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15 Feb 17:06

The One Thing I Wish I Knew at 22…

by Chris Muyo

Sales Hacker has always aimed to be the Next Generation of Sales. A large piece of this mission are the actual next generations, Millennials and Gen Z’ers.

According to Forbes, the workforce will be over 75% Millennial and Gen Z by the year 2030. Some stats say as high as 46% by 2020. That’s 3 short years from now. We’re here to help prepare them.

They say the dumb never learn, the average learn from their own mistakes, and the smart learn from the wisdom of others more experienced than them. So we set out to collect valuable advice from people who all started in some way or another in B2B sales or marketing, and followed different paths that made them successful.

We asked them, “What is The 1 Thing You Wish You Knew When You Were 22?”

The following advice is broken into 4 categories. These categories were created after we reviewed the responses, and they almost selected themselves.

  • Learning
  • Earning
  • Growing
  • Knowing

Take a look, write stuff down to remember for later, and add your advice, feedback, or stories in the comments.

*Responses presented in alphabetical order

LEARNING

1. Amit Bendov

CEO and Co-Founder, Gong.io

  • A little more humility won’t kill you. Decide faster, delegate, and go for it.

2. Carolyn Betts

Founder & CEO, Betts Recruiting

  • Be open – Your first job won’t be the most glamorous job you’ll ever have. You’ll likely have to start at the bottom and prove yourself. In order to get the job of your dreams you have to start somewhere. When you get into a company you love, work hard, prove yourself, gain experience and have success stories. It’ll pay off when you’re interviewing for a promotion or for your next job.

3. Christelle Flahaux

VP of Marketing, DOMO

  • In business, knowing and understanding data is the key to success. It takes the emotion out of the equation and allows people to understand opportunity and challenges.

4. Daniel Barber

VP of Sales, Datanyze

  • Understand the value of emotional intelligence. Managers possess the grit and functional skill to succeed, however leaders harness emotional intelligence to develop talent and empower others to achieve their goals.

5. David Cancel

CEO, Drift (ex-CPO, Hubspot)

  • The one thing I wish I knew when I was 22 is that there’s only one shortcut that will accelerate your career: learning from others. Warren Buffet said “It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes” and that quote has stuck with me because I’ve felt it first hand. Don’t worry about hacks or tricks. Focus on optimizing your career for learning. Hear more from David at The Revenue Summit!

6. Dave Mattson

CEO & President of Sandler Training

  • Have a sales process.  Hard work isn’t a guarantee for success.  Have a process and follow it. If you take the lead in the buyer-seller dance, you will be better off.  Otherwise, you’ll be constantly answering questions which you falsely think will lead to a close, but you’ll end up with nothing except spending a lot of time giving free consulting. You can write down what to do each step of the way or, better yet, ask successful people in your company what they do.  This will be a living document, so constantly improve it.

7. Emmanuelle Skala

VP of Sales & Customer Success, DigitalOcean

  • I wish I learned how to say no.  How to prioritize better.  How to speak up and let the BS of work get to me.  I wish I took advantage of the time when I had less responsibilities and instead of trying to get ahead and work – I slowed down. I’m glad I figured these things out eventually — success is not linear and not measured by titles or quota achievement; it’s measured by happiness.  

8. Jake Dunlap

CEO, Skaled

  • You have to manage up and take your growth into your own hands. Just doing your job and being the best salesperson won’t get you promoted. Being a great or good salesperson is the prerequisite to get you considered but you have to demonstrate other qualities of the new role BEFORE you ever get into that role to get the bump. Talk to your VP or director about what they look for in that next role outside of the numbers and if you can meet once a month to check in on your progress as you grow.

9. Jamie Shanks

CEO, Sales for Life

  • That my formal learning would only be the start of my adult learning.  My undergrad and masters degree were a warm-up to the massive amounts of infield, in-classroom, on-demand learning I would need to absorb to become an effective seller.  The sales world has changed so much in the last 10 years, I feel like I’m still a rookie sometimes!

10. Jim Dickie

Co-Founder, CSO Insights at Miller Heiman Group

  • Understand that sales is absolutely a real career. I stayed in it, climbed the ladder to being a CSO (Chief Sales Officer) and loved what I did.

11. John Barrows

Owner, JBarrows Sales Training

  • When I was 22 I didn’t know much and the only thing I thought I could control was my effort so I just decided to work harder than everyone else. I made more calls, went on more meetings, went to more events, etc. The whole adage of working smart, not hard didn’t connect with me since I didn’t know how to work smart.

You can apply A/B split testing to everything you do in sales: objection handling, dealing with gatekeepers, messaging, etc. All you need to do is identify something you want to work to improve, come up with two different approaches and see which one works better. By taking this approach you can get a lot better a lot faster than I did.

12. Julie Sokley

VP of Global Sales Operations, AutoDesk

  • I wish I knew the importance of getting global experience and learning not only a second language but a third one. Today’s millennial bilingual resume is table stakes. But those who are trilingual (or more) or are fearlessly pursuing global projects or roles very early in their careers, are the ones who will advance quickly. Taking a role outside of your home country gives you invaluable experience both personally and professionally. Hear more from Julie at The Revenue Summit!

13. K.V. Rao

Founder, Aviso

  • I wish I knew that Sales was hard, really really hard, and that the best and brightest want to work on hard things, but it is not just science and math careers that provide that challenge and reward.

14. Ken Krogue

Founder & President, InsideSales.com

  • When I was 22 years old I thought I knew everything. Now I know that I don’t. In fact, I have learned that I know very little. But I have learned to observe, ask lots of questions, form a theory, and then test that theory. It all comes down to what I call the science of selling; a four letter word that starts with “T”, ends with “t”, and is pronounced “Test.”

15. Kraig Kleeman

Founder, KraigKleeman.com

  • When I was 22, I wish I had known the reality that facts always trump both opinions and emotions.  To elaborate on this more fully, I wish I had a stronger ability to restrain both my emotions and my opinions.  My inability to exhibit this restraint was rooted in both impatience and naivete.  It further had its roots in my lack of experience at seeing the power of independently verified research anchored in intellectual integrity.

16. Lesley Young

Global SVP, GM Commercial & Online Sales, Box

  • At 22, you have a lot of knowledge but not a lot of experience. Every role, every team, every manager, and every company presents an opportunity to learn and grow your experience base. In every role, actively push yourself out of your comfort zone and seek out those who been or done what you haven’t and learn from their experience.

17. Lloyed Lobo

Founder, Boast Capital

  • The one thing I wish I knew as a 22 year old would be that sales is one of the most important skills in business. While I studied engineering, I regret not doing sales jobs through high school and college. I moved from an engineering role to sales early in my career and to date it’s been the most valuable skill to me as an entrepreneur. Even if you’re not in sales, the skills learned will help you network better, communicate better, present yourself better, negotiate better…

18. Lynne Zaledonis

VP of Marketing, SalesForce Sales Cloud

  • Some of you will work for 40 more years. Yes. 40. So use your time wisely early on to create a foundation of skill sets that will carry you through a successful and fulfilling career. Build your network. Go to lunch to grow relationships and ask the leadership in your organization to coffee. That interesting person in your bootcamp could be a CEO in 20 years. Be curious. Listen, learn and ask for feedback from your peers and managers. Hear more from Lynne at The Revenue Summit!

19. Maria Pergolino

SVP marketing & Sales Development, Apttus

  • Work hard and be patient. You are not an expert at anything in 6 months, or in a year, or even in 2 years. Get good at what you do. And I mean really good. Don’t feel like you have to move jobs every few years – that’s a recipe for disaster, not success. If you aren’t consistently at the top of the leaderboard, moving to something else just perpetuates mediocrity. Changing companies takes you steps back, not forward, and often you’re being hired to do the thing you did at your last company, stunting your growth, not accelerating it. Hear more from Maria at The Revenue Summit!

20. Matt Cameron

Managing Partner, SalesOpsCentral

  • I wish I knew how valuable my time working for a multi-national corporation would be later in my enterprise sales career. I would have spent as much time as possible with leadership from around the organization to get a deep understanding of the complex organizational processes and politics that drive strategic initiatives and spending. More than all my sales training over the years, it turned out that these precious moments were the ones that made the greatest contribution to my success in enterprise sales. Hear more from Matt at The Revenue Summit!

21. Matt Singer

CEO, Videolicious

  • At age 22, I started booking celebrities like Paul McCartney for a record I was producing, and I would research for weeks to find any contact information. Much later, I learned there’s a handy industry trade directory one could order for $150 and it had everyone’s business phone number that I had worked forever to find. The lesson was that most business processes have some established best practices, and it’s possible to move much faster if one can find the right playbook and apply it. There’s a playbook for almost everything.

22. Menaka Shroff

Head of Marketing, BetterWorks

  • I was so caught up in getting to the next title or role that I forgot to focus on learning and really understanding my true motivation. Specializing too early in your career sometimes limits you in what you can do down the line. It’s much harder to change careers later.

23. Mike Weinberg

Principal, New Business Sales Coach

  • When I was 22 I wished I understood that business is about two things: 1. Achieving results, not doing work. There are no rewards for doing the most work; all the rewards accrue to those who move the needle and deliver results. 2. You win by helping your client/customer win. My dad taught me that but I didn’t understand it then. Especially for salespeople, when our main objective is to improve our client’s business/condition, we will always win. If you keep these two principles front and center as a young seller, you will go very far!

24. Miles Austin

Sales and marketing Technologist, Fill the Funnel

  • Separate your ego from your initiatives and charge forward. Be honest about the causes of your failure, adjust your actions and thinking to correct and get back at it again. Treat each failure as a win to improve your game and then go at it again. Embrace your failures and commit to learn from, adjust and then refocus your actions and your career will reach higher than you can imagine.

25.Pete Kazanjy

Founder, Modern Sales Pros

  • I think the big thing that I wish I knew at 22 was that your career progression is only bounded by your desire and capacity to learn. There are mentors and great materials out there that you can use to up your game even if your organization isn’t investing in you. Do it yourself! This is sales: it’s all about initiative. Hear more from Pete at The Revenue Summit!

26. Ralph Barsi

Senior Director Sales Development, ServiceNow

  • I’d smack my 22 year-old self in the back of the head. At the time, my sales career was in its infancy, but nonetheless underway. The one thing I’d tell myself is to “show your work.” Chronicle your experiences and learnings, but share them too. Write but also publish. Speak but also present. Hear but also translate. Do the work but also “show the work.” Hear more from Ralph at The Revenue Summit!

27. Richard Harris

Founder, The Harris Consulting Group

  • I wish I would have had a more open mind to learning about life and proactively put time on my calendar to learn / read for 15 minutes per day.
  • I wish I had stopped to pay attention to what was happening around me from a technology perspective.
  • I wish I have learned to set and achieve smaller goals as they relate bigger goals and dreams.
  • Life is about having a good time. But a good time does not always mean a party. Hear more from Richard at The Revenue Summit!

28. Rick Nucci

Co-Founder & CEO, Guru

  • If I had to boil down the most enlightening thing I learned over the 2 companies I co-founded, it would be the realization that most of the world around you; the things, the products, the services, were made by people who are no smarter than you.  There is an often quoted answer Steve Jobs gave back in 1995 to this effect which I always loved.  Whenever I felt intimidated about meeting someone, my dad would always say “hey, they put their pants on one leg at a time just like you do”.  Same idea!

29. Roderick Jefferson

VP of Sales Enablement, Marketo

  • You’re NOT entitled to anything… You have to EARN it! Buck the norm… Work as though every opportunity may be your last… Even better, an audition for your next. This will ensure that you’re always focused. Make sure that you write down ALL of your goals… Ensure that they’re all time-bound & measurable. That’s the only way that you can truly say that you’ve met YOUR expectations!

30. Russ Heddleston

CEO, DocSend

  • Be more data driven: by nature, I am not a patient person. I’d rather get something done sooner rather than later, and (what I view as) unnecessary delays drive me crazy. At 22, I was all about getting things done as fast as possible. Being data driven was one of those annoying delays I viewed as an unnecessary step. Fast forward to me a decade later (I’m now 32), and I would tell myself that being data drive is pretty much ALWAYS the answer. There are three main reasons for this: 1) my instinct is often wrong. Taking time to collect data gives more time to think and brings new views to light.

31. Sangram Vajre

CEO & Co-Founder, Terminus

  • Believe in my God-given talents and focus 2000% on my strengths. Anything that I focused to improve was a distraction. If I were to re-do, I would start getting better at things I am good at and be self-aware to work around my inequities. Hear more from Sangram at The Revenue Summit!

32. Sara Varni

SVP, Sales Cloud at SalesForce

  • Daily behavior drives long-term success. Find one metric that you can monitor daily and use it as your ongoing progress report.

33. Scott Britton

Co-Founder, Troops

  • You learn way faster working for all stars who’ve run a proven playbook, than trying to figure everything out yourself as a young ambitious person. Be humble and work for someone else to learn to accelerate your growth before you go do your own thing.

34. Sean Burke

CEO, KiteDesk

  • What I wish I understood at 22 was the importance of developing the habit of continuous learning. During every step of your career, it’s important to take the time to grow personally and professionally.  To stay competitive sales professionals should consistently hone their craft since your income is nearly directly proportional to how well you sell.

35. Steve Richard

CRO, ExecVision

  • I wish I knew how much ‘who you sell to’ matters. Selling to consumers is different than selling to ‘main street’ businesses. Selling to mid-market companies is different than selling to big Fortune 500 enterprises. It’s good to try them all out and then decide on the one you like.

36. Tara Harding

VP of Sales Ops, Flatiron Health

  • I wish I had known that I could build the role I wanted – with passion – and not waste time waiting for a company to develop that role. If you can envision, communicate and show true value in the role you want role, go for it!

37. Tony Yang

VP of Demand Generation & Marketing Operations, Mintigo

  • Become a master of data. This means that you must be able to understand what data is saying and to use it to tell a story that people can understand and take action on it. But just as critical is knowing what data is important and what is noise. As a marketer, don’t be caught up in vanity metrics. Rather, understand what data points help you determine a desired outcome.

EARNING

38. Anand Kulkarni

Chief Scientist & Founder, LeadGenius

  • I wish I’d understood how much of career success is dependent on your ability to sell effectively – both ideas and products. Startup success is especially focused on how well you can sell as much as how well you can design a product that matters in a market.

39. Brent Adamson

Principal Executive Advisor, CEB

  • Like virtually everyone else, most 22 year-olds, I find, look at a possible career in sales as a last resort. Something to avoid at all costs rather than to pursue with a purpose. Let’s face it, sales has a branding problem. What many career sales professionals would tell you, however, is that sales is a great career. Done well, the pay can be remarkable, the work-life balance excellent, and the work personally rewarding in ways most non-sales professionals could never imagine. It’s a great career, really worthy of young professionals’ close consideration.

40. Chad Burmeister

Senior Director of Worldwide Sales Development, RingCentral

  • I wish I would have had more patience when it came to promotions and raises. Especially today, I see so many talented entry level Sales and Sales Development Representatives getting impatient in less than 12 months. I used to get impatient/ready for promotion at 18 months. As a result, at one company I missed a stock split, and 2X increase in valuation. Whenever you start at a new company, especially in technology, give it your all to stick around for at least 3 years.

41. Doug Landis

Growth Partner, Emergence Capital

  • When I was 22 I wish I knew …. how to negotiate better. Negotiation is a critical skill in your career. You need it to be a great sales rep as every interaction with a customer is a negotiation. You also need it when getting your career started or moving to a new job. When you’re young you don’t really know or understand how to ‘value’ things like your time, resources, skills or experience. Hear more from Doug at The Revenue Summit!

42. Jeffrey Gitomer

Author, Speaker

  • My dad and I sold an apartment house and made $100,000 profit in 1969. (Worth about $750k in today’s dollars). It took me 5 years to learn the law of “invest, don’t spend.” During that 5 years, I spent the money. All of it, and a few bucks more. I didn’t understand the value of investing before you spend. I didn’t understand that winning once didn’t ensure winning again. That lesson took 10 years to learn. I had to learn that in order to win, you had to be willing risk it all, and work your ass off to capture the flag and keep it.

43. Lori Richardson

Sales Accelerator Strategist, Score More Sales

  • One big thing I wish I knew was true then and true now – that compensation is negotiable. I didn’t know how to negotiate well and I seemed happy just to have an opportunity in tech sales because the market was booming then. I made big commissions and received incentive pay but was disappointed later to learn that my salary was less than my male counterparts.

44. Mark Roberge

Former CRO, HubSpot

  • Manage your career like your 401K. When you are 22, you invest your 401K in aggressive funds. Similarly, with your career, you should be aggressive. Take risks. Pursue roles where the extent of your responsibilities, financial upside, and potential impact on the world are not dependent on your age or work experience.

45. Michael Pedone

Sales Training Expert, SalesBuzz.com

  • As you improve your sales skills and your income starts to skyrocket, keep your living lifestyle the same for as long as you can and BANK. YOUR. CASH. It’s more important to have money in the bank than a fancy car (unless you paid CASH for it) because when you fall into a sales slump (which happens to everyone at least once in their career) you’ll be able to work your way out of it easier when you’re not worried about paying the bills.

KNOWING

46. Amyra Rand

VP of Sales, CriteriaCorp

  • When I first started working, I let my career manage me instead of the other way around.  Eventually I learned that I had to take ownership of my career and be pragmatic about the roles I accepted and the professional development I pursued.  In the end I would tell my younger self that:
  • You are responsible for managing your career and professional development and
  • As an internal candidate you have a strategic advantage – use it!

47. Anthony Kennada

VP of Marketing, Gainsight

  • I wish I fully appreciated at 22 how important the first few jobs out of college actually are – perhaps not in terms of functional experience, but rather, in service of getting great logos on the resume. I started my career as a technical recruiter, then moved to Silicon Valley (at 22) and took a job as an SDR at Box.

Only 4 years later, I became the VP Marketing at Gainsight.

Being an employee of an outlier company, especially early in your career, surrounds you with an invaluable network of co-workers and a real life application of business principles that no grad school or professional degree can offer. You’re also given an opportunity to hone in on your talents. I had no idea at 22 that I had a future in marketing – it was my mentors and early teammates that saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself.

48. Blake Harber

Manager of inside Sales, Lucid Software

  • I wish I understood the value of relationships in a sales environment. Not just with prospects but in truly building relationships within the sales community to learn from great leaders and accelerate my sales skills. Grant Cardone always says that “your network equals your net worth.” I have been a little slow to establishing my network in deals I worked early on and especially within the sales community where so much knowledge is so readily available to young sales reps!

49. Eric Nelson

SVP of Sales, HireVue

  • As you navigate your path ahead, be calculated.  Today, there is an increasing number of “job jumpers” navigating the workforce making it easy to self- justify rapid, and often rash, job moves for even the slightest pay raise or title change.  Don’t be mistaken, your time in role and your time with an employer paints a first impression about you to your future employers.  Weigh your career moves wisely and never underestimate the value of seeking the advice of mentors.  Remember, they have walked the path before you and have lived the benefits and consequences of their career decisions.

50. Jennifer Gluckow

Founder, CEO, and Author, Sales in a New York Minute

  • When I was 22, I thought that in order to be taken seriously in the workplace, I had to be serious. I was the youngest on my team, working with people who were decades older than I was. I wish I knew you don’t have to be serious to be taken seriously. In fact, it’s the opposite – make people laugh and they’ll be sold on you as a person, not just a businessperson! Yes, be great at what you’re doing. Yes, work your butt off. BUT here’s the key: the more fun you have, the better you’ll do, the better you’ll be liked – and most important, the more you’ll like yourself. I wish someone had given me the “fun” challenge: Find something funny or create your own fun in the workplace every day.

51. Jill Rowley

Social Selling (ex-Eloqua & Oracle)

  • I wish I would have known to ask more questions and make more meaningful connections. I wish I had realized the potential of the internet from a learning and networking perspective earlier in my career. Finally, I know now “to be interesting, be interested” — in something other than yourself — it would have been helpful to embrace that sooner. Hear more from Jill at The Revenue Summit!

52. John Stewart

CEO, MapAnything

  • The one thing I wish I knew when I was 22….was to spend more time developing a professional network. Join business networking groups; both inside and outside your chosen profession as it is unlikely you will stay in your first profession for your career. I was a Mechanical Engineer out of college and now I run a software company. And find a business mentor. Someone at least ten to fifteen years older than you that can offer guidance on how to achieve your career goals. Hear more from John at The Revenue Summit!

