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Tech leaders believe harnessing the power of big data could boost the economy as well as sectors such as health care

Episode 88 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why recent Facebook News Feed changes are indicators of audience engagement expectations on every platform.

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The recent Facebook News Feed updates are more than signals to change how you market on Facebook.

They are indicators of what your audience expects on every platform.

If you speak to live audiences you know people will only wait so long for you to engage them before they start making a path to the door.

Asking for a show of hands, by the way, is not engagement.

That’s the equivalent of a Facebook like, which Facebook has said is no longer relevant. What is? Comments, because comments are deliberate and thoughtful actions, as compared to shares and likes that are passive and less likely to spark audience engagement.

Facebook Zero Teaches What Works

The most recent batch Facebook changes that will be rolling out over the coming months have been referred to as Facebook Apocalypse or Facebook Zero. I like Facebook Zero because it’s easier to spell and it reminds us of the reach our content will get if we don’t change our ways — zero.

Mark Zuckerberg announced “posts that spark meaningful conversations between people” will have a prominent place in your News Feed. This will be measured by both the number and depth of the comments.

It’s necessary to develop a strategy that gets people talking to each other, but without using click bait. For example, if you ask people to comment you are technically baiting them and Facebook is saying they will demote that type of content.

In addition to click bait, actions to minimize or avoid completely are posting content from outside links, such as your blog or other news sources. Facebook’s rationale for this about-face is apparently to make room in the News Feed for content people really care about, which surprisingly is not video.

According to Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s Head of News Feed, “Video is primarily a passive experience” because when you are watching it you are not typically talking (engaging) with friends.” Interactions between people make memorable experiences whether that experience is Facebook or face-to-face at a live event.

To understand why meaningful conversations are the benchmark for assessing the value of content you only have to consider how algorithms and machine learning drive Facebook’s advertising model. Comments are content that makes Facebook increasingly smarter and that makes it more valuable for targeting audiences with Facebook ads.

Here are three ways to make encourage engagement to make your business smarter and better for its customers.

#1. Social Listening Is Good for Business

For more than a decade I’ve studied how social media influences business marketing. Social media’s greatest value is giving people a voice that adds context for people that are listening — and the platform or business that is mining that data.

Businesses only need to help their customers feel safe and in control to encourage these conversations. That’s what Facebook and YouTube have recently done. When customers feel truly valued they will open up about the experiences they desire most.

And that’s what businesses want to know.

#2. Collaboration Makes Experiences Better

Nobody wants to be sold to but everyone likes to buy. For that to happen you have to give them opportunities to test-drive your product or service because everybody makes decisions in her or her own way.

This is how content marketing moves people to action. It helps them take intermediary steps that guide them along the buyer’s journey with relevant, interactive content.

My landscaping business planned for collaboration with our customers because actively engaging them got them to take ownership. They showed up prepared to get the full value of our expertise and experience because we built a process that showed them how and why that works for them.

When you make customers collaborators the co-creation process always leads to better outcomes.

#3. Communities Lift Everyone Up

Facebook said that its News Feed will favor posts in Facebook Groups because presumably, that is where these conversations are happening. To be clear, a post is a post whether it is on a Facebook page, personal profile, or within a group. But the post most likely to reach that larger audience is the group post.

Groups are communities of people getting what they want while helping others too. In addition to Facebook groups, its good business to be active in other communities that support you and your business.

Get involved. That’s what Facebook is teaching us. Sitting on the sidelines observing is not likely to further your efforts to make friends or earn more customers.

My plan is to build systems for reaching people that are personal, human and collaborative. One example is content marketing with a voice and tone that resonates with the audiences my company can best serve. Then I’ll use technology like Google Analytics, my CRM, and comments to measure that.

If content is king, comments are its most valuable form for helping people think, feel and do more of what they want to do.

Let’s begin with an imagination exercise. You’ve recently graduated from college (Go Lions!) and have been hired as a sales representative at a medium-sized B2B company. Your first solo meeting with a potential buyer fast approaches. (Yikes.)

Do you think it would help you to be able to watch a video of a sample sales presentation, where you could learn more about how your products solve real problems for clients? Or carefully review the evidence-based sales process that your company has developed?

Sure it would. And at many companies, you could simply log on to web-based a sales playbook that contains these and other sales tools.

OK, but what exactly is a B2B sales playbook?

A sales playbook is a collection of materials that serves to identify your company’s sales process and methodology, outline sales objectives, and provide a framework for closing sales.

If this were the year 2000, a B2B sales playbook might be a collection of materials gathered into a binder that sits on a high shelf in a training room. But this is 2018, which means that the Millennials who are entering the workforce learn best from watching video, and expect to be able to access training materials on their smartphones.

So, a typical B2B sales playbook today is likely to be housed in the cloud and internally managed, though there are companies that help you refine your processes and develop your sales playbooks.

An Internet-based sales playbook makes it easier to continually update and offers more ways for new sales team members to learn, including articles, videos, interactive checklists, and quizzes.

What is inside a B2B sales playbook?

Naturally, each company will make decisions as to what to include in their B2B sales playbook, though there are common elements:

• A sales presentation, either a detailed plan or a video, which models how to speak about the client’s issues and how your product or service offers solutions. Sales reps can use this presentation as a template in creating their client-based presentations.

• A clear, comprehensive client profile for each product/service you offer, answering this important question: Who needs our product or service and why?

• A stakeholder map that profiles the stakeholders that surround the typical buyers. According to the Harvard Business Review, there was an average of 5.4 people involved in a B2B solutions purchase in 2015, but this number has risen to 6.8 in 2017.
• Interactive checklists and scoring guides that help the seller identify true selling opportunities by zeroing in on qualifying questions like “Has the client secured funding for this project” and “Do you have the trust of the client’s executives?”
• A list of common objections the sales rep is likely to hear in the buying process and the responses to help overcome those.

• It is not unusual for buyers operating in a corporate environment that demands keeping costs low to opt out of making a major purchase. Educate your sales reps on how to calculate the cost of inaction for these buyers, using the calculator provided in your B2B sales playbook.

• The sales process, clearly laid out, explained, and current.

• A set of accurate milestones in the process that let sales rep realistically judge where the buyer is in their buying process: A sales rep can use these milestones to help them judge where they should be in their selling process (opportunity management).

• A useful analysis of the competition that clearly shows how your company stacks up to the competition, in detail.

Your B2B sales playbook should be the central resource for your sales team.

Your B2B sales playbook might not include some of the elements listed above, and it may include others that are unlisted. Let’s wrap up with a few more reasons why you should develop a credible, authoritative, easy-to-access, and portable sales playbook:

• CEB cites surveys where 65% of buyers report that the buying process usually takes much longer than they had planned; in fact, it takes them as long to prepare for contacting the first sales rep than they had thought the entire purchase would take.

• Buyers want sales reps who know their stuff, who can guide them through the purchasing process: A sales playbook helps the sales rep to do just that.

• Your sales representatives deserve to be set up for success, to be provided with the information and models that they need to excel in their work, in an easily accessed format.

• According to research completed by the TAS Group, almost half of sales teams don’t have a sales playbook, but those companies who have invested in a well-defined sales process are 33% more likely to be high performers.

Creating an outstanding B2B sales playbook means investing time and money, but consider the increase in revenue from more deals won with it, and the lost opportunities you could have won had an effective sales playbook been in place.

Book sales. A lot of authors live and die by these two words and yes, they’re important but when it comes to book marketing, they aren’t the only thing that matters. And while it’s not a bad thing to focus on book sales, it shouldn’t be your only measurement of success.

Book marketing and publicity is about relationships, creating them, building them, and fostering them. But it’s also about taking advantage of every opportunity that comes your way, or growing something into an opportunity to gain more exposure and sell more books.

Think of your campaign as building blocks or bricks. One thing builds on another and on another to create a campaign that isn’t just gaining you exposure, but book sales as well. Let’s dig a little deeper.

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Book marketing isn’t about book sales! Here’s what it is about! via @bookgal #authortips…
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Will I sell more books if I’m on Radio or TV? How many?

Authors love media, often because there’s a correlation between media and big book sales. But is that accurate?

It’s hard to know what kind of book sales your media appearances will generate. I’ve known authors to go on major shows (such as Oprah) and sell less than 100 books from that appearance. Media opportunities are always this starry-eyed goal, because most authors assume that media = sales but this isn’t always true. Sometimes media = opportunity and in every case, media is a great way to build your resume. If this all sounds boring, stick with me, because we’ll get to how to sell more books in a minute. (Not sure if you’re ready for big media? I can help you!)

On any given day, and during any campaign an author may run, book sales depend on a great many things. Not the least of which is:

• A great book cover
• A great book
• Your message (what you say during the interview, blogger interview or TV appearance)
• How easily can readers get your book (spoiler alert: it doesn’t have to be in bookstores!)

So with this in mind, selling books is about more than media, although media can be a good strategy. Solid book marketing and publicity may lead to media, which in turn can create more opportunities and lend you credibility for future efforts.

So, What’s the Secret to Book Sales?

Exposure.

For a book to sell well, it needs to be seen multiple times by your audience. So, one interview on NPR may get your sales rank on Amazon kicking up, but it won’t stay there. However, that interview can present some other, great opportunities if you’re willing to dig deeper.

I’d never discourage an author from seeking media, but make sure you’re looking at media for the right reasons – and sales shouldn’t be one of them. So what should it be: opportunity. Maybe the opportunity to be a return guest, to do more with the show or publication, or maybe it’s just the opportunity a media interview presents to go after larger media.

The more you can do, in a focused way, for your book, the better it will do overall. Let me explain that. So let’s say you’re doing a lot of local media and feel like you’re ready for the big time. Your book sales may be good, but you feel they could be better. Certainly, the exposure couldn’t hurt. If you’ve done a lot of regional media, it’s likely that you’re ready to go into the national markets. Media loves media so the more media you do, the more you’ll get. Remember: building blocks.

Or, let’s leave media for a minute and go to something else like speaking. What if you have big dreams of being on stage, giving a well-paid keynote speech or just getting on the speaking circuit. If you have no experience in speaking, maybe starting in your hometown is a solid plan, to get your feet wet, hone your skills, and in the process, build your mailing list.

Good marketing and publicity campaigns aren’t about just one thing. They are also about seeking opportunity and building on what’s presented. Sometimes it means creating your own opportunities.

And it’s also about saying yes more often than you say no.

While it’s fine to turn down things that aren’t right for you, you should never turn down something just because you feel it’s “too small.” You never know where an opportunity like that could lead you. And it might just help you sell more books. Or even lead to something bigger!

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Successful authors say yes more than they say no! via @bookgal #bookmarketing #authortips
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Finding the Right Exposure for your Book

The best campaigns are the right ones for your book. Maybe this sounds like a no-brainer. But I can’t tell you how many times I talk to authors who do stuff “because they think it’s the right thing to do.” They don’t always think about whether it’s right for their book and audience. And if you’re not doing the right things, you won’t sell more books. You might see a small bump in sales, but it won’t move the needle far.

A good example of this is fiction, in particular genre fiction. I love marketing genre fiction but I will rarely ever promise and author big, national media for this. I find that most authors get that. Unless you’re already a big household name, national media is probably a wasted effort for you. Why not spend your time elsewhere?

In almost every case, reader connections are key to selling more books and, in particular this is true for genre fiction. So instead of building your campaign on a set of unrealistic goals, spend your time on marketing efforts that will actually reach your reader: reviews on Amazon, blogger reviews, eBook promos, Goodreads giveaways, etc. You get the idea.

Now where’s the opportunity, you say? Well, as you build relationships with readers and bloggers, you are also building opportunity. You’re building a chance for a future feature, review or maybe a guest blog post.

So finding the right exposure is key. Then building on that exposure to create relationships will help you sell more books.

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Do you know how to find the right opportunities for your book? via @bookgal #bookmarketing…
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Every Opportunity Builds on Every Opportunity

Every single thing you do, every “win” you get should be viewed as an opportunity. And in some cases, that opportunity may be to just foster a relationship with a blogger. Whatever it is, finding the opportunity in each of your marketing and publicity strategies will help you keep building towards better book sales.

We had an author once who hated the Internet. He was older and refused to do a website, social media, any of it. I finally talked him into the website and encouraged him to start blogging. His blogs were thoughtful, interesting, and insightful. He was clearly out to help his reader.

When Entrepreneur Magazine asked to interview him, he took it a step further with them and asked if they ever considered letting non-magazine staff blog on their site. As it turns out they did. He started blogging for them, which was a phenomenal opportunity that came out of one, simple interview. It’s also interesting to note that the interview in and of itself didn’t net a lot of book sales, but his ongoing exposure with them did, ultimately, sell more books.

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Book marketing opportunities build on each other, here’s how to create yours! via @bookgal…
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Putting it all Together

What happens when you view your book  marketing and publicity as opportunity is that it doesn’t just create one impression, but multiple opportunities for exposure. And, remember what I said earlier? Exposure is key to book sales.

