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In e-commerce, an effective and scalable shipping strategy is crucial. You can sell great products, you can hire genius marketing experts to help you reach the right audience, and you can have a beautiful website, but none of it matters unless you’re able to consistently provide customers with a delightful and reliable product delivery experience.

When you’re first starting out in e-commerce, shipping might not seem like much of a headache—people slowly become acquainted with your brand, orders start trickling in, and shipping out products isn’t that much work. You may even be able to manage most of the process manually on your own.

Here’s the problem:

Managing product shipping in this way isn’t sustainable over time. If you’re doing all the right things, it doesn’t take long for more people to learn about your brand, find your website, and make the decision to order products from your store. A sudden and dramatic increase in order activity can happen in as little as 24 or even 12 hours in some extreme cases.

If you’re just getting started with your e-commerce business, or if you haven’t taken the time to think strategically about how to manage product shipping in a way that allows you to easily or quickly scale your operations, it’s time to put a clearer strategy in place.

This quick guide will give you everything you need to in order to understand how to approach product shipping for your e-commerce business.

Glossary: Shipping & Fulfillment

Before you make any decisions about product shipping for your business, it’s helpful to first spend some time becoming more familiar with a handful of terms and phrases you’ll likely encounter along the way. Here are 11 words and phrases you should know:

• Inventory: an up-to-date list of products you have that can be sold to customers.
• Fulfillment Warehouse: a building where you store inventory and fulfill orders.
• Dropshipping: a product fulfillment business model that allows you to accept orders from customers and fulfill those orders through a distributor without having to pre-purchase or store inventory upfront. With this type of product fulfillment, you don’t own, pre-purchase, or store inventory upfront. Instead, you only pay for product once you receive orders from customers, and then your dropshipping vendor fulfills orders and ships products to customers for you.
• 3PL: Third Party Logistics providers, also known as 3PL, store your inventory for you and fulfill orders, but they do not own your products. They essentially act as an outsourced inventory management, shipping optimization, and order fulfillment arm for your e-commerce business.
  
• Self-Fulfillment: Self-fulfillment is another way to manage and fulfill product orders. With this type, you are storing, managing, and sending out inventory on your own, either from your house or your place of business.
  
• AOV: AOV stands for Average Order Value, a metric that e-commerce business owners use when making key business decisions that could impact or influence future growth, such as where to set your free shipping threshold. BigCommerce describes it as, “the average total of every order placed with a merchant over a defined period of time.” To calculate your average order value, you take your revenue and divide it by number of orders (over a defined period of time).
  
• Flat Rate Shipping: A shipping method that allows you to pay or charge a predetermined amount for a product, despite variations in weight or size.
  
• Shipping Rates: The fees you’ll need to account for when shipping your products through a carrier like USPS, UPS, or FedEx.
  
• Shipping Labels: The label you place on the outside of a box that tells carriers what to do with the box you want them to deliver.
  
• Shipping Carriers: The businesses and organizations that deliver your products to your customers.

It’s important to note that this is not a comprehensive list of terms you will encounter as you work to build a product shipping strategy for your business—this is simply a starter list of terms that will be referenced in the sections of this guide that follow.

Knowing Your Business

Now that you are more familiar with some of the vocabulary that relates to product shipping, it’s time to start thinking about what kind of scalable strategy you want to put in place for your business. To get started, the first thing you need to do is spend some time thinking more about your business, your products, and your customers.

Although they might look similar at first glance, no product shipping strategy is the same. There are many factors that should be evaluated and taken into consideration when it comes to deciding how you’ll approach and manage things like pricing, packaging, inventory management, and product fulfillment. To ensure that you’re able to build a strategy that meets the needs of your customers and business, ask yourself these questions:

Questions About Your Business

• What is your brand and what makes it unique?
• What type of experience are you trying to create for people?
• What first impression do you want to leave with people who interact with your brand?
• What does growth look like for your business over the next 30, 60, 90 days? What about in 6-12 months?
• What resources do you have available right now that could help you scale or optimize product fulfillment and shipping (people, money, software, storage, inventory, etc.)

Questions About Your Products

• Where do you ship your products from?
• Where are you typically shipping your products to?
• What size are your products?
• How much do your products weigh?
• How are your products typically purchased (single, multiple, bundled, etc.)?
• What is your AOV and how is it impact shipping costs?
• What carriers do you want to use to ship your products?
• What are all the costs associated with your products? What are your profit margins on products?
• What unique restrictions do you have to manage when shipping your products? For example, will you need to ship internationally? Will you need package insurance?

Questions About Your Customers

• How do your customers prefer to receive products?
• Why do your customers buy products from you?
• What impression do you want to leave with your customers when sending them products?
• Is your customer more likely to purchase if shipping is free or set at a flat rate?

To make the right decisions about your shipping strategy, spend time developing answers to as many of the questions listed above as possible. The more questions you can answer now, the more proactive and comprehensive you can be when it comes to putting your strategy together.

Understanding Your Fulfillment Options

To build the right shipping strategy for your e-commerce business, you need to first understand what your fulfillment options are. The fulfillment option you choose will ultimately affect how your products are shipped to customers. Here are the main fulfillment options you should consider for your products:

• Self-Fulfillment: you buy your products, store them yourself (at your home or place of business), and manually fulfill and prepare orders for shipment on your own. This option involves the most overhead and planning, but also the most control.

• 3PL: You purchase the products upfront, send your products to be stored at a fulfillment warehouse, and the warehouse keeps track of inventory and fulfills orders as they come in. Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a version of a 3PL, and it’s tight coupling with the Amazon marketplace provides additional benefits for that channel.

• Dropshipping: You do not pre-purchase products ahead of time. Instead, you only pay for products when a customer places a new order through your online store. When you get a new order from a customer, you send it to your dropshipping vendor, and they fulfill the order by shipping the product directly to the customer. This option is the easiest on the merchant, but typically the most expensive. It also offers the least amount of control.

Each fulfillment option above has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Recognizing that Packaging Matters

As you develop your shipping strategy, it’s important to realize how much packaging can play a role in the decisions you ultimately make. There are two types of packaging you can leverage for your products. Shopify refers to them in the following way in their blog post on shipping and fulfillment:

• Utility Packaging: standard boxes or envelopes with no visible branding or customized graphics.

• Branded Packaging: unique packaging that aligns with your brand style, personality, and imagery.

The packaging you ultimately choose will depend on how much money you can and are willing to spend, what your goals are with your packaging, and which fulfillment option you’ve chosen for your business.

For example, if you’ve chosen to leverage the dropshipping business model, you probably won’t have the option to customize packaging and create a unique experience for your customers. Dropshipping allows you to spin up your business for a relatively small investment, but it doesn’t allow for the customization that you might be used to seeing from other ecommerce brands. Self-fulfillment, on the other hand, allows for much more customization and control over how your brand is presented to your customer.

Branded boxes are much more compelling than standard boxes, but they’re also a lot more expensive, as Shopify points out in their blog post. They explain, “custom boxes tend to be the most expensive costs associated with creating a custom branded unboxing experience. To have your own custom printed boxes you can be looking at a minimum order of 500+ and can cost $5-$25 per box.”

This is on the high end of what I’ve seen in my experience, but regardless, there is an added cost per package with branded boxes.

To decide which type of packaging is right for you and your business, ask yourself the following questions?

• What does my fulfillment option allow me to do when it comes to packaging?
• How much money am I willing to spend on packaging?
• What experience am I trying to create for the customers who buy my products?
• How will my packaging decisions affect my shipping rates?
• Can I start small and work my way up to what I eventually want for my products?

Evaluating Shipping Options

The next action item on your product shipping strategy development list is to make some decisions on how you’d like to ship your products to your customers. There’s a lot that can be written and covered on this topic, but for the purpose of this quick guide, we’ll focus on the most important information you need in order to ship your products.

These are the most common carriers you can leverage to ship products:

• USPS
• FedEx
• UPS
• DHL
• Find more carriers here

Each carrier varies when it comes to package guidelines, shipping rates, and features. Picking the right one for your business will require you to spend time investigating and evaluating all the options. A good place to start is to determine how shipping rates differ across each carrier. To see the differences, utilize these calculators:

• Postage Price Calculator from USPS
• Rate Finder from FedEx
• Time and Cost Calculator from UPS
• Rate Quote and Transit Time Quote Tool from DHS

After you’ve spent some time comparing rates, dig deeper into the business tools and features that each carrier offers to a business like yours.

Deciding on Pricing

As part of your shipping strategy, you also need to spend time thinking about how overall costs will affect how you ultimately price products and shopping costs in your store. If you’re new to e-commerce, it’s important to understand that shipping will always be an incredibly expensive part of your business. If you don’t take costs into consideration from the beginning, you risk building a shipping strategy that doesn’t allow you to profit from your products or all the time, effort, and money you put into your business as a whole.

To determine how much to charge for your products and for shipping, you need to think about the costs associated with your packaging, your shipping rates, the cost of the product itself, any marketing material that gets included with your product, the money you have to pay for warehouse space or to hire 3rd-party vendors, and any other costs that are associated with the fulfillment and delivery of your products.

Add up all the costs associated with shipping your products, then tweak pricing as needed in your online store to ensure that you’re not losing money on every order that gets placed by your customers.

And remember, free shipping has become almost expected for items over ~$20, and not offering it will impact conversion rates and long term profit. Does your shipping strategy allow for you to offer free shipping on your top products while still earning a decent margin?

Finalizing Shipping Strategy

When you’ve spent time going through all the sections and areas outlined earlier in this quick guide, your final step is to create and finalize your shipping strategy—a clear framework that you can implement and revise as your business grows and demand for your products increase over time.

To plan, document and collaborate on your shipping strategy, consider leveraging a tool like Trello, Google Docs, Evernote, or Airtable.

Adopting Tools that Allow You to Scale

To further optimize how you handle fulfillment and shipping for your e-commerce business, consider leveraging the right software tools to automate many of the tedious tasks associated with product shipping.

Over to You

How do you approach shipping at your e-commerce business? What lessons have you learned? Tell me in the comments below.

The concept of influencer marketing isn’t new but how brands can leverage influencers and what works for collaborating with an influencer has drastically changed over the last 18 months.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a small business or an enterprise there are people that use your product or service that influence others through their actions, their words or simply their trust in that person. The hard part is finding the right influencer then mapping out what success looks like for you the brand and how you’ll measure that success.

On episode 61 of FOMOFanz I breakdown the mindset changes and critical steps required for brands to be successful with influencer marketing all the way from finding the right influencer to managing influencer expectations to ultimately creating a partnership built on trust with influencers that have unique communities that create different types of

content.

I’ve had the luxury of first being identified as in influencer in 2014 by IBM, then working with brands like Applebees, Cox Business, SAP and the Superbowl to build influencer marketing and I believe even in my short time in this space so much has changed and the value and plan for influencer marketing in 2016 wouldn’t work in 2018. (You can read more about my thoughts on influencers from an earlier episode of the podcast here.)

I’d love for you to listen to this episode as I share a bit about my experience but more importantly breakdown each of the below critical aspects that done correctly will lead to a successful influencer marketing partnership both moving the business needle and establishing a long term relationship with the influencer and their community!

Influencer Marketing Success In 2018 Requires Brands To:

• Define what success looks like and how to measure that.
• Micro-Influencer why they work for brands of all sizes
• Hiring the right people to source & how to properly outreach to influencer
• Managing expectations and partnering with the influencer to reach a shared goal.
• Content collaboration is far more than an influencer takeover or influencer creating content on their own channel.
• Field of dreams marketing is broken, you must engage with the community where the community is and be active in building trust with the community alongside the influencer
• Making the partnership beneficial for the influencer doesn’t require it being a paid relationship but it does require the brand to understand what matters to the influencer

Part 3 in a media tour series for my 2016 keynote at Digital Business World Congress (DES) in Madrid, Spain. This interview is with i9 Magazine, “O mundo digital visto por peritos internacionais.”

 

Digital Transformation Through a Global Lens

Digital revolution is happening. What are the buzzwords we must follow? Big Data, machine learning, smart cities, IOT, 4th industrial revolution,….?

The digital revolution is has been happening for decades and it will only continue to change how we work, learn, communicate and connect. The biggest trends that I’m following include an incredible array of disruptive technologies such as AR/VR, AI/maching learning, autonomous vehicles, IoT, 3D printing, wearables, et al.

In your opinion, are people becoming more digital followers or revolutionaries?

Digital consumers are revolutionaries by default. I refer to this phenomenon as digital Darwinism. As technology evolves, so does its impact on society. Simply by how people adopt and use technology, tech are changing the way everything will work. Then there are the true revolutionaries, those who design future tech and influence market trends.

What are the 2018 business trends we should watch?

2017-2018 business trends are all over the place. We’re going to see advances in AI/machine learning in CX. We’ll see fintech have an impact in the finance sector among enterprise organizations, not just startups. But more broadly, we’re going to see businesses more widely advance digital transformation efforts. I define digital transformation as the realignment of, or new investment in technology, business models, and processes to create new value for customers and employees and more effectively compete in an ever-changing digital economy. In fact, you can track the evolution of digital transformation using this maturity model.

What do you think about portuguese enterprises? Are they becoming digital or still have to do more?

I’ve been to Lisbon once and during that time, I met with several startups and enterprises. The truth is that every company can be more aggressive in their quest to compete in a digital economy. This is true for companies all around the world.

Nowadays, what is the secret for a product to succeed?

Everyone talks about three things, awareness, adoption and traction. But more importantly, a product must deliver value beyond making existing tasks or routines efficient or scalable. Products need to go beyond iteration which is doing the same things in better ways. They must think about innovation, doing new things that creates new value.

Are you coming to Portugal, to the Web Summit?

That’s up to Paddy Cosgrave. We are overdue for a conversation. Maybe everyone in Europe can let him know that they want me there!

Part 1 – Stop Talking About a Customer-Centered Culture and Build It Already (Más Movilidad)

Part 2 – Is Technology Creating a Narcissistic Society? (Expansión)

Part 3 – Digital Transformation Through a Global Lens (i9 Magazine)

About Brian

Brian Solis is principal analyst and futurist at Altimeter, the digital analyst group at Prophet, Brian is world renowned keynote speaker and 7x best-selling author. His latest book, X: Where Business Meets Design, explores the future of brand and customer engagement through experience design. Invite him to speak at your event or bring him in to inspire and change executive mindsets.

Connect with Brian!

Twitter: @briansolis
Facebook: TheBrianSolis
LinkedIn: BrianSolis
Instagram: BrianSolis
Youtube: BrianSolisTV
Snapchat: BrianSolis

The post Digital Transformation Through a Global Lens appeared first on Brian Solis.

Unlike other similar marketing documentation, a social media report isn’t strictly defined with a clear-cut structure. Even though you might be able to find different templates online, creating a paper to outline the data of a networking profile is not an easy task.

Almost every self-proclaimed digital marketing expert can tell you a few tips on how to define social media analytics to further your agenda. Yet, the truth is that we are all new to this.

The mere concept of social media marketing has been born less than a decade ago. Not to mention, as online tools adapt to new technologies the landscape of what the term represents also changes.

We, as a society, redefine the ways in which different networking platforms are used almost by the day. But as a digital marketing agency representative you want to win more clients, right? Well, here’s how to do it.

The “Big Picture” of a Social Media Report

Much like anything else in marketing, the social media report is nothing more than a tool you can use to backup your existing ideas. This can include the brand performance of a company on a platform, social media competitor analytics and much more. But before you start choosing the analytics which to put in a report, you must consider the big picture.

The only thing that a client wants from a social media agency is results. This can be in the form of increased brand recognition, online traffic or any metric in between. The way those results are usually defined is through conversion.

Whether the client is selling a product, service or an idea, they ultimately want results. Much like with the purchase of a billboard or through a flyer marketing campaign, social media is only a means to an end. Even though your employees might have fun engaging with your client’s customer base, at the end of the day what you must deliver to your client is conversion results.

For a business owner, social media is just a tool people use to further their marketing agenda. Chances are, if they are tech savvy, they will have some idea of how this can be achieved. But whether or not that’s the case, it’s your job to help them realize the true potential of social networking platforms.

And much like a marketing campaign is a means to an end for a customer, a social media report can be a means to an end for you in getting a client. You don’t have to advertise your business via this report, but instead you must show how what you do can help your client win more customers.

How is a Single Social Media Report a Great Advantage?

If you want to put your foot in the door, you must prove your worth. One of the best ways to do so, when it comes to social platforms, is to provide your client with proof that you are able to do the job. Showing a ton of slides of your existing projects and successes is a nice way to start.

But almost everyone who wants an in will have a good track record to backup their claims. Thus, to stand out, here are our suggestions. Dazzle them with a social media report of their current performance.

Let’s say, you want Samsung Mobile to be your next client. One way you can go about things is to outline a creative idea of how you can move their strategy forward based on your existing clients. But how do you close the deal? Instead of theorizing, put your words where your mouth is. Back up your idea based on existing data of their current social media performance.

Even though you won’t be able to have full access to the analytics of the Samsung Mobile profile that you would when they are your client, you are still able to create a neat report with the data that is available through the APIs of social media profiles. For example, in the above screenshot you can see that Samsung mobile had a 33% increase in the posted content, yet almost everything else was on the downtrend.

That’s a perfect setup to make up your case that you can turn those numbers around and that their existing social media strategy is not going in the right direction.

But dive in deeper, by taking a look at the Engagement rates and how abysmally small they are, you are almost ready to take in the cake before you’ve even tried. Simply by presenting the information that Samsung Mobile already has, you’d be able to create your case of how your digital marketing agency can improve their business. Making your due diligence to do the research of a company can show your client that you have commitment towards them and can give you further advantage in your presentation.

Going Astray – Researching the Market to Prove your Value

Another great way you can go about to win a new client is via proving your expertise in their own respective field. Most business owners want to be certain that their brands will be represented in a proper manner based on the industry they are in. Thus, by providing a social media report that includes market analytics can give you the needed edge to close the deal.

Research the Industry

The first step you need to take, once you have your eyes on a prospective client is to do your due diligence to research the industry. Usually, finding the main competitors of a business is a relatively easy task and is done via a few minutes of online scouting.

But knowing who your client is against is just the first step. If you want to provide social media marketing services to someone, you must be prepared to explain how exactly an online campaign on social platforms can further your client’s agenda.

Continuing with our previous example and by choosing a few of the top competitors of Samsung Mobile, we can immediately get a few insights on the social media state of the landscape.

First and foremost, Samsung Mobile doesn’t seem to perform that well compared to the companies we’ve chosen. If they were a potential client of ours, this could help us further prove our point that their social media campaign definitely needs some tweaking. The state of the landscape.

Diving further into the date, we can note a few changes that can be suggested. Take for example the top keywords that work in the industry. Compared to the keywords that are used by Samsung Mobile, you can see a clear difference.

Research the Social Media Performance of the Competitors

Furthermore, having access to such a market report can provide your client with numerous benefits that go outside of the world of social media. With this report, you can show your client that social media is not just about bringing in new clients and furthering your agenda.

Instead, networking platforms also provide you with insights on what your competitors are doing. If you don’t provide your clients with such analytics already, you should definitely start doing so today!

Diving in further, you can provide your client with research on the top performing posts. This can give you an idea of the expected direction in the content for that business. At the same time, it provides your client with the confidence that you are aware of how a single post can affect the outcome of a social media campaign.

In the Samsung Mobile example, you can analyze the top posts to push the insight that the featured product is receiving a response from the customer base on social media. What’s more, you can compare it to the best performing ones from HTC and OnePlusIndia to explain how pushing a marketing agenda can be achieved via proper content management on social platforms.

In a sense, both the posts from HTC and Oneplus India are just what people expect to find and engage with on Facebook, while the one from Samsung is more of a promotion/advert-type of post.

And don’t be fooled into thinking that we’ve spent days creating this Samsung report, just to give you a few examples in this piece. Instead, this report was easily created via our automatic social media reports features. You can check out the full report here.

Want to create Great Visual Social Media Reports? What do We Offer?

In fact, the above report was created in under 10 minutes with just a few clicks. That’s right! You don’t have to spend multiple hours researching and collecting different analytics, arranging them in a manner that is visually appealing.

With Locowise, you are able to create a range of different reports, simply by choosing the social media profiles you want. To learn more, make sure to sign up for a 7-day free trial of Locowise today!

It's been rumored for more than a year that LinkedIn Groups are going away.

Well, that rumor has been squashed, at least in the short term, by LinkedIn this week. Some people, including me, received a direct LinkedIn message from people in LinkedIn's Product Marketing Department that started out like this:

"We’re currently working on making some changes to the LinkedIn Groups experience, and because you are an expert user, we wanted to give you some advance details on what’s coming. Groups is at the heart of what makes LinkedIn a trusted place for professionals to help and support one another, and the changes we’re planning will make Groups a bigger part of the main LinkedIn experience."

*The entire message and also a subsequent message that includes additional details are printed at the bottom of this article.

