Like me, I'm sure you are working on complex challenges when it comes to data.

Multi-petabyte data warehouses. Multi-touch, cross-channel attribution analysis. Media mix modeling. Predictive analytics. Human-centric analysis. Oh, and let's not forget the application of machine learning to every facet of your work.

It is genuinely fun to work on these opportunities. They’re difficult, and every step forward offers a renewed sense of excitement and inspiration.

Despite the joy in these high-level, forward-thinking initiatives, I've disciplined myself not to let the unsexy fundamentals go overlooked. I’m particularly vigilant about avoiding friction in the core systems that facilitate the flow of money into the company and beloved products out of it.

So today, that valuable reminder for you kicked off via a case study inspired by Condé Nast. To inspire, and jump-start, a change in your focus, we’ll also look at Heal, Facebook and prAna.

Before we proceed with the stories… The unsexy fundamentals in this post focus on user experience. If you are a reader of my newsletter, The Marketing < > Analytics Intersect, you’ve seen me apply it to metrics (last TMAI was on Bounce Rate), reports, frameworks and more. The concept touches all facets of our professional universe.

Condé Nast | A Story of Unrequited Love.

Condé Nast is in a world of hurt, along with everyone else in the print business. In 2017, they've twice replaced the company's Chief Revenue Officer. They are pursuing a variety of digital experiments, and it remains unclear whether any of them will stick (unlike the New York Times, where new initiative such as "The Daily" podcast and T Brand Studio have proven overwhelmingly successful).

You might assume that Condé Nast, through these changes and new initiatives, would have solved the fundamental issue of subscriber retention.

Join me on that journey.

I love The New Yorker.

"Love" is an understatement. I ADORE The New Yorker magazine. I love David Remnick. And Amy Davidson and Sheelah Kolhatkar and John Cassidy and Jia Tolentino and… all of 'em. Hence, I'm proud to be a paying subscriber. The nourishment that your soul craves is in The New Yorker, and I encourage you to consider your own subscription.

As I almost exclusively read the articles online, I visited the website to switch to digital-only (from digital + print) when my subscription expired in October.

I recall this simple task posing a surprising challenge. I was busy, and ultimately, I gave up. Last week, in my guilt for reading articles online for free, I decided to try again.

The first step was to log into my New Yorker account.

I was already logged into the site and thus found this to be a bit of a nuisance. But, no biggie.

Post-login, I was taken to my profile page, where under the Edit button I received a lovely reminder of my tardiness.

[Full disclosure: The New Yorker, starting May 2017 had sent me at least 14 reminder letters via postal mail with a form to complete fill out and return with a check. I don't know who does this anymore, certainly not us. I want to add that I did not get a single reminder via email – with a direct link to renew. This despite the fact that The New Yorker has my email address, and it would be cheaper to send me 14 emails than printed letters. Clearly, the Department of Postal Mail is vigorous at Condé Nast.]

I clicked on Customer Care (but not before taking a tangent to explore what "Amazon Digital Subscriptions Manager" is, turns out to be the most expensive way to get a subscription to the magazine!).

Amazingly, I was asked to log in again, this time on a completely new domain.

It was a bit odd to see the captcha. I wonder just how many hackers are dying to access the Condé Nast subscription website to help process renewals!

Mildly irritated, I did as I was asked.

Once again, I was presented with a summary of my account, and I began scanning for my next action.

I simply wanted to change my subscription from digital + print to just digital, and to know what it will cost.

I scanned my options on the left navigation, with few promising options.

I give "Renew" a try.

Wrong choice.

My only choice was to up the game to two years.

I wondered what the Wired cross-sell says about New Yorker subscribers. Had it been tested?

I re-focused.

Next, I tried "Digital Access." It seemed to smell right.

Wrong choice again.

This just told me how to access the magazine anytime, anywhere! :)

Back to exploration mode.

(At this point, I was not irritated. I realized there was a lesson to be learned. So I began taking screenshots of this unnecessarily painful journey, wondering if any Condé Nast employee had ever tried to change their personal subscription.)

I revisited "Manage Your Subscription," to make the next best choice: "Adjust auto-renewal."

Right choice? No. Wrong again.

I didn't want to update my credit card.

This, I was forced to resort to the last bastion of the frustrated: "Subscription FAQs."

I hate FAQs; they are almost always useless. Will Condé Nast prove to be the one exception to the rule?

"How can I renew my New Yorker subscription," seemed somewhat promising. I dutifully choose "clicking here."

Wrong choice.

I was right back to where I started, amazed that this company is in so much trouble financially but won't offer someone desperate to pay them a seamless way to do so.

Left to the footer, I clicked "Subscribe." At that point, what did I have to lose?

This took me to a third site, where, finally I was able to choose a digital-only subscription!

No. Not really.

This is a "12 Weeks for $12" offer that only applied to new subscribers. This offered no path for an existing subscribers.

What was even more frustrating — massively so — is that there was also no answer to my other question: How much would a digital-only subscription cost?

In fact, on this subscription page (the one I linked to when recommending The New Yorker above), there is no way to determine how much The New Yorker costs per year.

Let me say that again. If you are trying to subscribe — new or returning — Condé Nast does not tell you the annual subscription cost!

#OMG

What kind of con are these people running?

This put me at my wit's end. I'd failed to give them my money.

I revisited the second site to select "Chat Now."

Having logged in three times, as indicated in the top-right corner, I am asked once again to supply my credentials.

I waited an eternity for the chat session to start, completely absent of any status indication (x minutes remaining, or you are 10th in the queue).

Bored, I jumped back to the other window to tinker.

That's where I noticed the suddenly appealing "Cancel" link. Click!

I found the three choices intriguing.

How many of those who visit the page to cancel their subscription would like to improve the experience? (It was also not clear what "experience" meant.)

I opted to "Reconsider and save $10," simply because I love The New Yorker, and I wasn't going to give up on them. I am going to subscribe no matter how inept Condé Nast is.

A friendly message informed me that I was to wait for an email containing my $10 discount.

Why do I have to wait, I wondered.

Did Condé Nast have so many employees that someone was going to review my "case history" and validate my worthiness for the $10 discount, which, let me remind you, they offered proactively?

Ding!

My chat window came alive. Hurrah!

No. Not really.

"Leah" seemed unfamiliar with the Condé Nast platform. She directed me to pages I couldn't see, and asked me to go sign up for an intro offer which I knew I wasn't allowed to get (that was clear in the legal terms on the page).

After not helping at all, I admired her chutzpah in asking if she can help me with anything else.

Frustrated, I choose "End Chat."

I decided to wait for my $10. I felt I'd earned it by now.

Now, it has been a couple weeks. Crickets from Condé Nast.

Since I still love The New Yorker, I'm considering a digital subscription under my wife's name. She'll get 12 weeks for $12, which is sad as I want to pay full price.

12 weeks into that subscription, perhaps I'll finally come to find the full annual fee.

Ensuring loyal customers are able to renew and modify their subscription is the most fundamental of functions. It is not revolutionary to say that you really don’t want friction there.

Condé Nast has analysts upon analysts upon analysts. They have a world of user experience experts. I am genuinely and absolutely confident that these 400 people are executing large complex projects to save Condé Nast from financial trouble. None of them though thinks that that starts with something simple and fundamental: Fixing renewals. Or, telling people what a subscription actually costs.

To say that this breaks my heart is an understatement of galactic proportions.

Up next, you.

Condé Nast is hardly alone. I highly recommend a close self-evaluation to ensure that this isn't true for you as well.

To inspire prompt action by you, let me share a few more UX examples that are super-close to the company making money (the thing they/you should positively nail).

Heal | A Story Unfulfilled Forms.

Heal has an irresistible value proposition: They’ll send a doctor to your house!

I’m blessed to have health insurance. Still going to a doctor is such a pain, and even with an appointment the doctor makes me wait. Heal it is.

I install the mobile app, and proceed to making my first appointment.

The very first thing I have to enter is my date of birth. Seems reasonable.

Here’s the screen I get…

What!

What is the reasonable number of times the Heal UX team thinks a human should be expected to click the little < button to get to their date of birth?

I won’t tell you how old I am (very!), it is a lot of back clicks for me. A lot.

I just gave up.

For this article I opened the app again. There has to be a (hidden) better way.

I tried to click on “January 2018” hoping it pops up a calendar. No dice. I then clicked on “Sun, Jan 7.” Nope. Nothing else seems clickable. Looking… Scanning… Then, I clicked on the little “2018” on the top left. I get a list of years, score! I scroll, scroll, scroll, I’m old, scroll, and find my year of birth.

Consider this: You are a startup trying to upend the existing insane healthcare system. Should you have a simpler way to fill out the date of birth? Unsexy fundamental.

In the month of December, when I needed an annual exam, I could not get the address field in the Heal app to get my home address in there. (Unsexy fundamental.) I had to make an appointment and drive to the doctor. Oh, the humanity!

Facebook | A Story of Unsent $100s.

The only way now to get to your followers on Facebook is to buy ads.

[Bonus read: Stop All Social Media Activity (Organic) | Solve For A Profitable Reality]

No problem. After I would post something I want my Facebook followers to see, I would click the blue Boost button and pay Facebook $100. That seemed to solve the Reach problem.

Then one day a little while back I’m greeted with a new button: Boost Unavailable.

I have 45k followers on Facebook, without boost I get just 4k.

So I want this problem fixed. I want to give Facebook my $100. Except. Boost Unavailable.

When I click on that button, I get this, to me, confusing message.

A long time ago I had a personal page on Facebook. A couple years ago they informed me that I was not a person, I was a brand and forced me to change that page to “brand page.” I lost all my connections, and got followers instead.

Now, I don’t know what to do with this message. This account is all I have.

I click on Manage Page Roles, to see what my choices are…

I have to admit I am lost.

I am confident someone at Facebook understands what is going on, they even understand every option in the 19 choices in the left nav. Sadly, I don’t. The end result is that I can’t give Facebook my $100 and get my posts boosted.

As you might have heard, Facebook is just fine without my $100 every other week. They are clearing $10 bil a quarter. Still, an example of an unsexy fundamental that their user experience team could consider solving for.

prAna | A Story of Unfiltered Sadness.

I appreciate the opportunity to support businesses that solve for fair trade, green and sustainable business practices. If their products last forever, even better as I have to buy a lot less over time.

prAna is a good example of such a company. I also admire their brand building efforts – from the logo to the shipping envelopes.

I can’t afford their clothes at full price, but can’t resist looking at the men’s sale section when I need something.

Filters are your BFF when you are in environments with lots of choice. You can quickly go from being overwhelmed to narrow focus.

prAna’s site has loads of filtering choices: Gender, size, activity (yoga, hiking…), fit (slim, fitted), inseam, color, fabric (fair trade, HeiQ…), performance (PFC Free DWR, quick dry…), rating, silhouette (button down shirt, flannel, that’s it, really!), country of origin.

Guess what’s missing?

Imagine you have go trawl through hundreds of items on sale for clothing you need. What is the first thing you want to filter by?

Think.

Yes! Type of clothing.

Pants. T-Shirts. Jackets. Shorts.

That is the one filter prAna does not provide. Unsexy fundamental.

Even with the other 9 filters, it is hard to quickly find what I’m looking for.

#arrrhhh

I have received 7 emails in the last handful of weeks from them with this subject line: “40% Off: End of Season Sale – Your Favorite Looks are Going Fast – Don’t Miss Out.” I wonder how long it will take the User Experience experts at prAna to figure out why the conversion rate is zero percent.

If the UX experts shop on the site, they’ll find these unsexy fundamental issues everywhere.

The most common reason I return pants are that they are not long enough. Pants with 34” inseam fit me.

I was looking for new pair of travel pants. The Calculus Pants look like they could do the job.

Two weird things.

No waist size. I can take a gamble on M, but length is not a gamble I’m willing to take. I scroll around a bit. Nothing.

I click on “Size & Fit Guide,” in case it specifies something for these pants.

I get the generic guide. It is helpful in that it confirms that I need “Long Inseam.”

Except. That information is not on the Calculus pants page.

Scroll up. Scroll down. Scroll around. Switch to mobile site, because why not. Nope. Nothing.

Perhaps these pants don’t come in the three choices (Short, Regular and Long). But at least tell me what the inseam size the Calculus pants are! Unsexy fundamental.

prAna charges $8 for returns, for any reason. That is a lot. Hence… No pants for me.

[For prAna’s UX team, possible inspiration: Patagonia’s men’s sale page]

Bottom-line | Recommendations.

Unsexy fundamentals are very sexy. I recommend two actions on your part:

2018: the year of doing the unsexy fundamentals well!

As always, it is your turn now.

Do you have a program/team in place to focus on unsexy fundamentals? What currently stands in the way of your company obsessing about ensuring all pathways to making money have been smoothed over? What is the primary mechanism in helping you figure out what unsexy fundamentals are broken? Do you have an example of a user experience, any mobile app or site, that is persistently frustrating?

Please add your insights, stories, frustrations, and wonderful accomplishments via comments below.

Thank you.

Bonus | Read: More examples and lessons in UX/Design, from HTC, United and Patagonia: Suck Less | A Plea For User-Centric Design: Powered By You

Bonus | Process to Implement: Heuristic Evaluations

The post Unsexy Fundamentals Focus: User Experiences That Print Money appeared first on Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik.

Creativity. We all want it. Unfortunately, we tend to give up on it over time.

When we’re just starting our careers, we’re excited. We’re going to take the world by storm. We approach our boss every morning with a new, brilliant idea. Getting a “yes” on something truly different seems like just a matter of statistics: The more we swing, the greater the chance we’ll get a hit. We have a high tolerance for risk and a high tolerance for rejection.

Ten years into our careers, we’ve taken our share of bumps and bruises. We’re still optimistic, but we’ve learned to test the waters before throwing out something crazy to see if people bite. We might email a wacky YouTube video to a few people on our team to test the response. If they tell us it’s fun but completely unrealistic for our industry, we cross it off our secret list of possibilities. We’ve gone from pitching wildly creative ideas every day to floating mildly interesting ideas once every six months.

By the time we’ve invested two decades in a stable career, we’ve got a lot to lose. At this stage, we may only pitch a new idea once every two years or so. Even then, it’s often just a rehash of something we’ve done before. Something safe.

Does this sound familiar?

It’s not that content marketers lack ideas. We’ve got a million of them! And it’s not that our ideas are bad. It’s just that we’ve been beaten into believing that we’re not creative because we’ve heard “NO!” for so many years.

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Hearing “no” too many times beats down our creativity, says @carlajohnson. #contentmarketing
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The art of the content project pitch

Our ideas aren’t bad. Our pitches are. And bad pitches kill great ideas.

This is how most people pitch a new idea.

You: I have a great idea! LEGO publishes a magazine every other month and they’ve had huge success. We need to publish a magazine too! 

Your boss: Are you kidding? (Select any of these excuses …)

• We’re not LEGO, we don’t have a budget for that.
• That would never work in our industry.
• Our products are too boring. 