Now, this won’t happen every single time. I mean not every media interview or blogger review will turn into multiple features. But maybe there’s something else that came come out of it. As I said: media draws media and the same goes for bloggers.

Each and every opportunity is a chance to build into something bigger.  And each opportunity should be grabbed, appreciated, and responded to. You never know what additional doors will open as a result.

And, you need to remember that in the end, publishing is a business. Writing books is a business. Every chance you get to expand your reach, to grow your visibility, will aid in your growth and efforts to sell more books.

I had an author tell me once that her secret to success was responding to every single reader email she got. Even ones that weren’t the most favorable about her book. And as a genre fiction author, this makes sense. Because that reader connection is vital. But moreover, it was the opportunity she created, each time she took five minutes to write back a reader, thank them for writing and asking if she could add them to her mailing list. She laid the foundation for her success and her book sales.

Your own success as an author will come from a variety of different marketing and publicity strategies for exposure. Just remember to really work each exposure you get. It will make a difference and help you sell more books!

Good luck!

Lead generation has – and will continue to be – a challenge for many marketers. It’s not simply that finding qualified leads is difficult, it’s that turning those leads into customers is also a challenge.If you can identify the biggest barriers or obstacles facing your target audience, you then have the chance to reach out to them with products and services that can solve their problems.

Pain points are the marketing words for issues and challenges that your audience finds distressing or that prevents them from achieving all they could in a perfect world where that pain point is eliminated.

Let’s talk about three stages of points that can help you generate leads that can turn into conversions.

1. A Pain Point Is Minor, But Irritating

Customer pain points often begin with a vague sense that something is wrong, and that it could be done better, but there isn’t the time or the inclination to make changes.

At this stage your prospect knows that there is an issue in the business process, but he or she continues to work through it without making an effort to fix a minor, but irritating problem.
This stage doesn’t give you much room to put on a full-court press about your solution, but you can express the fact that you’re listening and available if the problem doesn’t get better.

This can be through a friendly email that isn’t sales-y, but talks in general about similar discomforts that other clients of yours experienced, and how your company was able to provide a solution.

You can also send links to blog posts, videos and guides that touch on the prospect’s pain point, which builds up your company’s authority and credibility.

2. A Pain Point Is Creating Unhappiness and Desire For Change

At this stage, the customer’s pain point has progressed on the intensity scale, and now what was simply an irritation has progressed into a full-scale problem.

Whether that the problem is stifling the work process and affecting productivity, or is creating disharmony at the workplace, the winds of change are blowing, and that means opportunity for you if you play your cards the right way.

At this stage, your prospect is primed for more than just sympathy and understanding, he or she is looking to make a change, but still needs convincing that your product or service is the one to use.

Now that your prospect is warmed up to your products or services, how do you reel them in?

The answer is to make an offer that the prospect can’t refuse, and that usually means an offer of value that doesn’t cost your prospect anything.

Because the key at this pain point stage is to persuade your prospect to opt in to something that will provide a potential solution to the problem.

The opt-in offer is most effective when it has value, and value in a marketing context is defined as anything that solves a problem, answers a question or satisfies a want or need in your prospect.

If your prospect’s pain point is related to outdated software for example, your opt-in offer could be a free test run of your software for 72 hours so that the prospect can see how much better your product works.

You could also send your prospect a link to a webinar or instructional video that explains how your software works.

Once your prospect decides to buy that software, you have now maximized your lead generation efforts, but there’s still more to accomplish.

3. Identifying Other Pain Points

Once you’ve eliminated your customer’s pain point, you will usually find that there are other pain points you can exploit, which your customer will happily reveal to you now that there is a real relationship.

Your goal at this stage is to make sure that you don’t waste all the time, money and effort you put into generating this lead and converting the lead into a paying customer.

Remember, it is far less expensive to retain a customer than it is to find a new one, so you should focus on two things: upselling and cross-selling.

Upselling is a fancy word that means turning your customers on to premium products or elite services you offer that can solve their problems.

Unlike prospects, customers are more willing to look at upselling as a positive thing, because it appeals to their desire to have the best quality products and services available.

Cross-selling is all about selling accessories that pair well with your core product or service.

Amazon popularized the concept of cross-selling with its “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” message that appears on your screen after you’ve made a purchase.

If you perfect the art of upselling and cross-selling, you can reap years of financial rewards off a customer who was once just a prospect.

Lead Generation Is All About Identifying Wants and Needs

Identifying pain points help you generate leads, because once you know what a prospect is missing, you are then positioned to provide a solution that solves the problem, and puts your foot in the door to turn that prospect into a customer.

There are many ways to generate leads, but if you hone in on the emotional needs of your prospects, you can implement your marketing through the three-stages of customer pain points, and boost your bottom line.

The buzzword fintech covers a range of financial technologies that enable consumers to access financial services over their mobile phone or the Internet. Through the many fintech innovations introduced over the past five years, retail customers can take out a loan, make a payment, transfer money overseas, or invest their savings electronically. Customers enjoy a better experience at a lower cost by transacting via a simple interface that is easier to navigate than traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. And for many of these services, customers bypass traditional financial intermediaries who have profited from this activity, such as banks, mutual-fund dealers, and money-transfer companies.

While the fintech wave arguably started decades ago, the global financial crisis turned this swell into a tsunami. Technology, the loss of trust and the arrival of mobile-first millennials are driving this paradigm shift in financial services.

Over the past year, the pace of fintech innovations has accelerated as the first generation of technologies that enabled this digital transformation — such as mobile phones, cloud computing and peer-to-peer networks — has combined with newer technologies such as blockchain, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

These technologies not only lower the barriers to entry into banking, but have also opened the door to non-traditional players ranging from small startups to giant technology companies. The question is: How much of the disruption witnessed in other traditional consumer businesses — book and music stores, video rentals, hotels, taxis — will be seen in the financial sector? And what will happen to the incumbents?

As a country, you would think Canada should be well-positioned to benefit from the fintech tsunami due to our leading financial services sector, our highly educated workforce, our diverse and spread-out population and our pool of talented entrepreneurs and investors. But rather than leading, Canada is being held back by a lack of a national strategy and the absence of a fintech champion.

What should Canada be doing? Let’s look at Australia. Like in Canada, the Australian banking sector came through the financial crisis largely unscathed, owing to the same prudent policies, conservative risk-taking and strong leadership. But when it comes to the fintech tsunami hitting our economies, the similarities end there. Australia has an emergency preparedness plan, and Canada does not.

In March 2016, Australia’s treasurer published Backing Australian FinTech, a national strategy that outlined commitments and initiatives being undertaken by the government and other bodies to support and promote Australia’s fintech sector, including creating a FinTech Advisory Group; introducing funding and tax incentives; reforming insolvency laws to encourage angel investment; promoting fintech exports and partnerships; addressing data accessibility and cybersecurity issues; and encouraging government procurement of fintech. The report even has a dedicated website to track progress.

The catalyst for the Australian response was perhaps the threat of losing talent. In September 2015, the U.K. government invited nine leading Australian fintechs on an all-expenses-paid trip to London, hoping to convince them to relocate. This followed several years of lobbying by the private sector and regional and city governments. In October 2014, the Committee for Sydney — an independent think tank that champions the city — along with the government of New South Wales had commissioned a critical report on Australia’s fintech sector. In May 2015, these parties established a fintech hub and co-working space in Sydney, called Stone & Chalk. They then formed an industry body called Fintech Australia, which outlined how the federal government could build a thriving fintech ecosystem.

The message was received. In February 2016, Australia’s prime minister established an advisory panel drawn from banks, venture-capital firms and fintech startups, which published the top three obstacles to Australia’s ambitions, namely: a lack of government procurement, the over-regulation of equity crowdfunding and the absence of a regulatory sandbox to help startups navigate the regulatory system. This input led to Australia’s fintech strategy, which Treasurer Morrison backed up with budgeted support. Finally, in December 2016, Australia’s securities regulator launched its regulatory sandbox and innovation hub while pursuing outreach to securities regulators in Europe, Singapore and the United States.

Australia is not alone in publishing a national fintech strategy championed at the highest levels of government. The U.K., Hong Kong and Singapore have each published strategies, and in each case the head of the finance ministry was behind it. What these four countries have in common is their small size relative to their neighbours, their large financial sectors as a share of GDP, their dependence on exports (particularly of financial services), and their vulnerability to shocks from abroad. Canada shares these features, but lacks its leadership and strategy for the future.

• Make room for fintech, Competition Bureau urges regulators. 'An important sector of the economy'
• Fintech options ease the pain points of financing for entrepreneurs
• 'There's no silver bullet here': Global financial firms still grappling with fintech challenge, report finds

At Ivey’s Scotiabank Digital Banking Lab, we clearly see plenty at stake if Canada does not get its act together. In 2016, Canada’s financial sector represented seven per cent of GDP and 4.4 per cent of all jobs in Canada. This important sector is at risk of disruption from abroad, enabled by technologies that eliminate borders and other barriers to entry. It does not cost any more to access a foreign website than a Canadian one. And as shown with the growth of Netflix, Canadians are happy to pay for foreign over domestic content even in a so-called protected industry. While the entry of foreign players may lead to better service for Canadians at a lower cost, it would be infinitely better for Canadians if we developed these fintech abilities domestically and exported them abroad, particularly to the U.S. market.

To accomplish this goal, Canada needs a national strategy. Regional initiatives by provincial governments or municipalities such as Toronto and Montreal — while positive — will not suffice to develop a world-class industry. The elements of Canada’s strategy can be drawn from the plans of other countries such as Australia. All Canada needs is a national champion, and the evidence from other countries points squarely at our finance minister. Bill Morneau, it is time to take the wheel and steer Canada through the fintech tsunami.

Michael R. King is a professor in the Finance Group at the Ivey Business School at Western University, and co-director of Ivey’s Scotiabank Digital Banking Lab. This item first appeared in the Ivey Business Journal.

There is a certain sort of person who sells a dream, a vision of something that you want, by making it appear that you can have that result without actually paying the price necessary to obtaining it. The results are promised to be transformative, removing time, energy, and effort from the equation. There is always a story about how they discovered the secret, the magic that allows them to produce a result that evades others.

The modern charlatan also uses a straw man, something to push against to make their case. The straw man is the enemy and worthy of your contempt. The charlatan plays on your confirmation bias to speak to the part of you that wishes things were easier. They speak to the part of you that resists change, preferring not to have to do anything uncomfortable or anything that will stretch you beyond what you are right now.

The snake oil the charlatan sells is like magic. You need merely take it and you will have the results you want now. Without the need to change. Without having to pay the price in full. Without it taking time to produce the result.

There is no way to have what you want without paying the price in full to obtain it. If you want a certain result, you have to do the work necessary, without shortcuts, without hacks, and without any attempt to make it easier to obtain.

There is no way to improve your results or your competency without woodshedding, spending the time doing the work to transform yourself from an amateur into a professional, into a craftsperson instead of a dabbler. The quiet work, the work no one sees is what builds the competency for later—better—work.

There is no way to do what you have always done and produce a different result. If you want something to be different, you have to change before that outcome is available to you. The charlatan, the snake oil salesperson, the con artist would have you believe otherwise.

If the advice you are given doesn’t require that you change, if it doesn’t require time and effort, if it suggest that results are easy, look askant at that advice and seek your answers elsewhere. Look for someone who promises you that you will have to change, that you will have to work, and that you will have to pay the price in full.

The post On Charlatans and Other Con Artists appeared first on The Sales Blog.

The modern salesperson is not what you have been told. They aren’t digital. The modern salesperson isn’t a “social seller” either. Digital is a tool kit and, therefore, it is no indication of what makes one a modern salesperson. The modern salesperson is something much more than someone who knows how to use a set of tools—even the tools that are necessary to the trade.

The mistake here is in believing that the tools are what make the salesperson modern. That’s the mindset of a dabbler, someone who falls in love with some sport or hobby and buys all the professional gear believing that is what is necessary to produce the result. Your new LeBron Nikes are not going to make you a better basketball player.

The modern salesperson is a value creator. They have the business acumen, the subject matter expertise, and the situational knowledge to sit across from their dream client as a peer and as a consultative salesperson. They possess information, insights, and ideas that are valuable to their prospective clients—even if that person never buys from them. They create value that is worth paying for, and in doing so, they differentiate themselves from their competitors. This is what makes one modern.

The modern salesperson does not enter into the sales conversation by sharing information about their company, their products, the feature and benefits thereof, or why you should buy from them. They don’t believe that their product or company is supposed to sell itself. Nor does the modern salesperson start with discovery questions that the prospective client has been asked repeatedly for two or more decades. Instead, they start the conversation with ideas about what is going on currently, what it means, and why and how one might change. They have deep chops and can hold their own in a conversation about what their client should do to produce better results.

