however, you are also designing the product with sales in mind. Here are some factors to consider so you can engage SaaS enterprises more:

Single sign-on

As mentioned above, SaaS consumers want products or services to be uncomplicated. It will do you good if you can design products that only require a single sign-on because it reduces administration efforts.

Login audits

A lot of documents are passed on to different people and departments that organizations sometimes do not know who has access to which document. Creating a feature that shows who accessed a document and what time they accessed it makes it much easier to trace any errors or mistakes that might have occurred.

Limited credentials

Aside from login audits, features that give users different levels of access to certain documents and software are recommended. This protects any sensitive information in case some credentials got lost or phished.

Multi-level security

Cybercriminals are busy trying to wreak havoc to any system that has low-security levels. Your product or service will be more appealing to consumers if you have addressed different security concerns and implemented some solutions to those problems.

In Conclusion

While there is no panacea to making the perfect SaaS solution to different types of buyers, an excellent marketer knows how their target customers think, what kind of information they have access to and what interactions they have. Doing this can increase your conversion and your revenue as well.

This article originally posted at The Savvy Marketer.

Over the years we’ve seen companies both large and small take a variety of approaches to obtaining translation. While some practices may be understandable for companies that have infrequent and small translation requirements, we’ve run into four practices that often hang on long after some businesses’ translation needs have become regular and extensive, costing money and/or impacting quality.

One: Using bilingual employees to do translations

Some businesses tell us they don’t have any translation needs because they have employees who take care of it for them. Bilingual employees speak with the occasional Spanish-speaking customer or translate brief emails. But sometimes company leaders, even leaders of large companies, believe they can continue to rely on their employees for more extensive translation jobs such as marketing materials, websites, manuals, etc. One thing that can be said for employees as translators is that they are well acquainted with the industry terminology. But this possible advantage is usually greatly outweighed by these drawbacks:

Opportunity costs: Bilingual employees generally have other jobs at the company. The time they spend on translation takes away from their main job. Using employees is often seen as a cost-saving measure, but the use of these employees – often highly skilled and well-paid – represents an opportunity cost since it takes them away from their primary job. Using professional translators can actually cost less than the value of the work lost by using employees.

Delays: Because employees have other work that can’t always wait while they concentrate on translation, translation projects are often long and drawn out processes. I spoke with one international marketing person who had been trying to translate his company’s website into Spanish – his first language – for a number of years. He had never been able to either finish the translation or talk the company leaders into paying the relatively modest costs of hiring professionals.

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Poor quality: Companies that wouldn’t think of letting non-professionals write their marketing and customer support materials see no problem with simply handing these materials over to any bilingual employee for translation. A good translator has to know both the source and the target language extremely well, and also has to be a good writer in the target language. This is why we require a minimum of 5 years of translation experience, subject matter expertise, and references as to quality, communication skills and professionalism before we work with a translator. Generally, translators should only translate into their native language. If an employee’s only qualification as a translator is the ability to speak a second language, asking them to translate invites quality problems.

Two: Using Google Translate

Neural machine translation has arrived on the scene, and Google’s free tool has improved quite a bit in the past few years. Google translations read more fluently than they used to, which is good. However, the fluidity of the translation can be its downfall. Mis-translations and omissions still occur, but they become harder to catch. Even if a bilingual employee is carefully comparing source and output, errors can still slip by. And, a full bilingual check of the output from machine translation can be about as labor-intensive as actually creating a translation from scratch, which triggers the problems outlined in the first section of this post. Also, Google Translate provides no security for sensitive information and does not guarantee the accuracy of its output.

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If a translation just needs to be “good enough,” there are better options, for example, machine translation with engines that have been “trained” for specific language domains. Your language partner can help you find affordable machine translation solutions. But when accuracy is crucial — for example in translations of medical, industrial, and legal documents — machine translation can fail. A recent narcotics case was thrown out by a federal judge because the police tried to use Google Translate to ask a Spanish-speaking suspect for permission to search his car. The translation only asked for permission to search FOR the car, and the defense successfully argued that the defendant had never agreed to a search OF the car.

Three: “Throwing it over the wall”

Purchasing translation is a learning process. It’s frustrating for both of us when a buyer has been told “find out how much it will cost” but doesn’t have any details about how the content will be used, the level of specialization required, the turnaround time, or where it will be published. There needs to be some consultation to make sure the client’s needs are met. Is it for publication or internal use only? If it’s to be translated into Spanish, for example, will it be for Spain, Argentina, or the US? If it’s medical, is it for an audience of specialists or patients? If it includes graphics, can you provide the native design files? Asking questions is sometimes perceived as an attempt to “up-sell” but actually it’s the opposite: we are getting the information in order to quote the project at the lowest competitive price, according to the client’s needs.

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Another problem comes when the translation needs of a business are not coordinated, and services are purchased by each office or department on an as-needed basis. This leads to a lot of wasted time as buyers duplicate each other’s work. It also leads to inconsistent quality and unpredictable costs. Sharing knowledge of vendors and the translation process within an organization ensures that the buyers will develop the knowledge to ask the right questions of their internal corporate clients and can work efficiently with their language partners. In particular, the company should ensure that a translation memory is maintained and is added to with each project to avoid paying full price for re-translating updates, and to increase quality and consistency.

Four: Failing to plan for translation

When a company knows that materials will regularly need to be translated for particular markets, it’s time to start planning for translation from the beginning of the content development process. We can offer many suggestions for creating content that will smooth the translation process later, saving time and money.

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At a minimum, make sure that the English version of the material is clearly written and that the material is thoroughly proofread before it is sent out for translation. Changes made to the source during the translation process will increase costs. Also try to submit all of the materials that you want translated into a particular language at the same time. This may result in volume discounts and avoid minimum charges for small documents, and will certainly add to the consistency of the translation across materials.

Business translation is an investment, and the ROI of translation will be maximized by controlling costs without sacrificing quality. MTM LinguaSoft can help your company develop a process that flows as smoothly and cost-effectively as possible.

StockSnap / Pixabay

There are a lot of factors that go into making sales online (great user experience, fair pricing, enticing images, etc.), but your product description is a major player in this process and shouldn’t be ignored or rushed through.

Yes, the fine art of seducing your buyers is done not only through the images you use, but through your words.

So pour yourself a glass of wine (optional) and let’s talk about how to write damn-good product descriptions that will score you those sales!

Step 1: Determine Your Keywords

You may not realize it, but the words you use in your product headlines and descriptions can mean the difference between coming up in search results and getting buried on page 1,958.

Determining which keywords you should use is easy, so don’t be intimidated by this process. You can use a free keyword tool, like Google’s Keyword Planner, to conduct some basic research.

For example, say you want to write a product description for dog treats.

You’d type ‘dog treats’ into the Keyword Planner to find out how many average monthly searches it gets, but you don’t want to stop there.

Say ‘Dog treats’ itself gets 9,900 searches a month but has high competition for coming up in search results — that might seem like a good contender but the high comp means you aren’t likely to rank.