And on and on with excuses for not testing a new, creative idea.

Every idea needs support if it’s to go anywhere. The problem is, we don’t know how to get support for our ideas.

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Bad pitches kill brilliant #contentmarketing ideas. Here’s how to fix yours. @carlajohnson Read more >>
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You’re probably familiar with the “four Ps” of marketing (price, product, promotion, and place). I’d argue that it’s the art of the fifth P – pitching ­– that leads to brilliantly creative projects.

Every successful creative pitch accomplishes three things:

1. It creates an idea journey. A successful pitch brings people along for the ride. It starts with an inspiration and ends with how the idea can be executed in the real world.
2. It connects the inspiration to your brand. A great pitch paints a picture. It starts with an experience that sparked an idea, and then it connects the dots to the work you’re doing for your brand.
3. It triggers anticipation. An effective pitch shows people what’s possible and gets them excited about the future. Movie trailers do this. Captivating content does this. And if we’re going to be successful pitching new ideas, we have to do it, too.

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Great #content pitches get people excited about what’s possible, says @carlajohnson.
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A framework for successful pitches

These three elements explain the reactions we want the pitch to stir. But we still need a process for delivering pitches that prompt these responses.

Master this process to successfully pitch your big ideas anytime, anywhere.

1. Start with an observation. When you start your pitches by sharing what you’ve observed in the world, you give people context. You help them understand the inspiration for an idea. It’s an experience that they can relate to along with you.
2. Distill the observation’s essence. Next, distill the broader meaning you’ve observed. Bring out the big theme anyone can relate to and understand.
3. Relate it to your brand. Connect the dots between the essence of what you observed and what that means to your own brand. This is how you give people a big “aha!” about how your creative idea can impact the work you do.
4. Explain your idea generation. This is where most people begin. It’s also why they meet so much resistance. When you preface the explanation of how you generated your idea with the observation, distillation, and relation to your brand, you can hone in on why your observation matters ­– and how it has an opportunity to create value for your organization.

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Don’t start with the idea. First, share an experience and distill into a relatable theme, says @carlajohnson.
Click To Tweet

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The content pitch framework in action

Think about the pitch we started with (“LEGO publishes a magazine…. We need to publish a magazine too!”). Remember how it prompted our boss to give us a million reasons why it wouldn’t work?

Here’s how to pitch the same idea using this four-step process.

Observation

I was reading my daughter’s LEGO magazine the other day, and I noticed how it offers so many different activities for kids who love LEGOs. There are comics, interviews, and even competitions.

Distillation

As I flipped through a couple of issues, I realized that LEGO is great at using the magazine as a way to build community. It gives them a tangible connection to people in a format they can take with them anytime, anywhere.

Relation

I thought about that in the context of our brand. In the health care field, we have so many people who aren’t on computers during the day. And reading from a smartphone is hard. I see an opportunity to build a community in ways that other brands in our industry are overlooking.

Generation

That’s how I came up with the idea of a print magazine for health care professionals. One that’s fun, that relieves some of the pressure they feel every day on the job. It would feature interviews with interesting people who have unique specialties. And it would only come every other month, so readers would have time to digest it and look forward to the next issue. That schedule also gives our team time to curate the highest quality content. A thoughtful pace and a focus on quality reinforce what we want the health care community to think about our brand.

If you heard each of these pitches, which would you support?

Regain your creative confidence

When you follow this simple process, you’ll get close to “yes” more often. The more you find support and positive feedback for your ideas, the more confident you’ll feel about pitching again. Success breeds success.

Once you get into the habit of pitching this way, you’ll realize that successful pitches don’t depend on divine inspiration, but rather on refining your pitching process over time.

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Refining your pitching process leads to greenlights for creative #contentmarketing projects. @carlajohnson
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Soon enough, you’ll be as excited to pitch creative ideas as you were during your first year on the job.

Renew your creativity and your confidence by learning from experts and peers at Content Marketing World 2018. Register now for the best savings!

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post The One Thing Killing Your Most Creative Content Ideas (and How to Stop It) appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about Business Insider Intelligence, click here.

Life insurance is a fundamentally hard product to sell, as it requires people to think about their deaths and promises no immediate rewards.

The way life insurance is sold makes it doubly unattractive, as consumers have to go through an paper-based, lengthy application process and a bothersome medical exam, with little guidance from their providers, and often at high cost. The problem is worsened by incumbent insurers' failure to innovate, even as personalized products and streamlined services proliferate in other areas of finance.

Now, though, a small yet growing niche of insurtech startups is now finding different ways to digitize life insurance to make it more appealing. Life insurance-focused startups are tackling a number of problems with the status quo, including a lack of consumer understanding of the product, inconvenient application processes, weak customer loyalty, and inefficient data management and processing. Some are focused on improving products for consumers, while others are helping insurers to modernize. These startups are giving incumbents a way to revamp this product, either by partnering these companies or using their technology.

But these life insurtechs are shaking up a strictly regulated and sensitive product, and their solutions carry regulatory and ethical risks. That means such companies, and any insurers using their solutions, must take measures to make sure these new services add value to the industry. Nevertheless, life insurtechs are likely to spearhead change in this space, with incumbents following suit. Such startups will set new industry standards and consumer expectations around this complex product. That, in turn, will serve as a catalyst for innovation among legacy insurers.

In a new report, Business Insider Intelligence looks at the major players in the global life insurance industry, the problems (for consumers and providers) in the life insurance status quo, how insurtechs are revamping the life insurance space and giving the product a new lease of life, best practices for both startup and incumbent life insurance innovators, and what the future of the life insurance space will look like as fintech makes its presence felt in it.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

• The need for innovation in life insurance has never been clearer — life insurance sales on the whole are slowing, and policy ownership is hitting record lows. A lack of consumer understanding, inconvenient application procedures, low customer loyalty, and old IT systems are denting providers' returns.
• Life insurtechs are looking to revamp the space in two key ways: Consumer-focused players focus on eliminating the pain points that put consumers off buying life insurance coverage, while insurer-focused startups offer ways to improve processes and operations for the providers that still dominate much of the market.
• There are some risks attached to bringing technologies not typically used in insurance into this tightly-regulated space, but life insurers can adopt best practices to mitigate them and reap rewards, like: getting full customer approval to use their data, hiring tech-savvy compliance teams, and prioritize customer education about the product. Startups, meanwhile, should pick incumbent partners carefully.
• Incumbents’ activity in life insurance innovation to date has been limited to implementing some shiny new technologies, largely on the front-end. If life insurance incumbents want to stay relevant, they'll have to invest in the core systems needed to give them the freedom to innovate and introduce changes on their own terms.

In full, the report:

• Looks at the world's biggest and most innovative life insurance markets, and trends they're setting for the space.
• Explains the major inefficiencies embedded in the life insurance status quo, and the problems they're causing providers and consumers.
• Outlines the two main strategies life insurtechs are adopting to drive change in this market, for the benefit of buyers and sellers of life insurance.
• Discusses the best practices life insurance incumbents and startups should adopt to steer clear of the risks still attached to applying emerging technologies to such a tightly regulated product.
• Gives an overview of what the rise of life insurtechs has in store for the life insurance space going forward.

 

Join the conversation about this story »

Episode 86 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how the web runs on writing and why the right words, voice, and tone will make your marketing better too

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When you consider how much effort a business invests in getting discovered on the web, it’s surprising that few dig deep enough to understand the essential components responsible for making that happen.

People use words to search the web.

They may be spoken or typed, but they are words nonetheless. If they happen to be the right words, and they probably are if your ideal buyers are using them, then you need to develop an intimate relationship with those words and discover how to use them in your writing.

Of course, there’s more to writing for the web than just plugging in keywords. If you want to win with Google you want to aim for the best human experience possible for your target audience.

This is why the best copywriters are handsomely compensated for their work. People can tell. They may not know why they know, they just know.

Writing copy is seldom easy, but when it works it becomes your superpower. You can achieve that goal by respecting your brand story and finding that signature voice that best communicates it.

Hold on, there’s one more detail that trips up many marketers. Every piece of communication must have the right tone for the platform and the audience it is targeting. That awareness is key.

Words Tell a Story

The words your business uses to tell its story in many ways is the story because words reveal a great deal about who we are and our communication preferences.

For example, whether your marketing copy says landscaper or landscape company matters to your audience just as much as if it says y’all or you guys. What’s right is what connects with your audience.

The right words are like magnets that attract customers. That’s why your most valued keywords should be in the headlines of your content, as well as the subheadings and the body content. The same is true for your social media postings.

In addition to understanding how to use keywords to optimize your content, always take a step back to study the promise of your words, that is, the story they tell.

~ Does your headline make a promise that matters to your audience?

~ Does the copy that follows deliver on that promise?

~ Are there examples and anecdotes that make the story interesting?

~ Is there a call to action to bring that audience closer?

~ Does your company have people prepped and available to guide those relationships?

Once again, people can tell. They intuitively know if there is a real person behind a social media posting. And they get a sense of his or her age, background, and personality.

~ What is said when your business telephone is answered?

~ How does your company reply to emails?

~ How about angry emails from unhappy customers?

~ Or social media comments from engaged customers that are ready to do more?

The holy grail of web copywriting is to sell people before they call your office or walk into your business, but there are many other touchpoints along their journey where words can make or break the deal.

All of it tells a story, and that story should be part of a grand plan.

Words are The Voice of The Business

SEO attracts attention with words. Voice makes that communication human by describing who you are as a company, your core values and how you go about helping customers.

Think of your voice like fashion style. Does your style say you are light-hearted or all business? You certainly want to be perceived as professional, but it’s hard to deny the fact that most people want to work with companies that make the experience enjoyable.

Make a list of words that express your business culture and style. They will help you discover your writing voice. It may include words like these.

• Smart
• Friendly
• Innovative
• Established
• Easy
• Certified
• Discounted
• Guaranteed

Word Also Set the Tone or Feeling

One of the tricky things about writing is that you can be technically correct but wrong at the same time.

The difference is the tone or feeling your words express.

There’s a big difference between the tone of these expressions.

~ Sorry about that.

~ I’m sorry.

~ I am soOOO sorry.

~ I’m sorry about this and will get right on it and how we will fix it.

Writing that is tone deaf usually is too formal. It lacks the emotion that is necessary to show customers they are in a safe relationship and that they have control too.

As you may have imagined, it’s usually best to write to show not to tell. This is one of the outcomes of a world of social media, and it means that sometimes you are writing your message first to then record that message with an engaging video.

Your tone can be brave, confident, or edgy. You have to decide what’s best for your business.

Make a list of words that capture the tone or feeling of your brand too.

When you get serious about understanding and using the right words your marketing will begin to spark — because it will be more consistent across all channels.

If you stay with it that spark will ignite customer relationships.

Imagine your sales, marketing, administration, and production staff all using essentially the same — and right – words all of the time. That will be a symphony to the ears of your customers that need the reassurance that everyone is on the same page.

Isn’t it time to build your system of words that is the backbone of your sales, marketing, and service communications?

Product descriptions are crucial for search engine optimization (SEO), site visibility, traffic generation, and lead conversion. The best product descriptions are the appropriate length, tone, and style. They contain keywords, help attract site visitors, and lead them down the sales funnel. If creating product descriptions feels intimidating, don’t worry. Here at CEM, we’ve written tens of thousands of product descriptions over the years. We’re in a prime position to offer advice on the craft of writing these important pieces of content. Read on for valuable insights!

Are Product Descriptions Really That Important?

If product descriptions fall to the bottom of your content priority list, this could be the heart of your marketing problems. Descriptions provide overviews of the products, but they do much more than that. Well-written product descriptions have the power to add value to your website, improve your search engine ranking, and boost your sale conversion rates. Product descriptions can make or break the success of an e-commerce site.

Image source: https://pixabay.com/en/ecommerce-selling-online-2140604/

An ideal product description converts every browsing user into a buyer. It explains the benefits and features of the product and convinces the user to seal the deal. The product description must grab attention, offer information of value, and attract buyers. In the world of e-commerce, product descriptions are the key to attracting and converting leads. They are the bit of written content that search engines use to place the product in front of users who perform searches. Using descriptions to their fullest potential is key to maximizing brand visibility.

While it’s certainly possible to have a successful company without product descriptions, failing to include them is a risk you might not want to take. Good product descriptions can help your company, while no descriptions at all will have zero effect, at best. In many cases, failing to include product descriptions will actually hurt your company, as this practice leaves consumers in the dark about the product and less willing to make the purchase. Why risk losing sales on something so easy to incorporate? Add product descriptions to cover all of your bases in terms of site content.

Image source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/aged-antique-classic-keys-429246/

Basic Rules for Writing Product Descriptions

A Nielsen Norman Group study on the usability of e-commerce sites attributed 20% of task failures to incomplete or unclear product information. Poorly written descriptions (or worse, no descriptions at all) leave users’ questions unanswered and increase the odds of shoppers abandoning their purchases. Good descriptions, like most forms of web content, follow certain rules and best practices. These rules include:

• Write as much as necessary. Unlike meta descriptions, there is no character limit on product descriptions. That being said, your descriptions shouldn’t ramble on for hundreds of words or be so short as to leave questions unanswered. They should be exactly as long as necessary to do the product justice in a clear, succinct way – with no fluff or filler. Brands have had success with long and short descriptions.
• Get to the point. Users do not want to dig for the most vital information about a product in its description. The description is not a place for intros, conclusions, or link building. They are simply overviews of all the most important information about the product. Keep them short, sweet, and to the point for the best readability. Provide the most important information first, as shoppers tend to scan content in an F-shaped pattern.
• Use appropriate tone and style. Product descriptions give your brand the unique opportunity to showcase your tone and personality in a place shoppers might not expect such reliability. Use this to your advantage by tailoring the tone of your content to your target audience. If this means funny and witty, go for it. If your ideal shopper is a businessperson, stick to tight professional language. Do not write for everyone – write for your buyer personas.

Search engines cannot see pictures. Images of your products may speak volumes to you and to users, but they are almost useless in terms of SEO. To get your site to rank and become visible to searchers, you must accompany your product images with written content. Adding a description of the product according to accepted standards can work wonders for your site’s search engine ranking, traffic, and conversion rates.

Image source: https://pixabay.com/en/seo-search-engine-optimization-1216145/

How to Create Awesome Product Descriptions

Truly great product descriptions go beyond just the basic requirements. They exhibit a firm understanding of what consumers want, and deliver exceptional content every time. Whether a brand has a few or thousands of products, the descriptions can cinch sales when they’re on point. While each brand should use a custom-tailored content strategy for their descriptions, the following are three general ways to make product descriptions really shine:

1. Add keywords. Adding keywords to your product descriptions is a major part of SEO. Don’t just add words you think your buyers are searching – conduct actual keyword research to discover the words that are hottest in your niche. Relevant keywords inserted naturally (not too heavily) are vital for SEO and brand visibility during searches.
2. Answer questions. Product descriptions are where buyers go to learn more about the item they’re considering purchasing. They want to know the item’s specifications in detail – including its material, manufacturing source, size, color, price, and other important features. Answer client questions as completely as possible in your descriptions.
3. Engage with customers. Although the description is primarily the place for straight facts, this doesn’t mean the content has to be boring or unoriginal. Use the opportunity to tout the product’s most popular features and interact with your audience. Make your content interesting and engaging, tailored to your specific audience.