Salespeople who have evolved faster than their clients (which is a more accurate assessment than the idea that the opposite is true) understand that they are engaged in the process of helping their clients change, and they know how to help them with a process that allows them to make a good decision. This includes knowing how to get the stakeholders to find consensus among their teams and how to help them execute a new solution, one that will move them to a better future state.

These outcomes, and many more along this line, are what is necessary to making one a modern salesperson. A nice LinkedIn profile is not going to cover any of this ground, even if you put the words “trusted advisor” in your profile (something I will beg you not to do). The digital tools don’t make one a modern salesperson any more than a Rolodex, a business journal, and a phone book would have made one a modern salesperson in 1984. The ability to create value for the client in an age of continuous, accelerating, disruptive change is what makes one a modern salesperson. As has always been true, the tools are ancillary.

The post The Modern Salesperson Isn’t Digital appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Call sequencing has been shown to increase contact rates by up to 110%. So, isn’t it time you implement the same approach to your email outreach? Email sequences save time, create a consistent experience for your prospect, and can even speed up your sales cycle.

Begin by identifying your goal for the sequence. If you’re contacting a prospect for the first time, your goal might be to educate them about pain point solutions. If you’re trying to re-engage with a prospect who’s ghosted, your goal would probably be to get them on the phone.

Here’s an email sequence I use for prospects before I’ve gotten them on the phone. Use these templates to take some of the guesswork out of your daily prospecting, move up on the activity board, and close more deals.

The Pre-Call Email Sequence for Reaching a Prospect

Email 1: The pain message

If you’re contacting a client you haven’t yet spoken to on the phone, it’s important to immediately establish value and avoid pitching your product too soon.

This template starts with an attention-grabbing headline and drives home value with an easy-to-read, bulleted list of pain points that should ring true to those of your prospect.

Email 2: Value message

One week later, follow up with a value message. In your first email, you identified their pain points. Now it’s time to tell them about the benefits of your product/service. Give your prospects a solution, and offer them a glimpse into what life with your company is like.

Email 3: Name drop message

Another week gone by and you still haven’t heard from your prospect? It’s time for the name drop. Highlight clients with similar company goals as your prospect and speak about their success using your product/service.

Email 4: Qualify message

A week later, follow up with a question for your prospect -- and tie that question back to a pain point. You want to remind your prospect of the challenges they face, and highlight how you can help.

Email 5: Product message

A week later, it’s time to pitch your product and speak directly about its features. Keep this email short. Your prospect hasn’t verbally expressed interest in your offer, so you’re still trying to earn their attention and interest. Keep your product’s benefits and features bulleted and topical to boost readability.

Email 6: Last attempt

One week later, it’s time for your final attempt at contact. Avoid the temptation to be passive-aggressive or pushy. Keep your tone business-as-usual and self-aware. And tell your prospect you’ll always be available to talk when your product/service becomes a business priority.

Customize this sequence for your business and see how much time and energy you gain for other, more valuable tasks.

Everything in our lives now has at least 10 different ways to be measured, and another 50 articles on the metrics you should be using. This applies to more than just marketing—how to measure your personal success, how to measure your dog’s obedience, how to measure who does the dishes more often in your household. The list goes on, the numbers go on, and you spiral into a never-ending measurement crisis.

So,

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what happens when you start measuring everything? You lose track of what matters.

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Suddenly you’re grasping for one more like, one more follower, one more page view, one more gold star from your dog trainer. But do any of those measurements matter? Will they get you to your end goal? Probably not. In this sea of never-ending metrics, how do you know what to measure anymore?

The answer (don’t hate me): It depends.

In college, it was easy to measure my success—I had one goal in mind: pass my classes. Since graduation, I’ve realized that measuring success in my job has ranged from designing a dollhouse that would pass safety tests to planning a concert that would increase NPS scores to building campaigns that increase retention. Although the meaning of “success” in each of the scenarios is vastly different, how I determined my measurements was the same.

Here are four easy ways to help you cut through the key marketing metrics mess. 

1. Define Your Goal

By defining your goal, you can help narrow your focus on what you should be measuring. If your goal is to increase retention rates by 10%, then measuring page views or other vanity metrics isn’t going to help you.

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When you define your goal, you can work backward to see what metrics will contribute to your success.

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Start by asking yourself what larger company goal you’re trying to make an impact on. This can be different for every department. Yours could be focused on revenue, building a brand vision, or even recruiting talent. Then ask yourself what channel you’re using. Are you using email, a blog, social posts, or working with an influencer?  Use those two items to build the framework of your goal.

2. Minimize Your Metrics

Once you’ve defined the framework of your goal, there are still many metrics to choose from. Just because you can measure something, doesn’t mean you should. Focus on one metric that you can rally all the stakeholders for that project around. When you pick a key marketing metric that matters to multiple stakeholders, you’re able to easily communicate the importance of that project and quickly see whether the work everyone is doing is making an impact. This doesn’t mean that you should only use one metric forever. As you start to move forward with a project, you should increase the metrics you’re using to get the best results. This also allows you to develop benchmarks to be able to test and optimize as you move forward.

3. Pretty Isn’t Always Relevant

Remember, at the end of the day, you measure something to show the impact on the business. Metrics, like friends, should give you value. What does it matter if you have 5,000 friends, but only three of them ever talk to you? I would say you actually only have three friends. There are a lot of vanity key marketing metrics out there that are easy to measure and look great in a graph/pie chart/visual, but they won’t help you to prove your bottom line.

4. Make Your Key Marketing Metrics Tell a Story

At the end of the day, you need to prove through your metrics that the project you worked on either achieved success or not. That sounds simple, but not everyone you will be presenting findings to will find your results as easy to translate or even understand why they matter (don’t worry, they do matter). At this point, you’ve defined your metrics and should know what to do if your metrics prove to be successful or how to improve if they aren’t. Put the data you’ve received into a digestible format and take a look at it from your audiences’ perspective. Will they understand how they should proceed with the project?

Take these tips and measure everything in your life a little easier! Do you have a great way to cut the metrics mess? How do you decide what to measure? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

The post How to Cut Through the Key Marketing Metrics Mess appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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The insurtech industry saw another good funding year in 2017, with 202 deals — a record-breaking number — that together were worth over $2.2 billion.

This is undoubtedly concerning for incumbent insurers, as it shows there is increasing interest in new technologies and solutions in the insurance sector.

However, new research from McKinsey & Company shows that insurtechs might not be as threatening to incumbents as previously thought.

Here are some key stats from the report:

• A majority of insurtechs focus on enabling the existing value chain. Sixty-one percent of insurtechs that received funding in 2017 from either (re)insurers or financial investors focus on enabling the current value chain. This means they want to enhance the efficiency of product delivery, underwriting, claims, and other administrative functions. This doesn't pose a large threat to incumbents — in fact, they could potentially benefit from adopting the enhanced products and services these insurtechs are providing.
• Only 9% of insurtechs aim to completely disrupt the value chain. These insurtechs want to change the way insurers do business entirely, and effectively take the place of incumbents. However, that the number of insurtechs in McKinsey's study taking this approach is low suggests legacy insurers aren't at much risk of this kind of large-scale disruption, for now.

This is good news for incumbents, as it means their value chain is still the status quo.The fact that most insurtechs are looking to enhance the insurance process means that incumbents don't yet have to worry about a completely new business model overtaking the industry. While insurtechs are challenging the way incumbents operate, they are doing it in a way that gives legacy players the chance to keep up and compete.

Maria Terekhova, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has written the definitive Fintech Ecosystem report that:

• Looks at how the environment in which the fintech industry operates is changing, and what that means for the digitization of financial services.
• Gives an overview of the main subsegments within the global fintech industry, and discusses which categories have had to adapt to survive, which have reaped benefits from their original game plans, and which new segments have come to the fore in the past twelve months.
• Outlines the adaptations that incumbent financial institutions have begun making to adjust to an economy that's inevitably shifting to digital, and in which tech-savvy fintechs are increasingly setting the standards.
• Discusses what the future of financial services will look like as fintech embeds itself into the financial mainstream.

Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:

1. Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. >> Learn More Now
2. Purchase & download the full report from our research store. >> Purchase & Download Now

Join the conversation about this story »

Raise your hand if you’ve already heard about predictive marketing. While it’s certainly not a new concept, predictive marketing is experiencing a boost in prominence thanks to updated technology which has made it more effective—and popular—than ever before.

Just check out the term’s popularity growth from December 2008 through December 2017:

And it’s popularity is expected to go even higher in 2018:

With that in mind, let’s kick things off with a simple, straightforward definition.

What is Predictive Marketing?

The use of data analysis to predict which marketing actions are most likely to succeed based on historical patterns, trends, and outcomes.

You’ve probably used predictive marketing in the past—or some form of it—without labeling it as such. Anytime you use data-driven research to make sales projections, design advertisements, or write a blog post, you’re using predictive marketing.

Here are three pieces of predictive marketing advice you can start using today.

1. Use Predictive Marketing to Improve Reliability

The idea with predictive marketing is to choose future outcomes with a high potential for profit based on the understanding that historical data confirms a reliable degree of performance results.

Basically, marketing actions with the highest chance of success are chosen by researching historical behavior patterns.

For example:

• Historical behavior pattern: People leave church at 12:30 pm
• Marketing action: Restaurants promote a lunch special on Facebook starting at 12 pm

To choose reliable marketing actions that will produce successful results you need to understand the 3 aspects of predictive marketing:

1. Identify a pattern, trend, or outcome
2. Determine the level of reliability
3. Make an actionable marketing prediction

Together, these three parts can be used to create accurate forecasts that improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities.

Check out this example to see how all three parts work together:

1. Identify a pattern, trend, or outcome: You have a segment of 1,500 customers that visit your website each year during the 3rd week of November to search for a special turkey seasoning.
   
2. Determine the level of reliability: Based on data from the previous 7 years, you find that 17% of customers purchase every year, 71% never purchase, and 12% add turkey seasoning to their shopping cart before abandoning the page.
3. Make an actionable marketing prediction: You make two predictions based on the reliability of your customer’s behavioral data. First, you predict that approximately 71% of your 1,500 customers—1,065—will have enough interest in your turkey seasoning to visit your product page next November. Second, you predict that approximately 12% of customers—180—can be classified as highly interested and likely to purchase with the right incentive.

If you don’t have the luxury of reviewing several years worth of historical data, the next best thing to do is look at industry benchmarks, trends, and reports. The more relevant data you have to fall back on, the more trustworthy and accurate your marketing predictions will be.

The accuracy of your predictions depends on the information you use. David Ogilvy once said:

“The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.”

While Ogilvy was referring to making ads that were highly informative to your audience, the reverse is also true when applied to your marketing process. The more informed you are, the more accurate your marketing predictions will be.

In this case, you’re using the data to inform actions that will dictate success or failure. Which brings us to the next piece of predictive marketing advice.

2. Use Predictive Elements to Boost Your Marketing Results

In 2015, Peep Laja—founder of CXL—was hired as CMO for then-failing apparel retailer Karmaloop.com. The brand had filed for bankruptcy that year and was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars each month. Incredibly, their marketing KPIs were green across the board just 3 months after Laja joined the team.

How did Laja’s team accomplish this? By using data-driven tripwire marketing. There are 3 steps in tripwire marketing:

1. Modeling desired customer behavior
2. Flagging deviations from that behavior (i.e., the “tripwires”), and then
3. Focusing your marketing time and energy on correcting those deviations

In the case of Karmaloop.com, Laja created two segments to help identify the most profitable, high-lifetime value (LTV) customer behavior.

• The first segment was made up of customers who purchased multiple times with low item totals, but almost never returned products.
• The second segment included buyers who purchased once, had low-value items and returned them often.

Laja identified the first segment as profitable with high-LTV, while the second segment was unprofitable with negative-LTV. Further research showed that the first segment made up just 1% of website sessions but accounted for a whopping 43% of revenue.

Long story short? Laja used segment one as Karmaloop.com’s desired customer model and created a variety of marketing actions based on their predictive behavior.

3. Use a Predictive Marketing Model to Create Actionable Items

This is a simple process. Just apply the 3 predictive marketing steps to your current scenario:

1. Identify a pattern, trend, or outcome
2. Assign a level of reliability
3. Make an actionable marketing prediction.

Your actionable marketing prediction is the key to creating a successful model. If it’s off even a little you could wind up wasting a significant amount of time and money on marketing actions that never pay off.

Going back to the example of the 1,500 customers that historically visit your product page during the 3rd week of November, we can see that two predictive marketing models were created:

1. 12% of people will abandon their carts
2. 71% of people won’t add products to their carts

So, how do you use these models to create actionable items?

Start by clarifying the purpose of your predictions for each model:

• The first model predicts that people who abandoned their carts will be interested enough in the product to purchase with some encouragement.
• The second model predicts that a percentage of people who never added products to their cart could be incentivized to consider purchasing.

Now, you can create a corresponding actionable marketing item for each model.