But if you add ‘homemade’ to that and see it has 18,100 searches per month with medium competition – you’re getting closer to the right track but you’re still not quite there.

Now, what happens if you type in ‘homemade peanut butter dog treats’? Let’s say you find that phrase has 1,000 searches a month with low competition (ding, ding, ding!).

Yes, searches are much lower, but that can actually be a good thing because now you’ve also got low competition. This means it’s much more likely that this specific product will be found when people are searching for it. (And that’s about 1k people a month!)

If you go through this process for each product you have, (I promise, it’s pretty fast), you’ll see improved traffic flow coming into your online store or ecommerce site from the various search engines.

You’ll want to use the main keyword “Homemade Peanut Butter Dog Treats” as your product headline and use it again once in the description. You might use another, say, “gluten-free dog treats,” or something like it in the description as well, but remember that the content must sound natural and flow smoothly.

Warning: If you’re tempted to put your keyword into your description 10 times because you think it’ll get you the number 1 spot on page 1 of Google, don’t do it. It’ll never happen because this is called ‘keyword stuffing,’ and Google penalizes for that, but it will also turn off anyone who happens to read it, practically guaranteeing you lost sales.

Step 2: Write Down the Specifics

When you’re writing content for each product, think carefully about the specifics that should be included.

Basically, include every important detail a customer would want to know instead of leaving it to chance that they’d actually contact you for more details.

Leaving out that a shirt is made of wool or that a painting was done on metal rather than a linen canvas are details that can cost you a sale — or anger a potential buyer who did not realize these things prior to making a purchase.

Ask yourself these questions when writing your content:

• What exactly is my product? (Refer back to the keywords you researched in step one.)
• What materials is it made of?
• What process was used to make it?
• What colors does it come in?
• How is it used?
• Who is it best for?
• What sizes does it come in?
• What are the dimensions?
• Is it customizable?
• What makes it unique or special?
• How does what I offer stand out from competitors?
• Will I offer a warranty or money-back guarantee?

Step 3: Make It Jazzy

Now that you’ve got your keyword(s) and you know what specifics must be included, it’s time to put them all together into a brief, yet damn-good, product description.

And, no, simply writing “Red T-shirt” or “Toy for dog” does not fall under the category of “damn good.”

Take some time to make your descriptions sound, well, descriptive. After all, you’ve got to first sell that buyer on your product before you’ll actually make the sale.

Including a couple power words can help jazz up your content. For example, a “head-turning black dress” sounds better than simply saying, “black dress.”

Here is a small list of power words to get you started:

Step 4: Proof and Test

Always run your product descriptions through a spell-check program before setting them live. Typos can make your business seem less credible and less professional, which can cost sales. Never give a prospective customer a reason to take their business elsewhere.

If you have someone who would read your descriptions for you, (someone impartial would be best), have them go through them carefully and rate them. Was any information missing? Did they find any typos? How persuasive was the content? Was it too long/too short/too boring?

Having this insight can mean the difference between a customer hitting ‘add to cart,’ or navigating away into the vast black hole of the internet, never to be seen again.

But, don’t worry too much, if you follow the four steps above, you’ll be on your way to writing damn-good product descriptions in no time at all!

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures how customers feel about a company, brand, product or service. The initial research in 2003 that led to the NPS metric asked customers a series of questions designed to elicit their feelings about the company. The researchers, Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company in collaboration with the company Satmetri, wanted to find a question that would correlate with real-world customer behaviors. For instance, for a company to grow, it needs customers who recommend the company to others; customers who become repeat buyers; customers who don’t constantly shop around for the best price. The researchers tested many questions with customers, trying to find the one question that would identify those most desirable and engaged customers.

The Bain & Company research team found one question identifying that desirable block of customers more accurately than any other. It became what the researchers called “the ultimate question,” because it was so powerful in predicting customer behavior. In 11 of 14 mature, major industries where it was tested, that question revealed more customers in the desired block than any other. In the three industries a different question was slightly more effective, but “the ultimate question” scored so closely that it became the standard question used to compute the Net Promoter Score across all industries.

NPS is a metric that measures customers’ willingness to recommend the organization, brand, product or service to others. As such, it gives a score to the customer’s experience and loyalty. More than two-thirds of the Fortune 1000 use NPS as one of their measurement tools.

Bain & Company have found that “…companies that achieve long-term profitable growth have Net Promoter Scores two times higher than the average company…and leaders on average grow at more than twice the rate of competitors.”

At the end of the day – companies that can drive a significant portion of new business from current customers and by gaining referrals from those customers are at an incredible competitive advantage. In discussing the critical factor of customer service on that outcome, Matthew Hooper, Chief Revenue Officer at ProV International, shared that: “It is a business imperative.”

“There is the old saying: ‘If you do not service your customers, someone else will.’ Customer service quality is not only a direct correlation to repeat customers, it is also a major factor in the NPS (Net Promotion Score) that leads new customers to you. Failing to meet customers’ expectations in this digital age is a sure way to reduce volume business and send your customers running to your competitors,” said Hooper.

What Is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) Definition?

The Net Promoter Score is a number ranging from -100 to +100. A score of 0 (zero) or greater is considered “good.” The “average” U.S. company scores less than +10 according to Reichheld, while scores of +50 are considered “excellent” and scores of +80 are considered “world class.”

How is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) Calculated?

The thinking behind NPS assumes customers fall into three categories: Detractors, Passives and Promoters. The calculation is made by asking “the ultimate question,” then tallying results. The “ultimate question” is:

On a scale of zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend (company, brand, product, service) to a (friend, colleague, relative)?

The formula for calculating NPS is simple: NPS = % of Promoters – % of Detractors

Therefore, if we asked the “ultimate question” of 80 customers, we might find a distribution like this:

35% Promoters answered 9 or 10.
30% Detractors answered 0 to 6.
35% Passives answered 7 or 8.
Based upon this breakdown,
NPS = 35% – 30% = +5.

So what does a company do with this metric? While the score itself is useful, the real value comes from drilling down with those customers in the Passive and Detractor categories. Companies that use NPS require their customer-facing teams to ask additional questions of those in the Passive and Detractor categories. For example, “What led you to rating our company/product/service as a ‘4’?’” can reveal specific complaints a customer had, which gives management the data it needs to take corrective action. The practice of seeking out dissatisfied customers, uncovering their concerns, then fixing them is what gives companies that use NPS so much value.

Impact of a Poor Net Promoter Score (NPS)

While achieving high levels of customer satisfaction is the goal of every service desk, NPS gives a broader view of how customers value the company. It measures the quality of the customer experience and the degree of loyalty a company can expect from its customer base. Negative NPS values (where Detractors outnumber Promoters) call for management to take positive steps to understand how it can correct the problems that led to poor ratings.

At the same time, NPS scores may suffer from flaws in the basic NPS design. For instance, customers can say they will recommend a company, but NPS doesn’t prove they actually do. One can have a warm, positive feeling about a company but may never recommend the company to others.