The best product descriptions are simple, straightforward, and enjoyable to read. They follow the rest of the website’s tone and content strategy, and include important keywords based on user behavior research. They present a window into the company’s culture and personality, and – most importantly – persuade shoppers to add the item to their carts and complete the purchasing process. All of this is possible with the right content strategy.

Reap All the Benefits of Great Product Descriptions

It’s easy to brush product descriptions off as “fluff”, or very minor parts of your website, in the grand scheme of things. This mindset, however, can hurt your business. Companies that have great product descriptions have an edge over the competition. They take full advantage of all the benefits product descriptions can bring.

Product descriptions attract more leads with keyword optimization, give insights into the company’s unique personality, and boost business all-around. Fill your site with exceptional, research-backed product descriptions with help from Content Equals Money. We train our writers in creating copy without any filler, and we can turn around a large order for product descriptions in less than three business days.

Pricing can be one of the most elusive strategies for a business to nail down, especially for B2B companies. But getting your pricing right can make or break your business – it’s not only a driving factor in your profits, it also impacts how your brand is perceived by your customers and market.

Every business is different, so I can’t give you a single golden rule to set the perfect price (even “never lose money” doesn’t work, as you’ll see). But I can give you a trusted framework and warn you of the most common mistakes I see people make.

The Framework

There are three main phases in developing your pricing strategy: identifying cost, determining value, and setting your price.

1. Know Your True Cost

This first step is more important and a lot trickier than you think. Knowing your true cost isn’t as easy as getting a quote from your suppliers and totaling it up. To make smart business decisions you need to know the true cost of servicing your customers.

For a service business, the primary cost driver is labor hours. The bulk of costs are directly tied to the number of hours your team works on a specific project or account.

But the costs don’t stop there. You may also invest in marketing strategies for each of your services. These costs would not otherwise exist if you didn’t offer that service, so those must be included in the true cost of service.

The same can be said for businesses that sell physical goods. Your supplies, marketing efforts, and direct management expenses all need to be applied to calculate the true cost.

Be careful not to include business-wide expenses. If the expense is incurred independent of the sale of your product or service, it should be ignored in this decision. For example, my salary doesn’t impact the cost of any particular product we offer. Yours probably won’t either, unless you are responsible for a single product offering.

A good way to figure this out is to simply ask yourself: “If we stopped selling this product tomorrow, would this expense still need to be incurred?”

Once you know this number, you can use it to make sure that you are achieving your target ROI and making profitable decisions. Not knowing the true cost causes many businesses to run a loss without even realizing it!

But unless you are truly selling a nondifferentiable commodity, like copper or gold, you should not put too much weight on costs when setting your price.

Sure, it’s important to know so that you can evaluate a product’s success, but what is much more important is understanding your product’s value.

2. Determine Your Value

The most profitable businesses measure value against cost when devising their profit strategy.

For example, at my digital marketing agency, we consider how much our work will increase the profits of our clients, not how many hours we will have to bill to get them. Any price below that is reasonable. As long as you are providing more value to your clients than you are charging for, they will happily continue to employ your service.

Of course, you don’t want to take advantage of your customers and overcharge them simply because you can. That bloated margin will leave room for competition to come in and undercut you.

To determine the value of your product or service, you need to figure out what the business impact is on your client and how essential it is to their operations. You will know how to do this better for your business than I, but here are a few ideas:

1. Ask them. Interview customers and potential customers to find out where your business fits into their bigger picture. Learn about the positive changes they experience when they switched from a competitor to you.

2. Track results. In digital marketing, we know about the importance of tracking our success metrics. If the client’s average lead is worth $20 and you bring them 500 qualified leads a month, your services are easily worth $10,000.

3. Ask yourself: “What would happen if I stopped serving them?” If you decided to stop serving that client, what would happen to their business? Would they have to use a more expensive competitor? Would they lose many customers? Or discontinue a product of their own?

When you set your prices with value in mind (and it lines up with the costs you need to cover), you should be on the path to healthy profits. The last step of this framework is to use effective strategies to set the perfect final price.

3. Use Psychological Pricing

Once you have a ballpark figure for your pricing, you need to finalize it using psychological pricing strategies. This is where you tweak your price based on different psychological triggers and guide both their emotion and logic to make the decision that you want.

One of the most well-known examples is adjusting your price in a way that reduces the first digit in your price. For example: $49.99 instead of $50.00. Although logically we know these prices are essentially equivalent, our subconscious mind has been shown to greatly favor the former.

But a recent study has actually questioned the universal nature of that effect. They found that when a purchase was driven by more emotional status drivers, round pricing actually performed better.

The theory is that uneven numbers require more energy to process and promote more thought. This results in the customer relying more heavily upon reason when making their decision. The round numbers are easier to process, allow customers to make the decision emotionally, and give them a greater feeling of being right.

However, it’s worth noting that many business purchases are made on rational, and not emotional, grounds, so these latest findings may not be as important in B2B pricing.

Another psychological strategy doesn’t actually involve changing the price, but rather how you present it. It’s called price anchoring.

To convince customers that your price seems reasonable (or even a steal!) you need to give them larger numbers with which to compare. The oldest example of this is the “perpetual sale” like you find on Amazon.

Of course $17.39 seems reasonable for a product that’s worth $25!

There are ways you can leverage this in your business transactions. For example, add a screen question early on asking clients if their budget is above or below $2,000 a month. They will then find your proposal for $1,200 very agreeable since their minds have been thinking about $2,000.

None of these tricks are magic and they can’t automatically triple the value you offer or cut down your costs, but they will increase your sales volume and profits if used in conjunction with the proper value-based pricing.

Consider Long-Term Business Objectives

Since your business doesn’t exist in a vacuum or in a single moment of time, it’s important to optimize your price for higher profits. But it’s also important to keep your eye on the bigger picture. Maximizing your price for profits should be a long-term goal, not a temporary fix.

There are four main outside considerations I keep in mind when setting my prices:

1. Market Share

Sometimes to maximize your long-term profits, you need to sacrifice your short-term income in exchange for more market share. The increased name recognition, customer loyalty, and publicity you gain from cutting prices can be worth it in the long run if managed well. Sometimes it may even be profitable to run at a short-term loss. This strategy is especially viable for new market entries.

2. Lifetime Value

Make sure you know your average customer’s lifetime value. If you sell repeat services (like SaaS) or have a strong upselling or cross-selling strategy in place, it may be worth it to sell loss leaders. These are introductory products sold at a loss in order to form a relationship with a customer who is expected to spend much more in the future.

3. Competition

Another reason not to raise your price too high, especially in more mature industries, is the threat of competition undercutting you. If you charge prices in excess of three times your cost, competitors will find it easy to underprice you and steal your business.

If you are a market leader for a particular product or manage a strong differentiation, you might be able to set your prices high at first, but you should keep an eye on the competition’s prices to make sure that you remain competitive as their offerings catch up.

4. Brand Image

This can go both ways. As a consumer example, Apple tends to keep their prices extremely high despite massive margins. This hasn’t shown much sign of decreasing their sales rate and certainly hasn’t dampened their profits or brand image. The high price point actually gives their customers a feeling of superiority and helps Apple position their products as top-tier luxury goods.

On the other hand, if you raise prices too frequently or fail to deliver on your quality, the market may view you as greedy or overpriced which will leave a bad impression and make it very difficult for you to earn back their trust, even after your prices have been lowered.

Conclusion

There is no single pricing strategy that works for all businesses, but if you test out these tips, you should be able to improve your price point. Try different psychological pricing techniques and interview more customers about the value you bring them. Track your results and record what you learn so you can improve each time and you’ll soon be on a constant train of price optimization and increased profits.

The post How to Set Prices that Maximize Profit appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Over the years, history has given us pretty powerful dynamic duos. Think Batman and Robin, Mario and Luigi, or even Peanut Butter & Jelly—all perfect examples of how two is indeed, better than one. Yet, when it comes to creating dynamic duos within an organization, many companies fall short, siloing their departments under complex organizational structures, limiting the fantastic opportunity for cross-channel engagement. When it comes to winning new business, marketing and sales alignment might be the most amazing strategic alignment a company can embrace.

Before joining Marketo as a sales development representative, I was working in the marketing department of a small FinTech start-up. From collateral creation to brand messaging and advertising, I was able to get a taste of the full spectrum of marketing efforts that go into building a brand and establishing a marketing presence. As I reflect on my time in marketing, I want to share the key takeaways I have learned from being on the other side of the conversation.

In this blog, I am going to tell you the top three things any marketer can learn from their sales team.

Build Your Arsenal of Collateral

After plenty of phone calls, you can typically hear someone on our team say, “let me send you some follow-up material to show you the power of our platform,” obligating us to send relevant and engaging content to help persuade our potential buyer to take a more in-depth look into our platform. It’s at this specific point that I am relying on our marketing department to have built out a case study, webinar, one-pager, etc. dedicated to the exact needs of my lead. The best is when I can send material in different mediums (think word documents vs. videos and webinars) to help you diversify your offerings, so it is not death by whitepaper.

Especially in selling software, having documents that show the inside of your product, as well as documents that detail the technical aspects of your solution, are invaluable resources for providing a foundational product knowledge.

Having a library of organized, up-to-date, and diverse collateral will give your sales team the ammo they need to help persuade a company to begin the evaluation process. This will help them, at least on a surface level, understand your product, the value of your product, and relevant examples of your product being put to the test.

Not all Talk Tracks are Created Equal

During my time as a marketing assistant, we were creating messaging that was inclusive of a wide audience, which was understandable for a small start-up with limited resources. But, it is important to remember that messages created with an overarching theme don’t always resonate in a conversation with a potential customer. All too often, I run into companies who have elaborate and trendy company descriptions, but I am still left confused on what the company or their product actually does. That is why, when creating a strong sales and marketing alignment, understanding the messaging that lands with customers is crucial.

In the sales process, you can quickly gauge when a prospect is absorbing your value propositions or when they need more tangle examples. We’re able to understand their needs because they directly tell us the inefficiencies in our explanation. In marketing, there can be a delay in feedback, or even none at all, when it comes to the messaging put in front of a potential customer. Gaining an understanding of the narrative that is promulgated by the first point of contact in the sales process is essential to create brand consistency and a compelling long-term marketing strategy.

We’re All in This Together

One of the most predominant differentiators between marketing and sales is their compensation structure. Most marketing positions are salaried, while sales is typically commission based, at least partially. So, when executing your marketing campaigns, it is essential to consider the impact marketing can have on a sales representative’s success in their position.

For example, our sales strategy is predominantly inside/inbound sales—that is because our marketing team has created compelling campaigns that drive interested customers to our website. However, when a company has poor campaign execution, this can decrease the number of inbound leads a sales representative can engage; forcing them to pivot to an outbound strategy which generally has a more extended courting period. An essential job for marketing is to fill the funnel with qualified leads. Their successful execution is crucial to supporting the wellbeing of the other departments.

Building strong sales and marketing alignment is the dynamic duo your company needs when it comes to creating your brand, generating quality leads, and driving new business. When marketing and sales work as a team, amazing things can happen! So, to all of you marketers out there, I hope I’ve inspired you to grab your chair and head over to your sales department for a quick conversation to see what’s working and what’s not.

What have you as a marketer learned from your sales team? What have they helped you understand? I’d love to hear about your discoveries in the comments.

The post What Marketers Can Learn From Their Sales Team appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Happy 2018! As we move into the new year, it is time to think of new methods and strategies to plan your upcoming email marketing campaigns. Email has been a boon and will continue to be ubiquitous in the years to come.

Email trends like interactivity, gamification, use of dynamic data, typography, hyper-personalization, smart segmentation, etc. are some of the most prominent ones to look forward to in 2018.

Before you sprint towards formulating your marketing strategy for 2018, have a look at a list of email marketing stats and facts handpicked and compiled by EmailMonks. Keep these stats in mind and use them as a guide to plan your email marketing campaigns in the right direction.

• In 2017, global e-mail users amounted to 3.7 billion users. This figure is set to grow to 4.1 billion users in 2021. (Statista)

• In 2017, the total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day reached 269 billion and is expected to continue to grow at an average annual rate of 4.4% over the next four years, reaching 319.6 billion by the end of 2021. (Radicati Group)

• Email marketing spending in the United States would grow from 2.07 billion U.S. dollars in 2014 to 3.07 billion U.S. dollars in 2019. (Statista)

• Email has a median ROI of 122% – over 4x higher than other marketing formats including social media, direct mail, and paid search. (DMA and Demand Metric)

• 86% of professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes. (Hubspot)

• 89% marketers said that email was their primary channel for lead generation. (Mailigen)

• The most important goal of 54% (majority) of email marketing influencers is to increase the engagement rate of email marketing. (Ascend2)

• 78% of consumers unsubscribe from emails because brands were sending too many emails. (Hubspot)

• Tuesday is the best day of the week to send emails. If you send two emails a week, send the second email on Thursday. (Coshedule Research)

• The best times to send an email are 10 a.m. and from 8 p.m. to midnight. (Coshedule Research)

• By the end of 2018, worldwide mobile email users are expected to total over 2.2 billion. (Radicati)

• Emails not optimized for mobile devices get deleted by a majority (80.3%) of users. 3 out of 10 users unsubscribe from the list if the emails are not mobile optimized. (Bluehornet)

• Mobile email will account for 20 to 75% of email opens, depending on your target audience, product, and email type. (eMailmonday)

• Out of 1.52 billion email opens, the email clients that witnessed the most opens in 2017 are Apple iPhone, followed by Gmail and Apple iPad. (Litmus Email Client Market Share)

• Email list segmentation and personalized emailing were the most effective email strategies of 2017. (DMA)

• Marketers have witnessed an increase of 760% in email revenue from segmented campaigns. (Campaign Monitor)

• Segmented email campaigns get 14.31% more opens and 100.95% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns. (Mailchimp)

• 51% of marketers consider email list segmentation to be the most effective personalization tactic for effective email marketing. (Ascend2)

• Transactional or triggered emails have 8x more opens and substantially greater revenue than regular bulk emails. (Experian)

• The most effective triggered email types for e-commerce brands are cart-abandonment emails and welcome emails. (MarketingProfs)

• Welcome emails have on average 4 times the open rate and 5 times the click-through rate of a standard email marketing campaign. (InboxArmy)

• While people prefer to receive HTML and image-based emails, plain-text emails received higher open rates than HTML emails. The increased amount of HTML lowered open rates by 23%. (Hubspot)

• In 2017, the average results for email campaigns across industries were:
  • Open rate: 24.79%
  • Average click-through rate: 4.19%
  • Click-to-open rate: 11.88%

(SmartInsights)

• 72% of customers open an email due to the discount it offers and 62% customers open due to the personalized subject line. (Campaign Monitor)

• Subject lines containing emojis have a higher read rate than comparable text-only subject lines. (Business Wire)

• 47% of email recipients open email based on the subject line (Invesp)

• 68% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line. (Invesp)

• Subject lines including words like “urgent”, “important”, “alert”, etc. are proven to increase open rates. (Mailchimp)

• Personalized subject lines lift open rates by 29.3%. (MarketingSherpa)

• Interactive email content increases the click-to-open rate by 73% and adding videos to your email content can boost click rates up to 300%. (Martech Advisor)

• Social sharing buttons in email increase click-through rates by 158%. (Sarv.com)

Wrap Up:

Keeping these stats in mind, brainstorm to figure out what would work well for your business. Start now to plan a winning email marketing strategy for 2018.