Let’s say you decide to create two promotions for the third week of November:

1. The first promotion incentivizes abandoned cart customers to complete a purchase using a free shipping offer.
2. The second retargets people who visited and left your site without adding products to their cart with a 10% discount.

It’s important to note that these promotions can’t be randomly chosen if they’re going to be effective. They must be chosen based on research and historical data.

For example, perhaps you create the first promotion because you know that 61% of people abandon online shopping carts due to extra fees—such as shipping and taxes.

Creating a predictive marketing model will help you uncover your most valuable customer segments and develop actionable items that produce reliable, successful results.

Final Word on Predictive Marketing

Predictive marketing is becoming more prominent thanks to the popularity of marketing automation and its ability to predict and capitalize on market trends. Many marketing tools—including HubSpot, Buffer, and Hootsuite—already use predictive technology to estimate things like the best social media posting times, leads that are most likely to become customers, and which keywords will have the greatest success as a blog topic.

Moving forward, AI will no doubt play a larger role in predictive marketing, especially as it relates to analytics because data as a marketing tool is becoming more important than ever before.

Check out what Growth Tribe has to say about predictive analytics in the video below:

Here’s the main takeaway—use data-driven analytics to discover which marketing actions have the highest probability of succeeding by looking for patterns, trends, and outcomes that are predictable and reliable.

This article was originally published here.

When a business puts together a strategy for their sales, there are many aspects that need to be given attention to in order to maximize profit in the shortest amount of time. Because of this, businesses can sometimes struggle with deciding what strategies they should be prioritizing, and which ones they can put less of a focus on. If you’re unsure of where that attention should be for your business, it’s time to let you in on a little secret: that CRM should be at the center of your sales plan, no matter where you are in the cycle.

Here’s why:

It’s One of the Most Affordable Types of Marketing

Today, businesses spend a lot of money on marketing. Whether it be through rebranding a product or paying for Facebook ads, it’s all costly. Spending so much money on all of this can be a bit preemptive, too, as one can never really know how those investments will pan out over time. Therefore, it’s important to find ways to expand your marketing strategy, without needing to take such a huge risk financially.

This can be done through your CRM strategy. It’s a known fact that good customer service doesn’t need to cost a thing. Once customers are satisfied (or even better, delighted), they are very likely to refer your business to others. And, with the way social media and review websites have taken over, this can be a great way to market your business essentially for free.

You’ll Know Which Leads are Worth Focusing On

If you’re having even the slightest growth in your business, then you probably already have a good idea about which leads have been successful and which ones have fallen short. Any person can gauge easily what strategies are working and which ones need improvement. But, instead of going back to the drawing table altogether, don’t get too discouraged; you just need to keep doing what you’re doing well — and, if you take a second to think about what that is, you’ll realize quickly that it’s your CRM.

So, when you look back on your successful leads, what was it specifically that you did right? Did you spend more time talking with someone before making a sales pitch? Did you provide a lot of value to someone for free via your content strategy? Or, did you give them incentives to join, like a discount or sign-up promotion?

It doesn’t take a marketing expert to see what all of these things have in common!

Because Without a Great CRM Strategy, Nothing Else Really Matters

It’s obvious why CRM needs to be the center of your sales plan. Customers are the sole driver of profit to your business. Without them, your business wouldn’t even exist in the first place. They are the ones in need of your products or services, and if you can’t make them feel special, they aren’t going to give you the time of day.

Having good and reliable customers can only be achieved when you prioritize your CRM above everything else. While it may seem that other aspects of your business need attention, CRM is truly the root of all of those other things — from your marketing to your content strategy, to your website’s accessibility, etc.

It’s Easy to Prioritize CRM with Email Marketing and Marketing Automation

In addition to CRM being the most affordable form of marketing, it can also be the least time-consuming. Because you can easily incorporate a solid CRM strategy into your email marketing, you can give your customers what they want in a click of a button. From sending welcome messages to shopping cart reminders, or birthday discounts, they should drive that content completely. This will give momentum to your business and keep the sales cycle going.

Luckily, creating all these emails is a walk in the park with marketing automation. Putting your customers at the center of every email you send out is simple. Set everything up how you want to well ahead of time. Then, automate it so you can go about business without needing to check your computer all the time. When you’re done, take a look at your reports. If you made sure that CRM was the focus of each email marketing campaign, it’s likely you’ll see positive results.

As a sales leader, you are evaluated by the success of your team – for better or worse.

As John Greene at PhoneBurner put it:

“Sales managers must take ownership of the success or failure of their sales team…As the leader of your business unit, it’s your job to educate, motivate, and provide a productive workplace…This is critical for your company’s growth and success.”

I want to focus on those four words I set in bold. Ownership, educate, motivate, and provide. If you can get these four things down, you’ll be well on your way to inspiring your team to new heights (and your business and career with it).

When people think of being an inspiring leader, they usually think of lofty speeches and pep talks, which is really just the superficial piece of the motivational puzzle. Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and place for that, but alone, it’s not enough.

Radical Ownership

This is the most important role of a leader (in any department, not just sales). You must hold yourself to higher standards and be able to shoulder the responsibility when things go wrong. At the end of the day, the onus for everything your team puts out is on you.

On a personal level, you need to deliver on your promises and show your team that they can rely on you and trust you. You need to lead by example. If you expect your team to be in the office by 9:30 every morning, you should strive to be there by 9:00. If you expect them to stay late at the end of the quarter to catch up on quotas, you’d better stay with them.

Going beyond that, you need to show them that you’ve got their back when things get tough. Don’t be that leader who claims credit for the record-breaking month only to throw half your team under the bus when the leads dry up.

This step is really about how you conduct yourself so that you become worthy of the team’s respect. Get this part right and you’ll have a solid foundation of credibility for everything that comes next. If you have their respect, people will take your direction more seriously and, in turn, feel respected themselves. They’ll be intrinsically motivated to meet your expectations.

One clear strategy to hold yourself accountable to this is to tie your compensation directly to that of your team. In addition to earning their respect, this is a good trick to force you to keep their success in mind when life tries to seduce you into taking a lazier route (which happens to everyone at some point).

Radical ownership is the most important lesson today and lays the foundation for everything that follows. If you’re really a top-notch salesperson deserving that leadership position, prove it and close some deals. By walking the walk, you’ll remove any excuses your team could use with you or themselves.

Ongoing Education

As a sales leader, you probably have more experience or knowledge than the rest of your team. Don’t hold that from them.

Sure, there are some lessons that they need to learn on their own, but generally, everyone wins when you share what you know and are open to new lessons yourself. So mentor your team and give them valuable feedback without either sugar coating it or tearing them apart.

The best leaders are able to be:

• specific and sincere with praise
• kind and clear with criticism

Both these points help your team members hear what you’re saying and improve themselves.

Now, you can’t just rely on your past experience. Especially in today’s rapidly changing technological landscape, it’s important to keep learning in order to keep your edge. Continue going to industry conferences, trying new strategies, and learning from your most promising salespeople.

This is another reason it’s important for sales leaders to jump into the trenches from time to time: to keep in touch with the team’s day-to-day tasks and see how the industry is evolving. If you never stop learning, neither will your team.

Extrinsic Motivation

If you’ve got the first two points down, you’re likely already inspiring your team with what is called intrinsic motivation, which is “behavior that is driven by internal rewards. In other words, the motivation to engage in a behavior arises from within the individual because it is naturally satisfying.”

So the motivation I’m going to discuss in this point is less about inspiring speeches and more about extrinsic motivation, which should be designed around goals and rewards.

Great salespeople tend to be results driven. In order to make sure that your team is headed in the right direction, you should give them motivating and tangible goals. A quota is a good place to start, but you can do better. Strong goal setting is an entire subject on its own, but there are a few key things I’d like to highlight:

• Incentivize success past quotas. Rewards should accelerate, not plateau, after quotas. Why would you want your best performers to slow down?

• Align incentives with company goals. This means incorporating client-fit and retention metrics into goals and compensating accordingly.

• Break them down. While it’s good to have one quarterly or annual goal to focus on, help your team break that down into individual weekly and monthly goals. Take their target revenue number and break that into the number of prospects needed, presentations made, etc.

On the rewards side, it’s not always about giving more. Commissions are a classic and effective part of sales compensation, but they leave a lot of room for flexibility. You should include your team in the conversation when determining incentives and let them help choose their rewards. Don’t be afraid to get creative.

Beyond cash, what do they value? More vacation time? Recognition? Attending a special conference? A chance to work on bigger accounts? This will likely vary from team to team, so ask them in order to get the most bang for your buck by offering incentives aligned with their intrinsic motivations.

Providing a Productive Workplace

An inspirational sales leader also needs to be a great manager. Though it’s important to lead by example and connect with your team, your role doesn’t stop there. One of your most important jobs is to clear obstacles for your team that could hurt performance.

It’s your duty to coordinate with the company’s executives and directors and be a robust advocate for your people. They need to know that they always have a voice with you, that you’ll negotiate to get the budget for the things they need and make sure that they’re properly recognized for their big wins – and, circling back to radical ownership, protect them when things aren’t going well. You need them focused on building relationships and closing deals, not playing office politics.

This might also extend to mediating amongst team members. Sales naturally gets competitive, and while you should encourage some healthy competition to boost results, don’t allow it to become petty or personal. Do your best to keep a cooperative spirit above all by setting team goals with shared rewards and compensation.

One of the most important times that this applies is making sure that the team has all the tools it needs to be effective. Ask your people what challenges they face or where the systems are weak and what they feel the tool or solution is.

Invest in technology and training that improves their job satisfaction as well as sales numbers. Remember, investing in the people on your team goes a long way.

Conclusion

This philosophy of how to be an effective leader has helped thousands of sales teams blow through their goals, including the teams at my own digital marketing agency. Not only do these strategies bring in the dollars, but they make everyone better off, happier, and proud of what they do. Admirable goals for any business leader.

Now get out there and inspire your sales team to close some deals and then reap the rewards of their – and your – success!

The post How to Be a Leader that Inspires Your Sales Team appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Increase Sales and Website Traffic with These 4 Email Marketing Tools

Today I have some resources to help you maximize your email marketing revenue with four great tools. Here’s links with tips and tricks to kick start your Monday.

Converting subscribers into leads can be a challenge, but with the help of using the right tools you can have more success and responses. These great resources also save time as you get your message to the right target market. Would you like to increase your business sales? Take advantage of these email marketing tools, and let me know how these work for you!

1) Professional emails made easy – Mad Mimi

Want to create a professional looking email without the expensive software? Then you’ll love this easy drag and drop tool. Mad Mimi is great for marketers who are just starting their business and don’t have a big budget yet. Create a message that your prospects will want to read with sharing and tracking features included.

2) Precise subscriber insights – Exact Target

Do you have a large number of emails that need to be sent out? Then you might want to try Exact Target from Salesforce, which can handle the volume with added features like surveys and social sharing. Features include segmenting based on profile data, automation, detailed reports, and user behavior measurement. A free demo is available if you want to give this a try.

3) Powerful email marketing – Constant Contact

Expand your HTML and CSS customization options for email with this saavy tool. Constant Contact is a step up, and well up to the task of handling complex emails. Quickly and easily create professional looking messages with drag and drop features and fast editing. Personalize your emails and build more connections through automation and scheduling. Already have an email list? These can be uploaded right into your dashboard with automatic removal of unsubscribes, bounces, and inactive emails. You can get started for free with a no credit card required trial.

4) Reach your subscribers for free – MailChimp

Create a simple newsletter or post to social media with an easy to use email marketing software. Mailchimp delivers a lot of punch and with many no-cost services to boot. This has become a popular choice for marketers and businesses over the last few years and continues to build upon its platform. If your business doesn’t have the funds yet for email marketing software then this is a great tool to start with in order to promote your website and attract a larger audience.

Hopefully you will find these email marketing tools helpful for increasing your business sales. Are there any that you would like to add as well?

If you want to help folks feel an emotional attachment to your brand, you can do it with email newsletters. A report from Nielsen Norman Group found people feel personally connected to newsletters because they have an ongoing relationship with them, expecting them regularly delivered to their inboxes and creating a stronger bond than an out-in-cyberspace company website.

To ensure that emotional attachment to your email newsletters is a positive one, check out some tips for creating newsletters your leads will actually read.

Make It Easy on Recipients

You want your newsletters to be easy for recipients to:

• Read
• Respond to
• Opt out of
• Follow your call-to-action (CTA)
• Look forward to

Making it easy to read means using a streamlined, uncluttered format. Stick to a single, main topic rather than try to cram in everything under the sun. Keeping the content short, adding a compelling image or two, and formatting the text so its easily to scan are other ways to give your audience some reading pleasure.

Don’t send your emails from a “do not reply” address, either. This is particularly important if your newsletter asks a clever question. Seeing a “do not reply” address sends the message that you really don’t want to hear from the recipients, even if they have a clever response. You want to encourage interaction and strengthen the connection, not deter it.