I am cautiously optimistic about this announcement. But in typical LinkedIn fashion, these changes will be rolled out over the coming months. Therefore, it may take a while for all of us to see the impact of these changes.

That being said, I still think the idea of like-minded individuals virtually hanging out with each other (the premise of LinkedIn Groups) is a winning idea. Therefore, let's review some of the best practices relating to groups.
.

How to find information about the groups you're currently in

Click the Work tab on your top LinkedIn toolbar and then select Groups. You will then be taken to what I refer to as your LinkedIn Groups home page, which includes loads of information about your current groups, including:
.

• Today's highlights
• Your most active groups
• Listing of your current groups (under My Groups tab)
• Suggested groups you may want to join (under Discover tab)
  .

How to find additional groups that are right for you

LinkedIn currently has over three million groups, and you can join up to 100 at any one time. Here are some of the ways to uncover the best places to hang out.

1. In your top toolbar, use specific keywords in the search box. When the results are returned, click Groups in the sub-tab. Here are some ideas of the kinds of searches you may want to try:
.

• Schools you have attended
• Associations and groups you belong to
• Your city, state or region
• Your industry
• Your customers' industry (this is often an overlooked opportunity)
• Your hobbies or outside interests
• Certifications you have earned
• Types of software or other tools you use in your job
• Events you've attended or will be attending

2. Review the groups listed on the bottom of the profile of any person you're already hanging out with or would like to hang out with.

Do's and don'ts of LinkedIn groups

After you've found the best places to hang out, it's time to get involved.

Each group has a different feel or culture, and it will be pretty obvious what type of activity is appropriate. However, here are some general do’s and don'ts to help improve your effectiveness when hanging out in groups.

Do this in your groups
.

• Get involved in discussions where the right folks are talking about the right topics. Of course, you'll need to have expertise that will add value to the discussion. Also, consider sharing a link to a place where they can get more information on the topic being discussed.

• Invite fellow group members to join your network. If they're a particularly good target, mention in your invitation that you're in the same LinkedIn group or refer to a comment they made in a group discussion.

•  If you're looking for employment, check out the group's Jobs tab.

• Start your own discussion, and be sure to follow the ongoing conversation. Before starting a discussion, however, check out the group's rules, because some group managers have specifically outlawed links to your website or other things they feel are too self-promotional.

• Suggest taking the conversation offline when it’s appropriate.

• Send direct messages to members and share helpful information and/or resources.

Don’t do this in your groups
.

• Spend most of your time in group discussions selling your products and services.

• Share any confidential information.

• Make hurtful, personal or overly negative comments in the discussions.

• Think that you have to get the daily or weekly LinkedIn email notifications regarding all the activities in all 100 groups you are in. This will be overwhelming. Pick a few of your best groups, and follow those. Check the others out when you have some extra time.

• Think less of group members who have decided they don’t want to receive direct messages from other group members.

• Hesitate to end your membership in a group if you feel you're not getting any results. There are usually several groups in the same space. Find a new one that's a better fit for you.

Groups are a great way to start and grow new relationships that can lead to mutually beneficial business opportunities. I hope you'll use these ideas and the new optimism about LinkedIn groups to explore ways that groups can enhance your business and career.
.

Complete messages from LinkedIn about the future of LinkedIn Groups

January 14, 2018

The post Are LinkedIn Groups Worth Your Valuable Time? appeared first on Wayne Breitbarth.

• Specialist investment bank Exotix argues that the biggest potential for blockchain technology, first developed to underpin bitcoin, lies in frontier markets.
• Analyst Paul Domjan says blockchain could be used for things like property registration, contract law, and exchange in countries with volatile local currencies.
• Goldman Sachs made a similar point about the potential for bitcoin in countries with unstable local currencies.

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LONDON — The biggest potentially for blockchain technology is in developing markets not developed markets, according to specialist investment bank Exotix.

Paul Domjan, global head of research, analytics & data at Exotix, which specialises in emerging markets, compares blockchain technology to the smartphone and mobile boom of the last decade in a note sent to clients this week.

Smartphones brought about much greater change in developing markets than developed and allowed many countries to "leapfrog" fixed line telephones.

Domjan writes: "Today, frontier markets may be positioned to leapfrog developed economies once again, but this time the key technology is blockchain and cryptocurrencies."

He sees the clearest applications in recording property ownership, contract enforcement, and storing or sending currency.

Blockchain explained

Blockchain technology, also known as distributed ledger tech, was first popularised by bitcoin, the digital currency created in 2009. It allows for a shared database that is near instantly updated, meaning all parties can see the same version of that database. It uses complex cryptography and group authentication to police the editing of the ledger.

Usually people have a central database to record things like trade. That way an impartial middleman can make sure everyone is playing by the rules. Blockchain removes the need for that middleman.

The technology was originally developed to do away with the need for a central bank for bitcoin, meaning it could be totally independent. But this feature has almost endless applications for other industries and processes that involve a trusted middleman or central authorities.

Banks are particularly keen to adopt blockchain, as its inbuilt security and trust checks cut out the need for middlemen in processes like settlement and clearing. This, in turn, cuts down costs. Santander estimated in a 2015 report that the technology could save banks as much as $20 billion.

Sceptics argue that blockchain simply replicates processes and systems that already work relatively well, without enough of a payoff to warrant the costs.

Domjan says: "Due its distributed nature, recording new assets on a blockchain can be quite slow, with transaction times measured in hours or even days rather than the seconds that are typical of e-commerce. As such, blockchain technology is a poor substitute for existing ownership records in developed or even emerging economies."

'We see this advantage across the developing world'

That's not the case in emerging markets, Domjan says, where there is often only a poorly developed and unreliable system for recording property ownership.

"Whereas some emerging markets, such as Russia and China, have property registration systems on par with those in the high-income OECD countries, frontier markets in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia lag far behind, with average performance less than half that of the best performing economies," he writes.

While it is a developed nation, Sweden is looking at a blockchain-based land registry system. Others looking at the solution include Ukraine and Georgia.

Domjan writes: "Indeed, blockchain technology can be used to maintain a clear, reliable record of anything. For example, Estonia has implemented the BitNation public notary services, including recognising marriages recorded in the BitNation blockchain, and Ukraine is developing an election platform based on the blockchain."

It's a similar case for contracts. Ethereum's blockchain allows people to write rules based commands: if a payment is received, then release the deed to a property, for example. It's not that powerful in developed nations where processes are already established for this type of thing but it could be transformational in developing economies.

"The same principle can be used for transactions ranging from financial derivatives to international trade," he writes.

Finally, Domjan also argues that the ease of transfer of cryptocurrencies, which are built on blockchain technology, is also most useful to developing nations.

"In countries with capital controls, highly volatile currencies, and high inflation, the governance problems, payments transaction costs, and volatility of their domestic currency may seem worse than those of cryptocurrencies, or at least bad enough that cryptocurrencies represent an attractive hedge against their domestic currency," he writes.

"We see this advantage across the developing world, from foreign investors in Brazil looking to move money to brokers in Zimbabwe looking for an alternative store of value."

Goldman Sachs recently made a similar argument, saying that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin could become a legitimate currency in parts of the global financial system where the traditional functions of money don't work as well.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The CEO of a $445 billion fund manager speaks on the future of US tech stocks, inflation, and the next economic downturn

• The San Francisco Shipyard, a mixed-use development rising on the site of a former nuclear testing facility, is in limbo amid new allegations.
• The Navy has found evidence that a government contractor hired to clean radioactive contamination from the area botched the cleanup.
• Almost half of the cleanup work was later showed to be falsified or "suspect." Workers swapped soil samples from contaminated sites with clean ones.

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A sprawling middle-class neighborhood is rising on the site of a former nuclear testing facility in San Francisco. But its future is uncertain amid new allegations of a botched cleanup.

The US Navy has learned that Tetra Tech, a government contractor tasked with the cleanup of radioactive contamination at the retired San Francisco Naval Shipyard, faked more soil tests than previously thought, in order to expedite the city's largest redevelopment project. Workers swapped samples from areas known to be highly contaminated with dirt from clean areas.

According to investigations by Curbed SF and NBC Bay Area, almost half of the toxic waste-site cleanup was "suspect" or has "evidence of potential data manipulation or falsification."

These findings could cause the project to be delayed many years. The Navy is expected to release the results of its investigation into Tetra Tech in a public meeting on January 31.

This long-forgotten patch of the San Francisco waterfront holds promise for the city's strained housing market. The plan is to transform the retired shipyard into a bustling live-work community with 12,000 new homes and about five million square feet of office and commercial space. The project is being developed by Five Point, a spinoff of mega-developer Lennar.

The project has a price tag to match its hefty ambitions: $8 billion. That's on top of the $1 billion or more in taxpayer money that has been spent on the cleanup since the 1990s.

Hunters Point was a private commercial shipyard from 1869 until the start of World War II, when the Navy bought the property. The military repaired ships and submarines there. From 1948 to 1969, the shipyard hosted a then-secret laboratory that ran tests on ships exposed to nuclear weapons, as well as research on the effects of radiation on living organisms.

Military equipment and ships contaminated by atomic bomb explosions were left at Hunters Point, and toxic substances including petroleum fuels, pesticides, and heavy metals seeped into and polluted the soil at Hunters Point, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2015.

After the shipyard closed, it was declared a "superfund" site — a toxic-waste site where the United States Environmental Protection Agency can force parties responsible for the contamination to either perform cleanups or reimburse the government to do the work.

That burden fell on the Navy. It outsourced the work of decontamination and soil-testing to Tetra Tech. But several investigations into the nature of those efforts have led to scandals.

The City of San Francisco selected Lennar as the master developer of the shipyard in 1999. A year later, an investigation by SF Weekly found that the Navy mishandled the radioactive waste it produced there. It reportedly dumped huge amounts of contaminated sand into the San Francisco Bay and sprinkled radioactive material around the base to practice cleanup.

In 2017, several former employees of Tetra Tech admitted to faking soil tests. They described a company culture that valued speed over safety and accuracy. The whistleblowers led the federal Environmental Protection Agency to delay transfers of land from the Navy to the new master developer, Five Point.

The latest revelations suggest the cleanup was more questionable than previously thought.

Last fall, the Navy hired third-party contractors to conduct a review of Tetra Tech's data. A series of draft reports that those contractors presented to the Navy (and which Curbed SF reviewed via a public records request) showed that 853 "units" of land at the shipyard were tested. Of them, 414 were identified as falsified or suspect, representing 48% of total units.

The reports, which have not been publicly released, recommend retesting those 414 units.

Greenaction, a local non-profit fighting for health and environmental justice, has filed a petition with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to strip Tetra Tech of its license to perform radiological cleanup. Tetra Tech received a $85 million contract from the EPA in October to assess the abandoned uranium mines in the Navajo Nation across the American southwest.

It's unclear what impact the new allegations leveled against Tetra Tech might have.

Construction on the mixed-use development at the (rebranded) San Francisco Shipyard began long ago. Five Point has sold about 300 townhouses and condominiums and plans to build 11,000 more units. A recent quarterly report from Five Point said it expects the Navy to deliver the last 408 acres it owns in phases between 2019 and 2022, instead of starting this year.

Five Point declined to comment on the draft reports and referred Business Insider to the Navy.

The Navy has said that residents who already live at the San Francisco Shipyard are "100 percent safe." The existing housing is located on land that was used for military housing and non-industrial activities, SF Curbed reported and a spokesperson with Five Point confirmed.

Bradley Angel, executive director of watchdog-group Greenaction, told Business Insider that he thinks prospective buyers will think twice before settling down at the shipyard.

"If I was living there, I would definitely be asking some questions," Angel said.

SEE ALSO: San Francisco's housing shortage is so bad that an $8 billion development is rising on a former nuclear test site — here's what it's like

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: What a cyberwar with North Korea could look like, according to a cybersecurity expert

Earlier this month, marketers were shocked to learn that Facebook would be making more major changes to its News Feed, effectively bringing brand and publisher organic reach to zero by prioritizing high engagement content from family, friends and groups.

In a formal statement posted on his own Facebook page, Mark Zuckerberg said:

“We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That’s why we’ve always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness.”

“But recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other. … Based on this, we’re making a major change to how we build Facebook.”

While the announcement seemed to be the final nail in the organic News Feed coffin, the death of organic reach on Facebook has been a long time coming. Back in April 2015, Facebook announced it was updating News Feeds to strike a better balance between friends, public figures, publishers, businesses and community organizations. Then in late June 2016, Facebook said it would be making further refinements to ensure users don’t miss updates from their friends and families.

Now, after an intense year of political and social upheaval — not to mention the emergence of the fake news engine and the Russian advertising scandal — it’s no surprise that Facebook is re-examining things yet again.

But What Does It All Mean for Marketers?

Naturally, disappointed marketers all over the world are wondering how this change will truly impact their social marketing efforts. From our perspective, the change:

• Ends the organic reach of the News Feed and increases the importance of adding pay-to-play to your marketing mix — something that will likely require a bigger budget.
• Bolsters the importance of channel diversification.
• Makes it more important than ever for you to zero in on who your audience is and what motivates them, so you can share content and create an environment that will pique interest and engagement.
• Means Instagram will more than likely follow suit in the near future.

The Influencer Implication

Since Zuckerberg’s announcement, there’s been one implication in particular that’s captivated our attention. The way we see it, the value of influencer engagement on Facebook will increase even more.

Our CEO, Lee Odden, has long been an evangelist for working with influencers, believing that influencers can help brands bypass several obstacles. AdBlocking, for example, is in use on over 600 million devices, costing business over $22 billion in ad revenue, according to PageFair. Working with credible influencers who are trusted amongst an audience allows brands to bypass the adblocking obstacle and better connect with buyers.

Lee has also talked about other challenges such as distrust of brand advertising. In fact, 69% of consumers don’t trust ads, according to research by Ipsos Connect. And yet another obstacle is information overload. Americans are confronted with an average of 63GB of media on a daily basis (USC/ICTM).

All of these obstacles, according to Lee, are addressed by working with industry influencers. The virtual elimination of organic News Feed visibility for brands and publishers on Facebook is no different and marketers would be smart to think about how influencer engagement can keep organic Facebook visibility alive.

So, to sum it all up: Now that the organic News Feed is effectively dead, new life is being given to influencer marketing opportunities. Here are a few key considerations:

#1 – If you’re not in the influencer marketing game yet, you can no longer afford to wait.

Last year, we saw influencer marketing explode — becoming one of the most talked about topics among marketers and arguably our most-requested digital marketing services among both B2B and B2C clients. In addition, our own research shows that 57% of marketers say influencer marketing will be integrated in all marketing activities in the next three years.

This quote from Lee sums it up well:

“For any kind of content a business creates and publishes to the world, there is an opportunity for collaboration with credible voices that have active networks interested in what those voices have to say. In many cases, [audiences are] far more interested [in an influencer’s insights] than in what the brand has to say.”

With Facebook reducing branded content and elevating content from individuals, there’s no better time to invest in influencers — which can have an impact across all social platforms.

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With #Facebook reducing branded content and elevating content from individuals, there’s no better time to invest in influencers. #influencermarketing
Click To Tweet

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#2 – Influencers now hold more power than ever to more strategically align themselves with brands of their choice.

Influencer marketing was already poised to be big in 2018, but this change to Facebook’s platform will absolutely spur more brands and businesses to dip their toe into the water. As a result, influencers will see an uptick in requests, giving them more power to be very choosy about which brands they lend their time, insights and audience to.

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Influencers have more power to be very choosy about the brand they lend their time, insights and audience to. #influencermarketing
Click To Tweet

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#3 – Influencer nurturing will be more important than ever.

As illustrated by the previous two points, the Facebook change will lead to an increased adoption of influencer marketing, giving influencers more options. So it’s no surprise that it’ll be time to double-down on your commitment to influencer nurturing.

Now, we’ve always said that when it comes to building relationships and rapport with influencers, it’s critical that you put the time and effort into nurturing — rather than simply reaching out when you have a need. There has to be shared value.

But I think most marketers would admit that they have significant room for improvement in this area — and there’s no time like the present to recommit yourself.

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With #Facebook’s recent algorithm change, it’s time to double-down on your commitment to nurturing your influencers. #influencermarketing
Click To Tweet

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Capitalize on the Opportunity

Let’s face it. This “major change” to Facebook’s platform isn’t the first and it certainly won’t be the last. As a result, now is the time to fully capitalize on the opportunity by better working with industry influencers. Now is the time to refocus on connecting with your audience — and influencers can help you do just that by adding authenticity, credibility, unique insights and new eyeballs to your content.

What else is in store for influencer marketing in 2018? Check out these rising influencer marketing trends that you need to pay attention to.

What do you think about the latest Facebook News Feed algorithm change? Tell us in the comments section below.

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For the first three quarters of 2021, there were 11.78 million car sales in the U.S. — that’s 14.2% better than a year ago. With momentum like that, I’d say it’s a great time to be a car salesperson.

But even with those numbers, it takes more than having a license to get your customers to sign the dotted line — you have to be good at what you do to make them want the keys.

These days, car shoppers can easily find True Market Value, competitive sticker prices, and national inventory online. That means consumer choice has become less about which dealership offers the best price and more about which salesperson they like best.

So, want to know how to sell more cars? Brush up on car sales best practices, and ensure you always give customers an exceptional experience.

1. Remember names.

Brain Coach Jim Kwik says, "There is no such thing as a good or bad memory. There is just trained memory and untrained memory." He argues, "Your ability to remember a new name has to do with your intrinsic understanding of why it matters."

Consider how much you stand to earn by remembering each new prospect's name. To help with recall, once you learn a buyer's name, use it immediately. For example:

Salesperson: "Hello, welcome to XYZ Motors, I'm Meg, and who might you be?"

Customer: "My name is Bonnie."

Salesperson: "Great! Nice to meet you, Bonnie. What brings you in today?"

Once you've used the name, repeat it silently to yourself several times. Use it occasionally in the conversation, and make sure to write it down once they leave.

Focus on a particular feature of a person's face. It could be blue eyes, their haircut, or a friendly smile. Connect their name to a visual anchor so you remember it easily. For example, "This is Bonnie. Bonnie does not have a bonnet on." It's also helpful to link each person's name to an image. In this case, I might visualize a giant bonnet on Bonnie's head.

2. Ask the right questions.

After you ask their name, your first question will likely be, "What brings you in today?" It's important to qualify their answer by asking the right follow-up questions. Ask, "Do you know which car you're interested in?" "What are your must-haves in a car?" and, "Will you be the primary driver of this car?"

These questions provide context about what your buyer is looking for, their budget, and who you're selling to. Their answers also allow you to cross-sell or upsell. If the customer lists safety as a must-have, consider upselling them on a four-wheel drive package or pedestrian alert add-on.

3. Build rapport.

If you notice your prospect crossing their arms, becoming quiet, or shifting uncomfortably, stop selling and focus on rapport. If you continue to push an overwhelmed prospect with questions or selling points, you risk alienating them and losing the sale.

Instead, ask them what they like to do on the weekends, what they do for work, or where they're from. These questions are non-threatening and easy to answer.

Once your prospect's body language has relaxed, ease back into the sales process by asking, "Bonnie, you mentioned you like to ski on the weekends, would you use this vehicle to get up to the mountains?" This steers the conversation back to the sale and averts a crisis of cold feet.

4. Listen twice as much as you talk.

Listen to prospects more than you share opinions. When choosing between a salesperson who talks over them and one who listens — they'll choose the latter every time.

It's tempting to fill any conversational pause — but don't. By immediately following their answers with another question, you risk cutting them off before they've completed their response.

Similarly, if you talk through a lull during the test drive, you might distract your prospect from formulating valuable thoughts or concerns they have about the vehicle.

Instead, pause for one or two seconds after your prospect has finished speaking to ensure they've had time to reflect.

5. Treat every customer equally.

My husband and I recently visited several dealerships to buy a car. We were motivated buyers looking for a car we would share equally. At every dealership, the salespeople looked at my husband directly and asked what he did for a living. Each time, I waited for them to ask me the same question — two months and a Prius later, I'm still waiting.

This might seem like a small or insignificant overlook, but it stood out to me. When partners are buying a car together, don't assume one is investing more than the other. Ask each of them the same questions so everyone feels like a valued part of the sales process.

6. Don't disparage other dealers.

Don't disparage other dealerships. When prospects mention competitors, avoid the temptation to trash talk. Reply with, "I see," or "Alright," and explain what makes your dealership different.

By focusing on the benefits your dealership offers, you avoid making a negative impression on your prospect, and you've further illustrated what makes your business the better choice.

For example, instead of saying, "Oh, Dealership X offers terrible warranties. I don't think you'll find what you want there," say "We're offering a five-year warranty on all new cars. This offer is exclusive to our dealership!"

7. Don't be pushy.

When a prospect is on their third test drive of the same car, it's difficult to keep yourself from asking, "So, are you ready to buy?" or "What do you think?"