Women are underwhelmingly employed in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Not only women themselves, but governments and industries would benefit to realize the value of more women in such fields. The European Commission says that more women in information and communications technology (ICT), a STEM subfield, could increase the European Union’s GDP by nine billion euros per year.

This low-risk high-reward opportunity is being missed around the globe, with a particular negligence at home. Canada, for its gender-balanced cabinet, only sees 36 per cent of PhDs in science earned by women, while the UK and US see 49 and 46 per cent, respectively. Canada’s science minister thinks that Canadian universities aren’t doing enough to ensure gender parity.

Female participation in STEM, and especially within ICT, is of particular importance today as the world faces the Fourth Industrial Revolution: an extension of the Digital Revolution which will see heightened usage of artificial intelligence to find solutions to business and societal problems through automation. Traditionally, areas known to pose opportunities for secure and lucrative careers are STEM-related, and this will only become more true as artificial intelligence continues to find its way into the global market. Women need to pursue STEM in order to have a chance at artificial intelligence. Careers in this area may skyrocket at the same time that administrative and repetitive jobs, many of which are traditionally held by women, are at a higher risk of being automated.

Because employment loss due to artificial intelligence will disproportionately affect women, who are less likely to hold the most secure jobs, it is important to be proactive in encouraging women to take up a greater space in STEM- and particularly ICT-related careers. The World Economic Forum reports only 16 per cent of companies in the ICT industry perceive attracting female talent as a key future workforce strategy, while more than half view the biggest barrier to leveraging female talent as the lack of qualified incoming talent.

Whether women are choosing programs in ICT today or not, women were some of the first pioneers in the field. Thus, female participation in the study and practice of ICT is likely less of quality, and more of inclusivity and opportunity. Women only maintain a small share of the industry, with a 25 per cent wage gap, and only five per cent being CEOs. Though the overall employment outlook is stable for females across the ICT industry, the relative ease of recruiting women is ranked “harder”, and estimated to continue to be “harder” in 2020 by the World Economic Forum. It is all of our jobs to make it easier.

Solutions have been proposed for decades. We know that learning materials need to be inclusive and depart from gender roles, female role models in STEM are needed, equal and hands-on learning opportunities should be available, and employment policy needs to reflect the disadvantage women face in entering the STEM field. There is likely little need to propose new solutions, considering the breadth of existing solutions may not be implemented to their full extent.

What is needed is a sense of urgency to make meaningful steps toward increasing women in STEM, with a fortified focus on ICT. Perhaps what will create a sense of urgency is the potential for artificial intelligence to impact the workforce in many ways that cannot be anticipated or halted. As such, it is imperative that society, through all sectors and industries, prepares adequately for outcomes of automation that can be easily anticipated- one of which is increasing gender inequality in the workforce.   

This gives rise to serious inequality concerns and an increasing gender gap due to exclusion of lower-skilled workers from the changing labour force, leading to further marginalization of these groups. In regards to women in the ICT industry, who exist in the highest proportion in lower-level jobs and the lowest proportion in higher-level jobs, their place in the field is precarious at best. The implications of this are widespread. In a world where artificial intelligence is the future, women may be excluded from what may well be the most secure industry in the economy, at the same time many other jobs typically held by women are being augmented or overtaken by automation. The impacts not only on women, but entire economies, may be devastating.

Denea Bascombe is a Juris Doctor Candidate at the University of Sydney. She earned her Master’s degree from the Public Policy and Global Affairs program at the University of British Columbia.

There is a reason the nonlinear nature of sales causes so many problems. For a very long time, the real process of selling—and buying—hasn’t resembled what shows up on a PowerPoint slide and starts at the far left with Target and ends on the far right with Closed Won. It no longer follows a similar pattern for buyers, little of which has anything to do with the Internet or access to information. If more information made decision-making easier and faster, the cycle would be growing faster and fewer would end in “no decision.”

One of the challenges now is that salespeople perceive the discovery process as the process where they uncover their client’s needs well enough to create a compelling solution. For a long time, this is what discovery meant. There hasn’t been enough conversation about what the client’s discovery process looks like. My first real attempt at defining this idea is in The Lost Art of Closing, where I outlined the Commitment for Time, the Commitment to Explore, the Commitment to Change, the Commitment to Collaborate, and the Commitment to Build Consensus, a series of potentially nonlinear commitments the client needs to make to progress to the point where they can effectively change.

The truth of the matter is, many of us in sales have a good idea about what the client needs before they’ve come to the realization that they need to change at all. When we are asking for Time and the chance to Explore, we are helping the client explore the need to change, and potentially better results, if they aren’t already compelled to change. This process is important to the client, even if you already know what they need.

We’re asking clients to collaborate on the solution because it’s important that they contribute to the initiative and that it serves their need—and this is true even if you could guess at what you’d need to change. We’re also asking them to go through the process of building consensus within their organization because without that buy in the initiative will likely struggle—if it gets off the ground at all.

One of the reasons you have stalled deals in your pipeline right now is because you believe they have completed the discovery work when they still have work to do on their side. And when they have work to do on their side, you have work to do on your side, lest you become misaligned.

The post The Discovery Misalignment appeared first on The Sales Blog.

I’ve been working with a fascinating new client. We’ve been looking at how to improve their prospecting results.

It’s been a fascinating project, in some sense, I may be learning more from them than they have from me–but they seem excited about the changes we are introducing.

First, a little background. They wouldn’t be offended, but what they sell is about the furthest thing from being mission critical that one can imagine. Companies won’t grow their revenue as a result of buying their products. They won’t increase their market share, they won’t grow faster. There will be some cost improvement, employee engagement/satisfaction improvement. But the bottom line, there are many other things that are more important to their typical buyer.

They have the opportunity for “mega-deals,” but those generally happen after the customer has some experience with the products on a much smaller scale. As I looked at their typical deal, initial ARR is about $12-15K. While they sell a physical product, like many SaaS companies, they have a “land and expand” strategy, with very sophisticated account planning and growth opportunities. About 30% of their annual goal is based on new deals, and 70% is based on dramatic expansion within those customers.

They have a fantastic marketing organization, it works very closely with sales in providing inbound leads for sales to follow up. As is usually the case, the volume of inbound leads is never enough, it usually provides about 50% of what sales people need. Sales people have to add to that by a lot of outbound prospecting. They have a small inside sales team doing some lead qualification, but they are also trying to close orders on the first inbound call. So many of the leads, though high quality, the first contact is through the sales person.

Many would say, this can only be done by web based selling. We would drive paid search and other techniques, focusing on the transaction, and drive the customer to a shopping cart buying process.

Others of us would immediately leap to the high volume/high velocity approaches to prospecting. We would look at how to increase the volume of inbound leads through things like paid search, increased web presence, papering the world with endless “Dear Current Occupant” emails. We would have put dozens of outbound SDRs in place and systems that enable them to make hundreds and thousands of dials a day.

We would be ecstatic with results of a couple of percentage point of emails opens, fractions of percentage points of conversations and follow up meetings per dial. We would ratchet up performance by adding volume and velocity–more emails, more dials, an endless insanity of driving volume with decreasing open rates and conversation rates.

This client takes a dramatically different approach to prospecting. They’ve gone very old school, they go “door to door,” but in a very sophisticated way. They are very selective about the doors they knock on, focusing only on prospects that have the potential for mega deals, at some point. The “onesy-twosy” opportunities are the focus of inside sales.

When I first started talking to the customer about their approach and how to improve it, my immediate reaction was, “How is this affordable, how do you get the coverage necessary to drive the business volumes?”

As I started following some of the top performers around, I noticed some startling things. About 30-40% of their “first calls” resulted in initial meetings–and those meetings happened immediately at the first call. There was no appointment setting time gap.

I dove into what was happening. The top performers said, “It’s too easy for the prospect to ignore my emails and phone calls. When I am standing in front of them, they can’t ignore me.”

I kept probing, they said, “It’s easier for me to stand out. No one is showing up at the customer’s receptionist these days. I’m the only person coming in asking questions and asking for a quick meeting. Plus, I get a lot of insight, just by looking around at the office, what’s going on, and so forth. It gives me a way to better connect, both with the person at the front desk and the person I’m meeting with.”

The top performers had tried many of the high volume approaches. They said, “It’s really hard to stand out in an email. Even though we personalize the emails, are very targeted in what we do, our prospects see 100’s of emails a day. Regardless how good our email is, they often get lost in the noise.”

More remarkably, they went on to say, “Even though I’m interrupting them, they generally can find the time to spend 15 minutes with me, that’s all I need.” Their sales cycle is about 30-45 days, after that first meeting, most of it is done via phone or even email. The fact they have established that first face to face relationship is tremendously impactful, enabling them to conduct most of the sales process over the phone.

I have to admit, I was very skeptical about this. But then I did some analysis, looking at some public data about high volume/high velocity approaches.

One data point, from a leading tools supplier talking about high performance in a high volume outbound calling environment, suggested roughly 4% of dials resulted in initial conversations, and 5% of those conversations yielded initial meetings. So a person making 1000 dials a day, would have 40 conversations a day, resulting in 2 follow-on meetings.

By contrast, using the data for one of the top performers in the “old school” prospecting method, he was making roughly 10 face to face prospecting meetings a day, resulting in 4 initial meetings–at the same time! His yield was 200% greater than the high volume approaches that most of us think about.

While I don’t have the data, I suspect the number of qualified opportunities created in those initial meetings was much higher, both due to his targeting and the focus/attention he was able to get in the face to face encounter, versus the meetings established in the high volume, high velocity approaches.

I was still skeptical. I did some quick CPOD analysis, comparing some typical CPOD’s for those using the high volume/high velocity approaches, and this old school, door to door approach. Clearly, the field people were more expensive than inside people, SDRs, and possibly AEs. Both in OTE and in travel expense. But when I did the CPOD analysis, the costs were roughly the same.

Bottom line, the results from this old school, door to door approach stunned me. There are some challenges the client is facing, but most of these have little to do with the soundness of the approach, but more in consistency of execution, targeting, and maximizing the impact in these first meetings. They are looking at how they become more “important” to the customer, while they will never be mission critical.

Outside this client, we are seeing evidence that other old school approaches are coming back, producing tremendous results. Within enterprise accounts, more and more the “door to door,” within the enterprise are tremendously powerful–leveraging internal references and introductory meetings.

I’ve read of a small resurgence in direct marketing and direct mail.

As we look at the reasons for the success of these old school approaches, a lot of it is because, “No one else is doing it, so by being different, we stand out.”

Clearly, these approaches aren’t for everyone. But I think we need to broaden our perspectives about how we prospect and engage our customers. Think of the impact if you do have a “mission critical” solution and you had active engagement of 30-40% of your prospects in the very first contact? The results could be stunning!

Clearly, doing the same thing as everyone else, at higher and higher volumes, may not be producing the results we want. Perhaps re-examining the old school approaches, or looking at combinations with current approaches cna have a tremendous impact.

At the heart of every high-growth predictable revenue machine is a strong sales process. It’s the backbone that supports organizational scale. It enables accurate forecasting and lets sales and marketing work together constructively. And it facilitates fast root-cause analysis when quarterly sales go sideways.

Over the past few years, I’ve personally built, advised, or consulted with over 500 sales organizations. In each case, sales process is a focal point.

What I've learned is there’s no single "right" sales process for every team. Leaders need to understand their market and internal dynamics to reach the best decision for that moment in the company's evolution. I’ve also learned when you’re building a world-class sales process you need to crawl before you run.

While the outcome will be different for every team, here are the evolutionary steps to achieving sales process greatness.

How New Sales Managers Can Build a Sales Process

1) Crawl: Consistent action and documentation

At this stage, it's less about whether you have the "right" processes and more about whether the team can act against them without deviating. Put simply, there is no sales process worse than having no process.

It matters less which rule you pick and much more that you pick one and begin to form muscle memory. For example, try making a quick decision on re-opening lost opportunities versus creating new opportunities in the CRM, and decide whether you’ll call or email leads first.

Next, religiously enter data into the CRM. Log key steps in the sales process, and don't give reps a pass on poor data quality. My rule here is: Structured Data > Unstructured Data > No Data.

When possible, use a pick list in your CRM to keep things clean (structured). If that isn't possible, neatly organize your text (unstructured) into fields by topic. And avoid the "no data entered” scenario.

2) Walk: Objective selling stages and activities

With key rules in place and a lot of data entered into a CRM, it’s time to create selling stages and key activities.

Follow these three rules when creating sales process stages at this step in the journey:

1. Ensure each stage is self-explanatory and easy to understand. Share your selling stages with a new hire or colleague in a different department. If they don’t understand the difference between stage one and two, the stages fail this criteria and you need to work on further clarifying them.
2. There are identifiable differences between each stage. It should also be clear what moves an opportunity from one stage to the next. For example, you should know when to upgrade a lead to an opportunity. Reps must know what makes the stages different and what needs to be done to get a deal to the next stage. If this doesn’t pass your new hire/colleague test, work on differentiating your stages. Are prospects automatically enrolled in a demo of your product or do they need to speak with a salesperson first? These are the kinds of questions you should answer to ensure that each stage is clearly defined.

1. As the stages advance, meaningful progress is made toward a purchase decision. While this may be an overly linear way of thinking about the sale, it should be "roughly right" most of the time and illustrate positive progress toward ringing the sales gong.

These rules help you avoid a comically bad sales process where the stages are "Might," "Could," "Would," and "Should.” To create a better process, use stages like "Demo Scheduled," "Demo Complete," "Trial," and "Contract Sent" instead.”

In the later example, each stage is self-explanatory, it's clear how each is different and how to move from one to the next. It’s also easy to tell when an opportunity moves to the next stage and if progress is being made toward a sale.

For sales activities, keep the list manageable and focus on the most important steps. Consider where reps spend their time and where the organization spends its money. Keep the list to five sales activities, and avoid unnecessary minutia, like "Lunch meeting" or "Out of office meeting."