53. Jordan Christopher

VP of Sales, Sisense

  • If I look back, one of the things I wish I knew then was the importance of having trusted mentors or advisors. There were a number of experienced and successful people in my life but I was young and hard headed. I insisted on being independent and figuring out a path forward all on my own. I did well for myself, but had I turned to others for advice more often, I am certain it would have accelerated my professional growth and helped me avoid some of the mistakes I made.  

54. Kelly Riggs

Founder & CSO, Business LockerRoom

  • At 22, I would’ve liked to have had a much greater understanding of how important great people skills are to business success. At that time, my focus was on getting things done; excelling in the execution of tasks and responsibilities. But, as a salesperson, it is important to create value and appreciation not only with customers, but with all of the people who support the sale! Spending more time developing those relationships, as I learned much later in my career, is critical to gaining support for bigger challenges when they arise. You simply don’t succeed alone.

55. Kristen Habacht

Head of Enterprise Sales, Trello, Altassian

  • I wish I had understood how powerful a good network could be. I think that it’s a real skill to be a good networker and it takes pushing your own comfort zone. Like with any skill, it needs to be practiced and nurtured and it can have such immense returns. It’s not just people you have worked with or worked for but also joining new networks and searching out people in your field who you can really learn from.

56. Kristina McMillan

Director of Research, TOPO

  • Field Awareness: Developing an awareness of those around you is critical to success. Delivering an effective presentation or pitch is important, but it’s even more important to be able to “read the room” and understand how others are receiving your message – look to your audience for cues in body language to determine engagement, discomfort, or frustration. Listen to their responses, and try to discern the meaning between the words. Hear more from Kristina at The Revenue Summit!

57. Lars Nilsson

VP Global inside Sales, Cloudera

  • If you are coming out of school today, or have been in the workforce for a few years and don’t have somebody inside your company AND outside of it that you look up to and trust with your career, then take the time to find that! Research, seek, find, reach out to and secure two mentors for yourself. Invest in these relationships. Set up quick but highly focused 30 minute touch points one a month (or quarter). Plan your agenda and the questions you have for them when you get the time. Hear more from Lars at The Revenue Summit!

58. Mark Fidelman

Managing Director, Fanatics Media

  • I would have focused a lot more on developing a business network and less time trying to impress my boss.

59. Mark Hunter

Author, Speaker

  • What I wish I knew when I was 22 is the importance of building a network of influential and knowledgeable contacts from whom I could learn and seek assistance in moving my career forward. Coming out of college we all think we know everything! Oh how I regret ever thinking I even knew anything at all!

60. Noah Goldman

Sales Advisor

  • Someone younger, less experienced, less educated, with few connections etc… IS DOING WHAT YOU WANT TO DO RIGHT NOW! And say while I have been SAYING this since I was 22, I’ve only recently started to BELIEVE it. The latter is far harder than the former. That’s what I wish my 22 year old self REALLY knew.

61. Rob Jeppsen

CEO, Xvoyant

  • What I wish I knew at the beginning of my career was how to make a point without making an enemy. This skill has helped me have more influence with people in business and in life. Collateral damages closes opportunities in the future. As people have moved around from job to job I learned that it is a small world.  Someone that seemed unimportant before suddenly became very important as situations changed. People I marginalized, jumped over or around, or ignored remembered how they were treated by me…even if I didn’t mean to overlook them. The pursuit of my goals had me seeing people as a means to my own ambitious end, and created unfortunate limitations for me with people that I could have otherwise had great opportunities with. Hear more from Rob at The Revenue Summit!  

61. Sam Parr

Founder, The Hustle

  • Don’t have too much admiration for the people you look up to. Sure, they’re great, but don’t let your young age make you think you can’t crush them.

GROWING

62. Alina Vanderberghe

CEO & Co-Founder, ChiliPiper

  • The harder the fall, the more important the learning. I wish someone told me that with each opportunity to fail there’s an even bigger opportunity to learn. I would have failed more often.

63. Amanda Nelson

Senior Manager AppExchange, SalesForce

  • Once you feel that you’re getting outside of your comfort zone, push yourself a little further.

64. Amanda Holmes

CEO, Chet Holmes International

  • The one thing I wish I knew when I was 22 would be… My life could go on without my father. At the time he was battling cancer and the trauma of losing him felt like I would never recover. Today, four years after he’s passed I feel stronger, more confident, and bursting with light unlike ever before. I now know that it is within ourselves that we find true bliss. As long as we’re looking outside of ourselves for happiness we will be left wanting and unfulfilled. Hey 22 year old, stop spending so much time trying to save the world to make you feel worthy, you already are.

65. Ann Davis

VP of Sales, Journey Sales

  • Know your worth. All people are not created the same nor have the same skillset, either God given or learned and developed. I wish I understood my worth earlier in life as it would have helped me to grow in the direction I ultimately found later, technology sales.

66. Anthony Iannarino

Speaker, Facilitator, & Author, B2BSalesCoach.com

  • I knew everything I needed to know at 22. I knew how to front a rock-n-roll band. I knew how to talk to girls. I knew how to work and make enough money to live on my own in Los Angeles. Then only thing that might have been helpful to know at 22 was how much more I was going to need to know at 25.

67. Bill Binch

Managing Director, Marketo

  • The one thing I wish I knew when I was 22? That I didn’t know everything. I thought I did, thought I was right. But a big door in the face for me was to stay curious and keep learning, cuz guess what? I got better with experience and a few laps around the block. Stay hungry sales pros, cuz if you stop learning, then that’s the moment you start slipping…

68. Brooke Treseder

Director of Sales Ops, Pentaho

  • That most of the stuff I worried about when I was 22 doesn’t matter. Always foocus on doing the right thing and the rest will fall into place.

69. Dayna Rothman

VP of Marketing and Sales Development, BrightFunnel

  • There are a lot of things I would tell my 22 year old self! I would definitely say to stay creative, be motivated, and stay true to yourself–that one day you will have the confidence to command any room!

70. Deidre Moore

Director of Global Marketing, Qstream

  • I learned that while I was working hard, I was focused on the wrong things, and that I was not listening to the good advice my editor and my more experienced colleagues were giving me. Perhaps most importantly, I did not have a good understanding of the audience I was writing for, and what they wanted. When I was finally able to overcome my stubborn streak and focus on the end result, not just the process of getting there, I found success. It’s a lesson I still have to remind myself of every now and then, and one that I try to pass along to my team as well.

71. Falon Fatemi

Founder and CEO, Node.io

  • Believe nothing is impossible. We only convince ourselves that it is. Be resilient no matter what challenge you face. Ask why, even if you think you know why. As a woman in a male dominated industry expect to be met with an initial level of skepticism in meetings that male colleagues aren’t subject to. To combat this simply work harder, sell harder. Become a domain expert if that’s what it takes. And learn how to pitch from the heart. Hear more from Falon at The Revenue Summit!

72. Garin Hess

CEO & Founder, Consensus

  • All of the greats were just people. In hindsight, great achievements look inevitable, but in the thick of it they didn’t know the outcome. Washington didn’t know if they would beat the British. Douglass didn’t know if his people would ever see freedom in the “land of the free.” In the end, none of those that achieved greatness were destined to achieve it. It wasn’t inevitable. They just desired their objective so badly they sought it with everything they had and wouldn’t give in.

73. Jack Kosakowski

Global Head of B2B Social Sales Execution, Creation Agency

  • One thing I wish I would’ve know at 22 was the power of making a “commitment” to my sales career.  In my opinion, it is absolutely impossible to be successful at sales if you are not all in. I spent a lot of my twenties just doing enough to get by. Commitment is the one thing that holds 98% of people back in life and in business. If you aren’t focused and committed to learning your product better than everyone else, your buyer better than everyone else, and your industry better everyone else you will never be able to achieve your full potential and get yourself to the next level.

74. Jon Miller

Co-Founder & CEO, Engagio

  • Things are never as good as they seem when times are good, and things are never as bad as they seem when times are bad. Stay the course and hang in there.

75. Jorge Soto

Co-Founder & CEO, Freedeo

  • I wish I would have been more kind to myself knowing that I was on the right path despite how painful it was at times. The paradox of it all is that you must actually suffer and recover for the learning to occur. I wish I knew that then.

76. Lauren Bailey

President, Factor 8

  • Chill. It’s all going to work out just fine. The hard part is getting that first job. Work hard. Get better every day.Then pay attention to what you love and don’t love about it so you can pick your NEXT gigs on purpose.Sometimes the work is great but the environment or the hours aren’t. Heck, I know a great coder who just couldn’t stand to hang out with other coders. After a few years make a change. Try a new industry or something you’re passionate about. And be damn proud if it’s sales. I hope in twenty years you wind up exactly where you want to be too.

77. Max Altschuler

Founder & CEO, Sales Hacker Inc.

  • Be patient and cut your teeth. I cut my teeth for a long time, worked long hours, and worked hard. Don’t be short-sighted. Short term salary isn’t going to make you rich. Optimize for learning and you’ll optimize for long term wealth potential. Initiate in everything you do. Don’t just answer the question, pose a solution or add context.

78. Sam Jacobs

CRO, The Muse

  • I’m paraphrasing Chris Dixon, but, contrary to people’s advice to screw around in their early 20’s, I wish I’d moved to San Francisco or New York and immediately jumped into the startup scene and got my career going. I spent too much time without focus under the assumption that my choices didn’t have long term consequences. What I realized in my 30s is that the secret to success in life is how early you take it seriously. Get humble, start at the bottom, and begin working my way up as soon as I could.

79. Sarah Beth Anders

Product Marketing Team, LinkedIn

  • I would tell SB at 22 is that you are going to fail a lot. Like, a lot a lot. But, you’ll bounce back every time. There will be times when you don’t know how you could possibly bounce back, but you will find a way. Always take the shot, even when you are almost certain you’ll miss.

Your degree will basically be useless. While it is a necessary piece of paper to help land your first job you won’t learn anything there that you will apply to your career. It will demoralize you and make you feel like you aren’t smart enough to enter the “real world.”

The truth is, brawn beats brain every time.

80. Sean Sheppard

Founding Partner, GrowthX

  • I wish I had been more focused on developing as a person instead of my profession. Over the years I have to come to realize that there is no real distinction between personal and professional development in sales or any human centered roles. Becoming more mindfully aware of my behaviors, habits and the impact they have on those around me has made all the difference in my success. The older I get, the more I see the immediate results from making personal changes. Great sales professionals are great sales “people”.

81. Steven Broudy

Director of Inside Sales, MuleSoft

  • At 22, I was mentally preparing myself for the rigors of tackling an Army Special Operations unit’s assessment/selection process. I was also acutely aware that I was likely mere-months away from going to war for the first time. Suffice to say, I had a lot on my mind.

    What’s the one thing I wish I knew when I was 22? People are everything.

    Some of the men I went through that selection process with returned from war covered by an American Flag.  As the adage goes, “Mission first, people always.” Hear more from Steven at The Revenue Summit!

82. Todd Berkowitz

Research VP, Gartner

  • Find a career/job that you are passionate about and makes you happy. At age 22, you probably won’t know what it is and it may take you a long time to figure it out and that’s okay. But even if a particular job pays you really well, and you really like your manager and co-workers, that won’t be enough in the long run if you aren’t doing something that excites you. It’s okay to try new things (even in totally different fields), or make a lateral or even downward move if that will ultimately help you find a job that you will love.

83. Trish Bertuzzi

Author, CEO, The Bridge Group

  • The one thing I wish I knew when I was 22 was the value of self development. I relied on the company I worked for to educate me and provide me with the training I needed. Silly me. There is a wonderful world of education at our fingertips to be found in books, podcasts, events and webinars. I wish I had taken as much advantage then as I do now. Perfecting the craft of sales is a life long adventure but you own it… no one else.

84. Ursula Llabres

Head of Customer Success Workplace (Americas), Facebook

  • If you do the same thing for 10 years, you will be like a sharp graphite pencil on that one thing. If you vary your experience and the people you work with (including different countries you work in) you add depth and breadth to your professional perspective and learn a variety of ways you can have impact. You go from being a sharp graphite pencil to being a set of polychromos color pencils.

 

The post The One Thing I Wish I Knew at 22… appeared first on Sales Hacker.

14 Feb 17:16

Improve Your Marketing Communications With Insights From Neuromarketing (Part 1 of 2)

To ensure your marketing communications engage and convince your audiences, you'll need to understand how the human mind works. These are the six characteristics of the decision-making part of the brain you should be using to your advantage. Read the full article at MarketingProfs
14 Feb 17:14

10 Common Mistakes Almost Every Digital Writer Makes

by James Kosur

Digital Writer Mistakes

Writing is hard and honing your craft for the digital age has only exacerbated the difficulty of writing a solid piece of content that today’s readers actually want to absorb.

At Presto Media, we often find ourselves dealing with the exact same issues for many of our writers. Whether that writer has spent 15 years creating content for a major news publication or crafted their skills as a Buzzfeed contributor, the issues remain pretty static and surprisingly simple to fix.

Here’s a list of 10 common mistakes that almost every digital copyright struggle to overcome.

Burying The Lead

The who, what, where, why, and when of your story is incredibly important. This is the first chance your reader has to decide if they want to continue reading your story or will click through your entire slideshow. If you fail to capture the reader’s attention in the first few sentences of your piece, they are likely to jump off your page just as quickly as they arrived.

Missing the tone

When we talk about tone at Presto Media we look beyond the niche our writer is focused on for each piece. Instead, we examine the demographics of our partners’ readers, the type of content being written, and how articles have been historically written by the publication. Regular readers want to feel comfortable with pages they frequent and will stick with a story if it matches the tone they are familiar with.

Repetitively starting sentences the same way

Repetitive writing is lazy and that doesn’t make for highly engaging and unique content. If you find yourself starting everything sentence with “And then…” or “Also,” or any other repetitive variation, it’s time to rethink how creative you can become with your writing.

Poor image choices

Images are a struggle for many writers because of copyright laws and quality standards. If you don’t have a Getty Images account or contract with various other image providers, your photo options are limited. Our writers scour Pixabay, Photopin, Wikimedia Commons, and various other free image sources to find the best photos available.

Photos should match the needs of the content and should be of the highest quality possible. Blurry images, weirdly cropped photos, and other awkward photos can turn away readers just as quickly as poorly thought out content.

Padding articles to create long-form content

I recently wrote about the Google RankBrain algorithm and Google’s attempts to use natural language processing to determine the context of a news story, listicle, and other forms of digital content. Unfortunately, many publishers are still insistent that SEO requires large pieces of content that rely on heavy keyword usage. When an article is padded with content, the writer is often forced to move outside of the scope of the original article.

In some cases, even a 300-word article can become padded with loosely related facts that don’t capture the user’s interest in the story they believed would be presented.

Rely on the best writing possible to contextually tell a story that is engaging to the reader and you’ll win more times than you lose.

Using cliches like they are going out of style

We regularly run into issues where even the best 5-star writers use cliches to explain certain situations. If you pay close attention you have probably seen way too many uses of terms such as, “new lease on life,” “a diamond in the rough,” or “what goes around comes around,” among others. Find new and exciting ways to explain your story and it won’t seem dry and boring.

Being too vague with supporting details

If you are going to explain the successes, failures, and background of a person or place, it’s easy to fall prey to “list it all out” syndrome. For example, you provide a list of movies that Will Smith has starred in, information the average fan of the actor will already know. A better solution would be to offer a few interesting facts about his successes and failures as an actor or interesting facts about his dealings in Hollywood.

Sentences that go on forever

If a reader needs to finish a novel simply to get through a single sentence you are in trouble. At Presto Media, we push articles through the Flesch–Kincaid readability test which predicts the readability of an article. The test suggests sentences remain to no more than 13 words with as few syllables per word as possible. Don’t completely dumb down your articles but make each sentence easily digestible for your readers.

The ‘I’ versus ‘we’ dilemma

Many news writers switch between “I” and “We” when writing, oftentimes from one sentence to another. While a more personal story can be served well in the first person, it can also lead to a cynical tone that injects too much opinion into an otherwise non-opinion article.

The incredibly long sub-heading or title that includes more than 12 words and leads the reader astray in the process when all they want is a little bit of highlighted information

We recently wrote about the importance of guiding a reader with the help of sub-headings. Revealing interesting facts in a sub-heading is fine but you can lose your reader if you create huge swaths of information and shove it into a section of an article that is supposed to highlight main talking points and not give up the entire content focus.

The bad news? A green writer is prone to most of these mistakes. The good news? All of these problem areas can be fixed very easily and when more focus is placed on avoiding these pitfalls your writing can go from bland to exciting and fresh.

14 Feb 17:11

Microsoft calls for establishment of a digital Geneva Convention

by Kate Conger
A Microsoft logo sits on a flag flying in the grounds of the Nokia Oyj mobile handset factory, operated by Microsoft Corp., in Komarom, Hungary, on Monday, July 21, 2014. Microsoft said it will eliminate as many as 18,000 jobs, the largest round of cuts in its history, as Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella integrates Nokia Oyj's handset unit and slims down the software maker. Photographer: Akos Stiller/Bloomberg via Getty Images As the public grows more concerned with state-sponsored hacking, Microsoft is calling on tech companies to form a so-called “Digital Geneva Convention” by promising to protect users from nation-state attacks and vowing to never mount offensive cyber attacks. Microsoft is also pushing governments around the world to establish norms for engagement in digital warfare. Microsoft… Read More
14 Feb 17:04

Fintech startup Paradigm Ark promises more accurate audits using A.I.

by Peter Nowak
Tablet, glasses and financial documents

(Jamie Grill/Getty)

Murray Love wants to get to the heart of why artificial intelligence is necessary in today’s world. With his experience and background in analyzing financial reports, he’s convinced there are too many people wasting their talents doing the same.

“There is a significant amount of time and resources being wasted on very manual tasks,” he says. “I was watching very, very intelligent people wasting their time on tedious work.”

Two years ago, Love started developing software that would form the basis of Ark Paradigm, his Kitchener, Ont.-based startup, and that could indeed relieve humans of the need to pore over corporate financial documents.

His goal was twofold—to save people from mind-numbing work and to help companies deliver more accurate reports to shareholders and regulators.

Every year, companies lose millions of dollars by having to restate earnings, usually because of errors that weren’t caught by the human eye. In 2016, Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Mitsubishi were just two companies that embarked on such costly restatements.

Such mistakes don’t just immediately affect the bottom line, they can also have long-term effects on a company’s reputation.

“These are material misstatements that aren’t being communicated properly to shareholders,” Love says. 

Users of Ark Paradigm’s software upload their financial reports to the company’s platform. The AI goes through the material and analyzes it for any risks or possible instances of non-compliance with reporting requirements or regulations. Users receive a summary, complete with flags on any potential issues.

The company currently has three full-time staff conducting several pilot projects, with an eye to launching service next fall.

Mostly self-funded, Ark Paradigm has also received grant money from several sources, including $70,000 from the government of Chile. Love made the connection prior to starting his company, while working with the Canadian government’s trade commission.

As with most companies and entrepreneurs operating in the AI space, he sees increasing automation not as a threat to human jobs, but as something that can’t happen soon enough.

“When you look at [financial] audits three to four years from now, it’s going to be night and day,” Love says. “It’s something that needs to occur.”


MORE ABOUT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCEFINTECH:

The post Fintech startup Paradigm Ark promises more accurate audits using A.I. appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

14 Feb 16:59

THE HACKIES: How to hack your CRM for ABM, switching from leads to contacts and accounts

by Scott Brinker

The MarTech Hackies 2017

This article is a guest post by Lauren Frye of Bizible. It was entered into The Hackies essay contest for the upcoming MarTech conference. Like it? You can register your vote in the contest by sharing it on social media, especially LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

When any organization endeavors to implement account-based marketing, there comes a point where their reporting framework must follow suit. Trying to run account-based marketing campaigns while continuing to plan, target, and report with leads quickly becomes counter-productive.

Our team at Bizible recently made a complete switch from lead-based reporting to an ABM measurement structure based on accounts and contacts. While the process is involved and complex, it’s incredibly rewarding and highly effective if done properly.

(Click the image below for a larger version of the graphic.)

How to Hack your CRM for ABM

Technical “Hacks” when Switching your CRM to ABM

There are two categories of hacks involved in the process — technical and strategic.