Instead of asking direct or overly broad questions, say, "So, Bonnie, could you see yourself driving this car?" If you're feeling confident, ask, "Is this a car you would buy today?"

These questions continue to prime the buyer without cornering them or giving them too much to consider. The latter is also a great alternative to the desperate-sounding, "What can I do to get you to buy today?"

8. Make eye contact.

As your prospect is speaking, make sure to hold their gaze. Look directly into their eyes for up to five seconds before smiling, changing your facial expression, or altering your gaze. Any longer and you risk having a glazed, unnatural, or creepy expression. Any shorter and you might appear disinterested or impatient.

Remember, it's difficult for some people with autism or social anxiety to make or hold eye contact. If someone is avoiding your gaze, be sensitive to their needs and hold a soft gaze that doesn't make them uncomfortable.

9. Avoid using untrustworthy language.

"With all due respect," "I don't want to waste your time," "Honestly" and "To be honest with you," are obnoxious sales phrases that make you untrustworthy.

Instead, say, "I see where you're coming from. Would you mind if I offered a different opinion?" and wait for your prospect to respond.

And, instead of saying, "To be honest with you," or "I don't want to waste your time," simply be honest with your prospects from the start, and you won't have to clarify your statements.

10. Discuss price last.

When you ask, "Is this a car you're ready to buy today?" and the answer is "Absolutely," it's time to discuss price. Payment, cash down, and trade-in value are all part of this process.

Wait until the buyer is in love with the car and ready to buy. Then, leverage your sales manager to negotiate a price that will give your buyer a fair deal and maximize the dollars in your dealership's pocket.

11. Never be bored.

There will be slow days and weeks at your dealership. Use downtime to your advantage, and challenge yourself to never be bored. Use slow days to learn about your cars, read about next year's models, listen to podcasts that hone your skills, and follow up with prospects.

The best way to get ahead of the other salespeople on your floor? Use sales lulls to become stronger at selling.

12. Always follow up.

Having trouble getting customers to give you their phone number before they leave? Close their phone number before you take them on a test drive.

Your prospect doesn't want to jeopardize a chance to drive the car, which will make it easier for you to ask, "Alright, you're almost ready for the test drive. All I need is a phone number to reach you." Before they leave, let your prospect know when you'll follow up — and stick to it.

When you do follow up, start by asking how they are. Then, instead of saying, "Well, have you thought any more about the car?" ask, "Can I answer any questions about the cars you saw this weekend?" This question is less pushy and more likely to keep your prospect on the phone.

Your follow-up obligations don't end when your prospect buys a car from you. Call them a week or 10 days after their purchase to see how they like their new car. Write them a thank-you note and ask them to keep you in mind next time they're shopping for a new vehicle.

13. Be the last face they see.

If your customer buys a car from you, be there for the technical walk-through and personal inspection. Offer to take your buyer's picture and be excited for them. This is a big purchase and something most people want to celebrate.

If your prospect says they need a few days to make a decision, be understanding, tell them you'll follow up, and walk them to the door. This keeps you top of mind, and it avoids making them feel like you're frustrated they didn't buy.

14. Leave bad training behind.

You've likely encountered some bad advice during your sales training. Know when to leave it behind and go with your gut.

We’ve gone over what good car salespeople do, but now let’s discuss the skills they possess.

Essential Skills of a Car Salesperson

1. Good Communication

Strong verbal skills are a necessity when it comes to working in sales. Car shoppers are looking for salespeople to present the information they need clearly, and comfortably.

2. Active Listening Skills

When a client tells you what they’re looking for, you need to give them your full attention. Engaging in active listening lets them know you care and will help them find the car they’re actually looking for.

3. Adaptability to Client Needs

No two clients are alike. You need to be able to build rapport with all sorts of personalities and cater to all sorts of budgets, needs, and tastes.

4. Product Knowledge

This one seems like a no-brainer, but if you’re selling something, you should probably know the specifications of it. Your clients could have done their own research on the model they want already, and your job is to build upon that knowledge for them.

5. Organization Skills

Organization is key in sales. As you juggle different clients and tasks each day, you must have the correct information available when needed to close a sale.

6. Positive Attitude

Nobody wants to buy a car from a grouch, and it takes skill to maintain a positive attitude through the wins and losses of sales. Successful salespeople attract buyers with a cheerful attitude that is friendly and non-intimidating.

7. Self-Confidence

Yes, self-confidence is a personality trait — but for some, it’s a learned skill. Car shoppers are looking to buy from a salesperson who is confident in their ability to do their job, and good salespeople do just that.

So now that we know the behaviors and skills of a good car salesperson, what does it take to become one in the first place?

How to Become a Car Salesperson

1. Complete an education program.

Most job postings for car salespeople require a high school diploma or GED. While a college degree isn't required, it can be helpful if you hope to eventually move into a sales management position. If you aspire to manage the sales team, consider pursuing a degree in sales and marketing, general business, or economics and finance. This will give you the business knowledge to manage a team and structure your sales program.

2. Gain work experience.

Previous sales experience isn't always required. Car salespeople rely on communication, negotiating, and people skills — these skills can be developed in a sales or customer service role. Experience working face-to-face with clients and customers (e.g., retail sales) will help you excel in this role.

Plus, once you accept a position as a car salesperson, many car dealerships will provide training so you know exactly what you're selling and how to sell it.

3. Obtain a license.

Depending on which state you choose to work in, you might need to get a license before you can begin selling cars. In California, for example, you need to apply with the DMV to earn your car salesperson license.

With your prior education, experience, and license you're all set to begin selling. Remember, today's consumers have many options.

Delight Your Next Client

The old pushy tactics that worked 20 years ago likely won't earn you the sale today. Be patient, listen, and support your buyer through this big purchase. Be a partner instead of a pusher — the results will be worth your while.

January has flown by – literally, as I’ve been on 15 airplanes already and head to Virginia today for another company’s sales kickoff meeting. I. Am. Having. A. Blast. and hope you are, too! Before any more of this year gets behind us, I want to ask you to pause to answer this question for yourself:

What is your motivation to prospect for new business? 

Please don’t blowoff this question. I’m serious, and I’m asking for a reason. I have run into several salespeople lately who have been charged to bring in new business but can’t seem to bring themselves to proactively pursue target prospects. They know they need to initiate contact with potential buyers and they agree that sitting on their butts waiting for a lead (or commenting in LinkedIn groups) is not going to create sufficient opportunities to fill their pipeline. Yet, they just can’t get over the hump, and many remain stuck in reactive/passive mode – hoping beyond hope that the Opportunity Fairy will put a lead under their pillow or in their inbox!

Salespeople, please hear me on this: If you truly believe that your job is to improve the prospect/client’s situation and that you have/sell a solution that benefits them and will produce a positive outcome, then it is irresponsible not to make every effort to earn a conversation with potential buyers.

Very early in my sales career, my dad drilled it into me that as long as my motivation for selling was to help my customer win I would be very successful as a salesperson. If I helped the customer win then I would win. That was priceless advice. Think about it. If you truly believe that you can improve your prospect or client’s condition, then not only is your motivation to sell pure and honorable, but you are doing the customer, your own company, and yourself a disservice if you don’t pursue them with all you’ve got. 

So…if your heart isn’t in it, or you’ve been procrastinating, making excuses, or actively finding reasons not to prospect for new business, maybe it’s time for a heart and attitude check. Maybe you’ve been viewing yourself and your job wrong. Instead of seeing yourself as a pest, product-pusher, or pitchman, what if you viewed yourself correctly – as a true professional problem-solver, value-creator, advisor, expert, consultant, ________ ?  What if you embraced the reality that many of your prospective customers are likely living with a suboptimal solution, or are potentially stuck, and you and your company are in a position to help them? I certainly hope that would increase your motivation to pick up the phone and initiate a dialogue.

There’s another bonus to adopting this mindset: if producing a better outcome for your prospect is indeed your motivation for selling, customers will sense your authenticity and be much more receptive to your approach. And my friends, that is just another reason it is imperative that you have a compelling, customer-issue/outcome-focused sales story!

Stop putting off prospecting. There are potential customers out there who need you and your help!

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Join Us for the 2018 Virtual Sales Kickoff

As mentioned above, it’s Sales Kickoff Season and my friends Jeb Blount, Mark Hunter, Anthony Iannarino and I have been running/flying around the globe like madmen speaking and leading workshops pretty much everyday. Well, a few years ago Anthony got the idea to create a Virtual Sales Kickoff Meeting. It bothered him that only salespeople in large companies who could afford big kickoff meetings and to hire outside sales speakers were benefitting. And he wanted ALL salespeople to have the chance to kickstart the year with a powerful and practical kickoff meeting. So VSK was born and this year the four of us are back for another round. Once again, thanks to our great sponsors ConnectAndSell and DiscoverOrg, it’s FREE to you.

The focus of the 2018 Virtual Sales Kickoff is PRODUCTIVITY. The four of us will tackle how to get more done in less time while improving your outcomes. We will cover topics ranging from time-blocking to creating your model sales week. We’ll dive into strategic targeting of accounts, maximizing prospecting effectiveness to secure meetings faster, share the secrets of increasing pipeline velocity, and much more. And because we want you to receive maximum value, there will be no slides, no pontificating about ethereal sales theories, and no product pitches. Just powerful, practical advice from four guys who love sales and helping salespeople sell more. More than 10,000 people viewed last year’s virtual sales kickoff. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to get ideas you’ll be able to implement immediately! Register here for FREE.

I’ll let you in on one of our trade secrets. At Ceralytics, we have four distinct buyer personas. We created them in the early days of our company and used them to build out our product and develop our market strategy. We updated them over time as we learned more about our audience’s needs and pain points. Now, we’re scrapping those buyer personas and moving to a new approach.

For a long time, we have believed in and promoted the use of buyer personas in marketing, especially in the creation of content strategies. In fact, it’s a part of our “Define Your Audience” step in the seven steps we use to create content strategies for our clients.

But we’ve noticed the time we spend updating and modifying buyer personas to keep up with new intelligence far outweighs the time we’ve been able to use the buyer persona itself to create content. So why spend time updating something that we seldom use?

Have you also found yourself wondering why should you bother with buyer personas?

The Case Against Buyer Personas

At Social Fresh 2017, Christopher Barger of Brain+Trust Partners suggested that trying to categorize your audience into very specific buckets is simply not relevant anymore.

“User personas were great 15 to 20 years ago. But personas are based on assumptions we made about our audience. Now, we don’t have to assume because we have the ability to be data-driven,” says Barger. “Technology enables us to have real data about our audience from dozens of sources. When you put these all together, you will naturally see how people interact with your content and your brand.”

Every one of your buyers is very unique. Knowing your customer no longer means to categorizing them into a nice, neat persona like this:

Instead, understanding your buyer means knowing:

• How they interact with your content.
• How they interact with your competitors’ content.
• Where they get their news.
• What topics truly resonate with them.
• How those topics drive them to action.
• The channels that get them to engage with you.
• And most importantly, their pain points.

While personas can be a good starting point, they are often based on assumptions and are overly broad. Even personas we round out with data still assume that everyone in a certain category has the same needs and pain points. We need to move from assuming what a category of people wants to knowing what point points individuals have.

Our Buyer Personas

At Ceralytics, our four buyer personas are all within the marketing field. However, we’ve had real clients who are CEOs, COOs, and heads of business development. We don’t have buyer personas for these people, so should we create them?

We debated it. After all, we’ve proven that these people are our audience; they’ve been on calls with us, asking questions and seeking solutions to problems they had. But their titles really had nothing to do with their need. What they all had in common were pain points: lack of clarity around how to position their brand and what content they should use to communicate with their audiences, both in terms of marketing and sales.

After some deliberation, we opted not to create buyer personas for these people, but rather take their pain points and add them to a faceless persona with no title. Then, we found that a lot of our clients and prospects fit that faceless persona. When we just looked at the pain points and stripped away a lot of the other demographic information—age, gender, title, company size, etc.—it made things even clearer to us. What mattered were the pain points and how we, as a company, address them.

The Death of Buyer Personas

Since user personas are based on assumptions about our audience, it no longer makes sense to lean on them. We have an incredible amount of data we can use to determine the reality of our buyer’s needs instead of our perceived notion of them. As Barger says, “User personas are dead.”

With all of the tracking we can do on buyer’s journeys, we don’t have to put people into user personas artificially anymore. People put themselves into their own buckets.

This self-identification through a buyer’s own actions gives us a much clearer picture of their true pain points. If someone visits your site via organic search, reads three articles about how to smoke the best pulled pork, then two weeks later buys a smoker from you, do you try to bucket that person by demographics? Or do you look at the topics that resonated best with them and their buyer journey? In this case, it doesn’t matter if the person was 18 or 80, black or white, rich or just getting by. What mattered was what they did and how they engaged with what you created.

New technologies, including natural language processing and predictive analytics, identify the pain points our audiences have, track how they navigate a site by topic instead of by page, and deliver us insights in near real-time.

In a post-user persona world, technology takes us from guessing to knowing.

Tools to Help You Uncover How Your Audience Self-Identifies

Social intelligence gives marketers a deeper understanding of the wants and needs of their audiences in near real-time.

“Today’s social intelligence provides us information about larger groups of people based on actual social behavior—interactions with content that we can segment by awareness, engagement, and conversion,” says Duncan Alney, CEO at Firebelly Marketing. “We can bring granularity into play by interests and behaviors that is actual rather than hypothetical.”

Content intelligence uncovers current gaps in addressing pain points that other companies in your space are exploiting. It also identifies potential audience pain points that are currently underserved in your specific industry. Content intelligence also uncovers the topics that attract people to your site, engage them, and get them to convert.

The result gives you a deeper understanding of what your audience truly needs to move from an inquisitive prospect to a buyer. And it’s based on real data, not assumptions.

Marketing automation systems (MAS) and customer relationship management (CRM) tools also play an essential role in the post-user persona world. These databases of prospect and client information, when combined with content and social intelligence, bring a level of context and personalization buyers will come to expect.

Exit Your Comfort Zone

Buyer personas are simply too antiquated and don’t serve the function they did years ago. Nevertheless, many people I speak to are hesitant to move away from them. Barger summed up their hesitation: “The resistance from marketers to move away from personas is caused by a natural human instinct to stay in their comfort zone.”

Change is hard. Abandoning a fundamental component of marketing like user personas is a huge shift. Many will feel out of their comfort zone, while others will point to all of the data-driven marketing happening and wonder, “If we’re driving everything from data, is marketing going to become bland and boring?”

On the contrary, all of this data will only make marketing more exciting. You’ll be able to go all-in on creative projects with surefire evidence that you’re solving the right problem for the right people, thus delivering real value to your audience and driving business results.

Barger notes, “You’re still able to be creative. You’re just doing it from a smarter starting point.”

Confidence from that smarter starting point will lead to greater creativity, happier audiences, and better business results.

How Do You Create Content and Products Without Buyer Personas?

As technology advances and more data becomes readily available, everyone will find their own way of creating granular content that is personalized to the individual. Some will utilize CRM and marketing automation systems to personalize content for individuals on each of their site visits, creating a predictive path for each user. Amazon is a good example of this, though they are far from perfect.

At Ceralytics, we aren’t at a place to personalize every single user interaction. We feel that could do more harm than good—we might lose our company voice in the process. Instead, we now focus on two things:

1. What is the pain point we want to solve with a communication or product?
2. What feeling do we want people to have as a result of the communication or product?

The pain points come directly out of our content intelligence. We know what pain points resonate with our audiences across our site and our competitors’ sites. We know which pain points drive people to our site and which pain points lead them to take a buying action through our conversion analysis.

The feeling we want to instill in others, the one in that second bullet point, comes from the core of our brand. Speaking with a different voice to every demographic doesn’t feel genuine. Instead, we speak with one voice to that pain point, whether the person with that pain point is 18 or 80.

That authentic voice should come from the core of your company as well. Why does your company do what it does? As best selling author and marketing consultant Simon Sinek would say, “What is your why?” Be true to that mission. Be true to your company’s voice. Don’t placate your audience.

Identify the real pain points your audience has, and then speak with your voice to solve them. That’s far more valuable than any buyer persona.

The post Are Buyer Personas Really Dead? appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

Driving Business Results Without Effort

To many small business owners, the concept of marketing automation is nothing new. Integrating marketing and sales tools into your CRM can help you streamline your business and take repetitive tasks off your plate. However, there are also several unexpected benefits to utilizing this technology. Here are several business advantages you may gain by automating some processes:

1. More Time to Develop Other Aspects of Your Business

You might be surprised how much time you waste tending to your marketing efforts – sending emails, lead scoring, and taking care of repetitive tasks. When you use marketing automation, technology handles these tasks for you. Instead, you can focus on what drove you to pursue a career as an entrepreneur in the first place. Apply your skill and experience to development and making your business grow. Create content, establish thought leadership, and launch a new product or service – it’s all possible with marketing automation.

2. Positive Effect on Company Culture

Marketing automation, by its very nature, encourages collaboration. By incorporating marketing tasks into your CRM, you’re joining your sales, marketing, and technical support teams together. It’s an effective way to pool your company resources and get your employees working toward a common goal.

When different teams work together on the same software, they begin to understand how their work fits into the larger scope of your business. They also gain valuable insight to how their actions impact other departments, and vice versa. This creates a collaborative company culture, which will blend into your business as a whole.

3. Seamless Communication Between Channels

Managing leads across multiple channels can be frustrating. When we try to pursue multiple channels at once, we risk a low conversion rate and a lot of extra stress. At the worst, we lose prospects to the competition.

Marketing automation takes the pressure off and allows you to effectively pursue leads across multiple channels. Rather than spreading yourself too thin, automation eliminates the repetitive tasks so you can pursue leads organically and aggressively. Think of it as a safety net that keeps valuable prospects from slipping through your fingers.

The “omni-channel” method of marketing might seem daunting, but automation makes it possible. For example, you can store all your lead data in one central location, and run analytics to see which are most effective. Modern customers are both fickle and elusive, and automation keeps you one step ahead.

4. Identify Gaps in Customer Experience

Lastly, automation will help you identify where you can better serve customers. By tracking every aspect of your business, you can determine where your marketing efforts aren’t performing as they should. Analytics and tracking will expose gaps and bottlenecks in your customer service you may not have known existed. Leverage your data to improve your customer experience and sales.

Marketing automation has more benefits than you might realize. By eliminating certain tasks, you have more time to dedicate to improving your customer experience and growing your business. If you’re on the fence about using it, consider these benefits in your decision-making process.

Quality landing page copy can be one of your strongest assets when it comes to attracting new leads for your business. It’s a way to capture and grow your audience, and further build up your business.

Simply publishing anything in that space won’t work. You’ll have to put some thought into how to create copy that your audience will love. The good news is it’s not as hard as you might think. The blueprint is out there.

Below are some tips for breaking through to your customers, with landing page copy that grabs their attention. No one knows your business like you do. You can take these tips, and craft a page that turns skeptical readers into brand loyalists. Or you can hire a landing page copywriter.

15 Tips for Writing Landing Page Copy that Will Boost Your Business

Tip #1: Take a Lesson from the Past – Landing pages have a relatively short history compared to sales letters. Marketers and copywriters have been perfecting the art of the sales letter for as long as there’s been mail. That’s some history.

A simple Google search of “sales letter examples” can turn up some highly worthwhile results. For example, here is a compilation of the most successful sales letters of all time. Read what is there before you start writing. Get inspired. Figure out what has worked in the past and emulate it. Simply having a feel for the right kind of style will prove a valuable use of your time.

Tip #2: Craft a Killer Headline – Consider this well-known quote about headlines from copywriting master David Ogilvy:

“On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written the headline, you have spent 80 cents of your dollar.”

Most people will likely find your page through some variation of an add, a Google search, or on social media. The first exposure they’ll have to your company will be some variation of the headline to the page. One of the best ways for you to get the most of your landing page copy is to spend some extra time on that headline. Does it make people curious enough to keep reading?

It’s easy to look at the headline as something we can slap on top of the page at the very end. But the headline is what people will base their decision to read further on. It needs to be strong.

Tip #3: Use Social Signals – Your reader wants to know how seriously they can take your claims. They want to know you are capable of what you say you are. How good is your product or service? Confidence in language goes a long way in suggesting that you can do it. Throw in a sentence about how many people you’ve helped.

Have you been featured on any media? Have you done any press interviews, podcasts or guest posts? If the logo of the organization is recognizable, you could do an “As seen on” section to boost your credibility. Make sure the logos link to your specific story. These can help convey you as an expert in your industry.

Another way to convey strong social signals is through testimonials. Make sure the testimonials are strongly worded and that they are related to the specific offer related to your landing page. You can talk all day about the benefits of your business. When a customer does it, that will instantly hold more weight.

Tip #4: Be Conversational – A common temptation from businesses is to confuse professional and formal. Here’s an easy way to think about it…Not every office would require its employees to wear a shirt and tie. You don’t have to use stuffy language to sell more stuff. In fact, you shouldn’t.