3) Run: Assisting the buyer's journey

With the CRM running and a sales process in place, it’s time to take the next evolutionary step. Shift away from an internal selling process and move toward the customer’s buying journey.

This is a challenging stage, and the right answer will be different for every company. Stay focused by leaning into these core tenants:

1. Stages are the buyer's process, not the seller's steps. It's no longer about how a rep sells, but rather how a customer buys. Identify key stages and replace "Demo Completed" and "Trial" with "Evaluating Solutions" and "Technical Fit Assessment."
2. Establish buyer and seller exit criteria for each stage. Have reps progress to the next stage by proving certain criteria have been met. Buyer exit criteria is something the buyer's must do to show their journey is progressing. This might mean prospects need to confirm the statement of needs or introduce the rep to their boss. Seller exit criteria is action a rep must take before leaving the stage, like mapping out an org chart or sending a "champion letter." In both cases, the exit criteria must be objective (there is a clear-cut answer as to whether it's been met) and auditable (the manager can prove it happened).
3. Allow buyers to follow their own path. Step away from linear thinking and acknowledge customers make decisions differently. For example, in some cases it might be beneficial to allow a prospect to conduct a technical fit assessment before a demo. Think less about the order in which things need to be done and more about the list of activities that needs to happen to win.

This sales process utopia gives low-performing reps enough guidance to move opportunities in the right direction, while enabling all-star reps to help buyers along their journey.

While every team wants to implement best practices, not all are ready. Start by understanding how mature your organization is today, and remember every team needs to crawl before it runs.

The future is becoming less and less predictable with every election cycle, news cycle, and storm season. But based on their long history in their category, our team of publishers and research analysts at MarketResearch.com share their predictions about a variety of sectors that are undergoing rapid change — including food, technology, health care, automotive, and educational publishing.

1. The Demand for Transparency Will Transform Food Retail

More and more, food shoppers are looking for products that are natural and healthy, and they want proof that what they’re buying is free of chemical-laden substances.

According to David Sprinkle, research director at Packaged Facts, this “show me” standard will continue changing what packaged foods and restaurant menus look like. For example, more specialty manufacturers will avoid artificial food coloring and use the natural coloring of vegetables, fruits, and spices — as in the case of matcha donuts or turmeric ice cream. Instead of blending a dish, chefs will juxtapose and layer featured ingredients, so consumers can more clearly see what their food contains.

The demand for greater transparency isn’t limited to the ingredients on labels, it will also change how food is made, packaged, and presented. “‘If you’re explaining, you’re losing,’ as the political axiom goes, and trend-setting artisans and foodies are increasingly politicized about food processes and choices,” explains Sprinkle. “Today’s empowered consumers expect innovation, but reject the unexplained.”

2. Smart Devices Will Offer New Life-Hacks to Consumers

While the need for transparency will dominate much of food retail, the tech industry will unleash new gadgets that are designed to minimize household problems.

From smartphone-connected thermostats to the sudden ubiquity of voice-controlled assistants like Amazon’s Echo, many of the hottest products on the market now come with smart capabilities, a trend that is expected to grow stronger in 2018 and beyond.

“Basically anything that makes your life easier is going to see technological development,” says Kyle Peters, an industry analyst at The Freedonia Group. “But the biggest trend right now is not just the development and introduction of individual smart products, but the incorporation of those products into a common ecosystem.”

As consumers increasingly turn to smart products for the convenience they offer, manufacturers see growth opportunities in equipping these products with the technology to operate via one, consolidated system, such as the Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple’s Homekit, forthcoming in 2018.

But smarter technology doesn’t only mean simpler systems. Many new products either minimize or completely remove the need for end user intervention. For example, Amazon and Brita partnered up on a water pitcher that automatically orders replacement filters when the current one nears capacity. And once installed, the Google Home-friendly Nest Thermostat studies a household’s schedule and ultimately learns to adjust the temperature accordingly, no action required.

3. Individuals Will Take a More Active Role in Their Health Care

Consumers may increasingly prefer a “hands-off” mode when it comes to their home tech devices, but they are often taking a more proactive approach to their own health care. Many consumers are eager to self-monitor all kinds of health metrics, including genetics.

“Consumers are increasingly bypassing the physician and ordering genetic tests themselves in order to determine their risk for disease and to make lifestyle changes to adjust,” says Bruce Carlson, publisher of Kalorama Information.

Companies like 23andme.com sell not only nationality and ancestry testing but also reports for genetic health risk, which reveal whether one has an increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or other conditions. This practice was held back by the FDA until recently, and medical associations have been wary that these tests will lead to demands for unnecessary procedures.

But public demand for the tests is great. “Watch for this conflict between the public’s desire to know their genetic risk and the cost-cutting concerns of the healthcare system to play out in 2018,” Carlson says.

4. Autonomous Machines Will Extend Far Beyond Automobiles

As the world’s largest automakers clamber to be the first with a self-driving vehicle on the road that is safe enough for the mainstream, manufacturers in other industries wait eagerly for the opportunity to apply the inchoate technology to their own product lines.

“Currently, many of these systems rely on pre-set schedules or app-based remote activation capabilities,” says Jennifer Mapes-Christ, consumer and commercial products expert with The Freedonia Group. “The inclusion of autonomous technology will enable products to respond on their own to changed conditions, activating only when needed rather than when scheduled or when told.”

Sensors under development by the likes of Toyota and GM, whose analytics and object detection capabilities are key to the commercial viability of drones and robots, are hard to come by. Currently, limited supply chains have rendered the technology unavailable or prohibitively expensive for non-automotive applications, because demand far exceeds output. But as regulations are ironed out and public trust in the vehicles is earned, self-driving vehicles will become increasingly commonplace, and so will manufacturers’ access to the technology.

As a result, the high cost of the aerial drones now on the market will come down — by as much as a third in the next five years — and ground-based robots will also see increased adoption in a vast array of applications.

From lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners to personal assistants, security guards, and virtually everything in between, autonomous machines will begin to significantly impact everyday life in 2018.

5. Educational Publishers Will Confront an OER Future

Many of the trends cited so far will create innovation and potentially boost revenue. But some industries, such as educational publishing, face looming challenges in 2018.

“The growth and use of open educational resources (OER) — low-cost and often free — is one of the most significant factors that will shape the future of the $12 billion PreK-12 and higher education instructional materials industry,” explains Kathy Mickey, managing editor at Simba Information.

Simba Information believes the impact likely will be felt more widely in higher education as awareness and acceptance of OER among faculty increases. OER currently is having a negative 1% to 2% impact on industry revenue, according to Simba estimates.

Commercial publishers are going to have to look to technology platforms and tools that accommodate OER for revenue growth. As a result of the OER impact, Simba believes a constriction in the size of the industry will be the norm for some time to come.

Pickup of OER is slower in the K-12 sector, but K-12 publishers are increasingly incorporating OER in their large core programs or curating a variety of OER resources to offer teachers a pre-packaged library of authenticated resources.

Staying Ahead of the Curve

The five industry trends mentioned above are just a few of the developments that are worth keeping an eye on in the coming year. As we look to the future, the one constant we can expect is ongoing change and mounting pressure for companies to innovate at an accelerated pace. The ability to adapt — and keep informed — will be critical for business survival.

If your business is considered too boring and not that innovative, you will have a hard time getting the press to consider giving you a bit of space in the media. And if you are just taking your first steps into the entrepreneurial arena with very little budget that doesn’t allow you to afford a PR agency with valuable contacts with the press, this goal becomes even more complicated.

However, no challenge is too big, as we know that there is a “how” for every “impossible.”

I have said multiple times what the media are willing to cover and that you must think like they think once you decide to try to reach them.

When it comes to the business environment, the media want to speak about (or speak to)

1. Gossip,

2. News,

3. Controversies, and

4. Experts/authorities/celebrities.

If you have just joined the market, no matter how innovative what you do is or how prepared you are, they are not likely to call you as an expert when a specific topic related to what you do is discussed.

And it is even harder when what you do is so revolutionary that it will take much more time than you think to get considered credible. In this case you will need the endorsement of a few influential people to start making the news.

In a few words, needing endorsements to get endorsements, you will need PR to boost PR.

You certainly do not want to have the media gossiping about you, for the simple reason that although they might use words like “it seems,” “they said,” and “according to,” the shadow of doubt that they portray will dismantle your credibility and the sense of trustworthiness you want to convey.

For most people, doubt is already a definitive sentence of guilt.

If you are not an expert, if what you do is not that innovative, and if you are luckily out of the hell of gossip, you can still leverage the power of being controversial.

However, even in this case, the power of being controversial might not be sufficient as you will need to provide evidence that what you are saying can be verified and appears to be not too far from being at least correct, if not true.

To be noted: when it comes to marketing (and PR is a slice of the marketing cake), “true” and “false” are part of a misleading terminology.

“True” and “false” are terms that involve a leap of faith and are recurrently used in religious and ethical environments.

Marketing is neither a religion nor a philosophy. It is not about what you believe to be true or to be false. It is about what works and what doesn’t.

Thus, let “true” or “false” to pastors and philosophers and start thinking about “this works” and “this doesn’t work, so we need to find a new way to make it work.”

That said, before proceeding further in the dissertation of the topic, there is something that I need to say to your benefit to increase the chances that you can appeal to enough journalists to get media coverage, and I will do it by quoting Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, authors of TRACTION: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth:

“What gets a reporter’s attention?

Milestones: raising money, launching a new product, breaking a usage barrier, a PR stunt, a big partnership, or a special industry report.

Each of these events is interesting and noteworthy enough to potentially generate some media coverage. […]

But releasing a new version and breaking a usage barrier in the process is even more attractive to the press.”

When reaching out the press, you should think like the press.

It is not what you think is newsworthy but what the press thinks is noteworthy.

Let’s suppose that you haven’t raised any money, broken a usage barrier, signed a pig partnership; that you do not have a special industry report in your hands, you are not perceived as an expert, and you do not have that much to say which is sufficiently controversial…

How do you get media coverage?

By meticulously planning a PR stunt.

What can be defined as a PR stunt?

Using the clear and concise definition of Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, a PR stunt is

“Anything that is engineered to get media coverage.”

The best way to explain what a PR stunt is, it can be done by recurring to the most extreme example: a terrorist attack.

Indeed, what a terrorist attack does is merely break a pattern.

It is the unexpected that happens.

A terrorist attack breaks the pattern of the normal course of events, and as soon as it happens it gets massive, broad media coverage, conveying most of the media’s attention on it. It is something that can’t be ignored.

Thus, how can you be a PR terrorist?

How can you leverage your creativity in ways that

let you bypass the process of betting on the slim probability

that your press release will be chosen among the many

received by any single journalist on a daily basis?

PR stunts are part of a new discipline in the PR environment which is defined as Unconventional PR.

However, there is a risk involved.

Not every PR is good PR, and the simple fact that someone is talking about you does not necessarily improve the perception of what you do.

PR stunts are risky when they are too unconventional and offend the public morality.

For example, always stretching the dissertation to its extremes, a terrorist attack isn’t a great idea as a PR stunt.

Illegally painting the historical monuments of your city to promote your own creative agency isn’t going to positively increase the quality perception of what you do. It is going to attract media coverage for sure, but the way the press will portray you is the idiot who has ruined the historical heritage of his community (and you will also probably end up in jail for a short time).

Not all creative ideas are good ideas.

If, for example, you aim to promote your company by starting a contest where the winners will get a fat check, that’s how you attract curiosity and how you can positively impact the value perception of what you do.

For this reason, I am going to give you advice you will rarely hear from someone (like me) who is religiously loyal to methods that bring consistent results: get creative!

Brands are built with PR. If you are not in the process of becoming a brand, your chances to stay in the market are as high as your ability to sustain pressure on pricing. Once the pressure on pricing becomes unsustainable, the abyss will inglobe your brightest hopes.

Do PR. Become a brand.

Randomness makes some computations simpler, now it can be done in a single MRAM-like device

To kick off the New Year, frog's team has put together a comprehensive list of 12 tech trends we can expect to reign supreme in 2018, ranging from a shift in the way designers approach medical devices to more expressive hardware designs:

Algorithm Hall of Fame

From banking to dating apps, algorithms power our world. Google's PageRank algorithm, one of the most celebrated pieces of software in computing history, has dramatically changed both the way we access and how we value information. It has become such a profound part of our lives, it's catapulted the company's name into our everyday vocabulary. Don't believe it? Google it.

Algorithms have become celebrities for their public achievements. IBM's Deep Blue came to fame when it beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov. More recently, Watson, their AI platform, shot to stardom for beating the biggest winners from the TV show Jeopardy!, a game that relies on natural language understanding and knowledge of popular culture. Looking forward, this recognition will manifest in everyday behaviors. Soon, we'll make purchasing decisions based on the specific algorithms underpinning our favorite products and services. The AI systems behind a company's products and services will inform our financial, healthcare or transport choices.

Likely candidates for new entries to the Algorithm Hall of Fame? The first system that wins the race for full Level 5 Autonomous Driving Cars. The intelligent trading platform that makes global universal basic income a possibility. The machine learning system that revolutionizes cancer diagnostics and makes prevention possible. No matter what comes next, it's only a matter of time before these gain more attention for their contributions to society.

—Gonzalo Garcia-Perate, Principal Solutions Architect

Machines Before Medicine

The next big thing in preventative medicine may be not be medicine at all, and it's unlikely to come in a pill bottle. Instead, digestible robots will become your body's advocate, patrolling for illness to keep you healthy from the inside, before you may even become aware there's a problem. All the while, it will inform personalized, targeted, intelligent advice to help you get healthier. Trained to detect and treat different medical issues, edible health robots will also travel through the bloodstream to deliver important nutrients.

Similarly, digital therapeutics, or 'Digiceuticals' as it's also called, is a growing health discipline and treatment option that uses digital and connected-health technologies. Many who suffer from conditions like arthritis, migraines and depression will benefit from these digital alternatives to traditional medicine.

A digital approach may also be the next generation of addiction treatment and rehabilitation, especially to fight the growing opioid epidemic. Every day, more than 90 Americans die after overdosing on opioids every day, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse. Digital therapeutics could get addiction rehabilitation into the hands of people who need it most—those who could not otherwise afford treatment.

—Tingyu Chen, Interaction Designer & Jona Moore, Executive Technology Director

Shopping Gets Contextual

There's an incredible amount to gain by bringing more contextual guidance into our shopping experiences. Imagine a grocery store that offered a helpful nudge in the right direction in the form of recipe recommendations and meal plans based on which aisle you were browsing and your stored preferences. Or, say the store had an app that tracked your purchases to help you keep more food from ending up in the trash. Signature moments like these will bring value initially by saving customers time and cost, but they also open the door to scaling these savings to broader economic and environmental levels that stand to impact everyone.

Businesses are already feeling the pressure of bringing new value to their brick-and-mortar locations. Ecommerce and personalized subscription services continue to challenge traditional retail models. Now, companies will look to combining user data with new technologies like augmented reality and machine learning systems to help customers better engage with products both in their stores and in the world-at-large.