Technical changes involve how the data will move from one framework to the other. You’ll need to plan, configure triggers, map leads to accounts, map old lead fields to new contact fields, identify and capture persona information, reconnect other martech integrations, and audit the entire process along the way.

Technical: Planning

During the planning step, collect the list of which reports each stakeholder relies on currently and how those reports will change once you’ve switched to ABM mode.

Decide which new report types you’ll want to generate, as well as which types of data from which martech solutions are necessary to assemble those reports. Consider how the sales team will need to organize data, create call lists, and conduct outreach. These decisions will inform the rest of the process.

Technical: Lead-to-Account Mapping

Lead-to-account mapping is one of the most complex “hacks” you’ll need to accomplish. Some companies create custom solutions for this process or higher an outside consultant. But you should know that some advanced attribution martech solutions are able to do lead-to-account lookup for you, and it’s far more cost-effective.

The Custom Trigger:
The easiest way to convert your thousands of existing leads into contacts is by building a custom trigger to automate as much of the process as possible. The trigger performs three functions. Its first order of business is converting the lead into a contact.

The trigger’s second function uses a lead-to-account lookup tool to create a relationship between leads and accounts based on three factors in this order of operations:

  1. website of each record
  2. email domain of the lead, and website of the account
  3. a more obscure match on lead company name and account name

If there is no match, the trigger creates a new account and a new contact.

The trigger’s third function looks for contacts with the same email. If the email already exists, it merges the lead with the existing contact. A properly functioning trigger will port over existing leads to contacts, and it will also correctly categorize future generated leads according their respective contact and account.

Technical: Field Mapping

When marketers begin mapping fields in their new ABM system, it’s important to distinguish which fields need to be mapped from which sources.

In demand generation, most leads have their own “score” or “grade” to help salespeople gauge whether that contact is ready for certain types of outreach. However, in account-based marketing, all lead “scores” or “grades” should be the same as their account grades or stages.

The key is to identify which information from which sources belongs in which fields.

Technical: Auditing

After the mapping is complete, it’s critical to audit the process at this stage of the game. Verify that all information is correct, and consult stakeholders to ensure that they see all of the information they need in the place it belongs.

Technical: Persona Identification

When moving from demand gen to ABM, personas are arguably even more important to identify and track. This information can come from a variety of sources, including inbound forms, data enrichment technologies, and information gleaned during sales calls or email exchanges.

Next, create formulas that place the correct job titles within the correct “persona bucket” for outreach purposes. This will make it easy to create outreach lists for your personalized persona campaigns and workflows.

Technical: Integrations

Earlier in “mapping” steps, the marketing attribution solution and marketing automation platform were configured to pass information to the new CRM setup. Now, do the same with your other pieces of martech in order to loop in all vital data.

Strategic “Hacks” when Switching your CRM to ABM

Strategic changes affect how the stakeholders and managers use the new configuration, as well as the specific capabilities each business role will require from the system. You’ll need to create a target account list, determine prospect stages, adjust demand strategies, adapt the sales team’s processes, focus your content strategy, personalize nurturing processes, and modify reporting procedures.

Each of these new/revised strategic processes yields helpful account, contact, and persona engagement data to the CRM through the technical martech configurations outlined above. This data is passed primarily through the marketing attribution solution, as well as through marketing automation, call tracking, data enrichment technologies, and others as necessary.

Strategic: Attribution and Reporting

With the new ABM configuration inside your CRM, you’re able to generate new and better metrics for reporting purposes. You can report on net new contacts, account engagement, contact engagement, etc. (and all of these metrics can be pivoted by account grade).

An attribution solution is able to provide more complex metrics automatically, without any additional manual work. For example, based on how often personas have engaged with different types of outreach, advanced attribution solutions can derive a “Predictive Account Engagement Score” that will help trigger sales outreach at the proper time.

It’s also important to note that all of these reporting changes need to happen immediately. As soon as CRM configuration changes begin, those old lead reports will no longer be accurate.

Reconfiguring a CRM for ABM might have seemed like a daunting task, but it’s absolutely doable with the right game plan and the right martech behind the process. Follow these hacks to transform a leads-based CRM into a powerful ABM machine. It will help facilitate your account-based marketing outreach, track granular engagement metrics, providing accurate reports, and help your entire team be more effective. Ultimately, the goal is always revenue. And toward that end, ABM is an effective tool in the hands of any B2B marketer.

What did you think of this article as an entry in The Hackies essay contest for the upcoming MarTech conference? If you liked it, you can register your vote in the contest by sharing it on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Have a marketing/technology/management “hack” that you want to share with the world? Consider entering The Hackies yourself — we’d love to learn from your experience and insight!

The post THE HACKIES: How to hack your CRM for ABM, switching from leads to contacts and accounts appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

14 Feb 16:57

Process Excellence Makes Sales and Marketing Problems Solvable

by Terran Webb

goldfishSales and marketing executives in B2B companies seem to be working harder every year, yet consider some recent results:

  • 62% of companies had difficulty making target revenues in 2014. (Forrester)
  • 42% of all sales opportunities end in “No Decision.” (HubSpot)
  • B2B companies are delaying contact with salespeople. (Google and the CEB)
  • A pass bet at a craps table has better odds than the average sales forecast. (CSO Insights)

Further, for the last five years running, a Sirius Decision’s survey of sales and marketing organizations showed “The inability of our sales reps to sell value” is at the top of the list of B2B company challenges.

To say the typical companies in these studies are trying to improve would be an understatement! They try sales training, CRM systems, lead generation, contests, compensation plan changes, changing out salespeople, and many other things. Revenue is so important, most companies have no choice but to spend on sales and marketing. In fact, the sales portion of SG&A (sales, general and administrative) expenses is one of the largest costs in the typical company, and the most difficult to control.

With so much time, energy, and money at stake, why don’t things actually improve?

Three Reasons Sales and Marketing Productivity Don’t Improve

One reason is that customers today want to look on the Internet to help them solve their problems. They are less likely to talk to salespeople, at least in the beginning. Yet, salespeople often have little to do with their company’s website. Worse, when companies try to improve their marketing and their websites, they often struggle. With divergent opinions around what changes will create improvement, how do you select the best approach? Without a clear payoff, it is difficult to justify investment. So making changes is a difficult proposition.

This points out a second reason why things don’t actually improve: Most companies have difficulty distinguishing value from waste in sales and marketing. Should the company spend money on the website, or on sales training, or on recruiting more channel partners? Is attending trade shows more important than purchasing a new CRM system? With no easy rule or principle for distinguishing value from waste, companies can only muddle through.

So how do you distinguish value from waste in sales?

Value is created when you enable your customer to take the actions you want them to take.  Anything else is waste. Salespeople have always known they must get their customer’s attention, time, and trust if they are ever to have a chance of earning any of their customer’s money. Yet as we said earlier, salespeople are hampered when customers are searching to solve their problems on the Internet.

And this points up a third reason sales and marketing productivity isn’t improving. Executives who think in terms of functions instead of value unwittingly make assumptions that limit their awareness. They “swim” in a world where the goals of marketing, selling, and servicing are independent of each other. They see “sales process” as just an issue of detail and discipline – something else to consider alongside other departmental issues such as sales training, CRM, or lead generation. As the saying goes, “The last thing a fish discovers is water.”

Customers see your company as a single entity. Integrating your approach to finding, winning, and keeping them enables you to see the business as a production system that helps customers realize, prioritize, and solve their problems. These stages are called the customer’s journey, and it doesn’t matter whether helping the customer buy requires a marketing tactic or a sales tactic. What matters is implementing the appropriate tactic as efficiently and effectively as possible.

What Does a Sales Production System Look Like?

When sales and marketing becomes a cross-functional production system, companies can achieve big increases in sales productivity and margins. For example, one client achieved a 1% increase in margin without increasing prices, simply by reprioritizing their deal flow. Another doubled their sales productivity by figuring out and walking away from the least likely prospects. These changes actually happened quickly, and without much fanfare.

How does that happen? The first step is to get everyone to define their terms in the same way. For example, it is very common for different individuals in a company to have a different concept of who the customer is. One individual might think the customer is the person at the distributor who signs the check in payment of your company’s invoice. Another might think the customer is the end user who touches or uses the product. And still another might think the customer is the executive who achieves lower costs and higher performance as a result of selecting your products and services. If the people in your company are not aiming at the same thing, how can anything improve?

Getting your team to tie their words to observable reality takes time and energy, but that effort is richly rewarded.

For example, the sales VP at a machine tool company selling six figure capital equipment felt his salespeople were spending too much time on the wrong accounts. Unfortunately, the problem was not solvable in this form.  How much is “too much time?” What is the definition of “wrong account?” He realized certain observable characteristics, such as a prospect’s degree of interest in training and maintenance around their machines, were an indication of their willingness to pay for value. He and his sales team developed a list of traits that enabled them to convert these observations of prospect quality into a number. The higher the observed quality of the prospect, the higher the number.

Prioritizing their deal flow in this manner caused the best prospects to rank higher than when salespeople had forecast their deals informally. Like other clients, they were surprised to learn their sales forecasts become far more accurate with this approach. (Some clients have achieved 94% forecast accuracy.) Instead of working on their sales opportunities sequentially as they had in the past, our machine tool company started applying their scarce engineering resources to the highest quality prospects first. In practice this had the effect of increasing their margins. They conservatively estimated this increase to be at least 1%, which amounted to nearly a million dollars annually.

However, the impact went farther. Measuring their deal flow enabled them to detect a decline in the quality and quality of sales opportunities. This is an important market signal, indicating they might be in the early stages of a recession (recessions are especially hard on capital equipment manufacturers).

Instead of attempting to push harder on poor quality prospects, the sales team lent their expertise to help the marketing department develop a compelling ROI model for an exciting new product. The ROI model was published as lead magnet on a web page offering an even more detailed analysis and a budgetary quote, in exchange for qualifying information about the prospect. This was a big process change that would produce data about the quality of the prospect. Within the first three weeks the web page produced two new prospects in different parts of the world.

Far from having to enforce some arbitrary discipline around a “sales process” purchased from an outside sales training or CRM vendor, the management at this company merely encouraged the sales team’s energy to improve their own process!

Traditional approaches to managing sales and marketing cannot produce improvements like these. That’s because instead of solving for desired customer actions, they impose “best-selling practices” out of context, and make assumptions like “deals at stage 3 have a 40% chance of closing, while deals at stage 5 have a 90% chance of closing.” By failing to define and analyze actual data around what is working and not working in the field with salespeople and their customers, they fail to solve actual sales and marketing problems. In fact, that statement is a nice summary of why sales and marketing productivity doesn’t improve.

Process Excellence Makes Sales and Marketing Problems Solvable

No company has much direct control over the demand curve among its customers. However, by defining your terms, gathering data, and aligning the work to real customer value (the fundamentals of process excellence) you can remove the waste and misalignments that hamper conversion and productivity in your business.  You can pick up information allowing you to shift your resources to where customers need it, such as emphasizing more efficient new products or service and replacement parts during a recession.

This approach offers an immense opportunity for producing growth that is both more predictable and more sustainable. Process excellence works because it provides a data-driven framework for identifying which kinds of changes will actually make the sales funnel flow faster. Precisely defining the problems you are trying to solve has much greater impact than just applying another version of the usual fixes, such as lead generation, sales training, CRM, or attempting to select even more talented (and expensive) salespeople. Further, the simple, logical reasoning it encourages is respected by salespeople and marketers alike. Ultimately, improvements to the quality of customers that are input to your business increases the productivity, and therefore the profitability of the entire enterprise.

 

About the Author

More than twelve years ago, with deep experience in field sales, sales management, and sales training, Michael Webb set out to create a data-driven, process-based alternative to the offerings of typical sales training, sales consulting, and CRM companies. Since 2002, he has published numerous articles on ways B2B sales organizations can benefit from process improvement techniques, and consulted with companies like Burr Oak Tool, Danfoss, Wacker, Pentair, Tyco, and Thermo Fisher, as well as many smaller B2B companies.

His newest book, Sales Process Excellence earned the Shingo Research Award in 2015.  Learn more at www.salesprocessexcellence.com.

 

 

 

 

14 Feb 16:56

3 Critical Questions Customer Success Executives Need to Answer

by Bob Hayes

In today’s subscription-based economy, customers are no longer trapped in long-term contracts and are able to jump to competitors easily when they become dissatisfied with their current vendor. Consequently, many subscription-based and SaaS companies are turning to the practice of Customer Success to keep their customers. Customer Success is the function in a company that manages the relationship it has with its customers to ensure the customers receive value from the product or solution. Customer Success is about making customers as profitable and productive as possible.

Take the Customer Analytics Best Practices Assessment

The three questions on which this blog post is based were inspired by Mikael Blaisdell of the Customer Success Association. These questions were designed to help you think about important elements of your Customer Success (CS) program. I believe that answers to these three questions will help clarify and operationalize your Customer Success (CS) program. I answered the questions based on my professional experience as well as decades of scientific research on and practical experience in customer-centric programs.

1. What is the primary purpose of the Customer Success team?

I see two reasons why customer success teams exist.

  1. Improve the value that customers receive from products / solutions by making the customers productive
  2. Improve customer loyalty (build advocacy, decrease churn, expand relationships) to optimize profitability and growth for the company

These two questions are necessarily related to each other. Improving the value that your customers receive from your products will ultimately lead to them engaging in more loyalty behaviors. When your customers succeed, so does your company. The figure below (Figure 1) shows a model that represents how company performance is dependent on customer loyalty, which, in turn, is dependent customers’ perceived value.

Links_CS_CX_Loyalty.png Figure 1. Business model illustrates the path from the company’s business strategy to company performance. KPIs will include perceived value, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty (e.g., retention, advocacy, expansion)

2. What do you see as the greatest challenges confronting Customer Success executives (team/group leaders)?

The challenges that CS executives face will dictate the course of action they take to reach their ultimate goal of building an effective CS program. To stay ahead of the competition, they need to build a program that improves how they manage customer relationships.

We live in a world of Big Data where everything is quantified. As such, customers are leaving behind a digital trail of information about their behaviors, attitudes and interactions. This treasure trove of data can be analyzed to tell you many different things about the health of the customer relationship. It can tell you the current status of their health (descriptive). It can tell you what their health will be next quarter (predictive). It can also tell you what course of action you need to take to improve their health (prescriptive).

Customer Success, like many disciplines today, is morphing into an exercise of using data to make better business decisions. Despite the increased role that data play in customer success management, only half of CS teams have a data analyst. So, while data plays a significant role in customer success management, CS programs are not adequately leveraging either the technology or analytics practices to get the most value from their data.

I see three primary challenges for CS executives:

  1. Getting value/insights from the vast amounts of available data. The key points to remember when analyzing data are that you are able to get two types of insights from your data: 1) identify which customers are going to leave and 2) identify the reasons why customers churn.
  2. Understanding how best to introduce the power of analytics into the organization. In addition to having strong executive support around the use of data, there are a few ways to build a strong, data-driven approach to your customer success initiatives. These include: 1) Hiring a full-time data scientist, 2) Training existing staff on statistics and research, 3) Employing 3rd party provider (e.g., Data Science as a Service – DSaaS) and 4) Implementing a CS data/analytics platform.
  3. Ensuring the CS team members are successful. First, successful CS initiatives rely on a clear definition of success. By clearly articulating the meaning of “success,” you are helping your CS team understand what they need to do for their customers. Second, you need to provide the CS team the tools and resources they need to be successful. Finally, you need to measure the effectiveness of help your team; using the business model above, some common measures of success include: churn rates, growth (up/cross-selling) and advocacy.

3. How do you know a company is serious about Customer Success?

Talk is cheap. Instead, you need to look for specific practices that companies adopt in their customer success programs to determine if the company is serious about ensuring the success of their customers. In an earlier study, we found that loyalty leading companies adopted specific business practices at a higher rate than their loyalty lagging counterparts. As is reflected in their actions, loyalty leaders show that they are serious about their customers by how they use customers’ data across all levels of the organization.

Loyalty leading companies tend to adopt these practices:

  1. Integrate their data silos. Integrating disparate data silos not only allows you to see a 360⁰ view of each customer, it also allows your analytics efforts to uncover deeper insights that are simply not possible when you look at each data silo separately. We like to say that the sum of your data is more valuable than some of your data.
  2. Employ predictive and prescriptive analytics. While descriptive analytics provide insight about the past, predictive and prescriptive analytics help you peer into the future and take action to mitigate the risk of customer churn or to take advantage of opportunities to grow existing relationships.
  3. Utilize machine learning (e.g., intelligent system) to automate the process of extracting customer insights from data. Data scientists, despite what you might hear, are mere mortals. They have limited capacity to make sense of data. Rather than relying on data scientists alone, companies are using the power of machine learning to quickly surface insights in their vast amounts of data to proactively manage customer relationships. camm.png Figure 2. The Customer Analytics Maturity Matrix: A Model for Evaluating Your Customer Analytics Effort. To see where you rank, take the free Customer Analytics Best Practices Assessment.

Because data are only as valuable as what you do with them, CS professionals need to apply the right analytics to their data to help them make the right decisions about their customers. We recommend using the scientific method to finding these insights. Using the scientific approach requires asking the right questions, stating testable hypotheses, gathering the necessary data, analyzing those data and communicating the results / taking action.

Summary and Conclusions

In today’s highly digitized world, Customer Success, like many disciplines, is necessarily an analytics endeavor. Customer Success executives can take the following actions to modernize their CS program:

  1. Clearly define and articulate the goals of your CS program to your team: to increase customer perceived value of your solution and to improve customer loyalty.
  2. Track the right outcome metrics. These metrics include measures of perceived value and loyalty (i.e., retention, advocacy and growth/expansion). Depending on your business needs, some measures will be more important than others. If you have a churn problem, you might focus on retention metrics.
  3. Integrate your data silos to get a comprehensive picture of each customer.
  4. Unleash the power of machine learning on your aggregated data set to build better predictive models of customer behavior.

How well does your CS program optimize the use of data and analytics? To find out, take our free Customer Analytics Best Practices Assessment. To complete the 10-minute assessment, click the link below.

Take the Customer Analytics Best Practices Assessment

14 Feb 16:56

Move Faster Through Planning

by Brent Pohlman

Planning 2017

Way too much work is being done reactively, and we are paying the price. Over the last 10 years, I have learned that many people took customer service to a different level. To meet clients’ needs, many companies would build temporary processes to accommodate these people. Over time these same methods grew more complicated by the minute till that inevitable day comes when the system breaks. Yes, it will break. I have experienced this first-hand.

In the past, being reactive was often taught as the best way to serve clients’ needs. We were prepared to build processes that would accommodate every customer need. It helped us gain trust initially, but we are now learning that it is not in an environment of constant change.

Taking time to plan, even a little bit can save time, energy and actually create something much better. In times of chaos or rapid change, I am reminding my staff to take a step back and do the following:

STOPYes, take a deep breath.

ANALYZE THE SITUATIONSee the big picture or look at the steps that got you to this step

DEFINE THE ISSUEWhat is the real problem? Next, find the root cause

COMMUNICATE ALONG THE WAYDon’t go for the solution right away and continue to make mistakes and corrections

TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MISTAKEMany people do not want to take on the responsibility for a mistake or an opportunity because it means more work

DEVELOP A PLAN THAT LOOKS AT THE TOPIC AT HAND AND MAPS OUT A SOLUTIONThis is where the value of planning comes in

In the past, for one reason or another, I became a very reactive person. I was always fighting a political battle or being hit with one roadblock or another. I used to get caught up in the fight, and I tried unsuccessfully to get things pushed through and often I had to settle for progress on a much smaller and slower scale. Today, I am finding a new joy in empowering people to look closely at topics and issues and spend some time looking at the best solution. It really is amazing how a few more hours or a couple of days can really pay off when this time is used to think through issues and see the change from a better perspective.

In 2017, my goal is to approach opportunities and problems by taking a step back first and analyze the whole picture. The goal is not to react the quickest. The goal is to implement a process in the most efficient manner. This change in mindset has really helped me manage stress and think carefully about subsequent planned actions. In the end, the implementation is much smoother with fewer issues going forward.

Planning is the key!

14 Feb 16:56

I just read a book that completely changed the way I think about networking

by Caitlin Harper

networking drinks friends

Mama always said, “Network, network, network.”