Most internet users prefer a casual, informal approach. It helps in relating to your audience. As you write, picture yourself out for coffee with an ideal lead. You wouldn’t load them up with technical jargon just to sound smart. When it goes straight over their head, they’d tune out and never buy. The same is true online.

A conversational approach is better.

Tip #5: Practice Empathy – Your customer landed on your page because they are researching how to solve a problem. They view you as a potential solution. As you write the content, mention the problem. Show them you understand why they are there.

It’s up to you to convince them that they don’t have to go on with that problem. There is a quality, expert solution within their reach. There is a trusted method for getting what they want. You have listened. You understand them. You are on their side. The key to writing good landing page copy is empathy.

Tip #6: Write Like a Human – This should go without saying, but online it’s a big problem. The temptation is to oversaturate your copy with keywords and technical jargon. The temptation is to use this space to do everything you can to increase traffic. But that doesn’t always mean it’s the right traffic.

Better analytics won’t pay the bills, but more sales will. Last time I checked, the bank won’t take added traffic as a payment for your mortgage. Take an interest in your readers and customers. Be personable. You’re writing the page to appeal to people. You can accomplish this without writing stiff, robotic, repetitive copy.

Tip #7: Show them the Benefits – You aren’t selling a product or service, you’re selling how it makes people feel. You’re selling the experience of using what you offer. The benefits are how your product or service makes their life better. It’s not the way that the can opener takes the lid off, it’s that it does it in less time – so you can access your food faster, and satisfy your hunger.

It’s not what is under the hood of your convertible that you are selling. It’s the feeling of driving at 85 mph with the top down. Think about all the ways that the specific offer on your landing page can improve your customers’ lives. This is what you are selling.

Tip #8: Use Data to Get Specific – Data is another form of proof. It bolsters your argument and legitimizes your offer. You can use data to show people why they need what you sell. As a personal example, I’ve quoted a statistic several times that B2B companies that blog see 67 percent more leads than those that don’t. It reinforces the idea that you need to be publishing stories and information on a regular basis to continue getting in front of your audience. It keeps you visible.

Data strengthens your argument.

Tip #9: Write to a Segmented Audience – Landing page copy can be used to segment your audience, and talk to smaller groups individually. This allows you to better personalize your message. You could use a landing page to segment by age, gender, geography or purchasing habits.

Multiple landing pages to various segments of your audience can help you to reach a new level of detail and specificity.

Tip #10: Think Visually as You Write – Landing pages are typically long. They’re often well over 1,000 words. It’s going to take an enticing message to get the customer to read that. The way that you structure your landing page copy will make a significant difference in whether your reader makes it to your call to action or not.

You can help your reader along by using subheads, bullets and shorter paragraphs. Subheads help break the copy up, and give people a chance to pick up what your message is through scanning the page. Bullets help people to understand the most important points of your message, with minimal effort. When you realize that you are about to embark on reading a 2,000-word post, the last thing you want to deal with is academic-length blocks of test. Shorter paragraphs move the reader along faster.

Infographics and multiple images can also make long-form landing pages easier to read. It can help visual learners to grasp what you are talking about in your landing page copy.

Tip #11: Think Like a Minimalist – When you’re writing landing page copy that exceeds 1,000 words or longer, it’s easy to want to include a variety of information, strategies, talking points or calls to action. Resist this temptation to include ALL information. Instead, think like a minimalist.

When someone reads your page, what is the ONE thing you want them to do? The structure of your page should revolve around that. You don’t need to include sales points on other products. You don’t need to include benefits that don’t really match the segmented audience that you are addressing. Keep the message simple. Keep the ideas focused.

You may end up in a situation where you have strong, persuasive copy written that is super-persuasive. If it doesn’t fit with the intent of your specific landing page, take it out and use it somewhere else. When the copy is this long, it’s important to stay on message and keep it focused to what you are looking to do.

Tip #12: Use Shorter Submission Forms – If you are asking people to fill out a submission form, it’s crucial to keep that submission form extremely simple. Only ask people for the information that you’ll need. The more information people need to provide, the less likely they are to fill out your form.

Keep them accessible, and keep them simple. Typically their name, a contact email, and a message field are enough.

Tip #13: Use Bullets that Convey Value – Put thought into the bullets that go into your lists. The main point of quality bullets in a sales format, such as a landing page, is to convey the benefits of the product. Your lists should be illustrating the ways your product or service improves your customers’ lives. Remember, your bulleted lists maintain a higher level of visibility because they are more easily skimmable. Put some thought into what you want the take away to be.

Tip #14: A Lead Magnet that Sells – If you are using your landing page to capture email addresses, you’ll need a lead magnet. People don’t frequently give up their email address for nothing in return. You’ll need a way to provide added value to grow your email list. Some frequent lead magnets include ebooks, white papers, pdf reports, courses or more.

All companies have information that will be of value to their customers. Think about what you can offer to enhance your customers’ lives. This could be things like buying tips, why your product or service is necessary, or how to get the most out of the product. The possibilities for a quality lead magnet are endless, and often unique to the business or industry as well.

Make it enticing, and your email subscriptions can increase.

Tip #15: A Convincing Call To Action – It’s critical to close strong on your landing page. Emotion or enthusiasm can help you sell more. As much as we all view ourselves as rational, logical creatures who only buy for practical reasons, it’s just not the case. We buy because it makes us happy, fearful, safe or angry. We buy because of how it makes us feel. When that emotion is evident at the end, it can have tremendous results.

Another way to enhance the call to action is to create scarcity. We all suffer from fear of missing out (FOMO). It’s part of the human condition. If your product is part of a limited run, or only good while supplies last, the reader needs to take quick action. It creates demand.

Your services are limited by time constraints as well. There are ways to create FOMO there as well.

Make sure your call to action is convincing. Make sure people understand what they need to do to solve their problem. A strong call to action can make a significant difference when it comes to the effectiveness of your landing page copy.

Conclusion

Quality landing page copy can result in a situation where your website works for you in your sleep. You can use well-written landing pages to grow your leads, and retake control of your online presence. It can make all the difference between a successful and a flailing business.

Which are you?

The good news is you don’t have to be a talented, prolific writer to create landing pages that help your business. They are possible to write on your own. But they do take time. If you are looking to focus your time and resources on other aspects of running your business, hiring a landing page copywriter might be the right move for your business.

Is it time for you to utilize landing pages to create more business?

The Tools We’re Using in 2018 to Get More Subscribers and Customers

In today’s episode, I want to introduce you to a Thrive – a suite of WordPress plugin tools we’ve been using on our blogs for the past six months or so that we’re really excited about.

Today’s show is brought to you by two brand new courses from ProBlogger.

I’ve been talking about one of them – our Ultimate Guide to Starting a Blog – for the past month or so. It’s perfect for those people who want to get a blog launched with solid foundations.

We’ve had more than 1000 people start the course already, and we’re now seeing many of them launch their blogs. We’ll be celebrating the launches on the 7th February with what we’re calling ProBlogger’s International Start a Blog day. To be included in that day simply register for the course by 31 January and launch your blog by 7th Feb.

The second course we’ve developed that we’ll be launching in March isn’t just for new bloggers. It’s also for those of you who have been blogging for a while. It’s our 31 Days to Build a Better Blog course.

Long-time listeners will be familiar with that name. I originally ran 31DBBB back in 2009 as a blog post series. Later it was turned into an eBook, which we’ve since updated. That eBook sold tens of thousands of copies. I also did a version of the series to launch this podcast.

But now we’re giving it a complete overhaul and will be launching it as a course.

I’ll give you more details of it in coming episodes. But it’s perfect both for new bloggers who have just set up a blog with our start a blog course, as well as more established bloggers who want to give their blog a real kick start.

It’s really about developing good habits over an intentional month of blogging.

This will be a paid course, although we’ve kept it as affordable as we can. And we’ll be launching it to anyone who preregisters their interest at a launch discount.

Links and Resources on Tools We’re Using to Get More Subscribers and Customers in 2018

• Facebook Group
• Thrive
• Episode on CoSchedule

Courses

• Ultimate Guide to Starting a Blog
• 31 Days to Build a Better Blog

How did you go with today’s episode?

Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

The post 233: Tools We’re Using to Get More Subscribers and Customers in 2018 appeared first on ProBlogger.

Text messaging is the most used feature on any cell phone – smart or otherwise – and it’s also the most used form of communication for most of the world (including the U.S.).

If you’re like me, you look at how pervasive texting (SMS) is, and you think “There’s got to be a way to make money off of this!”

And there is.

There are several ways to use SMS to grow your business. Below I’ll show you a few of them, and I’ll explain why it’s so important that you do use SMS for your business in 2018.

1. Getting leads

In 2017, 70 percent of online traffic came from mobile devices, which is up from about 65 percent little more than a year ago. That number’s expected to grow to 73 percent in 2018.

People are on their phones a lot searching for products, businesses, and everything else. What happens when they find you?

Well, we already know most people prefer texting (see above), and now we know most people online are already on their smartphones. Something called Click-to-Text puts two and two together.

Click-to-Text is a button that works with your website, Google business listing, Adwords ads, and more. Viewers click the button to open a text to your business.

This tears down barriers and extra steps to convert more mobile viewers into leads. Once they text you, you also have the best way to reach them (their cell phone), and their reason for contacting you.

2. Following up on leads

Emails, phone calls, advertisements, and more all work for following up with leads and closing sales. But what if you could close more sales with fewer steps?

According to Constant Contact, about 17 percent of emails are opened, on average. About 20 percent of calls are answered (fewer listen to voicemail), and retargeting ads can be tricky to get right.

These methods work, but they also leave holes in your funnel, because you aren’t able to reach everyone consistently.

But 99 percent of text messages are read (mostly within a few minutes of being sent), which makes it easy for you to get your foot in the door. You can text to:

• Get an update
• Schedule a time to talk, or an appointment
• Ask for the close
• Share a “more info” link or picture
• And more

SMS helps you grow your business by instantly connecting you with the people you need to reach when you need to reach them. Plus, 45 percent of texts like this (on average) get responses, and some studies show they get almost 300 percent more “yes” responses than phone calls (source linked above).

What could that do for your business?

3. Ongoing customer communications

You probably text with your friends and family. Why not treat your customers the same way?

It’s important to think of business texting/SMS as two-way and conversational, not just as a way to push information. These conversations build relationships with your customers, and those relationships are key to growing your business.

You can start conversations by:

• Scheduling or confirming their next appointment
• Checking in to see how things are going
• Sharing new offers or info
• Asking for feedback or reviews
• Any other reason you can come up with.

89 percent of consumers say they want to message with a business for communications like these.

You should also consider how much easier it is to reach people through text than other methods, and how much time it can save you compared to calling.

The average phone call takes almost two minutes, but you can send one text to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people at the same time (without starting a group thread). You can also schedule messages in advance, just like email.

4. Customer service and support

Per Harvard Business Review, it costs anywhere from five to 25 times more to bring in a new customer than it does to keep an existing customer. Improving customer retention by just five percent can also increase revenue by anywhere from 25 percent to 95 percent.

But what customers want has changed drastically over the last few years, and it could be costing you a lot of business.

Did you know that 32 percent of callers placed on hold hang up immediately? Or that most customers are frustrated with current customer service options?

People have always valued quick and convenient service, but now they want it to be quick and convenient from the palm of their hand — without having to do much of anything themselves.

Texting meets today’s expectations, and people like texting for service and support because they can go on about their day during the conversation.

When you exceed expectations and provide great customer experiences, you will keep more customers for longer while spending less to do so.

Action steps

Mobile engagement has been trending upward steadily for a decade, and some form of SMS or mobile messaging has been trending right alongside it.

In 2018, it’s crucial that your business get in on the action.

SMS can help you grow your business, and frankly, it’s what people will expect from you. There are just a few things you need to do to find success with SMS in 2018.

Step 1:

Offer text (or Click-to-Text) as a communication channel wherever you want people to reach out to you. For leads, that includes at least your website and Google listing. For customer service, that includes your website homepage and other contact pages.

Step 2:

Begin reaching out to leads and customers through text (just don’t spam people). You can do this by following up with leads after you see their information come in, or by sparking conversations with existing customers to build those relationships.

Step 3:

Get something to manage all these texts as a business. Text Request is made for this, and you can even use your current business number in most cases.

Once you have your SMS strategies in place – which you can see by this article is simple to do — then there’s nothing left but to do it!

What are your thoughts on using SMS for business? Post them in the comments and let’s talk about them!

Early in the NAFTA saga, I assumed Canada’s banks would be feeling some heat.

Robert Lighthizer, the United States Trade Representative, included financial services on his initial long list of complaints, noting specifically that the U.S. desired improved access to the Canadian market.

And why wouldn’t it? After years of watching Toronto-Dominion Bank, Bank of Montreal and Royal Bank of Canada advance on their turf, the reopening of the North American Free Trade Agreement provided an opening to bust a hole in the ownership rules that protect the Oligopoly from international takeover.

Then I looked at the submissions the USTR received during its public consultation process.

If America’s banking giants ever really cared about Canadian ownership rules, they have moved on. There were thousands of submissions about NAFTA, but only a handful from banks. Of those, none encouraged Lighthizer to knock down the walls that protect Bay Street. Citigroup Inc. simply asked the U.S. government to “lock in existing levels of openness and integration in financial services.”

But you know what Citigroup did care about? Data.

First on the Wall Street behemoth’s NAFTA wishlist was, “language ensuring the free flow of data across borders and prohibiting governments from imposing measures requiring local servers for data storage.”

Welcome to the future.

If you’ve been following along, you will recall our Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and others talking about how excited they were to update the pre-Amazon NAFTA for the Internet age.

I commend you if you have managed to figure out what that means, because the 21st century doesn’t come up very often in the coverage of the talks.

As Bloomberg News put it in a headline this week, the main issues are cars and cows. Those are foundations of the old economy, not the new one.

Let’s pause for a moment so I can preempt some angry tweets and emails.

To be clear, nothing you just read, or will read, suggests Freeland should turn her back on auto workers and farmers.

Canada is home to some of the world’s best auto-parts makers, and the government should most definitely fight President Donald Trump’s attempts to skew North American production to the United States. And given Canada’s natural advantages in food production, especially as climate change pushes crop production north to avoid chronic droughts, there is a good argument for leaving supply management in place in order to solidify an area of strength.

• Canada to unveil proposals to head off NAFTA clash over autos
• Forget NAFTA, America's trade war with Canada has already started

But if the NAFTA talks are really about updating trade rules for the 21st century, who deserves pride of place on the Canadian agenda: Shopify Inc., the Canadian unit of General Motors Co., or the Dairy Farmers of Canada?

That should be a rhetorical question. Instead, it’s a skill-testing one for casual observers because all they will have read since negotiations started six months ago is minutiae about rules of origin in the car-and-truck business and tired debates about supply management.

If the coverage is indicative of the actual negotiations, there is reason for concern.

Consider: If the priorities of smallish auto-parts makers, or Big Retail, become the public’s priorities, then Canada’s negotiators ultimately will make the trade-offs necessary to secure a deal that they can sell to voters. 

Given what we have observed to date, it’s possible to imagine an American saying something like: “Want to keep your import tariffs on dairy and chicken? Fine, we hoped you’d say that; we will continue to govern intellectual property in a way that suits Silicon Valley, and if you are fool enough to give away all your data to Alphabet and Facebook, then they will get to decide what they do with it.”

“It’s a little bit worrisome,” Morgan Elliott, head of government relations at SOTI Inc., a Mississauga, Ont.-based mobile technology outfit, said of the NAFTA talks.

SOTI is the kind of company Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he likes. It is a leader in its field; it has offices in the United Kingdom, India, Australia and the Middle East; and it employs some 600 people to keep up with 17,000 customers, including such world beaters as American Airlines Group Inc., Volkswagen AG and fast-fashion retailer Hennes & Mauritz AB.

And yet SOTI and its counterparts at the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) feel like the “traditional players” are deciding the country’s trade policy.

Mexican business essentially is embedded with the country’s negotiating team, and American officials have been writing rules that favour U.S. technology companies for decades. The experience of Canada’s tech lobby in Ottawa has left it unsure that ministers and officials care that much about what it has to say.

“There’s not a lot of visibility on what’s going on with the digital chapters,” Elliott said in an phone interview. “We’d love to be more engaged with the government.”

Tech is partly to blame for its relative lack of influence. The millionaires and billionaires who make up this group of upstarts tend to moan about how Ottawa doesn’t understand what it takes to win, and then when you ask them to explain, they say they are “too busy running their companies” to get involved in policy.

“Part of the problem is us, in the past,” Elliott said.

Still, anyone with a subscription to The Economist knows that intellectual property and data must now form the foundation of any successful economy. The owners of those things will dictate the future — everyone else will be takers. No one in Ottawa should need the constant attention of lobbyists to be reminded of that.

The CCI has a list of trade priorities; among them, the extension of mobility rights to non-Canadians who are nonetheless official residents of Canada.

But the most important thing the NAFTA negotiators can do for them is to fight back against U.S. attempts to write the rules of the digital economy. That means retaining the right to demand that Canadian data be stored in Canada, and avoiding overly prescriptive rules, which Washington in the past has used to lock in advantages for American firms. Elliott said the CCI favours periodic reviews of NAFTA to ensure rules keep pace with technological change.

Let’s hope we start seeing more of this as the talks proceed. Trade agreements dictate the future, but they too often are written by those who owe their influence to past success.

It’s time for the current establishment to make some room at the table.

• Email: kcarmichael@nationalpost.com | Twitter: CarmichaelKevin

The pen is mightier than the sword. Which is good, because you probably don't want to threaten prospects into buying at sword-point.

As the primary "weapons" to convert prospects into customers, words are incredibly important to salespeople. How sales reps deliver their messages and converse with contacts can have a dramatic effect on the outcome of a conversation. Using the wrong phrase might cast a negative shadow on the proposal, while tweaking just a few words in the pitch might induce a client to buy immediately. The underlying message is certainly critical, but the words used to deliver it are equally so.

That's why all salespeople should become word nerds. Here's a list of 17 power words that can help you close more deals and earn your prospects' trust in the process.

1. You

Selling is about your prospects — not your company. A simple way to make that clear is by using the word "you" as much as possible. Think back to your childhood. Did your parents ever tell you it was impolite to talk about yourself?

Apply that rule here. Every time you might be tempted to phrase a sentence from the perspective of your company, find a way to rework it to make your prospect the subject.

2. Value

"Customers don't care about features and benefits," Colleen Francis, owner of Engage Selling Solutions, writes in her book Nonstop Sales Boom. "They only care about value and achieving their objectives."

Again, it's about them, not you. Skip over all the amazing features your product or service contains and instead make it clear how your offering will create value for your prospect's business.

3. And

This is a clever replacement for "but" when dealing with criticisms or objections. The word "but" signals to the prospect that you are about to utter a statement that runs counter to what they'd like to hear.

"And" by its very nature is inclusive — you seem to agree even when you're disagreeing. Consider these two examples from Sales Coach Seamus Brown:

"I see that you only have a budget of $50,000, but let me tell you why our system costs $100,000."

"I see that you only have a budget of $50,000, and let me tell you why our system costs $100,000."

Brown points out that the second sentence acknowledges the prospect's budget, while the first steamrolls over the problem and makes the buyer feel ignored. What a difference one word can make!

4. Do

Many sales experts recommend using "do" instead of "try." For instance, instead of "I'd like to try ... " say, "What I'll do is ... " This makes you seem competent and trustworthy — boosting your prospect's confidence in you and your offering in the process.

5. Or

If you present a single proposal to a client, you only give them the option of accepting or rejecting. But if you present them with two or three different variations on your proposal, suddenly you've doubled or tripled your odds of receiving some form of a "yes." So in negotiations don't just ask if they'd like to sign the contract, ask if version A or version B or version C is preferable.

6. Should we ... ?

Most people balk at being told what to do — especially when the person dishing out orders is not a member of their organization. With this in mind, the phrase "you should" can come off as arrogant and presumptive.

Reformulating suggestions as questions helps the prospect keep an open mind and diminishes the potential for the conversation to take a nasty turn.

7. Consensus

According to The Challenger Sale, "Widespread support for a supplier across their team is the number one thing senior decision makers look for in making a purchase decision."

So words that express agreement among stakeholders — such as "support" or "consensus" — could have a significant impact on your primary buyer's mindset. If you have backing from the entire team, play it up as much as possible. If you don't, stress how you're going to attain it.

8. Imagine

Stories stick in people's mind more readily than straight sales messaging. So the best reps don't only use stories in their speech, they also make sure prospects see themselves as the protagonists.

The word imagine can be helpful in this aim. Suddenly, the prospect isn't just hearing about a better future enabled through a new product or service — they're actually picturing themselves living it.

That makes for a shared vision — not one that exists exclusively in the salesperson's mind. 

9. See; Show; Hear; Tackle

Okay, so this isn't one word, but they're all part of one family. Each of these words evokes a sense, and sensory language grabs people's attention. Think about how the words you use relate to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic triggers.