Still, companies will have to respect the threshhold between helpful advice and being overly enthusiastic with messaging. Forcing a hard sale and coming off as pushy—especially at the wrong moment of time for an individual user—can put the relationship between a customer and brand at risk.

—Madhavi Rao, Senior Strategist & Toshi Mogi, AVP Strategy and Innovation

Hardware Gets Even Warmer

In 2017, our hardware got a little warmer. New Google Homes and Amazon Echos launched with bases wrapped in fabric, better reflecting the cozy living spaces they're designed to be invited into by customers. We also saw softer hues on devices such as the Nest thermostat and rounded corners on Samsung and LG phones.

Looking ahead to 2018, hardware will start to become more expressive. As our devices continue to hold a critical place in how we live our daily lives, consumers will demand options that fit their style seamlessly and aid in self-expression. Soon, our gadgets will be merged into our fashion choices. Products will be made in brighter, more vibrant colors, with materials that are soft to the touch or that feature prints and graphics we are proud to wear in style.

Meanwhile, even the virtual personal assistants embedded into our hardware are getting warmer. To increase adoption and personalize these experiences, virtual assistants are becoming friendlier, more human and more in-tune with our preferences. Gone are the days of cold, robotic voices and phrases that feel generic to all users—your bots' personalities will soon uniquely complement you.

—Sam Haddaway, Strategist

Great Digital Artists Steal

With augmented reality (AR), any work of art has the potential to become a collaboration. Now's your chance to add your finishing touches to the statue of David by Michelangelo, without being removed from the premises by a museum security guard. Michelangelo's interpretation of the human body will be constantly updated in different augmented layers for the foreseeable future. As more people use AR to contribute their own digital overlays to their physical environments, the question now is: who owns what we see?

AR is still wild territory, with behemoth media companies vying to use this new technology to provide content for the masses. But ownership in the physical world doesn't apply in the digital one. Enter a new age in contemporary art, one where people can express themselves collaboratively in the digital and physical realm. Think mixed-media taken to a whole new dimension, one where people not only have access to public art, but the expectation they can add their own signature without leaving a mark.

For businesses using AR, this means consumers will expect a level of collaboration, designing alternate experiences in tandem with brands and creators…with or without their permission.

—Kristina Phillips, Strategist

A Crypto Democracy

Blockchain is no longer just for currency exchange; it's a new platform for civic engagement. Because it changes how votes are collected and minimizes the risk of fraud or manipulation, blockchain technology may be what helps more voices get heard in government matters and policy decisions. By the 2018 midterm elections, we may just see an end to paper ballots altogether.

The public sector will also benefit from blockchain applications, including helping to manage taxes, registrations—even healthcare operations. Activists will continue to deploy blockchain in unlikely ways to service specific needs. Take, for example, the Bail Bloc app. Known as the "cryptocurrency scheme against bail," the app invites its users to convert their unused power into funds to help those who can't afford to get out of jail.

And business isn't backing away from blockchain anytime soon, especially for certain sectors. Even as the cannabis industry gains momentum legally, conventional banking options are still out of reach. Today, nearly 75 percent of all cannabis businesses operate without bank accounts. Many are turning to blockchain to bring transparency and accountability to their transactions instead. While they may be pioneers now, more traditional industries will soon follow suit.

—Sally Darby, Strategist & Kristina Phillips, Strategist

Immersive Experiences for All

Augmented reality (AR) adds a surreal layer to the real world, while virtual reality (VR) can transport us to entirely new ones altogether. Until now, however, these worlds have been relatively lonely places, designed for us to explore on our own.

So far, the biggest barrier to mainstream adoption of immersive technologies is that using them has historically been a solitary experience. Personal smartphones and fully immersive headsets don't allow multiple users to share the same views, and these systems are not currently designed to interact with one another. Now, the focus will be on helping us see these new worlds together.

The next stage in AR and VR adoption is to develop the accepted hardware and interactions that will help the internet extend into the environments around us. It will introduce new standards of engagement between users, as well as between users and their devices. This expansion into immersive storytelling, education, gameplay and entertainment will have incredible design implications, both in the digital world and in physical spaces. Soon, instead of being lone travelers on our augmented and virtual journeys, we'll have friends along for the ride.

—Seth Mach, Visual Designer

Inclusivity Goes Mainstream

The future of designing to advance the human experience will require a more comprehensive look at, well, the human experience. Not every one of us have the same abilities or the same needs, but everything from the way our cities are planned to the design of most of our products and services assumes that we do. Going forward, it won't be enough to design for some people, or even for most. The real challenge will be to design for all.

More industries are heading in this direction. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made a touching commitment on the company's behalf to design their products to be more accessible to all people, a matter close to his heart having fathered a son born with cerebral palsy. Retailers like Target and Tommy Hilfiger are expanding on their own previous commitments to accessible design, making clothing and goods that suit people of different abilities.

At first, perhaps the biggest challenge for organizations looking to honor inclusivity will be knowing where to start. With a clear focus on empathetic, human-centered design, more businesses will be able to share their best offerings with more customers.

—Justine Lee, Knowledge Manager

AI Disrupts Design

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing everything, and the Design industry is no exception. As AI enters our design toolkit, the opportunities are exponential and unknown. Well-established heuristics, design language systems and user interface toolkits will make it possible to train AI to learn the basic principles of designing a great digital product. Some time-consuming design processes will increasingly be automated, others may become obsolete.

With the help of AI, datasets become rich sources for innovation. Design-forward companies like Airbnb and Netflix have long been integrating AI into their products and services to personalize experiences. Photography platform EyeEm is using machines to assess image data by training AI to define qualities like 'beautiful.' By deploying AI across all phases of a project, designers can take a much broader and more meaningful perspective on their creations.

Meanwhile, as AI becomes embedded into our products and services, designers are tasked not just with creating machines for humans, but creating machines that are human-like. In the process, we're dissecting what it means to actually be human ourselves. As more consumers demand their AI not just have a personality, but a charismatic one that they want in their lives, we enter into an unprecedented level of intimacy between human and machine. To succeed in this world will require a human-centered touch.

—Matteo Penzo, Executive Technology Director & Viral Shah, Senior Strategist

Lo-Fi Data, Hi-Fi Experiences

Looking forward, the way we think about capturing data will change. Along with rich, high-fidelity datasets that reveal a lot about users, there will be a need for a new class of data rich in something else: anonymity. Low-fidelity audio data capture will focus on the quality of a conversation, not the subject matter. With location and heat-mapping sensors, we'll be able to draw conclusions about people's behavior, but not who's behaving. Sensors that capture low-fidelity images enable us to know someone's there, but not who it is.

We all know big data is big business. It's why our smartphones measure nearly every aspect of our existence, from how far we walk to how long we sleep. It's why sensors are embedded in our devices and installed in our spaces to track our movement, then connect to the web to enable smart services. The trouble is they measure too much and collect unnecessary, potentially intrusive information. Concerns around privacy and security are inhibiting the development of data-driven experiences. Enter instead a focus on low-fidelity inputs: collecting the data that is needed and only the data that is needed. Sensors certified and branded as "Lo-Fi" will be welcome everywhere and trusted by all.

—Harry West, CEO

Radical Vehicle Redesign 

Your current car will be the last internal combustion engine (ICE) car you ever buy. For those who buy new cars, your next car purchase is likely to be an electric vehicle (EV). Those who buy used cars will buy their first used EV within just a few short years. The economics are about to flip, making the purchase, maintenance and ownership of ICE cars more expensive than EVs. Car makers are lining up to meet demand. Interestingly, the secondhand value of ICE cars may plummet as owning one becomes uneconomical compared with EVs, further rewarding early adopters of EVs as they palm off their ICE cars.

And your EV may well be the last car you ever own, if you even have cause to purchase a vehicle at all. Uber turns 10 in 2018, and has now given more than 5 billion rides. It's given rise to multiple competitors and even impacted the way we think of transportation.

Yet, despite technological advances and a boom in car-sharing, vehicles look the same as they did 10 years ago and business models remain unchanged. On the near horizon are autonomous cars, which stand to further disrupt the way we commute. Soon, we'll see cars and entire business models redesigned to reflect these massive shifts.

—Tim Morey, VP Strategy & Sam Haddaway, Strategist

Social Media Grows Up

Social media's reputation has taken a beating recently. Critics condemn with increasing alarm its role in empowering bad actors who slander, harass, and spread misinformation—not to mention the massive proliferation of bots trained to do both. From national security probes to multiple studies on social media's impact on mental health, it's clear we as a society are taking a closer look at what social media is. Now is the time to determine what it could be.

Managed, purposeful platforms already provide a strong countercurrent to the status quo. True collaboration is happening in communities as diverse as physicians' social networks and neighborhood networks like Kansas City's Nextdoor, which create places for pooling efforts and solving problems. Governments, too, are learning to harness the medium's strengths. For example, crowdsourcing experiments like New York's 311 Online have inspired the startup Cityflag to build an app that could make participatory government available to any city willing to give it a try.

As scrutiny and regulation increases, users will become more savvy and willing to make these public spaces safe for sharing, learning and connecting. We'll move away from seeing them as just a stage for flaunting our likes and dislikes toward using them as vehicles for empathy and positive action.

—Sheldon Pacotti, Senior Solution Architect

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This post was originally published by frog.

When selling your business, an interesting and important question you should ask yourself is: What is it like to look for a business to purchase from a buyer’s perspective?

A few years ago, someone asked me this question, and unfortunately, although I had a vague idea, I didn’t know what the entire experience of buying a business was like for a buyer. So I put my buyer’s hat on and went looking for a business to buy. I responded to multiple business-for-sale ads, and here is what I discovered:

• Non-response – Between 60% and 70% of the sellers or brokers did NOT respond at all.

• Delayed response – Of those who did respond, only 25% of sellers and brokers did so in a timely manner.

• Cold, canned responses – Most inquiries received a template email in response, without additional information on the business.

• Complicated process – Most sellers and brokers sent forms to complete, including a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Most forms had to be printed, signed and then faxed back. If you’re trying to sell something, why make the process difficult?

• Lack of preparation – Most brokers and sellers were not ready to sell and had incomplete information. In addition, they were unable to answer basic questions, such as whether they offered a non-compete agreement and for how long, or provide specifics regarding the seller financing terms.

The responses were disappointing because only a few were adequately prepared. And those who responded didn’t do so in a timely way and couldn’t provide any useful information. Yes, there were a few solid responses; however, they were rare.

As a seller, you must demonstrate that you’re ready and serious about selling your business when a buyer contacts you. What you should do as a seller:

• Respect the buyer’s time – Looking for a business is a frustrating, time-consuming process. Respond to buyer inquiries promptly and professionally with more information and clear action steps.

• Be specific – Avoid responding to a buyer inquiry with “What do you want to know?” This type of response makes you look unprepared and is insulting to a serious buyer. Anticipate buyers’ questions and offer accurate, complete information that will help them decide if they want to take the next step to buy your business.

• Commit to selling – Be sure you want to sell. Don’t waffle with the buyer. Don’t say you are motivated to sell if you are not — this wastes the buyer’s time.

Based on my nearly 20 years of experience selling businesses, doing the following actions when responding to buyer inquiries can dramatically increase the chances of getting callbacks and keep the interest of buyers in your business:

• Provide timely responses – Responses should be immediate. You can set up an email program to reply automatically with important information, as well as a specific call to action.

• Reply with unscripted emails – Replies must not read like a template. How can you achieve this? Write your emails in simple, natural, conversational language.

• Provide a summary – The email should contain one to two paragraphs on the business, including what was in the original ad, because most buyers often respond to multiple ads and may forget the specifics of yours. This is also a good opportunity to resell the business and persuade buyers to take the next step.

• Make it easy – Don’t include forms that the buyer must print, sign and then fax back to you. Make the process easier by using technology, such as utilizing email, electronic non-disclosure agreements and online forms.

• Show gratitude – When responding, remember to thank the buyer for their time and acknowledge that you understand how the process of buying a business is often frustrating.

• Build trust – Always include your full name and contact information to help build trust and credibility.

In summary, try to place yourself in the buyer’s shoes when selling your business. If you were a buyer, how would you want the owner of the business you’re interested in buying to transact with you? You would probably want to deal with a seller who answers quickly to your questions, makes the process of buying his business easy for you, and is highly motivated and prepared to sell.

Keeping this in mind when you receive an inquiry from an interested party will increase your chances of finding the right buyer for your business.

To learn more tips on how you can deal with buyers to sell your business successfully, read my book “The Complete Guide to Selling a Business: A Roadmap to the Successful Sale of Your Business.”

It’s hard to spend more than 5 minutes on the internet today without stumbling across some Millennial-related content. From killing paper napkins to brunch, we often find ourselves paying lip service to this generation’s preferences. And there’s good reason: from being raised in a digital age to shifting economic pressures, Millennial buying habits are undeniably different from other generations.

But those differences don’t end in B2C territory. According to research we did with Heinz Marketing that surveyed over 500 professionals with buying authority, over 40% of Millennials now influence or make B2B buying decisions.

But they run the show differently.

Millennials have distinct buying preferences that have dramatically changed the B2B buyer journey. And their growing numbers and influence mean B2B marketers can’t just assume Millennials are just a B2C concern – we can’t afford to ignore this cohort of buyers any longer.

Lean into what makes Millennial buyers tick and “Millennial-proof” your marketing with these three core strategies:

1. Speak to Millennials’ specific challenges

Millennials are most likely to start searching for a problem that they are personally experiencing, whereas other generations are more often motivated by solving for team issues.

You may think this confirms the old trope of the self-centered Millennial employee. But it’s likely that they are more self-motivated. Rather than wait for their bosses to ask them to find answers, our research suggests that Millennials take the initiative to solve their specific professional challenges.

Where other generations may have gone through institutional channels and waited for a solution to their problem, Millennials charge head on into the research to solve their problem, bureaucracy be damned!

To successfully reach Millennials, marketers will need to develop a robust understanding of the specific needs and pain points of Millennial buyers in their vertical. What keeps your Millennial buyers up at night? How can you position your product as the solution to their problems?

2. Build a robust social media following

The power and potential of effective social media marketing is often overlooked in the B2B space, assuming the world of Instagram influencers and Snapchat takeovers are someone else’s opportunity.

But increasingly, thanks to the rise of the Millennial buyer, all generations now indicate that they start their research on social media when considering B2B buying decisions.

Millennials also value human connection and personal relationships with the vendors they choose to work with. Social media allows marketers to humanize themselves to their digital audience at the very top of your funnel. By building a strong, engagement-focused social media presence, marketers meet Millennial buyers at the beginning of the buying journey.

Social media is also a great opportunity to showcase your company values. Our research shows that Millennials buy for who you are, not what you’re selling. They prioritize community engagement and company values over specific product details.