Furthermore, some marketing experts argue that the formula for computing NPS treats people who give a score of zero the same as those who score the company with six, even though there is a clear difference in the perception of such customers. Likewise, a company might find their customers are 60% Promoters and 30% Detractors—versus 30% Promoters and 0% Detractors. Both result in an NPS of +30 despite what are obvious differences between the two customer groups.

How to Monitor the Net Promoter Score (NPS) & Engage Customers Providing Feedback

Once you have established a method for collecting customers’ perceptions of your company, product or service, you should have the NPS displayed in real-time as well as track it for trend analysis. You should also track NPS with other measures of customer perceptions—metrics like CSAT and CES, along with a Voice of Customer Program and social listening, noted Sean Hawkins, Group Manager of Customer Success at UBM, Top 50 ICMI Thought Leader and author at Call Center Weekly. But it’s equally important to have a plan for what you do with the insights gleaned from results.

“It’s not enough to have this abundance of data, if you aren’t going to do anything with it. Why measure, if there is no follow up action? Reach out to customers when they provide feedback. Thank them! Inform them of the improvements, which resulted from their feedback,” said Hawkins.

Service support managers also need a real-time understanding of support center performance and their associated personnel and activities. Reports on service support performance need to be generated on a routine basis, standardized across multiple support centers and be made available between multiple levels of management.

Utilizing performance analytics is recommended to proactively monitor the effectiveness and efficiency of your service support centers and make confident business decisions based on real-time data and trending. By connecting to multiple technologies and centrally monitoring all your support centers and staff with a single prescriptive dashboard, you can make proactive decisions to minimize risk and maximize your budget. The customer experience will continually improve by monitoring your resources and the impact they’re making.

This article was originally published on the RDT Metrics blog and reprinted with permission.

A B2B marketing trend I’ve observed over the past couple years is the “ungating” of premium website content like eBooks, white papers and other high-value resources. Gating refers to the practice of placing a form in front of a piece of content on your site in order to capture the contact information of the person looking to consume it. Typically, these forms reside on a landing page that introduces the content and describes its value, serving to entice the visitor to “convert” – i.e. enter his or her information and become a potential lead.

Ungating, as you might expect, refers to removing that sign-up form. Sounds like a great idea, right? Well, if you’re a B2B marketer tasked with generating leads from your website and measured by your website conversion rate, ungating may seem like the opposite of what you want to do! In this article, I’ll describe why we at Evergage decided to ungate the vast majority of our premium content, how we went about it, and what benefits we’ve begun realizing from it.

The Case for Ungating

Until the end of 2017, all of our eBooks and white papers (24 in total) were gated. And up until a couple of months ago, all of our on-demand webinars (30 in total) were gated as well. To produce this volume of content, meet our quality standards, and keep all of it up-to-date requires a significant investment of time and money.

We generated several hundred leads per month from people downloading these assets. By traditional website demand generation standards these were pretty good results. But for Evergage, we needed to drive a lot more value from our investment.

We knew our content had much broader appeal and value than the numbers we were seeing. What we needed was for our thought leadership content to provide greater brand value. In addition, an important part of the Evergage brand promise is to enable better customer experiences, yet here we were putting up annoying forms in front of our content!

The theory was that if we unshackled our premium content, we’d get far greater consumption of it and hence better brand exposure for Evergage. No forms would mean more downloads, more shares and more backlinks. Personalization is also still a new and competitive market, so we wanted to maximize the reach of our content to potential prospects and influencers.

Furthermore, just as our platform is used to improve customer experiences, we wanted to improve our prospects’ experiences consuming content on our website. We know that buyers today prefer to self-educate and conduct research on their own terms, without the fear they’ll be hounded by a sales rep before they’re ready to engage. And like many B2B tech companies these days, Evergage has adopted an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, so it’s less important to convert high volumes of visitors; rather, quality and fit are more important.

Speaking of quality…let’s not forget how much of the data collected on these forms isn’t accurate! If someone really wants access to a piece of content that’s gated but wants to remain anonymous, they simply enter false data. In 2017, a whopping 25% of leads who filled out eBook forms on our site were classified as “bad data.” I believe the most popular first name in our system was “asdf”! Meanwhile, another 30% of leads were classified as “not a fit” – in other words, they didn’t meet our qualification criteria to pursue. And, of course, a large number of leads were “not interested,” “unresponsive,” or fell into other buckets that indicated they weren’t good leads.

Lastly, we analyzed our lead flow and found that the highest quality leads generally did not originate from a gated content download. In fact, In 2017 only 1.6% of leads that we considered qualified and pursued actually started from an eBook download. Most prospects did, however, download one or more premium content assets at some point in their journey. It’s just that for very few was it the first thing they did. And those who did download an eBook as their first interaction with Evergage also engaged with us in other ways later in their journey, so we felt confident we would have eventually captured those leads via some other method.

Taking Action

In the latter part of 2017, based on the initial analysis we conducted, we decided to take action and kick off the ungating initiative — starting with our eBooks and white papers and, later, tackling our webinar replays. These categories represented 94% of all of our gated assets. Like most initiatives in marketing, we pursued the ungating process in stages. We began in late 2017 and continued through mid-2018, testing our assumptions and measuring the results along the way to ensure we were making the right decision and achieving the intended goals.

In order to get meaningful data quickly, we started with a major new asset we published last fall, our full-length book One-to-One Personalization in the Age of Machine Learning. The download numbers blew the doors off anything we’d published previously, which I wrote about in this blog article. It was a unique kind of asset, though, and we put a lot more into promoting it compared to typical eBooks and other content. Nevertheless, what we learned from the process affirmed our confidence in the value of ungating.

Next, we decided to test one of our most popular traditional eBooks, “35 Ways to Do Real-Time Personalization.” Yet ungating it wasn’t as simple as just removing the form. This was an existing asset with a carefully constructed workflow: visitor reads about asset on landing page => visitor registers for asset => data flows into Act-On (marketing automation system) => Act-On creates or updates lead in Salesforce => lead receives an email with a link to the eBook. This whole experience and workflow needed to be re-evaluated and re-engineered. We also wanted to introduce an optional lead registration form, but more on that in a bit.

We weighed the pros and cons of turning our eBooks into webpage content, and while the latter certainly has definite benefits particularly for SEO, we wanted our eBooks to remain intact in their highly professional, nicely designed and readily printable form. We felt the best way to present them to visitors was to embed each one as a PDF on a dedicated webpage where the viewer could read it online or click to download it.

Once the “35 Ways” eBook was ready and placed in its own new, ungated page, we could start tracking the results. We checked in weekly for several weeks to see how things were going, and the results were great. Downloads were up 4-5x. Based on these results – in addition to the results we saw from the full-length book – it was full steam ahead with the ungating initiative.

Of course, we couldn’t ungate everything all at once. We had to take the same care and follow the same steps as we did with the first ungated eBook and do the proper QA to ensure everything worked as desired. And there were bumps along the road like choosing an optimal embed method that was fast, reliable and responsive. Once the eBooks and white papers were done, we moved on to the webinar replays, which had its own unique aspects since those were embedded Brainshark video presentations rather than PDFs.