Always include an unsubscribe link at the end of your newsletters so recipients can opt out of the emails instead of reporting you as spam.

Pick a main CTA and focus efforts in that direction. While you may include more than one link if you’re mentioning different blog posts or information, you want to stick with one strong, compelling CTA to ensure the action you want recipients to take is absolutely clear.

Getting people geared up for your newsletter comes from delivering them on a reliable, consistent basis. Map out a regular schedule and stick to it so people get used to and even excited about receiving your regular emails.

Make It Enticing for Recipients

Enticing recipients to open and read your newsletters starts with a short, creative and compelling subject line. Humor can work wonders, as can asking a question or otherwise creating some type of incentive for readers to open it pronto. What would make them stop what they’re doing to take a peek at your newsletter? Use that as your subject line.

Newsletters stocked with endless promotional and sales copy can be a total turnoff. Keep your sales hype to fewer than 10 percent of the newsletter, dedicating 90 percent of the content to educational or informative content.

Narrowing your focus even further, by creating different newsletters for different audience segments, can increase engagement and enticement even further. Instead of sending one main newsletter, consider creating different newsletters to different segments based on customer personas. This way each newsletter can speak to the very specific interests of each segment.

Do Your Behind-the-Scenes Work

Before you send out any newsletter, you want to make sure you’ve done your newsletter homework. This behind-the-scenes work consists of a series of tasks that increase the chances your newsletter will be opened and read.

Your first task is to review your email contact list to make sure it’s up to date and thoroughly scrubbed. Sending your email newsletter to inactive or ancient email addresses, or to people who are no longer engaged with your brand, skew your metrics and invite headaches.

Inactive addresses increase your bounce rate, while contacts no longer interested in your company may simply mark your messages as spam.

Reviewing the performance of past emails is another necessary task to net best results. Reviewing metrics such as bounce rates, open rates, spam rates and click-through rates can help you shape your email newsletters going forward. It also helps with cleaning up your email contact list.

Having at least one other person look over the newsletter before you send it out is a must. Grammatical errors, broken links, and incorrect information can dash company credibility. Mistakes can likewise serves as a turnoff that makes recipients less inclined to open and read your subsequent newsletters.

Testing your newsletters is one final way to ensure you’ll land on a formula that pleases your audience. Here you can run A/B testing, experimenting with different elements of your newsletter to see which nets more positive responses. Elements you can experiment with include:

• Subject lines
• CTA design and colors
• Different images
• Including an image vs. using text only

Once you’ve done your background work, you can move forward crafting a newsletter aimed at making it easy on and compelling for your recipients. These tips can help you achieve email newsletter success, which can ultimately contribute to your brand’s overall success.

Postmedia columnist Daphne Bramham crosses the notoriously rough Drake Passage from the Falkland Islands to South Georgia — known as the Serengeti of the Southern Ocean — to Antarctica. Her daily reports from the 18-day expedition will cover issues from climate change and micro plastics in the ocean to Japan’s continuing whale hunt, the antics of penguins and the world’s wild race to tour, and exploit, this last frontier.

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PUNTA ARENAS, Chile — A continent at the bottom of the Southern Hemisphere was first imagined in the 2nd century as a counterbalance to the Arctic. Europeans first added it to their maps in the 1500s. But for nearly three centuries, Terra Australis Incognita remained purely speculative.

The last continent to be imagined, Antarctica was also the last to be discovered.

In 1773, Captain James Cook circumnavigated the Antarctic Circle, going farther south than any Europeans before him. He never saw Antarctica, but it didn’t stop him from believing.

 “That there may be a continent or a large tract of land near the (south) pole, I will not deny,” he wrote in his diary. “On the contrary, I am of the opinion that there is.”

Half a century later, Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen confirmed Antarctica’s existence in 1820. He saw it, but couldn’t reach it because of sea ice. It wasn’t until 1822 that American sealer and explorer John Davis and his crew became the first known to have landed there.

The Antarctic has long been a figment of my imagination as well. Long before Happy Feet or Blue Planet, I dreamed of walking among penguins. I longed to see the albatross that so bedeviled the Ancient Mariner. And after reading Ernest Shackleton’s incredible account of putting the lives of his men and himself above the vain-glorious attainment of the South Pole, I wanted to see where they had been.

Even now that I am finally setting off to see it, I still have whimsical, medieval moments where I imagine that I might find myself clinging by my toes, upside down, to the bottom of the world in order to not fly off into the universe.

As the last continent to be discovered, Antarctica remains a mysterious, mystical and spectacularly beautiful place that often turns adventurers and rational scientists into poets when they are asked to describe it.

Antarctica remains largely unknown. It is the emptiest and coldest place on Earth, with a recorded low of -89.2 degrees, and the only continent with no permanent human settlements other than the research stations that are mainly clustered along its coast.

Uniquely, it remains the only landmass that humans have yet to exploit for its resources.

Because it’s tucked at the bottom of the globe, sliced into bits to fit on flat maps, most of us don’t fully appreciate that Antarctica is roughly equivalent in size to the United States and Mexico combined.

A vast, frozen desert punctuated by volcanoes and mountain ranges, its highest peak — Mount Vinson — was only discovered in 1957. At 4,897 metres, it is nearly 1,000 metres higher than Mount Robson in the Canadian Rockies.

The South Pole itself is 2,700 metres above sea level. That is 1,000 metres higher than Banff and Denver.

Surrounded by the roughest and most dangerous seas, few places on Earth are farther from Canada. Even a more or less straight-line flight from Calgary to the Antarctic Peninsula is more than 18,000 kilometres. So, perhaps it’s not surprising that our Antarctic involvement is limited.

Canada signed on to the Antarctic Treaty in 1988. The international accord came into effect in 1961 and guarantees that Antarctica will be open to scientific research, but closed to mineral extraction, nuclear testing and the disposal of radioactive waste.

Because Canada has no permanent research station and no formal Antarctic research plan, it is only a non-consultative member to the treaty and not at the table when governance, sovereignty, resource exploration, wildlife protection, tourism or the effects of climate change are discussed.

Yet as a polar nation, a growing number of Canadian researchers, political scientists and environmentalists are pushing for greater involvement because of the parallel and complementary issues faced by both the Arctic and the Antarctic — everything from sovereignty to sea-level rise.

Animals have always drawn people to the far south, whether they are whalers, researchers or, today, an increasing number of tourists. The convergence of the southern seas with Atlantic and Pacific oceans makes the Antarctic a rich feeding ground for marine mammals, from the biggest (blue whales) to the smallest and everything in between, including the mythic albatross and adorable penguins.

But human incursions over the past century have severely impacted both the wildlife and the oceans.

Over two million baleen whales have been killed in the Southern Ocean — along with more than 725,000 fin whales, over 360,000 blue whales and another 250,000 or so humpbacks.

Evidence suggests that the stocks are rebounding since the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling there in 1982 — a moratorium that Canada opposed and, as a result, resigned its membership in the commission.

But now there are growing concerns about the commercial fishing of other species, which is damaging the rich stock of krill — a small shrimp-like crustacean that is the primary food source for baleen whales, penguins and other wildlife.

Still, as I head out today from the Falkland Islands on an 18-day expedition through South Georgia to the South Orkney Islands, into the Weddell Sea and on to the Antarctic Peninsula, I’ve been told to expect to see plenty of minke and humpback whales, thousands of penguins, as well as many seabirds, including, perhaps, the wandering albatross with its nearly 3.5-metre wingspan.

The wealth of marine wildlife in South Georgia has led to it being described as the Serengeti of the Southern Ocean.

But it doesn’t mean that many of those animals aren’t at risk. Of the 18 species of penguins, 11 are endangered.

Albatrosses are the world’s most threatened birds. All 22 species are listed as endangered, vulnerable or “near-threatened.” Blue, sei and fin whales are all endangered.

There is a move to set aside a conservation area about twice the size of British Columbia in the Weddell Sea off the Antarctic Peninsula to protect marine mammals, fish, penguins and seabirds.

In January, Greenpeace launched a global campaign in support of the European Union’s sanctuary proposal to the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. In October, the proposal to protect 1.8 million square kilometres was blocked by China and Russia even though China had brokered a deal the previous year to designate a 1.5 million-square-kilometre area in the Ross Sea, on the opposite side of the continent, as off-limits to fishing for 35 years.

In addition to direct human interventions, climate change is affecting this region more than anywhere else. According to Polar Knowledge Canada, the Southern Ocean is warming at twice the rate of the global ocean, having absorbed over 65 per cent of the heat associated with global warming and taken up to half of the ocean uptake of anthropogenic carbon.

The Antarctic Peninsula is showing the worst effects. One spectacular example came in July when one of the 10 largest icebergs in history calved off the Larsen ice shelf and into the sea. At an estimated trillion tons of ice, it is half the size of Haida Gwaii and accounted for about 12 per cent of the ice shelf’s total area, leaving it at the lowest extent ever recorded.

It’s too early to say what it might mean for wildlife. But when an ice shelf collapsed in the Ross Sea on the other side of the Antarctic, it had devastating effects on an Adelie penguin colony. Only two chicks were born in the colony and an estimated 18,000 died because the parents weren’t able to access their feeding grounds.

The reasons for the collapsing ice shelves are twofold. Warming seawater melts them from below, while warmer air temperatures melt them from above.

Because the ice chunks come from shelves that are already floating, this isn’t directly contributing to sea rise — any more than a melting ice cube in a drink doesn’t overflow the glass.

But scientists believe the collapse of the ice shelves may contribute to sea-level rise because they act as barriers to underground river water and advancing glaciers reaching the ocean.

Along with all the research being done on specific animals, on climate change and ice, there is growing interest in the quality of the water in the Southern Ocean.

During the 18 days on board One Ocean Expedition’s Akademik Ioffe, I will be helping take water samples to ship back to Peter Ross’s West Vancouver lab, where they will be processed.

Ross, vice-president of research for the Ocean Wise Conservation Association, is one of the world’s leading micro-plastics researchers. Using a Fourier-transform infrared spectrometer to identify and measure down to 5/1,000th of a millimetre, he and his researchers hope to determine the amount of these tiny plastics in the Antarctic waters, as well as trace them back to their source.

They will also be able to discern changes in the Antarctic and Arctic oceans because, starting this season, water sampling will be done on all of One Ocean Expedition’s polar voyages.

Although humans have a brief history in Antarctica, there are thrilling stories of past and present explorers, adventurers and scientists. Some are well-known — Shackleton, Robert F. Scott, Roald Amundsen, Edmund Hillary and Robert Swan.

Over 18 days, as I visit a small sliver of the Antarctic and of the continent, I’ll retell some of the heroic explorers’ stories and unravel new ones about life in this place — described as being “like a fairytale” by Amundsen and as “a great sterile desert with no animals, trees, birds or even bacteria … nothing” by adventurer Ben Saunders, whose solo attempt to cross Antarctica on foot ended abruptly in early January.

I’ll also be writing about the animals I see, the experts and others I meet along the way, and about ice and snow and what it means for sea level rise close to home.

I hope to take you along on this adventure with daily stories about what I’m seeing, learning and experiencing.

dbramham@postmedia.com

Twitter: @daphnebramham

Daphne Bramham is travelling as a guest of One Ocean Expeditions, which has neither reviewed nor approved her writing.

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Five things you probably don’t know about the Antarctic

The two British ships, Erebus and Terror, that were lost under John Franklin’s command and only recently discovered in the Arctic after nearly a century of searching, were the same ships used by Sir James Clark Ross, who discovered Victoria Land and the sea that is named for him. He also named two mountains after the ships — Erebus and Terror.

The sled dogs used by explorer Ernest Shackleton on his ill-fated Trans-Antarctic expedition in 1915 on the SS Endurance were bred and trained in Gimli, Man. by John Isfeld. Seventy of the dogs perished, but of the 30 that survived, some ended up in New Zealand and the last three ended up in the London Zoo.

Sir Edmund Hillary reached the South Pole in 1958 driving a Canadian-built Massey Ferguson tractor.

According to Maori oral tradition, its explorers (including women) reached the Antarctic waters as early as 650 A.D. But Danish-Norwegian explorer Caroline Mikkelsen was the first woman in the modern era to set foot on an Antarctic island in 1935. A mountain is named after her.

Up until 1969, the U.S. Navy refused to transport female scientists to the continent, and the U.S. National Science Foundation refused to allow women to work there.

You don’t have to be a great writer to put together awesome landing pages. In fact, a lot of people who wouldn’t consider themselves writers at all, have done it.

Last time I went over 15 strategies for writing quality landing page copy. There are some key elements that awesome landing pages include. There are plenty of examples of successful pages, where you can gain inspiration. Sales letters have been around even longer, and have a lot in common with the landing page format.

Hiring a landing page copywriter can also help. Below are some of the key ingredients for writing a landing page that works.