10. Their Name

Just like you, using your prospect's name makes them feel like they're the focus of your attention, and your presentation is customized just for them. People also naturally pay attention better when their name is sprinkled throughout a speech.

11. Because

Ellen Langer, a social psychologist and professor at Harvard University, conducted a study where she tested the impact of phrasing on people's willingness to let someone cut them in line. Here are the variations she used:

• "Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?"
• "Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?"
• "Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I'm in a rush?"

While only 70% agreed to let her cut in line when she used the first question, upwards of 90% let her skip when she used either the second and third phrasings.

The takeaway? When asking people to do something, always include a reason. Don't just request that your prospect introduce you to another stakeholder or fill out a survey — explain why you'd like them to take these actions. 

12. Opportunity

Problems are bound to crop up in the sales process, but that doesn't mean you should acknowledge them as such. The word "problem" has a negative connotation, and can make the prospect feel as if the process is difficult and unpleasant.

With this in mind, replace it with more positive words. Instead of saying "no problem," for example, say, "it's my pleasure." "I understand the problem" can become "I see an opportunity to make this run more smoothly."

13. Results

Prospects want solutions with some degree of certainty behind them. They want to know that the products or services they will deliver. That's why describing the definitive, impressive results you can promise potential customers can carry tremendous weight when trying to woo them.

14. Premium

Talking up an offering's prestige is an effective means of capturing a prospect's interest, retaining it, and ultimately translating it into hard sales. People respond to the concepts of high-esteem and quality.

If you can convey those factors tastefully and convincingly with words like premium, you'll be able to string together a compelling pitch that can have high returns.

15. Risk-Free

Sales is, in large part, the art of putting prospects at ease. That's why words like risk-free are valuable. You need to do what you can to allay stress and skepticism.

You can get a lot of mileage out of this term with prospects — whether it be by describing a free, no-strings-attached trial or assuring them that you have full confidence in your offering.

16. Exclusive

Being a part of the in-crowd is an attractive prospect in any context — and sales is no exception. Luxury and prestige are powerful motivators, and this term is tailored to play on both.

Creating the impression that your product or service is special and only available to a select few can spur some serious interest and action from potential buyers.

17. Safe

In a similar vein as risk-free the term safe can be leveraged to put prospects at ease. It reinforces the notion that your product or service is proven, effective, and decisively able to deliver.

Safe tells prospects they're in good hands — that you can promise they'll see the results they're looking for. People want solutions they can believe in. Safe assures them they can by alluding to the others already do.

Now, this list of power words for sales isn't exhaustive, but that doesn't make it any less useful or significant. Having a grasp on these words and how to use them in your sales efforts can pay off in spades. Language is crucial in sales, so it serves you to bolster your vocabulary with words that will elicit the right responses from prospects.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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APPLE LEAPS INTO THE HEALTH RECORD MARKET: An update to Apple’s iOS, announced Wednesday, included a beta version of its Health app that will allow iPhone users to store and share their medical records from a range of healthcare systems in the US. So far, 12 hospitals and clinics have partnered with Apple for the pilot, including John Hopkins Medicine, Cedars-Sinai, and Penn Medicine. These hospitals will be able to push health records notifications to eligible consumers’ phones, including medications, immunizations, lab results, and vitals. A beta version of the app became available on January 24 with the iOS 11.3 update, and officials expect it to be available as a free download within a few months.

The Health app update is an important step in solving the interoperability issues that plague the electronic health records (EHR) market. That’s important because healthcare is being increasingly consumerized and patients are more willing to move between systems that provide the best experience, rather than staying within a specific network, according to a 2017 survey by West. And because most healthcare systems have different IT standards, this can result in mismatched or incomplete patient EHRs, creating issues with the standard of care and causing a bottleneck in patient triage.

Eventually, the update could evolve into allowing patients to add real-time data to their medical records, such as exercise and sleeping patterns. That would give care providers a much fuller picture of the patient’s health, helping with things like chronic illness management, preventative medicine, and improving the overall quality of care.

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TELEHEALTH TO GO MAINSTREAM IN 2018 IN NORTH AMERICA: 75% of healthcare delivery organizations (HDO) in the US and Canada are either operating or planning to launch a telehealth service in 2018, according to a new study by embedded video tech company Vidyo. Telehealth is the umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of health diagnostic and management technologies that deliver healthcare remotely to patients, this includes video- and voice-telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, and health apps. One reason why telehealth is appealing to HDOs is its ROI potential. Around half of 300 clinical and IT professionals responsible for health and tech investments reported increased cost savings to their practice or facility, and over half reported that telehealth improved the efficiency and timeliness of care delivery, according to the study. However, hurdles such as physician reimbursement and the cost of implementation of telehealth services could still impede remaining organizations from providing telehealth to consumers. 

ACCENTURE, LOOPBACK JOIN FORCES TO IMPROVE NEW PAYMENT MODELS: Accenture is partnering with population health management company Loopback Analytics to make it easier for hospitals and clinics to develop and use value-based care payment models, according to HealthcareITNews. Value-based reimbursement (VBR) is an emerging payment model that focuses on measuring a patient’s health outcome against the cost of delivering the outcome. That differs from fee-for-service — the predominant system — that charges for the number of services delivered to the patient, such as lab tests, MRIs, and clinical visits. Since VBR is based on positive health outcomes rather than the medical services provided, it’s often more appealing to consumers. However, this can also make it difficult to measure from a business standpoint. One of the aims of the Accenture-Loopback partnership will be to help health systems improve cost efficiencies of delivering healthcare and have more consistent clinical outcomes. This will make it easier to measure the cost of care for patients on these new models. Accenture will lean on Loopback’s platform to help clients measure their clinical performance and suggest areas for improvement. The two companies hope that the partnership will give providers clearer guidelines to assess the financial impact of future VBR instances.

PHILIPS LEADS INVESTMENT IN REMOTE PATIENT MONITORING (RPM) COMPANY LINDACARE: The startup received around $8.6 million in funding from companies, including venture capitalist Capricorn ICT Arkiv, and Connecticut Innovations, according to MobiHealthNews. RPM is a sub-segment of telehealth that focuses on the monitoring of patients outside of conventional clinical settings. This can help reduce healthcare costs and increase access to care. A common use case is for the monitoring of cardiac diseases — the leading cause of death in US adults. RPM lets patients and caregivers keep track of their illnesses without the need for repeat hospital or clinic visits for ECGs. The global RPM market is projected to grow at an annualized rate of 17% between 2014 and 2022 to surpass $2 billion in value, according to Allied Market Research. LindaCare, which is based in both Leuven, Belgium, and Connecticut plans to use the funding to expand its US footprint as well as broadening the scope of cardiac diseases its products monitor. The company hopes the strategic partnership with Philips will help its global ambitions, and increase its credibility amongst healthcare systems, according to LindaCare founder and CEO Shahram Sharif.

In other news…

• Practice Fusion, an electronic health record (EHR) company, reportedly accepted a lower acquisition offer from Allscripts after it was unable to resolve an investigation by the Department of Justice, according to FierceHealthcare. Allscripts originally offered $250 million for the EHR company, before lowering the offer to $100 million amid a slew of DOJ investigations into EHR companies.

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What does “best practices” in Marketing Operations (MO) look like, and how do industry-leading companies operate and integrate this highly valuable function? We polled more than 80 marketing leaders to find out.

Key Findings
Four factors that survey participants say have contributed significantly to their MO success:

1. Clarity and consistency across the organization—shared practices, a well-defined road map and enabling infrastructure, reinforced by clear and pervasive communications that keep everyone on the same page.
2. Executive advocacy and support to champion the value of the MO function in achieving the organization’s objectives.
3. A culture of accountability and alignment that fosters buy-in at all levels and rewards productive behaviors consistent with the desired vision.
4. Processes and technology that are fully leveraged to achieve and sustain operational excellence.

To get an in-depth understanding of current MO functions, this benchmarking study solicited feedback from more than 80 technology companies. Participants were primarily CMOs, VPs of Corporate Marketing and Marketing Operations Directors with high-level marketing responsibilities at some of Silicon Valley’s most recognized Fortune 100, 500, and 1000 enterprises.

What Is Marketing Operations and Why Is It Important?
Marketing operations (MO) is a term that is sometimes used differently across organizations. We define MO as a thorough, end-to-end operational discipline that leverages processes, technology, guidance, and metrics to run the marketing function as a profit center and fully accountable business. The goal is to do two things exceedingly well:

• Drive the achievement of enterprise objectives by reinforcing marketing strategy and tactics with a scalable and sustainable enabling infrastructure
• Nurture a healthy, collaborative ecosystem both within and outside the marketing department that optimizes Marketing’s value and fuels enterprisewide success

In this article, we will focus on responses to one question summarized in the Journey to Marketing Operations Maturity — Best Practices in Marketing Operations Series benchmarking study report. We will see what bubbles up to the top for those marketing executives working “in the trenches” as they identify their most critical success factors.

Question: To what combination of factors do you attribute your MO success to date?

1. Clarity and Consistency Fuel MO Excellence

To achieve “best practice” status, clarity and consistency across the organization are critically important. All key players need to be operating with a common vision and road map that fosters consistent business practices, relevant metrics definition, and audience-appropriate reporting.

The best-performing companies have an enterprisewide dashboard at a corporate level, with each functional area setting goals and measuring performance for their key deliverables that cascade up to the enterprise strategic objectives. In short, success is driven by integrated processes, an enabling infrastructure, clear and pervasive communications, and ongoing metrics that are consistent and meaningful to the organization leadership.

2. Executive Buy-in and Advocacy

Clearly, survey respondents feel that their MO function can thrive only in an environment of executive advocacy and support. In the best-case scenario, MO is tightly integrated with Sales Operations and is highly regarded within the organization for its value and contribution.

Ideally, an organization’s CMO or top-ranking marketing executive views himself or herself as the internal client for key strategic as well as tactical MO deliverables, and these are considered an essential part of the overall management team’s agenda.

To achieve “best practice” status, constant reinforcement by the CEO and other members of the C-team is key. The MO function needs to be recognized as a valuable strategic asset at the company level (which is an earned role). It needs to share companywide visibility with other core functions and be an integral part of quarterly reviews and dashboards that are managed by the CMO and rolled up to an enterprise level.

With full executive buy-in and support, the MO function should be sitting at the table with other functional executives, actively participating as new directions are being debated, new product ideas are being developed, and strategically important projects are being funded.

3. Nurturing a Supportive Culture

Along with an enabling infrastructure and strong executive advocacy, respondents also credit a supportive culture for their MO success. Support is often a function of how effectively Marketing “cleans up its own act” first and then branches out to interdependent functions to role-model effective collaboration and educate groups such as Sales, Finance and IT on the “What’s In It for Them” in supporting key MO initiatives.

In “best practices” organizations, the MO team is highly regarded and fully supported, and its contributions are widely recognized. A culture of accountability and celebration steadily builds momentum and grassroots support. MO and Sales Operations are tightly integrated and work synergistically to achieve mutual successes and deliver bottom line results.

In the words of one survey respondent, “Business units appreciate MO’s proactive stance and contributions…and milestones are both celebrated and widely promoted as points of success.”

4. Process Refinement and Automation Bring Bottom Line Benefits

As “best practice” companies implement or refine their Marketing Operations processes, they see increasing opportunities for cost savings and efficiency gains. They can identify and eliminate sources of waste resulting from poor planning, redundancies, and expedited execution. They can break the inertia around bottlenecked programs and get sponsorship to move strategically important efforts forward.

In their own words, survey participants report:

• “Things are smoother because we’re all on the same page.”
• “We’ve implemented an annual operating plan and strategy with bottoms-up and tops-down forecasting, creating common repeatable processes and templates.”
• “We’re becoming more effective and efficient, and have a good process for stopping what does not add value.”

Process automation also plays a key role in streamlining Marketing Operations in many organizations:

• “We are fairly aggressive compared to our competitors in our integrated marketing approach regarding Web, print, and face-to-face customer contact.”
• “With Salesforce.com, we can show Sales exactly which campaign generated the lead, what was sent, etc.”
• “We have been putting in backend infrastructure like a lead management module on top of PeopleSoft CRM that collects and tags 80%-90% of leads generated.”
  With MO process refinement and automation, marketing operations’ contribution can be positioned to grow steadily over time.

Conclusion
A successful Marketing Operations journey requires clear goals, an enabling infrastructure, credible metrics, executive support, cross-functional cooperation and alignment, process refinement and automation.

These MO drivers are well within the control of senior management. They can help an organization unleash the power of Marketing Operations when combined with an in-depth understanding of MO fundamentals, guidance from a trusted outsource partner as needed, and effective and sustained execution.

Call to Action
If your company is facing challenges in any of the areas discussed in this article, or if you are thinking about creating a marketing operations function or increasing the effectiveness of the one you already have, you should start with a “current state assessment” that will help you evaluate the overall health of your Marketing and/or Marketing Operations function today.

Doing so will help you zero in on those areas that represent your most difficult challenges as well as your greatest opportunities for bringing the significant benefits of MO best practices to your organization.

About the Study: Based on hours of face-to-face interviews and an extensive online survey, insights have been published in a 63-page report, Journey to Marketing Operations Maturity—Best Practices in Marketing Operations Series, available in the ClearAction Value Exchange.

Image licensed to ClearAction by Shutterstock.

Recently, I’ve seen a renewed interest or discussions on Buying Process, Selling Process, Sales Methodology. Part is driven by an old article of mine, Sales Process or Sales Methodology.

There still seems to be a lot of confusion, some thinking we have to focus on one or the other. And then, unfortunately, there are too many, that while they might know the buying process or have a sales process or have a sales methodology–they simply don’t use them, instead choosing the Bumper Car approach to engaging the customer and selling.

I thought I’d try to walk through these topics—at a high level, perhaps in later posts I will drill further into each one.

Customer Buying Process: It’s fashionable to say, “We need to align/follow the customer buying process.” I suppose, by mouthing these words, we indicate our intent to be “customer focused.” Ironically, I walk into organizations espousing this, then watch as their sales people continue to pitch their products, without understanding where the customer is and what they are trying to achieve.

We have to be aligned with the customer and their buying process. But do they have a buying process and if they do, is that where we should be focused?

In transactional types of buying, where the customer buys frequently, they are very knowledgeable, the risks are well understood and managed, customers do have a buying process. They have a disciplined approach to evaluating alternatives ans selecting a solution. In this case, we need to be in lock step with them, as they go through their buying journey. Some sales people think transactional buying processes are only for low cost/low value purchases, but my experience is there a many multimillion deals (average deal size) that fall into transactional processes.

Also, while, I’m at this stage of the discussion, too many think confuse the contracting process with the buying process. For instance, right now, I’m involved in the contracting stage of what’s been a very long complex buying process. The decision has been made, pricing has been agreed upon, since this is a new client, our company needs to be registered as a vendor/supplier. Something can still go wrong, but the odds of that (unless I totally screw up) are extremely low. Every buying process — transactional/complex has this as an element and we have to include this in our sales process.

This brings us to complex buying processes. Again, 1000’s of articles focus on, “we have to align with the customer buying process.” If the customer has a buying process, we certainly have to be aligned with it.

But think a moment. Look at the data. CSO Insights show somewhere around more than 50% of forecast deals end in No Decision Made. CEB data shows over 60% of pipeline deals end in no decision made.

If customers have buying processes, then why is the failure rate so high?

When you drill down, where the buying process has gone off the rails has nothing to do with solution selection, but everything to do with aligning priorities, interests, agendas, gaining internal support and making a decision. Customers struggle with this, they simply may not know how to resolve these challenges.

Customer struggle with buying, too often, our thinking is they have a buying process, when we need to be teaching them how to buy and facilitating that process.

Alternatively, we misunderstand an internal project management process with a buying process. The project management process may have some stages (e.g. define the problem) and milestones–but it doesn’t address the issues critical to buying.

Then there’s one final, perhaps the most important element to understanding the customer buying process. As sales people, we are so focused on the customer buying decision, that we lose sight of the bigger picture/issues. The buying process is just one element of the overall change management or problem solving initiative the customer is going through. Even if the customer is looking at a major new initiative, let’s say CRM, the CRM system itself is just a part of the transformation effort itself.

There are plenty of things outside of “buying” that customers struggle with in these change management initiatives. While the data is somewhat old, as much a 70% of customer internal collaboration/change management initiatives (this has nothing to do with buying) fail. So if customers struggle with this, if they fail in the problem management/change management journey, however well defined their buying process, however well aligned we might be, we don’t get the order and the customer initiative fails.

We provide greater value when we look beyond the buying process itself, looking at everything the customer has to achieve in their overall problem solving or change journey. While we may not be able to play a significant role in this, the better we understand it, connecting the buying portion of the journey to these broader objectives, the more value we create and the more likely we can help the customer achieve their desired outcome.

Selling Process or Sales Methodology: There’s a lot of discussion about sales process or sales methodology. Before diving into each, some comments.

1. Sales process and methodology are different—ideally they are complementary and reinforce each other.
2. It is never a question of either/or, but rather an issue of both/and.
3. And as much as the vendors of sales training would like it to be one methodology, generally what we are seeing is the highest performing companies have a hybrid of a number of methodologies, adapted to their business needs and priorities, built on their sales process. There are no “off the shelf” training methodologies that meet 100% of a customer’s or their collective customers’ needs. Again, we tend to see, in the highest performing organizations, an artful blend of many methodologies supporting a key process(es) and go to market strategies.

Diving in a little more deeply.

Sales Process: Every company has to have a sales process(es). That process is unique to the company. The process is driven by the organization’s strategies, priorities, culture, their attitudes toward the customer, the customer experiences they want to create, their strategies for differentiation and value creation. It is based on their collective experience of what works and what doesn’t work, what drive success in engaging the customer and winning business.

As an example, we work with many companies that are head to head competitors, with very similar solutions, attacking the very same markets. Yet as we work with them, their sales processes are actually quite different. In fact the way the sell, the way they engage the customer, the way they create value in the process becomes key to their differentiation.

So why would we want to copy someone else’s process or use the “process” a sales training vendor recommends to all their customers-including your competition? Where is the differentiation? Where do we create value that is distinct from anything else the customer is considering.

So the first fundamental is your sales process(es) are unique to your company–anyone trying to tell you otherwise is not serving you well.

Now, is it one process, or is it multiple processes? The only reasonable answer is it depends. It depends on a number of things:

1. Are some of your solutions and the markets/customers they target transactional?
2. Are some of your solutions and the markets/customers they target very complex in the way they need to buy and make a decision?

The degree to which you have a mix, requires that you have at least two sales processes. We see this even in single product SaaS/XaaS companies. Part of their strategy is a land and expand strategy, it’s driven by landing individual users or small departments. There are usually a small number of people involved in the buying process (maybe only 1), and the level of impact/risk to the organization is small. Yet those same companies are also going after the enterprise win. They are looking to their customer to commit the entire enterprise to a solution. This is a very different sales process (a complex buying process, necessitating a different sales process.

Sometimes, the way certain markets or customer categories buy is different from market to market. For example, at least in the US, the Federal buying process is very different than what many other industry segments/markets might have. While each the buying process may be a consensus, complex process, there are great differences in how we engage the customer and how we guide them through their buying process.

So it may be impossible to have a single sales process. But we want to have as few as we possibly can–striving for one, if possible. We want to do this, simply because it becomes too complex and confusing for the sales people to know which process they should use. In fact, in organizations that have many sales processes, we sometimes see the organization structured around the different processes. For example a team that focuses on the transactional process and those customers where the transactional process aligns with their buying process, and another team focused on the complex process.

As we look at the number of processes, we want to strive for as few as possible (ideally one). Simply because it is easier for the sales people to learn and execute. Here’s where we look at the level of detail in describing the sales process.

I like to think of the sales process as a roadmap. It doesn’t tell you where every pot hole in the road is, what the road conditions are, what the weather is at the moment (are the roads icy, dry). It doesn’t tell you where on the road you need to be (race drivers refer to this as their line–each driver has a slightly different line, optimized to what they are doing). It doesn’t tell you anything about how fast you drive from the start to the destination. So each driver may embark on their journey to the same destination, at different speeds, using differing lines, and so forth. As obstacles appear in that journey, the drive must adapt to the specifics of the situation.

I had a client who tried to define every possible outcome in every step of their sales process. They reached 9 pages of flow charts (8 point font) and they had only describe the qualification process for one set of solutions in one set of markets.

So our sales process provides high level guidance, identifying critical activities or milestones that are more likely to drive success. It is up to the sales person to use these high level activities, but to adapt them to the specifics of the situation–not only the market/solution, but to what the customer is going through in their specific situation.

So the sales process is the starting point for developing our deal strategies, but the sales person has to develop and execute a dynamic deal strategy addressing their specific situation.

Sales methodology: Sales methodology is different than the sales process. Generally, sales methodologies do just that–the provide methods, tools, techniques to help you in executing the sales process. They don’t displace the sales process, but support and accelerate our abilities to execute the sales process.