Well, at least my mama did.

And I always said, “No way!” Cocktail parties, small talk, and passing out business cards is the stuff of nightmares for most people, and for good reason: They don’t lead anywhere.

They’re what J. Kelly Hoey, former lawyer, investor, networking expert, and author of “Build Your Dream Network: Forging Powerful Relationships in a Hyper-connected World,” calls “random acts of networking.”

But instead of spiraling in the opposite direction and claiming that networking is dead, pointless, or outdated, she’s refined the definition to reflect what it truly is: a way to go about solving a problem. That simple redefinition was my aha! moment that: 1. Mama was right. 2. I was kind of networking already. 3. It could be fun.

By reframing it this way, networking shed its unappealing skin of impersonal Linkedin messages and form emails to reveal the beautiful, community-building connection machine underneath.

Hoey encourages her readers to scribble notes in the margins of her book, highlight passages, and fold the pages, making her book half manual, half journal. Among entertaining infographics and engaging interviews with fascinating entrepreneurs and other expert connectors, Hoey’s book is packed with highly applicable tips.

For instance:

Stop committing random acts of networking

These are the form InMail messages that lack focus, the coffee meet-and-greets with no follow-up, the cocktail parties where you spend the night in the corner on your phone, and the business cards that end up in the recycling bin. Random acts of networking leave you drained and no better off than when you started, while “effective networking requires purpose and preparation.”

Use what Hoey calls the “why filter” and separate useful opportunities from the rest of the distractions and noise. Your answers to the why filter will leave you better equipped to network with a purpose and stop wasting time.

Hoey lists her four why filter questions in her book, so I decided to try them out myself. I just published a novel, so I’m attending more readings in the city and networking more. In one week, I was invited to two different readings. I didn’t know whether to attend both at the risk of wearing myself out that week, only one (and how would I choose?), or none and suffer from FOMO. So I asked myself Hoey’s questions:

  1. Is the opportunity aligned with my goal(s)?
  2. Will my participation add value to the other attendees and be valuable for me?
  3. Does the opportunity expand my network and/or strengthen existing relationships?
  4. What does my gut say? (She is “a big believer in trusting your gut.”)

Using Hoey’s why filter made it easy to make a decision: My gut said I should pick only one of the events and the other questions helped me choose which of the two to attend. But that is only the tip of the networking iceberg.

The goal comes first

Your networking process always starts with a goal. Next, you decide what network can help you reach that goal. Finally, you figure out the tactic.

Spoiler alert: if you don’t have a solid goal yet,  you can use your network to figure out what it should be. Research, talk to a mentor or coach, or reach out to your community to see what they think your strengths are and what you should be pursuing.

As Hoey says, “the new question is not what you know but Who knows what you know?” When your network knows what you know, they are better equipped to make suggestions and connections.

Having a clear goal in mind will also help you formulate a plan. Once you have a goal, you’ll be able to figure out who you need to know to help you achieve it. If you already know that person, get in touch. If not, it’s time to forge new, two-way relationships. This doesn’t mean cold-calling a complete stranger with a big ask. It means focusing on “strategy and communication tactics after you’ve figured out whom you’re seeking help from.”

Always follow up

At a recent networking event Q&A, someone asked Hoey, “What’s the one takeaway we should have from this?” and before the question was even finished, Hoey responded, “Always follow up.” In her book, she calls it “likely the most effective networking tool.” Send a thank-you note. Update a connector if their help landed you an interview, client, or job. Don’t leave people guessing about whether their own networking is effective!

No one ever said networking was easy (if they did, they were wrong). Like all things, it takes hard work and dedication. But it should be fun. So instead of bemoaning the need to network, approach it like any other problem and get out there and find a solution.

SEE ALSO: A master networker explains how to single out the most interesting people at any event

Join the conversation about this story »

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14 Feb 16:55

Daphne Bramham: It's time to turn your attention to politics at home

by Daphne Bramham

As mesmerizing as it is to follow President Donald Trump’s daily/hourly antics, Canadians and British Columbians need to focus on what’s happening here.

In May, voters will choose a new B.C. government and members of the federal Conservative Party will choose a new leader to challenge Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

And while it may be comforting that The Economist and others believe that Canada and British Columbia are shining beacons of light and hope, the truth is that everything is not OK. And voters know it.

Population growth and highly visible wealth in Vancouver have masked some stark and troubling issues. Economic growth is stagnant. The B.C. Liberals promised jobs and revenue from LNG development that never materialized and may never.

There are festering social problems, not least of which is a housing crisis. Illicit drugs are killing users at an unprecedented rate. Ninety-one per cent of seniors’ residential homes fail to meet the ministry guidelines for care. Privatization of foster care is only one of the many reasons that children like Alex Gervais have suffered excruciating maltreatment.

Public schools have suffered from 14 years of underfunding that is only now being corrected after the Supreme Court of Canada has ordered it.

The B.C. Liberals may be unpopular, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t in a position to win or even increase their majority.

Why? One only needs to look south. Premier Christy Clark is a populist in a party unbound by any firm ideology beyond supporting capitalism. Her campaign will fuel fears of free-spending socialists. Her appeal — like Trump’s — will be to disaffected suburban and rural voters who distrust urban elites and are frightened about what the future holds for them and their children.

New Democrat John Horgan lacks Clark’s sparkle. Worse, his party is untethered from its historical roots.

Its political calculus has been to secure votes in urban areas among intellectuals, professionals and environmentalists — Trump’s ‘elites’.

Its base now resides amid the condo towers sipping litres of lattes sold by underemployed university graduates. Because despite a heartfelt wish for a carbon-free future, its leaders (Alberta Premier Rachel Notley included) have yet to produce a credible plan for replacing those well-paid, resource jobs.

Opposition to resource developments including pipelines has alienated the NDP’s traditional support among blue-collar workers and skilled tradespeople whose middle-class wages depend on resource jobs.

Similar tensions between urban elites and rural/suburban working-class people are both exposed and exploited in the Conservative leadership race, which has some easy parallels to the Republican presidential contest.

The field of 14 contenders includes a reality TV celebrity, several anti-abortionists, a couple of nativists opposed to immigration, an opponent of same-sex marriage, an environmentalist, an international financier, a venture capitalist and a libertarian.

Given the wide range of views and values, the race could potentially destroy the uneasy alliance that Stephen Harper maintained between alt-right Reform Party stalwarts and former Progressive Conservatives.

And, depending on the choice, it could cause a fissure between West and East or even Quebec and the rest of Canada if the leader isn’t bilingual.

But what is most stunning and consistent with the Republican race is the vitriol within the Conservatives’ political family. While it hasn’t shown up on stage at the debates yet, it’s easily found in the comments on Kellie Leitch’s Facebook page. (Leitch has promised to use a values test to screen refugees and immigrants.)

Who the Conservatives choose matters because its leader will be the leader of the official Opposition and a potential prime minister. Pay the $15 for a Conservative membership and you could have a say.

Come May in British Columbia, all it takes to have a say is to ensure that you’re on the voters’ list and that you show up.

We live in an open — if imperfect — democracy. Unlike Americans, our differences are often less obvious because we tend to value consensus so much that at times it stifles debate.

But this is not a time for keeping quiet or being distracted by other country’s politics. We have challenges enough here — an aging population, immigration and, yes, even greater economic pressures because of Trump’s America First policies.

Finding solutions requires engaged citizens unwilling to leave it to demagogues to determine what our country becomes.

dbramham@postmedia.com

twitter.com/daphnebramham

14 Feb 16:55

5 Ideas to Successfully Monitor the Mobile Marketing Landscape

by Richard Smith

Mobile marketing is the newest way of approaching social cohesion and 2017 will see this concept grow beyond proportions. While mobile has taken over the pedestal as the primary source of content reception, there is a slight twist to how mobile marketing should be approached— at least on an entrepreneurial scale. Therefore, if you are already working on a mobile-centric strategy for your business, reading this post can surely help you modify certain areas by monitoring the landscape in a better way.

Mobile Marketing

The popularity of smartphones can be gauged by the frequency of launches and the usage pattern— even at public places. Mobile marketing, has, therefore taken a center-stage as businesses can reach customers without having to worry about the timing. A mobile user is always alert and so should be the companies catering to him or her.

So, let’s kickstart our discussion by putting forth 5 important points for assessing and even perfecting the mobile marketing arena:

Work on Your Mobile Site

You, being a marketer, must make it a point to create a mobile-friendly website— mainly as a part of your marketing strategy. Optimizing the website for smartphones and handsets is therefore an extremely important step. The idea here is to create a responsive design which loads perfectly every time there is a visitor. Be it images or the texts— everything needs to load perfectly as a shoddy version will repel prospective customers for eternity.

Patience is yet another aspect which needs to be talked about as mobile-based consumers expect a website to load in less than 4 seconds, on an average. Therefore, the mobile-optimized website needs to get rid of unnecessary plugins and forms which can slow down the same— to a considerable extent.

If online retail is your primary focus, you need to increase the page loading speed. One approach towards the same is to opt for specialized ecommerce platforms which integrate everything into the website— from landing pages to necessary plugins.

However, if you are inclined towards setting up a blog or two— optimization is something you need to look at. Even if your content is good, gearing it up for the mobile user is paramount. Another aspect that needs to be taken into account is Google’s search ranking factor which is slightly biased towards mobile friendliness. The brewed content needs to be easy to work with and perfectly navigable.

Prioritize Social Media

According to a recently concluded research, atleast 80 percent of social media surfing is initiated via mobile handsets. These figures need to be gauged closely by the marketers who are looking to build higher levels of brand presence over LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Mobile Marketing and social presence

Apart from handling these platforms, mobile-centric marketers need to focus equally on the likes of Snapchat and Instagram— arenas which have been popularized courtesy the advent of mobile marketing. However, it must be known that presenting content over each one of these platforms can slightly differ as concentrating on ROI is what makes all the difference.

When it comes to devising the perfect mobile marketing strategy for social media, overnight results should never be expected.

Simplify the Checkout Options

If you are following a sale-centric approach, offering seamless checkouts is absolutely necessary. The idea here is to cut down on clutter by reducing the size of forms and other distractions on the way. One such example would be the famous ‘1-click option’ from Amazon.

Marketers, reliant on the mobile-based marketing should opt for the one-page checkout rule besides adding something like a progress indicator which is visually helpful to the viewers. Another idea would be to integrate the likes of Google Wallet or the PayPal interface for seamless transactions. More often than not the need to register kills off the enthusiasm of a user and ecommerce websites must keep the same in mind. Another set of researches have suggested that at least 23 percent of prospective customers halt the purchase when asked to create a new account.

Moreover, if the user is buying something over the mobile, the checkout options need to be simplified further.

Adding Coupons and Receipts

Coupons, as a matter of face, are exciting to avail. Recent reports suggest that at least 96 percent of Americans login via their mobile handsets, in search of better bargains. While mobile marketers can easily incorporate coupons into the scheme of things, certain ones are given out upon registering for a given cause.

The idea here is to understand the target audience and act accordingly.

Next hack involves offering online receipts for every possible transaction. Receiving texts and mails—showcasing the billing information is extremely desirable but an overlooked aspect of mobile marketing. Not just the American contingent but the global consumer arena is also adopting this neglected aspect of mobile marketing— featuring E-challans, E-Receipts and other electronic billing solutions.

Testing Extensively

The mobile ecosystem is changing constantly and the best bet for the marketers would be to consolidate and keep on testing for newer possibilities. Mobile marketing is definitely a raging bull when it comes to traction and brand value but the techniques need to be checked frequently for redundancy.

Moreover, the website and social platforms catered over the mobile handsets need to be optimized for each and every device— with speed, interfacing, memory and resolution being the primary factors. Lastly, browser testing is one overlooked concept and should be treated with respect. At the end, it all pans down to how the content is presented across myriad platforms. While anything undercooked in a felony, lack of proper accommodation is something which can actually terminate a mobile marketing strategy much before its inception.

Bottom Line

When it comes to the present and future of online marketing, the mobile ecosystem is a force to reckon with. Therefore, it is advisable that even the most conventional marketers adopt the mobile-centric path as it would be impossible for them to thrive without adding the same to their marketing arsenal.

14 Feb 16:54

How to Uninstall and Remove Google Drive From Your PC or Mac

by Joel Lee

Need to uninstall Google Drive from your computer? Perhaps you don’t want to use Google Drive anymore or need to reinstall it to fix a problem.

Don’t worry! We’ll show you how to remove Google Drive from your Windows PC or Mac. In case you don’t need this nuclear option, we’ll also cover disconnecting and pausing Google Drive.

How to Disconnect Google Drive From Your Computer

Before you delete Google Drive from your computer, you should disconnect your system from your account. This is also a useful step if you don’t want to fully remove Google Drive yet.

To disconnect Google Drive, you’ll need to click the Backup and Sync from Google icon. It looks like a cloud with an upward-facing arrow.

On Windows, you’ll find this in the System Tray at the bottom-right of your screen; you may need to click the arrow to show all icons. On a Mac, you’ll see the same icon in your menu bar at the top of the screen. Once the Google Drive panel opens, hit the three-dot Menu button and choose Preferences.

Google Drive Backup Sync Menu

In Google Drive’s preferences panel, switch to the Google Drive tab on the left. Uncheck Sync My Drive to this computer to stop syncing everything. You can also check Sync only these folders to pick and choose certain directories to sync.

Google Drive Stop Syncing

If you do this, you can always come back into this settings panel to start syncing again or make changes to what syncs. Anything that’s not set up to sync will stay on your computer and you can access it, but changes you make won’t replicate to the cloud. Your local folders also won’t update when you make changes elsewhere.

To completely disconnect your Google Drive account from your current computer, go to the Settings tab.

Click Disconnect Account to sign out of Google Drive on this machine—just one of the important Google Drive settings you should know about.

Google Drive Disconnect

After you do this, the Google Drive app won’t do anything until you sign in again. You’ll still have access to the files in your Drive folder, but they won’t sync with the cloud.

How to Uninstall Google Drive

Decided you don’t want Google Drive or need to reinstall the software? Here’s how to delete Google Drive on your machine.

Note that removing the Google Drive app prevents your files from syncing, but it doesn’t delete your existing files. You can delete or move them as needed after uninstalling, which won’t affect the copies in the cloud.

Uninstall Google Drive on Windows 10

To remove Google Drive from Windows, you’ll just need to uninstall it like any other program. Open Settings (using the Win + I shortcut if you like) and browse to Apps > Apps & features.

Use the search box or scroll down to find Backup and Sync from Google, which is the new name for the Google Drive app.

Click Uninstall and walk through the steps to remove it from your computer. Once this is done, you’ll need to reinstall the app if you want to start syncing files to this computer again. Your Google Drive folder will stick around, but it’s cut off from your account.

Windows Uninstall Google Drive

Uninstall Google Drive on macOS

The process to remove Google Drive from your Mac is just like uninstalling any other macOS app. Open Finder and navigate to the Applications folder. If you don’t see it on the left sidebar, it’s also available under the Go menu or by using the shortcut Shift + Cmd + A.

Inside Applications, find the Backup and Sync from Google app and drag it to the Trash on your Dock. This deletes the app from your system.

Move App to Trash

How to Pause Google Drive

If you just want to stop Google Drive from syncing for a short time, you don’t need to disconnect or uninstall it. Both the Windows and Mac apps let you pause Google Drive if needed.

To do this, click the Backup and Sync icon again, as described above. In the three-dot Menu at the top-right of this panel, select the Pause option. This will stop Google Drive from uploading and downloading until you repeat the steps and choose Resume. Once you resume, it will sync all the changes made while it was paused.

Google Drive Pause Sync

You can also stop Google Drive from syncing by choosing Quit Backup and Sync from this menu. This closes the software, so it won’t sync until you start it again.

Controlling Google Drive

Now you know how to remove Google Drive from your computer, as well as disconnecting it. In general, you should only uninstall the app for troubleshooting or if you’re sure you don’t want to use it anymore. Disconnecting is sufficient if you want to make changes to the local files without changing what’s in your Drive.

If Google Drive isn’t enough for you, check out the most affordable cloud storage options.

Read the full article: How to Uninstall and Remove Google Drive From Your PC or Mac

14 Feb 16:54

8 Content Marketing Lessons to Live By (and Win Awards)

by Jodi Harris

marketing-words-live-by-win-awards

We all appreciate when our content marketing efforts earn kudos from our audiences. But for marketing agencies, recognition from the public and their peers is their bread and butter – winning an award can mean a higher profile for the portfolio of work, greater awareness and interest among potential clients, and maybe an increased chance of winning more business.

Dozens of agencies submitted entries to the 2016 Content Marketing Awards, resulting in 10 nominees for Agency of the Year and two winners – C3 Creative Code & Content GmbH in the large agency category, and Velocity in the small/medium-sized agency category. Multiple other agencies won awards in individual categories.

What does it take for agencies to create standout work worthy of being recognized by their content marketing peers? Take a look at some of the most acclaimed agency efforts from the field of winners and finalists and what made them stand out, along with some takeaways that brands and agencies alike can use to stay on par with some killer content competition.

Collaborate, create, and iterate

Velocity

Winner: Small/Medium Agency of the Year

Category Winner: Agency/Client Content Marketing Partnership

Velocity was challenged by Xerox to create and execute on a global content strategy that would unite five key lines of Xerox’s business, increase traffic to its services pages, and provide value to its various audiences – all in just eight weeks.

The intense, ambitious project succeeded brilliantly thanks to Velocity’s agile, fast-track process that leveraged Xerox experts for intensive input, created a Minimum Viable Playbook (see below) to govern the brand’s content, and iterated on that plan to produce content suitable for each line of business. All in all, the agency produced 65 thought leadership content pieces – including e-books (you can view a sample here), SlideShare decks, web articles, and infographics – which contributed to significant gains in Xerox’s marketing performance, including a 23% increase in U.S. web traffic, 88% increase in download conversion rate, and a 102% increase in content-driven social traffic.

Velocity-playbooks

Click to view the full Playbook

Takeaway: Set the stage for a successful collaboration with a documented content marketing strategy.

Velocity’s Agile approach required considerable input from the client’s stakeholders every step of the way. The agency’s central team began the journey by running content marketing workshops that prepared everyone for the project and secured the necessary buy-in.


Secure necessary buy-in by getting input from stakeholders every step of the way, says @joderama. #CMWorld
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Equally critical to the project’s potential for success was ensuring that content for each of the distinct business units could be integrated seamlessly into the website without losing its value or relevance to the various personas. By developing and documenting the strategic vision, goals, and editorial guidelines in the form of a shareable playbook, the agency did itself a solid: Not only did everybody working on the project clearly understand what was expected of them, they had a blueprint to govern their decision-making and streamline their processes for optimal efficiency and consistent quality.

Become an agent of influential change

C3 Creative Code & Content GmbH

Winner: Large Agency of the Year

Category Winner: Financial Services Publication

Allianz SE is a leading voice in the field of pensions, and its Project M magazine serves as a key platform for expert knowledge in the fields of asset management, life insurance, and retirement provision.

Pensions is a topic many would consider uninspiring, which is why the first-class journalism inside every issue of Project M is remarkable. The publication examines relevant business subjects from micro, macro, and meta perspectives, with articles written by famous journalists, academics, and experts. The Content Marketing Award judges noted that its rich and modern cover design projects an authoritative air of wealth and intelligence, and offered strong kudos for the publication’s ambitious aim of encouraging readers to come to their own conclusions on the broader societal implications of their investment choices.

C3-Project M

Takeaway: Don’t be afraid to challenge perceptions of your industry.

Way back in 2013, Joe Pulizzi stressed that content marketers need to get past their fear of taking sides if they want to create epic content. This advice is even more critical today, as it’s become increasingly difficult for organizations to distinguish themselves from the competition in some way. Taking a stance – even if it may be a controversial one – is a great way to produce an emotional response in your readers, and may even inspire them to join in the debate themselves, giving them an extra incentive to share your content with their personal networks.


Content marketers need to get past their fear of taking sides if they want to create epic content. @JoePulizzi
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Drive your brand value home (and away)

Marcus Thomas LLC

Category Winner: Paid Advertising/Content Marketing Integration

Marcus Thomas’ client, Momentive, is a global leader in silicone caulks and sealants, manufactured under the GE name. It’s about as dry (literally and figuratively) a topic as you can possibly have to generate excitement; yet the agency rose to the occasion with an integrated platform of micro-targeted content and advertising aimed at clearing customers’ confusion and ensuring that they find the best materials for their renovation task whether searching online or shopping in the aisles of their favorite home-improvement store.