5 Essentials for Awesome Landing Pages

Write a killer headline – Your effort starts and ends here. Your headline needs to entice people to click, and make a promise. What will they learn by continuing on? How will you solve their problem? Most people will find your page through search or social media. If you don’t give them a reason to click, they may simply move on.

There are resources available for learning the craft of writing a killer headline. Check out David Garfinkel’s Advertising Headlines that Make You Rich, or Jon Morrow’s Headline Hacks. Spend some time understanding the psychology behind word choice. For instance, studies have proven that the words “free” and “new” have a powerful impact when included in the headline. Learn what other words can help entice people to click, and learn how to use them effectively.

A Powerful Hook – Once your headline has convinced someone to click, the goal of each sentence is to simply get them to read the next. You want to establish trust, and show them that you understand their situation. This is where a hook comes into play.

If you can restate their problem in a way that shows them that you’ve listened, and you understand, you’ll have your readers’ attention. Once you have their attention, you can position your product or service as the solution to that problem. If your business has been at it a long time, use language that conveys as much:

“We’ve helped thousands just like you with _____________…”

Or

“Our proven system was developed with this exact situation in mind.”

Statements like this show that you have identified the problem you are aiming to fix, and that you have experience doing exactly that.

Bring Value – As your customer scrolls through your landing page copy they do it with an inner dialog of resistance. We all have a little bit of an inner skeptic, and we’re looking for the catch. They want to know what makes you different from the rest. They want to know how you will fix their problem.

If you sell a product, they’re not interested in what it’s made of. They’re not interested in the inside. They’re interested in results. Awesome landing pages convey the benefits using bullet points. Those bullet points convey what’s in it for them.

To give you a few key examples, your reader won’t care about the V6 engine, he’ll care about the wind in his hair at 85mph. He won’t care about how many volts his electric can opener is, he’ll care about time saved in his dinner-making routine.

Landing page copy can get long, depending on the product and the offer. Bullet points are a way to make those benefits stand out in extended text. They make it easy for readers to scan what you are writing and quickly understand the value.

Strong Social Proof – Everyone expects you to be your own best salesman. They expect a smooth pitch with strong bullet points, and an overwhelming sense of value. As your readers go through their list of inner objections while they read, they come to a point where they wonder what your past customers would say. They want to know if others would talk as highly of your product, as you are now.

You can easily put this objection to rest by including a few strong testimonials within the text of your copy. Show your readers what others think of your company, product or offer. The more specific the testimonial is to what you are selling, the better.

A Focused Call To Action – Again, most awesome landing pages have some fairly extensive copy. Simply reading the page is an investment in time. You can do your readers a favor by staying on topic, and making it clear what the offer is.

It’s been proven that when you give readers choice, it results in overwhelm. They simply close the window out, and don’t do anything. So make it clear what the ONE action you want them to take is. The most common CTAs are to buy now, or to download the free gift (this is used to grow email lists). But don’t ask them to do too much at once, or their choice will be to do nothing.

Conclusion

Including these essentials can help you make sure that you have awesome landing pages out their to help you grow your business. Again, you don’t need to be a great writer to produce landing pages that work.

You can also hire a landing page copywriter to help you find results.

Crossed arms, heavy sighs, short replies -- you know when a prospect’s getting frustrated. Worse, these physical signs show they’re losing interest in what you’re saying, and your shot at earning their business might be fading fast.

Often, difficult or even angry prospects aren’t expressing frustration with you. These emotions are tied to external situations and psychological stimuli. So, put your great communication skills to work, draw on your sales superpower of reading the room, and use these seven psychological tips for managing difficult prospects to save your deal.

7 Psychological Tips for Dealing with Difficult Prospects

1. Practice reflective listening

When you’re upset, has someone saying, “I understand,” ever made you feel better? I didn’t think so. Plus, this kind of broad statements isn’t accomplishing anything. Take the following scenario:

Prospect: “I’m frustrated because we have a limited budget and you’re unwilling to negotiate enough on price.”

Salesperson: “I understand, but …”

You know the conversation above isn’t going to end well.

Instead, practice reflective listening. This approach requires you understand what the other person is saying by interpreting their words and their body language. Then, respond by reflecting the thoughts and feelings you heard back to your prospect:

Prospect: “I’m frustrated because we have a limited budget and you’re unwilling to negotiate enough on price.”

Salesperson: “So, what I’m hearing is that our pricing is a barrier for your business. Your budget is tight, and I’m not successfully negotiating a price that meets your needs. Is that correct?”

If you’ve adequately understood their sentiment, move on. If not, say, “Tell me more, so I can better understand.” Never promise you’ll fix the situation -- because you might not be able to. Your goal in this moment is to make your prospect feel heard and valued.

2. Consider their affect heuristic

The affect heuristic is a mental shortcut. It helps you make quick, efficient decisions based on how you feel toward the person, place, or situation you’re considering. Put simply, it’s the fact that we all made decisions and judgements based on our worldviews and experiences. It’s our bias.

In these situations, objective facts carry little weight for us. Instead, we run the decision or situation through our internal “software” and develop our own opinions based on what we already know.

If you prospect keeps asking, “What’s the catch?” and delaying the sales process with legal questions and endless due diligence, it might not be helpful to say, “Your lawyer has already given you the all-clear. Can we move forward?”

Your prospect could have unknowingly been trapped into a year-long contract with a vendor who did not deliver on their promises. Because of that experience, your prospect is now viewing you through that lense.

Ask questions to understand the root cause of their apprehension. The questions below can help your prospect relax, and yield insights into why they’re unwilling to move forward:

• “I’d like to understand. Tell me more about why you’re skeptical.”
• “What can I do to relieve your fears?”
• “How can I help you feel comfortable enough to move forward?”

These questions also redirect the customer mind from thinking you’re untrustworthy to proactively considering what they need in order to move forward.

3. Tap into the beginner’s mind

The beginner’s mind -- also known as the zen mind -- is the strategy of approaching every situation as if you were a beginner. When you adopt this way of thinking, you enter every conversation with the “don’t know” mind, which keeps you from prejudging a prospect or their situation.

It also encourages you to live without “shoulds.” These are nagging thoughts like:

• The prospect should have already known they wouldn’t have budget until next quarter.
• The prospect should have read my email about their discount expiration.
• The prospect should not have assumed I would negotiate to meet such a low budget.

“Shoulds” put your mind on the defensive and jeopardize the productivity of the conversation before it even begins.

The zen mind also means you let go of being an expert. Sure, you’re an expert in your product/service, and you might be an expert in selling, but you’re not an expert in this prospect, their situation, or the conversation you’re currently engaging in.

So, instead of saying, “You told me you wanted to close at the end of this month,” approach each conversation with the beginner’s mind. Don’t prejudge your prospect’s frustration, forget about what they should have done, and view each conversation as a new puzzle to be solved.

4. Let go of fear

Fear of a negative outcome drives many of our reactions. Commonly, fear makes us want to control things. If a prospect is being difficult, we’re afraid to challenge them because we might lose the deal. If they express displeasure with your timeline or pricing structure, we’re afraid because we might not be able to fix the situation.

First, let go of the idea that you need to fix anything. When sitting down with a difficult prospect, your job is to listen, understand, and discern next steps -- not to immediately produce a solution.

So, instead of apologizing, slapping together a mediocre fix, or validating feelings, say, “It’s unfortunate X happened. I’m aware how this is affecting your business, and I appreciate your patience as I work to resolve this matter.”

5. “Chunk” the problem

Chunking is the process of taking one big problem and breaking it into several smaller, more manageable portions. These small portions are easier for us to tackle, and make us more willing to begin dealing with the issue at hand. Many people use chunking to organize their daily tasks. It’s equally helpful when managing challenging problems.

Does your prospect always have a reason they can’t sign the contract? At your next meeting, ask them to help you break down each of the final steps you need to take to get that contract signed. Simply seeing each task chunked can make it easier for your prospect to digest what’s left to do.

6. Remember, anger is natural

Ever throw out a price and watch your prospect become frustrated, maybe even angry, at how high it is? Or maybe you’ve been on the other side. A prospect tells you how much they want to pay for your product, and it’s so low it makes you mad.

The Recalibration Theory of Anger says this emotion is naturally wired into humans. In short, anger is our evolutionary way of bargaining. We furrow our brows, press our lips together, and flare our nostrils in to drive our “opponent” to place a higher value on what we have to offer.

When faced with an angry prospect, avoid the (natural) tendency to justify your position. Instead, understand your prospect is merely feeling undervalued and attempting to control the situation.

First, stop selling. Now’s not the time to move the deal forward. Take your prospect’s frustration seriously, but not personally. Remain calm. And actively listen to what your prospect say. When you’ve confirmed you understand their frustration, thank them for communicating it, and tell them you’ll get back to them with a solution.

When a prospect’s angry, it’s possible no solution will make them feel better. Give them time to cool off, and consult with your sales manager on the best way forward.

7. Keep calm and carry on

Conflict is part of business. How you react under fire impacts the future of your prospect and client relationships.

The adage, “the client is always right” still rings true. As a salesperson, you have far more to lose by taking the low road and stooping to a client’s level of hostility.

Treating someone with disdain or disrespect can reflect negatively on you and your company, so reputation management should always be top of mind.

Remember, people will often mirror the emotional signals you emit. If you respond with hostility and anger, don’t expect friendliness and understanding in return.

Emotional intelligence can be used to calm the storm, so use these tips for navigating your next conflict:

• Maintain a calm and professional tone while also remaining assertive.
• Refrain from name calling or finger pointing.
• Never say or write anything that can be used against you.
• Always resolve disputes in person or over the phone. Email is not an effective tool for hashing out disagreements.

HubSpot Director of Sales and 30-year sales veteran Dan Tyre says, “Dealing with difficult prospects is a fact of Sales life. If you’re average, you’ll fall prey to emotion. If you’re great, you’ll realize the opportunity and raise your game. Lean in, understand where your prospect’s coming from, listen closely, and have empathy.”

Be great today, and use these tips to communicate with difficult prospects.

Imagine you’re faced with the following scenario. You’re a doctor with three patients in varying degrees of distress, all requiring immediate attention. But as you’re the only medic available you have to decide in what order to treat them? How would you decide?

The answer lies in the work of an eighteenth century orphan, who rose to become the chief surgeon in Napoleon’s Army: Dominique Jean Larrey.

Larrey invented the concept of triage. (Incidentally, the term comes from the French verb for ‘separate’). This process, developed on nineteenth century French battlefields, involved separating patients into one of three categories:

• Those likely to live regardless of the care they received
• Those unlikely to live regardless of the care they received
• And finally, those for whom immediate care might make a difference

Larrey ordered his medics to categorize patients upon arrival and then focus on the final group, regardless of rank or nationality.

Radical? Yes. Ruthless? Possibly. But this approach, which focused finite medical resources where they made the biggest difference, saved thousands of lives.

Why Marketing Needs Triage

Two hundred years later, the process of triage should be applied to marketing targeting; it won’t save lives, but it could save millions of dollars. Marketers must create a similar three-fold categorization.

• Those likely to buy regardless of communication
• Those unlikely to buy regardless of communications
• And those for whom communications might make a difference

Marketing efforts should ruthlessly focus on the final category.

How Does This Work In Practice?

Marketers must identify who falls into each category for their particular brands. But there are some broad rules. The heaviest buyers tend to be in the first group. Their attitudes towards the brand are primarily driven by their product experience.

Furthermore, Byron Sharp’s work has shown heavy buyers of established brands offer less scope for increased frequency of purchase.

The second group, can be broadly described as rejecters of the brand. Even heavy spend against this group will have minimal effect, because of the problem of confirmation bias.

This bias, first described in 1954 by the psychologists Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril, suggests that we interpret messages through a lens of our existing feelings. So if we dislike a brand, any message will be interpreted negatively, through a lens of cynicism.

Advertising, as a relatively weak force, will struggle to over-turn these misconceptions.

Along with Jenny Ridell I ran an experiment in the UK to understand if the bias was still as powerful today. We surveyed 1,004 nationally representative voters about their views on raising sales tax by a penny to fund 10,000 extra nurses.

The results were then split by political affiliation. The twist was that half the respondents were told it was a Conservative policy and half Labour.

When Labour supporters thought the policy came from Labour there was strong support: 14 percent completely agreed. However, support plummeted to 3 percent when it was described as a Conservative policy.

Similarly, among Tories the policy was four times more popular when it was positioned as coming from their party.

The results show that voters interpret policies through a lens of their feelings for the party. If they dislike a party they’ll interpret any policy through a negative filter.

As can be seen from the scale of the effect this is not an insignificant factor: policy is far less influential than existing party affiliation.

By recognizing the limitations of advertising brands can focus their advertising resources where they work best. This means that more brands will be able to afford a constant presence among key groups.

What Happened To Larrey?

The idea of triage worked out well for Larrey. After Napoleon’s defeat Larrey was captured by the Prussians. They would have executed him but he was recognized as the famous surgeon who had saved the life of the son of the Prussian General Blucher.