Keep on Tracking

Ungating doesn’t mean throwing your hands in the air like you just don’t care. There’s no need to give up on tracking visitors who engage with your premium content and saying, “oh well, I guess we can’t know who our higher quality visitors are anymore.”

You definitely want to continue tracking what you can and capturing new leads when possible. Since we use Evergage on our own site, of course, we were still able to track on-page clicks and time spent to assess the level of engagement by each visitor on our newly ungated content pages. And if visitors arrived to these pages from emails or were already known visitors, we still update Act-On and Salesforce using “blind form submits” to ensure proper campaign tracking and attribution – all done behind the scenes. (Implementing this level of tracking is also part of the reason why the ungating process can take a little longer than you might expect.)

We also wanted to provide the opportunity to visitors to optionally register for our content. We didn’t want to disturb people with a form of any kind when they obtained their first premium piece of content on our site, but once they go for a second item, we present an optional form with just three fields presented in an unobtrusive way on the right side of the page. They can simply dismiss the form or fill it out if they want to opt in to future communications – which some do! And these are often the better quality, faster-moving leads.

We also include an optional checkbox on this form asking if they also want a demo. We’ve always had this on our forms, and in 2017 it was checked 11% of the time on eBook sign-up forms, generating hundreds of demo requests for our sales reps.

We also progressively profile those leads who provide their information. If we’ve already captured or know the person’s email, first name and last name, the next form they see asks for a couple additional pieces of information: title, company and industry.

And once we have that, we politely request phone number and “primary challenge” on a third and final form. Few fill this out, of course, but if and when they do, they’re of high quality!

Results

As of a couple months ago, we finished ungating all 54 assets we planned on ungating! We finished transitioning the webinar replays more recently, so I don’t have data on those, but I do have good stats on consumption of our eBooks and white papers which we completed earlier in the year:

We generated nearly 5x more downloads of our ungated eBooks and white papers compared to when they were gated. This translated into thousands more people consuming this content than we’d have experienced otherwise. At the same time, we saw a 50% drop in leads captured or visitors identified. This, of course, was not a surprise and frankly wasn’t as bad as expected. It’s also not as bad it that may sound; it only represented a few hundred “lost leads” compared to several thousand incremental, anonymous downloads who’ve been introduced to the Evergage brand, informed by our content, and potentially influenced as a future lead or referral source.

Additional Thoughts & Resources

Not to be forgotten in an analysis of the numbers, an overriding consideration in moving to ungate our content was to provide a better overall experience for our prospects. With the traditional model of gating content, you make a fundamental assumption that you will deliver value in exchange for someone’s contact information. But they don’t know that and you may be wrong. Shouldn’t you instead deliver value first in order to earn the opportunity to engage with a prospect? I believe so. Martin Karlowitsch from Netronic addresses the the topic of engaging your audience based on the anticipation of value versus delivered value nicely in “The One and Only Reason Why We Ungate All our Content.”

For another good resource on the “gate or not to gate” debate, check out Moz Co-Founder Rand Fishkin’s comprehensive and balanced assessment at https://moz.com/blog/content-gating-whiteboard-friday.

When we first entertained the idea of ungating our content, our analysis and discussions led to a fundamental question: if we ungated our thought leadership assets, how much would we lose in terms of quality lead generation compared to how much would we gain in brand reach and mindshare? We could measure the former but not really the latter. A big boost in consumption of content is the closest we can get at this point to assessing the impact on brand exposure. So, like many other programs and ideas, you test and measure what you can, but ultimately you still need to take a leap of faith.

Oh, and one more (important) thing…even if you run marketing (as I do), be sure you get sales leadership and CEO buy-in early on! It may require a leap of faith, but you don’t want to go it alone on this one.

If you go down this path as we did, remember to plan accordingly. Ungating is not as simple as just removing your sign-up forms. You want to be more sophisticated and thoughtful about it, provide a seamless experience for visitors, track what you can, capture leads when possible, and sync it all up in the relevant systems.

And, finally, big props to my colleague Zach Skole on owning and driving this initiative. We couldn’t have done this without him! #ungated

Erica Pandey / Axios:
Amazon has gained a wealth of city data from the 238 entrants for its HQ2, which could give it an edge over its rivals for building facilities like warehouses  —  When Amazon invited cities to compete for its second global headquarters a year ago today, it got reams of data from the 238 entrants …

Tech titans like Amazon and Microsoft aren't the only ones that are benefitting from the mass migration of businesses to the cloud.

As cloud computing becomes more ubiquitous in the IT industry, those same cloud giants are ramping up the amount they're spending on servers and data center equipment — and that's great news for those vendors from whom they buy their hardware and software. 

Today, public clouds account for just 20% of all computing workloads, but that percentage could grow to 48% by the end of 2020, according to Morgan Stanley.

In a report published on Tuesday, analyst Katy L. Huberty forecast that global capital expenditure spending among 14 major cloud companies  will increase 35% in 2018, up from 16% growth in 2017. Morgan Stanley estimates that Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft alone will account for 73% of that growth in 2018. 

These forecasts are based on spending at the companies which Morgan Stanley identifies as the most likely to invest in cloud infrastructure. It also includes other capital expenditure investments that the company might make, as well. 

Those dollars — spent by companies with large cloud businesses like Google, in addition to those who run their own clouds to power their business, like Facebook — will greatly benefit the vendors that sell data centers, servers and networking equipment. 

These are the 8 companies Huberty said have the most to gain from the growing cloud industry.

SEE ALSO: Goldman Sachs was an early backer of Uber, Dropbox and Spotify — here's what its CFO says the bank looks for in a startup investment

Arista

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In the 1990s, Portugal was in the throes of a national crisis, averaging 360 drug overdose deaths a year in a country of 10 million. Today, it has one of Europe’s lowest rates of drug, alcohol and tobacco use and the number of overdose deaths in 2016 was 26. In a weeklong series from Portugal, Vancouver Sun columnist Daphne Bramham looks at the lessons to be learned from the country’s radical approach to addiction treatment. 

LISBON, Portugal — Almost every day, foreigners knock on João Goulão’s door seeking a solution to their countries’ drug addiction problems.

Goulão is Portugal’s director-general of drug policy and the architect of its radical approach, which included decriminalizing all drugs for personal use. Among the pilgrims who have come here are philanthropist Richard Branson, Canadian Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould and, recently, an army of politicians and policy-makers from Norway.

Fortunately, the former family doctor is infinitely patient, as he’s been answering the same questions for almost 20 years.

In the late 1990s, Goulão and 10 others were charged with advising the government how to deal with the 100,000 people — one in every 100 citizens — using heroin. Overdose deaths were averaging 360 a year in the country of 10 million and Lisbon was called the junkie capital of Europe.