The agency created project-specific content focused on prime caulking situations – window and door installations, kitchen and bath remodeling, and home weatherization. The informative content was prepared in mobile and desktop formats, distributed using social posts, banners, search, and landing pages, and supported with data-driven search ads, as well as micro-targeted mobile campaigns that helped in-store consumers make sense of the choices they found on the shelves.

Marcus Thomas - weatherize

Takeaway: Capture interest by providing real-world utility.

Marcus Thomas made a smart decision to create helpful content that would appeal to the DIY crowd, as these enthusiasts often rely on advice they find online to make sure they achieve the best results when they take on a new project. By supplying consumers with practical, actionable advice and instruction, Momentum increased its credibility and authority as a trusted home-improvement partner. Furthermore, by incorporating tools that make it easier to manage the in-store purchase process, it earned trust that is bound to pay off when it’s time to purchase sealant products for their next project.


Provide customers w/ practical, actionable advice & instruction to build trust & credibility. @joderama
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Content marketing expert Jay Baer refers to this type of content as “Youtility” – content so useful that your prospects and customers would want to pay for it even though it’s available for free. Of course, it’s not always easy to determine what practical needs your content should address. While Jay recommends mining data from search engine queries, social media chatter, and web analytics for clues as to what your customers will find most useful, he contends that the surest way to get answers is to reach out and ask them directly using your online and offline outreach channels.

Surround your audience with the support they need

Meredith Accelerated Marketing

Category Finalist: Integrated Content Marketing Program (Print/Digital Integration)

Another integration project worth mentioning came from Meredith Accelerated Marketing (MXM), which successfully delivered content across every conceivable distribution channel (including print, email, mobile, video, and web) while forging an engaging and value-driven connection with consumers who are passionate about home décor and DIY ingenuity.

One example is the At Home with Copper content MXM created for Lowe’s Creative Ideas-spring 2016. The print magazine includes beautiful imagery on using the copper-pipe products available at Lowe’s to produce on-trend décor, while full project material lists, assembly instructions, video tutorials, and how-to tips were shared on the Lowe’s website, app, and e-newsletters. Through this immersive, 360-degree content experience, MXM provided consumers with compelling reasons to spend their home improvement money at Lowe’s, project ideas to inspire them to action, and the tools and confidence they need to complete the job successfully.

MXM - at home with copper

Takeaway: Maximize content impact with a COPE strategy.

Delivering an immersive, multichannel experience is a powerful way to engage your audience on their terms. But creating enough quality content to fill all those channels and ensuring that all efforts align with your business goals can be an intimidating challenge to address – particularly for those with limited content creation resources.

Fortunately, by working with a COPE strategy, even a content team of one can efficiently produce a steady stream of content without getting stressed to the point of exhaustion. As Zillow’s content marketing director Stephanie Reid-Simmons explains, COPE stands for “create once, publish everywhere,” and represents a highly sustainable technique of building strong, foundational assets that can be expressed in different forms and easily adapted for use on multiple content channels as part of a single, unified process.


Maximize content impact with a Create Once, Publish Everywhere strategy, says @betterlater. #CMWorld
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According to Stephanie, content marketers should follow these guidelines when determining whether their content ideas have what it takes to COPE:

  • Make sure they are substantive: Ask yourself if there’s enough substance to the original story before you decide to extend it to other formats and platforms.
  • Make sure they appeal to your publishing partners: If you want influencers and other professional publishing outlets to help you share your content on their platforms, make sure your assets conform to the quality, topic, and stylistic standards their audiences have come to expect.
  • Take topic cues from your data: Tracking and measuring the performance of all your content may reveal trends and ideas that have a high potential to engage your audience on more than one channel.

Create content for your people, by your people

Pace

Category finalist: Internal/Employee Publication

Walmart World is an internal publication tasked with increasing employee engagement, enhancing job success and satisfaction, and building stronger connections among Walmart’s 1.3 million associates across the country. It’s an ambitious aim for any organization (let alone one with such a diverse and dispersed audience base); yet Pace has met the challenge deftly, by empowering the employees themselves to shape the content that gets created and shared.

A monthly outreach letter to personnel managers regularly solicits story ideas and submissions from the members of Walmart’s workforce, while an associate expert panel surfaces additional topics, suggests on-the-job tips for increased success, and gathers sources, quotes, and feedback to help ensure that the articles have as wide an appeal as possible. The result is stand-out content that 94% of the company’s employees say they trust, 66% read regularly, and 71% cite as a source of pride in their company, according to a March 2015 research report.

Pace - walmart world

Takeaway: Drive enterprise-wide support for content by securing buy-in from team leaders.


Drive enterprise-wide support for #content by securing buy-in from team leaders, says @joderama. #CMWorld
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Walmart World drove a sense of personal investment in its success by involving the company’s associates in the planning and execution of content and providing them with a platform to share their own interests and experiences.

As Dan Steiner recently explained, the best way to gain acceptance for an internal program like this is to initiate a dialogue with department leaders, making sure each one understands the benefits of collaborative content and is willing to help drive participation. You may also want to consider rewarding employees for their contributions through perks like bonuses, exclusive event passes, or other means of internal and external recognition.

Learn to zig where others zag

Imprint

Category Finalist: Best Mobile App/Utility

Investment banking is more often associated with concepts like “security,” “responsibility,” or “functionality” than with “creativity” or “visual experience.” However, when it came time to build its mobile app, Fidelity recognized the need to distinguish itself in a crowded marketplace and decided to bet big on the power of technology, innovation, and personalization as a way to realize its content goals.

Fidelity teamed up with Imprint to transform its Portfolio Advisement Service (PAS-W) content into a visually compelling in-person experience. At the company’s annual WI Client Conference, a 55-inch touchscreen gave attendees a way to explore a series of unique investment scenarios and learn how Fidelity would evaluate, recommend, and manage a personalized asset allocation strategy for each one. By giving the audience an easy and fun way to interact with financial content in a live setting, Imprint reinforced the firm’s commitment to offer innovative solutions and deliver best-in-class investing education and support.

imprint-fidelity-hugo

Takeaway: Find a content niche where you can own the conversation.


Find a content niche where you can own the conversation, says @joderama. #CMWorld
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It’s so common for financial institutions to offer online investment tools and other educational content that it’s become nearly impossible for consumers to distinguish one company’s offerings from another. This is a key reason why all brands need to look for a content tilt – an area where little to no competitive content exists, giving the business a fighting chance of getting noticed by its target audience.

By finding a unique, technology-driven way to approach investment education and turn it into a hands-on experience, Imprint supplied Fidelity with the content tilt it needed to stand apart from the competition. To discover your own unique storytelling opportunity, Joe Pulizzi recommends exploring a few data points:

  • Your audience: Focus on a very specific reader who is likely underserved by the content in their niche.
  • Your approach: Explore a common challenge from a new angle, communicating in a different tone or experimenting with a new content format.
  • Your platform: If all your competitors have a blog, create a podcast, publish a print magazine, or embrace an emerging technology like virtual reality.

Broadcast your value across the right channels

Brand New Content

Category Winner: Most Innovative Content Marketing Distribution Strategy

As northern Europe’s largest dairy producer, Arla Foods is greatly concerned with demonstrating the connection between good health, exercise, and a balanced diet that includes dairy products. To inspire consumers in Sweden to embrace its vision of a healthier lifestyle, Arla teamed up with Brand New Content on an ambitious content platform called Vardagspuls.se.

The heart of the program is the Vardagspuls.se content hub, which consistently publishes enough engaging, informative content to fill the site – and its multiple social channels – with compelling conversations on how to lead a healthier lifestyle. But it’s the associated television program Brand New Content produced for TV4 Sweden (the country’s largest commercial channel) that serves as the booming voice of this content brand, both amplifying the key messages to a massive audience and feeding a large volume of relevant and entertaining video clips back to the site.

Vardagspuls-integrated-content

Takeaway: Take the guesswork out of the distribution process with a strategic channel plan.

For Vardagspuls.se’s health-conscious message to resonate broadly enough throughout Sweden to have an impact, it had to be communicated clearly and consistently across each of the initiative’s communication channels – no small challenge considering how many moving parts were involved. But jobs like this can be made a lot easier when you establish a goal-focused channel plan to guide your team’s efforts right from the start.

At a minimum, you should outline the content assets you plan to distribute on a particular channel, who you intend to engage, the goals you expect your efforts to achieve, and how you will evaluate your content’s performance. Once you have this basic framework, it’s easier to identify the best outlets for each new piece of content you create and ensure that all your efforts are aligned on the right business goals.

Speak to your goals using the right voice

256 Media

Category Winner: Best Branded Content Campaign

Many cultures seem to have their own views on the passage of time. When Irish financial institution EBS wanted to anchor its key message of “anytime mortgage meetings,” the company polled the populace to get a consensus on the meaning of terms like “an Irish minute” (4 minutes, 59 seconds) or “dead late” (a delay of 43 minutes, 39 seconds). With colloquial quantifications in hand, EBS teamed up with 256 Media to develop a series of humorous time-related content assets – including a Facebook app, infographics, videos, animated gifs, and a series of 12 “Irish Time” illustrations commissioned from Dublin-based illustrator Rob Stears.

Not only did the unmistakable Irish voice of EBS’ content entertain and engage its local audience, the campaign translated into some remarkable business results: It delivered more than 14% above the company’s target for mortgage meetings and over 40% above its target for online lead generation, and led to a 40% increase in year-over-year lending.

illustration_anytime

Takeaway: Create shared experiences that your audience will crave.


Create shared experiences that your audience will crave, says @joderama. #CMWorld
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What’s more powerful than communicating in a consistent and carefully cultivated brand voice? Ensuring that it’s a voice that your target audience will relate to.

As Scott Aughtmon explains, audiences crave certain types of stories – universally embraced themes that we are emotionally wired to pay attention to, want to make time for, are unable to forget, and want to share with others. This is the kind of content that influences, inspires, and moves people to take action.

The best way to do this is to frame your content around certain archetypal storytelling concepts, including the ones Scott shared in the infographic below:

Craveworthy content

It’s your turn to shine

Incidentally, the call for entries for the 2017 Content Marketing Awards opened a few weeks ago. If you have produced content you are really proud of over the past year, why not throw your hat in the ring and submit an entry? We will honor content marketers in over 90 categories this year – including Agency of the Year, Project of the Year, Marketer of the Year, and a wide range of project-specific creative, strategic, and distribution functions that span print, digital, in-person, and mobile platforms.

Not quite sure your work is ready for “prime time”? Register to attend Content Marketing World Sept. 5-8 in Cleveland, Ohio, to brush up on all the latest techniques and best practices that will give you an edge over this year’s competition. Use promo code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 8 Content Marketing Lessons to Live By (and Win Awards) appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

14 Feb 16:54

For Love or Money: Perspectives of a Serial Giver

by Randy Milanovic

I love to give. It’s in my DNA.

In 2016, my team and I gave hundreds of hours of our time. Our motivation to give is that it makes us feel good. It’s personal. We’re motivated by having a love for the cause.

love-or-money-people.jpg

Of those hours, the bulk of our ‘give’ tend to be advisory, supported by dedicating studio time for our team to apply their skills to projects meant to help others become more successful online and off.

While our 2016 causes share a theme of family, children and community, there’s another reason for giving that many people (especially charities) often overlook. You can imagine of course that if I’m volunteering, I’m providing time. If I’m advising, I’m providing knowledge. But if I’m paying – make no mistake about it – I’m making a purchase.

Slowly, ever so slowly, fundraising is emerging from its Dark Ages of reliance on myth, tribal wisdom and so-called “best practices.” More and more, it’s no longer acceptable to make and defend decisions on an “I think” basis with no empirical backup.

The increase in the application of behavioral science research to fundraising, the easy and inexpensive availability of predictive analytics, and the growth in numbers of fundraisers who actually understand numbers represent significant advances out of the swamp of guesswork and myth… Roger Craver and Tom Belford, editors, The Agitator – Source: 40 Non-profit Trends for 2017

Giving to charities and non-profits is a great way to build your brand, and larger sponsors know this well

Not to say this type of giving isn’t rooted in love, but in the corporate world it’s done for gain. An investment in a well known charity usually means exposure to its people, its partners, and growing good will in the community. It’s a media buy.

When developing a corporate sponsorship package, go beyond marketing your special events. Our experience has shown that developing an integrated corporate marketing program better serves the organization and its corporate partners. – Barbara Talisman

This type of give is focused on the ROI.

sponsor-or-partner.jpg

They’ll be asking… Is it a good investment? Is the opportunity temporary or sustainable? Do we share target audiences and is the cause relevant to my business? Will my brand exposure or audience grow as a result of our alignment? What impact will my investment have on how people perceive my company or brand?

If the answers to those questions are positive, the asker need only demonstrate a shared alignment for givers to do so, generously.

In this case, it’s not personal, it’s business.

So tell me, what’s your motivation for giving? Is it personal or business; love or money? Neither is wrong. The only wrong is not giving.

14 Feb 16:54

Nine Ways to Get New Mileage From Worn Out Content

by John Jantsch

Nine Ways to Get New Mileage From Worn Out Content written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

People don’t have enough time to continue to create the amount of content they need to attract visitors and convert them into leads. I get it. Creating content can be challenging and time-consuming, and coming up with new material regularly can seem impossible.

I’m here to tell you it’s doable, and you don’t even have to start from scratch. You can gain tremendous value just from reusing old content. Derek Halpern of Social Triggers said it well: “You don’t have to create content day in and day out. You just have to work on getting the content you already have in the hands of more people.” Here’s how.

Re-optimize old content

A few years ago, HubSpot wrote a blog post titled, “The Blogging Tactic No One Is Talking About: Optimizing the Past” and it was a keeper. In a nutshell, this post discusses that the company tested updating and re-publishing old blog posts to see if they could get more leverage out of them. The results were hard to ignore. By simply re-optimizing old content, HubSpot was able to increase organic traffic by 106%. 

Reoptimize content

The best news? Theses results aren’t unique to HubSpot. Many businesses are taking this approach and are reaping the benefits of it. My friend Brian Dean, of Backlinko, is one of them. In fact, after testing this theory for just two weeks, Brian saw a 260.7% increase in organic search traffic. Not bad for just optimizing and re-publishing content he already had.

reuse content

Interested in taking advantage of this? There are just a few simple steps you need to follow:

1. Review your analytics and identify your underperforming content

It isn’t necessary to optimize all material from the past. If you have blog posts or other content that is performing well, let them be (or repurpose them as I’ll outline below). There are two key components you should consider when finding the right content to re-optimize:

  1. Find posts with high traffic but low conversion and figure out how to increase leads on those posts
  2. Find posts with low traffic but high conversion and figure out how to get more visits to those posts

2. Optimize and update that content

Once you determine which posts you’re going to re-optimize, consider updating the following:

  • Update old images and screenshots to ensure the visuals are still relevant
  • Update any dated content or hyperlinks within the posts with new information and recent URLs
  • Add relevant CTAs to the posts to increase conversion
  • Focus on adding relevant keywords to the content naturally
  • Consider a content upgrade that might make sense on those pages

3. Republish your content

Once the content is updated, republish it and promote to your network via email and social media channels.

Re-optimization works because Google rewards relevancy and freshness. New visits will come out of sharing content within your network, and those new promotions will lead to new inbound links, also boosting SEO.

Repurpose old content

Optimizing old content may be an excellent way to bring new life to underperforming content, but what can you do to get new mileage out of content that is performing well? You can re-purpose it. By repurposing content, you can continue to gain value from previous content without having to completely reinvent the wheel.

The content you repurpose needs to be high-quality content from your past that will always be relevant to your audience. It’s difficult to repurpose content around fads that may go away as quickly as they appeared.

The key to making this work going forward is to think about this concept ahead of time. What posts would make great presentations? What presentations would make great ebooks? What video would make for a series of blog posts?

It’s also important that you review your analytics to see which content is generating the most interest. The more popular the original content is, the more likely the repurposed content will be popular as well. Essentially, high-quality content can create even more high-quality content.

Once you’ve identified the content that you’d like to repurpose, it’s time to develop the new content. Keep in mind that the goal is to make the content fresh and appealing enough to expand your audience.

How to repurpose content

I’ve found that one of the easiest ways to repurpose content is to start with video and create new content by working backwards from there. It’s amazing how many blogs, infographics, or premium content can spin off from there. I realize, however, that not everybody has video content, so I’ve provided other ways to refresh the content below.

1. Create new blog posts

Turn points discussed in listicles or numbered summary posts into posts of their own. Do the opposite as well by combining a bunch of posts on the same topic and turning them into listicles or summary-based posts.

2. Design an infographic

Take your written content and transform it into a visual infographic. Infographics are a great way to break up data, or take difficult concepts and make them more digestible for the reader.

3. Implement an email series

Emails shouldn’t be long in order to keep your readers’ attention. Take pieces of your content and turn them into a an email campaign that is easy for your readers to consume. You can then promote this series on your blog as a lead conversion opportunity.

4. Develop premium content

Consider gathering related blog posts and turning them into a comprehensive ebook or white paper. You can then use that content as a conversion tool to increase your leads.

5. Create a podcast 

People have busy lives and it can be hard to find time to sit down and read an article. Listening to a podcast on their way to work, however, is much more manageable. By repurposing content into podcasts, you create a whole new way to connect with your audience.

6. Create a video series

People love video, and because of this, businesses want to produce as much video content as possible. Instead of brainstorming a new script for each video, use blog posts as the material for your script. This will allow you to produce new videos at a more rapid rate.

Every business should create a series of videos based on the most frequently asked questions.

The list above contains a few of the many ways you can reformat your content into another great piece that will attract your audience. By optimizing and repurposing content from the past, you’ll be able to boost your SEO, reach new audiences, and gain additional credibility and authority within your space. Who wouldn’t want that?

Bottom line, don’t let content just sit there when you can still receive a ton of value from it.

Have you been able to get new mileage from worn out content? If so, I’d love to hear about it!

14 Feb 16:53

Great Expectations: A Personal Perspective on Safety and Security in the Era of Coworking

by Paula Gomprecht

Great Expectations Blog

As a woman, I have certain expectations for what a safe workplace should be, and most may not differ greatly from those of my male coworkers.

I want to be confident that if I step away from my belongings, they will still be there when I get back. I should be able to have a confidential conversation in a private setting. When I’m focusing on my work, I would prefer not to be fending off unwanted pitches, of any kind. And I want to be very sure that the workplace enforces policies against unprofessional and inappropriate behavior, including un-welcomed advances.

But with a workforce that has been liberated from corporate cubicles and is increasingly choosing to work in coworking facilities, how can personal privacy and safety be ensured?

I learned a lot about the value of a safe and welcoming workplace in my first job, where I had a colleague who often felt it necessary to remark on my looks. While at first flattering, the overtures progressed quickly to more aggressive propositions which continued even after I expressed my discomfort. I was forced to channel my inner Greta Garbo uttering “I want to be alone,” before ultimately escalating to HR – who I knew would have my back.

Of course, I don’t really want to work alone. I want to be around others and feel part of a community, as do 84% of coworkers based on a recent survey. I value my privacy and security, and I should not be expected to lower my expectations because I choose to work in a coworking facility.

Vinay Kantak, VP of Platform Services for Serendipity Labs Coworking, who is responsible for both online and on-premise security, recently penned a blog, Don’t Play Games When It Comes to Your Safety and Security for this The Inspired Worklife series. In it he notes the questions you should be asking your future or current coworking facility to determine what safety and security practices are in place. Below, I’ve added a few of my own, now that my expectations have been raised by working at Serendipity Labs. Adding these to Vinay’s list might help you determine which coworking community is right for you:

      • Are the desks made in a way that, regardless of your choice of outfit, protects you from feeling exposed?
      • Are privacy features designed into offices and meeting rooms, or will you be in a glass fishbowl where you feel like you are on display?
      • Are there a variety of seating options, so you don’t need to struggle to hop onto a tall chair or feel like a child forced to sit cross-legged on a beanbag?
      • If the ambient music, daytime communal events, or general noise level become distracting, will anyone address your concerns and are they willing to make a change to accommodate you?
      • If you are feeling harassed – either by an aggressive coworker peddling their wares, or worse, sexually – are there rules and a process in place to step in and protect you?