There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of methodologies out there. A lot are very similar, but use their own particular jargon to differentiate themselves, and may have slightly nuanced tools, and approaches. I’ve been through a number of them–whether solution focused, customer focused, consultative, provocative, insight driven, value-based, question based, VITO, account driven, and so forth. Some focus on specific aspects of the sales process or customer engagement process. For example they may focus on the front end of the process—inciting the customer to change. Others focus on understanding/probing needs, others focus on decision-making, and so forth. As a result, many organizations blend various sales methodologies to support their sales process.

Sometimes sales methodology can be confusing. The training companies provide the same sales training program to everyone. For example, consumer product organizations, professional services, embedded components/production parts, financial services, healthcare/pharma, industrial products, smb’s, giga-corporations all may buy the same off the shelf sales methodology. But clearly, these organizations have varying strategies, markets, sales processes, routes to market. To get the most value out of the sales methodology, while it may involve an increased cost, make sure the methodology supplier adapts everything to your sales process. Otherwise, sales people will struggle to get the most value out of the methodology.

Conclusion: As we “engineer” our organizations to maximize performance and productivity, we have to look assess all of these areas. We have to look at the customer problem solving process, their buying process, our sales process, the various sales methodologies. We have to integrate these to maximize our ability to create value with our customers and to for our people to execute winning deal strategies.

We have to be sensitive to the complexity that we may create in integrating these. We will never be able to, nor should we try, develop something that addresses every situation sales people will encounter. Consequently, we need to enable the sales people to be thoughtful and nimble enough to adapt these to their specific situation, developing and executing winning deal strategies.

An update to Apple’s iOS, announced Wednesday, included a beta version of its Health app that will allow iPhone users to store and share their medical records from a range of healthcare systems in the US. So far, 12 hospitals and clinics have partnered with Apple for the pilot, including John Hopkins Medicine, Cedars-Sinai, and Penn Medicine. These hospitals will be able to push health records notifications to eligible consumers’ phones, including medications, immunizations, lab results, and vitals. A beta version of the app became available on January 24 with the iOS 11.3 update, and officials expect it to be available as a free download within a few months.  

The Health app update is an important step in solving the interoperability issues that plague the electronic health records (EHR) market. That’s important because healthcare is being increasingly consumerized and patients are more willing to move between systems that provide the best experience, rather than staying within a specific network, according to a 2017 survey by West. And because most healthcare systems have different IT standards, this can result in mismatched or incomplete patient EHRs, creating issues with the standard of care and causing a bottleneck in patient triage.

Eventually, the update could mean patients can record real-time data to their medical records, such as exercise and sleeping patterns. That would give care providers a much fuller picture of the patient’s health, helping with things like chronic illness management, preventative medicine, and improving the overall quality of care.

For Apple, the update is an important value-add for its devices and could make them more appealing to consumers, here’s why:

• Self-monitoring of health is a rapidly growing industry. Consumers want control over their own health data; that includes tracking it, who owns it, and who can access it. Health and fitness app usage has grown 330% over the last three years, according to Flurry. Moreover, over 50% of consumers are using their health and fitness apps more than once a week. Apple can take advantage of this by providing an easy-to-access, centralized location for users' health and fitness data

• The Apple ecosystem is closed, meaning you’ve got to have an iOS device to be a part of it. Apple devices account for around 40% of the US smartphone market as of November 2017, according to Kantar. That means that consumers outside of the iOS ecosystem won’t have access to these interoperable features.

Apple still faces several hurdles as it moves more aggressively into the digital healthcare market. It’s possible that not all hospitals or healthcare systems will want to accept the new feature. And there is some concern that storing patients’ health records on their devices could result in data security vulnerabilities since the API needs to be open for data to be accessed and shared. Cyber-attacks against health data are becoming more common as more information is being stored digitally.

Consumers don't trust tech companies with their health data. Just 9% of consumers are willing to share their health history data with tech companies, according to a Rock Health survey.  That's compared to 79% who would be willing to share their health data with physicians, and 37% who said they would share their health data with insurance companies. And while consumer sentiment has likely shifted somewhat since 2016, it presents a solid barrier Apple must overcome if it hopes to convince consumers to store their health data on their devices. 

If Apple's beta program is successful, it’s likely that we’ll see more integration between healthcare systems and tech giants. Tech giants’ substantial consumer footprint make them an appropriate gateway for patient EMR. Moreover, expertise with cloud computing and data mining could mean that caregivers are able to turn the massive amounts of health data into actionable insights within population health — something that individual research institutions and hospitals are unlikely to have the computing power to achieve, according to Kalorama.

 

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In SaaS, machine learning has become an essential component to many different products. Whether it’s automating responses to inbound sales queries, identifying expense reports for audit, or surfacing anomalies in data, machine learning improves workflow software. To date, most software imbued with machine learning reduces costs rather than increase revenues.

Why is this the case? Because machine learning is focused on efficiency gains.

First, to train a machine learning model requires large amounts of data. Repetitive workflow processes produce this data. With enough data, a machine learning model can be applied to automate the workflow. For example, it’s straightforward to build machine learning models to automatically answer password reset questions.

Second, automation reduce costs because they eliminate the need to hire additional people to handle more work. A bot replies to login reset questions with an automated response in a link to a knowledge base, freeing customer support reps to focus on more challenging questions.

Third, revenue-generating activities are often unpredictable and novel. A new marketing campaign that positions a business intelligence product in a novel way can deliver a 30% increase in inbound lead volume. We haven’t found a way, yet, to have computers do those things for us.

Perhaps that will change in the future. Generative machine learning - the software that composes music or writes code - could “imagine” a constellation of new marketing campaigns or sales pitches. Coupling machine generated ideas with the efficient automated testing systems we’re developing today might unlock revenue growth opportunities.

By and large, the most frequent applications of machine learning in SaaS today are efficiency applications - automating the high-volume rote processes and reducing costs. Consequently, if you looking to build a machine learning based SaaS company, find a really expensive internal process and automate it.

Helping workers do more with less is always a compelling value proposition, provided the savings are large enough.

The next time you turn on a light, give some thought to Thomas Edison’s view of all the trial and error that preceded his invention of the lightbulb and many other mainstays of the modern world. “I haven’t failed,” he said. “I’ve just found ten thousand ways that don’t work.”

Edison’s comment is very much in synch with one of the central principles of the Anticipatory Organization system. First, if you’re not failing, you’re not pursuing innovation. And when you do fail, rebound quickly and start all over again.

That’s the idea behind my powerful strategy: Fail Fast to Learn Faster.

Many Failures, One Success

Here’s a statistic that really brings home the interrelationship between failure and innovation—and further, the value of learning to fail quickly. Studies have shown it can take upwards of 3,000 ideas to produce one product or service that goes on to be a commercial success.

Not only does that bring to light the essential value of repeated failure to obtain a successful outcome, but also the benefits of failing quickly. For one thing, failing fast allows you to move on from that missed shot or lost match that much sooner. You can then get to the next effort, which, hopefully, will yield better results.

Moreover, it saves you from needlessly expending energy and resources on ideas and concepts that certainly don’t warrant that sort of loyalty.

“New” Coke: A Case Study in Fast Failure

Here’s another example that many of us are familiar with. Some 30 years ago, Coca-Cola made what a rash of headlines now refer to as its single biggest blunder in more than 100 years—the introduction of the so-called “new” Coke. Essentially a change in the basic Coke formula, the new Coke had a smoother, sweeter taste—similar to Diet Coke, but sweetened with corn syrup. Market researchers and pollsters were confident that the new version was a winner.

Not quite. Fans weren’t merely disappointed, they were outraged. So passionate were “traditional” Coke drinkers that they organized grassroots campaigns across the country to force Coca-Cola to bring back the original Coke.

Which the company did after only a few months. Admittedly, new Coke kicked around in various permutations for a few years thereafter, but, in reintroducing the Coke formula that diehard fans had grown up with, Coke essentially acknowledged that the new formula had been a major misstep—and moved on as quickly as possible.

One stereotype that many might associate with the fail fast/learn fast dynamic is the type of organization best suited to leverage that strategy. It certainly can hold true with start-ups—small, flexible organizations whose makeup seems ideally suited to shifting gears when some idea or project simply isn’t panning out.

But that’s not the entrepreneur’s sole purview. For instance, General Electric’s FastWorks program is an agile, quick-turnaround approach for developing products similar to the methodology used by start-up companies.

GE’s FastWorks: A Successful Case Study

Introduced by Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt, the program is designed to encourage pervasive, ongoing innovation with an emphasis on quick pivots and adjustments once a project is deemed impractical or unworkable.

The results speak for themselves. FastWorks, according to GE, enabled the development of a new gas turbine in a year and a half, rather than the usual five years. In a 2015 keynote speech, Neeraj Vijay, CIO of GE’s Flow and Process Technologies, noted that the FastWorks program had taught him and his associates how to “fail fast, learn quickly and move forward.”

So, the next time you’re confronted with a new idea, product, service or anything that just doesn’t seem to be working out, ask yourself: Would I be better off failing, learning from the experience as quickly as possible and then moving forward?

If you’re ready to see the future and plan with greater confidence, you can get my new book, The Anticipatory Organization for the price of shipping at www.TheAOBook.com. It’s filled with principles such as fail fast/succeed faster and other great insights I’d love to share with you.

I hate learning.

I wanted to learn how to trade stocks and I ended up losing my home.

I wanted to learn how to play chess better and in one of my first tournaments I threw all the pieces on the floor and cried.

I wanted to learn to play poker and I lost about $20,000 the first ten times I played.

I wanted to learn how to start a business. I wanted to learn more about investing. I wanted to learn computer programming, how to make a TV show, how to write a book, how to speak to a large audience, how to do standup comedy.

Heck, when I was a kid I wanted to learn how to breakdance. I wanted to learn how to kiss a girl. I wanted and wanted.

Every time I ended up crying.

And then I learned to learn.

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A) HACK THE 10,000 HOUR RULE

This rule, developed by Anders Ericsson and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, damaged me for years thinking I needed 10,000 hours to succeed at anything, states that you need 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice” to reach master-level potential.

For instance, as Gladwell writes in “Outliers” (but Ericsson disputes in his book “Peak”), The Beatles got their 10,000 hours playing 20 hours a day in strip clubs in Germany before they wrote their first album.

Mozart played piano for 10,000 hours by the time he was 12 years old.

Story after story.

So I felt frustrated. I feel frustrated.

I’m 50. Sometimes I feel like it’s too late for me.

I only like to learn something if I can be among the best. If I can reach my potential. Potential enough to see the nuances in something I love so much I want to get good at it.

I’ll be dead after another 10,000 hours of learning.

But now I’m convinced the 10,000 hours can be skipped.

Here’s how.

B) PLUS, MINUS, EQUAL

PLUS

Find mentors.

A mentor can be real (someone who is willing to help you analyze your mistakes), or virtual (read books).

Both real and virtual are good.

For anything you are interested in, you should read 100 books a year. You should watch 100s of videos.

We have mirror neurons that learn by watching or reading our virtual mentors. It’s as if we download their lives into our brain and the mirror neurons think that their experience are ours.

For instance, when I wanted to learn how to be a better public speaker, I would watch videos of great public speakers right before I had to speak.

When I played in chess tournaments I would play through the games of world champions so I could learn more how they thought about the game.

And every time I lost a game I went over the game, move by move, with a grandmaster who I paid to coach me. He would set up similar positions to my losing position and we’d play game after game until I mastered the nuances.

When I wanted to learn about investing I read every investment book I could find and spoke with 100s of other great investors.

When you read, to maximize what you learn: immediately after reading a book write down “ten things I learned”. Else, you won’t remember more than 1 or 2 things at best from the book.

I’m trying to learn Standup Comedy now. I capitalize it because it’s that important to me. It’s the hardest skill I’ve ever had to learn.

I’m in year two. I probably watch 20 videos a day. I videotape myself on stage 4–6 times a week. And I read books about and by comedians.

And, fortunately, I have a podcast. So I ask great comedians to come on and I can ask them any question I want.

EQUALS

This is so important it really deserves its own letter. This one category alone, “Equals”, is worth about 4,000 of the 10,000 hours.

Find people who love what you love and spend as much time talking about this shared area as you can.

If you are all equally striving and finding your own path through learning this new skill you all want to share, then you will build community and learn together.

When I was learning poker, my friends and I would compare notes on every difficult hand we played during an evening.

When I was learning investing, I’d talk to friends in every area of investing (day trading, arbitrage, value investing, special situations, quantitative, etc etc) and we’d share notes and quickly learn through the experiences of each other.

Why not do this with mentors?

Because the mentors have so far passed this level they are not always able to get into the weeds in the same way as the Equals.

MINUS

Explain what you are learning while you are learning it. Two reasons:

1) If you can’t explain in a simple way, then you need to learn more. Beginner’s mind.

2) People who are behind where you are at in learning the skill will ask basic questions that you often need to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. Again: beginner’s mind.

C) MICRO-SKILLS

Every skill worth learning has dozens of micro-skills:

For instance, when I started my first successful business I had some natural skills at sales and technology (it was a technology business) but I had to learn so many micro-skills in order to succeed that it felt like I was going to die and fail almost every single day.

Here are some business micro-skills:

Sales, Management of employees, Negotiating, Selling to investors, Selling to acquirers, Product development, Product consistency and execution, Motivation, Emotional stability, and on and on.

All of the skills are exclusive of each other. Negotiating is not the same as Sales. Product development is not the same as management. But each skill needs to be developed to be successful.

Chess micro-skills: openings, middle game, endgame, tactics, positional play (which can be divided up into about 50 micro-skills, as well as all the different types of endgames), attack, defense, psychology, etc.

Standup micro-skills (I think. I hope): likability, commitment, crowd work (20–50 different types of crowds, mic work, pacing, stage control, and finally humor, which includes: punchlines, premises, tags, call backs, story telling, persona, act-outs, etc etc.

For whatever you are interested in: list the micro-skills. Figure out what you are good at, what you are bad at, and how you can learn to be better at each.

D) FAILURE

Anything worth learning, you’re going to suck. You’re going to suck badly.

The first day you play chess: you might love it, you might be talented, you might be confident, but you are a disaster compared to anyone with experience who has studied the game.

The same goes for business. For investing. For writing. For acting. For art. For creativity. For everything worth learning.

And failure is painful.

Nobody wants to lose money in poker. Or in investing. Nobody wants to spend months or years writing a book nobody reads.

But if you love something, and you want to get to your peak potential, your heart is going to break when you inevitably fail. And you will fail big and horrible and it will be like your brain and heart are torn in half.

But that’s the good news:

Because now you’re qualified to study the failure. You can go to a PLUS, and your EQUALS, and look at where you went wrong.

You can’t learn as much from succeeding because it’s harder to pinpoint where mistakes are (and it means you are not taking enough chances).

Ray Dalio, the largest hedge fund manager ever, told me on my podcast, “Pain + Reflection = Progress”.

Pain is a must.

With standup comedy, I always say “Yes” to a challenge. Do comedy on a subway car? Yes. Do comedy on a Monday night in a blizzard with the entire audience from Norway? Yes. Go on stage with a 102 fever and my voice completely shot? Yes.

Then videotape. Then go over quarter second by quarter second.

I was speaking to one of the best comedians in the world a few weeks ago. He told me he still videotapes and studies every single time he’s gone on stage.

Every year, every month, he’s better than the month before.

With business, it’s difficult because a business can take years. But try to have mini-failures.

Challenge yourself on deadlines, challenge yourself on customer acquisition, on customer service, on micro-execution of product, and on and on.

Figure out the ways that you can fail, do them, study them, repeat.

E) ENERGY

This should be the first item. Because it’s the most important.

Without energy, you can’t learn.

If you don’t sleep enough, you’ll be too tired and you won’t learn.

If you’re in a bad relationship, your brain will be distracted and you won’t learn.

If you don’t exercise your creativity, you won’t be able to combine ideas and learn from “idea sex”.

If you are too anxious, you will spend too much mental energy worrying about the future instead of learning in the present.

When I went broke for the fourth or fifth time I finally had to take a look back and say, “What was I doing right every time I made money?” and “What was I doing wrong”. It all boiled down to:

PHYSICAL HEALTH: Eat / Move / Sleep

EMOTIONAL HEALTH: Eliminate ALL of the toxic people in your life.

CREATIVE HEALTH: Write down ten ideas a day. The ideas can be about anything.

SPIRITUAL HEALTH: Learn how to deal with anxiety and regret. Release control over the things you have no control over.

Just these four things gave me so much energy, it probably took another 1000–2000 hours out of the 10,000 hours.

F) THE ONE PERCENT RULE:

Try to improve 1% a day at whatever it is you are trying to learn.

This seems like a small number. Just one percent!

But 1% a day, compounded, is 3800% per year.

That’s 37 times better than where you started in just one year.

I had a friend who I always played chess with. He played chess all day every day. But he never read a book on chess or studied with anyone.

He just played the same moves and made the same mistakes game after game. I asked him why he didn’t take the basic steps to improve?

All you have to do is take basic steps each day to improve as small as 1%.

He said, “Ahhh, I just like to play.” Which is fine.

But he never got better. Chess is much more enjoyable (everything is much more enjoyable) when you get better and when you learn and can appreciate the subtleties and the nuances.

Everything is an art form. The greatest artists have a vocabulary of 100,000s of patterns in their chosen field.

“Speaking” that vocabulary is pleasurable because you can enjoy the art form more, you can succeed more easily, you get acclamation for your success, you make friends with others who are also successful because you speak their language – but it requires every day learning new “words” in your art form.

Studying how Warren Buffet invests. Or how Bobby Fischer plays the King’s Indian. Or how Richard Pryor brought his authentic voice into his comedy. Or how Richard Branson can build and manage 400 businesses.

Or challenging yourself to fail a little bit each day to expand your comfort zone.

One percent a day = 3800 percent a year.

G) DO IT

You can’t get better at chess just by reading about it. You have to play. Then you have to play in high stress situations (like a tournament).

You can’t get to be the best at business just by reading about Richard Branson.

You have to start a business (or work for a startup or even work for a big business and notice their small successes and failures).

You can’t get to be great at comedy by watching videos. You have to go on stage. Every day.

Every day.

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Summary:

1. PLUS, MINUS, EQUAL
2. MICRO-SKILLS
3. FAILURE (Pain + Reflection = Progress)
4. ENERGY (Physical, Emotional, Creative, Spiritual health every day)
5. ONE PERCENT RULE
6. DO IT (every day)
7. USE THE ABOVE TO HACK THE 10,000 HOURS RULE (10,000 hours of deliberate practice gets you to your full potential).

The post Seven Steps To Learn and Master Anything As Quickly As Possible appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

Ever since CEB (now Gartner) published The Challenger Sale in 2011, the book has attracted much publicity. It provides five different profiles (detailed here) based on research of 6,000 individuals. They are:

• Challenger
• Lone Wolf
• Hard Worker
• Problem Solver
• Relationship Builder

The research in the book indicates that individuals with a Challenger profile will outperform all other profile types. Good so far.

Constructing Tension

The book also presents the concept of Challengers building “constructive tension” using three elements:

• Teach – Offers unique perspective and maintains two-way communication
• Tailor – Knows customer value drivers and identifies economic drivers
• Take Control – Is comfortable discussing money and can pressure the customer

The premise is that because the buying process has changed (buyers engaging with sellers later in the process – buyers knowing more about sellers and products and services); the salesperson’s behavior toward the buyer must change too. I don’t disagree with this either.

I also don’t dispute CEB’s research. As a matter of fact, I applaud them for their efforts and excellence in marketing their position and their services via this book.

But, let’s face it…

These concepts are old. For instance, Dave Kurlan and Objective Management Group have been studying the traits that differentiate top producers from others since 1990. It’s when they created the first ever PREDICTIVE assessment for salespeople.

And, while the CEB elements in part identify the traits of the best, they don’t tell the whole story. You see, not everyone can become a Challenger.

Certainly, individuals can be taught the words to say. They can role play to practice and they can follow a process to incorporate the concepts. The disconnect is that the Challenger sale is not a process at all. It merely describes a type of individual.

Challenger Traits

What is known about the Challenger type? Through the help of OMG’s research and analysis on over 1.6 million individuals (yes you read that right – 1.6 million vs the 6,000 in CEB’s research) I can confirm that the traits identified in the Challenger profile do indeed describe a superstar seller, but only partially.

What’s Missing?

CEB’s reports 17% of all B2B salespeople possess both the influencing and thinking ability to be Challengers (more on this later). But, here’s where CEB’s research is sketchy:

• The CEB database is much less comprehensive than ours (6K vs. 1.6M).
• It only looked at respondents from the world’s largest companies, ones that likely had comprehensive sales training and processes in place.
• Their analysis assesses if the individual has the influencing and thinking ability, but doesn’t address IF Challengers will ACTUALLY DO IT.
• The CEB analysis doesn’t consider what motivates Challengers.