Goulão was an unusual choice. He had no training in addictions and, rare among Portuguese, no direct connection with addictions. The closest family connection he has to drugs is a niece, who is in her 40s and living in a therapeutic community with schizophrenia caused by drug use.

As for his four children, “Hopefully, none of them will have problems.”

Because of its interventions, Portugal now has one of Europe’s lowest rates of drug, alcohol and tobacco use across all ages, and the lowest infection rates for HIV/AIDS and hepatitis that are associated with injection drug use. In 2016, the number of overdose deaths dropped to 26 from 40 the previous year.

The only thing that most outsiders know about Portugal’s laws is that all drugs for personal use are decriminalized. But what most fail to understand is that all drugs, other than alcohol and tobacco, remain illegal.

If police find you with illicit drugs, you’ll be arrested and taken to a police station where the drugs will be weighed. If the amount is above the strictly enforced threshold limits — designed to be a 10-day supply for personal use, or 25 grams of cannabis, five grams of cannabis resin, two grams of cocaine, or one gram each of ecstasy or heroin — you can be charged as a trafficker. If convicted, jail terms range from one year to 14 years.

João Goulão, the architect of is Portugal’s 2001 overhaul of drug policy, says drug decriminalization would be a disaster without easy access to treatment.

If the amount is below the limit, you’ll be sent the following day to the Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction — even if you’re a tourist. There, you will be interviewed by a psychologist or social worker before appearing before a three-person panel that will offer suggestions aimed at stopping your drug use.

From there, you’re fast-tracked to whatever services you’re willing to accept. If you refuse help, you can be asked to do community service or even, eventually, facing a fine, perhaps even having possessions confiscated and sold to pay the fine.

It’s why Goulão is so quick to point out that Portugal’s success isn’t because of decriminalization. It’s because, in 2001, his country made a commitment to providing whatever its citizens need to be as healthy and as fully engaged in society as possible.

“Decriminalization is not a silver bullet,” he said. “If you decriminalize and do nothing else, things will get worse.

“The most important part was making treatment available to everybody who needed it for free. This was our first goal.”

Underlying the policies is a national conviction that addiction is a chronic, recurring disease best dealt with through treatment not jail.

“Our approach is based on respect,” said Goulão. “It’s incremental. Our system works by asking citizens what he can give at that given moment.

“If he is completely dependent, I cannot appeal through force of will. I have to help him with his limited capacity to make his own choices. And, step-by-step, the ability of the citizen increases.”

Portugal created pathways to health that aren’t punitive. This required investing in treatment and recovery services and establishing a network that connects citizens to whatever they need in a timely manner, whether that’s outpatient counselling, time in a detox centre, even up to three years in a therapeutic recovery community.

And it meant that the government made a long-term commitment to ensuring that those services wouldn’t disappear when the economy crashed in 2008.

One of Europe’s poorest countries before 2008, Portugal was essentially insolvent after the global meltdown. The US$115-billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union came with strings. The government had to increase taxes and cut spending. Yet, the addictions treatment and recovery services survived almost unscathed.

Helped by a boom in tourism, Portugal’s economy is recovering. Even so, its coalition government cut spending by 30 per cent in most areas this year. Again, the exception was addictions treatment and recovery.

Lisbon is a colourful and graffiti-rich city, but one thing visitors won’t see is people using drugs openly.

“We had cuts of 10 per cent because we could explain to politicians that to disinvest would cost more later on,” said Goulão. “We had to sacrifice some things — studies, research and surveys. But the health responses and treatment facilities, we kept them.”

It shows how far Portuguese politicians, citizens and even bankers have come in understanding what has been accomplished here.

The country’s drug policy has not only saved lives, it’s saving Portugal money. In the first five years, the social costs related to drug abuse dropped 12 per cent, according to a peer-reviewed study in the International Journal of Drug Policy in 2014.

Within the first decade, the cost saving had jumped to 18 per cent. Those reductions are in the health costs of drug use and overdose deaths, but also savings to the legal system associated with drug-related criminal prosecutions and reductions in lost income and lost production of individuals serving time in jail for drug offences.

Of course, that wasn’t initially obvious to many. In 2001, the United Nations threatened sanctions to punish Portugal for decriminalization and some in the European Union threatened to close the borders.

The first indication of change came in 2002. The left-wing party that brought in the changes was defeated, but the right-wing government stuck with it because the first indication of the improvements  were becoming obvious.

Today, António Guterres, the prime minister who enacted the policies, is the UN secretary-general and Norway is about to follow the Portuguese model.

“Our first goal is to help people to resume their dignity,” Goulão said. “An addict has to do whatever to get his fix each day, I cannot ask him or her to behave as a free citizen.”

Often the first task is getting what Goulão described as “the citizenship tools that they need — an identification card and a health card.”

If they are acutely addicted to heroin, they’ll be offered enrolment in an opioid substitution program so they can get methadone or buprenorphine to curb their cravings as they move to the next step.

Once users are stabilized, Goulão said, “I can ask for more from them, but always with them being assisted with those new focuses.”

•

These days, Lisbon is no Vancouver. There are no cannabis shops, let alone one on almost every corner. The smell of marijuana doesn’t permeate downtown streets, or any streets for that matter.

Medical marijuana was only legalized in June. The notion of legalizing recreational marijuana is anathema here.

No addicts openly inject heroin, smoke or inhale illicit substances, and there is no drug market where dealers openly sell.

No fentanyl has yet been detected in the illicit drugs. So there’s no need for take-home naloxone kits, pop-up treatment tents or specialized training and trauma counselling for first-responders.

Until July, there were no supervised injection sites. Three opened in July — two in Lisbon and one in Porto, the country’s second largest city.

When you ask citizens what they’d do if they saw someone selling or using drugs in public, most say they’d either tell them to do it somewhere else or they’d call the police in hopes the user could be coaxed into treatment and recovery.

There is a national opioid replacement program that provides free methadone to addicts as a means to stabilize them and get them into treatment. A dispensing van circulates through the city on a regular schedule for those whose doctors don’t allow them multiple doses to take home.

Despite the easy access to opioid substitution therapy, use is stable with a slight drop in 2016 (the last available statistics) to 16,368 people. It mirrors the generally decreasing trend in opioid addictions.

Nuno Capaz is the vice-president of Lisbon’s Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction.

Abstinence — defined as freedom from any form of illicit drug use — is the long-term goal for all addicts, according to Goulão, and Nuno Capaz, vice-president of Lisbon’s commission for the dissuasion of drug use. Both do, however, acknowledge that it may be impossible for all addicts.

In B.C. with a population of 4.7 million, there were 27,553 people with methadone or buprenorphine prescriptions in 2016, twice as many as a decade earlier, with the number forecast to rise to 58,000 by 2020.

Despite that, provincial guidelines for opioid substitution programs approved last year raised concerns about “low retention rates” — people quitting methadone and buprenorphine — and an under-utilization of opioid replacement therapy as a treatment option, particularly in northern B.C.

In 2016, there were only 27 overdose deaths in Portugal, down from 40 the previous year.