From that first job until now, I’ve never shied away from opportunities to do something new, because I have been fortunate to work with experienced professionals whom I trusted to support me when I needed it. As business leaders, we have succeeded by often being willing to take similar leaps of faith. For coworkers, that leap is choosing a provider who is willing to ensure their safety and security. And isn’t it nice to know someone has your back, just in case you need it?

14 Feb 16:53

A Better Metric for the Value of a Worker Training Program

by Ali Jaffer
feb17-14-535457342

The United States has thousands of workforce development and training programs, run by the public, social, and private sectors. Some are excellent; others, not so much. The problem is that we don’t know which are which.

That lack of knowledge is costly. According to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, spending on programs in the U.S. for those not going to four-year colleges — everything from federal and state jobs initiatives to on-the-job training, certifications, community college, and employer training — is at least $300 billion a year. But according to the World Bank, only 30% of youth employment programs are successful, with many of those offering only marginal benefit. And most programs have no positive effect at all.

Yet workplace training is more necessary than ever, as technology and globalization continue to change the types of jobs that are available. In a dynamic economy workers are expected to adapt, to change not just jobs but sometimes careers, to pick up new skills when necessary. That requires successful training programs, which means we need to know which ones work.

Most existing training programs do try to assess their effectiveness. Many measure cost per student. Some measure job placement rates. A minority track on-the-job retention. These metrics are useful but miss the big picture, in part because they mistake a program’s cost for its value.

Think about it. If a program has a low cost per student but fails to actually help people forge a solid career, then the fact that the failure is cheap does not make it any less of a failure. Conversely, some programs may promise high rates of job retention, but at such a high cost per student that the program proves impractical or impossible to scale. Or, if the jobs themselves are low paying and don’t offer students a viable career path, they may not be worth it regardless of the high retention rates. Cost per student is good to know, but it doesn’t mean much if students don’t succeed in the workplace. Job placement matters, but a high placement rate is meaningless if the participant leaves after a week or if the job itself is temporary or doesn’t pay well.

Conducting an accurate cost-benefit analysis requires a holistic approach, one that incorporates costs and job placement and also accounts for how participants are doing after they leave the program. We need to adopt something similar to a “total cost of ownership” (TCO) analysis. Now common in industry, TCO considers both direct and indirect costs over time. Applying a form of TCO to workforce programs makes sense because, instead of concentrating on inputs (in the form of spending), this approach emphasizes outcomes (in the form of long-term results).

We have come to this realization the hard way — through experience. For the last two years we have been implementing Generation, a youth employment program that is part of the McKinsey Social Initiative. So far, Generation has served nearly 10,000 young people in five countries: India, Kenya, Mexico, Spain, and the United States. As we sought to measure Generation’s results, we began to understand the limitations of current practice.

We developed a new metric — cost per employed day (CPED) over the first six months — that we believe better defines how well employment programs work.

CPED combines elements of existing measures into a powerful, readily understandable one. It measures the social and economic benefits of employment programs with much greater precision.

Here’s an example. Program X serves 1,000 students at a cost of $1,000 each, or $1 million total. Five hundred individuals are placed into work (a 50% “job placement” rate), and they stay employed for an average of 60 days in the first six months. That adds up to 30,000 days on the job, at a cost of $33 per employed day. Program Y, on the other hand, has an up-front cost of $2,000 per student, but a placement rate of 80%, and graduates stay on the job for an average of 120 days. That comes out to 96,000 working days, or $21 per employed day. Clearly, Program Y, which at first blush looks twice as expensive as Program X, provides far more value in terms of helping participants find and keep gainful employment. At Generation, the CPED figure varies depending on the market, ranging from about $5 in India to $26 in the United States.

Debating the utility of specific metrics might seem like a minor thing. But adopting more-accurate measures of success increases accountability. And accountability drives results.

For example, once Generation managers realized the power of CPED, they used it to make operational improvements. On the basis of what we learned from CPED, we began to work more closely with employers to track retention rates and we increased our emphasis on mentoring in the first days on the job. Generation is also developing tools to improve data collection and management. While the data needed to make comparisons with other job training programs does not yet exist, our sense is that using CPED would reveal tens of billions of dollars in inefficient spending, in the form of programs with subpar CPED performance.

Perhaps the biggest challenge to widespread use of CPED is that workforce development programs are fragmented, with thousands of providers and almost as many ways of doing things. That makes getting basic information next to impossible. And because reporting requirements vary from place to place, practitioners spend an inordinate amount of time fulfilling compliance obligations that may be pointless.

CPED, by contrast, provides a simple and effective way to measure performance. For it to be adopted more widely, or even to become standard, all programs would need to collect data on cost per student, job placement, and retention. In addition, to enable everyone to learn what works, there should be a centralized database in which this information can be gathered and then easily accessed. Funders could help by adopting CPED and mandating that programs collect the necessary data.

Despite the promise shown by CPED, we have significant work ahead to improve this new metric and make it the standard across training programs. Today, for instance, many programs would struggle to measure CPED at the three-month mark, let alone at the six-month mark. Our hope is that once we, Generation, and other programs take this next step, we can extend the timeline for CPED, and perhaps even incorporate wages — both of which would make CPED a richer, even more accurate metric. While CPED can continue to be improved, it’s a big step in the right direction and can help us better measure the effectiveness of worker training programs.

“What gets measured gets managed” has become a cliché. Like many clichés, this one earned its status because there is a large element of truth to it. In a world in which 73 million young people are unemployed and over 200 million more struggle in unstable or dead-end jobs, it is surely possible to do much better. Data and metrics are part of the solution.

14 Feb 16:53

What the Experts REALLY Think About Performance Management

by Michael Heller

Performance reviews have been a long-time subject of debate. With the implementation of new HR technologies like automated microfeedback, people are starting to question whether regular performance reviews are useful at all. Shockingly, only 8% of companies believe their performance review process is highly effective—so why waste the time? We asked three performance review pros what their thoughts on the annual review were. Should they stay, or should they go?

Frequent Feedback Is On The Rise

“People want to know on an ongoing basis, am I doing right? Am I moving in the right direction? Do you think I’m progressing? Nobody’s going to wait for an annual cycle to get that feedback.” – Pierre Nanterme, Accenture CEO

So the annual review is on its way out, and no wonder, when 45% of HR leaders don’t think annual reviews are an accurate appraisal of employee’s work. So exit annual performance reviews and enter microfeedback! New automated systems make tracking employee progress a breeze, and have the ability to go out to employees once a month, bi-weekly or even once a week. Take a cue from companies like Deloitte and GE, who are doing once-a-month one-on-ones to keep up with their employees.

If Everyone Hates It, Throw It Out

“Performance management as practiced by most organizations has become a rule-based, bureaucratic process, existing as an end in itself rather than actually shaping performance. Employees hate it. Managers hate it. Even HR departments hate it.” – Laszlo Bock, Former SVP of People Operations, Google

If nobody likes it, it’s not going to be good for the business, that’s the bottom line. Even helpful, constructive feedback is going to lose its value when it’s wrapped up in time-wasting rules and regulations. Unsurprisingly, considering how much everyone hates them, 30% of performance reviews end up actually decreasing employee performance. Too many unhelpful annual reviews and employee engagement is bound to take a hit as well. Switch to frequent feedback to ensure you aren’t part of the 79% of companies that have significant retention and engagement problems.

How you, too, can create ongoing performance management for your employees:

Make Way For Millennials

“The world isn’t really on an annual cycle any more for anything…It’s the way millennials are used to working and getting feedback, which is more frequent, faster, mobile-enabled, so there were multiple drivers that said it’s time to make this big change.” –Susan Peters, Senior Vice President, Human Resources, at GE

Studies show that 68% of corporate recruiters say that it is difficult for their organizations to manage millennials. However, it’s projected that 75% of the workforce will be millennials by 2030, so it’s time to get used to their work style. Annual reviews aren’t going to cut it for this generation. They’re looking for coaching and support, not just a once-a-year check-in. Companies looking to be on the front lines of innovation should think seriously about changing up their annual reviews to something a little more compatible.

Performance reviews aren’t going away, and they’re not going to anytime soon, but they are changing. Annual performance reviews take too much time, have too many rules, and are wildly unproductive—even counterproductive at times. Instead, frequent feedback and microfeedback are on the rise. You’ll be shocked at how much engagement, happiness and productivity rates skyrocket: 69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were better recognized.

14 Feb 16:53

3 Ways to Make Time for the Little Tasks You Never Make Time For

by Dorie Clark
feb17-14-494331051

We’d all like to spend our time at work on high-value activities: setting strategy, fostering innovation, mentoring promising employees, and more. But every professional faces a relentless deluge of niggling tasks — the overflowing inbox, the introductions you promised to make, the stack of paperwork you have to file, or the articles you really ought to read.

This low-value work is particularly vexing in light of the Pareto Principle, the adage — now gospel in Silicon Valley and many business circles — that 20% of your activities are responsible for 80% of the value you create. If you can jettison what’s least important, the thinking goes, you can double down on what’s driving your most important contributions.

Indeed, sometimes you can let go of these activities. But you have to recognize, and reconcile yourself to the fact, that there is a price. Tim Ferriss, author of the bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek, advocates this approach. After one extended trip abroad during which he avoided email, he wrote that he had missed a large number of critical messages, including a fulfillment center crisis that caused him to lose more than 20% of monthly orders for his business, media interview opportunities that had expired, and more than a dozen partnership offers. Rather than mourning these lost chances, however, he embraced them. “Oftentimes,” he wrote, “in order to do the big things, you have to let the small bad things happen. This is a skill we want to cultivate.”

Perhaps. Though if you work for someone else, rather than being self-employed, the tolerance level for these missed opportunities is a lot lower. If you can’t afford to ignore email or other low-value tasks entirely, and your options for delegating to others are limited, here are three techniques you can use to minimize the pain and get things done.

One possibility is to batch your less important tasks and accomplish them in one fell swoop, creating a sense of momentum. You can do this solo — I used to park myself at a local café and vow not to come home until I’d completed my to-do list for the day — or, in some cases, communally. New York filmmaker Jeremy Redleaf recently launched “Cave Day,” an event in which professionals pay a small fee to spend a Sunday at a coworking facility, plowing through tasks such as cleaning your inbox and writing thank you cards.

Another technique, for those who prefer an incremental approach, is the “small drip strategy.” This involves identifying small blocks of time in your schedule (typically 15–30 minutes per day) and matching them with low-value tasks that need to be accomplished. Yesterday I had to look up how much I had paid my virtual assistant last year in order to get the information to my accountant, so he could issue her tax forms in a timely fashion. That’s no one’s definition of “strategic” or “high value.” It’s a boring, but mandatory, task that would be easy to put off. But when I reviewed my calendar the night before and saw I had a 15-minute window between two calls, I slotted it in and accomplished it. You can look for these scheduling holes serendipitously, or deliberately schedule in a half-hour of grunt work every day, perhaps at the end of the workday, when most professionals’ energy is waning and your ability to do creative thinking has tapered off.

Finally, you could procrastinate strategically. This differs from simply ignoring all incoming email, Tim Ferriss–style. What you do is weigh the value of the opportunity and set your own timeline for handling it. If the timeline happens to work for the other person, it’s a happy coincidence; if it doesn’t, you’ve already reconciled yourself to the possibility of missing out. I’ll often take this approach when it comes to requests from miscellaneous bloggers. I respond quickly to inquiries from official journalists, but if someone is writing a post for their personal blog, I’d like to help them out, but don’t want to sacrifice an important task (such as finishing book edits) to do so. I always write back eventually, but it may take me a number of days, or even weeks. If they can still use my quote, fantastic; if they can’t, it’s only a minor loss.

No matter how productive we become, we’re never going to permanently rid ourselves of low-value work. By following these strategies, we can at least handle it more efficiently and leave more white space in our days for the projects that are truly meaningful.

14 Feb 16:51

5 Must Fix Areas to Support the New LinkedIn Interface

by Mario Martinez Jr.

New LinkedIn Interface

As LinkedIn rolls out the new LinkedIn interface, many sales professionals are scratching their heads asking, where did everything go? There has been post after post asking about where, what, when, and how. Some of the messages are preaching doom and gloom while yet others make it seem like the end of the world has arrived! The fact is, the new experience mimics the mobile quite a bit, and although it looks and feels different, the power of LinkedIn’s database is still the foundation of the social networking platform and the end of the world has NOT arrived.

To help sales reps navigate the new LinkedIn better, I reached out to one of my favorite social sellers, friend and partner, Brynne Tillman, for a brainstorming session and walked away with valuable tips that can help business development professionals acclimate to the new interface. If you were a fly on the wall, this is some of what you may have heard:

The New LinkedIn Interface: What’s Changed?

Mario: “Brynne, it is amazing how many people are reaching out asking about the new LinkedIn Interface, what are you initial thoughts?”

Brynne: “I am pleasantly surprised. I find it clean and easy to navigate. Sure a few features have moved into Sales Navigator, but we got a few new ones that I am very excited about?”

Mario: “Love hearing the positive attitude. What are some of the features you like?”

Brynne: “I have two that I love. First, you can now include a hyperlink in a connection request. I am a big fan of sharing relevant content and the ability to do that in the invitation will most certainly increase the acceptance rate. Second, I also love that under the jobs tab at the bottom, there is a list of every company represented in your 1st degree network. If you are hunting net new logos, this is the place to start.”

How Can I Stand out From the Crowd?

Mario: “I love your first point. I have written about how to get a 74% acceptance on your connection requests. Now with the ability to include a hyperlink in your connection requests I believe this is really a game changer. Tell me what you think of this list I came up with on how sales can use links properly. They can:

  1. Share content which maps to their buyer’s specific business problem
  2. Share a relevant case study which show cases how your company can solve a business problem(s).
  3. Or Stand out from the crowd and send a video message link like the one included in this article here which will destroy your competition.

Brynne: “Yes, I agree! Regarding your point #3 Video is a powerful tool. In fact, you should include the link to my new video called The New LinkedIn Experience 2017 where I take users through how to navigate the new LinkedIn Interface and UI.

Mario: “The most uproar I am hearing is that the Advanced and Saved Search features have moved into Sales Navigator, how do you think this will affect sales professionals using the free or premium platform?”

Brynne: “The good news, as you know Mario, is that Boolean searches still work within your search bar of the new LinkedIn Interface – and when specific search strings are created by sales reps, finding the right buyers and stakeholders in LinkedIn is still pretty simple. There are still some filters including geographic location and industry among others that can help drill down to a very targeted list of prospects.

5 Must Fix Areas to Support The New LinkedIn Interface

Mario: “I have noticed that profiles look very different, what portion or portions should sales reps update within their own profile to be branded well & attract their buyers via the new LinkedIn interface?”

Brynne: “That’s a great question. There are 5 areas to focus on for sure.

  1. First, it is vital that there is a consistent brand message and look across the organization, and it has never been more important than now, with the new LinkedIn look. The background photo or banner not only looks very different than it did before but appears differently on the desktop and mobile. Marketing needs to get involved and develop powerful graphics that work in both places.
  1. Although your headline was always important, it now is front and center and has one very important job… to get your profile visitors curious enough to want to scroll down and learn more. Consider leaving off your title and company name and focus on who and how you help.
  1. Next, the summary is condensed and only has the first two lines showing. So, I am recommending that you have a call-to-open. Like a call-to-action, there has to be a reason that someone would want to click the see more button and read more of your summary. And, of course your summary needs to be a resource and provide value for your buyer.
  1. Your job description is more important than ever! When your visitors scroll down into your profile, it is this section that they see first. And, because we can no longer move our profile sections around, we have to really take it seriously. We have to switch from listing our awards and great sales negotiating skills to letting our audience know the solutions we bring to our clients. It is a significant mindset shift, but is vital to getting your brand message across.
  1. Make sure you upload rich media to enhance your profile visitor’s experience. This can be done in your summary – but is even more impactful in your job description now. Media to consider are videos, case studies or branded educational collateral, as they increase credibility and help build rapport.

Mario’s Special HINT: If you don’t know how to implement what is suggested in bullet #5… No worries – I’ve provided two How To Video’s to teach you how to do it!

  1. Episode 04 – How do I Add Multi-Media to my Summary Section on LinkedIn
  2. Episode 03 – How do I Add Multi-Media to my Experience Section on LinkedIn

Mario: “Before we wrap things up, what advice would you give a sales rep who wakes up one morning and barely recognizes their LinkedIn?”

Brynne: “Breathe, and know it will all be okay. LinkedIn has changed many times before, and we all threw up our fists and said how can they do this to us, but now we barely remember the features we had. LinkedIn is one of the most amazing business tool available to a sales rep today, but if you are missing some of those phenomenal features like the ability to mine your connections’ connections or deep advanced searches including company size and seniority level it just may be time to check out Sales Navigator. It is a game changer. “

In closing, there is a lot to catch up on around the new LinkedIn interface. As Brynne stated there are several moving parts around the new LI interface. But there is one thing to remember: The End of the World has not arrived! LOL LinkedIn and its associated sales tool (Sales Navigator) is still by far the defacto social tool that should be utilized for engaging with your buyers. So, whether you love the change or not, whether you think it’s a good move or not… it doesn’t matter. Adopt and embrace the change and ensure you leverage it to explode your sales pipeline.

14 Feb 16:51

Why Having a Unique Value Proposition Is Overrated (& What to Focus on Instead)

by billcates@referralcoach.com (Bill Cates)

unique-value-proposition-overrated.jpg

Marketing experts always talk about how we must have a unique value proposition or a unique selling proposition. They believe this helps us look different in the marketplace or accentuate what makes us distinct.

Sometimes we need to define and accentuate our differentiation to catch the attention of our prospects and others who are important to our business. But differentiation, distinction, or being unique isn’t the end game.

The end game is moving someone to take action: To respond to our email or voicemail, grant us an appointment, to do business with us, and to follow our recommendations. 

Every part of your unique value proposition should serve two purposes that continually work together.

  1. Relevance: What makes you different isn’t worth a hill of beans if you aren’t relevant. How many times have you had someone tell you about their product or service, but never took the time to know if what they offered was relevant to your world -- or at least make an attempt to learn your world first to tailor how they communicated their value? Have you ever been guilty of just talking about your value before getting to know the receiver of that message?
  2. Compelling: In this context, compelling means move to action. We cannot move someone to action until our message is relevant to them. Then, we must continue to ask questions and talk about our value in a way that results in action -- otherwise we just create polite interest without meaningful action.

Relevance Is a Two-Way Street

How we talk about our value should be designed to attract the right prospects into our world and simultaneously repel the wrong prospects.

When you craft your value proposition, narrow your message to the extent that how you talk about your value carefully qualifies who you want to enter into your world and disqualifies those who you don't. (Let someone else serve the prospects and clients who are not a fit.)

How we craft a relevant and compelling value proposition is inextricably linked to our ability to meet more new and qualified prospects through referrals and personal introductions.

4 Characteristics of the "Ultimate Value Proposition"

If being unique or different isn't what wins you the business of a new client, what is?

Being the right fit is. Your prospects must perceive you as the perfect fit for them or they’ll keep looking. Like I said, being a little distinct can draw someone to you at first, but if they don’t continue to see the relevance in your solutions, you’re history.

Here are the four characteristics of a successfully designed value proposition that'll win new business.

1) Targeted

In just about every industry we could name, generalization has given way to specialization. If you haven’t already done so, get super clear on the demographic and psychographic characteristics of your ideal client. A targeted value proposition is at the heart of all the elements that follow.

This targeting, or narrowed focus on who you are trying to attract into your business, creates what I like to call "macro relevance."

2) Attractive

It goes without saying that we want to talk about our value in a way that attracts people toward us. Being targeted helps, because the prospect will think, “This gal understands my world” or “He gets me.” Probably the most important aspect of an attractive value proposition is your “personal why” or “personal mission.” This is where you become real to your prospect, which is what makes you attractive.

3) Authentic

Have you ever heard someone talk about value in a way that may have been “different” but just didn’t seem genuine or “real?” Tricky, trite, or cheesy value props are often associated with the elevator pitch. Having a short, concise, and interesting way to communicate our value is important. But if what we develop does not feel genuine to us, we won’t use it (nor should we).