Before you brush off this idea, consider this: while the Millennial buyer may not always be the one calling the shots, you may never make it in front of the Baby Boomer or Gen Xer who may ultimately sign off on your product or service if you don’t get your product in front of Millennials. They are most likely to be researchers or influencers on buying committees, weeding out solutions early on and recommending the best fit for the company.

Marketers will need to build a robust social media strategy showcasing their values in 2018 to engage Millennial buyers.

3. Rethink the lead-gated white paper play

The lead-gated white paper download followed by a cold call from your sales team just doesn’t cut it with today’s buyers, especially Millennials.

Over 30% of buyers ranked downloadable content like white papers as the least useful content type for them early in a buying process. And the problem isn’t necessarily that B2B marketers aren’t creating great content, it’s that we’re equating a download with buying intent.

Just because someone downloads your white paper does not mean they are in a buying process (it just means they like your content). Further, Millennials in particular don’t want to be called by sales before they’re ready – 32% of them don’t want to connect with sales until the late stages of their buying journey (if at all) when they already know exactly what they want. This means your sales team is likely wasting their time calling people who downloaded a white paper, but are nowhere near ready to buy.

For B2B marketers, the challenge for 2018 will be creating content that keeps Millennial buyers engaged while they move through the buying process at their own pace. Marketers will need to create content and experiences that offer Millennial buyers continuing opportunities to engage without just grabbing their email addresses and hoping they want to hear from you.

The Millennials are here

2018 will require marketers to up their game – Millennial buyers are here, and they interact with content, and consume your marketing materials differently than previous generations.

To be successful in this changing landscape driven by the rise of the Millennial buyer, savvy marketers will speak to specific pain points, focus on relational channels like social media, and bravely abandon the well-worn lead gated white paper that has been central to the old B2B marketing bible.

Read the full report from SnapApp and Heinz Marketing to get more insight on how to Millennial-proof your 2018 marketing here.

The post Three Strategies to Millennial-Proof Your Marketing in 2018 appeared first on OpenView Labs.

 

I review a lot of content on this topic and am amazed at what I find written about lead cost. For example:

“The average cost per lead across all the companies surveyed is almost $200 ($198.44).Admittedly, that’s a useless statistic, as these figures vary quite dramatically depending on industry, company size, etc.” (see marketing charts analysis of HubSpot’s “2017 Demand Generation Benchmarks Report”)

Others stated that the range is between $35 – $100 for a B2B lead.

Of course, it depends on what you are selling, but common sense tells you that B2B leads for a complex sale (that are worth a sales rep’s time) are probably going to cost more than $200.

Look at this data from an actual PoinClear teleprospecting client:

• One source of leads was PointClear—we sent them only qualified leads and nurtured leads—at an average cost of $1,357.25.
• Five additional sources of leads were from other sources, which included some qualified leads and nurtured leads, but which also included many, many more which were termed just plain “leads” (not even scrubbed, let alone qualified and nurtured) and a lot of “scrubbed” leads which were also not qualified and nurtured. Leads from these sources, most of which will land in a black hole, all cost more than the PointClear qualified and nurtured leads.

This table compares the cost per lead on outbound (PointClear Prospecting/Nurturing) to several other sources of inbound leads.

• The EVP of Sales at this client, a big division of one of the world’s largest software companies, said that he received zero qualified leads from marketing—except for the PointClear outbound leads.
• Marketing on the other hand stated that they had provided sales with more than 4,000 leads.

This problem is classic and represents the disconnect between marketing and sales:

• Marketing is focused on the quantity and cost of the leads.
• Sales is focused on the quality of the leads and revenue generated.

Marketing considered the content syndicator download “leads” to be “too valuable to stop buying” (at $23.15 per gross lead). Because prequalifying the leads adds cost, marketing’s solution was that they would just quit prequalifying the leads and send them straight to sales.

What do you think the chances are that sales will cull through 3,117 suspects to find 40 prospects? Right. Zilch. Yet from one source alone marketing spent $72,158 per quarter on leads that were sent to sales and ignored. You can read more here.   

What is the “right” price to pay for leads? Here are some scenarios to review:  

Lead Rate Break-Even Analysis

To convert to a SaaS solution, calculate lifetime net present value of the average deal.

While this is a simplistic approach, you can see the extent to which average deal size, margin and the percent of revenue that is spent on marketing impacts the allowable cost per lead. Only the $50,000, 60% margin, 15% allowable marketing cost ($1,500 target allowable $ per lead) scenario works for proactive outbound marketing. You can’t cost effectively buy quality leads for low price and low margin offers.

I go through an exercise like this with prospects and clients as we work through whether our services will result in a successful outcome. 

I would be happy to walk you through this exercise if that would be helpful to you.

LinkedIn is a great tool for selling, but most salespeople are using it wrong. They’re treating it it’s a telephone or email and spamming people.

We’ve all gotten them (and many of you have sent them). I’m talking about the LinkedIn connect requests that are then instantly followed by some lame pitch or request for your time so push some irrelevant ware on us.

They’re obnoxious.

There is a better way and a more effective way and I talked about it on LinkedIn. You can see the video here.

Start by creating a list of all the problems your product or solution solves, both business and technical problems. Make them substantive and real. For ex: If you sell an enterprise video editing software, list all the problems editors, production companies, editing companies, movie houses etc. face with current or outmoded editing software. Be specific, and robust. Make the list as substantive as possible. Don’t list small, inconsequential, problems, list and address real, big, measurable problems.

Once you’ve created your list, outline the impact on the organization/company when those problems exist. How is a company affected by those problems?

Now, write a LinkedIn post or do a LinkedIn video on one of the problems, why it’s a problem editors need to pay attention to, the impact of the problem and ways to fix the problem.

Do this for 12 weeks, or 90 days.

That’s right, go to your list once a week and create a new LinkedIn post or video. Do it weekly for 12 weeks.

Then, everytime someone likes the post or video, go to their profile and click connect. Thank them for liking the video. Go to every comment and comment back then, go to the commenter’s profile and connect with them.

Do this every day for 90 days.

How many people do you think will like your posts?

How many people do you think will comment?

How many of those people do you think will be your target market?

Pay attention, and see who is commenting on more than just one article.  Pay attention to their title. Are any of the people commenting or liking, your target market?

If they are, reach out and ask if they are struggling with any of the problems you’ve written about and if you can get them any more information on the issue. Ask them if they are having any other types of problems they’d like you to address.

The key is to engage with their interest and around their timing. Rather than interrupting your prospects and irritating them with cold, uncomfortable, Inmails and connect requests, let them find you, using valuable, usable content. Get your 15 minutes in small chunks on their timeline.

LinkedIn is too robust a platform to use it like phone or email. There is no need to cold call, or do cold outreach on LinkedIn.   It’s perfectly suited to drive engagement and connection if you do it right.

Stop the LinkedIn cold outreach. Create a list of the problems your product or solution solves, start talking about and writing about those problems and let your prospects come to you.

 

The post Prospect on LinkedIn Without Being a Pesky Salesperson appeared first on A Sales Guy.

I’m not sure that what you might describe as the “traditional” approach to sales skills development - sending sales people on an occasional formal sales training course based on one of the many off-the-shelf methodologies - has ever delivered consistent results in terms of driving sustained performance improvement.

And that was in yesterday’s relatively static marketplaces! In today’s fast changing business environment, sales competencies require continuous honing and development. Simply repeating what worked a few short years (or even months) ago no longer guarantees future success. This has a number of significant implications.

First, skills development programmes themselves have had to become more agile - evolving to more of an on-demand, self-paced, customised-to-the-individual approach. There’s still an important role for team-based training, but bringing sales people together in a room once a year (or less) isn’t going to satisfy these new needs.

The role of the sales manager as coach and mentor has never been more important - and yet many organisations have not historically trained their managers to perform these critical roles (or appointed them because of their innate skills in these areas). This has to change - and is already changing in more progressive sales organisations.

A COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY

But even enlightened organisations can by themselves only solve part of the personal skills development puzzle. The development of sales competencies is not just an organisational responsibility - it also requires the personal and collective commitment and contribution of everyone in the sales team.

I don’t know about your approach, but I cannot imagine hiring a sales person nowadays who did not demonstrate a powerful personal commitment to ongoing development and learning, regardless of what their organisation provided for them. We need to recruit people that are hard-wired for continuous personal development.

NO ROOM FOR "KNOW IT ALLS"

And we need to assess our existing sales people for these same positive character traits - and make it clear that these attitudes are now the expected norm for every player in the team. Managers have a responsibility to constructively confront sales people who believe that they know it all and that there is nothing left for them to learn.

These "know-it-alls" and so-called “experts” are often lone wolves and frequently a disruptive presence in training programmes. I can recall a number of such experiences on training courses in the past, and I imagine you might be able to do the same.

TAPPING INTO COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE

We need to find ways of tapping in to the collective experiences of all of our sales people. We need to encourage and enable them to share what they have learned with their colleagues - and to accept that it’s OK to ask for help when facing an unfamiliar or uncomfortable situation.

If this is at odds with a traditional “macho”, every-sales-person-for-themselves sales culture, all well and good. If such organisations have not already failed, they surely will, and sooner rather than later. No modern sales organisation can survive or thrive without a collective learning environment.

Collective learning environments can, of course, be facilitated by technology, and there are a growing number of platforms that are capable of supporting such initiatives. But technology by itself isn’t going to address the issue - it can only help when supported by both executive and collective individual commitment.

FROM "ALWAYS BE CLOSING" TO "ALWAYS BE LEARNING"

Rather than “always be closing”, surely our modern mantra must be “always be learning”. And there’s an obvious upside - organisations that practice collective learning and shared best practices don’t just performer better - they are also better places to work.

There’s a powerful flywheel effect at play here: collective learning organisations make fewer mistakes, qualify more effectively and execute winning sales strategies more consistently.  Because they attract and retain better people, they lay the foundation for both current and future success.

But they also recognise that as an organisation, there are limits to what they can formally teach, and that they also need to create an environment where everyone is encouraged to play their full part in continuously enhancing their own skills and knowledge and that of their colleagues.

This article first appeared in the December 2017 edition of the International Journal of Sales Transformation, and is reproduced with permission.

IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU'LL PROBABLY ALSO APPRECIATE:

WEBINAR: Selling in the Breakthrough Zone

Our Guide to the Value Selling System

12-Point Value Selling Self-Assessment

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales and the founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, home of the Value Selling System®. Following a successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates, Bob now works with a growing client base of tech-based B2B-focused high-growth businesses, enabling them to progressively create, capture and confirm their unique value in every customer interaction.

Join Richardson and AA-ISP as we kick off the New Year with a complimentary webinar, Volume Doesn’t Equal Value: Unlock the Potential of Inside Sales with Consultative Telephone Selling.

Inside Sales is quickly becoming the engine of growth for businesses today. Advancements in sales and marketing automation mean that sellers can reach more customers in less time. However, volume doesn’t equal value. Winning the sale still requires compelling solutions that connect with deeper customer needs.

The webinar topics will include:

• How to add value to customers by identifying and pursuing cross selling opportunities
• How to inspire action from customers in order to close the business or advance the sale
• How to use active listening in order to get a clearer read on the customer’s needs
• How to prepare in a systematic and efficient manner with a clear sales objective for each call
• How to demonstrate credibility quickly and connect with customers in order to engage in a meaningful dialogue

The webinar will take place on January 11th at 2:00 p.m. EST. If you are interested in attending or think that your colleagues may be interested, you can register here.

We hope that you’ll join us.

 

The post Complimentary Webinar – Volume Doesn’t Equal Value: Unlock the Potential of Inside Sales with Consultative Telephone Selling appeared first on Welcome to the Richardson Sales Blog.

The holidays have winded down and it’s time to work your sales process back into shape! I’m ready to jump into 2018 and at the risk of sounding a little dark, this is my favorite time of the holiday season. When it ends.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to hang out with family and friends, relax, and eat lots and lots of great food. But eventually the relaxation period has run its course and it’s time to take our recharged batteries back to the real world.

It’s exciting, and I’m excited to talk through the steps of nailing down a truly beneficial sales process. But first, I’d like to talk a little about what a truly beneficial sales process looks like, and maybe little about what it doesn’t look like.

What it is:

• Easily understood by everyone working with prospects in it
• Complete and reliable in regards to the steps needed in it
• Crystal clear about what qualifies a deal to be added to the pipeline
• A way to visualize deal amounts

What it isn’t:

• Different for everyone on the sales team, or a process with set stages that mean different things to different people
• Incomplete or containing steps that aren’t absolutely essential
• Indescriptive about when a deal should be created
• Agnostic of prioritization between deals

Alright, let’s get this sales process solidified. This post is your first step towards a better sales process in 2018.

Create a Solid Sales Pipeline Blueprint

The first step in creating a solid sales pipeline blueprint is to map out every step that could happen in a sale.

Remove Unnecessary Steps

Review the list of every step in search of steps that are unnecessary. Unnecessary steps can be skipped without keeping a sale from going through. Think about things you absolutely need to do to move a prospect to the next stage of the deal. For example, if there’s a stage for sending a follow-up email I’d consider that unnecessary. If a prospect is ready to move to the next stage we probably wouldn’t make them wait until we send a follow-up email.

Remove Redundant Steps

Redundancies can be a little harder to identify than unnecessary steps. Redundant steps tend to be steps that can usually be combined together (however, this isn’t always the case).

Take these steps for example:

• RFP sent
• Proposal received
• Sent edits to proposal
• Received edited proposal
• Returned signed proposal

These steps are a little redundant, they can be turned into something like this:

• RFP Sent
• Returned signed proposal

It stands to reason that a signed proposal has seen any edits needed.

Remove Steps That are Out of Your Control

Steps that are out of your control are usually handled internally within the prospect’s organization. Being as they’re handled internally and are out of your control they can be very difficult, or even impossible, to report on.

Some companies will perform a legal review before they can agree to a contract. However, this shouldn’t be part of your sales pipeline. You don’t have any documentation to prove that it happened so capturing it in a CRM isn’t practical.

A prospect might tell you that they held an internal review of your tool, and they very well may have, but you can’t prove it. Also, you’re probably not going to fact check them to make sure they did a review before moving forward with the sale.

In the interest of keeping the steps in your pipeline reliable and complete, we should leave these kinds of steps out.

Put Stages in the Past Tense

Placing pipeline stages in the past tense will help remove any confusion around stage meaning and what needs to be done for a prospect deal to enter a stage.

It’s blatantly obvious, based on the tense of the stage names, that a deal within this stage has completed the what’s outlined in the title of it.

Let’s look at the example above. “RFP Sent” would mean that any deal in that stage is associated with a prospect who sent an RFP. Blamo.

Use The Prospect’s Point of View

By putting the stage titles in the prospect’s point of view we can create an environment that’s more helpful than pushy. Instead of trying to push prospects to the next step, this small step will help sales teams think about what they can do to guide the prospect to the next stage.