In B.C., 993 people died of illicit overdoses in 2016. The total rose to 1,422 last year.

During two weeks here, I saw no more than half a dozen people who were clearly high. The most obvious were two in Lisbon’s underground Metro. Another was screaming and dancing in the middle of a street in the upscale, Chiado shopping district, while a couple of others were curled up in parks or on church steps sleeping off the effects of drugs or alcohol.

Even the small shantytown that I went to with outreach workers didn’t come close to what’s become normal in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside or in the tent cities that have sprung up in this province.

•

Goulão still can’t get over what he saw when he visited Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside last fall.

“I was shocked. What I saw took me back to the end of the 1980s and 1990s in Lisbon with the public visibility of drug use and nuisance,” he said.

“What shocked me was that there are lots of responses but they do not seem to communicate. They’re not centred on what citizens need. … Citizens should be able to move through the system and get what they need.”

It’s got worse since his visit, with the overdose deaths only moderating slightly in the spring as B.C. entered its third year of a public health emergency.

He was asked about what would happen in Lisbon if an opioid user had to be revived with naloxone multiple times in a week.

“It wouldn’t happen,” Goulão said. “If it did, he’d probably be in a hospital under intensive psychiatric treatment. Four times in a week is not an accident. It has to be intentional. So he would need intensive therapy. … But I don’t know of somebody who would have overdosed so many times.”

He acknowledges that Portugal and Europe are lucky to have been spared the wave of fentanyl that is washing over North America. Goulão noted that heroin — opioids in general — have little appeal, especially among Portugal’s youth who have been regaled with tales of the bad days in the 1990s and learned the lessons from their parents and grandparents about its serious consequences.

Also, European doctors have  not prescribed painkilling opioids in anywhere near the quantities that have been handed out in North America.

“Portugal’s system is not perfect,” said Goulão. “But I believe we have the tools to meet the challenges.”

Among its challenges is how to deal with thousands of former heroin addicts who are returning to drug use in their older age.

“Twenty years ago, it was possible to find jobs for thousands of people at the final part of their (addictions) treatment,” Goulão said. “There were a lot of small and micro companies and we were convincing them to employ these guys.”

The companies would be given tax deductions and government help with the wages. The recovering users would have access to a therapist who was available to assist and motivate.

But since 2008, those companies have been closing. The government subsidies disappeared in the mandated cost cutting because they weren’t directly linked to addictions treatment and recovery.

“That’s a problem — the sustainability of these kinds of programs. These people lost their new lives. They collapsed like a house of cards and they relapsed. So now, they’re not as confident in our system of care,” said Goulão.

“Now, we are opening injecting rooms because they will not accept our invitation to treatment.”

dbramham@postmedia.com

Twitter: @daphnebramham

Addiction:
Winning
the war

Day 1: World comes to study Portugal’s grand experiment.

Day 2: Dissuasion commission aims to set users straight.

Day 3: Life today for drug addicts in Portugal.

Day 4: Outreach workers have a long-term goal.

Day 5: Harm reduction just a piece of the puzzle.

Day 6: Treatment centres abound; so do waiting lists.

Day 7: Applying the Portuguese model to B.C.

In addition to our Sunday App of the Week feature, we also summarize some of our favorite B2B sales & marketing posts from around the Web each week. We’ll miss a ton of great stuff, so if you found something you think is worth sharing please add it to the comments below.

7 Ways to Give Your Prospecting Emails a Makeover
Too many emails fall victim to common mistakes that make your response rates suffer. Here are some of those mistakes you should try to avoid. Thanks, Mike Schultz.

What Not to Do in B2B Sales — 7 Signs You’re About to Kill the Deal
What NOT to do if you’re trying to close a deal. Thanks for the tips, Manish Nepal.

The Myth of “What’s Working” in B2B Marketing
It’s a mistake to assume that any one consultant or thought leader or agency has all the answers. Great article, Howard Sewell.

5 Tips to Get Your Content Shared More Often
Not getting as many shares for your content as you would like? Check out these tips. Thanks, Helen Veyna.

How Connected should PR efforts be to Marketing efforts?
Public Relations plays a role in marketing efforts as it relates to awareness, influence, and credibility. Thanks for the article, John Moore.

Content Marketing vs. Marketing Content: Where You’re Getting It Wrong
Content is at the core of everything we do as marketers, but where are we getting our content wrong? Thanks for your thoughts, Randy Frisch.

Social Selling: What You Should and Should NOT Do
Where are some misconceptions when it comes to the term social selling. Here’s what you shouldn’t be doing. Thanks for the tips, Joanne Black.

6 Types of Content That You Can Easily Repurpose as Video
There are so many different types of content we need to create these days and for multiple different platforms. Here’s a look at how you can use that content for videos. Thanks, Ben Jacobson.

Marrying Up the Sales Process and the Buyer’s Journey
Because the buyer’s journey is nonlinear, the sales process is now nonlinear as well. Complex B2B sales is ever more complex. Great article, Anthony Iannarino.

The non-linear world of B2B buying
While rigidly defined processes might be the best way of running a manufacturing production line, they fail to reflect the reality of any moderately complicated sales environment. Thanks for your thoughts, Bob Apollo.

The post B2B Reads: Prospecting Email Makeovers and the Myth of What’s Working in B2B appeared first on Heinz Marketing.

Quantum computing has moved out of the realm of theoretical physics and into the real world, but its potential and promise are still years away.

Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, a powerhouse in the world of quantum research and a young upstart in the field presented visions for the future of the industry that illustrated both how far the industry has come and how far the technology has to go.

For both Dario Gil, the chief operating officer of IBM Research and the company’s vice president of artificial intelligence and quantum computing, and Chad Rigetti, a former IBM researcher who founded Rigetti Computing and serves as its chief executive, the moment that a quantum computer will be able to perform operations better than a classical computer is only three years away.

“[It’s] generating a solution that is better, faster or cheaper than you can do otherwise,” said Rigetti. “Quantum computing has moved out of a field of research into now an engineering discipline and an engineering enterprise.”

Considering the more than 30 years that IBM has been researching the technology and the millions (or billions) that have been poured into developing it, even seeing an end of the road is a victory for researchers and technologists.

Achieving this goal, for all of the brainpower and research hours that have gone into it, is hardly academic.

The Chinese government is building a $10 billion National Laboratory for Quantum Information in Anhui province, which borders Shanghai and is slated to open in 2020. Meanwhile, the U.S. public research into quantum computing is running at around $200 million per year.

Source: Patin Informatics via Bloomberg News.

One of the reasons why governments, especially, are so interested in the technology is its potential to completely remake the cybersecurity landscape. Some technologists argue that quantum computers will have the potential to crack any type of encryption technology, opening up all of the networks in the world to potential hacking.

Of course, quantum computing is so much more than security. It will enable new ways of doing things we can’t even imagine because we have never had this much pure compute power. Think about artificial and machine learning or drug development; any type of operation that is compute-intensive could benefit from the exponential increase in compute power that quantum computing will bring.