4) Micro-relevant

This is probably the most important of all these elements, and you can probably surmise that the first three feed into this one. More than anything else, your prospects want to know, “Why are you the right fit for me?” Meaning… “Why are you, your value, your solution, and your mission most relevant to me?” How do you create relevance?

There are two phases to being Micro Relevant. First, before you contact a new prospect, learn as much as you can about that prospect before you even reach out to them. When you look at your prospect’s LinkedIn profile, their Facebook page, their bio on their company website and what you can learn from your referral source, you become super relevant to that prospect.

Do you want to look different in the marketplace? Do your research before you contact a prospect. You will find your emails get returned and your voice messages get answered.

Second, when you meet with your prospect, have a conversation rather than immediately go into presentation mode. Give them some context of you are and what you do, but mix in high-value questions that teach, provoke, and peel back the layers of the onion. I don’t believe that “sales calls” should ever be a pure presentation, nor should they be a pure inquisition. You want to create a conversation that brings value to both your prospect and to you. 

At some point in your sales process, if you sincerely believe you are a good fit for the prospect’s situation, tell them that and tell them why. Tell them why you believe your offering is relevant to them. They want -- no, need -- to know that.

Don’t ever assume buyers will come to that conclusion on their own. Be confident and make a recommendation for the next logical step -- whatever that might be.

If a value proposition does not compel someone to take action or create movement on the part of your prospective clients, then it’s fatally incomplete. And the first and foremost way for your value proposition to move someone to take action is to be relevant.

When every question you ask and everything you say is relevant to your prospect, you are attractive, authentic, targeted, and distinctive. You will appeal to the emotional component of the decision making process and will win the new client.

If orange is the new black, then relevance is the new distinction!

HubSpot CRM

14 Feb 16:51

Salespeople: The Conference Session You Should Have Attended

by Colleen McKenna

Are you are in sales or marketing and trying to figure out how to sell to today’s modern and incredibly busy buyer? If so, this post is for you.

You may only get eight seconds; make the most of it.

Every conference works hard to find just the right keynote speaker to educate, entertainment and inspire the audience. I don’t know about you, but I typically find greater value in the breakout sessions, where speakers dive in and provide the information that makes you better at whatever you do or want to be.

As a speaker at a recent conference, I had the opportunity to sit in on the session before mine. I was intrigued by the topic: the increasing complexity of doing business with a Fortune 10 company. Within minutes, I was absorbed in the details she shared. (By the way, I am not sharing her name or company to save her from more unnecessary email).

Her presentation focused on the process for working with large Fortune 10 companies, including the Do’s and Don’ts for salespeople. So read on, study this against your marketing and sales process and share it with your colleagues.

I see a lot written on the buyer persona. Clients share their buyer personas with me all of the time. Most overlook several considerations that define a corporate buyer.

  • They are in back-to-back meetings and are often five to ten minutes late for meetings. This means that, many times, they haven’t processed the last meeting before needing to refocus for the next.
  • They are highly experienced in their field but often a novice when dealing with all their company’s compliance and regulatory requirements.
  • They have supplier (I despise the word vendor) and client-side experience, so they understand your frustration but need to follow their company’s process.
  • They have inboxes that overflow with emails from internal folks on current projects, messages from their higher ups and a slew from salespeople who say they have the next best thing that demands attention.
  • They are exhausted and often begin their work after the workday ends.

In this presentation, the speaker shared a screenshot that showed the number of emails from a salesperson, attempting to catch her attention and arrange a meeting. She also showed a list of emails highlighting how many internal people touch a particular project before it even begins. It was eye-opening.

We know it often takes eight to twelve touches to reach someone, and persistence is critical to the sales process, but at what cost? Could it turn off the person you want to meet, know and work with?

I see this all of the time. I download an ebook, and I’m now in their sales funnel. I receive a call, multiple emails, etc. within hours or days, and then regret signing up in the first place. Where do we, as marketers and salespeople, draw the line? I appreciate when the salesperson checks out the lead they receive from marketing before their initial outreach. To assume everyone that downloads something is a good prospect is silly. I want people to download our content and get to know us. I am not looking to convert everyone who reads our content.

So what’s a salesperson to do? According to the presenter, do the following:

  • Show specific examples of how you’ve helped a client succeed and key deliverables (you don’t need to reveal the client).
  • Don’t be afraid to discuss costs. Refrain from asking what their budget is and give them your costs first.
  • If you offer a new technology or digital platform, offer to do a small pilot or project at no/low cost to show it in action. Note: ask to roll this out with a group of people who will buy in and are excited about using new tools.
  • Send thoughtful, well-written emails. Note: this is critical and makes a difference.
  • Use your network. Ask an existing client in a non-competing space to proactively recommend or introduce you. Note: this is where your LinkedIn network is immeasurably valuable. See our posts on centers of influence (COI).
  • When meeting, listen more than talk.

If you’re a smaller business, think about working through an established partner. (See why below).

Now, here’s a list of what not to do. Take this seriously and vet your current practices against this. I know I will be.

  • Don’t use a “messenger” to deliver your message. Note: lots of people and companies are using appointment setters to arrange meetings. Most often those people know nothing about the person/company/products/services and end up blowing the conversation. If a corporate buyer picks up the phone (the holy grail) hears from a surrogate instead of you, how impressed do you think they will be? Granted 90% of the time those calls goes to voicemail, but what about the 10% that pick up? Are you willing to forego the impression of one ideal prospect? You decide.
  • Don’t send “canned” email correspondence. Note: she referenced receiving emails where within the email there are different fonts and sizes. A dead giveaway.
  • Leaving long voice messages won’t get attention.
  • Don’t call from a cell phone unless you have good cell service.
  • Don’t contact multiple people across the company with the same email or voicemail. They all get forwarded. See, below for more.
  • Once a connection and appointment are set up, don’t try to set up additional meetings with the boss.
  • Don’t use a call center to contact your prospects repeatedly.

I would like to add one additional “don’t”: Don’t say you want to set up a time to learn more about their company. Be specific. They don’t have time to bring you up to date on their company. Go to their website, LinkedIn Company Page and social channels for insight.

CEB says there is, on average, 5.4 people involved in every B2B buying decision. Identify them upfront and be prepared to speak to each of their areas of interest.

The speaker’s company is no exception and usually includes the following:

  • Business leader
  • Procurement
  • Legal
  • Compliance
  • Auditing
  • You and your team

Identify these people up front, know who they are; not to reach out to them but to prepare when you meet. Consider what they need to know about you, your company and your product/services to move the engagement forward. Ask your point of contact if it would make sense, at this time, to include specific people. Since you know their titles, you can look them up on LinkedIn.

It’s more impressive to ask if (insert specific name) would benefit from the joining the meeting rather than saying, please invite anyone you think would benefit.

If you think you’ve already had to do quite a bit of work, you’re right. Getting an appointment with corporate decision makers is not for the faint-hearted. Hold on, though. It’s just the beginning. Don’t miss the opportunity to make the most of the 45-60 minutes you have with them. Ask great questions. And, follow up. They may not need your offering today but if they took the time to meet, stay connected. Consider the following:

  • Connect with them on LinkedIn.
  • Ask how they prefer to communicate (phone, regular email, LinkedIn, texting, Twitter etc.) Don’t assume or think it’s consistent among your buyers.
  • Stay in touch by sharing your company’s content. Industry insight, trends, and stats are valuable. Don’t overlook their company’s content either.
  • Share valuable insight they are posting. If they are not posting, see if they “Like” anything and consider sharing it too.

Let’s say the meeting went well and they’ve given you the green light on a project; don’t get so excited. You’ve only reached the next hurdle, which will probably include signing or providing the following:

  • NDA (Non-disclosure Agreement)
  • MSA (Master Service Agreement)
  • Conduct Vendor Assessment
  • Indemnification (may range from 1 to 15 million dollars)
  • SLA (Service Level Agreement)
  • SOW (Statement of Work)

Some of these are quick and easy. Others are complex, depending on the organization. They are simpler if you have no pushback. If your legal team needs to be involved, you should plan on weeks and months of back and forth. Don’t forget to find out how invoicing and payments are processed. The larger the company, the longer their terms typically. Net 75 or 90 days is a long time to wait for payment for most small to mid-sized companies.

The pricing you provide to large companies is crucial. Often we want to go in low, especially with a small project to get our foot in the door. They want that too but think about the upfront time and effort that goes into the project. Small to mid-sized companies may not be able to float those costs.

I appreciated the speaker saying that it’s not always in everyone’s best interests to work with such large companies. I agree. In a recent conversation with Bob Miller, the founder of Miller Heiman, the world’s largest sales training company, he reflected that too often everyone is lured into the notion that working with these enterprise companies is the panacea but often it’s not and can be detrimental to a small business. The Sharks on Shark Tank caution people about working with the Big Box Companies all the time.

In the end, our speaker, (possibly your client or prospect) spends her days slogging uphill, hoping to find a bit of time to do the work she is passionate about doing. Keep that in mind the next time you start to pursue a new prospect.

I hope this post makes you pause and consider.

  • Are you clued in to who the modern buyer is and do you understand their perspective?
  • Are you more apt to engage with or annoy the person who you claim is your ideal prospect?
  • How can you stand out and make their life better?
14 Feb 16:49

4 Blunders Brands Make While Building an E-mail List

by Expert commentator

Avoid these mistakes to prevent costly email marketing errors

If you’ve marked 2017 as your year to grow your e-mail list, congratulations! Email marketing is a powerful tool that can help enhance your business, bring in new leads, and keep your company name on the tip of customers’ tongues. However, the reality is that it’s quite easy to make mistakes while you attempt to build a list. Those mistakes can result in lost time, customers, and money.

Blunder #1: You Don’t Give a Good Reason to Sign up

In 2017, an email address is nearly as personal as a phone number. Think about the times that you go to a store at the mall and they ask for your email address for their records. You probably cringe and envision all the spam email that will soon flood your box—and you better believe that your customers do the same thing.

One of the first steps to building an email list this year is to give your potential customers a reason to register their email account to your list. This means that you need to offer content that resonates with your audience on a deeper level than something you simply rehashed. You can offer content such as:

  • A custom eBook
  • Whitepaper
  • Case study
  • Checklist
  • Printout

Kissmetrics suggests that e-mail subscription rates can boost from 6% to 60% by offering upgraded and high quality content in exchange for an email address. In this instance, think downloadable content that’s an upgrade from a standard blog post. Convert checklists, whitepapers, and other content into PDFs to help boost perceived value.

Blunder #2: Your Opt-in Form Placement is Wrong

After you’ve put a lot of time and effort into a blog, email, or other type of downloadable content, you simply put your opt-in form at the bottom of the page and call it a day. New subscriptions will surely come flooding in at any time now, right?

Not so fast. Believe it or not, opt-in form placement is both an art and a science. There are numerous places where you can add your opt-in form for maximum subscriptions, including:

  • Top of the sidebar: This is one of the most common areas to add an opt-in form, and with good reason. It’s no secret that your customers read content from left to right, and it’s hard to miss an opt-in form that is at the top right of the page.

  • Popup signup forms: The popup subscription forms have boomed in popularity over the last few years. While you can certainly overdo it with this option and push customers away, they can also be very effective when it comes to building your email list. Be sure that your popup form is highly customized and beautifully designed. It needs to be eye-catching while offering an incentive to sign up to your list, but beware of Google’s interstitial update. On January 10, 2017, Google updated their algorithm to penalize sites who use intrusive interstitials, like popup ads and email sign forms, on mobile that hinder users from reading content on the page.

  • Header opt-in form: The header opt-in form is a bold approach. It takes up more real estate on your page and it simply can’t be missed.
  • Slide-in form: Slide-ins are like a popup form but a little less intrusive. They simply slide in from the left or right of your page as your customer browses your blog—a simple yet effective approach to build your email list subscription.

What’s the right opt-in position for you? There is no magic rule or guarantee that one will work better than another. Consider split testing over time to determine your best results. 

Blunder #3: You Didn’t Keep Mobile in Mind

Mobile friendly emails are more important than ever in 2017. According to email marketing platform, Campaign Monitor, Email opens on mobile devices grew 30% from 2010-2015, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. This means that you must design your e-mail templates with mobile in mind.

If you’re still not convinced that mobile is important, consider these statistics:

Keep your email marketing mobile friendly by offering snappy subject lines, presenting obvious calls-to-action, and including responsive e-mail design templates for the best user experience.

Blunder #4: You’re Firing off Generic Email Content

Customers can smell generic and sales-centric content from a mile away. Remember that you need to personalize your e-mails and make it feel as if the content is designed specifically for the customers. Personalized e-mails can increase click-through rates by 14% and conversions by 10%. Furthermore, personalized emails can offer 6 times higher transaction rates.

One way to personalize your email marketing is with custom e-mail subject lines that include the recipient’s name. This can increase the open rate by 29%.

By keeping your efforts mobile-friendly, personalized, and valuable in terms of user experience, you’re sure to achieve email marketing success in 2017.

Thanks to Megan Totka for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Megan Totka is the Chief Editor for ChamberofCommerce.com. Chamber specializes in helping small businesses grow their business on the web while facilitating the connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide. As a small business expert, Megan specializes in reporting the latest business news, helpful tips and reliable resources, as well as providing small business advice. She has significant experience with the topic of small business marketing, and has spent several years exploring topics like copywriting, content marketing and social media.
14 Feb 16:49

How Should Agencies Be Using Sales Enablement?

by Ron Ause

How Should Agencies Be Using Sales Enablement.jpg

It’s 2017: What Is Sales Enablement?

“Sales enablement” is one of those moving-target terms that, over the past two decades, has more often than not become the square-peg buzzword everyone wants to fit in their product’s round hole. What makes sales enablement tricky to define has a lot to do with the number and diversity of teams asked to align behind sales-enablement initiatives.

Initially, sales enablement was coined in response to the disconnect between marketing and sales teams. As Brainshark’s Jim Ninivaggi put it recently, sales enablement was marketing’s answer to “ the content problem .”

The first companies to deal with this problem developed solutions that would allow marketing to understand 1) how marketing collateral was being used by sales teams and to what effect and 2) how leads generated by marketing were performing for sales (setting into motion the great “qualified or not” debate of the late 2000s).

Of course, these intentions sounded great in theory, but they tripped over the fundamental issue of getting all a company’s content ducks in a row. As you might have guessed, the saturation of content we’ve seen in recent years isn’t limited to our search engines (*cough*—Google—*cough*) and inboxes.

Marketing teams are churning out enough content to make a seasoned librarian’s head spin. With every piece of collateral generated to satisfy a prospect’s question or a customer’s concern, another asset is added to a salesperson’s “arsenal.”

When you place sales enablement on your radar as a goal to be fully realized, you begin to wonder if true alignment between sales and marketing is even possible. And what does that mean for the other teams being looped into the sales-enablement conversation?

As Jason Liu, CEO of SAVO, told CMSWire, “sales enablement is not an endpoint, but a journey.” Now that sales enablement is less a buzzword and more a discipline, the need to define it lessens in importance.

For marketing agencies like yours, the question isn’t whether or not sales enablement is right for you—or even what it is—but if you’re ready to begin your sales-enablement journey.

What Are the Benefits of Sales Enablement?

Provides Structure

Anyone who has spent time marketing or selling in the agency world knows that situations can change multiple times in an instant. When you are dealing with creative concepts like most agencies are, you tend to be exposed to the more capricious side of executives. Very often, though you might be championing the benefits of data, clients are making decisions based on gut reactions.

Sales enablement, with its pillar of real-time availability, allows your team instant access to tried-and-true content that’ll provide it with support in even the most uncertain deals.

Gives Insight Into Your Sales and Marketing Process

There is no shortage of data out there about how long a customer spends researching your product before making a decision to take action. While this blind spot can be somewhat accounted for using analytics tools on your website, the revenue-generating data starts to appear once conversations begin between your sales team and a prospect.

Sales enablement provides executives with insight into how well your teams are performing and which proverbial levers are going to have the greatest impact if pulled. For example, if a particular piece of collateral converts to the high heavens on your site, but those leads then fall out of your pipeline faster than oil into the Gulf of Mexico, you are presented with an opportunity to address a major disconnect that could change how well your business performs this year.

Saves You Money on Bad Practices

When you live and die by billable hours, efficacy is your guiding dogma. B2B companies employing sales enablement often cite increased sales efficiency as a positive byproduct of their investment. However, according to Brainshark, “sales leaders will focus on ‘effective’ over ‘efficient’” in 2017.

By knowing which levers to pull, you end up knowing which levers you shouldn’t be pulling anymore. Sales enablement, when implemented appropriately, can help you identify practices and technologies that aren’t adding any value to your business.

Are You Ready to Start Your Journey?

Sales enablement has finally reached a point where it’s beginning to stabilize as a practice. As the cream of sales enablement solutions rises to the top, it’ll be easier to understand which approaches are having a positive impact on your peers’ businesses and which are just draining hard-earned budgets.

Like any change management, bringing sales enablement to your company will require a team effort. We can’t tell you whether or not you should be using sales enablement, but we definitely think you should be having the conversation with your leadership in sales, marketing, and ops about how you might incorporate some of its practices to improve your business in 2017.

14 Feb 16:49

Size isn’t everything: why more revenue often flows from smaller pipelines

by bob@inflexion-point.com (Bob Apollo)

Large pipeline square.pngOne of the abiding urban myths that misinforms sales pipeline management is the idea that sales people need at least 3* pipeline coverage in order to achieve their quota. Where this “golden number” came from, nobody seems to know, but it’s a fair bet that it dates back beyond the Neolithic.

Another widespread urban myth is the idea that whenever you have a bigger sales pipeline, you end up selling more. It’s the sort of misconception that leads marketing teams to drive to create an ever-larger number of MQLs without any regard for how many of them ever actually result in any revenue.

The simple fact is that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of what the optimum coverage ratio for any specific sales pipeline is…

In my experience, one of the things that distinguishes top sales performers from the rest is that they have too much respect for their own time to waste it pursuing opportunities that they have no realistic chance of winning - while their less-discriminating colleagues cling onto every available opportunity until long past its sell-by date, often because they misguidedly fear that qualifying out will make their pipeline look smaller.

This is not always just the sale person’s fault - sales managers are often to blame as well, by focusing more on the size of the sales person’s pipeline than the quality of the opportunities it contains.

If we’re to address this issue, we need to turn to rational methodology, and not urban myth. We need to instrument our sales pipelines so that we can identify the root causes of success and failure, and the behaviours that result in winning outcomes.

There’s a growing body of evidence to suggest that pipelines that are too large to manage are just as problematic as pipelines that don’t contain enough opportunity in the first place. For every sales environment, there is an optimal range of pipeline coverage - it just isn’t the same in every situation.

Here are a few of the factors that most commonly impact pipeline conversion efficiency:

  • Type of business (new customer vs. cross-sell vs. up-sell vs. renewal)
  • Type of purchase (required vs. considered)
  • Complexity of selling/buying process
  • Number of stakeholders involved in decision
  • Deal value (and approval level required)
  • Experience of sales person
  • Adoption of sales process

Some of these factors impact the efficiency and predictability of the sales pipeline as a whole - others reflect predictable differences between the performances of different product offerings or even individual sales people.

Applying a single, untested (and often unmeasured) universal pipeline coverage target makes no sense at all. And with the emergence of sales analytics into the mainstream, there’s no excuse for not knowing what the real optimum target ought to be across a range of different sales scenarios.

I’ll be addressing this point in my upcoming webinar with the Association of Professional Sales on the 4th April, on the subject “Why size isn’t everything: assessing the true value of your organisation’s sales pipeline” - you can register for the event here.

But back to that mythical 3* coverage ratio: the team at InsightSquared (the leading sales analytics platform for salesforce.com users) have done a great job of debunking the myth in this excellent article.

Their research shows that companies that emphasise quantity over quality in their sales pipelines tend to have much lower quality leads within their sales pipelines - and far lower conversion ratios. They also found that big deals (2x or more above average) tend to have lower likelihoods of closing and longer sales cycles.

Analytics can also show which sales people are more efficient than others in converting initial interest into sales action. Studying and comparing the shape of individual sales people’s funnels can highlight where some are more effective than others - and suggest ways in which targeted coaching can improve performance.

My own experience of applying sales analytics has convincingly proven that better qualified opportunities (using rational, consistent qualification criteria) have a measurably higher conversion rate and shorter sales cycles.