Spirit vs. Motivation

We know lots of companies that prefer to hire athletes. They feel like athletes have the competitive spirit to win the deals and can even overcome adversity. That is all great.

Where they miss is by failing to determine what truly motivates the individual. You see, athletes generally perform on a stage for the applause and adulation of the crowd, and/or recognition of somebody they respect (think coach).

I digress, but give you this example to demonstrate what happens when we focus too much on traditional means of describing a type of person. It leaves out a very important component – whether the individual will do what is necessary to be successful (selling your products and services, in your environment, to your targeted prospects).

Applying the Ability

It is one thing to identify the thinking and influencing ability discussed in The Challenger Sale. It is another thing entirely to be able to execute like a so-called Challenger. If you can find those that will “teach,” “tailor” and “take control,” absolutely hire them (assuming that is what fits your market).

The problem is finding them. OMG’s scientific-based analysis (the bigger sample I mentioned above) says Challengers make up just 7% (not 17%!) of the selling population. That’s not many Challengers.

What You Can Do

First, don’t despair. Instead, follow this four-step process to help those that are not Challengers excel. (And, by the way, just telling them to do it, sadly won’t work).

1. When hiring, screen for the traits you want, customized for your situation. Take our approach for a test drive Don’t just hire a one-size-fits-all type of salesperson, based on someone else’s ideal. Create the profile for your needs, based on reliable statistics, and customized for what works in your situation. Use science to predict success.
2. Use a repeatable, systematic sales onboarding process to ramp hires up as quickly as possible, but allow for customized elements suited to the individual. Cookie cutters are for cookies. People all have individual skills, strengths, weaknesses and gaps. Enhance the good, and reduce the bad.
3. Establish a repeatable sales process based on your company’s own best practices to achieve consistent sales results. Manage to it, hone it, and hold everyone accountable to it. If you want to evaluate your sales process, use this simple grader.
4. Coach appropriately. Be sure your sales leaders not only have the skills to coach, motivate and hold individuals accountable, but also can demonstrate the very skills and behaviors your frontlines need to possess. Unless you have a surefire way of preparing salespeople to become sales leaders, you may need help with this. It isn’t often natural that salespeople effortlessly move into management.

If you want another perspective about The Challenger Sale read this article by Dave Kurlan, CEO of OMG.

In a few short years, content marketing has gone from being digital marketing’s “new kid on the block” to one of the most widely-adopted promotional strategies in use today.

The Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends reports show how far content marketing has spread: 91% of participating B2B marketers use content marketing (of the 9% that aren’t already doing so, 54% plan to add the tactic in 2018). 86% of B2C marketing respondents have active content strategies in place.

This broad adoption should come as no surprise, given that:

• Content marketing produces three times more leads than paid search marketing, according to a survey by Kapost and Eloqua.
• “60% of people are inspired to seek out a product after reading content about it,” per data from Demand Metric.
• DemandGen data suggests that nearly seven in 10 B2B buyers claim to increasingly rely on content when researching purchasing decisions.

Yet, despite these compelling reasons, many businesses struggle to implement content marketing campaigns—let alone do so effectively. A survey of 400 U.S. industry leaders by The Creative Group reveals why: 45% of advertising and marketing executive participants say they struggle to find and attract quality creative content team members.

Your ability to partner with the right talent can mean the difference between a campaign that takes off and one that never gets off the ground. One of the first decisions you’ll have to make as a content marketing leader is whether that talent will join your in-house team or contract with you on a freelance basis.

How to Decide Between In-House vs. Freelance

An increasing number of companies are turning to freelance content creators. That’s because this contingent talent:

• Offers greater flexibility to engage on a per-project basis, rather than committing to long-term or ongoing work you may not need.
• Enables you to select the ideal freelancer for each project, drawing on a worldwide talent base, rather than limiting your search to your geographic area.
• Can be more cost effective to partner with, as they can often be brought on as 1099 contractors.

However, working with freelancers isn’t appropriate in all circumstances. There may be situations where hiring in-house employees is a better option for your needs.

Planning Your Content Team’s Structure

Let’s consider two companies. Both are enterprise software providers, but their needs are quite different.

Company A is launching a new content marketing initiative, and needs a marketing associate with experience managing all aspects of a campaign for a long-term engagement.

Since the median salary for marketing associates is $44,375 per year—and since we can conservatively estimate that basic benefits will add just over 30% to this amount—the cost to make this hire will be roughly $57,688 per year (not including associated overhead expenses).

Company B, on the other hand, has an employee like this in place already. Instead, they need a blogger with industry expertise to create a series of 10 articles for use in a marketing campaign.

Many freelance content writers are available for between $30-50 per hour. Assuming that the writer needs two hours to complete each post, the total cost of the project will be around $800—an amount that does not justify the cost of recruiting and onboarding an in-house marketer.

Certainly, Company B would be better off hiring a freelance blogger, as the nature of their short-term project makes going through a full hiring process unnecessary (not to mention, costly).

However, while Company A may benefit from bringing on a full-time, in-house content marketer who could take on everything from strategy to execution, they may also choose to pursue a hybrid solution. For example, they might:

• Bring on a handful of freelancers, including a contract-based strategist and multiple writers to create the suggested collateral. If the work required by the position can be achieved in fewer hours than a full-time schedule involves, this may be a cost-effective solution.
• Train an existing full-time employee to handle the strategy side of the campaign, while delegating to a few freelance content creators.
• Hire a full-time content strategist to work internally, but share content creation work across a freelance agency or group of freelance writers.

Each of these solutions would allow Company A to maintain flexibility, while also enabling them to tap into a broader base of talent than may be possible in their local area.

A few calculations will make the decision clear. By breaking out each role required and comparing the estimated time requirements relative to the costs of bringing on corresponding freelancers—while also considering the pros and cons of having or not having in-house staff—Company A will be able to choose the talent strategy that makes the most sense.

How Instapage Handles Content Creation

As you can see from the examples above, many different variables must be considered when determining whether to work with in-house or freelance content talent.

But enough with the hypotheticals. To help your company navigate these questions, let’s look at one example of how one of today’s top technology companies manages their content production.

Instapage CEO Tyson Quick uses a distributed team of freelance writers from Moldova, Canada, and Portugal to support the growth of his landing page creation tool. Hiring globally enables him to secure the best talent for each project, while also taking advantage of cost savings that can be reinvested into other marketing campaigns.

According to Quick, “It makes sense, not only from a financial perspective but also from a quality perspective—sometimes, we just can’t find the talent we need locally. It really makes our content manager more effective because now he can produce 3X more content every single week while maintaining our high quality standards.”

Curious about how other companies utilize freelancers? Read about a Fortune 1000 company that saw 40% in cost savings by scaling their content production with freelancers on Upwork.

Putting It All Together

Hopefully, this article has you thinking about the best approach for managing your company’s content creation requirements—whether that’s bringing on in-house talent, contracting solely with freelancers, or embracing a hybrid solution.

However, if it’s left you with more questions than answers, check out Upwork’s free ebook, The Content Marketer’s Surefire Strategy for Success.

In this mega guide, I’ll breakdown 31 different lead generation techniques you can use to supercharge your sales pipeline almost immediately.

Why am I sharing this? Because as a solo-founder, I wear many hats. Two of which are currently sales and marketing.

As a result, I am the lead generator, the SDR, and the closer.

While this may seem laborious, it gives me tremendous power over revenue.

I’m in control of every step of the sales process – from awareness to decision making.

If I were in a sales role within another organization, I’d probably create a similar system for myself. That way, I’m not waiting for someone else to bring me leads. I can go get them myself.

Even better, I can go directly to the leads that are most likely to convert.

In this article, I’ll show you how to create a similar process.

You’ll learn 31 lead generation techniques across 17 categories to fill your own sales pipeline and build career-changing relationships that last forever.

1. Optimize your social presence

Good lead generation systems need a strong foundation.

And that foundation is a credible personal brand.

If you haven’t optimized your LinkedIn profile to show off your best qualities, now is the time. Social media is going to play a big part in your lead generation efforts.

If leads are researching you, they’ll judge you by your LinkedIn profile. It’s sad, but it’s a fact of sales life.

Follow this checklist and make sure you tick all the boxes:

Profile picture: People are wired to digest images before words. Consider getting a professional head shot, preferably smiling.

Header image: Use as a visual demonstration of your expertise. Logos of publications you’ve appeared in or a picture of you with an industry influencer can quickly boost credibility.

Headline: Demonstrate your thought leadership. Include accomplishments, awards, and expertise.

Bio: Once you’ve hooked them in using the “credibility boosters” above, they’ll be reading your bio. Use this section to describe the specific solution you solve, and how you do it.

Recommendations: Ask for your peers or co-workers to write about the value you bring to their job and the organization as a whole. To get the ball rolling, write one for them first.

In the above example, Jim Keenan of “A Sales Guy” has done the following:

1. Used a cover image to showcase his book (authority)
2. Has a clear, friendly and professional head shot
3. Lists credibility boosters in his headline (CEO, Forbes Contributor, etc.)

Don’t worry if you haven’t any accomplishments or publications under your name. We’ll cover how to build credibility and authority in your industry shortly.

2. Build a personal brand “hub”

Creating a website might seem like a task for marketers.

But from a personal branding perspective, having your own website can supercharge your long-term career goals.

It will act as your professional hub – the platform for the content you create and the credibility you establish.

There are many benefits to owning a website, including:

List building – Owning an audience will set you up for future career success, especially if you ever want to start working on side projects.

Credibility – Websites are the perfect platform to show off your expertise, credentials, and publications you’ve been featured in/written for

Job hunting – Cut through piles of CV’s Word documents and half-baked LinkedIn profiles.

The good news? Building one doesn’t have to be difficult and requires zero technical skills.

Wix, for example, provides a drag-and-drop user interface, allowing you to build a website without having to learn code.

However, I would highly recommend hosting a WordPress site and using a theme like Bridge. It comes with a drag-and-drop visual website builder similar to Wix but provides more flexibility and ownership.

Check out this guide from Smashing Magazine to learn more about setting up WordPress.

So, what must your website include? To demonstrate credibility, you should have:

1. A home page: to quickly demonstrate expertise and include a call-to-action
2. A blog: to create and showcase content that solves your prospect’s pains

Here’s a good-looking home page example from Noah Kagan:

It has a clean design, giving the visitor only one action to take. It also includes a professional photo of Noah himself (an experiment showcased by VWO shows that images of people can increase conversion rate by 48%).

Noah’s goal is to build his email list. What you include on your homepage will depend on what you want to achieve. If your goal is to build credibility, include logos of publications or companies you’ve helped.

Brian Dean boosts credibility on his homepage by including blogs where he’s featured, as well as testimonials from other marketing influencers:

Remember the recommendations you gathered when optimizing your LinkedIn profile? Re-purpose them into testimonials (with permission, of course).

The next step is to create how-to content that helps solve your prospect’s challenges.

3. Create how-to blog content

Blogging is by far the fastest way to share expertise, build authority and generate your own leads over time.

Come up with topics by focusing on the challenges of your prospects.

3a. Uncover topics with customer development

Start by interviewing your current clients. Find out pains they’re trying to overcome that relate to your value proposition.

For example, if I were doing this for my content marketing service, Grizzle, I would ask my clients questions like:

1. What does your current PR system look like?
2. What are your biggest demand generation challenges?
3. What are your biggest hurdles when connecting with relevant influencers or partners?

By digging deep into these questions, I’ll know exactly which topics to write.

Let’s say a common challenge is “finding the right publications to target.” Your job would be to create content that helps prospects solve that problem. If it includes the solution you’re trying to sell, even better.

According to BuzzSumo, the top performing articles on LinkedIn included these phrases:

3c. How to create actionable content your audience will love

The B2B crowd love how-to information and trend data. When creating content, focus on insight backed by data, or actionable how-to information.

For this example, a “how-to” guide would deliver the most value. The next step is to create content that teaches prospects how to identify the right publications to target.

Start by creating a content framework. This is an outline that maps out your content from Point A (the challenge) to Point B (solution).

In my example, it might look like this:

1. Introduction
2. Ask your audience
3. Research competition
4. Find editors
5. Conclusion

It then needs to be wrapped with an engaging and attention-grabbing headline. For more information on generating killer headlines, check out Buffer’s complete guide.

For this example, some possible headlines include:

1. How to Find Publications With an Engaged Audience
2. 3 Steps to Targeting Publications Full of Your Buyer Personas
3. The Definitive Guide to Finding Guest Blogging Opportunities

These focus on a) the task and b) the outcome. The headline should tell readers what they’ll learn in the content and the outcome they can expect from following it.

4. Create engaging video content

Video content is hugely popular with marketers and salespeople alike – especially on LinkedIn:

1. They generate huge amounts of engagement
2. They’re incredibly shareable
3. It allows you to put your personality forward

Allen Gannett, CEO of TrackMaven and author of “The Creative Curve,” has been killing it with this format.

In the post above, Allen has shot a video with Amy Mowafi, CEO of MO4. They discuss what American companies can learn from their Egyptian counterparts.

At the time of writing, this post has 337 likes and 33 comments. Allen simply opened his mobile camera, click record and share insights.

Despite its simplicity, it works so well because so few people are doing it. The videos that deliver practical insight reap the biggest rewards.

So, how can you do this?

Talk to clients with whom you have a strong relationship. Ask if they’d be willing to chat with you for a two-minute video. Prep them on a specific question to add structure.

If you’re with them in person, record direct-to-camera. Otherwise set up a Skype call and use screen capture software to record the discussion.

Here’s another example where Allen did just this.

The topic is specific (networking tips), and he includes subtitles for those who are on a busy commute.

By asking a specific question and getting an in-depth answer, your video content will have structure, and the value will be clearer when writing a description.

When writing your description, tag the person you interviewed to introduce them and tell your audience what they’ll learn. This way, you’ll your content will be seen by both your audiences.

5. Build an outreach system

While it’s important to lay the foundations for the long-game, you want to see results fast.

Email outreach is still incredibly effective when done the right way. Luckily, you’ve already laid down a solid foundation by uncovering your prospects’ challenges.

Here’s a quick three-step process for building your own outreach system:

5a. How to find the best outreach targets

Good news! Your marketing team has already profiled your ideal clients.

They’re called buyer personas.

These documents outline everything you need to know about your clients:

Buyer personas include background information on their professional history, their goals, frustrations and where they hang out online.

Identify channels where your prospects are active. Use LinkedIn to uncover target accounts that fit your criteria. Having Sales Navigator will make things easier.

5b. How to write compelling outreach emails

The philosophy of personalization has shifted in recent years.

The {first name} variable is no longer good enough. Your entire email needs to show that you get your leads and understand their pains.

The easiest way to automate this is by segmenting your outreach list. Use the buyer persona documents to do this.

The positioning of your solution will be different for each persona. For example, those with a more sophisticated content marketing system in place will understand more sophisticated buzzwords than those who haven’t even started blogging yet.

Therefore, the introduction and pain points I focus on will be different for both. Segment your message by organization and buyer persona.

5c. Test unconventional approaches to optimize results

When I validated the need for Grizzle, I did the complete opposite of “cold email” best practices:

1. “Keep your emails short” – mine were a wall of text
2. “Add value” – I made it clear I wanted to do work with them

I tested long emails because I wanted to give my target audience as much information as they needed to make a decision.

If I don’t get a response, I follow-up with what I call a “statement of empathy,” acknowledging the length of my previous email and providing a shorter version.

Using this approach, I generated my first three clients. You should constantly be testing new approaches, especially when using saturated channels like cold email.

Test things nobody else is doing. Measure your results and, if you’re looking to optimize or things aren’t working anymore, try doing the opposite.

6. Shock-and-awe with direct mail

You head to Sales Hacker to learn some killer lead generation techniques.

You see direct mail on the list.

You check the date.

It’s 2018.

No, you’re not reading through some old-school sales content. Direct mail is making a comeback, and for good reasons.

According to InsideSales, B2B direct mail generates a response rate of up to 65%.

As everyone is still going all-in on digital channels, this traditional medium has a huge opportunity for attention.

The process is simple: send a card or handwritten note along with a gift.

This “lumpy mail” technique bypasses the gatekeeper and straight into the hands of the decision maker, eager to know what’s inside.

What kind of gifts should you include? According to InsideSales, gifts with a perceived value of under $11.40 reflect poorly on response rates.

Furthermore, useful gifts (e.g., books) are 47.3% more likely to generate a response than edible gifts.

There are three key elements to successful direct mail:

Make it personalized: Tailor both the gift and the message to the recipient. Segment your target audience and use relevant language for each persona or industry.

Make it valuable: Remember, cheap gifts don’t work. Make sure your gift has a high perceived value.

Make it useful: The gift must have some utility. Bonus points if it helps your prospect to do their job better.

Check out the full infographic on Sales Hacker to learn more about executing profitable direct mail.

7. Tap into your network for referrals

“Ask for referrals” is the sales equivalent of “email your list.”

To salespeople, it’s just obvious.

And yet, some of us still don’t do it enough.

The first question is, when is the right time to ask for referrals?

For software providers, the best time to ask is once your product has generated results – whether that be in the form of money made or time saved.

At what point does your product become a habit? Work with marketing to find out indicating behaviors, then reach out when the iron is hot.

For professional services, there’s a sweet spot. Too pushy and you’ll come across as money-hungry. But skip it altogether, and you miss out on untapped growth.

Here, the best time is after the first phase of your project.

When clients are happy with your work, that’s when you ask. Remember, don’t be pushy. Simply ask them if they know of anyone else who may be looking for a service like yours.

The second question is, how should you ask for referrals?

Here’s a five-point checklist to keep in mind when reaching out to clients:

1) Set the intention early: Get your clients prepped for referrals by mentioning it before the close. This way it’s not a surprise, and it’s much more likely they’ll refer you.

2) Ask for qualified referrals: If you ask clients who they know, you’ll get referred to anybody. Ask for referrals from people who fit your criteria, e.g., “marketers in the software space.”

3) Referrals aren’t cold calls: When you do get referred, you should enter the conversation by playing on the relationship with your client. Use a friendly tone, and act like you’re already part of their network.

4) Delight your clients: You’re not going to get referred if you don’t deliver on your promises. Of course, it’s down to your product or project delivery team to fulfill this. But you can still go above-and-beyond to deliver value.

5) Turn your referral process into a system: Set reminders “X days” after a prospect becomes a client. Furthermore, find ways to add value using content for the duration of their relationship with your organization. This is how you build long-term relationships.

8. Tap into engaged communities

There’s no point in building your personal brand and creating content if nobody is going to see it.

During your customer development conversations, you should also find out where they get their new information from.

These channels should include publications, influencers, and communities.

Find out where your prospects are hanging out online. Communities are one of the most effective ways of getting your content out to a wider audience.

8a. LinkedIn

While groups have become quiet and inactive, the news feed is where all the action is. Repurpose your content into a standalone, value-driven post.

Here’s an example from Sales Hacker’s very own Gaetano DiNardi:

You’ll generate more engagement and traffic from your existing LinkedIn connections. More on how to build your LinkedIn audience later.

8b. Quora

Many of your potential leads are using this Q&A platform to find information on their challenges. Information that you are qualified to provide.

Answer their questions using your content as a guide, including step-by-step instructions and a link back to your original content. Here’s a recent example:

8c. Facebook Groups

Groups generate a much higher engagement rate than pages. Which is why many business leaders have invested in building their own.

Tap into these communities by providing value. Don’t spam links to your content. Here’s a great example from Logan Honeycutt:

The principle here is simple: find out where your prospects are and add value to those communities.

That means creating organic content. Work within the context of how those communities and platforms work. Answer questions, provide value and share your experiences with fellow members.

9. Build strategic, win-win partnerships

I believe tapping into other people’s audiences to be one of the fastest ways to grow your own.

That’s why strategic partnerships work so well in the long-term. You’re adding value to brands and individuals who have access to your ideal clients.

9a. Complimentary solutions

If you’re selling a marketing solution, it may not make sense to partner with a FinTech company. But if you both target marketing directors in enterprise-level organizations, it makes perfect sense.

Partner with non-competing organizations who share your target market. Offer to send any leads or referrals their way as long as they offer to do the same.

This approach is more business development than a sales play. But by partnering with other sales leaders in non-competing companies, you tap into an entirely new audience.

Many SaaS platforms now have their own marketplace. For example, if you’re targeting e-commerce companies, then you may want to consider getting featured on the Shopify App store or Experts directory:

9b. Co-branded content

Some partners may not see the value in a referral program.

If this is the case, offer to create a long-form piece of content for their audience in exchange for a share of the leads generated.

This is exactly what PPC agency KlientBoost did. At the beginning of their journey, they sacrificed owned content to create co-branded ebooks and webinars with companies who had access to their ideal clients.

This approach helped KlientBoost grow to $1 million in revenue within a year. All because they built a lead-generating asset, which still works for them today.

10. Tap into new audiences with guest blogging

Another easy way to get your content and message in front of a larger audience is through guest blogging.