Security may be the Holy Grail for governments, but both Rigetti and Gil say that the industrial chemical business will be the first place where the potentially radical transformation of a market will appear first.

What is quantum computing anyway?

To understand quantum computing it helps to understand the principles of the physics behind it.

As Gil explained onstage (and on our site), quantum computing depends on the principles of superposition, entanglement and interference.

Superposition is the notion that physicists can observe multiple potential states of a particle. “If you a flip a coin it is one or two states,” said Gil. Meaning that there’s a single outcome that can be observed. But if someone were to spin a coin, they’d see a number of potential outcomes.

Once you’ve got one particle that’s being observed, you can add another and pair them thanks to a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. “If you have two coins where each one can be in superpositions and then you can have measurements can be taken” of the difference of both.

Finally, there’s interference, where the two particles can be manipulated by an outside force to change them and create different outcomes.

“In classical systems you have these bits of zeros and ones and the logical operations of the ands and the ors and the nots,” said Gil. “The classical computer is able to process the logical operations of bits expressed in zeros and ones.”

“In an algorithm you put the computer in a super positional state,” Gil continued. “You can take the amplitude and states and interfere them and the algorithm is the thing that interferes… I can have many, many states representing different pieces of information and then i can interfere with it to get these data.”

These operations are incredibly hard to sustain. In the early days of research into quantum computing the superconducting devices only had one nanosecond before a qubit transforms into a traditional bit of data. Those ranges have increased between 50 and 100 microseconds, which enabled IBM and Rigetti to open up their platforms to researchers and others to conduct experimentation (more on that later).

The physical quantum computer

As one can imagine, dealing with quantum particles is a delicate business. So the computing operations have to be carefully controlled. At the base of the machine is what basically amounts to a huge freezer that maintains a temperature in the device of 15 millikelvin — near absolute zero degrees and 180 times colder than the temperatures in interstellar space.

“These qubits are very delicate,” said Gil. “Anything from the outside world can couple to it and destroy its state and one way to protect it is to cool it.”

Wiring for the quantum computer is made of superconducting coaxial cables. The inputs to the computers are microwave pulses that manipulates the particles creating a signal that is then interpreted by the computers’ operators.

Those operators used to require a degree in quantum physics. But both IBM and Rigetti have been working on developing tools that can enable a relative newbie to use the tech.

Quantum computing in the “cloud”

Even as companies like IBM and Rigetti bring the cost of quantum computing down from tens of millions of dollars to roughly $1 million to $2 million, these tools likely will never become commodity hardware that a consumer buys to use as a personal computer.

Rather, as with most other computing these days, quantum computing power will be provided as a service to users.

Indeed, Rigetti announced onstage a new hybrid computing platform that can provide computing services to help the industry both reach quantum advantage — that tipping point at which quantum is commercially viable — and to enable industries to explore the technologies to acclimatize to the potential ways in which typical operations could be disrupted by it.

“A user logs on to their own device and use our software development kit to write a quantum application,” said Rigetti. “That program is sent to a compiler and kicks off an optimization kit that runs on a quantum and classical computer… This is the architecture that’s needed to achieve quantum advantage.”

Both IBM and Rigetti — and a slew of other competitors — are preparing users for accessing quantum computing opportunities on the cloud.

IBM has more than a million chips performing millions of quantum operations requested by users in over 100 countries around the world.

“In a cloud-first era I’m not sure the economic forces will be there that will drive us to develop the miniaturized environment in the laptop,” Rigetti said. But the ramifications of the technology’s commercialization will be felt by everyone, everywhere.

“Quantum computing is going to change the world and it’s all going to come in our lifetime, whether that’s two years or five years,” he said. “Quantum computing is going to redefine every industry and touch every market. Every major company will be involved in some capacity in that space.”

Martin Giles / MIT Technology Review:
Rigetti says its Quantum Cloud Services will let users run a hybrid of quantum and normal algorithms in the cloud, vastly reducing latency and increasing speed  —  A startup called Rigetti Comouting is linking quantum computers with classical ones in a new cloud service

If there’s one thing we’ve all heard when it comes to relationships, it’s that relationships are hard work. This expression can be applied to managing channel partners.

In general, managing relationships are hard when they’re long distance. Especially if you are working towards the goal of driving growth and increasing opportunities for your business.

It’s important to note that there are other conditions that make it difficult to establish and maintain a positive relationship, as well as, provide and receive real-time updates about leads and closed deals.

The good news is that we have you covered. Below you’ll discover how to avoid these 3 obstacles.

Obstacle #1: Creating and maintaining an engaging partner relationship to increase efficiency

What is motivating your channel partners to sell? If you are not continuously maintaining a good relationship with your partners, they may become demotivated to sell for you, resulting in a lack of efficiency.

Onboarding is a critical step in the channel partner relationship. This initial phase is about first impressions. A Partner Relationship Management (PRM) system that has a simple and easy to use onboarding process will provide partners with the right training tools that will create a positive sentiment from the start. Continue to maintain this relationship by ensuring important information is constantly updated.

To avoid starting your partner relationship off on the wrong foot, provide your channel partners with a simple and efficient onboarding process. This can include:

• A self service profile that partners complete
• An automated contract signing with integrated e-signature app
• Introductory videos, documents and marketing collateral

Obstacle #2: Lack of communication with partners

Communication is a challenge that people face all over the world. It can be especially frustrating when your partners are located internationally. Imagine trying to communicate with your partner through email to see where they are in the sales process. Maybe they’re trying to close a deal, but the absence of communication is causing them to be delayed in the sales process.

Can you imagine how frustrating this could be? Fortunately, a PRM portal helps close the communication gap by providing partners a central network that can be accessed 24/7. Partners will have be opportunity to use every piece of collateral needed to close leads, register opportunities, request MDF, share ideas, collaborate, and more.

Obstacle #3: Lack of Accessibility

How would you feel if your partner lost an opportunity due to a lack of accessibility to information?

A self-service portal can break through partner’s accessibility barriers. Partners will have real time access to relevant content such as documents, files, articles or data records.

Additionally, the portal is mobile-optimized, so Channel Partners will have the ability to close deals when they want.

What’s Next

Partner relationship management (PRM) portals are advantageous to businesses that have channel partners. A PRM portal makes it easier for your business to drive growth and increase opportunities. Give your business an advantage and research the best PRM portals for you.

There’s a dark cloud on the horizon. The behavior of cloud infrastructure providers, such as Amazon, threatens the viability of open source.

During 13 years as a venture investor, I have invested in the companies behind many open-source projects:

• Spring
• Mule
• Ruby Rails
• Groovy
• Grails
• Maven
• Gradle
• Redis
• SysDig
• Hazelcast
• Akka
• Scala
• Cassandra
• Spinnaker
• and others.

Open source has served society, and open-source business models have been successful and lucrative. Life was good.