In fact, it’s pretty clear that the old 3* sales pipeline coverage mindset really ought to be long past its retirement date. There’s simply no excuse for not adopting a smarter, situational and evidence based approach.

If you’d like to learn more, be sure to register for the webinar. And if you’d like to see for yourself how sales analytics could enable you to do a far smarter job of sales pipeline management, I'd be delighted to organise a free trial with my friends at InsightSquared. Or you can simply arrange a time to talk here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Apollo_3_white_background_250_square.jpgBob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales and the Founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the B2B value selling experts. Following a successful career spanning start-ups to corporates, Bob now works with a growing client base of growth-phase tech-based businesses, empowering them to systematically establish their uniquely relevant value to their customers.

14 Feb 16:49

What is Sales Support?

by Roda Novenario

Sales support refers to a variety of functions that help your sales representatives focus on actually selling and closing deals. These functions differ per company, industry and sales team. And, they can be done by hired associates, outsourcing teams, productivity tools, and – worst case scenario – by the sales representative themselves.

While sales support is not the factor that closes deals – it is crucial and important to your sales operations.

As your sales rep puts his or her best foot forward and gets in the proverbial door, sales support has already done the background work. It is the administrative, research and customer support work that cracked that door open, in the first place.

What Are The Types of Sales Support?

There are two major types of sales support that you need to employ: helpers and tools. Simply put, these are people, tools and documents that you’d want to have available for your sales team to use.

Sales Support: Helpers
Helpers are people or functions best done by people. They require a good level of expertise and decision-making skills that only trained men and women can provide.

Their sales support functions include:

  • Lead generation
  • Product training
  • Customer services
  • Active market communications

Lead generation: Sales support finds, qualifies and filters leads for the sales representative to contact. This can be through several channels, such as the company website, social media, professional networks, email campaigns and online data mining. This already cuts a lot of time off necessary research work.

Lead generation can be outsourced to qualified service providers or done internally by a sales associate. It depends on the specificity of your requirements. The more specific and specialized your target market is, the better it is for you to retain some of your lead generation functions within your team.

Product training and customer services: By making product materials and customer support readily available to your prospect, you are helping them make their purchasing decisions.

They can read your product specifications and manuals. If there are questions, they can reach out to your sales support team. Nothing beats access when it comes to tipping the scales in favor of your brand.

Active market communications: This refers to your public outreach, be it in the form of promotions, paid advertising, PR press releases and other marketing strategies. Market awareness is requisite to supporting your sales team. The more aware the public is about your brand, the easier it becomes to sell.

Sales Support: Tools
The tools of the trade are documents and software that help sales reps get their job done.

This could be as simple as letter, presentation and video templates that are easy to personalize, with a few clicks. Or, you might draft help documents on your brand’s benefits, and answers to common questions and objections.

Software tools include pre-programmed calculators and computer-aided designs (CAD). You might even have a website, which gives your reps access to secure pages for the private viewing of their prospects.

You can also invest in printed paraphernalia to leave with your prospective clients. This is still employed in certain industries, such as real estate. However, it may be redundant in some cases. If you already have a website with requisite information, product manuals and the like, why waste your budget on leaving a paper trail. You just need to make your market aware of these readily accessible online materials.

A comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) system, integrated with a reliable CTI system, is today’s indispensable sales support power tool. CTI makes your team more accessible and responsive to your prospective clients. While CRM can help you track the progress of each lead, at each point of contact.

What To Look For In A Sales Support Associate?

When you decide to task a person to support your sales team, it is important to have a clear idea on the jobs that you will delegate and the skills necessary for accomplishing them. This comes with optimizing your sales operations. You need to make sure that each member – the sales reps and the sales support group – is contributing their fair share to your company’s success.

Here are some of the tasks that you might assign to a sale support member:

  • Lead processing and management
  • Lead research and filtering
  • Customer account monitoring
  • Prospect and customer communications
  • Research, monitoring and reporting
  • Schedule management

Sales support is typically office-based and available 40 hours a week. However, with today’s outsourcing and telecommuting options, part-time employment of an internal or outsourced support staff has become popular. Again, your choice depends on how much you’d benefit from a dedicated office-based support staff.

At the very least, you can qualify your support team using the following criteria:
Training and educational qualifications
The requisite training and educational qualifications for providing adequate sales support differ per industry. You might be able to do with a talented individual with just a high school diploma or a US Bureau of Labor Statistics-recognized vocational course certification. Or, choose candidates that have certification from organizations like the International Association of Administrative Professionals. Experience in your industry is also a plus.

Rapport and Interpersonal Skills
As with the rest of your sales team, a huge part of a sales support’s work deals with people. From answering phones to providing customer support, good rapport and interpersonal skills are requisite.

Research Skills
Crucial to sales support is good research skills. You will rely on your sales support team for leads so they better come up with qualified ones. Lead generation is one of the more time-consuming aspects of any sales operations. You need to mine for leads, as well as qualify and filter through them. This is work best left to the support team. You sales reps should use their time crafting their approach and getting the leads down the sales funnel.

Attention to Detail
There is a good level of clerical, computing and administrative work that comes with sales support. You will eventually rely on this data for follow-ups, up-selling and cross-selling, customer support, and more. So, the details matter and your support team should pay good attention to it.

Sales Support Strategies

In the end, regardless of the moves you make in organizing your sales team – whether you employ an extra hand or external support, or acquire the most powerful tools in the trade – keep these proven sales support strategies in mind. The central idea is to free up your sales representatives. They should use up most of their time contacting clients, and trying to close deals.

Keep administrative tasks to a minimum.
Somrat Niyogi, CEO of the sales automation app, Stitch, says: “Organizations that understand how to minimize the amount of time salespeople spend doing administrative tasks, such as data entry, win by helping them be more productive.”

Analyze the prevailing sales process within your team. What are the tasks involved? Is it necessary for sales reps to spend hours in front of the before they get in contact with a lead? Is your CRM system user-friendly enough that it does not eat up man-hours?

See where you can intervene using sales support helpers and tools. Streamline your process such that your sales reps spend more of their time actually selling.

Qualify leads before sending them over to your sales reps.
Sparkroom Managing Director, Al Huezenga, suggests that you should: “Define your target audience and recognize that people outside of that definition are more likely to be wasting your time than resulting in sales.”

It is a waste of time to talk to someone who’s not ready to buy. So, it is crucial to pinpoint at what stage of the buyer’s journey is it practical to forward leads to a sales rep. That’s the only time to start a conversation.

There are commercially available behavioral and demographic data from companies, such as Neustar, to help profile leads.

Enable better communications and collaboration.
Access, both inward and outward, is key to a more productive sales team. So, empower them with power tools such as a comprehensive CRM system that’s integrated with your CTI system. Make lead information readily accessible to your sales reps, wherever they are. And, ensure that your representatives can be reached by their prospective clients at all times.

Use a CRM system that is specific for sales.
Not all CRM systems are created equal. Choose one with sales productivity at its core. This helps you keep focused on your customers buyer’s journey, at their precise stages, through lead prioritization, lead nurturing, automated reminds and the like.

Invest in regular training and team development opportunities.
The training and development of your team do not immediately add to your bottom line – yes. But, in return, you get more effective sales representatives.

Mark Donnolo of SalesGlobe says: “Top performing sales organizations invest in the development of their teams…. From technical training on products and services to sales process training, or gathering regional teams together once a year to share best practices, a well-planned training and development program provides a measurable ROI.”

Gamification strategies can help push your sales reps into action.
There is a competitive streak in most of us, and you can tap into this through gamification strategies that allot scores for each sales action and closed deals.

According to Leslie Strech, CEO of CallidusCloud: “According to a report from Aberdeen Group, companies do better on their quotas with gamification…. 85 percent of reps attain their quota and 51 percent of new hires achieve their numbers in their first year…. In the absence of gamification, only 78 percent of reps make quota and only 42 percent of new hires meet their numbers.”

14 Feb 16:48

How Sales Managers Can Avoid Being Blindsided By a Bad Sales Month or Quarter

by kevin@toplineleadership.com (Kevin F. Davis)

avoid-blindsided-bad-sales-month-415972-edited.jpg

It’s the last week of the month, and you’re fairly confident your team will hit its quota. You’ve been spending a lot of time coaching your two lowest-performing salespeople, as well as jumping in to help your superstar rep close big deals.

So you’re completely blindsided when three of your reps who always make their number have lousy months. Suddenly, you’re way below where you should be.

Many sales managers essentially leave their salespeople alone as long as they’re hitting quota. When some or several historically reliable performers suddenly fall on their faces, their managers never see it coming.

To avoid this phenomenon,implement the following three strategies.

1) Be a Proactive Sales Coach

The self-serving bias is a major factor of unexpectedly bad months. People tend to take responsibility for their successes but blame external factors for their failures. For example, a rep will attribute a great month to their work ethic and selling skills. The next month, when they’re struggling, they’ll blame marketing for sending them low-quality leads or the sales engineering team for not providing enough support.

As a result, salespeople don’t connect lost deals with specific errors they committed or skills they lack. They’re not going to approach their manager for coaching -- and their manager assumes everything is rosy because the bottom line is fine.

In my experience, 90% of salespeople suffer from self-serving bias. While their optimism is critical to bouncing back when they fail, the problem is they’re not analyzing the reasons why the failure occurred.

The solution is relatively simple: Be a proactive sales coach. Don’t wait for your reps to ask you for coaching or their performance to noticeably decrease, because by that time it’ll be too late. Get out of your office, observe your team members, and look for mistakes and weaknesses.

If one of your salespeople is committing an error, it’s relatively safe to assume they’re not the only one. Hold team-wide sessions on specific skills or practices based on your one-on-one observations.

2) Get Involved Early in the Sales Process

Typically, managers focus on the later stages of an opportunity. As the close gets closer -- and thus more likely -- they want to help their salespeople bring it in.

However, the size of a sale is determined by the customer early on in the buying cycle. Wait until the final days to get involved, and you’ll miss your chance to truly affect the outcome.

Let’s say you have a two-month sales cycle. If you’re getting involved at the six-week mark, you’re not seeing all the mistakes your rep made earlier in the process -- and those are the mistakes that are most important to correct. For example, they didn’t connect with the true decision maker, prepare a good call strategy, or set clear objectives for their initial meeting with the prospect.

I recommend getting involved early so you can catch and fix these issues.

3) Ask the Right Questions

During pipeline review, sales managers routinely ask, “Where are we with X account?”

The salesperson describes where she is in the sales process: “I met with the second decision maker and it went pretty well, now I’ve got a conference call with the entire buying committee on Tuesday … ”

However, this answer doesn’t give the manager a realistic portrayal of the deal. Customers don’t follow the prescribed steps of a sales process -- so even though the salesperson might think they’re about to close, the prospect might be on step two of the buyer’s journey.

To get a clear picture of the opportunity’s status, managers should focus on the customer and the actions they’ve taken.

Here are some questions that’ll come in handy:

  • “What problems does this particular prospect have that we can solve?”
  • “What are each decision maker’s decision making criteria?”
  • “What specific actions has the prospect taken thus far in regards to evaluating this decision?”
  • “Can you tell me how this prospect has made similar purchases in the past?”
  • “What’s their timeline?”
  • “What’s the process for actually buying a product?”
  • “Are there other vendors involved?”

Because these questions deal with the buyer’s journey rather than the salesperson’s process, they surface more accurate insights.

Taking these three steps will ensure you’re not completely surprised by a bad month or quarter. You’ll be able to predict poor performance while you’ve still got time to fix it.

For more advice, check out Kevin F. Davis's latest book, "The Sales Manager's Guide to Greatness: Ten Essential Strategies for Leading Your Team to the Top."

HubSpot CRM

14 Feb 16:48

Advanced Google Analytics: Using Data to Drive Value

by Angela Hausman, PhD

advanced google analyticsImage courtesy of Adobe

There’s the famous quote from John Wanamaker that goes something like this:

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.

Today, we might lump all our marketing activities into the bucket, not just our advertising.

And, while that might have been true in Wanamaker’s day, that certainly isn’t the truth today. Instead, businesses are swimming in a pool filled to overflowing with data, but many have no clue what to do with it all — how to derive actionable insights from their data.

Or, firms get obsessed with vanity metrics, especially in social media where they’re overly concerned with Likes and Comments, that have little impact on the value created by marketing activities.

Transforming data into value

Sometimes we find ourselves measuring things that are easy to measure rather than those things that are IMPORTANT for adding value. Either the metrics we follow don’t impact value or the insights they generate aren’t actionable. Yet, the RIGHT metrics are there, it’s just a matter of teasing them out. That’s where Google Analytics comes in, especially advanced Google Analytics.

Before we dive into using advanced Google Analytics to derive value, let’s look at how that process starts far from your computer screen — with goals.

Never, let me repeat that, never head over to your Google Analytics dashboard without asking yourself the question:

What insights do I hope to achieve using Google Analytics?

Otherwise, you’ll spend hours trolling through the various metrics and their permutations looking for nirvana.

You’re not gonna find it.

Instead, start with a plan and ask yourself: “How does marketing create value in my organization?”

Although, ultimately, you’re interested in conversion — because that’s what fills the company bank accounts, the answer generally lies within the conversion funnel.

content marketing plan

In other words, your marketing task is to bring people in — create awareness, drive them down the funnel, and get them to purchase your products. A single-minded focus on simply conversion ignores that very real fact that you have to prime the pump by bringing in new potential customers and reminding existing customers you exist, convincing them that you solve a problem they face (and do it better than everyone else), that your products provide superior value, that you have great prices and options for buying the product, then they will buy the product.

Google Analytics — funnel metrics

Occam’s Razor provides a different look to the conversion funnel, but it’s the same principle. The value of his take on the conversion funnel is that he provides metrics for evaluation across the various activities that drive prospective buyers toward conversion.

digital analyticsImage courtesy of Occam’s Razor

Embedded in this image is the notion that marketing activities (and content) vary as prospective buyers move closer to conversion. Using the wrong tactic based on the buyer’s stage is not only wasteful, but might damage chances of conversion.

The metrics suggested in Occam’s Razor apply to your website, but you can determine similar metrics for other digital marketing campaigns.

Advanced Google Analytics

So, approach Google Analytics with a plan … a plan that provides insights that create value for the firm. Here’s a list to consider:

  1. Ecommerce metrics — conversion, average order size, high-converting landing pages, highly profitable products, as well as demographics and psychographics of your visitors
  2. Attribution modeling — what sources contributed to conversion, not just the first or last touch in the conversion process. Everybody helped in the conversion so we need to understand how each activity contributed in order to derive value from that activity.
  3. Event tracking — assesses both online and offline events that reflect value for the firm
  4. Content – which pieces of content led to conversion

Ecommerce data – we need visitors who create value not more visitors

we havent ruined marketing

Look at the graph to the left and you’ll notice I’ve plotted average order value by source, which shows the value of each marketing source. Simply looking at traffic source, which is where most firms evaluate which channels to invest in, would have missed this value.

Another interesting aspect we might consider is how this changes over time, so we could plot this on a timeline. That way, we can see if one (or more) channels are becoming more (or less) valuable for our firm. We might extend the trend line to extrapolate the value of the channel moving forward.

Attribution modeling

advanced google analytics

Image courtesy of Occam’s Razor

In this image, from Occam’s Razor, we find different pathways of channels to conversion. Most use multiple channels, and attribution modeling attempts to tease out the value each channel provides the firm rather than simply looking at the last channel involved in conversion. Such single channel models overestimate the impact of some channels while underestimating the impact of other channels in the conversion process, which leads to bad decision-making.

Attribution modeling often relies on more than advanced Google Analytics as visitors must identify themselves to allow tracking across multiple visits and multiple touch points.

Event tracking

Sometimes the actions leading to conversion don’t happen on your website. For instance, maybe you want buyers to download your app or set an appointment with a sales rep.

Event tracking let’s you monitor these activities by counting the number of visitors who leave your page to accomplish these activities.

For event tracking to work, a firm needs to install a Javascript snippet to send a record of a click to Google Analytics. The code looks something like this:

function handleOutboundLinkClicks(event) {   ga('send', 'event', {     eventCategory: 'Outbound Link',     eventAction: 'click',     eventLabel: event.target.href   }); }

This short snippet tells Google Analytics to could each click as an event called “outbound link”, and the firm can now track the event just like any ecommerce activity — monitor performance of the event across channels, demographic and psychographic characteristics of users, etc.

Content

You need information about what content performs best, not just in terms of driving more visits to the site, but driving conversion. A more advanced feature of Google Analytics shows the funnel as this:

advanced google analyticscontent funnel

We can set up a funnel like this with channel as the starting point, rather than country, to see how the clickstream from some users might differ from those of other users.

14 Feb 16:48

4 Value Selling Tools to Move Leads Down the Funnel

by David Svigel

increase revenue with value selling tools

Buyer behavior has changed; contact with your prospects occurs later in the sales cycle, and your leads come armed with more information than ever before about your products and services.

What does this mean for marketing? It’s up to you to create and guide the conversation throughout the customer lifecycle. Thankfully, you can prepare for this by leveraging tools that sell value, rather than features, to increase lead quality and sales velocity. With the right solutions, you can integrate value selling tools on each channel of your multi-channel marketing environment–on landing pages and forms, in marketing programs, and throughout marketing activities.

In this blog, I’ll explain how you can use value selling tools in conjunction with your digital marketing platform to enhance the buyer’s journey and ultimately grow your revenue:

Build Awareness at the Top of the Funnel

Most people search for a solution before they’ve identified the size of their problem. However, if your prospects don’t know the true scope of their problem, anything they try is unlikely to resolve the underlying issue. This is like putting out the sparks of a conflagration instead of dousing the main fire.

Putting the cart before the horse is always a time-wasting effort, so help your prospects turn it around with an assessment tool. An assessment tool helps your prospects define their business problem and shows how they measure up to industry benchmarks and best practices. By requiring leads to fill out a form to obtain the results of their assessment, you can capture their valuable information in your marketing database.

example assessment tool

Assessment tool: identify gaps in performance

By its very nature, an assessment tool captures more detailed information than a typical content download, allowing you to further segment your leads and nurture them with highly relevant and personalized content. And by scoring leads and accounts in your marketing platform, you can determine their sales-readiness and prioritize high-quality leads.

Get Conversions to the Middle of the Funnel

At the middle of the funnel, your prospects have the right demographics and behavior, have engaged with you, and have displayed buying intent. They’re potential sales leads, but may need a little nudge.

A value calculator shows prospects how much money they’re losing by working around their pain points instead of resolving them, so they’ll be more likely to evaluate your solution. It’s often a bridge between the top and middle of the sales funnel and provides the foundation for a solid business case.

example value calculator

Value calculator: highlight the value of solving the problem

At the same time, the data you collect from your lead’s inputs can help you build out a more in-depth customer record in your marketing database. Integrating a value calculator with your marketing platform saves you time and eliminates errors by reducing manual data entry. Your sales team can also access all the information prospects enter into the value calculator, either through your CRM platform or digital marketing platform, which allows them to have more meaningful conversations with them right away.

Closing the Deal at the Bottom of the Funnel

As leads move from the middle to the bottom of the funnel, they’re close to becoming customers.

A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) tool allows them to compare your product with a competitor’s. If leads are evaluating multiple solutions, a TCO tool can validate your solution as the best choice. It also benefits your organization, feeding valuable information into your marketing database and providing direction for sales as they follow up.

TCO tool

TCO tool: compare against the competition

Another powerful motivator towards closing the deal is a return on investment (ROI) tool, which shows your prospects how quickly their investment will pay off. The results from an ROI tool justify the price of your solution and short-circuit requests for discounts. The financial metrics from an ROI tool can be used to convince their buying committee or finance team that your solution deserves an immediate slice of their budget.

example ROI calculator

ROI tool: calculate the ROI and break-even

Bringing It All Together

With a digital marketing platform that integrates with your value selling tools, your marketing data can be synced to create a detailed view of your buyers for use across the organization. This data automatically feeds into your marketing campaigns, and the increase in operational efficiency saves you time and money while automation grows your revenues faster.

By integrating value selling tools at each stage of the sales funnel, you can obtain highly specific data to refine your marketing. In addition, value selling tools provide real benefits to your prospects, allowing them to understand how your solution can help them succeed. Buyers will have all the information needed to make a quick and knowledgeable decision, shortening your sales cycle and increasing your closing ratios.

What other value selling tools have you used in your organization? Share in the comments below.