While some marketers feel it’s a waste of time, it can still drive qualified leads. In fact, we used the approach you’re about to learn to generate a near 6-figure deal.

Here’s a three-step guide to get started:

10a. Find the right publications

For this to work, you must target publications that have authority in your market with an active and engaged audience.

Therefore, you should measure each target publication against these metrics:

Domain authority (DA): A search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website is likely to rank on Google. Primarily used for SEO purposes, this can be a strong indicator of how authoritative a blog or publications is. Use Moz’s SEO Toolbar to measure this.

Social following: Look at your target’s Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages. Do they have a large following (at least 10,000 followers)? Are people actively sharing, commenting and engaging with their content?

Monthly traffic: Although only a “rough” metric, TrafficEstimate.com can provide a ballpark figure on how much traffic your target publications generate.

Next, you need to find publications that accept contributions. In Google, search for phrases such as:

• industry + “write for us”
• industry + “guest post”
• industry + “submit blog post”
• industry + “submit content”
• industry + “guest column”
• industry + “contribute to our blog”
• industry + “become a contributor”
• industry + “guest author”

You can also use AllTop, a directory of blogs categorized by topic and industry. Here’s what we get when I search for “content marketing:”

10b. Outreach and pitching

At this stage, most professionals create a piece of content and “pitch” it to editors.

Shopping content you’ve already written is inefficient. For whatever reason, your content may not be a “fit.” Meaning you’ll have to go through the whole process again until someone accepts it.

Instead, reach out first and collaborate on content. Ask if editors if they’re accepting contributions. Share your existing work and see if they’d like to hear your topic ideas.

Once you’ve generated a response, focus on topics that sit in the sweet spot of these three areas:

Your value proposition: It must be relevant to what you do and the challenge your solution solves.

Needs of the publication: What kind of content do they publish? Is it strategic or tactical? How-to or opinion- and insight-driven?

What the market is talking about: Look at publications like Forbes and other industry blogs to see what trends and topics your audience is already engaging with.

When pitching topics, make it clear you’ll deliver practical, how-to information. Publications are hungry for this kind of content.

10c. Distribution

Guest blogging itself is already a form of marketing to other people’s audiences. While most blogs share content with their email lists and social following, you should give it an extra push.

Having your name published in an authoritative publication builds credibility. Amplify your content in the communities you’re engaged with (see technique no. 8).

Outreach emails are also effective. Use BuzzSumo to find the most shared articles on the blog you’ve published to:

Click on “View Sharers” to see a list of Twitter accounts that shared the content:

Reach out to any relevant individuals who would find your content most valuable. You can either do this via Twitter DM or email.

When reaching out to sharers, it’s important to mention a good reason. In this case, it’s because they shared a popular piece of content from a publication you’ve just contributed to. Personalize each email with a reason why they would find it useful.

11. Influencer engagement to amplify your message

Networking with influencers has many benefits:

• They can introduce you to leads and provide new sales opportunities
• Their active audience may find your information valuable, meaning more eyeballs on your content
• They can be fun and profitable business development opportunities

So, how do you connect with them in the first place?

When connecting with B2B influencers, most advice looks like this:

1. Share their content
2. Comment on their articles
3. Tweet @ them
4. Email them

The problem is, this doesn’t provide real value. Sure, everyone loves the extra social shares, but does it solve their biggest challenges?

One of the best ways to start a relationship with influencers is to get them involved in the content creation process. Especially when that content is published in front of a large audience. Guest blogging is a particularly effective vessel for this approach.

Start by identifying relevant influencers. Who are the thought leaders and senior decision makers with access to your best leads? Create a list, including contact information and metrics such as the size of their social following.

Next, find a topic that is relevant to these influencers – or at least a segment of them. For example, when I created this blog post about side project marketing for CrazyEgg, I targeted the marketers and founders at the brands I included:

The connections I made in this article were secondary to the content I wanted to deliver. But the principles are still the same: feature relevant influencers in your content.

Once you have a topic that brings everyone together, reach out to them. I often find Twitter or LinkedIn are the best platforms for beginning this relationship, but email also works.

Voila! You’ve created win-win, value-driven relationships with thought leaders.

12. Survey your prospects

Most B2B professionals are eager to see what challenges they share with peers.

So instead of a traditional cold email, try surveying your prospects instead. To them, you’ll appear as someone gathering data and insights on the industry.

The secondary bonus to this is the insight you’ll generate on your buyer personas. You’ll be able to segment each respondent based on their answers, showing you where your solution will be able to serve them best.

To collect responses, use a tool like SurveyMonkey or Typeform:

Boost your response rates by using an incentive. I’m not talking about Amazon gift cards, but rather giving them access to the insights you generate before they go “public.” This will create an element of exclusivity while providing you with new content for your audience.

13. Grow your LinkedIn audience

In 2017, we saw LinkedIn evolve in a way we’ve never seen before.

Instead of a platform for recruiters to find candidates, it becomes a place for professionals to connect, share value and truly generate new business opportunities.

Having a large, loyal following on LinkedIn can open up many opportunities – including, of course, lead generation by means of social selling.

Here’s how to do it.

13a. LinkedIn audience growth

By now, you should have already optimized your LinkedIn profile. Now it’s time to build your audience.

This is where having LinkedIn Sales Navigator comes in handy. With it, you can view and connect with an unlimited number of people.

Having a large following expands your overall network on LinkedIn. You’ll end up with more eyeballs on your content.

Don’t fret over irrelevant people connecting with you. If they follow you and engage with your content, then you end up increasing your reach.

There are a couple of tools that can automate this process at your discretion, which include:

1. Linked Helper
2. Dux-Soup

But you must be careful. If you use these too often or send too many connection requests at once, you risk getting your account banned.

13b. Create organic LinkedIn content

Once you build an audience, you need to engage with them. You need to give them an action to take.

This doesn’t mean sending them an InMail to set up a meeting. You need to nurture them with valuable, engaging content before starting the sales process.

Right now, thought leaders see a lot of success with LinkedIn posts (in the news feed):

The best content on LinkedIn share stories, deliver insight or provide raw, how-to information.

Here’s a framework you can follow when creating yours:

The first two sentences need to draw your audience. Start with a change (in your business or industry), show credibility or outline a problem.

End your post with something emotionally-driven or insightful. The objective is to inspire engagement, spreading the reach of your content. It’s the part where you drive the “big” lesson you aim to teach:

Finally, you need content that keeps their attention and adds value throughout the entire post. Do this with tangible examples (from your own experiences or those of others), third-party statistics to back up your claims and instructions on how to solve a problem:

13c. Turning connections into leads

Over time, you’ll slowly build an audience with thousands of professionals and business leaders. Among these people are profitable sales opportunities.

There are a couple of ways to do this. The first is to identify them manually, generate insight on their pains and use InMail or email outreach to get their attention.

The second method is to get them to identify themselves with a sales funnel.

Here’s what it looks like:

1. Export connection email addresses from LinkedIn
2. Use them to create a Facebook Remarketing campaign
3. Create a short how-to video guide that helps them solve a relevant challenge
4. Include a call-to-action to schedule some time with you

To export email addresses from LinkedIn, click on My Network. Under the left pane, click on the “See All” link:

On the next page, click on “Manage synced and imported contacts” at the top-right of the page.

Finally, under “Advanced Options,” click on the “Export contacts” link. The contact details of all your connections will download in a CSV file.

You can now upload these emails to a Facebook Remarketing campaign. This guide from the guys at Acquisio will help you get started with this.

Most event pages have a registration process for speakers. Look through the event website or search “event + register to speak” on Google.

Here are some tips when pitching to speak at events (especially when reaching out to event organizers):

• Tailor your outreach to the conference, including any relevant “credibility boosters,” e.g., publications where you’ve contributed.
  
• When pitching a topic, don’t be broad. Tackle specific, in-depth topics on a pressing challenge.
  
• Be polarizing where possible. Challenge the status quo and don’t be afraid to take a controversial stance on a topic.
  
• If you have a recording of a previous speech, even in front of a small audience, this can be an effective way of demonstrating your capabilities.

Finally, don’t turn your talk into a sales pitch. Add practical information. Share insights and examples of others who overcame the same problems.

14b. Set up meetings with senior-decision makers

The old-school method of prospecting at events looked something like this:

1. Look at the list of exhibitors for interesting looking companies
2. Approach salespeople at the event in the hope you’ll be introduced to the right person

This is a spray-and-pray tactic. Instead, book meetings well in advance of the event itself.

Start connecting with target prospects now. Research the accounts you want to engage with and find out who will be going. Identify the most relevant person and connect with them on LinkedIn.

When reaching out, make it clear on a) your intention and b) what’s in it for them. What specific advice can you provide? This advice must be relevant to both their role and organization.

Limit each meeting to 10 minutes. That way, even if you end up scheduling five to ten different appointments, you have plenty of time to take advantage of other opportunities. It’s also much easier for a prospect to say yes to a shorter commitment.

Events also provide an opportunity to re-engage with stale leads. Reach out via email or social media and ask if they’d be willing to meet. You might find that the decision maker that was blocking progress last time has moved on.

Your turn…

Let’s go up a level – how do you feel about sourcing your own leads? Which lead generation techniques are you currently utilizing to fill up your own sales pipeline? Let’s share ideas in the comments below!

The post 31 Simple, Yet Brilliant Lead Generation Techniques to Supercharge Your Sales Pipeline appeared first on Sales Hacker.

 

For more than 20 years we’ve talked about multi-touch, multi-media, multi-cycle processes that multiply results. At least one software company literally took PointClear’s playbook, which includes details about the multi, multi, multi approach, and turned it into a red-hot piece of software. Wish I had thought of that.

Multi, multi, multi (which is multiple dials, voicemails, emails and in some cases direct mail across several sales cycles) has been re-termed “Cadence.” We think that’s great, because it’s a lot easier to say than what we used to call it.

Some people ask if voicemail and email should be part of the sales lead generation cadence. And my answer is, absolutely. Many of the leads we generate for clients are the result of a call back or email reply. In fact, some years ago a client closed a $1 billion deal when the prospect called us back after the 42nd touch and became a lead. So, I know voicemail and email as a part of the contact cadence works. Like a friend of mine says, how many returned calls do you get if you don’t leave a message?

Others wonder what else should be part of the cadence that is not usually addressed. I have an answer for that is well: Non-lead outcomes. Many companies leave 65% or more of the leads they could have generated on the table by ignoring these non-lead outcomes (often called dispositions). The table below summarizes what I’m saying—simply that your cadence should encompass longer-term opportunities and must include sales lead generation nurturing, as well as short-term opportunities.

The top of this table summarizes the results of standard lead generation—I call these one and done campaigns. The way this usually works is: send a third party a list, send them a script, send them some money and they will throw some so-called leads over the fence to sales.

Sales will ignore these leads because they are conditioned to expect poor quality marketing leads. One division of one of the largest software companies in the world wastes over $200,000 per year generating 9,000 leads, sends them directly to sales and sales refuses to work them. They continue this practice year after year because marketing just cannot find a cheaper source of leads—and that is their only measure—price, not quality.

The bottom of the table summarizes how companies can take advantage of lead and non-lead outcomes to optimize the return on marketing investments.

1. On the first pass through a list the same 50 SQLs (sales qualified leads) are identified as with the standard lead generation approach.
2. At the same time leads are being generated there are outcomes we call “pipelines.” These are qualified contacts at qualified companies—but there is an action item to accomplish at some point in the future (days, weeks or months) to convert these pipelines to SQLs—our metrics show that 20% of the pipeline outcomes will convert to SQLs on the next touch cycle.
3. About 25% of the outcomes will become true nurture dispositions. If effectively nurtured, over two contact cycles, 27% will become SQLs. Note that contact cycles vary by solution but typically a contact cycle is six weeks to three months.
4. Another 35% of the outcomes are contacts at companies that we did not have a conversation with. We did not reach them and they did not reply to a voicemail or email. Invariably, we will learn something about the contacts at these companies that will warm-up subsequent touches. Our experience is that 7.5% of these outcomes will convert too SQLs over the next two touch cycles.

Summary

In addition to designing and managing the cadence, you must also design and manage the process of nurturing all outcomes. Instead of starting over with a fresh list of 1,000 suspects and generating another 50 leads, you can contact 820 Pipeline + Nurture + No Response prospects and generate an additional 104 leads. I wrote another blog on this subject, if you’d like to learn more.

This process saves money, increases revenue and helps build a valuable prospect database. What else do you recommend?

When HubSpot was in its earliest stages, I used to say yes to almost anything: new features, new initiatives, new ideas. It empowered my team to move fast and get things done. I prided myself on being a “yes” man. We were working hard on getting product-market fit right, so anything we could do to get more customers and to find the right feature mix was a critical learning opportunity.

A popular, core feature of our product was our website grader. Looking to expand our reach and impact, I was quick to say “yes” to a Twitter grader… and to a Foursquare grader (yes, that was hot at the time)… and to a press release grader. If someone had a marketing grader idea, chances are I would say “yes” to it.

I said “yes” to a highly fun and creative video series.

I said “yes” to a HubSpot All Star Leaderboard that measured and posted customer engagement with our product.

By the time we’d grown to a couple hundred employees, all that dissipated energy had begun to yield diminishing returns. “Brian, this ‘yes-man’ thing worked fine in startup mode,” said Lorrie Norrington, one of our board members. “But it’s backfiring in scale-up mode. You have half-baked projects all over the place. You need to add the word ‘no’ to your management vocabulary.”

Lorrie had seen the path from startup to scale-up first hand at companies like eBay and Intuit, and I valued her perspective. Borrowing a morsel of wisdom from HP co-founder David Packard, she warned me that “more companies die of indigestion than starvation.” Lorrie was right: I had a serious over-eating problem.

I adopted three practices to put balance into my yes-no diet:

Put It In Writing

The single best tool I have found to help unlearn the yes-man ways of a startup CEO is a single-page document we call our MSPOT. With it, we articulate our Mission, the constituencies we Serve, the Plays we’re going to run this year, the plays we are going to Omit, and how we will Track our progress.

The most painful portion of that document are the Omissions. Painful, because they are usually excellent ideas with high potential—but necessarily omitted because we are better off doing a few things very well. One of the most agonizing Omissions I had to make was deferring the opening of our first international office by a year.

Whether to go international was a no-brainer. At the time, in 2011, we already had over 300 non-U.S. customers in more than 30 countries, representing nearly 10% of our business. What’s more, international customers were particularly happy, with a significantly lower churn rate than we were seeing domestically. Everything was pointing toward a full-on international expansion.

When to go international was another matter. Alongside the international question, I had also made the decision to radically focus on our newly clarified target buyer. We used to have two buyer personas—“Owner Ollie,” the owner of a small business; and “Marketing Mary,” a marketing director of a medium-sized business who needed to convert website visitors into leads. I had made the decision to refocus all of our product development, sales, and marketing efforts on the marketing director.

Could we do both at the same time—align our organization around a single market and launch internationally? We already had significant momentum for international expansion, including a few executives readying to lead the charge, making plans to move their families and careers to London.

Ultimately, I decided going international would have to wait another year, when we would have with the wind in our sails from full alignment across product, marketing, and sales.  I added “international office” to the Omissions box in our MSPOT, and made sure to broadcast the decision internally:

I’m dying to do international, but I want to put HubSpot’s wood behind the core economic engine of the business next year and get the machine running really well.  Europe is going to happen, but I want every extra dollar on my P&L to go into Marketing Mary, and the Europe stuff is going to be a pretty big initiative that will not help with this.

The only thing I regret about this decision is that I totally jerked around [specific individuals].  I feel terrible about this.  I’m confident I’m doing the right thing for the business, but in the process have done them wrong.

Let Your “No” Mean “No”

We’re a reasonably flat organization, and we give the floor to all sorts of competing opinions. Usually, we’re pretty good at coming to a conclusion, and everyone involved heads off to act on it.

Sometimes, though, ardent advocates on the short end of the decision would return to me and renew their case, perhaps with additional data or a more effective spokesperson. And, too often, in the absence of the full team, I’d see the sense in their augmented argument, and give them half a green light as well. Inevitably, that led to a reconvening of all parties, which frequently enough would lead to uninspired compromises.

That decision to “put every extra dollar on my P&L to into Marketing Mary” came after too many such compromises between chasing both Marketing Mary and Owner Ollie. By continuing to serve two masters, we watered down our marketing effort, and hampered our product development velocity. By finally saying “no,” in writing, to Owner Ollie, the post-decision hallway lobbying evaporated. Not only was everyone informed that the book had closed on an issue—but it became much easier to just point to the MSPOT and dispel plaintiffs seeking to re-litigate a decision.

And Let Your “Yes” Mean “Yes!”

The other parts of that MSPOT are for what constituents we will Serve, and what Plays we will do—with conviction, and no looking back.

In startup mode, we could make decisions quickly, and it didn’t necessarily matter if it was the right decision. We could examine the results, and if we didn’t see early promise, we were agile enough to adjust, change course, or if necessary, cut our losses and kill it. Remember that Foursquare grader project? We gave it a run, and we moved on.

That entrepreneurial mindset and willingness to say “yes” was instrumental in finding product-market fit. However, in scale-up mode, the virtue of keeping our options open, and changing gears based on new information, is disruptive and expensive.

When we committed to the Marketing Mary play, there could be no turning back. That comes with risk, of course, in case we had miscalculated. But, in the transition from startup to scale-up, we had accumulated enough data and experience to be confident. And that confidence energized our entire organization as we executed our goal with intensity.

As HubSpot has grown from a startup to scale-up, the discipline of saying “no” has paid big dividends for us. We launched HubSpot 3, our Marketing Mary play, in September of 2012. By the end of the year, we had increased the number of customers by 42% over 2011. And in the spring of 2013, we opened our European headquarters in Dublin.

It’s safe to say that the telecommunications industry is still a major driver for growth in some of the world’s most progressive countries. For sure, a great deal of these countries – think of Singapore and South Korea – depend their economic numbers on the telecommunications industry. This is mostly due to the demands for instantaneous communications and more so because of its societal importance.

To put it simply, a paper published in The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine points out the industry’s societal importance:

• It provides a technological foundation for societal communications.
• It enables participation and development.
• It provides vital infrastructure for national security.

From telephones to VOIP software, there’s always a solution that best fits the needs of a business. And as competition in such sectors as financial services and healthcare constantly increases, it has become crucial for telecommunications to improve core business processes by zeroing in on strategies that have a direct impact on the bottom line.

Going beyond this basic fact, the telecom industry will also need to tackle major market disruptions in order to stay competitive and efficient. To be more particular, telecom companies will have to understand the recent trends that are impacting how businesses define telecommunications. In other words, they should be able to understand recent issues and, eventually, come up actions plans that promise clear and accurate results.

For a start, here are several of the most important trends that will define how companies will operate in the coming months.

A shift to higher speeds

The B2B side of the industry will address higher demands for high-speed internet. Business requirements have changed ever since the introduction of fiber optic internet. From then on, companies have made it their priority to upgrade their IT infrastructure using this technology. In recent years, the cable industry has capitalized on this trend. But despite offering a cheaper alternative for customers in the broadband arena, the industry has yet to make a major dent as evidenced by a low penetration rate.

Complexity will increase

With the demands for more efficient telecom services continue to resonate, major players will have to address the fact that their products will become even more complicated. An article from The Fast Mode was able to point this out by saying that telecom companies will have to come up with fresher and more efficient ideas for the long-term. With that said, telecom companies will have to abide by the need to simplify their products to get more relevant results.

Dealing with big data

With software-as-a-service continues to be in-demand in a lot of sectors, telecom players will need to take advantage of this development by improving their data infrastructure. With innovations such as 5G entering the market, it will be a challenge for a lot of these telecom companies to deliver high-speed connectivity capable of handling large amounts of data.

With all these trends being taken into account, telecom players will no doubt re-evaluate their strategies and make necessary changes in their sales and marketing campaigns. These trends, after all, are just too complicated to begin, so it actually helps to have a clear plan of what you’re going to do.

B2B marketers in this industry shouldn’t look far for the right approaches. All they have to do, in fact, is to identify their target audiences and the right channels.

When it comes right down to determining your target demographics, you can only look towards sectors that need such products as VOIP and OTT communications. Enterprises that engage in the online tutorial business, for instance, will require the best equipment to support their operations, so it is crucial to focus more on getting customers from this sector.

But how exactly?

One thing’s for sure, telecom companies can use the following channels in order to generate quality leads for their sales pipeline:

Email

Most prospects right now require receiving an email to make better decisions in purchasing the right products and services.

Social media

Who says this only applies more to B2C? This channel works just as well when it comes to engaging B2B prospects.

Telemarketing

It’s not dead after all. In fact, there are B2B decision-makers that rely on telemarketing to know more about a particular telecom product. Again, one of the trends that will define 2018 for the industry is that these products will become more complex. Simplification is your way forward, and B2B telemarketing remains to be a viable option.