Amazon’s behavior

I admire Amazon’s execution. In the venture business we are used to the large software incumbents (such as IBM, Oracle, HP, Compuware, CA, EMC, VMware, Citrix and others) being primarily big sales and distribution channels, which need to acquire innovation (i.e. startups) to feed their channel. Not Amazon. In July 2015, The Wall Street Journal quoted me as saying, “Amazon executes too well, almost like a startup. This is scary for everyone in the ecosystem.” That month, I wrote Fear The Amazon Juggernaut on investor site Seeking Alpha. AMZN is up 400 percent since I wrote that article. (I own AMZN indirectly.)

But to anyone other than its customers, Amazon is not a warm and fuzzy company. Numerous articles have detailed its bruising and cutthroat culture. Why would its use of open source be any different?

Go to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and hover over the Products menu at the top. You will see numerous open-source projects that Amazon did not create, but runs as-a-service. These provide Amazon with billions of dollars of revenue per year.

For example, Amazon takes Redis (the most loved database in StackOverflow’s developer survey), gives very little back, and runs it as a service, re-branded as AWS Elasticache. Many other popular open-source projects including, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Postgres, MySQL, Docker, Hadoop, Spark and more, have similarly been taken and offered as AWS products.

To be clear, this is not illegal. But we think it is wrong, and not conducive to sustainable open-source communities.

Commons Clause

In early 2018, I gathered together creators, CEOs or chief counsels of two dozen at-scale open-source companies, some of them public, to talk about what to do. In March I spoke to GeekWire about this effort. After a lot of constructive discussion the group decided that rather than beat around the bush with mixing and matching open-source licenses to discourage such behavior, we should create a straightforward clause that prohibits the behavior. We engaged respected open-source lawyer Heather Meeker to draft this clause.

In August 2018 Redis Labs announced their decision to add this rider (i.e. one additional paragraph) known as the Commons Clause to their liberal open-source license for certain add-on modules. Redis itself would remain on the permissive BSD license  —  nothing had changed with Redis itself! But the Redis Labs add-on modules will include the Commons Clause rider, which makes the source code available, without the ability to “sell” the modules, where “sell” includes offering them as a commercial service. The goal is to explicitly prevent the bad behavior of cloud infrastructure providers.

Anybody else, including enterprises like General Motors or General Electric, can still do all the things they used to be able to do with the software, even with Commons Clause applied to it. They can view and modify the source code and submit pull-requests to get their modifications into the product. They can even offer the software as-a-service internally for employees. What Commons Clause prevents is the running of a commercial service with somebody else’s open-source software in the manner that cloud infrastructure providers do.

This announcement has  — unsurprisingly, knowing the open-source community  — prompted spirited responses, both favorable and critical. At the risk of oversimplifying: those in favor view this as a logical and positive evolution in open-source licensing that allows open-source companies to run viable businesses while investing in open-source projects. Michael DeHaan, creator of Ansible, in Why Open Source Needs New Licenses, put one part particularly well:

We see people running open source “foundations” and web sites that are essentially talking heads, spewing political arguments about the definition of “open source” as described by something called “The Open Source Initiative”, which contains various names which have attained some level of popularity or following. They attempt to state that such a license where the source code is freely available, but use cases are limited, are “not open source”. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed.

Those neutral or against point out that the Commons Clause makes software not open source, which is accurate, and that making parts of the code base proprietary is against the ethos of open source; and Redis Labs must be desperate and having trouble making money.

First, do not worry about Redis Labs. The company is doing very, very well. And Redis is stronger, more loved and more BSD than ever before.

More importantly, we think it is time to reexamine the ethos of open source in today’s environment. When open source became popular, it was designed for practitioners to experiment with and build on, while contributing back to the community. No company was providing infrastructure as a service. No company was taking an open-source project, re-branding it, running it as a service, keeping the profits and giving very little back.

Our view is that open-source software was never intended for cloud infrastructure companies to take and sell. That is not the original ethos of open source. Commons Clause is reviving the original ethos of open source. Academics, hobbyists or developers wishing to use a popular open-source project to power a component of their application can still do so. But if you want to take substantially the same software that someone else has built, and offer it as a service, for your own profit, that’s not in the spirit of the open-source community.

As it turns out in the case of the Commons Clause, that can make the source code not technically open source. But that is something we must live with, to preserve the original ethos.

Apache + Commons Clause

Redis Labs released certain add-on modules as Apache + Commons Clause. Redis Labs made amply clear that the application of Commons Clause made them not open source, and that Redis itself remains open source and BSD-licensed.

Some rabid open-source wonks accused Redis Labs of trying to trick the community into thinking that modules were open source, because they used the word “Apache.” (They were reported to be foaming at the mouth while making these accusations, but in fairness it could have been just drool.)

There’s no trick. The Commons Clause is a rider that is to be attached to any permissive open-source license. Because various open-source projects use various open-source licenses, when releasing software using Commons Clause, one must specify to which underlying permissive open-source license one is attaching Commons Clause.

Why not AGPL?

There are two key reasons to not use AGPL in this scenario, an open-source license that says that you must release to the public any modifications you make when you run AGPL-licensed code as a service.

First, AGPL makes it inconvenient but does not prevent cloud infrastructure providers from engaging in the abusive behavior described above. It simply says that they must release any modifications they make while engaging in such behavior. Second, AGPL contains language about software patents that is unnecessary and disliked by a number of enterprises.

Many of our portfolio companies with AGPL projects have received requests from large enterprises to move to a more permissive license, since the use of AGPL is against their company’s policy.

Balance

Cloud infrastructure providers are not bad guys or acting with bad intentions. Open source has always been a balancing act. Many of us believe in our customers and peers seeing our source code, making improvements and sharing back. It’s always a leap of faith to distribute one’s work product for free and to trust that you’ll be able to put food on the table. Sometimes, with some projects, a natural balance occurs without much deliberate effort. But at other times, the natural balance does not occur: We are seeing this more and more with infrastructure open source, especially as cloud infrastructure providers seek to differentiate by moving up the stack from commodity compute and storage to higher level infrastructure services.

Revisions

The Commons Clause as of this writing is at version 1.0. There will be revisions and tweaks in the future to ensure that Commons Clause implements its goals. We’d love your input.

Differences of opinion on Commons Clause that we have seen expressed so far are essentially differences of philosophy. Much criticism has come from open-source wonks who are not in the business of making money with software. They have a different philosophy, but that is not surprising, because their job is to be political activists, not build value in companies.

Some have misconstrued that it prevents people from offering maintenance, support or professional services. This is a misreading of the language. Some have claimed that it conflicts with AGPL. Commons Clause is intended to be used with open-source licenses that are more permissive than AGPL, so that AGPL does not have to be used! Still, even with AGPL, few users of an author’s work would deem it prudent to simply disregard an author’s statement of intent to apply Commons Clause.

Protecting open source 

Some open-source stakeholders are confused. Whose side should they be on? Commons Clause is new, and we expected debate. The people behind this initiative are committed open-source advocates, and our intent is to protect open source from an existential threat. We hope others will rally to the cause, so that open-source companies can make money, open source can be viable and open-source developers can get paid for their contributions.