Here are a couple of examples of this adjustment:

• “Held product demo” should be “Attended product demo”
  • The salesperson might think, “before this person can attend a demo we need to get it scheduled, to do that we need to coordinate on a meeting time.”
• “Received signed contract” should be “Sent signed contract”
• “Received RFP” should be “Sent RFP”

The Benefit of a Clear Sales Pipeline

Use this pipeline to identify the number of deals in each stage and bottlenecks in your process.

• The clear stage names will facilitate consistent sales stage use across large teams making it easy to identify issues
• Wording the stages from the perspective of the prospect will help salespeople think about how they can help the prospect get qualified to move to the next stage, instead of pushing them through the pipeline
• Using only absolutely necessary stages will keep sales teams several steps ahead by always knowing what’s next, and after that, and after that

Focus on the Point of Entry

When it comes to adding deals to a pipeline we need to find a balance.

• If it’s too difficult to enter, sales will be lost
• If it’s too easy to enter, the pipeline will be clutter with unqualified deals

Determine What Really is a Good Point of Entry

Consider the absolutely necessary first step in a pipeline, does anything need to happen before that, or can it be the trigger? In my experience, I’ve found that action-based triggers to be the most reliable in initiating new deals. Due to their timely nature, a deal will be created when someone is showing buyer signals.

For example, it might be absolutely necessary for the prospect to attend a demo before they can purchase a service. It stands to reason that before they can attend a demo they have to request it. Luckily, requesting a demo can be handled with a form, and that form submission action can create a new deal while also sending a notification to a salesperson to schedule the demo.

My favorite things about using automation to create deals are that they will be consistently labeled and all deals that match the criteria of the automation will be captured. This significantly reduces the likelihood of human error and will make reporting on sales opportunities won or lost more complete.

The Benefit of a Balanced Point of Entry

Use this point of entry to automate the deal creation as much as humanly possible.

• This will standardize nomenclature, making the pipeline easier to manage
• Ensure that all deals are getting captured
• Help prioritize deals and boost sales work efficiency
• Maximize reporting on potential sales

Use Deal Amounts to Visualize Pipeline Value

Standardizing value as much as possible can further facilitate valuable and scalable automation. When a new deal is created automatically a deal amount can be assigned to that deal.

Unfortunately, this isn’t always possible. Some companies offer several different services or have a lot of customization, and this can make it hard to assign a deal amount until after a deal has made it through some portion of the pipeline.

Luckily, later stages can be used to set up automation. Let’s suppose there’s a stage in a pipeline where a deal amount should be known. This is something that can be built into a sales process and supported with automation in the form of a sales notification to a salesperson when a deal enters a certain stage and doesn’t have a deal amount assigned yet.

The Benefit of Reliable Deal Amount Allocation

Using deal amounts will generate valuable context for a pipeline.

• It will reveal how much money is actually moving through our sales process
• We can accurately predict when we’ll see payment from our deals
• Further prioritization can happen on top of what we discussed earlier by letting us identify larger yielding jobs

Use this guide to map out a rock solid sales strategy for 2018. The steps outlined above provide a framework for developing a strong sales process. However, getting to the heart of what makes a good process for your company requires strategic conversations. While HubSpot has some resources for helping you map out your sales plan, you may want additional support.

Some trends are fun to watch, but others are downright worrisome. Especially in the world of tech, where the only constant is change. IT professionals across Europe and North America were asked to share 2018 tech trends that keep CIOs and CTOs up at night. Below are the four most common responses.

1. Security, security, security

Chances are, if your company hasn’t been attacked yet, it will soon. According to the 2017 U.S. State of Cybercrime survey, 36% of businesses say they were impacted by a phishing attack last year. That number rose 10% from the previous year.

Kean Graham, CEO of MonetizeMore, believes the rising value of cryptocurrencies will continue to attract more hackers and fuel their desire to succeed. Echoing his prediction of a darker future, Nathan Stallings, president of Matrix Integration, predicts the number of ransomware incidents will at least double in 2018. Stallings expects variations of WannaCry and NotPetya, plus Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) will fuel the spike.

Companies are responding by taking more proactive measures. According to Upwork’s latest skills index, penetration testing and vulnerability assessment rank as the fourth fastest growing skill in the U.S. freelance job market.

“Organizations should focus on prevention methods like security awareness training, detection methods like managed security services, and recovery,” says Stallings. In addition to training employees, be sure to establish security policies for protecting sensitive data when utilizing freelancers and other contractors.

2. New sources of security threats

For 2018, expect to see more focus on cloud security. Especially as companies increase use of remote workers and transition more of their business to the cloud. “The challenge will continue to be defining the security responsibilities of the cloud provider versus the organization,” says Stallings.

With technology in everyone’s pockets, some sources for potential security threats may easily be overlooked. Think about how many times you’ve seen people take pictures of whiteboard sessions on their unsecured personal phone. “Employees won’t change this risky behavior unless there is an easier method to digitize content,” says Adrian Cable, CTO and president of Kaptivo.

The IoT (internet of things) and connected devices also open the doors wider to security threats. Gartner predicts that by 2020, more than 25% of identified attacks in enterprises will involve the IoT. However, companies seem ill prepared as Gartner foresees the IoT will account for less than 10% of IT security budgets.

3. Tougher to get data and analyze it

Current usage indicates that machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) will become an increasing part of daily business operations. While many feel overwhelmed by the amount of data ML and AI produces, Mark Estes, CTO and co-founder of SoCu, believes it’ll make data more difficult to access.

“Data is getting more consolidated within a handful of major corporations. Companies that used to be more open to sharing data are starting to lock down the access to only themselves and a few key partners,” Estes says. “There are also fewer ways to obtain the amount of data needed to truly start leveraging machine learning and AI. Without this data, it is harder to innovate and create new market opportunities by leveraging these new AI technologies.”

If you have enough data, you’ll probably run into another problem: hiring data scientists to analyze it. An MIT Sloan Management Review showed 40% of the companies surveyed were struggling to find and retain data analytics talent.

You probably won’t find any relief in 2018. It’s predicted demand will create 905,000 more jobs involving data management and interpretation skills.

Many companies are accessing talent through the flexible workforce, but there’s competition there too. In Q4 of 2016, data science was the third fastest growing skill in demand on Upwork.

4. GDPR compliance

One of the biggest stressors in 2018 is compounded by a May 25th deadline. The European Union’s new regulation, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), moves companies to better address the entire lifecycle of customer data. GDPR also has the power to enforce heavy financial penalties for personal data breaches.

“As a result, expect substantial new investments in securing data,” says Dr. Salvatore Stolfo, CTO of Allure Security. “We’ll see lots of investments in encryption and other data security technologies such as active defense, or ‘hacking back.’ It comes down to one essential question that CTOs will have to answer: do you know where your data is, and who is accessing it?” says Stolfo.

Surfing the tsunami

Dealing with the four stressors mentioned above is difficult enough, but CIOs and CTOs must also prevail under tight deadlines and tighter budgets. Perhaps one of the biggest worries they face is keeping up without becoming overwhelmed.

To achieve their business objectives without spreading their resources too thin, many IT leaders follow a solid business strategy. Part of that strategy may include utilizing more freelancers and agencies to access niche expertise and complete critical projects faster.

Generating qualified leads remains a top challenge for B2B marketers. Here's how you can address three key B2B buying trends to earn buyers' attention and trust--and improve the quality of your lead generation. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

The days when marketers can design one-size-fits-all marketing campaigns for brands and products are gone. Consumers now want information tailored according to the preferences and needs of their age group.

You can’t target Baby Boomers using Snapchat videos, can you? No – right.

This is exactly why you need to change your approach from one-size-fits-all to generational marketing to be more productive.

Generational Marketing Allows You to Influence Entire Family

If you are using the old marketing tactics, chances are you will fail to impress some members of the family. But with generational marketing, you can positively influence the shopping decisions of the entire family.

But for this, you first need to identify and segment generations that an average family usually consists of.

According to HandMadeWritings, you can divide the living generations in the United States into six segments:

• I. Generation and Silent Generation are the oldest, born between 1901 and 1942. They do not make a large portion of actual buyers, so if you want to leave them out, you won’t miss much.
• Baby Boomers, born between 1943 and 1960, is the most important generation for marketers. Half of the consumer expenditure is done by this age group.
• Generation X consists of the people born between 1961 and 1981.
• Generation Y or Millennials, are the comparatively younger generation who have started to spend a lot online. They were born between 1982 and 2000.
• Generation Z or Boomlets are the youngest generations and future buyers, born after 2000.

Use Generational Marketing for Competitive Advantage

Generational marketing is still evolving. It’s also a relatively new marketing technique that can give you an edge over your competitors.

The better you understand each generation, the better you will become at creating content that can influence them.

For example, the social media savvy younger generation follows influencers on social media. These are the influential people on social media with a unique relationship with their followers.

This gives birth to an entirely new marketing strategy – influencer marketing, which is very effective if you are targeting Generation Z.

Here are some more tips to target each member of the family.

• Baby Boomers: They are already retired or reaching the retirement age, but that doesn’t stop Boomers from spending. This is not going to change for at least a decade, before Millennials will take over.

According to a retirement survey by the Employee Benefits Research Institute, almost 60% of baby boomers are looking to improve their life compared to their working years. They are willing to spend more to live a better life after retirement.

They are fond of simple messages, read brief blog posts, use mostly Facebook over other social media platforms, and usually make a loyal customer.

• Generation X: They are also influenced by brands and remain loyal. They are very active on Facebook and Twitter, but not on Instagram and Snapchat. They value honesty and work ethic.
• Generation Y: They are similarly active on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook ads are a good way to reach Generation Y. They like reading long, in-depth blog posts that help them learn something new. They also prefer reading reviews before buying something.
• Generation Z: The best way to reach them is through social media and video marketing.

If you are a marketer, Baby Boomer is the market segment where the money is for now. Prioritize this segment as they often buy for their kids and grandparents as well.

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All images provided by author under his or her own license.

If you want to learn how to engage in productive thinking, Tim Hurson is the guy to teach you how. Tim is the author of a book called “Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking” and this conversation is part of the celebration of the tenth anniversary of that book, which you can pick it up right now on Amazon. Anthony admits that this interview starts off a little weird for him because he and Tim have been acquainted with each other for a long time and they belong to a peer group where they communicate with each other often, but before this conversation, they’d never spoken face to face. It’s also a little weird because Anthony’s book, “The Lost Art of Closing” cites one of Tim’s books “Never Be Closing” on the cover flap as a bad idea. But in spite of that difference, which turns out not to be that much of a difference, Tim and Anthony are completely aligned on many things when it comes to life and sales. You’ll enjoy this stimulating conversation with Tim about how you can think more productively and therefore be more successful, so be sure you take the time to listen.

Productive Thinking As The Key to Greater Sales Success, with Tim Hurson - Ep 101Click To Tweet

How you as a salesperson can get the absolute right to the next deal with the person you just closed

This conversation starts out with a bit of banter between Anthony and his guest, Tim Hurson, over what Tim was trying to say when he wrote a book called “Never Be Closing.” Tim’s point was that thinking of things as “closed” could lead you to think that the deal is done, when it’s really only the beginning. What you’re actually doing is you’re gaining commitments, you’re gaining friends, you’re establishing relationships that you don’t want to end – which will lead not just to the first sale but to the second sale and all the sales beyond that. That’s where the conventional idea of closing is “Finish the deal” but where Tim says he never wants to finish the deal. He wants to open more deals. It’s what he calls having an absolute right to the next deal you sell in such a way that you don’t ever have to sell to that person again. Find out how you can build THOSE kinds of relationships, on this episode.

You’ve got to listen to this episode if you want to understand the way of thinking that enables you to be more creative, productive, and effective

Tim Hurson used to go around the country putting on seminars and giving speeches, and when he did he’d often meet people on planes. It was the typical situation where you start talking to somebody, asking, “What do you do?” and as soon as somebody asked Tim what he did he would say things like, “You know, I teach people how to think creatively.” They’d immediately go back to their magazine. But one day, completely on a whim, Tim answered the question by saying, “I teach people how to think more productively.” The difference in the response he got was nothing short of amazing. Suddenly he had made a connection with the person he was talking to because what was important to them was to be productive. Tim’s come to believe that there’s a way of thinking that actually allows you to learn better, to plan better, to solve problems better, to do better, and ultimately to BE better as a human being. Find out what that way of thinking is on this episode of In The Arena.

Listen to this ep if you want to understand the way of #thinking that enables you to be more #productiveClick To Tweet

Productive thinking has many enemies. You’ve got to clearly know what they are and how to overcome them

The second chapter of Tim Hurson’s book, “Think Better” speaks to the things that prevent us from thinking productively. He points out three of them: Monkey Mind, Gator Brain, and The Elephants Tether. In this conversation with Anthony, Tim walks through two of those three enemies to productive thinking, explaining how they work in the brain, why they happen, and what you can do to overcome them. This is a section you’ll relate to entirely. Anthony says the ability to master these enemies is the difference between consistently working in a distracted state and beginning to work in a productive state of mind. Don’t miss out on this practical conversation.

Most people are too quick to answer the questions that come up in life. Staying in the question longer could lead to greater solutions. Here’s how

Throughout life and business, we have questions to answer, dilemmas or obstacles to overcome. One of the highest human instincts is to find answers to questions – but often we rush to the answer too quickly. Tim Hurson says we don’t stay in the question long enough, which means we don’t do a good job of problem-solving. The reason we do this is that we’re really uncomfortable with not knowing, we’re uncomfortable with not nailing down things. We want to attribute a reason to things and the sooner we can do that the more quickly we’ll get back to a place of comfort – whether the answer we’ve come up with is the best answer or not. Discover how you can unlock untapped aspects of your productivity and creativity by staying in the question longer. Tim Hurson calls it “Productive Thinking” and you can learn all about it on this episode.

Most people are too quick to answer the questions that come up in life. Staying in the question longer could lead to greater solutions. Here’s howClick To Tweet

Outline of this great episode

• Why this conversation with Tim Hurson starts off a bit weird for Anthony
• The confusion between “Always be closing” and “Never be closing”
• Why productive thinking and creative problem solving are so vital
• The things that keep us from thinking productively
• The difference between reproductive thinking and productive thinking
• Do you “stay in the question” long enough? Why should you?
• Tim’s best advice for those who want to begin thinking more productively

Resources & Links mentioned in this episode

• www.ThinkXIC.com
• Tim’s website: www.TimHurson.com
• Tim on Twitter
• Camps/retreats Tim leads: www.MindCamp.org
• Tim’s Book: “Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking”
• Anthony’s Book: “The Lost Art of Closing”
• Tabu board game

The theme song “Into the Arena” is written and produced by Chris Sernel. You can find it on Soundcloud

Connect with Anthony

Website: www.TheSalesBlog.com

Youtube: www.Youtube.com/Iannarino

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iannarino

Twitter: https://twitter.com/iannarino

Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/+SAnthonyIannarino

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iannarino

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