Blucher’s son had been severely injured and captured by the French a few years earlier. Larrey, true to the principles of triage, had attended to the young Prussian officer, rather than a less in need Frenchman.

Who knows, maybe marketers who apply the principles of triage will end up benefiting too.

Contributed by Branding Strategy Insider by: Richard Shotton, the author of The Choice Factory, a new book on how to apply findings from behavioral science to advertising.

The Blake Project Can Help: Content Strategy Workshop

Digital transformation is huge right now. Latest Economist Intelligence Unit research claims that for 77% of businesses it is the primary strategic priority. Both digital native and non-digital companies are continually reinventing their products, business models and all joint processes for staying competitive and profitable in an increasingly dynamic environment.

Digital transformation requires every activity in the company from advertising and lead gen, to sales and accounting workflows, digitized, aligned and perfectly automated. Also, companies can no longer afford to take months to respond to evolving customer preferences or implement new ideas.

Therefore, digital transformation is a complex process that impacts all strategic aspects of businesses. The way many companies envision digital transformation is adding better lead-scoring or segmentation software. But it’s not really the case, although it’s a good start.

Increased agility is what organizations should aim at and here are a few key areas to focus on:

Internal operations

Everything starts here. From how all routine processes are being rearranged within the company. There are a true variety of tools on the market to help automate company’s internal processes. And the majority of them can be categorized into two types of solutions.

Point solutions for dealing with the priority tasks which are specific to the industry like content management systems, social profile management, accounting/billing (ie: Buffer, Invoicely, Drupal). Benefits of this sort of system include quick integration and easy adoption as they deal with focused activities and handle fewer processes. The downside, on the other hand, lies in being not integrated with other company’s processes and potentially causing operational gaps and delays.

Orchestration of a number of point solutions is an alternative way to automate internal operations. A single platform for managing all sorts of internal operations leads to organizational alignment and optimization of processes and workflows. What’s more, it will automate most routine tasks that are performed, on the average, by the 91 point solutions per company.

Customer-facing processes

Customers are the first to feel the challenges of the company setting new business goals, implementing new technologies and adapting to any changes in the market. For instance, as social media becomes a common communication channel for every person, it’s important for businesses not to fail to incorporate it to every stage of the customer journey for the sake of providing the most convenient and personalized customer experience. In the ever-evolving business environment, your core technology platform should offer the agility to continually test, adjust and upgrade processes.

Business model

The third of the core components on the way to digital transformation success is reconsidering existing and implementing absolutely new business models, rethinking the role of technology in your market strategy, sales transactions or even target markets. That must be the most large-scale and challenging part of embracing agility, but will remain inevitable and repeated part of the strategy for those who want a long-term success.

The bottom line

Companies willing to undergo digital transformation should realize that it’s not a one-time initiative. But rather a life-long commitment to regularly transform reflecting every change brought by the future.

Image Credit: Digital Vidya

As you can see, the statistics are all there; LinkedIn is a brilliant platform for generating leads. And, as we all know, lead generation means more sales! But what is LinkedIn, and how can you use it as a social selling tool to increase your potential customer base?

LinkedIn is a social media platform – just like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram – but it focuses on business. Individual users can create their own personal biography which includes education, work experience, and skills, and then link to a company. In terms of skills, other members have the option to endorse you, which shows that users are good at the things that they say they are good at. Otherwise, there is also a message service and a newsfeed. For companies, LinkedIn is a great place to advertise your company and post information or news stories in order to reach those all-important clients.

Now that we have a brief explanation of what LinkedIn actually is, it’s time for the most important part; finding out how to gain potential clients. Earning leads with LinkedIn is simple as you’ll see from the six steps below;

Step 1: Look after your profile

Firstly, it’s important to ensure that your profile is completely filled out so that customers can find out all about you – at this time I`d concentrate mainly on your personal profile as opposed to your business one, LinkedIn is all about personal relationships so using your personal account is an important part of this.

You need to ensure that all of your profile is properly filled out, and that you have added of all the skills and services you offer and ensure that you ask clients to give you recommendations to give you more authority and trust.

Step 2: Target your audience

What customers do you want to target? You need to think about this as the next steps tend to look at actually catering your information to that audience. Who requires your products or services? Are you a catering company looking to expand your bakery customer base? Are you a web design company looking to connect with marketing managers at companies? Once you have an idea of who your target audience is, you can then target them using location, company size, job title, or even skills.

Step 3: Create a group

A group on LinkedIn is just like a conference with all of the people who are within your target audience or area of expertise. Creating a group is simple and can allow you to network, share ideas and content, and find jobs. Once you’ve created a group, you need to make the page look as professional as you can, and then invite the whole of your target audience to engage with your group.

The key to building a group is the authority that it can give you – as the admin it allows you to create a community and sense of trust from others members.

Step 4: Contact your target customers

When you feel like you want to reach out to your potential customers, you should do a filtered search in LinkedIn, where you can search by keywords, companies, location, industry, etc. Once you’ve found a good amount of people to contact, you simply need to connect with them.

Consider writing a personalized message to draw similarities between you both and to make the experience more personal to them. Never look to sell to them right away, that`s never going to get you anywhere. Instead look to share value and build authority and connections over time.

Step 5: Talk about your group

Once the connection is there, talk to your potential customer about the group you have created. Talk about what it is, why they might be interested, and the benefits. Keep it going as a conversation so that you don’t seem as though all you want is a sale.

The more touch points you have with a potential customer the more aware of you they`ll become – half of the battle is making people aware of what you offer and can help them with.

Step 6: Engage, engage, engage!

Keep building connections and keep having conversations with your potential leads. Encourage them to get in contact with you and to learn more about your company. Ensure you tell them exactly how they will benefit from your product or services, or even from just knowing that you exist. Keeping in contact will keep you on your lead’s mind, and you will come into their mind whenever they need the service that you possess.

Image Credit: DowSocial Digital Consultancy

In summary, it’s important to keep the above daily actions in mind when using LinkedIn to gain those all-important leads; share content, make the right connections, and follow-up. Sharing content puts you in front of potential customers. But this is only significant if you make the right connections.

Find those people who are looking for services such as yours, and LinkedIn can be a powerful advertising tool.

Finally, follow-up with people and remember interactions are key.

I see a lot of people confusing features with benefits, especially in the tech world. Unfortunately, this can ruin sales and marketing efforts, making even a great product’s messaging unclear and alienating to customers.

I made this short video explaining the difference between features and benefits, and why the distinction is so important. I also share a few tips on how to transform flat features into alluring benefits that will grab prospective customers’ attention and lead to more meaningful sales conversations.

Do you have any great examples of transforming features into benefits you’d like to share? If so, please mention them in the comments!

 

The post Why Great Sales and Marketing Copy Is About Turning Features to Benefits appeared first on Salesfolk.

How a Virtual Assistant Can Save Your Sanity and Grow Your Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Jess Ostroff
Podcast Transcript

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Jess Ostroff. She is the Founder and Director of Calm at Don’t Panic Management, the first virtual assistant agency to embody a people-first approach to virtual assistant success. She and I discuss her new book, Panic Proof: How the Right Virtual Assistant Can Save Your Sanity and Grow Your Business.

Since 2011, Ostroff has been making matches between chaotic, overworked entrepreneurs and focused, calm virtual assistants. Offering services that span from administrative assistance to marketing support, she finds deep joy in making a difference through service. When she’s not speaking, writing, or researching productivity hacks, you can find Jess trying new recipes, tasting wine, searching for the next great music festival to attend, or playing with her labradoodle, Hummus.

Questions I ask Jess Ostroff:

• How has freelancing changed over the past decade?
• How can business owners get comfortable with delegating?
• How can a person find the right virtual assistant?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

• How to decide what you want your virtual assistant to do
• Why you need to plan on hiring a virtual assistant ahead of time
• How to set a virtual assistant up for success

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Jess Ostroff:

• Learn more about Jess Ostroff.
• Learn more about Don’t Panic Management.
• Buy Panic Proof: How the Right Virtual Assistant Can Save Your Sanity and Grow Your Business.
• Connect on Facebook.
• Follow on Twitter.
• Connect on LinkedIn.
• Follow on Instagram.

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

Most slide decks start with a series of slides about the company. They include things like the company’s history, their awards, their locations, their executive leadership team, and more recently, its investors and board members. From there, they often go into the way their products and services create value, with vignettes following the slide of the logos of the big, well-recognized brands the company already serves.

There is a reason decks have been designed this way. The executives and marketing people who commission these things want to tell the company’s story. They want to establish their bona fides. But in doing so, they start a sales conversation in exactly the wrong place; they start with “Let me tell you a little about me.”

Most salespeople use these decks in a linear fashion, marching through a dozen slides that prove they work for a strong, successful company, the kind of company you should want to do business with, leaning too heavily on the company itself as the value proposition. They also rely too heavily on products and services to demonstrate how they can help the client get better results, not recognizing that this formula doesn’t differentiate them from their competitor’s, with the client believing that the slide decks they see, and the talk tracks are interchangeable.

If you are going to share a point of view, a compelling reason to change now, that is a better starting place than your company’s history. If you have a message that is wroth sharing, then that message should come first.

If you are giving a final presentation, the place to start is with the client’s current state (the reason they need to change now), followed by the future state (where are we going), followed by the solution (how do we get there). The solution can include the stories, vignettes, case studies, and logos you want your dream client to see as proof that you do this work with big companies.

You can move all the slides about your company to an appendix, in case someone says, “Tell me a little about the awards your company has won and show me a map of your locations.”

The post How I Would Change Your Slide Deck appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Sales discovery calls aren’t always easy.

Especially when you’re shooting out a bunch of scripted questions to a prospect with whom you’re beginning to build a relationship. It can get boring, awkward and sometimes outright disastrous, making the entire process feel like an interrogation! But when done right, you’re a step away from building a healthy sales pipeline.

So how do you conduct a successful discovery call?

The rule of thumb is that the call isn’t about you and your business. It’s about the prospect and their business. So allow them to do most of the talking while you spend time doing what you should be focusing on: listening. Any sales pitch during the call is only going to turn them off and you aren’t going to get a second chance with them.

Your main motto during the discovery call is to uncover if the prospect is a good fit and that your solution can provide additional value to their business. And even if you use a script, you don’t have to follow it to a T, which you’ll learn in the audio recording at the end of this blog.

Most sales managers train sales teams to structure their calls so that conversations are meaningful and flow naturally. And of course, the more calls you make, the less you’ll rely on a script and the more you’ll be able to improvise on it.

Building rapport

Building rapport is most essential as it is the first step to earning confidence and trust. The more someone trusts you, the more they’re comfortable to share their pain points and needs with you. Here are some ways that will help you build a rapport with the buyer.

Setting the right tone: The quickest way to open prospects up and create rapport is to smile while you’re having a conversation, even if it’s over the phone. A chirpy voice creates a positive response in the buyer and they’ll look out for further conversations with you.

Deivanai, Business Development Executive at Freshworks, tells you how and why to set the right tone during your discovery calls.

Addressing prospects by their name: Starting the conversation by addressing the prospect’s name grabs their attention and makes the call personal. So instead of,

“Hi. This is Don from Acme Corp. How are you today?”

Try,

“Hi Rebecca. This is Don from Acme Corp. How are you today?”

Introducing yourself and the company: Tell them who you are. If they’d reached out to your business earlier, they can instantly recollect and be more inclined to carry the conversation forward.

Researching about the prospect: Breaking the ice with some research is a brilliant way to show prospects you care and get them to talk. But that doesn’t mean you’ve to spend hours researching about them. You don’t have the time. Mansi, Program Manager at Freshworks, suggests quick tips to research about the prospect and use that as a conversation-builder.

3 areas to do a quick research:

• Social profiles: Before you jump right into the call, take some time to look at their LinkedIn and Twitter profiles. Find out their hobbies, current interests and activities in their professional life. If you share mutual interests, that’s enough substance to start an effective conversation. As Anthony Iannarino rightly puts it in this sales blog,Rapport isn’t “I like you.” Rapport is “I am like you.”
  

  Here’s an example:

  “I noticed on your LinkedIn profile that you’ve recently taken up a new role, congrats! If this is your passion then I’m sure you’ll succeed in your new role.”

• Company website: Check the prospect’s company website and news/media page. If they just had a round of funding then you know that the company has the budget to buy your solution and you can steer your conversation accordingly.
• CRM software: Your CRM software should be equipped with features that show the prospect’s interest in your solution. For instance, their behavior on your emails, website or even on your product would give you a fair understanding of their needs and you can plan for the call appropriately.

Understanding the pain points

The best way to unlock a prospect’s pain point is to understand their business model and how they do things today. Get them to open up by asking open-ended questions like,

“What led you to sign up with us?”

“Have you used a similar tool in the past? If so, why are you looking for a change?”

Once you know the need, drill down further by asking clarifying questions to understand the problem they are trying to solve.

“Can you walk me through what exactly you are looking for in a helpdesk system?”

The first set of questions helps uncover the prospect’s current situation or process, while the second set of questions gives evidence of where you might be able to help them. Once you’ve uncovered the prospect’s pain points, go deep and challenge the prospect’s thought process by asking those hard, pressing questions.

“How would you define success for this project?”

“What are your short-term and long-term goals?”

The more you uncover the prospect’s pain points and needs with “what”, “why”, who”, “when” and “how” questions, the more you’ll understand and be able to guide them in their buying decision.

Providing value

By now you’d have understood the prospect’s pain points. But before you go ahead and provide the solution, summarize the conversation you just had with them to check if you’ve addressed all their concerns. This gives them room to think and add more challenges, if they’ve missed out on any.

“OK, so to quickly sum it up, [summarize the conversation]. Have I got this right, or do you want to add to it?”

At this point, tell them how your product can add value to their business by connecting the benefits of the product with their pain points. Drop keywords related to your product so when the buyer looks at your website, they can relate to your conversation.

Another way to add value to your conversation is by giving a relevant customer story that’s similar to the situation and concerns you’d just summarized. A relevant use case is equivalent to saying “don’t take my word for it” and shows that you’ve had success helping similar customers in the past.

“In fact, I’ve worked with ABC Corp and helped them move to our product completely, and they are seeing success with improved customer engagement and drawing powerful insights from reports. I can share their case study, it will help you understand how our product helped them. I don’t see why we can’t work with you to help you see similar success.”

You can also send case studies, any product videos, competitor analysis sheets etc. to help prospects in their buying decision. Digging right into plans and pricing isn’t going to provide value, unless the prospect is keen on it.

Establishing a timeline

Once you’ve qualified the prospect and the prospect has shown interest in working with you, find out if they have a timeline to get the solution up and running. Based on this information, you can suggest steps on how to carry the project forward.

“When is a good time for us to connect again?”

“How are you placed tomorrow?”

Send them a calendar invite or share your calendar with them so that they can choose a convenient date and time to schedule an appointment. If you aren’t sure whether the prospect is the decision maker, encourage them to add more members to subsequent meetings to speed up the decision-making process.

“Would you like to have some members from your team join in?”

Make sure you leave contact details with them so that they can get back to you. The whole idea is to help them at every step in their buying process.

Every discovery call is different because prospects are different. This call recording should give you a framework on how to structure your call.

Sample Discovery Call Structure

The above four steps are a great starting point for sales reps, irrespective of experience. Now, try it out in your next discovery call and see how things improve. And if you’ve discovered a tip or two that has worked for you, how about sharing them in the comments.

Zack McAuley is the Sr. Manager, Enterprise Account Based Marketing here at Seismic. He spends his days living the life of an ABM practitioner. ABM continues to grow in popularity and the Sales and Marketing world is going to be seeing a lot more people dedicated to ABM full-time.

There’s lots of talk about what ABM means from a high-level; how the strategy affects different departments, where resources need to be shifter, and what to expect in terms of revenue. But there doesn’t seem to be a lot of talk about what actual people do on a day-to-day basis. With that in mind we sat down with Zack to get a sense of a day in the life of an account based marketer.

What’s the first thing on your mind every day you come into the office?

Similar to a sales leader, the first thing on my mind each day is thinking about where we are against our number and how we can beat it. Based on our orchestration across both the sales and marketing teams, our ABM team has a monthly quota based on sales accepted opportunities and an annual closed business quota.

How much of your day is planned vs. how much of your day is dealing with situations that come up?

It’s 50/50. With the number of teams across sales, marketing, and customer success that we collaborate with, a good amount of the day is planned for us because a large part of our job is around orchestration. The half that’s unplanned is the fun part: tracking target account news and updating value props accordingly, working with sales to position for the next meeting, etc. The key to winning each unplanned situation is to have taken the time to have prepared ahead of time.

How do you stay organized around all of the different engagements that are ongoing?

Process before technology – and each ABM Manager on my team has their own process. For technology, I’ve found that three tools are critical for organization: MS Office—particularly OneNote, SFDC, and Seismic.

What needs to happen for you to consider your day a success?

We know more about our accounts today than we did yesterday, and that expertise is demonstrated through content, communication & collaboration with sales, and campaign ideas.

As a manager, how are you setting your team up for success throughout the day?

Spend time with your team’s customers—sales, demand gen, and product marketing—so that the time you spend coaching and developing your team is filled with feedback from those teams rather than solely your own vision.

What makes the life of an ABM practitioner different from that of the life of a marketing practitioner?

There are a lot of similarities—we want to measure many of the same things: segment awareness, engagement, MQLs, content usage, content performance, content ROI, etc. —but we spend more time on the front lines of the sales pit trying to make all of those metrics come to fruition.

What makes the life of an ABM practitioner different from that of the life of a sales professional?

The ABM team is on the front lines with sales researching account, planning account strategies, and preparing for meetings, but we then use that knowledge to create account-specific content and campaigns rather than hold client-facing meetings or execute the selling process.

What’s one piece of advice you have for those who are looking to transition to ABM roles?

Be empathetic. In working with so many teams, the key is to understand their day-to-day and work with them with that context.

What’s your favorite part of the day-to-day of being in an ABM role?

No day is the same. Some days you are strictly a product marketer, some days you’re an inside sales manager, and some days you are a demand generation strategist. It’s an excellent way to elevate your general skill set while making a large impact on the business.

We want to get better at selling and as sales leaders we want our salespeople to improve.  We need them to improve.  We hope that training and coaching and sales ennoblement tools will get us there.  We have also been told that there is more than one way to skin a cat but it might come as a surprise that there is more than one way to measure the progress being made by your salespeople.

There are traditional lagging indicators, like revenue generated, and there are traditional forward looking indicators, like new meetings, pipeline value and pipeline quantity compared to a prior period.  Conversion ratios - calls to meetings, meetings to qualified opportunities, qualified opportunities to closable, and win rates, all compared with the same ratios from a prior period.

These metrics tell a story, individually and together, but forward looking indicators tell a more timely story, especially if you have a long sales cycle.  However, as you'll read below, measuring sales progress doesn't stop with metrics because there is another powerful way to get instant feedback on a salesperson's progress.

Just the announcement that Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Jaime Dimon will be entering the health care space has sent shock waves for industry incumbents such as CVS, Cigna, and UnitedHealth. It also puts a fundamental question back on the agendas of CEOs in other industries: Will software eat the world, as Marc Andreessen famously quipped? Is this a warning shot that signals that other legacy industrial companies, such as Ford, Deere, and Rolls Royce are also at increased risk of being disrupted?

To start to answer that question, let’s tally up the score. There are three types of products today. Digital natives (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM) have gained competitive advantage in the first two, and the jury is still out on the third:

• Type 1: These are “pure” information goods, where digital natives rule. An example would be Google in search, or Facebook in social networking. Their business models benefit from internet connectivity and they enjoy tremendous network effects.
• Type 2: These are once-analog products that have now been converted into digital products, such as photography, books, and music. Here too, digital natives dominate. These products are typically sold as a service via digital distribution platforms (Audible.com for books, Spotify for music, Netflix for movies).
• Type 3: Then there are products where input-output efficiency and reliability of the physical components are still critical but digital is becoming an integral part of the product itself (in effect, computers are being put inside products). This is the world of the Internet of Things (IOT) and the Industrial Internet.

Manufacturing-heavy companies such as Caterpillar, Ford, and Rolls Royce compete in this world. An aircraft engine is unlikely to become a purely digital product any time soon! Such products have three components: physical components, “smart” components (sensors, controls, microprocessors, software, and enhanced user interface), and connectivity (one machine connected to another machine; one machine connected to many machines; and many machines connected to each other in a system).

Digital natives have already disrupted industries such as media, publishing, travel, music, and photography. But who is likely to assume leadership in creating and capturing economic value in Type 3 products: Digital natives or industry incumbents? Ford or Tesla? Rolls Royce or IBM? Caterpillar or Microsoft? Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase combine or UnitedHealth?

The Challenges for Digital Natives

Value will no doubt be created in the era of smart, connected machines. We don’t expect Amazon or Microsoft or IBM to design, make, and market agricultural tractors, aircraft engines, or MR scanners. The question really is: Can digital natives develop software-enabled solutions that siphon off significant value from industrial hardware? The answer is “yes.” But it won’t be easy. It will require tremendous amounts of investments in building new capabilities for hardware companies like HP, Cisco, Dell, Samsung, and Lenovo; established software companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft; and start-ups. In particular, there are three barriers they must overcome:

1. The physics of the hardware. Companies like Rolls Royce design and manufacture jet engines. These are very complicated machines. There is hard science behind these machines. That’s much different than digital natives like Airbnb where marketing is more important than technical expertise.

Industry incumbents have expertise in the material sciences, for instance. Further, scientific knowledge keeps improving over time. They have made heavy R&D investments—both basic and applied—to remain at the cutting-edge of the physics of the hardware. Much of this scientific knowledge is protected by patents.

Mastery of hard science is a pre-requisite to develop software-based solutions on the hardware. These companies’ superior product/domain knowledge provides them the comparative advantage to model the asset’s performance and write high-end/high value-added software applications. A “pure” digital company can write commodity software applications. But it must acquire enough capabilities on the physics to write sophisticated apps that improve assets’ performance.

2. Customer intimacy. Industrial giants have well-established brands, built strong customer relationships, and signed long-term service contracts. They’ve won the customer’s trust, which is why customers are willing to share data. Digital natives can work with industrial customers, but they have to first earn their trust; they must build capabilities to understand customer operations; they must match the industrials’ cumulative learning from customer interactions; they must learn to ask for the right data; and they have to hire experts in several verticals that can turn data into insights.

3. Difficulty in sharing risks. Industrial incumbents have product knowledge, customer relationships, and field engineers on customer sites. Companies like Rolls Royce can, therefore, offer outcome deals where they guarantee customer outcomes (examples: zero downtime, higher speed, more fuel efficiency, zero operator error, greater reliability) and share risks and rewards with customers. It would be very hard for Amazon or Google to guarantee customer outcomes and take risks with businesses whose operations they know little about.

The Challenges for Industrial Giants

Can the industrial giants lead in the Industrial Internet? The answer is “yes.” But it won’t be easy for them, either. They too have three significant barriers to overcome:

1. Software talent: The IT talent in industrial companies can execute projects oriented towards process efficiency and cost reduction. That talent is ill-suited to develop new, breakthrough software products that offer superior customer outcomes. For that end, they must be able to attract world-class innovators and software engineers. Is, say, Rolls Royce, in the same consideration set as Facebook and Google for young tech employees? Not, really. If so, how can the industrial giants compete to attract the best talent?

2. Digital culture: Industrial businesses and digital businesses operate with completely different principles. The characteristics of hardware businesses include long product development cycle, Six Sigma efficiency, and long sales cycle. Software businesses have different characteristics: short product development cycle, flexibility, and short sales cycle. The industrials must build a digital culture based on concepts like lean, agile, simplicity, responsiveness, and speed. That’s a tall order for an established enterprise.

3. The Incumbent’s Dilemma: Digital has the potential to disrupt industrial businesses. There are three ways digital strategy can cannibalize “core” industrial business. First, data and insights can help improve the productivity of machines; digital, therefore, has the potential to cannibalize future hardware sales. Second, data and insights increase the reliability of machines; digital therefore has the potential to cannibalize future service revenues. Third, software subscription and license might enable customers to do self-service. Current customers could terminate/renegotiate service contracts, and potential customers may not enter into service contracts at all. In short, it is very difficult for a company to disrupt itself.

The future of the Industrial Internet will involve partnerships across a variety of players including tech companies and industrial companies. The key issue: Who will assume the leadership position to extract maximum economic value in such an ecosystem? Will industrial companies take the lead? Or will the digital natives take the lead? Both have a chance.

If I were a betting man, I would place my bets on tech giants over industry incumbents. One factor that will favor digital companies in the industrial internet is technological/scientific breakthroughs that level the playing field for newcomers. For example, breakthroughs in battery technology made the electric cars possible. Electric cars are much simpler to design than cars with internal combustion engines, allowing Tesla and BYD to enter the market despite Ford’s decades of expertise. Since electrification and driverless cars go together, other tech companies such as Google, Baidu, Apple, and Lyft will also be able to enter the automotive market. Similar technological changes in jet engines and agricultural tractors can allow tech giants gain foothold in these industries as well.

More importantly, Amazon or Google have the resources to acquire the capabilities to master the physics and acquire customer relationships and compete with the industrial giants in the Industrial Internet. They have enough resources and some to buy them, if needed.

Among the tech giants, Amazon is a likely winner in the Industrial Internet. It has successfully fused physical with digital. Amazon understands the economic laws of analog products and is not afraid of massive up-front investments and slower growth. Its acquisition of Whole Foods and experiments with Amazon Go grocery stores are an example. Amazon is the one company everyone’s scared of, even industrial giants.